The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Patience, or the ability to wait, is the inexorable demand in all departments of life. Failures are inevitable, and we must not grieve over them. Nature is not concerned over her countless failures, for the beings behind Nature know that the higher spiritual law is bound to bring to pass the things which have been determined. Even so must students of Anthroposophy learn to wait in faith for events which are to mature in the womb of time. And the central point of this faith, its firm foundation, is the symbol of the Cross—as elucidated by a comprehension of the Christ principle. If we have come to know the reality of the Christ principle, we understand that this Christ principle is a force, a living force, and that it has been connected with human life on earth since the time that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth it united itself with one special human being. Since that time it has been with us, working among us, and we may become participators of its working if we endeavour to apply all means at our disposal to its understanding, in such a way that we make it the very life of our own souls.

When, however, we understand the Christ principle in this way, and know it to be in humanity, here on earth, and are able to come to it and draw water of life from the source, we then have the kind of belief which knows how to wait, not alone for everything which has to mature in the womb of time, but also for that which surely and certainly will mature for us human beings, if we but have patience. When within this transitory existence we grasp the Christ principle, there will mature for us—in the womb of the transitory—the intransitory, the eternal, the immortal. Out of the womb of time there is born for us human beings that which is beyond time. If we stand on this firm support, we base upon it, not a blind belief, but a belief permeated by wisdom, truth and knowledge, and we may say: What must, will come; and nothing prevents us from throwing our best energies into what we believe to be inevitable. Belief is the real fruit of the cross; it is that, which always calls out to us: ‘Look at your failures, which seem to imply the death of your creative work; then look from your failures to the cross, and remember that on the cross hung the source of boundless eternal life, which defeats death not only for itself but for all mankind.’ From belief spring courage and perseverance. But courage, perseverance and belief alone are not sufficient; another necessary factor will have to be established more and more the further we progress towards the future, and must form an increasing part of everything that may be achieved for the future of humanity. And this is that we must become capable of never being confused about an idea when once we have recognised its correctness. We may have to admit a thousand times that it cannot be realised immediately, that we must wait in patience and without faltering, though we believe that the Christ-force is working in the unfolding life of humanity in a way which will bring everything to birth at the right moment in the womb of time. We must, notwithstanding this, be able to judge of the rightness, of the indubitable rightness of the contents of our spiritual life. If we can wait for results, the occasions on which we have merely to wait when it is a question of deciding what is true, wise and right, will become fewer and fewer. The cross alone gives vital courage and belief to our right understanding; but the star of the light-bearer, the star of Lucifer, if we surrender ourselves to it, can enlighten us every moment as to the rightness and the indubitableness of the spiritual ideas within us. That is the other centre of force on which we must take a firm stand; we must be capable of acquiring knowledge which goes into the depths of life, which goes behind the outer, material appearances, which sends its rays from the place where there is light, even when to human eyes and understanding all is dark. It was necessary for the progress of humanity that darkness should reign for a time, and the next chapters will show more and more clearly how necessary it was. This necessity is indicated in a profound way in the Gospel of St. John. This darkness was illumined by what we call the Christ principle, the Christ.

A wonderfully beautiful legend tells us that when Lucifer fell from heaven to earth a precious stone fell from his crown. This precious stone—so the legend proceeds—became the vessel from which Christ Jesus took the holy Supper with His disciples; the same vessel received the Christ's blood when it flowed on the Cross, and was brought by angels to the western world, where it is received by those who wish to come to a true understanding of the Christ principle. Out of the stone, which fell from Lucifer's crown, was made the Holy Grail. This precious stone is in a certain respect nothing else—I will just mention it here, as the fact will be laid more plainly before your souls in the course of the next chapters—than the full power of the Ego. In darkness this human Ego had to be prepared for a new and more intelligent beholding if the radiance of Lucifer's star. This Ego had to school itself by means of the Christ principle, it had to ripen by the aid of the stone fallen from Lucifer's crown, that is to say through Anthroposophical wisdom, in order to become capable once more of bearing the light which comes not from without. This light, which only shines in us when we ourselves have the power to do what is requisite for acquiring it, must shine again in the world. Thus people who look at the future with full understanding know that anthroposophical work is work on the human Ego, which will make it into a vessel capable of again receiving the light which lives in a region where today our sight and intellect apprehend merely darkness and night. An old legend tells us that night was the original ruler. This night, however, is what today is filled with darkness. But if we permeate ourselves with the light which rises for us when we understand the light-bearer, the other spirit Lucifer, then will our night be turned into day. Our eyes cannot see if the outer light does not illuminate the objects round us; our intellect fails if asked to penetrate beyond the outer nature of things. The star of Lucifer, however, which comes to us when clairvoyant investigation speaks, throws its light on what only seems to be night and changes it into day. And this also takes from us all deadening and paralysing doubt. Then we understand the cross of the Christ in the star of Lucifer. It may be said to be the mission of anthroposophical spiritual life for the future to give us on the one hand certainty and strength whereby, firmly rooted in spiritual life, we may become recipients of the light of the Light-bearer, and on the other hand to make us lean firmly on the rock of unquestioning conviction that nothing which is due to happen through the interaction of forces which are in the world shall fail to happen. Only through this two-fold certainty shall we be able to accomplish what we have to do in the world; only through this two-fold certainty shall we succeed in transplanting Anthroposophy into life.

Therefore we must clearly recognise that we have not only the task of understanding the star of Lucifer, as it shone throughout human evolution till the precious stone fell out of Lucifer's crown, but that we have to receive this precious stone in its transformed character as the Holy Grail, that we must understand the Cross in the star; we must know that we have to understand the luminous wisdom which shone in the world during primeval ages, and which we deeply revere as the wisdom of pre-Christian times. To this we must indeed look up in full devotion, and add to it that which could be given to the world through the mission of the Cross. Not the least fraction of pre-Christian wisdom, of the light of the East, must be lost to us. We look up to Phosphoros, the Light-bearer; and indeed we revere this Light-bearer as the being through which alone we learn to understand the whole of the deep, inner meaning of the Christ; but side by side with Phosphoros we see Christophoros, the Christ-bearer, and we try to conceive of the mission of Anthroposophy in such a way that it only can be fulfilled if the symbols of these two worlds really ‘unite themselves in love.’ If this is our conception of the mission of Anthroposophy, Lucifer will guide us to the safety of a luminous spiritual life, and the Christ will guide us to the inner warmth of the soul which trusts and believes that that will come about which may be called the birth of the Eternal out of the Temporal.

And we shall further recognise that there is a light of the West, that shines in order to make that which originates in the East more luminous than it is through its own power. A thing becomes luminous through the light by which it is illuminated. Therefore let no one say that any falsification whatever of Eastern wisdom takes place when the light of the West shines on it. It will appear that what is beautiful and sublime seems most beautiful and sublime when illuminated by the noblest light. If we feel this idea and receive it into our souls, letting it fill them, we shall be able to learn in small things, through feeling and realisation, what will come to pass in great matters. We shall say: we stand firmly rooted in our truths and wait patiently for their realisation, however long deferred it may be.

Thus we work from one point of time to another in the firm belief that if we comprehend our mission rightly; we are working for that for which man ought to work, for eternity. For as far as human work is concerned, Eternity is the birth of that which has matured in Time.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! Allow me to say a few words in advance of our discussion this evening. The subject today will be to speak very specifically about the foundations that can be seen as absolutely practical outpourings of our anthroposophical movement: “Futurum” on the one hand, “The Coming Day” on the other. It may perhaps be recalled that these two foundations did not arise out of nothing, because we have just found that something like this had to happen now in this time of extreme need. It is true that it had to happen now; but on the other hand, it is also true that something like this would have been realized long ago if the possibility had existed. And it is a pity that it had to wait so long until the hardship taught people a few things about these things and until the difficulties that face such things have actually become almost insurmountable. My friends in Basel will remember a remark that I made in a lecture in Basel that now lies far behind us, which may have seemed grotesque to them at the time. I was speaking about the origins of our mystery plays. And I said at the time – of course, it was a thought that was not meant to be quite so paradoxical, paradoxical, accusing – that I would much rather found an anthroposophical bank than stage mystery plays at the highest level, that is, in the realm of purely artistic appearance. At that time, we were still living in a time when it was extremely difficult to make it understood that such a straight line leads from the highest spiritual healing processes into the most practical life. But I think the Basel friends who heard the lecture back then will remember how long it has been since I spoke of such a very practical foundation.

