The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Anthroposophical comprehension of spirit is not intended to be a merely theoretical world-philosophy, but rather to be the full content and energizing power of life.

And it fulfills its mission only if we so strengthen our anthroposophical apprehension of the world that it becomes fully alive within us.

For in thus uniting our souls with the anthroposophical conception of spirit we have become, in a certain sense, guardians who watch over definite and significant processes in human evolution.

Apart from Anthroposophy, whether men are followers of one system or of another they are as a rule convinced that thoughts and ideas, besides what they are in their own minds, are not also something else in their connection with the outer world. They expect thoughts and ideas, as ideals, to become operative in the world only in proportion as titan, by his deeds in the realm of the senses, succeeds in establishing their value.

The whole anthroposophical attitude presupposes our clear understanding that our thoughts and ideas must find still other means of realization besides the results of our deeds in the outer sense-world.

In the very recognition of this vital necessity lies the demand that the anthroposophist bear his part in watching over the signs of the times. Much is happening in earthly evolution; and upon malt, and particularly upon man in our own time, lies the obligation to gain a genuine under-standing of what occurs in the evolution of the world in which he has been placed.

With regard to a single individual everyone knows that his development must be taken into account, and not the mere outer facts that are about him. Just consider, roughly speaking, the present external facts surrounding human beings who are five years, ten years, twenty, thirty, fifty, or seventy years of age. Vet no one who is reasonable will demand the same attitude towards these things from the five-year-olds, the ten-year-olds, the twenty-year-olds as from men of fifty or seventy. What a man’s reaction to his environment should be can be determined only by taking into consideration his personal development. This is universally admitted in regard to individuals.

But as the individual man is subject to a definite development, having a different kind of powers in childhood, middle life, and old age, just so has general humanity different powers at different periods of its evolution. One is, as it were, sleeping in the midst of the world evolution if one fails to note that humanity, in its essence, is different in the twentieth from what it was in the fifteenth century, or even at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and earlier. Ignoring of this fact—the idea that one may speak of a mail or of general humanity abstractly, without consideration of their continuous evolving—belongs to the greatest errors, defi-ciencies, and aberrations of our time.

Now it may be asked: How is man to arrive at a more exact insight into these things? You know that we have often discussed one important point in regard to this evolution. The Greco-Latin period, from the 8th century B. C. to about the 15th century of our own era, we have to count as the so-called culture period of the Intellectual or Mind Soul; and the time since the 15th century as the culture period of the Consciousness Soul. This is an essential factor in the evolution of humanity precisely as regards our own time. Thus we know that the principal force in human development from the 15th century until the third millennium is the Consciousness Soul.

But in Spiritual Science, in real Spiritual Science one may never stop at generalities and abstract statements; one must seek at all times to grasp concrete facts. Abstractions are useful only when one is curious in a very ordinary sense. If it is intended to make Spiritual Science into life’s content, into a life-force, you must be more serious than curious, and you must not stop at such abstractions as I have just described. That we are living in the period of the Consciousness-Soul, that the development of the Consciousness-Soul is counted upon, is quite correct and extraordinarily important too, but we must not stop at that.

If we wish to attain to a definite view of these things we must first of all consider somewhat more exactly the essential constitution of man. As men we are divided, in the sense of Spiritual Science and counting from above downward, into the ego or 1, the astral body, the etheric body (which I have latterly called also the body of formative forces,) and the physical body. Among these different members of our human nature we live, for the time being, psychically and spiritually, only in the ego or I. The ego is given to us through our earthly evolution and the Spirits of Form who direct it. Everything, really, that enters our consciousness enters it through our ego. If the ego does not so unfold that it can maintain its connection—even though by means of the bodies—with the outer world, then we have as little consciousness as during sleep. The ego connects us with our environment. The astral body was given to us during the Moon-evolution that preceded the present Earth-evolution: our etheric body during the still earlier Sun-evolution; the physical body, in its inception, during the Saturn-evolution.

But when you go through the description of these bodies in Occult Science you will see in what a complicated way the adjustment of these four members was brought about in order to make man what lie is today. Do we not learn from the facts described in Occult Science that in the formation of the three sheaths of the human being spirits from all possible hierarchies took part? Do we not see that what enfolds its as physical body. etheric body, astral body is of a very very complicated nature? But not only did these hierarchies work together in bringing our vehicles into existence—they are still working within them. And no one understands man who believes him to be only a conjunction of flesh, blood, bones. etc., which natural science, physiology, biology, and anatomy describe.

Approaching the truth of this human sheath-being, seeing him in his reality, we perceive that beings from the higher hierarchies are working together wisely, as predetermined, in all that takes place unconsciously in his bodies. You may gather from the rather sketchy outlines which I have given in my Occult Science that this co-operation of individual spirits from the higher hierarchies in fashioning man must be very intricate in its details. But, nevertheless, if you wish to understand man you must come at these things ever more concretely, more in detail.

Now in this field of research it is extremely difficult even to focus the attention upon a concrete question; they are tremendously complicated, these concrete questions. Just suppose someone were to ask: What is the hierarchy of the Seraphim or of the Dynamis doing in the etheric body of man in the year 1918 of the present cycle of human evolution? For one can as easily ask this question as to ask, for instance, whether it is raining at the moment in Lugano. Of course, one can answer neither of these questions by mere thinking or by mere theories, but only by ascertaining the facts. Just as one must find out by a letter or telegram whether or not it is raining in Lugano, so we must inform ourselves through a real penetration of the facts regarding the present task, let us say, of the Spirits of Wisdom or the Thrones in the human etheric body. Such a question is of extraordinary complexity, and we can only persevere in our gradual approach to the spheres where such questions properly arise. And in this field of inquiry care is taken that man’s wings shall not grow up into the sky, and he become arrogant and proud, in his striving for real knowledge!

The nearest vistas, so to speak, which concern us most directly, are those upon which we can form a definite opinion. But these we ought to see clearly if we do not wish to remain asleep in regard to our own place in human evolution.

So I shall speak to you of a question which is not as vague and indefinite as the question: What are the Dynamis or the Thrones doing in our etheric body?—although this also is very concrete. Instead I shall put before you a question which really concerns men of the present day. This is: What are the angels (those active beings closest to man) doing in this present age within the astral body?

When we look into our inner being we see that the astral body lies nearest to our ego, so it is to be hoped that the reply to this question may vitally concern us. The angels are the hierarchy directly above the human hierarchy itself. So we are asking a moderate question, and later we shall see how we can answer the inquiry: What is being done by the angels in the human astral body, right now in the present age of mankind, which is passing through the 20th century, the period which began in the 15th century and will last into the beginning of the 3rd millennium?

Now what can be said as to the means of answering such a question? One can only say that spiritual research, if earnestly pursued, is not a trifling with concepts or words, but really works into the sphere where the spiritual world becomes perceptible. And anything so close to us may certainly be observed, but this question may be answered profitably only in the age of the consciousness-soul itself.

You might easily think that if this question could have come up in earlier ages and an answer been demanded, that this answer would now be at hand. But neither in the age of atavistic clairvoyance, nor in the Greco-Latin period could this question be answered, for the reason that the soul-pictures obtained by atavistic clairvoyance obscured the observation of the angelic activity in our astral body. There was nothing to be seen, just because of these atavistic pictures; and in the Greco-Latin period, thinking was not yet as forceful as it now is ... thinking has been strengthened, particularly through the era of natural science. So the age of the consciousness-soul is the one in which such questions may be consciously and effectively considered.

The productive quality of our Spiritual Science must be shown in that we do not put people off with theories, but are able to offer knowledge that is definitely applicable to life.

What are the angels doing in our astral body? We can convince ourselves of what they are doing only by rising to a certain degree of clairvoyant observation, so that we see what takes place in our astral body. We must attain at least to a certain degree of imaginative cognition if the formulated question is to be answered.

Then it becomes evident that these beings from the hierarchy of the angels—each angelic individual having its responsibility towards one 1w-man being, but also all working together—form pictures in the human astral body. They produce pictures tinder the guidance of the Spirits of Form

Unless we rise to imaginative cognition we do not realize that images are induced continuously in our astral body. They arise, these pictures, and then fade away. Were they not so created there would he in the future no development for man that would express the intention of the Spirits of Form. What the Spirits of Form propose to accomplish with us during and beyond the Earth evolution they must first model, as it were in images, and later their objective reality will appear in a transformed humanity.

Today the Spirits of Form are already creating these images in the astral body through the angels. The angels form pictures in the astral body upon a plane which man may reach by raising his thinking to clairvoyance. And if we can follow up these pictures, then we see that they are constructed according to definite impulses and principles, and in such a way that in the manner of their inception lie certain forces for the future development of mankind. If we watch the angels at their work (however strange this may sound, we can only express it in that way), if we watch, we shall notice that the angels have in their work a very definite intention in regard to future social conditions on earth. They aim to implant in the astral bodies such images as will bring about in the future certain determined social conditions in the united life of humanity.

Men may resist the admission that angels are releasing within them ideals for the future, but it is nevertheless true. And there is a fundamental principle in this picture-forming by the angels: the fundamental rule that in the future no one is to find peace in the enjoyment of good fortune while others beside him are unhappy. There reigns an impulse of the most perfect fraternity—of brotherhood rightly understood—of the most absolute unification of the human race with relation to social conditions in physical life. That is one standpoint, according to which the im-ages are formed by the angels in the human astral body.

But there is a second impulse with reference to which the angels form these images. They have certain objectives, not only in relation to the outer, social life, but also in relation to the soul itself, and to the soul-life of men. Through pictures imprinted upon the astral body they aim to so affect the soul-life that in the future every man shall see in his neighbor a hidden divinity.

Mark well, my dear friends: the angels intend through their work to bring about changes. These will be such that we shall no longer consider man, either in theory or practice, as a highly developed animal—according to his physical qualities alone. Instead we shall approach everyone with the fully developed realization that in every man something appears that takes its rise in fundamental divine sources, revealing itself through flesh and blood. To conceive of man as a manifestation, a revelation from the spiritual world, as earnestly as possible, as strongly as possible, as intelligently as possible—all this is being put into their pictures by the angels.

When this comes true it will have quite definite results. All the free religious instinct that will unfold in humanity will be founded upon the fact that in every man the image of God will he acknowledged in immediate life practice rather than in mere theory. Then there will be no religious coercion; none will be needed, for then every meeting between men will be as a matter of course a religious act, a sacrament, and no one will need any particular church organization upon the physical plane to support his religious life. The church, if it rightly understands itself, can have but one object: to render itself unnecessary upon the physical plane in that all life is being made into an expression of the supersensible.

To pour out upon mankind complete freedom of the religious life underlies the impulses of the angels’ work.

There is also a third intention: to give to humanity the possibility of attaining to the spirit through thought, through thinking to leap across the chasm, and arrive at direct spiritual experience.

Spiritual Science for the spirit, religious freedom for the soul, fraternity for the body—that resounds like cosmic music through the work of the angels in human astral bodies. Man needs only to lift his consciousness to a different level to feel himself removed to this wonderful workshop of angelic activity.

Now the fact is that we are living in the age of the consciousness-soul, and in this age the angels work within the astral body as I have just described. Man is to come gradually to conscious comprehension of these things. This belongs to human development. 1-low then, does one come to say anything like that which I have just told you? Where, so to say, is this activity to be found?

Well, it is still found today in the sleeping man. It is found in the conditions of normal sleep, and it is also found in waking sleep conditions. I have often explained how men, though supposedly awake, sleep their life away in the midst of most important matters. And I can give you the not very cheering assurance that anyone who goes through life consciously finds today many many sleepers. What is happening in the world they permit to happen, without interesting themselves in it, or troubling themselves about it, or taking any part in it. Great world-events often pass by men, as that which takes place in the city passes by sleepers—although the people are apparently awake. Then, however, if such men, though waking, are wholly unaware of something important, we can see in their astral bodies—quite independently of what they do or do not wish to know—how this important work of the angels goes on, of which I have spoken.

Such things often proceed in a manner which must seem to humanity very puzzling, very paradoxical. Many a man is regarded as quite unworthy to enter upon this or that connection with the spiritual world. But in truth such an one is in this incarnation just a fearful sleepyhead, who dozes through everything that goes on around him. Yet in his astral body one of the company of angels is working for the future of mankind. The astral body is nevertheless made use of, and all this may be observed within it.

But the point is that such a thing as this must force its way into the human consciousness. The consciousness-soul must be lifted to recognition of that which may be found only in this way.

Having accepted these assumptions, you will understand when I now call to your attention that this epoch of the consciousness-soul presses forward to a definite event, and that since it is with the consciousness-soul that we have to do, it will depend upon men how this event takes place in human evolution.

You see, it may come a hundred years earlier or later, but it really would have to enter the sphere of human development. And this happening may be thus described: men must come, purely through their consciousness-soul, through their own conscious thinking, to actual sight of the way in which the angels prepare the future of mankind. What spiritual science teaches on this subject must become the practical worldly wisdom of humanity, so practical that men may be firmly convinced, and of their own knowledge, that the angels intend what I have indicated.

Now the human race is so far advanced in its approach to freedom that it depends upon man himself to face this event in full consciousness, or to sleep it away. What would it mean to meet it in full consciousness? This means the following: It is possible today to study spiritual science; it is there; and it is only necessary to study it. It will be an aid if, in addition, various meditations are used, and such practical directions as are given in Knowledge of she Higher Worlds and its Attainment. But all that is really necessary is to study spiritual science, and consciously and rightly understand it. Without the development of clairvoyance any man may study it understandingly who does not himself set up the obstacle of prejudice. And if men study it ever more and more, assimilating its concepts and ideas, then their consciousness will so awaken that, instead of dozing through important events, they will become aware of them.

These events may be more exactly characterized, for just to know what the angel is doing is only a preparation. The main thing is to realize the threefold truth which mankind is to receive through the angelic activity, and which will make its entrance earlier or later, according to man’s receptivity, or at worst—not at all.

First: It will be shown how man, by means of his most immediate interest can comprehend the deeper side of human nature.

Yes, my dear friends, a moment will come, which men should not lose by sleeping, when they will receive from the spiritual world through their angels a stimulating impulse, which will lead them to feel a much deeper interest in every man than we are inclined to feel today. This heightened interest in our fellow man is not to develop subjectively in man’s usual indolent fashion, but suddenly, as with a leap, through the spiritual infusion of a certain secret—what the other man really is. I mean by this something concrete, not a theoretical abstraction: men will learn something that will arouse their continuous interest in each other. This is the first point in this threefold truth, and it will profoundly affect our social life.

The second point in it will be that the Christ-impulse requires, besides all else, complete religious freedom, and that no Christianity is genuine which does not make this freedom possible. This will be shown to each man spiritually, irrefutably by his angel.

And the third is the indisputable insight into the spiritual nature of the world.

This event, as already stated, is to take place in such a way that the consciousness-soul may acquire a definite relation to it. This is imminent in human evolution, for to this end the angel is working through its images in the astral body.

But I now point out to you that this approaching event is dependent upon the human will. Men may leave many things undone, and many are failing today in much that should lead to a conscious experience of this great moment.

There exist, however, as you know, other beings in universal evolution that have an interest in turning man from his course: the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings. The divine evolution of mankind includes the development I have described. If man were left to his own nature he would arrive in time at the perception of what the angel is unfolding in his astral body, but the Luciferic influence tends to force man away from this insight into the work of the angels. The Luciferic beings do this by curbing his will. They try to darken man’s understanding of the exercise of his own free will while making him into a good, even a spiritual being—indeed from the point of view which I am considering. Lucifer desires for man goodness, spirituality—but wishes to make it automatic, without free will. Man is to be raised to clairvoyance, in accordance with good principles, but automatically: he is to act as a spiritual reflection, an image of the divine, but without free will and the possibility of evil.

This is connected with definite evolutionary secrets. The Luciferic beings, as you know, have stood still at different stages of development, and they introduce elements foreign to normal evolution. They are interested in taking such a hold upon man that he may not attain to free will because they have never won this for themselves. Free will can be gained only upon earth, and they want to have nothing to do with the earth. They wish only Saturn, Sun. and Moon development—and to stop at that. These Luciferic beings hate in a sense the free will of man. They act in a highly spiritual way, but automatically—this is most significant—arid they want to lift man to their own spiritual height. They want to make him automatic—spiritual, but automatic. From this arises the danger that if man should become an automatic spiritual being before his consciousness-soul functions fully he might miss in the drowsiness of insensibility the revelation that is to come.

But the Ahrimanic Icings also work against this revelation. They do not strive to render man especially spiritual, but rather to kill in him the consciousness of his own spirituality. They try to induce in hint the belief that he is really only a completely developed animal. Ahriman is in reality the great teacher of materialistic Darwinism. He is also the teacher of all that technical and practical activity which admits the value of nothing beyond the external life of the senses, which desires an extensive technology only in order that man may satisfy, with greater finesse, hunger, thirst, and other animal needs. Working upon the consciousness-soul by all sorts of subtle scientific methods; the Ahrimanic beings strive to obscure, to kill in man the realization that he is an image of Deity.

In earlier ages it would have been useless for the Ahrimanic spirits to try in this way through theories to becloud the truth. Why? In the Greco-Latin period, and even more truly in earlier times, when man still possessed atavistic clairvoyance, the manner of his thinking was unim-portant, for he still had the pictures through which he looked into the spiritual world. Whatever Ahriman might have suggested about his relation to the animals would have had no effect upon his conduct. Thinking became powerful—powerful in its weakness, one might say—only in our own fifth post-Atlantean period. Only since the 15th century has thinking been competent to lead the consciousness-soul into spiritual realms—or, on the other hand, to hinder it from entering the spiritual world. Only now are we living in an age when a theory, a science, by a conscious method may rob man of his divinity, or his experiences of divinity. This is possible only in the period of the consciousness-soul. Therefore the Ahrimanic spirits are striving to spread a teaching that will obscure the divine origin of man.

From the description of these influences, adverse to man’s normal divine evolution, it may be gathered how he must order his life, so that he may not permit to pass unobserved the revelation that is to come. For otherwise a great danger will arise. And against this man must be on the alert. or else instead of this momentous event, which is intended to affect powerfully the future form of Earth-evolution, something may take place which would seriously impair it.

You see, certain spiritual beings, attain their own development through maps, concomitantly with man’s unfolding. The angels who produce their images in the human astral body do not 4o this as a game, but in order that thereby something may be achieved. Vet, since results must be sought within humanity, the whole thing would be rendered futile if man, having acquired the consciousness-soul, should deliberately disregard it. The whole thing would become play! The angels would be only playing a game in the development of man’s astral body! Only by coming to realization within humanity does it become, not a game but a matter of serious import.

From this you may learn that the work of the angels must remain earnest under all circumstances. Consider what might be behind the scenes of existence if men could reduce the angelic activity to play, simply through their drowsy insensibility.

And what if that should nevertheless happen! What if humanity should persist in remaining stolidly unaware of the important spiritual revelation of the future! If, for example, men permit to pass unnoticed the middle part—that relating to religious freedom—and so miss the repe-tition of the Mystery of Golgotha upon the etheric plane, of which I have often spoken, the reappearance of the etheric Christ, and other important things; if men should lose all this, then what should be accomplished through pictures in the astral body would have to be brought about by the angels in another way.

If man, by failing to become alert, should prevent what ought to be done in his astral body, then an effort would be made to reach the same results through sleeping human bodies. That which man would remain densely unaware of in his waking condition would be carried out-by the angels with the help of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. There, forces would be sought in order to produce effects unattainable when the waking soul is within these bodies, but which may be induced while man, who ought to have been awake to these things, is outside his physical and etheric bodies, with his I and astral body.

That is the great danger for the period of the consciousness-soul. That is what might occur if men should not turn to the spiritual life before the beginning of the third millennium! We are separated from it, as you know, by only a brief time, since the third millennium begins with the year 2000. It might come to pass that what the angels are to gain as the result of their labor they would have to seek in the sleeping bodies of men instead of in waking humanity. They might be forced to withdraw all their work from the astral body and submerge it in the etheric body in order to bring it to realization. But man would have no part in this. It would have to be accomplished during his absence from the etheric body, for if he were present in his waking state he would prevent it.

Now I have given you a general idea of the matter. But what would be the result if the angels should be obliged to carry out such work through man’s physical and etheric bodies during sleep without his conscious cooperation?

Its effect upon human evolution would be undoubtedly threefold. First of all there would be engendered in man’s sleeping bodies, in the absence of his Ego and astral body, something not aroused through his free choice, but which he would find present when he awoke in the morning. It would always be present, and it would be instinct instead of conscious freedom, and therefore detrimental. And certain instinctive knowledge, which is to enter human nature, regarding the mysteries of birth, conception, and the entire sexual life, truly threatens to become harmful tinder the dangerous conditions which I have described: that is, the danger that certain angels would themselves then undergo a change, of which I cannot now speak further, since this change belongs to the deeper mysteries of the science of initiation, of which nothing may be given out at present. It may be said, however, that the effect upon human evolution would be such that certain instincts relating to sexual life would arise, not wholesomely in clear waking consciousness, but in a pernicious, destructive way. These instincts would not be mere personal errors, but would pass over into social life, bringing about conditions—through the effects of this sexual life upon the blood—which would prevent men from developing any sort of brotherhood on earth, but instead would cause them to oppose it. This would all be a matter of instinct.

Thus there is coming a decisive point where one may turn to the right, remaining watchful and alert; or to the left—and sleep! But in this latter case instincts will appear that will be horrible!

What will the natural scientists says if such instincts appear? They will say that they are a normal development, an inevitable stage in human evolution. Man cannot be warned of such dangers by natural science for. from the scientific standpoint, it is equally explicable whether men become angels or devils. In regard to either, science says the same thing: the later is derived from the earlier—the great wisdom of the causal explanation! Natural science will he quite unaware of the event of which I have spoken: for if human beings become half-devils through their sexual instincts, science will look upon it as a necessity of nature. In short, the matter cannot he explained scientifically, although whatever may happen, science will regard it as susceptible of explanation.

Such things are to be comprehended only through spiritual insight, by supersensible cognition.

Such would be the first result of the changes evoked within the angelic activity. The second would bring to mankind an instinctive knowledge of certain remedies—but a destructive knowledge!

In a materialistic sense everything connected with medicine would make an enormous advance. Men would have instinctive insight into the curative power of certain substances and combinations, and by this knowledge would do fearful harm. But the harm would be called useful. That which is unhealthy would be called healthy, for it would be discovered that certain processes would have enjoyable results. Certain methods leading in unwholesome directions would simply be found agreeable.

The knowledge of the healing power of various processes would be increased, but would take a harmful direction, for through certain instincts it would also be discovered what kind of diseases could be brought forth by different substances and agencies. And a man could decide, according to his selfishness and egotism, whether to bring about illness or to refrain from doing so.

The third result would be mail’s acquaintance with definite powers by which, with the slightest stimulus—through the harmonizing of certain vibrations—great mechanical forces could be unleashed in the world. A sort of mental guidance of mechanism, of everything of a mechanical nature, would be developed in this way, and the whole technique be led into a vicious channel, which would, however, inordinately please and serve man’s egoism.

That, my dear friends, is a concrete statement of possible developments, and a conception of life and being which can be rightly appreciated only by those who realize that an unspiritual conception of life cannot clarify the situation. If a pernicious medicine were produced, if a terrible aberration of the sex instincts should develop, or an evil motive power in world-mechanics through the application of spiritual powers to natural forces, all unspiritual world-philosophy would not see through it, nor realize its deviation from the true path … just as little as a sleeper, so long as he sleeps, could see the approach of a thief who is coming to rob him. He sees what has happened only when he awakes in the morning—and what a terrible awakening would await mankind! Yet without this awakening man would continue to pride himself upon the broadening of his medical knowledge, and find such satisfaction in certain sex aberrations that lie would praise these errors as superhuman, as freedom from prejudice, as open-mindedness! Ugliness would be beautiful, and beauty ugly in some connections, and it would not be noticed because all this would be looked upon as a natural development. But it would be a wandering from the path which, within humanity itself, is prescribed for man’s essential nature.

I believe, my dear friends, if any feeling has been gained of the way in which spiritual science presses into our whole attitude of mind and soul, that one may also be possessed of the earnestness necessary for the reception of such truths as have been presented today. We may derive from them—as from all aspects of spiritual science—the recognition of a certain responsibility, a life-obligation. Whatever our circumstances, whatever we may have to do in the world, the important point is to be able to preserve this thought: that our actions must be saturated and irradiated by our anthroposophical consciousness. Then we shall contribute something towards the true progress of mankind.

A man is entirely mistaken if he ever believes that true spiritual science, seriously and rightly understood, could ever divert him from the practical, intensive work of life. True spiritual science brings awakening—awakening to the kind of things that I have pointed out today. My dear friends, if we may use the comparison that seeing into the spiritual world is a further awakening, just as ordinary awakening is an awakening from sleep, we can then, in order to understand the comparison, ask this other question: Can the waking state be harmful to our sleep?

Certainly, if it is not what it should be! If a man’s waking life is wholesome he will have healthy sleep, but if his waking hours are stupid, lazy, comfort-loving, without exertion, then his sleep will be unhealthy. And it is just the same with the waking life to which we are attuning ourselves through spiritual science. If through spiritual science we establish in ourselves a proper relation to the spiritual world, this will guide the interests of the ordinary sense-world in right directions, in the same way that a healthy waking life regulates our sleep.

Anyone who considers the life of our own times must indeed be asleep if he remain unaware of several things. How men have boasted, especially in recent years. of their efficiency! They have brought it about that those who most despise the realm of ideas, the mental, and spiritual, now occupy all the responsible positions. And one could go on declaiming about efficiency in this life so long as mankind has not been actually dragged into the abyss. Just now a few are beginning—in most cases only instinctively—to croak that a new time must conic, that all sorts of new ideals must arise! But it is only croaking. And should these things appear as instincts only, without conscious adaptation to the life of spiritual science, they would lead to the degeneracy of that which ought to be experienced in the waking state, rather than to any advantageous evolutionary transition.

He who appeals to people in familiar phrases may still meet with sonic success, but men will have to endure other words, unaccustomed expressions, in order that out of chaos a social cosmos may again emerge.

If in any age the men who should wake fail to do so, and do not recognize what ought to be done, then nothing authentic happens, but the ghost of the preceding epoch wanders around. In many religious organizations ghosts of the past move about, and our legal systems are still haunted by the ghost of ancient Rome. In the age of the consciousness-soul spiritual science is to free men from this bondage, and lead them to actual observation of a spiritual fact: What does the angel do in our astral body? To theorize about the angels, etc., is at best but a beginning. Progress requires us to speak factually, both in regard to our own period, and in an-swering the question which most immediately concerns us. It does concern us because the images that the angel is evoking in our astral body are to determine our future conditions, which must he brought to actuality through the consciousness-soul.

If we had no consciousness-soul we should not need to trouble ourselves, for other spirits, other hierarchies, would enter and work out what the angel is weaving; but since we are to develop the consciousness-soul no other spirits will step in to bring the angel’s work to realization.

Of course in the Egyptian age different angels performed this work of weaving. But soon other spirits entered, and to man this was darkened by his atavistic-clairvoyant consciousness. Thus men wove—these men, because of what they saw clairvoyantly—a (lark veil over the angels’ pictures. But now man himself is to unveil them. Therefore, he must not miss by sleeping that which will be brought into his conscious life during the period which is to close even before the third millennium. Let us extract from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science not merely all sorts of doctrines, but also resolutions; and these will give us strength to be wakeful. We can accustom ourselves to being wakeful human beings. We can he mindful of many things.

We can begin at once with watchfulness, discovering that not a (lay passes in which some miracle does not take place in our lives. We may also reverse this statement. We may say: If on any given day we call find nothing wonderful in our experience, we have simply overlooked it. Try at night to look over your life. You will find in it some circumstance great or small, of which you may say to yourself: It entered my life most strangely, and was accomplished quite unusually. You will succeed in this if you think comprehensively enough, if you fix your soul’s eye upon the association of events. In ordinary life this is not done because people seldom ask themselves: What, for instance, was prevented by this or that?

We seldom trouble ourselves to consider the things which have been prevented and which, had they occurred, would have entirely altered our lives. Back of these things, which were removed in one way or another, there exists a great deal that may well educate us in wakefulness. How many things might have happened to me today? If I ask myself this question every evening, and then think over single circumstances that might have brought about this or that result, there will attach to such questions reflections that will lead to watchfulness and self-discipline. This is something which, once begun, will take us further and further, until at last we do not try to find out only what was meant by the fact that we, for example, wanted to go out some morning at half-past ten, and that just at the very last moment some man or other came who detained us…

We are annoyed by the delay, but we do not ask what might have happened if we had really gone at the time planned. What was altered thereby?

I have already spoken to you more explicitly of these practices. From observation of the negative in our lives (which, however, bears eloquent witness to the wisdom guiding us), up to observation of the angel weaving and working in our astral body, there is a direct path, a very direct path, and one which we may safely follow.

In the course of these lectures I shall be obliged to draw your attention again and again to a characteristic of our inquiry that must pervade every aspect of Spiritual Science today. We must endeavour to ensure that the concepts, ideas and representations that we form and with which we live, are not only firmly grounded in logic, but also in reality. We must strive for ideas that are steeped in reality. In the matter of our inquiries which have a specific end in view—I will indicate this presently—it will not be superfluous to remind you that an idea may be true in a certain sense and yet fail to reach down to reality. Of course what we really mean by ideas steeped in reality will only emerge gradually, but one may arrive at an understanding of such ideas by means of simple analogies. I propose therefore by way of introduction to use an analogy to illustrate my meaning.

What I am about to say seems unrelated to, or apparently unrelated to our subsequent inquiry; it is simply an introductory exposition. From the sixteenth century until 1839 all the Roman Cardinals were obliged to swear a solemn oath. During the pontificate of Pope Sixtus V (1585–90) a sum of five million scudi had been deposited in the Castel Sant’ Angelo to be used only in times of need. And since the Church attached great importance to this, the Cardinals were obliged to swear a solemn oath to preserve the fund intact. In 1839, under the pontificate of Pope Gregory XVI, Cardinal Acton (note 1) [original note 1] refused to take the oath; he wanted the Cardinals to be released from their oath to preserve the fund.

If nothing more had been heard of the story, all kinds of plausible theories might have been advanced to explain why this remarkable prince of the Church sought to prevent the Cardinals from swearing an oath, still required of them at that time, to preserve the fund which was so important to the Holy See. And all these plausible theories might have been perfectly logical, but they broke down in the face of certain pertinent facts that were known only to Cardinal Acton, namely, that since 1797 the fund no longer existed, for it was already exhausted. The Cardinals therefore had been permitted to swear an oath to preserve a treasure that no longer existed. Acton refused to be a witness to the deception. Thus all the ingenious arguments that might have been advanced by those who were unaware that the fund was already exhausted would have collapsed.

If we meditate upon such an example as this—it often seems superfluous to reflect upon such obvious cases, but we must think about them and compare them with other situations in life—if we meditate upon such an example as this, we can grasp the difference between concepts rooted in reality and those which are not. Now I must draw your attention to the unreality of ideas today because, as you will see later, this is closely connected with the subject of these lectures, a subject that I must touch upon once again from the point of view of Spiritual Science. I will endeavour to relate the investigations which we have already undertaken to the study of a certain aspect of the Mystery of Christ. My last contribution to this subject will serve as a framework for that aspect of the Christ Mystery which I now propose to examine. But first of all I should like to put before you certain things which are seemingly unrelated to our main theme because they will provide an invaluable background to our studies.

In my book Christianity As Mystical Fact, which appeared some years ago, I ventured to indicate a certain way in which one could approach the Mystery of Christ. This book (which in its new edition was one of the last books to be confiscated by the old régime in Russia) was a first attempt to interpret Christianity from a spiritual standpoint, a standpoint which in the course of centuries has been more or less lost to Christianity during its development in the West. Now I should like to emphasize one thing in particular, for this will determine whether the arguments advanced in my book are valid or not. In this book I have adopted a definite attitude towards the Gospels. I do not wish to enter into further details at the moment, for my point of view is explicitly stated in the book. But if I am justified in my point of view we shall have to assume that the origin of the Gospels is not nearly so late as contemporary Christian theology often assumes, but that an early date must probably be assigned to them. You know that from the standpoint of Spiritual Science the origins of the Gospel teaching are to be found in the ancient Mystery teachings. We must see the Mystery of Golgotha as a fulfilment of these ancient teachings. Now such a spiritual conception will run counter to the exegeses of modern historians and theologians who will regard it no doubt as historically unsound. Now it is fairly evident that the Gospels did not exercise any significant influence during the first century, or at least during the first two-thirds of this century. There are indeed Christian theologians today who doubt whether any evidence can be adduced that in the first century of the Christian era people of consequence thought of, or even believed in, the person of Jesus Christ.

Now it will become increasingly evident that if the careful research of the present day broadens its scope and shows itself to be catholic as well as conscientious, then there will be an end to its many scruples. Of course it is possible to draw all kinds of conclusions from certain discrepancies between the Christian and Jewish records. But the fact that the Apocryphal Gospels, i.e. those not officially recognized by the Christian church, are very little known today and are virtually ignored, especially by Christian theologians, militates against these conclusions. The reason for this lack of recognition is that, to a large extent, Christianity, and especially the Mystery of Golgotha, are not apprehended with sufficient spirituality. There was no real understanding of the Pauline distinction between the psychic and the spiritual man. (Corinthians I, chap. XV, 44, 45.) Consider for a moment our division of man into body, soul and spirit, one of the fundamental conceptions of Anthroposophy. In reality, Paul who was familiar with the atavistic character of the truths of the ancient Mysteries implied the same as we imply today when we speak of soul and spirit as two members of human nature. This distinction between soul and spirit has virtually been lost in the West. But we cannot understand the real nature of the Mystery of Golgotha unless we have a clear understanding of the distinction between psychic man and spiritual man.

Now first of all I should like to cite an example (which I also referred to some years ago), in order to show you that the facts of external history are often falsely interpreted, especially in relation to the recent investigations into the life of Jesus. I refer to the generally accepted view that the Gospels are of late provenance (note 2). Now many objections can be raised against this view on purely historical grounds. It can be shown, for example, that in the year A.D. 70 Rabbi Gamaliel II was involved in a lawsuit with his sister over an inheritance. Rabbi Gamaliel II was the son of Rabbi Simeon who was the son of that Gamaliel of whom Paul was a pupil. The case came before a judge and it was difficult to determine whether the judge was a Roman with leanings towards Christianity, or perhaps a Jew with leanings towards Christianity. Now Gamaliel pleaded that he was the sole heir because, according to the Mosaic law, daughters could not inherit. The judge demurred: “Since you Jews have lost your country the Thora is no longer valid; only the Gospel is valid, and according to the Gospel a sister can also inherit.” There was no straightforward solution. What happened? Gamaliel II was not only covetous, but also cunning. He requested an adjournment of the proceedings. This was granted and in the interval he bribed the judge. At the second trial he appeared before the same judge who reversed the verdict. The judge confessed that at the first trial he had erred, that the Gospel could indeed apply to such cases, but did not annul the Mosaic law. And to confirm this he quoted Matthew V, 17, in the version which we have today, but with the textual variations arising from the Greek text and the Aramaic text of the Gospel which existed at the time when this judgement was pronounced in the year A.D. 70. In his ruling the judge quoted the Matthew Gospel, whilst the Talmud which recounts the story takes the Matthew Gospel for granted.

It would be possible to adduce considerable evidence to show that there is no reliable historical evidence for not assigning an early date to the Gospels. Historical research will one day vindicate completely the evidence from purely spiritual sources which forms the basis of my book Christianity As Mystical Fact.

