The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] We saw yesterday how the facts of the Cosmos proceed from the spiritual life of Beings who stand above man. Especially such a phenomenon as the one we introduced towards the end of our last lecture, the fight in heaven, which has left, so to speak, so many ‘corpses’ on the field of battle between Jupiter and Mars, which as planetoids are still being discovered by physical science in ever-increasing numbers; such a phenomenon must be of particular importance to us, and we shall have to return to it again: We shall see how this event is also reflected in certain processes of the earth's evolution, and how precisely in the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita we find the earthly reflection of this fight in heaven.

[ 2 ] But to-day we shall continue our studies so as to describe, though in a sketchy way, those other beings of the spiritual Hierarchies, whom we have indicated already, but whom yesterday we omitted. These are the Beings who, counting upwards, stand nearest to man, and are called in Christian Esotericism: Angels, Archangels, Primeval Beginnings or Primeval Forces; also Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. In theosophical literature the Archangels are also called Spirits of Fire, and the primeval Beginnings, spirits of Personality.

[ 3 ] These Beings who stand, as it were, in between man and those others to whom we referred yesterday as reaching up to Jupiter, Mars, etc., naturally stand in a nearer relation to man on the earth itself. First we have the Angels or Angeloi. They passed through their human stage during the evolution of the ancient Moon, and are fundamentally speaking, only as far on during our present earth evolution as man will be during the Jupiter evolution. They stand one stage higher than man. What is the task of these Beings? Their task can be realised when we take into account the development of man upon earth.

[ 4 ] Man develops from incarnation to incarnation. Our human evolution as it is now, reaches back through the ancient Atlantean time, through the Lemurian time and really begins in the ancient Lemurian time. This evolution through all these incarnations will continue for a long time yet, till towards the end of earthly evolution when other forms of human development will have come in. Now you know that what we call the eternal nucleus or kernel of the human being, the individuality, continues from incarnation to incarnation. But you also know that the greater number of people have to-day no recollection, no consciousness, as yet of their incarnations, and men do not as yet remember what happened to them during their former incarnations. Only those who have developed a certain degree of clairvoyance can look at their past incarnations.

[ 5 ] What sequence would there be between a man's incarnations upon earth when he cannot remember his former incarnations, if certain beings were not there to connect the separate incarnations, and watch the progress of the individual from one incarnation to the other? We have to assign one of these Beings to each man, a being who, being one stage higher, can lead the individuality over from one incarnation to the other. These are not the beings who rule Karma [but] preserve the memory from one incarnation to the other, so long as the man is not himself aware of it. These Beings are the Angels. Each man is a personality in each incarnation, and over each man a being watches, who has a consciousness which passes from one incarnation to the other. This makes it possible that in certain inferior grades of initiation, man is able, even if he does not himself know anything about his past incarnations, to ask his Angel about them. This is quite possible for certain lower degrees of initiation. The Beings who, as Angels, are one stage higher than men, have to keep watch over the whole human thread of life, which is spun for each single individuality from one incarnation to another.

Now, we pass on to the next group of Beings, to the Archangels — Archangeloi or Fire Spirits. These do not occupy themselves with separate men, with the single individual, but have a wider task; they bring single lives into harmonious order with the life of larger human groups, as, for instance, nations, races, etc. Within our earth's evolution the Archangels’ task is to bring into certain harmonious relationship each single soul with the national or race-soul. For those who penetrate into spiritual knowledge, the souls of races are something quite different from what they are for the lovers of the abstract in the science of to-day, or for present day culture in general. On a certain territory, (let us take Germany, France or Italy) live so and so many people, and because the physical eye sees only so many external human forms, such lovers of the abstract can imagine what is called the Soul of a nation or Spirit of a nation only as a comprehensive general idea of a nation. For the lover of abstractions the separate man only is real, not the soul of the nation, not the spirit of the nation. For one who truly sees into the inner working of spiritual life, that which is called the nation's soul or spirit, is a reality. In the soul of a nation there lives and weaves what we call a fire-spirit or an Archangel; he regulates, so to speak, the relation between separate men and the nation or races as a whole

[ 6 ] Then we rise to those beings whom we designate the Spirits of Personality, primeval beginnings, primeval forces, or Archai. These are still loftier Beings, who have a still higher task in the continuity of human existence. Fundamentally speaking, they regulate the earthly relations of whole human generations on earth, and they live in such a way that, on the waves of time, from epoch to epoch, they transform themselves at certain definite periods, they assume other spiritual bodies. Here again, you all know something of that which for the lovers of the abstract, is merely an idea, but which is a reality for those who can look into actual spiritual existence; it is that which is given a truly ugly name — the spirit of the time. You have here to do with that which represents the meaning and the mission of an epoch of humanity; picture to yourselves that we could describe the meaning and the mission of, for instance, the first thousands of years immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe. This ‘Spirit of the Age’ comprises something which reaches beyond single nations, beyond single races. Such a spirit is not limited to this or that nation, it goes beyond the limits of nations. That which one really calls a ‘Zeitgeist’ or Spirit of an epoch is the spiritual body of the Archai or the Primeval Beginnings or Spirits of Personality. It is to these Spirits of Personality that one has to ascribe the fact that within certain epochs, certain definite personalities appear on our earth. You understand, do you not, that earthly tasks have to be solved by earthly personalities; in a definite epoch, some epoch-making personality has had to appear. A strange muddle would come into the evolution of the earth if it were all left to chance, and Luther or Charlemagne were placed within any epoch, no matter which. This must be thought out first, the connexion with the whole evolution of humanity over the whole earth, has to be thought out; the right soul has to appear in harmony with the meaning of the whole earth's development. This is regulated by the Spirits of Personality, the Archai or primeval origins.

[ 7 ] And when we get beyond the Archai, we reach to those Beings whom we touched on yesterday, the so called Powers, — Exusiai, whom we also call the Spirits of Form. Here we have to do with tasks that reach beyond the earth. We differentiate in the course of human development a Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolution. We have now seen how all that happens within the earth itself is regulated by the Angels as regards the individual men, by Archangels as regards the relation between individuals and the large masses of humanity, and by the Spirits of Personality for the whole development of man, from the Lemurian period up to the period when man will again be so largely spiritualised that he will hardly belong to the earth. But something else has yet to be regulated. Humanity will have to be guided from one planetary condition to another. Spiritual Beings must also exist, whose care it is during the whole earth evolution to see that when that evolution will have come to an end, humanity may pass in the right manner through a Pralaya and find its way to the next goal, to the Jupiter goal. These are the Powers or Spirits of Form; yesterday we characterised their task from above downwards, now we characterise them from below upwards. The spirits whose care it is to see that the whole of humanity should be led from one planetary condition to another, are the Powers, Exusiai or Spirits of Form.

[ 8 ] We must now make a certain disclosure about the Cosmic position of these Beings. In spiritual science, in that which it is desired to continue to-day in Anthroposophy, and which is at bottom [of] the Wisdom of the Mysteries, these different Beings of the heavenly Hierarchies have always been spoken of as we have spoken of them to-day. We heard yesterday that the present Saturn represents the limit up to which reached the action of the Thrones or Spirits of Will; Jupiter, the limit up to which the Dominions, Spirits of Wisdom, acted; and Mars, the boundary line up to which reached the influence of the Mights, Dynamis or Virtutes, or Spirits of Motion.

[ 9 ] We may now characterise in a similar way how the Beings we named to-day divided specially the realms over which they held sway within our solar system. We must here touch on something which will perhaps call forth a certain amazement, even in you, who are already in a certain way schooled Anthroposophists, but which is absolutely in accordance with the truth. In the school curriculum of the present day, it is indicated that once upon a time, in grey antiquity, before Copernicus, there had been a conception of our Solar system which is known as the Ptolemaic System. People then believed that the earth stood in the centre of our system, and that the planets coursed round it, as they appear to do to our ordinary physical sight. Since Copernicus one knows — at least so people say — what people did not know formerly, that the Sun stands in the middle and that the planets circle around it, in their respective ellipses. But that which ought to be made quite clear and precise to people by such a description of our solar system, if one sincerely and honestly expounds it in the present day sense, is still something quite different. One ought to say: up to Copernicus, people knew only certain forms of movement in Universal space, and according to these, they judged how it could be with our solar system. What Copernicus did is not that he, so to speak, took a chair and gazed into space to see how the sun stands in some point of a circle or ellipse and how the planets turn around it; but he made a calculation, and this calculation explains what is seen in a simpler way than the former calculation did. The Copernican world system is nothing but the result, the product, of thought. [ 10 ] Let us look at it once from the point of view of the Ptolemaic. Let us consider that the Sun stands in the middle, let us calculate where the places of the planets must be, and then search whether it coincides with experience. Certainly, for mere physical observation, it coincides at first completely. Certainly one has built upon it all sorts of world systems, the Kant-Laplace system, for instance; but there one reaches a point where there were continual discoveries, a point which is no more scientifically quite honest. For later on, by purely physical observation, two planets have been added to it — we have not touched on them yet, but later we will show what they signify for our system — these are Uranus and Neptune. When one describes this world system one certainly should turn people's attention to the fact that in reality these two planets Uranus and Neptune, very much impair the truth of the calculation. [ 11 ] If one accepts the Kant-Laplace system, then, according to it, Uranus and Neptune should move with their moons as the other moons move around the other planets. But they do not; we even have among those outer planets, these two lately discovered planets, one which behaves in a very strange way. In reality, if the Kant-Laplace system is correct, somebody must, after having split off the rest of the planets, [have] turned the axis in such a way that it revolved at 90°, for its course is different from that of the other planets. These two differ greatly from the other planets of our solar systems. We shall see later how it is with them, but now we simply call attention to the fact that with the Copernican system we have only to do with a calculation, with something established as an hypothesis, as an assumption, at a time when man had gone completely adrift from the perception of spiritual co-relations and of what lies spiritually at the foundation of external happenings. But the old Ptolemaic system is not merely a physical system, it is one which was still derived from spiritual observation, when one knew that planets are boundary marks for certain realms where the higher Beings held sway. We must design our whole solar planetary system in a different way if we are to characterise these realms of control correctly. I shall draw this planetary system for you as it was expounded in the Mystery Schools of Zarathustra. We could just as well turn to other Mysteries for counsel, but we shall specially select this system for the explanation of our solar system with its planets, in respect of the spiritual Beings who are active within.

[ 12 ] In the System of Zarathustra something was accepted which differs from our observation of the heavens. You know that one can observe a certain progress of the Sun—call it apparent or otherwise: through the Zodiac during the course of long years. It is generally said—and it is correct—that from about the year 270 B.C. the sun in spring rose at the first point of spring in the Zodiacal sign of Pisces. But every year the sun advanced a little further, so that in the course of long, long epochs of time, it traverses, as regards its point of rising through the whole of one Zodiacal sign. Before 270 B.C. it did not rise in Pisces but in Aries, with its rising point in spring-time, it travelled through the whole sign of Aries during 2150 years. Before that, Taurus had been the Zodiacal constellation in the spring during the previous period of 2150 years. So, if we go back to five or six thousand years B.C., we find the spring-point in the Zodiacal sign of Gemini. That was the time in which the Mystery Schools of Zarathustra flourished.¹

Far back into hoary antiquity these Schools flourished and, when speaking of the appearance of the heavens, they calculated everything according to the constellation of Gemini, so that if we wanted to draw the Zodiac in the way we characterised it yesterday, we should have to place the constellation of Gemini here at the top. Then one would have to draw, in direct connection with the Zodiac, that which bounds the realm of the Thrones or Spirits of Will, the boundary of which is Saturn. Then we come to the boundary limit of the realm of those spiritual Beings whom we call the Spirits of Wisdom — the utmost boundary being Jupiter. Then we reach the limit of the realm of the Spirits of Motion of which the limit is Mars. We have seen that between these lies the battlefield which the fight in Heaven has left behind. Now if we want to divide the realms of power correctly, we must draw the boundary line of the Sun. Thus, just as we draw Mars as the boundary point up to which is the domain ruled by the Mights and Spirits of Motion, we must draw the Sun itself as marking the limit to which the Lordship of the Powers or the Spirits of Form extends. And then we come to the boundary which we designate with the sign of Venus. The realm of the Spirits of Personality or Archai reaches to Venus. Next we come to the boundary of the realm, the limit of which is marked by the sign of Mercury, and is the realm of those Beings, whom we call Archangels or Fire Spirits. And now we come very near the earth. We can now designate the realm which has the Moon for a landmark, and here we draw the earth.

[ 13 ] You must look on the earth as the Starting Point surrounded by a region under the dominion of certain Beings which reaches to the Moon. Then comes a region extending as far as Mercury, then one extending to Venus, and then one to the Sun.

You may be astonished at the sequence in which I have placed the planets. When the earth is here, and the Sun there, you would have thought that I should draw Mercury in the vicinity of the Sun, and Venus here. But no! For these Planets have had their names interchanged, in later Astronomy. That which is called Mercury to-day was called Venus in all ancient teachings, and that which is called Venus was called Mercury. Thus, note it well, one does not understand the ancient writings when one takes that which in them is called Venus or Mercury for the Venus or Mercury of the present day. That which is said about Venus has to be applied to the Mercury of to-day, and what is said about Mercury to Venus. For those two designations were later interchanged. On the occasion when man turned the world system topsy-turvy, when the earth was deprived of its central position, the perspective was not only changed, but the designations of Mercury and Venus were also changed.

[ 14 ] Now you will very easily bring into harmony what is drawn here with the physical or Copernican theory. You need only think: here is ☉, the Sun; around it turns Venus; further around it circles Mercury. Then the Moon turns round the earth. Then Jupiter revolves around it, then Saturn. You must think of the physical movements of each planet revolving round the Sun; but you can imagine such a position when the earth ♁, so to say, stands here and the other planets have revolved so, that on their way they find themselves behind the Sun. Thus if I drew it, it would be so; we draw our usual physical system, we draw the Sun as the one burning point, and let Venus, Mercury and the Earth with her Moon revolve round it. These are Earth, Venus, Mercury, according to the ancient designation. The next following is Mars, then after the Planetoids comes Jupiter, then Saturn. Now imagine it so that whilst ♁, the earth stands below, and Mercury and Venus follow, that then Mars ♂, stands there above, Jupiter ♃, there, and so on. Now you have the Sun, and Mercury, and the Venus of to-day ♀, here. It is plausible, that if those planets can take all sort of positions towards each other, they might also have once stood thus. This is how the Copernican system is drawn, only a point of time is chosen, when the Earth, Mercury and Venus are on the one side of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the other planets, on its other side.

This is what I have drawn, and nothing else. Here are Earth, Mercury, Venus, on the one side, and on the other side, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Thus, we have to do only with a change of perspective. This system is quite possible but only when this constellation was there. It is a fact that it was there at a certain epoch, when Gemini was above Saturn. Then one could observe clairvoyantly with particular exactness the connections between the regions in which the Spiritual Hierarchies hold sway. It was then revealed that around the Earth, up to the Moon, was the sphere of the Angels. In fact when one does not use the physical system as a foundation, one gets around the earth up to the Moon, the sphere of the Angels, up to Mercury the sphere of the Archangels, up to Venus that of the Archai or Spirits of Personality, and lastly up to the Sun is the realm of the Exusiai or Spirits of Form. Then comes the sphere — as I characterised it yesterday — of the Virtutes or Mights, then the sphere of the Dominions, and then that of the Thrones.

[ 15 ] When one speaks of the Copernican and of the Ptolemaic systems, one must have it clear in one's mind that in the Ptolemaic system something still remains of the constellation of ruling Spirits, and there the Earth must be taken as the starting point of the perspective. A future will come when this world system will again be the correct one; because Man will again know about the Spiritual World. It is to be hoped that men will be then less fanatical than they are to-day

To day, it is said: ‘Before Copernicus, people all talked nonsense, they all had a primitive world system. Since Copernicus we at last know what is right. All else is false, and because the Copernican system is the right one it will be taught in all ages, even if it were for millions of years.’ This is more or less the talk of the day. There hardly ever existed such superstitious folk as are the modern astronomical theorists; and there hardly ever was such fanaticism as there is in this domain of science. It is to be hoped that future generations will be more tolerant and that they will say: ‘From the fifteenth or sixteenth century men ceased to be conscious of the existence of the spiritual world, and that one must have other perspectives in the spiritual worlds, that there, one must arrange the heavenly bodies into a different order than when one observes in a merely physical way.’ Formerly that was done, but the time came when men considered the order and regulation of the heavenly bodies only from the physical point of view. ‘We can do this also,’ will cry the men of the future, and from the sixteenth century onwards it was quite correct. ‘Men had for a time to overlook the spiritual world but then people bethought themselves again and recollected that there was a spiritual world, they then returned to the original spiritual perspective.’ It is to be hoped that the men of the future will comprehend that there also was once an astronomical Mythology, and will not look upon our times with the same disdain with which the men of the modern superstitions look upon their forefathers.

[ 16 ] We see that the Copernican system became different, simply because merely physical standpoints were taken into account in relation to it. Before that, in the Ptolemaic system, there were still remnants of a spiritual point of view. Only through taking into consideration the other system, can one form any idea of the rulership and the action of the spiritual Beings within our solar-planetary-system. We keep to physical conditions when we say: Up to the Moon the Angels exercise their power, up to Mercury the Archangels, to Venus the Spirits of Personality, up to the Sun the Powers, as far as to Mars the Mights. Then come the Beings we call the Dominions, and here lastly the Thrones. We need only draw in other lines to designate the physical system, then we have in these lines the limits of the realms of power of the Hierarchies. As regards spiritual activities it is not our Sun at all which stands in the centre of the system, but the earth. Therefore, all the ages which have regarded spiritual development as the most essential part, have said: Certainly the Sun is a far nobler heavenly body, Beings have evolved upon it who stand higher than man; but that with which evolution is concerned is man, who lives upon the earth. And when the Sun withdrew from the Earth, it did so in order that man should develop in the right way. If the Sun had remained united to the earth man could never have been able to progress at the right tempo. This was possible only because the Sun withdrew along with those Beings who could bear quite different conditions. It left the earth to itself, so to speak, so that man might find his tempo for his own development. [ 17 ] A world system grows into this or that according to the point of departure — the perspective chosen. If one asks, where is the centre of our world system, seeing in it only what the purely physical senses can observe, then it is found in the Copernican system. If one asks about the arrangement of our solar system as it depends on the regions ruled over by the spiritual Hierarchies, we must place the earth as its centre, we then get other boundary lines; the planets then become something quite different, they become limits for the region over which each spiritual Hierarchy holds sway.

[ 18 ] And now you will easily be able to see the correspondence between what has been just said about the spacial distribution of each sphere of influence, with that which has been said about the task and mission of each group of Beings.

The Beings who are nearest to the earth, who hold sway in the immediate surroundings of the earth up to the Moon, are the Angels. From that region they guide the life of each single Individual as it progresses from incarnation to incarnation.

But something more is needed in order that whole masses of nations may be distributed in accordance with their mission upon earth. A little thought will reveal that co-operation with the cosmos is here necessary. It really depends on cosmic, not earthly conditions, whether a nation has one sort of character or another. Only think how a race with different qualities, for instance in hair and in skin, acts otherwise than another race would do; here we have the interactions of conditions which must be regulated from heavenly spaces. This is done from a region whose lordship extends up to Mercury, to the boundary of the Archangel's sphere of action.

Further, when the whole of humanity as it develops upon earth has to be guided and led, this has to be effected from still wider heavenly spaces, from that which extends as far as to Venus by the Archai.

When further, the task of the earth itself has to be led and guided, this must be done from the centre of the whole system. [ 19 ] I have said that our humanity evolves through Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. The Beings of the spiritual Hierarchies, who direct the mission of humanity carrying it on from one planet to another, are the Powers, the Spirits of Form. They must dwell in a very special place, they are of such a nature that their sphere of power reaches up to the Sun. The Sun already existed as a special, a particular globe alongside the ancient Moon; it is now near the earth, in the future it will be near Jupiter. Its realm of power extends beyond the single planets. Therefore the existence of the Sun must be bound up with those spiritual Beings whose realm of action also extends beyond the single planets. The Sun is a very special and perfect globe for this reason, that up to it extends that realm of power which stretches beyond the single planets.

Thus you see that in reality we do not find the outer spheres or dwelling places of the Hierarchies so much on the single planets as in the regions which are limited by the orbits of the planets. If you think of the whole surrounding space from the earth up to the Moon, it is filled with Angel-activities; and if you think of the spheres from the earth to Mercury, it is filled by the activities of the Archangels, and so on.

[ 20 ] Thus we have to do with the spheres of space; and the planets are the landmarks for realms of the spacial activities of the higher Beings. We see that a continual, progressive line of perfection is to be sought from man upwards. Man himself is chained to the earth. That eternal part of him which goes from incarnation to incarnation is guided by Beings who are not bound only to the earth, but who traverse the surrounding air and that which lies beyond it up to the Moon. And so on further.

[ 21 ] Now, man has been engaged on his evolution upon earth since primeval times, and his relationship towards his whole evolution upon earth, is exactly similar to the relationship between the small child and the grown-up person. The latter teaches the small child. It is the same as regards the Hierarchies in the cosmos. Man, who is chained to the earth, only gradually struggles through to the knowledge he needs, to the cleverness which is necessary to him upon earth. Higher Beings must teach him. What must happen so that this object can be gained? In the beginnings of the earth's existence, Beings who were otherwise not bound to the earth, had to come down from higher spheres. And that really happened. Beings who otherwise needed only to live in the surroundings of the earth had to come down so as to communicate to men what they already knew as the older, more perfect members of the Hierarchies. They had to incarnate into human bodies, not for their own development, for they did not need it, just as a grown-up man does not study the A.B.C. for his own progress, but so as to teach it to these small children. Hence, we look back into old Atlantean and old Lemurian times, when Beings descended from the surrounding realms of the earth to which they belonged and incarnated in human bodies and became the teachers of mankind. These are Beings who belonged to higher Hierarchies, to Mercury and Venus. The sons of Venus and of Mercury descended from above and became the teachers of young humanity, so that these men, wandering in the midst of that young humanity, really represented Maya or illusion. There have been such men. Let us suppose, in order to explain it more precisely: some normally developed man of the Lemurian times met such a man. Externally he did not appear very different from others, but a spirit had entered into him whose realm extended as far as Mercury or Venus. Thus, the exterior of such a man represented in reality Maya, an illusion. He looked like other men, but he was something quite different: he was a son of Mercury, or of Venus. In the early dawn of humanity there were such apparitions. The sons of Mercury or of Venus came down and wandered among men, so that they now received within them the character of the Beings of Mercury and Venus. We have said that the Beings of Venus are the Spirits of Personality. Such Beings walked the earth as men, being outwardly limited to narrow human personalities, but who with their mighty power guided humanity. These were the great conditions of lordship in Lemurian times, when sons of Venus guided the whole of humanity. The sons of Mercury guided parts of humanity. They were as powerful as those are now whom we call spirits of nations or of race.

[ 22 ] Maya or illusion does not only exist in the world but also as regards men. A man as he stands before us can have an external appearance which is a truth, which corresponds precisely to his soul; or else it may be a Maya; he has in reality a task, which corresponds to the task of the sons of Mercury or of the sons of Venus. This is what is meant, when it is said, that fundamentally the great guiding individualities of ancient times as they walked the earth with their ordinary names, represented a Maya, and that was what H. P. Blavatsky meant when she pointed out that the Buddhas represented Maya. You can find this very word in the Secret Doctrine. These things are derived in every respect from the teachings of the holy Mysteries: we have only to understand them.

[ 23 ] We are now obliged to ask: How does it happen then that such a son of Venus descends to us? How does it happen that a Bodhisattva can live upon earth? The Being of a Bodhisattva, the Being of a son of Mercury, forms an important chapter in the evolution of our earth which has to do with its connexion to the Cosmos itself. Therefore, tomorrow we shall have to consider the nature of the sons of Mercury and of Venus, of the Bodhisattva or Dhyani-buddhas.

• 1. The following tabulation is not Steiner’s chronology, but common chronology as accepted by the astrologers.
  In order to make this paragraph of use to the ordinary student it has been necessary to depart from the version as it stood in the reported text. The difference lies in the calculation of the dates. The conclusion to be drawn is approximately the same. We know Christ came during Pisces, which began 270 B.C. Add 2150 years and we get the following:
  2420 B.C. as the beginning of Aries,
  4570 B.C. as the beginning of Taurus,
  6720 B C. as the beginning of Gemini.
  Since our year 1881 we are under Aquarius. In other words:
  Gemini begins 6720 B.C. down to 4570 B.C.
  Taurus begins 4570 B.C. down to 2420 B.C.
  Aries begins 2420 B.C. down to 270 B.C.
  Pisces begins 270 B.C. down to 1881 A.D.

Every great spiritual stream in the world has its particular mission. These streams are not isolated and are separated only during certain epochs; then they merge and mutually fructify each other. The Event of Palestine is an illustration of one most significant fusion of the spiritual streams in humanity.

We have set ourselves the task of understanding the Event of Palestine with increasing clarity. But conceptions of the world and of life do not, as some people seem to imagine, move through the air as pure abstractions and ultimately unite. They are borne by Beings, by Individualities. When a system of thought comes into existence for the first time it must be presented by an Individuality, and when these spiritual streams unite and fertilize each other, something quite definite must also happen in the Individualities who are the bearers of the world-conceptions in question. The concrete facts connected with the fusion of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism in the Event of Palestine as described in yesterday's lecture, may have seemed very complicated. But if we were content to speak of the happenings in an abstract way and not in concrete detail, it would only be necessary to show how these two streams united. As anthroposophists, however, it is our task to give accounts of the two Individualities who were the actual bearers of these world-conceptions as well as to call attention to the contents of the teachings. Anthroposophists must always endeavour to get away from abstractions and arrive at concrete realities, so you should not be surprised to find such complicated facts connected with a happening as momentous as the fusion of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism.

This fusion necessarily entailed slow and gradual preparation. We have heard how Buddhism streamed into and worked in the personality born as the child of Joseph and Mary of the Nathan line of the House of David, as related in the Gospel of St. Luke. Joseph and Mary of the Solomon line of the House of David resided originally in Bethlehem with their child Jesus, as recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew. This child of the Solomon line bore within him the Individuality who, as Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, had inaugurated the ancient Persian civilization. Thus at the beginning of our era, side by side and represented by actual Individualities, we have the stream of Buddhism on the one hand (as described in the Gospel of St. Luke), and on the other the stream of Zoroastrianism in the Jesus of the Solomon line (as described in the Gospel of St. Matthew). The births of the two boys did not occur at exactly the same time.

I shall have to say things to-day that are not found in the Gospels; but you will understand the Bible all the better if you learn from investigations of the Akashic Chronicle something about the consequences and effects of facts indicated in the Gospels. It must never be forgotten that the words at the end of the Gospel of St. John hold good for all the Gospels—that the world itself could not contain the books that would have to be written if all the facts were presented. The revelations vouchsafed to humanity through Christianity are not of a kind that could have been written down and presented to the world once and for ever as a complete record. Christ's words are true: ‘I am with you always, until the end of the world!’ He is there not as a dead but as a living Being, and what He has to reveal can always be perceived by those whose spiritual eyes are opened. Christianity is a living stream and its revelations will endure as long as human beings are able to receive them. Thus certain facts will be presented to-day, the consequences of which are indicated in the Gospels, though not the facts themselves. Nevertheless you can put them to the test and you will find them substantiated.

The births of the two Jesus children were separated by a period of a few months. But Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke and John the Baptist were both born too late to have been victims of the so-called ‘massacre of the innocents’. Has the thought never struck you that those who read about the Bethlehem massacre must ask themselves: How could there have been a John? But the facts can be substantiated in all respects. The Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel was taken to Egypt by his parents, and John, supposedly, was born shortly before or about the same time. According to the usual view, John remained in Palestine, but in that case he would certainly have been a victim of Herod's murderous deed. You see how necessary it is to devote serious thought to these things; for if all the children of two years old and younger were actually put to death at that time, John would have been one of them. But this riddle will become intelligible if, in the light of the facts disclosed by the Akashic Chronicle, you realize that the events related in the Gospels of St. Luke and St. Matthew did not take place at the same time. The Nathan Jesus was born after the Bethlehem massacre; so too was John. Although the interval was only a matter of months, it was long enough to make these facts possible.

You will also learn to understand the Jesus of the Gospel of St. Matthew in the light of the more intimate facts. In this boy was reincarnated the Zarathustra-Individuality, from whom the people of ancient Persia had once received the teaching concerning Ahura Mazdao, the great Sun Being. We know that this Sun Being must be regarded as the soul and spirit of the external, physical sun. Hence Zarathustra was able to say: ‘Behold not only the radiance of the physical sun; behold, too, the mighty Being who sends down His spiritual blessings as the physical sun sends down its beneficient light and warmth!’—Ahura Mazdao, later called the Christ—it was He whom Zarathustra proclaimed to the people of Persia, but not yet as a Being who had sojourned on the Earth. Pointing to the sun, Zarathustra could only say: ‘There is His habitation; He is gradually drawing near and one day He will live in a body on the Earth!’

The great differences between Zoroastrianism and Buddhism are obvious as long as they were separate; but the differences were resolved through their union and rejuvenation in the events of Palestine.

