The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In these two lectures I should like to speak to you from the point of view of Spiritual Research, on the question so frequently and urgently put: “What is the meaning of life?” If in these two evenings we are to get anywhere near this subject we shall have to create first of all a kind of foundation or basis, on which to construct the edifice of knowledge, and from this deduce the answer in outline.

When we contemplate the things around us, those which exist for our ordinary sense-perception and our ordinary experience, and then turn to our own life, the result is at best the formulation of a question—the presentation of an oppressive, a painful problem. We see how the beings of external nature arise and decay. We can observe every year in spring how the earth, stimulated by the forces of the sun and the universe, bestows on us the plants which sprout and bud and bear fruit through the summer. Towards autumn, we see how they decay and pass away. Some remain indeed throughout the year, some for very many years, for instance, our long-lived trees. But of these also we know that even though in many cases they may outlive us, they also pass away at last, disappear and sink down into that which, in the great world of nature, is the realm of the lifeless. Especially do we know that even in the greatest phenomena of nature there rules this growth and decay: even the continents on which our civilisations develop did not exist in times past, for they have only risen in the course of time, and we know for certain that they will one day pass away.

Thus we see around us growth and decay; we can trace it in the plant kingdom and in the mineral kingdom as well as in the animal kingdom. What is the meaning of it all? Ever an arising, ever a passing away all around us! What is the meaning of this arising and this passing away? When we consider our own life, and see how we have lived through years and decades, we can recognise there also this coming into being and decay. When we call to mind the days of our childhood: they are vanished and only the memory of them remains. This stirs within us anxious questionings about life. The most important thing is that we ourselves have progressed a little through it, that we have become wiser. Usually, however, it is only when we have accomplished something, that we know how it ought to have been done. If we are no longer in a position to do a thing better, we still know how much better it might have been done, so that actually our mistakes become a part of our life; but it is just through our mistakes and errors that we gain our widest experiences.

A question is put to us, and it seems as if that which we can grasp with our senses and our intellect is unable to answer it. That is the position of man to-day; all that surrounds him confronts him with the problem, with the question: “What is the meaning of existence as a whole?” and particularly “Why has man his peculiar position within this existence?”

An extremely interesting legend of Hebrew antiquity tells us that in those old Hebrew times there was a consciousness that this anxious question which we formulated as to the meaning of life, and especially as to the meaning of man, occurs not only to man, but to beings quite other than man. This legend is extremely instructive and runs as follows:—When the Elohim were about to create man after their own image and likeness, the so-called ministering angels, certain spiritual beings of a lower grade than the Elohim themselves, asked Jahve or Jehovah: “Why is man to be made in the image and likeness of God!” Then Jehovah collected—so continues the legend—the animals and the plants which could already spring forth on earth before man was there in his earthly form, and He gathered together the angels also, the so-called ministering angels—those who immediately served Him. To those He showed the animals and plants and asked them what they were called, what were their names? But the Angels did not know the names of the animals and plants. Then man was created, as he was before the Fall. And again Jehovah gathered around him Angels, animals and plants, and in the presence of the Angels he asked man what the animals whom He made to pass by in succession before man’s eyes, were called, what their names were. And behold! Man was able to answer: “This animal has this name, that animal has that, this plant has this name, that plant has that,” Then Jehovah asked man: “And what is thine own name?” And man said: “I must be called Adam.” (Adam is related to Adama, and means: “Out of the earth: earth-being”). Jehovah then asked man: “And what am I myself to be called?” “Thou shalt be called Adonai,” man replied, “Thou art the Lord of all created beings of the earth.” The Angels now began to have an idea of the meaning of man’s existence on the earth. Though religious tradition and religious writings often express the most important riddle of life in the simplest way, there are many difficulties in understanding them, because we have to get behind their simplicity. We must first penetrate into the meaning behind them. If we succeed in this, great wisdom and deep knowledge are revealed. It may well be so with this legend, which we shall just keep in mind for a moment, for these two lectures will give us, in some sort, an answer to the question which it contains.

Now you know that there is a religion which has put the question as to the meaning and value of life by placing it in a wonderful form into the mouth of its own founder. You all know the story of the Buddha, how it tells us that when he left the palace in which he was born, and came face to face with the real facts of life, of which in that incarnation he had as yet learned nothing, he was most profoundly dismayed, and pronounced the judgment: “Life is suffering,” which as we know comprises the four statements: “Birth is suffering—disease is suffering—old age is suffering—death is suffering,” and to which is added “to be united with those we do not love is suffering, to be separated from those we love is suffering, not to be able to attain that to which we aspire is suffering.” We know then that to the adherents of this religion the meaning of life can be summed up by saying: “Life, which is suffering, only acquires a meaning when it is conquered, when it transcends itself.” All the various religions, all philosophies and views of life, are, after all, attempts to answer the question as to the meaning of life. Now, we are not going to approach the question in an abstract, philosophical way. Rather we shall review some of the phenomena of life, some of the facts of life, from the point of view of Spiritual Science, in order to see if a deeper occult view of life furnishes us with something wherewith to approach this question as to the meaning of life. Let us take the matter up again at the point we have already touched—the annual growth and decay in physical nature, the life, growth and decay in the plant world. In Spring we see the plants spring up out of the earth, and that which we see there as germinating, budding life, calls forth our joy and delight. We become aware that the whole of our existence is bound up with the plant world, for without it we could not exist. We feel how that which springs up out of the earth at the approach of Summer is related to our own life. We feel in the Autumn how that which in a certain sense belongs to us, again decays.

It is natural for us to compare with our own life that which we see germinating and decaying. For an external observation based only on what can be perceived by the senses and judged by the intellect, it is very natural to compare the vernal springing up of the plants with, let us say, man’s awakening in the morning; and the withering and decaying of the plant world in Autumn with man’s falling asleep at night. But such a comparison is quite superficial. It would leave out of account the real events with which we can already become acquainted through the elementary truths of occultism. What happens when we fall asleep at night? We have learned that we leave our physical and etheric bodies behind in bed. With our astral body and our ego we withdraw from our physical body and etheric body. During the night, from the moment of our falling asleep to the moment of our waking, we are with our astral body and our ego in a spiritual world. From this spiritual world we draw the forces which we require. Not only our astral body and our ego, but our physical and etheric bodies go through a kind of restorative process during our sleep at night, when the latter lie in bed, separated from the astral body and ego.

When one looks clairvoyantly down from the ego upon the astral, the etheric and physical bodies, one sees what has been destroyed by waking life; one sees that that which finds its expression in fatigue, is present as a destructive process and is made good during the night. The whole conscious life of the daytime is in fact, if we look at it in its connection with human consciousness and in its relation to the physical and etheric bodies, a kind of destructive process as regards the physical and etheric bodies. We always destroy something by it, and the fact that we destroy expresses itself in our fatigue. That which is destroyed is made good again at night.

Now if we look at what happens when we have withdrawn our astral body and our ego out of the etheric and physical bodies, it is as if we had left behind us a devastated field. But in the moment we are out of them, out of the physical and etheric bodies, they begin gradually to restore themselves. It is as if the forces belonging to the physical and etheric bodies begin to bud and blossom, and as if an entire vegetation should arise on the scene of destruction. The further night advances and the longer sleep lasts, the more do the forces in the etheric body bud and blossom. The nearer morning approaches and the more we re-enter our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body, the more a kind of withering or drying up sets in as regards the physical and etheric bodies.

In short, when the ego and the astral body look down from the spiritual world on the physical and etheric bodies, they see at night, at the moment of falling asleep, the same phenomenon which we see in the great world outside, when the plants bud and germinate in Spring. Therefore, to make a real comparison, we must compare our falling asleep and the earlier part of the sleep condition at night with Spring in nature; and the time of our awakening, the time in which the ego and the astral body begin to re-enter the physical and etheric bodies, with Autumn, in external nature. Spring corresponds to our falling asleep and Autumn to our awakening.

But how does the matter stand, when the occult observer, he who really can look into the spiritual world, directs his gaze to external nature and watches what takes place there in the course of the year? That which then presents itself to the occult vision teaches us that we must not compare things in an outward, but in an inward way. Occult observation shows that just as the physical and etheric bodies of man are connected with his astral body and his ego, so is there connected with our earth what we call the spiritual part of the earth. The earth also must be compared with a body, a widespread body. If we consider it only as far as its physical part is concerned, it is just as if we were to consider man with regard to his physical body only. We consider the earth completely when we consider it as the body of spiritual beings, in the same way in which, in the case of man, we consider the spirit as being connected with the body, yet there is a distinction. Man has a single nature controlling his physical and etheric bodies; a single psycho-spiritual nature belongs to that which is his physical human body and etheric human body. But there are a great many spirits belonging to the Earth-body. What in man’s psycho-spiritual nature is a unity, is, as regards that of the earth, a multiplicity. This is the chief distinction. With the exception of this difference everything else is in a certain way analogous. To occult vision is revealed how in the same measure as green plants come forth from the earth in Spring, those spirits whom we call the earth-spirits, withdraw from the earth. Only here again they do not, as is the case with man, absolutely leave the earth; they move round it, they pass in a certain way to the other side of the earth. When it is Summer in one hemisphere it is Winter in the other. In the case of the earth, the spiritual part moves from the northern to the southern hemisphere when Summer is approaching in the north. But that does not alter the fact that to the occult vision of a man who experiences the Spring on any given part of the globe, the spirits leave the earth; he sees how they rise and pass out into the cosmos. He does not see them move to the other side, but he sees them go away, in the same way as he sees the ego and the astral body leave man at the moment of his falling asleep. In the Autumn the earth-spirits approach and re-unite themselves with the earth. During the Winter, when the earth is covered with snow, the earth-spirits are directly united with the earth. In fact something similar then begins for the earth to what is found in man: a kind of self-consciousness. During the Summer the spiritual part of the earth knows nothing of what goes on around it in the universe. But in Winter the spirit of the earth knows what is happening in the universe around, just as man, on waking, knows and beholds what is taking place around him.

The analogy is thus complete, only it is the reverse of that which the outer consciousness draws. It is true that if we wish to go into the question fully, we cannot simply say: “When, in Spring, plants bud and spring from the earth, the earth spirits go away,” for with the budding and sprouting of plants there arise, as if out of the depths, out of the interior of the earth, other and mightier spirits. Therefore the mythologies were right when they distinguished between the higher and the nether gods. When man spoke of the gods who left the earth in Spring and returned in Autumn, he spoke of the higher gods. But there were mightier, older, gods, called by the Greeks the Chthonic gods. These arise in Summer when everything is budding and flourishing, and they descend again when in Winter the real earth spirits unite with the body of the earth.

Now, I should here like to mention that a certain idea, taken from scientific and occult research, is of immense importance for human life. For this shows us that when we consider the individual human being, we have really before us something like an image of the great Earth-being itself. What do we see when we turn towards plants which are beginning to sprout and bud? We see exactly the same as takes place in man when his inner life is active, we see how the one exactly corresponds to the other. How single plants are related to the human body, what their significance is for the human body, can only be recognised when such connections are understood. For it is in fact true that, on close examination, one sees how, when man falls asleep, everything begins to sprout and bud in his physical and etheric bodies: how a whole vegetation springs up in him: how man is in reality a tree or a garden in which plants are growing.

Whoever follows this with occult vision sees that the sprouting and germinating within man corresponds to what is germinating and budding in nature without. Thus you can form an idea of what will be possible when, in the future, Anthroposophy—often considered as foolishness to-day—is applied to life and made fruitful. We have for example, a man who has something wrong in his bodily life-activities. Let us now observe, when he falls asleep, what kind of plants are wanting when his physical and etheric bodies begin to develop their vegetation. When we see that on earth whole species of plants are missing, we know that something must be wrong with the life of the earth. And it is the same with the deficiency of certain plants in the physical and etheric bodies of man. In order to make good the defect we have only to seek on the earth for the plants which are missing in the man in question, and introduce their juices either in the form of diet or medicine and then we shall find the relation between medicine and disease. From this example, we see how Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science will intervene directly in life, but we are only at the beginning of these things.

In what I have just said I have given you, in a comparison drawn from nature, some idea of the composition of man and the connection of his whole being with the environment in which he is placed. We shall now look at the matter from a spiritual point of view. Here I would like to call attention to a matter that is of great importance, namely, that our anthroposophical outlook on life, while letting its gaze range over the evolution of mankind from the point of view of occultism, in order to decipher the meaning of existence, gives no preference to any one special creed, or any one view of life over any other. How often has it been emphasised in our occult movement that we can point to that which our earthly humanity experienced and developed immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe—the Flood. We passed through, as the first great post-Atlantean civilisation, the sacred civilisation of Ancient India. Here, at Copenhagen, we have already spoken of this old sacred Indian civilisation, and we laid stress upon the fact that it was so lofty, that that which has survived in the Vedas or in written tradition is only an echo of it. It is only in the Akashic Records that we can catch glimpses of the primeval teachings that issued from that time. There we gaze on heights which have not been re-attained.

The later epochs had quite a different mission. We know that a descent has taken place since then, but we know also that there will be again an ascent and that, as already mentioned, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science has to prepare this ascent. We know that in the seventh post-Atlantean age of civilisation, there will be a kind of renewal of the ancient, holy Indian civilisation. We do not give preference to any religious view or creed, for all are measured with the same measure, in every particular they are described: in each the kernel of truth is sought.

The important thing is that essentials be kept in view. We must not allow ourselves to stray in the consideration of the nature of each separate creed, and if we keep this in mind, in approaching the various points of view, we find one fundamental difference. We find views on life which are of a more oriental nature, and others which have permeated our Western civilisation. Once we make this clear to ourselves, we have something which throws light on the meaning of existence. We then find that the ancients were already in possession of something which we have to regain with difficulty, viz., the doctrine of reincarnation. The oriental stream possessed this as something springing from the profoundest depths of existence. You can still realise how the oriental mind shapes the whole of life from this doctrine, when you look at the relation of the oriental to his Bodhisattvas and his Buddhas. If you keep in view how little it concerns the oriental to select a single figure with this or that definite name, as the ruling power in human evolution, you see at once how he attaches much more importance to tracing the individuality which goes on from life to life. Orientals say that there are such and such a number of Bodhisattvas, high beings who have sprung from men, but who have gradually evolved to a height which we can describe by saying: A Being has passed through many incarnations, and then has become a Bodhisattva, as did Gautama, the son of King Sudhodana. He was Bodhisattva and became Buddha. The name Buddha, however, is given to many, because they passed through many incarnations, became Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the next higher stage, that of Buddhahood. The name Buddha is a generic name. It denotes a degree of human attainment, and has no sense apart from the spiritual being who goes through many incarnations. Brahmanism fully agrees with Buddhism in regarding the individual who goes through the different personalities, rather than the single person. It comes to the same whether the Buddhist says:—“A Bodhisattva is destined to ascend to the highest degree of human attainment, and for this he has to go through many incarnations; but for me the highest is the Buddha.” Or whether the adherent of Brahmanism says: “The Bodhisattvas are indeed highly developed beings, who ascend to Buddhahood, but they are inferior to the Avatars, who are higher spiritual individualities.” You see, consideration of the persisting spiritual entity is what characterises both these oriental points of view.

But now let us turn to the West, and see what is the thing of greatest importance there. In order to enter a little more deeply into this connection, we must consider the ancient Hebrew point of view, where the personal element enters. When we speak of Plato, of Socrates, of Michelangelo, of Charlemagne, or of others, we are always speaking of a person: we place before men the separate life of the personality with all that this personality has done for mankind. In our Western life we do not direct our attention to the life which has gone from personality to personality, for it has been the mission of Western civilisation to direct attention for a time to the single life. When in the East the Buddha is spoken of, it is understood that the designation “Buddha” is an honourable title which may be applied to many personalities. When, on the contrary, the name “Plato” is uttered, we know that this refers only to a single personality. This has been the education of the West.

Let us now turn to our own day. In Western civilisation, mankind has been trained for a time to direct his attention to the personality, but the individual element, the “individuality” has now to be added to the personal element. We stand now at the point where we must reconquer the individual element, but strengthened, vivified, by the contemplation of the personal.

Let us take a definite case. In this connection we look back to the old Hebrew civilisation, which preceded that of the West. Let us turn our attention to the mighty personality of the prophet Elijah. To begin with, we may describe him as a personality. In the West he is seldom regarded in any other way. If we leave aside details and look at the personality from a wider point of view, we see that Elijah was something very important for our evolution. He gives the impression of a forerunner of the Christ-Impulse.

On looking back to the time of Moses, we see how something had been proclaimed to the people; we see that the God in man was proclaimed. “I AM the God Who was, Who is, Who is to come.” He has to be comprehended as in the ego, but among the ancient Hebrews He was comprehended as the Folk-soul of the race. Elijah went beyond Moses, though he did not make clear that the ego dwells in the single human individual as Divinity, for he could not make clear to the people of his time more than the world was then able to receive. While even the Mosaic Culture of the old Hebrews was conscious of the fact that “the Highest lies in the Ego,” and that this Ego found expression in the time of Moses in the Group-Soul of the people, we find Elijah already pointing to the individual human soul. We see a forward leap in evolution. But a further impulse was needed, and again a forerunner appeared, whom we know as the personality of John the Baptist. Once more it was in a significant expression that the quality of John the Baptist as a “Forerunner” found expression. A great occult fact is here indicated that man, as primeval man, once possessed ancient clairvoyance, so that he could look into the spiritual world—into Divine activity—but he gradually approached towards materialism; the vision of the spiritual world was cut off. To this fact John the Baptist alludes when he says: “Change the attitude of your soul; look no longer at what you can gain in the physical world: be watchful, a new impulse is at hand (he means the Christ-Impulse). Therefore I say unto you, seek the spiritual world that is in your midst; there the spiritual element appears with the Christ-Impulse.” Through this saying John the Baptist became a forerunner of the Christ-Impulse.

Now we can direct our gaze to another personality, to the remarkable personality of the painter Raphael. This remarkable personality presents itself to us in an unusual way. In the first place, we need only compare Raphael to—let us say—Titian, a painter of a later period. Whoever has an eye for such things, even if he look at the reproductions, will find the distinction. Look at the pictures of Raphael and at those of Titian! Raphael painted in such a way that he put Christian ideas into his pictures. He painted for the people of Europe as Christians of the West. His pictures are comprehensible to all Christians of the West, and will become so more and more. Take, on the other hand, the later painters. They painted almost exclusively for the Latin race, so that even the schisms of the Church found expression in their pictures.

With which pictures was Raphael most successful? With those in which he was able to demonstrate the impulses that lie in Christianity. He is at his best where he could represent some relationship of the Jesus-Child to the Madonna, where this Christ-relation appears as something that is an impulse to feeling. These are the things which he really painted best. We have for instance, no Crucifixion of his, but we have a Transfiguration. Wherever he can paint the budding and germinating aspect, that which is self-revealing, he paints with joy and there he paints his greatest and best pictures.

It is the same with the impression which his pictures produce. If some day you come to Germany and see the Sistine Madonna in Dresden, you will realise that that work of art—of which it is said that the Germans may rejoice to have such a celebrated picture among them, Yes! that they may even regard it as the flower of the painters’ art—you will realise that this work discloses a mystery of existence.

When Goethe in his time traveled from Leipsic to Dresden, he heard something quite different about the picture of the Madonna. The officials of the Dresden Gallery said something like this to him: “We have also a picture of Raphael’s, but it is nothing particular. It is badly painted. The look of the Child, the whole Child itself, everything to do with the Child, is common. The same with the Madonna. One can only think that she is painted by a dauber. And then these figures down below of which one does not know whether they are meant for children’s heads or angels!” Goethe heard this coarse opinion, so that at first he had no right appreciation of the picture. Everything which we hear about the picture at the present time only came to be understood later on, and the fact that Raphael’s pictures made their triumphal march through the world in reproductions, is a result of this better appreciation. We have only to call to mind what England has done for the reproduction and circulation of these pictures. But what was effected in England by the trouble which has been taken for the reproduction and circulation of Raphael’s pictures, will only be recognised when people have learned to look at the matter from the point of view of spiritual science.

Thus through his pictures, Raphael becomes for us the forerunner of a Christianity which will be cosmopolitan. Protestantism has long regarded the Madonna as specially Catholic; but to-day the Madonna has penetrated everywhere into Protestant countries and we are rising more to the occult interpretation, to a higher inter-denominational Christianity. So it will be more and more. If we may hope for such results as regards interdenominational Christianity, what Raphael has done will also help us in Anthroposophy.

It is remarkable that the above three personalities confront us in this manner: all three have the quality of being forerunners of Christianity. Now let us direct occult observation to these three persons. What does it teach us? It teaches us that the same individuality lived in Elijah, in John the Baptist and in Raphael. However impossible it may seem, it is the same soul which lived in Elijah and in Raphael.

When it is revealed to occult vision—which searches and investigates and does not merely compare in a superficial way—that it is the same soul that is present in Elijah, in John the Baptist and in Raphael, we may ask how it is possible that Raphael the painter becomes the vehicle for the individuality which lived in John the Baptist? One can conceive that this remarkable soul of John the Baptist lived in the forces which were present in Raphael.

Occult research comes in here again, not merely to put forth theories, but to tell us how things actually are in life. How do people write biographies of Raphael to-day? Even the best are so written that they simply state that Raphael was born on Good Friday of the year 1483. It is not for nothing that Raphael was born on a Good Friday. This birth already proclaimed his exceptional position in Christianity and shows that in the deepest and most significant way he was connected with the Christian Mysteries. It was on a Good Friday that Raphael was born. His father was Giovanni Santi. He died when Raphael was eleven years old. At the age of eight years his father sent him as a pupil to a painter, who was, however, not of any special eminence. But if one realises what was in Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, one gets a peculiar impression which is further strengthened when the matter is investigated in the Akashic Records. There it appears that there lived in the soul of Giovanni Santi much more than could be expressed in his personality and then we can agree with the duchess, who at his death said: “A man full of light and truth and fervent faith has died.” As occultist, one can say that in him there lived a much greater painter than appeared outwardly. The outer faculties, which depend on the physical and etheric organs, were not developed in Giovanni Santi. That was the original cause why he could not bring the capacities of his soul to full expression; but really a great painter lived in him.

Giovanni Santi died when Raphael was eleven years old. If we now follow what takes place, we see that man certainly loses his body, but that the longings, the aspirations, the impulses of his soul continue to exist, and continue to be active where they are most closely connected.

There will come a time when Anthroposophy will be made fruitful for life, as it can already be made fruitful by those who have grasped it vitally and not merely theoretically. Permit me here to interpolate something before going on with Raphael. What I tell you in the examples I give is not mere speculation; on the contrary, it is always taken from real life. Let us suppose that I had children to educate. Whoever pays attention to the capabilities of children can notice the individual element in every child, but such experiences can only be made by those who educate children. Now if one of the parents of a child dies while the child is still young and the other parent is still living, the following may be noticed: Certain inclinations will show themselves in the child which were not there before and which consequently cannot be explained. But one who has charge of children has to occupy himself with these things. Such a one would do well if he said: “People generally look upon what is in Anthroposophical books as mere folly: I will not take this for granted, but will try whether it is right or not.” Then he will soon be able to say “I find forces at work which were already there and again there are other forces playing into those which were already there.” Let us suppose that the father has passed through the gates of death and there now appears in the child, with some strength, certain qualities which had belonged to the father. If this assumption is made and if the matter is looked upon in this way, the knowledge which comes to us through Anthroposophy is applied to life in a sensible way, and then, as is soon discovered, we find our way in life, whereas before we did not. Thus the person who has gone through the gateway of death, remains united, through his forces, with those with whom he was connected in life. People do not observe things closely enough, otherwise they would see more often that children are quite different before the death of their parents from what they are afterwards. At present there is not enough regard for these things, but the time is coming when they will receive attention.

Giovanni Santi, the father, died when Raphael was eleven years old; he had not been able to attain great perfection as a painter, but powerful imagination was left to him and this was then developed in the soul of Raphael. We do not depreciate Raphael, if, while observing his soul, we say: Giovanni Santi lives on in Raphael, who appears to us as a completed personality, as one incapable of higher attainment because a dead man gives life to his work.

We now realise that in the soul of Raphael are reborn the vigorous forces of John the Baptist and in addition, there live in his soul the forces of Giovanni Santi; that together these two were able to bring to fruition the result which confronts us as Raphael. It is true that to-day we cannot yet speak publicly of such extraordinary things, but in fifty years’ time this may be possible, because evolution is progressing quickly, and the opinions held to-day are rapidly approaching their decline. Whoever accepts such things, sees that in Anthroposophy our task is to regard life everywhere from a new point of view. Just as in the future people will heal in the way to which I have referred, so they will reflect on the strange miracle of life wherein men attract to their assistance, from the spiritual world, the achievements of those who have passed through the gates of death.

I should like to draw your attention to two things, when speaking on the riddles of life; things which so truly can illuminate the meaning of life. One is the fate that has befallen the works of Raphael. Whoever looks to-day at the reproductions of his pictures, does not see what Raphael painted. And if he travels to Dresden or to Rome, he finds them so much spoiled that he can hardly be said to see the pictures of Raphael. It is easy to see what will become of them when we consider the fate of Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” which is falling more and more into decay. These pictures, in times to come, will fall into dust, and everything which great men have created will disappear. When these things have vanished, we may well ask: “What is the meaning of this creation and decay!” We shall see that really nothing remains of what the single personality has created.

Still another fact I should like to put before you, and that is the following: If when to-day, with Anthroposophy as an instrument, we desire to understand, and must understand, Christianity as an Impulse that works for the future, we have need of certain fundamental ideas through which we know how the Christ-Impulse will continue to work. This we require. And we can point to a development of Christianity for which Anthroposophy is necessary. We can point to a person who presents Anthroposophical truth in special form—namely, that of aphorisms. When we approach him we find much that is significant for Anthroposophy. This person is the German poet Novalis. When we study his writings, we find that he describes the future of Christianity from out of the occult truths it contains. Anthroposophy teaches us that we have here to do with the same individuality as is in Raphael, John the Baptist and Elijah.

We have here again to glance into the further development of Christianity. That is a fact of an occult nature, for no one reaches this result by reasoning. Let us once more put the different pictures together. We have the tragic fact of the destruction of the creations and works of single personalities. Raphael appears and allows his interdenominational Christianity to flow into the souls of men. But we have a foreboding that some day his creations will be destroyed, that his works will fall to dust. Then Novalis appears to take in hand the fulfilment of the task and continue the work he had begun. The idea is no longer now so tragic. We see that just as the personality dissolves in its sheaths, so the work dissolves, but the essential kernel lives on and continues the work it had begun. Here once again it is the individual to which our attention is directed. But because we have kept firmly in mind the Western view of life and therewith the personality, we are able to grasp the full significance of the individuality. Thus we see how important it is that the East directed its attention to the individuality, to the Bodhisattvas, who go through many incarnations; and how important it is that the West first directed its attention to the contemplation of the single personality, in order, later on, to grasp what the individuality is.

Now I think there are many Anthroposophists who will say: “Well, this is something we have just to believe, when Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis are mentioned.” For many the main thing is that they must just believe. It is essentially the same as when from the scientific side some fact is asserted that many people have to believe, such as that this or that spectrum appears when certain metals are examined by spectrum analysis, or when for instance, the nebula in Orion is so examined. Some people have certainly investigated it, but the others, the majority, have to believe. But that is after all not the essential point. The essential point is that Anthroposophy is at the beginning of its development, and will bring souls to the point of examining for themselves such matters as we have discussed to-day. In this respect, Anthroposophy will help forward human evolution very rapidly.

I have put before you a few instances, which I submit as resulting from the occult point of view regarding life. Take only the three points which we have considered and you will see that by knowing in what way life is related to the Spirit of the Earth, the art of healing can be given a new direction and supplied with new impulses; how Raphael can only be understood when not only his personal forces are taken into account, but also those forces which came from his father. The third point is that we can educate children when we know the interplay of forces acting on them. Outwardly people admit that they are surrounded by numberless forces which incessantly influence them, that man is continually influenced by air, the temperature, his surroundings and the other Karmic conditions under which he lives. That these things do not interfere with his freedom everyone knows. They are the factors with which we have to reckon to-day. But that man is continually surrounded by spiritual forces and that these spiritual forces must be investigated is what Anthroposophy has to teach men: they will have to learn to take these forces into account and will have to reckon with them in important cases of health and disease, of education and life. They will have to be mindful of such influences as come from without, from the super-sensible world, when, for instance, some one’s friend dies and he then shares those sympathies and ideas that belonged to him. What has been said does not hold good for children only, but for all ages. It is not at all necessary that people should know with their ordinary consciousness in what way the forces of the super-sensible world are active. Their general frame of mind may show it, even their state of health or illness may show it. And those things which signify the connection of man’s life on the physical plane with the facts of the super-sensible worlds have a still wider bearing.