Now everything relating to the Mystery of Golgotha conceals the most profound mysteries for the present age. These mysteries will be resolved with the progressive advance of Spiritual Science. There are many pointers which indicate that these questions are not so simple as people fondly imagine today. For example, the relationship between Judaism and primitive Christianity in the first century of our era is virtually ignored. There are theologians who study certain Jewish writings in order to find evidence for their various theories. But one can easily demonstrate that these Jewish writings on which they rely did not exist in the first century. One thing appears to be demonstrable historically, namely, that in the second third of the first century a relatively harmonious relationship existed between Judaism and Christianity—in so far as one can speak of Christianity at that period. Generally speaking, when enlightened Jews discussed certain questions with the followers of Jesus Christ they easily arrived at an understanding. One need only recall the case of the celebrated Rabbi Elieser who made the acquaintance of a certain Jacob (as he calls him) towards the middle of the first century. The latter admitted to being a disciple of Jesus and had healed in His name. Rabbi Elieser conferred with the aforesaid Jacob and declared in the course of the conversation that what Jacob had said, and especially the fact that he had healed the sick in the name of Jesus, was in no way contrary to the spirit of Judaism.

Now this relatively easy harmony between Christian and Jew peculiar to earlier times came to an end towards the close of the first century. From that time even enlightened Jews became implacable enemies of everything Christian. The Jewish texts which are held to be of importance today date from the second century and testify to a growing discord between Christian and Jew. As we follow the deterioration of this relationship we see how a hatred of Christianity first emerged in Judaism and was associated with a progressive transformation within Judaism itself. Although the modern Hebrew scholars are versed in the Old Testament from their own standpoint, they are unaware of other forces that were still active in Judaism at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and so frequently failed to grasp the major issues with which a serious historical investigation of this period is concerned. We must realize that in the first century the learned Jewish Rabbis gave a totally different interpretation of the Old Testament from that which is given today. Since the nineteenth century the capacity to interpret ancient texts has largely been lost. Certain things which still existed even in the eighteenth century as a sacred tradition in the form of truths derived from the old atavistic clairvoyance, no longer had any meaning to nineteenth-century man. Those who speak of such matters today, even when they refer to a much earlier epoch, are regarded as addlepated!

In my last lecture I drew your attention to an important book Des Erreurs et de la Vérité by Saint-Martin (note 3). This book is undoubtedly a late product of its kind since it is inspired by ancient traditions which are now outmoded. None the less it still speaks from out of these traditional insights. I have recently quoted to you several extracts from this book which modern man is at a loss to understand. But if we accept the point of view of Saint-Martin we shall find that his book presents certain ideas which seem absurd to modern man, unless we are prepared to regard them as pure fantasy—and today almost everything of this nature is regarded as fantasy. Saint-Martin suggests that the human race has fallen from spiritual heights to the world of terrestrial existence. Today, many who are not confirmed materialists are still willing to tolerate theoretically the idea that the present human race can be traced back to a far-distant time when, with a certain part of its being, it stood at a far higher level than at the present time. Despite the materialistic character of Darwinism which assumes that man is descended from animal ancestry, there are others however who believe in his divine origin where he was originally in touch with divine traditions. But when we pass from these abstract notions to the concrete statements of Saint-Martin, statements which are found in Saint-Martin only because they are associated with primeval traditions from the ancient epoch of clairvoyance, we discover that modern man is at a loss to understand them. What can the man of today who has a thorough knowledge of chemistry, geology, biology and physiology, etc. and who has also assimilated that curious amalgam called philosophy—what can such a man think when he learns from Saint-Martin that our present human condition is the consequence of the “Fall”. Originally the human race had been differently constituted. Man, according to Saint-Martin, was originally equipped with a crossbow and a coat of mail. Thanks to the coat of mail he was able to prove himself in the hard struggle which was his lot. He has now lost the coat of mail which was originally part of his organism. He was also armed with a lance of bronze which could inflict wounds like fire. With this lance he could overcome elementary beings in the spiritual battle which faced him. And in the place where he originally dwelt he had seven trees at his disposal and each of these trees had 16 roots and 490 branches. He has now forsaken his former dwelling; he has fallen from his high estate.

If one were to claim for these views the same validity and reality as the geologist claims for his theories about primeval ages, I doubt if he would be considered to be in his right mind. One need only come along with all kinds of symbols and allegories and people are satisfied. But Saint-Martin was not speaking symbolically; he was speaking of realities which he believed had really existed. Of course in describing certain things which existed when the Earth in its original state was more spiritual than in later times, he had to appeal to “Imaginations”. [original note 2] But “Imaginations” represent realities; they should not be interpreted symbolically. Their imaginative content must be accepted at its face value. I mention this in passing. I cannot at the moment enter into details. I only wish to show the radical difference between the language of the eighteenth century in which a book such as Des Erreurs et de la Vérité was written and the language which alone passes current today. The style and idiom of Saint-Martin have completely died out.

Since the Old Testament, for example, can only be understood if we are conversant with certain things which are related to imaginative conceptions, it is clear that in the nineteenth century especially the possibility of understanding the Old Testament has been lost. But the further back we go the more we find that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there existed in Judaism, in addition to the exoteric Scriptures of the Old Testament, a genuine esoteric doctrine. It is to this esoteric doctrine that must be attributed in large measure the possibility of interpreting the Old Testament in the right way. Now it is impossible to interpret the Bible in the right way unless we evaluate its statements against a background of spiritual facts.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it was Romanism that was most averse to this particular aspect of the Jewish Mysteries. There has hardly ever been perhaps in the history of the world a more deep-seated antagonism than between the spirit of Rome and the Mystery tradition preserved by the initiates of Palestine. We must not, of course, regard the Mystery tradition as it existed in Palestine at that time as Christian, but only as a prophetic prefiguration of Christianity. On the other hand, however, we can only comprehend the ferment within Christianity when we see it against the historical background of the Mystery teachings of Palestine. This Mystery teaching was full of hidden knowledge about the “spiritual man” and provided ample indications of how human cognition could find a path to the spiritual world. Ramifications of this Mystery teaching were also to be found to some extent in the Greek Mysteries and to a lesser extent in the Roman Mysteries. The essence of the Palestinian Mysteries found no place in Romanism, for Rome had evolved a special form of community or social life which was only possible if the spiritual man was ignored. The key to Roman history therefore is to be found in the establishment of a community life under Rome that more or less excluded the spirit. In such a society it would be meaningless to speak of the threefold division of man into body, soul and spirit. The further back we go the more we realize that the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha in ancient times depended upon this tripartite division of man into body, soul and spirit. Paul for his part spoke of the psychic man and the spiritual man. But this was bound to offend Roman susceptibilities and explains much that followed later.

Now you know that the doctrine which is outmoded today but which in the early centuries sought to preserve the threefold division of man and the cosmos was Gnosticism (note 4). In later centuries Gnosticism was proscribed and finally suppressed so that it disappeared completely. I do not say that it ought to have survived; I simply wish to register the historical fact that Gnosticism held promise of a spiritual conception of a Mystery of Golgotha and was ultimately suppressed. Events now took a strange turn. Roman traditionalism was increasingly influenced by Christianity and the further this influence penetrated the less Rome understood its relationship to the “spiritual man”, and certain gnostic Christians gave increasing offence by continuing to speak of body, soul and spirit. In circles where Catholic Christianity had become the official religion there were repeated attempts to suppress the idea of the spirit. They felt that all reference co the spirit should be ignored, otherwise the old ideas of the tripartite division of man might revive again. So matters pursued their course. When we make a careful study of the early Christian centuries we find that many problems that are usually accounted for in other ways are seen in their true light when we realize that, as Christianity fell increasingly under the influence of Rome, the avowed object of Rome was progressively to eliminate the idea of the spirit. When we recognize that Western Christianity had of necessity to dethrone the spirit, innumerable questions of conscience and of epistomology are resolved. And this development ultimately led to the eighth Ecumenical Council of 869 (note 5). This Council laid down a dogma according to which it was contrary to Christianity to speak of body, soul and spirit, but truly Christian to speak of man as consisting of body and soul alone. The actual wording may not have been quite so explicit, but was later interpreted in this way. At first the Council simply stated that man possessed an intellectual soul and a spiritual soul. This formula was coined to avoid any reference to the spirit as a special entity, for the avowed object of the Council was to suppress all knowledge of the spirit.

This decree had unforeseen consequences. Contemporary philosophers begin their investigations by studying body and soul as if they were independent entities. If you were to ask, for example, a man like Wundt, on what grounds he accepted only the dichotomy of man, he would reply in good faith that it was on factual grounds since, from the evidence of direct observation, there was no sense in speaking of body, soul and spirit, but only of the body which looks outward and of the soul which looks inward. This is self-evident, he would reply. He had no idea that this was the consequence of the decree of the eighth Ecumenical Council. Even today philosophers do not mention the spirit. They follow the dogma laid down by the eighth Ecumenical Council. Precisely why they deny the spirit, though not openly, they do not know, any more than the Roman Cardinals knew what they were swearing to when they took an oath to preserve intact the fund which no longer existed. The real creative forces of history are all too seldom taken into consideration. Today anyone who rejects the conclusion of “unprejudiced science”, as it is called, which maintains that man consists of body and soul alone, is decried as an ignoramus, simply because the scientists themselves are unaware that their assumptions are based on the decrees of the Council of 869. And so it is with many other things. This Council is important because it sheds considerable light upon the evolution of Western thought.

You know that Western Christendom was deeply divided by the schism between the Eastern Church and the Church of Rome on doctrinal questions which still divide them today. The dogmatic ground of dissension—for which, of course, there are other, deep-seated motives—stemmed from the famous question of filioque (note 6). In a later Council (the Orthodox Church recognized only the first seven Councils) the Latin Church recognized the double Procession, namely, that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. This was declared to be heretical by the Eastern Church which maintained that the Holy Ghost proceeds only from the Father. The great confusion over this dogma could only arise because the conception of the spirit had become blurred. All understanding of the spirit had been gradually lost. This is undoubtedly connected with the fact that, from the beginning of the Fifth postAtlantean epoch onwards, man had to be denied for a time all perception of the spirit. In face of this truth, the events described above are only, so to speak, the tip of the iceberg. We must probe beneath the surface if we are to arrive at a valid point of view which is rooted in reality.

Now the period of evolution which played an important part in the establishment of this dogma of the dichotomy of man has not yet ended. The Christian theologians of the Middle Ages who still subscribed to the existing traditions—for it was only orthodox Church doctrine that maintained that man consisted of body and soul, whilst the alchemists and others who were still familiar with the old traditions knew of course that he was a trichotomy—these theologians knew how difficult it was to hold orthodox opinions whilst at the same time they had to admit that the heretical doctrine of man's trichotomy contained a kernel of truth. We see the frantic attempts of these theologians to evade this issue. If we do not recognize this dilemma we shall fail altogether to understand mediaeval theology.

Now this evolutionary period is far from concluded for it coincides with an important impulse in the development of Western civilization. And because, in the course of the twentieth century, many changes will be wrought which we must be aware of if we wish to understand our present epoch, I must refer to this period once again. Originally (if such a word may be used of something that has arisen in comparatively recent times) the being of man was divided into body, soul and spirit. The course of evolution was such that by the ninth century it had become possible to abolish the spirit. But matters did not rest there. These important changes are simply overlooked today. The complete transformation of thinking by Saint-Martin, for example, has been completely ignored hitherto. Having abolished the spirit, matters did not end there. There is now a growing tendency to abolish the soul in its turn. As yet only the first steps in this direction have been taken; but today the time is ripe for the abolition of the soul. But man fails to recognize contemporary tendencies which are of decisive importance. Already powerful evolutionary impulses are at work which are preparing to abolish the soul (note 7). There will be no need to summon Councils as in the ninth century. Things are done differently today. I must repeat that I have no wish to criticize, I merely place the facts before you.

Considerable progress has been made towards the abolition of the soul in many spheres. The nineteenth century, for example, saw the rise of dialectical materialism which is the basic tenet of (German) social democracy today. If we look upon Engels and Marx as the major “prophets” of dialectical materialism—the Biblical term is perhaps out of place in this context, but we may perhaps risk it here—they are also the direct descendants, historically speaking, of the Church Fathers of the eighth Ecumenical Council. We see here an unbroken line of development. The steps taken by the Church Fathers towards the abolition of the spirit were carried a stage further by Marx and Engels in their comprehensive attempt to abolish the soul. According to the materialistic theory of history spiritual impulses are of no account, the driving forces of history are material forces or economic factors—the struggle for material wellbeing. What appertains to the soul is simply a superstructure on the solid foundation of material processes. It is important to recognize the genuine catholicity of Marx and Engels and to note in these aspirations of the nineteenth century the true consequence of the abolition of the spirit.

The development of the modern scientific outlook is another factor which has contributed to the abolition of the soul. This outlook—I am speaking not of the positive achievements of the scientific “Weltanschauung”, which accepts only the reality of the corporeal and regards everything pertaining to the soul as an epiphenomenon, a superstructure on what is corporeal—this scientific outlook is the direct consequence of that development which we have just seen in the decisive impulses of the eighth Ecumenical Council. But the majority of mankind will probably not believe in this possibility until, originating from certain centres of world evolution, the abolition of the soul will receive more or less legal sanction. It will not be long before decrees are promulgated in several States declaring that those who take seriously the existence of the soul are not of sound mind, and only those will be regarded of sound mind who recognize the “truth”, namely that thinking, feeling and willing are the necessary by-products of certain physiological processes. Various steps have already been taken in this direction, but so long as they are confined to the realm of theory they can have no deep or lasting influence or significance. It is only when they are translated into practice in the social order that they exercise a deep and lasting influence. The first half of the present century will scarcely be over before those who are clear-sighted will be faced with an alarming situation by the abolition of the soul, akin to the abolition of the spirit that occurred in the ninth century.

It cannot be repeated too often that it is insight into these things which matters, insight into the impulses which have determined man's destiny in the course of historical evolution. It is only too true that the materialist education of today induces a more or less soporific condition. It inhibits clear thinking, precludes a healthy perception of reality and blinds man to the really important factors in historical evolution. And so today, even those who would fain satisfy their longing for spiritual knowledge lack the strength of will to kindle an awareness of certain impulses inherent in our evolution and to make serious efforts to see things as they really are.

Now there existed in Palestine certain Mystery teachings which were a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha and in respect of which the Mystery of Golgotha was seemingly a fulfilment. I referred to this when I said that in the Mystery of Golgotha the greatest mystery drama of all time was enacted on the stage of world history. In that event, we may ask, why did Romanism develop such a strong antipathy to Christianity in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and how was it that this apathy entailed in particular the abolition of the spirit?

These things are more closely related than is suspected by those who only study them superficially. Today few are prepared to admit that Marx and Engels are the direct heirs of the Church Fathers. That is of no great moment, but it leads to something of far greater moment if we bear the following in mind. At the trial before the Sanhedrin, which condemned Jesus Christ, the Sadducees played a leading part. Who were the Sadducees (those who have rightly been given the name of Sadducees) (note 8) at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha? They were a sect which wished to eradicate, to suppress everything that proceeded from the ancient Mysteries. They had a fear, a horror of every form of Mystery cult. The courts and the administration were in their hands. They were completely under the influence of the Roman State; in effect they were the servile agents of Rome. There is unmistakable evidence that they purchased preferment for large sums of money and then recouped themselves by dunning the Jewish population of Palestine. It was they who realized—and thanks to their Ahrimanic, materialistic outlook they were quick to perceive this—that Rome was threatened if it should come to be accepted in any way that the drama of Christ was related to the fundamental teachings of the Mysteries. They had an instinctive feeling that Christianity would give birth to something that would gradually overthrow the authority of Rome. And this accounts for those fierce wars of extermination which Rome waged against Judaism in Palestine during the first century and in later centuries. These wars of extermination were prosecuted with the avowed object of exterminating not only the Jews but all those who knew anything of the reality and traditions of the ancient Mysteries. Everything associated in any way with the Mystery teachings, especially in Palestine, was to be destroyed root and branch.

As a consequence of this suppression of the Mystery teachings the perception of the spiritual in man was lost, the path to the spiritual in man was closed. It would have been dangerous for those who later sought to abolish the spirit under the influence of Rome, of Romanized Christianity, if many of those who had been initiated in the ancient Mystery schools of Palestine had still survived, if those who still preserved a memory of the spirit and could still bear witness to the fact that man consisted of body, soul and spirit. The policy of Romanism was to establish a social order in which the spirit had no place, to encourage an evolutionary trend that would exclude all spiritual impulses. This could not have been realized if too many people had known the interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha that was adumbrated in the Mysteries. It was instinctively felt that nothing of a spiritual nature could emerge from the Roman State. From the union of the Church and the Roman State was born jurisprudence. In this the spirit had no part. It is important to bear this in mind.

It is important to realize that we are now living in an age when we must awaken the spirit once more, so that it can participate in the affairs of men. You can imagine how difficult this will be since materialism is so deeply ingrained. I believe it will be long before it is generally recognized that dialectical materialism is a true continuation of the eighth Ecumenical Council, before people understand the real implication of the term filioque which was responsible for the schism between the Western Church and the Eastern Church, between Rome and Byzantium. Today people are content to speak of these matters in a superficial way, to pass surface judgements. For the understanding of many things we shall have to appeal to feeling, and feeling can be wisely directed if one thing is kept clearly in mind. The feeling to which I refer and with which I will conclude this lecture today is the following:

When we study the history of Europe from the rise of Christianity onwards, we are no longer satisfied with that “fable convenue” which passes for history and which is the hidden cause of so much misery today. And when we have sufficient courage to reject this parody of history, we shall develop a feeling which will serve as a guiding principle in our enquiries into the evolution of Christianity today. We shall discover that nothing has met with so many hindrances, so much incomprehension and misrepresentation as the evolution of Christianity. And nothing has been so difficult as its propagation. When one speaks of miracles, there is no greater miracle than this, namely, that Christianity has survived. Not only has it established itself, but we live in an age when it must prevail, not only against those who would abolish the spirit, but also against those who would abolish the soul. And it will prove victorious, for Christianity will develop its greatest strength in face of bitterest opposition. By actively resisting the abolition of the soul we shall develop the power to perceive the spirit once again. When, under the influence of the spirit prevailing today (you will forgive the misuse of the word in this context) laws will be promulgated declaring those who regard the spirit as a reality to be of unsound mind—of course these laws will not be couched in specific terms, but under the brutal impact of the modern scientific outlook they will find their way on to the statute book—when this new modernized version of the decree of the eighth Ecumenical Council appears, then the time will have come for the spirit to be restored to its rightful place.

We shall then be forced to recognize that vague, nebulous concepts are of no avail. We must become aware of the deep origin, of the deep-seated feelings underlying these nebulous concepts, for they often conceal the materialism to which modern man has succumbed and which he refuses to admit to himself. And because he refuses to admit this to himself, because he will not acknowledge this openly, he pays the penalty; materialism corrupts his thinking. But Saint-Martin says in the more important passages of his book: “These things are not to be spoken of.” Certainly, it will be a long time before certain things can be discussed openly. None the less many things will have to be proclaimed loud and clear in order to awaken mankind to the true state of affairs. And in the not too far-distant future this warning will serve to reveal the origin of those hidden tendencies behind the evolutionism of Darwin, the source from which the sensual, perverse tendencies of the present materialistically orientated Darwinism has sprung.

But I do not wish to end on a melancholy note. I will not pursue the matter further, but simply direct your attention to these questions. Today I wished to prepare an outline plan which will serve as a basis for a special study of the Mystery of Golgotha. In my next lecture I will endeavour to fill in the details.

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Original Notes:

Note 1. Numerals in brackets in the texts refer to Notes by the translator at the end of each lecture.

Note 2. In Spiritual Science the first level of higher consciousness is given the name of “Imagination” or “Imaginative Knowledge”. It is the result of inwardly strengthened thinking, giving rise to a consciousness filled with living images or pictures.

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NOTES BY TRANSLATOR

Note 1. Cardinal Acton—Charles Januarius Acton (1803–47) Cardinal 1842. Uncle of the famous historian, Lord Acton (1834–1902).

Note 2. The dating of the Synoptic Gospels by Protestant theologians is as follows: Matthew, A.D. 70–75; Mark, circa A.D. 65; Luke, A.D. 50–55; and John, post A.D. 100. Roman Catholic theologians give the following dates: Matthew, post A.D. 70; Mark, A.D. 65–75; Luke, A.D. 70–80; John, A.D. 100.

Note 3. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803). Under the pseudonym of “The Unknown Philosopher” wrote on occultism and mysticism. Influenced by Pasqually, Swedenborg and Boehme. Alleged to have founded a Martinist Rite, a modification of the Rite des Elus Coëns. Was a firm opponent of the prevailing materialism of his day and emphasised the need for faith and good works. In later life withdrew from Lodge activities into mysticism.

Note 4. Gnosticism. The word is derived from the Greek gnosis—knowledge. The name “Gnostics” is used to designate widely different sects which flourished in the second and third centuries. They speculated on problems of human destiny and professed to teach a knowledge of God and man. Our knowledge of Gnosticism was for long confined to criticisms by its opponents: Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, St. Epiphenius and others. The leading exponents of Gnosticism were the Ophites, Simon Magnus, Carpocrates, Basildes, Marcion and Valentinus. Many documents are lost or were destroyed as heretical. Today our knowledge is based upon the Pistis Sophia (fourth century), the Bruce Codex (fifth century), the Codex Berulensis (now lost), the Manichaean writings found at Turfan in Chinese Turkistam (early in this century), the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic writings in Coptic translation discovered in 1945 at NagHammadi in Egypt, the ancient Chenoboskion. Valuable for further study are: The Gnostics and their remains, ancient and mediaeval, C. W. King, 1887, with descriptive plates of talismans, gems, sigils, etc; The Secret Book of the Egyptian Gnostics, Jean Doresse (from the French), 1960. Very important: The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas, Paperback 1963.

In Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Erster Teil, lectures VIII and IX, Dr. Steiner tells us that Gnosis was a wisdom knowledge, a “survival of ancient wisdom derived from the old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world. It was suppressed by dogmatic Christianity from motives of hostility to Mystery wisdom, for Gnosis declared that Christ had descended upon earth through the realms of the spiritual Hierarchies and incarnated in the physical body of Jesus which had been prepared for 30 years to receive the Christ Being.”

Note 5. The eighth Ecumenical Council or the fourth Council of Constantinople, 869, condemned Photius who was responsible for the Greek schism (see filioque). A note in the German edition says that it was the abuse of the Pauline distinction between the “psychic” man and the “spiritual” man which decided the Church of Rome to reject the idea of trichotomy.

Note 6. Filioque controversy. Filioque (“and the Son”) was an addition by the Western Church to the Constantinopolitan Creed, namely, that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son (called the double Procession of the Holy Ghost). This was the origin of the Greek schism and the chief ground of attack upon the Church of Rome by the Orthodox Church, which follows the Byzantine rite. Photius refused to accept the insertion of filioque in the Nicene Creed and the Photian schism finally triumphed in the Orthodox Church. The addition of filioque was first met with at the third Council of Toledo 589, and was defended by Patriarch Paulinus at the Synod of Friuli 796. When introduced into the monastery at Jerusalem by Frankish monks in 847 it met with immediate opposition from Eastern monks. It was adopted at Rome after A.D. 1000 and declared to be a dogma of faith in the fourth Lateran Council 1215.

Note 7. In this context it is interesting to note that, in 1926, at an International Psychological Conference, Pavlov declared that we must abandon the misleading term “soul”. “The proper study of psychology is physiology”, he declared.

Note 8. The Sadducees adhered to the letter of the law. They were the dominant priestly party and were subservient to the Roman procurators of Judaea.

The two previous lectures were devoted to considerations intended to show how that tremendous change, which entered into the whole soul constitution of civilized mankind with the fifteenth century—that is, with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period—continued to have an effect on outstanding personalities. Let me introduce today's lecture with a brief summary of these preceding considerations. I showed how intensely a personality such as Goethe sensed the continuing vibrations of the great change, how he sensed that it was a concrete experience to find intellectual reasoning entering into the human soul. He sensed that it was necessary to come to terms with the intellectual element of the soul and he also had an inkling of the direct intercourse between human beings and the spiritual world which had preceded this intellectual stage. Even though it was no longer as it had been in the days of ancient atavistic clairvoyance, there was nevertheless a kind of looking back to the time when human beings knew that it was only possible for them to find real knowledge if they stepped outside the world of the senses in order to see in some way the spiritual beings who existed behind the sense-perceptible world.

Goethe invested the figure of his Faust with all these things sensed in his soul. We saw how dissatisfied Faust is by stark intellectualism as presented to him in the four academic faculties:

I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end ...

He is saying in different words: I have loaded my soul with the whole complexity of intellectual science and here I now stand filled with the utmost doubt; that is why I have devoted myself to magic.

Because of dissatisfaction with the intellectual sciences, Goethe invests the Faust figure with a desire to return to intercourse with the spiritual world. This was quite clear in his soul when he was young, and he wanted to express it in the figure of Faust. He chose the Faust figure to represent his own soul struggles. I said that although this is not the case with the historical Faust of the legend, we could nevertheless find in Goethe's depiction of Faust that professor who might have taught at Wittenberg in the sixteenth or even in the seventeenth century, and who had, ‘Straight or crosswise, wrong or right’, led his scholars by the nose ‘these ten years long’. This hypothesis allows us to see how in this educational process there was a mixture of the new intellectualism with something pointing back to ancient days when intercourse with the spiritual world and with the spiritual powers of creation was still possible for human beings.

I then asked whether—apart from what is given us in the Faust drama—we might also, in the wider environment, come up against the effects of what someone like Faust could have taught in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. And here we hit upon Hamlet, about whom it could be said: The character which Shakespeare created out of Hamlet—who in his turn he had taken from Danish mythology and transformed—could have been a pupil of Faust, one of those very students whom Faust had led by the nose ‘these ten years long’. We see Hamlet interacting with the spiritual world. His task is given to him by the spiritual world, but he is constantly prevented from fulfilling it by the qualities he has acquired as a result of his intellectual education. In Hamlet, too, we see the whole transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Further, I said that in the whole mood and artistic form of Shakespeare's plays, that is, in the historical plays, we could find in the creativity of the writer of Shakespeare's plays the twilit mood of that time of transition. Then I drew your attention to the way in which Goethe and Schiller in Central Europe had stood in their whole life of soul within the dying vibrations of the transition, yet had lacked, in a certain sense, the will to accept what the intellectual view of the world had since then brought about in the life of human beings. This led them back to Shakespeare, for in his work—Hamlet, Macbeth and so on—they discovered the capacity to approach the spiritual world; from his vantage point, they could see into the world of spiritual powers which was now hidden from the intellectual viewpoint.

Goethe did this in his Götz von Berlichingen by taking the side of the dying echoes of the old time of the fourth post-Atlantean period and by rejecting what had come into being through intellectualism. Schiller, in the dramas of his youth, especially in Die Räuber (The Robbers), goes back to that time—not by pointing to the super-sensible world, but by endeavouring to be entirely realistic, yet putting into the very words characterizing Karl Moor something which echoes the luciferic element that is also at work in Milton's Paradise Lost.¹ In short, despite his realism, we detect a kind of return to a conception of reality which allows the spiritual forces and powers to shine through.

I indicated further that, in the West, Shakespeare was in a position—if I may put it like this—to work artistically in full harmony with his social environment. Hamlet is the play most characteristic of Shakespeare. Here the action is everywhere quite close to the spiritual world, as it is also in Macbeth. In King Lear, for instance, we see how he brings the super-sensible world more into the human personality, into an abnormal form of the human personality, the element of madness. Then, in the historical dramas about the kings, he goes over more into realism but, at the same time, we see in these plays a unique depiction of a long drawn-out dramatic evolution influenced everywhere by the forces of destiny, but culminating and coming to an end in the age of Queen Elizabeth.

The thing that is at work in Shakespeare's plays is a retrospective view of older ages leading up to the time in which he lives, a time which is seen to be accepted by him. Everything belonging to older times is depicted artistically in a way which leads to an understanding of the time in which he lives. You could say that Shakespeare portrays the past. But he portrays it in such a way that he places himself in his contemporary western social environment, which he shows to be a time in which things can take the course which they are prone to take. We see a certain satisfaction with regard to what has come about in the external world. The intellectualism of the social order is accepted by the person belonging to the external, physical earthly world, by the social human being, whereas the artistic human being in Shakespeare goes back to earlier times and portrays that aspect of the super-sensible world which has created pure intellectualism.

Then we see that in Central Europe this becomes an impossibility. Goethe and Schiller, and before them Lessing, cannot place themselves within the social order in a way which enables them to accept it. They all look back to Shakespeare, but to that Shakespeare who himself went back into the past. They want the past to lead to something different from the present time in which they find themselves. Shakespeare is in a way satisfied with his environment; but they are dissatisfied with theirs.

Out of this mood of spiritual revolution Goethe creates the drama of Götz von Berlichingen, and Schiller the dramas of his youth. We see how the external reality of the world is criticized, and how in the artistic realm there is an ebbing and flowing of something that can only be achieved in ideas, something that can only be achieved in the spirit. Therefore we can say: In Goethe and Schiller there is no acceptance of the present time. They have to comfort themselves, so far as external sense-perceptible reality is concerned, with what works down out of the spiritual world. Shakespeare in a way brings the super-sensible world down into the sense-perceptible world. Goethe and Schiller can only accept the sense-perceptible world by constantly turning their attention to the spiritual world. In the dramas of Goethe and Schiller we have a working together of the spiritual with the physical—basically, an unresolved disharmony. I then said that if we were to go further eastwards we would find that there is nothing on the earth that is spiritual. The East of Europe has not created anything into which the spirit plays. The East flees from the external working of the world and seeks salvation in the spirit above.

I was able to clothe all this in an Imagination by saying to you: Let us imagine Faust as Hamlet's teacher, a professor in Wittenberg. Hamlet sits at his feet and listens to him, after which he returns to the West and accustoms himself once again to the western way of life. But if we were to seek a being who could have gone to the East, we should have had to look for an angel who had listened to Faust from the spiritual world before going eastwards. Whatever he then did there would not have resembled the deeds and actions of Hamlet on the physical plane but would have taken place above human beings, in the spiritual world.

Yesterday, I then described how, out of this mood, at the time when he was making the acquaintance of Schiller, Goethe felt impelled to bring the being of man closer to the spiritual world. He could not do this theoretically, in the way Schiller, the philosopher, was able to do in his aesthetic letters, but instead he was urged to enter the realm of Imagination and write the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Then Schiller felt the urge to bring the external reality of human life closer to the spirit—I might say experimentally—in Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp), by letting a belief in the stars hold sway like a force of destiny over the personality of Wallenstein, and in Die Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina) by letting a destiny run its course virtually entwined with a belief in the stars. These personalities were impelled ever and again to turn back to the time when human beings still had direct intercourse with the spiritual world.

Further, I said that Goethe and Schiller lived at a time when it was not yet possible to find a new entry into the spiritual world from out of a modern soul constitution. Schiller in particular, with his philosophical bent, had he lived longer and finished the drama about the Knights of Malta, would have come to an understanding of how, in an order like this, or like that of the Templars, the spiritual worlds worked together with the deeds of human beings. But it was not granted to Schiller to give the world the finished drama about the Knights of Malta, for he died too soon. Goethe, on the other hand, was unable to advance to a real grasp of the spiritual world, so he turned back. We have to say that Goethe went back to Catholic symbolism, the Catholic cultus, the cultus of the image, though he did so in an essentially metamorphosed form. We cannot help but be reminded of the good nun Hrosvitha's legend of Theophilus² from the ninth century, when Goethe in his turn allows Faust to be redeemed in the midst of a Christianizing tableau. Although his genius lets him present it in a magnificently grand and artistic manner, we cannot but be reminded, in ‘The Eternal Feminine bears us aloft’, of the Virgin Mary elevating the ninth-century Theophilus.

An understanding of these things gives us deep insight into the struggle within intellectualism, the struggle in intellectualism which causes human beings to experience inwardly the thought-corpse of what man is before descending through birth—or, rather, through conception—into his physical life on earth. The thoughts which live in us are nothing but corpses of the spirit unless we make them fruitful through the knowledge given by spiritual science. Whatever we are, spiritually, up to the moment when earthly life begins, dies as it enters our body, and we bear its corpse within us. It is our earthly power of thought, the power of thought of our ordinary consciousness.

How can something that is dead in the spiritual sense be brought back to life? This was the great question which lived in the souls of Goethe and Schiller. They do not bring it to expression philosophically but they sense it within their feeling life. And they compose their works accordingly. They have the feeling: Something is dead if we remain within the realm of the intellect alone; we must bring it to life. It is this feeling which makes them struggle to return to a belief in the stars and to all sorts of other things, in order to bring a spiritual element into what they are trying to depict. It is necessary for us to be aware of how the course of world evolution is made manifest in such outstanding personalities, how it streams into their souls and becomes the stuff of their struggles. We cannot comprehend our present time unless we see that what this present time must strive for—a new achievement of the spiritual world—is the very problem which was of such concern for Goethe and Schiller.

What happened as a result of the great transition which took place in the fifteenth century was something of which absolutely no account is taken in ordinary history. It was, that the human being acquired an entirely different attitude towards himself. But we must not endeavour to capture this in theoretical concepts. We must endeavour to trace it in what human beings sensed; we must find out how it went through a preparation and how it later ran its course after the great change had been fulfilled in its essential spiritual force.

There are pointers to these things at crucial points in cultural evolution. See how this comes towards us in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.³ You all know the story. You know how crucial it was for the whole of Parzival's development that he first of all received instruction from a kind of teacher as to how he was to go through the world without asking too many questions. As a representative of that older world order which still saw human beings as having direct intercourse with the spiritual world, Gurnemanz says to Parzival: Do not ask questions, for questioning comes from the intellect, and the spiritual world flees from the intellect; if you want to approach the spiritual world you must not ask questions.

But times have changed and the transition begins to take place. It is announced in advance: Even though Parzival goes back several more centuries, into the seventh or eighth century, all this was nevertheless experienced in advance in the Grail temple. Here, in a way, the institutions of the future are already installed, and one of them is that questions must be asked. The essential point is that with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period the situation of the human being changes. Previously it was inappropriate to ask questions because conditions held sway about which Goethe speaks so paradoxically:

The lofty might
Of Science, still
From all men deeply hidden!
Who takes no thought,
To him 'tis brought,
'Tis given unsought, unbidden!

In those times it was right not to ask questions, for that would have driven away the spirits! But in the age of the intellect the spiritual world has to be rediscovered through the intellect and not by damping down the processes of thought. The opposite must now come into play; questions must be asked. As early as Parzival we find a portrayal of the great change which brings it about in the fifth post-Atlantean period that the longing for the spiritual world now has to be born out of the human being in the form of questions to be formulated.

But there is also something else, something very remarkable, which comes to meet us in Parzival. I should like to describe it as follows. The languages which exist today are far removed from their origins, for they have developed as time has gone on. When we speak today—as I have so often shown—the various combinations of sounds no longer remind us of whatever these combinations of sounds denote. We now have to acquire a more delicate sense for language in order to experience in it all the things that it signifies. This was not the case where the original languages of the human race were concerned. In those days it was known that the combination of sounds itself contained whatever was experienced in connection with the thing depicted by those sounds. Nowadays poets seek to imitate this. Think, for instance, of ‘Und es wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt’.⁴ Poetic language has here imitated something of what the poet wants us to see externally. But this is mere derived imitation. In olden times every single sound in language was felt to have the most intimate connection with what was happening all around. Today only some local dialects can lay claim to giving us some sense for the connection between external reality and the words spoken in dialect. However, language is still very close to our soul—it is a special element in our soul.

