The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Over a period of three hours I shall have the opportunity of speaking to you about the building idea of Dornach. In this first lecture, it is my task to characterize how this building idea emerged from the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement, and then, over eight days and in a fortnight, to go into more detail about the style and the whole formal language of this our building, the framework and the external representative of our spiritual scientific movement. By speaking about the genesis of the Dornach building, I would like to perhaps touch on something personal by way of introduction.

I spent the 1880s in Vienna. It was the Vienna in which the ideas were developed that could then be seen in the Votivkirche, in the Vienna City Hall, in the Hansen Building of the Austrian Parliament, in the museums, in the Burgtheater building, that is to say in those monumental buildings that were created in Vienna in the second half of the last century and which, to a certain extent, represent the most mature products of the architecture of the past era of human development. I would like to say that I heard the words of one of the architects involved in these buildings resound from the views from which these monumental buildings were created. When I was studying at the Vienna Technical University, Heinrich Ferstel, the architect of the Votivkirche, had just taken up his post as rector. In his inaugural address, he said something that I would like to say still echoes in my mind today, and it has echoed throughout my subsequent life. Ferstel said something at the time that summarized the most diverse views that had emerged in art at the time, especially in the art of architecture. He said: architectural styles are not invented, architectural styles are born out of the overall views, out of the overall development of the time and the emotional soulfulness of entire peoples and eras.

On the one hand, such a sentence is extremely correct, and on the other hand, it is extremely inflammatory for the human mind. And anyone who has ever immersed themselves with artistic sensibility in the whole world of vision from which this remarkable Gothic structure of the Votive Church in Vienna, translated into miniature, was created by Ferstel himself, anyone who has felt the Vienna City Hall by Schmidt, anyone who has felt the Austrian Parliament in particular, which, through Hansen's genius, has achieved a certain freedom of style, at the time when this same view had not yet been spoiled by the hideous female figure that was later placed on the ramp. Those who had experienced the artistic heyday of Gottfried Semper's mature architecture at the Vienna Burgtheater could truly feel the background from which such an artistic view emerged as that of Heinrich Ferstel, which has just been characterized. In all that was built, one sees ripe fruits, but basically one sees only the renewal of the styles of past epochs of humanity.

And I was able to feel this, I would like to say, inwardly inciting fact, for example, when I heard the lectures of the excellent esthete Joseph Bayer, who, out of the same spirit that Ferstel, Hansen, cathedral architect Schmidt, but especially Gottfried Semper, created with, tried to illustrate the forms of architectural art, the forms of ceramics, and so on.

Such a fact, such a world of ideas, is inspiring for the human mind, I say this because perhaps, when faced with such an idea, “architectural styles are not invented, but born out of an overall spiritual life” in the human mind - when one sees: this view has achieved something magnificent and powerful, but from a mere renewal, from a renaissance of old architectural styles, old artistic perceptions, so to speak - because then the question arises before the soul: Are we perhaps such a barren time after all that we cannot give birth to something new in this sense from our overall view, from the scope of our world view?

At the same time as all that could so richly fill the souls from these buildings when they immersed themselves in these views, from which the buildings arose, something else, though characteristic of the time, was concentrated in Vienna. In its soul body, Vienna had at that time also absorbed a certain height of precisely the newer medical progress. Skoda, Oppolzer and others represented a flowering of the development of medical science in the second half of the 19th century. At that time, especially if you lived among those who had to deal with such things, you could often hear a saying – and this saying also stayed with me: We live in a time in which medical nihilism has developed.

This medical nihilism, which had emerged precisely in the heyday of pathology, actually culminated in the fact that the great physicians mainly studied those forms of disease that could be observed in their course merely through pathology, in which nature's healing process only needed to be helped along by all sorts of measures, but in which little could be done for the patient by taking remedies. Thus, precisely out of this medical school arose a disbelief in therapy, a skepticism about therapy. And when pathology had developed to its highest peak that it could reach at that time, people actually despaired of the possibility of real healing and, especially in initiated circles, spoke of medical nihilism. That is what one could feel. Our world view, where it was to prove fruitful in a certain area of practical life, led to nihilism and a certain powerlessness in the face of that practical life.

Anyone with the ability to feel and perceive these things will, in the subsequent period of European civilization, be able to fully sense how, basically, those impulses, which on the one hand found expression in the fact that an architect as important as Heinrich Ferstel had to say, “Architectural styles are not invented, but are born out of the overall development of the time,” and yet still built in the sense of an old architectural style, on the other hand, expressed itself in the fact that in a practical area of life, people's views have led to nihilism.

What developed from this in the period that followed was basically a continuation of what had been expressed in this way. Through the most diverse circumstances, seemingly, but probably through a necessary connection, I was confronted with the necessity of setting up impulses of a new spiritual life everywhere in the face of the appearance of what lay in the lines of development I have indicated. This new spiritual life would in turn draw from such original sources of human thought , human feeling and human will, as they repeatedly existed in the epochs of human development and as they proved fruitful in order to give rise to the artistic, the religious and the cognitive.

If we want to feel in an even deeper way what the human mind was actually like at a time when, in art, only a kind of renaissance was living in the highest expressions of the artistic, and when, even in practical areas, views have led to a kind of nihilism When we delve into what was actually taking place in the soul and spirit during this time, we have to say that the spiritual matters that directly concern the human being, the scientific, and even to a high degree the religious life, had taken on an abstract, intellectual character. Man had come to cultivate less that which can arise from his entire human essence, his powers and impulses. In this most recent period, he had come to establish a mere head culture, a mere intellectualistic culture, to live in abstractions.

This is something that occurs as a parallel phenomenon in the materialistic age: on the one hand, people believe that they can completely immerse themselves in the workings of material processes; but on the other hand, precisely because of this striving for immersion in a tendency towards abstraction, a tendency towards mere intellectualism, a tendency through which the urge to shape something that can directly reach into the full reality of existence fades from the most intimate affairs of the human soul. One withdraws into an abstract corner of one's soul life, leaving one's religious feelings to take place there. They withdraw into the closed rooms of the laboratory and the observatory, and devote themselves to specialized investigations in these fields, but in so doing they distance themselves from a truly living understanding of the totality of the world. One withdraws as a human being from real cooperation with practical life, and as a result one arrives at a closed intellectuality. And finally, everything that we see emerging in the fields of philosophy or world view in this period bears a distinctly abstract, a distinctly intellectual character.

I believed that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science had to be placed in this current. It was not surprising that this spiritual science, when it was first placed in an intellectualist age, when it had to speak to people who, in the broadest sense, were fundamentally oriented towards intellectualist abstraction, initially had to appear as a worldview as if it itself had arisen only from abstraction, from mere thinking. And so it was that in our work for our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that phase arose which filled the first decade of the twentieth century and of which I would like to say: it was inevitable that our anthroposophically oriented world view should take on a certain intellectual character through the very nature of the people who were inclined towards it. It had to speak to people who, above all, believed that if you wanted to ascend to the spiritual and divine, you had to do so completely detached from the lower reality, you even had to arm yourself with a certain world-contempt, with a certain unreality of life. This was already an attitude that was alive in those who, out of their inclinations, had found their way into the current of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

And on the other hand, the world's judgment of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arose: Oh, they are dreamers, they are visionaries, they are people who are not relevant to practical life. This judgment arose - such things are very difficult to destroy - and still lives on today in most people who want to judge anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Of course, people saw that something different was alive in what appeared at that time as this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science than in their theories, in their world-view ideas. And since they regarded what they had sucked out of their bloodless abstractions from their materialistic orientation as the only spiritual reality to be attained by man himself, what the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science spoke to the world from completely different foundations seemed to them to be something fanciful, something fantastic.

But a quite different phenomenon was involved. What was spoken at that time out of truly shaped spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy is not the speech of fantasy or enthusiasm. It is the speech of spiritual research that can give an account of the nature of its research to the most exacting mathematician, as I said at another time. But it is true: what has been spoken here out of spiritual realities sounded different from the bloodless world views of modern times. It sounded different, not because it was more abstract, or because it ascended to regions of the spirit more bloodless and frozen than those which have given rise to the theories developed out of the modern way of thinking, but it sounded different because it proceeded from spiritual realities, because it proceeded from those regions of man where one not only thinks, where one feels and wills, but does not feel and will in a dark way, not in the way that modern psychology considers to be the only one because it only knows this; not out of dark feeling, but out of feeling that is just as bright, as bright as the purest thinking itself. And the words were spoken out of a will that is suffused with a light that is striven for as the bright clarity of pure thoughts is striven for, and these thoughts are grasped when we seek to comprehend reality. Thus, in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, there lived that which wanted to come from the whole person, which therefore also wanted to take hold of the whole person, to take hold of the thinking, feeling and willing human being.

When one was able to speak in this way from the innermost being of the whole person, one often felt the inadequacy of even modern modes of expression. Anyone who has felt this way knows how to speak about it. One felt that modern times had also brought something into external language that leads words into abstract regions, and that speaking in the way language has now become itself invites abstraction. And one experiences, I would say, the inwardly tragic phenomenon of carrying within oneself something that one would like to express in broad content and sharp contours and developed with inner life, but that one is then rejected back to what modern language, which is coming out of an age of abstraction and is theoretical, alone knows how to say. And then one feels the urge for other means of expression. One feels the urge to express oneself more fully about what one actually carries within oneself than can be done through the theoretical debates in which modern humanity has been trained for three to four centuries, the theoretical debates that have shaped our concepts, our words, in which even our lyricists, our playwrights, our epic poets live more than they realize. One feels the necessity for a fuller, more vivid presentation.

Out of such feelings, the need arose for me to say what was said in the first phase of our anthroposophical movement, which was clothed in more intellectual forms, through my mystery festival plays. I tried to present, in a theatrical way, in scenes and images that were to embrace the whole of human life, the physical, soul and spiritual life, what can be seen in the course of the world, what is contained in the course of the world as a partial solution to our great world riddles, but which can never be expressed in the abstract formulas into which the laws of nature can be expressed. This is how that which I then tried to depict in my mystery dramas came about. I had to resort to images to depict what comes from the whole human being. For only from the human being in his head comes what modern language has created for our science and our popular literature, and what today's people, if you listen to them, are able to understand. You have to touch the deeper sides of their minds if you want to speak to them what anthroposophical spiritual science actually has to say.

This is how the need for these mystery dramas arose. These mystery dramas were first performed in Munich, in the surroundings, in the setting of ordinary theaters. Just as it literally blew apart the inside of the soul when one had to express the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in the formulas of modern philosophy or world view, so it blew apart one's aesthetic sensation when one had to present in an ordinary theater, in an ordinary stage space, what was now to be depicted in a pictorial way: the spiritual content of the anthroposophical worldview and world feeling, of the anthroposophical world will. And when we worked in Munich on the theatrical presentation of these mystery plays in ordinary theaters, the idea arose to create a space of our own, to perform a building of our own, in which there would no longer be the sense of confinement that one in the manner just described for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but in which there is a framework that is itself the expression of what lives in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Therefore, this building was not created in the sense of an old architectural style, where one would have gone to any architect and had a house created for what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to work out, but rather it had to arise from the innermost being of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, because it did not merely work out of thinking and feeling, but out of the will itself, a structure had to arise out of this living existence of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a framework, which, as a style, as a formal language, gives the same as the spiritual-soul gives the spoken word of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. A unity had to be created between the building as an art form and the living element present in this spiritual science.

But if there is such a living element, if there is a living element that is not merely theoretical and abstract, if there is a truly living spiritual element, then it creates its own framework, because with such a spiritual element one lives within the creative forces of nature, within the creative forces of the soul, within the creative forces of the spiritual. And just as the shell of the nut is formed out of the same creative forces as the inside, which we then consume as a nut, just as the nutshell cannot be other than it is because it follows the laws the nut kernel comes into being, so this structure here in all its individual forms is such that it cannot be otherwise, because it is nothing other than a shell that has come into being, been formed, created according to the same laws as spiritual science itself.

If I may express myself hyperbolically, it seems to me that at the end of my life I would not have been haunted by Heinrich Ferstel's thought that “architectural styles cannot be invented” if the truth contained in it had not been clearly reckoned with. Yes, architectural styles cannot be invented, they must arise out of an overall spiritual life. But if such a spiritual life as a whole exists, then it may dare, even if in a modest way, even with weak forces, to also gain an art style from the same spirituality from which this spirituality itself is created.

I believe that I know better than anyone else what the faults of this building are, and I can assure you that I do not think immodestly about what has been created. I know everything I would do differently if I were to build such a structure again. I know how much this building is a beginning, how much of what is intended by it in the sense of its style may have to be realized quite differently. In any case, I do not want to think immodestly about this building. But with regard to what is intended by it, it may be pointed out how it wants to prove that architectural styles cannot be invented, but that they can be born if, instead of the nihilism of world view, a spiritual positivism is set, if, instead of the decadent decline of old world views, new sources of world view are sought. This building has therefore been created with a certain inner necessity. Just as feeling led us to present our world view in the mystery plays, as if feeling were to be taken into account in addition to thinking, so should the will, which is inherent in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, first express itself artistically in this building.

The fact that there is life in this spiritual science should, however, be shown in an equally modest way, just as a beginning – I always have to emphasize this – by the fact that we do not want to use this building to shut ourselves away and, as it were, strive for a higher world view as if it were a satisfaction of our inner soulful desires. No, in the next lectures on this building I will show you how all the building forms here live in such a way that they basically do not represent walls, but something artistically transparent. This is how the wall, which is designed here, differs from the walls that one is accustomed to in other architectural walls. The latter are final; one knows oneself inside a space that is limited in a certain way. Here, however, everything is shaped in such a way that, by looking at the frame, one can get the feeling, if one feels the thing in the right way, of how everything cancels itself out. Just as glass physically negates itself and becomes transparent, so the artistic forms of the walls are meant to negate themselves in order to become transparent; so painting and sculpture are meant to negate themselves in order to become transparent, so as not to lock up the soul in a room, but to lead the soul out into the world. And out of this tendency there also arose the impulse, still modest, which I call the social impulse and which in my book The Core of the Social Question should be presented to the world, not as a theory but as a call to action.

Spiritual science could not remain with intellectuality. In its first phase it had to take human habits into account, had to speak to those people who were still educated entirely in abstract intellectualism. But it had to progress from thinking to feeling in order to present to the world what was to be expressed not only through the abstract word, but also through the dramatic play, the dramatic action, the dramatic image. But this spiritual science could not stop at mere feeling. It had to progress to the realm of will. It had to overcome and shape matter, it had to give form and life to matter. Therefore, a new framework, a new formal language, indeed a new architectural style, had to be sought for the mystery plays and for everything that wants to express itself through them, including the living anthroposophically oriented spiritual science itself. In order to affirm what lives as the deepest impulse in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the social impulse also arose quite naturally in the time when adversity taught people to replace the tendency of decline with the tendency of ascent. We wanted to gain through this building, even through its style, that state of mind through which the human being goes out to experience all of social existence, goes out to be able to participate in the necessary social reconstruction of our time with living soul content.

Thus, I believe, this structure can be seen as standing within what reveals itself as the deepest needs of our time, which in turn want to lead people out of mere abstractness and the materialism associated with it, out of mere thinking and into living feeling, and into active will. And we believe that in this way we also have what must be the substance, as it were, for what is so urgently demanded of us today, for what we know: If we humans are unable to accomplish it, the slide into barbarism will continue. A worldview that encompasses the whole person, the thinking, feeling and willing human being, must also be able to provide the state of mind that enables people to work together on what is a vital necessity of the present and the near future: social action.

1.

In the history of recent Western philosophy, Rudolf Steiner appears as a unique personality because his whole philosophical work is not the result of a thinking effort, but is based on spiritual experiences. In the world of the East it goes without saying that a great thinker is at the same time a great initiate; in the West, however, it never before occurred that a whole philosophical system was based on immediate spiritual experience. For this reason Steiner had to face the greatest mistrust from the world of the “official” philosophers.

It was Eduard von Hartmann whose works Steiner carefully studied, who influenced his early writings, and to whom he dedicated his doctoral thesis, Truth and Knowledge, published in 1892; and that despite the wide difference in their views. Following Kant, Hartmann believed that true reality can never be grasped by means of our consciousness, and that the experiences of our consciousness are nothing but an unreal reflection of reality. In contrast, there was no doubt for Steiner that “the experiences of our consciousness can enter the true realities by means of strengthening of our soul forces, and that the divine spiritual principle manifests itself in man if he makes this manifestation possible by his soul life.” (See Steiner's autobiography, The Course of My Life.) The unconscious realities of the world which, according to Hartmann, are veiled forever from our knowledge, “can be brought to our consciousness again and again, by means of the efforts of our soul lives,” as Steiner expressed it in the book quoted above. We are by no means separated from the realities of the world forever, but only so long as we are perceiving by means of the senses exclusively. Actually, the world of the senses is spiritual. If by enhancing our soul life, we succeed in experiencing the ideas working in the world of the senses, then we are able to experience the world in its reality. Steiner calls his philosophical system, “concrete” or “objective idealism.”

From his early youth on, Steiner felt the kinship between this kind of idealism and Goethe's world conception. In contrast to almost all philosophers, his education was not a classical, but a technical one-as if this were a kind of presentiment of the world in which, and into which, Steiner wanted to work later. He graduated from the Institute of Technology in Vienna where he was strongly influenced by his personal connection with the famous Goethe researcher, Karl Julius Schröer. Upon Schröer's warm recommendation, Steiner was invited to edit, in 1884, the natural scientific writings of Goethe in the great Goethe edition of Kürschner's Nationalliteratur. Four years later he was invited to join the work at the Goethe Archives in Weimar. Here Steiner lived from 1889 to 1897.

As a fruit of this research work, his book, A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller, was published already as early as 1886. (Further editions appeared in 1924, 1936, 1949 and 1960 respectively.) Up to then, Goethe's scientific endeavors had been considered as mere poetic presentiments of the truth. It was Steiner who proved that all of Goethe's various individual discoveries and presentiments had their origin in a total view, and that this is what matters.

2.

Goethe's understanding of nature brought him in opposition to Kant. The problem here is the limitation of our knowledge. In this difference of views, Steiner in his interpretation of Goethe took the side of the latter, in opposition to Kant, and thus put himself in opposition to the Neo-Kantians, whose views were taught in all German universities at that time. Otto Liebmann who renewed Kantianism in the second half of the nineteenth century, had proclaimed that the human consciousness cannot be enhanced. The same line of thought was the foundation upon which Johannes Volkelt had based his thesis that the world known to man has to be separated sharply from the other world, that of the “things in themselves” which, as such, is unknown to man. Thus, the follower of Kant believed that man's knowledge is limited, and that man can never cross this limit; however, in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Steiner makes the statement that with his thinking, man lives in the reality of the world as a spiritual world, and that the world of the senses is, in truth, a manifestation of the spiritual principle.

In this, Steiner was in full agreement with Goethe. Goethe had conceived the great idea of metamorphosis. According to the latter, the world is a manifestation of ideal forces in the world of the senses. All plants, for example, are nothing but materializations of the one, ideal archetypal plant. The archetypal plant is the fundamental design of all plants: the knot and the leaf. We have to think of this fundamental design as a living, working idea which cannot be seen by means of our sense organs but which manifests itself in the world of the senses. Whenever this fundamental design materializes physically, it varies in a manifold manner, and in accordance with any of these variations, the different plants are formed, following the living archetypal pattern. The archetypal plant is the Proteus who hides himself and manifests himself in all these various forms and whoever is able truly to imagine this archetypal plant, can somehow invent new plants which do not, or do not yet, exist in the world of the senses.

Time and again, Steiner pointed to a conversation between Goethe and Schiller which took place in the summer of 1794 during which Goethe claimed to look at nature in such a way that nature is to be thought of as “working and living, and having the tendency from the whole into the single parts.” In the course of this conversation, Goethe drew a sketch of the “archetypal plant” as a physical super-physical form according to which all existing plants are shaped. Schiller, the follower of Kant, answered that this “archetypal plant” is nothing more than an idea which man builds up in order to understand the particulars. Goethe did not agree with this. He said that in the spirit, he saw the whole in the same way as physically he saw the particulars; there was no fundamental difference between the spiritual and the physical view. To him both were parts of the reality. Whereupon Schiller answered, “This is not an experience; this is an idea.” To this Goethe replied, “I am very happy about this, that I do have ideas without my knowledge, and that I even see them with my very eyes.”

This conversation reveals two typical approaches to the problem of the relationship between a spiritual and a sense experience. Schiller, on the one hand, emphasizes the contrast: the two experiences can never be united. In Goethe's view, on the other hand, the idea and the sense perception complete each other, forming two means of knowledge by working together. Man has to let things speak to him in a twofold way: one part of their reality is given him without his cooperation, if only he opens his senses; the other part, however, can be grasped by him by means of his thinking only, and if he is blessed as was Goethe, he is able to see it with his very eyes. However, together the two parts form the complete whole of the object itself.

Schiller considers the ideal part as a subjective addition on the part of man. Though Kant had realized that we have to use the concept of the inner functionality if we really want to understand the various products of nature, and that we cannot grasp the reality without this concept, he still allotted it to the “reflective power of judgment” of man only; or, in other words, he considered this concept to be nothing but an invention of man, though an indispensable one. In contrast to this, the young Schelling in 1797, exclaimed, entirely following Goethe's ideas, “No longer is there any reason to be afraid of statements!” And consistently, he wanted nature explained from the side of the idea. And here are Goethe's words: “By looking at ever-creative nature, we become worthy of spiritually participating in her productions. Didn't I, first unconsciously, and only following an inner urge, time and again insist upon that archetypal, typical principle? I even succeeded in building up a description which follows the formative forces of nature; and nothing was able any longer to prevent me from courageously undergoing the adventure of the reason, as the Old Man from Konigsberg himself calls it.” But for Kant, the “Old Man from Konigsberg,” the postulation of an objectively existent idea still remained an “adventure of the reason.”

But how is man able to grasp this idea which, of its own nature is non-physical, yet working in the physical world of the senses? Goethe considered himself as possessing a power of judgment by looking at an object (an “anschauende Urteilskraft”); he says that the thinking itself must be metamorphosed, must be enhanced, in order to experience the idea of metamorphosis; a spiritual activity is needed, a dynamic thinking.

