The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To-day we must again refer to the old and important teaching contained in the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, and, starting from that we shall carry forward our vision to our own times and the near future.

The Sermon on the Mount as reported in St. Matthew's Gospel can only be understood if we grasp the whole spirit of it, in the sense of the development of all humanity. Let us briefly recapitulate what was put before us in the last lecture: that the old dim clairvoyance of man had gradually receded and that the capacities and knowledge of man had to be more and more limited to the physical plane, and that for this reason the connection of man with the Spiritual worlds had to be based on an event on the physical plane. If we recollect all this we shall understand that the Divine-Spiritual Being whom we have characterised as the Christ, had to embody Himself in a physical body at the very time when the perception of man had become limited to the physical plane. This was done so that the most essential part of the life of this Divine-Spiritual Being could be described in words and expressions used on the physical plane. The important point is not so much that few persons (in comparison to the whole of humanity) were able to have a bodily perception and observation of Christ Jesus, as that what is related of Him is a presentation of events on the physical plane. For it cannot be said that the earlier records of other Divinities related in words belonging to the physical plane refer to actual physical events. In everything that we are told of these, words can only be useful as indications;—for what occurred with respect to these Divinities can only be understood by one able to apply the words to the events of higher planes. The life of Christ Jesus can however, be understood by anyone who can apply what is told to the events of the physical plane. In reference to this we can say: The Christ-Being descended into a physical embodiment, into complete life in a physical body. That had to be because human capacities at that time were of this nature, and because the human ego as such had to become conscious of its being if evolution was to go forward in the right way.

We have seen that the most important of the older intermediaries for the event of Golgotha was Zarathustra or Zoroaster. In order that he might become what he was to be, at that time a body had to be prepared, containing an extract, as it were, of what had been given to a whole people, a people who had to give to humanity the qualities which can only be communicated through physical inheritance. We have seen that the most essential thing in the old Hebrew people was the duty of developing in successive generations, from father to son, from son to grandson, and so on, those qualities which had to be inherited in a continually increased form, till they finally appear in their highest and best form in the body which was derived by inheritance from Abraham and Solomon and which was finally occupied by Zarathustra. We have a great deal more to learn through our studies before we shall be able to understand the full mission of the old Hebrew people, in all its details. This necessitates that we should gradually learn how the qualities needed for the body of Jesus were more and more ennobled in the course of the descent from generation to generation. It had to be made as perfect as possible for the fulfilment of its world-historical mission, for that mission could only be carried out if all that pertained to the body of the Solomonian Jesus Being was as perfect as possible in itself as regards those qualities. Now we know that the four principles of man's nature, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, are active in every human body; and that in time to come Spirit-self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-man, will also be active therein. This must not be taken to mean that the activity of the astral body will suddenly cease, or that the later is not being prepared in the earlier. In a certain respect everything that follows later must be prepared in what went before. Of course man cannot of his own strength so work upon himself to-day that the Life-Spirit, for instance, could come to particular expression within him; but in him work other Divine Spiritual Beings, with an activity which may be called an activity of the Life Spirit. This applies also to Spirit-man. Therefore, all the seven principles of the body, or rather of the human organism of Jesus of Nazareth had to be ennobled, as regards the qualities which had to be dealt with. This required very special preparation. This preparation may to-day give us an inkling of the secrets concealed in the development of humanity and of the earth.

The germs of the perfection in the body of Jesus of Nazareth had to be prepared long before. We have seen how during the first period (extending from Abraham to Solomon or David), the generations were worked upon just as a man's physical body is worked upon during the time between his birth and the change of teeth. This work was so performed by the forces active behind evolution, that at a certain time there was actually an ancestor of Jesus who already contained within him, capacities as nearly perfect as possible, and these re-appeared in the body which became the vehicle of Zarathustra. Thus in an ancestor of Jesus the foundations of a right development of all the seven principles of man's nature were present. In other words: If we trace back the ancestry of Jesus, we must find one ancestor who possessed the germ of the seven-principled-nature—although not so perfectly developed as in the body of Jesus of Nazareth—yet present in rudimentary form. Although not expressed in their external tradition, the secret doctrine of the ancient Hebrews was cognisant of this fact. It was aware that once upon a time a man lived of whom it must be said that the seven principles worked in him in such a way that they had to be described as quite peculiarly worthy of note! The Initiates of the old Hebrew secret doctrine actually pointed to an ancestor of Jesus of Nazareth, knowing that be possessed these seven human principles in a quite remarkable degree!

They called the ego of this ancestor, ‘Itiel,’ to indicate that in him the ego must have possessed that force (for Itiel signifies something like ‘possessor of force’). He must have possessed that dauntlessness, which would, when carried down through the generations, become the proper ego-vehicle for the high being who was to reappear in Jesus of Nazareth. In the same way they called the astral body of this ancestor ‘Lemuel’; that would more or less describe an astral body so far developed that it does not merely feel the law, the conformity to law, outside itself, but feels that it bears the law within it. They called the etheric body of this ancestor ‘Ben Jage’; that would signify an etheric body as far as possible transmuted within, which having attained a certain perfection, is able to take habits into itself. The physical body of this ancestor they called ‘Agur’, because the physical activity, the capacity of this ancestor on the physical plane, consisted in his having assimilated everything brought over from old tradition; for ‘Agur’ signified a collector. ‘All the ancient conceptions of the world, all the old traditions, were gathered together in Jesus; and the rudiments of this were already developed in this ancestor. What worked as Spirit-Man in this ancestor, was called, (because the Divine-Spiritual Beings gave loving attention to their work on the rudiments of Spirit-Man,) ‘Jedidjah’, a word signifying something like ‘the darling of the Gods’. What worked in this ancestor as Buddhi or Life-Spirit, was called ‘Kohelet’; for it was said: ‘In this ancestor there must have worked a Life-Spirit which was able to act as a teacher to the whole nation, so that its content could be poured out to them all’. And finally, Manas or Spirit-self in this ancestor was known by the word, ‘Salomo’, which signifies inner balance, for they said: Such a Spirit-self must have had within it the rudiments of being inwardly whole, of being in a state of balance within. Thus this ancestor, who is usually known only by the name of Schelomo, Schleimo, or Solomon, has three principal names: Jedidjah, Kohelet, Salomo; and four additional names: Agur, Ben Jage, Lemuel and Itiel, for these names signify the four coverings, whereas the three first names signify the divine inner part. The secret doctrine of the old Hebrews had seven names for this person. If later, people were dissatisfied with Solomon, as was the case even among certain sects of the Jews themselves (whether rightly or wrongly cannot be gone into here), this can easily be accounted for. In Solomon there were great, important rudiments, which were to be further propagated for a distinct purpose. Now an individual human being, at a definite stage of his evolution, does not always display in his outer life the germs of the qualities he is to bequeath to his descendants; perhaps for the very reason that such great forces are within him he may even be more subject to failure in this direction. The lack of morality to be observed in Solomon is not in contradiction to what the old Hebrew secret doctrine saw in him; on the contrary it would explain his failings.

Thus the old Jewish secret doctrine looks back to an ancestor of Jesus, fully conscious of his significance for the whole mission of their people. All that was but rudimentary in this personality, was propagated by descent through the generations, and appeared in its essence when it was required and made use of in the course of the world's history. This may give us an inkling of the secrets, regulated by laws, which lie behind the evolution of mankind.

Now if the mission of the old Hebrew people pre-eminently consisted in the fact that through the physical inheritance certain capacities are, as it were, instilled into their blood, capacities to be given to all mankind from the Spiritual world through this people, then, at the time of the appearance of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, humanity ought to have been sufficiently advanced to be able, through these ennobled capacities, to reascend into the Spiritual world; in other words it ought to have been able to take up the Christ-Impulse. I have told you all this to show what preparations were necessary in order, in the development of physical humanity, to create a sheath capable of enclosing the Christ-Being.

We can now perhaps feel and realise the intrinsic nature of the progress in the mission of humanity brought about by the descent of the Divine mission into physical matter, in the Jewish people. We can feel how the Divine was carried down into the depths of physical matter, in order that from this turning-point man might reascend so much the higher, from the now finer physical into the Spiritual. The ascent into the Spiritual had to begin from that time. For this however, an impulse had to be given to mankind which should to some degree place all that man can desire or expect from evolution into that deepest centre in man's being which can be designated as the ego. Through Christ, the impulse was to penetrate to the depths of man's inner being, out of the body of Christ there spoke such an impulse as called to the deepest part of man's nature. What was to be made different by this impulse?

Before this impulse came, all that brought happiness to men, that gave them bliss and made them feel ‘filled with the Divine,’ came to them in a sense from without; they expected it to come thence. If we do not merely study the history of the world from external documents but according to what the Spiritual records can give us, we must say that we look back to ancient times, when man ascended to the realm of Spiritual beings through arousing in himself,—whether by normal means or not,—the gift of clairvoyance. But this vision awoke in a dreamy way; Divine-Spiritual forces worked in it and the ego was suppressed. Man was more or less outside his ego. Although in his normal state he was not so conscious of his ego as he became later, yet he was then in the age when the spirit worked within him and carried him outside himself, without his ego into the Spiritual world. He yielded himself completely, either to the external Divine-Spiritual or to the Divine-Spiritual within his soul. But during that time of ecstasy, of enchantment, he was not in any sense conscious of his condition. The time was still to come when man would realise the relation to the spirit in his own ego, and thence permeate the deepest core of his being with the consciousness: I belong to a Divine-Spiritual kingdom. That could only come about through Christ pouring His own Being into the earth-being, so that the ego could permeate itself with what was the pattern of Christ. That enabled man to say: ‘I am now in a Spiritual realm, in the Kingdoms of Heaven with my ego, ‘whereas man formerly entered the Kingdoms of Heaven while outside it. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near, was the teaching given. For this the minds of men had to be changed, they were no longer to believe that they could only enter the Spiritual world in a state of ecstasy, for they would be able to find their relation to the Kingdoms of Heaven in full ego-consciousness.

We can see that this had to take place, for the old clairvoyant condition had, in the course of thousands of years, grown worse and worse. Whereas in olden times man, when in ecstasy ascended to the good Divine-Spiritual powers, that which still remained of the old ecstatic condition at the time of the founding of Christianity, had become such that when man was now outside himself he did not ascend to the good but to the evil spiritual powers. That is the great difference between the two states of development. In ancient times when man dreamily rose into the Spiritual worlds by the suppression of his ego—‘mediumistically’ as we should say to-day—he was then in the company of the good Spiritual beings. This had become different at the time when man was to find the way into the Kingdom of Heaven with his ego; when he now sought or brought about the states of ecstasy, they are described as being states of ‘obsession,’ which brought him into connection with evil hostile spiritual powers. So at the time of the appearance of Christ Jesus the following had to be proclaimed as a healing doctrine: ‘It is not right for you to try without your ego to get into a condition in which you can become aware of the Spiritual worlds; the right way now is to seek contact with the Divine-Spiritual worlds in the deepest core of your being!’

This is essentially the teaching contained in the Sermon on the Mount of St. Matthew's Gospel. We might re-write it thus: In olden times there was a dream-like clairvoyance. In this man was, in ecstasy, transported into the Spiritual worlds. At that time he was rich in Spiritual life; he was no beggar in the spirit as he became when Christianity was founded. When in olden times he was filled with the spirit, with what the Greeks called ‘Pneuma’, he was transported into the Spiritual worlds. Christ could not now say: ‘Blessed or God-filled are those who in their ecstatic states become rich in the spirit, for these are the very ones who will certainly be healed’! He now had to proclaim: ‘The time has come when blessed or God-filled are those who have become beggars in the spirit!’ That means, those who can no longer rise into ecstatic dreamy clairvoyant conditions, but who are obliged to seek the Kingdom of Heaven within, from out of their ego.

Formerly, when man was placed amidst the sorrows and sufferings of earth, he only had to call forth within him the state in which he could be transported into the Divine-Spiritual worlds. He was not obliged to endure suffering, for when it came to him, he could at once seek the state in which he was filled with the spirit, God-filled, and in that state—severed from his ego—he could find balm for the sorrows and sufferings of earth. Christ Jesus had to proclaim that this time too was now past and over. Those would now be blessed, or God-filled, who, while they could no longer look outside for help for their sufferings, might through the strengthening of their own ego seek within themselves the power to find the Paraclete in their inner being. ‘Blessed (God-filled) are they who do not banish sorrow by ecstatically raising themselves to the Divinity, but who endure it, developing the power of the ego whereby they can find within themselves the Paraclete, known later as the Holy Ghost who reveals himself through the Ego. ‘Even Buddha in his time did not recommend that sorrow should be endured, but that it should be thrown off, with all the thirst of earth. Even six hundred years before Christ Jesus, Buddha described sorrow and suffering on earth as the worst consequences of the longing for existence. Six hundred years later, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ in the second Beatitude proclaimed that sorrow must not be done away with in that way, but must be endured, that it was a trial through which the Ego might develop the strength it can find within itself: the inner support of the Paraclete. This is literally contained in the second sentence of the Sermon on the Mount, even to the expression; Paraclete. It is only necessary to read these things in the right way. That is precisely the task of our age; we must learn, through what is given to us in Spiritual Science, to read the great scriptures of old aright, through the teachings of Spiritual Science.

A third point is this. In olden times, when men could permeate themselves with what came to them in ecstasy and which the Greeks called ‘Pneuma’ or Spirit, they were then guided instinctively in their course. All their impulses, actions, emotions and desires—in fact, all that dwells in the astral body of man—was instinctively guided, when man was able to raise himself to the good Spiritual beings. He had not yet tried from his own ego to control and purify his inner passions and desires and to bring them into balance. Now, however, the time had come—and Christ was to proclaim this—when men having tamed, purified and balanced the passions, desires and impulses of this astral body—would of themselves reach the goal for the humanity of to-day, to which we give expression by pointing to the great progress of evolution. This has often been presented to us in the following way. Man began his existence on ancient Saturn; he continued it through the Sun and Moon-existence, until on the earth the ego was added to him. Only when he becomes conscious of this ego, when he tames and balances what was added to him by the astral body on the Moon, can he really attain to the goal of the earth-mission. Those who are able to control and balance the desires in their astral body can be blessed (God-filled), for by this means they will, through themselves, discover the Earth. Thus the third sentence of the Sermon on the Mount, which as usually translated contains a meaningless word, tells us the following: Those who ‘balance’ their passions desires and emotions (not make them ‘meek’) to them shall be given—or they shall ‘inherit’—the earth.

Thus the three first sentences of the Sermon on the Mount in their worldwide significance, place before us the following summary.

The first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount refers to the physical body, and informs us that it was formerly possible, in the olden times of humanity through a particular training of the physical body to perceive the Spiritual in clairvoyant dreamy conditions, but the physical body has now become poor as regards the inner possession of the spirit.

As regards the etheric body, through which man becomes conscious of suffering—although he is first aware of it in the astral body—the indication is given that men must learn to develop in themselves a force which will enable them to find help for the suffering which is given them as a trial.

Thirdly, we come on to the astral body, concerning which we are told, that through the taming and purifying of his impulses and passions man will find in his inner being the strength which will enable him to become a real ego, one to whom the earth mission is then allotted as his portion.

When we now ascend to the Ego, we know that this works in the sentient soul, intellectual soul and spiritual soul. The ego works in the sentient soul, that is: it spiritualised it. This enables man to feel the outpouring of human brotherly love—which becomes universal through the spreading of Christianity—as righteousness: ‘hunger and thirst after the all-ruling righteousness’. The sentient soul otherwise feels only in the physical body; it must now, through Christianity, learn to feel for spiritual things: to hunger and thirst after righteousness. Those who are able to find their human centre in the ego, will, as a result of their work on themselves, satisfy the longing in their sentient soul for an all-ruling earthly righteousness. ‘Blessed are they who, through the Christ-Impulse, learn to hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they will find a strong force in their inner being whereby, because they are working for the righteousness of the world, they shall find within themselves the satisfaction of this quality.’

We now come to the intellectual soul. We have often emphasised the fact that whereas in the sentient soul the ego is as yet but dimly brooding, in the intellectual soul it begins to shine forth, later to attain full consciousness in the spiritual soul where it first becomes a pure ego. In the intellectual soul something very singular happens: the human ego—i.e., that wherein we each resemble all other men, for each of us bears the ego within him—shines forth. No matter in what part of the world we meet with our fellow-man, through the fact that an ego shines out of his intellectual soul he is a human being like ourselves. Something shines forth from our intellectual soul, and if we receive it as well as we can and carry it out into the world, we can enter into the right relation with our fellow-men. In our intellectual soul we are to develop something which we must pour forth into our surroundings and which must flow back to us again. That is why this is the only occasion in the Sermon on the Mount when the subject of the Beatitude is like the predicate, ‘Blessed (or God-filled) are they who develop love; for as they radiate forth love, it will return to them again. ‘This shows the infinite depths of such a spiritual document, for it can be understood by the very way in which the sentences are constructed, it can be understood even down to the smallest details, if gradually, year after year, one collects all that Spiritual Science can give for the understanding of man. The difference between the fifth Beatitude and the others, in all of which the subject and the predicate are different, cannot in the least be understood without knowing that the fifth Beatitude points directly to the intellectual soul, or Mind-soul. We will now ascend to the work of the ego on the Spiritual or Consciousness soul. Here at last the ego is pure and unalloyed; only here can it become conscious of itself. This is beautifully expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, in the verse which expresses that only in the ego can the divine substance in man come to life. ‘Blessed are they, who are pure in blood or in heart (which is the expression of the ego), who allow nothing to enter there but the pure ego-nature; for they will recognise God therein, they will perceive God!’

The Sermon on the Mount now rises to that which refers to the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. Here man can no longer work through himself alone; at this stage of his evolution be must appeal to the divine Spiritual worlds, which, through Christ, have been brought into connection with the earth; he must look up to the renewed divine spiritual worlds. Whereas in former times strife and disharmony entered humanity through the ego-nature—as indeed it still does to-day—peace will be poured out over the earth through the Christ-Impulse. And those who take up the Christ-Impulse will become the founders of peace in that part of human nature which in the future will gradually develop as Spirit-Self; they will thus in a new sense become the sons of God, in that they will bring down the spirit from the Spiritual Realms—‘Blessed are they who bring peace—or harmony into the world; for they shall thereby be the sons of God!’ Thus must they be called, who are really filled inwardly with a spirit self which is to bring peace and harmony on the earth.

Now, we must clearly understand, that of all that develops on the earth, some part survives into later ages. This, in a certain respect, is hostile to what implants itself as a germ in later ages. What the Christ-Impulse brings, enters into the whole evolution of humanity—it does not, however, enter all at once, but rather in such a way that something still remains from the earlier stages of evolution. It is therefore necessary that those who first understand this Christ-Impulse should stand firm on the basis thereof, quite permeated inwardly with its force. If they are inwardly permeated by the force that proceeds from the seed that has come from the Christ and stand firm on that foundation, they will then be blessed in a new sense; in this they develop the force of firmness. ‘Blessed are they who stand under the new order, who stand under Christ and who suffer persecution from that which remains over from the old order!’ And the last of the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount points straight to the Christ-Impulse itself, for He says to the Apostles: ‘Blessed are ye, who are especially called to carry the Name of Christ out into the world!’

Thus we see how the Sermon on the Mount directs Christianity from out of the great teachings of cosmology and humanity, while everywhere directing attention to the force within, the centre point of which must be found in the Ego itself. The time has now come when this must be understood, and understood in such a way that people must not believe themselves to be true Christians because they try to find Christianity in some dogmatic collateral signification or side issue, but rather those are true Christians who understand the meaning of the text: ‘Change the disposition of your souls, for the kingdoms of heaven have descended even into the ego!’ Those persons can be called ‘Christians’ in the true sense who realise that this is the essential point, and who further understand that this had to be put at the beginning of our era in a different way from that in which it must be given out now! It would be a mistaken idea of Christianity to believe that what was considered Christian in the words spoken two thousand years ago has not since then undergone further development. Christianity would stand for nothing but a dead stream of culture. But it is a living one! It is developing, and will continue to develop! Just as it is true that Christianity had to start from the time when man had descended right down to the physical plane, when a Divine Being became man in a physical human body, so it is also true that at our present time man must learn to rouse himself to the understanding of Christianity and of the Christ Being Itself, from a Higher Spiritual Standpoint!—What does this mean?

Just as it is true that the old dreamy clairvoyant forces had been lost, so that at the time of Christ those persons who were filled ‘with God’ in the old sense could no longer be described as ‘blessed,’ but only such as formed the kingdoms of Heaven within them, it is also true that the ego of man will reascend into the Spiritual world in full consciousness and will develop ever new forces and capacities. Just as it is true that the time of the Baptist was the time when those capacities which led down to the physical plane had reached a crisis in humanity, it is also true that we have now again reached an important time. What is called the ‘Dark Age,’ which began in the year 3101 B.C. and reached its height at the time of the Incarnation, came to an end at the close of the 19th Century. The Kali-Yuga was concluded in 1899! We are now approaching a time when new forces and capacities will be developed by man and these will be distinctly apparent in the last half of our present century. These new forces and capacities must be understood. Particularly those persons who have studied and understood Anthroposophy must realise that such an uplifting of humanity towards the Spiritual has again become possible. For during the important times that will follow after 1930, single individuals will find it possible to develop higher forces in their nature, whereby what we know as the etheric body will become visible. A certain number of people will develop etheric clairvoyant powers.

One of two things will then be possible, either the materialism of our age will continue, in which case when these forces are manifested men will fail to understand that they lead into the Spiritual worlds; they will then be wrongly understood and so be crushed. Should that occur, would not people, speaking in a materialistic sense at the end of the year 1940, be justified in saying: ‘Now see what fantastic prophets those were who spoke at the beginning of the 20th century! Nothing of what they foretold has been fulfilled.’ But if the new capacities have not appeared, that would not contradict what may be said now, and must indeed be said; it would only prove that people without the right understanding have choked them in the bud and that they have missed something which humanity must possess if its further evolution is not to collapse into dissolution and decay. That is the great responsibility of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy has sprung from a knowledge of the necessity for an advanced preparation for something which will come, but which might be overlooked and suppressed. Anthroposophy has the task of bringing about an understanding of the Spiritual forces developing in man. If these forces are suppressed humanity will sink deeper into the mire of materialism.

On the other hand, Anthroposophy may be successful in spreading through its teachings an understanding of the fact that man must rise into the Spiritual worlds; it may succeed in lifting mankind out of the materialistic frame of mind. For this, however, something must now come forth from the anthroposophical movement, something that was prepared centuries ago, but which must now, in our own age, evolve to a particular and important turning-point.

The centuries that lie behind us were fitted for cultivating to an increasing extent the materialistic ideas of man. Under this materialistic influence it was easy to believe that the Christ-Impulse and the Christ-Being would come into touch with the world by incarnating once again—or perhaps oftener—in a physical, material body. Instead of acquiring clear notions of the fact that men must grow up as regards their capacities so that a great number, and finally all, might experience the Event of Damascus—that is: might experience the Christ in the atmosphere around the earth, and see Him in His etheric body—it was believed that Christ would descend again in a physical body, for the materialistic satisfaction of those who refuse to believe in the spirit, and who will not believe what St. Paul saw in the Event of Damascus: that Christ is in the Earth-atmosphere and that He is always there! ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!’ Those who develop the methods of clairvoyant vision into the Spiritual world will find what, could not be found there in the pre-Christian time: the Christ in His etheric body. That is the important progress in the evolution of humanity; before the first half of our century has elapsed, those faculties by means of which the event of Damascus becomes a personal experience, will develop naturally as it were, and men will see the Christ in His etheric body. He will not descend into flesh, but man will ascend when he has acquired understanding of the spirit.

