The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When it is a question of understanding the Event of Golgotha in the sense of the Christmas Mystery we may look in two directions: Towards the starry heavens with all their secrets on the one side and towards the inner being of man with all its secrets on the other. During these lectures I have spoken of how the Magi from the East recognised, from the starry heavens, the Coming of Christ Jesus upon the earth and of how from the visions arising out of man's inner being the simple shepherds in the field received the proclamation of this Saviour of mankind. And once again today we will turn our attention to these two directions whence, in reality, all knowledge comes to man—whence the highest knowledge of all, the knowledge of the very meaning of the earth, had to come.

In the epochs which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha the attitude of the human soul to the universe and to itself was quite different from what it was after the Mystery of Golgotha. This fact, of course, is not very vividly apparent to an external study of history because the ancient form of knowledge belongs to ages lying long, long before, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha. By the time the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, this form of knowledge had already become feebler, and truth to tell it was only individual, very outstanding men like the three Magi from the East who possessed such far-reaching knowledge as was then manifest. And on the other side it was only possible for men particularly sensitive to inner things like the shepherds—men of the people—to bring such visions out of sleep as these shepherds brought. But in both the Magi and the shepherds it was a legacy of that ancient knowledge through which men had once been related to the universe. Even in our time we could not say, especially not in regard to the actual present, that men give very clear expression to that form of knowledge which has entered into the evolution of humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. Speaking generally, however, what we are going to speak about this evening, holds good. The pre-Christian attitude to the starry heavens was such that men did not regard the stars in the prosaic, abstract way that is current nowadays. The fact that these men of olden times spoke of the stars as if they were living Beings was not due, as an imperfect science believes, to mere fantasy, but to a spiritual, although instinctive, atavistic perception of the starry heavens. Looking at the starry heavens in olden times men did not merely see points or surfaces of light but something spiritual, something that made them able to describe the constellations as they did, for to them the several planets of our system were ensouled by living beings. Men beheld the spiritual in the wide heaven of the stars. They saw the starry heavens as well as the mineral and plant kingdoms in their spiritual reality. It was with one and the same faculty of knowledge that men of old beheld these three regions of existence. They spoke of the stars as beings endowed with soul and also of the minerals and the plants as beings endowed with soul.

We must not think that the faculties of knowledge in olden times were similar to ours. A little while ago I spoke to you about a stage of knowledge which, although it was not so very different from our own, is nevertheless difficult for many people today to picture. I said that the Greeks, in the earliest period of their culture, did not see the colour blue, that the heavens were not blue to them. They perceived the colours that lie more towards the active side, towards the side of red-yellow. Nor did they paint in the shades of blue known to us. Blue came only later into the range of human perception.

Think of all shades of blue being absent from the world, and therefore of green looking different from what it does today, and you will realise that the world around the Greek did not appear to him as it appears to humanity today. For the men of much earlier times the surrounding world differed still more. And then from the world seen by men of old, the spiritual withdrew—withdrew from the worlds of stars, of minerals, of plants. The vivid active colours became duller and out of the depths there appeared what is experienced as blue. As the faculty for the perception of blue, of the darker colours arose, what the men of old experienced in the astrology which spoke to them in a living language, active and full of colour, changed into the grey, colourless geometry and mechanics which, drawing it as we do from our inner being, no longer enables us to read from the environment the secrets of the starry worlds. The ancient astrology was transformed into the world we picture today in the sense of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, into the world of celestial mechanics, of mathematics.

That is the one side. The other side is that in those olden times men possessed a deep, inner faculty for perceiving what was streaming around them out of the earth—the fluids of the earth. The fluids of the earth, the qualities of earth announced themselves as the counterpart of the starry heavens to certain inner faculties of perception. Man in olden times was highly sensitive to the characteristics of the climate of his country, of the soil on which he lived. A chalk or granite soil was experienced as different radiations from the Earth. But this was not a dim feeling or experience; it arose like colours or clouds inwardly felt, inwardly experienced. Thus man experienced the earth's depths; thus, too, the soul in his fellow-man and the life of animals. The experiences were more living, more intense. It was with a faculty of external knowledge that man gazed into the spirituality of the starry heavens, into the spirituality of the minerals and plants, with his atavistic, instinctive clairvoyance; and it was with instinctive inner vision that he perceived what was living spiritually in the earth's depths. He spoke not merely of chalk soil but he experienced specific elemental beings: one kind from chalk soil, other kinds from granite or gneiss. He felt what was living in other human beings as an aura but an aura bestowed upon man from the earth; particularly did he feel the animals with their aura as beings of the earth. It was as though the ground, soil and the inner warmth of the earth continued on in the whole animal world. When a man of old saw the butterflies over the plants he saw them drawing along with them what was rising from the earth; as in an auric cloud he saw animal life flowing over the earth.

All this gradually withdrew and the prosaic world remained for man's faculty of perception which now became external He began now to behold the world around him as we behold it, in its colours and so forth—without perceiving the spiritual. And what man had once seen through faculties of inner perception was transformed into our modern knowledge of nature; what he had seen spiritually through faculties of external knowledge was transformed into our modern mathematics and mechanics.

Thus out of the qualities which the simple shepherds in the field brought to their inner vision we have developed the modern view of nature; and out of what the Magi from the East brought to their faculty of perceiving the Star, we have developed our dry mathematics and mechanics. The faculties of outer and inner perception were still so rich in individual men at that time that the mystery of the birth of Jesus could announce itself from these two sides.

What really underlay this faculty of perception? During the period between death and a new birth, during the time through which we lived before entering through birth into earthly existence we have literally passed through the cosmic expanses. Our individuality was not then bound to the space enclosed by the skin; our existence was spread over cosmic expanses. And the faculty of magical vision still possessed by the wise men from the East was essentially a faculty which entered strongly into the human being from the period between death and birth—that is to say, it was a ‘pre-natal’ faculty. What the soul lived through before birth within the world of stars awakened to become a special faculty in those who were pupils of the Magi. And when the pupils of the Magi developed this particular faculty they were able to say: “Before I came down to this earth I had definite experiences with Mercury, with Sun, with Moon, with Saturn, with Jupiter.” And this cosmic memory enabled them to behold the spiritual in the whole external world as well, to see the destiny of man on earth. They saw it out of their memory of existence before birth within the world of stars.

The faculties by means of which the earth's depths, the mysteries of the souls of men and of the nature of the animals were perceived, were faculties which at first developed in germinal form in the human being and which manifested for the first time after death—but they were youthful faculties, potentially germinal. Although it is after death that these faculties become particularly creative, in earthly life they arise as potentially germinal forces during the first period of earthly life, in the child. The forces of growth in the child which bud and sprout forth from the spiritual, these forces of the child withdraw in later life from the human being. They withdraw and we are then filled more with those forces which were there before birth. But after death these child forces appear again. It was only specially gifted men who retained them on into old age. I have already said here that such faculties of genius as we have in the later years of life are due to the fact that we have remained more childlike than those who do not have these faculties or have them in a lesser degree. The maintenance of childlike faculties on into later life equips us with inventive faculties and the like. The more we can retain childlike faculties in mature years, the more creative we are. But these creative forces appear again more particularly after death.

Among individual peoples of pre-Christian times it had been possible for the after-death faculties to be fructified by those that had remained from before birth. Because such men allowed the kind of knowledge possessed by the Magi from the East to withdraw and the after-death knowledge to come more to the fore, and because the pre-birth faculties were able to fructify the after-death faculties, the gift of prophecy developed in these men, the gift of foretelling the future prophetically with the after-death faculties. Those whom we call the Jewish Prophets were men in whom the after-death faculties were particularly developed; but these faculties did not remain merely in the instinctive life as in the simple shepherds in the field to whom the annunciation was made, they were penetrated by those other faculties which had developed to greater intensity among such people as the Magi from the East, and which led to special knowledge relating to the secrets of the stars and the happenings in the heavens.

 Starry heavens ................................ 

 Earth's depths

 Mineral world ................................. 

 Human soul

 Plant world ................................... 

 Animal life

 Pre-birth faculties ........................... 

 After-death faculties

It will now be clear to you that the proclamation to the shepherds in the field and the knowledge of the Magi from the East were necessarily in agreement. The knowledge possessed by the Magi from the East was such that they were able to behold deep secrets of the starry heavens. Out of those worlds in which man lives between death and a new birth, out of those worlds whence came the faculties enabling them to penetrate the starry heavens, out of an enhancement of this knowledge this vision came to them: From that world which does not primarily belong to life between birth and death but to the life between death and a new birth—from that world a Being, the Christ, is coming down to the earth. The approach of Christ was revealed to the Magi out of their knowledge of the stars.

And what was the revelation to the shepherds in the field whose special faculty was to experience the Earth's depths?—The Earth became something different when the Christ was drawing near. The Earth felt this approach of Christ, bore in herself new forces because of Christ's approach. The pure-hearted shepherds in the field felt, from out of the depths, what the Earth was reflecting, the way in which the Earth was reacting to the approach of Christ. Thus the cosmic expanses proclaimed to the Magi from the East the same as the earth's depths proclaimed to the shepherds.

This happened at a time when remains of the old knowledge were still in existence. We are concerned here with men who were exceptional, even in those days, with men like the three. Magi from the East and these particular shepherds in the field. Both had retained, each in their own way, what had more or less disappeared from humanity in general. This was the reason why the Mystery of Golgotha, when its time was drawing near, could be proclaimed to them as it was.

In studying these things we must add to the ordinary, historical view, the knowledge that comes from Spiritual Science. We must try, as it were, to fathom the expanses of space and the depths of the life of the soul. And if we fathom the expanses of space in the right way we begin to understand how the wise men from the East experienced the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we try to plumb the depths of the life of soul we begin to understand how the shepherds received the tidings of what was coming so near to the earth that the earth herself became aware of the approach of these forces. The faculties connected with existence before birth, which were manifested in the Magi, correspond more to an intellectual element—different, of course, in those times from what it is today; they correspond more to knowledge. What worked in the shepherds corresponds more to will, and it is the will that represents the forces of growth in the universe. The shepherds were united in their will with the Christ Being Who was approaching the earth. We feel, too, how the stories of the wise men from the East—although they are so inadequately recorded in the modern Bible—we feel how they express the kind of knowledge with which the wise men approached the Mystery of Golgotha; it came from their consciousness to the external universe. We feel that the story of the proclamation to the shepherds points to the will, to the heart, to the life of inner emotion. “Revelation of the God from the heavens and Peace to those men on Earth who are of good will.” We feel the streaming of the will in the proclamation to the shepherds. The light-filled knowledge possessed by the Magi is of a quite different character.

We realise the profundity and significance of the knowledge in the Magi and the proclamation to the shepherds as narrated in the New Testament when we try to fathom the nature of human knowledge and of human will—faculties connected with existence before birth and after death.

Starry heavens		Earth's depths
Mineral world		Human soul
Plant world		Animal life
Pre-birth		After-death
faculties		faculties
Intellect		Will

I have said that what was a world of spirit to the men of old—the stars, the minerals, the plants—I have said that this has become for us the tapestry of the sense-world; what was formerly inner knowledge has drawn to the surface. If we picture to ourselves the knowledge in the shepherds as being inward and what manifested in the Magi as being outward, it was this outward external knowledge in the Magi which reached out into space and there perceived the spirit The inner life leads to perception of the earth's depths.

The inner kind of knowledge manifested in the shepherds (red in diagram) grows, during the further evolution of humanity, more and more outwards and becomes the external perception of today, becomes what we call empirical perception. What gave the Magi their knowledge of the world of stars draws inwards, more backwards towards the brain and becomes our mathematical, mechanistic world (green in diagram). A crossing took place; what was inner knowledge, pictorial, naive, instinctive imagination in pre-Christian times becomes our external knowledge, perception through the senses. What was once external knowledge encompassing the world of stars draws inwards and becomes the dry, geometrical-mathematical, mechanistic world which we now draw forth from within us.

Through inner enlightenment man of today experiences a mathematical, mechanistic world. It is only outstanding persons like Novalis who were able to feel and give expression to the poetry and deep imagination of this inner, mathematical world. This world of which Novalis sings the praises in such beautiful language is, for the ordinary man of today, the dry world of triangles and quadrangles, of squares and—sums and differences. The ordinary human being is prosaic enough to feel this world to be barren, dry; he has no love for it. Novalis, who was an outstanding person, sings its praises because there was still alive in him an echo of what this world was before it had drawn inwards. In those times it was the world out of which the Jupiter Spirit, the Saturn Spirit, the Spirit of Aries, of Taurus, of Gemini was perceived. It was the ancient light-filled world of stars which has withdrawn and in the first stage of its withdrawal becomes the world which seems to us to be dry, mathematical, mechanistic.

The faculty that intensified in a different form in the shepherds in the field to a perception of the voice of the Angel in the heights has become dry, barren and feeble in us—it has become our perception of the external world of sense; with it today we perceive minerals and plants, whereas with the old faculty, although it was hardly articulate, men perceived the earth's depths or the world of men and animals.

What today has faded into the mathematical-mechanistic universe, what was once astrology, contained such a power that the Christ was revealed to the Magi as a Being of the Heavens. What today is our ordinary knowledge through the senses, with which we see nothing but the green surface of grass, the brown skins of animals and the like—to this kind of knowledge when it was still inward, when it had not yet drawn outwards to the eyes, to the skin, there was revealed to the shepherds in the field the deep influence on the earth, the power with which the Christ would work in the earth, what the Christ was to be for the earth.

We, my dear friends, must find the way whereby the inner faculty that is now dry mathematics may intensify pictorially to Imagination. We must learn to grasp the Imagination given us by Initiation Science. What is contained in these Imaginations? They are in truth a continuation of the faculty with which the Magi from the East recognised the approach of Christ. The Imaginations are the budding, the offspring of what the men of old saw in the starry constellations, the star-imaginations, the mineral imaginations, in gold, silver, copper. The men of old perceived in Imaginations, and their offspring are the mathematical faculties of today. The mathematical faculties of today will become those faculties which understand the Imaginations. Thus by the development of the inner faculties men will have to seek for the understanding of the Christ Being.

But external perception must also be deepened, become more profound. External perception has itself descended from what was once the life of inner experiences, of instinct in man. The power which among the shepherds in the field was still inward, in their hearts, is today only in eyes and ears; it has shifted entirely to the external part of man and therefore perceives only the outer tapestry of the sense-world. This power must go still further outwards. To this end man must be able to leave his body and attain Inspiration. This Inspiration—a faculty of perception which can be attained today—will then, out of Initiation Science, be able to give the same as was given in the proclamation to the naive, inner knowledge of the shepherds in the field.

Astrology as it was to the Magi, heart-vision as it was in the shepherds. With the knowledge that comes from Initiation Science through Imagination and Inspiration modern man will rise to the spiritual realisation to the living Christ. Men must learn to understand how Isis, the living, divine Sophia, had to disappear when the time came for the development which has driven astrology into mathematics, into geometry, into the science of mechanics. But it will also be understood that when living Imagination resurrects from mathematics, phoronomy and geometry, this means the finding of Isis, of the new Isis, of the divine Sophia whom man must find if the Christ Power that is his since the Mystery of Golgotha is to become alive, completely alive, that is to say, filled with light within him.