3.

By adopting Goethe's theory of knowledge, Steiner also answers the question as to what meaning man's activity of knowledge has in the cosmos. The positivistic thinkers consider knowledge nothing but a mere comprising of individual objects into groups; and these groups are for us, then, abstract concepts or names. Thinking as such serves economic purposes exclusively, but it will never create anything new, although the latter might be of great importance for man. In contrast to this, Steiner states that Science is by no means a mere repetition of what is presented to us by our senses, in some abbreviated form, but rather it adds to it something fundamentally new, something which can never be found in the mere perception, or in the experience. This fundamentally new principle, however, is by no means something of a subjective nature which, according to Kant, man projects on the given perception, or on nature, but rather the true essence of the world of the senses itself. The physical phenomena are riddles which the thinking solves; but what this thinking thus brings about, is the objective world itself. For the world is presented to us by two means: by sense perception and by spiritual knowledge. Both are parts of the objective world. According to Kant, the unity of the objects as it is expressed in concepts, is merely loaned to them by man's I; every connection, he says, originates in our “transcendental apperception.” Steiner, on the other hand, says that just the opposite is true: that objects have their ideal content within themselves. The objects, however, are not presented to our senses in their completeness. By thinking about the objects, we develop the ideas which are working in the specific objects, thus adding to the perception what has been missing from it. This missing, however, is not an objective fact but only the consequence of the fact that by means of our senses we perceive the world in a fragmentary manner only.

Consequentially, the idea is, and works objectively; however it is not presented to our sense organs but appears, in our own thinking, on the subjective stage of our consciousness. This is the reason why it seems to us to be subjective only. Man, by means of his thinking, reveals the ideal nucleus of the world. If it were supposed that man's spirit did not exist, the ideas as expressed in natural laws would be working, but they would not be expressed, not grasped as such. Thus, our intellect does not create order in the objective outer world, but restores the order and the unity of this objective world, which has been interfered with by its own means of understanding, subject to two ways of knowledge. This, however, entitles him to grasp the concept as such, thus adding to the already existing form of existence, a completely new form. (Here the question arises as to whether or not Peter Wust was influenced by Steiner when in the former's Dialektik des Geistes, Dialectic of the Spirit, page 293 in the original German edition, he expresses almost the same lines of thought.)

Human thinking frees the ideal pure form as such; thus, man becomes a creator. Without him, thinking would not exist.

4.

Steiner's Anthroposophy—with which we are not dealing here—differs from the “mystical” schools in the extremely high value it accords to thinking. This high evaluation of thinking originates here, in Steiner's philosophy: man has his right place in the cosmos as a thinking being.

Thinking, on the one hand, and perception, on the other, belong together; however, we experience them as separated. Perceptions are presented to us; facing them, we are merely passive; thoughts, again, have to be brought about by the effort of our soul forces. The world insofar as it is perceived, cannot solve any riddles; there, dreams and hallucinations are presented to us in exactly the same way as is the world of the senses. Thoughts, however, are completely familiar to us, and—fundamentally, at least—are transparent. If we wish to find relationships within the world of sense perception, we have to use our thinking forces.

However, what is added to the perception by our thinking is by no means of a merely subjective nature. For it is not we who “have” the thinking, but rather it is the thinking which “has” us. We cannot combine contents of thoughts arbitrarily, but we have to follow their laws. The thinking does not produce the thoughts; it merely receives them, as does the eye the light, and the ear the sound. The only difference is that the senses work automatically while we remain passive, while, insofar as thinking is concerned, we have to activate it ourselves. Perceptions are given to us; concepts we ourselves have to work out.

Let us imagine a spirit to whom the concept is given together with the perception; such a spirit would never achieve the idea that the concept is not an integral part of the subject, but something of a “subjective” nature. Steiner suggests that in earlier times, as a matter of fact, all mankind experienced things in this way.

Therefore it is not the fault of the objects that we first confront them without the corresponding concepts, but of our own spiritual-physical organization. The abyss between perception and concept opens only at the moment when I, the perceiving subject, confront the objects. To explain the object by means of thinking means nothing other than to restore the connection which man's organization has broken up. It is up to man to gain knowledge. The objects themselves require no explanation. We are the ones who ask questions because we face the cleavage between perception and concept.

In this way Steiner has succeeded in building up a truly objective idealism, from Kant back to Plato, or forward to Schelling. What is new in Kant's philosophy—his idealism in contrast to dogmatism—remains in Steiner's world conception. Steiner, however, refuses to accept the subjective nature of this idealism, and with it, the disastrous division of the world into that of human experience and that of the objects in themselves. For Steiner, thinking is neither a mere subjective activity nor a shadowy imitation of the perception, but an independent spiritual reality.

5.

By considering from the outset the nature of the transcendental principle to be conceptual-spiritual, Steiner rejects the dogma of the modern theory of knowledge since Kant: that man is never able to grasp reality. In the thinking process, he himself participates in the transcendental order of laws of the objects. What here leads us constantly in the wrong direction is the fact that we think our I to be somewhere within our physical organization, and that impressions are given to it by the “outside.” The truth however is that our I is living within the order of laws of the objects themselves; but this life of the I in the region of the transcendental principle is not consciously experienced by man. It is rather his physical organization by which he experiences himself.

Steiner frequently uses the example of a mirror which reflects outer events; and this “mirror” is our physical body. The activity of the body represents the living mirror which reflects the life of the I, which in turn is of a transcendental nature. Thus the human I is able to enter the transcendental principle without “forgetting” itself. But the content of our ordinary, empiric, every-day consciousness is to what our I experiences in reality, as the reflection of the mirror is to the original.

This difference between our true life and that which is only “mirrored,” enables Steiner to settle the conflict between natural science tending toward materialism, and spiritual research presupposing the spiritual principle. Natural science studies nothing but the “mirrored reflection” of the reality which is bound to the brain; this “reflection,” of course, depends on the “mirror,” or in other words, on our nervous system. Man's illusion—though necessary for his every-day life—of thinking of his I as an entity living within his physical organization, is relatively justified here. However, the true innermost being of man will never be found within this physical organization, but rather in the transcendental field.

Thus man has to be considered as a being who, on the one hand is living in the spiritual world itself, and on the other, is receiving its experiences “mirrored” by its physical organization. The world of the senses is, in reality, a spiritual world, but it does not appear to us as such.

The training indicated by Steiner in his various anthroposophical books seeks to stimulate man's soul development to the point where he is able to experience this spiritual world consciously; and this training consists of laborious spiritual exercises which require, above all, a great deal of patience and perseverance.

For those of us who are not—or are not yet—in the position to come to spiritual experiences, Rudolf Steiner's philosophy will still be a highly important contribution toward man's understanding of himself and of the world in which he lives—even though this philosophy can be used only to guide the student on his own right way. However, this whole philosophy is by no means meant to be a mere theoretical line of thought; rather does it find its true completion in the realms of its practical effects. Steiner had good reasons for giving his book—in the original German at least—the title, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, that is, literally, The Philosophy of Freedom, and he poses the question: When is an action free? And he answers this question by stating that it is free when it has its origin in pure thinking. At first glance, Steiner's philosophy of ethics may appear intellectualistic. As in the theory of cognition we have to differentiate between subjective perception on the one hand and the objective concept on the other, in the same way, in the realm of ethics we have to differentiate between motives which originate in the perception and those having their origin in pure thinking. In the first instance we cannot call the deed a free one, since this kind of action is prompted by our surroundings, by our feelings and our will, as well as by our personal nature. None of these is truly free. Only the action motivated by our thinking is truly free. For this kind of action is objective; it is not in the least connected with our I; the world of thinking is common to all of us.

Spinoza, the great Dutch philosopher of the 17th century, objected to the doctrine that man's actions are free by saying that if a stone thrown by someone were endowed with consciousness, it would also make the statement that it flies “freely.” To this Steiner replied that it is not the consciousness as such that builds up in people's minds the belief that they are free; rather it is the fact that man is capable of comprehending the rationality of his motives—provided they are rational. Only that action can be called free which has been determined by the rationality of its ideas.

But how does man materialize his rational motives? The answer is, By means of his moral imagination, which enables him to obtain his motives from the world of ideas. The unfree man is determined passively by the motives of his surroundings which also include his innate nature. The free man, on the other hand, acts according to his moral intuition which, though his own, nevertheless lifts him from the level of his limited I to the objective world of thinking.

Now the problem arises, How can objective morality be united with personal initiative? Steiner strongly rejects Kant's ethics which claim his “categorical imperative” to be a general law which extinguishes the personality. He claims just the opposite, namely a purely individual ethic, expressing it thus: “I do not ask anybody, no man and no law; I perform my action according to the idea which guides me. In so doing, my action is my own, and not the execution of the will of an authority. The urging of my desires means nothing to me, nor does that of moral laws; I want simply to do what seems right to me.” In strict opposition to Kant, any action dictated by a general law appears to him as unfree, heteronomous, while only those actions are autonomous which originate in a law given by man's own self. In a letter dated December 5, 1893, addressed to John Henry Mackay, the follower of Max Stirner, Steiner expressly laid stress on the full agreement of his own philosophy of ethics with that of Stirner, presented in the latter's book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, The Individual and His Property.

The moral imagination must, out of necessity, be individual. This is the point which counts. However, here we find no opposition between individuality and the general law; we all share in the world of thinking, we all live in one spiritual world. Thus, despite the fact that every single human being draws from his own personal world of ideas, there cannot be any conflict. People are living together, not there is one spiritual cosmos, common to all. This is one of the most important aspects of the picture of Man. For the idea of man is that of a free being. However, we are still rather far from this goal, which belongs to the future. Man's evolution toward this highest goal is far from completed; Man has not yet become a reality. There is something very special in relation to the idea of Man: while all other ideas have materialized, have become one with their perception, as we have seen above, that of Man is still waiting for its materialization, its incorporation. It is Man alone who is able to complete this. While nature performs the task of completion in the case of the plant and animal, so far as Man is concerned nature can do no more than pave the way toward this completion. But it is only and exclusively Man himself who is able to take the last and the decisive step. Books have been written on the question whether or not Man is free, but the manner of asking the question is wrong, for it can never be answered objectively-theoretically. The answer is given by a process of self-liberation.

Rudolf Steiner enthusiastically follows the theory of evolution as it was developed by Darwin and Haeckel. However, he goes far beyond its mere biological aspect. The moral life of man is the continuation of his biological development. Creating new moral ideas out of our “moral imagination”—as, for instance, Gandhi's “non-violence,” or Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life”—is a “jump” in evolution comparable to the “jump” which creates a new species in the plant or animal kingdom. In a letter dated August 26, 1902, addressed to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, Steiner wrote, “Nature achieves the most important moments in evolution every time she makes her typical jumps.”

The evolution of mankind as a whole within the hierarchy of the Spiritual Beings is a process of cosmic importance.

HUGO S. BERGMAN
The Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, 1961

Translated by Stephen Michael Engel

When at the present time a Madonna, when a goddess addresses us from the stage one can hardly believe one’s ears. Not the faintest attempt is made to set the language apart from the ephemera of common life, and not the slightest effort to attain with the aid of speech to a higher sphere. The spirit is barred every way from admittance to the stage, and not an opening, not even the least pretentious of openings into its alien, inaccessible worlds can be found. Absolutely no one undertakes to allow any light to infiltrate from that hinterland of speech whence celestial forms may shine through. The reality of spirit is a concept cast by the wayside. A washerwoman at her sink is quite up to any one of these Madonnas perched on a pedestal in some miracle-play – and quite devoid of anything divine and spiritual in her language. The speaking is so uncultivated, so rough, so painfully prosaic. It is positively offensive. I do not mean this as a snub to washerwomen and the way they speak, which in their case is quite justifiable. Hard work makes the voice hard and rugged, and her struggling with material tasks must have a coarsening effect unless there happens to be religion or anthroposophy to restore the balance. But a Madonna is hardly likely to be subjected to such physical labours in the heavenly heights: A certain aura should always hedge her about – even on the pedestal. There should be a certain translucence, a luminosity, a spirituality that sounds in her voice. The speaker should be able to produce the effect of a voice sounding from afar, free and floating. The figure thus presented is an image of something that reaches for the heavens and brings us down her gifts, catching us in the effulgence of her beams and the music of the spheres.

And what about the heavenly hosts: Have you ever heard them speak, either on stage or behind the scenes? What about Goethe’s archangels, for instance, or the Lord in the same scene? They sound like a real lot of stay-at-homes, or a chorus of sales executives: dry, dun, getting-down-to-business, quite down-to-earth. As for the spiritual background, the circling tread of the dance, the course of the aeons – all absent.

The sun makes music as of old

Amid the rival spheres of heaven

Of the poetry there is hardly a trace.

Yet this is what we ought to pursue, to capture, today.

We have to feel our way towards it, step by step, listening, responding, continually wrestling, never relenting, until we burst out of our intellectual constraints, the barriers directed by material life across our path; until we transcend our restrictions and emerge into the open on the other side, liberated, saved. Anyone who is “happy discovering earthworms” will never succeed in getting beyond himself, will not make the discovery that he is also a being of air who can master the physical man, and make use of him without being chained to him. For him there will be no encounter with the word’s healing power, its life-giving power, or the power of illumination which enables him to grasp the core of his being and carries him over into the realm from whence he came. Borne on the wings of the word, he can endeavour to seek out his way along these paths. He has a presentiment of them whenever he gives himself over to the primordial powers of the word. The “I” – the vital breath – the divine centre: along such a path may the word lead one back to the beginning.

And let us explore the realms of that less expansive spirituality that opens up for us in poetry. Let us take the elemental world. Does modern art, like a child of the gods, hand us the key to unlock these kingdoms? Not at all! Cleverness, and a dash of temperament, are enough to be going on – absolutely rattling along, with no feeling at all for a wise disposition of aesthetic resources, such as comes from knowledge of our human organization. No knowledge of the laws that are manifestations of divine-creative forces in art, of which for us both man and the world are representations. Should not our ultimate aim be to trace the routes that the gods have taken in creating works of art after their own image, and into which they have breathed the breath of life? Let us embark with our tentative consciousness on those paths, beginning quietly and reverentially by experiencing the breath of life that furnishes the ground of our existence – here, in speech, as there, in creation. It is when we immerse ourselves in the word, when we fathom its being, that we enter upon those paths. What more marvellous prospect could there be?

Only we must begin by learning to spell. We must concern ourselves with the fundamentals, the speech-sounds themselves, and not with projecting our own one-sided personality.

I once saw in Germany a large-scale production of Shakespeare’s Tempest. But of the elemental world and its spiritual nature, there was nothing to be perceived. There was certainly a lot of noise, temperamental outbursts and screaming. The Caliban scenes were exorbitantly overdone, and protracted in the realist manner far beyond anything Shakespeare apportioned them. And Ariel? There was nothing in him of aerial lightness and strength: a heavy, booming voice, hard as bone; the figure thick-set. There was much bouncing up and down and shrieking. But the bouncing did nothing to dispel the heaviness of that little, earth-bound, dumpy figure with its anti-halo of tousled, dishevelled hair. An Ariel! Is not the word itself pure lightness and radiance – a soaring, sounding, hovering delight in the air? Shortly afterwards, I saw the same actress as Salome in Hebbel’s Herodes and Mariamne. It struck me then that she was talented. Her constitution lent support to her in that role: the dark, heavy voice, the hard, watchful, furtive glance; rooted to the earth and stocky in stature, she was the most interesting figure in Hebbel’s darkly-coloured piece, brooding on disaster as Salome-Herodias. Mariamne, on the other hand, seemed too cool and self-conscious, too keenly intelligent and concerned with women’s rights. A Maccabee? – no, a north-German down to the ground.

When will the actors find the escape route from this one-sidedness of the intellect, and reach the sources that will open up for them the culture-epochs, the races, the elements and the spirit-world? Desiccation is the only alternative to finding this way. In extremity, nerves fray. The breathless, consumptive approach soon loses its fascination – and is anyway not productive. If once the practice spreads, it becomes frankly objectionable. It is increasingly being rumoured that the theatre will be ousted by the film.

I once saw an Iphigeneia performance that acquired for me the status of an event. It was something of a turning-point, for things just could not continue like this. They had already been taken to breaking-point. And perhaps it was exactly here, where lay the driving powers behind such excesses as these, that the counter-forces could be evoked. I refrain from saying much about Iphigeneia herself. She was terribly tedious and common-place, expressing the boring and blasé inanities of a salon-lady – the kind who has nothing to do but parade up and down in her park and be pestered by her (solitary) insufferable admirer. Nor will I dwell upon the prize-fighter’s figure of King Thoas, the admirer in this case – though, with a neck like a bull and swinging his bare, muscular arms, he seemed to be saying: Just take my measurements, you won’t find anyone who can size up to me! I do not recall that anything else was conveyed in what he did say; certainly nothing faintly regal.

But then Orestes – Orestes: He was obviously sustained by one idea alone: that of being different from any Orestes that ever was. He was out to excel in triviality. Now if one is supposed to be a tramp, one must have the proper attributes: a skin as red as copper, an unkempt, tangled head of hair (of an indeterminate mousy colour), and a voice that is hoarse and flat, with a tinny ring. Orestes is supposed to be possessed. And so the intellect is set in motion to work out what a possessed person should look like: his thoughts will be incoherent, his nerves sensitive, making him nervous and wary of being touched; he finds everything repellent. Inwardly, such a concocted product of the head’s “realism” possesses about as much truth as a billiard ball that is made to speak. And outwardly it looks like a sort of uncared-for vagabond one might encounter on the highways of Russia ... but wait, that might actually be an inspiration: Tauris – the Crimea – Russia – a possessed vagabond it yields analogies: Modern interpretations are scarcely drawn from farther afield than this. As for Orestes, the accursed descendent of Tantalus, the Greek hero, on the other hand – such ideas are long out of date, far too hackneyed. And the same goes for iambics, for the metres and noble harmony of speech: we got beyond such things years ago.

It is said that Maximilian Harden’s journalistic career began in the following way. The editor of the Monday edition of the Berliner Tagblatt instructed a number of his young employees to “do nothing for the whole week except sit in coffee-houses, read all the papers you can lay hands on, and for next Monday write me an article that is different from everything else you have read on the subject.” Maximilian Harden is said to have done the best job.

If the motive-power behind the player of Orestes was something on the same lines, this might explain his grotesque whim and bad taste – otherwise quite inexplicable. His novelty consisted, in effect, only in pushing the tendencies of intellectualism and naturalism to an extreme, obsessively debasing this culminating achievement of the German spirit by his nervous brand of realism. The noblest, flawless, perfect product of German poetry, the Roman version of Goethe’s Iphigeneia, was quite ruthlessly and brutally trampled upon, and anyone who felt in sympathy with the play felt himself trampled upon too. We came away from the performance with a burden of responsibility: to rescue the most exalted values of the spirit.

It was about this time, as well, that our Shaper of Destinies was taken from us, he who had done so much for art, too, and pointed out the path of recuperation. He spanned the “shimmering arch” which bridges over the spirit-abandoned abyss of modern times to the other side. He was the builder, he did the moulding, he kindled and scattered the sparks, bequeathing us in his work myriads of precious stones. It is with a profound sense of responsibility that we now put together these precious stones from his spiritual wealth.

They will ennoble human beings, and fill them with bliss for thousands of years to come; and they will serve today as a magic key to open closed doors, to revive what is dead and heal what is sick, to atone for what is evil. We must only have good will. All these far-flung gems can become a magic key – even though, as in the case of these transcripts, they lie before our eyes in fragments. The notes of these three splendid lectures are very inadequate, and for all of seven years they lay hidden from the public at large because these deficiencies seemed too obvious. But so much of their richness remains that, on the foundation they lay, a rebirth of the theatre can come about.

Every word that was uttered must indeed be given its full value, and taken in all its interconnections. A foundation must be furnished for an understanding based on the will to an all-round knowledge of man and the world in their cosmic dimensions. Rudolf Steiner refers to what is adumbrated here as being “guiding principles”. With them he has opened new worlds for us.

These lectures can be our signposts to those more subtle reaches of art to which access has presently been lost, barred by materialism. The intimacies of the soul-life, the mysteries of man’s organization in conjunction with the mysteries of the cosmos form the basis of our considerations. They are intended only as points of departure for further advances, which will be achieved through steady work and inner experience. Limitations of time meant that they could be carried out only cursorily; but they may serve as prompters and awakeners to rouse the artist’s powers to independent life. They were given as part of a whole complex of lectures, which were aimed in a single direction: away from the nihilistic forces at work in our age, towards new light and recuperation. This was the deed which Rudolf Steiner performed. And if, to some hostile powers, his life’s work seems to have been checked or even annulled through the crippling of his public activities, the burning of the Goetheanum, his physical death – they are mistaken. The seeds, sheltering the future within them, are there. They are sprouting everywhere, even though external forms may be disrupted.

The task of preparation and re-edification for the future demanded unflagging effort, superhuman strength; and their affirmation could only be achieved through sacrifice. In a lifetime of indefatigable labour, one of the high points of Rudolf Steiner’s work was the opening of the Goetheanum as a Spiritual Scientific University (Hochschule). It was a time of subversive acts, of social dissension and economic collapse. Even though the art work was not entirely finished, the building could be committed to its proper function, the work for which it was intended. For three years the building served this purpose: the spiritual renewal of mankind. Then, on Sylvester Night, it was destroyed by fire. The solemnity of the festival gave way to the act of destruction; the vast framework of the completed year passed over into history. And thus, when it was rent away from earthly effectiveness, the building was impressed like a seal into the cosmos and the course of the ages.

The lectures formed part of the course for this university, and were not to be omitted from their context in the whole opening ceremony, of which they formed an integral part. For Rudolf Steiner the word stood at the foundation of everything that took place. The word was his point of departure, the central and directing force behind every development that unfolded and every seal that was opened. It was not Rudolf Steiner’s way to shroud great words in the secrecy of the occult: he paved the way for them through genuine understanding and inner apprehension. What he laid open to us became a matter of perception, something consciously grasped, an activity consciously undertaken. We were able, under his guidance, to scale the first rungs of the ladder. Then he gave us our freedom. In us his word was to become a courageous venture and accomplishment.