Now, however, it is a matter of the fact that we, having to go to such a foundation, needed the courage to really make something out of the whole anthroposophical way of thinking and attitude and also to make it understandable to the world that something like this must arise today out of the anthroposophical attitude, and in particular out of the education of thinking - including the most practical thinking - that arises out of observing anthroposophical feeling and imagining.

Now, however, things are such that, on the one hand, the facts speak a very eloquent language – for many countries, an all too eloquent language, because the decline is already so far advanced that people simply do not want to admit it. And of course – since not everything is coming to an end at once – it is impossible to admit the decline for a while. Right? Even if a person who used to have something to wear hardly has the opportunity to buy a suit anymore, he can still wear the old suits until they are shabby. And so you can believe that the decline is not yet here. You just wait until the evidence is provided by the suit you are still wearing becoming shabby. This is already the case with much of our economic life and even more so with our intellectual life – not to mention public life.

Now the task is to create something that is so well founded and so well thought out that it can be maintained through its very essence, through the will. But the matter is very difficult, and the work of those who want to devote themselves to these things is truly one that demands all possible dedication. And I would like to say this in advance because I would like to say something in particular that seems important to me.

I just want to add here that for the “Futurum” we have won Mr. Ith right from the start, who is trying with all his dedication to achieve through the “Futurum” what is to be achieved through this “Futurum”. And he will report to you this evening about the “Futurum” from precisely this point of view, and about the intentions and goals, about the next goals, from the point of view from which, at this moment, that is, I would like to say, on October 13, 1920, it must be spoken.

It is self-evident that such a report is only valuable when it comes from the person who is doing the work. A report as such, or even a brochure that is sent around, is only a small part of what is important; a brochure has only one meaning as an expression of what is being done. That is why we wanted to give you the report today, from the very person who heads “Futurum” here.

But there is one thing I would like to emphasize in particular. You see, we had to have the courage to base the whole reasoning of both “Futurum” and “The Day to Come” on anthroposophical principles, if I may put it that way. We must be able to make the world understand that the old economic thinking has been run down because this old economic thinking was only capable of carrying out its calculations to the extent that the approaches and results ranged from production to bringing the goods to market , and because the factor that belongs in these calculations has never been included – that is, what goes on in the minds of the people who work on producing the marketable goods, from the raw product to the finished product that was brought to market. That is what is going on in people's souls. And what is going on there, that was not so much looked at that it really, I would say, is just as much in an accounting context as the numbers that are in the books, in the accounting. But that was left out of the calculations. Our industrial economy only went as far as the completion of the market goods and ignored what was to be included, ignored the people.

And if today it were only a matter of getting the calculation right, which goes from raw products to market goods, then it would be possible to reach some kind of end relatively much faster.

All it would take is to bring the state fanatics [...] to their senses, and so on. But the one thing that has always been left out of the calculation is now making itself felt as a real factor in the turmoil throughout the civilized world and will continue to make itself felt if we refuse to include this factor, despite the fact that people do not want to admit it, who again and again overlook the language of facts that is so loud today.

It is important to keep pointing out the way in which the leading circles slept during the 19th century. What did the leading circles do after all? Statistics, and in a particularly ineffective way. What did they do, these leading circles? Let's say, for example, that they were concerned with founding pansophies, speaking theoretically of the supernatural worlds, all by themselves; they sat together, sometimes even in salons with mirrored windows. They were well heated. But where did the coal come from? As early as the 1940s, the British government established how this coal was mined, of course through statistics, which then revealed it. They published some very strange things, for example, in figures, but these were simply left out of the calculations. The figures showed, for example, that children as young as nine, ten, or eleven were were let down into the coal shafts in the morning before the sun rose, and were brought up in the evening after the sun had set; how men and women sat together by the coals that were thus brought to light, while the others conferred about general moral and lofty ideals. Down below, the naked men and naked women, which did not exactly contribute to the improvement of morality, were standing in the shafts; the children did not see sunlight at all during the whole week except for Sunday!

Now, these things have improved to a certain extent. But what needs to be done in this regard has not been done by those who could do it, and it still needs to be done. But the matter is being ignored. Worldviews are being forged by the stoves that are heated with the coals that are unearthed in this way, and people have no idea of the discrepancy that this creates in the world; they have no idea how the factor that is now rumbling in the world has been left out. The moral and spiritual aspects have been eliminated, but in reality they form a unity with the other.

Therefore, it is not just a matter of founding financial enterprises with a healthy way of thinking and perhaps thinking through how one can apply anthroposophy to practical life, but rather it is a matter of ensuring that such enterprises have a basis. And this support is only possible if those who are able to go with the anthroposophical movement form this support; the support must be in all those personalities who belong to the anthroposophical movement. We must work to ensure that something like the “Futurum” becomes well known in terms of its tendencies, in terms of its goals, that it is maintained by what is disseminated for the understanding of its principles by those who want to profess anthroposophy. Because anthroposophy is not just some theory, but anthroposophy means precisely the force that transforms the whole person and can prepare him to bear life as it must be borne if we want to move towards a possible future, not the barbarization of our entire civilization.

That is why we would like you to hear what is meant by the “Futurum”. Because it depends as much on the response it receives from the world as it does on the sensible attitude and sensible management of the “Futurum” affairs, whether something thrives.

That is why we wanted to ask Mr. Ith to enlighten us this evening about the next goals and the whole essence of “Futurum”.

[The following contributions are made: by Arnold Ich on the “Futurum”, Carl Unger on the “Kommenden Tag” and its operations, Pieter de Haan on experiences in Holland, Francke Fadum from Norway (notes illegible), Eugen Benkendörfer on the drawing of shares. As no questions are asked, Roman Boos closes the meeting with the words:]

Roman Boos: It seems that no more questions will be asked. I assume, therefore, that everyone knows what he has to do with his money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will be my task in these lectures to build a bridge from the ordinary experiences of everyday life to the most lofty concerns of man, and in so doing find a new point of contact between our daily life and what Anthroposophy or spiritual science has to give for our soul and spirit. For, as you know, my dear friends, the more thoroughly we absorb what spiritual science can give the more does it flow into our feeling, into our willing, and into those forces which we need in order to meet the manifold events and circumstances of life. And we know, too, that this spiritual science, which we can now learn by reason of the inpourings that are coming at this very time from higher worlds, is to a certain extent a necessity for mankind. Within a comparatively short time man would inevitably lose all confidence in life, all inner calm, all that peace of mind which is so necessary to life, if the message to which we give the name of Anthroposophy or spiritual science were not able to come to mankind precisely in our time.

But now it is also well known to us that this anthroposophical spiritual stream brings into sharp collision two divergent tendencies in man's thought and feeling and perception. One is a direction in thought and feeling which has been in preparation for many centuries and which has by now gained complete hold upon mankind, or will most assuredly do so in the near future. It is what we call the materialistic outlook, using the word in its widest sense, and it makes attack, so to say, upon the other direction of thought which is given with anthroposophy, it attacks the spiritual outlook on the world. And more and more pronounced will the conflict become in the near future between these two directions of thought. It will, moreover, be fought in such a way that it will often be very difficult to know with which direction of thought one is dealing. For the materialistic tendency of thought, for example, may not always come before one in unvarnished truthfulness, it may assume all manner of disguises. There will indeed be plenty of materialistic streams which will wear a spiritual mask, and it will be far from easy at times to know where materialism lurks and where we are to recognise the true spiritual stream. How difficult it is to form correct conclusions in this respect I endeavoured to show from various instances in two lectures which I recently delivered. In the first it was my aim to awaken an understanding for the ease with which one can become a sincere opponent of the anthroposophical world conception if one lets oneself be ruled by the thoughts and ideas that prevail in the world to-day. “How one refutes Spiritual Science”—that was what I tried to demonstrate in the first lecture, and I went on to give another on the subject of how Spiritual Science may be advocated and substantiated.

