The Rudolf Steiner Archive

(For a different translation of this lecture, see: The Proclamations to the Magi and the Shepherds)

Let us begin to-day by considering certain questions connected with this time of festival, with this season which yearly renews the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, renews also a direct experience of it in our feeling.

We really have three such times of festival in Christian tradition: the Christmas, the Easter and the Whitsuntide festivals. And we may say that, each in a different way, these three festivals bring man into connection, into relationship, with that in which the Christian tradition sees the meaning of all earth-evolution. These three festivals also differ as regards the human soul-forces. Christmas appeals more to the feeling and in a certain sense is the most popular festival, because to understand it requires a deepening of the feeling-life, and because it is the most readily approachable for the large masses of humanity. The Easter festival, which requires that we raise ourselves to an understanding of the real Mystery of Golgotha, of the entrance of a super-sensible Being into human evolution, is the most challenging to the human powers of understanding. It is a festival which lifts human understanding to the highest level, and which, although it is also generally celebrated, cannot however be popular in the same sense as the Christmas festival.

The third, the Whitsun festival, establishes a relationship particularly between the human will and the super-sensible world, the world to which the Christ-Being as such belongs. The carrying over of will-impulses into execution in the world is brought to human consciousness through a right understanding of the Whitsun festival.

Thus what we may call the secret of Christianity is given form in these yearly celebrations. The way in which the Christmas mystery touches man can be brought before our consciousness in the most manifold ways; and with the recurrence of the Christmas festival during the course of the years, we have considered the Christmas-Thought from the most varied standpoints. This time let us call to mind something which can become clear to any one who considers the Christmas mystery in the light of the Gospels.

In the Gospels we find a twofold announcement of the birth of Christ Jesus. One annunciation is made to the poor shepherds out in the fields. An Angel announces the birth of Christ Jesus to them—in a dream, or however one may wish to call it. Here we have to do with the perception of this event through inner soul-forces, soul-forces which, in the case of these shepherds in the vicinity where Christ Jesus was born, were in a special condition. And a second annunciation is set forth in the Gospels, the annunciation to the Three Kings, the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are told that they followed a star which announced to them the advent of Christ Jesus on the earth.

Thus we are shown two ways by which this earlier humanity reached what we may call its higher knowledge. This is another example of something which is never properly grasped in the present age. To-day we usually conceive of human beings as possessing thought and perception, and we imagine this thinking and perceiving, in fact, all use of the inner soul-forces, to have been in all past centuries and millenia essentially the same—only more primitive—as it is to-day. We know from anthroposophical spiritual science how the soul-constitution of man has changed with the passage of time; how differently in ancient times—for instance, seven or eight thousand years after the beginning of the post-Atlantean period, or even earlier—humanity regarded its own life and the nature of the surrounding universe. Moreover we know how this soul-constitution underwent many changes before it became that reasoning analytical faculty existing to-day, which in its approach to the outer world knows only the purely sense-perceptible aspect of things. This evolution takes its starting-point from a certain ancient instinctive clairvoyance and proceeds through the state found in our modern soul-condition, to return again in future to a clairvoyant perception of the world which will be permeated by full human consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth the ancient instinctive clairvoyance was already greatly dimmed. Men's souls were indeed differently constituted than they are to-day, although they no longer had the old clairvoyance; gone also were their old wise ways of fathoming the universe. The ancient wisdom-teachings as well as the old instinctive clairvoyance had grown very dim as the Mystery of Golgotha approached humanity. But remnants of both still existed, and we are clearly shown in the Gospels, if we rightly understand them, that this was the case. Such remnants were still present among single favoured individuals. We may recognise as such the poor shepherds out in the fields, who in the piety of their hearts possessed a certain clairvoyant capacity of a dreamlike nature. And we also recognise as such the Three Magi from the East, who are pictured as standing on the topmost rung of human society, and had retained from ancient times a capacity gained from a certain stream of wisdom, giving them insight into the course of world-events. Thus, on the one hand, the poor shepherds could be approached in a kind of dream-experience, in inward perception, by the event of Christ Jesus' birth, while, on the other, the Three Magi from the East developed a science which enabled them, by the study of world-phenomena, the appearances in the heavens, to be aware of significant events taking place open the earth quite beyond ordinary human ken.

Thus there are pointed out to us two quite definite, but widely differing, modes of knowledge. Let us turn our attention for the moment to what was present as the last remnant of an ancient stream of wisdom in the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are shown clearly that these Wisemen were able to read the riddles in the movements of the stars. In the existing descriptions we are made aware of an ancient knowledge of the stars whereby access was gained to the mysteries of the starry worlds and wherein the secrets of human events were also revealed. This ancient knowledge of the stars was something quite different from that of to-day. Our astronomy is in a certain sense also prophetic; it can prophesy eclipses of the sun and moon and so on, but it is merely mathematical and mechanical. It only speaks of space and time-relationships in so far as these may be represented mathematically, whereas the ancient wisdom of, the stars perceived in these movements something of higher significance, remote from space and time, taking place in the inner life of man. If we examine the science of humanity in olden times, we find its content essentially one of this wisdom of the stars. Men sought in the stars for a deeper understanding of earthly happenings. For to them the starry world was not the abstract mechanical thing it has become for modern humanity. For them the starry world was something full of life. They felt the presence of an essential Being in the universe, in the case of every planet. By means of an inner soul-language, in a certain sense, they even spoke with the individual planets, as we to-day speak merely from man to man in external words. People were conscious of inward soul-experience which was a reflection of what was going on out in universal space in the movement of the stars. This was a living, spiritualized way of looking at the universe. And man felt himself connected as a soul and spirit with this universe. This wisdom of the world was fostered in schools, in what may be described as Mystery schools, where the pupils were prepared in a careful, intimate and inner way to gain an understanding of the movements of the stars such as might illuminate human life upon the earth.

Of what nature were these preparations? These preparations for a knowledge of the starry heavens and their influences were of such a character that, even then, in the age of instinctive clairvoyance, the pupil was led to develop a more wide-awake life than normally. The large mass of mankind had a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, corresponding to a state of soul which was less wide awake than the one normal for us to-day. In ancient periods of human evolution people were not able to think as clearly as we can now. Geometry and mathematics as we know them could not then exist. The whole of life between birth and death had more of a dreaming character; but just because it was dreamlike it had a far more lively way of perceiving the surrounding universe than does our waking life to-day. And the strange thing was that the pupils of those ancient Mysteries existing 2000 years, or even 1000 years, before the Mystery of Golgotha (such men as the Magi may be counted among the last remaining disciples of this training), were trained in a knowledge which was very similar to our geometry and mathematics. Euclid was the first to give geometry to humanity; but he merely communicated it to humanity in general. What Euclid gave in the way of geometry had already lived in the Mysteries for thousands of years as something communicated only to the most carefully selected Mystery-pupils. It had a different effect then than in later times. It may seem strange and paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that what our children learn as arithmetic and geometry was taught in the Mystery-schools to selected individuals who were considered specially endowed and so accepted in the Mysteries.

To-day we often hear reference made to the mysterious matters supposedly taught in the Mysteries. Actually, in their purely abstract content, these mysterious matters are none other than those taught to children to-day. They are nothing else; and their Mystery-character lies not in the fact of their being unknown to us, but in the different way in which at that time they were taught. It is quite a different matter to call upon the reasoning of children through the content of geometry in an age in which, from the moment of awaking until falling asleep again man lives in a wide-awake consciousness, than it was to present these matters to specially selected human beings, whose consciousness was more mature, during the age of ancient instinctive clairvoyance and dreaming consciousness.

Our modern conceptions of these things are by no means always accurate. For example, there is a poem to Varuna in Oriental literature describing Varuna as appearing in the air, as wafting like the wind through the woods; Varuna appears in the lightning flashing out of the dripping clouds; in the human heart when the will is roused to action; in the heavens when the sun moves across them. Varuna is to be found on the mountains in the juice of the Soma.

What the juice of the Soma is, modern books profess not to know. To-day in our great learning we agree that we do not know what the juice of the Soma is, although there are people who drink it by the quart, and certainly know it very well from a certain standpoint. But it is a different matter to know these things—from the standpoint of the Mysteries than from the standpoint of waking consciousness in profane feeling.

You can read to-day of the Philosopher's Stone, which was accounted precious in an age when the nature of substance was somewhat differently regarded than it is to-day. Again the historians of alchemy will tell you that the Philosopher's Stone is quite unknown. Here and there in my lectures I have indicated that the Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most human beings; they simply do not know its qualities, or why it is so named. But since it is used by the ton, it is very familiar to most human beings.

The facts are simply upon occasion quite different from the concepts we hold of them with our present-day abstract, theoretical grasp of things, so remote from life and reality. There is not even a true grasp of what it might mean to take in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry with quite another soul-constitution than we have to-day, with a mature soul-condition. I have referred to this particular type of Mystery-schooling in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”; but just such important things as these are usually not properly understood, they are not ordinarily understood in their real significance. The fact that the way in which people were approached with things constituted the very kernel of the Mysteries in ancient times is something which should be grasped. And it was thus also in the case of such purely mathematical considerations, the content of feeling and the human fullness of which Novalis still sensed when he felt mathematics to be like great poetry—something which most people now-a-days will not agree with. And it is to such grasping of the world, permeated as it was with feeling, but poured into mathematical mould, that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was thus brought to a mathematical understanding of the universe, he developed just such a world-outlook as that possessed by the Wisemen from the East, as they are described to us.

The mathematics of the universe, which have become so thoroughly abstract to us, revealed at that time something really living, because the revelation found completion in what was brought to understand it. Thus what sprang as science from an ancient culture, and was still preserved in its last fragments to the Magi, made possible the one annunciation, through the channel of the teachers of wisdom, through external science, the annunciation experienced by the Magi.

On the other hand, it was possible for the inner experience of the secrets of humanity to develop in human beings who, like the shepherds in the fields, had a special predisposition in this direction. In such cases the inner forces of man had to reach certain heights; then what took place in the world of men became direct imaginative perception, an instinctive, imaginative picture-perception. Thus, through inner vision, the poor shepherds in the fields partook in the annunciation: “God makes revelation of His Being in the heavenly heights, and His peace shall be with all men of good will.” Thus did the secrets of the universe speak to the innermost being of the poor shepherds in the fields, as well as to the utmost heights attainable to human wisdom at that time, to the Wisemen of the East. Thus the great mystery of earthly life was imparted from two different sides.

What did these Wisemen of the East experience? What was the special development brought about in the souls of these pupils through the introduction of mathematics into their soul-condition, when this was found especially mature and ready? Kant speaks of mathematics as being “a priori” truth. With “a priori” he means a truth which is present within us before our external, empirical knowledge, before our experience of it existed. This is mere word-wisdom; nothing at all is said with this “a priori”! A meaning attaches to it only when it can be shown by spiritual science that mathematics is something that rises up within us, that rises to consciousness out of man's inner being.

Whence does it come? It proceeds from the experiences we went through in the spiritual world before birth, or conception. There we lived in the great wide universe. There we experienced what could be experienced before we had bodily eyes and ears. There we had “a priori” experience, when considered in relation to our life on earth. These “a priori” experiences rise in an unconscious way out of our inner being into the sphere of consciousness. Unless modern man has a premonition of this, as had Novalis, he does not know that when he does mathematics, experiences of the time before conception and birth are rising up within him. But for a person with true insight into these matter the mathematical capacity is in itself a proof of man's life in the spiritual world before conception. As far as those are concerned for whom this is not a proof of pre-natal existence, the fact remains that they do not think thoroughly enough about life's phenomena and have no idea what the true origin of mathematics is.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who possessed that wise outlook, still extant in its last fragments in the Wisemen of the East, had the clear impression: “When we study the stars and apply our mathematical forms and reckoning to them, we are spreading out again over the outer reaches of universal space what we actually lived in before our birth.” And it seemed to such a pupil of the ancient Mysteries as though he must say: “Now I am living on earth; my eyes look out into universal space and see my spatial surroundings. In these same phenomena of the spatial universe I lived before my birth; there I myself counted from star to star what I now merely copy and symbolize in mathematics. With my innermost forces I moved from star to star, living in what I now merely draw.”

Thus they experienced again all they had gone through before birth, or conception, and consequently it was holy to them. They realized that they had lived in a spiritual world before they walked on earth. This knowledge of the world in which man lives before he descends to the earth was present in its last remnants in the Wisemen of the East, and by its means they knew of the advent of the Christ-Being.

Whence came this Christ-Being? He came out of that time which we live through between death and rebirth, and He united Himself with the life we live through between birth and death. For this reason the science that concerns itself with the world we live in between death and rebirth can unveil such a mystery as the Mystery of Golgotha. And out of this science announcement was made to the Magi of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery.

As man lives here on the earth and concerns himself with gaining knowledge of his surroundings, with developing impulses for his actions, for his social life, he has still another unconscious experience. He knows nothing of it; but just as he experiences the after-effects of his pre-natal life, so does he also experience what passes through the gates of death and becomes the content of life after death, namely, the forces already present like a seed between birth and death, which only come to their full blossoming in the life after death. These forces worked with great intensity in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And they worked in their last remnants in the poor shepherds in the fields because of their special piety. Moreover, it is in these forces especially that we live between falling asleep and awaking, when our souls are outside of our bodies in outer space. The soul then lives as it will live consciously in future when it has laid aside the physical body after death. These forces, which under special conditions can penetrate from the world of sleep and dream into waking life, were once very active in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And these the poor shepherds experienced, receiving through them a revelation of the Mystery of Golgotha from a different quarter than that from which the annunciation came to the three Magi.

What does one experience by means of the forces peculiar to man between death and rebirth when, as in the case of the Wisemen from the Orient, they are kindled in the life between birth and death? One experiences what takes place beyond what is earthly. One is borne away from the earth out into the world of the stars where we live between death and rebirth. This was the world into which the Wisemen of the East were led away from the earth out into cosmic space.

And what does one experience by means of the forces which rise up from the inner being of man, especially in the world of dreams? One experiences what goes on within the earth. Here the Tellurian forces, the forces of which we partake because we live in our bodies, are at work. These forces work particularly in what we live through between falling asleep and awaking. Here, too, we are in the outer world, but essentially in that outer world belonging to the earth.

You will say that this is a contradiction of the truth that we are outside of our bodies. But it is not a contradiction. We always perceive only what is external to ourselves; that wherein we live is never perceived. Only people who are especially ignorant about certain subjects, and who are bent on establishing a knowledge consisting solely of phrases, are capable of skipping lightly over such matters with their phrases and of saying, for example, that the point is not to found a science of the spirit upon knowledge gained outside man, but to add to natural science a science derived from man's inner being.

With such a torrent of phrases Darmstadt wisdom-schools may indeed be founded, but one may still remain a mere phrase-maker even when founding schools of wisdom. For rightly understood, the matter is as follows. We may indeed say that, to arrive at the super-sensible, the world must be described from within; but we must first get into the inner being and then look at what is external from outside the body, by looking back upon the body. Keyserling's talks concerning observation from the standpoint of the soul do not attempt to enter man's inner being, they merely use phrases.

The fact really is such that when we are in the condition experienced between falling asleep and awaking, we look back, we feel our way back, as it were, into our bodies. We feel what is of the earth in our bodies; for they are of the earth. The poor shepherds in the fields really, felt the revelation of the earth through their bodies when in a dreamlike condition, they perceived what was happening in the form of the perception of an angel's voice.

These are the two absolute contrasts: the Magi with their knowledge of the heavens, and the shepherds with their earth-revelation. And it corresponds completely to the Mystery of Golgotha that the revelation came from two such different quarters. For a heavenly Being, as yet untouched by earth, was descending to it, and this descent had to make itself known by means of the wisdom of the heavens, which knew that something heavenly was descending.