Let us once again consider what Buddha gave to the world. Buddha's teaching was presented in the Eightfold Path—this being an enumeration of the qualities needed by the human soul if it is to escape the harsh effects of Karma. In course of time Buddha's teaching must be developed as compassion and love by men individually, through their own feelings and sense of morality. I also told you that when the Bodhisattva became Buddha, this was a crucial turning-point in evolution. Had the full revelation of the Bodhisattva in the body of Gautama Buddha not taken place at that time, it would not have been possible for the souls of all human beings to unfold what we call ‘law-abidingness’—‘Dharma’—which a man can only develop from his own being by expelling the content of his astral nature in order to liberate himself from all harsh effects of Karma. The Buddhist legend indicates this in a wonderful way by saying that Buddha succeeded in ‘turning the Wheel of the Law’. This means that the enlightenment of the Bodhisattva and his ascent to Buddhahood enabled a force to stream through the whole of humanity as the result of which men could now evolve ‘Dharma’ from their own souls and gradually fathom the profundities of the Eightfold Path. This possibility began when Buddha first evolved the teaching upon which the moral sense of men on Earth was actually to be based. Such was the task of the Bodhisattva who became Buddha. We see how individual tasks are allotted to the great Individualities when we find in Buddhism all that man can experience in his own soul as his great ideal. The ideal of the human soul what man is and can become—that is the essence of Buddha's teaching and it sufficed as far as his particular mission was concerned.

Everything in Buddhism has to do with inwardness, with human nature and its inner development; genuine, original Buddhism contained no ‘cosmology’—although it was introduced later on. The essential mission of the Bodhisattva was to bring to men the teaching of the deep inwardness of their own souls. Thus in certain sermons Buddha avoids any definite reference to the Cosmos. Everything is expressed in such a way that if the human soul allows itself to be influenced by Buddha's teaching, it can become more and more perfect. Man is regarded as a self-contained being apart from the great Universe whence he proceeded. It is because this was connected with the special mission of the Bodhisattva that Buddha's teaching, when truly understood, has such a warming, deepening effect upon the soul; for this reason too the teaching seems to those who concern themselves with it to be permeated with such intensity of feeling and such inner warmth when it appears again, rejuvenated, in the Gospel of St. Luke.

The task of the Individuality incarnated as Zarathustra in ancient Persia was altogether different—in point of fact exactly the opposite. Zarathustra taught of the God without; he taught men to apprehend the great Cosmos spiritually. Buddha directed man's attention to his own inner nature, saying that as the result of development there gradually appear, out of the previous state of ignorance, the ‘six organs’ of which we have spoken, namely, the five sense-organs and Manas. But everything within man was originally born out of the Cosmos. We should have no eye sensitive to light if the light itself had not brought the eye to birth from out of the organism. Goethe said: ‘The eye was created by the light for the light.’ This is a profound truth. The light formed the eye out of neutral organs once present in the human body. In the same way, all the spiritual forces in the Universe work formatively upon man. Everything within him was organized, to begin with, out of divine-spiritual forces. Hence for every ‘inner’ there is an ‘outer’. The forces that are found within man stream into him from outside. And it was the task of Zarathustra to point to the realities that are outside, in man's environment. Hence, for example, he spoke of the ‘Amshaspands’, the great Genii, of whom he enumerated six—in reality there are twelve, but the other six are hidden. These Amshaspands work from outside as the creators and moulders of the organs of the human being. Zarathustra showed that behind the human sense-organs stand the Creators of man; he pointed to the great Genii, to the powers and forces outside man. Buddha pointed to the forces working within man. Zarathustra also pointed to forces and beings below the Amshaspands, calling them the ‘Izards’ or ‘Izeds’. They too penetrate into man from outside in order to work at the inner organization of his bodily nature. Here again Zarathustra was directing attention to spiritual realities in the Cosmos, to external conditions. And whereas Buddha pointed to the actual thought-substance out of which the thoughts arise from the human soul, Zarathustra pointed to the ‘Ferruers’ or ‘Fravashars’, to the ‘world-creative thoughts’ pervading the Universe and surrounding us everywhere. For the thoughts that arise in man are everywhere in existence in the world outside.

Thus it was the mission of Zarathustra to inculcate into men an attitude of mind particularly concerned with analysing the phenomena of the external world, to present a view of the Universe to a people whose task was to labour in the outer world. This mission was in keeping with the special characteristics of the ancient Persians and the function of Zarathustra was to promote energy and efficiency in this work, although his methods may have taken a form that would be repellant to modern man. Zarathustra's mission was to engender vigour, efficiency and certainty of aim in outer activity through the knowledge that man has not only shelter and support in his own inner being but rests in the bosom of a divine-spiritual world and can therefore say to himself: ‘Whatever your place in the world may be, you are not alone. You live in a Cosmos permeated by Spirit, among cosmic Gods and spiritual Beings; you are born of the Spirit and rest in the Spirit; with every indrawn breath you inhale divine Spirit; with every exhalation you may make an offering to the great Spirit!’ Because of his special mission, Zarathustra's own Initiation was necessarily different from that of the other great missionaries of humanity.

Let us consider what the Individuality incarnated in Zarathustra was able to achieve. So lofty was his stage of development that he could make provision in advance for the next (Egyptian) stream of culture. Zarathustra had two pupils: the Individualities who appeared again later on as the Egyptian Hermes and as Moses respectively. When these two Individualities were again incarnated in order to carry forward their work for humanity, the astral body sacrificed by Zarathustra was integrated into the Egyptian Hermes. Hermes bore within him the astral body of Zarathustra which had been transmitted to him in order that all the knowledge of the Universe possessed by Zarathustra might again be made manifest and take effect in the outer world. The etheric body of Zarathustra was transmitted to Moses. And because whatever evolves in Time is connected with the etheric body, when Moses became conscious of the secrets contained in his etheric body, he was able to create the mighty pictures of happenings in Time presented in Genesis. In this way Zarathustra worked on through the power of his Individuality, inaugurating and influencing Egyptian culture and the culture of the ancient Hebrews that issued from it.

Through his Ego too, such an Individuality is destined to fulfil a great mission. The Ego of Zarathustra incarnated again and again in other personalities, for an Individuality of such advanced development can always consecrate an astral body and strengthen an etheric body for his own use, even when he has relinquished his original bodies to others. Thus six hundred years before our era, Zarathustra was born again in ancient Chaldea as Zarathas or Nazarathos, who became the teacher of the Chaldean Mystery-schools; he was also the teacher of Pythagoras and again acquired profound insight into the phenomena of the outer world.

If we steep ourselves in the wisdom of the Chaldeans with the help, not of Anthropology but of Anthroposophy, an inkling will dawn in us of what Zarathustra, as Zarathas or Nazarathos, taught in the Mystery-schools of ancient Chaldea. The whole of his teaching, as we have heard, was given with the aim of bringing about concord and harmony in the outer world. His mission also included the art of organizing empires and institutions in keeping with the progress of humanity and with order in the social life. Hence those who were his pupils might rightly be called, not only great ‘Magi’, great ‘Initiates’, but also ‘Kings’, that is to say, men versed in the art of establishing social order in the external world.

Deep and fervent attachment to the Individuality (not the personality) of Zarathustra prevailed in the Mystery-schools of Chaldea. These Wise Men of the East felt that they were intimately connected with their great leader. They saw in him the ‘Star of Humanity’, for ‘Zoroaster’ (Zarathustra) means ‘Golden Star’, or ‘Star of Splendour’. They saw in him a reflection of the Sun itself. And with their profound wisdom they could not fail to know when their Master was born again in Bethlehem. Led by their ‘Star’, they brought as offerings to him the outer symbols for the most precious gift he had been able to bestow upon men. This most precious gift was knowledge of the outer world, of the mysteries of the Cosmos received into the human astral body in thinking, feeling and willing; hence the pupils of Zarathustra strove to impregnate these soul-forces with the wisdom that can be drawn from the deep foundations of the divine-spiritual world. Symbols for this knowledge—which can be acquired by mastering the secrets of the outer world—were gold, frankincense and myrrh: gold the symbol of thinking, frankincense—the symbol of the piety which pervades man as feeling, and myrrh—the symbol of the power of will. Thus by appearing before their Master when he was born again in Bethlehem the Magi gave evidence of their union with him. The writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew relates what is literally true when he describes how the Wise Men among whom Zarathustra had once worked knew that he had reappeared among men, and how they expressed their connection with him through the three symbols of gold, frankincense and myrrh—the symbols for the precious gift he had bestowed upon them.

The need now was that Zarathustra, as Jesus of the Solomon line of the House of David, should be able to work with all possible power in order to give again to men, in a rejuvenated form, everything he had already given in earlier times. For this purpose he had to gather together and concentrate all the power he had ever possessed. Hence he could not be born in a body from the priestly line of the House of David but only in one from the kingly line. In this way the Gospel of St. Matthew indicates the connection of the kingly name in ancient Persia with the ancestry of the child in whom Zarathustra was incarnated.

Indications of these happenings are also contained in ancient Books of Wisdom originating in the Near East. Whoever really understands these Books of Wisdom reads them differently from those who are ignorant of the facts and therefore confuse everything. In the Old Testament there are, for instance, two prophecies: one in the apocryphal Books of Enoch pointing more to the Nathan Messiah of the priestly line, and the other in the Psalms referring to the Messiah of the kingly line. Every detail in the scriptures harmonizes with the facts that can be ascertained from the Akashic Chronicle.

It was necessary for Zarathustra to gather together all the forces he had formerly possessed. He had surrendered his astral and etheric bodies to Hermes and Moses respectively, and through them to Egyptian and Hebraic culture. It was necessary for him to re-unite with these forces, as it were to fetch back from Egypt the forces of his etheric body. A profound mystery is here revealed to us: Jesus of the Solomon line of the House of David, the reincarnated Zarathustra, was led to Egypt, for in Egypt were the forces that had streamed from his astral body and his etheric body when the former had been bestowed upon Hermes and the latter upon Moses. Because he had influenced the culture and civilization of Egypt, he had to gather to himself the forces he had once relinquished. Hence the ‘Flight into Egypt’ and its spiritual consequences: the absorption of all the forces he now needed in order to give again to men in full strength and in a rejuvenated form, what he had bestowed upon them in past ages.

Thus the history of the Jesus whose parents resided originally in Bethlehem is correctly related by St. Matthew. St. Luke relates only that the parents of the Jesus of whom he is writing resided in Nazareth, that they went to Bethlehem to be ‘taxed’ and that Jesus was born during that short period. The parents then returned to Nazareth with the child. In the Gospel of St. Matthew we are told that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and that he had to be taken to Egypt. It was after their return from Egypt that the parents settled in Nazareth, for the child who was the reincarnation of Zarathustra was destined to grow up near the child who represented the other stream—the stream of Buddhism. Thus the two streams were brought together in actual reality.

The Gospels become especially profound when they are indicating essential facts. The quality in the human being that is connected more with will and power, with the ‘kingly’ nature (speaking in the technical sense), is known by those cognisant of the mysteries of existence to be transmitted by the paternal element in heredity. On the other hand, the inner nature that is connected with wisdom and inner mobility of spirit, is transmitted by the maternal element. With his profound insight into the mysteries of existence, Goethe hints at this in the words:

From my father I have my stature
And life's serious conduct;
From my mother a happy nature
And delight in telling fables.

You can find this truth substantiated again and again in the world. Stature, the outer form, whatever expresses itself directly in the outer structure, and in ‘life's serious conduct’—this is connected with the character of the Ego and is inherited from the paternal element. For this reason the Solomon Jesus had to inherit power from the father, because it was his mission to transmit to the world the divine forces radiating through the world in Space. This is expressed by the writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew in the most wonderful way. The incarnation of an Individuality was announced from the spiritual world as an event of great significance and it was announced, not to Mary, but to Joseph, the father. Truths of immense profundity lie behind all this; such things must never be regarded as fortuitous. Inner traits and qualities such as are inherited from the mother, were transmitted to the Jesus of the Nathan line. Hence the birth of the Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke was announced to the mother. Such is the profundity of the facts narrated in the scriptures!—But let us continue.

The other facts described are also full of significance. A forerunner of Jesus of Nazareth was to arise in John the Baptist. To say more about the Individuality of the Baptist will only be possible as time goes on. But to begin with we will consider the picture presented to us—John as the herald of the Being who was to come in Jesus. John proclaimed this by gathering together and summarizing with infinite power everything contained in the old Law. What the Baptist wished to bring home to men was that there must be observance of what was written in the old Law but had grown old in civilization and had been forgotten; it was mature, but was no longer heeded. Therefore what John required above all was the power possessed by a soul born as a mature—even overmature—soul into the world. He was born of old parents; from the very beginning his astral body was pure and cleansed of all the forces which degrade man, because the aged parents were unaffected by passion and desire. There again, profound wisdom is expressed in the Gospel of St. Luke. For such an Individuality, too, provision is made in the Mother-Lodge of humanity. Where the great Manu guides and directs the processes of evolution in the spiritual realm, from thence the streams are sent whithersoever they are needed. An Ego such as that of John the Baptist was born into a body under the immediate guidance and direction of the great Mother-Lodge of humanity in the central sanctuary of earthly spiritual life. The John-Ego descended from the same holy region (Stätte) as that from which the soul-being of the Jesus-child of the Gospel of St. Luke descended, save that upon Jesus there were chiefly bestowed qualities not yet permeated by an Ego in which egoistic traits had developed: that is to say, a young soul was guided to the place where the reborn Adam was to incarnate.

It will seem strange to you that a soul without a really developed Ego could be guided from the great Mother-Lodge to a certain place. But the same Ego that was withheld from the Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke was bestowed upon the body of John the Baptist; thus the soul-being in Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke and the Ego-being in John the Baptist were inwardly related from the beginning. Now when the human embryo develops in the body of the mother, the Ego unites with the other members of the human organism in the third week, but does not come into operation until the last months before birth and then only gradually. Not until then does the Ego become active as an inner force; in a normal case, when an Ego quickens an embryo, we have to do with an Ego that has come from earlier incarnations. In the case of John, however, the Ego in question was inwardly related to the soul-being of the Nathan Jesus. Hence according to the Gospel of St. Luke, the mother of Jesus went to the mother of John the Baptist when the latter was in the sixth month of her pregnancy, and the embryo that in other cases is quickened by its own Ego was here quickened through the medium of the other embryo. The child in the body of Elisabeth begins to move when the mother bearing the Nathan Jesus-child approaches; and it is the Ego through which the child in the other mother (Elisabeth) is quickened.¹ (Luke I, 39–44). Such was the deep connection between the Being who was to bring about the fusion of the two spiritual streams and the other who was to announce His coming!

Events of great sublimity take place at the beginning of our era. When, as so often happens, people say that truth should be simple, this is due to indolence and a dislike of having to wrestle with many concepts; but the greatest truths can be apprehended only when the spiritual faculties are exerted to their utmost capacity. If considerable efforts are needed to describe a machine, it is surely unreasonable to demand that the greatest truths should also be the simplest! Truth is inevitably complicated, and the most strenuous efforts must be made if it is desired to acquire some understanding of the truths relating to the Events of Palestine. Nobody should lend himself to the objection that the facts are unduly complicated; they are complicated because here we have to do with the greatest of all happenings in the evolution of the Earth.

Thus we see two Jesus-children growing up. The son of Joseph and Mary of the Nathan line was born of a young mother (in Hebrew the word ‘Alma’ would have been used), for a soul of such a nature must necessarily be born of a very young mother. After their return from Bethlehem this couple continued to live in Nazareth with their son. They had no other children; the mother was to be the mother of this Jesus only. When Joseph and Mary of the Solomon line returned with their son from Egypt, they settled in Nazareth and, as related in the Gospel of St. Mark, had several more children: Simon, Judas, Joseph, James and two sisters. (Mark VI, 3).

The Jesus-child who bore within him the Individuality of Zarathustra unfolded with extraordinary rapidity powers that will inevitably be present when such a mighty Ego is working in a body. The nature of the Individuality in the body of the Nathan Jesus was altogether different, the most important factor there being the Nirmanakaya of Buddha overshadowing this child. Hence when the parents had returned from Bethlehem, the child is said to have been full of wisdom—that is, in his etheric body; he was “filled with wisdom and the grace of God was upon him.” (Luke II, 40). But he grew up in such a way that the ordinary human qualities connected with understanding and knowledge of the external world developed in him exceedingly slowly. A superficial observer would have called this child comparatively backward—if account had been taken only of his intellectual capacities. But instead there developed in him the power streaming from the overshadowing Nirmanakaya of Buddha. He unfolded a depth of inwardness comparable with nothing of the kind in the world, a power of feeling that had an extraordinary effect upon everyone around him. Thus in the Nathan Jesus we see a Being with infinite depths of feeling, and in the Solomon Jesus an Individuality of exceptional maturity, having profound understanding of the world.

Words of great significance had been spoken to the mother of the Nathan Jesus, the child of deep feeling. When Simeon stood before the newborn child and beheld above him the radiance of the Being he had been unable to see in India as the Buddha, he foretold the momentous events that were now to take place; but he spoke also of the ‘sword that would pierce the mother's heart’. These words too refer to something we shall endeavour to understand.

The parents were in friendly relationship and the children grew up as near neighbours until they were about twelve years old. When the Nathan Jesus reached this age his parents went to Jerusalem ‘after the custom’, to take part in the Feast of the Passover, and the child went with them, as was usual. We now find in the Gospel of St. Luke the mysterious narrative of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple. As the parents were returning from the Feast they suddenly missed the boy; failing to find him among the company of travellers they turned back again and found him in the temple conversing with the learned doctors, all of whom were astonished at his wisdom.

What had happened? We will enquire of the imperishable Akashic Chronicle.

The facts of existence are by no means simple. What had happened on this occasion may also happen in a different way elsewhere in the world. At a certain stage of development some individuality may need conditions differing from those that were present at the beginning of his life. Hence it repeatedly happens that someone lives to a certain age and then suddenly falls into a state of deathlike unconsciousness. A transformation takes place: his own Ego leaves him and another Ego passes into his bodily constitution. Such a change occurs in other cases too; it is a phenomenon known to every occultist. In the case of the twelve-year-old Jesus, the following happened. The Zarathustra-Ego which had lived hitherto in the body of the Jesus belonging to the kingly or Solomon line of the House of David in order to reach the highest level of his epoch, left that body and passed into the body of the Nathan Jesus who then appeared as one transformed. His parents did not recognize him; nor did they understand his words, for now the Zarathustra-Ego was speaking out of the Nathan Jesus. This was the time when the Nirmanakaya of Buddha united with the cast-off astral sheath and when the Zarathustra-Ego passed into him. This child, now so changed that his parents did not know what to make of him, was taken home with them.

Not long afterwards the mother of the Nathan Jesus died, so that the child into whom the Zarathustra-Ego had now passed was orphaned on the mother's side. As we shall see, the fact that the mother died and the child was left an orphan is especially significant. Nor could the child of the Solomon line continue to live under ordinary conditions when the Zarathustra-Ego had gone out of him. Joseph of the Solomon line had already died, and the mother of the child who had once been the Solomon Jesus, together with her children James, Joseph, Simon, Judas and the two daughters, were taken into the house of the Nathan Joseph; so that Zarathustra (now in the body of the Nathan Jesus-child) was again living in the family (with the exception of the father) in which he had incarnated. In this way the two families were combined into one, and the mother of the brothers and sisters—as we may call them, for in respect of the Ego they were brothers and sisters—lived in the house of Joseph of the Nathan line with the Jesus whose native town—in the bodily sense—was Nazareth.

Here we see the actual fusion of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. For the body now harbouring the mature Ego-soul of Zarathustra had been able to assimilate everything that resulted from the union of the Nirmanakaya of Buddha with the discarded astral sheath. Thus the Individuality now growing up as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ bore within him the Ego of Zarathustra irradiated and pervaded by the spiritual power of the rejuvenated Nirmanakaya of Buddha. In this sense Buddhism and Zoroastrianism united in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth.

When Joseph of the Nathan line also died, comparatively soon, the Zarathustra-child was in very fact an orphan and felt himself as such; he was not the being he appeared to be according to his bodily descent; in respect of the spirit he was the reborn Zarathustra; in respect of bodily descent the father was Joseph of the Nathan line and the external world could have no other view. St. Luke relates it and we must take his words exactly:

‘Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him and a voice came from heaven which said, Thou art my beloved Son, this day have I begotten Thee. And Jesus himself, when he began to teach, was about thirty years of age ...’

and now it is not said simply that he was a ‘son’ of Joseph, but: ‘being as was supposed the son of Joseph’ (Luke III, 21–23)—for the Ego had originally incarnated in the Solomon Jesus and was therefore not connected fundamentally with the Nathan Joseph.

‘Jesus of Nazareth’ was now a Being, whose inmost nature comprised all the blessings of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. A momentous destiny awaited him—a destiny altogether different from that of any others baptized by John in the Jordan. And we shall see that later on, when the Baptism took place, the Christ was received into the inmost nature of this Being. Then, too, the immortal part of the original mother of the Nathan Jesus descended from the spiritual world and transformed the mother who had been taken into the house of the Nathan Joseph, making her again virginal.² Thus the soul of the mother whom the Nathan Jesus had lost was restored to him at the time of the Baptism in the Jordan. The mother who had remained to him harboured within her the soul of his original mother, called in the Bible the ‘Blessed Mary’.

• 1. There is a slight ambiguity in the German text and the reader will do well to turn to the passage in the next lecture (p. 119) where Dr. Steiner speaks again of the mysterious process connected with the birth of John the Baptist and of the influence of the Nirmanakaya of Buddha hovering above the Nathan Jesus.
• 2. The German words are: und machte sie wieder jungfräulich.

To carry our spiritual understanding of things farther, we shall need more and more to turn our attention to certain historical facts. During the last decades our members have led a pleasant life, devoted entirely to the acquisition of knowledge from the lectures and discussions which have been held in different places. Nevertheless, this has formed an impenetrable wall, over which in many cases there has been a great reluctance to look out at what was happening in the outside world. But, if we want to see what is happening in the world in the right light, if we do not wish to found a sect but an historical movement—something which no other movement than ours can be—then we need to know the historical background for what is all around us in the world. And the way in which we ourselves are treated, particularly here in this place, where we have never done anything in the slightest degree aggressive, makes it doubly necessary for us really to look over the wall and to understand something of what is going on in the world. Therefore, I should like to combine what I have to say in the next few days with some historical comments, in order to draw attention to certain facts, without a knowledge of which we shall probably not now be able to get any further.

Today I want first of all to point out one thing. You know that about the beginning of the last third of the Nineteenth Century something found a foothold in the various civilized states of Europe and America, which was known as a realistic conception of life, a conception of life which was in essentials based on the achievements of the Nineteenth Century and on those which had prepared the way for that century. At the beginning of the last third of the Nineteenth Century people everywhere spoke in quite a different way, their underlying tone was different from what it became in the later decades, and still more in the decades of the Twentieth Century. The forms of thought which dominated wide circles became during this time essentially different. Today I will only mention one example. At the beginning of the last third of the Nineteenth Century the belief prevailed among educated people that the human being ought to form his own convictions out of his own inner self, about the most important affairs of life; and that even if, helped by the discoveries of science, he does so, a common social life is, nevertheless, possible in the civilized world. There was, so to say, a kind of dogma, but a dogma freely recognized in the widest circles, that, among people who had reached a certain degree of culture, freedom of conscience was possible. It is true that in the decades that followed no one had the courage to attack this dogma openly; but there was more or less unconscious opposition to it. And at the present time, after the great world catastrophe [the First World War], straightaway this dogma is something which in the widest circles is being repressed, is being nullified, though, of course, that fact is more or less disguised. In the sixties of the Nineteenth Century the belief prevailed in the widest circles that the human being must have a certain freedom as regards everything connected with his religion. The emergence of this belief was noted in certain quarters, and I have already pointed out how on the 8th December, 1864, Rome launched an attack against it. I have often told you how this whole movement was handled by Rome, how in the Papal Encyclical of 1864, which appeared at the same time as the Syllabus, it is expressly said: “The view that freedom of conscience and of religion is given to each human being as his own right is a folly and a delusion.”

At the time when Europe was experiencing the high tide, a provisional high tide, of this conception of freedom of conscience and of religious worship, Rome made an official pronouncement that it was a delusion.

I only want to put this before you as an historic fact; and in so doing I want to call your attention to what took place at a time when, for a large number of people, this question had arisen and called for a response from out the very springs of human conscience—the question: “How do we as human beings make progress in our religious life?” This question, posed in deep earnestness and really in such a way as to show that consciences were involved, was a significant question of the time. I should just like to read you something which illustrates how the cultured people of the day were deeply preoccupied with it.

There are in existence speeches of Rumelin whom I mentioned recently in connection with Julius Robert Mayer and the Law of Conservation of Energy. There exist speeches of Rumelin made in the year 1875, thus in this very period of which I am now speaking. In them he analyzed the difficulties humanity experiences in this very matter of the further study of religious questions. He also points out how necessary it is to follow these difficulties with clear insight. Anyone with intimate knowledge of this period knows that the following words of Rumelin expressed the conviction of many hundreds of men. Of course we do not need to advocate the peculiar form of science which arose at that time; insofar as we are Anthroposophists we are equipped to develop those scientific tendencies further, with a clear perception of their relative errors; and we are also equipped for recognizing that if science remains stationary at that standpoint we can get absolutely no farther with it. In the widest circles judgments arose on many points to do with religion, and we should recall these judgments today. The thoughts of thousands of people at that time were expressed by Rumelin in 1875 in the following words: “There has indeed at all times been a line of demarcation between knowledge and belief, but never has there been such an impassable abyss between them as that constituted today by the concept of miracle. Science has grown so strong in its own development, so consistent in its various branches and trends, that it flatly and without further ado points the door to the miracle in every shape and form. It recognizes only the miracle of all miracles, that a world exists and just this world. But within the cosmos it rejects absolutely any claim that interruption of its order and of its laws is something conceivable or in any way more desirable than their immutable validity. For to all the natural-historical and philosophical sciences the miracle with all its implications is nonsense, a direct outrage on all reason and on the most elementary bases of human knowledge. Science and miracle are as contradictory as reason and unreason.”

When, about the turning point of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, I began to speak in public lectures on certain anthroposophical questions, a last echo of the mood I have just described still existed. I do not know whether there are many here who followed these first lectures of mine, but in many of them I drew attention to the problems of repeated earth lives and of the destiny of human beings as they pass through one life after another. Now in dealing with these problems you will find that I always pointed out right at the end of the lecture that if one believes in the old Aristotelian idea that every time a person is born a new soul is created that has to be implanted into the human embryo, a miracle is thereby ordained for every single life. The concept of miracle can only be overcome in a sense that is justified if one accepts reincarnation, whereby each single life can be linked up with the previous life on earth without any miracle. I still remember well that I concluded one of my Berlin lectures with these words: “We are going to overcome in the right way that most important thing, the concept of miracle.”

Since then, of course, things have changed throughout the civilized world. That is primarily a historical fact, my dear friends, but it comprises something which is of the utmost interest to us. That is, that in the measure in which man loses the capacity to see the spiritual in the world, to explain the world of nature around him by the spirit, in that same measure must he place a special world side by side with nature and the ordinary world, which has as its content the world of miracle. The more natural science takes its stand on mere causality, the more the life of human feeling is driven, by a quite natural reaction, to accept the concept of miracle. The more natural science continues along its present lines, the more numerous will be those who seek refuge in a religion which includes miracles. That is why today so many men embrace Catholicism, because they simply cannot bear the natural-scientific conception of the world.

Take that sentence which I have just read, and compare it with what has been said in recent lectures here, and you will at once see what is in question. In this exposition of Rumelin occurs this sentence: “It recognizes only the miracle of all miracles, that a world exists, and just this world. But it rejects absolutely any claim that within the cosmos interruption of its order and of its laws is conceivable or in any way more desirable than their immutable validity.” Thus one thinks the primeval miracle, that the cosmos has come into being at all, but then, within this cosmos, one studies the Laws of Indestructibility of Matter and Conservation of Energy, and then everything rolls on with a certain necessity, so to say fatalistically.

That conception of the world is untenable, but it can only be overcome through the knowledge which I ventured to put before you last week, when I showed you that the Laws of Indestructibility of Matter and Conservation of Energy constitute an error, and that error is what above all has to be vigorously combated in our time. We have to do not merely with a continuous conservation of the universe, but with its continual destruction and coming into fresh existence. And if we do not establish in the cosmos the idea of a continual arising and passing away, we are obliged because we are human to affirm a special world side by side with the cosmos, a world which has nothing to do with the laws of nature that we demonstrate so one-sidedly, and which must include miracle. That unjustified concept of miracle will only be overcome in the measure in which we understand that everything in the world stands in a spiritual ordering in which we no longer have to do with an iron necessity of nature but with a cosmic guidance full of wisdom. The more we keep our gaze fixed upon the spiritual world as such and upon what we acquire through spiritual science, the more do we realize that what natural science puts before us today needs to be permeated by spiritual knowledge. It must therefore become our task to direct our attention more and more upon every science and upon all branches of life in such a way that they become permeated by what only spiritual science has to say. Medicine, jurisprudence and sociology must all be permeated by what can be known and seen through spiritual science. Spiritual science does not need any organization similar to that of the old churches, for it appeals to each single individual; and each single individual, out of his own inner conscience, through his own healthy understanding, can substantiate the results of spiritual-scientific investigation, and can in this sense become a follower of spiritual science. It puts forward something which makes a direct appeal to every single individuality just in this search for truth. It is the true fulfillment of what men were seeking in the time now past, in the last third of the Nineteenth Century—true freedom—freedom in their conception of the world, in their research and even in their opinions. That is just the task of spiritual science—to provide for the genuine justifiable claims made by the conscience of modern humanity. Hence for spiritual science there are no such things as closed dogmas, only unrestricted research which does not draw back in fear at the frontiers either of the spiritual world or of the world of nature, but which makes use of those human powers of cognition which have first to be drawn from the depths of human feeling, just as it also uses those powers which come to us through ordinary heredity and ordinary education.