Not that I imagined for a moment I could bring forward everything that might be brought forward on the one and on the other side; my aim was merely to call forth a feeling for the fact that it is perfectly possible to adduce a surprising number of arguments against the anthroposophical world conception, and to do so with great apparent justification. There are in our day men who simply cannot do other than make opposition with their whole soul to anthroposophy, and they belong by no means to the most insincere of our age, very often they are the most honest and devoted seekers after truth. I have no desire at this point to go over again all the grounds that can be brought forward against anthroposophy. I only want to suggest that from the very habits of thought of our time such grounds do easily result and can be well established. It is perfectly possible in our day to refute anthroposophy root and branch. But the question arises when one refutes anthroposophy in this way, when one adduces all reasons and arguments which can be leveled against anthroposophy: by what path does one come to such a position? Suppose that someone today out of the fundamental inherent tendency of his soul adopts anthroposophy, and then proceeds to make himself acquainted with all that the modern sciences can teach from their materialistic basis. Such a man can most radically refute and disprove anthroposophy or spiritual science. In order to do so, however, he must first of all induce a particular standpoint in his soul, he must assume the purely intellectual standpoint. You will see more clearly what is meant if you will now follow me in a consideration of the very opposite condition of soul. For the moment let us leave it at the simple statement, which I make out of personal experience, that when a man who is conversant with all the results of science in the present day abandons himself entirely to his intellect he can then refute anthroposophy radically. Let us now refrain from discussing this any further and turn in another direction, so as to approach our theme from a new aspect.

Man can look upon the world from two sides. He finds one view of the world when, for example, he considers a wonderfully beautiful sunrise. He sees the sun come to view, as it were, giving birth to itself from out of the gold of the dawn, he watches how the sunshine spreads over the earth, and he contemplates with deep feeling the power and the warmth of the sun's rays as they enchant forth life from the ground of the earth in a yearly returning cycle. Or again, a man may give himself up to contemplation of the setting sun; he beholds the twilight deepen until the darkness of night falls and countless stars shine out in the vault of heaven, and he sinks himself in meditation on the wonder of the starry heaven at night-time. When a man contemplates nature in this way he rises to a conception which must fill him with deepest blessing. For he can rise to a conception similar to a thought expressed once so beautifully by Goethe when he said: “When we look up to the wonder of the starry world, when we contemplate the whole process of the universe with its glories and marvels, then we are led at last to the feeling that all the glory that lies open to our view in the whole universe that surrounds us only has meaning when it is reflected in an admiring human soul.” Yes, man comes to the thought that just as the air that is all around him forms and builds his being—entering into him, so that he can breathe it, so that by the process it undergoes inside him it can build up his being—just as man is thus a product of this air and of its laws and processes of combination, so he is a product in a certain way of the whole wide world that constitutes his sense environment, he is a product of all that flows not only into his sense of sight, but into the sense which opens to the world of sound and the other worlds which stream in through our senses. Man comes to feel that he confronts the external sense world as a being in which this whole sense world is contained; he feels himself as a confluence of the world that is around him. And he can say to himself: When I look more closely into nature that is round about me, when I meditate upon it, perceiving it with all my senses, then I see how the true meaning of all that I behold out there finds its best fulfilment when it is crystallised out into the wonderful form of man himself.

And in very truth, when a man attains to seeing this, the feeling can come over him which has been expressed with such elemental force by the Greek poet:

“Many a wonder lives and moves,
But the wonder of all is man!”

For in man all the revelations of the external world flow together; all the one-sidedness becomes in man a many-sidedness. We contemplate the world of the senses, and we behold man standing in its midst as a being of sense, in whom everything else in the world is contained. For the more accurately we study the world the more closely do we see that in man all the one-sidednesses of the universe flow together and are united into a whole. And then, as we develop this feeling towards the great world, beholding how it all flows together in man, a thought can arise in our soul that can fill us with a deep sense of blessedness—the thought, my dear friends, of the God-willed man. We can feel how it is really as though the deeds and purposes of the Gods had built up a whole universe and had let stream forth from it on every side influences and workings which could at length flow together and unite in their most precious work which they placed into the very centre of the Universe—Man. Wrought by the will of the Gods! So said one who also contemplated the world of the senses in this aspect, namely in its relation to man. What, said he, are all the instruments of music in comparison with the marvellous structure of the human ear? What are they beside the marvellous structure of the human larynx, which is, in truth, like the ear, a musical instrument? Many a thing in the world can awaken our wonder and admiration: and if man, as he stands within the world, does not arouse this feeling, it is only because we have not learned to know him in all the marvel of his structure. When we give ourselves up to such a contemplation then the thought may indeed arise in our heart: What countless deeds of wonder have the divine and spiritual Beings performed that man might come into being!

That, then, is one path, my dear friends, on which man may be led in his consideration of the world. But there is another. And the other path opens up for us when we develop a feeling for the majesty and power, for the overwhelming greatness of what we call our moral ideals; when we look into our own soul and take cognisance for a moment of what moral ideals signify in the world. It belongs to an all-round healthy human nature to be very sensitive to the greatness and sublimity of moral ideals. And we can develop in us with regard to the moral ideals within a feeling that works just as overpoweringly in the soul as the feeling inspired by the glory and beauty of the revelations of the universe without. It can, indeed, be so when we enkindle within us love and enthusiasm for the moral ideals and purposes of man. A great warmth of feeling can then fill the soul. But this is now followed, quite necessarily, by a thought which is different from the thought that follows naturally on the contemplation of the world just described, which rests upon the revelation of the universe through man. There follows now a thought which is experienced most intensely of all by those very people who have the most sublime conception of the power of moral ideals. It may be expressed thus. How far art thou, O man, as thou art to-day, how far art thou removed from the lofty moral ideals which can rise up in thy heart! How tiny and insignificant art thou, with all thou dost and canst ever do, in comparison with the greatness of the age moral ideals thou canst set before thee! And not to feel so, dear friends, not to feel oneself small in comparison with one's ideals can only mean one has a mind that is itself pitiably small! For it is precisely as his mind and soul grow that a man comes to feel more and more his inadequacy in face of his moral ideals. And another thought then begins to dawn in the soul, a thought which can often come over us human beings, namely, the resolve to put forth all our courage and all our strength that we may learn to make moral ideals more living and strong within us than they have been hitherto. Or it may also happen that in certain natures the thought of their inadequacy in moral ideals takes such firm hold in their souls that they feel quite crushed by it, and feel themselves estranged from God, just because they have, on the other hand, so powerful a feeling of man as God-willed in his external aspect, as he is placed into the world of the senses. “There I stand”—perhaps they say to themselves—“as an external being. When I consider myself as external being I am bound to say to myself: You are confluence of the whole God-willed world, you are a God-willed being, you bear a God-like countenance! Then I look within me ... there I find ideals which God has inscribed into my heart, and which it is quite certain ought to be God-willed forces within me...” And then they feel a sense of their own inadequacy welling up out of their soul.

These are the two paths man can tread in his observation of the world and of himself. He can look upon himself from without and experience a wonderful sense of blessedness in his God-willed nature; he can look upon himself from within and experience an overwhelming sense of contrition for his God-estranged soul. A healthy state of mind, however, can do no other than come to the following conclusion: From the same divine source whence come the forces which have placed man in the midst of the universe—as it were, like a strongly concentrated extract of the universe, from the same divine source must also spring the moral ideals that be finds inscribed in his heart. Why is it the one is so far removed from the other? That is actually the great riddle of human existence. And truth to say, there would never have been such a thing in the world as Theosophy, or even Philosophy, if this breach had not arisen in the souls of men, if this discord which I have described had not been more or less consciously felt, whether as a dim and undefined sensation or as a clear and organised perception. For it is from the experience of this discord in the soul that all deeper thought and contemplation and enquiry have sprung. What is there to come between the God-will man and the God-estranged man? That is the fundamental question of all philosophy. Men may have formulated it and defined it in countless different ways, but it lies at the root of all human thinking. Is there a way by which man can see a possibility of building a bridge between the indubitably blissful vision of his external nature and the equally indubitably disturbing vision of his soul?

At this point, my dear friends, we must say a little about the road the human soul can take in order to lift itself up in a worthy manner to a consideration of the great and lofty questions of existence. For in treading this road we shall be able to discover the sources of many errors.

In the world outside, in so far as this world is ruled by external science, when people speak of knowledge, you will always find them say: Yes, of course, we arrive at knowledge when we have formed right judgments and exercised correct thinking. I recently cited a very simple example to illustrate how great an error is involved in this assumption that we are bound to arrive at truth when we make correct and reasonable judgments; and I would like to relate it again now, to show you that accuracy of reasoning need by no means lead to the truth.