We are standing before this very point of time, my dear friends. The outer earth will not provide man with those things which he has become accustomed to desire in modern times. The conflicts called into being by the terrible catastrophes of recent years have already changed a large part of the earth into a field where culture lies in ruins. Further conflicts will follow. Men are preparing for the next great world war. Culture will be wrecked in more ways. There will be nothing gained directly from what seems to modern humanity to be of most value for knowledge and the will External earth life, insofar as it is a product of earlier times, will pass away—and it is an entirely vain hope to believe that the old habits of thought and will can continue. What must arise is a new kind of knowledge, a new kind of willing in all domains. We must familiarise ourselves with the thought of the vanishing of a civilisation; but we must look into the human heart, into the spirit dwelling in man; we must have faith in the heart and the spirit of man in order that through all we are able to do within the wreckage of the old civilisation, new forms may arise, forms that are truly new.

Nor will these forms arise if we do not bear in mind with all seriousness what it is that must happen for the sake of humanity. Read in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and you will find it said that a man when he desires to attain higher knowledge must understand what is there called the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. It is said that this meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold means that willing, feeling, thinking separate in a certain way, that a trinity must arise out of the chaotic unity in man. The understanding that must come to the pupil of Spiritual Science through his knowledge of what the Guardian of the Threshold is, must come to the whole of modern mankind in regard to the course of civilisation. In inner experience, though not in outer consciousness, humanity is passing through the region that can also be called a region of the Guardian of the Threshold.

It is so indeed, my dear friends; modern humanity is passing over a threshold at which stands a Guardian, a Guardian full of meaning, and grave. And this grave Guardian speaks: “Cling not to what has come as a transplant from olden times; look into your hearts, into your souls, that you may be capable of creating new forms. You can only create these new forms when you have faith that the powers of knowledge and of will for this spiritual creation can come out of the spiritual world.” What is an event of great intensity for the individual who enters the worlds of higher knowledge, proceeds unconsciously in present-day mankind as a whole. And those who have linked themselves together as the anthroposophical community must realise that it is one of the most needed of all things in our days to bring men to understand this passing through the region which is a threshold.

Just as man, the knower, must realise that his thinking, feeling and willing separate in a certain sense and must be held together in a higher way, so it must be made intelligible to modern humanity that the spiritual life, the life of rights, and the economic life must separate from one another and a higher form of union created than the State as it has been up to now. No programmes, ideas, ideologies can bring individuals to recognise the necessity of this threefoldness of the social organism. It is only profound knowledge of the onward development of mankind that reveals this development to have reached a threshold where a grave Guardian stands. This Guardian demands of an individual who is advancing to higher knowledge: Submit to the separation in thinking, feeling and willing. He demands of humanity as a whole: Separate what has up to now been interwoven in a chaotic unity in the State idol; separate this into a Spiritual Life, an Equity State, and an Economic State ... otherwise there is no progress possible for humanity, and the old chaos will burst asunder. If this happens it will not take the form that is necessary to humanity but an ahrimanic or luciferic form. It is only through spiritual-scientific knowledge of the passing of the threshold in our present day that can give the Christ-form to this chaos.

This, my dear friends, is something that we must say to ourselves at the time of Christmas too, if we rightly understand Anthroposophy. The little child in the crib must be the child representing the spiritual development towards man's future. Just as the shepherds in the field and the Magi from the East went after the proclamation to see how that which was to bring humanity forward appeared as a little child, so must modern man make his way to Initiation Science in order to perceive, in the form of a little child, what must be done for the future by the Threefold Social Organism based on Spiritual Science. If the old form of the state is not made threefold it will have to burst—and burst in such a way that it would develop on the one side a wholly chaotic spiritual life, completely ahrimanic and luciferic in character, and on the other side an economic life again luciferic-ahrimanic in character. And both the one and the other would drag the state in rags after them. In the Orient there will take place the development more of ahrimanic-luciferic spiritual states; in the West there will be the development more of ahrimanic-luciferic economic life—if man does not realise through the permeation of his being by Christ how he can avoid this, how out of his knowledge and out of his will he can proceed to bring about the ‘threefolding’ of what is striving to separate.

This will be human knowledge permeated by Christ; it will be human willing permeated by Christ. And it will express itself in no other way than that the idol of the unitary state will become threefold. And those who stand properly in the spiritual life will recognise, as did the shepherds in the field, what it is that the earth experiences through the Christ. And those who stand rightly within the economic life, within the economic associations will unfold, in the true sense, a will that brings a Christ-filled social order.

My dear friends! Today I shall attempt to add to the ceremonies that you are to introduce when you take up your new offices as soul-care givers and shepherds, something that you can regard as a first instruction, so to speak, a priestly sermon, as it has been given in all times when people knew the right thing to do in these matters, and as it must be given today, so that you may grasp in the right sense what has now been done to you through the ceremonial act and what is to be done through you in the future. Today, we should make a special effort to allow the full meaning of this ceremony, which was essentially woven into the Mass, to take effect on our soul. And since it is woven into the Mass, it should always be repeated when you yourself celebrate Mass before the community.

The point is that the Creation before us is completely new and yet is one that is to fit into the whole earthly context of the evolution of the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha; and so again, as the Mystery of Golgotha itself has been placed in the overall evolution of the earth since its primeval beginning, so it is in turn compelled to take into account the evolving time. But for you, this means nothing other than taking into you the impulse of the time, insofar as the Christian impulse, the Christ impulse, lives in this time impulse precisely for the immediate present. It is indeed the case that in the immediate present this Christ impulse lives very particularly. You must realize that, especially with regard to what is to be transferred into your outer activity, you are doing many things differently than they were done in the older times of Christianity, when Christianity had not yet become Roman Catholic, when it still had an impact from the spiritual mystery knowledge with which the Christ impulse was received on earth in the first centuries. So you have to renew some of it and bring it into the present in its renewed form, so that it can continue to have an effect in the future.

Above all, you must understand that the languages in which Christianity was spread in the first centuries had a kind of sanctity. In the Near East, these languages were a Syrian dialect that still had an ancient flavor, the Greek language, and the Latin language. In fact, Christianity was first proclaimed to mankind in these three languages. So it can be said that those who either knew the apostles personally or at least were in the places from which the apostles preached and could still report on it, that they saw the apostle disciples and knew them face , that they recognized it as correct, that the gospel was proclaimed and the ceremonies were performed in the old Near Eastern Syrian dialect, in Greek and in Latin. Now we must be clear about the fact that in the course of human development everything undergoes a metamorphosis and that the essence of this Syrian dialect, which at that time had come from even older formations of spiritual development, was not used in the ceremonies but only in the sermon, where, of course, the territorial languages were used, that the essence of this dialect and of the Greek and Latin languages was that the Logos Himself was working in them. There was something in them that passed from the waves of language into the celebrant. This is something you should understand very deeply, that something was transferred from the structure of the language, from the formation of the language into the celebrant. And for those who were truly fervent as believers, it was the case that through the reciting of the Mass – for it was an old recitative in which the Mass was spoken; today it is called “singing” but it is not singing in the modern sense) — a power was also transferred to them, which today may no longer be transferred from person to person, because these powers counted on a certain elimination of the ego impulse in the person. Something passed directly from person to person that had a suggestive character, and today, if we want to renew Christianity in the right way, we have to transfer this into a completely different way of treating these things. That suggestive understanding, which was transmitted to the ancients by their presence when it was spoken suggestively, and which even brought forth from these fervent souls that they could see Christ in His presence when transubstantiation took place, must be conveyed in something that must be much more inward for today's time. And precisely for this reason, we may also give what has been expressed in the old language to the immediate present in a renewed language. And that is what we have done.

In doing so, we have first of all done something that shows in a very special way that, if we are to understand the Christ impulse in the present correctly, we must disregard the mere dead Christ and be aware that we must first find the spiritual relationship to the word spoken in the ceremony through our inner soul life, that relationship that originally existed with speech in a way in which the human being himself had less to do with. Today we are obliged to gradually achieve in our souls, through constant activation of this connection with the Christ impulse, that which is also to be achieved in this new form of speech and which can also be achieved if the Act of Consecration to Man is celebrated in the right way. It is my task today to bring about this transformation in the treatment of the Christian sacrificial act, and I would like to do this as vividly as possible in the following way.

Let us take the order of the Mass at the beginning. We need only imagine how, in older times, those feelings were awakened that were directly linked to the memory of Christ's appearance on earth. The Catholic Church still renews this in an external way in the order of the Mass that it celebrates at Christmas. The beginning of the Christmas Mass should be brought forward – not, of course, in the old recitative, which would actually be a sacrilege for more recent times, but in the way it can be done at present – so that we can vividly develop what can come before your souls today. You will recognize what you now have to do yourselves, but in a slightly different way.

Rudolf Steiner reads a Latin text from the Catholic Mass ritual. [The stenographer did not record which passage it was.]

In this language, we have something that should have an immediate effect on the faithful, in that the priest, by intoning the language, came into a direct connection with the spiritual, which always flows and weaves through language. We have now outgrown this undulating and weaving in language by raising ourselves in thought with self-awareness, and we must all live in this realization if we want to establish in the right way what we have in mind. In the older churches, intonation was very important, and the Catholic Church has retained this.

But as a result of this, in contrast to the development of modern times, in which the spirit of Christ should prevail directly in the Mass, it is in an Ahrimanic state of backwardness. Because of this Ahrimanic backwardness, in which the Catholic Church has remained by simply preserving what once was, it could never

never bring about that the Act of Consecration of Man becomes what it should become in our time. And if you want to implement what you want to implement in the right way, then you have to place yourselves in the evolution of the present in such a way that something is experienced by the souls again, just as the glory of Christ appeared before the eyes of the fervent souls during transubstantiation, so that the question of whether or not Christ was present in the sacrifice of the Mass could not arise. The theories and philosophies about transubstantiation only arose after this time, when those who were truly fervent souls could simply be asked: Did you see that Christ was on the altar? And many said, “Yes!” and the others had faith.

Our actions must be a preparation for what must happen in the future. And when you approach the community in the right way with the regenerated Mass, it will be able to work as I have just described. But then, above all, there must be a very deep and earnest understanding in your souls of what man's connection with Christ actually is in the immediate present and will become in the future. For you know that already in the first half of the twentieth century the Christ is to appear again for the seeing souls, whereas He was lost to the eyes of the souls because they lost the kind of seeing that I have just characterized and that made discussions about transubstantiation unnecessary. But people will have to do something to make this happen. The Christ is ready to walk visibly among men again in ethereal form, but men must do something for it. If you inaugurate and continue your movement in the right way, it will be able to happen through the power that lies in your Act of Consecration of Man and that passes over to the communities. Then you will have grasped what you are doing as something that is directly spiritually real. That is why I had to present to you today, at least briefly and vividly, what you have performed in the renewed, metamorphosed form as a mass cult in the last days.

Now it is a matter of what you accomplish in the right way being transferred to the community, because up to now you have done it for yourselves. Above all, it is important that you can properly place before your souls what is expressed as the mystery of Christianity in the third part of the letter to the Colossians, in the third verse. Today I would like to call this passage before your soul as it is really meant:

You have died, and your ego is separated from you and united with Christ in the spiritual world; but when Christ, who bears your ego, has himself appeared before the vision, then you too will reveal yourselves with him.

There is an enormous depth hidden in these words. It was actually spoken for later times rather than for the time of the apostles. It is actually spoken for our time, so that our time understands it in the right way. For it is the case that in the earthly development of humanity until about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, people experienced in their inner being that which could be of their true self in this inner being. In what they experienced within themselves, they simultaneously experienced something real of what had lived in them in their pre-earthly existence. One could not have said to these people: Become aware of something of your eternal spiritual-soul core!, because they simply had states of consciousness in which this eternal spiritual-soul core shone forth. They needed only self-knowledge, just as people today have knowledge of the soul; and by looking at themselves they perceived - without that distinct sense of self that only developed later - their lives before birth and after death. And so they could understand when the initiates spoke to them: “Your body dies; but what you experience within yourselves, you know will not die with you; that is alive, that remains alive.” — Death had no instrument to kill the human soul as well.

But what put the apostle in a different position was that, around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, souls had begun to share in the fate of the body, and that souls [since that time] are in danger of sharing in the fate of the body. In ancient times, the soul did not share the fate of the body. Dying is part of the fate of the body, and the soul did not die with it. That was the very concrete conception in ancient times. This fact was later abstracted because people could not bear it in all its intensity. People did not want to admit to themselves that what has developed between birth and death under the constant urge of the ego consciousness no longer has a part in the eternal soul core of the human being, but has a part in the body and participates in the fate of the body, that it thus also dies. Above all, this was clear to the first Christians: that in the evolution of the earth, the time had come when the soul, although it acquires an ego on earth, dies with the body as a result. That the body dies was not what was said in the first gospel proclamations, but that the soul dies, and that it has already died in people who emerged from the pre-Christian evolution of the world. It was meant as a real word: You have died. Not the earlier souls had died, for then they had not yet shared in the fate of the body, but you belong to the fate of the generation of those who have died, that is, your souls share in the fate of the body; for that which you carry here as an ego consciousness through your physical body is only an image of your true ego. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, although people had looked into their own selves and had glimpsed this true self, it was not yet separate from the human being. During the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, it was precisely this self that was separated from the human being, and the human being was raised into the spiritual world.

If we imagine what man experienced before the Mystery of Golgotha, he had his soul, in which he experienced the prenatal, and he had the real I, but he did not perceive it at first. After the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that man had his soul, but he no longer experienced the prenatal in it. Since that time, the true self is spiritual, that is, it does not belong to the earthly world, but to the spiritual world. This self is reflected in the physical body, the consciousness of self: “And your self is separated from you and united with Christ in the spiritual world.”

He has now descended to earth so that this spiritual world can permeate the earthly world through him. But man's true self does not live in the world that can be seen with eyes and approached with the three ordinary faculties of thinking, feeling and willing; it lives in a world that has since that time permeated the earthly one, but it is united with Christ. And one can only know the true self by knowing the Christ at the same time; one can only feel the true self if one feels the essence of the Christ and the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha at the same time; one can only be imbued by the true self if one is imbued by the impulse that emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha.

What could previously be taught through the ceremonies and rituals is something that you have to translate into a living spiritual life if your movement is to have meaning. But then you must realize that in our time everything is actually being done on the part of the Christ to show Himself to people together with the true human I, so that the word of the Apostle shall be fulfilled in our time:

You died, and your ego is separated from you and united with Christ in the spiritual world; but when Christ, who bears your ego, has come before the vision himself,

– as we can expect in the first half of our century –

then you too will reveal yourselves with him.

That means that then people will be able to walk around with the direct consciousness of the true self – not just with the image that is created by the physical body. And you shall make of them true Christians.

That is what you must make your task if you carry a substantial content with your movement. You must be clear about what it actually means: “With the newer times, more and more has arisen in humanity that man has come to his self-awareness. This does not initially mean an inner penetration with the true self. To arrive at self-awareness means a separation from the true self, an experiencing of oneself as coming from the true self. For this true self is one with the world of Christ. He brought this world of Christ into the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Today He waits to be seen again through the corresponding preparations [of human beings], to reveal Himself to people. Then it will be possible to endow self-awareness with the inner experience of the true self, and then the word from the Gospel will be fulfilled, which is found in this third chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians and is actually spoken for our time and : that you should first awaken in yourselves an understanding of the relationship of the true self to the Christ, so that you can then revive it through the Act of Consecration of Man in those laymen who are present at your Act of Consecration of Man. For by permeating yourselves with such an understanding of self-consciousness and its relations to the human world, of the Christ and his relations to the true human self, you will perform the human consecration ritual with the right feeling. And through feelings that can be stimulated in you by an understanding of these things, you will present to people a truth about the dying of the ego consciousness in the physical body, which is indeed a depressing truth for human beings, but also the uplifting truth of the salvation of the true human ego, in that the Christ can lead the ego through death. You will be so moved by the reception of such a truth that you will be able to enliven the Act of Consecration of Man through it and thus bring something before the faithful that must be understood differently than usual, that must be understood with the understanding of the spiritual world. And in doing so, you will not only perform the Act of Consecration of Man differently, but with an understanding of the spiritual world, so that the things that take place in transubstantiation can no longer be discussed, but will be seen and felt as a matter of course, in that it will be felt that something supersensible must be understood in the sensual. And because something supersensory is taking place in the sensory, it is superfluous to discuss it with the intellect.

