The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Dr. Steiner: Have you any questions to-day?

[ 2 ] Questioner: What was the cause of the darkening of the sun for three hours at the time of Christ's death?

[ 3 ] Dr. Steiner: That, of course, is a most significant question and one which, as you may imagine, has occupied me very deeply. I can well believe that the questioner too considers it important, because it indicates that such things are really no longer credible to the modern mind. That is why the nineteenth century solved it simply by asserting: It is not true, it is only imagery and no great importance need be attached to it.—That, however, is wrong. Careful study of the knowledge yielded by Spiritual Science leads to the discovery that at the time of Christ's death there was an eclipse of the sun, or at all events the sun was obscured to such an extent that when the death took place, darkness fell over the district. Such things should not be brushed aside and simply denied; quite obviously they call for explanation.

[ 4 ] Let me here remind you of something I have often mentioned in your presence. In ancient records you will everywhere find evidence that importance was attached to the time of the day, the time of the year, and so forth. No notice is taken of this to-day. In the New Testament a great deal is said about the miracles of healing performed by Christ, about the way in which He healed the sick. Emphasis is laid upon the fact that He adopted a definite practice in His acts of healing. In those days it was much easier to effect cures than it is to-day and this is a fact that is entirely ignored. Owing to the way in which humanity has developed—particularly in Europe—healing must start to-day from the body. But it was not always so. At the time when Christ lived on the earth, and above all in earlier epochs, it was still possible for healing to start from the soul. In a modern man the soul no longer has a very strong influence because as a result of upbringing and education his thoughts are entirely abstract. Thoughts of the kind that are universal to-day were absolutely unknown in those olden times. The human being was deeply and inwardly moved by what he thought. There was no such thing as “abstract, logical thinking.” Man's life of soul was quite different. To-day you may tell a human being something of supreme importance ... but it has no effect whatever upon his body because his soul is detached from the body. It is believed that the men of old were instinctively clairvoyant because they were not so closely bound up with their bodies, but this is simply not true; they were more deeply rooted in the body, they felt everything in the body itself and for this reason influences from the soul could work directly upon the body. When a particular name was uttered, a picture arose simultaneously before the soul. To-day ... well, a word may be uttered but no picture arises. In olden times a picture, definite and complete, arose before men and this picture would give them goose-flesh, cause a burst of laughter, or some other physical symptom; an immediate effect was produced in the body. Now this was made much use of in healing. But to be effective, the forces in the environment of a man must be used in the right way. That is why, when the Gospels are referring to Christ's acts of healing, we find the words: When the sun had set He gathered the sick and the suffering around Him. … “When the sun had set”—not, therefore, when the sun was shining in its full strength. If that had been the case, the words (which were addressed to the soul) would have been without effect. It was only when men came to Him in the evening twilight that the words could serve their purpose.

[ 5 ] Such things are ignored to-day but they are connected, nevertheless, with the life of man. Whether the sun is shining at the full, whether it is twilight, whether the season is spring, or autumn—all these factors have a mighty influence, And so it is, too, with other manifestations of nature. We see the life of Christ Jesus unfolding from the birth to the baptism in the Jordan and then through the three years until His death: everything drew to a climax. And the contributory factors were not the decree of the High Council alone, not the, revolution among the people alone, but also what was happening in the heavens and in the whole of nature!

[ 6 ] The Moon forces have an influence upon the human being during embryonic life which culminates in birth. Later on, the forces of the Sun and of other heavenly bodies have an influence upon him.¹ He is influenced by all the happenings of external nature.

[ 7 ] The attitude of people to-day to happenings in nature is really remarkable and is due to the fact that they never get away from their abstract thinking. It is known, for example, that after about eleven to twelve years, sunspots reappear in considerable numbers. But although it is known that a period of sunspots invariably coincides with unrest in some form on the earth, people cannot accustom themselves to take real account of the influence which plays down upon the earth from the super-earthly world and comes to expression in the sunspots. Nevertheless the influence is a reality! When it rains, human beings consciously abandon certain activities. When it is raining cats and dogs you cannot go on with gardening or work of that kind. There, you see, nature has an influence upon the conscious life of man. But upon his unconscious life, the whole surrounding universe of stars has a very great influence. Obviously, therefore, the effect of the sunlight upon man is by no means the same when the Sun is partly obscured.

[ 8 ] It cannot be said that in this way man's freedom is affected. But wherever deeper, spiritual laws come into consideration one must build on these in freedom, just as securely as a man, when he is on the first floor of a house, assumes that the floor will not develop a hole and precipitate him down to the ground floor. The laws of nature must be taken into account, also the great laws which rule outside in the universe.

[ 9 ] The deep sorrow caused in the hearts of certain men by what came to pass in Palestine at that time was accompanied by anguish in the world of nature. The anguish in human hearts and the anguish in nature were simultaneous. Just as the blood flows in the body and man's health is dependent on this blood, so do the living forces contained in the sunlight flow into the blood.

[ 10 ] Think of this.—A man dies on some particular day. Examination of his blood some two months or so before death would reveal to careful scrutiny that it is already on the way to becoming lifeless. Just as before the death of a human being the blood is gradually becoming lifeless, so—even at the time of Christ's birth—what lives in the light was already on the way to that condition of darkness which set in when the death actually took place. There was a close and intimate connection between happenings in nature and the life of Christ. And it may be said that just as Christ consciously chose twilight as the time for healing the sick, so His unconscious depths of soul chose the darkening of the Sun as the time of death. That is how one must picture these things in order to interpret them truly; their meaning can only be suggested in a delicate and intimate way for they do not lend themselves to crude explanation.

[ 11 ] Question: Have the Jews, as a people, fulfilled their mission in the evolution of humanity?

[ 12 ] Dr. Steiner: Discussion on this subject is unfortunately all too apt to lead to propagandism. But what must be said quite objectively on the subject has nothing whatever to do with propaganda in any shape or form.

[ 13 ] The way in which the development of the Jewish people proceeded in olden times was a most important preparation for the subsequent rise of Christianity. Before Christianity came into the world, the Jews had a deeply spiritual religion but, as I have told you, it was a religion which took account only of the spiritual law of nature.—If a Jew were asked: Upon what does the coming of spring depend?—he said: Upon the will of Jehovah!—Why is so-and-so an unrighteous man?—Because Jehovah wills it so!—Why does famine break out in a country?—Because Jehovah wills it!—Everything was referred to this one God. And that was why the ancient Jews did not live at peace with the peoples around them, whom they did not understand and who did not understand them. The neighbouring peoples did not worship this one and only God in the same way but recognised spiritual beings in all the phenomena of nature—a multiplicity of spiritual beings.

[ 14 ] These many spiritual beings are actually present in nature and anyone who denies their existence denies reality. To deny that there are spiritual beings in nature is just as if I were to say now that there is not a single person in this room!—If I brought in a blind man and you were not laughing loudly enough for him to hear, he might believe me. Deception in these things occurs very readily.—Friedrich Nietzsche's sight was very poor and when he was a professor in Basle only a few dilatory students came to listen to his lectures although they were extremely interesting. Nietzsche was always deeply sunk in thought as he went to the desk and proceeded to deliver his lectures. He lectured on one occasion when not a single person was present but because his sight was so bad he only noticed this when he was going out of the lecture-hall! In the same way a blind man could be made to think that a room is empty.—People disbelieve in spiritual forces and influences because they have been blinded by their education and all that happens in modern life.

[ 15 ] It is important for man to realise that he has a great deal to do with these myriad nature-spirits; but there is a power within him that is mightier than anything wrought by these nature-spirits. This is the basis of the conception of the ONE God, the Moon-God. The Jews came first to the recognition of this one God and repudiated all other spiritual beings in the phenomena of nature. They acknowledged the one God, Jahve or Jehovah. Jahve means, simply: I AM.

[ 16 ] Now this has been a very important factor in world-history. Think of it: veneration of the one and only Godhead is accompanied by the disavowal of all other spiritual beings ... Suppose two peoples are at war in spite of the fact that each of them recognises the one God; only one of the two peoples can be victorious. The victors say: Our God has given us the victory.—If the other side had gained the victory, the same would have been said. But if the same God has allowed the one people to be victorious and the other to be defeated, then this God has Himself been defeated. If Turks and Christians have the one God and both pray to this one God to bring them victory, they are asking the same God to defeat Himself. The real point is that one cannot, with truth, speak of a single Divine-Spiritual Being. In daily life, too, it is the same: somebody wants it to rain and prays for rain ... somebody else wants the sun to shine and prays for this on the selfsame day. Well ... it just doesn't make sense! If people noticed this there would be greater clarity about such matters—but they do not notice it. In the great things of life human beings often lapse into a thoughtlessness which they would not entertain in small things. Nobody, presumably, will put salt and sugar into his coffee at the same time; he will put in the one or the other, not both. Generally speaking, men are very lax about clarity of thought—and this lies at the root of the many disorders and confusions in life ...

The Jews introduced what is known as Monotheism, the belief that there is but the one God.

[ 17 ] I once said to you very briefly that Christianity thinks of three Divinities: God the Father, living in all the phenomena of nature; God the Son, working in man's free spiritual activity; and God the Holy Spirit, who awakens in man the consciousness of having within him a spirituality that is independent of the body. Three distinct spheres are pictured. If there were not three spheres it would have to be assumed that by the same resolve this one God allows the human being to die and then wakens him to life again. If there are Three Divine Persons, death belongs to the sphere of one Godhead, passage through death and beyond to another, and the awakening in spirit to yet another. Christianity could not do otherwise than picture the spiritual Godhead in three Persons. (In three Persons: this is not understood to-day but the original meaning was that of threefoldness, the Divine manifesting in three forms.)

[ 18 ] Now because Judaism conceived only of this one God, it could make no image of the Godhead but could only grasp the Divine with the innermost forces of the soul, with the intellect. It is easy to understand that this led to an intensification of human egoism; for man becomes remote from what is around him if he sees the Spiritual only in and through his own person. This has produced a certain folk-egoism in the Jewish world—there is no denying that it is so; but for this very reason the Jews are by nature adapted to assimilate what is not pictorial; they have less talent for the pictorial. If a Jew becomes a sculptor, he will not achieve anything very great, because this is not where his talent lies; he does not possess the gift of pictorial representation, nor does he readily develop it. But if a Jew becomes a musician he will generally be a very fine one, because music is not a pictorial art; it does not take visual form. And so you will find great musicians among the Jews but—at the time when the arts were at their prime—hardly ever great sculptors or painters. The style in which the Jews paint is quite different from that of Christian or oriental artists. The actual colour in a picture painted by a Jew has no very great significance; what it is that is being expressed, what the painter wishes to say by means of the picture—that is the essential. Judaism is concerned above all with the non-pictorial, with bringing into the world that which transpires within the human “I.”

But to maintain this adherence to the one God is not as easy as it seems, for if such adherence is not strongly forced upon them, men readily become pagans. It is among the Jews that this tendency has been least of all in evidence. Christianity, on the other hand, tends easily in the direction of paganism. If you observe closely you will find many indications of this. Think, for example, of how ceremonies are revered in Christianity. I have told you that the Monstrance actually depicts the Sun and the Moon. The meaning of this is no longer known but men unenlightened in this respect actually pray to the Monstrance, they pray to something external. Men are easily inclined to pray to something external. And so in the course of the centuries Christianity has developed many pagan characteristics, whereas in Judaism the opposite has been the case.

[ 19 ] This is most obvious of all in one particular field. Fundamentally speaking, Christians of the West—those who came from Greece, Rome and Central Germany—were almost incapable of continuing the principle of ancient medicine because they were no longer able to perceive the spiritual forces contained in the remedial herbs. But Jews who came from the East, from Persia and so forth, saw the Spiritual—that is to say their One Jehovah—everywhere. The Jews played a tremendously important part in the development of medicine in the Middle Ages; the Arabians were occupied more with developing the other sciences. And whatever medical knowledge came through the Arabians had been elaborated with the help of the Jews. That is why medicine has become what it is to-day. Medicine has, it is true, retained a certain abstract spirituality but it has assumed, so to speak, a “monotheistic” character. And if you observe medicine to-day you will find that with few, very few exceptions, all kinds of properties are ascribed to every sort of medicament! The exact effect which a particular medicament will produce is no longer known with certainty any more than Judaism knew how the myriad nature-spirits work. The abstract, Jehovah-influence has made its way into medicine and remains there to this day.

[ 20 ] Now it would be natural if the number of Jewish doctors in the different countries of Europe were proportional to the population. I am not for one moment saying—I beg you not to misunderstand me—that this should be adjusted by law. It would never occur to me to say such a thing. But in the natural course one would expect to find Jewish doctors in proportion to the number of Jews. This is certainly not the case. In most countries a relatively far greater number of Jews become doctors. This is a survival from the Middle Ages. The Jews still feel very drawn to medicine because it is in keeping with their abstract thinking. This abstract, Jehovistic medicine fits in with their whole mode of thinking. Anthroposophy alone, in that it takes account of the diverse nature-spirits, can recognise the forces of nature in the different herbs and mineral substances and so again establish this knowledge on sure foundations.²

[ 21 ] The Jews worshipped the one God Jehovah and men were thereby saved from wholly losing their way in polytheism. A natural consequence has been that the Jews have always kept themselves distinct from other men and so too—as always happens in such a case—have in many respects evoked dislike and antipathy. The right attitude to take to-day is that in the times to come it will not be necessary to segregate any particular culture in order to prevent its dissipation—as the Jews have been doing for centuries—but that this practice must be superseded by spiritual knowledge. The relation between the single Godhead and the multiplicity of spiritual beings will then be intelligible to men and no one people need be under the sway of subconscious impulses. That is why from the very outset I was apprehensive when the Jews, not knowing which way to turn, founded the Zionist movement. The attempt to set up a Jewish State denotes a decidedly reactionary drift, a retrogression that leads nowhere and runs counter to progress. A very distinguished Zionist with whom I was on friendly terms once told me about his ideal in life, which was to go to Palestine and found a Jewish kingdom there. He was, and still is, taking a very active part in the attempt to bring this about and he holds an important position in Palestine. I said to him: Such a cause is not in keeping with the times; what the times demand is something with which every human being can be allied without distinction of race, nation, class and so forth—that is the only kind of cause one can whole-heartedly support to-day. Nobody can expect me to join the Zionist movement, for there again one portion of humanity is being separated off from the rest. For this quite simple, natural reason, such a movement to-day cannot prosper in the real sense of the word—it is essentially retrogressive ... The advocates of such movements often use a remarkable argument. They say: But the course of history has shown that men do not really want the “human-universal”; they desire everything to develop on the basis of race.

[ 22 ] The conversation of which I have just told you took place before the Great War of 1914–18. And a factor leading up to that War was men's refusal to accept the great principle of the human-universal. The fact that men set their faces against this principle and wanted to separate from one another, to develop racial forces and interests, ultimately led to the outbreak of that War. Thus the greatest disaster of this twentieth century was due to an urge that is also present in the Jews.—And so one can say: Since everything that the Jews have achieved could now be achieved consciously by all human beings, the Jews would serve their own interests best if they let themselves be absorbed into the rest of mankind, be merged in the rest of mankind, so that Judaism, as a race or people, would come to an end. That would be in the nature of an ideal—but many Jewish habits and customs, and above all the hatred meted out to them, still militate against it. These are the kind of impulses that must be overcome and they will not be overcome if everything remains the same as it has been in the past. If the Jews feel hurt when they are told, for example: you have little talent for sculpture ... they can say to themselves: It is not necessary for every race of people to be sculptors; with their own particular faculties they can achieve something in a different domain! The Jews are not naturally gifted for sculpture. One of the Ten Commandments decrees: “Thou shalt make no graven image of thy God ...” it is because the Jewish people are averse to making any picture or image of the Supersensible. Now this is bound to lead back to the personal element.

[ 23 ] It is quite easy to understand this.—If I make an image or a picture, even if it is only in the form of a description as often happens in Spiritual Science, another person may impress it on his memory, learn from it, see truth in it, think what he likes about it. But if I make no image, my own personal activity must be in operation; the thought does not separate itself from me. For this reason it has a personal character. So it is in Judaism. Men must learn to perceive the Spiritual in their fellow-men. The Jewish world is still dominated by the racial impulse. The Jews marry among themselves, among their own people; their attention is still focused upon the racial, not upon the spiritual.

[ 24 ] Therefore to the question: “Have the Jewish people fulfilled their mission in the evolution of human knowledge?” the answer is: They have fulfilled their mission, for in earlier times the existence of a people who brought a certain form of monotheism into being was a necessity. To-day, however, what is required is spiritual knowledge. The mission of the Jewish people has been fulfilled. Hence this particular mission is no longer a necessity in evolution; the only right course is for the Jews to intermix with the other peoples.

[ 25 ] Question: Why was it that the Jewish people were destined to live in exile?

[ 26 ] Dr. Steiner: It is important to bear in mind the whole character of this “exile.” The Jewish people among whom Christ died were living at that time among people of quite a different kind, namely, the Romans. And now, suppose that the Roman conquest of Palestine had been complete; suppose they had killed everybody they wanted to get rid of and turned out the rest. Suppose that already at that time the Jews had intended or felt the urge to intermix with the other peoples ... what would have happened? Well ... the Romans would have captured Palestine and a number of Jews would have been put to death; others—as one says to-day in every country—would have been expelled and would have been able to continue their existence somewhere or other outside Palestine.

[ 27 ] But the Jews had neither the intention nor the urge to intermix with the other peoples; on the contrary, wherever they were, even when there were only a few of them, they always lived among themselves. They scattered far and wide; and only because they lived exclusively among themselves, intermarried among themselves, has it been noticed that, as Jews, they constitute a foreign element. The idea of an exile would otherwise not have arisen. It was this natural urge in the Jews that gave rise to the idea of their exile. It is all part of the intrinsic character of Judaism. And posterity is now astonished that the Jews were dispersed, were obliged to live as strangers. This has happened nearly everywhere. Other peoples intermixed and so were unnoticeable. By its very nature, Judaism has held tenaciously together. In this particular connection one is obliged to say that because human beings have held together, attention has been called to things that would not, otherwise, have been noticed.

[ 28 ] It is grievous and heartbreaking to read how in the Middle Ages the Jews lived in the ghettoes, in quarters of the towns where alone they were permitted to dwell. They were not allowed to go into the other parts of the towns; the gates of the ghettoes were locked, and so forth. But these things are talked about because it was noticed that the Jews in the ghettoes clung tenaciously together, lived entirely among themselves. Other men, too, have had equally terrible things to endure, although in a different way. The Jews stayed in their ghettoes, clung together there and people knew that they were not allowed to come out of their quarters. But just think of it.—Other men who were forced to work every day from early morning until late evening could not come into the towns either, although there were no gates to keep them out. Their sufferings, too, have been great. It must be admitted, therefore, that such things are often based solely upon their outer appearance ... they are based, as are many things in world history, upon outer appearance.

[ 29 ] The time has come when these things must be penetrated by the light of reality. And here we are led to the conception that when a destiny is fulfilled it is—to use an Eastern expression—karma, it is inner destiny. The characteristics of the Jews themselves has helped to give the story of exile the form it has assumed; the Jews are a tenacious people, they have held their own in foreign lands; and that is why in later times this has been so noticeable and is talked about to this day.

[ 30 ] On the other side, the natural result of all this is that the Jews are differentiated from other peoples and they are accused of all sorts of things of which the causes are not known. Does it not happen that if, in some district where people are superstitious, a man is murdered by an unknown hand and an unpopular Jew happens to live there, the whisper goes round that at Easter-time the Jews need human blood for their rites—therefore it is they who have killed the man ... The reason why such things are said is because the Jews are differentiated from the others; but the Jews themselves have done a great deal to cause this state of affairs.

[ 31 ] In considering these matters to-day it is essential to lay stress upon the human-universal, in contrast to the racial principle.

[ 32 ] Question: What was the significance in world-history of the seventy souls of the original family of Israelites?

[ 33 ] Dr. Steiner: Peoples of diverse character have lived on the Earth since ancient times. From the present age onwards, this diversity ceases to have real meaning, for as I have said, the human-universal must become the essential principle. Nevertheless if we study the earlier phases of the evolution of mankind we find the population of the Earth divided into all kinds of different peoples. The Spiritual is a living reality in the phenomena of nature; the Spiritual is also a living reality in the peoples of the Earth. In every people there is a guiding Folk-Spirit. As I have said in my book, Theosophy, “Folk-Spirit” is not merely an abstract term. When one speaks today of the French people and the rest, what does this suggest to the materialistic thinking of to-day? It suggests an accumulation of some 42 millions of human beings in the West of Europe—a pure abstraction; the traits and qualities of the people in question are a very secondary consideration. But it really is not so! Just as the seed lives in the plant, so something seed-like exists, which lives in the spirit of a people and then unfolds. A Spirit, a real Being, lives and works in the whole people.

[ 34 ] I have told you that the mission of the Jews in human history was to spread the belief in the One Godhead, and it will be clear to you that it was necessary for them, as a people, to be prepared for this. Therefore it came about that when the Jewish people originally came into existence, the several Folk-Spirits, each of whom worked individually in a particular people, all concerned themselves with the Jewish people. Thinking of the different peoples, we say: Indians—Indian Folk-Spirit; Egyptians—Egyptian Folk-Spirit; then Greek Folk-Spirit, Roman Folk-Spirit, and so on. Each Folk-Spirit had to do with a particular people. (Drawing on blackboard.) But if we take the Jewish people, then, in that corner of the Earth called Syria where the Jews had their home, the influences and will of all the Folk-Spirits operated in this one people.

[ 35 ] Let me try to make this clear by a simple analogy.—Imagine that each of you is in your own family circle, attending to its affairs. Each of you has a particular sphere of activity. So it was in the case of these Folk-Spirits.—But now, suppose you want to support, let us say, the cause and interests of the workers as a body: if that is so you will not remain in your own circle but you will hold a meeting and discuss among yourselves what proposal shall be put forward by you all, acting as a whole. And so we may say: In the peoples other than the Jews, each of these Folk-Spirits worked as it were in his own sphere; but what the Folk-Spirits achieved through the Jewish people was the outcome of a spiritual assembly. This influence worked with varying strength upon the members of the Jewish people. The Bible gives an indication of this when it speaks of seventy Folk-Souls entering into the people of Israel. All the Folk-Souls were in operation. This strong and potent influence has in a certain respect made the Jews into a cosmopolitan people and accounts for the tenacity that has remained characteristic of them. No matter where they might be, they were always able to gather together and preserve Judaism, simply because they had everything within them.

[ 36 ] It is very remarkable how Judaism has everything within it. In Orders or Societies of Freemasons, Oddfellows and the like, in which there is no new spiritual knowledge but an antiquated kind of knowledge they themselves no longer understand, you will find in the very words of the rites, elements deriving from all kinds of different peoples: Egyptian rites and words, Assyrian and Babylonian words and signs—but especially elements from the Jewish Kabbala and so forth.

[ 37 ] In this respect Judaism is truly cosmopolitan; it adapts itself to everything but also preserves its original impulse which is still alive within it. The same is true of the Hebrew language in which there is great richness of content, both spiritual and physical. Every Hebrew word is always full of meaning. It was a peculiarity with the Jews to write only the consonants; later on, the vowels were indicated by means of signs. The vowels themselves were not written; everybody might pronounce them in his own way, so that one man said: J-e-h-o-v-a ... another said: J-e-h-e-v-a ... a third said: J-e-h-a-v-e ... a fourth, J-o-h-a-v-e.—The vowel sounds were pronounced as they were felt. And that is why such a designation as the name “Jehova” which had been instituted by the priests in this particular form, was called the “unutterable Name” ... because it was not permissible to make arbitrary use of the vowels.

The very tenacity which characterised Judaism was an indication of the way in which the several Folk-Souls worked upon this one people. When you see the Jews in different countries you will need very keen perception to be able to recognise those Jews who have really mingled with the other peoples. You know, of course, that the most important statesman of the nineteenth century was a Jew. Jews who have really merged into the other peoples are no longer distinguishable from them. In a sentence spoken by a Jew, an experienced person will at once recognise the typical Jewish style—if, that is to say, there is no imitation which is a very common practice to-day. But the Jews seldom imitate. It is noticeable that a Jew invariably takes his start from something that is inwardly fixed or registered in a concept. This is very characteristic and it is connected with that assembly of the Folk-Souls and their co-operation. To this day, when a Jew makes a statement, he believes that it must be unconditionally valid. He proceeds on the basis of individual decision. It is really very interesting! Suppose a number of people—three, four, five—are together; one is a Jew, the other four are not. The men are representatives of a community of one kind or another. (I am not telling you about an imaginary situation but one which I have actually experienced) ... In this community, people have diverse views. Now these five men, of whom only the fifth is a Jew, begin to speak. The first says: It is very difficult to bring all these people into any harmony; the only thing to do is to bring persuasion to bear upon the minority and then upon the majority so that a compromise is reached. (That, after all, is how compromises are made—by people talking among themselves.) The second man says: Yes, but I have lived among the people, who compose the minority and I know how difficult it is to persuade them! The third, a representative of the minority, says: We don't want to have anything to do with it; it just won't work! The fourth man says: After all, one has to take one side or the other. When these four have spoken the Jew begins: All this is futile! Concept of compromise: compromise consists in balance being reached among different opinions and in certain people giving way.—You see, he comes out with an abstraction: “Concept of compromise”; he does not start from any particular point, but leaving out the article, begins: Concept of compromise ... thereby demonstrating his inborn tenacity. When somebody says: What, exactly, is this concept of compromise? ... he already has a mental picture of some kind. But the Jew does not begin in this way; he says: Concept of compromise!—This is an example of the Jehovistic conception: Jehovah says ... No thought is given to how it works out in a particular instance, but what has been registered and fixed in a concept is simply laid down as a principle. That is why the Jew always thinks he can develop everything out of the concept. As long as the Jews keep tenaciously among themselves, things will naturally remain as they are; once the Jews have merged into other peoples they will lose the habit of saying: “Concept of compromise!” ... and they will have to be in line with the others. All this is connected with the way in which the Folk-Souls have worked upon them.

• 1. See the previous lecture.
• 2. See: Spiritual Science and Medicine. Twenty lectures given by Rudolf Steiner to doctors and medical students. Dornach, 21st March to 9th April, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Has someone thought of a question during the last weeks?

Question: Sir, I would like to ask about various foods—beans and carrots, for instance: what effect they have on the body. You have already spoken about potatoes; perhaps we could hear something about other foodstuffs. Some vegetarians won't eat things that have hung in the air, like beans or peas. And when one looks at a field of grain, one wonders how the various grains differ—for apparently all the peoples of the earth cultivate some grain or other.

Dr. Steiner: So—the question is about the relation of various foods to the human body. Well, first of all we should gain a clear idea of nutrition itself. One's immediate thought of nutrition is that when we eat something, it goes through the mouth down into the stomach, then it is deposited farther in the body and finally we get rid of it; then we must eat again, and so on. But the process is not as simple as that. It is much more complicated. And if one wants to understand how the human being is really related to various foods, one must first be clear about the kinds of food one definitely needs.

Now the very first thing one needs, the substance one must have without fail, is protein. Let us write all this on the board, so that we have it complete. So, protein, as it is in a hen's egg, for instance—but not just in eggs; protein is in all foods. One needs protein without fail. The second thing one needs is fats. These too are in all foods. Fats are even in plants. The third thing has a name that will be less familiar to you, but one needs to know it: carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are found particularly in potatoes, but they are also found in large quantity in all other plants. The important fact about carbohydrates is that when we eat them, they are slowly turned into starch by the saliva in our mouth and the secretions in our stomach. Starch is something we need without fail, but we don't eat starch; we eat foods that contain carbohydrates, and the carbohydrates are turned into starch inside us. Then they are converted once again, in the further process of digestion, into sugar. And we need sugar. So you see, we get the sugar we need from the carbohydrates. But we still need something else: minerals. We get them partly by adding them to our food, for example in the form of salt, and partly they are already contained in all our foodstuffs.

Now when we consider protein, we must realize how greatly it differs in animals and human beings from what it is in plants. Plants contain protein too, but they don't eat it, so where do they get it from? They get it out of the ground and out of the air, From the mineral world; they can take their protein from lifeless, mineral sources. Neither animal nor man can do that. A human being cannot use the protein that is to be got from lifeless elements—he would then only be a plant—he must get his protein as it is already prepared in plants or animals.

Actually, to be able to live on this earth the human being needs the plants. But now this is the amazing fact: the plants could not live on the earth either if human beings were not here! So, gentlemen, we reach the interesting fact—and we must grasp it quite clearly: that of all things the two most essential for human life are the green sap in the green leaves and blood. The green in the sap of a plant is called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is contained in the green leaf. And the one other essential thing is blood.

Now this brings us to something very remarkable. Think how you breathe: that is also a way of taking in nourishment. You take oxygen in from the air; you breathe it in. But there is carbon spread through your entire body. If you go down into the earth where there are coal deposits, you've got black coal. When you sharpen a pencil, you've got graphite. Coal and graphite: they're both carbon. Your whole body is made of carbon (as well as other substances). Carbon is formed in the human body. You could say, a man is just a heap of black coal! But you could also say some thing else. Because—remember the most expensive thing in the world? a diamond—and that's made of carbon; it just has a different form. And so, if you like the sound of it better, you could say you're made of glittering diamonds. The black carbon, that graphite in the pencil, and the diamonds: they are all the same substance. If someday the coal that is dug out of the earth can by some process be made transparent, you'll have diamonds. So we have diamonds hidden in our body. Or we are a coal field! But now when oxygen combines with carbon in the blood, you have carbon dioxide. And you know carbon dioxide quite well: you only have to think of Seltzer water with the bubbles in it: they are the carbon dioxide. It is a gas. So one can have this picture: A human being inhales oxygen from the air, the oxygen spreads all through his blood; in his blood he has carbon, and he exhales carbon dioxide. You breathe oxygen in, you breathe carbon dioxide out.

In the course of the earth's evolution, gentlemen, which I have recently been describing to you, everything would long ago have been poisoned by the carbon dioxide coming from the human beings and animals. For this evolution has been going on for a long time. As you can see, since long, long ago there could have been no human kingdom or animal kingdom alive on the earth unless plants had had a very different character from those kingdoms. Plants do not take in oxygen: they take in the carbon dioxide that human beings and animals exhale. Plants are just as greedy for the carbon dioxide as human beings are for oxygen.

Now if we look at a plant [see drawing]—root, stem, leaves, blossoms: the plant absorbs carbon dioxide in every part of it. And now the carbon in the carbon dioxide is deposited in the plant, and the oxygen is breathed out by the plant. Human beings and animals get it back again. Man gives carbon dioxide out and kills everything; the plant keeps back the carbon, releases the oxygen and brings everything to life again. And the plant could do nothing with the carbon dioxide if it did not have its green sap, the chlorophyll. This green sap of the plant, gentlemen, is a magician. It holds the carbon back inside the plant and lets the oxygen go free. Our blood combines oxygen with carbon; the green plant-sap separates the carbon again from the carbon dioxide and sets the oxygen free. Think what an excellent arrangement nature has made, that plants and animals and human beings should complement one another in this way! They complement one another perfectly.

But we must go on. The human being not only needs the oxygen that the plant gives him, but he needs the entire plant. With the exception of poisonous plants and certain plants which contain very little of these substances, the human being needs all plants not only for his breathing but also for food. And that brings us to another remarkable connection. A plant consists of root, if it is an annual plane (we won't consider the trees at this moment)—of root, leaf and stem, blossom and fruit. Now look at the root for a moment. It is in the earth. It contains many minerals, because minerals are in the earth and the root clings to the earth with its tiny fine rootlets, so it is constantly absorbing those minerals. So the root of the plant has a special relation to the mineral realm of the earth.

And now look here, gentlemen! The part of the human being that is related to the whole earth is the head. Not the feet, but actually the head. When the human being starts to be an earth-man in the womb, he has at first almost nothing but a head. He begins with his head. His head takes the shape of the whole cosmos and the shape of the earth. And the head particularly needs minerals. For it is from the head that the forces go out that fill the human body with bones, for instance. Everything that makes a human being solid is the result of the way the head has been formed. While the head itself is still soft, as in the womb, it cannot form bones properly. But as it becomes harder and harder itself, it gives over to the body the forces by which both man and animal are able to form their solid parts, particularly their bones. You can see from this that we need roots. They are related to the earth and contain minerals. We need the minerals for bone-building. Bones consist of calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate; those are minerals. So you can see that the human being needs roots in order to strengthen his head.

And so, gentlemen, if—for instance—a child is becoming weak in his head—inattentive, hyperactive—he will usually have a corresponding symptom: worms in his intestines. Worms develop easily in the intestines if the head forces are too weak, because the head does not then work down strongly enough into the rest of the body. Worms find no lodging in a human body if the head forces are working down strongly into the intestines. You can see how magnificently the human body is arranged!—everything is related. And if one's child has worms, one should realize the child has become weak in his head. Also—whoever wants to be a teacher has to know these things—if there are persons who at a later age are weak-minded, one can be sure they have had worms when they were young.

And so what must one do if one observes this in the child? The simplest remedy is to give him carrots to eat for a while—with his other food, of course; naturally, one couldn't just feed him on carrots alone. Carrots are the root of the plant. They grow down in the earth and have a large quantity of minerals. They have the forces of the earth in them, and when they are taken into the stomach, they are able to work up through the blood into the head. Only substances rich in minerals are able to reach the head. Substances rich in minerals, root substances, give strength to a human being by way of the head. That is extraordinarily important. It is through carrots that the uppermost parts of the head become strong—which is precisely what the human being needs in order to be inwardly firm and vigorous, not soft.

If you look at the carrot plant, you can't help seeing that its strength has gone particularly into the root. It is almost entirely root. The only part of the plant one is interested in is the root. The rest of it, the green part, is of no importance, it just sits there up above. So the carrot is particularly good as a food substance to maintain the human head. And if sometimes you yourselves feel empty-headed, dull, can't think properly, then it's fine if you too will eat carrots for a while! Naturally, they will help children the most.

But now if we compare a potato to a carrot—well, first of all it looks quite different. Of course, the potato plant has a green part. And then it has the part we eat, what we call the tubers, deep down in the earth. Now if we would think superficially, we could say those tubers are the roots. But that is not correct; the tubers are not roots. If you look carefully down into the soil, you can see the real roots hanging on the tubers. The real roots are tiny rootlets, root hairs, that hang on the tubers. They fall away easily. When you gather up the potatoes, the hairs have already fallen away. Only in the first moment when you are lifting a potato loose from the soil, the hairs are still all over it. When we eat a potato, we are really eating a piece of swollen, enlarged stem. It only appears to be a root; in reality it is stem. The leaves are metamorphosed. The potato is something down there between the root and the stem. Therefore it does not have as much mineral content as the carrot; it is not as earthy. It grows in the earth, but it is not so strongly related to the earth. And it contains particularly carbohydrates; not so many minerals, but carbohydrates.

So now, gentlemen, you can say to yourselves: When I eat carrots, my body can really take it easy, for all it needs is saliva to soften the carrot. All it needs is saliva and stomach secretions, pepsin and so forth for all the important substance of the carrot to reach the head. We need minerals, and minerals are furnished by any kind of root, but in greatest amounts by such a root as the carrot.

But now, when we eat potatoes, first they go into the mouth and stomach. There the body has to exert strength to derive starch from them. Then the digestive process goes further in the intestines. In order that something can go into the blood and also reach the head, there must be more exertion still, because sugar has to be derived from the starch. Only then can it go to the head. So one has to use still greater forces. Now think of this, gentlemen: when I exert my strength upon some external thing, I become weak. This is really a secret of human physiology: that if I chop wood, if I use my external bodily strength, I become weak; but if I exert an inner strength, transforming carbohydrates into starch and starch into sugar, I become strong. Precisely through the fact that I permeate myself with sugar by eating potatoes, I become strong. When I use my strength externally, I become weak; if I use it internally, I become strong. So it is not a matter of simply filling oneself up with food, but of the food generating strength in our body.