There was once a small boy in a village who was sent regularly by his parents to fetch bread. He used always to have ten kreuzer, and bring back in exchange six rolls. If you bought one such roll it cost two kreuzer, but he always brought back six rolls for his ten kreuzer. The boy was not particularly good at arithmetic and never troubled himself as to how it worked out that he always took with him ten kreuzer, that a roll cost two and yet he brought home six rolls in return for his ten. One day a boy was brought into the family from another part and he became for our small boy a kind of foster-brother. They were of about the same age, but the foster-brother was a good arithmetician. And he saw how his companion went to the baker's, taking with him ten kreuzer, and he knew that a roll cost two. So he said to him, “You must bring home five rolls.” He was a very good arithmetician and his reasoning was perfectly accurate. One roll costs two kreuzer (so he reasoned), he takes with him ten, he will obviously bring home five rolls. But behold, he brought back six. Then said our good arithmetician: “But that is quite wrong! One roll costs two kreuzer, and you took ten, and two into ten goes five times; you can't possibly bring back six rolls. You must have made a mistake or else you have pinched one ...” But now, lo and behold, on the next day, too, the boy brought home six rolls. It was, you see, a custom in those parts that when you bought five you received an extra one in addition, so that in fact when you paid for five rolls you received six. It was a custom that was very agreeable for anyone who needed five rolls for his household.

The good arithmetician had reasoned, quite correctly, there was no fault in his thinking; but this correct thinking did not accord with reality. We are obliged to admit the correct thinking did not arrive at the reality, for reality does not order itself in accordance with correct thinking. You may see very clearly in this case how with the most conscientious, the most clever logical thinking that can possibly be spun out, you may arrive at a correct conclusion and yet, measured by reality your conclusion may be utterly and completely false. That can always happen. Consequently a proof that is acquired purely through thought can never be a criterion for reality—never.

One can also go very far wrong in the linking up of cause and effect when, for example, one applies it in respect of the external world. Let me give you an instance. Let us suppose a man is walking along the bank of a stream. He comes to a certain place, and you observe from a distance that at this point he falls over the edge into the water. You hurry up to him, meaning to save him; but he is drawn up out of the water quite dead. Now you see before you the corpse. You can quite well maintain, let us say, that the man has been drowned. You can go to work with your proof in a very able way. Perhaps at the place where he fell into the water there was a stone. Very well then, he stumbled over the stone and fell in and was drowned. The sequence of the thought is quite correct. When a man goes to the bank of a river, stumbles over a stone that is lying there, falls into the water and is pulled out dead—he must have been drowned. It cannot be otherwise. Now precisely in this instance it is not necessarily so. When you stop allowing yourself to be ruled by this particular connection of cause and effect, you may be able to discover that this man, in the moment when he fell into the water, was seized with a heart attack, in consequence of which, since he was walking at the edge of the stream, he fell in. He was already dead when he fell in; though everything happened to him just as it would to a man who fell in alive. You see, when someone comes to the conclusion, in this case from the sequence of the external events, that the man in question slipped, fell into the water and was drowned, the conclusion is quite a false one, it does not correspond with reality. For the man fell into the water because he was dead; he was not pulled out dead because he had fallen in. Twisted conclusions like this are to be found at every turn in the scientific literature of our time; only they are not noticed, any more than this instance would have been noticed if one had not taken trouble to investigate the matter. In more delicate and subtle connections of cause and effect such mistakes are continually being made. I only want to indicate in this way that in point of fact our thinking is quite incompetent to form a decision in respect of reality.

But now, if this is really so, if our thinking can be no sure guide for us, how are we ever to save ourselves from sinking into doubt and ignorance? For it is a fact, whoever has had experience in these matters and concerned himself deeply with thinking, knows that one can prove and disprove everything. No philosophy, however penetrating in its thought, can impose upon him any more. He may admire the acumen and penetration of its thought, but he cannot give himself up to the mere reasoning of the intellect, since he knows that one could just as well reason intellectually in the opposite sense. This is true of everything that can be proved, or disproved. In this connection one can often make intensely interesting observations in everyday life. There is a certain fascination, though of course only a theoretical fascination, in making the acquaintance of people who have come to that particular point in soul evolution where they begin to perceive and experience that everything can be proved and everything disproved, but are not yet sufficiently mature to adopt what we may call a spiritual attitude to the world.

In the last few weeks I have often been forcibly reminded of a man I once met who showed to a remarkable degree such a constitution of soul and yet was not able to come through to a grasp of reality such as spiritual science could give. He had come to the point of seeing quite clearly the possibility of contradicting and establishing every single statement that philosophy could possibly make. I refer to a professor in the University of Vienna, who died a few weeks ago, a man of quite unusual ability and intelligence, Laurenz Mullner. A remarkably gifted man, who could adduce with great clarity proof for all possible philosophical systems and thoughts; he could also contradict them all, and always styled himself a sceptic. I once heard him utter this rather terrible exclamation: All philosophy is really nothing but a very pretty game!—And when one observed, as one often had occasion, the quick flash and play of the man's mind in this game of thought, it was interesting also to see how you could never be sure of Mullner on any point, for he never admitted anything at all. At most, when someone else had spoken against a particular point of view, he would take great delight in bringing forward whatever could be brought forward for the confirmation of that point of view—and this in spite of the fact that perhaps a few days before he had himself picked it to pieces relentlessly. A most interesting mind, in fact from a certain aspect one of the most significant philosophers who have lived in recent times. The manner in which he came to be led into such a mood is also very interesting. For besides being a profound student of the history of the philosophical evolution of mankind, Mullner was a Roman Catholic priest. And it was always his earnest desire to remain a good Catholic priest, notwithstanding that for many years he was a professor in Vienna University. He was steeped in Catholic ways of thought, and this had the effect, on the one hand, of making all the mere game of thought which he found in the world outside seem small in comparison with the methods of thought which were fructified with a certain religious zeal. But his Catholicism had also this effect, that in spite of all, he yet could not get beyond the position of doubt. He was too great a man to stop short at a mere dogmatic Catholicism, but on the other hand his Catholicism was too great in him for him to be able to rise to a theosophical grasp of reality. It is extraordinarily interesting to observe such a soul, who has come to the point where one can actually study what it is the man needs if he is to approach reality. For it goes without saying that this able and most intelligent man saw quite clearly that with his thinking he could not approach reality.

As long ago as in ancient Greece it was known what the healthy human mind must take for its starting point if it hopes one day to reach reality. And the same statement that was uttered in ancient Greece still holds good. It was said: All human enquiry must proceed from wonder! That statement must be received in a perfectly positive way, my dear friends. In actual fact, in the soul that wants to penetrate to truth, this condition must first be present: the soul must stand before the universe in a mood of wonder and marveling. And anyone who is able to comprehend the whole force of this expression of the Greeks comes to perceive that when a man, irrespective of all the other conditions by which he arrives at the study and investigation of truth, takes his start from this mood of wonder, from nothing else than a feeling of wonder in face of the facts of the world, then it is in very truth as when you drop a seed in the ground and a plant grows up out of it. In a sense we may say that all knowledge must have wonder for its seed. It is quite a different thing when a man proceeds not from wonder but perhaps from the fact that in his youth his good teachers have drummed into him principles of some sort or other which have made him into a philosopher; or when perhaps he has become a philosopher because—well, because in the walk of life in which he grew up it is the custom to learn something of the sort, and so he has come to philosophy purely by dint of circumstances. It is also well known that the examination in philosophy is the easiest to pass. In short, there are hundreds and thousands of starting points for the study of philosophy that are not wonder, but something altogether different. All such starting points, however, lead merely to an acquaintance with truth that may be compared with making a plant of papier-mache and not raising it from seed. The comparison is quite apt! For all real knowledge, that hopes to have a chance of coming to grips with the riddles of the world, must grow out of the seed of wonder. A man may be ever so clever a thinker, he may even suffer from a superabundance of intelligence; if he has never passed through the stage of wonder nothing will come of it. He will give you a cleverly thought-out concatenation of ideas, containing nothing that is not correct—but correctness does not necessarily lead to reality. It is absolutely essential that before we begin to think, before we so much as begin to set our thinking in motion, we experience the condition of wonder. A thinking which is set in motion without the condition of wonder remains nothing but a mere play of thought. All true thinking must originate in the mood of wonder.

