The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Before beginning this lecture, Dr. Steiner spoke words of greeting to the audience which consisted of Members of the Anthroposophical Society only—and referred briefly to the importance and consequences of the Christmas Foundation Meeting held at Dornach in December, 1923.

In these three lectures I want to speak of how Anthroposophy can live as knowledge of the spiritual in the world and in man—knowledge that is able to kindle inner forces and impulses in the moral and religious life of soul. Because this will always be possible, Anthroposophy can bring to mankind something altogether different from anything produced by the civilisation of the last few centuries. This civilisation has actually suffered from the diffusion of brilliant forms of knowledge: natural science, economics, philosophy. But all this knowledge is a concern of the head alone, whereas moral religious impulses must spring from the heart. True, these impulses have existed as ideals; but whether these ideals and the feelings associated with them are also powerful enough to create worlds of the future when the present physical world has passed away, is a question unanswerable by modern science. What has sprung from modern science is the widespread doubt that is characteristic of the present age and the age just past.

To begin with I want to consider three aspects of man's life. We ourselves, our destiny, are inextricably connected with this life from birth to death. Birth, or rather conception, is the boundary in one direction; death is the boundary in the other. Birth and death are not life; they are merely the beginning and the end of physical life. And the question is this: Can birth and death in themselves be approached with the same mental attitude with which we contemplate our own life, or the life of others, between birth and death, or must our approach to the actual boundaries of birth and death be from a different vantage point? Therefore the aspect of death, which so significantly sets a boundary to human life, shall be the first object of our study to-day.

At the end of a man's earthly life he is divested by death of the physical body we see before us. The Earth takes possession of it, either through its own elements as in burial, or through fire as in cremation. What can the Earth do with the part of man we perceive with physical senses? The Earth can do no other than subject it to destruction. Think of the forces in nature around us. They build up nothing when the human corpse is given over to them; they simply destroy it. The nature forces around us are not there for the purpose of upbuilding, for the human body disintegrates when it passes into their grasp. Hence there must be something different which builds up the human body, something different from earthly forces, for they bring about its disintegration.

If, however, human death is studied with forces of cognition activated in the soul through the appropriate exercises, everything presents a different aspect. With ordinary faculties of cognition we see the corpse and nothing else. But when, by means of these exercises, we develop Imagination the first stage of higher knowledge described in my books then death is completely transformed. In death man tears himself from the grasp of the Earth; and if we cultivate Imagination, we see in direct vision, in living pictures, that in death man rises from his corpse; he does not die. At the stage of Imaginative Knowledge, physical death is transformed into spiritual birth. Before death, man stands there as earthly man. He can say: “I am here, at this place; the world is outside me.”—But the moment death occurs the man himself is not where his corpse lies. He is beginning his existence in the wide spaces of the Universe; he is becoming one with the world at which he has hitherto only gazed. The world outside his body now becomes his field of experience and therewith what hitherto was inner world becomes outer world, what hitherto was outer world becomes inner world. We pass out of our personal existence into world-existence. The Earth—so it appears to Imaginative cognition—makes it possible for us to undergo death. The Earth is revealed to Imaginative cognition as the bearer of death in the Universe. Nowhere except on Earth is death to be found in any sphere frequented by man, whether in physical or spiritual life. For the moment man passes through death and becomes one with the Universe, the second aspect presents itself—the aspect in which the widths of space appear to be everywhere filled with cosmic thoughts. For Imaginative vision and for the man himself who has passed through death, the whole Cosmos now teems with cosmic thoughts, living and weaving in the expanse of space. The space aspect becomes the great revealer. Having passed through death man enters a world of cosmic thoughts; everything works and weaves in cosmic thoughts. This is the second aspect.

When we confront a man in earthly life, he is there before us in the first place as a personality. He must speak if we are to know his thoughts. So we say: “The thoughts are within him; they are conveyed to us through his speech.” But nowhere within the perimeter of earthly life do we discover thoughts which stand alone. They are present only in men, and they come out of men. When we pass from the earthly sphere of death to the space sphere of thoughts, to begin with we encounter no beings in the widths of space—neither gods nor men—but everywhere we encounter cosmic thoughts. Having undergone death and passed into the expanse of universal space it is as though in the physical world we were to meet a man and perceive only his thoughts without seeing the man himself. We should see a cloud of thoughts. After death we do not at first encounter beings; we encounter thoughts, the universal World Intelligence.

In this sphere of cosmic Intelligence man lives for a few days after his death. And in the weaving cosmic thoughts there appears as it were a single cloud in which he sees the record of his last earthly life. This record is inscribed into the cosmic Intelligence. For a few days he beholds his whole life in one great, simultaneous tableau. During these few days what is inscribed into the cosmic Intelligence becomes steadily fainter and fainter. The record expands into cosmic space and vanishes. Whereas at the end of earthly life the aspect of death appears, a few days after the end of this experience there comes the vanishing into cosmic space. Thus, after the first aspect, which we may call the aspect of death, we have the second aspect, which may be called the aspect of the vanishing of earthly life. After death there is actually for every human being a moment of terrible fear that he may lose himself, together with all his earthly life, in cosmic space.

If we wish for more understanding of man's experiences after death, Imaginative Knowledge will be found to be inadequate; we must pass on to the second stage of higher knowledge, to Inspiration. Imaginative Knowledge has pictures before it—pictures that are in the main like dream pictures, except that we can never feel convinced of any reality behind the latter, whereas the pictures of Imagination, through their own inherent quality, always express reality. Through Imagination we live in a picture world that is nevertheless reality. This picture world must be transcended if we are to see what a man experiences after death when the few days during which he reviewed his life, have passed.

Inspiration, which must be acquired after or during the stage of Imagination, presents no pictures; instead of pictures there is spiritual hearing. Knowledge through Inspiration absorbs cosmic Intelligence, cosmic thoughts, in such a way that they seem to be spiritually heard. From all sides the cosmic word resounds, indicating distinctly that there is reality behind it. First comes the proclamation; then, when a man can give himself up to this Inspiration, he begins, in Intuition, to perceive behind the cosmic thoughts, the Beings of the Universe themselves. Pictures of the spiritual are perceived in Imagination; in Inspiration the spiritual speaks; Intuition perceives the Beings themselves. I said that the world is filled with cosmic thoughts. These in themselves do not at once point to beings; but we eventually become aware of words behind the thoughts and then of beholding through Intuition, the Beings of the Universe.

The first aspect of man's existence is the aspect of death it is the earthly aspect; the second aspect leads us out into cosmic space, into which, as earthly men, we otherwise gaze without any understanding; this is the aspect of the vanishing of man's life. The third aspect presents the boundary of visible space: this is the aspect of the stars. But the stars do not appear as they do to physical sight. For physical sight the stars are points of radiance at the boundaries of the space in the direction towards which we are looking. If we have acquired the faculty of Intuitive Knowledge, the stars are the revealers of cosmic Beings, spiritual Beings. And with Intuition we behold in the spiritual Universe, instead of the physical stars, colonies of spiritual Beings at the places where we conceive the physical stars to be situated. The third aspect is the aspect of the stars. After we have learnt to know death, after we have recognised cosmic Intelligence through the widths of space, this third aspect leads us into the spheres of cosmic spiritual Beings and thereby into the sphere of the stars. And just as the Earth has received man between birth and death, so, when he has crossed the abyss to cosmic Intelligence a few days after his death, he is received into the world of stars. On Earth he was a man of Earth among Earth beings; after death he becomes a being of Heaven among heavenly Beings.

The first sphere into which man enters is the Moon-sphere; later on he passes into the other cosmic spheres. At the moment of death he still belongs to the Earth-sphere. But at that moment, everything within the range of earthly knowledge loses its significance. On the Earth there are different substances, different metals, and so on. At the moment of death all this differentiation ceases. All external solid substances are earthy; at the moment of death man is living in earth, water, air and warmth. In the sphere of cosmic Intelligence he sees his own life; he is between the region of Earth and the region of Heaven. A few days after death he enters the region of Heaven: first, the Moon-sphere.

In this Moon-sphere we meet cosmic Beings for the first time. But these cosmic Beings are still rather like human beings for at one time they were together with us on the Earth. In my books you can read how the physical Moon was once united with the Earth and then separated from it to form an independent cosmic body. It was, however, not the physical Moon alone that separated from the Earth. At one time there were among men on Earth great, primeval Teachers; it was they who brought the primordial wisdom to mankind. These great Teachers were not present on Earth in physical human bodies, but only in etheric bodies. When a man received instruction from them, he absorbed it inwardly. After a time, when the Moon separated from the Earth, these ancient Teachers went with it and formed a colony of Moon Beings. These primeval Teachers of mankind, long since separated from the Earth, are the first cosmic Beings to be encountered a few days after death.

The life spent with the Moon Beings during this period after death is related in a remarkable way to earthly existence. It might be imagined that man's life after death is more fleeting, less concrete, than earthly life. In a certain respect, however, this is not the case. If we are able to follow a man's experiences after death with super-sensible vision we find that for a long time they have a much stronger effect upon him than anything in the earthly life which, in comparison, is like a dream. This period after death lasts for about a third of the time of life on Earth. What is now experienced differs with different individuals. When a man looks back over his earthly life he succumbs to illusion. He sees only the days and pays no heed to what he has experienced spiritually in sleep. Unless he is particularly addicted to sleep a man will, as a general rule, spend about a third part of his life in that state. After death he goes through it all in conscious connection with the Moon Beings. We live through these experiences because the great primeval Teachers of mankind pour the essence of their being into us, live in and with us; we live through the unconscious experiences of the nights on Earth as reality far greater than that of the earthly life.

Let me illustrate this by an example. Perhaps some of you know my Mystery Plays and will remember among the characters a certain Strader. Strader is a figure based upon a personality who is now dead but was alive when the first three Plays were written. It was not a matter of portraying his earthly life but the character was founded on the life of a man who was exceptionally interesting to me. Coming from comparatively simple circumstances, he first became a priest, then abandoned the Church and became a secular scholar with a certain rationalistic trend. The whole of this man's inner struggle interested me. I tried to understand it spiritually and wrote the Mystery Plays while watching his earthly life. After his death the interest I had taken in him enabled me to follow him during the period of existence he spent in the Moon-sphere. To-day (1924) he is still in that sphere. From the moment this individuality broke through to me with all the intense reality of the life after death, whatever interest I once had in his earthly life was completely extinguished. I was now living with this individuality after his death, and the effect upon me was that I could do no other than allow the character in the fourth Mystery Play to die, because he was no longer before me as an earthly man.—This is quoted merely in corroboration of the statement that experience of the life after death has far greater intensity, greater inner reality, than the earthly life; the latter is like a dream in comparison.

We must remember that after death man passes into the great Universe, into the Cosmos. He himself now becomes the Cosmos. He feels the Cosmos as his body, but he also feels that what was outside him during his earthly life is now within him. Take a simple example. Suppose you were once carried away by emotion during your earthly life and had struck someone a blow which caused him not only physical pain but also moral suffering. Under the influence of the Moon Beings after death you experience this incident differently. When you struck an angry blow, perhaps with a certain inner satisfaction, you did not feel the suffering of the man you struck. Now, in the Moon-sphere, you experience the physical pain and the suffering he had to endure. In the Moon-sphere you experience what you did or thought during your earthly life, not as you felt it, but as it affected the other person. After death, for a period corresponding to a third part of his lifetime, a man lives through, in backward order, everything that he thought and whatever wrong he did during his earthly life. It is revealed to him by the Moon Beings as intense reality. When I was inwardly accompanying Strader, for instance, in his life after death—he died in 1912 and is called Strader in the Mystery Plays although that was not his real name—he was experiencing first what he had experienced last in his earthly life, then the earlier happenings, and so on, in backward order. When he now comes before my soul he is living through in the Moon-sphere what he had experienced in the year 1875. Up to now he has been experiencing backwards the time between 1912 and 1875 and will continue in this way until the date of his birth.

This life after death in the sphere of the Moon Beings—who were once Earth Beings—is lived through for a third of the time of a man's life. The first seed of what is fulfilled as karma in the following earthly lives, arises here. In this life, which corresponds to a third part of his earthly lifetime, a man becomes inwardly aware, through his own feeling and perception, of how his deeds have affected others. And then a strong desire arises within him as spirit man that what he is now experiencing in the Moon-sphere as the result of his dealings with other men on Earth may again be laid upon him, in order that compensation may be made. The resolve to fulfil his destiny in accordance with his earthly deeds and earthly thoughts comes as a wish at the end of the Moon period. And if this wish—which arises from experience of the whole of the earthly life back to birth—is devoid of fear, the man is ready to be received into the next sphere, the Mercury-sphere, into which he then passes. In the Mercury-sphere he is instructed by the Beings whose realm he has entered—Beings who have never been on Earth, who were always super-sensible Beings; in their realm he learns how to shape his further destiny. Thus, to learn what a man goes through between death and a new birth, corresponding in his spiritual existence to what he experienced among earthly beings between birth and death, we must follow him through the Mercury-sphere, the Venus-sphere and the Sun-sphere. For the totality of man's life consists in the earthly existence between birth and death and the heavenly existence between death and a new birth. This constitutes his life in its totality, and of this we will speak in the next lectures.

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.

I can easily imagine that someone draws the conclusion from yesterday's deliberations that those personalities who belong to the groups of people, the peoples, who are only in the sixth cultural period receive their special mission because, as yesterday's expression put it, they belong to the time when development already took place in a descending line, are valued less than those who belong to groups of people of ascending development. I say I can easily imagine someone drawing this conclusion. In other words, I can easily imagine that especially in view of everything that was said yesterday, in connection with other remarks, someone is all the more likely to make a value judgment under the influence of all kinds of emotions and feelings. And so it may come about, as I pointed out, that what is said in particular in relation to these things in one place must be misunderstood in other places. Not because it is colored according to the needs of a place or certain people, but because it is not understood with the necessary objectivity, but with passion and all kinds of national aspirations. Someone might then say: So you only used words to flatter Central European culture, so to speak, and we, who belong to Eastern European culture, feel deeply offended by what has been said. Yes, when such a judgment is passed, it only proves that what I tried to show yesterday is happening, namely that it must be detached from the spiritual-scientific feeling, so detached that purely theoretical, purely abstract thinking is transformed into direct experience, that what otherwise belonged only to our knowledge is now closer to our feelings and experiences.

Anyone who would judge as just indicated would judge only theoretically and abstractly. For how would the concrete judgment that transgresses into experience be formulated in such a case? It would be formulated as follows: if what has been set apart is true, then we are heading towards a time when those who want to follow the progress of the cultural mission will no longer be allowed to be absorbed in mere national experience. The peculiarity of the fifth cultural epoch was such that the personalities belonging to it were able to merge in a certain way into the national feeling and in turn extract themselves personally from it. The sixth and seventh cultural epochs will be such that those who merely want to be national will be left behind in relation to the tasks of humanity. But this is, of course, the reason why we are pursuing a spiritual-scientific worldview: that humanity may free itself from mere national sentiment, from that sentiment which is not general human sentiment. So, what must be concluded from what was said yesterday is something quite, quite different. It is this: that the Central European national cultures are the ones that, as national cultures, have impulses within them that coincide with the great mission of post-Atlantic culture. But then there will come cultures that make it necessary for people to outgrow national impulses, and that it will not work if those who are the “excellents” today — one says “laggards”, so why not say “excellents”? — of the later cultures become completely absorbed in their national experience, and indeed with emphasis, as is happening with the population of Eastern Europe. In other words, since they have not yet received their mission in this national feeling, they are dependent on absorbing what is produced as spiritual science in order to rise above the national. Living understanding is also necessary there.

However, in today's world, where passions and prejudices are so opposed, it will be difficult to find what is necessary for people to be able to place themselves fully on the ground of spiritual science that truly strives for objectivity, to be able to place themselves fully on the ground of the purely human. We are pursuing spiritual science so that something may spread across the whole earth that goes beyond all differentiations. Therefore, those who turn to spiritual science from all nations should be able to gain objective understanding for something like what has been dealt with in that lecture cycle entitled 'The Mission of Individual National Souls', which should be studied wherever there are anthroposophists. Its significance lies precisely in the fact that it was given years before this war, so that no one can accuse it of having been produced out of the mood of this war. What matters is not that what is said here or there does not contain universal truths, but that it must be recognized how these truths are not tolerated everywhere. When I spoke here months ago, I pointed out that we in Central Europe have it easy to be objective, easier than the rest. Why we have it easier is also clear from that lecture cycle. All the deeper teachings of our serious events point out to us that something must develop out of the most diverse foundations of our present world culture that coincides with our spiritual-scientific striving. In a certain respect, one can say that these serious events are something like a powerful indication of the necessity of spiritual-scientific experience in the world. They prove that this spiritual-scientific experience must come. Therefore, what we experience here at this place can only be of secondary importance for us. Our real task is to assimilate into our soul life that which can already be understood everywhere without causing inner offence, although there are so many prejudices in so many areas.

The insights that spiritual science provides into the universal human in the human being also prepare us to be able to objectively survey everything into which we are placed by the evolution of the earth and the evolution of the world. For this, into which we are placed, is, so to speak, the soil from which we grow, and that through which we are to grow is the impulses that we take up through spiritual science. Basically, we are only with one half of our being in all the differentiations that are spread over the earth, with our physical body and our etheric body, which we also leave behind on the earth when we enter the other state of consciousness, which we can call sleep. But with the I and the astral body, we then go out of our physical body and etheric body and are then with our I and astral body in the world that man otherwise enters when he passes through the gate of death, in the world where all earthly differentiations cease, in the world into which the insights of spiritual science are supposed to introduce us. Those who can make initiation knowledge their own are truly protected by this initiation knowledge from giving any of the folk spirits special preference in a one-sided way. For how do we come into contact with the particular folk spirit to which we belong?

When we are in the spiritual world from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, with our ego and astral body, we are not in touch with our folk spirit, with the folk spirit that, so to speak, presides over our nationality, but we are only in touch with this folk spirit during our waking day life, from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep. Among the forces in which we are immersed when we enter our physical and etheric bodies, are also the forces in which the spirit of the people to which we belong is at work. We enter the field of this national spirit, so to speak, when we awaken; we leave it again when we fall asleep. But the one who acquires initiatory knowledge must, precisely during this acquisition, dwell in the world in which his national spirit is not, for he must enter the world in which we live between falling asleep and waking up. And then something special comes to light. Let us assume that a person belongs to a very specific nation. Everyone belongs to one, in that they must count themselves as belonging to a particular nationality. When a person leaves the sphere of their folk spirit when falling asleep, they no longer have contact with this folk spirit until they wake up again. Even those who acquire initiatory knowledge enter this realm, and during the time between falling asleep and waking up, they come together with the other spirits of the nations that otherwise live on earth, except for their own folk spirit. So one lives through a being together with the other folk spirits in the time between falling asleep and waking up, and with one's own folk spirit in the time between waking up and falling asleep. Only, one does not live with each individual folk spirit, but with their collective, with their association, so to speak, with what they accomplish in relation to each other, with the totality of the other folk spirits.

So you see, human life alternates – as the knowledge of initiation tells us – between an experience with the folk spirit in the waking state and an experience with the totality of the other folk spirits in the sleeping state. Only there is a means, as it were, whereby we have an abnormal coexistence with the other folk spirits, whereby we do not come together with their totality in our sleep, but come together with a particular folk spirit. This is when we hate a nation with particular passion. That is the abnormal thing: we cannot escape it when we hate a nation with particular passion, that during sleep we enter the sphere of its folk spirit. And anyone who acquires initiatory knowledge would, if they hated a people particularly for purely personal national reasons, enter the sphere of their national spirit when they enter the field of initiation, and it would soon become impossible for them to remain within it. To put it in trivial terms, I could say: anyone who hates another people because of their national passions is doomed to sleep with their national spirit. That is a trivial way of putting it, but it is to be taken quite literally.

The facts of the spiritual world ensure that the whole human race is one and that it is not possible to separate oneself from it. But if we face such facts, we can learn a lot from them. We are talking about the fact that the world in which we live externally with our senses and with our mind, which is bound to the brain, is a great deception, a Maja; but we also take this truth, that the world is a Maja, all too abstractly, we take it only theoretically. I would like to say that we still allow ourselves to grasp this truth intellectually. To grasp it full of life, not only our intellect, but often even our will, resists that. Because what is behind the world of deception, it looks like we don't want it to look that way. We shy away from it, we fear it, because the truth is uncomfortable for us. Knowing that all of humanity is, in a very real sense, one unit is not comfortable, because it does not allow us to view feelings and enthusiasm in the one-sided way that they are often viewed today, but rather it teaches us what they mean in the world of reality. But that is uncomfortable. The will often shrinks from the truth even more than the intellect does. Therefore, it is not surprising that in our time the truths of spiritual science are still widely regarded as folly, because the folly of the time fears the wisdom of the world. But only by looking beyond appearances is it possible to understand what is actually happening. I already pointed this out yesterday and now I will explain it in a specific case.

When we follow a person as he passes through the portal of death into the spiritual world, where he lives through the time between death and a new birth in order to prepare for a new life on earth, then we must realize become clear to what extent he is influenced in his life between death and a new birth by his last life on earth, and to what extent he brings with him through the gate of death into the spiritual life the echoes of his last life on earth. We know, of course, that when a person passes through the gate of death, he carries with him, after he has given up his physical body to the earthly elements, his etheric body, his astral body and

We also know that this etheric body soon separates from the ego and the astral body, with the exception of an extract that remains, and that the etheric body connects with the general workings of the cosmos. We have often considered all this. But now it is the case that after death, through his knowledge, the knowledge that remains with him after death, the human being nevertheless looks back at the fate of the ether body, and that this fate means something to him. It means something for the person after death when he looks at the fate of his etheric body, which proceeds in such a way that this progression is a kind of result of earthly life. And this result, this outcome of earthly life turns out differently for the most diverse conditions on earth, including, among other things, the different experiences within nationalities. The remains on earth that have a meaning for a person after death are quite different, let us say, for a soul that leaves a French body and passes into the spiritual world, and quite different for a soul that leaves a Russian body today and passes into the spiritual world. Souls that leave a French body today belong to a culture that has become, so to speak, mature and overripe, which allows much of this etheric body to be experienced on earth. The peculiarity of French folk culture — not the culture of the individual — is that the etheric body itself is worked through, imbued with forces and power effects, and therefore passes through the gate of death in a very sharply defined way, and then is in the spiritual world. Such etheric bodies do not dissolve for a long time; they remain present as spectra for a long time. In his imagination, the Frenchman, insofar as he belongs to it, has a very definite opinion of himself, of what he is worth in the world. But this is nothing more than the reflection of the firmly working forces in the etheric body. The etheric body is plastically formed and thus passes into the spiritual world.

It is quite different with the etheric body of a Russian person. It is not so firmly formed, it is more elastic, so to speak, it dissolves more easily into the spiritual world; therefore the souls are less tied to it. While the soul of the Frenchman is connected to the etheric body of the Frenchman for a longer period of time, the soul of the Russian is only connected to the etheric body for a short time. What the etheric body undergoes after death means less for the soul of the East. But this has a very definite, profound, significant effect on what happens behind the scenes of our existence in the present, so to speak. The destinies of the Russian soul are quite different from those of the French soul in the time between death and a new birth.

Now we know from the most diverse considerations that we are heading towards the etheric working of the Christ-Spirit in the twentieth century. This is already indicated in the exoteric sense at the appropriate point in the mystery drama 'The Portal of Initiation' by the reappearance of the Christ as an etheric physical body. And it has also already been pointed out in various reflections that this appearance of the Christ is being prepared for those people who will be able to see him since the last third of the 19th century, in that the active spirit of the time since that time is different from what it was before. For centuries before that, Gabriel was the active spirit of the time; since the last third of the 19th century, Michael has been the active spirit of the time. It is Michael who, in a sense, has to prepare for the appearance of the Christ as an ethereal being. But all this must be prepared, all this must be 'promoted in a certain way in the development, and it is promoted. It is promoted in such a way that Michael, as it were, fights for the appearance of the Christ, that he prepares the souls in the experience between death and new birth for what is to happen in the earth aura. Now sharply defined etheric bodies, which are in the elementary world around us, would always be disturbing in the time that must approach when this etheric form, which the Christ must take, is to be seen purely. Those souls who, after death, are less affected by their etheric bodies are closer to a pure conception of this etheric form. Hence the following emerges.

We see how part of Michael's work is to help dissolve the highly cultivated etheric bodies of Western Europe, which have a fixed form, and we see how Michael uses the souls of Eastern Europe in this struggle. And so we see Michael, followed by the hosts of Eastern European souls, fighting against the Western European etheric bodies and the impressions that the souls have after 'death'. So there is a living struggle behind the scenes of today's existence. This struggle exists, this struggle in the spiritual world. This fight in heaven, as it were, takes place between Russia and France in the spiritual world, a living fight between East and West. And this fight is the truth, and that which takes place in the physical world, that is the outer maya, that is the distortion of the truth. And here, as so often, when one contemplates spiritual facts, one is often given the harrowing impression that what is taking place here in the field of deception is the very opposite of what is taking place in the spiritual world as truth.