And so one can say: food from roots—and all roots have the same effect as carrots although not to the same degree: they all work particularly on the head—so, food from roots gives the body what it needs for itself. Foods that lean toward the green of the plant and contain carbohydrates provide the body with strength it needs for work, for movement.

I have already spoken about the potato. While it requires a terribly large expenditure of strength, it leaves a man weak afterwards, and does not provide him with any continuing strength. But the principle I have just given you holds good even for the potato.

Now to the same extent that the potato is a rather poor foodstuff, all the grains—wheat, rye, and so on—are good foodstuffs. The grains also contain carbohydrates, and of such a nature that the human being forms starch and sugar in the healthiest possible way. Actually, the carbohydrates of the grains can make him stronger than he can make himself by any other means. Only think for a moment how strong people are who live on farms, simply through the fact that they eat large quantities of their own homemade bread which contains the grain from their fields! They only need to have healthy bodies to start with, then if they can digest the rather coarse bread, it is really the healthiest food for them. They must first have healthy bodies, but then they become quite especially strong through the process of making starch and sugar.

Now a question might be raised. You see, human beings have come in the course of their evolution—shall I say, quite of their own accord—to eating the grains differently from the way animals eat them. A horse eats his oats almost as they grow. Animals eat their kernels of grain raw, just as they come from the plant. The birds would have a hard time getting their seed if they had to depend upon someone cooking it for them first! But human beings have come of themselves to cooking the grains. And now, gentlemen, what happens when we cook the grain? Well, when we cook the grain, we don't eat it cold, we eat it warm. And it's a fact, that to digest our food we need inner warmth. Unless there is warmth we can't transform our carbohydrates into starch and the starch into sugar: that requires inner heat.

So if we first apply external heat to the foodstuffs, we help the body: it does not have to provide all the warmth itself. By being cooked first, the foods have already begun the fire process, the warmth process. That's the first result. The second is, that they have been entirely changed. Think what happens to the grain when I make flour into bread. It becomes something quite different. And how has it become different? Well, first I have ground the seeds. What does that mean? I have crushed them into tiny, tiny pieces. And you see. what I do there with the seeds, grinding them, making them fine, I'd otherwise have to do later within my own body! Everything I do externally, I'd otherwise have to do internally, inside my body; so by doing those things, I relieve my body. And the same with the baking itself: all the things I do in cooking, I save my body from doing. I bring the foods to a condition in which my body can more easily digest them.

You have only to think of the difference if someone would eat raw potatoes instead of cooked ones. If someone were to eat his potatoes raw, his stomach would have to provide a tremendous amount of warmth to transform those raw potatoes—which are almost starch already. And the extent to which it could transform them would not be sufficient. So then the potatoes would reach the intestines and the intestines would also have to use a great amount of energy. Then the potatoes would just stay put in the intestines, for the subsequent forces would not be able to carry them farther into the body. So if one eats raw potatoes, either one just loads one's stomach with them and the intestines can't even get started on them, or one fills up the intestines; in either case there is no further digestion. But if the potatoes undergo a preparatory stage through cooking or some other means, then the stomach does not have so much to do, or the intestines either, and the potatoes go over properly into the blood and right up into the head. So you see, by cooking our foods, especially those that are counted among the carbohydrates, we are able to help our nutrition.

You are certainly acquainted with all the new kinds of foolishness in connection with nutrition—for instance, the raw food faddists, who are not going to cook anything anymore, they're going to eat everything raw. How does this come about? It's because people no longer know what's what from a materialistic science, and they shy away from a spiritual science, so they think a few things out on their own. The whole raw food fad is a fantasy. For a time someone living on raw food can whip the body along—in this situation the body has to be using very strong forces, so it has to be whipped—but then it will collapse all the more completely.

But now, gentlemen, let us come to the fats. Plants, almost all of them, contain fats which they derive from the minerals. Now fats do not enter the human body so easily as carbohydrates and minerals. Minerals are not even changed. For example, when you shake salt into your soup, that salt goes almost unchanged up into your head. You get it as salt in your head. But when you eat potatoes, you don't get potatoes in your head, you get sugar. The conversion takes place as I described to you. With the fats, however, whether they're plant fats or animal fats, it's not such a simple matter. When fats are eaten, they are almost entirely eaten up by the saliva, by the gastric secretions, by the intestinal secretions, and they become something quite different that then goes over into the blood. The animal and the human being must form their own fats in their intestines and in their blood, with forces which the fats they eat call forth.

You see, that is the difference between fats and sugar or minerals. The human being still takes his salt and his sugar from nature. He has to derive the sugar from the potato and the rye and so on, but there is still something of nature in it. But with the fats that man or animal have in them, there is nothing anymore of nature. They have formed them themselves. The human being would have no strength if he did not eat; his intestines and blood need fats. So we can say: Man himself cannot form minerals. If he did not take in minerals, his body would never be able to build them by itself. If he did not take in carbohydrates, if he did not eat bread or something similar from which he gets carbohydrates, he would never be able to form sugar by himself. And if he could not form sugar, he would be a weakling forever. So be grateful for the sugar, gentlemen! Because you are chock-full of sweetness, you have strength. The moment you would no longer be full to the brim with your own sweetness, you would have no strength, you would collapse.

And you know, that holds good even in connection with the various peoples. There are certain peoples who consume very little sugar or foodstuffs that produce sugar. These peoples have weak physical forces. Then there are certain peoples who eat many carbohydrates that form sugar, and they are strong.

But the human being doesn't have it so easy with the fats. If someone has fats in him (and this is true also of the animals), that is his own accomplishment, the accomplishment of his body. Fats are entirely his own production. The human being destroys whatever fats he takes in, plant fats or animal fats, and through their destruction he develops strength. With potatoes, rye, wheat, he develops strength by converting the substances. With the fats that he eats, he develops strength by destroying the substances.

If I destroy something outside of myself, I become tired and exhausted. And if I have had a big fat beefsteak and destroy that inside myself, I become weak in the same way; but my destruction of the fat beefsteak or of the plant fat gives me strength again, so that I can produce my own fat if my body is predisposed to it. So you see, the consumption of fat works very differently in the human body from the consumption of carbohydrates. The human body, gentlemen, is exceedingly complicated, and what I have been describing to you is tremendous work. Much must take place in the human body for it to be able to destroy those plant fats.

But now let us think how it is when someone eats green stuff, the stems and leaves of a plant. When he eats green stuff he is getting fats from the plants. Why is it that sometimes a stem is so hard? Because it then gives its forces to leaves that are going to be rich in carbohydrates. And if the leaves stay green—the greener they are, the more fats they have in them. So when someone eats bread, for instance, he can't take in many fats from the bread. He takes in more, for example, from watercress—that tiny plant with the very tiny leaves—more fats than when he eats bread. That's how the custom came about of putting butter on our bread, some kind of fat. It wasn't lust for the taste. And why country people want bacon with their bread. There again is fat, and that also is eaten for two reasons.

When I eat bread, the bread works upon my head because the root elements of a plant work up into the stem. The stem, even though it is stem and grows above the ground in the air, still has root forces in it. The question is not whether something is above in the air, but whether it has any root forces. Now the leaf, the green leaf, does not have root forces. No green leaf ever appears down in the earth. In late summer and autumn, when the sun forces are no longer working so strongly, the stem can mature. But the leaf needs the strongest sun forces for it to unfold; it grows toward the sun. So we can say, the green part of the plant works particularly on heart and lungs, while the root strengthens the head. The potato also is able to work into the head. When we eat greens, they give us particularly plant fats; they strengthen our heart and lungs, the middle man, the chest man.

That, I would say, is the secret of human nutrition: that if I want to work upon my head, I have roots or stems for dinner. If I want to work upon my heart or my lungs, I make myself a green salad. And in this case, because these substances are destroyed in the intestines and only their forces proceed to work, cooking is not so necessary. That's why leaves can be eaten raw as salad. Whatever is to work on the head cannot be eaten raw; it must be cooked. Cooked foods work particularly on the head. Lettuce and similar things work particularly on heart and lungs, building them up, nourishing them through the fats.

But now, gentlemen, the human being must not only nurture the head and the middle body, the breast region, but he must nurture the digestive organs themselves. He needs a stomach, intestines, kidneys, and a liver, and he must build up these digestive organs himself. Now the interesting fact is this: to build up his digestive organs he needs protein for food, the protein that is in plants, particularly as contained in their blossoms, and most particularly in their fruit. So we can say: the root nourishes the head particularly [see drawing above]; the middle of the plant, stem and leaves, nourishes the chest particularly; and fruit nourishes the lower body.

When we look out at our grain fields we can say, Good that they are there! for that nourishes our head. When we look down at the lettuce we've planted, all those leaves that we eat without cooking because they are easily digested in the intestines—and it's their forces that we want—there we get everything that maintains our chest organs. But cast an eye up at the plum and apples, at the fruits growing on the trees—ah! those we don't have to bother to cook much, for they've been cooked by the sun itself during the whole summer! There an inner ripening has already been happening, so that they are something quite different from the roots, or from stalks and stems (which are not ripened but actually dried up by the sun). The fruits, as I said, we don't have to cook much—unless we have a weak organism, in which case the intestines cannot destroy the fruits. Then we must cook them; we must have stewed fruit and the like. If someone has intestinal illnesses, he must be careful to take his fruit in some cooked form—sauce, jam, and so forth. If one has a perfectly healthy digestive system, a perfectly healthy intestinal system, then fruits are the right thing to nourish the lower body, through the protein they contain. Protein from any of the fruits nourishes your stomach for you, nourishes all your digestive organs in your lower body.

You can see what a good instinct human beings have had for these things! Naturally, they have not known in concepts all that I've been telling you, but they have known it instinctively. They have always prepared a mixed diet of roots, greens and fruit; they have eaten all of them, and even the comparative amounts that one should have of these three different foods have been properly determined by their instinct.

But now, as you know, people not only eat plants, they eat animals too, the flesh of animals, animal fat and so on.

Certainly it is not for anthroposophy ever to assume a fanatical or a sectarian attitude. Its task is only to tell how things are. One simply cannot say that people should eat only plants, or that they should also eat animals, and so on. One can only say that some people with the forces they have from heredity are simply not strong enough to perform within their bodies all the work necessary to destroy plant fats, to destroy them so completely that then forces will develop in their bodies for producing their own fat. You see, a person who eats only plant fats—well, either he's renounced the idea of becoming an imposing, portly fellow, or else he must have an awfully good digestive system, so healthy that it is easy for him to destroy the plant fats and in this way get forces to build his own fat. Most people are really unable to produce their own fat if they have only plant fats to destroy. When one eats animal fat in meat, that is not entirely destroyed. Plant fats don't go out beyond the intestines, they are destroyed in the intestines. But the fat contained in meat does go beyond, it goes over into the human being. And the person may be weaker than if he were on a diet of just plant fats.

Therefore, we must distinguish between two kinds of bodies. First there are the bodies that do not like fat, they don't enjoy eating bacon, they just don't like to eat fatty foods. Those are bodies that destroy plant fats comparatively easily and want in that way to form their own fat. They say: “Whatever fat I carry around, I want to make myself; I want my very own fat.” But if someone heaps his table with fatty foods, then he's not saying, “I want to make my own fat”; he's saying, “The world has to give me my fat.” For animal fat goes over into the body, making the work of nutrition easier.

When a child sucks a candy, he's not doing that for nourishment. There is, to be sure, something nutritious in it, but the child doesn't suck it for that; he sucks it for the sweet taste. The sweetness is the object of his consciousness. But if an adult eats beef fat, or pork fat, or the like, well, that goes over into his body. It satisfies his craving just as the candy satisfies the child's craving. But it is not quite the same, for the adult feels this craving inside him. The adult needs this inner craving in order to respond to his inner being. That is why he loves meat. He eats it because his body loves it.

But it is no use being fanatic about these things. There are people who simply cannot live if they don't have meat. A person must consider carefully whether he really will be able to get on without it. If he does decide he can do without it and changes over from a meat to a vegetarian diet, he will feel stronger than he was before. That's sometimes a difficulty, obviously: some people can't bear the thought of living without meat. If, however, one does become a vegetarian, he feels stronger—because he is no longer obliged to deposit alien fat in his body; he makes his own fat, and this makes him feel stronger.

I know this from my own experience. I could not otherwise have endured the strenuous exertion of these last twenty-four years! I never could have traveled entire nights, for instance, and then given a lecture the next morning. For it is a fact, that if one is a vegetarian one carries out a certain activity within one that is spared the non-vegetarian, who has it done first by an animal. That's the important difference.

But now don't get the idea that I would ever agitate for vegetarianism! It must always be first established whether a person is able to become a vegetarian or not; it is an individual matter.

You see, this is especially important in connection with protein. One can digest protein if one is able to eat plant protein and break it down in the intestines. And then one gets the forces from it. But the moment the intestines are weak, one must get the protein externally, which means one must eat the right kind of protein, which will be animal protein. Hens that lay eggs are also animals! So protein is something that is really judged quite falsely unless it is considered from an anthroposophical point of view.

When I eat roots, their minerals go up into my head. When I eat salad greens, their forces go to my chest, lungs, and heart—not their fats, but the forces from their fats. When I eat fruit, the protein from the fruit stays in the intestines. And the protein from animal substances goes beyond the intestines into the body; animal protein spreads out. One might think, therefore, that if a person eats plenty of protein, he will be a well-nourished individual. This has led to the fact in this materialistic age that people who had studied medicine were recommending excessive amounts of protein for the average diet: they maintained that one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty grams of protein were necessary—which was ridiculous. Today it is known that only a quarter of that amount is necessary. And actually, if a person does eat such enormous and unnecessary amounts of protein—well, then something happens as it once did with a certain professor and his assistant.

They had a man suffering from malnutrition and they wanted to build him up with protein. Now it is generally recognized that when someone is consuming large amounts of protein—it is, of course, converted in him—his urine will show that he has had it in his diet. So now it happened with these two that the man's urine showed no sign of the protein being present in his body. It didn't occur to them that it had already passed through the intestines. The professor was in a terrible state. And the assistant was shaking in his boots as he said timidly: “Sir—Professor—perhaps—through the intestines?” Of course!

What had happened? They had stuffed the man with protein and it was of no use to him, for it had gone from the stomach into the intestines and then out behind. It had not spread into the body at all. If one gulps down too much protein, it doesn't go over into the body at all, but into the fecal waste matter. Even so, the body does get something from it: before it passes out, it lies there in the intestines and becomes poisonous and poisons the whole body. That's what can happen from too much protein. And from this poisoning comes then very frequently arteriosclerosis—so that many people get arteriosclerosis too early, simply from stuffing themselves with too much protein.

It is important, as I have tried to show you, to know these things about nutrition. For most people are thoroughly convinced that the more they eat, the better they are nourished. Of course it is not true. One is often much better nourished if one eats less, because then one does not poison oneself.

The point is really that one must know how the various substances work. One must know that minerals work particularly on the head; carbohydrates—just as they are to be found in our most common foods, bread and potatoes, for instance—work more on the lung system and throat system (lungs, throat, palate and so on). Fats work particularly on heart and blood vessels, arteries and veins, and protein particularly on the abdominal organs. The head has no special amount of protein. What protein it does have—naturally, it also has to be nourished with protein, for after all, it consists of living substances—that protein man has to form himself. And if one over-eats, it's no use believing that in that way one is getting a healthy brain, for just the opposite is happening: one is getting a poisoned brain.

 Protein: abdominal organs Fats: heart and blood vessels Carbohydrates: lungs, throat, palate Minerals: head 

Perhaps we should devote another session to nutrition! That would be good, because these questions are very important. So then, Saturday at nine o'clock.

Emil Bock opened the discussion hour and formulated the following questions:

1. Out of the previous lecture this morning, how can we take the power of formative speech to which we still need to gain access, and accomplish a new speech technique, perhaps new forms and a new gestural technique?
2. How do we actually now really speak of a new understanding of the Bible, of a new Bible text? Furthermore, we ask Dr Steiner on occasion to discuss in more detail the two chapters from the synoptic Gospels, Matthew 13 and Mark 13.
3. What is the reality behind the Apostolic succession, the tradition and the ordination of priests in the technical sense, and how can such a reality be made more accessible again in the future?

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: With regards to the first question: You would already have seen, my dear friends, that out of what I said this morning, that in the illustration, the soul contents related to the supersensible and also what leads to the power of formative speech, must be searched for. Regarding the power of speech formation: we actually have no direct understanding of sound anymore today; we basically have no more understanding for words, so our words remain signs. Naturally our starting point needs to be out of the spiritual milieu of our time. Man must be responsible for these intimate things out of what currently is available. Precisely such a question brings us naturally into the area of the purely technical. First of all one has to make the understanding for the sound active again, within oneself. One doesn't easily manage the free use of speech when one isn't able to allow the sound as such, to stir within oneself. I would like to continue in such a way that I first draw your attention to certain examples.

[ 2 ] You see, when we say "head" (Kopf) in German, we hardly have anything else in mind than the total perception of what reaches us through the ear, which indicates the head. When we say "foot" (Fuss) it is hardly any different to what we experience in the tonality and sound content in relation to some foot. Now we only need, for instance, to refer to the Romance languages where head is testa, tête, foot is pedum, pied, and we get the feeling at the same time that the term is taken from something completely different. When we say the word Kopf in German, the term has come out of the form, from looking at the form. We are not aware of this any longer, yet it is so. When we say Fuss, it is taken from walking where furrows are drawn in the ground. Thus, it has come into existence out of a certain soul content and coined in a word. When we take a word formation like, let's say, "testament" and all other word formations which refer in Romance language terms to head, testa, then we will feel that the term Kopf in the Romantic languages originate through the substantiation and thus not out of the form, but through the human soul with the help of the head, and particularly activating the mouth organs. Pied didn't originate from walking or drawing furrows but from standing, pressing down while standing. Today we no longer question the motives which have come out of the soul and into speech formation. We can only discover what can be called, in the real sense, a feeling for the language when we follow the route of making language far more representational than it is currently, abstraction at most. When someone uses a Latin expression in terminology, some Latin expressions are even more representational, but some people use them to denote even more. For example, today one can hardly find the connection between "substance" and "subsist" while the concept of "subsist" has basically been lost. Someone who still has the original feeling for substance and subsistence would say of the Father-God, not that He "exists" but that he "subsists."

[ 3 ] Researching language in this way and in another way which I want to mention right now, in order to develop a lively feeling for language again, leads then to something I would like to call a linguistic conscience (Sprachgewissen). We need a linguistic conscience. We speak really so directly these days because as human beings we act more as automatons towards language than we do as living beings. Until we are capable of connecting language in a living way to ourselves, like our skin is connected to us, we will not come to the right symbolization. The skin experiences pain when it is pricked. Language even tolerates being maltreated. One must develop a feeling regarding language that it can be maltreated because it is a closed organism, just like our skin. We can gain much in this area, when we have a lively experience in some or other dialect.

Consider how often we have performed the Christmas Plays, and in these plays there is a sentence spoken by one or more of the innkeepers. When Joseph and Mary come to Bethlehem in search of lodging, they are refused by three innkeepers. Each one of the three innkeepers says: Ich als a wirt von meiner gstalt, hab in mein haus und ligament gwalt.—Just imagine what this means to a person today. He could hear: "I as a host of my stature ..."—and think that what the host is saying means he is an attractive man, or something like that, or a strong man who has stature within his hostel, in his house. This is certainly not meant. If we want to translate that into High German we'll have to say: "I as a host, who is placed in such a way as to have abundant comfort, I am not dependent on such poor people finding lodgings within, with me." This means: "I as a host in my social position, in my disposition." This shows them it is necessary not only to listen to him—words one often enough hears in speech—but to enter into the spirit of the language. We say Blitz" (lightening) in High German. In Styria a certain form of lightening is called 'heaven's lashers' (Himmlatzer). In the word "Blitz" there is quite another meaning than in the word Himmlatzer.

[ 4 ] So we start becoming aware of different things when we approach the sense of speech. You see, such an acquisition of the sense of language sometimes leads to something extraordinarily important. Goethe once uttered a sentence, when already in his late life, to the Chancellor von Müller, a statement which has often been quoted and is often used, to understand the entire way in which Faust, written by Goethe, originated. Goethe said that for him the conception of Faust had for 60 years been clear "from the beginning" (von vornherein); the other parts less extensively. Now commentary upon commentary have been written and this sentence was nearly always recalled, because it is psychologically extraordinarily important, and the commentators have it always understood like this: Goethe had a plan from the beginning for his Faust and in the 60 years of his life—since he was twenty or about eighteen—he used this plan, he had "from the start," to work from.

In Weimar I met August Fresenius who bemoaned the fact that it was a great misfortune, if I could use such an expression, which had entered into the entire Goethe research, and at the time I had urged an unusually thoughtful and slow philologist to publish this thing as soon as possible in order that it doesn't continue, otherwise one would have a few dozen more such Goethe commentaries. It is important to note that Goethe used the expression "from the start" in no other way than in a descriptive way, not in the sense of a priori but "from the beginning" in a very descriptive manner so that in the strictest sense one could refer to Goethe not having an overall plan, but that "at the beginning" he only wrote down the first pages (i.e. to begin with) and of the further sections, only single sentences. There can be no argument of an overall plan. It very much depends on how one really experiences words. Many people have, when they hear the word vornherein totally have no conscience that it has a vorn (in front) and a herein (in) and that one sees something spiritual when one pronounces it. This simple dismissal of a word without contemplation is something upon which a tremendous amount depends, if one wants to attain a symbolic manner of speech. Precisely about this direction there would be extraordinarily much to say.

[ 5 ] You see, we have the remarkable appearance of the Fritz Mauthner speaking technique where all knowledge and all wisdom is questioned, because all knowledge and wisdom is expressed though speech, and so Fritz Mauthner finds nothing expressed in speech because it does not point to some or other reality. [ 6 ] How harsh my little publication "The spiritual guidance of man and of mankind" has been judged in which I mention that in earlier times, all vowel formation expressed people's inner experiences, and all consonant unfolding comes from outer observed or seen events. All that man perceives is expressed in consonants, while vowels are formed by inner experiences, feelings, emotions and so on. With this is connected the peculiar manner in which the consonants are written differently to the vowels in Hebrew. This is also connected to areas where more primitive people used to dwell, where they have not strongly developed their inner life, so predominantly consonant languages occur, not languages based on vowels. This extends very far, this kind of in-consonant-action of language. Only think what African languages have from consonants to click sounds.

[ 7 ] So you see, in this way we gain an understanding for what sounds within language. One would be brought beyond the mere sign, which the word is today. Only with today's feeling for language which Fritz Mauthner believes in, can you believe that all knowledge actually depends on language and that language has no connection to some or other reality. A great deal can be accomplished when one enters into one's mother tongue and try to go back into the vernacular. In the vernacular one finds much, very much if you really behave like a human being, that is, respond to what you feel connected to the language. In the vernacular one has the rich opportunity to feel in speech and experience in sound, but also the tendency towards the descriptive, and you have to push it so far that you really, one could say, get into a kind of state of renunciation in regard to expressions that are supposed to phrase something completely separate from human experiences.

Something which thoroughly ruins our sense of language is physics, and in physics, as it is today, it only aspires to study objective processes and refrains from all subjective experience, there it should no longer be spoken at all. According to physics, when one body presses (stoßen) against another, for example in the theory of elasticity, then you are anthropomorphising, because the experience of pressure as soon as you sense sound, means you're only affected by the same kind of pressure as the pressure your own hand makes. Above all, one gets the feeling with the S-sound that nothing other can be described as something like this (a waved line is drawn on the blackboard). The word Stoß" (push/impacts—ß is the symbol for ss—translator) has two s's, at the end and beginning; it gives the entire word its colouring; so when the word Stoß or stoßen (to push/thrust) is pronounced one actually can feel how, when your ether body would move, it would not only move but be shoved forwards and continuously be kept up.

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[ 8 ] Thus, there are already methods through which one comes to the power of speech formation, which is then no longer far from symbolizing, for the symbolum must be hacked out of the way so that one experiences language as a living organism, because much is to be experienced within language. Someone recently told me that there are certain things in language which only need to be pronounced and one is surprised at how they reveal themselves as self-evident.

The Greeks recited in hexameter. Why? Well, hexameter is an experience. A person produces speech, as I've already said, in his breathing. However, breathing is closely connected to other elements of rhythm in the human being; with the pulse, with blood circulation. On average, obviously not precisely, we have 18 breaths and 72 heat beats; 72 equals 4 times 18. Four times 18 heart beats gives a rhythm, a collective inner beat. In a time when man sensed in a more primordial and more elementary way according to what was taking place within him, man experienced, when he could, in uttering the relationship of the heart beat to the breathing, bring the totality of himself into expression. This relationship, not precisely according to time, this relationship can be brought to bear; you only have to add the turning point as the fourth foot (reference plate 3 ... not available In German text) then you have a Greek hexameter half-line, in the ration of 4 to 1 as a pulse beat to breathing rhythm. The hexameter was born out of the human structure, and other measures of verse were all born out of the rhythmic system of the human being. You can already feel, when you treat language artistically, how, in the process of treating human speech in an artistic way, language is alive. This makes it possible to acquire a far more inner relationship to language, yet also far more objectivity. The most varied chauvinistic feelings in relation to language stops, because the configurations of different languages stop, and one acquires an ear for the general sound. There are such things which are found on the way to gaining the power of creative speech. It does finally lead to listening to oneself when one speaks. In a certain way it's actually difficult but it can be supported. For various reasons it seems to me that for those who are affected by it, it is also necessary not to treat the Scripture in the way many people treat it today. You will soon see why I say these things.

[ 9 ] In relation to writing, there are two kinds of people. The majority learn to write as if it's a habit of staking out words. People are used to move their hands in a certain way and write like this: in the majority. The writing lesson is very often given in such a way that one just comes to it. The minority actually don't write in the sense of reality, but they draw (a word is written on the blackboard: Kann [meaning can; be able to]). They look at the signs of the letters simultaneously as being written, and as an artistic treatment of writing, it is far more an intimate involvement. I have met people who have been formally trained to write. For instance, once there was a writing method which consisted in people being trained to make circles and curves, to turn them and thus acquire a feeling of connecting them and so form letters out of them. Only in this way, out of these curves, could the letters come about. With a large number of them I have seen that they, before they start writing, make movements in the air with their pen. This is what brings writing into the unconsciousness of the body. However, our language comes out of the totality of the human being and when one spoils oneself by writing you also spoil yourself for the language. Precisely the one who is dependent on handling the language needs to get used to the meditation that writing should not be allowed to just flow out of his hand, but he should look at it, really look at what he is writing, when he writes.

[ 10 ] My dear friends, this is something which is extraordinarily important in our current culture, because we are on our way to dehumanizing ourselves. I have already received a large number of letters which have not been written with a pen but with the typewriter. Now you can imagine the difference between a letter written with a typewriter or written with a pen. I'm not campaigning against the typewriter, I consider it as an obvious necessity in civilization, but we do also need the counter pole. By us dehumanizing ourselves in this way, by us changing our relationship towards the outer world in an absolute mechanistic and dead manner, we need in turn to take up strong vital forces again. Today we need far greater vital forces than in the time in which man knew nothing yet about the typewriter.

[ 11 ] Therefore, for someone who handles words, he must also acquire an understanding for the continuous observation, while he is writing, that what he is writing pleases him, that he gets the impression that something hasn't just flowed out of a subject but that, by looking simultaneously at it, this thing lives as a totality in him. Mostly, the thing that is needed for the development of some capability is not arrived at in a direct but in an indirect way. I must explain this route because I have been asked how one establishes the power for speech formation. This is the way, as I have mentioned, which comes first of all. As an aside I stress that language originates in the totality of mankind, and the more mankind still senses the language, so much more will there be movement in his speech. It is extraordinary, how for instance in England, where the process of withdrawal of a connection with the surroundings is most advanced, it is regarded as a good custom to speak with their hands in their trouser pockets, held firmly inside so they don't enter the danger of movement. I have seen many English people talk in this way. Since then I've never had my pockets made in front again, but always at the back, for I have developed such disgust from this quite inhuman non-participation in what is being said. It is simply a materialistic criticism that speech only comes from the head; it originates out of the entire human being, above all from the arms, and we are—I say it here in one sentence which is obviously restricted—we are on this basis no ape or animal which needs its hands to climb or hold on to something, but we have them as free because with these free hands and arms we handle speech.

In grasping with our arms, creating with our fingers, we express something we need in order to model language. So it has a certain justification to return mankind to its connection with language, bringing the whole person into it, to train Eurythmy properly, which really exists in drawing out of the human organism what is not fulfilled in the human body, but is however fulfilled in the ether body, when we speak. The entire human being is in movement and we are simply transposing though the eurhythmic movements, the etheric body on to the physical body. That is the principle. It is really the eurythmization of something like a necessity which needs to be regularly brought out of the human being, like the spoken language itself. It must stand as a kind of opposite pole against all which rises in the present and alienate people towards the outer world, allowing no relationship to be possible between people and the outer world any more. The eurythmization enables people in any case to return to being present in the language and is on this basis, as I've often suggested, even an art. Well, if you take into account the things I've just proposed, then you arrive at the now commonplace speech technique basically under the scheme of pedantry.

The great importance given to teaching through recitation and that kind of thing, only supports the element of a materialistic world view. You see, just as one would in a school for sculpture or a school of painting not really get instructions of the hand movements but corrects them by life forces coming into them, so speech techniques must not be pedantically taught with all kinds of nose-, chest- and stomach resonances. These things may only be developed though living speech. When a person speaks, he might at most be made aware of one or the other element. In this respect extraordinary atrocities are being committed today and the various vocal and language schools can actually be disgusting, because it shows how little lives within the human being. The formation of speech happens when those things are considered which I mentioned. Now if the question needs to be answered even more precisely, I ask you to please call my attention to it.

[ 12 ] Now there is a question about new commentary regarding the Bible, in fact, how one can arrive at a new Bible text.

[ 13 ] You see, the thing is like this, one will first have to penetrate into an understanding of the Bible. Much needs to precede this. If you take everything which I have said about language, and then consider that the Bible text has originated out of quite another kind of experience of language than we have today, and also as it was experienced centuries before in Luther's time, you can hardly hope to somehow discover an understanding of the Bible through some small outer adjustment. To understand the Bible, a real penetration of Christianity is needed above all, and actually this can only emerge from a Bible text as something similar for us as the Gospels had once appeared for the first Christians. In the time of the first Christians one certainly had the feeling of sound and some of what can be experienced in the words in the beginning of St John's Gospel which was of course experienced quite differently in the first Christian centuries as one would be able to do today. "In the primal beginnings was the Word"—you see, today there doesn't seem to be much more than a sign in this line, I'd say. We come closer to an understanding when we substitute "Word," which is very obscure and abstract, with "Verb" and also really develop our sense of the verb as opposed to the noun. In the ancient beginnings it was a verb and not the noun. I would like to say something about this abstraction.

The verb is quite rightly related to time, to activity, and it is absurd to think of including a noun in the area which has been described as in "the primal beginning." It has sense to insert a verb, a word related to activity. What lies within the sentence regarding the primal origins is however not an activity brought about by human gestures or actions, because it is the activity which streams out of the verb, the active word. We are not transported back into the ancient mists of the nebular hypothesis by the Kant-Laplace theory, but we will be led back to the sound and loud prehistoric power. This returning into a prehistoric power is something which was experienced powerfully in the first Christian centuries, and it was also strongly felt that it deals with a verb, because it is an absurdity to say: In the prehistoric times there was a noun.—We call it "Word" which can be any part of speech. Of course, it can't be so in the case of St John's Gospel.

[ 14 ] In even further times in the past, things were even more different. They were so that for certain beings, for certain perceptions of beings one had the feeling that they should be treated with holy reserve, one couldn't just put them in your mouth and say them. For this reason, a different way had to be found regarding expression, and this detour I can express by saying something like the following. Think about a group of children living with their parents somewhere in an isolated house. Every couple of weeks the uncle comes, but the children don't say the uncle comes, but the "man" comes. They mean it is the uncle, but they generalise and say it is "the man." The father is not the "man"; they know him too well to call him "man." In this way earlier religious use of language hid some things which they didn't want to express outwardly because one had the inner reaction of profanity, and so it was stated as a generalization, like also in the first line of St John's Gospel, "in the beginning was the Word." However, one doesn't mean the word which actually stands there but one calls it something which has been picked out, a singular "Word." It was after all something extraordinary, this "Word." There are as many words as there are men, but children said, "the man," and so one didn't say what was meant in St John's Gospel, but instead one said, "the Word." The word in this case was Jahveh, so that St John's Gospel would say: "In the primal beginnings was Jahveh," so one doesn't say "God," but "the Word."

[ 15 ] Such things must be acquired again by living within Christianity and what Christianity has derived from the ritual practice of the Old Testament. There is no shortcut to understanding the Gospels; a lively participation in the ancient Christian times is necessary for Gospel understanding. Basically, this is what has again become enlivened through Anthroposophy, while such things have in fact only risen out of Anthroposophic research. We then have the following: In the primordial times was he word—in primordial time was Jahveh—and the word was with God—and Jahveh was with God. In the third line: And Jahveh was one of the Elohim.—This is actually the origin, the start of the St John Gospel which refers to the multiplicity of the Elohim, and Jahveh as one of them—in fact there were seven—as lifted out of the row of the Elohim. Further to this lies the basis of the relationship between Christ and Jahveh.

Take sunlight—moonlight is the same, it is also sunlight but only reflected by the moon—it doesn't come from some ancient being, it is a reflection. In primordial Christianity an understanding existed for the Christ-word, where Christ refers to his own being by saying: "Before Abraham was, I am" and many others. There certainly was an understanding for the following: Just as the sunlight streams out of itself and the moon reflects it back, so the Christ-being who only appeared later, streamed out in the Jahveh being. We have a fulfilment in the Jahveh-being preceding the Christ-being in time. Through this St John's Gospel becomes deepened through feeling from the first line to the line which says: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." Even today we don't believe a childlike understanding suffices for the words of the Bible, when we research the Bible by translating it out of an ancient language until we penetrate what lies in the words. Of course, one can say, only through long, very long spiritual scientific studies can one approach the Bible text. That finally, is also my conviction.

[ 16 ] Basically, the Bible no longer exists; we have a derivative which we have put together more and more from our abstract language. We need a new starting point in order to try and find what really, in an enlivened way, is in the Bible. For this I have suggested an approach which I will speak about tomorrow, in the interpretation of Mathew 13 and Mark 13. You will have to state in any case that even commenting on the Bible makes it necessary to deal with the Bible impartially. If it is stated that something is mentioned which had only taken place in the year 70, therefore the relevant place could not have been mentioned before other than what had happened after this event, this could be said only if it is announced at the beginning of the Bible explanation that the Bible will be explained completely from a materialistic point of view; then it may be done like this. The Bible itself does not follow the idea that it should be explained materialistically. The Bible itself makes it necessary that the foreseeing of coming events is first and foremost ascribed to Christ Jesus himself, and also ascribed to the apostles. Thus, as I've said, this outlook is what I want to enter into tomorrow on the basis of Mathew 13 and Mark 13, by giving a little interpretation as it has been asked for.

