The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! It is quite natural that where personalities with very different starting points are together, difficulties of understanding arise, and such difficulties must arise, especially on the most important points. I can only try to overcome these difficulties little by little by guiding you slowly towards the things. In the long run, nothing can be achieved in these matters with ordinary questions and answers, and so it seems necessary to me, also with regard to the questions that have been raised, that I continue a little longer in the way of looking at things that I presented to you here yesterday afternoon, and which, at the point where we are now, makes it necessary for us to engage somewhat with the work of redemption as such. This was also one of the questions that was asked in the form of: What is the difference between the Lutheran idea of redemption and that which arises, for example, from anthroposophical contemplation?

This question cannot actually be asked so simply, and in particular it cannot be answered so simply. Rather, it must be characterized on the basis of its foundations. It is particularly necessary to be clear about the fact that there is a fundamental difference between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church precisely in the understanding of the work of redemption, but that there are also many other nuances to be considered in the understanding of this matter outside of these two broad categories. I must therefore discuss the act of Salvation as such, and then we will see how the concept is initially nuanced in Catholicism and in the Protestant Evangelical Church.

Now, we have the work of redemption in the first place in such a way that it confronts us in the deed of the Mystery of Golgotha. This deed of the Mystery of Golgotha, understood and presented as an objective historical fact, is what must first be brought together in the form of the question with what this work of redemption is in relation to man; let us say: In what way is the deed of Golgotha a work of redemption for man, from what does it redeem him, and so on? — But this question cannot really be answered any differently for today's consciousness of time than by also taking into account the subjective factor of how the work of redemption is experienced in the individual Christian personality. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of anthroposophical life, and who confuse much of the content of anthroposophy with what they encounter in the various theosophical views of the present day, very easily, I might even say very carelessly, characterize the opposition as follows: The Christian doctrine of redemption is the redemption through Christ Jesus and can therefore only be sought in the relationship of man to Christ Jesus, while the [theosophical] doctrine of redemption actually presupposes self-redemption, because in the successive in successive earthly lives, he would perform all deeds connected with his karma in such a way that he would lead [himself] out of a sinful existence into a sinless one; so there is self-redemption.

Take the numerous, and indeed intelligent, personalities – and in the present day their number is increasing day by day – [who convert from the Evangelical Protestant Church to the Catholic Church.] You can be sure that if something real does not happen in time, there will be a great influx from Evangelical Protestant areas to the Catholic Church in the future. It is becoming more and more apparent that what, in certain respects, leads to a kind of nullity in the Protestant Church that still exists today, as was so aptly characterized yesterday evening, is felt by many somewhat deeper people today, and this leads them back into the fold of the Catholic Church. It is absolutely the case that if we pay attention, we can experience this today in large numbers, and if something right does not happen, we will experience it, as I said, very, very strongly. My dear friends, discussing these things is something that could cost people very dearly in the near future. Always wanting to discuss and not considering that under this discussion the majority, precisely in the form of the most intelligent personalities, disappears. To single out one example, we need only look at a personality such as Friedrich Schlegel, the German romantic who returned to the Catholic Church. If we want to understand what actually led a personality like Friedrich Schlegel back into the fold of the Catholic Church, we have to look at the person as a whole. What led such a personality back into the bosom of the Catholic Church was basically the mystery of the sacrifice of the Mass; at least, from what I know of Friedrich Schlegel, I have never been able to form any other view than that it was the mystery of the sacrifice of the Mass. He came to this realization at a certain point in his life: everything that was given to me in a theoretical way while I belonged to the Protestant community is actually an outer work, something that does not place me in any reality; the moment I understood - so he said to himself — how a mystery is actually accomplished in the sacrifice of the Mass, whereby the mystery of Golgotha can be present in its reality at every moment, I knew how I could be religiously placed in a reality. — That is roughly the feeling that we can imagine of Friedrich Schlegel's conversion, if you will, to Catholicism.

Now, we are dealing with the fact that the path from the mystery of Golgotha to the individual believers is mediated by the priest in such a way that what happened at Golgotha is transferred from the ordained priest to the individual believer through the sacrament. The process itself is one that takes place entirely outside of subjectivity. And then, within Catholicism, we have to move on to a completely new area, I would say, if we now want to find the subjective correlate to that which takes place as something completely objective, as something that takes place in the external world. The only thing that matters in the Catholic Church is that simply by the existence of this church, a process has been created that unfolds in time and connects the individual Catholic, no matter what age he lives in, with the Mystery of Golgotha through the continuity of the church. We have, then, first of all, to look at the actual process itself, and see what has been accomplished in the course of time, from the Mystery of Golgotha to the moment when anyone receives the sacrament. We must therefore see in this process an essential element, something that is needed by the divine government of the world in order to guide earthly evolution to its goal. This must then be strictly separated from what happens within the Catholic Church. The further is to educate the individual through instruction and other means that are permitted within the Catholic Church, to bring him to an inner, and indeed to a full inner understanding of what is actually happening to him as a Catholic. He must therefore be taught to be seized by that which, however, happens to him in full objectivity. I know very well that this seems a bit radically expressed, but it is absolutely necessary to express it not as some would like to express it, who believe they have to excuse Catholicism before the world, but as it is expressed by those who are actually the ecclesiastical authorities. It is also about the individual being brought to an understanding, to an active understanding of the context of what is emanating from the Mystery of Golgotha through the means of grace of the sacrament in the individual, in his time and in his place, in the sanctification of each work, in the understanding of activity. At the most, it can be understood by the individual as a sin if he receives the sacrament unworthily; he can thereby commit a sin, but he cannot prevent the objective content of the event, the objective process of the event. Thus, for example, according to the Catholic view, I can receive a sacrament unworthily and thereby incur a grave sin, but I cannot prevent the process that takes place in all objectivity. I can also incur a grave sin as a Catholic priest if I administer the sacrament as an unworthy priest, but I cannot possibly prevent the effect of the sacrament. If I had to say at first that only in isolated cases can what I believe to be an indication of an objective event, namely that the aura around the transubstantiated host after transubstantiation , can at most be understood to mean that someone who today informs themselves about these things through supersensible vision can gain insight from such appearances, from such observations, that it is not as the Catholic Church presents it. But let us first get an exact idea of how the Catholic Church presents it.

Now, what I said in this sense, that one goes to see, so to speak, whether what the Catholic Church thinks is true, the Catholic Church would consider that a terrible sin, it would see it as the work of the devil. The Catholic interpretation would be to say: If someone goes around checking whether the host has an aura around one priest and not around another, then he is possessed by the devil, who wants to whisper an erroneous idea into his ear about what actually exists in Catholicism. So what I have just said is, in the sense of the Catholic Church, nothing more than a deception that comes from the enemy of Christ Jesus. That is how the Church must see it, and it cannot see it any differently if it remains within the bounds of its own understanding and if it does not want to apologize to the world. The views that one must have are quite strict. The Catholic Church makes this possible by including Romanism in its conceptual world, which can do such a thing; it makes it possible to find very sharp conceptual contours for these things. In fact, these things appear much sharper when they are presented in a Romance language. If you express them in a Romance language, for example in Latin, then it is the case that these conceptual contours can be produced with extraordinary clarity, even in modern Romance languages. However, as in modern French, the concept can evaporate and it flows out into a mere empty shell of a word. But even a mere empty phrase can represent something quite sharply defined, so that one must say: In those areas where priests are trained in the correct concepts, they are trained to a very, very sharp definition, and in such a way that this desire to grasp concepts firmly actually dries up all of life. I myself have seen the difficulties that some Catholic priests go to in order to understand it, priests who celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass daily. They usually start from a careful Aristotelian definition in order to understand how the material substance of the bread and wine can actually be transformed into the real body and blood of Christ Jesus, but of course a truly educated Catholic priest cannot have the slightest doubt that this is the case. He can only strive to get ideas that can explain it to him in some way; of course he is allowed to research this, but he must not doubt the content of the dogma. The goal of science is something quite definite for the Catholic, but within the limits of what lies between human abilities and the goal, the Catholic is absolutely free. Therefore, Catholic science also always relies on its freedom and then recognizes from certain points of view that the goal is not actually a contradiction in terms of the freedom of science, because this goal is of course also present elsewhere. This is something that is always coming back to. It is absolutely clear, for example, that if we have hydrogen in one test tube and oxygen in the other, that through a certain process the two combine to form water, and it is only our task to penetrate this inevitably established fact with our concepts. It is the same with the truths of revelation; they are also there, and they must likewise simply be permeated with the concepts. Science, according to Catholic scholars, is no freer in the field of natural science than in the field of revelation. In the one case, nature provides the objective, in the other case, the content of revelation. And if we add to this that the believing Catholic has no different relationship to revelation than to nature, that it is basically the same to him whether something is revealed to him through what appears as revelation, let us say, the Golgotha mystery and so on, or whether, on the other hand, things are revealed to him through his intellect, these two revelations are simply the same for him, and science is completely free for both. If you call it free in one case, you must also call it free in the other.

It must be clearly understood that the difference lies much deeper than in the field that is the subject of much discussion today, because the discussion is rather easy. As foolish as it was often believed among materialists, for example, that these things could be dismissed by discussing them with great arrogance, things are not so foolish; this must be noted again and again. If one approaches, for example, the arguments of David Friedrich Strauß with an open mind, which Nietzsche also characterized very well in his booklet 'David Friedrich Strauß, the Philistine and the Writer', and if, on the other hand, one also what appears with all possible old good traditions within the Catholic Church, then one must find, with an unbiased judgment, that what appears in David Friedrich Strauß is quite clearly below the level at which the Catholic discussion as such moves.

These things only make sense when they are said in a certain context. What I had to characterize as the actual Catholic is, of course, juxtaposed on the other side with what is meant by “mysticism” in the usual sense of the word, that mysticism which actually clearly leads back to inner experience, which also understands communion with Christ as an inner experience. Here we are actually dealing with the individual human being, who, simply by virtue of his particular nature and character, can have this 'unio mystica', behind which what takes place in the sacrament – which is the main thing in the Catholic sense – basically sinks to the level of an outer work, indeed for many mystics it disappears altogether. In fact, the connection with the objective fact of Calvary is completely lost, and all that is actually worth striving for is reduced to some subjective process. So, if you make the necessary efforts to do so, or if you are blessed or have some other kind of predisposition, you can experience the Christ within yourself through subjective experience, and often do not even realize that in this way you are intellectually and emotionally withdrawing from the world to the subject, and that you are actually completely losing the objective Christ with this subjective mysticism.

But it was precisely during the time when Luther was active that there was a strong urge for this mysticism, especially in the decisive area of religious development. And it may be said that a large part of the struggle through which Luther passed consisted in his having on the one hand to look to what was given him simply by his starting point from the Catholic priesthood, and on the other hand to what he particularly observed in something like his study of the “Theologia deutsch” or other mystical endeavors - after all, it was everywhere present in the early days of the Lutheran era - so it was according to the purely subjective experience that for him contained the danger of now completely losing Christ and falling prey to the mere devilish work, his subjective experience. For Luther could not regard the subjective experience, which completely loses the Christ, as anything other than the work of the devil, and in it he saw directly the danger of an arousal on the part of the devil, who aims to present the image of Christ inwardly to man, but to take away the Christ. Indeed, Luther must have felt, the adversary could find no better way to take Christ from humanity than to educate all people to the purely subjective experience of Christ. Of course it is quite possible to eliminate the objective Christ from the world by making it clear to people, in the most absolute pure experience, that if they inwardly experience Christ, that is enough. For Luther this experience of Christ would have taken away from him all objectivity, the whole of the objective process; for him it would have meant a taking away of Christ from mankind by the adversary of Christ.

This, my dear friends, is, if I may express myself in religious terms, a means of the evil spirits to dissuade us from the supersensible world, to instill images of the supersensible world into us and let us be satisfied with the images of the supersensible world. Anyone who is grounded in genuine spiritual science knows that materialistically tinged visions do not represent a connection with the spiritual world, but a turning away from the spiritual world, a casting out of the spiritual world. So when, for example, let us say, the anthroposophist, who sees things impartially, comes to atavistic or to morbid, pathological visions, it is his task not to remain in this visionary state, but to fight this visionary state with all his might, because the visions do not lead not lead to the supersensible, they lead away from the supersensible; and it is, I might say, only a distillate of that visionary experience which emerges in the false mysticism that wants to come to Christ through inner experience; it is only a distillate. Because people are basically incapable of having real visions, they make up fantasy content, which then actually throws people back on themselves.

In contrast to this, there is what can be felt as the relationship of man to Christ in the Lutheran sense, and this is that, first of all, the sense of the reality of the external work is lost, that is, the focus is on the historical-temporal, in the physical sense temporal church, and that in place of this church, not a non-church, but the invisible church is placed. In Catholicism, then, we have in the first place the visible church, which is nothing other than the work of Christ, and which sees in the outward world of temporal facts a definite and continuous trend extending from the event of Golgotha to the individual believer. On the other hand, we have the turning away from this closed current, so to speak, the reduction of what is a merely temporal process to a supra-temporal process. Thus, in the individual Catholic believer, let us say, for example, when he receives Holy Communion from the priest, a connection is made directly with the Mystery of Golgotha throughout the entire development of time. If he takes the matter strictly, the one who communicates according to the Roman Catholic ritual – in fact, according to any Catholic ritual – can imagine that this communion is carried out directly by Christ through the priest. He must be directly aware of the immediate presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper through the temporal mediation of the church, which has never given up this continuity. On the other hand, in the Lutheran ritual, communion can only be seen as a connection between the human being and the supernatural, and also with the supernatural, which is given by Christ himself, so that this connection is not a temporal but a trans-temporal act, through which the individual is brought into a direct relationship with Christ, not through the mediation of time, but directly, and that this relationship is mediated through faith. It is the case that the person with whom the communicant is connected through a timeless act proves, in subjective consciousness, to be identical with the one who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. There is actually no other consistent interpretation of the matter. It is about this: someone communicates at the altar, and through this they are brought into direct contact with the supersensible. Grace is at work at that moment; through grace, through the working of grace, faith is now aroused in that moment. But faith is not just an abstract, subjective belief; rather, faith is something that contains reality within itself. And through this faith, the communicator encounters the Christ, who has gone through the mystery of Golgotha, in that, through a special effect of grace, his faith is given to him in the immediate presence of the Christ and through this faith he is brought into the right kind of connection with the supersensible world in communion.

Of course, these things are also interpreted in the most diverse ways, and you can indeed read the most diverse interpretations about these things today. I must confess to you that I have read many such interpretations, the majority of those that appear today, and that are precisely from people who live in the consciousness of the present day. Most of these interpretations actually seem to me to avoid arriving at a very clear, coherent idea, so that one can do extremely little with them if one is accustomed to arriving at coherent ideas in these matters. It is not possible to accept what appears as faith in Luther's work as a mere subjective belief, as we are accustomed to in today's science, but it is necessary to see that in the act of faith through a gift of grace, the power of Christ is present in Luther's work. In a kind of trans-temporal act, one encounters on earth the same one who went through the Mystery of Golgotha.

But with that, my dear friends, we have given the great difference that exists between mysticism, as I characterized it to you earlier, and what the presence of the act of faith is in the consciousness, in the soul of the human being within the Lutheran confession. The mystic must incline more and more to regard the whole matter as a completely subjective one, as a completely personal relationship with Christ, whose objectivity actually eludes him. The Lutheran believer must say to himself: If I can have the right faith, then I must at the same time be a chosen one, I must be predestined to have in my faith not only the powers that can spring from my personality, but in this act of faith the power of Christ Himself, which is not given to me by something inward, but which comes to me entirely from without, but never through some kind of process that takes place in such a way that I could also see it externally, that I could visualize it through some temporal context, but which is actually a trans-temporal process that must be presented as something that could never enter into the process of historical becoming, of historical development. Thus, in the course of temporal-historical becoming, what appears as a supra-temporal act in the act of faith simply cannot be contained in it. So in this sense, no visible church could actually form a real ascent to what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha, because the only truly Protestant way of saying it is: In the act of faith, a supra-temporal act takes place; if now, in addition, the church is there to lead up to the Mystery of Golgotha in a temporal way, this purely temporal act, this continuity within the church actually means only one direction, which has nothing to do with the supra-temporal as such, other than that it is somehow the bearer of this supra-temporal.

Consider the consequence of this. If, in the sense of Catholicism, the essence of the temporal mediation by the church is seen to be that it must happen, then the continuity must not be allowed to break anywhere, then the apostolic succession must not be allowed to end anywhere, then only the ordained priest can ordain the other priest, and then only the one ordained by an ordained priest can be a priest, then we are led to the necessity of maintaining the continuity of the Church, because the temporal act is at the same time the supersensible act, which cannot be broken anywhere. That is the Catholic view.

If we turn to the Protestant view, the essential thing is a supra-temporal act, because that which is temporal in the church is only the 'vehicle of this supra-temporal act. So the succession can break somewhere. When the supra-temporal takes place in the individual personality through the supra-temporal act of grace, then this leads through the act of grace each time up to the Mystery of Golgotha. One encounters the Christ, and it does not matter what temporal mediation is present. For example, if the act beyond time takes place in the right way, historical continuity can be broken. It is not at all necessary for the act beyond time to be supported by any kind of temporal succession. That is how sharply things are opposed to one another. You must not fail to recognize this. And even if one or the other does not feel that way, it is simply the case that one really does shrink from ultimate consequences; and certain solutions will only come about if one decides not to confuse these things, not to blur the difference, but to present it to the soul in all clarity.

If we now continue in the anthroposophical sense, we see on the one hand the Catholic Church as it is today. I am speaking for the present time; what I say would not apply to the Catholic Church, say, in the 12th century. I speak for the present time, because we are dealing with resolutions that you are also making in the present time, and the development in the anthroposophical sense could not be something that would make it possible for us to say what we are saying today at a different time, but we have to speak directly from what is necessary for the present time. On the one hand, Catholicism, in which anthroposophy can see nothing other than what brings the supersensible world down into the sensory realm, an earthly manifestation of that which can never be completely absorbed into the earthly, which, through its earthly manifestation, can only be so that it is falsified in its actual meaning. Thus, in Catholicism, we see, on the one hand, something emerging that draws the [supratemporal] into the temporal element, and we cannot help but say: today's consciousness has not yet reached the point that it has created complete clarity about these matters in a sufficiently large number of people. It is simply the case that because in Catholicism there is no stronger contrast between the trans-temporal and the temporal, because the trans-temporal can appear in the temporal, can be within it, because a temporal appear and at the same time represent in its reality something beyond time, then it may well be the case within Catholicism that the real event emerges for that which the true [supersensible] event is.

Only out of such an awareness could I, for example, speak of many things in my theory of knowledge that could not have been expressed out of any other awareness. Thus we see how deeply justified the claim is for the act of faith to be a timeless act. And if we now consider the relationship to Christ Jesus in the Mystery of Golgotha, anthroposophy, through its cosmology, recognizes the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha, it recognizes the real passage of the extraterrestrial Christ-being through the deeds and experiences of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, from the side of knowledge, what comes from cosmology flows into that which the human being experiences in himself through the timeless act. What comes from cosmology is then a full confirmation that we are not dealing with something subjective, but that we are dealing with a process that is taking place in the development of the earth. And now we come to the point where we have to say, from the anthroposophical point of view, that if, for example, [the connection] with the supratemporal takes place in the right way in communion, then through this act communion is also established with the historical deed on Golgotha, established in a supratemporal way, and the appeal to the temporal mediation is not necessary as such, because something objective has happened for the evolution of the earth through what has happened for the earth and for humanity through the mystery of Golgotha. Anthroposophy simply leads us to say: With the Mystery of Golgotha, an integrating process for the whole of earthly evolution has taken place; after the Mystery of Golgotha, the whole of earthly evolution is something different than it used to be. The Christ Himself descended from supermundane spheres to the earthly realm and has been partaking in the process of earthly evolution since the Mystery of Golgotha. In the evolution of the earth itself, He has thereby initiated a supra-temporal process that has been present ever since and that does not depend on the temporal establishment of the Church. Thus, what can be encountered as a mere article of faith from the invisible church, acquires a content through anthroposophical knowledge, which must simply present the activity of Christ in the evolution of the earth as a reality.

My dear friends, when the activity of Christ is present in earthly reality, then it is present; the only question is whether one can find the Christ objectively working in the earthly process. One need not find him through some institution, which can only be a mediator. One must find him through what happens to oneself as a result of the institution. One can find him at any time, in any place, since the Mystery of Golgotha, and a church can be the mediator alone. When it appears as a church, it will sanctify itself as a church precisely by sanctifying its faithful. So one can say: the anthroposophical view is simply that, in religious terms, [finding Christ] depends on what happens on the path one takes to Christ, but that an unconditional reliance on succession succession within the church current would be a falling down into that which was entirely justified within the pre-Christian development of humanity, which only radiates through Catholicism into the development of humanity since the Christ event.

My dear friends, for those people to whom, in some local context, say, in the ancient Orient, a god approached — I say a “god” because the gods in the ancient Orient were, after all, in relation to Christ, we would today say, “sub-gods” — this very different god who approached must have appeared to them as the real source for everything divine in this tribe. One had to maintain continuity with him within the earth; once this god had appeared, one had to somehow find a ceremonial disguise that would never break away. Let us say that it was possible to offer this god the sacrifice of fire on the altar. If this meant that one had approached this god, if this meant that contact with this god had been established within the sensual entities, then this fire, once kindled on the altar of sacrifice, could never be allowed to go out, for with the physical flame the god would also have vanished. This fire had to be continuously maintained, the one fire had to be lit at the other; its flame had to endure in time, because in this way the god was preserved, who was “fired” into this material.

In a more spiritualized form, this then comes to us within the Catholic Church, which has preserved old customs, in the continuity of priestly ordination, and it comes to us within the individual church that contains the eternal flame. In every Catholic church there is a flame that must never be extinguished, a small candle that must always be lit from one that is still burning. And if today we see the small candle in the eternal lamp by which Galileo Galilei observed the laws of the pendulum in the church of Pisa, , then this flame, burning today, was kindled from that which burned earlier, and this goes all the way up to the first flame, so that in every single flame of a single church one should see that which was first kindled by the apostles themselves. There also had to be a material community for each individual flame, ascending to the one that was first kindled in the bosom of the apostles.

We see, on the one hand, Catholicism with its great danger of materializing everything, of bringing everything down into the temporal-material, and, on the other hand, Protestantism with the danger of atomization, which must be avoided. And that must be the big question in your endeavors: How can we avoid atomization, that each individual has his or her own confession, which leads to the impossibility of building a community? Because everything that must be understood as a timeless act that can be achieved by each individual tends towards that, and as a result, the Protestant Church carries the danger of atomization within itself. The Catholic Church runs the risk of completely destroying the existence of the individual, of only recognizing him as a link in the materialized Christ process. The Protestant Evangelical Church is in danger – in what it has now become, which it was not at the time of Luther – of pushing the individual so far that any community building becomes impossible, so that the church disintegrates into its atoms and that there will no longer be any possibility of pastoral care, that the Church would have to face its dissolution, its nullity, and in view of the present situation this would have to happen very soon if nothing is done to counteract this trend.

Thus, on the one hand, we have materialization, and on the other, spiritualization. Both are great dangers for the development of religious life in the civilized world. And so today we are faced with the possibility that on the one hand someone may arise and say as a Catholic: The Church is everything and she must not be shaken! — and on the other hand someone may say: The Church is nothing!

All this is expressed in the most diverse nuances, and it is expressed in the most diverse nuances. For example, among certain Protestants there is a constant tendency to become Catholic; on the other hand, among Catholics there is always a tendency to become Protestant. I do not say to “protest”, but to “protestantize”. We are indeed living in a chaos inside. It is extremely difficult, for example, for someone who is looking for clear concepts to understand how it really is in the mind of a personality like the one who opposed Dr. Geyer yesterday and simply asserted the resurrection as an historical fact based on the testimony of eyewitnesses. That is precisely the question: are the eyewitnesses credible? How do we come to understand the fact as an historical fact? The whole question of the [possibility of a] falsification of historical facts is dismissed because it is convenient to do so, and we have certainly contained a Catholicizing tendency within Protestantism, just as, on the other hand, Protestantizing tendencies are contained in Catholicism, especially when they express themselves subjectively, but without the pastors actually coming to a real departure from the church.

The following draft of a declaration of collaboration in a religious renewal was presented to Rudolf Steiner on October 4, 1921.

First version of a declaration of cooperation in a religious renewal:

I declare my determination to cooperate in the efforts for a comprehensive and effective religious renewal, as initiated by the organizers of the religious teaching course led by Dr. Rudolf Steiner from June 12 to 16, 1921 in Stuttgart, in accordance with the following guiding principles.

1. I recognize that anthroposophy is, in decisive respects, the new worldview that must be presupposed for a religious renewal today and that it has the necessary sources of knowledge for the new cults to be developed.

2. I declare my willingness to prepare and found independent congregations by implementing the cultic forms and suggestions for sermons and teaching gained from anthroposophical sources of knowledge. I will only seek to establish ties within the church where the purity of the impulse is not endangered.

3. To become qualified for the responsible priestly profession, I am willing to familiarize myself with the spirit of sacramental priestly work through intensive training.

4. For the present time, I recognize the following conditions for the pastoral work in question, based on scientific training: thorough theological training, an academic final examination; for non-theologians who, by way of exception, can be admitted on the basis of personal aptitude, participation in a four-month theological course organized by the leadership is required.

5. I undertake to use my best endeavors to recruit serious and suitable co-workers. After obtaining the consent of the Central Office, the person to be recruited may be approached and the material made accessible to him, under the condition of confidentiality. After completing the Dornach Course in September-October 1921, the commitment to the present declaration and the guarantee of a committed co-worker is required to join the co-workers. Every new co-worker should, as far as possible, be enabled to participate in a conference to be held at a location to be announced at the beginning of January 1922.

6. Only committed employees are entitled to purchase the course transcripts, and then only on condition that they treat them in strict confidence and return them to the management immediately upon request. Special copies of the course transcripts are available for advertising purposes (see point 5 for instructions).

7. I agree, for the sake of unity of action, not to use any cultic forms before the jointly determined date. In the event that I revoke my commitment, I forfeit all rights to use anthroposophically based rituals.

I will treat as confidential all material communicated to me orally, in writing or in print, as well as the names of all personalities involved in the movement.

Discussion after the Seventeenth Lecture

I will then ask you to ask further questions. And now, perhaps, I may conclude with a few words about the document with the seven points that was handed to me and that, of course, actually concerns not so much me as those who would come to sign this document. I also have no influence over anything that is to be decided on the basis of this document. I would just like to note that certain difficulties have arisen for me in three points, I believe in the 4th, 5th and 7th points. I didn't have to read it very quickly, but certain difficulties arose for me in points 4, 5 and 7, which I believe are only one difficulty. Of course, I don't need to read the points to you, I just want to read the fourth one, because this difficulty should be overcome.

“For the present time, I recognize the following conditions for the pastoral work in question, with regard to scientific training: thorough theological training, a final academic examination; for non-theologians who, by way of exception, can be admitted on the basis of personal aptitude, participation in a four-month theological course organized by the management is required.”

This point cannot be implemented without at the same time finding a way of appointing the organizers to decide on it. This point cannot be followed without having impeccable authorities who can bring about a decision in these matters. So that seems to me to be actually missing here, who has to decide on this. It is not the case that this can simply be decided after the expression: “Thorough theological training, an academic final examination”, but who allows it? And “for non-theologians... participation in a theological course organized by the management is required”. Who is the management? At least I couldn't find any clear indication of this. The fifth point reads: “I undertake to recruit serious, suitable collaborators to the best of my ability. After obtaining the consent of the central office, the person to be recruited can be approached and the material made accessible to him, provided this is done in confidence.” So at the very least, a central office would have to be set up properly, also in line with point 7: ‘[...] for the sake of unity of purpose’ and so on. Of course, it is also necessary that at least from the beginning a flawless central office must be created, and that you must create it in such a way that it takes care of those points that concern the law - because we immediately fall into the law when we stipulate in this way, and with that comes apostasy from God. We also come into the necessity of succession, so the mode between you would also have to be discussed in detail, in which way you create a flawless succession to that which you again establish in a flawless way as a central office in Berlin. In such a matter it is not possible to proceed in a purely associative manner, but in the creation of such a matter I consider it necessary to bring the whole seriousness of the matter before the soul. You can hardly do that without realizing that if you take on such strict conditions as those formulated in points 1, 2 and 3, you must actually create a very serious institution for the outside world, which must be more than what is achieved through the current association-based approach. For as a rule, firstly, the individual does not take care of it, and secondly, it is constantly being changed, so that what is there from the spirit of those first chosen is turned upside down by the next people. You have to ensure that what you set down here cannot be turned upside down by your successors. This is something that, in addition to this, should be discussed in a very serious way.

