The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During this course of lectures we have brought before our souls two remarkable documents of humanity, although necessarily described very briefly on account of the limited number of lectures; and we have seen what impulses had to flow into the evolution of mankind in order that these two significant documents, the sublime Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul, might come into existence. What it is important for us to grasp is the essential difference between the whole spirit of the Gita and that of the Epistles of St. Paul. As we have already said:—in the Gita we have the teachings that Krishna was able to give to his pupil Arjuna. Such teachings can only be given and should only be given to one person individually, for they are in reality exactly what they appear in the Gita; teachings of an intimate nature. On the other hand, it may be said that they are now within the reach of anyone, because they appear in the Gita. This naturally was not the case at the time the Gita was composed. They did not then reach all ears; they were then only communicated by word of mouth. In those old days teachers were careful to ascertain the maturity of the pupil to whom they were about to communicate such teachings; they always made sure of his being ready for them. In our time this is no longer possible as regards all the teachings and instructions which have in some way come openly to light. We are living in an age in which the spiritual life is in a certain sense public. Not that there is no longer any occult science in our day, but it cannot be considered occult simply because it is not printed or spread abroad. There is plenty of occult science even in our day. The scientific teaching of Fichte, for instance, although everyone can procure it in printed form, is really a secret teaching; and finally Hegel's philosophy is also a secret doctrine, for it is very little known and has indeed many reasons in it for remaining a secret teaching; and this is the case with many things in our day. The scientific teaching of Fichte and the philosophy of Hegel have a very simple method of remaining secret doctrine, in that they are written in such a way that most people do not understand them, and fall asleep if they read the first pages. In that way the subject itself remains a secret doctrine, and this is the case in our own age with a great deal which many people think they know. They do not know it; thus these things remain secret doctrine; and, in reality, such things as are to be found in the Gita also remain secret doctrine, although they may be made known in the widest circles by means of printing. For while one person who takes up the Gita today sees in it great and mighty revelations about the evolution of man's own inner being, another will only see in it an interesting poem; to him all the perceptions and feelings expressed in the Gita are mere trivialities. For let no one think that he has really made what is in the Gita his own, although he may be able to express in the words of the Gita itself what is contained in it, but which may itself be far removed from his comprehension. Thus the greatness of the subject itself is in many respects a protection against its becoming common. What is certain is that the teachings which are poetically worked out in the Gita are such that each one must follow, must experience them for himself, if, through them, he wishes to rise in his soul, and finally to experience the meeting with the Lord of Yoga, with Krishna. It is therefore an individual matter; something which the great Teacher addresses to one individual alone. It is a different thing when we consider the contents of the Epistles of St. Paul from this point of view. There we see that all is for the community, all is matter appealing to the many. For if we fix our attention upon, the innermost core of the essence of the Krishna-teaching we must say: What one experiences through this teaching, one experiences for oneself alone, in the strictest seclusion of one's own soul, and one can only have the meeting with Krishna as a lonely soul-wanderer, after one has found the way back to the original revelations and experiences of mankind. That which Krishna can give must be given to each individual.

This is not the ease with the revelation given to the world through the Christ-Impulse. From the beginning the Christ-Impulse was intended for all humanity, and the Mystery of Golgotha was not consummated as an act for the individual soul alone; but we must think of the whole of mankind from the very beginning to the very end of the earth's evolution, and realise that what happened at Golgotha was for all men. It is to the greatest possible extent a matter for the community in general. Therefore the style of the Epistles of St. Paul, apart from all that has already been characterised, must be quite different from the style of the sublime Gita. Let us once more picture clearly the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna. He gives his pupil unequivocal directions as Lord of Yoga as to how he can rise in his soul in order to attain the vision of Krishna. Let us compare with this a specially pregnant passage in the Pauline Epistles, in which a community turn to St. Paul and ask him whether this or that was true, whether this could be considered as giving the right views about what he had taught. In the instructions which St. Paul gives, we find a passage which may certainly be compared in greatness, even in artistic style with what we find in the sublime Gita; but at the same time we find quite a different tone, we find everything spoken from quite a different soul-feeling; It is where St. Paul writes to the Corinthians of how the different human gifts to be found in a group of people must work in cooperation. To Arjuna, Krishna says “Thou must be so and so, thou must do this or that, then wilt thou rise stage by stage in thy soul-life.” To his Corinthians St. Paul says: “One of you has this gift, another that, a third another; and if these work harmoniously together, as do the members of the human body, the result is spiritually a whole which can spiritually be permeated with the Christ.” Thus through the subject itself St. Paul addresses himself to men who work together, that is to say, to a multitude; and he uses an important opportunity to do this-namely, when the gift of the so-called speaking with tongues comes under consideration.

What is this speaking with tongues that we find spoken of in St. Paul's Epistles? It is neither more nor less than a survival of old spiritual gifts, which, in a renewed way, but with full human consciousness, confront-us again at the present time. For when, among our initiation-methods, we speak of Inspiration, it is understood that a man who attains to inspiration in our age does so with a clear consciousness; just as he brings a clear consciousness to bear upon his powers of understanding and his sense-realisations. But in olden times this was different, then such a man spoke as an instrument of high spiritual beings who made use of his organs to express higher things through his speech. He might sometimes say things which he himself could not understand at all. Thus revelations from the spiritual worlds were given, which were not necessarily understood by him who was used as an instrument, and just that was the case in Corinth. The situation had there arisen of a number of persons having this gift of tongues. They were then able to make this or that prediction from the spiritual worlds. Now when a man possesses such gifts everything he is able to reveal by their means is under all circumstances a revelation from the spiritual world, yet it may, nevertheless, be the case that one man may say this and another that, for spiritual sources are manifold, One may be inspired from one source and another from another, and thus it may happen that the revelations do not correspond. Complete harmony can only be found when these worlds are entered in full consciousness. Therefore St. Paul gives the following admonition: “Some there are who can speak with tongues, others who can interpret the words spoken. They should work together as do the right and left hands, and we should not only listen to those who speak with tongues, but also to those who have not that gift, but who can expound and understand what someone is able to bring down from the spiritual sphere.” Here again St. Paul was urging the question of a community which might be founded through the united working of men. In connection with this very speaking with tongues St. Paul gave that address which, as I have said, is in certain respects so wonderful that in its might it may well compare, though in a different way-with the revelations of the Gita. He says (1 Cor. xii. verses 3-31): “As regards the spiritually gifted brethren, I will not leave you without instructions. You know that in the time of your heathendom, it was to dumb idols that you were blindly led by desire. Wherefore I make clear to you: that just as little as one speaking in the Spirit of God says: Accursed be Jesus; so little can a man call Him Lord but through the Holy Spirit. Now there are diversities of gracious gifts, but there is one Spirit. There are diversities in the guidance of mankind, but there is one Lord. There are differences in the force which individual men possess; but there is one God Who works in all these forces. But to every man is given the manifestation of the Spirit, as much as he can profit by it. So to one is given the word of prophecy, to another the word of knowledge; others are spirits who live in faith; again others have the gift of healing, others the gift of prophecy, others have the gift of seeing into men's characters, others that of speaking different tongues, and to others again is given the interpretation of tongues; but in all these worketh one and the same Spirit, apportioning to each one what is due to him. For as the body is one and hath many members, yet all the members together form one body, so also is it with Christ. For through the Spirit we are all baptised into one body, whether Jew or Greek, bond or free, and have all been imbued with one spirit; so also the body is not made of one but of many members. If the foot were to say: Because I am not the hand therefore I do not belong to the body, it would none the less belong to it. And if the ear were to say: Because I am not the eye I do not belong to the body, none the less does it belong to the body. If the whole body were only an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were a sense of hearing, where would be the power of smell? But now hath God set each one of the members in the body where it seemed good to Him. If there were only one member, where would the body be? But now there are truly many members, but there is only one body. The eye may not say to the hand: I do not require thee! nor the head to the feet—I have no need of you; rather those which appear to be the feeble members of the body are necessary, and those which we consider mean prove themselves to be specially important. God has put the body together and has recognised the importance of the unimportant members that there should be no division in the body, but that all the members should work harmoniously together and should care for one another. And if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, and it one member prosper, all the members rejoice with it. “But ye,” said St. Paul to his Corinthians, “are the Body of Christ, and are severally the members thereof. And some God hath set in the community as apostles, others as prophets, a third part as teachers, a fourth as miraculous healers, a fifth for other activities in helping, a sixth for the administration of the community, and a seventh He set aside to speak with tongues. Shall all men be prophets, shall all men be apostles, shall all be teachers, all healers, shall all speak with tongues, or shall all interpret? Therefore it is right for all the gifts to work together, but the more numerous they are the better.”

Then Paul speaks of the force that can prevail in the individual but also in the community, and that holds all the separate members together as the strength of the body holds the separate members of the body together. Krishna says nothing more beautiful to one man than St. Paul spoke to humanity in its different members. Then he speaks of the Christ-Power, which holds the different members together just as the body holds its different members together; and the force that can live in one individual as the life-force in every one of his limbs, and yet lives also in a whole community; that is described by St. Paul in powerful words: “Nevertheless I will show you,” says he, “the way that is higher than all else. If I could speak with tongues of men or of angels and have not love, my speech is but as sounding brass or a clanging cymbal, and if I could prophesy and reveal all secrets and communicate all the knowledge in the world, and if I had all the faith that could remove mountains themselves and had not love, it would all be nothing. And if I distributed every spiritual gift, yea, if I gave my body itself to be burnt, but were lacking in love, it would all be in vain. Love endureth ever. Love is kind. Love knoweth not envy. Love knoweth not boasting, knoweth not pride. Love injureth not what is decorous, seeketh not her own advantage, doth not let herself be provoked, beareth no one any malice, doth not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth only in truth. Love envelopeth all, streameth through all beliefs, hopeth all things, practiseth toleration everywhere. Love, if it existeth, can never be lost. Prophesies vanish when they are fulfilled, what is spoken with tongues ceases when it can no longer speak to human hearts; what is known ceases when the subject of knowledge is exhausted, for we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child; when I became, a man the world of childhood was past. Now we only see dark outlines in a mirror, but then we shall see the spirit face to face; now is my knowledge in part, but then I shall know completely, even as I myself am known. Now abideth Faith, the certainty of Hope, and Love; but Love is the greatest of these, hence Love is above all. For if you could have all spiritual gifts, whoever himself understands prophecy must also strive after love; for whoever speaks with tongues speaks not among men, he speaks among Gods. No one understands him, because in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.” We see how St. Paul understands the nature of speaking with tongues. His meaning is: The speaker with tongues is transported into the spiritual worlds; he speaks among Gods. Whoever prophesies speaks to men to build up, to warn, to comfort; he who speaks with tongues, to a certain extent satisfies himself; he who prophesies builds up the community. If you all attain to speaking with tongues, it is yet more important that you should prophesy. He who prophesies is greater than he who speaks with tongues, for he who speaks with tongues must first understand his own speaking, in order that the community should do so. Supposing that I came to' you as a speaker with tongues, of what use should I be to you if I did not tell you what my speaking signifies as prophecy, teaching and revelation! My speaking would be like a flute or a zither, of which one could not clearly distinguish the sounds. How could one distinguish the playing of either the zither or of the flute if they did not give forth distinct sounds? And if the trumpet gave forth an indistinct sound, who would arm himself to battle? So it is with you; if you cannot connect a distinct language with the tongue-speaking, it is all merely spoken into the air.

All this shows us that the different spiritual gifts must be divided amongst the community, and that the members as individuals, must work together. With this we come to the point at which the revelation of Paul, through the moment in human evolution in which it appears, must differ absolutely from that of Krishna. The Krishna-revelation is directed to one individual, but in reality applies to every man if he is ripe to tread the upward path prescribed to him by the Lord of Yoga; we are more and more reminded of the primeval ages of mankind, to which we always, according to Krishna-teaching, return in spirit. At that time men were less individualised, one could assume that for each man the same teaching and directions would be suitable. St. Paul confronted mankind when individuals were becoming differentiated, when they really had to become differentiated, each one with his special capacity, his own special gift. One could then no longer reckon on being able to pour the same thing into each different soul; one had then to point to that which is invisible and rules over all. This, which lives in no man as a separate individual, although it may be within each one, is the Christ-Impulse. The Christ-Impulse, again, is something like a new group-soul of humanity, but one that must be consciously sought for by men. To make this clearer, let us picture to ourselves how, for instance, a number of Krishna students are to be distinguished in the spiritual worlds, from a number of those who have been moved in the deepest part of their being by the Christ-Impulse. The Krishna pupils have every one of them been stirred by one and the same impulse, which has been given them by the Lord of Yoga. In spiritual life each one of these is like the other. The same instructions have been given to them all. But those who have been moved by the Christ-Impulse, are each, when disembodied and in the spiritual world, possessed of their own particular individuality, their own distinct spiritual forces. Therefore even in the spiritual world, one man may go in one direction and one in another; and the Leader of both, the One Who pours Himself into the soul of each one, no matter how individualised he may be, is the Christ, Who is in the soul of each one and at the same time soars above them all. So we still have a differentiated community even when the souls are discarnate, while the souls of the Krishna pupils, when they have received instructions from the Lord of Yoga, are as one unit. The object of human evolution, however, is that souls should become more and more differentiated.

Therefore it was necessary that Krishna should speak in a different way. He really speaks to his pupils just as he does in the Gita. But St. Paul must speak differently. He really speaks to each individual, and it is a question of individual development whether, according to the degree of his maturity, a man remains at a certain stage of his incarnation at a standstill in exoteric life, or whether he is able to enter the esoteric life and raise himself into esoteric Christianity. We can go further and further in the Christian life and attain the utmost esoteric heights; but we must start from something different from what we start from in the Krishna-teaching. In the Krishna-teaching you start from the point you have reached as man, and raise the soul individually, as a separate being; in Christianity, before you attempt to go further along the path you must have gained a connection with the Christ-Impulse-feeling in the first place that this transcends all else. The spiritual path to Krishna can only be trodden by one who receives instructions from Krishna; the spiritual path to Christ can be trodden by anyone, for Christ brought the mystery for all men who feel drawn towards it. That, however, is something external, accomplished on the physical plane; the first step is, therefore taken on the physical plane. That is the essential thing. Truly one need not, if one looks into the world-historical importance of the Christ-Impulse, begin by belonging to this or that Christian denomination; on the contrary one can, just in our time, even start from an anti-Christian standpoint, or from one of indifference towards Christ. Yet if one goes deeply into the spiritual life of our own age, examining the contradictions and follies of materialism, perhaps one may genuinely be led to Christ, even though to begin with one may not have belonged to any particular creed. Therefore when it is said outside our circle that we are starting from a peculiar Christian denomination, this must be regarded as a special calumny; for it is not a matter of starting from any denomination, but that in response to the demands of the spiritual life itself, everyone, be he Mahommedan or Buddhist, Jew or Hindu, or Christian, shall be able to understand the Christ-Impulse in its whole significance for the evolution of mankind. This desire we can see deeply penetrating the whole view and presentation of St. Paul, and in this respect he is absolutely the one who sets the tone for the first proclamation of the Christ-Impulse to the world.

As we have described how Sankhya philosophy concerns itself with the changing forms, with that which appertains to Prakriti, we may also say that St. Paul, in all that underlies his profound Epistles, deals with Purusha, that which pertains to the soul. What the soul is to become, the destiny of the soul, how throughout the whole evolution of mankind it evolves in manifold ways, concerning all this St. Paul gives us quite definite and profound conclusions. There is a fundamental difference between what Eastern thought was still able to give us, and what we find at once with such wonderful clearness in St. Paul. We pointed out yesterday that, according to Krishna, everything depended on man's finding his way out of the changing forms. But Prakriti remains outside, as something foreign to the soul. All the striving in this Eastern method of development and even in the Eastern initiation, tends to free one from material existence' from that which is spread outside in nature; for that, according to the Veda-philosophy, is merely maya. Everything external is maya, and to be free from maya is Yoga. We have pointed out how in the Gita it is expected of man that he shall become free from all he does and accomplishes, from what he wills and thinks, from what he likes and enjoys, and in his soul shall triumph over everything external. The work that man accomplishes should equally fall away from him, and thus resting within himself, he shall find satisfaction. Thus, he who wishes to develop according to the Krishna teaching, aspires to become something like a Paramahamsa, that is to say, a high Initiate who leaves all material existence, behind him, who triumphs over all he has himself accomplished by his actions in this world of sense; and lives a purely spiritual existence, having so overcome what belongs to the senses that he no longer thirsts for reincarnation, that he has nothing more to do with what filled his life and at which he worked in this sense-world. Thus it is the issuing forth from this maya, the triumphing over it which meets us everywhere in the Gita, With St. Paul it is not so.

If he had met with these Eastern teachings, something in the depth of his soul would have caused the following words to come forth: “Yes, thou wishest to rise above all that surrounds thee outside, from that also which thou formerly accomplished there! Dost thou wish to leave all that behind thee? Is not then all that the work of God, is not everything above which thou wishest to lift thyself created by the Divine Spirit? In despising that, art thou not despising the work of God? Does not the revelation of God's Spirit dwell everywhere within it? Didst thou not at first seek to represent God in thine own work, in love and faith and devotion, and now desirest thou to triumph over what is the work of God?”

It would be well, my dear friends, if we were to inscribe these words of St. Paul-which though unspoken were felt in the depths of his soul-deeply into our own souls; for they express an important part of what we know as Western revelation. In the Pauline sense, we too speak of the maya which surrounds us. We certainly say: We are surrounded by maya: but we also say: Is there not spiritual revelation in this maya, is it not all divine spiritual work? Is it not blasphemy to fail to understand that there is divine spiritual work in all things? Now arises the other question: Why is that maya there -? Why do we see maya around us? The West does not stop at the question as to whether all is maya: it inquires as to the wherefore of maya. Then follows an answer that leads us into the centre of the soul—into Purusha: Because the soul once came under the power of Lucifer it sees everything through the veil of maya and spreads the veil of maya over everything. Is it the fault of objectivity that we see maya? No. To us as souls objectivity would appear in all its truth, if we had not come under the power of Lucifer. It only appears to us as maya because we are not capable of seeing down into the foundations of what is spread out there. That comes from the soul's having come under the power of Lucifer; it is not the fault of the Gods, it is the fault of our own soul. Thou, O soul, hast made the world a maya to thyself, because thou hast fallen into the power of Lucifer. From the highest spiritual grasp of this formula, down to the words of Goethe: “The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives,” is one straight line. The Philistines and zealots may fight against Goethe and his Christianity as much as they like; he might nevertheless say that he is one of the most Christian of men, for in the depths of his being he thought as a Christian, even in that very formula: “The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives.” It is the soul's own fault that what it sees appears as maya and not as truth. So that which in Orientalism appears simply as an act of Gods themselves, is diverted into the depths of the human soul, where the great struggle with Lucifer takes place.

Thus Orientalism, if we consider it aright, is in a certain sense materialism, in that it does not recognise the spirituality of maya, and wishes to rise above matter. That which pulses through the Epistles of St. Paul is a doctrine of the soul, although only existing in germ and therefore capable of being so mistaken and misunderstood as in our Tamas-time, but it will in the future be visibly spread out over the whole earth. This, concerning the peculiar nature of maya, will have to be understood; for only then can one understand the full depth of that which is the object of the progress of human evolution. Then only does one understand what St. Paul means when he speaks of the first Adam, who succumbed to Lucifer in his soul, and who was therefore more and more entangled in matter-which means nothing else than this: ensnared in a false experiencing of matter. As God's creation external matter is good: what takes place there is good. But what the soul experiences in the course of human evolution became more and more evil, because in the beginning the soul fell into the power of Lucifer. Therefore St. Paul called Christ the Second Adam, for He came into the world untempted by Lucifer, and therefore He can be a guide and friend to men's souls, who can lead them away from Lucifer, that is, into the right relationship to Him. St. Paul could not tell mankind at that time all that he as an Initiate knew; but if we allow his Epistles to work on us we shall see that there is more in their depths than they express externally. That is because St. Paul spoke to a community, and had to reckon with the understanding of that community. That is why in certain of his Epistles there seem to be absolute contradictions. But one who can plunge down into the depths, finds everywhere the impulse of the Christ-Being. Let us here remember, my dear friends, how we ourselves have represented the coming into existence of the Mystery of Golgotha. As time went on we recognised that there were two different stories of the youth, of Christ Jesus, in the Gospel of St. Matthew and that of St. Luke, because in reality there are two Jesus-boys in question. We have seen that externally—after the flesh, according to St. Paul, which means through physical descent—both Jesus-boys descended from the stock of David; that one came from the line of Nathan and the other from that of Solomon; that thus there were two Jesus-boys born at about the same time. In the one Jesus-child, that of St. Matthew's Gospel, we find Zarathustra reincarnated: and we have emphatically stated that in the other Jesus-child, the one described by St. Luke, there was no such human ego as is usually to be found, and certainly not as the one existing in the other Jesus-child, in whom lived such a highly evolved ego as that of Zarathustra. In the Luke-Jesus there actually lives that part of man that has not entered into human evolution on the earth. *[See also The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind, the Gospel of St. Luke, the Gospel of St. Matthew.]

It is rather difficult to form a right conception of this but we must just try to think how, so to speak, the soul that was incarnated in Adam, he who may be described as Adam in the sense of my Occult Science succumbed to Lucifer's temptation, symbolically described in the Bible as the Fall of Man in Paradise. We must picture this. Then we must picture further, that side by side with that human soul-nature which incarnated in Adam's body, there was a human part, a human being, that remained behind and did not then incarnate, that did not enter a physical body, but remained “pure soul.” You need only now picture how, before a physical man arose in the evolution of humanity, there was one soul, which then divided itself into two parts. The one part, the one descendant of the common soul, incarnated in Adam and thus entered into the line of incarnations, succumbed to Lucifer, and so on. As to the other soul, the sister-soul, as it were, the wise rulers of the world saw beforehand that it would not be good that this too should be embodied; it was kept back in the soul world; it did not therefore take part in the incarnations of humanity, but was kept back. With this soul none but the Initiates of the Mysteries had intercourse. During the evolution preceding the Mystery of Golgotha this soul did not, therefore, take into itself the experience of an ego, for this can only be obtained by incarnating in a human body. None the less, it had all the Wisdom that could have been attained through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, it possessed all the love of which a human soul is capable. This soul remained blameless, as it were, of all the guilt that a man can acquire in the course of his incarnations in human evolution. It could not be met with as a human being externally; but it could be perceived by the old clairvoyants, and was recognised by them: they encountered it, so to say, in the mysteries. Thus, here we have a soul, one might say, that was within, but yet above, the evolution of mankind, that could at first only be perceived in the spirit; a pre-man, a true super-man.

It was this soul which, instead of an ego, was incarnated in the Jesus-child of St. Luke's Gospel. You will remember the lectures at Bale; this fact was already given out there. We have therefore to do with a soul that is only ego-like, one that naturally acts as an ego when it permeates the body of Jesus: but which in all it displays is yet quite different from an ordinary ego. I have already mentioned the fact that the boy of St. Luke's Gospel spoke a language understood by his mother as soon as he came into the world, and other facts of similar nature were to he observed in him. Then we know that the Matthew-Jesus, in whom lived the Zarathustra ego, grew up until his twelfth year, and the Luke-child also grew up, possessing no particular human knowledge or science, but bearing the divine wisdom and the divine power of sacrifice within him. Thus the Luke-Jesus grew up not being particularly gifted for what can be learnt externally. We know further that the body of the Matthew-Jesus was forsaken by the Zarathustra ego, and that in the twelfth year of the Luke-Jesus his body was taken possession of by that same Zarathustra-ego. That is the moment referred to when it is related of the twelve-year-old Jesus of Luke's Gospel, that when his parents lost him he stood teaching before the wise men of the Temple. We know further that this Luke-Jesus bore the Zarathustra ego within him up to his thirtieth year; that the Zarathustra ego then left the body of the Luke-Jesus, and all its sheaths were taken possession of by Christ, a superhuman Being of the higher Hierarchies, Who only could live in a human body at all inasmuch as a body was offered Him which had first been permeated up to its twelfth year with the pre-human Wisdom-forces, and the pre-human divine Love-forces, and was then permeated through and through by all that the Zarathustra ego had acquired through many incarnations by means of initiation. In no other way, perhaps, could one so well obtain the right respect, the right reverence, in short, the right feeling altogether for the Christ-Being, as by trying to understand what sort of a body was needed for this Christ-Ego to be able to enter humanity at all. Many people consider that in this presentation, given out of the holy mysteries of the newer age about the Christ-Being, He is thus made to appear less intimate and human than the Christ-Jesus so many have honoured in the way in which He is generally represented-familiar, near to man, incarnate in an ordinary human body in which nothing like a Zarathustra ego lived. It is brought as a reproach against our teaching that Christ-Jesus is here represented as composed of forces drawn from all regions of the cosmos. Such reproaches proceed only from the indolence of human perception and human feeling which is unwilling to raise itself to the true heights of perception and feeling. The greatest of all must be so grasped by us that our souls have to make the supremest possible efforts to attain the inner intensity of perception and feeling necessary to bring the Greatest, the Highest, at all near to our soul. Our first feelings will thus be raised higher still, if we do but consider them in this light. We know one other thing besides. We know how we have to understand the words of the Gospel: “Divine forces are being revealed in the Heights, and peace will spread among men of goodwill.” We know that this message of peace and love resounded when the Luke-Jesus appeared, because Buddha intermingled with the astral body of the Luke-Jesus; Buddha, who had already lived in a being who went through his last incarnation as Gautama Buddha and had risen to complete spirituality. So that in the astral body of the Luke-Jesus, Buddha revealed himself, as he had progressed up to the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha on earth.

Thus we have the Being of Christ Jesus presented before us in a way only now possible to mankind from the basis of occult science. St. Paul, although an Initiate, was compelled to speak in concepts more easily understood at that time; he could not then have assumed a humanity able to understand such concepts as we have brought before your hearts today. His inspiration, however, was derived from his initiation, which came about as an act of grace. Because he did not attain this through regular schooling in the old mysteries, but by grace on the road to Damascus when the risen Christ appeared to him, therefore I call this initiation one brought about by grace. But he experienced this Damascus Vision in such a way that by means of it he knew that He Who arose in the Mystery of Golgotha lives in the sphere of this earth and has been attached to it since that Event. He recognised the risen Christ. From that time on he proclaimed Him. Why was he able to see Him in the particular way he did? At this point we must enter somewhat into the nature of such a vision, such a manifestation as that of Damascus: for it was a vision, a manifestation of a quite peculiar kind. Only those people who never wish to learn anything of occult facts consider all visions as being of one kind. They will not distinguish such an occurrence as the vision of St. Paul from many other visions such as appeared to the saints later. What really was the reason that St. Paul could recognise Christ as he did when He appeared to him on the way to Damascus? Why did the certain conviction come to him that this was the risen Christ? This question leads us back to another one: What was necessary in order that the whole Christ-Being should be able completely to enter into Jesus of Nazareth, at the baptism by John in the Jordan? Now, we have just said what was necessary to prepare the body into which the Christ-Being could descend. But what was necessary in order that the Arisen One could appear in such a densified soul-form as he appeared in to St. Paul? What, then, so to speak, was that halo of light in which Christ appeared to St. Paul before Damascus? What was it? Whence was it taken?

If we wish to answer these questions, my dear friends, we must add a few finishing touches to what I have already said. I have told you that there was, as it were, a sister-soul to the Adam-soul, to that soul which entered into the sequence of human generations. This sister-soul remained in the soul world. It was this sister-soul that was incarnated in the Luke-Jesus. But it was not then incarnated for the first time in a human body in the strictest sense of the words, it had already been once incarnated prophetically. This soul had already been made use of formerly as a messenger of the holy mysteries; it was, so to say, cherished and cultivated in the mysteries, and was sent whenever anything specially important to man was taking place; but it could only appear as a vision in the etheric body, and could only be perceived, strictly speaking, as long as the old clairvoyance remained. In earlier ages that still existed. Therefore this old sister-soul of Adam had no need at that time to descend as far as the physical body in order to be seen. So it actually appeared on earth repeatedly in human evolution: sent forth by the impulses of the mysteries, at all times when important things were to take place in the evolution of the earth; but it did not require to incarnate, in ancient times, because clairvoyance was there. The first time it needed to incarnate was when the old clairvoyance was to be overcome through the transition of human evolution from the third to the fourth Post-Atlantean age, of which we spoke yesterday. Then, by way of compensation, it took on an incarnation, in order to be able to express itself at the time when clairvoyance no longer existed. The only time this sister-soul of Adam was compelled to appear and to become physically visible, it was incorporated, so to speak, in Krishna; and then it was incorporated again in the Luke-Jesus. So now we can understand how it was that Krishna spoke in such a superhuman manner, why he is the best teacher for the human ego, why he represents, so to speak, a victory over the ego, why he appears so psychically sublime. It is because he appears as human being at that sublime moment which we brought before our souls in the lecture before last, as Man not yet descended into human incarnations. He then appears again to be embodied in the Luke-Jesus. Hence that perfection that came about when the most significant world-conceptions of Asia, the ego of Zarathustra and the spirit of Krishna, were united in the twelve-year-old Jesus described by St. Luke. He who spoke to the learned men in the Temple was therefore not only Zarathustra speaking as an ego, but one who spoke from those sources from which Krishna at one time drew Yoga; he spoke of Yoga raised a stage higher; he united himself with the Krishna force, with Krishna himself, in order to continue to grow until his thirtieth year. Then only have we that complete, perfected body which could be taken possession of by the Christ. Thus do the spiritual currents of humanity flow together. So that in what happened at the Mystery of Golgotha, we really have a co-operation of the most important leaders of mankind, a synthesis of spirit-life. When St. Paul had his vision before Damascus, He Who appeared to him then was the Christ. The halo of light in which Christ was enveloped was Krishna. And because Christ has taken Krishna for His own soul-covering through which He then works on further, therefore in the light which shone there, in Christ Himself, there is all that was once upon a time contained in the sublime Gita. We find much of that old Krishna-teaching, although scattered about, in the New Testament revelations. This old Krishna-teaching has on that account become a personal matter to the whole of mankind, because Christ is not as such a human ego belonging to mankind, but to the Higher Hierarchies. Thus Christ belongs also to those times when man was not yet separated from that which now surrounds him as material existence, and which is veiled to him in maya through his own Luciferic temptation. If we glance back over the whole of evolution, we shall find that in those olden times there was not yet that strict division between the spiritual and the material; material was then still spiritual, and the spiritual—if we may say so—still manifested itself externally. Thus because, in the Christ-Impulse, something entered into mankind which completely prevented such a strict separation as we find in Sankhya philosophy between Purusha and Prakriti, Christ becomes the Leader of men out of themselves and towards the divine creation. Must we then say that we must unconditionally give up maya now that we recognise that it seems to be given us through our own fault? No, for that would be blaspheming the spirit in the world; that would be assigning to matter properties which we ourselves have imposed upon it with the veil of maya. Let us rather hope that when we have overcome in ourselves that which caused matter to become maya, we may again be reconciled with the world.

For do we not hear resounding out of the world around us that it is a creation of the Elohim, and that on the last day of creation they considered: and behold, all was very good? That would be the karma to be fulfilled if there were nothing but Krishna-teaching (for there is nothing in the world that does not fulfil its karma). If in all eternity there had been only the teaching of Krishna, then the material existence which surrounds us, the manifestation of God of which the Elohim at the starting-point of evolution said: “Behold all was very good,” would encounter the judgment of men: “It is not good, I must abandon it!” The judgment of man would be placed above the judgment of God. We must learn to understand the words which stand as a mystery at the outset of evolution; we must not set the judgment of man above the judgment of God. If all and everything that could cling to us in the way of guilt were to fall away from us, and yet that one fault remained, that we slandered the work of the Elohim; the earth-Karma would have to be fulfilled; in the future everything would have to fall upon us and karma would have to fulfil itself thus. In order that this should not happen, Christ appeared in the world, so to reconcile us with the world that we may learn to overcome Lucifer's tempting forces, and learn to penetrate the veil; that—we may see the divine revelation in its true form; that we may find the Christ as the Reconciler, Who will lead us to the true form of the divine revelation, so that through Him we may learn to understand the primeval words: “And behold, it is very good.” In order that we may learn to ascribe to ourselves that which we may never again dare to ascribe to the world, we need Christ; for if all our other sins could be taken away from us: yet this sin could only be removed by Him. This, transformed into a moral feeling, is a newer side of the Christ-Impulse. It shows us at the same time why the necessity arose for the Christ-Impulse as the higher soul to envelope itself in the Krishna-Impulse.

An exposition such as I have given you in this course, my dear friends, should not be taken as mere theory, merely as a number of thoughts and ideas to be absorbed; it should be taken as a sort of New Year's gift, a gift which should influence our New Year, and from now on it should work as that which we can perceive through the understanding of the Christ-Impulse, in so far as this helps us to understand the words of the Elohim, which resound down to us from the starting point, from the very primeval beginning of the creation of our earth. And look upon the intention of the course at the same time as the starting point of our Anthroposophical spiritual stream. This must be Anthroposophical because by means of it will be more and more recognised how man can in himself attain to self-knowledge—. He cannot yet attain to complete self-knowledge, not yet can Anthropos attain to knowledge of Anthropos, man to the knowledge of man, so long as this man can consider what he has to carry out in his own soul as an affair to be played out between him and external nature. That the world should appear to us to be immersed in matter is a thing the Gods have prepared for us, it is an affair of our own souls, a question of higher self-knowledge; it is something that man must himself recognise in his own manhood, it is a question of Anthroposophy, by means of which we can come to the perception of what theosophy may become to mankind. It should be a feeling of the greatest modesty which impels a man to belong to the Anthroposophical movement; a modesty which says: If I want to spring over that which is an affair of the human soul and to take at once the highest step into the divine, humility may very easily vanish from me, and pride step in, in its place; vanity may easily install itself May the Anthroposophical Society also be a starting point in this higher moral sphere; above all, may it avoid all that has so easily crept into the theosophical movement, in the way of pride, vanity, ambition, and want of earnestness in receiving that which is the highest Wisdom. May the Anthroposophical Society avoid all this because from its very starting point, it has already considered that the settlement with maya is an affair for the human soul itself.