[ 17 ] Another question asks about the reality behind the apostolic succession and the priest ordination. This question can hardly be answered briefly because it relates deeply to the abyss which exists between today's evangelist-protestant religious understanding and all nuances of Catholic understanding. It is important that in the moment when these things are spoken about, one must try to acquire a real understanding beyond the rational or rationalistic and beyond the intellectualistic. This is acquired even by those who have little right to live in the sense of such an understanding. In the past I have become acquainted with a large number of outstanding theosophical luminaries, Leadbeater also among them, about whom you would have heard, and some other people, who worked in the Theosophical Society. I have recently had the opportunity—otherwise I would not have worried about it again—to experience, that some of these people are Catholic bishops; it struck me as extraordinary that a part of them were Catholic priests. Leadbeater in any case had, after various things became known about him, not exactly the qualification to become a Catholic bishop. Still this interested me about how people become Catholic priests. One thing is observed with utmost severity, which is the succession. In order for me to see which people have the right to be Catholic bishops, I was given a document which revealed that in a certain year a Catholic bishop left the Catholic church, but one who was ordained, and he then ordained others—right up to Mr Leadbeater—and ordination proceeds in an actual continuation, in an absolutely correct progress; they actually have created a "family tree" by it. I don't want to talk about the start of the "family tree" but you must accept that if it would be a natural progression that there once was an ordained bishop in Rome who dropped away, who then however ordained all the others, so all these Theosophical luminaries would refer back to a real descent of their priesthood to that which once existed. Therefore, awareness of this succession is everywhere present and such things are, according to their understanding, taken completely as the reality.

[ 18 ] Something like this must be taken as a reality within the Roman Catholic Church. The old Catholic church more or less didn't have the feeling—but within the Roman Catholic church it is certain accepted this way—that the moment the priest crosses the stole he no longer represents a single personality or attitude but he is then only a member of the church and speaks as a representative, as a member of the church. The Roman Catholic Church considered itself certainly as a closed organism, where the individual loses his individuality through ordination; they see it this way increasingly.

[ 19 ] Now something else is in contrast to this. You may think about what I've said as you wish, but I can only speak from my point of view, from the viewpoint of my experience. I have seen much within the transubstantiation. Today in the Catholic Church there is quite a strict difference according to which priest would perform the transubstantiation, yet I have always seen how during the transformation, during the transubstantiation, the host takes on an aura. Therefore, I have come to recognise within the objective process, that when it is worthily accomplished, it is certainly fulfilled. I said, you may think about this as you wish, I say it to you as something which can be looked at from one hand, and on the other hand also as a basic conviction of the church being valid while it was still Catholic, when the evangelist church hadn't become a splintering off. We very soon come back to reality when we look at these things and it must even be said within the sacrament of mass being celebrated there is something like a true activity, which is not merely an outer sign but a real act. If you now take all the sacraments of mass together which had been celebrated, you will create an entirety, a whole, and this is something which stands there as a fact. It is something which certainly touches things, where the evangelical mind would say: Yes, there is something magical in the Catholic Mass.—This it does contain. It also contained within it the magical part, one can experience in the evangelist mind as something perhaps heathen. Good, talk to one another about this. In any case this underscores it as being a reality, which one can't without further ado, without approaching the bearer of this reality, celebrate a mass. I say celebrate; it can be demonstrated, one can show everything possible, but one can't celebrate with the claim that through the mass what should happen at the altar will only happen when it is read without any personal imprint, in absolute application.

You see, it is ever present there where one works with the mysteries; it is simply so, when one works with the mysteries. Just as no Masonic ceremony may be carried out by a non-Mason in the consciousness of the Freemason, nor may a non-ordained person in true Catholicism work from out of Catholicism and perform with full validity the ceremony in consciousness.

[ 20 ] This is where we are being directed and must consult. I want you to take note that in this case the Catholic rules were actually very strict. Please don't take things up in such a way as if I am saying this towards pro-Catholicism; I only want to point out the situation. It isn't important for us to be for, or opposed, to Catholicism, because it's about something quite different. Particular customs were very strictly adhered to in the Catholic Church—not at all what is today in Rome's mood and procedure. If a priest became so unworthy as to be excommunicated, then his skin would be ripped off, scraped off from his fingers where he had held the sacred host in his hands. His skin would be scraped off. Sometimes such things are referred to but legally it is so, and I know such processes quite well, that after the priest's excommunication the skin of the fingers which touched the host, were scraped off. You can certainly set the objective instead of the succession that goes from the apostles through the priesthood to the priest celebrating today. You can set that which goes through consecration and through the sacraments themselves. You can exclude priesthood, but you can only exclude that by taking things objectively, right to a certain degree, objectively, that the priest no longer may have skin on his fingers when he is no longer authorised to celebrate the sacrificial mass.

[ 21 ] Isn't it true, if you have Catholic feeling, it is something as definite to you as two plus two making four? It is something definite according to religious feeling. When you don't have that then you as modern people must have a certain piety, which says to you the Catholic church has also just preserved the celebration of mass and if this is carried outside the circle to which it had been entrusted—other circles have not preserved the sacrifice of mass—if it is being performed in other circles it is pure theft. Real theft. These things must also be understood from such concepts. I believe to some it appears very difficult to understand what I am saying but in conclusion it has as such a certain validity which needs to be achieved through understanding. We don't have to worry about it here because you can experience the mass according to what there is to experience. As far as the training of a new ritual is concerned, it would not be disturbed at all by this, that the Catholic mass regards the mass to be something so real that it may certainly not to be removed from the field of Catholicism.

[ 22 ] This is firstly something which I wanted to say during our limited time. When I speak about the mass itself, and I will do so, I will still have a few things to add.

Emil Bock: I would like to introduce today's discussion hour and assume I have your understanding when I ask that yesterday's questions which have remained open, will, where possible, be considered again today. I believe I have your support for this. If you want me to clarify this request on your behalf, it will be to deal with the complex of questions regarding the apostolic succession coming into the question in future, where the need for the establishment of a new tradition must be expected, so to speak. In relation to this the question is important, how we, who are mostly Protestants, would relate to the work and personality of Luther, and go back to Luther's stance on the sacraments and to the whole Mystery content of Christianity. If I'm properly informed, that was the question which now appears to us as the next one, and I would very much like Doctor Steiner to enter into these questions as far as he considers possible.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! I will try to continue with what was implied in this relationship started here yesterday in such a way that the many questions, which actually have to come out of such an examination, from the most varied sides, can then be considered further, because for this program of the Dornach course, it would be of the utmost necessity that as far as possible, no doubt and uncertainties would remain.

[ 2 ] I would endeavour to go into the actual complex of questions and through this we will perhaps reach what underlies them, for further discussion. In fact, everything that licentiate Bock has just said is actually connected, so I may say it is important what opinions rise up among you now, regarding the position of Protestantism and Catholicism. I believe I can accept that you have come here from quite a positive foundation, namely to find a way out of today's religious turmoil. I myself don't want to say that it is obviously my wish to influence this towards the one or other side. Indeed, it doesn't concern some or other knowledge, but is about decisions of will, and these must rise out of inner convictions, being able of course to be motivated in the most varied ways, so we must actually discuss the possible motivation of their willed decisions. For example, a lot will depend upon your decisions of intent with regard the abyss that gapes between Catholicism and evangelical Christianity, between Protestantism and so on. Isn't it true, your resolution will be substantially different—I am now referring to the resolution of the majority of those present here—if you take into account that the Christian impulse, considered as widely as possible, in for example community building, can become that which the Christ wills for the world. However, regarding Catholicism—where I now separate Catholicism strictly from the Roman—Catholic Church—you could not find in Catholicism a possibility to bridge the abyss to the evangelistic side, if you don't gain a mutual understanding about the sacramentalism anchored in the Catholic world.

Naturally you could also be of the opinion: we are not concerned at all, we want to create a life-filled church-based movement and then show how this viable church movement asserts itself in the world.—You could also take on this point of view: that doesn't require such a strict understanding of Catholicism as such. However, you could only gain support in the judgement regarding this direction, after you have found clarity in some historic foundations about the basis for the opening of this abyss. Today the situation is actually like this; if a person has remained within Catholicism, is standing within practical Catholicism, then he actually can't understand the evangelical mind. Neither will someone who has grown up in the evangelical-protestant tradition, who is really connected to the various nuances in modern views anchored in the Protestant churches, be able to find the way over the abyss easily. It is precisely the reason for this question that must be understood before a decision can be reached.

[ 3 ] Catholicism carries within it that view which has disappeared from modern consciousness, actual modern consciousness from which has disappeared, one could say if you want to be precise, since the 15th century. It was quite appropriate—but again connected with Roman political impulses, which then allowed the appropriate background to come in—it was quite appropriate, in a certain way, to keep Catholicism in mind and make it a duty for the Catholic clerics to return to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, in other words, the philosophy promoting the culmination of philosophical thinking before the 15th century. One can say that to live without this philosophy, one can actually find no theory of knowledge for the justification of sacramentalism, as practiced in the Catholic Church. By contrast the protestant-evangelical consciousness lies within this development which was only imposed after the 15th century. If you want to live through the wrestling of these two currents you can look at the work of Nicolaus Cusanus, who already in the 15th century, one might say, with all intensity, raised the question for itself: How does the past and the future stand beside one another in my soul? Cusanus, by going back to certain soul experiences, connected with the name of Dionysius Areopagita, and was able to build a bridge for himself.

[ 4 ] I said yesterday that the Protestant quite rightly sees something magical in the way the Catholic performs Mass, and that is certainly correct. Because of our adaptation of the modern-day educational material, we are incapable of admitting to this magic. If you come with a modern consciousness you would not be able to find any difference between a sacrificial Mass as presented in the continuity of Christian evolution and a sacrificial Mass which is simply presented in words, symbols and gestures, perceptible by outer senses, as taking place in the Mass. Beyond the understanding of the content lies the understanding of that which is the sacrifice of Mass for the Catholic; this is connected with the unifying understanding of the world which has got lost for modern humanity, the unified understanding of the world which is understood on the one side by the spirit and on the other side from nature. I could say the route of knowledge has turned more to the side of nature while insight into the spiritual world has disappeared, and as a result of this, the possibilities to perceive certain mysteries. With this I don't want to say that in the consciousness of every Catholic priest there is also a substantial content about the sacrifice of the Mass. Still, in the Catholic community there is an awareness of this substantial content of the sacrifice of Mass to such a degree that one can still speak about the reality of it in the present.

[ 5 ] I can't make anything presented here, clearer to you in any other way, than through the view of knowledge. Everything, my dear friends, which is woven into our discussions during these days, what is presented in the Elaborat of Dr Rittelmeyer and the Elaborat of Dr Schairer, regarding the determination of the religious and the differentiation of the religious point of view from the point of view of knowledge, all this is incomprehensible to the Catholic. It basically doesn't exist for him. When he considers it as a modernist or someone like that, then he is basically already accepted by Protestantism even within Catholicism. For the Catholics none of these things give rise to some or other question; for them you can't formulate questions in this way. For true Catholicism, the assumption is that there should be a mere emotional human relationship to God, without a religious dogmatic content, something quite incomprehensible; the religious dogma should connect itself with the supersensible world. Certainly, you could say, the Scholastics do this, making a differentiation, as Protestantism adopts in a different way, regarding what one can know and what one should purely believe. However, the Scholastics don't make this differentiation in the same way. For the scholastic the difference lies between truths, acquired simply through human reason, and those truths which lie at the basis of revelation, basically only relate to the various ways people come to the content; but it is still not a fundamental difference. For scholasticism it is true that the Preambuli fidei are certainly there, acquired through ordinary reason, above which lies the truth of revelation, but the truth of revelation also has a real content with which one can have a thinking relationship, like the scientific truths, which also promote a relationship through thinking. Therefore, one's relationship to the revelations is the same kind of relationship one has to scientific truths. There is only a difference in relation to the way people arrive at the truth, not a fundamental difference as we have been discussing here, these days. There is something extraordinarily important here, and from it comes the basis of the abyss.

[ 6 ] You see, in order to clarify the sacramental and mass aspects to you here, I have to approach through the content of knowledge. If you look today at the two outer poles of human existence, the birth with the embryo and conception—I want to place these three in a unified term of "birth"—with birth on the one side and death on the other, so you understand what happens for the physical human being, even according to the order of scientific events. Today's human being, even if he is a theologian, speaks about birth and death as if they are scientific facts, involving physical man. That's exactly why in this day and age the wall between faith and knowledge has been so ruggedly erected, because one wants to keep something which has been taken away through purely scientific knowledge about birth and death, as one admittedly doesn't want for religion, to classify it in terms of knowledge.

How does a person regard birth today? It must seem a peculiar thing that I speak to you about birth, when I want to speak about Mass, but I would not be able to speak about Mass, without also speaking about birth. People see birth according to the study of embryology and ask: What happens to the embryonic germ through the fructification?—Then they ask: How is the male and how is the female substance of inheritance absorbed, and what actually goes on there, scientifically observable, from the forefathers to the child?—Today's man must, with all the antecedents of his scientific education, certainly take this point of view. This point of view exercises such a colossal suggestive view on modern man, that if this point of view is not according to science, it is regarded as nonsense. Everything which is brought up in the human being and is thereby entangled with his thinking habits, leads the human being to phrase his question in this way. Then he can, when he says: 'This question can be answered by science'—at least add: 'Faith remains the way in which the body and the soul may unite.' Yet, it is actually not so. Here lies one of the points where you can make yourself quite demonstrative; for Anthroposophy it is quite important to connect with science and develop it further. Through anthroposophic research it is shown that the concept of matter, as it exists in the human organism, becomes fully disabled in its mode of action. If one looks at a fertilized female egg and its further development, one actually is looking at something which through conception, has excluded itself from all possible earthly events. In the fertilized egg a chaos is created in which all processes available to science, are initially excluded. If I present it schematically it will end here. (A drawing is made on the blackboard.)

Through the fertilization, as far as it happens in the human being, a place is created within earth's processes, where everything stops which could be accessible to natural science. Through this exclusion the possibility is created, at this point, for cosmic activity to take place, peripheral cosmic processes. Within this place something happens which is not accessible to material science.

Here I'm drawing the earth, here is the realm of human beings, this is the periphery beyond which you can go, far beyond measure. While most of us, actually in the realm human beings have the earth's processes, also with the father and mother, we have here—in this circle which I'm drawing—effects from the periphery, from the immeasurable expanse, so that, what is happening here, may be transferred and enter into the scientifically given world. It is an imagination which is quite far away from modern man, because it has been lost since the 15th century.

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[ 7 ] When you are in the proximity of Nepal and walk over the earth, you only need to put a flame to a piece of paper and light it, to see how it smokes out of the earth. Those of you who have travelled in Italy would have seen this: it smokes out of the earth. Why does this happen? It is because what would rise from within the earth is usually held by the air pressure; by lighting a piece of paper the air pressure is reduced and what is below, in the earth, now pushes out.

[ 8 ] Through the fertilization the earth processes are excluded, and this enables the heavenly processes to be active. The reverse is what you can demonstrate with a volcanic vent. While we just examine earthly phenomena we have mainly to do with centralized processes, in other words that which rays out from the earth's centre, basically in the direction of gravity, whereas when we consider embryonic processes it is in relation to peripheral processes, which to some extent come from out of immeasurable widths, working in towards the centre. They become effective the moment the earth's effectiveness is excluded. If we go into what is taking place here, then with human embryonic development we need to examine what the participation of the entire cosmos has in the origins of mankind, and not look at precursors which are earthly. Secondly it happens—and it happens further along the embryonic development—that it enters into a relationship with physical matter. Thirdly, what happens is that which has come to the human beings out of the spiritual world and entered the physical world and all that can be in its emerging, everything which had come from the cosmos as periphery-central, in contrast with central-peripheral, now comes into the centre. Through all of this, only now earthly processes come about, man's utilisation of the earthly. The fourth event, the last one, is the preparation for inner human love which only appears when the individual has learnt to speak. So we can say that the precursors which take place through birth are the following: the human being's descent from the spiritual community: if you like the word, it could be "excommunication," meaning the descent, the coming down. (He writes on the blackboard.)

1. Descent.
   The second is the entering of the relationship with matter. (Writes on the blackboard:)
2. Relationship with matter.
   The third is entitlement to the centralising forces of the earth: adaptation to the earthly. (Writes on the blackboard:)
3. Adaptation to the earth
   And the fourth is perceptibility, the ability to speak which however only emerges after the birth, to the extent of what embryonic activity took place. (Writes on the blackboard:)
4. Ability to speak.
   We come closer to the mystery of birth in quite another way if we look at it like this, my dear friends. How can we come closer to the mystery of death which is the other pole of human life? If we now go in reverse, and we begin with the Ability to Speak (Writes on the blackboard:)

Gospel 1.

[ 9 ] Then we create in contrast to the entitlement of the centralising earthly forces, the resurrection, the re-adaptation of the periphery: this happens in the sacrifice of smoke. The opposite of "three" is what we are doing by taking what we receive and adapting it to the earth, to the smoke counteracting the earth's centralizing forces. (Writes on the blackboard:)

Offering 2.

[ 10 ] In other words, what are we doing here? We first speak the Word in the Gospel, and we become conscious that we express this Word in such a way that it is not our word in the sense as I've said yesterday, but that it goes over into objectivity. We relinquish the Word to the smoke—smoke which is capable of adapting the form of the words. Certainly you may say it is suggestive, but still, only suggestive. The Offering consists in the expressed word, which creates waves, being trusted to the smoke, carried up in the smoke. Our word itself becomes carried up. If we turn the relationship to matter around, then we arrive at the dematerialization in the transubstantiation, in the transformation. (Writes on the blackboard:)

Transubstantiation 3.

[ 11 ] In our becoming a child out of the periphery of the cosmos and drawing in our 'I,' in death we withdraw, and we have for this the sign of the transubstantiation, the de-materialization. Where does this power come from? See, just as the peripheral forces work towards the centre when we speak about birth, these forces which we have called up in the offering, work outwards into the world. They work because we have entrusted our words into the smoke. They now work from out of the centre and they carry the dematerialised words through the power of the speaker and in this way, we come into the position, to fulfil the fourth, the opposite of the descent, the merging with the Above, the communion. (Writes on the blackboard:)

Communion 4.

[ 12 ] Now, however my dear friends, we are not only born in the beginning of our lives but forces active at birth continue to work in us. These forces, however, do decrease when we are separated from our mother's body into the outer air. They become subdued but continue working to a lesser extent. The most obvious continuation lies in the creation of languages from the embryonic forces, also in relation to the rest of the organism. Besides the forces creating language, embryonic forces continue to work and do so most strongly from the moment of going to sleep to that of waking up. Thus, embryonic forces work more strongly during sleep than when people are awake. It is only an extract which had been working during the time of being an embryo, yet during hours of restful sleep these embryonic forces continue to work. Forces of death also work in us continuously. Every moment we are born, and we die. Death forces are working. The reverse processes which had descended to work in the development of language continue to work in us; this process works in us, which come from the Gospel through to communion, from the speech up to the union with the Divine-spiritual. However, that which is a sacrament in the Mass, is fulfilled in an outer process which continuously counteracts what is being born in us. This is what amounts to the continuous perpetual forces of death in us.

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[ 13 ] You see, this sacramental process would have been fulfilled in the old Mysteries. Why could they have been accomplished in the old Mysteries? They could have been fulfilled because a certain inherited spiritual perceptivity was available for them. The very moment when a person who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, pronounced the corresponding words, therefore expressing what we have in the Gospels today, these words were taken into account by the Divine-spiritual. With the ceremony the people surrendered their continuous dying process to the Divine-spiritual forces. These Divine-spiritual forces left the earth during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is only a historical prejudice to believe that the earth is in a continuous development. This is not so; it is certainly not. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not been fulfilled then we could not fulfil such a ceremony, then what dies is given over to the etheric and astral worlds and not, however, to the world where our 'I' belongs. It was not like that before the Mystery of Golgotha.

Here we touch on something, dear friends, which people with their intellectual education can't believe at all because they don't have the antecedents to it. They can't believe that fire, air, water and earth since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha are different from before. It only appears as determined by a time, not that the following could be answered: What would have happened to the earth if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place?—So let's just switch the Mystery of Golgotha off, and we can ask ourselves: What would have become of this ceremony if the event of the Mystery of Golgotha had not happened?

[ 14 ] It would be a procedure that, driven by the process of death, would only have conserved our being up to our astral body. The physical body would lose itself into the earth, the ether body would become indistinct in the etheric seas, and the astral body would enter into the astral world, but the I would be corrupted; the I would have to reach its end in some or other incorporation; the I could not go through the portal of death. That is the secret of earth evolution, that, before our time calculation began, the human being retained something which could have been redeemed by going through the gate of death, and which could be made clear through this ceremony. This ceremony, had the Mystery of Golgotha not intervened, would have become what it could have, if the last of the spiritual beings who still had a relationship to the human I, had departed from warmth, air, water, earth, and as in warmth, air, water and air only those beings remained, which still had a connection to our etheric, who have a further relationship to our astral, but no more with our human I.

[ 15 ] This, my dear friends, was the huge fear for the demons when they recognised Christ, who had descended on to the earth. They believed they could now take on the control and eradicate the human I from earth. It is clearly expressed in the Gospels, how the demons behaved when they recognised who had arrived. They knew their plan for the world was crossed out, they had hoped—from out of the spheres where they had originated, they could hope for it—to take the earth's rulership into their own hands. Christ stepped on to the earth and that which the Christ had brought down from the spiritual worlds into earthly events, gave the ceremony its new content, and in this ceremony the presence of the Christ Being took place.

[ 16 ] This is something which certainly can be accessed through spiritual science. You really need to take this up in yourselves, what I have, in a way, only drawn in threads, sketched, as if given in a little drawing. The human being needs to start arriving at a real understanding for the mystery of birth, which appears in nature as a sacrament itself, because it is supernatural, and an understanding must be created for the sacrament within the sacrifice of Mass, which becomes supernatural through the presence of Christ. For those who can't reason, as I've just spoken, for those who can't understand the actual process in the outcry of the lower demons when they saw the deeds of Christ, and only regard this outcry of the demons as a comparison, taking it as something exhausted in the meaning of words, don't understand anything about sacramental deeds, and in particular, the central sacramental ritual of the sacrifice of Mass.

[ 17 ] Unfortunately, humanity has forgotten that they could speak about these things since the first third of the 15th century. Today we are confronted with not only what is customary in the country, but also what has become customary on earth, to appear like a maniac when words are uttered considering the outcry of the demons as a real event when they saw the Christ. We often have the experience: What is wisdom before God, has become foolishness to the world. Then again what is foolishness before the world, in present times is so often wisdom before the gods.

[ 18 ] So the time has arrived when the sacramental element is not at all able to penetrate, because intellectualism is seizing all circles with such power—it works firstly on our religious and scientific areas—that it also seizes the religious and above all, things concerning theology. It's connected to external events, my dear friends, that took place, and you can see it resulted in what had actually developed out of church schools as a teaching for humanity, first preserved in the universities. If you want to continue taking this further you can study the way universities continued from the 14th century onwards, where the spiritual evolution gradually became removed from human evolution, how they gradually became secularized and how in due course what was within the spiritual led to the worldly. Make a study of how state waged war with the church, and how the state—because the church insisted on it—at most left the teaching content within it as an enclave but otherwise the spiritual has been taken out of humanity's evolution. This historical evolution you have to experience, you must even be able to feel it. We stand today in the presence of many cold hearts in historical development. We have completely stopped feeling religious at least as far as historical development is concerned. How can we gain from the Gospels at all, while they have emerged out of quite other states of evolution, when we have stopped feeling religious towards historical evolution?

[ 19 ] You see, here you have a real transition from out of the earthly life, into the spiritual life. Through birth a person descends in four steps into the earthly existence until the moment of speech, through the death process he ascends from speech up to communion. He would have died today, also his I, if he had not taken up what lies up to communion in the whole ceremonial process, if he has not taken up Christ, who redeemed from within the physical, the etheric, astral and conserving the I, so that he can retain his I even after death.

With the sacrifice of Mass people are snatched away from the power of the demons, from that power which entangles us in contradictions which are primarily shaped by intellectual concepts with sharp outlines. However, life is not made up of sharp outlines, life can only live within our consciousness in a conceptual way, if a concept organically evolves into another concept. With the inorganic, where we have detached concepts, they are merely clothed as dead in our consciousness. We need concepts which can evolve from one into another, which are alive and capable of metamorphosis; only these concept are not pushed away when we take them up inwardly, these concepts would be propagated and would be capable, through the offering, through transubstantiation up to communion, to become re-united with the Divine, through which we are released here on earth.

[ 20 ] Whoever adapts the standpoint of modern consciousness, my dear friends, takes on the standpoint which had to be accepted on the one side from the 15th century, if one goes with the progress of the human race. One actually has to simply go with progress; it gives a certain viewpoint of consciousness, by which we can't remain standing still. Even if we are to fall into an abyss, we would have to go with the progress of the human race, but we must simply find the possibility to return from the other side of the abyss so we may continue. What has been happening since the 15th century has of course been necessary. The evangelistic-protestant consciousness has permeated what had been necessary in the evolution of humanity since the 15th century. You can see how, as the point of this development approached humanity, the most varied discussions regarding the transubstantiation and the Last Supper came to the fore. As long as one takes the point of view of the sacramental, such discussions won't arise, because such discussions stem from the invasion of intellectualism in the sacramental way of thinking. From before the 15th century, we in Europe were at the same standpoint on which Hinduism stands today. When a Hindu participates in intellectual development, he is in this intellectual development as free as possible, in as far as he remains a true Brahman. The Hindu participates in the ceremony, in the ritual; it connects everyone, and those who participate in the ritual is a true Hindu believer; he can think about it as he wishes, in it he remains completely free. Dogma, which is captured by thoughts, or a content of teaching, basically doesn't exist. Schools can emerge that interpret things in a hundred different ways. All of this can exist in orthodox Hinduism, if only the ceremonies are recorded as something actual and real.

[ 21 ] Humanity in Europe also reached this standpoint before, around the time of the 15th century. At that time the invasion of intellectualism, which promoted sharp, outlined concepts, would simply not comply with sacramentalism, because with the commencement of discussions there was actually nothing to discuss. If there had been such a person as Scotus Eriugena, in other words a person who stood amidst the conception of the first Christian centuries presenting the discussion of later—one could even say that they were in front of him in a certain sense, it works that way ahead, it is after all in the others ...—(gap in notes). If you study this in Scotus Eriugena you could say he spoke out of the fullness of life, by contrast the later discussions can be compared to my experience with a school friend who had quite radically wriggled himself into materialism, and during our dialogue about one thing and another, he became quite angry and interrupted with the words: It is nonsense to speak about something other than brain processes, to say anything other than what moves in the brain are mere molecules and brain atoms, because those are the only things that happen in thinking and feeling.—So I answered: So, tell me, why are you lying? You are continuously lying when you say, "I feel" and "I think" and so on; you will have to say, "my brain feels," "my brain thinks"; in order for you to be correct, you have to say it like that.—Because he had developed completely into materialism, he criticized people one day in their very foundations. He said: A human being is a being who, instead of standing properly on a surface, moves by oscillating on two legs in a constant search for a position of equilibrium: it is simply nonsense to regard the way he moves, in any other way.—From his point of view, he spoke correctly because he criticized the living from the point of view of intellectualism. Somewhat in this way it would appear to an old confessor of sacramentalism, if one spoke from an intellectual critical viewpoint about sacramentalism and criticized religious life in this way. Since the 15th century it has become a matter of course and all of what is modern religious consciousness doesn't know just how much it has become entangled in it.

[ 22 ] So one can say: we have on the one side the Catholic Church, which, if it feels its living nerve rightly, does not allow intellectualism to enter into it, and we have on the other side the evangelist-protestant consciousness having developed in a cultural milieu which no longer experiences the reality of sacramentalism, as I've indicated today. That's why the abyss is so enormous. The Catholic has stopped in the human evolution presented in the impulses of the 15th century; he developed his religion only up to this point. Cardinal Newman's connection to Catholicism therefore was so difficult, because his approach was out of modern consciousness. For the Catholic, religious life has come to one side, while modern science took the outer side. You can't read a scientific work that has emerged from Catholicism without experiencing how the most learned priests and most learned Catholics work with science in such a way that it is regarded as outer phenomena, and only that which they bring in feeling, in fervour from their Catholicism, can give them strength. However, science is a different matter to what is done within the religious, and the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas was the last product of intellectual development in that it still included the philosophy as organic in its world view. As a result, it basically had to be discussed again for the philosophical fortification of Catholicism. [ 23 ] The Protestant consciousness felt obliged to take up intellectualism, to process intellectualism. Thus, they became alienated from sacramentalism; as a result, it became necessary to take on an ethical character, it was necessary to relinquish everything which somehow formed foundations of knowledge for the religious life. It was for instance necessary to insist that, instead of adding a mystery to birth, to substitute it with the scientific mystery of birth which meant connecting the soul with the body, achieved without an opinion possibly gained from it. The Mass, the inverse ceremony of birth processes, which are dying processes, would be mindlessly given over to historical development, and abandoned. This all relates to the time of intellectualism when the human being could no longer directly find the spiritual within the physical. So it can be seen, that if religious content is to be saved at all, it would be to formulate it in such a way that it has nothing connecting it to a content of knowledge. This will always stand as a gaping contradiction for anyone who does not, in theory, want to ignore the practical impulses of the soul's life.

[ 24 ] However, humanity could never have entered into the age of experiencing freedom without having participated what had been brought to fruition in the 15th century, because freedom can only be gained within the culture of intellectualism. Only intellectually are we able to depend so much on ourselves that we may have the inner experience, which I have portrayed in my book The Philosophy of Freedom (later translations called The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) regarding the experience of pure thinking as the foundation of freedom. All discussions prior to this regarding freedom, are only preparatory, because freedom is not to be discovered within a view which basically only contained necessity, like the view which had remained before the 15th century. So let's pose the fundamental question which can be solved in the present: How do we, despite recognising the blessings of intellectualism, rediscover the sacramental out of freedom?

[ 25 ] Without a deep grasp on this question, we will not be able to understand it. The help of historical evolution needs to be taken into account in order to understand these things. If you can't let go of what I've now come to terms with, if you don't understand Luther's soul struggle inwardly either, but only in a certain sense only outwardly, intellectually, you will see in the next few days that we have already, with what has been said today, started moving the building blocks together for the understanding of Luther's soul's struggle. With this I want to close today.

(Afterwards Rudolf Steiner admitted he would be willing to enter into eventual questions and Licentiate Bock asked him to shortly clarify again the connection between Mass and birth.)

[ 26 ] Rudolf Steiner: It concerns the ability of speech, therefore life through words, which is the last capability given through the powers of birth, come to the fore in this direction (reference to table 5—see outline below). Now, we develop the ability for language which we receive here, in the most comprehensive sense, which we apply in the Gospels, in that we proclaim the words of God, so that we are carried from birth up to the words which turn back again. So the way goes from "descent" up to the words, Logos, and then back again. I only wrote "Gospel" on the blackboard, to place the Mass as a reverse ritual in the ceremonial process. When we look at the sacrifice of Mass—I'm letting go of the introductory processes, they are all preparatory—so the first real action is reading the Gospel, the sounding out of words, that means all which is directed towards birth, we allow to sound initially in the sacrifice of Mass. The Gospel which is read, is actually the first process of the Mass, and sounds out as word. Now, after intermediate processes here again, which do not represent the essential, the offering begins. The altar is smoked. This has the meaning that the word, which is sounded, unites with the smoke and rises from the altar. Then a time follows in which the offering continues up to the transubstantiation, when we also come back to the final material. Finally, there's the communion, which is the reverse of the descent, which is to be taken upwards. If we have understood the totality of the processes, then we first have the word, then the offering with smoke, then the word is carried into it through the power of dematerialization in the transformation and to the unification through communion. Yes, so be it.

1. Descent—Communion 4.
2. Relationship with matter—Transubstantiation 3.
3. Adaptation to earth—Offering 2.
4. Ability to speak—Gospel 1.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Yesterday we started by addressing a wish which licentiate Bock had expressed at the beginning of our course and we find that what we need to build on to what I said yesterday afternoon about sacramentalism relevant to today, can be discovered if we link the possible reflections, which are necessary, to the 13th chapter of the Gospel of St Mark. It is important for us to certainly try again, in all seriousness, to derive specific meaning from what is expressed in living words. To me it is impossible that pastoral care can be developed in the future, without yourself developing the application of living words and even experiencing living words. However, it is impossible for current mankind which is so strongly gripped by materialism, to be able to handle the living Word in itself, without a historical deepening. It is simply so, that in dealing with intellectualistic concepts and ideas we are only dealing with dead words, with the corpse of the Logos. We will only deal with the living Word when we penetrate through the layer in which man lives today, only, and alone, by penetrating through the layer of the dead, the corpse-like words.

[ 2 ] My dear friends, the Catholic Church has to a certain degree understood very well how to misplace and obstruct access to these living words for those who, in their opinion, should be the true believers. In pastoral care the Catholic Church in a certain sense considers these enlivening words already, but in an outward sense. All these things will only become understood when we take what I presented yesterday and think them through deeply, and, if we can still penetrate them further, to yield clarity. I'm saying that the Catholic Church understood very clearly in this regard, to exterminate the life of the Word, because it belonged to one of the most significant epochs of all human development, and which had contributed briefly before and some three centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, just to the civilized part of humanity.

[ 3 ] When we ask our contemporaries about the essence of the Gnosis, for example the essence of the Montanistic heresy, then with the current soul constitution you basically can't understand anything correctly relating to it. That which would outwardly be informative in the becoming church has been carefully eradicated and the things that archaeologists, philosophers, researchers of antiquity discover from this characterised epoch, will indeed be deciphered word for word, but the decipherment does not mean reaching an understanding. All of this must actually be read differently, in order to enter the real soul content of olden times. It is for instance possible for modern humanity, to take the Deussen translation, which has exterminated all real meaning of the Orient, and, while thinking these translations are great, while mankind can't eradicate all understanding for what Deussen translated, devote yourself to such a Deussen translation. In order to understand, you need to penetrate the meaning of the first Christian centuries, more specifically the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha happened.

[ 4 ] I would like to give you access, somewhat in the way I have out of Anthroposophy, by means of a presentation, which you can visualise as symptomatic of what history brings. One of the most extinct things belonging in the first Christian centuries was referred to as the Pistis, placed in contrast to the Gnosis. The Gnosis can't be understood if one doesn't know that in that time epoch, in which, let's say, you appeared in the form of a Basilides or Valentinus, people who lived in the spirituality of that time, were fighting a very terrible battle, which can be characterised by them asking a question: What do we poor people have to do on the one hand with the spirit that juts in our souls, and on the other hand our physical body into which our soul likewise juts into? In a terrifying manner this question played out in the soul battle among religious people. The two opposite poles, to a certain extent, of this battle was the Gnosis and Montanism sect.

[ 5 ] The Gnosis was, for people who wanted to become Gnostics, being aware that within a person, where the soul resides, the spirit can only be reached through knowledge, through clear, lucid, light-filled knowledge. However, it was already during a time in which intellectualism was being prepared in the dark, in a time when intellectualism was regarded as the enemy of the human soul's relation to the spirit. To a certain extent people prophetically saw how intellectualism would push in, in the future; this arrival of intellectualism was seen as stripping the world of spirituality, wanting to completely make the world void of the Divine, like I have characterised for you yesterday. People saw this and people experienced intellectualism as a danger. People wanted to hold on to something spiritual which didn't come from intellectualism. That's roughly the soul battle Basilides fought, the Gnostic who wanted to stick to what was revealed in the course of the year. He said to himself: When a person submits himself to his forthcoming intellect, then he separates himself from the Divine spirituality of the cosmos; he must connect to what lies in his environment, which has come into being through the Divine spiritual cosmos; he must adhere to that which has the venerable image of cosmic creation in the circling of the world and thus the Divine process in matter; he must adhere to the course of the year.—Basilides did the following: He looked up - but with him it was actually still only tradition, so no longer an inner imaginative perception as in older times, which I characterised as the reading of the movement of the stars—he looked up and said: Last but not least, the spiritual gaze is lost; when we feel, that when we become aware the spiritual gaze is lost, then we talk about the unknown God, the God who can't be grasped in words and concepts, from whom the fist aeon this unknown God manifests himself, revealing himself—this concept of manifestation which later unified things as with Basilides, will be totally misunderstood if compared with what we understand today under "manifestation"; one should not say "it manifests itself" but "it is formed out of," it is individually shaped—out of the unknown God is formed the Nous, which also appeared with Anaxagoras as the first creation of the unknown God.