In the shepherds' wisdom we learn to know the earth by feeling our way into its weaving life as it perceived the descent of the heavenly Being. It is the same annunciation, only from another side. Wonderfully unified, we thus see what, although it was one and the same event, was announced in a twofold way to men.

And when we see how humanity received the event of Golgotha, we must say that, in regard to this and other matters, there were only the merest remnants of the ancient wisdom left to man. I have already shown how the Mystery of Golgotha was grasped in the first centuries of Christianity with the help of the fragments of an ancient wisdom known as Gnosis. From then on it became more and more a matter of trying to penetrate into the nature of the event of Golgotha with analytical reasoning powers alone. And in the 19th century naturalism gradually made its appearance in the confessional sphere. The super-sensible content of the event of Golgotha was no longer grasped at all, Christ became merely the “wise man of Nazareth”, naturalistically conceived. A new, spiritual grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha became necessary. The fact of the Mystery of Golgotha must not be confused with the way in which human understanding has dealt with this fact.

Now a soul-constitution such as the shepherds in the fields and the Wisemen of the East possessed still existed in its last fragmentary form at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. But all this changed in the course of human evolution. Everything changes and undergoes metamorphosis. What then became of the wisdom of the Eastern Magi? It has become our mathematics, with its knowledge of the heavens! The Magi possessed a super-earthly science based on sublime recollections of pre-natal life. All this has been shrunken and cramped into our mathematical, mechanical grasp of the heavens, so that we apply nothing but the laws of mathematics and mechanics to their phenomena. What we have in the way of mathematical astronomy is all that still rises up out of our inner being as the modern metamorphosis of what the Magi once possessed.

And looking at our external sense-knowledge, which is merely a perceiving with eyes and ears, we find it to be the externalized inner knowledge of the shepherds in the fields. What could once convey to the shepherds in the fields the inner secrets of earthly existence now permits only of that cold, natural-scientific observation of the outer world which is the offspring of the shepherds' wisdom. The child bears but slight resemblance to its mother. And our mathematics, our astronomy, are the offspring of the wisdom of the Magi.

Humanity had to go through this development. Our scientific researchers, sitting in their laboratories and clinics, have very little in common with the shepherds but theirs is a direct metamorphosis of the shepherds' wisdom. And our mathematicians likewise are in direct line of descent from the Eastern Wisemen. The outer has become the inner, and the inner, outer. And so we have indeed grown remote from the Mystery of Golgotha. We must become aware of this fact. We have become far removed indeed from such understanding. Perhaps many of those who call themselves preachers and ministers of Christianity in the official sense are the most remote from it of all.

The forces of knowledge, faith and feeling that live in man to-day can never penetrate through to the true being of the Mystery of Golgotha. It must be found entirely anew.

The wisdom of the Magi too has become dry mathematics, perceiving the heavens only in designs. It has become an inner thing. But inwardness must take on life once more. What was once outer must be built up again from within.

And now let us try to understand the content of a book such as my Occult Science from this standpoint. The Magi had a real penetration into the starry heavens; they saw what was spiritual there because they had insight into human pre-natal experience. This has become abstract in our mathematics. But the very same forces out of which we develop mathematics can be brought back to life, and intensified as imaginative vision. Then there is born from out our inner being a world which, although we create it within us, we see as the outer world, as though: containing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We see the heavens in inner vision just as the Eastern Wisemen externally perceived the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha. The external has become an inner thing, has become mathematical abstraction; and in like manner the inner must be widened out until it becomes a universe around us, until inner vision leads us to a new astronomy experienced within.

Only by thus reaching out for a new understanding of the Christ can we fill the festival of Christmas with a certain meaning. Has the Christmas festival any meaning for most human beings nowadays? It is a very beautiful custom, scarcely 150 years old, to have the Christmas Tree as a symbol of the Christmas festival. The custom of having a Christmas Tree came into being only in the 19th century. What is this Christmas Tree really? It is not so easy to find its meaning. In making the effort to find it, and by discovering how the Christmas Tree gradually came into use, how it grew from being the little branch, carried on St. Nicholas' arm on the 6th of December, into being our Christmas Tree, we come to realize that this Christmas Tree is also directly connected with the Tree of Paradise.

Human consciousness thus looks back here to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. What does this signify? This is one aspect of the way we make the Mystery of Golgotha known to-day. We turn back from the Mystery of Golgotha to the creation of the world, to the beginning of the world. We fail to grasp the meaning of the world's redemption, and instead turn back to the God who created the universe. This is expressed in the gradual disappearance of the real Christmas symbol, of the manger—so sublime a part of the Christmas plays of earlier centuries—and in the appearance of the Christmas Tree which is really the Tree of Paradise.

Thus the old Jehovah-religion again took the place of the Christ-religion; the Christmas Tree is the symbol of the reappearance of the religion of Jehovah. This Jehovah-religion makes its appearance in many shapes and forms to-day. For Jahve was once rightly worshipped as the one and only God in an age when his people felt themselves to be a unified folk, content within their limits, and living in the expectation of some day filling the entire earth. In our age people talk of Christ Jesus, but really worship only Jehovah. For, as we saw during the war, the people of the various nations talked of Christ, but were really concerned with the original God, Jehovah, who lives in the forces of nature and heredity.

On the one hand, the Christmas Tree, on the other, the national gods so remote from Christianity—with these humanity has turned back from grasping the Mystery of Golgotha to lay hold again on something belonging to a much earlier period. There has been a retrogression into the ancient Jehovah religion in the adherence to the nationalistic principle, in the announcement that the various peoples would follow their national gods.

You see, what must be taken into consideration is that in the annunciation, to the shepherds, and in the annunciation that came to the Magi, there is a human element common to all men. For the earth is the common property of all. The earth-annunciation received by the shepherds was one which could make no national distinctions and differentiations. And the Magi, who received a sun-annunciation, an annunciation from the heavens, also received a purely human element. For after the sun shines upon the lands of one folk, it shines on the lands of others also. Heaven and earth belong to all in common. With Christianity, a common human element is roused in all humanity.

This fact is pointed to in the twofold annunciation of the Christmas story. Such matters which were fully understood when man's soul-constitution was an entirely different one, will only be comprehensible to-day with the help of spiritual science.

We should inscribe this into our hearts to-day when we think of the Christmas festival. To-day, in thinking of the Christmas Mystery, we have need to look for a birth. We should not merely busy ourselves with idle talk about the Christmas festival and our own feelings, but should look for what must be born anew in this our age. For truly, real Christianity must be born anew. We need a cosmic Christmas festival for humanity.

Reflections such as those we are considering this evening are meant to be an interlude in the otherwise continuous presentation of the humanities. In particular, I would like to try this evening to develop some of the ideas I touched on in my lecture last December on the intellectual and cultural situation in Austria. In our time, in which the concept of Central Europe, and also of Central European intellectual life, must increasingly develop as a result of difficult events and experiences, it seems justified to take a look at the lesser-known circumstances of Austrian intellectual life.

Hermann Bahr, who is known in the broadest circles as a witty man, as a man who cultivates the most diverse areas of literature, comes, I would say, from a typically Austrian region: from Upper Austria, and visited France, Spain and Russia at a relatively young age, and I know that at the time he was of the opinion that he could faithfully represent the essence of French and even Spanish and Russian intellectual culture to a certain extent. He even immersed himself so completely in Spanish politics that, as he assured us at the time, he wrote a fiery article in Spain against the Sultan of Morocco when he returned. Well, for decades now, after his world travels, he has been staying in Austria, working as a playwright, as an editor, as a general observer of art, and also as a biographer, for example of the much-misunderstood Max Burckhardt, and so on. Until recently, I tried to keep track of what Hermann Bahr was writing. In recent times, and actually for quite a while, one finds in his work an endeavor, which he often expressed himself, that he is searching, to discover Austria. Now imagine, the man who thought he knew French, even Spanish character, who wrote a book about Russian character, then goes back to his homeland, is such a member of his homeland that he only needs to speak five words and you immediately recognize the Austrian; the man seeks Austria! This may seem strange. But it is not so at all. This search originates from the quite justified feeling that, after all, for the Austrian, Austria, Austrian nature – I would say – Austrian national substance is not easy to find. I would like to describe some of this Austrian national character in a few typical personalities, insofar as it is expressed in Austrian intellectual life.

When I was young, many people were of the opinion, the then justified opinion, that when considering art, artistry, literature, and intellectual development, one looked too much to the past. In particular, much blame was attached to the scientific history of art and literature, for which a personality is only considered if they lived not just decades but centuries ago. At that time, considerations could hardly rise to the immediate perception of the present. I believe that today one could feel something opposite: in the way that considerations about art and artists are so commonplace, we now often experience that everyone more or less starts with themselves or with their immediate contemporaries. I do not wish to consider the present situation of Austrian intellectual life here, but rather a period of time that is not so far in the past. I do not wish to proceed in a descriptive manner. With descriptions, one is always right and always wrong at the same time. One touches on one or the other shade of this or that fact or personality, and both the person who agrees and the person who refutes will undoubtedly be right in the case of a general characteristic, in the case of general descriptions. I should like to give a symptomatic description. I should like to pick out individual personalities and in these personalities to show some of the many things that are alive in the Austrian intellectual world. You will excuse me if I start with a personality who is close to me. I believe, however, that in this case being close to someone does not prevent me from making an objective assessment of the personality in question. But on the other hand, I believe that in this person I have encountered a personality in life that is extraordinarily characteristic of Austrian intellectual life.

When I came to the Vienna Technical University in 1879, the subject, which was of course taught there as a minor subject, was the history of German literature, Karl Julius Schröer. He is little known and much misunderstood by those who have met him. I now believe that he is one of those personalities who deserve to live on in the intellectual history of Austria. However, an important literary historian once made some strange comments about Karl Julius Schröer in the presence of a party at which I was sitting next to him. There was talk of a German princess, and the literary historian in question wanted to say that this German princess, however talented she might otherwise be, sometimes, as he put it, “could be very wrong” in her literary judgments; and as an example, he cited the fact that she considers Karl Julius Schröer to be an important man. Schröer took up a position as a teacher of German literary history at a Protestant lyceum in Pressburg around the middle of the last century, at a momentous point in Austrian intellectual life. He later taught the same subject at the University of Budapest. Karl Julius Schröer was the son of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, who was mentioned in my previous lecture on Austrian identity. Tobias Gottfried Schröer was also an extraordinarily important figure for Austria. He had founded the Pressburg Lyceum and wanted to make it a center for the cultivation of German intellectual life. His aim was to help those Germans in Austria who were surrounded by other nationalities to become fully aware of their identity as part of the German intellectual world.

Tobias Gottfried Schröer is a personality who, from a historical-spiritual point of view, comes across in such a way that one would like to feel a certain emotion, because one always has the feeling: how is it possible in the world that an important mind can remain completely unknown due to the unfavorable conditions of the time, completely unknown in the sense that one calls “being known” that one knows that this or that personality has existed and has achieved this or that. However, the achievements of Tobias Gottfried Schröer are by no means unknown or unappreciated. I just want to emphasize that as early as 1830 Tobias Gottfried Schröer wrote a very interesting drama, “The Bear”, which has at its center the personality of Tsar Ivan IV, and that Karl von Holtei said of this drama that if the characters depicted were Schröer's creations, then he had achieved something extraordinarily significant. And they were Schröer's inventions except for Ivan IV. However, the level-headed man, the not at all somehow radically minded Tobias Gottfried Schröer, had a flaw. In those days, people could not be allowed to read what he wrote, so to speak, that is, this view was held by the censors. And so it came about that he had to have all his works printed abroad and that one could not get to know him as the important dramatic poet that he was. He wrote a drama in 1839 called “The Life and Deeds of Emmerich Tököly and His Fellow Rebels”. In this work, one encounters in a large historical painting all the intellectual currents that existed in Hungary at that time. And in the character of Tököly himself, one encounters what critics of the time rightly called a Hungarian Götz von Berlichingen, not so much because Tököly had to be called a Götz von Berlichingen, but because Schröer managed to depict Tököly in such a vivid way that the dramatic figure of Tököly could only be compared to Götz von Berlichingen. It was only by a strange mistake that Tobias Gottfried Schröer was sometimes recognized. For example, he wrote a paper “On Education and Teaching in Hungary”. This paper was regarded by many as something extraordinary. But it was also banned, and attention was drawn to the fact that this author - who was basically the calmest man in the world - was actually a dangerous person. But the Palatine of Hungary, Archduke Joseph, read this writing. Now the storm that had risen over this writing subsided. He inquired about the author. They did not know who he was. But they speculated that it was the rector of a Hungarian school. And Archduke Joseph, the Palatine of Hungary, immediately took the man - it was not the right one! - into the house to educate his son. What a tribute to a personality! Such things have happened many times, especially with regard to this personality. For this personality is the same one who, under the name Christian Oeser, has written all kinds of works that have been widely distributed: an “Aesthetics for virgins,” a “World history for girls' schools.” If you read this “World History for Girls' Schools” by a Protestant author, you will certainly find it quite remarkable, and yet it is true that it was once even introduced in a convent as the corresponding world history – truly, in a convent! The reason for this was that there is a picture of St. Elizabeth on the title page. I leave it to you to believe that the liberalness of the nuns might have contributed to the introduction of this “world history for girls' schools” in a convent.

After pronouncing such sentences, Karl Julius Schröer let his gaze wander over the times when the German essence was thoroughly misunderstood by other nations around it as a result of various events. He spoke about this as follows: “The German name was held in low esteem by the nations that owed it so much; at that time, the German was valued in France almost on a par with barbarians.” In 1846, he spoke to his audience at the German Lyceum in Pressburg! But in contrast to this, Karl Julius Schröer was full of enthusiasm for what one could say he saw as the German intellectual substance, not for what is merely called nationality in the ethnographic sense, but for the spiritual that permeates everything that holds the German essence together. I quote a few of Karl Julius Schröer's statements from this time, which now lies far behind us, for the reason of showing how peculiarly that which is called the confession of German nationality lives in the more outstanding minds. Basically, we have to keep in mind that the way the German stands by his nationality cannot be understood by the other nationalities of Europe, because it is fundamentally different from the way the other nationalities stand by what they call their nationality. If we look at the more outstanding and deeply feeling Germans, we find that they are German in the best sense of the word because they see Germanness in what is spiritually pulsating, but also as a force tinged with this spirituality, in what counts itself German; that Germanness is something like an ideal for them, something to which they look up, that they do not see merely as a national organism. And therein lie many of the difficulties why German character – even in our days, and especially in our days – is so misunderstood, so hated. Such Germans as Karl Julius Schröer want to achieve their Germanness through knowledge, by gaining insight into the possibilities of life and action that the living organism of a nation offers. And again and again Karl Julius Schröer's gaze wanders, not in arrogance, but in modesty, to the question: What world-historical mission in the development of the human race has that which, in this best sense of the word, can be called Germanness and German nature? And before world history it wants to be justified, what is built up in views on German nature. Much more could be said about the special position of such minds in relation to the German character. Thus Karl Julius Schröer, speaking from this attitude, says: “The world epoch that begins with Christianity is also called the Germanic world; for although the other nations also have a great share in history, almost all the states of Europe were founded by Germanic peoples... .” — this is a truth that, at least today, is not readily acknowledged outside of the German border posts. Of course, it is not heard, but it is not readily acknowledged. “... Spain, France, England, Germany, Austria, even Russia, Greece, Sweden and so on, were founded by Germans and imbued with the German spirit.”