This basic tendency of spiritual science is very naturally a thorn in the flesh to those who are forced to teach in accordance with a fixed, dogmatic, circumscribed aim. And that brings us to a fact of considerable concern to spiritual science, and one of the illuminating circumstances making possible the present untrue fight against us today; that brings us to something which is only the result of what began in 1864 with the Encyclical and Syllabus of that time; that brings us to the fact that the whole of the Catholic clergy and especially the teaching clergy, by the Encyclical of the 8th September, 1907: Pascendi Dominici gregis, which makes such a deep incision into modern life, were made to swear the so-called oath against modernism. This oath consists in this—that every Catholic priest or theologian who teaches either from the pulpit or from the rostrum is obliged to accept the view that no knowledge of any kind can contradict what has been laid down as doctrine by the Roman Church. That means that in every Catholic priest who teaches or preaches we have to do with a person who has sworn an oath that every truth that can ever take root in humanity must agree with what is given validity as truth by Rome. It was a powerful movement which, at the time this Encyclical “Pascendi Dominici gregis” appeared, swept over the Catholic clergy’ for the whole civilized world, even the clergy, had in a sense been influenced by that mood which I have described as characteristic of the last third of the Nineteenth Century. There were always certain clergy who worked to bring about a certain freedom in Catholicism.

I say quite frankly that in the sixties of the Nineteenth Century in a large number of the Catholic clergy seeds of development of the Catholic principle were present which, if they had passed over into a free science, might in large measure have led to a liberation of modern humanity. There were most promising seeds in what was attempted at that time in various spheres on the part of the Catholic clergy. One day we must go into all this more closely and in great detail. But today I just want to draw your attention to it. And it was directly against this tendency inside the Church that the Encyclical of 1864 with its Syllabus was promulgated, and thus began that conflict which came to an end for the time being in the Anti-Modernist Oath. I may say that in the subconsciousness of many of the Catholic clergy, even as late as 1907, there was a trace of inward revolt, but in the Catholic Church there is no such thing as revolt. There it was a question of ceaselessly pressing home the axiom that what is promulgated by Rome as doctrine must be accepted. Then those who were obliged to go on teaching had to come to terms with what they had not the courage to deny, the freedom of science. Under the influence of what had arisen in the last third of the Nineteenth Century, the freedom of science had become a household word, a household word that, of course, even in liberal circles, often remained nothing more, but it was nevertheless a household word, and even learned Catholics had not the courage to say that they would break with the freedom of science and have nothing further to do with it. So they had the task of proving that one may only teach what is recognized by Rome as doctrinally valid (this they had to swear on oath) and that the freedom of science was consistent with this. I should like to read you a few sentences illustrating such a method of proof, given by the Catholic theologian Weber of Freiburg in this book Catholic Doctrine and the Freedom of Science. He there attempts specifically to prove that although a man may admittedly be obliged by his oath only to teach the content of what he is instructed by Rome to teach, he can notwithstanding remain a free scientist. After having argued at length that even mathematics is something given to one and that one does not surrender the freedom of science because one is bound by the truths of mathematics, he goes on to show that one does not surrender one’s freedom because one is compelled to teach as truth what is given by Rome; and one of his sentences is as follows: “A scholar is bound to specific methods of explanation or proof; just as the obligation of a soldier to rejoin his regiment at a certain time does not take from him his freedom, for he can either go on foot or by coach, by slow train or express, so the teacher still remains free in his scientific task in spite of his oath.”

That means that one is compelled to teach a definite body of doctrine, and to prove just that body of doctrine; as to how one does it one is left free. Just as free as a soldier who has sworn to join his regiment at a certain time, and who can travel either on foot or by coach, or by the slow or the express train. One ought to ask oneself how this going by foot or by coach, by slow train or by express has to end. Under all circumstances it has to end in joining his regiment. I am not making polemics, I am simply citing a historical fact.

You see in the course of preceding centuries and culminating in the last third of the Nineteenth Century there had gradually developed a mood in wide circles of the cultivated world which seemed full of promise. But all that is now dormant; souls have gone to sleep. Those who share the mood of that time are obviously now very old, are among the old discarded liberals, and those who were young during the last decades have not been awake to the very important claims of humanity. Hence if the decline is not to go further we have to challenge the youth of today to act otherwise. The generation living in the sixties of the Nineteenth Century could become a generation of Liberals but was not able to provide a liberal education. For that it would have had to master the concept of miracle in quite a different way than the way adopted by natural science. For that the concept of miracle would have to be surmounted by the spirit and not by the mechanical ordering of nature. And so, whereas this mood came over modern humanity like a kind of dream, those who worked against it were wide awake, and it was out of their waking consciousness that such things were born as the Encyclical and Syllabus of the year 1864, with its eighty numbered errors in which no Catholic might believe. In these eighty errors is to be found everything which implies a modern conception of the world. Now comes once more out of the fullest waking consciousness, the latest inevitable achievement, the Encyclical of the year 1907, culminating in the Anti-modernist Oath. Not only have these people been awake since the last third of the Nineteenth Century, but for a much longer time than that they have worked radically, energetically and intensively and the task they have achieved is what I might call the concentration of all Catholicism on Rome—the suppression in Catholicism of all that inevitably deprived the freest of all churches of its freedom; for in its essential nature the Catholic Church is capable of the greatest freedom. You will perhaps be astonished that I should say that. But let us go back a little way from our enlightened freedom from authority into the Thirteenth Century, which we have recently discussed in public lectures. I should like to recall to your minds in this connection a document of the Thirteenth Century, when Catholicism in Europe was in full flower.

It has to do with the question of the nomination by Rome of Albertus Magnus, one of the founders of Scholasticism, as Bishop of Regensburg. I need hardly say that in the Catholic Church today there could be no two opinions but that this nomination to one of the foremost bishoprics greatly enhanced the dignity of a Dominican who up to that time had merely laid the foundations of a reputation by numerous important writings and by a pious life spent in the affairs of his Order. For today the Catholic Church is a compact organism, and it has become so by having been completely transformed. When Albertus Magnus was about to be nominated Bishop of Regensburg, the Head of his Order sent him a letter which read somewhat as follows: “The Head of the Order beseeches Albertus Magnus not to accept the bishopric, not to bring such a stain on his good name and on the reputation of his Order. He should not submit to the desires of the Roman Court, where things are not taken seriously. All the good service which he has hitherto rendered by his pious life and writings would be imperiled if he became a bishop and entangled in the business which as bishop he would have to discharge; he should not plunge his Order into such deep sorrow.”

My dear friends, at that time there were voices in the Church that spoke thus. At that time the Catholic Church was no compact mass; within the Church it was possible to be plunged into deep sorrow if someone was chosen for an office which he knew was not regarded seriously in Rome. In the biographies of Thomas Aquinas we find mentioned over and over again that he refused the office of Cardinal. Today I am giving you some of the real reasons why that was so; in the biographies you will find mentioned the bare fact of his refusal. It is not easy to give the reasons after having made him the official philosopher of the Church!

But I should like to translate literally one sentence out of that letter to which I have referred, form the Head of his Order to Albertus Magnus: “I would rather hear that my dear son was in his grave than on the Episcopal throne of Regensburg.”

My dear friends, it is not enough simply to speak of the dark ages and to compare them with our own times, in which we are supposed to have made such magnificent progress; but, if we want to form judgments, we must know some of the historical facts as to how things have developed in the course of time. No doubt you are aware that Jesuit influence is behind many of the attacks on us. You know, for instance, that form the Jesuit side came the most flagrant lies; for instance, the accusation that I myself had once been a priest and had forsaken the priesthood. And you know that a few years later the person who uttered this lie could not think of anything else to say except that this hypothesis could not further be held. In the Austrian Parliament a member named Walterkirchen once shouted at a Minister: “If a man has once lied, no one believes him even if afterwards he speaks the truth.” But Jesuitism stands behind all these things; one can point to many things growing on the soil of Jesuitism, but in this respect also I only want today to point to a historic fact.

It is a fundamental point of the Jesuit rule to render absolute obedience to the Pope. Now in the Eighteenth Century there lived a Pope who suppressed the Jesuit Order irrevocably for all eternity—literally for all eternity. If the Jesuits had remained true to their own rule they would, of course, never have appeared on the scene again. However, they did not disappear but took refuge in countries where there were rulers at that time less favorable to Rome, rulers who thought that by serving Jesuitism they could serve the future, not of humanity but of themselves and their successors. For the Jesuit Order was saved by two rulers, Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine of Russia. In Roman Catholic countries the Jesuit Order was not recognized as having a valid existence. The Jesuits of today owe it to Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine of Russia that they were able to survive that period when they were persecuted by Rome. I am not making polemics, I am merely stating historic facts. But these historic facts are quite unknown to most people, and it is necessary that they shall be borne in mind, because we must no longer be a sect which has built a wall round itself. We must look at what is around us and learn to understand it. That is our undoubted duty if we desire to be true to that movement in which we profess to live.

You see, it is one of the worst and most harmful signs of the time that people trouble so little about facts and have no inclination to ask how they have come about, to ask whence has come the present revolt against us, from what source it is being nourished. Such judgments as proceeded from the mood which I characterized as the mood of the last third of the Nineteenth Century are less and less to be heard today. It is really astounding how little human beings today know of what is going on in the world. For they slept through the event of the Encyclical “Pascendi Dominici gregis” of September 8, 1907, whereby the oath against Modernism was imposed on the Catholic clergy. Voices such as would certainly have been raised by such a man as the Dominican General who preferred to see his dear son in the grave rather than on the Episcopal throne of Regensburg, are no longer heard; instead of that, people listen nowadays to voices which explain that a man can still be a free scientist if he swears that he can use any methods he likes to prove what he teaches; it does not matter whether he travels by express train or slow train, in a coach or on foot.

What leaps logic has to make if such proofs are to be used! I need not enlarge on this. But most people have no idea of the power lying in what at the present time is specially directed against us, who have never attacked anyone, and of what that power signifies. It is not sufficient to say that these things are really too stupid to notice. For, my dear friends, in the assertions constantly made about us, you will only find two things that can be affirmed with truth. For instance, when “Spectator” was reproached for having said his source was a book, the “Akashic Record,” and was told that that must have been a deliberate lie, for he must have known that he could not possess the “Akashic Record” in his library, he extricated himself as follows: “First, let me say that a printer’s error slipped into our second article. Akaskic Record instead of Akashic Record. This mistake Dr. Boos has noted with glee. He seems to strain at gnats and to swallow camels. In the same article there is another misprint; for Apollinaris, of course, one should read Apollonius of Ryana! This Dr. Boos has overlooked—perhaps intentionally!”

Now, my dear friends, if Akashic Record had been allowed to stand, I should not have complained, for that could be a misprint! And I would even go so far as to accept that a man of intellectual caliber to which the article bears witness could write Apollinaris instead of Apollonius of Tyana. I do not even hold it against him that he quotes as being among the sources from which we draw, someone whom he dubs with the name Apollinaris! But, my dear friends, it must be called a downright falsehood when it is maintained that the Akashic Record is something from which Anthroposophy is unjustifiably derived as from an ancient book. How does the gentleman wriggle out of this? He does not admit that there is anything with which to reproach him. He says: “This Akashic Record is a legendary secret writing which contains traces of the eternal truths of all ancient wisdom; it plays a part similar to that of the obscure book ‘The Stanzas of Dzyan’ which Madame Blavatsky claims to have found in a cave in Tibet, etc. etc.” Thus he makes clear to his flock that he can speak of this Akashic Record as of any other record once written down; and naturally they believe him. But I want to draw attention to two things. One is his statement: “Steiner considers he has rendered great service by rejuvenating Buddhism and enriching it by the introduction of the doctrines of reincarnation and karma, his own specialties.”

Needless to say I never made any such claim, not one single sentence of what has so far been published is true, or at most one thing, a thing which will perhaps always cause a headache to those who write in this strain. The one thing which can be looked upon as in any way true is in the passage in which he says: “The Gnostics also professed an esoteric doctrine and divided men into the Hyliker (ordinary people, the general run of men) and the Pneumatiker (theosophists) in whom was the fullness of the spirit and among whom therefore a higher knowledge (initiation) prevailed. The latter refrained from meat and from wine.”

This sentence: “refrained from meat and wine” is the only one of which we can say that, as it stands here, it is strictly true; and the doctrine it represents is to many an uncomfortable one. But now this gentleman (for it appears he wishes to be thought a gentleman) says further on: “That is, however, not true.” What is not true? “Buddhism speaks of the migration of souls, Steiner of reincarnation; both are the same. According to this theory Christ is none other than the reincarnated Buddha, or Buddha reappeared. Whether it is said that a person reincarnates or that his earthly life is repeated, it comes to the same thing. All these long arguments reveal the sophistry of Steiner and his so-called scientific mind.”

I beg you to notice that in both these forms really one of the most mischievous pieces of dishonesty possible has been perpetrated. Every possibility is removed which might enable those who read it to judge for themselves what the truth is. Up to the present, in all these long articles, no notice has been taken of Dr. Boos’ answer to the first attack, in which he mentions, I think, twenty-three lies. The other piece of dishonesty lies in the following sentence: “This path is, however, not false but correct.” He had previously talked a lot of nonsense about the will, and then he goes on to say: “This path is, however, not false but correct, for the claims of Christ are based upon the will. Christ Himself says: ‘I have come into the world to do the will of my Father.’”

Therefore, it is no longer permissible to say that it is a question of spiritual initiative or anything of that nature. Then he goes on: “This little example shows how far Steiner is removed from the true Christian impulse, and proves that to him Christ cannot be the Divine rules (the Way, the Truth, and the Life) but only the ‘wise man of Nazareth,’ or in theosophical language, a Jesu ben Pandira or Guatama Buddha.”

Now compare that with everything that has been said here in refutation of the modern theological view that one has to see in Christ Jesus merely the wise man of Nazareth. Think of all that has been said in this place against this materialistic theory! Yet here, by our nearest neighbors, we are calumniated, and what I have unceasingly contested is spread abroad as my own belief. I ask you, is greater falsehood possible? Can there be a more dishonest method than this? It is not sufficient to recognize the stupidity of these things, for you will more and more become aware of the real effects of such tactics. Therefore, it is essential that we here should really not sleep through these things, but that we should grasp them in all earnestness, for today it is really not a question of a small community here, but it is a great human question; and this great human question must be clearly seen. It is a question of truth and falsehood. These things must be taken seriously.

My dear friends, these observations are to be continued here next Thursday at the same time, and as has been the case today, a few eurhythmy exercises will precede the lecture. Then I want to take the opportunity, perhaps next Saturday, of holding a public lecture from this platform, without polemics, a purely historical lecture showing the historical basis of all that preceded and led up to the Papal Encyclical “Pascendi Dominici gregis” of September 1907, and the results that have followed from it. Therefore, if at all possible, we shall try to arrange a public lecture here next Saturday. Next Thursday there will be a kind of continuation of today’s theme, when we shall go deeper and shall see in particular what the spiritual life itself has to say to what is happening today.

You will have noticed that all my lectures for years past have stressed the importance, both for the spiritual and social evolution of humanity, of the spread of what we spiritual scientists call the results of initiation research. You know also that by the word initiation, to use an ancient term, we understand a seeing into a spiritual world separated from our physical-sensible world by a kind of veil; a veil which may very easily lead to illusions. What is first given to man is the physical-sensible world, and he makes use of this either for the concerns of ordinary life or in pursuit of what today is called science. He combines his perceptions in the physical world with all kinds of concepts, ideas and so on; but all that does not lead him beyond the world of the senses; and we may say that the only means through which in ordinary life the human being can to a certain extent look beyond and above the sensible is in dreaming. The dream, as we experience it today in ordinary life, is only a poor imitation of what may be called experience in the super-sensible world. The super-sensible world has to be perceived not only with the same degree of consciousness that one has in ordinary life, a degree of consciousness which is not there in the dream condition, but with a consciousness of even higher degree. In order to experience the super-sensible world, one must enhance one’s consciousness, to come to a state which bears a similar relation to that of ordinary life, of ordinary consciousness, as that of ordinary consciousness bears to sleep consciousness, or at any rate to dream consciousness. Thus a kind of awakening out of the ordinary consciousness has to take place. Hence the dream is, of course, only a poor imitation of what is experienced in that other condition.

But really the dream differs far less from ordinary thinking than is believed to be the case. When you become aware of the picture world of an ordinary dream, it is actually in its content essentially the same as what underlies one’s thoughts, only that in thinking the human being enters into the outer world through his senses; and therefore what is arranged in the dream by mere analogy, is in thinking ordered in accordance with quite external relationships, is ordered by the perception of the outer sense world, in accordance with what this world says to us. You can have a kind of proof of this if you sit down and shut your eyes, or let us say if you are lazy and just allow your thoughts to wander, and then notice how they have wandered, notice that as you recall them in your mind you can hardly find between them any more connection than one finds in the events of a dream. The ordinary uncontrolled flow of man’s ideas is in a certain sense subject to the same law as that of the dream. It is only through our senses that we are torn out of our dreams. And as soon as we silence our senses, then we really begin to dream. This dream activity has to be intensified. It has to be so organized that it becomes permeated by a higher consciousness than that which our ordinary senses confer. Then imaginative consciousness arises, and then by degrees comes inspired consciousness, of which I told you yesterday in my public lecture, that it is recognized by Thomism as a justified source of cognition.

In our initiation science, then, we have the results of such an intensified condition of consciousness. The difficulty in the present evolution of humanity and in that of the near future is that humanity will most certainly need this science of initiation, and will not be able to get on without it, for if only the materialistic knowledge that has been developed in the last three to four centuries should continue to permeate human evolution, conditions such as we are now experiencing in the present social chaos of the civilized world will repeatedly recur, broken only by short intervals. What science has been able to give to humanity since the middle of the Fifteenth Century has certainly been sufficient for the making of technical discoveries; has been sufficient to spread over the earth a network of commerce and business intercourse, but it does not suffice for the creation of social arrangements really adapted to the consciousness of present-day humanity. That is something which has gradually to be realized. As long as the science of our universities, our recognized public education, rejects the science of initiation, as long as an external, material science is alone recognized, so long will humanity be perpetually in the grip of chaotic social conditions, such as we are now having. The science of initiation will alone be able to save humanity of the future from such chaotic social conditions. Above all, the science of initiation will be able to give those human beings who can approach it a consciousness of the fact that the life here on earth, which we enter through the gate of birth, is the continuation of a spiritual life which we have spent in the super-sensible world between the last death and this present birth. Now you know that this spiritual life which precedes our birth or conception is not spoken of in the churches of our modern civilized world. It is never spoken of, and for a quite definite reason. Because at a certain point of time, which coincides with that of the Greek evolution between Plato and Aristotle, all consciousness of a pre-natal spiritual life was lost. Plato speaks clearly of that life, but Aristotle vehemently defended the theory that every time a human being is born on the earth, a quite new soul unites with his physical body. The Aristotelian doctrine is that for each physically-born human being a new soul is created.

Now if one holds such a view, one cannot say otherwise than that the life which begins with death, which a man begins by throwing off his physical body—and of this Aristotle also speaks—continues to exist and does not again descend to earth. For, of course, unless one can speak of a prenatal existence, one has no justification for believing otherwise than that after his death man remains forever in a spiritual world. That had already led Aristotle to draw some very weighty conclusions. For instance, he argued that if anyone between birth and death here on earth has led a life which burdens his soul with evil, that human being is for all eternity forced to look back on that evil, which can never again be blotted out or overcome. So that according to Aristotle’s view, when the man dies, he has to look back eternally on the one earth life for which he has to pay.

This doctrine of Aristotle was taken over in its entirety by the Catholic Church, and when in the Middle Ages the Church sought for a philosophy which could carry its theology, it took over, as regards the life of the soul, this Aristotelian doctrine, and one can still today recognize its echo in the idea of eternal punishment in hell.

Now, after having for thousands of years had this doctrine of the origin of the soul with the body impressed upon them, how is it conceivable that people can free themselves from it again and arrive at the truth? They can only do so by receiving a new spiritual science. Without this renewal of spiritual science mankind will not be able to accept a life before birth as a justified belief or, rather, before conception. Just think what it signifies for the whole evolution of humanity not to speak of a prenatal life. When in the churches of today we are told only of a life after death, that simply arouses instincts connected with man’s egotistical desire not to be extinguished at death.

My dear friends, an essay, a thorough-going study is needed—“On the Cultivation of Human Egotism by the Churches”—In such a study one would have to explore the real motives which are worked upon in the sermons and doctrines of all the usual religious denominations, and one would everywhere find that appeal is made to the egotistical instincts of man, especially to the instinct for immortality after death. One could extend this study to cover more than a thousand years, and one would see that these religious denominations, by eliminating the life before birth under Aristotelian influence, have fostered in the highest degree the egotism in human nature. Churches, as cultivators of the deepest egotistical instincts, is a subject well worthy of study. By far the largest part of the religious life of the modern civilized world today panders to human egotism. This egotism can be felt in pronouncements which I could quote by the dozen. Again and again it is written, especially in pastoral letters, “that spiritual science busies itself with all kinds of knowledge about super-sensible worlds, but man does not need that. He only needs to have the childlike consciousness of his connection with Christ Jesus.” That is said both by pastors and by the faithful; this childlike connection with Christ Jesus is always emphasized. It is brought forward with immense pride against what is, of course, far less easy to attain—penetration into the concrete details of the spiritual world. It is preached over and over again. Again and again man is led to believe that he can be most Christian when he least exercises his soul forces, when he least strives to think something clear with what he calls his Christ consciousness. This Christ consciousness must be something which man attains by absolute childlikeness—so say these easy-going ones. And best of all they like to be told that Christ has taken all the sins of mankind on Himself, and has redeemed mankind through His sacrificial death, without men having to do anything themselves. All this points to the belief that through the sacrificial death of Christ, immortality is guaranteed after death; but that merely tends to nourish in humanity the most extreme egotism. By this cultivation of egotism on the part of the churches, we have finally brought about what is dawning today over all the civilized world. Because this egotism has been so widely cultivated, mankind has become what it is today. Just think if the human being, not merely theoretically with ideas and concepts, but with the whole inner life of his soul were to grasp the truth that this earthly life as he enters it through birth lays upon him the obligation of fulfilling a mission which he has brought with him from a life before birth! Just think how egotism would vanish if that thought were to fill our whole souls, if this earthly life were regarded as a task which must be fulfilled because it is linked to an over-earthly life through which we have previously passed! Egotism is combated by the feeling that stirs in us when we look upon life on earth as a continuation of an over-earthly life, just as it is fostered by the religious denominations which speak only of life after death. That is what is important for man’s social well being, to restore the fact of his pre-existence to the consciousness of mankind of the present and of the future, and of course the idea of reincarnation is inseparable from that of the pre-existence of the human soul.

Thus we can say that the Catholic Church itself accepted the Aristotelian doctrine and made it into a dogma of her own; but this dogma must now be replaced by the higher knowledge of repeated earth lives, of pre-existence, which Aristotle was clearly the first to leave out of account.

You see, if you can estimate what importance it has for mankind to absorb certain elements into its inmost life of soul, then you will recognize what it means for man’s life of feeling in its widest sense. It means that the human being gets quite another consciousness of himself. Now, my dear friends, let us add to what has just been said, the words of St. Paul, that this ordinary consciousness must become permeated more and more by the consciousness, “Not I, but Christ in me.” When we look upon ourselves as something different, Christ will also become different within us. If we look upon ourselves as something which, even as regards the soul-spiritual, has only originated at birth, then of course the Christ can only be in what has come into existence with this present birth, and will only have the task of carrying our souls through the gate of death and further through all eternity. But if we know that we have had a prenatal life, we can know also that it is the Christ Himself Who has laid on us a mission for this life on earth, that we have to develop our own forces, that we have to find Him in our forces, that we have to seek Him as the best we can have in us, the best in our spirit and soul.

The Catholic Church, by doing away with the spirit in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in the year 869 has always taken care that those belonging to it should never think about the real psycho-spiritual nature of man. The Church laid down in that Council that man consists only of body and soul, though the soul has a few spiritual attributes; but that to regard man as consisting of body, soul and spirit is heretical, and when the Jesuit Zimmerman brought forward certain reproaches against spiritual science, he reckoned as its deepest sin that it seeks to re-establish the validity of trichotomy, by declaring that man consists of body, soul and spirit. For thereby the true nature of man and also his real relationship to the Christ must inevitably come to light. But what the Church worked for more and more was that man should not come to a true understanding of his real relationship to Christ. We may say, my dear friends, that the development of the western churches consists really in drawing an ever denser and denser veil over the real secret of Christ.

You see, fundamentally, all institutions are built on external abstractions. When a state is young it has but few laws and people are relatively unfettered by them. The longer a state exists, and especially the longer the various parties in the state apply their clever arguments, the more laws are made until finally no one knows where he is, for there is no longer only one law, but everything is entangled in the meshes of intertwining laws from which one has the greatest difficulty in freeing oneself.

That is the case also with the churches; when a church begins to make its way through the world, it has relatively few dogmas; but men must have something to do, and just as the statesman is always making laws, so do Churchmen create more and more dogmas, until finally everything becomes dogma, dogma becomes consolidated. It is only since the time when Scholasticism was at its height that this consolidation of dogma has been especially noticeable in modern civilization. Anyone who really studies thoughtfully the Scholasticism of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas will find that in their time everything to do with dogma was still fluid, still a matter for discussion, that discussion was still taken as a matter of course. True, in the Scholastic period there was already a certain opposition within the western church. There was the opposition between the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominican Order, of which Scholasticism was the flower, developed its knowledge through strictly logical ideas. The Franciscan Order declined to do that; the Franciscans wanted to achieve everything through a childlike feeling. I will not now enter into the relation between Dominican and Franciscan teaching, but I should like you to imagine what it would be like if people fought as vigorously today about the content of Dominican and Franciscan doctrine as they did in the Middle Ages, when they discussed dogma so freely. Of course, the Roman bishop even at that time declared people to be heretics; and he could have gone on doing so for a long while, had not the secular governments come to his assistance and burnt the people whom he merely wanted to condemn. In this matter one has to admit that greater blame falls on the secular rulers. All this did not prevent there being free discussion in the Catholic Church at that time. This free discussion has gradually been completely eliminated. Free discussion was something which the Catholic Church, as time went on, could not stand. And why not? Because a quite new consciousness was arising in humanity. This was the transformation of consciousness in man, which took place, as I have often explained to you, in the middle of the Fifteenth Century. The human being wants ever more and more to form his own judgment from the depths of his own soul. In the Middle Ages that was not so. Man then had a kind of communal consciousness, and only a few learned people, the real scholars, could get beyond that. They were able to evolve out of this common uniform folk consciousness because they had been trained in Scholasticism. This also applies to a certain number who were trained in the Rabbinical teaching. In general, however, man’s consciousness was uniform. It was a community consciousness, a family consciousness. But the individual consciousness was developing more and more.

Now, one thing that the Catholic Church had always had, because it had attracted highly educated people, was historical foresight. The Catholic Church knows quite well what I am now saying, that the principle of modern development is to foster the individual consciousness of man—but the Catholic Church is unwilling to let this individual consciousness arise. She wants to maintain that dull communal consciousness, from which only those will stand out who have received a scholastic education. Now, my dear friends, there is a very good way of maintaining this dull communal consciousness—it is always a dull one. And this is to damp down the ordinary consciousness which a person has whenever he makes use of his sense organs, to subdue it thoroughly. Just as the dream damps down the ordinary consciousness, similarly the consciousness is subdued for the purpose of making of it a dull communal consciousness. Now one of the many characteristics of the dream is that in many respects it is a liar. Or would you deny that the dream is a liar, that it represents things which are not true? It is, however, not due to the dream but to the subdued consciousness that when we dream we cannot test what is true and what is untrue. Hence it is one of the properties of this subdued consciousness that it takes away from human beings the possibility of distinguishing truth from untruth. Now if one is versed in these matters, what does one do? One relates to people under authority things which are not true, and one does this systematically. Thereby one subdues their consciousness to the dim state of the dream consciousness. Thereby one succeeds in undermining what since the middle of the Fifteenth Century has been seeking to emerge as individual consciousness in the souls of men. It is a fine undertaking so to work under authority as to write articles such as are now appearing in the “Katholischen Sonntagsblatt”; for thereby one succeeds in preventing men from developing in the way they should since the middle of the Fifteenth Century! Although the individual may not know it, the whole hierarchy is behind what happens in this respect, and has organized things extremely well. If one believes that these things happen out of mere naivety or purely from rancor, one is making a great mistake. Naturally, we must fight lying and untruth with all the means at our disposal, but we must not believe that these lies proceed out of simplicity or even out of the belief that what is said is the truth; for if these people spoke the truth, they would not attain what is their purpose to attain, which is to subdue consciousness by deliberately telling men lies, and that is a mighty and diabolical undertaking.

Now, my dear friends, this, too, must be said quite frankly. The simplicity is entirely on the other side. Simplicity today is not on the side of the Catholic Church but on the side of their opponents. They do not believe that the Catholic Church is great in the direction I have described; they do not believe that the Catholic Church long ago foresaw that the social condition which has now come over Europe would some day come about, and that the Catholic Church took her own measures to make her influence felt in those social conditions. What the Catholic Church intends is to create a bridge between the most radical socialism, Communism, and its own domination.

You see, this magnificent foresight is something one has to recognize in everything which has a real spiritual basis, a spiritual foundation that is rooted in a real spiritual life, and not in mere abstraction. You see, with all this modern enlightenment one arrives at nothing which can have a far-reaching significance in the course of human evolution. But the ceremonies practiced in the Catholic Mass are of far greater significance than all the sermons from evangelical pulpits, because they are deeds accomplished in the sensible world, and in their form they are at the same time something which enchants the spiritual world into the sensible world. For that reason the Catholic Church has never been willing to deprive herself of magical means of working on human beings. These magical means do exist. And we must not believe that anything other than re-entry into the spiritual world in all true inner sincerity and uprightness can be effective against these things. And as what one might call an external sign that the Catholic Church has always had a connection with the spiritual world, you can take something which I have already told a few of you.

In the first decade of the Twentieth Century a Papal Encyclical was issued which declared various things to be heretical. Papal Encyclicals speak in such a way that they always adduce the doctrine in question and then say: “Whoever believes that is anathema.” Thus it quotes some doctrine taken from one of the books of Haeckel or someone, and then says: “Whoever believes that is anathema.” It does not state what is true, but says: “Whoever believes that is anathema.”