That is the attitude with which you should approach the Mass before the people, and with this attitude you must permeate the Mass if it is to be celebrated in the right spirit before the members of your communities. I was obliged to add this as a first rule to the celebration of the Mass and to the celebration of the ordination of the pastoral care of souls. We will have to continue with such reflections for some time, because they are the foundations for what you will have to bring before the communities in words.

Now it would be good if you would discuss the things that are on your minds as long as I am still here.

A question has been raised about a formula for admission to the community and about the creed. [The exact wording of the question was not written down.]

Rudolf Steiner: The admission to the community will of course have to consist of a discussion between the person to be admitted and the person admitting them about the creed. Especially with regard to the creed, it cannot of course be demanded that it be immediately understood by the person to be admitted in the way it is presented in the formula, because on the whole we must continue to follow it in a certain sense of the old tradition. Even though we already have in our formula that which points to the right thing, we cannot change what has now been so shaped by historical development that actual admission into the community of Christians is effected through baptism, and it will also be impossible to perform baptism in any other way than as infant baptism. In this way you follow tradition on the one hand, but on the other hand you must be aware that this was of course not the custom in the early days of Christianity either. In those early days, one became a Christian by attending Mass – not as far as the Gospel, but as far as the first prayer, which I have called the “relay prayer” – and then was baptized. So one was baptized in the full consciousness that humanity had at that time. Actually, only adults were baptized, and those who were born of baptized parents were simply children of Christians, they were raised as Christians and were introduced to the baptismal act on the basis of this Christian education. This meant that those who were led to the baptismal ceremony had already been sufficiently introduced to the Christian creed through living with their Christian ancestors, and one could simply conduct a kind of exam with such candidates, whereby they were once again made aware of what they had experienced during their childhood in the company of older people. And so it happened; if they were found to be sufficiently grounded in Christian doctrine, they could be baptized. Admittedly, baptism was then a much more real act in the life of a person than it can be today. Today, in any case, we must continue to practice infant baptism for a long time to come. So we first accept the child into the community of Christians, but we omit from the infant baptism what belongs to the Mass. This is justified. Baptism is an act that takes place around the child in complete unconsciousness. And precisely for this reason, what confirmation is has been transformed so that today it stands in place of what originally was baptism and is simply postponed to the appropriate age. So with the person being admitted today, there will be, above all, a kind of discussion about what every person should actually understand of the creed. And if a formula is needed for this – and that seems to be the case from the question – then we can indeed draw up such a formula. But it could also develop in a free conversation. What should develop in free conversation with the person to be admitted, without a formula, would have to be the content that the person concerned can, I will not say, profess the real Christ to be equal to himself, but that he can develop a sufficient relationship to the real Christ when one speaks to him of this real Christ. From the way in which the person to be initiated perceives the way in which one speaks to him about the Christ, one must recognize whether he can really belong to the community. Whether or not someone should be accepted is, of course, entirely a matter of feeling. And then it will be a matter of the person to be accepted really learning to understand, at least in essence, the content of the Act of Consecration of Man. Even if it is not possible to really celebrate the Act of Consecration of Man everywhere, we will still have to make sure that even where we still have to hold back on anything cult-like, the inner content of the Act of Consecration of Man Consecration is brought home to the soul, so that one is always in a position to regard the Act of Consecration of Man as something that can be taken up in a sermon or in any theoretical discussion.

What is meant here can best be understood by saying the following. Think of the Protestant sermon. You will often have emphasized or heard emphasized how the Protestant sermon should not be merely a scientific or intellectual discussion, and most preachers today appreciate most about the sermon what is not intellectual at all, but what is emotional and spiritual. In fact, it is the case that in preaching, beyond everything intellectual, a spirituality radiates directly from the content of feeling and emotion. Even in our present-day de-divinized time, the Protestant preacher still tries to give people something spiritual with his sermon, and one can indeed experience good preaching in this sense. But what is left over from the cult in the Protestant Church is presented with a completely false pathos, even by good preachers. They immediately lose their role as speakers of spiritual matters when they come to celebrate, because they are no longer in the spiritual world. There is, of course, something right in the fact that the sermon should be inspired by the content of the soul, that it should speak to the heart and not to the mind. But because this, which is to happen through the sermon, is purchased through the exclusion of all knowledge about the spiritual world - which is still preserved in petrified dogmas - then such things come about as the assertion that one can approach what the Christian is supposed to experience by inserting foreign words into the language of those living today. It is a remarkable phenomenon – I have already drawn your attention to it today – how something spiritual still resides in the Latin language, which is no longer alive for today's man. Man today feels that the living language has been so transposed into the profane material that he no longer believes he can express anything supersensory with it. And even if he does not want a mass to be read in Latin – from which he can still discern what he should grasp in spirit – he would at least like to hear a single word that sounds fresh to him in his secular life, and so, for example, he would not just call the sacred a “sacred”, but a “numinoses” or something similar. Once again, something unknown and suggestive is introduced into that which, in the face of it, one is powerless to truly reach with the soul. Today, books are being written about the sacred from an unspiritual Protestant spirit, in which it is actually unconsciously said: we are not getting anywhere with the mere continuation of the Protestant spirit, we have to borrow from the Catholics. Not that one reads entire masses in a language that has not yet become profane, but one takes only a word that sounds similar – not entire sentences – so that at least a small point of the Catholic loan can be introduced into the Protestant. That is the ultimate extreme to which the inadequate practice of religion now carries even theology, because one actually wants to reject any recognition of the sacred that is substantial. Such things must be seen in their true light; one must know that today it is a mere expression of powerlessness if one does not try to feel the sacred again by penetrating from the “Spiritus sanctus” merely pronounced in rigid words by the Catholic Church “Spiritus Sanctus” to the ‘Healing Spirit,’ as it is expressed by the Catholic Church only in the rigidly formulated words. In the same way, one can gain a complete inner experience through the word ‘healing spirit’ if one takes things as we receive them in the teaching on which your efforts are based as spiritual facts.

By founding this movement, you will and must gain the opportunity to shape your preaching in such a way that you do not turn it into a sentimental, heart-wrenching one, with a terrible, untrue sentimentality, by, as it were, squeezing feelings out of yourselves. You do not have to do that. Rather, you must see in the Act of Consecration of Man something that has a spiritual content in its imagery, and you must keep this spiritual content alive in your congregation, stirring it into vibrancy, so that you will not need will have need merely to put into words and convey to the faithful what you have wrung from your own mind, something that can be true only for a short time and that may afterwards very easily seem hackneyed in your preaching. In the Act of Consecration of Man, which you present to the faithful, you have something that moves people, something you can refer to every time you have something to say. In it you have something real that you can tie into, which immediately transforms your word into one that retains the emotional content when it is heard by the faithful. In this way you also escape the danger to which the Protestant-Evangelical preacher is always exposed; this danger consists in his being compelled to give the content of his feelings to his sermon out of his personal life. In doing so, he clouds himself in a certain way. You can get to know Protestant preachers who already cloud themselves when preparing the sermon and who cloud themselves even more when they preach. But as a result, the sermon does not come across as something true. Now, by having to squeeze his personal feelings out of himself, the person uses his entire soul, engages all his soul powers and has nothing left free to let the Christ enter while he is speaking the sermon. If the preacher can give a hint at the appropriate points to what is hinted at in the ritual and what the believer has come to know through contemplation, if he thus passes over to the exemplification of the ritual , which can become an infinitely rich one, and if he makes this linking to the cultic action in the sermon very pictorial, then he rises, as it were, above himself, does not fully engage his soul powers. And it is precisely at the point where he does not engage his soul powers, but rather what takes place through the exemplification of the Mass, that the Christ enters. And it is out of this mood that the Mass can be spoken. It is precisely through this that the preacher can truly let the Christ speak. The power of the Christ permeates his words, and the feeling of the faithful answers him like an echo.

What matters for the preacher to be a true preacher is that he experiences something from the divine side, just as the listener experiences something from the world side. Only through his experiencing something from the divine side, only through his leaning backward toward the divine, can the right thing be stimulated in the minds of the faithful through the preacher.

That is what must permeate the sermon. And if what I have now explained has become a truth in your soul, then you will find out quite naturally whether someone is suitable for admission to the community or not. This cannot be described in abstract words. It depends on how you yourself feel about the matter. There may be a “formula”, but the formula is not the essential thing. What is essential is your insight, your insight formed out of the spirit of a Christianity such as has been presented here, into the person whom you wish to receive into the community and also into the person whom you wish to receive into your own, narrower priestly community. In this way you will come to be able to answer the questions for yourselves inwardly. Firstly: Can this person listen properly when the Gospel is proclaimed? If you have established that he can listen properly, then he will be a true believer. You will be able to answer the second question for yourselves through inner experience: Can the man who comes to me repeat the words of the Gospel from the spirit in the right way? Can he speak to his listeners in such a way that it is not his words but the words of the Gospel that resound? Then I can accept him as a candidate for the ministry.

This should show you how you must not fall back into an abstract and theoretical life, how you should not answer the questions of life with abstract sentences, but in such a way that life itself is pointed out, above all, the life that has been kindled in you.

That is what needs to be said first. We shall speak about the Credo later.

What I have to say to you to-day will be expressed in the form of pictures drawn from the imaginative life, which is the expression, the revelation, of the spiritual world. The human being is woven with his whole existence and activity into the spiritual world. We know from the many and varied descriptions of it that have been given here, that an abstract manner of speaking, such as is applied to external, sense-perceptible nature, cannot be used in speaking of the spiritual world, if actual manifestations of that world are in question. We know too, however, that the manner of speaking we must then adopt is no unreal one, but, on the contrary, one far more realistic than the logical, abstract speech we employ to express merely natural truths. This I wanted to say about the attitude to be adopted in what I shall now put before you.

When man finds, with spiritual vision, the way out beyond the physically sense-perceptible world, there reveals itself to him a world of spirit. In that world he feels led to make use of the phenomena of the physical world as pictures, with which to express what is spiritually revealed to him. So let me now put a picture at the centre of our considerations; a picture which is in truth a deep reality. Mankind, throughout its evolutionary history, has always been guided by impulses from the spiritual world. Those who could see so far found these impulses written as it were in brazen letters in a spiritual light, indicating the direction they should take. What is thus found in the spiritual world might be compared with the signposts of the physical world; not those that have just a pointing hand perhaps, and the name of some place or other, but signposts on which is expressed in powerful words—or at least in powerfully sounding words—what changes are due to take place in human thinking, feeling, willing. I am speaking of spiritual signposts. Such directions in the spiritual world, however, are usually drawn up for human beings in a remarkable manner, and have been so in all epochs—namely, in a kind of riddle-language. One has in a certain way to make an effort to get behind the riddle. In order that one of these signposts in the riddle-language may become a real impulse for life, a great deal of what one knows has to be brought together. And so just at the present time, as something suited to our immediate present and the near future, one finds in the astral light, as I may call it, such directing words as can become impulses for mankind. On the most varied occasions—I might say in the most varied places—there comes before one to-day, if one has the faculties needed to behold it, something that is like a warning, having moreover the quality of a riddle, and it calls forth in man the feeling that he should be guided by it, should take it as a strong impulse into his will, into his whole life of soul. What thus shines out to meet us in the astral light, as one such spiritual milestone, consists approximately of the following words:—

Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.
Yet it will only bring thee healing
When to thee is revealed
The lofty power of its Spirit.

First of all there is a challenge to discover what is actually meant. Some sort of impulse is referred to, something which is already present, something known to man, since otherwise one could not reckon on his finding an answer:

Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.
Yet it will only bring thee healing,
When to thee is revealed
The lofty power of its Spirit.

The explanation of these words, which, as has been said, how themselves in the astral light like a directing impulse or human beings, will be the purpose of to-day's lecture.

Let us recall a number of things that I have already explained here. Let us recall how the year's course, in its regular sequence through Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, has a spiritual content; how spiritual occurrences, superensible occurrences, are revealed in what happens in the course of the year just as a man's super-sensible soul and super-sensible spirit are revealed in what happens in his bodily life between birth and death. Let us reflect how, in what appears outwardly during the year's course, in Winter's snow, Spring's sprouting, waxing life, in Summer's life of blossoming and Autumn's life of ripening and fruiting—how in all this which discloses itself physically to men something spiritual is hidden, something spiritual sustains it. And so let us turn our gaze first to what takes place in this yearly course, from spring to summer and on towards the autumn.

In all that Earth reveals, in stone and plant, in everything that has being, spiritual beings live; not a mere washed-out spirituality, but separate spirit-beings, Nature-spirits. These Nature-spirits hide during the winter in the bosom of the Earth; they are breathed in, as it were, by the Earth; they are within the Earth. When spring comes, Earth breathes out, as it were, her spirituality; these Nature-spirits strive upwards. They aspire upwards with the forces of springing, sprouting life; they are active in the life which is felt in the light-radiant, sun-warmed air; within this they aspire upwards. And as we approach St. John's Day and the time of midsummer, then in the heights above us, if we look up to them, we have a picture revealed there, embodied in the forms of clouds, embodied mightily in lightning, too, and thunder, embodied in all the meteoric element above us, all that lived in the form of Nature-spirits during winter in the Earth's dark bosom. During winter we must look down to the Earth and feel, or behold how, hidden beneath the covering of snow, Nature-spirits are working, so that out of winter shall come spring again, and summer, from the productive Earth. But if in summer we look down to the Earth, then the Earth is as if impoverished by the loss of those Nature-spirits. The Nature-spirits have gone out into the wide universe; they have united themselves with the cloud-structures and everything that human sight encounters in the heights above. In all the ways I have mentioned they have streamed up to the heights, these Nature-spirits, and with them they have taken, in an extremely subtle form, extremely fine dilution, that which manifests outwardly as crude and lifeless sulphur. And in fact these Nature-spirits, as they billow and surge in cloud-forms and the like, during summer's height, weave and live pre-eminently in sulphur, the sulphur that is then present there in an extraordinarily subtle way, in the heights of the earthly realm. If we could speed through these high reaches of our earthly world during the height of summer with a sort of tasting-feeling sense, we should be aware of a sulphurous taste and even of a sulphurous smell, though in an extraordinarily dilute, subtle and intimate form. What develops up there, however, under the influence of the Sun's warmth and light, is akin to the process that goes on in the human organism when cravings, wishes, emotions and so on come welling up. Anyone who has the faculty for beholding and feeling such things knows that the Nature-spirits in the heights during midsummer live in an element which is as much saturated with desire as is the desire-life that is bound up with the animal nature of man—that animal part of man wherein he, too, is sulphurised, is permeated with sulphur in a very diluted form. We see, as it were, man's lower aspect, that which is animalised in him, arched as Nature's formation above us at the height of summer, filled with the life of Nature-spirits. What we thus recognise in its sulphurous quality when it weaves and lives in human nature, we call the Ahrimanic; in it the Ahrimanic actually lives. So we can also say: when in high summer-time we turn spiritual vision towards the heights, then in the cosmic sulphurous desires the Ahrimanic is revealed to us. So if we conceive of man in relation to this whole world nexus, we must say to ourselves: the Earth takes up in winter what exists in man as his lower nature and spreads over it crystalline snow, and in so doing the Earth receives the Ahrimanic from it. When in high summer the Ahrimanic is free, it works as cosmic desires out in the wide spaces of the world and is, indeed, subject to laws which proceed from the planetary neighbours of the Earth and are effective on them. And now we see how against this Ahrimanic desire-element, against this animal desire-nature of man turned inside out, as it were, in the cosmos, an opposing force is present. The force which brings the human being into subjection through his emotions, dragging him down below the human to the animal level, and is revealed in full summer high above us—against this a counter-force is provided in the cosmos. This counter-force is seen in those remarkable products which from time to time fall on to the Earth as products of the cosmos and contain meteoric iron. If you look at a piece of meteoric iron, you have in it a remarkable witness of the iron dispersed in the cosmos. In the shooting stars which come so frequently in August and bring iron into special activity, as it were, in the cosmos, we see revealed this counter-force of Nature acting against the desire-element which by that time is out there in the cosmos. And in this cosmic iron, condensed to meteoric stones, we have the arrows which the cosmos sends out against the animal desire element which, as I have just described, is cosmically manifest.

