The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Much is said today about the difference between belief and knowledge. In particular, it is often asserted that anthroposophy, in view of what it has to say, must be regarded not as a science but as a matter of faith, as a religious belief. But basically, all the differences that are made in this way stem from the fact that people have very little insight into what has emerged as belief in the course of human development, and that they actually do not have much insight into what knowledge is.

All belief, everything that is connected with the word belief, actually goes back to very early times in human development. It goes back to those times when the breathing process played a much greater role in the life of man himself than is the case now. Man, with his present state of soul, does not really pay attention to his breathing process. He breathes in and breathes out, but he does not perceive any special experience in doing so.

The beliefs of older times have always pointed to the importance of breathing. One need only remember – as I pointed out a few days ago – that in the Old Testament the creation of man is associated with the breathing of breath, and one need only recall what I said about the striving that existed in ancient India, for example, to gain higher knowledge by regulating the breathing process in a certain way. This striving had meaning in that time when man paid more attention to his breathing. I have said that this striving took place in the time when man perceived around him not only the dead nature that we perceive today, but when man saw spiritual and soul activity in all things and facts of nature, when he perceived spiritual and soul activity in every spring, in every cloud, in the river and in the wind. During this time, the aim was to become more and more aware of one's breathing: to regulate inhaling, holding one's breath, and exhaling. And through this regulation of the breathing process, what one might call self-awareness was generated, the experience of the ego, of “I am”. But this was a time when the perception, the experience of breathing in general played a certain role in human life. From his ordinary consciousness, the person of the present cannot imagine much of what it was like. I would like to give you such an idea.

The breathing process is divided into inhaling, holding the breath and exhaling. This breathing process is initially regulated by human nature. The yoga scholars I have spoken of regulated it differently. Just as today, when someone studies, they develop a way of thinking that is not the thinking of everyday life, so in the times when breathing played a special role in life, a different breathing was developed than in ordinary life. But let us now consider not yoga breathing, the developed breathing, but the ordinary. I can best show you this schematically.

Let us assume that this is the human chest organism, then we can say: we distinguish the inhalation process, the breath-holding process – I will not draw that separately – and the exhalation process. When people in ancient times inhaled, they experienced it as if, with the inhalation, that is, with the inhaled air from the outside world, what was spiritual in the beings and facts of the outside world came in. So in what I have here color-coded red as the inhalation current, the person, let's say gnomes, nymphs, experienced everything that was spiritual and soulful in the surrounding nature. And as he exhaled (blue), as he sent the inhaled air outwards, these beings became invisible again in the exhalation. They were lost, so to speak, in the surrounding nature. You inhaled and knew: there is something spiritual-soul in nature outside, because you felt the effect of this spiritual-soul in the inhalation. You felt connected to the spiritual-soul of the outer nature. That had a certain intoxicating effect on people in those ancient times - but it is only comparatively speaking - in a certain way. He intoxicated himself with the spiritual soul of his surroundings. And by breathing out again, he sobered up. So that he lived in a state of intoxication and a state of sobering up. And in this intoxication and sobering up there was an interaction with the spiritual soul of the outside world. But there was something else as well. Man felt, by breathing in, by intoxicating himself, as it were, with the spiritual-soul, how the spiritual-soul beings quietly drew up into his head from the breathing current, how they filled him inwardly, how they united with his own physical being. So that what man felt there can be expressed something like this: I breathe in the spiritual and soul life of the environment. It fills my head. I feel it, I perceive it. Then the breath is held. And as he breathes out, the person would say: I give back my perception of the spiritual and soul life.

But this had an intimate connection with life. Take just one very simple thing: here is chalk. If you take this chalk today, you look at it, you reach out, take it up. The people of the ancient epoch did not do that. We have the thought of looking at the chalk and then picking it up. This was not the case with ancient man, who looked at it and inhaled what was spiritually radiating from the chalk, exhaled, and only in the exhalation did he grasp the chalk, so that for him inhaling meant observing, exhaling meant being active. This was at a time when man actually always lived in a kind of rhythmic interaction with the environment. This rhythmic interaction has been preserved for later times, but without the living, observing consciousness of ancient times. Just imagine how, in our youth, threshing was still done by hand in the countryside: looking, beating, looking, beating, in rhythmic activity. This rhythmic activity corresponded to a certain breathing process.

Inhaling = observing

Exhaling = doing

As far as the later development of humanity is concerned, we can say that this experience of inhalation ceased to be perceived by the human being, and the human being perceived or perceives only that which goes up from breathing into his head. So in ancient times, the human being perceived how what was inhaled, which was intoxicating for him, continued into the head and connected there with the sense impressions. Later on, this was no longer the case. Later on, man loses consciousness of what is going on in his chest organism. He no longer perceives this upwelling of breathing because the sensory impressions become stronger. They extinguish what arises in the breath. When you see or hear today, the breathing process is included in the process of seeing and also in the process of hearing. In the ancient person breathing lived strongly in hearing and seeing, in the modern person seeing and hearing live so strongly that breathing is completely subdued. So that we can say, what was perceived by the ancient one in the breathing process in his inner being, no longer lives in the intoxicating, head-filling way that he said: Ah, the nymphs! Ah, the gnomes! Nymphs that whirl in the head, gnomes that hammer in the head, undines that surge in the head! Today, this hammering, surging, and whirling is drowned out by what comes from seeing and hearing and what fills the head today.

There was once a time when man perceived more strongly this upwelling of breathing into his head. This passed over into the time when man still perceived confusedly, when he still perceived something of the after-effects of the gnome-like hammering, the Undine-like surging, the nymph-like tumbling, when he still perceived something of the connection of these after-effects with the perceptions of sound, light and color. But then all that he still perceived of the breathing process was lost. And of those people who still had a trace of consciousness that breathing once introduced the spiritual-soul of the world into man, what now remained, what was established from sensory perception in connection with breathing, was called “Sophia”. But breathing was no longer perceived. So the spiritual content of breathing was killed, or rather, paralyzed by sensory perception.

This was particularly felt by the Greeks. The Greeks did not have the idea of such a science as we do today. If one had told the Greeks about a science as it is taught today at our universities, it would have seemed to them as if someone had continually pierced their brains with small pins. They would not have understood that it could give a person satisfaction. If they had had to take in science as we have it today, they would have said: That makes the brain sore, that wounds the brain, that stings. --- Because they still wanted to perceive something of that pleasant spreading of the intoxicating breath, into which, flowing in, the heard and the seen pours. So the Greeks did perceive an inner life in the head, an inner life such as I am describing to you now. And they called this inner life Sophia. And those who loved to develop this Sophia within themselves, who had a special inclination to devote themselves to this Sophia, called themselves philosophers. The word philosophy definitely points to an inner experience. The hideous, pedantic assimilation of philosophy, whereby one simply 'ochst' (as they say in student life) at philosophy, that familiarization with this science, was not known in Greece. But the inner experience of 'I love Sophia' is what is expressed in the word philosophy.

But just as the process of breathing that enters the body is taken up in the head by the sense perceptions, so what emanates as exhaled air is taken up by the rest of the body. In the limb-metabolism organism, just as sensory perceptions flow into the head through what is heard, just as what is seen flows into the head through what intoxicates the inhaled air, so too do physical feelings and experiences flow together with the exhaled air. The sobering effect of the exhaled air, the extinguishing of perception, flowed together with the physical feelings that were aroused while walking and working. Being active, doing, was linked to exhaling. And as man was active, as he was doing something, he felt, as it were, how the spiritual-soul left him. So that he felt when he did something, when he worked at something, as if he allowed the spiritual-soul to flow into the things. I take in the spiritual-soul: it intoxicates my head, it connects with what I have seen, with what I have heard. I do something, I breathe out. The spiritual-soul aspect goes away. It goes into what I hammer, it goes into what I grasp, it goes into everything I work. I release the spiritual-soul aspect from me. I transfer it, for example, by fizzling the milk, by doing something externally, I let the spiritual-soul aspect flow into things. That was the feeling, that was the sensation. So it was in the old days.

But this perception of the exhalation process, this perception of the sobering up, just stopped, and there was only a trace left in Greek times. In Greek times, people still felt something, as if, by being active, they were still giving something spiritual to things. But then everything that was there in the breathing process was dulled by the physical sensation, by the feeling of exertion, of fatigue in working. Just as the inhalation process was dulled in the head, so the exhalation process was dulled in the rest of the organism. This mental process of exhalation was paralyzed by the bodily sensation, that is, by the sensation of exertion, of becoming heated, and so on, by what lived in man so that he felt his own strength, which he applied by exerting himself, by doing something. He did not feel the breathing out process as fatigue in himself now, he felt a power effect in himself, he felt the body permeated with energy, with power.

This power that lived inside the human being was Pistis, faith, the feeling of the divine, the divine power that makes one work: Pistis, faith.

Sophia = the spiritual content of breathing, paralyzed by sensory perception

Pistis (faith) = the spiritual process of exhalation, paralyzed by the bodily sensation.

Thus wisdom and faith merged in man. Wisdom flowed to the head, faith lived in the whole of man. Wisdom was only the content of ideas. And faith was the power of this content of ideas. Both belonged together. Hence the only Gnostic writing that has survived from ancient times is the Pistis Sophia. So that in Sophia one had a rarefaction of inhalation, in faith a condensation of exhalation. Then wisdom became more rarefied still. And in the further rarefaction, wisdom became science. And then the inner power became more condensed. Man felt only his body: he lost consciousness of what faith, pistis, actually is. And so it came about that people, because they could no longer feel the connection, separated what was to arise subjectively from within as mere content of faith, so to speak, and what connects with external sense perception. First there was Sophia, then Scientia, which is a diluted Sophia. One could also say: originally Sophia was a real spiritual being that man felt as an inhabitant of his head. Today, all that is left of this spiritual being is the ghost. For science is the ghost of wisdom. This is something that should actually haunt the soul of today's human being like a kind of meditation, that science is the spectre of wisdom. And in the same way, on the other hand, faith — which is what it is usually called today; here one has not really grasped a particular difference in the words — faith as it is lived today is not the inwardly experienced faith of antiquity, pistis, but it is the subjective closely connected with egoism. It is the condensed faith of ancient times. In the faith that had not yet been condensed, people still sensed the objective divine within them. Today, faith only arises subjectively, as it were, rising like smoke from the body. So that one could say, just as science is the spectre of wisdom, so today's faith is the heavy residue of former faith, the lump of former faith.

These things must be held together, then one will no longer judge as superficially as many people do today, who say that anthroposophy is only a matter of faith. Such people do not know what they are talking about because they have never brought themselves to consciously perceive the whole connection between faith and wisdom, this inner experience of faith and wisdom, from the real history of mankind. Where today do we speak of history as we have to here? Where do we talk today about what the breathing process once was for man, how it represented a completely different experience than it is today? Where do we realize how abstract on the one hand and robustly material on the other that has become what was once a real spiritual-soul-like on the one hand and a real soul-bodily on the other?