I should like to put before you a simple fact which will show you the nature of this connection, a fact which is not invented, but has been observed in many cases. A man notices at a certain time that he has feelings which formerly he did not know; that he has sympathies and antipathies which formerly he did not know; that he succeeds easily where before he found difficulties. He cannot explain it. His surroundings cannot explain it to him, nor do the facts of life itself give him any clue. In such a case it can be found, when we observe accurately (it is true that one must have an eye for such things), that now he knows things which he did not know before and does things which he could not do before. If we examine matters further and have had experience of the teachings of Anthroposophy, it may be that we shall hear something like the following from him: “I do not know what to think of myself. I dream of a person whom I have never seen in my life. He comes into my dreams, though I never had anything to do with him.” If we follow the matter up it will be found that till now he had no occasion to occupy himself with this person. But this person had died and now first approaches him in the spiritual world. When he had come near enough to him he appeared to him in a dream which was yet more than a dream. From this person, whom he had not known in life, who, however, after death, gained influence on his life, came the impulses which he had not known before. It is not a question of saying: “It is only a dream.” It is far more a question of what the dream contained. It may be something which, although in the form of a dream, is nearer to reality than the outer consciousness. Does it matter at all whether Edison invents something in a dream or in clear waking consciousness? What matters is whether the invention is true, is useful. So also it does not matter whether an experience takes place in dream-consciousness or in physical consciousness; what is of importance is whether the experience is true or false.

If we now summarise what we are able to understand from what has just been said, we may say “It is clear to us when we learn to apply Anthroposophy, that life appears to us in quite a different light from before.” In this respect people who are very learned in materialistic ways of thought are but children. We can convince ourselves of this at any time. When to-day I came here by train I took up the pamphlet of a German physiologist in its second edition. In it the writer says that we cannot speak of “active attention” in the soul, of directing the attention of the soul to anything, but that everything depends on the functioning of the various ganglia of the brain; and because the tracks have to be made by thoughts, everything depends on how the separate brain cells function. No intensity of the soul intervenes, it depends entirely upon whether this or that connecting thread in our brain has been pulled or not. These learned materialists are really children. When we lay our hands on anything of this kind one cannot help thinking how guileless these people are! In the same pamphlet one finds the statement that lately the centenary of Darwin was celebrated, and that on that occasion, both qualified and unqualified people spoke. The author of the pamphlet thought himself of course quite specially qualified. And then follows the whole brain-cell theory and its application. But how is it with the logic of the matter? When one is used to considering things in accordance with truth and then sees what these great children offer people concerning the meaning of life, the thought occurs to one that after all it comes to the same as if someone should say that it was simply nonsense that a human will had any part in the way the railways intersect the face of Europe! For it is just the same as if at a given time one considered all the engines in their varied parts and functions, and said that these are organised in such and such a way and run in so many directions. But the different roads meet at certain junctions and through them the engines can be turned in any direction. What would occur if this were done would be a great disarrangement of trains on the European railways. Just as little, however, can it be asserted that what takes place in the human brain cells as the life of human thought depends only on the condition of the cells. If such learned people then happen, without previous knowledge, to hear a lecture on Anthroposophy, they look upon that which is said as the most utter nonsense. They are firmly convinced that a human will can never have anything to do with the mode and manner in which the European engines run, but that it depends on how they are heated and driven.

So we see how at the present day we stand confronted by questions regarding the meaning of life. On the one side there is darkness, on the other the spiritual facts press in upon us. If we grasp what has been said to-day we can, with this as a basis, put the question before our soul in the way in which it has to be put in Anthroposophy, namely: What is the meaning of life and existence, and especially of human life and human existence?

My dear friends! Today an even greater number of friends of Anthroposophy have made their appearance here, who have never before attended, and so I am obliged, with a few introductory words, to speak about the principles of the school. It certainly must be considered with utter gravity, that with the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum a breath of fresh air has come into the Anthroposophical Movement. And the entrance of this fresh air must penetrate thoroughly into awareness, especially so for the members of our School of Spiritual Science. Yes, I have pointed it out time and again, but I know that there are many friends of Anthroposophy here today, who have not yet been informed of the matter, and so I must lay it out once again.

It is certainly so, and it has had to be declared again and again since the Christmas Conference, that the Anthroposophical Movement must be strictly distinguished from the Anthroposophical Society.

The Anthroposophical Movement represents the infusion into human civilization of spiritual intervention and spiritual life-impulses, that can and should come into being in our time directly out of the spiritual world. The Anthroposophical Movement is there, not because human beings desire that it be there, but rather because it appears appropriate to the spiritual powers controlling and guiding the world, working to ensure the proper course of human history, it appears appropriate to these spiritual powers, to allow spiritual light, light that can come appropriately through Anthroposophy, to flow today into human civilization.

To that end the Anthroposophical Society was established as a governing body, to govern anthroposophical wisdom and institutions. And it had to be emphasized, time and again, that Anthroposophy is something above and beyond the Society, and that the Anthroposophical Society is merely the exoteric governance.

This has changed since the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum. Since the Christmas Conference it is quite the opposite. And only because the case is quite different, am I ready to clarify, with the Executive Council¹ established at the Christmas Conference, am I able to carry out the work that is appropriate, the work moreover that needs to be taken up, and only so am I able to clarify, together with the Executive Council, the assumed functions of leadership of what was established at Christmas as the Anthroposophical Society. What has happened through all this, I can address in just one sentence. This sentence is, that since Anthroposophy will now govern throughout in the Anthroposophical Society, all that occurs now within the Anthroposophical Society must be Anthroposophy itself. Since Christmas, Anthroposophy must be what is done in the Anthroposophical Society. Every individual deed must henceforth have the immediacy of an esoteric character. The appointment of the Dornach Executive Council on Christmas Day was an actual esoteric implementation, an implementation that must be considered as having come directly out of the spiritual world. Only when this is kept in mind by our anthroposophical friends can the Anthroposophical Society, which was actually founded in this manner, only then can the Anthroposophical Society flourish.

And so the Executive Council in Dornach, as underscored since the Christmas Conference, is an initiative executive council. Understandably, governance must take place. But governance is not the first matter of business to be attended to, but rather the business of allowing, of doing everything to allow Anthroposophy to flow through the Anthroposophical Society. To accomplish this is the aim.

The installation of the Dornach Executive Council took place in just such a way within the Anthroposophical Society. And it must be quite clear that from now on relationships within the Anthroposophical Society cannot be built on just any sort of bureaucratization, but rather must be built throughout on humanization. The statutes containing various paragraphs were produced in this way at the Christmas Conference. One must be aware, when one is a member, and must give affirmation to this, or else as described in detail in the statutes, the Executive Council at the Goetheanum must do what it has to do. And the Anthroposophical Society is constituted this way today. It is grounded on human relationships.

It is a small matter, but I must again and again emphasize it, that a membership card has been handed out to each member, signed by myself, so that at least, since at first it is a somewhat abstract matter, it is nevertheless handled with some personal rapport. It would have been quite possible to have had a stamp used with my signature on it. I don't do this, even though it does not lead to equanimity, by and by appending my signature to twelve thousand member-cards, I don't do it, because in reality the most abstract personal relationships would be established, in not having paused for just once, for just a moment, for each individual member, to focus on the name borne on the member's card. And self-understandably, by doing this, all future relationships will be somewhat more humanistic, and will put a mark on the commencement of concrete effective work within our society.

In this regard it must also become clear, I must emphasize this also, it must lie within the awareness of the membership, I emphasize this as otherwise many transgressions will occur, it must lie within the awareness of the membership that when the name General Anthroposophical Society is used, that the affirmation of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum has been obtained first. Even so, if something or other of an esoteric nature is distributed from the Goetheanum in Dornach and broadcast, this should only happen on the basis of an agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. Therefore, so that nothing will be claimed as going out in the name of the General Anthroposophical Society, that for those of us here, nothing given here as formulation and instructions will be claimed as having been authorized by the Goetheanum, that is, unless an agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum is in place. No abstract relationships will be possible in the future, only concrete relationships. Whatever goes out from the Goetheanum, must have the stamp of approval of the Goetheanum, made in concrete. This is why we need the title "General Anthroposophical Society", for someone may put out something about lectures that may have been held, or about formulations of various sorts given here, someone, as an active member of the Anthroposophical Society, might share a document prepared with the letterhead of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum, or from Frau Wegman, and this must give the impression that the Executive Council at the Goetheanum is in agreement. It is really important for the Executive Council at the Goetheanum to be regarded as being at the center of the Anthroposophical Movement in the future.

Now and always, the relationship of this School to the Anthroposophical Society must be held in the consciousness of the membership. Someone may be a member of the Anthroposophical Society, if he has the inner heartfelt drive to get to know, to learn to live with, what goes through the world as anthroposophical ideas of wisdom and impulses of life. One undertakes no other commitment as such, other than taking up with heart and mind what has been bestowed by Anthroposophy itself. Out of this general membership, one can, when the time is right, for now a minimum of two years has been stipulated, one can after a time of having lived within the flow of the membership of the General Anthroposophical Society, one can then seek membership in the School of Spiritual Science.

In coming into this School of Spiritual Science, a person undertakes a really serious commitment to the Society, to anthroposophical endeavors, specifically, in becoming a member, he commits to being in truth a representative of anthroposophical endeavors before the world. This is essential in this day and age. Under any other conditions, the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science cannot readily commit itself to working together with someone as a member.

Do not think that this constitutes a limitation on your freedom, my dear friends. Freedom itself requires that all who here concern themselves with this remain free. And as members of the school can and should be free in this endeavor, so also must the leadership of the school be free, that is, in being able to establish with whom they can and will work, and with whom not. Therefore, when the leadership of the school, for one reason or another, is led to conclude that a member cannot be a true representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, then it must be possible, for instance, if admission is sought, to disapprove the admission, or if admission has already occurred, the person under discussion having already become a member, to say that the membership must be forfeited. This must be adhered to in the future unconditionally in the strictest sense, for through this in actual fact a free working relationship of the leadership of the school with the membership will be ushered in.

As has already been stated in the Members’ Supplement to the Goetheanum News, we are endeavoring step by step to make it possible for those unable to participate at the Goetheanum to take part in some way in the continuing work of the school. In great measure all that was possible would have already been presented, but there has been much to do here since the Christmas Conference, and we can only take the fifth step after the fourth, and not the seventh step after the first. We may look through various newsletters, and in what is released to peripheral members partake of what goes on here in the school. We have already started, and those in the school involved in medical affairs may participate by partaking of the newsletter Frau Dr. Wegman is sending out concerning the work of the school. Gradually other possibilities will emerge and I beg you to be patient in this respect.

The most comprehensive thing yet to be mentioned would be this, that the school in particular must not become attached to a mode of operation stemming from human impulses, but rather to a mode of operation from the side of the spiritual world. A resolution of the spiritual world is to be taken up with whatever means are possible. This School ought to be an institution of the spiritual world for the present day, as has been the case at all times in the mysteries. It must be pronounced today that this school itself must develop, so as to become what it actually can be in our time, a real mystery school. Thereby you will come to be the soul of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Along with this, moreover, it has already been pointed out in what manner the membership of the school is to be attached in earnest to the school. It is self-evident that whatever esoteric work has been going on will be taken into the work of the school. For this School is the fundamental esoteric bedrock and wellspring of all esoteric work within the Anthroposophical Movement. And to this end, various personalities of whatever background, in founding something esoteric in the world, must have the agreement of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. These personalities must either come into full agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, or else they cannot in the least allow what emerges from the Goetheanum to flow into their impulses or into their teachings. Whoever seeks to strive esoterically under conditions other than these just mentioned, simply cannot be a member of this School. In this case such a person must be outside of the school, striving esoterically but by this School unrecognized, and he must himself be clear, that such undertakings can incorporate nothing of what wells up within and emanates from this school. Association with the school must be as thoroughly and concretely joined as possible. In this way each member of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, each and every member, must make clear to himself, that the school must be able to be regarded in such a manner, that a member is actually a true representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, that every single member's exoteric involvement with Anthroposophy is just so, that it is dealt with as a member of the school.

The attempt has certainly been made at the Goetheanum, in the event of my no longer being in a leadership position, no longer being the President of the Anthroposophical Society, for the school to develop in a fashion similar to other schools. Solely by means of interpersonal relationships that will not be possible. Here one finds real esoteric substance, which just cannot be found in any other school. And of course, no attempt will be made to rush into some sort of concordance with schools of the world, but rather what should begin at once, is to bring up questions, whenever an honorably searching person of today, from some area of life or another, comes upon this substance, questions that just cannot be answered outside of the esoteric.

It must be so in the future, especially for members. It is simply the way it is, for with the Christmas Conference something actually occurred, and this occurrence must be taken seriously. It has occurred, and in the future, because initiatives ought to be disseminated from this site, from the Goetheanum, in fulfilling its mission, it must be taken most seriously, it must be maintained unconditionally as a standard in fulfilling its mission, it must be crystal clear, and in the future in all the falderal attended to by members of the School it must be hearkened to, and again and again attention must be drawn back to it, in order to have a firm yet free acquaintanceship with it, which is by name, that I am present as a representative of Anthroposophy that flows forth from the Goetheanum. Whoever does not do this with a will, whoever cannot take this up again and again in an unconstrained free and easy manner, mulling over Anthroposophy quietly until after quite some time being prepared, striving in some manner or another along the lines of this policy, whoever believes that he will progress by first disavowing us in order then to be led back to us, usually does not really return to us, and should rather just give up his school membership at once. Membership in the School in the future, I can assure you, will be taken most seriously. I believe that for the various members of the school who henceforth really take up Anthroposophy with a will, taking it up not just for any reason, but taking Anthroposophy up in their work, taking up Anthroposophy in their work in the manner of holding it dear in their hearts, that it will lead again and again to the following phrase coming to mind, that one should approach people with Anthroposophy not just as immediately present and obvious. It must be communicated, by mouth or in some other fashion, in such a way that people can choose merely to remain within their own point of view outside of the school.

All this is what I must once more set out before you. And it had to be mentioned here today, because there are many, many friends of Anthroposophy who until now have not taken part in the work of this School. And specifically, because so many friends are here today who are new to the Class, we have had to wait awhile to start the lesson, we also, before the lesson has even begun, have had to attend to this preamble, which is, in a certain sense, an introduction to today's lesson. I will be holding a second lesson, the date of which is still to be determined, but no other friends will be able to attend this second lesson, other than those who are here today. Also, I will ask any others, who may be coming later, to be patient. Essentially, we cannot accomplish anything, when each time, whenever a lesson is held here, if ever and again new members arrive. With today's lesson we must be considered ourselves fulfilled with those actually in possession of memberships at this time. Certainly, one can become a member, although at the next lesson only those can take part, who are also already in such a position today. Yes, only those will be in this day's continuation.

Well, I would like here and now to begin the declamation, but at first please take note of this, that initially you are merely witnessing the mantric formulation as a reference to what initially emerged throughout time in the mysteries, and then by way of the outgoing mysteries from there hence unto the stars, as the imprinted script unto the entire cosmos, and into human souls, resounding in human hearts, resounding as the great clarion call to human beings, to strive after a real insight, a real knowing of one's self. The clarion call is this, "O Man, know yourself!" It resounds out of the entire cosmos.

As we gaze out to the resting stars, to those stars that in especially significant script stand in the zodiac, to those resting stars which through their gathering together in certain forms bring to expression the great cosmic script, then for one who understands this writing, there will initially be inscribed the contents of the Word of Worlds "O Man, know yourself!"

As one gazes out upon those, that as wandering stars journey along their ways, initially the sun and the moon, although also the other wandering stars, among which are the sun and the moon, then may be revealed, wrapped into the journeying paths of these wandering stars, as also in the forms of the resting stars, the content of the world-strengthening, soul-daunting Word of Worlds, and just so in the movement of the heart’s-, the heart’s world-content, the contents of one’s innermost nature.

And we take part through what we experience in the elements around about us out in the circumference of the earth, as well as experiencing them through our skin, through our senses, through having them nearby us, moving in us, and acting in our own bodies as Earth, Water, Fire, Air, through all that will the impulse of willing be embossed in the following words.

In this way we may allow the Word of Worlds to be intoned to human beings, to work on our souls by means of these mantric words:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, nothing is known but what flows forth from the spiritual world. Whatever passes as knowing by mankind, but is neither fathomed from what emerges from the spiritual world, nor is shared by those who are able to quest within the spiritual world, is not real knowing. The human being must be clear about this, when he gazes around about the world, gazing in the realms of nature at the things that present themselves in color upon color, at the things that are revealed radiant and resplendent, at the things living overhead in the beaming stars, at the things presenting themselves in the warmth of the sun, and at the things that sprout forth out of the earth. In all of these things there is sublimity, grandeur, beauty, and the fullness of wisdom. And a person would be greatly in error, if he were to blithely pass by this beauty, sublimity, enormity, and fullness of wisdom. The person must, when an esoteric wishes to press on with him into real knowing, he must also have a sense of whatever is around about himself in the world, an open, free sense. For during the time between birth and death, during his earthly existence, he is obliged to draw his forces out of the forces of the earth, to carry out his work within the forces of the earth.

But so true it is, that the person certainly must take part in all that is around him in color after color, tone after tone, warmth after warmth, star after star, cloud after cloud, creature after creature in the external realm, so true it is, that the person looks there around about at all of the abundance, grandeur, sublimity, fullness of wisdom, and beauty imparted to him through the senses, and can nowhere find anything, of what he himself is. Directly then, as he has a real sense of the sublimity, beauty, and grandeur in his surroundings in life on earth, then he will immediately take notice, that nowhere to be found in this light, bright realm of earth is the innermost source of his own existence. It is elsewhere. And having a full, inward appreciation of this, this brings the person to the point of seeking an opening into the state of awareness in which he can grapple with what we call the threshold to the spiritual world. This threshold, that lies immediately before an abyss, this must be approached, and when there it must be remembered, that in all that surrounds a person on the earth in earthly existence between birth and death, the fountainhead of what it is to be a human being is not to be found.

Then one must know that on this threshold stands a spirit-form that is called the Guardian of the Threshold. This Guardian of the Threshold is concerned in a way for the welfare of the person, that the person does not come unprepared, without having thoroughly lived with and taken deep into his soul the things that I have already spoken about, that the man does not approach this threshold unprepared.

However then, when the person in all seriousness is really prepared for spiritual knowing, and it may be that he acquires it in clairvoyant consciousness, or it may be that he acquires it through healthy common sense, for in keeping informed both are possible. Whichever is the case, whether knowing about or seeing the Guardian of the Threshold, just then is it possible, that the Guardian of the Threshold may really reach out with a guiding hand and allow the person to look out over the abyss. There, where the person seeks his inner being’s true condition, his actual origin, lying there initially, however, on that side of the threshold, is uttermost darkness.

My dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, we seek light, in order to see the origins of our own human essence in the light. Darkness however spreads out at first. The light that we seek must stream out of the darkness. And it streams out of the darkness only when we become aware of how the three fundamental impulses of our individual soul-life, namely thinking, feeling, and willing, are held together here in life on earth through our physical body. In physical earth existence thinking, feeling, and willing are bound together.

If I were to draw it bundled together schematically, I would draw it first with thinking [yellow], then with feeling [green] extending over into thinking, and then with willing [red] extending over into feeling. In this way the three are bound together in earthly existence.

The person must learn at heart that the three may separate from one another. And he will learn this when he steadfastly, more and more, takes the meditations recommended by this School as the forceful content of his life of soul. He will notice that it starts to happen. [It was once again drawn on the board.] Thinking [yellow] will become free, cast loose from its union with feeling, as will his feeling [green], as will his willing [red]. For the person learns to perceive without his physical body.

The physical body had been holding thinking, feeling, and willing together, drawn together into one another. [Around the first drawing an oval was drawn.] Here [by the second drawing of thinking, feeling, and willing] the physical body is not at hand.

Gradually, through the meditations that he receives here from the school, the person begins to feel himself outside of his body, and he comes into that state of being in which whatever the world is, for him will be the self, and whatever self was, for him will be the world. As we stand here on the earth in our earthly existence, we feel ourselves as human beings, we say, in that we become inwardly aware, that this is my heart, these are my lungs, this is my liver, this is my mouth. The various things that we call our organs, called by us our human organization, we label as our own. And we identify around about, there is the sun, there is the moon, there are the stars, the clouds, a tree, a stream. We denote these various things as being external to us, as we are bound up in our organs. We are quite distinct from those things that we identify externally as the sun, the moon, the stars, and so forth.

When we have prepared our soul sufficiently, so that we are able to perceive without the body, that is, distinct from the body, in the spirit-all, then a directly opposite awareness commences. We speak then of the sun as we speak here in earth existence of our heart, namely, that is my heart. We speak of the moon as that which forms my character. We speak of the clouds in a manner similar to speaking of our hair on earth. We call our organism all of what was a part of the whole surrounding world for the earthly man. And we identify outwardly, look there, a human heart, a human lung, a human liver, they are objective, they are the world. And as we here as men and women look out toward the sun and moon, as we gaze about in a physical body, so do we gaze about from the perspective of the world-all, in which the sun and moon and stars and clouds and streams and mountains are in us, and we look out at the person, who is our external world. The difficulty is only in the relationship of space. And this difficulty will be overcome.

And we may be sure, that as soon as we step out with our thinking out of our physical body, this thinking is at one with all that reveals itself in the resting stars. As we call our brain here, that it serves as the workhorse of our thinking, so do we begin to appreciate the resting stars, namely the resting stars of the zodiac, as our brain, when we are out there in the world and then gaze down upon the man external to us.

And those things that revolve as wandering stars, we perceive as just what our force of feeling is. Our power of feeling moves then in the coursing of the sun, the moon, in the coursing of the other wandering stars. Yes, between what we experience as thinking in the resting stars, and feeling, is the sun within ourselves [Between yellow and green on the second drawing, the sign of the sun was placed.] And between feeling and willing lies the moon, which we feel as being within ourselves. [Between green and red the sign of the moon was placed.] And quite simply, in meditating on these figures, lying within these figures is the force, ever more and more, for us to approach a spiritual perspective. One may come to this only when the substance of what I speak, of what I articulate here with these words, can actually be inwardly experienced, namely going out and beyond the physical body, extending oneself out over the cosmos, feeling the members of the cosmos, sun and moon, stars, and so forth, as one's own organs, and looking back at the person as being in the external world.

Dear friends, dear brothers and sisters, the thinking that people practice here on the earth between birth and death is just a corpse. It is not living. What a person otherwise likes to dwell on endlessly in his head about beauty, sublimity, and grandeur about the physical world in his vicinity, these thoughts do not live. But in pre-earthly existence they were living. They were living, these thoughts, before we descended into the physical world, while we were still living as beings of soul and spirit in the soul-spiritual world. Thoughts such as we have here upon the earth were full of life there, and our physical body is the grave in which the dead world of thoughts is buried, when we descend down upon the earth. And here we carry the thought-corpses within us. And with the thought-corpses, not with fully living thoughts, we think about what is in our sensory surroundings here upon the earth. But before our descent down into this physical world, there was active in us fully alive thinking.

My dear friends, one only needs, ever again and forever, with all of one's inner power and force, to thoroughly absorb this truth within. One comes to the point of developing in one's awareness a certainty that it is so. One learns to know the person as such. One learns to know him, so that one can gaze upon him, and say, there is the human head. [An outline of a head was drawn.] This human head is the base and the bearer for earthly corpse-thinking. They sprout forth, [It was drawn as an elongated form down to the right.] these thoughts, but dead, overlaid upon what has been taken in through the eyes, taken in through the ears, through the sense of warmth, taken in through other senses. This is how we regard thinking, in reference to the earth.

But gradually we learn to penetrate through this thinking. Behind it in the spirit-cell of the human head, there still reverberates true, living thinking, the thinking in which we lived before we descended into the physical world. As one gazes at a person, then most certainly one gazes initially at his dead thinking [Drawn as a red part of the head.]. But behind this dead thinking, in the head's spirit-cell, is living thinking. [Drawn as a yellow part of the head.] And this living thinking has brought along the primal force to construct our brain. The brain is not the producer of thinking, but rather the product of pre-birth living thinking.

And so, if one were to gaze with the proper awareness behind what the person reveals in the superficiality of his head's earthly dead thinking, looking into what is behind the spirit-cell, then one might gaze upon the living thinking which certainly is there. This is similar to an act of will coming to one's attention, willing as such in the human musculoskeletal system, for it is certainly there in us, but sleeping. We simply don’t know how a thought goes down, when it has the intention, the will, to make this or that happen in our muscles and elsewhere. Looking at what lives in us as willing, we behold willing in the spirit-cell as the thinking that lies behind sensually aligned thinking. However, the willing we behold there, which we are becoming aware of as thinking, is the creative force for our thinking-organ. There this thinking is no longer just human-thinking, there this thinking is world-thinking.

Understanding a person in this way, somehow being able to look behind earthly thinking, to the thinking which first made the foundation for earthly thinking in the brain, this allows sensual thinking to be cast off into the worldly void, and what emerges as an act of will is eternal thinking.

All of this brings us into the state of mind, within which we can allow the mantric words to work in us.

Look² behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened³ spirit cell
Willing ascends from bodily depths;
Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

The imagination must gradually stand before you, my dear friends, the imagination that from the top of your head are streaming out the dead thoughts that are aligned with the sensory world. Behind this lies true thinking, at first merely as darkness, shining behind and through the sensory thinking, the true thinking that actually configured the brain, into which a person descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. It is however a sort of willing. And one sees, then, how willing ascends from a person [A few white lines were drawn from below upward.], spreading out then in the head, and then becoming world-thoughts, because what lives in willing as thinking, is even now world-thinking.

Toward this end one seeks ever more fully to understand, ever more inwardly to grasp, and ever more and more to bring to an inner anchorage the mantric thoughts which one places within the soul, with these words, in the following way. [The first stanza was written on the board.]

Look behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened spirit cell

Please note that one must gaze behind the thinking. [Behind was underscored.]

Willing ascends from bodily depths;

Now one must be strong in soul, to allow the customary sensory thoughts to be cast off.

Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

In these seven lines is contained most certainly the secret of human-thinking in its connection with the world-all.

One must not make a pretense of this, in just grappling with these things with the intellect. One must allow these things to live as meditations in the heart's depth. And these words have strength. They are constructed harmonically. Thinking, willing, worldly-void, willing, and world-thought creating [These words were underlined on the board.] are joined together here in an inner organization of thought, so that they can work effectively upon imaginative awareness.

Even as we can look behind the human head, the human head becoming a mediator in gazing into world-thought creating, so may we glance behind the human heart, as the representation, the physical representation, the imaginative representation of the human soul. Even as thinking is the abstract representation of the human spirit, so may we glance behind the human heart, as the representation of feeling. Even so we can gaze into feeling as it is related to the ways of earth in human earthly existence between birth and death. We can gaze into feeling, although here not behind feeling, but rather within feeling [drawing, a yellow oval]. Then, just as we may discern world-thought-creating behind spirit-cell-thinking, so we may grasp in feeling, the representation of the heart, we may truthfully grasp in feeling, streaming through feeling, something that goes in and out of a person from the entire cosmos. World-living is what we truly grasp, world-living that in men and women becomes human-soul-living.

As it must stand there [in the first verse], "behind thinking's sensory light," so must it now be called, "into feeling's" in the second mantra, which must become harmonically interwoven together with the first.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams
Living streams from world afar;
Through calm of heart in sleep
Let human feeling waft away;
And world living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

[The second stanza was now written on the board.]

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams

Feeling is merely a waking dream. Feelings are not so well known to a person as are thoughts. They become known to him as the builder of dreams. In such manner are feelings dreams while awake. And just so are they called.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams

Living

Here [in the first verse] "willing" streams out of body's depths, although here streaming out of world distance into soul-weaving is "living." [The word living was underlined, and the mantric line was continued.]

streams from world afar;

[In the drawing four horizontal arrows were made.]