One should feel that the Anthroposophical Society ought to be the result of the profoundest human modesty. For out of this modesty should well up deep earnestness as regards the sacred truths into which it will penetrate if we betake ourselves into this sphere of the super-sensible, of the spiritual. Let us therefore understand the adoption of the name “Anthroposophical Society” in true modesty, in true humility, saying to ourselves Let all that remains of that pride and lack of modesty, vanity, ambition and untruthfulness, that played a part under the name of Theosophy, be eradicated, if now, under the sign and device of modesty, we begin humbly to look up to the, Gods and divine wisdom, and on the other hand dutifully to study man and human wisdom, if we reverently approach Spiritual Science, and dutifully devote ourselves to Anthroposophy. This Anthroposophy will lead to the divine and to the Gods. If by its help we learn in the highest sense to look humbly and truthfully into our own selves and see how we must struggle against all maya and error through self-training and the severest self-discipline, then, as written on a bronze tablet may there stand above us the word: Anthroposophy! Let that be an exhortation to us, that above all we should seek through it to acquire self-knowledge, modesty, and in this way endeavour to erect a building founded upon truth, for truth can only blossom if self-knowledge lays hold of the human soul in deep earnestness. What is the origin of all vanity, of all untruth? The want of self-knowledge. From what alone can truth spring, from what can true reverence for divine worlds and divine wisdom alone come? From true self-knowledge, self-training, self-discipline. Therefore may that which shall stream and pulsate through the Anthroposophical movement serve that purpose. For these reasons this particular course of lectures has been given at the starting point of the Anthroposophical movement, and it should prove that there is no question of narrowness, but that precisely through our movement we can extend our horizon over those distances which comprise Eastern thought also. But let us take this humbly in self-educative anthroposophical fashion, by creating the will within us to discipline and train ourselves. If Anthroposophy, my dear friends, be taken up among you in this way, it will then lead to a beneficial end and will attain a goal that can extend to each individual and every human society for their welfare. So let these words be spoken which shall be the last of this course of lectures, but something of which perhaps many in the coming days will take away with them in their souls, so that it may bear fruit within our Anthroposophical movement, within which you, my dear friends, have, so to speak, met together for the first time. May we ever so meet together in the sign of Anthroposophy, that we have the right to call upon words with which we shall now conclude, words of humility and of self-knowledge, which we should now at this moment place as an ideal before our souls.

Ladies and gentlemen! What I would like to do on this occasion is not actually to give a lecture, but rather to encourage as widespread an understanding as possible between those who are involved in the leadership and work of the Waldorf School and the parent body. The reason for this is that I really believe that this understanding, this working together of the parents with the teachers and others involved in the leadership of the school is something extraordinarily necessary and significant. Allow me to begin by describing an experience I had not long ago, an experience that will illustrate the importance of the issue I have just pointed out. Several weeks ago it was my task to take part in the festival in Stratford-on-Avon in England, a festival organized to celebrate the birthday of Shakespeare.¹ This Shakespeare festival was one that took place wholly under the influence of education issues. It was organized by people who are deeply interested in the education of children and adults. It can also be said that during this entire festival the world of Shakespearean art merely provided a background, since the actual issues that were being dealt with were contemporary issues in education. On this occasion one of the small effects, or perhaps even one of the large effects, of the pedagogical course that I held at Christmas at our Goetheanum in Dornach became evident.² Some of the people involved in this Shakespeare festival had taken part in this course.

Now, not far from London there is a boarding school which is not very large yet, but which is headed by a person who was present at the Dornach course and who took from there the impulse to introduce what we can now call Waldorf pedagogy, the Waldorf system of education, into this boarding school and perhaps also to apply it in expanding the school.³ We were invited to see this educational establishment, and in the course of the visit various questions were raised regarding how the school is being run at present and what could be done to transplant the spirit of the system of education that is fostered here in the Waldorf School to their situation.

One question in particular came up for discussion. The people in charge said that they were doing well with the children; each year they accept as many children as the small size of the establishment permits. The most difficult thing for them, however, was working together with the parents, and the reason for the difficulty—and this is certainly an international concern—was that nowadays the older generation everywhere has certain very specific views on how education is supposed to proceed. There are many reasons why parents send their children to one boarding school rather than another. But when there actually is a slight deviation from what they are accustomed to, it is very easy for disagreements to arise between the school and the parents. And this is something that really cannot be tolerated in an independent system of education.

The boarding school in question was experiencing especially great difficulties in this regard. What I am attempting to do now is neither to criticize nor to make recommendations, but simply to state the facts. In this school, in spite of the fact that it is a residential facility, there are no domestic employees at all. All the work of maintaining the school is done by the children and teachers. Cleaning the hallways, washing the dishes, planting the vegetables, taking care of the chickens so that they provide eggs—the list could go on and on. The children are involved in all kinds of work, and you certainly get the impression that things are run very differently there than in most other boarding schools. The children also have to cook and do everything else, and this goes on from first thing in the morning until late in the evening. It is also evident that the teachers and residential staff put a lot of energy into doing these things with the children. As I said, my intention is neither to criticize nor to advocate what they are doing; I only want to present it to you. Now it can happen that when the children go home on vacation and tell their parents about everything they have to do, the parents realize that they had not imagined it like that, and they cannot understand it. That is why it is so difficult to sustain harmony with the parents in this case. I describe this case only in order to point out how necessary we feel it to be, if we take a system of education seriously, to work together in complete harmony with the children’s parents.

Now of course our situation in the Waldorf School is different. We have no residential facility, we simply have a school where we naturally have to keep the principles of child-rearing in mind while providing academic instruction. Nevertheless, you can rest assured that working together with the parent body is a fundamental element in what we in the Waldorf School regard as our task. In running the school, an infinite number of questions constantly arise with regard to the weal and woe of the children, their progress, their physical and mental health—questions that can be solved only in partnership with the parents. This is why it will actually become more and more necessary for these parents’ evenings to evolve—and all the circumstances will have to be taken into account—and to become a more frequent event in the running of our school.

Our Waldorf School is meant to be a truly independent school, not only in name but in its very essence, and simply because it is meant to be an independent school of this sort, we are dependent on help from the parent body to an extraordinary extent. It is my conviction that if we have the desire to work together with the parents, this will call forth nothing but the deepest satisfaction on the part of all the parents.

The Waldorf School is an independent school. You see, ladies and gentlemen, what it actually means to be an independent school must be stated over and over again, and it cannot be stated strongly enough for the simple reason that in broader circles today it is scarcely possible to realize the extent of our need for independent schools of this sort. The prejudice of thousands of years is working against us, and this is how it works.

We do not need to look back very far in humanity’s evolution to find a school system, especially a primary school system, that was independent to a very great extent. But at that time independence caused a lot of illiteracy because few people sought out formal education. Then, in the course of humanity’s evolution in civilized areas, the desire began to grow in people to promote a certain educational basis for our interactions in society. At this point I cannot go into how this desire arose, but it came about at a time when people had renounced their allegiance to the old gods and now expected to receive all the blessings of humanity’s evolution and everything needed to advance it from a new god, the god of the State. Central Europe in particular was an area where people were especially intent on seeing the god of the State as a universal remedy, especially in the education of children.

In those times, the principle that was applied as a matter of course was that parliaments and large advisory bodies and so on were gatherings in which geniality could flourish, even if the individuals involved in these representative gatherings were not impressive in their degree of enlightenment. The opinion prevailed that by gathering together, people would become smart and would then be able to determine the right thing to do in all circumstances.

However, some individuals with a very good and profound understanding of these matters, such as the poet Rosegger,⁴ for example, were of a different opinion. Rosegger coined the expression—forgive me for mentioning it—"“One person is a human being; several are people; many are beasts.” Although this puts it a bit radically, it does contradict the opinion that has developed in the last few centuries, namely that all things state-related will enable us to determine what is right with regard to educating children. And so our school system simply continued to develop in the belief that there was no alternative to having everything spelled out for the school system by the political community.

Now, an independent school is one that makes it possible for the teachers to introduce into the educational system what they consider essential on the immediate basis of their knowledge of the human being and of the world and of their love for children. A non-independent school is one in which the teacher has to ask, “What is prescribed for the first grade? What is prescribed for the second grade? How must the lesson be organized according to law?”

A free school is one in which the teachers’ actions are underlain by a very specific knowledge of how children grow up, of which forces of body and soul are present in them and of which ones must be developed. It is a school in which the teachers can organize what they have to do each day and in each lesson on the basis of this knowledge and of their love for children. People do not have a very strong feeling for how fundamentally different a non-independent school is from an independent school. The real educational abilities of the teachers can develop only in an independent school.

That people actually do not have any real feeling for these things at present is the reason why it is so difficult to continue to make progress with an independent school system. We must not succumb to any illusions in this regard. Just a few hours before leaving to come here, I received a letter informing me that after a long time had been spent working to open a school similar to the Waldorf School in another German city, the request for permission had been turned down. This is a clear sign that the further evolution of our times will not favor an independent school system. This is something I want to ask the parents of our dear schoolchildren to take to heart especially: We must lavish care and attention on this Waldorf School we have fought for, this school in which the independent strength of the faculty will really make the children grow up to be allaround capable and healthy human beings. We must be aware that, given the contemporary prejudices we confront, it will not be easy to get something like a second Waldorf School. At the same time, it should be pointed out that this Waldorf School, which has not yet been in existence for three years, is something that is presently being talked about all over the civilized world. You see that it is nonetheless of significance—think about what I said about the school near London—that a group of people have gotten together to bring a Waldorf School into existence there.

We can also look at this issue from the much broader perspective of the need to do something to restore the position of the essential German character in the world. You can be sure, however, that the significance of this German essence will be recognized only when its spiritual content, above all else, is given its due in the world. This is what people will ask for if they meet the world in the right way. They will become aware of needing it.

For this to happen, we really need to penetrate fully into the depths of this German essence and to become creative on the basis of it. This is evident from something such as the vehement, sometimes tumultuous educational movement that could be experienced at the Shakespeare festival, which showed that there is a need all over the world for new impulses to be made available to the educational system. The impossibility of continuing with the old forms is a concern for all of civilized humanity.

The fact of the matter is, the things that are being fostered in the Waldorf School give us something to say about educational issues that are being brought up all over the world. But we also have almost all of the world’s prejudices against us, and we are increasingly faced with the prospect of having our independence taken away, at least with regard to the lower primary school classes. It is extraordinarily difficult to combat these prejudices, and the Waldorf School can do so only by making its children grow up to be what they can beonly as a result of the independent strength of the faculty.

For this, however, we need an intimate and harmonious collaboration with the parent body. At an earlier parents’ meeting I was able to attend, I pointed out that simply because we are striving for an independent school system, we are dependent on being met with understanding, profound understanding, on the part of the parents. If we have this understanding, we will be able to work properly, and perhaps we will also be able after all to show the true value of what is intended with the Waldorf School.

At that time I emphasized that we must strive to really derive our educational content from an understanding of the being of the child and the child’s bodily nature. Since to observe the child is to observe the human being, it is possible to observe children in this way only if we are striving for an understanding of the human being as a whole, as anthroposophy does. We must say again and again that it is not our intention to introduce anthroposophy into the school. The parents will have no grounds for complaining that we are trying to introduce anthroposophy as a world-view. But although we are avoiding introducing anthroposophy into the school as a world-view, we are striving to apply the pedagogical skill that can come only from anthroposophical training as to how we handle the lessons and treat the children. We have placed the Catholic children at the disposal of the Catholic priest and the Protestant children at the disposal of the Protestant pastor. We have independent religious instruction only for those whose parents are looking for that, and it too is completely voluntary; it is set up only for those children who would otherwise probably not take part in any religious instruction at all. So you see this is not something we stress heavily. Whatever we have to say with respect to our world-view is strictly for adults.

But I would like to say that what anthroposophy can make of people, right down to the skill in their fingertips, applies especially to teachers and educators. In dealing with children and with instructional content, what we should strive for is to have the children find their way quite naturally into everything that is presented to them in school, as a matter of course. We should assess carefully in each instance what is right at a particular stage of childhood.

You know that we do not introduce learning to read and write in the same way that is often used today. When the children begin to learn to write, we develop the shapes of the letters, which are otherwise something foreign to them, out of something the children turn to with inner contentment as a result of some form of artistic activity, of their artistic sense of form. The reason why our children learn to write and read somewhat later is that if we take the nature of the child into account, reading must come after writing.

Those who are accustomed to the old ways of looking at things will object to this, saying that the children here learn to read and write much later than in other schools. But why do children in other schools learn to read and write earlier? Because people do not know what age is good for learning to read and write. We should first ask ourselves whether it is altogether justified to require children to read and write with any degree of fluency by the age of eight.

If we expand on these ways of looking at things, more comprehensive views develop, as we can experience in a strange way: Anyone who knows a lot about Goethe knows that if we had approached him with what is demanded academically of twelve-year-olds today, he would not have been able to do it at that age. He would not have been able to do it even at age sixteen, and yet he still grew up to be the Goethe we know of.

Austria had an important poet, Robert Hamerling.⁵ As a young man, he did not set out to become a poet—that was something his genius did for him. He wanted to be a high school teacher, and he took the teacher certification exam. It is written in his certificate that he demonstrated an extremely good knowledge of Latin and Greek, but that he was not capable of handling the German language well and was thus only fit to teach the lowest class. But he went on to become the most important modern poet of Austria. And he wrote in the German language, not in Slovakian.

Our educational impulses must take their standard from actual life. The essential thing about our method of education is that we keep the child’s whole life in mind; we know that if we present the child with something at age seven or eight, this must be done in such a way that it will grow with the child, so that it will still stay with the person in question at age thirty or forty, and even for the rest of his or her life. You see, the fact of the matter is that the children who can read and write perfectly at age eight are stunted with regard to certain inner emotional impulses that lead to health. They really are stunted. It is a great good fortune for a child to not yet be able to read and write as well at age eight as is expected today. It is a blessing for that child’s bodily and emotional health.

What we need to foster must be derived from the needs of human nature. We must have a subtle understanding of this, and not merely know the right answer. It is easy to stand in front of a class of children and to figure out that this one said something right, but that one said something wrong, and then to correct the wrong thing and make it right. However, there is no real educational activity being practiced in that. There is nothing essential to the human development of a child in having the child do compositions and assignments and then correcting them so the child is convinced that he or she has made mistakes. What is essential is to develop a fine sense for the mistakes the children make. Children make mistakes in hundreds of different ways. Each child makes different mistakes, and if we have a fine sense of how different the children are with regard to the mistakes they make, then we will discover what to do to help them make progress.

Isn't it true that our perspectives on life are all different? A doctor does not have the same perspectives on an illness that a patient has. We cannot ask a patient to fall in love with a particular illness, and yet we can say that a doctor is a good doctor if he or she loves the illness. In our case, it is a question of falling in love, in a certain respect, with the interesting mistakes the children make. We get to know human nature through these mistakes. Excuse me for expressing myself radically, but these radical statements are really necessary. For a teacher, keeping track of mistakes is more interesting than keeping track of what the children do right. Teachers learn a lot from the children’s mistakes.

But what do we need in addition to all this? We also need a strong and active inner love for human beings, for children. This is indispensable for teachers. At this point innumerable questions arise. We are concerned about a particular child’s health of body and soul. We see this child for a few hours a day; for the rest of the time we must have confidence, complete confidence, in the child’s parents. This is why the teachers and educators of our Waldorf School always appeal to this confidence, and why they are so eager to work in harmony with the parents for the well-being of the children. As a rule, this is not something that is aspired to in a non-independent school to anywhere near the same extent; there people stick to observing the rules. That is why the very idea of independence in education often meets with very little understanding today.

In some countries, if you talk about independent schools, people will tell you that while things may be like that in Germany, they do not need to found independent schools because their teachers are already free. Teachers themselves will tell you that. It is astonishing that they respond like that, because we can tell that the people who are answering no longer have any idea that they could feel unfree. They do what they are ordered to do. It does not occur to them that it could happen differently, so they do not even feel that things could be different.

Just think of how different your situation is from other people’s with regard to understanding the Waldorf system of education. Other people have to make an effort to understand when we tell them we want to do things in a certain way because we believe it is the only right way. I believe that as parents of Waldorf School children you can see directly, in the beings that are dear to you, what is being done in the Waldorf School and how the relationship of the entire school to the child is conceived. It would be nice if there would come a time when it would be enough for parents simply to be content with what is being accomplished in an independent system of education. Today, however, all of you, who can see results in your own flesh and blood of how this Waldorf School is trying to work, must become strong and active defenders and promoters of the Waldorf system of education.

We have many other difficulties in addition to this. You see, if we really could live up to our ideals, we would be able to say that according to our insight, we should do this particular thing when the children are six, seven and eight, and this other thing when they are nine, ten, eleven and twelve, and so on. The results would be the best if we were able to do that, but we cannot; in some respects we must accept a compromise, because we cannot deny these children, these human beings who are growing up, the possibility to take their place in life.

So we have decided to educate the children from the time when they first enter primary school up to age nine in a way that is free of outer constraints, but while we are doing what human nature requires, at the same time we will support the children in a way that will enable them to transfer to another school [at the end of that time]. The same applies to age twelve and to age fourteen or fifteen. And if we have the good fortune to be able to continue adding grades, we must also make it possible for the young ladies and gentlemen who complete these grades to enter universities and technical colleges. We must make sure that the children will be able to enter these institutions of higher learning. I think it will be a long time before we are given the possibility of granting graduate or undergraduate degrees. We would accomplish much more if we were able to do that, but for the time being all we can do is to enable first the children and then the young men and women to learn what is required in public life in a way that does not inflict great damage upon them.

We find ourselves in very serious difficulties in this regard. You see, if you assess the situation according to human nature, according to what is good for human beings, then you would say that it is simply terrible for young men and women to be in modern college-preparatory and vocational high schools at the age of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. It estranges them from all of life. We must do what is necessary, whatever we can do, to make sure at least that the body also achieves a degree of skill that makes it fit for life. I often mention that you meet grown men nowadays who are incapable of sewing on a button for themselves if one gets torn off. I say this only by way of example. There are other similar things that people also cannot do, and above all they do not understand anything about the world. Individuals need to stand there in the world with their eyes open so that their hands are free to do whatever is needed. You see, this is why at a certain age we need to introduce the elementary aspects of things like spinning and weaving. Now, however, when students graduate from ordinary schools, they are not tested in weaving and spinning or in other arts that are useful in life, and so we must do these things in addition to all kinds of things that are required for the exam. This means that we must arrange our lessons as economically as possible. There is a special art to this in teaching.

Perhaps I may be permitted to introduce an example that happened to me personally. It was a long time ago. A family had entrusted their children to me for tutoring, and among them was an eleven-year-old boy who had been given up on as far as education was concerned. He was eleven years old, and for my information they showed me a sketchbook in which he had demonstrated his drawing ability. This sketchbook had a gigantic hole in the middle of the first page. He had done nothing but erase; that was all he could do. He had also once taken the test for entry into the first grade, and could do nothing at all. With regard to his other behavior, he often did not eat at the table but went into the kitchen and ate the potato peels, and there were difficulties in many other respects as well. It was a question of accomplishing as much as possible in the shortest possible time. I often had to work for three hours to get the materials together for what I would present to the boy in fifteen minutes. After two years he had progressed to the point where he could enter the Gymnasium. He was a hydrocephalic, with a huge head that steadily became smaller.

I mention this case because it shows what I mean by economy of instruction. Economy of instruction means never spending more time on something with the children than is necessary according to the requirements of physical and mental health. Nowadays it is especially important to practice this economy of instruction because life demands so much. Our Latin and Greek teachers, for example, are in a difficult situation because we have much less time to spend on these things, and yet they still have to be fostered in a way that meets the legitimate demands of cultural life. In all subjects, we must seek the art of never overburdening the children. And I must say that in all these things, we need to be met with understanding on the part of the parents; we need to work together in harmony with the parent body.

Really, the genuine successes that are of the greatest significance for life do not lie in accomplishing something amazing on behalf of one or the other gifted student. Genuine successes lie in strength for life. Thus it is always deeply satisfying to me when it happens that someone says that a certain child should be moved from one class to another so that this or that can be accomplished. The teacher fights for each and every child from time to time. These are real successes that take place within the loving interaction between the faculty and the children. Something can come of this, and things on which such great value is placed, such as whether the children are a little ahead or a little behind, fade into the background in comparison.

We are already being confronted with the fact—again, I would like to put it radically—that we cannot possibly be praised by those who hold the usual opinions about today’s school system, who are coming from these opinions. There is always something wrong in believing that something would be accomplished if people who think like this were to praise us. If that was how things were, if we were praised by today’s school authorities or by people who believe that these authorities are doing the right thing, then we would not have needed to start the Waldorf School at all.

Thus it is a matter of course for us to depend on the parents being in harmony with us and giving their time and attention to a method of education that derives from what is purely human. This is what we need today, and in a social sense, too.

Social issues are not resolved in the way we often imagine today. They are resolved by putting the right people into public life, and this will happen only if people are able to grow up really healthy in body and soul. We can do very little to influence what is specific to an individual, what an individual is capable of learning on the basis of his or her particular abilities, because in order to be of service at all in educating a person to become the best he or she can be—if we had to teach a Goethe, for example—we as teachers would have to be at least the equal of the person we are teaching. We can do nothing about what an individual becomes through his or her own nature; there are other factors determining that. What we can do is to remove obstacles so that individuals find the strength within themselves to live up to their potentials. This is what we can do if we become real educators and if we are supported by our contemporaries.

First and foremost, we can be supported by the parent body. We have found an understanding body of parents. Certainly, what I have to say tonight is filled with a feeling of gratitude. That so many of you have appeared tonight gives me great satisfaction. I hope we will be able to talk about details in the discussion period to follow; our teachers are prepared to answer any questions you may ask. Before that, however, I would still like to point out certain characteristic traits.

Recently the Waldorf faculty and I held a college-level course in Holland.⁶ The afternoon session in which pedagogical issues were discussed was led by Fraulein von Heydebrandt of the Waldorf School.⁷ This was one of the most interesting afternoons because we saw that today’s educational questions are of concern all over the world. Of course we know that we have no right to harp on how wonderful it is that we have come so far; we are not trying to emphasize our accomplishments.

The way things are today, many people recognize the impulse behind our school. What is still lacking, however, is for them to stand energetically behind us so that this cause can win additional support and become more widespread. Of course we realize that the first concern of parents is to have the best for their children. But with things as they are today, the parents should also help us. Going through with this is difficult for us. We need help in every respect; we need the support of an ever growing circle so that we can overcome the prejudice against our method of education. I say the following with a certain reserve; I certainly want to remain convinced that those who are sitting here have done everything they can financially. I am speaking under this assumption so that none of you will think that I want to step on your toes. Nonetheless, the fact remains that if we want to go forward, we need money.

Yes, we need money! Now people are saying, “Where is the idealism in that? What are you anthroposophists doing, telling us you need money and pretending to be idealists?”

Ladies and gentlemen! Idealism does not stand on firm ground if it makes grandiose statements but says, “I am an idealist, and since I am an idealist, I despise my wallet. I do not want to get my fingers dirty; I am much too great an idealist for that!”

It will scarcely be possible to make ideals into reality if people are such great idealists that they are unwilling to get their fingers dirty when it comes to making financial sacrifices. We must also learn to strike the right note in public in suggesting to people that they give us some support in this matter, which is still a great and terrible cause of concern for us.

After all, the Waldorf School is big for a single school; it has enough students. It is almost not possible to maintain an overview any more. This is a concern that has to be taken very seriously. We certainly do not want the school to grow larger in its present circumstances; we are going to give in to the need for physical expansion. But then the number of students will increase, as will the number of teachers. And since teachers cannot live on air, this requires the means to support them.

I am assuming, ladies and gentlemen, that each of you has already done whatever you can. It is now a question of spreading the idea further in order to find the idealists out there. There must be a decision on the part of the parent body to help the Waldorf School with regard to its material basis, or I am afraid that in the near future, if we want to continue to take care of things properly, our worries will become so great that they prevent us from sleeping, and I am not sure that the teachers in the school will be the kind you want to have there if they are no longer able to sleep at night!

Some people may have the feeling that I have been too radical in my choice of some of the things I have pointed out today, but I hope to have been understood on some of these points. I especially hope that I have not been understood merely on details. I would like to be understood on the farreaching issue of our need to be in cordial harmony with the parent body if we are to function effectively in the Waldorf School. T particularly wanted to point out the need for this because it actually already exists to such a great extent, and we will be best able to find possibilities for progress in this area if the groundwork has already been laid.

Out of the details of our aspirations, which can be addressed in the discussion to follow, out of all the details that come up in these parents’ meetings, let us take with us the impulse for cordial harmony among teachers and educators and the parent body. You parents certainly have a profound vested interest in this harmony because you have entrusted the most precious thing you have to the faculty.

Out of this awareness, out of our awareness of the faculty’s responsibility toward what is most precious to the parents who are associated with us, out of this collaboration may the spirit which has showed itself in the Waldorf School to such a satisfying degree continue to flourish. The more this unity thrives, the more this spirit will also grow and thrive. And the more this is the case, the more we will also achieve that other thing, that best of all possible human goals: to educate the young people entrusted to the Waldorf School for their life in human society. These people will need to stand up to the storms of life. If they are capable of finding the right ways of working together with other people, then it will be possible to resolve the individual human and social issues.

From the discussion

A question Is asked about the Abitur:

Dr. Steiner: I myself have only this to say: On the whole, the principle I have already presented applies. Through economy of instruction, we must get to the point where what we can achieve for the children at the most important stages in life will enable them to fit into what is demanded today. We cannot set these standards or decide whether or not we think they are right; we must submit to them. We are not being asked the question of whether or not what the Abiturrequires is justified. This will have to be accomplished through economy, and as of now we are not yet in a position to do this, but I fully believe that it will be possible to achieve this goal, even though it does not yet look like it in the case of the people in question. Our principle, however, is to make the children able to take the exam at the appropriate age. But there are also external difficulties to be overcome; the school must be approached without bias. Naturally, I know that it would be possible for someone to flunk boys or girls even though we had brought them to the point of being able to take the exam. I gave you the example of how it would be easy for me to flunk the commissioners themselves. We are striving to have our students be able to take the exam, regardless of what we think of it. We want our teaching to be in line with real life and not with some eccentric idea. As much as possible, we must try to introduce our students to life in the right way.

Something along these lines is still possible in Central Europe, while in Russia that is no longer the case. We must be glad for what we have. If we introduce it to the children now, more will be possible in the next generation.

I am emphasizing explicitly that we are not crazy characters who say that our children are only allowed to do this thing or that. We will go along with what is asked for in the exams, even if we are not always in agreement with it. Meanwhile, we are still taking everything into account that we deem necessary for the sake of humanity’s salvation.

Question: Would it not be possible to have school only in the mornings?

Dr. Steiner: There is always more than one viewpoint to consider in questions like this, isn't there? It has been said that instruction should take place between seven o'clock and one o'clock. Now let me point out some of the principles involved. In the question-and-answer sessions during my course of lectures at Christmas, the question of fatigue was raised, and I mentioned that the intent of our educational method was to refrain from fragmenting and dissipating the children’s attention by having an hour of religion followed by an hour of zoology and so on. The point is to teach in such a way that the children’s attentiveness can be concentrated. That is why a particular subject is taught for a longer part of the school day and over several weeks on end. This view is derived from specific knowledge of the nature of the child.

It was asked if the children do not get tired. I must draw your attention to the fact that in principle in our way of teaching we do not count on head work at all when dealing with children between seven and twelve years of age. That would be wrong. Instead, we count on the involvement of the rhythmic system and of the emotions connected to the rhythmical system of breathing and circulation. If you think about it, you will realize that people get tired, not through their rhythmic system, but through their head and limb systems. If the heart and lungs were to get tired, they would not be able to be active throughout an entire lifetime. The other systems are the ones that get tired. By counting on the rhythmic system during these years, we do not make the children as tired as they would get otherwise.

Thus, when experimental psychology investigates fatigue and states as a result of its experiments that children are so tired after three quarters of an hour that they need a change, this only proves that the teaching was done in the wrong way, tiring the children unjustifiably. Otherwise, the time limit arrived at would be different. The point is to conduct the lesson in such an artistic way that this kind of fatigue does not set in. We can achieve this only slowly and gradually, because new educational practices along these lines can be developed only gradually.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, it is possible to prevent the children from tiring to a very great extent by teaching in the right way. This is not the case with the teachers, however, because they have to work with their heads. And if we want to do the pedagogically correct thing and keep the instruction in the hands of one person, I would like to know what the teacher would look like who is supposed to teach from seven o'clock in the morning straight through until one in the afternoon. This is the main thing we have to consider. These teachers would be exhausted by ten o’clock if they had been teaching since seven, and it is not a matter of indifference whether or not we would continue to wear them out. That is not desirable, regardless of how much I might wish that the children from out of town would not have to make a two hour trip for one lesson in school. But that is the exception; it is exaggerated. Secondly, there are some things that must simply be accepted for the sake of achieving anything at all. Of course we cannot arrange the lessons for all the children in the way that would be desirable for the ones who live so far out of town. Of course that cannot happen. In such things, therefore, we have to deal with the actual circumstances.

In any case, we have arranged things so that the lessons that address the children in spirit and soul are given in the morning, to the extent that this is feasible. The afternoon is for eurythmy and artistic lessons. Instruction has been integrated into the times of day in a way that corresponds to the children’s age and nature. It would be a mistake to hold school from seven o’clock in the early morning until one in the afternoon, and this mistake would arouse a great deal of discontentment. It would require a complicated and completely different system [of scheduling]. Then, too, I would like to see what would happen if we had the children in the Waldorf School from seven to one and they were left to their own devices for the rest of the day. I would like to see what kind of notes and complaints would come from home because the children were coming back from their afternoons with all kinds of bad behavior. We would have to deal with both sleepiness and bad manners on the part of the children. Add that to the sleepiness of the teachers, and those notes would be full of bad things.

There are several points of view to be considered. I appeal to you to consider as a matter of course that since we could not avoid having school in session in the afternoon, the reasons we took into account took precedence.

A father asks that the students taking the Abitur be tested by a committee of Waldorf teachers.

Dr. Steiner: This is actually not an issue of education, and our work is with educational impulses. The point for us is doing what I mentioned—taking into account what is in accordance with the nature of the human being and making sure that the children are not forcibly excluded from actual life. Given the way things are, there may be certain possibilities for us in the first years. But I ask you to consider that we are exposed to certain risks in assessing whether or not a child will be able to pass the exam.

What do you think would happen if we were to guarantee that no boy or girl who graduates from this school would flunk the exam? In some cases, the parents have anticipated that the child would have difficulties with the exam and sent him or her to us for that very reason.

As teachers attempting what I have indicated, we will continue to make progress toward the possibility of the children passing the exam. Those who do not wish us well, however, would be able to prove systematically that this is not the case.

It is not up to us to make sure that an officially certified commissioner is present at the exam. If the parents want the exam to be administered by Waldorf teachers, then the parents would have to take the initiative to bring this about. It is not something that is inherent in Waldorf education. This is an issue of opportunity that would also have to be resolved as the opportunity presents itself, and perhaps by the parents. It is not that we want to be excluded from issuing valid diplomas, it is only that we will have to look at the matter from the educational point of view. I would like someone to prove to me that it makes sense from an educational point of view to subject the students to a school-leaving exam when you have been together with them for years. I would like someone to prove that it makes sense. We know what we have to say about each of our students when they have reached school-leaving age. If this needs to be officially documented for other reasons, then that can happen, but it is not actually an educational issue. Those who have experience in this field know that we can tell what a student is fit for better without exams than with them. We have no reason to work toward the goal of being allowed to administer the exams because this does not follow naturally from what underlies our educational methods.

A question is asked about discipline and the attitude of respect toward the teachers.

Dr. Steiner: If you ask whether respect exists wherever Waldorf pedagogy is notbeing applied... It is extremely important to have devotion or respect or love for the teachers come about in a natural way. Otherwise it is worth nothing. Enforced respect, respect that is laid down in the school’s regulations, so to speak, is of no value in the development of an individual. It is our experience that when children are brought up in a way that allows their own being to set the standards, they are most likely to respect their teachers. This is no grounds for complaint. Of course it cannot be denied that some individual instances do not exactly give evidence of respect. It all depends on how much the respect that grows out of love is worth, and how much more the other kind is worth if it is only demonstrated to the teachers’ face and not so much when they turn their backs. You must not imagine this as a situation in which each child does what he or she wants. It is a case of the children developing ever greater confidence in the faculty.

The progress in this particular respect is quite extraordinary. Anyone who is in a position to make the comparison will find that our progress with regard to discipline has been extraordinarily great in the past two years. The fact of the matter is that when we first got the children here, we had to think about how we would maintain discipline and so on. Now we have arrived at quite a different standpoint, actually. We have accomplished the most by having the relationship between teacher and child be a natural one. There is a great difference between how discipline is maintained at present and the situation a year and a half ago.

These things cannot be judged from a point of view that is brought in from outside; you must consider the Waldorf School itself. Respect cannot be beaten into someone—by which I do not mean to say that anything else can be. Respect must be won in a different way. In this regard, your apprehensions are understandable, but it is also necessary to break the habit of apprehension and look more closely at the results that are becoming evident in the Waldorf School.

If our school is still in existence after another couple of years, we will talk again about whether we have reached the point where our graduates can take the exams. Let us discuss it then. We are convinced that in principle this should be possible. By then we will also be convinced that there was no reason to fear that our method of education would bring about what is so very evident in the schools where compulsion is strongest, where I have seen in both the lowest and highest grades that things are in a bad way when it comes to respect. I do not think that we can take it as gospel that respect only thrives where there is compulsion in education, and that meanwhile our children are thumbing their noses behind their teachers” backs. If you deal with a child in the right way with a friendly warning, that is better than a box on the ear.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner was invited to address the conference of the “Organization for New Ideals in Education” in Stratford-on-Avon, England, April 1922. He spoke on “Drama and its Relationship to Education” and “Shakespeare and the New Ideals.” Included in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 1, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995 [Erziehungs- und Unferrichtsmethoden auf anthroposophischer Grundlage, GA 304, Dornach, 1979.]
• 2. Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1986 [Die gesunde Entwickelung des Menschenwesens],16 lectures given in Dornach, 1921-22, GA 303, Dornach, 1978.
• 3. Known at that time as the Priory School, this is now the New School in Kings Langley.
• 4. Peter Rosegger, 1843-1918, Austrian teller of folk tales.
• 5. Robert Hamerling, 1830-1889.
• 6. Six lectures in The Hague, April 7-12, 1922. See Die Bedeutung der Anthroposophie im Geistesleben der Gegenwart, Dornach 1957.
• 7. Caroline von Heydebrandt, 1886-1938.