Art was never lacking in any of the projects inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner. We were to approach art with understanding, and practise it with reverence, being mindful of its origin. In the celebration of the cosmic rite, art played a vital role. It sprang from the threefold Logos; it officiated and performed the sacrifice at the altars of truth, beauty and power. In the course of the age of rationalism, it has for the longest time preserved its links with the divine. In the age of triviality, this heaven-born child was sunk in physical nature: the triumph of mechanics tore her away from her spiritual origins and fettered her to the machine. She must be redeemed again!

The House of Speech (as Rudolf Steiner called the Goetheanum) was intended to lead art, science and religion, which had grown apart from their original unity into threefold isolation, back together. Rudolf Steiner saw in a spiritual deepening of art, science and religion and in their mutual fructification an effective remedy for the social ills of mankind. Barbarity might be avoided and, in place of the twilight of European culture that has already been confirmed by science, there might rise out of affliction, misery and delusion the light of a new dawn.

He expressed the object of his strivings in profoundly penetrating words, which allow us to realize the significance he attributed to a spiritualized form of art in the rebuilding of a higher culture for humanity.

The house which served this end, freely and openly bidding welcome to every guest, is no longer standing. But in its place there rises a building made, like a stronghold, in the hard material of our time – concrete. Life from its departed creator was still breathed into it, ennobling it and giving it its special significance. It is there that the Mystery Plays are to be performed. These dramatic creations of Rudolf Steiner, which put man in connection again with the spiritual cosmos and make him once more a “citizen of the universe”, explaining his present personality in terms of his earlier lives an earth – these productions will enable mankind to attain to self-knowledge, self-realization and self-renewal. And there above all, eurythmy must be cultivated: Rudolf Steiner added this new art, where speech-movement takes an externally visible form, to the series of already existing arts; and this leads to the compelling, the imperative demand for a renewal of the art of speech – the word artistically spoken. Concerted interaction between spoken word and eurythmic gesture was what Rudolf Steiner called for and this had to be attained in practice. When the performance corresponded with his demands, he gave us a conscious insight into our actions and shed light on the mysteries of the art of speech and poetry, thereby redeeming us from the insufferable state into which they had degenerated.

We are under no illusion that the world will bring any but a meagre understanding to bear on our endeavours. We shall be understanding, even if some honest student at first casts this book impatiently and despairingly aside. A metamorphosis of consciousness is necessary to pass this way, and art has been held back from any permeation by consciousness. A perceiving, a hearing, a willing consciousness: today these alone can bring us genuine aesthetic experience and wrest the language of poetry away from the abstractive intelligence and mechanization to which it has now fallen prey.

We have grown accustomed to what the modern stage puts before us and thus have little notion of the suffering that can be inflicted when the noblest works of poetic drama are brought before the soul mutilated, maltreated and desecrated, as is only too often the case today.

It is as if the gods have turned away in anger from what we have made of their gifts. They gave us everything, held nothing back. Works of unbelievable stature, purity and perfection of form have come into being. The German language has been moulded into an instrument of subtlest strength and pliancy, to grasp the breadth and profundity of existence, to unfold the inner essences of things. It is still capable of transformation, of pliancy; it still has the ability to grow beyond itself, bearing mankind onward and upward in its progress. But whoever leads it on to its destination resolutely and imperturbably will be stoned – while those who make it banal, who reduce it to the level of the feuilleton will be venerated.

The German language’s potentialities for concrete delineation and for the transcending of conceptual formulations are also to be found in another way: in the plasticity and translucence of its speech-sounds. It is not in the usual sense musical – not superficially. One has to have an ear for it. But it does have so many lights and shades, such capacities for veiling the sound or for brightening, flashing, that with its help we can break through the bounds of the senses. The world beyond sounds through in its modified vowels and its diphthongs, whispers through its clusters of consonants and rings out in the freely-suspended vaulting of its syntax. We do not realise what an artistic experience language can be until we have learnt to listen inwardly, until psychic-spiritual sound has been transposed into tone-formation and soaring movement.

The world of today is sheer intellect rendered actual. It does not go beyond the mechanical and mathematical; it cannot find the way into imagination and the creating of myths. We are unable to produce images any more, because we have grown abstract and hollow. It is much easier to be clever in one’s thinking than it is to form imagery, since the intellectual stems from our personality, while aesthetic creation makes much greater demands an our selflessness. It immerses itself in the object rather than reflecting upon it, lets itself be drawn along rather than seizing hold of it. Through living in intellectualism we lose our real connection with the world. We deprive human beings of their immortal part. The forming of images affects not only the intellect, but the whole man, entering into much deeper strata of the soul-life than does conceptual thinking. In attempting to speak in imagery, we bind the atoms sundered in the course of study, and divided amongst the conventional categories of learning, into a new synthesis. It must all be raised into the sphere of Imagination, where the plasticity of the language is released into movement and its musicality becomes ensouled. In this it draws near to the eternal in the soul which stands behind everything intellectual. Through imaginative, ensouled speech we can lead man to the substantial content of the word, to the super-sensible, to the creative word that flows from the super-sensible. The immortal life of the soul is roused to awakening when we speak artistically, out of the image; immortal life is smothered when we work out of intellectualism.

We placed the image or Imagination of the author of the Apocalypse before our souls yesterday, and I pointed out that it is a vision of Christ which was given by God. Then I pointed out that the letter which was sent to John must be looked upon as an explanation of the Imagination or as something which will help us to understand it.

The way in which the writer of the Apocalypse is then also looked upon as the writer of the letter is in line with the nature of the Mystery and with the way one speaks and thinks out of the Mystery. For it was in keeping with the nature of the Mystery that the writer of such a document did not consider himself to be the author in the way that we look upon the author of a work today, but he felt that he was the instrument of the spiritual writer. He felt that the act of writing the content down was no longer of much importance. This is why John treats the matter as if he were writing down the message of a god by order of the latter. This proceeds from everything that follows in a way that is really oriented in accordance with the Mystery.

One can say that our contemporary world needs an understanding of transitions like the one from the first vision in the Apocalypse to the following seven letters to the individual churches again. For present-day people have completely forgotten how to understand the things which everyone knew about in the mysteries and during the early years of Christianity.

This is another thing which you priests should really develop further. Just consider that what is written down in an inspired way in the Apocalypse is directed to the angel of the church in Ephesus, the church in Thyatira, the church in Sardis, etc. These letters were to be sent to angels. This is something over which modern intellects must stumble right away. But the important thing here is to consider the following.

A man once came to me near the end of his life who was trying very hard to really understand the Anthroposophical or spiritual view of things. You should really know about such things in your priestly work, for they are typical phenomena today. The important thing becomes evident in a striking way in this particular case, but it is something that you will often encounter on your priestly paths. And after all, it's the work on your priest's path which is the important thing. He said to me, “It looks as if Anthroposophists are trying to take the Bible literally.” I said, yes. Then he gave me all kinds of examples to show why he didn't think that the Bible should be taken literally. I said to him, “It's true that there are a great many so-called mystics, Theosophists, etc., who see all kinds of symbols and the like in the Bible and who break it up into a lot of symbols. Anthroposophy doesn't do this. It only tries to understand what the original text is really saying, and it can sometimes do this by proceeding from the symbolic language. And here,” I said “I have never found that one couldn't take the original text of the Bible literally, even though one often runs into misunderstandings which have arisen in the course of time in later translations.”

A literal reading of the Bible is a goal which can be attained. One can really say that anyone who cannot take a particular passage in the Bible literally yet, hasn't understood it yet, either. Of course this is also true of a lot of other things today.

We have come to such a passage here. We're touching upon something here which is' probably a little bit more esoteric than what we've encountered so far; but at some point it should really pass before your meditative eye's. Sometimes things in this or that confession which have remained behind from the old mysteries shoot and spray like volcanic fires from below, I can't say like lightning flashes, because they come from above.

I have often mentioned the pastoral letter of an archbishop which said no less than the following. The question was raised: who is greater, man or God? And although the language which was used was indirect, it nevertheless stated quite bluntly that priests are greater and more powerful than God, because when a priest—this doesn't apply to other people—stands at the altar he can force God to assume an earthly form, in the bread and wine. When a priest consecrates them and carries out a transubstantiation, the god must be present at the altar.

This is an explanation which goes far back to the ancient mystery culture, but it is also an explanation which is still common in esoteric Brahmanism in the orient today, to the extent that this is based on mystery knowledge. The idea that man is a being who includes the godhead is frequently used there, and this agrees with all mystery wisdom. Actually the idea is that man is higher than God. The Brahmanic priests from those times knew that they were the super-personal bearers of the Godhead, as it were, when their soul was in this mood.

This idea which shines in from the ancient mystery culture is a weighty one. But it is one of the things which every priest should meditate on at some point. However, it contradicts everything which has gradually arisen in the consciousness of Protestants. Protestants would say that this pastoral message is foolishness. We will come back to this letter in the course of our explanations of the Apocalypse. The idea here is just an exaggerated version of the idea which we encounter in the Apocalypse at the place I'm referring to.

John writes to the angels of the seven churches on orders from the gods or with divine inspiration. He is in such a state when he writes that he feels that he is the one who should give advice, warnings, a mission, etc to the angels of the seven churches. What is the concrete idea here? To whom does one have to point when the angel of the Christian community in Ephesus or Sardis or Philadelphia is mentioned? Although people can't really understand this today, there were certain individuals at that time, whom we would call educated Christians, who understood what it means when one says that when a prophetic person like John was writing to the angels of the churches while he was in a particular soul mood, he was higher than an angel.

However, the people who understood this would not have been referring to something supersensible when they said “angel.” They knew that Christian communities had been founded and continued to exist. The writer of the Apocalypse directed his letters to future times, when what he has to say about each community will come to pass. He is definitely not speaking about present conditions. He is speaking about future conditions. But those who were conversant with traditional views from the ancient mysteries would have had to point to the leading bishops in the communities who were the recipients of the letters.

On the one hand they were quite aware that the real leader of the community is the supersensible angel. On the other hand, they would have pointed to the bishop or the canonical administrator of the community. For they had the idea that the ranking administrator of a church in Sardis or Ephesus or Philadelphia was the earthly vehicle of a supersensible, angelic being. So that as John writes he actually feels that he is taken hold of by a being who is higher than an angel. He writes to the bishops of the seven churches as people who are permeated by the leading angel of a community, and not just by their own guardian angel—for everyone has one of the latter.

Then he mentions what he wants to tell these churches. And he's definitely pointing to the future. We have to ask: Why were seven letters directed to seven communities? Of course, these seven communities represent the various nuances of heathenism and Judaism from which Christ proceeded. One had a much greater understanding for concrete things in those times than one did later. For instance, there was the church in Ephesus, which had once given birth to the great Ephesian mysteries, and people knew quite well that the latter pointed to the future appearance of Christ in a way that was customary and necessary. The cultic rituals in Ephesus were supposed to mediate between the sacrificing priest, his congregation and divine, spiritual powers, including the coming Christ. The heathen community and cult in Ephesus foretold the coming of Christianity and therefore they stood quite close to it.

This is why the letter to the angel of the Ephesian church refers to the seven candlesticks. The candlesticks are the churches. This is explicitly, stated in the Apocalypse. Precisely the community in Ephesus is and must be taken the way it stands there, for this is its true form. The indication is that the church in Ephesus was more actively involved with Christianity than the other churches, and that this was its first love. For we're told that it left its first love. The Apocalypticer wants to speak about this coming time in his letter. We can see from this warning letter to the church in Ephesus that the Apocalypticer thinks that he should describe the development of the various churches in connection with what the communities experienced in ancient times.

In fact, the individual churches under discussion here represent various nuances of heathen or Jewish peoples, and they had various cults, whereby they approached the divine worlds in different ways. The way each letter begins shows one that the Christianity in each of the communities developed out of heathen rites in a special way.

One should realize that the attitude of soul which people had in the early days of Christianity was quite different from that of present-day Europeans, although this doesn't apply to the Orient as much. However, our view of religious things in a conceptual context or content which one can describe in a logical way was still very foreign to the ancient mystery type of thinking in the first Christian centuries, very foreign indeed. They told themselves: the Christ is one of the manifestations of the mighty sun being. However, the church in Ephesus, the church in Sardis, in Thyatira, etc., must each strive towards him from its cult in its own special way; each one can approach this being in a way which has a particular nuance. And one can find indications everywhere that they acknowledged this. Just consider the following.

Take a church like the one in Ephesus, which had to replace the ancient and profound Ephesian mysteries; it must be different than, say, the church in Sardis. The church in Ephesus had a cult which was completely permeated by the presence of divine, spiritual substances in earthly life. A priest who walked around in Ephesus could have called himself a god just as well as he could call himself a human being. He knew that he was a bearer of a god. The entire religious consciousness in Ephesus was really anchored in theophany or in the visible manifestation of a god in a human being. Each priest in Ephesus represented a particular god. And it was even one of their special tasks to really bring this theophanic element or this physical presence of a god into people's souls.

Let's suppose that the living, human elaboration of Artemis or Diana the moon goddess walked around among the Ephesian priestesses as they celebrated their cultic rites. The priests expected their followers to see the goddess in the earthly, human manifestation, so that they made no distinction between the earthly phenomena and the goddess. The people in public processions and in other ancient events in the mysteries represented gods. Just as one must learn to have adequate concepts about things today, so one had to acquire mental images and feelings in one's soul in order to see the god in the male or female priests.

Hence it is not surprising that after the Apocalypticer took it into his head to speak in the language of the mysteries—as I mentioned before—he turned to the community in Ephesus, where this particular way of thinking, feeling and sensing things was developed most strongly. It was only natural for the community in Ephesus to look upon the seven candlesticks as the most important symbol of its cult. They represented the light which lives upon earth, which however is divine light.

The situation was quite different in a community like the one in Sardis. This church was the Christian continuation, of an ancient, astrological star worship, where one really knew how the movements of the stars and planets are connected with earthly affairs. Where everything which greater or lesser leaders commanded or which happened on earth was read from the stars. The church in Sardis had developed from a mystery culture which really considered the investigation of life secrets and life impulses in the starry skies at night to be important. Before one could speak of the community in Sardis as a Christian one, one had to speak of it as the one which clung to an ancient, dreamy state of clairvoyance the most, for the secrets of the nocturnal macrocosm were disclosed to this clairvoyance; The people, who preserved and made a tradition out of this dreamy clairvoyance didn't think that what the day gives is very important.

The differences between the solar services and teachings in Ephesus and Sardis are really quite interesting to the extent that one can really speak of ancient wisdom in connection with these two places. The sciences were not separated from the mysteries at that time, and what was taught at these centers went out to laymen. The solar teachings in Ephesus separated the five planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury from the sun. and the moon. One set the sun—which we call a fixed star—apart in Ephesus: and one revered it from the time it rose to the time it set because one looked upon the sun as a principle which gives life.

This was not the case in Sardis. There one received its daily radiations rather indifferently, and one was mainly interested in what people in the ancient mysteries called the midnight sun. The nightly sun and the moon were considered to have the same value as the rest of the planets. The sun was really looked upon as a planet which was on an equal footing with the others. In Sardis one enumerated Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, sun moon. But in Ephesus they had Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury on the one side, and the gods of the day and the night, sun and moon, which are closely connected with life on earth, on the other. That is the big difference. And all the cultic rites in Sardis were based on this.

Thus in these first Christian times an old heathen cult which was only oriented towards Christian principles lived on in the church in Ephesus, whereas an old heathen cult which was oriented towards the kind of astrology which I just mentioned lived on in Sardis. Therefore, it is only natural that the Apocalypticer writes of the one who speaks to the community in Sardis, that he has seven spirits and seven stars; now the featured thing is not the candle sticks which stand on the altar and the light which is connected with the earth, but what stands up there in the macrocosm.

You can see how deeply the writer of the Apocalypse is still involved with the ancient mystery culture if you answer the question: What does the writer of the Apocalypse reproach the community in Sardis with, or what does he tell them to watch out for? He mainly tells them that they should be watchful, and that they should make the transition to the diurnal sun from which Christ came.

One has to take what stands there in a literal sense and to really press forward to the original meaning. The writer of the Apocalypse was just about the last one to speak about and deal with religious life like this on a large scale. Before that Alexander the Great dealt with it in this way when he spread religious life in a model way, and so did all the other people who spread religions in ancient times. No one used dogmas to talk people into things. They let people keep their cults and convictions and they only added as much to them as could be assimilated.

For instance, Buddha's messengers went over to Babylonia and Egypt. After they had done their work there one could hardly distinguish the later time from the earlier one as far as the external cultic rites and the use of words went. But there was certainly a tremendous difference inwardly after they had poured in what the existing cults, sacrificial services and convictions could hold. Something similar occurred in European regions in ancient times. Spreaders of religions connected them with the existing ancient mystery culture, and they didn't try to overpower people with a lot of dogmas.

These are the kind of building blocks one needs in order to be able to read something like the Apocalypse correctly, and to avoid the absurd ideas which people have often come up with in connection with it. For instance, this tolerant addition to existing things led the writer of the Apocalypse to refer several times to “them which say they are Jews, and are not,” which is something that the members of these two communities were thinking in their hearts. This kind of thing has led some people to think that the Apocalypse is a Jewish document and not a Christian one. However, one has to understand how these things proceeded from the way people used to think in ancient times. We will have to go into some of these details more exactly later.

However, we will have to touch upon one of these ideas now. I'm referring to the following. The one who was inspired to write at that time knew that any given reality is only connected with a certain number of typical phenomena or types. Now just look at the wonderfully individual way in which the seven churches were described in the Apocalypse. It's really wonderful; they're all described in such a way that they're clearly distinguished from each other and they each have a special quality. But the writer of the Apocalypse knew that if one had described an eighth community, he would have been describing things which were similar to those which were connected with one of the others: and the same would apply to a ninth one. All of the possible things were already described in these seven nuances. This is something he was well aware of.

This is another wonderful idea which surfaces from the far distant past. I ran into it again recently in a very graphic way when we had our summer course in Torquay, England, and we drove out to where the castle of King Arthur and his twelve brothers once stood. One can still see how important this place was from the vital life that exists there. If one looks at these promontories which still have a few ruins from the old Arthurian castles on them, one sees a large hill in the middle with the ocean on either side. One sees that the ocean ensouls the region in a very peculiar way, for the view is continuously changing.

During the relatively short time we were there, sunshine and rain alternated rapidly with each other. Of course this was also the case in past times, and as a matter of fact, things have quieted down somewhat today in this respect, for the climate there has changed. Now one looks at this wonderful interplay of elemental light spirits, which relate to the water spirits that stream up from below. Other quite special spiritual phenomena exist there when the ocean surges onto the land and then wrests itself loose and is thrown back again, and when the ocean curls up. This is actually the only place on earth where one finds this peculiar living and weaving of elemental, world beings.

What I had the privilege of seeing there was the vehicle for the inspiration of the participants in Arthur's work. They received the impulses for what they did from what was said to them with the help of these ocean beings and air beings. Here again, one could only have twelve people. This struck me there at the time, because one can still perceive what this establishment of the number twelve is based on. When one has to do with world percepts which have been created by elemental beings in this way, one finds that there are twelve nuances or kinds of perception. However, if any one person wants to grasp all 12, they all become blurred. The knights at Arthur's round table arranged things in such a way that each of them grasped one of these 12 nuances. But they were convinced that this gave each of them a sharply differentiated feeling for the universe and for the tasks that it presented them. But there couldn't have been a thirteenth, for this would have had to be similar to one of the 12.

The idea which obviously underlies this is that if people want to share their tasks in the world, there must be 12 people. They form a whole and represent 12 nuances. Whereas if people confront each other in communities or communes one gets the number seven. People knew about these things in those days. The Apocalypticer still had this supersensible knowledge of numbers, and he gives us other indications of this in the Apocalypse. Today I only want to speak about the way one reads the Apocalypse. One of the things that he sees is the seat of Christ or the transfigured son of man, surrounded by 24 elders. Here we have a numerical nuancing which is based on 24. What does this quartoduodeca shading mean?

Communities have a nuancing which is based on 7 and incarnated human beings have a shading which is based on 12. However, we arrive at a different number when it's a question of looking upon man as a representative of human evolution in super-terrestrial life. There were leaders of mankind who had to disclose the things which are written into the world ether or Akashic record to men from one epoch to the next, to the extent that they were ready to receive them. If we take the successive, great revealers of evolving humanity, we can find what they had to give inscribed in supersensible regions.

One should really not just look for Moses's individuality, for instance, for the Moses as he was on earth and not even just in biblical documents as they were on earth, since these have already been entered into the Akashic record; one should look for the individuality who is sitting on Christ's seat. The eternal part of Moses's earth existence, his permanent sub specie aeterni is firmly engraved in the world ether and is sitting there. However only 24 such human activities can be chosen for eternity. For a 25th would be a repetition of one of the previous ones. This is something people knew in ancient times.

If people want to work together on earth, there must be 12 of them. If human communities want to work together there has to be 7. An eighth one would be a repetition of one of the others. However, if the essential and eternal natures of those people who have spiritualized themselves in the course of human evolution and who each represent one human stage, work together, there must be 24 of them. These are the 24 elders.

We have these 24 elders around Christ's seat like the synthesis of all human revelations, although some of these revelations have already become manifest and some of them have yet to come. However, we also have man as a whole before Christ's seat in contrast to the individual human stages. One could say that man as such, as one must understand him, is represented among the four beasts.

A grand Imagination stands before us here. The transfigured son of man in the center, the individual stages of humanity throughout the course of time in the 24 directors of the 24 hours of the great world day on the seat, and spread out over all of this, man himself, amongst the picture of the four beasts, who has to include all the individual stages. Something rather important becomes manifest here.

What happens before the gaze of the Apocalypticer, who gives God's message to the angels of the communities and therewith to all mankind? When the four beasts go into action, that is, as man discovers his relation to the godhead, the 24 directors of the 24 hours of the great world day fall down with their faces to the ground. Here they are worshipping the entire human being or man as something that is higher than the individual stages of humanity which they represent. One really saw this Imagination in very ancient times, and the Apocalypticer placed it before humanity; however, in those ancient times they said that the one who is sitting on the seat will come, whereas the Apocalypticer says: He who sits on the seat has already been here. However, we can only learn to read the Apocalypse correctly and this is what I wanted to speak about today if we can learn to read things by proceeding from the ancient mysteries. We will keep on trying to find our way into the Apocalypse. There are profound secrets in it which you shouldn't just become familiar with, for some of them are secrets which you should carry out, which you should do.

