The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,In one of my last lectures here, I already referred to a significant contemporary literary publication, a literary publication that even someone who otherwise doesn't like to have much to do with what is commonly referred to as “literature” can point out, as is the case with the person speaking here. He wants to be concerned with the roots of practical life, with the forces that shape this practical life; he wants to be concerned with everything that shapes this practical life out of the spiritual, with everything that approaches man's mind and heart and soul directly, elementarily, and strengthens man for life. He wants as little as possible to do with what is regarded as “literature” today. But about the book – you can guess from the formulation of the title of today's Contemporary Speech – about the book by Oswald Spengler “The Decline of the West”, even those who do not particularly love literature as such may speak. For one can say: Precisely about that which today every person who is not actually asleep in his soul must feel, about the forces of decline, the forces of decline that are working powerfully, the forces of decline that are working terribly in our cultural and civilizational life must feel, precisely about this decline, about these phenomena of decline, Oswald Spengler in his book has used a language that, firstly, sounds so characteristically of the whole spirit of our time, but, secondly, and in particular, sounds of the Central European, of the German spirit. In this book by Oswald Spengler, nothing less is attempted than to prove the necessity of this decline of Western civilization, to prove it by all means, one might almost say with all the sophistication of today's science—yes, a science that is distilled from today's by a man of genius like a new science so that Oswald Spengler's book is, I would say, not a theoretical book, not a literary book, but a book that speaks of facts, of facts emerging directly from the human spiritual life of the present, but also speaks in such a way that the very thoughts of this book influence the actions of the people who take them up. And the fact that many people are taking up these ideas from Oswald Spengler's book is clear from the simple fact that, despite its 615 pages, well over 20,000 copies of the book have already been sold. What the sale of 20,000 copies of a book means for the number of readers concerned is known to anyone who has ever dealt with such questions. It can be said that among the things in the spiritual realm that one must deal with today if one wants to delve a little into the undercurrents of contemporary cultural and civilizational life, two books are among the most important for us Central Europeans books are among the most important: firstly, this book by Oswald Spengler, 'The Decline of the West'; and secondly, a work that has perhaps not yet received much attention in the literary world, the book 'The Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship'. This book has just been published by the Viennese cooperative publishing house “Neue Erde” and was written by the man who, as the highest economic commissar, that is, as the minister for economic affairs, summarized his principles and experiences in this book after the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, following his escape and internment in Austria. One would like to say: These two books cast a terrible light on what is present in the undercurrents of intellectual and even working life in the present.

Oswald Spengler is a man who in his “Decline of the West” tried to - the seeds for his book, he states, lie in 1911, so already before the beginning of the world war catastrophe - tried to show how our Western culture contains within itself forces of decline, how it necessarily shows itself to be a culture of decline through its characteristic manifestations. For Oswald Spengler, this culture is so obviously a culture of decline that he predicts that with the beginning of the third millennium, it will have reached its end as the ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Babylonian, ancient Greek, and ancient Roman cultures once reached their end. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not proved by a man who is acting on a superstitious prophecy, it is not said by a man who indulges in some random fantasy, it is said by a man who has mastered the scientific spirit of the present in an outstanding way. Precisely because of the genius of the author's personality, because of his universal mastery, one might say of twelve to fifteen sciences of the present day, because of his courageous penetration of all the consequences of these sciences for practical and historical life, this book must be seen as a wealth of deeds, not just as a single deed. All that I have just said must be said about this book on the one hand. But on the other hand, it is a terrible book. Is it not a terrible book that, with the full weight of the scientific armamentarium that can only be mustered today, ingeniously proves that the symptoms of decline in this Western culture must lead to the downfall of this Western culture, right from the beginning of the third millennium thousand years – these symptoms of decline, within which we live, which were played out with a blaze in the world catastrophe of war and which now continue, even if they are not noticed by sleepy souls?

One must concern oneself a little, and we want to do that in the introduction, with the whole way in which Oswald Spengler comes to his conviction of the necessity of the decline of the West, if one wants to answer the question that should actually be the topic of my reflection today: Who may now speak against the decline of the West? – for one should not speak lightly against Spengler's book. To speak against it carelessly would mean to carelessly ignore the serious scientific armament of the author, and would mean that one does not want to consider at all what he conscientiously brings out of the phenomena of contemporary life. And I believe that many people have already spoken out against Oswald Spengler's book who should not really have done so. Oswald Spengler appears in his book first of all as a historian. He says himself that he noticed the symptoms of decline before the world war catastrophe, as I said. He wanted to understand the actual causes, the essence of these symptoms of decline. He was one of those personalities on whose soul the symptoms of decline weighed heavily, while the great mass of the population, especially the so-called intelligent population, still talked about how we had come so far and how we we have achieved and how we want to carry it everywhere, into all corners of the world - it has become clear to us what power we actually had to carry out what we believed we had to carry out into all corners of the world. Oswald Spengler describes for us how he came to the conclusion, from observing the phenomena of decline in the present day, that one cannot really speak properly about these phenomena of decline without speaking about the whole history of the West, namely about what thoughts live in Western culture and how we are able today, precisely from a historical perspective, to bring these thoughts to life in us and to make them active. And so Oswald Spengler's reflection expanded into a comprehensive historical book that aims to explore the entire foundations of Western thought and feeling. Oswald Spengler comes to the conclusion that the scientific view that has become common in recent centuries has indeed been gradually applied to history, that this scientific view – we have often emphasized this here from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – that this scientific view has been incorporated into all the thinking, feeling and willing of those parts of humanity that are relevant to progress in general. But it is precisely in history, in what the [scientific view of] history does not provide, in the way it does not elucidate the actual causes of historical events, that Oswald Spengler realizes how misguided the entire historical approach has become in the last few centuries up to the present. This, ladies and gentlemen, is truly not without significance for the present day in a practical sense, for we will see later how, in the broadest circles, it is precisely historical prejudices that are to be made reality. We shall show, by means of a typical example, the Hungarian Council of Economic Commissioners, Eugen Varga, how the ideas which Oswald Spengler describes as historical thinking are actually being put into practice. If Oswald Spengler's thesis is only applicable to forces of decline, then the way of thinking and looking at things, which only uses thoughts and ideas that come from this view of decline, must also create only phenomena of decline in the field of social organism.

In a person like Professor Eugen Varga, the way of thinking that Oswald Spengler finds only touches on, and which, with the beginning of the third millennium, must lead to the decline of the entire Western world, has been incarnated, has become flesh.

Now Oswald Spengler became acquainted with what I have often called Goetheanism here; he became acquainted with the Goethean method of observing nature, in contrast to the natural science that is practiced everywhere as the official one at the universities and radiates from there to the lower teaching institutions and which [through application to historiography] has turned history into a caricature. And what does he find himself compelled to do when he becomes acquainted with Goethe's method of observing nature? He finds himself compelled to apply this Goethean method to history, to apply it, to be sure, in the way he believes it must be applied to historical phenomena. Goethe's method is far different from what is today officially the scientific approach. Goethe does not look at nature in a philistine, mechanical, pedantic way, as a mere cause and effect relationship; he looks at how the living being lives out its emergence, its birth, its growing young, its maturing, its growing old, its dying, by ascending into the realm of living beings. And one need only read his essay from 1790, his attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants, to see how Goethe observes the development of the plant from the root, from leaf to leaf, in its ascent to blossom and fruit , to see how he contemplates nature in its living becoming, how each leaf is the symbol of what is formed differently, how the primordial organ is only metamorphosed in the petal, in the stamen, and even in the germ. Inspired by this Goethean morphology, by this theory of the development of living beings, Oswald Spengler sets out to consider the historical development of mankind itself according to the pattern of Goethe's ideas of organic nature. He then comes to look at [the cultures] in the same way that one looks at the development and growth of an organic living being, a plant, an animal or even a physical human being, at the birth, growth, maturation, aging and death of cultures; and he looks at the birth , the growth, the maturing, the aging, the dying of Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman culture. He observes this by looking at the individual phenomena of these cultures in the same way that Goethe looked at the individual organs of a living being. And now he focuses on what Western culture has produced so far; he compares - just as someone who studies living beings compares one living being with another - he compares what Western culture has produced so far with what Greek, Roman, and so on, culture has produced in ancient times up to a certain point in its development. And then he can calculate where the present culture of the Occident stands, because one can compare this point of view with the corresponding point of view of Persia, Egypt, Greece, and so on; one can calculate when the present culture of the Occident will perish, because one knows how long the ancient cultures took to perish.

All this becomes fruitful because Oswald Spengler breaks with the philistine method of looking at history, and he has the courage to break with it, he has the courage to say what history has become in its connection to mere scientific ideas; he has the courage to say, for example: The previous form of historical approach has kept the formal consideration of history at a level that one would have been ashamed of in other sciences. Why does he think this? Because he thinks it is necessary not to apply the dead method to history, which is suitable for the mineral kingdom and other inanimate things, but to apply a living method to history, by comparing one cultural form with another. Of course, to do that you have to be as knowledgeable as Oswald Spengler; you have to be able to compare the achievements of the most diverse fields of science and art and technology in the most diverse times and cultures; you have to be able, for example, to compare the style in the architecture of any cultural period with the methods of optics, chemistry, and so on – that is, one must have a comprehensive view of what has really happened, and Oswald Spengler has that view, and he has it in the way that someone has it who has completely mastered the scientific spirit of the present. He can compare as the eye compares one plant with another, one animal with another; he can compare what the mathematician accomplishes in a cultural period with what the musician accomplishes; he can compare what the physicist accomplishes at the experimental table with what the socialist agitator designates as a cultural form in the same time; he can compare what the chemist says with what the painter conjures up on the canvas. That is to say, he can really apply a morphological approach: He can compare, he can shape the comparison, the analogy, as he believes, into a scientific method, and from this application of comparison, of analogy – which the others only apply as if on a string of fantasy – he finds strict methods to deduce the underlying causes from the superficial events of history, which are usually considered alone. He does this in his own way, and it is interesting to see what conclusions Oswald Spengler, with his genius, knowledge and courage, comes to. He truly manages to penetrate to what history has actually become today in the hands of those who treat it mostly from the point of view of some party or other and do not even realize it. How today's historians themselves mock the fact that in the time of Herder and Goethe, people described a Brutus, a Caesar, an Antony, an Alexander, a Pericles in the way they needed them for their ideals, in the way they needed any ideal personality, in order to present them either in their excellent, angelic or even nefarious nature. Today's historians believe that they have gone beyond the personal and human aspects that were introduced into the historical approach at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Oswald Spengler rightly reproaches them: “They sneer at the historians of Goethe's time when they express their political ideals by writing a history of antiquity and using the names Lykurg, Brutus , Cato, Cicero, Augustus, and by whose rescue or condemnation they cover their own program or a personal infatuation; but they themselves cannot write a chapter without betraying which party their morning newspaper belongs to.” One must often characterize that which lives in the consciousness of people of the present day, especially of intellectuals, even of those who appear to be at the pinnacle of science, one must often characterize it as Oswald Spengler has characterized it here.

And Spengler also notes many other things. For example, he notes how little some of what has been perceived in recent times as, I might say, absolute truth about some phenomenon has been drawn from the depths of events. Oswald Spengler, for example, draws attention to the whole fuss that was kicked up about Ibsen's “Nora” at the time. Those good bourgeois people who belonged to this milieu and knew only this milieu, from which something like Ibsen's “Nora” emerged, believed that they could draw the whole problem of femininity into their sphere. Oswald Spengler says: How comical Ibsen's women's problems appear when, instead of the famous Nora, you put, for example, Caesar's wife. Don't they know that they are basically only considering something modest: the lady who does not go beyond the bourgeois boundaries between 1850 and 1950 – because then they will have disappeared? It is quite a feat when a contemporary person who has to be taken seriously, like Oswald Spengler, hurls these things at people who, I would like to say, so gladly and often - unspoken or spoken in a strange with self-praise and self-satisfaction, they demonstrate, tacitly or explicitly, their self-praise and self-satisfaction at knowing so much about the deepest secrets of the world, and they have no idea that these secrets are nothing more than European superficialities between 1850 and 1950.

It would be terrible if the present could not muster anything to effectively counter the serious armament of Oswald Spengler. And there, my dear attendees, much must be pointed out that has been put forward for a number of years - actually, I may say, for decades - here in Stuttgart from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. You see, reference has often been made here to a significant fact, to the fact that the way in which science has affected the Western cultural process over the last three to four hundred years is actually quite wrongly regarded. It is believed that natural science has come about through Kepler, Copernicus, Galilei and so on – all this is a prevailing belief in the broadest circles, especially in scholarly circles – that one must learn from it how to penetrate reality. It is believed that one has to train one's thinking in science, because in science one can see how to think correctly, how to think exactly, and therefore one must look at everything else that occurs in life according to the pattern of this way of looking at things.

Spiritual scientific considerations lead to a different realization. These spiritual scientific considerations, they do what, I would like to say, Oswald Spengler falls back on in a scanty way from his also only superficial considerations of Goetheanism, they do it in a deeper way. Long before the name of Oswald Spengler could be mentioned in any way, something else was pointed out here in the most essential foundations of the whole development of Western culture. It was pointed out that what has happened in the development of this Western culture in the last three to four centuries can only be understood if one gains a real overview of the course of the whole history of mankind from the foundations of spiritual science. Here too, in public lectures, it has been repeatedly pointed out how quite different an ancient Indian culture was, and one must go back to the 7th or 8th millennium to find it. This is what I have called in my book Occult Science. I have pointed out how different the nature of such an ancient Indian culture was, and how different the nature of an ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Babylonian, and Greek-Latin culture, and how, after these cultures had been born , matured and died, and how our present-day culture emerged from it, the fifth cultural epoch after the great Atlantic catastrophe – our present-day culture, which people talk about in the most diverse ways. And again it was shown how within our present culture, since the middle of the 15th century, the intellectual element has been emerging and how, in the development of humanity, the emergence of this intellect – for before that time the intellect did not mean the most excellent cognitive power of man – how the emergence of this intellect has meant something special for the whole education of humanity, especially in the West.

My dear audience, if we take a spiritual scientific look at the entire configuration – precisely what Oswald Spengler strives for but does not achieve – the morphology of earlier cultural epochs, we know that these ancient cultures produced something great, powerful and awe-inspiring as they were born, grew young, matured, aged and died. But that to which our culture is called, what it has to bring from the deepest depths of the human soul to the surface of the outer cultural life, is the maturing of the true power of freedom in the human being. That is why I tried to present that which must well up from the depths of the human soul in the early 1890s in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. After this experience of freedom, after the experience of freedom in the pure intellect, for freedom can be experienced in nothing else – although other things in the human being are also valuable – freedom can only be experienced in pure thinking and can then radiate out to the whole of the human being's remaining nature. Mankind had to discard everything that it had previously brought to the surface out of instinct, like knowledge, in the form of mysticism, occultism, and theosophy. Today it is impossible to awaken again what humanity has acquired in the way of ancient astrology, mysticism, theosophy, gnosticism, and what was quite useful for an old knowledge, or to want to warm it up again. What is incumbent on us today, is to bring out from the present point of development of humanity just that which leads to the consciousness of freedom: the grasping of the human being in pure thinking. But when we grasp this human essence in pure thinking, then a completely new spiritual world must be born out of this thinking. Never in ancient cultures was that which we have handed down in terms of spiritual treasures and insights born out of pure thinking. Only in our time can a true realization of the spirit be born out of pure thinking, because this realization of the spirit must be born out of pure thinking, because only in this way can man, at the same time in the whole process of human development, mature to freedom, to the real consciousness of freedom, which from now on is his due in his development on earth. And everything we are experiencing today in the way of terrible present-day events and symptoms of decline comes from this: because humanity is to grasp from the very depths of its soul life the crystal-clear clarity of thought to conquer freedom, and because humanity is to mature to the strength necessary for this, the old realities are no longer relevant to it; they are no longer relevant to it at first, they are in decline, and the way must be sought to rise from the crumbling ruins of the old cultural life, permeated with pure thinking and thus growing into freedom.

In order to conquer freedom, to find ourselves completely within, we must give birth to human greatness from within, out of the chaos, out of the ruins of external life. Therefore, at first, humanity lost sight of what could really essentially control the external life, and just at the time when the urge was to awaken the consciousness of freedom, only a dead natural science came about. And what natural science did achieve was not something from which one could learn the actually progressive thinking, but it was something that afflicted humanity as a weakness. The fact that it must achieve freedom appears as a weakness in natural science. Natural science has become weak because the power must be turned to another side. Science itself has taken shape out of the educational forces within the human being. How science has become what it is is connected with the forces in the development of humanity. It is not the case that these forces have to learn from what science has become.

Now Oswald Spengler comes to this: one cannot penetrate into historical becoming with the ideas that science has produced. It really does matter that one needs comparison in order to get from the exterior of historical events to the deeper, interior happening. But — and we must be clear about this: Oswald Spengler does indeed recognize what is missing from today's historical perspective, from the perspective of humanity as a whole. He recognizes this clearly and sharply, and he even sees that only the perspective that has emerged in Goetheanism could help us to escape from the limitations of the scientific perspective. But Oswald Spengler is a mind that, although he has a universal command of the present-day sciences, is deeply stuck, not in the way of thinking that is produced by science, but in the way of thinking that has produced science since the middle of the 15th century; and he cannot develop himself out of it to what, from the depths of the human soul, could now overcome this scientific way of looking at things. Thus Oswald Spengler came to the negative realization in a brilliant way: Yes, we only bring about decline when we let natural science become our way of life. He comes to claim: What does today's natural science give us? It gives us the proof that the Occident, at the beginning of the third millennium, must end with its present culture. But now he cannot overcome in himself what has led to natural science. One has to give him the right: with those ideas that live in scientific knowledge, one can only come to the unproductive in the social ideas of the present. One must ascend to comparison, to the image, to the allegory, in order to recognize from it the deeper historical forces. But if the comparison, the allegory, is not to be merely a fantasy image and the image not merely a product of the imagination, if image and comparison, allegory and symbol in Spengler's sense are not to be merely something created by the imagination, then a real power must arise from the soul, which does not arise in Oswald Spengler. The real forces—the methods of attaining knowledge of the higher worlds have been described here—these forces must be developed if one seriously wants to use image, allegory, symbol, symptom, as Oswald Spengler uses them, for the consideration of world events. In other words, Oswald Spengler is a person who strives to go beyond this way of looking at things because he feels that the present way of looking at things is insufficient for the development of humanity; he knows that other forms of ideas must be applied, especially to history, but he does not want to apply these forms of ideas by inwardly invoking the power that alone can apply these forms of ideas. For it must be said: If someone applies images, allegories, imaginations, symbols to the historical approach, then he remains, if he remains at the point of view with which we are born, if he does not develop within himself the spiritual powers of knowledge that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks of, then he remains a player with mere allegories, remains a fantasist in the historical field. That means: What Oswald Spengler demands as his method must not be applied from his spiritual point of view, but it may only be applied when one ascends to that which has already been described here as imaginative, inspirative and intuitive knowledge.

Oswald Spengler wants to apply methods to the historical perspective that are still permeated by the old scientific thinking, even if not by the scientific spirit. And Oswald Spengler is one of those who blush when one speaks of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must speak of as the only way out of the decline of the West. To Oswald Spengler, the social orientation that is created from this anthroposophically oriented underground seems like salon communism and the like. That is to say, Oswald Spengler displays genius in terms of his personal intellectual power, displays universal thinking and insight in the most diverse fields of science, but at the same time he also displays the utmost narrow-mindedness when it comes to developing such intellectual powers that can apply his method in a fruitful way.

My dear audience, only when you understand this, only then can you speak out against Oswald Spengler's arguments about the decline of the Occident. Only then can one say: Yes, you are right, it is the cultures that have emerged in the course of historical development that are to be regarded in such a way that one looks at their birth, their youth, their maturity, their aging, their dying. Yes, if we look at them in this way, our culture also shows that we must ascribe to it the downfall meant by Oswald Spengler. But then we see only one culture next to the other, like one plant next to the other, like one animal organism next to the other. We then have none of what we get when we look at them in a spiritual scientific way.

If we look at cultures from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see the first culture, the ancient Indian culture – I have dealt with it in my lecture on the historical development of humanity – and we find that what man brings forth from his own consciousness at that time is primitive, very elementary, simple. But at the same time we find that what man can bring forth out of his own powers of consciousness is imbued with an awe-inspiring primeval world wisdom. We go back and find the first cultures at an elementary stage of development; but when we understand what primeval world wisdom lives in these cultures, we literally kneel down in awe before that which has permeated these primeval cultures. And if we go further, we find that these first cultures have been replaced by other cultures. We find less and less primeval world wisdom, more and more that which man consciously brings forth, and so more and more until we find a complete drying up of primeval world wisdom in our culture, especially since the middle of the 15th century. This is even expressed externally. It is nonsense for people to believe that they can understand scientific thought from the 10th or 11th century. No, they cannot understand it, because a completely different language was spoken then than is spoken today. One must first become familiar with the way of thinking of that time, which has changed fundamentally. Therefore, what these earlier cultures instinctively mastered of primeval world wisdom has died out, so that one culture could emerge from another, that the primeval Indian culture could send the germ of primeval world wisdom to the primeval Persian culture, which in turn could send it to the primeval Egyptian culture, which in turn could send it to the Greek-Latin culture, and so on. We have advanced — because of our sense of freedom — to a development of pure intellect, of pure thinking, but we have lost the ancient instinctive primeval wisdom.

If we, like Oswald Spengler, look at nature only from the outside, then we must speak as Oswald Spengler spoke about the decline of the West. And we may only speak out against this decline of the West if we have the courage to say to ourselves: the old, instinctive spiritual wisdom has dried up, but a new spark is already glowing in our hearts; we will give birth to a new spiritual life from what we have acquired as intellect, which can permeate our inner being with new cultural achievements. We not only believe, but we know: In our inner being is the germ of futures, not just of one future, and there we learn to understand how very differently we must view what has taken place in history than Oswald Spengler saw it. We see, for example, how the old Greco-Latin culture, which came up from the south, is drawing to its close; it brought Christianity over from the East, initially preserving the secret of Golgotha, and then — what happened to this secret of Golgotha? In those days it was still understood because a remnant of primeval world wisdom still existed; it understood the origin of Christianity. Then the Germanic peoples came from the north and took up what the aged peoples had developed, who had come to maturity and to die; they took it into their young blood and transformed it. These Germanic peoples were the last who could still absorb primeval world wisdom. Then, in their bosom, humanity developed, in which this primeval world wisdom dried up and which will bring forth a new spiritual life from the power that must be generated within itself. If this new spiritual life is not brought forth, then Western culture will descend into barbarism.

Today it is not a matter of looking at the outside world and saying: I believe there will still be enough forces to rekindle the declining life. —- It is not a matter of standing there with a sleeping soul and waiting for this or that to appear here and there that lives in the outside world; it leads to decline. And Oswald Spengler is right about the proof, no matter how many mistakes the historians he laughs at prove in his favor; but he ceases to be right in the eyes of those who are allowed to speak out against the decline of the West from a new spiritual life. He ceases to be right in the eyes of those who say: Yes, everything in the external world may and will collapse. But we can find something that was not there before: we can build a new world out of our will, if we illuminate it with pure thoughts, a world that is not seen today, but that must be willed. And one has strength for such volition only when one wants to permeate and interpenetrate this volition with what can be won through spiritual knowledge, as a permeation and impelling of this volition — in ways that have often been described here. And so today one does not appeal to the vague belief that there were always forces at work that brought forth new cultures. No, today one has to agree with Oswald Spengler: Yes, the facts prove the decline, and Oswald Spengler only summarizes the facts as proof. One has to agree with him if one does not have the certainty that The will that is kindled by the spirit, of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks, will not refute theories, not views, not concepts and ideas that are false, but will fight the facts of decline through its own sense of fact. Today we do not have to refute theories, we do not have to refute false views, today we have to overcome the facts based on the truth. That is the only thing that justifies speaking about the decline of the West. And at the same time it shows us how one has to understand an idea like Oswald Spengler's: that the Western, the Central European peoples, with everything they have produced, are already at the end, and that the Russian population – I have long before Oswald Spengler, I have said time and again that the Russian population contains the core, the true germ of the future Europe; that is true. But how does Oswald Spengler imagine the process of the future? He thinks that Western culture will disappear and that what is emerging in Russia will then take the place of what is in Central Europe. No, once one has grasped the core of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, one says something else, one says: Just as the Germanic peoples received the essence of Christianity in their own way, and could not have developed anything out of their young blood if the mystery of Golgotha had not appeared from the south, so too must the culture that comes from the east shine out of this Central Europe, which we ourselves develop from a new spiritual life. It is not a matter of a Russism alien to Oswald Spengler's sense flooding Western and Central Europe with something that is young in comparison to what has died. No, it is a matter of this Russism having to find something that we ourselves create as a new spiritual life, something that this Russism has to receive in the same way that the Germanic peoples received the Mystery of Golgotha with their young blood. The future of those who are rumored to have a future also depends on us not dying from the decline of the West, but on us developing the immortal part in us through a new spiritual life; only those who speak of such a thing may speak against the decline of the West.