It is another consequence of the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period that this has become deposited as something very deeply sensed within the human soul, again a fact which is left out of account by both philology and history. The fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean period human beings lived more within their language and that in the fifth post-Atlantean period this is no longer the case, brings about a different attitude by human beings towards the world. You can understand that human beings with their ego are linked quite differently to what is going on around them if, in using language, they go along with all the rushing of waves, the thundering and lightning, and whatever else is happening out there. This becomes ever more detached as the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period progresses. The ego becomes more inward, and language together with the ego also becomes more inward, but at the same time less meaningful as regards external matters. Such things are most certainly not perceived by the knowledge of today, which has become so intellectual. There is hardly any concern to describe such things. But if what is taking place in mankind is to be correctly understood, they will have to be described.

Imagine what can come into being. Imagine vividly to yourselves, here the fourth post-Atlantean period, and here the fifth. The transition is of course gradual, but for the sake of explanation I shall have to talk in extremes. In the fourth post-Atlantean period you have here the things of the world (green). The human being with his words, depicted within him, here in red, is still connected with the things. You could say he 'lives over' into the things through the medium of his words. In the fifth post-Atlantean period the human being possesses his words within his soul, separated off from the world.

Imagine this clearly, even almost in grotesque detail. Looking at the human being here in the fourth post-Atlantean period, you might say of him that he still lives with the things. The things he does in the outside world will proceed to take place in accordance with his words. If you see one of these human beings performing a deed, and if at the same time you hear how he describes the deed, there is a harmony between the two. Just as his words are in harmony with external things, so are his deeds in harmony with the words he speaks. But if a human being in the fifth post-Atlantean period speaks, you can no longer detect that his words resound in what he does. What connection with the deed can you find today in the words: I have chopped wood! In what is taking place out there in the activity of chopping we can no longer sense in any way a connection with the movement of the chopper. As a result, the connection with the sounds of the words gradually disappears; they cease to be in harmony with what is going on outside. We no longer find any connection between the two. So then, if someone listens pedantically to the words and actually does

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what lies in the words, the situation is quite different. Someone might say: I bake mice. But if someone were actually to bake mice, this would seem grotesque and would not be understood.

This was sensed, and so it was said: People ought to consider what they actually have in their soul in conjunction with what they do externally; the relationship between the two would be like an owl looking in a mirror! If someone were to do exactly what the words say, it would be like holding up a mirror to an owl. Out of this, in the second half of the fourteenth century, Till Eulenspiegel arose.⁵ The owl's mirror is held up in front of mankind. It is not Till Eulenspiegel who has to look in the mirror. But because Till Eulenspiegel takes literally what people say with their dry, abstract words, they suddenly see themselves, whereas normally they do not see themselves at all. It is a mirror for the owls because they can really see themselves in it.

Night has fallen. In past times, human beings could see into the spiritual world. And the activity of their words was in harmony with the world. Human beings were eagles. But now they have become owls. The world of the soul has become a bird of the night. In the strange world depicted by Till Eulenspiegel, a mirror is held up before the owl.

This is quite a feasible way of regarding what appears in the spiritual world. Things do have their hidden reasons. If we fail to take note of the spiritual background, we also fail to understand history, and with it the chief factor in humanity today. It is especially important to depart from the usual external characterization of everything. Look in any dictionary and see what absurd explanations are given for Eulenspiegel! He cannot be understood without entering into the whole process of cultural and spiritual life. The important thing in spiritual science is to actually discover the spirit in things, not in a way that entails a conceptual knowledge of a few spiritual beings who exist outside the sense-perceptible world, but in a way which leads us to an ability to see reality with spiritual eyes.

The change which took place, between the time when human beings felt themselves to be close to the spiritual world and the later time when they felt as though they had been expelled from that world, can be seen in other areas too. Try to develop a sense for the profound impulse which runs through something like the Parzival epic. See how Parzival's mother dresses him in a simpleton's clothes because she does not want him to grow up into the world which represents the new world. She wants him to remain in the old world. But then he grows up from the sense-perceptible world into the world of the spirit.

The seventeenth century also possesses a kind of Parzival, a comical Parzival, in which everything is steeped in comedy. In the intellectualistic age, if one is honest, one cannot immediately muster the serious attitude of soul which prevails in Parzival. But the seventeenth century too, after the great change had taken place, had its own depiction of a character who has to set out into the world, lose himself in it, finally ending-up in solitude and finding the salvation of his soul. This is Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus.⁶ Look at the whole process of the story. Of course you must take the whole tone into account, on the one hand the pure, perhaps holy mood of Parzival, and on the other the picaresque, comical mood. Consider Simplicissimus, the son of well-to-do peasants in the Spessart region. In the Thirty Years’ War their house is burnt down. The son has to flee, and finds his way to a hermit in the forest who teaches him all kinds of things, but who then dies. So here he is, abandoned in the world and having to set off on his travels. He becomes immersed in all the events and blows of fate offered by the Thirty Years’ War. He arrives at the court of the governor of Hanau. Externally he has learnt nothing, externally he is a pure simpleton; yet he is an inwardly mature person for all that. But because externally he is a pure simpleton the governor of Hanau says to himself: This is a simpleton, he knows nothing; he is Simplicissimus, as naive as can be. What shall I train him to be? I shall train him to be my court fool.

But now the external and the internal human being are drawn apart. The ego has become independent in respect of the external human being. It is just this that is shown in Simplicissimus. The external human being in the external world, trained to be the court fool, is the one who is considered by all and sundry to be a fool. But in his inner being Simplicissimus in his turn considers all those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. For although he has not learnt a thing, he is nevertheless far cleverer than all those who have made him into a fool. He brings out of himself the other intellectuality, the intellectuality that comes from the spirit, whereas what comes to meet him from outside is the intellectuality that comes from reasoning alone. So the intellectualists take him for a fool, and the fool brings his intellectualism from the spiritual world and holds those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. Then he is taken prisoner by some Croats, after which he roams about the world undergoing many adventures, until finally he ends up once more at the hermitage where he settles down to live for the salvation of his soul.

The similarity between Simplicissimus and Parzival has been recognized, but the crucial thing is the difference in mood. What in Parzival's case was still steeped in the mind-soul has now risen up into the consciousness soul. Now caustic wit is at work, for the comical can only have its origin in caustic wit. If you have a feel for this change of mood, you will be able to discover—especially in works which have a broader base than that of a single individuality—what was going on in human evolution. And Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did indeed secrete in Simplicissimus the whole mood, the whole habit of thought of his time. Similarly you can in a way find the people as a whole composing stories, and gathering together all the things which the soul, in the guise of an owl, can see in the mirror, and which become all the tall tales found in Till Eulenspiegel.

It would be a good thing, once in a while, to go in more detail into all these things, not only in order to characterize the various interconnections. I can only give you isolated examples. To say everything that could be said I should have to speak for years. But this is not really what matters. What is crucial is to come closer to a more spiritual conception of these things. We have to learn to know how things which are presented to us purely externally are also connected with the spirit. So we may say: That tremendous change which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period can be seen everywhere, vibrating through the cultural and spiritual evolution of mankind. As soon as you step back a bit from this turning- point of time, you come to see how all the different phenomena point to the magnititude of the change.

Only by taking the interconnections into account is it possible to understand what lies hidden in the figures brought by spiritual and cultural life out of the past and into the present. Take Lohengrin, the son of Parzival. What does it mean that Elsa is forbidden to ask after his name and origin? People simply accept this. Not enough deep thought is given to the question as to why she is forbidden to ask, for usually there are two sides to everything. Certainly this could also be described differently, but one important aspect may be stated as follows: Lohengrin is an ambassador of the Grail; he is Parzival's son. Now what actually is the Grail community? Those who knew the mystery of the Grail did not look on the Grail temple as a place solely for the chosen knights of the Grail. They saw that all those who were pure in heart and Christian in the true sense went to the Grail while they slept—while they were between sleeping and waking. The Grail was seen as the place where all truly Christian souls gathered while they slept at night. There was a desire to be apart from the earth. So those who were the rulers of the Grail also had to be apart from earthly life. Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, was one of these. Those who desired to work in accordance with the Grail impulse had to feel themselves entirely within the spiritual world. They had to feel that they belonged entirely to the spiritual world and certainly not at all to the earthly world. In a certain sense you could say that they had to drink the draught of forgetfulness.

Lohengrin is sent down from the Grail castle. He unites with Elsa of Brabant, that is with the people of Brabant. In the train of Heinrich I he sets out to fight the Hungarians. In other words, at the instigation of the Grail he carries out important impulses of world history. The strength he has from the Grail temple enables him to do this. When we go back to the fourth post-Atlantean period we find that all these things are different. In those days spiritual impulses played their part together with external impulses that could be comprehended by the intellect. This is hardly noticeable in the way history is told today.

We speak quite rightly today of meditative formulae, simple sentences which work in the human being's consciousness through their very simplicity. How many people today understand what is meant when history tells us that those required to take part in the Crusades—they took place in the fourth post-Atlantean period—were provided with the meditative formula ‘God wills it’ and that this formula worked on them with spiritual force. ‘God wills it’ was a kind of social meditation. Keep a look out for such things in history; you will find many! You will find the origins of the old mottos. You will discover how the ancient titled families set out on conquering expeditions under such mottos, thus working with spiritual means, with spiritual weapons. The most significant spiritual weapons of all were used by knights of the Grail, such as Lohengrin. But he was only able to use them if he was not met with recollections of his external origins, his external name, his external family. He had to transport himself into a realm in which he could be entirely devoted to the spiritual world and in which his intercourse with the external world was limited to what he perceived with his senses, devoid of any memories. He had to accomplish his deeds under the influence of the draught of forgetfulness. He was not allowed to be reminded. His soul was not permitted to remember: This is my name and I am a scion of this or that family. So this is why Elsa of Brabant is not allowed to question him. When she does, he is forced to remember. The effect on his deeds is the same as if his sword had been smashed.

If we go back beyond the time when everything became intellectual, so that people also clothed what had gone before in intellectual concepts, imagining that everything had always been as they knew it—if we go back beyond what belongs to the age of the intellect, we find the spiritual realm working everywhere in the social realm. People took the spiritual element into account, for instance, in that they took moral matters just as much into account as physical medicines.

In the age of the intellect, in which all people belong only to the intellect, whatever would they think if they found that moral elements, too, were available at the chemist's! Yet we need only go back a few centuries prior to the great change. Read Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue,⁷ who was a contemporary of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Before you stands a knight, a rich knight, who has turned away from God, who in his soul has lost his links with the spiritual world, and who thus experiences this moment of atheism which has come over him as a physical illness, a kind of leprosy. Everyone avoids him. No physician can cure him. Then he meets a clever doctor in Salerno who tells him that no physical medicine can do him any good. His only hope of a cure lies in finding a pure virgin who is prepared to be slain for his sake. The blood of a pure virgin can cure him of his illness. He sells all his possessions and lives alone on a smallholding cared for by the tenant farmer. The farmer has a daughter. She falls in love with the leprous knight, discovers what it is that alone can cure him, and decides to die for him. He goes with her to the doctor in Salerno. But then he starts to pity her, preferring to keep his illness rather than accept her sacrifice. But even her willingness to make the sacrifice is enough. Gradually he is healed.

We see how the spirit works into cultural life, we see how moral impulses heal and were regarded as healing influences. Today the only interpretation is: Ah, well, perhaps it was a coincidence, or maybe it is just a tale. Whatever we think of individual incidents, we cannot but point out that, during the time which preceded the fifteenth century, soul could work on soul much more strongly than was the case later; what a soul thought and felt and willed worked on other souls. The social separation between one human being and another is a phenomenon of intellectualism. The more intellectualism flourishes and the less an effort is made to find what can work against it—namely the spiritual element—the more will this intellectualism divide one individuality from another.

This had to come about; individualism is necessary. But social life must be found out of individualism. Otherwise, in the ‘social age’ all people will do is be unsociable and cry out for Socialism. The main reason for the cry for Socialism is that people are unsocial in the depths of their soul. We must take note of the social element as it comes towards us in works such as Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich. It makes its appearance in cultural works in which it can be sensed quite clearly through the mood. See how different is the mood in Der arme Heinrich. You cannot call it sentimental, for sentimentality only arose later when people found an unnatural escape from intellectualism. The mood is in a way pious; it is a mood of spirituality. To be honest about the same matters in a later age you have to fall back on the element of comedy. You have to tell your story as Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did in Simplicissimus, or as the people as a whole did in Till Eulenspiegel.

This sense of having been thrown out of the world is found everywhere, not only in poetic works arising out of the folk element. Wherever it appears, you find that what is being depicted is a new attitude of the human being towards himself. From an entirely new standpoint he asks: What am I, if I am a human being? This vibrates through everything. So from the new intellectual standpoint the question is asked over and over again: What is the human being? In earlier times people turned to the spiritual world. They truly sought what Faust later seeks in vain. They turned to the spiritual world when they wanted to know: What actually is the human being? They knew that outside this physical life on earth the human being is a spirit. So if he wants to discover his true being, which lives in him also in physical, earthly life, then he will have to turn to the spiritual world. Yet more and more human beings are failing to do this very thing.

In Faust Goethe still hints: If I want to know the spirit, I must turn to the spiritual world. But it does not work. The Earth Spirit appears, but Faust cannot recognize it with his ordinary knowledge. The Earth Spirit says to him: ‘Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, not me!’⁸ Faust has to turn away and speak to Wagner. In Wagner he then sees the spirit which he comprehends. Faust, ‘image of the Godhead’, cannot comprehend the Earth Spirit. So Goethe still lived in an age which strove to find the being of man out of the spiritual world. You see what came once Goethe had died. Once again people wanted to know what the human being is, this time on the basis of intellectualism. Follow the thread: People cannot turn to the spiritual world in order to discover what the human being is. In themselves, equally, they fail to find the answer, for language has meanwhile become an owl in the soul. So they turned to those who depicted olden times at least in an external fashion. What do we find in the nineteenth century?⁹ In 1836 Jeremias Gotthelf: Bauernspiegel; in 1839 Immermann: Oberhof, Die drei Mahlen, Schwarzwalder Bauern geschichten; George Sand: La Petite Fadette; in 1847 Grigorovich: Unhappy Anthony; in 1847-51 Turgeniev: Sportsman's Sketches.

We have here the longing to find in simple people the answer to the question: What is the human being? In olden times you turned to the spiritual world. Now you turned to the peasant. During the course of two decades the whole world develops a longing to write village stories in order to study the human being. Because people cannot recognize themselves, at best looking in the mirror as if they are owls, they turn to simple folk instead. What they can prove in every detail, from Jeremias Gotthelf to Turgeniev, is that everything is striving to get to know the human being. In all these village stories, in all these simple tales, the unconscious endeavour is to achieve a knowledge of man. From this kind of viewpoint spiritual and cultural life can become comprehensible.

This is what I wanted to show you in these three lectures, in order to illustrate the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is not enough to describe this transition with a few abstract concepts—which is what was naturally done at first. Our task is to illumine the whole of reality with the light of the spirit through Anthroposophy. These lectures have beenan example of this.

• 1 . John Milton, 1608-1674. English poet and puritan politician. His epic poem Paradise Lost was finished by 1665.
• 2 . Lecture Twelve, Note 7
• 3 . Wolfram von Eschenbach, c.1170-1220. One of the greatest medieval German poets. Parzival was probably written between 1200 and 1210.
• 4 . #8216;And it bubbles and seethes, and it hisses and roars’, Der Taucher by Friedrich von Schiller, translated by E. Bulwer Lytton in The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, Leipzig 1844.
• 5 . Till Eulenspiegel, a popular German peasant jester, was supposed to have died in Winn in 1350. The first extant text of the chapbook in High German chronicling his escapades was published in 1515. The name ‘Eulenspieger means, literally, ‘owl's mirror’. (Tr.)
• 6 . Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, d.1676. German writer. Simplicissimus, published in 1669, is said to be the greatest German novel of the seventeenth century.
• 7 . Hartmann von Aue, c.1170-1213. Middle High German poet. Der arme Heinrich (Poor Henry).
• 8 . ‘Thou'rt like the spirit’: Faust Part One. The Study.
• 9 . Jerennas Gotthelf (A. Bitzius), 1797-1854; Karl Immermann, 1796-1840; George Sand (A.A.L. Dupin-Dudevant), 1804-1876; D.W. Grigorovich, 1818-1883; I.S. Turgeniev, 1818-1883.

We have often drawn attention to the fact that the spiritual life of the first four Christian centuries has been completely buried, that everything written today about the views and knowledge of human beings living at the time of the mystery of Golgotha and during the four centuries thereafter is based on sources which have come to us essentially through the writings of the opponents of gnosticism. This means that the “backward seeing” of the spiritual researcher is necessary to create a more exact picture of what actually took place during these first four Christian centuries. In this sense I have recently attempted to present a picture of Julian the Apostate.¹

Now, we cannot say that the following centuries, as presented in the usual historical descriptions, are very clear to people today. What we could call the soul life of the European population from the fifth on into the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries remains completely unclear in the usual historical portrayals. What do we find, then, basically represented in these usual historical portrayals? And what do we find even if we look at the writings of facile, so-called dramatists and authors, writers such as Ernst von Wildenbruch,² whose writings are, in essence, nothing more than the family histories of Louis the Pious or other similar personages, garnished with superficial pageantry, and then presented to us as history?

It is extremely important to look at the truth concerning European life during those times when so much of the present originated. If we want to understand anything at all concerning the deeper streams of culture, including the culture of recent times, we must understand the soul life of the European population in those times. Here I would like to begin with something which will, no doubt, be somewhat remote from many of you; we need, however, to address this subject because it can only be seen properly today in the light of spiritual science.

As you know there is something today called theology. This theology—basically all our present day European theology—actually came into being—in its fundamental structure, in its inner nature—during the time from the fourth and fifth centuries after Christ through the following very dark centuries up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when it was brought to a certain conclusion through scholasticism. From the point of view of this theology, which was really only developed in its essential nature in the time after Augustine, Augustine himself could no longer be understood; or, at best, he could barely be understood, while all that preceded him, for example, what was said about the mystery of Golgotha, could no longer be understood at all.³ Let us consider the essence of this theology which developed precisely during the darkest times of the Middle Ages, darkest, that is, for our external knowledge. Above all, it becomes clear to us that this theology is something entirely different from the theology that came before it—if indeed what came before can be called theology. What theology had been before was actually only transplanted like a legacy into the times in which the theology I have just characterized arose. And you can get an impression of what earlier theology was like if you read the short essay on Dionysius the Areopagite in this week's edition of the Goetheanum,⁴ There you will find a portrayal of the way in which human beings related to the world in the first Christian centuries, a way altogether different from that which came to prevail by the time of the ninth, tenth, and following centuries.

In contrast to the later, newer theology, the old theology—the theology of which Dionysius the Areopagite was a late product—saw everything that related to the spiritual world from within and had a direct view of what happens in the spiritual worlds. If we want to gain insight into the way adherents of this old theology actually thought, into the way the soul of this theology inwardly regarded things, then once again we can really only do so with the methods of present-day anthroposophical spiritual science.

We then come to the following results. (Yesterday, from another point of view I characterized something very similar.)⁵

In the ascent to Imagination, in the entire process of climbing, ascending to imaginative knowledge, we notice more and more that we are dwelling suspended in spiritual processes. This “hovering” in spiritual processes with our entire soul life we experience as if we were coming into contact with beings who do not live on the physical plane. Perceptions from our sense organs cease, and we experience that, to a certain extent, everything that is sense perception disappears. But during the whole process it seems as if we were being helped by beings from a higher world. We come to understand these as the same beings that the old theology had beheld as angels, archangels, and archai. I could, therefore, say that the angels help us to penetrate up into imaginative knowledge. The sense world “breaks up,” just as clouds disperse, and we see into what is behind the sense world. Behind the sense world a capacity that we can call Inspiration opens up; behind this sense world is then revealed the second hierarchy, the hierarchy of the exusiai, dynamis, and kyriotetes. These ordering and creative beings present themselves to the inspired knowledge of the soul. And when we ascend further still, from Inspiration to Intuition, then we come to the first hierarchy, the thrones, cherubim, and seraphim. Through immediate spiritual training we can experience the realities that the older theologians actually referred to when they used such terms as first, second, and third hierarchy.

Now, it is just when we look at the theology of the first Christian centuries, which has been almost entirely stamped out, that we notice the following: in a certain way that early theology still had an awareness that when man directs his senses toward the usual, sensible, external world, he may see the things in that world and he may believe in their existence, but he does not actually know that world. There is a very definite consciousness present in this old theology: the consciousness that one must first have experienced something in the spiritual world before the concepts present themselves with which one can then approach the sense world and, so to speak, illuminate it with ideas acquired from the spiritual world.

In a certain way this also corresponds to the views resulting from an older, dreamlike, atavistic clairvoyance, under the influence of which people first looked into a spiritual world—though only with dreamlike perceptions—and then applied what they experienced there to their sense perceptions. If these people had had before them only a view of the sense world, it would have seemed to them as if they were standing in a dark room with no light. However, if they first had their spiritual vision, a result of pure seeing into the world of the spirit, and then applied it to the sense world—if, for example, they had first beheld something of the creative powers of the animal world and then applied that vision to the outer, physical animals—then they would feel as though they were walking into the dark room with a lamp. They would feel that they were walking into the world of the senses and illuminating it with a spiritual mode of viewing. Only in this way was the sense world truly known. This was the consciousness of these older theologians. For this reason the entire Christology of the first Christian centuries was actually viewed from within. The process which took place, the descent of Christ into the earthly world, was essentially seen not from the outside but rather from the inside, from the spiritual side. One first sought out Christ in spiritual worlds and then followed him as he descended into the physical, sensible world. That was the consciousness of the older theologians.

Then the following happened: the Roman world, which the Christian impulse followed in its greatest westward development, was permeated in its spiritual understanding with an inclination, a fondness, for the abstract. The Romans tended to translate perceptions, observations, and insights into abstract concepts. However, the Roman world was actually decaying and falling apart while Christianity gradually spread toward the west. And, in addition, the northern peoples were pushing from the eastern part of Europe into the west and the south. Now, it is remarkable that, at the very time Rome was decaying and the fresh peoples from the north were arriving, a college was created on the Italian peninsula, a collegium concerning which I spoke recently, which set for itself the task of using all these events to completely root out the old views and modes of seeing, to allow to survive for posterity only those writings which this college felt comfortable with.⁶

History reports nothing concerning these events; nevertheless, they were real. If such a history did exist, it would point out how this college was created as a successor to the pontifical college of ancient Rome. Everything that this college did not allow was thoroughly swept away and what remained was modified before being passed on to posterity. Just as Rome invented the last will and testament as a part of its national economic order so that the dispositions of the individual human will could continue to work beyond the individual's life, so there arose in this college the desire to have the essence of Rome live on in the following ages of historical development if only as an inheritance, as the mere sum of dogmas that had been developed over many generations. “For as long as possible nothing new shall be seen in the spiritual world”—so decreed this college. “The principle of initiation shall be completely rooted out and destroyed. Only the writings we are now modifying are to survive for posterity.” If the facts were to be presented in a dry, objective fashion they would be presented in this way. Entirely different destinies would have befallen Christianity—it would have been entirely rigidified—had not the northern peoples come pushing into the west and the south. These northern peoples brought with them their own natural talent, a predisposition entirely different from that of the southern peoples, the Greeks and the Romans—different, that is, from that earlier southern predisposition that had originated the older theology.

In earlier times at least, the talent of the southern peoples had been the following: Among the earlier Romans and even more among the earlier Greeks there were always individuals from the mass of the people who developed themselves, who passed through an initiation and then could see into the spiritual world. With this vision the older theology arose, the theology that possessed a direct perception of the spiritual world. Such vision in its last phase is preserved in the theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. Let us consider one of the older theologians, say from the first or second century after the mystery of Golgotha, one of those theologians who still drew wisdom from the old science of initiation. If he had wanted to present the essence, I would like to say, the principles of his theology, he would have said: In order to have any relationship to the spiritual world, a human being must first obtain knowledge of the spiritual world, either directly through his own initiation or as the pupil of an initiate. Then, after acquiring ideas and concepts in the spiritual world he could apply these ideas and concepts to the world of the senses. Those were more or less the abstract principles of such an older theologian. The whole tendency of the older theological mood predisposed the soul to see the events in the world inwardly, first to see the spiritual and then to admit to oneself that the sensible world can only be seen if one starts from the spiritual. Such a theology could only result as the ripest product of an old atavistic clairvoyance, for atavistic clairvoyance was also an inner seeing or perception, though only of dreamlike imaginations.

But to begin with, the peoples coming down from the north had nothing of this older theological drive, that, as I said, was so strong in the Greeks. The natural abilities of the Gothic peoples, the Germanic, did not allow such a theological mood to rise up directly in the soul in an unmediated way. To properly understand the drive that these northern peoples brought into the development of Europe in the following ages (through the Germanic tribes, the Goths, the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, and so forth) we must resort to spiritual scientific means, for recorded history reports nothing of this. Initiates, able to see directly into the spiritual world in order to survey from that vantage point the sense world, could not arise from within the ranks of these peoples storming down from the north because their inner soul disposition was different. These peoples were themselves still somewhat atavistically clairvoyant; they were actually still at an earlier, more primitive stage of humanity's development. These peoples—Goths, Lombards, and so forth—still brought some of the old clairvoyance with them. But this old clairvoyance was not related to inner perceptions—to spiritual perceptions, yes—but rather to spiritual perceptions of things outer. The northern peoples did not see the spiritual world from the inside, so to speak, as had the southern peoples. The Northerners saw the spiritual world from the outside.

What does it mean to say that these peoples saw the spiritual world from the outside? Say that these people saw a brave man die in battle. The life in which they saw this man spiritually from the outside was not at an end for them. Now, with his death, they could follow him—still from the outside spiritually speaking—on his path into the spiritual world. They could follow not only the way this man lived into the spiritual world but also the ways in which he continued to be active on behalf of human beings on the earth. And so these northern peoples could say: Someone or other has died, after this or that significant deed, perhaps, or after his having been the leader of this people or that tribe. We see his soul, how it continues to live, how (if he had been a soldier) he is received by the great soldiers in Valhalla, or how he lives on in some other way. This soul, this man, is still here. He continues to live and is actually present. Death is merely an event which takes place here on the earth. Such an experience, having come with the northern peoples, was present in the fourth and fifth on through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries before being essentially buried. This was the perception of the dead as actually always present, the awareness that the souls of human beings who were greatly venerated were still present, even for earthly human beings. They were even still able to lead in battle. People of that time thought of these souls as still present, as not disappearing for the earthly. With the forces given them by the spiritual world these souls continued, in a certain sense, the functions of their earthly lives. The atavistic clairvoyance of the northern peoples was such then, that, as they saw the activities of people here on the earth, they also beheld a kind of shadow world directly above people on earth. The dead were in this shadow world. One needed only to look—these people felt—to see that those from the last and next to last generation actually continue to live. They are here, we experience community with them. For them to be present we need only to listen up into their realm.

This feeling, that the dead are here, was present, was incredibly strong, in the time that followed the fourth century, when the northern culture mixed with the Roman. You see, the northern peoples took Christ into this way of perceiving. They looked first at this world of the dead, who were actually the truly living. They saw hovering above them entire populations of the dead, and they beheld these dead as being actually more alive than themselves. They did not seek Christ here on the earth among people walking in the physical world; they sought Christ there where these living dead were. There they sought him as one who is really present above the earth. And you will only get the proper feeling concerning the Heliand, which was supposedly written by a Saxon priest, if you develop these ways of perceiving.⁷ The descriptions in the Heliand follow these old German customs. You will understand the Heliand's concrete description of Christ among living human beings only if you understand that actually the scenes are to be transplanted half into the kingdom of shadows where the living dead are dwelling. You will understand much more, if you truly grasp this predisposition, this ability, which came about through the mixing of the northern with the Roman peoples.

There is something recorded in literary history to which people should actually give a great deal of thought. However, people of the present age have almost entirely given up the ability to think about such clearly startling phenomena found in the life of humanity. But pursuing literary history, you will find, for example, writings in which Charlemagne (742–814) is mentioned as a leader in the Crusades. Charlemagne is simply listed as a leader in the Crusades.⁸ Indeed, you will find Charlemagne described as a living person again and again throughout the entire time that followed the ninth century. People everywhere called upon him. He is described as if he were there. And when the crusades began, centuries after his death, poems were written describing Charlemagne as if he were with the crusaders marching against the infidels.

We only understand such writings properly if we know that in the so-called dark centuries of the Middle Ages, the true history of which is entirely obliterated, there was this awareness of the living multitudes of the dead, who lived on as shadows. It was only later that Charlemagne was placed in the Untersberg. Much later, when the spirit of intellectualism had grown strong enough for this life in the shadows to have ceased, then Charlemagne was transplanted into the Untersberg (and, as another example, Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, into Kyffhaeuserberg).⁹ Until that time people knew that Charlemagne was still living among them.

But wherein did these people, who atavistically saw the dead living above them, wherein did these people seek their Christianity, their Christology, their Christian way of seeing? They sought it in this way: they directed their sight toward what results when a living dead person like Charlemagne, who was revered in life, came before their souls with all those who were still his followers. And so through long ages Charlemagne was seen undertaking the first crusade against the infidels in Spain. But he was seen in such a way that the entire crusade was actually transplanted into the shadow world. The people of that time saw this crusade in the shadow world after it had been undertaken on the physical plane; they let it continue working in the shadow world—as an image of the Christ who works in the world. Therefore, Christ was described riding south toward Spain among the twelve paladins, one of whom was a Judas who eventually betrayed the entire endeavor.¹⁰ So we see how clairvoyant perception was directed toward the outside of the spiritual world—not, as in earlier times, toward the inside—but rather now toward the outside, toward that which results when one looks at the spirits from the outside just as one looked at them earlier from the inside. Now, the splendor of the Christ event was reflected onto all the most important things that took place in the world of shadows.

From the fourth to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there lived in Europe the idea that people who had died, if they had accomplished important deeds in life, arranged their afterlife so as to enable themselves to be seen with something like a reflected splendor, an image, of the Christ event. One saw everywhere the continuation of the Christ event—if I may express myself so—as shadows in the air. If people had spoken of the things they felt, they would have said: Above us the Christ stream still hovers; Charlemagne undertook to place himself in this Christ stream and with his paladins he created an image of Christ with the twelve apostles; the deeds of Christ were continued by Charlemagne in the true spiritual world.

This was how people thought of these things in the so-called dark time of the Middle Ages. There was the spiritual world, seen from without, I would like to say, as if imaged after the sense world, like a shadow picture of the sense world (whereas in the earlier times, of which the old theology was only a weak reflection, the spiritual world was seen from within). For merely intellectual human beings the difference between this physical world and the spiritual world is such that an abyss exists between the two. This difference did not exist in the first centuries of the Middle Ages, in the so-called Dark Ages. The dead remained with the living. During the first period after their death, after they had been born into the spiritual world, especially outstanding and revered personalities underwent a novitiate to become saints.

For the people of those times to speak of these living dead as if they were real personalities after they had been born into the spiritual world—this was not unusual. And you see, a number of these living dead, especially chosen ones, were called to become guardians of the Holy Grail. Specially chosen living dead were designated as guardians of the Holy Grail. And the Grail legend could never be completely understood without the knowledge of who these guardians of the Grail actually were. To say: “Then the guardians of the Grail weren't real people” would have seemed laughable to the people of that time. For they would have said: Do you who are only shadow figures walking on the earth really believe that you are more real than those who have died and now are gathered around the Grail? To those who lived in those times it would have appeared laughable for the little figures here on the earth to consider themselves more real than the living dead. We must feel our way into the souls of that time, and this is simply how those souls felt. Their consciousness of this connection with the spiritual world meant much for the world, and much for their souls. They would have said to themselves: To begin with, the people here on the earth consist of nothing more than what they are, right now, directly here. But a human being of the present will only become something proper and good if he takes into himself what one of the living dead can give him.

In a certain sense, physical human beings on the earth were seen as though they were merely vehicles for the outer working of the living dead. It was a peculiarity of those centuries that one said: If the living dead want to accomplish something here on earth, for which hands are needed, then they enter into a physically incarnated human being and do it through him. Not only that, but there were, furthermore, people in those times who said to themselves: One can do no better than to provide a vehicle for human beings who were revered while living on the earth and who have now become beings of such importance in the realm of the living dead that it is granted to them to guard the Holy Grail. And the view existed among the people of those times that individuals could dedicate themselves to the Order of the Swan. Those people dedicated themselves to the Order of the Swan who wanted the knights of the Grail to be able to work through them here in the physical world. A human being through whom a knight of the Grail was working here in the physical world was called a Swan.

Now, think of the Lohengrin legend.¹¹ When Elsa of Brabant is in great need, the swan comes. The swan who appears is a member of the Knights of the Swan, who has received into himself a companion of the circle of the Holy Grail. One is not permitted to ask him about his secret. In that century, and also in the following centuries, princes such as Henry I of Saxony were happiest of all when, as in his campaign into Hungary, he was able to have this Knight of the Swan, this Lohengrin, in his army.¹²

But there were knights of many kinds who regarded themselves primarily as only outer vehicles for those from the other side of death who were still fighting in the armies. They wanted to be united with the dead; they knew they were united with them. The legend has actually become quite abstract today. We can only evaluate its significance for the living if we live into the soul life of the people alive at that time. And this understanding, which, to begin with, looks simply and solely upon the physical world and sees how the spiritual man arises out of the physical man and afterward belongs to the living dead, this understanding ruled the hearts and minds of that time and was the most essential element in their souls. They felt that one must first have known a human being on the earth, that only then can one rise to his spirit. It was really the case that the whole understanding was reversed, even in the popular conceptions of the masses, over against the older views. In olden times people had looked first into the spiritual world; they strove, if possible, to see the human being as a spiritual being before his descent to earth. Then, it was said, one can understand what the human being is on earth. But now, the following idea emerged among these northern peoples, after they had mixed with Roman civilization: We understand the spiritual, if we have first followed it in the physical world, and it has then lifted itself out of the physical world as something spiritual. This was the reverse of what had prevailed before.

The reflected splendor of this view then became the theology of the Middle Ages. The old theologians had said: First one must have the ideas, first one must know the spiritual. The concept of faith would have been something entirely absurd for these old theologians, for they first recognized the spiritual before they could even begin to think of knowing the physical, which had to be illumined by the spiritual. Now, however, when in the world at large people were starting from the point of view of knowing the physical, it came to this, even in theology. Theologians began to think in this way: For knowledge one must start with the world of sense. Then, from the things of the senses one must extract the concepts—no longer bring the concepts from the spiritual world to the things of sense, but now extract the concepts from the things of sense themselves.

Now imagine the Roman world in its decline; and then imagine, within that world, what still remained as a struggle from the olden time: namely, the fact that concepts were experienced in the spiritual world and then brought to meet the things of the senses. This was felt by such a man as Martianus Capella, who in the fifth century wrote his treatise, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, wherein he wrestled still to find within the spiritual world itself that which was becoming increasingly abstract in the life of ideas.¹³ But this old view went under because the Roman conspiracy against the spirit—in that college or committee I have told you about—had destroyed everything representing a direct human connection with the spirit. We see how that direct connection gradually vanished. The old vision ceased. Living in the old conception a human being knew: When I reach over into the spiritual world angels accompany me. If they were Greeks they called them “guardians.” A person who went forth on the path of the spirit knew he was accompanied by a guardian spirit.