When the development of faith had reached a certain point, it became necessary for humanity to include something very specific in this belief. In ancient times, man had the divine within the belief. He experienced the divine in the process of exhalation. But the process of exhalation was lost to his consciousness. He no longer had the consciousness that the divine passes out into things. Man needed a revival of the divine for his consciousness, and he received this revival through the fact that he now received an idea within himself that has no external reality on earth. It has no external reality on earth that the dead rise from the graves. But the Mystery of Golgotha has no real content for a person if he describes the course of Jesus' life until Jesus dies. After all, that is nothing special. That is why Jesus is no longer anything special for modern theology either. Because a person goes through some experiences and then dies, as modern theology presents the life of Jesus, that is nothing special. The mystery only begins with the resurrection, with the living life of the Christ being after the physical body has gone through death. And - that is also according to Paul's words - whoever does not take up this idea of the resurrection into his consciousness has not taken up anything of Christianity at all, which is why modern theology is actually only a Jesusology, actually no Christianity at all. Christianity needs such a concept that refers to a reality that does not take place on this earth as a direct perception of the senses, but that as a concept already lifts man up into the supersensible.

Through an inner experience, the old human being was lifted up into the supersensible. I have shown you in these days how the yoga student was led to the inner experience of being a baby. They experienced the first impressions of being a baby, that which shapes the human being in a plastic way. What one otherwise knows nothing about became conscious through the yoga exercises I have spoken to you about, but with it, at the same time, the whole prenatal life, or the life that lies before conception, when the human being's soul was in the spiritual world above before descending and taking on a physical body. Only a notion of this remained. This notion is also contained in the Gospels: Unless you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. This saying refers to it, but in those days it no longer had any direct effect on life. This saying was, so to speak, a reminder that one could once place oneself back into the time of childhood and experience the Kingdoms of Heaven from which one descended through birth into physical existence. It is hardly the case that a person today, when he hears about the Kingdoms of Heaven from the Gospels or from some other ancient language, imagines something significant by it. He may think: Well, I have seen that here on earth – France, England and so on, they are divided into kingdoms. Whatever there is of kingdoms on earth is also there above, the kingdoms of heaven are there too. – Otherwise, people cannot really get a concrete idea of the kingdoms of heaven if they cannot imagine what is down there as being up there. I believe that in English, if I am not mistaken, they even say: the kingdoms of heaven. Yes, you don't get the idea of what is meant by the term “the kingdoms of heaven”, which has been modernized today. The gospel even usually says it in such a way that you can't even see what it actually means, it even says: the kingdom of God. In doing so, people hardly think of anything, but simply let a word resound. But in ancient times the heavens were exactly that which, when the earth is here (center), spread out as the sphere of the world (white, blue). And “kingdom” — what was that? Let us disregard all philology and take the observation to help here, which can be given by anthroposophical method itself. “Reich” = that which reaches out, encompasses, surrounds, that is the reaching, the sounding, the speaking, so that one must soar to the imagination: Through these heavens, for the one who learns to perceive, the spiritual-soul sounds through. He perceives not only the heavens, but the world-word that resonates and reaches through the heavens.

Those who cannot become like little children cannot perceive the word of the heavens, the word that speaks from the heavens everywhere. If earthly realms are called “realms” and earthly rulers “rulers of these realms,” then one would have to have the secret idea that these rulers could speak or sing so loudly that their voice would resound throughout their entire realm. In older, legendary conceptions, there is also something like a resounding of the realm. And this was symbolically expressed by the fact that laws were given which were proclaimed with trumpets to the quarters of heaven, whereby the kingdom became a reality. The kingdom was not the plane on which men dwelt, but the kingdom was that which the trumpet-angels carried out into the wide spaces as the content of the laws.

But it was a memory. Another concept had to come that was more related to the will – what preceded related to the idea, to the thought – to that which accompanies a person when he passes through the gate of death. The will remains as his energy development. This goes with him through the gate of death with the world thought content. The human will, filled with world thoughts, enters with him into the spiritual worlds when the human being dies. And it was to this will that the new idea of the resurrected Christ turned, of the one who lives even if he has died in an earthly way. This was the strong, powerful idea that did not merely recall childhood, that pointed to death, and that appealed to what passes through the portal of death with man. Thus we find the irruption of the Christ idea, the whole Christ impulse, thoroughly grounded in the evolution of mankind itself.

Now, of course, one can say: Even today there are still many people on earth who know nothing of the Christ. Those people who know about him today usually know it badly, but they learn something about the Christ, even if, according to the sense of today's materialism, they do not have the correct idea of the Christ, the feeling for the Christ that they have within them. But there are many people on earth who live in other, older forms of religion. And that is where the big question arises, which I already hinted at yesterday. I said that the Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. The Christ died for all people. The Christ Impulse has become a power for the whole earth. In this objective sense, apart from consciousness, the Christ is there for Jews, pagans, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on. He is there. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, He has been alive in the forces of the evolution of humanity on Earth. But there is a difference between whether people live within a Christian sphere or a non-Christian one. The only way to study the difference that exists between the life that a person develops between death and a new birth and life on earth is to see the connection. If a person has passed through death and was a Buddhist or Hindu in life, say, if he has not absorbed any idea, any feeling of Christ, then he takes with him for the universe behind death what a person can experience here on earth from the external environment, from nature. One would know nothing of nature in the heavens if man did not take with him the knowledge of the earth when he enters the realms of the heavens through death. Man carries what he takes in here on earth over into the realm of the supersensible by passing through death, for it is only through this that the supersensible worlds have any knowledge at all of the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal on earth. But the one who knows something of Christ, who can have the idea that Christ lives in him, who experiences the Pauline word, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” now carries into the supersensible worlds not only the knowledge of the earth, but the knowledge of the earthly human being. Thus both are carried into them by the modern human being as well. Christians carry into the supersensible world the knowledge of the earthly human being, of the bodily earthly form of the human being. The Hindus, the Buddhists, and so on, carry into the heavens the knowledge of what is around the human being. Even today, human beings complement each other in what they contribute to the supersensible worlds by passing through death. Naturally it becomes more and more necessary that all secrets which man can experience in himself, through himself, are carried into the heavens, so that man is more and more permeated by Christianity. But above all it is important that what man experiences here on earth only as a human being with other human beings is carried through death by means of Christianity.

Consider that this is actually an extraordinarily important truth, a very essential truth. Take, for example, the Hindu or the Buddhist. What he experiences in looking at the world, in feeling the world, in sensing the world, what he experiences in thoughts about minerals, in feelings about plants, in feelings about animals, he carries all this through the gate of death and enriches the knowledge of the gods in the supersensible world with what he experiences. What the Christian experiences by entering into a social relationship with his fellow human beings, by developing social connections, that is, what one can only experience as a human being among other human beings, what is experienced in human brotherhood on earth, that is what the Christian carries with him through the gate of death. One would like to say: The Buddhist carries the beauty of the world through the gate of death, the Christian carries kindness through the gate of death. They complement each other. But the progress of Christianity consists in the fact that precisely the social earthly conditions acquire a significance for the heavenly worlds.

The Oriental tyrants might decapitate as many people as they liked, but it had little effect on the worlds beyond. It only affected them to the extent that the person received external impressions as a result: the external impressions of horror and so on were carried through the gate of death. The unkindness between people that is developing today as a result of miserable social conditions, and which is spreading across the earth as a false socialism due to a misunderstanding of social interrelationships, also has a great significance for the supersensible worlds that people enter through the gateway of death. And when today, under the flag of the realization of socialism in the east of Europe, a terrible, destructive force is being developed, then what is experienced there is also carried into the beyond as a terrible result. And when unloving conditions develop among people in the age of materialism, this is carried into the transcendental worlds through the portal of death, to the disgust of the divine spiritual worlds.

Through Christianity, man should come to bear the results of the evolution of the earth, which arise through him, into the supersensible worlds as well. What man himself develops on earth, he becomes capable of carrying into the spiritual worlds through the thought of the Risen Christ, of a living being who has gone through death and yet lives.

This is why even those people who do not want their social deeds to be carried by death today have such a horror of recognizing the Risen Christ.

The ancients were allowed to become intoxicated by the breath. The moderns are not allowed to become intoxicated by words. Words must not be intoxicating for them, but must be held in the sense of Sophia, penetrating man with wisdom.

These are the things through which anthroposophy also points to what is important in social relationships today. And it wants to express something of this in its name, this anthroposophy, anthroposophia, which is also a wisdom. During the Greek period, the human being was taken for granted. Sophia was already a human wisdom because the human being was still full of light and wisdom. Today, when one says Sophia, people only think of the ghost of Sophia, of science. Therefore, one must appeal to the human being one is calling upon, to the Anthropos: Anthroposophia. One must point out that this is something that comes from the human being, that shines out of the human being, that blossoms out of the best forces of the human being. One must point this out. But it also makes anthroposophy something that enlivens human existence on earth. For it is something that is experienced by man in a more spiritual, but no less concrete way than the ancient Sophia was experienced, and which at the same time is meant to bring about that which was then in the whole human being, the content of faith, pistis. Anthroposophy is not a belief, but a real body of knowledge, but one that gives people a strength that in earlier times was contained only in faith.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to propose that we begin today with the disciplinary problems.

A teacher: F.R. threw a stone at another student and hit him on the head. He has been suspended.

Dr. Steiner: I do not agree with the proposal that was made to deal with this problem. It would look as though we thought we could have a strong effect upon such boys by dealing with them in a way that is something of a caricature. We actually know only from what other students have said how bad the situation was. Now, however, things are better. We can hardly do more than require F.R. to appear before a committee or perhaps the entire faculty over Easter, and then we can question him. I would like to speak with him then, also. Has his father reacted?

A teacher: The father has given up leaving him at school.

Dr. Steiner: I think we should decide that I will speak to F.R. when I come. The situation is, of course, not good, but I would not recommend expelling him. He always behaves well after you speak with him, and that lasts for a time. There is always a reason when he behaves like that, but afterward he is sorry.

A teacher speaks about a girl, S.F., in sixth grade. She ran away from the people she was living with and tried to walk to where her mother lives, a long distance away. The police found her while she was walking there. Dr. Steiner received a letter from her uncle mentioning that the housemother had spoken deprecatingly about the girl.

Dr. Steiner: Are we simply here to marvel at all the good children? Children are not the way we would like to have them. This whole situation shows only that Mrs. N., her housemother, doesn’t know how to handle her. It is quite clear she hasn’t the least idea about how to handle the girl. Our task is to educate children, and not to judge how good or bad they are. This situation shows that we should not send any more children to live with Mrs. N. Her uncle has certainly maintained a good attitude. Of course, it would make someone angry when such things are said about a child. To call her a whore is so silly that I am at a loss for words. We cannot allow Mrs. N. to mix into our affairs here. The girl has a very good character. Physically, she is not quite normal and is a little smaller than she should be. All these things show that she needs to be treated carefully. We should just leave things as they are with her and simply tell her that after Easter she will be moved to a better home. It would also be good if we wrote to her uncle and told him that we do not agree with Mrs. N.’s behavior. We still do not have sufficient contact with the children here. Although we are very careful with our methods, we should not simply leave the children to themselves. They need contact with the faculty. With the methods we use, we cannot, as a faculty, live in Olympian heights, above the private situations of the children. The children also need a little human contact with the faculty.