That is the first principle, which exists in people as a copy, when the human mind, not the intellectual mind but the lively mind I've characterised for you during these days, still existed within Greek philosophy (up to Plato), and which then appeared in a weaker form still in Aristotle.

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[ 6 ] What comes next is the Logos, in which from the Nous we descend further down. In human beings it is expressed by perceiving sound and tone. In the neck area we find five other principles which we need not characterise in detail now. With this we have what was first called the holy days of the year, which gives people, when they read the cosmos, an understanding of the human body, leading to the human head organisation.

[ 7 ] Besides these principles we find others in the human organization, 364 in total, which gives 364 + 1=365, the outer symbol which is expressed as the 365 days of the year. The word Day (Tag) originally was inwardly connected to God, so what Basilides, by speaking about 365 days, spoke about 365 gods which all partake in the creation of the human organism. As the last one of the gods—i.e. if you take one plus 364, and then take the last day of the year as a symbol for one God—Basilides saw the God who was worshipped by the Jews in the Old Testament. You see, this is what is extraordinary in the Gnosis, that it is in such a relationship to Jahve, the Jewish God, that he is not the unknown God connected to the Nous and Logos but with the Jewish God as the 365, as the last day of the year.

[ 8 ] By understanding the Gnosis in this way, the experience of the soul was to be permeated spiritually. If I were to give you a characteristic aspect of the Gnosis, in relation to inner human experience it is this: that the Gnostic aspired in everything to penetrate the Highest with knowledge, so that his gaze rose above the Logos up to the Nous. The Gnostic says: In Christ and in the Mystery of Golgotha the Nous is embodied in the human being; not the Logos, the Nous is embodied. This, my dear friends, if it is grasped in a lively way, has a distinct result for our inner soul life. If you consider these things abstractly, as is in our intellectual time presented to many people, well, then it is heard that people in olden times didn't speak about the Logos in which Jesus became flesh, but of the Nous, which became the flesh of Jesus. That's the thing then, if you have pegged such a term. For a person who spiritually lives within a lively experience of concepts, he would not be able to do otherwise, than to grasp such a soul's content, as to imagine sculpturally what the Nous becoming flesh is. The Nous having become flesh however, can't speak; this can't be the Christ, can't go through death and resurrection. The Christ of the Gnostic, which is actually the Nous, could only come as far as being embodied in people; it could not die or accomplish resurrection.

For Basilides, this darkened his observation. His gaze becomes clouded the moment he approaches the last acts of the Mystery of Golgotha with his inner gaze; it clouds his gaze when it comes to dying and resurrection. His gaze is drawn to the route towards Crucifixion, the route to Golgotha of Jesus Christ, but he couldn't accomplish, out of a lively imagination, that the Christ carried the cross to Golgotha, was killed on the cross and resurrected. He regards it in such a way that Simon of Cyrene took the cross from the Christ, that he carried it up to Golgotha, and instead of Christ, that Simon of Cyrene is crucified. This is the Christ imagination of the Gnostic in as far as the image of Basilides appears and is basically the historical expression of the Gnosis.

[ 9 ] So we see how the Christ in his final deed, is omitted by the Gnostic, how the Gnostic can't grasp the final result of Golgotha, how in their imagination the Christ is merely accomplished through the Nous, how it ends at the moment the Christ gives the cross away to Simon of Cyrene. On the one hand we have Gnosis, which is so strongly afraid of intellectualism that it did not let the legitimate power of intellectualism into human vision and as a result could not enter into the last act of the Mystery of Golgotha.

What did the Gnosis do? It stood in quite a lively way, I could say, in relation to the most extraordinary and powerful question of that current age: How does one penetrate the supersensible spirit from which the soul originated?—The Gnostic pointed away from that which somehow wanted to flow in from intellectualism and result in the image of Christ up to the point when he hands the cross to Simon of Cyrene. This is the one side of the human battle which at the time had the result of creating the influence of the great question, which I have set before you. What comes forth from this wrestling?

From all this wrestling another great question arises which became the crux for the Christian Gnostics. My dear friends, because the Gnostics regarded 365 as the Divine god of the Jews, they experienced the Fatherly and the Divine at the end of this row. When the Jews worshiped their god, they experienced it as Fatherly, while what later appeared as the Holy Ghost, they experienced the opposite pole, in the Nous. As a result, the Gnostics gave an answer to the primordial question in the first Christian centuries, an answer which is no longer valid today. Their answer was: The Christ is a far higher creation than the Father; the Christ is essentially equal to the Father. The Father, who finds his most outward, extreme expression in the Jewish god, is the creator of the world, but as the world creator he has, out of its foundations allowed things to be created simultaneously, the good and evil, the good and bad, simultaneously health and illness, the divine and the devilish. This world, which was not made out of love, because it contains evil, the Gnostics contrasted with the more elevated divine nature of the Christ who came from above, downward, carrying the Nous within, who can redeem this world that the creator had to leave un-liberated.

Christ is not essentially the Father, said the Gnostics, the Father essentially stood lower than the Son; the Son as Christ stood higher. This is the fundamental feeling permeating the Gnosis: however, it has been completely obstructed by what later occurred in the Roman Catholic continuation. Basically, we can't look back at what the big question was: How does one relate to the greater Christ in contrast to the less perfect Father? The Gnostic actually saw things in such a way that the Father of the worlds was still imperfect, and only by bringing forth his Son, he created perfection; that through the propagation of his Son, the act of procreation of his Son, He would complete the development of the world.

[ 10 ] In all these things you see exactly what lived in the Gnosis. If we now look at the opposite side, which comes into the strongest expression with Monatunus, already weaker but still clearly with Tertullian, then we look over to those who said to themselves: If we want to reach into the Gnosis, everything disappears; we can't through the outer world, not through the contemplation of the seasons, not through reading the stars, reach the divine, we must enter into man, we must immerse ourselves in man.—

While the Gnosis directed its gaze to the macrocosm, so Mantanismus dived into the microcosm, in the human being himself. Intellectualistic concepts were at that time only in its infancy and could not yet be fully expressed; theology in today's sense did not arise in this way. What existed in all the exercises, in particular those prescribed by Mantanus for his students, were inner stories, something which was enlivened within the students as visions. These atavistic visions for the Montanists were particularly indigenous. All those who were to separate themselves from belonging to the mere pastoral care of the Montanists were allowed to practice, and all of them were allowed to practice to the extent that they could answer the question: how does the soul-spiritual in man, in the microcosm, relate to the physical-bodily aspect?

[ 11 ] During ancient times, long before the Mystery of Golgotha, what I've just said was something obvious; had a self-evident answer. For those who lived in the time epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha, such an obvious answer didn't exist. People first had to dive into physicality. Because a fear existed of bringing intellectualism into this physicality, one entered the corporality with the power of the imagination and we get to know the descriptions of the forming of Montanist visions, which have also disappeared. In descriptions of Montanist visions—and this is characteristic—we always find the repetitive idea of the Christ soon returning in a physical body to the earth. One can't think of Montanism without thinking of the imminent return of the Christ to earthly corporeality. While the Montanist was familiar with the idea of finding the returning Christ, he strongly set before his soul what happened at the cross, what was accomplished through the death on the cross, what is involved in dying, what is involved in resurrection. The re-descent of the Christ, the physical-bodily immersion that takes place, was tinged by materialistic feelings in this view of the Montanists; they lived in the idea that Christ would come again and live in time and space. This was pronounced and those who believed this in the schools were only those who responded to the belief of the imminent coming of Christ Jesus to the earth, where he would stride along as if he is in a physical body.

[ 12 ] This is in contrast to the Gnosis, this is the other pole: it had a different danger, the danger that all historic development of humanity is to be imagined in space and time. The urge to imagine such an idea of the world is what Augustinus for instance experienced in his exchange with the Bishop Faustus. Through Faustus a method of imagination is introduced which is completely tinged with the senses as images presented to Augustinus, and this became a materialistic experience of the world for Augustinus, from where he approached the world. Augustinus' words are gripping: I search for God in the stars, and do not find Him. I search for God in the sun, in the moon, and don't find Him. I search for God in all the plants, in all the animals, and don't find Him. I search for God on the mountains, in the rivers; I don't find Him.—

He means that in all the images there is no inner experience of the Divine, as it is with the Montanists. Through this Augustinus learnt, as it happened in his exchange with Faustus, to recognise materialism. This created his soul battle, which he overcomes by turning to himself, to faith, towards believing what he doesn't know.

[ 13 ] We must let this rise out of history because the important things do not happen in a way, we can control it, by taking a document in hand which has lain in the archives, or by looking at the entire history of these fore-mentioned men from outside—that is an outer assessment of history. The most important part of history takes place in the human soul, in human hearts. We need to look into the soul of Basilides, into the soul of Montanus, into the soul of Faustus, into the soul of Augustinus, if we want to look into what really happened in the historic fields which one then can develop into what actually became a covering of Christianity in the Church of Constantine. The Constantine Church took on the outer life of worldly realms in which the spiritual no longer lived—in the sense of the 13th Chapter of the Mark Gospel—depicted as an already un-deified earth, a perished earth, into which the divine kingdom must again live as brought by him in its real spiritual soul form.

[ 14 ] You see, in the course of both these viewpoints, one on the side the Gnosis which only came up to the Nous, and on the other side Montanism, which remained stuck in a materialistic conception, you see, how in these contrasts present during the first Christian century, the writer of the St John Gospel was situated. He looked on one side to the Gnosis, which he recognised from his view as an error, because it said: In the primordial beginnings was the Nous and the Nous was with God, and God was the Nous, and the Nous became flesh and lived among us; and Simon of Cyrene took the cross from Christ and thus accomplished a human image of what happened on Golgotha, after Christ only went up to carrying the cross and then disappeared from the earthly plane.—For the gaze of the Gnostic Christ disappeared the moment Simon of Cyrene took over the cross. That was a mistake.

Where do you arrive if you succumb to all thought being human and having nothing to do with the spirit? No, this is not the way the writer of John's Gospel experienced it. It was not the Nous which was at the primordial beginnings, not the Nous with God and a veil covering everything which is related to the Christian Mystery, but: In the primordial beginnings was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and a God was the Logos and the Logos became flesh and lived among us.—So the first actions are connected to the final actions: a unity comes about when we understand it with the spirit. We wish for something which doesn't lift us above human heights, to where we must find the Nous, because that is only one perspective of the spiritual.

Just as much spirit is needed for the spiritual orientation to let people form the idea that Jesus and the Christ God is one, so much spirituality exists in the Logos. When we hold on to the Nous, we only reach Christ; when we hold on to a Montanistic vision we only reach Jesus who in an unbelievable way returns as Christ, but then again only as a physical Jesus. No, we should not turn ourselves to the Nous coming from humanity, we must turn to the Logos, in which the Christ became man and walked among us.

[ 15 ] The origin of the St John Gospel has really come about through an immense spiritual time context. I can't do otherwise, my dear friends, than to make a personal remark here, that I need to experience it as the greatest tragedy of our time, that theologians do not experience the majesty of the John Gospel at all, that out of a deep struggle preceding it, out of a struggle, the big question arose: How can mankind manage to, on the one hand, find a way to his soul-spiritual in the spiritual-supersensible where his own soul-spiritual nature originated from? On the other hand, how can mankind reach an understanding for how his soul is within the physical-bodily nature?

On the one hand the question could be answered by the Gnosis, and on the other hand it could be answered by an imagination towards the Pistis, which then came to Montanism in a visionary manner. The writer of the St John's Gospel was continuously placed in the middle, between these two, and we feel every word, every sentence only intimately if we do it in such a way as it flowed out of the course of the times, and in such a way that you feel the course of time during the Mystery of Golgotha as if it can be experienced forever in the human soul. With an anthroposophic gaze we can look back at the turning point in time, to the most important turning point in the earth, when one wanted to have this experience of adoration of the St John's Gospel. The day before yesterday I said to you, one has, and must, have an experience when one reads the Gospels with an anthroposophical approach, by reading them time and time again. This admiration of the reader is always renewed with each reading by the conviction that one can never learn everything from the Gospels because they go into immeasurable depths. In Gnosis, my dear friends, you can learn everything because it adheres to outer nature and cosmic symbols. In Montanism one can learn all about it because everyone who is familiar with such things knows what a tremendous suggestive persuasiveness all this has, that can be experienced through microcosmic visions, stronger than any outer impression. You must first learn, my dear friends, in order to be able to talk someone out of a vision, you first need to learn how to do it. You could, if you want to convince a person religiously, rather talk him out of what he has experienced with his outer senses, than anything he has experienced as visions, as atavistic clairvoyance, because atavistic visions are far deeper in a person. By allowing atavistic visions into a person, he is far more connected to them than to his sense impressions. It is far easier to determine an error in sense impressions than an error related to visions. Visions are deeply imbedded in the microcosm. Out of such depths everything originated which the writer of John's Gospel saw from the other side, the side of the Montanists.

Montanism was the side of the Charybdis while the Gnosis was the side of the Scylla. He had to get past them both. I feel it at once, as our current tragedy, that our time has been forced—really out of the very superficial honesty, which prevail in such areas—that the Gospel of St John has been completely eliminated and only the Synoptics accepted. If you experience the Gospels through ever greater wonderment at each renewed reading, and when you manage to delve ever deeper and deeper into the Gospels, then it gives you a harmony of the Gospels. You only reach the harmony of the Gospels when you have penetrated St John's Gospel because all together, they don't form a threefold but a fourfold harmony. You won't accomplish, my dear friends, what you have chosen to do in these meetings for the renewal of religion in present time, if you haven't managed to experience the entire depths, the immeasurable depths of the St John's Gospel. Out of the harmony of John's Gospel with the so-called synoptic Gospels something else must come about as had been established by theology. What can really be experienced inwardly as a harmony in the four Gospels must come about in a living way, as the living truth and therefore just life itself. Out of the experience, out of every experience which is deepened and warmed by the history of the origin of Christianity, out of this experience must flow the religious renewal. It can't be a result out of the intellect, nor theoretical exchanges about belief and knowledge, but only from the deepening of the felt, sensed, content which is able to be deepened in such a way as it was able to truly live in the souls of the first Christians.

[ 16 ] Then, my dear friends, we see how Christianity was submerged by all that Christ experienced in Romanism—as I've presented to you—in the downfall of the world. Those who still understand Christ today will have to feel that the downfall is contained in all that is held by the powers of Romanism. By allowing the powers of Romanism to be preserved by the peoples who lived in this Romanism—the Roman written language, the Latin language had long been active—by our preservation of Roman Law, in our conservation of the outer forms of the Roman State, by our even uprooting the northern regions which contained the most elementary Germanic feelings experienced out of quite a different social community, in the Roman State outstripping all that is from the north, we live right up to our present days in a Roman world of decay because in Christendom, as it was considered in the vicinity of Christ Jesus himself, no other site could be found. This is because the Christianity of Constantine, which found such a meaningful symbol in the crowning of Constantine the Great in Rome, was a Christianity which expressed itself in outer worldliness, in Roman legalities. Augustinus already experienced, as I characterised yesterday and today, the feeling in his soul: Oh, what will it be then, if that gets a grip on the world, that which streams out of godless intellectualism, out of godless Romanism into the world? The principle of civil government will become something terrible; the Civitas of people will be opposed by the Civitas Dei, the God State.—So we notice the rise—earlier the indications had already been there, my dear friends—we see an interest emerging that was just seized in the following times in its fullest power in religious fields, that a light is cast on all later religious battles in the soul, which has just felt these religious battles most deeply.

Already with Augustinus this question emerged: How do we save the morality in the face of outward forces of law? How can we save morality, the divinely permeated morality? Into Romanism it can't spread.—This is the striving for internalization we find in the commitments and confessions of Augustinus, if we penetrate them correctly.

[ 17 ] This occurs in the later striving in the most diverse forms. It appears in the tendency towards outer moral stateliness, which had to be developed according to Roman forms of the Roman Papal church, develop through the coronation of the kings becoming Roman emperors, in which the kings were accepted as instruments of the Roman Papal church, which itself was only fashioned out of ungodly Romanism. I speak in the Christian sense, in the sense of the first Christianity, which experienced Romanism as an enemy. How could one escape this which was being prepared? The first way one could get out was to not allow the internalised Christ to submit to the nationalization of morality, as it had evolved in the Roman Papal church. The nationalization, the outer national administration of morality was what Augustinus still accepted on the one hand, while, however, in the depths of his soul there were forces which he rebelled against.

[ 18 ] We see in this rebellion, one could call it, the tendency of morality to withdraw within, at least to save the divinity within morality, according to what one had lost in outer worldliness. We see this morality being turned inward, being searched for as the "little spark" mentioned by Meister Eckhard, by Tauler, by Suso and so on, and how in particular it profoundly, intimately appears in the booklet Theologia Deutch. This, my dear friends is the battle for the moral, which now came to the fore, not to be lost within the divine spirituality, when it has already been lost in outer world knowledge and administration of the world. However, for a long time one was not ready to use such force like Suso regarding morality and seize the divine to penetrate the moral.

[ 19 ] At first it was a question of arranging the whole in a kind of vague form, always envisioning the side of the outside world, for there had to be someone like a Carolus Magnus, who on the one hand was a worldly administrator, and who could transfer the state administration of morality to the crown of the emperor as an outward gesture, while the church worked in the background. It was imagined in such a way, I could say, that it became a kind of moral dilemma, a conscience that has become historical. This started in the 9th, 10th centuries and this inner conscience steered towards people looking at the world, and that man, because he stood in the middle of the search for the divine in the moral, didn't manage it in the world and searched for the enemies in the world which he felt within. Man looked in the world to find enemies. This resulted in the danger of Christians looking for enemies in the outer world, this led, my dear friends, to the mood of the crusades.

[ 20 ] The crusade mood stands in the middle of the quests for internalization, yet people still didn't reach that place within themselves where the divine was grasped through the moral. The crusade mood lived in two forms; it lived above all in the moral impact of Godfrey of Bouillon and his comrades. From them the call went out against Rome: Jerusalem against Rome! To Jerusalem! We want to replace Rome with Jerusalem because in Rome we have become acquainted with outwardness, and in Jerusalem we will perhaps find inwardness, when we relive the Mystery of Golgotha in its holy places.—This is how the imagination came to Godfrey of Bouillon who we may think of as finding the enemy inwardly, even though he still looked for it outwardly, looking for it in the Turks. The striving to turn more inward and there find the ruler of the world, but at the same time to crown a king of Jerusalem, all this expressed itself in the historic mood of the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. All this lived in the people. For once try to place yourself, in both the worldly and the spiritual reasons of the crusades and you will discover this historical mood everywhere.

[ 21 ] Rome saw this. Rome felt it indeed, something was happening in the north: Jerusalem against Rome. In Rome one felt the externalization, but Rome was careful. Rome already had its prophets; it was careful and looked into the future, seeing what people wanted: Jerusalem against Rome. So it did something which often happens in such cases, it introduced in its own way what the others first wanted, and the Pope allowed his creatures, Peter of Amiens and his supporters, to preach about the crusade in order to carry out from Rome what actually went against it. Study the history with understanding; take it as an impulse and you will see that already the first steps of the crusades took place in what Rome had anticipated and that which Godfrey of Bouillon and his supporters strived for.

[ 22 ] So we see in the historic mood how outer actions were searching for what lay within. I could say we can understand this historic mood in a spiritual way when we see how the Order of the Temple has grown out of the crusades, orders which are already further in their turning within. As a result of the crusades it brought an inwardness with it. It only takes things in such a way that it knows that one does not actually internalize them if one does not penetrate the exterior at the same time, when one doesn't, in order to save the moral, see it as an enemy in an exterior way. As paradoxical as this might appear, my dear friends, what Godfrey of Bouillon saw outwardly in the realm of the Turks, this is like Luther's battle at Wartburg Castle with its devils as an inner power. The struggle is directed inward.

[ 23 ] If you now look at all of this, what appears in programs about such people as Johannes Valentin Andrea, Comenius, what lives in the Bohemian brothers, then you will understand how in the later centuries of the crusades the pursuit of internalization has gone. I must at least mention the most symptomatic picture seemed to me always to be in a single place when I looked at this lonely thinker who lived in Bohemia, the contemporary of Leibniz, Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz. For the first time, in all clarity—we don't only know this today—he stripped morality of legality. Everywhere in the early days of writing in the Roman spirit, the legal was bound to the moral. What lived in a religious way in most people, lived in a philosophic way in the contemporaries of Leibniz. He wanted the moral element to be purely philosophic. Just like Luther wanted to get the inner justification, because in his time it was no longer possible to get justification in the outer world, so Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz as a lonely thinker, saw the task: How do I save, purely conceptually, morality from the encirclement and transformation of legality, with those poor philosophic concepts? How do I save the purely human-moral?—He didn't deepen the question religiously. The question was not one-sidedly, intellectually posed by Hoditz—Wolframitz. However, just because it is put philosophically, one notices how he struggles philosophically in the pure shaping of the substantial moral content living in the consciousness.

[ 24 ] In order to understand these times which after all form the foundation of ours, in which the feelings of our contemporaries live—without knowing it—you should, my dear friends, always look back at the deep soul battles experienced in the past, also when a modern person feels that he has "brought it so delightfully far"; by looking back at this time of the most terrible human soul battles, only one period of superstition is seen.

[ 25 ] So, I could say, the historic development of the struggle for morality came about. What was being experienced in this struggle shows up right into our present day, and it can be imposed on the spiritual search into religion, for religious behaviour, even into aberrations. Still, no balance has been found between Pistis and Sophia, between Pistis and Gnosis. This abyss is still gaping in contrast to the writer of the Gospel of St John who had infinite courage to stand above it and find the truth in between it all.

This summoning of strength in the search for the moral, in the will to save the divine, by applying it only to the moral, was felt in their simple, deep but imperfect way by those southern German religious people who are regarded as sectarians today, the Theosophists, who we find on the one hand in Bengel, and on the other, in Oetinger, but who are far more numerous than only in these two. They use all their might to strive, in complete earnestness, for attaining the divine in the moral, yet by trying to attain the divine in morality they realise: We need an eschatology, we need a prophecy, we need foresight into the course of the world's unfolding. This is still the unfulfilled striving of the Theosophists in the first half of the 19th century, started at the end of the 18th century when we must see the dawn of that which was completely buried at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and which must, from all those who experience the necessity for religious renewal, be seen.

[ 26 ] For this reason, my answers to your wishes which are in pursuit of such religious renewal, can't turn out in any other way than they do. I would quite like to give you what I must believe you are actually looking for.

My dear friends! I have been meditating on the course of the year up to the time that would fall roughly on 21-23 July to 22-23 August, the time that I have called the time of ripening. If we permeate ourselves with the world during this time, let ourselves be permeated by the world, then we feel - after we have immersed ourselves in meditation in what I presented this morning - not only how the spirit works in what is becoming and, so to speak, towards the light, but we feel the becoming of the outside world itself as spirit. And I can then say for this time in the same sense as I did for the other times in the morning, that is, for the time erwa from July 22 to August 23: Firstly, becoming as spirit that fills. (It is written on the blackboard:)

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1. Becoming as spirit that fills.

Secondly, I will try to feel how the light not only continues to work as I said during the transition from the time of St. John to this time, but how the light is born, as it were, in the darkness. So: the effect of light in darkness. (It is written on the blackboard:)

2. Effect of light in darkness

And when I can feel this, I will sense all around me the calm of the spirit weaving in nature. This morning I already pointed out how the whole, which matures there, appears to me as poured out calm, in which the light of the sun blows spiritually. So: the calm of the spirit weaving. (It is written on the board:)

3. The tranquility of weaving the spirit.

And fourthly, I feel myself indistinctly in the outer spiritual, as part of the spiritual, thus: the co-experiencing of the outer in the spirit. (It is written on the blackboard:)

4. The co-experiencing of the outer in the spirit.

This would be meditation, which can be developed by watching nature mature in August, and we will find that it is precisely during this time that Paul's writings can have such an effect on us if we approach them with understanding. While in previous periods the contrast between John and Paul should be placed before our souls or by us before the soul of the community, it becomes particularly significant for this time if we place the full significance of Paul before ourselves or before the community.

Then we come to the time when summer draws to a close and autumn sets in, when nature gives us that mood that can be called the expectation of the gifts of ripening, when we expect how that which has first worked on us as ripening will then fall to us. This is therefore the time from August 23 to September 23. As this ripening process unfolds, we will look to the spirit, in the dying away of the outward budding of nature, in the dying away of nature itself. (The following is written on the board:)

1. Look to the spirit

Secondly, we will have confidence in the power of that which lives in dying, since we see how these gifts are, as it were, brought to us by nature as it fades away. So (it is written on the blackboard:)

2. Confidence in the spirit

We will learn to revere the power that reveals itself to us in withering nature, in nature that fades away for our senses, from which the spirit confronts us, especially in view of what becomes of us from nature, in view of the harvest. We will learn to revere the power of the world in this nature.

3. Worship of the Power of the World.

Now we are ready to feel how what comes to us as gifts of the harvest does not confront us in images of the external world, but how the external world itself becomes increasingly darker, and we feel ourselves surrendered to what comes to us as a gift as the gifts of nature come to meet us. We can then feel our own inner radiance in the darkening external world. (It is written on the board:)

4. Radiant interior in the darkening outer world

And we will now condense the feelings we used to have towards the maturing into a grateful look at the radiant maturing of our own becoming. (It is written on the board:)

5. Grateful regard for the ripening of our own radiance.

These are the feelings that, as you can see, are, to a certain extent, much more abstract when they are expressed than those we have developed for Advent, for Christmas, for Easter and so on; but that is the given.

And now we come to the time from September 23 to October 23, when we experience the gifts we can receive and the harvest of the world. In beholding what is taking place there, where the world literally imposes a moral relationship on us, our feeling spiritualizes in beholding. It is impossible for man, when he feels in a fully human way, not to experience with gratitude what he can feel at the time of the harvest. (It is written on the board:)

1. The feelings spiritualize in beholding.

Our whole relationship to the world, even as it is a relationship to nature, acquires a moral character; we develop a moral view of the world. (It is written on the blackboard:)

2. Moral world view

But just as we are morally perceiving the world, it is as if the world would be forgotten as such with the approach of the harvest and as if it would become dark. (It is written on the blackboard:)

3. The world is forgotten and darkens

It is precisely in this world that is eluding us and darkening that we are compelled to withdraw into our inner selves. The luminous inner self can best learn a prayerful mood in this autumn meditation, or rather, in the meditation of the world moving towards winter. (It is written on the blackboard:)

4. The luminous inner self learns to pray.

Here meditation takes on the character that it very often, I might say as if by instinct, takes on in the case of deeper philosophical natures. By contemplating the world for a long time and forming their ideas, deeper philosophical natures very often have the feeling that all existence is only provisional because, as it presents itself to us, it does not contain seeds for the future, but because it fades away. In this mood, the mood for prayer best develops for meditation. In this mood, I would say, in this helpless mood, where the world has disappeared from our radiant inner being, it is also where we begin to pray while meditating, that is, we begin to turn to something. Here we best learn the necessity of the commandment or law. (It is written on the board:)

5. Feeling the necessity of the law.

But just by seeing the approach of the spirit, by experiencing the approach of the spirit inwardly in meditation, one feels something like a faintness in the spirit. We can say that the overabundance of the spirit can be felt there, this almost nightmare-like feeling of the spirit. (It is written on the blackboard)

6. The overabundance of the spirit is felt.

It is indeed an absolutely self-evident process that from Johanni onwards – where we have seen how only three stages of our inner meditative experience can come – through the following months, it so happens that in August there are four stages, then five stages, then six stages. This is something quite necessary. As we approach the Christmas season, the inner life of the spirit becomes more differentiated again, we live our way into a more differentiated life.

And now we come to the time from October 23 to about November 23 or 24. This is the time when everything can guide us through the following meditation: We have empathized deeply with the growth and maturation, but then also with what the decline of growth and maturation is and the approach of the gifts out of the decline. We have learned to apply all this to our own inner life. We are, to a certain extent, living with nature and can now, first of all, have the feeling of how a power such as that which brings us the harvest gifts wants to stir in us as well. But precisely now, when we still have a vivid echo, we can feel towards nature in decline how our will is without drive. (It is written on the blackboard:)

1. The will without impulse.

One feels that the moral should enter into the will. (It is written on the board:)

2. The moral wants to seize the will.

Now one can prepare oneself for the mood in which one actually finds Christ's will for the first time. You can say to yourself: I see the world around me, but what I see is not the world. I am seeking a real world. The world is a decayed world; what I see is not the world. You must have already mustered the courage to find the world somewhere else than in what you see and hear and perceive with the other senses. (It is written on the board:)

3. What I see is not the world.

You have to have the courage not to want to see the sun where it was in April, not to perceive the spirit where it sprouts and sprouts, but in the darkness, in death I must seek the sun. (It is written on the board:)

4. In darkness, in death, I must seek the sun.

But through this one will be able to feel oneself in darkness, (it is written on the board:)

5. Man is himself in darkness.

One feels, while one used to feel with the world, now the world is dying. (It is written on the board:)

6. In man the world dies

Everything can now come together in the question (it is written on the board:)

7. How does the world live again in man?

Then the Advent mood can come, which I characterized in the morning as the first one, which begins with the sensation of the word, with the sensation of the Logos. We have truly come through the moods of the year to be able to feel what the Logos is, and we can now develop the mood in the Advent season that is to lead up to the Christmas season.

May I read to you the experiment that I began this morning, such as how, by meditatively surrendering to what I have written on the board here, the meditation can be experienced inwardly in these words, how these words can be experienced in a breviary-like manner.

For the Advent season:

The word flows through heaven and earth
It spoke authoritatively to Moses on the mountain
It forms world beings, for the revelation to man
It weaves in the human interior, through itself to the hidden

It shines as the sun from the light into the darkness
It lives in Christ, bright out of the darkness, gentle in the brightness
It comes to earth in Jesus.

Now the Christmas season:

In the earthly man, He speaks from nature of the mystery of the world
In him, He works as the creative power of the world, full of light
In him, He speaks the word about his own nature
In his speaking, the gate of death and darkness opens.

In Him a new ancestor has appeared for man
Through Him reconciliation with the heights of the world is achieved
Through Him matter reveals spirit, spirit creates matter.

And in the time following Christmas, when we reflect for ourselves and with the community on those parts of the Gospel that deal with Jesus' youth until his preparation for death, when we meditate ourselves in the way I showed you this morning, we can summarize this meditation in the words:

And walking on earth, the power of wisdom grew in him
And he could not be reached by the tempter
The son of the lost human being
The healing power of the world
The disciple finds in his being
From it he taught
And founded the kingdom of the spirit in the sphere of the senses.

And the time of Lent:

The earth sinks from its original state
An abyss is destined for the good sense
Earthly man has lost the heritage of eternity
The sick require healing
A leader must arise for the directionless
The light must shine for him in the darkness
The power of the senses must turn spiritually.

And so, in the spirit of the meditations and Easter Gospels mentioned this morning, we come to the following Easter saying:

I see heaven's radiance
I feel the grave as a spiritual effect
Death comes to me as a physical fall
The resurrection is placed before my spirit
The resurrection lives in my prayers
The Risen One lives in me
My mind is directed towards Him.

Now the walk on earth after the resurrection, the time that follows Easter, before the time of Pentecost:

The supersensible has revealed itself
The meaning of good is the germ of existence
The sensory sphere is only appearance
Truth secretly rules being
I permeate myself with the power of the Risen One
I want to be a disciple of the Risen One
With Him, I want to be a being of another world.

Whitsun time, June:

Insight in the spirit can live,
In a new world, the meaning of good will take effect
In the spirit, truth carries itself
In the image of the mind, it reveals itself
It loosens my tongue
It frees my soul
It unites the divine with the human.

And we come to the time of St. John:

In the becoming of space and time, the spirit weaves
In the darkness of matter, the spirit is powerfully active, forming images
A being awakens in the sleep of the sensory world.

We come to the time of Paul, the time of ripening, July to August, the time after John:

The spirit rises from the world of becoming
In the darkness, light is born
The spirit rests in the web of the senses
The spirit lives in my life.

Toward September 23, in anticipation of the gifts of maturity:

My soul's eye looks at the spirit
And trust weaves into the gaze
Providence escapes the law of nature
What seems dark on the outside shines brightly on the inside
My gratitude flows to the peaceful spirit.

Now at the harvest of nature's gifts:

I look at the world with a spirit-filled feeling
The spirit feels my way of thinking
The world sinks into darkness
The inner being shines in prayer in the spiritual being
The inner being needs a ruler in the darkness of the world
Oh, the spirit takes a level head.

Now in the time leading up to November 23:

I lack the strength of my will
The sense of good wants to work
I see a world that destroys itself
In the destruction I must seek the light of becoming for myself
Darkness spreads in me
dying in the world in being human
How do I find the world in my darkness?

Next month, Advent will answer that.

In this way, we actually get the twelve stations of the breviary if we really get involved in the whole thing. And at the same time, you see something in what I have developed for you that is like an inner call for religious renewal. If you take the church year as it is in the traditional churches, once you have found your way through what has, of course, been corrupted in some ways, to the beauty of this church year, you have the significance of the Advent season, the wonderfully sweet intimacy of the Christmas season, and you can also shape all of this for the congregation in the sense of the Gospels. We then have everything we can do for ourselves and for the community in relation to Jesus, who in his youth grows ever wiser, develops until he cannot be tempted, and develops until he can appear as a teacher. We then have Lent, into which we can place everything that human self-knowledge can become so that the Easter event can be experienced in a dignified way. We also have the Gospel accounts, and these are particularly magnificent, of the events surrounding Easter; we also have the walk of the risen Christ with one or other of his apostles, which we can also gain from the Gospel; we then have the time of Pentecost with everything that follows the Feast of Ascension. But by developing the year in this way, we now lose touch with the world. The Old Catholic Church has now inserted the work of the apostles at this point, the feasts of the apostles, the feasts of the saints up to the feast of the dead for All Souls' Day and so on. But with that, the Pauline task in inner experience has actually been dropped. According to his commission, Paul had to go to those who had previously experienced the divine only as pagans in their souls. This mood, which we particularly need in the present time, which has taken away the religious from us – while we should give it back to the world – must also be in the human being. In this time, the religious feeling must find its way into nature, just as we have found it in the John mood, in the Paul mood of maturation. In the September mood, where we will see that we can very well experience what is given to us in the letters of Peter, we will be able to carry what we have developed in the harvest mood as the meditative life into the feeling of the [... gap in the postscript], without it falling prey to fantastic mysticism. During the time leading up to Advent, which I have just characterized as the time between now and November 23, we will be able to incorporate everything we have to say to the community and to ourselves, from the time of the Apostle's disciples, from the time of the Church Fathers.