So we can look with understanding and reverence upon the wisdom-filled guidance of the cosmos. We know, of course, that man needs this animal desire nature, precisely because in overcoming it, and not otherwise, he can develop the forces that first make him fully human. And man could not have this desire nature, this animalising element, if the same animal desire element were not a part also of the cosmos. The sulphur, then, the sulphurous Ahrimanic element is, as it were, one pole out in the cosmos, and the arrows discharged by the Cosmos through space to combat this sulphurous element are concentrated in meteoric iron—in the meteoric projectiles, so to say, of the universe.

Now man is a true microcosm, really a little world. Everything that manifests in the great world outside in gigantic and majestic phenomena such as the phenomena of meteors, manifests also within, in the inward nature of what he is himself as physical being. For this physical being is only an expression, a manifestation, of his spiritual being. And so in a certain way we bear within ourselves, starting from the animal lower nature, the sulphurous element. We must say to ourselves: this sulphurous Ahrimanic element storms through the human organism, stirs up his desire-nature, stirs up his emotions. We feel it within us; we behold it at high summer-time in the cosmic desire-covering above our heads. But we also behold how into this over-arching cosmic desire-covering there shoot the iron arrows of the meteoric phenomena, cleansing and clarifying it, acting as an opposite pole to the animal-like desire-nature. For through this shooting in of the meteoric iron arrows from the cosmos, the animal desire-covering of high summer time above us is purified. And what takes place in majesty and grandeur out there in the great cosmos, goes on continually also in us. We produce tiny iron particles in our blood, in combination with other substances, and while, on the one hand, there pulses through our blood the sulphurising process, there works against it inwardly, meteorically, as the other pole, the iron inside us, bringing about the same process as is effected outside in the cosmos by the meteoric iron. We can then so picture man's relationship to the cosmos that in the flashing meteoric element we find the cosmic counterpart of what within us is a million upon million-fold flashing forth of the meteoric element that sets us free by means of the iron in our blood, cleansing and clarifying us from the sulphurising process which is also active in the blood itself.

Thus we are inwardly a copy of the cosmos. In the cosmos this process is accomplished during the height of summer; man, because he stands within Nature as one emancipated from her in regard to time, has continually midsummer as well as the other seasons in himself, just as he has within him in the continuity of memory his former experiences. Outwardly they have vanished, but inwardly they remain. So is it too with what is present in Man as Microcosm in relation to the Macrocosm. What he thus carries in his physical body, however, he must grasp in soul and spirit, must become able to experience it within himself; he must learn to experience this meteoric shag of the blood-iron into the blood-sulphur as freedom, or initiative, as the strength of his will. Otherwise it remains an animal or vegetative process in him at the best. What precisely constitutes our becoming [a] human being in soul and spirit is that we grasp the processes which go on in us, such as this iron-sulphur process, with our soul and spirit, that we send the soul and spirit into them as an impulse. Just as when we have made an instrument and know how to handle it properly, we are able to perform something by means of it, so can we turn to the service of our will what works and lives in us as does this process of iron and sulphur, when once we know how to handle it; when, as human beings, we can handle and make use of what goes on as living processes within our body.

Let us now turn again to the cosmos and away from man. You can realise that what takes place out there in the cosmos is an earnest admonition to men. For this meteoric iron-process in the cosmos truly brings to mind our inner physical nature; this nature, however, can be placed at the service of our spiritual inner being. So now we come to the meaning which has to be ascribed to that brazen writing in the astral light:—

Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.

If we look round us at modern life, as it has developed in the course of recent centuries, we can see that the chief feature of this materialistic culture is the use of iron in the realm of earthly life. Look in any direction where our form of civilisation has flowered in recent times; it is iron that has planted in the physical world everything which has led to the culmination of this materialistic culture. We look for what it was that in so unparalleled a way has brought people together, and has laid down the paths for the various branches of materialistic culture and made them smooth; and everywhere we see it was iron and what can be developed out of it. When we speak of materialism in the life of thought it is true that the essence of materialism consists in the idea that everything is matter, and Spirit is a kind of vaporous result of the activities of matter. But the materialism of mankind in the last four centuries is shown not merely in the fact that people think materialistically; materialism is manifest also in the way we handle outer things. Out of the cultural impulses of recent times man has applied iron to this material culture, while the meteoric iron which falls from heaven is treated merely as a rarity, or as something one seeks to explain by means of a science that cannot grasp much about it. This meteoric iron, however, which falls to earth from out of the cosmos, which purifies and clarifies the animal-like life, is actually an admonition to us that we should look up from using iron materially for earthly purposes, and see what heavenly service iron performs in its meteoric aspect up above us, and, more especially, within us. For these meteoric processes within us go on all the time.

And so the first part of this warning speech, shining forth to meet us in the astral light, takes on the likeness of a word written in brazen letters, saying: O Man, thou hast put iron to thine earthly service.

Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.
Yet it will only bring thee healing,
When to thee is revealed
The lofty power of its Spirit.

It is not merely that we should look up in our thoughts from the materialistic world-conception to a spiritual world-conception, but that we should also look up from what we use in the service of material culture to the spiritual and cosmic aspects of what serves us in material form. And so precisely through these words, which have first to be unravelled like a riddle, we are directed to that Spiritual Being who lives in the universe in the revelation of meteoric phenomena, especially in what is revealed by meteoric phenomena at the height of summer. For at that time the Ahrimanic sulphurising process, which is otherwise present only within man, is there as a cosmic process, and the meteoric process is a counter-process to it; we have here the arrows which the cosmos discharges into the animalised cravings in the heights.

If one lets all this work upon the soul, one feels how truly man is connected with all that surrounds him in the world, and, within, one feels how one's very blood is permeated with soul, saturated with spirit. One feels in it this opposition between the Ahrimanic and that which purifies the Ahrimanic element, the iron in the blood; one feels the inner meteoric process. One looks up with comprehension to what is accomplished outside when the cosmic spirit-forces send the iron arrows into the animalised desire-world of the cosmos; one feels oneself entirely bound up with the cosmos and surrendered to it. Precisely in these particular phenomena, one feels entirely surrendered to the cosmos.

When one feels all this in full earnestness, then from this feeling there takes form a cosmic Imagination; one can indeed do no other than form and picture this cosmic Imagination. Just as animals have a different attitude towards outer Nature, being unable to form concepts or ideas of it, but only general impressions, whereas man forms pictures and ideas, so, when the soul has risen to exact clairvoyance, it is not possible for it to do otherwise, when it experiences such things as this—when its feeling turns inwardly towards its own meteoric process, and when looking outward it beholds in the cosmic meteor-process that rich fullness of life which is thus revealed—than to bring it all together in a comprehensive, inwardly saturated picture form, an Imagination in which is displayed how the human being, the Microcosm, and the Macrocosm are grown together. This does not mean that such an Imagination is merely built up out of fantasy; rather is it a real and true expression of a living process permeating the world and the human being; in this case, of a process that lives in the phenomena of the yearly course.

The Imagination which comes before man out of this experience is one that springs out of a living together with the natural processes of the year's course from midsummer on towards autumn, as far as the end of summer, the beginning of the autumn; And from this experience there arises, coming before the soul in living actuality, the figure of Michael. Out of what I have described to you is revealed the figure of Michael in his fight with the Dragon, with the animal nature of Man, the sulphurising process. And when one understands what is actually going on there, then the soul, which takes its own form and origin from the interweaving life forces of the cosmos, cannot but bring forth the fight of Michael with the Dragon. There appears as the outward expression of what is working out there in the cosmos in battle with the animalised desire nature, Michael himself. But he appears with a pointing sword, pointing it towards the higher nature of man. He shines forth with this pointing sword, and we picture Michael rightly when we find in his sword the iron that has been cosmically smelted and forged for this purpose. Thus there comes forth, one might say, out of the spiritual cloud-formations the figure of Michael with positive, searching and directing gaze, his eye like a guiding sign, its gaze sent outwards, never drawn back into himself; and the arm of Michael appears to us in the midst of a sparkling shower of meteor-iron, as though this were molten in cosmic desire forces and fused together again to form the flaming sword of Michael. Rightly do we picture Michael then, quite in accord with reality, when we think of his countenance as woven from the golden light of summer, with a positive gaze which is like a sign, as it were pointing outwards; like a ray of light from within which is sent actively out. We picture Michael rightly when his outstretched arm is flaming with flashing sprays of meteor iron, molten and fused together into the sword wherewith he shows humanity the way from the animal-like to man's higher nature, pointing the way from the summer season, when man most makes himself one with outer Nature, most nearly comes to a Nature-consciousness, to that other season, the time of autumn, when man, were he to continue to live united with Nature, could share only in her dying in the death she brings on herself. But it would be terrible for man, if he could only share with Nature, as autumn comes, this natural path to death, this self-destruction. When we experience Spring, then if we are really fully man, we yield ourselves to Nature in her sprouting, waxing, flourishing. If we are fully man, we blossom with each blossom, sprout with every leaf: with every seed we grow ripe ourselves. It is then that we give ourselves over to Nature's mounting, springing, sprouting life. For it is then her will to live, and we feel this impulse of life in experiencing hers. And we do well to devote ourselves to Nature at this season. But in autumn we cannot unfold this nature-consciousness in ourselves, for if we did that onesidedly we should have to share in the experience of the paralysis and death which she makes her own. Man dare not go with her in that direction; in the face of that he must rather increase his strength. Just as he must accompany living Nature in his own life, so must he set against dying Nature, against death, the Self. Nature-consciousness must be transformed into self-consciousness.

This is the great and powerful picture given us in the approach of autumn, so that from out of what happens in the cosmos we read the admonition: Nature consciousness must change in man into consciousness of self. But for this he needs the strength to overcome with his qualities of soul and spirit the inwardly death-bringing quality of animal-like Nature. For this he is given guidance when he looks out into the phenomena of the cosmos; to this he is guided by what is revealed in the figure of Michael, with his positive gaze and the flaming meteor-sword in his right hand. And Michael appears to us in that fight with the animalised desire-nature of which, also, a picture emerges from the loom of life. If we wish to paint this whole Imagination, we cannot paint it in any humanly arbitrary way; it can be painted only out of what is given by the cosmos. And the only way to picture the sulphurous element in it, rising into the heights with the elemental spirits in yellowish reddish shades, is in the figure of the Dragon, which takes shape from out of the sulphur. So that above the sulphurous Dragon, in whose burning head, as I might call it, is exhibited the desire-like process, above this Ahrimanised and sulphurised Dragon, we have Michael in the form I have described to you.

He who understands the world can describe it in Imaginations. And whosoever believes that one can paint the fight of Michael with the Dragon in any way one chooses, sins against the inner reality of the world. For the interplay of forces in the world has a definite ordering in relation to human beings. And all the great paintings and other works of art in the world have not come into existence out of arbitrary human choice. If that were so, they would scarcely have continued to appeal to man for centuries, even thousands of years. They have sprung from a real understanding of what weaves and lives out there in the cosmos, and also within the human being. And when out of the living and weaving in Nature and in man, in their mutual connection, there is created the substance of Imaginations, with all that is revealed from the mysteries of Nature, even to the colours and the way the colours gleam and shine, and the details of the forms—when all this is given artistic form, then it is that the great, genuine works of art arise, the great works that were created by the seers, that are imitated by the imitators and are decked out by the bunglers with all kinds of frippery till the real greatness that should go forth from these works, born out of the creative weaving of the cosmos, is no longer recognised. This is what gives these works of art the power to influence humanity through long periods of time. The great artistic motifs of painting and sculpture never would have become what they are had they not been created out of impulses seen to arise from the life of Nature and the life of man.

So we are able to direct our vision to what appears if Michael and the Dragon are painted in the spiritual sense of to-day (for older ways of apprehending it had to paint it according to their own knowledge); the countenance pictured in golden sun-gleam, the gaze positive, outward-looking, the sword of flame, molten and shaped anew out of the meteor-iron of the cosmos; and below, the Dragon, tormentor of human nature, the Dragon who manifests at high summertime, the sulphurous Dragon revealed in the weaving of flames rising up and at once fading again. This Dragon moving below in his own sulphurous element, taking form as the tormentor of humanity and the opponent of the higher hierarchies—this gives the necessary contrast over against the war-waging Michael, who compels the meteoric iron to his spiritual service.

Here you have an example of how the true iron passes over into art, must always pass over into art, since with abstract concepts one cannot compass the whole of reality. And this is the admonition to our times—that we should grasp just such a picture as this, for the awakening of strength, for the awakening of mankind. Therefore one would like to inscribe this picture in particular, this modernised picture of the fight of Michael with the Dragon, deep, deep into the human soul, the human heart, so that it may exert its influence in human forces of will and thought in the present time and in the future. And one can know that if a part of mankind were to take this picture in earnest, if a part of mankind were to understand how this picture takes shape from Nature's very self, and from the directive admonitions in the astral light, then to the material use of iron in the last few centuries, especially the 19th century, there would be added a spiritual element penetrated with the meaning and sense of iron. Then this picturing would kindle in man the force of soul and spirit which makes him able to take hold of the purpose of the meteoric iron within him, the iron that shoots into his blood, warring against sulphur. We must learn not to let this process go on in the subconsciousness, merely shaping the lower nature of Man; we must learn to place this process, this iron process in human blood, in the service of the soul-and-spiritual. That it is, that Michael wills in us.

This is what calls on us from the astral light—to celebrate worthily once more the Michael Festival when autumn is beginning. When now we speak of this Michael Festival which should take its place with the Easter and Christmas festivals and that of St. John, it must truly not be understood as meaning that here or there one celebrates a festival in an external way; the point is that we can celebrate such a festival only when we know how to link it with something really significant. The festival of Christmas has not arisen through any arbitrary convenient resolve, but because it is linked with the birth of Christ Jesus; the Easter Festival is linked with the Mystery of Golgotha; and these are very important events in the historical life of mankind. The Michael Festival must be linked with a great and sustaining inner experience of man, with that inner force which summons him to develop self-consciousness out of Nature-consciousness through the strength of his thoughts, the strength of his will, so that he may be able to master the meteoric iron process in his blood, the opponent of the sulphurising process.