That is the manner of Christ's return in our own age, for in this 20th century men must work their way up out of the Kali-Yuga into a century of clairvoyance. They must ascend to Christ by means of the capacities which they will develop; they must ascend to the Christ where He is and where He can be seen, at first sight, by those in the vanguard, those who through the teachings of Anthroposophy can be guided to what in the course of the next 2,500 years will be experienced to a greater or less degree by every human soul.

The great event which awaits mankind in the near future is, that those who raise themselves—with full Ego-consciousness—to the etheric vision of Christ in His etheric body, will be ‘God-filled’ or blessed. For this, however, the materialistic mind must be thoroughly overcome, and men must acquire understanding of Spiritual doctrine and Spiritual life.

In bygone centuries it was, comparatively speaking, not harmful for men continually to return to the materialistic conception of the so-called return of Christ. Particularly at the small times of transition, when that which has now reached its climax in a materialistic sense was being prepared for, as, for instance, in France in 1137, when a Messiah was expected, and was awaited by many in wide circles. A Messiah did actually appear then, but he led the people astray, because the belief in him had arisen through their materialistic ideas, for it was believed the Messiah would come in the flesh. Thirty years before, another Messiah appeared in Spain; there, too, it had been foretold that a Messiah would come in the flesh. At about the same time another new Messiah appeared in North Africa; there, too, it had been prophesied that one would come from the East, and appear in the flesh. Throughout the whole time during which the materialistic mind was being prepared, in that the highest things were being grasped by it, there appeared such prophets whose coming was foretold. Such phenomena are well known to those who understand the times, and they continued into the 17th century, when the approaching appearance of a sort of Christ, a Messiah, was proclaimed far and wide. This again found acceptance by the materialistically religious minds of men. Based on these prophecies, a false Messiah was thus able to arise in Smyrna, in 1667, bearing the name of Shabbathoi Zewi. He wrote letters and epistles at that time from Smyrna, which, although they contained nothing but false matter, being written in a materialistic sense, shook the world as greatly as had once the Epistles of St. Paul. In the 17th century there went forth from Smyrna the proclamation that in that city there dwelt a Messiah in the flesh! And Shabbathoi Zewi, the ‘just man of God’ was so considered, that it was said the whole world-reckoning would now take on another form. ‘He will pass through the world with his faithful disciples and all must believe in him who are willing to see the truth, who wish to see Christ in the flesh!’ It was preached to the people that his birthday must be held as the greatest Festival on Earth! Whole hosts of people undertook pilgrimages there—not only from Asia and Africa, but also from Poland, Russia, Spain, France, and so on; great numbers of persons traveled as pilgrims to Smyrna to see Shabbathoi Zewi, who was supposed to be Christ in the flesh, until the thing grew beyond all limits and he was arrested by order of the Sultan! This, said the people, was but the fulfilment of the prophesy, for it was foretold he would be in prison for nine months! The Sultan could think of no other method than to have him brought forth and stripped, saying: ‘We will see whether thou be a Messiah, a Christ; I shall have thee shot!’ And so it was finally proved that Shabbathoi Zewi was only an ordinary Ba Rabbi after all!

Such impersonations are the result of the materialistic thinking of our times, and there will be more of the kind, for the materialistic mind will make use of men.

What I am now saying will often and often be said during the next few decades: that the capacities of man will develop up to seeing the Etheric vision of Christ, in the reality of which they can then believe, just as firmly as did St. Paul himself! This is the immediate future of man, and this it is for which Spiritual Science must prepare him. But on account of the materialistic thoughts of men the time will also come when strong temptations will arise; false Messiahs will appear in the flesh. It will then be proved whether Anthroposophists have rightly understood Anthroposophy. Those who have not will be so adversely affected by the materialistic mind that they will succumb to the temptation. Although they believe in Christ they will believe in an incarnated Christ. But those who have gained understanding of true Spiritual life will realise that the ‘second Coming of Christ’ in our century, that greatest of Events, signifies that He comes to man in the Spirit, because mankind in the course of its development will have developed up to the Spiritual, will have evolved up towards Christ! Therefore in our century, the Sermon on the Mount undergoes a complete modification. It must be entirely re-modeled, so to speak. Those persons will be God-filled (or blessed) who, through having been beggars for the spirit in their past incarnations, have now advanced so far as to be able to ascend to that part of the kingdom of Heaven where Christ will appear before their spiritual sight!

Every single sentence of the Sermon on the Mount in its present form might be reconstructed in this sense. Christianity will only re-conquer its ancient documents when they are grasped in a living sense, when it is realised that they are living, not dead writings. When the time comes—and that time is here now—when materialistical research extends to the Gospel and takes away the tradition of Christ, then, as we have often stated, Spiritual research will give back the Gospels to mankind! This coincidence will not be accidental, it will come of necessity. It may be that in our own time—during which the materialistic mind having gone as far as it can, will reach a crisis—certain unfortunate persons having, through their mistaken philosophy been led into curious ideas, may conclude that effects may be produced without causes, and that there never was an historical Jesus-Christ. This should be comprehensible to Anthroposophists. They ought, indeed, to feel a certain pity for those poor men who, notwithstanding their philosophy, are so entangled in materialistic thought that they have altogether lost the faculty of imagining the existence of spirit, and who, consequently, keep flying in the face of the saying, that there is no effect without a cause. Christianity as an effect could not have existed without a cause! Anthroposophy, speaking from spiritual investigation, will tell men of Christ in the form in which He now lives, if they will but listen with an understanding mind. The understanding must be sufficiently matured to recognise definitely that the Christ will reappear, but as a reality higher than a physical one, a reality to which one can only look up, after first having acquired a sense and an understanding for spiritual life.

Inscribe in your hearts that Anthroposophy must be a preparation for the great epoch of humanity which is immediately ahead of us. Do not in this look upon it as matter of the first importance whether the souls now incarnated are still incarnated in physical bodies when Christ appears in the manner described, or whether they will then have already passed through the Portal and stand in the life between death and rebirth. For that which takes place in the 20th century is not of importance to the physical world alone, but to all the worlds with which man is connected. Just as those persons who will be in incarnation between 1930 and 1950 will experience the vision of the Etheric Christ, so a mighty revolution will also take place in the world in which man lives between death and rebirth. Just as Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha descended into the underworld, so will the effects of the Event which will occur for the inhabitants of the physical plane, rise into the spiritual plane. Those people who have not been prepared for this by Spiritual Science will miss the great and mighty Event, which will also take place in the Spiritual worlds in which man then lives. Those persons will have to wait for a new incarnation to experience on earth what makes them capable of receiving the new Christ-Impulse. For it is on earth that we must acquire the capacity of grasping all the Christ-Impulses, no matter how high they may lead us! Not in vain has man been placed in the physical world; for it is here we must acquire that which leads us to an understanding of the Christ-Impulse! For all the souls now living, Anthroposophy is the preparation for the Christ-Event that awaits us in the near future. This preparation is necessary. Other events will follow this Christ Event in the course of the development of mankind. It will therefore be a great omission, if those who have the opportunity of raising themselves during this century to the Christ-Event, do not take advantage of it.

Only if we look upon Anthroposophy in this way and inscribe it in our souls, can we realise what it means to each human soul and what it ought to become to all humanity.

The present lecture is to be a short preparation for the study of the Mystery of Golgotha, which will be more fully explained on the second day of our Easter Festival. As the basis for our study, let us take a text which to many appears incomprehensible, or, at any rate, difficult, and can only be understood when connected with the deepest esoteric meaning. This text will lead us to-day still deeper into the spirit and meaning of Christianity: ‘All sins may be forgiven except the sin against the Holy Spirit.’

These words really contain the purpose and mission of Christianity, and Anthroposophy is the right instrument with which to reveal and express the profound meaning hidden in these words. Anthroposophy does not wish to inaugurate a new faith or found a new sect; the time is past when new faiths or new special religions can be founded. The task of the future is the formation of the already existing religions into one great common religion of humanity. Anthroposophy does not wish to preach a new religion; it is rather the means for teaching the various religions how to comprehend the profound truths contained in them, and which fundamentally are one and only one!

The tendency of the age is to make trivial the religious truths. From the modern standpoint people like to consider Christ Jesus as ‘the simple Man of Nazareth’; they like to look upon Him as a sort of higher ideal man, in somewhat the same manner as Socrates, Plato, Goethe and others are also looked upon as ideals; they do not wish to uplift Him too far above the level of humanity; they are far from recognising that in this Christ Jesus there lived something which towered far above humanity.

But in order to have at least some small perception of the Mystery of Christ Jesus we must throw a strong light upon the old Gnostic questions. We must bring to our help all human wisdom to understand what happened between the first and thirtieth years of our era.

The religious records are certainly not there to be explained by trivialities, and there is no wisdom deep or wise enough to unveil the deep meaning in this Mystery. It is certainly true that the understanding of this Mystery ought also to be brought down to the simple mind, but it is also true that it is so profound and full of wisdom that no wisdom reaches far enough to measure all its depths! From this standpoint and in this frame of mind we may first explain what is understood in Christianity—in true esoteric Christianity—by the Holy Spirit, the Son—also called the Word or Logos—and the Father. We shall not penetrate into the meaning of these conceptions by means of philosophic speculations; we shall not give them an arbitrary meaning. The meaning was attached by the initiates, and we have to keep to what was taught in the schools of the Christian Initiates. It is bad when one probes into the Bible and speculates as to what this or that means. We know that there are schools in which the meaning has been taught from very ancient times and it is always the same meaning, there was never a different knowledge; there were never at any time different standpoints in it.

If we hold to what has come most to the surface of history, we find the esoteric school which St. Paul had at Athens, the school of Dionysius. The learned are accustomed to speak of a pseudo Dionysius, because the existence of these schools is not sufficiently indicated by documentary evidence; only in the sixth century a.d. do we find written traditions of them.

We must clearly understand that as regards writing the custom has radically changed. When at the present day a person has a clever thought he cannot wait, but must have it printed at once and scattered over the world. But the earlier custom was otherwise. The profoundest thoughts were strictly withheld from publicity; they were not thrown at everybody’s head; they were only given to one who was known, only to one who had been found worthy to receive them. Only he who had a sense of truth was allowed to receive the truths. They were only given to one who devotedly and with a true feeling towards the truths, opened his heart to receive them. What the pupil had to acquire was calmness, a deep longing, a feeling of devotion towards the higher truths. This was quite a different view from that of the present day, for now everyone may receive the truths, quite irrespective of the frame of mind in which he approaches them. In those days, however, it was held that one might not receive indifferently a truth, for example, about the starry heavens. It was clearly understood that the frame of mind was important if the truths were really to influence: only in a pure and uplifted frame of mind were even simple truths received, such as the truths of mathematics, and the student’s preparation before he was allowed to receive the truths consisted in the production of the right frame of mind.

This was also the case in the school of St. Paul: the pupils were most strictly prepared before they were allowed to receive the highest truths. This preparation—as well as the subsequent training—was given by word of mouth; the living spirit passed on from teacher to pupil, for a long period of time, and the highest Initiates who were the vehicles of the esoteric truths, always bore the same name. Thus in the sixth century the recorder of the Dionysian training was still known as Dionysius. One has to know this in order to be able to judge correctly when a pseudo Dionysius is spoken of.

Now to-day let us investigate according to esoteric Christianity into the profound meaning of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In our lecture on the Lord’s Prayer we have already discussed this meaning. We have learned how the Godhead is expressed in the three higher principles of man. We have heard that behind the ‘Father’ stands the Divine Will, behind the ‘Kingdom’ there is the Word, the Logos, and behind the ‘Name’ the Holy Spirit.

We shall now consider these three principles from a different point of view, in the manner taught in Christian esoteric training. Let us briefly recall the relations between the higher and lower parts of man. We have always learned that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, and within the astral body dwells the ‘I’; this was once the so-called sacred quaternary. We have also learned how in the course of human evolution the three bodies are transformed. The ‘I’ transforms the astral body, which is the vehicle of passions, impulses and desires; it may also be called the consciousness- body. In esoteric Christianity one is also taught to ennoble, cleanse and purify this body; and as far as this takes place in man it is called the work of the Holy Spirit. One might say that that part of the astral body which is purified by Manas or Spirit-Self, is called in Christianity: ‘To be seized by the Holy Spirit.’

We know that the ‘I’ also works transformingly on the etheric body. Now this is much more difficult. What man receives from art and religion alone works in a transforming, ennobling way upon the etheric body. Art sees and perceives the Eternal; the Eternal shines through it, and the impulses of art act more strongly on the ennobling of mankind than all the laws of ethics. But the religious impulses work the most strongly! One who with deep devotion looks up to the Eternal, who opens himself towards It and allows It to stream in, receives Buddhi or Life-Spirit—in a Christian sense, the Logos, Christ. In esoteric Christianity this is known as ‘taking the Christ into oneself.’ In order to explain to you the third principle, the process of taking in the Father, you must allow me to make a slight digression.

I beg you always to remember that Anthroposophy is absolutely not a colourless theory, for then it would run into the danger of forming a sect; no, it is to act upon the daily life, it is to ennoble and spiritualise it—then it is practical Anthroposophy. It does not wish to weave fancies, to excogitate anything, it intends that the spirit shall flow into the whole of our civilisation, and therefore it also draws attention to the practical side.

When you are in the midst of life, when the multitude of impressions press in upon you from life, then what you experience in this way is but a portion of the sum-total of your experiences. One who does not take this into account cannot unravel the secrets of life! The anthroposophist looks deeper; he knows that the etheric body and the astral body are influenced in various ways by his daily experiences. What you take into yourselves consciously, what attracts your conscious attention, for example, as you go along the street, is expressed in ebullitions and currents in the astral body. The occultist can observe these ebullitions and movements. But there are other impressions which do not usually engage one’s full attention. I will give an example to explain what I mean. We walk along a street and pass numberless things which do not arouse our strict attention; we know that we have passed shop windows left and right, that there were buildings left and right, and that we met human beings and carriages, but our attention was not directed to them, we have not consciously received anything from them. However, it does not on this account pass by us without leaving a trace; it makes a certain impression upon us. When we look at a placard or skim through a comic paper, not only what we follow consciously remains within us, but the things of which we are unconscious also make an impression upon us. One is wont to say that these impressions remain below the threshold of consciousness; but in truth it is different. Many things act upon a human being without coming to his consciousness, and in the meantime they act upon him deeply and produce an important effect. To begin with, they act on the etheric body. This body is continually taking in impressions, and from this we may gather how tremendously important to human development is also that to which a person pays no attention.

Everything that takes place on the surface of civilisation acts upon human beings; all these things call forth pictures in them. But Anthroposophy indicates the undercurrents of our civilisation; again and again it emphasises the need of understanding the spiritual world which lies behind the physical, it draws attention to the deep connection between the external world and spiritual things.

One age thinks differently from another and has different inclinations; in one age the spiritual movements are higher and in another lower, depending more upon sensation. To the occult investigator all this which makes an impression upon the etheric body is reflected as secret influences which act upon human beings. When in an occult manner one investigates the temperament, inclinations and sentiments of the people in central Europe in the eleventh or twelfth century one has to trace back the results to the style of architecture, the art, the means of civilisation which at the time surrounded them. The effect upon a man of that particular age in passing along the street of his town was different from the effect produced upon a man of the present age; other objects surrounded him and other sentiments filled him.

One must not leave out of account the fact that what lies more deeply down than the consciousness, is profoundly influenced by such impulses. And on this account one must not undervalue the seriousness of the statement when I say that just at the present time it is in the underground of our civilisation that the real foundation for materialism is found. I should not on this account be considered as a reactionary. The one who guides his method of observation by spiritual truths knows that the profound and noble things which act upon the etheric body also provide it with constructive forces; and when he extends this method of observation to what is produced by the materialistic way of looking at things it is then clear to him that nothing can be done by theories and teachings if they do not come down to these things. A change for the better cannot be expected until the spiritual truths are reflected in what surrounds man and influences him, even though his attention may not be continually directed towards it. With these remarks as a basis we may now consider the part of the higher man called the Spirit Man, Atma, Father.

We know that, starting from ‘I,’ the physical body also can be transformed. This transformation takes place consciously through what is taught in esoteric training. All that the pupil can learn with the intellect, all that influences his astral body is only the preparation; the training begins when the ‘I’ begins to work upon the etheric body, when he conquers his temperament, his inclinations and habits, when he becomes a different man. Through this he gains insight into the higher worlds. All that he learns, all that gives him a theoretical insight, all sciences, only influence the astral body; but all that works upon his etheric body gives such an impetus to his development that gradually the spiritual organs are formed in him and he begins to see in the higher worlds. Thus we see how the astral body and etheric body are transformed. That which transforms the physical body comes from the breathing process; this purifies and spiritualises the physical body. Christian esotericism calls this the Father. We have to distinguish that as much as a person has within him of what purifies and transforms the astral body, so much has he of the Holy Spirit within him.

As far as a person has within him that which purifies and transforms the etheric body, so far has he the Son, the Logos, within him.

As far as a person has within him (this is only known to an Initiate) that which ennobles and transforms the physical body, so far has he the Father within him.

If we wish to distinguish between the sins or blasphemies against the Holy Spirit, against the Son, and against the Father, we have to remember what the esoteric teachers understood as the mission of Christianity. You will find this mission expressed in the words which Christ Jesus uttered when He was told that His mother and His brethren were outside: ‘He who does not leave father and mother, etc., has no part in Me,’ or ‘He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me’ (Matt. 10, 37).

In Mark and Luke it is somewhat different. There He says: ‘My mother and My brethren are those who hear God’s word and do it’ (Luke 8, 21; Mark 3, 33; Matt. 12, 46-50).

In all these statements we have the true mission of Christianity; let us now go into this more closely and we shall gain at the same time the best preparation for our Easter Festival—the Mystery of Golgotha.

If we go a long way back along the path of the development of humanity we arrive at the Lemurian epoch. We know that ancient Lemuria lay south of present-day Asia, in the part now occupied by the Indian Ocean. In ancient Lemuria we find the four-membered, half-animal man, who indeed was already gifted with his fourfold nature, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the germ of the ‘I,’ but he was not yet able to work even to the very tiniest extent, on the three lower coverings, for the forces necessary for the work on these coverings had first to come into the vehicle of these coverings. That which is the content of your soul did not at that time exist in man! The ‘I’ was, as it were, a hollow space into which these forces could come, and this hollow space still exists within man. That which at the present time is called the depth of his inner being was formerly outside him, and at that time it sank into the human shell. Previously it was a part of the Divine Nature, it still rested in the Bosom of the Deity. We have often represented the outpouring of this divine part by saying that it was as if a number of little human sponges had each absorbed a drop, as it were, of this divine spiritual substance, which we pictured as a body of water. What is now within you, which forms your soul and which formerly rested in the Divine Bosom, was divided up among the several human bodies so that each one received a drop of this common divine substance. This common substance thus individualised itself into parts of the Deity. Just as each finger has its own life and still belongs to the whole human organism and from it receives its life, so each drop in each human being received its own life and dwelt in the human bodies which had prepared themselves to receive it and which waited to be ensouled by the Deity.

Now those human beings looked very different from what they do at present. You would be much astonished if I were to describe those grotesque bodies which absorbed the souls! Who worked so that these grotesque bodies developed into our present human bodies? Who did this? It is the work of the soul which is active within I From within, it shapes and forms the human body.

One may gain an idea of this work of the soul-forces by observing the remains of this self-out-shaping of the soul in the body of a human being of the present day; for example, when we consider the feeling of shame. The soul drives the blush of shame to the face; what is in the soul, namely, shame, expresses itself in the body in the blush of shame. Anxiety, fear, terror—these psychic experiences express themselves in the body as pallor. We all know that this is connected with the blood; the blood is the expression of the being that works within. But this only applies to warm blood! Just as it is true that at the present day in the feeling of shame, fear, anxiety and terror the ‘I’ acts on the blood and expresses itself in the body in a very limited way, so it is also true that in the remote past the effect was very great; at that time the blood expressed the inner force very accurately and minutely; it formed and fashioned the human figure through the several races. The inner experiences and feelings fashioned the human body when it was still soft and plastic, and their activity, their constructive forces, worked indirectly through the blood. The creator, the inner being, the power which shaped the body plastically, worked from the ‘I,’ indirectly through the blood, at the construction of the human being. Thus we may recognise that the blood is the vehicle of the ‘I.’

In this thought we have an explanation of the statement in the Bible that Adam was hundreds of years old. This depends upon endogamy or near marriage. In the earlier days of human evolution we find in every race smaller groups who were related to one another by blood, for they married exclusively within their groups and tribes. This had an important result, which is indicated in the following conversation between the authors Anzengruber and Rosegger. Rosegger describes his peasants in a dry matter-of-fact way, but Anzengruber describes them much more vividly, his peasants truly five before us. Once when these two authors were together, Rosegger gave Anzengruber the advice that he ought to go to the country and there five for a time amongst the peasants in order to see them and thus be able to describe them more vividly. But Anzengruber answered: ‘That I would never do, for then I should forget all my art. I have never seen a peasant, but the understanding of them is in my blood; I do not need to have seen them to be able to describe them, for the blood of generations of peasants flows through my veins. The spirit which lives in the peasants Eves in me, it passes through my father, grandfather and great-grandfather to me—for all my ancestors were peasants.’

Thus in Anzengruber there was still a degree of the peasant consciousness. And this was much more the case in ancient times! In those days a son did not merely feel in the same way as his father and grandfather had felt, but in him there was actually a vivid remembrance of the experiences of his ancestors.

There was a time when man had in his memory not only what he himself, but also what his father and grandfather had experienced. And therefore in those ancient, strictly limited communities a son said in regard to what his father had experienced: ‘I have experienced’ it. This was also the case in the generation of Adam, his ‘I’ was preserved for nine hundred years.

The ‘I’ continued through the generations; it was a common ‘I,’ a group ‘I.’ This ‘I’ which passed through several generations was called ‘Adam,’ and for this reason it is said that Adam lived for so long. This fact is hidden behind the statements in the Bible regarding the longevity of the persons mentioned at the beginning of the Bible.

From this we see how the blood, which was common to these narrowly limited groups, comes into consideration as the expression of the inner creative soul of man and how it binds these people to a certain extent into unity.

Now how was this broken through? By what means was the memory of the human being limited to his own life? It was through exogamy! By this means the narrowly limited tribe was loosened and expanded into a nation. Man would have been unable to develop if this strict community had not been broken through. The memory of the members of these blood-related communities extended up through the generations. Now we must remember that the vehicle of the memory is the etheric body. And here we have the intimate connection between the blood and the etheric body. The ‘I’ imprints itself into the etheric body, and is expressed in that which shoots into the blood.

Let us remember what he who is to be initiated has to accomplish in his etheric body and we shall to-day learn what this has to do with his blood. We know whence these schools of initiation originated; they can be traced back to the ancient Turanian Adept-Schools of Atlantis. And let us now call to mind how initiation took place. We know that when the pupil was sufficiently prepared he was put into a sleep by the Initiator for three days, and this made it possible for the Initiator to lift the etheric body of the pupil out of his physical body. The etheric body then lived in the higher worlds; the pupil consciously experienced the higher worlds; he knew their reality from his own experience. Only through his being prepared did he gain this power. When he returned again into his physical body he could bear witness to the reality of the higher worlds in which he had lived.