Emil Bock: We actually meant that these sentences should only have provisional validity, and we also meant to create a central office...

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, but I think that it is part of the creation of an institution of any kind to be absolutely clear about this central office. I think you should not part here without...

Emil Bock: That should happen when the signatures are available.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, can that be done? I don't want to say anything other than advice; consider what I am saying as nothing more than advice. It would have to be discussed among you whether the individuals who sign this do so before the central office is created or whether they sign it after the central office is created. In the first case, you are committing yourself to a number of sentences whose execution you do not know; in the second case, you are committing yourself to belonging to a certain reality. I do not want to exert any influence, but you must consider whether you want to sign statutes that you write and profess, or whether you are performing a real action. You will only carry out the real action when you have set up the central office, because that is where everything starts for the whole movement. Of course, either of the two possibilities can arise, but there is an enormous difference.

Emil Bock: It was actually only intended as a suggestion.

Rudolf Steiner: This has far too much weight. I must say that if someone is to put their name to points 1, 2 and 3 - (the text is read out again) - if you sign such important points, you must be aware that it is, so to speak, a decision for life. It means a decision for life.

One participant believes that the question of how the central office should be created can actually only be dealt with by a group of people who want to work on it; it would not be acceptable for people to join the discussion who had no intention of participating in the work.

Rudolf Steiner: So you think it is a matter of first signing this thing in order to then create the central office from the circle of those who have signed it? Of course, that can be the case too. But it would still have to be a cohesive undertaking, otherwise you create an intermediate period between what one is committed to for life and, isn't it, the actual real work. Of course, those who really work in this way can subscribe to that. But in my opinion, if it is really subscribed to, if it is subscribed to very seriously, it is such a decisive step for life that one cannot help but create this central office from the center.

Emil Bock: We thought that it would not be possible for a central office to present itself. We do not think we have the right to do so.

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps it will not be so difficult, given the way you have come together. You must first recognize each other. My opinion is that you are founding the central office at the same time as you sign. I even see it as a unified act. I think it cannot be that one first gives a formal signature. Only by giving one's signature does one become a co-worker in a very real Zeitströmung, otherwise this signature has no meaning, so that the signing would be identical with the creation of a central office.

Emil Bock: There is the question of how this central office should be created.

Christian Geyer: I don't think it's possible for us to discuss such important matters without these things being prepared in a small group. (Pastor Geyer follows up with the question of whether the work to renew religious life is not possible within the church organization, along the lines of Rittelmeyer's work in Berlin, or whether this ceases to be the case the moment this central office is brought into being.) I believe that this question must be thoroughly discussed in another circle by a small group and only then can it be put forward for general discussion.

Rudolf Steiner: I assumed that something like this had happened because I find in point 2 what concerns the position on church communities. It is stated in point 2 in such a way that I cannot imagine a greater precision: “I declare my willingness to prepare and found free communities by realizing the cult forms and suggestions for preaching and teaching gained from anthroposophical sources of knowledge. I will seek to establish ties within the church only where the purity of the impulse is not endangered by doing so.” — I cannot imagine it more precisely, everything is given in reality; therefore I have assumed that the wording has essentially been discussed in a small circle.

Christian Geyer points out that he has already experienced significant religious movements that have become so strong that the church was faced with the question of either letting them go or absorbing them into its organization. He finds that nothing has yet been said about the relationship between free communities and the church community.

Rudolf Steiner: But actually it has. I think it is clear, because [it says], “I will only seek to establish ties within the church where this does not endanger the purity of the impulse.” So that would be self-contained: if someone in such a free community says that it does not endanger the purity of the impulse, it is possible that he will work in such a community within the church. That is actually contained in the sentence.

A participant: It would therefore be a matter of including in this document a passage that would describe the central leadership in detail.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, you must take it that I do not want to have the slightest influence on what is to be done in the spirit of such a document. But I have read it, and I consider its contents so serious for the one who signs it that nothing but something tremendously serious can follow from it, that an act can follow. I must place that on one side, and in this direction I can only give advice. On the other side I must place something else. If I had time, I would give you a collection of all the things that have come to my attention in the course of the existence of the anthroposophical movement in the form of such documents within this society, where people have set out to do this or that. There is nothing else but such documents lying in my paper collection, and most of them have been forgotten by those who signed them at the time. Of course, these are the most extreme cases, but they represent the other side of the coin. I think that we are now at such a serious point in time that if we even think of going as far as signing such a document, we must also immediately move on to real action. I don't mean that you will form so many churches the day after tomorrow. That is not what I mean, but the actual working towards it, even if it is only possible in a small circle, the actual working towards a specific, very concrete goal. The concrete goal is there, but at the same time the possibility of very serious work must be created, which is not mere association or other work, but which is aware of accomplishing a world-historical deed. That is what I mean.

Emil Bock: That has actually been our intention, and it is actually quite clear that we do want to create the central office we have been talking about. We also discussed it this morning.

Rudolf Steiner: Is the earlier also meant in this sense? I just mean that if you sign such points, then at the same time you create the necessity to have the central office, otherwise you cannot read the individual points. The text refers to the central office; this wording already presupposes the central office.

A participant: May I perhaps draw a parallel? I would like to recall the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. I believe that something similar must happen here. At that time, three personalities took responsibility for bringing such a society into being, and I think that the process here should also be that a number of personalities find the courage to make a start and then say: We want this and that. Who will join us? I believe that a number of people who might naturally emerge from the Stuttgart Circle will find the courage to simply constitute themselves as the Central Council.

Rudolf Steiner: There is, of course, a difference between the Anthroposophical Society and what would have to arise here; it is a significant difference. You see, what is today the Anthroposophical Society used to be within the framework of the Theosophical Society, the great Theosophical Society, and I never treated it any differently than I did later on with the Anthroposophical Society. In such a society complete freedom must prevail; above all, when one is dealing with such a spiritual movement as the Anthroposophical Society, freedom must prevail in such a way that the leaders, above all, can never be enslaved. As soon as a society comes into being, the leaders actually lose their freedom; that is the danger. Therefore, societies like the Anthroposophical Society must actually do everything to ensure that the leaders do not lose their freedom. Of course, for many years I could only achieve this by simply doing as I pleased, which was probably what was intended by the spiritual world. I always took the principle of 'those who go along, go along; those who do not want to go along, do not go along and do not stay'. Everyone joins of their own free will; but those who have something to lead also have their free will. There can be no democracy or anything like that. When the Anthroposophical Society was founded, it was founded only in a somewhat more detailed way on the same basis as within the Theosophical Society, with the three of them in Munich saying: “We three are are here now – Dr. Unger, Dr. Steiner, Mr. Bauer – those who want to go with us to lead an Anthroposophical Society go with us; those who are right with us go with us, those who are not right with us do something else.

If you think about things thoroughly, you will find that there is no other way than this one, everything else leads to the enslavement of the free spiritual life. The moment any kind of agreement becomes necessary, the spiritual life is immediately enslaved. I really recommend that you think about this in this area; you will see that there is no other way than this one. You must not forget that the conditions of a society such as the Anthroposophical Society, which is completely involved in the field of comprehensive spiritual life, are somewhat different from what you want to establish. Therefore, you must consider the matter very carefully. The Anthroposophical Society, insofar as it adheres to me – I myself have preserved my freedom to such an extent that I am not a member of the Anthroposophical Society; there is a very profound reason why I am not a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and I occasionally emphasize this very sharply – that I am not a member of the Anthroposophical Society. So, the Anthroposophical Society, I have always understood it, comes into the world as a new creation, a completely new creation in every respect, as a new creation of the anthroposophical, for example. So within any statutes of the Anthroposophical Society, there could be no question of anything similar to your fourth sentence: “For the present time I recognize the following conditions with regard to scientific training...” So that makes it quite clear that there really are absolute differences. A distinction must be made, and we must first become clear about it. And that in the first point [required]: “I recognize that anthroposophy is the basis for a new worldview in crucial points,” one would not even be allowed to say that if, so to speak, one demanded it from the members of an Anthroposophical Society; it would not even occur to one to demand the anthroposophical worldview from the members. If someone is an atheist out of their own free will and joins the Anthroposophical Society in order to freely engage with what is being done there, then they can certainly do so. In reality, it is perhaps the only way to realize what Anzengruber says: As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist! — That is a famous atheistic oath.

But you have to be clear about the fact that what is [right] in the Anthroposophical Society is not actually possible for you, because you create out of a certain continuity, you recognize certain prerequisites. But I, for example, would not believe that the first point must be adhered to in such a strict way. I would not, for example, agree with the statement: “I recognize that in decisive points, anthroposophy is the new worldview that must be presupposed for a religious renewal today.” From my point of view — but I am only saying what I mean — I would prefer to say, for example: I recognize that for a religious renewal today it is necessary to turn one's attention to those phenomena that claim today, from original sources, to come from the supersensible world, such as Anthroposophy. I would think that the matter would be better that way. But, as I said, I do not want to influence anyone. And I certainly don't want anthroposophy to be represented in the world today by saying that it should be taken up, although I also believe that what I have said is more in the spirit of anthroposophy than if it were made into a kind of dogmatics, even if in a very free sense, which it is not in reality.

These are the things I wanted to say.

Corrected version of the Statement

I declare my determination to work in accordance with the following guiding principles in the efforts towards a comprehensive and far-reaching religious renewal, as initiated by the organizers of the religious teaching course led by Dr. Rudolf Steiner from June 12 to 16, 1921 in Stuttgart.

1. I recognize that today every effort towards religious renewal must go hand in hand with the effort towards a new world view that can claim to come from original sources in the supersensible world, such as anthroposophy.

2. I declare my willingness to prepare and found free communities by realizing the cult forms and suggestions for sermon and teaching that I have gained from anthroposophical sources of knowledge. I will only seek to establish ties within the churches where I am certain that the purity of the impulse will not be endangered.

3. For the sake of unity of action, I undertake not to use any of the cultic forms in any other way or at an earlier time than will be determined by common agreement.

4. In order to become qualified for the responsible priesthood, I am willing to familiarize myself with the spirit of sacramental priestly work through intensive training.

5. I am prepared to do my best to recruit serious, suitable co-workers.

6. I will treat as confidential all material communicated to me orally, in writing or in print, as well as the names of all individuals involved in the movement.

7. Should I fail to fulfill the above obligations, I will renounce the use of any anthroposophically based rituals.

8. I join those personalities who, during the Dornach Course in October 1921, entrusted Lic. Emil Bock with the leadership of of the work, with the proviso that he ensures that the necessary work is carried out in conjunction with Lic. Dr. Rittelmeyer (if the latter agrees) and the personalities who will continue to be co-opted.

The leadership initially has the following tasks:

a. Facilitating the exchange of ideas among all co-workers.

b. The direction of the promotional activity, which for the sake of order will be handled as follows:

The participants of the Dornach Course who could not sign the present declaration in Dornach will be kept in contact through a circular letter organization. Their signatures can be accepted at any time without further ado.

New co-workers must commit to this declaration and be sponsored by a co-worker who has signed up to the Dornach Course.

Every new co-worker should endeavour to attend a three- to four-day conference that will take place at the beginning of January 1922 at a location yet to be determined.

c. The administration of all course transcripts, which are the intellectual property of Dr. Steiner and can only be accessed with his consent, and of other material. Only signatories of this declaration are entitled to purchase the transcripts. Disclosure to those to be recruited is only possible after consultation with the management. In special cases, the management can make the transcripts available to course participants who have not yet signed.

d. The scientific prerequisites will be determined on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, in order to realize the common goal in public, a thorough theological education and an academic final examination are currently required. Non-theologians are encouraged to participate in introductory courses organized by the leadership.

In our time, outside the circles of the anthroposophical movement, there is little understanding of how to arrive at a true view of the soul. I am saying something that may sound incomprehensible to some people, because it is often assumed that one knows what soul is, what one is dealing with when one speaks of the soul, and so on. And on the other hand, such a statement can in many cases be taken for granted in the sense that centuries- and even millennia-old views of the human soul have finally run their course and that a view of the human soul must wait until scientific research is so advanced that it is able to provide information about the soul.

Now, however, I would like to counter these two objections today with nothing more than the assertion of the recently deceased linguist Fritz Mauthner, whom I have mentioned several times: that people in the present day often believe that they have an insight into this or that, whereas in fact they only have words. And it is for this reason that Mauthner wrote a “critique of language”. He wanted to show that today's civilized humanity in particular has an inherited language. We have expressions for all sorts of things. But if you look more closely at what is behind the words, there is actually nothing there. We have the word, we think we are designating something with the word, but in reality we are not designating anything.

Now, of course, it is nonsense to apply this criticism of language to scientific knowledge. For no one will be of the opinion that, whether one knows much or little, let us say, about a horse, one could be misled about the thing horse by the expression “horse” in some language. Everyone knows perfectly well that you cannot ride on the word horse, but you can ride on the real horse. And that makes it clear from the outset that, with regard to things that exist in nature, a critique of language is rather inconsequential, because one will always know the difference between the word and the thing with regard to external observation. I do not believe that someone who wants to ride out will sit on the word 'white horse' instead of the real white horse.

But it is really different with everything in our present civilization that, on the one hand, refers to the soul, to the life of the soul, to the facts of the life of the soul, and, on the other hand, refers to the ethical, to the moral demands of humanity. Here one must indeed say: there is actually only a belief that realities lie behind the words. Therefore, one can also understand that Mauthner thought deeply: Should one even still use the word “soul”? There is nothing real behind it, as when a person speaks of a horse with the word horse. People no longer have any insights into the life of the soul. Therefore, one should not only omit the soul from the science of the soul, as a 19th-century psychology of the soul did, one should completely eradicate the word soul, and speak of “spiritual phenomena” in such a way as to refer to something indeterminate. If one wants to say that there are three entities, Karl, Fritz, Hans, who are sons of the same father and the same mother, and wants to refer to them superficially and sweepingly, then one says: siblings. Why should one, Mauthner asks, say soul when one only knows so little about mental phenomena? The word soul designates nothing; one should say “Geseel”. If this view were really to gain currency, the delusion would be done away with that in speaking of the soul one had something more or other behind it. For in the future one would no longer say that man has an immortal soul. During his life on earth man has a soul within him, I am touched in my deepest soul, and so on.

Things are indeed extremely serious for those people who are seriously seeking a view of the spirit, much more serious than one usually thinks. In any case, they prove how much people should listen up in the present when it is asserted somewhere that the right means should be sought again to reach the reality of the soul.

Today we say that the soul abilities are mainly thinking, feeling and willing. But people should just honestly realize what they mean by these terms thinking, feeling and willing. It would soon dispel their belief that they are looking at something real. Today I would just like to speak about how anthroposophy can clarify that with ordinary consciousness one is not at all able to look at something fully real in this respect. And what I would like to hint at today in this regard, I will then explain in more detail in the next lecture, because today it is still my duty to point out another aspect.

If a person looks honestly into themselves today, they must admit that what they carry within them in terms of thoughts is mostly taken from the outside world. These thoughts are more or less only mirror images of what makes an impression on the human senses in the external physical-sensual reality. Just try to do the self-observation experiment clearly and ask yourself: How many thoughts are there in this human consciousness that point to something other than the words we have: thinking, feeling, willing, God, immortality and so on, that point to something in the spiritual life of ordinary civilization that is not mirrored from the outside world? People only strive to understand everything in terms of how it can be mirrored by the external world. And if you want to explain the spiritual to many people today, they actually demand visual aids for the spiritual as well, perhaps a film or something similar, because they say: if it is not illustrated to us, if we are not presented with sensory images, then we do not understand anything about the spiritual!

In such moments, when people demand that the spiritual be clothed in sensual images, they are more honest than when they speak as experts on the soul. If we take together much of what I have often discussed here in this house, then we will be able to realize that when we look back on our thinking, we have only one side of this thinking. In this sense one can even speak of a reality — but one can speak of a reality in this way, as when one gets to know a person only from behind. Imagine the grotesque thing: you only know a person from the back! Then you know him, but you do not know his nature. At most, you can sometimes grasp something of his nature. But then cases like that of the student who once came to Heidelberg as a young badger, registered with the famous Professor Kuno Fischer, and now, in his great joy, before going to the lecture hall, rushed to the barber's, had himself dressed up, and because he is so full of the fact that he is going to hear the famous man, also talks to the barber about it. The barber says, “Yes, today Kuno Fischer is writing something on the blackboard!” The student asks him, “How do you know that Kuno Fischer is writing something on the blackboard today?” Yes, when he writes something on the blackboard, he has his hair parted at the back before the lecture; that's when he turns around!

Well, when there are such clear signs that the character is expressed in the parting of the occiput, then one can indeed learn something about the inner personality, even if one only gets to know it from behind. But firstly, it is perhaps not particularly significant, and secondly, it is the case with most people that one does not learn very much.

With regard to our thinking, the most important part of our soul for life on earth, we only perceive, if I may put it this way, the back side. The front side escapes ordinary observation. For when one approaches the observation of human beings with anthroposophy and asks oneself: Is it all about thinking, that one forms abstract ideas about the external things grasped by the senses? — then one comes to the conclusion that this is not all about thinking, but thinking, apart from representing this sum of abstract thoughts, is also still another sum of forces. Thoughts cannot actually do anything, and one actually thinks best when one does nothing, when one sits quietly, when one cultivates calm. Thoughts are powerless, like mirror images are powerless. But if you now follow the human being, from infancy until he has grown taller, and if you later follow the growth processes that are still present in the human being - even if the human being is no longer growing taller, growth processes are still there - if you look at what the forces of growth are in the human being, then these are the same forces, now seen from the other side, that show themselves backwards in abstract thought. Man sends abstract thoughts outwards; inwards they are the forces that shape his brain. In the early childhood years, the brain is formed plastically. The forces that otherwise work as growth forces are the forces of thinking. And just as you have to imagine the front side if you see a person from behind – if you are allowed to imagine that they are a complete person – you have to imagine the concrete, real power of thought that goes into the human being and works on the human being in addition to abstract thinking.

That is the essence of a pedagogy based on healthy anthroposophy: the teacher knows that it is not enough for the child to receive this or that abstract idea from this or that person. There is a big difference between whether the child receives a living, pictorial, active idea or a dead idea. The dead idea has a retarding effect on the growth processes, the living idea has a promoting effect on the growth processes. And so we come to the fact that thinking shows one side, which, powerless, only reflects the outer world, and, when we look inward, we see a living side that permeates the whole organism of the human being and that is only the other side of his growth, the spiritual counter-image of his growth. And if one continues to research, one finds that what is represented by the other side - in relation to the human being it is the rear side, but in relation to thinking it is the front side - is not brought down by dead thinking, which only appears to us from the front, but by living thinking from its pre-earthly existence.

In fact, the transition from the pre-earthly existence to the earthly existence is such that, in the pre-earthly existence, the human being freely develops a system of forces that works in all directions in the spiritual world. Then he descends into the earthly existence. There this thinking, which is active and ruling in the spiritual world, transforms itself into the inner organizing forces of the body, and outwardly it sends, as it were, the reflecting surface onto which the earth projects its images. That is the fact. But now it is indeed the case that after a person has completed the time between death and a new birth in a satisfactory manner, he then has no task for this living thinking in the spiritual world. This living thinking has its great task in the time between death and a new birth. When this task is completed, the phenomenon occurs over there, which I have often described to you: the soul turns to earth life. But then this thinking has a new task: the task of forming the human body. And that is the significance of man's earthly thinking, of man's thinking that comes from the spiritual, that it is directed towards the human body in a formative way. Thus, in our true, in our real thinking, we have an heirloom from the spiritual world, but one that is only something on earth, because in the spiritual world it has lost its purpose. We have to thank this for the fact that our thinking can become so clear on earth. If this thinking still had a task as it had in the spiritual world, it could not become so clear on earth.

But let us turn to the other faculty of the human soul, to feeling. You will all notice - quite apart from what I myself have said about it here in this room: feeling is not as clear as thinking. Feeling is something that occurs in a different form, but in the same way as dreaming. The state of mind during feeling is basically the same as during dreaming, except that feeling occurs in a completely different form. Why is that so? Well, in feeling, just as in thinking, we only have the back side for this earthly life. But the front side is not only directed towards the human body, but, as man descends to earth from the pre-earthly existence, from the existence between death and a new birth, he also retains what lies behind feeling as an heirloom. But that still remains turned towards the spiritual, it does not just have an earthly task. Therefore, every night when a person falls asleep, he does not take his thinking with him into sleep, but he does take his feeling with him. And if you look at dreams in the right way, they are images because logical thoughts do not live on; but feelings live on. With every sleep, a person delves into the whole spiritual world. Man does not take his thoughts with him, but he does take his feelings, and even more so his volitions.

Understandably, during the day there is nothing to be done with the will. I have often said that a person can make a plan, he has a thought. But how the thought slides down into the body, how the will to move the hand continues to work, remains as dark as the state remains dark in sleep. But for that, a person retains the most from the eternal for his will. And again, one can see from the activity of the human being, for if the human being does not move, there is not a will present, but only a desire. Seen from the other side, the will represents something completely eternal. Thinking also represents something eternal, but it has been transformed into an earthly activity. The will, however, remains in the Eternal and is active in man's destiny through repeated earthly lives, in Karma.

I just wanted to give you an introduction to how one penetrates to a real teaching of the soul, so that behind the words thinking, feeling and willing there are realities, so that one points to reality. Just as the word horse refers to the outer physical horse, so when one penetrates anthroposophically into the life of the soul in this way, one can come to reality, to realities. That is the way, and on this way will come at the same time what I emphasized at the end of the last lecture here: that Anthroposophy will never will be understood when it is theory, but only when, in acquiring the anthroposophical, the human being becomes a different being, the human being is truly transformed; when he becomes a different being altogether in ethical and human relationships.

What is being striven for in this way is now confronted with something else. And now I come to what I am obliged to tell you, because Anthroposophy is already in the world and one must be alert to what is happening. We must not always have closed windows, but must also look out, and so it is a spiritual and intellectual duty to speak about these things. For everywhere today, where people believe that they have obtained clear concepts only from science, anthroposophy is dismissed with the assertion: that is fantasy, speculation, that is fantasy. And those people say that they alone have clear thinking. Apart from the fact that when one approaches anthroposophy, one naturally gains inner certainty from the truth by pursuing the anthroposophical, one must sometimes also look at how clear today's thinking actually is! I would like to discuss this with you first of all using an example, for the reason that the anthroposophist should be aware of what is today's culture or civilization. I will take an example that says something. If, let us say, one examines the logic of a person who writes in the newspapers, not much is said by that. But I take a prominent naturalist of the present day and say explicitly that I do not want to say anything malicious or disparaging, because I fully recognize that we are dealing with an important naturalist and with a serious matter that he discusses. And in this regard, I would like to draw your attention to the clarity that prevails in this regard.

In October 1910, the well-known naturalist Max Rubner gave the rector's speech at the University of Berlin, entitled: “Our Goals for the Future”. He talks about the spiritual goals of the future, and it is not just anyone who speaks, but someone who is immersed in research and who must be seen as a serious and diligent researcher from the point of view of today's civilization. At the end of his speech, he also addresses the students and tries – well, in a way that is beautiful in his own way – to make it clear that they should study. But he does this with the “clear” concepts — I mean “clear” in quotation marks — that are possible for such a researcher today, based on today's thinking. I would like to draw attention to a few points. First of all, he says, addressing the students: “We all have to learn; we come into the world with nothing but our instrument for intellectual work, a blank page, the brain, differently predisposed, differently capable of development; we receive everything from the outside world...”

So, an often-encountered view today, which says: Look, if you want to talk about the soul life, look at your brain, which is a blank slate that has to get everything from the impressions of the outside world. So when we are born, we have our brain as a blank slate, we have to expose ourselves to the impressions of the world, then they go into us, then the slate is written on. So, he says to his students, just expose yourselves to the impressions of the world with freshness, courage and vigor, and then the page you brought with you will be written on.

In the next sentence, he tells them how to do it. He says: “No brain wants to grasp everything that its ancestors have experienced and learned, what billions of brains have considered and matured in the course of human history, what our spiritual heroes have helped create...”

So the students should only pay attention to what the spiritual heroes have created. But now the spiritual heroes are suddenly creating, so now the unwritten brains have to oppose the written brains of the spiritual heroes! You see, as soon as you put two sentences together, one on page 23 and the other on page 24, they are no longer correct! For if the heroes of the mind were also blank brains, it would not be possible to speak of their impressions on the blank brains in such a way as to suggest that these brains have created anything, for that is precisely what is being denied: everything must be received from the outside world. But now the outside world is also considered to include what human brains create. One must indeed go into such things.

But then it goes on to say: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” Now, put the two sentences together: “We receive everything from the outside world,” and the second: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” This is not the speech of an ordinary newspaper writer, this is the speech of a truly meritorious researcher of the modern age. You see, it is basically irrelevant if you now want to point out the way in which such a personality characterizes how the brain works. “[...] there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” That is why he tells his students to sometimes look around for other subjects that they have not yet looked at: “[...] some areas of the brain only yield results when they are repeatedly plowed, but ultimately bear the same good fruit as others that open up more effortlessly.”

Well, after all, the soil that is plowed does not produce the plow. If you want to dwell on these thoughts, you can no longer grasp any thought at all. But now Rubner finds that this thinking is quite natural.

In order to show you the significance of what he is saying, I would like to say something in advance. When someone does sports, we see him in various movements. If you are particularly interested, you can even take a snapshot of these movements. But if we take an unbiased view of things, we have to admit that if we follow the internal organic processes that take place while someone is doing sports, what happens inside between nerve and muscle as a kind of process of destruction and restoration is, firstly, much more important for what it means to be human, but also infinitely more interesting than what can be captured in a snapshot. I am not saying anything against sport as an external physical exercise. But what the athlete is inwardly is truly much more interesting than what he is outwardly. It is only in what he achieves within the organism that it begins to become interesting.

Now it so happens that the opposite is the case with the movement of the human limbs as it is with thinking. In thinking, what is done, what happens, what the fact is, is the essential, and what lies in the organization is the unessential. In sports, what takes place externally in the facts is the less interesting part; what the organism does internally is the more interesting part. In thinking, what is interesting is what thinking presents itself as, what thinking really is; what the organism does in the process is something more or less simple. Therefore, when you understand things, you can no longer speak of thinking in the same way as of muscle movement.

But if all this becomes superficial, external, what do you say? Then you explain things like this: “Thinking strengthens the brain, and the latter (the brain) increases in performance through exercise, just like another organ, like our muscle strength, through work and sport. Studying is brain sport.

You see, our civilization is caught out in its most important element, in thinking about things, if you grasp it in such a place. You don't wake up to what is actually happening in the present through something else.

Now I would like to introduce you to a personality who, through her way of thinking, which can truly be called ingenious within certain limits, has some excellent negative thoughts about our present civilization, and who understands how to characterize it well: how it is ultimately an impossible formation and shaping of thought that has brought our civilization to decay and ruin. And I must say: the man who wrote the book about the “decay and reconstruction of culture”, Albert Schweitzer, is in a position to judge such things. Anyone who is familiar with Albert Schweitzer's book “The History of the Life-Jesu Research,” published in 1906, for example, and the way in which Schweitzer knows how to address even the most apocalyptic of subjects, so that he is already well ahead of the other theologians, must admit that Schweitzer can have a sound judgment of what contemporary intellectual life is actually worth. Now he has written this book, the first part of which has just been published. The first chapter is entitled: “The Fault of Philosophy in the Decline of Culture.” And truly razor-sharp are the sentences that are intended to characterize our present intellectual life, our life of civilization. The very first sentence is: “We are living in the era of the decline of culture. The war did not create this situation. It itself is only one manifestation of it. What was spiritual has been translated into facts, which in turn react on the spiritual in every respect in a deteriorating way.” A person who has insights into the worthlessness of present-day culture! And further: ”We lost our way in culture because there was no reflection on culture among us... So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.” And now he asks himself: Why is this symptom of the decline of culture there? Why are we living in a cultural decline? And he says to himself: If we look back just a short time, to the time when intellectualism was in its first stage of flowering, people still had a “total worldview.” They still spoke of ethical and moral goals in such a way that they lay in the same sources as the laws of nature. They contemplated the laws of nature and then ascended to the sources of morality with the same views, thus having a “total worldview” that encompassed both the moral and the natural.