It has frequently been emphasized that man's greatest riddle is himself. Both natural and spiritual science ultimately try to solve this riddle—the former by understanding the natural laws that govern our outer being, the latter by seeking the essence and purpose inherent in our existence. Now as correct as it may be that man's greatest riddle is himself, it must also be emphasized that each individual human being is a riddle, often even to himself. Every one of us experiences this in encounters with other people.

Today we shall be dealing not with general riddles, but rather with those posed to us by every human being in every encounter, and these are just as important. For how endlessly varied people are! We need only consider temperament, the subject of today's lecture, in order to realize that there are as many riddles as there are people. Even within the basic types known as the temperaments, such variety exists among people that the very mystery of existence seems to express itself within these types. Temperament, that fundamental coloring of the human personality, plays a role in all manifestations of individuality that are of concern to practical life. We sense something of this basic mood whenever we encounter another human being. Thus we can only hope that spiritual science will tell us what we need to know about the temperaments.

Our first impression of the temperaments is that they are external, for although they can be said to flow from within, they manifest themselves in everything we can observe from without. However, this does not mean that the human riddle can be solved by means of natural science and observation. Only when we hear what spiritual science has to say can we come closer to understanding these peculiar colorations of the human personality.

Spiritual science tells us first of all that the human being is part of a line of heredity. He displays the characteristics he has inherited from father, mother, grandparents, and so on. These characteristics he then passes on to his progeny. The human being thus possesses certain traits by virtue of being part of a succession of generations.

However, this inheritance gives us only one side of his nature. Joined to that is the individuality he brings with him out of the spiritual world. This he adds to what his father and mother, his ancestors, are able to give him. Something that proceeds from life to life, from existence to existence, connects itself with the generational stream. Certain characteristics we can attribute to heredity; on the other hand, as a person develops from childhood on, we can see unfolding out of the center of his being something that must be the fruit of preceding lives, something he could never have inherited from his ancestors. We come to know the law of reincarnation, of the succession of earthly lives and this is but a special case of an all-encompassing cosmic law.

An illustration will make this seem less paradoxical. Consider a lifeless mineral, say, a rock crystal. Should the crystal be destroyed, it leaves nothing of its form that could be passed on to other crystals.¹ A new crystal receives nothing of the old one's particular form. When we move on to the world of plants, we notice that a plant cannot develop according to the same laws as does the crystal. It can only originate from another, earlier plant. Form is here preserved and passed on.

Moving on to the animal kingdom, we find an evolution of the species taking place. We begin to appreciate why the nineteenth century held the discovery of evolution to be its greatest achievement. In animals, not only does one being proceed from another, but each young animal during the embryo phase recapitulates the earlier phases of its species' evolutionary development. The species itself undergoes an enhancement.

In human beings not only does the species evolve, but so does the individual. What a human being acquires in a lifetime through education and experience is preserved, just as surely as are the evolutionary achievements of an animal's ancestral line. It will someday be commonplace to trace a person's inner core to a previous existence. The human being will come to be known as the product of an earlier life. The views that stand in the way of this doctrine will be overcome, just as was the scholarly opinion of an earlier century, which held that living organisms could arise from nonliving substances. As recently as three hundred years ago, scholars believed that animals could evolve from river mud, that is, from nonliving matter. Francesco Redi, an Italian scientist, was the first to assert that living things could develop only from other living things.² For this he was attacked and came close to suffering the fate of Giordano Bruno.³ Today, burning people at the stake is no longer fashionable. When someone attempts to teach a new truth, for example, that psycho-spiritual entities must be traced back to earlier psycho-spiritual entities, he won't exactly be burned at the stake, but he will be dismissed as a fool. But the time will come when the real foolishness will be to believe that the human being lives only once, that there is no enduring entity that unites itself with a person's inherited traits.

Now the important question arises: How can something originating in a completely different world, that must seek a father and a mother, unite itself with physical corporeality? How can it clothe itself in the bodily features that link human beings to a hereditary chain? How does the spiritual-psychic stream, of which man forms a part through reincarnation, unite itself with the physical stream of heredity? The answer is that a synthesis must be achieved. When the two streams combine, each imparts something of its own quality to the other. In much the same way that blue and yellow combine to give green, the two streams in the human being combine to yield what is commonly known as temperament. Our inner self and our inherited traits both appear in it. Temperament stands between the things that connect a human being to an ancestral line, and those the human being brings with him out of earlier incarnations. Temperament strikes a balance between the eternal and the ephemeral. And it does so in such a way that the essential members of the human being, which we have come to know in other contexts, enter into a very specific relationship with one another.

Human beings as we know them in this life are beings of four members. The first, the physical body, they have in common with the mineral world. The first super-sensible member, the etheric body, is integrated into the physical and separates from it only at death. There follows as third member the astral body, the bearer of instincts, drives, passions, desires, and of the ever-changing content of sensation and thought. Our highest member, which places us above all other earthly beings, is the bearer of the human ego, which endows us in such a curious and yet undeniable fashion with the power of self-awareness. These four members we have come to know as the essential constituents of a human being.

The way the four members combine is determined by the flowing together of the two streams upon a person's entry into the physical world. In every case, one of the four members achieves predominance over the others, and gives them its own peculiar stamp. Where the bearer of the ego predominates, a choleric temperament results. Where the astral body predominates, we find a sanguine temperament. Where the etheric or life-body predominates, we speak of a phlegmatic temperament. And where the physical body predominates, we have to deal with a melancholic temperament. The specific way in which the eternal and the ephemeral combine determines what relationship the four members will enter into with one another.

The way the four members find their expression in the physical body has also frequently been mentioned. The ego expresses itself in the circulation of the blood. For this reason, in the choleric the predominant system is that of the blood. The astral body expresses itself physically in the nervous system; thus in the sanguine, the nervous system holds sway. The etheric body expresses itself in the glandular system; hence the phlegmatic is dominated physically by his glands. The physical body as such expresses itself only in itself; thus the outwardly most important feature in the melancholic is his physical body. This can be observed in all phenomena connected with these temperaments.

In the choleric, the ego and the blood system predominate. The choleric thus comes across as someone who must always have his way. His aggressiveness, everything connected with his forcefulness of will, derives from his blood circulation.

In the nervous system and astral body, sensations and feelings constantly fluctuate. Any harmony or order results solely from the restraining influence of the ego. People who do not exercise that influence appear to have no control over their thoughts and sensations. They are totally absorbed by the sensations, pictures, and ideas that ebb and flow within them. Something like this occurs whenever the astral body predominates, as, for example, in the sanguine. Sanguines surrender themselves in a certain sense to the constant and varied flow of images, sensations, and ideas since in them the astral body and nervous system predominate.

The nervous system's activity is restrained only by the circulation of the blood. That this is so becomes clear when we consider what happens when a person lacks blood or is anaemic, in other words, when the blood's restraining influence is absent. Mental images fluctuate wildly, often leading to illusions and hallucinations.

A touch of this is present in sanguines. Sanguines are incapable of lingering over an impression. They cannot fix their attention on a particular image nor sustain their interest in an impression. Instead, they rush from experience to experience, from percept to percept. This is especially noticeable in sanguine children, where it can be a source of concern. The sanguine child's interest is easily kindled, a picture will easily impress, but the impression quickly vanishes.

We proceed now to the phlegmatic temperament. We observed that this temperament develops when the etheric or life-body, as we call it, which regulates growth and metabolism, is predominant. The result is a sense of inner well-being. The more a human being lives in his etheric body, the more is he preoccupied with his internal processes. He lets external events run their course while his attention is directed inward.

In the melancholic we have seen that the physical body, the coarsest member of the human organization, becomes master over the others. As a result, the melancholic feels he is not master over his body, that he cannot bend it to his will. His physical body, which is intended to be an instrument of the higher members, is itself in control, and frustrates the others. This the melancholic experiences as pain, as a feeling of despondency. Pain continually wells up within him. This is because his physical body resists his etheric body's inner sense of well-being, his astral body's liveliness, and his ego's purposeful striving.

The varying combinations of the four members also manifest themselves quite clearly in external appearance. People in whom the ego predominates seek to triumph over all obstacles, to make their presence known. Accordingly their ego stunts the growth of the other members; it withholds from the astral and etheric bodies their due portion. This reveals itself outwardly in a very clear fashion. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, that famous German choleric, was recognizable as such purely externally.⁴ His build revealed clearly that the lower essential members had been held back in their growth. Napoleon, another classic example of the choleric, was so short because his ego had held the other members back.⁵ Of course, one cannot generalize that all cholerics are short and all sanguines tall. It is a question of proportion. What matters is the relation of size to overall form.

In the sanguine the nervous system and astral body predominate. The astral body's inner liveliness animates the other members, and makes the external form as mobile as possible. Whereas the choleric has sharply chiseled facial features, the sanguine's are mobile, expressive, changeable. We see the astral body's inner liveliness manifested in every outer detail, for example, in a slender form, a delicate bone structure, or lean muscles. The same thing can be observed in details of behavior. Even a non-clairvoyant can tell from behind whether someone is a choleric or a sanguine; one does not need to be a spiritual scientist for that. If you observe the gait of a choleric, you will notice that he plants each foot so solidly that he would seem to want to bore down into the ground. By contrast, the sanguine has a light, springy step. Even subtler external traits can be found. The inwardness of the ego, the choleric's self-contained inwardness, express themselves in eyes that are dark and smoldering. The sanguine, whose ego has not taken such deep root, who is filled with the liveliness of his astral body, tends by contrast to have blue eyes. Many more such distinctive traits of these temperaments could be cited.

The phlegmatic temperament manifests itself in a static, indifferent physiognomy, as well as in plumpness, for fat is due largely to the activity of the etheric body. In all this the phlegmatic's inner sense of comfort is expressed. His gait is loose-jointed and shambling, and his manner timid. He seems somehow to be not entirely in touch with his surroundings.

The melancholic is distinguished by a hanging head, as if he lacked the strength necessary to straighten his neck. His eyes are dull, not shining like the choleric's; his gait is firm, but in a leaden rather than a resolute sort of way.

Thus you see how significantly spiritual science can contribute to the solution of this riddle. Only when one seeks to encompass reality in its entirety, which includes the spiritual, can knowledge bear practical fruit. Accordingly, only spiritual science can give us knowledge that will benefit the individual and all mankind. In education, very close attention must be paid to the individual temperaments, for it is especially important to be able to guide and direct them as they develop in the child. But the temperaments are also important to our efforts to improve ourselves later in life. We do well to attend to what expresses itself through them if we wish to further our personal development.

The four fundamental types I have outlined here for you naturally never manifest themselves in such pure form. Every human being has one basic temperament, with varying degrees of the other three mixed in. Napoleon, for example, although a choleric, had much of the phlegmatic in him. To truly master life, it is important that we open our souls to what manifests itself as typical. When we consider that the temperaments, each of which represents a mild imbalance, can degenerate into unhealthy extremes, we realize just how important this is.

Yet, without the temperaments the world would be an exceedingly dull place, not only ethically, but also in a higher sense. The temperaments alone make all multiplicity, beauty, and fullness of life possible. Thus in education it would be senseless to want to homogenize or eliminate them, but an effort should be made to direct each into the proper track, for in every temperament there lie two dangers of aberration, one great, one small. One danger for the young choleric is that he will never learn to control his temper as he develops into maturity. That is the small danger. The greater is that he will become foolishly single-minded. For the sanguine the lesser danger is flightiness; the greater is mania, induced by a constant stream of sensations. The small danger for the phlegmatic is apathy; the greater is stupidity, dullness. For the melancholic, insensitivity to anything other than his own personal pain is the small danger; the greater is insanity.

In light of all this it is clear that to guide and direct the temperaments is one of life's significant tasks. If this task is to be properly carried out, however, one basic principle must be observed, which is always to reckon with what is given, and not with what is not there. For example, if a child has a sanguine temperament, he will not be helped if his elders try to flog interest into him. His temperament simply will not allow it. Instead of asking what the child lacks, in order that we might beat it into him, we must focus on what he has, and base ourselves on that. And as a rule, there is one thing we can always stimulate the sanguine child's interest in. However flighty the child might be, we can always stimulate his interest in a particular personality. If we ourselves are that personality, or if we bring the child together with someone who is, the child cannot but develop an interest. Only through the medium of love for a personality can the interest of the sanguine child be awakened. More than children of any other temperament, the sanguine needs someone to admire. Admiration is here a kind of magic word, and we must do everything we can to awaken it.

We must reckon with what we have. We should see to it that the sanguine child is exposed to a variety of things in which he has shown a deeper interest. These things should be allowed to speak to him, to have an effect upon him. They should then be withdrawn, so that the child's interest in them will intensify; then they may be restored. In other words, we must fashion the sanguine's environment so that it is in keeping with his temperament.

The choleric child is also susceptible of being led in a special way. The key to his education is respect and esteem for a natural authority. Instead of winning affection by means of personal qualities, as one does with the sanguine child, one should see to it that the child's belief in his teacher's ability remains unshaken. The teacher must demonstrate an understanding of what goes on around the child. Any showing of incompetence should be avoided. The child must persist in the belief that his teacher is competent, or all authority will be lost. The magic potion for the choleric child is respect and esteem for a person's worth, just as for the sanguine child it was love for a personality. Outwardly, the choleric child must be confronted with challenging situations. He must encounter resistance and difficulty, lest his life become too easy.

The melancholic child is not easy to lead. With him, however, a different magic formula may be applied. For the sanguine child this formula was love for a personality; for the choleric, it was respect and esteem for a teacher's worth. By contrast, the important thing for the melancholic is for his teachers to be people who have in a certain sense been tried by life, who act and speak on the basis of past trials. The child must feel that the teacher has known real pain. Let your treatment of all of life's little details be an occasion for the child to appreciate what you have suffered. Sympathy with the fates of those around him furthers the melancholic's development. Here too one must reckon with what the child has. The melancholic has a capacity for suffering, for discomfort, which is firmly rooted in his being; it cannot be disciplined out of him. However, it can be redirected. We should expose the child to legitimate external pain and suffering, so that he learns there are things other than himself that can engage his capacity for experiencing pain. This is the essential thing. We should not try to divert or amuse the melancholic, for to do so only intensifies his despondency and inner suffering; instead, he must be made to see that objective occasions for suffering exist in life. Although we mustn't carry it too far, redirecting the child's suffering to outside objects is what is called for.

The phlegmatic child should not be allowed to grow up alone. Although naturally all children should have play-mates, for phlegmatics it is especially important that they have them. Their playmates should have the most varied interests. Phlegmatic children learn by sharing in the interests, the more numerous the better, of others. Their playmates' enthusiasms will overcome their native indifference towards the world. Whereas the important thing for the melancholic is to experience another person's fate, for the phlegmatic child it is to experience the whole range of his playmates' interests. The phlegmatic is not moved by things as such, but an interest arises when he sees things reflected in others, and these interests are then reflected in the soul of the phlegmatic child. We should bring into the phlegmatic's environment objects and events toward which “phlegm” is an appropriate reaction. Impassivity must be directed toward the right objects, objects toward which one may be phlegmatic.

From the examples of these pedagogical principles, we see how spiritual science can address practical problems. These principles can also be applied to oneself, for purposes of self-improvement. For example, a sanguine gains little by reproaching himself for his temperament. Our minds are in such questions frequently an obstacle. When pitted directly against stronger forces such as the temperaments, they can accomplish little. Indirectly, however, they can accomplish much. The sanguine, for example, can take his sanguinity into account, abandoning self-exhortation as fruitless. The important thing is to display sanguinity under the right circumstances. Experiences suited to his short attention span can be brought about through thoughtful planning. Using thought in this way, even on the smallest scale, will produce the requisite effect.

Persons of a choleric temperament should purposely put themselves in situations where rage is of no use, but rather only makes them look ridiculous. Melancholics should not close their eyes to life's pain, but rather seek it out; through compassion they redirect their suffering outward toward appropriate objects and events. If we are phlegmatics, having no particular interests, then we should occupy ourselves as much as possible with uninteresting things, surround ourselves with numerous sources of tedium, so that we become thoroughly bored. We will then be thoroughly cured of our “phlegm;” we will have gotten it out of our system. Thus does one reckon with what one has, and not with what one does not have.

By filling ourselves with practical wisdom such as this, we learn to solve that basic riddle of life, the other person. It is solved not by postulating abstract ideas and concepts, but by means of pictures. Instead of arbitrarily theorizing, we should seek an immediate understanding of every individual human being. We can do this, however, only by knowing what lies in the depths of the soul. Slowly and gradually, spiritual science illuminates our minds, making us receptive not only to the big picture, but also to subtle details. Spiritual science makes it possible that when two souls meet and one demands love, the other offers it. If something else is demanded, that other thing is given. Through such true, living wisdom do we create the basis for society. This is what we mean when we say we must solve a riddle every moment.

Anthroposophy acts not by means of sermons, exhortations, or catechisms, but by creating a social groundwork, upon which human beings can come to know each other. Spiritual science is the ground of life, and love is the blossom and fruit of a life enhanced by it. Thus spiritual science may claim to lay the foundation for humankind's most beautiful goal—a true, genuine love for man.

• 1. Translator's note: The reader may conclude from this remark—for it was, after all, a remark, not a published claim—that Steiner was ignorant of the concept of seed crystals. However, a likelier explanation is that Steiner, whose audience was very likely not a scientifically knowledgeable one, was simply indulging in a bit of rhetorical hyperbole. He doubtless knew that a seed crystal will hasten the crystallization process in a saturated salt solution, but this fact is not really relevant to his point, which comes out only gradually in this paragraph. His point is not that a newly-forming crystal cannot receive some contribution from a previously existing one, only that it need not; this is in contrast to living things, which require a progenitor.
• 2. Francesco Redi, 1626-1697. Refuted spontaneous generation of living beings out of mud.
• 3. Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600. Italian philosopher, Dominican monk, burned at the stake as heretic. Taught that the world is infinite in space and time and filled with innumerable suns.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814. German Idealist philosopher.
• 5. Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821. French ruler and emperor 1804-1814 and 1815.

When the candles are lit on the Christmas Tree, the human soul feels as though the symbol of an eternal reality were standing there, and that this must always have been the symbol of the Christmas Festival, even in a far distant past. For in the autumn, when outer Nature fades, when the sun's creations fall as it were into slumber and man's organs of outer perception must turn away from the phenomena of the physical world, the soul has the opportunity—nay not only the opportunity but the urge—to withdraw into its innermost depths, in order to feel and to experience: Now, when the light of the outer sun is faintest and its warmth feeblest, now is the time when the soul withdraws into the darkness but can find within itself the inner, spiritual Light. The lights on the Christmas Tree stand there before us as a symbol of the inner, spiritual Light that is kindled in the outer darkness. And because what we feel to be the spirit-light of the soul shining into the darkness of Nature seems to be an eternal reality, we imagine that the lighted fir-tree shining out to us on Christmas Night must have been shining ever since our earthly incarnations began.

And yet it is not so. It is only one or at most two centuries ago that the Christmas Tree became a symbol of the thoughts and feelings which arise in man at the Christmas season. The Christmas Tree is a recent symbol but each year anew it reveals to man a great, eternal truth. That is why we imagine that it must always have existed, even in the remote past. It is as if from the Christmas Tree itself there resounded the proclamation of the Divine in the cosmic expanse, in the heavenly heights. The human being can feel this to be the unfailing source of those forces of peace in his soul which spring from good-will. And thus, according to the Christmas Legend, did the proclamation also resound when the shepherds visited the birthplace of the Child whose festival we celebrate on Christmas Day. To the shepherds there rang forth from the clouds: From the cosmic expanse, from the heavenly heights, the Divine Powers are revealing themselves, bringing peace to the human soul that is filled with good-will.

For centuries and centuries men could not bring themselves to believe that the symbol presented to the world in the Christmas Festival ever had a beginning. They felt in it the hallmark of eternity. Christian ritual has for this reason clothed the intimation of eternity in what takes place symbolically on Christmas Night, in the words: ‘To us Christ is born anew!’ It is as though every year the soul is called upon to feel anew a reality of which it is thought that it could happen once and once only. The eternity of this symbolic happening is brought home to us with infinite power if we have the true conception of the symbol itself. Yet as late as 353 A.D., 353 years after Christ Jesus had appeared on earth, the birth of Jesus was not celebrated, even in Rome. The Festival of Jesus' birth was celebrated for the first time in Rome in the year A.D. 354. Before then this Festival was not celebrated between the 24th and 25th December; the day of supreme commemoration for those who understood something of the deep wisdom relating to the Mystery of Golgotha, was the 6th of January. The Epiphany was celebrated as a kind of Birth-Festival of the Christ during the first three centuries of our era. It was the Festival which was meant to revive in human souls the remembrance of the descent of the Christ Spirit into the body of Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism by John in the Jordan. Until the year A.D. 353 the happening which men conceived to have taken place at the Baptism was commemorated on the 6th of January as the Festival of Christ's birth. For during the first centuries of Christendom an inkling still survived of the mystery that is of all mysteries the most difficult for mankind to grasp, namely, the descent of the Christ Being into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

What were the feelings of men who had some inkling of the secrets of Christianity during those early centuries? They said to themselves: The Christ Spirit weaves through the world that is revealed through the senses and through the human spirit. In the far distant past this Christ Spirit revealed Himself to Moses. The secret of the human ‘ I ’ resounded to Moses as it resounds to us from the symbol on the Christmas Tree from the sounds I A O—the Alpha and the Omega, preceded by the I. This was what resounded in the soul of Moses when the Christ Spirit appeared to him in the burning bush. And this same Christ Spirit led Moses to the place where He was to recognise Him in His true being. This is described in the Old Testament where it is said that the Lord led Moses to Mount Nebo ‘over against Jericho’ and showed him what must still come to pass before the Christ Spirit could incarnate in the body of a man. To Moses on Mount Nebo, this Spirit said: But thou to whom I revealed myself in advance, mayest not bear what thou hast in thy soul into the evolution of thy people; for they have first to prepare what is to come to pass when the time is fulfilled.