And then Karl Julius Schröer cites for his listeners a saying of a German literary historian, Wackernagel: “Throughout Europe now flowed...” - namely after the migration of peoples - “A pure Germanic blood, or combining Roman-Celtic blood, now flowed a Germanic spirit of life, took the Christian faith... on its purer, stronger floods and carried it along.” There was no time in which the hatred of Europe would have prompted such views as today. They were views that arose in a thoroughly honest way from the contemplation of the German character by this mind. And so he expressed himself: “The civilized peoples of Europe are one great family, and it is a single great course of the nations of Europe that leads through all errors back to the source of truth and true art, on which all nations accompany the Germans, often overtaking them, but in the end one after the other falling behind them. The Romance peoples are usually the first in everything: the Italians, then the Spaniards, the French, then come the English and the Germans. One of these nations usually represents the culmination of a particular trend of the times. But lately, even the English have had their hour struck in art and science... “—said in 1846, though with reference to the development of intellectual life—”... and the time has come when German literature is visibly beginning to rule over Europe, as the Italian and French did before!"

Thus was the man rooted in his Austrian homeland. And since I later became very close to him, I know well that it meant nothing to him, absolutely nothing that could somehow be described in words: he would have wanted the domination of one nation over another—not even within Austria. If one wants to call an attitude like Karl Julius Schröer's national, then it is compatible with the acceptance of every nationality, insofar as this nationality wants to assert itself alongside others from the germ, from the source of its own being, and does not want to dominate these others. His concern was not to cultivate the supremacy of the German character over any other nationality or over any legitimate national aspiration, but to bring to full development within the German character what is inherent within that German character. And that is what is special about this man: that he felt himself intertwined with Austrian national character through his entire aesthetic sensibility, through his entire feeling, artistic feeling, popular feeling, but also through his scientific endeavors. He became, so to speak, an observer of this Austrian national character.

And so we see that as early as the 1950s, out of his deep love for the people, he collected those wonderful German Christmas plays that have been preserved among the German population of Hungary, and published “German Christmas Plays from Hungary”, those Christmas plays that are performed in the villages at Christmas time, at the time of the Epiphany. They are strange games! They were actually only printed for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century – and Schröer was one of the first to have such things printed. They have been preserved from generation to generation in the rural population. Since then, many such Christmas games have been collected in the most diverse areas, and much has been written about them. With such heartfelt love, with such intimate connection to folklore, as Kar! Julius Schröer wrote his introduction to the “German Christmas Plays from Hungary” at the time, hardly anything has been written in this field since. He shows us that manuscripts of the plays were always preserved from generation to generation, as they were a sacred ritual that people prepared for in the individual villages when Christmas season approached; and that those who were chosen to play, that is, to go around the village and the most diverse locales to play these games for the people, in which the creation of the world, the biblical history of the New Testament, the appearance of the three kings, and the like were depicted. Schröer describes how those who prepared for such plays not only prepared themselves for weeks by learning things by heart, by being drilled by some kind of director, but how they prepared themselves by following certain rules; how they did not drink wine for weeks, how they avoided other pleasures of life for weeks in order to have the right feelings, so to speak, to be allowed to perform in such plays. How Germanic character has absorbed Christianity can be seen, how this Christianity has flowed into these strange plays, which are sometimes crude, but always deeply moving and extraordinarily vivid. Later, as I said, others also collected these things; but none approached it with such devotion of his personality, with such a connection to what was being lived out, as Karl Julius Schröer, even if his representations, scientifically speaking, are long outdated.

Then he turned to the study of German folklore as it is spread throughout the vast territory of Austria-Hungary, of German folklore as it lives in the people. And there are numerous treatises by Karl Julius Schröer in which he presents this folklore in terms of its language and the intellectual life expressed through it. We have a dictionary, a description of the dialects of the Hungarian highlands, the area that was settled by German settlers on the southern slopes of the Carpathians, and still is today, although most of the area is Magyar. With tremendous love, through Karl Julius Schröer, I would say, every word was recorded that resonates with the dialect of this area; but we have always recorded it in such a way that one can see from his descriptions how his interest was directed towards seeking out what the cultural task was, what the particular way of life of the people who, coming from afar, had to push their way into the east at a certain time in order to temporarily cultivate their own culture in the midst of other peoples, later to remember it and then gradually to be absorbed into other cultures. What Schröer has achieved in this field will in many ways represent something for the future, like wonderful memories of the ferment that shaped German identity in the wide expanse of Austria.

Karl Julius Schröer later came to Vienna. He became director of the Protestant schools and later professor of German literary history at the Vienna Technical University. And I myself experienced how he knew how to influence those who were receptive to the presentation of directly felt intellectual life. Then he turned more and more to Goethe, delivered his “Faust” commentary, which appeared in several editions, and in 1875 wrote a history of German poetry that was met with much hostility. It became an example at the time after it was published, a “literary history from the wrist” called. However, Schröer's literary history is not a literary history written according to the methods that later became common in the Scherer school. But it is a literary history in which there is nothing but what the author experienced, experienced in the poetic works, in art, in the development of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century up to his time; because that is what he wanted to present at the time. Karl Julius Schröer's entire life and intellectual development can only be understood by considering the Austrian character of Schröer's entire personality, which brought the scientific and artistic into direct connection , and to experience it in direct connection with folklore, that folklore which, particularly in Austria, I would say, presents a problem at every point of its development, if one only knows how to experience and observe it. And one must often think, perhaps also abroad: Is this Austria a necessity? How does this Austria actually fit into the overall development of European culture?

Well, if you look at Austria in this way, it appears to be a great diversity. Many, many nations and ethnic groups live side by side, pushed together, and the life of the individual is often complicated by these underlying factors, even as a soul life and as a whole personality life. The things that now play from one nation into another, what comes to light through this lack of understanding and the desire to understand and the difficulties of life, it comes to one's attention at every turn in Austria, combined with other historical conditions of Austrian life. There is a poet who, with great but, I would say, modest genius, understood how to depict something of this Austrian essence. At the end of the 1880s and in the 1890s, he could occasionally be seen performing in Vienna when one came to the famous Café Griensteidl in Vienna and also in certain other literary circles. Yes, this Café Griensteidl basically belongs to Austrian literature; so much so that a writer, Karl Kraus, wrote a series of articles entitled “Demolished Literature” when it was demolished. Today, one still reads about Café Griensteidl as if it were a beautiful memory. Please excuse me for including this, but it is too interesting, because at Café Griensteidl, if you went there at certain times of the day, you could really see a cross-section of Austrian literature. But today, when you read about these things, you often read about the times of the waiter Heinrich, who later became famous, the famous Heinrich of Griensteidl, who knew what newspapers each person needed to have when they came in the door. But that was no longer the real time, the time of the somewhat jovial Heinrich, but the real time was that of Franz vom Griensteidl, who had lived through the days when Lenau and Grillparzer and Anastasius Grün gathered at the Café Griensteidl every day or twice a week, and who, with his infinitely dignified manner, would occasionally tell a story in his own way about one of these literary greats when you happened to be waiting for a newspaper. As I said, Jakob Julius David also occasionally appeared in the circle of people there. Actually, David only emerged in Austrian intellectual life at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s. When you sat with him, he spoke little; he listened even less when people spoke to him because he was severely hard of hearing. He was very severely short-sighted and usually spoke from a compressed soul, from a soul that had experienced how often in life what we call fate weighs heavily on the soul. When I spoke to the half-blind and half-deaf man, I often thought how strongly Austrian identity was expressed in this personality, who had gone through a difficult youth, a youth full of privation and poverty in the valley of the Hanna, in the valley through which the March flows, where German, Hungarian and Slavic populations border on each other and are mixed everywhere. If you drive down from this valley to Vienna, you will pass poor huts everywhere; this was especially the case when David was young. But these humble huts often have people as inhabitants, each of whom harbors in his soul the Austrian problem, that which, in all its broad specificity, contains the Austrian problem, the whole diversity of life that challenges the soul. This diversity, which wants to be experienced, which cannot be dismissed with a few concepts, with a few ideas, lives in these strange, in a certain way closed natures. If I wanted to characterize what these natures are like, which David has described as being particularly prevalent in Austrian life, I would have to say: they are natures that feel deeply the suffering of life, but they also have something in them that is not so common in the world: the ability to endure suffering to a certain extent. It is even difficult to find words for what is made of the often arduous experience, especially in these Austrian regions. There is no sentimentality, but a strong ability to experience the diversity of life, which of course brings about clashes, even among the lowest peasant classes. But this does not turn into a weariness of life, into some kind of world-weary mood. It transforms itself into something that is not defiance and yet has the strength of defiance. It transforms itself, if I may say so, weakness into strength. And this strength is realized in the area in which it finds itself through the necessities of life. And weakness, which in a sense had been transformed into strength, showed itself in David. This man was half blind and half deaf. But he once said to me: “Yes, my eyes cannot see much in the distance, but all the more so when using a microscope, I see close up.” That is to say, up close he observed everything exactly through his eyes as if through a microscope; but he looked at it so closely that one must say: In what he saw with his eyes, there was something great that intervened, explaining and illuminating what was behind it. And as a substitute for the wide-ranging view, this man had a deep gaze in the small field of vision that he overlooked with his microscopic eyes, an obsession with getting behind the reasons for things. And that was transferred to his entire mental life. This allowed him to see the people he wanted to describe, deep, deep into their hearts. And as a result, he was able to depict many, many types of Austrian life in poetry, drama, novellas, and even lyric poetry. How this entire Austrian mood can form in the soul, not into sentimentality, but into a certain inner strength, which is not defiance, but contains the strength of defiance, is particularly evident where Jakob Julius David speaks for himself. There he says:

Almighty! Thou hast taken much from me,
Thou alone knowest what I have lost;
My eye sees the beautiful world blurred,
And only muffled, muffled and quiet
Life's sounds come to my ailing ear.
Once it hurt me – and for my own good,
I thank you today that I previously criticized you
You have spared me much sorrow, many horrors
Saved me from hearing and seeing...

Indeed, the man was such that he did not have to see and hear many things in order to bring out of the depths of his soul many things that he wanted to embody poetically. As I said, I would like to show what is expressed in such Austrian sounds in individual symptoms. And one must not introduce a touch of sentimentality when Jakob Julius David speaks of his fate in this way:

In the west you see gray in the valley
The heaviest clouds hang –
That reminds me of the days,
Which have passed for me...

In the east, asleep in the light of the storm, That is my today...

But this “today” he uses up, he exhausts it, and for him it became the possibility of describing Austrian folklore in such a way that everywhere, quite remarkably, one sees individual destinies in his work – many of his novellas have only a few characters. These individual destinies make one say: The way in which the characters collide with each other because they are placed next to each other in the world by kinship or otherwise is extremely moving and takes us deep into realities. But what Jakob Julius David captures so, I would say, microscopically and yet movingly and vividly, very rarely occurs in such a way that a large painting of world history is not somehow behind it, with the individual event taking place against its backdrop.

This contextual thinking of the small, which does not become shadowy and blurred because it appears on such a background, that this letting the small happen is colored by the greatness of world-historical becoming, that is what we find to be the most characteristic of a well-known Austrian poet, but one who unfortunately is not well enough known. We are talking about the greatest poet of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century, the poet whose home we find if we go just a little way west from the home of Jakob Julius David: we are talking about Robert Hamerling.

It is remarkable how the traits exhibited by individual personalities within Austrian intellectual life seem to clash, but when viewed from a certain higher perspective, they present themselves as qualities alongside other qualities, flowing together into a great harmony. It is remarkable: Karl Julius Schröer did not want to accept Robert Hamerling at all. To him he was a poet of secondary importance, a poet who, above all, is said to have destroyed his poetic power through his erudition. On the other hand, in Robert Hamerling there is the same attitude, the same noblest grasp of the German essence that I tried to describe in such a characteristic personality as Karl Julius Schröer. But that too is typical of Hamerling, and what I am describing to you here as typical personalities can be found in many, many others in Austrian life. I am trying to pick out only the characteristic traits that can really be presented as individual traits, but in such a way that they can stand for the whole. What is peculiar about Robert Hamerling is that he grows out of the smallest things. He comes from the Waldviertel in Lower Austria, from that poor region that bears its fruit only with difficulty because the soil is rocky and covered with forest, a region that is cozy and charming, and can be particularly enchanting in its hilly nature. Out of this peculiar nature and out of the limitations of the human character, Robert Hamerling's great spirit emerged. And he grew into a similar understanding of the German character to that of Karl Julius Schröer's spirit. We see this in one of Robert Hamerling's best poems, 'Germanenzug', where the way in which the German spirit lived in Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, is particularly clearly expressed. The ancient Germans move from Asia and camp on the Caucasus. Wonderfully, I would say, with magical vividness, it is described how evening falls, how the sun goes down, twilight reigns, the moon appears, how the entire army of Teutons camps, sleep spreads and only the one blond-haired , the spirit of Asia appears to him, releasing his people to Europe, and how the spirit of Asia permeates Teut with that which is in store for the Teutons up to their development in Germanness through history. There the great becomes great, but there also, with noble criticism, what is to be blamed is already expressed. There many a trait that especially people like Robert Hamerling see in Germanness is expressed by the goddess Asia. There the future is spoken of:

But however proudly you aspire, highly soaring, always still a blaze
you will keep the ancient sacred fire.
The dream-filled
drunkenness of God will live on in you...
You only strive because you love: your boldest thought
will be devotion that wants to sink into God.

Thus spoke Asia to the blonde Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples to Europe, speaking in advance of the genius of Germanness, and continuing:

Do you know the highest path for your struggle
When you grow strong in certain unity in the future?
Do you know the beacons in the sea of time
Which, beckoning afar with the flame of purity,
Bring you to the last, most beautiful goal?
High above, they shine with an eternal radiance
The sacred ideals
Of humanity: freedom, justice, and light and love!
These are the last fully glowing flames
of the original light - to stir them up all together
into one glow in the quarrelling hustle and bustle
of the life of nations: that is your mission...

And Robert Hamerling could not help but consider the details that he presents, for example, as an epic poet or as a playwright, in the context of the great spiritual development of humanity. I would say that all these observers over there in Austria have something in common with microscopic vision, which, however, wants to reach beneath the surface of things; and Robert Hamerling shows it most beautifully. And they have something in common with western Austria, of which one can say: it has a certain right to place the individual within the greater whole. Because the way the valleys stand between the mountains in some areas of western Austria is expressed in turn in what lives in a poet like Robert Hamerling. We can see that a great variety of things are expressed in this Austrian intellectual life, in all its sides, which may perhaps repel each other, but which nevertheless represent a diversity that is unity in the whole picture of culture that one can draw.

And in this diversity, the sounds that come from other nationalities combine not in disharmony, but in a certain sense in harmony. It is of course not possible to say anything specific about what sounds from other nationalities into Austrian intellectual life as a whole. Only a few symptoms will be characterized. For example, within Czech literature – with regard to these descriptions, I must of course be cautious, since I do not speak Czech – we have a newer poet, a recently deceased poet, who, as someone who wrote about him put it, has become for his people something similar to what was said about a great Czech musician: that he was there like a whale in a carp pond. That is how Jaroslav Vrchlický is placed in the spiritual life of his people. In his works, the whole of world history comes to life: the oldest human life of the distant past, Egyptian, European life of the Middle Ages and modern times, Jewish intellectual life, the whole of world history comes to life in his lyric poetry, comes to life in his dramas, in his stories, and is alive everywhere. This Jaroslav Vrchlicky – his real name is Emil Frida – has an incredible productivity. And when you consider that this man has translated a large, large area of the literature of other nations for his nation, in addition to his own extremely widespread production, then you can appreciate what such a mind means for his nation. I have to read to you, because otherwise I might forget to mention some of the poets of world literature that Vrchlicky has translated for Czech literature: Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Petrarca, Leopardi, Calderon, Camöens, Moliere, Baudelaire, Rostand, Victor Hugo, Byron, Shelley, Gorki, Schiller, Hamerling, Mickiewicz, Balzac, Dumas and others. It has been calculated that Vrchlicky alone translated 65,000 verses by Tasso, Dante and Ariosto. And yet this man was, I would say, the very embodiment of his nationality. When he emerged on the scene in the stormy 1870s – he was born in 1853 – it was a difficult time for his nation, with all the contradictions that had arisen; in relation to the Germans, all sorts of opposing factions had emerged within his own nation. At first he was much contested. There were people who said he could not write Czech; there were people who made fun of what Vrchlicky wrote. But that stopped very soon. He forced recognition. And in 1873 he was, one might say, like an angel of peace among the terribly feuding parties. He was recognized by all, and in his popular poetic works he resurrected entire paintings of world developments from all of them; just not – and this is striking – anything from Russian folklore! A man who wrote a short biography about him – before the war – expressly warned in this biography: one should see from this man in particular how little foundation there is for the fairy tale that the Czechs, or the western Slavs in general, have something to expect from the great Russian empire when they look within, as is often said.