You will remember how often I have pointed out that the decline of our culture has been caused by the fact that we have a one-sided view of nature, which posits the Kant-Laplace theory or something similar at the beginning of our existence on earth, where everything has formed out of a primeval nebula. Man also formed out of this primeval nebula, then what is called moral ideals arose - illusions - and when the heat death occurs one day, which must occur according to purely physical laws, there will be a large field of corpses, but what emerged as cultural ideals or moral ideals will be buried with them. Thus, our morality is no longer part of the world view. It is no longer part of it; it has become something that can only be captured in abstract thoughts. Schweitzer also knows that basically this has become the case around the middle of the 19th century. He is quite clear about it: “Now it is obvious to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway... The Age of Enlightenment” - by this he means the period when intellectualism first flourished - ”and rationalism had established ethical and rational ideals about the development of the individual into true humanity, about his position in society, about its material and spiritual tasks, about the behavior of nations towards each other and their absorption into a humanity united by the highest spiritual goals... But around the middle of the nineteenth century, this engagement of ethical rational ideals with reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it came more and more to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound. Its thoughts lagged behind the times, as if they were too exhausted to keep pace with it."

And now Albert Schweitzer wants to make it clear that if people no longer have effective thoughts, culture must perish. Since effective thoughts seem to be contained in philosophy, he attributes the reason for the decline of culture to philosophy. He knows, and expresses it in this book, that although Flege and Kant are read by only a few, their ideas dominate the ideas of thousands, because they pass unnoticed through all possible into the broadest masses of humanity, and one does not exaggerate when one says today: If only the most popular books have begun to be read by the simplest mountain farmers, then Kant is already in them. One only believes that philosophy works on those who read the philosophers. That is just outer Maja.

That is why Schweitzer says: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” But now he treats this philosophy with some compassion and says to himself: Philosophy should have thought, but since thinking had gone astray, since thinking had been forgotten, one need not be surprised that philosophy could no longer think either. So he treats philosophy a little more mildly. “It did not become clear to philosophy that the energy of the cultural ideas entrusted to it was beginning to be questioned. At the end of one of the most outstanding works on the history of philosophy published at the end of the nineteenth century - the same one that I once discussed here - “this is defined as the process in which ‘step by step, with ever clearer and more certain awareness, reflection on cultural values has taken place, the universal validity of which is the subject of philosophy itself’. In doing so, the author forgot the essential: that in the past, philosophy not only reflected on cultural values, but also allowed them to be transmitted as active ideas in public opinion, while from the second half of the nineteenth century they increasingly became a guarded, unproductive capital for it.

But now he becomes mild. After all, what can the philosopher do if he no longer thinks because everyone else does not think: “That thinking did not manage to create a world view of optimistic-ethical character and to base the ideals that make up culture in such a view was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thought. But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit this fact to itself and remained in the illusion that it really maintained a progress of culture."

Schweitzer no longer blames the philosophers for no longer being able to think, since it has become a general habit of people not to think anymore. But he does blame the philosophers for not having noticed this at all. They should have noticed it at least.

"According to its ultimate purpose, philosophy is the leader and guardian of general reason. It would have been its duty to admit to our world that the ethical ideals of reason no longer found support in a total worldview, as they used to, but were for the time being left to their own devices and had to assert themselves in the world through their inner strength alone... Philosophy philosophized so little about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the times with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.

Well, I think I have already told you many things about this sleeping from a variety of points of view.

In the next chapter, Schweitzer discusses the elements in us that inhibit culture. He comes to some very interesting conclusions. He finds, for example, that man has become unfree as a result of what he has absorbed as culture in recent times. Well, one can sympathize with him on that point, because people have gradually come to really only follow certain bellwethers, to swear by the authority of science, and so on. But now Schweitzer claims that the human being is not collected in his thinking. I don't think we need discuss this much either; Schweitzer is probably right that the power to collect has really declined a lot in our civilization. But then he calls the human being incomplete. Now, people will say, if he already finds us unfree and so unsettled; that we are not even supposed to be whole people, we cannot concede that to him! But he means it this way: What a person learns today, that is a specialty, be he a scholar or be he somehow a different person, so that only certain sides of his abilities are developed, not the total human being. Therefore, we go around as incomplete, not at all as complete people. And then he finds, as a fourth, that humanity has decreased to the highest degree. He cites beautiful examples. But he is generally of the opinion that unfree, uncollected and incomplete people do not develop humanity in their ethical lives either. He also finds a culture-inhibiting element in over-organization, in the eradication of human individuality. How much does the individual still depend on today? It depends only on what is prescribed by any organization. Schweitzer rightly accuses our time of over-organization as a particular tendency.

But now he also wants to move on to answering the question of how to achieve culture again. What must be done to achieve culture again? He then asks: What must the culture we achieve be like? — And he says: It must be ethical and optimistic. Now, imagine you want to build a house for yourself. You go to a builder who says: You have to describe to me what the house should be like so that I can make the plans for you. — So you tell him: The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful, and so that you can live comfortably in it. — Well, you can't make plans with that, but you think you have said something when you say: The house must be solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so that you can live comfortably in it. But you can't do anything with these statements. Nor can you do anything with the statement: A worldview must be ethical and optimistic. It's the same, exactly the same.

Once, when I was a little boy, there was a court case in a village where I lived. Some chickens had been stolen from a prominent member of the community. The judge wanted to know what the sentence should be and needed a description of the chickens. So he asked the man concerned what the chickens were like. “Well, they were beautiful chickens.” Yes, that's not enough. You have to tell us something so that we can get an idea of what the chickens might have been worth. Well, they were really quite beautiful chickens. Yes, but, you have to know whether the chickens were skinny or fat... – Well, they really were quite beautiful chickens. – And so it went on, nothing at all could be elicited from the man except that they were quite beautiful chickens. |

Now here we have a quite outstanding spirit who trenchantly characterizes the decline of culture in an extraordinarily fine and apt way, who even knows a great deal that people today do not even want to admit to themselves. For example, he knows the following – it is good that it is also said by someone other than just the anthroposophist: 'The summary of knowledge and the assertion of its consequences for the world view is not his concern. In the past every scientist was also a thinker who had a certain significance in the general spiritual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. Therefore we still have freedom of science, but hardly any thinking science at all.” It is indeed good to hear it from someone else for a change. But you see, despite all this insight, he does not get any further than the beautiful chickens. Extremely characteristic! Something that reappears as a truly fruitful worldview must be ethical, optimistic, firm, weatherproof, beautiful, and such that one can comfortably live in it!

Yes, he gets very far in this negative characterization. He notices that there are people who have already felt that this thinking, this brain sport, does not lead to the sources of existence. Therefore they said: Well, let us give up all this thinking and arrive at the truth by way of feeling or belief, by a mystical path. He sees that, and being a keen thinker himself, to a certain extent, he asks a remarkable question. The question is: “Philosophical, historical and scientific questions, which he was not able to answer, overwhelmed his earlier rationalism like an avalanche and buried him on the way. The new thinking world view must work its way out of this chaos. Let everything that actually is take effect on itself, passing through all kinds of reflection and recognition” - yes, if only he went through a little recognition and reflection now: the house should be beautiful and weatherproof - ”it strives towards the ultimate meaning of being and life, whether some of it can be unraveled,

The final knowledge, in which man comprehends his own existence in universal existence, is said to be mystical in nature. By this is meant that it no longer comes about through ordinary reflection, but is somehow experienced.

But why assume, he says, that the path of thinking ends at mysticism? Reasoning, as practiced up to now, has always stopped when it came close to mysticism...

Now one asks oneself: What does Anthroposophy want? To start from clear, mathematically clear thinking, not to stop at mysticism, but to penetrate, thinking, into the regions that are to be opened up for the eternal. Even then people still say that the house should be solid, weatherproof and comfortable to live in – when it is already standing in front of their noses, but they cannot find their way into it. This can be said without any modesty, but these are not the worst, these are the best, these are the sharp thinkers! We must not close our eyes to such things. We must not keep beating about the bush, saying that we must make this or that person understand what anthroposophy is, when people talk like this.

But further: “Thought carried to its conclusion thus leads somewhere and somehow to a living mysticism that is necessary for all human beings to think...” Right building leads to the good house, the way I want it! Now, he finds that people are unfocused, and so he wants to make it clear what people should do to get beyond this terrible state that culture has fallen into: “In itself, reflecting on the meaning of life has a meaning. If such reflection arises again among us, the ideals of vanity and passion, which now proliferate like evil weeds in the convictions of the masses, will wither away without hope. How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just spent three minutes each evening looking up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky...' It does not say in the footnote: 'The details can be found in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, oh no, but it says that somehow we have to get to the point that there are people who take three minutes to collect their thoughts - “..look up thoughtfully to the infinite worlds of the starry sky and, when attending a funeral, would devote themselves to the mystery of death and life instead of walking behind the coffin in thoughtless conversation...”

It then concludes with the following, after first drawing attention to the fact: But something, which is now a world view, should not actually be said to people; we do need such a world view - I just want to know what we need it for if we are not supposed to say it to people! “The great revision of the convictions and ideals in which and for which we live cannot take place by talking into the people of our time different, better thoughts than those they have..."

It is not right that one should speak better thoughts into the minds of people than they have, but rather one must leave them to themselves! Reflect, think of other things when you walk behind a coffin, reflect! - Yes, then people will just continue to do what they have been doing so far: they will not know what to reflect on in the three minutes and so on.

"Previous thinking sought to understand the meaning of life from the meaning of the world. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to leaving the meaning of the world open to question and to give our lives a meaning from the will to live, as it is in us... “It may be! - “Even if the paths by which we have to strive towards the goal still lie in darkness, the direction in which we must go is clear. Together we have to think about the meaning of life, to struggle to arrive at a world- and life-affirming worldview in which our drive, which we experience as necessary and valuable, finds justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening, and then becomes capable of setting up and realizing definitive cultural ideals inspired by the spirit of true humanity. — They'll be beautiful chickens!

No one will be able to say that I want to practice caustic, deliberately negative criticism. I chose the first example of Professor Rubner because I wanted to choose a personality whose scientific achievements would be recognized. I chose the second example so that I could say that I regard the person who wrote this book as one of the sharpest thinkers, as a personality who is most justified in speaking in this way. I do not want to criticize adversely, that is far from me. One must endeavor to point out characteristically what is. But when Albert Schweitzer says: Philosophy should have been on guard, but it was asleep, then we can't help but say: He continues to sleep.

Let's wait and see what the second part is like, but the first part promises that the second part will not be much different. He continues to sleep, only dreaming out of his sleep. They are desires, they are not realities. Our striving must be to go beyond mere illusions, beyond phrases, to arrive at realities. You see how the words of our language have been squeezed dry. So we have to proceed as we started this evening, by talking about the soul, then we will put content back into the words. Otherwise, as Schweitzer says: philosophy is not to blame for the decline of culture, but it is to blame for not having noticed it. Well, of course Albert Schweitzer is not to blame either for the fact that our words have been so squeezed out that they no longer contain any concepts or realities. But he is to blame for not noticing this at all. He does not notice that he is talking in completely squeezed-out words.

I felt obliged to draw attention to the cultural decline in such a cutting way in response to Albert Schweitzer's recently published cultural act – I don't mean this maliciously, I mean it quite seriously. I was obliged to point out what the situation must actually be like in order to gain a real judgment of what is not happening on the one hand and should be happening on the other. After we have gone through this episode, we want to continue talking about specific topics of anthroposophy.

At the opening of this conference, I want to extend my warmest greetings to you all. Had you come some four or five months earlier, I would have welcomed you in the building we called the Goetheanum, which stood over there. The artistic forms of its architecture and its interior design would have been a constant reminder of what was intended to go out into the world from this Goetheanum. However, the misfortune that befell us on New Year's night and inflicted such grievous pain on all who loved this building, has robbed us of the Goetheanum. And so, for the time being, we shall have to nurture the spirit—without its proper earthly home—that would have reigned within this material, artistic sheath.

It gives me great joy to welcome those of you who have come from Switzerland, and who have displayed, through your coming, real evidence of your interest in our educational goals, even though they have been received recently in Switzerland with enmity. With equal joy and gratification I want to welcome the many friends of Waldorf Education—or those wishing to become its friends—who have come from Czechoslovakia. Your presence confirms to me that education involves one of the most crucial questions of our time, and that it will receive the impetus it needs and deserves only if it is seen in this light by the various members of the teaching profession.

Furthermore, I welcome those of you who have come from other countries, and who show, through your presence, that what is being worked toward here in Dornach is not just a matter of cosmopolitan interest, but is also a matter of concern for all of humanity.

And finally I want to greet our friends, the teachers of the Waldorf School. Their primary goal in coming here is to contribute to this conference from their own personal experience. They are deeply connected with our cause, and expressed the wish to support this conference. This is greatly appreciated.

Today, as an introduction, I want to prepare the ground for what will concern us during the next few days. Education is very much in the news today, and many people connected with educating the young are discussing the need for reform. Many different views are expressed—often with considerable enthusiasm—about how education should go through a change, a renewal. And yet, when hearing the various ideas on the subject, one cannot help feeling a certain trepidation, because it is difficult to see how such different views could ever lead to any kind of unity and common purpose, especially since each viewpoint claims to be the only valid one.

But there is another reason for concern. New ideas for education do not cause undue concern in themselves, for the necessities of life usually blunt the sharp edges, causing their own compensations. When one hears nearly everyone call for a renewal in education, yet another problem comes to mind—that is, where does this praiseworthy enthusiasm for better education spring from?

Isn't it prompted by people's memories of unhappy childhood days, of their own deep-seated memories of an unsatisfactory education? But as long as the call for educational reform comes only from these or similar feelings, it merely serves to emphasize personal discontent with one's own schooling. Even if certain educational reformers would not admit this to themselves or to others, by the very nuance of their words they imply dissatisfaction with their own education. And how many people today share this dissatisfaction! It is little wonder if the call for a change in education grows stronger every day.

This educational dilemma, however, raises two questions, neither of which is comforting. First, if one's education was bad, and if as a child one was exposed to its many harmful effects, how can one know what constitutes proper educational reform? Where can better ways of educating the young be found? The second question arises from listening to what certain people say about their own education. And here I want to give you a practical example because, rather than presenting theories during this conference, I want to approach our theme in practical terms.

A few days ago a book appeared on the market that, in itself, did not draw my particular interest. Nevertheless it is interesting because in the first few chapters the author, an outstanding person who has become world-famous, speaks very much about his early school days. I am referring to the memoirs of Rabindranath Tagore,¹ which have just been published. Although I do not have the same interest in this person that many Europeans do, in regard to educational matters his memoirs do contain some noteworthy and pertinent details.

I am sure that you would agree that the most beautiful memories of one's early school days—however wonderful these may have been—will hardly consist of fragmentary details of what happened in certain lessons. Indeed, it would be sad if this were so, because what affects children during lessons should become transformed into life habits and skills. In later life we should not be plagued by the details of what we once learned at school, for these must flow together into the great stream of life. Couldn't we say that our most beautiful recollections of school are concerned with the different teachers we had? It is a blessing if, in later years, one can look back with deep, inner satisfaction at having been taught by one or another admired teacher. Such an education is of value for the whole of one's life. It is important that teachers call forth such feelings in their pupils; this also belongs to the art of education.

If we look at some of the passages in Tagore's memoirs from this perspective, we find that he does not talk of his teachers with much reverence and admiration. To quote an example, he says, “One of our teachers in the elementary school also gave us private lessons at home. His body was emaciated, his face desiccated, and his voice sharp. He looked like a veritable cane.” One might easily imagine—especially here in our Western civilization, often criticized strongly in the East—that the wrongs of education would hardly be so vehemently emphasized by an Asian. But here you have an example of how an Eastern personality, now world-famous, looks back at his school days in India. And so I shall use a word that Tagore also mentions in his book—that is, “miserable school.” The meaning of this expression is not confined to European countries, but seems to express a worldwide cultural problem. Later on we shall have to say much more about what teachers must do to kindle genuine interest for what they bring to their pupils.

But now I shall give you another example from Tagore's memoirs of how his English teacher approached this task. Tagore writes, “When I think back on his lessons, I cannot really say that Aghor Babu was a hard taskmaster. He did not rule us with the cane.” To us, such a remark would point to times long past, long superseded. The fact that Tagore speaks so much in his book about the cane indicates something we would consider culturally primitive. I believe that such a comment is justified when reading Tagore's description, not just about one of his teachers “looking like a veritable cane,” but also when he points out that another teacher actually did not use the cane. Speaking of this other teacher, Tagore continues, “Even when reprimanding us he did not shout at us. But, whatever his positive sides may have been, his lessons were given in the evening, and his subject was English. I am sure that even an angel would have appeared to a Bengali boy like a true messenger of Mamas (The God of Death), had he come to him in the evening after the `miserable school' of the day, kindling a comfortless, dim lamp, in order to teach English.”

Well, here you have an example of how a famous Indian speaks about his education. But Tagore also writes about how each child brings certain needs to education. He points out in a very practical way how such needs should be met, and how this did not happen in his case. I will leave it to you to interpret this situation in Western terms. To me it seems very good to look at such matters from a global perspective, matters that—if quoted in a European context—could very well arouse strong criticism. Tagore continues:

From time to time Aghor Babu tried to introduce a refreshing scientific breeze into the dry routine of the class room. One day he pulled from his pocket a little parcel wrapped in paper, saying, “Today I want to show you one of the Creator's wonderful works of art.” Unwrapping the paper, he showed a human larynx, which he used to explain to us the wonders of its mechanism.

I still remember the shock this gave me, for I had always thought that speech came from the entire human being. I did not have the slightest inkling that the activity of speaking could thus be isolated from the whole human organism. However perfect the mechanism of each single part might be, surely it would always amount to less than the complete human being. Not that I consciously realized this, but at the bottom of my feelings it was distasteful. The fact that the teacher had lost sight of such a truth must have been the reason why his pupil could not share in his enthusiasm for this kind of demonstration.

Well, this was the first shock when the nature of the human being was introduced to the boy. But another one, worse still, was to follow. Tagore continues:

On another occasion he took us into the dissecting room of the local medical school.² The corpse of an old woman was lying on a table. This in itself did not particularly disturb me. But an amputated leg, which was lying on the floor, completely threw me off my balance. The sight of a human being in such a state of fragmentation seemed so dreadful, so utterly lacking in sense to me, that I could not shake off the impression of this dark and expressionless leg for many days to come.

This example illustrates the reaction of a young person introduced to anatomy. Fundamentally speaking, this procedure is adopted in education only because it is in line with the orthodox scientific approach. And since the teacher has indeed gone through scientific training, it is naturally assumed to be a wonderful idea to demonstrate the mechanics of human speech with a model of the larynx, or to explain physiological anatomy with the aid of an amputated leg, for contemporary scientific thinking does not consider it necessary to look at the human being as a whole.

However, these are not yet the primary reasons for selecting certain passages from Tagore's memoirs—of which we will say more later on, not because of their connection with Tagore, but because they belong to the theme of our conference. First, I want to make another point.

Anyone judging Tagore's literary merits will correctly recognize in him an outstanding individual. In the autobiography of this distinguished author we read about his dreadful education. Doesn't this encourage a strange thought—that his poor education did not seem to harm his further development? Couldn't one conclude that a thoroughly bad education doesn't necessarily inflict permanent or serious harm? For did Tagore not demonstrate that despite this, he was able to grow into a good, even a famous person? (Examples like this could be multiplied by the hundreds, though they may be less spectacular.)

Considering the myriad impulses for educational reform, one could easily be pulled in two directions. On the one hand, how can anyone possibly be in a position to improve education if one has had the misfortune of suffering from a bad one? On the other hand, if “miserable school” has not prevented someone from becoming, not just a good, but even a great and famous person, then a bad education cannot do permanent harm. Is there any point in lavishing so much care on attempts to improve education? From a superficial perspective, one might conclude that it would be better to occupy oneself with matters that are more useful than educational reform.

If anthroposophy, which has been much maligned, were merely to offer even more ideas for educational reform, as is generally done, I would not even consider it worthwhile to attempt these in practice. But in reality, anthroposophy is something very different from what most people imagine it to be, for it springs from the deepest needs of our present culture.

Anthroposophy does not proceed, as so many of its enemies do, by shamefully denigrating everything that does not agree with its own principles. Anthroposophy is more than prepared to recognize and acknowledge what is good, wherever it is found. More of this later, for, as I have said already, today's content is intended only as an introduction.

Anthroposophy points to the importance of the scientific achievements of the last three to four centuries and, above all, to those of the nineteenth century, all of which it fully recognizes. At the same time, however, anthroposophy also has the task of observing how these great scientific successes affect the human soul. It would be foolish to think that the ideas of a relatively few scientifically trained experts have little consequence for society as a whole; for even people who know little or nothing about science are influenced by contemporary science in their soul mood and in their life's orientation. Even people of a strictly orthodox religious faith, born of tradition and habit, nevertheless owe their world orientation to the results of orthodox science. The attitude of modern people is colored increasingly by the scientific view with all its tremendous achievements, which cannot be praised highly enough.

Yet the constitution of the human soul has been strangely affected by modern science. Having revealed more and more of outer nature, science has, at the same time, alienated human beings from themselves. What happens when the human being is observed from a scientific perspective? Our attention is drawn first to what has already been discovered very thoroughly in the inert, lifeless world. Then the human being is analyzed according to physiological and chemical components and what was established in the laboratories is then applied to the living human being.

Or else our attention is directed to other realms of nature, to the plant and animal kingdoms. Here scientists are fully aware that they have not been able to establish laws as convincing as those applied to inorganic nature. Nevertheless—at least in the animal realm—what has been discovered is then also related to the human being. This is the reason why “the man in the street” sees the human being as the final evolutionary stage of animals. The evolutionary ladder of the animal species ends with the emergence of the human being. The animals are understood up to a certain point. Their bony structures or muscular configurations are then simply transferred to the human being who, as a result, is considered to represent the most developed animal.

As yet, no true picture of the human being has arisen from these methods, and this will become poignantly clear to us when we focus on education. One could say that whereas in earlier times human beings occupied a central position within the existing world order, they have been displaced, crushed by the weight of geological data, and eliminated from their own sphere by the theory of animal evolution. Merely to trace back one of the ossicles of the human middle ear to the square-bone (Quadratbein) of a lower animal is praised as real progress. This is only one small example, but the way human physical nature reflects the soul and spiritual nature seems to have been entirely disregarded by modern research.

This kind of thing easily escapes notice, because the orthodox approach is simply taken for granted. It is a by-product of our modern culture, and properly so. Indeed, it would have been a sad situation if this change had not occurred, for, with the soul attitude that prevailed before the age of science, humanity could not have progressed properly. Yet today a new insight into human nature is called for, insight based on a scientific mode of thinking, and one that will also shed light on the nature of the entire universe.

I have often tried to show how the general scientific viewpoint—which in itself, can be highly praised—nevertheless can lead to great illusions, simply because of its innate claims of infallibility. If one can prove science wrong on any specific point, the whole thing is relatively simple. But a far more difficult situation arises when, within its own bounds, a scientific claim is correct.

Let me indicate what I mean. What led to a theory such as that of Kant-Laplace?³ Using this theory—which has been modified recently, and is known to practically every educated person—scientists attempt to explain the origin of our Earth and planetary system. In their calculations, some of these scientists went back over long periods of time. When one scientist spoke of some twenty million years, soon enough he was considered naïve by others who spoke in terms of two hundred million years. Then other scientists began to calculate the length of time of certain processes taking place on Earth today. This is a perfectly correct thing to do, because from a strictly material point of view there is nothing else one can do. Sedimentation or metamorphosis of rocks was observed and, from the data gained, a picture was built up that explained certain changes, and the length of time involved was then calculated. For example, if the waters of Niagara Falls have been falling on the rocks below for such and such a period of time, one can calculate the degree of erosion of these rocks. If one now transfers this calculation to another spot somewhere else where considerably more erosion has been found, one can calculate the time this must have required through simple multiplication. Using this method, one might arrive at, let's say, twenty million years, which is quite correct as far as the calculation is concerned.

Similarly, one may start with the present time and, according to another well-known theory, calculate the time it will take for the Earth to become subject to heat death, and so on.

Yet, such a procedure might equally well be applied to a very different situation. Observe, for example, how the human heart changes from year to year. Noting the differences, one could investigate—following the same method applied in the case of Niagara Falls—how this heart must have looked some three hundred years ago, and what it would look like some three hundred years from now. Technically speaking, this method would be analogous to that of determining the times of geological changes and in this sense it would be correct. Observing the heart of a person aged about thirty-five, one would be basing one's calculations on an organ that has been functioning for a considerable length of time. However, one obvious detail has been overlooked—that this particular heart did not exist three hundred years ago, nor will it be there three hundred years from now. Though mathematically speaking the calculation is correct, it has no relationship to reality.

In our current intellectual age we are too preoccupied with whether or not something is correct, whether or not it is logically correct; but we have lost the habit of asking whether it conforms to actual real-life situations. We will confront this problem again and again this week. But it can happen sometimes that, when we follow apparently correct theories, even fundamental issues are simply overlooked. For example, you may have witnessed—I am not implying that as teachers you have actually carried out this experiment yourselves, for present company is always excluded when negative assertions are being made—you may have witnessed how the rotation of the planets around the Sun was graphically illustrated even to a class of young children. A piece of cardboard is cut into a disc and its center is pierced with a pin. A drip of oil is then put onto its surface before the disc is floated on water. When the pin is twirled around to rotate the floating disc, little droplets of oil will shoot off at a tangent, making “little planets”—little oil planets—and in this way a most convincing model of a planetary system has been fabricated. Needless to say, this experiment is supposed to prove the accuracy of the Kant-Laplace theory. Well, as far as one's own morality is concerned, it is virtuous enough to be self-effacing, but in a scientific experiment of this sort, the first requirement is certainly not to omit any essential detail—however small—and to include all existing criteria. And isn't the teacher spinning the disc the most important factor involved? Therefore, this hypothesis would make sense only if it were assumed that, long, long ago, a gigantic schoolmaster once twirled round an immense world-pin, thus spinning our entire planetary system! Otherwise one should not use such a hypothetical experiment.

And so, many elements of an unrealistic soul attitude can be detected where science appears to be most correct, where its findings cannot be contested. Consequently these elements of error easily creep into education. For those who teach are inevitably a product of their own time, and this is as it should be. When they come across such geological calculations or astronomical analogies, everything seems to fit together very nicely. Sometimes one cannot help but feel amazed at the incredible ingenuity of scientific interpretations that, despite their apparent power of conviction, nevertheless, can lead us away from reality. However, as educators we must never deviate from actual reality. In teaching, we face reality all the time, and this must spur us on to greater knowledge of human nature as it really is. In a certain sense this failure to penetrate human nature has already crept into modern-day educational thinking and practice.

I would like to illustrate this point with an example. Whenever you are dealing with children in the classroom, you will find that some are more gifted in one or another subject than others. Most of you will be familiar with the current thoughts and methods regarding this problem. I am referring to them here only to establish mutual understanding. There are different degrees of abilities in children. And how are these dealt with, especially in today's most progressive centers for educational science? From your study of educational literature you probably know about the so-called correlation coefficients recently introduced in schools. According to this method, the correlation coefficient one is written down if a pupil shows an equal aptitude for two different subjects. (Such a thing actually never occurs, but hypothetically it is simply assumed.) If, on the other hand, a natural gift exists for two subjects that are mutually incompatible, the correlation coefficient zero is given. The idea of this method is to test and measure the pupils' various gifts. For example, you may find that drawing and writing carry the correlation coefficient of, let us say, .7. This means that more than half the children who are gifted in drawing also have a natural skill for writing. One also looks for correlation coefficients in other combinations of talents. For example, writing is linked to a pupil's ability to deal with the mother tongue and, in this case, the correlation coefficient is .54. Arithmetic and writing carry the correlation coefficient of .2, arithmetic and drawing .19, and so on. From this it can be seen that arithmetic and drawing are the least compatible partners, whereas writing and drawing are matched most frequently. A natural gift for both the mother tongue and for drawing is found to be equally present in approximately fifty percent of the pupils.