Now similarly, as here [in the first verse], thinking should be cast out through strength of soul into the world-void, we now allow feeling’s dreams to waft away, in order, however, to discern in feeling's fabric of soul, what streams in as world living. When feeling's dreams fully fade away in sleep, when the individual human feeling ceases, then moving within a person is world-living.

Living streams from world afar;

[The writing was continued.]

Through calm of heart in sleep

Here [in the first verse] we need strength of soul; here [in the second verse] we need complete inner peace in sleep to allow feeling's dreams to fade away, and for heavenly world-living to stream into the human soul.

Through calm of heart in sleep

[The writing was continued, and the words "waft away", "world living", and human-being's-power" were underlined.]

Let human feeling waft away;
And world-living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

In these seven lines is the whole secret of human feeling, how out of the unity into the trinity, it can itself contain self-understanding.

Even so we can gaze out upon the human limbs, in which willing manifests. There, when we gaze out upon these human limbs, in which willing manifests, [On the drawing, a white arrow was drawn up in elongated form.], there we cannot say "look behind" or "look into", there we must say, "look over," for thinking streams down from the head in willing. In customary awareness a person is not able to observe it, but streaming from the head into the limbs are thoughts, in order that willing can work in the limbs.

Then, however, when we observe willing working in the limbs, when we see in every arm movement, when we see in every leg movement, how the stream of willing streams, then we will also be aware, how in this willing a secret thinking lives, a thinking that grasps earthly existence immediately. Yes, it has been laid in the foundation of our being from earlier lives on earth, that just there, through the limbs, earthly existence is grasped, apprehended, so that through this apprehension we have present existence. Thinking sinks down into the limbs. And when we see it in the willful movement of the limbs, how it sinks down of its own accord, this thinking, then we may catch a glimpse of thinking in willing. [On the drawing, red was drawn downwards in elongated form.]

As we gaze out with the soul, it otherwise would be concealed from us, how thinking lives in arms, in hands, in legs, in feet, and in toes, and then we must see that this thinking is actually light. It streams, thinking as light streams through arms and hands, through legs and toes. And by itself it transforms willing, which otherwise lives in the limbs as sleeping willing. It transforms willing, and thinking appears as willing’s magical essence, which is transferred into a person from an earlier life on earth, carried by the spirit, into the present life on earth.

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

It is a sort of conjuring, it is effective, magical, this unseen thinking in the limb's willing. A person begins to understand when he knows that thoughts, because we sleep in the will, that thoughts, even when not apparent in willing, are magically effective in the limbs as willing. And he begins to understand true magic, a magic that at first appears as thoughts, that lives through arms and hands, through legs and toes. [The third stanza was written on the board, during which the words "thinking", "transformed", "thinking", and "willing’s-magical-essence" were underlined.]

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

And in this is the secret of human willing, how such willing, formed out of the world-all, works magically, is contained in human beings.

And so, my dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, we will observe this as a foundation, for the time still to be announced, when I will build further upon this foundation. We will observe this as a foundation, using it in meditation, as we allow the mantric words ever and ever again to be drawn through the soul.

Look behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened spirit-cell
Willing ascends from bodily depths;
Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams
Living streams from world afar;
Through calm of heart in sleep
Let human feeling waft away;
And world-living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

• 1. der Vorstand
• 2. One may say Sieh in German, but in English one does not say “See over there,” or “see into your heart,” but rather “look over there,” or “look into your heart.”
• 3. Finstren is one of two variants of the uninflected comparative form of the adjective “dark” (finster). As this adjective is also sometimes inflected in German, meaning the ending of the word changes to express a grammatical function or attribute, it is confusing to translate, but a new ominous word such as darkling should not be invented. Dark or darkened seem to capture the meaning.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Yesterday my stating point was to indicate in a few words how Anthroposophy can certainly not be considered as an education of religion and in no way can it directly enter into the development of religious life, but only, as I indicated, indirectly. Anthroposophy must, according to its nature, live as a free deed in the human spirit, it must depend on the free deeds of the human spirit—like natural science as well, which heads in the opposite direction—while religious life must be based on communication with the Godhead with whom one knows one is connected and with whom one knows one is dependant in religious life.

[ 2 ] At first a serious abyss could open up between those who can offer Anthroposophy to contemporary civilization, and the blossoming of religious life. Perhaps in the totality of what we will talk about here will show you that this abyss doesn't exist. I would just like to call your attention today to how anthroposophical life intervenes in the academic world in such a way that it lends a religious colouring to it.

[ 3 ] It is quite without doubt that the modern world rules the relationship of humanity to the cosmos and its earthly environment with agnosticism, and religious people who do not acknowledge this, will come up against a very serious mistake. They would like to remain, to a certain extent, stuck in the comfortable old form and would not contribute anything to ensure that the essence of the old form can remain intact for the earth's development. This mistake unfortunately applies to many people at present. They shut themselves off from the necessity that the epoch we are entering into, requires that we clarify and move towards a conscious, awakened knowledge with human prudence in every area. If religious life is artificially distanced from this knowledge, so it would—while undoubtedly knowledge of a larger authority is being addressed—cause this knowledge to perish, as it once before had threatened to do in the 19th century, when the materialistic knowledge wanted to destroy religious life in a certain sense.

[ 4 ] What I have said regarding this must simply penetrate our sensitivities, it must be clear, and when it is clear, my dear friends, then our mental picture, as I bring it up in front of you, will not seem like such a paradox, as it might be for those who encounter and hear it for the first time.

[ 5 ] The agnosticism, the Ignorabimus, is something which has sprung up out of the scientific way of thinking of modern time. What kind of knowledge is it which professes ignorance or agnosticism? It is based on something which it agrees with completely; it is based on the fact that people have gradually been trying to totally shut out their life of soul from knowledge. It is namely so that the ideal human knowledge according to the modern scientist, also the historian, is to shut out subjectivity and only retain what is objectively valid. As a result, the process of obtaining knowledge—for scientific research as well—is completely bound to the physical body of man. Please understand this, my dear friends, in all earnest. Materialism namely has the right when it takes this knowledge which is available to it, not only in regard to what is totally due to material conditions, but which appear as material processes. What really happens between people, in their search for scientific knowledge and the outer world, moves between the outer material things and the relationship to the sense organs; this means their relationship with the material, physical body. The real process of seeking knowledge in connection to the earthly world is a material process right into the final phases of cognition. What the human being experiences in this cognition, is lived through as an observer; he experiences it with his soul-spiritual "side-stepping," so that the human being actually is quite right in the cognitive process as being understood physically and to recognise this as the only decisive conception. The human being as observer, which has no activity within himself—this has already often been mentioned by scientists who have thought about this, recognised it and spoken about it.

[ 6 ] You see, for in this process of acquiring knowledge, where the human being is actually a mere observer, everything a person has as inner journeys in his soul life, is discounted by the observed reality. The human being observes the outer things, he thinks about these outer objects, he is reminded by outer things, but he certainly also observes how in his reminiscences, his memories, how his emotions of feelings and willing come into it, only how this happens, he doesn't know because he is completely unsure about the origin of these feelings and willing, so that for this knowledge, which can only be acknowledged in the present, the only thing which comes into consideration is what happens between the observation and the memory. This is only a picture; it runs as a parallel occurrence next to the real materialistic process running alongside it. The material process is the reality and the recognition runs alongside the material process.

[ 7 ] If one had the means for really absorbing what was approaching in the epoch leading up to the Mystery of Golgotha, in the teachers and pupils of the mysteries, and what in that time, one could say, through three decades during which it happened, the then Gnostic orientated mystery teachers spoke about their most inner heartfelt convictions, then one can do no other than to say: they anticipated that the human being will experience himself as a mere observer in the world, and that even his process of acquiring knowledge will occur without his soul's participation. This experience ruled throughout the prevailing mood of the beings of the mysteries during the times of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 8 ] How can we come to terms with this knowledge today regarding ignorance and agnosticism? We arrive, as we've said, at something which appears as a paradox. Knowledge is the result of the material process, even tied to the material world, while the human being experiences spiritually, but is a mere observer in his spirit. If we now expand the Christian point of view of this phenomenon, then we finally reach a point of integrating this knowledge into the process itself that the Christian view of the various human processes ever had. We reach a point in a sense, which we characterised yesterday, to regard the recognition of human sinfulness in our time as the final phase of the Fall of mankind from its former conditions. Only then will we understand our current science out of religious foundations, when we can regard science as the final phase of the expression of the sinful human being, when we can place it into the realm of sin. This is what appears as a paradox. Out of sinfulness comes ignorance, out of sinfulness, religiously expressed, comes agnosticism.

[ 9 ] Only when we feel this way regarding modern science, can we feel Christian towards science. Then again—and we will actually see this in the following days—quite a necessary path results from the understanding of the sinfulness of today's science, an inner human path which can be understood as grace.

[ 10 ] With this I have initially indicated what we will be undertaking in the following days; because sometimes you have to do things a little differently to what is customary with today's science, when one wants to explain things in a proper way. To a certain extent one must first draw the outer circle and go inward from there and not start with a theory and draw conclusions from that.

[ 11 ] With this at least something real is indicated in humanity. If we simply remain stuck in the ordinary knowledge of current science, then we remain stuck in images. The moment we sense within these images—and all of science today is an image—the sinfulness within this modern scientific element, we comprehend matter with a reality within ourselves, then we are on the way to take science itself into reality. One must be able to develop a feeling, if one wants to rise to it, to ask questions in such a way that something of reality is felt: how is it possible, in a religious sense that, what the human being initially experiences as an observer, can be brought into something real through which human life here on earth is not merely a nonhuman, material life and that the human being is not a mere observer but that a person with his own true being can express himself by processing material existence? When does inner life reach into outer reality so that something is created out of the inward experience and a person is no longer only a mere observer?

[ 12 ] You see, there have been attempts to answer this question from time immemorial with the essence of sacramentalism, and one doesn't arrive at another understanding of the essence of sacramentalism than on the basis of such considerations as I've pointed out. First of all, one thing confronts us in human beings and that is the Word.

[ 13 ] The Word is actually for current science something quite mysterious, something secretive; because uttered words are at the same time perceived through the sense of hearing. In man there is a moment which lies in the words, when he utters words and he hears them at the same time. In the eyes, in the ability to see, the process has an active and a passive element completely intertwined; it is also present there but is not yet analysed in physiology today. Actually, it is present in all the senses but in relation to hearing and speaking both the active and passive elements are clearly separated from one another. When we speak, we certainly don't consider ourselves as observers of our lives; when we speak, we participate creatively in our life because speaking is simultaneously connected to our breathing process. What takes place in speaking streams over the breathing process. When we breathe in we bring the pressure of the breathing right into our spinal cord canal and in this way, pressure is translated to the brain and works creatively on the cerebral fluid. In the breathing process the outer world streams into us, moulding ourselves. The air we breathe is firstly outside, it enters into us, works formatively on our cerebral fluid and thus also works formatively in the semi-solid parts of the brain. We only understand the brain correctly if we don't just look at it as something which has grown in humans, but if we look at it as something in progressive interaction with the outer world.

[ 14 ] In this in-streaming of breath we weave the words which we express. I want to firstly only indicate these things, as I suggested, I want to draw an outer circle and then move gradually inward. By our interweaving our words with our breath—which is indicated in the Old Testament as giving humans their origins—blowing in the air to breathe—through which our word unifies with what is considered in the breath of air as divine, we experience the Word as the Creator within us. We observe something in the world process where we are not merely observers but feel our soul's life working creatively into our body.

[ 15 ] We have reached an understanding which allows us to say: in the original creation of mankind was the Word, and everything in human beings was created through the Word.—Just study what it means that the human being, by learning to speak, slowly disentangles his physical organisation through speech. We haven't yet considered the words of the Gospel of St John, but we have discovered the manifestation of something of the bodily nature of the human being in this Gospel. When we contemplate the human being we first of all have his spiritual soul expression and from here the Word comes, which then draws into his bodily organism and shapes him, and thus we have many of these bodily forms which in the course of our lives develop from words themselves, because this is the way we are, we develop out of our words.

[ 16 ] What speech/language means to human beings can only really be studied fully in its depths through spiritual science. Already in the sense of the Testaments we have an interweaving of the words which moves through man as the first divine process, that of breathing. Mere thinking which moves in the sphere of the observer is pushed into the creative sphere. When thinking becomes transformed into words, the Divine empowers these thoughts; it is, one could say, the deification of thoughts occur in the words. When one becomes aware that there is much more to words than speech, then words become something through which a person discovers his first connection, his first communication with the Divine in his own behaviour, a behaviour which is like a condensing; like a thought immersed in feeling. While this is to some extent a route from subjective to objective thought, we have the possibility for something which is spiritually objective, to flow into the word. This can be followed by the idea that much more can exist in words than what is in merely man-made thinking; that to a certain extent something divine can flow into the words and that in the words something divine can be expressed, that a divine message can be contained in the words.

[ 17 ] So we have the first element, that people from out of themselves, find their way going out into the environment, permeated with what is divine in the words. This is somewhat the way the Words of the Gospels were experienced, the in-streaming of the divine in the words of the Gospels which we can feel in the creative activity of the words for ourselves; here we have the first element how man can change from his subjectivity to the objective, like in ritual.

[ 18 ] Now, one can look at what a person doesn't think regarding the world, but what actions he performs in the world. Simply look at human actions. These human actions are seldom regarded in the right light by modern materialism.

Once again, I can only make indications about what this actually involves; we will later enter into them again.

[ 19 ] Just imagine the following contrivance: around a pulley a rope, here a weight, and on the other side a larger weight. The rope is pulled down on the side of the heavier weight and pulled up on the opposite side. The same thing can happen if you now pull on the lighter side and lift the heavier side. You could accomplish something yourself which can also happen as an objective process. In the first place, depending on the heavier weight, it happens without you being there; but when you are there, you can shift the weight. What happens in the outer world can also happen without you.

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[ 20 ] This is however a process in inorganic nature. When you study what a person accomplishes in the outer world you realize what is of importance is that it happens in such a way, that it comes from spiritual interrelationships, and that the body of a person only presents the possibility for the action. In our actions we namely—in that we gain knowledge of the world as soul-spiritual observers—only have our body as one ingredient. In our bodies processes take place—processes of movement, of nourishment, of dissolving and so on. What takes place in our bodies is an ingredient, something that is added to what happens objectively. Our body doesn't take part in our actions; we only understand our actions when we consider them when separated from the body. Just as we in the cognitive process, seen materialistically, have something which turns us into observers, so we have in the process of actions for the world, in the process of action, which takes place in the world, something in which the body doesn't participate. Processes which take place in the body remain without cosmic meaning, just like materialistic knowledge has no cosmic meaning. A person remains in materialism in his actions when they only pertain to the earthly, like a hermit standing in the world has no relationship to anything outside of himself. If he searches for this relationship, then he must mix something spiritual into his actions, accomplish actions in such a way that they aren't separated from him, like all earthly actions, then he must allow his thoughts and feelings to enter in a vital way into his actions, so that the actions become signs for what lives in them. Then the actions are a sacrificial act, then they are the sacrifice.

[ 21 ] When we look at knowledge in this way, we see knowledge objectified by the validation of the message in words; if we look at the actions, we have the objectification of action, the drawing out of man alone in what is given in the sacrificial act. Here we first have the relationship of a person to the outer world in the sense that it originates out of the human spirit-soul. Out of the spiritual soul now also rises the imagination—in relation to words, which are no longer experienced as a human, but as a divine revelation—and in relation to the sacrificial act, which is no longer being experienced as the manipulation of the human world, in which man is not involved, but as such is involved with his thoughts, his feelings; this he experiences again in his inner life.

[ 22 ] The other relationship of the human being to the outer world, we find in human nutrition. We actually have three relationships to the outer world: observation through the senses, breathing and nutrition. Everything else can be referred back to these. Breathing is actually positioned between perception and nutrition because one could say that breathing is half perception and half nutrition. It is undeniable that the breathing process stands between the process of perception and nutrition. You see, it is simultaneously connected to the processes of perception and nourishment. Breathing is the synthesis between observation and nutrition.

[ 23 ] Physiology considers nutrition incorrectly. Physiology is of the opinion that we take in nourishment, that we take out of the food what we need and repel the rest. This is not so. That we absorb substance is only a side-effect. The process of life means we are actually constantly opposed and fight back against what is caused by the ingestion of foodstuff into ourselves. We eat, we drink—and the result is something which lies truly very deep in our consciousness, beneath our conscious soul life. What happens there is a constant defensive action. In this physical-physiological process of defence are found the actual processes of life and of nutrition. The life process of nourishment is an averting process. Only when we realize how the organism is organised in this way, to receive the suggestion for a defence—for us to have a defence there naturally has to be suggestion—only when we understand that by the defence against a substance coming from outside as a suggestion in the process of nourishment, will we be able to really understand nourishment. With nourishment a process of aversion is involved, while the absorption of substances is only a side effect through which the finest filaments of the human being the suggestion for resistance is directed from the outside, in order for the aversion to take place in the most outer periphery of the organism. Only at this point of averting does the actual life process of nutrition take place, so that the ordinary earthly process of nourishment is actually a resistance to the earthly. The earthly pushes the nourishing items into us, and we must absorb it, but this is a process of resistance.

[ 24 ] This is the reality, but it is not the way science looks at the whole thing. What is actually happening with this repulsion? Something happens which lies completely outside of human consciousness. When we take up nourishment, it is actually a process of the material world. Each substance is actually a concentrated, reduced world process. Processes of the outer world we take into ourselves, we repel them, but by repelling them, a counter process comes about: the process of the outer world becomes something quite different, transformed, and in this transformation, something happens in us. Outer matter is transformed in us. What becomes of it? It becomes spirit within us. This is something which is ordinarily not seen, that the human being in his actual process of digestion, in his transformation of the outer world steers outer material processes to spiritualization.

In the outer world nature goes through world processes, and as a fragment of this world process, we could call it the origin of a seed, from which all other things originated through the seed serving as nourishment. What happens in the outer world becomes firstly transformed within the human being before it goes further on its way to spirituality. It can't be transformed into the spiritual in the outer world, only within the human being can it change into the spiritual. This is simply an objective fact, which I state here, nothing else. However, what I'm presenting here for you happens outside the world of human thoughts. It happens in the deeper regions of human will and partially in the feeling realms. Only certain parts of the feeling life, and will, take part in the process of nourishment, which I've recently indicated. Thought processes don't take part in it; it goes in the opposite direction; through the Word it goes from below into the formation. Here beneath, we have, coming from outside in the opposite direction, like the way the thought process does it, the process of transformation.

[ 25 ] If one wants to place this transformative process within the human being so that when one looks at a person according to the manner in which he looks at the outer world, then one must place something in the outside world which actually doesn't happen in the outside world, but only within the human being. With this one had placed a sacramental act in the outside world, something which doesn't take place in natural phenomena, but which takes place within the human being as a human mystery. If one wants to take what belongs to the most inner part of man, which we have just characterised, and place this in front of the human being, then one arrives at the conversion of the bread and the wine as the body and blood (of Christ), which is the transubstantiation. The transubstantiation is not an experience of the outside world; the transubstantiation is revealing to the outside world what is fulfilled within the most inner part of the human being. We see in the transubstantiation what we are unable to see in the outside world, because the outside world is a fragment of existence, not a totality; in the sacraments we add that to the outside world in addition to what the kingdom of nature accomplishes within the human being.

[ 26 ] This, my dear friends, is the original idea of the sacrament, that something is added to outer world phenomena, something which inner man doesn't experience consciously but which is within the human being, and because it is not recognised but exists subconsciously, it can through signs be placed into the outside world. To consummate transubstantiation, a person must feel something unconsciously connected with the innermost being of his self to the symbols. He is indeed paving the way for intercommunications with the spirits of the outside world by presenting the transformation, which would otherwise take place behind the veil of memory within him, as a sacrament.

[ 27 ] With this we have not yet grasped what the highest achievable thing is by human beings, we have only grasped the spiritualisation process of substance in the human being, the transformation, the transubstantiation. What happens in man as an objective process takes place, I would say, only as separated from our consciousness by a thin veil, behind our consciousness. This happens because from this side, at every moment of our lives, our "I" is stirred up. We dive down below this transformed substance and by our absorbing the matter of the outside world, our process of life exists in this transformation, by our spiritual soul diving under into the transformation of the outside world, our "I" is continually nourished, our "I" is continuously encouraging the union with the substance transformed by this process. The union with the substance after its transformation represents the accessibility of the ego-manifestation to spiritualisation. Let's consider this in a sacramental way.

If we place the sacramental before us then the participation in the sacrament is such that it is materially represented through symbolism; as soon as it is transubstantiated it becomes united with the human being and here we have the fourth link of what in the ritual can be represented as the sacramental signs in the relationship of the human being to the world.

[ 28 ] If we look at the human beings in as far as they are involved with the outside world, then we have, what I would call, the realization of the process of knowledge (in spirit) in Words, and in the sacrificial act, which appear outwardly in signs, we have indicated everything which a person can unite with in his soul-spirit and actions. If we look at human beings absorbing the outside world, where we have the proclamation of the message in word and the sacrificial act, if we look at human beings who continuously give birth out of the spiritual, then we have realized this in the sacramental acts of transubstantiation and communion.

[ 29 ] With this we have thus the possibility to connect the human being in his relationship to all his actions in the outside world in a real sense. Actions distance themselves from him, his own body walks beside him. In transubstantiation that which does not take place in the world is presented as an event, because the outside world is only a fragment of possible events. In communion a person unites himself with the outside world to which he can't connect through his thinking. Objective processes precede transubstantiation and communion. As a result of this we place a person through a physical-soul-spiritual way in a relationship with the world. We have stopped regarding the human being as in a hermit's existence removed from the world; we've started seeing him as a member of the whole world. We have learnt to regard the world as material, but there, where we see it as a fragment, to look at it as if the spiritual foundation on which matter is based is only a part, spiritualising and perfecting; and we have taken the divine cycle, which is in the outer and inner part of man, and placed it before us ... (Some gaps in stenographer's text made the publisher shorten the text here.)

[ 30 ] This is what the people wanted to present to those who said: The human physical-soul-spiritual relationship to the universe can be brought back through the sacraments; recognised through the proclamation, through the sacrificial act, performed through the transubstantiation and communion. You could live together with the entire world by taking what is usually spread over two halves in a person, the soul-spiritual, which just watches, and the physical, which is just an addition to external actions. These can be united by taking what the mere observer wants to remain in relation to the outside world, sacramentalize it in the proclamation of the Word, in the Gospel—which comes out of the "Angelum," out of the realm permeated by the spiritual world—and in the sacrificial act, experienced in his inner life and through which the human being only becomes complete, sacramentalised in the transubstantiation, the transformation, and then by incorporating the human being into this whole in communion, in union. Here you have a real process which is no mere process of knowledge but a process which is connected to your feeling and will, while the process of knowledge takes place in a cold, frozen region of mere abstraction.

[ 31 ] What takes place in the coldness of knowledge is warmed somewhat by the proclamation of the Word and in the sacrificial act. That which, however, through overheating can no longer exist consciously, because heat numbs consciousness and thus can't be perceptive, which can happen when the phenomenon is elevated to a noumenon/psyche, means that in place of external processes which are perceived by the senses, the external process of sacramental action is imitated by the human being itself, in which sacramental action is regarded as what lies behind nature, which can't be produced by anything else, with an objective meaning in the world, because it places the events of human life itself in the cosmos.

[ 32 ] With this we have given something which our current abstract process for acquiring knowledge actually presents in life. However, a question remains, which is an important question. We can understand that something happens in people through the Word, because the Word works into the corporeality and man forms himself through words. We can also understand that through the sacrificial act something happens in the inner part of man because the sacrificial act is executed in such a way that he is not just holding back what is in his body, but that his feeling and willing takes part in the sacrificial act. As a result, an earthly event in the body is connected to a super-earthly event. This can be comprehended. In fact, quite different feelings are experienced during the sacrificial act than any during any other processes in ordinary outer activities. A dampening of the consciousness which is carried within, is numbed. If we can now say something happens within human beings, then the great question arises which we want to address in future: does this event, which is primarily an independent event, does it not take its course in outer events? Is it not also a world event? If so, then we should ask ourselves, what a person experiences as in an outer action, which is symbolic and thus somehow withdraws from the course of events in natural phenomena—do such actions in their turn somehow weave into the course of events in natural phenomena? Are they something real, outside of the human being? This is the other component of the question. As we said, we will occupy ourselves with this question in the next days.

[ 33 ] You will have already noticed in what has come in front of you, that there are four main elements of the sacrifice of mass which rest on the primordial experiences of consciousness, in the mysteries. The four principal constituents of the sacrifice of mass are namely: reading the Gospel, the Offering, the transubstantiation (transformation) and communion (unification).

[ 34 ] In everything which I present to you, my dear friends, I have no other goal than to share these things firstly with you. Everything that is to happen now will be based on the fact that, despite our communal confrontations which we know about, the tasks of our time will especially come out of a truly religious consciousness. We will speak about this further, tomorrow.

An Open Letter To Dr Rudolf Steiner

September 1921

Honourable Doctor!

After the devastating impressions of the last years which have gone through the German world, a longing has developed for religious renewal. It is true that on the whole, quite small circles have these longings which are really serious and alive. However, these are circles in which one can hope to find the power for how this can be developed. Some really strong will glows here in the youthful hearts waiting for the aim and leadership. There where one didn't dare to think about it not long ago, lectures are being held regarding the rebirth of the German nation, and one allows certain religious sounds to become agreeable even if one doesn't want to know anything about church life. In newspapers and magazines, and much more so in innumerable dialogues, there is a turn towards higher questions. The feeling that something new and great could come into the inner realm lives in a clear or less clear way in many of the best of us. As hopeful as we at times evoke this mood, at closer inspection we still discover a hopelessness, which is truly a call for mercy. Nearly superstitiously one waits in these circles for religious leaders, but one has no idea in which direction one is steered and vacillates between hope and a deep mistrust in one's own hope. Inspired, one celebrates soon the one and then the other which on the region of the inner life appears strong and safe to talk about, yet to which one has to admit shortly after, that one was disappointed and that the word of fulfilment is not mentioned again. One hopes for intuitions, does not know the at least where it should come from and which are the most believable, and confuses ever more dangerous tendencies of instinctive life with divine revelations. One regards the great personalities of the past, Fichte, Goethe, also Luther, and tries drawing inspiration from their work without really liberating contemporary solutions.

People look for substitutes in community feelings and community experiences and completely forget that each and every great soul had been given by community. There's a demand for a new "ritual" and they don't know that only a new spirit can bring a new ritual/worship, that the right spirit on its own can bring about a satisfactory form of worship from out of himself. People create all kinds of dance and play and enjoy the sure spirit of times gone by, expecting from this to create something which one can't create yourself but should create.

In this general hopelessness, which becomes ever more evident and could bring about a change of heart, Anthroposophy steps in and—multiply this hopelessness! Those who experience Anthroposophy for the first time, express much of the passionate rejection they experience. As one of those who have entered into such a circle where an understanding for your work can be found, I would here like to be the spokesman for these circles. In this way I would like to advise you to make something of the coherence and mood of these people, in order to help them understand Anthroposophic thought and actions better. As vividly as I am empathic on the one hand, how strange, yes, repulsive these people at first encounter Anthroposophy, so sure is my experience on the other hand that a fulfilment of the great, deep longing of our time can be achieved through the correct knowledge of anthroposophic accomplishments.

The people of whom, and for whom, I want to talk about here, long for a great purpose in life. They imagine this purpose of life, consciously or unconsciously, as a unified, powerful thought, as a singular soul-powerful feeing, which carries the whole of life and lift it up. Now the find Anthroposophy and discover an abundance of assertions in all kinds of fields, a mass of individual insights, big and small, which they initially don't know how to approach and towards which they feel helpless. It is as if they want to dangerously push everything away by saying 'One is necessary', which they still experience as a deep human need.