Therefore, wherever the old ideas live on today, especially when they become socialist theories, it shows that people not only observe the decline and allow it to happen, but that they actually foster it. And in this respect it is extremely interesting to see how the Minister for Economic Affairs in Räterepublik Hungary, Professor Eugen Varga, has gained his experiences, which he describes in his book “The Economic and Political Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship”, which has just been published by the Wiener Genossenschaftsverlag der “Neuen Erde”. He describes how, in terms of his principles, he is a Marxist similar to Lenin and Trotsky in an even more radical form, and he wants to establish an order, an economic order in Hungary with these forces that are shaping themselves to the point of bullishness. I will only emphasize in a few brief strokes how, on the one hand, he is a true Marxist. He believes that if you make the world Marxist, it will become real, so he is making Hungary Marxist, and real, in the first instance. He knows that it was the urban industrial proletariat that carried the Marxist ideas, and he knows that what he wants to establish can only be born out of the ideas that the urban industrial proletariat swears by. But he has to state one thing right away: yes, the entire belief of this urban proletariat is that the future depends on the practical realization of Marxist ideas. But when such institutions are set up, the urban population and thus the urban industrial proletariat will be left without bread and become unhappy. The only ones who will benefit are the peasants outside; if things are set up as we want them to be, they can do a little better; the proletarians in the cities are initially faced with nothing but impoverishment, enormous price increases, and ultimately only ruin. —So how does Professor Eugen Varga, as a true Marxist, console himself? He says to himself: The greatness of an ideal is shown by the fact that you can starve for it. — But if the ideal has promised the people that, if it is fulfilled, they will not have to starve, then it is questionable whether they will really be so willing to starve if it is not fulfilled. And Varga should have waited to see if his Hungary of councils did not collapse for internal reasons. He has the excuse, however, that it did not come to that because he can point to the Romanian incursions and other external reasons; and so he finds all sorts of other things that he cites as his experiences.

And it is particularly interesting to point out these phenomena because one is dealing with someone who was allowed to become a practitioner, who was able to show how the stubborn theories that one thinks are just practical turn out to be reprehensible and corrupting when one wants to transfer them into reality. And so Professor Eugen Varga also has many a nice story to tell about his Marxism. But he also describes how he appoints his works councils, how everything is chosen from the workforce, how the positions in the factories that are foremen are filled, and so on. He says: You have to avoid the old bureaucracy. But what he describes is bureaucracy. But he says: What is currently rife will all be beautifully resolved in the future. He says: Yes, in the present, one does indeed have bad experiences; because those who have been elected to supervise the companies are just hanging around, arguing, and the others, who are still supposed to work, think that they should all be elected to the supervisory bodies themselves, because this loitering and arguing seems to them to be a very special ideal. This is the picture painted by Professor Eugen Varga, the creator of the Soviet dictatorship in Hungary. He does not realize that in a single sentence, on page 47 of his book, he expresses a significant truth. I will be quite frank with you: his book is an extremely interesting contemporary phenomenon for me, because in Professor Eugen Varga, what Oswald Spengler regards as the symptoms of decline are transformed into socialist ideas. There is a power of decline in his ideas, so that through people like Professor Eugen Varga, the power of decline is instilled in people. If you leave culture to its own devices, if you try to use such ideas to meddle in such areas, as Lenin and Trotsky and others do in the East and in Asia, then you are pushing for destruction in a concentrated way, so that history then rushes headlong into complete destruction. So, in terms of cultural history, a book by a man like Eugen Varga, who wants to be a practitioner and in doing so brings the theory of the decline of the West into his practice, is interesting to me, because this book is not just literature, it is something that expresses real life.

But what is actually interesting about it? I have to say that as interesting as the book is, what actually interests me the most is just a single sentence, which can be found on page 47 of Professor Eugen Varga's book. The sentence even surprised me. He describes how he formed his works councils, how the production commissar is at the top and how the individual commissars are, as the true Marxist envisions them. These production commissars mediate between the works councils and the supreme economic office. Now, on page 47 of his book, there is a strange confession about these commissars. You see, he says: This system – he means his system of councils – meets all four of the above-mentioned requirements, if the person of the production commissioner is the right one. Well, my dear audience, if you put the right people in all the positions, then you don't need to implement socialist ideas in reality, because then all the requirements will be met by these personalities. Thus, from the considerations of this practical abstract theorist, what he consciously certainly did not want to admit jumps out. His four demands are: 1. the councils must be elected from the working class, 2. the establishment of economic commissariats, 3. that the whole thing is not bureaucratic, and 4. that all individuals, including teachers, must be politically reliable. These demands are being met – when? When the commissioner is a suitable person. – The economic system of Professor Eugen Varga will, of course, only find the commissioner reliable who is just as much a Marxist and Leninist as Varga himself. This shows how these people deal with reality. They do not merely describe – as historians describe the old heroes, an Alexander, a Pericles – according to the political concepts contained in their morning newspaper – no, they want to shape people according to what their morning newspaper contains. Here we have what Oswald Spengler finds to be the main cause of decline, transferred into the most direct practice, and the most important thing in practice is simply not seen. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what leads to an answer to the question: Who is allowed to speak out against the decline of the West?

We live in a time in which only those who feel in their souls that there is a spiritually oriented science that can ignite the will so that forces arise that were not there before are allowed to speak out against the decline of the West. Those who consider only the forces that existed before, like Oswald Spengler, or those who work outside, like Professor Eugen Varga, can either see only the decline or must bring it about themselves. Who may speak against the decline of the West? The one who demands the human deed that comes from the newborn spiritual life may speak out against the downfall of the West. — This is how the question must be answered clearly and unambiguously today, and this is how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been trying to do so for years.

When I observed the results of the teaching in the individual classes towards the end of the school year at the Waldorf School, I could see – I have already mentioned some of it – how, for example, Dr. Stein introduced the 7th and 8th grades to history from the perspective of the rising spiritual life, a will that is contrasted with the dwindling forces. I have mentioned other things that shine into the Waldorf School as good fruits of our spiritual science. Today I would just like to mention that people outside scoff, especially when the soul and spirit of the human being, alongside the body, are spoken about — as they have to be from a spiritual science. But one should just have seen, for example, how in Class 5, under the direction of Miss von Heydebrand, what anthroposophy makes of anthropology is brought to the children - albeit in a form appropriate to the children - and what awakens in the children an idea of the real concrete form of the soul and spirit of the human being. There is a pulsating life in man, there is nothing of the dullness of today's anthropological concepts that are otherwise brought to children; because the insights are drawn from real life, real life is also stimulated in the young. It is only a matter of the teacher being able to transform what emerges from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for the corresponding age.

And so it may also be said: At the time when it struck the development of the earth, one had the Mystery of Golgotha; one understood it with the remnants of the old instinctive spiritual science - I have presented this several times in my lectures -; one must understand it today with the rising, new spiritual science. Then Christianity itself will experience a new birth, then Christianity will be understood again for the first time, because under the hand of theologians, Christianity has degenerated into materialism. But instead of seriously addressing the issue of how Christianity itself must be rediscovered from a renewed spiritual life, today theologians are emerging - forgive me for also bringing this up - theologians who [turn against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science]. If one wanted to read all the literature against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science today, one would come to nothing else, but it is sometimes interesting to keep an eye on the titles of the writings that appear there. For example, there is a publication called “The New Church”, edited by Pastor Franz Tügel and Dr. Peter Petersen on behalf of the Hamburg Volkskirche. In the 15th issue of 1920, there is an article titled “Theological Direction, Dr. Steiner and the Devil”. And on page 232 we find the following sentence: “At best, it can still be imagined that a Catholic becomes a disciple of Steiner...” — something like this is born out of today's culture; people should just consider what the Catholic clergy hurls at anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but here a Protestant is speaking, and so the author thinks that this spiritual science could, well, be acceptable to Catholicism – “[...] there are relationships that one can understand; but how a Protestant, at least a conscious one, one who has been influenced by the spirit of the Reformation, can follow it, is completely beyond comprehension. In Steiner's school, all belief is an assumption of truth! And Schaeder rightly points out that all the exercises recommended by Steiner result in legalism and moralism. For me, there is no doubt: Luther would have handed over the Steiner doctrine to the devil in his language, and he would also have emphasized the thoroughly un-German aspect of it. He would have warned his Protestant Church against the false prophet.” Now I would like to ask: Do the exercises I recommend lead to lawlessness and immorality? Because that is emphasized here as something particularly bad, that the exercises I recommend lead to legalism and moralism. Well, a lot is written in this tone today.

However, there is also another tone in which, one cannot say, is written. For example, the anatomy professor Fuchs in Göttingen, who has already been mentioned here, managed to use a sophisticated distortion in newspaper articles to claim that anthroposophy is not scientific. He proved nothing other than that as a scientist of today he can only regard that as science which just happens to fit into his head, and what does not, he does not regard as science. That means, he does it the way those did it who, when Copernicus appeared, considered Copernicus to be unscientific because he did not teach what they taught the faithful in the church. In medieval times, the grand inquisitors came from the ranks of the church; today they can come from the ranks of university professors and be called Fuchs; and their followers are prepared to pull out all possible means of fighting from their pockets, such as children's trumpets and ratchets, house keys that are whistled with when a Dr. Stein and a Dr. Kolisko talk about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It cannot be said that these people had not heard the speeches that had been delivered, because otherwise they would have had to conjure up the children's trumpets and ratchets and whatever else they had, after hearing the “bad” reasons of Dr. Kolisko and Dr. Stein. But it was not in their power to hear the reasons of Dr. Stein and Dr. Kolisko; it was in their power to shout something down, as in medieval times, with other means, they would have crushed what these people today venerate as progress. One must have the courage to look at such an attitude without reservation. And yet one needs to look no further than the numerous sleeping souls of people who do not want to look at the phenomena of spiritual life, who would like to sleep in the face of these phenomena. Then one must say - also about the supernatural - what a Viennese writes about his Vienna, what he writes about what he loves there - even if it is not particularly well written, it is still something like self-knowledge. After this young Viennese draws attention to his own youth and brings it together with what he says has developed into a healthier spirituality, he writes in the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung no. 29 of July 19, 1920:

The intellectual situation of the German Danube countries seems to me to be even less encouraging than the economic and political situation. We have more or less the cheapest and shallowest kind of socialism, the oldest and long-since-overcome variety of philosophy in free-spirited debauchery and banal historical concepts; alongside it, the most unedifying method of playing off knowledge and belief against each other; alongside it, religiously embellished blanket intolerance; alongside it, the most uncritical desire to pounce on all noisily embellished artifice , an admirable loquacity and sentimental preference for the self-evident; alongside it, traits of genius, muffled by tacitly agreed lack of talent among intellectuals, which regards half as whole and the whole as half, and finally, on top of that, a considerable variety of vanity that, puffing itself up, says: “Don't tell me! I am bad and educated myself!” It is hardly surprising that, embedded in such a kind of spirituality, even the softest and most unprofiled brand of occultism is the most popular here. A broad, murky stream of nonsense flows through this city and all kinds of truisms flourish on its banks.

Now, my dear attendees, it is fair to say that a kind of spirituality prevails here that allows the most stupid brand of occultism, the most stupid spiritualistic stream of nonsense, to flow around freely – that, my dear attendees, is a matter of course! I do not want to point out now – because it is already too late – that there might be other places besides Vienna where this stream of frivolous shallowness has its audience and where people are asleep to what is most necessary: the reawakening of those forces that must awaken in the human breast if we want the dawning of the dawn to take the place of decline. But if we can recognize error, just as, on the one hand, people of genius like Oswald Spengler can prove the downfall of what exists, and, on the other hand, people like Professor Eugen Varga can show the currents of decline through their deeds, then we – if we have the ability to awaken in the soul, then we will be able to look at the spiritual current that, as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, wants to put into the will of people that which can be born out of the light of supersensible knowledge. And then, then we will gain a new version of the Christ's words: Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will not pass away. - We will then say: Yes, everything that is accessible to the eyes of Oswald Spengler and everything in which social reforms such as those of Professor Eugen Varga would like to move, that will pass away. But that which is born of a truly new spirit will dominate the future, because it not only believes in some indeterminate forces somewhere that will help to bring about a new culture, as has been helped in the past, but it wants to ignite the own will, the deepest inner will of man himself, which one has in freedom in one's hands, to new powers. We speak out against the downfall of the West not only because we have faith in the future, but because we want to bring about a future that we can already see. Just as we see the future plant in the germ of the old one, so we want a future that we already see as a germ in us. The future will be, if only we want it, against all forces of doom. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is directed at the will, not at the idle point of view, and from this it wants to take the right to speak out against the downfall of the West.

Not only everyone notices that civilized humanity is going through severe crises in the present, but everyone actually experiences them. I would like to say that two of these crises have recently emerged quite clearly, so to speak explosively.

The first, more insidious crisis, is already being noticed and mentioned by a great many people in the present, but its nature is understood by very few. For this crisis, which has brought such severe misery and hardship to humanity in the first instance and which we can describe as the state crisis of the present, we can probably set 1914 as the year of explosion. We know, of course, how the most terrible struggles took place in the European state system at that time, and how humanity is still suffering from the terrible after-effects of those struggles today. It may be said that it became apparent during the course of these struggles, but especially after these struggles came to an apparent end in 1918, that it became apparent how little is understood as to where the source, the actual cause of this state-legal crisis of humanity is to be found.

From two sides, one could hear something like a motto that would indicate the direction in which the terrible crisis would develop. Some thought – I do not want to go into the characteristics of the individual parties now, that does not belong here, but I just want to mention it – they thought that a different structure of the state system of civilized humanity must emerge from the chaos of war; at least, many thought, the existing states would have to change their borders, set up safeguards here or there. The others, no less numerous, wanted to make the motto from the most diverse points of view: Neither winners nor losers! - That would mean that the system of states of civilized humanity must emerge from the chaos of war in the same form as it was before.

It must be said that both those who thought of conquests, of changing state borders, and those who spoke the slogan “neither victor nor vanquished” actually realized that this terrible confusion in the second decade of the 20th 0th century had arisen from the fact that the states, in their mutual relationship, with their borders as they were, simply could not remain, but that they also did not have the strength within themselves to reorganize themselves in such a way that a tolerable relationship could emerge between them. That it could not come to the conclusion 'neither victor nor vanquished' is shown by the outcome of the war. But that the conclusion 'victory' is not enough either is shown by what has developed since then, because if you look at what has arisen from the way of thinking, from the outlook of those who are among the victors , then one must say: in Versailles, in Saint-Germain, in Spa and so on, everywhere those who thought with the same thoughts were together, with which one set up the states that had come into confusion and chaos. They wanted to continue with the same way of thinking, the same way of looking at things. They wanted to set up some new state territories, which we also saw emerging – at first only on the surface – but what was hoped for did not come of it. Anyone who takes an unbiased look at the conditions of civilized humanity today will have to admit that what has been established, especially in Europe, already clearly shows that it cannot have an inner foundation. From the disorder in which everything that emerged from the peace agreements finds itself, the unbiased must recognize that one simply cannot continue the old way of thinking, the state way of thinking, which has emerged through modern history. It has asserted itself in the peace agreements; it has proved its impossibility through the facts.

The second crisis – or perhaps it would be better to say the explosion of the second crisis, since it had been in preparation for a long time – occurred around 1918 and in the following years. It can be called the economic crisis. Out of the chaos of war arose in the yearning of humanity what could be called the aspiration to arrive at economic conditions such as are present in the instincts and needs of numerous members of today's civilized humanity. What have we seen emerging from this economic crisis so far? If we look to the West, we see absolute helplessness; we also see the continuation of economic activity as it has emerged in modern history; we see continuous experimentation without guiding ideas; we see those who are concerned about this economic activity, so far in great apprehension about the outcome of this experimentation. And if we look to the East, we see how purely economic thinking, insofar as it has asserted itself in the minds of the proletariat, has taken on a strange form. We see in the European East – and we see the same thing continuing deep into Asia – the endeavour to create, one might say, a militarized economic state structure. We see the purely militaristic principle applied in the East, which has suffered such shipwreck from the old constitutional states. I would like to say: we see the purely militaristic principle applied to an economic organism that is to be created. And today the facts speak clearly enough for these efforts. Who would claim today that anything else could be achieved by this militarization of economic life in the east of Europe than merely the plundering of the old economy and the destruction of the old economic structure? One has illusions about anything that is to be created for humanity, but which crumbles more with each day, with each week. On the other hand, we see how the ideas and views of people, how they have developed, particularly in the second half of the 19th century, as so-called thought-based economic reforms, social reforms, how these ideas, where they are to be applied radically, cannot in the least produce anything fruitful.

And so it may be said that two crises, the state crisis and the economic crisis, now face civilized humanity with no prospect of a way out. One does not need to develop extensive spiritual abilities to recognize this, as I mentioned in the introduction; one need only devote oneself impartially to observing what is happening. From these observations, which could already be made over decades, if one directed the attention of the soul to the way in which these two crises were clearly preparing, arose that which has been undertaken in recent times in Dornach as anthroposophical college courses. Of course, the anthroposophical college courses held in September and October of this year in Dornach by three lecturers from the most diverse branches of science need not be overestimated in their present significance; they are a very first and perhaps very weak beginning, but the beginning of a very definite, purposeful will. The thirty lecturers in Dornach were intended to show that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that I have been presenting for almost two decades now, also in Stuttgart, has the inner strength and the inner scientific methodology to fertilize the most diverse human scientific branches, so that they can take on a form corresponding to the demands of contemporary and future life.

But what is necessary in order for something like this to be undertaken in a purposeful way? It is necessary to understand what the most important, the third crisis is, of which the other two crises mentioned are basically only the outward expression. But this third crisis is not yet being properly understood by almost all of humanity today: it is the crisis of our entire spiritual life. I know, my dear audience, that what I am saying is something that is met with the gravest doubt in the broadest circles today. I also know that what I am saying is something that people actually find uncomfortable to hear. This is shown, for example, by the fact that many people admit the state crisis and many people admit the economic crisis, that they demand fundamental changes in the conception and organization of state and economic life as a result of this admission, but that very few people are convinced that intellectual life, including the individual sciences, must also undergo a transformation. In many circles today, it is thought that intellectual life must provide the sources for further fruitful progress for humanity, for emerging from hardship and misery and social confusion. But people think of the contribution of intellectual life in such a way that they simply take only those 'intellectual goods' that have been produced so far as so-called 'safe science' and want to introduce them into the widest circles through the most diverse channels, through adult education centres, popular education associations and so on. But - as I have mentioned here before - people are not unbiased enough to thoroughly consider the following fact: When one recognizes that it was precisely those circles that have so far participated in the intellectual life as it has developed in modern human development, and that it was precisely these educated circles that have essentially become the bearers of the confusion, when one recognizes this, one must admit that the same confusion cannot be removed by popularizing the thoughts that have led to disaster and that have been brought about by this intellectual movement, because then the same confusion would arise from the widest circles that has already emerged from the narrow circle of the representatives of this intellectual life.

Therefore, the aim that has emerged from Dornach, where these Anthroposophical college courses have taken place, is not to simply popularize in a conservative way what we already have in terms of so-called certain science or other spiritual goods within which the confusions have asserted themselves, but to fertilize this spiritual material anew, to give it an impetus through which it can become the bearer of a different social and economic life. The aim of the spiritual movement inspired by anthroposophy is to renew spiritual life, not to broaden the old spiritual life. It should be recognized within the spiritual movement inspired by anthroposophy that the impulses, thoughts and views that have led to the confusion of states and the confusion of the economy were already present in the old school of thought. But few people today still take the trouble to really look at the origins of our distress and our lives, at the crisis in our intellectual life. That is just inconvenient. After all, something should be “certain”, one should be able to stand on some firm ground. One believes that everything would be shaken if one were to have a reforming effect on this intellectual life itself. That is why it is so difficult for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to speak to people of the present day, because basically the interest that it must assert out of its inner sense of duty in world history is not active at all among the people in the broadest circles. One would like to look everywhere, in the economic and the state, for the sources of the crises, but one shrinks from looking for them in the spiritual life.

But until we look for it in the intellectual life, nothing, absolutely nothing, will improve – not in economic life, nor in the life of the state. For what is external reality in the life of the state and in economic life is, even if people do not want to see it today, only the expression of what people think, what they have learned to think through the spiritual life that has emerged in the last three to four centuries, particularly in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century in the developmental history of humanity. The state and economic crises are too noticeable to be denied, and it has become necessary to recognize that new impulses must be supplied to both state and economic development. Many people admit that something must happen in the spiritual life as well. But that something must happen that is oriented towards anthroposophical spiritual science is something that people of the present day, who also admit the former, very often resist. We can already give enough examples of this today - examples that can be taken from the present, both from the world regions suffering from terrible cultural pressure that belong to the defeated, and from those cultural regions that belong to the victors.

We see, now that the war turmoil has come to a temporary, but only apparent, end, that after the revolutionary spirit had emerged, the call to separate the ecclesiastical and religious element from the state element has been asserted within Germany. Taken in the abstract, I would say that this is the first call for a part of what the threefold social organism wants: it wants to separate the entire spiritual life from the state and economic life and place it in its own self-government, built only on its own principles. Today, only this innermost part of spiritual life is understood, so that one has demanded, but only in an abstract sense, its separation from state life.

Now, however, other phenomena have emerged in this very area within Germany: from a certain quarter, a decidedly anti-religious, anti-Christian sentiment has asserted itself, and that which has asserted itself there has combined with the war cry: separation of the Church from the State. In particular, it became difficult for Protestantism to come to terms with what emerged as a result of the war, the revolution. On the one hand, one had to realize that the Catholic Church, with its ancient constitution, would not lose much by separating from the state, because it has so many political and administrative and also popular impulses within itself that it could indeed only gain from this separation from the state, especially if it still circumvents the separation from the state in a scheming way. On the other hand, the connection of the Protestant churches with the state authorities was so close – the Protestant churches were designed to see the ecclesiastical authority exercised by state powers – that they had to feel, as it were, abandoned by the separation from the state. This was felt to a certain extent, leading to a kind of rallying call for a gathering of all that could still, from a religious point of view, direct the gaze towards the spiritual. The various denominations were to be organized so that they could achieve together what they could not achieve separately, through a kind of self-government.

Yes, something else emerged that is highly characteristic: those who were the bearers of this “consolidation” idea of the various church denominations openly stated that it was good that the separation of church and state affairs was still taking place as trustingly as possible with regard to the state authorities, that the separation - as it was put - was happening in a “benevolent” manner, so to speak. They openly stated that at least religious education would still be provided by the state and so on, that the church would not simply be released from state authority, but would be compensated in a certain way - well, and what more such things are -: “benevolent detachment from the state”. From this it can be seen that religious denominations are accustomed to being run by the state; they cannot imagine a certain state independence. This is not only due to economic circumstances, but also to the way people think. And so we see that the churches that are to gain their independence still look, so to speak, if only halfheartedly, to the state leadership they have become accustomed to over the centuries. This is more or less the case in Central Europe.