We see that this initiation depended upon one thing. The pupil had to suppress his consciousness, which was absolutely under the control of the Initiator. The Initiators worked through the Initiates into life, to a certain extent they were at the head of the social structure, they were there like a social pyramid, everyone believed them, everyone looked up to them. Through acting upon the impulses of the Initiates they had everything under their authority. And this authority was founded upon truth and wisdom, for only wise ones might exercise this authority without harm coming to humanity.

In Initiation all depends upon leading out the etheric body in the right way. The Initiator could not do this with everyone. In order to initiate a person in this way long and careful preparations were necessary. It depended upon the blood of the neophyte being of the right composition. This was the reason for the great value attached to the priestly caste or tribe which might not be mixed with other blood. For centuries they were prepared; people were brought together who were necessary for this right mixture of blood, until one was produced who could become an Initiate. This was handling human life in grand style! The greatest Initiates were prepared for centuries with respect to their mixture of blood. This was the method of initiation of pre-Christian times. But this could not remain the same for ever in the course of human development; for with what is it connected? It is connected with the small blood-communities. The further we go back the more do we come to this principle of initiation. Then this blood principle was broken through; the family expanded to the tribe and the tribe to the nation. It was then proclaimed that all such limited blood-ties had to be broken through; for where dwelt the communal principle in man? It came through his blood. When in ancient times it was made possible by means of warm blood for the Divine to be implanted in the developing humanity—how did this implantation take place? It surged through the blood. Where did He work most powerfully Who said: ‘I Am He Who is, Who was and Who will be’? In the blood running through the veins. When one led a human being to the highest, to initiation, one led him by handling his blood!

He who only considers the Mystery of Christianity externally understands it badly! Christianity itself is a mystical fact! We can only understand it as we understand the mystery of blood.

With the advent of Christ Jesus a new configuration of our planet came about! If someone on another planet had been able to observe ours, from a few centuries before Christ, if he had directed his attention to it through the centuries and right into the distant future, if he saw it, not with his physical eyes, but directing his attention to the astral and etheric atmosphere of our planet, he would have seen that from the sixth century before Christ our planet slowly changed. Then it made a sudden leap, it gained a new impulse; something else entered into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Only he who admits that there is something spiritual around the earth, and who considers this as something real and actual, can understand what this means! He who considers it in this way will find the expression for this transformation in the spiritual, and to such an one we say: All that holds people together in small blood communities gradually breaks asunder. There comes the time when a person leaves father, mother, etc. All that which acts upon the blood as a kind of ‘group “ I ”’ has to disappear from the earth! When it is ready to become a new, astral planet all this must have disappeared and in the place of what has disappeared something new will come I A great bond of brotherhood will then bind humanity, and the impulse for this brotherhood is given by Christ Jesus! He is the spiritual fact which effects this transformation. Hence the ideal which He presents when He says, ‘He who does not leave father and mother cannot be My disciple,’ and the indication which He gives: ‘They who believe in the Divine Spirit are My brothers and My sisters !’ Hence the non-recognition of those related to Him, for these ties of blood were something which had been overcome. It is from this standpoint that we have to consider these words of Christ, not as a symbol, not as a comparison, but as reality I For they are a reality!

Now consider the uplifted cross and the blood which flows from the wounds 1 Understand well the profound significance of this in the course of the world’s history I Why does it flow? Why is the blood spoken of? It is that which has to lose its importance in this narrow sense if humanity is to broaden out to the coming ideal, to the common brotherhood! That which is to make all humanity one is no longer to depend upon the blood which pulsates in the ‘I.’ Therefore the superfluous ‘I’-blood flows through the wounds of Christ. All egoistic, self-seeking blood which unites a man with mother, father, brother, sister—all this has to flow! This is the real fact! With the amount of blood which flows there is lost the tendency to form limited communities, and there originates the tendency for the whole of humanity to be united into one great community. No one has come so close to this as Richard Wagner in his ‘Parsifal’ I Never did an exoteric person approach so closely to the deepest truth of the esoteric secrets of Christianity!

When we learn to understand it in this way, we shall see that the deepest purpose of Christianity is to unloose that which binds mankind within narrow egoistic limits. It will split up mankind into individuals who feel themselves to be separate, and who unite again in love of their own free will; who increase in individuality to the same extent that they feel themselves to be part of the whole world. This you see in the Mystery of Golgotha, in this religious impulse. which is of the very greatest importance. Here everything that is to come about in the future is prepared! It begins to work at Whitsuntide when the Holy Spirit is poured forth, that is, when the understanding of this tie of brotherhood begins to stir. This is expressed in a most beautiful symbol when we are told that the Apostles spoke to all nations in every tongue! That which had flowed through the blood of the Logos is there spread abroad by the Holy Spirit!

Let us go back to the ancient principle of initiation. At that time everything depended upon the Initiates. The whole of civilisation received its impulses from them. This now ceased. The splitting up of mankind into individuals had to take place and thereby the impulse towards brotherhood was created at the same time. The ancient principle of initiation exercised by the Initiators of truth and wisdom no longer sufficed if humanity was to mature to this brotherhood. Each human being must himself be in possession of truth and wisdom. We then see the spreading abroad of this wisdom step by step and its co-operation with the individual, in the activity of the Holy Spirit, how it worked from then onwards in humanity. As long as man listened to authority he could five quietly in the narrowest circles, for this authority took care of the whole group; but this now ceases, the limited community is broken through, each one must now take care of himself; each individual has now to receive that which holds good for each human being. What can this be?

The wisdom which was poured into humanity through the Initiates was One; when, however, it was to be given to the individual human being it was specialised. Thus originated the teachings which Buddha, Zoroaster, Hermes and others brought to mankind; the smaller the community the more it was specialised.

When brotherhood was founded there had to flow down into the whole of humanity that of which the Initiates had formerly taken care. In this wisdom we have that which unites, that which will unite the human beings who have left father and mother. But so far removed are people from this universal wisdom that they talk about ‘their own opinions,’ and they say, ‘I find this,’ ‘I believe that.’ They have passed over to egotism; they are in a condition of separation, but they have not yet made their connection with universal wisdom. They are as individual as possible! They must first disaccustom themselves from saying, when they are speaking about the knowledge of wisdom, ‘This is my standpoint.’ That is a childish position! There is no special standpoint in regard to wisdom. He only has comprehended the idea of the Holy Spirit who has comprehended that truth and wisdom are one I He who presses forward along the path knows that there is no such thing as different standpoints in truth; he knows that he is dealing with a fundamental unity. He no longer needs to attach himself to an authority, because the universal common Spirit of Wisdom and Truth joins mankind together into the great brotherhood I That is the experience at Whitsuntide, when the Apostles speak from the hearts of all men to all men. The festival of Whitsuntide is the indication that with the development of the highest authority, the Spirit of Truth unites us all. That which from that time on will five and work is the unifying wisdom which can be revealed to us as soon as we open ourselves to it and wish to receive it!

And he who sins against this wisdom which forms humanity into one brotherhood, he who sins against this universal Spirit of Truth and Wisdom, commits the great sin against the Holy Spirit which cannot be forgiven him, because he is sinning against the development of the earth, because he is teaching the spirit of division and not the Unifying Spirit who will form the brotherhood of the future.

What teaches us this Unifying Spirit? Anthroposophy! Therefore positive Anthroposophy is also positive wisdom. It does not wish to preach in general ethical terms, for it is unnecessary to preach brotherhood to humanity; it wishes to give humanity wisdom, concrete wisdom which must lead to brotherhood. It gives this wisdom by teaching people to understand their own being, by answering the profound riddles of existence as to the whence and whither of man, by teaching the evolution of the world! He who thus penetrates into the wisdom, he who thus gathers knowledge, he who is prepared in this way by the positive teachings of Anthroposophy, comes entirely of himself to the union with humanity, for people are united into a brotherhood when the Sun of Wisdom unites them in the spirit; it completely ennobles them, completely transfigures them, completely unites them.

That is the mission of Christianity. Christianity is the expression of the connection between human beings who are becoming freer and freer, and it is the union in perfect freedom into a brotherhood in the light of the one truth I This brotherhood develops entirely of itself when you pay heed to those sublime words of Christ: ‘Ye will know truth by means of truth and the truth shall make you free.’

There will not be two thoughts about one and the same thing when humanity has come to this brotherhood in the spiritual; that is the profound meaning of this statement.

When humanity has known the truth, when it has lived the truth, it will have found the truth, through itself; it will then be truly free and will know the depth of the statement: ‘Ye will know the truth by means of truth and will make yourselves free!’

On many occasions we have emphasized that the present historical moment of human evolution is the one in which intellectual life predominates. The epoch which has been characterized as the fourth post-Atlantean age, as the Graeco-Roman age, was a preparation for the present epoch. And you also know, from certain soul characteristics of man which developed during these epochs, that we reckon the Graeco-Roman age from the Eighth Century B.C. to the Fifteenth Century A.D. Since that time we must take into account the epoch in which we are now living, in which the soul qualities of western humanity must unfold, and which we look upon as the present moment in history.

Before the Fifteenth Century man's whole relation to the world of the intellect was quite different from what it was later on. Since the Fourth Century A.D. the human soul had a certain inclination towards the intellectual life which existed in ancient Greece and was about to set; nevertheless we find in this second period of the fourth post-Atlantian epoch a soul mood which can only be fully grasped if we immerse ourselves with a feeling soul into the characteristic of the ancient Greeks, particularly during the time which history describes in a rather superficial way, when Greek life was beginning to evolve, and the time of Socrates and Plato until the end of the Greek era.

From all that shines through an external—one might say, superficial historical description—it is possible to recognize, even without a spiritual-scientific deepening, that when the ancient Greek gained what we now call an intellectual world conception, this gave him pleasure, or at least a sense of satisfaction, and when by his intellectual power he could form a picture of the universe, after having passed through the different stages of learning of that time, he believed that he had risen to a higher stage of human development. When he could grasp the world intellectually, he believed that he was a human being in a higher sense. During the fourth post-Atlantean age, there existed in full measure inner joy and satisfaction derived from the life of the intellect.

This may also be observed in the historical characters of a subsequent epoch. For example, the way in which John Scotus Erigena of the Ninth Century formed and described his ideas, shows us that he believed to have in them something which may arouse inner enthusiasm. Even though later on a somewhat cooler form of discussion set in, we find this soul attitude in the men who sought to gain an intellectual picture of the world through Scholasticism, and who were frequently alone in their striving, isolated from the rest of the world. It was the course of development during the past centuries which induced men to believe that by rising up to intellectual thoughts they must lose their inner soul warmth.

But by going back to a time which does not lie so very far back, by considering, for example, the intellectualistic world conception still existing in Schiller, or even to the extraordinary exact morphology developed by Goethe, we may observe that these men painted their picture of the world in a very marked ideal-intellectualistic way and believed to be human beings in the true sense of the word only if they could bring inner warmth into their ideas. Not so very long ago, the world of ideas was not yet described in such a pale, cold way as is so frequently the case today.

This fact is connected with an important law of human development. It is connected with the fact that man himself adopted an entirely different attitude towards the world of ideas grasped through his intellect; it was an entirely different attitude from that of past epochs. In earlier times, the world of ideas was linked up with the living essence of the universe, for the universe was looked upon as a living organism. I might say: True insight into older forms of thinking can show us that in the past everything dead, everything that was not alive, was really looked upon as something which falls off from the world's living essence, and this was thought of as being spread over the whole universe; it fell off from it, like ashes fall off from burning substance. Man's feeling attitude towards the universe was quite different from his present attitude. He looked upon the universe as a great, living organism, and its lifeless part, for example, the whole extent of the mineral kingdom, was to him ashes falling out of the universal processes, and these ashes were dead, because they were nothing but the refuse of the world's living essence.

During the past centuries, this feeling towards the universe underwent an essential transformation. Scientific knowledge, for example, is now fully valued—or this was the case—only insofar as it deals with lifeless substances and processes. In an ever-growing measure, the longing arose to look upon everything living only as a kind of chemical combination of lifeless substances. The idea of spontaneous generation from lifeless substances became prevalent.

On many occasions, I have already mentioned the following: During the Middle Ages, when people tried to produce the homunculus in the retort out of certain ingredients, they never connected this with the idea of spontaneous generation in the meaning of modern scientific investigation, but they looked upon the homunculus as a definite living essence conjured up from an indefinite living universe. For they did not yet think of the universe as something lifeless, as a mechanism. Consequently people believed in the possibility of conjuring up a definite living essence out of an indefinite living essence. Never did it occur to a medieval mind to connect lifeless with living things. These things are very difficult to grasp without the aid of spiritual science, because modern people are accustomed to form their ideas by assuming that their thoughts are absolutely correct and have become so perfect, because mankind has left behind the stages of childhood.

Although people boast of modern progress, the thoughts which they now form have never been so rigid in the past. Indeed, this rigidity, particularly in regard to man's cognitive power, is a subjective element. When man turns his thoughts and ideas to lifeless things, this is something quite passive. For he can form his thoughts with the greatest ease and comfort; the lifeless world does not change, and he forms his concepts of physics without being disturbed by the fact that in approaching Nature with his lifeless thoughts, Nature itself, with its living changing character, demands from him to be just as living and mobile in his thoughts.

Goethe still had the feeling that when single phenomena had to be drawn out of the whole extent of facts and grasped in the form of ideas, then inwardly living thoughts are needed, not sharply outlined ones, but thoughts conforming with the ever-changing, living form of existence, with the ever-changing, living beings.

Expressed more paradoxically, we may say that modern man likes thoughts which can be formed without much effort. This tendency to rigid thought, to thoughts with sharp outlines, can only be applied to lifeless things, to things which do not change, so that the thoughts themselves remain unchanged and rigid; but these rigid thoughts, which really ignore life in the external world, nevertheless gave man—as I have frequently described—the inner consciousness of freedom.

Two things have arisen through the fact that man lost life completely in the sphere of his thoughts: One is the consciousness of freedom, the other the possibility to apply these rigid thoughts, drawn out of lifeless things and applicable only to lifeless things, to the magnificent, triumphal technical achievements, based on the realization of the rigid system of ideas.

This is one aspect of mankind's modern development. We must grasp that man separated himself, as it were, from the living world, he became estranged from it. But at the same time we should also grasp the following: If man does not wish to remain within the lifeless essence of the world, but wishes to take into his soul the impulse of life, he must discover the world's living essence through his own power, whenever he faces the lifeless world.

When we go back into ancient times, we find that each cloud formation, the lightning coming out of the cloud, the rolling thunder, the growing plant, etc., gave man a living essence; through knowledge, he breathed in life, as it were, and thus he existed in an immediate way within the world's living essence. He only had to take in life from outside. In accordance with man's present stage of development, which only enables him to grasp lifeless thing in his thoughts, so that the external world no longer gives him a living essence, he is obliged, in the present epoch, to draw this living essence out of the innermost depths of his own life; he himself must become alive. History cannot be grasped theoretically, through the intellect. It would be too monotonous. With our whole soul we should penetrate into the way in which people experienced history during the different epochs. We shall then discover what a great change took place in all the pre-Grecian epochs, if I may use this expression, which Anthroposophy traces back as far as the Atlantean age, that is to say, as far as the Seventh and Eighth Centuries B.C.—we shall discover the great change which took place from the time of ancient Greece until now. Let me describe to you this change of human feeling in connection with the universe—let me describe it to you quite objectively. I wish to describe how this change of feeling in human souls facing the universe appears in the light of a spiritual conception.

When we go back into ancient times—only faint traces of this remote past are known to ordinary history, for in order to grasp these things we must penetrate into them in a spiritual-scientific way, through the methods which you have learned to know—when we go back into ancient times, to the men of the pre-Grecian age, for example to the Egyptian culture, the Babylonian-Chaldean culture, or even to the ancient Persian culture, we shall find that everywhere men had come down to the earth from a prenatal, pre-earthly life, and that they still bore within them, as an after-effect, all that the Gods had implanted into them during their pre-earthly existence.

In the past, the human being felt that he lived on the earth in a way which made him say to himself: I am standing here on the earth, but before I stood upon it, I lived in a soul-spiritual world, imaginatively speaking, in a world of light. But this light continues to shine mysteriously in my inner being. As a human being, I am, as it were, a covering sheath for this divine light that continues to live in me.

Man thus knew that a divine element had come down with him to the earth. In reality, he did not say—and this may be proved philologically—I am now standing upon the earth, but he said: I, who am a human being, enfold the God who came down to the earth. This is what really lived in his consciousness.

And the farther back we go into human evolution, the more frequently shall we find this consciousness: I, who am a human being, enfold the God who came down to the earth. For the divine element was manifold. One might say: In the past, man was conscious of the fact that the last gods of the godly hierarchy reaching down to the earth were human beings. Those who do not distort Oriental culture in the terrible way in which Deussen distorted it for Europe, those who do not perceive in a superficial, external way, but in a truly feeling manner, the state of consciousness of the ancient Indian who felt himself at one with his Brahman whom he enfolded, will also be able to feel what really constituted the true essence of soul life in ancient times.

Out of this developed the consciousness of the Father, man's attitude towards God the Father. He felt that he was, as it were, a son of the Gods. He did not feel this in connection with his body of flesh and blood, but in connection with that part of his being enfolded by his flesh and blood, though according to many people of ancient times, these were not worthy of being the involucre of a God. Not the human being of flesh and blood was looked upon as divine, but that part which came from a spiritual world and entered man's physical-earthly part, the being of flesh and blood.

Man's religious connection was thus felt above all in the relationship to God the Father. In the ancient Mysteries the highest dignity, the highest rank was that of the Father. In nearly all the Mysteries of the Orient the candidate of initiation had to pass through seven different stages. The first stage or degree was one of preparation, in which he gained a soul constitution giving him a first idea of what the Mysteries revealed to him. The subsequent degree, up to the fourth, enabled him to have a full understanding of his folk soul, so that he no longer felt that he was a single human being, but the member of a whole group of men. And by rising to the higher stages, the fifth and sixth degree, he felt in an ever-growing measure that he was the involucre of a divine essence. The highest degree was that of the Father. People who had attained this stage realized in their external life and existence this divine archetypal principle which could be experienced by man, and which could really be brought in connection with man. The whole external spiritual culture was entirely in accordance with this central point of religious life: to experience in human consciousness a relation with the creative principle of God the Father. Everything which could be grasped by man's inner being was experienced accordingly: Man felt that the light of knowledge which could be kindled within him came to him from God the Father. In his own intellect he felt the influence of God the Father. Cults and rituals were arranged accordingly, for they were only a reflexion of the path of knowledge which could be followed in the Mysteries.

Then came the Greek Age. The Greek is the most perfect representative of that stage of human development coming out of those older soul conditions which I have just described to you. The ancient Greek felt that man was more than man, not only the involucre of something divine. But this Greek feeling was of such a kind that a person who had passed through a Greek training—let us call it the Greek school of the intellect, or Greek art, or Greek religious life—felt, as it were, that the divine essence had completely identified itself with man. The ancient Greek no longer thought that he enfolded a God, but he felt that he was the expression of God, that he set forth a divine being. But this truth was no longer pronounced as openly as the other truth in older epochs. In ancient Greece this truth: As a human being, thou art a divine being, a son of the Gods, was only revealed to the disciple of the Mysteries at a definite stage of his development. It was deemed impossible to describe this secret of human evolution to people who were not adequately prepared for it. But a Greek who had been initiated into the Mysteries knew this truth. This explains the fundamental feeling of that epoch was not a clearly outlined idea, but a fundamental feeling of the soul.

We come across this fundamental soul feeling in Greek art, which sets forth the Gods as if they were idealized human beings. This way of setting forth the Gods as idealized men proceeds from this fundamental feeling. The Greek therefore took back, as it were into the chastity of feeling, his relationship to the Divine.

When the Greek world conception had completely set, an entirely new soul mood came to the fore in the Fifteenth Century. No longer did the human being feel that he enfolded a divine essence or set forth something divine, as he experienced himself in ancient Greece, but he felt that he was a being that had risen from less perfect stages to the human stage and that he could only look up to a divine essence transcending the physical world. Modern man called into life natural science based upon this fundamental feeling, which is, however, still unable to discover man's connection with his own self.

It is the task of Anthroposophy to rediscover man's connection with his own self and the divine essence. This may be thought of as follows: Let us transfer ourselves into the soul of a man living before the time of ancient Greece. He will say: I enfold a divine essence. By enwrapping it with my body of flesh and blood, I set it forth less worthily, in a way which is not in keeping with its true essence. I can only draw it down upon a lower level, as it were. If I wish to set forth the divine essence purely, I must purify myself. I have to pass through a kind of catharsis, cleanse myself, so that the god within me may assert himself.

This is in reality a return to the archetypal principle of the Father and it comes to expression in many forms of past religious life, through the fact that people thought that after death they returned to the ancestors, to their distant forefathers. Religious life undoubtedly reveals this trait, this tendency towards the archetypal, creative principle of the Father. Man does not yet feel quite at home upon the earth. And he does not yet strive from a kind of alien position, as it were, to a transcendental God; he rather strives to set forth man as purely as possible, in the belief that God might then express himself through man.

In ancient Greece life undergoes a change. Man no longer feels so closely connected with the divine principle of the Father, as in the past. As a human being, he feels himself intimately connected with the divine essence, but at the same time also with the earthly one. He lives, as it were, in equipoise between the divine and the earthly. This is the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha takes place. It is the epoch in which one could no longer say only: “In the beginning was the Logos. And the Logos was with God (by this one meant the Father-God), and the Logos was God.” One had to say instead: “And the Word was made Flesh.”—The Word, originally looked upon as being one with the Father-God, was now looked upon in such a way that it had found an abode in man, it dwelt fully in man, and man had to seek it within himself.

The Mystery of Golgotha met this mood which had arisen in mankind. God the Father could never be imagined in human shape; he had to be imagined in a purely spiritual form. Christ, the Son of God, was imagined to be divine-human. In reality, the longing felt by the ancient Greek, or what he set forth as an artistic realization, reaches its human fulfillment in the event which took place in the Mystery of Golgotha.

We should not bear in mind details, but the essential; namely, that a divine essence entered man, in his quality of human being living upon the earth.

The Mystery of Golgotha thus stands at the centre of the whole human evolution on earth. The fact that the Mystery of Golgotha entered history at a moment when the Greeks strove to set forth the divine in man from an external aspect, from the aspect of the earth, as it were, should not be considered as an historical coincidence. We might say, and this is more than a poetical image: The Greeks had to set forth the divine in man artistically, out of the ingredients of the earth, and the cosmos sent down to the earth the God who entered man, as a cosmic answer to the wonderful question sent out into the world's spaces, as it were, by the Greeks. In the historical development we may sense, as it were, that with their humanly portrayed gods the Greeks addressed the following question to the universe: Can Man become a God? And the universe replied: God can become Man. This reply was given through the event of the Mystery of Golgotha.

On many occasions I have explained that it is only possible to grasp the real, original essence of the Mystery of Golgotha by approaching it not only with the knowledge of lifeless things applied by modern men, but with a new living knowledge, a knowledge that is once more pervaded with the spirit.