Now, you see, the science of initiation makes it always possible to investigate such things, and I set myself the task of making certain investigations concerning this Encyclical. I am bound to say that here, as in so many other things, what was promulgated by the Pope “ex cathedra” at that time was really drawn from out of the spiritual world. I mean that what has flowed into that Encyclical did come down from the spiritual world. But in an extraordinary way it was completely reversed! Everywhere where there should have been a ‘yes’ there was a ‘no’, and vice-versa. That is something—and I could give other instances—which shows that the Roman Church has today some sort of real connection with the spiritual world but one that is extraordinarily harmful for mankind. Therefore, we need not be surprised that it sees in the rise of modern spiritual science something which it wishes at all costs to get rid of, for, my dear friends, what is the effect of this new spiritual science? It brings about a consciousness of a prenatal life, of pre-existence. That may not be! Under no circumstances shall that happen! So spiritual science must be condemned; for spiritual science calls man’s attention to his own being, makes him aware that he consists of body, soul, and spirit. Under no circumstances may that be; therefore spiritual science must be condemned. People would see, for example, that the dogma of eternal damnation in hell is an Aristotelian consequence of the creation of the soul at physical birth. Suppose a Catholic theologian today studies the connection between Aristotle and Scholasticism, and perceives that the Scholastics derived their proof of the origin of the soul together with the physical body from the philosophy of Aristotle! He would see behind the scenes of the origin of dogma. What is done to prevent this? The theologian is made to take the oath against Modernism. He is made to swear that it is part of his creed that he can never come to a historical conclusion contrary to dogmas which are given out from Rome. The fact that he has taken this oath works so strongly on his feelings that he is confused in his sober research and can never come to see that dogma is bound up with the historical evolution of humanity. Now things cannot remain in this state if the science of initiation arises, and therefore this science of initiation must under all circumstances be condemned.

Why am I telling you these things, my dear friends? So that you may not take the matter too lightly. For in our anthroposophical spiritual science it is verily not a question of the sort of things which go on, for instance in the Theosophical Society. That the Theosophical Society is not to be taken seriously is clearly to be seen from the fact that one day it came to accept by a majority the whole farce of Krishnamurti as the reborn Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Such a comedy is only based on hypocrisy, even though this hypocrisy be taken seriously by many. But what should grow on the soil of Anthroposophy, of spiritual science, should be a search for truth, sincere through and through. It is therefore something which, as the Catholic Church is well aware, penetrates behind the scenes, to what must not be discovered if that church is to maintain the dominion in the world to which she lays claim.

All that I am now saying is simply to show you that these things may not be taken lightly. For it must be recognized that the Catholic Church has shown great foresight. Though the individual sheep follows the lead and merely obeys orders, though he may be ignorant of what this systematic lying means for the whole evolution of mankind—though the individual knows nothing and does as he is told, the whole system is thoroughly well established, for the lying will be believed by large numbers.

On the other side there is the naïve belief that all the external fabrication of natural laws which today forms the subject of our university education can be of significance for the further development of humanity, that all that nonsense about the conservation of matter and energy can be of significance for the further development of mankind! Today people cannot even look with an unprejudiced eye upon the snow which is spread before them every winter (if they are living in the temperate zone), yet through the covering of the forces of growth by the snow crust one part of the earth goes through a complete transformation; and folk consciousness which speaks of the purity of the snow knows far more than our modern science which talks of the conservation of matter and energy. Of course I can only say what I am now saying because I have spent many weeks in showing you how ill-founded are the modern laws of the conservation of matter and energy, how in fact in every human being matter and energy are destroyed, as they work up towards the head, and new matter and new energy arise. All these things are bound to be fiercely contested in some quarters, and the only thing which can help is for as many people as possible to become conscious of the present task of mankind—to be aware that the individual consciousness must lay hold of the world. It will do so, but it can either lay hold of the wisdom of the world or of the blind instincts. If it seizes hold of the blind instincts there will come about a completely antisocial condition, such as is now being prepared in Russia. That, my dear friends, will gradually evoke an antisocial condition against which the English or North American governments, not to speak of the French or any other, will be absolutely defenseless. It would be childish to believe that the English Parliament will be able to deal with what will then lay hold of humanity if the individual consciousness works merely by instinct. But there is one power which will be ready to deal with it, and that is the power of Rome. It is only a question of how it will be done. Rome can establish a dominion; it has the necessary means for this. Thus the only real question is not whether Bolshevism or the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie will get the upper hand; the question is whether there will be antisocial chaos, Roman domination, or the resolve on the part of mankind to fill itself with that spirit which in 869 at the Council of Constantinople the western Church declared it heretical to recognize.

There is no other alternative than that mankind determine not to go on living in the way which is natural when there are only materialistic thoughts about the world. How does mankind live in a materialistic world? People earn their living in accordance with the fluctuations of the market; there is no other measurement for the social order. After that they may perhaps have a philosophy of life, as a sort of luxury, but only as a luxury. Those supposed to be still more profound say that one must raise oneself into the spiritual world and leave the evil material world behind; a really profound nature can have nothing to do with the material world; he must understand nothing about the material world, but become a mystic and live in the higher world! But even these profound natures as well as the less profound have children and have the notion that these children must “earn,” that it would be very, very wrong if the children were not sent to schools where they would be trained in present-day methods of earning a living. Thereby they have already come to terms with the existing state of things; thereby they hand on this materialism to the next generation.

Now when someone talks like this he is an inconvenient person, and it is best simply to revile him, for to hear what I have just been telling you is for most people as if they were being irritated by vermin. Now people do not like being irritated in this way by psychic vermin and so they cover themselves with a thick skin which makes them impervious to what spiritual science has to say about our present culture. It is on this side then that the naivety lies; and when the Catholic Church saw that people were becoming so one-sided, they took care to have people specially trained, and in this they really were indirectly guided by spiritual impulses. And the foundation of the Jesuit Order by Ignatius Loyola as a result of fundamental influences from the spiritual world is one of the most significant events of metahistory, and in it one has to do with a strong spiritual efficacy.

Now, my dear friends, we must, of course, among ourselves be able to speak frankly; hence I have been obliged to speak of the grand but questionable training of the Jesuits. I also dealt with this theme in the cycle From Jesus to Christ, which some misguided member has now delivered into the hands of a mudslinger and fabricator of nonsense. You know that in the Karlsruhe cycle I discussed the fundamental basis of Jesuit training. What, may I ask, is the use of stating in each cycle that it is printed as a manuscript for members only, when mudslingers have the cycle at their disposal and can use it for the preparation of all sorts of lies? This incident bears out in a remarkable way what I have already often said, that the time would come when one could no longer count on these cycles being restricted to a small circle, for mankind is not at present fit to be entrusted with anything. Of course, everything written in that quarter is rubbish and untrue, but it is written not on the basis of my public writings, but of private cycles which have been passed on, and I have good reason to believe that one of the first cycles given into the hands of the Catholic clergy was that very Karlsruhe cycle on the Jesuits. For they on their part are not inclined to let the truth about Jesuit training be known. The world must know nothing of how Jesuits are trained; the world must know nothing of their powerful discipline.

Modern mankind in its simplicity is merely retarding its own consciousness. On the subject of the Jesuits there are absolutely no true ideas. There are numerous men within that Order of such spiritual capacity that if they were scattered about the world and did not spend their time in the way they do but were working at external science or painting or poetry, they would be honored as individual geniuses; they would be recognized as the great minds of mankind. Within the Jesuit Order there are countless men who would be great lights if they were to appear as individuals and were busy with something different—with, for instance, materialistic science. But these men suppress their very names; they submerge themselves in their Order, and one of the conditions of their strength is that the world should know nothing of the way in which many a head, clothed in black cassock and Jesuit cap, has been trained.

These things are intended to show you how fundamentally different the whole form of consciousness is in different categories of human beings. But our modern simpletons, who consider themselves enlightened, will not take these things seriously. That must be emphasized again and again, and that, my dear friends, is what I had to speak to you about today.

Now for the next two weeks while I am away we can have no more lectures here. In conclusion to what I have said, partly in public, partly in these private lectures, I had to add all that I have said here today in order that you should not ignore the importance of this misuse of our lecture cycles by our own members. Of course, when the cycles were given, I thought I had to do with people who would respect the undertaking which in a certain sense they had been given. But I was mistaken, and it is quite clear from the rubbish that appears in articles today who has all the cycles at his disposal!

I should like to recall once again those things I mentioned at the end yesterday about the paradox in the character of our present time. It seems to me that no time has had to be characterised in this way, in its outstanding representatives, as just our own present time. Just think for a moment—let us properly state the facts once again—yesterday I have to speak of an outstanding man of the present, a man of whom I could say that he has developed completely out of the so-called spiritual substance of the present—Oswald Spengler. Without a doubt he is immediately one of those who have won the greatest possible influence over the youth in Central Europe, and that one will have to reckon with this influence. But one sees, as I mentioned yesterday, this influence reaching out far beyond Central Europe. The “Times” have published an article about what is in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, and it is indeed an outstanding phenomenon that, with the decisiveness one is accustomed to today among the so-called professionals, a man who is equipped with 12 to 15 sciences which he has completely mastered, strictly proves that at the beginning of the 3rd millennium our western culture must fall into decadence and barbarism. It is a significant phenomenon that by the same means, the same way of thinking and research with which our times thinks itself to have achieved so much, someone proves clearly and distinctly that this civilisation will have to completely disappear in so short a time.

Here we most definitely do not have to do with a view of things that is restricted to belles lettres or the Sunday supplements, as so often in the present; we have to do with something which appears with the heavy equipment of professional expertise and, above all, we have to do with a man of genius. This man of genius applies western science for the purpose of laying the foundation for the view that the culture of the 17est is heading for destruction. And yesterday, so as to comprehensively characterise Oswald Spengler I had to tell you the most extreme paradox. I had to tell you that this Spengler, without a doubt, is a man of genius, but that he says the greatest foolishness. I have cited examples of this for you; so that we stand before the remarkable experience in the spiritual life of the present, that genius and foolishness are linked together. That is, in general something characteristic, that the most remote extremes are linked in the present, and one would most certainly get a feeling for this so disturbing linkage if, on the other hand, one did not live on in such a somnolent manner.

For I just imagine that if such things were spoken of, as I did yesterday about Oswald Spengler, at a gathering 130 years ago, in Central Europe, then such a gathering would have ended in a complete uproar, because at that time people were still awake! This is a general phenomenon, that the paradoxes interweave in our time, and that human beings are extremely dulled in regard to these paradoxes, because, fundamentally, the spiritual element makes absolutely no impression any more upon men of the present.

And I have to say a second thing to you, that this Oswald Spengler is an eminently intelligent man, that one has to be so intelligent as he is, so as to be able to produce such grandiose stupidities such as he has produced. I'll add to this remark, that there are enough dumb clowns around who have reproached me, saying for example, that regarding the one and the same phenomenon I have said now this, now that. I have taken the liberty yesterday to say on one and the same evening two things about one personality: that it is a genius and a fool, intelligent and grandiosely stupid. Today we are experiencing such things. And not until these things are understood earnestly, that we are able to experience such things today; that these things do rise up out of the depths of our present day consciousness—not until one gains such an insight into the necessities of our time—not until then will one really gain an insight into the deep significance of spiritual science as it is here intended.

There is connected with what I have had to characterise in this way, the change in the usages, the whole application, that one makes regarding supersensible knowledge. I have presented to you yesterday how for millennia in the mysteries the supersensible knowledge was protected, how it was taken for granted that one remained silent about them. I have told you that today something completely different has become necessary. In spite of the fact that it has just become clear that remaining silent, even in regard to the outer situation of protection of my lecture cycles could not be achieved, nonetheless we must strictly hold to the line, that certain truths, even those which reach to the highest levels, are to be dealt with quite openly in the public. We can no longer succeed in remaining silent as we have experienced it in the ancient secret societies or even in the mysteries, not in our present time in which there are so many people who have the "proofs" that we have “gloriously brought about so much progress.”

Today it is absolutely necessary that we have a certain democracy. Since more than a century democracy has been a necessary demand of our time. And as little as it can be done away with that always only single spiritual researchers are able to exists so much more will it also be necessary in order that the social life be founded in the proper way, that just the wisdom gained from insights into the spiritual worlds are to be carried into the broadest circles. How necessary that is can become clear to you from the following consideration—a consideration which is again of the sort which many reactionary backwards but otherwise admirable representatives of certain secret societies find highly offensive when one communicates such things today.

You know of course that the traditional religious confessions actually speak only of immortality, that is, they think that in their sermons, in their theology they ought to speak only of the continuing of the soul after death. Indeed, in theology, and in the sermon not only is nothing else spoken of but the continuing existence after death, but also in the traditional European confessions it is even declared to be heathen and heretical if one speaks of pre-existence, of the life of the soul in the spiritual worlds before birth or even before conception. I have also characterised for you why that gradually developed in the course of the European spiritual streams. To what actually does the representative, the advocate of the traditional religious confessions speak? Fundamentally it only speaks to the refined egotism of the soul. They bring forth on behalf of immortality nothing other than what human beings want to hear from out of their egotism, because out of this egotism they long for, they yearn for life after death.

This covetousness is pandered to in thousands and thousands of sermons and theological and religious writings. Because human beings do not want to be obliterated in death, the appeal is made to the instincts of this refined soul egotism, and from this point of view human beings are brought up to believe in immortality. However, for what is the actual eternal element in man, and about which one cannot speak if one does not speak of pre-existence, there is very little feeling for that. In the European languages we do not even have a word corresponding to it. We have the word “immortality,” but we do not have the word “unbornness.” We would just as much have to have the word “unbornness” available, if we really pursue the eternal element in the human soul, as we do also have the word “immortality.” We merely negate the passing away at the end of life, in that we place a negative prefix in front of mortality, and speak of “immortality.” We have no accustomed word such as “unbornness.” Some such word must however find its way into life. For if one speaks to the human being of “unbornness,” then one cannot appeal to their egotistical soul instincts. I should like to say: immortality will become understood as a matter of course, if one grasps unbornness in the right way; but this unbornness makes life more uncomfortable than most human beings want to have it and, above all, as the representatives of the traditional religious confessions would like to have it.

All that does not have a mere theoretical significance, that also has a thoroughly practical and real significance. For such a truth as I have mentioned here several weeks ago we must not take too lightly. I told you: today one actually saw only in the theoretical, academic, doctrinary sense that human beings are materialistic. One actually means: they think materialistically. But what is actually meant when one says: human beings think materialistically? One thinks along these lines: people think wrongly because materialism is not right; human beings do indeed have an immortal soul, the actual being of man is spiritual, therefore materialism is false. Thus one must simply fight materialism and in theory strive for what is right. That, however, is not what really counts, but the matter is to be considered in this way. Certainly, in the first place man's being is soul-spiritual. Let us suppose that this is the soul-spiritual being of man. (sketch outline of head & body). But after conception or birth, this soul-spiritual element builds up a complete imprint of the soul-spiritual element. Everything that is soul-spiritual is imprinted in the bodily physical. Now you can experience two things. You can experience that human beings become acquainted with such thoughts that are fetched out of the spiritual world, such as stand in our Anthroposophical books, thoughts which the materialists take for nonsense, as the materialists hold to be fantasies if one thinks such thoughts, One does not oneself have to be a spiritual researcher but if one thinks with the soul-spiritual element, then the bodily physical element is a faithful imprint of it. However, if one is a mature researcher in the present, and if in ordinary life one thinks in denial of the soul-spiritual element, then one thinks with the ordinary physical brain, and then one becomes only an imprint of the material element. If one denies the soul-spiritual element, then one really becomes a materialist. Thus, the materialism is right, it is not false! That is the essential thing! One can take things so far, that one does not represent a false view if one stands for materialism but, that one has fallen so far into matter that one really thinks materialistically; therefore the material theories are correct. The most essential character of our time therefore is not that people think incorrectly if they are materialistic, but the most essential characteristic is just that the majority of human beings become materialistic in that they deny the soul-spirit element and think merely with the physical body; they bring forth with the physical body an imitation, a bogus image of the life of soul. In that we fight materialism, we do not have to do with a mere reversal of theory, but rather we have to do with a decision of the will to tear oneself loose from the material, so that we not become merely theoretical materialists, but rather so that we do not sink down into the material-element, so that materialism shall become incorrect. It is correct for our time; it must become incorrect! We must apply our power for this, that materialism became incorrect. Thus this is not dealing with mere reversal of theories, rather this is dealing with inner spiritual deeds which humanity in our time must carry through so as to tear itself loose from materialisation.

With this, however, a great and significant truth is connected. The traditional religious confessions speak merely of the post-mortem life, the life after death. We know from our literature and lectures and other presentations that it is completely justified to speak of this post-mortem life, this life after death. We also describe it faithfully in its details. But we do not speak out of the same spirit as do the traditional confessions; we speak out of a different spirit. We speak out of the spirit of knowledge, not merely out of the spirit of a stupid belief. However, the traditional confessions speak just to the egotism, the refined soul egotism, and they refuse with all their strength a pre-birthly life. Just look at how the traditional confessions look at the supposition of a life prior to conception in such an emphatically heretical way. Naturally, along with preexistence there is necessarily connected the insight into repeated earth lives; but along with the fight against pre-existence there is naturally connected at the same time the fight against repeated earth lives. But in that only the post-mortem life, the life after death is reflected upon in the theological and religious presentations, in the sermon, the human soul is worked upon in a certain way; feelings and sensings enter into the human soul.

The human soul is formed in a certain manner. It is not correct to say that a human soul through which thoughts have passed such as those in my Outline of Occult Science looks just the same, as a human soul to whose egotistical instincts one has appealed in the mere traditional religious way in regard to post-mortem life. I have often drawn your attention to the fact that real logic, the life of spiritual impulses is a different one than mere thought logic. I have often mentioned the example of Avenarius who has taught here in Switzerland at the University of Zurich. He was a very sincere solid bourgeois, a good citizen; he lectured in his materialistic philosophy, and no one could say anything other than that he has been a solid person who has fit himself into the ordinary citizen philistine customs At the beginning of the 20th century if you had asked those peoplemr, who were then in Russia because they were Bolsheviksi, what their official philosophy was, then you got the answer: the philosophy of Avenarius; that is the official philosophy of Bolshevism.

Naturally, is someone is a clever philosopher, a good logician, and he studies the philosophy of Avenarius and draws conclusions from it then most certainly Bolshevism is not the outcome—that comes from something completely different. However, life draws a different conclusion, than the conclusions of logical thinking. In life, when the third generation has arrived, then Bolshevism appears as the philosophy of Avenarius. That is the logic of life. One penetrates into that when one takes up spiritual scientific knowledge. With merely abstract intellectual logic one remains static, if one only takes up what results from present day natural scientific or religious world views.

Such a difference, as in the both kinds of logic, also exists for the working of the traditional religious confessions, and for the working of spiritual science, such as is anthroposophically intended here. For people who spice their base attacks on Anthroposophy with a few pithy phrases—that our Anthroposophists then usually fall for—they often say: we theologians fight just as much for the supersensible as the Anthroposophists, and therefore in a certain way we are comrades in arms. Often, after the basest attacks have been made, this phrase is added, by those who in our own circles are taken to be the ones with goodwill. Indeed, one has the striving not to really seriously look at what is really at work here. Nonetheless, the logic of facts is quite a different one. If you draw the conclusion from the logic of facts from what is said about post-mortem life in the pulpits in that one appeals to the refined soul instincts, the refined egotism, then it could look as though a life was striven for beyond that of the senses, a life through which the soul, after it has passed through death, is to enter into the supersensible world. But that is not so. Rather, just through the fact that in a one-sided way, theoretically, the religious confessions have nurtured the idea of the mere post-mortem life through centuries and millennia, just through that the denial of the supersensible world has been gradually generated, in terms of real logic—just through that, in reality, materialism has been brought about. For even though in the head, one lets oneself be instructed by faith regarding life after death, the subconsciousness strives toward concluding this life with earthly mortality. And whereas the churches have decided to merely speak to the convenience of the instincts of human beings regarding immortality, that materialism was applied in European culture and its American offspring, which actually in the inner being strives entirely in the direction of closing life with earthly death. But those materialists who today strive theoretically, and socially, in that they want to make arrangements, social arrangements which are only reckoning with life up until death, these pure materialists draw the faithful logical consequences, right on into Bolshevism, which the religious confessions have furthered in the human beings within occidental culture. For merely to talk about immortality after death, means to generate, in the subconscious, the yearning also to die in the soul along with physical death. That is the truth of which I wanted to speak to you today. This yearning, to want to know nothing of a life in the supersensible realm, has been magnified just through this one-sided speaking about the eternal after death.

If one does not seriously take in this truth, then one does not have an insight into the connections in which the present European and American civilisation stands in regard to the past. Because standing for a mere life after death, is to educate in the direction of the subconscious yearning, to conclude life with physical death. As one has to say: there are already a large number of human beings in the so-called civilised world, who actually in their subconscious bear the very intense yearning to want to have nothing to do with the ideology of a life after death, and want life to conclude with physical death. All those human beings, from whose hearts there issues forth the materialistic world view, have in their subconscious actually the most intense striving to be obliterated in physical death. Even if in their upper consciousness they subscribe to the illusion, because their egotism cannot bear anything else but the desire to life after death, their subconscious strives to be obliterated in physical death.

The reality, in truth, is even more serious. Namely, if the human being with sufficient intensity, for a sufficiently long time develops this subconscious yearning that he will be destroyed by physical death, then he will be destroyed by physical death. Then what is present as the soul-spiritual element and had created its own image will cease to have a significance; then it once again unites itself with the spiritual worlds and loses its egohood. The image of the egohood becomes Ahrimanically transformed, and the Ahrimanic powers get what they want; they take over the earthly life. This means that a large portion of the present civilised world is striving towards not continuing the civilisation of the earth, but towards making people really die and handing over earthly life to very different beings than what human beings are.

It is of no use today not to point out these things. It is of course uncomfortable to have to accept these things, and it is much more comfortable if one only had to say—materialism is false; so one gradually converts oneself to a better view of the world. No, such things are of no use to us. What human thoughts are, become realities, and material thoughts gradually become material realities. However in our spiritual science we are not concerned just with theories, but with things that are realities in the human being, and as long as one does not fully grasp that we are concerned with matters that are realities in human beings—just so long does one not grasp either the depth of Anthroposophically intended spiritual science, nor the great seriousness concerning the cultural necessities that have to be looked at in our time.

Thus you see that our time is in danger of destroying the culture of our earth - not merely nurturing false views, but bringing forth images of these false views in the human beings themselves, and leading humanity away from its eternal existence.

I know how strong the longing of human beings is ever and again not to look at such truths, for when one makes clear some such truths, then people repeatedly come and say: but isn't there also the possibility that also those who do not directly want it may be saved? Certain representatives of religious confessions have an easier time with this. They impart, to those who really only want a kind of “nice old aunt” religion, that indeed, not through their own inner deeds do they become participants in the spiritual world, but that they only have to submit themselves passively to their belief in Christ, then Christ will save them. That is just the great difficulty that one has when one seriously wants to stand for spiritual science, that one may not speak to what is “so comfortable” in human beings.

For many a person would like to be a good Anthroposophist; but then his aunt does not want him to do that, and he does not wish that the aunt should lose her individuality; and then at the very least, the intensity of his Anthroposophical conviction is very strongly curbed. Many of you will know how very much I point to reality in these things, which hinder that earnestness is connected with Anthroposophical spiritual science, that must be connected with it. I have also already said here; materialism is not damaging merely for the reason that it cannot lead people theoretically to spirit knowledge—but also, firstly for the reason that I have mentioned today that the human being in fact becomes increasingly material when he allows the materialistic thoughts to work upon himself, and also, secondly, that in the further course of cultural materialism is condemned to not be able to research the secrets of matter. We have held a course here for doctors and medical students. It consisted in this, that Anthroposophical science was applied in the concrete sense, so as to demonstrate what the knowledge of the healthy human being and of the sick human being is. One showed, at least as a beginning, that out of a spiritual manner of consideration, one can know the being of the brain, the being of the teeth, the being of the bones, the spleen and the liver. Material science cannot do this. Materialistic science cannot come to a knowledge just of matter and of material existence. You can really see this in a single symptom.

Look at present day psychiatry. Psychiatry currently is nothing else than a description of abnormal soul life as it appears in the life of the soul. Now every so-called mental illness has its correlation in a material element. If someone has this or that confused idea, then the spleen or the lung is not in order; but the connection between the soul-spiritual element and the material element (which itself in reality, is also a soul-spiritual element) is only to be recognised through spiritual science, not through materialistic science. This materialistic science is simply condemned to make able to cognise the being of matter itself, therefore also, for instance in medicine many people they cannot help, because then one must help them with an essence of matter. One must even be able to help the mentally ill with a material essence. If one would seriously gain the knowledge that rests in the depths of Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then one would even bring about the streaming of spiritual scientific knowledge into the material existence, and therewith also into the social life. Therefore it was something to be taken for granted that the view of the threefold social order would result from this spiritual science, for all other knowledge of the present time is simply too little intensive, is too much mere thought knowledge and does not take hold of the realities—and therefore it can also not work into the social life. Just in connection with the social considerations I have often said: one speaks today of social ideals; one says that whole countries are to be set up socially; one speaks of nothing else today but socialism. Yet at the same time no period were so antisocial, at no time in their instincts were human beings so antisocial as today. Indeed, today people bypass each other without taking notice of anything. In a certain degree no one sees into the other person. Why, then?

One can either recognise, as is the case in our Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a supersensible world above our world. You know that we do not speak like the vexatious pantheists of a spirituality “in general.” We talk just the same as here upon earth of an animal, a plant, or a mineral; thus we talk, raising ourselves up from the realm of man to a realm above men, to a realm of angels, a realm of archangels etc. We talk of concrete spiritual beings, that is, we raise ourselves to the knowledge, to the insight into the essence of beings in the spirit. One can either do that—or one cannot do that. But if one does not do that, as we have done in occidental culture for centuries, what then results from this in terms of the logic of reality, not just with thought logic? The consequence is that one has no more sense, no more feeling for the soul-spiritual element; for in its actual configuration the soul-spiritual element can after all only be thought by us in the super-sensible element. One loses the feeling for the soul-spiritual. But if one meets another human being if one wants to know the whole man one should indeed also reach out to the soul-spiritual in man, reach out to a soul-spiritual element! One can, however, not find the soul-spiritual in the physical human being, if he has not first acquired the sense for the soul-spiritual element through thinking in the supersensible element. Whoever shies away from intercourse with the gods also loses intercourse with the supra-physical human being, with the human beings who live here on earth. For whoever has no sense for intercourse with the gods, he will only see the physical body, not the soul-spiritual element—that is, he will come to no unfolding of the soul-spiritual life. We need, simply, the intercourse with the gods so as to be able to fulfil the intercourse with our fellow men in the proper manner, and we need this intercourse with the gods, so that our soul-spiritual component turns to these gods—not just our thoughts, where we become pantheistic or something—but our entire human nature has to turn to them.

This last truth the Catholic Church, in its way, has understood very well, for what does it do? It does not limit itself merely to instruction in the catechism, which one can bring about in man through abstract theological conceptions, but also it serves out the altar sacrament as a sacrament, and it faithfully inculcates in its believers, that Christ is really contained in the sanctissimum, that Christ actually goes the way that otherwise the metabolism goes, when the altar sacrament is consumed. There are among you perhaps all too few who can properly evaluate the whole significance of what I now say, because perhaps only the least of you know in what form the altar sacrament is brought to meet the Catholics. There really lives in the altar sacrament something of the Original Wisdom, of the giving over of the entire human being to the divine. Therefore it can occur that such a letter to the faithful comes about such as that one which was issued not long ago by an archbishop that contains the explanation that the priest is mightier than God, because the priest is in a position to force God to be present in the altar sacrament, the sanctissimum. God has to be in the host, if the priest wills it. This it stands in the letter to the faithful by an archbishop which was issued just a few years ago. That is the Catholic attitude. The Protestant or Evangelical finds this to be completely unmentionable. The Brahmins in India would have taken this for granted from his viewpoint. Here there lives on in Catholicism something which belongs to the most ancient constituent parts of the original world wisdom and only has to be properly understood, and naturally may not be transformed from white magic into black magic, as it has happened in that letter to the faithful. But it lives in everything which I should like to say has developed as the aura of the altar sacrament in Catholicism, there lives the impulse: you should not only in your thinking, in your abstract thinking, turn to the divine: you should also, for example turn yourself with the same longing that lives in hunger. You go toward God not only in that you think; you go towards God in that you eat at the altar, and the God who lives in matter takes the way through your body, that everything in your metabolism takes. You unite yourself, materially, with your God! In the spreading of this attitude there lies the secret of a tremendous power. This secret of a tremendous power must not be overlooked, most certainly not now when the Catholic Church has the intent to direct its victory parade through the entire occident and the American arm,

In one of the first of my writings, The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World you will find knowledge described, and in a particular passage of the next appearing Outline to the Second Volume of Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings, you will find knowledge (thus, for what is a spiritual occurrence) described by the word “communion”, knowledge is the spiritual communion of humanity. I do not know how many people have understood the entire historical and cultural significance of this word, this sentence in one of my very first writings. For in this sentence, this was given the leading over of the materialistic grasp of community with God, to a spiritual grasp of community with God. The transformation from bread into the soul substance of cognition.

If one would recognise the overall connections of what it was attempted to give, since this little book, The Theory of Knowledge, with what then has been given in Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then one would have an insight into what has to be held as necessary from the Anthroposophical side, in order to really permeate with understanding what must stream into the present social life for its healing. But this earnestness that recognises such connections is lacking very often in the sleeping souls of the present, thus one takes little account of what paradoxes the life of our time actually brings, and what makes these paradoxes necessary in life.