To be sure, sulphur and iron have flowed in human blood ever since there was a human race. What takes its course there between sulphur and iron determines the unconscious nature of man. It must be lifted into consciousness. We must learn to know this process as the expression of the inner conflict of Michael with the Dragon; we must learn to raise this process into consciousness. Something has then come about to which the Michael Festival may be linked. But it must first be there, be fully understood, inwardly, deeply understood. Then it will be possible to celebrate the Michael Festival in the way a festival drawn from the cosmos can be celebrated by men. Then we shall have the knowledge which is really able to see something in iron other than what the chemist of to-day or the mechanic sees in it. Then we shall have what teaches us how to take in hand the iron in our own organism, in the inner part of our human nature. Then we shall have the majestic picture of Michael in battle with the sulphurous Dragon, of Michael with the flaming sword of iron, as an inspiring impulse to what man must become, if he is to develop the forces of his evolution for progress and not for decline.

This it is, which shows itself to us as an admonition from the spiritual world in the brazen letters that grow into enigmatic words but that can be understood precisely out of the conditions of our present time:—

O Man,
Thou mouldest it to thy service,
Thou revealest it according to the value of its substance
In many of thy works.
Yet it will only bring thee healing,
When to thee is revealed
The lofty power of its Spirit.

That is Iron. Let us learn to know iron, and equally all other substances, not merely in terms of material value; let us learn to know them in their majestic spirit power! Then there will be human progress once again, progress for the Earth; and that is what we must will, if we want to be man in the true sense of the word.

Report on the 14th General Assembly of the German Goethe Society

This year's Goethe Assembly took place on June 4 in the presence of the Grand Duke, the Hereditary Grand Duke and the Hereditary Grand Duchess and an impressive crowd. The following distinguished and well-known friends were present from Berlin: Professors Erich Schmidt and Carl Frenzel, bookseller Wilhelm Hertz, banker Meier-Cohn, Reichstag deputy Alexander Meyer, Ernst von Wildenbruch, Dr. Paetow as representative of the "Rundschau", Dr. Osborn and others. From Frankfurt a.M. were present: Professor Veit Valentin and the sculptor Rumpf. The University of Jena was represented by the curator Eggeling and Professor Michels. Friedrich Kluge came from Freiburg i. Br. Apart from Lewinsky, we noted the eternally young Carl Sonntag and Edward von Darmstadt among the important foreign stage artists. Privy Court Councillor Dr. Karl Ruland opened the meeting with a. He referred to the commemorative publication of the Goethe-Gesellschaft, which will be published at Christmas under the editorship of Bernhard Suphans and Erich Schmidt and on which Dr. Karl Schüddekopf (Weimar) and Dr. Walzel (Bern) are currently working. It will deal with Goethe's relationship to the Romantics and will gain particular interest through the publication of previously unknown or little-noticed letters by Schlegel, Arnim, Zacharias Werner and others. The Chairman also noted that a new translation of the first part of Goethe's Faust into English had recently been published by Mr. E. Webb and that several copies had been made available to members of the Society (published by Longmans Green & Co, 39 Paternoster Row, London). Mr. Ruland then drew attention to a new bust of Goethe from the studio of the well-known sculptor Rumpf in Frankfurt am Main, which was unveiled to the public for the first time today and which greeted the audience promisingly from the living green of the leafy plants behind the speaker's platform. The work, which was rightly admired by those present, depicts the young Goethe around the time he came to Weimar (1775).

Then Professor Dr. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf from the University of Berlin took to the stage and gave a perfectly formed lecture on Goethe's "Pandora" that was deeply thought-provoking. This last testimony to Goethe's strict classical style, the speaker began, had already been the subject of much in-depth research, but it had never become popular. Most of the readers today would probably still agree with Frau von Stein, who had said that only some parts were enjoyable. Goethe also admitted this in an amiable manner. But even if we take offense at the antique rhythm imposed on our language, we must not give up the attempt to get closer and closer to the core of the poetry. Whether Goethe portrays himself in Epimetheus, whether Frau von Levetzow's daughter and Minna Herzlieb are reflected in the daughters of Epimetheus, as is claimed, is of psychological value, but completely irrelevant to understanding the artistic organism. In the following summary, Redner points out some mysteries that seem unsolvable, such as the origin of Prometheus' son, Phileros, who symbolizes the impulse to higher things, to love. The love relationship between Phileros and Epimeleia, on whose realization Pamino and Pamina do not seem to have remained without influence, has been happily transformed by Goethe from the symbolic into the purely human. The scheme of the continuation of the poem does little to clarify this relationship; in any case, Pandora should appear with the olive branch, the symbol of peace, she herself as the representative of beauty. Art and science, represented by Phileros and Epimeleia, should be seen as the mediators between heaven and earth. Prometheus, reconciled, will wear the oil wreath and rejoice in his creations; and Elpore's appearance at the end inspires courage and hope. After the first step towards human culture through fire, the way seems to be paved for art and science. But Pandora's Ark is dark, incomprehensible. Could art and science suddenly fall into people's laps from heaven? That was a completely alien idea to Goethe, for man could only rise through his own work. In order to bring order and clarity to these feelings that arise through reading, one must firstly look at the poet's objective model, the mythological precipitation of the fable, and secondly consider the circumstances of the time and the mood of mind that influenced the poet in his work. Goethe was probably familiar with Hesiod's tradition, even if he deviated from it. He was probably also familiar with Plato's fable (Protagoras) about Prometheus' theft by fire, through which man becomes capable of existence, even if he initially remains raw. Aidos and Dike as goddesses are sent down, as are timidity and a sense of justice. Plato's school was focused on Eros, i.e. man's longing for infinity, the return of Pandora stimulates people to work, that is the main idea. On the other hand, it is important to remember how things looked in Weimar and in Goethe's soul after the Peace of Tilsit (1807). Anna Amalia was dead and the glorification of the prelude was dedicated to her: "To the opening of the Weimar Theater on 19 September 1807." Deep thoughts occupied the poet on November 19 in Jena, as the diaries reveal; he was studying ancient philosophy at the time, and the olive tree in Prometheus' garden also blossomed for him. Pandora points to the goods that cannot be lost: Freedom and ideals. Plato had founded his academy above a ruined state; the Ark of Pandora led up from the ruins of the German Empire. But who is Pandora? Epimetheus possessed her; he must therefore have known her. She is beauty in a thousand forms and the revelation of form to ennoble content. 'Iδ'εα is the best explanation of what form means; think of Schiller's "Ideals", and the combination of Phileros and Epimeleia demonstrates the maturity of humanity for art and science. Have our people, whose character traits also include the formless, the unbound, understood this admonition? What has not yet been achieved must bring forth the activity of future generations, the fire of the children of Titan must be preserved on the altar of beauty.

In the foregoing, it has only been possible to give a very brief sketch of the content of the important lecture, which will appear in the next volume of the Goethe Yearbook.

From the proceedings that followed the lecture, we should first mention the extremely witty cash report by the Society's treasurer, Kommerzienrat Dr. Moritz. The speaker emphasized that in the past year the Society had unfortunately not been able to fill the gaps in its membership caused by the natural course of events and various personal circumstances. Compared to the corresponding number of members in 1896, a loss of around 4o members was recorded in the past financial year 1897. However, given the solidity of the publications published each year alongside the yearbook, which could only have a stimulating effect, a renewed upswing was to be hoped for. On December 31, 1897, the Society consisted of 2635 members. There were no significant changes in the Society's income and expenditure compared to the previous year. - On the other hand, the construction of the building for the archive gave rise to extraordinary expenses (20,000 M.), which, however, were covered by ordinary income, except for a small remainder, without drawing on the reserve fund of around 66,000 M. As already mentioned, the report was interspersed with all kinds of delicious flowers of delightful humor. The speaker showed particular affection for the female members, who used to make up 23 percent of all members, but now only 15 percent. Among other things, the presentation of the reasons why some former members have recently decided to leave the Society was a source of great amusement. Before the Treasurer read out an authentic letter from these circles, no one would have dreamed that the pressure on the "ailing agricultural sector" could also have reduced the number of members. Mr. Redner concluded with a witty application of Goethe's words about "cold music, which is only able to capture the heart and mind five hours after listening to it". He hoped that his arguments would have a similar effect on the audience. Loud applause followed the delicious interlude by the witty speaker.

Then Privy Councillor Dr. B. Supban announced that not only was the library, which now amounted to more than 41,000 volumes, growing at a pleasing rate, but that the collection of manuscripts in particular had recently received very significant donations of great value. Thus, on June 3, the son of the late poet Viktor von Scheffel had presented the Grand Duke with the original manuscripts of "Trompeter von Säckingen", "Ekkehard", "Gaudeamus", "Juniperus" and the "Bergpsalmen" (some with illustrations), all "wonderfully composed". The Hereditary Grand Duchess had donated valuable and extensive original manuscripts of the former contributors to the "Tübingen-Stuttgarter Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände", which was edited by the poet Hauff's brother, to the Goethe-Schiller Archive. Dr. Suphan went on to explain how unjustified the occasional complaints about the slow progress in printing the edition of Goethe's works were. On the other hand, he had to declare loudly and publicly that work was being done honestly, but that due to the nature of the matter, some things could only progress slowly, and he gave a few examples, not lacking in humor, of how often the strength of the staff was put to the test by answering countless inquiries of all kinds. Then Dr. Suphan, referring to an essay by Herman Grimm on "The Future of the Weimar Goethe-Schiller Archive", which appeared in the last issue of the "Deutsche Rundschau" and was well worth reading, announced that a new work, a monumental Goethe-Schiller dictionary, was to be tackled soon. Preliminary work had already been done, such as a program by Otto Hoffmann in Steglitz on Herder's vocabulary, etc. Scholars of the first rank had promised their cooperation, and only the entire German people could participate. A giant sample postcard made by Dr. Suphan with a scheme for filling in materials for the dictionary on the open side caused much amusement. Finally, Privy Councillor Dr. Ruland, the director of the local museum, reported on the Goethe National Museum, where work was also continuing. Some time ago, Professor Dr. Furtwängler in Munich had carefully examined the cut stones collected by Goethe, and as a result of this examination some of the existing errors had to be corrected. The results of this examination would soon be made available to a wider audience through printing. Of the gifts recently received by the museum, the bust of the old Goethe from the studio of Professor Eberlein in Berlin, a gift from the Grand Duke, is to be kept in the garden room of the Goethe House in the future. Furthermore, a bust of Duchess Anna Amalia made of Fürstenburg pottery and a letter from Goethe to Count Gneisenau dated ı2 July 1829 should also be mentioned. Dr. Ruland concluded his remarks with the wish that the friendly attitude of all friends and patrons of the Society may continue to be preserved for the museum in the future.

This was followed by a break of several hours, part of which was used to view the collection, and in the afternoon the banquet took place, which was spiced up by various witty speeches and consumed in the most comfortable atmosphere. Alexander Meyer's toast to the ladies was particularly witty, indeed of sparkling humor, in which the speaker expressed in an amiable, mischievous manner the personal benefit he had derived from the morning's festive lecture. In the evening, Joseph Lewinsky's recital of Schiller's and Goethe's ballads met with grateful applause in the packed court theater. After the theater there was a routine with the Hereditary Grand Duchess; only many of the guests woke up the next morning in the well-known Osteria near the court theater with singing and cheerful conversation.

Dear attendees! At the kind instigation of Baron Rosenkrantz, a number of questions have been put by our friends, which are now to be answered within the framework of this event.

Before that, however, since the request has been expressed so frequently and I have also asked some friends personally, I would like to ask those artists present here and a few others who have never seen the wooden group, which is still in progress, to come to the studio tomorrow at 9 a.m. This group will then be shown. But I ask you to take this matter very seriously and I really ask only those to come who have never seen the group before.

Now a number of questions have been handed to me.

Question: If the content of a work of art is the most important thing, why can't we express it in accordance with the Greek ideal?

Dr. Steiner: The question is not quite clear. I would like to think that it alludes to what I have often said about Goethe's view of art, which was expressed when Goethe, upon arriving in Italy, wrote to his friends in Weimar: When I look at these Greek works of art, I believe that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am trying to grasp. I would just like to note that if it is possible for a person to truly find a way to experience and relive the creative forces of nature, as I have indicated on various occasions when discussing this building, then we do not actually become imitators of nature, but we do create with our materials in the same way that nature creates. We need only remember that, in the full perception of man, the aim should not be to imitate nature, because whatever we encounter in nature, whether in the form of landscape or anything else, is always done more perfectly by nature than even the most accomplished artist can achieve. Art is only justified if, in the Goethean sense, it does not imitate nature, but continues nature's work from the same forces that nature uses to create. And then, if we create in this way, we can recreate nature just as the Greeks did. We must only be clear about the fact that humanity does not go through various stages of development in vain, just as the individual human being does not either, but that our present humanity has different developmental impulses from those of the people of the Greek age. What the Greeks had in common with nature in their art is there for us in a different form, and if we accept and understand this metamorphosis of the whole coexistence of man with nature, then we can definitely say that what we create is just as “recreated according to the laws of nature” as the Greek works of art are.

Question: If we take beautiful colors from nature, why shouldn't we be able to take beautiful forms from nature?

Dr. Steiner: I would not be able to see that either. But I ask you to consider again how I repeatedly spoke about colors in connection with this building and how I spoke about forms in my lecture on art. It is not a matter of imitating the inartistic, which is characteristic of an inartistic present time, but of not imitating nature's colors, but of experiencing them. We do, after all, inwardly experience color and then create from the world of color. Likewise, we can, of course, also experience form from within, and then we will create forms for ourselves as they also appear in nature. But we must bear in mind that when we draw, we are actually demanding not to imitate nature's forms, but to counterfeit them. We have to draw the surfaces.

It is indeed the case in nature itself that the horizontal line, when we draw it, is a fake – I said a lie a few days ago. What can be seen is the blue sky, the green sea, and the form is the result of the color. This is already in nature, and when we work artistically out of color, the form arises just as the form arises in nature itself.

Question: Should color be used in painting from a moral point of view?

Dr. Steiner: If I understand the question correctly, it is asked whether one should try to translate a moral intention into colour or even into colour harmony if one has a moral intention.

I believe that anyone who tries to embody human and moral thoughts in colour in this way actually creates in an unartistic way. Only that which can be experienced as spiritual in the world of color can be embodied in color. To the same extent that one has the moral intention of artistically forming what has been morally conceived, one falls back on symbolizing, and allegorizing is always inartistic.

To illustrate what I actually mean, I will say the following: I was once obliged to reconstruct the forms of the Kabirs, the Samothracean gods, the Samothracean mysteries, for the purpose of a Faust performance here. They had to be shown while the Goethean text was being spoken. I believe that I was able to construct these Kabirs out of spiritual contemplation. Then – and I say this not out of immodesty but because it is a fact that should be communicated – then it occurred to one of our members to have these Kabirs, who fell, as well and they should be photographed. Now, the thought of photographing a three-dimensional work is so repulsive to me that I actually want to run away from every photograph of a sculpture, because what is really artistically created is created out of the spiritually experienced feeling for material, and because it is impossible to directly experience what is conceived in spatial forms in the form of a surface. Therefore, at the time, I preferred to do it again in black and white, because I wanted to take this wish into account, and then you could photograph it.

Anyone who thinks that moral intentions can be realized in painting is thinking that you can take any content, I mean a novella, and then pour it into any material. That is not true. It is artistically untrue. In a material, any artistic thing can only be formed in one way.

Question: Does this mean that in the future sculpture should express inner feeling and painting inner wisdom?

Dr. Steiner: I will allow myself to answer this question now because it belongs together with another question, in connection with the other question.