That which in ancient times had been a real spiritual being, the guardian, was grammatica, the first stage of the seven liberal arts, at the time when Capella wrote. In olden times men had known that which lives in grammar, in words and syntax, can lead up into imagination. They knew that the angel, the guardian, was working in the relationships between words. If we read the old descriptions, nowhere would we ever find an abstract definition. It is interesting that Capella does not describe grammar as the later Renaissance did. To him grammar is still a real person. So, too, rhetoric at the second stage is still a real person. For the later Renaissance such figures became mere allegories—straw figures for intellectual concepts. In earlier times they had also been spiritual perceptions that did not merely edify as they did in Capella's writings. They had been creative beings, and the entry that they had initiated into the spirit was felt as a penetration into a realm of creative beings. Now with Capella they had become allegories; but nevertheless, at least they were still allegorical. Though they were no longer stately, though they had become very pale and thin, they were still ladies: grammatica, rhetorica, dialectica. They were very thin and weak. All that was left of them, as it were, was the bones of spiritual effort and the skin of concepts; nevertheless, they were still quite respectable ladies who carried Capella, the earliest to write on the seven liberal arts, into the spiritual world. One by one he made the acquaintance of these seven ladies: first the lady grammatica, then the lady rhetorica, the lady dialectica, the lady arithmetica, the lady geometria, the lady musica, and finally the heavenly lady astrologia, who towered over them all. These were certainly ladies, and as I said, there were seven of them. The sevenfold feminine leads us onward and upward, so might Capella have concluded when describing his path to wisdom. But think of what became of it in the monastery schools of the later Middle Ages. When these later writers labored at grammar and rhetoric they no longer felt that “the eternal feminine leads us onward and upward.” And that is really what happened: Out of the living being there first came the allegorical and then the merely intellectual abstraction.

Homer, who in olden times had sought the way from the humanly spoken word to the cosmic word, so that the cosmic word might pass through him, had to say: “Sing me, O muse, of Peleus' son, Achilles.” From the stage when a spiritual being led a person on to the point in the spiritual world at which it was no longer he himself but the muse who sang of the wrath of Achilles, from that stage to the stage when rhetoric herself was speaking in the Roman way, and then to the mingling of the Roman with the life that came downward from the north—was a long, long way. Finally, everything became abstract, conceptual, and intellectual. The farther we go toward the east and into olden times the more we find everything immersed in concrete spiritual life: the theologian of old had gone to the spiritual beings for his concepts, which he then applied to this world. But the theologian who grew out of what arose from the merging of the northern peoples with the Roman said: Knowledge must be sought here in the sense world; here we gain our concepts. But he could not rise into the spiritual world with these concepts. For the Roman college had thoroughly seen to it that although men might angle around down here in the world of sense, they could not get beyond this world. Formerly men had also had the world of the senses, but they had sought and found their concepts and ideas in the spiritual world; and these concepts then, helped them to illuminate the physical world. But now they extracted their concepts out of the physical world itself, and they did not get far—they only arrived at an interpretation of the physical world. They could no longer reach upward by an independent path of knowledge. But they still had a legacy from the past. It was written down or preserved in traditions embodied and rigidified in dogmas. It was preserved in the creed. Whatever could be said about the spirit was contained therein. It was there. They increasingly arrived at a consciousness that all that had been said concerning the realms above as a result of higher revelation must remain untouched. The revelations could no longer be checked. The kind of knowledge that can be checked now remained down below—our conceptual life must be obtained here in the physical world.

So in the course of time what had still been present in the first dark centuries of the Middle Ages persisted merely as a written legacy. For it had become quite another time when the medieval, atavistic clairvoyance of the Saxon “peasant,” as he is called (though, as the Heliand shows, he was, in any case, a priest, born of the peasantry) still existed in Europe. Simply looking at the human beings around him this Saxon peasant-priest had the faculty to see how the soul and spirit goes forth at death and becomes the dead and yet alive, living human being. Thus, in the train of those that hover over the earthly realm, he describes his vision of the Christ event in the poem, the Heliand.

But what was living here on the earth was drawn further and further down into the realm of the merely lifeless. Atavistic clairvoyant abilities came to an end, and people now only sought for concepts in the sense world. What kind of a view and attitude resulted? It was this: There is no need to pay heed to the super-sensible when it comes to knowledge. What we need is contained in the sacred writings and traditions. We need only refer to the old books and look into the old traditions. Everything we should know about the super-sensible is contained there. And now in the environment of the sense world, we are not confused if for knowledge we take into account only the concepts contained in the sense world itself.

More and more this consciousness came to life: The super-sensible is preserved for us and will so remain. If we want to do research we must limit ourselves to the sense world. Someone who remained entirely within this habit of mind, who continued, as it were, in the nineteenth century this activity of extracting concepts out of the sense world that the Saxon peasant-priest who wrote the Heliand had practiced, was Gregor Mendel.¹⁴ Why should we concern ourselves with investigations of the olden times into matters of heredity? They are all recorded in the Old Testament. Let us look, rather, down into the world of sense and see how the red and the white sweet peas will cross with one another, giving rise to red, white, and speckled flowers and so forth. Thus you can become a mighty scientist without coming into conflict or disharmony with what is said about the super-sensible, which remains untouched. It was precisely our modern theology, evolved out of the old theology along the lines I have characterized, that impelled people to investigate nature in the manner of Gregor Mendel, whose approach was that of a genuine Catholic priest.

And then what happened? Natural scientists, whose science is so “free from bias,” subsequently canonized Gregor Mendel as a saint. Although this is not their way of speaking, we can describe Mendel's fate in these terms. At first they treated him without respect; now they canonize him after their fashion, proclaiming him a great scientist in all their academies. All this is not without its inner connections. The science of the present time is only possible inasmuch as it is constituted in such a way as to regard as a great scientist precisely one who stands so thoroughly upon the standpoint of medieval theology! The natural science of our time is through and through the continuation of the essence of scholastic theology—its subsequent proliferation, its diversification. It is the continuation into our time of the scholastic era. Hence it is quite proper for Johann Gregor Mendel to be subsequently recognized as a great scientist; that he is, but in the good Catholic sense. It made good Catholic sense for Mendel to look only at sweet peas as they cross with one another, it was following Catholic principle, because all that is super-sensible is contained in the sacred traditions and books. But we see that this does not make sense for natural scientists, none in the least—only if they are bent on stopping short at the stage of ignoramuses and giving themselves up to complete agnosticism would it make any sense to limit research to the sense world.

This is the fundamental contradiction of our time. This contradiction is what we must be attentive to. For if we fail to look at these spiritual realities we shall never understand the source of all the confusion, of all the contradictions and inconsistencies, in the endeavors of the present day. But the easygoing comfort of our time does not allow people to awaken and really to look into these contradictory tendencies.

Think what will happen when all that is said about today's world events becomes history. Posterity will get this history. Do you think they will get much truth? Certainly not. Yet history for us has been made in this very way. These puppets of history, which are described in the usual textbooks, do not represent what has really happened in human evolution. We have arrived at a time when it is absolutely necessary for people to learn to know what the real events are. It is not enough for all the legends to be recorded as they are in our current histories—the legends about Attila and Charlemagne, or Louis the Pious, where history begins to be altogether fabulous. The most important things of all are overlooked in these writings; for it is really only the histories of the soul that make the present time intelligible.

Anthroposophical spiritual science must throw light into the evolving souls of human beings. Because we have forgotten how to look into the spiritual, we no longer have any history. Anyone of sensibility can see that in Martianus Capella the old guides and guardians who used to lead people into the spiritual world have become very thin, very lean ladies. But those whom historians teach us to know as Henry I, Otto I, Otto II, Henry II, and so on—they appear as mere puppets of history, formed after the pattern of those who had grown into the thin and pale ladies, after grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and the others. When all is said and done the personalities who are enumerated in succession in our histories have no more fat on them than those ladies.

Things must be seen as they really are. Actually the people of today should be yearning to see things as they are. Therefore, it is a duty to describe these things wherever possible, and they can be described today within the Anthroposophical Society. I hope that this society, at least, may some day wake up.

• 1. Julian, the Apostate (332–363), Roman Emperor (361–363). Steiner is referring to his lecture of July 16, 1922 (GA213). Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Occult History (Lecture Four), Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (Lecture Seven), World History in the light of Anthroposophy (Lecture Six).
• 2 . Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909), German writer, author of historical dramas, novels, and verse.
• 3 . St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354–430). Early Latin church father. Exerted tremendous influence on later Christian thought. Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Christianity as Mystical Fact, Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, (Lecture Seven).
• 4 . Steiner is here referring to an essay by Günther Wachsmuth on Dionysius the Areopagite and the doctrine of the hierarchies that appeared in Das Goetheanum, July 23 and July 30, 1922.
• 5 . Lecture of July 22, 1922 (GA213).
• 6 . Lecture of July 16, 1922 (GA213).
• 7 . Heliand, a poem in alliterative verse on the Gospels written between 825 and 835 A.D.
• 8 . E.g., Pèlerinage de Charlemagne (eleventh century), Gran Conquista de Ultramar (thirteenth century).
• 9 . Charlemagne (724–814), King of France and Roman Emperor. The Untersberg is a mountain ridge, full of caves, near Salzburg, Austria. Frederick Barbarossa (Redbeard) or Frederick I (1123–1190), Holy Roman Emperor. Esteemed by Germans as one of their greatest kings.
• 10. Peers of Charlemagne's court.
• 11. Lohengrin, a knight of the Grail, son of Parsifal. Led by a swan to rescue Princess Elsa of Brabant, he then marries her. When she asks his name, in violation of her pledge, he must return to the Grail Castle without her. Tale ascribed to Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1285–90); basis for Richard Wagner's opera, Lohengrin (1847).
• 12. Henry I (c. 876–936), first German king from the House of Saxony, campaigned in Hungary in 933.
• 13. Martianus Minneus Felix, Latin author of the fourth-fifth century, author of The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, the encyclopædic work in verse and prose that introduced the Seven Liberal Arts to the Middle Ages.
• 14. Johann Gregor Mendel. Augustinian priest and botanist, creator of Mendelian genetics. Mendel did his famous breeding experiments in the monastery garden in 1856. Results published 1866. Not widely recognized until after 1910.

Yesterday we spoke at least in a few words about the extent to which the Earth itself is a source of inspiration for people living on it. Of course, only hints can be given in a field that is as all-encompassing as this.

It is important and significant, especially in our time, to become aware that such connections exist as those we have been talking about, because man within the evolution of the earth is at the point, especially in our present time, of emancipating himself, as it were, from this earthly influence, and, on the other hand, to allow himself to be permeated by those influences that do not come from the world of the earth but from the spiritual world surrounding the earth.

This endeavour to get into human abilities, into human thinking and feeling, that which is not merely earthly, underlies our spiritual-scientific endeavour. All tendencies of modern education are really moving towards this spiritual-scientific endeavour, and it may well be said that there are two things that must increasingly come to the consciousness of the modern human being.

The first is that man, in relation to his own soul essence, belongs to a world that does not reveal itself to the external senses, but that lies behind the external sense world. Man belongs to such a world with his innermost soul being, which can be reached neither through sense observation nor through inferences and logic based on sense observation. It will be the task of our time to gain clarity on this point, that all knowledge conveyed by the external senses and their philosophy, which is based only on external sensory knowledge, cannot approach what the human soul actually is.

The second truth is one that you are familiar with from your spiritual scientific life, but you also know that it is still very far from the general consciousness of the present day. It is the important truth of repeated earthly lives, of the fact that the human soul is not exhausted in the body in which it lives between birth and death, in all that is connected with this body, but that it goes from life to life.

Because these two truths, that the soul belongs to a world that lies behind the sensory world and that it goes from life to life, are among the most important for our time, which must be understood first, I have added a chapter to the second volume of my Rätsel of Philosophy», I have added a chapter in which these two truths in particular are pointed out in an intensive way from the course of human development, because it is an urgent requirement of our time that more and more people learn to understand precisely these two truths.

Since this book, “The Riddles of Philosophy”, is not specifically aimed at anthroposophists, but at all people who can read and understand what they read, an attempt had to be made to point out these two truths as briefly but as sharply as possible. It may be said that it lies in the deeper consciousness of people in modern times to direct their thoughts towards these truths. For the time being, I will just say to direct their thoughts. We can see such tendencies to direct thoughts towards these truths everywhere. I have sometimes tried to cite people from the new spiritual history who tend towards such truths. Today I would like to give another example.

Emerson is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the 19th century, who wrote so meaningfully and forcefully, if not in pedantic philosophical language, then in a forceful language. Whether he is talking about nature or the human race, Emerson points out that the outer structure of the world, which man surveys with his senses and comprehends with his mind, is only the shell, the phantasmagoria, and that one can only arrive at the truth by trying to penetrate behind the phantasmagoria.

But minds like Emerson's go even further. And I would like to give an example of this. Among his very significant books, Emerson also wrote one called “The Representatives of the Human Race”. In this book, he treated Plato as a representative of all philosophical human endeavor; Swedenborg as a representative of mystical human endeavor; Montaigne, a significant mind of the 16th century , as representative of skepticism; Shakespeare as representative of the poetic faculty; Goethe as representative of the literary faculty; and Napoleon as the man of action, as representative of the man of action.

This book has certainly achieved something significant. It highlights the types of humanity in relation to the soul. It would make for an interesting reflection if one were to shed light on how Plato's representative of philosophical endeavor and Montaigne's representative of skeptical endeavor are actually met. This book marks one of the greatest achievements of human spiritual endeavor. Now, Emerson curiously devotes, I would say, a particularly loving portrayal to Montaigne, although this loving portrayal is only encountered when one thoroughly engages with this chapter on Montaigne. This is also very significant for Emerson's commitment to the spiritual-scientific world view. Anyone who seriously engages with this world view becomes aware of how truly every thing has two sides, how when one tries to express a truth, one can only say something one-sided and the second side must lurk in the background, as it were.

The skeptic who has a vivid sense of the fact that one is, as it were, already doing an injustice when formulating a truth strictly, is touched in the deepest sense by the spiritual-soul fluid that is always present in the human soul and that prevents one, as soon as one is only touched by the spiritual world, from stating a sharply contoured truth with too much aplomb, without pointing out that in a certain sense the opposite of it also has a justification.

This sense of having been touched by a feeling that comes from spirituality is what makes Montaigne an important figure. But that is not what I wanted to point out. I wanted to point out how Emerson tells how he came to Montaigne. He says: Even as a boy, I found a volume of Montaigne in my father's library, but I did not understand him. — When he had then graduated from college, he looked at the book again, and then he got the strange urge to get to know, sentence by sentence, what Montaigne had written. And he did that, following this urge. Now we see in the chapter about Montaigne, which Emerson wrote, that he was looking for an expression for why he was suddenly obsessed by Montaigne and suddenly began to absorb him completely. He finds no better expression for it than to say: It was as if I had written these books by Montaigne in a past life. From this you can see how a man of the most eminently modern mind, who approaches what is demanded by the present, is forced, when he wants to express himself about the most intimate things in his soul, to form an expression that tends entirely towards the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He cannot find a better expression and must therefore resort to the idea of repeated lives on earth.

Something like this is extremely characteristic and tremendously significant, and this now leads us to tie in with the idea that was expounded yesterday. If we look at the most distinguished minds of our time – and one of the most distinguished is Emerson – then, on the one hand, if they are as great as Emerson, they have inherited the knowledge of the earth, in that they are part of the evolutionary process of the earth. They know what is absorbed by a person today. They know that when you are placed at a certain point on earth, you speak a certain language and so on, that it is customary in the place where you are sent to hand these things down to the child, to the young person, and thus to bring that which is called education to the people. This knowledge, which is handed down to a people in this way, is knowledge of a wide scope. It is fair to say that this is knowledge of a broad scope, and one can see how Emerson actually proceeds.

We know that when he had a lecture to give, it seemed as if what he said sprang forth from his mind as he was saying it. Everything seemed improvised. If he was visited on a day when he was supposed to give a lecture, the visitors could see that all kinds of notes were lying around the room, from which he had gathered what he had to say, so to speak, about the outward appearance of his material. But behind what he passed on to humanity lay intimacies, and this is precisely an intimacy, which I have expressed, that the idea of repeated earthly lives shimmers quite chastely in one place.

One can see how even the best of our time, by feeling and feeling through such truths in their souls and also expressing them, remain chaste within themselves, do not yet want to carry these truths into the realm from which external knowledge arises.

If we now approach the matter from a spiritual scientific point of view, we have to illuminate it differently, because our time is the time whose mission it is to bring to clarity and to real knowledge what has so far been held back in the soul and only occasionally hinted at, clarity, to bring it to real knowledge, to shape it into forms of knowledge, so that our time really has the task of making many things that have emerged from the souls of the best up to this time of ours into full clarity, into a truth that is self-evident for people. And here we can describe exactly how it was when Emerson, in his rich lectures, would soon say a sentence expressing a realization about the industrial life of his surroundings and then a few lines later bring something that deals with ancient India, and then again something that deals with Shakespeare. So he gathers together, so to speak, the knowledge of the earth and then often a remark slips out of him that comes from the intimacy of his soul.

Where does what lies in such a remark come from? This can only be answered by considering all sides of human nature. Man recognizes only the least, only a part of his life, which takes place from waking to falling asleep, during his time on earth. The other part of life is spent asleep, and this part of human life is very, very diverse.

It is true that for many, many people this life in sleep proceeds in such a way that they come into contact with elemental world entities that are connected with lower expressions of human nature than the daytime expressions. One would like to say that people engage in all sorts of nonsense from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up, in the realm of elementary life, of nightlife, things that they have outgrown when they are in the outer life. Who would not know that he often has to be ashamed of his dreams. This is a general experience that anyone can have. Man, then, during sleep, does all kinds of foolish things, in a company that is not a good one, but one that appeals to his passions, his instincts, and is much worse than the one in which he is educated during his waking life.

Only if we understand this can we better understand many historical events. To prevent people today from making too much of a mess of things in the physical world, they need to be endowed with the gift of not attaching too much importance to their dreams. He therefore forgets his dreams very easily, forgets the Allotriia from the dreams, and that is good for him, because he should be prepared to enter the spiritual world in waking consciousness, while the prehistoric times were there to let people enter this spiritual world during sleep until they woke up.

Strictly speaking, a stronger awareness of this world is not as far behind us as is usually believed. I will give you an example of this too. There is a picture by Albrecht Dürer that has posed many riddles for many people, especially scholars. The etching is about a satyr-like, faun-like figure that is holding a female being, as it were. From the background, another female figure appears, approaching the couple as if to punish them. And a Hercules-like male figure stands nearby, holding a club in his hand, which he uses to hold back the punishing female figure from the group of the woman with the satyr, preventing her from approaching. It is, one might say, quite remarkable, extremely remarkable, how the scholars have struggled to understand this picture. It is usually called 'Hercules'. But what it expresses is not found in the usual Hercules saga. So one wonders: how did Albrecht Dürer come up with this scene? And some very curious ideas have been put forward. One can see, for example, how helpless Herman Grimm is in the face of this picture. He does not know what to make of it. He comes up with the strangest ideas. And why is that? Why can't people make sense of it? Because he and the scholars do not know — as Albrecht Dürer still did — that people can still enter a spiritual world when they are asleep. Today, this awareness has been lost. But Dürer still knew, for example, that there are men who, during sleep, engage in all sorts of antics with the elemental world, men who are quite civilized during the ordinary time, but during sleep they fall back into the world of drives and do all sorts of useless things, all sorts of antics.

In the painting by Albrecht Dürer, we see the satyr and Hercules with the club. Good old Hercules, who is standing there, would like to be this satyr himself. But he lives in the physical world, in a moral world on the physical plane, and his wife does not allow him to do so. She comes along and wants to drive him away. But he likes it and holds her back.

We see here an inner process of the soul and know that Albrecht Dürer still knew something of these things. Thus much in the art of not so distant centuries can be explained, because at that time there was still an awareness of the connection of man with the spiritual-elemental world immediately adjacent to the physical.

But if we turn to such noble minds as Emerson's, we have to say that they do not engage in frivolities during their sleep, but in noble things. When they are in the spiritual world with their ego and astral body, they come into contact with the truths that are to be true anthroposophy in humanity. What future physical knowledge is to become comes to her consciousness. One could say that Emerson receives something like this in his sleep. That is why it fits so chastely and intimately into what he has to say about the physical life with his physical senses and mind, surveying the wide expanse of earthly life.

Now it would not be in keeping with the evolution of humanity if people were simply to grasp, as I said, in their life of sleep, what lies behind the appearance of sense and behind the phantasmagoria of the senses. For that is again the meaning of evolution, that the life of sleep loses more and more of its significance in knowledge. One must be a great spirit like Emerson if one wants to conquer something out of the life of sleep, like the idea of repeated lives on earth. But what is spiritual must come into humanity, must find its way into humanity. Just as these truths are related to the innermost human soul life, as they reveal themselves there, as it were, in a kind of dawn, especially in spirits like Emerson, so on the other hand there must be an earthly disposition to understand such truths in the light of waking consciousness. There must be an earthly predisposition to perceive oneself in such a way that one finds it natural to recognize these truths. You understand that this is not yet natural in the present, because we are still such a small group as spiritual scientists, and all those who stand outside of spiritual scientific striving see us as fools or something similar.

It is not part of modern education to recognize these truths directly. Man's natural temperament argues against it. As a rule, the logical arguments people put forward against spiritual science are extremely inferior, because people do not resist on logical grounds; they resist because, by their very nature, they are not predisposed to accept such truths today, through all that they are through the forces of the earth.

But there must come a time when man's nature will be so constituted that he can immediately grasp these truths, just as he can grasp mathematical truths today. Man must be organized naturally so that he can grasp these truths. For this it is necessary that he is physically so constituted for the time that elapses between birth and death that his brain is so developed that he can see these truths.

In the sense of yesterday's discussion, such a relationship must be established between the spirits that work in the earth and people, that people are constituted in such a way that they can absorb these truths, and this happens in such a way that an area of land, as I showed and sketched yesterday, leans from east to west towards the three gulfs I spoke of yesterday. This area of land is only a phantasmagoria on the outside. This area of land is in reality composed of the spirits of the earth. In reality, the spirits of this area of land work on people and physically shape them in such a way that they understand the truths of the spiritual and mental constitution of man and repeated lives on earth. What I would say is more for the Western spirits, which have to conquer from sleep, will have to become a more self-evident truth in waking life for those who lean towards the East in the evolution of humanity. The earth prepares its bodies, one would like to say, for what they need for evolution. This earth is absolutely that which I discussed yesterday: a far-reaching organism that is ensouled and that, from time to time, sends out the earth spirits from its soul life, which organize the bodies in such a way that they can intervene in evolution in an appropriate way.

You see, these things are extraordinarily deep and significant, and one must really get involved with such things if one wants to understand what it is all about. However, if you compare the earth as an ensouled and spiritualized organism with what man is as an ensouled and spiritualized organism, there is a great difference. Man is related to the actual spirits of the earth through the exterior of his physical body, in which he actually does not usually live in it, but in which he is stuck in it. Through the etheric body, he is related to the spirits of water; through the astral body, he is related to the spirits of air, and through his connection with the ego, he is related to the spirits of fire.

When a person leaves their physical and etheric bodies during sleep, they live with their ego and astral body only in relation to the warmth that pervades the earth and the air that flows and breathes through the earth. They are torn away from everything that configures earth and water in the physical body. Man is truly torn out of everything that, I would like to say, the physical and etheric bodies do as earthly beings when they sleep. Of course, air and warmth also belong to the earth, but only to the earth, not to the parts of the earth. Now, for man as a spiritualized being, warmth is, so to speak, that in which he dwells as in his own element. In the higher animals, there is already a preparation for this. They have their own warmth, not just the warmth of their surroundings. They live in their soul, in their own warmth. Man has particularly developed this, that he lives in his own warmth, that he has his own temperature. This is something that separates him from the great variety of the outside world. Heat is, as it were, something that every human being carries within himself and carries with him. There he is in his actual self, there he is at home in the warmth.

In the air, he lives in it to a lesser extent. I would like to say that the differentiation of the earth already exerts a certain influence on him. Whether he lives in mountain air, sea air or country air, that makes a certain difference. In this way, the human being comes into relation to what affects him from the outside. This is the case with the human being as a soul-inspired and spiritualized organism.

The opposite is the case with the earth as a souled and spiritualized organism. What warmth is for human beings, that is for the earth just the earth, the solid earthly, and warmth is for it the 'outmost' that has a relationship to the souled earth like to us the earth. The earth is earth through and through, as we are warmth through and through. The earth is outwardly differentiated in relation to warmth. Depending on whether it extends its limbs into the icy regions or into the sultry region of the tropics, it opens its soul outwardly to warmth, just as we, in relation to our physical body, incline toward the region in which we happen to live. In the case of the earth, it is exactly the opposite of the human being, and this is the basis for the interaction between the earth as a spiritual and animate organism and the human being as a spiritual and animate organism. Through this interaction, that which comes about in the physical human body arises so that this physical human body, in the succession of nations and peoples, enters into the evolution of the whole earthly existence in the right way. We have an intensive relationship between the earthly and the human precisely in those peoples who, as a mass of people, moved from east to west. And one could express this intensive relationship as if one were to see a mighty being in the earth itself, and this mighty being would decide to intervene in evolution in an appropriate way, let us say from the 20th century onwards. Then it must say to itself: I must direct certain spiritual entities up to my surface, I must let them be active in such a way that they prepare physical bodies so that the physical bodies can receive through the brain the truths that are beneficial to humanity in this time of evolution.

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What I have just expressed is like a thought that the earth has. This thought can only be grasped if it is grasped with the right devotion and reverence, if it is not taken like the thoughts of external science, but if it is regarded as something sacred, as something that cannot be uttered without reverence, because one is reminded of man's connection with the spiritual world, because one is directly immersed in the communication between the human and the divine, where such things are expressed. Therefore, attention should be paid everywhere to ensure that the necessary atmosphere of feeling and sentiment is present when such things are expressed. This is extremely important in such matters. One might say: in a certain sense, such things must not be expressed in any other way than that they are based on the feeling, the mood of prayer. A looking up to the spiritual worlds must pulsate through what we think through so thoroughly as we approach such thoughts. And that this can happen in a natural way, through the external environment alone, is why our body is constructed, and why everything that is to appear in it is made.

Thus we see in what I have just described a kind of example of how the earth, as earth, works spiritually through what is contained in its solid element, how it creates and forms that which lives on it in evolution.

If, on the other hand, we go more to the west, we have different conditions. Yesterday I explained to you a situation where the west interacts with the east, where the liquid element leans over like a mighty being towards the east and expresses the three-part soul nature, leaning over into the three great gulfs, which the spiritually inclined peoples of ancient Finland still felt as Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen, and which today are so prosaically referred to as the Gulfs of Finland, Bothnia and Riga. In the ancient Finnish people, that which comes from the liquid element and that which comes from the solid element worked together. In the Finnish people, the element that more constitutes the ethereal human being and refines the physical human being, the liquid element, and the element of the earth, that which comes from the earth, that which constitutes the physical human being, united.

The question may be raised as to the significance of a people like the great Finnish nation, which has fulfilled such an eminent mission in the course of the Earth's mission and yet still remains for later times. All this has its significance in the whole progress of evolution, that such a people remain, that they do not disappear from the Earth when they have fulfilled their mission. Just as a person retains in living memory the thoughts that he has conceived at a certain age for a later age, so must earlier peoples also remain as a conscience, as a living memory in relation to what happens in later times: as a conscience.

And now one could say: The conscience of the European East will be that which the Finnish people have preserved. There must come a time when an understanding of the tasks of evolution will take hold of the heart, when the ideas of Kalewala will flourish from the very heart of the Finnish people, when this wonderful Kalewala epic will be imbued with modern spiritual ideas and when the whole of Europe will be made aware of its depth.

The European peoples revered the Homeric epics. The Kalevala flowed from even deeper sources of the soul life. This cannot be recognized today. But this will be understood when the teachings of spiritual science are applied in the appropriate way to explain spiritual phenomena in the evolution of the earth. An epic like Kalevala cannot be preserved without being preserved in living existence, without the souls that dwell in the body, which are related to the creative powers of Kalevala. It remains as a living conscience. In this way it can continue to work, not through the words but through that which has lived in it itself, continues to live, that there is a center from which it can radiate. What matters is that this is there, like the thoughts we have had earlier are there in later life.

In the West, there is more of what forms and shapes the etheric body. These are difficult truths, and you will have to get used to them, because I do not have the opportunity, which one will hopefully have one day in the evolution of the earth, to deal with the things that I have to deal with in an hour over the course of a whole year. You will have to be open to supplementing many things with your thoughts, to meditatively reflect on what has been said. Then it will become fully familiar to you. In particular, do not try to approach things with these or those hasty nuances of feeling.

In the West, there is more of an effect on the etheric body, which had to be formed in the same way, but at an earlier time, than it has to be done on the physical body in the East.

You see, it is very easy to misunderstand such things, because the differences are fine, very subtle. If, for example, we see in the West that it depends on the peoples that the etheric body has been formed more by the spirits of water, it is self-evident – because the physical body is an imprint of this – that the physical body has also been formed as an imprint of the etheric body, out of the forces of water. But the important thing is that in the East the forces of the physical body have a more direct effect. So we have to focus on what is important. External physical science cannot make this subtle distinction. It sees that the Eastern physical body is configured in one way and the Western physical body in another. It does not see any more than that. Only spiritual science can go into such differences in more detail. Furthermore, language is so clumsy and very unsuitable for expressing such differences. When you say something completely different, you often have the impression that you are actually saying the same thing. Yesterday, for example, I had to say that for Asian peoples it is important that the forces that build up the physical body lie in their own etheric body. Today I have to say that it is important for the peoples of the West that the etheric body is formed from the forces of water. If you take all of this together, you will understand that in the old days it was the case that the etheric body had to be formed in the Eastern peoples of Europe, but today, now, is the time when the physical body has to be formed , while in the western peoples it is the case that their etheric body is formed after their physical body has already received its character more from the outside, that their etheric body is directly exposed to the genii of the sea, the genii of the water.

In the case of Western peoples, what they are comes about through the impulses entering their etheric body. Where the impulses enter the etheric body more, what matters less is the spatial and more the temporal. How the impulses work in the succession of time is what matters more.

If we look towards the east, we see how thoughts well up out of the earth, as it were, to prepare human beings for future evolution. If we look towards the west, we see thoughts welling up out of the fluid, the forces that form the etheric bodies in the succession of time.

And there we see how, in the ancient times in the West, the etheric body of man was formed far into Central Europe in such a way that this etheric body lives out its immediate life in the body, alive, outwardly.

What does that mean? It means, my dear friends, that in ancient times in western Europe there lived people who brought their way of life to light from the etheric body in the same way that people now bring it to light from the physical body — where the etheric body has already worked with these old impulses. There were people who still had a living relationship with the spiritual world, especially with the elemental world. That belongs to ancient times. Those times are, so to speak, already over, when the genii of the liquid element spoke to the etheric body of man in the West in the most lively way. But when this etheric body is spoken to, it is different from our time, when it is mainly spoken to the physical body of man. The physical body of the human being is spoken to in such a way that an impression is made on his senses, that he acquires knowledge and adopts certain habits of life that are connected with the impressions of the senses.

These ancient Westerners were still more connected with the elemental world in their habits, in what lived within them. Among the Celts, there were people who knew about the elemental world just as we know about the physical world today; people to whom the elemental world was not closed, who could speak of nature genii, of water genii, of earth genii, just as we speak of trees, plants, mountains, clouds, who had direct contact with these nature genii. And the peculiarity of life in Europe is based on the fact that this was precisely the case in ancient times, because in those days, just as one acts today through the senses on the physical body, one acted on the etheric body of the human being.

Then, of course, work was still being done on the etheric body of the human being, but this etheric body was formed and developed in such a way that the relationship of the genii of fluidity to it took place more in the subconscious, and the conscious relationship with the nature spirits receded more.

How did this come about? For France, for example, it came about through the wave of Romanic evolution sweeping over the wave of Celtic evolution, permeating the Celtic element with the Romanic element. In the confluence of the Celtic and the Romance, we have two impulses. An old impulse, which directly mediates the connection between the elementary world and the etheric body, and in the new impulse, in the influence of the Romance, we have that which also enters the etheric body, but that it is like an historical, a historic wave, so that what I said in earlier lectures could occur, that a revival of the ancient Greek element could take place in the French element.

If we want to understand this western type of human being correctly, we must assess these various impulses, which also flow into the etheric body, in the right way. And now, so to speak, we have spoken of characteristic phenomena with regard to the influences on the physical body and with regard to the influences on the etheric body. The situation is different when we consider the middle region. There things are somewhat different. There we are dealing with something, I might say, much more unexpressed, with something that can be less clearly characterized. There we are dealing with the fact that both spirits of the earth and spirits of the liquid element have a direct effect on the physical body.

You see, it is a transition. Here, in the West, the spirits of the liquid element act directly on the etheric body. The spirits of the liquid element subside in Central Europe, and they are joined by certain spirits of the earthly element. They act directly on the physical body; less strongly on the etheric body. The spirits of the earthly element refine the physical body as you go further east. Therefore, in some way connected with Central Europe, we have everything that, over a long period of time, has provided Europe with such physical bodies that are accessible to the liquid and solid elements. And so we see how what flows into human evolution must become more complicated. We see how, out of this store, this reservoir, the people of the Franks, as I have described them, through the agency of the fluid and the solid, are preparing to reintroduce themselves into the Celtic-Romanic folk element; and only then does that which has confronted us as the active element in human evolution arise.

The Franks who remained behind thus retain the peculiarity of preferring to receive in the physical body that which emanates from the liquid and earthly spirits – the Saxons are related to them in this respect. The Franks who moved to the West united their nature with that which comes from the direct influence of the genius of the sea, which becomes even more significant when we consider that it incorporates the historical element of the Romance language.

In this way the impulses interlock and so we can understand how, above all, if we want to characterize Western Europe, we cannot come to an understanding unless we take into account everything that intervenes in the etheric body.

If we want to characterize Central Europe, we have to say that it depends more on the physical body, it depends more on what is configured in the physical body. Now we see how such impulses, like the ones expressed, concentrate in certain centers, as it were, how they characteristically emerge in certain centers. Two such centers, which are truly characteristic of each other, are found in Central Europe on the one hand and in the British Isles on the other. In Central Europe, where it is most strongly expressed, we have what I have called the solid element, and where what comes from the spirits of the liquid and the spirits of the solid flows into the physical body, where it is mixed, and in the British Isles, where - in some ways more strongly than in France, for example - what comes from the spirits of the liquid element has a preferential effect on the etheric bodies. This has led to people living in these two areas who basically carry the same impulses within them; only some carry them in their physical body and are suited to everything connected with the work of these genii in the physical ; the others, in the British Isles, have them in their etheric bodies and are thus called upon to bring about everything that is connected with the impulses of the etheric body. If I may say it grotesquely, I could say that if you put a German and an Englishman together, you notice the difference when you look at their physical bodies. You only notice the similarity when you put the German's physical body together with the Englishman's etheric body. Only then does it become apparent that the same impulses are alive there.

You see what emerges, caricatured, in the external view, which remains with the external phantasmagoria, I would say. Do not misunderstand the word. It only appears in its true form when one considers what becomes the basis of life, what the truth is. But because in the world the entities must work together, because it cannot be otherwise, because the world is a whole, it must be so that on the one hand certain impulses work through the physical body, on the other hand through the etheric body. I would say that is the way it should be. This is how the corresponding real interaction arises.

And so you see, what appears in the spiritual world is that a very special relationship has come about between the German world and the British world. I have explained this very special relationship for the East and West in a previous lesson, in which I showed you how a certain struggle takes place in the spiritual world for the East and West, caused by the diversity of the souls that come from an eastern and the souls that come from a western body.