Yesterday I had to speak to you of the paradoxes in life out of the characteristics of our present age. Now I ask you to become acquainted with speeches that were given by outstanding bishops or archbishops at prominent events of the present in the general sense. Then you find how for instance in the recent speeches of an archbishop in Munich. Friesing, which truly is very interesting to read, it is presented how the workers of the present are again to be won over for Catholicism, the intelligentsia and the workers. There you find a speaking, to be sure, out of the decadence of a spiritual substance in decay, and yet even so out of a spiritual substance, and at first you must connect to something which at first appears to be abstract, if you want to get behind what the reality is here. That archbishop of Munich, Friesing says, for instance: Catholicism must once again win over the workers. And he then mentions the various conditions concerning how Catholicism can win over the workers of the present for the Catholic Church. One must not counter such speeches today with the confrontation. Indeed, you have certainly had time enough to win over the workers since, according to your view, Catholicism through the pontificate of Peter in Rome was founded. If today you find it necessary to speak of again winning the workers and the intelligentsia, then that confirms that with what you have presented for centuries, you have lost them. If you thus still want to present the same things, can you then subscribe to any other view as to say to yourself, that you will again attain the same as you have previously attained—namely that you will lose those whom you wish to attain for yourselves? Does not one implicitly confirm that one did not act correctly, if one finds it necessary to speak in this way today about the winning again of the uneducated as well as of the intelligentsia?

However, present day humanity does not see such contradictions. Just that is what is necessary, that one sees such real contradictions. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that one has a deep insight into such things. It is true, man does have a soul-spiritual element, but we live in an age in which it can be denied. It is not that the materialistic theory that the brain thinks is incorrect. No, but when the human being denies his soul-spiritual element, then the brain begins to think like a robot. But if man does not want that his brain thinks, if he wants the soul-spiritual element to think, then he has to turn to a spirit-soul element that tears this thinking loose from matter. However, the tearing loose from matter, from this true materialism, is not merely the taking on of a different world view, but it is something that has to be taken hold of by the entire human being; it has to be torn loose from mere material existence by the whole human being. For man does not become only materialistic when he denies the spiritual element; he becomes himself more materialized when he denies the spirit. He becomes merely an image of the spiritual, he becomes materialized, which Ahriman can simply dissolve into the Ahrimanic universe, and will merely continue to work on further as a dependent impersonal member of it—whereas if he understands the Mystery of Golgotha in the right way, he is called upon to maintain his ego and to continue the progress of earthly civilisation.

I would like to sum up once more what I said yesterday concerning the differences of the soul constitutions among the various nations and of human beings generally all over the world. I have indicated that various predispositions and soul qualities exist among people in different parts of the earth. Thus, the population of each region on earth can contribute to what all humanity accomplishes in regard to the whole of civilization. Yesterday we had to point out that the Oriental nations and all the people of Asia are especially predisposed by their nature to develop that element which makes its contribution to the spiritual life of the social organism. Oriental people are especially gifted for everything pertaining primarily to the spiritual development in mankind, hence to knowledge and formulation of the super-sensible realm. This is connected with the fact that Oriental people are particularly inclined to develop concepts and ideas on how the human being has descended into this earthly existence from spiritual worlds, in which he has lived since his last death until this birth. The realization or the doctrine of preexistence, which is based on the fact that the human being has undergone a spirit existence before entering into a physical body here, is a principal aspect of these Oriental predispositions. There is therefore also the capability of comprehending repeated earth lives. It is possible for a person to adhere to the view that life goes on after death, continuing on forever without his returning to the earth. It is not logically possible, however, to hold the view that life on earth is a continuation of a spiritual existence without also being obliged to take for granted the thought that this life must repeat itself. Thus, the Oriental was particularly predisposed to understand that he dwelt in spiritual worlds prior to this earth life, that in a sense he received the impulses for this life on earth from the divine spiritual world.

This is connected with the whole way in which the Oriental arrived at his knowledge, his whole soul constitution. I have already indicated this to some of you. Now there are a number of other friends present here, and I would like to characterize something once more that I have already outlined for some of you.

We know that man is a threefold being, that he is divided into the nerves-and-senses man, the rhythmic man—who includes the activities expressed in breathing, blood circulation, and so on—and the third, the metabolic man, everything that has to do with man's metabolism. Now these three members of the human organization do not come to expression in the same manner everywhere on earth; they are expressed in different ways in different parts of the world.

Speaking of the East, all this is in decadence in a sense; it is suppressed and slumbers today in the Oriental human being. We are not concerned now with his present soul condition. Instead, we must become principally acquainted with a soul state that he possessed in a distant past. For the very reason that this soul condition has diminished, Asia humanity is about to adopt Bolshevism with the same religious fervor and devotion with which it formerly received the teaching of the holy Brahman—something that Europeans and Americans will become aware of before very long to their horror. Which of the three members of human nature came to special expression in the Oriental? It was the metabolic man. It was particularly the ancient Oriental who dwelt completely in the metabolism. This will not appear a repulsive view to anyone who does not conceive of substance in terms of lumps of matter, but who knows that spirit lives in all matter. The lofty, admirable spirituality of Orientals was brought about by what rose out of their metabolic process, and radiated into consciousness. What occurs in the human metabolism is, of course, intimately related with what the external sense world is. From the latter, we receive what then turns into matter within us. We know that behind this outer sense world there is spirit. In reality, we consume spirit and the consumed spirit becomes matter first within us. Yet, what we consume in this manner produced spirit in the Oriental even after it had been consumed. Thus, a person who understands these things views the remarkable poetic achievements of the Vedas, the greatness of the Bhagavad Gita, the profound philosophy of the Vedas and Vedanta and the Indian philosophy of Yoga without admiring them any less—because he knows that they have emerged from the inner process as a product of metabolism, just like the blossoms of a tree are the result of its metabolism. Just as we look at the tree and see in its blossoms what the earth pushes toward air and light, so we view what human beings in ancient India produced in the Vedas, in the Vedanta and Yoga philosophies, as a blossom of earthly existence itself. What we see as a product of the earth in tree blossoms is, in a way, offered up to air and light. Nevertheless, it is a product of the earth in the same sense as are wheat and grain growing in the fields, and fruits an trees, which are then cooked, enjoyed and digested by the human being. Within the special nature of the ancient Indian, this—instead of turning into plant blossoms and fruits—became the marvelous formulations of the Vedas, the Vedanta and Yoga philosophies. One who must view the ancient Indian as one would a tree. Both are examples of what the earth is capable of producing in its metabolism—in a tree, through its roots and sap, in man through his nourishment. Thus, one learns to recognize the divine in something that the spiritualist scorns, because he finds matter to be of such a low order.

Moreover, the ancient Indian had an ideal. It was his ideal to go beyond this metabolic experience to the higher member of human nature, namely, the rhythmic system. This is why he did his Yoga exercises, his special breathing exercises, practicing them consciously. What the metabolism brought forth from him as a spiritual blossom of earth evolution came about unconsciously. What he did consciously was to bring his rhythmic system, the system of breathing and blood, into a regulated, systematic movement. What did he do by thus advancing himself, for this was his specific form of advancement. What did he accomplish? What happened in this rhythmic system? We inhale the air from outside; we give to this air something that comes from the human metabolism, namely, carbon. Within us, a metabolic process takes place between something that is a result of our metabolism and something contained in the air that we breathe in. Today's materialistic, physical world-view finds nitrogen and oxygen—ignorant of the true nature of both—mixed together in the air and considers it something purely material. The ancient Indian perceived the air as the process which occurs when the element derived from the metabolism unites in the human being with what is inhaled and is then absorbed. When he fulfilled his ideal inherent in Yoga philosophy, the ancient Indian perceived in the blood circulation the mysteries of the air, that is, what exists spiritually in the air. Through Yoga philosophy he became acquainted with what is spiritual in the air. What does one learn to know there? One comes to recognize what has come into us, insofar as we have become beings that breathe. We learn to perceive what entered into us when we descended from spiritual worlds into this physical body. Knowledge of preexistence, of life before birth, is then cultivated. Therefore, it was in a sense the secret of those who practiced Yoga to penetrate the mystery of life before birth.

We see that the ancient Indian dwelt within his metabolism, notwithstanding the fact that he produced much that was beautiful, grandiose, and powerful, and he artificially raised himself to the rhythmic system. All this has, however, fallen into decadence. Today, all this sleeps in Asia. It only makes itself felt nebulously in abstract forms in asiatic souls when enlightened spirits, such as Rabindranath Tagore, speak of and revel in the ideal of the Asians.

Going from Asia to Central Europe, we find that the European, provided that he really is one, can be characterized as in Fichte's statement which I pointed out to you yesterday: “The external material world is the substance of my duty become visible; on its own, it has no existence. It is there only so that I might have something with which to fulfill my duty.” The human being who lived and lives in the central regions of the earth on this basis, dwells in the rhythmic system, just as the ancient Indian lived in the metabolic system. One remains unconscious of the element in which one lives. The Indian still strove upward to the rhythmic system as to an ideal, and he became aware of it. The Central European lives in the rhythmic system and is not conscious of it. Dwelling in this way in the rhythmic system, he brings about all that belongs to the legal, democratic governmental element in the social organization. He forms it in a one-sided way, but he forms it in the sense I indicated yesterday, because he is especially talented in shaping matters dealing with relationships between people, and between a person and his environment. Yet he, in turn, also has an ideal. He has the ideal to rise to the next level, to the man of nerves and senses. Just as the Indian considered Yoga philosophy to be his ideal, the artistic breathing that leads to insight in a special manner, so the Central European considers it his ideal to lift himself up to conceptions that come from the being of nerves and senses, to conceptions that are pure ideas, attained through an inner elevation, just as the Indian by advancing himself attained to the Yoga philosophy.

Therefore, it is necessary to realize that if one really wishes to understand individuals who have worked from such a basis as did Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Goethe, one must understand them in the same way an Indian understood his Yoga initiates. This special soul disposition, however, tones down the real spirituality. One still gets a clear awareness of it, for instance, in the way Hegel takes ideas as realities. Hegel, Fichte and Goethe possessed this clear awareness that ideas are truths, realities. One even comes to something like Fichte says: “The external sense world has no existence of its own; it is only the visible substance of my duty.” But one does not reach the fulfillment of ideas which the Oriental had. One can reach the point of saying, as did Hegel: “History begins, history lives. That is the living movement of ideas.” Yet one limits oneself only to this external reality. One views this external reality as spirit, as idea. Yet, particularly if one is in Hegel's place, one can speak neither of immortality nor of unbornness. Hegelean philosophy begins with logic; this means that it starts with what the human being thinks of as finite; then it extends over a certain philosophy of nature. It has a psychology, however, that deals only with the earthly soul. It also has a theory of government. Finally, it rises to its highest point when it reaches the threefold aspect of art, science and religion. Yet it goes no further; it does not enter into the spiritual worlds. In the most spiritual way, men like Hegel and Fichte have described what exists in the external world; but anything that would look beyond the outer world is suppressed. Thus we see that the very element that has no counterpart in the spiritual world, namely, the life of rights, of the state, something that is entirely of this world, makes up the greatness of the thought structures that appear here. One looks at the external world as spirit but is unable to go beyond it. Yet, in the process one trains the mind, teaching it a certain discipline. Then, if one values a certain inner development, this can be accomplished, because, by schooling oneself through what can be achieved in this area by occupying the mind with the realm of ideas, one is in a sense inwardly propelled into the spiritual world. This is indeed remarkable.

I must admit to you that whenever I read writings by the Scholastics, they evoke a feeling in me that induces me to say that they can think; they know how to live in thoughts. In a certain other way, directed more to the earthly sphere, I have to say the same of Hegel, Fichte or Schelling. They know how to live in thoughts. Even in the decadent way in which Scholasticism appears in Neo-Scholasticism, I find a much more developed life of thought than is found, for example, in modern science, popular books, or journalism. There, all thinking has already evaporated and disappeared. It is simply true that the better Scholastic minds, in the present time, for example, think in more precise concepts than do our university professors of philosophy. It is somewhat surprising that when one allows these thoughts to work upon oneself, for example, when reading a Scholastic book, even a truly Scholastic-Catholic text, and allows it to affect one, using it in a sense as a kind of self-education, one's soul is driven beyond itself. Such a book works like a meditation. Through its effect, one arrives at something different that brings about enlightenment. Here, we confront a very strange fact.

Consider that if such modern Dominicans, Jesuits and priests of other orders, who immerse themselves in what remains of Scholasticism, would permit the educational effect of Scholastic thought forms to work upon them all the way, they would all come through this discipline in a relatively easy manner to a comprehension of spiritual science. If one would allow those who study Neo-Scholasticism to follow their own soul development, it would not be long before those priests of Catholic orders in particular would become adherents of spiritual science. What had to be done so that this would not happen? They were given a dogma that curtails such study, and does not allow what would develop out of the soul to come about. Even today, someone wishing to develop towards spiritual science could be given as a meditation text the Scholastic book written by a contemporary Jesuit that I once showed here.⁶⁵ Yet, as I told you, it bears the imprimatur of a certain archbishop. The enlightenment that would occur in a person, if he were completely free to devote himself to it, has been cut off.

We must be able to see through these things. For then we will realize how important it is for certain circles to prevent by all means the consequences of what would develop if free reign were given the effects of these matters in the souls. The Central European striving is, after all, aimed at lifting oneself out of the rhythmic man, where one dwells as a matter of fact, to the nerves-and-senses man, who possesses what he attains for himself in the ideal sphere. For these people, there is a special predisposition to understand earthly life as something spiritual. Hegel did this in the most all-encompassing sense.

Let us now go to Western man. Yesterday, I said that Western man, particularly as exemplified by the most brilliant minds as early as Bacon and others, followed by Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Buckle, Thomas Reid, and the economist Adam Smith, has a special predisposition to develop the kind of thinking which can then be utilized in the economic part of the social organism.

If we consider Spencer's philosophy, for instance, we realize that this is a kind of thinking which stems completely from the nerves-and-senses man, that in all respects it is a product of the senses and nerves. It would be most appropriate for creating industrial organizations and associations. It is only out of place.when employed by Spencer for philosophy. If he had used this same thinking to set up factories and social organizations, it would have been applied in its rightful place. It was out of place when he used it for philosophy.

This comes from the fact that Western man no longer lives in the rhythmic system, but has taken a step upward, living as a matter of course in the human nerves-and-senses system. It is the nature of the Oriental to live in his metabolic system. It is the Central European's nature to live in the rhythmic system. It is Western man's nature to live in the nerves-and-senses system (see drawing). The Oriental lives in the metabolism; he strives upward, trying to attain to the rhythmic system. The Central European lives in the rhythmic system. He strives towards the nerves-and-senses system. Western man already lives in the latter. Where does he wish to ascend? He is not yet there, but he has the impulse to strive upwards beyond himself. It appears at first in a caricatured form, which I characterized for you yesterday as the denial of matter and the autosuggestion of the human being in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science. Despite the fact that this is as yet a caricature, it is nevertheless a forerunner of what Western man must aim for. The aim must be something superhuman, by which I do not mean to imply that anyone who, instead of striving beyond the nerve-sense system, strives down into unconsciousness, and such as that, would thereby become superhuman.

Yesterday, I concluded by saying that it is in this way that the human faculties are distributed over the world's various regions, and it is necessary for real cooperation to come about. We are in a position today where, in regard to civilization, we are completely dependent on the nerves-and senses being of the West. I made use of a paradox, but this paradox quite clearly expresses the reality of the situation. The thoughts in Vienna and in Berlin are not the thoughts that arose from the folk spirit and then culminated in Fichte or Hegel. The spirits of Fichte and Hegel have been buried. What is written today in books and newspapers in Central Europe, in Vienna or Berlin, are not Fichte's thought forms; it is a lie when people quote Fichte today. Rather, the truth is that what reaches the public in Berlin or Vienna today is more closely related to what is being thought in Chicago or New York than to what was thought by Fichte or Hegel.

What had to happen, however, was that these three members, of which this one (in the East) was, to begin with, especially predisposed to the spiritual life, brought across the spiritual life as a tradition of its original, elementary form once existing in the Orient. There in the East the human being lived as fully within the life of the spirit itself as today he is firmly anchored here in Europe in physical life. Only the shadowy reflection of this spiritual life is found in Central Europe, and only its tradition in Western Europe. Western Europe is characterized by its own predisposition to the postmortem life, the life which is envisioned after death. I told you yesterday that in America an awareness is already in the process of developing, if only in a few sects, that man must not merely be passive about his soul life here on earth if he is to carry something through death and live on in spiritual worlds. He must acquire here through his work and actions what he wishes to carry through the gate of death. The awareness exists that the human being disintegrates if he does not provide for his immortality here, if, on earth, he does not develop a sense for ideals. This is already emerging in some Western sects, even though this ideal still appears in a distorted form.

That which is the life of the state on the other hand was striven for by what existed in the rhythmic system and could be borne upward into thoughts. This has come into evidence especially in the man of the middle (the Central European). From there, it affected the West. We are dealing with an odd phenomenon here that is only understood when one looks at its inner aspect. Strange as it may seem, something was astir in Central Europe. It goes without saying that in the rhythmic system the inclination remained for a communal human life, for a social life together in freedom. This impulse remained, to start with, deep in the unconscious realm (see drawing below). It is true, however, that impulses are present among human beings even if people are not conscious of them. Let us say, therefore, that something definite lived, to begin with unconsciously, in Central Europe in the eighteenth century; it could not rise into consciousness, but its effects were transmitted to the West. Having been received there, but not having developed inwardly as a matter of course, it turned into passion and feeling, thus into the French Revolution.

Schiller had thoughts on this. Here (referring to the drawing on page 12), we have the French Revolution. There is even a symbolic event attesting to the fact that Schiller pondered on what actually happened there. You know that he had the honor of being made a French citizen. He therefore pondered on it all, but to begin with, it all lived in his rhythmic system. Then, through his own insight, he lifted it up into consciousness and wrote his letters concerning the aesthetic education of man.

You find in these letters what one could say at that time about people living together in a truly free state. Hume then merely took this concept of the state, which Schiller had lifted up into consciousness in his Aesthetic Letters, and somewhat pedantically fashioned it into a system. There is something extraordinarily important in what Schiller brought out from the depths of the folk spirit in these letters on aesthetic education. Because it was something so profound, it was subsequently not comprehended when the element of the nerves-and-senses man became dominant everywhere.

I have often referred to a lonely man, living in Vienna, by the name of Heinrich Deinhardt.⁶⁶ Heinrich Marianus Deinhardt: 1821–1879, “Beitraege zur Wuerdigung Schillers. Briefe ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen.” Published by G. Wachsmuth, Stuttgart, 1922. He wrote letters upon letters about this aesthetic education of the human being, most ingenious letters. This man had the misfortune of breaking a leg as the result of a fall in the street. The leg was set, but, being undernourished, Deinhardt could not recover and died from breaking a bone. That is to say, he who already in the second half of the nineteenth century had so conscientiously interpreted Schiller's Aesthetic Letters died of malnutrition. And Deinhardt's letters on Schiller's aesthetic education of man are completely forgotten!

Again, these Aesthetic Letters by Schiller would be a good preparation for purifying and uplifting the soul so as to gain a spiritual view of the world. Schiller himself was not yet able to do this. It is always effective, however, if another person engaged in soul development takes up something originating from the one who as yet does not reach up into the spiritual world. It then has the effect of letting him see into the spiritual world. To be sure, people in Europe have revered as special remedies for the soul Ralph Waldo Trine, Marden⁶⁷ and similar superficial minds instead of Schiller, forgetting the other views that would actually lead upward into the spiritual world.

It is indeed necessary that these matters be grasped and comprehended in the whole context of life and world conditions. People have to realize how differentiated human capabilities are all over the earth. And the following must be pointed out. Up to now, no effort has been spared to publicize Schiller's riotous early works, The Robbers, Fiesco, or Intrigue and Love. People become most enthusiastic about the sentimentalities of Mary Stuart, the very profitable dramatic scenes of Maid of Orleans or the Bride of Messina. Today, Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, in which he surpasses himself in significance for all humanity—his Robbers, the whole of Mary Stuart and Wallenstein notwithstanding should not only be taken up and studied, one should allow them to affect one. For today, it is up to us not just to indulge in the empty talk of philistine academics existing in regard to our classical writers such as Goethe and Schiller, but above all else to take our own stand and on our own to discover what was great about them. We go on repeating what philistine academia has said for over a century about Wallenstein, Mary Stuart, and so forth. Our task today is to grasp such greatness ourselves in a fundamental way, for only then can humanity progress. So, here too, we discover the necessity for a transformation, a renewal. Even what people in our schools read and hear about Mary Stuart, Wallenstein, The Robbers, and so forth, must be revised. In this critical age we need a complete renewal, for the times are critical indeed.

If we look over to the West, we see that with all that it can produce as the expression of mankind through the nerves-and-senses system, this West is asking for the ascent into what lies beyond human knowledge in the spiritual world. I told you yesterday that in order for the cultural life, the life of the state and the economic life to be able to assert themselves in the threefold social organism, they must work together. These three elements must work together. Let us not merely say, “Ex Oriente lux!” We can turn to the Orient, study the Bhagavad Gita, Yoga philosophy and the Vedas; we can grind away at these subjects just as we have become accustomed to grind away at others in Europe. We can start grinding away at Oriental philosophy after the other subjects have become boring to us. But we shall make no progress this way, for what was once right for the earth will not again be appropriate for the present and Future; it will remain something of the past. We can admire it as something that was once right for the earth; we cannot, however, simply adopt it again in a passive manner as does the Theosophical Society, for instance. Likewise, we cannot just carry over what has been handed down to us of the European past in the old tradition. We cannot say that what is contained in the national characteristics of the Orient, of Middle Europe, can simply be renewed by us. Rather, we must ask, if we wish to achieve a realistic union of these three elements that are inherent dispositions of human nature, how can we do that? We can only do it when we realize in what way the nerves-and-senses life, which has, after all, taken hold of all of us, must pass beyond itself. It means that we must rise to something different that can come neither from the East, the Middle nor the West. It can only come through the new initiation, through the new spiritual science. It is brought about by our ascending from the most current form of thinking, trained by natural science and the nerves-and-senses being, to the science of the new initiation; acquiring from this new initiation the ways and means for bringing about cooperation between what was once the nature of the ancient Orient, later that of the Middle and now that of the West. We need a new science of initiation that can bring about a unity of these three, a living unity. In this modern age, we will not arrive at a cultural life if we do not strive for this new initiation science. We will have no proper politics, no life of the state, if we just continue in the same old way, if we do not turn to those scientific branches born of the new initiation and inquire how the politics of the future must be shaped. Neither will we achieve a new economic life, if we do not understand that form of thinking which should be applied neither to philosophy as did Spencer, nor to the life of the state as did Adam Smith, but only to the organization of the economic life. Then, however, we must also know how to integrate the latter into the two other systems. For that we need the science of initiation. We cannot progress if we cannot say to ourselves: From a comprehension of what was once the Oriental disposition, we come to the essence of the cultural, the spiritual life. By truly comprehending the disposition of the human being of the Middle, we reach the point of really understanding the nature of the life of rights, of the state. By understanding the Western nature, we gain a comprehension of what the economic life is. The three fall apart, however, if we cannot unite them in a higher unity. And we can only accomplish that when we view the three from the perspective resulting for us from the new Mysteries, which are here called the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

These matters must be understood, for whoever has insight into them knows that all the aspirations coming to expression today are leading towards ruin. People simply do not reckon with the most important factors. Take the most radical socialists. Subjectively they may have honorable intentions for humanity, but they only count an forces of decline. They strike a wrong balance of life. We only take stock the right way when, out of spiritual science, we do not just grasp at anything arbitrarily put there, saying that this is the way it must be if humanity is to be happy, but when we ask ourselves: What will come into being when the cultural life, the life of rights and the economic life are brought into the right relationship with each other; what kind of social organism results from that? Then, such a social body will also contain its permeation with spirit. This implies the presence of a realistic economic life, not one that people dream and fantasize about, but one that can originate as the best possible one. Again, its political system will be the best possible; a cultural life will be present that will unite the prenatal life with that after death. Such a cultural life will see in the human being, dwelling here in this physical world, a being orienting himself according to his rights; a being into whom, in the cultural sphere, shines his prenatal life; a being who in the economic life cannot attain to an ideal, only to the best possible one, yet is able through initiation science in his will to transform the faculties active in the economic sphere so that they allow the life after death to shine forth. Because this is the case, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not just one theory among many, not something that takes its place as a party or sectarian program alongside others. Anthroposophy is something that is brought forth out of the knowledge that can be acquired when garth's and mankind's evolution are comprehended in their working together and in their totality.

In the present time, we have to admit that any other relationship to the world or to temporal reforms will lead to nothing, for what can bring progress to mankind must emerge out of the new initiation science.

Today, this must be expressed again and again in many different ways. It has been incorporated into this building; it is expressed in all the details of this structure. Looking even at its smallest segment, it can tell you about what is intended here, what is expressed in words in a variety of ways. This is what gives the whole matter here a certain uniform character. At the same time, a will comes to expression here that is intimately connected with the forces of ascent, not the declining forces of evolving humanity, something one could wish people would understand. This is what we should like to work for more and more. This is what we now wish to aim for by means of the courses⁶⁸ that will be given here this fall, in which we intend to show that the knowledge derived from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can work in a truly fructifying manner into the individual branches of science. Then, the day will perhaps come when people will understand what is really intended here, when sufficient comprehension will exist in the world so that we can reach the point at some future date when this building, still enshrouded in mist, can be opened up. For, as long as this building cannot be opened up, there still exists something that shows a lack of understanding for what is intended here.
I shall continue with this next Friday at eight o'clock.

At eight tomorrow, our friend, Count Polzer,⁶⁹ will lecture on European politics of the last century in connection with the testament of Peter the Great. This is an interesting subject about which, hopefully, a discussion will ensue. On Friday, I shall continue with the questions, already presented, and their application to the individual human being. On Saturday, at eight o'clock, I will continue with those particular questions that relate to religious problems. Sunday at six-thirty will be the next eurythmy performance, followed by a lecture.

• 65. Reference to Alfons Lehmen, SJ: 1847–1910, and his book Lehrbuch der Philosophie auf aristotelisch-scholastischer Grundlage, Vol. I, Freiburg i. Br., 1917. Compare with this the lecture of July 10, 1920, reprinted in “Blaetter fuer Anthroposophie,” September, 1953. Not translated.
• 66. Heinrich Marianus Deinhardt: 1821–1879, “Beitraege zur Wuerdigung Schillers. Briefe ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen.” Published by G. Wachsmuth, Stuttgart, 1922.
• 67. Orison Swett Marden: 1850–1924, American author.
• 68. Reference to the first Course of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum from September 26 until October 16, 1920.
• 69. Ludwig Graf von Polzer-Hoditz: 1869–1945; his lecture was later published under the title, “Der Kampf gegen den Geist und das Testament Peters des Grossen,” Stuttgart, 1922.

When you consider what has been said here during the past two days you will see that what belongs to the essence of imperialism is that in an imperialistic community something that was felt to be part of a mission—not necessarily justified, but understandable—later continued on as an automatism, so to speak. In the history of human development things are retained—simply due to indolence—which were once justified or explicable, but no longer are.

If a community is obliged to defend itself for a period of time, then it is surely justified to create certain professions for that purpose: police and military professions. But when the danger against which defense was necessary no longer exists, the professions continue to exist. The people involved must remain. They want to continue to exercise their professions and therefore we have something which is no longer justified by the circumstances. Something develops which, although perhaps originating due to the necessity for defense, takes on an aggressive character. It is so with all empires, except the original imperialism of the first human societies, of which I spoke yesterday, in which the people's mentality considered the ruler to be a god and thus justified in expanding his domain as far as possible. This justification was no longer there in all the subsequent empires. Let us now consider once again from definite viewpoints what is apparent in the historical evolution of mankind. We find that in the oldest times the will of the individual who was seen as divine was the indisputable power factor. In public life there was in reality nothing to discuss in such empires; but this impossibility of discussion was grounded in the fact that a god in human form walked the earth as the ruler. That was, if I may say so, a secure foundation for public affairs.

Gradually all that which was based on divine will and was thus secure passed over to the second stage. In that stage the things which can be observed in physical life, be they persons, be they the persons' insignias, be they the deeds of the governing or ruling persons, it was all symbols, signs. Whereas during the first phase of imperialism here in the physical world the spirit was considered directly present, during the second stage everything physical was thought of as a reflection, as an image, as a symbol for what is not actually present in the physical world, but only illustrated by the persons and deeds in the physical world.

Such times, when the second stage appeared, was when it first occurred to people that a possibility for discussion of public affairs was possible. What we today call rights can hardly be considered as existing during the first stage. And the only political institution worth mentioning was the phenomenon of divine power exercised by physical people. In social affairs the only thing that mattered was the concrete will of a physical person. To try to judge whether this will was justified or not makes no sense. It was just there. It had to be obeyed. To discuss whether the god in human form should or should not do this or that made no sense. In fact it was not done during those times when the conditions I have described really existed. But if one only saw an image of the spiritual world in physical institutions, if one spoke of what Saint Augustine called the “City of God”—that is, the state which exists here on earth, but which is really an image of heavenly facts and personalities, then one can hold the opinion that what the person does who is a divine image is right, is a true image: someone else could object and say that it is not a true image. That's when the possibility of discussion originated. The person of today, because he is accustomed to criticize everything, to discuss everything, thinks that to criticize and discuss was always present in human history. That is not true. Discussing and criticizing are attributes of the second stage, which I have described for you. Thus began the possibility to judge on one's own, that is, to add a predicate to a subject. In the oldest forms of human expression this personal judging was not at all present in respect to public affairs. During the second stage what we call today parliament for example was in preparation; for a parliament only makes sense when it is possible to discuss public affairs. Therefore, even the most primitive form of public discourse was a characteristic of the second stage. Today we live in the third stage, insofar as the characteristic form of the western countries more or less spreads over the world. This is the stage of platitudes. This stage of platitudes, as I characterized it to you yesterday, is the one in which the inner substance has also disappeared from discussion and therefore everyone can be right, or at least think that they are right, when it can't be proved that they are wrong, because basically within the world of platitudes everything can be affirmed. Nevertheless, previous stages are always retained within the next stages. Therefore the inner impulse to imperialism exists. People observe things very superficially. When the previous German Kaiser wrote in a book that was opened out to write in: “The king's will is sublime law”—what did it mean? It meant that he expressed himself in the age of platitudes in a manner that only had meaning for the first stage. In the first stage it was really the case that the ruler's will was highest law. The concept of rights, which includes the right of free speech, and involves lawyers and courts, is essentially a characteristic of the second stage, and can only be grasped in its reality from the viewpoint of the second stage. Whoever has followed how much discussion has taken place about the origin and character of rights will have noticed that there is something shimmering in the rights concept as such, because it is applicable to the symbolic stage, where the spiritual shimmers through the material, shines, so that when only the external signs, the legal aspects and words appear, one can argue and discuss what are rights and the legal system in public discourse.