Let us now look at the rest of the world. It is extremely interesting that in Switzerland, for example, speakers from America are now being heard who are church representatives of religious denominations. What do they say in their speeches? They say something like the following in their speeches – I can only summarize what is explained in detail in a few sentences – they say something like the following, from the American point of view, of course: Humanity is striving, they say, for the League of Nations. The League of Nations is supposed to lead humanity out of the old, militaristic conditions; it is supposed to bring the longed-for peace and a new human culture and human civilization. But, they say, the achievements of the statesmen to date, what they have accomplished so far, cannot bring about a viable League of Nations. In saying this, they are attacking Woodrow Wilson, whom they describe as a well-meaning but somewhat foolish idealist. For such a League of Nations would be forged together by external, state conditions that have actually outlived themselves, that no longer have the strength to support human civilization. The true League of Nations, so say these American pastors, must be rooted in the hearts of men. But it can take root in the hearts of men only when Christian feeling and religious confession are found throughout the earth. And so these American speakers would actually like to come to the constitution of the League of Nations with the Europeans from the religious point of view; they would like to win the hearts of humanity religiously.

What I am relating to you, ladies and gentlemen, is something that comes from the spiritual life. But anyone who hears the speeches of such American pastors, and who is able to see without prejudice what is now raging economically in Europe, will say: however beautiful the words may be – they are sometimes very beautiful, these words that are spoken there - however beautiful the words may be, they do not find the way to the hearts of men; they are powerless to found an inner league of nations. For those people, whose instincts and desires give rise to the social battle cries of today, no longer have an ear for these beautifully spoken words; they demand something else; hearts do not open to these words. Here it is shown, as well as on the ground, where the call sounds to break away benevolently from the state, to gather together what is scattered, everywhere it is shown that one already notices the creeping mental crisis of the present. But one must really be quite biased if one can believe that, on the one hand, the beautiful words of American pastors can found the world federation in the hearts of men or that, on the other hand, by collecting the various denominations that exist in Central Europe can be brought about by the collection of what exists in terms of denominations in Central Europe – a spiritual renewal that is truly powerful enough to bring about strength for social human progress, to bring about strength that can reform in the state and economic spheres. Only if one is biased can one believe such things.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science studies what is actually taking place from its insights and its perspective, and it notes: Yes, the will is there to make a spiritual life powerful among people again, so that the state and economic life can emerge from thoughts rooted in a fruitful spiritual life. Otherwise, economic and political life cannot be reformed. The will is there, but something is missing: the creative power. Today it is not enough for American pastors to repeat old-fashioned words, however beautifully they are forged, but which have lost their value for human hearts. Today it is not a matter of collecting the confessions of the past; today it is a matter of bringing a new spiritual life to people through a new creation. Only those who do not merely want to repeat the old, do not merely want to collect the old, but who develop the will to create spiritually anew understand the spiritual crisis.

We must ask ourselves: Why do the most beautiful words prove powerless? Why does the collection [of religious creeds] lead to nothing? We see that in the course of the last three to four centuries, what is called state life and what is called economic life has become powerful throughout civilized humanity. These two have taken the spiritual life so completely in tow that those in Central Europe who, in terms of their religious confession, are to be separated from the state, nevertheless crave the state and its leadership. So completely has the spiritual life been dragged in tow that today the most beautiful words that can be spoken from this old spiritual life no longer find their way to the hearts in which the instincts for today's reforms arise. This proves, from the external historical facts, that we do not merely need a new fertilization of the old, a stimulus for the old, but that we need a complete new creation. From this point of view, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science stands. It wants to fertilize the individual sciences, which are supposed to provide the thoughts for the state and economic life of humanity. But spiritual science as anthroposophically oriented should also inspire state life itself and economic life in such a way that both are supplied with new impulses that are created in spiritual life itself. We have succeeded in doing this for a large part of the sciences, at least for a start – we can emphasize this after our successes, after our results during the Dornach college courses. Historical, physical, chemical, biological, legal, yes, even mathematical, philosophical, psychological research – all these fields have already taken shape through our college courses, showing what these branches of science will become if they are methodically and rigorously permeated by what spiritual scientific research intends, as it has been presented here in Stuttgart for more than a decade and a half. It is precisely this crisis of the spirit, which makes necessary new spiritual creations, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to point out. Why, I said, have the most beautiful words proved powerless? Why do we long for guidance from the state again? Because, basically, we have gradually attained a spiritual life that was entirely an appendage of state or economic life, that was entirely established in relation to educational and teaching institutions out of state will, that was entirely maintained by the aging economic forms. What state and economic life have hammered together with spiritual life over the past few centuries, what they have made out of the old creeds, has now become something that proves powerless when it wants to assert itself, as is the case with the American pastors for the founding of a League of Nations. Yes, my dear ladies and gentlemen, spiritual life has been reduced to this impotence by the state's supreme supervision and economic supremacy. The spiritual life towards which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims must, as I have often discussed here, arise from the innermost soul life of the human being himself. This soul life, however, cannot be subject to any kind of supervision or control, but can only arise in full freedom, through the completely free development of human individuality, in the free self-administration of this spiritual life itself. If this spiritual life is in free self-management, if it can produce precisely the kind of science that has emerged in Dornach and that the Waldorf School demonstrates for the art of education every day, if this spiritual life in free self-management can truly bring forth the human individual abilities that are sent into the physical world with every human being through birth or conception from spiritual worlds, then the fruits that flourish from such a free spiritual life can be fed to state life and economic life. The crises in the life of the state and in economic life are due to the fact that they lack the fertilizing ideas which should be supplied to them from a free spiritual life. When the state and economic life took it upon themselves to direct the spiritual life, it resulted in the suppression of the fertilizing influence which can only come to them if the spiritual life is left free, so that from this freedom the spiritual life can have an effect on the state and economic life. What I am hinting at here can also be fully substantiated by an unbiased observation of the course of civilization history. I will just point out some of this evidence. We see how, since the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, especially since the 18th century, economic life has become more and more complicated. We see how the necessity has developed to lead this economic life, which used to be guided more instinctively, even into city culture, even into the guild system, out of unconscious thinking. But one need only look at the people who are to be named among the spiritual founders of the newer economic sciences, at minds like those of the Frenchman Frangois Quesnay and the Englishman Adam Smith, and one will find that, in the period of world history in which it has become necessary to grasp the economy from the spirit, scientific thinking itself has become powerless to cast any kind of light on economic life. Both Quesnay, the Frenchman who wanted to establish a political economy more from a natural science background, and Smith, the Englishman who founded a similar political economy, basically wanted to construct the whole political economy from a few axiomatic-looking principles such as “the validity of private property” and “the economic freedom of the human individual”.

If we look in particular at the founder of modern political economy, Adam Smith – and his thinking is, of course, only an expression of the thinking of his entire age, the 17th and 18th centuries – we find that this economic thinking of Adam Smith is basically a true reflection of the thinking that was established as scientific thinking in the West of civilization in particular at that time. It is very interesting to follow how, for example, what entered into physical-astronomical thinking as a method, as a way of looking at things, through Newton, and then entered into science as a way of dealing with problems, is encountered again in Smith in the treatment of economic tasks. Just as mathematical physics seeks to derive everything from a few principles that can be grasped by the intellect in the abstract, so a man like Adam Smith seeks to derive the whole of political economy from a few principles that can be grasped by the intellect in the abstract. It is interesting to observe how unprejudiced minds, even Bulwer in a novel, set about mocking what has now become established as thinking in political economy. We find the mocking thought in Bulwer: “In the past it was believed that anyone who wanted to get involved in political economy had to have extensive knowledge of what people do when they do business with each other. Today, all you need are a few abstract principles, and you can derive the entire national economy from them. - And even earlier, an unbiased thinker, Young, said: Until now, he had thought that someone who wanted to talk about the national economy had to know the virtues and vices of people, the way people communicate in economic life, what they do there - in short: that such a person had to have extensive knowledge. But Adam Smith showed him, said Young, that you only need a few ideas and that with a few strokes of the pen you can compress all the extensive, empirical economic knowledge into a few abstract ideas.

As economic life has become more complicated, what has happened to economic thinking? Well, my dear audience, something has come over this economic thinking, which first asserted itself in the West, which originates from the newer economic life, which is modeled on the newer economic life and which, in its final consequences, whether one admits it or not, now appears in the East of Europe in the few abstract thoughts of Lenin and Trotsky as the final consequence. That is what we have to face. But you only understand what is at stake here if you not only acquire a few abstract thoughts - which today's humanity loves very much - but if you get a thorough overview of the course of human development for many centuries, as I have often hinted at and as I will now hint at from a different point of view.

My dear attendees, just as a view such as that begun by Newton, which then came into the human psychology through other thinkers and mechanized the human psychology , just as Newton mechanized astronomy, just as this mechanical-mathematical scientific approach came into political economy through Adam Smith, so, basically, it has taken hold of even the popular views of the modern civilized world. And today, in the age of newspapers and the popularization of science, there are basically few people alive who have not been touched in some way, even if they are unaware of it, by the spirit of this scientific discipline. This type of science lives on the one hand in mathematics; in mathematics it has the only thing that springs from within the human being, for all of mathematics is not something that is gained through observation, but it is something that springs from within the human being. This branch of science, which has mathematical thinking, which can be clearly seen, for example, in Smith, and also in Ricardo, the later editor of the national economy, - this mathematical thinking is one side of modern science. The other side is the sensory observation of the external world and the formation of all kinds of abstract theories, of atomistic or other materialistic theories about this sensory external world. These two currents actually stand there: sensory observation of the external world, mathematizing thinking. We must be fair to what appears on the one hand as mathematizing thinking, right into economics, and on the other hand as conscientious observation and conscientious experimentation in the external world. We must be fair to this, for it has brought about the great triumphs of modern Western science. And I have emphasized it many times: these triumphs of modern science are by no means opposed by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but fully recognized. But it must be realized that there was a time in the development of humanity when this kind of scientific attitude was not present at all. Today, of what was present in humanity in this field, only the last decadent remnants are left.

Again I point to the Orient. But if one wants to see the essential things in their true form, one must not look to the present-day Orient, where everything is already in decline and destruction, which was once an ancient wisdom of humanity, which was even greater than it later became — you can read about it in my book “Occult Science”. It was even greater in the time before the Vedas, before the Vedanta philosophy came into being; what still shines out artistically from the Vedas, and only in the last echoes from the Vedanta philosophy, can still be seen by the unbiased knower in the whole of oriental development. There is much that is magnificent and powerful in the wisdom. There is nothing in it of the special way in which Western science of more recent times works. The way of thinking, the way of looking at the world, was quite different. The scientific methods that we so admire today, and rightly so, that we must emulate, were not found in ancient oriental thought. Instead, ancient Oriental wisdom had what I would call a world view, in contrast to science: a world view without science. That was basically the characteristic essence of the ancient East in its wisdom.

This world view is significant in that it encompasses the whole person; it is significant in that through this world view, the human being grasps himself as spirit, soul and body. Admittedly, this world view in the ancient Orient occurred in such a way that little attention was paid to the body and to that which belonged to the external, physical world. This life was more of an understanding between soul and spirit, in which man knew himself rooted, but it was a world view. That is to say, through what man thought and felt, he firmly established his position, his relationship to the world of the senses and to the world of the spirit. He did this not in a scientific way, but through soul perception. What was gained through spiritual contemplation certainly lived in its original form in the ancient times of the Orient. But the legacy of it lived on, and basically, the legacy of this oriental world view can be felt right up to the present day. This life of world-conception gave that through which, for example, the first Christianity - in which this ancient oriental wisdom and world-conception was still alive - grasped the mystery of Golgotha that gives meaning to the earth. But in the place of the view that the ancient Orient had, the intellectual element became more and more established as this view remained. Before the appearance in more recent times of the Western world's science, which is also without a worldview and which has also given shape to the teaching of the soul and to economics, as I have mentioned, what I would like to call an inner struggle arose in the middle, beginning with ancient Greece, clearly developing in ancient Rome, and then establishing itself throughout Central Europe. He grasped an event that can only be grasped by the spirit, the Christ event, still through the inherited echoes of ancient, oriental wisdom. Alongside this, through the special talents of Western humanity, there shimmered more and more, even into this Central Europe, that which is mere human intellectuality, which basically wants to understand the entire cosmos, above all our earthly surroundings and human beings themselves, only through mathematics and through observation of the external world.

And so, in Central Europe, on the one hand, there was precisely that which one might call a leaning towards the ancient oriental heritage. Everything that lived and still lives today through the Middle Ages and more recent times in the content of Christian teaching, everything that lives in it as a world view - even if it has almost gone out, even if pure rationalism has taken hold of modern theology - is for the most part old oriental heritage, because only a few attempts at a new creation exist. And connected with this is what man now finds out of himself through mathematics and observation of nature, but which does not lead to a world view. And so we see in the Middle Ages, in the time when Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were working, this conflict between what human reason can achieve through observation and mathematics, what should be limited to the sensory world, and that which is supposed to be revelation, world-view revelation – the Mystery of Golgotha, which was not called by that name at the time, but which, in terms of its content, not of fact, was ancient oriental heritage. And basically, this dichotomy lives on to this day in all public life in Central Europe, including in state and economic life, emerging from the Middle Ages - this dichotomy between scientific thinking without a worldview and an old, inherited worldview without science. Man in Central Europe has been called upon to wage this inner battle since the time of the ancient Greeks. And it was precisely this inner struggle that produced the greatest spiritual achievements during the period of German culture at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. For that which lived in Herder, Schiller, Goethe, in the philosophers of German idealism, in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, only lived in all these minds because these minds, in their inmost depths, concentrated the struggle that exists between science without world-view and the inherited world-view without science. In Goethe's works, one can follow this conflict in his individual utterances, as he tried to reconcile what science gives on the one hand, and what lived in him as an intuitive feeling, in accordance with the imagination, as an ancient heritage of the Orient. Indeed, with Goethe it goes even further; he experienced this inner conflict until the eighties of the 18th century. Then he was drawn to the south, so that he could at least still feel in the south the echoes that remained in southern Europe of the ancient oriental, unscientific world view, which, however, was very, very much dying out in Greece. From this unscientific world view, nothing but mathematics, dry mathematics, came through the Arabs from the European south to the west. It is basically Europe's last remnant, albeit a lasting remnant, of what arose from the unscientific world view of the Orient as a comprehensively universal concept. For there, all wisdom was so intrinsic to the human being, whereas in our civilization, only mathematics is still intrinsic. Novalis, in particular, felt this about mathematics and stammered out.

And what the Western civilization has gained is what I would call the system of observation and experimentation, from which the actual science of the West has emerged, from which everything that man does not initially gain from his inner being emerges, but which he gains by allowing the world of the senses to have an effect on the senses. And what has become of the scientific spirit in the process, what has been transferred from the scientific spirit to all the things through which our leading people gain their education, their scientific knowledge, that, my dear audience, has revealed its powerlessness in the face of economic and state life, in the face of the spirits I have mentioned, to whom many other names could be added.

And so we see our modern life looming. I would like to express it symbolically, what has actually become established in the last three to four centuries as our looming modern life. Outwardly, it is characterized as follows: On the one hand, we see the essential spirit of science developing and dominating schools and universities. But we see that what is done in schools and universities leads to an unworldly existence. We see how the universities stand as lonely islands of education. But we also see something else happening: that what is done in the way of newer science, of science without world view, stops at nothing. A characteristic example of this is the Darwinian doctrine, which, with such scientific conscientiousness, traces the development of living beings from the simplest creature to the most perfect one. However, it places man at the top of this animal organization, so to speak, and only comes to explain man insofar as he is an animal. From this and many other examples, one could show how the insights of mathematizing and purely externally observing science stop at the human being. Thus we have a scientific system of education, without a world view, that lives in abstractions, that does not give the human being what the world view of the Orient, without science, still gave - a sense of his place in the world - that only satisfies the head, only the intellect, that does not take hold of the whole person. On the one hand.

On the other hand, something arises that I would like to describe symbolically by showing you the factory with the modern practitioner. What is the relationship between the factory and the university? Yes, there is a relationship, but this relationship has become very one-sided. The one thing that shines from the modern universities into the factory is mechanical science. And this shining of mechanical science has brought about the great development of technology for the factory and for everything that goes with it, which has founded modern civilization. This science, which stops at the human being with its knowledge, was able to contribute to the development of technology in the highest sense. But even in the factory, the practitioner stops at the human being. He extends his routine — for it is nothing other than routine — only into the technical and into that which is connected with the technical. He cannot establish any relationship, any human relationship, between himself as an entrepreneur and leader and those who work on modern civilization from out of the broad mass of humanity. In knowledge, science stops short of the human being; in practice, in social activity, it stops short of the human being. This halting of the advance is indicated by a boundary. Everything that could come from modern mathematical science into technology, everything that could fertilize trade and commerce, and so on, has been taken into the area that has this boundary. But from science, which stops at human knowledge, no social life could be gained from this science that could have satisfied the great demands of modern times on this purely human side. And so, beyond the boundary, stood all of humanity, which in the most recent time now demanded its human dignity; so stood that humanity to which one had not found the path in practice, just as one had not found the path to the human being himself and his essence in the modern world-view-less scientific knowledge. This is the tragedy that has led to the modern crises, because what is written about modern practical life in the books, what is written in the ledger and the cash book, has nothing to do with what lives in the souls of those who stand beyond the boundary, beyond which humanity one stopped. But these came forward with their soul demands, and from these soul demands arose the counter-image of the spiritual crisis of the present.

Thus we have seen the rise of those universities, those colleges, those educational institutions that only opened the way to the technical, to the commercial, to the inhuman, I might say, into the factory, into industry, into the modern money economy, but which did not penetrate to the human being itself. And so, on the other hand, we have seen the imperfect sense of observation, which was first found in cognitive science without a world view, develop into the experimental sense of modern practitioners, who want nothing to do with guiding ideas, who limit themselves to experimenting with the mathematical-mechanical-technical, who summon people and make them work without concerning themselves with the social structure of humanity. We have seen the rise of the practitioner, who today has a formal hatred of all guiding ideas, who has a formal hatred of everything scientific, of everything cognitive, but who is right on the one hand in that this modern, world-view-less science has nothing of what can illuminate practice, insofar as the human heart is involved in practice. But this practitioner is wrong in that he attributes to this branch of science what he attributes to every spiritual life. And so he wants to remain a routine practitioner, he wants to continue what I would call a spiritless, mere experimental approach. This makes it so difficult to really build the bridge that could be built from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to the most practical life. The only thing to blame for this is the aversion of practitioners, who want to remain routiniers, to what, for example, the impulse for the threefold social organism comes from spiritual science. More and more we have seen this hatred of practice against everything that is spiritual life. And so today in the West we see a confused hustle and bustle of experimental economic activity, of experimental state activity. And we see in the East this economic activity, this state activity, leading to a militarized economic state that must paralyze everything human.

Thus we see how the crisis of the state and the economic crisis have actually arisen from the crisis of the spirit. Based on this clear insight, what has been represented here for more than a decade and a half as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to develop the forces for human progress. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to develop living knowledge out of the same scientific spirit that developed in the West without a worldview, out of the innermost human soul experience. This knowledge in turn becomes a worldview, not just a repetition of old words that no longer find their way to the hearts of men, but which seeks to shed light on the old creeds and to open up the view to that mighty event in the evolution of the earth, the Mystery of Golgotha. There is resistance to such a renewal of spiritual life, which, from the spirit of modern humanity, seeks to view the fundamental fact of Christianity, which can only be properly grasped and contemplated in spirit. We can no longer return to the ancient Orient. We can no longer aspire to a worldview that is not scientific. We have moved beyond the times when a worldview lacking in science could suffice for humanity. Today we are faced with the great task of developing a worldview from science through the inner development of the human being. We will be able to do this if we truly understand the nature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. However, as long as there are still people who claim that what is gained through the spiritual-scientific method of knowledge - an inward but strictly scientific method modeled on the strictest mathematical methods - could be just as much a vision as any other vision or hallucination, as long as there are there are people who claim such things, because, for example, they cannot in reality read what is written in my books “Occult Science” or “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”; as long as there are such people and as long as such people find credence, spiritual science will indeed have a difficult road to travel. I will have more to say about this. For such people do not realize that what is grasped with spiritual insight, what is grasped by man inwardly awakening himself to a spiritual insight, teaches him to distinguish fantasy from reality just as one learns to distinguish fantasy from reality in ordinary consciousness. The logic of facts on which this distinction is based is basically very simple, a logic of facts that only our opponents cannot grasp.

How do I know, for example, that when I lift a kilogram weight, I am not hallucinating, but that it is external reality? How do I recognize that? I recognize this by the fact that I simply have to strengthen my sense of self when I lift the weight. I have to make myself stronger inwardly. If I have a mere vision or hallucination, my sense of self remains with the same intensity. I am absorbed in the vision because I do not have the experience of intensifying my sense of self. I notice the resistance by the fact that I have to apply strength that is within me when lifting the kilogram weight; I am not absorbed in the vision. Likewise, when I have spiritual experiences, I do not lose myself in hallucinations or fantasies in which my sense of self does not increase. They are described everywhere in the spiritual scientific writings that those experiences through which one penetrates into the world in which man is before birth or conception, in which he will be after death, in which his eternal is rooted , that these experiences through which one penetrates into the supersensible world presuppose that one must awaken the soul more than in ordinary life, that is, one must make it experience more intensely, more strongly inwardly. But this expresses precisely what guarantees the scientific nature of what is asserted as spiritual insight. And if one asserts what I have only hinted at here, what I have often discussed in lectures here in Stuttgart over many years, if one asserts this, then, yes, then one acquires accurate views about what has seized modern humanity like a crisis in intellectual life.

For example, one sees how mathematics came to the West as an ancient inheritance via a detour through Arabia, but how it was powerless to conquer the complicated economic and political life of the West, as can be seen, for example, in Adam Smith. One observes that this mathematical thinking, this mathematical view, is gained entirely from within the human being, and by inwardly awakening the soul, one develops precisely that which adheres to this mathematical thinking. It is precisely that which lives in mathematical thinking that one develops into a higher perfection through inner, spiritual methods. In this way one acquires a very specific spiritual view. By inwardly enlivening the mathematization, which is limited only to the world between birth and death, through spiritual-scientific methods, one learns to recognize that which comes into the soul through inspiration. It comes in such a way that the intuition opens up for us to what the human being has experienced supersensibly in spiritual worlds before birth or conception. Mathematics is the one field of science that has preserved for us a final starting point for arriving at a view of prenatal human life.

What Western science, without a worldview, acquires in its external observation, if it is developed here [in spiritual science], initially provides something that does not remain an abstract view - for worldview For science without world-view it remains abstract contemplation – but it rises to become moral, as I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, rising to become moral imagination and thus the foundation of the moral life of the human being. Everything we gain in thoughts from the outside world leads to images, to imaginations, which ultimately connect with inspiration. We experience this. And however imperfect what we can observe of the external world between birth and death may be, when we process it inwardly, when we also experience what we have observed outwardly in our soul through the spiritual-scientific method, then from our imaginations we also gain a view of the life into which we enter after our death. When applied to science, spiritual science will in turn lead to a world view that is based on mathematics, observation and experimentation. However, this world view can give modern civilization the strength to advance humanity. For the world view has the property - as it already showed as an oriental, science-less world view - that it affects the mind and will of man, that it works in such a way that man founds a legal life according to these particular views, through which he brings about an understanding from person to person in the human community, in other words, that he builds himself a state life. A worldview stimulates the will through which economic life is determined. Science without a worldview speaks only to the head, to the intellect; it leaves the emotions and the will unaffected.

And so we see that while intellectual science has reached its highest flowering at the beginning of the twentieth century, the feeling that should permeate the state and the will that should shape economic life have remained uninfluenced. We would be heading towards this barbarization if head and intellect increasingly develop the life of instinct and leave mind and will uncared for, as it is already so terribly evident in the East of today's civilization. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, on the other hand, can take hold of feeling and will and thus generate a new force for human progress. This is something that science, without a worldview, cannot do. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in turn penetrates into feeling, that is, into state life; it penetrates into the will, that is, into economic life. It is by this crisis and the healing of it that one must recognize what the other two crises are. Non-ideological science, ladies and gentlemen, only seizes the intellect. It leaves unaffected the emotional life, which should lead to that proper understanding between man and man, which is the decisive thing in the state, and it leaves equally unaffected the will, which should have a formative effect in economic life.