Question: Would art under the influence of anthroposophical teachings not tend to become monotonous, which would not be interesting? Is there not a danger that art would bear an anthroposophical stamp, as if from a particular school of painting? Dr. Steiner: If one grasps what can really arise out of anthroposophical thinking as art, grasps it correctly, then I think the question will not arise at all, and one will not be led to believe that anthroposophy could ever aspire to influence art through anthroposophical teachings. To think in any other way than that the artistic can arise out of the experience of the spirit flowing in the material, out of living together with the material, cannot actually be assumed from an anthroposophical attitude.

In a somewhat primitive way, many anthroposophists understand this to mean, for example, that they somehow paint what they have been given in the teaching of the Rosicrucians on a blackboard, and then one encounters these images in all the individual branches. There is inner feeling, inwardly intended, outwardly recorded. I usually help myself with regard to such “artistic attempts” by not looking at them in the respective branches, because these are admittedly primitive and not very far-reaching, but they are precisely wrong attempts to transfer what can be represented in the spirit, which now becomes word, which becomes teaching, into some artistic aspect. That is nonsense. You cannot carry what is teaching into the work of art.

But what real anthroposophy is, whether you approach it through the teachings or through art, leads to the inner experience of something far more original than anthroposophical teaching and anthroposophical art is, of something that lies further back in human life. If, on the one hand, artistic forms are created that have nothing at all to do with the anthroposophical teachings, and if, on the other hand, one focuses on the word, on the thought, then, from the same foundations, one creates contexts of ideas. Both are branches that come from the same root. But you cannot take one branch and stick it into the other.

In any case, I cannot understand how a life that has developed out of such art could possibly become monotonous, because – and I am speaking only illustratively now – I can assure you that if I had to build another one after this one is finished, it would be completely different, it would look completely different. I would never be able to build this structure again in a monotonous way; and I would build a third one differently again – it will certainly not come to that in this incarnation. But I feel, especially in what underlies the anthroposophical as the living, that in art, beyond everything monotonous, it comes to life. I can tell you, one always only wishes to comply with what one can do, with what presents itself to the soul, and not at all in a monotonous way, but to show in great variety what one would like to show.

The questions that were asked in English have now been answered, and since Mrs. Mackenzie has promised to tell us about some of her intentions, I believe that we may use the time we still have left to listen to Mrs. Mackenzie about her intentions.

Mrs. Mackenzie: (remarks in English not written down)

Dr. Steiner: I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie and ask Baron Walleen to translate her words into German.

Baron Walleen: (translation:) Dr. Steiner has given his consent to hold a seminar for teachers here around Christmas time. Mrs. Mackenzie has taken on the responsibility of finding suitable individuals in England and America who could be accepted as students in these seminars, and Mrs. Mackenzie hopes that if such a beginning is made, it will be possible to gradually develop a teacher training seminar for the whole world here. The matter is being handled quite informally in order to gain time, so that when she returns to England, Mrs. Mackenzie will immediately try to make contact with such personalities as she finds suitable to attend this course. It would be important to know early on, in October, which personalities and how many can and will come here. Of course, Dr. Steiner himself will lead the course.

Dr. Steiner: I would just like to say this very briefly in response to Mrs. Mackenzie's words: if this extraordinarily satisfying plan can be realized, everything should be done here to bring satisfaction to those who are making such efforts to expand the effectiveness of the Goetheanum in this important area. Thank you very much on behalf of our cause and the promise that all efforts will be made here to implement your intentions in a dignified manner!

Delegates' conference ¹ in preparation for the founding of the International Anthroposophical Society

Stuttgart, September 13-17, 1923

Invitation in No. 6 of the “Mitteilungen, herausgegeben vom Vorstand der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft in Deutschland”, Stuttgart, July 1923

To the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany

We hereby invite all members of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, in particular the members of the extended board and the trusted representatives, to a general meeting to be held in Stuttgart between September 10 and 15 of this year. We are not yet able to present you with a detailed program for this conference, but we have the great pleasure of informing you that Dr. Steiner has accepted an invitation to give a series of lectures from September 12 to 15.

Applications for this main conference can already be sent to the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, Stuttgart, Champignystraße 17.

Dear Friends!

Since the delegates' meeting, Dr. Steiner has spoken in various places, for example at the two general meetings of the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland, about the fact that the Anthroposophical Society must set itself a new task that will also gain it the respect of the outside world. The question is most forcefully raised in the eight lectures he gave in Dornach from June 10 to 17. In this issue of the “Mitteilungen” we are bringing a summary report of these lectures and would like to draw particular attention to the passage at the end: “How to give the Anthroposophical Society a certain character should be discussed everywhere.”

Such discussions have been the focus of many circles since then, and what we have been able to learn from the letters we have received has been extremely valuable to us, and we are very grateful for them. Now it will certainly move hearts to an even greater extent, just as it has here in Stuttgart, and we are confident that we will succeed in gathering the fruits of this summer's work from all sides at the main conference, so that we can then approach the work of the coming winter, which will certainly be particularly difficult, from the new perspective.

We see the necessity of resuming public work as quickly as possible with powerful lectures on the essence of anthroposophy in all major centers. We have a new style in mind for such lectures, a new language, so to speak. The students of anthroposophy, who have been drawing on the living spirit for so long, should present themselves in such a way that no one can say that it is a copy of what Dr. Steiner has said or written. We have to throw a lot of our own power of persuasion into the balance to prove the power of anthroposophy on living human beings.

To appear in this way, each individual needs a society behind them, whose organization ensures uniformity of approach. Already today, the fruitful seeds of a natural structure are emerging spontaneously in different places. We hear, for example, from our friends in central Germany that they hold quarterly meetings so that a number of working groups can exchange experiences and report to each other through their representatives. The friends on the Rhine have achieved the same, despite the endless complications caused by the occupation. Here in Stuttgart, we can look back with great satisfaction on the meetings that have taken place every four weeks, with friends from all the surrounding towns coming here to work together.

If we consciously develop the tendencies that are present here, we will be able to achieve what we cannot achieve through correspondence or sending printed material. We have written and received countless letters at the Anthroposophical Society's office and can confidently say that, aside from purely “bureaucratic” matters, which are justified and necessary in their place, the best that we have to say and give each other cannot be expressed. But if we imagine that we are creating about six to eight centers throughout Germany that can be regularly reached by all members living in a larger district, then perhaps six to eight letters are enough to achieve regular and rapid communication with all friends. Travel would also become more feasible if mutual visits and, in particular, the participation of the local board were possible at such gatherings in the larger districts.

The main conference will be able to deal with such questions. Furthermore, we want to establish the extended board and the body of trusted individuals; and these matters will in turn point to the internal work of the individual working groups. For example, the important question of an introduction to anthroposophy should be mentioned: “We have to work our way through to the individual guidelines, which will then work as the self-evident.” This is how it says at the end of the seventh of the Dornach lectures.

Overcoming the “three points”, which in their fundamental nature are reminiscent of older occult societies, is perhaps the greatest task that the Dornach lectures present to us. We hope to be able to present you with a draft in the near future that is intended to emphasize three guidelines: 1. what those who approach from outside can see as the purpose of the society, 2. what the people united in the society want to set themselves as a task, 3. what the society wants to achieve in all areas of life.

If we can summon up the right self-reflection for what has led each of us to anthroposophy, then we will also find the right words that can be heard by the “homeless souls”.

Time is short and the tasks are great.

With warm regards,

The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany 1. A.: Dr.-Ing. Carl Unger. Dr. Walter Johannes Stein.

Circular letter from the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany to the working groups in Germany and Austria and to the trusted representatives:

Stuttgart, July 31, 1923

Champignystraße 17

Dear Friends,

Today we can give you more details about the main conference in September, to which you were invited in the June issue of the “Mitteilungen” (No. 6), although the program cannot yet be given its final form.

With regard to the date, there has been a slight postponement in that the conference will not take place between September 10 and 15, but from Thursday, September 13 to Monday, September 17, 1923. The conference is planned in such a way that the extended board, the trusted individuals, and the working group leaders will meet and deliberate from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. (based on special announcements to the participants).

The main lectures, in particular those by local co-workers, are planned for the afternoons from 4 to 6 o'clock. These will be followed by discussions.

In the evenings, lectures will be given by Dr. Steiner and possibly by other speakers, starting at 8 o'clock.

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The following topics will be discussed during the morning and afternoon sessions:

I. The Anthroposophical Society and its spiritual task internally and externally. The following topics are planned:

1. Confidential organization, extended board, etc.
2. Regional associations of working groups
3. Lecture system
4. “Introductory courses”
5. Lecture transcripts
6. Membership admission
7. Financial matters.

II. Combating opponents.

III. Formation of anthroposophical societies in individual countries and founding of the international society in Dornach.

IV. Rebuilding the Goetheanum.

We request that working groups register their reports (especially on I and II) and any presentations by September 1 at the latest, so that they can be taken into account when finalizing the agenda. We also request that any other requests regarding the program be communicated to us as soon as possible. Anthroposophical Society in Germany The Executive Council:

Dr. Carl Unger.
Dr. W.J. Stein

To the representatives of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany!

Dear Friends!

We hereby invite you to a meeting of representatives that will precede our conference. On Thursday, September 13, 1923, at 10 a.m., we want to meet at the Gustav-Siegle-Haus in Stuttgart to discuss the goal of the conference. Only if the guiding idea is nurtured and supported by all the trusted representatives at this meeting will we succeed in holding a conference in which social consciousness is stirred. In the future, the board and extended board, together with the trusted figures, will have a lot to actively shape.

At this preliminary meeting, we plan to first constitute the two bodies of the extended board and the trusted figures. Each of these two bodies must see itself as a body and become aware of its task.

To create an awareness of the Society, it is important that the extended board members, who are spread throughout Germany, feel that they are fully acting representatives of their body and also express this to the outside world. There should be an awareness that the working groups (branches) are divisions of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, and that they are responsible for the inner work. They should not appear in public. All public events should be organized by individual members of the extended board on behalf of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. Thus, the Society is representatively represented to the outside world by the board and extended board.

The trusted representatives accept the members. In doing so, they also develop an external effect. The person is accepted into the Anthroposophical Society (initially not into any branch). The Executive Council carries out the admission, and the person of trust proposes by signing the application for admission. So every member initially becomes a free-standing member, i.e. a member of the Society. Only then can they become a member of a branch, i.e. a member of an esoterically working group. This is just an example to show the nature of the person of trust's activity.

It is planned to have every membership card countersigned in Dornach (this suggestion comes from Dr. Steiner), so that ultimately every single member will feel that they are a member of the international society, which will have its center in Dornach. However, this will not be decided until the international society's conference at Christmas.

As you can see, it is important to prepare the national societies for this international merger. But these organizational matters, important though they are, will be of secondary importance. The most important goal of our conference is the discussion of the Society's goal and the revision of the three guiding principles contained in the draft principles.¹

These three guiding principles still contain some of the sectarianism of the Theosophical Society and are therefore not appropriate as guiding principles for a true world movement. If our Society is to expand in a way that is appropriate to its present task, then no one should be required to profess belief in the guiding principles. Instead, any person who has an interest in the existence of a Society that is legitimately seeking paths to the supersensible worlds in order to enrich life and its practical individual aspects through supersensible knowledge should be able to become a member. But there are many more people who want something like this than there are members of our society, and such a reorganization of society would therefore result in a very extraordinary expansion of it. In this expansion, however, everything will depend on the trust leaders' knowledge of human nature and on the help they receive from the entire membership. In the future, all kinds of sectarian measures for admitting members, such as demanding that they complete introductory courses, read certain books, etc., will have to be eliminated, and everything will depend on the knowledge of human nature. The trusted personalities will have to learn to seek and find people who belong to us by nature, not those who have belonged to a doctrine and now profess it. It will be necessary to overcome this tendency to develop the vestiges of a religious belief.

We will have to discuss all this and much more that the friends themselves will want to accomplish. But we hope that such a preliminary discussion can create a unity and warmth that will give the course of the whole conference anthroposophical warmth and youthful momentum.

Kind regards
I.A.: Dr. Walter Johannes Stein

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• 1. From Rudolf Steiner's announcement of his journey to this conference after his lecture in Dornach on September 10 and the documents reproduced below, it is clear that this conference was understood as a “delegates' conference”.
• 1. See references below.

Today I would like to follow up on the things I discussed a fortnight ago. In the near future, we may also have the opportunity to talk about our experiences in Amsterdam. But today I would like to talk about some specific things that reach into our physical plane – something we already started the other day.

I have often emphasized that the events that take place in our physical world are nothing more than a kind of shadow reflection of what is happening on the higher planes. It is clear to the occultist that he can only understand the events in the physical world if he knows what is happening on the supersensible planes. To the occultist who has insight into the higher planes, it appears as if people are pulled by threads that emanate from the higher planes. This could seem to be an infringement of human freedom. But today I would like to show that this is not the case. Some examples may show us how the higher planes affect us.

First of all, I must refer back to something I have already said earlier: that in principle there is no absolute good and absolute evil. Evil is only a kind of “displaced” good. If something has happened, let us say in the lunar epoch of development that preceded our epoch, and part of it has been transmitted into our development, then it appears as out of place in the present time. It was good during the lunar epoch, but it appears evil to us during the earthly epoch. During the lunar epoch, someone might have had the task of organizing the instinctual urges in a harmonious way; but this activity was completed when the lunar epoch ended. The task of the earthly epoch now consists in controlling these urges again from the level of the manas. If someone today were to live out their urges as the Pitri were forced to live them, they would be an evil person in our epoch, whereas in the lunar epoch he would have been a wise man.

People do not usually think about what events such as the appearance of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim religion, meant in the sixth and beginning of the seventh century.

One must imagine that at first Christianity endeavored to grow into the various other forms of religion. At first we see only a small Jewish community in Palestine; it has remained quite small. The Folk-souls do not easily allow a principle such as that contained in Christian teaching to be imposed on them. The Apostle Paul found the way to the Gentiles by first leaving the thoughts of the Gentiles as he found them and then using the pagan religious forms to infuse the Christian essence into them. In the southern regions of Europe, the Mithras service was cultivated; it was similar to today's Sacrifice of the Mass. The pagans there accepted Christianity because they were allowed to keep the Mithras festival that had become dear to them. It was similar with the Germanic peoples with the festival that became a Christian symbol as Christmas. Their sacred ancestors were accepted as Christian saints. In this way, Christianity grew into ever new areas and among new tribes. It was the adaptability of Christianity that made this possible. The Christian religion expanded more and more; but because of this multiformity, it also needed a powerful central point: that is the Roman papacy. All the damage that was later caused by Christianity is linked to this world-historical mission of the papacy.

The Semitic peoples had to be handled differently. Mohammed did that. He formulated the first great doctrine when he said: All gods but the One are no gods. Only the one I teach you is the only God. This doctrine can only be understood as an opposition to Christianity. From the very beginning, Christianity's task in conquering the physical plane was to work its way into the human personality; it does not build on old forces, but seeks to work through manas.

We see that in Mohammedanism there is no conscious attempt to take up the old spiritual forms of paganism, but that the right way to conquer the physical plane is to be found only through physical science. We see how this physical science takes hold of the art of healing, which originated in Arabia and later spread to other countries. The Arabian doctors only started from the physical plane, unlike the healers of the ancient Egyptians, the Druids and even the ancient Germanic tribes. All of them had come to their healing profession by developing their psychic powers through asceticism and other exercises. Today we still see something similar in the practices and processes of shamanism, only that these have degenerated today. So psychic powers were developed in these early healers. Muhammad introduced the art of healing that takes its remedies only from the physical plane itself. This art of healing was developed where one did not want to know about spiritual beings, but only about a single God. Alchemy and astrology in the old sense were abolished and made into new sciences: astronomy, mathematics and so on. These later became the sciences of the Occident. The Arabs who came to Spain, we see men educated in the physical sciences, especially mathematicians. The true followers of this school said: We respectfully revere what lives in plants, animals, etc., but man should not imitate in an amateurish way what only God is called to create. Therefore, we find only arabesques in Moorish art, forms that are not even plant-like, but are purely the product of the imagination.