They want a clear, safe way to be indicated up high, which recommends itself to them convincingly and invitingly, a way they can walk forward to with a clear conscience and joyful courage. Now they hear of all kinds of exercises, which could and should be done, through which one laboriously acquires all kinds of abilities which do not seem essential and decisive to them—how one for example focuses your mind on the blossoming and withering of a plant in order to get an impression of the transience of life, the spirituality of a flower and so on. A confusing wealth of advice spreads itself out before them, on the one hand from the moral, known and obvious side and on the other hand, from the 'occult' strange or even questionable side. They would gladly feel free and great, striving at the pinnacle of humanity so to speak, but now they must find that some individuals with deep insights should be far ahead of them, and that they have no prospect in life to even come close to reaching them. As a result, they feel themselves pushed into a lower human class and even robbed of their human kingdom. They feel like an assassination attempt on their human dignity, even if they don't say it out loud.

Many of these people strongly feel that help can only come from a higher world. It is precisely here that Anthroposophy seems to be gradually thrown back on itself. It is for them as if people gradually want to and must push themselves higher, with unending effort and boredom while they long to be seized from above and be filled with new, powerful life forces from above.

Many of them have worked through a large part of knowledge of our time. Just from current science they have received powerfully chilling and paralysing impressions. And now also the realm of belief and the realm of knowledge needs transformation? Must their most precious and highest experiences of their inner soul realm be sacrificed for research and a descriptive 'science'? They fear that this will fall back into a dull intellectualism; they rear a falsification, even desecration of the inner life. It looks to them like a basic, dangerous underestimation of the deep distinction is presented between knowledge which appear through the senses and phenomena, and belief, the inner truth freely acknowledged. Not only a few of these people carried a strong knowledge within, that help must somehow be expected from Christ, not from churchlike Christianity, but from the correctly understood Christ himself. Yes, in individuals you find an instinctive awareness of the "living Christ" as the great helper of mankind. Now they are told that in Anthroposophy, Christ is regarded as the "regent of the sun" or that to begin with the two Jesus children in our time reckon with all kinds of extraordinary details; sincere claims which, as far as they had not found this quite repulsive initially, now in any case mean absolutely nothing and above all doesn't appear to be of help.

Some of them are also influenced by the "culture" of the last decades—the word "culture" itself has become so questionable that it can hardly be heard any more. They all look rather at everything else as a "new culture." Now they experience Anthroposophy penetrating into all outer areas, in architecture, the art of dance, which all want to renew our culture. There it appears that the power of humanity regarding religion as the main focus is pushed aside to a busyness and all kinds of outer work of vain distraction.

Above all, however, we must also remember those by whom the social question has been raised precisely by religious sentiment, becoming the mighty burning question of our time, and who can only through a new spirit, which grasps and truly fulfils humanity with a pure, strong brotherly mood make the salvation possible for the world. To them Anthroposophy seems neither simple nor warm, neither convincing nor contemporary or popular enough to somehow help humanity recover from their current main dilemma.

How much the present theological striving of anthroposophy has remained inadequate, I know all too well. During the last years I've had many hours of embarrassment about it, that this great spiritual movement has been regarded as failed by my theological colleague, in a spiritual and unfortunately also human way. In the above-mentioned mood I believe deeper reasons need to be looked for regarding this strong instinctive antipathy which anthroposophy meets in theologians, but also in other religious circles.

Let me at least indicate to ignorant readers—who can say one gets the clear impression that I am again being mistaken through Anthroposophy—that I believe I have the right to know what to expect from all these objections which I have to handle almost daily. I clearly see that the antipathies partly originate out of a false understanding of the tasks which Anthroposophy proposes, which is quite inclusive yet simultaneously humble, when many of its opponents think, partly out of an inadequate insight into the depth and character of the current spiritual crises, and out of a similar inadequate knowledge of the real possibilities for their solution. While you have up to now not according to my knowledge entered explicitly and in detail into this whole circle of concern, I believe that for many there is really a need for you to once and for all answer such questions. Particularly enlightening it could be as well, if you can express yourself regarding how you from your point of view, out of your abilities judge the actual present human being to have "religious impressions" at all. Does one not turn to soul powers which are dwindling relentlessly, when one in some old sense of "pure religious" way want to address current humanity? What exists for the future when people today still speak about a "religious experience" and impressions of God? How can powers, which make people susceptible for the higher worlds, be enlivened and in which way can they be renewed? How do you imagine an active religious proclamation in future? The main issue would be to hear what you have to say, how you see the current religious crisis from your point of view, and how Anthroposophy can and will contribute.

As always with immense gratitude and veneration.

Yours,
Friedrich Rittelmeyer.

Introduction to Mystery Centers, Lecture 1

Dear friends, Last Sunday the Dutch Anthroposophical Society was founded in the Netherlands, and with that the last of the national societies has come into being, which are to be there as preparatory foundations when the International Anthroposophical Society is to emerge from these individual national societies here at Christmas. The task will be to take what is now happening on the basis of these individual national societies and make it into something real, so real that the Anthroposophical Movement can perhaps find in it an instrument for society. Today it is already the case that one can see from the most diverse individual phenomena, from the most diverse symptoms, how this anthroposophical movement is taken much, much more urgently elsewhere than it often is within the Anthroposophical Society. I do not mean by this – please do not misunderstand me, my dear friends – I do not mean that there is a lack of individuals within the Anthroposophical Society who are wholeheartedly committed to the movement and who constantly develop their feelings in the direction of the Society's thinking and feeling, as it must be one day. But what is missing within the Society, what underlies the words that I have to speak about this absence, is real activity in the direction given by the impulses of the Anthroposophical Movement.

I said that much more is happening in this direction in another place: namely, with the opponents. It is indeed the case that today, from a more or less opposing — or often, as it is often called, objective side, hardly any comprehensive presentation of the spiritual currents of the present day appears without the anthroposophical movement being forcefully taken into account – usually, of course, in a derogatory sense, or if not in a derogatory sense, then in such a way that the anthroposophical movement is harmed anew.

All these things cannot be taken into account unless active interest within the Anthroposophical Society can develop in the same way as it does among those outside, whether as opponents or as so-called objective observers. This is what you encounter everywhere. Especially the opponents take Anthroposophy very seriously.

I would ask you to consider just one thing. If you look at things from the outside and assess the importance of anthroposophy today based on the number of members of the Anthroposophical Society, it seems almost laughable, one might say, that the opposing side takes this anthroposophy so seriously. You only have to consider that, if you count the number of members of the Anthroposophical Society, it is truly a terribly small group in relation to any other society or spiritual context. And the great old spiritual movements should not care what is believed or not believed by such a small group of people. It is not because the opponents know full well what Anthroposophy is. They appreciate Anthroposophy, in their own sense, and they actively appreciate it.

Now, of course, it can be said that we simply do not have personalities within the Anthroposophical Society who are predisposed to activity. That is certainly a factor, because the vast majority of personalities have come precisely to absorb a world view, not to be active in some direction within the Society. But on the other hand, there is this necessity today: if the Anthroposophical Society is to continue to exist, it needs active work and activity. This must be said again and again. It may be a mishap that we need it, but we need it.

This is particularly evident when we see, and I want to say this quite positively, how necessary it is today to be able to count on the fact that a very strong international anthroposophical society will emerge from the individual national societies at Christmas; because we really cannot leave the whole anthroposophical movement as it is.

The necessity exists that, regardless of who it is, people must find each other within the Anthroposophical Society who are interested in what is happening in the world, who know how to deal with what is happening in the world! It is always actually a great astonishment to see when something of what is happening in the world is mentioned.

Of course, I know that many excellent people within the Anthroposophical Society actually take umbrage when the Society is asked to place itself in the spiritual evolution of contemporary humanity. I can also understand that many would prefer the Anthroposophical Society to be an association of people who sit quietly in their chairs and pursue their world view and do not need to worry about what is otherwise going on in the world. I can understand it, certainly; from the whole process that has taken place in the founding and development of the Anthroposophical Society, it is understandable. But on the other hand, the necessities of the world are also there. And there it is absolutely essential that we at least submit to these necessities in a certain sense.

Purely anthroposophical work goes well everywhere. One can only say: it goes well. There was an excellent atmosphere in The Hague with regard to this anthroposophical thinking and feeling together. The lectures that I gave as a branch on the connection between man and the supersensible world were given in an excellent atmosphere. The public anthroposophical lectures also created an excellent atmosphere. The lectures that were organized with a pedagogical focus also created an excellent atmosphere.

Furthermore, we were delighted to see a small Waldorf School established in The Hague with a first, fourth and eighth class, which makes an extraordinarily satisfying impression. We were able to take a step forward in what can be achieved in the field of anthroposophic medicine, just as we have already done in London and Vienna, by organizing lectures on anthroposophic medicine for doctors in The Hague. These were held at the invitation of Dr. Zeylmans, who has set up a clinic there along our lines, lectures on anthroposophic medicine were given by Dr. Wegman and myself. All this could be achieved. As I said, this is all without the slightest criticism. The practical things are going very well. But when it comes to holding things together through the Anthroposophical Society, then, of course, there are still problems as far as feelings and perceptions are concerned; but then the fact arises that the Anthroposophical Society would like to be a bit of an extended family that shuts itself off from the outside world. And that is also how it is in its practices. Isn't it, for my sake the statutes can be made as one wants; they are not the essential thing. The essential thing is how one behaves, even when admitting members. When admitting members, one can proceed in such a way that one closes the Society, or one can enlarge it as much as possible. And the way of thinking about admitting members is simply such in many respects that we cannot count on seeing the Anthroposophical Society grow in the direction in which it must grow if it is to bring into the world — I do not say wants to bring into the world: Today, one is no longer free to want to carry something into the world or not — what the Anthroposophical Society has become through its substance. Today, one is no longer free: certain things just have to be done! And enthusiasm is often lacking. One would so much like to see this enthusiasm develop in the Society!

I am not saying this just because it is an experience that was made in the last days in The Hague, but rather an experience that has now arisen from the establishment of the national societies and which must be stated before we proceed to establish the one for which the national societies exist: the International Anthroposophical Society, which should have its center in Dornach.

This is a report on what took place in The Hague that appears to be not entirely objective, but perhaps it is more objective internally than it initially appears externally, to be given.

I must begin with the gratifying observation that upon my return¹ I encountered a great many friends who are here in Dornach for the first time. They have come to inform themselves about what goes on in Dornach and what is meant to proceed from here into our anthroposophical movement. I cordially welcome all the newly arrived friends and hope that because of their stay with us they can carry back with them many new inspirations. Among the friends we can greet once again are many we have not seen for years. This fact along with much else undoubtedly indicates the difficulties of the age in which we live. I have just returned from a visit in Stuttgart, which was filled with the manifold tasks generated within our anthroposophical sphere of work. Among other matters, it included the ending of the first academic year of the Waldorf School² founded in Stuttgart. This Waldorf School belongs to those establishments which manifest most prominently the ideas of our anthroposophical spiritual movement. Even though one sets high standards for it, the completion of the first school year has demonstrated that there is cause for satisfaction. I can say this because it is possible to remain objective even if one is wholeheartedly involved in the project and even if, in a certain sense, one has been its instigator.

Above all it is gratifying to see how the Waldorf School teaching staff definitely understood how to proceed from a completely anthroposophical basis, as had always been the intention. Present-day conditions necessitated that this basis in anthroposophy should not produce a school that teaches a certain world view, a school in which anthroposophy would be taught. That was never the intention. With this in mind, therefore, we arranged the religious instruction so that children of Protestant parents, who wished them to have Protestant religious instruction, could be taught by a Protestant minister; Catholic children, by a priest. Only those who did not care to be numbered among the existing denominations were separately taught a form of anthroposophical religious instruction. Except for this, we certainly never considered the founding of an institution that teaches a specific world outlook. All efforts were directed toward the creation of a school in which the practical teaching impulses arising from the viewpoint and will of our spiritual science could for once be directly applied in the education and instruction of youth. It was our aim that the anthroposophic impetus should be expressed not in the content of the classes but in the way classes were taught, in the manner in which the whole school system was handled; that this impetus be manifested in the specific kind, and the different methods, of instruction. Once an anthroposophist has stimulated his classes through his anthroposophic will, the fertilization of the teaching process shows precisely what a vitalizing effect anthroposophy has when it is implemented in this way.

Throughout its first year, I always had the opportunity to observe the progress at the Waldorf School. Again and again, I was there for one or two weeks. I could supervise instruction and was able to watch the development of the different classes. I could see, for instance, how our friend, Dr. Stein,³ succeeded in enlivening his history class for older students by bringing anthroposophic impulses into history. Anthropology, as taught by Fräulein Dr. von Heydebrandt in the fifth grade, was lifted from the tedium prevailing ordinarily in our schools by imbuing it truly with anthroposophic will. I could cite many other instances from which you could clearly see that without in any way teaching abstract anthroposophy the subject matter comes alive by the method and the way it is treated and fertilized by anthroposophy. This practical application of anthroposophic strength of purpose shows that anthroposophy need not remain an abstract, remote philosophy, but can definitely influence human activity, even though we unfortunately have little opportunity to penetrate human affairs, except in limited areas like the Waldorf School. Now, when we ended the first year something happened that seemed to be only an exterior matter, but, as I am about to explain, it was an event that had great inner significance. A complete innovation took place. It concerned the report cards.

The report card system is truly one of the most miserable aspects of our schools. In a superficial, groping manner, teachers must grade their students from 1, 2, 3, 4 to 5 and so on,^T1 a procedure that stifles the very nature of schools in a most appalling way. Our report cards are based on actual educational psychology, on an absolutely practical application of human psychology. At the end of the first school year, the teachers were at the point where they were able to write a report card for every child corresponding to its own character and capabilities, individually indicating the possibility for continued growth and progress. No report card was like any other. There were no numbers indicating grades. Instead, through the teacher's individual insight into his pupil, the student received a characterization of his personality. Already in the course of the first school year, the teachers had so intimately sought to deepen their understanding of every child's soul that they were able to write into the report card an accompanying verse suited to each recipient's individual character.

These report cards are an innovation. Do not conclude, however, that it can be imitated or readily introduced somewhere else, because this change has been brought about by the whole spirit of the Waldorf School and is based on the fact that the most intensive educational psychology was practiced during the first school year. We carefully studied what was causing certain intimate manifestations in the faster or slower progress of a class, and already in the course of the first school year, we made a few discoveries that were in some ways surprising. We learned, for example, that the whole configuration of a class takes on a specific form if the number of boys and girls in that class is equal. The configuration is a quite different one if boys are in the majority and girls in the minority, and it changes again when there are more girls than boys in a class We have had all these examples in our classes. These imponderables, which elsewhere are not taken into consideration at all, are in many ways the essential element in a class.

When one attempts to express certain aspects of psychology, trying to define them in so many words, he is then already past the point that really matters. It is just the predominant and nonsensical custom of our time that one attempts to express things too rigidly in words. One cannot study matters thoroughly if one wants to express them in this constrictive word structure. One must be aware that by expressing things in this manner they can only be indicated approximately.

Of course, we always find ourselves in an odd position when we talk about the results of our anthroposophically oriented movement of spiritual science. The Waldorf School, whose teachers have proven themselves eminently suited to their tasks, could only justify itself because a group of human beings was gathered together who were most competent and pedagogically most qualified. It is unfortunate that in any effort to carry something out in a practical sense today, one encounters, much more than is generally realized, the one great obstacle, namely, a lack of qualified people. Today, the world has a paucity of people who are qualified for any real tasks in life. In our case the difficulty would be compounded should a second school be established. To find suitable, really proficient individuals capable of working in the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would be much more difficult because the one existing school has, of course, already attracted all those who could seriously be considered. Yet there can be no doubt that, for once, something has been accomplished in a certain area. I must say, however, that this is like an island. There, in the course of the first school year, a spiritual system of education has become manifest which truly evolved from the fundamentals of anthroposophy. It is an island, however, enclosed within its shores. Beyond these shores, the financial and economic connections of the school are affected by the great decline in the economic and political life of the present. This is where the problems lie. We can see that our prospects are not what they should be; they are not as good as they should be considering the nature of our achievement. Yet does anyone have even a slight understanding of what the Waldorf School has created based on the spirit?

The Waldorf School was founded by our friend Molt⁴ so that the children of the Waldorf Astoria Works could receive an education. Already in the first year, many children from the outside, who were unconnected to the factory, became students at the school; there must have been around 280 of them. Now, many new students have been registered, but from the Waldorf Astoria Works we have no more than were previously here, as well as the few who have meanwhile reached school age. If everything goes really well, and if economic and other problems can be solved, we shall, judging from the present applications, have more than four hundred students in our school. This means we shall have to build, hire more teachers, establish parallel classes. All this must happen! In a certain sense it will be a crucial test as to whether the financial understanding of our needs by those involved can keep pace with what induces so many people from the outside to bring us their children. It was somewhat ironical to me when the mother of one of our students was introduced to me in the school corridor as Frau Minister So and So. Even those connected with the present government are bringing their children to the Waldorf School now!

Some of these matters actually should be studied more closely in their social context as well. Then, perhaps, it would be possible to perceive the real needs of our society and how they are met by institutions such as the Waldorf School.

Now and then the Waldorf School was beset by a certain superficiality that is a characteristic of our times, as I have often pointed out. The leadership of the school was naturally confronted with people here and there who wanted to visit for a while, that is to snoop around a bit. Yet there is really not all that much to see. What does matter is the whole spirit at work in the school, and that is simply the anthroposophical spirit. People who can't make the effort to read anthroposophic books and who hope to set something from scouting round in the Waldorf School would be better served by deepening their knowledge of anthroposophy. For what bestows spirit on the Waldorf School and lies at its very foundation can only be seen in the spiritual impulses that are the Basis of anthroposophical spiritual life. I have often pointed out to those who have been attending my lectures for some time that today the anthroposophic spiritual life is not directed only toward the individual who seeks the way out of his soul's distress and life's afflictions in the spiritual forces of the world. Today, spiritual science must address itself to the need and decline of our time. Then, however, the comprehension of what spiritual science has to offer will be met by that special kind of understanding that a person today can generally bring to anything of a spiritual nature. When talking about spiritual science, it is often necessary to speak in an entirely different language than is customary. One could say that in a certain sense words acquire a new meaning through spiritual science. It is absolutely necessary to feel and to sense this.

Today I would like to acquaint you with some things that can illustrate how essential it is not only to be willing to hear a somewhat different world view expressed in customary terminology, but to learn to receive the words differently with one's feelings.

Let us begin with a specific case. When speaking about any ideology today, it is designated by an abstract name: materialism, idealism, spiritualism, and so forth, and people are quite sure that they can say which is correct, and which is incorrect. A materialist comes to a spiritualist, for example, and explains to him his way of thinking, how he sees man's thoughts and feelings as products of the brain. The spiritualist answers, “You think incorrectly. I can refute that logically!” Or, perhaps, “That is contradicted by the facts!” In short, the crux of the matter is that today, when people talk about issues concerning world views, one ideology is said to be right and the other one wrong. The spiritualist presumes that only he has the correct philosophy, and wishes to prove the materialist wrong and convince him that he would be better off if he became a spiritualist.

Spiritual science has nothing to do with such a way of proceeding. It does not wish to lead to a different logical insight from that of other world views. Spiritual science, if it really fulfills its task, must become action based on insight. In spiritual science, knowledge must turn into action, action in the whole cosmic world context. I will explain this by using a few definite examples. Today, when people look at the world naively but with a slight materialist tendency, when they direct their eyes and ears outward, hear sounds, notice colors, experience warmth and similar sensations, they perceive the external material world. Should they become scientists, or merely absorb through popular means what science wishes to represent, they will then form or simply accept certain concepts that have originated through the combination of all the color, sound and warmth elements and others that are to be observed in the external world. Now, there are people who maintain that everything one sees is, in the first place, only an external phenomenon. Yet this idea is generally not gone into thoroughly enough. People see a rainbow, for example. As a result of their education, when they look at the rainbow, they are already convinced that the rainbow is only an apparition, that they cannot go to the place where the rainbow is, neatly put a foot on it and march along the rainbow bridge as if it were a solid object. People are sure that it cannot be done, that the rainbow is merely an apparition, a phenomenon that arises and then disappears again. They are convinced that they deal only with apparitions because they cannot come into contact with this aspect of the external world through their sense of touch and feeling. According to their view, as soon as something can be grasped or touched, it is no longer a phenomenon to the same degree, even though recent philosophy may in some instances claim that it is. In any case, the impressions of the sense of touch, for instance, are intuitively taken as something that guarantees a different external reality than the phenomenal realities of the rainbow.

This notwithstanding, all that our external senses perceive comprises merely a world of phenomena, modified perhaps in respect to the apparition of the rainbow, but a world of phenomena nevertheless. Regardless of how far we direct our gaze, how far we can hear, in whatever is seen, heard or otherwise perceived, we deal only with phenomena. I have attempted to explain this in the introduction to the third volume of Goethe's scientific writings.⁵ We deal with a tapestry of phenomena. Whoever makes an effort through experimentation or any combination of pure reasoning to find matter in the realm of appearances is pursuing a dead end.^T2 There is no matter out there. One deals only with a world of phenomena.

This is precisely what the whole spirit of spiritual science reveals: In the external world, one deals only with a world of appearances. An exponent of a current world outlook will therefore conclude that it is wrong to look for matter at all in the realm of phenomena. Anthroposophy cannot agree with this attitude; it must put it differently by saying: Because of the whole configuration of man's mind, he comes to the point where he wants to seek for matter in the moving tapestry of phenomena, to seek out there for atoms, molecules and so on, which are resting points in the phenomenon. Some picture these as tiny, miniature pellets, others imagine them to be points of energy and are proud of the fact; others, prouder still, think of them as mathematical fiction.

What is important, however, is not whether one thinks of them as small pellets, sources of energy, or mathematical fiction, but whether one thinks of the external world in atomistic terms. This is what is important. For a spiritual scientist, however, it is not merely wrong to think atomistically. The kind of concept determining rightness or wrongness may be sound logic, but it is abstract, and spiritual science has to do with realities. I urge you to take it very seriously when I say that spiritual science has to do with realities!

This is why certain concepts that have become merely logical categories for today's abstract world-view must be replaced by something real. This is why, in spiritual science, we not only say that one who seeks atoms or molecules in the external world thinks in the wrong way; we must consider this manner of thinking an unhealthy, sick thinking. We must replace the merely logical concept of wrongness with the realistic concept of sickness, of unhealthiness. We must point to a definite sickness of soul—regardless of how many people it has seized—which expresses itself in atomistic thinking. This condition is one of feeblemindedness. It is not merely logically wrong for us, it is an expression of feeblemindedness to think atomistically; in other words, it is feebleminded to seek in the external world something other than phenomena which, when it comes right down to it, are an a par with the phenomenon of the rainbow. It is relatively easy for people with other world outlooks to set things straight: they do it by refutation. To have been able to refute something is considered an accomplishment. Yet, in a spiritual-scientific sense, no final conclusion has been reached by refutation; it is important to refer to the healthy or unhealthy soul life, to actual processes expressed in man's whole physical, soul and spiritual being. To think atomistically is to think unhealthily, not merely erroneously. An actual unhealthy process takes place in the human organism when we think atomistically. This is one thing we must become clear about regarding the phenomena of the external world and its character of appearance.

We must also become clear about our inner life. Many people seek the spirit inwardly. To begin with, the spiritual cannot be found in the inner realm of man. Truly objective evaluation of every abstract form of mysticism bears this out. What today is sometimes—nay, often—called mysticism consists of brooding over one's inner self, attempting to seek self-knowledge by introverted brooding. What is discovered by practicing such one-sided mysticism? One certainly finds interesting things. When we look into the human being and find all those inwardly pleasant experiences arising which we call mystical—what are they really? They are just the very things that point us toward material existence. We do not discover matter in the external world where the sense phenomena are found; we come upon matter in our inner being. This brings us to the point where we can characterize these things correctly. Regarded from the most comprehensive point of view, it is the body's metabolism that seethes and boils there within the human interior and which flames up into consciousness as one-sided mysticism, mistaken by many to be the spirit that can be found in the inner self. It is not the spirit, it is the flame of metabolism within man. We find matter not in the external world, we find it in ourselves. We find it precisely through one-sided mysticism. That is why a great many people who do not want to be materialists deceive themselves. They excuse their not wanting to be materialists by saying, “Out there is base matter; I shall rise above it and turn to my inner being, for there I will find the spirit.”

Actually, spirit is neither without nor within. Outside are the interweaving phenomena; within ourselves is matter, constantly seething and boiling substance. This metabolic processing of matter kindles the flames that leap into consciousness and form the mystic impressions. Mysticism is the inwardly perceived corporeal matter of the metabolism. That is something that cannot be logically refuted, but must be traced back to actual processes when man yields in a one-sided way to the metabolism.

Just as the belief that it is possible to find traces of matter in the external world indicates feeblemindedness—that is, a real illness of the spirit, soul and bodily being of man—so does one-sided preoccupation with mysticism indicate a corporeal indisposition. It points toward something that sounds somewhat insulting if put bluntly. Yet we must use an expression that is, as it were, spoken from yonder side of the Guardian of the Threshold and means, “Childishness.” In the same way that one incurs feeblemindedness through atomistic thinking concerning the outer world, one becomes childish when yielding to a mysticism that wants to feel the spirit in the seething of the inner metabolism.

Childishness, of course, has a good side, too. When we observe the child we see a lot of spirit in it, and geniality in many instances consists in man's preserving the childlike spirit all the way into advanced age. When we look at the world from the other side of the threshold we can see that it is the spirit which, for instance, forms the child's brain, that spirit which accompanies us from the spiritual world when we enter the physical world through conception or birth. This spirit is most active in the child. Later, it is lost. Therefore, the word childishness is not meant as an insult in this instance, it merely denotes that spirit which forms the brain out of a more or less chaotic mass. Later on, however, if this spirit, which actually shapes the child's brain, does not pour itself sufficiently into logicality, into experience, into what life presents; if, instead, it acts in a one-sided manner and excludes the individual physical experiences; if it goes on working in the way it did during the first seven years, then instead of becoming intellectually mature one becomes childish. Childishness is frequently found to be a characteristic of a great many mystics, particularly arrogant ones. They wish to weave and live in that spirit which is really what should be active in the child's organism. They have retained this spirit, however, and, greatly impressed by their own accomplishment, they gaze at it in wonder in their consciousness, believing, in their one-sided, abstract mysticism, that they are perceiving a higher spirituality, when it is only the matter of their own metabolism.

Again, we do not need merely to refute the one-sided mystic if we are really well grounded in an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We must show that it is the sign of an ailing constitution of the spirit, soul and body when man broods one-sidedly within his inner being, thereby attempting to find the spirit.

I have drawn these two examples, familiar to you from anthroposophical literature, in order to point out to you how serious from a certain viewpoint matters can become when, leaving the ordinary spiritual life of today, one immerses oneself in anthroposphical spiritual life. There, one no longer deals with something as insignificant as “right” or “wrong.” It now becomes a question of “healthy” or “sick” conditions in the organic functions. Thus, on a higher level, something that goes in one direction must be considered healthy, while something going in another direction must be considered sick. I would like you to understand from these implications how spiritual science is an active knowledge; how it cannot stand still on the level of the nature of ordinary knowledge but becomes something real. The process of knowledge, insofar as it expresses itself in spiritual science, is something that actually takes place in the human organism.

In a similar manner we must define the element that lives in the realm of will. When we talk of the realm of will in our age—an age permeated by that grandiose decline we have often discussed—when we speak of what develops into human will impulses and try to define their character, then we say: Man is good or evil. Again, we are dealing with ethical categories—good and evil—which are just as necessary, of course, as logical categories. Yet, from what arises out of the impulses of spiritual science, it is not merely a question of what is meant when one action of man is designated as good and another as evil. When one calls a human action good, even in a karmic connection, it is a question of balancing in some way or other the good with the evil. We refer to something that pertains to an ethical judgment of man.