And so we see what has emerged as the threefold crisis in modern times. We see how people long for a renewal of intellectual life, but how they do not want to admit that this renewal of intellectual life can only come from a new creation. And so we see the powerlessness of the old intellectual life in the “collection” idea, in the fine words of the American speakers who address the Swiss and the Europeans in general. But attention must be drawn to the necessity of a new creation of intellectual life. Only from this new creation of spiritual life will something new be able to emerge that was not there, that has not proved its impossibility, like the modern state system, which in 1914 entered into its catastrophe, not merely into its crisis because it had no free spiritual life alongside it, which had not proved its impossibility like the economic life, which entered into its catastrophe in the present because it did not have the fertilization of the free spiritual life.

In modern times, we see the emergence of an intellectualized science that cannot produce the human being who is equal to political and economic life, who can find fruitful ideas for political and economic life. We see the emergence of the type of person who, in the institutions of the state, seeks only the satisfaction of his or her egoism through human sentiment, instead of communication from person to person, and thus gradually undermines the structure of these state institutions. We see through mere intellectual science, which seizes the head alone, the will degenerating into mere instinctive life, and thus also flowing into acts of egoism. We see the rise of a lack of brotherhood, which aims only at enhancing the existence of one's own being, from mere science without a worldview. However, we will find the new forces for human progress precisely through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and thus find a worldview from modern science. It will produce a thinking human being whose thinking is not merely intellectual, whose thinking shines into feeling, whose thinking penetrates into will. We will see the man of action springing from the thinker, the man who, instead of merely satisfying his egoism, seeks human understanding in a state community.

We will see the emergence of the human being who, in the associations that bring together people with the most diverse economic needs and with different economic abilities, we will see the sense of brotherhood emerging from the will, which is fertilized by a real spiritual thinking, which works in associative community in such a way that the human being works together with the other people with understanding for all and thus also for himself. We shall see emerging from a truly spiritual world-knowledge the thinking man of action, the feeling man of right, the fraternally minded economic will-man, and thus we shall gain out of such an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science a new power for human progress out of the spiritual crisis.

Speaking about occultism and the occult development of the human being, one must first and foremost clarify how the cultivation of occult development relates to actual theosophical work in the world. The latter has, since its inception, performed its task precisely by making a certain number of occult truths accessible to mankind. These truths about the super-sensible worlds, which can be learned from the theosophical literature and lectures, are essentially ancient. However, until the last third of the 19th century, it was neither usual nor necessary to share these truths publicly with the world in the form in which they exist today as theosophical truths. The cultivation of these truths was a matter of the so-called secret schools and secret societies.

One who wanted to learn some of the ancient truths about the inner world, had to be, so to speak, an accepted student, a student of the great teachers of mankind. That someone would have travelled around, as we do nowadays, to share certain elemental truths with the world, wasn't done back then. One who was admitted had to provide certain proofs of his character, his intellectual and other abilities, and within the school, there was a very strict division by degree. It was impossible, for example, to reveal to someone who had just been accepted, secrets of higher degrees. In short, everything was strictly ordered, and the world outside did not know anything about the existence of such a secret science, although this is the only true occultism.

Who were those who found their calling there? Usually, they were not known. One was a smith, one a shoemaker, a privy councillor, a carpenter. What was known was only what he represented in the world. One did not know that these people were wise ones, able to deeply look into the spiritual and super-sensible world. This changed in the last third of the 19th century. Today it is necessary that at least the elementary parts of the secret sciences reflected in theosophical texts, lectures and other writings, be made public. That this is possible and why this is so, we will see right away.

First, we must take a look at this past age, which really basically lasted into the 14th century, and also partly into the last third of the 19th century. What is happening now, the publication of certain elemental teachings of occultism had been prepared by the occult movement. This movement was founded in the 14th and 15th centuries by a high-ranking individual who became known to the world under the name of Christian Rosenkreutz.¹ What ‘Christian Rosenkreutz’ is, or who hides behind it, only the initiates know. One thing only is certain, he belongs to the most developed individuals of the modern era, who had to shape the occult knowledge of the Middle Ages in such a way, that it would fit into modern life.

In the last third of the 19th century, some were meant to go out to announce to humanity, what it needs to know today. Theosophy is nothing else but the elementary doctrine of occultism.

If we now look back at those distant times when occultism was practised in secret, there were three avenues by which a human being could come into contact with the super-sensible worlds: First as an initiate, second as a clairvoyant, third as an adept. In the old days, these three methods were kept strictly apart, and if we really want to understand what the occult development of man is all about, then we must clearly understand these three terms.

It is actually known what is meant by a clairvoyant. I specifically note that the more important one is the clairvoyant because he, after all, possesses higher senses. It is very easy to explain what a clairvoyant is. In every human soul, hidden abilities lie dormant. These can be developed, enabling the human being to look into the world hidden from the ordinary senses. There are such secret scientific methods. If a human being practises these himself, then he will no longer be as unconscious during sleep as an ordinary human being. Practising these methods make it possible that his astral body, when it pushes itself out with the Ego, perceives the spiritual world in his surroundings. Initially perceived like flooding light, like light- and colour-phenomena, he then begins to hear during the night.

This is a real experience the human being has of himself: that he, for the time being in a transitional state, is surrounded by a spiritual world as well as by a physical one. This is the beginning of actual clairvoyance.

One who really wants to achieve the state of clairvoyance, must be able to carry across into his day-consciousness what he now sees at night, because it would only be a half-measure if one could only look at night into the astral world. Once he is able to really tune in, so that he sees not only what exists for the physical senses in humans, animals and so on, but also perceives as shining aura that which the human being and the animal feels and experiences, then the state of modern clairvoyance is reached. Therefore, a clairvoyant is someone who can really see into the spiritual world and speak about it.

Let’s assume, there was an area where people have never seen a railroad and someone from there moves to an area where there were railroads. Then he would learn about it through his own experience. He would be able to talk about it at home based on his own experience, just as the clairvoyant can testify about the spiritual world.

But someone who is such a clairvoyant, is not yet what could be called an adept, nor could he be called an initiate. If a man who, according to the example above, has become familiar with a railway by personal experience, now returns home, he would not be entrusted with the task of building a railway. The same applies to the clairvoyant. He is not able to do what someone else can do who has gained practical and scientific knowledge in the super-sensible world. This is how the clairvoyant, who has only seen what exists in the higher worlds, is in comparison to the adept.

Still different is the Initiate. Here is another comparison: Imagine a human being who can see all colours and lights, and another one who is quite short-sighted. The first one doesn’t know anything about the laws of the world of light, the other one, who can’t see far, but as a trained physicist and scientist knows all the laws well. There are people, who are initiated to a high degree, despite them not being clairvoyant; at least this is applicable to all the old schools, but not to the same degree nowadays. In the old days it was possible to work like this, because don’t forget that to teach clairvoyance or train initiates is a lengthy process. Some require many incarnations to achieve this.

Such cooperation of clairvoyants and initiates is now no longer entirely possible; for this reason the Rosicrucian School no longer keeps these things strictly separate. The selflessness, that used to operate in the secret schools, can hardly be comprehended by people today. Especially, in the Egyptian secret schools individuals worked together in this way. Today, the requisite trust no longer exists, and modern man cannot imagine this anymore. This is why initiates and clairvoyants in the Rosicrucian schools were only developed to a certain degree. In contrast, one has to deal very carefully with adeptship as one could only harm the world. Because people are very disinclined to believe that spiritual powers influence everything. A storm would be unleashed and the consequence of this would be that the preparatory understanding would be jeopardised. First, it is necessary for clairvoyants and initiates to teach the occult knowledge, and only then adepts will gradually appear.

What is an adept? They exist in all areas. Observe man himself. Man consists by his nature of a physical, an etheric, and an astral body and an ego. The various limbs of human nature develop quite differently at certain ages. This is a very important consideration. Because, for the occultist a human being is born repeatedly, first physically out of the physical mother. There the physical body is enclosed by the mother’s physical body; different blood circles and juices are moving from mother to child. Once it is physically born, the mother’s physical body is detached from the child completely. This is the first birth. At this point in time the etheric body has not been born. The second birth only happens after the second dentition begins in the seventh year of life. Until then the etheric body is enclosed by the etheric shell, which does not really belong to the specific etheric body of the child. Only in the seventh year of life will the etheric body really be born. The shell will be pushed back, and the outer expression of this process is the appearance of the adult teeth, which the human being will keep. The clairvoyant sees, how, to the extent in which the teeth appear, the etheric body is being born out of his mother’s shell. Until sexual maturity, the human being is still enclosed by its astral mother, who is there from the beginning and will remain also after the seventh year of life. Then the astral mother will be pushed aside, and only now the astral body will be born, like earlier the physical and the etheric body were born. The reaching of sexual maturity means for man, the birth of the astral body. From age twenty-one to twenty-eight only, the ego will be fully born.

Once people realise how this development proceeds, it will become clear what kind of impact this will have on education. I have given a description of this in my paper The education of the child from the perspective of the science of the spirit.² This brochure contains all the rules that need to be taken into consideration in this context. Now, you see, a teacher, who has mastered this system, would be an adept in the area of education.

This practical work appearing from the spiritual worlds is adeptship. Until age seven a kind of hardening (solidification) of forms is happening inside the human being. All forms of the brain, and the bone structures (skeleton) will be created by the seventh year of life. They will continue to grow, but what doesn’t develop by age seven is irretrievable. So something irretrievable can be neglected by education. From then onwards the etheric body becomes free. Now it becomes obvious how the teeth that a human being gets are an expression of proper solidification and formation processes of the etheric body, which is just being born, and show whether they are in correct proportion to each other. These two things are related, the emergence of the teeth and the emergence of the etheric body. Everything that is concerned with growth and reproduction is connected with it. If one of these is not correct, then the other one will not be correct either. This illustrates how the science of the spirit explains how the teeth and the etheric body are connected. For example, women who have bad teeth, are more likely to have been affected by childbed fever.

Something of the principle of solidification and something of the principle of softening must exist—these hardening and softening principles need to exist in balance. Rickits, for example, occurs when the softening principle is stronger. Let us assume that the hardening principle is predominant, then the germs are laid for tuberculosis, for arteriosclerosis.

The moment in which the human being, by applying super-sensible principles, is able to guide the development of the etheric and physical body, he will be an adept in the area of child education, just like Paracelsus,³ who is no longer understood, was an adept, as he could perceive in any moment the invisible principles. Now you can imagine the kind of storm that would break out if you would approach a university with such teachings. Humankind must be prepared step by step, and then it will come to a point where it will demand that spiritual leaders back up their teachings with works from the spiritual world. The reason for the existence of initiates is, that the spiritual world can be researched and found according to its prevailing laws by means of clairvoyance. However, when one has found it and talks about it, then all things that a clairvoyant says can be understood by common sense, and if someone maintains that he cannot understand these, then the reason is not that he isn’t clairvoyant, but that he does not want to use his common sense enough.

Thus, one can be an initiate, without being clairvoyant, but then one has to rely on the clairvoyant. In a certain respect, the theosophical movement aims to help by requiring that all their public teachings are based on clairvoyants’ experience. What do you then want an audience for? In a way, one wants to turn them into Initiates, who comprehend without being clairvoyant themselves.

This is the mission of the theosophical movement. It is also the correct relationship between the teachings that are being given and the way these are made available to the wider audience. Now, this in-depth penetration of the super-sensible world is based on very particular methods. Here, I have already once mentioned specifically the Rosicrucian method,⁴ therefore I will only add a bit.

To raise a human being up into the higher worlds, to turn him into a clairvoyant, requires him to first develop strengths which are already in him: thinking, feeling and willpower. This already includes a lot of the difficulties experienced in the first elementary grades, which are talked about if one intends to alert of dangers. Clairvoyance is for certain people a far too beautiful thing, and those who hear something about Theosophy are keen to achieve clairvoyance. They are not very thrilled when they are told it is necessary to learn something before one gets results.

The first thing one must do is to develop one’s thinking, thoroughly develop it, and certainly prior to becoming a clairvoyant. It is extraordinarily difficult nowadays, to explain what is meant by ‘develop the thinking”. If you can see into the higher world through the opening of the higher senses, you will see that these worlds look very, very different from what you have imagined here. Normally, someone who cannot yet look into them can hardly imagine what one can experience, what kind of impressions there are, and even less so in relation to the world of clairaudience, the harmony of the spheres. One thing, however, remains constant through all worlds: logical thinking. If you have learnt this here, then it is a safe guide in the astral and spiritual worlds. The impressions are totally different, but logic remains the same. This only begins to change in the highest worlds.

What is offered in the theosophical works and books is sensory-free thinking. If one doesn’t learn to do that, then one exposes oneself to a certain danger. One can enable someone else to look into the astral world, but it should not be forgotten, that, if one is not completely standing on the solid ground of healthy thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult there to tell truth from illusion. One who can’t differentiate is simply deranged, he is not spiritually or mentally healthy and thus exposes himself to the danger of losing his balance when the astral world overwhelms him.

One learns to grasp the astral world gradually, by working on one’s feelings, and this happens through imagination. I will show you how this approaches the human being, teaches him, and introduces him to the astral world. This is facilitated by way of converting all ideas a human has, which are normally expressed as dogmas and abstract concepts, into pictures which appear visually. What we are thinking and talking and learning are abstract concepts, thus initially there is speculation. This will lead no one into the higher worlds. Only when the concepts are transformed into pictures does the human being gradually gain access to the higher worlds.

How is this transformation of thoughts into pictures achieved? In the Rosicrucian school, a teacher would say to the student: Look at this plant. With its roots it strives into the ground, its stem rises up straight, on the top is the bloom and the fruit. And now compare the plant with the human being. Superficially thinking one could be tempted to compare the bloom with the human head, and what is down below in the plant with the feet of the human being. In reality, the head of the plant is the root, and what the plant holds chastely up towards the light are its fertility organs. This is exactly the opposite of what is the case with humans.

The bloom has turned these organs towards the light. Imagine this whole thing exactly—if you wouldn’t turn the plant’s fertility organs up towards the light, but down towards the centre of the earth, then they would be penetrated by desire and passion. Thus, we find in a human being a reversed plant, at once pervaded by desires and passions. Thus, the human body is flesh whilst the plant body, the chaste one, is a body that has not yet developed into flesh.

And now look at an animal: It stands between plant and human. Plant, animal and the human being upwards form the cross that extends throughout the whole of nature. Now the student is told: Look at the plant, how it turns its calyx upwards, is kissed by the sun, by the beam of light called the holy lance of love. The human being had to exchange the plant body with the one of flesh pervaded by desire, but he has a high ideal in front of his eyes.

Here we must observe the human heart and the larynx. There are two types of organs in a human body, those, which are on the path to imperfection, and which will incrementally fall away, and others that are only in the stage of formation. All the lower organs, the sexual organs will fall away. Heart and larynx, on the other hand, are organs which will only be perfected in the future, and will only then be developed.

I am speaking to you. My thoughts are within me. I put these into words that originate from my larynx, and create sound vibrations, and in this way, my thoughts communicate with your soul. The voice box is the apparatus to produce airwaves and bring out that which is in the soul. If someone would invent a device through which these waves could be solidified, then you would be able to pick up my thoughts, and my words. In the future, the larynx will not only produce words, but one day it will become the creative, reproductive organ, and will create future beings similar to humans.

During certain times the plant-like nature of the human was not yet penetrated by the lusting passionate nature of the flesh. Those specific organs, which were the latest to develop out of the animal nature, will first disappear again. These are the reproductive organs. These remained for a long time as plant organs after the human being had already appeared in flesh. For this reason, there exist pictorial collections where pictures of hermaphrodites⁵ with plant organs are on display. When the Bible tells about Eve’s fig leaf, in reality, this is a symbol of the fact that these organs were the last to develop in the flesh. In this way, the religious texts must be interpreted. The sexual organs are declining organs, whilst the larynx is in a process of complete transformation, and once the human being has become chaste again, the larynx will turn itself again towards the spiritual sun. The calyx of the plant developed into the form of the flesh filled with passionate desires, and then the larynx will once again become a chaste, pure calyx, fertilised by Spirit, which will be raised up towards the holy lance of love. This is also the symbol of the Holy Grail, its high ideal.

Compare this, try to feel and re-experience all the shivers those images aroused; then you will have only one of those images which are given to a Rosicrucian student. And while you are wandering through these, then you will realise bit by bit that your feelings become facts for you. You will perceive that these feelings radiate light. It always radiates, but the lower human being doesn’t see it. One who experiences this mystical part of imagination learns to see his feelings. This is the beginning.

Not magic, but an intimate process of imagination happens at the beginning of the rise to clairvoyance. But here one thing needs to become clear because from that moment onwards you will see everything emanating from yourself. When one actually starts to transform the inner life into light, one has to be able to bear what is then seen. This requires a strength of character which hardly anyone can imagine. For example, if you, not being clairvoyant, tell a lie this is bad enough. But if you are clairvoyant and tell a lie, and you then see how the lie becomes visible and what it means on the astral plane, then you will understand why it is said that there a lie is murder. And this is so. Just assume you have seen an event happening, and have formed an idea about it, and then tell something that is incorrect, i.e., something that is a lie. Then from the object emanates the correct and from you the false stream and these two will collide and cause a terrible explosion; and each time you do this, you attach a hideous creature to your karma that you can't get rid of until you have made good what you have lied about.

Everyone who wants to become clairvoyant needs to develop three virtues, which are crucial for him. First, self-confidence is needed to be sure of oneself. Second, self-awareness is needed so one is never allowed to shy away from recognising one’s mistakes. And third, presence of mind is needed since one will encounter many things on the astral plane that, while present around us all the time, are something else to see. For this reason these characteristics must be developed first and foremost, and it is really nonsense that some sort of schools or societies train people to become clairvoyants without guiding them in this way.

If now in a different way, a student will be taught namely through occult texts, he will be guided upwards into the spiritual Devachan world to hearing. There one must immerse oneself into those pictures which exist for the development of the human being. I will place one such picture as an example in front of your soul.

Think of the ancient times, when the human being had just come into existence in his current form. In those days Earth was a warm, glowing fireball, and all metals and minerals were melted in the glowing Earth. The physicist would say human beings could not exist there. In those days the human being climbed down from the Godhead and formed himself in the glowing matter. This transformation was a lengthy process. If you were able to see what the clairvoyant can perceive, you would see that he had wrapped himself into a body of fire.

Where has the fire that was burning on the Earth now gone? Where is it? It is in your blood. All the warmth that has been inside the human beings and the animals was and is the fire glow of the Earth. And once you will be able to transform your blood again, so that it shines—and this will be the case when the human larynx will be transformed into the Holy Grail—then the human beings will once again send out an abundance of light. If someone now immerses himself into a picture like this one, then he can achieve clairvoyance, clairaudience. I wish to point to the introduction to the Apocalypse of John which states: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, that God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.” These are pictures that have been used for development in Rosicrucian schools. The clairvoyant must learn to decipher such pictures. The development of the Earth will be the Word, and the Word will be with man, and man will create human beings through the Word.

• 1. Christian Rosenkreutz: Not recognised by public history as a real historic figure of the 14th/15th century, Christian Rosenkreutz became legendarily known from two anonymous Rosicrucian texts Fama Fraternitatis, ot the Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Highly Laudable Order of R.C., Kassel 1614, and Confessio Fraternitatis or Confession of the laudable Brotherhood of the highly honourable Rose Cross, Kassel 1615. According to this, he was a German of noble birth who lived from 1378 to 1484. The name appears for the first time in a text handwritten and as such distributed in 1604, and in 1616 anonymously published in the text The Chymical Wedding of Christiani Rosencreutz, Anno 1459. Rudolf Steiner presented the author of this text, Johann Valentin Andreae, as the carrier of inspiration of Christian Rosenkreutz. Refer to Rudolf Steiner, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in Philosophy and Anthroposophy. Collected Essays 1904-1923, GA 35. The essay is also contained in the translation of The Chymical Weddinginto New High German by Walter Weber, Basel 1978., According to Rudolf Steiner, Christian Rosenkreutz was a real historical personality. Compare also, The Esoteric Christendom and the Spiritual Leadership of Humanity, GA 130.
• 2. The Education of the Child from the perspective of Spiritual Science, first published in 1907.
• 3. Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, 1493-1541, doctor and philosopher.
• 4. Refer to note 1(Chapter 1) above. Obviously, the deliberations of Rudolf Steiner at this point have been only fragmentarily captured by the note taker. For better comprehension it is referred to the presentation in the lecture dated 15 September 1909; Lecture 1 in The Luke Gospel cycle, GA 114.
• 5. Beings who have male and female gender characteristics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first of the topics chosen for this short lecture cycle is “Nature and Spirit in the Light of Spiritual Science”. Nature and Spirit! — It seems to express a contradiction, and the human soul immediately has many opposing views and opinions that have confronted each other in the world. We know, of course, that in recent centuries a kind of science has emerged that only wants to accept nature and that, from its point of view, can hardly do anything other than also consider the spirit to be nature. On the other hand, we see how defenders of the spirit and of intellectual life assert themselves in all fields, even in our time. And we need only look on one side to the extreme, where it was said in the 19th century: the brain secretes thoughts, like the liver secretes bile. That is, what we perceive as spiritual in the human being is a purely natural process, and we do not believe in another spirit. We need only place this alongside the many current efforts to establish a spiritual science, and we have extremes.

But one can also think differently about the words “nature and spirit”, namely, point to Goethe's words: “Nature is sin, spirit is devil, they harbor doubt between them, their deformed hybrid child.” And so we can point out many things that set nature and spirit in opposition to each other, and we can find many things in them that have brought disharmony into human hearts, that have caused storms of struggle and conflict in the world.

On the other hand, we are still confronted with a word from more recent times, also from Goethe, which says that the spirit could never be and be effective without matter and that matter could never be and be effective without spirit. This word can be refuted very easily. One need only point out that when I cut a piece of granite out of a rock, I then have matter without spirit! It is very easy to find refutations of profound words in the world, and it must be clearly understood, especially in a spiritual-scientific movement, that nothing is easier for the foolish in the world than to refute the words of the wise with a great semblance of right. An anthroposophical view must go deeper into these things.

What is spirit, what is nature? — There is no doubt in our ordinary perception that we encounter nature when we see plants sprouting from the earth in spring and watching them unfold. There we see the weaving and living of nature. Nor is there any doubt that we speak of nature with a certain right when the snowflakes cover the earth in winter. These are both effects of nature. But does this mean that we are fully entitled to participate in what is unfolding around us? Imagine that: Entities could think that are much smaller than we are, so small that for them our nails or our hair would be as big as for us the trees, so these entities would describe the hair of our head in the same way that we describe the plants that come out of the earth. We humans, however, do not describe the individual hairs or the head of the human being as a ground on which the individual hairs rise, because we know that we cannot find a hair as an individual being in nature; they are only possible on another being. Only someone who, due to their smallness, cannot see the hairs in their entirety could describe a hair on its own. Such an entity could perhaps very well distinguish between the different hairs. Depending on the place on the head where they grow, they could be organized into classes and orders: one class of left temporal hair, one class of right temporal hair; one class of left frontal hair, one class of right frontal hair; later, names could be given to further distinguish them. Thus, there could be a hair science for such small entities. For other beings there is, with some justification, such a science: it is botany. While in fact the earth as a whole produces individual plants just as our head produces hair, while the individual plants belong to the earth and do not exist as a special genus, in botany the plants are classified and described without taking into account that this plant world forms a unity belonging to the earth, just as our hair forms a unity with our organism. To nature or the world, it is of no consequence that man has created a botany for himself, just as a hair science would be of no consequence to a thinking little being for man.

Spiritual science, however, leads us even further. It shows us that just as little as one can think of a being like man, with hair on his head, without a soul, just as little can the earth be considered other than as a whole, which has all material, purely natural things as organs of the earth spirit or the earth soul. When we study this earth spirit or this earth soul further, it differs from the human soul at first. What is peculiar about the human soul is that it presents itself to us as a kind of unity. With the earth spirit, this is not the case at first. In the end, however, as you know, there is a directing earth spirit, but the next thing we find in the spiritual observation of the earth is a large number, an abundance of elemental beings, which form the next stage of the earth spirit as a multitude, a diversity.