If you take this concise month, August, you will be able to sense in its fourfold structure the indication of the structure of the month in weeks, while for the other months the weeks are effaced in their conciseness. A complete breviary will now have to be compiled in such a way that the fourfold division of the month and the twelvefold division of the year are included in meditations, or that the weekly meditations are included in the annual meditations. Then one can also proceed to the daily meditation in such a way that the meditation expressed in the breviary is a threefold one for each day. The weekly verses would follow on from the annual verses, which I have shared with you as they have emerged for me. However, the weekly verses would be repeated in each month, and these would be followed by the daily verses, which run each week from Saturday to the following Sunday. So we would have year-month verses, month-week verses, week-day verses, 21 lines, three times seven lines, except for the middle months, where we have four lines in August, three lines in the St. John season, five lines in the September season, and so on. Thus the breviary is also structured inwardly according to number, and one really experiences that into which we are subconsciously placed in the world. We bring the spirit up into consciousness in the experience of the year. I will speak more about this tomorrow. So tomorrow the formation of the breviary will take us a short time and then we will move on to discussing community building.

(The following is a response to questions submitted in writing by Rudolf Steiner)

Question: When it comes to the content of the breviary, should we also consider similar methods to those used in the Catholic breviary? Days of the Saints? Examination of Conscience?

Rudolf Steiner: I have tried to develop for you, as it were, the principle of the breviary as it arises directly out of the present time, and I cannot see that a religious renewal could be possible if a renewal of breviary prayer does not take place in this direction. The hours can be taken in such a way that we have the opportunity to delve into the content of the breviary meditation three times a day, in the morning, at noon and in the evening.

Question: What is the connection between the calendar of the soul and the weekly sayings of the breviary?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, the weekly sayings refer to the moods that are in the calendar of the soul. Isn't that right? The one who seeks these things out of the spirit, out of real supersensible experience, always has the very concrete situation before him; and in trying to research for your breviary, I had your minds before my soul. When I once formulated the twelve seasonal verses and the weekly verses, I had before me the very different moods of an anthroposophical context, within which no one could yet know that knowledge would arise somewhere, that a religious renewal was necessary. But you will feel that if you compare what we have in mind here with the moods of the annual week proverbs, the two will complement each other perfectly, and each will support and illuminate the other.

I will have to talk about the question of the consecration of holy water and the ordination of priests tomorrow when we come to the topic of community building. All of this is part of it. I will also talk about the place of the sermon in the service tomorrow.

Question: Should the traditional names or new names be used for the prayers and rituals? Wouldn't the latter be better?

Rudolf Steiner: I cannot understand what is meant by the question. So far I have spoken about the baptismal ritual and I do not know why this should not be mentioned by that name.

Questioner: With this question, I am mainly concerned about the names that could arouse suspicion on the part of the outside world, as if Catholicism were to be represented here, for example, the name for the new ritual, “Mass,” or here, “Breviary.” For us, these names are perfectly understandable, but I mean to the outside world.

Rudolf Steiner: I must confess that I am now using words that can make the matter understandable to you, and that will probably have been achieved. But everything that now has to do with putting it into the world should be done by you. Of course, this or that can be guessed here or there, but it is not really the anthroposophical task to intervene in the reality of community and church building.

Question: What is the significance of celibacy in the past and in the present?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, I have spoken about celibacy in relation to the Catholic Church. It serves the aims of the Catholic Church in a very consistent way, as we have seen in the context of the lectures. But now the question is that today, people must rather more strongly ask the question, that is, answer the question: How does the pastor achieve the mood that can sustain pastoral care, even though he is not subject to celibacy rules or at least cannot be required to observe them? In the time in which we live, the important thing is not to alienate ourselves from the world with religion, but to penetrate the world with religion; that is the important thing.

Question: How are the triangle and the square related to baptism?

Rudolf Steiner: The triangle and the square are only the preliminary stages of the cross. The cross is the one that underlies the whole of human development. Although the cross on Golgotha is thoroughly historical – the external reality, as it is often disputed, cannot be disputed in this way – on the other hand, in the sign of the cross we have the sign for the physical and etheric human being. But before we come to the sign of the cross, we have that which lives in the human being as an astral being. Isn't it true that what lives in the sign of the cross, the physical and etheric human being, is completely unconscious? What lives in the astral body is semi-conscious; it is best expressed in the square. It is truly expressed in the square, and what lives in the I is in the triangle. So we see: I – triangle, astral body – square, the whole human being as he lives as I and astral body in the physical and ether bodies – the cross. This is entirely connected with the feeling one has towards I and astral body and towards physical and ether body. (See Chart 18 above)

Question: What is the basis for the symbols of the lamb and the dove?

Rudolf Steiner: This is something that would lead extremely far if it were to be fully developed. It is absolutely the case that there is also a spiritual natural history, if I may use the paradoxical expression. Those who look at the world of birds with a spiritual eye see in the world of birds something in which, albeit in its Ahrimanic ramification, the spirit has worked more than, for example, in the human form. The being is not formed from the inside out, but from the outside in. We have here a formation out of the cosmos in the formation of the feathers, in the whole formation of the bird, which should not simply be represented as it is represented by our sensory natural science today, but should be represented in such a way that its bone structure corresponds to a reproduction of the human head, so that the bird is actually a head with the mouth, because the bird's head is merely a complicated mouth. One must learn to understand this whole design, and when one learns to understand it, then one already gets the necessity, not just the possibility, to see that which one wants to express as the healing spirit in the dove, and to see that which the sacrifice offers in the shape of the lamb. In the time when such symbols were conceived, the lamb or the ram was usually depicted as a recumbent lamb, looking backwards with its head. This form is even something essential; it means that one does not turn one's gaze towards the world, but turns one's gaze away from the world, so to speak, one tries to look into oneself.

Question: What is the Christ experience in the Gospels besides the Father experience? And to what extent does the Christ experience or the Christ mystery in the Mass seem to be only a Christ experience compared to, for example, Paul's Christ experience?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, the thing is that in the newer human being, the Christ experience and the Father experience cannot be distinguished from one another, because the newer human being perceives in nature only what grows and sprouts, and thus in nature actually perceives only that which does not carry death within itself, because the human being does not perceive the fruitfulness of death. The Christ experience only comes into confrontation with the Father experience when we can feel, for instance, that we – adding the experience of the Holy Spirit – make the negations [of the Christ experience and the Father experience] clear to ourselves in the following way. The Father-experience simply arises as the summary of the whole human nature out of the consciousness of the healthy human being. The healthy human being is organized in such a way that just as he must see and hear, so he must have the Father-experience. That is why I always said to my listeners when discussing these things: Not to have the Father-experience is an illness. Not to have the Christ-experience is a fate, because it cannot be acquired through what is merely in the blood, but because, as it were, through self-education, the encounter with the Christ in the outer world and within the human being must be experienced. That is an essential difference. And because today we cannot have the Father-experience as we did in pre-Christian times, arising from a healthy organism – I have discussed this – we have to have an inadequate Father-experience today. With our organism, which has now become such that it can no longer grasp the spiritual, we have to have the Father-experience as a memory. The Christ-experience must be a present experience. We must be able to make this clear distinction. If we wrestle with the question, where is the Father? —, then we are too weak with our present organism to find him. And if we then go to the Christ because we cannot find the Father and seek the Christ through the inner in the outer, then we experience the Christ-experience as a destiny, while one can experience the Father-experience as health. And when we wrestle with the questions: Does the Christ also give us what the Father has given? Is the Christ in what He gives us only similar to the Father or is He equal to Him? — when these questions of Arianism, of Athanasianism, take on a living form again, as we still see, for example, in Eastern philosophers such as Solowjow, then the differentiation between the experience of the Father and the experience of Christ and also the experience of the Holy Spirit in man comes to life again quite clearly, because not to recognize the Spirit is folly. Not recognizing the Father is illness, not recognizing the Christ is fate, not recognizing the Spirit is folly. And we must fight our illness in order to come to the Father, we must bring about our fate in order to come to the Christ, we must fight our 'folly' in order to come to the Spirit. This, of course, only hints at the beginning; what is at issue here is the extraordinarily differentiated experience of the Father and of the Christ. I cannot find that these two experiences are differentiated in the modern Protestant feeling; there is even something strongly Theistic or Deistic about it. One could say that one person feels more what can be achieved in the mind, he feels more Christ, but it is just only an undifferentiated feeling, and the other feels more the Father, but here too it is undifferentiated again; no Christianity comes out of this experience.

Question: What is the position of anthroposophy regarding the supersensible of the universe outside our solar system, including Uranus and Neptune? Are there beings outside the earth that are similar to humanity, and is there also a Christ impulse for them? Do they also need to be redeemed?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, my dear friends, why should we concern ourselves with this question? We get to know the world as a sensual world, and we arrive at the supersensible insofar as our own being is placed in this supersensible. Such questions do not actually arise in this abstraction for the spiritual researcher, because he stands in concrete life. I am often asked what the ultimate goal of the world is, because: If I do not know the ultimate goal, some people say, then I will not set myself in motion with regard to the course of the world and its development. — I always had to answer: If I want to go to Rome and someone only knows the timetable to Bern, there is bound to be someone who knows the route to Ticino and there will be someone else who knows the route to Milan and so on. So I can rest assured with my timetable to Bern. Likewise, I can be reassured if I know the present and what the near future holds, because I will first have to perfect myself in order to recognize the path to the next stage at the next stage. So it is really a matter of seeking living knowledge, knowledge that one can experience, and not of pushing intellectualism to its very limits. In doing so, we lose ourselves completely in the formless.

Question: How can we explain cruelty in the animal kingdom?

Rudolf Steiner: Of course one could answer such questions, but one is misunderstood if one answers them in short sentences. One has to go into everything that is a real force in nature. One has to start at a seemingly completely different end to arrive at an explanation of these things. Start where you are confronted with the spawning of fish, with the release of milt into the sea, and how countless of them perish and only a few become fish. But this is only an outward appearance, because it is actually not known what happens to the undeveloped fish spawn from the aspect of a world that lies immediately behind our sensory world, which is also there. It also undergoes its development. That which is deprived of development in the sense undergoes development in the spiritual. It is destroyed in appearance, but it is preserved in its inner becoming. And in the situation of this fish spawn, which becomes a fish, are also all those wheat grains in the field that are used for sowing again, that is, that turn into wheat again. But all the grains you consume with the bread are capable of becoming fish spawn, because they do not reach the goal that is set for them in the sense world. Just ask what would become of the world if all those beings who do not achieve their goal in the sense world were to withdraw from their other goal, which is not similar to the goal that can be seen in the sense world. The world is indeed very complicated. It is certainly deeply true that the lamb and the one who feels with the lamb must find it cruel when the lamb is eaten by the wolf, but it would be terribly cruel for the wolf if there were no lambs. It is just that what the wolf feels is important for a completely different world than the one in which we live with our senses. One must already have a sense of the world's unfathomability and of the possibility that the world presents itself quite differently from other sides than from the side from which we look at it here. Therefore, our combinative mind, which is actually only intended for the sensory world, fails when faced with some questions, and if we want to use it to explain cruelty in the animal kingdom or other things in the way we are accustomed to explaining [with the combinative mind], we cannot understand these things.

Well, that's what I can answer today. I'll maybe prepare the next two questions, including the one about holy water, for tomorrow.

Mankind is ever in need of truths which cannot, in every age, be wholly understood. The assimilation of truths is not only of significance for our knowledge; Truths in themselves contain life-force; and by permeating ourselves with truth, we permeate our soul being with a Cosmic element, just as we must permeate our physical being with air taken from outside in order to live. Deep truths are indeed expressed in great religious revelations, but in such a form that their real inner meaning is often only understood much later.

The New Testament has been written; the New Testament is there as a revelation for humanity—but the whole of the earth's evolution will have to run its course before this New Testament will be fully understood. In the future, man will require much knowledge of the external world, and of the spiritual world also; and if taken in the right sense everything will make for an understanding of the New Testament. The understanding comes about gradually, but the New Testament is written in a simple form so that it can be absorbed, although it can only later and gradually be understood. The assimilation of the truths that are to be found in the New Testament is not without significance, even if we cannot as yet understand the truths in their inner depths. Later on, the truth becomes cognitional force, but it is already life-force; it is imbibed, in a more or less childlike form. And if these very questions which we began to consider yesterday are to be understood in the sense in which they are imparted in the New Testament, we need knowledge of greater depth, with insight into the spiritual world and its mysteries.

To continue the last lecture, we must again examine some occult mysteries, for they will be able to guide us to a further understanding of the riddle of guilt and sin, and from this point of view throw light on the relation of Christ to the human soul.

In the course of our anthroposophical work we have often been faced with a point of view which may be clothed in the form of a question, ‘Why did Christ die in a human body?’ In reality this question expresses the riddle of the Mystery of Golgotha: ‘Why did Christ die, why did the Godhead die, in a human body?’

God died because for the sake of the evolution of the universe it was necessary for Him to be able to enter humanity; it was necessary that a God of the upper worlds should be able to become the leader of the earth-evolution. Christ had to become akin to death. Akin to death! One could wish that this expression might be deeply understood by the soul of man. As a rule a man only meets with death when he himself sees another die, or in different phenomena akin to death, which are to be found in the world, or in the certainty that he must himself pass through the portal of death when the present incarnation is over. But this is really only the external aspect of death. Death is present in quite a different form in the world in which we live. Let us start from an ordinary everyday phenomenon. We breathe the air in and we breathe it out again: but thereby the air undergoes a change. When this air is exhaled it is dead air; as exhaled air, it cannot be inhaled again, for exhaled air is harmful. I only indicate this in order that you may understand the meaning of the occult saying: ‘When the air enters into man, it dies.’ That which is living in the air dies when it enters into man. Death enters the air with every breath taken by man. That, however, is only one phenomenon. The ray of light which penetrates our eye must likewise die, and we should have nothing from the rays of light if our eye did not set itself up against the ray of light as our lungs do in the case of the air; the light that enters into our eye dies in our eye; and as a result of the death of the light in our eye it comes about that we can see. That which is living in the light dies when it penetrates our eye. The ray of light is killed in the eye. We slay it in order that our eye may be able to perceive. We are filled with that which must die within us in order that we may have our earth-consciousness. Corporeally we kill the air; we kill also the ray of light which penetrates us, we kill it in many ways.

When we call Spiritual Science to our aid, we differentiate earth substance, and the substance of water, air and heat; we then enter into the world of light-ether; we speak also of the warmth-ether. As far up as the light-ether, we kill that which penetrates us; we slay it unceasingly in order that we may have our earth-consciousness. But there is something that is not killed by our earth-existence. We know that above the light-ether there is the so-called ‘chemical-ether,’ and then there comes the ‘life-ether.’ Those are the two kinds of ether which we cannot kill. But, because of this, these two kinds of ether have no special participation in us. If we were able to kill the chemical-ether, the waves of the harmony of the spheres would sound perpetually into our physical body, and we should destroy these waves with our physical life. And if we could also kill the life-ether, we should destroy and continuously kill within ourselves the cosmic life that streams to the earth. In earthly sound a substitute is given to us, but it must not be compared with what we should hear if the chemical-ether were audible to us as physical human beings. For physical sound is a product of the air and is not the spiritual sound; it is only a substitute for the spiritual sound.

When the Luciferic temptation came, the progressive gods were obliged to place man in a sphere, where, from the light-ether downwards death lives in his physical body. But at that time the progressive gods said—and the words are there in the Bible—‘Man has taken unto himself the faculty of differentiation between Good and Evil, but Life he is not to have. Of the Tree of Life he is not to eat.’ In Occultism an addition may be made to this; to the sentence ‘Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat’ might be added the words ‘and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear.’ Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear! These spheres were closed to man. Only through a certain process in the old Mysteries were the tones of the Sphere-Music and the Cosmic Life, pulsating through the universe, revealed to those who were to be initiated when it was given them, outside the body, to see the Christ in advance. Hence it is that the old philosophers speak of the Music of the Spheres.

In drawing attention to this, we indicate at the same time those regions from which the Christ came to us at the time of the baptism by John in Jordan. Whence did Christ come? He came from those spheres which had been closed to man, which man had to forget at the beginning of the Earth-evolution, as a result of the Luciferic temptation—from the region of the Music of the Spheres—from the region of Cosmic Life. At the baptism by John in Jordan, Christ entered into a human body, and that which permeated this human body was the spiritual essence of the Harmony of the Spheres, the spiritual essence of the cosmic Life—elements that still belonged to the human soul during its earth-evolution, but from which the soul of man had to be separated as a result of the Luciferic temptation. In this sense also man is related to Spirit. As a being of soul he really belongs to the region of the Music of the Spheres, and to the region of the Word—of the living cosmic Ether. But he was cast out from these regions. They were to be restored to him again in order that he might again be gradually permeated by that from which he had been cast out. Therefore it is that, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, the words of St. John's Gospel touch us so deeply: In the primal beginning, when man was not yet subject to temptation, was the Logos. Man belonged to the Logos ... the Logos was with God, and man was with the Logos, with God. And through the baptism by John in Jordan the Logos entered into human evolution—He became Man.

Here we have the all-important connection. Let us leave this truth as it stands there, and approach the question from another side. Life as a whole shows itself to us only from the external side. If it did not show itself merely from the external side, man would know how he absorbs the corpse of the light into his eye when he sees.

What was it that the Christ had to undertake in order that the fulfillment of St. Paul's saying: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me,’ might be made possible? It had to be possible that Christ should permeate the nature of man; but the nature of man is filled with what is slain through human nature in earth-existence, from the light-ether that dies in the human eye downwards. The nature of man is filled with death; but what lives in the highest kinds of ether was withdrawn in order that human nature might not be filled with their death. But in order that Christ might dwell in us He had to become akin to death, akin to all that is spread out in the world, beginning from the light down into the depths of materiality. Christ had to be able to pass into that which we bear within us as the corpse of the light, of the heat, of the air, etc. It was only because He was able to become akin to death that He could become akin to man. And we must feel within our soul that the God had to die so that He might be able to enfill us, who had acquired death as a result of the Luciferic temptation, so that we might be able to say: ‘Christ in us.’

Many other things are hidden for man behind sense-existence. He turns his gaze upon the plant-world; he sees how the light of the sun conjures forth the plants from out of the soil. Science teaches us that light is necessary for the growth of plants, but that is only half of the truth. He who looks at the plants with clairvoyant sight sees living spiritual elements rising out of them. The light dips down into the plants and rises again out of them as a living spiritual element; the light comes down into the plants in order to be transformed in them and to be born again as a living spiritual element. In the animals it is the chemical-ether that enters, and this chemical-ether is not perceptible to man: if man could be aware of it, it would sound spiritually. The animals transform this ether into water-spirits. The plants transform light into air-spirits; animals transform the spirit active in the chemical-ether into water-spirits. But man transforms what dwells in the cosmic ether-in the life-ether—that which enables him to live at all and which he has been prevented from killing within himself—that he transforms into earth-spirits.

In a course of lectures in Carlsruhe ‘From Jesus to Christ,’ I once spoke of the human ‘phantom.’ This is not the time for drawing the connecting threads between what is to be said here and what was said then about the human ‘phantom,’ but such connecting threads do exist and you will perhaps find them for yourselves. To-day let me present the thing from another side.

There is perpetually brought forth in man something that is also spiritual—the life in him. It is forever passing out into the world. Man projects an aura around him, an aura of rays whereby he enriches the earthly spiritual element of the earth. In the earthly spiritual element of the earth, however, there are contained, all the qualities, moral or otherwise that man has acquired and that he bears within himself. This is absolutely true. Clairvoyant sight perceives how man sends out his moral, intellectual and aesthetic aura into the world and how this aura continues to live as earth-spirit in the spirituality of the earth. As a comet draws its tail through the cosmos, so does man draw through the whole of earthly life the spiritual aura which he projects. This spiritual aura is held together phantom-like, during a man's life, but at the same time it rays out into the world his moral and intellectual wealth of soul. Life is very complicated, and this also is a phenomenon of life.

When, in our occult studies, we go back to the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that men of those periods simply radiated this phantomlike entity which contained their moral qualities, into the external world, into the external spiritual aura of the earth. But humanity developed in the course of the earth's existence, and just at the epoch when the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass a certain stage had been reached in the evolution of this phantom-like entity. We may say that in earlier times the phantomlike entity, rayed out by man, was much more evanescent; by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had become denser, had more form; and as a fundamental characteristic of this phantom-like entity, man had mingled the connection with death, which he was developing in himself, by killing the ray of light that enters into his eye, and so on, as I have explained. These earthly spiritual entities which radiate from man himself are like a stillborn child, because man imparts his death to them. If Christ had not come upon Earth, human beings would, during the sojourn of their souls in earthly bodies, continuously have exuded entities with the impress of death upon them. And with this impress of death there would have been bound up the moral qualities of men, of which we spoke yesterday—objective guilt and objective sin,—they would have been within it.

Let us suppose that Christ had not come. What would have happened in the evolution of the earth? From the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha would otherwise have taken place, men would have spiritually created dense forms to which they would have imparted death. And these dense forms would have had to pass over to ‘Jupiter’ with the earth. Man would have imparted death to the earth. A dead earth would have given birth to a dead Jupiter.

It could not have been otherwise, because, if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, man would have lacked the possibility of permeating what rayed out from him, with the Music of the Spheres, and the Cosmic Life. Christ brought these with the Mystery of Golgotha. And when there is a fulfillment of the words: ‘Not I, but Christ in me,’ when we bring about a relationship to Christ within ourselves, that which rays out from us, and which would otherwise be dead, is made living. Because we bear death within us the living Christ had to permeate us, in order that He might give life to the spiritual earth-essence that we leave behind us. Christ, the Living Logos, permeates and gives life to the objective guilt and sin which detaches itself from us and which we do not carry further in Karma, and because He gives it life, a living earth will evolve into a living Jupiter. That is the result of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The soul can, if it reflects, receive Christ in the following way. The soul can realize that there was once a time when man was within the bosom of the divine Logos. But man had to succumb to the temptation of Lucifer. He took death into himself. Into him there passed the germ by which he would have brought to birth a dead earth as a dead Jupiter. That remained behind, which, before the temptation, the human soul had been destined to receive for its earth-existence: with Christ, this entered again into man's earth-existence.

When man takes Christ into himself so as to feel permeated with Christ, he is able to say to himself: ‘That which the gods had allotted to me, before the Luciferic temptation, but which, owing to the temptation by Lucifer, had to remain behind in the Cosmos, enters into my soul with Christ. The soul may become perfect again through taking Christ into itself. Then only am I fully soul; then only am I again what, according to divine decree, I was intended to be from the very beginning of the earth.’ ‘Am I really a soul without Christ?’ man asks himself: and he feels that it is through Christ that he first becomes the soul that the guiding divine Beings intended him to be. That is the wonderful feeling of ‘home’ which souls can have with Christ; for out of the primal cosmic home of the soul did Christ descend, in order to give back to the soul of man that which had to be lost upon the earth as a result of the temptation of Lucifer. Christ leads the soul up again to its primordial home, the home allotted to it by the Gods. That is the bliss and the blessing of the human soul in the experience of Christ. It was this that gave such bliss to certain Christian mystics in the Middle Ages. They may have written many things which in themselves seem to be tinged with too strong a sense element, but it was nevertheless fundamentally spiritual. Such Christian mystics as those who joined Bernard of Clairvaux, and others, felt that the human soul was as a bride who had lost her bridegroom at the primal beginning of the earth; and when Christ entered into their souls, filling them with life, and soul, and spirit, Christ was to them as the bridegroom who united himself with the soul, and whom she had once lost in her original home, whom she had forsaken in order, through Lucifer, to follow the path of freedom, the path of differentiation between good and evil.

When the soul of man really lives into Christ, feeling that Christ is the living Being, Who from the death on Golgotha flowed out into the atmosphere of the earth, and may flow into the soul, it feels itself inwardly vivified through the Christ. The soul feels a transition from death to life.

As up to the most remote future we must live out our earthly existence in human bodies, we cannot hear directly the Music of the Spheres, nor have direct experience of the cosmic life. But we can experience that which flows out from Christ, and in this way, have, by proxy, as it were, that which otherwise comes to us from the Music of the Spheres and the cosmic life. Pythagoras of old spoke of the Music of the Spheres. Why?

Pythagoras was an initiate of the ancient Mysteries. He had gone through the experience wherein the soul passed out of the body. When the soul was out of the body he was able to be withdrawn into the spiritual worlds; there he saw Christ Who was later to come to the earth. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, man cannot speak of the Music of the Spheres as did Pythagoras; but even if his soul does not live outside the body he can speak in another way of the Music of the Spheres. As an initiate he might even to-day speak like Pythagoras; but the ordinary inhabitant of earth can speak of the Music of the Spheres and of the cosmic life only when he experiences in his soul: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me,’ for That is What has lived in the Sphere-Music, and in the cosmic life. But we too must pass through the experience in ourselves; we must receive the Christ into our souls. Let us suppose that a man were to fight against this that he did not wish to receive Christ into his soul. At the end of the earth when the earth spirits, that have arisen in the course Of the life of mankind, have formed themselves into a nebulous spirit-form that has emanated from the earth, such a man would bear with him all those phantom-like entities which had come forth from him in earlier incarnations. There would be a dead earth, and this would pass over, dead, to Jupiter. At the end of the earth-period a man might have carried out and completely absolved his Karma; he might have shouldered the whole of it in order to work out the adjustment of all the imperfections committed by him; he might have become perfect in his soul being, in his Ego, but sin and guilt would remain objectively in what was left behind. That is a truth, for we do not live only for ourselves; we do not live in order that we may become egoistically more perfect; we live for the world, and at the end of the world, the remains of our earth-incarnations will stand there like a mighty tableau if we have not taken into us the living Christ. When we connect what was said in the last lecture with what is being said to-day (and it is really the same, only taken from two sides) we understand how Christ takes upon Himself the guilt and sin of the earth-humanity, in so far as these are objective guilt and sin. And if we have inwardly realized this, ‘Not I, but Christ in me,’ then He takes over what comes forth from us, and these ‘remains’ of ours stand there vivified by Christ, irradiated by Christ and permeated by His life. Our incarnations stand there, that is to say, the remains of these incarnations, and taken as a whole, what do they yield?

Because Christ unites them all—Christ Who belongs to all mankind in the present and in the future—all the remains of the single incarnations coalesce. Let us take one incarnation: certain relics or remains are left, as we have described. Further incarnations have other remains, and so on, up to the end of the earth period. If these relics are permeated with Christ, they coalesce—compress what is rarified and you will get density—spirit also becomes dense, our collective earth-incarnations are united into a spiritual body. That belongs to us, we need it, because we evolve onwards to Jupiter, and it is the starting point of our embodiment on Jupiter. At the end of the earth period we shall stand there with our soul, we shall stand there before our earth-relics, which have been gathered together by Christ, and we shall have to unite ourselves with them in order to pass over with them to Jupiter.

We shall rise again in the body, in the earth-body, that has condensed out of the separate incarnations. From a heart profoundly moved I say: ‘In the body we shall rise again!’

In these days, young people of sixteen, and even less, are beginning to press their own confession of faith, and to talk of having happily grown beyond such nonsense as ‘The Resurrection of the Body.’ But those who seek to deepen their occult knowledge of the Mysteries of the Universe strive gradually to rise to an understanding of what has been said to men, because—as I explained at the beginning of this lecture—it had first of all to be said, in order that men might grasp it as life-truth and then understand it later. The resurrection of the body is a reality, but our soul must feel that it will arise face to face with the earth-relics that have been collected, brought together by Christ, face to face with the spiritual body that is permeated with Christ. This is what our soul must learn to understand. For supposing that (because of our not having received into ourselves the living Christ), we could not approach this earth-body with its sin and guilt and unite with it. If we rejected the Christ, the relics of our various incarnations would be scattered at the end of the earth-period; they would have remained, but they would not have been gathered together by the Christ who spiritualizes the whole of humanity. We should stand as a soul at the end of the earth period, and we should be bound to the earth, to that in the earth which remains dead in our relics. Certainly our souls would, in spirit, be free in an egoistic sense, but we could not approach our bodily relics. Such souls are the booty of Lucifer, for he strives to cross the true earth-goal, he tries to prevent souls from reaching their earth-goal, to hold them back in the spiritual world. And Lucifer will send over what has remained of scattered earth-relics, to the Jupiter evolution as a dead content of Jupiter, which will not separate as Moon from Jupiter, but will be in Jupiter, and will be continually emitting these earth-relics. And these earth-relics will have to be called into life on Jupiter by the souls above, of their own kind.

And now you will remember what I told you some years ago—that the human race on Jupiter will divide itself into those souls who have attained their earth-goal, who will have attained the goal of Jupiter, and into those souls who will form a middle kingdom between the human kingdom and the animal kingdom on Jupiter. These latter will be Luciferic souls, Luciferic—merely spiritual. They will have their body below, and this body will be a direct expression of their whole inner being, but they will be able to direct it only from outside. Two races, the good and the bad, will differentiate themselves from one another on Jupiter.

A Venus existence will follow that of Jupiter; and again there will be an adjustment as a result of the further evolution of the Christ event, but it is on Jupiter that man will realize what it means to wish to be perfect only in his own Ego, and not to make the whole earth his own affair. Through the whole course of the Jupiter cycle man will have to experience that, for all that he has not permeated with Christ, during his earthly existence, will then pass before his spiritual sight.

Let us reflect from this point of view upon the words of Christ which sent His disciples out into the world to proclaim His Name, and in His Name to forgive sins. Why to forgive sins in His Name? Because the forgiveness of sins is connected with His Name. Sins can only be blotted out and transformed into living life if Christ can be united with our earth-relics, if during our earth-existence He is within us in the sense of the Pauline saying: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me.’

And wherever any religious confession, in its outer ceremonial associates itself with this saying of Christ in order to bring home to souls the meaning and significance of Christ, we must seek this deeper meaning in it. When in any form of religious confession, one of His servants speaks of the forgiveness of sins, by Christ's command, as it were, it means that he who with his words about the forgiveness of sins, forms a connection with the forgiveness of sins through Christ, says to the soul in need of comfort: ‘I have seen that thou hast developed a living relationship to Christ. Thou dost unite with objective sin and guilt, and with what as objective sin and guilt is to enter into thine Earth-relics, all that Christ is to thee. Because I have recognized that thou hast permeated thyself with the Christ—therefore I dare to say to thee: “Thy sins are forgiven thee.”‘

Such words always mean that he, who in any religious confession whatsoever, speaks of the forgiveness of sins, is convinced that the person in question has formed a connection with Christ, that he wants to bear Christ in his heart and in his soul. Because of this he is permitted to give comfort when the other comes to him conscious of his guilt. ‘Christ will forgive thee, and I dare to say unto thee that in His Name thy sins are forgiven thee.’ Christ is the only forgiver of sins because He is the bearer of sins. He is the Being Who gives life to human earth-relics, and a wonderful link with Him is created when those who want to serve Him can give comfort in the words: ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee’—to those who show that in their inner being they feel a union with Christ. For it is a fresh strengthening of the relationship to Christ when the soul realizes ‘I have taken such a view of my guilt and of my sins, that it might be said to me that Christ takes them upon Himself, works through them with His Being.’ If the expression ‘forgiveness of sins’ is to be an expression of a truth it must contain as an undertone that the sinner is reminded of his bond with Christ even if he does not form it anew. There must be so inward a bond between the soul and Christ that the soul cannot be reminded of it often enough. And because Christ is bound up with the objective sin and guilt of the human soul, the soul can best remind itself in daily life of its relation to Christ by reminding itself at the moment of the forgiveness of sins, of the existence of the cosmic Christ in the earth's being. Those who join Anthroposophy in the real spirit, and not merely in an external sense, can most assuredly become their own father-confessors. Through Spiritual Science they can learn to know Christ so intimately and feel themselves so closely connected with Him—that they can be directly conscious of His spiritual presence. And, when they have solemnly vowed themselves to Him as the Cosmic Principle, they can in spirit direct their confession to Him, and in their silent meditation ask from Him the forgiveness of sins. But so long as men have not yet permeated themselves with Spiritual Science in this deep spiritual sense, intelligent reference must be made to that which, as an external sign, is known in the various religions of the world as the ‘Forgiveness of Sins.’ Men will become spiritually freer and freer, and in this greater spiritual freedom their communion with Christ will become more and more a thing of direct experience.

And there must be tolerance I A man who thinks that, through the deep understanding which his innermost soul has of Christ—the Spirit of Golgotha—he can hold direct intercourse with the Christ, must look with understanding upon those who need the positive declarations of a confession of faith, and who need a minister of Christ to give them comfort with the words ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee.’ On the other side there should be tolerance on the part of those who see that there are men who can manage for themselves. This may be all an ideal in the Earth existence, but the anthroposophist, at all events, may look out to such an ideal.

I have spoken to you of spiritual secrets which reveal themselves, and which make it possible for men—even those, who have imbibed much spiritual teaching—to look still more deeply into the nature of our being. I have spoken to you of the overcoming of human egoism, and of those things which we must understand before we can have a right understanding of Karma. I have spoken to you of man in so far as he is not only an ‘I’ being, but belong to the whole earth-existence, and is called to help forward the attainment of the divine aim of the earth. Christ did not come into the world and pass through the Mystery of Golgotha in order that He might be something to each one of us in our egoism. It would be terrible if Christ were to be so understood in a sense that the expression of Paul. ‘Not I, but Christ in me’ should only encourage a higher egoism. Christ died for the whole of humanity, for the humanity of the earth. Christ became the central Spirit of the earth Who has to save, for the sake of the earth, the spiritual-earthly elements that flow from man.

Those who read theological works to-day can bear out what I now say. Certain theologians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries peremptorily disposed of the popular belief of the Middle Ages, that Christ came upon earth in order to snatch the earth from the devil, to snatch the earth from Lucifer. Within modern theology there is an ‘enlightened’ materialism which will not recognize itself as such, on the contrary it imagines itself to be very enlightened; it says: ‘In the dark Middle Ages people said that Christ appeared in the world because He had to snatch the earth away from the devil.’ But the true explanation leads us back to this simple, popular belief of the people. For everything on the earth which is not set free by Christ belongs to Lucifer. All that is human in us—all that is more than what is contained in our Ego, will be ennobled; it will be made fruitful for the whole of humanity when it is permeated with Christ.

And now at the end of what we have been considering during the last few days, I do not want to omit to say these words to each single one of the souls who have gathered together here: Hope and confidence in the future of the work in which we are engaged, can dwell in our hearts, because we have endeavored, from the very beginning, to fill what we had to say with the will of Christ. And in this hope and confidence it may be said that our teaching is itself what Christ wishes to say to us, in fulfillment of His words: ‘I am with you always even to the end of the earth-ages.’ We have wished to be mindful only of what comes from Him; and that which He has breathed into us, according to His promise, we want to take into ourselves as Spiritual Science. Not because we feel our Spiritual Science to be filled with an element of Christian dogmatism, do we consider it truly Christian, but because having Christ within us, it is really a revelation of the Christ. I am therefore also convinced that what takes root as true Spiritual Science in those souls which want to receive our Christ-filled Spiritual Science will be fruitful for the whole of humanity.

Clairvoyant investigation shows that much of what is good in a spiritual sense in our Movement proceeds from those who have taken our ‘Christian’ Spiritual Science into themselves, and who, after having passed through the gate of death, send down to us the fruits of this Christian Spiritual Science. The Christian Spiritual Science, which they have taken into themselves, and which they are now sending down to us from the spiritual worlds is already living in us. For they do not keep it merely for the sake of perfecting their own Karma. They can let it stream into those who want to receive it. Comfort and hope arise for our Spiritual Science when we know that our so-called ‘dead’ are working with us.

In the second lecture we spoke about these things in a certain connection. But to-day, when we have come to the close of this course, I should like to add a personal word.