Please note that, on principle, I do not object to this kind of scientific research. It would be wrong to declare that such things should not be investigated. As a matter of fact, I find these things extraordinarily interesting. I am not in the least against such experimental or statistical methods of psychology.

But if their results are directly implemented in education, it is as if you were to ask someone to become a painter without mentioning the importance of having to deal with color. It is as if one were to say instead to such a person, “Look, here is a good book on esthetics. Read the chapter about painting and, in itself, that will make you into a good painter.”

A well-known painter in Munich once told me a story that I have quoted several times. While he was a student at the local arts school, Carriere, [Moritz Carriere (1817–1895) German thinker; published Aesthetics in 1815.] the famous professor of esthetics, was lecturing in Munich. One day the painter and some of his fellow students decided to go and see this famous expert who also lectured on painting. But one visit was enough for them, because, as they put it, all he did was “crow with esthetic delight.”

This is how it strikes me if people think they can benefit their educational practice with the kind of thing mentioned above. Though these experiments may be interesting from a scientific perspective, something very different is needed for the practical classroom situation. It is necessary, for example, that teachers can penetrate human nature so deeply that they can recognize the origin of the skills for drawing and writing within the inner functions, or recognize what enables a pupil to speak the mother tongue well. To achieve such a faculty, a living observation of the human being is required, which eventually may lead one to discover how specific capacities flow out of some children for, let us say, drawing or the skill for their native language. Here, statistics are of little use. One must take a cue from what children reveal of themselves. At most, such statistical evidence may serve as an interesting confirmation afterward. Statistics do have their value, but to believe that they are tools for educational practice only shows the degree of one's alienation from real human nature.

Today, many people look at statistics as a key to understanding human beings. In certain areas of life this is justified. It is possible to build a statistical picture of the human being, but such a picture will not allow us to understand the human being in depth. Think, for instance, of how useful statistics are in their appropriate sphere, such as in insurance. If I want to take out a life insurance policy, I will be asked how old I am, and I must give evidence for the state of my health, and so on. From such data the level of my premium can be worked out very neatly, depending on whether I happen to be a youngster or an old fogy. My life expectancy is then calculated and these details meet exactly the needs of the insurance business. But what if, in my thirty-seventh year, I had taken out a life insurance policy for, let us say, twenty years? Would this make me feel obliged to die at the age of fifty-seven, simply because of what was calculated on paper? To enter fully into the stream of life is something very different from following certain established criteria, however logically correct they may be, or however beneficial they may be in their proper sphere.

When considering the question of aptitude for writing and drawing in children who have recently entered school, one must remember that they have reached the stage of their second dentition. In the coming lectures you will hear more about the different stages of children's development, and about how their ages can be divided into three groups: the period from birth to the change of teeth; from the second dentition to puberty; and the time following puberty. Later we shall go into more detail about what happens in children during these three periods.

For now let us consider this question of writing and drawing. Science, having scrutinized so minutely the three kingdoms of nature that surround us, now transfers the knowledge gained to the human being. Knowledge of the outer world and the mode of thinking about outer nature now becomes the key to understanding the human individual. And yet, if one observes the human being within the human sphere, one will come to recognize the true situation. One only needs the courage to do so with the same accuracy and objectivity used to study outer nature. Current research shows such courage only when observing external nature, but shrinks from applying the same methods in the study of the human being.

Let's look at how the child develops from birth to the change of teeth. This change of teeth is a unique event in life, inasmuch as it occurs only once in life. Now, if you can experience something similar to the feelings Tagore expressed when he saw the amputated leg, you will realize that what is revealed in the change of teeth does not just happen in the jaws, but encompasses the entire human being. You will feel that something must be pervading the whole child until around the age of seven, and that some activity must reach a climax in the change of teeth. This activity is there in its original form until the seventh year, and then it is no longer present in its original state.

When studying physics, for example, scientists have the courage to speak of latent heat as distinct from the various forms of liberated heat. According to this concept, there must be some form of heat that cannot be determined with a thermometer, but can be measured after it has been released. When characterizing these phenomena that occur in nature, scientists have shown courage in their interpretations. However, when the human being becomes the object of study, this courage is no longer there. Otherwise they would not hesitate to state: What has been working until the seventh year in the child, working toward liberation during the change of teeth, must have been connected with the physical organism before becoming freed and reappearing in a different guise as the child's inner soul properties. This same process can also be recognized in other areas of the child's bone formation. One would realize that these newly emerging powers must be the same, although transformed, as what had been active previously in the child's physical organism.

Only courage is needed to look at the human being with the same cognitive powers used to study outer nature, but modern science will not do this. However, if we do this, our attention is drawn toward all that belongs to the bony system, to everything that hardens the human form to give it structure and support. Orthodox physiology might eventually go this far—if not today, then certainly in due time. The most important branches of science are going through considerable changes just now, and the time will come when they will follow the course indicated.

But something else must also be considered. In later years, the child will be introduced to many different subjects, such as geometry. In today's intellectual age, one has an abstract concept of three-dimensional space, to choose a very simple example. One imagines: three lines at right angles to one another hovering about in space and extending to infinity. It is possible to form such a concept abstractly, but in such a case it is not inwardly experienced. And yet, three-dimensional space wants to be experienced as reality. This does happen in a young child, although unconsciously, at the crawling stage when, losing its balance time and again, it will eventually learn to acquire the upright position and achieve equilibrium in the world. Here we have a case of actual experience of three-dimensional space. This is not merely a question of drawing three lines in space, because one of these three dimensions is identical with the human upright position (which we can test by no longer assuming it—that is, by lying horizontally or sleeping). This upright position signals the most fundamental difference between the human being and the animal, because, unlike the human backbone, the animal's spinal column runs parallel to Earth's surface. We experience the second dimension unconsciously every time we stretch our arms sideways. The third dimension moves from our front toward the back.

In reality these three dimensions are experienced concretely as above and below, right and left, forward and backward. What is done in geometry is merely an abstraction. Human beings do experience with their bodies what is shown in geometrical constructions, but only during the age when they are still largely unconscious and dreamy. Later on, these experiences rise into consciousness and assume abstract forms.

With the change of teeth, the forces that cause an inner firmness, an inner consolidation and support, have reached a certain climax. From the moment when the child can stand upright until the inner hardening processes manifest in the change of teeth, the child inwardly tries, although unconsciously, “body geometry” as an activity akin to drawing. When the teeth change, this becomes a soul activity—that is, it enters the realm of the child's soul. We might understand this transformation better through an analogy; just as a sediment falls to the bottom when a chemical solution cools, and leaves the upper part clearer, so there is also a physiological aspect to the hardening process—the sediment, as well as its counterpart: the clear solution within the child's soul realm, which manifests as a faculty for geometrizing, for drawing, and so on.

After this period, we can see the child's soul qualities streaming outward. Just think about how such a discovery engenders real interest in the human being. We shall observe this streaming out in greater detail, and how it is reflected back again, later on.

In this respect everything in life is linked together. What we do to the child not only has an immediate effect, but influences the whole lifetime. Only a few people are prepared to observe a human life as a whole, but most focus their attention on present circumstances only. This is the case, for example, when one creates an experiment concerned only with the present. On the other hand, have you ever observed how the mere presence of some old people can be like a blessing for the others present? They need not even say a word. Goodness radiates from their presence simply through what they have become. And if you now search the biography of such old people, you may find that when they were children they learned to feel reverence quite naturally, without any outer compulsion. I could say equally that they learned how to pray, by which I mean praying in its widest sense, which includes a deep respect and admiration for another human being. I would like to express this thought in the form of a picture. Those who have not learned to fold their hands in prayer during childhood, cannot spread them in blessing in old age.

The different phases of life are all interconnected and it is of great importance in education to take this into full account. We learn a great deal about the child when we recognize how soul forces well forth after they have completed their task of working in the physical body up to the end of the first seven-year period.

Psychologists have made the strangest hypotheses about the interplay of soul and body, whereas one period of life actually sheds light on another. What we can see in the child between the change of teeth and puberty will tell us something about the soul forces previously engaged in working within the child's physical realm. Facts speak for themselves and shed light on one another. Think of how such things will stimulate interest in education! And genuine interest in the human being is needed in education today. Far too many people think about the relationship of body and soul—or of soul and body—only in abstract terms. And because so little of real value has emerged, a rather amusing theory has been formulated—that is, the theory of the so-called psycho-physical parallelism. According to this theory, processes of soul and body run side by side on a parallel course. There is no need to bother about points of intersection, no need to bother about the relationship between body and soul at all, because they supposedly meet at infinity! That is why this theory sounds like a joke.

However, if one allows the guidance of practical experience, one can discover the actual interrelationship between body and soul. One only needs to look over a person's whole life-span. Let us take the example of someone who develops diabetes or rheumatism at a certain age. When trying to find a remedy for such an illness, usually only the present conditions are considered; this, in itself, is quite justified. It is certainly proper to make every effort to heal a sickness whenever it occurs. But if one surveys the whole life of the patient, one may discover that many times diabetes is due to a memory that was overtaxed or developed in the wrong way between the change of teeth and puberty. Health during later years is largely conditioned by the way a person's soul life was developed during childhood. The way a child's memory is trained will affect the metabolism after a certain period of time. For example, if undigested vestiges of memory remain in the soul of a child between seven and fourteen, they will be released approximately between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five as physical residues, which can then lead to rheumatism or diabetes.

It is not an understatement to suggest that teachers should have at least a modicum of medical knowledge at their disposal. It is not right for them to leave everything concerning the child's health to the school doctor, who usually doesn't even know the children. If any profession in our time requires a wider background, education needs it most of all.

This is what I wanted to tell you as an introduction to our conference theme, so that you can judge for yourselves when you hear people say that anthroposophy now dabbles also in education, whereas others believe that it has something valid to say on the subject. Those who are ready to listen will not be swayed by those who have the opinion that there is no real need for education, or that there is no point in discussing it simply because their own experiences in this area have been so frustrating. Anthroposophy begins with an entirely different attitude. It does not simply want to correct old ideas, but begins with a true picture and knowledge of the human being, because, in keeping with human progress, these things have become necessary today.

If you go back to the earlier forms of education, you will discover that they have all arisen from the general culture of their time, from the universal nature of human feelings and experiences. We must rediscover a universal approach, flowing from human nature itself. If I had my way, I would give anthroposophy a new name every day to prevent people from hanging on to its literal meaning, from translating it from the Greek, so they can form judgments accordingly. It is immaterial what name we attach to what is being done here. The only thing that matters is that everything we do here is focused on life's realities and that we never lose sight of them. We must never be tempted to implement sectarian ideas.

And so, looking at education in general, we encounter the opinion that there are already plenty of well-considered educational systems; but since we are all suffering so much from the intellectualism of our times, it would be best if the intellect were banished from education. This is very correct, but then it is concluded that, instead of developing a science of education, again we should appeal to our inherent pedagogical instincts. However desirable this may sound, it is no longer possible today because humankind has moved to a further stage of development. The healthy instincts of the past are no longer with us today. A new and unbiased look at education has to be backed by fully conscious cognition, and this is possible only if our understanding can penetrate the very nature of the human being. This is what anthroposophy is all about.

One more point: intellectualism and abstractions are rampant today to the degree where there is a general feeling that children should be protected from an education that is too intellectual, that their hearts and feelings should also be educated. This is entirely correct, but when looking into educational literature and current practice, one cannot help noticing that such good intentions are not likely to go very far because, once again, they are formulated in a theoretical and abstract way. It is even less clear that this request should be made, not just on behalf of the child, but should be addressed also to the teachers and, most of all, to the pedagogical principles themselves. To do this is my goal. We must not give mere lip service when stating how we wish to educate the heart of the child and not just the intellect, but we should ask ourselves how we can best meet this challenge.

What do we have to do so that education can have a heart again?

• 1. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Indian Bengali poet and novelist; won Nobel prize for literature in 1913; knighted by England, but resigned knighthood (1919) in protest against English repression in Punjab.
• 2. There can be no doubt that Aghor Babu wanted to give his boys a special treat.
• 3. Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827) French astronomer and mathematician. Immanuel Kant (1724–1895) German philosopher.

In the course of the evolution of mankind, the different world-religions have placed mighty pictures before humanity. If these pictures are to be fully understood a certain esoteric knowledge is required. In the course of years, such a knowledge, based on Anthroposophy, has been applied to the interpretation of all the four Gospels, in order that their deeper content and meaning may be brought to light.* This content is for the most part in the form of pictures, because pictures refuse to communicate themselves in the narrow, rationalistic way that is possible with concepts and ideas. People think that once a concept has been grasped they have got to the root of everything to which it is relevant. No such opinion is possible in the case of a picture, an imagination. A picture or an imagination works in a living way, like a living being itself. We may have come to know one aspect or another of a living person, but ever and again he will present new aspects to us. We shall not be satisfied, therefore, with definitions purporting to be comprehensive, but we shall endeavour to look for characteristics which contribute to the picture from different angles, giving us increasing knowledge of the person in question.¹

To-day I want to bring two familiar pictures before you, and to describe certain aspects of them.

The first picture is that of the disciples of Christ Jesus on the day of the Ascension. Gazing upwards, they see Christ vanishing in the clouds. The usual conception of this scene is that Christ went up into heaven and so departed from the earth, and that the disciples were then left, as it were, to their own resources. Likewise all earthly humanity, for whose sake Christ fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, was by the Ascension left to its own resources.

The thought may occur to you that in a certain respect this belies the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. We ourselves know that through His deed on Golgotha Christ resolved to unite His own Being with the earth, that is to say, from the Mystery of Golgotha onwards to remain forever connected with earth-evolution. The mighty picture of the Ascension might thus seem to be at variance with what esoteric vision of the Mystery of Golgotha reveals concerning Christ's union with the earth and with mankind.

We will try to-day to overcome this seeming contradiction in the light of actual spiritual facts.

The second picture is that of the scene ten days after the Ascension, when tongues of fire descend upon the heads of the assembled disciples and they are moved “to speak with other tongues.” What this actually means is that henceforward the disciples were able to impart the secrets of the Deed on Golgotha to the heart of every human being, irrespective of religion or creed.

Keeping these two pictures before our minds, we shall try to give some indication of their meaning. Anything more than this is not possible.

We know from our study of Anthroposophy, that the evolution of mankind did not begin on the Earth, but that Earth-evolution proper was preceded by a “Moon” evolution, this by a “Sun” evolution, and this again by a “Saturn” evolution, as described in my book An Outline of Occult Science. During the period of the “Saturn” evolution, man developed in his descent from the Spiritual as far as the rudimentary basis of the physical body. In that epoch, however, the physical body was a body of warmth only; that is to say, warmth of varying degrees, forces of warmth, gathered together around the being of soul-and-spirit.

During the “Sun” evolution man acquired an aeriform body, during the “Moon” evolution a kind of fluid, watery body, and a solid, earthy body, in the real sense, only during “Earth” evolution proper.

Let us think, now, particularly of the Earth-evolution. It fulfils its course in seven successive epochs, of which the first three are recapitulations: the first, a recapitulation of the “Saturn” period, the second of the “Sun” period, the third (the Lemurian epoch) of the “Moon” period. Earth-evolution proper really begins with the fourth epoch, that of Atlantis. We are living now in the fifth epoch, which will be followed by the sixth and the seventh.

The mid-point of Earth-evolution falls in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and so in our present age the Earth has already passed the mid-point of its development. From this you will realise that the Earth is already involved in a declining phase of evolution, and in our time this must always be taken into account. As I have often said, it conforms entirely with the findings even of modern materialistic geology.

In his book The Face of the Earth, Eduard Suess has stated that the soil beneath our feet to-day belongs to an earth that is already dying. During the Atlantean epoch the earth was, so to say, in the middle period of life; it teemed with inner life; it had upon it no such formations as the rocks and stones, which are gradually crumbling away. The mineral element was active in the earthly realm in the way in which it is active to-day in an animal organism, in a state of solution out of which deposits will not form unless the organism is diseased. If the animal organism is healthy it is only the bones that can be said to take their form as deposits. In the bones, however, there is still inner life. The bones are not in the condition of death, they are not, like our mountains and rocks, in process of crumbling into dust. The crumbling of the rocks is evidence that the earth is already involved in a death-process.

As already said, this is now known even to ordinary materialistic geology. Anthroposophy must add to this knowledge the fact that the earth has been involved in this process of decline ever since the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Moreover, in the earth must be included everything that belongs to it: the plants, the animals, and, above all, physical man. Physical man is part and parcel of the earth. In that the earth is involved in a process of decline, so too is the human physical body. Expressed differently, in more esoteric terms, this signifies that by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, everything that was first laid down in a germinal condition in the warmth-body of the “Saturn” evolution had reached completion. The human physical body actually reached completion by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and since then the path of its evolution has been one of decline.

Evolution does not, of course, proceed with complete uniformity. One race or people enters a phase of evolution earlier or later than another, but, speaking generally, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was at hand, the evolution of the physical constitution of man had reached a stage when humanity all over the globe was facing the prospect of finding further incarnation impossible on the earth; in other words, of being unable henceforward to accompany the earth in its declining evolution.

In the Schools of Initiation it was known, and can of course also be known to-day, that at about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the human physical body had reached a degree of decline where the men who were then in incarnation or who were to be incarnated in the near future, that is, up to about the fourth century A.D., were faced with the danger of leaving an earth that was growing more and more desolate and barren, and of finding no possibility in the future of descending from the world of spirit-and-soul and building a physical body out of materials provided by the physical earth. This danger existed, and the inevitable consequence would have been the failure of man to fulfil his allotted earthly mission. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers working in combination had succeeded to the extent that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, earthly mankind was face to face with the possibility of dying out.

Mankind was rescued from this fate through that which was achieved by the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby the human physical body itself was imbued again with the necessary forces of life and freshness. Men were thereby enabled to continue their further evolution on earth, inasmuch as they could now come down from worlds of spirit-and-soul and find it possible to live in physical bodies. Such was the actual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I have often spoken of this, as for example in the lecture-course given in Carlsruhe under the title From Jesus to Christ.² The greatest hostility was aroused by these lectures because, out of a sense of esoteric duty, certain truths were presented which many people wish to keep concealed. Indeed it can be said that from a certain quarter the hostility to Anthroposophy started from these very lectures.

What I have described, however, is one aspect of the actual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha. This same fact can, of course, be expressed in many different ways. It was expressed differently in that lecture-course, but what I am now describing is the same fact, merely seen from another side. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the forces promoting the growth and thriving of man's physical body were quickened anew, with the following result.—It was now made possible for man to receive, during his life of sleep, an impulse he would not otherwise have received. The whole evolution of man on earth takes its course, as we know, in the alternation of waking life and sleep-life. In sleep, the physical body and ether-body remain behind; from the time of falling asleep until that of waking, the ego and the astral body make themselves independent of them. During this state of independence in sleep the influence of the Christ-Force takes effect in the ego and the astral body in those men who through the requisite mood and content of their soul-life have made fitting preparation for this condition of sleep. Penetration of these higher bodies by the Christ-Force, therefore, takes place mainly during the state of sleep.

To turn now to the biblical event of the Ascension, we must realise that at that time the disciples had become clairvoyant to a degree at which they were able to behold what is, in truth, a deep secret of earthly evolution. These secrets remain unnoticed by man's everyday consciousness, which is incapable of knowing whether at one point or another in the evolution of humanity something of supreme importance is taking place. There are many such happenings, but the everyday consciousness is unaware of them. The picture of the Ascension actually signifies that at this moment Christ's disciples were able to witness spiritually an event of untold significance, enacted “behind the scenes” as it were of earthly evolution.

What they witnessed revealed to them, as in a picture, the prospect of what would have come about for men had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place. They beheld as a concrete spiritual happening what would have then befallen, namely, that the physical bodies of men would have so deteriorated that the whole future of humanity would have been endangered. For the consequence of this physical deterioration would have been that the human etheric body would have obeyed the forces of attraction which properly belong to it. The etheric body is being drawn all the time towards the sun, not towards the earth. Our constitution as human beings is such that our physical body has earthly heaviness, gravity, but our etheric body, sun-levity. Had the human physical body become what it must have become if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, the etheric bodies of men would have followed their own urge towards the sun and have left the physical body. The existence of mankind on earth would inevitably have come to an end.

Until the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ's dwelling-place was the sun. Therefore in that the etheric body of man strives towards the sun, it is striving towards the Christ. Now picture to yourselves the scene on the day of the Ascension. In spiritual vision the disciples see Christ Himself rising heavenwards. A vision is conjured before them of how the power, the impulse of Christ unites itself with the etheric nature of man, in its upward striving; of how at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha man was facing the danger of his etheric body being drawn out into the sun like a cloud, but how, in its sunward streaming, it was held together by Christ. This picture must be understood, for in truth it is a warning. Christ is akin to those forces in man which naturally strive towards the sun and away from the earth, and will always do so. But Christ remains in union with the earth. Thus the Christ Impulse holds man securely on the earth.

In this picture of the Ascension, something more is manifest to the disciples. Suppose that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place and that numbers of men had become clairvoyant to the degree to which the disciples became clairvoyant at this moment. These men would have seen the etheric bodies of certain human beings departing from the earth in the direction of the sun, and they would have come to this conclusion: ‘This is the path man's etheric body is taking. The etheric-earthly element in man is being drawn away into the sun.’ But now, by carrying to its fulfilment the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has rescued for the earth this sunward-striving etheric body. And thereby is manifest the fact that Christ remains united with mankind on the earth. Thus something else became apparent here, namely that through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ brought to pass within earth-evolution a cosmic event. Christ came down from the heights of spirit, linked Himself with humanity in the man Jesus of Nazareth, fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, united His evolution with that of the earth. It was a cosmic Deed accomplished for the whole of humanity.

Mark these words: The Deed on Golgotha was fulfilled for all mankind. The eye of clairvoyance can never fail to perceive how, since that Deed, the etheric forces in man, with their urge to escape from the earth, are united with Christ in order that He may keep them in the earth-evolution. This applies to the whole of mankind.

This leads us to another consideration. Suppose that only a handful of human beings had been able to acquire knowledge of these facts that relate to the Mystery of Golgotha, and that a large section of mankind—as is actually the case—had not recognised its significance. If this had come about, the earth would be peopled by a few true believers in Christ and by a large number who do not acknowledge the essential content and meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. What, then, is to be said of the latter? How are these human beings who do not acknowledge the Mystery of Golgotha related to it?—or, better put, how is the Deed of Christ on Golgotha related to these human beings?

The Deed of Christ on Golgotha is an objective fact; its cosmic significance does not depend upon what men believe about it. An objective fact has, in itself, reality of being. If an oven is hot, it does not become cold because a number of people believe that it is cold.—The Mystery of Golgotha rescues mankind from the decay of the physical body, no matter what men believe or do not believe about it. The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted for the sake of all men, including those who do not believe in it.—That is the cardinal fact to be remembered.

We realise, then, that the Deed on Golgotha was enacted in order that by this means mankind on earth might be quickened to the degree necessary for its rejuvenation. That has come to pass. It has been made possible for men to find on the earth bodies in which they can and will for long ages of future time—be able to incarnate. It is, however, fundamentally as beings of spirit-and-soul that men will pass through existence in these now rejuvenated earthly bodies, and it is as beings of spirit-and-soul that they will be able to appear on the earth again and again.

Now the Christ Impulse, which must have significance for the spiritual nature of man as well as for his bodily nature, can impress itself upon a man's waking state, but it can make no impression on his sleeping state unless this Impulse has been received into his soul. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, would have produced its effect in the waking life of men who had no knowledge of it; but it would not, in such circumstances, have affected them in their life of sleep. The inevitable result would have been that while men would have gained the possibility of incarnating time and again on the earth, nevertheless, if they had acquired no knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, the condition of their sleep would have been such that the connection of their spirit-and-soul nature with Christ must have been lost.

Here you see the difference in the relation to the Mystery of Golgotha of those men who have, so to speak, no desire to know anything about it. Christ performed His Deed for their bodies, in order that earthly life should be made possible for them, just as He performed it for utterly unbelieving non-Christian peoples. But to take effect in man's spirit-and-soul nature, the Christ Impulse must also be able to penetrate into the human soul during the state of sleep. And this is only possible if a man consciously acknowledges the import of the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, can proceed only from a true recognition of its content.

Thus there are two things that mankind must realise: on the one hand that Christ holds back the ether-body in its perpetual urge towards the sun; and on the other, that man's spirit-and-soul nature, his ego and astral body, can receive the Christ Impulse only in the time between falling asleep and waking—and this is only possible when knowledge of this Impulse has been acquired in waking life.

To sum up: the urge of the etheric bodies of men to draw towards the sun is perceived by the disciples in clairvoyant vision. But they also perceive how Christ unites Himself with this urge, restrains it, holds it fast. The mighty scene of the Ascension is that of the rescue of the physical-etheric nature of man by Christ.

The disciples withdraw in deep contemplation. For in their awakened souls is the knowledge that through the Mystery of Golgotha complete provision was made for the physical-etheric nature of mankind as a whole. But what happens, they wonder, to the being of spirit-and-soul? Whence does man acquire the power to receive the Christ Impulse into his nature of spirit-and-soul, into his ego and astral body? The answer is found in the Whitsun festival.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Impulse has taken effect on the earth as a reality which is within the comprehension of spiritual cognition alone. No materialistic knowledge, no materialistic science can understand the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the soul must acquire the power of spiritual cognition, of spiritual perception, of spiritual feeling, in order to be able to understand how, on Golgotha, the Christ Impulse was united with the impulses of the earth.

Christ Jesus fulfilled His Deed on Golgotha to the end that this union might take effect, fulfilled it in such a way that ten days after the event of the Ascension He sent man the possibility of imbuing also his inner nature of spirit-and-soul, his ego and astral body, with the Christ Impulse. The permeation of the human spirit-and-soul with the power to understand the Mystery of Golgotha is the sending of the Holy Spirit. This is the picture of the Whitsun festival, the festival of Pentecost. Christ fulfilled His Deed for all mankind. But to each human individual, in order that he may be able to understand this Deed, Christ sent the Spirit, in order that the individual being of spirit-and-soul may have access to the effects of the Deed that was accomplished for all men in common. Through the Spirit man must learn to experience the Christ Mystery inwardly, in spirit and in soul.

Thus these two pictures stand side by side in the history of the evolution of humanity. That of the Ascension tells us: The Deed on Golgotha was fulfilled for the physical body and the etheric body in the universal human sense. That of Whitsun tells us: The single human being must make this Deed bear fruit in himself by receiving the Holy Spirit. Thereby the Christ Impulse becomes individual in each human being.

And now something else can be added to the picture of the Ascension. Spiritual visions such as came to the disciples on the day of the Ascension always have a bearing upon what man actually experiences in one or another state of consciousness. After death, as you know, the etheric body leaves the human being. He lays aside the physical body at death, retains the etheric body for a few days, and then the etheric body dissolves, is actually united with the sun. This dissolution after death betokens union with the sun-nature streaming through the space in which the earth, too is included. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, man beholds, together with this departing etheric body, the Christ Who has rescued it for earthly existence through the ages of time to come. So that since the Mystery of Golgotha there stands before the soul of every human being who passes through death the Ascension picture which the disciples were able to behold that day in a particular condition of their soul-life.

But for one who makes the Whitsun Mystery, too, part of his being, who allows the Holy Spirit to draw near to him—for such a one this picture after death becomes the source of the greatest consolation he can possibly experience: for now he beholds the Mystery of Golgotha in all its truth and reality. This picture of the Ascension tells him: You can with confidence entrust all your following incarnations to earth-evolution, for through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ has become the Saviour of earth-evolution.—For one who does not penetrate with his ego and astral body—that is to say, does not penetrate with knowledge and with feeling—to the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha, for him this picture is a reproach until such time as he too learns to understand it. After death, the picture is as it were an admonition: Endeavour to acquire for the next earthly life such forces as will enable you to understand the Mystery of Golgotha!—That this picture of the Ascension should, to begin with, be an admonition, is only natural; for in subsequent earthly lives men can endeavour to apply the forces they have been admonished to acquire, and gain understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You can now perceive the difference between those who with their inmost forces of faith, knowledge and feeling put their trust in the Mystery of Golgotha, and those who do not. The Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled for mankind as a whole, in respect of the physical body and etheric body only. The sending of the Holy Spirit, the Whitsun mystery, signifies that the soul and spirit of man can partake of the fruits of the Deed on Golgotha only if he finds wings to bear him to actual understanding of the essence and meaning of that Deed.