Imagine the tremendous shock for the one who acquires initiation knowledge that there is an alliance between peoples who fight each other fiercely in the spiritual world! Of course, such things must not be generalized, nor must the conclusion be drawn that everything in the spiritual world is the opposite of the physical world. Each individual case must be examined. But in this case we also get this harrowing impression, this impression that, one might say, initially crushes our knowledge. Behind the scenes of existence, things often look very different from how they appear in the outer world. But we can only understand things in their true context if we can shine a light behind the scenes of existence from the point of view of spiritual science. But then our whole conception will also be imbued with those feelings which, as it were, allow our hearts to plunge into the truth in the face of the prejudices we must be subject to when we surrender to the currents of the external physical world. Today, Central Europe is really wedged between two fighting powers and, to a certain extent, has to keep them apart. But from this arises the connection between what I called yesterday the struggle of Central European culture and what is besieging this Central European culture on both sides, as if it were in a stranglehold. That is the karma of Central European culture: to see its development taking place between two forces that must fight each other due to an earth-historical necessity. A true sense of the tragic conflict of circumstances, as they now affect Central Europe, can only emerge from such a consideration. Only when we base our view on such a consideration do we realize that, basically, non-involvement in the struggles that are actually to be fought out is what is really characteristic of Central Europe, an innocent attitude towards these struggles and being entangled in karma. And now we have also seen what the exact harmony of what is contained in evolution is: we have seen how involved the East and West of Europe are in the coming Christ event. If we consider the struggle of Central European culture with its unification, as I characterized it yesterday, of the spiritual and the physical, then we also have the special development of the Christ impulse, which is, after all, the bearer of this unification of the spiritual and the physical. So in the middle of Europe, the phenomenon of transferring Christianity into earthly events. Here, on the physical plane, something of tremendous significance is taking place, and to the right and left, something that has to be fought for on the higher planes. The physical and spiritual planes join together when we look at them in this way.

This is the supplement to what we discussed yesterday. And so it is basically with all evolution, insofar as it develops gradually under the influence of the Christ impulse. For what is happening now in the twentieth century has gradually developed. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Impulse has entered into the earthly development of mankind, and has worked therein. But if the Christ Impulse had been limited to the way in which people have understood it, it would have been able to accomplish little so far. We are only just beginning to understand; we are only just beginning to grasp something of what the Mystery of Golgotha is through spiritual science. The Christ Impulse has worked. But it has truly worked least of all in the bickering and shouting of theologians. It would have been bad if only as much of the Christ Impulse could have entered into the evolution of the earth as people have grasped with their minds in the various epochs. But I have pointed out how the Christ impulse has worked through the centuries into the unconscious powers of the soul. I have described to you how on October 28, 312 Constantine stood against Maxentius, and how a battle was fought there that decided the fate of Europe. This battle was not fought by the skill of the generals, but by what took place in the subconscious of men. Maxentius consulted the Sibylline books. They seduced him, instead of leaving his armies in safety in Rome, to lead them out of the gates of Rome, to meet the armies of Constantine. But Constantine had the dream: to let the monogram of Christ go in front of his army. Thus it was not the sagacity of the generals that was followed, but dreams, that is to say, the impulses of the subconscious. Europe has been shaped by what emerged from this. The real shaping of the Christ impulse, over which theologians quarrelled, did not come from what the theologians argued about, but from what the living Christ was in the fields where he can work. Not the human concepts of Christ are important, but the living Christ, who works through the impulses that are His. When people did not understand Him, He entered into a realm where there is no need to understand, where one absorbs in dreams what is to pass into the sphere of the will.

And once again it was in Europe that the Christ impulse penetrated and gave Europe a certain shape: in the 15th century, when Europe took on a completely different shape through the simple country girl, the Maid of Orleans. Had England triumphed over France at that time – which the Maid of Orleans prevented – all subsequent historical developments would have been different. But truly, the shepherdess of Orleans did not have human wisdom, but in her the Christ Impulse worked through its Michaelic forerunner, outwardly in favor of France, but in reality in favor of England; for otherwise England would not have been able to undergo the development that it has undergone. But the Christ impulse worked with tremendous clarity for those who want to see through the world spiritually, for what was to come.

I have often pointed out how those old legends, those old sagas and myths contain truths that indicate that in the thirteen nights between Christmas and the Feast of Epiphany, that in these nights of deepest winter darkness is the time when the powers of clairvoyance are particularly favorable to the powers of clairvoyance. Where, so to speak, the physical forces withdraw most into inactivity, there the spiritual forces are particularly active. These thirteen nights, from Christmas to January 6th - so an old Norwegian legend tells us - Olaf Ästeson slept. And in this sleep he went through all that in imaginations, which we now recognize anthroposophically as Kamaloka, as the soul world, as the spiritual world. That is a truth. And many a person who, I might say, is at the gateway of initiation, can give this initiation its final perfection if they can achieve a very special, concentrated inner experience during this time, into which the birth of the Christ, the spiritual sunlight, has rightly been placed. One might say: If someone is to experience an unconscious initiation, when would they best experience it? Then he would experience it best if he is prepared during these nights, when he is in a state of sleep, a kind of state of being removed from the world, until January 6. Could we not assume that the shepherdess, Joan of Arc, who was certainly not educated or trained in the humanities but was inwardly spiritualized, could have been best initiated if she had gone through these nights in a kind of sleep state, a state where she would not have comprehended the outer world through the senses and the mind? She did! In the time before physical birth, one is certainly not predisposed to perceive the surrounding world through the external senses, because these senses only awaken at birth in physical existence. One is also not capable of reflecting through the mind before birth, but the spiritual part is then in contact with the cosmic spiritual environment.

Now, the Virgin of Orleans spent the thirteen days before January 6 in her mother's womb, because she was born on January 6. This is a fact that speaks profoundly of the interrelationships between worlds. The World Spirit guiding evolution needed a human soul in the body of the Virgin of Orleans, who spent the last thirteen days of pregnancy in her mother's womb until January 6, when she was born. There we see deep into those connections that are behind the scenes of existence. There we see how the world is led in spiritual terms. A soul was born that was initiated, so to speak, by the spirit of the world itself up until its birth. It is therefore a matter of acquiring a sense of how the carpet of external Mayan existence is spread out before us: if we tear it in different places, we can begin to glimpse the secrets of existence. And this must become feeling and intuition for the transforming power of spiritual science for the culture of humanity. It must become an intuitive perception that in order to look into the secrets of the world, one must radically break with the mere observation of the external maya, which of course had to occur since the splendor and fame of scientific research. But in the future this splendor and fame must be replaced by spiritual science. Above all, what humanity needs for the real assimilation of spiritual science in the soul will be a truly good will for the connection of one's own soul with the spiritual worlds. But all this must proceed from a certain self-knowledge. Yet self-knowledge is not at all easy, and it is one of the greatest illusions to which one can succumb in ordinary life to think that self-knowledge, which must be the beginning of all true knowledge, is easy.

Even with regard to the most external things, it is not even particularly easy. I have a book here that has coincidentally – in what one calls a coincidence – karmically come into my hands again these days: the book of a contemporary philosopher who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna: “Analysis of Sensations.” The person who wrote the book makes very interesting self-revelations. On page 3, he says: As a young man, I once saw my face in profile in a mirror while walking across the street, but I did not recognize it as my own face. I thought: What a repulsive, unappealing face! — So you see, even to this extent, self-knowledge of the purely external form is not even that widespread. The good man openly admits: he encounters a highly unappealing face with a repulsive character, and then he discovers that it is his own. He knew himself so little in terms of his external appearance. You see, it is not easy to acquire even external self-knowledge. You can be a university professor and still not know yourself, as this example testifies. Ernst Mach, that is the professor's name, makes a similar confession. He is completely honest. He says: “I once came back from a journey quite tired and got into an omnibus. At the same time, someone else got into the omnibus. I thought: what a run-down schoolmaster is getting in there!” — And lo and behold, it was me. — He had seen himself in the mirror. The good man knew what a rundown schoolmaster looks like, so he saw one getting on, but he couldn't identify with it, he didn't know that he looked like that. He adds to his story: So I knew the class habitus better than my own!

Much more difficult than knowing our outer appearance is knowing our soul, knowing what we actually are in our spiritual being. But without this, it is not possible if one really wants to make progress in the field of initiation. Delusion about oneself is one of the most widespread human peculiarities, and what takes place in the depths of the human soul is generally not known. It is very easy to think: Yes, I know myself, I know what I want! One forms certain ideas about oneself; but these are mostly

not really suited to express what we truly are. Down there in the soul, it often looks quite different from the region where we form ideas about ourselves. Some examples are given that not only can happen, but often do happen in human coexistence: Two people live together. One of them has something against the other, so that he actually likes to torment and torture the other sometimes, sometimes more intensely, sometimes less. Whatever the cause of this torment may be, it can be an original urge to be cruel. A person can go around seemingly quite harmlessly in the world and yet actually be a very cruel fellow who feels the need to torture a fellow human being. If you talk to this person, he will not forgive you if you think of him as a cruel fellow, as a disgusting guy who only feels satisfied when he can torture his fellow human beings. but he will say: Oh, I love this person so much, so terribly, but he just does this and that and that, and precisely because I love him so much, I can't stand it when he does that! This is in the person's conscious mind, but in the subconscious is the cruelty. And the ideas of the conscious mind are only there to conceal, to excuse us from ourselves. The way we form ideas in the conscious mind is only there to excuse us properly from ourselves. I knew a gentleman who emphasized at every opportunity that he only adopted a certain intellectual direction out of pure unselfishness, that he was not particularly sympathetic to this direction, but out of a sense of duty and unselfishness he had to adopt this direction. I said to him: What you think about the things you do and why you do them is not important, but what is important is why you really do them. And you do it because it gives you lust to do just that, because it particularly flatters your vanity to do this. — It is unpleasant to admit: I am actually quite vain, that's why I do this or that. — That's why we love our Maja, she does it differently. The Maja that we carry in our consciousness about ourselves is often even more unlike reality than the Maja that we have about spiritual science. Love is certainly a wonderful thing, and rightly so in the eyes of humanity. But all too often it is wrongly spoken of! When we were still connected with the other Theosophical Society, we often heard how it depends on people loving each other deeply and truly! Often this love was only the veil that was cast over the dogmatic quarrels. For love can often be a mask for the strongest selfishness. When someone takes particular pleasure in doing this or that, they often disguise what they do and what actually gives them pleasure as love; and they excuse themselves for what they would never actually confess, leaving it in the depths of their subconscious. Yes, when we descend into this human being, then we really soon descend into an abyss. Man can really only recognize himself by delving into the secrets of spiritual existence, by familiarizing himself with the great laws of this spiritual existence. For the human being is complicated, and it is the greatest error to believe that this human being is somehow simple. I would like to say: All the secrets of the world are combined to bring the human being together. But things must be properly understood.

Playing with self-knowledge stops very quickly when you realize something of the spiritual secrets of human existence. Let us assume that a person, through some training or other, begins to have a certain clairvoyance and even manages to see quite wonderful images that he can fix, so that people come and are completely enchanted by the meaningful connection between this person and the spiritual world. The connection undoubtedly exists, but one must see through this spiritual connection in its truth, one must see through what it can really be. You see, the human being, with its physical body, is based on the etheric body as its creator, then the astral body, then that which we call the ego carrier. All of this works on the physical body, and each higher body in turn works on the lower. If you take the etheric body and examine it directly with clairvoyance, it is a wonderful structure of shimmering colors that flow into each other. What are these colors that flow in the etheric body? Yes, these are the forces that build the physical body, the forces that not only build organs for it but also work in what is carried out by the organs of the physical body during life. But the human organs are of different importance. Take two such organs as the intestines and the brain. External anatomy examines the tissues and everything that comes into consideration as being of equal value. But these are not things, they are quite different. When we look at the human brain, as a physical organ it is complete; this is because the brain processes those floods of color. If we look at the etheric body of the human brain, we see it in relatively pale colors, because the colors were used to create the structure of the brain. When we look at the intestines, we find the flowing colors shimmering brightly and wonderfully intertwined, because the intestines are really coarser organs; not so much of the spiritual has to be used there, the forces remain in the etheric body, and only a smaller part is used for development. Therefore, the etheric body of the brain is pale, but the etheric body of the intestines is of wonderful, vibrant colors, beautiful.

Now, imagine that someone comes to have clairvoyance as I have described it. Two things can happen: clairvoyance can occur as a result of loosening the etheric body of the brain, but it can also occur as a result of loosening the etheric body of the intestines. In clairvoyance, a person often becomes aware of his or her own interior. The one who gets the etheric body of the brain out will initially see a rather pale world; but the one who gets the etheric body of his or her intestines out can reflect wonderfully flooding colors into the etheric world. In order to bring the pale colors of the etheric body of the brain into contact with the flowing colors of the cosmos, it is necessary that we first draw the flowing colors from the entire sphere of the cosmos. To develop the flowing colors of the etheric body of the intestines, we can radiate them out of ourselves, and in this way a quite marvelous formation can be seen by means of clairvoyance. It is certainly a genuine clairvoyant form, but when it is examined, what is it? It is nothing other than one's own digestive process; it is what the etheric body does during the digestive process of a person; it projects itself into the etheric space. From the anatomical point of view, this is most interesting. But we must realize that we only begin to get an inkling of what is actually present in the spiritual world when we approach the secrets of the spiritual world. We only then get an inkling that out of the wonderfully flowing sea of colors of the etheric body, there also arises that which must take place in the etheric body so that the intestines function in the right way. If one then sees this clairvoyantly, it is certainly a clairvoyant process; but it is nothing that is connected with heavenly secrets, it is nothing that brings the great cosmic facts of the world to us in any way, but it is something that brings us to our most ordinary lower self.

And just when we ascend to self-knowledge with clairvoyance, we find that the first thing we experience in terms of wonderful images is a reflection of our basest self. And only then, when we make a greater effort to get rid of those parts of the etheric body that have remained behind in us as lesser ones because the majority have been used to the heart and brain, only then do we manage to radiate out what is within us and make an impression through the more strongly applied forces on the outer ether. And then the following happens: When we project the etheric body of the physical organs, we push it out into space. When we develop higher clairvoyance, we also work outwards, but we work out what we build up between birth and death, so that it prepares what develops in us between death and a new birth. We inscribe this in space, and thus we produce an effect in the etheric world. And there we encounter that which is formed through these effects, the cosmic effects, the cosmic facts.

We are constantly working towards this. The book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' aims to express this in the most eminent sense, that the right ways are found, not to find the lower being of man through an enchanting clairvoyance, but to fathom the secrets of the world. It is pointed out again and again that this clairvoyance is difficult, that it appears pale, that one first develops through great efforts of those forces, which are the forces of the human being between birth and death, to true clairvoyance, that then the secrets of the world can be unraveled. Where these forces lie can be imagined by delving into what was said in the Vienna Cycle of 1914. There is talk of the forces that a person develops between death and a new birth, of the forces for which it is only possible to use stammering words, because words are coined for the physical world, and one can only express what is quite different in the spiritual world than in the physical-sensual world through word compositions. But people find it more convenient to imagine the spiritual world as nothing more than a kind of continuation of the physical world, only somewhat thinner, somewhat more fleeting. People would find it convenient to see figures walking around in the spiritual world, as they do in the physical world; but they find it inconvenient that one must develop a new way of thinking when one wants to enter the spiritual world. All of this should prove to you that not only human understanding, but above all human will, resists what spiritual science must bring into the world in our time. We can truly say: Not only because large sections of people today do not understand spiritual science do they reject it, but because they do not want it, because fundamentally they are horrified that the world is as spiritual science wants and must depict it.

An especially important concept must be understood in order to comprehend the experience between death and a new birth. Basically, one cannot say that a person who has passed through the gate of death has no consciousness and that his consciousness must first awaken. That is not even correct, but it is correct that he has too strong an awareness when he has gone through the gate of death, that he is completely surrounded by awareness, that he is quite dazed by the spiritual sunlight of consciousness and must first begin to orient himself, as I have explained in more detail in the cycle just mentioned. Here on earth we have to acquire wisdom in a makeshift way; but over there we are surrounded by wisdom on all sides, so we have to dim it so that we can behold it. The parts that we have subdued to human weakness are the ones we can see. So first we have to familiarize ourselves with the subjugation of our consciousness until we can find our way around. This is something that becomes particularly apparent when one really looks at the phenomena. You see, one then gradually tries to shape the words so that they properly express these phenomena. Not long ago a dear member of our society in Zurich died. Karma had it that although I had wanted to see the member in the physical life, I came too late and did not see him. But then, after a few days, we had the cremation in Zurich. I was asked to speak at this cremation, and I tried to put into words what presented itself to me inwardly as the essence of this dear member of our society. I tried to capture this essence in a few words. Then the cremation was carried out. And it was now noticeable that the first orienting emergence from the engulfing consciousness occurred at the moment when the body passed into the flames, when seemingly the flame, in reality the heat, seized this body. At that moment, the scene we had had before was before the soul of the deceased. Before, during the funeral oration, she had not taken part in it, but afterwards, when the cremation began, she looked back. And just as in physical life one has space in front of oneself, so the dead person sees things in time. What has passed is beside the dead person. He sees the scenes standing in front of him. Time really becomes space. The past is not past, it remains there, it is looked at. Then the dead descended again into a general stupor, and it then takes a long time for orientation to take place. But such moments prepare themselves, one might say, bright moments, which are then further processed. Then there is another submerging into the general flooding of consciousness, until later a complete orientation occurs.

And so it must be said that it is an important concept that reflects the wisdom that consciousness thinks in a different way after death than before death. It is not that a degree of consciousness must first mature after death, but that the immeasurable consciousness must be attenuated to a certain degree. We must bear this in mind. And then we must take the realization very seriously that the truth is often exactly the opposite of what appears on the surface. I have already illustrated this with an example. A person is walking along the edge of a stream, falls into the stream and drowns. We go after him and find him drowned, and at the point where he fell into the stream we find a stone. We can then justifiably conclude that the person fell into the stream over the stone and thereby drowned. If we do nothing further, we come to no other conclusion. But here, with regard to the physical facts, the logic of the facts may be wrong. At the autopsy, we may discover that the man had a stroke and that he consequently fell into the water, so that cause and effect are reversed. We thought the man was dead because he fell into the water; in reality he fell into the water because he was dead. In relation to the external facts, the logic was wrong. Thus we often cannot come to terms with logic for the external Maja.

Take the case we experienced in the fall regarding our pain in Dornach. The seven-year-old son of a member of the local branch who had settled in Dornach was missing one evening. And after it became clear that the child could be under a fallen furniture truck, the truck had to be lifted in the middle of the night, and little Theo Faiß was pulled out from under it, dead. What had happened? No furniture truck drives in that area, no truck drives at all. It is an extremely exceptional case for a truck to drive there. There were no trucks driving there long before or after. And little Theo always fetched what he had to fetch a quarter of an hour earlier. That evening he had been asked to wait a quarter of an hour. He could have walked on the right side while walking on the left side of the car, but he was made to go to a different exit than usual. Everything has come together so that it happened down to the second, so that the boy just happened to come under that car. If you examine the case spiritually in its karmic context, then the soul of the boy had ordered this car to find death at this time; it was all arranged that way, the physical event is a consequence of the spiritual connections. Then you understand things in a completely different way, then you also understand the connection between what happened and the further course after death. Little Theo had an etheric body that he could have had for another seventy, eighty years or more in normal life. None of this is lost, it remains there. An etheric body of a child who died at seven still has the forces within it that would have been used in life; they are present in the spiritual world. And those who have to do with the etheric aura of our building are well aware of this; for the etheric body of the little boy has been there since his death, there are the forces, the strong spiritual forces of this clever, loving, well-disposed boy. These are the forces of help and assistance for everything connected with the aura of the Dornach building.

In this way, spiritual and physical effects are connected. The times when one had to look to the spiritual world for what happens in the physical world are no longer; but they still exist. We are beginning to understand some things through our spiritual science. However, there is much in it for which we need help from those who leave the physical life with unspent etheric forces. Think of the thousands and thousands who are passing through the portals of death in the great fields of serious contemporary events, all of them people with unconsumed etheric bodies. These are all spiritual forces that could have been effective for a long time if the people in question had remained in the physical world. In physics, it is already recognized that no force is lost. In the most eminent sense, however, this law of the conservation of energy is present in the spiritual world. The forces that an etheric body has to sustain a life between birth and death until the age of eighty or ninety are not lost when someone passes through the gate of death early. The forces are there. In addition to what enters the spiritual world through the ego and the astral body and has value for the individuality, the etheric body has a general value for that which passes into the general aura of human evolution on earth. So we can look up to the fresh, vigorous, unspent etheric bodies that work down from the spiritual worlds into the times to come.

Just as we often see today that 'the dead fight with the living', so on the other side we see the etheric field, the elemental world, permeated with forces, with strong human forces, which are acquired in high confidence in the belief in ideal human goals, which are left behind by people who have gone through the gateway of death with this belief. But those who will live later will have to look up to these unspent etheric forces, which will continue to be effective. These etheric forces of those who died young will most certainly demand that they have not in vain found the transition into the spiritual world and look down from there. They will demand that they can really contribute their part to the reorganization of the spiritual world, which is demanded of humanity. These ethereal bodies are there as admonishers, admonishers that say: We have gone into the spiritual world so that forces that can go into your hearts and souls can flow to you from here, with which you can work even more strongly for the progress of the development of the earth in the spiritual-scientific sense. We must understand the interaction between the physical and the spiritual, not in a nebulous, hazy way, but as a concrete spiritual connection between people who live here on earth in physical bodies and the souls that have gone up into the spiritual world. There will be a common ground if we understand the facts and properly imbibe what spiritual science can give us. Yes, truly, an insight into the connection between the spiritual and the physical can also put us in the right way to the great seriousness of our time, and make us feel completely how what is happening can only be justified by us before the future if it is taken as the cause of a great, significant human struggle and human work on the physical plane as well. What we emphasized yesterday must be fulfilled: the right understanding between the spiritual and physical worlds. What is contained in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

The spiritual evolution of mankind must be brought into a living connection with the whole surrounding world. For many men to-day a great deal has become dead and prosaic; and this is true even of our religious festivals. A great section of mankind has only the smallest notion of what Christmas, Easter and Whitsun signify; it has almost entirely lost that overwhelming richness in the life of feeling which in earlier times men possessed through their knowledge of their connection with the spiritual worlds. Yes, even the festivals have for many men to-day become dead and prosaic. The pouring down of the spirit has become a mere abstraction, and this will change only when men come again to a real spiritual knowledge.

Much is said nowadays about the forces of nature, but little enough about the beings behind these forces. Our forefathers spoke of gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, but to see any reality in such ideas is regarded to-day as sheer superstition. It doesn't matter much, in themselves, what theories people hold; it only begins to be serious when the theories tempt people not to see the truth.

When people say that their ancestors' belief in gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders and the like was all nonsense, one would like to make a rather grotesque reply, and say: “Well, go and ask the bees. They could inform you: the sylphs are no superstition to us; we know well enough what we owe to the sylphs.”—Anyone investigating spiritual forces can find out which force it is that draws the bee on towards the flowers; he sees actual beings leading the bee to the flowers: amid the myriads of bees which fly forth in search of nourishment are the beings our predecessors called sylphs.

It is especially where the different kingdoms of nature come in contact with each other that certain elemental beings are able to reveal themselves. Where moss is growing on the rocks, for example, such beings can establish themselves; or again, in the flowers, in the contact of the bee with the flowers, certain beings have the chance to show themselves. Another possibility arises where man himself comes into touch with the animal kingdom. This does not happen, however, in the ordinary run of things, as for example, when a butcher slaughters an ox or when a man eats meat. It does occur, however, in less usual circumstances, where the contact between the two kingdoms is the result of something more than the mere fact of life. It occurs particularly where a man has that kind of relationship to animals which involves his own feelings, his own concern of soul. A shepherd, for example, may sometimes have such a special relationship to his sheep. Connections of this sort were very frequent in more primitive cultures in earlier times; they resembled the relationship which an Arab has to his horse. And such soul-forces as play over from one realm into the other—as they do between the shepherd and his lambs, or when the forces of smell and taste stream over from the flowers to the bees—these give to certain beings the possibility of incarnating themselves. The spiritual investigator perceives something like an aura around the blossoms, which arises as the bees thrust their way into them and taste what they find there. A kind of flower-aura streams out, and this provides nourishment for certain spiritual beings.

The question why there are beings just here and nowhere else, does not arise for anyone who understands the spiritual world. If opportunities are provided for such beings, then they are there; give them that on which they can live and they are there. It is just as when human beings let evil thoughts stream out from themselves, certain beings then incorporate themselves in his aura; they are there because he allows nourishment to stream to them. The opportunity is given for certain spiritual beings to incorporate themselves wherever different kingdoms of nature come into touch with each other. Where metal is found in the rocks, the miner as he hacks away sees certain tiny beings which were compressed together into quite a small space and now scatter in all directions. These are beings in some ways not unlike man himself; they have the power of reason, but it is reason without responsibility; and so, when they play some mischievous prank on a man, they in no way feel they are doing anything amiss. They are the beings our forefathers called gnomes; they prefer to take up their abode where metal and stone come together. There was a time when they did men good service, as in the early days of mining; the way to lay out a mine, the knowledge of how the strata ran—this was learnt from such beings.