Nor is that enough. We must go a step further. Even when thinking originates in the mood of wonder, then if a man is predisposed by his karma to grow sharp-witted and clever, and quickly begins to be proud and take pleasure in his cleverness and then perhaps gives all his energy to developing that alone, the wonder he felt in the beginning will no longer help him at all. For if, after wonder has taken hold in the soul, then in the further course of his thinking a man does no more than merely “think,” he cannot penetrate to reality. Please let me emphasise here that I am not saying a man ought to become thoughtless and that thinking is harmful. This opinion is often widespread in our circles. Just because it has been said that one must proceed from wonder, people are apt to regard thinking as wrong and harmful. When a man has made a small beginning in thinking and can reckon up the seven principles of the human being, and so on, there is no reason why he should then cease thinking. Thinking must continue. But after the wonder another condition must show itself, and that is a condition we may best describe as reverence for all that to which thought brings us. After the mood of wonder must follow the mood of veneration, of reverence. And any thinking that is divorced from reverence, that does not behold in a reverent manner what is proffered to its view, will not be able to penetrate to reality. Thinking must never, so to say, go dancing through the world in a careless, light-footed way. It must, when it has passed the moment of wonder, take firm root in the feeling of reverence for the universe.

Here the path of true knowledge comes immediately into open opposition with what is called science in our day. Suppose you were to say to someone who is standing in his laboratory with his retorts, analysing substances and then again building up compound by a process of synthesis—suppose you were to say to him: “You cannot really hope to investigate truth. You will, of course, think it out very beautifully and piece it together in your mind, but what you are doing is no more than mere facts. And you approach these facts of the world without any piety or reverence. You ought really to stand before the processes going on in your retorts with the same pious and reverential feeling as a priest feels before the altar.” What would such a man say to you to-day? Probably he would laugh at you, because from the standpoint of present-day science one simply cannot see that reverence has anything whatever to do with truth and with knowledge. Or, if he does not laugh at you, at best he will say: “I can feel great enthusiasm for what goes on in my retorts, but that my enthusiasm is anything other than my own private affair, that my enthusiasm should have anything to do with the investigation of truth—that you can never persuade a person of intelligence to believe.” You are bound to appear foolish in the eyes of present-day scientists if you venture to say that research into the nature of objects, and even thought about objects, ought never to be divorced from reverence, and that one ought not to take a step forward in thought without being filled with the feeling of reverence for the object of one's enquiry. Reverence is, however, the second requisite on the path of knowledge.

But now a man who had attained to a certain feeling of reverence, and then, having experienced this feeling of reverence, wanted to press forward with mere thought—such a man would again come to a nothingness, he would not be able to get any farther. He would, it is true, make some discoveries that were quite correct, and because he had gone through these first two stages, he would with his correct knowledge have also acquired many clearly and firmly established points of view. But he would inevitably, for all that, soon fall into uncertainty. For a third condition must take hold in the soul after we have experienced wonder and reverence, and this third mood we may describe as feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with the laws of the world. And this feeling can be attained in no other way than by having insight into the worthlessness of mere thinking. One must have felt over and over again that he who builds on correctness of thinking—whether he ends by confirming or contradicting is of no account—is really in the same case as our little boy who reckoned up the number of the rolls so correctly. Had that little boy been able to say to himself: “My reckoning may be quite correct, but I must avoid building upon my correctness of thought, I must follow truth, I must put myself into accord with reality”—then he would have found out something which stands higher than correctness, viz., the custom of the village to give in an extra roll with every five. He would have found that one has to go out of oneself into the external world and that correct thinking stands us in no stead when we want to find out whether something is real.

But this placing oneself into wisdom-filled harmony with reality is something that does not come easily, does not come of itself. If it were so, my dear friends, man would not in this time be experiencing—nor would he ever have experienced—the temptation that comes through Lucifer. For what we call discriminating between good and evil, acquiring knowledge, eating of the tree of knowledge, was most assuredly planned to come for man by the divine leaders of the world—only at a later time. Where man went wrong was in wanting to possess himself too early of the knowledge of the difference of good and evil. What had been intended for him at a later time, the temptation of Lucifer made him want to acquire earlier; that is the point. The only possible outcome was an inadequate knowledge, which has the same relation to the true knowledge man would have won in the way intended for him, as a premature birth has to a normal one. The old Gnostics actually used this expression, and one can see now how right they were. They said: Human knowledge, as it accompanies man through the world in all his incarnations, is in reality a premature birth, an Ectroma; because men could not wait until they had undergone all the experiences which should have led them step by step to know-ledge. A time should have been allowed to pass, during which man should have brought certain moods and conditions of soul to greater and greater maturity, and then knowledge would have been bound to come to him. This original sin of mankind is still being constantly committed. For if men were not guilty of this sin they would care less how quickly they can acquire this or that truth and would be concerned instead as to how they might grow mature for the comprehension of truth.

How strange it would seem to a man of the present day if some-one were to come and say to him: “The Theorem of Pythagoras is quite comprehensible to you, but if you want to have a deeper understanding of the hidden meaning of the statement: ‘The sum of the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle is equal to the square on the hypotenuse’”—or to take a still simpler case, if someone were to come and say to him: “Before you are ripe to understand that three multiplied by three is equal to nine you must go through this or that experience in your soul! For you can only grasp that truth when you have brought yourself into harmony with the laws of the world, which have so ordered things that mathematical laws appear to us as they do!” Why, he would only laugh, and even louder than before! Really and truly men are still continually guilty of the original sin, for they think that at each stage they reach they can comprehend everything, without any regard for the fact that man needs first to have a certain experience before he can comprehend this or that. It is really essential to be inwardly sustained and upheld all the time by the consciousness that with all one's strict and precise thinking one can, as a matter of fact, get nowhere at all in the domain of reality. This realisation belongs to the third condition of soul which we are now describing.

Use all the efforts we may to judge correctly of something, error can always creep in. A true judgment can only result when we have attained a certain maturity, when we have waited for the judgment to “jump” to us, not when we put ourselves about to find it, but when we take pains to make ourselves ripe for it to come to us. Then the judgment we form will belong to reality. The man who exerts himself ever so strenuously to hit upon a correct judgment can never expect by such exertion to arrive at a judgment that is in any way conclusive or satisfactory. He alone can hope to come to a true judgment of a matter who applies all his care and thought to making himself riper and riper to receive the right judgments from the revelations which will then stream into him, because he has grown ripe to receive them. It is possible to have quite strange experiences in this connection. A man who is quickly on the spot with his ready-made judgment will naturally think that if someone has fallen into the water and is pulled out dead he has been drowned. But a man who has learnt wisdom, who has grown mature in the experience of life, will know that a general correctness of thought is of no significance at all, but that in each single case one has to give oneself up to the facts as they present themselves and let them form the judgment. You may constantly see the truth of this confirmed in life.

Take an instance. Somebody makes a statement. Well and good. You yourself may have another view of the matter. You may say: What he says is quite false. You have yourself an altogether different opinion. Now it can very well be that what he says and what you say are both false, in a certain respect both judgments can be right and both false. At this third stage of the soul you will not see anything conclusive in the fact that one person has a different view of a matter from another person; that tells nothing at all. It merely says that each of these stands on the pinnacle of his own opinion. Whereas he who has learnt wisdom always reserves his judgment, and in order not to be involved in any way with his judgment he will wait with it even when he is conscious that he may be right. He holds back, putting his opinion to the test, as it were. But suppose someone makes a statement to-day and then two months later says the very opposite. In such a case you can completely exclude yourself, you have nothing whatever to do with the two facts. And when you look at these two facts and let them make their own impression upon you, you do not need to oppose either of them, they contradict each other mutually. The judgment is made by the external world, not by you. Then, and then only, does the wise man begin to form a judgment. It is an interesting fact that one will never understand how Goethe pursued his study of natural science unless one has this conception of wisdom, where one has to let the objects themselves do the judging. Therefore did Goethe make the following interesting observation—you will find it in my Introduction to Goethe's Natural Scientific Works. He said: We ought really never to make judgments or hypotheses concerning external phenomena; for the phenomena are the theories, they themselves express their ideas, if only we have grown mature to receive impressions from them in the right way. It is not a question of sitting down in a corner and puzzling out in one's own mind something that one then considers correct, it is a question rather of making oneself ripe and letting the true judgment spring to meet one out of the facts themselves. Our relation to thinking must not be that we make thinking sit in judgment upon objects but rather that we make it an instrument whereby the objects can express themselves. This is what placing oneself in harmony with objects means.