In the age of the platitudes, however, understanding of what is necessary for rights in society is completely lost: that the spiritual kingdom shines through into the physical kingdom. And then one arrives at such definitions as I described yesterday using the example of Woodrow Wilson. I will now read to you a definition of the law that Woodrow Wilson gave so you can see how this definition consists of nothing but platitudes. He said: “The law is the will of the state in respect to those citizens who are bound by it.” So the state unfolds a will! One can well imagine that someone who is embedded so strongly in abstract idealism, not to mention materialism—for they are practically the same—can claim that the state is supposed to have a will. He would have to have lost all sense of reality to even conceive of such a thing let alone write it down. But it is in the book I spoke to you about yesterday—the codex of platitudes: The State, Elements of Historical and Practical Politics.

There are other interesting things in it. Only in parenthesis I would like to draw your attention to what Wilson says in this book about the German Empire after he describes how the efforts to found it were finally successful in 1870/71. He describes this with the following sentences: “The final incentive for achievement of complete national unity was brought about by the German-French war of 1870/71. Prussia's brilliant success in this struggle, fought in the interest of German patriotism against French impertinence, caused the cool restraint of the central states towards their powerful neighbor in the northern end; they united with the rest of Germany and the German Empire was founded in the royal palace at Versailles on January 18, 1871.” The same man wrote that who a short time later in Versailles united with those whose impertinence had once been the motivation for the founding of the German Empire. Much of present day public opinion derives from the fact that people are so terribly superficial and pay no attention to the facts. If you decide to decide according to objective information, then things look quite different from what is propounded in public and accepted by thousands upon thousands of people. It wouldn't have hurt one bit if when Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in glory, praised from all sides, these remarks had been held up to him. That is what must be striven for, to take the facts into account, which means also the truth.

So the second stage is when discussion arises, which is what makes the civil rights concept possible. The third stage is when economic life is the essential reality. And yesterday we showed how this [present] age of platitudes is absolutely necessary in the course of historical evolution in order that the platitude, which is empty, can open people's eyes to the fact that the only reality is economic life and how it is therefore so necessary to propagate spirituality, the new spirituality in the world.

People have quite a skimpy idea about this new spiritual life. And it is therefore understandable that it is burdened with the most ridiculous misunderstandings. For this new spirituality must penetrate into the depths of human life. And although those secret societies, about which I spoke yesterday, only traditionally preserve the old forms, the slogan “brothers,” meaning not to let social class or an individual's religion play a part in the lodges, in a certain sense does prepare for it in the right way.

We say today—I beg you to pay special attention to this, let's take something quite banal, quite common: “The tree is green.” This is a manner of speaking which is common to the second stage of human development. Perhaps you will understand me better if you imagine that we try to paint this opinion—that “the tree is green.” You cannot paint it! There will be some white surface and green will be added, but nothing about the tree has been painted. And when something of the tree is painted which isn't green all you do is disturb the effect even more. If you try to paint “The tree is green,” you are painting something dead. The way we combine subject and predicate in our speech is only useful for our view of the dead, of the non-living in the world. As we still have no idea of how everything in the world is alive, and how to express ourselves about what is alive, we form such judgments as “The tree is green,” which presupposes that a relationship exists between something and the color green, whereas the color green is itself the creative element, the force which acts and lives. The transformation of human thinking and feeling will have to take place within the innermost life of the soul. This will take a long time to accomplish, but when it does it will affect social conditions and how people relate to each other.

Today we are only at the beginning of all this. But it is necessary to know which paths lead to the light. I have said that it is meaningful when people get together and each one's subjective beliefs play no role. And consider it from this viewpoint—really think about it—the way in which anthroposophy is described. It is not described through definitions or ordinary judgments. We try to create images, to present things from the most varied sides, and it is senseless to try and nail down something meant in a spiritual-scientific sense with a mere yes or no opinion. People today always want to do that, but it isn't possible. It happens ever more frequently—because we are growing out of the second stage and into the third—that someone asks: What is good for me in order to counter this or that difficulty in life? Advice is given. Aha! The person concerned says, so in this or that situation in life one must do this or that. They generalize. But it has only a limited meaning, for judgments given from the spiritual world always have only an individual meaning, are only applicable to one case. This way of generalizing, which we have become accustomed to in the second stage, must not continue into the third stage. People today are very much inclined to carry things over from the past into the future. One can become disinclined towards the things which are pernicious for the soul by seeing clearly what is happening.

Yesterday I indicated to you that in many respects the Catholic Church harks back to the first stage. It contains something like a sham or a shadow of the first stage of human evolution, which sometimes solidifies into a kind of spiritual imperialism, as for example in the 11th century when the Monks of Cluny really ruled over Europe more than is thought. From their ranks the powerful, imperialistic Pope Gregory VII emerged. Therefore Roman Catholic dogma enables the priest to feel greater than Christ, because he can force him to be present at the altar. This clearly shows that the institution of the Catholic Church is a relic, a shadow-image of what existed in the very first imperialism.

You know that a great enmity existed between the Catholic Church and the secret societies which used Freemasonry in the west—a certain form of Freemasonry at least—as their instrument. It would go too far in this lecture to describe in detail how this enmity has gradually increased over time. But one thing can be said, how in these secret societies the opinion is very strong that the Catholic Church is a relic of the first stage of imperialism. The Holy Roman Empire used this framework to have Charlemagne and the Otto's crowned by the pope, thereby using the imperialism of the soul as the means of mundane anointment. They took what still remained from older times and poured it into the new. Thus the imperialism of the second stage was poured into the framework of the first imperialism.

Now we have arrived at the third stage, which shows itself to be economic imperialism, especially in the west. This economic imperialism is connected to a background culture of secret societies, which are sated with empty symbols. But while it has become clear that the social constitution of the Church is a shadow-image of what once existed and no longer has meaning, it is still not understood that in the second stage the statesmen of the west still suffer under a great illusion. Woodrow Wilson would no longer speak of the will of the Church, but he speaks of the will of the State as being self-evident. But the state only had the importance attributed to it during the second stage of human development. Whereas during the oldest, the first stage the Church was all-powerful, in the second stage the state contains everything that was attributed to the Church in the first stage. Thus the economic imperialism of Great Britain and even a certain idea of freedom has been poured into the state. And those who were educated in Great Britain see in the state something that can well have a will of its own.

But we must perceive that this concept of the state must take the same road the concept of the Church has traveled. It must be realized: If we retain this concept of the state for the entire social organism, a mere rights institution, and force everything else into this rights institution, we are propagating a shadow just as the Church has propagated a shadow—recognized as such by the secret societies. There is little awareness of this though. Think of all the public affairs that people are enthusiastic about which are pressed into the concept of the political state. There are nationalists, chauvinists and so forth; everything we call nation, national , chauvinism, it's all incorporated into the framework of the state. Nationalism is added and the concept of the “nation-state” is construed. Or we may have a certain opinion about, say socialism, even radical socialism: the framework of the state is used. Instead of nationalism, socialism is incorporated. But then we have no concept; it can only be a shadow-image, as the constitution of the Church has become. In some Protestant circles the idea has arisen that the Church is only the visible institution, that the essence of religion must take root in people's hearts. But this degree of human development has not yet arrived in respect to the political state, otherwise we wouldn't be trying to squeeze all kinds of nationalisms into the political boundaries which exist as the result of the war [First World War—trans.] All this neglects to take one thing into consideration—the fact that what occurs in the historical development of humanity is life and not mechanism. And a characteristic of life is that it comes and goes. The imperialistic approach is different however. According to this approach one does not think about the future. This is part of the present-day approach to public affairs, that people have no living thoughts, only dead ones. They think: Today we instituted something, it is good, therefore it must remain forever. The feminist movement thinks like this, as do the socialists and the nationalists. We have founded something, it begins with us, everything waited for us until we became clever enough. And now we have discovered the cleverest that exists and it will continue to exist forever. It's as though I have brought up a child until he is eighteen years old and I say: I have brought him up correctly, and he will stay as he is. But he will get older, and he will also die, as does everything in the course of human evolution. Now I come to what I mention before about what must accompany the principle of indifference to one's religious beliefs and fraternity. What must accompany them is the awareness that life on earth includes death and that we are aware that the institutions we create must of necessity also cease to exist, because the death principle already resides in them and they therefore have no wish to exist forever, do not consider being permanent. Of course under the influence of the thinking characteristic of the second stage this is not possible . But if the feeling of shame of which I spoke yesterday arises, when we realize that we are living in the kingdom of platitudes under which only economic imperialism glimmers—then will we call for the spirit, invisible but real. We will call for a knowledge of the spirit, one which speaks of an invisible kingdom, a kingdom which is not of this world in which the Christ-impulse can actually gain a foothold.

This can only happen when the social order is tripartite, threefold: The economy is auto- administered, the political state is no longer the absolute, all-inclusive entity, but is exclusively concerned with rights alone, and spiritual/cultural life is truly free, meaning that here in reality a free spiritual sector can be organized. The spiritual life of humanity can only be free if it is dependent only upon itself and when all the institutions responsible for cultivating the spirit, that is, cultural life, are dependent only upon themselves.

What do we have then, when we have this tripartite organism, this social organism? We have an economy in which the living physical earth is predominant. In this sector the economic forces of the economy itself are active. I doubt anyone will think that if the economy is organized as described in my book Towards Social Renewal—Basic Issues of the Social Question some kind of super-sensible forces will be present. When we eat, when we prepare our food, when we make our clothing, it is all reality. Esthetics may be symbolically present, but the actual clothing is the reality.

When we look at the second sector of the future social organism [the rights sector], we don't have a symbolism like the second stage, where the political state constituted the totality, but we have what is valid for one person being equally valid for the other. And the third sector will be neither symbol nor platitude, but a spiritual/cultural reality. The spirit will possess the possibility of really living within humanity. The inner social order can only be built through a transition to inner truthfulness. In the age of platitudes this will be especially difficult though. For during the age of platitudes people acquire a certain ingenious cleverness, which is, however, nothing more than a play on words of the old concepts. Just consider for a moment a characteristic example. Suddenly from the imperialism of platitudes comes the idea that it would be good if the queen of England also has the title “Empress of India.” One can invent the most beautiful reasons for this, but if it didn't happen, nothing would have changed. The Emperor of Austria, who now belongs to the deposed royalty, before he was chased out carried around along with his other titles a most unusual one: Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galizia, Lodomeria, Illyia and so on. Among all these titles was also “King of Jerusalem!” The Austrian Emperor also carried, until he was no longer emperor, the title “King of Jerusalem.” It came from the crusades. It would be impossible to give a better example of meaninglessness than this. And such meaninglessness plays a much greater role than you imagine. It is a question of whether we can arise to a recognition of the present-day platitudes. It is made difficult because those who live in platitudes are the verbal representatives of the old concepts that stagger around in their brains imitating thoughts. But one can only achieve real thinking again when the inner soul-life is filled with substance and that can only come from knowledge of the spiritual world, of spiritual life. Only by being relieved by the spirit can one become a complete person, after having been constipated with platitudes. What I described yesterday as a feeling of shame will result in the call for the spirit. And the propagation of the spirit will only be possible if the spiritual/cultural sector is allowed to develop independently. Otherwise we will always have to take advantage of loopholes, as was the case with the Waldorf School because the Württemberg Province education law had such a loophole which made it possible to establish a Waldorf school only according to spiritual laws, according to spiritual principles, something which in practically no other place on earth would be possible. But one can only organize the things concerning the spiritual life from the spirit itself if the other two sectors do not interfere, if everything is taken directly from the spiritual sector itself.

At present the tendency is the reverse. But this tendency does not reckon with the fact that with every new generation a new spiritual/cultural life appears on earth. It's immaterial whether a dictatorship or a republic is established, if it is not understood that everything which appears is subject to life and must be continuously transformed, must pass through death and be formed anew, pass through metamorphoses, then all that will be accomplished is that every new generation will be revolutionary. Because only what is considered good for the present will be established. A fundamental concept for the western areas which are so mired in platitudes must be to see the social organism as something living. And one sees it as living only when it is considered in its threefold nature. It is just those whose favorable economic position allows them to spread an [economic] imperialism over practically the whole world who have the terrible responsibility of recognizing that the cultivation of a true spiritual life must be poured into this imperialism. It is ironic that an economic empire which spread over the whole world was founded on the British Isles and then when they were seeking mystical spirituality turned to those whom they had economically conquered and exploited. [India—Tr.] The obligation exists to allow one's own spiritual substance to flow into the social organism. That is the awareness which our British friends should take with them, that now, in this worldwide important historic moment, in all the world's economic institutions where English is spoken, the responsibility exists to introduce true spirituality into the exterior economic empire. It's an either/or situation: Either efforts remain exclusively oriented towards the economy—in which case the fall of earthly civilization is the inevitable result—or spirit will be poured into this economic empire, in which case what was intended for earthly evolution will be achieved. I would like to say: Every morning we should bear this in mind very seriously and all activities should be organized according to this impulse. The bell tolls with extreme urgency at present—with terrible urgency. In a certain sense we have reached the climax of platitudes. In an age when all content has been squeezed out of platitudes, content which came to humanity previously but which no longer has any meaning, we must absorb real substantial content into our psychological and social life. We must be clear about the fact that this either/or must be decided by each individual for him or her self and that each must participate in this decision with his most inner force of soul. Otherwise he does not participate in the affairs of humanity.

But the attraction for illusion is especially strong in the age of platitudes. We wish so to sweep away the seriousness of life. We avoid looking at the truth inherent in our evolution. How could people let themselves be deceived by Wilsonian ideas if they really had the intense desire for truthful clarity? It must come. The desire for truth must grow in humanity. Above all, the desire for the liberation of spiritual/cultural life must grow along with the knowledge that nobody has the right to call himself a Christian who has not grasped the saying: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

This means that the kingdom of Christ must become an invisible kingdom, a truly invisible empire, an empire of which one speaks as of invisible things. Only when spiritual science gains in importance will people speak of this empire. Not some church, not some state, not some economic empire can create this empire. Only the will of the individual who lives in a liberated spiritual/cultural life can create this empire.

It is difficult to believe that in the lands in which people are downtrodden much can be done to free spiritual life. Therefore it must be done in those lands where the people are not downtrodden politically, economically and, obviously, not spiritually downtrodden. Above all it must be realized that we have not arrived at the day when we say: Until now things have gone downhill, they will go uphill again! No, if people do not act for this objective out of the spirit, things will not go uphill again, but will continue downhill. Humanity does not live today from what it has produced—for to produce again a spiritual impulse is necessary—humanity lives today from reserves, from old reserves, and they are being used up. And it is childish and naïve to think that a low point is reached some day and things will get better then, even with our hands in our laps. That's not how it is. And I would like to see that the words spoken here kindle a fire in the hearts of those who belong to the anthroposophical movement. I would hope that the specter which perhaps haunts those who find their way to this anthroposophical movement be overcome by the spirit meant here. It is certainly true that someone who finds his way to such a movement often seeks something for himself, for his soul. Of course he can have that, but only in order to stand with his soul in the service of the whole. He should advance, certainly, for himself, but only so mankind can advance through him. I cannot say that often enough. It should be added to those things I said should be thought about every morning. If we had really taken the inner impulse of this movement seriously, we would have been much farther along. But perhaps what is done in our circles does not help advance towards the future, but is often a hindrance. We should ask ourselves why this is so. It is very important. And above all we should not think that the sharpest powers of opposition are not active from all sides against what strives for the well-being of humanity. I have already indicated to you what is being done in the world in opposition to our movement, what hostility is activated against us. I feel myself obliged to make these things known to you, so that you should never say to yourself: We have already refuted this or that. We have refuted nothing, because these opponents are not interested in the truth. They prefer to ignore as much as possible the facts and simply aim slanderous accusations from all corners.

I would like to read part of a letter to you which arrived recently from Oslo. “One of our anthroposophical friends works in a so-called people's college in Oslo together with a certain Schirmer. This Mr. Schirmer is in a certain sense quite a proficient teacher, but is also a fanatical racist and a sworn anti-Semite. At a people's meeting where three of us gave lectures about the Threefold Society, he talked against us, or rather against Dr. Steiner's Towards Social Renewal, although without much success. The guy has a certain influence in teachers' circles and he works in his own way in the sense of the social triformation in the school insofar as he is for freedom, but on the other hand he works against the social triformation and Dr. Steiner for the simple reason that he suspects that Dr. Steiner is a Jew. That is perhaps not so bad. We must expect and overcome more serious opposition. But now he has received confirmation of his suspicion. He turned to an ‘authority,’ namely the editor of the political anthropological monthly, Berlin-Steglitz. This purely anti-Semitic magazine wrote to him that Dr. Steiner is a Jew through and through. He is associated with the Zionists. And the editor added that they, the anti-Semites, have had their eye on you [Dr Steiner] for a long time. Mr. Schirmer also says that a persecution of the Jews is beginning now in Germany, and that all the Jews on the anti-Semites' blacklist should be simply shot down or, as they say, rendered harmless.” and so on.

You see, this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism as such, that's only on the face of it. They choose slogans in these situations, with which they try to accomplish as much as possible with people who listen to slogans. But such things clearly indicate what most people don't want to see, what they want to ignore more and more. It is today much more serious that you think, and we should not ignore the seriousness of the times, but should realize that we are only at the beginning of these things which are opposed to everything that is intended to advance human progress. And that we should never, without neglecting our responsibilities, divert our attention from what is a radical evil within humanity, what manifests as a radical evil within humanity. The worst that can happen today is paying attention to mere slogans and platitudes, and believing that outdated concepts somehow have roots in human reality today—if we do not initiate a new reality from the sources of the spirit itself.

That, my dear friends, was what I wanted to tell you today, first of all to all of you, but especially to those whose visit has pleased us greatly—especially to our English friends, so that when they return to their own country, where it will be so important, they will have something on which to base their activities. You will have seen that I have not spoken in favor or against anyone, nor have I flattered anyone. I only speak here in order to say the truth. I have known theosophists who when they speak to members of a foreign nation begin to talk about what an honor it is to be able to spread the teachings about the spiritual life in a nation which has accumulated so much glory. Such things cannot be said to you here. But I believe that you have come here to hear the truth and I think that I have best served you by really trying to tell the unvarnished truth. You will have learned during your trip that telling the truth nowadays is not a comfortable thing, for the truth calls forth opposition now more than ever. Do not be afraid of opposition, for they are one and the same: to have enemies and to tell the truth. And we will understand each other best when our mutual understanding is based on the desire to hear the unvarnished truth. Before I leave for Germany, this is what I wanted to say to you today, and especially to our English friends.

Like two mighty pillars of the spirit have the annual festivals of Christmas and Easter been placed by the Christian world within the course of the year, itself a symbol of the course of human life. On these spiritual pillars standing before the human soul in its contemplation are inscribed the two great mysteries of mankind's physical existence. We must regard them very differently from the way we regard other events in the course of our physical life.

It is true that a supersensible element reaches into this physical life through our sense observation and our intellectual judgments, through the content of our feeling and will. In certain instances it proclaims itself clearly as supersensible—when, for example, Christian feeling undertakes to symbolize it in the festival of Pentecost. With Christmas and Easter, on the other hand, we must look at two events in earthly life that in external appearance would seem perhaps to be completely physical events; and yet, in contrast to all other physical events, they do not—indeed, they cannot by their very nature—present themselves as simply physical events. We can observe human physical life as we observe nature, perceiving with our senses the external manifestation of the spirit. But we can never observe the two boundary events of human life, not even just their physical occurrence, without confronting through physical perception itself their tremendous riddle, their profound mystery. These are the events of birth and death. In the life of Christ Jesus, and in our thoughts of Christmas and Easter reminding us of it, these two events of man's physical life stand before our soul, addressing the Christian heart.

As we contemplate these two great mysteries in their relation to Christmas and Easter, we find illuminating strength for our thinking, a powerful incentive for our willing, and an uplifting of our whole being. They stand there, these two pillars of the spirit, possessing an eternal value.

In the course of human evolution, however, men's capacities have changed for approaching the sublime conceptions of Christmas and Easter. During the early Christian centuries, when the Event of Golgotha had penetrated and shocked many hearts, men gradually found their way to the thought of a Savior dying on Golgotha. In the Crucified One hanging on the Cross they found the idea of redemption. And they gradually formed the powerful imagination of Christ dying on the Cross. But in later times, especially since our modern age began, Christian feeling has adjusted itself to the materialism rising in human evolution and has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering the world as the newborn Jesus.

One may certainly say that a sensitive person will find European Christianity decidedly materialistic from the way it has concentrated in recent centuries upon the Christmas manger. The desire to fondle the infant Jesus—this is not meant in a bad sense—has become trivial in the course of centuries. And many songs about the Jesus Child that today are still considered beautiful, or—as some people would say—charming, seem to us not serious enough for these grave times.

But the conception of Christmas and the conception of Easter are eternal pillars, eternal monuments of the human heart. One can truly say that this age of new spiritual revelations will cast new light upon Christmas, so that gradually it will be experienced in a glorious, new form. It will be our task to hear the call in present world events for a rejuvenation of many old conceptions, the call for a new revelation of the spirit. It will be our task to understand that a new meaning for Christmas is working its way out of world events for the strengthening and uplifting of the human soul.

The birth and death of a human being, however intently we may observe and analyze them, manifest themselves as events happening on the physical plane but in which a spiritual element prevails. No one who reflects earnestly can possibly deny that they give evidence in the way they occur that man is the citizen of a spiritual world. No physical observation of birth and death will ever find anything in what the senses can perceive and the intellect grasp, other than events in which the spirit is directly manifested in the physical. Only these two earthly events appear in this way to the human heart.

For the event of birth, the Christmas event, the human and Christian heart must develop an ever deeper sense of mystery. One may say that men have seldom looked from a high enough level upon the mysterious nature of birth. Seldom, indeed; but then at such moments its tidings speak to the depths of the human soul.

So it is, for instance, with the images associated with that spiritual genius of fifteenth-century Switzerland, Nikolaus von der Flüe.¹ It is related of him—and he himself told it—that before his birth, before he breathed the outer air, he beheld the physical form that he would have after birth and during the course of his life. Also, he beheld before birth the ceremony of his own christening, with the persons who were present and who were then around him in his early childhood. With the exception of one elderly person whom he did not recognize, he knew all these people because he had seen them before he saw the light of the physical world.

However one may view this story, one cannot but see that it points impressively to the mystery of human birth, which is so magnificently symbolized for world history by the Christmas imagery. The story of von der Flue suggests that there is something connected with our entrance into physical life that only by a very, very thin wall is hidden from our everyday view, a wall so thin that it can be broken through when a karmic situation exists as in the case of Nikolaus von der Flüe. Such moving allusions to the mystery of birth and Christmas still meet us here and there. But one must say that as yet mankind is hardly aware of the fact that birth and death, the two boundary pillars standing there in the physical world, reveal themselves even in their physical appearance as spiritual events that could never occur in the ordinary course of nature, as events in which, on the contrary, divine spiritual Powers actually intervene. This is evident from the fact that both these boundary experiences still remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.

The new revelation of the Christ now moves us to contemplate the course of human life—allow me to express it in the following way—as Christ wishes us to contemplate it in the twentieth century. As we try today to grasp the meaning of Christmas, let us recall a saying attributed to Christ Jesus that points truly to the Christmas event: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Except ye become as little children”: this is certainly not encouraging us to strip away all the mystery of the Christmas conception, and to drag it down to the banality of “dear little Jesus,” as many folk songs and other songs have done—the folk songs less than the art songs—during the materialistic development of Christianity. This very saying—“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”—impels us to look up to mighty impulses flowing through human evolution. And in our own time, all that is happening in the world can surely be no reason for lapsing into trivial ideas of Christmas, when the human heart is filled with pain, when it must look back upon millions of human beings who have met their death in these last years, must think of countless human beings hungering for food. At this time surely nothing is fitting but to contemplate the mighty thoughts in world history that have impelled and inspired humanity. One can be brought to such thoughts by the saying, “Except ye become as little children.” And one can supplement it by these words: “Unless you live your life in the light of this thought, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

When a human being enters this world as a child, he has come directly from the spiritual world. What happens in physical life, the procreation and growth of his physical body, is only a covering for the event that cannot be described otherwise than by saying: man's central being leaves the spiritual world. He is born out of the spirit into the body. When the Rosicrucian says “Ex Deo Nascimur,” he is speaking of the human being entering the physical world. What first en-sheathes him, what makes him a complete physical being here on earth: this is what is referred to by the words “Ex Deo Nascimur.” If one would speak of the kernel of the human being, his innermost core of being, one must say: he comes down from the spirit into this physical world. Through what takes place in the physical world—which he is able to observe from spiritual regions before his conception and birth—he is clothed with a physical body, in order that he may have experiences that are only possible in such a body. But he has come, in his central core of being, out of the spiritual world. And he reveals—to one who wants to see things as they really are in this world, who is not blinded by materialistic illusions—he reveals in his very first years by his very nature that he has come out of the spirit. One's experiences with a child, if one has insight, are of such a character that one feels in him the after-effects of his recent life in the spiritual world.

This is the mystery that is indicated by such stories as the one associated with Nikolaus von der Flüe. A trivial view and one strongly influenced by materialistic thinking asserts in its simplicity that a human being develops his ego gradually in the course of his life from birth to death, that his ego becomes more and more clearly manifest and more and more powerful. This is a naive way of thinking! If one observes the true human ego that comes from the spiritual world into its physical sheath through birth, one speaks quite differently about the entire physical development of the human being. For one knows that as the human being grows physically in his physical body, actually his true ego slowly vanishes into the body, becoming continually less and less manifest. One knows that what develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only a mirrored reflection of spiritual happenings, a dead reflection of a higher life. One is expressing it properly if one says, the entire fullness of a man's being gradually disappears into the body; it becomes more and more invisible. He lives his life here on earth by gradually losing himself in his body. At death he finds himself again in the spirit. That is what one says who knows the facts. Someone ignorant of the facts will declare that a child is incomplete, that his ego gradually develops to greater and greater perfection, growing out of vague subconscious levels of human existence. A knowledge of what the spiritual investigator sees, causes one to speak differently about these things than is done from today's sense-consciousness, enmeshed as it is in external illusions and materialistic feelings.

Thus the human being enters the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature while he is a child is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to his spiritual nature, which is entering into physical existence as if it were falling asleep. This spiritual nature only seems so empty of content to us because we cannot perceive it in ordinary life, just as we cannot perceive the sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to accomplish in regard to his physical body: that he shall bury himself in it more and more deeply, in order to acquire faculties that can only be acquired in this way. His soul and spirit being must lose themselves for a while in physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual origin, in order that we may grow strong in the thought that we have journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world: it is for this reason that the Christmas festival stands there like a mighty pillar of light within the Christian world.

The Christmas imagination must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity. It will then become powerful again for humanity. Human beings will once more be able to draw strength from it for their physical life; it will remind them in the right way of their spiritual origin. Seldom in our present time does it have so powerful an effect upon human hearts as it will have in the future. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in the very laws of spiritual existence, that what appears in the world to help mankind forward does not appear at once in its ultimate form. It appears first, as it were, tumultuously, as if it were launched prematurely by unlawful spirits of world evolution. We only understand the historical evolution of humanity properly when we realize that truths are not always to be taken up as they first appear. The right moment must also be considered for their entrance into evolution in their true light.

Among various thoughts that have entered into the evolution of modern humanity—inspired, certainly, by the Christ Impulse but appearing at first in premature form—is that of human equality before God and the world, the equality of all men. This is a profoundly Christian conception capable of ever increasing in depth. But it should not have been presented to human hearts in such vague form as it was given by the French Revolution when it first appeared among mankind so tumultuously. We must realize that human life is involved in a process of evolution from birth to death, and that the chief impulses working upon it are distributed in time. Think how it is with the human being as he enters sense-existence: he is filled with the idea of the equality of human nature in all men. We experience the child nature most intensely when we regard the child as permeated through his whole being by this idea. Nothing that creates inequality among men, nothing that organizes men so that they feel different from other men: nothing of all this enters at first into the child's nature. It is all imparted to him in the course of his physical life. Inequality is created by men's physical existence. They come from the spirit equal before God and the world and their fellowmen. This is proclaimed by the mystery of the child.

This mystery is closely related to our understanding of Christmas, which will be made more profound by new Christian revelations. For these will have to do with the new Trinity: the human being, representing all humanity; the forces of Ahriman; and the forces of Lucifer. As one learns how man is placed in world existence in a situation of balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, one comes to understand the real significance of the human being in external physical life.