A teacher reports about N.N. who had stolen something and had behaved very poorly.

Dr. Steiner: His is a difficult case. We need to remember that no father is present. His mother, who has always been a rather unfortunate woman with no inner fortitude, hangs onto the boy. She does not know what to do and has always been disturbed by every message she receives from Stuttgart. She also did not know whether she had enough money to leave him here. With her, all this insecurity is constitutional. She is quite unstable psychologically. That is clear from the fact that she is now here in an insane asylum. That is something that could have just as easily occurred earlier. She may well return to her earlier situation.

This woman’s entire psychological makeup was transferred from her astral body into the boy’s etheric body. He has absorbed it organically, so that his behavior is a genuine picture of his mother’s psychological situation. In the astral body, it is only an insecurity in making decisions, in not knowing what to do. With him, it results in a desire to show off. Take, for instance, one of the worst cases, when he acted shamelessly in front of a window. His mother’s psychological situation remains in the realm of judgment, so that allowing her soul to be seen in a shameless way is a psychological illness. With the boy, it has gone into physical exhibitionism. Here you can see how heredity actually proceeds. The things that exist in the parents’ souls can be seen in the physical bodies of the next generation. That is something that is known medically.

It is quite clear to me that it is important for us to treat this boy with good intentions until he reaches the age of eighteen or nineteen, when his conscience will speak. First, he needs to properly integrate the part of his I from his previous incarnation that is the basis of his conscience. It is not yet properly integrated, so his conscience does not play the same role as conscience does in others who are further along. He experiments with all kinds of things. People always experiment with their higher self when their lower self does not yet contain what keeps them firm and strong. This will last until he reaches eighteen or nineteen. You need to treat him with good intentions, or you will have it on your own conscience that you allowed him to be corrupted; and what develops in that way will remain corrupted. He is really very talented, but his talent and his moral constitution are not developing at the same rate. Today, he has an organic moral insanity. We need to carry such children past a certain age through our well-intentioned behavior without approving of what they do. Conscious theft was not at all present in the case where they hid some money, and so forth. Keep him in the remedial class; that will be good for him. We should continue to treat him in the same way.

The situation with his mother is much more unpleasant for us as anthroposophists. Her coming to the place she had always dreamed of certainly caused her present situation. She had always dreamed about Stuttgart.

We have other situations that are a result of current events and the effects of German nationalism upon the school. I have already been told about them. I do not feel that this trend began with one boy alone. The question is whether the boys do this just because they have too much time on their hands, or whether they belong to some group. This situation is difficult to understand. You can do something positive here only by undertaking things that would tend to include these boys and girls. Recall for a moment that nationalism does not need to play a very large role at that age. What attracts them is all the fanfare. They have the impression that our Waldorf teachers sit at home on Sundays making long faces down to their waists and meditating and so forth. The preacher is something else, again. “What kind of people are these, anyway?” If we do nothing about that, the problem could increase, under certain circumstances. The impression that the faculty sits on Olympic thrones has spread too far.

You can do something else to counter that. Of course, you don’t need to do everything yourself, but you could support Dr. X. so that the children have something to do. I thought it was a very good idea to carefully choose a number of our younger people from the Society and ask them to undertake some trips with the students. Surely even Waldorf School teachers could learn something from that about what is needed to arrange such things. Otherwise, the perception of your sitting on an Olympic throne will remain. Of course, the first responsibility of the faculty will always be leadership of the school, but you should still do something like that. These nationalistic things could have a far-reaching impact—we might end up with a corps of ruffians. I am not so afraid of the attitude as I am of the children turning into ruffians. If the students know we are together with them, they will not be caught by such things.

This also played a major role in the debates we had in Dornach about founding a youth section. Somehow, we must find a way within the Youth Section to create some kind of counterforce against all these other movements. You need only think about the youth groups within Freemasonry that use nationalistic aspirations everywhere. Here, under the careful guidance of the faculty, we must find a way to bring the youth movement into a healthy whole. Here, everything is still much too individual, too atomized. Our faculty needs to counter the general principle in Stuttgart of never working together, always working separately. A teacher asks about the upcoming final examinations.

Dr. Steiner: The children in the twelfth grade have written that they wish to speak with me. I can do that only when I am here Tuesday for the conference. I would like you to tell the whole class that.

In general, I think the results of the final examination have shown unequivocally that everything we have discussed is still true. It would, of course, have been better had we been able to add a special class and keep the Waldorf School pure of anything foreign to it. Everything we discussed in that regard is still the same and should not be changed. Nevertheless, the statistics seem to indicate that the poor results were due to the fact that the students were unable to solve problems for themselves because they were used to solving them as a group. You know it is very useful to have the children work together, and we have also seen that the class gives a better impression when they speak together than when they speak individually. We were somewhat short on time, but it seems you did not have the students work enough on solving problems alone. They did not understand that properly and were thus shocked by tasks to be solved alone. I have the impression that you overdid what is good about speaking together. For example, if a few were causing some trouble, you quickly changed to having them all speak together. It has become a habit to work only with the class as a whole. You did not make the transition into working with the children individually. That seems to me to be the essence of what was missing. We should have no illusions: The results gave a very unfavorable impression of our school to people outside. We succeeded in bringing only five of the nine students who took the test through, and they just barely succeeded. What will happen now with those who did not take the final examination or who failed it? When I am here on Wednesday, we need to discuss all these things with the twelfth-grade teachers.

A teacher requests some guidelines for the pedagogical conference to be held at Easter in Stuttgart.

Dr. Steiner: The basis of the Vorstand’s decision about the conference was that the conference should express the significance of the Waldorf School within all of modern education and that we should clearly demonstrate the importance of the Waldorf School principle. In other words, you should say here and there why the Waldorf School and its methods are necessary. Such a presentation gives people the opportunity to notice the difference between Waldorf School pedagogy and other reform movements. Another perspective is that we can demonstrate what we have said to the youth movement in our letters to the newsletter.

The second letter to young members says that human beings presently do not do at all well to be born as children. It is really the case that now, when human beings are born as children, they are pushed into an educational method that totally neglects them and requires them to be old. It does not matter whether someone tells me about the content of today’s civilization when I am eighteen or when I am seventy-five. It sounds just the same, whether I hear it at eighteen or at seventy-five. That is either true or not. It can be proven or refuted logically. It is valid or not. You can grow beyond such a situation only after eighteen, so you might need to decide not to come into a child’s body at all, but instead to be born as an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old body. Only then would things work.

An initiate from an earlier time, if born today, could not be an initiate again if he or she had to go through our present-day schools. I discussed that in Dornach in my lectures about the Garibaldi incarnation. He was an initiate, but his earlier initiation could appear only after he became separated from the world, a practical revolutionary. Garibaldi is only one example of how people today cannot express what exists within them. We must give children back their childhood. That is one task of the Waldorf School. Today’s youth are old.

We received a number of replies from young people in Dornach following the announcement of the Youth Section. They were all very honestly meant. The main thing I noticed was how old even the youth in Dornach are. They speak about old things, they cannot be young. They want to be young, but know that only in their subconscious. What has gone into their heads is mostly old. They are so clever, so complete. Young people must be able to be brash, but everything they say is so reasonable, so thought out, not at all spontaneous. I am happiest when spontaneous things happen; they may be unpleasant, but I like them best. What we spoke about at a youth meeting in Dornach a short time ago was so well thought out that it could have been said by professors. I made a joke about something, and they took it seriously. They have put on a cloak of thoughtfulness, which is ill-fitting at every point. You can see that in the way they speak. You feel very much like a child when today’s youth speak.

Regarding such things, you should express the responsibility of the Waldorf School to today’s youth with some enthusiasm at the Easter conference. We should not simply give clever lectures; we need some enthusiasm. We need to have some wisdom about how we speak of the relationship of the Anthroposophical Society to the school so that we do not offend people. We do not want them to say that we have been able to accomplish what we wanted since the beginning of the school, namely, an anthroposophical school. We need to show them that we have extended anthroposophy in order to do the things that are genuinely human. We need to show them that anthroposophy is appropriate for presenting something genuinely human, but we must do that individually. We should not give too strong an impression that we are lecturing about anthroposophy. We should show how we use anthroposophical truth in the school, not lecture abstractly about anthroposophy. That is the perspective we had at the time. The board of directors in Dornach follows such things with great interest. They want to be informed by everyone and to work on everything, but we need to round off some rough edges. The letters in the newsletter will, over time, discuss all aspects of anthroposophy.

The people in Bern are not asking the Waldorf School teachers for detailed lectures at the Easter pedagogical course. What they want are introductory remarks that will lead to discussions as they are usually held.

A teacher asks whether the present two eighth-grade classes should be combined in the ninth grade.

Dr. Steiner: We need a third fifth grade class more than a second ninth-grade class. We could combine them. The children are fourteen or fifteen years old. You should be able to keep them under control. It is difficult to find an appropriate teacher, though I have tried. We can discuss the whole thing later.

A teacher asks whether it would be better pedagogically if the upper grades also had one class teacher for the whole time, like the lower grades.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot do what is necessary simply by having one class teacher, if that teacher does not do what is really necessary. What we need is that everyone concerned with the upper grades wants to do what is necessary. I do not believe it is very important to have a single class teacher. If we all want a better relationship with the children, I do not see why we would need to restrict it.

A teacher asks about a possible summer camp in Transylvania.

Dr. Steiner: That may be possible, but I find it difficult to imagine how. The situation there is quite different. It is very much in the East. You can have some strange experiences there. I went to a lecture in Hermannstadt in the winter of 1888-89. When I arrived in Budapest, I was unable to make my connection. I had to travel via Szegedin and arrived at about two in the afternoon in Mediaš. I was told I would have to remain there for some time. I went into a coffee house in town where you had to scrape the dirt away with a knife. A number of players came in. There was something Vulcan- like and stormy in their astral bodies; they were somehow all tangled together. Everything went on with a great deal of activity and enthusiasm. The room was next to a pigsty and there was a horrible smell. You can get into such situations in that region, so we would have to protect the children from such experiences. Everyone gets bitten by all kinds of insects as well.

There had been some difficulties with Mr. Z., one of the teachers.

Dr. Steiner: I had the impression we should offer Mr. Z. a vacation to give him an opportunity to collect himself. My impression was that he needed some rest. The question now is to what extent we can still keep him in school. If he intensely felt how he is, we might be able to keep him. X. says he is unstable. We really can’t do anything other than send him on a vacation and bring him back again.