When this third stage has been experienced, even then the thinking cannot be allowed to stand on its own feet. Then comes what is in a sense the very highest condition of soul to which man has to attain if he would arrive at truth. And that is the condition to which we may give the name devotion or self-surrender. Wonder, reverence, wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world, surrender to the course of the world—these are the stages through which we have to pass and which must always run parallel with thinking, never deserting it; otherwise thinking arrives at what is merely correct and not at what is true.

We will here make a pause at the point to which we have come, rising from wonder through reverence and wisdom-filled harmony with world phenomena to the stage we have named “surrender” but have not yet explained. To-morrow we will speak further about it. Let us hold all this well in mind, and on the other hand let us also remember the question we threw out at the beginning, namely, why it is one only needs to make oneself intellectual in order to be able to refute spiritual science. Let us consider that we end our lecture to-day on these two questions, which tomorrow we will proceed to answer.

[ 1 ] From our last lecture you will at any rate have seen that the man of to-day, constituted as he is in his bodily nature and by education, cannot easily bring into his present incarnation such spiritual contents as are seeking to enter in from former incarnations. He cannot even do so when this present incarnation is so strange and unusual a one as that of which I spoke last Sunday. For, in effect, we are living in the age of evolution of the conscious, spiritual soul. This is an evolution of the soul which evolves most especially the intellect, i.e., that faculty of the soul which governs the whole of life to-day, no matter how often people may be crying out for heart and sentiment and feeling. It is the faculty of the soul which is most able to emancipate itself from the elementarily human qualities, from that which man bears within him as his deeper being of soul.

[ 2 ] A certain consciousness of this emancipation of the intellectual life does indeed find its way through when people speak of the cold intellect in which men express their egoism, their lack of sympathy and compassion with the rest of mankind, nay even with those who are nearest to them in their life. Speaking of the coldness of the intellect one has in mind the following of all those paths which lead, not to the ideals of the soul, but to the planning of one's life on utilitarian principles and the like.

[ 3 ] In all these things people give expression to a feeling of how the element of intellect and rationalism emancipates itself within the human being from what is truly human. And indeed if one can fully see the extent to which the souls of to-day are intellectualised, one will understand also in every single case how karma must carry into the souls of to-day the high spirituality which these souls have passed through in former epochs. [ 4 ] For I ask you to consider the following.—Let us take quite a general case. I showed you a special example last time, but let us now take the general case of a soul that lived in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha or even after the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way as to take the spiritual world absolutely as a matter of course. Let us think of a human being who in such a life could speak of the spiritual world out of his own experience as of a world that is no less real and present than the many-coloured warm and cold world of the senses.

[ 5 ] All these things are there within the soul. And in the interval between death and a new birth, or in repeated intervals of this kind, all these things have entered into relationship with the spiritual worlds of higher Hierarchies. Many and manifold things have been worked out in such a soul.

[ 6 ] But now, let us say through other karmic circumstances, such a soul has to incarnate in a body which is altogether attuned to intellectualism, a body which can receive from the civilisation of to-day only the current conceptions which relate, after all, only to external things. In such a case this alone will be possible, for the present incarnation: the spirituality that comes over from former times will withdraw into the subconscious. And such a personality will reveal in the intellect which he evolves perhaps a certain idealism, a tendency to all manner of good and beautiful and true ideals. But he will not come to the point of lifting up from the subconscious into the ordinary consciousness the things that are there latent in his soul. There are many such souls to-day. And for him who is truly able to observe with a trained eye for spiritual things, many a countenance to-day will contradict what openly comes forth in him who wears it. For the countenance says: in the foundations of the soul there is much spirituality, but as soon as the human being speaks, he speaks not of spirituality at all. In no age was it the case in such a high degree as it is to-day, that the countenances of men contradict what they themselves say and declare.

[ 7 ] We must understand that strength and energy, perseverance and a holy enthusiasm are necessary in order to transform into spirituality the intellectualism which after all belongs to the present age. These things are necessary that the thoughts and ideas of men to-day may rise into the spiritual world and that man may find the path of ideas upward to the Spirit no less than downward into Nature. And if we would understand this, then we must fully realise that intellectualism to begin with offers the greatest imaginable hindrance to the revelation of any spiritual content that is present within the soul. Only when we are really aware of this, only then shall we, as Anthroposophists, find the true inner enthusiasm. Then shall we receive on the one hand the ideas of Anthroposophy which must indeed reckon with the intellectualism of the age, which must remain, so to speak, the garment of contemporary intellectualism. Then shall we also become permeated with the consciousness that with the ideas of Anthroposophy, relating as they do, not to the mere outer world of sense, we are destined really to take hold of that to which they do relate, namely, the spiritual. To enter deeply and perseveringly into the ideas of Anthroposophy—it is this in the last resort which will most surely guide the man of to-day upward into spirituality, if only he is willing.

[ 8 ] But what I have said in this last sentence, my dear friends, can truly only be said since about the last two or three decades. Previously one could not have said it. For although the dominion of Michael began already with the end of the seventies, nevertheless it was formerly the case that the ideas which the age provided were so strongly and exclusively directed to the world of sense that even for the idealist to rise from intellectualism to spirituality was possible only in rare, exceptional cases in the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century.

[ 9 ] To-day I will give you an example to reveal the outcome of this fact. I will show you by an example how strong and inevitable a force is working in this age to drive back and dam up the spiritual contents which are surging forth from former times in human souls. Nay, at the end of last century such spiritual contents had to withdraw and give way to intellectualism if they were to be able to reveal themselves in any way at all.

[ 10 ] Please understand me rightly. Let us assume that some personality living in the second half of the 19th century bore within him a strong spirituality from former incarnations. Such a personality lives and finds his way into the culture and education of this present time (or of that time) which is intellectualistic, thoroughly intellectualistic. In the personality whom I now mean, the after-working of former spirituality is still so strong that it is really determined to come forth, but the intellectualism will not suffer it. The man is educated intellectually. In the social intercourse which he enters into, in his calling or profession, everywhere he experiences intellectualism. Into this intellectualism what he bears within his soul cannot enter. Such a human being would be one of whom we might say that Anthroposophy would truly have been his calling. But he cannot become an Anthroposophist, though the very thing which he bears within him from a former incarnation, if it could enter into the intellect, would have become Anthroposophy. It cannot become Anthroposophy; it stops short; it recoils as it were from intellectualism. What else can such a personality do? At most he will treat intellectualism again and again as a thing into which he does not really want to enter, so that in one incarnation or another what he bears within his soul may be able to come forth. Of course it will not come forth completely, for it is not according to the age. It will very likely be a kind of stammering; but it will be visible in such a man how he recoils and shrinks again and again from going too far, from being touched too closely by the intellectualism of the age.

[ 11 ] I want to give you an example of this very thing to-day. To begin with I will remind you of a personality of ancient time whom we have mentioned here again and again in all manner of connections, I mean Plato. In Plato the philosopher of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. there lives a soul who forestalls many of the things that mankind ponders on for centuries to come. You will remember when I drew your attention to the great spiritual contents of the School of Chartres, how I referred to the Platonic spirit which had been living for a long time in the development of Christianity. And in a certain sense it was in the great teachers of Chartres that this Platonic spirit found its true development according to the possibilities of that time.

[ 12 ] We must realise that the spirit of Plato is devoted in the first place to the world of Ideas. We must not, however, conceive that the “Ideas” in Plato's works are the abstract monster which ideas are for us to-day, if we are given up to the ordinary consciousness. For Plato, the “Ideas” were to some extent almost what the Persian Gods had been, the Amschaspands who as active genii assisted Ahura Mazdao. Active genii attainable only in imaginative vision—such in reality were the Ideas in Plato. They had a quality of being, only he no longer described them with the vividness with which such things had been described in former times. He described them as it were like the shades of beings. Indeed this is how abstract thoughts henceforth evolved: the Ideas were taken by human beings in an ever more and more shadow-like way. But Plato, as he lived on, nevertheless grew deeper in a certain way, so that one might say: well-nigh all the wisdom of that time poured itself out into his world of Ideas. We need only take his later Dialogues, and we shall find matters astronomical, astrological, cosmological, psychological, the last named expressed in a most wonderful way, and matters concerning the history of nations. All these things were found in Plato in a kind of spirituality which, if I may so describe it, refines and shadows down the spiritual to the form of the Idea.