This lecture is the ninth of sixteen lectures from the lecture series entitled Spiritual Relationships within the Human Organism. It is also known as Knowledge of Higher Worlds.

There is no doubt that in the present time a great number of people is longing to know something about the spiritual, supersensible worlds and even scientific men have recently made the attempt to discover paths enabling them to gain knowledge of the supersensible world. But a modern person is continually hampered in all these attempts to penetrate into the supersensible world by the obstacle of judgments based upon modern science, by the authority of modern science. But when one confronts sources out of which it might be possible to draw facts concerning the supersensible world, the following view is generally advanced; It is not possible to obtain exact knowledge of the supersensible worlds, the kind of knowledge which we are accustomed to have in modern science, for all these facts concerning the supersensible worlds do not stand the test.

But the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, which I shall take the liberty to explain to you now and in the following days, strives to reach an exact, a really exact knowledge of the supersensible world. This Knowledge is not “exact” in the meaning that experiments have to be made as is the case in modern science which deals with the external world, but exact spiritual knowledge consists in the fact that inner soul capacities of the human being which in ordinary life and in ordinary science only exist in a dormant state are developed in such a way that in the course, of this development the cle.ar conscious faculties remain throughout in full activity, as they do in exact modern science. Whereas in exact modern science we maintain the state of consciousness which we have in ordinary life and strictly observe the scientific methods while we investigate the external world, the spiritual science of Anthroposophy adopts a different attitude, for we submit to what p might designate as intellectual modesty and say to ourselves; Once upon a time we were children and we then had capacities which did not in the least approach those which we now possess as adults, faculties which we gained through education or through life itself. Even as from childhood onwards we developed certain capacities which we did not have before, so in a grown-up person there are certain dormant capacities which slumber within him in the same way in which his present capacities slumbered within his soul during childhood. These slumbering capacities may be drawn out of the soul with the aid of certain methods.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy, in the meaning of these lectures, must draw these slumbering capacities out of the human soul in such a way that the methods applied to our development before we attain to supersensible knowledge, manifest every stage of our development, so that it follows a definite course. We therefore prepare ourselves for the perception of the higher worlds by applying first of all these preparatory measures to our own development, measures which in themselves constitute an exact method. As already explained to you in this same hall during my last lectures, an exact clairvoyance can therefore be reached along this path. Clairvoyance is gained in an exact way, whereas in ordinary science, with the aid of the ordinary powers of cognition, we can investigate Nature in an exact way.

To-day I shall not explain in detail how this exact clairvoyance can be acquired, but I shall speak of this more fully in due course. In my last lectures, however, I already spoke to you of the methods by which it is possible to gain exact clairvoyance. Further information on these methods may be obtained above all from the book that is now translated into English: “THE WAY OF INITIATION.”

I wish to point out to you to-day why it is not possible in ordinary life to penetrate into the higher worlds. This is denied to modern people chiefly because they are able to perceive the world only in the present moment. Through our eyes we can only perceive the world and its phenomena in the present moment/. Through our ears we can only hear tones in the present moment. This apples to each sensory organ. To begin with, everything which constitutes our past earthly existence can only be gathered by memory, that is to say, in the form of shadowy thoughts. Compare how living and real were your experiences ten years ago, and how pale and shadowy are the thoughts by which you remember them to-day.

To our ordinary consciousness, everything which transcends the present moment appears in such a form that it can only live in shadowy memories. But these shadowy memories can be stimulated to a higher life. This is possible by methods which, as already stated, will not be explained in detail to-day, by methods which consist of meditation in thought, of concentration upon thoughts, of self-training, and so forth.

Those who apply these methods and thus learn to live in thought just as intensively as they ordinarily live in their sense-impressions, acquire a certain faculty which consists in the fact that they are able to survey the world in a way which transcends the present moment. Such exercises which lead to the result that the world can be observed beyond the present moment, must however be made for a long time, and the time will be in accordance with the individual predisposition of each person, and they must consist of a careful system, that is to say, of exact meditation and concentration. Particularly in our days some people bring with them when they are born capacities which can be developed in this way. That is to say, such capacities are not evident immediately after birth in the form which they may take on afterwards, but at a certain moment of life they emerge from man's inner being and then we know that they could not have been acquired in the ordinary course of existence unless they had been brought into life through birth. These capacities reveal themselves in the fact that we can live in the world of thoughts in the same way in which we ordinarily live in the physical world through our physical body.

Do not take such a statement too lightly. Consider that the existence which we ascribe to ourselves is due to the fact that we are able to take part in the existence of the physical world through our own experience. If we reach the stage in which we are able to unfold an inner life independently of the impressions which we obtain through our eyes, our ears, and our other sense-organs, if we unfold this life which is inwardly just as intensive as the ordinary life of the senses and which does not only weave in shadowy thoughts but in inner living thoughts, so that these are experienced just as livingly as we ordinarily experience sense-impressions we gain the certainty of a second form of existence, we experience a new kind of self-consciousness.

We experience what I might designate as an awakening not outside the body, but within our inner self. A new life awakens within us, although our physical body is just as quiet and inert as when we are asleep in ordinary life, with the senses closed to the impressions which come from outside.

If we cast a glance into our inner self, we find that in ordinary life we are only aware of what we take in through our senses. Through direct perception we know nothing whatever of our own inner being. Our ordinary state of consciousness does not enable us to look into our inner organisation, but when we acquire the new kind or self-consciousness which lives in the sphere of pure thinking, we learn to look into our inner being in the same way in which we ordinarily look out into the physical world.

We then have more or less the following experience: In ordinary life, when we look out info our world, there must be the light of the sun or some other light shedding its rays upon the objects in our environment. This light, which is outside, enables us to perceive the external objects. When we gain consciousness of our inner being in this second state of existence within the activity of pure thought, which is however objectively real with the same intensity, and wealth of colour as the ordinary sense-perceptions, we then feel as it were (not only “as it were,” but in a real sense, meant spiritually of course), we feel an inner light, the existence of a light which sheds its rays upon our own inner being, in the same way in which external lights ordinarily illumine the objects in our environment.

For this reason, the state of human consciousness and experience which we thus acquire, may be designated as a form of clairvoyance. This clairvoyance which exists within the awakened spiritual self-consciousness at first gives rise to a new capacity; We are able to enter again, to live through again, every moment experienced during our earthly existence.

For example, it is quite possible to have the following experience: We were once eighteen years old. When we were eighteen, we experienced this or that thing. Now we do not only remember these experiences, but we live through them again, in a more or less strong and intensive way. We are once more what we were a “Time-body,” in contrast to the spatial physical body, which contains the sense-organs.

This Time-body appears all at once. We do not experience it in successive moments, but it is there all at once. It is there before us, in its inner mobility. We survey our own being within our whole past existence on earth, we survey our whole life, which we ordinarily review in memory, which we can ordinarily survey only in the form of pale thoughts, light falls upon our whole earthly life, but so that we stand within it and can live through every moment of our existence.

If we experience this inner illumination, we know that we do not only have a physical body, a spatial body. We then learn to know that the human being also has a second body, which is less substantial than the physical body, and which is really woven out of the images of our earthly, life. These images, however, are more than pictures, for they are forces which mould our earthly existence in a creative way. They form our physical organism and shape our activities. We thus learn to know of the existence of a second human being within us.

This second human being that now appears to us, is perceived in such a way that it grows aware of its existence. If becomes conscious of itself, even as the physical spatial body is aware of its existence within a physical body, it becomes conscious of its existence within a finer, I might say more etheric world, within a world which is filled with light. The world manifests itself to us in a second form of existence and reveals finer, more etheric shapes. For at the foundation of everything physical lie these finer more etheric forms, which can be perceived in this way.

We then have the strange experience that everything which we experience through this finer body can only be retained for a short time. Generally speaking, people who have acquired exact clairvoyance and can therefore shed light upon their etheric body, or the body of formative forces, as it can also be designated, perceive, the etheric aspect of the world, the etheric part of their own being. At the same time however, they must admit that these impressions vanish very quickly. They cannot be retained. A kind of fear then takes hold of us, and we wish to return as quickly as possible to the perceptions of the physical body, in order to feel an inner sense of firmness as human beings, as human personalities.

When we experience our own SELF within the etheric body, we also experience things pertaining to the higher world, we experience the etheric aspect of the higher world. And at the same time, we discover how fleeting these impressions are, for we cannot retain them for long; we can only retain them by seeking some kind of support.

Let me now give you an example showing you the kind of aid which I must draw in, in order to prevent these etheric impressions from vanishing too quickly. Whenever such impressions arise, I do not only endeavour to see them, but I also try to write them down, so that the activity, which thus sets in, does not only come from the soul's abstract capacities, but is held fast through the act of writing down the impressions. It is not important at all to read these notes afterwards; the essential thing is that a stronger activity should flow into the one which is, to begin with, a purely etheric activity.

By doing this, we pour, as it were, into our ordinary human capacities something which is immensely evanescent and liquid and which vanishes very quickly. This is not done unconsciously, as in the case of a medium, but with full consciousness. We pour our etheric experiences into our ordinary bodily faculties, and are thus able to retain these impressions.

This also enables us to understand something very important: We can now understand how a supersensible etheric world (we shall speak of other supersensible worlds in due course) can be retained. It is a supersensible, etheric world which comprises our own being, the course of our own life and the etheric part of Nature which reaches as far as the starry spheres. We learn to know this etheric world. And we learn to experience our own being within this etheric world, and at the same time we learn to know that unless we come down into the physical body it is impossible to retain the etheric world longer than two or three days at the most. If our clairvoyant faculties are highly developed, the etheric world can be retained for two or three days.

Since certain things, of which I shall speak presently, enable us to have this survey as modern initiates, we are able to form a judgment of what we thus, retain within our etheric body, or within the body of formative forces, without the support of our ordinary bodily capacities. It is the same survey which we obtain from the standpoint of a higher consciousness of self when we pass through the portal of death, after having cast aside the physical bone which decays. But for the reasons stated above, also this post-mortem survey cannot be retained in human consciousness longer than two or three days after death.

The development of an exact clairvoyance thus makes us experience the first conditions which arise after death. We experience them by learning to know them in advance, in a fully conscious state.

Every human being who sheds his physical body when passing through the portal of death, goes through the experiences which an initiate has in advance in a fully conscious state. But the human being would not continue to be conscious (why he has a consciousness after death, in spite of it all, will be explained afterwards) he would have no consciousness throughout the time in which higher knowledge enables him to retain his etheric body, or the body of formative forces, that is to say for two or three days.

Within his etheric body the human being can therefore be conscious of the etheric world for two or three days after death. Then he sheds this consciousness. He feels how the etheric body falls away from him, as it were, in the same way in which his physical body first fell away from him; he feels that it is now necessary to pass over to a new state of consciousness in order to continue to live consciously after death as a human being.

What I have now described to you as the first moments, as it were, after death (for in the face of the life of the cosmos these are only the first moments) can be retained by those who have acquired the above-mentioned capacity to look into the higher worlds. They experience in advance what otherwise takes place only after death. When such a strong consciousness of Self is acquired, so that the support of the physical body is no longer needed, these first moments after death can be experienced in advance within this intensified state of consciousness.

We can then shed light upon our higher existence, and this enables us to recognise within us that light which during the first two or three days after death sheds its rays upon a world which differs from our ordinary physical environment, which we perceive through our senses during our earthly existence between birth and death.

The experiences which follow these first days after death will be explained when the first part of this lecture has been translated.

The inner illumination described to you just now is needed in order to survey the supersensible part of life's course on earth, which, in its character form, continues a few days after death, as already explained. The spiritual light which sheds its rays into man's inner being must be kindled within us. This enables us to go beyond the stage in which we only live in the perceptions of the present moment transmitted by our sense-organs.

If we wish to gain further knowledge of the super-sensible world, not only the perceptive state of consciousness in life should undergo a transformation, but also life itself. Ordinary life generally consists of a state of existence enclosed within our physical spatial body. The boundaries of our skin are at the same time the boundaries of our existence. Our life reaches as far as the boundaries of our body. When we live within this state of consciousness we cannot go beyond that sphere of knowledge of the higher worlds which has been described so far. When we gain knowledge of the higher worlds, we can only transcend our ordinary experiences by acquiring a form of experience which is not closed in by our spatial body, but which participates in the life of the whole world which constitutes our environment in ordinary life.

It is possible to participate in the lit ... of the universe when we gain knowledge of the higher worlds. As already stated, I shall only give a few indications concerning the methods of a modern initiate which enable him to gain an exact knowledge of the higher worlds. Everything else may be found in my book “INITIATION.”

When we acquire the capacity to live not only within a second form of existence that consists in a life of thought still enclosed within the spatial body, but when we acquire the capacity to live outside our body, through the fact that we do not only allow certain thoughts to live intensively within our consciousness, but through the fact that we can also eliminate these thoughts from our consciousness by systematic exercise, we gain this new state of consciousness enabling us to have experiences outside the body. Let me now give you an easy example.

Let us suppose that we are contemplating a crystal. This crystal is there before us, because we see it with our eyes. A person who only wishes to become a medium or to reach a kind of hypnotic condition will stare at this crystal until a dulled state of consciousness arises. But the spiritual science of Anthroposophy has nothing to do with such things. It must draw in quite different exercises. When we look at a crystal, Anthroposophy finally leads us to the point of turning away our attention from the crystal, of abstracting our attention from it in the same way in which we generally abstract our attention from thoughts. We therefore have before us a crystal, but this crystal teaches us to look through it psychically, not physically, so that we do not use our eyes for this kind of contemplation, although our eyes are wide open. This psychical knowledge arises through the fact that we eliminate the crystal from our vision. Such exercises can also be done by eliminating a colour which we have before us, so that we no longer see it, although it is still there before us.

In this way we can above all do exercises consisting in the elimination of thoughts that rise up in the present moment through external impressions. Or we can eliminate thoughts which we have had in some past moment of our life and that now rise up in the form of memories; we eliminate such thoughts, we throw them out of our consciousness, so as to bring about a state of mind which only consists of a waking consciousness and which excludes every impression coming from the external world.

By doing such exercises we discover within us the capacity to transcend the boundaries of our spatial body, so that we no longer live within these boundaries. In that case we participate in the life of the whole world which we ordinarily perceive as our environment from the limited aspect of its physical phenomena.

This gives rise above all to something which can be compared with a recollection of that state of existence in which we live when we are asleep, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, but it is a recollection which rises up in a completely clear state of consciousness. Even as in our ordinary perceptions we are limited to the present moment, so in our ordinary life we are limited to the experiences which we always have during our waking state of consciousness.

Consider the fact that whenever you remember some portion of your life, the experiences which you have during the hours of sleep remain blanks in your ordinary consciousness. All the soul-experiences from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up do not rise up in your memory; in reality, memory is therefore an interrupted stream. But we do not always notice this.

All the experiences of the soul from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up confront our awakened higher consciousness as if they were intensified memories. This awakened consciousness arises through the fact that the human being can live consciously outside his body. This leads us to the second stage of knowledge in the supersensible worlds; we can, to begin with, perceive what our soul passes through when our body is in a state of repose, when it has no perceptions and no manifestations of the will, as if the soul were no longer contained within it.

We are thus able to remember in ordinary life our experiences outside the physical body, the experiences which we have whenever we go to sleep, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. But we should bear in mind that these experiences must be judged in the right way. We learn to know the experiences of the soul outside the body, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. This can only be perceived if we develop a state of consciousness, a condition of existence outside our body.

At this point we do not only recognise the thing which is illumined, as it were, by that inner light which also sheds its rays over our “time-body” as already explained to you, but within our daytime memory, that has risen to this stage of exact clairvoyance of a higher kind, we now learn to know our real experiences, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. To begin with, however, these experiences are rather surprising. Even as in ordinary life we live within our ordinary consciousness, within our physical body, and know that we have within us the lungs, the heart, etc., so we have a cosmic, not a personal human state of consciousness, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. Although this may sound paradoxical, clairvoyant knowledge enables us to perceive that this cosmic state of consciousness contains the living images of the planetary worlds, of the starry worlds. We feel that we live within the universal life of the cosmos. We contemplate the world, as it were, from the standpoint of this universal experience within the cosmos.

Because we now experience within us what ordinarily exists in our environment, we pass through everything that we experienced during our physical life from the moment in which we last woke up to the moment in which we fell asleep; we live backwards through all these experiences, in the real form in which we experienced them during our waking life.

For example, if we live through an ordinary day and then sleep during the night, the experiences which we had just before going to sleep will be lived through backwards; then come the experiences of the afternoon, and throughout the night we live backwards through our daytime existence.

As stated, in exact clairvoyance it is a question of acquiring this retrospective memory within our ordinary daytime consciousness. Even as our ordinary memory can recall experiences of many years ago in our daytime consciousness, so exact clairvoyance enables us to have this retrospective experience of our daytime existence. This exact clairvoyance therefore constitutes a kind of extended memory. We look back upon the experiences which we have when we are asleep. We know that when we are asleep, we have experiences outside the physical, spatial body, we know that we live in a real world, in an essential world, which contains, as it were, within its consciousness an image of the whole universe, and we know that within this universal essence we live backwards through our daytime life.

We then discern that within this retrospective experience our daytime-existence does not last as long as it does here in the physical world. When we investigate this supersensible sphere, that is to say, when we learn to know these things better and better by systematic practice, we gradually recognise that this retrospective experience is three times faster than the physical experience within our ordinary consciousness. During his sleeping life which lasts one third of his waking life, a person who is awake two thirds of his time and asleep one third of his time, also passes through the experiences which he has during the two thirds which constitute his physical existence. We therefore learn to know a life which we develop outside our body and which takes its course backwards with threefold speed.

When by exact clairvoyance we recollect our sleeping life of the night during the ordinary life of the day, we also know that this retrospective experience of sleep has no meaning of its own What exact clairvoyance can call up within our ordinary daytime consciousness is like a memory. But the experiences of sleep which we are thus able to remember, reveal at the same time that they do not have a meaning in themselves, but that they point to something which lies in the future.

This can be explained as follows: If you ask your selves; How do I judge the memory of an experience which I had twenty years ago? you will reply: I experience it like a shadowy thought. Through its very essence, however, this memory offers the guarantee that, we do not have before us an empty fantasy, but the image of something which we really experienced in the past during the course of earthly life. Even as memory in itself guarantees that it refers to something which really existed in the past, so the experiences of the night upon which we look back contain the guarantee that they have no meaning in themselves but point to something which lies in the future.

In regard to memory it is not necessary to prove that it refers to something past. Similarly, when we acquire exact clairvoyance it is just as little necessary to prove that the night-experiences which we survey are not fancies that arise out of the present, moment, for they show in an evident manner that they are related with man's future, with that moment in the future when the human being lays aside his physical body through death, in the same way in which he lays it aside symbolically through exact clairvoyance.

We thus learn to know the experiences of the human being after death, when he has absolved the three days of which we have spoken. Indeed, this process resembling memory also teaches us to recognise, the importance of the two or three days after death, when we have the feeling as if we lived within ä universal consciousness, within a cosmic consciousness, when we survey our etheric being once more from the aspect of the cosmos and look back upon our experiences during our past earthly life. We then learn to know the experiences which follow this stage of existence, namely we learn to know that the event of death is followed by a life which takes its course three times faster than earthly life. It is the same thing which we learned to know by contemplating the experiences which we have at night, when we are asleep.

We know that the contemplation of our etheric part, which only lasts a short time after death, is followed by a life that lasts twenty, thirty years, or even less, according to the age reached during our life on earth. Approximately—for all these things are approximate—this life after death takes its course three times faster than our earthly life. If a person has, for example, reached the age of thirty, he will pass through the existence referred to above three times faster, that is to say, in ten years. If a person has reached the age of sixty years, he will after death live backwards through his earthly life in twenty years;—but everything must be taken approximately.

We perceive all this by exact clairvoyance in the same way in which we perceive past things through memory. We thus learn to know that death is followed by a supersensible life, by a life in the supersensible world, which consists of a retrospective experience of our whole earthly life. Each night we pass through the preceding day. After death we pass through our whole preceding life retrospectively. We once more pass through every experience of our earthly life. By living again through all these things experienced during our earthly life, by passing through them spiritually, we acquire a right judgment of our own moral value.

During the time through which we pass after death we acquire, as it were, a consciousness of our moral personality, of our moral value, in the same way in which here on earth we are conscious of our existence within a body of flesh and blood. After death we live within that part which constituted our moral essence here on earth. By passing once more through all these things in a reversed order, so that the development of a moral judgment is no longer handicapped by our instincts, impulses and passions—for we now survey them spiritually—we learn to acquire a right and true judgment of our own moral quality.

In order to acquire this judgment, we must pass through the length of time of which we have spoken just now. When we have absolved this length of time after death, our inner moral life begins to vanish, the retrospective memory of our moral value on earth disappears, and we must proceed further through the spiritual worlds, equipped with another state of consciousness, which can also be recognised through exact clairvoyance.

This does not only entail that we should live outside our spatial body, but within a state of consciousness which completely differs from the consciousness which we have here, in the physical world. We then perceive that the living experience of our moral worth, which we acquired by passing through one third of the time which constituted our earthly life, is followed by a supersensible life, by a spiritual life. And we learn to know this life. It is a new form of existence, a purely spiritual life. But in order to know it, exact clairvoyance must be able to rise from the ordinary consciousness to a higher state, to a pure state of consciousness, so that it is fully able to recognise this higher state of consciousness.

I have tried to give you a description of two conditions after death. The description of the third condition of existence will follow, when the above has been translated.

If you consider this retrospective experience described just now, which we have when we are asleep, you will see that this is an experience which the human being has outside his physical, spatial body—he is, as it were, outside himself, by the side of his own self,—but this existence is, I might say, of such a kind that one cannot move in it. Essentially speaking, we then reverse the actions which we carried out during our ordinary daytime consciousness. Even a person who attains supersensible insight into these experiences by exact clairvoyance, in the manner explained to you, feels as if he were a captive in a world which he is able to recall in the clear, daytime consciousness of clairvoyance, but in which he cannot move about, for he is chained and fettered in it.

The third condition of higher knowledge and of higher life which we must attain, is therefore the capacity to move about freely in the spiritual world. Otherwise it is impossible to gain knowledge of the purely spiritual, supersensible state of consciousness.

In addition to exact clairvoyance we must acquire what I designate as ideal magic, but this is to be clearly distinguished from the wrong kind of magic which takes on external forms and which is connected with a great deal of charlatanism. The ideal magic of which I intend to speak is to be clearly distinguished from this charlatanism.

By ideal magic I understand the following:

When we survey our life with our ordinary consciousness, we perceive that in a certain sense we underwent a change with the years and decades that passed by. Though slowly, our habits gradually changed. We acquired certain capacities and certain others disappeared. One who observes himself honestly in regard to certain capacities pertaining to his earthly life can say that whenever he acquired a new capacity he became a different person. This is how life transforms us. We completely surrender to life and life educates and trains us and develops the configuration of our soul.

But those who wish to enter the supersensible world with full knowledge—in other words, those who wish to acquire ideal magic must not only intensify thought, as described, so that it enables them to recognise a second form of their existence. But they must also emancipate their will from the physical body on which it depends in ordinary life. We can only activate our will through the fact that we use our physical body, our legs, our arms, our instruments of speech. The physical body is the foundation of our volitional life.

The following can be done, and this has to be done quite systematically by those spiritual investigators who wish to attain to ideal magic in addition to exact clairvoyance. Such a strong will-power should be unfolded, that at a certain moment of life they can say to themselves: I must lose a certain habit and my soul must assume a new habit.

When we apply our will-power strongly in order to change certain forms of experience completely, a few years may sometimes be needed for this—but it can be done. We can be educated as it were not only by life itself, through the means of the physical body, but we ourselves can take in hand this education, this self-training.

Such strong exercises of the will, which are also described in the above-mentioned books, lead those who wish to be initiates in the modern meaning, to new experiences besides those that imply the retrospection of our daytime experiences during sleep.

It is then possible to develop states of consciousness which are not those of sleep, but which are lived through in full consciousness and which nevertheless render it possible to do something and to move about while one is asleep, so that one is not only in a passive state as is ordinarily the case when one is outside the body in the spiritual world, but one is able to act in it, one can be active in the spiritual world. Otherwise one will not be able to progress during the condition of sleeping.

Those who become modern initiates in this meaning are also active within their human being during their sleeping condition; they carry this activity also into the existence which takes its course from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. If the will is thus carried into the human being during the condition of sleep, when the human being lives outside his body, an entirely new state of consciousness can be developed: a consciousness which is really able to perceive what we pass through during the time which follows the post-mortem period that has just been described.

There, this new state of consciousness really enables us to look into our human existence after our earthly life, in the same way in which we look into our prenatal human existence. We then perceive that we pass through an existence which takes its course within a spiritual world, even as our physical-earthly existence takes its course within a physical world. We learn to know our purely spiritual essence within a spiritual world, even as here upon the earth we learn to know our physical body within a physical world. We then obtain the possibility to judge how long this life may last, which constitutes as it were the epoch of moral valuation, as described above!

If through ideal magic we thus carry the will into our soul-life, we gain knowledge of this adult state of consciousness and we learn to compare it in the right way with the dull state of consciousness which we had at the beginning of our earthly life, as infants.

You know that through our ordinary consciousness we cannot remember the first years of our infancy. There we live in a kind of dull consciousness and we enter the world in a kind of sleep. As adults our consciousness is intensive and clear in comparison with this dull, dark consciousness into which we look back and which we had at the beginning of our earthly life.

Those who ascend to ideal magic in the manner described, learn to know the difference between the ordinary waking consciousness of an adult and the dull consciousness of an infant. They learn to know, as it were, that they rise by stages from the dull consciousness of infancy to the clearer consciousness which they have as adults.

The connection which they discover between the child's dreaming consciousness and the consciousness of an adult, teaches them to judge the other connection which exists between the ordinary consciousness of an adult and that illumined consciousness which contains not only exact clairvoyance, but also ideal magic, a consciousness which enables them to move about freely in the spiritual world.

I might say that we learn to move about freely in the spiritual world in the same way in which we learned to move about freely with our physical body in our physical existence on earth, as we passed over from the helpless state of childhood to this more emancipated state. In addition to the connection which exists between the consciousness of early childhood and our ordinary consciousness, we thus learn to know another connection which exists between our adult state of consciousness and the highest purely spiritual state of consciousness.

But this also enables us to know that in the post-earthly life after death we are spiritual beings among spiritual beings; we work together with these spiritual beings and at the same time learn to judge how long this spiritual existence among them will last.

I must again bring in the example of an ordinary experience which we remember. We now realise that even as a memory contains a past reality, so the experiences which we now have contain the right judgment of the fact that in the initiate's higher consciousness there are not only things which have a significance for our earthly life, but things which pertain to the life after death, when we live as a spiritual being among spiritual beings. We also learn to know what connection there is between the purely spiritual life and the earthly life through which we passed between birth and death.

When an initiate looks back upon his earliest childhood, he knows that the older he grows, the easier it will be for him to look into the spiritual world. To be sure there are some people who are comparatively young and who possess the capacity to look into the spiritual world. But this vision gains in exactness and clearness with every year that passes. As we grow older we are more and more capable to pass over into that other state of consciousness. This shows us the relation which exists between the different states of consciousness.

We learn to know the following; We have, for instance, reached the age of forty years, but we are only able to remember our life as far as the third or fourth year. We study the conditions and realise how much more we have at the age of forty, than during the unconscious, dreamlike state of consciousness which we have in childhood. We learn to recognise that the life after death is longer to the same extent as our earthly life is longer than our dreamlike childhood existence; the life after death lasts for many centuries.

After our retrospective experience of a moral character we therefore enter a purely spiritual life, where man is spirit among spirits. This is a life which lasts for centuries. During this spiritual existence the human being faces tasks which pertain to the spiritual world, even as here, during his earthly existence, he faces tasks which pertain to the physical world.

To exact clairvoyance, which is supported, I might say, by ideal magic, or by the capacity to move about freely in the spiritual world, these tasks become manifest through the fact that from the essence of the spiritual world in which we live after death we extract all the forces which then lead us on to a new life on earth. From the very outset of our existence after death, this new life on earth confronts us as a goal, as an aim which we always have before us. And the earthly existence within the body of a human being, which is a real microcosm, is the result of a powerful experience which we have, in the spiritual world after death.

You see, when we speak of a germ here in the physical world, this germ is small and gradually unfolds itself, until it becomes a large tree or a large animal. I might also speak of a spiritual germ which develops after our physical life on earth, after death. Out of the spiritual forces of the universe the human being develops with the aid of the spiritual Beings, a spiritual germ for his next life on earth. This elaboration does not consist in a repetition of his earthly life, but it contains activities and essential forces which are far greater to be sure than anything which can be experienced on earth. During our post-earthly existence, our first experience in the spiritual world is this preparation of our future earthly life, upon the foundation of experiences which we can only have in the spiritual world.

In addition, we have the cosmic consciousness, of which I have spoken. Through the fact that such a cosmic consciousness arises in one human being and also in other human beings ... indeed, it exists every night, though we pass through it in a dull state which is no real consciousness, but, if I may use the paradoxical expression, an unconscious consciousness ... through this fact the human beings live not only as spiritual beings together with other spiritual beings who never come down to the earth, but who dwell in the purely spiritual world, but they also live together with all the souls who are either incarnated in physical bodies, or who have also passed through the portal of death and consequently have the same experiences: the cosmic state of consciousness which is common to them all.

The threads which were spun here on earth from soul to soul, in the family or in other human relationships, the connections which we made while living within a physical body, these threads and all the ties upon the physical plane are now laid aside. We lay aside everything which we experienced as lovers or friends, or in connection with human beings otherwise closely connected with us, we lay aside these experiences which we had through our physical body, in the same way in which we lay aside the physical body when we enter the spiritual world. But family ties, friendships, loves which we experienced here on earth continue spiritually beyond the portal of death. They become spiritual experiences which build-up our next earthly life. We do not work alone, but during the time in which we pass through the moral valuation if our past life we work together with the human souls who were dear to us here on earth.

Through exact clairvoyance and ideal magic these facts appear as something which is not subjected to faith, but as something which constitutes real knowledge. They are facts which penetrate into our direct vision. Indeed, we may say: Here in the physical world a gulf separates one human soul from the other, no matter now dearly they may love each other, for they can only meet within their bodies and they can only cultivate relations which are determined by the fact that they live within physical bodies.

When we live in the spiritual world, the physical body that belongs to a beloved person here on earth no longer constitutes an obstacle and no longer renders it difficult for us to live together with the other soul. Even as the vision of the spiritual world entails the capacity to look right through earthly objects, as already described to you, so a human being who has passed through the portal of death can commune with the souls whom he left behind upon the earth, he can have intercourse with them by passing right through their bodies. All those who were dear to him are experienced by him as living souls, even while they are still living upon the earth, until the moment when they too pass through the portal of death.

I wished to speak to you first of all of these things, as an introduction to the three lectures on exact clairvoyance and ideal magic, for such truths can give us an insight into the real, supersensible life of the human being. I wished to show you that when we strive after exact clairvoyance and ideal magic, it is really possible to speak of the higher worlds in terms of scientific knowledge, in the same way in which one can speak of the physical world in terms of an exact knowledge of Nature.

If we penetrate further and further into the higher worlds—and there will be people who will develop their faculties so that they will be able to do this—we shall see that no branch of science, even in its most perfect form, need be an obstacle which prevents us from accepting the truths revealed by exact clairvoyance and ideal magic. Upon the foundation of a real scientific mentality we can accept the truths relating to experiences through which we pass not only here upon the earth during our existence between birth and death, but also during our existence between death and a new birth, until we return into a new earthly life.

To-morrow I shall speak to you of the repeated lives on earth and indicate how they will terminate, for I shall take the liberty to give you a description of the relation which was brought into human life on earth by the Event of Christ, by the Event of Golgotha.

I shall then be able to show you that the knowledge of which I have spoken, in so far as it concerns us individually sheds light upon the whole development of the human race during its existence upon the earth, so that it can also illumine what really took place when Christ entered the earthly life of humanity.

These lectures are therefore meant to show on the one hand that it is not necessary to reject the exact natural science of modern times when one speaks of spiritual truths. The subject of tomorrow's lecture will be the Event which is of greatest importance also for mankind's life on earth. The Christ Event will rise up before our souls in a new, more radiant aspect, if our souls are willing to take in the truths concerning the spiritual world, as set forth here.

To-morrow's task will therefore be to explain the connection which exists between the spiritual science of Anthroposophy and Christianity.

My dear friends! Of the two areas that you yourselves also spoke about yesterday, it seems to me necessary that we deal first with the one that will have to provide the foundation for all our work. Of course, we must first prepare the real ground, and in our time that can be nothing other than community building. We will be able to deal with what is to develop on this real ground all the better in our discussions if we first talk about this community building.

On the one hand, it is undoubtedly the most difficult of your tasks, although it is easy to underestimate, but on the other hand, it is also the most urgent. You can see this from the form that the youth movement has taken. This youth movement, as it lives today in its most diverse forms, has a clear religious background, and this religious background is also always emphasized by the understanding members of the youth movement. And if you look at this youth movement with an open mind, what you notice about it is what is intimately connected with the building of community.

Consider the following phenomenon of this youth movement: it emerged some time ago, years ago. How did it emerge? Initially with the express aim of joining one group with another. It emerged explicitly under the motto of union, of group formation; and the significant thing is that in recent years this youth movement has undergone a metamorphosis into its opposite in many circles. Even those who may have taken it most seriously in those days now advocate isolation and a hermit-like existence. They emphasize the impossibility of joining forces with others. And why is that so?