We see this expansion in a different way, this: to see the individual experience against the background of the great interrelationships of humanity and the world — we see it in a different way in a poet whom I already referred to in my last lecture on Austrianness, the Hungarian poet Emmerich Madách. Madách was born in 1823. Madách wrote, one must say, truly imbued with a full Magyar spirit, among other things that cannot be mentioned here, The Tragedy of Man. This The Tragedy of Man is again something that does not tie in with the great events of humanity, but directly represents these events of humanity themselves. And one would like to say how Madách, the Magyar, the native of eastern Austria, presents this “tragedy of man”, which differs, for example, from the figures that Hamerling, in his own way, created out of the great painting of world history in “Ahasver”, “King of Sion”, “Aspasia”. They differ as the mountains of western Austria differ from the wide plains of eastern Austria, or rather – and I would like to be more precise here – as the soul, when it rises in the often so beautiful – especially when they are bathed in sunlight – valleys of western Austria and lets its gaze wander over the mountains that border these valleys, — how the soul, in this absorption, differs from that mood of going out into the wide open, but indefinite, that overcomes it when the Hungarian puszta, with its wide plain character, affects that soul. You know from Lenau's poetry, what this Hungarian puszta can become for the human soul.

A remarkable poem, this “Tragedy of Man”. We are placed directly at the beginning of creation. God appears alongside Lucifer. Adam dreams the future world history under Lucifer's influence. This happens in nine significant cultural images. In the beginning, we are introduced to the Lord and Lucifer; Lucifer, who wants to assert himself in his entire being towards the creator of this existence, into which the being of man is intertwined. And Lucifer admonishes the creator of the world that he is also there and that he is of the same age as the creator of the world himself. In a sense, the Creator must accept Lucifer as his helper. We hear the significant words in the poem: “If the negation” - namely Lucifer - “has even the slightest hold, your world will soon unhinge it.” With this, Lucifer threatens the creative spirit. The Lord hands Lucifer two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of immortality. But with these, Lucifer tempts man. And he tempts Adam, thereby causing Adam to lose paradise. And outside of paradise, Lucifer introduces Adam to what in the visions of Madách is the knowledge of the forces of nature, of the whole fabric of forces that can be gained through knowledge of man through the natural phenomena unfolding before the senses. It is the invisible cobweb of natural laws that Lucifer teaches Adam outside of paradise. And then we are shown how Lucifer makes Adam dream of the more distant fate of the world. There we see how Adam is re-embodied as a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, and Eve, in her re-embodiment, meets him as the wife of a slave who is mistreated. Adam is seized by a deep melancholy; that is, he sees it in his dream, in which his later life, all his later embodiments, appear before the soul's eye. He sees it in such a way that he is seized by deep bitterness about what is to become of the world. And further, we are shown how Adam is re-embodied in Athens as Miltiades, how he must experience the ingratitude of the people; further, we are shown how he has to observe the declining culture and the penetration of Christianity in ancient Rome, in the imperial period. Among crusaders later in Constantinople, Adam comes to us in a new life. He is embodied again as Kepler at the court of Emperor Rudolf; as Danton during the French Revolutionary period. Then he is embodied again in London. There he becomes acquainted with that through which, according to the view of Madách, Lucifer has a characteristic effect on the present. The words must already be spoken that are written in it: “Everything is a market where everyone trades, buys, cheats, business is cheating, cheating is business.” It was not written under the influence of the war, because the poem was written in the 1860s. Then, in a later life, Adam is led to the end of time on Earth, to a landscape of ice, and so on. It is undoubtedly interesting, but one would also like to say that, like the Hungarian steppes, which extend into infinity and leave much incomprehensible and unsatisfactory – that is how this poem is. And only sporadically do we realize that the poet actually means that the whole thing is a dream that Lucifer inspires in Adam. And what the poet really wants to say is that this is how the world would be if only Lucifer were at work. But man also has an effect. Man has to seek his strength and counteract Lucifer. But this is hardly hinted at, only, I would like to say, hinted at at the end, but in such a way that what appears as positive in the face of the negative, in the face of sadness, in the face of suffering, must also be summarized, like suffering that develops into defiant strength. “Fight and trust” is what Adam is taught. But what man can fight for is not shown at all. What the world would become if it were left to nature alone is depicted. And this poem has grown out of a deep inner life and a difficult life experience.

Madách is also one of those natures who, in a different way, can be characterized by saying: Oh, this diversity of life, which is linked to the historical conditions of Austria, passed through his soul; but at the same time also the strength to transform weakness into strength.

Madách comes from old Hungarian nobility. He grew up in the Neögrader district. He lost his father very early. His mother was a spiritually strong woman. Madách became a dreamy, contemplative person. In 1849, after the revolution, he took in a refugee who was already gone when the police came looking for him; but the police still came to the conclusion that Madách had taken in this refugee. Madách was put on trial and sentenced to four years in prison. It was not so much the prison, which he accepted as an historical necessity, that had a severely distressing effect on Madách, but the fact that he had to separate from his wife, from his family, who was like his other self, whom he loved most tenderly, and that he not see her, not share in this life for four years, was devastating to him, that was the real hard blow of fate that made him doubt humanity, if it had not been for the fact that every hour he spent in prison was followed by the hope: you will see her again then. And so he wrote his poems, in which he imagined going through the door. Even after he was actually released, he wrote the last of these poems on the way home, in which he wonderfully describes the heaven that would now receive him. And he really did come home. The woman he loved so tenderly had meanwhile become unfaithful to him, she had left with another. And through the gate through which he wanted to enter in the sense of the poem he had written, he had to enter his treacherously abandoned home. In visions, the traitor and his betrayal often stood before his eyes. It was from such sources that his historical and human feelings, his feelings about the world, were formed. This must certainly be borne in mind if one is to appreciate this poetry, to which one might possibly have many objections.

For that is the point – and it would be interesting to develop this in detail – that the diversity that is in Austrian life and that is brought about by such things as I have mentioned can, again and again, broaden one's view and present one with tasks, so that one must directly link one's own experiences to the great experiences of humanity, yes, to the tasks of humanity. And just as with Hamerling, although he spent half his life on his sickbed, every poetic note he uttered was connected with the most direct experience, so too with Emmerich Madách on the other hand.

You see, this diversity – one can ask: did it have to be forged in the course of human development in Central Europe? Is there any necessity in this? If you look at the matter more closely, you do indeed get an insight into such a necessity, to find the most diverse human minds in a single area of space also united in shared destinies. And I would like to say that it always seemed to me like a symbol of what is present in the national community, in the diversity of the people, that nature, and strangely enough especially around Vienna, has already created something of a great diversity in the earth. Geologically, the so-called Vienna Basin is one of the most interesting areas on earth. As if in an earthly microcosm, as in a small Earth, everything that interacts with each other is brought together, but it also symbolizes what can explain to you that which is otherwise spread over the Earth's surface. And for those who have an interest in and an understanding of scientific observations, the contemplation of this Vienna Basin, with the numerous secrets of the Earth's formation that can be studied there, is deeply inspiring. One is tempted to say that the Earth itself develops a diversity that is bound into a unity in the center of Europe. And what is geologically present in the Earth is basically only reflected in what takes place above this Earth's surface in the minds of human beings.

I say all this not to make propaganda for Austria, but only to describe a characteristic feature. But this characteristic feature comes to the fore when one wants to describe Austria. And, I would like to say, when one goes into the field of exact science, of geology, one finds in Austria something that corresponds to what Austria's great poets claim as their most distinctive feature. If you observe Hamerling, if you observe Jakob Julius David, if you consider other great Austrian poets: the characteristic feature is that they all want to tie in with the great destiny of humanity. And that is also what gives them the most intimate and profound satisfaction. A man who was a friend of mine wrote a novel at the time, to Hamerling's great satisfaction, in which he attempted to express medieval knowledge in the form of individual figures in terms of cultural history. The novel is called “The Alchemist”. It is by Fritz Lemmermayer. And Fritz Lemmermayer is not an outstanding talent. He is even a talent who, after this novel, has hardly achieved anything significant again. But one can see that the essence that runs through the nation can take hold of the individual and find characteristic expression even in this untalented person, in all his volition.

As I said, even in the exact science of geology, something like this can come to the fore. It is probably a deep necessity that this is the case with the great Viennese geologist Eduard Sueß, perhaps one of the greatest geologists of all time, to whom we owe the study of the conditions of the Vienna Basin. Just the sight of this Vienna Basin, with its tremendous diversity, which in turn combines into a wonderful unity, could instinctively give rise to a great, powerful geological idea, which comes to light in this man and of which one must say that it could only have been developed from the Austrian character, for Eduard Sueß is an archetypally Austrian personality in his entire being: this unity in diversity, I would say, this microscopic imprint of the entire geology of the earth in the Vienna Basin. This is evident in the fact that Eduard Sueß, in our time, that is, in the last third of the nineteenth century, was able to make the decision to create a three-volume work, “The Face of the Earth,” a book in which everything that lives and works and has lived and worked in the earth in geological terms is pieced together into a significant, rounded image on a large scale, so that the earth becomes visible. Every aspect is treated with exactitude, but when one beholds the entire face of the Earth as Sueß has created it, the Earth appears as a living being, so that one immediately sees: Geology comes from the earth. If one followed Suess further, something would be created in which the planet would be directly connected to the whole cosmos. Suess takes the earth so far in this respect that, to a certain extent, the earth is alive and one only has the need to ask further: How does this earth live in the whole cosmos, now that it has been understood geologically?

Just as much in Austrian poetry is connected with the Austrian landscape and Austrian nature, so I believe that the geology of Austria in the narrower sense is connected with the fact that, perhaps, in the spiritual life of humanity: that from Vienna this book in the field of geology could arise, this book, which is just as exactly scientifically as ingeniously assessed and executed and in which really everything that geology has created up to Sueß is processed in an overall picture, but in such a way that one really believes at last that the whole earth is no longer the dead product of the usual geology, but as a living being. I believe that in this area, precisely what could come from Eduard Sueß's Austrian identity plays into the scientific achievements—by no means in any way into the objectivity of the sciences, which is certainly not endangered by this—what could come from Eduard Sueß's Austrian identity. And when you look into this Austrianness in so many different areas, you realize that figures like those created by Jakob Julius David really do exist, in whom a single trait of the soul often takes hold because the difficulties of life have pushed aside the others, and fills them so completely that the individual soul has its strength, but also its power and its reassurance and its consolation. These figures become particularly interesting when these souls mature into people of knowledge.

And there is a figure from the Upper Austrian countryside, from the Ischl area – I have already referred to the name in the previous lecture – there is the remarkable farmer and philosopher Conrad Deubler. If you imagine every figure that Jakob Julius David created from Austrian life to be a little younger, if you imagine the events of this life that shaped this life later to be absent and imagine them in the soul of Conrad Deubler, then any such figure could become Conrad Deubler. Because this Conrad Deubler is also extremely characteristic of the people of the Austrian Alpine countries. Born in Goisern in the Ischl region, he becomes a miller, later an innkeeper, a person who is deeply predisposed to be a person of insight. When I now speak about Conrad Deubler, I ask that it not be taken as discordant to point out that, of course, a world view such as Conrad Deubler's is not represented here; that it is always emphasized that one must go beyond what Conrad Deubler thought in order to achieve a spiritualization of the world view. But what matters is not clinging to certain dogmas, but being able to recognize the honesty and justification of every human striving for knowledge. And even if one cannot agree with anything that Conrad Deubler actually professed, the contemplation of this personality, especially in connection with characteristics of Austrian life, means something that is typical and significant in particular, in that it expresses how, from within those circumstances, there is a striving for wholeness that, in many respects, can be compared spiritually to being spatially enclosed by mountains. Conrad Deubler is an insightful person, despite not even having learned to write properly, despite having had very little schooling. Jakob Julius David calls the personalities he describes and sketches “musers.” In my home region of Lower Austria, the Waldviertel, they would have been called “simulators.” These are people who have to go through life musing, but who associate something sensitive with musing, who find much to criticize in life. In Austria, we call this “raunzing” about life. People grumble about life a lot. But this criticism is not dry criticism; this criticism is something that is immediately transformed into inner life, especially in figures like Conrad Deubler. He is a man of insight from the very beginning, even though he couldn't write properly. He is always going for books. In his youth, he starts with a good book, a book that aspires from the sensual to the spiritual: Grävell, “Der Mensch” (Man). Deubler reads this in 1830 (he was born in 1814), and Sintenis, “Der gestirnte Himmel” (The Starry Sky), Zschokke's “Stunden der Andacht” (Hours of Devotion). But he doesn't really feel at home with these things, he can't go along with these things. He is a contemplative by nature, and he is imbued with enthusiasm to find satisfaction for the soul not only for himself, but also for those who inhabit his village with him. Something in these people is striving out of the traditional worldview. Then Conrad Deubler becomes acquainted with the ideas that most deeply moved and stirred the times at that time – he becomes acquainted with writings that were written out of the spirit of Darwinism. He becomes acquainted with Ludwig Feuerbach, with David Friedrich Strauss. Later he becomes acquainted with the writings of Ernst Haeckel, but this is later. He reads all of this, devouring it. I will mention in passing that he was sentenced to several years in prison for dealing with such reading material and reading such things to his fellow villagers, and for founding a kind of library for his fellow villagers. It was from 1852 to 1856 – for religious disturbance, blasphemy and spreading blasphemous views! But as I said, I only mention this in passing, because Conrad Deubler bore the whole thing manfully. For him, it was a matter of penetrating to knowledge out of a fundamental urge of his soul. And so we see in this farmer what we may see in another spirit, I would say, on a higher plane of life, at the very end. We see in this spirit how attempts are made to reconcile the scientific way of thinking with the deepest needs of the soul. That Conrad Deubler could arrive at a purely naturalistic-materialistic view of life should, as I said, not concern us. For what matters is not that, but that in such people there lives the urge to see nature itself spiritualized. Even if they initially only accept it sensually, in them all lives the urge to accept nature spiritually. And from such a view of nature, a spiritualized view of life must nevertheless arise in the course of human evolution. So this simple farmer has gradually become a famous personality, especially among the most enlightened spirits of the materialistic epoch. He was an enthusiastic traveler and not only learned in his early youth in Vienna what he wanted to learn, he also traveled to Feuerbach in Nuremberg. But it is particularly interesting how his inn in Goisern became a place of residence for the most important people in the field of natural science and natural philosophy. Haeckel repeatedly stopped at Deubler's, staying there for weeks at a time. Feuerbach often stopped there. Deubler corresponded with David Friedrich Strauß, with the materialist Vogt, with the so-called fat Vogt, with all kinds of people, and we should not be disturbed by the unorthographic, the ungrammatical, but rather we should be struck by the unspoilt nature of the man of knowledge.