The effect of the conditions just described is something else. I ask you not to take what I have to say today as if it can be understood or speculated upon rationally. One must observe in the spiritual world, otherwise one will not be able to arrive at the right conclusion. A harmony is gradually emerging between what is happening in Central Europe and the British Isles, a harmony, a true spiritual alliance that has gradually grown so strong that it can be said that spiritually speaking, no earthly souls love each other more than the earthly souls of Central Europe and the earthly souls of the British Isles. There the strongest love, spiritually conceived, exists, and that expresses itself outwardly in what we now see before us. Such are the complications of the situation.

One would truly not express such things if they were based only on a lightly founded knowledge, if one had not gained them through the most painful experiences. Do not think that you can generalize by thinking that every alliance in the physical world is a war in the spiritual world, and a war in the physical world is an alliance in the spiritual world. Things are as I have described them to you. And that this is expressed as a struggle is the expression in today's materialistic culture for the difficulty of really living out the matter in the spiritual.

Our time is reluctant to recognize what is present in the spiritual world, not only in words but also in deeds. It tries to present the opposite of what is present in the spiritual world, because the materialistic age is also reluctant to recognize the spiritual in deeds. And so the tendency of the spiritual world – namely, after the harmony of the physically achieved in Central Europe and the ethereally achieved in the British Isles – is drowned out in Maja by what is happening today in the form of struggle and mutual hatred.

You see, it is worthwhile for those who are not spiritual scientists to consider us fools, because the insights that emerge from the spiritual world are very much at odds with what can be observed in the physical world. But we can be assured that the further development of humanity depends on the fact that spiritual truths will really penetrate, that people really learn to see beyond the world of the senses. For this to happen, events are necessary, of which I have spoken more or less clearly in these days.

We can be glad that Karma has brought us together here in a neutral area, where it is possible to speak so frankly about these things, for it is not easy to speak about them, especially today. But it is good for the humanities to find their way into these things, because they may regard what happens in the outer world precisely as an incentive to look behind the veil. Much would remain quite incomprehensible if one could not see behind this veil. Things only get their full meaning when one sees behind this veil.

A teacher reports about the independent religious instruction in the beginning and intermediate classes. They discussed verses from the mystery plays and “Cherubinischen Wandersmann” (Cherubic wanderer).

Dr. Steiner: It is important that you don’t ignore the children’s level of feeling. Can you give a concrete example?

A teacher: In the upper class, I had the children recite, “Let me peacefully act in you.…”

Dr. Steiner: Do you think the children can work with that? Yes, then you can continue with it.

A teacher: Perhaps we could divide the courses.

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly true. I think that if we divided the beginning class in two and left the upper class as it is, things would go well in all three groups.

That is, grades 1-3, 4-6 and 7-9.

A teacher reports that he had used three hours for the preparatory instruction for the Youth Festival.

Dr. Steiner: Isn’t that too much for the students? How many are there?

A teacher: Twenty-six.

Dr. Steiner: It will be difficult to say anything until we have seen a real success. It is certainly good to try that. If it is not successful, then we will need to see how we can do it differently.

A teacher reports about the course in social understanding. There were two hours per week in the sixth through eighth grades, and also some for fifth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, the age from eleven to fifteen is difficult, but this is a separate class.

A teacher: We are also visiting factories.

Dr. Steiner: If you do this really livingly, make it lively, and connect it with all the questions about life that arise at that age, then things will work. I would try to see if the children have too much to do, and then try to connect things to life concretely wherever possible.

I believe the children may be overworked now, and that will, of course, certainly come out in some odd place. It would be a good idea not to have eight hours on one day.

I don’t understand why it is necessary to spend three hours preparing for the Youth Festival. Why wasn’t one hour sufficient? In such questions, the amount of time is not so important as the time available for them. It would, perhaps, be better if we could limit those things we can definitely limit. We could do that for those children attending the Youth Festival by dropping the independent religious instruction as such and connecting it with the preparation for the Youth Festival.

A question is asked about who may attend the Sunday services.

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly a problem. We had never thought that anyone other than the parents would attend. Of course, having begun in one way, it is difficult to set a limit. How should we do that? Why did you admit people who are not parents at the school? If we allow K. in, there is no reason we should send other members away. Where does that begin and where does it end? It’s mostly people who think this is just one more tea party. We have also had other disturbances by people from outside the school being at the school. The thing that disturbed me most was that people who have absolutely nothing to do with the school became involved in discipline. I certainly have nothing against strictly limiting the admission to the services to the parents, no siblings and no tea parties. We did not create that service for that. Now there are no limits. We should admit only the parents or those whom the faculty recognizes as moral guardians.

A teacher asks again about an older member in connection with the Sunday services.

Dr. Steiner: She should stay away. You need to make that clear to her in an appropriate way. That is the problem. The moment we allow someone in who has no child, it becomes difficult to draw the line. Where we need to make exceptions is in the Anthroposophical Society, or we simply leave it as it is.

A teacher: That has been impossible to do.

Dr. Steiner: The exceptions should perhaps only be for once or twice, but they grow.

A teacher: It should not be strictly a school affair. It is separate from the school.

Dr. Steiner: We hold the Sunday services within the context of the school. They are a part of the school in just the same way as, for instance, a class for a particular craft would be. That would also be something special that would be within the school, but not a part of the school. We can do things only in that way, otherwise we will have all these problems. I was recently asked if we could arrange to have a Sunday service in H. for their anthroposophical youth. At the present, when we are under attack from every direction, that is total nonsense. There are already such areas of attack, such as when Mr. L. stands up and conducts a service for the anthroposophical children. He has already received permission to observe our service. I would certainly deny any association with a Sunday service outside the school. It only makes sense if there are a number of children receiving religious instruction from an anthroposophical basis and there is a Sunday service in our school for these children. Thus, we would never admit someone from outside the school.

A teacher: Then we should leave it that way.

Dr. Steiner: We could leave things that way, but there are exceptions. It is difficult to understand how we could turn someone away when we say that Mrs. G. said they could come. Then we would have to turn away Mr. Leinhas, but he is a member of the Waldorf School Association. Eventually this will become a kind of right and will include everything connected to the school in any way.

A teacher: Can we include the wives of faculty members?

Dr. Steiner: Of course, we cannot admit them. If they have no children, they also have no right to it.

A teacher reports about the deportment lessons. An attempt was made to teach the children a soul diet. The children brought all kinds of gossip into school.

Dr. Steiner: It is unavoidable that the anthroposophical children hear things at home. That is not dangerous as long as the parents are reasonable. The healthy attitude of the parents will keep the children from becoming too wild, even though those things may go in deeply. The things we have often had to struggle against, such as those you mentioned about O.R. may arise because the parents talk about silly things.

You will have noticed that the instruction is bearing fruit. I would mention that particularly in critical cases, you have had good success with stories that have a particular moral. If you are certain a child has a specific kind of misbehavior, then you can think of a story in which that type of misbehavior becomes absurd. Even with very young children, you can rid them of their greed for sweets and such if the mother tells a story that makes that behavior absurd. If you think of something along the lines of the dog who goes over the bridge with meat in his mouth, that strongly affects the child and has a lasting effect. That is particularly true if you allow some time to go by between the misbehavior and telling the story. Generally, you can achieve more when the child has slept, and you return to the subject the next day. To take up the behavior immediately after it occurred is the worst thing. That sounds very theosophical, but it is also quite true.

It would also be a good idea if we, as the entire faculty, could take up individual children, or groups of children, who are a source of concern and speak about them. That seems to me to be something very desirable. It requires only that we give some interest to it.

This morning I asked about P.I. He has disappeared. You remember that his father had told me certain complaints he had. It would be a good idea if we could compare what is happening with the boy to what the father is complaining about. The father appears to be a rather useless complainer, always blaming things. I will talk with the boy. It seems to me that the father always complains and picks up small things that bother the boy. Then he expands them into fantasies so that the boy does things the father suggests. The boy certainly does not know what he wants to do.

That is a major problem in every school because it is so difficult to keep everything under control. Precisely in such questions, we must have complete clarity within the faculty about the individual students.

Some things are very interesting when you look at the statistics in detail. I have looked at all the classes. It is striking to me that there are very few children lacking in talent and also few who are gifted, but there are a large number of average children. One sign of that is that they are all making good progress. I always want to differentiate between progress as such and the content of the progress. It is possible that some things have not gone forward, but the tempo is good.

In the fourth grade, there are actually only two slow children and three who are not really moving along. However, the others, at least according to their writing, are sufficiently talented children. It is possible that there may be a number of pranksters, but those whom we have called such are actually gifted pranksters. That certainly hits the nail on the head.

All that relates to something else. When we raise the general level of morality, then things will even out. A characteristic of the Waldorf School students is that they are terribly jealous about their teachers. They only like their own teacher, and that is the one who does things right. That is certainly the case. But, on the other hand, although that has its good side, it also has a darker side. The main thing is not to pay too much attention to it. You shouldn’t feel flattered when you hear such things. That is readily apparent during class when Mr. A. is no longer a human being. The children see him almost as a saint.

Why shouldn’t the children laugh? That is more in keeping with the school. If you know anything, you will know the most important people were pranksters. If you connect that with life, you will see it has another aspect.

It would be good if they were not so loud. The fourth grade is terribly loud. But, we should not take these things so seriously. Morally, it is very significant if you have changed a child’s obtrusive characteristic. For instance, if you can achieve that the fourth grade is not so loud, or if you can break B.Ch.’s habit of throwing his school bag ahead of him. If you can change such an obvious characteristic, regardless of whether you view that as good or bad behavior. It has great moral significance if you can break the boys in the fourth grade from all that terrible yelling. I would say it is a question of general didactic efficiency, how far the speaking in chorus goes. If you develop it too little, the social attitude suffers. That is formed through speaking in chorus. If you go too far, the capacity to comprehend will suffer because that has a strongly suggestive force. When they speak as a group, the children will be able to do things they otherwise have no idea of. It is the same as with a mob in the street. The younger they are, the more they can fool you. It is a good idea to randomly request them to do the same thing again individually, so that each has to pay attention to what the other says. When you are telling a story, you can give some sentences and then let the children continue. You should do things I have done, for instance, when I said, “You there, in the middle row at the left end, continue on,” “You there in the corner, continue,” so that they have to pay attention and that you can make the children move along with you. Speaking in chorus too much leads to laziness. The tendency to shout in music confirms that.

Particularly in the fourth grade, you should pay attention to the intangibles. I am speaking of the very real intangibles that exist in the tension within the entire class. For example, there is the ratio between the number of girls and boys. I don’t mean you have to change that. You need to take life as it is, but you should at least try to pay some attention to such things. If I am not mistaken, in the fourth grade there is the highest ratio of boys to girls. It occurs to me that the physiognomy of the class is related to the ratio of boys to girls. In Miss Lang’s case, the situation is different. You should pay attention to such things. In Miss Lang’s class, there are significantly fewer boys than girls. Today, there were certainly twice as many boys in the fourth grade, twenty-five boys and eleven girls. In the sixth grade, there are twelve boys and nineteen girls. That is something you should certainly pay attention to, don’t you agree? The fifth grade is interesting for its balance. Today there were twenty-five to twenty-five. (Speaking to Dr. von Heydebrand) Today was certainly a good opportunity, because you had brought some very interesting material to the class. That is the proper way to bring anthroposophy. Such things are what we should pay attention to.

A teacher: I believe I have perceived a relationship between the phlegmatic children and a deep voice, the sanguine children and a middle tone, and a higher voice with the cholerics. Is that correct?

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly true with the first two. The question regarding the higher voices is rather interesting. In general, it is true that phlegmatics have lower voices and the melancholic and sanguine children, middle tones. The sanguine children are among the highest voices. The choleric children spread out over all three. There must be some particular reason. Do you thing that tenors are mostly choleric? Certainly on the stage. The choleric element spreads out everywhere.

A teacher: How can we have such differing opinions about the temperament of a child?

Dr. Steiner: We cannot solve that question mathematically. We can certainly not speak in that way. In judging cases that lie near a boundary, it is possible that one person has one view and another, another view. We do not need to mathematically resolve them. The situation is such that when we see and understand a child in one way or another, we already intend to treat it in a particular way. In the end, the manner of treating something arises from an interaction. Don’t think you should discuss it.

There is a further question about temperaments.

Dr. Steiner: The choleric temperament becomes immediately annoyed by and angry about anything that interrupts its activity. When it is in a rhythmic experience, it becomes vexed and angry, but it will also become angry if it is involved in another experience and is disturbed. That is because rhythm inwardly connects with all of human nature. It is certainly the case that rhythm is more connected with human nature than anything else and that a strong rhythm lies at the base of cholerics, a rhythm that is usually somewhat defective. We can see that Napoleon was a choleric. In his case, the inner rhythm was compressed. With Napoleon you will find, on the one side, something that tended to grow larger than he grew. He remained a half-pint. His etheric body was larger than his physical body, and thus his organs were so compressed that all rhythmical things were shoved together and continuously disturbed one another. Since such a choleric temperament is based upon a continuous shortening of the rhythm, it lives within itself.

A teacher: Can we say that one sense predominates in such a temperament?

Dr. Steiner: In cholerics, you will probably generally find an abnormally developed sense of balance (Libra) and an external display of that in the ear canal through an autopsy. The experience of rhythm, the sense of balance and sense of movement, the interaction of these, rhythmic experience. In sanguines (Virgo), in connection with the sense of balance and sense of movement, the sense of movement predominates. In the same way, in melancholics (Leo) the sense of life predominates and in phlegmatics (Cancer) the sense of touch predominates physiologically because the touch bodies are embedded in small fat pads. That is physiologically demonstrable.

Now, it is not so that the touch bodies transmit sense impressions. What occurs is a reflex action, just like when you compress a rubber ball and allow it to spring back. The little warts are there to transmit it to the I, to transmit the impression in the etheric body to the I. That is the case with each of the senses.

A report is given about the eurythmy instruction.

Dr. Steiner: The enthusiasm for eurythmy is somewhat theoretical. We always have the desire for the Eurythmeum before us, but we do not have enough rooms. If we did more tone eurythmy, we would want to have someone who played the piano. That might be necessary. We have until now done relatively little tone eurythmy. Miss X. started a children’s tone eurythmy group in Dornach and has been very successful with it. One thing we should take note of is that except for those older children who are more talented, the younger children more easily learn eurythmy, that is, they more easily develop their grace through it so that in fact eurythmy has been quite fruitful. With the older children, it is more difficult because they don’t want to get used to properly springing up, but the younger children learn it quite gracefully. It would never occur to people that having the younger children spread their legs is something ugly. It is certainly not ugly, but I am convinced that would never occur to them.

A teacher reports about gymnastics. Some children are cutting the class.

Dr. Steiner: We certainly have to ask if those children are avoiding gymnastics, or if they only want to sneak away to fool around.

A teacher: M.T. is very graceful in eurythmy, but outside he is clumsy.

Dr. Steiner: Just in his case, I can imagine he is avoiding things in order to do something else.

A teacher: He is lazy.

Dr. Steiner: Since he is fooling around so much, he is certainly very active. He is a very good boy.

A teacher makes a remark.

Dr. Steiner: In my opinion, it is very good that O.N. copies the writing. You can see that in marriages where the husband often writes like the wife or vice versa.

There is a report about working in the garden and shop class. There are difficulties with some children who are unsocial and lagging and don’t want to help each other.

Dr. Steiner: Are there many? We can hardly do anything else than put all of them together, give them a certain area so they are ashamed when they don’t get anything done. They need something that would be obviously complete so that they will be ashamed of themselves when they finish only a quarter. But not a hint of ambition. What I said does not count upon ambition, but upon shame. We could also form a group that looks at what they have done in the presence of the children and brings some dissatisfaction to expression. I think that if Mrs. Molt and Mr. Hahn were called upon to look at what he did, then M.T. would certainly decide to work in order not to cause any words of displeasure. Another method would be that you take those children and keep them close to you during class, but that is difficult to do. We must make them feel ashamed when they do not finish. I would not arouse the feeling of ambition, but of shame.

A teacher asks if it might be possible to form a bookbinding shop.

Dr. Steiner: I am not certain if that is consistent with the school. Bookbinding is something normally contained in the curriculum for the continuing education school. We could, however, try binding. Is there someone here who could take up such a course for the continuing education school? One or two perhaps, since we can certainly develop bookbinding as an artistic craft. We had no transition from those beautiful old volumes, which are slowly disappearing, to these monstrous modern volumes. The things made now are mostly just trash. It is always intriguing to accomplish something through artistic craft. What are made today are really not books. We should make books again. That is something that falls within the realm of the crafts in the continuing education school.

As such, it is a simple job, but we certainly could accomplish something. Of course, we will need to master the technique. That would give the children something to improve upon. I mean, for instance, when it comes to gold leafing, there is certainly much that can be improved. What they need to learn is relatively simple, though. It is simply practice.

A teacher: I am not certain I could take that over.

Dr. Steiner: This is a question we must discuss in connection with the continuing education school.

A teacher: Should I give a few lessons in my class?

Dr. Steiner: Then we would come into the question of subject teachers. That is something we must avoid as long as we can. As long as someone is there who can do it properly, then that will do. A teacher: Two periods a week for handwork are not enough. Could we increase the number of hours?

Dr. Steiner: I notice that there is considerable ability in the handwork class. As soon as the Waldorf School Association provides us with many millions, we will be able to have many rooms and employ many teachers. Now we can hardly add more work time. We must accomplish everything else by dividing classes. Two hours per week should be sufficient. We must divide the classes and then that is only one hour.

A teacher: Should we take the boys and girls separately?

Dr. Steiner: I would not do that. I would prefer to begin by dividing the whole class into two halves. You let the boys do things other than knit in handwork, don’t you? The girls, of course, also. Nevertheless, I would not do it. I would not begin separating the boys and the girls. We need to find another solution.

A teacher: Should the preschool be like a kindergarten?

Dr. Steiner: The children have not started school yet. We cannot begin teaching them any subjects. You should occupy them with play. Certainly, they should play games. You can also tell stories in such a way that you are not teaching. But, definitely do not make any scholastic demands. Don’t expect them to be able to retell everything. I don’t think there is any need for an actual teaching goal there. We need to try to determine how we can best occupy the children. A teaching goal is not necessary. What you would do is play games, tell stories, and solve little riddles.

I would also not pedantically limit things. I would keep the children there until the parents pick them up. If possible, we could have them the whole day. If that is possible, why not? You could also try some eurythmy with them, but don’t spoil them. They shouldn’t be spoiled by anything else, either. As I said, the main thing is that you mother the children. Don’t be frivolous with them. You would not want to do anything academic with them. You can essentially do what you want.

In playing, the children show the same form as they will when they find their way into life. Children who play slowly will also be slow at the age of twenty and think slowly about all their experiences. Children who are superficial in play will also be superficial later. Children who say that they want to break open their toys to see what they look like inside will later become philosophers. That is the kind of thinking that overcomes the problems of life. In play, you can certainly do very much. You can urge a child who tends to play slowly, to play more quickly. You simply give that child games where some quickness is necessary.

There is a question about speaking in chorus.

Dr. Steiner: You can certainly do that. You can also tell fairy tales. There are many fairy tales you should not tell to six-year-olds. I don’t mean the sort of things that the Ethical Culture Association wants to eliminate, but the stories that are simply too complicated. I would not have the little children repeat the tales. However, if they want to tell something themselves, then listen to it. That is something you will have to wait on and see what happens.

A teacher asks about student reports.

Dr. Steiner: We spoke about that already. You will need to emphasize some things, but not pedantically. You should try to have a little bit of personal history at the beginning, and then go into each child individually. For instance, you could write something like, “E. reads well and speaks interestingly,” and such things, so that you create the text yourself. You create a sentence freely written in which you emphasize what is otherwise simply a subject. You may need to speak about all subjects, but perhaps not. I would print the report form so that it has only the heading, “Independent Waldorf School, Yearly Report for …” and then leave room for you to write.

Each of you will describe a student in your own way. If more than one teacher has had the child, then each should write something. It would, however, be preferable if the various statements were not too contradictory. For example, one of you says, “He reads quite well,” and another says something that supports that. The best is that the class teacher begins the description of the child and the others go from there. It certainly will not do if the class teacher writes, “He is an excellent boy,” and then someone else writes, “He is really a terror.” You will have to put things together.

A teacher asks about the reports from the religion teachers.

Dr. Steiner: Well, they will have to write their two cents worth, also. We must also include the religion teachers. Here, they will have to control themselves, or they won’t be able to write anything.

A teacher: Do we need to have the parents sign the reports?

Dr. Steiner: I would simply have an introduction that says that those parents who want to have their children return the following year should sign the report. If the children are not returning, then we don’t need to do anything, but if they are, the parents should sign it. We made it through without any midyear reports. Do the parents want a midyear report?

Yes, the children will simply report and bring their report cards. They will receive them again at the end of the year when the report is already a booklet. It can certainly be a booklet, but perforated. Suppose at the beginning a child is not very good, then you could write a criticism. Perhaps later the child is better and would want to have the previous report removed. The booklet can be perforated.

Then you can write something that is not praise. You cannot give these two children reports that say their writing was very good, but you could phrase it in a way that describes how well the child writes without criticism. With little M., I would write, “He has not accomplished more than copying simple words. He often adds unnecessary strokes to the letters.” Describe the children.

Another question is asked.

Dr. Steiner: We hold the child back. I would only differentiate between those moving on to the next class, and those we have determined will go into the remedial class if they return. I don’t want to keep children back. In the case of these two children, they came only after Christmas. Now that we have the remedial class, it is possible to place those children who will be unable to meet the goals of the class into the remedial class; for example, those who are slow learners. It is not a good idea to begin failing the others. We should have held them back when they began school. It would certainly be preferable not to fail children. I don’t see how we could do that. In your class, there are at most three others who might be held back, aside from those two who we could place in the remedial class. For now, you will have to bring them along by not excessively praising them, but also not criticizing. Simply state that they have not quite reached the goals of the class. It was our responsibility to place the children in the proper classes when they entered the school. It would not be wise to fail them. It is important that we discuss H. and how we will treat her. We had to put her in the third grade; after we promised that, we had to put her there. In general, we should not keep the children the entire year, especially those who come from other schools, and then let them fail. But, now they are in this situation. The children we need to carry along are really not so bad, but we should never put a child into a class that is too advanced.

A teacher: How should we place children from other schools? Should we go according to their age, or is there some other way?

Dr. Steiner: In the future, when the children come at the age of six and go through all the grades, then this will no longer happen. For now, we must attempt to put the children in the grade that is appropriate for them, both according to their age and to their ability.

A teacher asks if a child can be placed in the remedial class.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t think that is possible. Particularly in the first grade you should not go too far in separating children into the remedial class. I have seen the child, and you are right. But, on the other hand, not so very much is lost if a child still writes poorly in the first grade. If we can do it, it would be very good for all of the children like that if we could do the exercises I discussed previously with you.

If you have her do something like this (Dr. Steiner indicates an exercise): Reach your right hand over your head and grasp your left ear. Or perhaps you could have her draw things like a spiral going inward, a spiral going to the right, and another to the left. Then she will gain much. You need exercises that cause the children to enter more into thinking.

Then we have writing. There are some who write very poorly, and quite a number who are really first class. The children will not improve much when you want to make them learn to write better by improving their writing. You need to improve their dexterity; then they will learn to write better.

I don’t think you will be able to accomplish much with your efforts at improving bad handwriting simply by improving the writing. You should attempt to make the children better in form drawing. If they would learn to play the piano, their writing would improve. It is certainly a truism that this really poor handwriting first started when children’s toys became so extraordinarily materialistic. It is terrible that such a large number of toys are construction sets. They really are not toys at all because they are atomistic. If a child has a simple forge, then the child should learn to use it. I wish that children had toys that moved. This is all contained in Education of the Child. The toys today are terrible, and for that reason the children learn no dexterity and write poorly.

It would be enough, though we can’t do this at school, if we had those children who write poorly with their hands, draw simple forms with their feet. That has an effect upon the hand. They could draw small circles or semicircles or triangles with their feet. They should put a pencil between their toes and draw circles. That is something that is not easy to do, but very interesting. It is difficult to learn, but interesting to do. I think it would be interesting also to have them hold a stick with their toes and make figures in the sand outside. That has a strong effect upon the hands. You could have children pick up a handkerchief with their feet, rather than with their hands. That also has a strong effect. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that they should eat with their feet. You really shouldn’t do this with everything. You should try to work indirectly upon improving handwriting, developing dexterity in drawing and making forms. Try to have them draw complicated symmetrical forms. (Speaking to Mr. Baumann) Giving them a beat is good for developing reasoned and logical forms.

A teacher asks about writing with the left hand.

Dr. Steiner: In general, you will find that those children who have spiritual tendencies can write without difficulty as they will, left or right-handed. Children who are materialistically oriented will become addled by writing with both hands. There is a reason for right-handedness. In this materialistic age, children who are left-handed will become idiotic if they alternately use both hands. That is a very questionable thing to do in those circumstances that involve reasoning, but there is no problem in drawing. You can allow them to draw with either hand.

A teacher asks if they can tell fairy tales where bloody things occur.

Dr. Steiner: If the intent of the fairy tale is that the blood portrays blood, then that is inartistic. The significant point in a fairy tale is whether it is tasteful or not. No harm is done if there is blood in it. I once mentioned to a mother that if she absolutely avoided mentioning blood when she told her children fairy tales, they would become too tender. Later, they would faint when seeing a drop of blood. That is a deficiency in life. You shouldn’t make children incapable of facing life by setting up such a rule.

A teacher asks about L.G. in the third grade. She is nervous and stutters.

Dr. Steiner: It would help if you made up some exercises. I am uncertain whether we have any sentence exercises with k and p. You should have her do those and walk at the same time, and then she would also be able to say those sentences. It would also be a good idea for her to do k and p in eurythmy. However, don’t take such things too seriously because they usually disappear later in life.

A teacher asks about E.M. in the fifth grade, who also stutters.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, didn’t you present her to me before? I must have seen her. You will need to know what the problem is, whether it is organic or lying in the soul. It could be either. If it is a problem in the soul, then you could have her do specially formulated sentences. If it is an organic problem, then you would need to do something else. I will need to take a look at her tomorrow.

A teacher asks about A.W. in the fifth grade. He adds titles to his name and underlines “I.”

Dr. Steiner: That is a criminal type. He might become a forger. He has a clear tendency toward criminality. He can write much better. Clearly a criminal type. You will need to undertake a corrective action with his soul. You will have to force him to do three (not recorded), one after the other. I will take a look at him tomorrow. His father is infantile.

A teacher asks about a closing ceremony.

Dr. Steiner: I would make the closing ceremony such that, assuming I will be there, I would speak, then Mr. Molt, and then all of the teachers. We should make a kind of symphony of what we have to say to the children. There should be no student presentations. They can do that in the last monthly festival. We could review the past school year and then look toward a summer vacation that will awaken hope, then give a preview of the next school year. That is what I think.

A teacher mentions a woman who intends to make a film about the Waldorf School and three-folding.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t have any idea what to do here. If, for example, someone wants to photograph the buildings, that will certainly hurt nothing. There is nothing wrong with that. If she wants to make a film publicizing the Waldorf School, we would have nothing against showing that publicly, since it is not our responsibility. Our responsibility is that the Waldorf School be properly run. We are not responsible for what she photographs any more than you are responsible for what occurs if you are walking along the street and someone offers you a ride. We can tell her we will do what we can do, but there is nothing we can do. She may want to photograph the eurythmy lessons. I did that in Dornach, but it was not very good. That is a technical question. I don’t think much will come of it. She wants to film the three-folding? I was thinking, why shouldn’t the film contrast something good with something bad? We certainly can have no influence if she creates a scene in the film where two people speak about the Waldorf School, but we do not need to let her into the classrooms. She can certainly not demand that we allow her to photograph anything more than a public eurythmy performance by the children. Since she wants to publicize eurythmy, that would be her contribution to the members’ work. It is rather senseless if she wants to film the classes. She could film any school, there is nothing particular to see. She could, for example, record that terrible yelling in the fourth grade.

It would certainly not be proper to suppress offhandedly, due to false modesty, somebody who wants to publicize three-folding and the school. It would be better if we could hinder everything that is tasteless, but, due to false modesty, I would be hesitant to hinder anything. We have much interest in making the school as perfect as possible, but there is certainly nothing to be gained by preventing someone from photographing it. If she had set up and filmed my lecture, what could I have done against that?

A question is asked regarding the trip to Dornach for the First Class of the Anthroposophical University of Spiritual Science (Sept. 26–Oct. 16, 1920).

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, those things are not so easy. We want to have a course this fall where various people present lectures. We have invited Stein and Stockmeyer, and it would, of course, have been nice if many could come. But, finding lodging in Dornach is just as difficult as in Stuttgart. It is not so easy to invite people, the exchange problems, and so forth. It is, however, possible, if the exchange problems are resolved by then, that we could find room for a number of people. My desire is that everyone coming from the Entente will pay for two others coming from Central Europe. However, that does not need to be too cozy. We could do it as we did for the physicians’ course, that would be possible. However, you need to remember that we don’t have rich people in Dornach and Basel.

A teacher remarks that there are also difficulties in obtaining a visa.

Dr. Steiner: Generally, when people travel to Switzerland for vacation, they can obtain a visa. You only need to be careful that you are not going for another reason. You cannot travel in Switzerland in order to earn money. We are treated terribly there. Now they allow people to move there so that they will pay taxes. Otherwise, you cannot. We are being hit very hard. That is one of the major problems we have with the Goetheanum. If there is not another attitude toward the Goetheanum, people outside Switzerland will soon be unable to visit it.

There was some discussion about reproductions of the paintings in the cupola of the Goetheanum.

Dr. Steiner: What was painted in color in the cupola needs to be understood from the colors. If you reproduced it photographically, you could achieve something only if you enlarged it to the same size as in the cupola. It is just not something we can reproduce simply. The less the pictures correspond to those in the cupola, the better it is. Black and white only hints at something. It cries for color. I would never agree with those inartistic reproductions. They are only surrogates. I do not want to have any color photographs of the cupola paintings. The reproductions should not stand by themselves. I want to handle that so that what is not important is what is given.

It is the same with the glass windows. If you attempted to achieve something through reproductions, I would be against it. You should not attempt to reproduce such things exactly. It is not desirable that you reproduce a piece of music through some deceptively imitative phonograph record. I do not want that. I do not want to have a modern, technical human being. The way these paintings appear in the reproductions never reproduces them. The reproductions contain only what is novel, not what is important. You then have a feeling that this or that color must be there. That reminds me of something you can find in The Education of the Child—namely that you should not give children beautifully made dolls, but only those made from a handkerchief.

At this point of our educational studies I want to interpolate some remarks referring to the arrangements which were made in the Waldorf School in order to facilitate and put into practice those principles about which I have already spoken and shall have more to say in the coming lectures.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart was inaugurated in the year 1919 on the initiative of Emil Molt, [Director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory.] with the purpose of carrying out the principles of anthroposophical education. This purpose could be realised through the fact that the direction and leadership of the school was entrusted to me. Therefore when I describe how this school is organised it can at the same time serve as an example for the practical realisation of those fundamental educational principles which we have been dealing with here.

I should like to make clear first of all that the soul of all the instruction and education in the Waldorf School is the Teachers' Conference. These conferences are held regularly by the college of teachers and I attend them whenever I can manage to be in Stuttgart. They are concerned not only with external matters of school organisation, with the drawing up of the timetable, with the formation of classes and so on, but they deal in a penetrative, far-reaching way with everything on which the life and soul of the school depends. Things are arranged in such a way as to further the aim of the school, that is to say, to base the teaching and education on a knowledge of man. It means of course that this knowledge must be applied to every individual child. Time must be devoted to the observation, the psychological observation of each child. This is essential and must be reckoned with in actual, concrete detail when building up the whole educational plan. In the teachers' conferences the individual child is spoken about in such a way that the teachers try to grasp the nature of the human being as such in its special relationship to the child in question. You can well imagine that we have to deal with all grades and types of children with their varying childish talents and qualities of soul. We are confronted with pretty well every kind of child, from the one whom we must class as being psychologically and physically very poorly endowed to the one—and let us hope life will confirm this—who is gifted to the point of genius.

If we want to observe children in their real being we must acquire a psychological faculty of perception. This kind of perception not only includes a cruder form of observing the capacities of individual children, but above all the ability to appraise these capacities rightly. You need only consider the following: One can have a child in the class who appears to be extraordinarily gifted in learning to read and write, or seems to be very gifted in learning arithmetic or languages. But to hold fast to one's opinion and say: This child is gifted, for he can learn languages, arithmetic and so on quite easily—this betokens a psychological superficiality. In childhood, say at about 7, 8 or 9 years old the ease with which a child learns can be a sign that later on he will develop genius; but it can equally well be a sign that sooner or later he will become neurotic, or in some way turn into a sick man. When one has gained insight into the human being and knows that this human being consists not only of the physical body which is perceptible to the eye, but also bears within him the etheric body which is the source of growth and the forces of nourishment, the cause whereby the child grows bigger; when one considers further that man also has an astral body within him, the laws of which have nothing whatever to do with what is being physically established but on the contrary work destructively on the physical, and destroy it in order to make room for the spiritual; and furthermore when one considers that there is still the ego-organisation which is bound up with the human being, so that one has the three organisations—etheric body, astral body, ego-organisation and must pay heed to these as well as to the perceptible physical body—then one can form an idea of how complicated such a human being is, and how each of these members of the human being can be the cause of a talent, or lack of talent in any particular sphere, or can show a deceptive talent which is transient and pathological. One must develop insight as to whether the talent is of such a kind as to have healthy tendencies, or whether it tends towards the unhealthy.

If as teacher and educator, one represents with the necessary love, devotion and selflessness the knowledge of man of which we have been speaking here in these lectures, then something very definite ensues. In living together with the children one becomes—do not misunderstand the word, it is not used in a bragging sense—one becomes ever wiser and wiser. One discovers for oneself how to appraise some particular capacity or achievement of the child. One learns to enter in a living way into the nature of the child and to do so comparatively quickly.

I know that many people will say: If you assert that the human being, in addition to his physical body, consists of super-sensible members, etheric body, astral body and ego-organisation, it follows that only someone who is clairvoyant and able to perceive these super-sensible members of human nature can be a teacher. But this is not the case. Everything perceived through imagination, inspiration and intuition, as described in my books, can be examined and assessed by observing the physical organisation of the child, because it comes to expression everywhere in this physical organisation.

It is therefore perfectly possible for a teacher or educator who carries out his profession in a truly loving way and bases his teaching on a comprehensive knowledge of man, to speak in the following way about some special case: Here the physical body shows signs of hardening, of stiffening, so that the child is unable to develop the faculties which, spiritually, are potentially present, because the physical body is a hindrance. Or, to take another case, it is possible that someone might say: In this particular child, who is about 7 or 8 years old, certain attributes are making their appearance. The child surprises us in that he is able to learn this or that very early; but one can observe that the physical body is too soft, it has a tendency which later on may cause it to run to fat. If the physical body is too soft, if, so to say, the fluid element has an excess of weight in relation to the solid element, then this particular tendency causes the soul and spirit to make themselves felt too soon, and then we have a precocious child. In such a case, during the further development of the physical body, this precocity is pushed back again, so that under certain conditions everything may well be changed and the child become for the whole of life, not only an average person, but one even below average. In short, we must reckon with the fact that what external observation reveals in the child must be estimated rightly by means of inner perceptiveness, so that actually nothing whatever is said if one merely speaks about faculties or lack of faculties.