Perhaps it is, when viewed symptomatically, something that is one of the most significant social phenomena of our time, particularly in central, southern and eastern Europe, that the striving to be a spiritual hermit has emerged so rapidly from the striving for community building in the youth movement, and that there is actually a certain fear of union. If you are familiar with the youth movement, you may find something different here and there, but if you look at it impartially, you will see that the decisive impulses of this youth movement will have to be characterized as I have done.

Now, what is the underlying reason for all this? The underlying reason for all this is that the religious communities have not been able to hold this youth within themselves. It is quite obvious that this youth movement does contain a clear religious impulse. Originally, if we may say so, it was a rebellion against the principle of authoritative life, of paternal life, of looking up to the experience of older people, that gave rise to this youth movement; it was a shaking of the human, paternal principle of authority. The times developed in such a way that people simply no longer believed in their fathers, that they simply no longer had any inner, subconscious trust in their fathers. But man needs man, especially when it comes to action and work. People sought unification, but they could only seek this unification with spiritual life, which is anchored in the hearts of people today when they live and are raised in our ordinary schools, under our religious impulses and so on. Of course, religious longing stirs in young people precisely when something is not right in the external religious life, but it stirs as an indefinite, abstract feeling; as something nebulous, it stirs. On the other hand, it is precisely in connection with this religious urge that the longing for community life arises. But from all that young people could receive, from all that is available, the possibility of real community building does not arise, but rather – if I may express myself somewhat radically – only the possibility of clique formation. That is, after all, the characteristic of our time: that wherever the desire for community arises, what actually arises everywhere is not a real inner sense of community, but the sense of forming cliques, that is, of joining together through the accidental community and feelings of community for what is nearest at hand. What leads one person to another by the accident of place, the accident of circumstances, and so on, leads to the formation of cliques. But these cliques, because they are not based on a solid spiritual foundation, all have the seed of dissolution within them. Cliques dissolve. Cliques are not lasting communities.

Lasting communities do not exist under any other condition than that they are based on a genuine shared commitment in communal life. And for anyone who is familiar with the history of social life, there was nothing surprising in the fact that what only contained the beginnings of cliquish behavior could not develop into community life, and that therefore these young souls became reclusive, received the urge within themselves not to join, and even developed a certain fear of joining. Everyone goes more or less their own way, I would say, who has fully participated in the youth movement. But since this youth movement emerged from a shock to the paternal authority principle, it must be said that this historical life of more recent times does not contain the seeds for real community building.

What you must seek first and foremost is the formation of a community. And if you want to arrive at a goal that is true and rooted in reality, you will have no other choice than to practice threefolding, to be truly aware of how to practice threefolding. In your profession, you absolutely do not need to agitate for threefolding in the abstract. In your profession, it is particularly possible to work very practically for threefolding. But there is no other way than to seek out the way to those to whom you want to speak. A real way must be found to found communities.

Now one need not believe that by doing something like this, one must become a revolutionary in a certain radical sense. There is no need for that at all. It may happen in one case that you get into some kind of regular ministry, into a preaching job, in the completely regular way. It may also happen that you succeed in directing the external material conditions here or there in such a way that you found a completely free community. But such free communities and those in which one strives to bring freedom into religious life must belong together; and that can only be the case if, in a certain way, what you strive for – please do not misunderstand me here to misunderstand me, it is not to preach the pure power principle, but the justified power principle —, if what you strive for becomes a power, that is, if you have a certain number of like-minded people. Nothing else will make an impression on the world. You must actually have the possibility of having people as preachers over a large territory who are from your very own circles. To do this, it will be necessary to make the circle you have now at least ten times larger. That will be your first task, so to speak: to seek out such a large circle of like-minded people, initially in the way that the smaller circle came about. Only when people in the most distant places – relatively distant places, of course – see the same aspiration emerging, when there is cohesion with you over a larger territory, will you be able to proceed to such a community formation, regardless of whether you have come to the ministry of preaching by a path recognized today or otherwise.

You will be able to work in such a way that you can truly bind your parishioners to you inwardly, emotionally. When I say “bind,” it does not mean to put on slave chains. To do that, however, the parishioners must gain the awareness through you that they live in a certain brotherhood. The communities must have concrete fraternal feelings within them and they must recognize their preacher-leader as a self-evident authority to whom they can also turn in specific questions. That means that you must first of all establish a self-evident authority in these communities, which you do not need to call fraternal communities or the like in an agitative way, especially with regard to economic life, however strange it may seem at first. It must be possible for advice to be sought from you in economic matters and in all matters related to economic affairs, based on the personal insight of the community members. It must be possible for people to feel that they are receiving a kind of directive from the spiritual world when they ask the preacher.

You see, when you can look at life, then what should actually be giving direction to it comes to you in seemingly small symptoms. I was once walking down a street in Berlin and met a preacher I had known for a long time. He was carrying a travel bag. I wanted to be polite and asked him some question. The next thing, of course, was that I asked him the question that arose from the situation: “Are you going on a trip?” — “No,” he answered me, “I'm just going on an official act.” — Now you may see something extraordinarily insignificant in it; but from the whole context, the matter seemed extraordinarily significant to me. The pastor in question was more of a theologian than a preacher, but he was a very earnest man. He had the things he needed for a baptism in his traveling bag and yet he spoke and felt in such a way that he could say to someone whom he could reasonably expect to understand a different turn of phrase: “I'm going to an official function.” — That is something like a policeman, when a thief is to be sought, he also goes to an official act.

It should disappear completely from the preacher's work that the connection with the external state or other life should somehow emerge in his consciousness. The whole emotional tenor of the words must express the fact that what is being done is being done by a personality who acts out of the consciousness of her God, out of the free impulse of her human personality. The consciousness must be present: I am not doing this as an official act, I am doing it naturally out of my innermost being, because the divine power leads me to do so.

You may consider this a minor matter. But it is precisely this tendency to regard such facts as unimportant that is perhaps the most important factor in the decline of religious activity today. When, on the other hand, such things are regarded as the main thing, when a person is imbued with the direct presence of the Divine in the physical, right down to the most minute sensation, and when the preacher feels such authority that he knows he am bringing divine life into it, I am not performing an official act in the modern sense, but am carrying out a commission from God – only then will he transmit to his parishioners that which must be transmitted as imponderables.

This seems to be quite far removed from economic life. And yet, as things stand today, we must not consider the things we are striving for here in Stuttgart in the field of threefolding to be decisive for other areas of life. We are working out threefolding from the totality of the social organism. But for your profession, it is a different matter. For your profession, it is a matter of permeating each of the three limbs — which, even if they are not properly organized, are in fact still there — with religious life; so that, although complete freedom of action prevails within the communities, within which, of course, economic life also takes place - it must, so to speak, be a self-evident prerequisite that in economic matters, where it is a matter of spiritual life flowing into the community, the decision is made by the preacher, by the pastor. There must be such harmony, and above all, the pastor must live in intimate connection with the entire charitable life of his community. To some extent, he must be aware of the balance of social inequalities. This must be striven for in the community. One must actually be the advisor of the men, and one must also be, to some extent, the helping advisor of the women; one must help the women's charity, and so on.

Both men and women must, when it comes to organizing their economic affairs, economic aid, and economic cooperation in a higher sense, unquestionably have the natural feeling that the preacher has something to say. Without an interest in economic life, a participatory interest, religious communities cannot be established, especially not in today's difficult economic times.

Is that not right? We can initially present such things as an ideal, but in one area or another we will have the opportunity to approach the ideal to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, you will face endless resistance if you strive for something like this. You will be rejected, but you must make your parishioners aware of this, and through their desire, the necessity to achieve this guiding influence of the preacher in economic life will become apparent.

At this point, I must say that much must remain an ideal. Above all, what must be the part of the one who lives as a preacher in a community in terms of legal and state life must still remain an ideal in many cases today. I will give a specific example. The fact that religious life has increasingly lost its real foundation has led to things that seem extraordinarily enlightened to today's people, but that have thoroughly undermined religious life from within social life. One example is the view that is held today about marriage legislation. There is no doubt that marriage legislation — whether conceived in strict or less strict terms, depending on other circumstances — is necessary. But it is necessary, under all circumstances, that this marriage legislation be integrated into the threefold social organism. For this, however, it is of course necessary to have a clear sense of marriage as a distinct institution that represents the threefold social organism. It is, first of all, an economic community and must be integrated into the social organism in so far as it has an economic part. Thus, a connection must be sought between the economic community that marriage represents and the associations. Today, little more can be thought of this, but this awareness must arise from within the communities, that above all the economic side of marriage must be supported by the measures of the associations, by the measures of economic life.

The second thing is that the legal relationship is clearly perceived as a relationship in itself, and that the state has only to intervene in the legal relationship of marriage, so that marriage between a man and a woman is only of concern to the state insofar as it is a matter of law, which originates from the state.

On the other hand, you will have to claim the spiritual blessing of marriage as your very own within the religious community in a completely free way based on your decision. So you will have to strive for the ideal that the religious blessing of marriage is placed within the freedom of religious decision and that this decision is fully respected, so that it is seen as a basis for the other, so that the trust that exists in the community is actually sought first for the marriage decision of the pastor or the preacher. Of course I know that such a thing is perhaps even regarded by many Protestant people today as something quite out of date, but again I can only say: that such things are regarded as out of date shows the damage of civilization, which inevitably undermines religious life.

So you will have to make your parishioners aware that the actual inner spiritual core of marriage has to do with religious life and that threefolding must certainly be practised in this area, that is, all three parts of marriage must gradually find their expression in social life, that is, all three things must be included. One should not imagine threefolding in such a way that one draws up a utopian program and says that one should threefold things. One threefolds them in the best way when one grasps that threefolding is implicitly contained in every institution of life and how one can shape the individual things in such a way that threefolding underlies them. Perhaps in your profession, in particular, it is not necessary to place too much emphasis on representing the threefold social order in the abstract; but one must understand how life demands that this threefold order comes about, that is, that each of the individual limbs of the social organism is a truly concrete, existing reality.

Of course you will meet with great resistance to this today, but it is precisely in such matters that you can, if you start by educating your community, best develop the relationship between the free spiritual life – in which, above all, the religious element must be included – which is to be, not in, I might say, benevolent mutual addresses, that one tolerates each other, but by actually presenting what is demanded by the matter as one's ideal. Of course, you must be prepared for the greatest resistance.

And thirdly, you must have the opportunity to develop what the free spiritual life should mean in the threefold social organism. Today, in the general social organism, we no longer have a spiritual life at all; we have an intellectual life, but we have no spiritual life. I would say that we have no dealings between gods and humans. We do not have the awareness that in everything that happens externally in the physical world, the divine work should be there through ourselves, and that the real, true spirit should be carried into the world, that therefore both the actions that take place within economic life, as well as the legal determinations that take place within state life, and in particular that the education of youth and also the instruction of old age must be the free deed of the people participating in this spiritual life. — That is what must be understood.

Therefore, you will have no choice but to fight for your complete individual authority for the free will. Of course, this is something that our time demands: that the individual who preaches preaches under his own authority. You see, in this area, one simply has to look at the tremendous clash of contradictions that prevails in our time.

When I go to a Catholic church today and come to the sermon, I know that the preacher is wearing the stole. I know that when he is wearing the stole, the person standing in the pulpit and preaching is not at all relevant to me as a human being. This is also really in the consciousness [of the Catholic priest]. As a human being, he does not feel responsible for any of his words, because the moment he crosses his chest with the stole, the Church speaks. And since the declaration of infallibility, the Roman Pope speaks ex cathedra for all things to be proclaimed by the Catholic Church. So, in [the Catholic preacher], I have a person in front of me who, at the moment [of the sermon], completely empties himself and doesn't even think about somehow representing his opinion, who is absolutely of the opinion that he can have a personal opinion that he keeps to himself, that doesn't even have to agree with what he speaks from the pulpit, because a personal opinion is out of the question there. The moment he crosses his stole over his chest, he is the representative of the church.

You see, that is one extreme. But it is there, and it will play a major role in the cultural movement that is just around the corner. Because as corrupting as we have to regard this power, it is a power, an immense power; and you cannot approach it otherwise than by becoming fully aware of it. They will have no other way of fighting. You will encounter this power at every turn in your life. It is spreading in an immeasurable way today, while humanity sleeps and does not notice.

On the other hand, the task of the time is to trust in – if I may call it that – divine harmony. And that, my dear friends, has absolutely not been understood in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. But it is something that should be understood in the most urgent sense in the present. In my “Philosophy of Freedom”, the legal system is also based on the individual human being acting entirely out of himself. One of the first and most brilliant critics to write about my Philosophy of Freedom in the English Athenaeum simply said that this whole view leads to a theoretical anarchism. This is, of course, the belief of today's people. Why? Because modern man actually lacks any truly divine social trust, because people cannot grasp the following, which is most important for our time: When you really get people to speak from their innermost being, then harmony comes about among people, not through their will, but through the divine order of the world. Disharmony comes from the fact that people do not speak from their innermost being. Harmony cannot be created directly, but only indirectly, by truly reaching people at their core. Then each person will automatically do what is beneficial for the other, and also speak what is beneficial for the other. People only talk and act at cross purposes as long as they have not found themselves.

If you understand this as a mystery of life, then you say to yourself: I seek the source of my actions within myself and have the confidence that the path that leads me inwardly will also connect me to the divine world order outwardly and that I will thus work in harmony with others. This brings, firstly, trust in the human heart and, secondly, trust in external social harmony. There is no other way than this to bring people together. Therefore, what you must achieve if you really want to have a social effect through your profession, a divine social effect, a spiritual social effect, is the possibility to really work from within, that is, everyone for himself, because he has found himself, has the possibility to be an authority.

The Catholic preacher acts without individuality, crosses the stole and is no longer himself, he is the Church. The Catholic Church has the magical means to powerfully influence social life without trust [in individual strength], through external symbolic soul activity. This was necessary to establish social communities towards the end of the 2nd millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha and was most ideally developed in ancient Egypt. In a roundabout way, which can be traced exactly historically, this has become the inner essence of the Catholic Church. The essence of the Catholic Church is that it still stands today at the point of view of the Egyptian priests and their social life in about the second millennium BC. The Catholic is an influence of the old into our time.

In contrast to this, there is a need today to really stand on the standpoint of our time, not to feel that we are anything other than the bearers of divine life within ourselves, which has become intellect. You have to fight for the freedom of speech so that no one can tell you what to preach, and that there is no norm for the content of the sermon. That is what you have to fight for. Otherwise you will not be able to found communities unless you make it a principle to fight for the freedom of preaching.

With this, I have first outlined in some detail what must, so to speak, lead to the formation of a community from within. If you are able to realize these things, then you will also, in turn, encourage young people to form a real community, whereas young people have only been able to form cliques out of themselves. I am convinced and have full confidence that if such communities can be brought into existence, then the young people will gather in such communities and something useful can come out of it, whereas perhaps 15 to 20 years ago the young people sought union in the so-called youth movement, but were leaderless because they no longer believed in their fathers and thus strove towards community building without any real inner impulse. All that came of it was the formation of cliques. Today, people's souls are hermits. But if there were a possibility of coming together, they would join immediately, and where truly free communities arise, that is, communities with inner freedom, young people in particular would flock to them.

You see, in such matters we naturally have a difficult time with our anthroposophical movement. Because of its inner nature, this anthroposophical movement today can be nothing other than a completely universal movement. It must, so to speak, extend itself to all areas of life, and we are in an extraordinarily difficult situation with regard to the anthroposophical movement. We are in the difficult situation that on the one hand a certain anthroposophical good must be communicated to the world today - it must go out into the world, because the world lacks the opportunity to receive spiritual content - on the other hand, the desire to form communities, to form anthroposophical communities, is arising everywhere. Call them branches, call them what you will, the endeavour is there to found anthroposophical branches. And because the anthroposophical movement today still has to be something universal, these anthroposophical branches cannot really come to a real life, because they oscillate back and forth between the religious element and the spiritual element, which is more directed towards all branches of life. Naturally, they do not develop a true sense of brotherhood; they do not even grasp their social task, which consists in founding small communities as models of what is to spread throughout humanity. But either they degenerate into a mere transmission of the teachings, or they feel the human resistance to unification and split into opinions, quarrel and the like. But if we ask ourselves where the fault lies, we find it not in these communities but in the fact that today one cannot really find a true connection to religious life by penetrating the spiritual world with insight. Among all the denominations that exist today, anthroposophists cannot find a religious life. These communities must first come into existence. They cannot come into being in any other way than by people seriously considering all the things that can lead to the founding of such communities. I believe that the external possibilities, the possibilities for establishing institutions, will not be so difficult to find if the attitude that I have tried to characterize for you today really takes hold, provided there are enough of you. If you have ten times as many people who are preparing to fulfill the preaching profession throughout Germany, over a larger territory, then you will also have the opportunity to come to community building out of this attitude. But community building is the foundation. Only when we have become clear about this can we talk further about worship and preaching.

Now I would like to ask you to speak up and ask questions about your own specific thoughts, desires, and so on. Perhaps you have had concerns about some of the things I have mentioned, or you feel that one or the other question has not been fully addressed, that you need more practical information.

A participant: Even if the practical side comes about easily, it may be that this or that practical matter is of the greatest importance to us now, especially since some of us are already in certain practical situations. Therefore, I would ask you to perhaps tell us something about the possibilities for connecting. Initially, there are two possibilities for connecting, either perhaps from the church or from the existing anthroposophical communities. Is it at all possible to connect from church work afterwards? This fear that it cannot be found still holds back many of us, although they could already enter into church service. What should happen then? The question of practical matters is perhaps already included, but the fundamental question of the possibility of making contact is already contained in it, because there is simply no clarity in our own movement about where we can make a practical connection right now. Would we be wasting an opportunity if we entered the church service now in the hope of being able to make a connection later? Should we not rather do something else, because we have to make a connection somewhere.

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is such that the answer to this must be a manifold one. It cannot be given in the same way because, despite the difficulties that the church presents today, there are still possibilities to work from within the church that should perhaps not be left untapped. If you take into account the particular circumstances here or there, you will be able to say that, given the nature of the community as a whole, you can found your community yourself, if you seek out the existing forms of the ministry, but then gradually lead the community out of the current church circumstances, while you would not be able to get the community members together if you placed yourself outside the church and simply tried to gather them. On the other hand, in certain fields it will no longer be possible to work outside the Church at all. In such cases it is of course absolutely necessary to try to found free communities. But I would recommend under all circumstances not to approach the matter with the aim of forming a union with the anthroposophical branches and so on, and not to aim at working out of anthroposophy itself, because in that case you would be pulled down before you got anywhere. Anthroposophy as such will simply be attacked in the most outrageous way from all possible sides in the near future; and in order to arrive at the formation of a quiet community within this battle, you see, the strength that you have today, even if you were ten times as numerous, is not yet sufficient. We do not yet live in social conditions that would make it possible to develop religious communities from anthroposophy itself. They have to form religious communities for themselves and then seek union with the anthroposophical movement. The anthroposophical movement – I can say this quite openly – will never fail to support this union, of course; but it would not be good to form ecclesiastical communities out of the anthroposophical 'communities', so to speak.

You see, when we founded the Waldorf School - it is not an example, but there is at least a similarity - we did not set out to found a school of world view, a school of anthroposophy, but merely to bring into pedagogy and didactics what can be brought in through anthroposophy. I was quite insistent that Catholic children should be taught by Catholic priests and Protestant children by Protestant priests. Now, however, it has become clear that, because the first core of the Waldorf School was working-class children, a great many children would have had no religious instruction at all. And so it became necessary to provide an independent anthroposophical religious education. But I am very particular, especially in my own behavior in this matter, that this anthroposophical religious education does not fall into the constitution of this school, but that it comes from outside in the same way as Catholic and Protestant religious education, so that the school as such gives this religious instruction out of itself, but simply allows the Anthroposophical community to give this Anthroposophical religious instruction to those children for whom the parents want it, just as Protestant religious instruction is given to Protestant children and Catholic religious instruction to Catholic children. In this area, we must be serious about the fact that the spiritual works only through the spiritual. As soon as we would make a school constitution to incorporate religious education into the school curriculum, we would probably achieve more at first than we are achieving now, but slowly dismantling it. We must have faith in the spirit to work through itself. And that is why we in the anthroposophical movement face the great difficulty that as soon as we establish a branch, we do so in the physical world; and there, of course, people always strive to work through external means. But anthroposophy cannot work through external means today; it can only work through that which is in it as spiritual content that works on people. These two things are always in conflict with each other: external branching out – internal effectiveness. This fights terribly with each other. And that would even change into a healthy one at the moment when a community could really be formed out of the religious spirit. Now, of course, it is a matter of overcoming, I would say, higher inconveniences, so to speak.

You see, when I speak to Swiss teachers about the liberation of intellectual life, the liberation of the teaching profession, even the best of them usually reply: Yes, in Switzerland we are actually quite free, we can do what we want at school. — But no one does anything other than what the state wants. In terms of freedom, they are basically as unfree as possible; they just don't feel their unfreedom, they feel their unfreedom as freedom because they have grown so inwardly together with it. We, in turn, must first learn to feel the unfreedom. I was once able to feel it in a very strange way at a threefolding meeting I had held in Switzerland; I would say it was more in a humorous way. During the discussion, someone had become extremely heated in a certain fanatical way about the fact that in Germany, laws and police measures were used to command everyone to behave loyally, to worship the monarchy loyally, and so on, that all this was a commandment. He became so terribly heated about it. I said to him: It may well be that Republicans get worked up in such a way against the monarchy, but I remember that when the German Kaiser was in Switzerland a few years ago, the people behaved in an extremely devotional manner, so that at that time in Zurich the image of devotion far surpassed what people were used to in Germany. — To which he replied: Yes, that is precisely the difference between Germany and Switzerland: in Germany, it is all compulsory, the people have to do it, but we do it voluntarily. —- That is the difference between free people and those who are unfree.

Well, it is not true that we have to, and that all people have to – it is completely international in our time – we actually have to learn what it means to be a free person. And that is why I believe that it must actually be possible to tie in with where some freedom is still possible within the church, to found these free communities from within the church itself.

I am not unaware of the difficulties, but it is true that you only have to consider the real cultural conditions, especially in Central Europe. A certain kind of community was formed at the time – and we really must learn from history – when Old Catholicism emerged after the proclamation of the dogma of infallibility. Now, if you take Old Catholicism in terms of its content, it can be said to have the same in terms of doctrine and priestly behavior as the Protestant pastorate. It is already inherent in Old Catholicism, which has only preserved in a popular way a cultus that we will talk about later. One can say that Old Catholicism, precisely because it arose as a reaction, already contained within it that which, by itself, could have led to the free formation of congregations outside the Church. Now you will know, of course, that Old Catholicism in Germany was received with great enthusiasm. Parishes were formed here and there, but they could not live, could not die. Of course, at that time, because one could not form such parishes within the Catholic Church, they had to form themselves. There was no other way. In Switzerland, where much more of the Old Catholicism has been preserved – because there are many Old Catholic communities there – it has recently become quite blatantly clear that these communities are continuing a conservative life, but are no longer growing, but rather remaining small, even shrinking, so that they are already on the ground of a descending development. This is the difficulty of forming free communities today.

Therefore, it will be necessary to save as many people as you can – not from the church, but from those people who have not yet been able to decide to leave the church in order to found free communities with you – to really grasp them in the church and bring them out. If things develop in this way, you can be quite sure that the connection with the anthroposophical movement will be achieved. For the anthroposophical movement, although it will have to fight terrible battles, will nevertheless establish its validity, even if it is only possible with many sacrifices on the part of those working in it, with great sacrifices. It will establish its validity , but it will hardly be in a position today to found a branch of religious life out of itself — that is why I always spoke today of the special nature of your profession — it will hardly be in a position to shape communities in a particular religious sense. It will be necessary for what I always emphasize to become truth: The Anthroposophical Society as such cannot found new religious communities and so on, but one must somehow form the religious community out of oneself, or - as far as one can - form it with the human material that today, purely out of prejudice, still stands within the old church. But perhaps you can formulate the question further so that we can talk about it in more detail.

Dr. Rittelmeyer – he just got sick – would have had the opportunity, given the way he had behaved towards his parishioners, to found a completely free parish in the middle of Berlin. And once it has a certain power, a certain standing, is it large, then you don't dare approach the pastor in any way. Is it actually your opinion that one should not have this last remnant of consideration for the church?

A participant: I think it will be especially difficult to work in the church, and I don't yet see clearly to what extent we could do that even now. We will have to wait until we can go out together to do the actual work. Would it perhaps be possible to look for points of contact in the church now? But then we would already be scattered until we are ready to go out together.

Rudolf Steiner: As long as you do not have a preaching ministry, you cannot seek such connections now. You must seek what is the preparation for religious work, of course independently of the church, at least inwardly independently. As long as you are, so to speak, students, you cannot seek union with the church. You can only look around to see where it would be possible to pull such congregations out of the church. And if you should find that this is impossible in Central Europe, then you should still proceed to the free formation of congregations, and you should seek the means and ways to proceed to this free formation of congregations.

Now, of course, I would only have two objections to an absolutely free establishment of a congregation, that is, one of you goes to place X and the other to place Y and simply, by preaching first for five and then for ten or twenty people for my sake, gradually creates a free congregation. The only difficulty I can see is that this path is, first of all, a slow one – you will see that it is a slow one – it is the safest, but a slow one. And the second is the material question. Because, isn't it true that if things were to be done this way, it would be necessary for this matter to be financed in the broadest sense, to be properly financed, so that a community would simply be established by you yourselves, and that the financing of this community would be sought.

Now I must say that this would, of course, be the best way; even if it has to be fought for with external material means, it would naturally be the best way. But I must tell you quite frankly that all these paths require great courage on your part. It takes great courage for you to join in the struggle that naturally arises, to join in the difficulties, in the struggle, for the financial foundation as well. It would, of course, be best if we could raise sufficient funds to make you completely independent, so that you could simply choose whether to collect here or there, even if it is only from the smallest circle, my community. It will come about. It takes courage to believe that it will come about. It will come about, but of course you need the financial basis, and there are extraordinary difficulties standing in the way of this today. The community of all today's positive confessions will soon be there, which most strenuously opposes the fact that something like this is done. And you cannot do it in detail, you have to organize it as a large movement. You actually have to establish a community out of all of you who set themselves this goal in life and for whom a financial foundation is then sought.

Now, you can do the math. It would be enough, if, let us say, there were two hundred of you, because this way is, so to speak, a very safe one and does not depend on such speed. Now you can calculate for yourselves what is needed annually. As soon as you have the means to do it, you can do it. Then it is the safest way. But then it is also the most visible way, and that would actually be the more natural one. But in today's social and economic conditions, raising these funds in Central Europe – and that is what it could be about – is extremely difficult. Because you won't find any possibility to do something like this in another empire, in another country. So in both Eastern and Western Europe it is absolutely out of the question; in Central Europe it could be done for internal reasons, and a great thing would be done with it.

Werner Klein: I must say in this regard that I have so far only seen this path, the latter, and actually still consider it the only viable one. We have major difficulties with financing, of course, but we could work to eliminate them. I also believe that you can keep your head above water with your own resources if you create your own field of activity in a city, perhaps try to get money from lectures. You will be able to make friends who will help you. But you can also get into a profession – after all, we live in the age of reduced working hours – so you will be able to fill a less significant position at the town hall or somewhere where you can make a living if necessary, in order to gain the time to pursue what is on your mind. I believe that you will be able to survive. But alongside that, a generous organization would have to be set up and an attempt would have to be made to at least obtain funds. And according to what lives in all of us in Germany, this general yearning for something new and strong, I believe that many things will be found. That will depend on us. — But now, for the first time today, I see the second way in connection with the church and I believe that one can go hand in hand there. The path of the free community requires a completely different tactic, a joint approach to the goal, and a joint approach at a joint point in time, but still each for himself when one emerges as a larger movement; while the other tactic is that everyone starts working on their own and tries to create a new community from the church. The one will not interfere with the other. At the moment when we are perhaps so far along on this safe but also more difficult path that we can, to put it bluntly, get started, then those who have so far taken the other path will join us in our work and then, with can support us with fruits that have already shown themselves to be real and positive, while, if we succeed in one area or another in following up the successes in one or the other area, that would only be to be welcomed and regarded as a factor in itself. If we really want to achieve something socially in view of the social and religious hardship today, then only this first, sure way seems to be available. We must try it in any case. If we fail, we will still take the other path, and if it is taken simultaneously by those who already want to work in order to fill the interim period, it is to be welcomed. If we want great things, we must also strive for the great and try.

Rudolf Steiner: It is indeed the case that here in Stuttgart we have had some experiences with the difficulties that confront something like the surest way that has been characterized here. Of course, I am entirely of the opinion that this path can be taken if sufficient effort is put into it. But please also be aware of the difficulties that are encountered in all areas today. There is an extraordinary amount of goodwill in saying that one can also take on some position and work alongside it in the way that is desirable. But it is an open secret that students at German universities will face terrible financial difficulties in the coming years. People have thought of all kinds of impractical things; even a professor came to me and said that we should think about setting up printing presses because students will no longer be able to afford to print their dissertations, and they should print them themselves there. Of course, I do not have the slightest sympathy for such material inbreeding; because I do not know how the students should earn anything by printing their own dissertations. I thought it would be more rational to abolish the forced printing of dissertations altogether – for the time of need. – So, one thinks of all kinds of impractical things, but the matter is a very serious one. For example, it would be an extremely appealing idea to me if the “Kommende Tag” were able to provide a certain material basis for at least a number of students, that is, it would have to, let's say, take on a group of students in its enterprises for three months on a rotating basis, while employing others for the next three months. Then the latter could go back to university and study. So that would be a nice idea to implement, if it were possible. But in our own company, the moment we tried to implement something like that, i.e. hire a number of students, we would immediately have a revolution by the trade union workers, who would tell us: that's not on. They would throw us out. And, wouldn't you agree, something similar would happen, even if it wasn't exactly in the form of being thrown out, but probably in the form of not being let in. Besides, I don't see any real possibility of being able to pursue such a profession alongside a job, even with today's shorter working hours, where you can give yourself completely, because it requires complete devotion to really fulfill such a profession, which you want to pursue. I don't see any real possibility.

You see, we are simply faced with the fact that today, due to the difficult living conditions, people are actually not as strong as they should be. So I fear that such a path, where the person in question would have to rely on himself in financial terms, would at least lead to a slight neurasthenia. It also seems rather unlikely to me that under present-day conditions it is possible to earn a living by lecturing and working independently in this way. You see, intellectual services are paid for in the old currency, and one has to eat in the new currency. If you take the payment for intellectual performance, then in the old currency you get 30 marks, and in the new currency you would have to spend 300 marks. So this matter would of course be difficult. On the other hand, it would be really worth working for a financing in the broadest sense.

I also think that working together with the church, which seems to be more appealing to Mr. Klein than to some of you, is not a lost cause. Because combining this work with the church would, I believe, have advantages.

You can do both. I still think that experience today suggests that if you first succeed in creating free congregations from within the church, you will find followers simply by your approach. You will find followers. Because it is no exaggeration to say that there are many pastors and priests in the Protestant religious communities today who would like to get out of their jobs and just need a nudge. If you succeed in drawing these people out of their communities, then you will find that some of the pastors currently in office will follow you. That would be a good addition. It would enable the movement to grow rapidly. You would find support from those who, on their own, simply cannot muster the initiative. If the impetus were provided from outside, you would find support.

That would, of course, be extremely desirable if we could somehow at least tackle the question of financing. I deliberately say “tackle it somehow”, because if this financing question is properly tackled, then it is likely to succeed. Tackling it is much more difficult than succeeding once it has been properly tackled. For what is lacking today in the broadest sense is the active cooperation of people in the great tasks of life. People everywhere have become so accustomed to routines that one does not really gain sufficiently active collaborators for the most important tasks.

I believe that we should perhaps make use of our time, and because we have now come directly to the practical issues, which should be discussed preliminarily, I would ask you to come at half past six this evening for the continuation.

My dear friends,

For this “Pastoral Medicine” course we are bringing together for the first time the members of two distinct circles of spiritual work. This is of quite special importance. We must inquire, therefore, first of all into the reason for the combination, from the intended content of the course itself. In the first place I would like to point out that perhaps this course will be an example of how ancient traditions must be renewed through a particular form of spiritual activity in our time. For what has so far developed under the name “pastoral medicine” has lost its original content. We will see that this is so in the course of our study. Yet out of the very foundation of this present age there arises a most significant task that as it takes shape may be allowed to bear the name of pastoral medicine. We have made the strict requirement that this course be mainly for real theologians and real physicians, including those who are training to be real physicians, in the sense in which that title can be given them from the standpoint of the Medical Section of the Goetheanum. How this standpoint is to be understood will become clear during the course. We have admitted a few individuals who are exceptions to the general requirement, and these for reasons based on the opinion of the Medical Section of the Goetheanum.

First and foremost, dear friends, there must be an absolutely clear understanding in the part of the theologians and on the part of the physicians what is now going to be made possible by their working together: namely, a new pastoral medicine. Their working together has indeed often been discussed; it has even been pointed out that the anthroposophical movement should try to bring it about. But things have come to light that must be corrected during this course. A proper working together must certainly not be understood to mean any dilettantish interference by one side into the work of the other side. It certainly does not mean that the theologians are to become physicians, or that the physicians are to become in the slightest way theologians. It is purely a matter of the two professions working together hand-in-hand. The course will stress very strongly the importance of preventing any kind of confusion by, for instance, the theologians trying to get their hands into various medical measures that cannot possibly lie in their sphere of work. On the other hand, physicians must be clearly aware of the position they must always hold—in the sense just described—toward theologians. It is tremendously important that this should be thoroughly understood by both sides. A great deal will depend upon it.