Most of all, understanding must come about, Christian understanding, for a certain aspect of human life. Someday Christian thought will announce a fact that has already been put forward by some minds since the middle of the nineteenth century—may I say, in stammering accents, but quite distinctly. When one has first grasped the fact that a child enters his earth life with a consciousness of human equality, then one must go on to the fact that as the child becomes a man, unequal powers develop in him—as if from just the fact of being born—powers that are obviously not of this earth. One is then confronting another great mystery of human existence, one that is in direct contrast to the idea of equality. To see into this mystery will help one to form a true picture of mankind—something that already at this present moment in time has become earnestly necessary for the future evolution of the human soul. One faces the startling fact that human beings begin to differ from one another while they are growing out of childhood, by reason of something that obviously is born in them, something in their blood: that is, their various gifts and capacities.

One meets the question of gifts and capacities that create such inequality among men in connection with the thought of Christmas. Future Christmas festivals will point to the origin of this vast difference throughout the world in human capacities, talents, even genius. A person will only attain balance in his life when he has learnt to know the origin of certain capacities that are distinguishing him from other men. The light of Christmas, of the Christmas candles, must provide an explanation for evolving humanity. It must answer the question: Do individuals suffer injustice between birth and death from the way the universe is ordered? What is the truth about capacities and talents?

Dear friends, many things will be seen in a different light when mankind has become permeated by the new Christian feeling. Particularly, it will be understood why an esoteric knowledge of the Old Testament included special insight into the nature of prophecy. Who were those prophets who appear in the Old Testament? They were individuals who had been sanctified by Jahve and authorized by Him to use special spiritual gifts that reached far beyond those of ordinary men. Jahve had first to sanctify those capacities that are born to men through the blood. We know that Jahve influences human beings in the time between their falling asleep and waking; He does not work in their conscious life. Every true believer of the Old Testament said in his heart: The capacities and talents that differentiate men, rising to the level of genius in the case of a prophet, are indeed born with the individual. But they are not used by him beneficently unless he sinks in sleep into the realm where Jahve guides his soul impulses. Jahve, active from the spiritual world, transforms his talents; otherwise they would only be physical, only part of his bodily organism.

We point here to the deep mystery of an Old Testament conception. But this must die away, including the belief in the nature of a prophet. New conceptions must enter the evolution of world history for the salvation of mankind. The talent that the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve during unconscious sleep must now in this modern age be sanctified by the human being himself when he is awake and in a state of clear consciousness. But he can only do this if he knows that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even genius, are luciferic endowments, that they work luciferically in the world unless they are permeated and sanctified by all that enters the world as the Christ Impulse. One touches upon a tremendously important mystery in the evolution of modern humanity if one grasps this central fact of the new Christmas thoughts. The Christ must be so felt, so understood that a human being can now stand before Him as a New Testament believer and say: In spite of my childhood sense of equality, I have been endowed with various capacities and gifts. But they can only contribute to the salvation of mankind if I dedicate them to the service of Christ Jesus, if I permeate my whole nature with the Christ, so that they may be freed from the grasp of Lucifer.

A heart permeated by the Christ tears away from Lucifer what otherwise works luciferically in human physical existence. This must be the powerful thought that will pervade the future evolution of the human soul. It is the new Christmas thought, the new annunciation of Christ's activity in our souls, transforming the luciferic influence. Lucifer's power in us is not due to our having come out of the spiritual world, but to the fact that we are clothed by a physical body permeated by blood. We have our talents through heredity. Our individual capacities come to us through the luciferic stream of heredity. They must be mastered and put to use during physical life not through inspirations we receive from Jahve during sleep, but through the Christ Impulse that we can feel working within us in our fully conscious life.

“Oh, Christian,” says the new Christianity, “turn your thoughts to Christmas! lay upon the Christmas altar all the differentiation you have received through your blood! sanctify your capacities, gifts, genius as you behold them illuminated by the light coming from the Christmas tree!”

The new revelation of the spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dull and unheeding as it addresses us in this extremely serious time. If we remain receptive, then we will find the power that mankind must find for the great tasks that will confront us in this very age. We must experience the meaning of Christmas in all its gravity. Today we must realize in clear waking consciousness what the Christ was really saying when He spoke those words, “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” The sense of equality that is natural to a child is not—if we regard him properly—proved false by these words. For the Child Whose birth we commemorate on Christmas Eve reveals ever new thoughts to mankind in the course of our evolution. He now proclaims that we must place all the distinguishing capacities we possess within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child. All that our different talents achieve must be brought to the altar of this Child.

Perhaps, stirred by the earnestness of this Christmas thought, you will now ask, “How am I to experience the Christ Impulse in my own soul?” This question is often a burden in men's hearts.

Dear friends, what we may call the Christ Impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment, suddenly and tempestuously. It has taken root differently at different periods of evolution. In our present time a human being must take up in full, clear waking consciousness the cosmic truths that have been imparted stammeringly by our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. As these truths are made known and as he comes to understand them, they will awaken in him the assurance that a new revelation, the new Christ Impulse for this age, has been brought to him. He will perceive the new Impulse if only he is attentive.

Try—in a truly lively way such as is appropriate for this age—to take into yourselves the spiritual thoughts of the cosmic Powers; try to take them up not merely as a teaching, or a theory, but so that they move your souls to their very depths and warm them, illuminate them, permeate them, so that you carry the thoughts living within you! Try to feel them so intensely that they seem to enter your soul by way of your body and change the body itself. Try to strip away from them all abstractions, all theory. Try to realize that they are true nourishment for the soul; they are not just thoughts, they are spiritual life coming from the spiritual world.

Enter into the most intimate inner union with these truths and you will observe three things. First you will observe that gradually—however they may be expressed—they eradicate from your soul something that usually appears so obviously in human beings in this age of the consciousness soul: self-seeking. When you begin to notice that they kill egotism and disarm self-seeking, then you will have perceived the Christ-permeated character of the thoughts of our anthroposophical spiritual science.

Secondly, observe the moment that untruthfulness approaches you, untruthfulness in any form, either when you yourself are tempted to be careless about the truth or when the falseness approaches you from the outside. If at such a moment you can also observe that immediately there is an impulse moving within you, warning you, pointing to the truth, admonishing you and impelling you to hold fast to the truth, wanting to prevent falsehood from entering your life—in contrast to ordinary present-day life, so much inclined to sham—then you are again experiencing the living Christ Impulse. No one will find it easy to lie, or to be casual about sham and pretence, in the presence of the spiritual thoughts of anthroposophy. A sign pointing the way to a sense for truth—apart from all other aspects of understanding: this you will find in the thoughts of the new revelation of the Christ. When you have reached the point where you do not seek a merely theoretical understanding of spiritual science, as is sought for any other science, but where the thoughts so penetrate you that you say to yourself, “Now that these thoughts are united with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing me, directing me toward the truth”: then you will have found the second aspect of the Christ Impulse.

In the third place, when you feel that something streams from these thoughts even down into your body, but especially into your soul, working to overcome illness, making you healthy and strong, when you sense the rejuvenating, invigorating power of these thoughts, the adversaries of illness: then you will have experienced the third aspect of the Christ Impulse. This is the goal toward which mankind strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit: to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome egotism and the falseness of life, to overcome self-seeking through love, the sham of life through truth, illness through health-giving thoughts that put us into immediate accord with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the harmonies of the universe.

Not all these things can be attained at the present time, for man carries an ancient heritage around with him! There is a foolish lack of understanding, for instance, when such a backstairs politician as Christian Science twists into a caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Even though, due to our ancient heritage, our thinking is not yet sufficiently powerful to accomplish what we long to accomplish—perhaps from a selfish motive—nevertheless thought does possess healing power. But in regard to such things people's ideas are always distorted. Someone who understands may tell you that certain thoughts give you health, and then he is suddenly stricken with this or that illness. It is indeed due to that ancient heritage that we cannot today be relieved of all illness merely by the power of our thought. But are you able to say what illness you would have had if you had not possessed these thoughts? Can you say that you could have passed your life in your present state of health if you had not had these thoughts? Can you prove that a person who has interested himself in our spiritual science and then has died at forty-five years of age, would without these thoughts not have died at age forty-two or age forty? People think the wrong way around! They concern themselves with what their karma cannot bestow upon them and pay no attention to what their karma does bestow upon them. If—in spite of every contradiction in the external world—you will watch and observe through the power of inner trust that you have gained from an intimate acquaintance with the thoughts of spiritual science, you will perceive the healing power that is penetrating even your physical body, the health-giving, freshening, rejuvenating force that is the third element which Christ the Healer brings with His continuous revelations to the human soul.

We wanted to enter more deeply into the thought of Christmas which is so closely related to the mystery of human birth. We wanted to bring in brief outline what is revealed to us today from the spirit as a continuation of the thought of Christmas. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our lives. We can feel that it places us, no matter what happens, in the midst of the impulses of cosmic evolution. We can feel ourselves united with those divine impulses; we can understand them and draw power for our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought. Humanity is evolving—it would be wrong to deny it. Our only right course is to go forward with this evolution.

And Christ has declared: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” This is not just a phrase, it is truth. Christ has not only revealed Himself in the Gospels; Christ is with us; He reveals Himself continually. We must have ears to hear what He is ever newly revealing in this modern age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations; but strength will be ours if we have such faith.

Strength will indeed come to us if we accept the new revelations, even if they speak to us from life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. We journey as individual souls through repeated earth-lives during which our destiny comes to fulfillment. Even this thought, which enables us to sense the spiritual working behind external physical life, even this we can only accept if we take into ourselves in a truly Christian sense the revelations that follow one another. The Christian in this age, the true Christian, when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin to work with the strengthening thoughts that can now come to him from the new cosmic revelations, bringing power to his will and illumination to his thinking. And his feeling should support the power and light of his thought in the course of the Christian year, to help him approach that other thought that points to the mystery of death: the Easter thought, which brings the final experience of human earthly existence before our souls as a spiritual experience. We will feel the Christ more and more livingly as we are able to place our own existence in the right relation to His life. The Rosicrucian of the Middle Ages, uniting his thought with Christianity, declared: Ex Deo Nascimur; in Christo Morimur; Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus. Out of the Divine we have been born, if we think of ourselves as human beings here on earth. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This all pertains to our life, our individual human life. If we look away from our own life to the life of Christ, then we see our life as mirrored reflection. Out of the Divine we are born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This saying is true of the Christ living in our midst as our first-born Brother. We can so affirm it that we feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and reflected in our human nature. Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as it stands in the Gospel of Luke, represented by the symbol of the descending dove—out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died; in the Divine will He rise again.

We can only perceive eternal truths in the right way if we see them in their contemporary reflection—not in a single, absolute, abstract form—and if we feel ourselves not as abstract humanity but as live, individual human beings whose duty is to think and act in harmony with the time in which we live. Then we will try to understand the Christ, who is with us “always, even to the end of the world,” to understand Him in His contemporary language as He teaches and enlightens and empowers us through the thought of Christmas. We will want to take the Christ into ourselves in His new language. We must become intimately related to Him. Then we will be able to fulfill in ourselves His true mission on this earth and beyond death. In each epoch human beings must take the Christ into themselves in their own way. This has been people's feeling when they have beheld in the right way the two great pillars of the spirit, Christmas and Easter.
That profound German mystic, Angelus Silesius,² expressed it in this way:

“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”

And, contemplating Easter, he wrote:

“The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.”

Truly, the Christ must live within us. We are not human beings in some abstract sense, we are human beings of a definite epoch, and the Christ must be born within us in our epoch in accordance with His words. We must endeavor to bring the Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination. As He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind throughout all ages, even to the end of earthly time, so He wills now to be born in our souls. If we try to experience the birth of Christ within us in this epoch, as it becomes a light and a power in our soul—the eternal Light and eternal Power entering into time—then we perceive in the right way the historical birth of Christ in Bethlehem and its image in our own souls.

“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”

As He creates the impulse in our hearts today to contemplate His birth—His birth in the course of human events, His birth in our individual souls—so we deepen the thought of Christmas within us. And so let us look toward that “night of consecration” (Weihenacht), which we should feel is bringing a new strength and a new illumination to mankind, to help them to endure the many evils and sorrows they have had to suffer and will still have to suffer.

“My Kingdom,” Christ said, “is not of this world.” It is a saying that challenges us, if we regard His birth in the right way, to find in our own souls the path to His Kingdom where He will give us strength and light for our darkness and helplessness, through the impulses coming from the world of which He Himself spoke, which His appearance at Christmas will always proclaim. “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But He has brought His Kingdom into this world, so that we may always find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope bestowed upon us in all the circumstances of life, if only we will come to Him, taking His words to heart, words such as these:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

• 1. Nikolaus von der Flüe: 1417–1487. Urged arbitration as a method for resolving disputes.
• 2. Angelus Silesius: 1624–1677. See Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, GA 7 (Blauvelt, New York, Steinerbooks, 1980).

In what we have here been considering I have shown how in the course of man's evolution something very different may be going on in the unconscious depths of his soul from what appears more on the surface. A man may think he is striving for this or that, whereas in reality in his innermost soul there hold sway impulses directed to quite different aims. This truth is particularly significant in our time. We see today a whole class of men setting their wills in a certain direction. But just here we may have the experience how in this age of the development of consciousness something different is coming to expression on the surface of the soul from what is living in its depths, where impulses not present in consciousness today are striving for expression, for realisation.

The consciousness of the proletariat is today filled with three things. First, the materialistic interpretation of history; secondly, the view that up to now, in reality, class struggles have been at the basis of what has gone on in the world, what is now happening being thought to be a reflection of these class struggles. The third thing is the theory of surplus value, that is, the theory that surplus value arises through the unpaid labour of the worker, which makes a profit that is than taken by the employer from the worker without the latter receiving compensation.

What makes the impulses arise in the consciousness of the proletariat, from which are drawn the forces active in the modern social movement, is derived from the combination of these three factors. This, however, refers only to what lies in the consciousness of the proletariat. In the depths of the souls of all present-day mankind, in the deeper layers of the souls of the proletariat too, three other things are living, of which the world as yet knows very little. The world does not make such effort towards self-knowledge, and therefore knows nothing of what, in the depths of the soul, is actually striving for historical realisation.

These three other things are, first, a penetration of the spiritual life, a penetration fitted for the present age, what may be called Spiritual Science. The second is freedom in the life
of thought, freedom of thought. The third is socialism in its right and true sense. Without knowing it the proletariat are striving for these three things. Their instincts follow the other three things that I referred to as being active on the surface of their soul-life, in their actual consciousness.

In this very difference between the proletariat's conscious efforts and their unconscious impulses we see particularly clearly what a complete contrast they make. Take the materialistic interpretation of history. This is due to the modern materialism which has arisen during the last four centuries. This materialism first made itself felt among the leading classes of men in the field of natural science, and later took its hold on all science. It then turned to the material interpretation of history among the members of the modern proletariat, who in reality have simply taken over as heritage the kind of conceptions concerning science holding good for the bourgeoisie. This material conception of history is due to all spiritual life being, as it were, merely the smoke arising from the proceedings in the economic life, from all that is working in the sphere of man's economic life. In the historical course of man's life there is actually only what is going on in the different spheres concerned with the creation of goods—production, trade, consumption; and according to how men have carried on their economy at different times, has depended on their religious belief, what kind of art they have cultivated, what attitude they have taken to rights and morality. The spiritual life is, finally, an ideology, that is, it has no independent reality, being a reflection of the eternal economic struggle. Certainly all the ideas required by men, what they feel aesthetically, on what they bring to expression through their moral will can work back again on the economic struggle. But ultimately all spiritual life is a mirrored image of the external economic life. This is what is called the materialistic interpretation of history. If human life be a mere reflection of purely external, material, economic forces, if it be true that the world is only a world of the senses and that men's thoughts reflect only what is of the senses, if men live entirely in such ideas, wanting to see as reality only what the sense world reveals, then this is a turning away from all true life of the spirit, and signifies man's refusal to recognise an independent spirit resting on itself.

Thus in modern times efforts are directed towards marshalling more and more proofs to justify the assertion that no such thing exists as an independent spirit living in the supersensible, that there is no such thing as spirit at all. This plays upon the surface of men's life of soul, and has constituted. the essential content of modern consciousness since mankind entered the age of the consciousness soul. But in the very depths of their life of soul men today are striving for the spirit; they have, one might say, a most deep and inward need of the spirit. This may be confirmed if we look at the evolution of human history.

We have often looked back on the special kind of spirituality in the first post-Atlantian period of culture, the Indian, and described its character from the most varied standpoints. What we have learnt about it enables those who can look on the things without prejudice to say that the life of spirit, as it existed in the old Indian culture-epoch—to be discovered only by means of Spiritual Science—rests upon unconscious intuition. Mark well, unconscious, for it was then a matter of an atavistic life of spirit.

If we then pass on to the ancient Persian life of spirit and seek its sources, we find them flowing from an unconscious inspiration. The Egypto-Chaldean life of spirit is still prevalent in so-called historic Egyptian times, and if we study history without prejudice we shall be able to see that in the old Egyptian and Chaldaea knowledge we have to do with what is in the soul as unconscious though living imagination.

There then followed the Graeco-Latin life of spirit. In this the ancient imaginations remained, permeated, however, with concepts, ideas. The essential thing expressed by Greek life was that, in human evolution, the Greeks were the first to possess this element that, as an impulse of the soul, was previously non-existent. The Greeks already had ideas, concepts, as I have shown more fully in my Riddles of Philosophy. But through all their ideas and concepts there were weaving the figurative, the imaginative. This is unnoticed today, particularly when it is a question of that unaccountable Greece of which our schools and universities speak. When the Greeks uttered the word ‘idea’ for example, they had in mind nothing so abstract as the concept called up by our word. With than the word conjured up a kind of vision, which was nevertheless to be grasped clearly in the form of concept. It was something perceptible; idea was at the same time vision. In Greek one would never have been able to speak of ideology, though the word comes from the Greek. In any case a Greek would not have spoken so that the same feelings would have been aroused that are aroused today by the word ‘ideology’. For to the Greek ideas were full of being, something permeated by pictures.

Now it is characteristic of our fifth post-Atlantian epoch that imaginations have vanished from the consciousness soul, and it is the concept above all that remains.

Our modern life of spirit, with so little power of picturing things that only abstractions remain, is particularly prized by the cultured for its very dryness and dullness. These times live, so to speak, on abstractions and would reduce everything to some kind of abstract concept. It is just in what is called middle class practical life that, in the most extensive sense, this abstract concept holds sway. It is, however, already making itself felt that in the depths of men's souls slumbering, unconscious impulses are striving after renewed imagination. (This is true of the present and will continue to be so in the near future.) Thus, of the fifth epoch we may say: Concepts striving for imaginations.

1. Old Indian Culture-epoch: Unconscious intuitions as the source of the life of spirit.

2. Old Persian Culture-epoch: Unconscious inspirations as the source of the life of spirit.

3. Egypto-Chaldean Culture-epoch: Unconscious imaginations as the source of the life of spirit.

4. Graeco-Latin Culture-epoch: Unconscious imaginations with concepts.

5. Modern Culture-epoch: Concepts striving for imaginations.

Our Spiritual Science goes to meet this striving for imaginations. The overwhelmingly greater part of mankind knows as yet nothing of what goes on in the soul, and thus see all life of the spirit in mere ideas and concepts before which men feel themselves helpless. For concepts as such have in themselves no content. Till now it has been the destiny among leading circles to develop a certain predilection for purely abstract thinking. This love of abstract thinking, however, has produced something else. This thinking in pure concepts is helpless! It produces an endeavour to rely upon the reality that cannot be relied on because it is only suited to the senses, namely, external physical reality. This belief in external physical reality has, in truth, arisen from the ineffectiveness of the concepts of modern mankind.

The ineffectiveness, the helplessness, of the conceptual life is expressed in every sphere of the spiritual life. In science the great desire is to experiment, so as to discover something not otherwise given to the world of the senses. Pondering on the world of the senses with ideas alone we do not got beyond it, for concepts themselves contain no reality. In art we are getting ever more accustomed to the copying of a model and keeping to the external object alone. Up to now, in art, it has been the destiny of the leading circles of mankind to be absorbed more and more in the mere study of external sense reality. The capacity to create out of the spirit and to represent the spiritual by artistic means is being increasingly lost naturalism alone is striven for, imitation of what nature, as such, represents in the external world, because from the abstract life of the spirit nothing wells up which in itself van be given independent form.

If you consider the development of art in recent times, you will find this everywhere confirmed—this continual striving after more naturalism, after a representation of what externally is seen and perceived. This has finally reached its peak in what is called Impressionism. Before Impressionism artistic endeavour was directed to the reproduction of some external object. Then came those who carried this to its logical conclusion end said: When I have before me a human being or a wood, and I paint this men or this wood, I am not giving my impression, for while I am standing before the wood the sun illumines it in a particular way, but after a few moments the light effect may be suite different. In my desire to be naturalistic what am I to perpetuate? I cannot hold to what the external world shows me for that changes each moment. I try to paint a man who is smiling, but the next instant his expression may be grim! Am I to turn the grim face into the smiling one? What am I to paint? If I wish to paint the external object in its temporary state I shall have to use force on the object. Objects of nature do not allow of this, but with the human object as model force has to be used for the pose and expression to be held as long as possible. But then, when one tries to imitate nature, the model takes on an expression as if he had catalepsy. So that is no good.—For this reason they became Impressionists; they waited to catch and hold the fleeting impression. Then, however, it is no longer possible to be altogether naturalistic, but all means must be used, not to irritate nature, but to reproduce how it appears and reveals itself to anyone in a certain moment. The trouble is that in an effort to be naturalistic one becomes impressionist, and then, alas, as impressionist it is impossible to remain naturalistic: So the whole thing is changed round. Some no longer aimed at giving the impression, at fixing the outward impression, and tried to express what, however primitive, arose within themselves—they tried to hold fast what happens within. These became Expressionists.

In the moral sphere, even in the life of rights, the same course can be shown; everywhere there arises this striving after the abstract life of spirit preferred by men. We have only to look at modern human evolution correctly, and we shall find everywhere this urge towards abstraction. And what effect has this had on the modern proletariat? Since they have been tied to machines, caught up in the present soulless capitalism, their whole destiny has become bound up in the economic life. The same trend of ideas that brought members of the middle-class circles to naturalism in art has now brought the proletariat to the theories expressed in the materialistic interpretation of history. The proletariat everywhere has drawn upon the logical consequences of bourgeois culture—consequences before which the bourgeoisie now stand aghast.

Now, within these bourgeois circles what has been the attitude towards religion? In earlier times there was at least a dim atavistic conception of the Christ-Mystery; there was a feeling that abstract spiritual life offered no possibility of conceiving how the Christ had lived in Jesus. Thus men's ideas became limited to what, in the early days of Christianity, had happened in the world of the senses; they became limited to what merely concerned Jesus. The Christ was looked upon more and more as mere man, whereas the Christ belonging to the supersensible world vanished ever further from the field of human vision. The abstract life of the soul, finding no way to the Christ, contented itself with Jesus. What did the proletariat make of this? They asked themselves: Why do we need any specially religious outlook regarding Jesus? The bourgeoisie have already made of Him the simple man of Nazareth. If Jesus is this simple man of Nazareth, He will naturally be just like us. We are dependent on the economic life and why should Jesus not have been so too? Have we still any justification in ascribing to Him a special mission, or in calling Him the founder of a new human age if He is just the simple man of Nazareth who, for His part, drew His teachings from the economic processes into which He Himself was placed? We must study the economic processes at the time of the founding of Christianity, and the way in which a simple worker deserted his work to spread ideas around concerning the contemporary economic ordering in Palestine. From that we shall see why Jesus made the statements like he did. This Jesus-theory is the final result of modern protestant theology, which no longer has any power over modern men, the modern proletariat.—

But now, in the subconscious depths of their souls, modern men are once more striving for freedom of thought, for inward initiative in thought. On the conscious surface of their soul-life it appears that the opposite is to be the aim, and this opposite is the object of their striving. Hence the deep protesting opposition in the subconscious which comes to expression in the present terrible struggle. The leading bourgeois circles want to be free of any authority; but they are up to the neck in every kind of belief in authority. They have a blind belief in authority above all where the sphere of the State is concerned—now regarded by them as the highest authority. For whose judgment stands higher for the modern middle-class than that of the ‘expert’? The expert is consulted in everything, even in matters of external life. Whoever enters life having left the University with a degree, must know everything. Be he a theologian, he is consulted about God's intentions towards man; if a lawyer he is asked what rights a man has in life; if a doctor of medicine, he is asked for a universal cure, and if any kind of philosopher at all, he is questioned about every possible thing in the world. Modern philosophers always smile when their glance falls on the book of a venerable philosopher of pre-Kantian days—Christian Wolf. This book is called Rational Thoughts on God, the World, the Soul of Man, and all other things; people smile at such a book. But modern leading classes most firmly believe in the spiritual laboratories the State has set up for its citizens, where the whole content of human intelligence is brewed. The concern of these circles is not to give everyone a consciousness of his own, but to create a uniform consciousness, and to manage that in the widest sense it should be a State-consciousness. Modern consciousness is much more a consciousness of the State than is commonly believed. People think of the State as their God who Gives them all they need. They no longer have to bother themselves about things, for the State sees to it that there should be provision for all reasonable departments of life. The proletariat have been excluded from the life of the State except in a few spheres allowed them by its democratic form. With their labour-power that engages the whole man, the proletariat were yoked to the economic life. For this reason it now drew upon itself, for its own life alone, the final consequence. The modern middle-class citizen has a State-consciousness, and though he may not always admit it he is quite willing to boast about this State-consciousness. It is really not necessary to have “Reserve-Lieutenant” and “Professor” printed on your card, just to make a parade of your State-consciousness. It can be done in a quite different way. But the proletariat had no interest in the State. They were harnessed to the economic life, and their feelings were again, though in accordance with their own lives, the final consequence of middle-class feelings. The proletarian consciousness became class-consciousness, and thus we see that since they had nothing to do with the State their class-consciousness was built on internationalism. The middle-class were able to have leanings towards the State only because this modern State looked after them, and the middle-class wish to be looked after. The State, however, did not look after the proletarian, and he felt himself as part of the world only in so far as he belonged to his class. The arising of the proletarian class has been brought about in the same way throughout all States. Hence came the formation of an international proletariat, feeling consciously opposed to the bourgeoisie and all that tended, with the same force of consciousness, towards the State and the agents of the State. Thus, within recent times there has arisen an extraordinarily powerful form of class-consciousness among the proletariat. I do not know how many of you have been to proletarian meetings. But how do they always close They close by copying as a proletarian consequence what has come from so many bourgeois organisations and interests! For example, with what did bourgeois meetings in middle Europe begin and and? With “Hail to the Emperor:” And every proletarian meeting has ended with “Long live the international revolutionary social democracy!” We have only to reflect on what enormous suggestive power lies in these words heard by the proletariat week after week, and how these words induce a uniform consciousness throughout the masses so that all freedom of thought has naturally been driven out. All this has taken firm hold of the soul. Formerly there were meetings, that have now become less frequent, called by the bourgeoisie, to which social democrats also were invited. The Chairman on closing would say: “I shall first beg the social democrats to leave, and then ask the audience to rise and give a salute to the Emperor.” There were also proletarian meetings at the discussions of which the bourgeoisie were allowed to contribute. And at the end the Chairman would ask middle-class members to retire, so that the “Long live the international revolutionary social democracy” could be proposed. Thus was welded what passed through the soul as a uniform class-consciousness—the opposite of what was in the depths of their souls, the opposite of the longing for individual freedom of thought, for an individual form of consciousness!—That is the second thing.

And the third thing pressing for realisation in the depths of the modern soul is Socialism, which can be briefly described as the effort of the modern soul, in the time of the consciousness soul, to be able to feel itself an individual within the social organism. This is how man wants the social organism to be founded; he wants to feel himself member of this social organism. This means that he wishes a consciousness to permeate him that gives him the feeling: What I do is done so that I know in what way the social organism has a part in me and how I have a share in the social organism. Man lives within the social organism. But nowadays, as I have said, the feeling for the social organism is present only in the subconscious.

Today when a painter points a picture he is right in saying: This picture must be paid for; I have put my art into it.—What is his art? It is something only made possible for him by the community, by the social organism. His artistic ability, it is true, depends upon his karma, his earlier earth lives; but people today do not believe that, and by not believing it deceive themselves. If however we ignore the share of ability brought down by our individuality from higher regions through birth, then we are entirely dependent upon the social organism. But modern man pays no conscious heed to this, so instead of a social feeling in his consciousness there has arisen during the last four centuries, above all, on increasingly egoistic, anti-social trend of thought. This anti-social thought expresses itself particularly by everyone thinking first of himself and trying to get as much as possible out of the social organism. The feeling that one should return to the social organism what one has received, is harboured indeed by very few. In leading bourgeois circles there has gradually arisen in regard to the spiritual life the greatest imaginable egoism, egoism that looks upon sheer spiritual enjoyment, sheer intellectual enjoyment, as something man is specially justified in procuring for himself. We have, however, no claim to spiritual enjoyment prepared for us by the social organism if we are not in the position to return to the social organism an appropriate equivalent.

Now the proletariat, not being able to share in the spiritual part of the social organism, and being yoked to the economic life and to soulless capitalism, are again driven to the final consequence of middle-class egoism shown in the theory of surplus value. The worker recognises that it is he who actually produces what comes from machines at the factories, and wants to have the proceeds. He does not wish a part to be withdrawn and to go elsewhere. Seeing nothing but the capitalist who places him at the machine, he naturally thinks that all the surplus value goes to the capitalists and that he must above all turn against them. Considered objectively, there is of course something else, quite different hidden in this so-called surplus value. For what is surplus value? It is everything produced by manual labour for which this labour receives no compensation. Suppose there were no surplus value, that everything went to the worker for his immediate needs. Then it would go without saying that there would be no spiritual culture, no further culture at all! There would be only the economic life, only what can be brought into existence through manual labour. It cannot be a question therefore of the surplus value going to the manual worker, but only of its application in a way that can bring surplus value and manual work into agreement. This will happen only when conditions are created in which the manual worker can have some understanding of where the surplus value goes.