What I am now saying can also be borne out by studying the biographies of the most varied types of human being. In following the course of the spiritual development of mankind it would be possible to cite many a distinguished personality who in later life achieved great things, but who was regarded as a child as being almost completely ungifted and at school had been, so to say, one of the duffers. In this connection one comes across the most remarkable examples. For instance there is a poet who at the age of 18, 19 and even 20 was held to be so ungifted by all those who were concerned with his education that they advised him, for this very reason, not to attempt studying at a higher level. He did not, however, allow himself to be put off, but continued his studies, and it was not so long afterwards that he was appointed inspector of the very same schools that it had not been thought advisable for him to attend as a young man. There was also an Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, who studied with the purpose of becoming a teacher in a secondary school (Gymnasium). In the examination he obtained excellent marks for Greek and Latin; on the other hand he did not pass muster for the teaching of the German language, because his essays were considered to be quite inadequate. Nevertheless he became a famous poet! We have found it necessary to separate a number of children from the others, either more or less permanently or for a short time, because they are mentally backward and through their lack of comprehension, through their inability to understand, they are a cause of disturbance. These children are put together into a special class for those who are of limited capacity. This class is led by the man who has spoken to you here, Dr. Schubert, whose very special qualities make him a born leader of such a class. This task calls indeed for special gifts. It needs above all the gift of being able to penetrate into those qualities of soul which are, as it were, imprisoned in the physical and have difficulty in freeing themselves. Little by little they must be liberated. Here we come again to what borders on physical illness, where the psychologically abnormal impinges on what is physically out of order. It is quite possible to shift this borderland, it is in no way rigid or fixed. Indeed it is certainly helpful if one can look behind every so-called psychological abnormality and perceive what is not healthy in the physical organism of the person in question. For in the true sense of the word there are no mental illnesses; they are brought about through the fact that the physical does not release the spiritual.

In Germany today [just after the First World War.] we have also to reckon with the situation that nearly all school children are not only undernourished, but have suffered for years from the effects of under-nourishment. Here therefore we are concerned with the fact that through observing the soul-spiritual and the physical-corporeal we can be led to a comprehension of their essential unity. People find it very difficult to understand that this is essential in education. There was an occasion when a man, who otherwise was possessed of considerable understanding and was directly engaged in matters pertaining to schools, visited the Waldorf School. I myself took him around for days on end. He showed great interest in everything. But after I had told him all I could about one child or another—for we spoke mostly about the children, not about abstract educational principles, our education being based on a knowledge of man—he finally said: “Well and good, but then all teachers would have to be doctors.” I replied: “That is not necessary; but they should certainly have some medical knowledge, as much as a teacher needs to know for his educational work.”

For where shall we be if it is said that for some reason or another, provision cannot be made for it, or the teachers cannot learn it? Provision simply must be made for what is required and the teachers must learn what is necessary. This is the only possible standpoint. The so-called normal capacities which man develops, which are present in every human being, are best studied by observing pathological conditions. And if one has learned to know a sick organism from various points of view, then the foundation is laid for understanding a soul endowed with genius. It is not as though I were taking the standpoint of a Lombroso [Italian criminologist.] or someone holding similar views; this is not the case. I do not assert that genius is always a condition of sickness, but one does actually learn to know the soul-spiritual in learning to know the sick body of a child. In studying the difficulties experienced by soul and spirit in coming to outer manifestation in a sick body, one can learn to understand how the soul seizes hold of the organism when it has something special to express.

So education comes up against not only slight pathological conditions, such as are present in children of limited capacity, but it meets what is pathological in the widest sense of the word. This is why we have also introduced medical treatment for the children in our school. We do not, however, have a doctor who only practises medicine and is quite outside the sphere of education, but our school doctor, Dr. Kolisko, is at the same time the teacher of a class. He stands completely within the school as a teacher, he is acquainted with all the children and is therefore in a position to know the particular angle from which may come any pathological symptom appearing in the child. This is altogether different from what is possible for the school doctor who visits the school on certain formal occasions and judges the state of a child's health on what is necessarily a very cursory observation. Quite apart from this, however, in the teachers' conferences no hard and fast line is drawn between the soul-spiritual and physical-corporeal when considering the case of any particular child. The natural consequence of this is that the teacher has gradually to acquire insight into the whole human being, so that he is just as interested in every detail connected with physical health and sickness as he is in what is mentally sound or abnormal.

This is what we try to achieve in the school. Each teacher should have the deepest interest in, and pay the greatest attention to the whole human being. It follows from this that our teachers are not specialists in the ordinary sense of the word. For in effect the point is not so much whether the history teacher is more or less master of his subject, but whether by and large he is the kind of personality who is able to work upon the children in the way that has been described, and whether he has an awareness of how the child is developing under his care.

I myself was obliged to teach from my 15th year onwards, simply in order to live. I had to give private lessons and so gained direct experience in the practice of education and teaching. For instance, when I was a very young man, only 21, I undertook the education of a family of four boys. I became resident in the family, and at that time one of the boys was 11 years old and he was clearly hydrocephalic. He had most peculiar habits. He disliked eating at table, and would leave the dining room and go into the kitchen where there were the bins for refuse and scraps. There he would eat not only potato peelings but also all the other mess thrown there. At 11 years old he still knew practically nothing. An attempt had been made, on the basis of earlier instruction which he had received, to let him sit for the entrance examination to a primary school, in the hope that he could be received into one of the classes. But when he handed in the results of the examination there was nothing but an exercise book with one large hole where he had rubbed something out. He had achieved nothing else whatever and he was already 11 years old. The parents were distressed. They belonged to the more cultured upper-middle class, and everybody said: The boy is abnormal. Naturally when such things are said about a child people feel a prejudice against him. The general opinion was that he must learn a trade, for he was capable of nothing else. I came into the family, but nobody really understood me when I stated what I was prepared to do. I said: If I am given complete responsibility for the boy I can promise nothing except that I will try to draw out of the boy what is in him. Nobody understood this except the mother, with her instinctive perception, and the excellent family doctor. It was the same doctor who later on, together with Dr. Freud, founded psycho-analysis. When, however, at a later stage it became decadent, he severed his connection with it. It was possible to talk with this man and our conversation led to the decision that I should be entrusted with the boy's education and training.

In eighteen months his head had become noticeably smaller and the boy was now sufficiently advanced to enter a secondary school (Gymnasium). I accompanied him further during his school career for he needed extra help, but nevertheless after eighteen months he was accepted as a pupil in a secondary school. To be sure, his education had to be carried on in such a way that there were times when I needed hours in order to prepare what I wanted the boy to learn in a quarter of an hour. It was essential to exercise the greatest economy when teaching him and never to spend more time on whatever it might be than was absolutely necessary. It was also a question of arranging the day's timetable with great exactitude: so much time must be given to music, so much to gymnastics, so much to going for walks and so on. If this is done, I said to myself, if the boy is educated in this way, then it will be possible to draw out of him what is latent within him. Now there were times when things went quite badly with my efforts in this direction. The boy became pale. With the exception of his mother and the family doctor people said with one accord: That fellow is ruining the boy's health!—To this I replied: Naturally I cannot continue with his education if there is any interference. Things must be allowed to go on according to our agreement. And they went on.

The boy went through secondary school, continued his studies and became a doctor. The only reason for his early death was that when he was called up and served as a doctor during the world war he caught an infection and died of the effects of the ensuing illness. But he carried out the duties of his medical profession in an admirable way. I only bring forward this example in order to show how necessary it is in education to see things all round, as a whole. It also shows how under certain definite educational treatment it is possible in the long run to reduce week by week a hydrocephalic condition.

Now you will say: Certainly, something of this kind can happen when it is a case of private tuition. But it can equally well happen with comparatively large classes. For anyone who enters lovingly into what is put forward here as the knowledge of man will quickly acquire the possibility of observing each individual child with the attention that is necessary; and this he will be able to do even in a class where there are many pupils. It is just here however that the psychological perception of the kind which I have described is necessary, but this perception is not so easily acquired if one goes through the world as a single individual and has absolutely no interest in other people. I can truly say that I am aware of what I owe to the fact that I really never found any human being uninteresting. Even as a child no human being was ever uninteresting to me. And I know that I should never have been able to educate that boy if I had not actually found all human beings interesting.

It is this width of interest which permeates the teachers' conferences at the Waldorf School and gives them atmosphere, so that—if I may so express myself—a psychological mood prevails throughout and these teachers' conferences then really become a school based on the study of a deep psychology. It is interesting to see how from year to year the “college of teachers” as a whole is able to deepen its faculty for psychological perception. In addition to all that I have already described, the following must also be stated when one comes to consider the individual classes. We do not go in for statistics in the ordinary sense of the word, but for us the classes are living beings also, not only the individual pupils. One can take some particular class and study it for itself, and it is extraordinarily interesting to observe what imponderable forces then come to light. When one studies such a class, and when the teachers of the different classes discuss in college meeting the special characteristics of each class, it is interesting for instance to discover that a class having in it more girls than boys—for ours is a co-educational school—is a completely different being from a class where there are more boys than girls; and a class consisting of an equal number of boys and girls is again a completely different being. All this is extremely interesting, not only on account of the talk which takes place among the children, nor of the little love affairs which always occur in the higher classes. Here one must acquire the right kind of observation in order to take notice of it when this is necessary and otherwise not to see it. Quite apart from this however is the fact that the imponderable “being” composed of the different masculine and feminine individuals gives the class a quite definite spiritual structure. In this way one learns to know the individuality of the different classes. And if, as with us in the Waldorf School, there are parallel classes, it is possible when necessary—it is very seldom necessary—to make some alteration in the division of the classes. Studies such as these, in connection with the classes, form ever and again the content of the teachers' conferences. Thus the content of these conferences does not consist only of the administration of the school, but provides a living continuation of education in the school itself, so that the teachers are always learning. In this way the conferences are the soul of the whole school. One learns to estimate trivialities rightly, to give due weight to what has real importance, and so on. Then there will not be an outcry when here or there a child commits some small misdemeanour; but there will be an awareness when something happens which might endanger the further development of the school. So the total picture of our Waldorf School which has only come about in the course of the years, is an interesting one. By and large our children, when they reach the higher classes, are more able to grasp what a child has to learn at school than those from other schools; on the other hand, as I have described, in the lower classes they remain somewhat behind in reading and writing because we use different methods which are extended over several years. Between the ages of 13 and 15, however, the children begin to outstrip the pupils of other schools owing, among other things, to a certain ease with which they are able to enter into things and to a certain aptness of comprehension.

Now a great difficulty arises. It is a remarkable fact that where there is a light, shadows are thrown by objects; where there is a weak light there are weak shadows, where there is a strong light there are strong shadows. Likewise in regard to certain qualities of soul, the following may be observed. If insufficient care is taken by the teachers to establish contact with their pupils in every possible way, so that they are models on which the children base their own behaviour, then, conversely, as the result of a want of contact it can easily happen that deviations from moral conduct make their appearance. About this we must have no illusions whatever. It is so. This is why so much depends upon a complete “growing together” of the individualities of the teachers and the individualities of the pupils, so that the strong inner attachment felt by the children for the teachers on the one side may be reciprocally experienced by the teachers on the other, thus assuring the further development of both.

These things need to be studied in an inner, human, loving way, otherwise one will meet with surprises. But the nature of the method is such that it tends to draw out everything that lies potentially in the human being. At times this is exemplified in a somewhat strange fashion. There is a German poet who knew that he had been badly brought up and badly taught, so that very many of his innate qualities—he was always complaining about this—could not come to expression. This was because his body had already become stiff and hardened, owing to the fact that in his youth no care had been taken to develop his individuality. Then one day he went to a phrenologist. Do not imagine that I am standing up for phrenology or that I rate it particularly highly; it has however some significance when practised intuitively. The phrenologist felt his head and told him all kinds of nice things, for these were of course to be found; but at one spot of the skull he stopped suddenly, became red and did not trust himself to say a word. The poet then said: “Come now, speak out, that is the predisposition to theft in me. It seems therefore that if I had been better educated at school this tendency to theft might have had very serious consequences.”

If we wish to educate we must have plenty of elbow room. This however is not provided for in a school which is run on ordinary lines according to the dreadful timetable: 8 to 9 religion, 9 to 10 gymnastics, 10 to 11 history, 11 to 12 arithmetic. What comes later blots out what has been given earlier, and as, in spite of this, one has to get results, a teacher is well-nigh driven to despair. This is why in the Waldorf School we have what may be termed teaching periods. The child comes into a class. Every day during Main Lesson, which continues for the best part of the morning, from 8 to 10 or from 8 to 11, with short breaks for recreation, he is taught one subject. This is given by one teacher, even in the higher classes. The subject is not changed hour by hour, but is continued for as long as may be necessary for the teacher to get through what he wishes to take with the class. In arithmetic, for instance, such a period might last 4 weeks. Every day then, from 8 to 10 the subject in question is carried further and what is given one day is linked on to what was taught the previous day. No later lesson blots out the one given earlier; concentration is possible. Then, after about 4 weeks, when the arithmetic period has been taken far enough and is brought to a conclusion, a history period may follow, and this again, according to the length of time required, will be continued for another 4 or 5 weeks. And so it goes on. Our point of view is the very opposite to what is called the system of the specialist teacher. You might for instance when visiting the Waldorf School find our Dr. Baravalle taking a class for descriptive geometry. The pupils sit facing him with their drawing boards in front of them. He lets them draw and his manner is that of the most exemplary specialist teacher of geometry. Now coming into another school and looking at its list of professors and teachers you will find appended to one name or another: Diploma in Geometry or Mathematics or whatever it may be. I have known very many teachers, specialists in mathematics for instance, who boasted of the fact that when they took part in a school outing they were quite unable to tell the children the names of the plants.—But morning school is not yet over and here you will see Dr. Baravalle walking up and down between the desks and giving an English lesson. And out of the whole manner and method of his teaching you will see that he is speaking about all kinds of things and there is no means of knowing in which subject he is a specialist. Some of you may think geography is his special subject, or geometry or something else. The essential substance and content of one's teaching material can undoubtedly be acquired very quickly if one has the gift of entering right into the sphere of cognition, of experiencing knowledge within the soul. So we have no timetable. Naturally there is nothing pedantic about this. In our Waldorf School the Main Lesson is given in periods; other lessons must of course be fitted into a timetable, but these follow on after the Main Lesson.

Then we think it very important that the children should be taught two foreign languages from the time they first come to school when they are still quite small. We take French and English. It must be admitted that in our school this can be a perfect misery, because so many pupils have joined the school since its foundation. For instance pupils came to us who should really be taken into Class 6. In this class however, there are children who have already made considerable progress in languages. Now these new children should join them, but they have to be put into Class 5 simply because they haven't the foggiest notion of languages. We have continually to reckon with the difficulties.

Another thing we try to arrange is that whenever possible the most fundamental lessons are given in the morning, so that physical training—gymnastics, eurythmy and so on—is kept for the afternoon. This however is no hard and fast arrangement, for as we cannot afford an endless number of teachers not everything can be fitted in as ideally as we would wish, but only as well as circumstances permit. You will not misunderstand me if I say that with ideals no beginning can be made. Do not say that anthroposophy is not idealistic. We know how to value ideals, but nothing can be begun with ideals. They can be beautifully described, one can say: This is how it ought to be. One can even flatter oneself that one is striving in this direction. But in reality we have to cope with a quite definite, concrete school made up of 800 children whom we know and with between 40 and 50 teachers whom we must also know. But what is the use (you may ask) of a college of teachers when no member of it corresponds to the ideal? The essential thing is that we reckon with what is there. Then we proceed in accordance with reality. If we want to carry out something practically we must take reality into account. This then is what I would say in regard to period teaching.

Owing to our free approach to teaching, and this must certainly be apparent from what I am describing to you, it naturally comes about that the children do not always sit as still as mice. But you should see how the whole moral atmosphere and inner constitution of a class depends on the one who has it in charge, and here again it is the imponderable that counts. In this connection I must say that in the Waldorf School there are also teachers who prove to be inadequate in certain respects. I will not describe them, but it can well happen that on entering a class one is aware that it is “out of tune.” A quarter of the class is lying under the benches, a quarter is on top of them and the rest are continually running out of the room and knocking on the door from outside. We must not let these things baffle us. The situation can be put right again if one knows how to get on with the children. They should be allowed to satisfy their urge for movement; one should not fall back on punishment but set about putting these things right in another way. We are not at all in favour of issuing commands; on the contrary with us everything must be allowed to develop by itself. Through this very fact however there also develops by itself what I have described as something lying within the teachers as their life. Certainly the children sometimes make a frightful noise, but this is only a sign of their vitality. They can also be very active and lively in doing what they should, provided the teacher knows how to arouse their interest. We must of course make use of the good qualities of the so-called good child, so that he learns something, and with a rascal we must even make use of his rascally qualities, so that he too makes progress. We do not get anywhere if we are only able to develop the good qualities. We must from time to time develop the so-called rascally qualities, only we must of course be able to turn them in the right direction. Very often these so-called rascally qualities are precisely those which signify strength in the grown-up human being; they are qualities which, rightly handled, can culminate in what is most excellent in the grown up man or woman.

And so ever and again one has to determine whether a child gives little trouble because he is good, or because he is ill. It is very easy, if one considers one's own convenience, to be just as pleased with the sick child who sits still and does not make himself heard, as with the good child, because he does not call for much attention. But if one looks with real penetration into human nature one often finds that one has to devote much more attention to such a child than to a so-called rascal. Here too it is a question of psychological insight and psychological treatment, the latter naturally from the soul-spiritual point of view.

There is another thing to be considered. In the Waldorf School practically all the teaching takes place in the school itself. The burden of homework is lifted, for the children are given very little to do at home. Because of this, because all the work is done together with the teachers, the children's attitude is a quite remarkable one. In the Waldorf School something very characteristic comes about, as the following example will show: There was an occasion when certain pupils had misbehaved. A teacher who was not yet fully permeated with the Waldorf School education felt it necessary to punish these children and he did so in an intellectualistic way. He said: “You must stay in after school and do some arithmetic.” The children were quite unable to understand that doing arithmetic could be regarded as a punishment, for this was something which gave them the greatest pleasure. And the whole class—this is something which actually happened—asked: “May we stay in too?” And this was intended as a punishment! You see, the whole attitude of mind changes completely, and it should never happen that a child feels that he is being punished when he has to do something which he actually does with devotion, with satisfaction and joy. Our teachers discover all sorts of ways of getting rid of wrong behaviour. Once it so happened that our Dr. Stein, who is particularly inventive in this respect, noticed that during his lesson in a higher class the children were writing letters and passing them round. Now what did he do in order to put the matter right? He began to speak about the postal service, explaining it in some detail and in such a way that the writing of letters gradually ceased. The description of the postal service, the history of the origin of correspondence had apparently nothing to do with the misdemeanour noticed by the teacher and nevertheless it had something to do with it. You see, if one does not ask in a rationalistic way: “What shall I do” but is able to take advantage of a sudden idea because one knows instinctively how to deal with any situation in class, the consequences are often good; for in this way much more can be achieved towards the correction of the pupils than by resorting to punishment.

It must above all be clear to every member of the class that the teacher himself truly lives in accordance with his precepts. It must never come about that a choleric boy who makes a mess of his exercise hooks, seizes his neighbour by the ears and tweaks his hair, is shouted at by the teacher: “How dare you lose your temper, how dare you behave in such a way! Boy, if you ever repeat such a performance I will hurl the inkpot at your head!” This is certainly radically described, but something of the kind may well happen if a teacher does not realise that he himself must be an example in the school of what he expects of the pupils. What one is has far more importance than having principles and a lot of knowledge. What kind of a person one is, that is the point. If a candidate in the examination for teachers, in which he is supposed to show that he is well-fitted for his calling, is only tested in what he knows,—well, what he knows in the examination room is precisely what later on he will have to look up again in his text books. But this can be done without the need of sitting for an examination. But in actual fact no one should enter a school who has not the individuality of a teacher, in body, soul and spirit. Because this is so I can say that in carrying out my task of choosing the teachers comprising the College of Teachers at the Waldorf School, I certainly do not regard it as an obstacle if someone has obtained his teacher's diploma, but in certain respects I look more closely at one who has passed his examination than at another who through his purely human attitude shows me that his individuality is that of a true teacher. It is always a matter of concern when someone has passed examinations; he can undoubtedly still be an extremely clever man, but this must be in spite of having passed examinations.

It is remarkable how Karma works, for the Waldorf School, which is intended to stand as a concrete example of this special education based on the knowledge of man, was actually only possible in Württemberg, nowhere else, because just at the time when we were preparing to open the school a very old school regulation was still in force. If at that time people had been taken hold of by the enlightened ideas which later came forth from the constitutional body of the Weimar National Assembly (Nationalversammlung) with which we have constantly to contend, because it wishes to demolish our lower classes, we should never have been able to create the Waldorf School. It will certainly become ever rarer and rarer for teachers to be judged according to their human individualities and not according to their qualifications. It will become even rarer in the lower classes to be able to do this or that; for the world works—how can one put it—towards “freedom” and “human dignity.” This “human dignity” is however furthered in a strange manner by the help of the time-table and general arrangement of lessons. In the capital city of a country there is a Ministry of Education. In this Ministry it is known what is taught in each school and class by means of regulations which apportion exactly how the subjects are to be divided up. The consequence is that in some out-of-the-way place there is a school. If information is required as to what exactly is being taught for instance on 21st July, 1924 at 9.30 a.m. in the 5th class of this Primary School it has only to be looked up in the corresponding records of the Ministry and one can say precisely what is being taught in the school in question.—With us, on the contrary, you have two parallel classes, 5A and 5B. You go perhaps into both classes, one after the other and are astonished to find that in the one parallel class something completely different is going on from what is happening in the other. There is no similarity. Classes 5A and 5B are entrusted entirely to the individuality of the class teacher; each can do what corresponds to his own individuality, and he does it. In spite of the fact that in the teachers' conferences there is absolute agreement on essential matters, there is no obligation for the one class to be taught in just the same way as the parallel class; for what we seek to achieve must be achieved in the most varied ways. It is never a question of external regulations. So you will find with the little children in Class 1 that a teacher may do something of this kind [Dr Steiner made movements with his hands.] in order to help the children to find their way into drawing with paintbrush and paint: you come into the class and see the children making all kinds of movements with their hands which will then be led over to mastering the use of brush or pencil. Or you come into the other class and there you see the children dancing around in order that the same skill may be drawn out of the movement of the legs. Each teacher does what he deems to be best suited to the individualities of the children and his own individuality. In this way life is brought into the class and already forms the basis of what makes the children feel that they really belong to their teachers.

Naturally, in spite of that old school regulation, in Württemberg, too, there is school inspection; but in regard to this we have come off quite well. The inspectors' attitude showed the greatest possible insight and they agreed to everything when they saw how and why it was done. But such occasions also give rise to quite special happenings. For example, the inspectors came into a class where the teacher usually experienced great difficulty in maintaining discipline. Time and again she had to break into her teaching and not without considerable trouble re-establish order. Well, the inspectors from the Ministry came into her class and the teacher was highly astonished at the perfect behaviour of the children. They were model pupils, so much so that on the following day she felt bound to allude to it and said: “Children, how good you were yesterday!” Thereupon the whole class exclaimed: “But of course, Fräulein Doktor, we will never let you down!” Something quite imponderable develops in the pupils when the teachers try to put into practice what I have stated at the conclusion of all these lectures. If children are taught and educated in such a way that life is livingly carried over into their lives, then out of such teaching life-forces develop which continue to grow and prosper.

Dear friends;¹ dear ladies and gentlemen! You have chosen to entrust your children’s education to the Waldorf School, which has now been in existence for more than a year. If we want to communicate the Waldorf School’s methods and manner of instruction in a few indications—we do not have time for more than that tonight—it is best to start by mentioning one thing that we need in the Waldorf School much more than in any other school. In this school more that in any other, we need to work with the parents in a relationship of trust if we want to move forward in the right way. Our teachers absolutely depend on finding this relationship of trust with the children’s parents, since our school is fundamentally based on spiritual freedom—by which I do not mean, of course, any phantasmagorical spiritual license on the part of the children. Our school takes its place in our overall culture as an independent school in the best sense of the word. Just think about the otherwise compulsory integration of school life into public life by the civil authorities. Schools have been conceived wholly in the context of the state establishment which they are intended to serve exclusively, supplying the state with human beings of the sort it requires. That this is not also in the interest of truly healthy individual development is the recognition on which the Waldorf School is founded. The Waldorf School is intended to serve healthy human development above all else. All the instruction and education taking place in the Waldorf School are to be built up on the basis of healthy human development.

As you know, people today often say that a child’s individuality should be developed in school, that children should not be force-fed, that we should draw out what is present in each child. This is a very nice principle. There are many, many equally nice principles in the pedagogical literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In an abstract respect, this pedagogical literature, which is supposed to teach teachers how to teach, is not bad at all. An extraordinary number of good things have been said about education by all kinds of humanitarian people, but we cannot say that these good intentions correspond in all instances to the actual practice of education, as we may call it. And that is what it all depends on for us in the Waldorf School—on building up a real, true practice of education. And I actually do believe that it will be possible to arrive at a true practice of education through cultivating the spiritual life that takes place in our circles in particular, for this is especially intended to enable us to understand the human being better than any other way of cultivating the spiritual life could do. And this applies not only to the adult human being, but also to the child, to the human being in the becoming.

People often believe that they understand growing human beings in the right way. And at least as a general rule—and in fact this is much more often the case than those who are not closely involved with children believe—there is indeed a human relationship in which a very good understanding of the developing human being is present, and that is the relationship of a father or mother to the child. The relationship of a father and mother to their child is a natural one. It is one in which they grow into living with the child, and they have a certain feeling for the right thing to do. Of course they may also do the wrong thing at times, but that is because of more or less unnatural circumstances, because of an unnatural development in their proper fatherly or motherly feeling.

However, when the child grows up and enters the time when the change of teeth begins, then what home can be for the child is no longer enough. If this were not the case, then we would not need to have schools. But at this point the child must go to school, and then the important thing is for the child to receive an education that can guide him or her as a developing individual toward life, consciously and out of an understanding of the nature of the child. In order for this to take place, however, a real understanding of the human being must be alive in the child’s teacher. And a real understanding of the human being actually requires the teacher to be active in the noblest of the sciences, the science of the soul. Because the human being is fashioned out of the entire world, a real knowledge of the human being requires us to look into the whole world with a free and penetrating gaze. Someone who is not sufficiently warmly interested in knowing about the world to focus on it will also not be capable of insight into the human heart and mind, and especially not into the aspect of this that is meant to make a child develop into a complete human being. Anyone who is incapable of feeling everything that exists in the world as the physical element, everything that pervades and governs the world as the soul element, and everything that is contained in it as the spiritual element, will not be able to understand the nature of the child, because there is still present in the child something of the mysterious working of what is brought along when a human being descends from quite different worlds, from spiritual worlds, to the parents from whom he or she takes on a body.

When we observe a child in the first years of life, from week to week and from month to month, it is really the most wonderful thing in the world’s becoming. The world’s most wonderful secrets are revealed when we observe how something that is at first indefinite grows out spiritually through the child’s physical being, how indeterminate features that still bear traces of the merely natural are shaped by the inner element of spirit and soul, how the soul gradually works its way out through the eyes that gaze into life with ever-increasing understanding. It is wonderful to see how children become one with their surroundings, how they recreate almost everything they see there in all that they do in their still clumsy fashion, and how they finally grow together with their surroundings in learning to speak. The first seven years of their life are totally dedicated to growing together with their surroundings in this way. When the children are admitted to school, around the time when they are approaching the change of teeth, then everything we undertake with them must be based on this knowledge of the human being.

However, there is also something else on which it must be based. We may believe that we understand the nature of the growing human being. However, what induces a child to read, write, and do arithmetic must be drawn from the very nature of the growing person, and here we soon notice what a complicated thing it is to truly understand the human being. In our teacher-training courses we may have learned methodically and well how to teach reading and writing and so forth. Then we can make an effort to apply what we learned there, and in practical terms we can even do very well up to a certain point, and yet we achieve nothing in our teaching unless a certain relationship exists between teacher and child, a relationship of real mutual love. That is what we really try to cultivate in our Waldorf School as something that is pedagogically and methodologically just as necessary as mere outer skill. We want an atmosphere of love to be alive in every class, and for instruction to take place on the basis of this atmosphere of love.

But this love cannot be mandated. It is not accomplished by giving sermons on this type of love in teacher-training institutes. Love cannot be taught just like that. But as teachers, we actually need more love than we need for the other aspects of our lives. You see, the amount of love people usually have for their children, no matter how many they may have, is small compared to what a teacher needs. No one has as many children of their own as a teacher usually has to teach in a class. As adults we develop the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man, and this is also something that is meant to be kept within a narrow circle, because it is not good if love of this sort is divided up among too many personalities. So the love that flows from an individual out into life is always meant to be distributed among relatively few people. Of course we are supposed to love all human beings, but that is kept within certain limits. To include the millions is only possible to a certain extent.

However, it is absolutely necessary for a teacher to have the same degree of love, although possibly in a somewhat different way, for the children in his or her class that parents have for their children or a man for the woman he loves or a woman for the man she loves. It must be the same love and just as intense. It is transferred more to a soul and spiritual level, but it must be present. We are not born with this love; we must acquire it from elsewhere, from a science, from knowledge. This science, however, is not as dry and abstract as today’s natural sciences or scientific activity in general, whose dryness and solemnity have rubbed off on education. We can have love of this sort only as a result of a science that truly deals with the spirit and reveals the spirit, for where a science provides spirit, it also provides love. Thus the cultivation of the spiritual life, the spiritual science, that has led to founding the Waldorf School provides the teachers with this real love. We need this love; everything must be based on it. Even the school’s most matter-of-course methods must be based on it. Above all else, the spirit of understanding the world and the spirit of love must be present in instruction as it is practiced in the Waldorf School, in the education that we want to provide. And this cannot be accomplished with cliches and generalities. It can be accomplished only if we know how to apply in detail and over and over again what we know about the development of the child from month to month and from year to year.

In ordinary education, people nowadays immediately begin to present the child with something that paralyzes the individual’s entire healthy development. Let us look back on the development of humanity for a moment. There have been times—and we cannot be so arrogant as to imagine that people in those times were stupid and childish—when people did not yet learn to read and write in the modern sense. At most, they learned a primitive form of arithmetic. Today we learn to read and write, but we do not learn reading and writing as they first developed out of nonreading and nonwriting; we learn something that has become very rational and conventionalized. When we do not hesitate to teach children the reading and writing that are now customary in our dealings with each other, we are basically using very artificial means to introduce them to something that is foreign to them. When children come to us in the first grade, we must be careful not to forcefeed them with what adults are supposed to be able to do. And now I am going to speak of something that our dear friend Herr Molt already pointed to—that in the Waldorf School children learn to read and write somewhat later than in other schools. There are good reasons for this. In many respects, it is a mistake to learn to read and write as early as this happens in other schools. The point is not to make the children acquire certain capabilities as quickly as possible, but rather to teach them to be good and capable people later on in life, people who do not make life difficult for themselves. Outer circumstances can make life difficult enough for many people as it is; we do not need an inner feeling of weakness or inability messing up our lives. We must find a method of teaching reading and writing very carefully and on the basis of the children’s natural tendencies and skills.

Let me just mention that we start by first letting the children draw certain forms from which the forms contained in the letters of the alphabet are developed. We let the children get into reading by starting with writing, because the more we start from something that has its basis in the entire human being, the better it is for the children’s development. In reading and writing as we adults use them to interact with each other or to learn about things belonging to spiritual or other aspects of life, the signs for letters, the signs constituting our words, have become something very conventionalized. Ancient peoples still used a pictorial script that contained something concrete. There was still a connection between what was used to express something in writing and what was being expressed. In our letters, however, it is no longer possible to recognize anything of what is being expressed. Thus if we simply teach children these letters as the end result of a long process of development, we are forcing them into something that is foreign to them. Instead, we must lead the children in a sensible way from things they enjoy drawing, from something that comes from their whole being, to the shapes of the letters. Only afterwards can we develop reading on the basis of this.

I have tried to use this example to show you the thrust of our art of education—to really read in growing human beings what we are meant to do with them. Those who understand human nature are well aware of how things are connected in life. We often do not observe much of what is most important in life. We often find people—and today they are much more numerous than we believe—who take no real pleasure in anything, who tire very easily, and who grow old before their time—at least inwardly with regard to their souls—and so on. We are not clear as to the origin of this. It comes from the fact that as children in the sixth, seventh and eighth years of life, they were not taught writing and reading in the right way. Those who understand human nature know that children who learned to read in the right way, who were not force-fed at age six or seven but learned to read and write naturally, may master reading and writing a bit later, but they will take along what they gained from learning to read and write as a real gift that they will have for the rest of their lives.

If we drum it into them in all kinds of artificial ways that disregard their natural tendencies and developmental possibilities, we can get children to read and write at seven-and-a-half, but in many respects we will have crippled these children’s souls for life. In contrast, if we have gone about it in the right way, the children only learn to read and write at age eight, but life forces develop in them as they are learning. That is what we want. While the children are in school, we want them to acquire life forces, forces with effects that will last for their entire lives.

As inhabitants of Central Europe, you do not need to be told that we find ourselves in a terrible situation today. The misery and suffering are truly not becoming any less, but are increasing almost from day to day. And it can be said that much of this stems simply from the fact that people can no longer find their way into life in the right way; they can no longer adapt to life. To be sure, the most important time with regard to people finding their way into life is not their school years, but a much later time, the time when they are in their twenties, between the ages of twenty and thirty. This is the time that earlier ages (which we cannot and do not want to wish back) called the transition from apprenticeship to mastery. There is sometimes something extremely sensible in the designation of such transitions.

This is the time in which people actually fully grow up. They must then find a way to become skillful in life. Then something happens that I would like to compare to the following image taken from nature. Let me remind you of a certain river that flows through Carinthia and Krain. As it flows from its source, it is known as the Poik. Then it disappears into a hole and is no longer visible. After a time it comes to the surface again. It is the same river; it has simply flowed underground for a while, but now as it continues above ground, it is called the Unz. Then it again disappears and flows underground. When it surfaces again, it is known as the Laibach. It surfaces again and again; it is the same water, but sometimes it flows underground.

It is also like this in a human life. There is something present in human life in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh years of life, and also during the school years, in the form of children’s urge to play. Everything that belongs to children’s play is especially active at this age. Then, like the river, it sinks below the surface of human life. Later, when sexual maturity arrives and other things happen, we see that this urge to play is no longer active in the same way. But when people enter their twenties, the same thing that was present in play surfaces again. However, it no longer functions as the urge to play; it is now something different. It has now become the way in which the individual can find his or her way into life. And in fact, if children are allowed to play in the right way according to their particular potentials, when they are introduced to the right games, then they will be able to adapt to life in the right way. But if we miss out on something about the nature of the child in the games we introduce, the children will also lack skill in finding their place in life. This is how these things are related: The urge to play, the particular way in which a child plays, disappears and sinks below the surface of life. Then it resurfaces, but as something different, as the skill to adapt to life. There is an inner coherence in life throughout all its stages. We need to know this in order to teach children in the right way.