Concerning the entire matter, I would like to say that it seems to me that we must direct our attention toward not allowing such things as discussions with the students to develop. Where would we be if we had more discussions where the students can complain about the teachers? We cannot allow that. It was already very bad in the other case, which resulted in our expelling the students. Now, it is coming up again—a few students come and want to discuss things with the teachers. We cannot allow that. Z. does do all these things, but we cannot allow the students to undermine the authority of the teacher. That would result in the students judging the teachers, which is really terrible. Students sitting as judges over the teachers. We have to avoid that. Of course, one teacher yells at them more and another less, one is more creative, another less. However, we really cannot take such discussions seriously, where the students put the teacher before a tribunal. That doesn’t work. Were that to occur, what would happen is what they once proposed, that the teachers no longer give grades, but the students grade the teachers each week. After Easter, we have to see if we can have him work only in the lower grades. There is not much more we can do.

I fear Z. will always fall into such things. He will need to feel that behaving that way does not work, but that will take a longer time. You need to make the situation clear to him and tell him we may have to send him on a permanent vacation. He is a real cross to bear, but on the other hand, he is a good person. He did not find the right connection, and that has happened here also. A time may come when we can no longer keep him in school, but now we need to give him an opportunity to correct his behavior. I fear, though, he will not take it up.

In such cases, there is generally nothing to do but hope the person finds a friend and makes a connection, and that the friend can then help the person out of such childishness. In a certain way, everything he does is rather childish. In spite of his talents, he has remained a child in a certain area. He is at the same stage as the students, and that causes everything else.

His living conditions seem to be horrible, but I do not see the connection between his behavior and his living conditions. Others could have even worse living conditions and still not come up with the idea of doing such things in school. I feel sorry for him. He needs to find a friend, but has not done that. He would then have some support. There is no other way of helping such people. Apparently, he has nowhere to turn. It was perhaps a karmic mistake that he came into the faculty. If he found someone he belongs with, what I said would probably occur. I do not think, however, that there is anyone within the faculty that Z. could befriend. It is, perhaps, something like it was with Hölderlin, but not as bad.

A teacher asks if the school should set up a public first-aid station since bandages and so forth would then be cheaper.

Dr. Steiner: I think we will have to buy those things by the case ourselves. Without doubt, it would be desirable if we had a room where we could take the children. On the other hand, it would not be so desirable if people from outside mixed in with that. There is no real value in that. It is good to have Dr. Kolisko here. The faculty should take care of that. Obviously, this can’t happen a couple of times every day, but with three hundred children, minor things will happen where we need a bandaging room we can sterilize and disinfect. Perhaps something will happen once a week, and it will be sufficient if we have a room. I think it is important that we have a doctor on the faculty, but the more we can close ourselves off from the outer world, the better it is. We should try to obtain bandaging material cheaply.

I had thought that there would be a number of questions. As I already said, we have generally made great progress. In the first year it was apparent that you struggled with the subject matter, but you made progress in all areas. What is important though, is what kind of progress you made and that in the coming years we work more with those ideas that are consistent with and related to the Waldorf School. I believe that progress lies in what the students have learned, as well as what the teachers have slowly discovered about how to treat the students. Everything has progressed, even the pranksters. The pranksters have become strong pranksters, but that doesn’t hurt anything. That is simply a side effect. Many have even become better behaved, more cultivated, more intellectual. That is very good and hurts nothing.

In my opinion, we must put more value upon psychology in the future. We must work with psychology. You should not understand that as abstractly or theoretically as it may appear. That might look as though we wanted to analyze the children. When we become accustomed to understanding the children psychologically, we will slowly find a relationship to them that results purely from our activity. That understanding of the children will not remain as a mere recognition, but will become another relationship if you really try to understand them. There is still much we need to catch up on in creating a proper relationship to the children. We need to be clear that when so much depends upon personal activities, as it does here, an intensive analytical understanding of the children is necessary. Then things that have occurred in the past will no longer happen.

It is difficulty to characterize individual cases, but that is not necessary. We should act psychologically. If you think about that, you will discover what I mean. I don’t so much mean that the children must achieve this or that, but that you ask yourselves what the children can achieve in accordance with their psychological makeup. Always work from the standpoint of the children. You can change individual behavior only if you really try to understand children in their different variations. Each child is interesting.

Miss Lang showed me a prankster, B.N. She had cried terribly, but today she skipped school again. That is interesting, and we will have to study it. I cannot promise she will keep her word. It may last for years. I can imagine that she spent some time with tightrope walkers; that is certainly a reason for being interested in her, isn’t it? If you create expectations about what a child is, you can easily define things. However, you can achieve a genuine psychological understanding of a child only through intense study. One of my thoughts is that we should consider learning to understand the children as one of the main things in the first year. We should never assume they must be one way or another.

There is something else that strongly disturbs me in nearly all classes. We should continually strive to integrate anthroposophy organically in the instruction. That truly enlivens the children’s strengths. Just the way that you, Dr. von Heydebrand, have done in anthropology and you, Dr. Stein, have done in history. That is something that is present intuitively with many of you. You cannot do eurythmy without Anthroposophy. You need to try to bring Anthroposophy into your teaching without teaching anything theoretical.

In my opinion, you include a great deal of Anthroposophy when you attempt, and that is the ideal, to bring what we call rhythm into your work. For instance, when you try to connect what the students learn in music, singing, and eurythmy with handwork. That has an extremely positive effect on the children. I would recommend that you read Karl Bücher’s book Work and Rhythm. We should have this book. All work is based upon musical work, threshing, blacksmithing, plastering. Today, you hardly hear that anymore. But if you had gone out into the country at an earlier time and listened to the threshing, you would have heard the flails swinging in rhythm. I think we can bring that into our work. That is what I mean when I talk about bringing the spirit into it. You will find that principle in Work and Rhythm, even though he states it rather pedantically.

Of course, I am also carrying the question about the end of school, about the closing ceremony. I definitely think it should include a certain amount of festivities. Today is the twenty-third, and I will not be able to attend. I simply cannot be there, though I surely would like to be. We need to begin the summer holidays on time. In my opinion, the teachers have done enough, and they will collapse otherwise. I would really like to be at the closing ceremony. Each teacher should give a short speech. Perhaps Mr. Baumann would be kind enough to take care of the musical part. Perhaps you could write something that could be presented through eurythmy, not a normal eurythmy presentation, but something that represents the close of school. It would be really wonderful if we could do that. Begin with a eurythmy presentation accompanied by music. Then go on into a musical presentation alone and close with eurythmy again. I would suggest your composition be connected with the closing of school. Perhaps Miss Röhrle could do something with two or three of the older girls. Then we must have something, and this is very important to me, that is a kind of speech about life, to let the children go and to receive them again. Something that has a connection with the children’s leaving school and their return.

Someone had written on a blackboard, “The sky is blue, the weather is nice, we want to go for a walk, dear teacher.” Dr. Steiner was rather angry about that.

Dr. Steiner: You haven’t seen that? Sometimes when the weather is too hot, you can let the children go. I don’t think it would be right to close earlier, though. I am not in favor of letting the children go as long as we can keep them here. We let them go earlier than we really should. We can, of course, make it easier for the children, but only when it is too warm. It would almost be better if we kept them and took them some place, but stayed with them. Don’t you think it is better when the children go to kindergarten. The longer we have them, the better it is. In that way, we can have the children who do not yet go to school. Right now we can generally take the children only when they begin elementary school. When the age of imitation ends, then we can begin. It would be nice if we could bring something into the child’s education during the first seven years. We will have to have something for the earlier years, later is less important.

Some people want some temporary school buildings, but I think we should discuss that in detail after school has closed. It is settled in general, but, nevertheless, we need to discuss it. There are some things we need to decide that cannot wait until after school has begun. We must expand the singing class, and we need a teacher for it. There are many other things we need to discuss if we have an additional grade. We must also carefully consider who will take over the first grade. We cannot assume that Stockmeyer’s and Stein’s work will cease. These are all things we need to discuss at an early enough time. For those reasons, I will have to be here when school ends unless something significant hinders that. I will probably need to be away only for four to six days. Today is too early.

How should we handle those children who arrive too late? I had to wait today as I came into the school. Three girls were coming in. They simply went in, not the least disturbed that they were late. The person I was walking with said to me, “It seems quite all right with them that they are late.” So, what do we do with the children who come late?

A teacher: Have them come a quarter of an hour earlier.

Dr. Steiner: Then we run the danger that they don’t come at all. We must avoid under all circumstances giving them a punishment we cannot carry out. We may never place ourselves in a situation where we may have to relent in a disciplinary decision. If we say that a child must come earlier, then we must enforce that. We must order the child to come earlier. The girls today were in the seventh or eighth grade. We lose all control the minute we look away. We will find ourselves on a downward path and will continue to slide. With punishment, we cannot relent. It is better to let it go. Under certain circumstances, it can lead to the opposite of what we want, with the children forming a group among themselves and saying, “Today I come late, tomorrow, you.” I don’t think that would work, because it would make us somewhat laughable. Of course, it’s just laziness. Having the children come earlier is not so good; it would be better if they stayed a quarter of an hour longer. That is something the children do not like.

Have you tried that to see if it works? If a child comes ten minutes late, having him or her stand for a half hour. If they have to stand three times as long, they will certainly think about every minute. Let them stand there uncomfortably. Your boy rubs the back of his head on the wall and amuses himself with all kinds of things. I think that in such cases, when there is some punishment connected with the misbehavior, you can be particularly effective if you allow them to stand in some uncomfortable place. The older children will then be careful that they do not come too late. We could also buy a number of little sheds, and then they will not come too late as a group. They may even get some cramps in their legs. We could have the sheds built in the shop class.

A teacher: What should we do if a teacher comes too late?

Dr. Steiner: Then we will have the children put the teacher in the pen. It is important, though, that we differentiate in such things. I would not punish the children as severely in winter as in summer. The moment the children notice there is some reason for the disciplinary action, they will agree to it. In the winter, we could discipline them less intensively and have them stand only twice as long. We need to stir them up. There are some who are inattentive. The industrious children will hardly come too late.

A teacher asks about the windows.

Dr. Steiner: Sometimes, when you go by, you want to climb in yourself. We will need to put some mesh up, so that they can’t climb in.

Concerning F.R. in the fourth grade.

Dr. Steiner: That is a very difficult case. If he leaves school, that will be a real problem, something not particularly desirable. On the other hand, he should not suffer. We should not serve our school on a silver platter to the school he next attends. There will certainly be teachers there who will happily hear that someone comes to them saying he could not stand it here. Tomorrow, I will take a look to see what we can do. This is a very difficult situation.

Here, we have the question of whether to try a parallel class. Right now, there is hardly anything else we can do other than place him in the previous or the following grade. I definitely do not want him in the previous class, so he would then go in your class in the next higher grade. I don’t think there is any other solution, but that will cause considerable upset with the children. We will need to do it in such a way that it appears to be an exception. We will have to think about how we will handle this. It would be a bad story if people knew we did this for personal reasons. Of course, we also run the danger that the children will say, “Well, he got out, we could also try.” What should we do with such a boy though, if we do not want to send him away? Perhaps I will visit the class tomorrow. He is actually not the problem. That is something he inherited, and it has a continuous effect upon him. It is something in the family. It would be best if we could help him past that hurdle. Perhaps he might even become a really good person. He is certainly enthusiastic about eurythmy and singing, he simply does not want the normal class instruction. He finds it horrible. Then there are other things that people take too seriously. He took five marks, but only in fun. You can reach him, he just needs a certain kind of objective treatment because everything at home is so subjective. We have all tried that. His father is a person like the teacher who says when a child is excited, “I will teach you what being relaxed is, I’ll show you what relaxed is.” That is how his father is.