Mankind will land itself in a blind alley if it fails to acquire a spiritual understanding of these things. As with the gnomes, so with the beings we may call undines; they are found where the plants come into contact with the mineral kingdom. They are bound up with the element of water, they incorporate themselves where water and plant and stone come together.—The sylphs are bound to the element of air, and lead the bees to the flowers. Now everything science has to say about the life of the bees is riddled with error from top to bottom, and nowadays the beekeepers are often misled by it; in this direction science proves itself unusable and again and again beekeepers have to come back to old practices.

As for salamanders, these are still known to many people. When someone feels that this or that element of soul is streaming towards him, this mostly arises through the salamanders. When a man relates himself to animals in the way the shepherd does to his lambs, the salamanders are then able to embody themselves; the knowledge the shepherd has in regard to his flock is whispered to him by these beings.

If we take these thoughts farther we shall have to say: We are entirely surrounded by spiritual beings; we are surrounded by the air and this is crowded with these spiritual beings. In times to come, if his destiny is not to be of the sort that will entirely dry up his life, man will have to have a knowledge of these beings; without such a knowledge he will be unable to make any further progress at all. He will have to put the question: Whence do these beings arise? And this question will lead him to see that, through certain steps taken by the higher worlds, that which is on the downward path to evil can through a wise guidance be changed into good.

Here and there in life we meet with the products of decay with waste products. Thus for example, manure is a waste product, and in agriculture it is used as a basis to further plant growth. Things which have apparently fallen away from a higher course of development are taken up again by higher powers and transformed. This happens with the very beings of whom we have been speaking.

Let us consider how the salamander, for example, originates. Salamanders, as we have seen, are beings who require a special relationship between man and animal. Now the kind of ego man has to-day is only to be found in man, in the human being living on the earth; every man has his ego enclosed within himself. It is different with the animals: they have a group-ego, a group-soul; that is to say, a group of animals with the same form have a common group-ego. When the lion says ‘I’, its ego is up above in the astral world. It is as if a man were to stand behind a wall in which there were ten holes, and then to stick his ten fingers through them. The man himself cannot be seen, but every intelligent observer would conclude that someone is behind, a single entity who owns the ten fingers. It is the same with the group-ego. The separate animals are simply the limbs: the being they belong to is in the astral world. We must not imagine the animal-ego to be like the human being of course, though if we consider man as he is as a spiritual being, we can then certainly compare the animal group-ego with him.

In many animal species the group-ego is a wise being. If we think of how certain kinds of birds live in the north in the summer and in the south in the winter, how in spring they fly back to the north—in this migrating flight of the birds there are wise powers at work; they are in the group-egos of the birds. Anywhere you like in the animal kingdom you can find the wisdom of the group-egos in this way. If we turn back to our schooldays we can remember learning how modern times gradually arose out of the Middle Ages, of how America was discovered, and how gunpowder and printing were invented, and later still the art of making paper from rags. We have long been accustomed to such paper, but the wasp group-soul invented it thousands of years ago. The material of which the wasp's nest consists is exactly the same as is used in making paper out of rags. Only gradually will it become known how the one or the other achievement of the human spirit is connected with what the group-souls have introduced into the world.

When the clairvoyant looks at an animal, he sees a glimmer of light along the whole length of its spine. The physical spine of the animal is enveloped in a glimmering light, in innumerable streams of force which everywhere travel across the earth, as it were, like the trade winds. They work on the animal in that they stream along the spine. The group-ego of the animal travels in a continual circular movement around the earth at all heights and in all directions. These group-egos are wise, but one thing they have not yet got: they have no knowledge of love. Only in man is wisdom found in his individuality together with love. In the group-ego of the animals no love is present; love is found only in the single animal. What underlies the whole animal-group as wise arrangements is quite devoid of love. In the physical world below the animal has love; above, on the astral plane, it has wisdom. When we realise this a vast number of things will become clear to us.

Only gradually has man arrived at his present stage of development; in earlier times he also had a group-soul, out of which the individual soul has gradually emerged. Let us follow the evolution of man back into ancient Atlantis. Mankind once lived in Atlantis, a continent now lying beneath the Atlantic Ocean. At that time the vast Siberian plains were covered with immense seas; the Mediterranean was differently distributed, and in Europe itself there were extensive seas. The farther we go back in the old Atlantean period, the more the conditions of life alter, the more the sleeping and the waking state of man changes. Since that time consciousness during the sleeping condition has darkened, as it were, so that to-day man has, so to say, no consciousness at all in this condition. In the earliest Atlantean times the difference between sleeping and waking was not yet so great. In his waking state at that time man still saw things with an aura around them; he did not attain to any greater clarity than this in his perception of the physical world. Everything physical was still filled out, so to say, with something unclear, as if with mist. As he progressed, the human being came to see the world in its clear-cut contours, but in return he lost his clairvoyance.

It is in the times when men still saw clairvoyantly what was going on up above in the astral world that all the myths and sagas originate. When he was able to enter into the spiritual world, man learned to know the beings who had never descended into the physical world: Wotan, Baldur, Thor, Loki.—These names are memories of living realities, and all mythologies are memories of this kind. As spiritual realities, they have simply vanished from the sight of man. When in those earlier times man descended into his physical body, he got the feeling: “Thou art a single being.” When he returned into the spiritual world in the evening, however, the feeling came over him: “Thou art in reality not a single being.” The members of the old tribal groups, the Herulians, the Cheruskans and the like, had still felt themselves far more as belonging to their group, than as single personalities. It was out of this condition of things that there arose such practices as the blood-feud, the vendetta. The whole people formed a body which belonged to the group-soul of the folk.

Everything happens step by step in evolution, and so it was only gradually that the individual developed out of the group-soul. The accounts of the patriarchs, for instance, reveal quite other relationships which confirm this fact. Before the time of Noah, memory was as yet something quite different from what we know. The frontier of birth was no real frontier, for the memory streamed on in those through whom the same blood flowed. This onstreaming of memory was in earlier times something quite different from what we possess; it was far more comprehensive. Nowadays the authorities like to have the name of each individual recorded somewhere or other. In the past, it was what man remembered of the deeds of his father and grandfather that was covered with a common name and called Adam or Noah; what was remembered, the stream of memory in its full extent, was called Adam or Noah. The old names signified comprehensive groups, human groups which extended through time.

Now we must put ourselves the question: Can we compare the anthropoid apes with man himself? The vital difference is that the ape preserves the group-soul condition throughout, whereas man develops the individual soul. But the ape group-soul is in a quite special position to other group-souls. We must think of a group-soul as living in the astral world and spreading itself out in the physical world, so that, for instance, the group-soul of the lion sends a part of its substance into each single lion. Let us suppose that one of these lions dies; the external physical part drops away from the group-soul, just as when we lose a nail. The group-soul sends out a new ray of being, as it were, into a new individual. The group-soul remains above and stretches out its tentacles in a continual process of renewal. The animal group-soul knows neither birth or death; the single individual falls away and a new one appears, just as the nails on our fingers come and go.—Now we must consider the following:—With the lion it is entirely as we have said, that every time a lion dies, the whole of what was sent out by the group-soul return to it again. It is not at all so, however, with the apes. When an ape dies the essential part does return to the group-soul, but a part does not; a part is severed from the group-soul. The ape detaches substance too strongly from the group-soul. There are species where the single animal tears something away from the group-soul which cannot return to it. With all the apes, fragments are detached in each case from the group-soul. It is the same with certain kinds of amphibians and birds; in the kangaroo, for example, something is kept back from the group-soul. Now everything in the warm-blooded animals that remains behind in this way becomes an elemental being of the kind we call a salamander.

Under entirely different conditions from those on the earth to-day, the other types of elemental beings have detached themselves in the past. We have here a case where cast-off products of evolution, as it were, are made of service under the wise guidance of higher Beings. Left to themselves, these would disturb the Cosmos, but under a higher guidance the sylphs, for example, can be used to lead the bees to the flowers. Such a service changes the harmful into something useful.

Now it could happen that man himself might entirely detach himself from the group-soul in becoming an individual and find no means of developing further as an individual soul. If he does not accept spiritual knowledge in the right way, he can run the risk of complete severance.

What is it that protects man from an isolation which is, without the direction and purpose which, earlier on, the group-soul had given him? We must clearly recognise that man individualises himself more and more, and to-day, he has to find a connection once again with other men out of his free will. All that connects men, through folk, race and family, will be ever more completely severed; everything in man tends more and more to result in individual manhood.

Imagine that a number of human beings on the earth have come to recognise that they are all becoming more and more individual. Is there not a real danger that they will split away from each other ever more completely? Already nowadays men are no longer held together by spiritual ties. Each one has his own opinion, his own religion; indeed, many see it as an ideal state of affairs that each should have his own opinion. But that is all wrong. If men make their opinions more inward, then they come to a common opinion. It is a matter of inner experience, for example, that 3 times 3 makes 9, or that the three angles of a triangle make up 180 degrees. That is inner knowledge, and matters of inner knowledge need not be argued about. Of such a kind also are all spiritual truths. What is taught by Spiritual Science is discovered by man through his inner powers; along the inward path man will be led to absolute agreement and unity. There cannot be two opinions about a fact without one of them being wrong. The ideal lies in the greatest possible inwardness of knowledge; that leads to peace and to unity.

In the past, mankind became free of the group-soul. Through spiritual-scientific knowledge mankind is now for the first time in the position to discover, with the utmost certainty of purpose, what will unite mankind again. When men unite together in a higher wisdom, then out of higher worlds there descends a group-soul once more. What is willed by the Leaders of the spiritual-scientific Movement is that in it we should have a society in which hearts stream towards wisdom as the plants stream towards the sunlight. In that together we turn our hearts towards a higher wisdom, we give a dwelling-place to the group-soul; we form the dwelling-place, the environment, in which the group-soul can incarnate. Mankind will enrich earthly life by developing what enables spiritual beings to come down out of higher worlds.

This spirit-enlivened ideal was once placed before humanity in a most powerful way. It was when a number of men, all aglow with a common feeling of fervent love and devotion, were met together for a common deed: Then the sign was given, the sign that could show man with overwhelming power how in unity of soul he could provide a place for the incarnation of the common spirit. In this company of souls the same thing was living: in the flowing together, in the harmony of feeling they provided what was needed for the incarnation of a common spirit. That is expressed when it is said that the Holy Spirit, the group-soul, sank down as it were into incarnation. It is a symbol of what mankind should strive towards, how it should seek to become the dwelling-place for the Being who descends out of higher worlds.

The Easter event gave man the power to develop these experiences; the Whitsun event is the fruit of this power's unfolding. Through the flowing of souls together towards the common wisdom there will always result that which gives a living connection with the forces and beings of higher worlds, and with something which as yet has little significance for humanity, namely the Whitsun festival. When men come to know what the downcoming of the Holy Spirit in the future can mean for mankind, the Whitsun festival will once more become alive for them. Then it will be not only a memory of the event in Jerusalem; but there will arise for mankind the everlasting Whitsun festival, the festival of united soul-endeavour.

It will depend on men themselves what value and what result such ideals can have for mankind. When in this right way they strive towards wisdom, then will higher spirits unite themselves with men.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

We have passed by the basic ideas in the Platonic worldview. I call them basic ideas because they are actually the most important for understanding Platonic mysticism, namely the Platonic ideas of the eternity of the soul and the ideas of love. The one idea has been revealed to us through an examination of the Platonic discussion "Phaidon", the other through an examination of the "Banquet". We have seen that these two ideas, which perhaps play the greatest leading role in the spiritual development of mankind - the great goal of the eternity of the soul and the path of love - are also among the most important and fundamental ideas in Platonic mysticism.

This is also the point where we can best understand the influence of Platonism on Christianity, i.e. how Christianity developed under the influence of Plato. It would not be making the most necessary contribution to clarity if we did not, on the occasion of the consideration of the eternity of the soul and love, at the same time draw attention to how these two basic ideas have reappeared in Christianity. I will pass over the intermediate stages. They will become all the more understandable if we touch on the relationship between Platonism and Christianity. I have thought a lot about this. You will therefore forgive me if I have to address some of the more difficult questions.

I am of the opinion that the views and relationships that exist between Platonism and Christianity have not unjustly given rise to such a great literature, a literature that is centuries old, because through the shadowing, through the peculiar way in which the Platonic spirit has settled into the Occident through Christianity, one can see how the Occident is influenced by Platonism. It can only be understood - and it is only possible to show the true relationship between Platonism and Christianity - if one looks at its mystical elements and considers the core ideas of Christianity.

The liberal, theological approach still insists that the relationship between Platonism and Christianity should be presented according to a mystical method. And so we must be clear about the fact that we must seek out the actual core ideas of Christianity in their original meaning. Only in this way will we be able to understand where Platonism meets Christianity and thus understand what Plato presents to Christianity as a kind of world view. Only the theosophical-mystical direction has the possibility of really grasping the core. All exoteric methods do not have the possibility of grasping what had to come from ancient mysticism in order for Christianity to emerge.

But in order to show what has happened, I would like to show the characteristic features, illustrated by the consciousness of the builders, those who have contributed to its development. I would like to show how it presented itself to the souls of the first [church fathers and teachers]. Then the most important key point is that [Christianity] presents something fundamentally new compared to Platonism. This fundamentally new thing is nothing other than that Christianity is direct, real life, life as it presents itself before our eyes and ears. If you do not hold on to this core point, you will not be able to see what distinguishes it from the old religions and also from the mysteries and Platonism.

I would like to point out once again what is emphasized in Platonism and Christianity. It was the immediate life, that which the everyday person perceives directly, that Platonism was supposed to overcome; and on the other hand, it was that it rose to something higher, which cannot be perceived with the senses, into the eternal view. Plato's "Phaidon" wants nothing other than eternity of the soul. He does not want to prove the eternity of the soul. It is not about logical proofs. His aim is to bring to life that which gathers around Socrates and to bring it into a new world. The soul should rise by turning away from what can be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears. In short, eternity should be something that one acquires, that one acquires through the introduction to the mysteries. Plato's pupil says: "The soul can become immortal when it rises to the vision of eternity. When it sees the spiritual, it participates in spiritual life. This makes it eternal. This is a developmental process that we went through in the Platonic "Phaidon", and also a developmental process that we see in the "Banquet". We see that it was Diotima who lifted us up to the higher standpoint.

I drew attention to what Goethe said about his view of such eternal conversations. He says: "If I have inserted myself into the spiritual course of development of the universe, then I am entitled to have a place assigned to me by nature. We are not immortal in the same way. We must first acquire this right. We have to develop this first claim first.

This is the basic element that runs through Plato's "Phaedo". Plato says [in essence]: You can see what you want, but if you only perceive what your eyes, ears, the external senses give you, then you cannot enter the spiritual. The supersensible is what guarantees you the eternity of the soul. - He could not have soul eternity proven. The disciples should acquire it, they should become immortal. This is the basic conception of the Platonic method. - Logic can only link together perceptions that you already have.

And now let us look at what lived in the first centuries of Christianity. The experience of the senses was what was emphasized. The message of salvation was to consist in the fact that the Savior, the one who brought the right to eternity for man into the world, was visibly there. So it is the Savior who is perceived by the senses. - Here are a few passages that show that it is about becoming visible, about the Good News:

"We behold his glory. - He who has seen it testifies to it, and his testimony is true, and he is conscious of speaking the truth so that you may believe." [John 19:35]

We have not preached the presence of Jesus Christ to you in a sophisticated way, but as eyewitnesses. We have heard his voice. - I am not saying that this is to be understood symbolically, I am saying that this is to be understood literally, not symbolically. - What we have heard and touched, we tell you so that you may have the message with us.

It is essential that we are assured by Irenaeus that we can be assured of this by people who have known such people themselves. Irenaeus himself still knew people who were disciples of the apostles, and he says that they still had personal experiences. This is the sensual truth that lived in the consciousness of the first Christians. This sensual truth, which was there for the eyes to see and the ears to hear, lives on in the Church. This [truth] is there for all time. It is not only the temporal truth that took place at the time when Jesus lived, but it lives on as such. This is what we call Christian mystery.

The Lord's Supper is not just a symbol and must not be just a symbol if we do not want to end up with something completely watered down. Christ has appeared today - Christmas. We must take this as an eternal truth, that what has happened once can happen again and again. So it does not happen symbolically, but in such a way that it is really there in the present.

This mystical view existed in the first centuries when Christianity was formed. I would therefore like to agree with [Möhler] and consider it to be the only correct thing to say: viewed from one side, the Church is one in which the living Christ lives, whose personality is repeated and continues uninterruptedly. Not in the way of a deceased person. He does it in a sensual way. In baptism he always takes us into his fellowship. The Savior has been foretold. And for the apostles and the first Christian teachers, the word and sensory perception are valid. They relied on the Old Testament as well as on visual evidence.

We must be clear about the fact that they see an incomprehensible continuation of life. What has happened once must be there forever. This must be emphasized, just as the words of Augustine must be emphasized again and again, which show us that even at the time of Augustine, appearances compelled him to do so, for he says: I would not profess it if the sensually perceptible authority of the Church did not compel me to do so. This is what guarantees the truth of the message of salvation.

There are two aspects to this: firstly, being a naturalized eye and ear witness and secondly, the authority of the truly continuing church. Without this continued existence of the church, even Paul would not have felt comfortable believing in it. The church must be the embodiment of the mystery, it must be a mystical community, it must be added to the testimony of the apostles and apostles' disciples. It must be clear to us that these views became firmer and firmer in the first centuries, and that they also became firm in Augustine's worldview.

What I have now explained as the basic characteristic of Christianity in the first centuries is the necessity that the content cannot be proven, but only vouched for, that human thinking has nothing to do with this content, that it can at most be a point of reference for understanding this content. We have to keep that in mind. It is essentially linked to Christianity that it is based on certainty.

The mysteries also have nothing to do with logic, they are also based on experience. Plato was familiar with the mysteries. Anyone who wanted to become a Mystic had to personally submit to the required process. He had to take part in it personally and allow himself to be initiated. He had to ascend to the pinnacles of knowledge. They had to climb up personally. And so it was in the Platonic initiation.

In Christianity, something new was added: the substitution by a single personality living in history. It was something that antiquity had in mind as an exemplary type of commitment in a historical act by a single historical personality. Three things had to come together - and that is the important thing that had to happen in order for Christianity to come into being. It had to be there:

- firstly, what lived in the ancient mystery cults as an explanation of the world;
- secondly, the initiation process that everyone who wanted to be initiated had to undergo;
- thirdly, a transformation had to take place.

Let's take a closer look at what this transformation was like. Platonic mysticism has already shown us the beginnings. This [transformation] is that we are dealing with a - I may best say - first materialization of the eternal being, let us say with a materialization of God. And then again we are dealing with the ascending process of the development of the worldly into the divine. We have to do - now let us say - with the divine, in order to make the conception that comes into consideration clear - with the eternal, divine essence, and on the other side with the Logos that forms itself in matter, that develops, that transforms itself in the most manifold ways, with a sequence of stages in the development of the Logos. [We need only follow Philon of Alexandria], and we will find this sequence of stages of the Logos.

First, we have the Logos before us in its pure spiritual form. No human being can grasp it, although human individuality rests in it. According to [Philon], this spiritual entity is the primordial Logos. It is a [prototype] of what appears in the world as the divine world order. Whoever lives and works in the world and recognizes the world must - and this must be noted - consider on the one hand the descending line that goes from the spiritual to the material, and on the other hand the line that ascends and goes from the material to the spiritual. Only by standing in the middle can he understand why he is an individual. Only through this can he understand why he is a being appearing as a duality. By realizing that he can have hope of entering into the spiritual primordial being, but also by realizing that this being forms the world order itself.

Because the world itself is spiritualized, he becomes aware that he is dealing with a twofold Logos, with a Logos that cannot be reached and with a Logos that is poured out, with the Logos that has become flesh, with the Logos that has become material. The material world is an exact image of the divine world; but it is not the same as the original divine essence.

[Philon] distinguishes between these two entities. God is the Father of all things, the primordial Logos; and the Son of God, the children of God are the materialized Logos in the world. It is that which develops, transforms, strives upwards towards the primordial Logos. This upward striving in one form or another can be found in mysticism. We will see this in neoplatonic theosophy, which form mysticism can still take. Then we have the basic skeleton that underlies all mysticism. That is one element.

The other element is the initiation process; and here I must try to express myself particularly clearly, because - according to the experiences of others - they say things somewhat differently. I am compelled by my experiences to express myself somewhat differently. I will try to be as clear as I can. We have to understand what it was all about. I will only be able to prove this with a few glimpses, let's say, of the initiation process of the Egyptian schools. [Gap in the transcript]

We must be clear that man, by moving further along this path, is making a journey that leads back in the true sense of the word. Now I would like to draw your attention to this: Initiation is that which a person achieves when he walks back along his path, goes through it, when his consciousness is illuminated. Deeper and deeper truths can be revealed to people. And these are the initiations that man encounters on his path into his inner being. These initiations are the same as the Principia of the world. They are the fundamentals and the foundations of the world that come to development in the world. Let us call the principles of development in the world "Logos. If man can really progress on the path of initiation to the real principles of the world, then he will find within himself the same thing that he finds outside as a principle. Thus initiation was a real, actual process, something that man actually goes through. It is not of subjectively human significance, but of objectively divine significance. The path of knowledge is a way back, a reconnection of man with the original source of existence. What he finds in himself is what he rests with in the objective of the world, that is what leads man to deification, to divinization. The path of knowledge is the path of deification.

The second way is that which is based on principles, on the Logos. This is also a real process. It is a real process, not an allegory. The idea that it is a real process can only be obtained through spiritual experience. Think of the initiation process that every Myste had to go through, intertwined with the process of the creation of the world. And now, instead of understanding this as an exemplary process that every Myst had to go through, think of a unique historical process, think of a single initiate and think of him as the original initiate, as the representative initiate for all others, then you have the image of the "Christ as it developed in the first century of Christianity. The materialization, the incarnation of the divine Logos conceived as a one-time event, but in such a way that it is the real incarnation of the divine Logos, then you have the Christ-appearance.

Three things must therefore be distinguished:
1. the old doctrine of the origin of the world,
2. the initiation process and
3. the combination of these two things with a historical

conceived, individual act. This is the view that Theosophy has of the origin of Christianity, and this is the one against which, of course, not the slightest objection can be raised from the esoteric point of view, because the esotericist must regard precisely this way of looking at the truth as much deeper.

Here you have what lived in the consciousness of the old Christians. They claimed that which was presented to them as a process of development in the old schools and which then happened as a single act. And that made it necessary to make it dependent on appearance. The purpose of the initiation process is to raise the lower aspects of man, to divinize them, so that the Word becomes flesh in the individual, so that the individual struggles upwards, is sanctified upwards. This was demanded as something done.

So instead of continuing the mysteries of antiquity, Christianity had to bring a new mystery into the world. Spiritual survival is not merely an allegory, but a matter of faith, and the ecclesiastical principle of authority had to take its place. For Plato, the concept of love was central. He regarded it as a kind of demon. It is that which leads people from the lower levels to the higher levels of knowledge, which transforms people from the temporal to the eternal. Love is the mediator between the temporal and the eternal. But love is also the demonic agent that brings about the process of development in each individual human being, the passage from the temporal to the eternal. And to the extent that this love is not at work, to that extent the review of ideas, as Plato says, cannot take place.

What is achieved through this initiation process, which is described to us as the initiation process of ideas, is an introduction to the divine, to seeing. This can only be mediated through love, which is a guide for every personality. Platonic love is something else. It is not to be confused with what "Christian love is. What can be found in Christian writings is not to be put together with Platonic love. Just think that the path was there in the ancient mystical teaching. The path of the mystics was a personal one. It was such for an individual. Now we are dealing [in Christianity with a vicarious mystery] with a historical event that happened once. It is a question of what used to serve as the idea of the origin of the world becoming, as it were, the map according to which the path is traveled. This whole world, which Plato calls the world of ideas, was removed from the personal perspective, it was removed from personal observation. It was that which was guaranteed by historical tradition or ecclesiastical authority. But that which underlies the ancient mystery, the eternal truth of the incarnation of the Logos, was that which was moved beyond the human perspective. For the people of Platonic philosophy, this was called the way of love. This love, this Eros, took on a different, a new form. It now became a principle through which man could look up to something that was beyond human comprehension. Everything Plato said boiled down to this: knowledge was there to lead to where one could make perceptions; but this knowledge could not lead there [because the Eternal born in the midst of knowledge, in the midst of light - Brahma, so to speak - was not accessible to knowledge]. What had to take the place of love was not something that had an end, but something that offered a view, that led to remaining in the apparent, in the historical. At the same time, a path was closed which the old Myste wanted to reach, but which can no longer be traveled. This is why Christianity had to put forward a different idea for the "path of love". And that is "faith. Faith is that [which no human knowledge can achieve, it is that] which can only be revealed, which must be guaranteed by sight. The Christian can believe, but not strive for the content of the infinite. This is what took place at the beginning of Christianity, because these views were actually transformed, because in each individual the mystical initiation process was re-stamped as a unique historical event. The element of Hermes, the guide from the earthly to the divine, was also transformed into an abstract element that had only a subjective meaning. The way in which the Platonic conception and the mystery doctrine in particular still had to take on an earthly form in everything that presents itself to us as Christianity is something I would like to talk about next time.