But because this essence and meaning can be fully grasped by spiritual knowledge alone, not by material knowledge, it follows that the truth of the Whitsun festival can be grasped only when men realise that the sending of the Holy Spirit is the challenge to humanity more and more to achieve Spirit-knowledge, through which alone the Mystery of Golgotha can be understood.

That it must be understood—this is the challenge of the Whitsun Mystery. That it came to pass for all mankind—this is the revelation given in the Ascension.

And so it can truly be said that Anthroposophy enables us to understand the relation of the Whitsun Mystery to the Ascension revelation. We can feel Anthroposophy to be like a herald bringing illumination to these festivals of Spring, and to its many facets we have added yet another, essentially belonging to it.

This should convey to you the mood-of-soul in which the true feeling for the festivals of the Ascension and of Whitsun can arise. The pictures which such festivals bring before the soul are like living beings: we can approach nearer and nearer to their reality, learn to know them more and more intimately. When once again the year is filled with spiritual understanding of the festival seasons, it will be imbued with cosmic reality, and within earthly existence men will experience cosmic existence.

Whitsun is pre-eminently a festival of flowers. If a man has a true feeling for this Festival he will go out among the buds and blossoms opening under the influence of the sun, under the etheric and astral influences—and he will perceive in the flower-decked earth the earthly image of what flows together in the picture of Christ's Ascension, and the descent of the tongues of fire upon the heads of the disciples which followed later. The heart of man as it opens may be symbolised by the flower opening itself to the sun; and what pours down from the sun, giving the flower the fertilising power it needs, may be symbolised by the tongues of fire descending: upon the heads of the disciples. Anthroposophy can work upon human hearts with the power that streams from an understanding of the festival times and from true contemplation of each festival season; it can help to evoke the mood-of-soul that conforms truly with these days of the Spring festivals.

• 1. See lecture-courses by Rudolf Steiner on each of the four Gospels; also numbers of other published lectures.
• 2. Ten lectures, Oct. 5th—14th, 1911. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co.

In the last few days I have been speaking of man's place in the Universe. On the one side we envisaged man's organisation as composed of physical body, etheric body or body of formative forces, astral body and the true ‘I’ which passes from earthly life to earthly life. At the same time I also tried to show how these members of the human being are each connected in a different way with the Universe. It can be said that the physical body is connected with all that is the physical, earthly world of the senses; man's physical body is part of that world. But when we think of the etheric body or the body of formative forces, we must understand that this belongs to quite a different kind of world, to that world which is itself etheric and of which I told you that man should experience it as coming to him from the far spaces of the cosmos. If, then, we imagine the forces of the earth spreading out in all directions and man living within these forces, which are those of the physical world, we must conceive the etheric world as coming in on all sides from the direction of the outer global shell of the universe to meet the outstreaming physical forces, and thus reaching man. It is obvious, therefore, that man's etheric body is subject to entirely different laws from those governing the physical body.—And again, when contemplating man's astral body, we perceive it to be connected with worlds that are not to be found at all in that cosmos which is contained in the Physical and the etheric, and in which we find that with our astral body we belong to the world we enter between death and a new birth.

And finally with the ‘I’ itself we belong to a world that flows as from a quickening fount through worlds which, as for instance our own world, are threefold in character. The three members of our world are the physical, the etheric, the astral. The world of the ‘I’ passes through this world and through other similarly threefold worlds. It is therefore a far more embracing world, one that we must regard as eternal as compared with the temporal.

But we must also have regard to the fact that, whenever we employ those human faculties of perception and understanding which inform us about the etheric body or the body of formative forces, the astral body and the ‘I,’ we do in fact enter into entirely different worlds. We have to change over to the sphere of active, living thinking in order to experience our etheric body. What we then have to bear in mind is that in that world everything is different from what we experience while bound to the physical world of the senses. In the first place the things and happenings we know from the aspect of the physical world appear in quite a different light in these higher worlds. As it is, the things and events encountered in the physical world are after all only final manifestations. They have their source in the higher worlds; so that we then see more into the primary origins of our surroundings in the physical world. But apart from that, when in the physical world we have, to begin with, the world well known to ordinary consciousness, where man is surrounded by the three kingdoms of nature besides his own. But when we rise to those powers of cognition—in my books I have used the expression ‘Imaginative Cognition’—which enable us to experience our own etheric body or the body of formative forces, we enter the etheric world. And we have sufficiently developed and strengthened our faculties when we have kindled the inner light and can experience ourselves, as it were, in the Second Man, in the body of formative forces; we then enter the world which, at any rate to begin with, reveals itself to us in images: the world of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai.

Having broken through, as it were, into the cosmic spheres where the etheric body, the body of formative forces, becomes perceptible to us, we recognise on entering this world of flowing images that these reveal manifestations of the Beings of the third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. There we are among Beings who are not with us in the physical world of the senses. The presence of these Beings reveals itself to us through the medium of qualities similar in kind to those we perceive also through our senses in the physical world.

But here, in the world of the senses, we see for instance the colours spread over the surface of things or in purely physical configurations such as the rainbow. Sounds are experienced as connected with specific objects in the physical world. In the same way, warmth and cold are felt as emanating from certain objects in the physical world of the senses. But when we regard the world in which the third Hierarchy is revealed to us, we do not have colours adhering to things, sounds reverberating from objects, and so on, but colours, sounds, warmth and cold flowing and vibrating—one can hardly say through space—but flowing and vibrating in time. Colour is not spread over the surface of things but it fluctuates and moves in waves. And by applying the faculties which enabled us to enter these worlds, we know that, just as in the physical world colour-effect suggests a material foundation, so in yonder world the floating cloud of colour, a flowing organism of colour, is the manifestation of the working and weaving of the spirit-and-soul forces of the third Hierarchy. So that the moment we behold the life-tableau of which I have spoken, which gives a clear and spontaneous picture of the whole of our life since birth, there also appears within this stream of our own life's events something of which one can. say: within the de-materialised world of flowing colours and sounds lives the third Hierarchy.

The Connection of the various Members of Man's
Being with the corresponding Worlds of the Universe

When our faculties of cognition are strong enough to rise to the level where we can observe our own astral body, that is to say, that part of us which existed before we descended into earthly life, and which we shall again carry with us when we have passed through the gate of death, then we know: this is a wider world, a world we do not find in the cosmic ether but beyond the gates of birth and death. Here we enter the wider astral world.

Things do not tally exactly with descriptions given in my book, “Theosophy,” where they are presented from a different point of view. But just as we meet the third Hierarchy when we have attained experience of our body of formative forces, so we encounter the second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Kyriotetes and Dynamis, in the world which reveals to us our own astral body. And this second Hierarchy does not become perceptible to us in flowing colours and sounds, but it manifests itself to us by heralding and proclaiming the import of revelations of the Logos resounding and weaving through the Universe. The second Hierarchy speaks to us.

If, after having attained the necessary powers of cognition, one wants to give some Indication of how one is related to these worlds, using words which naturally no longer have meaning that is applicable in the sense-world, and yet are to some extent expressive in regard to the higher worlds, one must say: For the etheric world the inner living thinking becomes a kind of organ of touch. With living thinking we touch this world of flowing colours and so on. We must not imagine that we see the red as the eye sees the red of the senses, spread out on the surface of things; instead we sense, we ‘touch’ red and yellow and so forth; we touch the sounds, so that we can say: in the etheric world, living thinking is the element of touch in relation to what lives in the world of the third Hierarchy.

On entering that world to which in a sense our astral body belongs, we cannot speak of experiencing this astral world merely through the element of touch, but we must say: we apprehend this world as the revelation of the Beings of the second Hierarchy. Each separate manifestation presents itself to us as a member, a part of the World-Logos. Out of the deep silence resounds the voice of the Spiritual Beings. Thus, after touch: speech, communication.

And when, in the way I have indicated, sustained effort rewards us with the experience of the ‘I’ which goes from earthly life to earthly life and, between them, passes through the other lives between each death and a new birth, then we enter the spirit-world proper, the higher spirit-world. What happens in this world to begin with, is that we enter into a special relationship to our true ‘I.’ The ‘I’ we experience inwardly here in this life on earth between birth and death is, as we know, bound to the physical corporeality. We are aware of it as long as we experience ourselves in the physical body and, in a way, we are forced to practise selflessness when we rise into the etheric world and the astral world. There we have at most something like a recollection of this earthly ‘I.’

But now we find the true ‘I’ as it passes from earthly life to earthly life. Our first impression is that of an entirely different being. We say to ourselves: Here I live through this earthly existence between birth and death. Looking back I see that strip of etheric world which takes me back as far as my birth on earth. Then my vision opens into world-wide realms existing only in time, where to speak of space would be quite misleading; but in a wide perspective the world appears to me in all its fullness, as it lives and weaves between death and a new birth. Looking through and beyond the ether, the world of the third Hierarchy, and through the astral, where I was between death and a new birth as in a super-sensible world whose life is revelation of the Logos manifesting as the Cosmic Word—as my vision penetrates all this, I finally behold a being at first far remote, a being representing the essence of my previous life on earth. First, then, I see myself here in this earthly life with my present ghost-like ‘I,’ and then, looking far back through all that has just been described, I see what constitutes the essence of my previous life on earth. But at the same time I perceive how the content of the latter, as the gradually evolving ‘I,’ has been passing through the worlds I have been observing in retrospective perspective as far as my present life on earth. To begin with I do, in fact, perceive my true ‘I’ as some strange, remote being. And in this being, strange as it appears to me at first, I recognise myself.

Every word in this passage should be taken with absolute seriousness because every single word is of significance. This whole experience must culminate in the realisation that the true ‘I’ first taken to be some strange being, is indeed one's own self; that there appeared what seemed to be some other being which lived in the far distant past, but that it is, in fact, you yourself.

And then one discovers how this self has flowed from the previous existence on earth into the present earthly life, but that now, in this life, it is covered up, as it were, and could emerge only if all that befalls between going to sleep and waking were to stand revealed before the soul. It is there that all that which on its way through the astral and etheric world has reached us from our previous life on earth, continues to live and weave.

It is, you see, a world of earthly contradictions mingled with chords of heavenly harmonies in this inner process of the striving soul: earthly contradictions inasmuch as by means which are designed to meet the needs of ordinary daily life on earth, one cannot really reach one's own true ‘I.’ As it is, only the first rudiments of love live in our earthly ‘I.’ And even so, a glow is shed over life on earth through the power of love which radiates into this earthly life. But this love must grow stronger. It must gain sufficient strength to enable man to behold the etheric world and the astral world through the power of love and thus to overcome what lives in him as his lower self, as egoism—the opposite of love—to gain mastery over that which, as the antithesis of love, enables him to experience himself in earthly life as an independent ‘I.’ Love must grow so strong that one learns to ignore this earthly ‘I,’ to forget it, to disregard it. Love is the identification of one's own self with the other being. This impulse must be so strong that one ceases to heed one's own ‘I’ as it lives in the earthly body. Here then arises the contradiction, that it is precisely through selflessness, through the highest capacity for love, that one advances towards one's own true ‘I’ beckoning as it radiates through the cycles of time.

One has to lose one's earthly ‘I’ to behold one's true ‘I.’ And he who fails to accomplish this act of surrender has simply no means of finding the true ‘I.’ One could say that the true ‘I’ does not want to be sought whenever revelation of its presence is desired. If sought for, it hides. For only in love will it be found, and love is a surrender of self to the other being. For that reason the true Self must be found as if it were another being.

At the moment of coming face to face with one's true ‘I,’ one also becomes aware of what lives in a wider world, in the spiritual world itself. One meets the beings of the first Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones.

And just as there one finds again one's ‘I’—of which one has really only a reflection in earthly life—so now one finds the entire world of earthly environment in its true spiritual form. Hence one must also lose this earthly world to find the world of its primal origins, together with the true ‘I.’

So that we can say: What reveals itself in the spiritual world is something remembered, is touch, speech, memory; but remembrance of something which formerly one had known only in reflections, in images.

Thus, by experiencing one's human self, and with the realisation of one's own humanity, one enters into the life of the Universe in its totality. And to give a clear picture of the various members of man's being, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ‘I,’ each must also be shown in its relationship to the corresponding worlds of the Universe.

What I have now described must be well understood and taken in its full meaning before any approach to the problem of the four parts of man's nature can disclose their true significance. Here is a case in point which shows very clearly that man must not only turn his thoughts in other directions, but think in a different way if he is to rise to a true understanding of the spiritual world. He must bring to life what are really only dead images in purely physical sense-perception: his attitude of mind must change.

And here one can indeed come across some extraordinary products of modern spiritual life, which show the difficulties that have to be overcome if Anthroposophy is to enter into the souls of men.

Anthroposophy as Academic Philosophy
(“Chair-Philosophy”) Sees It

When the book “Occult Science:” had been published, a well-known modern philosopher took it upon himself to analyse it. He first read the chapter about the four members of man's constitution—physical body, etheric body, astral body, ‘I’—and so on. Now this book has also been read by many quite simple people but people possessed of healthy common sense. For them it had point and meaning because with healthy common-sense one can always follow a subject, just as one can understand a picture without being a painter. But to one who in these days is a much quoted philosopher, such understanding presents considerably more difficulties than It does to a naive, simple human being. As this renowned philosopher reads: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ‘I,’ he is puzzled and wonders what he can make of it all. What does it all mean? Physical body, yes, of course. Etheric body?—well, perhaps it exists. What is dense matter in the physical body may here be of finer substance, but it is still matter. He argues, therefore, that to distinguish between physical and etheric body is to draw an arbitrary dividing line between the two.—Astral body?—We know something about a soul, says this philosopher, but—astral body? In the soul we have our thinking, feeling and willing. These are functions of the physical body. If one understands the physical body one has also grasped the meaning of thinking, feeling and willing. And the ‘I’—that is only the synthesis of all this. Such was his way of arguing.

And now please observe how the renowned philosopher's critical thought was formulated.—Having taken account of what he could find in the “Occult Science:” much as one might look at a chair, he said to himself: a chair can also be divided into its parts—legs, seat, back, first, second and third part—and there is no reason why man could not be divided in the same way as a chair. Finally he grants that this will serve well enough as a classification of man's constitution, but there is really nothing remarkably new in it, as in his view the principle underlying the division of man's constitution into its four members applies equally to the chair.

When we turn to physical chemistry the matter already becomes less difficult. There one could not talk so glibly about simple division. The chemist divides water into hydrogen and oxygen, H₂O; the natural scientist will not simply divide water in an abstract sense into two parts, hydrogen and oxygen.

He cannot leave it at that because he knows that hydrogen will not only combine with oxygen, as in water, but that it also combines, for instance in hydrochloric acid, with chloride. It follows that hydrogen contained in water is not only to be found there as part of water but is capable, when not forming part of water, of entering into quite different combinations. And likewise oxygen, when not forming part of water, can enter into other combinations and unite with quite different substances, as for instance, calcium, in lime. Hydrogen plus chloride can become hydrochloric acid, oxygen plus calcium becomes lime. Here one could not say: all you have to do is to divide water into its parts in the abstract, like a chair.

Man has to be considered on a still higher level. Here we have not merely a division into physical body, etheric body, astral body and ‘I,’ but man's physical body must be conceived as belonging to the earth. When a human being passes through the gate of death and leaves his physical corpse behind, the physical body turns to earth, but the etheric body rises up into the ether. The astral body leaves both and enters those worlds which are the domain of the second Hierarchy. And the I belongs to a different world again, the domain of the first Hierarchy. These four members do not merely represent a division for classification, they belong to quite different spheres of the Universe. At the same time the distinction illustrates the nature of man's being. We have here, on a much higher level, something for which one has to search already when progressing from the comparison of the chair with that of the water.

Naturally the level of mentality in our modern civilisation again presents a considerable obstacle, for the much-cited philosopher could have learned already from chemistry that it is not enough to go on talking only about abstract divisions, that one can apply them to a chair but not to water. However, in the case of this so-called philosopher, the philosophy unfortunately did not get past the chair to the water. It did not rise from the observation of life's trivialities to natural science. On the other hand, natural science does not concern itself with philosophy, so that the chemist of to-day does not think about such things at all.

It shows that in a philosophy which, from this point of view, might be called a ‘chair-doctrine,’ thinking in terms of natural science has as yet no part. Again, in chemistry, in natural science, philosophy plays no pert. Therefore it is precisely in the world of the scientist that those conditions are wanting, which can pave the way to an understanding of the deeper, inner truths of the Universe in their relation to man.

The man who undertook this critical study did in fact submit his article to me first, in manuscript. But what could I do with it? One cannot enter into a discussion with a man whose mind lacks the very first pre-requisites. I did nothing about it, but later found the article printed with all the mistakes and all the nonsense contained in such ‘chair-philosophy.’ Such are the trials of fate which Anthroposophy has to suffer on the way. One must be clear about such situations as they so often arise between Anthroposophy and its critics. It is precisely in that quarter that for the time being there is not the slightest possibility of an understanding.

And this philosopher, much quoted among philosophers, even makes certain concessions in line with ideas which are more or less popular currency in modern civilisation. For instance, he admits that there once existed a continent between Europe and America called ‘Atlantis,’ inhabited by the ancient Atlanteans, a prehistoric humanity. Then he asks the hypothetical question—I am not quoting verbatim—how is it possible that today, when we have a proper physiology and a proper psychology, anyone could conceive the idea of dividing man's being in such a way! Of course in Anthroposophy one does not do it in the way it can be done with a chair, but he thinks so. This philosopher—in his own way he is perfectly conscientious—was honestly puzzled how anyone could make such a division, or could hold such a primitive conception as compared with the knowledge a modern philosopher can command.

Well, as regards fundamental truths the modern philosopher is not in a particularly favourable position, but he thinks he is. Two days ago I explained to those who attended the Teachers' Course what modern so-called ‘psycho-analysis’ really is.

I should like to repeat that the peculiar thing about psycho-analysis is that it arises on the one side from dilettante physiology, in which the soul-forces do not reach the sphere of the spirit but remain bound to the body, while on the other hand it is based on dilettante psychology. The two do not meet. As a result, grotesque connections are being formulated when dilettantism endeavours to establish links between research work in psychology and research work in physiology. And the dilettantism is of immense proportions, and equally great in both cases. The psychiatrists' own psychological dilettantism equals in magnitude that of physical dilettantism, but when both are the same in volume and operate jointly, they multiply each other. That, according to simple arithmetic, makes the square of dilettantism. So that, seen in the true light, psycho-analysis is the square of dilettantism, because it is the product of the multiplication of dilettantism by dilettantism.

Now the problem for our much quoted philosopher amounted to this: he could not understand how anyone could conceive such a primitive idea as to divide man's being into four members as one divides a chair into three. So he advances the hypothesis that I must be a re-incarnated Atlantean. Really quite ingenious from the chair-philosophy point of view!

The Overcoming of Materialism by Knowledge attained
through living Thinking

One can be a materialist if lack of inner strength makes it impossible for the soul-forces to seek an opening for finding the way which leads into the world of soul-and-spirit, to the archetypal origins. Nothing can be gained by trying to prove anything on crude evidence, because materialism can certainly be proved as long as the evidence of proof is taken from the physical world. That is the crucial point. To find the way from the physical, into the spiritual, inner activity is needed, not abstract reasoning. The way to true Anthroposophy is found through that inner activity in man which stimulates the search for true knowledge. And all skirmishing in attempts to prove anything is useless, because you cannot argue with a man whose proofs are based entirely on the physical world of the senses. To disprove to such a man what to him is indisputable remains an impossibility as long as he lacks that primal strength of the inner life which alone could start him on the way to finding the spiritual world.

This must be understood. One must realise that it is given to man to rise of his own free will from the physical to the spirituals that this rising into the spiritual world is not an act of sense-bound reasoning, but an act of inner, conscious human experience. It is only when one really has this vital inner experience that one becomes capable of appreciating Anthroposophy in the right perspective, as seen against the merits of merely physical methods of cognition.

Our time is sorely in need of this.—A philosophy whose analytic powers of reasoning are only applicable to such things as chairs, can hardly be expected to have a ready understanding for what are real human values. It is, however, quite competent when dealing with chair-values. But what humanity needs today is what leads man to man, to the real man, not merely to his outward appearance. In its outer aspect the appearance reflects all that is inherent in the archetype of the spiritual entity, but it does not reveal that to inner experience. For in the experience of self, man must first find and recognise himself as a being of soul-and-spirit. Thus in the last resort the way to all knowledge is bound up with knowing oneself as an image of the true Self of man.

If with the growing strength of love that level of knowledge is attained by which one recognises as one's own self what at first seems to be a strange being, and again, if one rises to the height where the earthly world is found again in the archetypal world, then one is no longer engaged in a process of gaining abstract knowledge, but in a process of living cognition.

And it is in this living process of attaining knowledge that the world reveals itself to man through his own being, and that his own being reveals itself in his experience of the outer world. Thus man becomes a being who finds himself again in the entire Universe, for knowing himself he learns to know the world and, knowing the world, he learns to know himself. In this inter-relationship between world and man there reveals itself what unites man with the Divine-Spiritual, that which makes his being aglow with the religious mood of all real higher knowledge. And finally, when earnest cognition blends with religious experience, then knowledge radiates religious emotion, and the transparency of knowledge is lifted to that sphere where faith becomes knowledge through its own inner power of cognition. The world is found in man and man in the world on the path of knowledge through the world.

(In the etheric world: through living thinking: touch.
In the astral world: through the deep silence of the soul: speech.
In the spiritual world: through re-cognition: memory.)

Thus world and man become united in an all-embracing, cosmic, spiritual-divine being, in which man finds himself and the world and so for the first time rises to his true human dignity which can then also enter his religious and moral ethos and make him fully Man.

Today¹ I should like to discuss a theme which can perhaps lead to some points of view from which to assess present-day cultural and spiritual life in connection with what has gone before in human evolution. As I have often said, cultural life since the first third of the fifteenth century is entirely different from that of earlier times, and now we are faced with the necessity to return, but in full consciousness and with deep thought, to an understanding of the spiritual part of our life in the cosmos. The spiritual part of our life in the cosmos was understood in ancient times by an instinctive clairvoyance, and this was the case most of all in the most ancient ages of earthly civilization. Then the capacity to push through to the spirit receded more and more, until a time came when mankind needed a new impetus, whereupon the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

Today I should like to mention that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, people who were concerned with spiritual life looked to those institutions known in general human cultural life as the Mysteries. In those most ancient days of human evolution it was unthinkable that spiritual vision and spiritual knowledge could have any other source than the Mysteries. When we try to observe the consciousness of those who turned to the Mysteries in those ancient days, if knowledge was what they desired, we arrive at the following picture: All external knowledge not stemming from the Mysteries, all intellectual knowledge gained by human beings by themselves, did not come into being until the later part of the Greek era. Only then did people want to discover certain truths out of themselves, without the help of the Mysteries. That is why the course of scientific development is reckoned, by those who understand these things, to have started in the time of Thales.² I have discussed this in my book Riddles of Philosophy.³ Before that time knowledge was sought with the help of the Mysteries. When we examine the consciousness on which this was founded, we discover that those who conducted the Mysteries, and also their pupils, saw something most important in what they called ‘the prince of this world’—they meant the earth—as opposed to the princes—that is, the spiritual beings—of other worlds.

In today's language, ‘the prince of this world’, as he lived in the consciousness of ancient times, would be called the being of Ahriman. The being of Ahriman would more or less be equivalent to this prince of earthly life. The spiritual revelations which can be derived from ‘the prince of this world’ are none other than those of intellectual knowledge. The leaders of the Mysteries would certainly have considered all that lived in the knowledge that grew up in Greece outside the Mysteries to have been inspired by ‘the prince of this world’. In contrast, they saw it as the task of the Mysteries to lead human beings towards a spiritual vision which tends away from ‘the prince of this world’, which tends to lead human souls into realms which are not ruled by ‘the prince of this world’. We cannot help but make use of such expressions in order to show properly what is meant, and no one should think that there is anything superstitious about using these expressions.

Let me give you a picture of what someone initiated in the ancient Greek, or the Egyptian, or Persian Mysteries would have thought in those old days about ‘the prince of this world’. We have to understand that these people also spoke about the Christ-being, though they used other names. Using the name of Christ is not the only way of speaking about the Christ-being. We naturally use the name of Christ when we want to speak about the Christ-being, for Christ to us actually means that Being who underwent the Mystery of Golgotha and united himself with earthly civilization. Before the Mystery of Golgotha this Being was not yet united with earthly civilization. He still lived as the great Sun-being outside the earthly world. The Mystery of Golgotha denotes the uniting with the earthly world of this Being who lived outside the earthly world. But those initiated in the Mysteries certainly knew this Being who lived outside the earthly world. And the being known as ‘the prince of this world’—that ahrimanic being—also knew him. That being—I am describing what lived in the consciousness of the initiates—felt himself to be the lord of the earth. He considered that whatever human beings possessed through the forces of the earth was something they had from him. But he knew that the Christ-being lived outside the earth and also had an influence on human life by way of the Mysteries, whose teachings were then popularized and brought amongst the peoples.

To describe more closely what lived in their consciousness, we may say that the initiates in the Mysteries thought as follows: The chief influence of ‘the prince of this world’ is on the physical bodies of human beings. These wholly do his bidding and he feels he is the lord of human physical bodies. But he could not feel himself to be the lord of the etheric and astral natures of human beings, of their life-bodies and their souls. The life-body and the soul were seen to be under the influence of a Being who lived outside the earth; the forces of the Christ-being had always been seen to flow into these. But with the forces of their own soul human beings were quite unable to receive what ought to flow into them from the Christ-being. They could only do so by turning to what the Mystery initiate received after the proper preparation. The Mysteries were seen to take hold of what came from outside the earth and pass it on to human beings. So ‘the prince of this world’ said to himself: Here on earth I am the master. From the earth the physical bodies of human beings draw their forces, and one of these forces is the human earthly intellect. Here I am the master and nothing can contest this here on earth. By way of the Mysteries, something from outside the earth flows into it. This I will tolerate.

But ‘the prince of this world’ rebelled against the Mystery of Golgotha because from then on he would have had to share his supremacy with the Christ who descended to the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. ‘The prince of this world’ felt the Christ to be a rival in his mastery of the earth. He would have tolerated the sharing of the rulership with another being from outside the earth, but he would not tolerate a rival here within the earthly realm.

Here, then, out of the spirit of the ancient Mysteries, we have an indication of the real opposition of ‘the prince of this world’ towards the Christ. Among those with knowledge about such things this opposition was strongly felt throughout the Middle Ages until well into the fifteenth century. Any mention of ‘the prince of this world’ and of the Christ took it into account. There was a certain awareness of two dominions. One of these had rightfully ruled the bodily nature of man before the Mystery of Golgotha, but since then this sovereignty over the bodily nature of man has had to be shared with the other, with the Christ. For now Christ no longer influences only man's soul element, that is, his astral and etheric bodies; his purpose is now to influence also man's physical bodily nature, or rather whatever is expressed by this physical bodily nature, namely, everything to do with the intellect and with man's own capacities in the widest sense. Christ should live in every aspect of human nature. This is what entered into mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it never occurred to those who knew about such things to seek knowledge of external matters in any sphere which the human head or even the other soul or heart forces can reach on their own. Such things were left to the Mysteries. So before the Mystery of Golgotha there was certainly a strong awareness of the distinction between earthly wisdom and earthly sensing on the one hand, and a sensing of super-earthly forces on the other. The unique spiritual configuration of the early medieval centuries is only comprehensible in the light of a clear understanding of this fact.

Now this fact can be greatly clarified by something that was regarded as being of paramount importance in very many Mystery centres. The preparation and subsequent trials undergone by the Mystery pupils on the path of initiation varied, of course, in the different centres. But these variations were only really like the different paths up a mountain which, despite their different routes, all lead to one and the same summit in the end. They all led to one and the same Mystery goal. Despite the modifications, there were two measures within the Mysteries which every pupil had to undergo and which could be termed as being of paramount importance. These were, on the one hand, the draught of forgetfulness and, on the other hand, something which worked on the human being during the Mystery procedures like a powerful shock—like entering into a powerful fear. It is no longer permissible to use either of these for the purpose of achieving higher super-sensible knowledge. Today everything has to take place in the realm of soul and spirit, whereas the Mystery pupils in ancient times underwent procedures which always had to call on their physical body. What is achieved today is similar, but higher knowledge must now be striven for in the sphere of consciousness only, whereas in earlier times it took place in the sphere of instincts and dreams. Because all the Mysteries included something akin to the draught of forgetfulness and also something akin to the physical shock, the pupils’ external intellect was damped down. This intellect was less clear than it is today, but it nevertheless held sway in connection with everything relating to the external world.