Whenever we rise into the realm of the spiritual scientific, it is much more a question of recognizing that what is at work there is a certain manner of thinking, feeling and willing for human beings which leads upward to a fruitful development, to progress in evolution. On the one hand, we have abstract goodness. It is of outstanding moral value, but even that is ethically abstract. When it is a matter of spiritual-scientific impulses, however, man must not only do good, or only do the good which lets him appear as an ethically good person. He can do, think or feel only that which advances the world in its development in the external sense world; or he can do something that is not merely evil, leading to an ethical condemnation, but has a destructive effect on the world forces. This was already meant to be indicated in the Portal of Initiation,⁶ where Strader and Capesius are speaking and the following is pointed out: Everything that is done here in the sense world and is subject to ethical judgments of good and evil turns into phenomena behind the curtains of existence, having either a progressive, constructive effect or a destructive one, leading to decline. Just try to experience this entire scene that is permeated with thunder and lightning, where things are happening in a most realistic manner in the soul world while Capesius and Strader are discussing one or the other matter. Try to re-experience this scene and you will see how what we experience as the ethical sphere here on the physical plane is in reality very different there.

All this is to show you how serious world aspects become in that instance when, upon leaving today's customary way of judging by logical or outward human categories only, one ascends to the realities that confront us when we view the world from the spiritual scientific standpoint. Things become serious, yet they must be mentioned today because the world now demands a new kind of spiritual life. Things are happening in the world today that everyone sees but that nobody wishes to comprehend in their actual significance because one cannot take the step from external abstraction to reality. I want to give you a few other examples.

You find today that you live in a world where, among much else, there exist, for example in the social field, a great many party organizations—liberal, conservative and many other parties. Human beings are unaware of the actual nature of these parties. When they have to vote, they decide on one or the other party. They do not give much thought to what it really is that exists as party policy, pulsating through all of public life. They are incapable of taking these things seriously. There are quite a number of people who, in the nicest superficial manner, repeat all sorts of Orientalisms about the external world as Maya, but when it really comes to doing something in this external world they do not stick to what they repeat so abstractly. Otherwise, they would ask, “Maya? Then these parties must be Maya too. Then what is the reality to which this Maya points?”

If this matter is pursued in a spiritual-scientific way in more detail—and tomorrow we shall go deeper into this topic—one finds that these parties exist in the external world by having programs and principles, that is, they pursue abstract ideas. Everything that lives in the external physical world, however, is always the replica, the reflection of what is present as a reality in a much more intense form in the spiritual world. Here is the physical world (see drawing, red), but everything in it points toward the spiritual, and only above, in the spiritual world, can the actual reality of these physical things be found (red). Down here, for instance, you find the parties (orange). On the earth, they oppose each other, seeking to gather a great number of people under the umbrella of an abstract program. Then what are these parties a reflection of? What is up there in the spiritual world if these parties down here are Maya? No abstractions exist in the spiritual world above, only beings. Yet, political parties are rooted in abstraction. Above, one cannot profess adherence to a party program; there one can only be a follower of this or that being or hierarchy. There one cannot just subscribe to a program on the basis of the intellect; that cannot happen there. One must belong with one's whole being to another entity. What is abstract down here is being above that is, the abstract below is only the shadow of beingness above. If you consider the two main categories of parties, the liberal and conservative, you know that each has its own program. When you look above to see what each is a reflection of, then you discover that ahrimanic being is projected here (see drawing, lower part) into the conservative views, luciferic being in the liberal thoughts. Down here, one follows a liberal or conservative program; up there, one is a follower of an ahrimanic or a luciferic being of some hierarchy.

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It can happen, however, that the moment you pass across the threshold it becomes necessary really to understand all this clearly, and neither be fooled by words nor succumb to illusions. It is quite easy to assume that one belongs to a certain good being. Just because you call a being good, however, does not make it so. Anyone can say, for instance, “I acknowledge Jesus, the Christ,” but in the spiritual world, one cannot follow a program. The whole manner in which the concepts and images of this Jesus, of Christ, fill such a person's soul indicates that it is merely the name of Jesus, the Christ, that he has in mind. Actually he is a follower of either Lucifer or Ahriman, but calls whichever it is by the name of Jesus or Christ.

I ask you: How many people today know that party opinions are shadows of realities in the spiritual world? Some do know and act according to their knowledge. I can point to some who know. The Jesuits, for instance, they know. Do not think that the Jesuits believe that when they write something⁶ against anthroposophy in their journals, for instance, they have hit upon something special and logically irrefutable. Refutations are not what counts there. The Jesuits know very well how their refutations could be countered. They are not concerned with a rational fighting for or against something, but with being followers of a certain spiritual being which I do not wish to name today, but which they call Jesus, their Leader, to whom they belong. Whoever this being may be, they call it Jesus. I do not wish to go into the facts more closely, but they call themselves soldiers and him their Leader. They do not fight to refute, they fight to recruit adherents for the companies, the army of Jesus—that is, the being they call Jesus. And they know very well that as soon as one Looks across the threshold, abstract categories, logical approval or disapproval no longer matter, only the hosts following one or the other being. Down on earth it is a matter of mere figures of speech. This is what mankind today is hardly willing to understand, namely, that if we wish to escape from the decline of our age it can no longer be a question of abstractions or merely of what one may think, but that we must deal with realities. We shall begin to ascend to realities when we stop talking about right or wrong and begin speaking about healthy or sick. We begin to rise to realities when we cease talking about programs of parties or world views, and instead speak about following real beings whom we encounter as soon as we become aware of what exists an yonder side of the threshold. It must be our concern today actually to take that serious step that leads from abstraction to reality, from merely logical knowledge to knowledge as deed. This alone can lead us out of the chaos now gripping the world.

The world situation, about which we shall speak tomorrow and the day after, can be judged in a sound way only by someone who examines it with the means that spiritual science is prepared to give him. Otherwise one will be unable to see in the right light the significant, existing contrasts between East and West. All that outwardly manifests itself in visible realities—what else is it but the inherently absurd expression of what lives as thoughts in people's heads? How, then, do these thoughts manifest themselves to us?

To answer this question and to conclude today's presentation, I would like again to call our attention to an obvious example. More than once, I have pointed out how Catholic clerical factions, especially here in Switzerland, are now resorting to a web of lies in order to destroy spiritual science. Those of you who have been here have witnessed a number of examples of what the Catholic Jesuits come up with in the attempt to destroy anthroposophy. Consider the attacks made by Jesuit seminarists with weapons that are certainly not nice. I need not characterize this; those who have not informed themselves can easily do so.

For Switzerland and Central Europe, where these things happen, are all part of the world. So, too, is America. I recently received a magazine published in America in which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is characterized, while, at the same time, the Jesuits in Europe denounced spiritual science as a threat to the Catholic Church and to Christianity. You know by now that Reverend Kully⁷ stated that there are three evils in the world. One is Judaism, the other Freemasonry, but the third—worse than all of them, even worse than Bolshevism—is what is taught here in Dornach. This originates from the Catholic side, and is how anthroposophy is characterized.

What about America? I want to read you a small paragraph from an American publication written at the same time Catholic journals over here printed their view of anthroposophy:

Just as the Catholic hierarchy has always insisted that the Roman church is the only one with any authority,

—Protestant sects do not come into consideration; according to the Roman church, these sects stand outside the gates; they are viewed merely as a great number of heretics?

so it is self-evident that the church which Steiner's glib tongue alludes to can be none other than the Roman Catholic church. This assumption is reinforced and indeed any doubt about the matter ceases, when one reads Steiner's other occult books. They all point to the same thing, namely, his writings are purely misleading; the sheepskin of a superficial occultism covering the wolf of Jesuitism.

So you see that in America anthroposophy is taken for Jesuitism, while in Europe the Jesuits strongly oppose anthroposophy as the biggest enemy of the Catholic church. That is how the world thinks today! That, however, is also how people think in Europe where they are living side by side; they are just not aware of it.

The American article concludes with several more nice sentences:

Steiner claims to be an initiate. That may be; but whether he is of the White Lodge or belongs to the Brothers of Shadow is something one can only decide when it is realized that he stood on the side of men of “blood and iron” ... and that a number of his students here (in America) were interned as German spies.

So you see, sometimes the wind blows from the Roman Catholic corner, sometimes from the American side! It just shows you how things are inside the heads of our contemporaries. Yet, from the thoughts hatched inside human heads, there developed what has led into the decline of the present, and the ascent must truly be sought in a different direction from the one where many seek it today.

Tomorrow, we shall continue with this subject.

• 1 . Reference to Rudolf Steiner's return from Stuttgart where, from July 24 until August 1, 1920, he had been giving lectures for the teachers of the Waldorf School, for the general public and the Anthroposophical Society.
• 2 . The Waldorf School: Founded by Emil Molt (1876–1936) in the year 1919 for the children of the workmen in the “Waldorf-Astoria” cigarette factory and the public as a coeducational elementary and high school under the leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who had also appointed the teachers and had given them preparatory courses.
• 3 . Dr. Walter Johannes Stein: 1891–1957, Dr. Caroline van Heydebrandt: 1866–1938; both teachers in the Waldorf School from 1919.
• T1. In the German educational system, the grade of 1 is equivalent to an A; 4 is a D and 5 would indicate a failing grade.
• 4 . See Preface and Introduction to Goethe's Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner. Introductions to all the volumes written by Rudolf Steiner under the same title, Dornach, 1926.
• 5 . Rudolf Steiner: “The Portal of Initiation” contained in Four Mystery Play, GA 14 (Toronto, Steiner Book Centre, 1973).
• T2. The “dead end” alluded to here is the translation of the German expression “Holzweg,” literally, “wooden path.” Like all such expressions in a language, it springs from real experience. The “Holzweg” is a rough timber road, or a system of such roads, proceeding into the forest and used by woodcutters. It leads nowhere and may dead-end suddenly. Hence, it would be easy to get lost on it.
• 6 . “Stimmen der Zeit,” Freiburg i. Br., 1918–1920, Otto Zimmermann SJ, Josef Kreitmaier SJ, Konstantin Nopels SJ.
• 6 . “Stimmen der Zeit,” Freiburg i. Br., 1918–1920, Otto Zimmermann SJ, Josef Kreitmaier SJ, Konstantin Nopels SJ.
• 7 . Max Kully: 1878–1936, Catholic minister of Arlesheim near Basle. Reference to a calumnious article against Rudolf Steiner that he wrote in a Catholic Sunday paper, July 6, 1920.

Anthroposophy, when properly understood, will guide us back more and more into that immediate life from which a materialistic way of thinking, quite paradoxically, estranges us.

We have said this frequently, here and at other places, at many different occasions, and always in order to characterize the mission of our anthroposophical movement. The above statement will make a strange impression on many of our contemporaries, for they are of the opinion that true life, or what they call life, is to be sought elsewhere than in what anthroposophy has to give; and they are also of the opinion that anthroposophy is least qualified to show them how to lead a practical everyday existence. Such is not the case. Anthroposophy will help us in all ways, great and small! Its teaching, when thoroughly assimilated, will enable those who are engaged in public or other matters to solve the problems of the day in the way in which they should be solved if mankind is to lead a complete life. The many disorders and unhealthy conditions of our age which are now being approached, from one standpoint or another, in a more or less amateurish manner, could, if our contemporaries were to permeate themselves with anthroposophical truths, be successfully handled. I just wanted to touch on this issue, it will not be the focus of our contemplation today.

Today it will be more the emotional aspect of anthroposophy with which I ask you to occupy your thoughts. It will be noticed how to a deeper, feeling permeated comprehension of life, a time like the present must seem to be abstruse, uninteresting, matter-of-fact and theoretical. When Christmas, Easter or Whitsuntide approaches, we can see how certain outward forms and external ceremonies are adhered to But there is very little left of what our forefathers felt to be alive in their very souls—that deep current of feeling penetrating into the soul which was peculiar to our forefathers with regard to the relationship of mankind to the whole cosmos and its divine foundations. This feeling was particularly alive at the time of such festivals. Then it was something tangible for the soul, for then it received impressions different from those gained during the rest of the year.

No true conception is formed today of that which filled the souls of our ancestors when the days grew shorter, the end of the year approached and the birthday of Christ Jesus was about to be celebrated; or when, at the festival of the resurrection of Christ Jesus, the snow was slowly melting, and what the earth had hidden appeared once more on the surface. It would seem indeed that our life were concrete. In reality the feelings of our contemporaries have become abstract, matter-of-fact and empty. People pass through the streets, and hardly feel more about Christmas than that it is a time for giving and receiving presents. Should they have any other feeling, there is little connection between it and that deep feeling which absorbed our forefathers at that time of the year. Mankind has lost its true relationship with life. To show how to regain this relationship is one aspect of the mission of anthroposophical spiritual science.

One who only grasps with his mind and understanding what is usually called the anthroposophical conception of the world has understood only the very least part of anthroposophy. It is only understood by him who realizes that the whole of man’s feelings and emotions must be altered when anthroposophy lives itself into the heart and soul. What was abstract for a certain time, and even forgotten in its significance—the true meaning of our festivals—will again penetrate into our souls when the intimate connection of the whole surrounding world with man is realized again, as it may be through a spiritual perception.

The deeper meaning of the Christmas festival has often engaged our attention at this time. Today, we shall look at it from another aspect. This can only be done if at first we make quite clear to ourselves what impression anthroposophical thoughts and ideas produce on our feelings, how they really have the power of making out of a human being something quite different from what he is at present, something through which he will again know what it is to have an immediate experience of the pulsation of the spiritual life of nature—actually to feel the warmth which passed through creation, animating every being. When a man looks today at the starry sky with the help of the abstruse science of astronomy, he sees it inhabited by abstruse material worlds. But these celestial bodies will again appear to him as the bodies of souls and spirits; space will once more appear to him permeated by spirit and soul. He will experience the whole cosmos as filled with warmth, and have the feeling that he has when reclining on the bosom of a friend; though of course experiencing the spirit of the cosmos is much more majestic and sublime.

We know that we have to seek in man alone such a soul as we are cognizant of in man—an individual soul, which, so to say, lives in a single body. The soul of the other creatures which surround us, we must seek in another way and in a different form. The animals which live in our midst also have souls, but we shall look in vain for them here on the physical plane. The animal-ego, which we name a “group ego”, is to be found on the astral plane; and a whole group of related animals, for example the lion-group, the tiger-group, the cat-group, all separate groups of related forms, have each of them a common soul, a common ego. The separation by space here on earth makes no difference; every lion belongs to the same lion-ego, whether one lion is here in a zoo, and another in Africa. The spiritual scientist can find the animal ego on the astral plane; and there these group-egos are individual personalities, just as your personality here on the physical plane is individual. As your ten fingers belong to your individual personality, so does every lion belong to the group-ego of the lions. If we could become acquainted with the individual group-egos on the astral plane, we would find that wisdom is their most conspicuous characteristic, although to us here on earth separate animals may not appear very wise. Nobody ought to judge the characteristics of the group-ego, of animal individuality on the astral plane, on the basis of the characteristics of the separate animals here on earth. Just as little as your ten fingers show the characteristics of an individual ego, just so little does the single animal show the characteristics of the group-ego.

These group-egos act very sagaciously, and are wiser than you imagine; for what you know here as the achievements of animals are brought about by these group-egos. They live in the atmosphere surrounding our earth, they are to be found round about us. If you follow the flight of birds as they migrate at the approach of autumn from the north-east to the south-west, and at the approach of spring return once more from the south-west to the north-east, you might ask yourself: who guides their flight so wisely? In your search for the individual directors and rulers you will come, as a student of spiritual science, to the group-egos of the different genera or species. The astral ego, which is just as much an ego on the astral plane as the human ego is here, lives in every animal community. The group souls or personalities or astral egos, who have their individual members here on the physical plane, are much wiser than the egos of mankind on the physical plane; everything which is so wisely organized in the animal-world is the manifested wisdom of the group-egos of animals. We walk differently through the world if we know that at every pace forward, we step through beings whose deeds we are able to see.

Now let us look at the plant kingdom: the egos of this plant world are to be found in a still higher world than the one in which the group-egos of the animals live. The egos of plants (there are actually very few of them) are to be found in the spirit-world or Devachan; each one of the plant-egos embraces many, very many, of the individual plants which are found here on earth in such great variety. If we should seek the place where these plant-egos are to be found in space, we would come to the center of the earth. All plant-egos are united at the center of the earth.

It would reflect a rather primitive mental life if, when considering the spirit of the egos, you were to ask: Is there room enough for all these different egos? In the spirit everything in-terpenetrates. He who does not understand this comes to the point of view expressed just now in a book which is particularly recommended to theosophists. This book certainly speaks of spiritual worlds, but speaks about them by using arguments such as: If in the course of a thousand years thirty billion people had lived whose souls are now in the atmospheric surroundings of the earth, then there would be such a great number of souls, that there would scarcely be room for them all in the earth’s periphery.—This book is well intentioned, but it is extremely trivial. (“Unknown Powers,” by C. Flammarion.)

We have to seek the plant-egos in the center of the earth, because the earth itself as a planet is a complete organism. In the same relation in which the hairs of your head art to your organism, so are the plants to the organism of our earth. These plants are not independent beings but are members of the earth organism.

Feelings of pleasure and pain in plants are the pleasure and pain of the earth’s organism; we need only recall what you were told a few weeks ago about pleasure and pain in the plant-kingdom. He who is able to observe these things knows that if you injure a plant in the part above the earth, the injury is not connected with a feeling of pain in our earth organism. On the contrary, it gives a pleasant feeling to the earth, in the same way in which the cow suckling her calf gets and bestows a pleasurable sensation. Thus the green of the plant which springs out of the earth, even though fixed, may be compared with the milk of the animal organism. And when in autumn the reaper cuts the grain with his scythe, it is more than an abstract occurrence to one who understands how to transform anthroposophical ideas into feelings of the soul. The reaping calls forth a breath of joy which goes over the whole field, and the mowing of the grass fills the field with pleasurable sensations.

Thus we learn to feel with the earth organism as we feel on the bosom of a friend. We feel pain with the earth when we understand that as soon as we tear out the plants by their roots, the earth feels pain. It ought not to be objected here that under certain conditions it might be better to transplant a whole plant with roots rather than to pick its blossoms. Such an objection is not relevant here. If a person begins to get grey hair, and in order to remain younger looking pulls out the first grey hairs, does the action hurt the less?

Thus we learn to feel with nature around us; more and more we learn to experience nature as permeated by soul and spirit. When we enter a quarry and watch the men breaking stones, this act remains with us as something concrete, not abstract, if we deepen our anthroposophical ideas on the subject into feelings of the soul. Then we do not only see the stones flying out of the rocks—not even if a rock were blasted would it seem abstract to us. On the contrary, we learn to feel what nature, permeated by soul and spirit, is feeling outside us. If we have a glass of water before us and throw into it some salt or a lump of sugar, and watch how the salt or sugar dissolves, this arouses the feeling that there is soul in it. If we would know what kind of a soul is contained therein we must not bring forward ordinary analogies. It would be very easy to believe that when the quarry-man breaks off the stone, his action causes nature to feel pain, but in reality the exact opposite is the case. What is called division into fragments in the mineral kingdom gives nature the greatest joy, an internal sensation of well-being. There is also an internal sensation of well-being when we dissolve a piece of sugar or salt in water. Feelings of pleasure flow through the water during the dissolving of the mineral bodies. It is different under different circumstances.

We can call to mind the primeval age on earth—that time when our earth was a fiery-fluid body with every mineral and metal dissolved in it. It was not possible for our earth to remain in such a state, it had to become the place on which we live, the solid body on which we can walk about. The metals and minerals had to solidify out of the liquid element; it was necessary for them to harden, to pull themselves together. Everything that was dissolved in the liquid element had to congeal and become crystallized. A similar process to what can be observed with salt dissolved in a glass of water: let the water evaporate and you will be able to see the salt crystals as firm particles. If you follow the feelings which are brought into action by such happenings you will see that pain can be felt even in the apparently dense mineral kingdom. Everything which appears to us as demolition and breaking into fragments gives a feeling of pleasure to the earth; whereas consolidation, compression, crystallization give a feeling of pain. The minerals and rocks of the planet on which we live have been formed under conditions of pain. And this has, more or less, been the case during the hardening of the earth’s crust.

If we look into the future development of our earth, we must imagine that what is firm and solid will become more and more flexible and liquid, until at last the earth changes into that which is called the “astral earth.” Thus the earth matter will have become rarer and rarer; so that we, in the first half of our earth’s evolution, must regard the elements of the mineral kingdom as that which, under the influence of pain and suffering, has formed the solid stage for our existence. Towards the end of the earth’s evolution there will be more peaceful feelings, the whole earth will be full of feelings of joy; it will change into a heavenly planet, which, in the cosmos, will be astral.

When the initiated talk about these things, deep mysteries lie hidden in their words. They express themselves in such a way that their words have several levels of meaning, because they contain so much. St. Paul, who was an initiate, spoke with words which always had several hidden meanings. The further we advance in the comprehension of the cosmos, of the spirit worlds, the better we shall understand these expressions of St. Paul and their hidden meaning. St. Paul knew that the earth suffered during the time it was becoming firm, and that it is longing for its release into a spiritual, heavenly state: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, waiting for the adoption.” (Romans viii, 22) By these words the initiate Paul referred to the pain accompanying the formation of the hard minerals whereon we stand and move.

So long as we only consider Anthroposophy as a system of thought we do not understand it rightly. It is the characteristic mark of Anthroposophy, that ideas must change into feelings, and we become different beings when, at every step, we feel and are conscious of all that we see about us. Those who really understood the esoteric teaching of Christianity were also of this opinion. You can follow the Christian writers as far as the eighteenth century and discover many who had sympathy with all the pleasure and all the pain of living nature. In their writings they use words which are for mankind today but empty sounds, or at the most allegories or pictures, whereas to those who understand them they are truths: “You shall not alone think upon nature, but you shall perceive it and taste it and feel it!”

They meant that when the reaper cuts the grain, we should taste the feeling that passes over the field during this action.

When we see the man in the quarry breaking off the stone, we should enjoy with nature her sensation of well-being. When we notice a deposit of earth where a river flows into the sea, we should at the same time learn to feel the pain which accompanies the deposition of earth.

Thus we can begin to experience nature completely permeated by soul. Our souls will then gain the power of growing out of their confinement. Feeling streams into the world in which we live, and we become one with the whole of nature. When we become one with it, piece by piece, we will also feel the spirituality and soul-nature of the great yearly occurrences. In the spring, when the days gradually become longer and longer, and more light falls on the earth; when out of her womb the plants, whose seeds were in the earth, spring up, and when everything is once more clothed in green, then we feel that not only what we see—as the shimmering green- is coming forth, but we feel as well that something akin to soul activity is taking place.

When winter draws near, the days grow shorter, less light falls on our earth, the plants retire to their winter sleep, and the green changes, we too experience a similar feeling to that which we have at night when we fall asleep. On the other hand, the awakening of external nature in the spring draws from us its corresponding feeling, for these events are no allegory, but realities. We feel the changes in nature, and also the changes in the soul and spirit of nature. In the latter half of the summer we feel how everything seems to decline, how the soul of our earth approaches sleep.—Then in the evening, when we ourselves fee1 sleepy, we have a real example before us of the living process which we have often described. Gradually, the astral body with the ego withdraws from the physical and etheric body, frees itself, and floats as it were into its own, its very own original world. If a man could do today, in the present condition of the evolution of humanity, what he will be able to do in the future, a spiritual consciousness would light up when the astral body lifts itself out of the etheric and physical bodies; spiritual forces and a spirit world would surround the body; man would simply leave his physical body in order that he might enter into another form of existence. This, in fact, he does today too, but he knows nothing about it in his present stage of development.

The same thing also occurs to our earth. The astral body of our earth changes during the year. (The changes are not the same in the two opposite hemispheres, but this does not concern us today). The astral body of our earth is occupied with the external natural existence of our earth during the time in which plants and life generally spring up out of the earth. When plants grow, it is the astral body that looks after everything that grows and flourishes on the earth. In the autumn, when a kind of sleepiness comes over the earth, this astral body returns to its spiritual activity.

Those who are able to really feel this earth-process know that during the height of the sun—from spring right into autumn -in everything which grows and increases out of doors, they must see the outer revelation of the spirit of the earth. But when autumn approaches they are directly in contact with the liberated astral body of the earth; when the days are shortest, that is, when the outer physical life approaches nearest to sleep, then the spiritual life awakens. What is this “spiritual life” of the earth? Who is the “spirit of the earth?”

This “spirit of the earth” described Himself as such when He spoke these words: “He that eateth My bread, treadeth Me with feet”; and when He made reference to that which the earth brings forth as true nourishment for man and said, “This is My body!” and again when He was referring to that which flows as the sap of life and said, “This is My blood!” In these sayings He described the earth itself as His organism.

This was quite different in pre-Christian times—different from what it is in the Christian era at a definite moment of the earth’s evolution. During the short days when the sacred mysteries of the ancients were being observed, those who were initiated turned with their whole soul towards the sun; at midnight on the day which we know as Christmas Day, those about to be initiated into the sacred mysteries were advanced so far that they were able to see the sun at the midnight hour. They were then promoted to being clairvoyant. We today cannot see the sun at the midnight hour because it is then at the other side of the earth; but the physical earth presents no obstacle to the seer, he can see the sun. He sees it in its spiritual essence. When the seers saw the sun at the midnight hour in the holy mysteries they saw the sun’s sovereign ruler—the Christ. Those saw Him who were able to come into contact with Him, but at that time still in the sun.

The flowing of blood from His wounds on Golgotha was an event fraught with meaning for the whole of the earth’s evolution. Nobody understands that event who has not the power of understanding that Christianity is built upon a mystical fact. If someone with clairvoyant sight could have watched the development of the earth from a distant planet for some thousands of years, he would not only have seen the physical body, but the astral body of our earth as well. This astral body of the earth would have emanated definite lights, definite colors and definite forms during those thousands of years. In one moment this was changed.

Other forms appeared, other lights and colours shone forth -and this moment was when the blood flowed out of the wounds of our Saviour at Golgotha. This was not only a human, but a cosmic event. Through it the Christ-Ego, which up to this time could only be discovered in the sun, passed to the earth. It linked itself with the earth, and in the spirit of the earth we find the Christ-Ego, the sun ego. The initiate is henceforth able to see in Christ himself the sun-spirit which formerly, at the time of Christmas, was only to be seen at the midnight hour on the sun in the holy places of the ancients.

Christian consciousness, not only the consciousness of the ordinary Christian, but the consciousness of the Christian initiate, lies in the living feeling of union with the spirit of Christ. This takes place every year when the days are becoming shorter and the physical earth is beginning to fall asleep. It is then possible for us to come into direct connection with the spirit of the earth. Therefore, to place the birth of our Savior in the time of the shortest days and the longest nights was not the outcome of an arbitrary decision, but the result of initiation. Bound up with the shortening of the days and the lengthening of the nights, we see something infinitely spiritual, and we feel at the same time that in this event there is a living soul—the highest soul which we are able to feel in the earth’s evolution.

When the first Christians uttered the name of Christ, they did not express any doctrine or any particular mode of thought. It would have seemed quite impossible for them to call anyone a Christian who believed only the words which Christ Jesus spoke as a Christian teacher. It cannot be denied that these doctrines are also to be found in other religious beliefs, and no one wishes to regard them as something singular. Today, however, for the first time in history, par-ticularly in the educated classes, special stress is laid on the fact that the teaching of Christ Jesus is in harmony with other religious beliefs. It is quite true that it is difficult to find a single precept which had not already been taught before; but this has nothing to do with the matter. Not by doctrine alone is the Christian made one with Christ. He is not a Christian who believes in the doctrine, but he is a Christian who believes in the Christ-Spirit. In order to be a Christian we must have the feeling of union with Him, the feeling of union with the Christ who actually dwells on earth. Simply to avow the teaching of Christ is not preaching Christianity. To preach Christianity means to be able to see in Christ the Spirit Whom we have just characterized as the regent of the sun; Who in the moment when the blood flowed out of His wounds on Golgotha, transferred His work to the earth and through this act drew the earth into the work of the sun.

On this account those who were the first to preach Christianity laid very great stress on proclaiming the person of Christ Jesus, and very little stress on His words: “We have seen Him when He was with us on the holy mount.” They attached great value to the fact that He was there—that they saw Him. “We have placed our hands in His wounds.” They valued the fact that they had touched Him. What was felt at the time was that the whole of the future evolution of mankind on earth proceeds from this historical event. On this account the disciples said: “We value the fact that we were with Him on the holy mount; but we also think it a great thing that the words of the prophets have been fulfilled in Him—those words inspired by very truth and wisdom.” What the prophets foretold has been fulfilled. By “prophets” was then meant initiates, men who could predict the Christ, because they had seen Him at the midnight hour at Christmas time in the Holy Mysteries. The first disciples considered the event on Golgotha as a fulfillment of that which has always been known; and a rapid and total change took place in the feelings and thoughts of the initiated.