The Greek power was superseded by Rome, but Greek education was passed on to the Romans. The Arabs received what they have from Muhammad. Muhammad introduced science, which is only permeated with laws of the physical plane. The Christian monks were inspired by the Moors. Although the Moors were beaten back through political power, monotheism, which brings with it a deepening of physical science, came to Europe through the Moors and led to a purification of Christianity from all paganism.

Through Christianity, the emotional life of man was led up to Kama-Manas. Through Mohammedanism, the intellect, the spirit, was led down from the spiritual life to the abstract comprehension of the purely physical laws. This physical science had to develop through various stages to reach the level it now occupies. It had to go through the science of the Vedic priests and all the following stages to reach the achievements of our present time. Some of this had already been achieved by the Atlanteans, albeit through psychic powers. Since the Atlantean times, this development towards physical laws has been in preparation.

The Chinese are a remnant of the Atlantean Mongol race. When we hear the word Tao in Chinese, it is something difficult for us to understand. The Mongols of that time had developed a form of monotheism that went as far as the psychic tangibility, as far as the feeling of the spiritual. When the old Chinese, the old Mongols, pronounced the word Tao, they felt it when they pronounced it. Tao is not “the way”, as it is usually translated, it is the fundamental power by which the Atlanteans could still transform plants, by which they could set their remarkable airships in motion. This basic power, also called “Vril”, was used everywhere by the Atlanteans, and they called it their god. They felt this power within themselves; it was “the way and the goal” for them. Therefore, every Mongolian considered himself to be an instrument in the hands of the great Vril power.

This monotheism of the Atlanteans remained with those races that survived the great flood. From this form of religion, which was still spiritual, the fifth root race emerged. These old spiritual forms of religion, the worship of a unified God, gradually degenerated into polytheism. Monotheism only remained among the most highly developed priests. At the beginning of Christianity, the monks behaved cunningly: they said that Baldur had become a human being in Palestine. In the early centuries, one would have found Christianity colorfully mixed with paganism, even in Arian Christianity. This development took place at the same time as a particularly vivid glimmering of religious feeling in the old Mongolian races was being induced by highly developed shamans. We see, as a reaction to polytheism, on the one hand, the emergence of a new unified religion in Arabia through Mohammed. On the other hand, we see, somewhat earlier, an initiated shaman rising up in his Tao consciousness, taking revenge on those who had fallen away from the old monotheistic idea of God. Attila was called “The Scourge of God.” We see the princes he deposed living in splendor and pomp all around his kingdom, but he, the shaman, lived in the greatest simplicity. It is said of him that his eyes glowed and the earth trembled when he raised his sword. This great initiate would have been fully justified in the Atlantean era; in our time, he would look like a criminal. The same power that is an expression of the divine fire in its time appears as divine wrath in another period. Why does this happen? It is necessary in order to make further development possible. If development is to be continue, viewed from a higher plane, the individual threads must once again intertwine harmoniously.

We had also spoken of the Druid priests who taught the people through fairy tales and myths. They were healers, priests and astrologers at the same time. They possessed inspired knowledge. When the Celtic element was replaced by the Germanic tribes, the belief in the old form of inspiration also receded. The conquest of the physical plane was entrusted to man; he became a warrior. The intuitive and productive power comes to us in the feminine. The woman became a priestess, who was at the same time a healer, for example the Weleda. All healing arts were in the hands of women at that time; the man was pushed out onto the outer, physical plane. We still encounter this in the time of the Merovingians and Carolingians. It was only through the science learned by the monks from the Moors that the spiritual element was increasingly replaced. And from the 16th to the 19th century, the material way of thinking increased more and more. The psychic healers gave way; they were discredited and despised as magicians or witches. The loss of the ability to work with psychic means of healing is connected with this; healing in this way is no longer as effective. Paracelsus still possessed these abilities completely.

This is connected with the transition of the leadership of humanity from a Dhyan Chohan of a higher kind to another Dhyan Chohan. The Christian esoteric calls the healing Dhyan Chohan “Saint Michael”, which is the Archangel who guides the psychic idealism of man. Man only becomes free by realizing that everything that happens on the physical plane is caused by higher forces. He must enter into a relationship of discipleship with the Archangel Michael.

Two entities played a role in the Old Testament: the leading spirit is harmonious. Beelzebub, also a Dhyan Chohan, is disharmonious. He is the leader of all disharmony on the physical plane. He must be understood in order to know why one form can have a destructive effect on another. Since the 16th century, the hosts of Beelzebub have gained the upper hand over the hosts of Michael. Mammon is the god of obstacles, which holds man back from pursuing his straight path. It would be out of place if this were to continue into the next century.

All physical events are the shadows of supersensible events. The battle between spiritual forces and materialism is a reflection of the battle between the hosts of Beelzebub and Mammon against Michael. This battle first had to be fought on the higher planes; it was decided there thirty years ago in favor of Michael, and the present battle here on the physical plane is a reflection of it. The battle above has been decided, but for the individual human being the battle has not yet been fought. If the people today are not up to it, we must all perish and new people would have to come. With this the path is shown, the point at which the individual human being must step in today.

This book is the transcript of a shorthand report of nine lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in the early part of 1924, about a year before he died. Although his audience consisted very largely of people who had been studying for many years the spiritual science which is Steiner's legacy to the world (and which he also called Anthroposophie), he himself described the course as an ‘Introduction’. The German title of the book is Anthroposophie: eine Einführung in die Anthroposophische Weltanschauung. ‘We will begin again,’ he observed in Lecture IV, ‘where we began twenty years ago;’ and he may well have had in mind that the Movement itself had, in some sense, begun again only a month or two before with the solemn Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society under himself as President at Christmas 1923. Though he proceeded ab initio, assuming no previous knowledge on the part of his hearers, this course is not an elementary exposition of Anthroposophy. We are gradually led deeply in, and the path is steep towards the end.

There are many very different approaches to the general corpus of revelations or teachings which constitutes Spiritual Science. As with Nature herself, it is often only as the student penetrates deeper and nearer to the centre that any connection between these different approaches become apparent. A reader of Christianity as Mystical Fact, for example, which dates from 1902 and of Steiner's lectures on the Gospels might well be surprised to find that it is possible to read Theosophy (1904) without ever discovering that the incarnation of Christ and the death on Golgotha are, according to him, the very core of the evolution of the universe and man. The truth is that the mastery of Anthroposophy involves, for our too stereotyped thinking, something like the learning of a new language. It would be possible to learn to read Greek and only afterwards to discover that the New Testament was written in that tongue.

From this point of view the present book is in the same category as Theosophy, yet even within this category the two approaches are made from such diverse directions that one might almost suppose the books to be the work of different men. Nevertheless it is best to look on the following lectures—as Steiner himself makes it clear that he does—as a supplement or complement to what is to be found in Theosophy.

The book Theosophy is the most systematic of all the writings that Steiner has bequeathed to us. Its whole basis is classification and definition and, taken by itself, it undoubtedly gives (quite apart from the dubious associations which the word ‘theosophy’ has for English ears) a false impression of the nature of Anthroposophy. It is as indispensable to the student as a good grammar is indispensable to a man engaged in mastering a new language, and it contains as much—and as little—as a grammar does of all that the language can do and say. Its method is that of description from outside. And this approach, essential as it is as one among others, is perhaps the one most likely to lead to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Such terms as ‘soul world’, ‘spiritland’, ‘elemental beings’, ‘aura’, are liable to be taken literally in spite of the author's express warnings to the contrary. The descriptions are taken as reproductions of the reality that underlies them instead of as similes—attempts, that is, at making clear a purely spiritual reality in words which have received their stamp of significance from their relation to the physical world.

No one who studies the teachings of Rudolf Steiner seriously remains in any real danger of succumbing to this sort of literalness. But anyone reading hurriedly through the book Theosophy—or even through Theosophy and the Occult Science—and inclined to judge the value of Anthroposophy from that single adventure may well do so. That is why the present book seems to me to be an important one—not only for ‘advanced’ students of Anthroposophy, to whom it is perhaps primarily addressed, but also to the comparative beginner. It is condensed and difficult for most readers, and above all for those who have never dipped into the broad unbroken stream of books and lectures which flowed from Rudolf Steiner during the twenty years that elapsed between the publication of Theosophy and the delivery of this Course. But even if the content is far from fully understood, it cannot fail to give the reader some idea, let us say, of the sort of thing that is really signified by the spatial and other physical metaphors in which the systematic exposition of Theosophy is couched.

For here the approach is from within. It is no longer simply the objective facts and events, but the way in which the soul tentatively begins to experience these, which the lecturer makes such earnest efforts to convey. We have exchanged a guide book for a book of travel. The one who has been there recreates his experience for the benefit of those who have not, trying with every device at his disposal to reveal what it actually felt like. Of course the difficulty is still there; it can still only be done by metaphor and suggestion; but the difficulty is much less likely to be burked by the reader's surreptitiously substituting in his own imagination a physical or sense-experience for a purely super-sensible one.

Compare, for instance the description of the astral body given in Theosophy with the characterisation of it in No. V of these lectures:

One says to oneself: What I am observing as the astral body of this person is not really present today, i.e. on the 2nd February 1924. If the person is twenty years of age, you must go backwards in time—let us say, to January 1904. You perceive that this astral body is really back there, and extends still further back into the unlimited. It has remained there and has not accompanied him through life. Here we have only a kind of appearance—a beam. It is like looking down an avenue; there, in the distance, are the last trees, very close together. Behind them is a source of light. You can have the radiance of the light here, but the source is behind—it need not move forward that its light may shine here.

So, too, the astral body has remained behind, and only throws its beam into life. It has really remained in the spiritual world and has not come with us into the physical. In respect to our astral body we always remain before conception and birth, in the spiritual world. If we are twenty years old in 1924, it is as if we were still living spiritually before the year 1904 and, in respect to our astral body, had only stretched forth a feeler.

‘Thus,’ he adds a few pages later, ‘if you describe the astral body as I have done in my Theosophy you must realise, in order to complete your insight (my italics)’:

that what is active here is the ‘radiance’ of something far back in time. The human being is really like a comet stretching its tail far back into the past. It is not possible to obtain a true insight into man's being unless we acquire these new concepts. People who believe one can enter the spiritual world with the same concepts one has for the physical world should become spiritualists, not anthroposophists.

In the same way one could compare the description of the etheric body in the earlier book with its treatment here in Lecture IV. The etheric body is not a vehicle of any such ‘life-force’, as is understood by the creative evolutionists. It is totally incompatible with the assumptions of positivist science. If it can be described as a ‘formative forces’ body, it can equally well be described, from another approach, as a thought-body. This is the approach which is required for all the teachings which Steiner developed later concerning the descent of the Cosmic Intelligence and its progressive embodiment in the personal intelligence of man. And it is this approach which is chosen in the book which follows.

He begins by describing the practical steps needed to develop the ‘strengthened thinking’ which is the first stage of higher knowledge. And he continues:

If you strengthen your thinking the supra-terrestrial spatial world begins to concern you and the ‘second man’ you have discovered just as the earthly, physical world concerned you before. And, as you ascribe the origin of your physical body to the physical earth, you now ascribe your second existence to the cosmic ether through whose activity earthly things become visible. From your own experience you can now speak of having a physical body and an etheric body ... I stretch out my physical arm and my physical hand takes hold of an object. I feel in a sense the flowing forces in this action. Through strengthening my thought I come to feel that it is inwardly mobile and now induces a kind of ‘touching’ within me—a ‘touching’ that also takes place in an organism; this is the etheric organism; that finer, super-sensible organism which exists no less than the physical organism, though it is connected with the supra-terrestrial, not the terrestrial.

Equally important is the exposition in this lecture of the way in which astral and etheric find outward expression in the physical constitution of man, the etheric in his fluid organisation, which can only be understood with the help of the concept of the etheric body, and the astral in that ‘third man’—who is physically the ‘airy man’ and who can be experienced as ‘an inner musical element in the breathing’. The nervous system is shown to be the representation of this inner music.

The matter in this book is extremely condensed and one feels one is maiming it by arbitrary selections such as I am making for the purpose of this Introduction. I have, for instance, said nothing of the extensive and detailed discourse on dreams contained in Lecture VII, and VIII, which some readers may even find the most enlightening thing in the book. One final selection may however perhaps be made. In these lectures Steiner approaches the life after death by speaking of ‘four phases of memory’. The theme is first heard in Lecture VI, where, after speaking of the nature of memory he emphasises that it is not the concern of the remembering individual alone, but is there for the sake of the universe—‘in order that its content may pass through us and be received again in the forms into which we can transmute it’.

The universe needs us because, through us, it ‘fulfils’ itself—fills itself again and again with its own content. ... The universe gives its cosmic thoughts to our etheric body and receives them back again in a humanised condition.

It receives them back when we die. The moment we die, the world takes back what it has given. ‘But it is something new that it receives, for we have experienced it all in a particular way.’ Then, in the ninth and last lecture, the last three phases of memory lead into—indeed become—in a miracle of condensation—all that is presented so differently in Theosophy under such titles as ‘The Soul in the Soul-World after Death’.

Is this an esoteric or an exoteric work? Certainly it will be more readily appreciated by readers who have worked through other approaches to be found in the books and lecture-cycles and perhaps especially in the Leading Thoughts. Yet it is the whole aim and character of Spiritual Science, as Rudolf Steiner developed it, to endeavour to be esoteric in an exoteric way. For that was what he believed the crisis of the twentieth century demands. And I doubt if he ever struggled harder to combine the two qualities than in these nine lectures given at the end of his life. Thus, although he was addressing members of the Anthroposophical Society, I believe that he had his gaze fixed on Western man in general, and I hope that an increasing number of those who are as yet unacquainted with any of his teaching may find in this book (and it can only be done by intensive application) a convincing proof of the immense fund of wisdom, insight and knowledge from which these teachings spring.

OWEN BARFIELD

London,
August 1960.

Dr. Steiner: I think it would be good if we took care of the formal things today. If there is still something to say about the beginning of school, it might be better to do that after we have taken care of the formal things. We will probably need to meet again tomorrow to speak about the beginning of school from a more spiritual perspective. Today, I think we should try to take care of the various needs that have arisen from the faculty.

The classes and the foreign language classes are assigned.

Dr. Steiner: The question now is if anyone has a particular wish regarding these assignments.

Changes are made to meet some expressed desires.

A teacher: I would like to ask if we can define an order of presentation for art. I thought that I would begin tomorrow in the ninth grade with those things connected with the curriculum as a whole, that is, related to history and literary history. I want to show how art arose from mythology.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to bring the art class into step with history and literary history. You could try to make a transition from Germanic mythology to art and then remain with that for a time. Then, perhaps you could show how the Germanic myths reappear in a different artistic form as aesthetics. You could certainly show, for example, the connection between Dürer and German mythology. They are fifteen-year-old children. You could use this as an occasion to show how the old Germans painted their gods just as Dürer painted his figures later.

You could then go on into the tenth grade, since the curriculum depends upon the previous year. In the tenth grade, we have Goethe’s poems and style, and that can stay. In the eleventh grade, summarize music and poetry.