Answer to the question:

The Christ has been completely eliminated. Two things are to be distinguished, the believers and the teacher who taught the doctrines of the ancient mysteries. The parables reveal a teacher of the Essaean community. He spoke to the people as it was appropriate for the people. Behind Jesus stands the actual teacher, as with Krishna, Ramah and so on. What Jesus taught is no different from what the Orient taught. But what Christianity has become is something else. What was demanded by the mystics is something else[: to believe in] a unique historical fact.

The content of the Christian dogmas of the first centuries is exactly the same as in the old mystery schools. The content of the mystery teachings is presented as a diabolical imitation of the divine word in order to be able to say that they teach something else after all.

Philon deepened the Platonic philosophy. Philon broke through the principle of strict isolation from the outside world. The external dissemination of doctrine through the parable was cultivated. The esoteric core disappeared, the exoteric shell remained. Paul deepened the exoteric nature of Christianity.

Dr. Steiner: Unfortunately, our main problem is that we must give up the Waldorf School ideal for the twelfth grade. We cannot base the twelfth-grade curriculum upon our principles. We simply have to admit that we must take all the subjects in other high schools into account during the final year. I am looking with some horror at the last semester, when we will have to ignore everything except the subjects required for the final examination. It’s inconceivable that we can work any other way if the students are to pass the final examination. This is really a problem. After thinking about it a long time, I do not think there is much to say about the curriculum for that class except those things we already considered, such as chemical technology and such.

The students are about eighteen, and at that age it is best if they attain an overall understanding of history and art. We should give them an understanding of the spirit of literature, art, and history without, of course, teaching them about anthroposophy. We must try to bring them the spirit in those subjects, not only in the content but also in the way we present them. With the students, we should at least try to achieve what I have striven for with the workers in Dornach, pictures that make it clear that, for instance, an island like Great Britain swims in the sea and is held fast by the forces of the stars. In actuality, such islands do not sit directly upon a foundation; they swim and are held fast from outside. In general, the cosmos creates islands and continents, their forms and locations. That is certainly the case with firm land. Such things are the result of the cosmos, of the stars. The Earth is a reflection of the cosmos, not something caused from within. However, we need to avoid such things. We cannot tell them to the students because they would then need to tell them to their professors in the examinations, and we would acquire a terrible name. Nevertheless, that is actually what we should achieve in geography.

In physics and chemistry, we should try to cover every principle that reveals the whole system of chemistry and physics as an organism, a unity, and not simply an aggregate as most people assume. With the twelfth grade, we have a kind of conclusion, and we must draw conclusions everywhere. We must give answers to the questions that arise, for instance, in mineralogy, where the five Platonic solids manifest. We should do that when we study minerals and crystals.

In art, we can only continue what we previously did in music, sculpture, and painting. That can never be concluded.

Unfortunately, we can do none of that. The only new thing we can do is one hour of chemical technology. Elsewhere, we will need to make sure that we simply bring the students far enough along that they can answer the questions on the final examination. This is terrible, but there is nothing we can do to avoid it. However, we should follow our curriculum as exactly as possible until the students are fourteen. As far as possible, I would ask you to consider up to that year all the things that have fallen by the way. We need to strictly carry out the curriculum until the students are fourteen.

I am telling you all this so that you will know how you would need to think were it possible to apply the principles of the Waldorf School with eighteen-year-old students. Eighteen-year-olds need to understand the various historical periods in a living way, particularly regarding the “getting younger” of humanity. That would have an important influence upon people. In the oldest periods of humanity, people could feel the development of their souls until the age of sixty. Following the Mystery of Golgotha, they could feel it only until the age of thirty-three, and today that is possible only until twenty-seven. Students need to comprehend this ongoing decrease before they begin their studies at an institution of higher learning. It is something that belongs in the general education in a Waldorf school and would have a tremendously beneficial effect upon the students’ souls.

The situation is as follows. When we look at the learning goals of the twelfth grade, we need to imagine that the students will continue at a college, and we also need to imagine that they have completed their general education. We can find our teaching goals in the following circumstances. Today, you can represent anthroposophy to the world such that people with sound human feeling can understand it. (Sound human understanding does not exist today.) They can understand it through feeling. Today, however, if those who have gone through a modern high-school education do not have a particular predisposition, it is impossible for them to comprehend certain anthroposophical truths. Today, they have hardly any possibility of understanding such things.

If you consider Kolisko’s chemistry, it is clear that it is unimaginable for modern chemists. You can teach students that kind of imaginative capacity until the age of eighteen or nineteen, that is, until the completion of the moon cycle, which then begins again. If people are to comprehend certain concepts, they must achieve a particular development during that period.

Compared to other people today, you are all a little crazy. You all have something that sets you apart from the current general development, something that is present to a greater or lesser extent in each of you. You have a certain kind of eccentricity. You are, in a certain way, not quite normal. Those who are normal, that is, “normal people,” cannot understand some things. Chemists with a normal education cannot understand Kolisko’s chemistry. They simply have no concepts for it. Our goal should be to make that understanding possible for our students. However, we cannot achieve that when we are forced to work toward ruining brains in exactly the same way that modern schools work toward that goal. Souls cannot be ruined. They undergo a self-correction before the next earthly life, although if things remain as they are today and continue into the next earthly life, humanity will degenerate. We cannot do these things. It is simply impossible. Even people like Herman Grimm could maintain themselves upon their islands only by brusquely brushing away certain concepts. People like him simply went past others, but they were the last who had such concepts. Those people, who were quite old during the 1890s, were the last who had them, and that possibility died with them.

It is particularly difficult with today’s youth. Today’s young people, as we have seen quite clearly in our anthroposophical youth movement, have a tendency to reject all ideas. They are not interested in ideas and, therefore, to the extent that they do not accept anthroposophy, become disorganized. Today’s young people are forced into a terrible tragedy, particularly if they are academically inclined and have gone through our college preparatory schools. We can achieve more for those students who go into practical life at the age of fourteen.

It is impossible, for example, to develop a spatial concept as I described it in the recent teachers’ course in Dornach, that is, the three dimensions, up-down, left-right, front-back. That is why it is so difficult to give people an understanding of anthroposophical truths. No one today is interested in things for which there should be broad public interest. I have said that everything connected with the will works three-dimensionally in the earthly realm. Everything connected with feeling is not three-dimensional, but two-dimensional, so that when you move from willing to feeling in your soul, you have to project the third dimension onto the plane in a direction that corresponds with front to back. We need to remember that we cannot simply—we can reduce it to the symmetry of the human being, but we cannot limit it to only that. This plane is two-dimensional everywhere—thinking then leads to one dimension and the I to zero dimensions. When we do that, the situation becomes quite clear. Now I ask you, how can such elementary things be presented in a lecture? There is simply no possibility of making that plausible to the modern public. No one is interested in it.

It would certainly be wonderful if, for example, in addition to the normal perspective of orthogonals, planes, and centers, people understood perspectives of three dimensions to two, from two dimensions to one, and then from one to the zero dimension. It would be wonderful if people could do that so that we could differentiate a point in many ways.

I am telling you all these things so that you can see how things need to be in the future and how we should form a school that would really educate people. Today, so-called educated people are really very undeveloped because today’s students are required to know many things in a certain way, but they really need to know them in a quite different way. I think we should try to do as much of that as possible in the lower grades, but in the upper grades, we must be untrue to our own principles, at least for the most part. We can only include one thing or another here and there. Even someone like J.W. can say to me that she would take the final examination if she thought she would pass. I told her that would be sensible only if she is certain she will pass. If she failed, it would not be good for the school.

The worst thing is that if we could convince the state to accept our reports, our students could very well follow a course of study at the university with what they would learn from our curriculum. Everything connected with the final examination, which causes such misery in modern school life, is absolutely unnecessary for studying at the university. Students could take up Kolisko’s chemistry as a subject. They would at first be surprised by chemical formulas, of course, but they could learn that later. It is much more important that they understand the inner processes of materials and the relationships between them. These are the things I wanted to say. I would like to discuss this whole question further. I would have completed the curriculum, but it has no meaning for the twelfth grade. We already know what we must do.

The students need to complete all the practical subjects insofar as possible. That is something you will feel after a time. So that the children have some sense of security, I would like to ask them about these subjects. I had the impression a while ago that the children thought the questions were unusual when you stated them poorly.

A teacher: Could we split the classes?

Dr. Steiner: We would need to have parallel classes from the age of fourteen, but we do not have enough teachers. The problem is financial. I would like to know how the finances are now. We should always keep that in mind.

There is some discussion about the financial situation.

Dr. Steiner: Well, the important thing is not that we have a financial report, but that we always have what we need in the bank. We can certainly continue, but we will have to do something. Otherwise, it will be impossible to do what needs to be done. For now, we cannot consider such a split.

At the college level, we cannot reach our goals for a very long time. The Cultural Committee might have done that, but they fell asleep after a few weeks. We might be able to achieve the things we want so much if we had the situation that existed in Austria for many private high schools. There many parochial high schools had the right to give and grade the final examinations, and technical schools could provide an accepted final report. I believe there are no such institutions in Germany. We would need a state official to be present, but the teachers would actually do the testing. A state official, while certainly causing many difficulties in our souls, in the end would have little effect on the grades if the final examination was held by our teachers.

A teacher: I believe we should speak to the students who will not be able to pass the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: That depends. People will say the faculty is at fault if more than a third of the class do not achieve the learning goals. If it is less than a third, the fault is thought to be the students’, but when a third or more do not achieve what they should, then it is seen as the faculty’s problem. You know that, don’t you?

In general, no one who has had good grades fails. The problem is, that is not taken into account. A further point is whether we could avoid using those really unpedagogical textbooks. The teacher could, of course, use them for preparation. Most of those texts are simply extracts from various scientific books. I have noticed that the questions come from such books and that there are readings from them, also. That can, however, cause many problems. We need to get away from using such references. We can use Lübsen’s books since they are quite educational, although the last editions have been somewhat ruined. His books are very pedagogical through all the editions before those made by his successor. Imagine for a moment the wonderful value of calculus in pedagogy. His analytical geometry is also pedagogically wonderful, at least the older edition, as well as his volumes on algebra and analysis. He has, for example, a collection of problems that are extraordinarily good because the methods required to solve them are very instructive.

A teacher: Should we throw out all the textbooks?

Dr. Steiner: For translation, they are not so bad. However, for German readings, you should not use normal textbooks. They are quite tasteless. Perhaps we should write down our lesson plans for the following teachers, so they could at least have some material for reading. There are so many people here who can type. Why can’t we prepare documents that people can read? The offices are filled with people, but I have no idea what they do.

A teacher: The students in the twelfth grade would like an additional hour of French.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to make everything possible. It is terrible that the twelfth-grade students will not receive an introduction to architecture. If everyone teaching languages helped, it might be possible.

An English teacher asks about prose readings for the twelfth grade, about Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, and about the English art and literature magazine The Athenaeum.

Dr. Steiner: The Athenaeum is edited very practically. You should not give it to the students, but instead use some individual essays. You could also use it in the eleventh grade. We do not have such well-edited magazines in Germany anymore. This is an old magazine, a humanistic magazine par excellence. There was a terrible German imitation called Literary News. Zarnck’s Literarisches Zentralblatt (Literary journal) was also a terrible imitation. It was a magazine for people who do not exist even in England.

A teacher: We have done enough of Tacitus and Horace. Should we take up Sallustius?

Dr. Steiner: Sallustius and Tacitus. I think the Germania would be enough. You could have them read a larger piece from that and then give them a test.

A teacher asks about music for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: A feeling for style, as such, an awareness of how Bach differs from others, is the main thing for the twelfth grade. At worst, you will have a problem at Christmastime if we see that we cannot continue all of the art instruction. Do not consider it an impossibility that we have to stop all art instruction at Christmas. Other people make fun of our things.

A teacher asks about religious instruction for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: You should go through religious history and give an overview of religious development. Begin with the ethnographic religions and then go on to folk religions and finally universal religions.

Begin with the ethnographic religions such as the Egyptian regional gods, where the religions are still quite dependent upon the various tribes. There are also regional gods throughout Greece. You need to do this in stages. At first, we have the religions that are fixed at a given location, the holy places. Then, during the period of wandering, the tent replaces the holy places, the religion becomes more mobile, and folk religions arise. Finally, we have universal religions, Buddhism and Christianity. We cannot call any other religions universal.

In the ninth grade, read the Gospel of Luke, which is a pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

A teacher asks about the Apocrypha.

Dr. Steiner: The children are not yet mature enough to go through the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha contains many things that are more correct than what is written in the Gospels. I have always extended the Gospels by what we can verify from the Apocrypha. Sometimes there are strong conflicts. When they take up the Gospels, the children must grasp them. It is difficult to explain the contradictions, so if they took up the Apocrypha nothing would make sense anymore. I would simply study the Gospels. A teacher asks about religion in the tenth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Following St. John’s Gospel, a number of paths are possible. You could do either the Gospel of St. Mark or Augustine, selecting some sections from the Confessions where he speaks more about religion.

A teacher asks if they should teach zoology and botany in the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Those subjects need to be included if our reports are to be officially recognized. We study zoology in the fifth grade, then the human being, then zoology again. If we did not have this problem of final examinations, I think it would be wonderful to present zoology to the children in the course of three weeks. That would be eighteen mornings to handle the twelve groups of animals. In the twelfth grade, we should limit zoology to categorization; the same is true of plants.

The students already know about skeletal structure, since you have already done anthropology. The most important thing is that they gain an overview about how we classify animals. You should begin with single-celled animals, then go through the worms. You will have twelve if you consider the vertebrates as one class. A teacher asks about how continents swim.

Dr. Steiner: Usually people do not think about how it looks if you move toward the center of the Earth. You would soon come to regions where it is very fluid, whether it is water or something else. Thus, according to our normal understanding, the continents swim. The question is, of course, why they don’t bump into one another, why they don’t move back and forth, and why they are always the same distance from one another, since the Earth is under all kinds of influences. Why don’t they bump into one another? For instance, why is a channel always the same width? We can find no explanation for that from within the Earth. That is something that comes from outside. All fixed land swims and the stars hold it in position. Otherwise, everything would break apart. The seas tend to be spherical.

A teacher asks for more details. Dr. Steiner takes a teacher’s notebook and draws the following sketch in it while giving an explanation.

Dr. Steiner: The contrast is interesting. The continents swim and do not sit upon anything. They are held in position upon the Earth by the constellations. When the constellations change, the continents change, also. The old tellurians and atlases properly included the constellations of the zodiac in relationship to the configuration of the Earth’s surface. The continents are held from the periphery; the higher realms hold the parts of the Earth. In contrast, the Earth holds the Moon dynamically, as if on a leash. The Moon goes along as if on a tether.

A teacher asks about drawing exercises for fourteen- and fifteenyear- olds.

Dr. Steiner: You should have the children paint the moods of nature. The continuation students in Dornach have done wonderful work in painting. I had them paint the difference between sunrise and sunset, and some of them have done that wonderfully. They should learn those differences and be able to paint them. Those are the kinds of things you could work with, for example, the mood of rain in the forest. In addition, they should learn the differences between painting and sculpting.

In the lower grades, take care, when things get out of hand and you cannot get through the material, that you do not rashly reach for a substitute and simply tell the children a story to keep them quiet.

I hope to be here again tomorrow morning.

Easter is felt by many to be associated on the one hand with the deepest feelings and sensibilities of the human soul, and on the other, with cosmic mysteries and enigmas. The connection with cosmic mysteries becomes clear when we consider that Easter is a so-called movable feast, the date of which is fixed each year with reference to a specific constellation in the heavens. We will have more to say about this in the lectures to come. As for Easter's connection with the human soul, if we examine the customs and rites that have become associated with it through the centuries, we cannot fail to observe the great significance with which a large part of mankind has come to invest this festival.

For Christianity, Easter was not important initially, but it became so during the first few centuries. It is linked to Christianity's basic tenet, the Resurrection of Christ, and to the fundamental impulse to become a Christian provided by that fact. Easter is therefore a celebration of the Resurrection, but as such it points back to times and festivals predating Christianity.

These earlier festivals centered around the spring equinox, an event which, though not identical with Easter, enters into the calculation of its date, and celebrated nature's reawakening in the new life burgeoning forth from the earth. And this leads us directly to the heart of our subject, which is the Easter festival as a stage in the evolution of the Mysteries.

For Christians Easter commemorates the Resurrection. The corresponding pagan festival in a sense celebrated the resurrection of nature, the reawakening of what, as nature, had been asleep throughout the winter. However, there the similarity ends. It must be emphasized that with regard to its inner meaning, the Christian Easter festival in no sense corresponds to the pagan equinox celebrations. Rather, a serious examination of ancient pagan times reveals that Easter, in the Christian sense, is related to festivals that grew out of the Mysteries and that were celebrated in the fall.

This most curious fact demonstrates what serious misunderstandings regarding matters of the highest importance have occurred in the course of humanity's development. In the early Christian centuries, nothing less happened than the confusion of Easter with a completely different festival, with the result that Easter was moved from fall to the spring.

With this we touch upon something of enormous importance in the development of humanity. Consider for a moment the essential content of Easter. First, the figure central to Christian consciousness, Christ Jesus, experiences death, as commemorated by Good Friday. He then remains in the grave for three days, symbolizing his union with earthly existence. Christians observe this interval, the one between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, as a period of mourning. Finally, on Easter Sunday, the central being of Christianity arises from the grave. In essence, then, Easter involves Christ's death, lying in the grave, and resurrection.

Let us now turn to one of the many forms of the corresponding pagan festival, for only in doing so can we grasp the relation of Easter to the Mysteries.

Among many ancient peoples we find celebrations whose rituals enact a content strongly resembling that of the Christian Easter festival. One of these was the festival of Adonis, which was observed by certain Near Eastern peoples over long spans of pre-Christian antiquity. At the center of this festival stood a likeness of the god Adonis, who represented all that manifests itself in human beings as vigorous youth and beauty.

The ancients in many respects undoubtedly confused the god's image with what is represented; hence their religions frequently bordered on fetishism. Many indeed took the image of Adonis to be the actually present god, the god of beauty and youthful strength, of an unfolding seminal power that reveals in splendorous outer existence all the inner nobility and grandeur of which humanity is capable.

To the accompaniment of songs and rites portraying humanity's deepest grief and sorrow, the god's likeness was immersed for a period of three days in the sea if the Mystery site was near the sea, in a lake if it was near a lake, or otherwise in an artificial pond that was dug nearby. For three days a profound and solemn silence took hold of the entire community. When after that time the idol was lifted from the water, the laments gave way to songs of joy and hymns to the resurrected god, the god who had come back to life.

This was an external ceremony, one that profoundly stirred the souls of a great number of people. Even as it did so, however, it hinted at what happened within the sacred Mysteries to every person aspiring to initiation.

In those times every candidate for initiation was led into a special chamber. It was dark and gloomy and its walls were black. The chamber contained nothing but a coffin or at least something like it. Laments and dirges were sung around this coffin by those who had led the neophyte into the chamber. The latter was treated as if he were about to die. His teachers made it clear to him that by being laid in the coffin he was to undergo the experience of death and of the three days following. The candidate was to achieve total inner clarity regarding those experiences.

On the third day, in a spot visible to the occupant of the coffin, a branch appeared, signifying life's renewal. The earlier laments gave way to hymns of joy, and the initiate arose from his grave with transformed consciousness. A new language, a new script were revealed to him, the language and script of the spiritual world. He was permitted to see, and did see, the world from the viewpoint of the spirit.

Compared with these procedures enacted deep within the Mysteries, the external, public rites were symbolic, resembling in their form the initiation ceremonies of the select few. At the proper time these rites, of which the Adonis festival may be taken as typical, were explained to their participants. The rites took place in the fall, and participants were instructed in somewhat the following way:

“Behold, autumn is now upon us; the earth loses its mantle of plants and leaves. All is withering. In place of the greening, burgeoning life that began to cover the earth in spring, snow will now come, or at least a desolating drought. Nature is dying. And as it dies all around you, you shall experience that part of yourself that is similar to nature. Human beings die as well. Each of us has his autumn. And although when life comes to an end it is fitting that the souls of those remaining should be filled with deep sorrow, it is not enough to meet death only when it actually happens. In order that you be confronted with death's full solemnity, that you be able to remind yourselves of death again and again, you are shown each fall the death of that divine being who stands for beauty, youth, and human grandeur. You see that he too goes the way of all nature. Yet, precisely when nature becomes barren and begins to die, you must remember something else. You must remember that although human beings pass through the portal of death, although in this earthly existence they experience only things that are like those that die in autumn, at death they are drawn away from the earth and live their way out into the vast cosmic ether, where for three days they feel their being expand until it encompasses the whole world. Then, while the eyes of those on earth are focused only on death's outer aspect, on what is transitory, in the spirit world the immortal human soul awakens after three days. Three days after death it arises, born anew for the spirit land.”

In a process of intense inner transformation, the candidate for initiation into the Mysteries actually experienced this dying and reawakening within his own soul. The profound shock inflicted upon people by this old method of initiation—we shall see that in our day completely different methods are necessary—awakened within them latent powers of spiritual vision. They knew henceforth that they stood not merely in the world of the senses, but in the spiritual world as well.

What the students of the Mysteries received as timely instruction might be summed up in the following words: “The Mystery ritual is an image of events in the spiritual world, of what occurs in the cosmos; the public rituals in turn are a likeness of the Mysteries.” No doubt was left in the students' minds that the Mysteries encompassed procedures representing what human beings experience in forms of existence other than the earthly, that is, in the vastness of the astral and spiritual cosmos.

Those who could not be admitted to the Mysteries because they were deemed not mature enough to receive directly the gift of spiritual vision were taught appropriate truths in the cultic rituals, which symbolized what occurred in the Mysteries. These rituals, such as the Adonis cult, that took place amid autumn's withering, when all of nature seemed to speak only of the transience of earthly things, of the inexorability of death and decay, served to instill in people the certainty, or at least the idea, that death as experienced by nature in the fall must also overtake human beings, overtake even the god Adonis, representative of all the beauty, youthfulness, and grandeur of the human soul. The god Adonis also dies. He disappears into the earthly representative of the cosmic ether, into water. But just as he is lifted out of it, so too is the human soul raised from the waters of the world, the cosmic ether, about three days after it has passed through the portal of death.

The secret of death itself was thus portrayed in the ancient Mysteries through the corresponding autumnal festivals. These festivals coincided in their first half with the withering and decay of nature, and in their second half with the opposite, namely, with the eternal essence of the human being. Humanity was to contemplate the dying of nature in order to recognize that human beings die as well, but that in accordance with their inner nature they arise anew in the spiritual world. The purpose of these ancient pagan Mystery festivals was thus to reveal the true meaning of death.

As humanity developed, the time came when a particular being, Christ Jesus, carried down into bodily nature the process of death and resurrection that the candidate for initiation had achieved in the Mysteries only on the level of the soul. People familiar with the ancient Mysteries can peer into them and perceive that neophytes were led through death to resurrection within their souls, that is, they awakened to a higher consciousness. It is important to note that their souls, not their bodies, died and that they did so in order to rise again on a higher level of consciousness.

What aspirants to initiation experienced only in their souls, Christ Jesus passed through in the body, that is, on a different level. Because Christ was not of the Earth, but rather a sun-being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, he could undergo on Golgotha in the entirety of his human nature what initiates had formerly experienced only their souls.

Those who still possessed intimate knowledge of the old Mystery initiation, from that time on to our own, understood the event at Golgotha most profoundly of all. They knew that for thousands of years people had gained knowledge of the spiritual world's secrets through the death and resurrection of their souls. During the process of initiation body and soul had been kept apart, the soul being led then through death to eternal life.

What a number of select people had thus undergone in their souls was experienced all the way into the body by the being who descended from the sun into Jesus of Nazareth at the time of his baptism in the Jordan. An initiation process repeated over many, many centuries became in this way a historical fact.

That was the essence of what people familiar with the Mysteries knew. They knew that because a sun-being had taken possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth what had formerly occurred for the neophyte only at the level of the soul and its experiences could now take place on the plane of the body as well. In spite of Christ's bodily death, in spite of his dissolution into the mortal earth, the Resurrection could be brought about because Christ ascended higher in soul and spirit than was possible for a candidate for initiation. The neophyte was incapable of bringing the body into such profoundly subsensible regions as Christ did, so that he could not rise as high in resurrection. Except for this difference in cosmic magnitude, however, it was the ancient initiation process that appeared in the historic deed on sacred Golgotha.

In the first Christian centuries very few people knew that a sun-being, a cosmic being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, or that the earth had actually been made fruitful by the coming of a being previously visible only in the sun for students of initiation. And for those who accepted it with genuine knowledge of the old Mysteries, Christianity consisted essentially in the fact that Christ, who could be reached in the old Mysteries by ascending through initiation to the sun, had descended into a mortal body. He had come down to earth, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

A mood of rejoicing, even of holy elation, filled the souls of those who understood something of this Mystery when it occurred. Living awareness then gradually gave way, through developments we shall discuss presently, to a festival in memory of this historical event on Golgotha.