So the pupil was led into a dulled consciousness both by the draught of forgetfulness and by the shock, which might be compared with the inducement of a state of fear. What was the significance of the draught of forgetfulness? The point was not the forgetting, though the pupil did forget. The effect it was to have came from its ceremonial preparation, from the special way it was mixed, to the accompaniment of certain preparations before it was drunk by the pupil. It was definitely a physical draught which, through the way it was served, brought it about that the pupil forgot the whole of his life since birth. This is something which is achieved nowadays through development in the realm of soul and spirit. Nowadays a clear consciousness of a great tableau of life encompassing everything that has occurred since birth is first conjured up. This is then suppressed and, in consequence, the human being is led into the spiritual form of his life before birth, or before conception. The same was achieved in a more physical way through the ancient draught of forgetfulness.

But the forgetting was not the essential point. Negative things are never the essential point. The positive thing achieved was that the pupil's thinking became more mobile and more intense. At the same time it became less clear. It became dreamy because the effect was achieved by influencing the physical organism. The effect of the draught of forgetfulness on the physical organism—it can be exactly described—was that the brain, if I may put it this way, became more fluid than it is in everyday life. Because the brain was made more fluid, because the pupil began to think more with his cerebral fluid than with the solid parts of the brain, his thoughts became more mobile and more intense.

Nowadays this must be achieved more directly, by means of developing soul and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of Occult Science. But in those days the brain was made more fluid by external influences. The goal was to make the spirit and soul element of the pupil—as it was before he made the connection with a physical body through conception: in other words, as it is in the spiritual world—capable once more of penetrating through the brain. This is the essential point.

In a drawing it would look like this. Suppose this is the mass of the brain (green). Once the human being has been born his spirit and soul element stops short before it (red). The brain is so constituted that the human being's inner spirit and soul element cannot pass through the brain. In his brain the human being is not filled with his spirit and soul element. Instead, external perceptions can enter and make themselves felt in the brain through the senses—let me draw an eye here. Put another way, the constitution of the brain is such today that the eternal aspect of the human being cannot rise up into it. Instead, external impressions can enter. By being given the draught of forgetfulness the pupil gained the possibility of receiving into his brain what was his spiritual and soul element before conception or before birth (red). That is the one side.

The other side is the shock which was administered to the pupil. Think how a shock affects human beings. They are as though paralysed. There can be shocks which bring about the paralysis of the whole human being. A paralysed person, a cataleptic person, cannot move about because his muscles are rigid. But in a human being who can go about his life in the ordinary way, his body absorbs this eternal aspect (white with red). In our blood, in our muscles down below, the element of spirit and soul, the eternal element, is absorbed. But because of this it cannot be perceived. It cannot penetrate the brain, but lower down it is absorbed. It cannot be perceived, but when the muscles go rigid it steps out freely as a matter of course.

The rigidity of the muscles was brought about by the effect of the shock. As a result, the element of spirit and soul was not absorbed by the rest of the organism—apart from the brain—but was freed. So now the spirit and soul element was in the brain because the brain had been softened by the draught of forgetfulness, while the rest of the organism was at the same time prevented from absorbing it. Thus the element of spirit and soul came to be perceived. From two sides came the possibility of perceiving the element of spirit and soul. In ordinary life the human being was incapable of perceiving it because the brain, with which everything else was perceived, was unable to take it in; it could not enter the brain. Neither could it be perceived from the rest of the organism, the will and so on, for the rest of the organism had absorbed it. But now the pupil's brain was softened—of course, only for the moment at which knowledge was to enter. So his element of spirit and soul rushed into his brain. Meanwhile, the rest of his body became rigid so that it could not absorb the spirit and soul element. There the pupil stood, with his softened brain on the one side and a rigidified organic system on the other, as though encased in a capsule. There he stood in his spirit and his soul which had been given to him from two sides.

This is the aim of these procedures which are described in such a practical manner. I must expressly point out, though, that these things cannot be imitated nowadays. People would, anyway, be at a loss as to how to imitate them and, if they tried, the result would not be agreeable. These days all such things have to be attained by working with soul and spirit. But of the past it can certainly be said: Having been enabled to perceive their element of spirit and soul by partaking of the draught of forgetfulness and by being shocked into physical rigidity, the pupils in the Mysteries became ‘Christians’. In the Mysteries they became Christians.

The early fathers of the church were certainly aware of this. But today people are not told about it, or it is even denied. But the early church fathers knew that human beings had been made Christians through the Mysteries. There are passages in the writings of the early church fathers⁴ which state that Heraclitus and Socrates, though they lived before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, were Christians, even though they were called atheists in their own time. I have often quoted from such passages in the writings of the early church fathers. It was the view of the ancient Mystery leaders and initiates that ‘the prince of this world’ was not interested in that human being who came forth out of the other; he left this human being to Christ. But he did not want Christ to come down to the earth in order to take hold of the human being in his entirety. This is described in the gospels in the way it is said that the demons, the lower servants of ‘the prince of this world’, when they heard that Christ had come, began to rebel. They recognized him and were furious.

We have to understand, when speaking about earthly evolution, that the spiritual powers whose influence on the human physical body was perfectly legitimate before the Mystery of Golgotha had, after the Mystery of Golgotha, to share this influence with the Christ. This is an essential aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why in the Middle Ages ‘the prince of this world’ came to be called ‘the unlawful prince of this world’. This expression would not have been justified in the ancient heathen world but when it came to be used in the Middle Ages it was a correct title, befitting the circumstances.

The essential aspect of all this, with regard to the spiritual evolution of mankind, is that in more ancient times the physical body was withdrawn from the element of spirit and soul. The working of the brain was counteracted because the brain was softened by the draught of forgetfulness, and the powers of absorption of the rest of the organism were counteracted by the hardening of the rest of the organism by means of the shock. So in these older times the body was withdrawn from the element of spirit and soul.

Today, our aspiration is not to withdraw the body but to draw out the spirit, by strengthening and enhancing our forces of spirit and soul. The opposite of what used to take place must happen now; now the spirit must be drawn out. No changes must be allowed to take place in the physical, bodily aspect. Since the fifteenth century the human being has been organized in such a way that changes in the physical body, of the kind that were customary in those of Mystery pupils, would denote a condition of sickness. It would be a pathological condition, which must not be allowed to come about in normal development.

I am describing all this in order to give you an idea of what is to be understood by the concept of ‘the prince of this world’, which keeps recurring in olden times. ‘The prince of this world’, who in the Middle Ages became ‘the unlawful prince of this world’, is an Ahriman-like being. We can find such a being everywhere, in external nature and in the inner being of man. Indeed, only when we are in a position to find such a being in its manifestation both in external nature and in the inner being of man can we gradually come to an understanding of its essence.

Look at external nature. You will find there two contrasts, but what matters is to be able to sense the essence of these contrasts. Think of the blue sky. Of course in southern climes the blue sky must be seen rather differently than is the case here. When the envelope of air round the earth is filled by the effect of the sun, this is not the pure essence of the blue sky, for it is then overcast with something else. But the pure effect of the blue sky is that of coldness. The blue sky as such is cold. What you sense in the coldness of the blue sky, unmitigated by earthly sultriness—this is an all-embracing ahrimanic influence. The ahrimanic influence causes space to be petrified, congealed into blueness. Take note of this expression! It is unusual, but if you gradually come to sense what it means to say that space is petrified, congealed into blueness, you will have discovered the ahrimanic tendency in external nature.

The contrasting effect is that of the reddish, yellowish clouds sailing past. The effect is one of warmth, exactly the opposite. This, too, can be disguised by the coldness of the earth's environment but, all in all, a cloud lined with red, a yellowish cloud, has something warm about it. This is the contrasting effect, the effect of air. Between these two polar opposites something takes place, and that is what benefits the earthly life of man. We can say, then, that the effect on the earth of space petrified, congealed into blueness was seen in the Middle Ages to be the cosmic working of ‘the prince of this world’.

And when we look into human beings we find that they can be in a condition which makes them pale. You know how there is something livid, something blueish about palor in human beings. When human beings turn pale, when they feel their way into coldness, they are then sensing something ahrimanic working in them. Flushed redness, on the other hand, shows something luciferic at work in their nature. Out of all these details together we can gradually build up a full picture of what this ahrimanic being, ‘the prince of this world’, really is. People's pallid, often so clever, thoughts, running along always in straight lines—the whole intellectual aspect of man—this is the ahrimanic influence, the influence of ‘the prince of this world’, on the working of the human head.

These things must be understood from the point of view of spirit and soul. In the livid blueness, in the way human beings grow pale, in the way they devour themselves inwardly and feel their way into coldness, in the way they are filled with pale, abstract thoughts—in all this we have to feel the ahrimanic influence, the rulership of ‘the prince of this world’. And then we have to feel the warming influence of the Christ-impulse.

For the present time it is rather revealing and also necessary to recognize how different was initiation in ancient times compared with the principle of initiation today. There are certainly people today who still lack the courage to approach the Anthroposophical Movement but who have a deep longing for what, in the end, only the Anthroposophical Movement can give. They long for a transformation of their soul, after which they would find their way to the knowledge they seek. Obviously the greater part of mankind today rejects this transformation of the soul and imagines that any knowledge man is capable of reaching can be achieved through the ordinary state of soul which is brought about by our ordinary education and through our ordinary life. On my last tour I met a man who was greatly concerned to achieve some knowledge through the philosophical possibilities offered today, but not through Anthroposophy. He said that it would be interesting and important to ascertain in Anthroposophy how this higher knowledge might be achieved, for everywhere—this ‘everywhere’ is very relative, of course—the different world views were recognizing that the achievement of real knowledge was a matter not only of the intellect but also of the will. And in the ancient Mysteries, too, it was a matter of transforming the will.

In the description of the ancient Mysteries in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact⁵ you will find that the decisive, radical difference between the ancient striving for knowledge and that of today lies in the fact that in ancient times it was necessary to prepare the will. The will had to be turned in a direction different from that of ordinary life. The will had to be purged, purified; it had to be transformed and lifted to a higher stage. The pupil had to give a new direction to his everyday will, which was dominated by ‘the prince of this world’. Through cultivation of his will, the pupil had to reach the point at which knowledge can be attained. Today, on the other hand, people imagine that we can stop at whatever point we have reached through our ordinary studies. And our intellectual life is merely the product of the ordinary configuration of our brain. If it is softened, as I have indicated, there is a strong possibility that thoughts can be willed, that everywhere thoughts can be willed. And when will becomes conscious through the rigidifying of the body, then thoughts appear in the will itself. This can also happen today when, on the path I have described, knowledge of higher worlds has become possible.

It is a very important sign today that once more there are people who know that the intellect alone is not enough and that it is necessary to cultivate the will in order to reach whatever knowledge is possible for man. So by looking at what is going on in a general way we come to see that a great many people are approaching who want to hear about spiritual matters. Also, from things which are shown to us as we go along, we see that there are people who once again realize that the will must be cultivated, if knowledge is to be achieved. All this goes to show that there is an urgent need for spiritual life today. Unfortunately, though, because people lack the courage to approach Anthroposophy, because they think Anthroposophy is something peculiar, they imagine that they can achieve what they are searching for along some other path. The world will have to come to the conviction that what is wanted can only be achieved on the anthroposophical path. Please do not misunderstand me. It is not my intention to maintain that what Anthroposophy has revealed so far is necessarily generally valid or particularly obvious. But I want to point out the importance of the direction in which Anthroposophy is going. This is what can lead to the satisfaction of the powerful longing that exists today, a longing which must be satisfied if human civilization is to move forward at all.

• 1 . Today: In his introduction to this lecture (contained in GA 255), Rudolf Steiner spoke words of appreciation for the way in which Albert Steffen had reported in the journal Das Goetheanum on a lecture denigrating Anthroposophy.
• 2 . Thales of Miletus, c.640-545 B.C.
• 3 . Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1973.
• 4 . For instance, St Justin Martyr, Apologia I, 46.
• 5 . Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972.

Lecture at the 2nd general assembly of the Johannesbau-Verein

My dear Theosophical friends!

When the Johannesbau Association followed on from our last general assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society here in Berlin with a meeting, I had a few words to say to you about how the Johannesbau should be situated in the overall development of art, and in particular architectural art: that it should be seen, in the sense in which we also otherwise view what we want to achieve in the field of theosophy or anthroposophy, as something necessary in the whole spiritual development of humanity, so that what is to happen through theosophy or anthroposophy does not appear as some kind of arbitrariness, does not appear as something that we give birth to out of ourselves as some kind of arbitrary ideal, but appears as we derive it as a necessity from that writing, which reveals to us the necessary path of the human spirit through the development of the earth.

Now, one can choose many points of view to present this necessity that has just been characterized. At that time, I showed from a certain point of view how this necessary placing in human history of what is intended by the Johannesbau is to be understood. Today, another point of view will be chosen so that my considerations today will, in a certain respect, supplement what was presented here in December 1911.

Architecture is actually bound to a very specific premise if we understand architecture in the sense that man wants to create a shell, as it were, using some material, through some forms or other measures, be it for profane living and working, be it for religious activities or the like. In this sense, the art of building, architecture, is absolutely bound up with what we can call soul-life, is connected with the concept of soul-life, arises out of soul-life and can be grasped by grasping the whole extent of soul-life.

Now, over the years of working in spiritual science, the soul has always presented itself to us from three points of view: from the point of view of the sentient soul, from the point of view of the mind or emotional soul, and from that of the consciousness soul. But then this soulfulness also appears to us when it first announces itself, as it were, but does not yet really exist as soulfulness when we speak of the sentient or astral body. And again, the soulfulness appears to us when we say that the soulfulness has developed to such an extent that it seeks a transition to the spirit self or manas. If you look at my theosophy, you will find the threefold soul in it as a sentient soul, a mind or emotional soul and a consciousness soul, but you will find the sentient soul adjacent to the sentient body, so that the sentient soul and sentient appear as two sides of one and the same, the one side more soul-like, the other more spiritual; and then you will find, combining again, consciousness soul and spirit self; the consciousness soul representing the more soul-like side, while the spirit self represents the more spiritual side.

Those who, as anthroposophists, gradually find their way into such an understanding of these terms, as our esteemed friend Arenson has very beautifully explained in these days, will not be able to stop at the words sentient soul, mind or consciousness soul and only seek to find one or other definition for these words , but as a true anthroposophist will long to gradually develop in his mind many, many concepts, feelings and insights, which the one feeling leads to the other and so on, in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding, which in the case of these concepts is structured in the most diverse directions.

For the seer himself, the words quoted include, one might say, entire worlds. Therefore, in order to understand such concepts, one must also take into account what has been presented about human development, for example in the post-Atlantic period: that the sentient body has particularly developed in the ancient Persian culture, the sentient soul in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the mind or emotional soul in the Greco-Roman period, the consciousness soul in the time in which we ourselves live, and that we see the next period of time, so to speak, as already approaching in its development, yes, that we ourselves, with what we want as anthroposophy, theosophy, are working on the approach of this next period of time, which in a certain way should show us the connection between consciousness soul and spirit self or manas.

Architecture, as has been said, is closely linked to the concept of the soul. Now, someone might ask: shouldn't architecture then also be linked to the development of the soul, as it has just been characterized? And should not the forms and designs of architecture show certain peculiarities in their succession that are connected with this development of sentient body, sentient soul, and so on? And would one not then have no justification at all for speaking of architecture in the case of certain periods, for example the first post-Atlantic period, which particularly brought the etheric body to development? For if architecture is bound to the soul, it should only begin to dawn when it begins to develop. So one would assume that it begins to emerge in the sentient body, because that is, as it were, the other side of the soul; and before that, one would have to refer to times in which an actual art of building, in the sense in which we characteristically understand architecture, did not exist at all.

Now it is difficult in itself to answer this question from the point of view of external history, because everything that goes back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period can hardly be gleaned from historical monuments and traditions, but can only be derived from clairvoyant research. Even the period of Zarathustra, which we call the original Persian period, lies so far back that historical research is out of the question, let alone the period that we know to be connected with the development of the etheric body, namely the original Indian period.

However, one can also have strange experiences with this matter if one approaches the very clever people of the present day with it. Recently, for example, one of these clever people said that these post-Atlantean periods, as they are recorded in my esoteric science, for example, are untenable, because anyone who is familiar with the linguistic monuments of India would never believe that Indian culture had progressed as far ahead of Egyptian and Chaldean culture as it is presented in this esoteric science. Well, one can only be surprised that such very clever people of the present day have not yet managed to read a book written in their mother tongue with understanding, even if they can sometimes read Sanskrit. For it is expressly stated in esoteric science that the culture of India, including the Vedic culture, which is the subject of external science, is not the one spoken of in esoteric science as the ancient Indian culture, the first culture of the post-Atlantean time, but that in the case of the Vedic culture we are dealing with a time that can be counted as belonging to the third post-Atlantean cultural period, which thus runs parallel to the Egyptian-Chaldean culture. The original Indian culture, on the other hand, was one of which no external documents and no external monuments and the like exist and of which only the last echoes are contained in the Vedas. I will not dwell on this any further, but say this only because one or the other of you might hear this objection and perhaps not immediately have the concepts and ideas at hand that can refute such an objection.

So the question I have just hinted at remains, namely that in the first post-Atlantic period we have to go back to times when an actual art of building, as for the later periods, could not yet be possible. But then we come to a strange boundary point, to which external research also points; we come, so to speak, to a preliminary stage of architecture: the building of spaces for religious, for worship activities in caves, carved into the rock, as can be found in India or Nubia. This is indeed the age that stands on the boundary of the development of the soul from the physical. These cave dwellings confirm what spiritual research suggests we can expect in terms of the development of the soul: it is only in the period of human development in which we see the soul developing out of the physical that we also see the first real higher architecture developing out of what were previously rock caves and underground rock caves that had been hewn out of the earth itself.

In this respect, the earth appears like the physical realm into which the human soul first works, as it also happens in the development of the human being itself, where the soul works into the physical, the sentient soul into the sentient body. And in the transition from cave rooms to architectural works that encompass human activities, we also see the importance of the transition from the culture of the sentient body to that of the sentient soul.

There will come a time when what Theosophy or Anthroposophy provides will be elaborated for all branches of human knowledge, for all branches of human development. And it will be found that everything that other human worldviews present one-sidedly is cobbled together from some inadequate concepts and ideas, while spiritual science or anthroposophy shows the comprehensive whole with which one can shine a light everywhere. One can be completely reassured, even if people do not yet believe this today. That is not the point, but rather that time will provide the evidence for it. We just have to give it time. These confirmations will gradually be realized in all areas of life and development. This also applies to architecture.

And if we now go through the post-Atlantean development, we see that, in the course of time, the individual developmental epochs are, so to speak, bound to the soul, to the development of the sentient soul, then to that of the mind or feeling soul, and then to that of the consciousness soul, right up to our time. And in our own time we can see the time approaching, even if it is still only in the preparatory stage, when the spirit soul or manas will be worked out of the consciousness soul, so that we stand, as it were, at the opposite end of the process to that in the post-Atlantean epoch when we passed from the bodily to the soul realm. Just as the sentient soul was worked out of the sentient body in those days, so we are now facing a time in which we have to work our way out of the soul and into a spiritual realm. For architecture, this means that we can expect the opposite again. That is to say, just as in those earlier times caves were hewn out of the rocks as the preliminary stages of human architectural works, so now, in the present rising time, we have to work into the spirit in order to create the complement, the counterpart to it.

Let us now try to visualize the following, initially without more precise details about the time frame, since everyone can form for themselves what is necessary for parallelism. Let us consider the development through the sentient soul, mind or intellect soul, and consciousness soul, so initially the development through the sentient soul. Through being endowed with the sentient soul, the human being enters into a reciprocal relationship with the world around him. Through the sentient soul, what is present in the world as reality passes, as it were, into the human soul, into the human inner being itself. The external becomes an inner experience by way of the sentient soul. Therefore, there should now be something in the development of architectural art that, as it were, quite naturally emerges from cave construction and shows something in itself that is characteristic of the sentient soul. That is to say, it should be built in such a way that one wants to represent both an exterior and an interior.

Here we need only recall the construction of the pyramids and similar buildings, and we can even think of more recent scientific research that has shown how astronomical-cosmic relationships are reflected in the dimensions of the pyramids, and then we have an idea of what it is all about. The more we study the pyramid, the more we discover its strange structure based on cosmic relationships. Astronomical dimensions are reflected in the ratio of the base to the height, for example. And anyone who studies the pyramid gradually comes to the conclusion that with the pyramid, the pyramid priests expressed everything that could be expressed in a structure as a perception of cosmic conditions. The pyramid was built as if the earth wanted to experience within itself what is perceived from the cosmos. Just as the sentient soul brings the external reality to life within itself and presents what is outside as an inner reality, repeating in its own way what is outside, so the pyramid repeats external cosmic relationships in its proportions and forms, for example, in the way sunlight falls within it. Just as external reality finds a kind of representation in the human being through the sentient soul, so the pyramid looks like a large sentient organ of the entire earthly culture in relation to the cosmos.

Let us move on. How should architecture behave in a cultural stage in which the characteristic is the intellectual or mind soul? The mind or soul of mind is the inner soul in man that has the most work to do within itself, that builds on the already inner foundation of the sentient soul to further develop this inner soul, but does not yet go so far as to bring it together again into the actual I; thus it spreads and expands the soul, so to speak, without allowing it to culminate in the center of the I. The person who has developed precisely this soul element comes to us through the richness of his soul life, through the many inner soul contents and experiences that he has fought for and achieved; he has less of a need to build systems out of his inner experiences, but rather gives himself over to the breadth of these inner experiences. The intellectual soul is a life of the soul that bears itself inwardly, closes itself inwardly, and totalizes itself inwardly.

What kind of architecture would be needed to correspond to such a soul? It would have to be an architecture that, unlike the construction of a pyramid, does not so much resemble a kind of image or representation of cosmic conditions, but is more of a self-contained, total being; something that supports itself and which, so to speak, entirely in keeping with the intellectual soul or soul of feeling, shows the breadth of development in the way the individual parts are supported, and is less concerned with integrating what is there in the breadth of development. No one who is familiar with the nature of the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling, as it has just been characterized, can doubt that Greek and also Roman architecture can be understood as an external image of the life of the soul of intellect or soul of feeling.

Let us consider Greek architecture, for example Greek temple architecture, as we have often done before, by understanding it as the house of the god himself, so that the god dwells within it and the whole house presents itself as the dwelling of the god, the whole inwardly rounded as an inward totality. We have even been able to say from our contemplation of the Greek temple: This Greek temple does not claim that a person or a community of people is inside it. It is the dwelling place of the god and can stand alone, closed, as a totality in itself, just as the mind or soul is an inner totality, a self-contained inner life, which does not yet go to the ego, but which, albeit unconsciously, is the manifestation of the god in man. And when we see how in Greek temple construction one part supports the other, how everything is based on the columns striving upwards and supporting the beams, how the mutual forces are combined into a totality without the whole any way systematically toward a unity, toward a point, we find in it - and in Roman architecture the same is actually the case - that breadth, that expanse, which we find in the intellectual or emotional soul itself.

What is striking about Greco-Roman architecture is that it is based on statics, on the pure statics of the individual forces that unfold in a supporting or burdening way. But there is one thing you can forget about a Greek temple: you can forget that it has a “heaviness”. For anyone who feels naturally will or can at least feel that the columns are something that grows out of the earth. And with that which really grows out of the earth, with the plant, one does not have the feeling of oppressive heaviness. That is why the column in the Greek temple gradually strives to become similar to the stem of a plant, even if this only becomes visible in the Corinthian column. And that is why, in terms of perception, the column is not a burden, but rather a support.

But when you then come to the beam, to the architrave, you immediately have the feeling that this weighs on the column, that is, the structure is permeated by inner static equilibrium. And anyone who has developed their inner life will also have the feeling that the perceptions, feelings and concepts they have arrived at, which they have worked towards internally, are supported internally in the same way that the column supports the beam. Because at the time when Greco-Roman architecture originated, the intellectual soul or soul of mind was particularly developed in humanity, therefore, when the soul wanted to express itself in the language of architecture, it naturally strove to express what it had experienced internally in the static structure. Not with the intention, but in the way the human soul nature expressed itself, it was in the architecture to create a reflection of the soul.

And then gradually the development progressed to the consciousness soul. It is essential for the consciousness soul to summarize what the soul experiences in the total feeling: “You are! And you are this one person, this one personality, this one individuality.” By living in the soul of mind or feeling, God lives in you; but you allow God to live in all the vibrations of the soul, you are certain of him, so you do not have to summarize it as in one point and you do not have to bring yourself to consciousness: “You are identical with your divine.” But this is something that must be done in the consciousness soul. In this, it is not the case that the person rests inwardly within themselves as in the mind or feeling soul, but in the consciousness soul, the person reaches out from themselves in order to unfold their I arbitrarily into reality, into existence.

If you have a feeling for the formation of words, you can literally see how the words that have just been spoken as the characteristic of the consciousness soul form themselves almost automatically into the Gothic pillar and the Gothic arch, where the enclosing shape presents us with a structure that no longer expresses calm, inward persistence, but rather, through its forms, the striving to emerge from mere inward stasis. How great is the difference between the beam, which is carried in full static calm by its column, and the mutually supporting arches, which come together at the apex and hold each other, where everything pushes towards a point, just as the power of the human soul is concentrated in the consciousness soul.

And anyone who can empathize with the ongoing process of human development, especially when observing Italian or French architecture, feels how, in the transition from the development of the intellectual or emotional soul to the development of the consciousness soul, it is no longer a matter of a calm, static support and supporting itself out of its inner totality, and one no longer strives for inward unity in form, as in Greek architecture, but rather seeks to pass over into the dynamic, as it were, to emerge from one's skin, in order to enter into connection with the reality of the outer world, as in the consciousness soul. Gothic arches open up to the light of heaven in long windows. This is not the case in Greek architecture. In a Greek temple, it would make no difference to the perception whether light fell into it or not. The light is only incidental. This is not irrelevant to the Gothic cathedral; the Gothic cathedral is inconceivable without the light refracted in the stained glass windows. Here we can feel how the consciousness soul enters into the totality of the world and strives out again into general existence. The Gothic style is thus the architectural striving that is characteristic of the age of the development of the consciousness soul.

And now we enter our own age, in which a world view that does not arise out of arbitrariness but out of the necessities of human development must realize that the human being must work his way out of the soul and into the spirit again, that the human being rests in the spirit of himself. The Gothic building, with its special architecture of the wall broken through by the windows, with its opening up for what can come in, for what must now come, appears as no more than the forerunner of this process! Like the right-hand harbinger of what is to come - where the wall necessarily leads to a structure and in this respect is also only a filler, a decoration, not an enclosure, like the walls of the Greek temple - like a harbinger, this Gothic building appears to be what must now become the new building for the enclosure of the coming Weltanschauung, the new building whose essential characteristics I have already hinted at here and there and some of whose essential features have even already been attempted, for example in the Stuttgart building.

The essential thing will be that the complement to the preliminary stage of architecture, to cave construction, where the rock itself materially closed off what had been hewn into it, will now appear; that our new building opens up on all sides, that its walls are open on all sides, not, however, to the material, but open to the spiritual. And we will achieve this by designing the forms in such a way that we can forget that there is any city or the like besides our building. Such an attempt has already been made in the Stuttgart building; its walls are open despite the material closure, open to the spirit. In the new building, too, we will design the forms, the decorative, the picturesque, in such a way that the wall is broken through, so that we can feel our way through color and form: Despite being closed in, our spiritual and mental outlook expands into the world at large. Just as the proportions of the cosmos were taken up in the pyramid, we take what we can experience through anthroposophy and theosophy and create forms, colors, outlines, figures for it , but we create all this in such a way that precisely through what we create on the walls and conjure up on the walls, these walls themselves disappear, and we experience the closed space in such a way that we can feel the illusion everywhere: It expands out into the cosmos, into the universe, just as the consciousness soul, when it merges with the spiritual self, expands out of the merely human into the spiritual.