And when, through many centuries, the evolutionary preparation had been completed, the same Spirit by Whom Moses had been held back, did indeed reveal Himself—by becoming Flesh, by taking on a human body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Therewith mankind as a whole was led from the stage of Initiation signified by the word ‘Jericho’ to that indicated by the crossing of the Jordan.

The hearts and minds of those who in the early centuries of our era understood the true import of Christianity turned to the Baptism in the Jordan of Jesus of Nazareth into whom Christ descended, Christ the Sun-Earth-Spirit. It was this—the birth of Christ—that was celebrated as a Mystery in the early Christian centuries. The insight for which we prepare ourselves to-day through Anthroposophy, through the wisdom belonging to the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, flashed up in the form of vision from the vestiges of ancient clairvoyance still surviving during the age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place; it flashed up in the Gnostics, those remarkable, enlightened men who lived at the turning-point of the old and the new eras, whose conception of the Christ Mystery differed in respect of form but not in respect of content, from our own. What the Gnostics were able to teach trickled through into the world and although what had actually come to pass in the event indicated symbolically by the Baptism in the Jordan was not widely understood, there was nevertheless an inkling that the Sun Spirit had been born at that time as the Spirit of the Earth, that a cosmic Power had dwelt in the body of a man of earth. And so in the early centuries of Christendom the festival of the birth of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the festival of Christ's Epiphany, was celebrated on the 6th of January.

But insight, even dim, uncertain insight into this deep Mystery faded away more and more as time went by. The age came when men could no longer comprehend that the Being called Christ had been present in a physical human body for three years only. More and more it will be realised that what was accomplished for the whole of earth-evolution during those three years in the physical body of a man is one of the very deepest and most difficult Mysteries to understand. From the fourth century onwards, with the approach of the materialistic age, the powers of the human soul—then still at the stage of preparation—were not strong enough to grasp the deep Mystery which from our time on will be understood in ever greater measure. And so it came about that to the same extent to which the outer power of Christianity increased, inner understanding of the Christ Mystery decreased and the festival of the 6th of January ceased to have any essential meaning. The birth of Christ was placed thirteen days earlier and envisaged as coincident with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. But in this very fact we are confronted by something that must always be a source of inspiration and thanksgiving. Actually, the 24th/25th of December was fixed as the day of Christ's Nativity because a great truth had been lost, as we have heard. And yet ... although the error would seem to point to the loss of a great truth, such profound meaning lay behind it that—although the men responsible knew nothing of it—we cannot but marvel at the subconscious wisdom with which the festival of Christmas Day was instituted.

Verily, the working of Divine wisdom can be seen in the fixing of this festival. Just as Divine wisdom can be perceived in outer nature if we know how to decipher what reveals itself there, so we can perceive Divine wisdom working in the unconscious soul of man when the following is borne in mind. In the Calendar, the 24th of December is the day dedicated to Adam and Eve, the following day being the Festival of Christ's Nativity. Thus the loss of an ancient truth caused the date of Christ's birth to be placed thirteen days earlier and to be identified with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth—but in a most wonderful way the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was linked with the thought of man's origin in earth-evolution, his origin in Adam and Eve. All the dim feelings and experiences connected with this festival of Jesus' birth which were alive in the human soul—although in their upper consciousness, men had no knowledge of what lay behind—all these feelings that were astir in the depths of the soul speak a wondrous language.

When understanding was lost of what had streamed from cosmic worlds in the event which would rightly have been celebrated on the 6th of January, forces working in hidden depths of the soul caused the picture to be presented of man as a being of soul-and-spirit before physical embodiment, at the starting-point of evolution as a physical human being. The picture is of the new-born child whose soul is as yet untouched by the effects of contact with the physical body, of the child at the beginning of physical evolution on earth. But this is not a human child in the ordinary sense; it is the child who was there before human beings had reached the point of the first physical embodiment in earth-evolution. This is the being known in the Kabbala as Adam Kadmon—Man who descended from divine-spiritual heights, with all that he had acquired during the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon. The human being in his spiritual state at the very beginning of earth-evolution, born in the Jesus Child—this was presented to mankind by a Divine wisdom in the festival of Jesus' birth. At a time when it was no longer possible to understand what had descended from cosmic worlds, from heavenly spheres, to the earth, remembrance of their origin, of their state before the advent of the Luciferic forces in earth-evolution was engraved into the souls of men. And when it was no longer realised that in the highest and truest sense it could be said of the Baptism by John in the Jordan: From cosmic worlds there has come into human souls the power of the self-revealed Godhead, in order that peace may reign among men who are of goodwill—when understanding of how this picture could be presented as a sacred festival was lost, another affirmation was presented in its place, the affirmation that at the beginning of earth revolution, before the Luciferic forces began their work, man had a nature, an entelechy that can inspire him with undying hope.

The Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke—not the Jesus described in the Gospel of St. Matthew—is the Child before whom the shepherds worship. To them the proclamation rang forth: Now is the Divine revealed from the heavenly heights, bringing peace to the souls of men who are of good-will. And so for the centuries when the higher reality was beyond man's grasp, the festival was instituted which every year brings to his remembrance: Although you cannot gaze into the heavenly heights and there recognise the great Sun-Spirit, you bear within you, from the time of your earthly beginning, the Child-Soul in its state of purity, unsullied by the effects of physical incarnation; and the forces of this Child-Soul can give you the firm confidence that you can be victorious over the lower nature which clings to you as the result of Lucifer's temptation. The linking of the festival of Jesus' birth with remembrance of Adam and Eve gave emphasis to the thought that at the place visited by the shepherds a human soul had been born in the state of innocence in which the soul existed before the first incarnation on earth.

At this time of festival, therefore, since the birth of the God was no longer understood, the birth of a human being was commemorated. For however greatly man's forces threaten to decline and his sufferings to take the upper hand, there are two unfailing sources of peace, harmony and strength. We are led to the first source when we look out into cosmic space, knowing it to be pervaded by the weaving lift, movement and warmth of the Divine Spirit. And if we hold fast to the conviction that this Divine-Spiritual Power weaving through the universe can permeate our being provided only that our forces do not flag—there we have the Easter thought, equally a source of hope and confidence flowing from the cosmic spheres. And the second source can spring from the dim inkling that as a being of soul-and-spirit, before he became the prey of the Luciferic forces at the beginning of his earthly evolution, man was still part of the same Spirit now awaited from cosmic worlds as in the Easter thought. Turning to the source to be found in man's own, original being, before the onset of the Luciferic influence, we can say to ourselves: Whatever may befall you, whatever may torment you and draw you down from the shining spheres of the spirit, your divine origin is an eternal reality, hidden though it be in the depths of the soul. Recognition of this innermost power of the soul will give birth to the firm assurance that the heights are within your reach. And if you conjure before your soul all that is innocent, childlike, free from life's temptations, free from all that has already befallen human souls through the many incarnations since the beginning of earthly evolution, then you will have a picture of the human soul as it was before these earthly incarnations began.

But one soul—one soul only—remained in this condition, namely the soul of the Jesus Child described in the Gospel of St. Luke. This soul was kept back in the spiritual life when the other human souls began to pass through their incarnations on the earth. This soul remained in the guardianship of the holiest Mysteries through the Atlantean and Post-Atlantean epochs until the time of the events in Palestine. Then it was sent forth into the body predestined to receive it and became one of the two Jesus children—the Child described in the Gospel of St. Luke.

Thus did the festival of Christ's Nativity become the festival of the Birth of Jesus.

If we rightly understand this festival we must say: That which we believe to be born anew symbolically every Christmas Night, is the human soul in its original nature, the childhood-spirit of man as it was at the beginning of earth-evolution; then it descended as a revelation from the heavenly heights. And when the human heart can become conscious of this reality, the soul is filled with the unshakable peace that can bear us to our lofty goals, if we are of goodwill. Mighty indeed is the word that can resound to us on Christmas Night, do we but understand its import.

Why was it that the festival of Christ's birth was set back thirteen days and became the festival of the birth of Jesus? To understand this we must penetrate into deep mysteries of human existence. Of outer nature, man believes, because he sees it with his eyes, that what the rays of the sun charm forth from the depths of the earth, unfolding into beauty through the spring and summer, withdraws into those same depths at the time when the outer sun-sphere is darkest, and that what will spring forth again the following year is being prepared in the seeds within the depths of the earth. Because his eyes bear witness, man believes that the seed of the plant passes through a yearly cycle, that it must go down into the earth's depths in order to unfold again under the warmth and light of the sun in spring. But to begin with, man has no notion that the human soul too passes through such a cycle. Nor is this revealed until he is initiated into the great mysteries of existence. Just as the force contained in the seed of every plant is bound up with the physical forces of the earth, so is the inmost being of the human soul bound up with the spiritual forces of the earth. And just as the seed of the plant sinks into the depths of the earth at the time we know as Christmas, so does the soul of man descend at that time into deep, deep spirit-realms, drawing strength from these depths as does the seed of the plant for its blossoming in spring. What the soul undergoes in these spirit-depths of the earth is entirely hidden from the ordinary consciousness. But for one whose eyes of spirit are opened the Thirteen Days and Thirteen Nights between the 24th of December and the 6th of January are a time of deep spiritual experience.

Parallel with the experience of the plant-seed in the depths of the natural earth, there is a spiritual experience in the earth's spirit-depths—verily a parallel experience. And the seer for whom this experience is possible either as the result of training or through inherited clairvoyant faculties, can feel himself penetrating into these spiritual depths. During this period of the Thirteen Days and Nights, the seer can behold what must come upon man because he has passed through incarnations which have been under the influence of the forces of Lucifer since the beginning of earthly evolution. The sufferings in Kamaloca that man must endure in the spiritual world because Lucifer has been at his side since he began to incarnate on the earth—the dearest vision of all this is presented in the mighty Imaginations which can come before the soul during the Thirteen Days and Nights between the Christmas Festival and the Festival of the 6th of January, the Epiphany. At the time when the seed of the plant is passing through its most crucial period in the depths below, the human soul is passing through its deepest experiences. The soul gazes at a vista of all that man must experience in the spiritual worlds because, under Lucifer's influence, he alienated himself from the Powers by whom the world was created. This vision is clearest to the soul during these Thirteen Days and Nights. Hence there is no better preparation for the revelation of that Imagination which may be called the Christ Imagination and which makes us aware that by gaining the victory over Lucifer, Christ Himself becomes the Judge of the deeds of men during the incarnations affected by Lucifer's influence. The soul of the seer lives on from the festival of Jesus' birth to that of the Epiphany in such a way that the Christ Mystery is revealed. It is during these Thirteen Holy Days and Nights that the soul can grasp most deeply of all, the import and meaning of the Baptism by John in the Jordan.

It is remarkable that during the centuries of Christendom, wherever powers of spiritual sight developed in the right way, it was known to seers that vision penetrated most deeply during the period of the Thirteen Holy Nights at the time of the winter solstice. Many a seer—either schooled in the mysteries of the modern age or possessing inherited powers of clairvoyance—makes it evident to us that at the darkest point of the winter solstice the soul can have vision of all that man must undergo because of his alienation from the Christ Spirit, how adjustment and catharsis were made possible through the Mystery enacted in the Baptism by John in the Jordan and then through the Mystery of Golgotha, and how the visions during the Thirteen Nights are crowned on the 6th of January by the Christ Imagination. Thus it is correct to name the 6th of January as the day of Christ's birth and these Thirteen Nights as the time during which the powers of seership in the human soul discern and perceive what man must undergo through his life in the incarnations from Adam and Eve to the Mystery of Golgotha.

During my visit to Christiania last year¹ it was interesting to me to find the thought which in rather different words has been expressed in so many lectures on the Christ Mystery, embodied in a beautiful saga known as ‘The Dream Legend.’ Strange to say, it has come to the fore in Norway during the last ten to fifteen years and has become familiar to the people, although its origin is, of course, very much earlier. It is the legend which in a wonderfully beautiful way relates how Olaf Åsteson is initiated, as it were by natural forces, in that he falls asleep on Christmas Eve, sleeps through the Thirteen Days and Nights until the 6th of January, and lives through all the terrors which the human being must experience through the incarnations from the earth's beginning until the Mystery of Golgotha. And it relates how when the 6th of January has come, Olaf Åsteson has the vision of the intervention of the Christ Spirit in humanity, the Michael-Spirit being His forerunner. I hope that on some other occasion we shall be able to present this poem in its entirety, for then you will realise that consciousness of vision during the Thirteen Days and Nights survives even to-day, and is in fact, being revivified. A few characteristic lines only will now be quoted. The poem begins:

Come listen to me and hear my song
The song of a wonderful youth,
I'll sing you of Olaf Åsteson
Who slept many days—'tis the truth.

'Twas Christmas Eve when down he lay
And slept so long all unknowing,
He never woke till the thirteenth day
When to Church the people were going.
Yes, it was Olaf Åsteson
Who lay so long a-sleeping.

(Translated from a German version
of The Dream Legend, by E.C.M.)

And so the poem goes on, relating how in his dream during the Thirteen Days and Nights, Olaf Åsteson is led through all that man must experience on account of Lucifer's temptation. A vivid picture is given of Olaf Åsteson's journey through the spheres where human beings have the experiences so often described in connection with Kamaloca, and of how the Christ Spirit, preceded by Michael, streams into this vision.

Thus with the coming of Christ in the Spirit, it will become more and more possible for men to know how the spiritual forces weave and hold sway and that the festivals have not been instituted by arbitrary opinions but by the cosmic wisdom which so often lies beyond the reach of men's consciousness yet works and reigns throughout history. This cosmic wisdom has placed the festival of the birth of Jesus at the beginning of the Thirteen Days. While the Easter Festival can always be a reminder that contemplation of the cosmic worlds will help us to find within ourselves the strength to conquer all that is lower, the Christmas thought—if we understand the festival which commemorates man's divine origin and the symbol before us on Christmas Day in the form of the Jesus Child—says to us ever and again that the powers which bring peace to the soul can be found within ourselves. True peace of soul is present only when that peace has sure foundations, that is to say, when it is a force enabling man to know: In thee lives something which, if truly brought to birth, can, nay must, lead thee to divine Heights, to divine Powers.—The lights on this tree are symbols of the light which shines in our own souls when we grasp the reality of what is proclaimed to us symbolically on Christmas Night by the Jesus Child in its state of innocence: the inmost being of the human soul itself, strong, innocent, tranquil, leading us along our life's path to the highest goals of existence. May these lights on the Christmas Tree say to us: If ever thy soul is weak, if ever thou believest that the goals of earth-existence are beyond thy reach, think of man's divine origin and become aware of those forces within thee which are also the forces of supreme Love. Become inwardly conscious of the forces which give thee confidence and certainty in all thy works, through all thy life, now and in all ages of time to come.

• 1. 7th-17th June, 1910, when the Lecture Course on The Mission of the Folk-Souls was given.

When spiritual science investigates mankind's evolution it arrives at results which in many respects differ considerably from those presented by natural science. This applies more especially to the human soul. The view obtained through spiritual knowledge of the human soul's evolution during hundreds and thousands of years differs from the view that is possible merely through natural-scientific investigation. Looking back into earlier ages we recognize that man once possessed atavistic clairvoyance and that this made his consciousness different from what it is today. However, we must also recognize that a residue of this clairvoyance persisted right into later centuries to a far greater extent than is realized. It is particularly important to be aware of the fact that right up to the 14th, 15th, 16th and even into the 17th century a vestige of the ancient clairvoyance was still in evidence. Not with its former strength, it is true, but although weakened, it was clearly a remnant of the former atavistic clairvoyance and could be encountered over the greater part of the earth.

I have spoken in earlier lectures of the fact that even today there are people who possess atavistic clairvoyance. The reason not much is known about it is because people are usually too embarrassed to confess to their fellow men that revelations from spiritual realms enter their consciousness. I described some instances of this kind in the last lecture. However, the difference is very great between what people could still experience directly from the spiritual world in the 16th and 17th centuries and what is possible since then. And even in the 17th century most people would not have been able to describe what appeared to their clairvoyant vision to the extent of being able to say that they had seen such and such a being. Their consciousness in spiritual experiences was not strong enough to grasp the situation sufficiently to form mental pictures of it. But though the consciousness was subdued, spiritual beings did still enter into man's will, into his feeling and also into his conceptual life. This was the case to a far greater extent than is imagined today. At the present time it is really extraordinarily difficult for someone who is able to look into the spiritual world and is conversant with the nature of what is to be experienced there, to speak freely about it to his fellow men. As I have often mentioned, one's contemporaries would receive too great a shock were one to describe certain, even elementary, facts concerning man's relationship to the spiritual world. Naturally it can cause clashes of views when an initiate, from his knowledge of the spiritual world, is obliged to say the very opposite to what his contemporaries, owing to their materialistic convictions, can accept as truth.

This situation had not yet arisen in the 14th, 15th, 16th or even 17th centuries. Much of the literature from this period is interpreted quite wrongly. This is not only because modern people think they know better than their predecessors, they also no longer understand their attitude to life. This fact comes to expression in curious ways. For example it is quite extraordinary to witness the way modern philosophers, in their writings or when lecturing, castigate the Scholastics of the Middle Ages. They go out of their way to demonstrate how far they themselves have advanced beyond i what they see as prejudiced, pedantic and narrow ideas of the Scholastics. But in truth, compared to the Scholastics, the modern philosophers are incredibly ignorant and they completely misunderstand the Scholastics. What is not realized is that at the time of Thomism, when a philosopher was engaged in the subtle art of ideation, of defining and elaborating the finer points, he was in contact with the spiritual world. It must be realized that for example Thomas Aquinas,²⁶ in the 13th Century, attained the concepts and ideas he elaborated in his writings in a completely different way from the way ideas are acquired today. One must think of his books as being inspired by a spirit from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi and that he recorded what came from a higher consciousness.

A modern philosopher would find dreadful the idea of having to sit down and wait till his Angel inspired him before writing what he was to communicate to the world; that with his Angel by his side he was to be the mouthpiece, the physical human mediator for what the Angel proclaimed concerning a higher world. Yet in no other way is it possible to understand what is coming into being, what is becoming. What I am now saying is of the greatest importance and I beg you to take special note of it. Only by listening to what is inspired into us or vouchsafed through Imagination can we come to understand what is coming into being. In our ordinary consciousness, since the 16th, 17th but especially since the 18th century, we have no relationship whatever to what is evolving, coming into existence. We look directly at things, but how much of what we see do we take into our consciousness? Let us say we look at a blossoming rose; in no instance, at no moment do we see the actual coming-into-being of the rose. From the formation of the seed to the extinction of the rose what we see is the dying, the fading away. That we see the red rose at all is due to the fact that we grasp its dying aspect. The coming-into-being aspect of things can be grasped only if one is able to listen to higher beings or receive impressions from them. No one, except higher beings who at present do not incarnate in a physical body, can perceive the becoming of the rose. In the very lowest realm of perception, the subjective light, which is almost as dull as the old clairvoyance was and, when it occurs, still is, do we see something of the becoming of the rose. But not when we look at it with physical eyes and grasp what we see conceptually.

This illustrates that an essential characteristic of our materialistic age is that only what is dying, what is going towards extinction, enters our consciousness. That was not the case at the time of the Scholastics nor even in the 17th century.

In the early part of the 17th century a little-known philosopher, Henry More,²⁷ born 1614, lived in England. When we look at his external life we see him as a living proof that man does not develop his individuality from inherited qualities alone. He brings with him characteristics, not found in parents or earlier ancestors, from former lives on earth. Henry More's parents and relations were all strict orthodox Calvinists, but already as a small boy he fought Zwingli's rigid teaching of predestination. Henry More rejected it emphatically although no one in his environment maintained anything contrary to this rigid doctrine. He had also another distinguishing characteristic. When one studies his writings, which are very interesting, one discovers the remarkable fact that he spoke of the inner presence of the spiritual world in human consciousness quite differently from the way people spoke of it later. He was a philosopher of the 17th century yet he knew that only through a more receptive consciousness than the ordinary one which only grasps the dying aspect, can man unite with that living reality which expresses itself in inspired consciousness as processes of becoming. In such inspired consciousness man can know about the processes of becoming whereas otherwise he can know only about what is connected with processes of dying. What is perceived everywhere through present-day consciousness is the dying aspects of things and even Henry More was not altogether clear that he had communed with spiritual beings. When he attempted to grasp his experiences in conceptual form; i.e. form mental pictures of them, these pictures would vanish in the very process of forming them just like a dream vanishes as we wake up. Thus he could not bring his experience of meeting spiritual beings into clear consciousness; he would forget as we forget a dream. Only dimly was he aware of their presence in his inner life but the effect of these experiences remained with him.

A very interesting thought, well known to us, was expressed also by Henry More. The thought that if one wants to reach certain higher knowledge one must learn to regard one's whole being as a member of a higher organism. Just as a finger is a member of the hand and loses its existence if separated from the hand, so too is man nothing, if torn out of his organic connection with the whole cosmos. With the finger this is more obvious. However if the finger could walk freely over our body it might well also succumb to the illusion of being an independent organism. Certainly the earth is there for man, but man is equally, in the adjoining spiritual world, a member of the greater organism of the earth. Man cannot tear himself out of this connection anymore than the finger can tear itself from the hand. I have often expressed this thought as an antidote to man's misplaced and all too prevalent conceit. In Henry More it rose as a sudden revelation. The reason was because he did have a dim knowledge, like a half-forgotten dream, of man's interconnection with the whole cosmos although he could not bring it into conscious conceptual form.

When one tries to discover what helped Henry More to formulate what lived so beautifully in his soul one finds that he had been deeply impressed by a certain booklet. This small book: the “Theologia Germanica” had also made a great impression on someone else; namely Luther²⁸ who made it available to wider circles in Germany. Henry More became a student of the “Theologia Germanica” by “the man from Frankfurth.” You will find more on this subject in my book “Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.”