If we look into the time before the Christian era, and even let our thoughts wander further to a more remote time, we find that all love and affection is bound up with the tic of blood relationships. In the Jewish race, out of which Christ Himself issued, we see love only between those who are kinsfolk—we see that those love one another in whom the same blood flows; even earlier than this, love always rested on the natural foundation of a common blood-relationship. Spiritual love, which is independent of flesh and blood, was first introduced on earth by Christ. On this depends the fulfillment of the saying: “Who forsaketh not father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, cannot be My disciple.” He who makes love conditional upon the natural foundation of blood-relationship, is not according to this sense a Christian. Spiritual love, which as a great fraternal bond will permeate all mankind, is the result of Christianity.

Christianity teaches mankind how to acquire the most perfect freedom and inner cohesiveness. The ‘Psalmist said, “I remember the days of old and ponder times long past”. To look back upon one’s first ancestors was a persistent experience of the olden times. The men of old could feel the blood of their ancestors flowing through their veins, and felt that their ego was connected with the ego of their ancestors. If it were desired to really feel this connection, even amongst the old Jewish people, it was customary to utter the name of Abraham; he who uttered this name felt that some of the blood which descended from Abraham flowed through his veins. When he wished to express his highest nature the Jew said: “I am one with Abraham!” After the death of his body, his soul returned into Abraham’s bosom—this has a deep, a very deep meaning. At that time man was not in possession of the self-dependence which first entered his consciousness through Christ Jesus. The conscious understanding of the “I am” was awakened by Christ Jesus. At that time they could not have felt the whole divinity of the inner divine being of man. They felt “I am,” but they connected it with their ancestors; they felt it in the common blood which flowed through their veins since the time of Abraham. Then Christ Jesus came and with Him the consciousness that there is something older and more independent in mankind. The “I am” is not only to be sought in what is common to a nation, but is something in the individual personality, which therefore must again seek love with its own personality, beyond itself. The ego which is today confined in you, cut off from everything outside itself, seeks spiritual love beyond itself.

This ego does not feel itself one with the father who was in Abraham, but with the spiritual Father of the world: “I and My Father are one!” A more profound saying than this—although this is the most impressive—because it appeals more to the understanding, is the one in which Christ made it clear to mankind that they are not expressing the utmost when they say, “I existed before in Abraham.” He points out that the “I am” is of older date, emanating from God Himself:

“Before Abraham was, I Am.” In this way does the saying appear in the original—which usually is so expressed that nobody quite understands what it means—“before Abraham was born, I am.” The “I am,” the innermost spiritual being, which everyone has within him, existed before Abraham.

One who understands this saying penetrates deeply into the essence of Christian intuition and life, and understands why Christ also refers to it in the words: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!” Therefore we also ought to feel the true hidden meaning of the expression in the Christmas hymn, which tells us every year anew at Christmas the original secret of the existence beyond time of the “I am.” The hymn is not sung as a reminder, “Today we remember that Christ was born”, rather we sing every time: “Christ is born in us today!” For this event is eternal, and that which once took place in Palestine can happen anew every Christmas night for those who have the power of transforming the teaching into feelings and experiences.

Anthroposophy will help mankind really to feel and understand again what is meant when we celebrate such a festival. Its mission is not to teach an abstract doctrine, an abstract theory, but to lead man back into fuller life—to make this life appear not as something abstract but as something which is filled with soul. We feel this soul when we go into the quarry and watch the stones being split off; when we see the migration of birds; when we see the scythe going through the grain; when the sun rises and sets. And the more profound the events we contemplate, the deeper do we feel their soul nature. At the great turning-points of the year we feel the most important soul events. What is most important for us is that we shall again learn to feel at those great turning-points of the year which are marked out in our festivals.

Thus our festivals will again become like a living breath permeating the soul of man; at the time of such festivals man will again become familiar with the whole weaving and working of the full soul and spirit nature. The anthroposophist must for the present act as a pioneer with regard to what these festivals may once more become when mankind understands their spirit anew—understands anew what is called “the festival spirit.” It will belong to those forces which will once more lead man out into the cosmos, when anthroposophists at such festivals feel and realize something of the feelings and sensations of nature, and remember at these important moments what Anthroposophy is able to restore to mankind through its teachings. Anthroposophy will then become a living factor in the soul, and will be genuine “life-wisdom”, vitaesophia. Anthroposophy can accomplish this best when the world-soul comes down amongst us, and is united with us in an especially intimate manner at the festival of the birth of Christ.

In continuation of what I have said in the preceding reflections on the tasks of anthroposophical world view in the present and for the development of humanity, today I would like to add a few more things from a different perspective: those points of view that can arise when one sees how the world view of the nineteenth century led, as it were, to a kind of absurdity in Friedrich Nietzsche, and how it can be shown, precisely from the phenomenon of Nietzsche, that such a view of the world and of the human being as is presented in anthroposophy is an historical necessity for the development of humanity. I do not wish to repeat things that I have already said about Nietzsche here and elsewhere in the anthroposophical movement, but I would like to point out two implications of Nietzsche's world view today that I have touched on even less.

Throughout his life, Nietzsche was characterized by a tendency to arrive at a view of the value and essence of morality in man. Nietzsche was a moral philosopher in the proper sense of the word. He wanted to come to terms with himself regarding the origin of morality, the significance of morality for humanity, and the value of morality for the world order. In this quest for clarity, we see how two main themes run through his entire life, which, in relation to many other things, has undergone the most diverse transformations.

The first is that throughout his life – from the point in his life that he had already passed through in his second year at university until the end of his life, one might say – he had an essentially atheistic view. The atheistic element is what has remained constant throughout all the transformations of Nietzsche's world view.

And the second is that, in the face of what has come to him peculiarly in the moral impulses of the present, what has also come to him in the intellectual and practical impulses of human life in the present, he has asserted one virtue as the most fundamental, and that virtue is honesty towards himself, towards others, towards the whole world order. Integrity, honesty, that is what he considered to be the most important thing, what is most necessary for modern man, both inwardly, to his soul, and outwardly, to the world.

Nietzsche once listed four cardinal virtues that he considered to be the most important for human life. Among these four cardinal virtues, honesty, this honesty towards oneself and others, is the first. These four cardinal virtues are namely: firstly, honesty towards oneself and one's friends; secondly, bravery towards one's enemies; the third cardinal virtue is generosity towards those whom one has defeated, and the fourth cardinal virtue is courtesy towards all people.

These four cardinal virtues, which Nietzsche described as being particularly necessary for present-day humanity, all tend towards the one he described as the first, and which he regarded as a kind of necessary temporal virtue: they tend towards honesty, towards sincerity. And one can say: there is a relationship between this virtue of sincerity and his atheism.

Nietzsche first of all grew out of his age completely and utterly. He then outgrew this age in an even more comprehensive sense. Even a superficial examination shows how he initially took root in Schopenhauer's worldview, which is also an atheistic one, and how he initially saw this Schopenhauerian worldview artistically realized in Richard Wagner's musical drama in the first period of his life.

Nietzsche started out with Schopenhauer and Wagner. He then absorbed what can be called the positivism of the time in scientific life, that is, the world view that thinks the whole world is built solely on what is immediately perceptible, on what is perceptible to the senses, and which therefore sees the sensual as the only thing that matters for the world view.

And Nietzsche then attained a certain independence in the third period, by assimilating the modern idea of development, which he so elaborated that he applied it to man, by setting himself the ideal, as a kind of positivistic ideal, that man must develop into the superman.

Thus Nietzsche has outgrown various currents of thought and currents of culture of his time. But how has he outgrown them? The answer to this significant question also contains important information about the characteristics of the entire age that occupies the last third of the 19th century. One must ask oneself the question: Why did Nietzsche become an atheist? He became one out of a sense of integrity, out of inner honesty. He took with complete honesty what the 19th century was able to offer him in the way of knowledge, what he was able to absorb with holy zeal from this 19th-century knowledge. And he said to himself quite intuitively: If I take this particular kind of 19th-century knowledge honestly, then it does not lead me anywhere towards the divine; then I must exclude the divine from my world of thought.

There lies the first great conflict between Nietzsche and his age, so that he had to become a fighter against his time. When Nietzsche looked around at the people who had also absorbed the knowledge of the 19th century, he saw that the vast majority of them still believed in a divine world order. He perceived this as dishonesty. It seemed dishonest to him to look at the world on the one hand as the knowledge of the 19th century looked at it, and then somehow to assume a divine order on the other. Because he was still speaking in the various thought formulas of the 19th century, he did not actually express what he instinctively felt about the 19th-century world view. He felt that the 19th century viewed world phenomena in the same way that one views the human organism when one has it as a corpse, when it has died. If one believes in this human organism in death, so to speak, if one believes that this dead organism has an inner truth, then one could not honestly believe that this organism only has a meaning when it is permeated by the living and ensouled and spiritualized human being. Anyone who studies a corpse should actually say to himself: What I can look at, what I can study, has no truth. It only has a truth if it is permeated by the spiritualized human being. It presupposes the spiritualized human being. But that is no longer there when I have the corpse before me.

Nietzsche felt this very clearly, although he did not express it so clearly: if you look at nature in the way that modern world knowledge looks at it, you look at it as a corpse. You should actually say to yourself: what you interpret as nature around you no longer has the divine in it. But if one accepts it in its absoluteness, if one speaks of this nature in such a way that one only follows its laws, then one must obviously deny that a divine underlies it. Because the way it stands before you, this nature, has no more of a divine basis than a human basis underlies a human corpse.

These were the feelings that lived in Nietzsche's soul. But the 19th-century world view had such a strong effect on him that he said to himself: Yes, we have nothing but this nature before us, and modern times have taught us to have nothing else before us. If we stick to this knowledge of nature, then we must reject God.

And so Nietzsche, as a student of Schopenhauer, rejected any divine, considering it dishonest to have modern knowledge and yet still speak of a divine. In this respect, his inner life was extraordinarily interesting because it strove for such intense honesty. He perceived it as a cultural lie of the 19th century that on the one hand there was a view of nature as it was, and on the other hand people still spoke of a divine. But he also took life seriously within this natural order in which one still believed. And he saw that the life of modern man had actually developed in such a way that it had become quite natural for him to assume such an order of nature. After all, nature had not forced modern man to accept this order, but life had become such that it could only endure such a view of nature. The view of nature actually came from life. And Nietzsche felt that this life was thoroughly dishonest. And he strove for honesty.

He had to say to himself: If we live in such an order as modern humanity recognizes as the true one, then we can never feel like human beings within this truth. That was actually the basic feeling in the first period of his life: How can I feel like a human being when I am surrounded by this natural order as it is now viewed? That which is truth does not allow me to come to my consciousness as a human being! Nietzsche felt and sensed this too, and so he said to himself in this first period of his life: “If one cannot live in truth, then one must live in appearance, in poetry, in art.

And when he turned his gaze to the Greeks, he believed he had recognized in them the people who, out of a certain naivety, had come to this dissatisfaction with the truth and who therefore consoled themselves with appearances, with beauty. This is what he expressed in his first, so beautifully written hymn, “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music”. He wanted to say: Man, when you are in the realm of truth, you can never feel like a human being. So flee from the realm of truth into the realm where you create a world that does not correspond to truth. In this world of poetry you will be consoled by what truth can never give you.

The Greeks, he believed, had felt as the true naive pessimists that one could not be satisfied within the world of truth. That is why they created above all their wonderful tragedies, a world of beautiful appearance, in order to have in this world that which can satisfy man.

In Richard Wagner's musical drama, Nietzsche believed he saw a renewal of this beautiful appearance, with the express purpose of leading people away from the so-called real world into the world of appearances, in order to find satisfaction as human beings. So there was no possibility for Nietzsche to say to himself: Let us take the sensory world, deepen our contemplation of the sensory world, penetrate from the external manifestation to the inner divine, and thus feel connected to this divine as a human being and come to feel truly human in the world.

For Nietzsche, this consideration was not possible. He saw no possibility — because he wanted to be honest — of arriving at such a consideration from what the 19th century was. Hence the other: This whole reality gives us no satisfaction, so we satisfy ourselves with an unreal world. Just as if there were beings somewhere who came to a planet where they found only corpses, and in the face of these corpses would have to see not remnants of reality but true reality, because they had once permeated, and as if these beings, who thus encountered a planet of corpses, were beings who, in order to console themselves for these corpses, invented beings to animate them. That was Nietzsche's first sense of the world.

And basically, the writings that followed The Birth of Tragedy were: David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, confrontations of his honesty with the dishonesty of the time. This time spoke, although it had no way out of sensuality into the spirit, it still spoke of spirit; this time spoke of the divine, although basically it could not include a divine in its knowledge anywhere. This period spoke something like this: In the past, people surrendered to the delusion of a divine, but we know from the study of nature that there is no divine. But we have our concerts, of course, in which we make music. — There is a chapter in David Friedrich Strauß's “The Old and the New Faith” that particularly annoyed Nietzsche, where David Friedrich Strauß asserts this philistine point of view. That is why Nietzsche wrote this essay about Strauss as a philistine and writer, in spite of the fact that Strauss was a relatively excellent man, in order to show how one can either be dishonest by still assuming a divine quality that one should no longer assume, or how one must fall into the banal and philistine, as he saw it with David Friedrich Strauss.

But now the second period in Nietzsche's life began. He remained true to himself with regard to the demand for honesty, he remained true to himself with regard to his atheism. But in the first period, he adopted ideals, albeit aesthetically colored, ideals that would have a justification and with which people could console themselves about the reality of the external senses.

But now, I would like to say, in the second period of his life, his mind clings more strongly to what, according to the prevailing view of the time, the world reveals to people alone. And so he said to himself: No matter how much a person devotes himself to ideals, these ideals are born out of his very nature! People imagine many beautiful things, but this ideal beauty is only an all-too-human one.

And so the time came for him when he saw particularly the human weakness, the all-too-human, the devotion of man to his physique. And since he took the view of nature seriously, he said to himself: Man cannot help but devote himself to his physique! - Nietzsche once said: Long live physics, even longer live honesty in believing in physics. “Let us be honest,” he said to himself in the second period of his life. ”Let us be clear: no matter how beautiful an idealistic thought a person has, it is still an emanation of his physical nature. Therefore, when we approach human life, let us not describe the smoke it produces at the top, but let us describe the fuels from which this smoke is formed at the bottom: then we will not arrive at the idealistic-divine, but at the human-all-too-human.

And so, in the second period of his life, Nietzsche, because he wanted to be honest with himself and with others, virtually killed all idealism in life. So he said to himself: What people usually call soul is actually just a lie. This is based on the structure of the body, and something that comes from this structure of the body reveals itself in such a way that it is given the name soul.

And Nietzsche saw in this inclination of some modern people, for example, to Voltaire, the true enlightenment, that true enlightenment that consists in man no longer engaging in some illusory world in order to elevate himself above reality, but rather that he actually looks at reality in its physical nature and sees all morality emerging from the physical.

And if you then look at the third period in Nietzsche's life, you can't help but notice how he, one might say, out of a highly pathological nature, took this honesty to excess, as he said: If If you take seriously and honestly what you can know about nature and the laws of nature in the modern sense, then you have to say: Everything that is supposed to live as spirit in the human being is precisely the emanation of his physical being. Therefore, the human being can only be the perfect one who, in comparison to others, shows the physical being to be the most perfect; that is, the one who has such a physical nature that the strongest instincts live in him.

Nietzsche ultimately saw instinctual life as superior to all spiritual life, as that which, in its development, leads man beyond himself, in that instincts become ever stronger and stronger, remain instincts, but rise ever higher and higher above the animal: this is where man becomes superman.

What was it, then, that actually impelled Nietzsche in this way, that he first recognized the ideal in appearance as necessary for man, that he then, as he put it, led this ideal onto the ice, because he saw how it arises from the physical, and that he then wanted to lead man to the superman through a higher development of his physique, his instinctive life? It was impossible, if one stood within the world view of the 19th century, to grasp the physical in the sense of this world view, and then still get out of it if one wanted to remain honest. One simply had to stay inside.

And Nietzsche developed, if one may say so, an iron honesty in placing himself with all that he had in the physical. So that in fact his ideal for the future, if one may still speak of an ideal, for human civilization should have consisted in man's enlightenment about the great illusion of having a spirit. That these undercurrents are usually not seen in Nietzsche, who, however, worked his way out as honestly as possible, is only due to the fact that he denied the spirit with so much spirit that he glorified the spiritual poverty of humanity in such a brilliant, brilliant, witty way.

It becomes simply impossible to be a moral philosopher, as Nietzsche was by his very nature within the 19th-century world view, if one honestly wants to take this on board. For if one is no longer able to speak of the fact that man's task on earth is to bring a spiritual and supernatural element into this earthly world, if one feels compelled to remain within the mere earthly world, then, if one wants to establish morality, one wants to establish it without justification. Morality becomes outlawed if one accepts the world view of the 19th century in all honesty. And that is what Nietzsche really experienced deep inside: that morality became outlawed. He wanted to be a moral philosopher. But where did the moral impulses come from? That was the big question for him. If one finds the luminosity of the supersensible in man, then morality arises as the demand of the supersensible on the sensible. If one finds no supersensible element in man, as was the case with the world view of the 19th century, then there is no source from which one could draw moral impulses. If one wants to distinguish good from evil, then one needs the supersensible. But the supersensible had to be rejected by Nietzsche, who honestly took the world view of the 19th century. And so he groped around in human life to find something like the origin of the moral impulses.

So he looked at the cultural development of humanity, found how strong racial people acted as conquerors towards weaker people, how these stronger racial people imposed the direction of their actions on the weaker ones, how they, out of their instinctive nature, demanded of those whom they had acted as conquerors towards: This is how you should act! Nietzsche could not believe in any categorical imperative, in moral commandments. He could only believe in the instinctive racial supermen, who saw themselves as the good ones, the others as the bad ones, that is, as the inferior human beings, on whom they imposed the direction of action.

And then it happened that those who were the inferiors according to the conquerors joined forces and now, not with the more brutal older means, but with the finer means of the soul and spirit, with cunning and guile, made themselves conquerors over the others. And those who had previously considered themselves the superiors, the good ones, they called the bad ones, because they were conquerors, power-seekers, force-seekers, militarists; they called them the bad ones. And they called themselves the good, who had previously been called the inferior, the bad. Being poor, limited, oppressed, weak, overcome and yet holding on in weakness, in being overcome, that is the good, and being a conqueror, overcoming the other, that is the evil.

Thus good and evil arose from good and bad. But good and bad did not yet have the later moral connotation, but merely the connotation of the conquering, the powerful, the noble, in relation to the army of slave people, who were the inferior, the bad ones. And what was later distinguished between good and evil, that came only from the slave revolt of the previously bad, inferior, who now called the others criminals and evil, in revenge for what had happened to them. Thus, to Nietzsche, the later morality, clothed in the concepts of “good” and “evil,” appeared as the revenge taken by the oppressed on the oppressors. But he found no inner foundation for morality. He could only stand beyond good and evil, not in the midst of good and evil. For to find an inner foundation for good and evil, he would have had to resort to the supersensible. But that was a delusion to him, it was merely the expression of weak human nature, which did not want to admit to itself that its true essence is exhausted in the physical.

If one wants to characterize Nietzsche, one would like to say: Actually, all thinking people of his time should have spoken as he did, if they had been as honest as he was. And he made it his goal to be completely honest. That is why he became a fighter against his time, and that is why he had such sharp intellectual weapons, and why he strove for a revaluation of all values. He saw the values by which he lived as being the product of dishonesty. Centuries had already worked to bring about modern scientific concepts and also introduced them into all of history. But the same centuries had left that which was no longer compatible with them in human souls: divine and moral ideas. Values had emerged that now had to be reevaluated.

Nietzsche's life is a tremendous tragedy. And I don't think that anyone has really grasped the essence of human civilization in the last third of the 19th century and how it continued to have an effect in the 20th century, in the right way, who has not even seen into such a tragedy as it took place in a soul experiencing this civilization, as in Nietzsche. It is really the case that we have to see the collapse we are now experiencing as a consequence of what Nietzsche calls the dishonesty of modern civilization. One would like to say that Nietzsche became a fighter against his time because he had to tell himself: If this dishonesty continues, then only a destructive struggle can break out among the nations that belong to this modern civilization. And this tragedy in Nietzsche's life arose from the fact that Nietzsche wanted to find the foundations of morality, but could not find them in the education of his time. Nowhere could he find a source from which he could draw moral impulses. And so he groped his way through and wounded his fingers everywhere in the groping. And out of the pain he described his time, as he has just described it.

What was he looking for? He was looking for something that can only be found in the supersensible realm, something that cannot be found in the realm of the sensible. That is what he was looking for. No matter how beautiful, great, and noble the moral principles you come up with, they cannot heat a machine, turn a wheel, or set the electrical apparatus in motion. But if one applies only that to one's cognition which sets the machine in motion, sets the electrical apparatus in motion, turns the wheel, if one introduces only that into one's cognition, then one can never understand how that which lives in man as a moral impulse is to reach into one's own human organism. You can think up the most exalted ideals, but they can only be smoke and fog, because there is no possibility of them taking effect in a muscle, in some skill or the like. There is nowhere in the sensory world where you can see moral ideals taking effect in the organic. Imagine the most beautiful moral ideals – Nietzsche could only say to himself – if you harbor them in your head, then you are to your own organism as you are to a machine. You can make posters for the machine, write on them “Moral Ideals”: it will not heat with them, it will not turn. But should you revolve around your moral ideals if you are as nature intended you to be? You can think them up, they may be very beautiful, but they cannot intervene in the workings of the world! Therefore, they are a lie in the face of reality. It is not the person who devotes himself to ideals who is effective, but the one who fuels his machine so that the instincts become powerful: “the blond beast,” as Nietzsche paradigmatically expresses it.

And so Nietzsche stood with his problems before Man, who could only have been moral to him if the moral impulses in him had found a point of contact. They did not. Therefore, no good and evil, but - “Beyond Good and Evil”.

But now consider: we have always had to characterize this whole modern world-knowledge by saying that it does not approach man, it cannot gain any conception, any idea of man. So, if one experiences in the sense of the modern world-view, one does not have man in one's soul. Yet in Nietzsche everything tended towards man. Everything tended towards something he could not have! And now, in keeping with the modern idea of development, he wanted to transform man into the superman, only he did not have man. How could it be shown, from what was not available, how man develops into the superman! Man was not there for contemplation, for intuitive perception, for feeling, for the impulses of the will. Now the superman! It was as if one had formed these words only out of old habit: man and superman - and now choked, because these words have no content, just as one chokes in a vacuum.

Nietzsche was faced with the necessity of entering the supersensible world with moral problems, and could not enter. That was his inner tragedy. And with that, he is at the same time the representative soul of the end of the 19th century, that representative soul who points out the necessity: If you want to remain honest as human beings, you must enter the supersensible world in order not to declare the ideals of morality to be a lie.

Nietzsche goes mad because he is confronted with the necessity of entering the supersensible world and cannot do so. Many other people do not go mad; but I do not want to explain the reasons why they do not go mad, because one must indeed observe certain limits of politeness when describing the peculiarities of civilization. But one thing is clear from Nietzsche's life: modern man can only be honest and upright with himself and others when he enters the supersensible world. In other words, honesty and uprightness do not exist in a nonsensory world view. Nor can the path from man to superman be found if one cannot take the other path from the sensual to the supersensible. And if morality belongs in a certain sense to the superman, then it demands that this superman be sought not in the sensual but in the supersensible, otherwise it is a mere word, the word “superman,” that is called out but to which nothing resounds from the world.

Tomorrow I will approach the subject from the other side, from the side of how what Nietzsche encountered must now be further developed so that moral values in human life can be understood in the right way and harmonized with the knowledge of our time.

On the “tailoring problem” of the Anthroposophical Society

Tomorrow I will look at the topic from a different angle, from the angle of how what Nietzsche encountered must now be further developed so that morality can be properly understood in human life and reconciled with the knowledge of our time. These are the questions that the members of the Anthroposophical Society must ask themselves. Having an understanding of such questions is part of the Anthroposophical Society. And it is now in the process of coming to its senses.

At the end of February, I would like to add, a meeting of delegates will take place in Stuttgart – if traffic conditions still permit – at which the fate of the German Anthroposophical Society will be discussed first, so that the conditions of the Anthroposophical Society can then be discussed in more detail. These things must be taken very seriously today. For it was precisely during my presence in Stuttgart that I felt so keenly how, above all, those who want to do something within the Anthroposophical Society must bear in mind that anthroposophy, in the three stages that I described to you here recently, has become something that has outgrown what the Anthroposophical Society wants to remain in many ways.

In the first stages of the Anthroposophical Society's development, no thought was given to how, later on, under the influence of a Goetheanum and other things, people in the furthest reaches would relate to Anthroposophy, in the sense of opposing it or of adhering to it. The Society must grow with the growth of Anthroposophy. And so the next problem, which is to occupy the minds of the Anthroposophical Society at the end of February in Stuttgart – forgive me, my dear friends, if I express this in a figurative way – the next problem is a tailoring problem. It is the problem that has been raised by the fact that anthroposophy today is something in relation to which the Anthroposophical Society represents clothes that anthroposophy has outgrown. The sleeves of the skirt no longer reach the hands, not even the elbows, not to mention the trousers. Now the problem of tailoring must really be solved with the full application of the mind: how do you make the right clothes for Anthroposophy out of the Anthroposophical Society? That will be the big problem for Stuttgart at the end of February. And this is indeed pointed out in the call that has now been sent out.

What has struck me most is that there is not enough of what I hinted at at the end of my last lecture here last week. I said: Of course, not everyone can become a physician in the anthroposophical sense, but there can be understanding for what is happening in medicine that is inspired by anthroposophy to the greatest extent, there can be understanding, there can be interest. This interest must be present in the broadest sense among the members of the Anthroposophical Society for everything that happens within Anthroposophy. Then we will also succeed in solving the problem of the tailor. But it must be solved, otherwise other means must be considered; for the opponents are full of interest and are extremely attentive to everything, and their methods consist precisely in being good disseminators of the Anthroposophical worldview. Oh, if the members of the Anthroposophical Society were as good at spreading the Anthroposophical worldview as the opponents, then things would go excellently!

The opponents take everything they can from the writings, interpret it in the most absurd way and spread it with frantic interest. So that Anthroposophy is very well known – but as a caricature – on the part of the opponents. Until now, there has been no equal to this in terms of the true form of Anthroposophy. That is how it is. But this is what has now become critical and what must necessarily be led towards a solution. We need a strong and not a weak Anthroposophical Society in the near future.

I recently gave you the names of the provisional committee that will manage affairs within Germany for the time being until the assembly of delegates takes place. The last time we were in Stuttgart, a number of prominent figures declared their willingness to make their voices heard at the assembly of delegates, thereby awakening hope among those who care about the Anthroposophical Society that the support of anthroposophy in the most diverse directions will be presented to the world in a truly penetrating way. But the lecturers who have agreed to take on this task will really have to summon up all their strength and mobilize all their interest if they are to fulfill their duties. We will see.

Today I shall speak in the most concrete way about the Spirit in order to lay a foundation for the next few days, and I must appeal to you to try to arouse a fundamental feeling for what is here meant by the Spirit.

What is taken into account by the human being today? He attaches importance only to what he experiences consciously, from the time he wakes up in the morning until the time he goes to sleep at night. He reckons as part of the world only that which he experiences in his waking consciousness. If you were listening to the voice of the present and had accustomed yourselves to it, you might say: Yes, but was it not always so? Did human beings in earlier times include in what they meant by reality anything in addition to what they experienced in their waking consciousness?

I certainly do not wish to create the impression that we ought to go back to the conditions in earlier epochs of civilization. That is not my intention. The thing that matters is to go forward, not back. But in order to find our bearings we may turn back, look back, rather, beyond the time of the fifteenth century, before the age I attempted to describe radically to you yesterday. What men of that time said about the world is looked upon today as mere phantasy, as not belonging to reality. You need only look at the literature of olden times and you will find, when men spoke of “salt,” “mercury,” phosphorus and so on, that they included many things in the meaning which people are anxious to exclude today.