In the new architecture, the significance of the individual column will also change completely. If, as in the Greek temple, we are dealing with static conditions, with conditions in which inwardness is of primary importance, then it is natural that the column forms and the capital forms should be repeated. For how could one imagine a column in one place as being different from another in the neighborhood if they have exactly the same function? It must be designed in the same way as the other. It cannot be any different, because every column has the same function.

If we are now dealing with a new architecture that reaches out into the cosmos, which is differentiated in the most diverse ways on all sides, and we are to forget that we are in an inner space, then the columns take on a completely new task, a task that is somewhat like that of a letter that points beyond itself by forming a word with the other letters. Thus the columns combine, not in a diversity, but like the individual letters to form a weighty writing that points outwards to the cosmos, from the inside outwards. And so we will build: from the inside out! And just as one capital follows the other, so they will join together and express something as a totality. This will be something that leads beyond the room. And what we will otherwise install, for example inside the dome, will be installed in such a way that we will not have the feeling of We are closed in by a dome, but that the whole painting seems to pierce the dome, carries it away into infinity. To do this, however, one will have to learn to paint a little in the way that Johannes Thomasius paints for Strader's sensibility, so that Strader gets the feeling: “The canvas, I want to pierce it, to find what I am supposed to seek.”

You will realize that in the mystery plays not a single word is written in vain, but always from the whole, and that all the things we want necessarily follow from the preconditions of our culture. Today I just wanted to evoke a feeling for the fact that in the entire treatment of the walls, the architectural motifs, the columns, and in the use of everything decorative, the new architecture must aim at the destruction of the material, so to speak overcome the wall and outwards, so that the picturesque must also overcome the wall; I wanted to evoke a feeling that all this must occur and be attempted through the new architecture and that this is a necessity in view of the course of human development, as we recognize it as a necessary one.

However, given the necessity of such a building in the course of human development, it seems pathetic that it is so difficult to actually carry out the building, and pathetic too are all the objections raised by the authorities in Munich, including those of the artists who have been called upon to judge it and who have said that the building would overwhelm its surroundings. Perhaps they felt a little queasy about the building overwhelming the neighborhood, about it growing out of it into a very wide environment. They will initially feel oppressed by it.

Such objections, raised by artists who believe themselves to be at the cutting edge of their time, seem grotesquely comical when viewed from the perspective of human development. Our dear friend, who is helping us here as an architect, said that the master builder should not let himself be forced by the client, but should create as a free artist, as he wishes. That is a nice principle, because let's say the client orders a department store, he would not be very satisfied if the “free artist” built him a church. Now, there are many such buzzwords. But one is limited by task and material. The term “free artist” simply makes no sense here. For I would like to know what the “free artist” will do if he intends to execute a plastic work of art from free artistry, to mold clay and create a Venus, and instead of Venus a sheep comes out? Is he then a free artist? Does the word 'free' have the slightest meaning in art when Raphael was commissioned to paint the Sistine Madonna and it ended up being a cow? Raphael would have been a 'free' artist, but he would not have created a Sistine Madonna! Just as one only needs one tongue for certain things, here too only one tongue is needed. For such reasoning has nothing to do with the necessary real conditions of human development, but rather it depends on whether one has a truth in mind that relates to doing, to working. For truths that are to be fruitful, that are to be 'true', must be grounded in the necessities of human development. However, they will always be applicable to what Schopenhauer said about truth entering into human development. For Schopenhauer said: “In all centuries, poor truth has had to blush because it was paradoxical, and yet it is not its fault. It cannot take the form of the enthroned general error. So it looks up with a sigh to its patron, Time, who beckons victory and fame to it, but whose flapping of his wings is so great and slow that the individual perishes from it.

Let us hope, dear friends, and let us do our part, because it could be good for our cause, that our guardian spirit takes pity on us and turns his gaze to us, so that we, recognizing the necessity of our structure, may soon be able to truly create this shell for anthroposophy or spiritual science, which corresponds to the development of humanity.

We have seen that out of the Mysteries grew something that made man aware of being related to the world in a way that can be expressed in the annual festivals; and in particular we have learned that Easter is an outgrowth of the principle of initiation. From all that has been set forth it will have become evident what a significant role the Mysteries played in the entire evolution of humanity. Really everything of a spiritual nature that has permeated the world and developed through mankind originated in the old Mysteries. In modern terms we could say that the Mysteries were all-powerful in guiding the spiritual life.

Now, it was intended from the beginning that mankind should develop freedom; and to this end it was necessary for the old Mystery system to recede and for humanity to be less closely linked, for a time, with the powerful guidance that proceeded from the Mysteries, to be cast more upon its own resources, as it were. We certainly cannot assert today that the time has arrived in which men have achieved their true inner freedom and are ready to pass over into the next phase of evolution that is to follow upon that of freedom. This is not the case. Still, many have already passed through a number of incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less strongly felt than formerly; and though the seeds of these incarnations have not yet sprouted, they are nevertheless potentially present in the souls of men. And with the coming of a more spiritual age they will develop what they have not developed in their present dimness of vision. Above all things, however, it will be necessary that the wisdom, the vision, the experience of the spiritual such as can be attained by modern initiation, be met with esteem, with reverence; and this must be offered out of man's freedom. Without esteem and reverence, true enlightenment and a spiritual life of humanity is really not possible.

Surely we make the right use of festivals if with their help we try to implant in our souls this esteem, this reverence for things spiritual as they have evolved during the course of human history; if we try to learn how to observe in the most intimate way possible the spiritual significance of outer events, to understand how these carry spiritual meaning from one age over into another. For the time being men keep returning to Earth in repeating incarnations, thus carrying over their experiences of earlier epochs into later ones. Human beings are the most important factor in the further development of all that takes place within the history of mankind. But men of all periods live in a definite environment, and clearly, one of the most significant environments was that of the Mysteries. A most important factor in the progress of humanity is the carrying over of what has been experienced in the Mysteries and re-experienced, be it again through the medium of Mysteries, whence it acts upon mankind, or by other means of enlightenment. Today it must be the latter, for the true Mystery system has withdrawn from the present outer world and is to reappear only in the future.

If the impulse that went forth from here, from the Goetheanum, at the time of the Christmas Meeting, really takes root in the Anthroposophical Society, it is certain that by leading to ever deeper insight the Anthroposophical Society will be the foundation for the Mysteries of the future. These new Mysteries must be consciously nurtured by the Anthroposophical Society. We recall an event that can be utilized in our development as once a similar one was used: the burning of the Temple of Ephesus. Both were the result of a grave wrong; yet on different planes things have different meanings, and it is possible for a frightful iniquity, as it appears on one plane, to be employed on another for the advancement of human freedom—in the sense that precisely such horrible events can bring about a real advance in human progress.

But as I have already said, such matters must be grasped through their inner meaning if they are to be approached understandingly. One must enter into the particular manner in which the spiritual element of the world pervaded the Mysteries. Yesterday I pointed out how the establishment of the annual Easter Festival grew out of a spiritual conception of the constellation of Sun and Moon, and that from the Moon viewpoint the other planets were observed. And I said further that according to what is learned by observing the other planets, the human being, in descending from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence, is guided in forming his light-ether body.

If we would observe and rightly understand how this light-ether body, these ether forces, are transmitted to us by the Moon forces, Moon observations—by what I might call the spiritual Moon observatory, this can be done as we have just endeavored to do it: by turning to the cosmos where it is all inscribed and exists as a fact. But it is important to ponder in our souls the human element as well, the part it plays in the different epochs as a factor of these truths.

As a matter of fact, never did the souls of men take part so intimately, so fervently, in this last phase of the descent to Earth—the enveloping in an etheric body—as in the Mysteries of Ephesus. There the whole service of the Goddess of Ephesus, exoterically called Artemis, was directed toward co-experiencing the spiritual weaving life within the cosmic ether. When members of the Ephesian Mystery approached the image of the Goddess, the feeling this gave them may be said to have become intensified to hearing; and what they heard, as though the goddess were speaking, was something as follows: I rejoice in all that bears fruit in the wide expanse of cosmic ether.—A deep impression was created by this expression of intense joy on the part of the Goddess of the Temple, her joy in all that grows, sprouts and burgeons in the world-ether; and an ardent feeling of close relationship with blossoming and flowering was in particular something that permeated the spiritual atmosphere of the Ephesian Sanctuary as with a magic breath.

Nowhere else was the growth of the plant life, the drive of the Earth forces into the plants, co-experienced so intensely as in the Mystery of Ephesus, for the entire training here tended to that end. And this led to the next step: it was here that instruction was given, if I may so call it, specially intended to induce in the minds of members a feeling for the Moon secret, of which I spoke yesterday. It was everyone's own experience to feel himself as a light-being, because the act of receiving his light-form from the Moon was made so alive for the neophytes and initiates.

A part of the ritual ran something as follows—and one who could take part in it was actually transported into that act of forming himself out of the sunlight that circles around the Moon: as though proceeding from the Sun, there came to him the sound J O A.¹

He knew that this J O A activated his ego, his astral body. J O (ego, astral body) and A (the approach of the light-ether body), joining in J O A. Then, with the J O A vibrating in him, he felt himself to be composed of ego, astral body and etheric body.

And then it seemed as though he heard sounding up to him from the Earth—for he had been transported into the cosmos—something that saturated the J O A: eh v. JehOvA What rose up to him in the eh v were the Earth forces.

Now he realized that in this JehOvA he felt the complete human being. The premonition of the physical body, which he acquired only on Earth, he felt intimated in the consonants complementing the vowels that in the J O A indicate the ego, the astral and the etheric body.—This becoming one with the JehOvA was what enabled the disciple of Ephesus to sense in their full significance the last steps of the descent from the spiritual world.

But in feeling the import of this J O A the neophyte at the same time felt himself to be the sound J O A in the light. Then he was a human being: resonant ego, resonant astral body, in a shimmering light-ether body. He was sound in light. That is the nature of cosmic man; and in this state the initiate was able to grasp what he saw in the cosmos, just as on Earth he could perceive through his eyes what occurs in the physical environment of the Earth. When the neophyte of Ephesus bore this J O A within him he really felt transported into the Moon sphere, and he took part in all that could be observed from the point of view of the Moon.

In this condition the human being was man in general, in the sense that the differentiation between man and woman did not enter until the descent to Earth occurred. Man felt himself transported into this pre-earthly existence, the region immediately preceding his approach to the terrestrial. The Ephesian disciples were able to achieve this ascent to the Moon sphere in a particularly intimate way; and henceforth they carried in their heart, in their soul, what they had experienced there. It sounded for them something as follows:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.²

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

That expresses what permeated every Ephesian, and he counted it the most important of all that pulsed through his being. When a participant in the Ephesian Mysteries heard these words ringing in his ears, as it were, there was something about them that made him feel himself completely as a human being; for through them he became aware of the relation between the forces of his etheric body and the planetary system. This came to forceful expression. The cosmos speaks to the etheric body:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might.

Now the human being feels himself to be in the power of the moonlight.

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing.

The chiming, endowed with creative force, sounds across from Mars. And what gave strength to man's limbs, endowing him with the power of movement:

And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging.

From Jupiter there rays across:

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming.

And from Venus:

And Venus' love-bearing beauty ...

In order that then Saturn may gather up all that rounds off the human being within and without, prepare him to descend to Earth and there to clothe himself in a physical garb; and then further enable this physically garbed being, who bears the god within him, to live on the Earth:

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being
And to ages now aborning
Consecrate thee.

From what I have described you can readily see that the spiritual life in Ephesus was colorful and aglow with inner light. Epitomized in the thought of Easter, it comprised really everything that had ever been known about man's true dignity in the cosmos, in the whole universe. And many of the wanderers I mentioned yesterday—those who went from one Mystery to another in order to benefit by the totality of the Mysteries—many of these have repeatedly assured us that nowhere else as in Ephesus—at least, not so joyously—did they perceive so intimately and brightly the harmony of the spheres through that Moon point of view, where the radiant astral light of the world shone on them, where they sensed it in the spiritual sunlight flooding the Moon: in other Mysteries the saturation of man's soul and spirit with astral light was not felt with such an intense, inner artistic grasp.

All this was associated with the temple that went up in flames by the hand of a criminal or a lunatic. But as I mentioned during the Christmas Conference, initiates of the Ephesian Mysteries were re-embodied in Aristotle and Alexander; and these personalities came close to what was still capable of being sensed, in their time, of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now, what appears to be an outwardly fortuitous event can be of great spiritual significance in world evolution. Among ourselves it has frequently been mentioned for years that the Temple of Ephesus was burned at the hour in which Alexander the Great was born. But as this temple burned, something significant occurred.

What untold experiences had come to the dwellers in that temple through the centuries! What a wealth of spiritual light and wisdom had suffused its halls! And while the flames lept up from the Temple of Ephesus, all that wisdom was imparted to the cosmic ether, so that we may say: the perpetually recurring Easter Festival of Ephesus that had been locked in the temple halls was henceforth inscribed in the dome of the universe, in so far as this is etheric, though in less legible letters.

That is often the way things work out: much human wisdom that in olden times had been enclosed within temple walls was released, was inscribed in the world-ether, and there at once becomes visible to one who ascends to real imagination. And this imagination is the interpreter, as it were, of the secret of the stars: what once was secret within the temples has been inscribed in the world-ether, and there it can be read by means of imagination.

We can put it another way, but it means the same. I go out into the starlit night, contemplate the firmament and throw myself open to it. Then, if I have the right capacity, the forms of the constellations and the movements of the planets are transmuted as into vast cosmic script. And if I read this script, something emerges like that which I explained yesterday in referring to the Moon secret. When the stars no longer remain merely something to be mathematically and mechanically computed, but become the alphabet of cosmic script, these things can indeed be read there.

But I should like to develop the matter further. When Alexander and Aristotle approached the Kabirian secrets in Samothrace at a time when the old Mysteries were already on the decline,² something occurred to them at that moment through the influence of the Kabirian Mysteries like a memory of the old Ephesian time, which both had passed through in a certain century. And once more there resounded the J O A, and again they heard intoned:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.

But in this memory, this historical recollection of something ancient, there resided a certain power, the power to create something new. And from that moment there streamed forth this power to create something new—but it was something strange and little observed by mankind. For you must really first understand the nature of this creative power that went forth from the collaboration of Alexander and Aristotle.

Take any notable poem or other work of art—it can be a most beautiful one, such as the Bhagavad Gita or Goethe's Faust or his Iphigenia—anything you value very highly—and reflect on its rich and mighty content—let us say, on the content of Goethe's Faust. Now, by what means, my dear friends, is this rich content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it is transmitted in the ordinary way, as it is to most people. At some time during your life you read Faust. What did you encounter on the physical plane—on the paper? Nothing but combinations of a b c, and so forth. The means by which the mighty content of Faust is disclosed to us consists only of combinations of the letters of the alphabet. If you know the alphabet, the paper contains nothing that does not correspond with one of the twenty-odd letters. Something is conjured up out of these twenty-odd letters—if you know how to read—that evokes for you the whole glorious substance of Faust. You may find it excessively tiresome to recite the alphabet, and you may consider it as abstract as anything could well be; yet rightly combined, this superlative abstraction gives us the whole of Faust.

Now, when there was heard again the cosmic resounding from the Moon that disclosed to Aristotle and Alexander what the blaze of Ephesus signified, how that fire had carried the secret of Ephesus out into the world-ether, there came to Aristotle the inspiration to found the cosmic script. This, however, is not achieved by means of the alphabet, but rather through thoughts, as book writing is made up of letters. And so the letters of the cosmic script came into being.—When I write them down for you they are just as abstract as the alphabet:

There you have a number of concepts. They originated when Aristotle laid them before Alexander. Learn to accomplish with these concepts what you do with the alphabet, and you will have learned to read in the cosmos by means of Being, Quantity, Quality, Relationship, Space, Time, Position, Having, Doing, Suffering.

In our age of abstractions something peculiar happened to logic, as it is taught in the schools. Imagine a custom existing in some school to teach—not reading, but, for instance, to provide books from which the pupils had to keep learning the letters in all conceivable combinations, but never arriving at using them for envisioning the wealth of the contents: that would be the same as what the world has done to Aristotle's Logic. In the books on logic are listed his categories—that's what people call them. People memorize them, but have no idea what to do with them. It is exactly like memorizing the alphabet without knowing how to apply it.

Reading the cosmic records bases on something just as simple as extracting the content of Faust by means of the alphabet—it must merely be learned. And fundamentally, all that anthroposophy has ever brought forth or ever will has been experienced by means of these concepts, just as what is read in Faust is experienced through the letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are comprised in these simple concepts that are the cosmic alphabet.

Something intervened in Earth evolution at the time of Alexander that stands in contrast with the direct perception so characteristic of Ephesus. It did not develop till later, especially during the Middle Ages; and it is deeply hidden, profoundly esoteric. Profoundly esoteric is the meaning that dwells in those ten simple concepts; and actually we are learning more and more to live in them. But we must keep striving to experience them as livingly in our soul as we do the alphabet when a wealth of spiritual substance is in question.

Thus you see how something that for thousands of years had been a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom flowed into ten concepts, whose inner power and light, however, remain to be re-disclosed. And when man will have learned again to read in the cosmos, when he will experience the resurrection of what has lain buried as though in a grave during this interlude in human evolution between the two spiritual ages, then it will come about at some future time that the world wisdom, the light of the world, will be found again. It is our task, my dear friends, to bring to light again what is hidden. We must make of Easter an experience for all humanity. And just as it could be said on other occasions that anthroposophy is a Christmas experience, so it is in its whole manifestation an Easter experience, a resurrection experience coupled with an experience of the grave. And it is especially important during this Easter gathering that we should feel, if I may so express it, the solemnity of anthroposophic striving by realizing that today we can turn to a spiritual Being Who may be close to us, directly beyond the threshold, and appeal to Him thus: Oh, how blessed was mankind at one time with divine-spiritual revelation that still shone so very bright in Ephesus! But now all that is buried. How can I uncover what is so deeply buried?—for one would like to believe that what once existed might in some historical way be found again in the grave where it lies.

Then the Being will reply to us, as did once before a like being in a similar case: What you seek is no longer here. It is in your heart, if only you will unlock your heart in the right way.

Anthroposophy is indeed latent in the hearts of men, but it is for these human hearts to open in the right way. That is what we must deeply feel. Then we will be led back—not instinctively, as of old, but in full awareness—to the wisdom that lived and shone in the Mysteries.

All this I would like to implant in your hearts, my dear friends, at this Easter time; for to permeate yourself with something that can enkindle a feeling of solemnity in every heart dedicated to anthroposophy, that is something which carries up into the spiritual world and which must be correlated with the Christmas impulse given at Dornach. For this impulse must not remain a thought-out, intellectualistic one, but must spring from the heart; it must not be formal or matter-of-fact, nor must it be sentimental: it must issue from the cause itself and bear the mark of solemnity. When the conflagration at Ephesus blazed up, first in the outer ether and then in the heart of Aristotle, it revealed anew to Aristotle the secrets that could then be epitomized in the simplest terms; and we may say in all modesty that, just as he was able to use the fire of Ephesus to this end, so it is our task—and we shall fulfill it—to use what the flames of the Goetheanum carried into the ether: the aims and purpose of anthroposophy.

What do we gather from all this, my dear friends? That at the memorial service in the Christmas-New Year time, the time in which the disaster struck us a year before, it was vouchsafed us to send forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. How could this be? Because we are right in feeling that what had previously been a cause pertaining to this Earth, worked for and established as such, was carried by the flames out into cosmic space. Because this misfortune has come to us we are, recognizing its consequences, justified in saying, Now we understand that we may no longer represent a mere Earth cause, but must know it as one of wide etheric space in which the spirit lives: the cause represented by the Goetheanum is a cause of the cosmic ether in which lives the spirit-filled wisdom of the world. It has been carried out into the ether; and it is granted us to permeate ourselves with the Goetheanum impulses flowing in from the cosmos.

Take this in any sense—as an image, if you like: even as an image it signifies a profound truth, a truth that can be simply expressed: the Christmas impulse calls for the permeation of anthroposophical activity with an esoteric element. This is present because what had been earthly now reacts on the impulses of the anthroposophical movement through the astral light in the physical fire that rayed forth into cosmic space; but we must be able to receive these impulses.

Then, if we are able to receive them, we feel a certain important link in the chain of all that lives in anthroposophy: it is the anthroposophical Easter spirit, which can never in the world believe that the spirit perishes, but rather that it arises ever and again after dying through the world; and anthroposophy must hold fast to the spirit resurrected again and again out of eternal depths.

That is what we will take into our hearts as the Easter thought, the Easter feeling; and from this gathering we shall carry away feelings, my dear friends, that will fill us with courage and strength for work when we return to our allotted spheres.

• 1. Translator's Note:—For readers not familiar with German it must be explained that j is pronounced like our y in “yet”—in other words, like an excessively short German i. For this reason it is not too strange that one often encounters J for I (but only in capitals), and the above is a case in point. Indeed, there is no choice here but to use it, as the same letter must serve as a pure vowel in J O A and later as a modified vowel in Jehova.—The letters J O A must be pronounced Ee Oh Ah, and Jehova that appears later, Yay-hoh-vah.
• 2. Translation by Henry B. Monges.
• 2. Samothrace still existed as a memorial and also as a sanctuary for work, but in the main the Mystery schools had declined in the time of Alexander.

For esoteric development—the true path to knowledge—the individual must find the way to understanding what it means to live in a world in which the senses, the whole physical organization, in not a facilitator; that is, to live with the psychic-spiritual, which is man's true identity, in a spiritual world. In order to do so there are many different more or less meditative exercises, mental exertions meant to affect the soul.

And to give a picture of what a human soul can pass through on the way from experiencing the physical sensory world to experiencing the spiritual world is what will be provided in these class lessons by means of the various considerations and the summarizing of such considerations in individual verses, which may then be meditated upon according to each member's possibilities and needs.

Once a certain time has passed the communications given in these class lessons, which, as I have often stressed, are real communications from the spiritual world, will coalesce in such a way that those who have participated—it is also karma for those who could be here—will have a complete picture of the first stage of esoteric development.

As a result of the various indications which are given here we can gradually rise above our earthly existence to an experience of the cosmos, we can develop the feelings which carry us out into those distant reaches of the universe from which the spiritual comes to meet us. But as long as we confine ourselves to using our senses and reason only in connection with the sense-perceptible world which surrounds us, it will be impossible for us to grasp what the spiritual world reveals as the truth accessible to man.

You see my dear friends, as I have often stressed, human common sense can understand everything offered by anthroposophy, if it exerts itself sufficiently and is free of prejudice. But it is just in reference to this common sense where a touchstone exists concerning whether or not someone is really destined by their karma nowadays to participate in anthroposophy.

There are two possibilities. One is that the person hears about anthroposophical truths, lets them work on him and considers them to be self-evident. It is obvious that everyone sitting here today belongs to that group. For if someone who does not belong to that group wishes to participate in a lesson as a member, it would not be honest of them. And honesty is the most important aspect of esoteric life—complete truthfulness penetrating the human soul and spirit.

There is another group of people who find what is presented by anthroposophy to be fantastic, somehow belonging only to visionaries. These people show by their behavior that they are not able, according to their karma, to sufficiently separate common sense from physicality and the senses to be able to grasp sense-free truth, sense-free knowledge.

It is therefore the extent to which common sense is bound to corporeality or not which determines such a great divergence between people. For if you honestly consider that you possess a common sense which understands anthroposophy, then at the moment it grasps anthroposophy honestly, it does so independently of corporeality. And this healthy common sense which grasps anthroposophy honestly is the beginning of esoteric striving. And we should treasure the fact that healthy common sense which understands anthroposophy is the beginning of esoteric striving. It should not be overlooked. For when one starts with this understanding through healthy common sense and then follows the indications given in the appropriate schools, one proceeds farther and farther along the esoteric path. You can use whichever of the verses provided here which you consider appropriate for you. But you should apply them together with the indications as to how they relate to the inner life of man.

Today I would like to again provide an indication of how you can leave the body—if only by means of so slight a jolt that you don't even realize it.

We should develop the ability to observe and study the minerals and plants in our environment to the extent that we feel them within—if only by means of thinking—and become truly aware of how this earthly environment is related to us, that due to our wearing a physical body we are directly related to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms around us. And then we ask the question in all honesty: Why? Why did I absorb the physical substances of the earth just by being born? Why do I drag myself through life from birth till death in order to end physical life once my organism is no longer able to process its physical elements? We must deeply feel our relationship to our physical environment starting from such a personal enigma. Then, however, we will also feel more and more what the starting point for esoteric life can be. Then we feel that in physical earthly life we are blindly groping in the dark.

And finally, my dear sisters and brothers, consider the people of today who have been placed in earthly life after birth and educated according to the usual methods and called to this or that work due to purely external circumstances. They do not understand the relationship of this work to the totality of human existence. Perhaps they do not know much more than that they work in order to eat. They do not realize that in the plants they eat cosmic forces from the distant boundaries of the universe are present which pass through the human organism and therefore in a certain sense undergo a cosmic evolution. Many people today cannot even begin to glimpse this process due to the materialism of the times. But to admit that by the mere consideration of earthly relationships one stands spiritually blind in life and lives in the dark—that is the starting point for true esoteric development.

And then change the direction of your gaze from what surrounds you on the earth to the star-studded heaven—either in thought, or if you really want to be affected by it, in reality. Behold the planets, behold the stars, fill yourselves with the infinite transcendence of what shines back to you from the universe, and say to yourself: as human beings we are related just as much to what radiates down from the universe as we are to what surrounds us in the physical environment.

Then by gazing up to the star-studded heaven, we really have the feeling that we do not live in darkness, but that we are freed from life in the darkness by rising with our soul-spiritual being to the stars, rise to what the stars represent as pictures in their constellations. And, you see, if we can really enter meditating into this vision of the star-filled sky it becomes a plenitude of imaginations. You know the old pictures in which not only the constellations have been painted, but in which they have been recapitulated symbolically as animals. Not only the star group that is in Aries, or in Taurus has been represented, but also the symbolic images of the ram and the bull are included.

Today people think: Well, it was arbitrary on the part of those ancient inhabitants of the earth that just because the constellations were so named that the corresponding pictures were added. But that was not the case at all. In reality in ancient times the shepherds in the fields did not merely gaze up at the star-studded sky with physical eyes, but also in dream-consciousness or sleep-consciousness out there with their flocks they turned their souls with closed eyes towards outer space. They did not see the constellations which physical eyes see. But they actually perceived those pictures, those imaginations which fill universal space—albeit somewhat differently from what was later painted.

We can no longer go back to what the simple shepherds experienced by instinctive clairvoyance. But we can do something else. With far greater thoughtfulness we can imagine ourselves into the star-filled sky. We can feel the depth and at the same time the awesome majesty of what radiates back to us. And gradually we can come to a sense of veneration for what is expanding out there in cosmic space. And the more ardent the veneration is the more clearly can the experience be that the outer sense-images of the stars disappear and the star-filled sky becomes an Imagination for us. But only then, when the star-filled sky becomes an Imagination for us, do we feel ourselves carried away by our soul's vision.

You see, still in Plato's time one felt something special about the physical eye when it is observing. Plato himself described seeing as follows: When I look at a person something leaves my eye and encompasses him. People in ancient times sensed that something streams out of the eye and encompasses the object. The etheric streams out. Just as when I stretch out my hand and grasp something I know that I am connected to my hand until reaching the grasped object, so in the times of instinctive clairvoyance people knew that something etheric goes out from the eye and encompasses the thing looked at. Today people think, well,the eye is here, the object seen is there. So the object sends out ether-waves which drum against the eye and the drumming is perceived by some kind of soul—about which even the materialist talks about here, but without having any idea of what it is. But that is not true. It is not a mere impact on the person emanating from the object, but really also an emanation of the person's inner etheric substance.

And we perceive our ether body as belonging to the universe when the star-filled sky becomes for us the grand open page of the universe on which the imaginative secrets of cosmic being are written—if we are able to read it.

And then the feeling comes to us: When you are here on earth you are in the robust sense-perceptible reality. But you are blind, you live in darkness. When you rise up with your sensibility then you live in what otherwise only shines down to you from the distant universe, and you live in the illusion of the distant universe. But at the same time you take your own etheric being out into the distant flooding stream of this illusionary world.

And the illusion ceases to be illusion. It cannot be a nothing if we immerse ourselves in it. When we have this feeling—I will draw it—.