While this memory was taking shape, awareness of Christ's identity as a sun-being grew dimmer and dimmer. Those familiar with the ancient Mysteries could not be mistaken about that identity. They knew that genuine initiates, by being made independent of the physical body and experiencing death in their souls, had ascended to the sphere of the sun and there found the Christ. From the Christ they received the impulse to resurrection. Having raised themselves up to him, they were cognizant of his true nature. From the events on Golgotha they knew that the being formerly accessible only in the sun had descended to mankind on earth.

Why? Because the old rite of initiation, through which neophytes had risen to Christ in the sun, could no longer be performed. Over time human nature had changed. Evolution had progressed in such a way as to make initiation by means of the old ritual impossible. Human beings on earth could no longer find Christ in the sun. For this reason he came down to enact a deed to which earthly humanity could now turn its gaze. This secret is among the holiest things of which we may speak here on earth.

What was the situation then for those living in the centuries immediately following the Mystery of Golgotha? If I were to draw it, I would have to sketch something like this:

In the old initiation center (red, at right), neophytes gazed up to the sun and through initiation became aware of the Christ. To find him they looked out into space, so to speak. In order to show later developments, I must here represent time in terms of the earth proceeding along a line from right to left—its subsequent positions from year to year represented by arcs beneath the line—even though the earth does not actually move this way through space. At the left, let us say, is the eighth century; the Mystery of Golgotha (cross, at center) had already taken place. Human beings, instead of seeking Christ in the sun from a Mystery temple, now look back toward the turning point of time, to the beginning of the Christian era. They look back in time (yellow arrow in figure) toward the Mystery of Golgotha, and there find Christ performing an earthly deed.

The significance of the Mystery of Golgotha was that it changed a previously spatial perception into perception through time. Furthermore, if we reflect upon what transpired in the Mysteries during initiation, remembering that initiation was an image of human death and resurrection, and then consider the form taken by the cult—the festival of Adonis, for example—which was itself a picture of the Mysteries, then these three things appear raised to the ultimate degree, unified and concentrated, in the historical deed on Golgotha.

The profoundly intimate rites of the Mystery sanctuaries now stood forth as an external, historical event. All humankind now had access to what was previously available only to initiates. No longer was it necessary to immerse an image in the sea and symbolically resurrect it. Instead human beings were to think of, to remember, what actually took place on Golgotha. The physical symbol, referring to a process experienced in space, was to be supplanted by the internal, immaterial thought, by the memory of the historical deed on Golgotha experienced within the soul.

A remarkable development began to take place during the centuries that followed. Human beings were less and less cognizant of spiritual realities, so that the substance of the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer gain a foothold in their souls. Evolution tended toward the development of a sense for material reality. Human beings could no longer grasp in their hearts that precisely where nature presents itself as ephemeral, as dying and desolate, the spirit's vitality can best be witnessed. The autumnal festival thus lost its meaning. It was no longer understood that the best time to appreciate the resurrection of the human spirit was when outer nature was dying, that is, during the fall.

Autumn simply became an unsuitable time for the festival of resurrection, for it could no longer turn people's minds to spiritual immortality by underscoring nature's transience. People began to depend upon material symbols, upon enduring elements of nature, for their understanding of immortal things. They focused upon the seed's germinating force, which, though buried in the fall, sprouts forth again in spring. People adopted material symbols for spiritual things because matter could no longer stimulate them to perceive the spirit in its reality. Human souls lacked the strength to receive autumn's revelation of the spirit's permanence in contrast to the impermanence of nature. Help from nature, in the form of an outwardly visible resurrection, was now necessary. People needed to see plants sprouting from the ground, the sun gaining strength, light and warmth increasing, in other words, a resurrection of nature, in order to celebrate the idea of resurrection itself.

But this meant that the immediate connection to the spirit present in the festival of Adonis, and potentially present in the Mystery of Golgotha, disappeared. An intense inner experience that was possible in ancient times at every human death gradually faded out. In those times people had known that although a departed soul's first experiences beyond the gate of death were indeed a matter for solemn reflection, after three days the living could rejoice, for they knew that then the departed soul arose out of earthly death into spiritual immortality.

Thus the power inherent in the festival of Adonis disappeared. It lay in humanity's nature that this power should at first arise with great intensity. Ancient peoples beheld the death of the god, the death of human beauty, grandeur, and youthful vigor. This god was immersed in the sea on a day of mourning. The mood was somber, for people were at first to develop a feeling for the ephemeral. This mood, however, was to yield in turn to a different one, to that evoked by the human soul's super-sensible resurrection after three days. When the god—or rather his likeness—was raised out of the water, rightly instructed believers saw in it an image of the human soul as it exists a few days after death. The fate of departed souls in the spiritual world was placed before them in the image of the risen god of beauty and youth.

Thus each year in the fall human minds were awakened to a direct contemplation of something deeply connected with human destiny. At that time it would have been deemed inappropriate to convey this by means of outer nature. Truths that could be experienced spiritually were represented in the cult's symbolic rituals. However, when the time came for the ancient, physical idol to be replaced with the inner experience of the unseen Mystery of Golgotha, a Mystery that embodied the same truth, humanity at first lacked the strength, for the spirit had retreated into deeply hidden regions of the human soul.

The need to look to nature for symbols of the spirit has continued into our own time. Nature, however, provides no complete image of our destiny in death; and while the idea of death has survived, that of resurrection has increasingly disappeared. Even though resurrection is spoken of as a tenet of faith, the fact of resurrection is not a living one for people of more recent times. It must, however, once more become so through anthroposophical insight that awakens a feeling for the true concept of resurrection.

If, therefore, as has been said on appropriate occasions, we as anthroposophists must cherish the Michael idea as a heralding thought, and must deepen our understanding of the Christmas idea, so too must our experience of the Easter idea be particularly festive. For it is anthroposophy's task to add to the thought of death that of resurrection, to become an inner celebration of the resurrection of the human soul, imbuing our philosophy with an Easter mood. Anthroposophy will be able to achieve this when people understand how the ancient Mystery concepts can live on in the true concept of Easter, and when once again a proper view prevails of the body, soul, and spirit of the human being and of the fates of these in the physical, soul, and divine-spiritual worlds.

Jean Paul's personality

[ 1 ] There are works of the mind that lead such an independent existence that one can devote oneself to them without thinking for a moment of their author. One can follow the Iliad, Hamlet and Othello, Iphigenia from beginning to end without being reminded of the personality of Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe. These works stand before the viewer like beings with a life all their own, like developed human beings that we accept for themselves without asking about their father. In them, not only the spirit of creation but also that of the creator is constantly before us. Agamemnon, Achilles, Othello, Iago, Iphigenia appear before us as individuals who act and speak for themselves. Jean Paul's characters, these Siebenkäs and Leibgeber, these Albano and Schoppe, Walt and Vult always have a companion who speaks with them, who looks over their shoulders. It is Jean Paul himself. The poet himself also speaks in Goethe's Faust. But he does so in a completely different way to Jean Paul. What has flowed from Goethe's nature into the figure of Faust has completely detached itself from the poet; it has become Faust's own being and the poet steps off the stage after he has placed his double on it. Jean Paul always remains standing next to his figures. When immersing ourselves in one of his works, our feelings, our thoughts always jump away from the work and towards the creator. Something similar is also the case with his satirical, philosophical and pedagogical writings. Today we are no longer able to look at a philosophical doctrine in isolation, without reference to its author. We look through the philosophical thoughts to the philosophical personalities. In the writings of Plato, Aristotle and Leibniz, we no longer remain within the logical web of thought. We look for the image of the philosopher. Behind the works we look for the human being struggling with the highest tasks and watch how he has come to terms with the mysteries and riddles of the world in his own way. But this idiosyncrasy has been fully expressed in the works. A personality speaks to us through the works. Jean Paul, on the other hand, always presents himself to us in two forms in his philosophical writings. We believe that he speaks to us from the book; but there is also a person next to us who tells us something that we can never guess from the book. And this second person always has something to say to us that never falls short of the significance of his creations.

[ 2 ] One may regard this peculiarity of Jean Paul's as a shortcoming of his nature. For those who are inclined to do so, I would like to counter Jean Paul's own words with some modification: Every nature is good as soon as it remains a solitary one and does not become a general one; for even the natures of a Homer, Plato, Goethe must not become general and unique and fill with their works "all the halls of books, from the old world down to the new, or we would starve and emaciate from oversaturation; as well as a human race, whose peoples and times consisted of nothing but pious Herrnhutters and Speners or Antonines or Lutherans, would at last present something of dull boredom and sluggish advancement."

[ 3 ] It is true: Jean Paul's idiosyncrasy never allowed him to create works that have the character of perfection through the unity and roundness of their form, through the natural, objective development of the characters and the plot, through the idealistic representation of his views. He never found the perfect stylistic form for his great spiritual content. But he penetrated the depths and abysses of the human soul and scaled the heights of thought like few others.

[ 4 ] Jean Paul was predisposed to a life of the greatest style. Nothing is inaccessible to his fine powers of observation, his high flight of thought. It is conceivable that he would have reached the pinnacle of mastery if he had studied the secrets of art forms like Goethe; or that he would have become one of the greatest philosophers of all time if he had developed his decisive ability to live in the realm of ideas to greater perfection. An unlimited urge for freedom in all his work prevents Jean Paul from submitting to any formal fetters. His bold imagination does not want to be determined in the continuation of a story by the art form it has created for itself at the beginning. Nor does it have the selflessness to suppress inflowing feelings and thoughts if they do not fit into the framework of the work to be created. Jean Paul appears as a sovereign ruler who plays freely with his imaginative creations, unconcerned about artistic principles, unconcerned about logical concerns. If the course of a narrative, a sequence of thoughts, flows on for a while, Jean Paul's creative genius always reclaims his freedom and leads the reader down side paths, occupying him with things that have nothing to do with the main thing, but only join it in the mind of the creator. At every moment, Jean Paul says what he wants to say, even if the objective course of events demands something completely different. Jean Paul's great style lies in this free play. But there is a difference between playing with complete mastery of the field in which one moves, or whether the whim of the player creates formations which give the impression to those who look at things according to their own laws that one part of the formation does not correspond to the other. With regard to the Greek works of art, Goethe bursts out with the words: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws according to which nature proceeds and which I am on the track of", and: "These high works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, which have been produced by men according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God." One would like to say of Jean Paul's creations: here nature has created an isolated area in which it shows that it can defy its own laws and still be great. Goethe seeks to achieve freedom of creation by incorporating the laws of nature into his own being. He wants to create as nature itself creates. Jean Paul wants to preserve his freedom by not paying attention to the laws of things and imagining the laws of his own personality into his world.

[ 5 ] If Jean Paul's nature were not very cozy, his free play with things and feelings would have a repulsive effect. But his interest in nature and people is no less than Goethe's and his love for all beings has no limits. And it is attractive to see how he immerses himself in things with his feelings, with his rapturous imagination, with his lofty flight of thought, without, however, seeing through the essence inherent in these things. essence itself. One would like to apply the saying "love is blind" to the sensuality with which Jean Paul describes nature and people.

[ 6 ] And it is not because Jean Paul plays too little, but because he is too serious. The 'dream that his imagination dreams of the world is so majestic that what the senses really perceive seems small and insignificant compared to it. This tempts him to embody the contradiction between his dreams and reality. Reality does not seem serious enough for him to waste his seriousness on it. He makes fun of the smallness of reality, but he never does so without feeling the bitterness of not being able to enjoy this reality more. Jean Paul's humor springs from this basic mood of his character. It allowed him to see things and characters that he would not have seen in a different mood. There is a way to rise above the contradictions of reality and to feel the great harmony of all world events. Goethe sought to rise to this height. Jean Paul lived more in the regions in which nature contradicts itself and becomes unfaithful in detail to what speaks from its whole as truth and naturalness. Appear therefore

[ 7 ] Jean Paul's creations, measured against the whole of nature, appear to be imaginary, arbitrary, one cannot say to them: "there is necessity, there is God"; to the individual, to the individual, his sensations appear to be quite true. He has not been able to describe the harmony of the whole, because he has never seen it in clear outline before his imagination; but he has dreamed of this harmony and wonderfully felt and described the contradiction of the individual with it. If his mind had been able to vividly shape the inner unity of all events, he would have become a pathetic poet. But since he only felt the contradictory, petty aspects of reality, he gave vent to them through humorous descriptions.

[ 8 ] Jean Paul does not ask: what is reality capable of? He doesn't even get to that. For this question is immediately drowned out by the other: how little this reality corresponds to the ideal. But ideals that are so unable to tolerate the marriage with harsh reality have something soft about them. They lack the strength to live fully and freshly. Those who are dominated by them become sentimental. And sentimentality is one of Jean Paul's character traits. If he is of the opinion that true love dies with the first kiss, or at least with the second, this is proof that his sentimental ideal of love was not created to win flesh and blood. It always retains something ethereal. Thus Jean Paul hovers between a shadowy ideal world, to which his rapturous longing is attached, and a reality that seems foolish and foolish in comparison with that ideal world. Thinking of himself, he says of humor: "Humor, as the inverted sublime, does not destroy the individual, but the finite through the contrast with the idea. For it there is no single folly, no fools, but only folly and a great world; unlike the common joker with his side-swipes, it does not single out individual folly, but humiliates the great, but unlike parody - in order to elevate the small, and elevates the small, but unlike irony - in order to set the great alongside it and thus destroy both, because before infinity everything is equal and nothing is equal." Jean Paul was unable to reconcile the contradictions of the world, which is why he was also helpless in the face of those in his own personality. He could not find the harmony of the forces of the soul that were at work in him. But these forces of the soul have such a powerful effect that one must say that Jean Paul's imperfection is greater than many a perfection of a lower order. Jean Paul's ability may lag behind his will, but this will appears so clearly before one's soul that one feels one is looking into unknown realms when one reads his writings.

Boyhood and grammar school

[ 9 ] Jean Paul spent his childhood, from the age of two to twelve, in Joditz an der Saale, not far from Hof. He was born in Wunsiedel on March 21, 1763 as the son of the tertius and organist Johann Christian Christoph Richter, who had married Sophia Rosina Kuhn, the daughter of the cloth maker Johann Paul Kuhn in Hof, on October 16, 1761. Our poet was given the name Johann Paul Friedrich at his baptism. He later formed his literary name Jean Paul by Frenching his first two first names. On i. August 1765, the parents moved to Joditz. The father was appointed pastor there. The family had grown in Wunsiedel with the addition of a son, Adam. Two girls, who died young, and two sons, Gottlieb and Heinrich, were added in Joditz. A last son, Samuel, was born later, when the family was already in Schwarzenbach. Jean Paul describes his childhood in a captivating way in his autobiography, which unfortunately only goes up to 1779. All the traits that later emerged in the man were already evident in the boy. The rapturous fantasy, which is directed towards an ideal realm and which values reality less than this realm, manifested itself at an early age in the form of a fear of ghosts that often tormented him. He slept with his father in a parlor of the Joditz rectory, separated from the rest of the family. The children had to go to bed at nine o'clock. But the hard-working father only came to Jean Paul in the parlor two hours later, after he had finished his night's reading. Those were two difficult hours for the boy. "I lay with my head under the comforter in the sweat of ghostly fear and saw in the darkness the weather light of the cloudy ghostly sky, and I felt as if man himself were being spun by ghostly caterpillars. So I suffered helplessly for two hours at night, until finally my father came up and, like a morning sun, chased away ghosts like dreams." The autobiographer gives an excellent interpretation of this peculiarity of his childhood. "Many a child full of physical fear nevertheless shows courage of mind, but merely for lack of imagination; another, however - like me - trembles before the invisible world, because imagination makes it visible and shapes it, and is easily frightened by the visible, because it never reaches the depths and dimensions of the invisible. Thus, even a quick physical danger -- for example, a running horse, a clap of thunder, a war, the noise of a fire -- only makes me calm and composed, because I fear only with my imagination, not with my senses." And the other side of Jean Paul's nature can also be seen in the boy; that loving devotion to the little things of reality. He had "always had a predilection for the domestic, for still life, for making spiritual nests. He is a domestic shellfish that pushes itself quite comfortably back into the narrowest coils of the shell and falls in love, only that each time it wants to have the snail shell wide open so that it can then raise its four tentacles not as far as four butterfly wings into the air, but ten times further up to the sky; at least with each tentacle to one of the four satellites of Jupiter." He calls this peculiarity of his a "foolish alliance between searching far and searching near - similar to binoculars, which double the proximity or the distance by merely turning around". The boy's attitude towards Christmas is particularly significant for Jean Paul's character. The joys that the near reality offered him could not fill his soul, however great the extent to which they materialized. "For when Paul stood before the tree of lights and the table of lights on Christmas morning and the new world full of splendor and gold and gifts lay uncovered before him and he found and received new things and new and rich things: so the first thing that arose in him was not a tear - namely of joy - but a sigh - namely about life - in a word, even to the boy the crossing or leap or flight from the surging, playful, immeasurable sea of the imagination to the limited and confining solid shore was characterized by a sigh for a greater, more beautiful land. But before this sigh was breathed and before the happy reality showed its powers, Paul felt out of gratitude that he must show himself in the highest degree joyful before his mother; - and this glow he accepted at once, and for a short time too, because immediately afterwards the dawning rays of reality extinguished and removed the moonlight of imagination." Not as a child, nor in later life, could Jean Paul find the bridge between the land of his longing, which his imagination presented to him in unlimited perfection, and the reality that he loved, but which never satisfied him because he could not see it as a whole, but only in detail, in the individual, in the imperfect.

[ 10 ] On behalf of his mother, Jean Paul often visited his grandparents in Hof. One summer's day on his way home, as he looked at the sunny, glistening mountain slopes and the drifting clouds at around two o'clock, he was overcome by an "objectless longing, which was a mixture of more pain and less pleasure and a desire without memory. Alas, it was the whole man who longed for the heavenly goods of life, which still lay unmarked and colorless in the deep darkness of the heart and which were fleetingly illuminated by the incident rays of the sun." This longing accompanied Jean Paul throughout his life; he was never granted the favor of seeing the objects of his longing in reality.

[ 11 ] There were times when Jean Paul wavered as to whether he was born to be a philosopher or a poet. In any case, there is a distinctly philosophical streak in his personality. Above all else, the philosopher needs to reflect on himself. The philosophical fruits ripen in the most intimate inner being of man. The philosopher must be able to withdraw to this. From here he must be able to find the connection to world events, to the secrets of existence. The young Jean Paul also shows a budding tendency towards self-reflection. He tells us: "I have never forgotten the phenomenon within me, which I have never told anyone about, where I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, of which I know exactly where and when. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing under the front door and looking to the left at the wood, when suddenly the inner face, I am an I, came before me like a flash of lightning from the sky, and remained shining ever since: then my I had seen itself for the first time and forever." All the peculiarities of Jean Paul's character and those of his creations are already to be found in the earliest traits of his nature. It would be wrong to look for the cause of the physiognomy of his spiritual personality in his growth out of the limited conditions of his upbringing. He himself considers it a happy coincidence that the poet spent his childhood not in a big city but in the village. This generalization is certainly daring. For Jean Paul, because of his individual nature, it was fortunate that he received his first impressions in the idyll of Jodice. For other natures, another is certainly the natural one. Jean Paul said: "Let no poet be born and educated in a capital, but where possible in a village, at most in a small town. The overabundance and overstimulation of a big city are for the excitable child's soul like eating dessert, drinking distilled water and bathing in mulled wine. Life exhausts itself in him in boyhood, and he now has nothing more to wish for than at most the smaller things, the villages. If I think of the most important thing for the poet, of love, he must see in the city, around the warm earthy belt of his parental friends and acquaintances, the larger cold turning and icy zones of unloved people, whom he encounters unknown to him and for whom he can kindle or warm himself as little as a ship's people sailing past another strange ship's people. But in the village they love the whole village, and no infant is buried there without everyone knowing its name and illness and sorrow; - and this glorious sympathy for everyone who looks like a human being, which therefore extends even to the stranger and the beggar, breeds a concentrated love of humanity and the right strength of heart."

[ 12 ] There was a real rage for knowledge in the boy Jean Paul. "All learning was my life, and I would have been happy to be taught like a prince by half a dozen teachers at once, but I hardly had the right one." Of course, the father who provided the elementary lessons was not the right man to satisfy this desire. Johann Christoph Christian Richter was an outstanding personality. He inspired his small parish, whose members were connected to him like a large family, with his sermons. He was an excellent musician and even a popular composer of sacred music. Benevolence towards everyone was one of his outstanding character traits. He did some of the work in his field and garden with his own hands. The lessons he gave his son consisted of letting him "merely learn by heart, sayings, catechism, Latin words and Langen's grammar". This was of little avail to the boy, who was thirsting for real spiritual nourishment. Even then, he sought to acquire on his own what was not available to him from outside. He created a box for himself in which he set up a "case library" "made entirely of his own little sedes, which he sewed together and cut out of the wide paper cuttings from his father's octave sermons".

[ 13 ] On January 9, 1776, Jean Paul moved to Schwarzenbach with his parents. His father was appointed pastor there by a patron, Baroness von Plotho. Jean Paul now went to a public school. The lessons there did not meet his intellectual needs any more than those of his father. The principal, Karl August Werner, taught the pupils to read in a way that lacked all thoroughness and immersion in the spirit of the writers. The chaplain Völkel, who gave him private lessons in geography and philosophy, provided a substitute for those in need of knowledge. Jean Paul received a great deal of inspiration from philosophy in particular. However, it was precisely this man to whom the young mind's firmly pronounced, rigid individuality came to the fore in a brusque manner. Völkel had promised to play a game of chess with him one day and then forgot about it. Jean Paul was so angry about this that he ignored his beloved philosophical lessons and never went to see his teacher again. At Easter 1779, Jean Paul came to Hof to attend grammar school. His entrance examination revealed an unusual maturity of mind. He was immediately placed in the middle section of the Prima. Soon afterwards, on April 135, his father died. Jean Paul had no real luck with his teachers in Hof either. Neither principal Kirsch nor deputy principal Remebaum, the primary school teachers, made any particular impression on Jean Paul. And once again he felt compelled to satisfy his mind on his own. Fortunately, his relationship with the enlightened Pastor Vogel in Rehau gave him the opportunity to do so. He placed his entire library at his disposal and Jean Paul was able to immerse himself in the works of Helvetius, Hippel, Goethe, Lavater and Lessing. He already felt the urge to assimilate what he had read and make it useful for his own life. He filled entire volumes with excerpts of what he had read. And a series of essays emerged from this reading. The grammar school pupil set about important things. What our concept of God is like; about the religions of the world; the comparison of the fool and the wise, the fool and the genius; about the value of studying philosophy at an early age; about the importance of inventing new truths: these were the tasks he set himself. And he already had a lot to say about these things. He was already dealing independently with the nature of God, with the questions of Christianity, with the spiritual progress of mankind. We encounter boldness and maturity of judgment in these works. He also ventured to write a poem, the novel "Abelard and Heloise". Here he appears in style and content as an imitator of Miller, the Sigwart poet. His longing for a perfect world that transcended all reality brought him into the path of this poet, for whom there were only tears on earth over broken hearts and dried up hopes and for whom happiness only lies beyond death. The motto of Jean Paul's novel already shows that he was seized by this mood: "The sensitive man is too good for this earth, where there are cold mockers - in that world only, which bears weeping angels, does he find reward for his tears."

[ 14 ] In Hof, Jean Paul already found what his heart needed most, participating friends: Christian Otto, the son of a wealthy merchant, who later became the confidant of his literary works; Johann Richard Hermann, the son of a toolmaker, a brilliant man full of energy and knowledge, who unfortunately succumbed to the efforts of a life rich in deprivation and hardship as early as 1790. Furthermore, Adolf Lorenz von Oerthel, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant from Töpen near Hof. In contrast to Hermann, the latter was a soft, sentimentalist full of sentimentality and enthusiasm. Hermann was realistically inclined and combined practical wisdom with a scientific sense. In these two characters, Jean Paul already encountered the types that he later embodied in his poems in manifold variations, as the idealistic Siebenkäs compared to the realistic Leibgeber; as Walt compared to Vult. On May 19, 1781, Jean Paul was enrolled as a student of theology in Leipzig.

University life

[ 15 ] Conflicting thoughts and feelings waged a fierce battle in Jean Paul's soul when he entered the classrooms of the high school. He had absorbed opinions and views through avid reading; but neither his artistic nor his philosophical imagination wanted to unfold in such a way that what he had absorbed from outside would have taken on a fixed, individual structure. The basic forces of his personality were strong but indeterminate; the energy was great, the creative power sluggish. The impressions he received aroused powerful feelings in him, drove him to make decisive value judgments; but they did not want to form themselves into vivid images and thoughts in his imagination.