Here one touches on the point where most of the offences of the modern middle-class order have been committed. Machines and factories have been set up, trade has been carried on, capital put into circulation, the worker placed at the machine and thus harnessed to the capitalistic economic order. There he is meant to work. But no one has had the idea that the worker has need of anything beyond his labour power. It is not his labour power alone but also his leisure, the force he has left when his work is done, that must be used in a healthy social order. Only those capitalists are justified who have as great an interest in the Proletariat's labour power that is left over, as they have in the economic application of their forces. Those capitalists alone have justification who take care that the worker, at the end of a definite period of work, can have access to what is good from a universal human point of view spiritually and otherwise educationally.

For this, he must first have the fruits of education. In Middle-class society these fruits of education have been developed, therefore it has been possible for all kinds of popular cultural institutions to be set up. What people's kitchens of the spiritual life! What has not been founded in this sphere! But what feelings must have been awakened by all this in the proletariat? The feeling indeed that the middle-class is giving him something they are cooking there among themselves. Naturally he distrusts it and thinks: Aha, they would make me middle-class too by feeding me with the milk of the pious way of thinking in these people's kitchens!—These welfare movements of the bourgeoisie are largely responsible for the facts arising today in such a shocking way on the horizon of social life. What is appearing flows from much deeper sources than is generally thought. I want the surplus value. That is the egoistic principle that appears as the final consequence of the egoism of the middle-class who also wanted the surplus value. Once again the proletariat takes on the final consequence. And instead of the real, true socialism, slumbering in the depths of the soul, there appears on the surface of the life of the soul, in the consciousness, the theory of surplus value which is eminently anti-social. For everyone who takes surplus value to his heart is doing so for the satisfaction of his own egoism.

Thus today we have an anti-social socialism, just as we have a striving for a content of consciousness that is nothing of the sort. It is simply the result of the economic connection of one class of human beings expressing itself in the class-consciousness of the proletariat. Thus today we have a spiritual endeavour that denies the spirit and has found its logical conclusion in the materialistic interpretation of history.

We must look deeply into these things otherwise we shall not understood the present times. H0w little, in this direction, have the middle-class circles been inclined to cultivate insight into these connections, how little are they still prone to become conscious of them though the facts have spoken so clearly and with such urgency. In no other way will it be possible to bring about a striving among the proletariat that is truly social, in place of the present anti-social striving, than by trying to establish the economic life on a healthy, independent basis as a member of the social organism, which without State interference will have its own laws and its own governing body. In other words, we must make every effort to prevent the State being its own economist in any sphere. Then could be developed real socialism in the economic life, for which there is a deep yearning in the human soul. And there must also be an endeavour to separate from the economic life that of the actual political State, which for its part has no claim either to the economic life nor to the spiritual, cultural, educational life, and so on. If the life of the State makes no demands in either direction, but simply embodies the life of rights, than it bring to expression what here in the physical world is the basis of the relation between man and man—the relation that makes all men equal in the sight of the law. It is only when the life of the State is thus that true freedom of thought can be developed.

As third member of the sound social organism the life of spirit must be formed on its own basis, which can be drawn from the reality of the spirit and must press onward to true Spiritual Science. What in the depths of their souls men are striving for today is indeed the healthy social order, which must, however, be threefold.

Thus can things be regarded, as they have been considered by us today, and Spiritual Science should be taken also in this sense both deeply and earnestly, not as something that is listened to like a Sunday sermon, for that is middle-class.

It is middle-class that in its economic life only a small circle should, at a pinch, be cared for—at least, think they are caring for themselves. It is middle-class in the life of the State to let the State do the caring, and when, to pay a little attention to the life of the spirit, people visit a person, or take up theosophy or anything of the kind. It is really respectably bourgeois: And the Theosophical Movement today has indeed established a life of the spirit very characteristic of middle-class life. One can think of nothing more bourgeois in character than this modern Theosophical Movement. It has grown up as a sectarian spiritual movement right out of the needs of this class. Hence came the struggle when we tried to work out from the Theosophical Movement something that should be permeated by modern human consciousness, and established as a movement for mankind. But from this sectarian bourgeois element, that found an anchorage in the superficiality of human souls, there was always opposition. We must get beyond this; anthroposophical striving must be understood as something demanded by the times, giving us wide instead of narrow interests, and not merely leading us into little groups for the reading of lecture cycles. It is good to reed lecture cycles; I beg you not to jump to the conclusion that no one in future should read them. We should, however, not stop there. What is read must be put into practice by seeking above all to find the relation with modern consciousness. Let us therefore thoroughly read the cycles, and we shall soon see that what is in them actually passes over into our life forces! Then it is the best social nourishment today for striving souls. For everything is thought out there, as indeed it is ultimately in our building, especially in what is there striven for artistically. It is thought out in the sense of modern times, and in these times it can be thought out in no other way. I do not know if you have considered how this building tries to be, even in social respects, a most modern product, and how in this modern sense it aids man in his striving. Just imagine a building the inside of which, or the greater part of which, had no purpose—if it just stood there! It ought to stand in a connection with the whole of the rest of the world order, to have any sense at all. Overhead in the cupola even by day it would be pitch dark, dark as night, were electric light not to come in from outside! This building points to all that is going on outside, so thoroughly is it born of all that is most modern. It must therefore develop in connection not with what is on the surface of the soul but with the inner spiritual aspirations of the time.

Thus, you might reflect upon much that is connected with this building. It is indeed a representative of the most modern spiritual life, and is only to be rightly understood if we grasp the idea of it being a kind of comet, a comet with a tail. The tail consists in there living in the human soul what is really raying forth in feeling from Anthroposophy. But it might easily happen that many people would take up the attitude towards this building that some Catholics, and indeed leading Catholics, have taken towards modern astronomy. In modern astronomy comets are looked upon as ordinary bodies in the firmament, whereas in olden days they were thought to be rods of correction wielded by some materially conceived spirit from a heavenly window. When the time came that leaders of Catholicism could no longer deny that comets should be ranked with other heavenly bodies, they invented en expedient. Some of them who were clever said: The comet consists of a core and a tail; we cannot deny that the core is a heavenly body like the rest, but the tail is not so; the tail has the origin formerly ascribed to it!—So it may also happen that people come to think: We approve of the building, but we will have nothing to do with all the odd experiences issuing from it like a comet's tail!—

But the building, like the comet, belongs to its tail, and it will be necessary that everything in relation to it should be felt in its true connection.

Translator Unknown

From the various discussions on our present-day stage of development you will have seen that, from a certain higher point of view, mankind is at the present time passing through a very important phase in its existence. If I say "at the present time" we must naturally be aware that what is in question is a very long period, and when we speak of the "present time" today we mean the epoch of the consciousness soul, into which mankind entered roughly at the middle of the 15th century and which extends over 2,000 years. We will, in turn, be succeeded by another epoch, in which an essential part of human nature, quite different from what has developed in the epoch which has just elapsed, will force its way to the surface.

We always divide up the whole evolution of mankind, you see, into sequences of seven phases, whether we are fixing our eyes on longer or shorter epochs. We are now standing in the fifth epoch, and we know that in the sixth epoch the spirit-self is to take possession of mankind. The development of the Ego belongs to our epoch, although it particularly brings the consciousness- soul to expression. In passing over from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch man passes over a sort of Rubicon (see diagram), when the whole of mankind enters into a phase of development which leads up to higher spirituality. This is a very important, significant fact. Now when one is describing conditions of evolution on a great scale, for example those which concern the whole of mankind, it is always inadequate to do so by means of the conditions of development of individual men. If one does this, one is very liable to get mere comparisons. What I am about to quote is, of course, more than a mere comparison, but you must be on your guard against taking the matter pedantically. You must take it in a broad sense.

You know that when a human being enters into the supersensible world he has to pass what we call the Guardian of the Threshold. One comes into the supersensible would by passing this Threshold. You will find this passing- over depicted in my little booklet The Threshold of the Spiritual World. If you take what is depicted there, together with certain chapters of the work How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, you can get more precise representations of this. You know that when one passes over the Threshold the existing bonds in the human soul which connect thinking, feeling and willing become more loosened. Thinking, feeling and willing become in a certain sense more independent. On this side of the Threshold in a normal spiritual life, these three activities of Man are more interwoven.

Regard must be had to these facts, that one has to pass over the Threshold on entering into the supersensible world, and that, in a certain sense, a kind of splitting apart of the three principal activities of human soul-life takes place, which makes thinking, feeling and willing independent. What the individual man can consciously experience while passing over into the supersensible world is being experienced by the whole of mankind in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch lies the Threshold through which the whole of mankind must pass.

The fact that the whole of mankind is passing through the Threshold does not at all need to come directly to the consciousness of individual men. If, for example, men were to persevere in that disposition which the majority now has, in refusing all spiritual knowledge, the whole of mankind would pass over the Threshold just the same in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but men, for the greater part, would not be aware of the fact. That powerful soul-spiritual event which can be described as the Crossing of the Threshold can only be experienced consciously by men if they partake in that knowledge which is obtained through Spiritual Science. But event if not a single man were aware that the whole of mankind is passing over the Threshold, that in reality mankind is already, at this time, engaged in this passing, the passing would, nevertheless, take place. It does not in the least depend on whether mankind is aware of it or not. It can be that men are not aware of it. They can hinder the spreading of knowledge of this fact by their stubbornness. But the bringing to expression of the fact in the development of mankind is not thereby prevented.

If you first of all take this in its abstract aspect, you will be able to say to yourselves during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch of ours, during the development of the consciousness-soul, something significant and mighty is happening to mankind. To this belongs the fact that a certain separation is taking place of the life of thinking from those of feeling and willing. Please fix your attention clearly on this fact. A separation is taking place in mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which makes independent the life of thinking, that of feeling and that of willing. The three spheres of the soul-life of the whole of mankind are becoming more independent. And this will distinguish that mankind of the future from the mankind of the past, that in the past the soul was more centralised in itself, while in the future it will feel itself to be three-membered. If a human being is alone by himself, he will certainly be able to undergo his development in this sense in which we find it intimated in the work How Does One Attain Higher Worlds?: this concerns single, individual men. When men are taken together as a people, a state, and economic organisation and so forth, when men have intercourse with one another to get to know and to satisfy their common interests, this splitting of the whole soul-life into three spheres is developing because, as has been said, behind the scenes of existence of the whole of mankind is passing through a phase of development which one can compare with the passing of the individual man through the Threshold into the supersensible world.

Now there area actually men in our time who are aware of something of these events which are occurring behind the scenes of existence. But they are only aware of them, I should like to say, in the negative sense. I have often mentioned to you the name of Fritz Mauthner, who has written a Critique of Speech and a thick, two-volume Dictionary of Philosophy.¹ After I have recently said something substantial to you, just about the significance of speech in human life,² it will be interesting to you to hear how a man of the present day thinks about the soul-life of man, who, like Fritz Mauthner, directs his attention just to speech but in doing so has no inkling of the existence of Spiritual Science, who has no idea of what Spiritual Science can do for mankind. Just in the case of this kind of man of the present-day, who is entirely ignorant of spiritual-scientific matters but who has an acute brain, more intelligent than those of innumerable official learned men, one can find peculiar opinions uttered about human development when he turns his attention to the working of speech, to the human soul.

On the whole, as you know well, the mankind of today is still infinitely proud of what it calls its Science. Fritz Mauthner is not at all proud of this Science. He sets no store at all by this Science. For he believes that, while they think they have a Science, they are in fact, merely muddling about with words, that they are merely relying on words, and that while they think in words, come to an understanding with words and think that they have an inner soul-life, they are, nevertheless, fundamentally only moving about in the external words. Fritz Mauthner has made this clear.

Now call to mind that I recently said to you³: of the whole construction of our speech, the dead most clearly understand what we say to them in verbs, while they aware of almost nothing of what we want to say to them when wee speak to them in nouns. In this connection you can already have a feeling of what importance speech has in the real spiritual life of men. And if men cannot rid themselves of the speech-content of their so-called thinking then, when they think in nouns, they are in actual fact thinking something completely unspiritual, something which does not make its way into the Spiritual World at all. They cut themselves off from the Spiritual World as a result of thinking in terms of nouns. It is, indeed, very much the case at the present day that men are cutting themselves off from the Spiritual World by a kind of thinking in terms of nouns.

Peoples which have already fallen into decadence and which experience their verbs in a very substantive way [...] are thereby setting themselves completely off from the Spiritual World.

Now after Fritz Mauthner had found that, in everything which is carried on today as Science, there really exists nothing more than a sort of "making a fool of oneself" through speech, he comes to an opinion about the human soul which is remarkable in the highest degree for the present day. He says in the first place, men confront the world. While they are confronting the world and perceive it with their senses, they are really only becoming aware of those impressions which they denote by means of adjectives. People do not pay attention to this, but it is a good remark. If you see a bird flying, if you see a table standing, you are really only perceiving qualities through your senses—let us say, the colour of the bird. You are also only perceiving the qualities of the table. It is really only a self- deception, an illusion, that you still perceive a special table apart from these qualities, that you can perceive something else besides those impressions which you denote by adjectives, namely what you can denote by nouns. With his senses, man only perceives the qualities of things. When he puts these sensible qualities into words by means of adjectives, by means of the adjectives of speech, he is living sensually with the things, in an external way. And a man like Fritz Mauthner asks himself: but what can a man, who is living with the things in an external way, really receive into himself from the things? What can he reproduce about the things? He can only receive, thinks Fritz Mauthner, what is reproduced through Art, by which is understood the whole development of art from the most primitive stages of mankind to what can be indicated today as the highest stage of art. When man digests what he perceives with the senses, what he can uttered through adjectives, Art arises.

For people like Fritz Mauthner, who have stripped off much that is superstitious in the present time, especially the superstitions of our schools, artistic creation, even the most primitive of all, is the only thing which man achieves creatively in union with things. But man is not satisfied with merely expressing the qualities of things by means of adjectives: he forms nouns. But with the nouns he indicates nothing at all of what approaches men in the external sense-world.

Fritz Mauthner makes this especially clear, and for this reason he says in the second place: when Man arises to illusionary life by forming nouns, mysticism arises in his soul. Here he believes that he is penetrating into the essence of things, and is not aware that he really has nothing in the nouns. In this sphere—so Fritz Mauthner thinks—he can only dream. He therefore says: if you men really want to live, you must represent things artistically, for only then are you awake. If you have no mind for artistic representations, you really are not awake at all in your soul. You are dreaming if you think that you can penetrate into the essence of things further than can be done by the mere artistic forming of sensible quality- data. You fall into unreality with your mysticism, but you have a certain satisfaction in this mysticism. You dream of things by forming nouns in reference to them.

It is true that, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, this is a foolish assertion, but one which is extraordinarily acute and important for the present time, because in fact a man does only experience dream illusions if he develops only those qualities which people love today in the whole world of nouns, in which he can live mystically. But the majority of men do not make this clear to themselves.

However strangely it may sound, it is an extraordinarily important fact for the life of the present day that men work with the external, sensible qualities of things, with what they bring to expression in adjectives. They work on these external things by altering their qualities in some way. Then, disregarding the fact that they are working on these external things—let us say, in primitive art, people turn to the churches, to the schools, in order to learn something about the essence of things. But there they get only get an education expressed in nouns, really nothing but illusions. A man like Fritz Mauthner has a quite correct feeling for this. If one walks over a meadow and sees the green surface there, differentiated in the most varied way, interspersed with white, blue, yellow and reddish varieties of flowers, one has what is the true reality in the sensible world. But men believe that they can get hold of something beyond this. If they walk on the road, one beside the other, and the one stretches out his hand and picks something which looks yellow, he then asks the other: but what is the plant called? The other has, perhaps, learned at some time, from someone else or at school, what this plant is called, and he utters a noun. But this whole proceeding is an illusory one—it is a mere dream-activity. The true activity consists merely in seeing something yellow of a particular shape, but what is said about it in nouns is a dream-activity.

Men love this dream-activity today, but in fact it has no content. Many people, who are left unsatisfied by mere occupation with the external, qualitative impressions, listen to sermons and take part in divine-services. But all that lives in their souls as a result of the sermons and church services is also, at bottom, no more that a dream, a tissue of illusions, nothing real. Men who occupy themselves more accurately with the character of speech, as Fritz Mauthner did, notice this and draw attention to the fact that in the moment when one goes beyond what is artistic or artistically handled one at once enters the sphere of mystic dreaming.

Then Fritz Mauthner differentiates yet a third stage in the soul-life of men today, one which he calls Science. Today this is quite specially proud of the idea of development, of evolution. It prefers to express what it presents in verbs. But now take what I have said to you with reference to the experiencing of verbal activity, the activity of verbs. But how many people experience verbs eurhythmically today? How dry, insipid and abstract is what men experience in verbs! The German says Entwicklung. One says "evolution" if one is going to utter the same idea in speech in a different way. But one certainly has no idea at all of the reality of the words "evolution" or Entwicklung unless one is in the position concretely to carry one's feeling right through this word, inwardly to live through it.

But how many people, if they say: "the physical man of today has evolved (entwickelt) from lower organisms" think of a ball of thread is wound together and which is being unwound, which is "e-volved"! If you have a ball, the thread of which is wound up, and unwind it, you can say: "you are evolving this". This is evolution (Entwicklung). For you have the concrete representation.

Now consider Ernst Haeckel, who says that man has evolved from the apes. We do not wish to speak of the substance of the matter. Do you believe that he pictures to himself that there is a ball of thread and that something has been unwound from it by the changing of the ape into a man? Is it not the case that quite certainly nothing concrete like this lies in the word which is uttered when someone says that man has evolved from the ape—otherwise he would have had to think of the "unwinding of a thread from a ball!"

What does it mean when one utters the word "evolves" but really calls up no picture of it before oneself? This is the remarkable thing that men today, while they are thinking scientifically, prefer to express themselves in verbs, take refuge in verbs, but that they think nothing at all while using verbs. For if they were to make clear to themselves what they really are thinking, they would not get on at all with the object of their thoughts. Scientific concepts are really nothing else than scientific absence-of-thought. Today you can take the thickest text book, especially in political economy, and go through the concepts there—there are just as many absences-of-thought contained in them as there are concepts.

Now in this way somebody like Fritz Mauthner, who has no inkling of Spiritual Science, naturally cannot look into the reasons for the absences-of-thought into which we area now looking after we have just discussed how things are connected with speech. But Fritz Mauthner feels that, in the present day scientific way of thinking, this scientific talk is nothing more than an absence-of-thought, in consequence of the boundaries of thinking in terms of speech. It is, however, a hard fact if one has to confess: in the lower school grades, where, to be sure, plenty of sins are being committed against the children, the nature of the child demands that one gives it concrete thoughts, because it still wants to have something perceptible to the senses. But then, when people pass into the Gymnasium or become high school girls, one can already expect more from them in the way of absence-of-thought, for already the Conceptional is ceasing to have a content. And when one passes right on to the University, this is the summit of the absence-of-thought with is there traded-in as science, for the only reality today consists in handling things, what is artistic, what one brings out of the laboratory, the dissecting room and so on, the technical, the artistic. But what is "thought-out"—yes, I see, to be uttering a piece of nonsense—is nothing thought-out: it is an absence-of-thought.

Fritz Mauthner feels this. He therefore sets out this list of three steps, firstly Art, secondly Mysticism (which, however, is a state of dreaming), and thirdly Science, of which he says that in reality it is a learned ignorance a docta ignorantia.

I. Art
II. Mysticism: dreaming
III. Science: docta ignorantia

Thus one must take something uttered by a man like this as being a confession of a representative man of the present-day. Something of this kind is said by just the man who has stripped off those superstitions under the sway of which the majority of men live today, one who, as a result of his consideration of speech, has come to see what an emptiness is overflowing over present day mankind, while in the highest level of education pretended thoughts are taught which are, nevertheless, only absence-of-thought. Then this absence-of-thought overflows with a clutter of words into popular literature and comes at last, in journalism, to that terrible bog of words from which the majority of men nourish themselves spiritually today.

I could have quoted some other personage of the present day as an example: however, Fritz Mauthner brings this thing to expression in a uniquely precise, narrowly-systematised manner. Consider it well, what I have brought before you with regard to a representative man of the present day who has no inkling of Spiritual Science. If, intelligently and in an unprejudiced way, you take the conversation which the men of today carry on with one another, from the customary afternoon gossip to what is said in meetings of professional or territorial bodies, in the Reichstag or the Duma, there results a jumble of speech, of words, permeated by absence-of-thought.

But in this way one describes the real facts about what one must call "culture" today. I have depicted to you no more than the facts which just simply exist. And the task of the spiritual scientist is to look into this condition in a really unprejudiced way, courageously and without deceiving himself. You see, people who stand outside Spiritual Science are already coming to the view that it is a terrible superstition to consider Science, as it holds sway today, as anything but a docta ignoratntia. And it has gradually come to be this. Since it has been described by Nicolas of Cusa (1401–1464) at the beginning of the 15th century by the words docta ignorantia, our science has become this to an ever greater extent.

Now, of course, simple people can come and say: "But what are you saying? You have surely as often told us that the present time has attained to something magnificent in respect of Natural Science, and that you fully acknowledge the triumph of Natural Science". Yes, my dear friends, but nature contains no thoughts! It is just in the age of absence-of-thought that Natural Science can develop to the greatest extent of all, because it needs no thoughts, but merely external formulae, in order to classify natural-scientific facts. Natural Science owes its greatness just to the circumstance that, in order to be correct Natural Science, it may be without thoughts and even ought to be so. But the thing to which I wanted particularly to draw your attention to is this: that already in the present day people are noticing how mankind is passing through something which is turning their inner soul-life into a state of dreaming and Science really into one of sleeping, a state of ignorance. This, again, is the comfort which people feel today in Science and scientific thinking, that it lets itself sleep so comfortably in their souls. People do not at all believe how deeply the men of today are sleeping while they consider that they know something, how obedient they are to authority, even to excess, when freed by what they call "science" and what is given to them as Science, but how, out of their deep sleep, they can nowhere apply this Science to their real surroundings. Yes, they look on the application of "something scientific" to external life as a fantastic thing.

Just put in a library—it must be a very big one—all the learned works about psychiatry, all the works on mental diseases. You would then have gathered together much that is ingenious, in the sense of the present time. But yet one must also assume that the psychiatrists who occupy themselves professionally with affairs know what is in the books at least, they must know the principal facts, and they do know them, but as though they were asleep. For if, for example, it is a matter of considering life, of considering the fact that a man, who has for years controlled events over a great part of Europe, was and is really mad, then their science of psychiatry is of no use to people, for they do not think of applying their Science to real life.

These things were not always like this in the development of mankind. If we go back into other epochs, this was not present in the same measure. And, the further back we go, so it is present to a smaller extent. When men had the old, atavistic clairvoyance in ancient times, their dreams were then no dreams as we understand the term today, but they had a psychic content, in which they perceived something real. And people examined human affairs out of their sleep. Today it has come about that if men want to remain men they must gather their a knowledge different from that before which Fritz Mauthner finds them standing as before a docta ignorantia or a dreamlike mysticism. Men must wake up, and they can only do so through spiritual-scientific knowledge. Therefore I refer to what must happen as a awakening. This awakening must be something very real, something encroaching very, very deeply into life. Today people speak, and think in speech as it is described by us, and they believe that by this means they have thoughts as well. But in reality they have no thoughts. For what are thoughts for the man of today, if he really grasps them as thoughts? They are, in fact, nothing real: they are reflections of something real. And just when the man of today soars up to thoughts, if he is sinking at the real life of ideas, he must be conscious of the fact that these ideas as such are phantoms of reality, but are not reality itself.

I recently brought you a chapter of Hegel (Vol. 1, Lecture 8). I told you that it would be difficult to understand, because Hegel always bestirs himself in thoughts. This, to be sure, is so terribly difficult for men today—to bestir themselves in thoughts. One even becomes offensive to people, offensive in the highest degree, if one bestirs oneself in thoughts. When first I began to speak about Anthroposophy in Berlin, all sorts of people came from the most diverse directions of so-called spiritual life and wanted to see really what was happening, people who had taken part in Spiritualism, who had tried by means of all sorts of questionable mediumistic methods to experience something of the Spiritual World—all of them came there. And then it often turned out that just this kind of person regularly went to sleep in my lectures, especially when they were themselves rather mediumistic. One could see many a person there, sound asleep. Then they stayed away for the future. And some of them said that they dared not continue to go these lectures, for the spirits had told them that they would be dealing with ideas there, with thoughts, and that they dared not go to them.

My dear friends, I still call to mind a lady—she appeared to have become unwell—who ran out the door at some speed but who laid herself down at full length as soon as she was outside. The giving of thoughts had made this impression on her! Today, people in general are not trained in real thoughts, because they consider that when they bestir themselves in the projection of speech they have thoughts. But just when one admits oneself to be thinking, one is aware that, in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch of today, one has shadow-pictures if one really thinks, that is to say if one lives in thoughts. If one rightly comprehends the character of the life of thought, one is aware that the soul, as it were, bestirs itself on the surface of the thoughts, while something remains behind in the unconscious. There is the soul. But it sees something which it sends forth like the shadow-pictures of that in which it lives. It must comprehend the shadow-pictures, thoughts, ideas, and must carry them over into something which still, in many cases, remains unconscious for the men of today. How can it do this? It can only do it when that is received into the life of thoughts about which we can give ourselves up to no deception of any kind when we receive it: that is, the will to think, the feeling of the will while we are thinking, the feeling that we are present, that we are really leading over one thought into another, that, while we are thinking, we always have a clear picture underlying our thoughts.

Men do not love this today. They sit, walk or stand today, and their thoughts are churning up in their heads as I have just described, which is really absence-of-thought, but it is playing through their heads. Men give themselves up to these so-called thoughts, passively give themselves up to them, even take in every so-called thought which rolls through their heads. And the result of this is that the will to think, that which works arbitrarily and actively in thoughts, is of the utmost rarity in the souls of men today.

The man who holds himself to be a leader of opinion today wishes to the smallest degree to sit down and bring his will into activity. He quickly takes up the newspaper, so that his thoughts may be unrolled from outside, or a book—but does not develop within himself that activity which now really leads to active thinking. The mankind of today lives in a state of social laziness with regard to this active thinking—one can call it nothing else.

All these things give the real form of that transition which a man like Fritz Mauthner feels when he thus utters what I have described to you above. But all these things are phenomena connected with the crossing of the Threshold by the whole of mankind. The whole of mankind must pass by the stern Guardian of the Threshold in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. And just in the epoch of the development of consciousness, it ought to come to the consciousness that mankind is passing through this stage in its development. But then a sort of splitting-up of the life of the soul must take place. What was centralised as a unity in earlier times must be split asunder into a trinity, and every single member must be centralised on its own account.

Because this is a question effecting human beings in their community-life, not individual men, it can only come about if there are external points of support, on which this tendency towards inward threefoldness can go on developing. These external points of support must now be present in the social organism in which men live. It is not in my choice that I must speak about the threefold social organism today. It is this which must be made clear to mankind from the signs of the times, from those signs of the times which become clear when one considers that mankind must pass the stern Guardian of the Threshold. And if you seek for an inner characteristic of the reasons why the threefolding must come about in the social organism, then just re-read that chapter in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds which deals with the Guardian of the Threshold. It is all there already, from another point of view.

When one studies Spiritual Science, one is studying the most significant impulse of the present day development of mankind. Spiritual Science explains, from the most diverse points of view, the most intensively working life-necessities of the present time. And, while the splitting of the human soul into the three members of thinking, feeling and willing is pointed out in the chapter in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds about the Guardian of the Threshold, it is a result demanded of the whole of mankind that they give thought to the Threefold Social Organism.

This is how the things are connected. If you consider the individual human being who steps over the Threshold to the supersensible world, you can say to yourselves this man experiences in himself the separation into a life of thinking, a life of feeling and a life of willing. If you consider the mankind of today who, while they are going through the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, step over the Threshold behind the scenes of historical Becoming, then you must say: this mankind must find its life of thinking in an independent spiritual organism, its life of feeling—that is to say the relations of feeling which play between man and man—in the independent rights-organism, and the life of will in the economic circuit, in the economic organism.

If you consider these matters in this way you will have the right foundations for the necessity of such statements as are made with regard to the Threefold Social Organism. Then you will also rise above the mere babel of words which often rules the present time. Then you will have insight that at the present time one should not dispute in words but should realise that words only gain importance and point to thoughts if one brings them into the right direction, if one considers that everything which must develop itself as thought-life in the spiritual organism of mankind is the cultivation of the individual capabilities of mankind, i.e. that individualism must rule in the spiritual organism, democracy must rule in the rights- or state-organism because this has to do with what every man develops in the way of relations with every man; in the sphere of economics, associative life must rule which holds together the co-workers in a profession, or the association which also arises as a result of the connection of production with consumption—in other words, socialism must rule in the sphere of the economics organisation. But the three independent members must appear separated in their characteristic qualities.

Now we are still living in a time in which Ahriman plays ball with men, while he lulls them into illusion about what really is to come to pass. So he causes them, as he has been done in former times, to mix together the will-organism and the feeling-organism—namely, socialism and democracy—and causes them to say: we are striving for social-democracy. As a result, the individualistic momentum is entirely left out, for, you see, people do not love thoughts. For otherwise one would have to say: "we must strive for individual-social-democracy", and this would destroy the most significant ideas which doctrinal social-democracy has today. In the confusion which the harmonising-together of socialism and democracy brings to social-democracy, you see an activity which Ahriman is carrying on with men. And one will only feel the seriousness of this tendency if one keeps one's attention on the transition at the Threshold of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and knows that, because the whole of mankind lives within the Social Organism must come about, just as a threefolding of the soul-life of the individual must come about in the passing of the individual man over the Threshold.

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• 1. Fritz Mauthner, Philosophisches Wörterbuch, Munich 1910.
• 2. The Social Question as a Question of the Soul: The Inner Experience of Speech.
• 3. R.S. The Social Question as a question of soul