Apparently the thought has even been entertained that theologians should actually acquire medical knowledge. Well, of course, it is always good to acquire knowledge. But the important thing here is to realize absolutely clearly that physicians, in addition to the cultivation of their thinking, feeling, and willing, have had specific medical training. People should not play with the idea that they can push their way into the world with bits and pieces of medical knowledge without this specific medical training—even if they are theologians! On the other hand, physicians must develop a special conception of their profession; they must learn through pastoral medicine that something essential is expressed when it is said: The flame of offering belongs to the priest, the Mercury staff to the physician. And only through the working together of the flame of offering and the Mercury staff is a healthful cooperation possible. One must not want to heal with the flame of offering, or to celebrate ritual with the Mercury staff. But one must realize that both are divine service. The more fully this is realized, the better their cooperation will be, with physician remaining physician and priest remaining priest, and the more healing will be their work in the world. Our anthroposophical movement must not be allowed to become an area where everything is thrown together in chaotic fashion: the seriousness that we should be cultivating so strongly within our movement would suffer thereby. One can have knowledge of the general procedure for a foot operation, but one should certainly not think that therefore one can perform the operation. And this holds true for all medical matters. Above all, Anthroposophy must not become propaganda for quackery. Theologians must not be allowed to become quacks.

The Medical Section at the Goetheanum will handle with extreme seriousness whatever is going to give an individual a position out in the world as an anthroposophical physician. But the following must also become an established procedure: that physicians who want to work with the same impulses as the Medical Section at the Goetheanum will have their status and their relation to the Section properly defined by the Section. There will be no progress unless this procedure becomes a complete reality—so complete, in fact, that in the future someone will be acknowledged as a physician if the requirements of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum are filled. From this point of view also, we are justified in not having admitted to this course healers who are not physicians. Those who are here today (with a very few exceptions) can lay full claim in the outside world to membership in the medical profession. Perhaps we have made ourselves clear. I have been speaking more from the administrative angle. But the matter will be the concern of pastoral medicine itself. When the theologians recently raised the question of whether something of a medical nature could be given them, I could not do otherwise than say that I would give a course on pastoral medicine in which theologians could participate. And so the course has been organized by the Medical Section of the Goetheanum, and the theologians are taking part in it. It must be quite clear why we have structured it in this way.

Up to now, pastoral medicine has not been a subject in the medical faculties, but in the theological faculties. And the pastoral medicine that has been taught in the theological faculties has really not contained anything specifically medical. Or perhaps I should ask, have any physicians here who have gone through the academic training had any pastoral medicine in their medical courses? It is not offered in any catalogue of a medical faculty. It hardly appears any more in Protestant theological faculties, but it does have a role in Catholic theological faculties—and for a good reason. Only it contains nothing of a medical nature. In the main it contains, first, the knowledge priests need in order to work as pastors, not only with healthy people who are given into their care, but also with those who are sick. There is a difference in whether one has the care of the soul of a sick person, particularly one who is seriously sick, or of a healthy person. With the sick, perhaps severely sick individuals, the question is how one shapes the soul care, how one relates to it. But I have never yet found a book on pastoral medicine that did not stress repeatedly that the first task of the pastor is to make certain by word and deed that a real doctor is found, and that the pastor should refrain from all medical measures.

A second important subject of pastoral medicine has to do with the hygienic aspects of certain ritual measures. For instance, the healthfulness or unhealthfulness of fasting required for ceremonial reasons is explained for the lay person; also what medical science has to say, for instance, about circumcision and similar matters. For priests themselves—this, of course, has just to do with Catholic faculties—it sets forth clearly what is to be said from a hygienic standpoint about asceticism. This is spoken about very fully.

A further subject has to do with what measures should be taken, for instance, in a parish where there is a doctor, what connection there should be between the medical care and the sacraments. When a religious community bases its activity on the reality of the sacraments, the priest must be prepared to meet the medical treatment that is being given. There is, for instance, the anointing that the priest must perform at the sickbed by the side of the doctor. We have also to consider what significance the earlier pastoral medicine attributed to a person's receiving communion while recovering from a severe illness. Looking at the spiritual aspect, one has to ponder on the working of the sacrament in relation to the processes of healing in a human being.

A further subject examines how the pastor has to relate to the physician in psychopathic cases, cases of mentally handicapped or psychically abnormal individuals. The pastoral work is varied for such cases. This was the principal task confronting pastoral medicine in its earlier days, and it was taken care of through the centuries rather extensively by calling on the authority of the Church Fathers' writings.

That is a field of work that cannot appear in the same light to us who are involved in a renewal of spiritual life. Indeed, from fundamental anthroposophical views we are aware of very important tasks in that field for a new pastoral medicine. And we can discover the extent of such tasks if we consider the subject from two sides.

First, let us consider it from the medical point of view. What are we doing when we apply a therapy? When we give a medicine or apply some healing measure to a sick person, there is always the fact that in the healing process we want to set in motion, whether physical or spiritual or pertaining to the soul, we are going beyond the so-called normal relation of that person to the surrounding world. No matter what therapy we use, in every instance we are going beyond what the person has normally in everyday life, whether it is taking of nourishment, or exposure to light and air, or exposure to soul influences. In every circumstance we are going beyond all of that in our therapy. Even if we simply prescribe a small change of diet, we have gone a small step beyond what the person had permitted in his or her own everyday relation to the surrounding world.

Say we prescribe a medicine. If it's a physical substance, its effect will be that a different process takes place than would take place if the patient were merely eating food. And it is the same with other therapeutic measures. In using any therapeutic measure we are intervening in the life of the patient in a way that is different from the way life usually works upon that person. For what is the normal intervention in human life? How does a person take hold of his or her own life? We can distinguish three kinds of processes that intervene, or can intervene, in human life. First, the process that is active in the person in the same way that physical-chemical forces are active in outer nature. Second, the process that is active in the realm of a person's life forces, in life itself. Third, the process that takes immediate hold of the person in the sphere of consciousness:

1. Physical-chemical
2. Life
3. Consciousness

Here we must grasp an important concept. In ordinary life there are three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping. The moment we apply an active therapeutic measure, we are intervening in the sphere of consciousness to a greater or lesser degree depending on what the measure is. Such intervention never occurs in such a direct way in the so-called normal course of life. A person who is eating, for instance, is surrendering to the usual process of taking nourishment; then, if this has proceeded normally, waking, dreaming, and sleeping follow in normal fashion. At the most, we might vary a diet for the purpose of bringing about better sleep, but there the boundary is already shifted. Therapy has already begun.

It is quite another matter if you intervene with some therapy when, for instance, a patient has a fever. If you were to apply the same therapy to a healthy person you would alter the person's condition of consciousness. Thus a physician has to work fundamentally with the various states of consciousness. A human being's ordinary relation to the outer world has to do with life forces, but in medical work one is intervening in the states of consciousness. You will find this is so in every single therapeutic measure. And it is the specific characteristic of a therapeutic measure that it does enter into what has to do in some way or other with the variability of consciousness. In fact the only effective therapy is one that takes such deep hold of our human constitution that it penetrates to the source from which our various states of consciousness come. But thereby you are intervening as physician, as therapist, directly in the ordering of the spiritual world. Your alteration of someone's condition of consciousness means that you are intervening directly in the ordering of the spiritual world. And when you have a really active cure, through this penetration into the state of consciousness, even though it may be into subconsciousness, you are always drawing the soul of the person into the therapeutic process. You do not remain in the physical sphere. Ordinary consumption of food, ordinary breathing, and other ordinary processes remain in the physical sphere, and the higher members work indirectly through the physical sphere. Higher forces are active through the physical organism. In contrast, when you are working as a physician or therapist you draw the patient's soul directly into his or her physical body. Indeed we can say if physicians understand their profession properly, they realize that they enter directly into the realm of the spiritual. It only seems that therapy is merely a physical or biological process. True therapeutic measures always involve the patient's soul, even though at first this may remain unknown to the ordinary consciousness. You should observe what actually takes place in a patient when, let us say, a fever is suddenly lowered by some therapeutic means. In this event processes are introduced into the innermost depth of the patient's being—just as the illness itself had worked into this depth—beyond the merely physical and biological realm. So we have looked at the picture from the medical point of view. We have seen how doctoring, healing, by its very nature leads from the physical realm into the spiritual.

Now let us examine the priest's profession just as carefully. Priests whose calling is not one of teaching, if they are truly active priests, then they are connected with the ritual, and the ritual includes the sacraments. But the sacraments are not symbols. What are they? They consist of the fact that external events take place, which are not exhausted, in chemical or biological processes. They contain orientations which are embodied in the physical-biological sphere, but which have their origin in the spiritual world. Sense-perceptible actions are performed, and spirit streams into the actions. Spiritual reality is present in the ritual on the level of sense perception. And what takes place there in front of the congregation takes place first of all before their conscious observation. Nothing is permitted to take place except what does take place in that way. Otherwise it would not be ritual, not sacrament, but suggestion. The sacraments—if they are done right—are never allowed to contain any element of suggestion. All the more, therefore, they are able to contain what is spiritual. They take place before the waking consciousness of the participants, but they work into the sphere of the life forces.

In communion a person is not just eating the material substance; in that case it would not be a sacrament. Nor is it a matter of symbols. Rather it has to do with reaching into a person's life, because a sacrament is enacted, is celebrated, through an orientation toward the spiritual world. Therefore one can say therapy leads from life to consciousness; the ritual with its sacraments leads from consciousness to life.

Therapy: life to consciousness
Ritual (sacraments): consciousness to life

There you have the two activities in polarity: therapeutic activity and the celebration of the sacraments. In therapeutic measures, the course leads from life to consciousness, and consciousness becomes a helper, at least (in ordinary consciousness) an unconscious helper, in the healing process. In the celebration of the sacraments life is made a helper for what is enacted before the consciousness. Both of these activities have to be grasped spiritually in deep inwardness—not merely diagrammatically as it is now being presented to you. They require the involvement of the total human being if that individual wants to make one or the other a vocation. In our present civilization therapy has left behind the spiritual element, and theology has left behind the concrete world. In our present civilization therapy has taken a false path into materialism and theology a false path into abstraction. For these reasons their true relationship has become completely veiled. This true relationship must be reestablished. It must become active again.

Again it must become clear that for diagnosis physicians need a trained observation that enables them to see a biological or physical process in the human organism as a spiritual process. For all processes in the human organism are spiritual. For diagnosing, and still more for treatment, physicians need an observation that is trained to see the lighting up of the spirit within the physical. Priests need an observation that is trained to see the lighting up of the physical reflection of a spiritual event. There is a polarity again. But there must always be polarities working together in this world, and these are no exception.

To see how they are to work together will be a task within the sphere of Anthroposophy and based on Anthroposophy, a task also to be fulfilled within anthroposophical spheres of activity. So one can think that out of this gathering for a pastoral medicine course there may actually be created future anthroposophical physicians—physicians who will hold the right relation to priests because of their own relation to the spiritual world. The priests themselves will have come out of the Movement for Religious Renewal. Something quite special will develop out of this course for the physician and the priest so that they will work together in a true way.

For what in this case can it mean that they work together? Surely not that the priest does dilettantish doctoring and that the doctor is a dilettante priest! If their working together were to consist of priests knowing a few medical facts and physicians vesting themselves as priests, then I'd like to know why they should work together. Why should an experienced physician be interested in half priest-half doctor dilettantism? It makes no sense. And why should a priest want to interfere in medical matters except when the physician asks for a pastor? On the other hand, if the physician is a good physician standing squarely within the medical profession, and if the priest is a real priest, they can work together. It means that one offers help to the other out of professional abilities, not that one pushes into the other's professional domain.

Such an association will bring about a profoundly important result for our culture. The physician will truly understand the priest, and the priest the physician. The priest will know as much about being a doctor as is needed to know and the physician as much about the vocation of the priest as is needed to know. And then in time we will see to what extent physician and priest can work with the teacher to accomplish something beneficial to humanity.

In that area, too, people will have to work together—and in the most manifold ways, because education is also something that must be looked at from a fresh point of view. The priest cannot be a physician, nor the physician a priest, but they can both in a certain sense be teachers. But all the details of these new associations will have to be thought out quite concretely. Therefore I would like to ask you from the very beginning to count this earnest request as part of all that this pastoral medicine course is going to present: that everything be worked out on a professional and expert basis. Priests will truly help actual physicians if they reject all thought of medical dilettantism. That will be one of their responsibilities. And physicians will be able to do very much at the sickbed to bring the mission of the priests to proper fulfillment—precisely at the sickbed, where often a priest has to intervene in life in a really essential way.

On New Year's Eve it is always fitting to remember how past and future are linked together in life and in the existence of the world, how past and future are linked in the whole life of the Cosmos of which man is a part, how past and future are linked in every fraction of that life with which our own individual existence is connected, is interwoven through all that we were able to do and to think during the past year, and through all that we are able to plan for the coming year.

The thoughts which, almost in answer to an inward need, we call up before our souls in reviewing what we have done during the past year, and what we intend to do next year, should be pervaded with adequate earnestness and dignity, in accordance with the spirit of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, so that we may illumine these thoughts with the Higher Light which we can receive from Spiritual Science, through contemplation of the great Cosmic events. How does this human life of ours stand with regard to past and future? It is like a mirror. Indeed, comparison with a mirror approaches reality far more than it may seem to do at first. Striving a little to attain self-knowledge is indeed like standing before a mirror. We stand, looking into a mirror and there in that mirror lies the past, of which we know its reflection is in the mirror. Behind the mirror lies that into which at first we cannot look, just as it is not possible to see in space, what lies behind a mirror. Perhaps the question should be raised here: What is it that corresponds in our world-mirror to the silver covering at the back which turns the transparent glass into a mirror? In the ordinary mirror the glass is coated behind so that we cannot see through it. What constitutes the coating of the world-mirror that reflects the past for us, and at first keeps the future hidden from our gaze? The world-mirror is coated with our own being, with our own human being. We have only to bear in mind that with the usual means of knowledge we are really unable to see ourselves, to see what we ourselves are. We cannot see through ourselves, we see through ourselves just as little as we see through a mirror. When we look into ourselves, many things are mirrored back to us, things which we have experienced, things which we have learnt; but our own being remains hidden from us, because we can see through ourselves at first just as little as we can see through an ordinary mirror. Looking at the matter generally, or I might say, in the abstract, we may consider this comparison with a mirror as I have just described it. But when we come to details modifications are needed. Trying to look back on our life through this mirroring process (for looking back on our life, on what our inner soul reflects, is a mirroring process), we must confess: What we see mirrored there, is only a part of our experiences. When you try to look back on your experiences, you will find that these experiences are continually subject to interruptions. You look back on what the day has brought you; but you do not look back on what the preceding night has brought you. The experiences of the night are an interruption. You look back on yesterday, you do not look back on the night before yesterday, and so on. Stretches of nighttime, not filled in by thoughts upon our experiences, are continually inserting themselves. It is an illusion to think that we survey our entire life when looking back upon it; we only piece together to some extent, what the days contain. In reality, the course of our life comes before us with continual interruptions.

We might now ask: Are these interruptions in the course of our life necessary? Yes, they are necessary. Were there no such interruptions in the course of our life, or, to speak more correctly, in the retrospection upon our life's course, then, as human beings, we should be quite unable to perceive our Ego. We should see the course of our life filled merely by the world outside, and in our life there would be no ego-consciousness at all. That we are able to experience, to feel our Ego, depends on the fact that our life's course is continually being broken up piece-wise. It is precisely with respect to this ego-perception, brought about by interruptions in the course of life, that present-day humanity faces a critical period. When a human being of today looks back on life and, as has just been explained, attains his Ego through this looking back, this Ego of present-day man is, in a certain respect, empty, we only know that we have an Ego. In earlier periods of earth evolution men knew more. Just as in ordinary daily life, the dreams of an individual dimly emerge out of his nightly experiences, so the clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions of the human beings of earlier periods emerged out of the Ego. These clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions were dreams only in their form; what they contained was reality. We may say: The Ego of present-day man has been emptied of the clairvoyant-atavistic content which was the support of men of past ages, permeating them with the conviction that they had something in common with a divine element, that they were connected with something divine. Out of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, there arose in man's sentient life that which condensed into religious feeling and religious veneration towards those beings to whom religious cult and religious sacrifice were dedicated. How does the case stand today? Today the Ego is empty of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, and when we look back on the Ego it is more or less only a point in our soul-life. The content of this Ego is a firm point of support, but it is nevertheless only a point. Now, however, we are living in an age in which the point must again become a circle, an age in which the Ego must again receive a content. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has made a mighty inroad into our Sense-world, in order that the Ego may again receive a content. This is why, ever since the seventies of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has willed to re-enter our physical existence through revelations in a new way. What we are striving for in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is this: To receive with goodwill all that is seeking to enter through spiritual revelation from another world—from a world, however, which bears within it this world of ours—and to clothe these revelations in terms by which they can be communicated to man. These revelations are nothing less than that which definitely (in a certain respect) guarantees the future of mankind. It is not, indeed, a direct glance behind the mirror, but it is a guarantee for this, viz., that when we as human beings, hasten to meet the future i.e., hasten to step behind the mirror—which means facing the future—then that which we have to do in the future will be able to come to pass in full power, if we have first tested our forces, if we have first strengthened them through that, which, by means of Spiritual Science, reveals itself to us out of the Spiritual World.

Just as in the past, man's Ego was filled with an atavistic clairvoyant content, which guaranteed his connection with the divine, so today our Ego must be filled with a new spiritual content, received in full consciousness, a content which gives us again the link uniting our soul with the divine Soul-being. The men of the past possessed an atavistic clairvoyance. The last inheritance of this atavistic clairvoyance is abstract reflection, the abstract power of cognition possessed by modern men. It is a much diluted remnant of the early clairvoyance. The man of today can feel that this dilution, this logical dialectic dilution of a former atavistic clairvoyance, is no longer able to support his soul. Then the longing will arise within him to receive something new into his Ego. But that which has formed the end in the evolution of mankind from primeval times up to the present, must now be made the beginning. In olden times, man had clairvoyant revelations and did not understand them. Today man must first understand, must exert to the utmost his intellectual power, must exert to the utmost his reason. If he so exerts it through that which lies before him in Spiritual Science, then mankind will again develop the power of receiving the Spiritual clairvoyantly. This is certainly something that most people today wish to avoid, viz., to make use of their healthy human reason in order to understand Spiritual Science. Were it possible to avoid the use of man's reason, it would also be possible to avoid altogether the entrance of spiritual revelations into our earthly world.

Thus past and future are linked together on this New Year's Eve, this Cosmic New Year's Day. For today, what is impending is indeed a kind of Cosmic New Year's Day. The future stands before us as a formidable question, not an indefinite abstract question, but as a concrete question. How can we approach that which, as a question put to mankind, in the form of a spiritual revelation, is striving more and more since the last third of the nineteenth century, to enter our earthly world? And how are we to place it in relation to revelations of the past? These questions should be livingly experienced. Then we should feel how important it is to direct our longings towards that which is presented here as Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Then we should realize the earnestness and the dignity of the striving for Spiritual Science. It is especially needful to have this feeling at the present time. For we are not dealing with any kind of arbitrary human will (“Willkur”); we are dealing with something that as Cosmic knowledge wills to reveal itself to us from out of the world's evolution; we are dealing in very truth with what the gods will to make of man. But here we are faced with the fact that when we on the one hand turn towards the spirit, on the other hand those who wish only to worship the past, are drawn away by the Spirit of contradiction, by the Spirit of opposition. And the more we try with all our might to grasp the spirit of the future state of man, the more surely will the people of the past be possessed by the spirit of opposition. It is to be noticed among people of today that religious feeling is seeking to assume new life. Groping attempts are numerous. The attempts of Spiritual Science must not be groping. Through such attempts the real, concrete world of the Spirit ought to be grasped. Almost like a premonition of what it ought to be, we are faced by those who say: “Mere religious tradition is not enough for us; we want to have an inner religious experience, we do not only want to hear the message that, according to tradition, Christ lived and died in Palestine so many, or so many years ago—we want to experience in our souls the Christ-experience.” In many quarters we find such ideas arising among men, among people who believe that something of the Christ-experience has arisen in the depths of their souls.

These are groping attempts, often even questionable attempts, because at the same time people are content in the egoism of their soul, and then turn away from all inclination to the Spirit. These longings after inner spiritual experience are there nevertheless, and even groping attempts towards such inner spiritual experience, towards a new interest in the spiritual world, should be recognized. But the spirit of opposition will surely arise.

To judge by what he himself has printed, such a representative of the spirit of the past has recently uttered quite remarkable words at Stuttgart, contrasting attempts, groping attempts, to rouse a new religious interest, a new religious experience, with attempts to reach a really new concrete knowledge of the spiritual world, as in the case of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In the Shepherd-Play, performed at the Waldorf School, one of the shepherds, who has had a spiritual vision, says that he very nearly lost his power of speech. When I read the last page of Gogarten's Spiritual Science and Christianity, I must say that I very nearly lost my power of speech, for it is indeed surprising that anyone should say such things in the present age. It is things such as this that, on the Cosmic New Year's Eve, should stimulate contemplation of the comparison of the past with the inevitable future. What does this representative of religion really say? I do not know if the full import has been realized. He says: “Today—I ought to say at all times—the chief task is to safeguard the elementary feeling of piety of which I have spoken. It is almost wholly lacking today. We are occupied with religious ‘interests’ with religious ‘experiences’. Since Anthroposophy provides such good material for ‘interest’, and is such a good medium for ‘experiences’, people are helpless and without power of resistance when they meet it. People know even less of that fundamental, elementary bond, the bond brought into life by piety, which drives away every religious ‘interest’, and scatters every religious ‘experience’, the bond between God and creature. And because man knows little of this bond, he knows still less of that other bond, the unconditioned direct union between God and man.”

Here in the name of religion we see every religious interest repudiated, every religious experience scattered. A wholly undefined “bond” which cannot of course be differentiated, and which the speaker does not wish to differentiate, takes the place of religious interest, and of religious experience. We do indeed lose our power of speech when a teacher of religion says: “True piety must drive away every religious interest and scatter every religious experience.” We have gone so far that we are unable to realize what it means when an official representative of religion says: “Away with religious interest! Away with religious experience!” You see, apart from the fact that Gogarten does not know that he himself would be quite unable to speak of religion at all, if in the past there had never been atavistic religious interests and religious experience; apart from the fact that he as official representative of religion, could never have stood before an audience had not religion entered into the evolution of mankind, through religious interest and religious experience; apart from all this, everything I have told you just now proves what I told you before, that in the present day the very people who consider themselves the true representatives of religious life, work for the destruction of all that is essential in religion. Have these men lost every possibility of understanding what pertains to the human soul? Can these men no longer understand that when man turns his attention to anything, attention is guided by interest, and that everything entering the consciousness of man is based on experience? It seems as if human beings no longer speak from such consciousness at all, but only from a spirit of opposition. We should bear this in mind in all seriousness when we look into the mirror which so mysteriously unveils the past and conceals the future—though in a certain way the mirror unveils the future, too, in the way I have described.

It is the aim of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science to serve religious interest, and to give a content to religious experience. With what result? In the course of this year (1919) the question was brought forward before the Holy Roman Congregation whether the teaching that is termed theosophical is in keeping with the teaching of the Catholic Church, and whether it is permissible to belong to theosophical societies, to attend theosophical meetings, and to read theosophical papers and periodicals. The answer was: “No”, in every case, No, “in omnibus”. This is the spirit of opposition, of contradiction, and the Jesuit Zimmermann interprets it more particularly by applying this veto of the Holy Roman Congregation to Anthroposophy also. I need not set Zimmermann's writings before you in detail. You all know the wind that blows from a certain quarter against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and that it is the breath of the Spirit of contradiction. The Spirit carried in this wind can be felt in the following words, penned by that same Zimmermann, who for years spread abroad the lie that I was a renegade priest: “Through the defection of their General Secretary, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who took along with him most of the members, the Theosophical Society picked up again to some extent in the course of years, and now owns about twenty-five lodges, one-fifth of which are certainly somewhat dormant, and publishes at Dusseldorf, as its official organ, Das Theosophische Streben (The Theosophic Endeavour). The followers of Steiner, who named his theosophy ‘Anthroposophy’ after his exit, complained recently that he was becoming unproductive, that he had no new ‘visions’, that he always lectures upon the same things, that he would soon have to throw himself into something new, etc.” This paves the way for another article dealing in the same intelligent fashion with the “Threefold Social Organism”. You see what Spirit of truth backs up this Jesuit? A Jesuit does not merely represent his personal opinion, but the opinion of the Catholic Church. He speaks only as a member of the Catholic Church. What he says represents the opinion of the Catholic Church. We must judge such things from a moral point of view. We must ask whether anyone who deals with truth as this man does—a man, moreover, held in high esteem by a particular religious community, can be held in high esteem by the true spirit of humanity.

As long as questions of this kind are not considered with due earnestness, we have not arrived at the right understanding of the Cosmic New Year's Eve. At the present moment, it is essential to reach this right understanding. It is essential for us to extend our sympathies—alas, our sympathies often arise from egoistic sources—to the great human relations, and to feel for the whole of mankind that human sympathy which impels us to make a spiritual movement like this effectively fruitful for the evolution of mankind. May you experience, my dear friends, at this very time, that it is the Spirit of the Cosmos itself, which for decades has been seeking entrance. May you experience during the coming night, that this Spirit which seeks to enter humanity, shall here so be served that the souls of those, who will to feel with and who will to think with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, may feel their union with this new Spirit which wills to enter the world—the Spirit which alone can bring to the earthly world, the world that is destroying itself—the new upbuilding impulse out of Heaven. In this hour, a symbolic hour every year, demanding that we experience it as the decisive hour between past and future—in this hour may you unite your souls with the new Spirit; may you so experience in your souls the contact of the past year with the coming year, that the Cosmic Year which is passing away, may contact itself with the dawning Cosmic Year.

But the passing Cosmic Year will still send many an after-effect into the future; destructive forces into the spheres of Spirit, of Equity, of Economics. Therefore it is all the more needful, that as many men as possible shall be seized in the innermost depths of their souls by the New Year of the Spiritual Future, and shall develop a Will which may be the foundation of a new spiritual world, a world to be built into the future evolution of mankind. Those who care for the future of mankind are not those who would kill religious interest, who would do away with religious experience, but those only, those alone who can see how, through the intellectuality of our age, the old religious interest has faded away, the old religious life has been crippled. Those only care for the future, who see how a new interest must seize mankind, how new religious experience must spring up in mankind, so that man may bring into the Cosmos new germs for a future existence.

My dear friends! At the end of this lecture I would like to explore the arrangement of the material which we want to consider in the time remaining available to us. Today I want to start by continuing what I had begun yesterday. This will make it easier to reach clarity quite quickly regarding the effects of the teaching when the necessary basics are there in the sense I have imagined them and added them to this. For these basics to be more solid, we need a little additional time.

If we consider how to enter into the Gospels in the sense of working with the Gospel processes, then we first of all discover before our souls how in a most particular way the Gospels can be related to, and it is of course necessary, regarding this point, that everyone approaches them from a personal perspective. You then generally understand the content when such a perspective is asserted. For this reason, you may allow me to say something personal in today's lecture. I'm urged to do this because it is the best way for you to receive the following. When I approach the Gospels, it often happens that I have quite a distinctive feeling that within the Gospels, as far as they can be understood, what has been thought and said about them—and you could even, I say this explicitly, however often you approach them—always encounter something new. You can never know enough about the Gospels. Learning about the Gospels is linked to something else; it is linked to the fact that the further you occupy yourself with them, the more your admiration grows for the depth of the content, for just that, I could call it the immeasurable, into which you can become immersed, which calls for the actual experience, that there is no end to this immersion into the depths, that this admiration increases greatly with every deepening of the Gospel involvement.

There are however difficulties along this path which come to the fore when some strides are made into the Gospel—I stress the words "into"—that make you stumble over the inherited content. For actual spiritual researchers this creates less of a disturbance, because such a person would place the primordial Gospel into, what one could nearly call, a wordless text, and that makes it easier not to stumble over the inherited content. Admiration as a basis for reading the Gospels, seems to me an indispensable element for individuals, as a foundation for their religious learning processes. I once more need to stress that it is not important to characterise religious life in general, but to supply a foundation for the teaching process, in any case for religious processes as such.

This admiration you develop for the Gospels actually connects to everything, including details in the Gospels, and follows something else which will probably surprise you, but as I said, I'm speaking from a personal perspective; as a result of this admiration there is the feeling that you are never completely satisfied with just one of the Gospels, but you would only be satisfied with a combined harmony sounding through all the Gospels in a lively way. For instance a great deal of meaning can be found if you let the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel work on you and strive to enter into it as I've tried to indicate yesterday and want to continue with today; then again taking the parallel position, but now with Luke's Gospel, into your soul, where approximately the same situation is described, then you will have quite a changed impression of the experience. The impression becomes quite different; one arrives at quite another synopsis to one which one usually experiences, compared with an inner, lively synopsis.

You see, when you have occupied yourself with such things for a long time, you have had all kinds of experiences in life, and these experiences could seem quite important in as far as having started as a youngster and entering into these teaching processes which you wanted, in the majority.

I once encountered a man with a New Testament. For this New Testament he had acquired four differently coloured pencils and then he had with one pencil, I think it was the red one, underlined everything carefully which appeared as common content in all four Gospels. That meant, as he showed me, very little. He had taken St John's Gospel. There were four pencils; the other three he had applied to delete what only is contained in the Matthew Gospel, and then, what only was in Mark's Gospel and finally that which only appeared in the Gospel of Luke. In this way he had in his way created a strange analytical synopsis about which he was extraordinarily proud. I objected, saying such attempts were often made; we also know about it within German literature—it was an Englishman who held this achievement in front of me—where these attempts are made with corresponding places indicated next to one another in columns and blank intermediate spaces left where it can only be found in one of the Gospels. He was a priori convinced that his synopsis was the best.

It is exactly the opposite way to what can be found with the choice of the spiritual route. Here the different Gospels' content doesn't fall apart in contradictions, but they are enclosed into the totality of the deed, together; the coming-into-admiration is an experience which has to be had, an experience which is resisted in the most imminent sense by our present spirit of the time. For the spiritual scientist, however, it turns out that what I cannot even ask you to accept is still there, it turns out that there is no other way, than that the content of truth must appear other than just by the harmony between the four Gospels. It would, even if one would create an external synopsis as in Tatian's sense, which are not contradictory within certain limits, it would not result in what is found in the four Gospels as a concrete harmony.

You need to allow all four to work on you and then wait to see what comes out of this, not by first prescribing what the unopposed abstract truth should be and then only look for all which you can eliminate which contradicts the abstract truth. The truth needs to be experienced, and the Gospels themselves are such written works in which truth can be experienced; however, you need to have patience in order to experience this truth in the Gospels. You can of course object and say, you will never actually be able to experience the truth within the Gospels. I have to agree with your point of view because I still never presume to believe that I have found the truth of the Gospels completely; by continuously making further progress I have the decisive feeling that remaining patient in waiting is the basis, because the certainty of truth does not diminish, but becomes increasingly bigger. You can calmly feel the truth as an ideal placed before you at an immeasurable distance yet with the awareness that you are on your way towards it. These are the things you need to place in the soul with Gospel reading, and shape in your heart, otherwise you would actually never be able to cope with the Gospels in a real way. Of course, you could ask: Should I do this?—It will be shown in the next few days, that yes, one should do this after all.

Now I must say, it was quite an inner rejoicing for me when I came across something in the Gospels which someone else probably have found as well, but I came across it through spiritual research into the Gospels. I came across an image which really should be grasped with the eyes of the soul; an image of the three Wise Men or the Three Kings—kings were in those days initiates, inspired by wisdom—how the three Wise Men according to their knowledge discovered in the stars, clearly saw the starry script in the heaven leading them to the Star of Christ, and they came to worship Christ. They actually saw that Christ had to come, according to the prophecy in the stars. For those who know out of scientific foundations what is called star wisdom, can actually only honour this image in the right sense, because they would know that star wisdom is in the most imminent sense different from what we call astronomy today.

What we call astronomy today is mathematical and, at most, of a physical nature. If we talk about astronomy today, which is a science of calculations, and we talk of astrophysics, which is a mechanical science, also when we as religious individuals come from a different basis to our feeling towards the cosmos, we speak out of our time spirit and feel and think within it. However, prophetically predictive star wisdom of the Tree Wise Men is something quite different.

Star wisdom was at that time not taken like earth wisdom. Star wisdom was called something which could not be calculated purely by mathematics or physics, it was regarded as something that must be read like a scripture which had to be learned. The starting point was the twelve fixed signs of the zodiac, and then to look what changes the planets experienced in their positions—seven were accepted, as you know—in relation to the fixed signs of the zodiac. These curved movements were taken up by man; just as we read letters, so man saw signs in the curves, signs giving through the planetary positions in the zodiac, and with their own observations of the stars, to each was added a plane. These planes were differentiated according to how man experienced the world-all from the physical point of view: (draws on blackboard) north, south, east, west, with which you could intensively think about the depth of the dimensions, with nothing added, but everything that was found in the dimensional depth, projected on this plane. By looking at these fourfold differentiated planes as the table on which you read what is shown in the starry worlds as revealed, resulted in a feeling as if you read in the cosmos, and there were specific tasks, which one attains through this reading of the cosmos.

One such task was that you said: Shift yourself particularly into seeing, into your inner seeing and understand how you feel yourself within it, and by understanding yourself in this inner positioning, you now follow the moon's course, follow therefore what can be placed here (demonstrates on blackboard), and you will understand as earthy man, the secrets of Saturn.

I initially just want to indicate how such things came about. These were once lively human occupations and through this reading in the heavens a certain amount of knowledge was gathered. Today's astronomy and astrophysics by comparison appear as someone describing the letters, but in the astronomy under consideration here, I'm not even talking about the letters but about reading the text. That's the difference. With this I wanted to characterise how wisdom was created for humanity from which the wise men rose up out of the Orient in search of Christ: this wisdom directed them to the Christ.

My dear friends, what has actually arisen in our souls with this? What is placed before our souls is that the highest wisdom which could, at that time, be reached in the world, was leading towards the Mystery of Golgotha, the highest wisdom. To a certain extent in this lies the thought of the proclamation: May you obtain the highest wisdom; the highest wisdom which can be gained from reading the stars, proclaiming the Mystery of Golgotha to you. This image appears in the Matthew Gospel when you are in the position to fully engage in the Matthew Gospel, in its own time epoch. This experience forms itself in such a way that it really turns into admiration for the depictions of the Matthew Gospel.