And I would like to say that this trait, which in Deubler appears in the rustic and coarse, appears in the man, whom I already referred to in the previous lecture, in a highly subtle way: Bartholomäus von Carneri, the real Austrian philosopher of the last third of the nineteenth century. Carneri is also the type of mind that is initially overwhelmed by Darwinism, but which shows all the more clearly how impossible it is for him to really accept science as it is accepted in Central Europe; how it is impossible for such a mind not to link science to the innermost striving of the human being, not to seek the path that leads from science to religious deepening and religious contemplation. Bartholomäus von Carneri is precisely one of those minds for whom it is true when Asia says to the blond Teut that the most serious thinking in the German spirit wants to arise out of love and come to the intimacy of God. Even if this intimacy with God comes to us, as it were, in atheistic clothing in Carneri, it still comes to us from the most intense and honest spiritual striving. Carneri, as a philosopher and as a man of world-view, stands entirely on the ground of the view that everything that is spirit can only appear to man in matter. And now Carneri is under the influence of a strange delusion. One could say that he is under the influence of the delusion that he now regards the world in terms of nothing but concepts and ideas, in terms of nothing but perceptions and sensations that are born of the spirit, with which he believes he can grasp and comprehend only material things, only the sensual. When someone looks at something sensual, says Carneri, this sensuality can be divided, but the division goes only so far that we can survey this limited thing with our senses. But when the division continues, when the differentiation becomes so fine that no sense can oversee it, then what lives in the differentiated material must be grasped by thinking, and then it is spirit, - spiritually out of the belief that actually only the natural is naturally understood. This is very characteristic, because Carneri's world view is really instinctive spiritualized materialism; one could even say purest spiritualism. And only through the trend of the times, through the effect of the times, did the deception arise that what Carneri speaks of can only be meant spiritually, when in fact it is fundamentally only expressions of the material. But what Carneri grasps so instinctively idealistically, consciously naturalistically, he must necessarily attach to ethics. And what man works out for himself in the way of morals becomes, for Carneri, because he strives for a certain monism of world view, only a sum of higher natural laws. And so Carneri, precisely because he is subject to the characterized deception, transfers the moral, the highest impulses of moral action, into the human soul like natural impulses. And there one sees particularly what is actually at work in minds like Carneri's. In their youth, they lived in a world view that made a fundamental distinction between spirit and nature. They could not reconcile this with the urge of their souls. What science has produced in three to four centuries, these minds had grasped instinctively: No, nature cannot be what it is or should be according to the old traditions; in many of its aspects, nature cannot simply be an abandoned child of the gods. What is the lawfulness of the world must live in nature.

And yet, although such people only wanted to be naturalists, it was basically the urge to give nature its spirit, which lived in them. This is what makes these men so extraordinarily characteristic. And if it can be shown, even in the case of Sueß, the geologist, how his nationality gave a special human colouring to his great work on geology, the same could be shown in the case of a philosopher like Carneri, if one were now to follow his inner life. Precisely what emerges from the observation with regard to the lawful connection between the most diverse nationally colored human minds, as they can be found in Austria, had the particular effect that there, in complicated form, in manifold form, human images stepped before the soul in such a way that riddle upon riddle arose. And in looking at human experiences, at people one has before one daily, one looked at something where the natural plays up into the moral and the moral plays down again into the natural. So it was that in Carneri a noble ethical world view of the historical course of humanity was intimately mixed with a certain naturalism, which, however, is basically only a transitional product, a transitional from which most of all that could be found as a later stage is represented here as a spiritual science, if one is only aware that everything in the world needs its historical development.

Thus, in Carneri's work, a certain view of the ethical, historical ethical life of humanity is combined with the natural life. For him, natural life and historical life merge into one. He sharpens his view of the natural phenomena he has observed so wonderfully, I might say so lovingly and intimately, for the phenomena of humanity, insofar as they take place between nation and nation. The one always clarifies the other. And Carneri had the opportunity, in particular, to be able to contribute to the development of Austria's destiny because he was a member of the Austrian Parliament for a long time and because he absorbed the basic conditions of Austria at that time in the most honest way into his soul. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of a senior Austrian civil servant. It is remarkable that today I often have to describe personalities to you who were outwardly tormented by deep suffering. Carneri was a twin child. His twin sister developed quite well. But from the beginning he was afflicted with a curvature of the spine. He was ill all his life, paralyzed down one side. He also corresponded with Conrad Deubler. And although I have already been made aware from another source of what Carneri's external life was like, I would still like to present to you the words that Carneri wrote to Deubler on October 26, 1881, so that you can see what an extraordinarily physically tormented man Carneri was. “Do you know,” Carneri wrote to Deubler, ”that the description of your home has made my heart very heavy? It reminded me of the time when I was healthy. I have the forest just behind the house and I have not entered it for years because I can only walk on completely flat paths. I have long since renounced any higher enjoyment of nature, but also everything that is called social entertainment. Incidentally, I can't say that I feel any less happy as a result. Due to a muscle cramp in my neck (torticollis intermittens), which often extends across half of my body, my existence is an extraordinarily arduous one. But I don't mind, and that's what matters. In short, it will be difficult for me to visit you; but if it is feasible one day, I will. We are sticking together, even without knowing each other face to face, and that's the main thing."

And I have read here before how the Austrian poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who knew Carneri well, described the exterior of Carneri from a moving scene. She describes it as follows: ”... “How could you bear it, all these years, and still keep that smile, that kindness and joy of life?” I cried out in agony when Carneri suffered such an attack in my presence. Slowly he raised his head, which had sunk low on his chest, wiped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with his trembling left hand, breathed deeply and looked at me with a look that was once again all sun and willpower. “How so?” he smiled. ‘But don't you understand that in my daily struggle with such a beast, I wanted to remain a man, and become a man I had to? I —, he smiled again, ’just had my ambitions. That‘, he pointed to his still-twitching body, ’should be stronger than me? Should it be able to rob me of my days? To make me loathe all the joys and beauties of life? Would I be a man if I did not remain the stronger? So it began, and so it will end.

Thus speaks one who, due to the previously described deception, believes himself to be a naturalist, but who has absorbed a noble ethic from naturalism. But he also shows us a personality that, in a certain respect, contains within itself much that is genuinely Austrian: the ability to turn a strong soul into a strong soul and not to be able to bear weakness being taken as weakness, but rather acting — was particularly developed in this Carneri. And this sense is poured over his entire philosophy. And if you read his works, you will find this sense. But you will also find the infinitely loving response to the facts of life. Incidentally, it already emerges in his poems, in his various writings, which appeared as early as 1840. And the whole of Carneri – it was wonderful to look at him. He stands before me as I look down from the gallery of the Austrian House of Representatives. It was always an important day when one knew that Carneri would speak. Carneri, who was half paralyzed, who could only walk on flat paths, who could only speak in such a way that half of his tongue participated in the speaking, so to speak, that only half of his brain was only half thinking. This Carneri had conquered his physicality; that he now stood there and that his speech was imbued with the most tremendous acumen, with which he saw through everything that could be seen through, that could be condemned. And everywhere he found the right words, which shot like an arrow at those who were to be hit, and which could everywhere inspire those who wanted to be inspired. Carneri was far too much of an idealist for his speeches to always be followed by action. But his speeches were feared in a certain way. In a scholarly way, he presented to his parliament what he carried in his whole thinking – one might say: Austria. This lived and this spoke. And whether he spoke where he could agree with something or whether he spoke as an opponent – that which was discerning Austrian patriotism always spoke through Carneri; such a patriotism, which seeks the tasks of this Austrian national community in the whole historical development of mankind. And even when he spoke about individual matters, not in abstract terms but with all the color of his speech, a great historical trend came to life. And even when he had to reproach, when he had to reproach bitterly, I would say that in his thoughts the blood relationship between this thinker Carneri and Austrian-ness came to life. Therefore, anyone who is aware of this can never forget how the words of one of his last speeches must have sounded from Carneri's mouth, where he saw some things approaching that the opponents of Central Europe had overestimated, that were not as the opponents of Central Europe believed, but that could have been brought about by many out of lack of understanding. Carneri was one of those who saw it from afar, but who, above all, did not want to merely criticize it, so that Austria would remain truly strong. That is why his words of reproach had such an effect that they could remain in the soul. And those who heard such words of reproach, such words of reproach imbued with the deepest feeling, which he uttered in one of his last most brilliant speeches, where he said: “I document thereby express my conviction... which can be summarized in two words, two words which — and I have experienced many a serious moment in my sixty years — I utter for the first time in my life today: Poor Austria!” That such words could be spoken, that there were people who felt that way, is where the forces lie that today have their counter-image in the vilifications of Austria's opponents, outside of Austria, among the enemies of Austria. In Carneri, something of the spirit of those who, in all their diversity, strove to bring Austria powerfully into harmony, because they understood the necessity of the harmony of this diversity, lived.

In the end, he went blind. He celebrated his eightieth birthday in 1900 – by then he had gone blind. As a blind man, he wrote his Dante translation at the time. He dictated from memory, because he had Dante's Divine Comedy in his soul and was able to translate it from memory. At that time, his life was behind him. In many, it lives on, in more people than one might think. He had become blind, weak. As a blind man, he sat in a wheelchair; he had eighty years behind him, sixty years of work. “Realized” - I say this in parentheses - when this man was eighty years old and blind, the University of Vienna ‘recognized’ him by awarding him the doctorate as an eighty-year-old blind man and declaring that it understood something of his merits, with the words: ”We highly appreciate that you have been able to give your scientific ideas such a form that they are able to penetrate into further circles of the people, and that your honorable sir, in addition to the noblest devotion to Austria, has always represented those principles of freedom in your public activities, without whose unreserved recognition a successful advancement of knowledge and scientific work is not possible.” One must be glad that such things as Carneri has done for the benefit of his country and, dare I say it, for the benefit of humanity, are at least recognized; even if one can become eighty years old, blind and deaf before they are recognized. Well, that is the way things are going today.

Unfortunately, I have already taken up far too much of your time; but I could continue at length by attempting to describe, not by means of description, but by means of symptoms, in which, I believe - not always in such a refined way, of course - Austrian folklore lives, but which also shows what this Austrian folklore is when it can show itself in its noblest blossoms. I have mentioned these noblest blossoms because I believe that it is good if the population of Central Europe gets to know each other better in our difficult times, also in a spiritual sense. For time is forging a whole out of this Central Europe, and a unified spirit already prevails in this whole. And the better we get to know this unified spirit, the more alive it will appear to us, and the more we will be able to trust it. All the more will one be able to believe that, despite all misunderstanding, it cannot be overcome. In the German representatives of Central Europe there lives, in many cases, what I have already had to characterize as not simply an instinctive devotion to nationality, but an ideal to which one wants to develop, which consists in spirituality and in the development of strength, which one can only approach and which one can only truly appreciate when one regards it in connection with what leads to the salvation of all mankind. Indeed, there is something about the most German of Germans when they speak of their nationality that others cannot understand; for never does anything else live in the Germans but the duty: You must develop what wants to live through your nationality in the world! The duty to develop is, in a sense, to be national. Hence the constant urge to place one's own nationality within the context of the goals of all humanity. And so it was with Carneri, that in his soul-searching he found what, ethically, must be connected as the basic features of the development of all humanity with natural law. For him, this was one. But he regarded it with such love that for him the Germanic ideals were also part of the historical development of all mankind. And he could compare, and only because he really compared, he felt entitled to think about the Germanic as he did. I would have much more to say about it, but there is not enough time. A mind like Carneri's first looks at the essential nature of the various nations, and then he allows the value of his own nation to emerge before himself in the right image. He considers his own national substance in connection with other national substances. From this point of view, he says to himself: The freedom of all nations, the recognition of every nation, is compatible with everything German, because that lies in the whole German development. And this, for Carneri, is contradicted, for example, by the Pan-Slav ideal, which proceeds from the a priori view that supremacy must one day be granted to every nation; which works towards getting supremacy. In contrast to this, Carneri says: The leadership of the Germanic spirit, which dominates Europe and extends to the distant West, originates from the concept of morality, which, on the favorable soil that has made it flourish, bears beneficial fruits. It cannot, therefore, last any longer than this world is habitable. And precisely at the time when Carneri was a member of the Austrian parliament, the situation in Central Europe, particularly in the political sphere and in the field of political observation, was such that England and the English constitution were seen as a model. Many politicians wanted to model the constitution of all countries on the English model. And much else in England was seen as a model. Carneri was very much involved in such politics, where many of his comrades thought this way. But Carneri wanted to come to clarity. Carneri wanted to be objective in his view of humanity. But out of this objectivity arose his sense of belonging to the Germanic-Germanic essence and his objective assessment of a country like England. What I am going to share with you now, Carneri did not just write before the war – he died long before the war, after all – he wrote it in the 1860s. “England,” he says, ‘the country of continuous progress par excellence, will turn to general ideas if it is not to descend from the proud heights it has climbed. Nothing characterizes it better than the fact that it has become so ’practical' in the self-confident development of its greatness that it had to learn from the Germans that it had produced the greatest playwright in the world!” In a spirit like Carneri's, this is not just any kind of jingoism, it is a sense of belonging to the Germanic essence; a sense of belonging that arises from knowledge, that arises precisely from deep knowledge, and that does not want to allow itself to appear in the world and claim what it is entitled to claim before it can justify itself before the entire mission of humanity on earth. This is something that, whether it is spoken in Germany or in Austria, can find little understanding among the others, because it is basically the national conception of the specifically German.

With regard to Austria, however, I have, I believe, characterized something of Austrian-ness for you more than descriptive words can, by showing some of living people. And I hope that I have characterized Austrian character in these living people in such a way that, through the contemplation of these living people, the conviction can arise that this Austria is not just a motley collection, brought together by some arbitrary act, but that it corresponds to an inner necessity. The people I have tried to present to you prove this. And they prove this, I think, by the fact that one can say of them, as of deeply thinking souls, seeking a world view or an art out of a deep temperament, what has been said in another area and in another respect with reference to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky. The saying that was then repeated was once said with reference to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky: “In your camp is Austria!” I believe that one can expand on this saying and say of such people, as I have tried to interpret for you, that in their searching souls Austria lives, Austria lives as something that they feel is a necessity: “In their thoughts Austria lives!” And I believe that Austria lives in a very lively way.

My dear Friends,

We shall find that a study of the history of dramatic art can throw considerable light for us on the problems that face us in that field today. For only gradually has dramatic art made its way into the evolution of mankind. What for us comprises the essentially dramatic has really only found its way, bit by bit, into the evolution of mankind; and, as we know too well, inartistic features that are hostile to the development of the art have also been continually intruding themselves. And now a time has come when to all that the centuries have so far produced, many quite new things have to be added; for mankind has advanced in evolution. Anyone who has to take part in the staging of plays will moreover receive encouragement and stimulus for his work by making a deep, esoteric study of plays that have at different epochs provided a standard or basis for the development of acting and of stage work altogether.

There are three important factors to be borne in mind when we are considering the production of a play. I do not mean that we must adhere to them pedantically, but rather that we should have an artistic perception of where and to what extent each enters into the play we have in hand. They are important for us because they have been so first for the author; they have influenced him in his composition of the play—of that written text which, as we saw, is for the actor neither more nor less than what the score is for the musician.

Taking these three in order, we find that the first hovered like an overpowering presence above the drama of ancient times, the drama that originated in the Mysteries. I mean destiny.