We cannot allow him to remain in the fourth grade. We would run the danger that he would jump overboard, and that would certainly not be pleasant. I still recall a very horrible situation. At that time, I was at an engineering school.7 The janitor’s son was very ambitious. A teacher who was very hot tempered grabbed him by the scruff and walloped him. The boy left the class. He knew from his father where the cyanide was; he took it and poisoned himself. After that, the teacher became red when someone left the class during the period. (Speaking to Dr. von Heydebrand) I only mention all this because he will be coming to you in the fifth grade. He does not belong in the fourth grade. We made an error there.

Act psychologically! We must study the children’s feelings.

A teacher asks about lace making and embroidery.

A teacher: Should we have school on Peter and Paul’s Day?

Dr. Steiner: We can take the day off. “Peter and Paul is always quite lazy.”

The following was also noted.

Bad teeth, the cause lies in the soul/spirit.

Connection between eurythmy and the formation of teeth.

Handwork. Knitting develops good teeth. The children gain dexterity through knitting.

Notes from the lecture

People who live in abstract concepts and have no particular inclination to engage with spiritual life in its reality very often talk about there being a transitional period here or there when discussing the process of human development. The spiritual researcher cannot be so generous with the words “we live in a transitional period”. Those who really observe spiritual life must know that such times of transition come, and those where the course of development proceeds more evenly. In this sense, we can indeed say that we live in a spiritual transition period. Some of what takes place in it will be the subject of our consideration today.

Every development, whether it be the evolution of the individual between birth and death or the evolution of the planets, always has currents within it; it does not proceed in a straight line. Even in the life of the individual we must distinguish between two currents. In the education of the child you can already find one of these currents. This is described in the booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science' and also in the second part of 'Occult Science, an Outline of the Principles of the Science of the Spirit', which has just been published. Actually, the human being experiences several births. First, the physical birth. Only what we call the physical body is born. Until then, it was enveloped in the physical mother's body. This first state lasts until the age of seven. Until then, he is surrounded by the etheric sheath. Now, until about sexual maturity, the human being also frees himself from this sheath, and then the astral body is born. At the age of twenty-one, the I is born.

If we observe this development, we can say that it takes place in every human being according to certain laws. Certain rules can be followed, which are given in that little book, “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”, and it is beneficial if they are followed. But now we come to what is individual for each person: this is an inner current that runs parallel to the first current. The second current proceeds within the first. This second current includes everything from previous lives, from one's own experiences. The difference between the outer and inner currents of development can be recognized in every person, especially in people with significant character traits.

Petöfi is a Hungarian poet. His fellow countrymen saw something very special in him. His Hungarian identity is expressed in his lyrical poems. You get to know Magyar will, feeling and thinking from them. If you look into this in more detail, you learn that his name was not Petöfi at all, but that his father was Serbian and his mother Croatian. There was nothing Magyar in him. What was not Hungarian built up in him: that was the external development. Then there is the inner development, which reflects what is there from previous lives: Hungarian in essence.

Another example is the German painter Asmus Carstens. He had an overwhelming urge to paint. If you have the opportunity to see the things he created, you will say: These are the things of someone who can't paint at all. But his individuality is in his pictures. He wanted to learn painting from a famous painter, but when the painter went out, he was supposed to operate the coach box. He didn't want that and left. He then went to a wine merchant to learn his trade and had to wash barrels. He then came to Copenhagen. There he was not accepted at the academy because he was too old. He never learned how to paint, had no sense of color, but what he did create has become something significant in art. This is an example of such cases, where there is such a special urge from previous lives, but the outer development is not favorable for it.

We must apply such results of spiritual research in life if we want to approach life correctly, otherwise life could prove that we would have missed something. For example: some individuality enters life. It is predestined to accomplish something. But we fail to educate their bodies properly. In the seventeenth or eighteenth year, when crises occur, it becomes apparent that the coverings are not properly formed: the astral body is not formed with the instincts and desires; the etheric body is not formed with the corresponding skills and habits. Then the outer and inner development do not coincide. In milder cases, people lose their inner balance; but a complete disruption of the soul life can also occur. If something like this happens in the crisis years, it is due to nothing more than the non-harmonization of the various currents.

We must supply the human ego with concepts and understanding for life: habits for the etheric body, concepts for the astral body. What comes over from the previous life must develop freely.

In the great evolution of humanity, we can see how the two currents of development merge. The souls that are now embodied here were previously embodied in the other epochs: in the Greco-Latin, Egyptian, Persian, Indian. The world was different when your souls looked up at the venerable pyramids. If the earth were always the same, then the incarnations would serve no purpose. They make sense because something different occurs each time.

Now it could be that one or two or three lives would not have been properly utilized, for example in the Egyptian-Babylonian period. Then something would have been missed that could never be recovered. Inner development runs like a thread through the outer life, through what we can learn from the outer life. Thus a disharmony can also occur between the outer and inner currents of development. Now one could say: What you are telling us is somewhat distressing; it could be that we have neglected something that we can never make up for. First spiritual science brings us enlightenment, and now we can no longer make up for it. But it is not like that. Until now, people were not at all able to choose and neglect freely and independently. Only now does the time begin when souls can miss something. That is why spiritual science is only coming now, so that people can hear what they can miss, to see how people burden themselves with guilt when they miss something. That is why spiritual science is being proclaimed now, because humanity needs it now.

The human soul with its abilities was not always as it is today. In the past, people had an old, dim clairvoyance. The waking states were not as developed in ancient times as they are today. Objects were surrounded by an ether aura. Between waking and sleeping, people lived in the spiritual worlds and were there among spiritual-divine beings. In those days, people knew that spiritual worlds existed not only from hearsay but from experience. The further back we go, the more we see man in this spiritual world. The gates of this spiritual world then gradually closed on him. One can indicate such points in time quite accurately. A saying goes that nature does not make leaps. This saying is very inaccurate and inappropriate. Where a green leaf becomes a flower, there is a leap, and so it is.

Just as we can indicate the exact point of transition from green leaf to flower, so we can indicate the time when clairvoyance ceased. Of course it happened gradually, but on average it stopped at a certain time. This point in time can be indicated as 3101 BC. At that time people discarded their old clairvoyance. Before that time there was still a dim clairvoyance present, like a memory of an even older clairvoyance. In that early age people really saw clearly into the spiritual world. And there was an even earlier time when people regarded the physical as something highly insignificant. That was the golden age. This was followed by the silver age, in which people also saw into the spiritual worlds. Then came the iron age, in which people had a memory of the old clairvoyance, and then - starting in 3101 - the next age, our age, in which the gates of the spiritual world closed.

Krita Yuga is the first, the golden age; the second, 'Treta Yuga, the silver; the third, Dvapara Yuga, the bronze; the fourth, Kali Yuga, also called the dark age, beginning in the year 3101 BC. Within the dark age, we must find that which could not be anywhere else: 3000 years after the beginning of this age, we find the event of Golgotha.

Humanity could no longer ascend to the gods. Therefore, a god had to descend. This is what happened with the Christ event. The human ego could only live out itself in the Kali Yuga. Therefore, the event of Golgotha had to take place here. The destinies that can be told with earthly words were those of Christ Jesus. When initiates ascended to the spiritual world in the past, it had to be expressed in spiritual words. That is why it is not understood today. Because this God led an earthly life, it was possible to speak of Him in earthly words. That was also a time of transition. This cannot be expressed more clearly than in the words: Change your soul's disposition, for the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near to you. The understanding, the connection with the Kingdom of Heaven, can only be found within oneself. You can no longer find it beyond your earthly self, but heaven has come right up to your self. “Blessed are they who are poor in spirit” also points to this. In the past, the spirit was given to them. Now people have become poor. They can now only find the spirit in their own self.

It is a childish notion to say that Christ or John the Baptist proclaimed a kingdom that was to return after a thousand years. It should only be hinted that we should enter the kingdom through our own self. Such a special time is here again today. It could be that this time would be slept through.

The Latin historian Tacitus does not speak of the Christians as of something significant, but rather as of a new sect. It was said in Rome that in a remote street there was a new sect whose leader was a certain Jesus. How important an aspect can be overlooked! Just as the time of the former transition was important, we are now in a transition period that may not be quite as important, but it is still important. Humanity is acquiring new abilities. These abilities must be applied to increasingly identify the Christ.

In 1899, the Kali Yuga had expired. New powers are developing in people, but not only those that can be gained in occult training, as it is written in “Occult Science”. In the coming decades, some people will say that they see people quite differently. Science will no longer be enough for them. People will gradually see the etheric body. Some people will foresee and predict this and that, connections and so on. This will gradually emerge.

Two things can now happen. Let us assume that anthroposophy had never existed, never said that it could explain something like this. Then people would say: those who see something like this are insane — and would put them in insane asylums. Or anthroposophy is lucky and finds its way into people's hearts. So we have two developmental currents again: These abilities, just described, develop in the outer human current; but our individuality must grow into these abilities. The human ego must learn to understand what it actually is that is developing.

It is not at all necessary that what is now being proclaimed by anthroposophy as prophecy should also be believed and heeded. And if it does not come to what was prophesied, then people would say: You see, it was just a fantasy. — 'But, only those people do not understand it, the development went as it should not have gone. Humanity would wither and freeze.

The Christ has only once lived in a physical body. When people in the pre-Christian era were able to see into the spiritual worlds, they were told: There is something else, a spiritual, that is not yet visible today, but a time will come when this will be seen, and then a time will come when this great spirit will live in the physical body. A person who knew about this lived in Palestine, but he did not recognize the Christ. Yet when he clairvoyantly recognized the Christ in the etheric body, he recognized that what he had known was to come had been fulfilled. Then he knew that the Christ had lived. That was the event of Damascus.

In his etheric body, the Christ can always be found by the clairvoyant consciousness. When this further development of humanity occurs, people will experience the event of Damascus. The abilities occur with the expiration of the Kali Yuga. And the ability to experience the event of Damascus occurs in the years 1930 to 1940. And if one does not go past this point in time blindly, then one will be able to speak of a coming to Christ. That is what is called in the occult schools: the return of Christ. Then an age will come that will last 2500 years. More and more people will live their way up to the Christ through the anthroposophical view. In the first half of the 20th century, the return of Christ will be able to occur. Deepened and further developed, Christianity will become that.

We may say today what was said then: Change your soul's disposition so that you may find the Kingdom of Heaven, which is drawing near! Care must be taken that this time does not pass unrecognized.

It will also work through Christ for those who pass through physical death between now and then. Those who die around 1920 will be able to understand in devachan what is happening here at that time, but only if they have acquired an understanding of it in their earthly life and have prepared themselves for it.