The question may have arisen in your mind why it should be that in the 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th and even 17th centuries people appear who know of the spiritual world through direct communion. The reason is the following: Those who in these centuries knew most about man's connection with the spiritual world had been on earth, if not in their last incarnation then as a rule in the last but one, at a time when preparation for Christianity was being made in the secret schools, in the Mysteries. Individuals such as Henry More were present on earth in the centuries prior to the Mystery of Golgotha. They then had an intermediate incarnation in the 7th, 8th or 9th century but this later incarnation had much less impact on them than that received in the previous one from the teaching in the mysteries. These teachings, preparing for the Mystery of Golgotha, made a deeper, more intense, impression on their soul. That is why so much of great significance was said concerning Christianity during those later centuries. Through their communion with the spiritual world these individuals derived an insight into the world's coming-into-being which, since the 17th century has no longer been possible. From then onwards one had to draw ever more on external accounts alone; these accounts, however, only describe what is in the process of decline. Spiritual knowledge is needed to bring insight once more to what is in the process of becoming. The preparation for Christianity, which lasted more than half a millennium during the tragic centuries leading up to the Mystery of Golgotha, made an enormous impression on these spirits. What they carried over into the later incarnation was an impulse of feeling, an inner mood of soul which they were able to give conceptual form.

European cultural development, between the 14th and 17th centuries, takes on a deeper significance when studied with this background in mind. One comes to realize that very spiritual concepts and ideas concerning Christianity and the Bible are to be found in this period. These concepts and ideas often seem strange today because they originated from spiritual experiences. To turn his attention to the essential aspect of that period is of special interest for man today. The period between the 14th and 17th centuries is really like a mighty retrospect. Forces were still present in man's soul through which experience could arise of the surging weaving life of the spiritual world. We enter the minds of those who lived in that period when, in contemplating them, we do not forget this retrospective quality of their consciousness.

If for example we want to understand Luther it is essential to keep in mind what I have just said. Recently a very interesting book: Luther's Creed by Ricarda Huch²⁹ has appeared. The reason why the book is so interesting is mainly because it is written completely out of present-day consciousness; that it is also inadequate makes it somewhat disappointing. The periodical: “North and South” contains in the July issue an article about this book entitled: “Ricarda Huch and the Devil.” The article points out that with our consciousness as it is today we cannot really comprehend the way man's mind worked in an earlier epoch. This fact makes it all the more interesting to see how Ricarda Huch deals with Luther's belief in demons. Unlike those who, when requested for an opinion concerning Luther's belief in demons, are too cowardly to voice one, she tries to treat him fairly. Others usually dismiss the issue by saying: Well, Luther was certainly a great man but his talk about demons, his belief in the devil stemmed from the fact that he shared the general superstitions of his time.

An opinion of this kind is just about as helpful as that of the honest professor who, reading with his students what Lessing had written about a drama performance, explained that Lessing had not really been able to think through what he had written; and the professor added: “Well, if only I myself had more time!” It is through this kind of superior attitude that it is concluded that Luther had shared in the superstition of his time. The fact is that no one can understand Luther who does not realize that what, out of the spirit and consciousness of his time, was called “the devil”—we would say Ahriman and Lucifer—was for him actual spiritual experience. When he spoke of these matters at Wartburg or anywhere else it was always from direct experience. Try to compare and bring together what Luther says and you will inevitably come to the conviction that only someone who has actually seen the devil, who has met him in direct experience, can speak as Luther did. Moreover he was well aware that: “Small folk never see the devil even when he has them by the collar.” Ricarda Huch agrees, with much good will but purely theoretically, against the superior attitude of the academics who, in their cleverness, know that the devil does not exist. They conclude that Luther was superstitious as were others at his time and one must excuse and forgive the great man.

Ricarda Huch does not agree with those who hold such a superior view of great spirits of the past. However it is obvious that she has no personal experience of what the devil looks like. She does believe in him although she has never seen him; so how does she visualize the devil? She believes in his existence because she knows that there are things which neither natural science nor physiology can explain, things which must come from the devil. She too feels that some excuses must be made for Luther for she says: "One ought not to imagine that Luther believed the devil walked about the streets complete with horns and tail." However, like others, she sees what she calls the devil as a combination of certain evil traits and characteristics such as stupidity, pride, untruthfulness and so on. But these are mere abstract concepts and Ricarda Huch thought Luther used his pictorial expressions in that sense. Luther was obliged to use pictures because there is no other way to express spiritual experiences. Yet he was directly acquainted with the devil through the inner battles which unavoidably must be fought when man comes face to face with the devil.

Luther clothed his experiences in pictures in the way one otherwise clothes them in words. Only the most obtuse thinkers could possibly maintain that the words one uses to depict an event contain the event itself. Yet this is precisely the objection levelled against me by professor Dessoir when he says that I have derived the various stages of mankind's evolution, not from reality, but from mental pictures. Such things are rather prevalent; in this particular case it stems from lack of insight, from utter ignorance. In the second chapter of my forthcoming book, dealing especially with moral corruption in academic circles, you will see what kind of people are among those who teach in public places of learning. These people who help shape the present, contribute to its dreadful miseries. They also create a situation in which the Royal Academy of Science awards its prize to the shoddy history of psychology submitted by Dessoir. If you read what Dessoir's colleagues have themselves said about this slatternly superficial treatise you will get an idea of the kind of literature that circulates and even wins awards in the academic world.

Luther lived at a time when the possibility still existed to have awareness of the spiritual world. All the devilry of Ahriman he experienced directly; he could not put these experiences into ordinary words because words are designed for physical things. Spiritual experiences must be described in pictures, in Imaginations. However, Imagination does express the reality of what is perceived and experienced super-sensibly. This Ricarda Huch does not understand. She thinks that though Luther spoke of the devil one must not take it to mean that when someone with spiritual sight comes among people he will, in numerous cases, find Ahriman, hunchbacked and with horns, looking at him from where he sits firmly entrenched between their shoulders. But Luther's descriptions were based on experience, and the pictures he uses are his way of describing these experiences. His personality was not such a gentle one as that of Ricarda Huch who believes he merely used symbolic pictures for man's evil upsurging passions.

One can ask what it is that gives Luther's doctrine—as it is usually called—the power it has. The answer lies in the fact that it is no mere doctrine, it must be understood very differently if one is to do it justice. In one's imagination Luther, standing there in the 17th Century, must be visualized as looking back with inner sight to a time when communion was being cultivated with the spiritual world, to a time when he himself cultivated such communion precisely in the realm of the ahrimanic. To recognize Ahriman is to free oneself from him; the danger lies in not recognizing him—you can read more about this aspect of Ahriman in my Four Mystery Dramas. To come face to face with Ahriman, the way Luther did, is to set oneself free. What Luther says can seem incomprehensible unless one recognizes that he is describing actual experiences; when it is realized then the power of his words is greatly enhanced. Even when we find certain aspects of what he said unpalatable his words strike us as genuine because he saw things in a much wider context than is normally possible today.

It is an interesting and highly significant phenomenon that Luther should appear, embodying the fruits of what was taught in the pre-Christian Mysteries. Luther was one of the greatest participants in those Mysteries that prepared the way for the founding of Christianity. What he absorbed in these Mysteries remained quite unimpaired by the later intermediate incarnation and was the source and strength of his power in his incarnation as Luther. But what was Luther's most significant revelation concerning his direct experience of Ahriman?

We must keep in mind that the essentially ahrimanic age begins only after Luther. Though people are not aware of it, present-day natural-scientific knowledge is saturated by Ahriman. The characteristic feature of today's materialistic outlook is that every concept is prompted by Ahriman. Luther was destined, at a significant turning point to make man aware of this fact. However when someone is able to look into the spiritual world he sees things in a different light from those who cannot do so. Furthermore the spiritual world affects man differently once he becomes conscious of it.

We begin to understand Luther's peculiar position once we realize that the powerful force he brought over from an earlier evolutionary stage could not be effective in later epochs. He was destined to rescue for mankind a view of Christianity before it had been weakened by unrecognized ahrimanic influences. That is the reason for the breadth of his vision and the strength of his consciousness of Ahriman.

Someone once wrote a book in which he had collected all the contradictions to be found in Luther's writings. Luther read the book and wrote a reply which is included in a letter to Melanchthon. Luther's comment was: “The silly ass only speaks of contradictions because he understands neither side of a contradiction, he does not understand that one can honour someone as a Prince yet at the same time speak of him as a devil and oppose him.”—Luther's letter to Melanchthon, where he speaks of this, is most interesting, for it also reveals his relationship to his own time. He used other expressions which would not be used today but are entirely comprehensible in view of his acquaintance with the spiritual world. These expressions are not, as historians suggest, merely a product of his time. Those who call Luther's expressions cynical or frivolous do so out of their own cynicism or frivolity.

What is important in relation to these things is to recognize that individual aspects of something may recur, although the greater issue itself is not repeated. This applies also to Scholasticism; people will only learn to relate to it when they rediscover in it the more subtly differentiated thinking than the one cultivated today. The way the spirit came to expression in Luther will never be repeated. He must be accepted just as he is, as a historical phenomenon. It would be a mistake to imagine that anyone could repeat Luther's life. What one should do is to make so thorough a study of Luther, as he appears in history, that one comes to recognize what it was that revealed itself through him in this particular incarnation. One must attempt to see beyond the individual who was active in the mysteries preparing for Christianity and then had an intermediate incarnation before appearing as Luther. We need to see that we are not dealing here only with a certain individuality but that in this one phenomenon the whole trend and law of mankind's evolution is expressed. It could happen because of his former conscious experience—even though as Luther this knowledge had become subconscious—of that realm where he encountered the devil; i.e., Ahriman.

In general Luther is seen the way academics see him: theologians are usually academics. His direct experience of the spiritual world is disregarded and his talk of the devil is seen as the weakness of a great man. But in truth the weakness lies in those who speak in this way about Luther.

Then came—and here we see how evolution runs its course—the time after Luther when Ahriman permeated the materialistic view of life. Though man was not conscious of it this was the case especially in the 19th Century. From the eastern part of Europe the possibility will first emerge for man to know once more the realm he enters when he attains insight beyond the physical plane. This seems a strange fact when we at present look towards the East. We see there aspects revealing both the baseness and the greatness of Russian nature. Over several years we have described what is preparing itself in Russia. It is indeed a remarkable experience to watch what takes place there; one has to say that these people are children still. They really are children and when they are not children they are possessed.

How can one escape the realization that Kerensky³⁰ is possessed? Naturally he considers himself far above such a superstitious idea that Ahriman has taken possession of him. But Ahriman has learned to produce from Western science a thinking which is utterly alien to the East, alien because it is a thinking related only to processes of dying. Not only does Western thinking understand nothing about the Russian people; Easterners themselves—that is, the leading people in the East—who try to judge Russians with Western thinking do not understand the Russians. There is in the Russian people still something childlike, something that points to the future. And in the future it is destined to develop into the ability to look once more into the spiritual world, to develop a relationship once more with the spiritual world.

What is preparing in Russia for the future is in complete contrast to the preparations that were made for our own epoch at the time of the Great Luther. Our age looks back, it makes manifest a force working from the past. We are looking at something very remarkable in the contrast between Luther's experience of his time and for example the childlike experience of a Russian like Soloviev³¹ during the time leading up to the revolution. We are seeing two opposite poles which are related as North to South, or if an abstract comparison is wanted, as positive and negative electricity. Two opposite directions of thoughts and views; unable to understand each other. It is obvious from the way Soloviev speaks that he is remote from any understanding of Luther, and if we remain with Luther it is quite impossible to understand Soloviev. We must widen our horizon to encompass both positive and negative.

I wanted to place these important issues before you. When next we meet I shall attempt to present Luther as a self-contained individuality—not only as he appeared in his time but as he appears within mankind's evolution as a whole—from a point of view obtainable only through Anthroposophy.

• 26. Thomas Aquinas 1225–1274 Scholastic Philosopher
• 27. Henry More 1614–1687 English Philosopher.
• 28. Martin Luther 1483–1546 Inaugurator of German Reformation
• 29. Ricarda Huck 1864–1947
• 30. Alexander Feodorowitsch Kerensky b. 1881 Russian Politician
• 31. Wladimir Soloviev 1853–1900 Russian Philosopher and Poet

The theme on which I propose to speak in these lectures seems to me of peculiar importance in view of present conditions. At the very beginning let me emphasise that there is no element of sensationalism or anything of that kind in the choice of the title: The Fifth Gospel. For I hope to show that in a definite sense and one that is of particular importance to us in the present age, it is possible to speak of such a Fifth Gospel and that in fact no title is more suitable for what is intended.

Although, as you will hear, this Fifth Gospel has never yet been written down, in future times of humanity it will certainly be put into definite form. In a certain sense, however, it would be true to say that it is as ancient as the other four Gospels.

In order that I may be able to speak about this Fifth Gospel, we shall have, by way of introduction, to study certain matters which are essential to any real understanding of it. Let me say, to begin with, that the time is certainly not very far distant when even in the lowest grade schools and in the most elementary education, the branch of knowledge commonly called History will be presented quite differently. It is certain—and these lectures should be a kind of confirmation of it—that in times to come the concept or idea of Christ will play quite a different and much more important part in the study of history, even the most elementary, than has been the case before. I know that such a statement seems highly paradoxical, but let us remember that there were times by no means very far distant, when countless human hearts turned to Christ with feelings of immeasurably greater fervour than is to be found to-day, even among the most learned Christians in the West. In earlier times these feelings of devotion were incomparably more intense. Anyone who studies modern writings and reflects on the main interests of people to-day will have the impression that enthusiasm and warmth of feeling for the Christ Idea are on the wane, especially so in those who claim an up-to-date education. In spite of this, I have just said that as this age of ours advances, the Christ Idea will play a much more important part than hitherto in the study of human history. Does this not seem to be a complete contradiction?

And now we will approach the subject from another side. I have already been able to speak on several occasions in this very town about the significance and the content of the Christ Idea; and in books and lecture-courses which are available here, many deep teachings of Spiritual Science concerning the secrets of the Christ Being and of the Christ Idea are to be found. Anyone who assimilates w hat has been said in lectures, lecture-courses and indeed in all our literature, will realise that any real understanding of the Christ Being needs extensive preparation, that the very deepest concepts and thoughts must be summoned to his aid if he desires to reach some comprehension of Christ and of the Christ Impulse working through the centuries. If nothing else indicated the contrary, it might possibly be thought that a knowledge of the whole of Theosophy or Anthroposophy is necessary before there can be any true conception of Christ. But if we turn aside from this and look at the development of the spiritual life of the last centuries, we are met from century to century by the existence of much profound and detailed knowledge aiming at a comprehension of the Christ and His revelation. For centuries and centuries men have applied their noblest, most profound thought in attempts to reach an understanding of Christ. Here too, it might seem as if only the most highly intellectual achievements of men would suffice for such understanding. But is this, in fact, the case? Quite simple reflection will show that it is not.

Let us, as it were, lay on one scale of a spiritual balance, everything contributed hitherto by erudition, science and even by theosophical conceptions towards an understanding of Christ. On the other scale let us lay all the deep feelings, all the impulses within men which through the centuries have caused their souls to turn to the Being called Christ. It will be found that the scale upon which have been laid all the science, all the learning, even all the theosophy that can be applied to explain the figure of Christ, will rapidly rise, and the scale upon which have been laid all the deep feelings and impulses which have turned men towards the Christ will sink. It is no exaggeration to say that a force of untold strength and greatness has gone forth from Christ and that erudite scholarship concerning Him has contributed least of all to this impulse. Truly it would have boded ill for Christianity if, in order to cleave to Christ, men had had to resort to all the learned dissertations of the Middle Ages, of the Schoolmen, of the Church Fathers, or even to what Theosophy contributes to-day towards an understanding of Christ. This whole body of knowledge would be of very little help. I hardly think that anyone who studies the march of Christianity through the centuries with an unprejudiced mind can raise any serious argument against this line of thought; but the subject can be approached from still another side.

Let us turn our thought to the times before Christianity had come into existence. I need only mention something of which those sitting here are certainly aware. I need only remind you of the ancient Greek dramas, especially in their earlier forms. When portraying a god in combat or a human being in whose soul a god was working, these dramas make the sovereignty and activity of the gods concretely and perceptibly real. Think of Homer and of how his great Epic is all inwoven with the workings of the Spiritual; think of the great figures of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. These names bring before our mind's eye a spiritual life that in a certain domain is supreme. If we leave all else aside and look only at the single figure of Aristotle who lived centuries before the founding of Christianity, we find there an achievement which, in a certain respect, has remained unsurpassed to this very day. The scientific exactitude of Aristotle's thinking is something so phenomenal, even when judged by present-day standards, that it is said: human thinking was raised by him to an eminence unsurpassed to this day.

And now for a moment we will take a strange hypothesis, but one that will help us to understand what will be said in these lectures. We will imagine that there were no Gospels at all to tell us anything about the figure of Christ, that the earliest records presented to man to-day in the form of the New Testament were simply not in existence. Leaving on one side all that has been said about the founding of Christianity, let us study its progress as historical fact, observing what has happened among men through the centuries of the Christian era ... In other words, without the Gospels, without the story of the Acts of the Apostles, without the Epistles of St. Paul, we will consider what has actually come to pass. This, of course, is pure hypothesis, but what is it that has really happened?

Turning our attention first of all to the South of Europe in a certain period of history, we find a very highly developed spiritual culture, as represented in Aristotle; it was a sublime spiritual life, developing along particular channels through the subsequent centuries. At the time when Christianity began to make its way through the world, large numbers of men who had assimilated the spiritual culture of Greece were living in the South of Europe. If we follow the evolution of Christianity to the time of Celsus—that strange individual who was such a violent opponent of Christianity—and even on into the second and third centuries after Christ, we find in Greece and Italy numbers of highly cultured men who had absorbed the sublime Ideas of Plato, men whose subtlety of thought seems like a continuation of that of Aristotle. Here were minds of refinement and power, versed in Greek learning; here were Romans who added to the delicate spirituality of Greek thought the element of aggressive personality characteristic of Roman civilisation. Such was the world into which the Christian impulse made its way. Truly, in respect of intellectuality and knowledge of the world the representatives of this Christian impulse seem to be uncivilised and uneducated in comparison with the numbers and numbers of learned Romans and Greeks. Men lacking in culture make their way into a world of mellowed intellectuality. And now we witness a remarkable spectacle. Through these simple, primitive people who were its first bearers, Christianity spreads comparatively quickly through the South of Europe. And if with an understanding of the nature of Christianity acquired, let us say, from Theosophy, we think of these simple, primitive natures who spread Christianity abroad in those times, we shall realise that they knew nothing of these things. We need not think here of any conception of Christ in His great cosmic setting, but of much simpler conceptions of Christ. Those first bearers of the Christian impulse who found their way into the world of highly developed Greek learning, had nothing to bring into this arena of Greco-Roman life save their own inwardness, their personal connection with the Christ Whom they so deeply loved; for this connection was as dear to them as that with their own kith and kin. Those who brought into the Greco-Roman world in those days the Christianity that has continued to our own time, were not well-informed theosophists, were by no means highly educated people. The Gnostics who were the learned theosophists of those times had, it is true, risen to sublime ideas concerning Christ, but even they contributed only what must be placed in the rising scale of the balance. If everything had depended upon the Gnostics, Christianity would certainly not have made its victorious headway through the world. It was no highly developed intellectuality that came over from the East, causing the comparatively rapid decline of the old Hellenic and Roman culture. There we have one side of the picture.

We see the other side when we consider men of intellectual distinction, beginning with Celsus—the opponent of Christianity who even then brought forward all the arguments that are still valid to-day—down to Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher on the throne. We think of the Neo-Platonists with their subtle scholarship, whose ideas make those of philosophy to-day seem mere child's play, so greatly do they surpass them in loftiness and breadth of vision. Thinking of all the arguments against Christianity brought from the standpoint of Greek philosophy by these men of high intellectual eminence in the world of Greco-Roman culture, the impression we get is that they did not understand the Christ Impulse. Christianity was spread by men who understood nothing of its real nature; it was opposed by a highly developed culture incapable of grasping its significance. Truly, Christianity makes a strange entry into the world—with adherents and opponents alike understanding nothing of its real nature. And yet ... men bore within their souls the power to secure for the Christ Impulse its victorious march through the world.

And now let us think of men like Tertullian who with a certain greatness and power entered the lists on behalf of Christianity. Tertullian was a Roman who, so far as his language is concerned, may almost be said to have re-created the Latin tongue; the very certainty of aim with which he restored to words a living meaning lets us recognise him as a personality of real significance. But if we ask about his ideas, there is a very different story to tell. In his ideas and thoughts he gives very little evidence of intellectual or spiritual eminence. Supporters of Christianity even of the calibre of Tertullian do not accomplish anything very considerable. And yet as personalities they are potent—these men like Tertullian, to whose arguments no highly educated Greek could attach much weight. There is something about Tertullian that attracts one's attention—but what exactly is it? That is the point of importance.

Let us realise that a real problem lies here. What power is responsible for the achievements of these bearers of the Christ Impulse who themselves do not really understand it? What power is responsible for the influence exercised by the Church Fathers, including even Origen, in spite of all their manifest ineptitude? Why is Greco-Roman scholarship itself unable to comprehend the essential nature of the Christ Impulse? What is the reason of all this?

But let us go further. The same spectacle stands out in still stronger relief when we study the course of history. As the centuries go by, Christianity spread over Europe, among peoples like the Germanic, with quite different ideas of religion and worship, who are, or at least appear to be, inseparable from these ideas and who nevertheless accepted the Christ Impulse with open hearts, as if it were part and parcel of their own life. And when we think of those who were the most influential missionaries among the Germanic peoples, were these men schooled theologians? No indeed! Comparatively speaking, they were simple, primitive souls who went out among the people, talking to them in the most homely, everyday language but moving their very hearts. They knew how to put the words in such a way as to touch the deepest heart-strings of those to whom they spoke. Simple men went out into regions far and wide and it was their work that produced the most significant results. Thus we see Christianity spreading through the centuries. But then we are astonished to find this same Christianity becoming the motive force of profound scholarship, science and philosophy. We do not undervalue this philosophy but we will focus our attention to-day upon the remarkable fact that up to the Middle Ages the peoples among whom Christianity spread in such a way that it soon became part of their very souls, had lived hitherto with quite different forms of thought and belief. And in no very distant future, many other features will be stressed in connection with the spread of Christianity. So far as the effect produced by this spread of Christianity is concerned, it will not be difficult to agree with the statement that there was a period when these Christian teachings were the source of fervent enthusiasm. But in modern times the fervour which in the Middle Ages accompanied the spread of Christianity seems to have died away.