We thus reach the point of saying to ourselves: Man has reached on the one hand his consciousness of freedom, and on the other hand, with the aid of lifeless thoughts, the technical and mechanic progress in external culture; he cannot, however, remain standing by this inner lifelessness. Out of his soul's own strength he must gain the impulse of life, of something that is spiritually living; that is to say, he must again be able to win ideas which are inwardly alive, which do not only seize the intellect, but the whole human being. Modern man should really attain what I have indicated in my book on Goethe's world conception; he should once more be able to speak not of lifeless ideas and abstractions, but rise up to the spirituality in which he is pervaded by ideas, and take into this sphere of ideas all the living warmth that may gleam in his soul, the brightest light which his enthusiasm may kindle in his soul. Man should again bring into his ideas the whole warmth and light of his soul. Inwardly he should again be able to carry his whole being into the spirituality of the world of ideas. This is what we have lost in the present time.

We may say: In modern literature there is perhaps nothing so deeply moving as the first chapter of Nietzsche's description of Greek philosophy, which he himself designates as “The Tragic Age of the Greeks.” Nietzsche describes the philosophers before Socrates: Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras—and for those who have a real feeling and an open heart for such things, it is deeply moving to read Nietzsche's description of how at a certain moment of Greek life, the Greek rose up to the abstraction of mere existence. From the manifold impressions of Nature filling the human soul with warmth, he passed over to the pale thought of existence.

Nietzsche says more or less the following: It gives one a chilly feeling, as if one entered icy regions, when an ancient Greek philosopher, for example Parmenides, speaks of the abstract idea of the encompassing existence. Nietzsche, who lived so completely in the modern culture, as described to you the day before yesterday, felt himself transferred to glacier regions.

Nietzsche failed, just because he could only go as far as the coldness, one might say, the glacier character, of man's world of ideas. A truly spiritual clairvoyance can bring soul warmth and soul light into the intellectual sphere, so that we can reach that purity of thought, described in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” without becoming inwardly dried out, but filled with enthusiasm. By abandoning the earthly warmth of the life of the senses, we can feel in the cold regions of intellectualism the warm sun forces of the cosmos; by abandoning the shining objects of the earth and by experiencing inner darkness through the intellectual world of thought, the living soul impulses, which we bring into this darkness, can receive the Cosmic Light, after having overcome, as it were, the earthly darkness.

Everywhere in Nietzsche we find this longing for the cosmic light, the cosmic warmth. He cannot reach them, and this is the true cause of his failure. Anthroposophy would like to indicate the path leading to a goal where we do not lose earthly warmth, earthly light, where we preserve our keen interest in every concrete detail of earthly life, and rise to that height of concept where the divine essence becomes manifest in pure thought; as modern men we then no longer feel this divine essence within us, as did the human beings of past epochs, but we ourselves must first find the way to it, we must go to it.

This is the mood which truly enables us to experience the Mystery of the Holy Ghost. And this constitutes the difference between the spiritual life of modern and ancient man. The man of older epochs absorbed his spirituality from every single creature in Nature. As already explained: The cloud spoke to him of the spirit, the flower spoke to him of the spirit. Through his own forces modern man must animate his concepts, which have grown cold and lifeless: then he will come to the Holy Spirit that will also enable him to see the Mystery of Golgotha in the right way.

When we thus pervade our ideas—let me say it quite dryly—in an anthroposophical way with soul warmth and soul light, then we draw something out of humanity and take it with us. For unless we take this along, we cannot go beyond the dry, banal, abstract character of the world of ideas. But if we rise up to a comprehension of the world, with the aid of that knowledge which is contained in anthroposophical books, our ideas will remain as exact as mathematical or other scientific ideas. We do not think in a less precise way than the chemist in his laboratory, or the biologist in his cell; but the thoughts which we thus develop require something which comes from the human being and accompanies them. When an anthroposophist speaks out of imagination and inspiration, and sound common sense really grasps this imagination or inspiration, these confront him in the same way in which mathematical or geometrical figures confront him in mathematics; but the human being must bring along something, for otherwise he does not grasp these ideas in the right way. What he must bring with him is love.

Unless knowledge is pervaded with love, it is not possible to grasp the truths given by Anthroposophy; for then they remain something which has the same value as other truths. The value is the same when, in accordance with the ideas of some materialistic natural scientists you state: Marsupials, human apes, ape-men and men … or whether you say: Man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego. Only the thought is different, but not the state of mind. The soul, the state of mind, only change when the spiritual comprehension of man within Nature becomes an inwardly living comprehension. But there can be no real understanding unless knowledge is accompanied by the same feeling, the same state of mind, which also lives in love. If knowledge is pervaded with the experience of love, this knowledge can approach the Mystery of Golgotha. We then have not only the naïve love for Christ, which is in itself fully justified—as already stated, this simple, naïve love is quite justified—but we also have a knowledge which encompasses the whole universe and which may deepen to the comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. In other words: Life in the Holy Spirit leads to life in Christ, or to the presence of Christ, the Son of God.

We then learn to grasp that through the Mystery of Golgotha the Logos actually passed over from the Father to the Son. And then the following important truth will be revealed to us: For the men of ancient times it was right to say: “In the beginning was the Logos. And the Logos was with God and the Logos was a God,” but during the Greek epoch they had to begin to say: “And the Logos was made flesh.” Modern man should add: “And I must seek to understand the Logos living in the flesh, by raising my concepts and ideas and my whole comprehension of the world to the spiritual sphere, so that I may find Christ through the Holy Ghost, and through Christ, God the Father.”

Undoubtedly this is not a theory, but something which can penetrate into the direct experience of modern man, and this is the attitude towards Christianity which grows quite naturally out of Anthroposophy.

You see, my dear friends, it is indeed indispensable that modern man should grasp the necessity of treading a spiritual path. He needs it in view of the present lifeless culture consisting in the mechanism of modern life—which should not be despised, for, from another aspect, it must be greatly valued. But an inner push is needed, as it were, so that modern man may set out along this spiritual path. And this inner push—recently I spoke of it as a real awakening—is a development which many people prefer to avoid. The opposition of modern people to Anthroposophy is really due to the fact that they have not experienced this push, this jerk, within their soul. It is uncomfortable to experience it. For it casts us, as it were, into the vortex of cosmic development. People would much rather remain quiet, with their rigid sharply outlined thoughts that only turn to lifeless thing which are not on the defensive, when the world is to be grasped, whereas everything that is alive defends itself, moves and tries to slip out of our thoughts, when we try to grasp it with lifeless concepts. Modern people do not like this. They feel it. They cloak it in all manner of other things and become quite furious when they hear that a certain direction, coming from many different spheres of life, calls for an entirely different way of grasping the world.

This mood alone explains the very peculiar things to be observed among opponents of Anthroposophy. It suffices to mention a few recent examples, for these can show us the strangeness of it all.

We were hit by the great misfortune of losing our Goetheanum. We know quite well that in spite of all efforts to built it up again, the first Goetheanum cannot rise up again; it can only remain a memory, and it is an immense grief for us to have to say: The Goetheanum wished to set forth a style of art in keeping with the new spirituality, and this style of art, which was meant to exercise a stimulating influence has, to begin with, vanished from the surface of the earth with the Goetheanum. When we only mention this fact, we can feel the immense grief connected with the loss of the Goetheanum.

Generally, in the face of misfortune, even opponents cease to use a pitiless, scornful language. But just the misfortune which deprived us of the Goethanum, induced our opponents to speak all the more scornfully and insultingly. They think that this is right: this is so peculiar. It fitly belongs—but in an unfit way—to the other thing mentioned above.

The Anthroposophical Movement began as a purely positive activity. No one was attacked—our only form of “agitation” was to state the facts investigated by anthroposophical methods of research and we waited patiently until the human souls that undoubtedly exist in the present time, should come to us led by the impulse which lived in them, in order to gain knowledge of the truths which had to be revealed out of the spiritual world. This was the tendency of our whole anthroposophical work; we did not intend to agitate, to set up programs, but we simply wished to state the facts obtained through investigation of the spiritual world, and to wait and see in which souls there lived the longing to know these realities.

Today there are many people who are opponents of Anthroposophy without knowing why; they simply follow those who lead them. But there are nevertheless some who know quite well why they are opponents of Anthroposophy; they know it, because they see that out of the anthroposophical foundation come truths which call for that inner jerk which has been characterized above. This they refuse. They refuse it for many reasons, because these kinds of truths were always to be preserved within more restricted circles, in order to emerge from the rest of mankind as small groups forming a kind of spiritual aristocracy. Consequently their hatred is directed particularly towards that person who draws out the truths from the spiritual world for all human beings, simply because this is in keeping with the present age. At the same time these opponents—I mean, the leading opponents—know that truth as such cannot be touched, for it finds its way through the smallest rifts in the rock, no matter what obstacles it may encounter. As a rule, they do not therefore attack these truths: for the truths would soon discover ways and means of ousting the foe. Observe the opponents, indeed in our anthroposophical circles it would be most advisable to study our opponents carefully: They renounce attacking the truths, and lay chief stress on personal attacks, personal insinuations, personal insults, personal calumnies. They think that truth cannot be touched, yet it is to be driven out of the world, and they believe that this can be done by personal defamation. The nature of such an opposition shows how well the leading opponents know how to proceed in order to gain the victory, at least for the time being.

But this is something which Anthroposophists above all should know; for there are still many Anthroposophists who think that something may be reached by direct discussion with the opponent. Nothing can do us more harm than success in setting forth our truths in the form of discussion; for people do not hate us because we say something that is not true, but because we say the truth. And the more we succeed in proving that we say the truth, the more they will hate us.

Of course this cannot prevent us from stating the truth. But it can prevent us from being so naive as to think that it is possible to progress by discussion. Only positive work enables us to progress; truth should be represented as strongly as possible, so as to attract as many predestined souls as possible, for these are far more numerous in the present time than is generally assumed. These souls will find the spiritual nourishment needed for the time when no destructive, but constructive work will have to be done, if human development is to follow an ascending, not a descending curve.

There is no way out of the present chaos if we follow the materialistic path. The only way out is to follow the spiritual path. But we can only set out along the spiritual path if the Spirit is our guide: to choose the Spirit as our guide, to understand how we should choose it, this is the insight which Anthroposophists should gain; this is what they should learn to know in the deepest sense.

Welcome, all who are present here! In this second lecture I would like you to consider that I had assumed last night, to hearing Dr Kolisko's lecture today, and not present it myself. Due to this it wasn't possible in this short time to quite sort out what I would say and I can only hope, as a whole, to roughly cover the details which Dr Kolisko wanted to convey to you.

When from the anthroposophical viewpoint the relationship of the animal world to the human world is spoken about, then it must be pointed out in particular how the present anthroposophical ideas relate historically to the Goethean world view—I have mentioned this twice here at least. The theme in question today, specifically the very first of Goethe's accomplishments in the natural scientific area, will come under scrutiny, namely in his treatise entitled: “Human beings, like the animals, are attributed with an intermaxillary jawbone in the upper jaw.” One needs to keep all the relationships in view when considering how Goethe came to this treatise on the basis of some anatomical and physiological studies and on which grounds of his approach to embryological studies he attributed this to.

During the time when Goethe, already as a young student and later as a friend who to a certain extent had made the Jena University Institute dependent on him, lived with these problems to which he was exposed, namely the problem of what the actual difference could be between human beings and animals. He noticed how people all around him were focused on discovering the difference within the form, within the human and animal morphology, of the differentiation between people, who should be, to some degree, the crown of creation, and the animal world. Also regarding the circumstances where the intermaxillary, which is clearly detached in all animals from any other jaw bone but which is not found in the human being as a separated bone, made people believe that this part of the head's development gave the decisive difference between humans and animals. Goethe didn't agree. He was of the opinion that man and animal were created according to their entire organisation in the same way, therefore such a detail could not indicate a differentiation. In addition, the intermaxillary bone in mature people grow together, so Goethe tried to show how this phenomenon relied only on later development because in the embryonic stage, human beings displayed the same relationship in their upper intermaxillary bone as in animals.

You only have to follow the enthusiasm with which Goethe pointed out to how lucky he was, that the human being actually has the intermaxillary jaw bone in common with the animals, and how out of the whole big picture of the morphology, no decisive difference between the human being and the animal could be found in a single detail. From the kind of limitation of man and animal as you find everywhere in the 18th Century, it could not be stated in this way—also for Anthroposophy it could not be stated in this way. What Goethe accepted was this: By the animal organisation developing up into the human organisation, details already in the animal organ formation were transformed and then gradually through its evolution created the possibility to make space for what is within man, and in such a way reveal the transformed animalistic organisation in the totality of man. Goethe thought only about the metamorphosed animal organisation within the human and not of an autonomously separated human morphology.

This, I might add, needs to be established as the foundation in the search for the differentiation, in the anthroposophical sense, between animal and human organisms. If an organisation itself, in its forms, only depends on the animal and the human metamorphosis, then one has to, if you are looking for differentiation, primarily watch the course of life of a person and of an animal, and gradually observe how the human being unfolds out of the functioning of his organs, and how an animal takes on form through his organs. In brief, one needs to search more from biological than from morphological regions.

Now, one can prepare, in a specific way, how to discover the understanding through biological differences, by finding a foundation in which the animal functions originate and which appears in both man and animal, and this relates to the sense organs. The sense organs, or better said, the functions of the sense organs are more or less vital in everything which takes place in the animal and human organisms. We may assume that in the simple nutritional processes in the lower animals, in the purely digestive processes, a function of a primitive sense happens, which, we say, is where taste experiences for instance happen more or less as a purely chemical function of metabolism. These things become increasingly differentiated the further one ascends the animal row, right up to the human being. We won't get anywhere if we go straight to the animal organisation to find something which does not have a sensory life. Certainly one could say: what for instance do the senses have to do with the development of the lymph and blood?

Today already there is talk from the non-anthroposophical scientists about subconscious processes in the human psyche, and as a result we will for the sake of brevity only hint at it, and not let it appear as something completely unauthorised when I say: What takes place in the mouth and palate as a taste experience, what takes place in the process and function with for instance the ptyalin, pepsin and so on, how can it not also take part in the subconscious? Why should—I say this as a kind of postulation—the experience of taste not continue through the entire organism and why should the subconscious experience of taste not happen parallel to the lymph and blood development in all organ processes? Through this we can follow the biological side of the human and animal organisations by looking at their sensory life.

The sense life unfolds—as I have indicated years ago how it is partially a fact of outer science—not only in the usually claimed five senses, but in a clear discernible number of twelve human senses. Now, we are only talking about human beings. For those who want to understand if one could speak about twelve senses in the same way as for five or six—from seeing, hearing smelling, tasting, feeling or touch—for those it is valid that one can speak for instance about the sense of balance, which we recognise inwardly whether we stand on two feet or only one, whether we move our arms in one way or the other, and so on. By our position as humans in the world, we are in equilibrium. This equilibrium we accept, although from a much duller position than that of our perceiving through the senses about what takes place in the process of seeing; so that we may speak about the sense of equilibrium as we speak about a sense of seeing. Let us be clear about this. When we speak about the sense of equilibrium we turn ourselves more towards our own organisation, we perceive inwardly, while with our eyes we look outwardly. However, this experience of equilibrium fosters its basis as a sense perceptible function. In the same way we can expand the number of senses on the other side. When we merely hear something, the function of the human organism is really different to when we, as it were, hear directly through the ear, and then explore what becomes indirectly perceptible to us, through speech. When we follow the words of others with inner understanding it doesn't involve mere judgement, but a process of judgement comes out of a perceptive process, a sense process; so we need to speak about it as having a sense of speech—or a sense of language, a sense of the word—just as we have a sense of hearing. In other words, we must, if we consider the words more anatomically-physiologically, presuppose there is within the human organization a special (sensory) organization which corresponds to the hearing of what had been spoken as well as hearing inarticulate sounds. We must assume a special organisation for the sense of speech, which is quite similar to a sensory organisation, for example the organisation of sight or of hearing.

We may also, when we go to work without prejudice, not say: we get to know that a person is standing in front of us, when we see there is something in the external space shaped like a nose, like two eyes and so on, and through an analogy conclude that a person is stuck in there, because we see that in us there is also a person, revealed outwardly through a nose, eyes and so on. Such an unconscious conclusion in reality doesn't form the basis; it is rather the direct entry into others which corresponds to something special within them which can be compared to a sensory organisation, so that we can speak about a sense of Self (Ichsinn). When we look through the functioning of people in this unprejudiced way, then we need to, with the same authorization with which we spoke about the sense of hearing, of taste and so on, speak about the organisation of perception for words, about an organisation of perception for thoughts, for an organisation of the Self—not for one's own self, because for one own Self it is dependent on something quite different. Further, we must speak about a sense of movement, because it is something quite different, whether we call it movement or rest. Likewise, we must speak about a sense of life—ordinary science already speaks partly about that.

When we determine the number of sense organisations, we arrive at twelve human senses. Of these, several are inner senses, because we involve the inner organism—how we feel and experience the sense or equilibrium, sense of movement and so on—while observing it. However, qualitatively the experience with observation of the inner organization remains the same for the seeing, hearing or taste processes. It is important to see things only in the right context.

If the starting point is from a human angle of a complete physiology of the senses then certain biological phenomena from the human realm, on the one side, and the animal realm on the other, reveal a particular meaning. This meaning can exist even if you admit to everything which has been presented by recent research, even from Haeckel, regarding the morphological and also physiological human organisation in relationship to that of the animal. Here the most impossible misunderstandings come about. It is believed, for instance, that Anthroposophy must oppose Haeckel, simply on the grounds that it rises from mere observation through the senses to the empirical observations of the spiritual; it is believed that Anthroposophy must from this basis change Haeckelism. No!—What needs to be changed in Haeckelism must be changed out of natural scientific methodology, so Anthroposophy doesn't need to argue here because one can have discussions, as scientific researchers, with Haeckel.

What Anthroposophy has to offer refers to quite other areas. It is correct to emphasize that by counting the bones of the higher animals, there's no differentiation to the number in humans. The same goes for the muscles. This gives no differentiation between human and animal organisations. If, however, we proceed biologically, we discover real differentiation. We find that we can attribute a special value to the essential way the human organism is placed differently in the cosmos to the animals. When we observe the higher animals, we have to admit that their essential aspect is that the axis of their backbone is parallel to the earth's surface while by contrast, humans in the course of their life make their horizontal spinal axis vertical, which means an important function in the life of humans are to stand upright.—I know objections can be raised: there are some animals which have more or less of a vertical spinal axis. This is not the salient point as to how it is excluded through outer morphology, but how the entire organisation is adjusted. We will also see how with certain animal, bird types or even mammals, where the spine can be brought into more or less of a vertical position, a kind of degenerative effect appears in their total predisposition, while with people there is already a predisposition for the spine to be vertical.

When I mentioned this some years ago in a lecture in Munich, a man educated in natural science approached me, who I could naturally understand quite well, and said: ‘When we sleep, we do have a horizontal spine.’—This does not matter, I replied, but what matters is in the relationship to the situation, let's say, of the bone in the leg or foot to the rest of the bodily structure and to the whole cosmic relationship of mankind, and how this is processed by the human or by the animal. Indeed, the human's spine is horizontal during sleep, but this position is outward; inwardly the human is so dynamically organized that he can bring himself into a condition of equilibrium where the spine is vertical. When animals come to such a state of equilibrium, they are degenerating in a certain sense, or they tend towards developing some human-like functions and as a result prove, what I want to present now.

We can say that by the human being purely functionally, out of the total dynamic of his being in the course of his first year of life, forming his spinal axis vertically, he has brought himself into another relationship of equilibrium cosmically than the animal. However, every being is created out of the cosmic totality, and one can say, and adapt—I don't want to enter further into this.

When we track the formation of single bones, for example the ribs or head bones further, then we also gain the morphological possibility of how the formation of ribs or head bones in a man or dog adapt to the vertical or horizontal spine. Because the human being finds himself in a vertical position he lives in contrast to the animal, who stands on four legs, in quite a different state of equilibrium, in quite a different cosmic relationship.

Now we must try to clarify the problem from the other side, what actually happens in the sense's processes in a person and what happens to him with reference to the sensory process. Due to our limited time I wish to speak only with indications, but this can also be translated into a completely precise biological-physiological terminology.

Let's take the process of seeing. We could create divisions into what the specific function of the organ of sight is, and into what happens further as a continuation within the physical; one could call it an analogy of the optical nerve of the eye which loses itself in the inner nervous system. Thus, we could differentiate, on the one side, the process of sight itself, and then everything connected to it in the totality of experience. In the direct present process of vision there is also the imminence of the image perceptibility; when we look at something then we don't separate the imagery from the vision. Turning our eyes away from what we looked at, we then retain a kind or imaginative remnant which clearly shows a relationship with the vision's observation. Whoever can really analyse this will see the differences between the imagined remnant obtained through the organ of vision as opposed to what happens with the hearing process. We have within us an experience of the process of sight, one could call it, in a dualistic way. First being more turned to what actually is observed through the senses and then turning again to the remnant within imagination which remains more or less as a manifested memory.

Let's take everything that lives in the inner image perceptibility of human beings, which depends on the five senses. The one which is the most dependable is of course the process of sight. Only a ninth of what is found through vision, is found through the hearing process. When we consider soul life, there is even less found in it than the seeing and hearing processes, and so on. We know, that in addition to the image perceptibility which leads to lasting memory, it also plays a role but in reality, less than with the seeing and hearing processes.

Now we can pose the question: Is there also for the more hidden senses, like the sense of equilibrium or sense of movement, this duality which is found in the observation perceptibility and image perceptibility? With a truly unbiased physiology and psychology the duality is there for instance in the sense of equilibrium, but the connection is seldom noticed. In the lectures I've just given, I spoke about the mathematical geometric relation of finding oneself upright in relationship to space. We construct relationships to space. What is it actually, that we are doing here? It is connected to the entire person just as it is when with the process of sight, the observed element is clearly separated from the image perceptibility, because we keep the imagination inside. We don't observe the colour outwardly but we experience the qualitative aspect of the colour, of colour tones, and what lives as a feeling, a feeling I have towards warm or cold colours strongly within myself.

We can now say the following: ‘I want to instantly see a show of all the soul images which I've acquired through my life, which I can see through my eyes.’ We would then enter into a visual system of the soul. We would, without having outer sight, rise inwardly into a kind of reconstruction of the visual process. If you apply this same kind of consideration to the sense of equilibrium, you obtain everything which you have experienced through the sense of equilibrium in your own organism, rising within, which corresponds to the geometry in outer life.¹ Mathematic and mechanistic laws have not been discovered by outer experience. Mathematic and mechanistic laws have been acquired though inward construction. If you want to recall mechanistic laws you have to access them through the image perceptibility of your sense of equilibrium. The entire human being becomes a sense organ and thus inwardly creates the other pole of what had been observed. For instance, we create mathematics and we believe we have a purely a-priori science. However, mathematics is no pure a-priori science. We don't notice that what we are experiencing as a sense of balance is what we translate into mathematical geometric imagination, like the observation through sight is translated into the imagination of the observed sight. Without noticing the bridge, we have created the sense of balance through maths or through mechanics.

When you think about this, you would understand the innermost relationship of the human organism with its position of equilibrium in the cosmos. Then you could say to yourself: With the animal, which stands on its four legs and which has been given its equilibrium position and sense of equilibrium, the animal must experience equilibrium in quite a different way within itself than a person does mathematically. We find the mathematical simply as a result of us being placed in the cosmos.