Now you leave this image for a moment. Going on to Luke's Gospel you find the verse of the shepherds in the fields. In contrast to the Three Wise Men from the Orient, who have the highest knowledge, you are taken to the simple-minded shepherds in the fields, who know nothing about knowledge, who can't for a moment sense the knowledge possessed by the three Wise Men from the Orient. The shepherds, through the natural relationship they have with their consciousness, only have an inner experience in which the announcement is given: The Divine is revealed in the Heights, so that peace may come to all mankind—only out of their uncomplicated, simple-minded experience this manifests as an image, not a mere dream image, but a picture of an imagination of a higher reality, a higher actuality. We are led to the hearts of these shepherds, who out of this human simplicity, in the absence of all knowledge, come to the decision to go and worship the Child.

Let's now place these two side by side. We don't look at them as something about who said this or who said that, but we place them side by side as the complimentary experience towards the complete truth. What do we get then? We have the direct, enlivened conviction: The Mystery of Golgotha has appeared in such a way that it is revealed to the highest of knowledge of that time and the most simple-minded hearts, if they are open to it in a selfless way. On the one hand, hardly anything can be seen with greater illumination and on the other hand experienced with greater depth in the soul, than the feelings in the Mystery of Golgotha.

You have to have the boldest of modern intellectualist minds towards experiences, well founded in present knowledge and not only in an outer content of old wisdom, but in the soul constitution of the old wise ones, if you want to behave like modern science behaves towards these things. Just as deeply as the cosmic reading resides within the starry worlds, so deeply are the simple-minded shepherds in the fields certain of the strong validity of the announcement. Today, mankind no longer knows how the soul constitution has changed in the course of time, humanity doesn't know how, what can be read in the outer knowledge of the stars, can be experienced inwardly in the human soul as it was experienced in olden times, how astral truths were heart-felt experiences, and how we as human beings, in order to gain our freedom, were led out of these stages of consciousness, and after gaining our conscious freedom, we can again return to this earlier stage. My dear friends, we must be able to acquire this selfish feeling. To achieve our freedom, we must go back so far, let's say from 20 December to 6th or 7th January just as abstractly as people with our souls, as we do, for example, when we (abstractly) experience Easter time. Let me express this particularly clearly—as I've said, these things even take root in life's experiences—I once attended a small gathering where the discussion was about a reformed calendar, a reformed calendar to be developed from modern needs. A modern astronomer who was highly regarded in the astronomic scholarly community, was also present. He obviously was an expert witness and pleaded for the uniformity in the Easter festival being determined as always being on the first Sunday of April, that it would be at least purely outwardly, abstractly, fixed. He had no understanding at all that mankind had to look at the alternating relationship between the sun and moon in order to determine the Easter festival. To speak like this in such a gathering would of course have been complete foolishness. We are so far away from our inner religious experience of what current humanity can understand of the cosmos, which, just when it's at the highest point of its particular chapter of scholarship, they see it only as normal for mankind.

Among the reasons given at the time to determine the Easter festival, there was also introduced the disorder which had to be put into the annual accounting records, when the variable time of Easter had to be placed into these books, they no longer preserve anything other from the old religion than inserting the words "With God" on the first page. This was recorded in the accounting records. I ask you to please go and look for yourselves, how much of this expression is observed in the pages that follow.

You need to understand such things thoroughly, as expressions of the spirit of the time. If you don't grasp the spirit of the time even into the details, how will you then sense the actual impulse for religious renewal? You have to be able to say to yourself with certain seriousness that this "with God" should prove true on the pages of the General Ledger and Cash Book or Journal. Just imagine what power is needed to encounter the forces active in today's social life, to really bring religion into life. This has to be sensed constantly in the background, or otherwise the drive to religious renewal is not serious enough, as it should be today. So, a feeling must develop for change in the soul constitution. You must understand that in olden times the soul constitution was such that when the earth was frozen and the stars appeared in its extraordinary aura in the second half of December, inner mankind was so contracted that they came to visions which allowed them to inwardly experience what in reality was outwardly read in the stars by the exploring astrologers.

From the same source did the poor shepherds on the fields and the astrologers (for that was they were, the Wise Men) come to worship the Christ infant. They came from different sides to the same place. The ones from the periphery of the world-all, the others from the centre of the heart of mankind, and they discovered the same. We must learn while doing one thing or another, to also really find the same, we must, particularly as religious teachers do this, so that our words gather content, content of such a kind as the content in the words the Tree Wise Men brought from the Orient.

In the same way as the shepherds went forth in the fields, we must go, because only then will words become as powerful as they need to be. We need content for our words, and we need power in words. We attain such content for our words when we deepen ourselves in something like the Matthew Gospel; and we attain the power when we deepen ourselves in something like the Luke Gospel. These two Gospels—we will still come back to the others—stand to a great extent as complimentary opposite each other. It is what anyone can give and taken into their being, just as if we break through what is given as religious teaching content coming from of the depth of the human soul.

So you see, we can only really speak in this way through Anthroposophy. Just try for once if you can find the possibility somewhere, to speak in this way. Where you will find it, Anthroposophy is actually subliminally present; it doesn't always have to be called dogmatic, it is not meant that way.

Now, as soon as we approach such feeling and experiences as we find in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel, my dear friends, then first of all we will find—by just taking the words, as they are expressed—that their experienced content is not the same as what we so easily have in the awareness of our time—we discover first of all an elevated admiration for the entire composition of the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel. The entire composition can only leave one filled with admiration.

First of all, we have the parable of the sower. After this parable we have three parables, from the sowing of the herbs and the weeds which should grow until the harvest, we have the mustard seed parable and the parable of the sourdough. Between these parables we have certain instruction of the disciples who should listen differently compared to how other people listen. Then come the dismissal of the people and more parables which are addressed to the disciples only. During the course of the chapters we are led through parables spoken to the people, and to instructions given to the disciples regarding the parables which had been given to the people. Then follows the disciples being taken into, I'd like to call it, the secrecy of the parables which only the disciples share, followed by the question: Have you understood the parables?—and the answer: Yes, Lord.—

This is a wonderful composition and it becomes even more admirable when we go into details. First of all, we simply have the parable of the sower. After introductory words having been said, we are told what the sower sows; that birds also eat the sown seeds, some seeds fall on stony ground where they can only have weak roots and get too little inner strength, others fall on good earth. This is clearly put to us; and after this has been given, the next parable already starts with the words: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like ..." The parables that follow and that are also spoken to the people, begins with "The Kingdom of Heaven is like ..." The people are therefore thoroughly prepared, by first having the facts established and then they are softly led to what is said as facts, facts aimed at the nature of the kingdoms of heaven. That's all the people will be told, then they will be released.

The following parables are taught to the disciples: the parable of the treasure in the field, the parable of the precious pearl, the parable of the fish caught in the net from which many are thrown out, and the good ones gathered for nourishment. These parables are only spoken about to the disciples, and they are asked whether they have understood. They answer with the word "Yes," which in the context of the Gospel would mean the same if today we could acquire the right feeling for it, and say: Yes, Amen.—In this the wonderful composition lies, which does not have to be looked for because it comes across in a natural way.

Sceptics may well say: this layout means nothing, as it is put down.—However, my dear friends, if you let yourself live into the Gospels, you will not be able to do anything other than experience these things; and it will have its reasons why we must experience them so, as to live into the wonderful composition, in order to really notice all the details, the Gospels have to reveal. Here you have a wonderful composition.

Let's try and enter into this wonderful composition. Let's go to the three parables only told to the disciples about heaven. According to the total sense in which the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel is expressed, out of the spirit of Matthew's Gospel of Christ Jesus, this is not said to the people. Listen carefully what I emphasize: in the spirit of the Matthew Gospel this would not be told to the people. Try to remember exactly what is said in these parables which are only told to the disciples. Firstly, there's the parable about the treasure in the field, discovered by a man who then sells all he has in order to buy the field with the treasure in it, so he may own it. Actually, it comes down to this, that he sells everything in order to acquire this treasure; that he gives up everything so that he may have the treasure. This relationship of Jesus to his disciples may not be expressed to the people. Why? Because it contains a certain danger; that of becoming egotistic, the danger of reward-ethics. One could not, without damaging the people, without further ado speak about egoism. Egoism is addressed when one urges good deeds with reference to the reward of the Eternal. Reward ethic, which fundamentally is still present to a marked degree in the Old Testament, this reward ethic is rejected by Christ Jesus. That is why he speaks about this parable—for which the unprepared would look for as reward—only to those who had already progressed far enough that there would no longer be a danger for this parable to indicate its egotistic meaning. The disciples who through their communal life with Christ Jesus had gone beyond egoism, to them this could be said as it is in this parable, to them the heavenly realms could be compared with a treasure. In the disciples the urge for selfishness was not agitated. To the people in this sense of the Matthew Gospel it could not be said, just as little as what follows, which is structured accordingly with the parable of the merchant who sells everything in order to acquire the Heavenly realm. Because Christ Jesus knows he may speak to his disciples in this way, he can speak to them about the last, the most dangerous parable. It is the parable which must have a terrible effect on unprepared people, the parable of everything which is in offensive, evil or sinful, will finally be burnt in the furnace of fire, and only the good be gathered for Heaven. This can only be tolerated by minds which have learnt to be un-egoistic; otherwise it would anger their minds regarding such a parable.

What is it actually, that should be avoided with such an instruction, which Christ Jesus gives his disciples? Becoming angry should be avoided, that people should become angry with the way of the world and about being human. The entire 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel is an instruction to make people patient regarding their destiny; for this reason, it can only be revealed at the very end, as to what will happen at the end of the world. So these final parables are the ones which could only be spoken to the disciples in secrecy because in they were—whatever the Christ Jesus may also say, as the most terrible thing, at this moment, in this immediate present—to be found in unselfishness. For this reason, they could say: Yes, Amen.

After we have tried to have an experience of these particular parables addressed only to the disciples, we can go back to the others. A person can only be prepared for a selfish notion of something if he approaches something which exists outside of him in nature, without agitation of his judgement. If a person dwells on the contemplation of the four processes of the seeds—if a person doesn't think of anything other than: the seeds which fall on to the ground are eaten by the birds, the seeds that fall on stony ground, fall under the thorns, and some on good ground—by simply spending time with these observations, one can actually not be engaged with oneself: one is drawn into selfless observation. After one has, in this way, presented the outside world to the usually selfishly dominated mind, then only can something happen. What is it that can happen?

Now you see, here we again come to an important detail of the 13th Matthew Gospel chapter. I can do nothing towards someone finding this examination of details as perhaps pedantic; for me it is not pedantic, it is certainly a reality. From out of the time consciousness of the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha important differences are made between ears, errors in hearing, and eyes which are slumbering, sleeping and not awake. The explanation is given that the evolution of mankind should be discovered through the inaccurate hearing and that the eyes should be awakened.

You see, this leads us to, as at that time—which we know about from other anthroposophic foundations—a clear differentiation made between the organisation of hearing and the organisation of seeing. People in the present day clearly know nothing about this. They don't know for example, that the total organisation which stream out from the rhythmic, goes up into the head organisation, and encircles an inner organisational harmony between hearing and speech. Hearing and speech belong together. Hearing and speech is to a certain extent combined in a single organ complex, which today's physiology doesn't list. When I show you my wooden sculpture group you will be able to use this practically demonstrated physiology—but which it doesn't want to be—to see how it appears these days, out of anthroposophic foundations, that they are a unit: breathing, speaking and hearing. These three are also present in seeing. Take this for example (writes on blackboard):

• Breathing
• Speaking
• Hearing

I could also have written: speaking, breathing hearing—the sequence is unimportant. Take these three as the members of a single deed. The three members are also present in seeing. Also in seeing it is there on the one hand, something driven through breathing into the brain, the breathing process participates in seeing. All this is so quietly indicated in the human organization that we are able to say: This here (note on blackboard: breathing) is completely atrophied in human consciousness; what we are still able to observe, when we speak, and thus look at our breathing, we don't notice in the visual act; it is completely atrophied. (Beside the word Breathing he writes on the blackboard):

—completely atrophied

With the act of seeing there is also something half atrophied that links to hearing. (Beside the word Hearing he writes on the blackboard):

—half atrophied

That is partially atrophied, it remains quite in the shadows of the subconscious. The only thing which is expressed in seeing, corresponds to speaking. (Beside the word Speaking he writes on the blackboard):

—developed

In conjuring up the images around us through our eyes, we speak etherically. However, the other two members which otherwise clearly diverge, which diverge while listening and speaking, are hardly present with seeing, but atrophied; here mere formation of the image overwhelms us. Because this connection is not perceived, today's tricky physiological foundation lies in epistemology. All epistemological theories, or at least many of them, start from the physiological foundation of observation, which are equally described for all the senses; they actually have no meaning other than an act of seeing. What you can find in the physiological foundation only really fits the act of seeing and is therefore unclear, because people can't see that some things are atrophied. One could say that these physiological views, which dominate there in relation the sensory physiology, are the most dreadful, able to depress the human mind: one is forever being bothered with things said about the senses in general while each sense must be treated concretely, individually. In many cases it is so that a sensory unit theory is taken as a basis.

Such a science as we have developed in Anthroposophy was of course not available at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. How we can discover the truths about things today essentially depends on our admiration for the Gospel content. Today there's been talk that one must apply great efforts to reach into spiritual research, and that we must regard seeing differently to listening. With listening one must say: People can actually only hear in error because listening is fully developed as a single act. We also have ears that are open during sleep; we have no wilful influence on our auditory images. Our 'I' doesn't quite flow into them and form what is heard, but only in such a way that it can penetrate them with erroneous judgements. Hearing can become incorrect. Seeing has caused hearing to become half atrophied. Seeing has only developed what corresponds to it in speech. Added to this one must be awake, the eyes must be awakened just as people need to learn to speak.

Without it being explicit knowledge in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, it would have been simply correctly spoken and understood out of the inner soul constitution of the people. I'm not saying something like the Christ having learnt Anthroposophy—that sounds very amusing—or to those he had spoken, had learnt about Anthroposophy. He spoke in such a way because he was aware how the other, by listening, would have understood. Yet also there he had to speak in such a way, as one spoke at that time, regarding seeing, and regarding hearing, from out of the most inner soul constitution. Because of me you use the expression "out of the subconscious" which is a term often misused today in an inconvenient way for these things. In order to have this understood in the right way, you can also understand the third which is also contained in the Matthew Gospel: to understand it with a person's whole being; his concentration, understanding through the heart. Understanding with your whole being is quite a different kind of understanding; one must speak to the heart of the person if you want to explain the parables. You can't speak in a different way to the heart if it is not functioning in such a way that the eyes are made to see in the right way, the ears to hear in a right way. This is how you have to distinguish: you must awaken the ability to see and make the ears hear in the right way. The ears don't need to be awakened, they only need to hear correctly.

In the total style of the 13th Matthew Gospel one's first attention is directed to the full human being; to the focus of the whole human being in his heart, perceiving through his senses, if he is to approach the interpretation of the parables. In the following way Christ Jesus makes it understandable to his disciples: after he has gone through from quite an objective observation given in the parable of the sower, he can no present further active parables and allow these to lead towards the functions of the heavenly realms. First, we have the parable of the plants and the weeds which point out that the good seeds could not flourish, without evil next to it. Then again one could say this is being expressed in a wonderful, quite scientific knowledge, because we know in a certain sense that plants can be damaged if the weeds are taken out in the wrong way. Likewise, we would harm mankind if we were to eradicate sin, for example, by not leading sinful men spiritually to the righteous, but by eradicating them before "the harvest," that is, before the end of the earth. This is approachable to people; what works in plants or in weeds, can be placed before their souls. It can be taken further, placed there objectively, how the world is spread out in the wide-open spaces, and how to carry what comes from the world, to the heavenly kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is the mustard seed, which is small compared with other seeds, then again it becomes a bigger tree compared with other plants.

This too, has to be pointed out to people, how it needs to be seen that the sprout is less visible to the eye than the grown-up plant, the heavenly less obvious than the worldly. Then awareness is drawn to how the kingdom of heaven works like sourdough, but all permeating, also working—at that time this imagination was far more obvious—as something spiritual. At that time this imagination could be uttered without introduction: Look at the sourdough as it is taken by the woman who leavens the bread with it; look at the bread which it spiritualises, behold the kingdom of heaven as it spiritualizes the world. You could not say to the people: Sell everything! The people had to behold what is indicated here, otherwise if you said: Sell everything!—in their selfishness they would really sell the whole world in order to buys something which is in the heavenly realm.

So we see in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel the construction and composition of the truth because the truth is not simply stated as an abstraction, but the activity of truth consciously works from one person to another, that one needs to feel all the time, how one should speak. This is not the teaching of a hierarchy, this is simply the result of what becomes necessary through reality. It is in fact necessary, my dear friends, to speak to you in a different way because you want to become pastoral workers, than I would have spoken to non-pastoral workers, who are only believers. This content of the truth we find in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel comes to us as a direct life experience which we can have in our time, which calls such a strong feeling within us, that it actually has something of a religious character.

You see, for those who have the sense that a way must be found to the truth, the truth must turn into such an inner component that it exists among people and that people can experience the truth—they would feel that university education, as it lives in writing books, is actually something hostile. Today something exists in our writing of books; when we write a book, we don't really feel like a human being among other human beings, for it is conceived as an abstraction; while writing the book it is without regarding who would be acquiring the book. This even produces the desire particularly when spiritual supersensible things are spoken about, for things that can stand alone in a book, and that, because it is ignorant, can only give something very deficient to unknown crowds of people, also again jointly experience the truth with the people in the manner and way these people are prepared for truth, while much is given in the preparation of the truth and less to the ignorant formulation of the truth content. This gives one a clear and strong experience of what I yesterday called the vital content of the Gospels. The vital content of the Gospels must also not be understood abstractly, as many do today. People do not believe, when they as religious teachers allow their words to a certain extent to flow together, that words are permeated with feelings; they firmly insist that in what one calls sacramental, they believe they should find something flowing forth out of the abstraction.

This is not the essential thing; the essential is the sense of feeling oneself a person among people, by experiencing truth with other people. This is after all Christian. For this reason, it is necessary to believe in Christian community building, not only Christian proclamation. It is very necessary to believe that everything must necessarily flow towards real community building: this means not merely thinking about what others are saying, but to communally feel and act together. In community building the foundation must be for the community feeling communally, and act communally. It must be a real soul-spiritual organism built by the community. We will talk about this further.

The following list was given for the material to be discussed:

1. Preliminary conditions
2. Foundation of teaching activity
3. The way to experiencing the truth
4. The essence of the breviary, the sermon
5. Building the ritual
6. The treatment of the Community.

Today I would like to address myself to a subject specifically requested by our friends here, a subject having great significance for modern spiritual life. It shall be considered from the standpoint I have often taken when speaking of things of the spirit. As a rule, it is difficult to speak of such a unique and deeply significant subject unless it be assumed that the audience keep in mind various things explained in other lectures given on the foundations of spiritual science. This science is neither widely recognized nor popular; in fact, it is a most unpopular and much misunderstood spiritual stream of our day. Misunderstandings can easily arise especially with a subject like the one chosen today, because the opinion is far too widespread that anthroposophy might undermine this or that religious creed, thereby interfering with what someone may hold precious. Anyone willing to go into anthroposophy in any depth sees that this opinion is completely false. In one sense, spiritual science aims to develop further the way of thinking that entered human evolution through natural science. By strengthening the human soul, it seeks to make this kind of thinking fruitful. The way spiritual science must proceed differs significantly, however, from the way taken by natural science. Anthroposophy takes its start, not from the world perceived by the external senses, but from the world of the spirit. Questions pertaining to the spiritual life of the soul must therefore be considered from the standpoint of spiritual science. Undoubtedly for many in our time the most important question in the spiritual life of humanity pertains to the subject of today's lecture, that is, Christ Jesus.

To ensure that we shall understand each other at least to some extent, I would like to make a few preliminary observations before moving on to any specific questions. Spiritual science, though it is the continuation of natural science, makes entirely different demands on the human soul. This fact accounts for the misunderstanding and opposition spiritual science encounters. The kind of thinking derived from natural science is tied up with a problem that more or less concerns human souls today when they consider higher aspects of life. This is the problem of the limits to knowledge. Spiritual science in no way belittles the most admirable attempt of philosophers to ascertain the extent of human thought and knowledge. Thinkers who judge on the basis of what can ordinarily be observed in the soul easily conclude that human knowledge can go so far and no farther. It is commonly said, “This fact can be known; that other cannot.”

On this issue spiritual science takes a completely different stand because it takes into consideration the development of the human soul. Granted, in ordinary life and science the soul does indeed confront certain limits of knowledge. The soul, however, may take itself in hand, transform itself and thereby acquire the possibility of penetrating into spheres of existence radically unlike those usually experienced.

Here I can only indicate what in earlier lectures and in such books as An Outline of Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have already explained, namely, that the soul can completely change itself. Through practicing certain exercises, the soul may bring about an infinite enhancement of its inherent forces of attention and devotion. Ordinarily, the soul-spiritual life uses the human body like an instrument. Just as hydrogen is bound to oxygen in water, so is this life closely connected with the body, within which it works. Now, just as hydrogen may be separated from oxygen and shown to have completely different qualities from water, so may the soul, through the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, separate itself from the body. By thus turning away from and lifting itself out of the body, the soul acquires an inner life of its own.

Not by speculation or philosophy but by devoted discipline can the soul emancipate itself from the body. To live as a soul-spiritual being, apart from the body is the great experience of the spiritual investigator. Here I can only indicate things I have elaborated elsewhere.

Today my task is to show how the spiritual investigator must regard the Christ Jesus Event. Statements of religious creeds concerning this event are derived from experiences of the soul in its life within the body. The statements of the spiritual investigator come from clairvoyant experiences of the soul as it lives independently of the body in the spiritual world. In this condition the soul can survey the whole course of mankind's evolution.

What the spiritual investigator thereby learns of Christ Jesus calls for a certain way of speaking, because the investigator acquires his knowledge in immediate spiritual vision while living separated from his body. Yet he can communicate this knowledge only indirectly by turning his attention to the things of this world. His description, however, must convey what he has experienced in spiritual vision. Thus, what follows in way of explanation of certain processes in man's external life is not meant to be taken metaphorically. It is intended rather to express something in which spiritual science must come to an understanding with natural science. In respect to one point in particular it is most important to come to terms with present-day thought.

In natural science it is admitted that a mere descriptive enumeration of single events in nature is inadequate. It is recognized that the scientist must proceed from a description of natural phenomena to the laws invisibly animating them. These laws we perceive when we relate phenomena with each other, or when we immerse ourselves in them. In this way they reveal their inner laws. In the treatment of historical facts, however, this natural scientific method is not easily applied.

Now, as a rule, I am disinclined to speak of personal matters, but in the following case I can speak of something objective. The title of my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, which was first published many years ago, was not chosen without due reflection. It was selected to indicate a certain way of observing things. It was not entitled The Mysticism of Christianity because I did not intend to deal with this topic, nor was it entitled Christian Mysticism because I did not intend to write on that theme, the mystical life of the Christian, either. What I sought to show was that the Christ impulse, the entrance of Christianity into mankind's development, can be comprehended only by perceiving how the super-sensible plays into the development ordinarily described in history. As these facts are accessible only to spiritual vision, they can be called mystical. They are mystical while at the same time having occurred on earth.

The origin and development of Christianity can be understood only when we realize that facts in history arrange themselves as do facts in our solar system, where the sun has the major role and the other planets less important parts. This arrangement can be recognized when facts are seen from a natural scientific standpoint. In the field of history, however, facts are rarely so viewed. Here, the succession of facts is easily described, but the fact that the way of contemplating the historical facts differs from the way of contemplating scientific facts is lost sight of.

There is a law in natural science whose validity is more or less acknowledged by all, despite this or that detail of it being open to dispute. This law, first formulated by Ernst Haeckel, has become fundamental to biology. It states that a living being recapitulates in its embryonic life, passes through stages of development that resemble those of the lower animals such as the fishes. This is a law recognized in science.

Now there is another law, which can be discovered by spiritual vision, that is of great importance in mankind's development. Because it is valid only in the sphere of spiritual life it presents a rather different aspect than the law just mentioned, but it is as true as any in natural science. It enables us to say what is undoubtedly true, that humanity has passed through many stages in its development, and that as it has passed from one epoch to another, from one century to another, it has taken on various forms. We need only assume that the epochs known to history were preceded by primeval ones. At this point we may ask if the life of humanity as a whole can be compared with anything else. Of course, any comparison concerning mankind's development must be the outcome of spiritual-scientific observation. External facts must be used as a language, as a means of communication, to express what the spiritual investigator perceives. What he perceives is that mankind's development as a whole may be compared with the life of a single man.

The experiences of mankind in ancient cultures—in those of Egypt and China, Persia and India, Greece and Rome—were different from those of our time. In those ancient epochs man's soul lived in conditions different from those of today. Just as in the individual human life the experiences of childhood are not the same as those of youth or old age, so in these cultures mankind's experiences were not the same as ours are today. Human development passes through various forms in the various ages of life.

The following question now arises. What stage in the individual life of man may be compared with the present epoch of humanity? This question can be answered only by spiritual science. Anthroposophy stands upon such a foundation that it can say that when man enters his life on earth he does not inherit everything from his mother and father that belongs to his being. We can say that man descends from a life in the spirit to an existence on earth, and that the spiritual part of his being follows certain laws whereby it connects itself with what is inherited from the parents. Further, we can say that the spiritual part helps in the whole growth and development of the human body. We see how the soul and spirit takes hold of and works upon physical substance. The wonderful mystery of man's gradual development, the emergence of definite traits from indefinite, capacities from incapacities, all bear witness to the sculpting power of these spiritual forces. Through spiritual science we are lead to look back from this present life to former lives on earth. We see that the way our soul-spiritual being prepares the bodily organization and the course our destiny takes depend[s] upon what we have elaborated and gained for ourselves in former lives.

Exact spiritual-scientific investigation shows that during the whole ascending course of our lives, up to our thirties, the fruits won from former lives on earth and brought with us from the spiritual world still exercise an immediate influence upon our physical existence and destiny. Our soul, being connected with the external world, progresses as we experience life on earth. From these experiences a soul-spiritual kernel forms itself within us. Up until our thirtieth to thirty-fifth years we arrange our lives in accordance with the spiritual forces we have brought with us from the spiritual world. From the middle of our lives onward the forces of our soul-spiritual kernel begin to work. This seed, containing what we have already elaborated, continues to work within us for the rest of our lives.

Even after a plant has faded away, the forces capable of producing a new one survive. These forces are like the soul-spiritual forces we gain for ourselves in the first half of life and that predominate in the second. When, in this second period of life, our senses weaken, our hair turns gray and our skin becomes wrinkled, our external life may be compared with a dying plant. Yet, in this period what we have prepared since our birth, what we have not brought with us from a preceding life but have rather elaborated in this life, grows ever stronger and more powerful. It is the part in us that passes through the portal of death, that casts off life as something faded. It is that part in us that passes over into the spiritual world. At an important moment in our life, when the fresh forces of our youth start to wane, we begin to cultivate something new on earth, that is, a soul-spiritual seed that passes through death.

We may now ask ourselves what period in human life can be compared with the present epoch, considering the whole development of humanity. Can our present age be compared with the first part of human life, with the first thirty to thirty-five years, or with the latter part. Spiritual-scientific observation of the present age reveals that our existence in the external world can in fact be compared only with the period of human life lying beyond the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years. Human development on earth has already passed the middle part of life. We need only compare the experiences of mankind in our present culture with experiences undergone in the Egyptian-Babylonian or Greco-Roman cultures. We need only point to our mighty and admirable technical and industrial achievements to show that man has now severed himself from what is directly and instinctively connected with his body.

Men in ancient cultures faced the world as a child does. The child's life is an ascending one, completely dependent upon the body. Mankind's life today, in contrast, is mechanical, cut off from the body. History, science, philosophy and religion all show that mankind in its evolution has reached a point lying beyond the middle of life. Modern pedagogy, with its efforts to be established on rational lines, especially bears out this fact. Modern pedagogy differs markedly from ancient pedagogy. Children growing up under our artificial education become severed from the direct impulses of humanity. An earlier education, one in an epoch lying before mankind's middle life, was derived from intuition and instinct. Observation of the riddles of education strongly confirms the fact that humanity has now passed beyond the point of maturity. We may now ask ourselves what point in humanity's evolution corresponds to the point in the individual life of man that lies between the thirtieth and thirty-fifth years.

When the spiritual investigator, objectively observing the evolution of humanity, turns his gaze on ancient times, he finds a trend that culminates in the Greco-Roman epoch. He finds that then humanity as a whole reached that age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of an individual man. The individual man may use a surplus of vital forces in his body to live beyond the descending point in his life and to cultivate up until his death a soul-spiritual kernel. In the life of humanity as a whole, however, things take a different course. When the youthful forces of humanity cease to flow, as it were, a new impulse is needed for its further development, an impulse not lying within humanity itself. Even if we know nothing whatsoever of the Gospels or of tradition, we need only look at mankind's historical development to discover in the Greco-Roman epoch the entrance of such an impulse. There, at a certain moment, the turning point of man's whole earthly development occurred. A completely new impulse entered the course of man's evolution, when its youthful forces were on the wane. An examination of the ancient mysteries will throw more light on this historical fact.

These mysteries, which existed in every culture and which to some extent have reached our knowledge through literature, were functions performed at centers that served both as schools and churches. Through cultic rites intended to transform the everyday life of soul, these functions enabled men to attain to higher knowledge. These mystery schools took different forms in different countries, but at all centers those souls whom the leaders of the schools believed capable of development received training.

In the mysteries man's soul life was not regarded as it is today. In this ancient viewpoint, which anthroposophy must renew, the soul was deemed unfit in its ordinary state to penetrate into those spheres where its inmost being flows together with the very source of life. The ancients felt that the human soul had to prepare itself for knowledge by undergoing a certain moral and esthetic training. They thought that through this inner training the soul could transform itself and thereby acquire forces of knowledge surpassing those of ordinary life. The soul then became capable of perceiving those mysteries that lie behind external phenomena.

There were basically two kinds of center[s] where pupils were trained to acquire spiritual wisdom and a vision of life's mysteries. Pupils of the first kind, under the guidance of the centers' leaders, especially developed the psychic life. During spiritual vision they could free themselves from the body. The Egyptian and Greek mysteries offered this kind of training. The other kind existed in the Persian mysteries of Asia Minor.

Pupils of these Egyptian and Greek mysteries were trained to turn their senses away from the external world and thus eventually to enter the condition man ordinarily falls into unawares when he is overcome by sleep, when sense impressions cease. The soul of the pupil was led completely into his inner self, and his inner life was given a strength and intensity far surpassing that required to receive merely sense impressions. After pursuing his exercises for a long time, the pupil reached a certain stage in his inner life when he could say to himself, “Man learns to know his real being only when he has torn himself away from his body.” The strange but distinct mood evoked in the pupil's soul gave rise to an experience he could characterize with the words, “In everyday life, when I use my body to connect myself with the world of the senses, I do not really live within my full human nature. Only when I have a deeper experience of myself within my own being am I a man in the fullest meaning of the word.” This experience impressed on him that man can know his spiritual essence by penetrating into his innermost soul. He thereby could draw near to God, the primeval source of his being. Within himself he could feel that point where his soul life united with the divine source of existence.

It must be added that this type of training resulted in an increase of egotism, not a decrease. The leaders of the mysteries thus set great store upon a schooling in human love and unselfishness. They knew that through the wisdom of the mysteries a pupil could indeed unite with his god even though he were insufficiently prepared, but they realized that he could do so only at the price of increased egotism. By withdrawing from the sense world and entering the spiritual world he could experience the human self, the human ego, far more strongly than is usually the case. The men in these mysteries who, by strengthening their inner lives perceived God, remained useful members of human society only if they had first passed through a spiritual development grounded in a sound preparation of the moral life. This, the Dionysian initiation, led man to experience within himself what lies at the base of all human nature, that is, Dionysos.

In the other type of initiation, practiced mainly in Asia Minor and Central Asia, man was led to the secrets of life by an opposite method. He had to subdue all his inner soul experiences, to free himself of the cares and troubles, the passions and instincts of his personal existence. He could then experience the outer course of nature far more intensely than is normally done. Whereas we normally experience only winter and summer, the disciples of these initiation centers had to experience, in a special way, the change from one season to another. Even as our hands share in the life of our bodies, so did the disciple have to share in the life of the earth. When the earth grew cold, when its plant covering began to fade, he had to feel within his soul its life of sadness and desolation. He had to share in these experiences as a member of the whole organism of the earth. Too, he could share in the rising life of spring and of the earth's awakening at midsummer, when the sun stands at its highest point on the horizon. He felt those forces of the sun in union with the whole earth.

In this kind of initiation the disciple's soul was drawn out of his inner being, whereby he could participate in the events of the cosmos and raise himself to the soul-spiritual essence permeating the universe. His experience differed markedly from ordinary contemplation of nature because he felt he lived within the very soul of the universe. In not a bad but a good sense, he was beside himself. He was, though one hesitates to use this word because it has taken on an unpleasant connotation, in ecstasy. Upon achieving this union with the cosmos he could say to himself that through living in the universe and through experiencing its most intimate soul-spiritual forces, he had come to realize that everywhere the final goal of the cosmos is the creation of man. Did man not exist, the whole creation could not fulfill its end, because he was the meaning of the cosmos.

It is one thing to say this; it is quite another to experience it. The disciples of the mysteries felt this fact because they entered into the life of the universe with an enhanced selfconsciousness. Indeed, this proud sense of self was indispensable to their experience of the cosmos. Whereas egotism resided in man's penetration into his spiritual being, pride lay in his union with the soul-spiritual essence of the world. Therefore, those who prepared the disciples for such an experience took care that they did not completely fall prey to pride.