And now think of Copernicus, of the whole development of natural science on into the nineteenth century. This natural science which since the time of Copernicus has become an integral part of Western culture, might appear to run counter to Christianity. The facts of history may seem, outwardly, to substantiate this. For example, until the 'twenties of the nineteenth century the writings of Copernicus were on the so-called Index of the Roman Catholic Church. That is an external detail, but the fact remains that Copernicus was a dignitary of the Church. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake by the Roman Church but he was, for all that, a member of the Dominican Order. The ideas of both these thinkers sprang from the soil of Christianity and their work was an outcome of the Christian impulse. To maintain that these teachings were not the fruits of Christianity would denote very poor understanding on the part of those who claim to hold fast by the Church. These facts only go to prove that the Church did not understand the fruits of Christianity. Those who see more deeply into the roots of these things will recognise that what the peoples have achieved, even in the more recent centuries, is a result of Christianity, that through Christianity, as also through the laws of Copernicus, the gaze of the human mind was turned from the earth out into the heavenly expanse. Such a change was possible only within Christian culture and through the Christian impulse. Those who observe the depths and not merely the surface of spiritual life will understand something which although it will seem highly paradoxical when I say it now, is nevertheless correct. To this deeper observation, a Haeckel, for all his opposition to Christianity, could only have sprung from the soil of this same Christianity. Ernst Haeckel is inconceivable without the base of Christian culture. And however hard modern natural science may try to promote opposition to Christianity, this natural science is itself an offspring of Christianity, a direct development of the Christian impulse. When modern natural science has got over the ailments of childhood, men will perceive quite clearly that if followed to its logical conclusions, it leads to Spiritual Science, that there is an entirely consistent path from Haeckel to Spiritual Science. When that is grasped it will also be realised that Haeckel is Christian through and through, although he himself has no notion of it. The Christian impulses have given birth not only to what claims to be Christian but also to what appears on the surface to run counter to Christianity. This will soon be realised if we study the underlying reality, not merely the concepts and ideas that are put into words. As can be seen from my little essay on “Reincarnation and Karma,” a direct line leads from the Darwinian theory of evolution to the teaching of repeated earthly lives.

But in order to understand these things correctly we must be able to perceive the influence of the Christian impulses with entirely unprejudiced eyes. Anyone who understands the doctrines of Darwin and Haeckel and is himself convinced that only as a Christian movement was the Darwinian movement possible (although Haeckel had no notion of this, Darwin was aware of many things)—anyone who realises this is led by an absolutely consistent path to the idea of reincarnation. And if he can call upon a certain power of clairvoyance, this same path will lead him to knowledge of the spiritual origin of the human race. True, it is a detour, but with the help of clairvoyance an uninterrupted path from Haeckel's thought to the conception of a spiritual origin of the Earth. It is conceivable, of course, that someone may accept Darwinism in the form in which it is presented to-day, without grasping the life-principles which in reality are contained in it. In other words, if Darwinian thought becomes an impulse in someone who lacks any deep understanding of Christianity—which nevertheless lies in Darwinism—he may end by understanding no more of Darwinism than he does of Christianity. The good spirit of Christianity and the good spirit of Darwinism may alike forsake him. But if he has a grasp of the good spirit of Darwinism, then—however much of a materialist he may be—his thought will carry him back over the earth's history to the point where he recognises that man has not evolved from lower animal forms but must have a spiritual origin. He is led to the point where man is perceived as a spiritual being, hovering as it were over the earthly world. Darwinism, if developed to its logical conclusion, leads to this recognition. But if someone has been forsaken by the good spirit of Darwinism and happens to believe in the idea of reincarnation, he may imagine that he himself once lived as an ape in some incarnation of the planet Earth. [The reference here is to certain assertions made by the theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater.] Anyone who can believe this lacks all real understanding of Darwinism and of Christianity and must have been forsaken by the good spirits of both! For Darwinism, consistently elaborated, could lead to no such belief. In such a case the idea of reincarnation has been grafted into the soil of materialism. It is possible, of course, for modern Darwinism to be stripped of its Christian elements. If this does not happen, we shall find that on into our own times the impulses of Darwinism have been born out of the Christ Impulse, that the impulses of Christianity work even where they are repudiated. Thus we find that in the early centuries, Christianity spreads quite independently of scholarship or erudition in its adherents; in the Middle Ages it spreads in such a way that the Schoolmen, with all their learning, can contribute very little to it; and finally we have the paradox of Christianity appearing in Darwinism as in an inverted picture. Everything that is great in the Darwinian conception derives its motive power from the Christian impulses. The Christian impulses within it will lead this science of itself out of and beyond materialism.

The Christian impulses have spread by strange channels—in the absence, so it appears, of intellectuality, learning, erudition. Christianity has spread irrespectively of the views of its adherents or opponents—even appearing in an inverted form in the domain of modern materialism. But what exactly is it that spreads? It is not the ideas nor is it the science of Christianity; nor can we say that it is the morality instilled by Christianity. Think only of the moral life of men in those times and we shall find much justification for the fury levelled by men who represented Christianity against those who were its real or alleged enemies. Even the moral power that might have been possessed by souls without much intellectual education will not greatly impress us. What, then, is this mysterious impulse which makes its victorious way through the world? Let us turn here to Spiritual Science, to clairvoyant consciousness. What power is at work in those unlearned men who, coming over from the East, infiltrated the world of Greco-Roman culture? What power is at work in the men who bring Christianity into the foreign world of the Germanic tribes? What is really at work in the materialistic natural science of modern times—the doctrines of which disguise its real nature? What is this power?—It is Christ Himself Who, through the centuries, wends His way from soul to soul, from heart to heart, no matter whether souls understand Him or not. It behoves us to leave aside the concepts that have become ingrained in us, to leave aside all scientific notions and point to the reality, showing how mysteriously Christ Himself is present in multitudinous impulses, taking form in the souls of thousands and tens of thousands of human beings, filling them with His power. It is Christ Himself, working in simple men, Who sweeps over the world of Greco-Roman culture; it is Christ Himself Who stands at the side of those who in later times bring Christianity to the Germanic peoples; it is He—Christ Himself in all His reality—Who makes His way from place to place, from soul to soul, penetrating these souls quite irrespectively of the ideas they hold concerning Him.

Let me here make a trivial comparison. How many people are there who understand nothing at all about the composition of foodstuffs and who are none the less well and properly nourished? It would certainly mean starvation if scientific knowledge of foodstuffs were essential to nourishment. Nourishment has nothing whatever to do with understanding the nature of foodstuffs. Similarly, the spread of Christianity over the earth had nothing to do with men's understanding of it. That is the strange fact. There is a mystery here, only to be explained when the answer can be found to the question: How does Christ Himself wield dominion in the minds and hearts of men?

When Spiritual Science, clairvoyant investigation, puts this question to itself, it is led, first of all, to an event from which the veils can really only be lifted by clairvoyant vision—an event that is entirely consistent with what I have been saying to-day. This above all will be clear to us: the time when Christ worked in the way I have described, is past and gone, and the time has come when men must understand Christ, must have real knowledge of Christ.

It is therefore also necessary to answer the question as to why our age was preceded by that other age when it was possible for the Christ Impulse to spread independently of men's understanding. The event to which clairvoyant consciousness points is that of Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit. Clairvoyant vision, quickened by the power of the Christ Impulse, was therefore directed, in the first place, to this event of Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit. It is this event that presents itself first and foremost to clairvoyant investigation carried out from a certain standpoint.

What was it that happened at the moment in the earth's evolution described to us, somewhat unintelligibly to begin with, as the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles? When with clairvoyant vision one investigates what actually happened then, an answer is forthcoming from Spiritual Science as to what is meant when it is said that simple men—for the Apostles themselves were simple men—began to utter in different tongues, truths which came to them from the depths of spiritual life and which none could have thought them capable of uttering. It was then that the Christian impulses began to spread, independently of the understanding of those human beings to whom they made their way. From the event of Pentecost pours the stream that has been described. What, then, was this event of Pentecost? This question presented itself to Spiritual Science and with the spiritual-scientific answer to it begins—the Fifth Gospel.

In today’s lecture we shall consider how the content of a lesson may be adapted to the life of the children. There can be no doubt whatsoever that an education that is not based on a true understanding of the human being cannot possibly succeed in adapting the content of a lesson to the reality of human life.

The spiritual aspect of the human being is not recognized today; it is really only the physical body that is considered. There are some, perhaps, who admit to something of a soul nature that, in a vague way, influences the physical body. But even they do not consider the inner concrete nature of soul and spirit. It is exactly this consideration that anthroposophy is to contribute toward an understanding of the human being. It is only this that will, in a conscious way, make the adaptation of our lessons to the human life processes possible.

Let us assume—it will not be difficult to imagine it—that the children are listening to a story you tell them, or that they are looking at a picture you drew for them on the blackboard, or that they are looking at a diagram of an experiment, or that they are listening to a piece of music you play for them. In each of these activities you are initially in a relation to the outer physical reality of the children. But what you are inserting into the children in a roundabout way through the physical reality—be it through the eyes, the ears, or the comprehending intellect—everything that is thus placed into the children very soon assumes a quite different form of life.

The children go home, they go to bed, they go to sleep; their egos and astral bodies are outside their etheric and physical bodies. What you did with the children in this roundabout way through the physical body and also the etheric body continues in the astral body and the ego. But the latter two are now, during sleep, in a quite different environment. They experience something that can only be experienced during sleep, and everything you taught the children participates in the experience. The effects of the lesson that remain in the astral body and ego are part of the experience during sleep. You must know that you let flow into the astral body and ego what you teach the children through this detour of the physical body and that you thus affect the children’s sleep experience. The children will present to you on the following morning the results of what they experience between falling asleep and waking.

A simple example will clarify this for you. Let us think of a child who is doing eurythmy or singing. The physical body is active, and the active physical body and the etheric body impress this activity on the astral body and ego. The ego and astral body are forced into participating in the movements of the physical and etheric bodies. But they resist, because actually they have other forces to concentrate on. These forces must now, in a way, be subdued. And although the ego and astral body resist, they must accept what their own physical and etheric bodies mediate to them—in eurythmy it is more the physical body; in listening to a piece of music, it is more the etheric body.

Ego and astral body then enter the world we live in between falling asleep and waking up. Everything that has been impressed on them continues during sleep to vibrate in them. Ego and astral body actually repeat—in the more intricate and spiritualized way peculiar to their nature—what they experienced in eurythmy and music. They repeat all of it. And what they thus experience during sleep, this the children take with them to school on the following day. The children incorporate the experience into their etheric and physical bodies, and we have to reckon with that.

Considered in totality, the human being presents an extraordinarily complicated structure for us to come to terms with in our lessons. Let us now take a closer look at these processes. Let us consider a child who is doing eurythmy. The physical body is in movement, and the movements of the physical are transferred to the etheric body. Astral body and ego initially resist, but the activities of the physical and etheric bodies are impressed on them. Astral body and ego then separate during sleep and connect the impressions to spiritual forces that are quite different. On the following morning astral body and ego return the impressions to the etheric and physical bodies. We can then see a remarkable harmony between that which was received from the spiritual world during sleep and what the etheric and physical bodies experienced during eurythmy. The effect shows itself in the way the sleep experiences adjust to what was prepared and carried out on the previous day. It is only in this complementing of the physical/etheric by the spiritual that we can see the special healing element of eurythmy.

Indeed, spiritual substantiality is brought to the human being upon awakening in the morning after a day including eurythmy. It is similar in singing. When we let a child sing, the essential activity is that of the etheric body. The astral body must strongly adapt to this activity and, again, initially resists before taking it into the spiritual world. The astral body returns, and what it brings back again expresses itself in effectively healing forces. We may say that in eurythmy we have a force that mainly affects the health of the child’s physical body, while in singing a force expresses itself that mainly affects the child’s mechanism of movement and, through movements, then again the health of the physical body.

We can make very good use of these connections in education. If we organize our curriculum—this is an ideal, but the teachers could at least try to come close to it—so that the eurythmy lesson is given in the afternoon, it will be allowed to continue its life during the following night. On the next day, we can teach a physical education lesson in the way I outlined yesterday. The experience then penetrates the body in such a way that the movements made in physical education have a healing effect. Much can be achieved by this alternation of eurythmy and physical education.

Or again, much can be achieved on any one day when we let the children sing. They take this experience into the spiritual world during sleep. On the following day we let them listen to music—we let them listen to rather than make music. What was done on the previous day is then consolidated in the listening to music—an extraordinary healing process. You can see that under ideal conditions—that is, a curriculum structured to adapt to the conditions of life—we can affect the children’s health in an extraordinary way. We shall do still far more in this regard.

Let us take the physics lesson as another example. We make an experiment. Remember what I said yesterday: Our thinking, our mental pictures, are head processes, while it is the rhythmic human being who judges, and the metabolic human being who draws conclusions. It is especially our legs and feet that draw conclusions. If you keep this in mind, if you think of the processes of perception in this way, you will tell yourselves that everything connected with the will, everything we produce out of ourselves during the process of perceiving, is deeply connected to the drawing of conclusions and not only to the forming of mental pictures or ideas. When I look at my body, then this body is itself a conclusion. The idea, the mental image, arises only because I am looking at my body, but in carrying out a definite half-conscious or unconscious procedure, I synthesize the parts in a way, akin to the forming of judgments, that allows me to experience the totality. I then express the experience in the sentence: This is my body. But this is already the perception of a conclusion. As I perceive, perceive intelligently, I am drawing conclusions. And the whole of the human being is within these conclusions.

This is so during an experiment, because in experimenting the whole of the human being is active, receiving information. Conclusions are continuously drawn during the process. Judgments are generally not perceived; they are predominantly inner processes. We may thus say that the whole of the human being is occupied during an experiment.

From an educational point of view, children do not really benefit much at all from such experiments. They may be interested in what they see, but their normal organization as human beings is as such not strong enough for them to exert themselves continuously in every part of their being. That is not possible. I always ask too much of them when I ask them to exert themselves totally. The children always get too far outside themselves when I ask them to observe an experiment or something in the environment. The important aspect in education consists in really paying attention to the three parts of the threefold human being—in allowing each part to receive its due, but also in getting all to the point where they can correspondingly interact.

Let us return to the physics lesson. I make an experiment. The whole of the human being is occupied, is asked to make an effort. This is quite enough to begin with. I then draw the children’s attention away from the instruments I experimented with and repeat the various stages. Here I am appealing to their memory of the direct experience. During such a review or recapitulation—without the presence of the apparati, purely in the mind—the rhythmic system is especially enlivened. After having engrossed the whole of the human being, I now appeal to the rhythmic system, and to the head system, because the head naturally participates during recapitulation. The lesson can then be concluded. After first having occupied the whole of the human being, then mainly the rhythmic system, I dismiss the children. They go to bed and sleep. What I activated in the whole of their being, then in their rhythmic system, now during sleep continues to live in their limbs when astral body and ego are outside the body.

Let us now regard what remains lying on the bed, what allows the content of the lesson to keep on working. Everything that has developed in the rhythmic system and the whole of the human being now streams upward into the head. Pictures of these experiences now form themselves in the head. And it is these pictures that the children find on waking up and going to school. Indeed, it is so. When the children arrive at school on the following morning they have, without knowing it, pictures of the previous day’s experiments in their heads, as well as pictures of what—in as imaginative a way as possible—I repeated, recapitulated after the experiment. The children I then confront have photographs of the previous day’s experiment in their heads. And I shall now reflect on yesterday’s lesson in a contemplative way. Yesterday I experimented, and in reviewing the experiment I then appealed to the children’s imagination. In today’s lesson I add the contemplative element. In doing so, I not only meet the pictures in the children’s heads, but also help to bring the pictures into their consciousness.

Remember the progression: I teach a physics lesson, make an experiment, then recapitulate the stages of the experiment without the apparatus. On the following day, we discuss the previous experiment, contemplate it, reflect on it. The children are to learn the inherent laws. The cognitive element, thinking, is now employed. I do not force the children to have mere pictures in their heads, pictures they have brought with them from sleep, pictures without substance, without meaning. Just imagine the children coming to school with these pictures in their heads, of which they have no knowledge. If I were to immediately start with a new experiment, without first nourishing them with the cognitive, contemplative element, I would again occupy the whole of their being, and the effort they would have to make would stir up these pictures; I would create chaos in their heads. No, above all, what I must do first is consolidate what wishes to be there, provide nourishment. These sequences are important; they adapt to, are in tune with, the life processes.

Let us take another example, a history lesson. In the teaching of history there is no apparatus, no experiment. I must find a way of again adapting the lesson to the life processes, and I can do this as follows. I give the children the mere facts that occur in space and time. The whole being is again addressed just as during an experiment, because the children are called upon to make themselves a mental picture of space. We should see to it that they do this, that they see what we tell them, in their minds. They should also have a mental picture of the corresponding time. When I have brought this about, I shall try to add details about the people and events—not in a narrative way, but merely by characterization. I now describe and draw the children’s attention to what they heard in the first part of the lesson. In the first part, I occupied their whole being; in the second, it is the rhythmic part of their being that must make an effort. I then dismiss them.

When they return on the following day they again have the spiritual photographs of the previous day’s lesson in their heads. I connect today’s lesson with them by a reflective, contemplative approach—for example, a discussion on whether Alcibiades or Mithradates was a decent or an immoral person. When I make an objective, characterizing approach on the first day, followed on the next day by reflection, by judgments, I shall allow the three parts of the threefold human being to interact, to harmonize in the right way.

These examples show what can be done if the lessons are properly structured, if they are adapted to life conditions. The structuring and adaptation are only possible in our curriculum, which allows the teaching of a subject for several weeks. They are not possible in the traditional schedule, wherein physics is taught on one day and, perhaps, religion on the next. How could one thus consider what the children bring with them? It is difficult, of course, to structure all the lessons in this way, but one can at least come close to doing so. And by taking a good look at our schedule, you will see that we have attempted to make that possible.

It is furthermore also important to have an overview of all these connections. If you remember what I said yesterday—that it is not only the head but the whole human being who is a logician—you will learn to appreciate the significance of activities that require skills. It really was not a mere whim on our part when we introduced knitting also for boys. The faculty of judgment is indeed essentially enhanced by this activity of the hands. It is least developed through mere logical exercises. Logical exercises actually do very little for the development of the faculty of judging, of forming opinions. By connecting predicate to subject we contribute nothing to that faculty. What we actually do in that instance is make the faculty of judgment rigid. Children so exercised will grow into adults who can only judge according to patterns or schemes. Too many intellectual exercises result in schematic individuals. Another result of such exercises is too much salt deposit; the human being is permeated by salt and tends toward perspiring. We can easily observe this in children whose judgments have been unduly taxed: they perspire too much during the night.

Indeed, it is true. When we are too strongly and one-sidedly intellectual/spiritual—without knowing that the physical/corporeal is the pure expression of the spiritual—we usually affect the body, and mostly in the wrong way. Herbart’s education, as well as that of others—education that is predominantly based on developing the faculty of forming mental images and ideas—results in the destruction of the body. It is important for teachers to know this.

You can see the significance of what I have told you in other areas of life. Every decent human being is supposed to listen to sermons in church. This is certainly a good tradition. The usual sermons are rather abstract. In fact, the preacher is trying to direct his congregation from everyday life to higher regions. They are to be edified and so on. It is all quite justified. Still we must understand what is actually happening during today’s sermons, preached by people who are living in abstractions, who are ignorant of the connections in nature, whose thoughts do not contain such connections, who in fact do not even enjoy natural phenomena.

Let us now assume that the faithful attend such sermons that are not connected to everyday life. There are many such sermons nowadays. The faithful listen. Initially we do not notice anything amiss. But they do get physically ill, albeit only to a slight degree that is outwardly not noticeable. The effect of such sermons is the breeding of slight illnesses. A few hours after such a sermon, the listeners are subjected to the processes of an illness. The pain is consciously experienced to only a half or even a quarter degree. The inevitable effect is the feeling of one’s miserable body. But surely the cause cannot possibly be in the sermon that has raised one to higher, more spiritual regions! One then analyzes one’s feelings, becomes contrite, and realizes: I am a sinner. This is the interpretation of the illness that follows a sermon. And this—making the congregation experience themselves as sinners—may even have been intended by a certain unconscious shrewdness on the part of the sermonizer.

This phenomenon, quite general in our time, is connected with the other phenomena of decadence. I have mentioned it in order to show you that a wrong preoccupation with the spirit does not affect the spirit but rather the body, and quite concretely; I have mentioned the phenomenon so that you may understand that we ought to educate our children from a knowledge of this accord of the spirit with the physical body.

Sometimes curious events are not noticed, although they greatly influence the whole of our cultural life. During the last third of the nineteenth century less attention was given to the teaching of geography. The subject of geography played an ever diminishing role in teachers colleges. It was given an unimportant place in the curriculum, to be taught as a secondary subject by either the teacher of history or the teacher of the natural sciences. But take another good look at our diagram of the human being on the blackboard. When we see the human as a being who draws conclusions, who is placed within the world and does not separate from it through the head, we cannot think of him or her without the surrounding space. Space is part of the human being. Insofar as we have feet and legs, we are a part of the world of space. And the teaching of geography is, spatially considered, for the astral body a “being-put-on-itslegs.” The astral body actually grows denser and thicker lower down. We teach about space and in so doing increase the density of spirit and soul in the lower astral body, toward the ground. In other words, we consolidate, we bring about a certain firmness in the human being when we teach geography in an imaginative way—always stressing the reality of space, making the children conscious of, for example, the distance between the River Thames and Niagara Falls.

If we teach geography clearly and graphically, we place the human being within space, and we especially cultivate an interest in the whole world. The effects will be seen in various ways. Individuals taught geography in this way will have a more loving relation with their fellow beings than those who have not learned about spatial relationships. They learn to take their place next to other human beings, learn to be considerate. These things strongly affect the moral life, whereas the neglect of geography results in an aversion to loving one’s fellow beings. Even a superficial observation will confirm this. The connections are there, even if they are not noticed. Today’s unhappy cultural phenomena are the effects of such follies.