For example, there is a very important point in time in the life of a child that may sometimes come a bit earlier, sometimes a bit later, but always falls approximately between the ninth and tenth years of life. At this point in a person’ life, a lot depends on having the right feeling of admiration and respect for one’s teacher. Of course, this feeling should also be present at other times, but at this moment in life something essential is being decided for the child. It is really of extraordinarily great significance. That is why the art of education is so difficult to achieve—it rests on a thorough understanding of the human being. Many things that show up at later stages of life and cause a great deal of unhappiness, preventing people from finding their place in life and making them incapable of working, even causing them to develop tendencies toward physical illnesses, all stem from the fact that as children they were not dealt with in the right way between their ninth and tenth years of life. We do not believe this today, but it really is so. Until the ninth or tenth year of life, we must try to keep the children occupied with instructional material that does not force them to think about themselves too much. Instead, they should be thinking about things that are out there in life. Then, between the ninth and tenth years of life, we must begin to present them with concepts and images of plants and animals that help them make a transition from thinking about the world to thinking about themselves. All of our teaching must be designed to introduce things at the right moment, when the inner nature of the child requires it, so to speak.

What I am indicating to you in just a few words is actually a highly developed study of the human being on the basis of spiritual science. This is what makes it possible to develop a real art of education. This art of education, based on a truly spiritual scientific understanding of the human being, is meant to govern the entire Waldorf School; it is meant to be the spirit that prevails there. And in fact, we believe that much of what is so painful in our day and age is crying out for the next generation to be made good and capable through an education of this sort. We also believe that if parents understand why they are entrusting their children to a school that is set up on the basis of a real and thorough understanding of the human being, they also really understand what our present times demand. What we need in this school comes about through a relationship of this sort between the parents and the school. This is a part of how we work. If the children who come to school in the morning are sent off by parents who understand the school and therefore have the right kind of love for it, then the children will also be able to have the right experience of what is meant to come to meet them, more than anything else, when they open the door to the school and meet their teachers with the love that is the only source of truly appropriate instruction and education.

When what we introduce is presented at the right moment and lies within the children’s abilities and potentials, it becomes a source of revitalization for the children for their entire lives. And when the parents of our children realize that we are actually working to produce people who will be both fit for and able to question a life that will become ever more difficult in decades to come, these parents will relate to the school in the right way. Our work must rest on the understanding of the parents. We cannot work in the same way as other schools that are protected by the state and by authorities of all sorts. We can only work only if we are met by an understanding community of parents. We are aware of what we are being given in the children in this school, whom we are trying to educate out of a true understanding of the human being and of what subjects can be employed at any given time. This is the awareness out of which our teachers can teach best. If, out of this awareness, we always try to give these children the best that can be given to them, then we need to have this school surrounded by a wall of parental understanding like the walls of a fortress. We love our children here; we teach on a basis of understanding the human being and of loving children, while around us a different love grows up, the parents’ love for the being of our school. Given the lack of understanding and questionable moral development that we face today, it is only within this community that we are really able to work toward a future in which human beings will thrive.

The work that is to be done in this direction may be limited to a small community, but much can come out of this small community if it always meets the school with the right understanding.

Our teachers need an awareness of this sort because they lack all the compulsory disciplinary measures that teachers in other schools have to back them up, as it were. But nothing reasonable will ever happen in human life as a result of coercion. In order to be able to work in freedom, we need the parents to understand how we try to do this. And the fact that a very considerable number of people have been found who are sending their children to the Waldorf School demonstrates that at least a start has been made toward this understanding. We would like it to spread more and more, of course; we would like more and more people to realize that something good can come about only through a real, true art of education. But especially on evenings like tonight, we must be glad that we can come together in the spirit of wanting to bring about a better future for humanity by working together with those who are trying to raise and educate the generations to come in the sense of real knowledge of and love for the human being.

Of course it is not possible, even with the best of will, to fully achieve the ideal that hovers before us on our first attempt; something, however, has been achieved. To begin with, too, what we are doing will not meet with a full and thorough understanding. It is possible that many things will be misunderstood. Under certain circumstances, it will be possible for people to say, “Well, in this school some children are not being hit often enough. There are surely some children who need to be hit, either literally or figuratively.” Such things are sometimes said, but not out of a thorough understanding of, or love for, the human being. There are methods that may work more slowly, but are more certain to develop the good in a person than any unnatural compulsory disciplinary measures. An understanding of some of these things can be achieved only gradually.

You know, I was recently told about one boy who came to the school only a short time ago, but has put in a lot of thought and also really learned something fundamental here with us. He said, “I don't know; I used to be in another school where we learned arithmetic and mathematics and geometry and all kinds of things; and now I'm supposed to become a good, capable person, but in this school I'm not learning any math at all. What am I going to amount to if I don't learn any math?” Where did this boy get the idea that he was not going to learn any math? You see, we try to accomplish under natural circumstances what other schools attempt to achieve by scheduling, by herding the children from one subject to another so that they never have time to concentrate on anything. So that the children can really work their way into a subject, we teach the same subject for weeks at a time during the main lesson of the day, for two hours each morning. We do not jump from one lesson to the next or from one subject to the next; we only change subjects after a while. Now this boy arrived at a time when mathematics was not being taught, so he thought that he was not going to learn any math at all. Later, of course, he noticed that he was then concentrating on math rather than being driven on to something different in each lesson; he was learning math more thoroughly. It is easy for misunderstandings of this sort to arise, even if they are not all as obvious as in this case. In the Waldorf School, many things look different from what we were used to earlier, so we should not be too quick to judge.

The things we foster really are drawn from what I have called “understanding the human being.” This is characteristic of our school. It is also the reason why, as far as we can tell, the children are extraordinarily happy to come to school. I come to the school from time to time and take part in the lessons. We are striving to work out of the nature of the child in such a way that the children feel that they want to know the things we intend them to know, to be able to do the things we intend them to be able to do, rather than having the feeling that things are being forced upon them. This has to be developed in a way specific to each subject, since each one is different.

Next, all instruction must be pervaded by a specific educational principle that can be attained only if the teachers themselves are fully involved in spiritual activity. It is not possible for them to do this if they are not aware of their responsibility to the spiritual life. However, ladies and gentlemen, it is only possible to take up this great responsibility toward the spiritual life if it is not being replaced for us by a merely external feeling of responsibility. If we proceed simply according to what is prescribed for a single school year, we feel relieved of the need to research week by week both what we are to take up in school with regard to the individual subject, and how we are to present it. It should be characteristic of our teachers that they draw again and again from the living spiritual source. In doing so, they must feel responsible to the spiritual life and know that the spiritual life is free and independent. The school must be self-administrating; teachers cannot be civil servants. They must be fully their own masters, because they know a higher master than any outer circumstance, the spiritual life itself, to whom they stand in a direct connection that is not mediated by school officials, principals, inspectors, school boards, and so forth. The activity of teaching, if it is really independent, requires this direct connection to the sources of spiritual life.² Only teachers who possess this direct connection are then able to convey the spiritual source to the children in their classes. This is what we want to do; this is what we are striving to accomplish more and more. In the time since we began our work, we have carefully reviewed from month to month how our principles are working with the children. In the years to come, some things will be carried out in line with different or more complete points of view than in previous years. This is how we would like to govern this school—out of an activity that is direct and unmediated, as indeed it must be if it flows from spiritual depths.

You absolutely do not need to be afraid that we are trying to make this school into one that represents a particular philosophy, or that we intend to drum any anthroposophical or other dogmas into the children. That is not what we have in mind. Anyone who says that we are trying to teach the children specifically anthroposophical convictions is not telling the truth. Rather, we are trying to develop an art of education on the basis of what anthroposophy means to us. The “how” of educating is what we are trying to gain from our spiritual understanding. We are not trying to drum our opinions into the children, but we believe that spiritual science differs from any other science in filling the entire person, in making people skillful in all areas, but especially in their dealings with other human beings. This “how” is what we are trying to look at, not the “what.” The “what” is a result of social necessities; we must apply our full interest to deriving it from a reading of what people should know and be able to do if they are to take their place in our times as good, capable individuals. The “how,” on the other hand, how to teach the children something, can only result from a thorough, profound and loving understanding of the human being. This is what is meant to work and to prevail in our Waldorf School.

This is what I wanted to tell you, my dear friends—to point out how on the one hand we need our children’s parents to be really sincere friends of our school. The more we are able to know that this is the case, the better and more forcefully we will be able to accomplish our intentions for the school. We need to have an ongoing activity of love for teaching, of love for dealing with children, among our faculty and among all those who are connected to our teaching. This will be accomplished if a real spiritual life, a spiritual life that has honest and upright intentions with regard to humanity’s spiritual, economic and political upswing and progress, stands behind our faculty and all those having to do with our school. It will be accomplished if the attitude toward teaching and the skill in teaching that are to be at work in our school are surrounded by a wall of parents who approach us with understanding and are devoted to our school in sincere friendship. If we have these friends, then the work of our school will succeed, and we can be convinced, ladies and gentlemen, that by doing what is good for our school and our children we will also be doing what is good for all of humanity as it is meant to evolve in the future. To work in the right way for education, for schooling, also means to work seriously and truly for human progress.

From the discussion

Herr Molt thanked Dr. Steiner for his lecture and encouraged the parents to ask questions and make their wishes known.

People complained that the children in the second grade could not yet read as well as those in the public school, and that because the subjects were being taught in blocks, the children always lost their connection to what had been done before.

Dr. Steiner replied:

With regard to reading and writing at the right time, I would still like to say the following: In line with what we are accustomed to today, it is certainly somewhat depressing to see a child going into the second grade who still cannot correctly rattle off what is there on the paper in the form of little ghosts. However, experience contradicts this and teaches us to know better. You see, we do not necessarily have to assess life only in terms of very short spans of time. I have met people who at the age of eighteen or nineteen were able to put their reading and writing to extremely good and skillful use, for instance because of being obliged to take up a career at an early age, as life sometimes demands of us. I have met people who found their place in a profession at an early age with considerable skill, and I have known others who did this with less skill. Now, do some research and find out whether, among these people whom life forced to embark on a career at age eighteen or nineteen, the ones who did so with skill are the ones who learned early, much too early, to rattle off what the little ghosts on the paper said, or whether it was the ones who learned to do this somewhat later. At issue here is whether things were learned in the right way for real life. This is what our method adheres to very carefully. I would like to make you aware that we often do not observe these things in their appropriate context in life. I have met people who had a very, very good style of writing, who wrote good letters. It was possible to research the circumstances to which they owed this. And I must confess quite openly that I discovered that in most cases they were people who had still made the most awful mistakes at age eight or nine. They only learned to shed these mistakes at age ten or eleven, but that is how they came by their special skill. These things are complicated, and we have to consider how our methods of instruction proceed from a comprehensive understanding of the human being. Then we will get used to the fact that many things become accessible to the children at different times from what we are used to. If it had always been the case that there had been strict rules about these things—"It is harmful for children to learn to read before the age of eight”—then no one today would be surprised when they still cannot read, but now we think this is a bad thing. There is something in this that you just said yourselves: The Waldorf School is supposed to lead to the right thing, not to make compromises with what is false.

As to what was said about it being difficult for the children to get back into a subject when they have been away from it for a while, what is important here is that we not judge the success of the school by what happens in the very next block of time. For the life of the mind, we need something similar to what happens in our physical life: We cannot be awake all the time; we must also sleep. When we do not sleep, we also cannot be properly awake in the long run. When the children have been taught for a couple of years according to this method, in which things do not always proceed at a constant pace but are removed from the children’s view now and then, you will be able to convince yourselves how thoroughly they have taken possession of these things. After a couple of years you will probably come to a different conclusion than you do now on the basis of first impressions. Of course we are exposed to misunderstandings on some counts. However, perhaps what now puts people off will prove its worth over the years. We must wait and see.

Two additional questions addressed the points of whether Waldorf school students would be able to take the Abitur,³ and of whether it would not be possible to assign homework.

Dr. Steiner responded:

It is certainly a matter of principle with us that the children should not be deprived of any possibility to take their place in life as we know it at present. There are certain things we have to do as a consequence of our pedagogical and methodological viewpoints, but these must be compatible with guiding the children into life in ways that do not cause them any outer difficulties. I formulated this principle myself, and it is being implemented as best we possibly can, especially in the most important points. With this in mind, I also drew up a document, an educational contract of a sort, that takes these two things into account.⁴ We teach without regard for the interim educational goals that are set for the individual grades in other schools until our children are nine years old and have completed the third grade. After all, in order to do justice to what follows from a real recognition of the children’s needs and to meet the demands of a real philosophy of education, we need a certain amount of leeway, don't we? After this amount of time, we can then take into account what is required of us by law for all kinds of underlying reasons. So, by age nine we want the children to have come far enough that they would be able to transfer to any other school. After that, we again allow ourselves some leeway until they are twelve, so that we can again practice an appropriate education during this time. At age twelve, any child is again able to transfer to another school. The same thing will apply at age fifteen and again at the Abitur: If we are lucky enough to be able to continue adding grades to the school and to take the children all the way to the Abitur; then they will be far enough along to take the exam at the usual age. Of course it is always possible that there will be an examiner somewhere who insists that the young people from the Waldorf School cannot do a thing. It is always possible for the examiners to flunk someone if they so choose, or to give the slow ones a good grade and flunk the smart ones. We cannot guarantee that this will not happen. As a general rule, however, where we can do better than what is done outside, we must do better, in spite of the fact that we must avoid putting obstacles in the children’s way when it comes to meeting the outer demands of life. To be sure, this is at best a second choice. It would be better if we could also establish colleges, but that cannot be, so we must be content with the second choice in this instance.

We should never fail to consider what it means for a real art of education when children are given assignments that we cannot make them complete. It is much, much better to refrain from giving compulsory homework, so that we can count on having the children do what they do with real pleasure and conviction, rather than constantly giving assignments which some children will not complete anyway. It is the worst thing in education to constantly give assignments that are not carried out. It demoralizes the children in a terrible way. We must be especially careful to comply with these more subtle educational principles. The children who want to work have plenty to do, but there should be no attempt at coercion on the part of the school. Instead, if we absolutely want the children to work at home, we should make the effort to encourage them to do so voluntarily. There will always be enough for them to do. But we should not let the tendency arise to work counter to the principles of a really appropriate art of education by moving toward coercion.

• 1. The wording of this speech and of the discussion that follows was revised by Rudolf Steiner himself for publication in the Mitteilungsblatt für die MitZlieder des Vereins Freie Waldorfschule [Newsletter for Members of the Independent Waldorf School Association], March 1922, Vol. 2.
• 2. On truly independent educational activity and the threefolding of the social organism, see Rudolf Steiner’s Towards Social Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol, England, 1992, [Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendjgkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft (1920)], GA 23, 1976, and The Renewal of the Social Organism, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1985, in GA 24, Aufsätze iiber die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage 1915-1921, 1961.
• 3. The German school-leaving examination that qualifies a student for university entrance.
• 4. When the Waldorf School was founded, Rudolf Steiner had submitted a memorandum to the authorities in which the agreement was recorded that at the conclusion of the third, sixth and eighth grades its students were to be at the same level of learning as their counterparts in the public schools. Within these time-periods, however, the School was guaranteed complete freedom of instruction.

The main intention of these lectures is to build a bridge from spiritual-scientific knowledge to the kind of conception of life which our time demands, and I intend also giving a few indications on this theme in the coming days.

What we call modern life takes living hold of all those people who, through living in towns or in similar circumstances, have been torn away from a direct connection with nature. And we know that since the advent of modern life people have always thought about its significance both for the intellectual as well as the material progress of human civilisation. And now it is time that the impulses we are acquiring from spiritual science should enter into modern life. Gradually we shall have won through to the feeling that with respect to many a thing that meets us in life today we need spiritual science as a kind of compensation for those things in modern life that weaken, we might actually say destroy, something of the general divine-spiritual life forces of man.

People who are able, by means of the first stages of the life of initiation, really to let modern civilisation affect them in all its aspects, will have experiences that give them deeper insight into the significance which modern life has for man's whole existence, than that obtained from an external view of life unsupported by spirituality. People who have taken the first steps in the life of initiation will pass differently through the experience of spending a night in a train or on a steamer, especially if they sleep on the journey. What is different for the person who is in these first stages of initiation and the one who has not had any connection with it is that the experiences become conscious for the former, and he finds out what is actually happening to him when he spends a night travelling on a train or a ship, especially if he goes to sleep. Of course the person who does not acquire initiation knowledge of things also undergoes the effects that an experience of that sort has on the whole human organism. With regard to the whole effect on the human being there is, of course, no difference.

If we want to understand what these indications actually mean we must recall to memory a spiritual scientific truth which you no doubt know, namely, that whilst we are asleep our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric body. In fact, because of certain limitations which cosmic laws impose on us in the natural order of things, our ego and astral body are very close to our physical body and etheric body in a case like this, so that if we are asleep on a train journey our ego and astral body are right inside all the rattling, rumbling and braking going on in the wheels and the engine of the train. And it is just the same on a modern steamer. We are inside everything going on around us. We are inside these not exactly musical experiences in our surroundings, and you need only have taken the very first steps in initiation to notice on waking up that when the ego returns with the astral body into the physical body and etheric body they bring with them what they experienced while they were being squeezed through the machinery, for they really were inside the moving machinery right up to the moment of waking.

We bring all this disharmonious squeezing and tearing back into our physical and etheric body, and if you have ever woken up with all the after-effects of what the engines of a steamer or a train have done to your ego and astral body, and bring that into your waking consciousness, you will notice how little it synchronises with what is going on within you in the way of a kind of experience the ego and the astral body have of the inner harmony of the physical and etheric body. You do in fact bring back with you the wildest confusion, the most frightful din of pulling, screeching and rattling and if you are sensitive to it you will feel that the effect on the etheric body really is as though your physical body were being bruised and dismembered—which is, of course, a clumsy expression, but you will not misunderstand. This is an absolutely unavoidable side-effect of modern life, and I want to give a word of warning right at the outset, as the kind of lecture I want to give today can very easily rouse what I would call theosophists' hidden arrogance, which flourishes very well here and there.

I am not making a general allusion, of course, let alone a particular allusion, for when one holds a talk on a matter like this, one immediately provokes judgments. I think that in the case of this theosophists' arrogance, it can easily happen that people imagine they must take great care not to expose themselves to these destructive forces; that they must protect themselves from all the influences of modern life; that they must closet themselves in a room containing the right surroundings, with walls of the colour indicated by theosophy, to make sure that modern life cannot reach them in any way that would be harmful to their bodily organisation.

I really do not want my lectures to have this effect. Everything of the nature of withdrawing and protecting oneself from the influences of all that we necessarily have to encounter as world karma arises out of weakness. But anthroposophy can only strengthen the human soul (Gemüt), and should develop those forces that inwardly strengthen and arm us against these influences. Therefore, never within the compass of our spiritual movement could any kind of recommendation be given to cut oneself off from modern life, or to turn spiritual life into a kind of hothouse culture. This could never apply in the realm of true spiritual culture. Although it is understandable that weaker natures prefer to withdraw from modern life and go into one or another kind of settlement where they are out of reach of it, the fact remains that this arises not from strength but from weakness of soul. Our task, however, consists in strengthening our soul life by permeating ourselves with the impulses of spiritual science and spiritual research so that we are armed against the onslaughts of modern life, and so that our souls can stand any amount of hammering and knocking and are still capable of finding their way into the divine-spiritual realms right through the hammering and knocking of the ahrimanic spirits.

One thing must be taken into account, however, which I have often referred to. We human beings do not only sleep at night. We actually sleep in the daytime as well, only we do not notice our daytime sleep as much as our nighttime sleep. During the night our thought life is dimmed down, and because our soul lives predominantly in our thoughts we are, as a matter of course, more aware of the dimming down of our thought life during nighttime sleep. During the day our life of will is more at rest, yet we are less aware of this because we live less in our will. All the arguing the philosophers have done about the freedom and lack of freedom of the will is due to this. As they have not taken into account that they are investigating the will whilst they are daytime sleepers and therefore cannot arrive at its true nature, they talk a lot of nonsense about free will and unfree will, indeterminism and determinism. In actual fact, whilst we are open to the waking life of day, we are only conscious of our will life to a very small degree; it dips down into the subconscious, into the region that belongs purely to the astral body.

Thus during our waking day, too, we are involved in all that modern life has produced around us in the way of the stress and noise of modern technology. During the night it is more our life of thought and feeling that becomes submerged in the noise and stress, during the day it is more our life of feeling and will.

Now in the course of human evolution what we call modern life has not always existed. It came on the scene essentially at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.⁴ The beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch actually coincides with the beginning of the modern age. What does modern intellectual culture say about the beginning of the modern age? As we know, modern intellectual culture is proud of the achievements of modern life. It is expressed somewhat like this: Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages people were incapable of developing a real observation of nature such as could have led to natural science. This did not happen until modern times. And when people talk of modern times like this they are speaking of the time which began with the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. That was when people broke away from the old way of observing nature and observed it impartially, solely according to abstract laws. And it was through this knowledge of the laws of nature that natural science came into the position of opening up the possibility of mastering the forces of nature, and mastering them in an unprecedented way, as we so often hear. Yet this is just what modern technology is. And the characteristic nature of modern technology arose as a result of man acquiring knowledge of natural laws and then proceeding to use the material world to fashion his machines according to these natural laws, machines with which he can then work back on nature and life by filling modern life with them and creating his own technological setting; that is, modern life in its essence and function. Thus we see that it is the modern age that has established real natural science and the resultant mastery over nature and its forces.

You often hear people speaking like this. However if we speak like this we are speaking Ahriman's language for this is using the language of Ahriman. But let us see if we can translate this language of Ahriman into the real and true language that we are trying to acquire again by means of spiritual science, a language where words not only acquire the meaning ascribed to them through observation of external nature, but also acquire the meaning ascribed to them when we look at the cosmos in its entirety, that is, both as nature and as spiritual life.

Let us start by looking quite superficially at what happens when we develop modern technology. What is happening in the first place is just work being carried out in two stages. The first stage consists of destroying the interrelationships of nature. We blast out quarries and take the stone away, maltreat the forests and take the wood away, and the list could go on—in short, we get our raw materials in the first instance by smashing and wearing down the interrelationships in nature. And the second stage consists of taking what we have extracted from nature and putting it together again as a machine according to the laws we know as natural laws. These are the two stages, if we look at the matter on the surface.

But what is it like if we look below the surface? Looking at it from inside, the matter is like this: When we take things from nature, mineral nature to begin with, we know from previous lectures that this is linked with a certain feeling of well-being belonging to the elemental spiritual beings that are within it. This, however, does not concern us so much now. What is important here is that we cast out of nature the elemental spirits belonging to the sphere of the regular progressive hierarchies who, in fact, are the very spirits who maintain nature. In all natural existence there are elemental spiritual beings. When we plunder nature we squeeze out the nature spirits into the sphere of the spirit. That is, in fact, what is constantly happening during the first stage. We smash and plunder material nature and thus release the nature spirits, driving them forth from the sphere allotted them by the Jehovah gods into a realm where they can fly about freely and are no longer bound to their allotted dwelling places. Thus we can call the first stage the casting out of the nature spirits. The second stage is the one where we put together what we have plundered from nature, according to our knowledge of natural laws. Now when we construct a machine or a complex of machines out of raw material according to our knowledge of natural laws, we put certain spiritual beings into the things we construct.

The structure we make is by no means without its spiritual beings. In constructing it we make a habitation for other spiritual beings, but these spiritual beings that we conjure into our machines are beings belonging to the ahrimanic hierarchy. Thus at the first stage we encounter nature spirits who are in progressive evolution and cast them out and at the second stage we unite these ahrimanic spirits with our mechanisms or other products of technology. This means that by living in this technological milieu of modern times we create an ahrimanic setting for everything that goes on in us in a sleeping state, by night or day. So it is no wonder that a person at the first stages of initiation, bringing back with him into his waking life all that he has experienced outside in the way of noise and confusion, feels its destructive character when he comes back into his physical and etheric body with this in his ego and his astral body. For he is bringing back into his own organism the results, as it were, of his having been in the company of the ahrimanic elemental spirits. Thus we could say that at the third stage, at the cultural level, we have technology around us, stuffed full of ahrimanic spirits which we have put there. This is what things look like from inside.

Now if we turn our attention away from the occult side of modern life and look back at those times when people slept with only a thin partition dividing them from nature, a partition through which spirit could easily pass, and when their daytime work was within the realm of nature that still harboured regular spirits of the Jehovah hierarchy, we have to admit that in those times people's souls, their egos and astral bodies, brought back into their physical and etheric bodies the kind of nature spirits that had an enlivening effect on their inner life of soul. And the further we go back in the history of mankind's evolution the more we find what is becoming a greater and greater rarity today, namely that people did not fill themselves with the ahrimanic spirits of technology, but with nature spirits that were progressing on a straight path and which the good spirits of the hierarchies, if we may use the expression, have linked to the events and being of nature.

Now man will only attain the kind of connection he needs in order to be truly human if he seeks it in his inner life, if he delves so far down into the depths of his soul that he reaches the forces that connect him with the spirit of the cosmos, out of which he was born and in which he is embedded, but from which he can be separated. A separation has already taken place in his sense perception and intellect, and now again through his being filled with ahrimanic beings in the course of modern life, as we have seen. Only by penetrating into the depths of his own being will man find the connection with divine spiritual beings that he needs for his salvation, the spiritual hierarchies that are progressing on a straight path. This connection with the spiritual hierarchies for which we were actually born, in the spirit, this living connection with them, is made difficult to the highest degree by the saturation of the world by modern technology. Man is being, as it were, torn away from his spiritual-cosmic connections, and the forces which he should be developing within him to maintain his link with the spiritual-soul being of the cosmos are being weakened.

A person who has already taken the first steps in initiation will therefore notice how the mechanical things of modern life penetrate into man's spiritual-soul nature to such an extent that a great deal of it is smothered and destroyed. He will also notice that the destruction of these forces makes it particularly difficult for him really to develop those inner forces which unite the human being with the ‘rightful’ spiritual beings of the hierarchies—please do not misunderstand the word. When a person who has taken the first steps in initiation tries to meditate in a modern railway carriage or on a modern steamer, he makes a great effort, of course, to activate the necessary forces of vision to lift him into the spiritual world, yet he notices the ahrimanic world filling him with the kind of thing that opposes this devotion to the spiritual world, and the struggle is enormous. You could call it an inner struggle experienced in the etheric body, a struggle that wears you out and crushes you. Other people who have not taken the first steps in initiation also go through this struggle of course, and the only difference is that the student of initiation experiences it consciously. Everyone has to go through it; the effects of this are experienced by everyone.

It would be the worst possible mistake to say that we should resist what technology has brought into modern life, that we should protect ourselves from Ahriman by cutting ourselves off from modern life. In a certain sense this would be spiritual cowardice. The real remedy for this is not to let the forces of the modern soul weaken and cut themselves off from modern life, but to make the forces of the soul strong so that they can stand up to modern life. A courageous approach to modern life is necessitated by world karma, and that is why true spiritual science possesses the characteristic of requiring an effort of the soul, a really hard effort.

You so often hear people saying “These books of modern spiritual science are difficult; they make you exert yourself in order to develop your soul forces and really penetrate into spiritual science.” This is why ‘well-meaning’ people—and I am saying this in inverted commas—keep on coming to me and saying that they want to smooth out difficult passages for their fellow men and change what is written in rather a difficult style into something as trivial as can be—and these last words are not said in inverted commas. However, it belongs to the essence of spiritual science that it makes demands on soul activity, that you do not accept spiritual-scientific truths lightly, as it were, for it is not just a matter of taking in what spiritual science says about one thing and another, but of how you take it in. You should take it in by dint of effort and soul activity. To make spiritual science your own you must work at it in the sweat of your soul—please forgive me for not being very polite. That belongs to the business of spiritual science, if you will excuse the mundane expression.

It shows a further misunderstanding of the actual nerve of spiritual science if people shy away from the difficult ideas and conceptual structures of spiritual science. And don't we know how many people shy away from it, how many people would prefer to dream—the Lord gives it to His Own in sleep! They would far rather have things conjured up before them in all kinds of visions of the spiritual world than acquire knowledge through the activity of exerting their inner life of soul. We know how many people there are who prefer having visions rather than sitting down and studying a difficult book of spiritual science, even though it is capable of speaking to the human soul forces that are asleep during ordinary daily life, for spiritual science really does activate the part of man that is otherwise unconscious and transport him into the life of the spiritual world. The right approach is not to receive conscious daily life apathetically and to grope in the dark, but to make an effort out of soul activity to get through what is given for the development of thoughts and ideas. For when you make an effort and have the courage to make yourself at home in this development of thoughts and ideas, this brave and active effort will bring you to the stage where mere theorising on what is given and mere acceptance in thought passes over into seeing and really being in the spiritual world. However, the really modern conception of life that arises for us from these considerations is that, because of our technological surroundings, we descend into a kind of ahrimanic sphere and become filled with ahrimanic spirituality.

The most terrible calamity would have come about in earth evolution if, in earlier ages, provision had not been made for these experiences of ahrimanic spirituality that world karma is bringing to modern mankind. Life always progresses like the swing of a pendulum. It is experienced like a pendulum swinging in one direction or the other. You cannot say “Beware of Ahriman!” for nothing can protect you from him. And if someone longs to shut himself up in a room surrounded by the colour that suits him best, where he has no factories near him or trains passing by if he can possibly help it, but is completely cut off from modern life, there are many, many ways in which ahrimanic spirituality can get into his soul. Even though he withdraws from modern life, modern spirituality will still reach him.

Now something entered into human evolution that, as it were, held off the calamity, and I gave an indication of this a long time ago in a lecture cycle in Munich.³ We must take all these things together, for that is also part of the active experiencing of modern spiritual science. Man has been given art; art, which also takes its raw material from nature by reducing and wearing it down, and at the second stage puts it together again to make something new, with a breath of life in it, although it is only of a pictorial nature. The life of the artistic impulses given us in the past has the capacity, as I said in Munich, to imbue its material with a more luciferic spirituality. Luciferic spirituality, beauty as an illusion, in fact everything that has an effect on man through the medium of art, leads man away from matter into the spirit, yet it does so through the life in the material. Lucifer is the spirit who constantly wants to flee from matter and bear man into the life of the spirit in an unjustified way. That is the other swing of the pendulum. It is only because we have to go through a technological atmosphere in the present incarnation that it is possible for us to come into connection with Ahriman, whereas in earlier incarnations we were more connected with a quality that could be steeped in art. Thus we are countering certain luciferic forces by means of the present-day ahrimanic forces, which together form a balance, whilst the pendulum of life swung one way in the past and swings the other way now.

What spiritual science quite specifically has to want at the present time is that human beings do not sleep and dream through what world karma is imposing on them. Yet people who wish to know nothing about spiritual science do sleep and dream through all the influences of Ahriman and Lucifer. They are exposed to these influences even if they themselves know nothing about them. But ‘life cannot go on like this; life has to be lived consciously from now on, and that is what spiritual science is for, so that people do not go through the world sleeping and dreaming, but understand what is around them. For this to happen, however, we must really get down to the subtleties of our spiritual-scientific business—if you will forgive the word. Such subtleties often go unnoticed, and this is the sort of thing I find when I read through transcripts of lectures I have given. Often what is of essential importance to me does not appear at all in the transcript. Just look at two examples of this. I used a certain sentence a little while ago and did not say that spiritual science wants something, but that spiritual science should want it, or has to want it. That is a particular expression which comes quite naturally to a person who is speaking out of the spirit of spiritual science, for spiritual science leads as a matter of course to a more impersonal grasp of the truths of spiritual life than other sciences do. Speaking in the manner of other sciences we would say “Spiritual science wants something”. But spiritual science says “what it should want or must want” And I say “The way I must express myself” and not “The way express myself”.

A great deal depends on such subtleties; we must not pass them by. On the contrary we must begin to believe that everything depends on spiritual science taking hold of man's innermost soul forces, and that it is capable of transforming them. Therefore it will not do to approach spiritual science with the kind of thinking one is in the habit of using in ordinary life. People are still largely unaware of what I mean by this. This can be seen, actually sensed, so to speak, in certain crude symptoms in the evolution of ordinary science.

Let us take one example out of many. Modern science of religion—irreligious science of religion—is especially proud of the fact that it has found a connection between New Testament utterances and commandments and Old Testament and heathen utterances and commandments. People have followed up the origin of every phrase in the Lord's Prayer, for instance, and said “This particular phrase comes from here and that one from there”. If you hear it like this it can sound credible. Yet the moment you approach the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual world-historical light you notice that all these things appear in a new context, and that the important thing is not the discovering that all these expressions were there in earlier times but looking at them in the context which gives them a new shade of meaning. In this respect the Old and the New Testament differ entirely. Subtle things like this convey the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. The words and even the word connections often stay the same but their shade and colouring is different, and that makes all the difference.

There is something tremendous behind the fact, for instance, that the conception of the ego in the whole evolutionary system of language is quite differently constructed the further back we go in pre-Christian times, than it is later on when we go forwards from the Mystery of Golgotha. The way people spoke about the ‘I’ changed, and this can be seen in the configuration of language. When the ‘I’ becomes part of the word for the verb, as is the case in many languages, it signifies something entirely different from when it is separated from the verb and spoken as a separate word, and so on.

The important thing is to work our way with the help of spiritual science to an approach to life which looks consciously at the things which influence our human organism of spirit, soul and body. The way I have described man's relationship to his technological surroundings is, of course, only in its beginning stages. It was about four centuries ago that things began to get like they are today. Then the nineteenth century that was so proud of itself took a tremendous leap forward in the ahrimanisation of human life. Yet a great deal more will take place in future human evolution in the direction of this ahrimanisation. We have been in it for about four hundred years. It is coming slowly and gradually. It has already reached a certain climax among the vast numbers of our fellowmen who, because of the isolation caused by living in towns, hardly have any connection any more with real nature spirits. I once said, symbolically, that it is important for man's development to be able to distinguish oats from barley. Yet really, how many people are there in a town environment today who cannot tell the difference any more between oats and barley! Perhaps they can distinguish the plants, as that is comparatively easy in the case of oats and barley, but where the grains are concerned they can no longer tell the one from the other. If they have lived in a town or were actually born there, they usually cannot tell the difference.

Now it happens like this in the evolution of mankind, that when human beings have progressed a stage, this progress is always bound up with another experience that is at another stage, as it were, in a parallel stream. And this has happened. Whilst technological life has been drawing modern man closer to Ahriman in the way I have described, he has also been getting closer to him in another way. When a spiritual view of history replaces the crude way of viewing history introduced by materialism, people will understand what spiritual science has to say on this matter.

If we go back to the time that preceded the last four centuries, man not only had a different relationship to his environment than he has today, but he had, above all, an entirely different relationship to something that comes to expression in himself, really comes to expression in himself; he had a different connection with his speech, to the way he spoke. Speech does not only contain what modern materialistic science believes it does; there is something in speech which in many ways is connected with man's not fully-conscious experiences, which often occur in the subconscious realms of his being, and which are therefore interpenetrated by spiritual beings. Spiritual beings live and are active in man's speech, and when man forms words, elemental spiritual beings pour into these words. During human conversations spiritual beings fly about the room on the wings of the words. This is why it is so important that we pay attention to certain subtleties of speech, and do not simply let uncontrolled feelings get the better of us when we speak.

Right into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we could say that man still possessed the remnant of a living experience of the elemental spirituality contained in language. The spirituality of language was still active within him, for language is in a certain respect more inspired and spiritual in many ways than an individual human being. It is only occasionally nowadays that we notice a person reverting from a materialistic way of thinking to a feeling for the inspired spirituality of language.

On one occasion⁴ here I gave a very clear if trivial example showing in what way a person's mind can revert from the materialistic role of today. On the whole it still happens to many people, but they are not immediately aware of it. If someone is travelling down the Rhine and he speaks for instance of the ‘old Rhine’, what does he mean? No doubt he feels something. But what is he referring to? When people speak of the ‘old Rhine’ I do not think they mean the riverbed, the hollow in the ground. That would be the only permanent part, of course. But we cannot discover what else the ‘old Rhine’ is supposed to be, for the water is certainly absolutely new; it keeps flowing on, and if you try and find anything old except the hollowed out riverbed, it cannot be done. The old Rhine! Language is more inspired than man, because the language obviously means the River God, even if people are not conscious of it. One is describing the elemental being that belongs to it very suitably when one says the ‘old Rhine’.