Whilst I have been speaking to this Norrköping Branch of our Society I could not help being conscious of the spirit of one who was so closely connected with us here. It is really true to say that the spirit of Frau Danielsen like a ‘good angel’ looks on all that this Branch wants to undertake. Hers also was a ‘Christian spirit’ in the sense described, and the souls who knew her will never feel themselves separated from her. May that spirit hover as guardian-spirit over this Branch! Willingly will it do so if the souls that work in this Branch receive it. With these words, which I speak from the depths of my heart, I close these lectures, and I hope that we shall continue to work together on the spiritual path which we have entered.

In the course of years, considerations have been brought forward in the various groups in different lecture-cycles, for a great number of the anthroposophical friends sitting here, on the John Gospel, the Luke Gospel, the Matthew Gospel, and we have attempted in these considerations, on the three gospels, to let appear before our spiritual eye the great event of Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different sides, as it were, in three varying ways. And perhaps these considerations have proved adapted to lay in our souls the foundations for an ever-increasing valuation of this unique event. We have already pointed out how the reason why we have four gospels is to be sought essentially in the fact that the writers of the gospels, as inspired occultists, wanted to represent this great event each from his own side, just as one copies or photographs something external from one standpoint. And if one takes photographs of a thing from different sides, so through a combination of what results, through bringing them together before the soul, one can come to the true reality. Each of the evangelists really gives us opportunity to consider the great event of Palestine from one special side. From a side which we can call at the same time the opening of the highest human, occult and other aims, and beside this highest human principle, also taking into account the highest world principle—from this side it is the John Gospel which gives us an insight into the great event of Palestine.

The Luke Gospel opens for us an insight into the secrets, which hover round the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, of the Solomon and Nathan Jesus, up to the moment where the great inspiration of Jesus of Nazareth is replaced by the Christ.

The Matthew Gospel, for those who have heard the lecture-cycle on it, or have read it later, has to show how from the people of ancient Hebraism, from the folk-secrets of the Hebrew people, the physical principle of life (as it were) was prepared, in which the Christ-Principle should incarnate for three years.

In a certain connection it is again the Mark Gospel which can lead us into the highest summits of the anthroposophical, Christian method of observation, and through the Mark Gospel opportunity is given us to look into many things which should be imparted to us through the gospels, but are not brought near to us in such a way by the other evangelists. And I have laid on myself the task of saying a few words because opportunity offers itself today to speak of the Mark Gospel.

If we speak of this, we must be quite clear how necessary it is to look into many things for which the superficial world of the present has no real inclination. If one is to understand the Mark Gospel and all its depths, one must become acquainted with the quite different method of expression among men at the time when Christ Jesus walked on earth. Do not take it amiss, if I attempt to say to you what I really intend, through a distinct shading, a distinct twilight.

We express through speech what we want to say. And what lives in our soul should in a certain way be made obvious in the words of speech. In this method of expressing through speech what lives in our soul, the various epochs of human development are very different from each other. If we went back to the epoch of the old Hebrew evolution, to that wonderful method of expression which was still possible in the old Hebraic temple-speech, we should find quite another method of clothing the secrets of our soul in words, than people today have any idea of. When a word sounded in the old Hebraic speech—only the consonants were written, the vowels were then added—then there did not merely sound in this word what sounds in it today; a more or less abstract idea... but a whole world. Because of this, the vowels were not really written, because he who spoke gave out his most inner being just through his way of vocalising, whereas in the consonants, there lay more the description, the portraying of what is outside. One can say that when, e.g., an ancient Hebrew drew a “B”—what corresponds today with our “B”—he always felt something like a portraying of external relationships, of something which formed a warm, hut-like enclosure. The letter “B” always evoked the picture of something which, house-like, could surround a being. One could not utter the “B” without that living in the soul. And if one vocalised an “A,” one could not do it without something of strength, of force, even of radiating power, living within it. Thus the soul lived further. The soul-content worked outwards with the words, soared into space and into other souls. Thus speech was then a far more living affair. It entered far more into the secrets of existence than our speech.

That is the light which I wanted to place before you. And the shadows I must represent in contrast; that we in our time have become to a high degree in this connection pedants. Our languages only express abstractions, generalities. One does not even feel that any more. Speech only expresses now pedantry, fundamentally. How should this be different in an age when people even begin to manipulate it in literary fashion long before they have a spiritual content; in an age when such an infinite amount goes into the broad masses as print, when each one thinks he must write something, when everything becomes an object for writing. I have had to experience that even in the founding of our society, authors turned up from curiosity, who had the intention of being able to extract perhaps a novel out of the matter: why should not forms exist there which one can have on tap and retail in a public writing shop? Thus we must be quite clear that we have a speech which has become abstract, empty, pedantic—in contrast to the way in which one formerly conceived it as something holy, to which one felt the responsibility that GOD should speak from out of it. Hence it is so infinitely difficult to squeeze into modern words those great, tremendous facts, which are imparted to us and which sound to us, for instance, in the gospels. Why should the man of today not also believe that one can give everything in our speech? He cannot understand that our speech says something empty with what even the Greek speech still meant with a word. And if we read the Bible today, we read something which, compared with its original content, has been sifted once, twice, three times, but so sifted, that there remains not the best but always the worst. Therefore it is naturally cheap in a certain way to appeal to the modern words of the Bible. But we go astray most of all if we appeal to the Bible in the case of the Mark Gospel, as it lies before us today. In any case we must not do that.

Now you know that the Mark Gospel had in its first lines as its basis the words which the translation by Weizsacker, regarded as exceptionally good (but it is conceivable that what is regarded today as so excellent, need not be so really), renders as follows: “As stands written in the prophet Isaiah; Behold, I send my messenger before thee, who shall prepare the way for thee; listen how it calls in the wilderness; prepare the way of the Lord; make straight his paths.”

Honest people must really say to themselves, if the Mark Gospel begins thus in this Weizsacker: I do not understand a single word of it all. Whoever will understand it must really resolve to do something. Whoever goes sincerely to work, cannot understand anything when it is said: “Behold, I send my messenger before thee, who shall prepare the way for thee; listen how it calls in the wilderness; prepare the way of the lord; make straight his paths.” For either a triviality is uttered, or something is said which one cannot understand. One must first bring together those ideas which make it possible to understand such an utterance as that of Isaiah's here. For Isaiah points to that great, mighty event, which should be the most significant event in human evolution. What is he really pointing to? Now from what we have already described, we can well indicate what Isaiah predicted. We can indicate it by saying: In ancient times, man had a kind of clairvoyance; he had the possibility of growing with his soul-forces into the divine spiritual world. What really happened with man when he grew thus into the divine spiritual world? Then it was the case that when he grew into the divine spiritual world he ceased to employ his Ego, so far as it was developed at that time. He used his astral body, in which were those forces which were the forces of vision, of seership, whereas all the forces rooted in the Ego were gradually awakened through the perception of the physical world. It is the Ego which employs the instruments of the senses. The ancient human being, however, when he sought illumination about the world, employed his astral body. The ancient human being saw, perceived in the astral body. Further evolution consisted in this, that the transition was found from the astral body to the use of the Ego. With reference to this Ego, the Christ-Impulse had to be the most intense impulse. If, now, the Christ is taken up into the Ego so that the phrase of Paul is true, “Not I, but the Christ in me,” then the Ego has the power of growing into the spiritual world through itself. Formerly, only the astral body could do this.

Thus we have an evolution of humanity before us of which we can say: Man employed his astral body as organ of knowledge, but he lost more and more the possibility of developing an organ of knowledge in his astral body. And the more one approached the Christ Event, that stage of evolution arose of which man must say: My astral body has less and less the possibility of looking into the spiritual world. Nothing arose through its union with the spiritual world, and the Ego was not yet forceful enough to get, from its side, any illumination from the world. That was the age when the Christ drew near.

Now in the real evolution of mankind, it is a question of certain great strides being gradually prepared, which then occur. This was the case with the Christ-Impulse. But a transition had to exist. Things could not so run their course that man saw how his astral body gradually became dull towards the spiritual world, so that he would have felt utter barrenness and desolation in himself, until the Ego was kindled through the Christ-Impulse. Things could not take this course. But in the case of a few it happened through an especial influence from the spiritual world, they saw something already in the astral body similar to the way one should later see and know through the Ego: The egoity (Ego-hood) was, as it were, prepared in the astral body. That was an anticipation of the egoity in the astral body. Man indeed first became earthly man through the Ego and its development. The astral body really belonged to the ancient moon. At that time, the angel, the angel-man, was at the human stage. The angel was man on the old moon. Man is man on the earth. We know that. On the old moon, it was man's task to use his astral body. Everything else was only preparation for the Ego-evolution. The beginning of our earth evolution was a repetition of the moon evolution. For man could never become fully man in the astral body; but on the moon, only the angel could become man in the astral body. Therefore—just as in the earth-man the Christ lived in order to inspire the Ego—so for the preparation of this Ego-hood the possibility had to be given, that from the angels of the moon—from the moon-men, the angels—prophets were so inspired in their human astral body, that the Ego could be prepared. There had thus to occur what a prophet could have characterised in the following way: There will come in human evolution a time when man will be ripe for the ego-evolution. In the astral body only the angels of the moon have raised themselves to the highest. But in order that man can be prepared for this egoity, certain human beings must be so inspired on earth, through grace, in exceptional conditions, that they work as angels, in spite of their being human; that they are angels in human form.

Here we come to an important occult idea, without which you cannot understand at all the evolution of humanity in the sense of occultism. Externally uttered, it is naturally easy if one simply says that all is Maya. Well, all right. But that is an abstraction. One must really take it earnestly. Therefore one must be able to say: There stands a man before me... that, however, is Maya! Who knows... is that, anyhow, a man? Perhaps the human existence is but the external veil, employed by quite another being than man is, just to bring about something which cannot yet be effected by man. I have indicated something of this in my Portal of Initiation.

In ancient times, such an event was actualised for humanity, when that individuality who lived in Elias was reborn in John the Baptist, and when, in the soul of John the Baptist, an angel entered for that incarnation, and employed the corporality, and also the soul-nature of John the Baptist, in order to effect what no human being would have been able to bring about. In John lived an angel, an angel who had to go before, and announce before, that which should live in Jesus of Nazareth, in the widest sense, as true Ego-hood [Ichheit]. It is extremely important to know that John the Baptist is a Maya (illusion), and in him there lives an angel, a messenger. This stands also in the Greek: “Behold, I send my messenger = Angel.” The German alone thinks no more of this, that in the Greek “Angel” stands in this place. “Behold I send my angel before him.” And so there is indicated a deep world-mystery which, preceded with the Baptist, was prophesied by Isaiah. He characterises John the Baptist as a Maya, as an illusion, he who in truth comprises the angel, who, as angel, has to announce what man really should become through the reception of the Christ-Impulse—because the angel has to announce beforehand—what man only later has to become. And so, at this place, there should be said: “Behold, that which gives the egoity to the world, sends the angel before thee, to whom the egoity should be given.”

Now we pass to the third sentence. What does it signify? Here one must call to mind the whole historic world-situation. How had things become in the human breast, since the astral body had gradually lost the power of stretching out its forces like tentacles, to look clairvoyantly into the divine spiritual world? Formerly, when the astral body was put in activity, it could see in the divine spiritual world. This possibility disappeared more and more, and it became dark in man. Man could formerly spread out his astral body over all the beings of the divine spiritual world. Now he was alone in himself—alone is the same as eremos [Greek ernmos] That which the soul was now, lived in the solitude. That also stands there in the Greek text: Behold, how it appears, how it there speaks in the solitude of the soul (or you could say “in the wilderness of the soul “)—when the astral body could no more spread itself out to the divine spiritual world. Give heed how it calls in thy soul-wilderness, in thy soul-loneliness.

What is it that announces itself beforehand? Here we must be clear as to the meaning of one quite definite word, when one uses it of soul-phenomena, or of spiritual phenomena in general, above all in the Hebrew, but also in the Greek: the word Kyrios. If one translates it by “the lord,” as generally happens, then one is translating truly absolute nonsense. What is meant by it? Everybody in ancient times, who had such an utterance on his tongue, knew that something was meant thereby which was connected with the soul-progress of the human race. He knew, therefore, that the word “Kyrios” pointed, indeed, to secrets of soul. We have in the soul, when we look to the astral body, various forces. We usually call them thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul thinks, feels, and wills. Those are the three forces that work in the soul. But they are the serving forces of the soul. As man progressed in evolution, these forces which formerly were the lords, to whom man was given over—(man had to wait whether his thinking, feeling, willing was called)—these single soul forces became subject to the Kyrios, the Lord of the soul forces, the “I.” Nothing else was understood by this word, when it referred to the soul, than the “I,” though it no longer held in the old sense: the divine spiritual thinks, feels, wills in me, but I think, I feel, I will: The Lord makes itself valid in the soul forces. Prepare yourselves, ye human souls, to go such soul paths, that ye let the strong “I” awaken in your souls: Kyrios, the Lord in your souls. “Listen, how it calls in the solitude of soul. Prepare the force or the direction of the soul—Lord, of the I. Make open his forces!” Thus one must translate it, approximately. “Make its forces open, so that it can come in, so that it is not the slave of thinking, feeling, and willing.” And if you translate these words: “Behold, that which is the ego, sends its angel before thee, who should give thee the possibility to understand how it calls in the solitude of the astral soul: prepare the directions of the I, make the forces open for it, for the I,” then you have a meaning in these significant words of the prophet Isaiah; then you have an indication of the greatest event in human evolution; thus you understand from this how Isaiah speaks of John the Baptist, how he points out thereby that man's soul-solitude longs for the approach of the Lord in the soul, of the “I.” Then the words get force and weight. Thus, we must grasp such words.

Why could John the Baptist be the bearer of the angel? He could be this, because he had had a quite special initiation, The various initiations are specialised. These initiations are not something general; they are specialised. With those individualities who have a quite special task, an initiation had to occur according to a quite special kind of secret. Now for everything which happens at all in the spiritual world, it is so provided that there is revealed in the heavens, in the starry script what spiritual facts there are. One can receive the sun-initiation, that means, enter the secrets of the spiritual world, which is the world of Ahura Mazdao, for which the sun is the external expression. But one can be initiated into the sun secrets in a twelve-fold way, and each initiation is in a certain connection a Sun-Initiation, but yet is differently constituted with reference to the other eleven. According as man has this or the other task for the whole of mankind, he receives a sun-initiation of which one can say: This is a sun-initiation but such that one must express by saying: The forces flow in so that the sun stands in the sign of Cancer. That is different from the initiation one receives which one must express by saying: The forces flow in as if the sun stands in the sign of the Balance or Scales. They are the expressions for different specialised initiations. And those individualities who have such a high task, a high mission, as characterised here for John the Baptist, they must be initiated in a quite special manner in a special initiation, because only from this can they get the strong force necessary to bring about this mission in the world, also, under conditions in a quite one-sided way. And so, John the Baptist, in order that he could become the bearer of the Angelos, had that sun-initiation, which one can call the initiation from the sign of the Waterman. As the sun stands in the sign of the Waterman, that is a symbol for that kind of initiation which John the Baptist received, in order to become the bearer of the angel, while he received the force of the sun, as it flows down when it stands in the sign of the Waterman, when it stands in such a relation to the other stars, that one designates it with the expression: It stands in the sign of the Waterman. That was the symbol that John had the Waterman-initiation. The sign indeed received this name Waterman, because he who had the Waterman-initiation received especially the power as a spiritual initiate, of effecting in human beings what John effected as the Waterman, as the Baptist: namely, to bring human beings to this, that with the immersion in water, they got their etheric bodies so free, that they came to such a self-knowledge, which made possible what was the most important thing at the time. Human beings were immersed, and the etheric body became free for a moment. Through the baptism in the Jordan, man could feel the quite especial importance of the world-historic epoch. Therefore John was initiated just in the Baptism Initiation. And because one must express that symbolically, with the flowing-down of the sunrays out of the sign in which the sun stands, so one called this sign also—the Waterman. Thus the name of the human power is carried over.

Today a whole number of learned ignoramuses make the attempt to interpret spiritual events by bringing down the heaven, as it were, to the earth. They say: Now, that signifies the prominence of the sun. All these learned people, who really do not know much, interpret human events from out of the heavens. The reverse was the case. What lives in man spiritually was carried over to the heavens, while one made use of the heavens as a means of expression. So that John the Baptist could say: I am he who baptises you with water. And that was the same as if he had said: I am endowed with the initiation of the Waterman. I baptise you with water, I am endowed with the initiation of the Waterman. That was the word which John would have been able to say to his intimate disciples. And just as the sun progresses in opposition to its sense-path: if you proceed in opposition to Waterman, there arises—Virgin; then it passes to Balance. If we have initiation in mind, we must consider the opposite path, on the other side: from Waterman to Fishes. Thus John could say: Something will come that no longer has to work as corresponds to the sun from out of the Waterman, but as corresponds to the working of the sun from out of the Fishes. One will come who will bring a higher baptism. When the spiritual sun mounts higher, then there arises from the Waterman-baptism, the baptism from spiritual water. The sun ascends in spirit from Waterman to the Fishes: hence the well-known fish-symbol for the bearer of the Christ, which is an ancient symbol. For just as in John through quite special spiritual influences a Waterman initiation took place, so the initiation, of which I have spoken here and there to you, which arose through all mysteries in a secret way which transpired around Jesus, a Fish-initiation—a progression of the sun by one constellation. That was what placed Jesus of Nazareth in his age, that he was first subject to a Fish-initiation.

This is, one might say, sufficiently indicated to us in the gospel of Mark. Yet such things can only be indicated in image form. Christ Jesus draws together all those who are seeking fish. Therefore all his first apostles are fishermen. And we can find obvious what I have said—the progress to the Fishes, when we are told: I have baptised you with water. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit. And as he drew to the sea of Galilee—that means, when the sun was so far advanced, that one could see its counterpart from the Fishes—those are inspired who were called Simon, and Simon's brother, James, and James' brother, fishers—they are inspired in the corresponding way. How can we understand all that? We cannot understand it, unless we enter a little more closely into the means of expression of that time.

Our modern means of expression is pedantic. If a man stands before us, we say: there is a man. If a second stands before us, we say again: there is a man. A third—another one, etc. But we have merely Maya before us. If a being has two legs, and a human countenance, then in our pedantic way of expression we have but the one word: there is a man. But what is a man for occultism? Nothing but Maya! Really, as he stands there before us, man is—nothing. He is about as much as the rainbow which stands in the sky. How long is this anything? Only so long as the necessary conditions are given between rain and sunshine. If the sun and rain alter their relationship, it is gone. It is just the same with man. He is only a streaming together of forces of the macrocosm. We must seek the forces in heaven, here or there in the macrocosm. There, where one assumes perhaps a man somewhere on the earth, there is nothing for the occultist. But forces are streaming from above down, from below up, and they intersect. And as the peculiar constellation of rain and sunshine results in the rainbow, so forces streaming out of the macrocosm from above and below result in a phenomenon, and this appears as man. That is the man. Man is nothing as he stands before us. In truth, he is a schema, a Maya, an illusion. It is the cosmic forces which are real, which intersect there where our eyes think they see a man. Just try and take this expression earnestly: Man is nothing as he stands before us. He is but the shadow of many forces. The being, however, who reveals itself in man, can quite well be elsewhere, than at that point where this man is walking on two legs. There are three men: The one is an ancient Persian, who works at the plough in the old Persian agriculture. He looks like a man—in truth he is one of the souls, who are nourishing their forces out of this or that world from below or above. The second is perhaps an old Persian official. He is built through forces from another world which intersect in him. If we will know him, we must mount to these forces. All of you, as you are sitting here, are in your reality quite somewhere else. Only the forces from your own real being ray here.... Then stood a third Persian there, of whom one had to say: He is really utter deception—he is utterly a schema, which stands there. What was there in reality? One must go up to the sun, there are the forces which nourished this model. There above, among the secrets of the sun, one finds that which one can call the Gold Star—Zarathustra; that sends the rays down, and here below stands a model, which one calls Zarathustra. In truth, his being is not there at all. That is the third.

Now it is important that in ancient times one was aware of what was meant by such designations. One did not give names as one does today, but one named people according to what lived in them, not according to their external illusory appearance. We must be quite clear of this. So that one should have been able to say: An ancient human being at the time of Christ should have well understood when one pointed to John the Baptist, and said: Here is the angel of God. One would only have heeded that which had taken up the place. One spoke of the chief matter, not of the subsidiary ones. Now let us assume the same mode of expression was applied to Christ Jesus Himself. How must one have spoken of Christ Jesus if one understood such things? No man at that time would even have dreamt of naming that which then wandered over the earth, this wandering body in flesh, the Christ Jesus; but that was the sign, that what streamed down spiritually from out of the sun, was caught up in this point in a quite special manner. If this body, which was the body of Jesus, went from one place to another, that was the rendering visible of the sun-force which went from one place to another. This sun-force could also go alone. At times the expression was so used, that Christ Jesus was in his home in the flesh, but what was in him moved further, even without his body. Especially in the John Gospel the expression is so used, that under conditions, when this being moved purely spiritually, the writer of the gospel speaks quite exactly as if this sun-force dwelt in a fleshly body. Hence it is so important that the deeds of Christ Jesus are always brought into connection with the physical sun, which is the external expression for the spiritual world, which has been collected, been caught up, at that point where the fleshly body wanders. If thus the Christ Jesus heals, for instance, then it is the sun-force which heals there. This must stand, however, at the right place in the heavens. “When evening was come, as the sun went down, they brought to him all who were sick, diseased, etc.” It is important that one indicates that this healing power can flow down when the external sun has set, when the sun only still works spiritually. And as He needs a definite force in order to work, he had to take this out of the spiritual sun, not out of the physical visible sun. “And early in the morning, while it was still dark, he arose and went out.” The path of the sun, and the sun-force is expressly indicated to us: that this sun-force works, and that fundamentally Jesus is only the external sign: that this path of the sun-force could also be visible to the weak external eyes. And everywhere in the Mark Gospel where we have mention of the Christ, the sun-force is meant, which for that epoch of our earthly evolution was quite especially active on that part of the earth called Palestine. And one could see the sun-force. “At this or that time, Christ went from this place to that place.” One could just as well say: “At this time, the spiritual force of the sun, as if gathered into a focus, went from this to that place,” And the body of Jesus was the external sign which made visible to the eyes how the sun-force moved. The paths of Jesus in Palestine were the paths of the sun-force come down to earth. And if you draw the steps of Jesus as on a special map, then you have a cosmic event; the working of the sun-force out of the macrocosm in the land of Palestine. It is a question of this macrocosmic event. It is especially the writer of the Mark Gospel who points this to us; the writer of the Mark Gospel, who well knew that a body, which was the vehicle of such a principle as the Christ-Principle, must be subdued in a quite special way by his principle. It was the pointing to that world which Zarathustra had so powerfully announced behind the world of sense, the pointing to that world as it works into the human world. And so now there was indicated through Christ Jesus how the forces work on into the earth. Therefore a kind of repetition of the Zarathustra-events must occur in that body which, as we have seen, even if it was the body of the Nathan Jesus, was in a certain way influenced by the Zarathustra Individuality.

Now let us hear the great, beautiful legends of Zarathustra. As his mother gave him birth, the first wonder of Zarathustra showed itself as the famous Zarathustra smile. The second wonder was when the king of the district where Zarathustra was born, Durasrav, resolved to murder Zarathustra, of whom the decadent magicians had said special things. As the king appeared to stab the child, his arm was paralysed. That was the second miracle after the birth of Zarathustra. And then, the king who could not use his dagger against Zarathustra, had the child taken among the wild beasts of the desert. That is the expression for the fact that in earliest childhood, Zarathustra had to see what man sees when he appears impure. Instead of the noble group-souls, and the noble, higher spiritual beings, he sees the outflow of his wild fantasy. That is the exposure in the desert to the wild animals, among which Zarathustra remains unharmed. That is the third miracle. The fourth was again a miracle among the wild animals, etc. Always it was the good spirit of Ahura Mazdao who served Zarathustra.

We find these wonders again in the Mark Gospel repeated: “And then the Spirit drove him into the wilderness—(really it means solitude)—for forty days... and the angels ministered unto him.” Here we are shown that the body was prepared to take up, as it were, in a focus, that which transpired in the macrocosm. What happened with Zarathustra must happen again; being led to the wild beasts.... This body took up what came in from out of the macrocosm.

The Mark Gospel already in its first lines places us within the greatest cosmic connections. And I wanted to show you how basically, if one but first understands the words in the right sense—not as in our modern pedantic speech, but as in the ancient speech, where each word had living worlds behind it—when one understands it in the sense of this ancient speech, how then the Mark Gospel gets new life, new force. But one must say: Our modern speech can only find what was already laid in the words in these ancient speeches, after much paraphrase. What we utter when we say: “Man lives on the earth and develops his ego. Man formerly lived on the moon, then it was the angels who went through their human stage.” All of that lies behind, when it runs: “Behold, I send my angel before man.” And the words are not to be understood, without the presupposition of what is offered in spiritual science. And people in the present should be sincere, and say of the words at the beginning of the Mark Gospel: That is incomprehensible. Instead of doing this, they stand there in petty pride and explain spiritual science as fantasy, which puts all kinds of things into what they know in a simple way. But these people of today do not know it at all. And today one no longer has the principle that one had, for instance, in ancient Persia, where from epoch to epoch, the ancient holy documents were rewritten, in order to be clothed anew for each epoch. Thus the divine spiritual word as Zend-Avesta was transformed, and again transformed, and what exists today is the last form. Seven times the Persian Bible was written anew. And anthroposophy should teach men how necessary it is that books in which the holy secrets are written must be transformed from age to age. For especially when one will preserve the mighty style of old, one may not as it were attempt to remain as much as possible with the old words. One cannot do it, one understands them no more, but one must attempt to transform the ancient words into a direct understanding of the present. We have tried this summer to do that with Genesis.¹ You saw, then, how many of the words must be transformed. You have perhaps today got a little idea of how the words must also be transformed in the Gospel of Mark.

• 1. Secrets of Creation. A series of lectures on the Book of Genesis delivered by the author at Munich, August, 1910, now out of print, but to be reprinted shortly in a second and revised edition.

In the gathering held here just after the Christmas Course we turned our attention to things that can deepen medicine in an esoteric sense. And we tried—to the extent to which this is possible in such brief meetings—to penetrate into the esotericism of medicine, in the way that is suitable for younger medical aspirants today. In formulae for further contemplation and elaboration, we received things that can quicken the sense for medicine and emphasis was laid upon the necessity of having this sense for medicine.

I picture to myself that you have worked upon these things for a time, my dear friends. Naturally, my idea of this work is not that people sit down and ponder about such things theoretically, but that from time to time, when the inner need is felt, they let these things work upon and develop the soul. It was inevitable, from the very way in which these things came before us, that one perfectly definite fact should emerge—a fact which I believe to be of importance for our gathering now. Because of the very concentrated form in which the esoteric things were given at the first gathering, one or another, to a greater or lesser degree, must have realized that it was necessary to face certain inner difficulties. The purpose of esoteric teachings is not always to make life as easy as possible for us. In a certain respect the opposite is certainly the case. They are also there in order to make life more difficult, to make us realize the difficulties of understanding the world, of really getting to know the world and human beings. So that when we become alive to these difficulties, we take the opposite path of development from that which is so often taken in our civilization today. We take the opposite to a superficial path of development. It is only by becoming alive to the difficulties existing as between the outside world and the human being that a person can be deepened in soul. I think, therefore, the best way now will be if, bearing these inner difficulties in mind, you will bring them forward in the form of questions and we will then make matters that can really promote the development of our subject into the theme of our discussions. I would ask you, to begin with, to tell me what inner and outer difficulties have arisen in your own circle. Difficulties will have arisen both for the practitioner and for the student. There are a number among you who are now approaching the end of their studies; they will have found quite specific difficulties and we will try to find their solution. All of you have received the first circular letter and you will have realized that in connection with definite questions there is a very great deal to say. I would like to ask if any question, definite or indefinite, has arisen, for such questions will surely lead us further. In this way we shall get away more from theoretical study and reach matters which lie in the realm of actual experience.

Question: A participant asked about the course of the year, the Calendar of the Soul, definite constellations of the stars and whether one must be consciously aware of these.

That is not essential. You mean observation of the constellations as they are at a particular time. It is, of course, a help if one is able to look at the visible constellations. But if I have understood you aright you mean: How are things, really, if we allow the formulae we have been given to work upon the soul? These things work through their own inherent mantric power; orientation in the outer world according to the stars can, of course, be a help but you must remember the following. Take the most striking example of a human-cosmic relationship that can still be observed today, namely the menses. It is obvious that they are determined cosmically yet they are not so determined in the present epoch. They were cosmically determined in a much earlier phase of cosmic evolution in which our earth was also involved. Then, in the course of time, they became independent, were emancipated from the external cosmos, so that nowadays there is no direct dependence. Therefore, one cannot say nowadays that the phases of the moon are coincident with menstruation. This cannot be said. But it is certainly true to say that there was once a time when the one coincided with the other; then they separated. The moon phases exist on their own. Menstruation takes its own independent course. Here is one example of separation. The other that I will mention is not governed by the phases of the moon but by the daily phases of the moon. Ebb and flow were once coincident with certain influences of the moon. Again there was separation. The moon is on its own, ebb and flow on their own.

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These things also hold good in the working of mantric power. Mantric power is certainly of such a nature that what happens in the human being as a result of it was at one time coincident with cosmic processes, but separation has now taken place, so that a proper orientation is necessary. If we want this help from the outside world we must say to ourselves first of all: What is to happen in the inner being is inscribed in the cosmos. But in contemplating this we must make ourselves inwardly independent and be able to experience inwardly and quite on our own, emancipated from the cosmic happenings. Therefore it is not unconditionally necessary to reckon with the constellations of the stars in the working of a mantram. Equally it cannot be a question of the menses being regulated according to the external phases of the moon, because the menses have become a process of the world of nature. Today it is the case that the whole of our inner life that is to be influenced by mantrams must take place in emancipation from the outer cosmos.

In connection with other subjects I have often had to speak of this as the difference between Eastern and Western esotericism. The whole standpoint of the oriental is this: the human being has come forth from the cosmos, he must return there, he must be united with the cosmos again. Think of the posture of the Buddha. It is a return to earlier conditions. This is shown by the Buddha's whole posture, the crossing of the legs one over the other, the elimination of the limb structures. The position of the arms, too, is such that the whole relationship to the earth is paralyzed. We see how the human being again members himself into the cosmos. He goes back again. So it is, in reality, with the whole of Eastern esotericism. It is a going backwards. Our Western esotericism can only be a going forward, an ever-increasing emancipation. For this reason it is not so inwardly comfortable and when applied in certain domains particularly it does not make for inner ease.

Of course, if you have some specific, pathological condition before you, and when you look at the constellations you find, for example, that the condition definitely set in when Saturn was in opposition to the moon, this naturally has a certain significance. For if you now come as a healer with Saturn and moon, that is to say, in earthly terms, with lead and silver, saying: I will apply the lead cosmically and the silver in the earthly form, trying to pulverize it, to dissolve it; I will change it into the earthly form, thereby producing the same constellation that is expressed in the heavens in the opposition to the moon, then you can heal in the sense of the cosmic forces. But at the same time you bring the human being into a condition which throws him back into earlier stages of evolution. Whereas if you take your start directly from the given earthly state—the connection of the human being with lead, with silver—then you are working in something that is in a process of emancipating itself within the human being and you are looking not into the past but into the future. In this case you will certainly be doing something similar, but you get at it from within, by getting to know the nature of the lead and the silver, realizing that the lead works as substance, the silver through what it actually becomes when it is broken into pieces, dissolved, resolved into atoms. But you are comparing it with the human nature that is already emancipated, not with the cosmos. This is the way in which one must proceed. Therefore it may certainly be a help to think about the actual constellations of the stars. But to begin with, we shall have to use all our power to lend ourselves to the inner activation of soul by the mantric formulae we have been given, and seek for everything more from within.

Question: What must I do out of the ego when I am meditating?

From out of the ego? Meditation consists, does it not, in the following. As a modern person you feel that you must understand every sentence. This is emphatically an activity of the ego in the present incarnation. Everything you do intellectually is an activity of the ego. In the present incarnation the intellect predominates and everything else is overshadowed by the ego, works upwards at the most like a dream, and is unconscious. In contrast with this, meditation means elimination of this intellectual striving and, to begin with, taking the content of the meditation just as it is given—purely according to the sounds of the words. When you approach the content of the meditation intellectually you bring your ego into movement before you absorb the meditation, for you think about the content; it is outside you. If you let the meditation be present in your consciousness just exactly as it is given, not cogitating over it at all but simply letting it be in your consciousness, then your ego is working in you not from the present incarnation but from the past. You hold the intellect still, simply transporting yourself into the word-content which you hear inwardly, not outwardly; you transport yourself into this word-content and as you do so your inner being works within the content of the meditation—the inner being which is not that of the present incarnation. But thereby the content of meditation becomes—not something for you to understand merely—but something that works within you in reality; so that finally you become aware of: Now I have experienced something I was unaware of earlier.

Take a simple meditation which I have often given: “Wisdom lives in the Light.” If we think about this we can extract many very clever things but equally frightfully stupid things from it. “Wisdom lives in the Light” is there in order to be heard inwardly. When you hear this inwardly that within you which listens does not come from your present incarnation but what you have brought with you from former earthly lives. It is this that thinks and experiences, and after some time there lights up within you something you did not know before, that you cannot think out with your own intellect. Inwardly you are much further than your intellect. Your intellect contains only a tiny extract of what is really there.

After all, you must take what is given in Anthroposophy absolutely concretely and objectively. Just think about the following: With the change of teeth the human being really renews his whole physical body. This must be taken as a fundamental fact. That the human being gets second teeth is really only the most external symptom of all, merely, a fragment of what is going on. Just as the so-called milk teeth are replaced, so is the whole human organism replaced. After the change of teeth, so far as his physical substance is

concerned, the human being is entirely new in comparison to what he was when he was born. The modern view which jumbles everything together is that the human being is born, passes through a metamorphosis with the change of teeth and then goes on developing. It is not like this. The truth is that when the human being comes physically into the world he has, as well as the so-called milk teeth, a body that is a product of hereditary development. He has received a body that is the product of what is contained in the whole line of ancestry. The physical body of the first seven years—if we express it in figures—comes from here. From the seventh to the fourteenth year the human being has a body, too, but this body has not been produced from the first by transformation. What the human being has brought with him to the earth has intervened here.

Picture it as follows: the human being has had his body. This body which has come to him from the line of heredity is a model; he has it as a model. Into this body he takes earthly substance. If he were to work only with the forces he brings with him from pre-earthly existence he would elaborate this earthly substance which he takes into his body in the first seven years into quite a different form. He would call forth quite a different form. He does not come at birth with the tendency to give form to a being with eyes, ears, nose, like the being who stands on the earth. He enters with the tendency to structure the human being in such a way that very little is structured by way of the head through his pre-earthly being; it is especially upon everything else that the greatest care is expended. What is stunted in the embryonic life is developed in the astral, in the ego organization. Of the physical embryo, therefore, we must say: Physical nature in the embryo is developed in a wonderful way but the pre-earthly human being has very little indeed to do with it. On the other hand the pre-earthly human being plays the very greatest part in all that lies around the embryo. It lives in what is demolished in the physical world, amnion, chorion, and so on. Within this lives the pre-earthly man.

You can picture it rather like this. To begin with, the cosmos is copied. This is what the human being wants, in reality, to do when he has come down from the pre-earthly into earthly existence. Why does he not do it? Because a model is already provided. And in accordance with this model, with the substances received, he transforms the pre-earthly during the first seven years of life. His inherent tendency would be to form a more spherical being, a being organized into a sphere. This is transformed in accordance with the model and so the pre-earthly forces work out this second physical man who is there from the seventh to the fourteenth years, but to begin with, by adhering to the model which comes from the forces of heredity.