We can deal with this earth spirit for the time being. Then it turns out that, for example, on the half of the earth where it is summer at a certain time, these entities of the earth spirit go through a kind of sleep, and where it is winter, they wake. For spiritual realization, in fact, to the same extent that the plants sprout out of the earth, the elemental beings and spirits begin to fall asleep. In winter, they begin to stir. Then these elemental beings and spirits form their ideas, sensations and feelings in their own way. What night is for humans is summer for the half of the earth that is currently in summer, and what day is for humans is winter for the earth. The Earth as a whole sleeps and wakes like man, but in such a way that one half is always more awake and the other more asleep, whereas man is organized in such a way that when he sleeps, he sleeps all at the same time. That is actually not correct either, but it is quite the same with man as with the Earth. When man sleeps, only his head is asleep, while the other organs are all the more alert. But man is just not equipped to perceive that. It is actually the same with the earth, although not quite. One hemisphere of the earth has more water than the other, so the earth's sleeping and waking is not unlike man's sleeping and waking.

Just as we regard human beings as animate and ensouled beings, so must we also regard the Earth. Just because we walk the Earth as such small creatures, we do not see that it has both body and soul at the same time. But that also stems from the materialistic age. Kepler, for example, who also knew how to think, still says that he regards the Earth as a great organism. He just had no occult conception of the earth, so he did not know that winter means waking and summer sleeping for the earth, and he imagined the earth to be a great whale instead of thinking of it as a souled being higher than man. He somewhat belittled the conditions, saw the He saw the earth as a whale and in the movement of the air he saw the inhaling and exhaling of the animal. This was also the view of Giordano Bruno. For him, the earth was a great, ensouled organism that breathes with the tides. Goethe was of the same opinion: “The Earth is a great, living individual that manifests its process of inhaling and exhaling in the tides, in the currents of air and in the seas.” Yes, the spirits of the older, more spiritual times still knew that one cannot look at the earth in such abstract, theoretical terms as one does today, as if one could describe a hair or a nail in itself, whereas one should know that these cannot exist without the whole organism, that they are grounded in the whole organism. The naturalistic view does not know what is important. When observing the world, it is important that one can ask oneself about everything in the world: Is it a part of a whole or is it a whole in itself? — If someone finds a human tooth, they should not look at it as an individual thing, but the tooth is only understood when it is seen as a part of the human being. It is also absurd to describe a single plant, because it is only conceivable as a part of the whole earth being. So it is only conceivable that the outer body of the earth has a soul and a spirit. And if one knows nothing of the spirit of the earth, if one does not know that this earth is the body of a spirit, as our own body is, then one regards the earth as mineralogy, geology, botany regard it. These have no consciousness of the fact that behind everything they describe is the directing earth spirit. If I cut a piece out of a rock, it is easy to say: There is no spirit in it! — There is no spirit in a piece of tooth either, but the piece of tooth is inconceivable without the whole human being and the soul-spiritual to which it belongs.

We must keep this in mind when we speak of nature and spirit. When we speak of the earth as a natural planet, without speaking of its soul and spirit, this description stems only from the fact that we disregard the spirit, we do not want to know anything about it. Where does the earth exist as a mere natural planet? Botany, geology, astronomy would say: It moves in space! —- If that were true, it would soon stop moving, then it would collapse, like the human body after death, when the spirit has left it.

This way of looking at the world has rubbed off. Even the limbs of the human being and the human being as a whole are described today as if they were only nature, that is, one looks at the corpse. For if man were as the physiologist, anatomist and so on describe him, he would have to die immediately. Physiology describes only its own fantasy, as do astronomy and geology with their description of the earth. This is a pure fantasy product. There is no such thing as the mere natural earth. The fact that the earth is as it is is based, down to the smallest piece of rock, on the earth being permeated by the spirit of the earth.

There we see what is important. When observing human beings, it is important to find the starting point from which the part can be seen as part of the whole, and not to crumble the part away from the whole. Man as such is a whole. But when it comes to the earth, the whole earth is to be regarded as a whole. If we separate nature and its effects from the earth, what then is this nature? Then it is our product of the imagination, which does not really exist, which only appears to us because we cut a part out of a whole. Therefore, it can be seen that it is not at all important that someone describes something accurately, but that he knows how a part is integrated into the whole, or rather grows out of the whole. The earth must be seen as a whole, not as a physical whole, but as a living being that belongs to its spirit.

But we could also talk about nature and spirit in another way. We only need to look at the human being itself. In the human being, something comes to us that seems to justify the concepts of “nature and spirit” as opposites. A child is born, and all the expressions of life in the child in the early days appear to be something that has emerged from the physical, from the whole of physical nature. That is why it is often said that a child still acts entirely according to its nature. Only later is the spiritual, the soul, born out of the body. In the beginning of his life, man is more nature, later he develops more of the spirit. But that, in turn, is nothing more than a careless way of looking at things. For in the early days of our life there is much spirit in us, it is just more hidden in us than later. Everything that gives our body its forms is active spirit, it is just that we do not work inwardly in spirit and illuminate it with the faculty of memory. We truly have no less spirit in us in the early years of childhood than in later years. One could even be more radical in one's speech. Someone recently asked: What does it mean when a child only lives for a few days and then dies? Occult science shows us that such a short life still has a purpose. Often, the being in the womb has been able to develop many things, but sometimes it has not been able to develop one thing, for example, healthy vision. Let us assume that someone was an excellent person in one incarnation, but had poor eyesight. Then it will happen that such a person later lives only a few days in an incarnation, just to make up for what was lacking in the previous life because of his poor eyesight. In this case, this incarnation must be counted as part of the previous one. In general, the importance of the child's ability to learn in the first few days is greatly underestimated. When the child learns to see into the light, more capacity is needed than for anything learned in the first academic semester.

One can object to such things, but just think about the content of such a thing, and you will see that it is correct. We only consider childhood in the right way when we know that the spirit is not less in the body when we build our brain, work out our physiognomy and so on, than later, when we can do something more astute. At a later age, the spirit has withdrawn itself a little more from the body and works as the more abstract spirit, but it can no longer organize the brain. This has already become fixed again. The spirit, which one so readily calls “spirit” later in life, was already present in the first part of life, but had something else to do then, was more linked to the natural processes. We just don't see that, that's why we call what happens there just nature, and what happens later consciously, just mind. Therefore, man assumes an opposition between the “natural” processes of early childhood and the spirituality of thinking, feeling and willing in later life. But the contrast is quite different.

In early childhood, there is an intimate connection between nature and spirit; they permeate each other and are still on friendly terms. Later, they separate, and the spirit and natural processes take place more separately. In return, the natural processes become more spiritless, in that the spirit has differentiated itself from them and become the special soul of which the human being is so proud. Man pays for this with his body becoming more spiritless. Man has first drawn spirit out of his body so that he can use it more separately for himself. There is something similar in the whole evolution of the earth. In very early times of the earth, spirit was intimately connected with the nature of the earth everywhere, and so there was then an intimate interaction between earth spirit and earth nature. Today, in a certain way, the nature of the earth is as separate from its spirit as the nature of the human being is from the soul. And just as it is the spirit in the human being that directs thinking, feeling and willing, so too, in the evolution of the earth, the earth spirit runs alongside the natural process as the course of history. In the Lemurian period these were still more interwoven with each other, just as the spiritual and natural processes are more closely related in the child than in later man. What is the point here? Does it matter whether we say: the spirit develops in the later age of life or the earth age? — No, it was already there, but in those days it directed its activity to that which was then separated. And that hardens, lignifies, dies.

For this reason, we must also consider the whole, which is to be considered as a whole, not in time, only according to its parts. Man as a child is not a physical whole on earth. A human being in youth, middle age, old age and so on is only a whole, and we cannot say: 'The human being undergoes a development from the natural to the spiritual', but we must say: 'In his first childhood, nature and spirit were intimately connected. Later they separate more and more. Thus, the natural becomes somewhat dead, somewhat less inwardly alive, and the spirit becomes more independent. So a differentiation has occurred in the whole human being. That is the right impression. But the spiritual does not develop out of the natural without further ado. There is differentiation. If we speak of nature without spirit, then we speak of a mere fantasy product. Under the present physical conditions of the earth, a human being could never later become a thinking, feeling and willing creature that is so proud of its spirituality if it had not first detached its spirit from its natural existence. One must learn to completely rethink about nature and spirit.

This goes even further. Let us consider the external nature of man and woman. If you look at it very superficially, you will come to the conclusion that woman is closer to nature, judges more directly from the standpoint of nature. Man has distanced himself more from nature; independent thinking, the independent spirit, lives more in him. — The materialistic age, which thinks of the spirit in materialistic terms, has taught other reasons for this difference, such as the weight of the brain. But when the brain was weighed by the man who thought up this theory, it turned out that he had a particularly small man's brain! So if we look at nature and spirit in this way, even a superficial glance shows how little this is true. Anyone who goes into the depths here will in turn come to a completely different way of looking at things. In a certain respect, however, the woman's outer being is more natural, but in turn more spiritual than the man's outer being. Womanhood on today's earth is more natural because the spiritual activity in her has not yet separated from her physicality as it has in man. Therefore, man cannot be conceived of as having a greater spirituality than woman, but in man only that which is distilled spirit, leaving matter beside it, is more prominent. On the other hand, for certain parts, the male body is more abandoned to spirit. The feminine body is more permeated by spirit, as for example is the case with the child; the masculine body is more abandoned to matter at a later age than it is in youth. But we must not speak of more naturalness or spirituality in being a man or a woman.

The approach must therefore be completely different. It is true that, in a sense, what has to do with the essence of man and woman affects us throughout our lives. It is not always pleasant to point this out. Why, for example, are there more women than men in the Anthroposophical Society? Does this not actually speak against the presence of intellect in anthroposophy? — one might ask. The answer to that question is entirely objective, but it is easy to be misunderstood when one gives it. The fact that women are more attracted to the Anthroposophical Society, that is, more readily embrace spiritual truths, is because they preserve the spirituality of the nervous system and the brain longer in later life. In the case of man, these separate from the physical earlier, so he does not have the opportunity to so easily take in what speaks to what is neither man nor woman, but what stands above: the being itself.

In an incarnation, a person is either man or woman. In the case of man, the lignified parts are more developed, and somewhat more distilled out of his overall nature is the spirit, the temporal, transient spirit. In women, nature and spirit remain more connected throughout life, which is why their nature remains more flexible. But spiritual truths speak to something in people that has nothing to do with the difference between men and women. Because the being that goes from incarnation to incarnation can alternately be man and woman, even if that is a truth that often makes men angry.

Thus, our deepest nature has nothing to do with man or woman. Just as it has nothing to do with man and woman, so the deepest nature of world phenomena and facts has nothing to do with nature and spirit, but one time it is more spiritual, the other time more natural. These are both phases of an existence, as life continues. Just as in human life, there is a daily alternation between more spiritual activity during the day and more natural activity for the physical human being at night, so in the universe there is an alternation between times when beings become more spiritualized and times when they become more “naturalized”. That is a rhythm in the universe. For example, if you look at the nature of man, when he is a man in an incarnation, when he is thus karmically condemned to distill the spirit out of the natural, then he can say to himself: 'Now I am indeed karmically destined to distill the spirit out of nature, but that must alternate rhythmically, cyclically with a woman's existence, where I am allowed to be more in the natural with my spirit, so that I may have a pendulum swing in the direction of natural existence.

This is the case with all planets, with all wholes, totalities, with all worlds. Where we find a natural, there is a spiritual belonging to it, and where we find a spirit, it tends to separate something out of itself, which is a natural. Nature and spirit are not opposites, but alternating states of the higher being that stands behind them.

Thus we must see that through our spiritual world view, many old concepts with which much mischief has been done must be corrected. When we stop describing only parts of a being that is actually a whole, we will also come to clarity about the concepts of spirit and nature and will no longer limit ourselves to one-sidedness. Then one will realize that the spirit would be very weak if nature were hostile to it, then one will realize that nature is something that the spirit occasionally releases from itself, like the snail releases its shell. But the spirit can also absorb nature again and dissolve it within itself. Then it makes it invisible, but then it has it within itself, then it has become one with it. If a complete unity of spirit and nature were to exist somewhere, it would mean that for the realm of facts, the spirit has dissolved all nature that belongs to it.

Let us assume that a person is forty years old. He has his nature and he has his soul, his spirit, of which he is so proud. If we go back to his childhood, it is more of a unity, but it appears more in its natural basis. If we go back even further, before his birth, then he is entirely spiritual, he still had all spirituality without a natural basis, without matter in him.

It is a pendulum swing in the world: the being creates its image in the natural aspect and reveals itself through it. The spirit bears nature in its bosom in order to make an image of itself with what it itself gives birth to in its bosom as nature. But the spiritual essence also has the power to absorb everything that is out there in nature into the spirit. And so the spirit can triumph over all images of itself in order to appear ever anew in new transformations and new forms. This testifies to the fact that an infinite number of formations rest in the bosom of the being, and that the meaning of the world is actually fulfilled in ever new and ever new becoming. If one can see the belonging together, the inseparability of spirit and nature, one comes to the being in the world.

If anyone who has a background of Spiritual Science, and has absorbed something of its teaching about the evolution of the world, then goes on to study those tremendous opening words of our Bible, an entirely new world should dawn upon him.

There is probably no account of human evolution so open to misinterpretation as this record known as Genesis, the description of the creation of the world in six or seven days. When the man of today calls to life in his soul, in any language familiar to him, the words In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, they convey to him scarcely a faint reflection of what lived in the soul of an ancient Hebrew who allowed the words to work upon him. It is not in the least a question of being able to replace the old words by modern ones; it is much more important that we should have been prepared by Anthroposophy to feel at least something of the mood which lived in the heart and mind of the Hebrew pupil of old when he brought to life within himself the words: B'reschit bara elohim et haschamayim v'et ha'aretz. A whole world lived while such words were vibrating through his soul.

What was it like—this inner world which lived in the soul of the pupil? We can only compare it with what can take place in the soul of a man to whom a seer has described the pictures he experienced on looking into the spiritual world. For what in the last resort is Spiritual Science but the outcome of seership, of the living intuitions which the seer receives when, having freed himself from the conditions of sense-perception and of the intellect bound up with the physical body, he looks with spiritual organs into the spiritual worlds? If he wishes to translate what he sees there into the language of the physical world, he can only do so in pictures, but if his descriptive powers suffice, he will do it in pictures which are able to awaken in his hearers a mental image corresponding with what he himself sees in the spiritual worlds. Thereby something comes into existence which must not be mistaken for a description of things and events in the physical sense-world; something comes into existence which we must never forget belongs to an entirely different world—a world which does indeed underlie and maintain the ordinary sense-world of our ideas, impressions and perceptions, yet in no way coincides with that world.

If we want to portray the origin of this our sense-world, including the origin of man himself, our ideas cannot be confined to that world itself. No science equipped only with ideas borrowed from the world of the senses can reach the origin of sense-existence. For sense-existence is rooted in the super-sensible, and although we can go a long way back historically, or geologically, we must realise that, if we are to reach to actual origins, there is a certain point in the far distant past at which we must leave the field of the sense-perceptible and penetrate into regions that can only be grasped super-sensibly. What we call Genesis does not begin with the description of anything perceptible by the senses, anything which the eye could see in the physical world. In the course of these lectures we shall become thoroughly convinced that it would be quite wrong to take the opening words of Genesis as referring to events which can be seen with the outward eye. So long as one connects the words “heaven and earth” with any residue of the sensuously visible one has not reached the stage to which the first part of the Genesis account points us back. Today there is practically no way of obtaining light upon the world it describes except through Spiritual Science. Through Spiritual Science we may indeed hope to approach the mystery of the archetypal words with which the Bible opens, and to get some inkling of their content.

Wherein lies their peculiar secret? It lies in the fact that they are written in the Hebrew tongue, a language which works upon the soul quite differently from any modern language. Although the Hebrew of these early chapters may not perhaps have the same effect today, at one time it did work in such a way that when a letter was sounded it called up in the soul a picture. Pictures arose in the soul of anyone who entered with lively sympathy into the words, and allowed them to work upon him—pictures harmoniously arranged, organic pictures, pictures which may be compared with what the seer can still see today when he rises from the sensible to the super-sensible. The Hebrew language, or, better said, the language of the first chapters of the Bible, enabled the soul to call up imaginal pictures which were not wholly unlike those that are presented to the seer when, freed from his body, he is able to look into super-sensible regions of existence.

In order to realise in some measure the power of these archetypal words we must disregard the pale and shadowy impressions which any modern language makes upon the soul, and try to get some idea of the creative power inherent in sound-sequences in this ancient tongue. It is of immense importance that in the course of these lectures we too should seek to place before our souls the very pictures which arose in the Hebrew pupil of old when these sounds worked creatively in him. In fact we must find a method of penetrating the primeval record entirely different from those used by modern research.

I have now given you an indication of our line of approach. We shall only slowly and gradually learn to comprehend what lived in the ancient Hebrew sage when he allowed those most powerful words to work upon him, words which we do at least still possess. So our next task will be to free ourselves as far as possible from the familiar, and from the ideas and images of “heaven and earth,” of “Gods,” of “creation,” of “in the beginning,” which we have hitherto held. The more thoroughly we can do this the better we shall be able to penetrate into the spirit of a document which arose out of psychic conditions quite different from those of today.

First of all we must be quite clear as to the point of time in evolution we are speaking of, when we deal with the opening words of the Bible. You know of course that contemporary clairvoyant investigation makes it possible to describe to some extent the origin and development of our earth and of human existence. In my book Occult Science, I tried to describe the gradual growth of our earth as the planetary scene of human existence, through the three preliminary stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon.¹ Today you will have in mind, at least in broad outline, what I described there. At what point then in the spiritual scientific account should we place what draws near to our souls in the mighty word B'reschit? Where does it belong?

If we look back for a moment to ancient Saturn, we picture it as a cosmic body having as yet nothing of the material existence to which we are accustomed. Of all that we find in our own environment it has nothing but heat. No air or water or solid earth is as yet to be found upon ancient Saturn; even where it is densest, there is only fire—living, weaving warmth. Then, to this living, weaving warmth, a kind of air or gaseous element is added; and we have a true picture of the Sun existence if we think of it as an interweaving, an interpenetration, of a gaseous, airy element and a warmth element. Then comes the third condition, which we call the Moon evolution. There the watery element is added to the warmth and the air. There is as yet nothing of what in our present earth we call solid. But the old Moon evolution has a peculiar characteristic. It divides into two parts. If we look back upon old Saturn, we see it as a single whole of weaving warmth; and the old Sun we still see as a mingling of gaseous and warmth elements. During the Moon existence there takes place this separation into a part which is Sun and a part which retains the Moon nature. It is only when we come to the fourth stage of our planetary evolution that the earth element is added to the earlier warmth, gaseous and watery elements. In order that this solid element could come into existence, the division which had taken place previously during the Moon evolution had first to repeat itself. Once again the sun had to withdraw. Thus there is a certain moment in the evolution of our planet when, out of the universal complication of fire and air and water, the denser, more earthy element separates from the finer, gaseous element of the sun; and it is only in this earthy element that what we today call solid is able to form.

Let us concentrate on this moment, when the sun withdraws from its former state of union with the rest of the planet and begins to send its forces to the earth from without. Let us bear in mind that this was what made it possible, within the earth, for the solid element—what we today call matter—to begin to condense. If we fix this moment firmly in our minds we have the point of time at which Genesis, the creation story, begins. This is what it is describing. We should not associate with the opening words of Genesis the abstract, shadowy idea we get when we say “In the beginning,” which is something unspeakably poverty-stricken compared with what the ancient Hebrew sage felt. If we would bring the sound B'reschit before our souls in the right way, there must arise before us—in the only way it can do so, in mental images—all that happened through the severance of sun and earth, all that was to be found at the actual moment when the separation into two had just taken place. Furthermore we must be aware that throughout the whole of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, spiritual Beings were its leaders and its bearers; and that warmth, air, water are only the outer expressions, the outer garments of spiritual Beings who are the reality. Thus when we contemplate the condition which obtained at the moment of separation of sun and earth, and picture it to ourselves in thoughts full of material images, we must also be conscious that the elementary “water,” “air,” “fire,” which we have in our mind's eye, is still only the means of expression for moving, weaving spirit which, during the course of the preceding Saturn, Sun and Moon stages has advanced, has progressed, and at the time now being described has reached a certain stage in its evolution.

Let us place before us the picture of an immense cosmic globe, composed of weaving elements of water, air or gas and fire, a globe which splits apart into a solar and a telluric element; but let us conceive too that this elementary substance is only the expression of a spiritual. Let us imagine that from this substantial habitation, woven of the elements of water, air and heat, the countenances of spiritual Beings, weaving within it, look out upon us, spiritual Beings who reveal themselves in this element which we have had to represent to ourselves through material images. Let us imagine that we have before us spiritual Beings, turning their countenances towards us, as it were, using their own soul-spiritual forces to organise cosmic bodies with the help of warmth, air and water. Let us try to imagine this!

There we have a picture of an elementary sheath, which, to give a very rough sensuous image of it, we may perhaps liken to a snail-shell, but a shell woven not of solid matter, like the snail's, but from the forest elements of water, air and fire. Let us think of spirit, in the form of countenances, within this sheath, gazing upon us, using this sheath as a means of manifestation, a force of very revelation which, as it were, pricks outward into manifestation from what lies hidden in the super-sensible.

Call up before your souls this picture which I have just tried to paint for you, this image of the living weaving of spirit in a kind of matter; imagine too the inner soul-force which causes it to happen; concentrate for a moment on this to the exclusion of all else, and you will then have something approximating to what lived in an ancient Hebrew sage when the sounds B'reschit penetrated his soul. Bet^*, the first letter, called forth the weaving of the habitation in substance; Resch^†, the second sound, summoned up the countenances of the spiritual Beings who wove within this dwelling, and Schin^‡, the third sound, the prickly, stinging force which worked its way out from within to manifestation.

Now the underlying principle behind such a description is dawning upon us. And when we have grasped that, we are able to appreciate something of the spirit of this language; it had a creativeness of which the modern man with his abstract speech has no inkling.

Now let us place ourselves at the moment immediately preceding the physical coagulation, the physical densification of our earth. Let us imagine it as vividly as possible. We shall have to admit that in describing what was taking place at that moment we cannot make use of any of the ideas which we use today to describe processes in the external sense-world. Hence you will see that it is utterly inadequate to associate any external deed with the second word we meet in Genesis—bara—however closely that deed might resemble what we understand today as creation. We do not thus get near to the meaning of that word. Where can we turn for help? The word implies something which lies very near the boundary where the sensible passes over directly into the super-sensible, into pure spirit. And anyone who wishes to grasp the meaning of the word bara, which is usually translated “created” (In the beginning God created ...), must in no wise associate it with any productive activity which can be seen with physical eyes.

Take a look into your own inner being! Imagine yourselves as having been asleep for a while, then waking up, and, without opening your eyes to things around you, calling up in your souls by inner activity certain images. Bring home vividly to yourselves this inner activity, this productive meditation, this cogitation, which calls forth a soul-content from the depths of the soul as if by magic. If you like you can use the word “excogitate” for this conjuring up of a soul-content out of the depths into the field of consciousness; think of this activity, which man can only perform with his mental images, but think of it now as a real, cosmic, creative activity. Instead of your own meditation, your own inward experience in thinking, try to imagine cosmic thinking-then you have the content of the second word of Genesis, bara. However spiritually you may think it, you can only liken it to the thought-life you are able to bring before yourselves in your own musing, you cannot get nearer to it than that!