What has now been said will be said even more often in the next ten years, so that time will not pass unused. It must also be heard by those who are so steeped in materialism that they can only think that Christ can only reappear in a physical body. False messiahs will arise around the middle of the twentieth century who will tell people that they are Christ. And true anthroposophy will know that they are not, that only materialistic ideas are at play. So it is important for anthroposophists to know that spiritual life must be there.

We live in an important transitional epoch, we can say. Times are running fast. The Kali Yuga lasted 5000 years. The next epoch will last 2500 years.

The coming together with the Christ is what is now imminent. The Christ will not descend to humanity, but humanity will ascend to the Christ.

1909 was the year when Rudolf Steiner published Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and completed An Outline of Occult Science, the sequel to his important book Theosophy, which had appeared in 1904. These three works, along with the earlier The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894), contain the nucleus of Steiner's anthroposophical thought.

The eleven lectures translated in this book were also given in 1909 and have been taken from the first half of a volume of lectures published in German under the title Das Prinzip der spirituellen Ökonomie im Zusammenhang mit Wiederverkörperungsfragen. Ein Aspekt der geistigen Führung der Menschheit (Rudolf Steiner Verlag: Dornach, Switzerland, 1979). The titles of this German volume and its component lectures are not by Rudolf Steiner but were assigned later on the basis of expressions used by him. Inasmuch as individual lectures in the German language have been published individually, their titles go back to the Complete Edition (CE) of Steiner's works begun by Marie Steiner. Steiner himself first spoke about the “principle of spiritual economy” in Berlin in 1908 when he was already working on his book An Outline of Occult Science.

The theme “spiritual economy” is directly related to Steiner's investigations about “the spiritual guidance of human beings and humanity” and later lectures dealing with karma. The eleven lectures translated in this book and the ten lectures translated and published under the title Esoteric Rosicrucianism (Anthroposophic Press: Spring Valley, N.Y., 1978) occupy a special place in Rudolf Steiner's work because the aspect stressed in the two volumes is not presented in this fashion elsewhere in the Complete Edition.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded as a separate organization in 1912, but Steiner did not actively guide it until 1923, two years before his death. At the time when the following lectures were given, Rudolf Steiner was still General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society and was using the terms “theosophy” and “theosophical,” but always in the sense of the anthroposophical spiritual science presented by him from the beginning. He suggested later that these designations be replaced by “anthroposophy,” “spiritual science,” “ anthroposophical,” or “spiritual scientific.”

As the excerpt from his autobiography printed at the end of this book indicates, Rudolf Steiner directed his lectures largely to individuals who were somewhat familiar with the rudiments of anthroposphical teachings and who joined him in the struggle and labor. Then, as he listened “to the pulsations in the soul-life of the members,” the form of a lecture began to emerge. This process—admirable in itself—is problematic for the translator of Steiner's lectures because the style, syntax, and choice of words were intended to involve the souls of a listening, and not a reading, audience in a process of discovery.

Another problem facing the translator is the fact that most of the lectures collected were originally transcribed from Steiner's shorthand notes by different individuals and that the quality or completeness of these transcriptions differs considerably. Most can be considered nearly literal transcriptions of the spoken word, but in this book there seems to be gaps in the fourth, fifth, and ninth lectures. The reader should take into consideration that these three lectures were extracted from lecture cycles whose transcription was of insufficient quality to warrant their publication as a whole. The three seemingly incomplete lectures mentioned above were included in the present collection because they contain important details relevant to the subject matter and are not mentioned in other lectures. Finally, although the sixth lecture, given at the dedication ceremony of the Francis of Assisi Branch, seems repetitive and somewhat tedious, it too offers insights that add to the understanding of the theme.

Given these special circumstances I have tried to grasp the connotative quality of words, phrases, and sentences as Steiner used them in his probing, searching manner and render them in an English form that is simultaneously comprehensible and suggestive to a modern American speaker. Ultimately, however, such an attempt must not be considered more than an approximation of the author's original sense and a confirmation of Wilhelm von Humbolt's dictum that “all understanding is also a misunderstanding.”

The translation of some words in this book may require an explanation. Throughout the eleven lectures I have endeavored to translate the German word Mensch, which has a masculine grammatical gender, not with “man” and in the plural with “men,” but with “human being,” choosing “human beings” when the repeated use of the reflexive pronouns “himself” and “herself” would seem awkward. I employed this practice in deference to modern female readers and because I wanted to dispel even the slightest hint of a mistaken notion arising from the use of “man” or “men” that human evolution and the reincarnation of the human soul applies primarily to males. One of the few exceptions to this practice is the rendering of Geistesmensch or Geistmensch as “spirit man,” because “spirit human being” would sound awkward.

I capitalized Spiritual Science, an approximation of the German word Geisteswissenschaft, because I wanted to give the term greater prominence in a text that abounds with words related to spirit and because I consider it a proper noun that designates systematic anthroposophical thought and spiritual activity. At no place in the lectures does Rudolf Steiner use the word Geisteswissenschaft in its more widely known academic meaning of “humanities” or “liberal arts.”

Furthermore, I rendered Ätherleib as “etheric body,” rather than the “ether body” preferred by some translators because the word “ether” may conjure up distracting connotations in the minds of some and also because adjectival consistency of the term with the related concepts “physical” and “astral” (body) seemed to be desirable. On the other hand, I was reluctant to, but finally did, choose “ego” for German Ich, which in English can mean “I” or “self.” Steiner once described the ego as “that which says ‘I’ to itself,” but once, in the first lecture of the present book, he uses both Ich and “ego” to designate the same entity in different physical bodies. I felt that even though the current use of “ego" in psychology and popular speech can conjure up imprecise and misleading feelings, it is nevertheless a term to which many modern American readers ascribe a soul quality. Whenever Steiner uses the word Ich, which I have rendered in these lectures with “ego,” it should be understood to mean the fourth body or principle with which the human being has been endowed—the other three being the physical, the etheric, and the astral bodies.

The few footnotes that were deemed necessary to provide some background information to the reader not familiar with certain historical personalities or contexts have been placed at the end of the book. Although I am sympathetic to the argument that the constant flipping of pages in search of a footnote can be distracting, I felt that the overriding concern should be that the reader gets a sense of the uninterrupted flow of thoughts with which Rudolf Steiner managed to involve his audience in the substance and dynamics of his presentations.

The lectures presented in this book touch on the very core of Rudolf Steiner's teachings and visions, according to which four basic facts govern human evolution from prehistoric times to the present. First, humanity has evolved as a result of the dialectics between forces and counterforces in the spiritual world. Second, earthly lives are repeated in a variety of spiritual ways, and valuable components are preserved for later use. Third, evolutionary forces have changed human consciousness, and new soul qualities are developed at certain intervals. Finally, the Mystery of Golgotha is the centerpiece of human evolution, but the influence of Christ-Impulse was manifest long before the birth of Jesus and can be observed in individualities such as Buddha, Zarathustra, and Moses.

Anthroposophy is not a religion—it goes beyond that—but its totality is subsumed under Rudolf Steiner's Christology. The reader will encounter recurring questions in these lectures—sometimes in a fresh combination, sometimes in a slightly different context, always thought provoking. For example, What is Spiritual Science and what can it do for us? What is human thought from a spiritual scientific point of view? How can it be that the Event at Golgotha is the centerpiece of all human evolution? Who was the Christ from an anthroposphical perspective, and how did the Christ-Impulse evolve? Why do the teachings of Zarathustra and Buddha constitute a transition in human consciousness and what, from an anthroposophical perspective, is the fundamental difference between the Buddhist and the Christian interpretation of life? How has the etheric body of Shem been preserved in all the Hebrew people? In what way does spiritual economy provide for certain etheric and astral bodies to remain active for the benefit of humanity, and what is the function of an avatar? Finally, why are we in the modern era, destined to undergo the complete unfolding of the ego?

It was Steiner's firm belief that his listeners or readers should never follow the teachings of anthroposophy blindly, but that they would have to struggle to find answers and new questions about the origin and the destiny of humanity. The seriousness of such a struggle gradually gives comfort to the human soul, and it is hoped that reading these lectures will have the same effect.

Peter Mollenhauer
Southern Methodist University

[ 1 ] Whoever would form a just estimate of Anthroposophy and the relation it bears to the evolution of the Spiritual soul, must look ever and again at the particular constitution of mind among civilized humanity, which began with the rise of the natural sciences and reached its culmination in the nineteenth century.

[ 2 ] Let him but place the peculiar character of this age before his soul's eye, and compare it with that of earlier ages. At all times during mankind's conscious evolution, Knowledge was regarded as being that which brings Man together with the world of Spirit. Whatever a man was in relation to the Spirit, that he ascribed to Knowledge. In Art, as in Religion, Knowledge lived.

[ 3 ] A change came with the first dawning gleams of the Age of Consciousness. Knowledge now began no more to concern itself with a great part of human soul-life. It was bent upon investigating the kind of relation which Man develops towards external existence when he directs his senses and his reasoning mind on to the world of ‘Nature.’ But it refused any longer to concern itself with the relations which Man develops towards the Spirit-world when he makes the same use of his inner faculties of perception as he does of his outer senses.

[ 4 ] Thus it came about of necessity that the spiritual life of Man became linked, not with the Knowing of the present age, but with the Knowledge of past ages—with Tradition.

[ 5 ] A split came into Man's soul-life; it fell into two. Before him was Nature-knowledge on the one side, striving ever further and further afield, unfolding its powers in the actual and living present. On the other side was the inner life, with its feeling-experience of a relation to the Spirit-world that once, in olden times, had been fed from a corresponding fount of knowledge. From this feeling-experience there gradually faded away all understanding as to how, in olden times, the corresponding knowledge had come about. Men possessed the tradition, but no longer the way by which the truths handed down by tradition had been known. They could only believe in the tradition.

[ 6 ] Anyone who considered the spiritual situation with a perfectly calm and luminous mind, about the middle of the nineteenth century, could not but have said to himself: “Humanity has reached a point when the only knowledge which it still thinks itself capable of developing has nothing to do with the spirit. Whatever it is possible to know about the spirit, mankind in former times was able to discover to-day the capacity for such discovery has gone from the human soul.”

[ 7 ] In all its force and bearings, however, people did not place the situation thus clearly before the mind's eye. They confined themselves to saying, “Knowledge simply does not reach to the spiritual world; the spiritual world can only be an object of Faith.”

[ 8 ] It may shed some light on the matter, if we look back into the times when Grecian wisdom was forced to yield place to the Christianized Roman world. When the last schools of Greek Philosophy were closed by the Roman emperor, the last treasures too of ancient spiritual learnings wandered away from the soil on which henceforth the European spirit developed its life and thought. They found connection with the Academy of Gondi Shapur, in Asia. This was one of the places where, owing to the deeds of Alexander, the tradition of the ancient learning had remained preserved in the East. In the form which Aristotle had been able to give it, this ancient learning was still living there.