[ 16 ] At university, Jean Paul only sought all-round stimulation. As the eldest son of a clergyman, it was part of the family tradition for him to study theology. If the intention of becoming a theologian ever played a role in his life, it did not last long. He wrote to his friend Vogel: "I have made it a rule in my studies to do only what is most pleasant to me, what I am least unskilled at and what I already find useful and consider useful. I have often deceived myself by following this rule, but I have never regretted this mistake. - To study what one does not love is to struggle with disgust, boredom and weariness in order to obtain a good that one does not desire; it is to waste one's powers, which one feels are made for something else, in vain on a thing where one can make no progress, and to withdraw them from the thing in which one would make progress." He lives at the university as a man of spiritual enjoyment who seeks only that which develops his dormant powers. He listens to lectures on St. John by Magister Weber, on the Acts of the Apostles by Morus; on logic, metaphysics and aesthetics by Platner, on morals by Wieland, on mathematics by Gehler; on Latin philology by Rogler. He also read Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Pope, Swift, Young, Cicero, Horace, Ovid and Seneca. The diary pages and studies in which he collects and processes what he has heard and read grow into thick volumes. He developed an almost superhuman capacity for work and a desire to work. He set down his views in essays that reflect his struggle for a free world view, independent of religious and scholarly prejudices.

[ 17 ] The insecurity of his mind, which prevented Jean Paul from finding his own way in the face of the contemplation and appropriation of the foreign, would probably have held him back for a long time from appearing before the public with his attempts at writing if the bitterest poverty had not driven him to the decision: "To write books in order to be able to buy books." Jean Paul did not have time to wait until the bitterness he felt as a Leipzig student about the deplorable state of life and culture had turned into a cheerful, superior sense of humor. Early mature works emerged, satires in which the grumbling, criticizing man and not the poet and philosopher speaks out of Jean Paul. Inspired by Erasmus' "Encomium moriae", he wrote his "Praise of Stupidity" in 1782, for which he was unable to find a publisher, and in the same year the "Greenland Trials", with which he first appeared in public in 1783. When one reads these writings, one has the feeling that here is a man who not only vents his resentment on what he encounters that is wrong, but who painstakingly collects all the weaknesses and dark sides, all the stupidities and foolishness, all the mendacity and cowardice of life in order to pursue them with his wit. The roots through which Jean Paul connected with reality were short and thin. Once he had gained a foothold somewhere, he could easily loosen it again and transplant his roots into other soil. His life was broad, but not deep. This is most evident in his relationship with women. He did not love with the full elemental force of his heart. His love was a game with the sensations of love. He did not love women. He loved love. In 1783 he had a love affair with a beautiful country girl, Sophie Ellrodt in Helmbrechts. One day he wrote to her that her love made him happy; he assured her that her kisses had satisfied the longing that his eyes had aroused in him. But he also writes soon afterwards that he only stayed a little longer in Hof because he wanted to be happy in this place for some time before he would be happy in Leipzig (cf. Paul Nerrlich, Jean Paul, p. 138 £.). As soon as he is in Leipzig, the whole love dream has faded. His later relationships with women were just as playful with the feelings of love, including those with his wife. His love had something ghostly about it; the addition of sensuality and passion had too little elective affinity to the ideal element of his love.

[ 18 ] The insecurity of the mind, the little connection of his being with the real conditions of life made Jean Paul a self-tormentor at times. He just flitted about reality; that is why he often had to go astray and reflect on his own personality. We read of a self-torture that went as far as asceticism in Jean Paul's devotional booklet, which he wrote in 1784. But even this asceticism has something playful about it. It remains stuck in ideal reverie. However profound the individual remarks he writes down about pain, virtue, glory-seeking, anger: one always has the impression that Jean Paul merely wanted to intoxicate himself with the beauty of his rules of life. It was refreshing for him to write down thoughts such as the following: "Hatred is not based on moral ugliness, but on your mood, sensitivity, health; but is it the other's fault that you are ill? ... The offending man, not the offending stone, annoys you; so think of every evil as the effect of a physical cause or as coming from the Creator, who also allowed this concatenation." Who can believe that he is serious about such thoughts, who almost at the same time wrote the "Greenland Trials", in which he wielded his scourge against writing, against clericalism, against ancestral pride in a way that does not betray the fact that he regards the wrongs of life as the effect of a physical cause?

[ 19 ] The bitterest need caused Jean Paul to leave Leipzig like a fugitive on October 27, 1784. He had to secretly evade his creditors. On November 16, he arrived in Hof with his mother, who was also completely impoverished.

Educator and years of travel

[ 20 ] Jean Paul spent two years in Hof surrounded by a housebound mother and the most oppressive family circumstances. Alongside the noisy bustle of his mother, the washing and scrubbing, the cooking and flattening, the whirring of the spinning wheel, he dreamed of his ideals. Only the New Year of 1787 brought partial redemption. He became a tutor to the younger brother of his friend Oerthel in Töpen near Hof. There was at least one person in Chamber Councillor Oerthel's house who was sympathetic to the idealistic dreamer, who had a slight tendency towards sentimentality. It was the woman of the house. Jean Paul remembered her with gratitude throughout his life. Her loving nature made up for some of the things that her husband's rigidity and roughness spoiled for Jean Paul. And even if the boy he had to educate caused the teacher many a worry due to his suspicious character, the latter seems to have clung to his pupil with a certain love, for he later said of the early departed that he had had the most beautiful heart and that the best seeds of virtue and knowledge lay in his head and heart. After two years, Jean Paul left Oerthel's house. We are not informed of the reasons for this departure. Necessity soon forced him to exchange the old schoolmaster's office for a new one. He moved to Schwarzenbach to give elementary lessons to the children of his old friends, the pastor Völkel, the district administrator Clöter and the commissioner Vogel.

[ 21 ] During his time in Hof and Töpen, Jean Paul's need for friendship bore the most beautiful fruit. If Jean Paul lacked the endurance of passion for devoted love, he was made for friendship that lived more in the spiritual element. His friendship with Oerthel and Hermann deepened during this time. And when they were taken from him by death in quick succession, in 1789 and 1790, he erected monuments to them in his soul, the sight of which spurred him on to ever new work throughout his life. The deep glimpses that Jean Paul was granted into the souls of his friends were a powerful stimulus for his poetic creativity. Jean Paul needed to lean on people who were attached to him with all their soul. The urge to transfer his feelings and ideas directly into another human soul was great. He could consider it fortunate that shortly after Oerthel and Hermann had passed away, another friend surrendered to him in loyal love. It was Christian Otto who, from 1790 until Jean Paul's death, lived through his intellectual life with selfless sympathy.

[ 22 ] Jean Paul himself describes how he spent the period from 1783 to 1790. "I enjoyed the most beautiful things in life, autumn, summer and spring with their landscapes on earth and in the sky, but I had nothing to eat or wear and remained anemic and little respected in Hof im Voigtlande." It was during this time that his "Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren nebst einem notwendigen Aviso vom Juden Mendel" was written. In this book, the creative satirist appears alongside the polemicist. The criticism has partly been transformed into narrative. People appear instead of the earlier abstract ideas. But what is still laboriously struggling for embodiment here emerges in a more perfect form in the three stories written in 1790: "Des Amtsvogts Freudel Klaglibell gegen seinen verfluchten Dämon"; "Des Rektors Fälbel und seiner Primaner Reise nach dem Fichtelberg" and in the "Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterleins Maria Wuz in Auenthal". In these three poems, Jean Paul succeeds in drawing characters in which humanity becomes caricature. Freudel, Fälbel and Wuz appear as if Jean Paul were looking at his ideal image of man in mirrors, which make all the features appear diminished and distorted. But in doing so, he creates afterimages of reality. Freudel depicts the t'ypus of man, who at moments when he needs the greatest seriousness and solemn dignity becomes ridiculous through the trickery of his absent-mindedness or chance. Another kind of human caricature, which judges the whole world from the narrowest perspective of its own profession, is characterized in Fälbel. A schoolmaster who believes that the great French social upheaval would have been impossible if the revolutionary heroes had commented on the old classics instead of reading the evil philosophers. The Auenthal schoolmaster Maria Wuz is a wonderful picture of stunted humanity. In his village idyll, he lives human life on a microscopic scale, but he is as happy and content as none of the greatest sages can be.

[ 23 ] It is difficult to decide whether Jean Paul was a good schoolmaster. If he was able to follow the principles he wrote in his diaries, then he certainly turned his pupils into what they were capable of becoming. But schoolmastering was certainly more fruitful for him than for his pupils. For he gained deep insights into young human nature, which led him to the great pedagogical ideas that he later developed in his "Levana". However, he would hardly have been able to endure the confines of the office for three years if he had not found in his visits to Hof a conductor that was entirely in keeping with his nature. He was a connoisseur of the intellectual pleasures that arise from relationships with talented and excitable people. In Hof, he was always surrounded by a crowd of young girls who swarmed around him and stimulated his imagination. He regarded them as his "erotic academy". He fell in love, as far as he could love, with each of the academy girls, and the intoxication of one love affair had not yet faded when another began.

[ 24 ] This mood gave rise to the two novels "The Invisible Lodge" and "Hesperus". Gustav, the main character of the "Invisible Lodge", is a nature like Wuz, who only outgrows Wuz's existence and is forced to allow his tender heart, which could be content in a narrowly defined circle, to be tortured by harsh reality. The contrast between ideal sensuality and what is really valid in life forms the basic motif of the novel. And this motif becomes Jean Paul's great problem in life. It appears in ever new forms in his creations. In "The Invisible Lodge", the ideal sensuality has the character of a deep emotionalism that tends towards sentimentalism; in "Hesperus" it takes on a more rational form. The protagonist, Viktor, no longer merely raves with his heart like Gustav, but also with his mind and reason. Viktor actively intervenes in the circumstances of life, while Gustav passively allows them to affect him. The feeling that runs through both novels is this: the world is not made for good and great people. They have to retreat to an ideal island within themselves and lead an existence outside and above the world in order to make do with its wretchedness. The great man with a noble nature, a brilliant mind and an energetic will, who weeps or laughs at the world, but never draws a sense of satisfaction from it, is one of the extremes between which all Jean Paul's characters are to be placed. The other is the small, narrow-minded person with a subaltern attitude, who is content with the world because his empty mind does not conjure up dreams of a greater one. The figure of Quintus Fixlein in the 1794 story "Life of Quintus Fixlein drawn from fifteen boxes of notes" approaches the latter extreme; the following poem "Jean Paul's biographical amusements under the brainpan of a giantess", written in the same year, approaches the former. Fixlein is happy with modest plans for the future and the most petty scholarly work; Lismore, the main character of the "Amusements", suffers from the disharmony of his energetic will and weaker ability and from the other between his idealistically lofty ideas of human nature and those of his fellow human beings. The struggle that arises when a strong will that transcends the boundaries of reality and a human attitude that grows out of the limited conditions of a petty existence collide was depicted by Jean Paul in the book "Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs im Reichsmarktflecken Kuhschnappel" (Pieces of Flowers, Fruit and Thorns or the Marriage, Death and Wedding of the Poor Lawyer F. St. Siebenkäs in the Imperial Market Town of Kuhschnappel), published at Easter 1795. There are two people here who, because of their higher nature, do not know how to come to terms with the world. One, Siebenkäs, believes in a higher existence and suffers from the fact that this cannot be found in the world; the other, Leibgeber, sees through the nothingness of the world, but does not believe in the possibility of any kind of better. He is a humorist who thinks nothing of life and laughs at reality; but at the same time he is a cynic who cares nothing for higher things and considers all idealistic dreams to be bubbles of foam that rise from the muck of vulgarity as a haze to the scorn of humanity. Siebenkäs suffers at the hands of his wife Lenette, in whom philistine, narrow-minded reality is embodied; and Leibgeber suffers from his faithlessness and hopelessness. But he always rises above it with humor. He demands nothing extraordinary from life; that is why his disappointments are not great and why he does not consider it necessary to make higher demands of himself.

[ 25 ] Even before finishing "Hesperus", Jean Paul had swapped his teaching and educational work in Schwarzenbach for one in Hof. In the summer of 1796, he undertook a trip to Weimar. Like the heroes of his novels in the midst of a reality that did not satisfy them, Jean Paul felt at home in the city of muses. In his opinion, everything that reality could contain in terms of grandeur and sublimity should have been crowded together in this small town. He had hoped to meet giants and titans of spirit and imagination, as he had imagined them in his dreams to the point of superhumanity. And he did find geniuses, but only human beings. He was not attracted to either Goethe or Schiller. Both had already made their peace with the world at that time; both had realized the great world harmony that allows man to make peace with reality after a long struggle. Jean Paul was not allowed to find this peace. His soul was made for the lust of the struggle between ideal and reality. Goethe seemed to him stiff, cold, proud, frozen against all men; Schiller rock-faced and hard, so that foreign enthusiasm bounced off him. Only with Herder did a beautiful bond of friendship develop. The theologian, who sought salvation beyond the real world, could be a comrade to Jean Paul, but not the worldlings Goethe and Schiller, the idolizers of the real. Jean Paul felt the same way about Jacobi, the philosophical fisherman in the murky waters, as he did about Herder. Understanding and reason penetrate reality and illuminate it with the light of the idea; feeling clings to the dark, the unrecognizable, to the world of faith. And Jacobi reveled in the world of faith, as did Jean Paul. This trait of his spirit won him the hearts of women. Karoline Herder raved about the poet of sentimentality, and Charlotte von Kalb admired in him the ideal of a man.

[ 26 ] After his return from Weimar, Jean Paul's poetry lost itself completely in the vagueness of emotional indulgence and in an unworldly way of thinking and attitude in "Jubelsenior" and "Kampanerthal oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele" (1797). If the journey to Weimar had not strengthened his eyes for an unbiased contemplation of life, the varied wanderings that lasted from 1797 to 1804 did even less. He now lived successively in Leipzig, Weimar, Berlin, Meiningen and Koburg. Everywhere he established relationships with people, especially with women; everywhere he was welcomed with open arms. People were intoxicated by his ideas, which flowed from the depths of the emotional world. But the attraction they exerted on him soon wore off. He wrapped thick tentacles around the people he got to know, but soon drew these arms in again. In Weimar, Jean Paul spent happy days in the company of Frau von Kalb, Duchess Amalia, Knebel, Böttiger and others; in Hildburghausen, he carried his love game so far that he became engaged to Caroline von Feuchtersleben, only to part with her again soon afterwards. From Berlin he fetched the woman who really became his wife, Karoline, the second daughter of the senior tribunal councillor Maier. He entered into a marriage with her, which initially lifted him to the highest heights of happiness that a man can climb, and from which all happiness then disappeared to such an extent that Jean Paul only held on to her out of duty and Karoline endured it with submission and self-emptying. On her union with Jean Paul, this woman wrote to her father: "I never thought I would be as happy as I am. It will sound strange to you when I tell you that the high enthusiasm which carried me away when I met Richter, but which subsequently faded away as I descended into a more real life, is revived anew every day." And in July 1820, she confessed that she no longer had any right to his heart, that she felt poor and miserable in comparison to him.

[ 27 ] In Meiningen and Koburg, Jean Paul was able to get to know the peaks from which the world is ruled. The dukes in both places were on the most friendly terms with him. He was not to be missed at any court festival. Anyone seeking intellectual entertainment and stimulation joined him.

[ 28 ] Jean Paul's two most important poems, "Titan" and "Flegeljahre", were written during his years of wandering. His poetic power appears heightened, his imagination works in sharper outlines in these works. The characters are similar to those we encounter in his earlier works, but the artist has gained greater confidence in drawing and more vivid colors. He has also descended from depicting the outside of people into the depths of their souls. While Siebenkäs, Wuz and Fälbel appear like silhouettes, the Albano and Schoppe of the "Titan", the Walt and Vult of the "Flegeljahre" appear as perfectly painted figures. Albano is the man of strong will. He wants great things without asking where the strength to achieve them will come from. He has an addiction to breaking all the shackles of humanity. Unfortunately, it is precisely this humanity that is confined within narrow limits. A soft heart, an over-sensitive sensibility blunt the power of his imagination. He is unable to truly love either the rapturous Liana, with her fine nerves and boundless selflessness, or the ingenious, free-spirited Linda. He cannot love at all because his ideals make him demand more from love than it can offer. Linda wants devotion and nothing but devotion from Albano; but he thinks that he must first win her love through great deeds, through participation in the great war of freedom. He first wants to acquire what he could easily have. Reality in itself is nothing to him; only when he can combine an ideal with it does it become something to him. In view of the great works of art in Rome, it is not the secrets of art that open up to him, but his thirst for action awakens. "How in Rome a person can only enjoy and melt softly in the fire of art, instead of being ashamed and struggling for strength and action," he does not understand. But in the end this 'thirst for action only finds nourishment in the fact that it turns out that Albano is a prince's son and that the throne is his by inheritance. And his need for love is satisfied by the narrow-minded Idoine, who is devoid of any higher impetus. Opposite Albano is Schoppe, who is a body giver in a heightened form. He gives no thought to the nothingness of the world, for he knows that it cannot be otherwise. Life seems worthless to him; nothing has value for him but personal freedom and boundless independence. Only one struggle could have value for him, that for the unconditional freedom of the individual. He derides all other activities. Nothing frightens him more than his own ego. Everything else does not seem worth thinking about to him, not worth enthusiasm and not worth hatred; but he fears his ego. It is the only great mystery that haunts him. In the end, it drives him mad because it haunts him as a single being in the midst of an eerie void.

[ 29 ] Something of this fear of the ego lived in Jean Paul himself. It was an uncanny thought for him to descend into the depths of the mind and see how the human ego is at work to produce all that springs forth from the personality. That is why he hated the philosopher who had shown this ego in its nakedness, Fichte. He mocked him in his "Clavis Fichtiana seu Leibgeberiana" (1801).

[ 30 ] And Jean Paul had reason to shy away from looking into his innermost self. For in it, two egos engaged in a dialog that sometimes drove him to despair. There was the ego with the golden dreams of a higher world order, which mourned over the mean reality and consumed itself in sentimental devotion to an indefinite beyond; and there was the second ego, which mocked the first for its rapture, knowing full well that the indefinite ideal world could never be reached by any reality. The first ego lifted Jean Paul above reality into the world of his ideals; the second was his practical advisor, reminding him again and again that he who wants to live must come to terms with the conditions of life. He divided these two natures in his own personality between two people, the twin brothers Walt and Vult, and portrayed their mutual relationship in the "Flegeljahre". How little Jean Paul's idealism is rooted in reality is best shown in the introduction to the novel. It is not the concatenations of life that are supposed to make the enthusiast Walt a useful person for reality, but the arbitrariness of an eccentric who has bequeathed his entire fortune to the imaginative youth, but on condition that various practical obligations are imposed on him. Any failure to fulfill these practical obligations immediately results in the loss of part of the inheritance. Walt is only able to find his way through life's tasks with the help of his brother Vult. Vult attacks everything he starts with rough hands and a strong sense of reality. The two brothers' natures first complement each other for a while in a beautifully harmonious endeavor, only to separate later on. This conclusion again points to Jean Paul's own nature. Only temporarily did his two natures create a harmonious whole; time and again he suffered from their divergence, from their irreconcilable opposition.

[ 31 ] Never again did Jean Paul succeed in expressing with such perfection what moved him most deeply in poetry as in the "Flegeljahre". In 1803, he began to record the philosophical thoughts he had formed about art over the course of his life. This gave rise to his "Preliminary School of Aesthetics". These thoughts are bold and shed a bright light on the nature of art and artistic creation. They are the intuitions of a man who had experienced all the secrets of this creation in his own production. What the enjoyer draws from the work of art, what the creator puts into it: it is said here with infinite beauty. The psychology of humor is revealed in the most profound way: the hovering of the humorist in the spheres of the sublime, his laughter at reality, which has so little of this sublime, and the seriousness of this laughter, which only does not weep at the imperfections of life because it stems from human greatness.

[ 32 ] Jean Paul's ideas on education, which he set down in his "Levana" (1806), are no less significant. His sense of the ideal benefits this work more than any other. Only the educator really deserves to be an idealist. He is all the more fruitful the more he believes in the unknown in human nature. Every pupil should be a riddle for the educator to solve. The real, the educated should only serve him to discover the possible, the yet-to-be-formed. What we often feel to be a shortcoming in Jean Paul the poet, that he does not succeed in finding harmony between what he wants with his characters and what they really are: in Jean Paul, the teacher of the art of education, this is a great trait. And the sense for human weaknesses, which made him a satirist and humorist, enabled him to give the educator significant hints to counteract these weaknesses.

Bayreuth

[ 33 ] In 1804, Jean Paul moved to Bayreuth to make this town his permanent residence until the end of his life. He felt happy again to see the mountains of his homeland around him and to pursue his poetic dreams in quiet, small circumstances. He no longer created anything as perfect as the "Titan", the "Flegeljahre", the "Vorschule" and the "Levana", although his 'urge to be active took on a feverish character. Upsets about contemporary events, about the miserable state of the German Reich, an inner nervous restlessness that drove him to travel again and again, interrupted the regular course of his life. Half an hour away from Bayreuth, he had made himself a quiet home for a while in the house of Mrs. Rollwenzel, who cared for him like a mother and had made him famous. He needed the change of location in order to be able to create. While it was initially enough for him to leave his family home for hours every day and make the "Rollwenzelei" the scene of his work, this also changed later on. He traveled to various places: Erlangen (1811), Nuremberg (1812), Regensburg (1816), Heidelberg (1817), Frankfurt (1818), Stuttgart, Löbichau (1819), Munich (1820). In Nuremberg he had the pleasure of getting to know his beloved Jacobi, with whom he had previously only written, in person. In Heidelberg, his genius was celebrated by young and old alike. In Stuttgart, he became close to Duke Wilhelm von Württemberg and his talented wife. In Löbichau, he spent the most beautiful days in the house of Duchess Dorothea of Courland. He was surrounded by a society of exquisite women, so that he felt as if he were on a romantic island.

[ 34 ] The fascinating influence that Jean Paul exerted on women, which was evident in Karoline Herder and Charlotte von Kalb and many others, led to a tragedy in 1813. Maria Lux, the daughter of a republican from Mainz who had played a role in the Charlotte Corday catastrophe, fell passionately in love with Jean Paul's writings, which soon turned into an ardent love for the poet she did not know personally. The unhappy girl was dismayed when she saw that her feeling of admiration for the genius was turning more and more stormily into a passionate affection for the man, and gave herself up to death. Sophie Paulus' affection in Heidelberg made a deeply moving impression, if not an equally shattering one. In constant vacillation between moods of fiery love and admirable renunciation and self-control, this girl consumes herself until, at the age of twenty-five and unsure of herself, she offers her hand to the old A. W. Schlegel in a union that is soon shattered by the conflicting natures.

[ 35 ] The cheerful superiority that enabled him to create humorous images of life left Jean Paul completely in Bayreuth. What he still produces has a more serious tone. He is still unable to create characters who lead an existence appropriate to the ideal human nature he has in mind, but he does create characters who have made their peace with reality. Self-satisfied characters are Katzenberger in "Katzenbergers Badereise" (1808) and Fibel in "Leben Fibels" (1811). Fibel is happy, despite the fact that he only manages to write a modest book, and Katzenberger is happy in his study of abortions. Both are distorted images of humanity, but there is no reason to mock them, nor, as with Wuz, to look at their limited happiness with emotion. Schmelzle's "Des Feldprediger Schmelzles Reise nach Flätz", which was written before them (1807), differs from them. Fibel and Katzenberger are content in their indifferent, meaningless existence; Schmelzle is a discontented hare's foot who is afraid of imaginary dangers. But even in this poem there is nothing more of Jean Paul's great problem, of the clash between the ideal, fantastic dream world and actual reality. Nor is there any sense of a struggle between the two worlds in Jean Paul's last great poem, the "Comet", on which he worked for many years (1815 to 1820). Nikolaus Marggraf wants to make the world happy. His plans are indeed fantastic. But he never felt that they were just a dream. He believes in himself and his ideals and is happy in this belief. Essays written with reference to the political situation in Germany and those in which Jean Paul discusses general questions of science and life were written between the larger works. Some of them are collected in "Herbstblumine" (1810, 1815, 1820) and in his "Museum" (1812). The poet appears as a patriot in his "Freiheitsbüchlein" (1805), in the "Friedenspredigt" (1808) and in the "Dämmerungen für Deutschland" (1809).

[ 36 ] During his time in Bayreuth, Jean Paul's humorous mood increasingly gave way to one that took the world and people as they were, even though he only saw imperfections and small things everywhere. He is disgruntled about reality, but he bears the disgruntlement.

[ 37 ] The great humorist was not granted a cheerful old age. Three years before his end, he had to watch his son Max die, with whom he laid to rest a wealth of hopes for the future and most of his personal happiness. An eye ailment that afflicted the poet worsened in his last years until he became completely blind. The old man, who could no longer see the outside world, now immersed himself completely within himself. He now lived the life he thought no longer belonged to this world, even before death, and from the treasure trove of these inner experiences he drew the thoughts for his "Selina" or "On the Immortality of the Soul", in which he speaks like a transfigured person and believes he really sees what he has dreamed of all his life. Jean Paul died on November 14, 1825. "Selina" was not published until after his death.