Look at the plays of ancient Greece. Everywhere we are shown how powerfully destiny works into human life. Man himself is of very little account; it is destiny, heaven-sent destiny, that works into his life all the time. Realising this, we can appreciate the genuine artistic impulse that lay behind the tendency to obliterate more or less whatever was individual in the human being—giving him a mask, and even going so far as to make use of instruments in order to conceal the individual quality of his voice. We can well understand how this conception of God-given destiny led to an effacement of the human individuality. Looking back then to the drama of ancient times, we find that it displayed on the stage the grand and all-powerful working of destiny; therein lay its achievement. We need only call to mind the tragedies concerned with the myth of Oedipus to see at once how true this is.

There are, however, two things that occupy a prominent place in modern drama, of which you will find little or no sign in these early dramas where the attention is centred upon the working of destiny. As a matter of fact, they could only find their way into drama as the Age of Consciousness drew near for man, the Age of the Spiritual Soul.¹

The interchange of love between human beings could not be dramatised on the stage in the way it is today until the souls of men had begun to receive each its more individual form. In the drama of ancient times you will, it is true, find love, but a love that bears the stamp of destiny and is dependent also on social relationships. An outstanding example is the figure of Antigone in the well-known play of Sophocles. But that love between the sexes which enters later with such compelling power into drama, even itself forms and shapes the drama—becomes possible only with the dawn of the Age of Consciousness.

The other thing that you will miss in the early days of dramatic art is humour. Look, for example, at the plays of Aristophanes, who has been dubbed the scoffer, and compare them with the plays of the time when the impulse of the Age of Consciousness was beginning to make itself felt. You may take any number of plays of the Aristophanes type, and you will constantly find satyrs taking part in them; but you will look in vain for the humour that sets something free in man, that gives wings to human life. That does not show itself in drama until man is entering upon the Age of Consciousness.

Note too, that this is also the time when men's gaze, as they look upon the stage, begins to be turned aside from destiny, begins rather to take a kind of delight in the way that man makes himself master and shaper of destiny. Attention and interest are now, in fact, being increasingly directed, instead of to destiny, to character. So here we have come to the second factor that we have to consider in staging a play—character. The dramatist puts on the stage men and women as we meet with them in life; and as his presentation of them develops, they become more and more interesting.

We shall not yet find a power of vision that can command the whole compass of man's individuality. People are still portrayed rather more as types; and we have, instead of the old masks, the character masks. Among the Latin peoples, who took such delight in drama and were so gifted in its performance, we find these character masks—striking evidence of a dawning interest in man as an individual with a character of his own. The feeling for character still labours under the limitations of this connection with type. It is nevertheless the human being, the individual human being, who is so to speak given the mask of the character-type to which he is adjudged to belong.

There was also a very good understanding in those days of the close relation of human beings to their environment. The character mask, it was felt, can be truly appreciated only when it is seen on the background of the part of the world to which it belongs. Hence the folk masks of those times. We find them particularly in Italy; but other countries soon began to follow suit. These folk masks bear witness to an interest, not merely in men and women, nor even merely in character-types ; they mark the beginning of an interest in what character owes to milieu. And this interest spread far and wide, reaching even to Shakespeare, in whom we can still clearly recognise an appreciation of the bearing of milieu upon character.

The Italian would observe, for example, that persons of social distinction, who have a certain standing in life, and who have also money in their purses and are accordingly able to maintain a good position in society—such persons, he would observe, are to be met with especially in Venice. And so in the folk-plays of those times the Pantalone—for that was the name given to this character—would always appear on the stage in Venetian dress. He would tend also to speak with something of a Venetian accent. There, then, we have one of these character masks. We are, you see, coming away from the working of destiny, for here it is man who stands before us and claims our attention.

Let us now look at another character mask that meets us in these plays. (There were, you must know, hundreds of such plays, literally hundreds, genuine products all of the Italian genius, and you will find the wealthy ‘Merchant of Venice’ in every one of them.) The second character mask is the man of learning; and he appears in the form of a shrewd and clever lawyer. This clever lawyer always hails from Bologna, and wears the traditional robes of a lawyer who has graduated in the University of Bologna. That then is the second. The third is the scoundrel, the dodger, known as Brighella. He comes from the common people, and is always in company with the Harlequin, the simpleton, who also hails from the common people. These two fellows, the scoundrel and the simpleton, are from Bergamo and will always be dressed in Bergamese style.

And then there were the serving-women, ladies of some experience in life, who—incidentally—were capable for the most part of getting the control of the household into their own hands. It appears that in those days such ladies generally came from Rome; their costumes were accordingly in Roman style. The writers and producers of these plays were, you see, observant; no detail escaped them.

There, then, we have the transition from destiny to character. You can see what a thorough-going change it wrought in drama. And I think even the brief sketch I have given you of its history will help you to understand how important it is for the student of dramatic art to study this development of character in drama—learning to observe how characters group themselves in types, and how character grows out of milieu. When he has worked through such a study, the student will be more fitted to undertake the ‘individual’ parts of the modern stage, he will be able to tackle them with elemental force and energy.

As he studies these plays, the student will also realise what a liberating and lively humour the people of those days possessed. For it was not merely the authors who were responsible for the plays. As a matter of fact authors did not play a role of any particular importance in those days. The text of a play, as it came from their hands, could not even truthfully be called a ‘score' for the actor; before it could go down with the audience, he would have to add to it considerably from his own resources. It was quite taken for granted that the actor would supply witty sallies here and there on his own account.

Dramas of this kind show unmistakably that destiny is disappearing from the stage, and the spectators are being presented with plays where it is the characters that determine the action. This is also the moment when the stage begins to realise that it has to reckon with the audience, that it cannot ignore them.

And now, from destiny and character, from out of these two, emerges our third factor in drama: action, or plot.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

At the opening of a play, before the plot began to unfold and reveal how character and destiny are at work there, an ‘Exclamator’, as he was called (for they used the Latin word), would come forward—rather in the way the Prologue does in our Christmas Plays—and give a kind of summary of the moral of the play. For the stage did a great deal in those days to influence social life and behaviour.

You are not to conclude from this that the manners and morals of those times were anything to boast of; on the contrary, it implies that they were rather loose and that there was ample reason for the stage to do something for their improvement. It is always important, you know, to look at facts from the right angle!

I would like now to describe to you one such drama. Do not take it as an exact description of a particular one (as I said before, there are hundreds of them); it will, however, be characteristic, and will provide you with a good illustration of what I want to say later.

Let us suppose then that at the beginning of one of these dramas we are faced with a situation that is created entirely by the typical characters that are there in the play. In a spot that may perhaps be not very far away from where we are now meeting, some gipsies have made their encampment. The gipsies are referred to as the ‘heathen’.

The play proceeds somewhat as follows. (The story corresponds quite well with one or another of these plays, but my intention is to make my description general and typical.) We have then, to begin with, the man Ruedi and his wife Greta, and they are talking together. Ruedi tells Greta she must take care to lock up all their valuables, because the heathen are in the neighbourhood; things are sure to be stolen, for the heathen live by stealing. Greta replies that she has of course already done this; she does not need any reminder from him. ‘But I tell you what, you drunken lout,' she goes on to say, ‘you put far more money than the heathen steal into the pockets of the alehouse keeper. And there's got to be an end of that; it can't go on any longer.’

Ruedi is rather taken aback, for Greta is a woman of force and energy. After standing silent for a minute or two, he heaves a deep sigh and stammers out: ‘Well, well, I suppose I'd better go to the gipsies and get them to tell me what a bad lot I am; after all, they're fortune-tellers as well as thieves.’

‘You great fool,' says Greta, ‘to believe the gipsies. It's all nonsense what they say. You'd much better save your money instead of running after them.’

But Ruedi is not going to be put off. Before he sets out, however, he goes to the stables and warns the stableman too about the heathen, ordering him to lock up the stables and carry the manure out to the fields. And now the stableman gets talking, and discloses to Ruedi that Greta has hidden away in the stable eight good Rhenish gulden, in those times quite a small fortune. He, the stableman, knows the spot where they are buried. Then the ‘stupid’ Ruedi begins to be sly. But first of all he goes off to the gipsies to have his fortune told.

So here destiny enters the story; but note how! People no longer believe in it, it is all left to the gipsies.

The gipsy woman says to Ruedi: ‘Well, my man, you are a thoroughly good sort; but you have a bad-tempered wife, and she makes life miserable for you. And you yourself, you know, you drink too much!’

Heavens alive, thinks Ruedi, she knows a lot! There's something in fortune-telling after all.

‘But now, look here!’ continues the gipsy,’ you go and get yourself some better clothes and walk about the village with an air, and you'll be made headman of the village—only, you'll have to drink less! ’

Ruedi is delighted with the idea. And now what the stableman told him will come in very useful. First, however, the gipsy wants her fee. Why, of course!—but Ruedi hasn't any money. Greta never gives him any. Then he has a bright idea. ‘You told me just now that if I put on fine clothes I shall be made headman of the village. When I am, I'll help you gipsies in your thieving. That shall be your payment.’ This suits the gipsy-woman splendidly; a headman's connivance will be of more worth to the gipsies than any fee.

And now Ruedi goes back home, his head full of the idea that he must get some fine new clothes and be made headman of the village. So he goes to the stable, digs up the eight gulden and hands them to the stableman to take to the neighbouring town.

Arrived there, the stableman goes to the wool merchant and says to him: ‘My master who lives outside the town wants to see some materials of different colours, I am to take them to him to choose from; he is having some new clothes made, for he is going to be headman of the village.’

‘But I don't know your master,' replies the merchant, ‘and how am I to know what might happen to my cloth?’

‘Oh, don't you worry,' says the stableman, ‘he's a perfectly honourable man. You let me take the cloth; it'll be quite all right.’ The eight gulden the stableman pockets, and the rolls of stuff he turns into money in some way of his own. And so he comes back empty-handed, having cheated his master of the eight gulden and the merchant of the rolls of cloth.

His master inquires what has happened. ‘I've left the eight gulden with the merchant,' replies the stableman, ‘and he says you must go yourself and choose the material in his shop; meantime he has the money safe.’ The money is, of course, not with the merchant at all; the stableman has taken it for himself.

At this point a scene is inserted where we are shown Greta pouring out her woes to a friend of hers. She has discovered that the gulden she buried in the stable have disappeared. What if the cow has eaten them and dies in consequence!

And now Ruedi makes his way to the wool merchant's—and behold, the merchant has not the cloth. Ruedi hasn't it either. The merchant has also not the money; nor has Ruedi. The stableman is standing by, and the merchant declares he will sue him. He will, he says, put the matter in the hands of a lawyer; and he'll find a first-rate one, he will! (Here they come, you see, the character types.)

Well, Ruedi and his stableman go home again. But a little while later a messenger comes running in great haste, beginning—in the good stage instinct of those times—to call out to them while he is still a long way off, summoning them both to come at once to the wool merchant's.

As soon as they arrive there the merchant starts inveighing loudly against the stableman—and one can well understand it. He becomes quite abusive, and rails against him, calling him all sorts of hard names The man feels terribly insulted and declares that he will on his part bring an action against the merchant, and they will soon see what comes of that!

The merchant raises no objection; he knows he has right on his side and feels confident of the issue. The stableman, however, is a kind of Brighella, and it is he who procures the cleverer lawyer.

And now the trial begins, the stableman's lawyer having in the meantime instructed him how to behave in court. The judge puts his learned questions, all in best Bologna manner The peasant grows more and more bewildered, confuses the cloth with the money, and the money with the cloth. When he should be answering about the eight gulden, he keeps talking of the cloth, and vice versa, and all because the lawyer puts him out by talking incessantly.

And now it is the stableman's turn to be questioned. But all he says in reply is: veiw!¹ A fresh question is put to him. Once more he answers: veiw! Still another question. Again the same reply: veiw! The lawyer has advised him, you see, to be completely stupid and say nothing but veiw! Eventually the judge finds this too silly. ‘He's just crazy; one can do nothing at all with a fellow like that!’—and he sends the parties home. And so the whole affair comes to a humorous end.

And now it turns out that in the course of the conversation between them, the stableman had promised his lawyer the eight gulden. These the lawyer now receives, in payment for his advice to say nothing but veiw! The stableman has the cloth. As for the peasant and the merchant, they have had all their trouble for nothing The spectator, however, goes home well pleased; he has enjoyed watching the characters unfold as the play proceeds. Pieces of this kind were played by the hundred—full of true humour, a natural, elemental humour of the common folk. And they were well played, for the players put their whole heart into their acting.

Thus, at the dawn of the Age of Consciousness, does the drama of character push its way into the drama of destiny, and take root there and grow. That is how the drama of character first began. And you will not easily find for your students a better subject for study than these very plays; for they are built up with quite remarkable skill. They can well form a basis for the study of delineation of character.

A school of dramatic art should arrange for courses of instruction in the history of the whole treatment of drama, and especially of character, beginning with the end of the fifteenth century. This kind of character drama was popular throughout the Latin countries at the end of the fifteenth century, and also in Switzerland. Afterwards, it spread to Germany and by the sixteenth century was everywhere in vogue. That is to say, at secular times of the year. For the Christmas Plays are survivals of the drama of destiny; in them we see destiny working in from the worlds beyond. So that we have in those times, on the one hand, within the rather austere forms of Christian tradition, a continued adherence to destiny, and then also this original and elemental up-springing of character in drama. Both are there, side by side; and that is what makes this second stage in the evolution of drama an extraordinarily fruitful field for study.

The mask of ancient times, that actually hid the human being, has now given place to the character mask, and we shall soon be approaching the time when we have before us on the stage human individualities. But please remember that there are good and well-founded reasons for making a special study in our day of this first beginning of character in drama. A student can learn a great deal from such a study.

Let me remind you at this point of the development we traced in Schiller's dramas a few days ago. We were studying this development from a rather different point of view; we can, however, clearly see that Schiller was all the time experimenting between the two kinds of play, inclining now more to the drama of destiny, now again more to the drama of character. Highly gifted dramatist as he was, Schiller did not know how to bring together the elements of character and destiny.

Take Wallenstein. We cannot truthfully say that destiny is here an organic part of the drama. Destiny and character are joined up externally rather in the way one cements bricks! Then again later on, in Die Braut von Messina, we find Schiller once more trying, as it were, to drag in destiny. Only in Demetrius does he at length, after many attempts, succeed in weaving together destiny and character, weaving them together to form genuine dramatic action.

Character drama is important also for opening the way to comedy. True, preparatory steps in that direction had been taken in Roman times; for there was, you know, in Rome a kind of anticipation of the Age of Consciousness. But it is tragedy that stands in the foreground throughout the centuries of classical antiquity. Satire will not infrequently come to expression in some comic afterpiece, but we do not find what can properly be called comedy until, with the coming of the Age of Consciousness, love and humour make their appearance on the stage.

If you can succeed in carrying in your mind's eye a clear picture of how drama has evolved, that will help you in your work as producer. You will then be able to approach with the right mood and feeling, on the one hand, plays where the more tragic and solemn elements prevail and, on the other hand, plays that are in a lighter vein and belong more in the realm of comedy. Your study will have given you fresh guidance for the staging of the two kinds of play.

Consider first how it is with tragedy. Simply from the insight that you have acquired in this kind of study, you will go to work in the following way. Please do not imagine it is a matter of theories and definitions. What you have to do is to prove by experience how you yourself develop an insight that can give birth to artistic creation. That is the only right way; and it is what I have been trying to show you in today's lecture.

The first part of a tragedy (sometimes called the ‘exposition’), where the spectators are to be made acquainted with the situation, where their interest has to be aroused, will have to be played slowly; and the slowness should be achieved, not so much by slow speaking or acting as by pauses, pauses between the speeches, pauses even between the scenes. This will ensure that you make contact with your audience; they will then the more easily unite themselves, inwardly and sympathetically, with the situation.