[ 9 ] It was caught however in the tide of that eastern stream which one may name Arabism. Arabism is, in one aspect of its character, a premature development of the Spiritual Soul. Through a soul-life working prematurely in the direction of the Spiritual Soul, Arabism afforded the opportunity for a spiritual wave to pour itself from Asia through this channel over Africa, Southern Europe, Western Europe,—and so to fill certain members of European humanity with an intellectualism which ought only to have come later. Southern and Western Europe received, in the seventh and eighth centuries, spiritual impulses which should really not have come until the age of the Spiritual Soul.

[ 10 ] This spiritual wave could awaken the intellectual life in Man, but not that deeper level of experience by which the soul enters into the spiritual world.

[ 11 ] And so, when Man was exercising his faculties of knowledge in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, he could only go down to a depth of soul not deep enough for him to light upon the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] The Arabism by which European spiritual life was invaded kept human souls in their life of Knowledge back from the spiritual world. Prematurely, it brought into action that intellect which can only take hold of external Nature.

[ 13 ] And this Arabism proved very powerful. Upon whomsoever it laid its grasp, an inward and for the most part all-unconscious arrogance began to take hold of this person's soul. He felt the power of intellectualism, but did not feel the inability of the mere intellect to penetrate into reality. So he abandoned himself to that external reality which comes of its own accord to men and works upon their senses. He never thought of taking any step towards the spiritual reality.

[ 14 ] This was the situation with which the spiritual life of the Middle Ages was faced. It had inherited the mighty traditions of the spirit-world; but all its soul-life was so steeped in intellectualism through—one might say—the covert influence of Arabism, that knowledge found no access to the sources whence the inherited traditions, after all, drew their substance.

[ 15 ] Thenceforth, from the early Middle Ages on, there was a constant struggle between what was instinctively felt in men's minds as a link with the Spirit, and the form which Thought had assumed under Arabism.

[ 16 ] Men felt within them the world of ideas. To their inner life it was an immediate reality. But they could not find in their souls the power to experience, within the Ideas, the living Spirit.

Thus arose the Realist philosophy, which felt a reality in the Ideas, but could not find this reality. This Realist philosophy heard in the Idea-world the speech of the Cosmic Word, but was not able to understand its language.

[ 17 ] The Nominalist philosophy, on the other hand, contended that since the speech was not understandable it was not there at all. For Nominalism, the world of Ideas was only a collection of formulae in the human soul, without root in any spiritual reality.

[ 18 ] What was here surging in these two opposing currents, lived on into the nineteenth century. Nominalism became the scientific school of thought, for the knowledge of the natural world. From external data of the sense-world it built up a grand conceptual structure, but it reduced to nothing all insight into the inner being of the world of Ideas. ‘Realism’ lived a dead existence. It knew of the reality of the world of Ideas, but could not attain to it in living and perceptive knowledge.

[ 19 ] Men will however attain to it when Anthroposophy finds the way to a living experience of the Spirit in the Ideas. Side by side with the Nominalism of the natural sciences must stand a Realism truly advanced and developed, bringing a way of knowledge which shows that the knowledge of spiritual things has not died out in mankind, but can rise anew from new-opened sources in the human soul, and flow once more through human evolution.

Leading Thoughts

[ 20 ] Anyone who turns the eyes of his soul upon the course of human evolution in the age of Natural Science, is met at first sight by a gloomy prospect. Splendid is the growth of Man's knowledge in respect to all things of the external world. But there comes over him, in return, a peculiar form of consciousness, as though a knowledge of the spiritual world had ceased to be possible at all.

[ 21 ] It seems as though such Knowledge could only have been possessed by men in olden times, and as though with regard to the spiritual world people must simply remain content to accept the old traditions and make them an object of Belief.

[ 22 ] From the resulting uncertainty during the Middle Ages concerning Man's relation to the spiritual world, there arose on the one hand a disbelief in the real spirit-content of Ideas—represented by Nominalism, of which the modern scientific view of Nature is a continuation—and on the other hand, as a knowledge of the reality of Ideas, Realism, which, however can only find its fulfillment in Anthroposophy.

[ 1 ] To gain a true appreciation of Anthroposophy in relation to the development of the Spiritual Soul, we must turn our gaze again and again to the particular mental condition of civilised mankind which began with the blossoming forth of the Natural Sciences and reached its climax in the nineteenth century.

[ 2 ] One should place the character of this age vividly before the soul's eye, comparing it with that of preceding ages. In all ages of the conscious evolution of mankind, Knowledge was regarded as that which brings man to the world of Spirit. To Knowledge, man ascribed whatever relationship to Spirit he possessed. Art and Religion were none other than the living life of Knowledge.

[ 3 ] All this became different when the age of the Spiritual Soul began to dawn. With a very great part of the life of the human soul, Knowledge now concerned itself no more. Henceforth, it sought to investigate that relation to existence which man unfolds when he directs his senses and his intellectual judgement to the world of ‘Nature.’ It no longer wanted to concern itself with that which man unfolds as a relation to the world of Spirit, when he uses—not his outer senses—but his inner power of perception.

[ 4 ] Thus there arose the necessity to connect the spiritual life of man, not with any living present Knowledge, but with Knowledge gained in the past—with Tradition.

[ 5 ] The life of the human soul was rent in twain. On the one hand there stood before man the new science of Nature, striving ever onward and unfolding in the living present. On the other side there was the experience of a relation to the spiritual world, for which the corresponding Knowledge had arisen in the ages past. All understanding of how the Knowledge, corresponding to this side of human experience, had been gained in ages past, was gradually lost. Men possessed the Tradition, but they had lost the way by which the truths of Tradition had been known—discovered. All they could do now was to believe in the Tradition.

[ 6 ] A man who had consciously reflected on the spiritual situation, say about the middle of the nineteenth century, would have been bound to admit: mankind has come to a point where it no longer feels itself capable of evolving any Knowledge, beyond that science which does not concern itself with the Spirit. Whatever can be known about the Spirit, a humanity of earlier ages was able to investigate and discover, but the human soul has lost the faculty for such discovery.

[ 7 ] But men did not place before themselves the full bearing of what was taking place. They were content to say: Knowledge simply does not reach out into the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be an object of Faith.

[ 8 ] To gain some light upon these facts of modern history, let us look back into the time when the old Grecian wisdom had to retreat before the power of Rome, when Rome had accepted Christianity. When the last Greek Schools of the Philosophers were closed by the Roman Emperor, the last custodians of the ancient Knowledge too departed from the regions in which European spiritual life was henceforth to evolve. They found a haven in the Academy of Gondishapur in Asia, to which they now became attached. This was one of the centres of learning in the East where through the deeds of Alexander the tradition of the ancient Knowledge had been preserved.

[ 9 ] The ancient Knowledge was living on there in the form which Aristotle had been able to give to it. But in the Academy of Gondishapur it was also taken hold of by that Oriental spiritual stream which we may describe as Arabism. Arabism in one aspect of its nature, is a premature unfolding of the Spiritual Soul. Through the soul-life working prematurely in the direction of the Spiritual Soul, the possibility was given in Arabism for a spiritual wave to go forth, extending over Africa to southern and western Europe, and filling certain of the men of Europe with an intellectualism that should not properly have come until a later stage. In the seventh and eighth centuries, southern and western Europe received spiritual impulses which ought to have come only in the age of the Spiritual Soul.

[ 10 ] This spiritual wave was able to awaken the intellectual life in man, but not the deeper founts of experience whereby the soul penetrates into the world of Spirit.

[ 11 ] And now, when in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries man exercised his faculty of Knowledge, he could but reach down to those levels of the soul where he did not yet impinge upon the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] Arabism, entering into the spiritual life of Europe, held back the souls of men, in Knowledge, from the Spirit-world. Prematurely it brought that intellect into activity which was only able to apprehend the outer world of Nature.

[ 13 ] This Arabism proved very powerful indeed. Whosoever was taken hold of by it, was seized by an inward—though for the most part quite unconscious—pride. He felt the power of intellectualism, but not the impotence of intellect by itself to penetrate into Reality. Thus he gave himself up to the externally given Reality of the senses, which places itself before the human being of its own accord. And it did not even occur to him to approach the spiritual Reality.

[ 14 ] The spiritual life of the Middle Ages found itself face to face with this position. It possessed the sublime Traditions about the spiritual world. But the soul-life was intellectually so impregnated by the hidden influence of Arabism, that medieval Knowledge found no access to the sources from which the contents of the great Tradition had after all proceeded.

[ 15 ] Thus from the early Middle Ages onwards, that which men felt instinctively within them as a connection with the Spirit, was battling with Thought in the form that this had assumed under Arabism.

[ 16 ] Man felt the world of Ideas within him; he experienced it as something real. But he could not find the power in his soul to experience, in the Ideas, the Spirit. Thus arose Realism, feeling the reality in the Ideas and yet unable to discover it. In the world of the Ideas, Realism heard the speaking of the Cosmic Word, but it could not understand the speech. [ 17 ] And Nominalism in opposition to it, seeing that the speech could not be understood, denied that there was any speech at all. For Nominalism, the world of Ideas was but a multitude of formulae within the human soul-rooted in no Reality of Spirit.

[ 18 ] What lived and surged in these two currents, worked on into the nineteenth century. Nominalism became the mode of thought of Natural Science, which built up an imposing conceptual system of the outer world of sense, but destroyed the last relics of insight into the nature of the world of Ideas. Realism lived a dead existence. It knew still of the reality of the world of Ideas, but had no living Knowledge with which to reach it.

[ 19 ] But man will reach it when Anthroposophy finds the way from the Ideas to the living experience of Spirit in the Ideas. In Realism truly carried forward, there will arise—side by side with the Nominalism of Natural Science—a path of Knowledge which will prove that the science of the Spiritual, far from being, extinguished in mankind, can enter into human evolution once again, springing forth from newly-opened sources in the soul of man.

(March, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with regard to the foregoing study: The apparent Extinction of Spirit-Knowledge in Modern Time)

[ 20 ] 177. Looking with the eye of the soul upon the evolution of mankind in the Age of Science, a sorrowful perspective opens up before us to begin with. Splendid grew the knowledge of mankind with respect to all that constitutes the outer world. On the other hand there arose a feeling as though a knowledge of the spiritual world were no longer possible at all.

[ 21 ] 178. It seems as though such knowledge had only been possessed by men of ancient times, and man must now rest content—in all that concerns the spiritual world—simply to receive the old traditions, making these an object of Faith.

[ 22 ] 179. From the resulting uncertainty, arising in the Middle Ages as to man's relation to the spiritual world, Nominalism and Realism proceeded. Nominalism is unbelief in the real Spirit-content of man's Ideas; we have its continuation in the modern scientific view of Nature. Realism is well aware of the reality of the Ideas, yet it can only find its fulfilment in Anthroposophy.

[ 1 ] The decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the appearance on the scene of peoples from the East—the great migrations—are a phenomenon of history to which the attention of true research must again and again be turned. For the present day still contains many an after-effect of these catastrophic happenings.

[ 2 ] A true understanding of these events is impossible to merely exoteric history. For we must look into the souls of the human beings who took part in these migrations and witnessed the downfall of the Roman Empire.