We talk about three dimensions because we are positioned in three dimensions in the cosmos. However, the vertical dimension we have only achieved in the course of life. We have placed ourselves into the vertical position. What we have experienced in our earliest childhood reflects later in us as mathematics; it only doesn't develop as quickly as the seeing process. The reflection of the experience of equilibrium goes on in the course of life. In childhood we have a very strong experience of the sense of equilibrium, when we go over from crawling to walking and standing. This reflects in later life and becomes visible as mathematics and mechanics. We often take mathematics as something woven out of ourselves. This is not so. It comes out of the observation of our organism. Why then are there certain thoughts which can be related to the cosmos, which then can create an entire construction in thought, a ‘thought-edifice?’ That is merely a result of human beings standing within the cosmos. When we now compare the position of equilibrium between the animal, in his relation to the cosmos, with that of the human being, then we could say: We have with the animal the bondage with the earth organisation and we have with the human being the uprightness, being ‘lifted-out’ of the earth organisation. What we express as individualized thoughts result from our human organisation having an individual position of equilibrium.

Thus, this actual act of placing oneself in the cosmos is not something which emerges from the organism itself as is found with the animals, but it is something formed within the human organism which is only achieved in the course of the first seven years of life, and goes right into the organs. As a result, we have this polarity between animals and humans that on the one hand humans stand upright and walk vertically. This is quite a cosmic position which lives in the human being, to which everything now has to adapt, and which distinguishes it from the animal. On the other hand, thoughts appear in the soul, thoughts which go beyond the sensual perception, beyond what is sensed with the five senses, extricating themselves from that. Just as the human being frees itself in its cosmic position from the earth, so the human thoughts extricate themselves from the bondage of the sense world, they become free in a certain way.

We must—for anthroposophy it is a definite but here I want to present it more as a hypothesis—we must see in the human being, through his upright spinal axis, a certain position of equilibrium which separates him from animals, and on the other hand we must regard thoughts of a particular imaginative form, as specifically human. Whoever examines such things from an Anthroposophic viewpoint—it could still become more or less relevant—will see how the human being's particular development of his sense of equilibrium and sense of movement achieve more towards a free system of thought than the case is through the eyes and ears, and we also gain insight of the human being requiring an inner organisation for this. The human being simply has an organisation within itself which is not yet found in the animal—this can also be proven materially—which simply supports ideas which are torn free from the earth's bondage to which the animal is bound, but which is limited by the special equilibrium position in humans. Therefore we can say: by the human standing upright, he has created an organ for abstract thinking.

So we have with the upright related organisation of human organs a different situation to those in the animals, which have organs too. Through the upright position the nerves and blood organisation work in a different way under the influence of the equilibrium position so that in the human something appears which can't be brought about in the animal. We discover this relationship really in the physical organization of humans and not as mere dynamism. This is of fundamental importance. Just imagine what happens in the evolution of an organization as a result of a change in their position of equilibrium, how it appears in the animal, how it is in the human being, what changes there for instance with reference to the upper and lower leg, hands and so on. Just imagine what it means that the human being is a two-hander and not a four-footer. The human being is fitted out with the same forms as the animal but they are in different positions and as a result are changed, metamorphosed forms. This can also simply be anatomically demonstrated if the necessary tools and experimental methods qualify. We are looking for such tools and experimental methods in our institute in Stuttgart. In any case before these methods can be empirically found externally, the differences need to be arrived at firstly through imaginative observation. Therefore, Anthroposophy is not useless with reference to research into the finer areas of the human, animal and plant forms, because science can't discover these things through imagination. Once they are discovered they can be verified by science.

When one looks at how another position of equilibrium reorganises the organs, one also finds that certain organs are changed in such a way that they become the human organ of speech and the organism becomes capable of creating speech.

Through this you have gained an insight into the extraordinary organisation of mankind, which has simply come about because of it being an upright being, having repercussions right into matter. Also in relation to the physiological organ of speech it has contributed—where an outer morphological distinction between man and animal can be determined—which after all shows the difference between man and animal biologically.

Here you have a few suggestions which can indicate the way how, in an outer lay method, research may be done which can also be actually researched scientifically. What I wanted to bring I could only briefly sketch here. However, continue to think about these ideas and the results will actually be a way for science to research the differentiations between the animal and human organisations in a biological relationship.

• 1. In the next few sentences some word-gaps followed in the stenographic text. The omissions were filled in with the help of the lectures of Dr Steiner on the 16th March 1921, 29 September, 1 and 3 October 1920 in GA 322

The great transformation that I have characterized here from a variety of angles and that has taken place in the spiritual development of humanity over the course of the last centuries, not only has the intellectual, the theoretical character of knowledge changed, but what has changed also has an influence on the whole human soul life, and thus on the whole human life in general. In order to understand this, one can imagine the following. Of course, what is shown in individual symptoms, which emerge more or less clearly when one wants to understand the actual foundations of life, must be shown in characteristic forms of expression of life.

We have often referred to what were places of knowledge in ancient times of human development. They were the mystery centres. These mystery sites were, to a large extent, shrouded in human veneration. When speaking of mysteries and mystery beings, it was said that through what was practiced in the mysteries, something most important for humanity on earth was present. Everything meaningful in human life was thought to radiate from the mysteries. It was said, in a sense, that If there were no mysteries among people, people on earth would not be able to be what the gods wanted them to be!

So people looked at the mysteries with a feeling of the highest reverence and the most intimate respect, and at the same time they looked at them with a feeling of gratitude, knowing that they gave them what makes it possible to be on earth what the gods want to make of people. One need only compare this with the way in which people look at educational institutions today, and one will find nowhere that tremendous warm devotion. In many cases, one even finds a feeling that, once one has necessarily settled for what comes from the educational institutions, one is glad to be free of them. But in any case, even if one does not look at this extreme, one still knows that one does not actually get from the educational institutions what seems necessary to one inwardly as a human being for one's actual humanity, what makes one a human being. No matter how much theoretical reverence one may have for what is gained in chemical laboratories, biological institutes, legal educational institutions, and even philosophical schools, one will not have the feeling: You are aware of your humanity because there are chemical laboratories, biological institutes, legal educational institutions, and even philosophical seminars.

You cannot say that – even if these educational institutions are perhaps shrouded in a certain theoretical atmosphere – all the warm feelings of reverence of people in the widest sense gravitate towards these educational institutions.

In any case, it will not be all that often that a student, for example, who is preparing a paper for a university seminar and who then, in this way, gives of himself intellectually, feels that he is doing so imbued with his whole elementary humanity as a mystery schoolboy once felt when he had passed one of the stages of practice.

But on the other hand, man needs something that brings him into contact with something worthy of worship here on earth, from which he feels the divine emanating. But if we compare this nuance, which I would call more cultural-historical, with what actually underlies it, let us go back, say, to the times when, in the Near East, two or three millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, mystery-like educational institutions existed: In these mystery-like educational institutions, the natural science of the time was studied, if one can call it that. They studied the starry sky, the nature of the stars, the movements of the stars, the appearance of the stars at certain times, and so on. Today one imagines that this study of the starry sky in those days may have been somewhat fantastic. It was not. It was done with at least the same, if not much greater, methodical care as mineralogy, geology or biology are done today.

But what did they say to each other when they studied the nature of the starry sky? They said to each other: If you know the nature of the starry sky, then you know something about the nature and destiny of man on earth. The study of the starry sky culminated in the fact that knowledge about the fate of man and entire peoples on earth could be gained from the constellations of the stars.

One did not look up at the starry sky with a merely theoretical intention, but rather one said to oneself: If you know the relationship of Saturn to the sun or the relationship of Saturn to a sign of the zodiac at the moment when a man is bidden or where he accomplishes an important deed in life, then you know how the heavens have placed man on earth, you know to what extent man is a creature, a son of the heavens. You study what you study about heaven in order to understand what guides you in your life on earth. Everything that was acquired as knowledge about the nature of heaven was aimed at man. All knowledge was actually permeated by something thoroughly human. And whatever man did on earth, he felt it in connection with what he could study in the heavens. We can take an example from, say, a human artistic activity. When people in ancient times took up poetry or music, they drew on the inspiration that came to them from the heavens.

I have mentioned it often: Homer does not say, to use a poetic phrase “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of the Peleid Achilles,” but because he was aware that he was not speaking something that came to him from human arbitrariness, but he speaks something that the heavens whisper to him. And anyone who was in any way musically active on earth reproduced through the sound of earthly instruments what he believed he had heard in the spaces of heaven in the music of the spheres. Man felt quite distinctly in the way he was active on earth, in the way he cooperated with other people on earth, in the way he founded communities on earth, that he experienced the impulses of will that radiated from the vastness of the universe down to earth and which he explored according to his knowledge of the starry sky, that he acted as a human being here on earth according to these intentions of heaven.

One would like to say: everything that was science, art and religion in those ancient times flowed into human weaving and working. For religion, science and art were indeed a unity, a unity that ultimately radiated into man, so that man might feel himself on earth as the being the gods wanted him to be.

This mood lasted as long as man had a spiritual insight into the heavens, as long as he allowed a spiritual to be conveyed to him in the being, in the course of the stars and in the appearance of the stars, which, so to speak, flowed through the knowledge of the stars to him on earth so that he could realize it on earth.

Today, astrology is a word that does not have a good ring to it. However, if we imagine it in the old sense, it takes on a better sound. Man looked up at the stars, and from the stars the Logos revealed itself to him, which in turn worked through his thoughts, through his imagination, through his language here on earth. Man himself, when he set his speech organs in motion, practiced that which, in the formation of sounds, made the secrets of the heavens resound here on earth again. The Logos, which is the reason that prevails in the human race, appeared as the efflux of the starry world. Astrology: what happened here on earth appeared as an image of the archetype, which one experienced through astrology.

If we look at our insights today, we see how these insights are gained through sensory observation of the earthly. Even when studying astronomy today – I have already discussed this yesterday – it is only the reflection of earthly knowledge up into the heavens. Today's human being acquires sensory knowledge. He does indeed stand in the world differently than he used to. I have characterized this different standing in these lectures here recently. I said: Today's intellectual man, with his abstract concepts, but also with what his freedom is, which is only possible with the development of abstract-intellectual concepts that do not force man, that also give him moral imperatives that arise from his individuality, as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, only comes into the evolution of mankind at the time when that consciousness, which originated in astrology and presented man as a being executing the intentions of the gods on earth, had ceased to exist. This human being, with his intellect and his sense of freedom, is a creature cut off from the heavens. He has truly become the earth's hermit and acquires his knowledge here on earth. And the way in which he acquires his knowledge also explains the interest with which he clings to these insights.

In ancient times, it would have been inconceivable to see a duality between religion and scientific knowledge. When scientific knowledge was acquired, it was such that it gave one an immediate religious feeling, that it showed one the way to the gods, that one could not help but be a religious person in the right sense if one had acquired knowledge.

Today one can acquire the whole wide range of popular knowledge: one does not become a religious person from it. I would like to know who becomes a religious person today by becoming a botanist, a zoologist, a chemist! If he wants to become a religious person, he seeks the religious in addition to knowledge. Therefore, we seek places of worship in addition to knowledge, and are often even convinced that knowledge leads us away from religious paths, that we must seek other paths that in turn lead us to the religious. And yet, here too, we have repeatedly had to emphasize the importance of newer insights. We had to point out that these newer insights are absolutely necessary for modern man and for the further development of humanity. But when man today places himself in the world with his intellectualism, with his sense of freedom, he is already developing here on earth that which the older man, who, if I may express it in this way, had a sense of heaven , only developed after death.

When we describe the moments after death for today's man, we describe how the person in the picture looks back at first on his life by separating his etheric body from himself. We then describe how he reviews his life in a subsequent period. For older times, life after death had to be described in such a way that people were told: That which you can only attain here through a higher revelation, an intellectualistic view of the world, will appear to you after death. That which you are to achieve here on earth can only exist as an ideal; you will be a free human being after death. — That is what they told older people. The true human being comes when one has passed from this physical world into the spiritual world. That is what they said in ancient times. But what people experienced only after death in ancient times, looking back on earthly life, intellectualism and a sense of freedom, for which all earthly life was preparation, has already been introduced into the life between birth and death by the modern human being. Here on earth, he becomes an intellectual being, here on earth he becomes a being with a sense of freedom.

But for this, he must acquire something on earth in sensory knowledge and in the combination of his sensory knowledge that is initially far removed from his interests. No matter how long we explore through the telescope that which we today explore of the starry worlds: humanly we do not feel inwardly warmed and inwardly enlightened by it. Expeditions are being organized by astronomers and naturalists to prove Einstein's ideas. But no one expects the observations that are being made to be as close to directly elementary human nature as one would have expected from the astronomers of the ancient Babylonian or Assyrian cultures. The modern insights give us a tremendous difference: the lack of interest in values. It may be extremely interesting when this or that biological discovery is made today, but one does not say: By making this or that biological discovery, man comes closer to the divine-spiritual being that he carries in his soul. It is to this divine spiritual being, which he bears within his soul, that man wants to come closer through a separate religious interest.

Nevertheless, today we do not have the right concept of the way in which an older humanity has come to knowledge, even in later times. One need only think of the momentous experience of fate when a man like Archimedes, while bathing, discovered the Archimedean principle and exclaimed, “I have found it!” Just such a single insight was something that one felt as if one had looked through a window into the secrets of the universe.

This warm-heartedness towards knowledge was certainly not present when the X-rays were discovered, for example. One could say that today's relationship to what knowledge provides is more that of gaping open one's mouth than of inward soul rejoicing. That makes a human difference! And this human difference must be borne in mind for the development of humanity.

Something very remarkable emerges from all this. For centuries now, modern people have been experiencing in their lives what they used to have only after death: intellectual comprehension of the world and the consciousness of freedom. But they have not even really noticed it. That is the remarkable thing, that modern humanity has not even really noticed something that it has received from heaven into earthly life. The emotional world has not grasped it at all, the elemental in the human world. One would almost say that it has a bitter aftertaste for humanity. Humanity does not look at the pure thought the way I have tried to look at it in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, where one would rather sing hymns to it than dissect it. And the consciousness of freedom has led people to all sorts of tumultuous things, but not to the realization that something has descended from heaven to earth. Not even the fundamental power of modern human development has been felt purely humanly. Where does that come from?

If you answer this question, then you also answer one of the most important questions of human existence in general. In ancient times, man acquired his knowledge by looking up at the sky, seeking the Logos there, that which the gods spoke to man through the starry sky and the nature of the stars. All that man did here on earth was illuminated by the content of the Logos, and this content was in turn fetched from the stars. Human life would have been meaningless if it could not be given a purpose through knowledge of the stars.

Now, in a very similar sense, everything we acquire internally as knowledge is actually nothing. We acquire it by allowing ourselves to be constrained to botany, zoology, biology, physiology, etc., and at most we allow ourselves to be moved by ambition, by an insight into the necessity of being able to eke out our lives on earth, to all of this. Again, this is a radical statement, but in a sense it borders on reality. For those who attach great ideals to things today, there is still a certain illusionary element through which they reinterpret the matter into an ideal. At least, people who could associate a meaning with the word: I pray a chemical formula. Yes, one must indeed express an important cultural-historical fact, even if it is negative, in such a form!

It takes a Novalis, with his deep and at the same time youthfully enthusiastic knowledge, to feel something like: I pray in the dissolution of a differential equation. Our ordinary mathematicians do not feel very prayerful when they reveal the secret of a differential equation. That which is self-evident, that with knowledge the whole person is engaged at the same time, the whole person feels their indebtedness to the divine, this self-evident fact is not at all self-evident to today's humanity. It is much more natural for those who are rising to the highest achievements of knowledge to be glad when they have the exams behind them so that they do not have to go through these things again. The joy of going through the stages of the mysteries: you don't notice much of that in modern people who go through the exams. At least it is extremely rare for someone today to speak with the full ancient mystery seriousness of that intimate divine deed that this or that professor has done by giving him a dissertation topic and putting him in the position to now pass through the waters of holiness while working on this dissertation topic! But this would be the normal, the obvious!

If you just think about it, you have to say: Yes, down there is the earth with its many things (see drawing page 70, white and green). These many things have been seen by the old cognizers. But they only believed they had grasped them in the right sense by looking up at the stars and bringing down the rays from the stars, which illuminated everything for them in the right way (red).

These ancient cognizers sought the reflection of the starry world in earthly life (lower red), otherwise all that I have indicated below would have seemed worthless to them. Today we pay no attention to what is above, but study what is below. We study it in countless details. When we have surrendered to some kind of knowledge oriented here or there, we have many details in our heads. But the evaluation of these details becomes somewhat indifferent to life, and with it also a certain lack of interest in the high, elementary human. Especially in the actual spiritual realm, this becomes conspicuously apparent.

Vöscher, the Swabian, has already ridiculed how indifferent to a universal human consciousness that becomes, which is to be overcome today, if one wants to struggle up to knowledge, by saying that one of the most “significant” treatises on the subject of modern literary history would be one on the connection between the chilblains of Frau Christiane von Goethe and the symbolic-allegorical figures in the second part of Faust! Why could a dissertation not be written about this connection, as is done about many other things? The methodology that is applied, the human interest that is involved, is, after all, no different in quality from when someone writes a treatise – and this does happen – about the thought lines in Homer's poetry! Yes, we really do acquire knowledge about what people only considered worthy of knowledge after they were able to illuminate it from the knowledge of heaven.

We do not have the knowledge of heaven. We do not look at the copper by looking up at Venus, we do not look at the lead by looking up at Saturn, we do not look at the primeval man by looking up at the constellation of Aquarius, and we do not look at that which passes over into certain inner impulses of human nature in the animal nature of the lion by looking up at the constellation of Leo, and the like. We bring down from the heavens nothing that can explain the earthly to us, but we turn our gaze to the wide-ranging, scattered details of the earth alone.

We need something that brings us valences into the individual, that leads us to see again what someone saw when he saw some earthly object illuminated from the heavens. We have knowledge of many things, but we need a unified knowledge that can radiate into all the individual fields of knowledge and give the individual fields of knowledge value. That is what anthroposophy wants to be.

Just as people once looked to the heavens in astrology to explain the earth, anthroposophy wants to see in people what they have to say about themselves, so that from there everything we about minerals, animals, plants, about man, about everything that can be known in addition to what is scattered, will be illuminated by anthroposophy.

And just as man once looked up at the heavens to understand his life on earth , so the intellectually liberated human being must learn to know himself, so that he can look beyond the moment of death, when he steps out into a spiritual world, and where the gods will look down on what he brings them, what radiates from him. For he should already have become human on earth, whereas before he only became human after death.

How he has become human will be shown through the power he has gained from pure human consciousness. And this pure human consciousness is to be given to him through that which radiates from anthroposophy to everything else, which man on earth can know, but also what man on earth can accomplish.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” thus in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. Man has brought down the Logos from the revelation of the gods in the heavens.

But the Word was made flesh, and not only dwelt among us, but continues to dwell among us. The Logos has become flesh. What was once sought in the heavens must now be sought in man. For the Logos was once rightly sought in the Father-God; in our time the Logos must be sought in the Son-God.

But man finds this Son-God in his elementary meaning when he makes Paul's word true: “Not I, but Christ in me,” when he comes to know himself. All anthroposophy aims to delve deep into the human being. When ancient times delved deep into the human being, what did they find? At the bottom of human nature, the luciferic powers. If modern man delves deep enough into himself, he will find the Christ. This is the other side of the turnaround from older to newer times. With intellectualism and the consciousness of freedom having descended from heaven to earth, and with the Christ having united with humanity on earth, man finds the Christ in the depths of his own being, if he descends deep enough; while older people have found the Luciferian spirituality precisely by going deep enough.

This was also the message that an older student body in the mysteries was to understand particularly clearly: delve down into the human being as it is on earth, and at the bottom of your own soul you will ultimately find that which you must recoil from in terror: the powers of Lucifer. Therefore, look up at the moment of death; only when you have passed through the gate of death do you become a true human being. There you will be saved from what you find at the bottom of your soul here on earth: the luciferic powers.

That was the experience of death in the ancient mysteries. That was why they had to look to the realization, to the depiction of the moment of death in the mysteries, these ancient mystery students.

The modern human being should take on that which has become his: intellectualism and the consciousness of freedom. If he accepts them worthily, so that he permeates all other earthly knowledge and all other deeds with what wells up out of pure human consciousness, as anthroposophy wills, then he finds the Christ-powers at the bottom of his soul. Then he says to himself: Once I looked up at the constellation of the stars to fathom human destiny on earth; now I look at the human being and thereby learn to recognize how this human being, having already on earth become imbued with the humanity of the Christ-substance , shines out to the universe, and how it shines up to the heavens as the star of humanity after passing through the portal of death.

This is spiritual humanistics, which can take the place of the old astrology. This is what instructs people to look in the same way at what the human being can also reveal in himself as Sophia - Anthroposophia - as the stars once revealed themselves as Logia. But this is also the consciousness with which one must imbue oneself. And there one then learns the world significance of the human being. From there one learns to recognize that world significance of the human being that first allows us to study the physical body, which then allows us to study the formative forces or etheric body. But I will mention just one example: If you study the human physical body in the right way, by looking at it from the point of view of anthroposophy, you learn how the human physical body can follow its own forces. When it follows its own forces, it is constantly striving to become ill. Yes, what exists down there in the human being as the physical body is actually in a constant effort to become ill. And if we look up from the physical body to the etheric body, we have in the etheric body the totality of those forces of the human being that are constantly in the effort to restore the sick person to health. The pendulum swing between the physical body and the etheric body is aimed at constantly maintaining the center between the pathological and the therapeutic. The etheric body is the cosmic therapist, and the physical body is the cosmic pathogen.

And we could speak just as well for other areas of human knowledge. And in speaking thus, we say to ourselves: When we are confronted with an illness, what must we do? We must somehow, through certain healing constellations, call upon the etheric body to heal. Ultimately, all medicine does this: somehow call upon the etheric body of the person to heal, because it is the healer. If we approach the ether body in the right way in a person who can be made healthy, if we seek what can come to him from the ether body in terms of healing powers according to his general human destiny, then we are on the way to healing him.

But I will talk about that tomorrow. I will speak about this latter chapter, which has been discussed in connection with today's discussion, tomorrow.

This meeting took place following the Pedagogical Conference.

Dr. Steiner: The first thing I would like to say is that we can be deeply satisfied when we look back over the previous years. The conference was extremely satisfying. The way the Waldorf School was described, the way the various subjects were presented, the way individual speakers gave their presentations, made the conference very good both inwardly and outwardly. The conference most certainly made a great impression upon the visitors. We will undoubtedly overcome the difficulties we confront, particularly the financial difficulties, through presenting such conferences, if we can just hold out long enough to reach as many people as possible.

We certainly need to be thankful to all those who worked to make the conference such an extraordinary success. We need to recognize the significant efforts you made for the conference in spite of all the work you have to do in the school during the year. I only hope that you are not too tired to make this new school year just as good as the ending of the last. You can, of course, assume I fully support everything you have done. I particularly want to thank the people who organized the conference for their enormous work. I think the entire faculty needs to be very thankful to those individuals.

There are two things I believe are important to say now. I want to mention them to the extent that they are appropriate within the faculty. The first concerns general anthroposophical activities, and the second relates to what I believe may be important for future conferences. Nevertheless, I want to expressly emphasize that this past conference was extraordinarily successful.