But now, as the play proceeds, new persons or events intervene, and it becomes uncertain how things will turn out. This is the middle of the play, where the plot reaches its climax. Here you will again need a rather slow tempo, but the slowness has this time to be in the speaking and in the gesturing; the play will thus still move slowly, but without pauses. Not of course entirely so; the speaker must have time to take breath, and the spectator too! But you should definitely shorten the pauses, and to that degree slightly quicken the tempo.

Then comes the third part, which has to bring the solution. If this last part were played in the same tempo, it would leave the audience a little sour and dissatisfied. It is important to increase the pace here and let the play end in a quicker tempo.

Here then, in this third part of the play, there has to be an inner quickening of tempo, showing itself both in speech and in gesture.

Tragedy

(I) in slow tempo: pauses
(II) in slow tempo: without pauses
(III) in quickened tempo.

If these stages are observed, your acting will not fail of those imponderable qualities that make for contact with the audience. And you will find that the right tempo for speech and gesture comes of itself out of the feeling that your study and training beget in you. Thus, the main point for the production of tragedy is that everything be in right measure and proportion.

Something quite else comes into consideration for comedy. (Our modern plays stand rather between the two; so that for their production one can learn from both.) When we come to comedy, it is character that begins to take the prominent place. Such a piece as I described just now can be very helpful to you, if you want to learn how to set about producing a comedy; for plays of this kind, abounding in the simple, primitive humour of the people, can always be begun in the way I will now describe.

The first thing is to see that your actor, who will reveal his character in his speaking, expresses himself with an instinctive enjoyment of his part, so that the audience feel at once: Yes, there he is—the Pantalone. today, of course, we put individual men and women on the stage, not types; nevertheless, we can set to work on the artistic shaping of our comedy on the same lines—that is, begin by letting the characters display themselves in their speech and gesture, and in no uncertain terms. We need not go so far as some miserable producers who, for example, if they put a barber on the stage, think it necessary he should be ostentatiously scraping the lather off a customer's chin. No occasion for grotesque demonstrations of that sort. But we should take pains in this first part of the play to let the several characters stand out in strong relief. As you see, we are here not concerned, as in tragedy, with the measure or tempo of the acting, but rather with its content.

As we go on towards the middle of the play, the interest will centre on the various conflicting factors that emerge and that leave us in some doubt as to how it is all going to end. And here it would actually be a little risky to continue entering with intensity into the individual characters; rather must the emphasis be laid on the plot. The whole character of the speaking must centre the hearer's attention on the plot. At this point the earlier comedies favoured the inventive actor. For the book of words left him extraordinarily free; he could extemporise here and there, expressing his astonishment, for instance, when something happens that gives the whole plot an unexpected turn—and so forth. Actors were in this way able on their own initiative to emphasise certain incidents or features in the plot.

And then, at the end of a comedy, particular emphasis should be laid on destiny. This is important. The acting must show how destiny breaks in upon the course of events and brings it all to a happy conclusion.

Comedy

(I) The emphasis is on the Characters.
(II) The emphasis is on the Plot.
(III) The emphasis is on Destiny.

If one is to produce a comedy successfully, with emphasis first on the characters, then on the plot, and finally on the working of destiny, one must of course do one's best to acquire a lively and sympathetic understanding of what destiny and character and plot are in their essential nature.

There is something more that the actor can do. Latent within him are deep feelings and perceptions, and these he should now evoke. What I am going to recommend may seem to you, my dear friends, to be rather external, but you should not on that account belittle it. If you will receive it and follow it out earnestly and with understanding, it will have a wonderful effect. It will awaken in your heart and soul a fine perception for how you are to set about acting—first tragedy, and then comedy. And as you continue to live with it, to live with it in meditation, you will also be helped to carry into real meditative experience the exercises of a more general nature in connection with your calling, that I have already given for your meditation and concentration. Take, for example, what I showed you the other day when we drew the circle of the vowels and found, on one side of the circle the development of tragedy, and on the other side the development of comedy Imitate in your soul the path followed by a drama of tragedy, and your soul will be so attuned that it will develop the skill required for the speaking and producing of your tragedy.

Where a meditation is intended to prepare us for a right treatment of tragedy, very much will depend on how far we are able, during the meditation, to attain inwardly what I described yesterday as liberation from our spoken part. This, my dear friends, must first be attained. We have to carry our preparation of the part up to the point where we have such command of it that we could go through it in our sleep. And then we must be able also to look at it, as it were, from without, taking an active and sympathetic interest in it and in the whole speaking of it (that speaking which we ourselves have created and formed), entering into it with heart and feeling, and also with will and with thought.

The actors of an older time were given meditations to prepare them for their task; and I would like now to give you a brief formula on the same lines. Approaching the words in the mood that belongs to tragedy, try to concentrate your soul with all inner warmth into just that mood that you need for the understanding of tragedy—for that kind of understanding which has actual formative power. And you will see, as you meditate the words you will attain this understanding. But you will need to repeat the meditative preparation over and over again. Go through it now and

then, when you have a few moments' leisure—you might be taking a walk one day, and come upon a secluded spot where you can sit and think quietly for a little. Here then are the words: Ach ( this is merely a preparatory interjection)—

Ach, Fatum,
Du hast
stark mich<
umfasst,
nimm weg
den Fall
in den Abgrund.²

I use the Latin word Fatum because, to begin with, the soul must be held steadily in the a and u that evoke the tragic mood: u giving the suggestion of fear, and a bespeaking awed amazement. Then, when we come to stark mich, note that i enters in, to take its part in the tragedy. Note too that farther on the vowels follow one another exactly as they do on the circle:

nimm weg
den Fall
in den Abgrund.

If you will meditate these words, letting speak in them, above all, the feeling that is called up within you by that inner perception of sound which you have acquired in your training, then the words can become for you a kind of foundation upon which you can build the production of your drama of tragedy.

Ach, Fatum,
Du hast
stark mich
umfasst,
nimm weg
den Fall
in den Abgrund.

These words give the mood for tragedy. If for a long time you have repeatedly held before you such a meditation, then you will assuredly find the right inner mood for tragedy when you need it.

For comedy, on the other hand, we have to go back to exercises of a more whimsical and subtle kind, that were not practised with the deep fervour that belongs to exercises for tragedy. (Tragedy, you must remember, is a child of the Mysteries.) None the less, even these exercises for humorous plays had a powerful esoteric influence. They were able actually to beget humour in the actor, and then they did not as it were take it back again but let it pour full stream into the speaking

For if you are going to produce comedy (and please when I use the word ‘produce’, do not take it in a merely external sense), you must be able to laugh in the words. I do not mean you should be perpetually tittering. There are persons who like to draw attention to their remarks by constantly tittering and laughing a little as they speak, a habit that is apt to leave one with the impression that there is not much point or meaning in what is being said. For the actor to bring laughter into his feeling for sound is quite a different matter. It works as true art—in spite of its popularity! There were always in an older time comedians who did this, just as surely as in the early Middle Ages you find priests taking part in the solemn and sublime dramas that were directly connected with the Church. And these early comedians, from among whom in course of time the first professional actors were recruited, laboured always to attain to a deep inner understanding of their work on the stage.

Here then I will again put before you a brief formula from olden times. It was not given merely to make tongue and palate elastic and plastic,—a result that we saw could be attained by cultivating sound-perception; these words, as one meditates them, turn into laughter. They must of course be meditated aloud. And then you will find you have to laugh.

Try practising aloud, as often as you can, this little string of words that I will now write on the blackboard. And, as you say them, enter into the speaking of them with your whole heart and feeling.

Izt'—this is really the word jetzt (now), but it has to be spoken here as izt—

Izt' fühl ich
wie in mir
linklock-hü
und lockläck-hi
völlig mir
witzig
bläst³

your soul; you will laugh inwardly, in your soul. Naturally, you cannot expect to attain that by deepening your feelings as for tragedy! And this has now to be your ideal—to carry into your speaking a laughing soul. Then will your work as producer be full of humour, the humour that has power of itself to produce and form a comedy.

And try to practise it, making with linklock-hü this movement (see first Drawing) and with lockläck-hi this movement (see second Drawing), so that you repeat the whole formula thus:

Izt' fiihl ich
wie in mir
linklock-hü
und lockläck-hi
völlig mir
witzig
bläst.

Try to live your way into this little formula, giving it its full development and speaking it always three times in succession—with the linklock-hü, pulling the upper lip upwards and the lower downwards, so that the lips are puckered; and with lockläck-hi flattening the creases out again.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

As you continue repeating it, it will make you laugh in your soul; you will laugh inwardly, in your soul. Naturally, you cannot expect to attain that by deepening your feelings as for tragedy! And this has now to be your ideal—to carry into your speaking a laughing soul. Then will your work As producer be full of humour, the humour that has power of itself to produce and form a comedy.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

• 1. The Age of the Spiritual (or Consciousness) Soul is the epoch of man's development in which we are now living and which began in the fifteenth century.
• 1. Pronounced very like our word’ five’. The sounds do not make a word at all in German.
• 2. fate,
  Thou hast laid
  firm hand
  upon me;
  suffer me not
  to fall
  into the abyss!
• 3. Inside me I feel
  how linklock-hä
  and lockläck-hi
  go wittily
  whispering
  on!

Dr. Steiner:

My dear friends!

We are in the middle of the reports by the General Secretaries and the representatives of the groups working in all kinds of places outside Dornach. In a moment we shall continue with these reports. But first I would like to speak a few words in the midst of these reports, words to which I am moved by what has been said in such a satisfactory way by these speakers. From what we have been told we may gather how very devoted is the work being carried on out there. We may add what we were told yesterday to the names I allowed myself to mention the day before. There, too, despite the ruins on which we stand, we may see what can encourage us during this Conference not to be pessimistic in any way but rather to strive actively for a genuine optimism.

During this Conference we must everywhere, in every realm, consider the activity of building-up rather than the activity of dismantling. So today, early on in the Conference, I want to suggest that we give it a certain definite direction. During the meetings of members over the next few days there will of course be opportunities for discussing various matters. But today, early on, I want to say the following: As we saw in the necessary content of the Statutes, we have to connect total openness with the Anthroposophical Society. Anything less, dear friends, is not permitted by the signs of the times. The present age can no longer tolerate any tendency towards secrecy. This presents us with a fundamental problem which we shall have to solve.

By this I do not mean that we shall have to discuss it a great deal during the Conference, for it is in our hearts that this fundamental problem will have to be solved. We must be absolutely clear about the fact that our Society, before all others, will be given the task of combining the greatest conceivable openness with true and genuine esotericism.

At first under the obstacles and hindrances of those terrible years of the war, but then also through all kinds of inner difficulties, we have indeed experienced the establishment of this problem in every direction. Indeed lately no meeting within the Anthroposophical Society has taken place which lacked, as it were, the backdrop—though unnoticed by many—of this problem: How can we combine full openness with the profoundest, most serious and inward esotericism? To achieve this it will be necessary to banish from our gatherings in the future anything which smacks in any way of the atmosphere of a clique. Anthroposophy does not need the atmosphere of a clique. When hearts truly understand Anthroposophy they will beat in unison without the need for heads to knock together. If we solve this purely human problem of letting our hearts sound in harmony with one another without the need for our heads to knock together, then from the human side we shall have done everything necessary, also in the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society, to prepare for the achievement of the things that have been depicted.

We must achieve these things; we must reach the point at which we can feel in all our deeds that we are connected with the spiritual world. This is the very aspect which must be different in the Anthroposophical Society from any other possible association in the present time. The difference must be that out of the strength of Anthroposophy itself it is possible to combine the greatest conceivable openness with the most genuine and inward esotericism. And in future this esotericism must not be lacking even in the most external of our deeds. There is in this field still a lot to learn from the past ten years.

What I am saying is also related to our responsibilities. Consider the following, my dear friends: We stand in the world as a small Society, and this Society has a peculiar destiny at present. Even if it wanted to, it could not reject this characteristic of openness which I have been emphasizing so strongly. It would be unable to reject it. For if out of some leaning of sympathy we were to decide today to work only inwardly with our groups, which would of course be very nice, if we were not to concern ourselves with the public at large, we would discover that there would soon be an increasingly inimical concern for us on the part of the public. The more we fail to concern ourselves with the signs of the times, the more will be the inimical concern for us on the part of everything that can possibly be against us. Only if we find the path, only if with courage we find the straight path to what we should do shall we succeed in navigating the ship of the Anthroposophical Society through the exceedingly stormy waves which surge and break around it. What we should do is the following: As a small Society we face the world, a world—you know the one I mean—which actually does not love us. It does not love us. This is a fact we cannot alter. But on the other hand there is no need to do anything on purpose to make ourselves unpopular. I do not mean this in a superficial sense but in a deeper sense of which I speak from the foundations of occult life. If we ask ourselves over and over again what we must do to make ourselves better liked by this circle or by that circle in the world, by any circle which does not like us today; if we keep asking ourselves how we should behave in this field or in that field so as to be taken seriously here or there; if we do this, we shall most certainly not be taken seriously. We shall only be taken seriously if at every moment in whatever we do we feel responsible towards the spiritual world. We must know that the spiritual world wants to achieve a certain thing with mankind at this particular moment in historical evolution; it wants to achieve this in the most varied realms of life, and it is up to us clearly and truly to follow the impulses that come from the spiritual world. Though this might give offence initially, in the long run it is the only beneficial way. Therefore we shall also only come to terms among ourselves if at every opportunity we steep ourselves in whatever impulses can come out of the spiritual world.

So now, having given these indications, which I shall bring to completion over the next few days, I once more want to repeat before you at least a part of those words which were spoken to you yesterday in accordance with the will of the spiritual world. May they stand as an introduction in our souls again today as we enter into our discussions.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling in depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.
Soul of Man!

Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

We can work rightly with words such as these, which are heard coming from the Cosmic Word, if we arrange them in our own soul in such a way that they cannot depart from us again. And it will be possible for them to be so arranged if, amongst all that has resounded, you first highlight that part which can give you the rhythm. Dear friends, let me write down here first of all the part that can indicate the rhythm:

In the first verse: Spirit-recalling,
in the second verse: Spirit-awareness,
in the third verse: Spirit-beholding.

Contemplate this in its rhythmical connection with what is brought about in the human soul which is called upon, the human soul which is called upon by itself, through the words:

Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I—,

consider the rhythm linked with ‘spirit-awareness’ when you hear:

Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I—,

and the rhythm linked with ‘spirit-beholding’ when you hear:

On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing—.

Take in this way each phrase so that it can only stand as I have written it here. Take what comes rhythmically out of the Cosmic Rhythm: ‘own I within God's I’, ‘own I in the World-I’, ‘own I in free willing’. And take what rises up from ‘comes to being’ to ‘unite’ to ‘bestow’, where there is the transition to moral feeling. Feel the connection with ‘spirit-recalling’, ‘spirit-awareness’ and ‘spirit-beholding’. Then you will have in the inner rhythm what it is during these few days that the spiritual world is bringing to us to raise our hearts, to illumine our thinking, to give wings and enthusiasm to our willing.

I now have a telegram to read to you: ‘Christmas greetings, best wishes, Ethel Morgenstierne.’ And now may I ask the representative of Honolulu, Madame Ferreri, to speak.

Madame Ferreri reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the representative of Italy, Baroness de Renzis, to speak.

Baroness de Renzis reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I perhaps suggest that certain questions raised here, such as that of accepting applications for membership on the basis of correspondence only, and similar matters, shall be discussed later when we consider the Statutes.

Dr. Steiner: The Duke of Cesaro will also give a report concerning Italy on behalf of the Novalis Group in Rome.