Dr. Steiner confirms the teacher’s understanding about art instruction in the previous grades. The same teacher now proposes artistically treating what is done in the twelfth-grade German class, literature beginning in 1740, in preparation for the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: Then, we would no longer need a special literary history class. We need to see to it that the students learn the things they may be asked. In connection with modern literary history, they will certainly be asked about things that began with Gottsched and Bodmer and what followed them. German and art class can certainly cover the same material.

In order not to make compromises, I think it would be good to recognize that a large number of Goethe’s works are based upon impressions of paintings, and also that we can trace back much romantic art to musical impressions. Try to develop how the arts are intertwined.

An essay by Burdach, “Schiller’s Chordrama und die Geburt des tragischen Stiles aus der Musik” (Schiller’s choral drama and the birth of the tragic style from music) in the Deutschen Rundschau (German review) is mentioned.

Dr. Steiner: Burdach’s research has a problem in that it has an underlying tendency. He wants to show that somehow certain themes arise out of some primal forces, and then he follows them further. This is really very contrived. Schiller was certainly not as dependent upon earlier streams as Burdach claims. We certainly cannot ignore Schiller’s dramatic experimentation and the fact that he created a choral drama after many attempts. In Demetrius, he created a romantic drama in a style much like Shakespeare’s. You cannot ignore the details Burdach cites, since they may be useful. However, you will probably arrive at a different conclusion, probably that Schiller would have created something quite different from The Bride of Messina had he really swum in that stream.

That essay belongs with the series of things Burdach has produced. He has an idée fixe. He wants to show that a theme arises out of a subhuman source. All these things are similar, so you need to be cautious with Burdach. He also wrote other things where he derives the minstrel from Arabic provincials by finding the original impulse in the middle of the Middle Ages and using it as the beginning of the literary stream. Faust and Moses also belong in this group, as do Shakespeare’s dramas.

A teacher speaks about his tenth-grade class in Western history and Middle High-German literature.

Dr. Steiner: You need to do that harmoniously. Even if you do not like the material, we have to begin with what you have already done as a basis. There is nothing from the present we could use as a basis. We have to use an older historical picture as our basis and then present our perspective as history. Couldn’t you use Heeren as a basis? You could just as well take Rotteck, though he is a little bit old-fashioned and one-sided. It would also be good if you brought out the correspondences with artistic styles. Young people today could learn a tremendous amount if you were to read some chapters from Johannes Müller’s Vierundzwanzig Bücher allgemeiner Geschichte (Twenty-four books of history) with them. That is historical style, almost like Tacitus. Such attempts to work in a unified way have been made time and again, something that needs to be renewed from our perspective.

If you lean too heavily upon geology, you are in danger of taking the basement, leaving out the ground floor, and then taking the second floor, whereas you should actually begin with what geology offers for historical themes, such as the Great Migrations and dependence upon territory. My public lectures in Stuttgart could be helpful for that. Of course, you cannot present that in class. It was intended for enlightened older people in Stuttgart. You will need to translate it for the students and, in the future, be sure to leave out the Chymical Wedding.

If you begin preparing for this now and immediately begin with literature, you will have to use something like Heeren, Rotteck, or Johannes Müller. It is certainly not right to transform history into religious history alone. That is something for the religion teachers. I will give you the curriculum tomorrow.

A teacher: Where should I begin in this class?

Dr. Steiner: You said yourself you wanted to begin with the dependence upon the Earth. Therefore, you should take the climates of the various regions, today’s cold and temperate zones, and geological formations as a basis for history. Show how a people changed when they moved from the mountains down into the valleys, but do all this from a historical perspective, not a geographical one, so that you speak about a particular people during a particular period. Show, for example, why the Greeks became Greeks. Here, you could use Heeren as a guide. What is important is that things be done properly.

A teacher (who is to take over teaching history and German in the ninth grade): I would like some guidance for ninth-grade history. What should I particularly emphasize?

Dr. Steiner: You need to deepen their understanding.

The previous class teacher: In the eighth grade I presented history in pictures and biographies. I particularly emphasized cultural history in the nineteenth century.

Dr. Steiner: According to our curriculum, the children in the eighth and ninth grades should gain a picture of the inner historical themes, the major movements. They should learn how the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought an enlarged viewpoint to human beings, an increase in all directions, geography and astronomy. They should learn how that played out historically. Then they should learn how the effects of the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century enlightenment played out in history and how, in the nineteenth century, the integration of peoples and nations had an effect. Taking each century, you can present the facts from these perspectives.

Regarding your preparation, it would be very good if you could create a picture for yourself of what story would result if Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years War were continued to the present time, that is, what modern history would be like. In regard to Middle Europe, Treitschke’s summaries are very good. In the first chapter of his German History, he brought all the threads together. A teacher wants to begin the twelfth grade with series and then go on to integral and differential calculus.

Dr. Steiner: Differential and integral calculations are not really demanded. If you want to do this efficiently, you can begin integration earlier, and use series to explain both. I would try to get far enough that the students can use differential and integral computations with curves. That is sufficient for the final examination. If the students can work with second- and third-degree equations, that is enough. The problems that will be given are published.

Dr. Steiner learns that there are also more difficult problems.

Dr. Steiner: I would certainly like to know what is left to learn at college. There is really not much more. In any event, you can begin tomorrow with series.

A teachers asks about chemical formulas.

Dr. Steiner: We will have to find out what is required for the final examination. That is the problem; we start making these compromises, but we need to go far enough that the students can pass the final examination. This is terrible.

There would be some sense in it if they at least used stereometric formulas, but they mostly use planar formulas, which is quite senseless. The students need to know the processes. All this is senseless and very sad, but we have to take it into account.

Tomorrow, we can meet again at the same time to discuss questions concerning the curriculum, but for now I would like to take care of any other questions and desires.

A teacher asks about texts for English. Dickens’s Christmas Carol is too difficult for the eighth grade.

Dr. Steiner: You can be certain that you can read Dickens with children who know almost nothing, and what they need to learn, they can quite easily pick up. Tell them how the story goes on. Perhaps you could solve the problem if you first told the children about the content and selected some simpler excerpts for them to read. You can certainly overcome such difficulties. These texts are the very best for those children who cannot read English.

An eighth-grade teacher: E.B. is not very happy with me.

A teacher: One of his comrades would like to be in your class because it is more artistic.

Dr. Steiner: You could exchange the two.

There are problems with the class schedule, and the religion classes are too large.

Dr. Steiner: It cannot be any different than last year. There must be some way of solving the scheduling problem. I cannot imagine that we cannot solve it. There should be no more than fifty students in a religion class.

A teacher asks about a deaf-and-dumb child in the remedial class.

Dr. Steiner: She is not deaf. She can hear and can also be taught to speak. She is only a little slow. She does not respond, so you will simply have to try everything. You need to say something slowly, then have her speak it after you. Continue in that way; first speak slowly, then increase the speed so that she gradually needs to understand things more quickly. You could also do the exercise by speaking loudly, then having her speak softly, and then the other way around. You could do it slowly and have her do it quickly. Do variations of that. If possible, use a series of words that have some connection. Do them forward and backward in order to develop the center of speech. I would also have her do the curative eurythmy exercises connected with the head. She should do them daily, even if for only a short time.

(Speaking to the school doctor) She should also receive edelweiss at 6X potency, which is an effective means for healing the connection between the hearing nerves and the hearing center. It has a strong effect and is effective even when the hearing organs are hardened. The hardening has a relationship to edelweiss; it absorbs the flowers. You will find that the relationships that exist within this mineral, but not mineralized, material are within the flower also, and that they have an extreme similarity to the processes that constitute the hearing organ. We have used this remedy for ten years. Be sure to soak the flowers well first. A teacher asks about decorating the room for religious services.

Protocol Record Stuttgart

After various speakers have expressed themselves in the general debate, Rudolf Steiner takes the floor:

Rudolf Steiner: It seems necessary to me that we now move on to the special debate. Mr. Leinhas has already made some comments not to derive things from gray generalities and to bring them into the realm of the necessary. And Mr. Molt has also made certain suggestions. But it seems necessary to me that the following be said in order to give a truly practical side to our endeavors.

First of all, it is necessary for this cultural council to address the task of propagating the whole idea of the threefold social order so that it penetrates into broader sections of the public and is understood there. Without propagandizing for the idea of the threefold social order, one naturally does not get ahead in a single specific area.

But then it would be necessary for this Cultural Council to do a second thing, through which it could actually carry out practical work as quickly as possible. So far, we have tried - just recapitulate what has happened - to create understanding for the idea of the threefold social order. Of course we were told: That is utopian, that is ideology, that has nothing to do with reality! But we did not let ourselves be deterred from continuing to work for this understanding and at the same time to bring it to a certain result: to the propagation of the works council idea.

And now that the idea of works councils has actually been presented to the world as a real thing to be worked out, people are beginning to see the idea of the threefold social order not so much as a utopia. Now they are beginning to take it seriously. The industrialists are up in arms about the works councils, the trade unions are up in arms about the works councils, in short, there is a lot of agitation against them from all sides. I don't know whether they would agitate so strongly against something they found to be completely harmless. This shows the transition from the original germinal idea, which already contains the fact, to real life practice. But the practice of life must then also be maintained with the appropriate strength. The question of works councils also originated in Russia, only it ended in failure there because all sorts of other things poured over it and fought against it. With regard to economic life, it is therefore a matter of the works councils providing the basis for economic life and its members to emerge from the current conditions themselves. I just want to show you that we are moving on to real practical work. First, there must be an understanding of the basic idea, then you can move on to the practical work.

The cultural council should first of all be aware that its first task is, of course, in the field of education in the broadest sense and of those suggestions that must come from the rest of the intellectual life for the education system. Today, it cannot be a matter of taking socialization in the abstract again. Entertainments which have gradually become distinctly capitalist entertainments in modern times – such as the theater and, to the highest degree, the cinema, which is, after all, only a concomitant of the very extreme capitalist-bureaucratic age – will only be able to achieve their socialized form when the foundations of intellectual life are first socialized. I really fear that we will soon also be hearing about the “socialization of purebred dog breeding, the distribution of Christmas trees to families” and the like. If socialization were to be understood in this way, we would not get anywhere.

What we have to deal with first of all, if the Cultural Council is to develop its activities, is, firstly, the elementary school question. Look at the elementary school question from a practical point of view. The Anthroposophical Society itself is a spiritual movement that has emerged from contemporary spiritual life and placed itself on an independent footing – at least in terms of its intentions. It could achieve a great deal if people had the courage to do so and did not rely too much on the forces that stand in the way of such courage. But the important thing is to grasp the right approach from the point of view of threefolding. The School of Spiritual Science has been founded in Dornach. It is certainly not located on any state property; it works independently in one branch of spiritual life. A number of our members have now expressed the wish to educate their children from the bottom up, in accordance with the principles and impulses of true spiritual life. I do not need to emphasize the fact that anthroposophists also have children; so we already had the children. In Dornach we might even have had the teachers. And the parents were highly motivated. We had everything, really. So what did we lack? Why did we not found such a school? Because the state, free Switzerland, does not give us the right to do so, because it does not recognize a school that is not established by the state itself.

My dear friends, the main thing is to fight for recognition of what is achieved in such a school on the basis of purely spiritual and educational principles. It is a matter of abolishing any kind of state school supervision and any kind of law that only allows teaching to be given by this or that teacher appointed by the state, and the like. That is the first thing. And here we have to struggle with the objections that are always raised today, especially by the Socialists, under the banner of the unified school, when it comes to a healthy basis for the elementary school system.

Let us take the example of Dornach again. Dornach is in the Canton of Solothurn. When I first spoke there about the threefold social order, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Arlesheim soon came to me and said: It will be very easy to see in the canton of Solothurn how difficult it is to accommodate such an endeavor, because it took a great effort to wrest the school from the school “brothers” and school “sisters” of the canton of Solothurn, and it took a great effort to secularize the school. If the right to found schools were granted to any kind of endeavor, then clerical schools would probably arise, perhaps even schools for the nobility. In short, people were terribly afraid that these things might take hold.

These are things that must be dealt with first. The discussion must be entered into with the public: How does the Cultural Council, with its idea of the threefold social order, relate to the so-called state-run comprehensive school with compulsory education? This is the issue that must be clarified in public. So the first task is: How does the Federation for Threefolding relate to what a member of the majority socialist party and member of the state parliament in Reutlingen recently said: What do you want then? We have now created a school law that is absolutely in line with the most ideal views! – Then the Federation for Threefolding has to show through its cultural council: Even if you were angel-like beings, we would never accept a school law from the hands of the state! – because the point is to wrest the school from the state. It must be shown that people will not become illiterate again if schools are freed from state control, that new classes of students will not emerge, and so on. That is the first positive question, the elementary school question. And until it is shown [in the cultural council] that there is an understanding of such a question in the face of today's political currents, the cultural council will only be a wild beating around the bush.

The second thing is to show that we can only get rid of the higher schools if we get rid of the awful system of qualifications. Everything that stands between elementary school and university can only be determined by the fact that it is preparation for university. The universities have to say: We want to get these or those people into our ranks, for this we make the demand that the secondary modern schools and the secondary schools – which must also become something completely different according to these or those principles – are managed. Consider that the secondary modern school has long since existed only to prepare students for the one-year voluntary military service by granting them the right to do so, to become future civil servants. So here, too, it is important: Get the schools out of the state!

Then we must fight for the autonomy of the university. It already had that in the old days. We have only just destroyed the last remnants of the university's autonomy in recent times. The university must be an autonomous corporation. It must regain what has particularly ventured in recent times. What the universities used to consider as self-evident was what they awarded when they granted a doctorate in any faculty. That was the expression for it: the university here and there, which is regarded as an autonomous body, gives XY the right to call himself a doctor in a certain field; it therefore awards him the diploma. This meant that the autonomous body had established the right for people, which it could guarantee as an autonomous body. And the state has conquered this whole thing, because today the awards of the faculties are only decorative pieces, titles without any rights, and the states have introduced their state examinations for this, that is, they have extended their tentacles to the universities. They are no longer autonomous. You can't find anything like in the past, where someone could be said to be a doctor who studied at the University of Montpellier; that's a good school! Today everything is abstracted. So the demand is: autonomous universities, abolition of all state exams. If the state needs people, it should test them. If it needs someone for a position, it can test them according to its own criteria. Such a test is only meaningful for the state, not for what must be free from the state in the areas of teaching and education.

The following positive questions arise:

Firstly, a free comprehensive school without state supervision, justified by the demands of the time;

secondly, the abolition of the so-called system of qualification for secondary schools,

thirdly, the reduction of state examinations and the autonomy of universities.

These things must be presented to the world as a clear program. If we start with this, we begin at a similar point as in business life with the question of works councils. If we start with this, the others, who of course need this or that, will follow. The point is to start by tackling things where they are universally human: in lower and higher education, which is generally also universally human.

That is what I wanted to say first about the transition to the special debate, so that this comes out. Certainly a committee should be elected. But it should deal with the most current issues and I wanted to point out to you that the most current issues and positive ones are important. Initially, no value should be placed on the content of the individual worldviews. What matters is not whether Catholics, Protestants and so on want to found their schools, but [that] we achieve the very next practical thing in a positive way – initially in the field of intellectual life, which concerns all people: the position of the school on its own feet.

These are the issues that must be vigorously discussed in the coming days and must crystallize into very specific individual points. And with these individual points, those who are truly able and have the will to do so must then go before humanity to implement these things. For this upheaval in spiritual life is more important than anything else. Because without this upheaval in spiritual life, none of the rest will come about.