There, you see, you have two, actually distinguishable entities of forces in the human being. How can you understand these force entities? Take, with the outlook and feeling of the physician, the book Occult Science and read where the earth's evolution is spoken of. At first there is a Saturn evolution, then a Sun evolution. If you follow the description of the Earth evolution you will find that until the separation of the sun, sun, moon and earth were one, combined together in one. Afterwards there is a separation of earth and sun, earth and moon. Up to the middle of this evolution, therefore, the human being lives in the cosmos. He lives in sun and moon just as he lives in the earth. After the separation of the sun he lives outside the sun; after the separation of the moon, outside the moon. Until the separation of the sun, therefore, the cosmic forces were working upon man's nature; those forces, too, which are today outside the earth in the moon and in the sun were working in the human being because he belonged to the world in which the sun and moon were still present. There followed for the human being an evolution during which sun and moon were outside.

There was a phase of evolution which contained within it all that today is both earthly and of the nature of sun and moon; later on, the extra-earthly emancipated itself from the earthly. The earthly went on along its own path, it dried up, hardened, became physical—and you find this today in the stream of heredity; it has densified within the stream of heredity. What the human being has received since the separation of the moon and sun lies in the forces working in from the cosmos. That is the point. So that in the model that is received in order that the second man may be elaborated, you have a model that really represents a primeval, artistic principle given by father and mother, originating when sun and moon were still united with the earth. It was then that the forces which really give the human being his earthly configuration were developed. For you will readily understand that the configuration of the human being is an earthly one. Try to think of the being of man entirely removed from the earth. What could be done with it? You would be extremely unhappy if after death you were to make use of anything like legs. Legs have purpose only when the earth's forces of attraction pass through them, when the legs are within the sphere of the earth's forces of attraction. Legs—and arms and hands, too—have meaning and purpose only on the earth. So that a whole section of the human organism, in the way it is developed, has purpose only when we are earthly man. What we are as Earthly man has no meaning so far as the cosmos is concerned. Therefore when we come to the earth as beings of spirit and soul, our wish, to begin with, is to form quite a different organization. We want to build a sphere and to generate all kinds of configurations within this sphere, but we have no wish for this being with whom the cosmos itself can do nothing. This being is given us as a model and we build up the second man in accordance with this model.

In the first life-period, therefore, there is a perpetual struggle between what comes from us out of the previous incarnation and what comes from hereditary development; the two elements fight with each other. The illnesses of childhood are the expression of this fight. Just think how intimately the whole inner being of soul and spirit is bound up with the physical organization during early childhood. When the second teeth appear you can see how they push up against the first, how they still have tussles with each other, and in this same way the whole second man has tussles with the first. But within the second man there is the super-earthly being; in the first a foreign, earthly model. These two work into one another and if you observe this inter-working truly you can see how, if the inner man, who as a being of soul and spirit was present in pre-earthly existence, has too much the upper hand for a time, working into the physical very strongly and having, willy nilly, to adjust itself by dint of effort to the model, that it damages the model by striking up against it everywhere, saying: I want to get this particular form out of you—then the fight expresses itself as scarlet fever. If the inner man is tender, so that there is a continual shrinking back, a wish to mold the in-taken substances more in accordance with their own nature, and resistance is put up to the model, the struggle comes out as measles. What is, in reality, a mutual struggle expresses itself in the illnesses of childhood. Moreover, it is only possible to understand truly what comes later if these things can be properly reckoned with.

It is, of course, very easy for the materialists to say that all this is stupid, because children still retain a likeness to their parents after the change of teeth and not only up till that time. Such talk is nonsense. The fact is that one being is weaker, directs himself more in accordance with the forces of heredity, builds up the second man with a greater resemblance to the model. This naturally comes out in the appearance, but the same thing has been going on when the being has adjusted itself more in accordance with the model. On the other hand, there are human beings who after the change of teeth become very unlike what they were before. In such cases what comes from the pre-earthly life of soul and spirit is strong and they adhere less to the model. We have therefore simply to see these things in their right connection.

The following, too, must be remembered. Everything that has to be taken in must, in the first place, be taken in by the child and elaborated inwardly in such a way that the ego and astral body enter into intimate contact with the foodstuffs. Later on this need not be the case any longer. The human being is never afterwards in the position of being so strongly compelled to work out, according to a model, something that is independent as is the case during the first seven years of life. During those years he must work up in his ego and astral body everything he takes in; he must work it up in such a way that it can be molded in accordance with the model. This process must be helped; and the world has arranged for it, inasmuch as milk is able to bear a very great resemblance indeed to an etheric structure. Milk is a substance which really still has an etheric body and because this substance, when it is taken by the child, still works up into the etheric, the astral body is able at once to take hold of the milk and then there can arise the close inner contact between what is thus taken in and the astral body and ego organization. For this reason there is an inward, intimate connection in the child between the external foodstuffs and the inner organization of spirit and soul.

In the whole way in which the child drinks milk you can actually see how his astral body and his ego are taking hold of the milk you can see it with your very eyes. And now, as a physician, you must realize the remarkable process of working up what is going on. On the one side, meditate in mantrams, letting the mantram work upon you, freeing your forces of soul on the one hand; and on the other hand, meditate simply upon the child. Picture to yourself how the being of spirit and soul comes down and makes its way to the physical foodstuff, ignoring the model to begin with, and then picture what is going on between the being of spirit and soul and the foodstuff—a process that is now directed in accordance with the forms contained in the model. If you form a true picture of an excessively strong working of the spirit and soul, the picture crystallizes into that of scarlet fever. A picture of a too feeble working of the spirit and soul which wavers in the face of the model and becomes the picture of measles.If you picture these things in meditation you carry over ordinary meditation into medical meditation. It is dreadful that people today want to grasp everything with the intellect. In medicine really nothing can be grasped with the intellect. With the intellect one could at the very most grasp the diseases of the minerals—and there it is not a question of curing. Everything medical must be grasped by direct perception and the faculty for this has to be developed.

You cannot notice this process in a grown-up person. The digestive tract takes over the foodstuffs—it is a process transacted inwardly; whereas in the child, astral body and ego take over the foodstuffs. Unfinished forms of human nature have there to be directed and fashioned in accordance with the model. When you meditate upon the child, you see a mighty metamorphosis going on. You see the spirit and soul lighting up, as it were, and the in-taken foodstuffs cast into darkness and shadows; you see there how the second man is formed out of light and darkness, in colors, as it were. You see how the pre-earthly in man is a brightness and how the external foodstuffs are a darkening. In the child a brightness comes upon the darkness, a brightness that comes from the pre-earthly. The milk goes in as darkness. The brightness and the darkness together give rise to manifold colors. What is white in the physical is black in the spiritual; always the opposite.

These things make it possible for the ego to be active in quite another way than is usual in life. What a feeble effort it is that we make in the act of ordinary, intellectual thinking. Intellectual activity is man's greatest weakness. He simply carries one concept to another. But if you observe the child in the way now described you will meditate in such a manner that your ego organization is thoroughly involved in the effort.

These things, in their further course, must also be heeded in our pedagogy. In a school like the Waldorf School we have children between the ages of seven and fourteen. At this age things have changed. The second man has been developed. The child before us has been molded out of pre-earthly existence according to the model that has been cast off; forces of heredity, naturally, have remained in the child. They have been brought into the model, into the imitation of the model. The child is now much too unearthly. For now the forces that come from beyond the earth have worked on the child with special strength and the swing of the pendulum has gone to the opposite side. Formerly, this was externally visible in the human being; he was entirely the product of heredity. Now that which is to be seen externally has arisen entirely from within. It is the external world that has now to be mastered. What has hitherto worked without consideration for the earthly world, with consideration only for the human model, must direct itself to the outer world. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, astral body and ego organization must work in such a way that this super-earthly being is again adjusted to the external conditions of earth existence. This process has its culmination at puberty. At that age the human being is placed wholly within earthly conditions; he enters into his relationships with earthly conditions; the earthly is membered into his being. Therefore the element of greatest importance in the generation of the second man between the seventh and fourteenth years is what the human being brings with him from pre-earthly existence. For this reason his own specific karma only begins to work after puberty. Then the earthly works in. A culmination is reached at puberty and the third man now begins to develop.

The second man—so far as the substance is concerned—is thrown off and the third man is developed. The process does not reach so far as actual form, it only gets as far as life. If it were to get to form, we should get third teeth, because the human being is now governed by external conditions. Within these outer conditions it is the case that the human being again takes in what is extra-human. When he was being governed by the model he was directed entirely in accordance with the human. So long as he was governed by the model he was governed by something passed on by heredity. But in this there lies, in reality, something that is dried up. Since the separation of the sun it has really broken off from the root of his being and is dried up, withered. Therefore the forces of heredity contain the most pathological forces and when he is governed by the model the human being really absorbs innumerable causes of illness. He absorbs few such causes during the period after the change of teeth because then he is governed by the external world; climate, everything contained in the outer air, etc., are less harmful. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the human being is healthy; then again there begins a period when he is again susceptible.

All these conditions must be observed in such a way that you have the picture of man in your mind. If you have this picture of man in mind, then you also meditate rightly. Then you will be able to combine what you learn with what you meditate upon and what you have learned does not remain theory but becomes practice, because you uncover the power that enables you to perceive these things. This is what is so urgently needed today. It is impossible to achieve anything in medicine so long as we persist in thinking that evolution goes forward in a straight line. The human being is in reality constituted from separate streams of development which take their course in periods of seven years; what comes later is linked to what is earlier; it is not a one-sided continuation but different conditions are always intervening. Continuous evolution in this sense, where the earlier alone is the cause of the later, is only to be found in the mineral kingdom, less in the plant kingdom and least of all in the human kingdom.

Let us try to picture the plants. How do people proceed today when they picture the plants? There is the soil of the earth. The seed is pictured as being laid into the soil and then the plant grows out of this. People are naive enough to think as follows: Hydrogen is a very simple molecule, consisting of two atoms. All kinds of things are imagined to form combinations. Alcohol is certainly a very complicated molecule. Carbon is there combined with hydrogen and oxygen and then one has something more complex. And now there come still more complicated substances with more and more complicated molecules. There was a period during the eighties and nineties of the last century when the titles of these were very complicated, consisting of more than three lines in length. Yes, the molecule has become terribly complicated! And now still more so. Then it becomes a seed, and a seed is a most highly complicated combination. Then the plant grows out of the seed. But all this is nonsense. The basis of the seed formation is, in reality, that earthly matter tears itself away from the principle of structure and passes over into chaos, becomes chaotic, contains no more forces of matter in itself. Then, when no earthly structure is present, what is working out of the cosmos can assert itself. The cosmic declares its readiness to mirror the cosmic structure in the minute. In the seed formation the “nothingness” asserts itself over against the earthly and the cosmos works into the nothingness.

Frau Dr. Kolisko could tell you an interesting fact which entirely confirms this. During investigations into the function of the spleen we took small rabbits and excised the spleen. In spite of this the rabbits were quite well. They did not die of the operation, but a long time afterwards, from colds. It was quite possible to see how the rabbits live on without the spleen. When one of the rabbits died, we were able to see what had happened and in the place of the spleen there had appeared tissue which had assumed a decidedly spherical form. What had really happened? We had excised the physical spleen and by doing this had artificially driven earthly substance into chaos, made it accessible to the cosmic forces, and something resembling a seed formation had come into being. There had arisen, in an extremely primitive form, something that resembled the structure of a seed—an image of the cosmos. This quite harmless vivisection, therefore, confirmed a matter of great significance, for this is what appears to spiritual-scientific observation.

Take a quartz crystal. It is an earthly thing. Why? Why is the quartz crystal an earthly thing, retaining its form really in a very pedantic, rigid way? The quartz gets its form from an inner force and if you break it apart with a hammer the single parts always retain the tendency to be six-sided prisms, self-contained, six-sided pyramids. This tendency is present. You can as little rid the quartz of this tendency as you can get pedantry out of a man who is pedantic by nature. You may atomize a pedantic person, but he will still remain pedantic. The quartz does not allow itself to come to the point where the cosmos can do anything with its forces. Therefore the quartz has no life. If the quartz could be pulverized to such a degree that in the single fragments it no longer had the tendency to be governed, in the single fragment, by its own forces, something living and cosmic would grow out of the quartz. This is what happens in the formation of a seed. In the seed, matter is driven out to such a degree that the cosmos can intervene with its etheric forces. The world must be seen as a perpetual entering into chaos and again an emergence from chaos. What is contained in quartz also came at one time from the cosmos, but it remained at a standstill, has become Ahrimanic. It no longer exposes itself to the cosmic forces. As soon as anything enters into the realm of the living it must always pass through chaos.

This again is something which will help you to meditate in the sense of medicine. And you can also picture the developed plant—how it grows from leaf to leaf, and so on. You come to the formation of the seed in the fruit. Whereas you otherwise picture the seed plant as brightness it now becomes dark, quite dark. Then again comes the light, when the forces from outside take hold. In this way, too, you can make an imaginative picture from the being of the plant. When you are aware of an object which you call “plant”—then it is an imaginative meditation. You should not remain in the sphere of the intellectual but in the sphere of the concrete, inner picture. The intellectual element is merely there for the purpose of presenting what is known, in the form of thoughts.

Suppose you write down the word Menschenkind. This word is taken from something that has been perceived. Very well. The word Menschenkind reminds you of a Menschenkind (a human child). But suppose you take the word and say: I like the i, so I will put that first, I like the n, so I will put that next, then the sch and so on. You can put the word together in a different way but nothing that you can make anything of will come out of it. This is what people are doing with concepts all the time. The concept is only the spiritual term for the perception. People separate and combine concepts and think in acts of thinking. They do this, too, when they are observing the external world. They cover up observation with thinking and so they live today outside reality. This is possible as long as one is working with the science that stands outside reality, with geometry and arithmetic. But if we want to go in for medicine we cannot stand outside reality. If we do, then we also stand outside reality in medical practice itself.

My dear friends!

Let us first remember the protecting spirits of those who are out there in the fields of difficult present decisions:

Guiding spirits of your souls, watchers ever active,
May your wings carry
The love of our souls
To the earthly beings who trust in your protection.
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may helpfully shine
On the souls it lovingly seeks.

And turning to the protecting spirits of those who have already passed through the portals of death:

Spirits of their souls, watchers ever active,
Your wings may bear
Our souls' imploring love
To the sphere-men you guard.
That united with your power, our request may helpfully shine on the souls it lovingly seeks.

And the spirit that we seek to approach through our spiritual science, the spirit that has gone to the salvation of the earth, to the freedom and progress of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, be with you and your difficult duties.

My dear friends, it must be self-evident that in these difficult times that have befallen humanity, the thoughts of the souls that want to participate in the general destiny that can become human beings, that these thoughts turn to what is currently flowing through our time; what, above all, presents us with such difficult, difficult riddles in our time. For there is no doubt that difficult riddles are to be lived through in our time, which is truly - and this is certainly not a cliché - different from other times that we have not only been able to live through in our lives so far, but that humanity has been able to live through for a long time. When we think of some people with whom we lived before 1914, and who passed through the gate of death before 1914, we might well ask ourselves today: How would these people have related to what they are experiencing today in terms of their feelings and perceptions? Of course, if we think in terms of our spiritual science, how such souls, after they have freed themselves from the body in the spiritual world, look down, it is different. Then, when we understand what is happening from the records of the spiritual world. But it is perhaps still a need to think about how people who lived with us, if they were still alive, would judge the time in which we live.

In the lectures I have given and the reflections I have presented, I have often mentioned the name Herman Grimm. He is a personality who certainly did not stand on the ground of spiritual science, but who, with all his thoughts and ideas, grew out of the great impulses of spiritual life in the first half of the nineteenth century. And it was always interesting to either read or hear what Herman Grimm judged about what was going on in the world around him. If he were still alive today - he died at the beginning of the twentieth century - one cannot imagine how he would judge the violence of the events that surround us today based on his thoughts and feelings. Whenever I mentioned his name up until 1914, and that happened often, it was as if he were standing next to me, representing a different school of thought, but one that was always interesting to listen to. He could be thought of as a contemporary. Since 1914, it is as if he were a personality who could just as well have lived and died centuries ago. The way he thought, the way he related to world events, seems to one - as I said, not when one considers the soul in the spiritual world, but what it would have thought if it were embodied in the body - one cannot form any idea of how he would have expressed himself about current events, based on what he has otherwise judged, how he has formed feelings about them.

We have actually lived through so much in these three years that what we have lived through before must seem to us like a myth, like a legend, centuries behind us. And anyone who experiences our time with a truly feeling heart and a truly moving soul can already realize that in these three years he has lived through something that can otherwise only be lived through in centuries. All scales become different for the judgment of the events. We are confronted with things from the periphery of the world that could make one believe that humanity would not have been up to them at all before they appeared on the horizon of existence.

Of course, these things could be foreseen to a certain extent, my dear attendees, but the fact that they were so little foreseen testifies to how little people wanted to understand what was being pointed out about what was to come. I remind you of one thing today. Again and again, even after public lectures, I was asked how man's repeated lives on earth could be reconciled with the increasing population on earth, with the fact that the population is constantly growing. One would think that if souls were to return again and again, the population would remain constant in a sense. I had to say many things against this prejudice, but I always repeated one thing, as those who heard it will remember: the time could come when people would be horrified to realize that not only an increase in population but also a quite considerable decimation of the population could take place.

Of course, one could not point out the terrible prospect with dry words. But anyone who takes what I said at the time in the Vienna cycle in 1914, and considers it, will see that it points to stages in the development of humanity that make much of what has had to be experienced in the last three years understandable. Only, my dear friends, one could say that in many respects people have not yet really come to their senses. Experience and experience can be very different in the present. In this respect, it happens that people believe they are experiencing the present, but meanwhile they are oversleeping it. And today one can meet a great many people who, in the most important matters, always judge as they did in January 1914, although their hearts should be deeply moved by such terrible trials. But for the person who views the world from a certain spiritual-scientific point of view, what is now taking place within humanity must present not just one, but many, many riddles. The desire to solve these riddles with what are today superficial ideas, which pass through the general consciousness or general education in this way, should actually pass away. One should develop a longing, an urge to seek out the deeper forces that prevail in human development and that make it understandable why humanity has entered into such a crisis.

This evening, my dear friends, we want to occupy ourselves with such a consideration of the deeper developmental impulses of humanity.

We cannot understand the things that are happening in the present because they have far-reaching causes if we only look at the present itself. But over the years we have gathered enough ideas from the spiritual world to be able to gain an understanding from the wider perspective of world observation.

We must start from what we have already considered from different points of view, and what we want to consider today from such a point of view, which is of the greatest possible importance for our immediate present. But first, let us at least make a few comments on the particular way in which many things in the present show us their signature, their special nature. In this present time, I have often thought of an experience that goes back to my early youth and that is so very characteristic, although at first it seems far-fetched. It is so very characteristic of the deeper foundations of our current development.

An old friend of mine was very close to another man. This man was an excellent, fine spirit. He did not write much, did not have much printed, but what he did have printed had an enormously significant weight and would have, if it had penetrated, come to the consciousness of people, could have had a significant effect on people's souls in the second half of the nineteenth century. The man who had the little that was published printed — I will talk about this in more detail in a moment — once fell and broke his leg and died from it. The leg could easily have been set, but he could not be brought through the fall because he was malnourished. So it was said after his death, and rightly so: “You see, that was one of the deepest minds of Central Europe, Deinhardt. He died many decades ago. He remained undernourished because no one was interested in his particular kind of spirituality.

Now, what did he want? Yes, he wanted something that people today cannot even begin to grasp, that has actually been disregarded. And yet, precisely because we cannot grasp it, it is so significant for our time. My dear friends, this man wanted nothing more than to make the tremendous spiritual impulse that lies in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man pedagogically fruitful for all of humanity. To this end, he wrote a small number of works that are tremendously ingenious. I believe that today they have all been pulped. I don't think that any of these writings can be preserved. And he died of hunger. No one was interested in the fact that something could be drawn from these letters about the aesthetic education of the human being that could raise the entire intellectual level of humanity through an incredibly profound social pedagogy. Of course, by the time the nineteenth century came to an end and the twentieth century began, humanity had absorbed other ideas. Let us also make clear to ourselves by means of an example what ideas humanity has actually absorbed.

You see, one of the leading spirits of France – but since before the war the world was not as divided into nations as it is now, he was also one of the leading spirits of the whole of Europe, and he was listened to in Germany as well as in France – was Maurice Barres. He initially belonged to the free-thinking French youth. As he went further and further in his aspirations, and actually could not befriend the materialism of the nineteenth century, he tried to find his way to a more spiritual direction, but he knew of no other spiritual direction than Catholicism. And so he surrendered to Catholicism, which made him “pious” to such an extent that he became one of the most rabid haters and denigrators of Germans. But let us turn to another side of his nature. Maurice Barres said the following words to justify that today a person who strives for the spiritual must profess Catholicism. I ask you to take these words with the full seriousness, because they are characteristic of the present-day life of ideas. Maurice Barres says:

["It is a futile effort to seek the hereafter. It may not even exist! And however we approach it, we cannot learn anything about it. Let us leave all occultism to the enlightened and the conjurers; whatever form mysticism may take, it contradicts reason. But let us give ourselves to the Church, first of all because she is inextricably linked with the tradition of France. And then, because she formulates with the authority of centuries and great practical experience the rules of that ethics that must be taught to nations and children. And finally, because it, far from abandoning us to mysticism, defends us directly against it, silences the voices of the mysterious groves, interprets the Gospels and sacrifices the generous anarchism of the Savior to the needs of modern society."

Now, my dear friends, in the deepest sense, one cannot imagine a greater frivolity or cynicism than when a person says: Whether there is a hereafter, one can never know; maybe there is none. But let us give ourselves to the Church, not because we are attracted by what it contains, but because it has been able to adapt the generous world view of the Savior to the needs of modern society.

Yes, my dear friends, there is a cynical judgment, but a judgment that lives today in many minds as a feeling; as that feeling that does not know how to take anything very seriously, that does not want to go anywhere into the true depth of reality, because then it would have to penetrate into the spirit, which belongs to reality. But we are not dealing with a light criticism of this time. We have to understand this time. Because only those who understand what is going on can really do their duty in the place where they are. And so we want to try to understand this time by answering the question of how it has developed. As I said, we have to gain a broader perspective and look at the whole time since the great Atlantic catastrophe from a certain point of view.

We have said, my dear friends, immediately after the great Atlantic catastrophe befell the earth, there came the first, the Ur-Indian cultural period; that cultural period of which no historical documents exist. For what is available as documents comes from later times. But the first spiritual culture that could be brought to humanity developed in this post-Atlantic period within the ancient Indian cultural epoch. Life in this time was quite different. And anyone who believes that life on Earth once took a similar course to that of the present time is quite considerably mistaken; they are just too lazy to recognize how humanity has developed through spiritual science. They do not want to recognize how it has developed, and so of course they cannot fully understand what is happening in the present.

Above all, for the people of the first cultural epoch, the ancient Indian cultural epoch, one can say that the whole environment was not yet as it is now. Now the environment for human beings is such that they have air around them; that they have around them what the mineral earth is; that cloud formations rise into the air, which in turn fall down as rain; the water that rises and falls in these cloud formations is contained in the rivers and seas; the air is interspersed with warmth and cold, that is, with the element that was called fire in ancient times. For people today, these are physical things: fire, air, water; physical things that they see in such a way that they ascribe to them the properties that they perceive with their senses. It was not so for the people of the ancient Indian cultural epoch. In those days, people did not yet perceive fire, air and water in the same physical way that today's people perceive fire, air and water in the physical sense. It was an enormous mystery for the people of this first cultural epoch when they saw the flame rise; when they felt the warmth sweeping over the earth with the breeze; when they perceived the air itself in its blowing; when they heard the water rushing; when they saw the water in the air as a cloud or falling as rain. And they had consciousness, these people of the first cultural epoch: just as in a person whom one stands before, not only what one sees with the senses lives in him, but a spiritual-soul life also lives in him , a spiritual soul that belongs to the spiritual worlds, so too does spiritual soul live in the fire that rises with the flame, lives in the blowing air, in the rising and descending water. And that is what they felt, these people: This spiritual-soul aspect belongs to us, belongs to the human being, just as the air, for example, belongs to us as a physical thing; we breathe it in and out. The air that is outside is inside us, then outside again; we are not a separate entity, but what is in us is inside, outside - inside, outside. But for them it was the same with the spiritual aspect of warmth. By sensing warmth, they sensed the spirit of warmth. And so with air and water. In the elements, they felt how spiritual things live in them.

But this feeling asserted itself in a very strange way in a young person during the first cultural period. He felt the elements of fire, air and water as a kind of riddle. But he could not solve this riddle. He had a feeling that it was actually his physicality, his physical corporeality, that prevented him from solving these riddles. He said to himself: “At night, when I sleep, I am outside of my physicality with my real self.” But during his youth he could not really do anything with this sleeping state. Although life in his sleep at that time was infinitely more lively than later or even today. Dreams were not so chaotic, they had some significance. But the physicality with which a person remains connected even outside of their body prevented young people in that first cultural epoch from perceiving the spiritual beings in the elements when they were out of their bodies, sleeping or dreaming.

But this physicality was arranged differently back then. Mankind changes quite a bit over the course of centuries. As strange as it seems, spiritual research shows us that in those days, people remained, one might say, childlike in their developmental capacity for much longer than they do today. Today, people complete the course of their development relatively early. In very early childhood and youth, our mental and spiritual development is quite strongly dependent on our physical development. The child can only scream when it needs something or when it is naughty. But then the structural conditions of the brain change and with the change of the physical, the mental and spiritual also change. And this continues throughout the years. We know that what is spiritual and soul-like is intimately connected with what is physical in development. How the muscles grow stronger, how the metabolism changes, all these things that occur in the human being are expressed in this spiritual and soul-like development. But this stops with increasing age. We will talk later about when it actually stops being important for human development in the present day. For people in the ancient Indian cultural epoch, it did not stop as early as it does now. The human being of the first cultural epoch went through his youth, his growth into his twenties. Then he came to that epoch of life where the human being, as it were, remains static, where he enters middle age, around 35, and enters the descending line. The body sags again, one mineralizes. Today we do not experience any of that. At most, we notice when we reach a certain age that memory declines a bit, but nothing else comes naturally instead. When old people complain that their memory is failing, and we know that this is because the brain and nervous system are becoming mineralized, then nothing else takes its place. It can be the same with the other spiritual powers. It was not so in the first cultural period. Then the soul and spiritual aspects of the human being fully participated in development, even when the human being entered the descending phase of life. Not only did their memory decline, but as their physical bodies decayed, their souls became more and more spiritual and were able to see into the spiritual world. It was precisely when their physical bodies were decaying and mineralizing that they were able to gain what they could not have during the time when their physical bodies were growing, flourishing and thriving. In this case, physical maturation and the strengthening of the imagination are hindered. The change in the physiognomy, in the nerves, holds back the soul and spiritual aspects. Today, we have no means in our external lives to counteract the body's tendency to collapse and mineralize. But in the first cultural epoch, this counteraction was there by itself. The soul still had the strength to draw directly on new forces from beyond the body, but these were spiritual forces. And then man underwent the strongest development, the actual development of maturity, immediately after the Atlantic catastrophe, at about the age of 56. Then it went down to the ages of 55, 54, 53 and so on to the age of 48. And when man had descended to the age of 48, the first, the primeval Indian cultural epoch was over. Therefore, in this leading culture, social life proceeded in such a way that everyone knew: if you ever reach your fiftieth year, you will become enlightened. The development of humanity itself provides the opportunity to live with the elements; to perceive in the fire how it is permeated by the archai, the spirits of personality; how the air is permeated by the archangeloi, the archangels; how the water is permeated by the angeloi, the angelic beings. That is why in those ancient times, the elderly were shown such tremendous respect and honor, because people knew that they were maturing and growing together with the elements. But by becoming so familiar with the elements, the spirit of the elements also took part in everything a person did. And so it came about that in those times, the way the elemental spirits worked on people was naturally specified according to the individual areas of the earth. That which lived in air and water and fire worked differently in India, in Europe, in Africa, and in America. And under the leadership of those who were enlightened in the 1950s, people drew the forces of their lives from their immediate natural surroundings, which were also perceived as spiritual. The land with air and water and fire, that is, its thermal conditions, imposed its peculiarity on those who lived on it. People were differentiated according to this. And just as our body is so differentiated that everyone grows a nose and not an ear, so the earth is such that a certain spiritual culture could only grow in India, and another in Greece, for inner reasons. Thus, out of the elemental nature of the earth, what the spirits of the elements brought into man grew.

If you imagine this, you have the earth itself as a spiritual realm of a very strange kind, which is properly expressed in the face. This gives this first cultural life in the ancient Indian epoch such a strange character. So you can say: the spirits themselves ruled on earth; the spirits. You see, the human ego did not yet have the significance that it had later. Just as little influence does man today have over his breathing, so little influence did he have in those days over what he thought and what he did. For that is what the elemental spirits in him thought.

In the next period, in the second cultural epoch, things were already different. People did not remain capable of development for as long. One could say that the age of general humanity decreased. Just as the second cultural epoch began, people only remained capable of development until the age of 48; then in the further course of time until the age of 46, 45 and so on until the age of 42. Then the second cultural epoch came to an end. So human development lasted well into the forties. Yes, but not everything was perceptible until that time. People would have had to develop well into their fifties if they were to feel and sense all the spirituality of the elemental forces and see it flowing through their beings. They could not do this to the same extent now, because in the 48th year the possibility of growing into it ceased, into that which one can naturally only grow into at the age of 48. The consequence of this was that people became duller in their feelings and perceptions, in their whole thinking and nature, towards the elements of fire, air and water. They did not become as dull as people are today, but they did become duller. One could say that they felt the elements more physically naked. They felt something like this during this time – but only when they reached their forties. Until then, they had to wait, until then they went through the ascending development of youth, went through the middle of life at the age of 35. But then, in their forties, they grew into a certain consciousness, which I could characterize in the following way.

They said to themselves: Yes, wherever there is wind and water and fire, there is also spirit; the bright spirit. When you reach your forties, you grow into this spirit. But the body itself, when it is really growing physically, really thriving physically, prevents one from growing into it. So with the soul one actually belongs to the bright spiritual realm, the spiritual that permeates all elements. The body hinders one, it pulls one back into the darkness again and again. And so, during this period, this struggle in which the human being finds himself between light and darkness was particularly emphasized. In the later Persian period, this became the struggle between the spirit of light, Ormuzd, and the spirit of darkness, Ahriman.

They felt, the people, by waking up, by coming back into the physical body: Yes, there we descend into darkness. And the youth, the young people, they knew: Because we are still in the state of growing, we have to wait until the forties, then we will be enlightened. They were not yet enlightened enough to have a living awareness of the human being's place in the struggle between light and darkness.

But with that, what was on earth ceased to be as strongly differentiated as it used to be. In the past, so to speak, every piece of culture that was above a certain area of the earth was so that it belonged there. But now that people were becoming more indifferent to the elements and were seeing more the light that fights against darkness, now came the time when less was adapted to the elemental forces that developed as culture on a stretch of the earth. There was more commonality across all of humanity. People did not have much in common in the first cultural epoch; they had as little in common as the nose has with the ear. Now the individual groups of people became more and more like one another in their belonging to their group souls.

In the third cultural epoch, things were even more different. There, in the 42nd year, people stopped being capable of development by themselves. They only remained capable of development until the 42nd year, into the 41st year and so on until the 35th year. They became even more dull to life in the elements, in fire, air and water. What lived in the elements became even more alien to them. But something else became more familiar to them. The workings of the great cosmos in light and darkness became familiar to them. Try to realize this clearly: during the day, people woke up, lived in their work, lived in the activities of the day. Then he felt that he was thrust down into the physical with his soul; there he lives in darkness. But when his soul and spirit are free, that is, from falling asleep to waking up, then this soul - in youth one did not know it, but between the ages of 42 and 35 one knew it - then the free soul is given to the spiritual environment. And one no longer felt the spirits of the elements, that is, the archai, archangeloi and angeloi, but one felt their signs shining in the stars, in the constellations, in the planetary constellations in the space in which the soul was when it was free outside the body. And so the person felt: if you descend into the darkness, then you are removed from the star constellations; but with your spiritual soul you are placed in them. There you are exposed to cosmic space; it is a star constellation where you are placed.

But consider, this star constellation is different at every point on earth. And if in the first cultural period one had directly sensed the spirits of the elements, one might say, as they descended into man, now one looked up at the stars in cosmic space and said: hence come the light forces of man. But they come differently to every place on earth. One place on earth is under this star constellation, another place on earth is under that. And it began in this third cultural period, when one became wise between the 42nd and 35th year – after that one had to become wise from the depths of the soul, one had to have what one still wanted to absorb from the stars. But it did not happen by itself, as I have characterized it now, so that one became mature between the ages of 42 and 35, and then knew very well about the dependence of the free soul on the star constellations; then people said to themselves: There are places on Earth that are under this star constellation, other places on Earth under that star constellation. If you look at Greece, you would have to say: Greece is not just this spot on Earth. It is the spot on Earth that is under a particular star constellation at a particular time of the year. Troy is the spot on Earth that is under a very specific star constellation at a particular time.

You see, it was out of these foundations that, in that third cultural period, what you have been taught as the strange struggles developed until the end of this third cultural period, when the Trojan War took place. Because what is told as the legend of Helen and Paris is only the reflection of a star constellation. And by fighting over Troy and Greece, or the Greeks fighting in Troy, and vice versa, they fought for the star constellation. And the wise men between the ages of 42 and 35 said what it meant in Greece or in “Troy to be, to possess Greece or Troy. To speak of the struggle between nations in that time, in this third cultural period, which ends in 747 BC, is to speak of something different than speaking of the struggle between nations today. At that time it meant observing how the souls of the nations fight in their own corner of the earth, how the leaders of the nations go forth to fight for their people, who are now no longer meant to express merely the physiognomy of a particular region of the earth, but something that flows down from the starry worlds, to fight for this piece of earth for this people. That is why I said: It is necessary to imagine how times will change, how something different will always happen.

To speak of the struggles between nations of that time in the same way as one speaks of them today means knowing nothing at all about the development of humanity, since this Trojan War was inspired by what the wise men of that time divined from the constellations that ruled over Greece and Troy. To speak of this war as one does today is to want to engage in fantasy and to want to know nothing of the actual nature and essence of man.

Then came the time when the general age of people had decreased again, the fourth post-Atlantic cultural period. Since one was no longer capable of development beyond the age of 35, the possibility of perceiving spirituality in the elements had disappeared altogether. One simply listed the elements in physical terms: fire, air, water, earth. At most, there was still a hint that something spiritual was in the elements, which the first Greek philosopher Thales said, that water is the origin of everything. That is not just physical water alone, but the spirit of water that lives in everything. This fourth post-Atlantic cultural period begins in 747 BC. But there was one thing that people still knew during this period, and it was still capable of development until well into the thirties. They no longer knew the spirit that ruled out there in the air, in the water, but they knew that there is a spirit within oneself. When you moved your finger, you knew that there was something spiritual living in you. To imagine the body as today's man imagines it, as today's science imagines it, that would not have been possible for the Greek. That was still something absolutely impossible for the Greek. But he perceives what is physical as spiritual and soul at the same time. He perceives that in every movement, in growth, in everything that happens in the body, the spiritual and soul-like prevails. Therefore, during this period, which begins in 747 BC and ends in 1413 AD after the Mystery of Golgotha, the view was developed that the human being consists of body and soul. But something remarkable developed within Greek culture. It is interesting to look at the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example. He reached the pinnacle of wisdom that a Greek could reach. But he was not initiated into the mysteries. This is very important.