That is a rough example. This spirituality, this belief in spirituality exists throughout language. And a feeling, at least, for this connection with spirituality in language still really existed in the disposition of soul of all the peoples of Europe, during the course of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch and right up to modern times as far as the fifteenth and sixteenth century. If you are not aware of this fact you cannot have the right feeling for the beginning of the St. John's Gospel. For the opening words of the St. John's Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word”, arose, in fact, out of a consciousness that the part the word plays within the whole human organism and human life, provides the connection for man, by way of elemental spirituality in the first place, to the whole of the world lying behind the world of the senses.

If, with the means that spiritual science puts at our disposal, we observe the way human life has run its course from the Middle Ages up to modern times, and are able to look right into the soul, we shall in fact find that man's relationship to speech was altogether different in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, even in the last phase of it that lasted up till the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Whenever they spoke people heard undertones, genuine undertones. People no longer believe this, because nowadays human beings really only live in the material aspect of the sounds of speech. A spiritual element joined with the sound as though it sounded again an octave lower. Thus when people spoke, or heard people speaking, something resounded in the words that was not differentiated according to one or another language, but was of a universal human character. One can really say that when human experience comes to expression, as it were, in the flowering of the separate languages, mankind today experiences the flowering as a vibrating of sounds in the ear, and experiences the sounds as something that have a meaning. Whereas in earlier times they experienced a steeping of the whole element of speech in something that joined with it and was not differentiated into the various languages. The dividing line between the one experience and the other fell in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Mankind was torn away from the genius of language.

Nobody can understand the actual jolt mankind was given in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, unless he studies the special character of this damping down of undertones in the experiencing of speech. Something was lost to mankind, and this comes to light in the happenings of the times, whether they be battles or peacetime creations. Before the point of time mentioned the human soul still experienced it. Whenever people spoke, this resounding of undertones in the experiencing of speech still lived in human souls. That is why the whole of history has an entirely different quality before this turning point, than afterwards. Through spiritual science we must develop a spiritual ear, as I would like to call it, for the completely different tone that events had in the Middle Ages than they have today, as human souls were connected to their experiences in quite a different way in those times.

I will choose the Crusades as an example of a general human soul-experience. They are only conceivable in the way they came about in the Middle Ages if we know of the existence of these spiritual undertones in the experiencing of language. The present-day peoples of Middle and Western Europe would most certainly not be so affected by the words of Clermont's synod:⁵ God wills it—Dieu le vent—as the peoples of the Middle Ages were. The reasons for this, however, can only be recognised if we take into account what has just been said.

An important phenomenon in all modern intellectual life is also connected with this. The whole formation of modern history has to do with this. If you once envisage history with these subtle language undertones in mind, you will understand why, at the point of time I have indicated, the various European nationalities grouped themselves together, those nationalities who before that time had quite different relationships with one another; who were governed by quite different impulses in their relationships to one another. The way the different nationalities group themselves in the various parts of Europe, right up to the present day, has to do with impulses that we interpret quite falsely if we go back from the present to the Middle Ages to look for the origins of nations, without bearing in mind the tremendously important rubicon that had to be crossed in the life of the soul.

I can only give you indications of these themes whereas they would actually require a whole series of lectures. The most important part of all this must be left to your meditation, which will discover what can be found as a result of these indications. What I would hope to have achieved is to have given you a picture of how to build a bridge between spiritual science and knowledge of life, and shown you how spiritual science can lead to a conscious approach to the reality in which we live. Having spoken of the real foundations on which these indications are based, it would appear quite natural that this modern age of ours makes a renewal of many things necessary, compared to the past. Through being placed today by world karma in a setting that functions in an especially ahrimanic way, and through having to make our soul forces strong enough to find our way into spiritual spheres, despite all the hindrances that come to us from ahrimanic spirituality, our souls are in need of different kinds of sustenance than before. For the same reason art must also adopt new paths in all its branches.

Art obviously had to speak differently to the souls that were less exposed to the attacks of Ahriman than we are today. Art has to speak in a new way to souls today, and our Goetheanum building⁶ is meant to be the very first step, really and truly the very first step towards art of this kind, and not anything perfect. It is an attempt actually to create the kind of art that calls on the soul to be active, on the lines of the whole conception of modern life, yet a spiritual conception of modern life. Let us remember the frightfully trivial comparison I made regarding the Goetheanum building a few weeks ago. I asked, “How does the effect our Goetheanum building is intended to have, compare with that of an older building, or an older work of art in general?

A work of art from the past made an impression by means of its forms and colours. Its forms and colours made an impression. If we make a diagram of it and the form is like this, this form had an effect on the eye (he did a drawing). What was in space and what the form was filled out with, was what made the impression. And it is the same with the colours. The colours on the walls made the impression.

I said that our building is not intended to be like that; our building is meant to be—and this is the terribly trivial comparison—like a jelly mould that does not exist for its own sake but for the sake of the jelly. Its function is to give a form to what is put into it, and when it is empty you can see what it is for. What it does to the jelly is the important thing. And the important thing with our building is what a person who goes inside it experiences in the innermost depths of his soul, when he feels the contours of the forms. All that the forms do is set the process going that creates the work of art. The work of art is what the soul experiences when it feels the shape of the forms. The work of art is the jelly. What has been built is the jelly mould, and that is why we had to try and proceed on an entirely new principle.

Likewise what you will find in the way of paintings in our Goetheanum building will not be there for their direct effect, as used to be the case with art in the past, but will be there for the soul to encounter, so that the experience resulting from this encounter will be a work of art. This of course involves a metamorphosis—I can only give indications of all this—the metamorphosis of an old artistic principle into a new one, which we can depict by saying that when the sculptural, the pictorial element is taken a stage further, it is led over into a kind of musical experience. There is also the opposite step, from the musical element back into the sculptural-pictorial.

These are things which are not created arbitrarily by the human soul, but have to do with the innermost impulses we have to go through, because we are in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. It has been, as it were, ordained by the spiritual beings that guide this evolution.

A start has to be made in every realm. If people find things about our building that are imperfect they may be assured that the people who are actually engaged in building it will find far more imperfections than the people who criticise it—far, far more. There are faults to be found in it which people who just look at it would not think of. But that is not the point. The point is that a start is being made, for there are so many things that have to happen. The important thing is not the perfection we achieve in what we must will to happen, but that a start is made on what has to come to life here, however imperfect it has to be. For everything new that comes into the world is imperfect compared with old things that have stood the test of time. Things that are old have reached their highest level, whereas new creations are still in their infancy. That is quite obvious.

I will begin tomorrow where we have stopped today, and consider the renewal of an artistic conception of the world and the connection this has with the whole cultural life of today.

• 4. 1413. See Rudolf Steiner's Occult Science, an Outline, chapter on ‘Future Evolution of the World and of Mankind#8217;, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979.
• 3. Secrets of the Threshold, lecture VI, Anthroposophical Publishing Co., London 1928.
• 4. On 3rd October 1914, towards the end of the first lecture on Occult Reading and Occult Hearing, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1975.
• 5. convened by Pope Urban II in 1095. Here the decision was taken for the First Crusade.
• 6. Laying of foundation stone 20th September 1913. Burning of the Goetheanum, 31st December 1922.

Along with the tasks which one can set oneself in a certain realm as a speaker it will be a question at first of entering in the appropriate way into the material itself which is to be dealt with. There is a twofold entering into the material, in so far as the message about this material is concerned in speaking. The first is to convert to one's own use the material for a lecture so that it can be divided up—so that one is as it were placed in the position of giving the lecture a composition. Without composition a talk cannot really be understood. This or that may appeal to the listener about a lecture which is not composed: but in reality a non-composed lecture will not be assimilated. As far as the preparation is concerned, it must therefore be a matter of realizing: every talk will inevitably be poor as regards its reception by the listeners which has merely originated in one's conceiving one statement after the other, one sentence after the other, and going through them to a certain extent, one after the other, in the preparation. If one is not in the position, at least at some stage of the preparation, of surveying the whole lecture as a totality, then one cannot really count on being understood. Allowing the whole lecture to spring, as it were, from a comprehensive thought, which one subdivides, and letting the composition arise by starting out from such a comprehensive thought comprising the total lecture,—this is the first consideration.

The other is the consulting of all experiences which one has available out of immediate life for the subject of the lecture,—that is, calling to mind as much as possible everything one has experienced first-hand about the matter in question,—and, after one has before one a kind of composition of the lecture, endeavoring to let the experiences flow here or there into this composition.

That will in general be the rough draft in preparing. Thus one has during the preparation the whole of the lecture before one as in a tableau. So exactly does one have this tableau before one, that, as will indeed naturally be the case, one can incorporate the single experiences one remembers in the desired way here or there, as though one had written on paper: a, b, c, d.—There is now an experience one knows belongs under d, another under f, another belongs under a,—so that one is to a certain extent independent of the sequence of the thoughts as they are afterwards to be presented, as regards this collecting of the experiences. Whether such a thing is done by putting it onto paper, or whether it is done by a free process without having recourse to the paper, will determine only that he who is dependent upon the paper will speak worse, and he who is not dependent upon the paper will speak somewhat better. But one can of course by all means do both.

But now it is a matter of fulfilling a third requirement, which is: after one has the whole on the one hand—I never say the ‘skeleton’—and on the other hand the single experiences, one has need of elaborating the ideas which ensue to the point that these things can stand before the soul in the most complete inner satisfaction.

Let us take as an example, that we want to hold a lecture on the threefold order. Here we shall say to ourselves: After an introduction—we shall speak further about this—and before a conclusion—about which we shall also speak—the composition of such a lecture is really given through the subject itself. The unifying thought is given through the subject itself. I say that for this example. If one lives properly, mentally, then this is valid actually for every single case, it is valid equally for everything. But let us take this example near at hand of the threefolding of the social organism, about which we want to speak. There, at the outset, is given that which yields us three members in the treatment of our theme. To deal with, we shall have the nature of the spiritual life, the nature of the juridical-state life, and the nature of the economic life.

Then, certainly, it will be a question of our calling forth in the listeners, by means of a suitable introduction,—about which, as mentioned, we shall speak further—a feeling that it makes sense to speak about these things at all, about a change in these things, in the present. But then it will be a matter of not immediately starting out with explanations of what is to be understood by a free spiritual life, by a juridical-states life founded on equality, by an economic life founded on associations, but rather of having to lead up to these things. And here one will have to lead up through connecting to that which is to hand in the greatest measure as regards the three members of the social organism in the present—what can therefore be observed the most intensively by people of today. Indeed, only by this means will one connect with what is known.

Let us suppose we have an audience, and an audience will be most agreeable and sympathetic which is a mixture of middle-class people, working-class people—in turn with all possible nuances—and, if there are then of course also a few of the nobility—even Swiss nobility,—it doesn't hurt at all. Let us therefore assume we have such a chequered, jumbled-up audience, made up of all social classes. I stress this for the reason that as a lecturer one should really always sense to whom one has to speak, before one sets about speaking. One ought already to transpose oneself actively into the situation in this way.

Now, what will one have to say to oneself to begin with about that which one can connect with in a present-day audience, as regards the threefold social organism? One will say to oneself: it is extraordinarily difficult in the first place to connect onto concepts of an audience of the bourgeois, because in recent times the bourgeoisie have formed extraordinarily few concepts about social relationships, since they have vegetated thoughtlessly to some extent as regards the social life. It would always make an academic impression, if one wanted to speak about these things today out of the circle of ideas of a middle-class audience. On the other hand, however, one can be clear about the fact that exceptionally distinct concepts exist concerning all three domains of the social organism within the working-class population,—also distinct feelings, and a distinct social volition. And it means that it is nothing short of the sign of our present time, that precisely within the proletariat these qualified concepts are there.

These concepts are to be handled by us, though, with great caution, since we shall very easily call forth the prejudice that we want to be partisan in the proletarian direction. This prejudice we should really combat through the whole manner of our bearing. We shall indeed see that we immediately arouse for ourselves serious misunderstandings if we proceed from proletarian concepts. These misunderstandings have revealed themselves in point of fact constantly in the time when an effect could still be brought about in middle-Europe, from about April 1919 on, for the threefolding of the social organism. A middle-class population hears only that which it, has sensed for decades from the fomenting behavior of the working- class, out of certain concepts. How one views the matter oneself is then hardly comprehended at all.

One must be clear that being active in the world at all in the sense, I should like to say, of the world-order has to be grasped. The world-order is such—you have only to look at the fish in the sea—that very, very many fisheggs are laid, and only a few become fish. That has to be so. But with this tendency of nature you have also to approach the tasks which are to be solved by you as speakers; even if only very few, and these little stimulated, are to be found to begin with at the first lecture, then actually a maximum is attained as regards what can be attained. It is a matter of things that one stands so within in life, as for instance the threefolding of the social organism, that what can be accomplished by means of lecturing may never be abandoned, but must be taken up and perfected in some way, be it through further lectures, be it in some other way. It can be said: no lecture is really in vain which is given in this sense and to which is joined all that is required.

But one has to be absolutely clear about the fact that one will actually also be completely misunderstood by the proletarian population, if one speaks directly out of that which they think today in the sense of their theories, as these have persisted for decades. One cannot ask oneself the question for instance: How does one do it so as not to be misunderstood?—One must only do it right! But for this reason it cannot be a matter of putting forward the question: Then how does one do it so as not to be misunderstood?—One tells people what they have already thought anyhow! One preaches to them, in some way, Marxism, or some such thing. Then one will, of course, be understood.

But there is nothing of interest in being understood in this way. Otherwise one will indeed very soon have the following experience—concerning this experience one must be quite clear—: if one speaks today to a proletarian gathering so that they can at least understand the terminology—and that must be striven for—then one will notice particularly in the discussion, that those who discuss have understood nothing. The others one usually doesn't get to know, since they do not participate in the discussions. Those who have understood nothing usually participate after such lectures in the discussions. And with them one will notice something along the following lines.—I have given countless lectures myself on the threefolding of the social organism to, as they are called in Germany, “surplus-value social democrats,” independent “social democrats,” communists and so on.—Now, one will notice: if someone places himself in the discussions and believes himself able to speak then it is usually the case that he answers one as though one had really not spoken at all, but as though someone or other had spoken more or less as one would have spoken as a social-democratic agitator thirty years ago in popular meetings. One feels oneself suddenly quite transformed. One says to oneself roughly the following: Well, can it then be that the misfortune has befallen you, that you were possessed in this moment by old Bebel?¹ That is really how you are confronted! The persons concerned hear even physically nothing else than what they have been used to hearing for decades. Even physically—not merely with the soul—even physically they hear nothing other than what they are long used to. And then they say: Well, the lecturer really told us nothing new!—Since they have, because one was obliged to use the terminology, translated the whole connection of the terminology right-away in the ear—not first in the soul—into that which they have been used to for a long time. And then they talk on and on in the sense of what they have been used to for a long time.

This is the approximate course of countless discussions. At most, a new nuance entered into the matter when, from their newly attained standpoint, the Communists made an appearance and declared something like this: Above all else it is necessary to gain political power! Certainly, it is quite natural—I speak from experience and cite examples that actually occurred—that one first has to have political power. For instance, one person believed that if he had the political power in the capacity of head of the police, he would certainly not install himself as a registrar, since by profession he was a shoe-repairman, and he could well understand that a shoe repairman could not know anything of the responsibilities of a registrar. Therefore, if he were head of the police (over the whole country), he would not make himself a registrar since he was a shoe-repairman.—He did not realize that by saying this he really implied that while he felt quite well suited to be installed as Minister of the police, he did not consider himself qualified to be a registrar!—This was a kind of new nuance for the discussion. The nuances were always approximately in this form.

Well, nevertheless, we must understand that in order to be comprehensible one must speak out of the inmost thoughts of the people. For, if one does that, their unconscious mind can follow somehow. This is particularly the case when the lecture is structured in the manner I have already indicated and shall elaborate on still further. But concerning the points that are really important, we must avail ourselves of concepts based on experience which, in this case, are concepts that can be formulated out of the experiences of the feelings of the working class.

Consider the spiritual part of the threefold social organism. Since the dawn of Marxism, the workman has developed quite definite concepts in regard to this spiritual aspect, namely the concept of ideology. He says: The spiritual life has no reality of its own. Religion, concepts of justice, concepts of morality, and so forth, art, science itself—that is nothing by itself. Only economic processes exist on their own. In world-historical development, one can follow how actual reality consists of how one level of the population relates to the other in economic life. From this factor of how one class relates to another in the life of the economy, the concepts, the feelings in religion, science, art, morals, rights, and so on, must evolve quite by themselves like a form of smoke that arises from something. So, rights, morality, religion, art are not realities by ideologies.—In all social-democratic and other Proletarian meetings, this expression, “ideology,” along with the underlying sentiment that I have just characterized, could be heard for decades. It was nothing short of an especially developed means of indoctrination to make people understand: The middle class speaks of truth per se. It speaks of the values of morality and art—but all this has no standing in reality by itself; these are chimeras that arise from the economic process. One of the leaders of the working class, Franz Mehring,² carried this matter to special extremes in a book, The Lessing Legend.

A not very significant book by a typical middle-class professor, Erich Schmidt,³ was published concerning Lessing. The reason that it isn't very significant is that it is not really Lessing who is being dealt with there, but a papier-mache figure, wrongly designated as “Lessing,” to which Erich Schmidt links the remarks, narrations and observations that he was capable of due to his special talent or lack of talent. The reader is not dealing with a person at all in this book but with a made-up statue calling [sic] “Lessing.” Before the book Lessing by Erich Schmidt had even been written, when I heard Erich Schmidt give a lecture in Vienna in the Academy of Sciences, where he presented the first beginnings of the first chapter of this Lessing-book in condensed form in a speech, I already knew that this middle-class professor did not have particularly clear conceptions about the living man Lessing but only a papier-mache Lessing. At that time, I was strangely impressed by this speech, which demonstrated so clearly that if a person is otherwise enjoying a certain social standing and is allowed to speak, even in such a venerable academy of sciences, he need not say anything of real substance. For, at the most important points, where Erich Schmidt brought out something that was supposed to be characteristic for the personality whom he was discussing, he always said—singling out something of Lessing's manner of working or style of writing—“That's typically Lessing!” And this expression, “That's typically Lessing!”—one heard, I believe, fifty times during this lecture at the academy.

Well, if one is dealing with John Smith from New Middletown, and one has to characterize him, relating the special way that he keeps up his compost heap, one will be able to say along the same lines, “That's typically Smith!”—One will have made an equally weighty statement.

What I am saying is that we are dealing with something extraordinarily insignificant. But a proper social-democratic writer, as was Franz Mehring, ascribed the insignificance of Erich Schmidt's book on Lessing to the fact that Erich Schmidt was a middle-class professor, and so he said, “Well, that's a product of the Bourgeois.”—And now he pitted his Proletarian product against it, and he called his book, The Lessing Legend. This book examines the economic conditions under which Lessing's forefathers had lived and what they did, how Lessing himself was placed in his youth within the life of the economy, how he had to become a journalist, how he had to borrow money—this is, after all an economical aspect—and so on. In short, it is shown how Lessing's conception of Laocoon, how his Dramaturgy of Hamburg, how his Minna von Barnhelm had to be the way they were because Lessing had grown out of certain economic conditions.

After the pattern of this book, The Lessing Legend, by the party-scholar Mehring, one of the students of my Worker's Education School—for many years, I did indeed teach in such an institution, even giving instruction in lecturing—proved in a trial-speech that the Kantian philosophy originated simply from the economic conditions out of which Kant had developed. One always encountered matter similar to this (in these circles) and probably could find them still today, although by now they have more or less become empty phrases. But it was indeed so, and it meant that the modern member of the working-class held the view that everything pertaining to the spiritual life is ideology.

In regard to the political life of rights, the Proletarian only gives credence to what is once again established within economic conditions as relationships between people. For him, these are the social classes. The class holding power rules over the other classes. And a person belonging to a certain class develops class consciousness. Therefore, what the modern workman comprehends of the political life of rights is the class and what is close to his heart is class consciousness.

The third member of the social organism is the economic part. There too, clearly defined concepts exist within the working-class, and the central concept that is referred to again and again, in the same manner as the concepts, ideology and class consciousness, is the concept of surplus value. The workman understands: When something is being produced, a certain value is attached to the economic product; of this value, he receives a portion as compensation, the remainder is taken away for something else, He designates the latter as “surplus value,” and occupies himself with this increment value, of which he has the feeling that he is deprived of it insofar as the value of the fruits of his labours are concerned.

Thinking these matters through in this manner, one can see how within that segment of the populace that has developed in recent times as the active and truly aggressive one, clearly defined concepts do in fact exist for the three spheres of the threefold social organism. The social life reveals itself in a threefold way—this is approximately how a proper Proletarian theorist would put it—it reveals itself in the first place through its reality, through the value-producing economy. This value-producing economy does itself produce the surplus value out of the economic life. Through the balance of power that develops, the socially active people are split into classes in the economic life, which represents the only reality; therefore, if they contemplate their human worth, they arrive at class consciousness, not human consciousness. And then there develops what one likes to have on Sundays, and what one needs—but also sort of inbetween—to properly invent machines, so that every so often, in one's free time, inventions can be made and so on; thus, ideology develops, which, however, results as a nebulous product out of the actual reality, out of the economic life.

I am really not drawing caricatures, I am only describing what dwelled in millions, not thousands, but millions of heads in the decades preceding the war, continuing also through the war. The working-class therefore does have a concept of threefoldness of the social organism, and one can relate to that.

One can relate to it in a still further sense. Once can refer to the fact that in recent times the economic life has basically developed in a separate direction, since it contains its own inherent laws of necessity, and that the other elements of life, the spiritual life and the political life of rights, have lagged behind. People could not remain behind in the economic life. In the last third of the nineteenth century, they first had to change over to universal communications, then to the world economy. An inner necessity underlies that. In a certain sense, it develops b itself unless people ruin matters as was the case because of the war. But because other matters did not keep up with the pace and because abstract intellectualism developed in them, awareness of the economic life became influential to an extraordinary degree and mainly affected people everywhere suggestively by its very nature. And this suggestive influence did not only take root in human conceptions but it turned into establishments. Intellectualism gradually has taken complete hold of the social life.

Abstraction, the abstract element is the property of intellectualism. In life, one finds, let's say, butter; or a Madonna by Raffael, or one has a toothbrush or a philosophical work; in life, there are powder boxes for women, and so on. Life is made up of a lot of things, as you know. I could continue with this list endlessly. But you will not deny that these items differ vary greatly from each other and that if one wants to gain concepts of all these things, these concepts will be very different from each other. But in the social life of recent times something developed nevertheless that became extremely significant for all relationships in life and that is not so very differentiated after all. For, we can say that a certain amount of butter costs two francs; a Madonna by Raffael costs two-million francs; a toothbrush costs only about two-and-a-half francs now; a philosophical work—which might be the least expensive—costs, shall we say, if it is a think single volume, seventy rappen; a powder box, if it is of especially high quality, costs ten francs.

Now we've found a common denominator for the whole thing! Now we only need to consider the differences of the numbers, something that is part of one area. But we have spread an abstraction, the monetary value, over everything.

This has ingrained itself especially deeply into people's manner of thinking, although people do not always admit to it. Certainly, a person who is a poet considers himself as the world's most important point, he will therefore not evaluate himself in the above way; neither will a person who is a philosopher, and so on. Least of all one who is a painter! But the world evaluates all these matters today in this style in the social evaluation of human beings. And the end-result is that, let us say, a poet has a net value of ten-thousand francs for a publisher, if the publisher is generous from the time he beings to write his novel until it is finished. So this is the value of a poet for a certain period of time, isn't that right? We have placed him also in the equalizing abstractions.

Well, I could cite all sorts of examples here; but I already said that the middle-class didn't waste much time thinking about these matters. A poet in his attic room⁴—I am now referring to the “Oberstuebchen” that is situated on a floor high above the others—naturally considers himself something quite special, but in social life he was worth ten-thousand francs. But he paid no attention to that unless he happened to belong to the working-class. He paid no heed to it. But the laborer did; from all this, he drew the conclusion: I don't have butter, I don't have powder, I don't have a philosophy book. But I have my capacity for work; I offer it to the owner of the factory, and to him, it is worth, let's say, three francs for each day; the daily capacity for work.

You must forgive me for writing “poet” here for the reason that one could experience that a poet was treated a good bit worse in the course of the last few decades than the workman with his daily capacity for work. For the latter could defend himself still better than the poet, and as a rule, the ten-thousand francs were not worth more than the wage of three francs for the Proletarian working capacity, with the exception of a few. It goes without saying that poets such as, for example, the blessed E. Marlitt—I don't know if many of you remember her—earned splendid wages with her The Secret of the Old Spinster, a novel concerning which the best criticism would be the one expressed once by a certain person: Oh book, if only you had remained the secret of the old spinster!

Now the workman considered what he had become by having been placed into the abstraction of prices in regard to his capacity for work. For what does anything in the economic life represent by virtue of having a price-tag? It is a commodity. Anything for which a price can be paid must be considered a commodity. I've said that the life of the middle-class runs its course along with a certain indifference in regard to such matters. But these concepts arose from the working-class and in this manner, the idea emerged: We ourselves have become a commodity with our capacity for work.

This is something that now worked together with the other three concepts. A person who understands modern life correctly, knows that when he comprehends the four concepts, ideology, class consciousness, surplus value, capacity for work as a commodity in the right way so that he can place himself into life with these four concepts in regard to experiences, that he then encounters with these four concepts the reality of consciousness that exists in particular among the segment of the population which actively and consciously wants to bring about a transformation of social conditions. One therefore has the task of contemplating how to deal with these four concepts.

If a lecturer has a mixed audience of working-class people and those of the middle-class, he will have to speak first of all in such a manner so as to call attention to the fact that the working-class could not help but arrive at these matters and how, due to modern life, a workman could not become acquainted with anything except the processes of the economic life. For this is how matters developed since approximately the middle of the fifteenth century. This was when it slowly began. For if we go back further than the middle of the fifteenth century, we find that man with his being was still connected with what he produced. One who makes a key pours his soul into his key. A shoemaker makes shoes with all his heart. And I am quite certain that among those, where these things continued on in a healthy way, no disdain existed in regard to any such labor. I am fully convinced—not only subjectively, for, if necessary, such matters could be proven—that Jakob Boehme⁵ enjoyed producing his boots just as much as his philosophical works, his mystical texts that he wrote, likewise in the case of Hans Sachs,⁶ for example. These matters—that something that is material is looked down upon, and that spiritual matters are over-valued—have only developed along with intellectualism and its abstractions in all areas. What happened is that through the modern economic life, which has been permeated by technology, the human being has been separated from his product so that no real love can any longer connect him with what he produces. Those people who can still develop a sense of love for what they produce in certain professional fields, are becoming increasingly rare. Only in the so-called professions of the mind, this love still exists. This is what causes the unnatural element in social differences and even classifications in recent times. One has to go east—perhaps this is no longer possible now, but it was the case decades ago—in order to still find joy in one's profession. I must admit I was really delighted, actually moved, when, decades ago, I encountered a barber in Budapest to whom I had gone for a haircut, who danced around me all the time and each time when he had cut off something with his scissors, would say, taking his hand-mirror: Oh what a wonderful cut I've just made! What a great cut this was!—Please go and try to find a barber capable of such enthusiasm today in our civilized country!

What has taken place is the separation of man from his product. It has become something of indifference to him. He is placed in front of a machine. What does he care about the machine! At most, it interests—not even the one who built it, but the one who invented it' and the interest that the inventor has in the machine is usually not a truly social interest. For social interest only begins when one can discover the possible value, the monetary yield, in other words, when the whole thing has been reduced to the level of its price.

It is, however, the economic life that the modern workman has become familiar with above all else. He has been placed into it. If he is to approach the spiritual life, the latter is nowhere connected with his immediate inner life. It does not move his soul. He accepts it as something alien, as ideology. It is part of the modern historical process that this ideology has developed.

If, however, you are successful in calling forth a feeling in the workman that this is the case, then you have achieved the beginning of what has to be attained. For a member of the working-class listens to you today with the following attitude: it is an absolute necessity of nature that all art, all science, all religion are ideologies. He is very far from believing that with this view he has simply become the product of modern-day developments. It is very difficult to make that clear to him. If he does notice it that everything is merely supposed to be ideology, he feels terrible about it and turns his whole way of thinking around; then he becomes aware of the completely illusory nature of this view. He among all people is, as it were, predisposed better than any other to feel disgust over the fact that everything has turned into ideology; but you must make him realize this in his feelings. The thoughts that you set forth or have developed in your own mind do not interest the listener. But in the way that I have described it, you lead him to the point of sensing the matter. For what is important is that you put the subject into the right light for workmen by giving your sentences this nuance.

For members of the middle-class, the matter must be put in a different light again, for what is quite proper for people of the working-class is detrimental for those of the middle-class in this area. It is not only a matter of lecturing correctly, but due to the diversity of life today it is a matter of speaking well in the sense of what I said yesterday, and that as far as possible a lecturer addresses the members of the middle-class as well. What has to be made clear to them is that, because they were indifferent to what was developing, they helped cause the problem. Because of what the middle-class did, or rather didn't do, matters developed to the point where they have become ideology for the working-class. Members of the middle-class must be made to comprehend. Once upon a time, religion was something that filled the whole human being with an inner fire; it was something that gave rise to everything that a person carried out in the external world. Customs derived from what people considered holy in regard to social life. Art was something by means of which a human being rose above the hardships and difficulties of life on earth, and so on. But, oh, how the value of these spiritual properties has declined in the past few centuries! Because of the manner in which the middle-class upholds them, the workman cannot experience them in any other way but as ideology.

Take the case that a workman comes into the office of the employer for whatever reason. He has his own views concerning the whole management of the business. Let's assume that the bookkeeper, to whom he was called, or the boss himself, ahs just left the office. He sees a large volume in which many entries are made. The workman has his own views concerning what the figures in it express. He has recently developed these views. Now, because the bookkeeper or the boss happens not to be there and he is half-a-minute early, he opens the cover and looks at the first page. There, it says on top of the page, “In God's Name!” (“Mit Gott”). That catches his attention, for, indeed, this religious element appearing on the first page in the words, “In God's Name,” is really pure ideology, because the workman is convinced that there isn't much that is in “God's Name” in the pages that follow, This is right in the style in which he pictures conditions in the world in general, There is as little truth in what people call religion, custom and so on as there is in this book, where it says “In God's Name” on the first page. I don't know whether it says “In God's Name” in ledgers in Switzerland; but it is quite common that people begin their account books with “In God's Name.”

Therefore, it is a matter of making it clear to people of the middle-class that they are the cause for the view concerning ideology among workmen.

Now, each party has its portion. Then, the lecturer has reached the point where he can explain how the spiritual life must once again acquire reality, since it has in fact turned into ideology. If people have only ideas concerning the spirit and not the whole relationship with the actual spiritual life and substance, then this really is ideology. In this way, one acquires a bridge to the sphere, where a conception can be called forth concerning the reality of the spiritual life. Then it becomes possible to point out that the spiritual (cultural) life is a self-contained reality, not merely a product of the economic life, not just an ideology, but something real that is based on its own foundation. A feeling must be evoked for the fact that the spiritual life is a reality based on its own foundation. Such a self-evident reality is something else than an abstract fact, for something with an abstract basis must be based on a foundation elsewhere.

The workman claims that ideology is based on the economic life. But inasmuch as a person only abandons himself to abstract ideas in his spiritual life, this is indeed something ephemeral, something illusory. Only if people penetrate through this nebulous, illusory element, through the idea to the reality of the spiritual life—as happens by means of Anthroposophy—only then can the spiritual life be experienced as real once again. If the spiritual life is merely a sum of ideas, then these ideas do indeed stream up from the economic life. There, they have to be organized, there one has to provide them with an artificial effectiveness and order. And this is what the state has done. In the age when the spiritual life evaporated into ideology, the state took it in hand to bestow on it at least that reality, which people no longer experienced in the spiritual world itself.

This is how one has to try to make it comprehensible in what way all this, which the state has given the spiritual life without being qualified to do so—since it has turned into ideology—does have a reality. It must have, after all, a reality. For if a person does not have legs of his own but wants to walk, he must have artificial ones made. In order to exist any given thing must have reality. Therefore the spiritual life must have its own reality. This is what must be felt, namely, that the spiritual life must have its own reality.

To begin with, you will make a paradoxical impression among the people of the middle-class as well as those of the working-class. You must even call forth an awareness of the fact that you appear paradoxical. You can do this by giving rise to the conception among your listeners that you think in the same manner as the workman by making use of his language, and at the same time that you think like a member of the middle-class by making use of his terminology. But then, after having developed these trains of thought which can be brought out with the help of what is recalled of experiences gained in life, after you have gone through something like this as a preparation, then you arrive at the point of speaking to people in such as way that gradually a comprehension can be brought about for the issues that must be met with understanding.

Speaking cannot be learned by means of external instructions. Speaking must be learned to a certain extent by means of understanding how to bring to the lecture the thinking which lies behind it, and the experience which lies before it, in a proper relationship.

Now, I have today tried to show you how the material first has to be dealt with. I have connected with what is known, in order to show you how the material may not be created out of some theory or other, how it must be drawn out of life, how it must be prepared so as to be dealt with in speaking. What I have said today everyone should now actually do in his own fashion as preparation for lecturing. Through such preparation the lecture gains forcefulness. Through thought preparation—preparing the organization of the lecture, as I have said at the beginning of today's remarks: from a thought which is then formed into a composition—by this means the lecture becomes lucid, so that the listener can also receive it as a unity. What the lecturer brings along as thinking he should not weave into his own thoughts.—Since, if he gives his own thoughts, they are, as I have already said, such that they interest not a single person. Only through use of one's own thinking in organizing the lecture does it become lucid, and through lucidity, comprehensible.

By means of the experiences which the lecturer should gather from everywhere (the worst experiences are still always better than none at all!) the lecture becomes forceful. If, for example, you tell someone what happened to you, for all it matters, as you were going through a village where someone nearly gave you a box on the ear, then it is still always better if you judge life out of such an experience, than if you merely theorize.—Fetch things out of experience, through which the lecture acquires blood, since through thinking it only has nerves. It acquires blood through experience, and through this blood, which comes out of experience, the lecture becomes forceful. Through the composition you speak to the understanding of the listener; through your experience you speak to the heart of the listener. It is this which should be looked upon as a golden rule. Now, we can proceed step by step. Today I wanted more to show first of all in rough outline how the material can be transformed by degrees into what it afterwards has to be in the lecture. Tomorrow, then, we resume again at three o'clock.

• 1. August Bebel, 1840–1913. Founder in 1869 with Wilhelm Liebknecht of the Social-Democratic Party.
• 2. Franz Mehring, 1846–1919; socialist writer and politician, founder of Marxist literary analysis.
• 3. Erich Schmidt, 1853–1913, literary historian.
• 4Note by translator: Rudolf Steiner makes a pun with words here. The term “Oberstuebchen” can refer in German to an attic room as well as one's head. Not to be quite right in the head can be expressed as not being quite right in the “Oberstuebchen.”
• 5. Jakob Boehme, 1575–1624; mystic and shoemaker in Goerlitz.
• 6. Hans Sachs, 1494–1576; Meistersinger, poet and shoemaker in Nuremberg.