[ 14 ] But in Plato everything is alive, and in Plato above all this perception is alive: that the Ideas are the foundations of all things present in the world of sense. Wherever we turn our gaze in the world of sense, whatever we behold, it is the outward expression and manifestation of Ideas.

Withal there enters into Plato's world of conception yet another element which has indeed become well known to all the world in a catchword much misunderstood and much misused—I mean the catchword of Platonic love. The love that is spiritual through and through, that has laid aside as much as possible of that egoism which is so often mingled with love—this spiritualised devotion to the world, to life, to man, to God, to the Idea, is a thing that permeates the Platonic conception of life through and through. It is a thing which afterwards recedes in certain ages only to light up again repeatedly. For Platonism is absorbed by human beings ever and again. Again and again at one place or another it becomes the staff by which men draw themselves upward. And Platonism, as we know, entered most significantly into all that was taught in the School of Chartres.

[ 14 ] Plato has often been regarded as a kind of precursor of Christianity. But to imagine Plato as a precursor of Christianity is to misunderstand the latter, for Christianity is not a doctrine, it is a stream of life which takes its start from the Mystery of Golgotha. It is only since the Mystery of Golgotha that we can speak of a real Christianity. We can however say that there were Christians before the Mystery of Golgotha in this sense, that they revered as the Sun Being and recognised in the Sun Being the sublime Figure who was subsequently recognised as the Christ within the earthly life of mankind. If, however, we speak of precursors of Christianity in this sense we must apply the term to many pupils of the ancient Mysteries, among whom we may indeed include Plato. Only we must then understand the thing aright.

[ 15 ] Now I already spoke at this place some time ago of a young artist who grew up while Plato was still living, not exactly in Plato's School of the Philosophers but under Plato's influence. Indeed I mentioned this matter already many years ago. Having passed through other incarnations in the meantime this individuality was reborn, not out of the Platonic philosophy but out of the Platonic spirit. He was reborn as Goethe, having karmically transformed in the Jupiter region what came to him from former incarnations, and notably from the one in which he partook of the Platonic stream, so that it became that kind of wisdom which does indeed permeate all the contents of Goethe's work. Thus we can indeed turn our gaze to a noble and pure relationship between Plato and this—I will not say “disciple”—but follower of Plato. For as I said, he was not a philosopher but an artist in that Grecian incarnation. Nevertheless Plato's eye did fall upon him and perceived the infinite promise that lay within this youth.

[ 16 ] Now it was truly hard for Plato to carry through the following epochs, through the super-sensible world, what he had borne within his soul in his Plato incarnation. It was very hard for him. For although Platonism lit up here and there, when Plato himself looked down upon the Platonism that evolved here on the earth, it was for him only too frequently a dreadful disturbance in his super-sensible life of soul and spirit.

[ 17 ] I do not mean that that which lived on as Platonism was therefore to be condemned or harshly criticised. Needless to say the soul of Plato carried over livingly into the following epochs piece by piece and ever more and more, what lay within him. But Plato above all, Plato who was still united with the Mysteries of antiquity, of whom I said that his Doctrine of Ideas contained a certain ancient Persian impulse—Plato found the greatest difficulty in entering a new incarnation. When he had absolved the time between death and a new birth—and in his case it was a fairly long time—he found real difficulty in entering the Christian epoch into which, after all, he had to enter. Thus although in the sense I just explained we may describe Plato as a forerunner of Christianity, nevertheless the whole orientation of his soul was such as to make it extraordinarily difficult for him, when ready to descend to earth again, to find a bodily organism into which he might carry his former impulses in a way that they might now come forth again with a Christian colouring.

Moreover Plato was a Greek. He was a Greek through and through, with all those oriental impulses which the Greeks still had, which the Romans had not at all. Plato was in a certain sense a soul who carried philosophy upwards into the higher poetic realm. The Dialogues of Plato are works of art. Everywhere is the living soul, everywhere the Platonic love which we need only understand in the true sense and which also bears witness to its oriental origin.

[ 18 ] Plato was a Greek, but the civilisation within which alone he could incarnate, now that he was ripe for incarnation, now that he had grown old for the super-sensible world—this civilisation was Roman and Christian.

Nevertheless, if I may put it so, he must take the plunge. And to repress the inner factors of opposition, he must gather together all his forces. For it lay in Plato's being to reject the prosaic, matter-of-fact and legalistic Roman element, nay indeed to reject all that was Roman.

[ 19 ] And there was also a certain difficulty for his nature to receive Christianity, for he himself represented in a certain sense the highest point of the pre-Christian conception of the world. Moreover even the external facts revealed that the real Plato-being could not easily dive down into the Christian element. For what was it that dived down into Christianity here in the world of sense? It was Neo-Platonism, but this was something altogether different from true Platonism. We remember how there evolved a kind of Platonising Gnosis and the like but there was no real possibility of taking over into Christianity the immediate essence of Plato. Thus it was difficult for Plato himself, out of all the activity which he bore within him as the Plato-being and the results of which he must now bring with him into the world—it was difficult for him to dive down in any way. He had as it were to reduce all this activity.

[ 20 ] And so it was that he reincarnated in the 10th century in the Middle Ages as the nun Hroswith—Hroswitha, that forgotten but great personality of the 10th century, who did indeed receive Christianity in a truly Platonic sense and who carried into the Mid-European nature very, very much of Plato.

She belonged to the Convent of Gandersheim in Brunswick and carried infinitely much of Platonism into the Mid-European nature. This in truth it was only possible at that time for a woman to do. Had not Plato's being appeared with a feminine character and colouring it could not have received Christianity into itself in that age. But the Roman element too was strong in all the culture of that time which had to be received. Perforce, if I may put it so, it had to be received. And so we see the nun Hroswitha evolving into the remarkable personality she was, writing Latin dramas in the style of the Roman poet Terence, dramas which are of extraordinary significance.

[ 21 ] You see, it is appallingly easy to misrepresent Plato wherever he approaches one. I often described how Friedrich Hebbel made notes of a play—it never got beyond the plan—Friedrich Hebbel made notes of a play in which he would give a humorous treatment of the following theme.—Plato reincarnated sits on the benches of a grammar school.—A mere poetic fancy, needless to say, but this was Hebbel's idea.—Plato is reincarnated as a schoolboy while the schoolmaster puts him through the Platonic Dialogues and Plato himself, reincarnated, receives the very worst criticism with respect to the interpretation of the Platonic Dialogues. These things Hebbel noted down as the subject for a play which he never elaborated. Nevertheless it shows, it is like a divination of how easy it is to misunderstand Plato. Now this is a feature which interested me most especially in tracing the stream of Plato. For this very misunderstanding is extraordinarily instructive in finding the right paths of the further life and progress of the Platonic individuality.

[ 22 ] It is indeed highly interesting. There was a German philosopher (I do not remember his name, it was some Schmidt, or Müller), who with all his scholarship “proved” up to the hilt that the nun Hroswitha wrote not a single play, that nothing was due to her, that it was all a forgery by some Counsellor of the Emperor Maximilian. All of which proof is of course nonsense, but there you have it. Plato cannot escape misunderstanding.

[ 23 ] And so we see arising in the individuality of the nun Hroswitha of the 10th century, a truly intensive Christian and Platonic spiritual substantiality united with the Mid-European-Germanic spirit. And in this woman there was living so to speak the whole culture of that time. She was indeed an astonishing personality. And she among others partook in those super-sensible developments of which I told you. I mean the passage of the teachers of Chartres into the spiritual world, the descent of those who were then the Aristotelians, and the discipleship of Michael. But she took part in all these things in a most peculiar way. One may say: here was the masculine spirit of Plato and the feminine spirit of the nun Hroswitha wrestling with one another, inasmuch as they both of them had their results for the spiritual individuality. If the one incarnation had been of no significance, as is generally the case, such an inward wrestling could not afterwards have taken place. But in this individuality it did take place and indeed it went on for the whole succeeding time.

[ 24 ] And at length we see the individuality ripe to return to earth once more in the 19th century. He became an individuality of the very kind I described above as a hypothetical case. For the whole spirituality of Plato is held back, recoils and shrinks back in the face of the intellectuality of the 19th century which it will not come near.