And now imagine that during your musing two kinds of images come before your souls. Suppose there is a man to whom on awakening two different kinds of thought occur, a man who muses about two different kinds of thing. Suppose that one kind of thought is the picture either of some activity, or of some external thing or of some being; it does not come about through external sight, through perception, but through reflection, through the creative activity of his soul in the field of his consciousness. Suppose that the second complex of ideas which arises in this awakening man is a desire, something which the man's whole disposition and constitution of soul can prompt him to will. We have elements both of thought and of desire coming up in our souls through inner reflection. Now imagine, instead of the human soul, the Beings called in Genesis the Elohim, reflecting within themselves. Instead of one human soul, think of a multiplicity of reflecting spiritual Beings, who, however, in a similar way—save that their musing is cosmic—call forth by reflection from within themselves two complexes which might be compared with what I have just been describing—a pure thought-element and an element of desire. Thus instead of thinking of the musing' human soul, we think of a group of cosmic Beings who awaken in themselves two complexes; one of the nature of thought or ideation, that is, one which manifests something, expresses itself outwardly, phenomenally; and another of the nature of desire, which lives in inner movement, inner stimulation, which is permeated with inner activity. Let us think of these cosmic Beings, who are called in Genesis the Elohim, musing in this way. The word bara, “created,” brings their musing home to us. Then let us think that through this creative musing two complexes arise, one tending towards external revelation, external manifestation, and another consisting of an inward stimulus, an inward life; then we have the two complexes which arose in the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when the words haschamayim and ha'aretz—represented for the modern man by “heaven” and “earth”—sounded through his soul. Let us try to forget the modern man's conception of “heaven and earth.” Let us try to bring the two complexes before the soul, the one which tends more to disclose itself, tends to outward manifestation, is disposed to call forth some outside effect; and the other complex, the complex of inner stimulation, of something which would experience itself inwardly, something which quickens itself inwardly; then we have what expresses the meaning of the two words haschamayim and ha'aretz.

As for the Elohim themselves, what kind of Beings are they? In the course of these lectures we shall learn to know them better, and to describe them in terms of Spiritual Science; but for the present let us try to reach in some measure the meaning of this archetypal word “Elohim.” Whoever wishes to get an idea of what lived in the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when he used this word should clearly understand that in those days there was a lively comprehension of the fact that our earth evolution had a definite meaning and a definite goal. What was this meaning and this goal?

Our earth evolution can only have a meaning, if during its course something arises which was not there before. A perpetual repetition of what was already there would be a meaningless existence, and unless the Hebrew sage of old had known that our earth, after having passed through its preliminary stages, had to bring something new into existence, he would have regarded its genesis as meaningless. Through the coming into existence of the earth something new became possible, it became possible for man to become man as we know him. In none of the earlier stages of evolution was man present as the being he is today, the being that he will more and more become in the future; that was not possible in earlier stages. And those spiritual Beings who directed the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions were of a different nature from man—for the moment we will not enter into the question whether they were higher or lower. Those Beings who wove in the fiery, gaseous and watery stages of elementary existence, who wove a Saturn, Sun and Moon existence, who at the beginning of earth existence were weaving its fabric—how best do we come to know them? ... How can we draw near to them?

We should have to go into very many things to get anywhere near an understanding of these Beings. To begin with, however, we can come to know one aspect of them, and that will suffice to bring us at least one step nearer to the potent meaning of the ancient Bible words. Let us consider those Beings for a moment—the Beings who stood nearest to man at the time when he was created from what had developed out of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Let us ask those Beings what they really wanted. Let us ask them what was their will, their purpose. Then we shall be able to get at least some idea of their nature. They had great ability; in the course of their evolution they had acquired capacities in various directions. One of them could do this, another that. But we understand the nature of these Beings best if we realise that at the time we are now considering they were working as a group towards a common goal; they were moved by a common aim. Although at a higher level, it is as if a group of men, each with his own special skill, were to co-operate today. Each of them can do something, and now they say to each other: “You can do this, I can do that, the third among us can do something else. We will unite our activities to produce a work in common in which each of our capacities can be used.” Let us then imagine such a group of men, a group each of whom practises a different craft, but which is united by a common aim. What they intend to bring into existence is not yet there. The unit at which they are working lives to begin with only as an aim. What is there is a multiplicity. The unit lives, to begin with, only as an ideal. Now think of a group of spiritual Beings who have passed through the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, each one of whom has a specific ability, and who all at the moment I have indicated make the decision: “We will combine our activities for a common end, we will all work in the same direction.” And the picture of this goal arose before each of them. What was this goal? It was man, earthly man!

Thus earthly man lived as the ultimate goal in a group of spiritual Beings who had resolved to combine their several skills in order to arrive at something which they themselves did not possess at all, something which did not belong to them, but which they were able to achieve by combined effort. If you accept all that I have described to you—the elementary sheath, the cosmic, meditative spiritual Beings working within it, the two complexes, one of desire quickening inwardly, and another manifesting outwardly—and then ascribe the common purpose I have just mentioned to those spiritual Beings whose countenances gaze out of the elementary sheath, then you have what lived in the heart of the Hebrew sage of old in the word Elohim.

Now we have brought before us in picture form what lives in these all-powerful archetypal words. Then let us forget all that a man of today can think and feel when he utters the words: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Bearing in mind all that I have told you today, try to put this picture before you. There is the sphere in which fiery, gaseous and watery elements weave. Within this active, weaving elementary sphere a group of pondering spiritual Beings live. They are engaged in productive pondering, their pondering is penetrated through and through by their intention to direct their whole operation towards the form of man. And the first-fruits of their musing is the idea of something manifesting itself outwardly, announcing itself, and something else inwardly active, inwardly animated.

“In the elementary sheath the primeval Spirits pondered the outwardly manifesting and the inwardly mobile.” Try to bring before yourselves in these terms what is said in the first lines of the Bible, then you will have a foundation for all that is to come before our souls in the next few days as the true meaning of those all-powerful archetypal words which contain such a sublime revelation for mankind—the revelation of its own origin.

• 1. To avoid any ambiguity, capital letters will be used throughout this book for the words Sun and Moon, when they refer to the planetary evolutions preceding that of our earth.

For anyone who has a background of Spiritual Science, and has absorbed something of its teaching about the evolution of the world, then goes on to study those tremendous opening words of our Bible, an entirely new world should dawn upon him.

There is probably no account of human evolution so open to misinterpretation as this record known as Genesis, the description of the creation of the world in six or seven days. When the man of today calls to life in his soul, in any language familiar to him, the words In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, they convey to him scarcely a faint reflection of what lived in the soul of an ancient Hebrew who allowed the words to work upon him. It is not in the least a question of being able to replace the old words by modern ones; it is much more important that we should have been prepared by Anthroposophy to feel at least something of the mood which lived in the heart and mind of the Hebrew pupil of old when he brought to life within himself the words: B'reschit bara elohim et haschamayim v'et ha'aretz.¹ A whole world lived while such words were vibrating through his soul.

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What was it like—this inner world which lived in the soul of the pupil? We can only compare it with what can take place in the soul of a man to whom a seer has described the pictures he experienced on looking into the spiritual world. For what in the last resort is Spiritual Science but the outcome of seership, of the living intuitions which the seer receives when, having freed himself from the conditions of sense-perception and of the intellect bound up with the physical body, he looks with spiritual organs into the spiritual worlds? If he wishes to translate what he sees there into the language of the physical world, he can only do so in pictures, but if his descriptive powers suffice, he will do it in pictures which are able to awaken in his hearers a mental image corresponding with what he himself sees in the spiritual worlds. Thereby something comes into existence which must not be mistaken for a description of things and events in the physical sense-world; something comes into existence which we must never forget belongs to an entirely different world—a world which does indeed underlie and maintain the ordinary sense-world of our ideas, impressions and perceptions, yet in no way coincides with that world.

If we want to portray the origin of this our sense-world, including the origin of man himself, our ideas cannot be confined to that world itself. No science equipped only with ideas borrowed from the world of the senses can reach the origin of sense-existence. For sense-existence is rooted in the supersensible, and although we can go a long way back historically, or geologically, we must realise that, if we are to reach to actual origins, there is a certain point in the far distant past at which we must leave the field of the sense-perceptible and penetrate into regions that can only be grasped super-sensibly. What we call Genesis does not begin with the description of anything perceptible by the senses, anything which the eye could see in the physical world. In the course of these lectures we shall become thoroughly convinced that it would be quite wrong to take the opening words of Genesis as referring to events which can be seen with the outward eye. So long as one connects the words “heaven and earth” with any residue of the sensuously visible one has not reached the stage to which the first part of the Genesis account points us back. Today there is practically no way of obtaining light upon the world it describes except through Spiritual Science. Through Spiritual Science we may indeed hope to approach the mystery of the archetypal words with which the Bible opens, and to get some inkling of their content.

Wherein lies their peculiar secret? It lies in the fact that they are written in the Hebrew tongue, a language which works upon the soul quite differently from any modern language. Although the Hebrew of these early chapters may not perhaps have the same effect today, at one time it did work in such a way that when a letter was sounded it called up in the soul a picture. Pictures arose in the soul of anyone who entered with lively sympathy into the words, and allowed them to work upon him—pictures harmoniously arranged, organic pictures, pictures which may be compared with what the seer can still see today when he rises from the sensible to the supersensible. The Hebrew language, or, better said, the language of the first chapters of the Bible, enabled the soul to call up imaginal pictures which were not wholly unlike those that are presented to the seer when, freed from his body, he is able to look into supersensible regions of existence.

In order to realise in some measure the power of these archetypal words we must disregard the pale and shadowy impressions which any modern language makes upon the soul, and try to get some idea of the creative power inherent in sound-sequences in this ancient tongue. It is of immense importance that in the course of these lectures we too should seek to place before our souls the very pictures which arose in the Hebrew pupil of old when these sounds worked creatively in him. In fact we must find a method of penetrating the primeval record entirely different from those used by modern research.

I have now given you an indication of our line of approach. We shall only slowly and gradually learn to comprehend what lived in the ancient Hebrew sage when he allowed those most powerful words to work upon him, words which we do at least still possess. So our next task will be to free ourselves as far as possible from the familiar, and from the ideas and images of “heaven and earth,” of “Gods,” of “creation,” of “in the beginning,” which we have hitherto held. The more thoroughly we can do this the better we shall be able to penetrate into the spirit of a document which arose out of psychic conditions quite different from those of today.

First of all we must be quite clear as to the point of time in evolution we are speaking of, when we deal with the opening words of the Bible. You know of course that contemporary clairvoyant investigation makes it possible to describe to some extent the origin and development of our earth and of human existence. In my book Occult Science I tried to describe the gradual growth of our earth as the planetary scene of human existence, through the three preliminary stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon.² Today you will have in mind, at least in broad outline, what I described there. At what point then in the spiritual scientific account should we place what draws near to our souls in the mighty word B'reschit? Where does it belong?

If we look back for a moment to ancient Saturn, we picture it as a cosmic body having as yet nothing of the material existence to which we are accustomed. Of all that we find in our own environment it has nothing but heat. No air or water or solid earth is as yet to be found upon ancient Saturn; even where it is densest, there is only fire—living, weaving warmth. Then, to this living, weaving warmth, a kind of air or gaseous element is added; and we have a true picture of the Sun existence if we think of it as an interweaving, an interpenetration, of a gaseous, airy element and a warmth element. Then comes the third condition, which we call the Moon evolution. There the watery element is added to the warmth and the air. There is as yet nothing of what in our present earth we call solid. But the old Moon evolution has a peculiar characteristic. It divides into two parts. If we look back upon old Saturn, we see it as a single whole of weaving warmth; and the old Sun we still see as a mingling of gaseous and warmth elements. During the Moon existence there takes place this separation into a part which is Sun and a part which retains the Moon nature. It is only when we come to the fourth stage of our planetary evolution that the earth element is added to the earlier warmth, gaseous and watery elements. In order that this solid element could come into existence, the division which had taken place previously during the Moon evolution had first to repeat itself. Once again the sun had to withdraw. Thus there is a certain moment in the evolution of our planet when, out of the universal complication of fire and air and water, the denser, more earthy element separates from the finer, gaseous element of the sun; and it is only in this earthy element that what we today call solid is able to form.

Let us concentrate on this moment, when the sun withdraws from its former state of union with the rest of the planet and begins to send its forces to the earth from without. Let us bear in mind that this was what made it possible, within the earth, for the solid element—what we today call matter—to begin to condense. If we fix this moment firmly in our minds we have the point of time at which Genesis, the creation story, begins. This is what it is describing. We should not associate with the opening words of Genesis the abstract, shadowy idea we get when we say “In the beginning,” which is something unspeakably poverty-stricken compared with what the ancient Hebrew sage felt. If we would bring the sound B'reschit before our souls in the right way, there must arise before us—in the only way it can do so, in mental images—all that happened through the severance of sun and earth, all that was to be found at the actual moment when the separation into two had just taken place. Furthermore we must be aware that throughout the whole of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, spiritual Beings were its leaders and its bearers; and that warmth, air, water are only the outer expressions, the outer garments of spiritual Beings who are the reality. Thus when we contemplate the condition which obtained at the moment of separation of sun and earth, and picture it to ourselves in thoughts full of material images, we must also be conscious that the elementary “water,” “air,” “fire,” which we have in our mind's eye, is still only the means of expression for moving, weaving spirit which, during the course of the preceding Saturn, Sun and Moon stages has advanced, has progressed, and at the time now being described has reached a certain stage in its evolution.

Let us place before us the picture of an immense cosmic globe, composed of weaving elements of water, air or gas and fire, a globe which splits apart into a solar and a telluric element; but let us conceive too that this elementary substance is only the expression of a spiritual. Let us imagine that from this substantial habitation, woven of the elements of water, air and heat, the countenances of spiritual Beings, weaving within it, look out upon us, spiritual Beings who reveal themselves in this element which we have had to represent to ourselves through material images. Let us imagine that we have before us spiritual Beings, turning their countenances towards us, as it were, using their own soul-spiritual forces to organise cosmic bodies with the help of warmth, air and water. Let us try to imagine this!

There we have a picture of an elementary sheath, which, to give a very rough sensuous image of it, we may perhaps liken to a snail-shell, but a shell woven not of solid matter, like the snail's, but from the forest elements of water, air and fire. Let us think of spirit, in the form of countenances, within this sheath, gazing upon us, using this sheath as a means of manifestation, a force of very revelation which, as it were, pricks outward into manifestation from what lies hidden in the supersensible.

Call up before your souls this picture which I have just tried to paint for you, this image of the living weaving of spirit in a kind of matter; imagine too the inner soul-force which causes it to happen; concentrate for a moment on this to the exclusion of all else, and you will then have something approximating to what lived in an ancient Hebrew sage when the sounds B'reschit penetrated his soul. Bet the first letter, called forth the weaving of the habitation in substance; Resch the second sound, summoned up the countenances of the spiritual Beings who wove within this dwelling, and Schin the third sound, the prickly, stinging force which worked its way out from within to manifestation.

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Now the underlying principle behind such a description is dawning upon us. And when we have grasped that, we are able to appreciate something of the spirit of this language; it had a creativeness of which the modern man with his abstract speech has no inkling.

Now let us place ourselves at the moment immediately preceding the physical coagulation, the physical densification of our earth. Let us imagine it as vividly as possible. We shall have to admit that in describing what was taking place at that moment we cannot make use of any of the ideas which we use today to describe processes in the external sense-world. Hence you will see that it is utterly inadequate to associate any external deed with the second word we meet in Genesis—bara—however closely that deed might resemble what we understand today as creation. We do not thus get near to the meaning of that word. Where can we turn for help? The word implies something which lies very near the boundary where the sensible passes over directly into the supersensible, into pure spirit. And anyone who wishes to grasp the meaning of the word bara, which is usually translated “created” (In the beginning God created ...), must in no wise associate it with any productive activity which can be seen with physical eyes.

Take a look into your own inner being! Imagine yourselves as having been asleep for a while, then waking up, and, without opening your eyes to things around you, calling up in your souls by inner activity certain images. Bring home vividly to yourselves this inner activity, this productive meditation, this cogitation, which calls forth a soul-content from the depths of the soul as if by magic. If you like you can use the word “excogitate” for this conjuring up of a soul-content out of the depths into the field of consciousness; think of this activity, which man can only perform with his mental images, but think of it now as a real, cosmic, creative activity. Instead of your own meditation, your own inward experience in thinking, try to imagine cosmic thinking-then you have the content of the second word of Genesis, bara. However spiritually you may think it, you can only liken it to the thought-life you are able to bring before yourselves in your own musing, you cannot get nearer to it than that!

And now imagine that during your musing two kinds of images come before your souls. Suppose there is a man to whom on awakening two different kinds of thought occur, a man who muses about two different kinds of thing. Suppose that one kind of thought is the picture either of some activity, or of some external thing or of some being; it does not come about through external sight, through perception, but through reflection, through the creative activity of his soul in the field of his consciousness. Suppose that the second complex of ideas which arises in this awakening man is a desire, something which the man's whole disposition and constitution of soul can prompt him to will. We have elements both of thought and of desire coming up in our souls through inner reflection. Now imagine, instead of the human soul, the Beings called in Genesis the Elohim, reflecting within themselves. Instead of one human soul, think of a multiplicity of reflecting spiritual Beings, who, however, in a similar way—save that their musing is cosmic—call forth by reflection from within themselves two complexes which might be compared with what I have just been describing—a pure thought-element and an element of desire. Thus instead of thinking of the musing' human soul, we think of a group of cosmic Beings who awaken in themselves two complexes; one of the nature of thought or ideation, that is, one which manifests something, expresses itself outwardly, phenomenally; and another of the nature of desire, which lives in inner movement, inner stimulation, which is permeated with inner activity. Let us think of these cosmic Beings, who are called in Genesis the Elohim, musing in this way. The word bara, “created,” brings their musing home to us. Then let us think that through this creative musing two complexes arise, one tending towards external revelation, external manifestation, and another consisting of an inward stimulus, an inward life; then we have the two complexes which arose in the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when the words haschamayim and ha'aretz—represented for the modern man by “heaven” and “earth”—sounded through his soul. Let us try to forget the modern man's conception of “heaven and earth.” Let us try to bring the two complexes before the soul, the one which tends more to disclose itself, tends to outward manifestation, is disposed to call forth some outside effect; and the other complex, the complex of inner stimulation, of something which would experience itself inwardly, something which quickens itself inwardly; then we have what expresses the meaning of the two words haschamayim and ha'aretz.

As for the Elohim themselves, what kind of Beings are they?

In the course of these lectures we shall learn to know them better, and to describe them in terms of Spiritual Science; but for the present let us try to reach in some measure the meaning of this archetypal word “Elohim.” Whoever wishes to get an idea of what lived in the soul of the ancient Hebrew sage when he used this word should clearly understand that in those days there was a lively comprehension of the fact that our earth evolution had a definite meaning and a definite goal. What was this meaning and this goal?

Our earth evolution can only have a meaning, if during its course something arises which was not there before. A perpetual repetition of what was already there would be a meaningless existence, and unless the Hebrew sage of old had known that our earth, after having passed through its preliminary stages, had to bring something new into existence, he would have regarded its genesis as meaningless. Through the coming into existence of the earth something new became possible, it became possible for man to become man as we know him. In none of the earlier stages of evolution was man present as the being he is today, the being that he will more and more become in the future; that was not possible in earlier stages. And those spiritual Beings who directed the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions were of a different nature from man—for the moment we will not enter into the question whether they were higher or lower. Those Beings who wove in the fiery, gaseous and watery stages of elementary existence, who wove a Saturn, Sun and Moon existence, who at the beginning of earth existence were weaving its fabric—how best do we come to know them? ... How can we draw near to them?

We should have to go into very many things to get anywhere near an understanding of these Beings. To begin with, however, we can come to know one aspect of them, and that will suffice to bring us at least one step nearer to the potent meaning of the ancient Bible words. Let us consider those Beings for a moment—the Beings who stood nearest to man at the time when he was created from what had developed out of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Let us ask those Beings what they really wanted. Let us ask them what was their will, their purpose. Then we shall be able to get at least some idea of their nature. They had great ability; in the course of their evolution they had acquired capacities in various directions. One of them could do this, another that. But we understand the nature of these Beings best if we realise that at the time we are now considering they were working as a group towards a common goal; they were moved by a common aim. Although at a higher level, it is as if a group of men, each with his own special skill, were to co-operate today. Each of them can do something, and now they say to each other: “You can do this, I can do that, the third among us can do something else. We will unite our activities to produce a work in common in which each of our capacities can be used.” Let us then imagine such p. group of men, a group each of whom practises a different craft, but which is united by a common aim. What they intend to bring into existence is not yet there. The unit at which they are working lives to begin with only as an aim. What is there is a multiplicity. The unit lives, to begin with, only as an ideal. Now think of a group of spiritual Beings who have passed through the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, each one of whom has a specific ability, and who all at the moment I have indicated make the decision: “We will combine our activities for a common end, we will all work in the same direction.” And the picture of this goal arose before each of them. What was this goal? It was man, earthly man!

Thus earthly man lived as the ultimate goal in a group of spiritual Beings who had resolved to combine their several skills in order to arrive at something which they themselves did not possess at all, something which did not belong to them, but which they were able to achieve by combined effort. If you accept all that I have described to you—the elementary sheath, the cosmic, meditative spiritual Beings working within it, the two complexes, one of desire quickening inwardly, and another manifesting outwardly—and then ascribe the common purpose I have just mentioned to those spiritual Beings whose countenances gaze out of the elementary sheath, then you have what lived in the heart of the Hebrew sage of old in the word Elohim.

Now we have brought before us in picture form what lives in these all-powerful archetypal words. Then let us forget all that a man of today can think and feel when he utters the words: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Bearing in mind all that I have told you today, try to put this picture before you. There is the sphere in which fiery, gaseous and watery elements weave. Within this active, weaving elementary sphere a group of pondering spiritual Beings live. They are engaged in productive pondering, their pondering is penetrated through and through by their intention to direct their whole operation towards the form of man. And the first-fruits of their musing is the idea of something manifesting itself outwardly, announcing itself, and something else inwardly active, inwardly animated.

“In the elementary sheath the primeval Spirits pondered the outwardly manifesting and the inwardly mobile.” Try to bring before yourselves in these terms what is said in the first lines of the Bible, then you will have a foundation for all that is to come before our souls in the next few days as the true meaning of those all-powerful archetypal words which contain such a sublime revelation for mankind—the revelation of its own origin.

• 1. See Figure 1, below.
• 2. To avoid any ambiguity, capital letters will be used throughout this book for the words Sun and Moon, when they refer to the planetary evolutions preceding that of our earth.

If in this whole lecture course we are to concentrate our efforts on gaining a deeper understanding of the words “Father and Mother of Jesus,” and consequently of the essence of Christianity in general according to the Gospel of St. John, we must first acquire the material for an understanding of the concept, Mother and Father, in its spiritual sense, as it is intended in this Gospel and at the same time in its actual meaning. For it is not a question of an allegorical or a symbolic explanation.

We must first understand what it means to unite oneself with the higher spiritual worlds, to prepare oneself to receive the higher worlds. We must at the same time consider the nature of initiation, especially in regard to the Gospel of St. John. Let us ask: What is an initiate?

In all ages of the post-Atlantean human evolution, an initiate has been a person who could lift himself above the outer physical sense-world and have his own personal experiences in the spiritual worlds, a person who could experience the spiritual worlds just as the ordinary human being experiences the physical sense-world through the outer senses, eyes, ears, etc. Such an initiate becomes then a witness of those worlds and their truths. That is one aspect. But there is also something else very essential which every initiate acquires as a very special characteristic during his initiation, that is, he lifts himself above the feelings and sensations which are not only justified but also very necessary within the physical world, but which cannot, however, exist in the same way in the spiritual world.

Do not misunderstand what is said here and imagine that anyone who is able, as an initiate, to experience the spiritual world as well as the physical world must give up all other human feelings and sensations which are of value here in the physical world and exchange them for those of the higher worlds. This is not so. He does not exchange one for the other, but he acquires one in addition to the other. If, on the one hand, he has to spiritualize his feelings, he must, on the other, strengthen much more those feelings which are of use for working in the physical world. In this way we must interpret those words used in connection with an initiate, namely, that he must, in a certain sense, become a homeless person. It is not meant that in any sense he must become estranged from his home and his family as long as he lives in the physical world, but these words have at least this much significance, that by acquiring the corresponding feelings in the spiritual world, the feelings for the physical world will experience a finer, more beautiful development. What does it mean to be homeless? It means that one without this designation cannot, in the true sense of the word, attain initiation. To be a homeless man, means that he must develop no special sympathies in the spiritual world similar to those he possesses here in the physical world for special regions or relationships. The individual human being in the physical world belongs to some particular folk or to some particular family, to this or that community of the state. That is all quite proper. He does not need to lose this; he needs it here. If, however, he wished to employ these feelings in the spiritual world, he would bring a very bad dowry to that world. There, it is not a question of developing sympathy for anything, but of allowing everything to work upon him objectively, according to its inherent worth. It could also be said, were this generally understood, that an initiate must be, in the fullest sense of the word, an objective human being.