In ancient times, all the truths constituting man's knowledge were acquired through the mysteries on the one or the other path. Humanity's course of development was then on the ascent. Man was unfolding fresh forces and lived in the stage of childhood, as it were. He had to learn through the mysteries how to reach the spiritual worlds. Ancient civilizations always revealed one of these two sides: that derived from man's strengthening his inner life, and that derived from his surveying the whole universe, which enabled him to say that all this pointed to the human being, to the soul-spiritual part he bears within him. Such a disciple of the second kind of initiation could also say when he looked out into the world's spaces, “There, in the wide reaches of the universe, something lives that must enter into me if I am to fully know myself as a human being. But when I live on the earth, unable to look out into the wide world, the spirit cannot come to me, and I cannot really know myself as man.”

Humanity then entered an epoch in which its youthful forces became exhausted. The whole human race reached an age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of the individual man. In this epoch the ancient mysteries, which existed to help humanity in its youth, had lost their meaning. Furthermore, something happened that is most difficult to understand even now. When man attempted to rise to the soul-spiritual essence of the cosmos, this essence no longer drew near him; he could no longer experience the god within himself.

When the ancient Persian surpassed his ordinary state of consciousness, he could feel how God descended upon his soul, how his soul became permeated by the God of the universe. Humanity always had this possibility so long as it possessed its youthful forces. But in the Greco-Roman epoch this possibility ended. Then, everything prescribed in the ancient mysteries to bring inspiration to man became ineffectual, because humanity was receptive to this inspiration only in the time of its youth. Something else now arose. What man could no longer receive because individual human nature had lost the capacity of receiving it even with the help of the mysteries, now entered into the whole evolution of humanity. One human being had to come who could directly unite the two initiation paths.

Purely from the standpoint of spiritual science, apart from all the Gospels, we now see Christ Jesus entering the evolution of the world. Let us imagine someone who knows nothing whatsoever of the Gospels, knows nothing of traditions, but who has entered modern civilization with a soul permeated by spiritual science. Such a person would have to say to himself, “There came a time in the evolution of the world and in the history of humanity when man's receptivity for spiritual life ceased.” But humanity has preserved its soul-spiritual life. How can this be? The soul-spiritual essence that man once took into himself must have entered the evolution of the earth in some other way, independently of man. A Being must have taken into himself what the mystery disciples once received through the power of a most highly developed soul life. In sum, a human being must have appeared who inwardly possessed what the one mystery path enabled the soul to experience directly, namely, the spiritual essence of the external world, the spirit of the universe.

Spiritual science thus regards Christ Jesus as one who inherently possessed those strengthened powers of soul formerly acquired by disciples of the one mystery path. With these powers of soul he could take into himself from the cosmos what the disciples of the other mystery path had once received. From the standpoint of spiritual science we can say that what the disciples of the ancient mysteries once sought through an external connection with the Godhead came to expression in immediate form and as historical fact in Christ Jesus. When did this happen? It happened in that age when the forces that were already exhausted in humanity as a whole were also exhausted in the life of the individual human being. In his thirtieth year of life Jesus had reached the age humanity as a whole had then attained. It was in this year that he received the Christ. Into his fully developed, inwardly strengthened soul he received the spirit of the cosmos. At the turning point of human evolution we discover that a man has taken into his soul the divine-spiritual essence of the universe. What was striven for in the ancient mysteries has now become an historical event.

Let us proceed, bearing in mind indications of the Gospels concerning the life of Christ Jesus from the Baptism in the Jordan to His Resurrection. Spiritual science enables us to say that in this period something completely new entered the evolution of humanity. In the past, man made a real contact with the divine essence only through the mysteries. What was thus experienced in the mysteries went out into the world as revelations, to be accepted in faith. In the event we are now considering, the contact with the spiritual-divine essence of the cosmos happened in such a way that within the man Jesus, Christ entered the stream of earthly life for a period of three years. Then, at the Mystery of Golgotha, a force that formerly lived outside the earth poured itself out into the world. All the events through which Christ passed while living in the body of Jesus brought about the existence of this power in the earthly world, in the earthly part of the cosmos. Ever since that time this power lives in the same atmosphere in which our souls live.

We may term one of the two types of initiation sub-earthly and designate the other, in which man took up the spirit of the cosmos, super-earthly. In either case, man had to abandon his human essence to make contact with the divine essence. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, concerns not only the individual human being but the whole history of man on earth as well. Through this event humanity received something completely new. With the Baptism in the river Jordan something formerly experienced by every disciple of the mysteries entered a single human being, and from this single human being something streamed out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, enabling every soul that would do so to live and be immersed in it. This new impulse entered the earthly sphere through the death and resurrection of Christ. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha man lives in a spiritual environment, an environment that has been Christianized because it has absorbed the Christ impulse. Ever since the time when human evolution entered upon its descent, the human soul can revive itself; it can establish a connection with Christ. Man can grow beyond the forces of death that he bears within him. The spiritual source of man's origin can no longer be found on the old path; it must be found on a new path, by seeking a connection with Christ within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

The Christ Event appears to the spiritual investigator in a special light. It may be of interest to describe what he can actually experience after he has so changed his soul that he can perceive the spiritual world. The spiritual investigator can behold a variety of spiritual processes and beings, but he sees them in a special way, depending upon whether or not he has experienced the Christ impulse during his physical existence. Even today one may be a spiritual investigator without having made any inner connection with the Christ impulse. One who has passed through a certain soul development and attained to spiritual vision may thereby investigate many mysteries of the world, mysteries lying at the foundation of the universe; yet even with this vision, it is possible that he still cannot learn anything of the Christ impulse and of the Being of Christ. If we establish a connection with Christ while in the physical body, however, before the attainment of spiritual vision, if this connection is established through feeling, then this experience of Christ that we have gained while in the body remains with us like a memory when we enter the spiritual world. We perceive that even while we lived in the body we had a connection with the spiritual world.

The Christ impulse thus appears to us as the spiritual essence given to man at a time when the ancient inheritance no longer existed in human evolution. What the individual human being experiences after his thirtieth to thirty-fifth years, the whole of humanity experienced at the beginning of our era. Humanity, which unlike the individual human being does not possess a body, would have lost its connection with the divine-spiritual world had not a superearthly Being, a Being who descended to the earth from the cosmos, poured out his essence into the earth's evolution. This act enabled man to restore his connection with the spiritual world.

I realize that I am presenting things that are even less popular with the public than are the principles of spiritual science. Today I can give but a few indications, which in themselves cannot produce any kind of conviction. In regard to the Christ impulse I can only point out the direction taken by spiritual science, which seeks to be a continuation of natural science. The thoughts I have just presented must gradually enter into human evolution, which they will the more spiritual science enters into it. Unlike many other things being advanced today, spiritual science is not easy. It assumes that before attaining to certain definite experiences the soul must first transform itself.

In respect to the Christ experience in particular, spiritual science points out the significant fact that in the ancient mysteries man could find a connection with the divine essence only by going out of his own being. To experience the divine essence he had to abandon his humanity, become something no longer human. After the turning point of human evolution, however, the wonderful and significant possibility arose that man no longer needed to go out of himself in the one direction or the other. Indeed, man lacked the strength to do so. Nor could he in his youth anticipate a time when this would be possible since humanity had already reached a definite age.

The Mystery of Golgotha enabled man to transcend his ordinary human essence while still retaining his humanity. He could now find Christ by remaining man, not by increasing his egotism or pride. It now became possible for man to find Christ by deepening and strengthening himself in his own being. With Christianity something entered human evolution that enabled man to say to himself, “You must remain a human being; you must remain man in your inmost self. As a human being you will find within yourself that element in which your soul is immersed ever since the Mystery of Golgotha. You need not abandon your human essence by descending into egotism or by rising into pride.”

Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha the quality that each human soul now needs, the quality that in past epochs could be found only outside humanity, must be found in humanity itself, within the evolution of the earth. This deepest and most significant human quality is love. Man in his development must no longer follow the course of strengthening his soul on the one mystery path that leads to egotism, because ever since the Mystery of Golgotha it is essential that man acquire the capacity of transcending egotism, of conquering egotism and pride. Having done this, he can experience the higher self within him. A path of development must now be followed that does not lead us into egotism and pride but that remains within the element of love. This truth lies at the foundation of St. Paul's significant words, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

Only after the Mystery of Golgotha did it become possible to objectively experience Christ as that element enabling man to unite with the divine essence. A pupil of the ancient mysteries may indeed have anticipated St. Paul's words, but he could not have experienced their fulfillment. The mystery disciples and their followers could say, “Outside my own being is a god who pours his essence into me.” Or else they could say, “When I strengthen my inner being, I learn to know God in the depths of my own soul.” Today, however, each human being can say, “The love that passes over into other souls and into other beings cannot be found outside my own being; it can be found only by continuing along the paths of my own soul.”

When we immerse ourselves lovingly into other beings, our souls remain the same; man remains human even when he goes beyond himself and discovers Christ within him. That He can be thus found was made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. The soul remains within the human sphere when it attains to that experience expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” We then have the mystical experience of feeling that a higher human essence lives in us, an essence that enwraps us in the same element that bears the soul from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. This is the mystical experience of Christ, which we can have only through a training in love.

Spiritual science shows how it became possible for the human being to have this inner, mystical experience of Christ. By way of comparison, we find in Western philosophy the thought expressed that had we no eyes we could not see colors. Our eyes must be so built that they can perceive colors; there must be an inner predisposition to colors in our eyes, so to speak. Had we no eyes, the world would be colorless and dark for us. The same reasoning applies to the other senses. They too must be predisposed for the perception of the external world. From this argument Schopenhauer and other philosophers have concluded that the external world is a world of our representations. Goethe has coined the fine motto, “Were the eye not sun-like it could never perceive the sun.” We might say further, “The human soul could never understand Christ were it not able so to transform itself that it could inwardly experience the words, ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’”

Goethe had something else in mind when he expressed the truth that were the eye not sun-like it could not see the sun, namely, that our eyes could not exist had there been no light to form them from the sightless human being. The one thought is as true as the other: There could be no perception without eyes and also no eyes without light.

Similarly, it can be said that did the soul not inwardly experience Christ, did it not identify itself with the power of Christ, Christ would be non-existent for the soul. How can the human soul perceive Christ unless it identifies itself with Him? Yet the opposite thought is just as true, that is, man can experience Christ within himself only because at a definite moment in history the Christ impulse entered the evolution of humanity. Without the historical Christ there could be no mystical Christ. The assertion that the human soul could experience Christ even if Christ had never entered the evolution of mankind is a mere abstraction. Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it was impossible to have a mystical experience of Christ. Any other argument is based on a misunderstanding. Just as it would be impossible for us to have the mystical experience of Christ without the historical Christ, even though the historical Christ can be discovered only by those who have experienced the mystical Christ.

Through spiritual science we are thus led to a vision of Christ not based upon the Gospels. Through spiritual science we can perceive that in the course of history Christ entered the evolution of humanity, and we know that He had once to live in a human being so that He could find a path leading through a human being into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Spiritual research thus leads us to Christ, and through Christ to the historical Jesus. It does this at a time when external investigation, based upon external documents, so often questions the historical existence of Jesus.

The thoughts I have here presented may of course meet with opposition, but I can fully understand it if some say my statements appear to them like a fantastic dream.

From a spiritual contemplation of the whole evolution of humanity we can, through spiritual science, come to a recognition of Christ, and through Christ's own nature we can recognize that He once must have lived in a human body. Spiritual-scientific investigation necessarily leads to the historical Jesus. Indeed, it is possible to indicate with mathematical precision when Christ must have lived in the man Jesus, in the historical Jesus. Just as it is possible to understand external mechanical forces through mathematics, so is it possible to understand Jesus by regarding history with a spiritual vision that encompasses Christ. That Being Who lived in Jesus from his thirtieth to thirty-third years gave the impulse humanity needed for its development at a time when its youthful forces were beginning to decline.

In recapitulation, I can say that a new understanding of Christ is a necessity today. Spiritual science not only tries to lead us to Christ; it must do so. All the truths it advances must lead from a spiritual contemplation of man's development to a comprehension of Christ. Men will experience Christ in ever greater measure, and through Christ they will discover Jesus.

Thus, I have tried to day to take my start from the evolution of humanity, directing your gaze from Jesus, upon whom many look with skepticism, to Christ. In future, Jesus will be found on that path we may characterize with the words, “Through a spiritual knowledge of Christ to an historical knowledge of Jesus.”

Spiritual Science—The Gospel—The Future of Mankind

In the autumn of this present year Nuremberg can celebrate an important centenary, for it was in 1808 that this city received one of the greatest German spirits within her walls. He was one of those spirits of whom we hear little to-day and whose works are understood still less; but he will signify very much for man's intellectual life in the future when he is once understood. He is doubtless difficult to understated and it may be some time before people grasp him again. In the autumn of 1808 Hegel became Director of the Royal Grammar School in Nuremberg.

Hegel made a statement that we may perhaps take as foundation for what we are going to study. He said: The most profound thought is connected with the figure of Christ, with the outer historical figure. And it is the greatness of the Christian religion that every grade of consciousness can grasp the historical external figure, while at the same time it is a challenge to the most earnest labours of the mind and the deepest penetration. The Christian religion is comprehensible at every stage of culture and yet at the same time it challenges the deepest wisdom.—These are the words of Hegel, the German philosopher.

That the Christian faith, the message of the Gospel, can be understood at every stage of consciousness has been taught for a period to be reckoned almost in millennia. To show that it is a summons to the deepest thought, to a penetration into humanity's whole fund of wisdom, will be one of the tasks of Spiritual Science, if this is understood in its true sense and inmost impulse and made the guide of human life. What we are to consider to-day will be misunderstood if it is thought that Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science is in any way a new religion or desires to establish a new religious faith in place of an old one. One might say, not to be misunderstood, if Spiritual Science is grasped aright, it will be clear that though it is a sure and firm supporter of religious life, in itself it is no religion, nor will it ever contradict any religion as such. It is another matter, however, for it to be the instrument to explain the profoundest truths and the most earnest and vital secrets of religions and show how they may be understood.

It may seem somewhat far-fetched if we make the following comparison in order to show the relation of Theosophy or Anthroposophy to religious documents (and to-day we shall be concerned with the religious documents of Christianity). Anthroposophy is related to the religious documents as mathematical instruction is related to the books on mathematics which have appeared in the course of mankind's history. We have an old work which is really of interest only to students of history versed in mathematics, namely, the geometry of Euclid. It contains for the first time in a scholastic form the mathematical and geometrical facts that are now taught to children in school. How few of the children are aware, however, that all that they learn about parallel lines, triangles, angles, etc., stands in that old book, that it was given to humanity then for the first time. It is quite right to make the child conscious that one can realize these things in oneself, that if the human spirit sets its forces in motion and applies them to the forms of space it is able to realize these forms without reference to that ancient book. Yet someone who has never heard of the book and has been taught mathematics and geometry will value and understand it in the right sense if he one day comes across it. He will know how to prize what was given to mankind by the one who set this work for the first time before the human spirit. In this way one might characterize the relation of Spiritual Science to religious documents.

The sources of Spiritual Science are of such a nature that if it is understood in its true impulse it is not to be referred to any kind of document or tradition. Just as knowledge of the surrounding sense-world is given us by the free use of our forces, so can the knowledge of the super-sensible, the invisible lying behind the visible, be given us by the deep-lying spiritual forces and faculties slumbering within the human soul. When man uses the instruments of his senses he can perceive things lying before him and combine them with his intellect. In the same way someone using the means given him through Spiritual Science can look behind the veils of sense-existence to the spiritual causes, to where beings weave and work which are imperceptible to the physical eye and ear. Thus it is in the free use of man's forces, though they are still slumbering as super-sensible forces in the majority of men, that we have the independent source of spiritual knowledge, just as the source of external knowledge lies in the free use of forces directed to the sense-world. And when man possesses the knowledge which introduces him into the super-sensible behind the sensible, the invisible behind the visible, a knowledge as definite as his knowledge of outer objects and events, then he may go to the traditional books and records. Furnished with super-sensible knowledge he may approach the records through which, during the course of evolution, tidings have reached man of the super-sensible world, just as the geometrician approaches the geometry of Euclid. And then he tests them as the modern geometrician tests the geometry of Euclid; he can prize and recognize these documents at their true value. Nor does one who approaches the records of Christianity equipped with knowledge of the super-sensible world find that they lose in value; indeed on the contrary, they appear in a more brilliant light than they showed first to the mere believer, they prove to contain deeper wisdom than had been dreamt of earlier, before the possession of anthroposophical knowledge.

But we must be clear on another point before we can realize the right relation of Anthroposophy to the religious documents. Let us ask ourselves who is better able to judge the geometry of Euclid—one who can translate the words and give the contents without having first penetrated into the spirit of geometry, or one who already understands geometry and is therefore able to discover it in the book? Let us think of a mere philologist, one who knows nothing of geometry, how many incorrect statements would appear if he tried to convey the meaning of the contents. Many have done this with the records of religion, even those who are supposed to be chosen to fathom their true sense. They have gone to these records without first having any independent knowledge of super-sensible facts. And so we have to-day most careful explanations of religious documents, explanations that explore the history of the time and show how the documents originated, and so on. But the explanations resemble explanations of Euclid's geometry by a non-geometrician. Religion—and this we will hold fast—can only be found if one is aided by spiritual-scientific knowledge, although Spiritual Science can only be an instrument of the religious life, never a religion itself. Religion is best characterized through the content of the human heart, that sum of feelings and emotions through which man's sensitive soul sends up all that is best in it to the super-sensible beings and powers. The character of a man's religion depends on the fire of these feelings, the strength of his sensitivity, just as it depends on the warm pulse-beat in the breast and on the feeling for beauty how a man will stand before a picture. True it is that the contents of the religious life is what we call the spiritual or super-sensible world. But just as little as an aesthetic feeling for art is the same as an inner grasp of its laws—though it may assist understanding just as little are the wisdom, the science, that lead into the spiritual worlds the same as religion. This science will make religious feeling more earnest, worthier, broader, but it will not be religion itself. Grasped in its true sense it may lead to religion.

If we wish to understand the force and significance, the real spirit of the Christian religion we must penetrate far into spiritual life. We must look back into times of a primeval past, the pre-religious age of mankind, and try to envisage the origin of religion. Is there a pre-religious age of humanity? Yes, a time existed on earth when there was no religion; this is acknowledged by Spiritual Science though in a very different sense from the assertions of materialistic civilization. What does religion signify for mankind? It was and for a long time will still be that which the word itself signifies. The word “religion” means the uniting of man with his divine element, with the world of the spirit. The religious ages are essentially those in which man has longed for union with the divine, be it out of the sources of knowledge, or from a certain feeling, or because he felt that his will could only be strong if it were permeated by divine forces. Ages in which man had an inner premonition rather than definite vision, in which he rather sensed that a spiritual world was around him, than saw it—these are the religious ages of our earth. And before these ages were others when man did not need such a sense of longing for union with the super-sensible spiritual world, because he knew that world, as to-day he knows things of the sense world. Does man need to be convinced of the existence of stones, plants, animals? Does he need documents or doctrines to prove to him or let him surmise that there are rocks, plants, animals? No, for he sees them round him and needs therefore no religion of the sense-perceptible world. Let us imagine someone from quite another world, possessing quite different senses and organs of knowledge, one who would not see the stones, plants and animals because to him they were invisible. Let us imagine that he was informed through writings or in some other way of their existence, which to you is a matter of direct sight and knowledge. What would that be for him? It would be religion. If he were informed through some book of the existence of stones and plants and animals it would be religion to him, for he has never seen them. There was a time in which humanity lived amongst those spiritual beings and deeds that are recorded in the religious teachings and teachings of wisdom.

The word “evolution” has become a magic word in many fields of thought to-day, but it has been applied by science solely to outer sense-perceptible facts. To one who regards the world from the standpoint of Spiritual Science everything is in process of evolution, and most of all the human consciousness. The state of consciousness in which man lives to-day, through which when he wakes in the morning he is able to grasp the world with his senses, this state has evolved from a different one. We call the present consciousness the clear day-consciousness. But this has evolved from an ancient state which we call the dull picture-consciousness of mankind. There, however, we reach back to humanity's early evolutionary stages of which anthropology tells nothing, since it uses only the instruments of the senses and methods of the intellect. It believes that man has gone through stages in the far past which are the same as the animal creation passes through to-day. We have seen in earlier lectures how the relation of man to the animal is to be understood. Man was never such a being as the present animal, nor is he descended from beings like them. If we were to describe the forms out of which man has evolved they would prove very different in appearance from the present-day animal. These are creatures which have stayed behind at earlier stages of evolution, con-served these stages and hardened them. The human being has grown beyond his earlier evolutionary stages, the animal has gone down below them. So in the animal world we see some-thing like laggard brothers of humanity, who no longer, however, bear the form of those earlier stages.

The earlier stages of evolution took their course when there were different conditions of life on the earth, when the elements were not distributed as they are to-day, when the human being was not encumbered with the kind of body he now bears, and yet was man. He was able to wait, figuratively speaking, within the course of evolution for his entry into the flesh, was able to wait until the fleshly materiality had reached a condition in which he could develop the forces of the present spirit. The animals were not able to wait, they became hardened at an earlier stage, took on flesh earlier than was right. They were therefore obliged to stay behind. We can thus picture that the human being has lived under other conditions and other forms of consciousness. If we follow these back for thousands and thousands of years we shall always find different ones. What to-day we call logical thought, intellect, understanding, has only evolved late in man's history. Much stronger were certain forces in him which are already beginning to decline, such, for instance, as memory. In an earlier age memory was far more developed than it is now. With the growth of the intellect in mankind, memory has stepped essentially into the background. If one uses some measure of practical observation one can recognize that what Spiritual Science relates is not said without foundation. People might assert that if that were true about memory, then a person remaining backward in development by some accident, should be backward least of all in memory. It could also be claimed that if intellectuality were fostered in a person artificially kept back, then his memory would suffer. Here in this city a characteristic case of this very nature is to be found.

Professor Daumer, whom one must hold in the highest esteem, observed this case very thoroughly. It was the case of that human being, so enigmatic for many people, who was once placed into this city in a mysterious way, and who in just as mysterious a way met his death in Ansbach. An author, in order to indicate the mystery of his life, wrote that as he was carried out to burial the sun was setting on the one horizon and the moon was rising on the other. I speak, as you know, of Caspar Hauser. If you disregard all the pros and cons that have been asserted, if you look only at what has been fully verified, you will know that this foundling—who was one day simply there in the street, and who since he did not know whence he came, was called the Child of Europe—could neither read nor write when he was found. At an age of twenty years he possessed nothing of what is gained through the intellect but he had a remarkable memory. As they began to instruct him, as logic entered his soul, his memory disappeared. This transition in consciousness was accompanied by something else. He possessed at first an incredible, an entirely inborn truthfulness and it was precisely in this truthfulness that he went more and more astray. The more he nibbled, so to say, at intellectuality, the more it vanished. There would be many things to study were we to enter deeply into this human soul which had been artificially held back. It is not difficult for the student of Spiritual Science to credit the popular tradition, so unacceptable to the learned people of to-day, which relates that while Caspar Hauser still knew nothing, while he still had no idea that there were beings besides himself of different form, he exercised a remarkable effect upon quite savage creatures. Savage animals humbled themselves and became mild, something streamed from him that made such beasts gentle, although they savagely attacked anyone else. We could in fact penetrate deeply into the soul of this remarkable personality, so enigmatic to many, and you would see how things that cannot be explained from ordinary life are led back through Spiritual Science to spiritual facts. Such facts cannot be learnt by speculation but only by spiritual observation, though they are comprehensible to an unbiased and logical thinking.

All this has only been said in order to show you that the modern consciousness has evolved from another, an age-old-state when man was not in direct touch with outer objects in the modern sense, but on the other hand was in connection with facts and beings of the spiritual world. A human being did not see another's physical form—nor did this form resemble that of to-day. When another being approached him a sort of dream-picture arose and by its shape and colouring he knew whether the other was antagonistic to him or sympathetic. Such a consciousness perceived spiritual facts and the spiritual world. To-day man is among beings of flesh and blood, at that time, when he turned his gaze to himself and himself was soul and spirit, he lived among spiritual beings. They were present to him, he was a spirit among spirits. Although his consciousness was only dreamlike, yet the pictures that arose in him were in living relation to his environment. That was the far distant age when man still lived in a spiritual world. Later he descended from it in order to take on a corporeal nature suited to his present consciousness. Animals already existed as physical creatures while man still perceived in spiritual realms. He lived at that time among spiritual beings, and just as you need no proof to be convinced of the presence of stones, plants and animals, so man in those primeval times needed no testimony in order to be convinced of the existence of spiritual beings. He lived among spirits and divine beings and therefore needed no religion. That was the pre-religious age.

Then man descended, the earlier form of consciousness changed into the modern. Colours and forms are no longer perceived as floating in space, colour is laid upon the surfaces of sense-objects. In the same measure as man learnt to direct his senses to the outer world, did this outer world draw itself like a veil, like the great Maja, over the world of spirit. And humanity had to receive tidings of the spiritual world through this sheath, religion became necessary.

There is also a state, however, between the time preceding a religious consciousness and the time of actual religion: there is an intermediate condition. Thence are derived the mythologies, sagas, folk-stories of the spiritual worlds. It is a dreary arid learning that has no inkling of real spiritual events and asserts that all the figures of Nordic or German mythology, of Greek mythology with its accounts of the deeds of the gods are merely inventions of popular fantasy. They are not inventions, the peasant folk do not indulge in such fancies and if they see a few clouds stretched across the sky, say that they are little sheep. That the people have such fantasies is a fiction of our modern learnedness which abounds in lively fantasy about such things. The truth of the matter is quite different. The old saga and stories of the gods are the last relics, the last memories of the pre-religious consciousness. They are records of what men themselves have seen. Those who described Wotan, Thor, Zeus, etc., did so because they remembered that such things had been experienced once upon a time. Mythologies are fragments, broken pieces of what had once been experienced. The intermediate stage was shown in another way as well. Even when clever men had already—let us say—become very clever, there were still persons who under exceptional conditions (call them states of insanity or being carried away, as you will) could see into the spiritual worlds, who could still be aware of what in earlier times was seen by all. They recounted that they themselves still saw something of the spiritual world. This was linked with the memories and led to a living faith among the people. That was a state transitional to the state of actual religion.

We may ask: what paved the way in mankind to an actual religion? It was because men found a means of so developing their inner being that they were once more able to behold the worlds from which they had sprung, which they used to see in a dull consciousness. And here we touch upon a chapter which to many modern minds contains but little probability, the question of initiation. What are initiates? They were those who so developed their inner nature of soul and spirit through certain methods that they grew again into the spiritual world. There is initiation! In every soul super-sensible forces and faculties lie dormant. There is, or at least there can be, a great and mighty moment when these forces awaken. We can gain some idea of this moment if we picture the general course of human evolution. To speak in the words of Goethe we can say that we look back into the far past when the human body had no such physical eye or physical ear as exist to-day. We look back to times when there were undifferentiated organs, able neither to see nor to hear, at the places where these organs are now situated. A time came for physical humanity when such blind organs evolved to radiant points, gradually evolved until light itself dawned upon them. In the same way a time came when the human ear had developed to such a stage that the former silent world revealed itself in tones and harmonies. The sun's forces worked upon the formation of the human eye. And to-day man can live the life of spirit and thus develop the organs of soul and spirit which are largely undeveloped in present mankind.

The moment is possible and for many has already dawned when the soul and spirit are transformed just as once the external physical organism was transformed. New eyes and ears arise through which the light shines and tones resound out of the spiritually dark and silent world. Development is possible, even to the point of living into the higher worlds. That is initiation. And the Mystery Schools provided methods of initiation as in ordinary life the methods of the chemical laboratory or of biological research are made available. The difference is only this—official science has to prepare instruments and other apparatus for its use, while he who would become an initiate has but one instrument to perfect, namely, himself in all his forces just as the force of magnetism can lie dormant in iron, so there slumbers in the human soul the power to penetrate into the spiritual world of light and sound. And so the time came when normal humanity saw only physical sense-existence and when the leaders were initiates. These could see into the spiritual worlds and give information and explanation of the facts of that world in which man had earlier lived.

To what does the first stage of initiation lead? How does it appear to the human soul? Do not imagine that this development is merely a matter of philosophic speculation, a spinning out, a refinement of ideas. The ideas man has about the sense-world are transformed when he grows into the spiritual world. No longer does he apprehend things through sharply outlined concepts, but through pictures, through Imaginations. For the human being grows into the spiritual process of world creation. The firm definite contours of the physical material world exist, in fact, nowhere else. In the world creative process the animal does not appear with clear outline. One has there something like a basic idea of the animal from which the diverse external forms can originate, a living reality, membered in itself. One must take one's stand strictly on the basis of Goethe's words: “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” The initiate learns at first to know and grasp in pictures, he learns to ascend into the spiritual world. There his consciousness must be more mobile than that which serves us for apprehending the surrounding sense-world. Hence this stage of development is called the Imaginative Consciousness. It leads man again into the spiritual world, but not in a dull twilight state. The initiate consciousness to be gained is clear and bright, as clear as man's consciousness by day. There is thus an enrichment, the spiritual consciousness is added to the day-consciousness. In the first stage of initiation man lives in the imaginative consciousness. The documents of humanity record what the initiates experienced in the spiritual world just as information with regard to the science of geometry was imparted to mankind through Euclid. We recognize what stands in these records when we go back to the sources—the spiritual vision of the initiates.

Those were the conditions prevailing among men up to the appearance of the greatest Being who has trodden upon the earth, Christ Jesus. With his appearance anew element entered evolution. If we would understand the essential nature of the new element bestowed on mankind through Christ Jesus, we must realize that in all pre-Christian initiation the candidate was completely withdrawn from ordinary life, he must work upon his soul in centres of profoundest secrecy. Above all we must realize that when man raised himself again into the spiritual world something of that merely dreamlike picture-consciousness still remained. Man had to retreat from this sense-world to be able to enter the spiritual world. That this is no longer necessary to-day has been brought about through the appearing of Christ Jesus on earth. Through the fact that the Christ-principle has entered humanity, the Central Being, the very Centre of the spiritual world, has once existed historically in a human being on this earth. It is the same Being for whom all these have longed who have developed a religious life, who have beheld in the Mystery Centres, who have left the sense-world in order to enter the spiritual world. The Being of whom it has been proclaimed that man confronts it as his highest nature, this has entered humanity's evolution with Christ Jesus. One who understands something of genuine spiritual science knows that all religious proclamation before the coming of Christ Jesus is a prophecy of him.

When the ancient initiates wished to speak of the highest that was accessible to them in the spiritual world, of that which they were able to see as the origin of all things, then under the most diverse names it was of Christ Jesus that they spoke. We need only remember the Old Testament, itself a prophecy. We remember how when Moses was to lead his people he received the command: “Say to thy people that the Lord God has said unto thee what thou shalt do.” Then Moses asks: “How will the people believe me, how can I convince them? What shall I say when they ask who has sent me?” And he was commanded: “Say the ‘I-am’ has sent thee.” Read it again and compare as exactly as you can with the original text and you will see its significance. The “I-Am,” what does that mean? The “I-Am” is the name for the divine Being, the Christ-principle of man—the Being of whom man feels like a drop, a spark, when he can say “I am.” The stone, the plant, the animal cannot say “I am.” Man is the crown of creation inasmuch as he can say “I am” to himself, he can utter a name which does not hold good for anyone but the one who utters it. You alone can call yourself “I”; no one else can call you “I.” Here the soul speaks within itself in a word to which none other has entrance except a Being which comes to the soul through no external sense, on no outer path. Here Divinity speaks. Hence the name “I-Am” was given to the Godhead whose being fills the world. “Say that the ‘I-am’ has told thee !” Thus was Moses to speak to his people.

Men learn only gradually to understand the true, deep meaning of this “I-am.” Human beings did not feel themselves as individuals at once. You can still find this in the Old Testament, these men did not as yet feel individual. Even the members of the German tribes, right into the time of the Christian Church, did not feel themselves to be individualities. Think back to the Cherusci, the Teutons, etc., the German tribes in whose land modern Germany now lies. The separate members felt the tribal ego, and themselves as a part of it. A man would not have said “I am” in the clear, definite way it is said to-day; he felt himself part of an organism composed of those who were related by blood. This blood-relationship assumes the greatest proportions among the followers of the Old Testament religion. The individual felt himself sheltered in the whole folk which for him was ruled by one Ego. He knew the meaning of “I and the Father Abraham are one,” for he traced the blood-relationship back through the generations to Abraham. If he wished to go beyond his single ego he knew himself to be sheltered in the Father Abraham, from whom flows all the blood through the generations, which is the external bearer of the common Folk-Ego.

Now if this expression, which signified the highest they knew to the people of the Old Testament is compared with what has been brought through Christ Jesus then a lightning-flash illumines the whole advance that has come about through Christian evolution. “Before Abraham was, was the ‘I-am.’” What does this mean? “Before Abraham was the ‘I-am.’” (That is the right rendering of the biblical passage.) It means: Go back through all generations, and you find something in yourself, in your own individuality which is even more eternal than what flows through all blood-related generations. Before the ancestors were, was the “I-am,” that Being which draws into every human being, of which each human soul can directly feel something in itself. Not “I and the Father Abraham,” not I and a temporal Father, but I and a spiritual Father, who has no part in anything perishable, we are one! I and the Father are one. The Father dwells in each separate individual, the Divine Principle lives in him, something which was, which is, and which is to be.

Men have actually only begun after 2,000 years to feel the force of this world-impulse; in future ages, however, they will realize the significance for mankind of this forward step in the remission and evolution of the earth. What the ancient initiates tried to reach could only be realized if one went beyond the individual human being and grasped the spirit of a whole people. If the normal man heard that he would say: That is a transient entity which begins with birth and ends with death. But if he were initiated in the secrets of the Mysteries, he saw as the Folk Spirit, as the actual Being who flows through the blood of the generations, that which was only dimly sensed by the others. He could see what can be reached only in the spiritual realm and not in external reality. He could see a divine Being who flows through the blood of the generations. To stand face to face in the spirit before this God could only take place in the Mysteries.

Those who were round Christ Jesus with full understanding as his intimate pupils were conscious that a Being of divine spiritual nature stood outwardly before them, clothed in the flesh as human personality. They were sensible of Christ Jesus as the first human being to bear a Spirit who otherwise was felt only by interrelated groups, and who could only be seen in the spiritual world by initiates. He was the Firstborn among men.