Those who were initiated into the mysteries were also able to attain to that which was not given to people by themselves. But Aristotle could only come to what a person without initiation could come to. But there he was at the summit of this wisdom. How did Aristotle imagine immortality? That is characteristic. He said something like this: If I cut off one arm of a human being, it is no longer a complete human being. If I cut off two arms, it is no longer a complete human being at all. And if I take the whole body, then it is of course no longer a complete human being. Therefore, the soul, which Aristotle thought was immortal, in the sense of a Greek, in the sense of Aristotle, is immortal. But this immortal man is, after death, not a complete human being, but an incomplete one. Therefore, Aristotle expresses philosophically what I have often quoted from the Greek Homer, who says: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows,” because man could only be complete in the Greek view if he had body and soul. He is an incomplete human being, even though he is an immortal human being. The soul is no longer a whole human being for him. It is cut off from its surroundings if it has no body with its sense organs, which bring it into relation with the world.

You see, it turns out that what can be called: Man was brought more and more down to his physical nature. He remained incapable of development in the periods in which he could have received illuminations about the spiritual world. Only those initiated into the mysteries received such illuminations. So it came about that, to a certain extent, people lost their connection with the spiritual and were brought down to their physical nature.

This fourth period begins in 747 BC. You see, at the time the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, human beings remained capable of development until about the age of 33. They remained capable of development until the age of 33 at the time the Mystery of Golgotha occurred! What one can take up by oneself in development up to that point, people took up, but that did not give them the possibility – it can be seen best in Aristotle – to speak of an immortal in man. One could only speak of the fact that man is an imperfect human being when he goes through death; that he is actually no longer a whole human being. Not that this was true, but it was no longer possible through human insight to imagine what lives beyond death.

You can easily say: But why were people not simply initiated into the mysteries, and why did not the mysteries reveal to people the immortality of the human being? Yes, the mysteries were already there. They had to continue to have an effect little by little, because people would have lost their connection to the spiritual world through natural development. So there had to be at least one way into the spiritual world, but precisely because people were increasingly pushed down into the physical, in that the powers of the human being were claimed in order to thrive and prosper, it came down to the fact that one could only learn something [about the spiritual world] from the mysteries. On the one hand, man placed more and more value on the feeling of being in a body; on the other hand, he had to say to himself: Yes, you are connected to the spiritual world, but you can only gain insight into the spiritual world in the mysteries.

So what happened? What happened was that the rulers in the Greco-Latin period, the Roman Caesars, the Roman emperors, forced themselves to be initiated. The first Roman Caesar, Augustus, was an initiate. He had the power, he could force himself to be initiated. He made little misuse of it. You see, my dear friends, what has come about, this prevalence of external power, this placing of man in the development of the earth as a citizen of the Roman Empire - because one first became a “citizen” there - it only became possible when man no longer felt himself a citizen of the spiritual world. Only then did man become involved in everything that comes from the “flesh”. But one could force oneself - if one was the mightiest man in the flesh, if one was Roman emperor - to be initiated into the mysteries. And not only Caesar Augustus had forced himself to be initiated, but also a man like Caligula forced himself to be initiated. And what history reports refers to truths. Because Caligula was able to speak with the spirits of the elements, with the spirits of the moon. He could consciously use the formulas that were used at that time by the initiates. He knew that “man is of divine nature,” so he allowed himself to be worshipped as a god. But for people like Augustus, Caligula and Nero, who were all initiates because they forced initiation, their initiation led to an insistence on power in the physical world, but at the same time to a real contempt for the physical. For this Caligula, when he once heard of a court case in which an innocent man had been convicted, he said: That does not matter, because the innocent man was certainly just as guilty as the guilty man. And another time he said: Well, the judges who condemned the guilty man are just as guilty.

A personality like Nero's can also be understood from such backgrounds. For what did they say when they were as initiated as Nero? He did not understand Christianity. But when you were as initiated as Nero, you said to yourself: natural development no longer provides anything spiritual. The spiritual realm must come into the world in a different way. In a different way, the spirit must come to earth. It must descend in a different form than before, when one grew into what surrounded one as a spirit through natural development. This was wrung out in the insane mind of Nero and showed itself in how he wanted to demand the coming of the spirit. He knew from physics: it no longer gives the spirit, it has peeled itself out of the spiritual. Therefore, he wanted to set Rome on fire and from there ignite the world fire. It was his idea to destroy the earth because it no longer yielded the spirit. Nero was completely convinced that human physicality has now been completely abandoned by the spirit. Only if one does not rely on the body, but only on the spirit and soul, did he want to seek the spiritual realm from a completely different direction. Why then this earth, human flesh, which is in any case only unchaste? Neros called all human flesh, all physical unchaste. When one speaks of psychoanalysis today, one is strongly reminded of Nero. One can say: He was the first psychoanalyst who sought everything in the human flesh. That was the other side.

Briefly, before the time of Nero, the human race was actually only developing up to the age of 33. And now, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ grew up to the age of 33, to this lifetime of man. Human beings had descended in their development from 56 to 33 years of age; the Christ Jesus grew contrary to this age of man. He found death in the 33rd year of life and radiates his impulses into the earth. He merged with the earth's substance.

Imagine this miracle. The human race is getting younger and younger until it is 33 years old. The Christ comes at this time, he develops up to the 33rd year, then passes through the gate of death and radiates his own being there. It is a supreme moment when one contemplates this connection between the Mystery of Golgotha and the development of humanity. This is how the Mystery of Golgotha is part of human development. The 33 years of Christ Jesus are not a coincidence. It had to be so because his ascending age had to coincide with the descent of humanity.

You see, my dear friends: spiritual science does not take us away from an understanding of Christianity; spiritual science leads us more and more into this understanding of Christianity. We get more and more feeling for the great significance of Christianity. From this we can see how crazy it is to accuse spiritual science of not being able to relate to Christ in the right way. And by what kind of people is it accused? By people who want to relate to Christ in a strange way. Take a statement such as the one that was recently made in the magazine 'Die Furche' in 1915. There, in a way that is not actually initially unkind, spiritual science, insofar as it is represented by me, is spoken of, but then it is said:

Therefore, one must not only [call out the following words of Rudolf Steiner to certain aberrations of this spiritual activity, but to all those who are influenced by this movement: “Those who do not want to trust completely dark powers, whose true nature and origin they cannot know, should avoid getting involved in such things.”]

Yes, my dear friends, I am telling you this because otherwise this article is not without favoritism. But that also arises from a feeling that must be counted among the great lies of our time. What do people of this kind actually want? Well, that the Christ has redeemed them, no matter how they behave now; if only they can always speak the name “Lord, Lord” and talk about it.

Of course, spiritual science must relate to Christ Jesus in a different way. It must bear in mind the words of Christ Jesus: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Spiritual science does not want to leave unused the divine power that is in people, but seeks the path to Christ. Out of laziness, out of the great lie of life, that which speaks in such a way as is spoken at the end of this article is asserted. No attention is paid to how, especially in our time, the spiritual forces must flow in such a way that, through spiritual science, they can lead precisely to the secrets of the Christ being. Here again you have a glimpse of the terrible superficiality of the present time, through which humanity must pass. It wants to leave everything to Christ Jesus without making much effort or exerting itself. What a comfortable point of view! But this is the point of view of those today who call themselves Christians and reject spiritual science as un-Christian. True spiritual science, as you can see, dear friends, leads to such a deep understanding that one experiences the harrowing fact that the descent of the ages of humanity grows together with the 33rd year, the 'year of the death of Christ Jesus'. Right down to the last detail, spiritual science proves to open up understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now, since 1413, we have been living in the age where humanity is only capable of development on its own, from 1413 to the age of 28. Today we have come down to the age of 27.

From this you can see, my dear friends, that spiritual science did not arise out of an arbitrary whim or out of some principle of agitation, but rather: Man simply cannot develop further in our time through himself than up to the age of 27. What is to develop further, the soul must drive forward through its own inner impulses, which come from the spiritual world. The body can no longer provide it.

And anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has the task of leading souls beyond the development that they can find through the body alone. There you have a secret of our time. Anyone who does not try to understand spiritual science, even if only in a rational, intellectual way – you can understand spiritual science without undergoing an inner development – but this understanding must ignite the connection of the soul with the spiritual world, must feel it. If you don't come into contact with the spiritual world through spiritual science, you won't live past the age of 27. Today, one can only grow older through spiritual development. This is very significant, my dear friends, this is something tremendous. When the riddles of the present weigh heavily on you, when you want to know what has happened and what has to happen, when you are looking for an answer to the question: What is the purpose of spiritual science? How is it challenged by the interests and impulses of the present?

Then we look at the leading, most influential people, for example, of the present time. Going into more detail is not exactly appropriate in our time of non-existent freedom of the press. So one can choose an example, but it is truly not chosen from the chaos created by the war. I have spoken in cycles about what happened before the war, when the feelings that the war had produced were not yet alive in people. But you can see from this that I was already able to see certain personalities at that time as they are happening today. I always had to ask myself again: Which personalities clearly show that people cannot grow older than 27 years if they are not seeking a spiritual impulse? And then I found that a characteristic person of this kind is the President of North America, Woodrow Wilson. He is one of those people who cannot get older than 27 years old – even if they live to be a hundred – because he only takes in what humanity gives of itself. You see, that is why such a person can send great ideas into the world; one can have a spiritual and intellectual pleasure in these ideas, one can lick one's fingers because one feels such pleasure, but they are still only immature ideas. They do not even reach the age of 35, the middle of life, they are 27 years old – yes, they are boyish ideas. Humanity sleeps through these facts, that these ideas are no older than twenty-seven years, because it cannot think things in such a way that the man who sits in one of the most powerful places on earth today solves the mystery for us, why he sends nothing but abstract, nothing but big, resounding words without real reality into the world. Because his ideas are no older than twenty-seven years, therefore they cannot find their way into reality. The man who sits in the most important place today, who therefore says all the tirades in his / gap in the transcript] message, which speak of freedom of peoples and the like. So today people find beautiful words, ideal words. They sound so nice to people that they say: He is an idealist, he has good ideas.

But what matters today, my dear friends, is not that someone has beautiful ideas, but that someone has ideas that can reach into reality, that really have the power to work in reality. What matters is not that someone has ideas to secure peace and then issues a manifesto that in a few weeks creates war in their own country. There is a great difference between the beauty, logic and idealism of ideas and the reality of ideas. That is why I emphasized so strongly in my last book that today we cannot just have beautiful ideas and feel them with a certain voluptuousness, but that we can descend into reality with our ideas, that we have practical ideas for life that can become reality, that can have an effect on reality as a force. Today, beautiful ideas can be precisely those of the most immature people. I would like to give you a trivial example of this. You can hear people saying, “Oh, we are living in a great spiritual change; this war will bring about a completely new era. In the future, it will no longer be as it was before, but the most capable man will be in the right place.” What beautiful ideas! One can lick one's fingers with sheer voluptuousness at having uttered such beautiful ideas. But if the son-in-law or the nephew is “the most capable,” then the whole beautiful idea is worth nothing. These beautiful ideas do not intervene in reality. What matters is not that a person grasps the full reality and regards ideas only as the instrument for immersing themselves in reality, but that they grasp reality. Today, people do not even feel what is meant by such words. They do not feel how far they are from reality because they have become accustomed to listening for beautiful ideas that mean nothing at all. What is at stake is that we ourselves must immerse ourselves in reality with our souls, we must become akin to reality. That is why today, in every field of knowledge, there are only unrealistic ideas. Political economy has only unrealistic ideas. What is now called political science, you can go through it, everywhere at the universities it consists only of unrealistic ideas. Nowhere are the ideas suitable for immersion in reality. Now an excellent man, who is even sympathetic towards my ideas, has published a book – yes, from beginning to end the book is full of abstract ideas. Nowhere can one find the slightest sense of immersion in reality.

But my dear friends, what happens among people depends on what people think and feel. Therefore, it is necessary to realize: we need a wisdom that is related to reality. We must permeate the ideas with which we want to rule the world with the spirit that is taken from reality itself.

And so the task at hand is to become familiar with reality. But this can only be achieved by building on a spiritual-scientific foundation. We have already become very alienated from reality. People can think an awful lot in the present. Some people are so clever. But these clever ideas are all abstract and have no reality value, because the human being has no reality value when it comes to ideas. In the case of man, one speaks only of the dead product in physiology, in biology; of that which has no reality value itself. How can one have anything real in economic ideas, in political science ideas, if the starting points do not contain concepts that have reality.

Try to understand this correctly, my dear friends, and you will realize that this spiritual science must not be taken as many do, as a mystical, nebulous construct that wants to lead people away from the practice of life. The opposite is true. I have often used the example of a horseshoe magnet. You can say, “Well, that's a horseshoe, we'll shoe a horse's hoof with it.” That would be nonsense, of course, because the horseshoe-shaped magnet is to be used as a magnet. The world only sees the horseshoe and shoes a horse's hoof with it. This is what today's humanity does with the world. Namely with the social order of people, because it has no concepts that really grasp what is in reality, as magnetism in the horseshoe magnet.

And here, my dear friends, is what it is all about, because no one who does not understand this understands the deeper reasons for the terrible times in which we live. And as people have moved away from reality, they have also moved further and further away from the true, real understanding of the facts.

Today it can easily happen that, for example, A says to B: Hey, C did this and that. B thinks that because A said that C did this, B actually said: C is a bad guy. A didn't say that, he just listed facts. But B goes to C and says: Hey, A said you were a bad guy.

This is a paradigm for much of what happens today. People no longer know how to distinguish between what they think of things and the facts. Enormous harm is caused by this because people do not look at what arises from such inaccuracies received through thoughts. A sense of fact is what people need. But do they have it? Do they have this sense of fact? An example that could stand for hundreds, for thousands, for millions: There is a magazine called “The Invisible Temple”. A certain Horneffer publishes this magazine.

Many people now say: Oh, “The Invisible Temple”, that is certainly something very deep, something very, very deep. And now you read; you read all kinds of beautiful things; you can have voluptuous sensations from these beautiful things. But, you see, I have the February issue right now. It contains a discussion about monism and theosophy:

[As different as the monists are from the theosophists, and as eagerly as they fight and despise each other, they are strangely similar in one respect: they monopolize the word 'science'. What they do themselves is true, pure science; what other people do is sham and pseudo-science. This can be read in Haeckel and Rudolf Steiner.]

I ask you, where? Open all the things I have written, all the things I have said, and see if I have ever spoken these words! But this is in a magazine that now comes out with the pretension of calling itself “The Invisible Temple”. In the face of this, one must get used to calling a lie a lie. You have to call a lie a lie, because that is a lie. It does not matter whether it is he who lies or they who lie, those who appear with pretension, in the blue freemason magazine under the title “The Invisible Temple” to put forward all sorts of strange chatter, not to say anything worse, who do not want to make a judgment about where lies are present. By alienating oneself from reality with one's concepts and ideas, by saying this or that without having the sense to immerse oneself in reality, one also distances oneself from the sense of the truth. But this is something that must come first: a sense of the truth if salvation is to come for our time.

And so, my dear friends, since we have actually run out of time, I would like to add to this reflection something that really shows how, even in our circles, in the so-called anthroposophical circles, and only recently, what is alienation from the sense of fact plays a role.

I started today's reflection by saying that a person could, so to speak, starve to death by wanting to popularize Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. They are truly not popular. After all, who actually knows them? Who, in particular, understands the tremendously deep meaning of the impulses they contain?

Have we not seen how, in the course of the development of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, people have increasingly distanced themselves from the spiritual world and increasingly degenerated in their instincts? Schiller raises the big question in one of the first centuries of our time – the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period begins in 1413 – in his letters on aesthetic education: how do instincts find their way back to the spiritual? How do you find your way back? At that time there was still no spiritual science, as Schiller wrote, in the way one could think about these things at that time, how man finds his way back from instincts to spirituality. This is magnificently, powerfully, incomparably stated in these letters. And it was actually a regression in later times that one did not want to pick up the thread into the spirit that Schiller wanted to take.

And basically, within our ranks, little was understood of how everything was actually designed to truly follow the right path of spiritual science dictated by the times. One of the first publications is my lectures on Schiller, which I gave at the Berlin Free University, where we talked about the “Letters on Aesthetic Education” in connection with his spiritual development. This is one of the first publications of the Theosophical Society, which then became the Anthroposophical Society. There were difficult struggles. But, my dear friends, there is still much to come, because today we see the matter as having reached a kind of climax. I do not want to be misunderstood in this. Therefore, allow me to deal with matters in a few moments that only appear to be personal matters.

[In truth, they are really not personal matters for me. And when some members of the Anthroposophical Society, at the time when the terrible battle had to be fought against Annie Besant, withdrew in a noble way and said: we do not want to have anything to do with personal matters, is actually incomprehensible. Because you have to distinguish between who is the attacker and who is the attacked, otherwise things come about as they have now come about.

Let us take a harsh example, so that we can visualize how it is necessary to see with one's whole soul to form an opinion. You see, spiritual science could flourish without a society. If you had a few people in different German cities who organized lectures every winter, spiritual science could flourish for humanity without the Anthroposophical Society. There are two things: the Anthroposophical Society and spiritual science. The Anthroposophical Society must be something in itself, must be a reality in itself in its impulses. Therefore, one must stand within it with full judgment. Now, I have to discuss here things in which the Hanover branch is less involved, but which nevertheless affect the unity of the Society.

Do you see what happened years ago? There was a certain Mr. Grasshoff, who was pushed in by a member. He went from lecture cycle to lecture cycle, from lecture to lecture; he copied everything down, bought all the books, all the cycles? He also copied everything that was privately written down. After a few months, he had everything that had been said in the lectures and that had been written together.

Now you might say, after all that happened later: Why was the man admitted? Yes, you can't turn someone away because of what they will do in the future. That's a dilemma. When a person enters society, you can't tell them — forgive the harsh expression — you can't say: you won't be accepted because you would turn out to be a bastard later. So there is the dilemma. So the man had written down everything he could get his hands on. Except for the title he gave his book – “The Rosicrucian World Conception” – everything else is mine. But he had written a preface. In this book, he not only included what he had found in printed books, so that he had published something in America, but also things that had not yet been published here. But he wrote a preface. And in it he says: Yes, of course he used a lot in this book, included a lot that he had learned from me and my books. But that would not have been enough. Then one day he was called to a master in Transylvania, who then gave him the deepest knowledge, so he could give so much more in his book. But what you find “more” is just copied from cycles and lectures. That's how this book was made.

Now you can say: That's American. Fine. You can forgive a lot under that flag. But that wasn't the only thing that happened. A German publisher was found, but Hugo Vollrath's publishing house had this book translated into German and published it as individual Rosicrucian lesson letters in Germany. And there it had a preface in which it is said: “Some of it has already been said here, that is, in Germany, but much of it was unclean; it first had to be cleansed in the pure air of California.” And so you get so-called Rosicrucian letters in which everything is stolen, everything is theft, but on top of that, theft with defamation.

You see, such an outrage is impossible in the outer literary life, because something like that would become known and be dealt with accordingly. I have discussed this repeatedly, but with us it goes in at one ear and out the other. It is not discussed further. It is not taken into account that such an outrage must be reported and made known, otherwise it will have consequences. It will also be known if one only forms the right judgment about it. It depends on the judgment. Not only that one forms logical judgments, but that one also knows in such things how great the disgrace is that is possible in the world.

You see, things like that have consequences. You know that there was a member – a member until recently – who could not be rejected either. He was a member for a long time. In fact, because we were sympathetic to this member, one of his writings was even published by our publishing house. But then he wanted to publish another writing. In this book, 'Who Was Christ?' the author also makes use of all kinds of things from the cycles. But then he says: 'Dr. Steiner did hint at such things, but he never went into them in detail; one must treat the subject more thoroughly'. Dr. Steiner took offence at that. I myself only said that Dr. Steiner had probably taken offence, but that I had not dealt with it myself. I only read one passage, which was enough to understand that this book had to be rejected. This man had been looking for years to find some kind of field of work in the Anthroposophical Society — as a follower; he was a strange follower, though. You see, the man gets this book rejected and then becomes an opponent; even an enemy, not just an opponent. Yes, then he wrote an article in the so-called “Psychischen Studien” (Psychical Studies). An article in which he wanted to prove alleged contradictions in my writings. But if he had only written about the contradictions, he would not have attracted much attention. Whatever can be said objectively should be said. Yes, let a hundred or a thousand pamphlets appear; spiritual science has no opposition to fear. But objectivity is out of the question in this case. The man in question - it is Privy Councillor Seiling - weaves slander, defamation and lies into his foolish arguments about contradictions. He has adopted the strategy of trying to drive spiritual science into a kind of scandal, and he finds compliant editors who are far too lazy to fight spiritual science objectively; they would have to study it, and they don't want to do that. So they push the whole thing into scandal, defamation, by throwing mud at those who want to represent this spiritual science. Such things are sometimes done in a very subtle way, my dear friends! For example, Hofrat Seiling published an article that followed the article about the so-called contradictions. This article is a perfect example of what a subtle desire for defamation can do. You see, the most harmless thing that can happen is that it is of no concern to anyone – it was our marriage. A scandal arose about it among people who, of course, had no right to do so. It was nobody's business. But the fact that a number of women - not to use any other word - used the opportunity to create a scandal about this matter is characteristic of the way these women see things. This scandal was absolutely none of our business; the others made it. But how does Seiling formulate this matter? He formulates it in such a way that this marriage has led to scandals in Dornach. And so everyone must believe that the marriage itself led to a scandal, while it was these - yes, I am now making points - while it was these... women who made this scandal. - This is how you write sophisticated defamatory articles.

But other things were written as well. Many of our members know that I allowed the cycles to be printed. But I had to make up my mind to do so, firstly because the members wanted it; the transcripts that circulate among the members are often downright terrible. For example, we had to experience that we saw a transcript that was going around saying that I had said that prostitution was set up by great initiates in the sixteenth century. So I really had enough of these private transcripts. But I couldn't see all of these things.

Seiling was one of those people who did not make my life easy. Now he is noble enough to say: If Steiner did not give so many conversations to members, then he could see through the cycles and there would be no need for 'Unseen Postscript'. And Seiling cannot stop grumbling about the Anthroposophical Society and the way members behave. One can think of countless details in such matters. And just with Seiling, one only needs to think of it when he now speaks of how much time was taken for the discussions with members, then one only needs to think of the fact that it was Seiling who, for example, in Munich, saddled me with a completely insane person who did not visit me, whom I, to do Seiling a favor, visited more often. Of course, what the man wanted as advice turned into terrible vindictiveness and hatred for me.

Yes, my dear friends, to look into what happened there is a terrible thing. Therefore, one should not talk about opposing writings that only want to be factual. One must make a strict distinction. If someone has made a judgment that is as dismissive as can be, but remains objective, then I agree with it. You see, our dear, good Ludwig Deinhard – he died recently. He has done almost more than anyone else in recent times for spiritual science. Wherever he could, he published beautiful, significant articles. But he worked hard to get there because he was initially involved in a completely different field. And at the time when I began lecturing, under the influence of Deinhard — one may say this because he was later one of the most loyal and active supporters, and the latter is even more valuable — the following appeared: “The Berlin traveler in spiritual science has arrived!” That's okay. That's an opinion; anyone can take a position on this opinion. It is not a defamation, but an opinion, and one may have opinions. As I said, Deinhard has long since outgrown it, but even if he hadn't, you're allowed to do it; you're allowed to characterize, that's literary license. But you're not allowed to slander; you're not allowed to say things that are simply not true, that are objective untruths. But that is what distinguishes Seiling's attack from such attacks. And that is why it is quite worthless to refute this “discussion of contradictions.” Rather, the world must know: the man started this whole story purely because he was rejected by our publishing house with this brochure “Who Was Christ?” That is the real reason. And it is this real reason that must be pointed out, that is what matters.

Now another case. Many years ago, a man from central Germany wrote to Dr. Schüßler: He did not know what to do, whether to marry into a family or whether to turn to another change in his life. And when she wrote to him that we were not there to give advice on such matters, he gradually became more involved with the Theosophical Society at the time, initially within it in Berlin, albeit in a peculiar way, so that people got the impression – I am not saying that he did it, but that people got the impression, and very credible people – that he would now take care of the marriage for himself in the Society. Then, at a general assembly, without any artistic feeling and without a clue, he unleashed Schiller's Cassandra on the heads of the shocked members. Then he went to Munich. Now we had the misfortune of unsuspecting people approaching us and asking us to let him learn how to paint. But he didn't want to learn to paint, he wanted to be able to paint. He didn't want to become a painter, he wanted to be a painter. We just didn't know how to go about it. We wanted to help him in every way. A great deal has been done for the man, but he could do nothing. He wanted to be a genius, and he was terribly resentful that he could not be made a genius. Just as with what is called development, people resent the fact that they have to work for it. They would actually like me to take care of it: I turn to him, then I have to develop myself – he will do it. – Well, this man was concerned with not learning anything and yet wanting to be something. He went wild over it. That is the reason for his wildness. But now he writes that through the exercises he is supposed to have received – I don't know – he has developed spots on many parts of his body. And now he writes the most incredible articles in all sorts of places, which are as ridiculous on the one hand as they are defamatory on the other.

For example, he writes: The exercise would have particularly harmed him, that he should have thought: What is happening in my environment is good and necessary. — Isn't it, you have to be so ruthless as to give someone such an exercise! It bruised him in many places. But this exercise is actually in Schopenhauer's works. You will find the words in Schopenhauer, who considers it healthy for every human being. So he has not been given anything particularly magical, as you can see, but a very generally human exercise. But today – well, those editors who included the article by Erich Bamler also know Schopenhauer. The truth is that the man wrote these articles. What is in them are objective untruths and even stupidities. The truth is that the man did not become a genius and went wild about it. Yes, that's how it is.

And now we are happy that they have started - and that the story seems to be to be continued - that not only am I being thrown dirt, but they are now no longer stopping at Dr. Steiner - and in a “tone that is not there at all. Nothing like this has been printed yet, the way it is now being printed against what is being done and written here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Yes, for example, there is rambling about the disgracefulness of the exercises that the doctor is said to have given to a young girl. And how did she give these exercises? When the young girl was called to account for how she could claim that, since it is common knowledge that Frau Doktor never gives exercises, when she was asked how she could claim that Frau Doktor had given her exercises that had harmed her, since it is quite untrue, she said, “Yes, she didn't give them to me in such a way that she would have told me.” Yes, but how then, they asked her. Well, the young girl said, I listened to Dr. Steiner's recitations for eurythmists. Poems by Lienhard, poems by Uhland. Of course the poems were only meant for the others, but for me they contained exercises, so she gave me exercises. She didn't consciously receive the exercises, it was said, but she was simply Dr. Steiner's medium.

Yes, these things – that they are insane is not our concern, but that they are invented, that they are objective untruths, that is our concern. The matter has finally come to a head, that in the same article in the “Psychischen Studien” it says - the Anthroposophical Society really had to be found in order to have members who would believe something like this from a magazine - it says something like this: Dr. Steiner wrote about the Lazarus miracle in the book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”, and he wanted to perform the Lazarus miracle with me. He wanted to transform me as Christ transformed Lazarus. This is connected with the fact that she burst into my bedroom one morning in a terrible fit of raving madness. She actually wanted to assault Dr. Steiner, but her door was locked. She was then taken to a sanatorium. This does not prevent her from writing these things now. Among other things, she says that it is all because Dr. Steiner sent her chocolate. Dr. Steiner just wanted to do her a kindness and bought her chocolate and other times apples or oranges. They wanted to be kind to her. — Because at the time she was thought to be ill, she was in a sanatorium. Now she writes that this chocolate was sent to her to thicken the blood so that the Lazarus miracle could take place. That's what's in the magazine now, and the editor adds the note:

[These are the kinds of madness that can land a healthy person in the asylum! - Ed.]

That's what really makes it personal. So the treatment consisted of sending the sick girl chocolate to the sanatorium, not to thicken her blood, but to eat, that's the treatment.

These are the kinds of things that are so terribly ridiculous on the one hand, like the Goesch case. It was said: Yes, the Goesch case is yet to come and will be one of the most difficult. The Goesch case is also, on the one hand, so terribly ridiculous and, on the other hand, so defamatory and disparaging, because today the intention is to eliminate spiritual science not by honest debate but by discrediting the person, by telling things that are pure invention and so foolish that people can say, Well, if they go to such lengths to perform a Lazarus miracle, then you can't take this spiritual science seriously. On the other hand, people can say: people go crazy with spiritual science, it is dangerous. It is the best policy to count on people's addiction to scandal; it is the best policy one can adopt to make something impossible. It is written in a tone, in a way that is simply incredible. And the editor makes the comment that one could believe it.

If some defenders now come forward, so we know that there are people in this society who “consider Dr. Steiner to be the Christ”. Yes, my dear friends, anything is possible in this day and age! I recently received a letter from a neighboring town. The letter said that the gentleman had attended a public lecture of mine. I spoke about the repeated incarnations of Christ and made it clear that I am laying claim to the present one. And he noted that he heard this with his own ears and not only he, but also some friends who were sitting with him in this lecture. So today people tell stories that are the crassest nonsense; they swear by them under certain circumstances.

You see, people still have their secondary purposes. What do people want to achieve? The young lady's article was written from the attitude from which all things come. This article is entitled “Anthroposophy: Sexual Magic”. It is interesting that everything leads to the sexual realm.

People who are themselves under the influence of sexuality – well, it is easy to understand that they want to drag everything into this area. But there are other purposes behind it as well. The strange thing is that if you read Goesch's writing today - which has not yet been published, but they are threatening to publish it - if you read this writing, you will find the strange thing that he constantly proves what he says against me by referring to passages from the mystery dramas. He refutes me from books of mine, from lectures, from my writings. It has never happened before that such a method has been used. It is quite a novelty. A person in Dornach writes to Goesch to bring him a little more to reason. He receives the answer from Goesch, which is supposed to make it clear to him that he will not allow himself to be converted: “I only need to remind you of a profound saying - or something like that - that clarifies your situation:

I hear not the friend,
I hear a ghastly creature.

That is actually from the Rosicrucian Mystery. Yes, what people actually want is to get the matter onto a track where everything is made public. Whether they want to urge you to publish everything in a justification, or whether they want to urge you to bring a lawsuit in which everything must be made public. They want to have everything. In today's world, you can no longer keep anything secret from humanity, which is going through a crisis that is clearly evident in these matters.

For those who are familiar with spiritual science, this is not surprising, but the judgment must be brought into the right channels. Those who have to speak about spiritual matters, especially esoteric ones, know very well that if they speak to about 120 people, 70 of them are potential opponents. This is simply because one has to speak to certain depths of the human soul. At most, 50 can remain loyal. The others, if they do not die earlier, will become opponents. But the big difference is whether they become decent opponents. For the time being, we live in a time when most are not decent. One can be satisfied with decent opponents, because spiritual science will only slowly and gradually become part of human development. That goes without saying.

All this that I have explained to you shows the absolute necessity for me to take certain measures. For it is impossible to allow what spiritual science is supposed to achieve to be dragged through the mud. As long as only people like Freimark and the like spread their calumnies about spiritual science, the matter could still be ignored. But now that those who throw mud at everything and do the worst are recruiting from society itself, even if they are resigning, I have to take a measure - together with another one - a measure that means that I have to suspend all private meetings for the near future. It is no longer possible for me to hold private meetings. Those who are honestly seeking esoteric knowledge may be patient; a substitute will be found for these esoteric discussions. Anthroposophy must be brought into the full light of the public, and all private discussions must cease. No one can feel more sorry and wistful than I feel sorry and wistful, because I have enjoyed serving people. But since I have said many things so often in vain, it must now be pointed out by facts that a correct judgment must prevail. It cannot continue like this, that one considers fools to be initiates and the like. So it is impossible to get along. Therefore, all private discussions must stop in the near future. As I said, a replacement will be created for those who continue to strive esoterically honest.

But this measure must be supplemented by another, and anyone who does not say this second measure when saying the first, does not remain with the truth. This second measure is that I allow everyone to say everything that has ever been said to them in these private conversations, if they want to. Nothing need be kept secret that has ever been said in private conversations. For it is precisely about these private conversations that an enormous amount of lies are told. Precisely these private conversations are used to drag spiritual science into the mud, because they cannot be refuted by spiritual science itself. Therefore, these private conversations must cease; one must submit to this necessity; without exception they must cease. And besides, as I said, I authorize anyone to pass on the content of the private conversations if they so desire. This should help to silence those dreadful tongues that are now opening up such a campaign of defamation, if these measures are carried out for a while and if it is seen that not only spiritual science itself but also everything that happens in society does not need to shy away from the light of day.

But there would be a lot to do, because there would still be a lot of this mudslinging that has developed up to now, and there would be a lot to do if one had to deal with everything that has developed from the worst instincts.

You have to get to know people in society. So far, as a rule, it has been done the way a lady in Berlin did it. There were scandal-mongering ladies in Dornach who attacked me and the doctor in the most terrible way. A lady who was related to one of the scandal-mongering ladies in Dornach wrote to the doctor saying that she should do something to bring the scandal-mongering ladies to their senses in a benevolent way. It has become the custom to interpret the first principle of our society as meaning that anyone can commit any disgraceful act, so one must treat them with love and goodwill because one has to apply this principle to all people. The one who is attacked is seen as the sinner. At least we can assure you that there is no kind of impertinence that has not been directed at us in the course of anthroposophical work. I have to take these two measures not only because of the content, but also to make it clear that we must finally take the demand for sound judgment seriously, so that morbid judgments cannot persist. I also pronounced these measures in Munich. Someone said: Why should everyone have to suffer when a few people do such things? I had to answer: Yes, you turn to those who cause such things, and not to those who then have to carry out such measures under duress. If they had wanted to, they could have found a way, maybe not now that the avalanche has started – but they should have found ways and means at the time when it was still just a snowball. But in the future, the only way to help is to take such strict measures.

Please do not take it amiss that I had to add this consideration to the actual spiritual consideration that I wanted to make here.] One would like so much not to have only words at one's disposal to say what needs to be said in today's world, to find one's way to the hearts and souls of people. Language has already become a purely abstract product. And the words, how they are heard, already weak and abstract. I would like to give another example of this.

Just think, people today hear someone say, “He did it pretty well.” Who will think differently today if someone speaks as if they wanted to say “almost well.” “Pretty well” equals “almost well.” But “pretty” has the same root as the word “geziemt,” which means “what befits.” And 'pretty good' does not just mean 'almost good', but, if you feel the word in the right way, then you feel: 'in the way of 'good', so when something is done 'pretty well', that you have done it so that it can please, that it is appropriate, that it is well done. Who listens in this way today? However, spiritual science must speak in this way. Then the Seilingers come along and say: It is bad German. The worse Seiling writes, the worse he finds what is cultivated in my books or cycles as a “German style”, but which is entirely based on spiritual science.

Who today senses in the words “between”, “two”, “doubt”, that which divides? This lies in the doubt that something divides when one is confronted with a division. Who senses this so concretely in the word? Who also senses it in the word “purpose”? - “Zw” - And so with all the words. Language has also become abstract.

My dear friends, when one has to discuss such important contemporary issues as I have today, when one has to speak of the necessity to grasp reality again in a conscious sense, one would like to be able to handle something other than mere words, which have already become abstract today.

Perhaps some of you can still hear in your hearts, as today's abstract words are felt, what was said first about the demands of the time and about the position of spiritual science in humanity.

Think about it a lot, my dear friends; many of the riddles that confront us today in this terrible time find their solution in the development of today's reflection.