Today I would have liked to be able to lecture on a theme going beyond the events of the moment, and I hope that will be fully the case with tomorrow's lecture, which will begin at seven o'clock. For today, however, I still feel the need to say a few things that relate not only to the letter I had to read yesterday, but also to the very gracious letter from the members that Mr. Bauer has just delivered to me and to still another letter I have received. This is especially necessary now that the things discussed in these letters have come to pass. What I have to say will relate to the matter at hand only to the extent that this particular case can show us all kinds of things we need to know about the relationship of the details of what is going on among and around us to our spiritual movement with its teachings, for in discussing specific occurrences, it is often possible to discover something of universal importance.

I will start from the fact—speaking more or less aphoristically—that I read you a letter yesterday that was signed by two members of the Society and mentioned a third member of long standing.

I believe I will not be committing an indiscretion in telling you about a letter that Mr. Bauer showed me just fifteen minutes ago, a letter written by a Society member who is a physician.¹ The writer is quite rightly of the opinion, as I myself was yesterday, not only after but during the reading of Mr. Goesch's letter, that we are not dealing with anything logical but with something that has to be considered from the point of view of pathology.

Obviously, this is one of the many assumptions we can make in this instance, but in my opinion—and this is simply my personal opinion and should not be considered binding on anyone else—this assumption would be incomplete if we do not also ask whether we are allowed to tolerate the fact that our Society and our entire movement are constantly being endangered by all kinds of pathological cases. Are we to tolerate psychopaths who are destroying our spiritual-scientific activity? Yes, to the extent that we can have compassion for them. However, if we tolerate them without fully taking their pathological nature into account, we allow them to constantly endanger everything that is most precious and most important to us. Of course, we need to be clear that we are dealing with psychopaths, but we must also be clear about what we have to do so that our cause is not jeopardized. Even things we recognize as being caused by illness have to be dealt with appropriately in real life. Of course, how this applies to the personalities in question is a totally separate issue.

As you have seen from many things we have had to discuss over the course of time, there is a certain recurrent experience that is unavoidable in a spiritual movement such as ours: Personal interests and personal vanity inevitably get mixed up with our purely objective aspirations. This need not even be taken as a reproach, strictly speaking; after all, we are all human. But it does need to be mentioned, and I am simply stating my personal opinion on the subject; of course, you are not bound by my opinion. When people are willing to admit that they are subject to vanity in certain areas and that for the time being (perhaps for reasons having to do with their upbringing and so on) they have no particular interest in getting rid of that vanity, that is a much lesser evil than wanting to be absolutely perfect at any given moment. The greatest evil, so it seems, is when people want to believe in their own perfection in every instance, when they want to believe that they are doing whatever they are doing for totally selfless reasons, and so forth.

The greatest temptation faced by any spiritual movement such as ours is the very pronounced vanity that comes into play simply because such movements must necessarily have great and noble aims that can be realized only gradually, and not all of us can immediately broaden our interests to include the objective requirements of our cause. It is understandable enough that when some people first hear about reincarnation, they take an immediate personal interest in finding out about their own previous incarnations for reasons of personal vanity. Looking into history for this reason is the worst possible way to investigate previous incarnations, but that is what most people do out of personal vanity. Thus, instead of being an inner path of meditation, historical events or the Old and New Testaments become a treasure trove for the gratification of personal vanity. Simply put, it is nothing more than that. And it is good to be aware that looking for one's own incarnations in history or in the Bible is basically nothing more than personal vanity.

It is understandable that this kind of vanity should come into play. The trouble starts, however, when vanity is not recognized as such, and when instead of examining their deep-seated ambitious motives calmly, people shroud them in a mantle of occultism or let them merge into some nebulous mysticism.

Concerning certain things that prevail with some justification outside the confines of a spiritual movement, the movement must make a point of approaching them from the perspective of a much more elevated morality than is the norm. However, we must never disregard the possibility that a lot of what we consider higher morality may be nothing of the sort, but simply an outlet for our own drives and instincts. From the kinds of discussions we have been through before, you can see how people can have perfectly legitimate human instincts and drives, but let them get mixed up with all sorts of occult embellishments. They may even console themselves for the existence of these drives and instincts with all sorts of deceptively rational explanations. It would be much better if they would simply admit these drives exist and apply their esoteric schooling to understanding them.

I read Mr. Goesch's letter to you; you all heard it and followed what was going on. What I am going to say about it today is simply my personal, non-binding opinion. Among other things, it was stated in this letter: "I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style… in the ideal form I had envisioned.”

We all know that Miss Sprengel is the keeper of the seal and that Mr. Goesch is the one who wrote the letter. I think if any French-speaking people were to read this letter and apply the old French proverb “cherchez la femme,” they would be quite right, in spite of the fact that “keeper of the seal” is a masculine noun in German. In fact, if you apply the principle of “cherchez la femme,” much of what is talked about in this letter becomes more understandable.

I still need to express my own personal opinion about some of the details in this letter. For instance, in this letter it is suggested that it is impossible to imagine that so-called lessons of the esoteric school could be held within our Society after all that has happened. I read that passage yesterday. It suggests that because of all the “crimes” the letter describes, lessons of the esoteric school could no longer be held.

We must look at these things, too, in the right light and not hesitate to look at them closely. As you know, we temporarily discontinued these esoteric lessons when the war broke out, and anyone who bothers to look at these things carefully will realize that this is due to nothing other than the present circumstances of the war.² These lessons are not being given anymore so as not to do our Society a disservice.

There are only two possibilities these days. One is to act in the best interests of the Society, which means that regardless of whether we live in a nation at war or a neutral country, we must refrain from holding meetings that are not open to the public. Just imagine what could happen, and what a windfall it would be for people who go around making insinuations, if we were to hold secret meetings behind locked doors. Obviously, we must not do that, and Society members will have to resign themselves to doing without these lessons. It is as clear as day that we cannot have meetings between members from different countries going on behind locked doors, which is not to say that anything unacceptable would be happening there. As far as we are concerned, such meetings could happen on a daily basis as a matter of course. But you know how strong the opposition to our movement is. This must also be taken into account, and we must not endanger the whole movement by doing anything stupid or foolish. That's why we must give up holding closed meetings—they would simply open the door to that modern illness known as “spy-itis.”

The other possibility, which is totally out of the question, would be to separate the members according to nationality in order to speak to them. That is obviously not in line with the purpose of our Society.

I hope you have realized by now that this measure was taken because the war made it necessary; it will be rescinded as soon as the war is over, as you could all have worked out for yourselves.
I must still mention a few more thoughts in connection with this measure. We cannot simply assume that all the people out there are so decent and respectable that they will assume that we, too, are only capable of decent and respectable actions. We cannot expect them to be concerned about us and about finding out what we are doing. They have no way of knowing whether or not we are doing something they would consider unacceptable. That is what stands behind taking measures like this. It is impossible to count on the outside world making positive assumptions about us, but we really ought to be able to count on this within the Society itself.

In recent months, not only in this letter but in all the events leading up to it, we have repeatedly heard the opinion—coming from people whose aspirations are expressed in this letter—that the lessons of the esoteric school have been stopped not because of the war but because the Society has assumed a form that makes it necessary for such lessons to stop altogether. After all, given the “crimes” that have been committed, it can no longer be assumed that people will have the requisite trust in such lessons. This means nothing less than that we have to expect that certain measures we take within the Society will be judged in a way that can no longer be considered a decent or respectable interpretation. This interpretation is absolutely inadmissible; it is real slander and cannot be excused as a simple mistake.

Legally speaking, it is no different from libel, and it is even more worrisome when the rumors being spread are veiled in all kinds of mystical disguises. The way such things are passed around is often much more disastrous than people imagine, although I wouldn't go so far as to endorse the point of view of this letter-writer and claim that rumors whispered from one person to another must necessarily make use of black magic. That is not what I mean. Spreading rumors can be accomplished by quite natural means and does not necessarily imply any talent for black magic.

Let me emphasize once again before I continue that what I am saying is my own opinion, not to be taken as binding on anyone else.

In the letter in question, there was much talk of how people are supposed to have been unduly influenced through me. I will not comment on the contradiction inherent in this—on the one hand, my friendly conversations and handshakes are interpreted as techniques of black magic, and on the other hand I am blamed for not seeking closer relationships with members. On the one hand it is stated that I cut myself off from the members and don't do enough for them, but on the other hand I am supposed to have used each and every conversation and handshake to influence people against their will.

We need to understand how such a contradiction can come about. For instance, someone may desire something—let's take the case of a person who wants to have been the Virgin Mary in a previous incarnation. This is a real example, not a made-up one. Suppose the person in question comes and makes me aware of this. If I were to say, “Yes, yes, my occult research confirms that,” then that person would most likely not take this remark as an instance of undue influence. If what people are told corresponds to their desires, they are extremely unlikely to interpret it as an attempt to influence them unjustifiably. Now, self-deception and vanity are not usually taken to such an extreme that people imagine themselves having gone through this particular previous incarnation—they are more likely to choose something else, but the principle involved is what we need to consider at this point.

At this stage of human evolution, the autonomy of individual souls must be respected in the most painstaking way. Basically, people who think like the person who composed this letter do not have a viable idea of this painstaking kind of respect. After all, the writer of this letter would have found it pleasant to have been influenced in line with his own desires, and he wished for much more personal discussion. Suppose he and I had actually discussed all kinds of stuff, and also exchanged handshakes. On the one hand, that would have been exactly what he wanted, and on the other hand, the terrible crime he mentions would have been committed against him. As I said, most people have no idea of the painstaking regard for individual freedom that has to be the rule in a movement like ours. We must make an intense effort to preserve the autonomy of individual souls.

Let's imagine people coming to us with relatively mild cases of incarnational vanity. If we agreed with them, they would surely not go on complaining about being unduly influenced. But suppose we said to them, “Don't be silly; never in all your previous lives were you any such person!” If we are being very precise about it, that would have to be considered an unjustified intervention in these people's inner being, although perhaps not a very serious one.

Let's look at this instance with all possible clarity. If people come to us and tell us who they think they were in an earlier incarnation, regardless of whether they have come to this conclusion out of vanity or out of something else, they have arrived at it themselves, out of their own individual souls. This is where their own soul's paths have led them. And it belongs to the fundamental nature of our movement to lead people further, if possible, starting from whatever point they have arrived at inwardly when they come to us, but not to break their heart and will at some particular moment. If in such a moment we simply make an end of the matter by saying, “Don't be ridiculous; that's nonsense,” that is not an appropriate response. It actually would be an unjustified intervention if we permitted ourselves to speak like this, and these people would have no option but to extend us their confidence in a very personal way not appropriate to the situation, which, as we shall soon see, requires a totally different kind of confidence.

Instead, we should really say something along the lines of, “Well, as things stand now, this thought is something you have arrived at in your own soul. Try to make this thought carry over into real life; try to live as if it were true. See if you can actually do what you would be able to do, and if what happens is what would have to happen if it were true.” An answer like this helps them arrive quite logically at how things really are. It truly preserves their personal freedom without cutting anything off short, no matter how erroneous a path they may have been on until now. It is important to realize that refraining from influencing other souls is actually a very deep issue.

If they stick to the facts, people who share the opinions expressed in this letter will also not be able to maintain that any individuals in this Society have been particularly spoiled by me when it comes to having their previous incarnations made known. Please take what I have just said extremely seriously: It is not adequate to have some clumsy idea of what it means to influence or not influence others; in this day and age, if we always try to respect the freedom and dignity of others, the standards we must apply will be extremely difficult to live up to.

I have always consciously cultivated this sort of respect for the souls of others within our Society, to the extent that, in my attempt to preserve individual freedom, I have made a habit of speaking much less affirmatively or negatively than most people probably would. I have always tried to say only what would enable the person in question to come to independent conclusions on the matter, without acting on my authority. I have tried to eliminate personal authority as a factor by simply advising people to take certain things into account. This is something I have always made a conscious effort to foster.

I hope you will also realize that the misconceptions set down in this letter are not even among the strangest ones that can come about. It has happened more than once that people showed up at a lecture cycle somewhere or other, saying that it was Dr. Steiner's expressed wish that they attend. That has happened many times. If you look into it a bit, you will find that the people in question had told me of their plans to attend the series and, since I am always heartily pleased to meet members again in different places, I had told them I was very glad. In many cases, however, what I said was so changed in the minds of the people in question that by the next day they were saying that it was my particular wish that they attend this course. This is another instance of these strange misconceptions.

Many of our friends want nothing more than to be told what to do, but I have always tried to conduct myself so the members would notice that it would not occur to me to want to give people personal advice about how to manage their everyday life. I am far from wanting to influence them in things like whether or not they should attend a certain lecture cycle. From my perspective, the thing people most often want me to do and that I have to resist most strongly is to influence them personally in details like this. I never want to do that and always have to refuse. Within a society such as ours should be, it is necessary to refrain from that kind of thing.

All of this relates to something else that needs to be stated once just as a matter of principle. Anyone who observes how I try to work will realize that I always attempt to let the matter at hand speak for itself. And that brings me to the issue of confidence, as I would like to call it. I would really like to ask you members to duly consider whether I have ever done anything with regard to either an individual or the Society as a whole to encourage confidence of a personal nature in myself. Try to think about this and come to a conclusion on the basis of how I hold my lectures.

Let us consider an obvious case. You were all so kind as to show up for the lecture I held two days ago on various mathematical and geometrical ideas.³ In the course of this lecture, I told you that from a certain spiritual scientific perspective, matter is nothing; matter as we know it is a hole in space. There is nothing there where matter is. However, I do not want you to simply take this statement on faith; I am far from wanting anyone to take these teachings on faith simply because they come from me. Instead, I try to show how modern science, including its most advanced and respected representatives, can arrive at the same insight as spiritual science. I tried to demonstrate an objective basis in fact, a basis that is also revealed by the results of scientific research, regardless of my own personal way of arriving at this discovery and quite apart from the fact that I am the one telling you about it.

I make a point of doing this so you will not need personal faith in me, but will be able to do without it and see how I try to let the subject, no matter how difficult, speak for itself.

I am sorry to have to present the issue of confidence to you like this; I would have preferred for you to see for yourself that all my efforts are directed toward making confidence in a particular personality unnecessary. The only kind of confidence that comes into question here at all would be the kind enabling you to say, “He is really making an effort to not simply lecture us on some kind of inspired insights; he is really trying to get everything together in one place so that things can be assessed on their own merit, independent of his personality.” Of course, this is not to say that I always succeed in “getting everything together in one place”—first of all, there isn't enough time for that, and secondly it is the nature of things to remain incomplete. My method, however, does tend in the direction of eliminating rather than encouraging faith in me personally. That is how we have to look at this issue of confidence in a spiritual movement. That is what is important to me, but in this, too, I am only expressing my personal opinion.

Admittedly, we must also recognize a certain perspective that tends to make everything relative, since in general it is true that everything should be subject to legitimate criticism. And it is certainly true that everyone should have the right to criticize where criticism is justified. On the other hand, this business of criticizing must also be taken relatively. Just think, the amount of work we can do is limited by time and cannot be extended in just any direction according to the whims of others. In view of that, you will realize that some of Mr. Goesch's ideas have not been thought through in terms of real life.

As I have often pointed out and can state quite openly, I would not venture to speak about certain things if I had not lived and worked with them for decades and become familiar with them over the course of a long life. For example, I would never have spoken about Faust if I had not lived my way into it over decades of intense involvement with the subject.⁴ Having done so, however, it is a real waste of time for me, as you can imagine, if someone who has not put anywhere near that kind of effort into it comes and wants to argue certain points with me. You really cannot ask that of me or of anyone else. Someone once wrote a letter to the poet Hamerling on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, addressing him as “Dear old man”; Hamerling was somewhat taken aback, needless to say.⁵ Now, I am over fifty already, but I think you will admit that my task demands a certain amount of time and will understand that I do not need to spend time debating with people about things I was already concerned with when those people were still in diapers. In the abstract, getting involved in such discussions may be the right thing to do, but it is not usually very fruitful, especially when it has to do with things like the contents of this letter. I really have to say that. It is quite a different thing when someone speaks out of age and experience than when some young upstart talks about it. That is simply a fact of life.

And then, just think about the blatant contradictions in this letter. You don't have to think as I do, but I do want to tell you what I think about it. One sentence reads: “Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors…,” and so on. In conjunction with this sentence, the writer lists a large number of undertakings that I would not presume to mention myself if they weren't listed here, since I would have to admit that everything on this list has been done imperfectly at best. I have always emphasized, for instance, that the Johannesbau represents only the beginning of what ought to be done. Even so, people do not seem to be able to understand that I might have to limit what I take on, that I cannot, in addition to all these activities, take the time to cultivate all the relationships dreamed up by the writer of this letter. It is really taking things too lightly to imagine that I can possibly do both.

I am reluctant to put it like this, and I ask you to recognize my reluctance, but in order to do all that I would really have to ask the person who composed this letter to make each year twice as long. Barring that, I have to be permitted to organize my own activity as I see fit, which, however, in no way limits what other people want and can do. That, in fact, has been the goal of all my efforts—that each person should do what he or she wants without anyone asking them to do anything other than what they want to do. In that case, however, I must also be granted the right to limit what I recognize as my own task. In most cases, it is just those people who do not want to get involved in any concrete tasks and do not want to develop their will to serve concrete purposes who are most involved in criticizing what has already been accomplished.⁶

However, this is not a constructive attitude in real life. People who are not in agreement with an association as it already exists are welcome to stay out of it, and to do whatever they are in agreement with. It is much easier, though, to become part of some society and criticize it from within than to do something on your own initiative. Finding fault is easy, but it in no way determines or restricts what you yourself can accomplish. Knowing what ought to happen and that someone else is doing something badly is never the crucial factor, but what is crucial is the effort someone makes to actually carry out what one talks about and is able to do. It is also not crucial that other people carry out what I want to have happen—they can take it up or leave it; their freedom is limited, not by me, but only by what they believe themselves able to accomplish. They must simply develop the will to carry out what lies within their own capabilities.

When this Society of ours was in the beginning stages, I believed it could be a prime example of this last-stated principle. It is the greatest failing of this day and age that people always want a tremendous amount but do not actually manage to do anything. Well, that is understandable enough. You see, anyone who has acquired knowledge and capability in any particular field and works with what has been learned knows that what one can actually accomplish is really terribly little. People who have had to develop their abilities are the most aware of how little can actually be done, while those who can do very little or have not yet tested their abilities think they can accomplish the most. That is why programs are more visible nowadays than accomplished facts; programs are floating around all over the place. It is extremely easy to set down in abstract terms what we hope to achieve through socialism, theosophy, the women's movement, community with others, and so on. It's easy to develop ingenious and appropriate programs. But people who have done something positive, even within extremely limited circles, have actually accomplished much more than the ones who put out the greatest programs for all the world to see. My friends, we must realize that what counts is what actually gets done. It would be best if we would more or less keep our programs locked up in a secret chamber in our hearts and only use them as guidelines for our individual lives.

Of course, it is very easy to misunderstand a movement like ours. Yesterday, I pointed out that we have to accept misunderstanding as a matter of course and spoke about how we should relate to misunderstanding on the part of people outside the movement who are not only unsparing in their criticism—their criticism would actually be a good thing—but unsparing with slander and false accusations as well. A significant amount has been accomplished in this regard over the course of the years. Especially in the area of slander and disparagement much has been achieved; yet the steps necessary to fend them off have not been taken. It is really necessary that the most intimate attributes of a spiritual movement like ours spread within our Society.

Something I always advocate and repeatedly mention because it is obviously part of my task is the fact that what I can mean to another person must be determined only by the spiritual aspect of our movement. And it is crucial that this spiritual factor, this purely spiritual factor uniting us, not be misinterpreted. I really cannot discuss the issue of the case at hand without touching upon these things. I am very sorry about all this because I always try to protect people as long as possible. However, our cause has to be more important than individuals. There is no other way.

Anyone who can judge these things objectively will be readily able to see the connection between what I said earlier about respecting the freedom of each independent soul and how I relate to individual members. I am constantly trying to make a reality out of something that is a natural consequence of our spiritual movement and that seems necessary to me in order to handle all personal relationships in such a way that they are appropriately integrated into our spiritual movement. This means I must leave each and every member of our Society free to act in ways that may differ completely from mine.

Some of you may share Mr. Goesch's opinion, and welcome any efforts to cultivate our social and personal interaction and cohesiveness. I myself think it would be a good thing if someone would make this effort, so that our Society would be a society in more than name only. However, my own role in this Society is necessarily limited. Nevertheless, I realize that I am still the one who knows by far the greatest number of members personally. Many people here know fewer than I do. I am certainly not opposed to people doing a lot to cultivate the personal aspects that play such a great role in this letter, but as I said, I must limit what I myself take on for reasons I have already presented adequately.

In view of that, it seems a very strange misunderstanding of what is actually going on when we hear opinions like those expressed again in this letter, claiming that the best of what I have to offer is becoming a mere shadowy image because of all this. According to this point of view, it seems that this Society built on the basis of spiritual science, this Society as I have to understand it, is seen as something that is too abstract and ought to assume a much more personal character. I am putting it like this—“ought to assume a much more personal character”—in order to avoid using a different expression. I have often explained that this personal character is not possible; it simply cannot be. I have even said so to some members individually. I would prefer to see this personal element rooted out to such an extent that I could, for instance, lecture from behind a screen so as to avoid mixing up personal connections to members with the main point, which is to disseminate anthroposophical teachings and make them effective in actual practice. I am sorry to have to say things like this, but how are we supposed to understand each other if these things are not said?

I would like to relate a particular incident and then comment on it. There is a certain person to whom I have always related as I described above, trying to practice what is right in relation to our spiritual movement, fulfilling my obligations with regard to this movement and disregarding any personal factors.⁷ Some time ago, this person found it necessary to write me a letter that begins as follows. I will not read the whole letter, but only the part of it that seems to be at the root of this whole incident. This letter arrived on December 25, 1914—Christmas Day of last year. I will now read this very characteristic passage, which begins with a quotation from one of the mystery dramas: “ ’Seven years now have passed,’ Dr. Steiner, since you appeared to my inner vision and said to me, ‘I am the one you have spent your life waiting for; I am the one for whom the powers of destiny intended you.’ ” Further on in the letter, we read, “Neither the teaching nor the teacher was enough to revive my soul; that could only be done by a human being capable of greater love than any other and thus capable of compensating for a greater lack of love.”

This is asking for something that cannot and must not be given in a personal sense. The teacher and the teachings are of lesser importance; what is wanted is the human being, the person. We should not play hide-and-seek in cases like this. At the conclusion of Mr. Goesch's letter, he says that he arrived at his insights under the guidance of the keeper of the seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style. Now, this keeper of the seal is the same person who wrote the sentence I just read, a sentence that shows that the things she is writing about have been slowly coming to a head for a long time. I will refrain from using any adjectives to describe the particularly pronounced insinuations in the letter Mrs. Steiner received from her yesterday. (See p. 115.) Such insinuations should not be repeated because of course people should be protected as long as they actually allow themselves to be protected. However, I really must point out that it is possible for things like this to happen in our Society.

Please do not imagine that I have been blind to this development, which has split into two parts, so to speak. I will speak first about the part that has to do with our Society as it is seen from outside, since it may be best to talk about that aspect first. Among the many things, some of them highly slanderous, that have been written in defamatory articles about our movement in general and myself in particular, there have been ever-recurring insinuations about the number of man-chasing hysterical women in our Society. I am not saying that this is true, but simply that it is mentioned in the many diatribes that have appeared, slandering us and myself in particular.

The current case is not an isolated incident, and things that appear in this form should not be interpreted personally but taken as symptomatic. Still, I must say that someone trying to get close to our movement should not try to do so by writing “Seven years now have passed, Dr. Steiner…” and so on. I do not want to go into these things at great length, but you will understand what was meant. These things cannot be judged on the basis of a single case, however. Instead, each individual case has to be interpreted as a sign that the teachings have not been received as impersonally as they should have been, and as an indication that there were some among us ready to set less store by the teachings and the teacher than by the human personality.

This was one of the secondary reasons why I and my loyal colleague, who had stood by me for so many years, were married last Christmas. I admit that we were not at all inclined to conceal the matter behind any occult cloak. First of all, as far as we were concerned, these personal things were nobody else's business. Secondly, with regard to the relationship between us, it had become necessary not to let misunderstandings arise because of things being taken on a more personal human level than they were intended.⁸ An expression used frequently between the two of us in those days was that by marrying me, Mrs. Steiner had become the “cleaning lady” with regard to things that had been accumulating in some people's heads. I think you understand what I mean. Our intent was to have things taken less personally than they had been until then.

I hope you will not misunderstand me when I say that in general in a society such as this one, liberating ourselves as much as possible from the customs of the rest of the world is not the point. Instead, we should be helping the world progress with regard to customs and ways of looking at things. It can only be of help to us to arrange such matters so they are quite clear in the eyes of the outer world and so no one can get mistaken ideas about them.

This also led Mrs. Steiner, in responding to a letter from the person who actually instigated this whole business, to write that a civil wedding ceremony was actually not such a terribly important event, considering our years of working together on things that were of utmost importance to our lives. The response to that was, “However, your civil marriage unleashed a disaster for me, one that I had feared and seen coming for years—not in what actually happened, you understand, but in its nature and severity.” It should suffice for me to point out that a certain relationship exists between what we are experiencing now and the appointment of the “cleaning lady.” As far as I am concerned, no further proof of the need for the cleaning lady is needed!