The more individualized a man becomes the more he can become a bearer of Love. Where the blood links men together they love because they are led to what they should love. When man is granted individuality, when he tends and nurtures the divine spark within him then the impulses of love, the waves of love, pass from man to man out of the free heart. And thus with this new impulse man has enriched the old bond of love that is bound to the blood-tie. Love passes over gradually into spiritual love which flows from soul to soul and which will ultimately encompass all humanity in a common bond of brother-love. But Christ Jesus is the Force, the living Force, once historically and externally present, through whom for the first time mankind has been brought to the bond of brother-love. Men will learn to understand this bond of brother-love as the perfected spiritualized Christianity.

People say very lightly to-day that theosophy should seek the common kernel of truth in all religions, for the contents of all religions are the same. People who talk like that and only compare religions in order to note the abstract resemblance have no understanding of the principle of evolution. World evolution is not without meaning. All religions undoubtedly contain the truth, but inasmuch as they evolve from form to form they evolve to higher forms. It is true that if you search deeply enough you can find teachings in other religions that are also to be found in Christianity. Christianity has not brought new doctrine. The essential element of Christianity does not lie in its teachings. Take the founders of pre-Christian religions, in their case it was a matter of what they taught. If they themselves had remained unknown, their teaching would have been preserved and this would have been enough. But with Christ Jesus that is not the point. What matters is that he was there, that he has lived here on this earth in a physical body. Not belief in his teaching but in his Person—that is the essential thing. The point is that he has been beheld among mortals as the Firstborn; whom one asks: if Thou wert in the position in which I find myself, wouldst Thou feel as I do? Wouldst Thou think as I am now thinking? Will, as I am willing? That is the important thing, that he is the greatest example as Personality, with whom it is not a matter of listening to his teaching, but of looking at him himself, and seeing how he acted. And so the intimate pupils of Christ Jesus speak quite differently from the pupils and disciples of other religious founders. It is said of those: The Master has taught this or taught that. The disciples of Christ Jesus say: We are not telling you invented myths and doctrines; we say to you what our eyes have seen, our ears heard. We have heard his voice, our hands have touched the Source of Life whereby we have community with you. And Christ Jesus himself said: “You shall bear witness for me in Jerusalem, in Judea to the end of the world.” These words contain a very great significance; testimony shall you bear for unto the end of the world. That means that there will at all times be those who, just as the men in Judea and Galilee, could say out of direct knowledge who Christ was, in the sense of the Gospel.

“In the sense of the Gospel”—what does that mean? Nothing less than that he was from the beginning the Principle that lived in all creation. He says, “If you do not believe in me, believe at least in Moses, for if you believe in Moses, then you believe in me, for Moses has spoken of me.” We have to-day seen this. Moses has spoken of him by saying: The “I-Am” has said it to me; the “I-am,” who up to then was only perceptible in the spirit. The fact that the Christ has entered visibly into the world, appearing as man among men, is what distinguishes the Christ-gospel from the divine proclamations of other religions. In all of these religions spiritual wisdom was directed to something which was outside the world. Now, with Christ Jesus, something entered the world which was to be grasped as the sense-perceptible itself. What did the first disciples experience as the ideal of their wisdom? No longer merely to understand the life of the spirits in spirit-land, but how the Highest Principle could have been present on the earth in the historical Personality of Christ Jesus. It is much easier to deny divinity to this Personality than to acknowledge it. Here lies the distinction between a certain doctrine of early Christian times and what we may call inner Christianity—the distinction between Gnosis and esoteric Christianity. The Gnosis certainly recognizes Christ in his divinity, but it could not raise itself to the conception that the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, as the writer of the John Gospel emphasizes. He says: You shall look upon Christ Jesus; not as something to be grasped purely in the invisible, but as the Word which has become flesh and dwelt among us. You must know that with this human personality a force has appeared which will work into the farthest future, which will encircle the earth with the true spiritual love as a force that lives and works in all that lives into the future.

And if man gives himself up to this force he grows into the spiritual world from which he has descended. He will ascend again to where the initiate's vision can already reach to-day. Man will divest himself of what belongs to the senses when he penetrates into the spiritual world. The candidate who was initiated in ancient times could see in retrospect the far past of spirit-life; those who are initiated in the Christian sense through receiving the impulse of Christ Jesus are enabled to see what becomes of this earthly world of ours when humanity acts in the sense of the Christ Impulse. As one can look back to earlier conditions, so, starting from the coming of Christ, one can look into the farthest future. Consciousness will alter again, there will be a new relation of the spiritual to the sense-world. Earlier initiation was directed to time past, to age-old wisdom; Christian initiation reveals the future to one who is to be initiated. That is a necessity; man is to be initiated not only in wisdom, or in feelings but in his will. For then he knows what he is to do, he can set himself a goal for the future. Ordinary everyday people set themselves aims for the afternoon, for the evening or the morning; the spiritual man is able, out of spiritual principles, to set himself distant aims which pulse through his will and make his forces quicken. To set goals before humanity means in the true, highest sense, in the sense of the original Christ principle, to grasp Christianity esoterically. In this way it was grasped by the one who has written the great principle of the initiation of the will—the writer of the Apocalypse. We misunderstand the Apocalypse, if we do not understand it as the impulse given for the future, for action and deed.

Everything that we have let pass before us to-day can be understood out of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. I have been unable to give more than a slight sketch. When through Spiritual Science one grasps what lies behind the sense-world, one can look with understanding at all that has been given in the Gospels, at what has been proclaimed in the Apocalypse. And the more deeply penetrating is one's approach to the super-sensible worlds, the more profound is what one will find in the Christian documents. The records of Christianity will appear in higher brilliance, with deeper truths when one goes to them strengthened with the spiritual vision that may be gained by the help of Anthroposophy. True it is that the simplest heart can have some feeling of what truths lie hidden in Christianity. But man's consciousness will not be satisfied for ever with a dim sensing, it will evolve higher and wish to have knowledge and under-standing. Yet even when it mounts to the highest teachings of wisdom, there will always be mysteries in Christianity still more profound. It is for the simplest heart but also for the most developed intellectuality. The initiate experiences it again as pictures, and so the naive consciousness may divine what truths are slumbering there. Man, however, will demand knowledge and not faith—and even then he will find satisfaction in Christianity. If the explanations of the Gospels are given him through Spiritual Science he will be able to find the fully satisfying content in Christianity. Hence Spiritual Science will take the place of the highest philosophies of the past. It will bear testimony to the beautiful words of Hegel quoted at the beginning: “Profoundest thought is linked with the historical external figure of Christ Jesus, and every degree of consciousness—therein lies the greatness of Christianity—can grasp it externally. At the same time, however, Christianity demands the deepest and most penetrating wisdom. Christianity is for every stage of culture, but it can meet and satisfy the highest demands.”

Yesterday we drew attention to the existence of great leaders of mankind as far back as the epoch we call the Atlantean period of human evolution. We know from what was brought forth yesterday that this epoch ran its course on a continent we call the Old Atlantis, lying between Europe-Africa, and America; we also mentioned that human life at that time was very different from what it is today, particularly with regard to the nature of human consciousness. Our scrutiny disclosed the fact that the consciousness with which man is endowed today developed only gradually, and that he started from a sort of dim clairvoyance. We know further that the human physical bodies of the Atlantean period consisted of a substance far softer, more flexible, more plastic, than at present; and clairvoyant consciousness reveals the fact that at that time men were not yet able, for example, to perceive solid objects such as our eyes see today in sharp outline. The Atlantean could distinguish the objects of the outer world—the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—but only indistinctly, blurred. Just as nowadays in a foggy autumn evening the street lights show a fringe of color, so people of that time saw objects surrounded by a colored border—an aura, as the term is. The auras were the indication of the spiritual beings belonging to the objects. At certain times in the course of the day the perception of these spiritual beings was very indistinct, but at others very clear, especially in the intermediate states between waking and sleeping.

If we wish vividly to imagine the consciousness of an ancient Atlantean, we must think of it as follows: He did not see a rose, for example, so sharply outlined as we do today. It was blurred, hazy and surrounded by colored borders. Even by day it was indistinct, but it became more so and disappeared entirely in the interval between waking and sleeping. On the other hand, however, he discerned quite clearly what we must term the rose spirit, the rose soul. And the same was true of all other objects in his environment. In the progress of evolution outer objects became ever clearer, while perception of the spiritual beings associated with them grew dimmer. But in compensation man kept developing his self consciousness: he learned to be aware of himself.

Yesterday we mentioned the period in which a distinct sense of the ego emerged, adding that the etheric body came to coincide with the physical body as the last third of the Atlantean age approached. You can imagine that previously the nature of leadership as well was quite different, for at that time there existed nothing like a mutual understanding among men resting on an appeal to reason. In those days of dim clairvoyance mutual understanding was based upon a subconscious influence passing from one to the other. Especially was there still present to a high degree something we know today only in its last misinterpreted and misunderstood survival, namely, a kind of suggestion, a subconscious reciprocal influence, invoking but little the collaboration of the other's soul. Looking back to early Atlantean times we see that a powerful effect was exercized on the other's soul the moment any image, any sensation, arose in the soul, and the will was directed upon the other. All influences were powerful, as was also the will to receive them. Only scraps of all this have survived.

Picture to yourself a man of that time passing another while executing certain gestures. If the observer were even slightly the weaker of the two he would have felt impelled to imitate and mimic all the gestures. The only surviving remnant of this sort of thing is our inclination to yawn when we see another person yawning. Formerly a far closer tie prevailed between human beings, based on the fact that they lived in an atmosphere totally different from that of today. Only during a heavy rain do we nowadays live in water-soaked air, whereas at the time of which we speak the air was constantly saturated with dense moisture; and in the early Atlantean epoch man was composed of a substance no more dense than that of certain jellyfish now living in the sea and scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding water. That was the way man was constituted at that time, and he solidified only gradually. Nevertheless we know that even then he was exposed to influences not only of the regular guiding higher spiritual beings who either dwelt on the sun or were distributed among the various planets of our solar system, but also of the Luciferic spirits that influenced his astral body; and we have learned, too, in what manner these influences took effect. But we found further that those who were to be the leaders of the Atlantean people had to combat these Luciferic influences in their own astral body. By reason of the spiritual and clairvoyant nature of their consciousness all men of that time could perceive whatever spiritual influences were exerted on them.—Nowadays one who knows nothing of spiritual science laughs when you tell him his astral body shows the effects of Luciferic spirits; but then, he does not know that the influence of these spirits is far stronger than it would be if he took note of them.

“The Devil your good-folk ne'er scent,
E'en though he have them by the collar.”

That is a very profound utterance in Goethe's Faust; and many a materialistic influence of today would not exist if people knew that we are by no means rid of all the Luciferic influences as yet.

In Atlantis the leaders and their disciples kept a careful watch for everything that excited passions, instincts, and desires, for everything emanating from that quarter which aroused in man a deeper interest in his physical-sensible surroundings than was beneficial for his progressive development in the cosmic scheme. The first duty of one who aspired to become a leader was to practice this self-knowledge, to guard carefully against anything that might arise in him through Lucifer's influence. He had to study these Luciferic spiritual beings in his own astral body most accurately, for by so doing he could keep them at a distance. This also enabled him to perceive the other divine-spiritual beings, the higher, guiding ones, and particularly those that had transferred their own sphere of action from the earth to the sun, or to other planets; and the regions beheld by men corresponded to that from which they had descended. There were human souls, for instance, that had come down from Mars; and when these, in keeping with their development, combatted the Luciferic influences in their own astral body, they attained to a higher degree of clairvoyance, to a pure and good seership, and they beheld the higher spiritual beings of the region from which they themselves had descended, from the Mars region. Souls that had come down from Saturn learned to see the Saturn beings, those from Jupiter or Venus, the Jupiter or Venus beings: each beheld his own region.

But the most advanced among men, those who had survived the moon crisis, were able gradually to prepare themselves to envision not only the spiritual beings of Mars, Jupiter, or Venus, but those of the sun itself, the exalted sun beings. Having come down from the various planets the initiates were again able to behold the spirituality of these planets. From this it is clear why in ancient Atlantis there were institutions, schools, where those who had descended, for example, from Mars were accepted, when sufficiently mature, for the purpose of studying the mysteries of Mars; and that there were other sanctuaries where those who had come from other planets could learn their mysteries. Applying the later term “oracle” to these institutions, we have in Atlantis a Mars Oracle, where the mysteries of Mars were studied, a Saturn Oracle, a Jupiter Oracle, a Venus Oracle, and so on. The highest was the Sun Oracle; and the loftiest of all the initiates was the ranking initiate of the Sun Oracle.

Because suggestion and the influences of will played so important a part, the whole method of instruction was very different. Let us try to imagine the nature of the intercourse between teacher and pupil. Assuming the presence of spiritual teachers who had achieved initiation as by an act of grace, we ask, How did the later neophytes arrive at initiation in the Atlantean age? Here we must imagine first of all the mighty impression exercized by those already initiated—through their whole conduct, their mere presence—upon those predestined to become their pupils. The very sight of an Atlantean initiate was enough to start a sympathetic vibration in the soul of the neophyte, thus disclosing his fitness for the discipleship. The influences that passed between men at that time were entirely remote from objective day-consciousness, and the type of instruction we know today was then unnecessary. All intercourse with the teacher, everything the teacher did, worked hand in hand with men's imitative faculty. A great deal passed unconsciously from teacher to pupil; hence the most important factor, for those sufficiently matured through their previous life conditions, was that in the beginning they should merely be admitted to the sanctuaries and remain in contact with their teachers. Then, by observing what the teachers did and by impressions made on their feelings and sensations, they were trained—prepared, indeed, over a very long period of time. Eventually the harmonious accord between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the pupil reached the point where everything the teacher possessed in the way of deeper spiritual secrets passed over of itself to the disciple.—Such were the conditions in those ancient times.

Now, what was the situation after the union of the etheric and physical bodies had become established? Although the two bodies had come to cover completely during the Atlantean epoch, the union was as yet not very firm, so that by an effort of will the teacher could, in a certain sense, withdraw the pupil's etheric body from the physical. It was no longer possible, even when the right moment had come, for the teacher's wisdom to pass over into the pupil as of its own accord; but the teacher could easily withdraw the pupil's etheric body and then the pupil could see whatever the teacher saw. So the slight or loose connection between the etheric and physical bodies made it possible to release the former, and the wisdom, the clairvoyant vision, of the master passed over into the disciple.

Then there occurred the great cataclysm that swept away the Atlantean Continent. Mighty elemental disturbances in air and water, terrific upheavals in the earth, gradually altered the entire face of the globe. Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had been dry land only to a very slight extent, arose out of the water, as did likewise America. Atlantis disappeared. Men migrated eastward and westward, and a great variety of settlements came into being. But after the mighty catastrophe mankind had advanced another step. Again a change had taken place in the connection between the etheric and physical bodies: in the post-Atlantean time the union of the two became much firmer. The teacher could now no longer detach the pupil's etheric body by an impulse of will and thereby transmit his power of vision as he had formerly done. Hence initiation, leading to vision of the spiritual world, had to take another form which can be described somewhat as follows:

The instruction which had been based largely upon direct psychic influence from teacher to pupil had gradually to be superseded by a form slowly approaching what we know as instruction today; and the farther the post-Atlantean age advanced, the greater grew the resemblance to our modern method of instruction. Corresponding to the Atlantean oracles, institutions were now established by the great leaders of mankind exhibiting similarities to the old Atlantean oracles: Mysteries, initiation temples, came into being in the post-Atlantean epoch; and just as formerly those fitted for it were received into the oracles, so now they were admitted to the Mysteries. There the neophytes were carefully trained by means of exacting instruction, because they could no longer be influenced as they were formerly. In all civilizations over a long period of time we find such Mysteries. Whether you seek in the culture we knew as the first post-Atlantean, which ran its course in ancient India, or in that of Zarathustra, or among the Egyptians or Chaldeans, you will invariably find neophytes being admitted to the Mysteries which were something part-way between church and school; and there they underwent a severe training calculated to promote thinking and feeling as these apply to events of the invisible, spiritual world—not merely as related to things of the sense world.

And what was taught there can now be accurately defined: to a great extent it was the same as what we have come to know today as anthroposophy. That was the subject of study in the Mysteries; and it differed only in that it was adapted to the customs of that time and was imparted according to strict rules. Today people who in a certain sense are ripe can be told of the mysteries of the higher worlds in a more or less free way and comparatively rapidly. Of old, however, the instruction was strictly regulated. In the first grade, for instance, only a certain sum of knowledge was imparted and all else kept completely secret. Not until the pupil had digested this was he apprised of anything pertaining to a higher grade. Through this sort of preparation, concepts, ideas, sensations, and feelings referring to the spiritual world were implanted in his astral body, a procedure tending at the same time to combat the influences of Lucifer; for all that is imparted in the way of spiritual-scientific concepts refers to the higher worlds, not to the world in which Lucifer aims to stimulate man's interest, not to the sense world alone.

Eventually, when the neophyte had been prepared in this way, the time approached for him to be guided to independent vision, when he himself should see in the spiritual world. This implied the ability to reflect in his etheric body everything he had accumulated in his astral body; for vision of the spiritual world is achieved only when the fruits of study stored in the astral body are experienced so intensely, through certain feelings and sensations connected with the knowledge acquired, that not only the astral body, but the denser etheric body as well, is thereby influenced. If the pupil was to rise from learning to seeing, all that had been taught him must have borne fruit.

That is why, throughout the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Greek epochs the training period closed with the following act. First the pupil was again prepared for a long time—now not through learning, but by means of what we call meditation and other exercises designed to develop inner concentration, inner tranquility, inner equanimity. He was trained to make his astral body in every respect a citizen of the spiritual worlds; and when the right time had come the conclusion of this development consisted in his being placed in a deathlike state lasting three and a half days. While in Atlantean times the etheric and physical bodies were so loosely joined that the former could be withdrawn more easily than in later periods, it had now become necessary in the Mysteries to throw the neophyte into a deathlike sleep. While this lasted he was either placed in a coffinlike box or bound to a sort of cross—something of that sort. The initiator, known as the hierophant, possessed the power to work upon the astral, and particularly upon the etheric body—for during this procedure the etheric left the physical body. That is something different from sleep: in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed while the astral body and ego withdraw; but in this final act of initiation only the physical body remained in place. The etheric body was simply withdrawn from the greater part, at least, of the physical body—from the whole upper portion; and this left the candidate in a deathlike state. Everything that had been learned through meditation and other exercises was now impressed into the etheric body while in this condition. During these three and a half days the neophyte really moved about in the spiritual worlds wherein the higher beings dwell. Finally the hierophant called him back, meaning that he had the power to awaken him; and the candidate brought with him a knowledge of the spiritual world. Now he could see into this spiritual world and could proclaim its truths to his fellow men who were not yet ready to envision it themselves.

Thus the ancient teachers of pre-Christian time had been initiated into the profound secrets of the Mysteries. There they had been guided by the hierophant during the three-and-a-half-day period; they were living witnesses to the existence of a spiritual life and to the fact that behind the physical there is a spiritual world to which man belongs with his higher principles and into which he must find his way. But evolution proceeded. What I have just described to you as an initiation existed most intensively in the first epoch after the Atlantean catastrophe; but the union of the etheric and physical bodies grew ever firmer, hence the procedure became more and more dangerous, because man's whole consciousness accustomed itself increasingly to the physical sense world. You see, that was the import of human evolution: men were to become used to living in this physical world with all their inclinations and propensities. This learning to love the physical world was a great step forward for mankind.

In the early part of the post-Atlantean civilization there still remained a living recollection of the existence of a spiritual world. People said: We, the late descendants, can still see into the spiritual world of our ancestors.—They still retained the dim, dull, clairvoyant consciousness and they knew where lay the world which was their true home. They said, All that surrounds us in our day-consciousness is like a veil spread over truth: it hides the spiritual world from us; it is maya, illusion.—They did not accustom themselves at once to what they now could see, nor could they readily understand that it was intended that they lose their awareness of the old spiritual world. That was the characteristic feature of the first post-Atlantean civilization; hence that was the time in which men could most easily be guided to the spirit: they still felt a lively interest in the spiritual world. Naturally matters could not remain thus, because the Earth's mission consists in man's becoming fond of the forces of the earth and conquering the physical plane. Were you able to envision ancient India, you would discover the spiritual life to be on a tremendously lofty level.

A comprehension of what the original teachers revealed to mankind is possible in this day and age only after a study of spiritual science. For others, the teaching of the great holy Rishis is nonsense, foolishness, for they can make no sense out of what is told them there about the mysteries of the spiritual world. From their standpoint they are naturally quite right: everyone is always right from his own standpoint.

In ancient India spiritual vision was enormously extensive, but the use of even the simplest implements was non-existent. People provided for themselves in the most primitive ways. There was nothing like a natural science of any kind—or what is so called today—because everything that could be observed on the physical plane was looked upon as maya, the great illusion; and only by uplift to the great Sun Being or similar beings was the real, the true, to be found. But again, matters could not stop there: among the post-Atlanteans there had to be those as well with the will to conquer the kingdom of earth; and the first attempt to this end was made in the time of Zarathustra. In the transition from the old Indians to the ancient Persians we see a mighty step forwards. In Zarathustra's view the outer world ceased to be mere maya or illusion: he showed men that what surrounds them is of value, though he emphasized the presence of spirit underlying all. While the ancient Indian saw a flower as maya and sought the spirit behind it, Zarathustra said, The flower is something we must value, for it is an integral part of the universal spirit existing in all things; matter grows out of spirit.

We have already mentioned that Zarathustra drew attention to the physical sun as the field of action of spiritual beings. But initiation was difficult; and for those who wanted not merely to be told of the spiritual world by the initiates but to see for themselves into the great sun aura, more drastic measures were called for in connection with their initiation. Furthermore, all human life gradually changed; and in the next cultural epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, the physical world was conquered to a still greater extent. Man was no longer bent upon a purely spiritual science which studies the realm that underlies the physical: he observed the course of the stars; and in their position and movement, in what is outwardly visible, he sought the language of divine-spiritual beings. In this script co-ordinating visible objects he recognized the will of the Gods. That is the way cosmic interrelationships were studied in the Egypto-Chaldean time. And in Egypt we see arising a geometry applied to external things. Such is the story of man's conquest of the outer world.

In Greece even greater progress was made in this direction. There we see come about the union of soul experiences and external matter. In a Pallas Athene or a Zeus we sense that into the material substance has streamed what first lived in a human soul. It is as though everything which man had made his very own had flowed out into the sense world. But as man became ever more powerful in the sense world and his soul grew more and more attached to it, his alienation from the spiritual world increased correspondingly in the life between death and a new birth. When the soul left an ancient Indian body and entered the spiritual world, there to pass through the requisite development before the next birth, it retained a feeling for the living spirit. Through his whole life the man of that time yearned for a spiritual environment; and all his sensations were kindled by the revelations he had heard concerning life in the spiritual world, even though he was not an initiate himself. So when he passed the portal of death the spiritual world lay open before him, as it were, in light and radiance.

But as the physical world became more and more congenial and men adapted themselves to it ever more readily, the periods between death and birth were proportionately obscured. In the Egyptian epoch this had gone so far, as can be established by clairvoyant consciousness, that in passing from the body into the spiritual world the soul was enveloped in darkness and gloom, in a sense of loneliness, of segregation from other souls; and when a soul feels loneliness and can hold no converse with other souls it experiences a frosty chill. And while the Greeks lived in an age in which, by means of such glorious external beauty, men had made the earth into something quite special, this period was darkest, gloomiest, most chilling, for the souls living between death and rebirth. A noble Greek, questioned as to his sojourn in the nether world, replied, “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shades”. That is not a legend but an utterance actually in accord with the attitude of that time.

It can therefore be said that with the advance of civilization men became more and more alienated from the spiritual world. The initiates who could see into the higher regions of the spiritual world became increasingly rare because of the growing dangers connected with the initiation procedure: it became more and more difficult to preserve life for three and a half days in a cataleptic state, with the etheric body withdrawn.

Then there intervened a regeneration of the whole life of humanity through the impulse already mentioned in the foregoing lectures, the Christ-Impulse. We have described how Christ, the exalted Sun Spirit, gradually approached the earth; we have learned how in Zarathustra's time He still had to be sought in the sun as Ahura Mazdao, and how Moses beheld Him closer by—in the burning bush and in the fire on Mount Sinai. Gradually He entered the sphere of the earth in which a great change was thereby destined to be wrought. The first concern of this Spirit was that men should come to recognize Him when He appeared on this earth.

The salient feature of all the old initiations was the necessity for withdrawing the etheric out of the physical body. Even in the postAtlantean initiations the candidate had to be reduced to a deathlike state of sleep, that is, a state in which he was devoid of physical consciousness. This implied coming under the control of another ego: it was invariably thus. The candidate's ego was wholly controlled by his initiator, his hierophant. He quitted his physical body completely: he did not dwell in it, nor did his own ego exercize any influence upon it. But the great aim of the Christ-Impulse is that man shall undergo a wholly self-contained ego development and not descend to a state of consciousness beneath that of the ego in order to attain to the higher worlds: and in order to achieve this, someone had first to offer himself in sacrifice so that the Christ Spirit itself might be received into a human body. We have already pointed out that a certain Initiate Who had prepared Himself through a great many incarnations had become able, beginning with a definite period in His life, to yield up His own ego and receive the Christ within Himself. This is indicated by the Baptism in the Jordan, as told in the Gospel of St. John.

Here we must ask, What was the real import of this Baptism? We know that John the Baptist, the Forerunner who told of the coming of Christ Jesus, carried it out among those whom he had prepared to receive the Christ in the right way. We will understand what the St. John Gospel tells us of the Baptism only if we bear in mind that John's purpose in baptizing was the true preparation for the coming of Christ. A modern baptism, which is but an imitation of the original symbol, provides no understanding of the question. It was not a mere sprinkling with water, but a complete immersion: the candidate lived under water for a certain length of time, varying according to circumstances. What this signified we shall now learn by delving into the mystery of the being of man.

Recall to mind that the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. In the waking state during the daytime these four principles are firmly knit together, but in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and the ego are outside. In death, on the other hand, the physical body remains as a corpse: the etheric body withdraws, and for a short time the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body remain united. And to those of you who have heard even a few of my lectures it must be clear that in this moment a quite definite experience appears first: the deceased sees his past life spread out before him like a magnificent tableau; spatially side by side, all the situations of his life surround him. That is because one of the functions of the etheric body is that of memory bearer, and even during life nothing but the physical body prevents all this from appearing before him. After death, with the physical body laid aside, everything the man had experienced during his lifetime can enter his consciousness.

Now, I have mentioned as well that a retrospect of that sort also results from being in peril of death, or from any severe fright or shock. You know, of course, from reports that when a man is in danger of drowning or of falling from a mountain height, he experiences his whole past life as in a great tableau—provided he does not lose consciousness. Well, what a man thus experiences as the result of some danger, such as drowning, was experienced by nearly all who were baptized by John. The baptism consisted in keeping people under water until they had experienced their past life. But what they experienced in this way was, of course, experienced as a spiritual picture; and here it became apparent that in this abnormal state the spiritual experiences linked up, in a way, with the spiritual world in general, so that after being lifted out of the water again, after the baptism by John, a man knew: There is a spiritual world! In truth, what I bear within myself is something that can live without the body.—After baptism a man was convinced of the existence of a world to which he belonged in respect of his spirit.

What, then, had John the Baptist brought about by baptizing in this way? People had become more and more attached to the physical world as a means of mutual contact, and believed the physical element to be the true reality. But those who came to the Baptist experienced their own lives as spiritual: after being baptized they knew that they were something over and above what their physical body made them. Human interest had gradually developed in the direction of the physical world; but John evoked in those he baptized the awareness of the existence of a spiritual world to which their higher selves belonged. You need only clothe this utterance in other words and you have: “Transform your interest that is now directed toward the physical world.” And that is what they did—those who received the baptism in the right way. They knew, then, that spirit dwelt in them, that their ego belonged to the spiritual world.

It was in the physical body that this conviction was gained. No special procedure was involved, as formerly in the initiations: what occurred was experienced in the physical body. And in addition, the experience of the baptism, as carried out by John, acquired a special meaning as a consequence of the manner in which the whole doctrine of the time was received and merged with the soul—the doctrine established by Moses' revelation. After baptism, a man not only was aware of his oneness with the spiritual world, but he recognized the particular spiritual world which was approaching the earth. He knew that what now pervaded the earth was identical with what had revealed itself to Moses as ehjeh asher ehjeh in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai; and he knew that the word Jahve or Jehovah, or ehjeh asher ehjeh, or I am the I AM, was the true expression of that spiritual world. So through the baptism by John men knew not only that they were one with the spiritual world, but that in this spiritual world there dwelt the I AM out of which the spirit in them was born. That was the preparation John imparted through his baptisms; that was the feeling, the sensation, he aroused in those whom he baptized. Their number, of course, was necessarily small, since few of them were ripe enough to experience all this when submerged; but some discerned the approach of the Spirit later to be called the Christ.

Try now to compare all this with what was set forth yesterday. What the ancient spiritual beings had brought about was love based on blood ties, on physical communion, whereas the aim of the Luciferic spirits was to render each individual dependent solely upon his own personality, his own individuality. Lucifer and the lofty spiritual beings had been working simultaneously. Gradually the old blood ties had loosened, as can be established even historically. Think of the conglomeration of peoples in the great Roman Empire! That was a result of the loosening of the blood ties and of the universal desire, in varying degrees, to find the center of gravity in personality. But another result was that people had lost contact with the spiritual world: they had identified themselves with the physical world and developed a love for the physical plane. As the ego-consciousness had increased through Lucifer's agency, man had proportionately coalesced with the physical world and rendered barren his life between death and a new birth.

Now, the Baptist had indeed prepared something that was of great significance for mankind: he had prepared the way for man to remain within his personality and at the same time find there, after the submersion, exactly what once he had experienced as “gods” at the time when he himself still lived in water, when the atmosphere was saturated with moisture and fog. That experience in the divine worlds was now repeated. In spite of being an ego, man, as a human being, could now be reunited with his fellows, could be led back to love, a love that was now spiritualized.

That is the mainspring of the Christ event characterized from another aspect. Christ represents the descent to our earth of the spiritual power of love, though even today its mission is only beginning to take effect. If we trace this idea by means of the John and the Luke Gospels we find spiritual love to be the very core of the Christ impulse through which the egos that had been sundered are increasingly brought together again—but now in respect of their innermost souls. From the beginning, men have been able to surmise but dimly what Christ had come to mean for the world; and today very little of it has been realized because the sundering force, the after-effect of the Luciferic powers, is still present and the Christ principle has been active only for a short time. And though nowadays people seek to co-operate in certain external activities, they have not so much as an inkling of what is meant by harmony and accord between souls where the most intimate and important matters are concerned—or at best they vaguely sense it with their thoughts, their intellect, which counts for little.

Truly, Christianity is only at the beginning of its activity: it will penetrate ever deeper into the souls of men, will increasingly ennoble their ego. This has been felt particularly strongly by people of the younger nations: they feel the need of identifying themselves with the Christ force, to steep themselves in it, if they are to get on. One of our contemporaries in eastern Europe, the executor of the great Russian philosopher Solovyev, once said: “Christianity must unite us as a nation, otherwise we shall lose our ego, and with it, all possibility of being a people.” A mighty utterance, emanating as from an intensive intellect for Christianity. But that again proves the need for Christianity to penetrate into the depths of the human soul.

Let us examine a certain very radical case. It will show us that precisely in respect of the innermost life of the soul even the most high-minded and noble men are still far from possessing what will one day lay hold on them, when Christianity shall have filled man's innermost thoughts, his innermost ideas and feelings. Think of Tolstoi and of his work during the last decades which seeks to reveal in its own way the true meaning of Christianity. A thinker of his caliber should arouse enormous respect, especially in the West where whole libraries are cluttered up with lengthy philosophical manglings of the same thing that a Tolstoi can say in great and powerful words in a book like On Life. There are pages in Tolstoi's writings in which a certain extensive understanding of theosophical truths is expounded with elemental grandeur, truths, to be sure, which a philosopher of western Europe cannot hit upon so accurately—or at best he must write volumes about them, because what they reveal is mighty. It can be said that in Tolstoi's works there is an undertone we can call the Christ impulse. Engross yourselves in his books, and you will see that what pervades him is the Christ impulse.

Now turn to Tolstoi's great contemporary, interesting if for no other reason than that from a comprehensive philosophical Weltanschauung he attained to the very gates of a life of such genuine vision as enabled him to survey an epoch in full perspective—apocalyptically, so to speak. While his visions themselves are distorted, due to an inadequate background, Solovyev nevertheless rises to clairvoyant perception of the future: he places before us a forecast of the 20th Century. And if we read his writings with sympathetic understanding we find there much that is great and high-minded, especially in connection with Christianity. Yet he speaks of Tolstoi as of an enemy of Christianity, as of the Antichrist! This goes to show that two men today can be profoundly convinced they are giving their epoch the best there is, can act out of the very depths of their souls, and yet fail to understand each other: for each of them the other is “anti”. Nowadays people do not reflect that if outer harmony, a life permeated by love, is to become a possibility, the Christ impulse must first have penetrated to the profoundest depths: love of mankind must be something very different from what it is today, even in the noblest spirits.

The impulse that was foretold and then entered the world is only at the beginning of its work, and it must be ever better understood. What is it that is lacking, particularly in our time, among all those who cry for Christianity and declare it a necessity, yet cannot bring it within reach? Anthroposophy, spiritual science, that is what they lack: the present-day way of understanding Christ. For Christ is so great that each successive epoch will have to find new means of comprehending Him. In former centuries other ways and forms were employed in the search for wisdom. Today we need anthroposophy; and what anthroposophy offers today for an understanding of Christ will hold good through long ages to come, because anthroposophy will prove to be something capable of stimulating every human capacity for knowledge. Humanity will in time grow into a comprehension of the Christ.

But even the anthroposophical conception is a transient one—we are aware of this; and the time will come when so great a subject, now framed in ephemeral terms, will call for still vaster conceptions.