We live as blind people in the darkness of earthly existence, (white arc); then we journey out into the distant universe (yellow rays), at the end of which we can feel the cosmic Imaginations by means of reverence for the brilliance of the stars (red waves).

So now that we have journeyed out we are together with our etheric being within the imaginative cosmic web. If we can accomplish this, then we are no longer in the physical body. We have traveled through the etheric emptiness to experiencing the cosmic Imaginations.

You see, it's like when in the physical world someone writes something down and, because we have learned to read, we read it. By being out in the cosmos—the gods have written the cosmic imaginations for us in the cosmos—when we arrive we see the imaginations from the other side (arrows). At first we live here on the earth (inner circle). Then we draw ourselves up to the cosmic imaginations (outer wave-circle).

Yes, my dear friends, my sisters and brothers, the zodiac speaks a meaningful language when we do not observe it from the earth—Arias, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo—but rather when we encircle it from without. And it is a task of our consciousness to encircle it from without. Then we begin to read the cosmic secrets, which are the deeds of the spiritual beings. In a novel we read of the deeds of men. When we look at the zodiac from the other side and read what from the earth we see virtually from behind, as Moses was told that he always had to look at God from behind, that is, from the earth. Initiation consists of seeing from the other side—not a matter of gawking, but of reading. And what we read are the spiritual deeds of the spiritual beings who brought it all about.

And when we have silently read long enough, when our souls have concentrated deeply on this reading, then we begin to hear in a spiritual way. Then the gods speak with us. When the gods speak with us we are within the spiritual world.

Now you see, my dear sisters and brothers, the initiate can tell you: the soul can rise up to the cosmic heights, receive the cosmic imaginations, read them from the other side, the spiritual deeds, become capable of hearing in a spiritual way the language of the gods.

But if you really immerse yourself in what the initiate relates with your whole heart, your whole feeling, if you don't just listen to it greedily and say: Well, if I also could do that I'd like it, it would be interesting—but I'm not going to bother. But you receive it as something which you can revere, which you can love, which you can repeatedly meditate on, then it is the path to enter esoteric life yourself.

And you will find this path by meditating profoundly on the words:¹

1. I live in the dark domain of the earth,
2. I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
3. I read in the deeds of the spirits,
4. I hear in the speech of the gods.

When experienced with the necessary deeply meditative feeling this works wonders in the human soul, transforms the human soul. It must rhythmically flow through the soul again and again, for it leads the human being through his own interior cosmic being.

But it is necessary that such a thing be deeply interiorized. And even though it still speaks more to the head, the heart should also participate in the whole process of going out into the etheric universe, then into the spiritual universe, that is, on the other side of the universe. It is necessary in such a process that we take our hearts with us in the experience and that it stimulate in you the feelings which can come quite naturally by this excursion into the outer universe. But these feelings must be really stimulated. It is therefore good to look deeply into what the words say:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
I wander in the brilliance of the stars
I read in the deeds of the spirits.
I hear in the speech of the gods.

Then you try to imagine that someone is speaking to you from a spiritual depth, as though you were not thinking it, but as though you were hearing it, as if another being were speaking. You really imagine that another being is speaking to you from an unknown depth. Then you try to develop the right feelings for what you have heard.

These feelings live in the second part of the verse:²

5. The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,
6. The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me

When I am aware that I live blindly in the darkness of the earth, I long to get out. Then the brilliance of the stars becomes the comforter which expands my being:

The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

Now from the other side:

7. The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

—when I read them—

8. The speech of the gods is creating to me.

Only you must use it correctly. Imagine yourself vividly in this meditating which you are doing. As though someone were speaking to you from spiritual depths is how you hear the lines of the first verse. You bring the corresponding feeling to each verse, so that you experience in the meditation: first listen, then bring feeling; listen, then bring feeling; and so on.³

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me.

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

It is a meditation in dialog in which you always objectify the first line, but the second you feel as though streaming out of your heart. Now you try again to visualize how one acts and weaves into the other, and then try to feel with your will what you can experience through the dialog.⁴

From depth of spirit resounds:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,

The heart replies:

The darkness of the earth creates longing in me.

The will senses the impulse in the dialog between lines 1 and 5:

9. The earth's darkness extinguishes me.

After this dialog has taken place we recall the connection of lines 2 and 6:

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

10. The brilliance of the stars awakens me.

Afterward we recall what resounds from spiritual depths and the heart's reply:

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me.

The will now senses:

11. The deeds of the spirits call to me.

into the spiritual world.

And now the most sublime, where we feel ourselves in dialog with the gods themselves, where the gods not only let us read, but speak:

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

12. The speech of the gods engenders me.

—brings me forth, engenders me.

Now imagine the whole meditation. It runs as follows: dialog—line for line with a spiritual being present in the dim spiritual depths that always speaks the top line of the verse. And the heart always replies:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

Now I recall each one and add the outpouring of will as a remembrance of what had just gone before:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,
The earth's darkness extinguishes me.

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,
The brilliance of the stars awakens me.

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,
The deeds of the spirits call to me.

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me,
The speech of the gods engenders me.

Conviction results from the dialog in meditation, from recalling the dialog and in strengthening the recollection by means of the will.

If, firstly, with inner devotional feeling, secondly with complete soul and interest we have done what I have just described, if we do it not as mechanical meditating but as a true experience of the soul, then this means of creating a relation to the spiritual world really does have an awakening effect on the soul.

Also in the case of the last verse, which in the way I have described should really be experienced as remembrance of speech and answering speech—speech of the spirit and answering speech of the heart, we must correctly feel how, firstly, consciousness, which we wish to achieve, is extinguished by the earth's darkness. We must sense how a moment of extinguishing sleep overcomes consciousness, and how upon awakening, at the second line, we hear the spirits calling us to them, how afterward we feel: the spirits have called us so that they can bring us forth, engender us in the spiritual world by their own cosmic word.

If these nuances of inner experience flow through the soul—and the representations of the spiritual being who speaks to us are included—and the heart reciprocates with its dedication to the spiritual being, then yes, then the stimulation exists in the soul which will gradually lead this soul onto the esoteric path. And we must be clear that as we experience these three verses in our souls in the way in which I have described as best we can, something powerful takes place in the subconscious mind. If we sincerely live in these three verses as I have described, then when the first line resounds, our soul unconsciously passes through the starting-point of earthly life when the etheric body was first formed.

If we can vividly imagine what from the spirit resounds:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,

then we approach—in the unconscious—with this hearing in spirit, the moment in which our etheric body was formed; and from pre-earthly existence, from life between death and a new birth, acts the force with which we sincerely reply from the heart:

The darkness of the earth creates longing in me;

because we have the longing for the spiritual as a heritage from pre-earthly existence.

And again we are transported to the beginning of earthly existence. And what acts from our hearts is inspired by the previous earthly existence.

I wander in the brilliance of the stars:

We are transported to the beginning of our earthly life. The real comfort the brilliance of the stars can give when we are transported back is in our heart's reply:

The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

And then:

I read in the deeds of the spirits:

We are transported back to the earth's beginning. Remember how we are taught by spiritual beings in pre-earthly existence.

The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

Among whom I lived and wandered before I descended to the earth.

I hear in the speech of the gods:

We heard them during the period between death and a new birth. We sense that what the gods say is not mere information as is what men say; we realize that the speech of the Gods is creative:

The speech of the gods is creating for me.

But then, if we can see it so, lines 9, 10, 11, 12 also acquire the correct meaning:⁵

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The earth's darkness extinguishes me,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

—deletes me from my present earth life for I am led back, through the region between death and a new birth, to my earlier incarnation. I divine this; therefor my consciousness is extinguished, for my consciousness was, until now, that of my current incarnation. In this moment of sleep I am transported back so I can divine: I am wandering in my previous incarnation.⁶

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars awakens me
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,

I am brought back to what I was in the previous incarnation as though awakened in it. My karma arises before me, the connection of destiny arises before me, it arises before me from the other side.⁷

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits call to me
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

to fulfill my karma with the forces which derive from my previous earth-life.⁸

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods engenders me.
The speech of the gods is creating for me,

Everything I am becomes clear to me when my earlier earthly existence penetrates the present one and shines through it and wanders through it and pulses through it. For here I am. My present I is in a process, it is a seed which will have meaning once I have passed through the gates of death. What shines and works in me from the previous earthly existence into the present one makes me into a human being, engenders me as an existing human being.

If we have the conviction that it is so, that—although we believe only to be in the ordinary world of physical existence—our soul really makes the journey back to the previous earth-life, then we will be aware of the gravity of what we are experiencing. And through this awareness a warmer, luminous current streams through our thinking, feeling and willing. And with that inner magical feeling, which is necessary for the meditation to work in the right way, our meditation will prevail. We may call it a magical feeling for it cannot be compared with any feeling we have on earth, because it is completely independent of all corporeality. If we cannot yet leave the physical body behind with our thinking, this magical thinking which we experience through the gravity of our soul's activity is present in the purely spiritual world.

According to the way we experience these things, our esoteric striving is fulfilled. And that is what I was obliged to lay before your souls today, my dear sisters and brothers.

In conclusion I would like to say one more thing. It should not happen that someone passes on the verses and the information given here without first asking permission. Only with permission may these things be passed on from one to another or to a group. It is especially frowned upon, my dear friends, that these verses or their interpretation be sent by post. They may not be sent by post, and I ask that this be strictly observed.

• 1. The first part of the verse is written on the blackboard.
• 2. The second part is written on the blackboard.
• 3. An arc is drawn connecting lines 1 and 5; another connecting 2 and 6, another connecting 3 and 7, and another connecting lines 4 and 8
• 4. The third part of the verse is arranged in connection with the first and the second parts while lines 9, 10, 11 and 12 are written on the blackboard.
• 5. Line 9 is written again, this time on the arc connecting lines 1 and 5.
• 6. Line 10 is written again, this time at the arc connecting lines 2 and 6.
• 7. Line 11 is written again, at the arc connecting lines 3 and 7.
• 8. Line 12 is written again, at the arc connecting lines 4 and 8.

My dear friends! When the Johannesbau-Verein followed on from our last General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society here in Berlin, I addressed a few words to you about the way in which the Johannesbau is to be placed in the whole development of art, especially architectural art; that it in the sense in which we also otherwise consider that which we want to achieve in the field of theosophy or anthroposophy - as something necessary in the whole spiritual development of humanity; so that what is to happen through theosophy or anthroposophy does not appear as some kind of arbitrariness, not as something that we give birth to out of ourselves as some kind of arbitrary ideal, but appears as we see it as a necessity, as it were, in that writing that reveals to us the necessary path of the human spirit through the evolution of the earth.

Now, one can choose many points of view to present this necessity that has just been characterized. At that time, I showed from a certain point of view how this necessary placing in human history of what is intended by the Johannesbau is to be understood. Today, I would like to choose a different point of view, so that my present considerations may, in a certain respect, supplement what was presented here in December 1911.

Architecture is actually bound to a very specific premise if we understand architecture in the sense that man wants to create a shell, as it were, using some material, through some forms or other measures, be it for profane living and working, be it for religious activities or the like. In this sense, the art of building, architecture, is definitely bound up with what we can call the soul, is connected with the concept of the soul, arises from the soul and can be grasped by grasping the whole extent of the soul.

Now, over the years of working in spiritual science, the soul has always presented itself to us from three points of view: from the point of view of the sentient soul, from the point of view of the mind or emotional soul, and from that of the consciousness soul. But then this soul-life also presents itself to us when it first announces itself, as it were, but does not yet really exist as soul-life when we speak of the sentient or astral body. And again, the soul-life presents itself to us when we say that the soul-life has developed to such an extent that it seeks a transition to the spirit-self or manas. If you look at my Theosophy, you will find the threefold soul in it: the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. But you will find the sentient soul bordering on the sentient body, so that the sentient soul and sentient appear as two sides of one and the same, the one side more soul-like, the other more spiritual; and then you will find, joining together again, consciousness soul and spirit self; the consciousness soul representing the more soul-like side, the spirit self, on the other hand, the more spiritual side.

Those who, as anthroposophists, gradually find their way into such an understanding of these terms, as our esteemed friend Arenson has very beautifully explained in these days, will not be able to stop at the words sentient soul, mind or soul, and consciousness soul, and only seek to find one or the other definition for these words , but as a true anthroposophist will long to gradually develop in his mind many, many concepts, feelings and insights, which lead from one feeling to another and so on, in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding, which in the case of these concepts is structured in the most diverse directions.

For the seer himself, the words quoted include, one might say, entire worlds. Therefore, in order to understand such concepts, one must also take into account what has been presented about human development, for example, in the post-Atlantic period: that the sentient body has particularly developed in the ancient Persian culture, the sentient soul in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the mind or emotional soul in the Greco-Roman period, the consciousness soul in the time in which we ourselves live, and that we see the next period, so to speak, as already approaching in its development, yes, that we ourselves, with what we want as anthroposophy, theosophy, are working on the approach of this next period, which in a certain way should show us the connection between consciousness soul and spirit self or manas.

Architecture, it was said, is closely linked to the concept of the soul. Someone might ask: Should architecture not then also be linked to the development of the soul, as it has just been characterized? And should not the forms, the designs of architecture show certain peculiarities in their succession, which are connected to this development of sentient body, sentient soul and so on? And would we not then have no justification at all for speaking of architecture in the case of certain periods – for example, the first post-Atlantean period, which particularly brought forth the etheric body – so as to be right in speaking of architecture? For if architecture is bound to the soul, then it should only begin to dawn when it begins to develop. Therefore, one would assume that it begins to emerge in the sentient body, because that is, as it were, the other side of the soul; and before that, one would have to refer to times when an actual architecture - in the sense in which we characteristically understand architecture - would not exist at all.

Now it is difficult enough to answer this question from the standpoint of external history; for everything that goes back beyond the Egyptian-Chaldean period can hardly be gained from historical monuments and traditions, but can only be derived from clairvoyant research. Even the time of Zarathustra, which we call the original Persian period, lies so far back that historical research is out of the question, let alone the time period that we know to be connected with the development of the etheric body, namely the original Indian period.

However, one can also have strange experiences with this matter if one approaches the very clever people of the present day with it. Recently, for example, one of these clever people said that these post-Atlantean periods, as they are recorded, for example, in my “Occult Science”, are untenable, because anyone who is familiar with the linguistic monuments of India would never believe that Indian culture had progressed as far ahead of Egyptian and Chaldean culture as it is presented in the sense of this “Occult Science”. Well, one can only be surprised that such very clever people of the present day have not yet managed to read a book written in their mother tongue with understanding, even if they can sometimes read Sanskrit. For it is expressly stated in “Occult Science” that the culture of India, including the Vedic culture, which is the subject of external science, is not the culture of ancient India, the first culture of the post-Atlantic period, but that in the case of the Vedic culture we are dealing with a time that can be counted as belonging to the third post-Atlantic cultural period, which thus runs parallel to the Egyptian-Chaldean culture. The original Indian culture, on the other hand, was one of which no external documents and no external monuments and the like exist and of which only the last echoes are contained in the Vedas. I do not want to dwell on this any further, but say this only because one or the other of you might hear this objection and perhaps not immediately have the concepts and ideas at hand that can dispel such an objection.

So the question remains, as indicated earlier, that in the first post-Atlantic period we would have to go back to times when an actual art of building, as for later times, could not yet be possible. But then we come to a strange boundary point, to which external research also points; we come, so to speak, to a preliminary stage of architecture: the building of spaces for religious, for worship in caves, carved into the rock, as one finds in India or Nubia. This is indeed the epoch that stands on the boundary of the development of the soul out of the physical. These cave structures confirm what spiritual research indicates regarding the development of the soul: Only in the period of human evolution in which we see the development of the soul out of the physical development do we also see the real higher art of building evolving out of what were previously rock caves, underground rock caves that had been hewn into the earth itself.

In this respect, the earth appears like the physical realm into which the human soul first works, as it also happens in the development of the human being itself, where the soul works into the physical realm, the sentient soul into the sentient body. And in the transition from cave rooms to architectural works that encompass human activities, we see at the same time the importance of the transition from the culture of the sentient body to that of the sentient soul.

There will come a time when the insights of Theosophy and Anthroposophy will be developed for all branches of human knowledge and for all branches of human development. And it will be found that everything that other human worldviews present one-sidedly has been cobbled together from some inadequate concepts and ideas, while spiritual science or anthroposophy shows the whole picture, with which one will be able to shine in everywhere. We can be completely reassured, even if people today do not yet believe it. That is not important, but that time will provide the evidence for it. We just have to give it time. The confirmations will gradually emerge in all areas of life and development. Also in the field of architecture.

And if we now go through the post-Atlantean development, we see that in the course of time the individual developmental epochs are, so to speak, bound to the soul, to the development of the sentient soul, then to that of the mind or mind soul and then to that of the consciousness soul, right up to our time. And in our own time we see, still in the preparatory stage, the time when the consciousness soul is being worked out of the spiritual self or manas, so that we are, as it were, standing before a reversal of the process that took place in the post-Atlantic epoch, when we passed from the bodily to the soul realm. Just as the sentient soul was worked out of the sentient body in those days, so we are now facing a time in which we have to work our way out of the soul and into a spiritual realm. For architecture, this means that we can expect the opposite again. That is to say, just as in those earlier times caves were hewn out of the rocks as the preliminary stages of human architectural works, so now, in the present rising time, we have to work into the spirit in order to create the complement, the counterpart to this.

Let us now try to visualize the following, initially without more precise details of time, for everyone can form for themselves what is necessary for parallelism.

Let us take the development through the sentient soul, the mind or intellect soul and the consciousness soul; first, therefore, the development through the sentient soul.

Through being endowed with the sentient soul, the human being enters into a reciprocal relationship with the world around him. Through the sentient soul, so to speak, what is present in the world as reality enters into the human soul, into the human inner self. The 'outside becomes an inside by way of the experience in the sentient soul. Therefore, in the development of architectural art, there should be something that emerges quite naturally from cave construction and shows something in itself that is characteristic of the sentient soul. That is to say, it should be built in such a way that one wants to represent an exterior as well as an interior. Here we need only recall the construction of the pyramids and similar buildings, and we can even think of more recent scientific research that has shown how astronomical-cosmic relationships are reflected in the dimensions of the pyramid construction. More and more will be discovered about the pyramid's strange structure based on cosmic conditions. Astronomical dimensions can be found in the ratio of the base to the height, for example. And anyone who studies the pyramid gradually comes to the conclusion that with the pyramid, the pyramid priests expressed everything that could be expressed in a structure as a perception of cosmic conditions. The pyramid was built as if the earth wanted to experience within itself what is perceived from the cosmos. Just as the sentient soul brings the outer reality to life within itself and presents what is outside as an inner reality, repeating in its own way what is outside, so the pyramid repeats in its proportions and forms outer cosmic relationships, for example, in the way sunlight falls within it. Just as external reality finds a kind of representation in the human being through the sentient soul, so the pyramid looks like a large sentient organ of all earthly culture in relation to the cosmos.

Let us move on. How should architecture behave in a cultural stage in which the characteristic is the intellectual or mind soul?

The mind or mind soul is the inner soul in man, which has the most work to do within itself, which, on the already inner foundation of the sentient soul, further develops this inner soul , but does not go so far as to reunite it into the actual I; thus it spreads and expands the soul-life without allowing it to culminate in the center of the I. The person who has developed precisely this soul element comes to us through the richness of his soul life, through the many inner soul contents and experiences that he has fought for and achieved; he has less of a need to build systems out of his inner experiences, but rather gives himself over to the breadth of these inner experiences. The soul of mind or feeling is a life of the soul that bears itself inwardly, closes itself inwardly, and totalizes itself inwardly.

What kind of architecture would be needed to correspond to such a soul? It would have to be an architecture that, unlike the construction of a pyramid, does not so much resemble or represent cosmic conditions, but is more of a self-contained, complete being in itself; something that is self-supporting and, in accordance with the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling, shows the breadth of development in the way the individual parts are supported, and is less concerned with uniting what already exists in the breadth of development. No one who is familiar with the nature of the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling, as it has just been characterized, can doubt that Greek and also Roman architecture can be understood as an external image of the life of the soul of intellect or of the soul of feeling.

If we look at Greek architecture, for example Greek temple architecture, as we have done many times before, by understanding it as the house of the god himself, so that the god dwells within it and the whole house presents itself as the dwelling of the god, the whole inwardly rounded as an inward totality. From our contemplation of the Greek temple, we have even been able to say: This Greek temple does not claim that a person or a community of people is within it. It is the dwelling place of the god and can stand alone, closed, as a totality in itself, just as the intellectual or emotional soul is an inner totality, a self-contained inner life, which does not yet lead to egoity, but which, even if unconsciously, is the manifestation of the god in man. And when we see how in Greek temple architecture each part supports the other, how everything is based on the columns striving upwards and supporting the beams, how the mutual forces are joined together into a totality without the whole any way systematically toward a unity, toward a pinnacle, we find in it – and in Roman architecture the same is actually the case – that breadth, that expanse, which we find in the intellectual or emotional soul itself.

'This is precisely what is striking about Greco-Roman architecture: it is based on statics, on the pure statics of the individual forces that unfold in a supporting or burdening way. But there is one thing you can forget about a Greek temple: you can forget that it has a sense of 'heaviness'. For anyone who feels in harmony with nature will, or at least can, feel that the columns are something that grows out of the earth. And with that which really does grow out of the earth, with plants, there is no sense of oppressive heaviness. That is why the column in the Greek temple gradually strives to become similar to the stem of a plant, even if this only becomes visible in the Corinthian column. And so, in our perception, the burden is not on the column, but for our perception the column is a carrier. But when we then come to the beam, to the architrave, we have the direct feeling that this weighs on the column, that is, the structure is inwardly permeated by static equilibrium. And anyone who has developed their inner life will also have the feeling that the perceptions, feelings and concepts they have arrived at, which they have worked towards inwardly, are supported inwardly in the same way that the column supports the beam. Because at the time when Greco-Roman architecture originated, the intellectual soul or soul of mind was particularly developed in humanity, therefore, when the soul wanted to express itself in the language of architecture, it naturally strove to express its inner experiences in static form. It was not intentional, but rather a natural expression of the human soul, to create a reflection of the soul in architecture.

And then gradually the development passed over to the consciousness soul. It is essential to the consciousness soul to summarize what the soul experiences in the total feeling: “You are! And you are this one human being, this one personality, this one individuality.” By living in the intellectual or emotional soul, God lives in you; but you allow God to live in all the vibrations of your soul, you are so certain of him that you do not need to summarize them as in one point and not to bring yourself to consciousness: “You are identical with your divine.” But you have to do that in the consciousness soul. In this soul, it is not the case that man rests inwardly in himself as in the soul of understanding or of feeling; but in the consciousness soul man strives out of himself to unfold his ego arbitrarily to reality, to existence.

If you have a feeling for the formation of words, you can literally see how the words that have just been spoken as the characteristic of the consciousness soul form themselves as if by magic into the Gothic pillar pillar and the Gothic arch, where the enclosures give us a structure that no longer expresses calm self-reliance, but rather the striving to escape from mere internal stasis through its forms. How great the difference is between the beam, which is carried in full static calm by its column, and the mutually supporting arches, which come together at the apex and hold each other, where everything pushes towards a point, just as the power of the human soul is concentrated in the consciousness soul.

And anyone who can empathize with the ongoing process of human development feels, especially when observing Italian or French architecture, that during the transition from the development of the intellectual or emotional soul to the development of the consciousness soul, it is no longer a matter of calm, static support and carrying it out of the inner totality, and one no longer strives for inward unity in form, as in Greek architecture, but seeks to pass over into the dynamic, as it were, to emerge from one's skin, in order to enter into connection with the reality of the outer world, as in the consciousness soul. The Gothic arches open up to the light of heaven in long windows. This is not the case in Greek architecture. In a Greek temple, it would make no difference to the perception whether light fell into it or not. The light is only incidental. This is not irrelevant to the Gothic cathedral; the Gothic cathedral is inconceivable without the light refracting in the stained glass windows.

There one can feel how the consciousness soul enters into the totality of the world and strives out again into general existence. The Gothic style is therefore the architectural striving that is characteristic of the age of the development of the consciousness soul.

And now we come to our own age, in which a world view that does not arise out of arbitrariness but out of the necessities of human development must realize that the human being must work his way out of the soul and into the spiritual, that the human being in the spiritual self rests in himself spiritually. The Gothic building, with its special architecture of the wall broken through by the windows, with its opening up for that which can come in, for that which must now come! Like the harbinger of what is to come – where the wall necessarily leads to a structure and in this respect is also only a filler, a decoration, not an enclosure, like the walls of the Greek temple – this Gothic building appears as a harbinger of what what the new building must now become for the envelopment of the coming Weltanschhauung, the new building whose essential peculiarities I have already hinted at here and there and of which some essentials have even already been attempted, for example in the Stuttgart building.

The essential thing will be that the complement to the preliminary stage of architecture, to cave construction, where the rock itself materially closed off what was hewn into it; that our new building opens up in all directions, that its walls are open on all sides, not to the material, but open to the spiritual. And we will achieve this by designing the forms in such a way that we can forget that there is any city or the like besides our building. In the Stuttgart Bau, such an attempt has already been made; its walls are open despite the material closure, open to the spirit. In the new building, too, we will shape the forms, the decorative, the picturesque, so that the wall is broken through, so that we can feel our way through color and form: even though we are closed off, the spiritual and mental view expands into the world. Just as the proportions of the cosmos were taken up in the pyramid, so we take what we can experience through anthroposophy and theosophy and create forms, colors, outlines and figures for it, but we create all this in such a way that precisely through what we create on the walls and , these walls themselves disappear, and we experience the closed space in such a way that we can feel the illusion everywhere: it expands out into the cosmos, into the universe, just as the consciousness soul, when it merges with the spiritual self, lives itself out of the merely human into the spiritual.

Thus in the new architecture the significance of the individual column will also advance to something quite different. If, as in the Greek temple, we are dealing with static relationships, with relationships in which inwardness is of primary importance, then it is natural that the forms of the columns and the capitals should repeat themselves. For how could one think of a column in one place as being different from another in the neighborhood if they have exactly the same function? It must be shaped in the same way as the other. It cannot be any different, because every column has the same function.

If we are now dealing with the new art of building in the cosmos, which is differentiated in the most diverse ways on all sides, we should forget that we are in an inner space, so the columns take on a completely new task, a task that is somewhat like that of a letter that points beyond itself by forming a word with the other letters. Thus the columns join together, not in their diversity, but like the individual letters of a weighty writing, pointing outward to the cosmos, from the inside out. And so we will build: from the inside out! And just as one capital letter follows the other, so they will join together and express something as a totality. This will be something that leads beyond the room. And what else we will add, for example inside the dome, will be added in such a way that we will not have the feeling: we are closed in by a dome – but that the whole painting seems to pierce the dome, to take it away into infinity. To do this, however, one will have to learn to paint a little in the way that Johannes Thomasius paints for Strader's sensibility, so that Strader gets the feeling: “The canvas, I want to pierce it to find what I am supposed to seek.”

One can see that in the mystery plays not a single word is written in vain, but always from the perspective of the whole, and that all the things we want from the preconditions of our culture necessarily come together. Today I just wanted to evoke a feeling for the fact that in the overall treatment of walls, architectural motifs, columns, and in the use of all decorative elements, the new architecture must aim at the destruction of the material, so to speak, overcome the wall and , so that the pictorial must also overcome the wall; I wanted to evoke a feeling that all this must occur and be attempted through the new architecture and that this is a necessity in view of the course of human development, as we recognize it as a necessary one.

However, in view of the necessity of such a building from the course of human development, it seems pathetic that it is so difficult to actually carry out the building, and pathetic are also all the objections that are being made by the authorities in Munich, and also by the artists who have been called upon to judge it and who have said that the building would overwhelm the neighborhood. Perhaps they had a slight feeling of unease about the building overwhelming the neighborhood, about it growing out of it into a very wide environment. They will feel it as oppressive at first.

Such objections, raised by artists who believe themselves to be at the cutting edge of their time, seem grotesquely comical when considered in the context of human evolution.

Let us hope, dear friends, and let us do our part, because it could be good for our cause, that our guardian spirit takes pity on us and turns his gaze to us, so that we, recognizing the necessity of our structure, may soon be able to truly create this covering for anthroposophy or spiritual science, which corresponds to the development of humanity.