There is no harm in taking things at face value and not reading more into them than is actually there, my friends, but it is always harmful to link a particular occult mission with some petty detail, or even something of major importance, from one's personal life. That's why we prefer the image of the “cleaning lady,” which corresponds to the facts much better than any pompous pronouncements we might have come up with, although we never imagined we would have to talk about it.

It is my personal opinion that if someone in our spiritual movement looks for something so personal in things that are perfectly self-explanatory, it is a disturbing reminder of the prevalence of certain instincts in our Society. The only acceptable way to deal with these instincts is to admit that they exist and face up to them truthfully without any occult disguises. That is also the best way to move beyond them. It only works if you confront them for what they really are. In our circles, however, an incredible amount has been done to surround these things with an occult aura.

Why should we let the purely objective interest we actually ought to have in our spiritual movement be clouded by dragging personal vanity into everything? Why should we let that happen? People who spend a lot of time thinking about their incarnations down through history are not really interested in this cause; they lack the particular kind of interest they ought to have. The only difference between them and ordinary egotists is that ordinary egotists are not so presumptuous as to identify themselves with all kinds of historical incarnations, but satisfy their personal vanity with other things.

It is really true that it is much better for people to flaunt their clothes or their money than their incarnations—that is much the lesser of the two evils. These are things we have to take seriously and inscribe into the depths of our soul. They have done too much harm over the years and are so intimately bound up with what I am forced to call “personal vanity,” to use a general term.

When personal vanity plays a large part, the most unbelievable misunderstandings can arise. As she recounts in her letter, this “keeper of the seal” once came to me and stated that she was obliged to apply standards already long since present within her to whatever came toward her from the outer world. My response was, “Why should that mean you can't be part of our spiritual movement? Of course you can apply your own standards,” by which I only meant that our teachings have nothing to fear from anyone's personal standards. That is what people are supposed to apply. In my opinion, there was nothing wrong with her wanting to apply her own standards. But the way she interpreted this showed that what she actually meant was that she was already in possession of everything spiritual that could be given her; she had already seen it in visions and thus was already in possession of it.

Then this woman went on to ask whether in that case she could or should become a student of mine. I do not know why she asked that; the question is a contradiction in itself. Well, all I can say is that it was an undeniable fact that she wanted to join us in spite of everything, and there was no way to prevent her from doing it. However, her claiming to be already in possession of it all and condescending to work with this movement while insisting on applying her own standards reveal a kind of vanity that is looking for something other than our teachings. After all, she did not need the teachings if she had them already. People are so unbelievably unaware of this kind of vanity, and it plays such a very great role in a movement like ours.

This person assumed that what was being taught actually stemmed from her, no less. That is somewhat difficult to understand. She must have found some reason to believe that in something in Mrs. Steiner's letter of response to her,9 something that led her to point more specifically to this mysterious source of our esoteric movement. That is how this strange state of affairs came about. My friends, it is no longer possible to play hide-and-seek for the sake of protecting individuals; it is time for us to go into these things. In the seal-keeper's answer to Mrs. Steiner, she says, "Three years ago, like a sick person seeking out a physician, I asked Dr. Steiner for a consultation. There was something very sad that I had to say during that interview, and I have had to say it frequently since then: Although I could follow his teachings, I could not understand anything of what affected me directly or of what happened to me. I must omit what brought me to the point of saying this, since I do not know how much you know about my background and biography." She says this because I once had to hear a conversation in which this was discussed. “I was not able to express my need, and Dr. Steiner made it clear that he did not want to hear about it.” It's true that I did not want to hear about it, but I did respond. You cannot just avoid things like that by indicating that you do not want to hear about them. “The following summer, however, we were graced with the opportunity to perform The Guardian of the Threshold; in it a conversation takes place between Strader and Theodora, a conversation that reflected in the most delicate way the very thing that was oppressing me. Perhaps Dr. Steiner did not ‘intend’ anything of the sort”—intend is in quotation marks—“nevertheless, it is a fact. Perhaps it was meant as an attempt at healing.” In the passage in question from the mystery drama, Strader says he owes everything to Theodora.

When people write things like this, especially in an attempt at a formal style, though its grandiloquence contributes nothing to its clarity, we really cannot assume that it deserves to be treated as a personal communication. There is a lot that could be seen as personal, and I have mentioned none of that; everything I have mentioned is intimately related to the whole character and nature of our movement. If people don't want these things to be mentioned in public, they should not write them down. When the kind of attitude expressed in this letter becomes predominant, it undermines everything I am trying to accomplish with every word I speak and with everything I have been doing for many years.

If we are to go on working together, you must not remain ignorant of what I think my position among you should be. If in fact we are to go on working together, it will have to be on the same basis as before. We must find a way to create a form for our spiritual movement that will be appropriate to the stage of evolution of people in our day and age. That cannot happen, however, if all kinds of personal things take the place of what should be achieved and understood on a spiritual level. It astounds me that in these difficult times, when our interest should be focused on the development of a major portion of humanity, someone should have so little interest in the events of the day as to drag such highly personal interests into our Society. A person who thinks it permissible to live in the illusion that something did not happen the way she dreamed it would, and has nothing better to do than cause a crisis on that account, is really cut off from the most profound aspect of our times.

This is how these highly personal matters start creeping into our Society. However, personal matters cannot be allowed to enter our movement, not in this form and not in any other. People whose chief interest is in their own person will only find a place in our Society to a very limited extent. Generally, people who wrap themselves in a mystical cloud also attempt to do the same to those around them. It would be inconsistent to imagine that you yourself are everything under the sun and not have the people around you be something special too, so the tendency is to broaden the circle. But when, as so frequently happens, this purely personal interest and personal feeling of vanity take the place of objective observation of and efforts toward what our spiritual movement is meant to be, they inflict the worst possible damage on our Society.

One might have thought that the Johannesbau going up here would have presented enough problems to keep our members busy and distract them from the vainer and more foolish things in life. One really might have believed that this building would turn their thoughts to better things. But as you see, that has not come about as we might have hoped, and yet we have to go on working. I thank you all for the expressions of confidence contained in the letter our friend Mr. Bauer brought to me, as well as those expressed by other members, and I hope ways and means can be found to deal with these obstacles to our movement's true progress and to give a little thought to what it will take to keep our movement from being too seriously constrained by outer hindrances in the future.

Criticism, my friends, cannot harm us. People can criticize us objectively as much as they like, and it will do no damage. First of all, it will always be possible to counter the criticism with whatever needs to be said, and secondly, time is on our side. Today, people may well still think we're fools because of our boiler house or the Johannesbau itself, or whatever, but they'll come around, and we can wait until they do. That's the way it is with anything new.

It is something totally different when slanderous and untrue statements are made. In that case, we are obliged to set these claims straight again and again if we don't choose to simply ignore them, and of course the slanderers can always answer back. It can even reach the point of taking legal action. Yet, we do need to defend ourselves against such statements, even if it feels like washing our hands in black and filthy water.

If we could really foster an active attitude and strengthen our forces on these two fronts, we would be able to do a lot that has been left undone so far.

Of course, this is not meant as a personal reproach to anyone in particular; some of what I said applies to some people, other things to others. It is intended quite generally. However, what I have pointed out has a solid basis in fact, and in order for you to see it, I have had to present something of the situation to show how things that were only intended to be taken spiritually have been taken very personally.

Please don't take it amiss if I say that if someone comes with complaints, even if she says she already knew everything she has gained or can still gain through the movement, the only thing to do is treat that person like a child and offer fatherly admonition or friendly consolation. I was naive enough to believe that it had helped, and then had to watch these delusions of grandeur appear afterward, so it… [gap in stenographic record] great damage within this Society of ours.

Considering the claims of the keeper of the seal, there was never any point in doing anything other than smilingly forgiving her for this rubbish, the way you excuse a child. Please don't hold it against me that I said what simply had to be said. But for the sake of our movement's dignity, we cannot permit pathological elements to destroy it. That is why we cannot always take the stand that we should simply accept these pathological elements for what they are. When this pathological element takes on all the appearances of delusions of grandeur, we have to call it by name; we have no other choice. This is by no means directed against the personality in question, but only against what is deserving of criticism in that person. After all, we must face the facts and not hide the issue behind the cloak of the occult. It requires a particular effort at self-education to do that, but if we succeed, we will see things as they truly are instead of through a glass darkly.

Perhaps you will say that I myself am speaking out of vanity at this point. That will make no difference to me, since I have already been condemned to call a spade a spade in this instance. I have known many students who thought they were smarter than their teachers and proceeded to tell them off, claiming that the latter had made all kinds of promises without keeping them. That this should also happen within our Society comes as no great surprise.

Now I have given you my own humble opinion, which you are not to take as binding. I am simply asking that you take it in the same way I want you to take everything I say, that is, I would like you to try to see if we are better able to get on with life in our movement once a common resolve is there to call the big things big and the little things little instead of drawing a mystical halo around any old arbitrary personal vanity.

If we are not aware of the full seriousness of our movement, the temptation is very great to fake it by decking out all sorts of life's little vanities in this same serious garb. That cannot be, and this simple statement means more than it seems to. This is what I had to say, although I did not want to. I cannot read these letters in their entirety in front of the whole movement, but it would not occur to anyone who could read them that I have overstepped my authority by quoting passages from private correspondence. In this case, it had to happen because these things are related to the very foundations of what we are doing together.

• 1. It has not been possible to ascertain which physician and which letter are referred to here.
• 2. See the volume Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919, note 5 to section II above.
• 3. See II, note 1 above.
• 4. See the two volumes Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethes “Faust” (“Spiritual Scientific Commentaries on Goethe's Faust”), GA 272 and 273, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator.]
• 5. Robert Hamerling, 1830–1889, Austrian poet.
• 6. This seems to be a reference to Heinrich Goesch, who was not involved in any kind of practical activity. It was reported by some members that he had refused to help with the construction of the first Goetheanum.
• 7. The person referred to is Alice Sprengel. See Part Two, p. 109ff in this volume and also note 1 under I above.
• 8. The second half of this sentence is somewhat unclear in the stenographic record and may have not have been taken down exactly or completely.

What we have really been endeavouring to do in our talks together here is to delve a little more deeply into Waldorf School pedagogy, in order to find in that pedagogy the kind of education with which we can approach the so-called abnormal child. It will have been clear to you from our discussions that, if you want to educate an abnormal child in the right manner, you will have to form your judgement and estimation of him in quite another way than you do for the so-called normal child—and of course differently again from the way he is regarded in ordinary lay circles, where people are for the most part content merely to specify the abnormality and not trouble themselves to look further and enquire into the causes of it. For there is no denying it, the man of today is not nearly so far on (in his study, for example, of the human being), as Goethe was in his study of the growth and nature of the plant. (And, as we saw, Goethe's work in this direction was a beginning, it was still in its elementary stage.) For Goethe took a special delight in the malformations that can occur in plants; and the passages where he deals with such are among the most interesting in all his writings. He describes, for example, how some organ in a plant, which one is accustomed to find in a certain so-called normal form, may either grow to excess, becoming abnormally large, or may insert itself into the plant in an abnormal manner, sometimes even going so far as to produce from itself organs that would normally be situated in quite another part of the plant. In the very fact that the plant is able to express itself in such malformations, Goethe sees a favourable starting point for setting out to discover the true “idea” of the archetypal plant. For he knows that the idea which lies hidden behind the plant manifests quite particularly in these malformations; so that if we were to carry out a whole series of observations—it would of course be necessary to make the observations over a wide range of plants—if we were to observe first how the root can suffer malformation, then again how the leaf, the stem, the flower, and even the fruit can become deformed, we would be able, by looking upon all these malformations together, to arrive at an apperception of the archetypal plant.

And it is fundamentally the same with all living entities—even with beings who live in the spirit. More and more does our observation of the human race lead us to perceive this truth—that where we have abnormalities in man, it is the spirituality in him which is finding expression in these abnormalities.

When once we begin to look at the phenomena of life from this aspect, it will at the same time give us insight into the way men thought about life in olden times; and we shall understand how it was that education was regarded as having an extremely close affinity with healing. For in healing men saw a process whereby that in man which has received Ahrimanic or Luciferic form and configuration is made to come nearer to that in him which, in the sense of good spiritual progress, holds a middle course between the two extremes. Healing was, in effect, the establishment of a right balance in the human being between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And then, having a more intimate and deep perception of how it is only in the course of life that man comes into this condition of balance, of how he needs indeed to be brought into it by means of education, these men of an older time saw that there is something definitely abnormal about a child as such, something in every child that is in a certain respect ill and requires to be healed. Hence the primeval words for “healing” and “educating” have the very same significance. Education heals the so-called normal human being, and healing is a specialised form of education for the so-called abnormal human being.

If it has become clear to us that the foregoing is a true and fundamental perception, we can do no other than carry our enquiry further along the same road. All the illnesses that originate within the human being have, in reality, to do with the spiritual in him, and ultimately even the illnesses that arise in him in response to an injury from without; for when you break your leg, the condition that presents itself is really the reaction that arises within you to the blow from without—and surgery could certainly learn something by looking at the matter in this light. Starting therefore from this fundamental perception, we find ourselves ready to approach in a much deeper and more intimate manner the question: How are we to deal with children, having regard to the whole relationship of their physical nature to their soul and spirit?

In the very young child, physical and spiritual are intimately bound up together, and we must not assume—as people generally do today—that when some medicament or other is given to a child, it takes effect physically alone. The spiritual influence of a substance is actually greater in the case of a very little child than it is with a grown person. The virtue for the child of the mother's milk, for example, lies in the fact that there lives in it what was called in the archaic language of an earlier way of thought the “good mummy” in contrast to the “bad mummy” that lives in other products of excretion. The whole mother lives in the mother's milk. Mother's milk is permeated with forces that have, as it were, only changed their field of action within the organisation. For up to the time of birth, these forces are active in the region that belongs in the main to the system of metabolism and limbs, while after birth they are chiefly active in the region of the rhythmic system. Thus they migrate within the human organisation, moving up a stage higher. In doing so, the forces lose their I content, which was specifically active during the embryonic time, but still retain their astral content. If the same forces that work in the mother's milk were to rise a stage higher still—moving, that is, to the head—they would lose also their astral content and have active within them only the physical and etheric organisation. Hence the harmful effect upon the mother, if these forces do rise a stage higher and we have all the abnormal phenomena that can then show themselves in a nursing mother.

In mother's milk we still have therefore astral formative forces that work spiritually; and we must realise what a responsibility rests upon us when the time comes to let the little child make the transition to receiving his nourishment directly for himself. The responsibility is particularly great for us today, since there is now no longer any consciousness of how the spiritual is active everywhere in the external world, and of how the plant, as it ascends from root up to flower and finally to fruit, becomes gradually more and more spiritual—in its own nature and also in its activity and influence. Taking first the root, we have there something that works least spiritually of all; in comparison with the rest of the plant, the root has a strongly physical and etheric relation to the environment. In the flower however begins a life which reaches out, in a kind of longing, to the astral. In a word, the plant spiritualises, as it grows upwards.

Then we must carry our study a stage further, and enquire into the place of the root within the whole cosmic connection. Its part and place within the cosmos is expressed in the fact that the root has grown into the soil of the Earth, has embedded itself right into the light. The truth is that the root of the plant has grown into the soil in the same way as we have grown with our head into the free expanse of air and into the light. We can therefore say that here below

we have that which in man is of the head nature and has to do with perception; while here above we have the part of the plant that in man has to do with digestion, with nourishment. The upper part of the plant contains the spirituality that we long for in our metabolism-and-limbs system, and is on this account related to that system in us. One who is able with occult perception to regard first the mother's milk, and then the astral which hovers over the plant and for which the plant longs and yearns, can behold—not indeed a perfect similarity, but an extraordinarily close relationship between the astrality that comes from the mother with the mother's milk, and the astrality that comes from the cosmos and hovers over the blossoms of the plants.

These things are said, not in order that you may possess them as theoretical knowledge, but in order that you may come to cherish the right feeling towards what is in a human being's environment and enters thence into the sphere of his deeds and actions. As you see, we shall have to take care that we find the right way to accustom the little child—gradually—to external nourishment, stimulating him with the fruiting part of the plant, fortifying his metabolic system with the flowering part, and coming to the help of what has to be done by the head by means of a gentle admixture of root substance in his food. The theoretical mastery of these relationships will serve merely to start you off in the right direction; what should then happen is that in the practice of life the knowledge of them flows into all your care for the child, not as theory but more in a spiritual way.

In this connection we cannot but recognise how extraordinarily difficult it is in our day to “behold” a human being as he really is. Again and again, in every field of knowledge into which we enter, our attention is drawn away from that which is essential in man as man. Modern education and instruction is not calculated to enable us to see man in his true being. For it is a fact that in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century the power to behold what is essential in man died right away. Up to that time, and even still during that time, an idea was current which survives now only in certain words that have remained in use—lives on, here and there, so to speak, in the genius of language. We might describe this idea in the following way.

Surveying the whole human race, we find it subject to all manner of diseases. We could, if we chose to be abstract, write these all down. We could take some plane surface and write upon it the names of the various illnesses in such a way as to make a kind of map of them. In one corner, for instance, we might write illnesses that are inter-related one with the other; in another corner, illnesses that are fatal. In short, we could classify them all so nicely as to produce in the end a regular chart or map, and then it would not be difficult to find the place on the map where a child with a particular organisation belonged. One could imagine how some special pre-disposition in regard to illness could be shown in a kind of diagram on transparent paper and then the name of the child be written in on the region of the map where he belonged. Let us suppose, then, that you regarded illnesses in this way and made such a map as I have described. In the first half of the nineteenth century people still had the idea that whenever the name of an illness had to be written in, they could always write in, for that illness, the name of some animal. They still believed that the animal kingdom inscribes into Nature all possible diseases, and that each single animal, rightly understood, signifies an illness. For the animal itself the illness is, so to speak, quite healthy. If however this same animal enters into man, so that a human being, instead of having the organisation that properly belongs to him, is organised on the pattern of that animal, then that human being is ill.

It was not superstitious people alone who continued to hold such conceptions in the first half of the nineteenth century; this idea of the nature of disease in man was held, for example, by Hegel—and a very fruitful and productive idea it was. Think what a light can be thrown upon the nature and character of a particular human being if one can say: he “takes after” the lion, or the eagle, or the ox; or again, he gives evidence of being wrenched away in the direction of the spiritual—the spiritual works too powerfully in him. Or, let us say, carrying the idea a step further, suppose the ether body of a certain human being is too soft and flabby and shows obvious affinity to physical substance, then that would be for one an indication of a type of organisation that generally occurs only in the lower animal kingdom. These are fundamental conceptions of a kind that it is important for you to acquire.

And now I would like to go on to speak of what you as educators must undertake for your own self-education. You can take your start from certain given meditations. A meditation that is particularly effective for a teacher is the one I gave here two days ago. Meditating upon it inwardly with the right orientation of heart and mind, it will in time bear fruit within you. For you will discover that as you are carried along in your feeling on the waves of an astral sea, borne hence away from the body, you will begin to find yourself in a world—you can liken it only to a world of gently surging billows—where you are given the possibility to see around you the very things that provide answers to your questions.

But here, I must warn you that if you desire really to make your way through to the place where such things are possible, you must comply with the conditions—I do not mean merely knowing them in theory, I mean faithfully fulfilling in real earnest the conditions that are necessary for development on the path of meditation, and that are described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. [Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Press as Knowledge of Higher Worlds—how is it achieved? ] You will remember how mention is made there of egoism as a hindrance on the path of development—egoism in the sense that man centres his attention upon his own I, values his I too highly. What does it mean when we hold our I in such high esteem?

We have, as you know, to begin with, our physical body, which derives from Saturn times and has been gradually formed and completed with such wonderful artistic power in four majestic stages of development. Then we have the etheric body, which has undergone three stages of development. And we have besides the astral body, which has undergone only two. These three members of man's being do not fall within the field of Earth consciousness; the I alone does so. Yet it is really no more than the semblance of the I that falls within the field of Earth consciousness; the true I can be seen only by looking back into an earlier incarnation. The I that we have now is in process of becoming; not until our next incarnation will it be a reality. The I is no more than a baby. And if we are able to see through what shows on the surface, then, when we look at someone who is sailing through life on the sea of his own egoism, we shall have before us the Imagination of a fond foster-mother or nurse, whose heart is filled with rapturous devotion to the baby in her arms. In her case the rapture is justified, for the child in her arms is other than herself; but we have a spectacle merely of egoism when we behold man fondling so tenderly the baby in him. And you can indeed see people going about like that today. If you were to paint a picture of them as they are in the astral, you would have to paint them carrying each his child on his arm. The Egyptians, when they moulded the scarab, could at least still show the I carried by the head organisation; but the man of our time carries his I, his Ego, in his arms, fondling it and caressing it tenderly. And now, if the teacher will constantly compare this picture with his own daily actions and conduct, once more he will be provided with a most fruitful theme for meditation. And he will find that he is guided into the state I described as swimming in a surging sea of spirit.

Whether we are able to get in this realm the answers to our questions will depend upon whether we have in our soul the inner peace and quiet which we must seek to preserve in such moments. If someone complains that things are constantly happening that prevent him from meditating, the complaint will of itself afford a pretty sure indication as to whether or not he is in a fair way to make progress in this direction. For you will never find that one who is genuinely undergoing development will complain that this or that hinders him from meditating. In point of fact we are not really hindered by these things that seem to come in our way. On the contrary, it should be perfectly possible to carry out a most powerful meditation immediately before taking some decisive step, before doing a deed of cardinal importance—or, on the other hand, to carry out the meditation after the deed, in entire forgetfulness of what has been experienced in the performance of the deed. Everything depends, you see, upon having it in our power to wrest ourselves away from the one world and live for the time being completely within the other world; and whenever we want to summon up our inner spiritual powers, right at the very beginning must come the ability to do this.

Watch for yourselves and observe the difference—first, when you approach a child more or less indifferently, and then again when you approach him with real love. As soon as ever you approach him with love, and cease to believe that you can do more with technical dodges than you can with love, at once your educating becomes effective, becomes a thing of power. And this is more than ever true when you are having to do with abnormal children.

Wherever people have the right feeling about their activities, these activities do work together in the right way. Just as in the physical organism heart and kidneys must work together if the organism as a whole is to have unity, so must the Constituents work together for the great end they all have in view, while each of them fosters within itself that element in the whole for which it is in particular responsible. And anyone who then sets out to undertake some new task in the world, must bring what he is doing into co-ordination with what emanates from the Constituents.

Suppose you have the intention of undertaking work with backward children. The first thing you have to do is to study and observe the pedagogy that is followed in the anthroposophical movement. That whole living stream of activity must flow into all that you do and undertake. For within this educational stream is contained that which can heal the typical human being, and enable him to take his place rightly in the world. And then you will find that the Medical Section is able to give you what you need in order that you may deepen this pedagogy and adapt it to the abnormality of the individual in question. If you set out in all earnestness to accomplish this, yon will soon realise that there can be no question of expecting simply to be told: This is good for this, that is good for that. No, what is wanted is a continual living intercourse and connection between your own work and all that is done and given in the educational and in the medical work of the [Dynamic] movement. No break in this living connection must ever be permitted. Egoism must not be allowed to creep in and assert itself in some special and individual activity; rather must there always be the longing on the part of each participant to take his right place within the work as a whole.

Curative Eurythmy having come in to collaborate with Curative Education, the latter is thereby brought into relation also with the whole art of Eurythmy. Here too it should be evident that you must look for a living connection. This will mean that anyone who practises Curative Eurythmy must have gone some way towards mastering the fundamental principles of Eurythmy as an art. Curative Eurythmy has to grow out of a general knowledge of Speech Eurythmy and Tone Eurythmy—although the knowledge will not necessarily have been carried to the point of full artistic development. Nor must we lose sight of the importance before all else of human contacts. If Curative Eurythmy is being given, the one who is giving it must on no account omit to seek contact with the doctor. When Curative Eurythmy was first begun, the condition was laid down that it should not be given without consultation with the doctor. You see from all this how closely, how livingly interlinked the different activities have to be in Anthroposophy.

It will thus be necessary to take care that the work you are initiating at Lauenstein—a work, let me say, that I regard as full of hope and promise—is carried on in entire harmony with the whole Anthroposophical Movement. You can rest assured that the Anthroposophical Movement is ready to foster and encourage any plans with which it has expressed agreement—naturally through the channels that have been provided in accordance with the Christmas Foundation Meeting. And conversely you should keep constantly in mind that whatever you, as a limb or member of the movement, accomplish—you do it for the strengthening of the whole Anthroposophical Movement, for the enhancement of its work and influence in the world.

This then, my dear friends, is the message I would leave with you. Receive it into your hearts, as a message that comes verily from the heart; may it go with you, and may its impulse continue to work on into the future.

If we who are in this spiritual movement are constantly thinking: how can this spiritual movement be made fruitful for practical life?—then will the world not fail to see that it is verily a movement that is alive.

And so, my dear friends, let me wish you all strength and good guidance for the right working out of your will.