The effects of the teaching of history are quite different. History is concerned with time. We only teach it correctly when we pay attention to this fact. If we merely concentrate on historical episodes, we do not consider the time element enough. If, for example, I speak about Charlemagne as though he were the children’s uncle who is still alive today, I give them a false picture. Whenever I speak of Charlemagne, I must give the children a clear and graphic experience of the distance in time. I can do this by saying: “Just imagine—you are a small child and you take your father’s hand.” The children will have no difficulty in imagining this. I now point out the difference between the child’s and the father’s ages. I continue: “Your father holds his father’s hand, then he your grandfather’s, and so on. Now imagine thirty people holding hands. The thirtieth could be Charlemagne.” In this way, the children get a feeling for the distance in time. It is important to teach history in this way—not placing isolated episodes next to each other but rather giving the children the feeling of distance in time.

It really is important to point out the characteristic differences [in consciousness—translator] when we deal with specific epochs in history, so that the children can have an idea of them. What matters is that historical events are seen to be living within the framework of time. Seeing historical events in this way strongly affects our inner life.

If, on the other hand, we teach history in a way that ignores the time element and also takes hold of the inner life too strongly—that is, if we concentrate on recent local history at the expense of events in the distant past, if (as it were) we put the emphasis in our lessons on cultivating a wrong patriotism (you will easily think of many such instances)—then we shall greatly engender obstinacy and willfulness of the inner life and a tendency toward moodiness. These are side effects, which will, above all, make people reluctant to observe world events objectively. And this is so terrible today. Neglecting geography and taking the wrong approach to history have greatly contributed to the serious illnesses of our time. You yourselves will admit to the problems you have in facing many a situation now, problems resulting from the way you were taught history in school.

The examples I have given you will illustrate the path our teaching must take if it is to connect to life conditions, to life impulses, in a healthy way. We cannot be satisfied simply with mediating facts; we must, above all, be aware of the life conditions of the human being in the physical, soul, and spiritual connections. We must always see the human being before us; and we must see the human being in his or her totality, as a being who is also extremely active during sleep. If we ignore this sleep activity—and this is ignored in today’s education, apart from the hygienic aspects of sleep—if we ignore the fact that the content of our lessons continues into sleep, develops further during sleep, we will have the quite definite effect of making the human being into a robot, an automaton.

We could, indeed, venture to say that today’s education is in many respects an education not toward humanness but toward the most obvious type of human automaton—namely, the bureaucrat. Our children are trained to become bureaucrats. Such people are no longer really human. They are fixed, they have an existence, they are finished. The human being is lost, is concealed behind the label. We have an appointment with an officer, be it a clerk or barrister, and it matters little who the actual person behind the label is.

Such is the result of only paying attention to daytime consciousness in education, of denying the spiritual element, of not considering the activities during sleep. We see this tendency in a frightening way in modern philosophy. Descartes and Bergson assert that the ego constitutes the continuity of the human being, that in the ego we can grasp the reality. I would like to point out to such people that they then cease to exist as soon as they fall asleep, that they always begin life anew on waking up. The dictum “I think, therefore I am” should really be changed to: “On June 2, 1867, I was from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M., because I thought during that time. Then again I was from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M. on the following day.” Life would then become rather complicated. What lies between 8 P.M. and 6 A.M. would have to be excluded. But this is not considered, because such people prefer all sorts of ideas and abstractions to the realities at the basis of the human being.

But we must deal with these realities in our education. Doing so will allow us to educate human beings again. Doing so we need not then worry about establishing the right social or economic conditions. People who have been educated as human beings will see to them. Clearly, cultural life must be autonomous and independent. We can educate human beings only when concentrating on their human aspects, when we think about social change merely as a consequence of such an education—that is, not as having been made by the government. Cultural life must not be an appendix of the state or of economic life but must develop out of its very own sphere.

Our talks so far will have shown you the necessity of including exact knowledge of the physical human being when you prepare your lessons. The reason we consider such apparently remote matters is the important step our school is taking in adding a tenth grade class to the present elementary grades. In the tenth grade class we shall have girls and boys who are already more mature, who are at an age that will have to be treated especially carefully. I would like to spend the next few days in giving you a thorough understanding of this age when, as you know, important developmental stages occur.

You may well say that this is surely the business only of those who teach at this level. But this is not so. The teachers in our school must develop ever more into a complete organism, and all of you will, directly or indirectly, be concerned with all age groups, with the total education of every child.

However, before I address myself to the needs of the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-old students, I must today touch on some preliminary matters. During our meetings we shall then work on the tenth grade curriculum.

Let us, therefore, continue in the way we began during the last two days. I would like to impress on you the connection between the spirit/soul and the physical/corporeal aspects of the human being, especially of the child. Today’s culture regards spirit and soul merely intellectually. Our cultural life does not include an actual and living spiritual life. And in the mainly Catholic central European countries, Catholicism has assumed forms that are no longer true, so that even there one cannot expect any help regarding the religious mediation of spiritual life. The Protestant spiritual life has become more or less fully intellectualistic. As far as our school is concerned, the actual spiritual life can be present only because its staff consists of anthroposophists. We do not teach anthroposophy—our school must not represent a world conception—but through the way the teachers are acting, through their inner life, the soul and spirit elements enter the school as though through the imponderables of the soul.

When we now teach the various subjects expected of a school—reading, the thought processes in arithmetic, those in the natural sciences, everything that is of a cognitive nature—we give the children ideas and mental pictures. The ideas and mental images are for the child’s organism an activity that is quite different from physical/corporeal instruction—which, although it participates in the education of the thought processes, is also carried out independently. Physical/corporeal instruction is carried out quite independently in eurythmy, in physical education, and in instrumental music, but no longer in singing. Everything is, of course, relative. But there is a great difference, a polarity, between what the children are asked to do in these subjects—and also when they are learning reading and writing, when we strongly appeal to the physical activity—and what they are asked to do in subjects such as arithmetic, in which case the physical activity plays a subordinate role. In handwriting, on the other hand, physical activity plays a predominant part.

We should really go into details. Let me single out the subject of writing and show you the role physical activity plays. There are two types of people in regard to writing. (I believe I have already mentioned this to those of you who have attended previous lectures.) There are those who write as though the writing is flowing from their wrists. The forming of the letters is carried out from the wrist. Future business people are actually trained to write in this way. Their writing flows from their wrists, and this is all there is to it. That is one of the two types of people in regard to writing. The other type is disposed to looking at the letters. These people always contemplate what they write, deriving an almost aesthetic pleasure from it. These are the painter type, and they do not so much write from the wrist. Those of the first type do not paint.

I actually got to know the special training for people who are prepared for business. They are encouraged to put a kind of flourish to the letters. Their writing is characterized by continuous flourishes emanating from a certain swinging motion of the wrist. Taken to an extreme, this kind of writing will lead to something that is really quite awful. I know people who carry out all sorts of swinging motions with their pens in the air before they begin to write—a quite terrible thing when taken to an extreme.

We really ought to get people to write in a way that is akin to painting. Writing in that way is far more hygienic. When writing is accompanied by an aesthetic pleasure, the mechanical aspect is pushed into the body. It is the inner organism rather than the wrist that is writing. And this is most important, because the mechanical aspect is then diverted from the periphery to the whole of the human being. You will notice that when you teach children to write in this painting way, they will also be able to write with their toes. This would, in fact, constitute a triumph, a success—when a child is able to hold a pencil between the toes and form adequate letters. I do not say that this ability should be developed artistically. But we do have in such an instance a shifting of the mechanical activity to the whole human being. You will agree that in this regard most of us are extremely clumsy. Can you think of anyone who is able to pick up a piece of soap from the floor with his or her toes? To do this at least should be possible. It sounds grotesque, but it points to something of great significance.

We should cultivate this painting-like writing. It pushes the actual mechanical activity into the body, and the writer’s connection to the writing is brought to and beyond the surface. The human being is imparted into his or her environment. We should really get used to seeing everything we do, rather than doing things thoughtlessly, mechanically. Most people do write mechanically, thoughtlessly. Because writing is thus a manysided activity, we can, in a certain way, consider it as a significant aspect in our lessons. In arithmetic, on the other hand, the actual writing has a subordinate position, because with that subject it is the thinking that preoccupies the student.

We must now be quite clear about the processes taking place during reading. The activity of reading is initially spiritual and then continues into the physical body. It is especially the activities that are of a cognitive, mental/spiritual nature that considerably tax the delicate parts of the physical organization. You can picture, physiologically, the deeper parts of the brain, the white matter. The white matter is the actual, the more perfectly organized part of the brain. It is organized toward the more functional tasks, whereas the gray matter at the surface—which is especially well developed in humans—provides the brain’s nourishment. The gray matter has remained behind, in a very early stage of evolution. In regard to evolution, it is the deeper part of the brain that is more perfect.

If we teach a child to observe well, as in reading, we greatly tax the gray matter, engendering a very delicate metabolic process. And this delicate metabolic process then spreads throughout the organism. It is especially when we believe ourselves to be occupying the children mentally and spiritually that we affect their physical organism most strongly. The observation and comprehension during the reading of and listening to stories engender metabolic processes that tax the children to an inordinately strong degree. We could call what is happening the impression of the spiritual into the physical. A kind of incorporation of what we observe and comprehend during a story is necessary. Something akin to a physical phantom must develop and then impart itself into the whole organism. The organism is filled with delicate salt deposits. Not coarsely, of course. A salt phantom is imparted into the whole organism, and the necessity arises to dissolve it again through the metabolism.

This process takes place when the children read or listen to stories. When we believe ourselves to be occupying the mind and spirit in our lessons, we really evoke metabolic processes. And this must be considered. We cannot do anything else but to see to it that our stories and reading material are faultless in two respects. First, the children must be interested in the subject. Genuine interest is connected with a delicate feeling of pleasure that must always be present. That feeling expresses itself physically in very subtle glandular secretions that absorb the salt deposits caused during reading and listening. We must endeavor never to bore the children. Lack of interest, boredom, leads to all sorts of metabolic problems. This is especially the case with girls. Migraine-like conditions are the result of a one-sided stuffing of material that must be learned without pleasure. The children are then filled with tiny spikes that do not get dissolved. They tend toward developing such spikes. Yes—we must be aware of these problems.

Second, immediately connected with the metabolic problems arising from boredom is the unhappy situation that does not allow us enough time for everything we ought to do. We should really see to it that the currently available readers—which can drive you up the wall—are not used. The books I have seen in the classrooms are really quite awful.

We must not forget that we are preparing the children’s physical constitutions for the rest of their lives. If we make them read the trivial stuff contained in most readers we affect their delicate organs accordingly. The children will turn into philistines rather than into complete human beings. We must know that the reading material we give our children strongly affects their development. The results are unavoidable in later life.

I really would like to ask you to compile your own anthologies, including the classics and other worthwhile authors, and to refrain from using the available books. This additional effort is necessary. We must do something. It is, after all, the task of the Waldorf school to use methods different from those practiced elsewhere. What matters is that in reading or storytelling, and also in the presentation of the natural sciences, we take great care not to harm the children in these two ways.

Eurythmy and singing lessons can be said to be working in the opposite direction, engendering an organic process that is quite different. All the organs connected with these activities contain spirit. When the children are doing eurythmy they move, and during the moving the spirit in the limbs is streaming upward. When we ask the children to do eurythmy or to sing, we liberate the spirit. The spiritual, of which the limbs abound, is liberated—a very real process. In our singing and eurythmy lessons we release the spiritual from the children. As a consequence, the released or liberated spirit expects to be made use of after these exercises. I explained this to you in yesterday’s lecture in another connection. The spirit now also waits to be consolidated.

In singing, eurythmy, and physical education we spiritualize the children. They are quite different beings at the end of the lesson; there is much more spirit in them. But this spirit wishes to consolidate, wishes to remain with the children. We must not allow it to dissipate. We can prevent it from dissipating quite simply and effectively by making the children sit or stand quietly at the end of the lesson. We should try to maintain this calm for a few minutes. The older the children, the more important this will be. We should pay attention to these things if we wish to prepare the children in the best possible way for the following day. It is not in the children’s interest for us to let them rush out of the room immediately after a gym, singing, or eurythmy lesson. We should, instead, let them calm down and sit quietly for a few minutes.

In considering such matters we really touch on a cosmic principle. There are many and diverse theories about matter and spirit. But both, matter and spirit, contain something that is more than either of them, a higher element. We may say that if this higher element is brought to a state of calm, it is matter; if it is brought into movement, it is spirit. This being a high principle, we can apply it to the human being. Through the short period of calm following a gym, singing, or eurythmy lesson or other such activity, we produce in ourselves—for the spirit we have liberated—a delicate physical phantom, which then deposits itself in our organism for us to make use of. Knowing about this process can help us make discoveries that will have corresponding effects in our other interactions with the children.

We shall now consider further uses for this knowledge. There are children in our school with a very vivid imagination, and there are children with very little imagination. We need not jump to the conclusion that half of our students are poets and the other half not. We notice the difference not so much in the actual way the imagination shows itself but rather in the way memory develops. Memory is strongly related to imagination. We have some children—and we should notice them—who quickly forget what they have experienced and heard during a lesson, who cannot hold on to the pictures of what they have experienced, for whom the pictures disappear. And we have other children for whom the pictures remain, assume an independent life of their own, and surface continuously, cannot be controlled. We should be well aware of these two types of children. There is, of course, a whole range between these extremes. For children with a vivid imagination, memory causes the pictures to surface in a changed form. Most frequently, however, the pictures surface unchanged, as reminiscences. The children are then slaves to what they have experienced during their lessons. And then there are the children for whom everything disappears, evaporates.

It is now a matter of dealing with these two types of children appropriately. It is possible to occupy groups of children in the most diverse ways if we develop a routine in the best sense of the word—a routine in a spiritual sense. Children with poor memory, who have difficulty in getting the pictures to surface, should be made to observe better during reading. We should try to get them to listen better. With children who are slaves to their mental pictures, we should see to it that they become more physically active, mobile; we should make them concentrate more on writing. We could have two groups in the class—giving the children who are poor in imagination the opportunity for cultivating their reading and observation, while for the other group, the children with a vivid imagination, we could especially cultivate painting and writing. Naturally, it is a matter of degree, because everything is relative.

We can take this distinction further. (But the following observation is especially important: We can only gradually learn these things; we cannot cover everything during the first year.) Children who are poor in imagination—that is, children who cannot easily remember—should be asked to do eurythmy standing up, mainly with their arms. Children with a vivid imagination who are tormented by their mental pictures will benefit by moving the whole body, be it by running or by walking. This we can encourage. It really is very important that we pay attention to such matters.

In addition, we ought to know the value of the consonants for phlegmatic children who find it difficult to recall mental pictures, whereas the children who are tormented by their ever-surfacing mental pictures will greatly benefit from eurythmy exercises that concentrate mainly on vowel sounds. It can indeed be observed that vowel exercises have a calming effect on the rising mental pictures, while consonant exercises engender them. Acting on this knowledge can help both groups.

The same distinction applies to music lessons. Children poor in imagination and memory should be encouraged to play musical instruments; children with a vivid imagination should be occupied with singing. It would be ideal—if we had the necessary rooms—to teach both groups simultaneously, one in singing, the other in instrumental music. If we could practice a twofold method—listening to and making music—this would have a tremendously harmonizing effect on the children. It would be most valuable if we could make it possible to alternate between singing and listening: to let half the class sing and the other half listen, and then vice versa. This practice should really be cultivated, because listening to music has a hygienic, a healing effect on what the head is to do in the human organism; singing has a healing effect on what the body is to do in the head. If we carried out everything that we could in this way, we would have far healthier people about.

We are not really aware of the fact that we have regressed in human evolution. In the past, children were allowed to grow up without being educated; their freedom was not invaded. Now we violate this freedom when we begin to educate them in the sixth or seventh year. We must make up for this crime, this destruction of freedom, by educating them correctly. We must be quite clear that it is the manner of education, the “how,” that we have to improve if we wish to avoid a terrible future situation. It does not matter how much today people insist on stressing the cultural progress, the dwindling number of illiterates—they themselves are no more than imprints, the automata made by the schools. We must avoid this end, must not produce mere imprints in our schools. We must allow our children to develop in their individuality.

This issue becomes especially important when we make use of artificial methods such as learning by rote or by heart. In repeating something in this way the children transmit the content of what they have learned from the soul and spirit to the physical organism. What is learned by heart must first be understood. But during the process of learning by heart the children gradually slither into an ever more mechanical, physical way of learning. This is the way along which the content of learning is taken—from the initial subjective element to the objective element.

We must be honest in such matters. When the content is taken to the objective level, we must make the children listen to themselves, must make them aware that they are hearing themselves speak. We must bring the children to the point that, to the same extent as they recite the lines, they listen to themselves. We can succeed in this if, for example, the children differentiate the sounds they produce. We tell them: “What you are speaking is all about you, and you can hear it.” We must try to get the children to the point that they can hear themselves speak.

But this is not enough. Something else is even more important. We shall never succeed in letting the children find the transition from having the content of the words in their thoughts and feelings to learning it by heart if we do not appeal most strongly to their feelings before the memorizing begins. The children must never be asked to learn anything by heart before they have a deep feeling for all the details contained in the words—especially a feeling that allows them to relate to the content in the right way.

Let us consider an extreme case. Let us think of a prayer. The children should, when asked to learn a prayer, be urged to be in a mood of devotion. It is up to us to see to this. We must almost feel a horror if we teach the children a prayer without first establishing this mood of reverence or devotion. And they should never say a prayer without this mood. We should thus not make the children recite a lovely poem without first arousing in them a faint smile, a pleasure or joy; we should not order them to have these feelings but rather allow the content of the poem to awaken them. This principle applies to other subjects as well.

Much harm has been done to humankind during the course of evolution. Certainly, things have improved a little in this respect. But my generation remembers the way children were made to memorize, for example, historical dates and other facts. I myself remember history lessons during which teacher and children read a paragraph in a textbook and the children were afterward supposed to remember it; they simply learned it by heart. I heard an intelligent boy speak of the “Car of Jerusalem” instead of the “Czar of Russia”! He did not notice the gaffe during his mechanical recital of a passage in the book. This is not an isolated case. This method of learning things by heart in such subjects as geography and history has greatly contributed to our present cultural decadence.

It is essential to prepare the children correctly for such things that are to be learned by heart: prayers and poems. Their feelings must be engendered, the feelings they must have when they listen to themselves. Especially during the saying of a prayer, the children must have the feeling: “I grow above myself. I am saying something that makes me grow above myself.” This mood must apply to everything that is beautiful and graceful.

The mood also affects the physical organism, has a hygienic significance, because every time we teach something of a tragic or exalted nature we affect the metabolism. Every time we teach something of a graceful, dainty nature we affect the head, the nerve-sense organism. We can thus proceed in a hygienic way. Children who are flippant, light-headed, who are always bent on sensations, we shall try to cure by producing in them the mood they must have for something of a sublime, tragic nature. This will already be beneficial. We must pay attention to such matters in our lessons.

You will be able to do this if you yourselves have the right attitude to your teaching. Every now and then, in an almost meditative way, you ought to answer the question: How does my teaching of history or geography affect the children? It is necessary for us as teachers to know what we are doing. We have spoken about the way history and geography ought to be taught, but it is not enough to know it; it must be recalled in brief meditations. Does the teacher of eurythmy, for example, know that he releases the spirit from the children’s limbs? Does the teacher, during a reading lesson, know that she incorporates the spirit in the children?

If the teacher becomes aware of these things, she will almost see that when she is reading in the wrong way, when she bores the children, they will tend toward metabolic illness; she will feel that by making a child read a boring piece of literature, she actually produces a diabetic in later life. She will then develop the right sense of responsibility. By occupying the children continuously with boring material, you produce diabetics. If you don’t calm the released spirit after a physical exercise or a singing lesson, you produce people who lose themselves in life.

It is extraordinarily important that teachers thus occasionally reflect on what they are doing. But the reflection need not be oppressive. The teacher who is primarily concerned with reading will through it develop the feeling that she is actually continuously incorporating something, that she is working at the physical organism, and that she makes the children, through the way they are reading, into physically strong or weak adults. The teacher of handwork or crafts will be able to say to himself that he affects especially the spiritual in the children. If we let the children do things in handwork or crafts that are meaningful, we shall do more for the spirit than if we let them do things that are generally believed to be spiritual.

Much can be done in this direction, because much of what the children are doing nowadays in handwork is quite wrong. We can work in a more positive way that will have especially good results. I immediately noticed the children in Dornach making pillows, little cushions, which they then embroidered. If the embroidery is merely arbitrary, it isn’t really a cushion. The embroidery must be such that it invites the ear to lie on the cushion. The children seemed to especially enjoy making tea cosies. But they must be made properly. If I am to open the cosy at the bottom, the movement of my hands must be continued in the embroidery; the embroidery must indicate the opening of the cosy. But the children have been so ruined by the conditions of our time that they embroider the bottom of their cosies like this:

This is the wrong way round. The drawing must show where the opening is. When embroidering the top of a blouse or shirt, the children must learn that the embroidered band at the throat must widen toward the bottom and narrow toward the top. An embroidery on a belt must immediately show that it opens to both sides simultaneously; it must be widest at the center. Everywhere the children should learn to find the correct form.

Very much can be achieved by these things if we do not so much bother about the eye, but produce them in the feeling. You must get the children to feel what their design indicates: it widens at the bottom, it presses down from above. This must be translated into feeling; we must get, what the hands are supposed to do, into the hands. The human being is here essentially fully occupied in his whole being, thinks with his whole body. We really must try to see to it that such things are felt. The handwork lessons must be directed to feeling. The child should, when embroidering a corner, have the feeling: this corner must be embroidered in such a way that, when I put my finger into it, it can’t get through. If it happens to be something else, the embroidery must indicate this. This is the way we ought to teach. The handwork teacher can then say: I teach in a way that I especially engender the children’s spiritual activity. No teacher needs to feel that he or she occupies an inferior position in the school.