The first thing I would like to say is that if we want future conferences to be successful, we will need to really understand what is going on in Stuttgart when such a conference is held. In particular, we will need to understand what happens within the Anthroposophical Society itself. If we do not understand the environment in which we live, we will run a certain risk. The Waldorf School did not create this difficult situation, but in the future we must see that the school reaches an understanding with the Society so that if the majority of participants at our next conference are anthroposophists, they will not be in the position of having no opportunity to hear anything specifically anthroposophic. That is, we must avoid having people travel a long distance to a conference where nothing is said about Anthroposophy. This completely ignores the anthroposophical movement as such. That situation clearly formed the background and significantly affected the whole conference, which was itself the result of enormous effort and sacrifice. It would, of course, have been an enormous advantage had someone asked for a specifically anthroposophical session during the conference.

Of course, the anthroposophical committee (actually, there are two) gave no thought to the fact that such meetings would be entirely appropriate, even though they knew a large number of anthroposophists would be here. You should have no illusions about that. A large number of people came with the justifiable expectation of meetings more connected with anthroposophy, an expectation that would be unjustifiable if the conference did not have an anthroposophic background.

You will find genuine supporters for the Waldorf School only among people who understand anthroposophy. You should not expect that the impressions of the moment will have any lasting effect on others or that this conference will not give rise to opposition, which will then be unloaded on me. Even the most wonderful conference, if we forget such things, will give rise to opposition that will be unloaded on me. Things will be better in such cases if we are careful to create an understanding within the Anthroposophical Society. Then we could show that anthroposophy exists within the school, but because of its nature, anthroposophy does not tend to turn what it creates into something specifically anthroposophical. Anthroposophy exists to make something more generally human.

Dr. Schubert emphasized that very well. If you create wonderful rules and find them to be very valuable, but then put them over a hole, you will soon find that those rules no longer exist. That is what we do not consider. We create the most beautiful things, but they exist without any foundation. The foundation must be the anthroposophical movement. We are slowly coming to the same place as the old Austrian empire when the various realms disintegrated and the empire no longer existed. We are faced with the absurdity that there are two newsletters containing absolutely nothing. We face the danger of the Anthroposophical Society disintegrating into a number of individual movements. We face the danger that we will have the Waldorf School, The Coming Day, and so forth, but no longer an Anthroposophical Society. In that situation, there will no longer be any interest for our movement as a whole.

We can be polite to school officials, but you should not expect any success through them. If you believe they can be a source of our success, you are creating an illusion for yourself. That is just the problem, we create illusions. That is something we should not do, or else one day we will find the most beautiful forces poised over a hole. That is something we must avoid, something we must seriously consider. We should not limit the future of the whole movement by allowing the brilliance of such a conference to blind us.

I would also like to mention that in the future we must avoid emphasizing the negative and critical aspects too strongly. The first mention will not have much influence because the people who heard it will soon forget it unless opposition was lying dormant in their souls. That negative aspect existed in even the best lectures, and is something we must significantly reduce. I am certainly not against hitting people with a sledgehammer, but we should avoid being negative. Dr. N.’s lecture was filled with negative examples. Such things eat away at people if they hear them repeatedly. You spoke about experience in history, but then argued horribly against documents in connection with Herman Grimm. Grimm often stressed that we can speak about history only to the extent we have material about it. If you tell people they should base history upon inner experience and ignore documents, they will object, saying, “What does this Dr. N. know about history? He never even studied it!” Then, what you said simply collapses. (Speaking to another teacher) On the next day, you had to show that you do use documents.

In such cases, we certainly need to place documents in the proper light. You can tell people only that we must first illuminate every document. The sun that sheds light on a document cannot come from the documents themselves. If you throw the baby out with the bathwater, you give people new points of attack at each step. Without documents, you cannot do the least thing in history. You can do nothing unless you develop a counterpoint and show that each document has its proper value only when properly illuminated. Such negative situations are enormously detrimental because they continue to grow. It was quite good that you (speaking to another teacher) corrected the situation in a mild way. It was necessary to say that an error had occurred, so that you could present the whole thing as a complete picture. It needed to be corrected from a different perspective. You seem to have been quite near, but could not say something positive about the documents. You should have done that.

Another thing that was a kind of error was to try to enliven the discussion of religion in the lecture “The Artistic Element in Religion Class.” You didn’t say anything in the lecture about the artistic presentation of religion, so the title was not justified. You didn’t connect the discussion about teaching religion with that. Such things simply have a negative effect.

We must make a serious effort to avoid such negative situations. I intentionally wrote an essay about Richard Wahle because I wanted to show how the Anthroposophical Society should interact with the rest of the world, both verbally and in writing. I wrote that essay to illustrate the attitude we should have. When you read the essay, I would ask you to recognize that it handles the question of how we should orient ourselves when working with people in the world outside.

We have to take the positive things into account also; otherwise we will never get past our illusions. It is destructive to work with illusions, and we cannot permit ourselves to be devoted to them in our judgments. We need to be clear that we can move forward only through people who come to us as spiritual virgins. We can move forward only with such people. If you think all of your politeness can change the opinion of a school official, then you have one of the strongest illusions, one that can be terribly harmful. It is important that you keep people’s good intentions, but have no illusion that they will help you. At best, they may help in externalities by not forbidding that you do something. We might summarize the school officials’ impression as, “Things are not so bad at the Waldorf School. It, of course, represents things we believe in.” If you think that opinion is true, then we should close the Waldorf School tomorrow. It would not have been necessary to have started it at all.

You must have no illusion. It is easy to criticize. You do not need to avoid criticizing, but you should allow the criticism to result in something positive. It is important to use these things we learn clairvoyantly to illuminate these things that approach us from outside. If you understand the intent of Truth and Science, you will find that reality lies in the interpenetration of perception and the results of human activity.

Well, that is what has happened recently, at least to the extent that the Waldorf School is affected, and I want to do everything to bring our movement forward. What we need, however, is some kind of communication with the central directors, in the normal sense of the word, about anthroposophical work. That is slowly disappearing in spite of the fact that important members of the committee are on the faculty. You seem to forget you are anthroposophists the instant you become Waldorf teachers. That is not acceptable.

The major failing of the conference was that no one thought of doing something for these anthroposophists who had traveled here from afar and to whom we should have brought something more anthroposophical. It is very curious that we are approached from all sides to convey something about anthroposophy. It is really so; I couldn’t take a step without someone saying something, and those who volunteered to direct such activities did nothing to meet the concrete wishes of members of the Society. On the contrary, they did not even take their own wishes into account. They certainly have wishes themselves. That would change immediately if the various streams, such as the pedagogical, suddenly shifted toward the other side. Now that we have finished the conference, we need to be conscious about taking that into account in the future.

A teacher makes a remark.

Dr. Steiner: Now we need to make a final decision about the classes. The main problems are the 1a and 1b classes. Before Miss Hofmann can continue her work here in the Waldorf School, she will need a year to recover. She cannot use her strength here until she has recuperated for a year. I therefore propose that Dr. von Heydebrand take over the 1a class. I believe that is also her desire. I think we can resolve such problems in this way. The question of who teaches the classes needs to be considered by the whole faculty. I would ask that you say everything you have to say about who teaches each class, both for and against. In the case of Dr. von Heydebrand, there is, of course, no “for” or “against.” Everyone will be happy if she takes over the 1a class. Are there any proposals for 1b? I ask that all of you say what you have to say, since the faculty as a whole needs to agree with who teaches each class.

There is some discussion about Miss N.

Dr. Steiner: Much of the problem lies in the fact that you cannot speak. You can never teach in that way. You really need to get used to the idea of taking a course in speech. You did not complete last year because of the way you present yourself, how you used to present yourself. You cannot speak. When you stand in front of the class that way, you will never finish.

Z. says something about that.

Dr. Steiner: That is true for many. Mr. Z. does not understand that because he has developed a language for himself that works right down into the fibers. You should not underestimate what a difference working to develop your speech makes. If someone does it instinctively, as you do, and it is certainly positive that your voice is so effective, then you should not be surprised that the subject comes up here. Miss N. will have difficulties as long as she does not accept the need of taking a course in proper speaking. (Speaking to Mr. Z.) Your speech carries, and so much depends upon the speech. (Speaking to Miss N.) You will see that you will have a completely different attitude after you have taken some instruction in speech. The one you have now gives the children the impression you are a dried-up old lady. That is what is important. Mr. Z. makes the impression of a lively young man. Why shouldn’t we say such things? So much depends upon these things in pedagogy. You need to get used to them if you are to make any progress in putting aridness aside.

If you took some good speech instruction, you would not have as many colds. I am not at all surprised. Do not underestimate the hygienic influence proper speech can have. Being able to speak properly is very significant. As long as you cannot use your organs of speech properly and one thing runs into another, as long as you do not properly cultivate your organs of speech, you will have colds. I think it is terrible that so many of you have colds. If people would properly “onion” themselves by learning how to speak, colds would disappear.

Marie Steiner: Proper speech often helps getting past colds, but not always.

Dr. Steiner: Well, the fact is that we really need to do something in this direction. I don’t mean that in a moral sense, but aesthetically. There is a discussion about whether Miss N. could or should stay at the Waldorf School. Some of the teachers object to her teaching.

Miss N.: I would find it most valuable if you, Dr. Steiner, would say something.

Dr. Steiner: I already said what I think. If things continue in this way, then we will have enormous difficulties. I would like you to recall, however, that what happens to A could also happen to B. I think that if we continue with this depressing way of looking at things, we could close.

The general opinion has been that I should select the teachers. We should continue with that, but now the problem is that although that opinion has not changed in fact, it has changed in feeling, in how we look at the situation. I may have to pose the question now of whether the faculty members want to select the teachers themselves.

On the other hand, today’s discussion has not changed the fact that it may be better if you were to go to C. I think that might be better. It is not easy to overcome such a mood. That just occurred to me.

It is too bad. How can we make a decision when you want to discuss everything within the faculty? This could happen to anyone tomorrow. In deciding who will take a position here at the Waldorf School, there are so many things to consider that are no longer the same thing when they are spoken in words. It is really very difficult to do when things are said such as, “A person is completely unfit to teach a class.” That is something that could happen to someone else tomorrow, and should not happen here. One such case is enough. It is terribly sad that we have even one such case. I do not think it is completely unfounded, though. Miss N. has been unable to gain the sympathy of a number of colleagues, not just in the question concerning her class. That, however, could happen to any of you.

For those who have experienced the things I have, this may be an interesting story. In Vienna there was a lecturer, Lorenz, who was appointed as the rector, and who then gave a speech about Aristotle’s view of politics. He was now God. His predecessor was a theologian. The assistant rector was very much disliked for a speech he had given in the state assembly. The students decided to stamp him out. This situation was now presented to the rector for a decision. Lorenz went into the class and was greeted with, “Rise.” He said, “Gentlemen, your ‘rise’ is quite insignificant to me. Your ‘rise’ is quite unimportant to me after you have trampled out a man who, regardless of his political opinion, is such a scientific great, someone standing far above me.” Then the students shouted, “Die, Lorenz!” You can learn a great deal from this story. The question is, therefore, who will take over the 1b class. Perhaps we should leave it open for now.

Dr. Steiner reviews the teaching schedule for the 1923–1924 school year and makes a number of decisions.

Dr. Steiner (speaking to one of the teachers): You need to go on vacation for a year. I cannot take the responsibility for your taking a leave due to illness and then reappearing here shortly afterward. When you have been as sick as you were, then you were so sick that I would ask you to go on vacation for a year. Since you participated in the pedagogical conference, it is clear you could have waited to take your sick leave. I am affronted by the fact that you went away and caused so much confusion, then returned and participated in the conference; I cannot say I have very much trust that you will be able to take up your teaching at the beginning of school. I can only suggest that you take a year off. The whole thing is a ridiculous situation.

I have to say that from my perspective, the situation was such a major disappointment that I no longer believe you will be able to teach successfully. This is not a severe rebuke. The work here in the Waldorf School is not a game. We cannot allow people to take things lightly.

You can see that it is not easy for me to take up a second case. Of course, we had to bow to health, but then you must want to become healthy again. It is not a harsh decision to ask you to go on leave for a year.

Anyone can attack me through their personal ambition. Everyone can trample around on me. Those are things I don’t discuss with others. Before 1918, I did not need to speak in that way. Things are terribly misused. This is no harsh rule. It was enormously foolish for you to come again. You really need to gain some strength, and you should not undertake such foolish things again. Were you to continue to teach as you have, I could have no trust. The events have shown that you needed to leave, but then you come back at a time when it is silly to return.

I know those sayings. When people want to come to such a conference, they say it is terribly important. You need to be clear that I can do nothing more than say you need to recuperate for a year. I do not understand why you find that so difficult. You need to get used to undertaking things conscientiously and to feeling responsibility, and not simply skip recuperating because you want to hear certain things now. If you have something important to do, you should also be careful with your health. I am saying that in a very decent way and have good intentions toward you. Nevertheless, you need a year’s leave. (Speaking to one of the upper-grade elementary-school teachers) There is a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with you. A whole group of parents think that you are rude and that the children cannot handle the way you present yourself. That saddened me because I thought the way you taught botany was very good. It is difficult, because people do not see that things come from various directions.

A teacher: I will try to improve that.

Dr. Steiner: I think you should not be too childish in the way you present things to illustrate the subject. It seems to me that you underestimate the children’s souls. You do not live with their souls at the stage in which they now exist. You need to teach without presenting things too childishly.

I wonder if we need to change things in the ninth grade so that we no longer have the normal main lesson. The eighth grade is really the last year of elementary school. In the following grades, we change teachers. It is a question whether we can continue. Let’s take a look at the teachers.

Dr. Steiner discusses in detail the teaching schedule, the subjects, and the class schedule.

Dr. Steiner: In the upper grades a thorough review of mathematics would be included in main lesson. Two hours would be enough for that. If the mathematics teacher takes over the main lesson, then we do not need more time for review.

(Concerning a new teacher) X. will come and be integrated here so that he is not ruined by having to go through the Stuttgart system. It would be good if he could jump in wherever we need a replacement in academic subjects. First of all, we would then have a substitute teacher, and second, he might effectively take over teaching academic subjects in the upper grades. He would have to be guided if he were to take over such a class. We could achieve some kind of relief if we used him to continue what was introduced by one of you teaching a core subject. Otherwise, we could not develop new teachers. This is something that might work well. The problem with these subjects is that there is not enough time for preparation; the teachers are simply not well enough prepared. That is the situation. We can only improve that if you are relieved.

I would like to have X. here for that reason, but there is an additional reason. X. may really achieve something someday. I don’t see that the Research Institute is in such a condition that we should send him there. If we did, he would only stand around. We cannot afford to simply throw young people away when we can include them here. He will do something. That needs to be our standpoint, as then we can properly fill out the positions for teaching academic subjects.

A teacher says something.

Dr. Steiner: (During the discussion concerning hiring somebody to teach humanities) Could your wife take over teaching the humanities in the ninth grade? I have not proposed that as yet, because I thought she had too much to do with the children. We cannot allow it to become common that man and wife are both employed here. When the children are no longer in diapers, it would be a good idea if she could take over literary history and history.

We need to fulfill other conditions when we are under the pressure of having to prepare the twelfth grade for their final examinations. In that case, the teaching has to be very concentrated. We will have to take up the question of final examinations soon. We will have to ask the students questions in such a way that they can easily fail.

The best thing would be if we were in a position to work only with those students who really want to take the final examination. This final examination question is really a burden for us, but there will probably not be very many who really want to take it. Are there many girls who want to take the final examination?

A teacher: In the other upper grades, there are many who want to go into eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner: Then they should not take the final examination. When the eurythmy school is halfway established, we will have to form eurythmy more completely. It cannot remain the way it is now, but will have to be more completely developed. When someone wants to become a ballet dancer, she must undergo training for seven years. We also need to have some supplementary subjects. In time, it will be absolutely necessary to have a genuinely human education there. Related arts such as dance and mime will also have to be taught. If the eurythmy school is to be successful, we must develop it further. Such training will most certainly need five years. We cannot afford to just wildly produce eurythmists. Those who are later to become teachers certainly need to have a complete education. They need to know something about the human being, also. They will need an education in literary history, for example. Slowly, we will have to develop a proper curriculum.

The question now is whether we could free those who are to become eurythmists from those classes they do not want to take. They could then go over to the eurythmy school and learn there.

It would be best if we did not split the curriculum at the Waldorf School with eurythmy. We would have to do things so that when there is a split, those who are moving on would not take the final examination. That is, those who want to have further education in art could not take Latin and Greek.

A teacher asks if the twelfth grade should learn bookbinding and working with gold leaf.

Dr. Steiner: It would be wonderful if we could continue with that.

It gives me profound pleasure to be among our Breslau friends. We have been through grave times which have made it all too obvious that mankind today is in need of something which can enable further development to take place. These catastrophic times are the consequence of a loss of upward momentum in human evolution. But in the soil of Anthroposophy we are tilling forces which can serve us in building up a spiritual life. Therefore I shall not speak too much today about contemporary events, but rather about the knowledge which human beings need, knowledge which they must absorb into their moral impulses. A great deal lives in our soul of which we are hardly aware. But because it is there, and because our soul element is linked to our existence on the earth, it is very important for our life.

What weighs on human beings today is the discordance between what the soul really needs and what present-day science can supply. Scientific knowledge is very demanding, and we ought to ask ourselves what it is that it demands of human beings. One thing it demands, for instance, is that we should accept its view of the beginning and end of the earth. Take the Kant-Laplace explanation of how the world began. A glowing ball of gas was formed by chemical and mechanical forces; it cooled, and when it was cool enough the same mechanical forces brought about the further solidification of everything that later became the kingdoms of plant, animal and man. And as for the future of earthly life and existence, we are told of an end to all life brought about by a gradual re-warming of the earth. Scientists say that physical laws will lead to the death of the earth through overheating. The end of the earth stretches before us like a gigantic churchyard. Between the two extremes, of the chemical and mechanical beginning of the world and its death by warmth at the end, lie all our human aspirations and ideals, all the moral purposes we have ever had or are going to have. The question is, why do such ideals and aspirations arise by chemical and physical means in the first place, if all they are destined for is to perish in the general death by overheating? Of course we can retort that these are theoretical considerations which have little influence on ordinary life. But even if we prefer to evade such questions, they still remain as disharmonies which work right into the depths of our unconscious soul life. They lead to the anxious question: What is the point of our moral impulses, what is the point of our religious ideals, if the whole of earth evolution is doomed to destruction?

The way this question is put shows what I am getting at. For all our moral impulses and all our religious ideals would benothing but an immense fraud perpetrated on mankind, they would be a terrible illusion, if they were destined to be buried in the cemetery of the earth. Eloquent examples already exist of the terrible effect of such soul moods brought about by purely scientific knowledge, but we are often not properly conscious of them. So the anxious question lives on in human hearts. Asking it from the point of view of natural science we have to say: We human beings grew out of nature and our moral ideals rose up in us; but they will perish with the earth. These moral ideals will perish in natural science. Natural science does not allow us to concede that our ideals have an independent, actual, reality. And even though this is no more than a theory, it nevertheless weighs heavily on the human soul.

This fatalistic world view is based, in the final analysis, on faith in the imperishability of material forces. But anyone trying to topple this dogma is considered mad. If this dogma were true, there would be no escape for moral ideals; they would simply be a picture of something that human beings have thought up and figured out. There would be no escape for these ideals if spiritual research could not find the means to give back to people a super-sensible content for their consciousness. This is relevant today. And in this relevant matter we are living at an important turning-point of evolution. Those of you who know me are aware that I do not like saying such a thing, because any moment in time can be called a turning-point. We have to consider in what respect a certain moment is a turning-point.

Let us consider where the knowledge given by natural science can lead us. Look first at the human being in his external manifestation living in the physical, sense-perceptible world. If we do this in an absolute sense, we see no more than a corpse. If we leave everything aside except the physical, sense-perceptible being and if we allow only chemical and physical laws to work on this being, then, by following only the external laws of nature, the human being begins to disintegrate, to dissolve. The forces we recognize with ordinary knowledge destroy the human being.

This alone is enough to refute the materialistic world view. If we say that the external forces destroy the human being, this must mean that from birth onwards people have been gathering forces which resist this destruction. As it dissolves, the corpse is absorbed into the world which we perceive with our senses. It is amalgamated into the sense-perceptible world by the death forces of chemical and physical laws. But what takes place at death inwardly at the level of the soul cannot be perceived by external sense-perception. These inward processes of soul can only be experienced by direct vision in the realm where higher knowledge has its source. This vision shows that outside the body the inward soul element is united with the spirit, with all the spiritual forces that stream through the world, giving it strength. The soul which unites with the spirit after death is then bound up in the spirit in the super-sensible world.

This is a fact which takes its place beside the fact of the corpse. In life the physical body was filled by the soul; in death it unites with the forces of nature. Anthroposophy leads us to a fact of life which is diametrically opposed to the fact of death. The merely theoretical statement of the eternal life of man can never be satisfying. But Anthroposophy introduces the fact that the soul unites with the spirit. The knowledge of natural science, on the other hand, leads only to the fact of death.

The higher sources of knowledge given by spiritual science lead us to what is revealed to the spiritual seeker in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. These stages of knowledge are described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds¹ and also in Occult Science. In the first instance you will find that here are descriptions of stages of knowledge. However, more is given to the spiritual seeker than mere stages of knowledge. Just as natural-scientific knowledge is not just knowledge but also possesses other sides and aspects, so it is with higher knowledge.

Today I shall consider with you something that goes beyond Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as stages of knowledge, something that I discussed, for instance, in the Vienna lecture cycle of 1914² about life after death, but now from a somewhat different point of view. The part of the human being that lives here on earth is a corpse which is united with external physical nature. And just as he is united with the mineral forces below, so is he also united with the higher hierarchies above. Just as in the corpse he grows together with the mineral forces, so above he slowly grows together with, and enters into, the hierarchies. Sometimes people say that they might as well wait until they die to find out what happens then. And they might as well wait to grow together with the hierarchies. This is all very well, but it is not actually the point. It is very important for the human being to grow into the hierarchies in the right way, for we have to admit that to start with he stands in the world in a manner which allows him no inkling of his relationships with the higher hierarchies. Much depends on our becoming aware of these relationships.

The first hierarchy with whom human beings have a relationship we may call the world of the angels. But those who do not recognize the spiritual world—for whatever reason—cannot establish a relationship with the world of the angels, any more than someone who lacks physical sense organs can establish a relationship with the physical world. Angels are the beings next above man, closest to man, yet under certain circumstances we cannot approach them. Only by endeavouring to make a picture of the angel world while we are here on earth can we prepare to form relationships with it. The portal of death leads to the world of the angels if human beings can become conscious after death of what is confronting them.

The second group of higher beings is that of the folk spirits, or archangels. Angels are not folk spirits. Real folk spirits have no individual links with human beings, as is the case with angels. Folk spirits are related to communities and groups of human beings. Even natural science sometimes speaks of the national spirit, but this does not denote an actual being, let alone a spiritual one. From higher knowledge the spiritual seeker knows that folk spirits are real spiritual beings whose position is one step above that of the angels. The human being can grow into this hierarchy, too. But if our inner spiritual experience is not intense enough, our angel cannot lead us with our consciousness to the folk spirit. But since we have to be led to the folk spirit, this happens unconsciously by means of the laws of karma. Either we grow into the folk spirit consciously and with love, or we are forcibly led into the sphere of the folk spirits. When, after death, the moment is reached at which we turn to descend once more to the sense-perceptible world for a new incarnation, then it makes a great difference, as our soul is led down, whether we have consciously united in love with the folk spirit, or whether, unaware of what is going on, this takes place forcibly, under coercion.