People say nowadays: “Yes, in those days men added something out of their own phantasy when they spoke of salt, mercury, phosphorus.”

We will not argue about the reason why this is so anxiously excluded today. But we must realize that people saw something in phosphorus, in addition to what is seen by the mere senses, in the way modern men see color. It was surrounded by a spiritual-etheric aura, just as around the whole of Nature there seemed to hover a spiritual aura, although after the fourth or fifth century A.D. it was very colorless and pale. Even so, men were still able to see it. It was as little the outcome of phantasy as the red color we see. They actually saw it.

Why were they able to see this aura? Because something streamed over to them from their experiences during sleep. In the waking Consciousness of that time man did not experience in salt, sulphur, or phosphorus any more than he does today; but when people in those days woke up, sleep had not been unfruitful for their souls. Sleep still worked over into the day and man's perception was richer; his experience of everything around him was more intense.

Without this knowledge as a basis we cannot understand earlier times. Later on the experience of the ancients in connection with sulphur, phosphorus and so on became a mere name, an abstraction. The Spirit continued as an abstraction in tradition, until, at the end of the nineteenth century, the word spirit conveyed nothing to the mind, nothing by way of experience. External culture, which alleges such great progress, naturally attaches the greatest importance to the fact that the human being acts with his waking consciousness. Naturally, with this he will build machines; but with his waking consciousness he can work very little upon his own nature. if we were obliged to be always awake we should very soon become old-at least by the end of our twentieth year—and more repulsively old than people today. We cannot always be awake, because the forces we need to work inwardly upon our organism are active within us only during sleep. it is of course true that the human being can work at external, visible forms of culture when he is awake, but only in sleeping consciousness can he work upon himself. And in olden times much more streamed over from sleeping consciousness into the waking state.

The great change took place in the middle of the fifteenth century: this trickling of sleep consciousness into waking consciousness ceased. Pictorially I would say: In the tenth and eleventh centuries of western civilization man still grew up in such a way that he felt: Divine-spiritual powers have been performing deeds within me between my going to sleep and waking up. He felt the influx of divine-spiritual forces just as in waking consciousness he experienced the health-bringing light of the sun. And before going to sleep there was in every human being an elemental mood of prayer, full of Nature-forces. People entered sleep—or if they were men of knowledge they at least strove to do so—by giving themselves over to divine-spiritual powers.

The education of those who were destined for the spiritual life was such that this mood was deliberately cultivated. At the end of the nineteenth century those who regarded themselves as the most spiritual men had for a long time replaced this by another method of preparation. I have often witnessed how people prepare themselves for sleep: “I must take my fill of beer to prepare for sleep.” This sounds grotesque. Yet we see it is historically true that vision into the spiritual world through sleep was a deliberate and conscious striving among human beings of past epochs, apart from the fact that the candidates for initiation—the students of those days-were prepared in a sacred way for the temple-sleep in which they were made aware of man's participation in the spiritual world.

At the present time when one considers the development of civilization people do not ask: What has come about in modern mankind from the educational point of view? The question is not asked because people do not think of the whole human being but only of part of him. One has a strange impression if one sees a little further than the nearest spiritual horizon: people believe they at last know the truth about certain things, whereas the men of old were altogether naive. Read any current history of physics and you will find that it is written as if everything before this age were naive; now at last things have been perceived in the form in which they can permanently remain. A sharp line is drawn between what has been achieved today and the ideas of nature evolved in “childish” times. No one thinks of asking: What educational effect has the science that is absorbed today, from the point of view of world-historical progress?

Let us think of some earlier book on natural science. From the modern point of view it is childish. But now let us put aside the modern point of view and ask: What educational effect had such a book at that time and what effect has a modern book? The modern book may be very clever and the older one very phantastic, but if we consider the educational value as a whole, we shall have to admit that when a book was read—and it was not so easy to read books in those days, there was something ceremonial about it—it drew something out of the depths of men's souls. The reading of a book was actually like the process of growing: productive forces were released in the organism and human beings were aware of them. They felt something real was there. Today everything is logical and formal. Everything is assimilated by means of the head, formally and intellectually, but no will-force is involved. And because it is all assimilated by the head only and is thus entirely dependent upon the physical head-organization, it remains unfruitful for the development of the true man.

Today there are people who struggle against materialism. My dear friends, it would be almost more sensible if they did not. For what does materialism affirm? It asserts that thinking is a product of the brain. Modern thinking is a product of the brain. That is just the secret—that modern thinking is a product of the brain. With regard to modern thinking, materialism is quite right, but it is not right about thinking as it was before the middle of the fifteenth century. At that time man did not think only with the brain but with what was alive in the brain. He had living concepts. The concepts of that time gave the same impression as an ant-hill, they were all alive. Modern concepts are dead. Modern thinking is clever, but dreadfully lazy! People do not feel it, and the less they feel it the more they love it. In earlier times people felt a tingling when they were thinking—because thinking was a reality in the soul. People are made to believe that thinking was always as it is today. But modern thinking is a product of the brain; earlier thinking was not so.

We ought to be grateful to the materialists for drawing attention to the fact that present-clay thinking is dependent upon the brain. Such is the truth and it is a much more serious matter than is usually imagined. People believe that materialism is a wrong philosophy. That is not at all true. Materialism is a product of world-evolution but a dead product, describing life in the condition where life has died.

This thinking which has evolved more and more since the fifteenth century and which has entrenched itself in civilization the farther west we go, (oriental civilization in spite of its decadence has after all preserved some of the older kind of thinking) has quite definite characteristics. The farther west we come the more does a thinking, regarded by the orientals as inferior, take the upper hand. It does not impress the oriental at all; he despises it. But he himself has nothing new; all he has is the old kind of thinking and it is perishing. But the European, and more so the American, would not feel at ease if he had to transfer himself into the thinking of the Vedas. That kind of thinking made one tingle and the Westerners love dead thinking, where one does not notice that one is thinking at all. The time has come when people confess that a millwheel is revolving in their heads—not only when someone is talking nonsense but when they are talking about living things. They merely want to snatch at what is dead.

Here is an example which I am only quoting for the sake of cultural interest, not for the sake of polemics. I described how it is possible to see an aura of colors around stones, plants and animals. The way in which I put this in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds was such that it made living thinking, not dead thinking, a necessity. A short time ago a professor at a University who is said to have something to do with philosophy, came across this description. To think livingly! Oh, no? that won't do; that is impossible! And there is supposed to be an aura of colors around stone, plant, animal!—He had only seen colors in the solar spectrum and so he thinks that I too can only have seen them in the solar spectrum and have transferred them to stone, plant and animal. He cannot in the least follow my way of describing, so he calls it just a torrent of words. For him, indeed, it is so. He is incapable of understanding it at all. And for a great number of University professors it can be the same. A millwheel is going round in their heads, so away with the head; and then, of course, nothing can possibly come out of it!

The living human being, however, demands a living kind of thinking and this demand is in his very blood. You must be clear about this. You must get your head so strong again that it can stand not only logical, abstract thinking, but even living thinking. You must not immediately get a buzzing head when it is a matter of thinking in a living way. For those whose characteristic was pure intellectualism had dead thinking. The purpose of this dead thinking was the materialistic education of the West. If we look into it, we get a very doubtful picture.

The earlier kind of thinking could be carried over into sleep when the human being was still an entity. He was a being among other beings. He was a real entity during sleep because he had carried living thinking with him into sleep. He brought it out of sleep when he woke up and took it back with him when he fell asleep. Modern thinking is bound to the brain but this cannot help us during sleep. Today, therefore, according to the way of modern science, we can be the cleverest and most learned people, but we are clever only during the day. We cease to be clever during the night, in face of that world through which we can work upon our own being. Men have forgotten to work upon themselves. With the concepts we evolve from the time of waking to that of sleeping we can only achieve something between waking and sleeping. Nothing can be achieved with the real being of man. Man must work out of the forces with which he builds up his own being. During the period when he has to build himself up, when he is a little child, he needs the greatest amount of sleep. If ever a method should be discovered for cramming into babies all that is taught to seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, you would soon see what they would look like! It is a very good thing that babies are still provided for from the mother's breast and not from the lecturing desk. It is out of sleep that man must bring the forces through which he can work upon his own being.

We can carry into sleep nothing from the concepts we evolve through science, through external observation and experiments and the controlling of experiments; and we can bring nothing of what is developed in sleep into these concepts of the material world. The spiritual and the intellectual do not get on well together unless united in the world of full consciousness. Formerly this union was consummated, but in a more subconscious way. Nowadays the union must be fully conscious, and to this human beings do not wish to be converted.

What happened when a man of earlier times passed with his soul into sleep? He was still an entity, because he had within him what hovers around material things. He bore this into sleep. He could still maintain his identity when in sleep he was outside the physical body and in the spiritual world. Today he is less and less of a real entity. He is well-nigh absorbed by the spirituality of Nature when he leaves his body in sleep. In true perception of the world, this is at once evident to the soul. You should only see it!—well, you will be able to see it if you will exert yourselves to acquire the necessary vision. Humanity must attain this vision, for we are living in an age when it can no longer be said that it is impossible to speak of the Spirit as we speak of animals or stones. With such faculties of vision you will be able to see that even though Caesar was not very portly in physical life, yet when his soul left his body in sleep it was of a considerable “size”—not in the spatial sense, but its greatness could be experienced. His soul was majestic. Today a man may be one of the most portly of bankers, but when his soul steps out of his body in sleep into the spirituality of Nature, you should see what a ghastly, shrunken framework it becomes. The portly banker becomes quite an insignificant figure! Since the last third of the nineteenth century humanity has really been suffering from spiritual under-nourishment. The intellect does not nourish the Spirit. It only distends it. That is why the human being takes no spirituality with him into sleep. He is well-nigh sucked up when with his soul as a thin skeleton, he stretches out into the world of spiritual Nature between sleeping and waking.

That is why the question of materialism is far from theoretical. Nothing is of less importance today than the theoretical strife between materialistic, spiritualistic and idealistic philosophy. These things are of no reality, for the refutation of materialism achieves nothing. We may refute materialism as often as we like, nothing will come of it. For, the reasons we bring in order to refute it are just as materialistic as those we quote for or against idealism. Theoretical refutations achieve nothing one way or the other. But what really matters is that in our whole way of looking at the world we have the Spirit once again. Thereby our concepts will regain the force to nourish our being. To make this clear, let me say the following.

Now, I really do not find any very great difference between those people who call themselves materialists and those who in little sectarian circles call themselves, let us say, theosophists. For the way in which the one makes out a case for materialism and another for theosophy is by no means essentially different. It comes down to whether people want to make out a case for theosophy with the kind of thinking entirely dependent upon the brain. If this is so, even theosophy is materialistic. It is not a question of words, but whether the words express the Spirit. When I compare much of the theosophical twaddle with Haeckel's thought, I find the Spirit in Haeckel, whereas the theosophists speak of the Spirit as if it were matter, but diluted matter. The point is not that one speaks about the Spirit but that one speaks through the Spirit. One can speak spiritually about the material, that is to say, it is possible to speak about the material in mobile concepts. And that is always much more spiritual than to speak un-spiritually about the Spirit.

However many come forward today with every possible kind of logical argument in defense of the spiritual view of the world; this simply does not help us, does not help one bit. During the night we remain just as barren if during the day we ponder about hydrogen, chlorine, bromine, iodine, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silica, potassium, sodium and so on, and then evolve our theories; as if we ponder about the human being consisting of physical, etheric, and astral bodies. It is all the same so far as what is living is concerned. To speak in a living way about potassium or calcium, to treat chemistry as really alive, this is much more valuable than a dead, intellectual theosophy. For theosophy too can be taught in a dead, intellectual way. It does not really matter whether we speak materialistically or intellectually, what matters is that the Spirit shall be in what we say. The Spirit must penetrate us with its livingness. But because this is no longer understood, it is very disagreeable when anyone takes this seriously.

I did this in one of my last Oxford lectures, and to make myself quite clear I said: It is all the same to me whether people speak of spiritism, realism, idealism, materialism or anything else When I need language to describe some external phenomenon I use materialistic language. This can be done in such a way that the Spirit too lives within it. If one speaks out of the realm of the Spirit, what one says will be spiritual although the language may have materialistic form. That is the difference between what is cultivated here as Anthroposophy and what is pursued in other places under similar names. Every other week books against Anthroposophy are brought out. They contain statements which are supposed to be leveled against what I have said, but what they attack is always quite new to me for as a rule I have never said such things. They collect all sorts of rubbish and then write voluminous books about it. What they attack has usually nothing whatever to do with what I actually say. The point is not to fight materialism but to see to it that the concepts come out of the world of the Spirit, that they are really experienced, that they are concepts filled with life. What is here presented and accepted as Anthroposophy is quite different from what the world says about it.

People fight today against Anthroposophy—and sometimes also in defense of it—quite materialistically, un-spiritually, whereas what really matters is that experience of the Spirit should be made a reality in us. People easily get muddied, for when one begins to speak of spiritual beings as one speaks of plants and animals in the physical world, they take one for a fool. I can understand that; but there is just this, that this folly is the true reality, indeed the living reality for human beings! The other kind of reality is good for machines but not for human beings.

This is what I wanted to say quite clearly, my dear friends, that in what I intend here and have always intended, the important thing is not merely to speak about the Spirit, but out of the Spirit, to unfold the Spirit in the very speaking. The Spirit can have an educative effect upon our dead cultural life. The Spirit must be the lightning which strikes our dead culture and kindles it to renewed life. Therefore, do not think that you will find here any plea for rigid concepts such as the concepts physical body, etheric body, astral body, which are so nicely arrayed on the walls of theosophical groups and are pointed out just as, in a lecture room, sodium, potassium and so on are pointed to with their atomic weights. There is no difference between pointing at tables giving the atomic weight of potassium and pointing to the etheric body. It is exactly the same, and that is not the point. Interpreted in this way, Theosophy—or even Anthroposophy—is not new, but merely the latest product of the old.

The most incredible twaddle is heard when people suddenly feel themselves called upon to uphold the spiritual. I do not mention these things for the sake of criticism, but as a symptom. I will tell you two stories; the first runs as follows. I was once at a meeting in the West of Europe on the subject of theosophy. The lectures had come to an end. I fell into conversation with someone about the value of these lectures. This personality who was a good disciple of theosophical sectarianism told me of his impression of the lectures in these words: “There are such beautiful vibrations in this hall.” The pleasant sensation, you see, was expressed in terms of vibrations—in other words, materialistically.

Another time people pestered me about some discovery that had been made on the spiritual plane. It was stated that repeated earth-lives—which as a matter of fact can only be revealed to the soul by genuinely spiritual perception—must also be perceived in an earthly guise, must be clothed in terms of materialistic thinking. So these people began to speak of the “permanent atom” which goes through all earth-lives. They said: If I am now living on the Earth, and come back again after hundreds of years, the atoms will be scattered to the four winds—but one single atom goes over into the next earth-life. It was called the “permanent atom”. Quite happily the most materialistic ideas were being introduced into the truth of repeated earth-lives, into a truth that can only be grasped by the Spirit. As if it could profit anyone to have a single atom say from the fourth or filth century going around in his brain! Surely it is the same as if a surgeon in the world beyond had managed to equip me in this life by having preserved my stomach from a former incarnation and inserted it in my present body. In principle, these things are exactly the same.

I am not telling you this as a joke, but as an interesting symptom of people who, wanting to speak of the Spirit, talk of the pleasant sensation coming from spiritual “vibrations” and have only absorbed through imitation what others have known about repeated earth-lives, clothe this in such a way that they talk about the permanent atom. Books have been written by theosophists about this permanent atom—books with curious drawings showing the distribution of hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine and so on. And when one looks at them they seem no less outrageous than the sketches which materialists have made of the atoms. It does not matter whether we say: This is spiritual, or that is material. What matters is to realize the necessity of entering the living Spirit. I do not say this in a polemic sense but to make it clear to you.

The following is characteristic. There lives at the present time a very gifted Benedictine Father Mager, one of the finest minds in the Order—and the Benedictines have exceedingly fine minds. Mager has written an extremely interesting little book on “The Behaviour of Man in the Sight of God.” It belongs, in thought, to the time when Benedict founded his Order. Had it been written then it would have been quite in accordance with the times. When someone writes a book about the “Behaviour of Man in the Sight of God” one can admire it. And I do admire it. The same priest has, however, also given his opinion on Anthroposophy. And now he becomes the densest of materialists. It is really terribly difficult for one to force one's way into such a rigid kind of thought in order to describe the statements made by this priest. What he censures most is that the perception in Imaginative knowledge, which I put first, is of such a nature that for Father Mager it amounts to a lot of pictures. He gets no farther. And then he says, in accordance with his scientific conscience, that Anthroposophy materializes the world. He takes violent exception to the fact that Anthroposophy materializes the world, in other words, that Anthroposophy does not confine itself to the unreal, abstract concepts he loves—for this Father loves the most abstract concepts. Just read any Catholic philosophy and you will find—Being, Becoming, Existence, Beauty and so on—all in the most abstract form. Whatever you do, don't touch the world! And the Father notices that Anthroposophy contains living concepts which can actually come down to real things, to the real world. That is an abomination to him.

One ought to answer him: If knowledge is to be anything real, it must follow the course taken by God in connection with the world. This course started from the Spiritual and was materialized. The world was first spiritual and then became more and more material, so that real knowledge must follow this course. It is not sought for in Anthroposophy, but one comes to it. The picture slips into reality; but Father Mager condemns this. And yet it is exactly what he must himself believe if he wants to give his faith a reasonable content. But he calls it in our case the materialization of knowledge.

Of course, there is no satisfying those who insist: For heaven's sake no living concepts, for they will slip into reality, and concepts must be kept away from that! In such cases we can only have concepts belonging to waking consciousness and none that is capable of working upon man from the spiritual world. And that is exactly what we need. We need a living evolution and a living education of the human race. The fully conscious human being feels the culture of the present day to be cold, arid. It must be given life and inner activity once again. It must become such that it fills the human being, fills him with life. Only this can lead us to the point where we shall no longer have to confess that we ought not to mention the Spirit, but it leads us to where the good will to develop within us the inclination not for abstract speaking, but for inward action in the Spirit that flows into us, not for obscure, nebulous mysticism, but for the courageous, energetic permeation of our being with spirituality. Permeated by spirit we can speak of matter and we shall not be led astray when talking of important material discoveries, because we are able to speak about them in a spiritual way. We shall shape into a force that educates humanity what we sense darkly within us as an urge forward. Tomorrow, we will speak of these things again.

This lecture is included in Volume 220 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 11 of 12 from the lecture series A Living Knowledge of Nature, the Fall of the Intellect into Sin, the Spiritual Resurrection.

The spiritual life of the Middle Ages, from which the modern one derives, is essentially contained—as far as Europe is concerned—in what we call Scholasticism, that Scholasticism of which I have repeatedly spoken. At the height of the scholastic age two directions can be distinguished: Realism and Nominalism.

If we take the meaning of the word Realism, as it is often understood today, we do not grasp at once what was meant by medieval scholastic Realism. It was not called Realism because it approved only of the outer sense-reality and considered everything else an illusion; quite the contrary was the case—it was called Realism because it considered man's ideas on the things and processes of the world as something real, whereas Nominalism considered these ideas as mere names which signified nothing real.

Let us look at this matter quite clearly. In earlier days I explained the conceptions of Realism, by using the arguments of my old friend, Vincenz Knauer. Vincenz Knauer held that people who consider only the outer sense-reality, or that which can be found in the world as material substance, will not be able to understand what takes place, for instance, in the case of a caged wolf, which is fed exclusively on lamb's flesh for a long time. After a certain time the wolf has changed his old substance; this would consist entirely of lamb's flesh and in reality the wolf should turn into a lamb, if its substance is now lamb's substance! But this does not happen, for the wolf remains a wolf—that is, the material aspect does not matter; what matters is the form, which consists of the same substance in the lamb's case and in the wolf's case. We discover the difference between lamb and wolf because we gain a conception of the lamb and a conception of the wolf. But when someone says that ideas and conceptions are nothing at all, and that the material aspect of things is the only one that matters, then there should be no difference between lamb and wolf as far as the material substance is concerned, for this has passed over from the lamb into the wolf! If an idea really means nothing at all, the wolf should become a lamb if it keeps on eating lamb's flesh.

This induced Vincenz Knauer, who was a Realist in the medieval scholastic sense, to form the following conception:—What matters, is the form in which the substance is coordinated; this is the idea, or the concept. Also the medieval scholastic Realists were of this opinion. They said that ideas and concepts were something real, and that is why they called themselves Realists.

Their radical opponents were the Nominalists. They argued that there is nothing outside sense-reality, and that ideas and concepts are mere names through which we grasp the outer things of sense-reality.

We might adopt the following argument:—Let us take Nominalism and then Realism, such as we find it, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas, or in other scholastic philosophers; if we contemplate these two spiritual currents in quite an abstract way, their contrast will not be very evident. We might look upon them as two different human aspects. In the present day we are satisfied with such things because we are no longer kindled and warmed by what is expressed in these spiritual currents. But these things contain something very important. Let us take the Realists who argued that ideas and conceptions—that is, forms taken up by the sensory substance—are realities. The scholastic philosophers already considered ideas and thoughts as something abstract, but they called these abstractions a reality, because they were the result of earlier conceptions, far more concrete and essential.

In earlier ages, people did not merely look at the idea “wolf”, but at the real group-soul “wolf”, living in the spiritual world. This was a real being. But scholastic philosophers had subtilized this real being of an earlier age into the abstract idea. Nevertheless, the realistic scholastic philosophers still felt that, the idea does not contain a nothingness, but a reality. This reality indeed descended from earlier quite real beings, but people were then still aware of this descendancy or progeny. In the same way the ideas of Plato (which were far more alive and essentially endowed with Being than the medieval scholastic ideas) were the descendants of the ancient Persian Archangeloi-Beings, who lived and operated in the universe as Anschaspans. They were very real beings. For Plato they had grown more dim, and for the medieval scholastic philosophers they had grown abstract. This was the last stage of the old clairvoyance. Of course, medieval realistic scholasticism was no longer based upon clairvoyance, but what it had preserved traditionally, as its real ideas and conceptions, living in the stones, in the plants, in animals and in physical man, was still considered as something spiritual, although this spirituality was very thin indeed. When the age of abstraction or of intellectualism approached, the Nominalists discovered that they were not able to connect anything real with thoughts and ideas. For them these were mere names, coined for the convenience of man.

Medieval scholastic Realism, let us say, of a Thomas Aquinas, has not found a continuation in the more modern world conception, for man no longer considers ideas and thoughts as something real. If we were to ask people whether they considered thoughts and ideas as something real, we would only obtain an answer by placing the question somewhat differently. For instance, by asking someone who is firmly rooted in modern culture:—“Would you be satisfied if, after your death, you were to continue living merely as a thought or an idea?” In this case he would surely feel very unreal after death! This was not so for the realistic scholastic philosophers. For them, thoughts and ideas were real to such an extent, that they could not conceive that, as a mere thought or idea, they might lose themselves in the universe, after death. But as stated, this medieval scholastic Realism was not continued. In a modern world conception, everything consists of Nominalism. Nominalism has gained the upper hand more and more. And modern man (he does not know this, because he does not concern himself any more about such ideas) is a Nominalist in the widest meaning.

This has a certain deeper significance. One might say that the very passage from Realism to Nominalism—or better, the victory of Nominalism in our modern civilization—signifies that humanity has become completely powerless in regard to the grasping of the spiritual. For, naturally, just as the name “Smith” has nothing to do with the person standing before us, who is somehow called “Smith”, so have the ideas “wolf”, “lion”, conceived as mere names, no meaning whatever as far as reality is concerned. The passage from Realism to Nominalism expresses the entire process of the loss of spirit in our modern civilization. Take the following instance, and you will see that the entire meaning is lost as soon as Realism loses its meaning.

If I still find real ideas in the stone, in the plant, in the animals, and in physical man—or better still, if I find in them the ideas as realities—I can place the following question:—Is it possible that the thoughts that live in stones and plants, were once the thoughts of the Divine Being who created stones and plants? But if I see in thoughts and ideas mere names which man gives to stones and plants, I cut myself off from the Divine Being, and can no longer take it for granted that during the act of cognition I somehow enter in connection with the Divine Being.

If I am a scholastic Realist, I argue as follows:—I plunge into the mineral world, into the vegetable world and into the animal world; I form thoughts on quartz, sulphide of mercury and malachite. I form thoughts on the wolf, the hyena and the lion. I derive these from what I perceive through my senses. If these thoughts are something which a god originally placed into the stones and plants and animals, then my thoughts follow the divine thoughts. That is, in my thinking I create a link with the divinity.

If I stand on the earth as a forlorn human being, and perhaps imitate to some extent the lion's roar in the word “lion”, I myself give the lion this name; then, however, my knowledge contains no connection whatever with the divine spiritual creator of the beings. This implies that modern humanity has lost the capacity of finding something spiritual in Nature; the last trace of this was lost with scholastic Realism.

If we go back to the days in which men still had an insight into the true nature of such things through atavistic clairvoyance, we will find that the ancient Mysteries consisted more or less in the following conception: the Mysteries saw in all things a creative productive principle, which was looked upon as the “Father-principle”. When a human being proceeded from what his senses could perceive to the super-sensible, he really felt that he was proceeding to the divine Father-principle.

Only when scholastic Realism lost its meaning, it became possible to speak of atheism within the European civilization. For it was impossible to speak of atheism as long as people still found real thoughts in the things around them. There were already atheists among the Greeks; but they were not real atheists like the modern ones. Their atheism was not clearly defined. But it must also be said that in Greece we often find the first flashes of lightning, as if from an elementary human emotion, precursory of things which found their real justification during a later stage of human evolution. The actual theoretical atheism only arose when Realism, scholastic Realism, decayed.

However, this scholastic Realism continued to live in the divine, Father-principle, although the Mystery of Golgotha was enacted thirteen or fourteen centuries ago.

But the Mystery of Golgotha—I have often spoken of this—could really be grasped only through the knowledge of an older age. For this reason, those who wished to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha through what remained from the ancient Mystery wisdom of God the Father, looked upon the Christ merely as the Son of the Father.

Please consider carefully the thought which we shall form now. Imagine that someone tells you something concerning a person called Miller; you are only told that he is the son of the old Miller. Hence, the only thing you know about him is that he is the son of Miller. You wish to know more about him from the person who has told you this. But he keeps on telling you:—The old Miller is such and such a person, and he describes all kinds of qualities and concludes by saying—and the young Miller is his son. It was more or less the same when people spoke of the Mystery of Golgotha according to the ancient Father-principle. Nature was characterized in such a way that people said—the divine creative Father-principle lives in Nature, and Christ is the Son. Essentially, even the strongest Realists could not characterize the Christ otherwise than by saying that he was the Son of the Father. This is an essential point.

Then came a kind of reaction to all these forms of thought adhering to the stream which came from the Mystery of Golgotha, but which grasped it according to the Father-principle. As a kind of counter-stream, came all that which asserted itself as the evangelic principle, as protestantism, etc., during the passage from medieval life to modern life. A chief quality among all the qualities of this evangelization, or protestantism, is this that more importance was given to the fact that people wished to see the Christ in his own being. They did not base themselves on the old theology which considered the Christ only as the Son of the Father, according to the Father-principle, but they searched the Gospels in order to know the Christ as an independent Being, from the description of his deeds and the communication of the words of Christ. Really, this is what lies at the foundation of the Wycliffe and Comenius currents in German protestantism:—to consider the Christ as an independent Being.

However, the time for a spiritual way of looking at things had passed. Nominalism took hold of all minds and people were no longer able to find in the Gospels the divine spiritual being of the Christ. Modern theology lost this divine spiritual more and more. As I have often said, theologians looked upon the Christ as the “meek man of Nazareth”. Indeed, if you take Harnach's book—“The Essence of Christianity”, you will find that it contains a relapse; for in this book a modern theologian again describes the Christ very much after the Father-principle. In Harnach's book, the “Essence of Christianity”, we could substitute the word “Christ” wherever we read the word “God-Father”—this would make no great difference.