It is just through its evolution upon the earth that humanity has emerged out of a former homeless state connected with the ancient dreamy, clairvoyant consciousness. We have seen how mankind has descended out of the spiritual spheres into the physical world. In the primal spiritual spheres, patriotism and such things did not exist. When humanity descended from the spiritual spheres, one part peopled the earth in one region and another part in another region, and thus the individual groups of human beings of different regions became stereotype copies of those regions. Do not imagine that the negro became black solely from inner reasons; he became black also through adapting himself to the region of the earth in which he lived. And so it was also with the white people. Just as the great differences of colour and race came into existence because human beings have acquired something through their connection with their environment, so is it also true in respect of the smaller differences in folk individuality. But this has again to do with the specialization of love upon the earth. Because men became dissimilar, love was at first established in small communities. Only gradually will humanity be able to evolve out of the small communities into a large community of love which will develop concretely through the very implanting of the Spirit-Self. The initiate had to anticipate whither human evolution is tending in order to overcome and bridge over all barriers and bring about great peace, great harmony and brotherhood. In his homelessness, he must always, at the very beginning, receive the same rudiments of great brotherly love. This was symbolically expressed in ancient times in the descriptions of the wanderings experienced by the initiate, such as those, for example, of Pythagoras. Why was this described? In order that the initiate might become objective toward every thing in the feelings he had developed within the heart of the community. It is the task of Christianity to bring to the whole of humanity the Impulse of this Brotherhood which the initiate always possessed as an individual impulse.

Let us hold clearly in mind that most profound idea of Christianity, that the Christ is the Spirit of the earth and that the earth is His body or vesture. And let us take it literally, for we have said that we must weigh in the balance each separate word of such a document as the Gospel of St. John. What do we learn with respect to the “vesture of the earth” when we make a survey of evolution? We learn, first of all, the fact that the vesture of the earth—that is, the solid parts of it—was divided. One person took possession of this part, another of that part. This part belonged to one person, that part to another. Possession, i.e. the extension of the personality through the acquisition of property, is in a certain sense that into which the garment worn by the Christ, the Spirit of the earth, has, in the course of time, been divided. One thing alone could not be divided, but belonged to all; this was the airy envelope surrounding the earth. And from this airy covering, the breath of life was breathed into the human being, as we are shown in the myths of Paradise. Here we have the first rudiments of the ego in the physical body. The air cannot be divided. Let us try to find out whether the one who described Christianity most profoundly in the Gospel of St. John has anywhere indicated this:

And they parted His garments; but His coat they did not divide.

Here you have the words which give you an explanation of how the earth as a whole, together with its airy envelope, is the body or garment, and the coat of the Christ. The garments of the Christ were divided into continents and regions; but not the coat. The air has not been divided; it remains a common possession of all. It is the external, material symbol for the love which is hovering about the earthly globe, which will later be realized.

And in many other connections, Christianity must bring mankind to an acceptance of some of the ancient principles of initiation. If we wish to understand this, we must now characterize initiation. It will suffice, if we consider especially the three main types of initiation; the ancient Yoga, the really specific Christian initiation, and that initiation which is entirely appropriate for men of the present day, the Christian-Rosicrucian initiation. We intend now to describe what course initiation, in general, takes in all three of these forms; what it is and what it represents.

How does a human being become capable of perception in spiritual worlds? First, let me ask, how have you become capable of observing in the physical world? The physical body has sense-organs that make this possible. If you trace human evolution very far back, you will find that in primeval times, the human creature did not yet possess eyes for seeing and ears for hearing in the physical world, but that, as Goethe says, all organs were still undifferentiated. As proof of this, just recall how certain lower animals today still have these undifferentiated organs. Certain lower animals have points through which they can distinguish only light and darkness, and out of these undifferentiated organs, eyes and ears have been moulded and formed. They have been worked into the plastic substance of the physical body. Because your eye has been moulded, there exists for you a world of colour, and because your ear has been sculptured, a world of tone is audible to you. No one has the right to say that a world does not really exist; he may only say, “I do not perceive it.” For to see the world in the true sense of the word, means that I have the organs with which to perceive it. One may say: “I know only this or that world,” but one may not say: “I do not admit of the existence of a world that someone else perceives.” A person who speaks in this manner demands that others too should perceive only just what he himself perceives, but nothing else; he claims authoritatively that only what he perceives is true. When at present someone appears and says: That is all Anthroposophical imagining, what Anthroposophists declare exists, does not exist,” he only proves that he and those like him do not perceive these worlds. We take the positive standpoint. Whoever grants only the existence of what he himself perceives, demands not only that we acknowledge what he knows, but he wishes to make an authoritative decision about something of which he knows nothing. There is no greater intolerance than that shown by official science toward Spiritual Science, and it will become even worse than it has ever been before! It appears in the most varied forms. People are not at all conscious of saying something which they should not allow themselves to say. In many gatherings of very good Christians, one can hear it said: "Anthroposophists talk of some kind of an esoteric Christian teaching, but Christianity needs no esoteric teaching; for only that can be true which a simple, unpretentious mind can perceive and understand," which means, of course, only what the speaker can perceive and understand. He therefore requires that no one should perceive and understand anything different from what he himself perceives and understands. The infallibility of the Pope is quite properly not acknowledged in such Christian assemblies, but the infallibility of the individual is claimed today in the widest circles even by the Christians. Anthroposophy is attacked as a result of this papal standpoint in consequence of which each individual sets himself up as a kind of little pope.

If we consider that the physical sense-world exists for us because the individual organs have been carved into the physical body, it will no longer seem extraordinary when it is said that perception in a higher world rests upon the fact that higher organs have been formed in the higher members of the human organism, in the ether and astral bodies. The physical body is, in this way, already provided with its sense-organs, but the ether and astral bodies are not yet so provided; these have still to be carved into them. When this has been done, there exists what is called perception in the higher worlds.

We shall now speak of the way in which these organs are built into the ether and astral bodies. We have said that in anyone who aspires to initiation and has attained it, higher organs have been developed. How is this accomplished? It is a matter of understanding the human astral body in the state in which it exists in its purity. During the day this astral body is immersed in the physical body. There the forces of the physical body act upon it; it is not then free. It carries out the demands of the physical body; hence it is impossible to begin the development of these higher organs during the day. It can be begun when the astral body is out of the physical body, in sleep; only then can the astral body be moulded. The human astral body can only have its higher sense organs developed when they are carved into it during sleep, while outside the physical body. But we cannot manipulate a sleeping human being; that would not be possible for the modern man, if he wishes to perceive what is happening to him in sleep. If you have him in an unconscious condition, then he cannot observe this. Here there seems to be a contradiction, for the astral body is not conscious of its connection with the physical body during sleep. But indirectly it is possible that during the day the physical body is acted upon and the impressions which it then receives remain within the astral body when this is withdrawn at night. Just as the impressions which the astral body receives from the surrounding physical world have been impressed upon it, so in like manner we must do something quite specific with the physical body, in order that this something be imprinted upon the astral body and then be formed in it in the proper manner. This happens when the human being ceases to live in his customary way during the day, allowing random impressions to enter his consciousness, and takes his inner life in hand by means of a methodical schooling in the manner described. This is called Meditation, Concentration or Contemplation. These are exercises which are as strictly prescribed in the schools for the purpose, as microscopy is prescribed in the laboratories. If a person carries out these exercises, they act so intensely upon him that the astral body is plastically re-shaped when it withdraws during sleep. Just as this sponge adapts itself to the form of my hand as long as I hold it there, but forms itself again according to the forces inherent in it as soon as I release it, so in like manner is it with the astral body; when in sleep it withdraws from the corporality, it follows the astral forces invested in it. Thus it is during the day that we must undertake those spiritual activities by means of which the astral body, during the night, is plastically formed so that organs of higher perception are developed in it.

Meditation can be regulated in a threefold manner. 1. There can be more consideration given to the thought-matter, to the so-called elements of Wisdom, the pure element of thought. This is the Yoga training which deals especially with the element of thought, Contemplation. 2. One can work more upon the feeling through its special cultivation. This is the specifically Christian course. 3. Again one can work through a combination of feeling and will. This is the Christian-Rosicrucian method. To consider the Yoga practice would carry us too far, and it would also have no relationship to the Gospel of St. John. We shall consider the specifically Christian initiation and explain its basis. You must think of this form of initiation as one which a person belonging to the present social order could hardly undergo. It demands a temporary isolation. The Rosicrucian method, however, is the method by which we can work ourselves into the higher worlds without interfering with our duties. What, however, is applicable in principle, we can also fully explain by means of Christian initiation.

This method of initiation has to do exclusively with the feelings, and I shall now have to enumerate seven experiences of the feeling-life; seven stages of feeling, through the experiencing of which the astral body is actually so affected that it develops its organs during the night. Let us describe how the Christian neophyte must live in order that he may pass through these stages. The first stage is what is called “Washing the Feet.” Here the teacher says to the pupil: “Observe the plants. They have their roots in the ground; the mineral earth is a lower being than the plant. If the plant were able to contemplate its own nature, it would have to say to the earth; it is true I am a higher being, but if thou wert not there, I could not exist; for from thee, O earth, I draw most of my sustenance. If the plant were able to translate this into feeling, it would then bow itself down to the stone and say:—I bow myself before thee, O stone, thou humbler being, for I am indebted to thee for my very existence! Then if we ascend to the animal, it would have to behave in a similar manner toward the plant and say: Indeed it is true, I am higher than the plant, but to the lower kingdoms I owe my existence! If in this manner we mount higher and reach the human being, then each individual who stands somewhat higher in the social scale must incline himself to the lower and say: To those on the lower social level I owe my existence! This continues on up to Christ-Jesus. The Twelve who are about Him are at a level lower than Christ-Jesus; but as the plant develops out of the stone, so does the Christ grow out of the Twelve. He bows down to the Twelve and says: I owe you My existence.”

When the teacher had explained this to the pupil, he then said to him: "For weeks must thou surrender thyself to this cosmic feeling of how the superior should incline to the inferior and when thou hast thoroughly developed this feeling within thee, then wilt thou experience an inner and an outer symptom!" These are not the essential things, they only indicate that the pupil has practiced sufficiently. When the physical body was sufficiently influenced by the soul, this was indicated to him by an external symptom in which he feels as though water were lapping over his feet. That is a very real feeling! And he has another very real feeling in which the “Washing of the Feet” appears to him as in a mighty vision in the astral, the inclining of the Higher Self to the lower. Thus the occult student experiences in the astral world what is found depicted in the Gospel of St. John as an historical fact.

At the second stage, the pupil is told: "Thou must develop within thyself yet another feeling. Thou must picture how it would be were all the suffering and sorrow possible in the world to come upon thee; thou must feel how it would be wert thou exposed to the piling up of all possible hindrances, and thou must enter into the feeling that thou must stand erect even though all the adversity of the world were to bear down upon thee!" Then when the pupil has practised this exercise for a sufficient length of time, there are again two symptoms; in the first he has the feeling of being beaten from all sides, and in the second he has an astral vision of the “Scourging.” I am relating what hundreds of people have experienced whereby they have acquired the ability to mount into the higher worlds.

In the third exercise, the pupil had to imagine that the holiest thing that he possesses, which he defends with his whole ego-being, is subjected to jeers and gibes. He must say to himself:—“Come what may, I must hold myself erect and defend what is holy to me.” When he had accustomed himself to this, he felt something like pricking upon his head, and he experienced the “Crown of Thorns” as an astral vision. Again it must be said that the important thing is not the symptoms; they appear as a result of the exercises. Care was also taken that there was no question of suggestion and auto-suggestion.

In the fourth exercise, the pupil's body must become as foreign to his feelings as any external object—a stick of wood for example—and he must not say “I” to his body. This experience must become so much a part of his feelings that he says: “I carry my body about with me as I do my coat.” He connects his ego no longer with his body. Then something occurs which is called the Stigmata. What in many cases might be a condition of sickness is in this case a result of Meditation, because all sickness must be eliminated. On the feet and hands and on the right side of the breast appear the so-called Stigmata; and as an inner symptom, he beholds the “Crucifixion” in an astral vision.

The fifth, sixth and seventh grades of feeling, we can only briefly describe. The fifth grade consists of what is called “The Mystical Death.” Through feelings which the pupil is permitted to experience at this stage, he feels as though, in an instant, a black curtain were drawn before the whole physical, visible world and as though everything had disappeared. This moment is important because of something else that must be experienced, if one wishes to push on into Christian initiation, in the true sense of the word. The pupil then feels that he can plunge into the primal causes of evil, pain, affliction and sorrow. And he can suffer all the evil that exists in the depths of the human soul, when he descends into Hell. That is the “Descent into Hell.” When this has been experienced, it is as though the black curtain had been rent asunder and he looks into the spiritual world.

The sixth step is what is called the “Interment and Resurrection.” This is the stage at which the pupil feels himself one with the entire earth-body. He feels as though he were laid within and belonged to the whole earth planet. His life has been extended into a planetary existence.

The seventh experience cannot be described in words; only one could describe it who is able to think without the physical brain instrument—and for that there is no language, because our language has only designations for the physical plane. Therefore, only a reference can be made to this stage. It surpasses anything that the human being can possibly conceive. This is called the “Ascension” or the complete absorption into the spiritual world.

This completes the gamut of feelings into which the pupil, during waking day-consciousness, must place himself with complete inner equanimity. When the pupil has surrendered himself to these experiences, they act so strongly upon the astral body that, in the night, inner sense-organs are developed, are plastically formed. These seven steps of feeling are not practiced in the Rosicrucian initiation, but the result is the same as that of which we have just spoken.

Thus you see that the important thing in initiation is to influence the astral body in such a way by the indirect means of the day-experiences, that it may, when it is wholly free during the night, take on a new plastic form. When the human being in this manner, as an astral being, has given himself a plastic form, the astral body has become actually a new member of the human organism. He is then wholly permeated by Manas or Spirit-Self.

When the astral body is thus divided, that part which has in this way been plastically formed is brought over into the ether body. And just as you press the seal upon the sealing-wax, and the name on the seal appears not only on the seal, but on the wax as well, so too must the astral body dip down into the ether body and impress upon it whatever it may now possess. The inner process, the working over of the astral body, is the same in all methods of initiation. Only in the method of transmission into the ether body do the individual methods differ. We shall speak tomorrow of these differences and show how the three methods of initiation, which have proved to be the most profound evolutionary impulses in the course of the post-Atlantean age, differ from each other and what significance initiation, in general, has for human evolution. Then these parts of the Gospel of St. John upon which we have not yet been able to touch will also become clear.

Emil Grosheintz: The third extraordinary General Assembly of the Association of the Goetheanum in Dornach is now in session. I request Dr. Steiner to take the chair for the day.

Rudolf Steiner: Dr. Grosheintz, as chairman of the Goetheanum Association, kindly asks me to take over the chairmanship of this extraordinary general assembly. I hereby accept it with thanks and warmly greet all the friends who have gathered and also the representative of the authorities.

The extraordinary General Assembly is hereby opened, and we will discuss the matters that have become necessary for the organization of the Association of the Goetheanum as a result of last year's Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

This Christmas Conference, my dear friends, was intended to bring a new direction into the whole anthroposophical movement, and above all, with this new direction, it should be avoided in the future that things in our movement drift apart, and it should be ensured that in the future they are actually led out of the anthroposophical movement.

As you know, a board of directors was appointed at the Goetheanum during this Christmas Conference, which now, as an initiative board, feels fully responsible for what happens in the Anthroposophical Society. And this intention can only be realized if the Anthroposophical Society in future stands before the whole of public life as the body that really does the work, that really feels fully responsible for everything that exists. This can only be achieved if we now also bring about a unified constitution in the mutual relationship of the individual activities. And so it was agreed between the previous chairman, Dr. Grosheintz, and myself for the Association of the Goetheanum Dornach that, firstly, because the organization of affairs has fallen to me, especially since the painful Goetheanum catastrophe, it must therefore also be possible for me in the future to take full responsibility for what happens here.

I had to lead the negotiations, which lasted almost half a year, about the accident in Dornach, insofar as it was related to the measures of the various insurance companies, with all that interested the authorities in this accident at the time. Then, after that was settled, we had to think about how to rebuild the Goetheanum. Of course, it couldn't be done in a day. It took some time to consider and develop possible plans for the reconstruction. We had to deliberate with ourselves in the most diverse ways.

We are dealing with a completely new material that is being used, because of course we do not want to create the possibility of such an easy fire again. It goes without saying that the building, since it is now to be constructed out of the completely fireproof material of reinforced concrete, must be thought of in a completely different way than it was thought of as a wooden structure. The style, the whole attitude of the building had to change as a result, and when the relevant negotiations with the authorities are concluded, we will indeed have a significantly different building in front of us in the new Goetheanum than the old wooden structure.

But work has continued, and we are now at the stage where, once we have cleared away the rubble on one side, and once we have received the official approval on the other, which will not be long now, and which we hope will be favorable when we have this official approval to build, we will also start building. And it would indeed be my wish to promote this construction as quickly as possible, so that – I am still thinking about it, even if perhaps our architect is overcome by a slight palpitation when I say these words, but despite all that – our architect is a very accommodating man, and he will have to consider how things will turn out, which will then be met by me in the course of the next activity – I am still thinking that meetings could be held in the new building as early as Christmas if the permit comes quickly and we can use the favorable construction period for this.

But please do not take this as a promise, just as a wish on my part, which of course may be opposed by many obstacles, of course. But as a rule, it is primarily the prejudices that are difficult for me in such matters. Then, of course, there may be external obstacles that are sometimes beyond one's control to overcome. But in any case, we will make every effort to overcome the matter.

So you see that there is no other way in the near future than for what has been agreed between Emil Grosheintz and me to actually be carried out, that I myself be entrusted with the presidency of the Goetheanum Association. Of course, I can only do this on condition that Emil Grosheintz, who has led the Goetheanum Association in such a beautiful and self-sacrificing way, is then the second chairperson, and that we can work together. That would be one thing.

But then it will be necessary, out of the whole spirit of the Anthroposophical Society as it now exists, for this Anthroposophical Society to function as the actual registered association, i.e. to be outwardly the institution that represents everything here in Dornach. It will therefore be necessary for the General Anthroposophical Society to exist as a registered association. Within this Anthroposophical Society, four subdivisions will have to be established. These four subdivisions are planned by me in such a way that I take into account only purely real things, and not programmatic matters. We have worked a lot with the programmatic since 1919, but from the moment I took over the chairmanship of the Anthroposophical Society at Christmas, I myself cannot work responsibly with the programmatic, for the simple reason that I am really quite opposed to everything programmatic, everything theoretical, everything that works with paragraphs, not for a personal reason, but for the whole reason of our anthroposophical movement. One can only work from the real.

We have four, I would say four, currents of real institutions that have been active in living, organic activity from the very beginning: firstly, the Anthroposophical Society itself, which, even when the programmatic things began, was was often challenged; so it will continue to exist as the Anthroposophical Society in the narrower sense – I will now proceed historically by listing the facts – as the first subdivision. It is, of course, completely independent of all the programmatic developments since 1919.

Secondly, within our movement, we have the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, which has now moved to Dornach and cannot be treated differently [because] as an integral part of the Anthroposophical movement itself.

Again and again, efforts were made to thwart this view, which is actually the essence of the matter, from here or there. Again and again, the opinion arose that the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House was the institution that needed help most of all because it was not being properly managed, and the like. But when I wanted to substantiate one thing or another in the field of political economy with something that was actually working, and not something programmatic, I could only ever cite the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, which did not develop from a grand program but from small beginnings, starting with two books and then working very slowly, so that it was always grounded in reality and never received any subsidy from any quarter other than that which arose from the matter at hand and which had absolutely real possibilities for covering costs. So that in terms of economic leadership, this Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House could even be cited as an example to follow if one wants to base economics on life. That would be the second subdivision.

The third subdivision – as I said, I am listing historically – would be the Association of the Goetheanum in Dornach itself, which emerged as the third institution and also worked only out of anthroposophical principles, untouched by any side currents. It would therefore also be able to form a subdivision of the General Anthroposophical Society.

And fourthly, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, which was founded by Dr. Ita Wegman on the basis of anthroposophical principles, would then be integrated. And since I have to justify what it is all about - that it is really a real anthroposophical thing - if I want to explain it, I have to do it in the following way. I have to explain to you that there is an enormous difference between this Clinical Therapeutic Institute and other similar institutes. Many things have come into being since 1919 under the influence of the fact that at that time it was possible, more or less justifiably, to believe that certain things could be carried from some side into our movement, carried better than they could be carried from within the anthroposophical movement itself.

If we consider some institutions, we can say that they would not be there today if it were not for these movements, which emerged at the time in connection with the threefold social order movement, and if these movements had not emerged, the institutions would have been created by them. This is not the case with Dr. Wegman's Clinical Therapeutic Institute. One could say, and this is absolutely correct, that if none of the programmatic institutions had come into being – this Clinical Therapeutic Institute, which emerged from the intentions of anthroposophy, and of course from medical intentions – this Clinical Therapeutic Institute would then be there.

Let us imagine away everything that has been created since 1919. Not only has the Clinical Therapeutic Institute never had any need to take any of this into account, but on the contrary, it has even filled in for the other things to a very considerable extent at a crucial moment, so that here we have an institution that differs in its entire development and in its entire existence, also in the way it presents itself. It is a fruitful institution, one that is self-supporting, economically viable in itself, and promisingly economically viable.

So this institution definitely belongs to those that are now to be subdivisions of the General Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, the clinic is being acquired by the Anthroposophical Society through the Association of the Goetheanum in Dornach, and will form an integral part of the general Anthroposophical movement in the future.

These are the facts that arise purely from the matter itself. I would like to say that one cannot think differently about the further development of things here if one wants to put the matter on a healthy footing for the future. All other measures arise as necessary consequences.

We will have to negotiate the further composition of the Executive Council of the Goetheanum Association; we will have to negotiate the minor changes to the statutes that are necessary. All of this will arise as a consequence of the conditions just stated.

It is still the case that, if this reconstitution occurs, the board of the Anthroposophical Society will of course be on the board of the Goetheanum Association in the future: The President of the General Anthroposophical Society will also be President of the Association of the Goetheanum, the Secretary of the General Anthroposophical Society will also be Secretary of the Association of the Goetheanum, and the entire Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society will be part of the Executive Council of the Association of the Goetheanum. This is a rough outline of what should form the basis for the organization of this extraordinary General Assembly. Perhaps Mr. Emil Grosheintz would like to say something?

Emil Grosheintz: I would just like to add that the Executive Council of the Goetheanum Society had a meeting this morning and that at this meeting Dr. Steiner was asked to take over the chairmanship of the Goetheanum Society and the previous Executive Council resigned. This board, the previous board, is therefore resigning, and the new board will be constituted in such a way that the new members of the board of the Goetheanum Association will be chosen by cooption by the chair.

Rudolf Steiner: So the previous board has decided to resign as such, and the composition of the board would result from what will be laid down in the statutes immediately afterwards – should it be done beforehand? [Representative of the authority:] No. That the Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society, as I have stated, is on the Executive Council of the Goetheanum Association, and that then – Dr. Grosheintz will work by my side as the second chairperson – the remaining members of the Executive Council are appointed by this Executive Council. And it will be a matter of course that the previous members of the board of the Goetheanum Association will be re-admitted to the new board. I believe that all of you who are concerned will agree that the previous members of the board should be re-admitted to the board as such. Should it then become necessary to supplement the board in some other direction, this addition could be made over time.

We would then have a board consisting of the board of the General Anthroposophical Society, which includes the chair and the secretary, and then the other board members of this General Anthroposophical Society, as well as Dr. Grosheintz as second chair, [in addition to] the personalities Mr. Molt, Dr. Peipers, Count Lerchenfeld, Mr. Geering, Dr. Unger, Mrs. Schieb, Mrs. Hirter, and Professor Bürgi. These would then be the board members who should be there in the future.

I think that those personalities I have proposed will agree. I then ask to open their opinions.

If that is not the case, I would like to open the discussion about what I have set out. But I would like to proceed with the adoption of the new statutes, which, after all, show no changes other than those that have become necessary as a result of the proposals made. Perhaps Mr. Emil Grosheintz could read out the original paragraph, and I will then read the amended one.