This finds expression in a spiritual, a soul, fact. We can be born into a nation because we are related by coercion to that folk spirit, or because we are related by inner love. Those who are able to perceive such things find it outstandingly characteristic of our time that a great many people today lack a sufficiently loving relationship to their folk spirit. This statement hints at the cause for what today brings about disorder among nations. The conflict prevailing among nations today stems from the fact that many people are born with little love for their folk spirit and therefore find themselves in a forced relationship to it. The love which leads us to a particular folk spirit can never bring about a conflict with other nations. We must do everything we can to help people regain a love-filled relationship with their folk spirits. This is most urgent.

As we stand here in life, we have Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as stages of knowledge which can lead to real vision in the spiritual and soul realm. But in the realm of spirit and soul, when our soul is to return once more to the physical world, Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are facts governing events, they are facts of action. There our soul stands in a relationship with whatever it is that it has to achieve out of the cosmos. If we are to manage our life properly it must grant us conditions which make the achievement of its aims as nearly feasible as possible. Thus the discarnate, spiritual human being works through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition towards his reincarnation in the physical world, while the incarnated, sense-bound human being can gain through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition a vision of the world of soul and spirit.

Natural-scientific knowledge is not in a position to recognize the profoundest secrets of life. Such knowledge starts, for instance, with the consideration of a chemical compound. Proceeding to the consideration of a more complicated chemical compound, and so on, it arrives in the end at the living cell, which it regards as nothing more than a particularly elaborate chemical compound. Spiritual science shows that externally the cell is indeed a particularly elaborate chemical structure; but when the living cell, the germ of a new life, arises in the mother's womb in such an elaborate fashion, the chemical laws are reversed and become chaotic. In the germ of the embryo in the mother's womb, in the germ of life, the chemical laws are suspended, reversed, and in the realm of nature this means chaos. Because the germ is chaos, the cosmos can work into it.

Between death and a new birth the human being has an inkling of this. In the first step on the way to a new incarnation Imagination is realized and leads towards reincarnation. In the second stage Inspiration is realized, and this is a far clearer consciousness than our brain consciousness, for Inspiration is a cosmic force. A part of this cosmic force is breathed in, as it were, and streams towards the bodily nature without coming fully to consciousness, rather as is the case with the will. We are unaware of how our will moves our hand, yet our hand moves in the manner required. The spiritual human being approaching incarnation through realized Inspiration stands in relation to this realized Inspiration as does the incarnated human being to the air. When we think about our physical body in the ordinary way, we imagine it to consist of muscles, nerves, vessels, bones. We imagine the same of a corpse. The airy part of our organism we assume to be outside it rather than within. Although we know that we cannot live without air, we still do not consider it as so intimately a part of ourselves as, say, our skeleton. Yet it is a part of our organism. The air as it is outside us, and at the next moment within, only to be outside again at the next, is a part of our organism. It lives rhythmically in us. In a far more extended rhythm we live with the element of soul and spirit. Just as we breathe air in and out, so we also breathe the element of soul and spirit in and out, though for the most part this takes place unconsciously. Physically, too, part of what happens through breathing takes place unconsciously. When the human being consisting of soul and spirit breathes in realized Inspiration, he takes a picture into his soul. He takes it into the dampened down part of his consciousness. And what he takes in is the world of moral and religious impulses. He takes this in as his conscience.

The third stage in the descent to a new incarnation is when the human being makes the transition to what his parents give him. In doing this he is enacting a realized Intuition. So you see that what can be achieved, while incarnated, by way of three higher stages of knowledge, is something that is accomplished as a real occurrence in the realm of soul and spirit on the way to incarnation. Here on earth we ascend to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And on our return from the spiritual world to incarnation we descend from the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is the counter-image, in the spiritual world, of the three higher stages of knowledge.

What does this show us? It shows us that Anthroposophy is not merely knowledge but something which is alive. Through Anthroposophy we strive for higher knowledge in order to grasp the reality of the higher realms of life and in order to fill our souls with the content of what lives in the spiritual worlds. Those whose common sense has helped them to understand what the spiritual seeker has to say, experience something else as well. They can say to themselves that human beings in the state of incarnation between birth and death are constantly counteracting the death forces at work in their body. The forces of death are forever present in the human body, but so are those forces which counteract the forces of death. They are there. If we did not bear the forces of death within us we should never have developed our understanding for our physical environment.

One of the most important facts given to us by higher knowledge is that our forces of intellect are bound up with our forces of dying. Death is in a way nothing but a summary of all the forces of dying which are forever at work in us. But a moral ideal, which can intensify until it becomes a religious ideal, lives in us in quite a different way. It is said that certain natural forces exist which bring it about that plants grow upwards; and these forces are taken to be quite real. But when, on looking into the human being, people find there the driving forces of moral and religious ideals, they are not inclined to accept these as having any reality. Yet there they are, working not only in every human being but also in the cultures of all mankind. Higher knowledge teaches us that moral ideals live in man through the burning up of matter. Matter is destroyed when a person makes moral resolves. The breaking down of matter is the precondition for the building up of moral ideals. What is crucial is the manner in which a human being breaks down matter and the manner in which he can build it up again. External research is still caught up in the prejudice about the indestructibility of matter. But spiritual science shows that man can break through external natural forces. Once we are in possession of an anthroposophical world view we can comfort ourselves in face of the idea of the death of the earth through overheating. For it is this very destruction of matter which ensures for the human being the possibility of building up his moral personality.

If you look deeply into your soul you will find something which consumes and gnaws at the soul of modern man. This something, which consumes and gnaws at the soul, is the fact that modern natural science excludes the moral element from the realm of what is real. Anthroposophy shows how human beings break through natural laws; how the moral element destroys matter, which is then built up again as matter which can be the bearer of a moral world order. All that is contained within the confines of our skin is connected with the dying forces of matter. But what the world builds up again—this has been forgotten by the natural sciences.

In order to discover new moral worlds we must proceed to the question of where matter can be built up. Death is in us at every moment, but so is resurrection. This is where we should look. This, out of the anthroposophical world view, is the perspective we must place before human souls, since the natural sciences have turned their attention for far too long and far too one-sidedly to the forces of dying. It is important to develop the courage to attend to what must be done in order to build up new worlds.

I am assuming that these suggestions will give encouragement and lead to meditations on how to see more clearly what is felt and talked about a great deal, but what ought also to be strongly willed.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved?
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and New birth, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London 1959.

A teacher asks Dr. Steiner to begin the meeting with a short speech.

Dr. Steiner asks about gymnastics class.

A gymnastics teacher: We tried teaching at the same time in the same room. We could just do it with the third grade, but it was completely impossible with the sixth grade. Because of the size of the gymnasium, we were unable to keep the two classes under control. We do not think there is any advantage in continuing in this way. In addition, we also need the gymnasium for teaching eurythmy some of the time.

A teacher: We do not yet have an instrument for the new small eurythmy room.

Dr. Steiner: That is only temporary.

A eurythmy teacher: The new eurythmy room is too small for some of the classes, which is why we have to use the gymnasium.

Dr. Steiner: The so-called “little eurythmy room” is large enough. It is not a little room, it is a large hall. Anything larger would be too large for eurythmy. It is not very fruitful to teach eurythmy in an enormous room. That would certainly not be fruitful.

The fact is that you need the gymnasium so much that eurythmy cannot be taught there. It was conceived as a gymnasium and thus should be used to hold gymnastics class. Where else could you teach it?

Concerning the first two grades, there is not much we can do for now. In the future, though, gymnastics is actually too much for the first two grades. Instead, they should have some supervised play. We should begin with such supervised games as soon as we have a little breathing room, so that in the third grade a transition can be made from games to actual gymnastics. The children need real movement.

The gymnastics teacher: Without increasing the number of hours, we could include the first and second grades by giving them only one hour of instruction.

Dr. Steiner: The third grade has two hours.

How are things with eurythmy in the various grades?

A eurythmy teacher: The first through fifth grades have one hour each; the sixth through eleventh grades, two.

The gymnastics teacher: Due to the large number of classes in the tenth and eleventh grades, we had to move one of the gymnastics classes into the time allocated for shop.

Dr. Steiner: Gymnastics loses less than shop if one hour is dropped. We could talk about it if the question was how to give a complete education without any manual training. That seems preferable to me since the children have a quiet form of gymnastics in their shop class. We have arranged the schedule so that the gymnastics does not adversely affect the periods following, haven’t we?

A teacher: We could arrange to have a games period.

Dr. Steiner: We have no one to teach it, so we can hardly consider that now. It will not be possible to decrease the teaching load until the end of this school year.

The gymnastics teacher: We are certainly not concerned with an overburdening.

Dr. Steiner: Fifteen hours are enough. If you teach fifteen hours, then you need to give two or three hours per day, and that is a lot for gymnastics.

The gymnastics teacher: We want to find a way.

Dr. Steiner: That is true. Nevertheless, you must take the following into consideration. In a school such as ours, we need to develop gymnastics class in a certain way, but that can happen only over time. Next year we may well be able to focus on developing gymnastics for the twelfth grade. At present, we treat it as only a stepchild. We will need to work together on that.

I think teaching gymnastics will present a number of difficulties for you as our Waldorf School develops. The main thing is that, beginning with a particular grade, the purpose of gymnastics will be conscious exercise for strengthening the human organism, a kind of hygienic whole-body massage of the human organism. I think you need to orient yourself more toward the upper grades.

In the lower grades, I am considering having the women work on the games. The authority of the gymnastics teachers should not suffer by first having them play with the children. They should represent what actually occurs in gymnastics. The children should not feel that their games teacher is now teaching gymnastics to them. I am, of course, not belittling games. A female games teacher in the first and second grades would not go on to gymnastics. The children would get a distorted feeling if we don’t make such a change. What I mean with games is movement.

What is important now is to find a replacement for Mrs. Baumann during her illness. Mrs. Fels should take over half the eurythmy classes and Mrs. Husemann, the other half. Mrs. X. would have the more mature students because she is older and more mature herself.

Marie Steiner: Mrs. X. first had quite a shock.

Dr. Steiner: I do not want Mrs. Y. to give the entire instruction, because I want the older children to have a more mature person.

A teacher: Tittmann will be free only after the first of April.

Dr. Steiner: Then there is nothing we can do other than wait. I am really sorry that this situation must continue. I thought it was very difficult that you had to do the French class immediately after art.

A teacher: There is nothing we can do about that.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult, but there is nothing we can do. Twentyfive hours is too much, but we have to wait.

A teacher: We will lose eight teaching days due to the earlier close of school.

Dr. Steiner: We don’t need to cling to our schedule as though it were a great treasure. The exact amount of material per week is not so important.

A teacher: Should we do a longer book in tenth-grade French?

Dr. Steiner: You could use a different book. They should complete at least one book, even if they do not read a lot. Have you thought of something? I think you could choose something shorter that could be completed in the remaining two and a half months. In a class like that, it might be best to read a biography. There is a nice little book called La Vie de Molière.

Marie Steiner: Enfant célèbre.

Dr. Steiner: I would particularly recommend a biography.

A teacher: We read Livius in Latin. Next we will do Somnium Scipionis. I also included Horace, and we will read two or three odes and learn them from memory.

Dr. Steiner: You will certainly take up Cicero?

A teacher: In tenth-grade English, we completed The Tempest, and now we are doing excerpts from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Dr. Steiner: I would prefer that, instead of excerpts, you read the whole book. Making a selection for English is not easy. As soon as you move past Shakespeare, things become difficult.

It may be good to read Macaulay in the tenth grade, but that depends upon how you treat it. This is the age of life where children should learn to characterize in a broad and comfortable way. Biographies, for example Luther’s, are very useful for children at the age of fifteen. They are not very appropriate later, as the children will find them boring. In contrast, I think it would be good to read Carlyle and Emerson in the eleventh and twelfth grades. You might recommend Walter Scott for reading by themselves, but Emerson and Carlyle would be books for the class. Emerson has such short sentences.

A teacher asks about a newly enrolled child.

Dr. Steiner: She could go into the ninth grade. In foreign languages, she would be at the very bottom, but that is not so bad. You should, however, make her acceptance dependent upon her having some place to live, but you will need to do that with some tact. You might even consider trying to find good living quarters for her yourself.

We now have two children of workers at Dornach in the eighth grade, and the tuition has to be paid out of the funds for the building. They will have to find their own living quarters, but they will have to be places where we know that the adults pay some attention to such children. The workers at the building are quite connected to these things.

A teacher: If I were a man and had an apartment I would take some children myself.

Dr. Steiner: Now you tell me you are almost a man.

A class teacher: T.M. and O.Nr. need to be separated in the fourth grade.

Dr. Steiner: With such children, much depends upon what they are accustomed to. It will not make much difference in the first half-year, but afterward for sure. They should be separated. (Speaking to the teacher of the parallel class) T.M. would go to you. He is easier to handle. I think it would be best if you took him.

A religion teacher asks if it would be all right if he were to go on a lecture tour.

Dr. Steiner: If you arrange it with the others, there should be no difficulty.

A teacher: We are striving to awaken a religious mood, but there are some problems with many of the children. X. often ruins the class. He does not like such moods.

Dr. Steiner: He certainly does not like moods, but there is nothing to be done. Even worse could occur. You could use his lack of participation to highlight the seriousness of the material.

A teacher asks about a service for the older children.

Dr. Steiner: I will soon arrange for an offering at the Sunday service.

A religion teacher asks another question.

Dr. Steiner: In connection with this question, we need to return to something we have already discussed. It is important that the youth of our Waldorf School talk less about questions of world perspective. The situation is that we need to create a mood, namely, that the teacher has something to say that the children should neither judge nor discuss. That is necessary, otherwise it will become trivial. An actual discussion lowers the content. Things should remain with simply asking questions. The children even in the tenth and eleventh grades should know that they can ask everything and receive an answer. For questions of religion and worldview, we need to maintain that longer. The religion teacher needs to retain a position of authority even after puberty. That is something I mentioned before in connection with the “discussion meetings.” They need to be avoided. If the children put forth questions of conscience, and you answer them, then there is nothing to say against that.

We also need a second thing. The older students often mentioned that we emphasize that the Waldorf School is not to be an anthroposophical school. That is one of the questions we need to handle very seriously. You need to make the children aware that they are receiving the objective truth, and if this occasionally appears anthroposophical, it is not anthroposophy that is at fault. Things are that way because anthroposophy has something to say about objective truth. It is the material that causes what is said to be anthroposophical. We certainly may not go to the other extreme, where people would say that anthroposophy may not be brought into the school. Anthroposophy will be in the school when it is objectively justified, that is, when it is called for by the material itself.

In things such as Parzival, it is already there, so that you will need to direct attention away from symbols rather than toward them. Wagner’s followers in Bayreuth have gone into much more nonsense about symbols than occurs here. We do not do that here. Parzival has to be taught as a man of the world, not a monk. I think this is something I needed to say today. For the children, of course, much is quite difficult.

It would be best if you discussed symbolism as little as possible. Stay with the facts, the historical background, without becoming trivial. Remain with the facts, not symbols.

A teacher asks about the English teachers who had visited the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: Only women came, and they were quite satisfied. I certainly thought we would have to deal with much harsher judgments.

Discipline is much easier in England. When you go into a boys’ school there, you find only well-behaved boys. You might not find that so nice, but if you love discipline, you will find it wonderful. Modern Englishmen, at least in regard to their external behavior, are close to being insolent. Everybody assures you that they get better by the age of fourteen. That is certainly true in Gladstone’s school. I have observed how they go into the dining hall. It’s something that lies in the temperament of the people. The children are quieter there than here.

A teacher: N.G. is here.

Dr. Steiner: I do not want to have anything to do with that family, even indirectly. Besides N.G., I feel sorry for the children.

I am very sorry to have disturbed the harmonious mood. So much occurred that I referred to as the “Stuttgart attitude” following that terrible misfortune. I could not let things pass by without naming names, because things were really catastrophic. I have to say that was the way things had to be. Due to the nature of the problem, I repeatedly needed to put these things in the proper light. I also would have thought, considering the situation, that no one would have thought of doing something like this. It is quite strange how things that outside, in normal life, would not occur at all, blossom so well in this anthroposophical foundation, the foundation of the Waldorf School that should be kept pure. It would be hard to imagine a normal faculty meeting where someone asks the school principal to say something nice. If we have no self-discipline, we cannot move forward. It is very painful for me that things are as they are. Aside from the fact that I have been unable to determine the actual content of the problem, everything is simply swimming around. If only something would move in a particular direction, but everything is simply floating about. I do not know what people are thinking. The mood here is so tense. We need to give some thought to all this. Certainly one task of the Waldorf School faculty is to cease all of this inner comfort. The fact that things are done in the way they are is a part of these nonmethods. It is really too bad for today’s meeting, since a disharmony has now come into it.

In the interest of the Anthroposophical Society, I had to see that the methods that have arisen here since 1919 do not go any further. Something must happen in the near future in the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society. This is an important question, but people will have to think about it. It would be best not to do things in that way, and better if you helped to improve the situation. You can certainly not say that working together does not make sense, and that everyone should work individually. If that principle had been in effect in 1901, there would be no room for us. People worked together until the end of the war. This kind of separation from one another arose only since 1919 when individuals went off to the great tasks that were begun then. That is the reason for what has unfortunately occurred in the Anthroposophical Society, namely, that the Society has divided into a number of cliques. Before, there was some balance that inhibited the formation of such cliques. Now, there are big and little cliques everywhere, and everything is falling apart.

We cannot say everyone should live like a hermit. A harmonious cooperation should arise from the admonitions of our opponents that became so clear through the catastrophe at Dornach. Learn from our opponents! Our opponents know things very exactly, and they know, at least from their perspective, how to take them seriously, more seriously than is done by the Anthroposophical Society. There is a continual demand for something new, as has happened in Dornach. The Society as such needs to become a genuine reality, not simply a bureaucratic list of so-and-so-manythousand people who barely want to know anything about one another. The Society must become a reality, and there is much we can achieve through the Waldorf School if the faculty would stand as an example of harmonious cooperation. Everyone needs to really give something of themselves, and that is where individual activity comes in, namely, that everyone takes interest in each other’s work. It is simply narrow-minded to always seek the error in someone else. If we fall prey to that error, we will cease to be an anthroposophical society. There is certainly no other real example of anthroposophical activity if it is not here in the faculty. If you do not want to become enthusiastic about anthroposophy, then I do not know how it will be possible to save anthroposophy itself. That is really necessary. The catastrophe in Dornach is the culmination of our opponents’ activity. The Waldorf School faculty needs to take on the leadership of anthroposophical behavior. That is what is necessary.

A teacher asks a question.

Dr. Steiner: I would be happy to give you information. What I said recently about the incorrect methods relates to how anthroposophical matters are treated, not to the teaching methods here. What I have to say about that, I have already said. As of this morning, I cannot say that anything special has resulted. I was satisfied with the little I saw this morning. I thought things would come to a good conclusion. It was clearly noticeable, for example, that there is a greater level of seriousness in the higher grades. There is a much better tone in the higher grades. I see nothing to talk about there. I spoke about incorrect methods in connection with the extent of faculty participation in the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society.

(Speaking to a teacher) It would be good if you were careful to leave out the inner school methodology in your considerations until tomorrow.

We will overcome the problems in the school methodology. The Waldorf School has proven what lies in its basic impulse. Individual problems have arisen, but as a whole, the Waldorf School has proven what lies at its basis. We will overcome the problems. Most certainly, we will move forward with the inner methodology. There is something else that comes into question aside from the general anthroposophical aspect. In connection with methodology, we could try to lift everything from the Earth and move it to the moon where we could perfect it. But, that is something we cannot do with anthroposophical activity. We will overcome the problems at the school because that is an isolated area and can remain so.

Everything was present in the discussions with the leaders of the Movement for Religious Renewal. In the lecture I had to give in Dornach on December 30, I directed everything toward anthroposophists, not toward those working for a renewal of religion. 4 That was clear from ten paces away, but it lead to an argument between the anthroposophists and those of the Religious Renewal. There is now a tense mood and a heavy atmosphere. If we leave these things the way they are, the Anthroposophical Society will be destroyed, and other institutions along with it. It is sad that this all occurred directly following the events in Dornach. We should have guarded against that. We need to do something to relieve it. Those anthroposophists who are not involved with the renewal of religion said nothing, but the anthroposophical perspective should have been maintained, but without rancor. You cannot expect the Movement for Religious Renewal to make things easy for anthroposophists. They are taking the cream and leaving the rest, but the Anthroposophical Society needs to stand firm. That is something of concern to everyone. The school should not shine because the faculty has no concern about the Anthroposophical Society. You need to have a strong interest in it.

Question: The principle of direct observation in teaching has been rediscovered in recent times. Now it turns out that when children leave school, they are helpless in the face of life when they are supposed to think. They have become stuck on the image as a result of direct observation.

Rudolf Steiner: This is an extraordinarily important pedagogical question of the present day, the question of the concreteness or the exclusive concreteness of teaching. Now this question is perhaps not so specialized, but can only be treated exhaustively by looking at the whole of pedagogical thinking. I would like to mention first of all that teaching in the Waldorf school is based on our knowledge of human development. The Waldorf school is certainly not a school of world view, but all the educational skill, all the educational methodology, all the educational handling of things that can be achieved from an anthroposophical state of mind should be put into practice to benefit the Waldorf school. In this practical respect, the insight that children up to about the age of six or seven imitate everything plays a major role. Children continue to imitate up to this age. This means that at this age, at kindergarten age, one should not actually teach in the usual sense, but should rely on the child's ability to imitate. You see, when you have been dealing with such things for decades, as I had to, you gain all kinds of experience. People come to you and ask about all sorts of things. Once a father came to me, very unhappy, and said: What should we do, our boy, who has always been a good boy, has stolen. - I asked the father: How old is the boy? - Four to five years. - Then, I said, we must first examine whether he really stole. - The examination showed that he had not stolen at all, the little boy, even though he had taken money from a drawer. He had only seen every day that his mother gave money to the delivery people from her drawer. He thought: if that's how mom does it, then it's okay - and he just took money from the drawer too. He bought sweets, but did not eat them himself, but gave them away. The child was simply an imitator, according to his age. What he did was simply an act of imitation. The point is that you don't actually lead children of this age to do anything that they are not allowed to imitate. Then begins the age of life that starts with the change of teeth and ends with sexual maturity, which is the actual elementary school age. This elementary school age simply demands – what is demanded today from some party lines must be set aside, the factual must be brought to the fore – this age demands that the child learn to understand and act on the basis of authority. It is of very special significance for the whole of later life, especially for the education during the early years for later difficult times and for everything that can happen in life, that the child during this phase of life, from about seven to fourteen years of age, accepts something in terms of authority. This relationship of a self-evident authority of the teacher and educator to the child is something that cannot be replaced by anything else for the human being in his whole later life. It would be easy to find proof of something that cannot be acquired later in life if one has not had the good fortune to have a natural authority in one's life.