[ 3 ] Ancient Greece and Rome flourished in the epoch of human evolution when the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was unfolding. Indeed the Greeks and Romans were most essentially the bearers of this unfolding process. But in the Greek and Roman peoples the evolving of this stage of the soul did not contain the seed from out of which the Spiritual Soul could truly have developed. All the contents of soul and spirit, latent in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, blossomed forth luxuriantly in the life of ancient Greece and Rome. But Greece and Rome were unable, out of their own inherent powers, to pass on to the new stage of the Spiritual Soul.

[ 4 ] The stage of the Spiritual Soul did, of course, appear none the less. But the Spiritual Soul was as something implanted from without into the character of the Greek or Roman—something that did really not proceed out of the personality.

[ 5 ] The connection with and severance from the Divine Spiritual Beings, of which we have said so much in these studies, takes place with varying intensity in the course of succeeding ages. In olden times, it was a power entering into human evolution with the impulse of a mighty living process. In the Greek and Roman experience of the first Christian centuries it was a feebler power—but it still existed. While he was unfolding the fullness of the Intellectual or Mind Soul within him, the Greek or Roman felt—unconsciously, but with no less deep a meaning for his soul—a loosening or severance from the Divine-Spiritual nature and a growing independence of the human. But this ceased in the first Christian centuries. The early dawn of the Spiritual Soul was felt as a renewed union, a closer connection with the Divine-Spiritual. Men evolved back again, from a greater to a lesser degree of independence of soul. Nor could they receive the Christian content into the human Spiritual Soul, for they were unable to receive the Spiritual Soul itself into their human being.

[ 6 ] Thus they came to regard the Christian content as something given to them from outside—from the spiritual outer world—not as something with which they could become united through their own faculties of Knowledge.

[ 7 ] But it was different with the peoples coming from the North-East, who now entered on the scene of history. They had passed through the stage of the Intellectual or Mind Soul in a condition which, to them, conveyed a feeling of dependence on the spiritual world. They only began to feel something of human independence when, with the beginnings of Christianity, the earliest forces of the Spiritual Soul were dawning.

In them the Spiritual Soul appeared as something deeply bound up with the human being. They felt a glad sense of unfolding force within them when the Spiritual Soul was stirring into life.

[ 8 ] It was into this new-springing life of the dawning Spiritual Soul that the Christian content entered in these peoples. They felt the Christian content as something springing to life within their souls, not as something given from outside.

[ 9 ] Such was the mood in which these peoples approached the Roman Empire and all that was connected with it. Such was the mood of Arianism in contrast to Athanasianism. It was a deep inner conflict in world-historical evolution.

[ 10] In the Spiritual Soul of the Greek and Roman, external as it was to man, there worked, to begin with, the Divine Spiritual essence, not uniting fully with the earthly life, but raying into it from without. And in the Spiritual Soul of the Franks, the Germanic tribes, etc., which was only just dawning into life, such of the Divine-Spiritual as was able to unite with mankind worked as yet but feebly.

[ 11 ] To begin with, the Christian content living in the Spiritual Soul that hovered over man grew and expanded in outer life. On the other hand, that Christian content which was united with the human soul, remained as an inner urge, an impulse within the human being waiting for future development—for a development which can only take place when a certain stage has been attained in the unfolding of the Spiritual Soul.

[ 12 ] In the time from the first Christian centuries until the evolutionary epoch of the Spiritual Soul, the dominant spiritual life was a Spirit-content hovering above mankind—a content with which man was quite unable to unite himself in Knowledge. He therefore united with it in an outward way. He ‘explained’ it, and pondered on the question: how, and why, and to what degree the faculties of the soul were insufficient to bring about the full union with it in Knowledge. Thus he distinguished the realm into which Knowledge can penetrate, from that into which it cannot. It became the proper thing to renounce the exercise of those faculties of soul which rise with Knowledge into the spiritual world. And at length the time approached—the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—in which the forces of the soul that inclined towards the Spirit were diverted from the Spiritual altogether, so far as active Knowledge was concerned. Men began to live their conscious life in those forces of the soul only, which are directed to the sense-perceptible.

[ 13 ] Blunt indeed became the powers of Knowledge for spiritual things—most of all in the eighteenth century.

[ 14 ] The thinkers of humanity now lost the spiritual content from their Ideas. In the Idealism of the first half of the nineteenth century, the Spirit-empty Ideas themselves are represented as the creative substance of the world. Thus Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Or again, they point to a Supersensible which vanishes into thin air because it is bereft of Spirit. Thus Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and others. The Ideas are dead when they no longer seek the living Spirit.

[ 15 ] There is no escaping the fact, lost was the sense of spiritual vision for the things of the Spirit. [ 16 ] A ‘continuation’ of the old life of spiritual Knowledge is impossible. With the Spiritual Soul unfolding within him, man's faculties of soul must strive onward to reach their new union with the Spirit-world, a union elementary, immediate and living. Anthroposophy would fain be such a striving.

[ 17 ] In the spiritual life of this age, it is just the leading personalities who to begin with do not know what Anthroposophy intends. Wide circles of people who follow in their wake are thereby kept away from Anthroposophy. The leading people of today live in a soul-content which in the course of time has grown altogether unaccustomed to use the spiritual forces. For them, it is as though one would call upon a man having an organ paralysed, to use it. Paralysed were the higher faculties of Knowledge from the sixteenth into the latter half of the nineteenth century. And mankind remained utterly unconscious of the fact; indeed, the one-sided application of Knowledge-powers directed to the outer world of sense was regarded as a sign of special progress.

(March, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with reference to the foregoing study: Historic Cataclysms at the Dawn of the Spiritual Soul)

[ 18 ] 180. The Greeks and Romans were the peoples predestined by their very nature for the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. They developed this stage of the soul to perfection. But they did not bear within them the seeds of a direct, unbroken progress to the Spiritual Soul. Their soul-life went under in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul.

[ 19 ] 181. In the time from the origin of Christianity until the age of the unfolding of the Spiritual Soul, a world of the Spirit was holding sway which did not unite with the forces of the human soul. The latter contrived to ‘explain’ the world of the Spirit, but they could not experience it in living consciousness.

[ 20 ] 182. The peoples advancing from the North-East in the great migrations, encroaching on the Roman Empire, took hold of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul more in the inner life of feeling. Meanwhile, imbedded in this element of feeling, the Spiritual Soul was evolving within their souls. The inner life of these peoples was waiting for the present time, when the re-union of the soul with the world of the Spirit is fully possible once more.

If ever a difficult book was worth every minute of effort it requires, this is it—all of it, not just the parts already published as The Case For Anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner's own words, spoken in Dornach on February 4,1923 shortly after the burning of the first Goetheanum, set the tone:

In the first essay of my book Riddles of the Soul, I reiterate that a person bound to contemporary civilization believes that we confront all kinds of insurmountable limits to our ability to know. Such a person feels relief at this. His relief, however, only indicates a desire not to wake up. He wants to remain asleep. But anyone who in a modem sense wants to enter the spiritual world must begin to grapple with inner soul tasks at precisely the spot where the other person sets limits to knowledge. And as he begins to grapple with the ideas arising at this borderland, there opens up for him gradually, in stages, a view of the spiritual world. One must in fact take what anthroposophy offers in the way it is meant.

Take this first essay of Riddles of the Soul. Its content may be imperfectly expressed, but one can certainly discover in it the intention with which it was written! Its purpose is to awaken the realization: If I stop where modern civilization stops, then the world is actually boarded up for me. From natural science I try to go further. There come the barriers. There the world is boarded up for me.

The content of this first essay of Riddles of the Soul is an effort to knock away those boards with spades. When we feel that we are working with spades to knock away the planks that have boarded up the world for centuries, when we consider the words to be spades, then we arrive at the soul-spiritual realm.

Most people have the unconscious feeling that an essay like the first one in Riddles of the Soul is written with a pen from which ink flows. But it is not written with a pen. It is written with soul spades, which want to rip away the planks that board up the world, i.e., which want to clear away the limitations of natural science, but want to do so with inner work of the soul. The reader must participate in this activation of the soul, however, when reading an essay such as this.

In addendum 6 on page 131 of this book, Rudolf Steiner describes for the first time his thirty-year-long work in relating the three soul forces of thinking, feeling, and willing to the three systems of the body: the nervous, rhythmical, and metabolic. In the same section we are shown why he believed the theoretical division into sensory and motor nerves to be so harmful.

The essay on Max Dessoir challenges us to experience the subtlety and exactitude required of a spiritually striving modem person. As Rudolf Steiner states on page 54, “the thorough permeating of concepts with consciousness is necessary if these concepts are to have a relation to the genuine spiritual world.”

W.L.

Born in Austria in 1861, Rudolf Steiner received recognition as a scholar when he was invited to edit the Kürschner edition of the natural scientific writings of Goethe. In 1891 Steiner received his Ph.D. at the University of Rostock. He then began his work as a lecturer. From the turn of the century until his death in 1925, he delivered well over 6000 lectures on the Science of Spirit, or Anthroposophy.

The lectures of Rudolf Steiner dealt with such fundamental matters as the being of man, the nature and purpose of freedom, the meaning of evolution, man's relation to nature, and the life after death and before birth. On these and similar subjects, Steiner had unexpectedly new, inspiring and thought-provoking things to say. Through a study of the transcripts of lectures like those contained in this book, one can come to a clear, reasonable, comprehensive understanding of the human being and his place in the universe.

In all his years of writing and lecturing, Steiner made no appeal to emotionalism or sectarianism in his readers or hearers. His profound respect for the freedom of every man shines through everything he produced. The slightest compulsion or persuasion he considered an affront to the dignity and ability of the human being. Therefore he confined himself to objective statements in his writing and speaking, leaving his readers and hearers entirely free to reject or accept his words. He addressed the healthy, sound judgment and good will in each person, confident of the response in those who come to meet his ideas with the willingness to understand them.

Among the many activities springing from the work of Rudolf Steiner are the Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening Association which aims at improved nutrition resulting from methods of agriculture outlined by Rudolf Steiner; the art of Eurythmy, created and described by him as “visible speech and visible song;” the medical and pharmaceutical work carried out by the Clinical and Therapeutical Institute of Arlesheim, Switzerland, with related institutions in other countries; the Homes for the education and care of mentally retarded children; and new directions for work in such fields as Mathematics, Physics, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, Drama, Speech Formation, Social Studies, Astronomy, Economics and Psychology.

The success of Rudolf Steiner Education (sometimes referred to as Waldorf Education) has proven the correctness of Steiner's concept of the way to prepare the child for his or her eventual role as a resourceful, creative, responsible member of modern adult society.

The transcripts of Rudolf Steiner's many lectures on a wide variety of subjects are a storehouse of spiritual knowledge as it can become fruitful in many fields of modern life. However, Steiner himself stressed that his lectures were not intended for print, and are not a substitute for what he expressed in his written works on the Science of Spirit or Anthroposophy. Therefore, if the reader finds the following lectures of interest, or if they arouse questions and points upon which he wishes further clarification, he is certain to find the latter in the fundamental books included in the series of Major Writings of Rudolf Steiner listed at the end of the present volume.

The Publishers