So we have: “Association of the Goetheanum of the Free University for Spiritual Science in Dornach (Switzerland), registered in the commercial register of the Canton of Solothurn.”

[1. Typescript:]

This would be changed to read at the top: General Anthroposophical Society, sub-division Association of the Goetheanum of the Free University for Spiritual Science in Dornach (Switzerland).

[2. Handwritten entry by Rudolf Steiner:]

Strikethrough: That would... would be above... Sub-division of the Goetheanum of the School of Spiritual Science.

Added: Its name would be changed to

[3rd reconstruction of the altered text:] Its name would be changed to “General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach [schaft in] (Switzerland).”

The following would be omitted: “registered in the commercial register of the Canton of Solothurn”, because the Anthroposophical Society is [then already] registered. Then would come: “Articles of Incorporation of June 26, 1924”.

Emil Grosheintz: Now §1: “Under the name 'Verein des Goetheanum, der Freien Hochschule für Geisteswissenschafo, there exists an association in the sense of Art. 6Off. of the Swiss Civil Code; the seat of the association is Dornach (Canton Solothurn, Switzerland).”

[1st typescript:]

Rudolf Steiner: The amended paragraph would read: “Under the name Verein des Goetheanum, der Freien Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft, there exists an association as a member of the General Anthroposophical Society with its seat in Dornach, Canton Solothurn, Switzerland.”

[2. handwritten entry by Rudolf Steiner:]

Strikethrough: the Goetheanum; the School of Spiritual Science

Added in the margin: the General Anthroposophical Society has an association in the sense of [with reference arrow]

3. Reconstruction of the handwritten amended paragraph:] “Under the name of the General Anthroposophical Society, there exists an association in the sense of Art. 60ff. of the Swiss Civil Code. The seat of the association is Dornach (Canton Solothurn, Switzerland).”

[4. Official Protocol:] An association exists under the name “Association of the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science” as a member of the General Anthroposophical Society. The registered office of the association is Dornach (Canton Solothurn, Switzerland).

Emil Grosheintz: [§2:] “The purpose of the association is to cultivate artistic and scientific endeavors.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§3: The organs of the association are: a) the association assembly (general assembly of members), b) the board, c) the auditors”

Rudolf Steiner: To be changed to read: “The organs of the association are: a) the board of directors, which includes the entire board of directors of the General Anthroposophical Society.

[Official protocol] b) the board, which includes the entire board of the Anthroposophical Society.

Emil Grosheintz: “§4: The members of the association are: a) ordinary, b) extraordinary, c) contributing members”

Rudolf Steiner: Remains unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§ 5: Ordinary membership is acquired by appointment by the board. §6: The application for admission as an extraordinary or contributing member must be submitted in writing to one of the two chairpersons. Admission is granted by resolution of the board.

Rudolf Steiner: Remains unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ7: A member's resignation must be submitted in writing to one of the two chairpersons. The resignation must be submitted at least three months before the end of the financial year. The board of directors may decide to expel a member from the association without giving reasons.

Rudolf Steiner: No changes.

[Official protocol:] Resignation can only be made to the [protocol incomplete]

Emil Grosheintz: §8: “Ordinary and extraordinary members shall pay an annual contribution of at least 100 Swiss francs at the beginning of the financial year, and contributing members shall pay at least 50 Swiss francs or, upon application and with the approval of the board, the same number of units of the corresponding national currency.”

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ9: The Association Assembly is the supreme body of the Association. The ordinary Association Assembly (the General Assembly) is to be convened each time after the end of the financial year in the following first half of the year. Extraordinary Association Assemblies may be convened by decision of the Board.

The General Assembly is convened by written invitation from one of the two chairpersons to the members. The invitation must include the agenda for the General Assembly. The invitation must be posted at least five days before the scheduled date of the General Assembly.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ10: Only full and associate members are entitled to participate in the association meetings. The associate members have an advisory vote at these meetings. The resolutions are passed by the full members. One of the two chairpersons chairs the association meeting. He has the casting vote in the event of a tie.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§11: Requests for items to be added to the agenda of the General Assembly must be submitted in writing to one of the chairpersons at least 14 days before the General Assembly.”

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§12: The Executive Council shall be elected by the General Assembly of full members from among the full members for a term of seven years. If a member of the Executive Council resigns during his term of office, the full members shall hold a by-election for the remainder of the term of office of the resigning member.”

Rudolf Steiner: §12 will be amended to include a sentence. It will read: “The Executive Council, with the exception of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society – which is included by default – is elected by the Assembly of Full Members for a period of seven years. Should a member of the executive council resign during his term of office, the full members shall elect a replacement for the remainder of the term of office of the resigning member.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ13: The members' meeting shall elect two auditors to examine the accounts and cash management. These may not be taken from among the full members.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§14: The Executive Council elects two of its members to serve as co-chairs, one to serve as secretary, and also hires the executive director.”

Rudolf Steiner: This §14 will be worded as follows: “The Executive Council constitutes the office in such a way that the chairperson and secretary of the General Anthroposophical Society are at the same time the chairperson and secretary of the Association of the Goetheanum. The second chairperson is elected by the first chairperson.

[Official Protocol] “The Executive Council constitutes the office in the sense that the chairperson and secretary of the General Anthroposophical Society also serve as chairperson and secretary of the Goetheanum Association. The second chairperson is designated by the first chairperson.”

Emil Grosheintz: “§15: The two chairmen are each individually authorized to represent the association independently.”

Rudolf Steiner: No change.

Emil Grosheintz: “§16: The management of the executive council is regulated by the council itself.”

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§17: At the regular association meeting, the board of directors must report on the past administrative period and present the accounts. The auditors' report must be enclosed with this report and the accounts. The association's administrative period is set at one year; it runs from January 1 to December 31.”

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ18: The association's liabilities are covered by its assets. Personal liability of members is excluded.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§19: The association is to be entered in the commercial register in accordance with Art. 61 of the Swiss Civil Code.”

Rudolf Steiner: Deleted.

Official protocol: “§19: The association is to be entered in the commercial register in accordance with Art. 61 of the Z.G.B.”

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ20: In the event of the dissolution of the association, the general meeting must decide on the use of the association's assets and the method of liquidation. The association's assets are to be used in line with the purpose of the association.

Rudolf Steiner: Remains unchanged.

These would be the amended statutes. I would like to make one further comment, to avoid any misunderstanding regarding the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag. When I said that it had never received a subsidy that was not derived from the matter itself, this means that it has never received any subsidy from outside at all, but that when work began on the two books, a small Schiller work and the Philosophy of Freedom, it was supported only by Dr. Steiner herself, and that everything that happened economically happened within the publishing house itself. So this publishing house has never received any external funding and has never been supported by capital from outside.

I would now like to open the discussion about what has been presented to you here.

Of course, it is also possible for friends who are not full members of the Goetheanum Association to take part in the discussion. Does anyone wish to speak?

Dr. Unger believes that we can be extremely grateful that the Executive Council of the Goetheanum Association and the new council have undertaken the regulation of the matter in this way, which is desirable and gratifying from all points of view, and would like to recommend that the amended statutes and everything connected with them be accepted en bloc.

Rudolf Steiner: A proposal has been made to accept the amended statutes and everything related to them en bloc. Does anyone wish to speak?

Since no one does, we will proceed to the vote. I would ask those members of the Goetheanum Association who are entitled to vote and who are in favor of this proposal to raise their hands.

It has been unanimously adopted.

It would then only be a matter of leaving the execution of the whole matter, which I believe is clear, to the future board of the Goetheanum Association. Is there anything to be said about this?

Then I also ask those members who are entitled to vote and who are in favor of leaving the execution of what has been decided to the future board to raise their hands.

This is also adopted.

Does anyone have anything to say about anything else?

In this case, we have reached the end of our extraordinary general assembly. I would like to thank the representative of the authority for attending our meeting.

Do you [the representative of the authority] have anything to add regarding the election of the board?

Representative of the authority: No.

Then we have come to the end of the proceedings, and I declare the third extraordinary general meeting closed.

For the correctness of the protocol
The 1st Chairman:
The 2nd Chairman:

Note on the Back of the Typescript with the Minutes of the Meetings of June 29, 1924

After the welcoming address by the chairman, the report on the technical work, the statement of accounts and an exchange of views between the members, Dr. Steiner takes the floor.

Now, if no one else wishes to speak, I would just like to add a few aphoristic comments in connection with the meeting of the Goetheanum Association.

I would like to touch on the moral side of our cause. First of all, following on from what has been said, I would like to emphasize that those who see it as their task to work on the completion of the Goetheanum are, as is basically self-evident, also of gratitude to the leading personalities of the Executive Council, who for many years have devoted themselves to the task in often quite difficult circumstances, providing the foundation for the entire undertaking with their personalities and their work. I believe that it is not always considered what it means that here, for example, in Dr. Grosheintz himself and all that belongs to him, we have a personality who, already connected with the area on which the Johannesbau stands, , has become connected with the idea of creating the Johannesbau here, which then transformed into the Goetheanum, and which has devoted itself to this work in such a self-sacrificing way for many years, which must stand behind everything. And so I would like to express my gratitude to him and to all those who, in a similar way to him, selflessly devote their strength and time to this work in a board-related and connected way, and to express my thanks to them, which certainly comes from all of your hearts. Above all, I would like to emphasize the hope that we can continue to find such noble and understanding support from this quarter in particular. [Applause]

When our artistic work here is discussed, it would always be of particular importance not to lose sight of the way in which the artistic work of the Goetheanum in particular is to relate to the world today. Whenever I have the opportunity to guide any outside visitors through the building, I repeat over and over again, almost at every point where something is said and explained to people, that with regard to everything that is artistically and otherwise considered for the building, it is first and foremost a transition, an intention that should be thought of as a continuation.

It is particularly important that we see ourselves as a beginning for many things related to our movement. It is also particularly important to always teach the world, which is so hard of hearing today, so that judgments can be formed from this point of view about this Goetheanum and everything related to it.

Our spiritual scientific endeavor is itself a beginning. And if this is misunderstood, false judgments will be formed in the world over and over again. Therefore, it is important to me that this be emphasized in all its details: It is intention, beginning, and the intentions that are to find further expression and independent development in the world that matters. I tried to somehow represent this in every detail.

I would like to mention one of the last details, one of the details that unfortunately came to grief. When we were in the very satisfactory position of being able to organize a public eurythmy performance in Zurich, the question arose as to whether — well, how should I put it, it's always on the tip of my tongue, to say something disrespectful — for the philistines who were to be invited, introductory words that could then be printed. And I also wanted to emphasize for this matter of eurythmy, which will certainly be extraordinarily important for the world one day, that with what is now to be presented to the public, one has a beginning, an intention, which is to be worked out, which is to undergo its development, which is to progress. Criticism of beginnings can only be directed in this direction if we always remain aware that they are beginnings.

And so I believe that much of the gossip that is spread about our movement could be replaced if our dear friends were to thoroughly impress upon the world, which is so hard of hearing today, that we are not at all foolish enough to bring anything even remotely perfect into the world in any direction, but that we just want to give a start, something that is an intention, which is not at all regarded by us as something perfect. In more recent times, as I said, when I have the opportunity to show people around, I repeatedly emphasize that now that the matter has progressed so far, I recognize the errors most precisely, and that a second time such a building is erected, it would not be done as it has been done now, and as it must now, of course, be continued accordingly, since one cannot build on top of each other contradictory things.

Above all, however, something else is also necessary in connection with this. Isn't it true that I must emphasize it again and again, because it should lead to the understanding that is to be conveyed, on the one hand, by the members of the Anthroposophical Society, but, on the other hand, by all those friends who are interested in the building. The point is that the inner structure of the building, the artistic inner structure of the building, in a certain respect – why should we not speak quite freely when we are among ourselves? – that the artistic structure could actually only be brought to the stage it has reached today through a kind of struggle.

We must not forget that, due to a peculiar karma, which I will perhaps talk about in these days, the Anthroposophical Society — not Anthroposophy, but the Anthroposophical Society — grew out of the Theosophical Society. Time and again during the years when we were still a “Theosophical Society”, artists made certain objections to the Society, and I emphasize that I still value their judgment particularly valuable to me now, for the reason that artists themselves are only in a few cases, let me say – I want to be polite for once – in a few cases, completely seized by the general philistinism, philistrosity of the world.

The artist, in so far as he is an artist, always retains – I won't say anything about in so far as he is a human being – he always retains something of a certain still freer judgment, which is now one of the rarities in the world. And so it may be said that especially in the last decades of the 19th century and in what has passed so far in the 20th century, in an age of the most widespread philistinism with regard to public judgment in all areas, he has already developed a somewhat – or much – freer, more independent judgment that is more closely related to the intellectual. This still existed in the world of artists. And in the artistic field there are still phenomena of a literary, scientific or critical nature that one likes to follow; while even the most proficient work in the technical, especially the scientific, field, which one must of course recognize as a great achievement of the time, is almost enough to make one sick to death of it, due to the way in which it presents itself to the world in a philistine manner. Because even the most accomplished work in these fields, what must necessarily be accomplished in these fields, in the fields of science and technology, is presented to the world in such a philistine way, in such a way of thinking, that it can really get on one's nerves if one is forced to follow it.

It is different with regard to much of what comes from the world of art. It is connected with this that it has always pained me when, during the years of our affiliation with the Theosophical Society, artists repeatedly and repeatedly tried, sometimes with great goodwill, to look at what was hanging on the walls as such stuff, not true, such huge rose crosses with the correct seven roses, where the question was always: How should these roses be attached? How should one do this and that? What is the right symbolism? and so on. When they had looked at these things and seen what had actually been achieved, artistic natures naturally always came and said: Yes, of course, one cannot object to this spiritual movement of Theosophy, one is interested in it; but one is so taken aback when such artistic Botokudentum prevails precisely within the Theosophical Society. And of course it was painful, because I was the last person who could be inclined to contradict such a judgment. Because such a judgment was entirely justified in the broadest sense with regard to the artistic impulses that lived in the Theosophists.

Of course, it was only possible to fight against it – not theoretically, not through teaching, since you can't achieve anything in these areas through teaching – but slowly and gradually. Of course, we could only achieve something by having truly artistic natures in our midst. I need only think of one personality who must be remembered again and again, who must remain unforgettable for all those things that have been and are being undertaken as vital things in certain areas within our movement. I need only remind you of Fräulein Stinde, but I could also remind you of others. I will only say that by combining what was there from the artistic side, it was possible to take up the fight against all the symbolizing, all the abstract, idealistic stuff in the shaping of our things. And of course, today there is still the need to turn against it when people come again and again and ask: What does that mean? What does this mean? In the sense in which people ask, “What does this mean?” nothing means anything to us! What matters at the Goetheanum – even if it is only a beginning and a rather incomplete one – is to really bring something into the world that is truly artistic in color, form, and so on.

What matters is not where artistic feeling is concerned. I say it again and again, and when people come and see our [sculptural] group over there [under construction], that at the center stands the Christ, and above is Lucifer and below is Ahriman. That is a private feeling, and basically has nothing to do with the artistic feeling and the whole work. Of course, it can be seen as a discussion drawn from the artistic to further explain the matter itself; but it has nothing to do with the matter as a work of art. The line that was added to express the falling Lucifer, the line that breaks away in its harmony with the whole structure in its organism, is infinitely more meaningful than the artistically actually boring explanation: This is Lucifer, this is Ahriman, and so on and so on. What is important is a line that goes from right to left and is felt as a line!

I could, of course, go on in this direction for a long time and draw attention to many things that actually occur in the assessment of these things, but I do not want to put anyone off. Of course, everything is heard with love, no matter what is said, even if it happens that someone holds the raised hand of Ahriman over his head because he thinks Ahriman is a snake and so on: that is even in some circumstances quite interesting in itself; but it does show that with regard to what is actually to be achieved here through the building, there is a lot to be done. And what it comes down to is – I have expressed it for one area in my first mystery drama, for example, that the form of the color is the work and so on.

Of course, saying such things has no particular value, but it does have value if the opportunity is really given to implement such things in reality, in fact.

But that is what I would like to emphasize. I have actually had a great deal of experience in this field, not only in the artistic field, but also, for example, in the field of individual scientific achievements. My aim has always been to introduce spiritual science, but as a living force, not as something dead, into the various branches of life.

If you express any spiritual-scientific idea in an external form, you kill the idea. What is at stake is that, through the intensity of spiritual-scientific inner attainments, one becomes a different person who, in relation to everything in him, learns to feel differently than one can learn anywhere else today. Then, in the particular field in which he is working, he abandons himself to the impulse that has been placed within him, and a different art arises from the roots of spiritual science, but always indirectly through the human soul, so on the detour through the human soul, that all the idealism of spiritual science first disappears, is transformed in the human soul and only in the transformation does art become art. If you still see any forms that are created, anything of what must be given as an idea in spiritual science, then it is artistic nonsense, it is not real art.

That is what I would like to emphasize. And that is why my ideal in this area would be – as I said, I want to emphasize the moral side of our meeting today – my ideal would be if, by everyone reflecting on: What is intended here? What has not been achieved? How could we achieve what we actually want? if, above all, there were a truly fruitful effect on artistic judgment, if there were a real intention to educate oneself artistically through what this Goetheanum wants. This is something that has so far been rejected by the minds of many of our friends — my dear friends, I have to say it. And there is a danger that people will ask: Why are there seven pillars, why exactly seven pillars? And so on. All of this should really be secondary to how one should feel. And then one must also feel the initial intention behind it.

My dear friends, what our very dear Mr. Linde said about my contribution to the small dome is not something I myself value particularly highly, and I also stand by the fact that it is quite a beginning, a beginning that is a bit of picturesque scribble, but a beginning that may perhaps show what is actually wanted, perhaps better in this than in anything else. And I may well make the confession to you that I would perhaps achieve what I want if I were not fifty-eight years old today, but if I could still learn for thirty-five years, in order to then carry out approximately what I would like to carry out and what I would like to see in the small dome. This will also make it clear to you that I myself do not have such an enormous desire to do something in the great dome either.

Of course, I will do whatever is desirable in the given case for each individual part of the building, whatever I consider to be my duty, and I will lend a hand wherever possible. But I also want everyone to know how I myself think about these things, which I view with a fair amount of modesty on the one hand, but on the other hand with a bit of immodesty: because I do believe that what could be achieved by people after a long period of independent work, after a long time when we ourselves can no longer be there, in a way that is fruitful for the future, as intended by this building, inaugurated, initiated. So that one could get a great deal out of what is wanted here, if one understood it in precisely this way. Whether there are external possibilities to intervene in the large dome as well, depends on powers that I am not inclined to call the wise world powers, but which currently force one to live from day to day, in whose goings-on – well, I just don't call them the wise world powers – in whose goings-on one cannot intervene so directly. I will, of course, do everything I can to be on site as much as possible; but one cannot even know whether one might not be prevented from doing so in the coming weeks due to current events and have to be absent for a while. Well, somehow it may be possible that the dawn of a new era will bring greater freedom here as well. But for the time being, precisely for this reason, one cannot say anything particularly definite. I can only say that I will do everything that is necessary to make this building what it should be and what it can become after what has been started.

Then I would like to say a few words about the trust company, which I welcome with such great joy, my dear friends. The first thought of this trust company occurred to me through a conversation that Mr. Molt, on his own initiative, had with me in Stuttgart at the beginning of this year. I do not need to share the content of this conversation with you, because the content was then practically included in the actual reasoning of the trust and in what has been shared with you today. I will just say that at the time I welcomed the establishment of this trust with tremendous satisfaction, for the following reason.

Please understand me correctly, my dear friends. I welcome it with deep joy when there are many idealists and spiritualists in the best sense of the word within our society – even if many of them are quite impractical people who do not always carry so-called practice, especially not business practice, on their noses – when there are many people within this society who get their intentions from a certain idealistic point of view. But if you just look at this financial account, you will understand that the Johannesbau, which has now become the “Goetheanum”, is something that also requires quite a strong intervention of practical impulses. Our friends who initially turned to the Johannesbau out of their idealism cannot always bear this in mind. And I would be the very last person to want to introduce even the slightest discord into the very deep, honest gratitude that I feel for those who, as I said at the beginning of my words, have dedicated themselves to the Johannesbau in the background, so to speak, in the role of directors.

However, my dear friends, the progress of the work over the years has shown that the intervention of a certain practice is necessary. It is so difficult to bring together idealism and practice in an individual. As I said, I don't want to introduce the slightest discordant note. But the esteemed and dear chairmanship will not take it amiss if I now, for example, mention a small but truly kindly intended damper that I felt during the meeting. This does not in any way affect my deep, honest gratitude. But isn't it true that I, who am accustomed to seeing meetings go in the way they should, winced inwardly at the failure to touch on the very first necessary point on the agenda and to request that the minutes of the previous general assembly be read or at least that a vote be taken on whether or not they should be read. These formalities must not be omitted. And so there are many things that must be considered. Right? You have to be a stickler at the right moments, and you won't hold it against me if I say such things. It's just a personal problem, and it really doesn't do any harm in practice today. But that's the way it is with these and other things.

Well, my dear friends, in February of this year, the idea of the trust company approached me, and I will now tell you quite frankly why I welcomed it with particular joy. You see, all that is said there, interest on loans and so on, is certainly very nice, but that actually goes without saying when you set up a trust company; what else could you do if you didn't do that? But that is not what impressed me about the idea of the trust company back then, my dear friends. I believe that it will be realized and could perhaps be particularly important for our time. What was important to me was that precisely those personalities in our society who are somehow involved in the rest of the world, who are involved in it through one or other social aspect, should come together under a certain aspect.

A cause such as ours, when it is as tangible to the world as the Johannesbau, can only flourish if the members do not just pursue it in the way that many do. I am not criticizing them, that's just the way it is; they are members of the Anthroposophical Society or the Johannesbau Association in secret, so to speak, but they don't want it to be known, do they? I believe that there are some who even like to come to the lectures of the Anthroposophical Society, but are very reluctant to have it known at their bank office that they are members, and so on. Well, there are such things. But you can't get anywhere with that. Of course you can have an ideal society, but you won't get anywhere with it if you want to create something like the Goetheanum, which has to be run in a business-like manner. You can only make progress if the personalities who belong to it also really make use of the other social affinities they have in the outside world, in other words, if someone is this or that, they use the respect they have in their circle to create a foundation, a real foundation, for what is to be created there for the good of humanity.

So I welcomed the trust company as a collaboration between personalities who have a position in the rest of the world and who use this position in the interest of the Goetheanum. Therefore, my dear friends, it was immediately plausible to me that the name “Goetheanum” emerged precisely in connection with our society. There will be many idealists in our Society who do not like the fact that the beautiful biblical name, or whatever it is, 'Johannesbau' is being changed to the name 'Goetheanum'. But, my dear friends, everyone can carry in their hearts what is actually being achieved here for humanity. The matter is to be presented to the world in such a way that the world understands it as simply as possible. And to attach importance to something happening differently, so that the world understands it, I think that is very damaging to our cause. Therefore, it was quite right for the trust company to say to itself: if we call ourselves 'Johannesbau', everyone thinks: well, that's just something, well, 'something'! And if we call ourselves “Goetheanum”, then that connects with something [recognized], and those people who would say about “Johannesbau”: well, that's just “something”, would at least be embarrassed not to acknowledge Goethe.

I am certainly not overestimating our contemporaneity, because, after all, they may well think of the “Goetheanum” as “something” in their hearts, but then they feel a little embarrassed. And we also have to be aware of such impulses from our revered contemporaries. All kinds of things come together. As for why one should say 'Goetheanum' for spiritual and intellectual reasons, I have dealt with this sufficiently in my lectures. But I wanted to mention the example of the trust company to show that there is also a very practical reason for doing so. And if, in the present difficult times, when we are heading towards such chaos, everyone in the trust company uses what they have to stand in the world, to connect with it and to bring it into the building of St. John, which will certainly also have a difficult position in the world, then the trust company will do something good. Otherwise, it would, of course, be necessary to set up a super-trust company for the trust company at a later date, so that the super-trust company would relate to the trust company in the same way that the Johannesbau relates to the trust company, and so on.

Emil Grosheintz: Does anyone else wish to speak? - If not, I would like to close today's meeting.