And so it is at this age that the question of object lessons arises. The extreme form of this teaching method, as it is practised today, has grown out of materialism. They want to put everything right in front of the eye. They believe in nothing but what is before the eye; so everything should be put before the child. But not only the difficulties you have emphasized arise, but also others that arise on the part of the teachers. Take the auxiliary books written for teachers, in which instructions are given for visual instruction. The banalities and trivialities that are dished up there are nothing short of outrageous. The instinctive tendency is always to push everything to the lowest possible level. This is the kind of object lesson in which the child is taught nothing more than what he already knows. This is the worst kind of teaching imaginable, which provides insight in this way. The best teaching is that which not only caters for childhood but for the whole of human life. If life is not such that one still has something to gain from one's school days in one's forties or fifties, then the teaching was bad. One must be able to look back on one's school days in such a way that there are living forces in this reminiscence. We also grow as our limbs grow and many other things within us are transformed; everything about us grows. When we teach children concepts, ideas and views that do not grow, that remain, and on which we place great emphasis, then we sin against the principle of growth. We must present things to the child in such a way that they are placed in the context of living growth. Again, we cannot do this with flat, banal object lessons, but rather when we as educators face the child, imponderables then come into play.

I often use an example like this: let us assume we want to teach a child a concept – one that can be derived purely from an understanding of child psychology at a certain age – the concept of immortality. One can make this concrete in natural processes, for example, in the butterfly in the chrysalis. One can say: the immortal soul in man is contained in it, like the butterfly in the chrysalis, only that it develops in a spiritual world, just as the butterfly develops out of the chrysalis. That is an image. One can teach this image to the child in two different ways. The first is this: one thinks, “I am the teacher, I am tremendously clever; the child is young and terribly stupid.” So I will set up this symbol for the child to represent this concept. I am, of course, long since beyond it, but in this way the child is to grasp the immortality of the soul. Now I am explaining this in an intellectualistic way. This is not the way to teach a child; not because what has been said is wrong, but because one is not attuned to the child in the right way. When I immerse myself in anthroposophical spiritual science, it is not an image that makes me feel smarter than the child, but a truth. Nature itself has created the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis at a lower level, and the process of passing through the gate of death at a higher level. If I bring what lives so vividly in me to the child, then the child benefits.

You can't just say that you should do it this way or that, but rather it depends on imponderables, on a certain state of mind that you yourself have as a teacher - that is the important thing. Difficulties arise when one stops at the flat illustrative teaching, which is becoming more and more impersonal; at the age when the teacher should play the important role as a self-evident authority, he withdraws. There are, for example, certain things that should simply be handed down to the child on the authority of an adult. You cannot teach everything to the child on the basis of direct instruction. Moral concepts, for example, cannot be based on direct instruction; nor on mere commandments. They can only be conveyed to the child through unquestioning authority. And it is one of the most significant experiences that one can have in later life, when one has absorbed something in the eighth, ninth, twelfth year, because a revered personality regards it as correct – this relationship to the revered personality belongs to the imponderables of . You reach the age of thirty, and with a certain experience it comes up from the depths of human consciousness; now you understand something that you actually took in twenty or thirty years ago, at that time on authority. This means something tremendous in life. This is in fact a living growth of what one has taken in during childhood. Therefore, all this discussion about more or less intuition is not so important. These things must arise out of the object itself. Also, the discussion about more or less thinking and so on, is not very important. The important thing is that teachers are placed in their proper place, that the human element is brought together in the right way in a school organization. That is the main goal. In real life – and the life of teaching and education is a real life – you can't do anything with curricula or anything that can be formulated in paragraphs. Because if three or six or twelve people sit down together, no matter what their antecedents are, what circle they come from, what education they have, they will be able to work out an ideally beautiful curriculum. If you somehow put something together in paragraphs from your own reflections, it can become ideally beautiful, the most wonderful things can be included. I am not mocking; it does not have to be bad, it can be extraordinarily beautiful and magnificent, but that is not the point. What matters is that in the school, which has a number of teachers, real life takes place; each of these teachers has his or her special abilities, and that is the real thing that has to be worked with. What use is it if the teacher can point out: this and this is the teaching goal? That is only an abstraction. What he can be for the children as a personality, in that he stands in the world in a certain way, that is what matters. The school question in our time is essentially a teacher question, and from this point of view all the more detailed questions, such as the question of teaching by demonstration and the like, should be treated. So can you, for example, teach children in an extremely effective way through teaching by demonstration? I must say that I feel a slight horror when I see these tortures with the calculating machines in a class, where they even want to transform things that should be cultivated in a completely different way into visual instruction. If you just want to go further with pure visual instruction, you will end up with clumsy children. This has nothing to do with phenomenology or phenomenalism: to develop proper phenomenalism, one must first be able to think properly. In school, we are dealing with pedagogical methodology, not scientific methodology. But we must know how closely proper thinking is connected not only with the brain and the head of the person, but with the whole person. It depends on the way in which someone has learned to think, on the skill in his fingers. For in reality, man thinks with his whole body. It is only believed today that he thinks with his nervous system, when in reality he thinks with his whole organism. And the reverse is also true: if one can teach a child quick thinking in the right way, and even presence of mind to a certain extent in a natural way, one is working for physical dexterity; and if one carries this quickness of thinking to the point of physicality, then the children's dexterity also comes to one's aid. What we have now established in the Waldorf school is much more important: instead of the usual visual instruction in manual skills, the children move on to self-forming, through which they get a sense of the artistic design of the surface. This then leads in turn to the mathematical conception of the surface in later years. This living into the subject matter, not through mere visual instruction for the senses, but through a living together with the whole environment, which is achieved for the whole person, is what we must work towards.

I just wanted to point out that such questions should be placed in the context of pedagogical thinking as a whole and that today we spend far too much time discussing the specifics.

Rudolf Steiner in response to other questions: What has been said and often emphasized before must be firmly held: the Waldorf School does not want to be a school of world view as such. The fact that it is based on anthroposophical soul-condition is only the case insofar as it is implemented in educational practice. Thus, what is at issue in the Waldorf School is the development of what can be achieved by purely pedagogical means from the anthroposophical movement. The Waldorf School does not want to be, and cannot be, a school of any kind that teaches a particular worldview. That is why the Waldorf School has never claimed – until now – to take responsibility for the religious education of the children in its care. What the one or other anthroposophist may think about questions of world view is not important. The point is that anthroposophy in the school and all that goes with it is intended to have an effect only in pedagogical practice. For this reason, the religious education of the Catholic children was handed over to the Catholic priest and that of the Protestant children to the Protestant pastor. Now it happened – this simply arose from the contemporary circumstances – that there were quite a number of dissident children who would actually have grown up without religion. For these children, religious education is now provided, but it is not considered part of the school, but rather it presents itself as free religious education alongside Protestant and Catholic religious education. We have at least had the success that children who would otherwise not have been admitted to any religious education at all now grow up with a religious life as a result. This is a free religious education that is taught by someone who understands it and is called to do so, like the others who teach Catholic and Protestant religion. However, it must be strictly maintained that the intentions of the Waldorf School are not to promote any particular world view. The aim is not to indoctrinate children with anthroposophy but to apply anthroposophy in practice. So questions on this topic are irrelevant. At the beginning we had to find an appropriate approach to what follows from practice. We have our views about how a seven-, eight- or nine-year-old child should be taught, and these are appropriate. We believed that we had to decide these things on the basis of purely objective principles. Now, of course, the Waldorf school is not an institution for hermits or sects, but an institution that wants to fully engage with life, that wants to make capable people out of children for the sake of contemporary, very practical life. Therefore, it is important to organize the lessons in such a way that, on the one hand, the strict pedagogical requirements are met, and on the other hand, it is important that the Waldorf school is not just any institution for eccentrics. I then worked out the matter in such a way that from the time of entering school until the completion of the third class, you have an absolutely free hand in the individual years, but by the time they have completed the third class, the children are ready to transfer to any school. From the ninth to the twelfth year, you again have a free hand, and then the child must be ready to transfer to any other school, and the same applies when they have completed primary school. We are currently setting up one class each year; what happens next remains to be seen.

As you can see, it is not a matter of working from party-political or ideological considerations, or anything like that, but purely of putting Anthroposophy into educational practice. The ideal would be that the children initially – because anthroposophy is only developed for adults, we have no children's teaching, and have not yet been in a position to want to have one – would not know that there is an anthroposophy, but that they would be kept objective and thus placed in life. These things cannot be achieved in the ideal; no matter how hard the teacher tries to remain objective, one child will live in a circle of parents and the other in a circle of parents; there are also anthroposophical fanatics, and their children bring anthroposophical mischief into the school, as well as all kinds of other things. It must be made absolutely clear that it can never be a question of the Waldorf School in any way being a school of world view or anything of the sort. It is not that at all, but it wants to make children into capable people in the immediate present, that is, in the life in which we are placed within the state and everything else, so that they are capable within it. It is self-evident that the Waldorf school does not bring the ideas of threefolding into the school. This cannot happen through the efforts of Waldorf education. No party politics are brought into the Waldorf school from the anthroposophical side.

Question: Isn't the methodology that the pastor uses somewhat opposed to the rest of the teaching? Isn't there a conflict here?

Rudolf Steiner: You can't achieve anything completely in life. It would be very nice if we could find not only a Protestant pastor but also a Catholic one who would teach according to our methodology. As I said, our school only wants to put pedagogical practice into practice, not a worldview. The other can go hand in hand with this. Now it is self-evident that in free religious education – because the question was asked about such education to be taught only by anthroposophists – our methodology is also used. We would very much like the Protestant and Catholic education to be taught in the same way, but we have not yet achieved that.

Question: What is the content of the material taught to anthroposophical children?

Rudolf Steiner: The material is determined in such a way that an attempt is made to take the child's age into account. This is what is always at the psychological basis. That is why it is important in all things that they are most effectively brought to the child when they are introduced at the exact age at which the child's inner being resonates most strongly with them. It is a fact that in the seventh or eighth year of life, little is achieved with objective gospel or Bible knowledge, and nothing at all with catechism knowledge. It is not absorbed by the child. This is an anthropological law. On the other hand, everything religious that can be directly formed from a certain shaping of natural processes is very well absorbed by the child at this age, all ethical and genuinely religious concepts that can be formed from natural processes. Above all, one can lead the child to religious feeling indirectly through images of nature.

It is only from the age of eight, or even closer to nine, that one can lead the child to the actual Christian feeling. Only then does he begin to grasp, for example, what lies behind the figure of Christ Jesus. The concepts that the child must be taught if it is to grasp the content of the Gospels are only really assimilated by the child in the course of time. It is good if it has a foundation and is only properly introduced to the content of the Gospels around the age of nine, and then gradually led up to the deeper mysteries of Christianity. It must be emphasized that this free religious education is, in the most eminent sense, a thoroughly Christian one, that is, the various denominations that take part in it are introduced to true Christianity. It is the case that if you are a teacher at the Waldorf School, you have come to this [Christian] conviction yourself, precisely from the anthroposophical point of view. You have come to Christianity from this side. You may put it differently, but children are introduced to real Christianity. Just as we leave Protestant and Catholic religious education to themselves, we also leave religious education from an anthroposophical perspective to them entirely. It has never been my aim to ensure that children attend these free religious education classes. They came in large numbers, but it is really not the aim to damage the external reputation of the school by making it happen in such a way that it could be said to be a school of world view. One does not want to be that at first. That is why we are careful about free religious education and only give it because it is requested.

Many souls are sleeping their lives away without a glance toward the spiritual world, without any connection, through prayer or otherwise, with the spiritual world. Think of a sleeping city where the souls have all gone out of their bodies. Whatever these souls took in of a spiritual nature during the day now lives on in them. If they took in nothing, nothing can live on in them during the time between falling asleep and waking up. But if something spiritual is experienced while awake, or if something is raised to the spiritual through prayer or meditation, then this will be for the dead, when it has been carried over into sleep, just what the cornfields are for living persons. If nothing thrives in the cornfields, people starve. What people take with them into sleep is like seeds for the fields where the dead sojourn. What we bring with us in the way of spiritual thoughts, of devotion to the world of soul and spirit, is what the dead live on, nourish themselves with, consume. And as famine ensues here on earth if the fruits do not thrive, so a sort of famine ensues when souls live materialistically and carry nothing with them into sleep. This is the connection between life in the spiritual world and life on earth.

Now someone might say: Maybe there will be a great number of deaths over there. That cannot happen. The dead souls can experience hunger and the pangs of hunger, but the dead cannot die. This brings us to an important question.

You see, death is something known only in the physical world. It is present only in the physical world, and not at all in the supersensible world.

Let me point out something to you. If you go through all the sciences here, you will find that they have worked out all sorts of laws. But science has one ideal, an ideal that one would have to say was fantastic, even if it could be attained; and that is to know life directly. Chemical and physical laws can be investigated any time, but to investigate life is an ideal. Life can never be understood by means of physical laws, because it flows into the physical world from the higher worlds.

Thus, life is something that is not known here, while death is something that is not known in the higher worlds. It is senseless to think that death could occur in the higher world. Pain and suffering have a meaning in the supersensible world, but not death. The beings of the higher hierarchies know nothing about dying.

The angels veil their faces before the mystery of man's creation, they know nothing of it ... They can learn about it only through what they are told by beings who enter the physical plane; they cannot know it directly. This is true of all the beings of the higher hierarchies. Only one of them learned to know death, the Christ. This is the profound significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, that a being became acquainted with death through terrible suffering.

If one thinks this over, meditates on it, one may come to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and to see Christ as the only being that learned to know death.

So, what happens to the souls who are starving over there for the reasons we have described? They feel their connection with the earth fading away. They are living in a world where they must say to themselves: The earth is being withdrawn from us, it no longer enters into our existence. And for the disembodied persons this means great pain, terrible suffering. It means that these souls begin to long for death. But since there is no death there, their hunger causes endless pain as they long for death.

Thus, we see how spiritual science works as seed for the dead, filling them with the proper nourishment. Only if we know things like this can we form a right opinion of spiritual science and see that it is not a theory but an elixir of life, and that it bridges the gulf between the living and the dead. We must see that: through it our souls can build a living bridge to the dead. And because this is so, we must shape the anthroposophical work in the branches in such a way that we learn what a living person can do for one who has died before him. The simplest thing he can do for him is to read to him, read ideas, concepts, notions that are related to the supersensible world. Spiritual science is a language that can be understood by the dead as well as the living. And it can be of service not only to those who occupied themselves with anthroposophy while they were alive, but also to those who would have nothing to do with it. Those who were already anthroposophists here will feel it as an especially good deed if we read to them.

It is often objected that the dead, being already in the supersensible world, must know all about it and thus have no need of what we read to them on the subject.

My dear friends, the earth is not only a vale of tears, it is something that has a real efficacy. The dead can look at the supersensible world, but they cannot form ideas and concepts from merely looking. After all, there are animals on earth. They can look at things, but they cannot form concepts as men do. If the earth had never come to be, the human soul would live in higher worlds but it would never attain concepts about the higher worlds. Men have to go through life on earth if they are to form concepts and ideas. So, a soul that goes through death without an inkling of the spiritual world will live there without experiencing any of the concepts and ideas that we are able to study here through spiritual science. It would have to return to earth to do this.

Thus, a soul can be helpful on earth by reading to the dead, because it can be understood by the dead. And even if the dead persons took in nothing of spiritual science while on earth, we need not assume that they will reject it after death. On the contrary, many who raged against anthroposophy and wanted to know nothing of it are now yearning to hear about it. Not only the things around us are entangled in Maya. There can be a Maya that overcomes a person who rages against spiritual science. What happens in the depths of the soul is often very different from what is on the surface. A person may work up a rage in his daily consciousness, yet have a great longing in him. It is quite hopeless to try to bring such a person to anthroposophy, but in his soul, he may be a better anthroposophist than others. After he dies, however, the Maya is lifted. Then we see what was in the depths of the soul. Here the soul raged, but now the longing comes to the fore. It may be that our reading is in vain, but this we must risk ...

...

We come into closer connection with the dead if we devote ourselves to anthroposophy in the right way. We must fill ourselves with understanding for the necessity that spiritual science should make an impression at the present time.

The more we work with spiritual science, the more we notice that the dead also work back upon the living. For example, in educating children who have lost their fathers at a very early age, we must take this into account. Often one can feel the father sending an influence from the spiritual world. I once had to tutor children whose father had died early. I tried to train them in my own way, but it would not work, simply would not work. But when it occurred to me to allow for the influence of the father from the spiritual world, then it went very well ...

...

If you work out something about incarnations in a clever theoretical way, it will usually be wrong. It must seem strange that Raphael was the same person as a thorny character like John the Baptist.

How could it happen that this thorny man, who had to pave the way for the Mystery of Golgotha in such a violent way, reappeared as the gentle, pliable, charming Raphael? But look at this. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, died when Raphael was eleven. He was a painter. He was not a great painter so far as external achievements go, but he had great ideas in his head, although he could not put them on camas because he had no technical skill. He was also a poet. There was a great deal of fantasy in him, but the physical capacities simply were not there. He went early through the portal of death, and then his forces worked into his son. In Raphael's hands and imagination worked all that his father could send into the physical world. One can say that the old Giovanni Santi was a painter without hands in the supersensible world, for in a wonderful karmic relationship he supplied, in combination with the Christ-filled individuality of the Baptist, what came to expression in Raphael. The supersensible world had to work with the physical world to achieve this result. It shows how the so-called dead are able to influence those who have been left behind ...

...

Life on earth has another important mission. When we have gone through the portal of death, if we are not to be lonely, if we are to know something of other souls, we must meet these other souls. We could be together with them there, yet know nothing about them. We must make some connection with the souls here in order to be acquainted with them over there. In the spiritual world souls can walk through each other and know nothing about each other. It is important for those over there that they be read to by persons whom they have known here. The connections we make here are also connections over there. We found societies and build up friendships on a spiritual basis in order to establish connections that will endure beyond death. Not as a mere whim, but as a need that extends beyond death, we are trying to bring our spiritual life into a sort of societal form. Thus we see that, by building up connections with other souls here on earth, we make sure that we will not be hermits in the world between death and a new birth, that we will have a sociable life there as well as here. We will have understanding for the other souls after death only if we try to see into them now.

Therefore, in order not to be shut off from more remote souls, we interest ourselves in their life. For instance, we study religions because we cannot know much about other souls if we are not familiar with their beliefs. We build a close tie with the souls that are near to us. But we can also have some connection with the people whose religious beliefs we study. We must learn to understand seers and to perceive that they cannot do otherwise than bring to other men what they themselves see, in order that what is needed may come to pass in the world and the mission of the earth may be fulfilled.

It must be conceded that over there only those souls who have taken in something spiritual here can have a full consciousness of their influence on the physical world. And since we should learn more and more about these matters, I will mention a fact that is important even if it is not easy to understand. Let us take a soul that never bothered about the supersensible world while it was here. This soul can work on the physical world with its intentions. But although this soul can see the souls that have remained behind—at least, if they know something about the spirit—it is not aware that its intentions are working on the physical world. This knowledge is lacking. There is after all a certain difference between living in immediate communion with your fellow men and being hindered from having such communion so that your intentions reach them only invisibly. You would see everything as in a mirror. The dead person who entered the spiritual world without spiritual knowledge sends down his intentions, but he is not conscious of doing so. This is far less satisfying for him than if he knew: Now you have this intention and you are sending it down.

This direct knowledge of the connection with the living is available only to those who had some kind of spiritual life here or to those who are instructed by the reading of spiritual ideas after death. The reading can replace the knowledge. And it will more and more be the case that men here on earth will achieve consciousness of the influences of the dead, so that there will not be a one-way influence by persons here working on the spiritual world, but persons here, as they learn more about the supersensible world, will be aware of what is coming from over yonder.

We are only at the beginning of anthroposophical development. Therefore, what is being said now will be little heeded. But it will be heeded more in the future. One will have moments when one sees quite clearly how the dead are working. Not every moment of our lives is favorable, but people who fill themselves with spiritual science will base such moments. We really experience very little of what is going on around us. We experience only what happens near us from hour to hour. But that is the least of what is really there, or could be there. Take the following example. Someone goes to work at eight o'clock every morning. His way leads through an old garage. One day he is delayed in starting, and when he comes to the garage he sees that it has collapsed. This happened just at the moment when he would normally be passing through.

Such a case shows how much does not happen that really could happen in our lives. How do you know what would have happened to you if you had crossed the street three minutes earlier than you did? Admittedly there are karmic necessities here, but there are also thousands of possibilities that do not become facts. What actually occurs is one of innumerable possibilities. Just these moments when something could have happened but did not do so because we, so to speak, missed the opportunity. Just these are the right moments for glimpsing the spiritual world. Take another example: You miss a train through being delayed. You should accept this calmly because there may be karma behind it. You should cultivate calmness, and if you do, you will notice a shadowy thought arising in such moments when some accident could have occurred but did not. This thought will be something that a dead person is saying to you, something that may be an important communication from over yonder.

In order to receive a direct communication from the spiritual world, we need a certain soul-training. Spiritual science can furnish such a training. This can go so far that through someone who has died before us we experience, for example, that he is continually concerned about us. If he died very young, he has conserved certain forces that he had in his life. These forces are still available to him and, if the conditions are favorable, he can project them into earth-life. Perhaps the dead person loved us and wants to send us his forces. And we use these forces, although we are not conscious of this. Then it happens that we avoid an accident, by missing a train or something of the sort. Then we see, like a living dream-picture, the imagination of the person who loved us and is sending us his forces. We have an inkling of him, and he shows us that he is concerned about us. We will know how to understand this.

Think how the love that souls have for one another can be increased if one knows that one is not torn away from those whom one leaves here, but can still work for them. And this working will gradually reach the point where a bridge can be built to the souls. If one thinks in this way of the souls that feel themselves close to the dead and strengthen their love through the possibility of further active loving, then the love between soul and soul will be kindled through what spiritual science can give, and this can really be something very substantial when compared with what usually exists as love today. Souls will be brought together in the right way for the first time when people realize that the dead and the living belong to one world.

To bring people to understand that life here and life yonder are only changes of form, this is part of the mission of anthroposophy in our time. And we understand this mission only if we see that through spiritual science we tear away the wall that now seems so threatening because materialistic attitudes are spreading so widely over the earth ...

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In the life between death and a new birth the soul is no less occupied than here. The circumstances over yonder are not the same as here, but they are prepared here in earth-life ... Continually flowing into the physical causes are forces that come from the powers of the higher worlds. If one has had no conscience here, he will have to go through something terrible. He will become the slave, the servant, of the beings who have to bring illness and early death into the world.

There are persons who generate enthusiasm and love, zeal for their work; who do gladly what they must do in accordance with their capacities and their karma. There are also many vocations in which people really cannot work with any enthusiasm, and this will be the case more and more. Therefore, it is necessary that souls who, in spite of it all, punctually discharge their duties, should have something else to which they can turn with enthusiasm. Through spiritual science one can have something that he can do with love and enthusiasm, and through which forces will develop in one's soul. Thus, we can become the servants over yonder of those beings of the higher hierarchies who pour freshness, growth, and health into earth-life.

All these connections enable us to look beyond death and know that we belong to the macrocosm, that we are not living for physical existence alone while on earth but are developing important forces that will come into their own between death and a new birth. We become able to live in such a way that we do not hinder the fruitful development of mankind, but rather generate forces that can further it. We can regard this as the mission of anthroposophy.

Answers to Questions

It should be a selfless service that one does with the reading. The dead understand our speech for 4 or 5 years after dying. Our thoughts for a longer time.

Photographs are of no use in finding the dead. Handwriting is better. You will not succeed in finding them with photographs. The connection is achieved much better by quietly concentrating on their handwriting.