And to make this process the easier the feminine capacity of the nun Hroswitha has been instilled into the same soul. Thus as the soul appears on the scene, all that it had received from its incarnation as a woman, great and radiant as she was, makes it the more easy to repel the modern intellectualism wherever it is not liked.

[ 25 ] Thus the individuality stands upon earth anew in the 19th century. He grows up into the intellectuality of the 19th century but lets it come near him only to a certain extent, externally, while inwardly he is perpetually shrinking back from it. Platonism comes forward in his consciousness not in an intellectualistic way, for again and again, wherever he can, he speaks of how Ideas are living in all things.

The life in Ideas became an absolute matter of course to this personality. Yet his body was such that one continually had the following impression: the head simply cannot give expression to all the Platonism that is seeking to come forth in him. But on the other hand there could spring forth in him in a beautiful way, nay in a glorious way, that which is hidden behind the word “Platonic Love.”

[ 26 ] Nay more, in his youth this personality had something like a dream-intuition of how Mid-Europe cannot and may not after all be truly Roman. For indeed he himself had lived as the nun Hroswitha. Thus in his youth he represented Mid-Europe as a modern Greece. Here we see his Platonism striking through. And he represented the rougher region that had stood over against ancient Greece, namely Macedonia, as the present East of Europe. There were strange dreams living in this personality, dreams from which one could see, and this was very interesting, how he wanted to conceive the modern world in which he himself was living, like Greece and Macedonia. Again and again, especially in his youth, there arose the impulse to conceive the modern world—Europe on a large scale—as Greece and Macedonia magnified.

[ 27 ] The personality of whom I am speaking is none other than Karl Julius Schröer. With the help of all that I have now brought together you need only take Karl Julius Schröer's writings. From the very beginning he speaks in a thoroughly Platonic way. But this is so strange: with a kind of feminine coyness, I might say, he takes good care not to enter into intellectualism wherever he has no use for it.

[ 28 ] When he spoke of Novalis, Schröer was often fond of saying: Novalis—he is a spirit whom one cannot understand with this modern intellectualism which knows only that twice two is four.

[ 29 ] Karl Julius Schröer wrote a history of German poetry in the 19th century. In this history, wherever one can approach a thing with Platonic feeling, it is very good, but wherever one requires intellectualism it is suddenly as though the lines were to sink away into nothingness. He is not a bit like a professor. He writes many pages about some who are passed over in silence by the ordinary histories of literature, while about the famous ones he sometimes writes only a few lines.¹

When this history of literature was first published, how the literary pundits did wring their hands! One of the most eminent among them at that time was Emil Kuh, who declared: this history of literature is not written by a head at all; it simply flowed out of a wrist.

Karl Julius Schröer also published an edition of Faust. A professor—in Graz—for the rest a very good fellow—wrote such a dreadful review of it that I believe no less than ten duels were fought out among the students at Graz pro and contra Schröer.

There was indeed much grievous misunderstanding, failure of recognition. This poor estimate of Schröer went so far that on one occasion at a social gathering in Weimar where I was present, the following thing happened. In that circle Erik Schmidt was a highly respected personality and dominated everything when he was present. Conversation turned on the question, which of the princesses and princes at the Weimar Court were wise and which were stupid. This was being seriously discussed and Erik Schmidt declared: the Princess Reuss (she was one of the daughters of the Grand Duchess Reuss)—the Princess Reuss is not a clever woman for she considers Schröer a great man.—This was his reason!

[ 30 ] But you must go through all his works, down to that most beautiful little book Goethe und die Liebe, for there you will really find what one can say without intellectualism about Platonic Love in immediate and real life. Something extraordinary is given to us in the style and tone of this little book Goethe und die Liebe. It came to me beautifully on one occasion when I was discussing the book with Schröer's sister. She called the style “völlig süss vor Reife”, fully sweet unto ripeness—a pretty expression. And such indeed it is. It is all—I cannot say in this sense so concentrated—but it is all so fine, so delicate in its form. Refinement indeed was a peculiar quality of Schröer's.

[ 31 ] And yet this Platonic spirituality, repelling intellectualism, this Platonic spirituality that did not want to enter into this body made at the same time a quite peculiar and strong impression, for in seeing Schröer one had the distinct perception: this soul is not quite fully there within the body. And then when he grew older one could see how the soul, not being really willing to enter into the body of that time, withdrew little by little out of that body. To begin with the fingers grew swollen and thick. Then the soul withdrew ever more and more, and as we know, Schröer ended in the feeblemindedness of old age. [ 32 ] Certain features of Schröer, not the whole individuality, but certain features, were taken over into my character Capesius, Professor Capesius, in the Mystery Plays.

Here indeed we have a remarkable example of the fact that the spiritual currents of antiquity can only be carried over into the present time under certain conditions. And one may well say that in Schröer the recoiling from intellectuality showed itself characteristically. Had he attained intellectuality, had he been able to unite it with the spirituality of Plato, Anthroposophy itself would have been there.

[ 33 ] And so we see in his karma how his paternal love for his follower Goethe, if so I may describe it, becomes transformed. It had arisen in the way I told you, for in that ancient time Plato had indeed loved him in a paternal way. We see this love karmically transmuted; Schröer becomes a warm admirer of Goethe. Thus it emerges once again.

[ 34 ] There was something extraordinarily personal in Schröer's reverence for Goethe. In his old age he wanted to write a biography of Goethe. Before I left Vienna at the end of the eighties he told me about it and afterwards he wrote me about it. But of this biography of Goethe which he would have liked to write he never wrote in any different vein than this.—He said: Goethe is continually visiting my soul. It always had this personal character which was indeed karmically predestined as I have now indicated.

[ 35 ] The biography of Goethe was never written, for Schröer fell into the feeble-mindedness of old age. But we can indeed find a luminous interpretation of the whole character of his writings if we know the antecedent which I have now explained.

[ 36 ] Thus in the well-nigh forgotten character of Schröer, we see how Goetheanism came to a standstill before the threshold of intellectualism transformed into spirituality. And if I may put it so, one could really do no other, having once been stimulated by Schröer, than carry Goetheanism forward into Anthroposophy. There was no other course to take. And again and again this deeply moving picture (for so it was for me) stood before the eye of my soul: Schröer carrying the ancient spirituality of Goethe, pressing forward in it up to the point of intellectuality. And I understood how Goethe must be grasped again with modern intellectualism, lifted up into the spiritual domain. For only so shall we fully understand him. Nor did this picture by any means make things easy for me. For owing to the fact that that which Schröer was could not directly and fully be received, again and again there was mingled in the striving of my soul, a certain element of opposition against Schröer.

[ 37 ] Thus, for example, when at the Technical University in Vienna Schröer conducted practice classes in lecturing and essay writing, I once gave a pretty distorted interpretation of Mephisto merely to refute my instructor Schröer with whom at that time I was not yet on such intimate and friendly terms. There was indeed a certain opposition stirring within me.

But as I said, what else could one do than loose the congestion that had taken place and carry Goetheanism really onward into Anthroposophy!

[ 38 ] Thus you see how world-history really takes its course. For it takes its course in such a way that we may recognise: whatever we possess in the present day emerges with great hindrances and difficulties. Yet on the other hand it is well prepared.

Read the wonderful hymn-like descriptions of womanhood in Karl Julius Schröer's writings. Read the beautiful essay which he wrote as an appendix to his History of Literature, his History of German Poetry in the 19th Century. Read his essay on Goethe and his relation to women. If you take all these things together you will say to yourselves: truly here is living something of a feeling of the worth and character of womanhood which is an echo of what the nun Hroswitha had lived as her own being. These two preceding incarnations harmonise and vibrate together wonderfully in Schröer's life, so much so that the breaking of the thread became indeed a deeply moving tragedy. And yet in Schröer of all people there enters into the end of the 19th century a world of spiritual facts, immensely illuminating towards an answer to this question: How shall we bring spirituality into the life of the present time.

[ 39 ] Herewith I wished to round off this cycle of lectures.

• 1. There is a gap in the stenograph here. According to some who attended the lecture, Rudolf Steiner spoke of Christian Oeser, the father of Karl Julius Schröer, as being the reincarnation of Socrates.
  See the discussion which follows the corresponding German text and alternate English translation available by clicking the 'Show German' at the top of the page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This meeting took place following the Pedagogical Conference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A teacher makes a remark.

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

There is some discussion about Miss N.

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

Z. says something about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A teacher: I will try to improve that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A teacher says something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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