As long as the “wisdom of the Father” considered the Christ as the Son of God, people possessed in a certain sense a way of thinking which had a direct bearing on reality. However, when they wished to understand the Christ himself, in his divine spiritual being, the spiritual conception was already lost. They did not approach the Christ at all. For instance, the following case is very interesting (I do not know if many of you have noted it):—when one of those who wished at first to take part in the movement for a religious renewal,—but he did not take part in the end—, when the chief pastor of Nuremberg, Geyer, once held a lecture in Basle, he confessed openly that modern protestant theologians did not possess Christ—but only a universal God. This is what Geyer said, because he honestly confessed that people indeed spoke of the Christ, but the Father-principle was in reality the only thing that remained to them. This is connected with the fact that the human being who still looks at Nature spiritually (for he brings the spirit with him at birth) can only find the Father-principle in Nature. But since the decay of scholastic Realism he cannot even find this. Not even the Father-principle can be found, and atheistic opinions arose.

If we do not wish to remain by the description of the Christ, as being merely the Son of God, and wish instead to grasp this Son in his own nature, then we must not consider ourselves merely such as we are through birth; we must instead experience, during earthly life itself, a kind of inner awakening, no matter how weak this may be. We must pass through the following facts of consciousness and say to ourselves:—if you remain such as you were through birth, and see Nature merely through your eyes and your other senses and then consider Nature with your intellect, you are not a full human being, you cannot feel yourself fully as a human being. First you must awaken something in you which lies deeper still. You cannot be content with what you bring with you at birth. You must instead bring forth again in full consciousness what lies buried in greater depths.

One might say, that if we educate a human being only according to his innate capacities, we do not really educate him to be a complete human being. A child will grow into a full human being only if we teach him to look for something in the depths of his being, something he brings to the surface as an inner light, which is kindled during life on earth. Why is it so? Because the Christ who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, and is connected with earthly life, dwells in the depths of man. If we undertake this new awakening, we find the living Christ, who does not enter the usual consciousness which we bring with us at birth, and the consciousness that develops out of this innate consciousness. The Christ must he raised out of the depths` of the soul. The consciousness of Christ must arise in the life of the soul, then we shall really be able to say what I have often mentioned:—If we do not find the Father, we are not healthy, but are born with certain deficiencies. If we are atheists, this implies to a certain extent, that our bodies are ill. All atheists are physically ill to a certain extent. If we do not find the Christ, this is destiny and not illness, because it is an experience to find the Christ, not a mere observation. We find the Father-principle by observing what we ought to see in Nature. But we find the Christ, when we experience resurrection. The Christ enters this experience of resurrection as an independent Being, not merely as the Son of the Father. Then we learn to know that if we keep merely to the Father, in our quality of modern human beings, we cannot feel ourselves as complete human beings. The Father sent the Son to the earth in order that the Son might fulfill his works on earth. Can you not feel how the Christ becomes an independent being in the fulfillment of the Father's works?

In the present time, Spiritual Science alone enables us to understand the entire process of resurrection—to understand it practically, as an experience. Spiritual Science wishes to bring these very experiences to conscious knowledge out of the depths of the soul; they bring light into the Christ-experience.

Thus we may say, that with the end of scholastic Realism, it was no longer possible to grasp the principle of the Father-wisdom. Anthroposophical Realism, or that kind of Realism which again considers the spirit as something real, will at last be able to see the Son as an independent Being and to look upon the Christ as a Being perfect in itself. This will enable us to find in Christ the divine spiritual, in an independent way.

You see, this Father-principle really played the greatest imaginable part in older times. The theology which developed out of the ancient Mystery-wisdom was really interested only in the Father-principle. What kind of thoughts were predominant in the past?—Whether the Son is at one with the Father from all eternity, or whether he arose in Time and was born into Time. People thought about his descent from the Father. Consider the old history of dogmas; you will find throughout that the greatest value is placed on the question of Christ's descent. When the Third Person of the Trinity, the Spirit, was considered, people asked themselves whether the Spirit proceeded from the Father, with the Son or through the Son, etc. The problem was always connected with the genealogy of these three Godly Persons—that is, with what is connected with descent, and can be comprised in the Father-principle. During the strife between scholastic Realism and scholastic Nominalism, these old ideas of the Spirit's descent from the Father and from the Son were no longer understood. For you see, now they were three Persons. These three Persons who represent Godly Persons, were supposed to form one Godhead. The Realists comprised these three Godly Persons in one idea. For them, the idea was something real, hence the one God was something real for their knowledge. The Nominalists could not very well understand the Three Persons of the one God—consisting of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. When they summarized this Godhead, they obtained a mere word, or name. Thus the three Godly Persons became separate Persons for them, and the time in which scholastic Realism strove against scholastic Nominalism was also the time in which no real idea could be formed concerning this Godly Trinity. A living conception of the Godly Trinity was lost.

When Nominalism gained the upper hand, people understood nothing more of similar ideas, and took up the old ideas according to this or to that traditional belief; they were unable to form any real thought. And when the Christ came more to the fore in the protestant faith—although his divine spiritual being could no longer be grasped, because Nominalism prevailed—it was quite impossible to have any idea at all concerning the Three Persons. The old dogma of the Trinity was scattered.

The things had a great significance for mankind in the age when spiritual feelings were predominant, and played a great part in the human souls for their happiness and unhappiness. These things were pushed completely in the background during the age of modern narrow-mindedness. Are modern people interested in the connection between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, unless the problem happens to enter into theological quarrels? Modern man thinks that he is a good Christian, yet he does not worry about the relationships of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He cannot understand at all that once this was one of mankind's burning soul-problems. He has grown narrow-minded, and for this reason we can term the age of Nominalism the narrow-minded age of European civilization, for narrow-minded people have no real feeling for the spiritual, that continually rouses the soul. These kinds of people live only in their habits. It is not possible to live entirely without spirit, yet the narrow-minded people would like to live without any spirit at all—get up without the spirit—breakfast without the spirit—go to the office without the spirit—lunch without the spirit—play billiards in the afternoon without the spirit—in fact they would like to do everything without the spirit! Nevertheless the spirit permeates the whole of life, but narrow-minded people do not bother about this—it does not interest them.

Hence we may argue: Anthroposophy should therefore strive to maintain the Universal-Divine. But it does not do this. It finds the divine-spiritual in God the Father; it also finds this divine-spiritual in God the Son. If we compare the conceptions of Anthroposophy with the earlier wisdom of the Father we will find more or less the following situation:—Please do not mind my using a somewhat trivial expression, but I should like to say, that, as far as Christ was concerned, the wisdom of the Father asked above all—”Who was his Father? Let us find out who his Father was and then we shall know him.” Anthroposophy is, of course, placed into modern life, and in working out natural sciences it should of course continue the wisdom of the Father. But Anthroposophy works out the wisdom of the Christ and begins with the Christ. Anthroposophy studies, if I may use this expression, history, and finds in history a descending evolution. It finds the Mystery of Golgotha and from thence an ascending evolution. In the Mystery of Golgotha it finds the central point and meaning of the entire history of man on earth. When Anthroposophy studies Nature it calls the old Father-principle into new life, but when it studies history it finds the Christ. Now it has learned two things. It is just as if I were to travel into a city where I make the acquaintance of an older man; then I travel into another city and I learn to know a younger man. I become acquainted with the older and with the younger, each one for himself. At first they interest me, each one for himself. Afterwards I discover a certain likeness between them. I follow this up and find that the younger man is the son of the older one. In Anthroposophy it is just the same—it learns to know the Father, and later on it learns to know the connection between the two; whereas the ancient wisdom of the Father proceeded from the Father and learned to know the connection between Father and Son at the very outset.

You see, in regard to all things, Anthroposophy must really find a new way, and if we really wish to enter into Anthroposophy, it is necessary to change the way of thinking and of feeling in respect to most things. In Anthroposophy, it is not enough if anthroposophists consider on the one hand a more or less materialistic world conception, or a world conception based more or less on ancient traditional beliefs, and then pass on to Anthroposophy, because this appeals to them more than other teachings. But they are mistaken. We must not only go from one conception to the other—from the materialistic monistic conception to the anthroposophical one—and then say that the latter is the best. Instead we must realize that what enables us to understand the monistic materialistic conception does not enable us to understand the anthroposophical conception. You see, theosophists believed that the understanding of the materialistic monistic conception enabled them also to understand the spiritual. For this reason we have the peculiar phenomenon that in the monistic materialistic world conception people argue as follows:—everything is matter; man consists only of matter—the material substance of the blood, of the nerves, etc.

Everything is matter. Theosophists—I mean the members of the Theosophical Society—say instead:—No, this is a materialistic view; there is the spirit. Now they begin to describe man according to the spirit:—the physical body which is dense, then the etheric body somewhat thinner, a kind of mist, a thin mist—these are in reality quite materialistic ideas! Now comes the astral body, again somewhat thinner, yet this is only a somewhat thin material substance, etc. This leads them up a ladder, yet they obtain merely a material substance that grows thinner and thinner. This too is a materialistic view. For the result is always “matter”, even though this grows thinner and thinner. This is materialism, but people call it “spirit”. Materialism at least is honest, and calls the matter “matter”, whereas, in the other case, spiritual names are given to what people conceive materialistically.

When we look at spiritual images, we must realize that we cannot contemplate these in the same way as we contemplate physical images; a new way of thinking must be found.

Things become very interesting at a special point in the history of the Theosophical Society. Materialism speaks of atoms. These atoms were imagined in many ways and strong materialists, who took into consideration the material quality of the body, formed all kinds of ideas about these atoms. One of these materialists built up a Theory of Atoms and imagined the atom in a kind of oscillating condition, as if some fine material substance were spinning round in spirals.

If you study Leadbeater's ideas on atoms, you will find a great resemblance with this theory.

An essay which appeared recently in an English periodical discussed the question of whether Leadbeater's atom was actually “seen”, or whether Leadbeater contented himself with reading the book on the Theory of Atoms and translating it into a “spiritual” language.

These things must be taken seriously. It matters very much that we should examine ourselves, in order to see if we still have materialistic tendencies and merely call them by all kinds of spiritual names. The essential point is to change our ways of thinking and of feeling—otherwise we cannot reach a really spiritual way of looking at things. This gives us an outlook, a perspective, that will help us to achieve the rise from sin as opposed to the fall into sin.

Mr. Albert Steffen opened the meeting and said that many people were probably rudely awakened by cannon shots this morning. This is because today, down in the village, there is a celebration of the anniversary of the Battle of Dornach, which took place in 1499 on the same hill where we are now gathered. This battle marked the culmination of the wars of independence that had begun when the three founders of the Swiss Confederation met to swear an oath on the Rütli. As can be read in Swiss history books, this confederation was the model for the United States of America, which in turn became the model for the republics and democracies of Europe. The hill of Dornach is therefore a crucially important point for the history of humanity. The anthroposophical movement, which now has its spiritual center here, is neither political nor national. During the last Goetheanum, people of all nationalities worked peacefully side by side on the hill of Dornach, even during the world war. It is of the greatest historical significance, said Mr. Steffen, that he can make the announcement today that the International Anthroposophical Society will be founded here in Dornach at Christmas this year. Mr. Steffen then gave some examples of the spiritually low-level spite and dishonesty with which the opposition to Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum works, so that the unanimous and tireless support of members in all countries is needed to establish and maintain the new Goetheanum.

Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth briefly reported on the results of the special meeting of the country delegates the previous afternoon. A significant step forward had been taken, both practically and morally. It had to be emphasized that it was not enough to indicate approximately how much funding might be collected over the course of a year; rather, Dr.

Steiner could only be asked to take the reconstruction into his own hands if a certain sum were guaranteed now. It was a great moral success that a few delegates had taken such a heavy responsibility upon their own shoulders. The following sums have been guaranteed in writing by individual delegates:

England... ..... 115,000 Swiss francs

Netherlands... 150,000

Switzerland... 200,000

Denmark... 100,000

Honolulu... 200,000

America... 30,000

Czechoslovakia. 30,000 (from German members there)

Italy. 20,000

Austria. 10,000

Sweden. 10,000

865,000 Swiss francs

As was expressly emphasized by all the delegates, this is only a first step, so that construction can begin immediately. It is hoped that in the coming months, through vigorous activity, significantly larger sums can be secured.

A second problem, which must now be discussed here and also after the delegates return to their countries, is the founding of the International Anthroposophical Society in Dornach at Christmas. In the course of this year, several national societies, e.g. in England, Holland, etc., will be founded on their own initiative, and it is to be hoped that several other countries will follow this example as soon as possible. The rebuilding of the movement in Dornach will result in a great deal of correspondence with all countries and branches, which is why the founding of national societies will greatly facilitate joint work, reporting, etc. Some grotesque examples were given to show why members who do not affiliate with other branches and country groups are unjustifiably dissatisfied when they are not notified of events in good time. It is hoped that this will be much easier and better in the future, thanks to the creation of country groups, which will simplify the exchange of information, and to the creation of a comprehensive address archive. (See below for more details.)

Between now and Christmas, we need two things more than ever: courage, so that we can secure all the physical foundations for the new structure by then; and love, so that the International Anthroposophical Society can be born at Christmas, an act that must mean something for the spiritual aura of the Earth.

Mr. Leinhas explained clearly and unambiguously that according to the existing laws it is absolutely necessary to leave the contributions collected in Germany, which are deposited with the trust company in Stuttgart, in Germany and to use them up there. He suggested, as one of several possibilities, that these funds be used for a study fund to make it easier for students to devote themselves intensively to the study of the various anthroposophical fields of teaching.

Mr. Heywood-Smith pointed out that today, July 22, was an important day in the history of Switzerland's wars of liberation. We are now facing another decisive historical moment, where another deed is to be accomplished that also demands trust in the ideal and the commitment of the whole being. We still need three million Swiss francs to rebuild the Goetheanum. The three confederates at Rütli had risked their lives for the cause of freedom. Are there three people in our Society who would be willing to guarantee the three million from their own means and thereby perform a deed of love for humanity? The members could then, in turn, perform a deed of love by ensuring that the guarantors do not suffer any loss once the contributions flow into the fund at the same rate as they are needed for the reconstruction.

Dr. Büchenbacher described the difficult moral tasks that have to be overcome by the friends in Germany; as Dr. Steiner showed us in his lectures, we have to help the genius of the time to overcome the demon of the time. Germany is a particularly difficult and important battleground for these forces at this time.

Mr. Scott Pyle, America, expressed in a heartfelt way how unfortunate it was that the German contributions could not directly benefit the Goetheanum this time and that it would be a beautiful act of international community spirit if the other countries, going beyond their own foundations, would also distribute the German contribution among themselves. He himself set a good example by donating a large sum.

Miss Woolley, England, added to it by donating jewelry to the German contribution.

Mr. Jan Stuten impressed upon the audience the necessity of the new Goetheanum, especially for a rebirth of artistic life. In the old Goetheanum, all forms were so harmonious and musical that they had a direct inspiring effect on the artist. A new music could have been born from the contemplation of the capitals, architraves and other living organic forms of the Goetheanum. He described the uninspired, uncreative decadence of modern compositions with examples to the contrary. The anthroposophical artists asked the Friends of the Arts to help them with the new Goetheanum, so that a place full of stimulation for the creative powers of artists on earth could be created again. Eurythmy also needs the Goetheanum as a setting of the same spirit. The performance that the delegates saw yesterday, for example of Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream”, would have been an event, a renaissance of Shakespeare's works in a new spirit. We felt deeply grateful to Dr. Steiner for this event. Mr. Stuten proposed that one or more of Dr. Steiner's mystery plays be performed during a festival week on large stages in Switzerland and abroad in the course of this year.

Ms. Henström, Sweden, reported on anthroposophical work in Sweden and guaranteed, at her own responsibility, a nice contribution from Sweden for the fund.

Miss Lina Schwarz, Italy, spoke about the wishes of her Italian friends and hoped that in the future it might be possible to send a newsletter from Dornach to all countries.

Count Polzer, Austria, said that in a properly conducted budget debate, spiritual human areas of interest should also be addressed; he welcomed the fact that in the last few days the budget negotiations here had been brought to such a level that at the same time, deep spiritual problems such as the consolidation of the Society in its connection with the reconstruction of the Goetheanum could be discussed. A center should be formed here in Dornach, in lively exchange with the life in the branches of all countries. He hoped that despite the growing difficulties, the delegates and members would meet quite often in Dornach and thus get to know each other more and more personally and warmly. Graf Polzer requested that the members of the other countries now also accept the resolution adopted by Switzerland.

Mr. Steffen asked those in favor of the resolution to rise. - (All the delegates remained silent for a few moments.) — The international assembly has thus unanimously endorsed this resolution.

The international assembly of delegates was closed by Dr. Steiner on the evening of July 22, at the end of the third of his lectures on “Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy”, with the following words:

This was an attempt to characterize the three perspectives that anthroposophy can open up: the physical, the soul and the spiritual perspective.

It will undoubtedly be a memorable meeting, my dear friends, if the building of a new Goetheanum can now emerge from it. And it would be wonderful if this new Goetheanum could become such that it could also radiate to us in its forms what is to be said through the word on the basis of anthroposophy to humanity. In this way, my dear friends, you will have done a great deal for anthroposophy.

I may speak impersonally in all these matters at this moment; it really does not depend on me. I also do not want to speak about the decision that has been made, the content of which is that it should be left to me to make the internal arrangements for the construction. For my request that I be allowed to carry out the building work under these conditions was made because I can only take responsibility for the building work under these conditions. And all this remains within the objective.

It is commendable that this request has been sympathetically received. The anthroposophical movement as such will benefit from the outcome. And so, as I bid farewell to our friends who have come here, I would just like to be the interpreter of the anthroposophical understanding, and the repercussions of this anthroposophical understanding will not fail to materialize for those who have this understanding. It can truly be seen from the spiritual realm what a difficult sacrifice our friends are making for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum. But the feeling has now entered our ranks that the will for what stands as an ideal before the soul's eye cannot be realized without such great sacrifices.

The Goetheanum will only be truly blessed if those who make the sacrifices truly want them and if the sacrifices come from a sacred will. But the beauty and beautiful sincerity of this will can already be expressed by the interpreter of anthroposophy as a warm farewell greeting. And I can assure you of this: now that the sacrifices have been made, the Goetheanum will be rebuilt to the best of our ability.

Building this second Goetheanum will require stronger, harder struggles than building the first, and a moral fund to supplement the physical one would be highly necessary. So, in the name of anthroposophy, I am deeply grateful to all those who have rushed here, and if it is the case that the right understanding will increasingly take hold, then in a sense the blessing cannot fail to come, and then one can also look forward calmly to the difficult struggles that this work in particular will entail.

Therefore, today, in a particularly serious and also in a particularly warm way, I would like to say goodbye to the friends.

Some preliminary remarks for the founding of the International Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Christmas 1923.

A large number of the delegates who had been present at the conference from July 20 to 23 met again after the conference to determine the issues that require preliminary discussion in the various countries and groups during the next few months, so that the delegates can arrive at Christmas well informed about the views of their friends at home and armed with fruitful proposals for the development of the International Anthroposophical Society.

We therefore sincerely request that the following points be thoroughly discussed in the assemblies of the Anthroposophical branches and groups in the time between now and Christmas, so that harmony of opinion can be achieved all the more quickly in Dornach on the basis of the clarified views of friends from all countries:

1. There will be a discussion about the merger of the national societies that have already been founded or will be founded by Christmas to form an International Anthroposophical Society. Reports will be given on the different ways in which the individual national societies are organized.

2. Possible revision of statutes by the national societies, insofar as the current draft ¹ needed to be changed or added.

3. Those countries, such as Belgium, Poland, etc., that have expressed the wish to remain affiliated to the Swiss Anthroposophical Society for the time being, until their membership has grown stronger, are asked to send the Swiss Anthroposophical Society a precise list of the addresses of the members of their group, as well as to indicate which individuals are to be notified of any events, communications, etc. who are then responsible for passing this on to all members belonging to their group.

4. Proposals for the person of a General Secretary of the International Anthroposophical Society. The decision, of course, lies with Dr. Steiner.

5. Some delegates had proposed appointing so-called envoys in Dornach, i.e. prominent individuals from the various countries who already live in Dornach and could be consulted or called upon to assist in dealings with the individual countries. Opinions were divided on the expediency of such an organization. It would, of course, only be useful if it facilitated, rather than complicated, communication between Dornach and the national societies.

6. The amount and due date of the contribution to be paid to Dornach per member (upon admission and annually) to cover the expenses of the General Secretariat. (It should not be forgotten that the sending of such communications, the organization of meetings, the handling of the constantly increasing number of requests in Dornach, etc., which result from the international growth of the Society, require funds that cannot be covered permanently by the Swiss Society or from private funds, but must be borne jointly by all countries).

7. Regular additions to the address archive of members in Dornach (unless otherwise agreed). (It is proposed that contributions and lists of new members, resignations, changes of address, etc. be sent to Dornach on 7 January and 1 July respectively).

8. Determination of the responsibility of the general secretaries, boards of directors, etc. of the national associations and of the International General Secretary with regard to the admission of new members to the Society. — (For example, during discussions with Dutch friends, it was suggested that the admission card of a new member be signed by the general secretary of a country and countersigned by the International General Secretariat). 9. The question of publishing a journal can only be resolved by specific proposals regarding the person and the means.

10. Organization of a dignified and effective defense against opponents in all countries. The International Anthroposophical Society must take on this task to such an extent through increased collaboration across the whole earth that Dr. Steiner is not impeded in important work by the tiresome defense against opponents.

11. Members in all countries to work together to support the initiatives launched by the Anthroposophical Society in the fields of education, therapy (distribution of remedies, support for clinical-therapeutic institutes, etc.), scientific research, art, etc. It would be very nice if, in this respect, the delegates could come to Dornach at Christmas with concrete proposals and reports of their own activities in all countries after intensive discussions.

12. How much have the individual countries and groups been able to contribute to the reconstruction of the Goetheanum? (It would be helpful for the continuity of the work if a preliminary report on this could be given by October 15, 1923).

Please send the names of the delegates who are to represent their countries in Dornach at Christmas to Dornach by December 1, 1923. Similarly, information is needed about accommodation, etc. In addition to the responsible delegates, all members of the Society are of course most warmly and urgently invited to attend. The exact date of the Christmas meeting will be announced.

All correspondence should be addressed to “The Secretariat of the Anthroposophical Society”, Dornach near Basel, Switzerland, Haus Friedwart, 1st floor.

We repeat Dr. Steiner's closing words: “It would be wonderful if this new Goetheanum could become such that it could radiate to us in its forms what is to be said through the word on the basis of anthroposophy for humanity.

The building of the new Goetheanum and the carrying out of anthroposophical truths into the spiritual life of the whole earth will show that the signals of the Anthroposophical Society, which are to be born at Christmas, are a living and active being.

Please come, dear friends, to Dornach at Christmas, equipped for such tasks and with loving intentions.

Albert Steffen Dr.
Guenther Wachsmuth

Chronological overview of the days of the conference with a literal rendering of Rudolf Steiner's words

First day, Friday, July 20, 1923

11:30 a.m., Friedwart House: preliminary discussion of the Swiss delegates (without Rudolf Steiner). The official delegates are elected and the question is discussed of whether Switzerland can raise the planned 400,000 francs for the reconstruction.

4 p.m., Glass House: Preliminary discussion of the German delegates (without Rudolf Steiner). Carl Unger mentions three points for the conference: 1. Rebuilding the Goetheanum, 2. Appeal for donations, 3. Following the “resolution” of the Swiss. The composition of the German delegation is decided: Dr. Unger, Emil Leinhas, Wolfgang Wachsmuth, Hans Büchenbacher, Maria-Röschl, Felix Peipers, Graf Lerchenfeld, Kurt Walther, Frau Goyert, Oberstleutnant Seebohm (Johanna Mücke has resigned).

5 p.m., Glass House: preliminary discussion of all the delegates named by the various countries to determine the conference program and the chairmanship. Albert Steffen is elected chairman, George Kaufmann from London vice-chairman, and Guenther Wachsmuth secretary. The Swiss delegate E. Etienne from Geneva reports the following from this meeting in a private letter dated July 29, 1923:

"This first discussion was actually more of a get-together. The various country delegates had come here more or less informed, some hardly knew the purpose of the meeting; they had therefore not been given any powers of attorney and were more here to find out something that they could then inform their country and their branches about. Of course, this was a hindrance and an obstacle to the smooth running of the purely financial part of the work program.

It was interesting to see how the mentality of their people was reflected in the statements of the various delegates. Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria were the most willing to make sacrifices. The tragedy is that for the last two countries, the exchange rate situation is such that their enormous sacrifices appear so small when converted into francs. The Nordic countries, on the other hand, failed to contribute. Italy and France are willing but have few members and little money. England and America have disappointed... In contrast, the German group has been exemplary for Czechoslovakia. Of the 27 members, 150,000 Czech crowns (about 10,000 francs) have been delivered so far, and their delegate has personally committed to a further 20,000 francs. Will the three Czech groups be as loyal to the cause? They were not represented.

8 p.m., carpentry workshop: Rudolf Steiner's first lecture on “Three Perspectives on Anthroposophy” (in CW 225).

Second day, Saturday, July 21, 1923

10 a.m., carpentry hall: First general assembly of the delegates and members of the Anthroposophical Society. Welcome address by Albert Steffen and report by Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth on yesterday's preliminary negotiations. In the discussion that followed, various suggestions were made as to how the funds for the reconstruction could be raised. Cf. the report by Albert Steffen and Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth on page 557. At the end of the morning session, Rudolf Steiner took the floor:

See GA 252

George Kaufmann translates Rudolf Steiner's remarks into English. Then, until 1 p.m., the negotiations continue on the financing of the building and the proposed brochure.

3 p.m., Glass House: Special meeting of all delegates about the sums to be provided by the individual countries. (There are no minutes of this meeting.)

5 p.m., Carpentry: Eurythmy performance with introductory address by Rudolf Steiner (in CW 277).

8 p.m., carpentry workshop: Rudolf Steiner's second lecture on “Three Perspectives on Anthroposophy” (in CW 225).

10:30 p.m., glass house: assembly of delegates after Rudolf Steiner's lecture. There are no minutes available, but the Swiss delegate E. Etienne from Geneva reports in a private letter dated July 29 about this meeting, at which Rudolf Steiner was also present, as follows:

"It was sometimes exhausting to listen to the haggling and haggling. The committee, which was pushing for large sums to achieve something worthwhile, and the delegates, some of whom had no authority to make real commitments. It is therefore to be hoped that they will really do everything they can in their countries to increase the guaranteed minimum amounts, in line with the number of members and their actual financial possibilities.

After the minimum amounts had been agreed (which depended on whether or not the doctor considered the guarantee offered to be sufficient – he wanted to be absolutely sure and only took note of guaranteed amounts), it was concluded that at least 25% of the guaranteed amounts must be paid by 15 October of the following year. The original plan was to reconvene on this date. However, all the delegates were sufficiently empowered and well informed about the final amounts that their country would contribute to the reconstruction and in which installments.

Doctor Itten said that he would now immediately start planning the new Goetheanum for the funds that had now been made available (insurance and minimum amounts). If in October the delegates are able to guarantee larger sums than those currently foreseen, then these funds would be used for the extensions. This met with long faces, and the immediate objection was raised that nothing of this should be mentioned at tomorrow's general assembly (we delegates would keep silent about everything anyway), because everyone wants to give their money for the Goetheanum and not for extensions. The sense of sacrifice could wane if this became known. The doctor replied that if our old Goetheanum had not burnt down, we would have been forced to build extensions anyway, because the work that awaited us could not have been done in the old building; we felt that ourselves at the time. And we should not imagine that greater sacrifices are now being demanded of us than we would have had to make without the fire in the next three years (we would not have had three million to start with!). In short, Dr. Itten was keen to make it clear to us that the extensions were not only not a disaster, but something desirable, and he tried to encourage us. — Later, he came up again and said very kindly: Don't think I'm making a joke: you can very well proceed in such a way that I design a Goetheanum for the available money, right up to the roof, so for the time being without a roof. (Much laughter.) I suppose most anthroposophists would then still want the roof and raise the necessary money for it.

The suggestion was generally liked – but whether Doctor really proceeds in this way will probably depend on the degree of trust in our willingness to make sacrifices. Doctor just said clearly that he did not want to go through the misery of raising money a second time. He would only build with what was actually raised and would not rely on promises.

• 1. Refers to the “Draft Principles of an Anthroposophical Society” from 1912/13. See “Notes” below.