The Duke of Cesaro reports.

Dr. Steiner: Now may I ask Fräulein Schwarz to speak on behalf of the other Italian group.

Fräulein Schwarz reports on behalf of the group in Milan.

Dr. Steiner: Now would the representative of the work in Yugoslavia, Herr Hahl, please speak.

Herr Hahl reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I ask the representative of the Norwegian Society, Herr Ingerö, to speak.

Herr Ingerö speaks.

Dr. Steiner: Now may I ask the representative of the Council of the Austrian Society, Count Polzer, to speak.

Count Polzer speaks.

Dr. Steiner: Now may I ask the representative of the group in Porto Alegre in Brazil, Dr Unger, to speak.

Dr. Unger: Allow me in a few words to carry out a commission which I was most delighted to accept. For quite some time we have been corresponding with friends over there, mostly from Germany, who had emigrated and had begun to work there anthroposophically. Herr Brandtner in particular has been writing lately. He has made great efforts to get something going in Porto Alegre. And connected with this, work is also going on in other South American towns which will gradually be co-ordinated so that independent centres from which to work may be set up there too. For this purpose Herr Mayen from Breslau was asked by the friends over there to go out, first of all to Rio. He will gradually take on work in a number of towns. I have been particularly asked to give voice to the sympathetic interest of the friends over there. Everything that comes to us from over there expresses the most intimate interest in all that has to do with Dornach and whatever continues to come from Dornach. As often as possible someone comes to Europe and we hope most fervently that anthroposophical life may soon start to blossom there in the most intensive way. Just as I bring greetings from our friends over there, so I hope that when I report back to Porto Alegre I may also be permitted to send them from here our good wishes for the prospering of the work in Porto Alegre.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the representative of the Swedish Anthroposophical Society, Fräulein Henström, to speak.

Fräulein Henström reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the representative of the Swiss Anthroposophical Society, Herr Aeppli, to speak.

Herr Aeppli reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the representative of the Council in Czechoslovakia, Dr Krkavec, to speak.

Dr. Krkavec reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the other representative of the Council in Czechoslovakia, Dr Eiselt, to speak.

Dr Eiselt reports.

Dr. Steiner: This brings the reports to a close. I believe I may be allowed to say that you are all, with me, exceedingly grateful to those who have given them. For they enable us to see that we have a foundation on which to base our new work, since now we know how much truly great, devoted and varied work is being done and has already been done in the Anthroposophical Society.

Now I should like to move on to the third point on our agenda, consideration of the Statutes. First the Statutes must be read out. Though you all have a copy, I would nevertheless like to ask that they be read out once more, so that we can then commence the discussion of each point. Would Dr Wachsmuth now please read the Statutes in accordance with point three of our agenda.

Dr. Wachsmuth reads out the Statutes of the Anthroposophical Society.

Dr. Steiner: As you will have gathered from various remarks I have made, it would be really good if on the one hand our meeting could be allowed to run as freely as possible amongst its individual members. However, on the other hand, if a proper discussion is to take place, it is necessary for us to be quite strict in conducting the debate. So please take this not as pedantry but as a necessity applicable to any gathering. Today we have run out of time, so I would ask you that we continue this meeting tomorrow after Dr Wachsmuth's lecture. Tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock Dr Wachsmuth will give his lecture. Then we shall break for a quarter of an hour before continuing the meeting. At this meeting I should like to conduct the proceedings as follows. Not in order to be pedantic but so that we can be as efficient as possible there will first be a kind of general debate on the Statutes, a debate in which first of all the whole attitude, meaning and spirit of the Statutes in general is discussed.

Then I shall ask you to agree to the Statutes in general, after which we shall open a detailed debate in which we take one Paragraph at a time, when contributors will be asked to speak only to the Paragraph under consideration. There will then be a concluding debate leading to the final adoption of the Statutes. This is how I would ask you to proceed tomorrow when we discuss the Statutes.

Now I have to announce that our Conference continues this afternoon with a eurythmy performance at 4.30 and my lecture at 8 o'clock this evening. Tomorrow at 10 o'clock we shall hear Dr Guenther Wachsmuth's lecture in the field of natural science about the face of the earth and the destiny of man. Then after a quarter of an hour's break we shall continue with this meeting.

I also have several more announcements to make. As I had to stress earlier, before we began our meeting, it is quite difficult, because there are so many of us—and it is of course wonderful that there are so many dear friends here—to hold this gathering together. You cannot tell, just by coming to the meetings, how difficult it is. Of course we are deeply sorry that the primitive quarters here are causing such discomfort and so many problems for our dear friends. Nevertheless, I have to ask that in future not more than three seats are held by any one person. I have to say this because it has happened that whole rows of seats have been held by a single person, and this has led to innumerable discussions with those who have come in later.

Then I should like to remind you of the wish we expressed earlier that the two front rows be reserved for those dear friends who are either disabled or deaf or need special consideration for any other reason. If there are any seats left in these two rows, which is sure to be the case, then please leave them free for the General Secretaries of the different countries and for the secretaries who might be accompanying them. It will become necessary in the next few days to have the General Secretaries together here where they can be seen rather than scattered all over the hall.

Thirdly I would perhaps like once more to ask our Dornach friends—truly I have nothing personal against them—to take their seats next door in the ‘summer villa’.⁴⁴ I know it is most inhospitable in this rainy and snowy weather, but all we can do is ask our Dornach friends to put up with the rain so that the friends from further afield can sit here in the hall away from the rain.

Also I would like to mention that from today the upper canteen will be open in the evening for those friends who are quartered in the dormitories or other inhospitable places, so that they may have somewhere to go that is heated. Food and drink will not be served then, but I hope that the conversations that can take place there will be all the more stimulating and encouraging. So although it will not be possible to quench hunger and thirst, it will be possible to keep as warm as may be in the evenings after my lecture until 11 o'clock at night.

Furthermore I want to draw your attention to the following: Mr Pyle in the most admirable way has modelled a very fine money-box⁴⁵ which he has had produced. You will find these money-boxes outside the doors. If you look at them carefully you will find that the beautiful forms tempt you to want to own such a money-box yourselves. They are for sale, so you can buy one and take it home and put something in it every day. When it is full you can use what you have collected to put towards the re-building of the Goetheanum, or for any other purposes related to the Goetheanum. Let me point out that even if you only put in 10 Rappen every day—think what you might spend this on each day—by the end of the year you will have saved quite a tidy sum. I can see my respected friends here are already working out how much! You will find that it will be a worthwhile amount. But I don't want to encourage you to put in only 10 Rappen. I would rather you put in whatever amount you consider proper, or whatever you feel obliged to put in even if you don't think it proper.

Those who find it difficult for one reason or another to take a money-box home with them will see that similar money-boxes have been set out here into which they may put something. Naturally if you do not have your own money-box to take home, it would be a good thing if you could delve deeply into your purse while you are here, so that these money-boxes may be filled. We shall have no trouble in seeing to it that they are rapidly emptied.

Finally I would please ask that spectators at the Christmas Plays refrain from booking their seats for the evening lectures.

You see, without all these many wishes—let us not call them prohibitions—we shall be unable to keep the Conference going in an orderly manner.

Now, my dear friends, I adjourn this meeting until the appointed hour tomorrow.

• 44. This designation for the extension built on to the carpentry workshop for the occasion of the Christmas Conference referred to ‘the chilly draught which blew there permanently’ (Ernst Lehrs Gelebte Erwartung, Stuttgart, 1979).
• 45. On the basis of a pencil drawing by Rudolf Steiner.

[See GA 259 for Rudolf Steiner's introductory words given immediately before this lecture concerning the burning of the first Goetheanum. —rsarchive.org]

In my last lecture, I said that one root of the scientific world conception lay in the fact that John Locke and other thinkers of like mind distinguished between the primary and secondary qualities of things in the surrounding world. Locke called primary everything that pertains to shape, to geometrical and numerical characteristics, to motion and to size. From these he distinguished what he called the secondary qualities, such as color, sound, and warmth. He assigned the primary qualities to the things themselves, assuming that spatial corporeal things actually existed and possessed properties such as form, motion and geometrical qualities; and he further assumed that all secondary qualities such as color, sound, etc. are only effects on the human being. Only the primary qualities are supposed to be in the external things. Something out there has size, form and motion, but is dark, silent and cold. This produces some sort of effect that expresses itself in man's experiences of sound, color and warmth.⁵²

I have also pointed out how, in this scientific age, space became an abstraction in relation to the dimensions. Man was no longer aware that the three dimensions—up-down, right-left, front-back—were concretely experienced within himself. In the scientific age, he no longer took this reality of the three dimensions into consideration. AS far as he was concerned, they arose in total abstraction. He no longer sought the intersecting point of the three dimensions where it is in fact experienced; namely, within man's own being. Instead, he looked for it somewhere in external space, wherever it might be. Thenceforth, this space framework of the three dimensions had an independent existence, but only an abstract thought-out one. This empty thought was no longer experienced as belonging to the external world as well as to man; whereas an earlier age experienced the three spatial dimensions in such a way that man knew he was experiencing them not only in himself but together with the nature of physical corporeality.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

The dimensions of space had, as it were, already been abstracted and ejected from man. They had acquired a quite abstract, inanimate character. Man had forgotten that he experiences the dimensions of space in his own being together with the external world; and the same applied to everything concerned with geometry, number, weight, etc. He no longer knew that in order to experience them in their full living reality, he had to look into his own inner being. A man like John Locke transferred the primary qualities—which are of like kind with the three dimensions of space, the latter being a sort of form or shape—into the external world only because the connection of these qualities with man's inner being was no longer known.

The others, the secondary qualities, which were actually experienced qualitatively (as color, tone, warmth, smell or taste,) now were viewed as merely the effects of the things upon man, as inward experiences. But I have pointed out that inside the physical man as well as inside the etheric man these secondary qualities can no longer be found, so that they became free-floating in a certain respect. They were no longer sought in the outer world; they were relocated into man's inner being. It was felt that so long as man did not listen to the world, did not look at it, did not direct his sense of warmth to it, the world was silent. It had primary qualities, vibrations that were formed in a certain way, but no sound; it had processes of some kind in the ether, but no color; it had some sort of processes in ponderable matter (matter that has weight)—but it had no quality of warmth. As to these experienced qualities, the scientific age was really saying that it did not know what to do with them. It did not want to look for them in the world, admitting that it was powerless to do so. They were sought for within man, but only because nobody had any better ideas. To a certain extent science investigates man's inner nature, but it does not (and perhaps cannot) go very far with this, hence it really does not take into consideration that these secondary qualities cannot be found in this inner nature. Therefore it has no pigeonhole for them. Why is this so?

Let us recall that if we really want to focus correctly on something that is related to form, space, geometry or arithmetic, we have to turn our attention to the inward life-filled activity whereby we build up the spatial element within our own organism, as we do with above-below, back-front, left-right. Therefore, we must say that if we want to discover the nature of geometry and space, if we want to get to the essence of Locke's primary qualities of corporeal things, we must look within ourselves. Otherwise, we only attain to abstractions.

In the case of the secondary qualities such as sound, color, warmth, smell and taste, man has to remember that his ego and astral body normally dwell within his physical and etheric bodies but during sleep they can also be outside the physical and etheric bodies. Just as man experiences the primary qualities, such as the three dimensions, not outside but within himself during full wakefulness, so, when he succeeds (whether through instinct or through spiritual-scientific training) in really inwardly experiencing what is to be found outside the physical and etheric bodies from the moment of falling asleep to waking up, he knows that he is really experiencing the true essence of sound, color, smell, taste, and warmth in the external world outside his own body. When, during the waking condition, man is only within himself, he cannot experience anything but picture-images of the true realities of tone, color, warmth, smell and taste. But these images correspond to soul-spirit realities, not physical-etheric ones. In spite of the fact that what we experience as sound seems to be connected with certain forms of air vibrations, just as color is connected with certain processes in the colorless external world, it still has to be recognized that both are pictures, not of anything corporeal, but of the soul-spirit element contained in the external world.

We must be able to tell ourselves: When we experience a sound, a color, a degree of warmth, we experience an image of them. But we experience them as reality, when we are outside our physical body. We can portray the facts in a drawing as follows: Man experiences the primary qualities within himself when fully awake, and projects them as images into the outer world. If he only knows them in the outer world, he has the primary qualities only in images (arrow in sketch). These images are the mathematical geometrical, and arithmetical qualities of things.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

It is different in the case of the secondary qualities. (The horizontal lines stand for the physical and etheric body of man, the red shaded area for the soul-spirit aspect, the ego and astral body.) Man experiences them outside his physical and etheric body,⁵³ and projects only the images into himself. Because the scientific age no longer saw through this, mathematical forms and numbers became something that man looked for abstractly in the outer world. The secondary qualities became something that man looked for only in himself. But because they are only images in himself, man lost them altogether as realities.

As few isolated thinkers, who still retained traditions of earlier views concerning the outer world, struggled to form conceptions that were truer to reality than those that, in the course of the scientific age, gradually emerged as the official views. Aside from Paracelsus,⁵⁴ there was, for example, van Helmont,⁵⁵ who was well aware that man's spiritual element is active when color, tone, and so forth are experienced. During the waking state, however, the spiritual is active only with the aid of the physical body. Hence it produces only an image of what is really contained in sound or color. This leads to a false description of external reality; namely, that purely mathematical-mechanistic form of motion for what is supposed to be experienced as secondary qualities in man's inner being, whereas, in accordance with their reality, their true nature, they can only be experienced outside the body. We should not be told that if we wish to comprehend the true nature of sound, for example, we ought to conduct physical experiments as to what happens in the air that carries us to the sound that we hear. Instead, we should be told that if we want to acquaint ourselves with the true nature of sound, we have to form an idea of how we really experience sound outside our physical and etheric bodies. But these are thoughts that never occurred to the men of the scientific age. They had no inclination to consider the totality of human nature, the true being of man. Therefore they did not find either mathematics or the primary qualities in this unknown human nature; and they did not find the secondary qualities in the external world, because they did not know that man belongs to it also.

I do not say that one has to be clairvoyant in order to gain the right insight into these matters, although a clairvoyant approach would certainly produce more penetrating perceptions in this area. But I do say that a healthy and open mind would lead one to place the primary qualities, everything mathematical-mechanical, into man's inner being, and to place the secondary qualities into the outer world. The thinkers no longer understand human nature. They did not know how man's corporeality is filled with spirit, or how this spirit, when it is awake in a person, must forget itself and devote itself to the body if it is to comprehend mathematics. Nor was it known that this same spirituality must take complete hold of itself and live independently of the body, outside the body, in order to come to the secondary qualities. Concerning all these matters, I say that clairvoyant perception can give greater insight, but it is not indispensable. A healthy and open mind can feel that mathematics belongs inside, while sound, color, etc. are something external.

In my notes on Goethe's scientific works⁵⁶ in the 1880's, I set forth what healthy feeling can do in this direction. I never mentioned clairvoyant knowledge, but I did show to what extent man can acknowledge the reality of color, tone, etc. without any clairvoyant perception. This has not yet been understood. The scientific age is still too deeply entangled in Locke's manner of thinking. I set it forth again, in philosophic terms, in 1911 at the Philosophic Congress in Bologna.⁵⁷ And again it was not understood. I tried to show how man's soul—spirit organization does indeed indwell and permeate the physical and etheric body during the waking state, but still remains inwardly independent. If one senses this inward independence of the soul and spirit, then on also has a feeling for what the soul and spirit have experienced during sleep about the reality of green and yellow, G and C-sharp, warm and cold, sour or sweet. But the scientific age was unwilling to go into a true knowledge of man.

This description of the primary and secondary qualities shows quite clearly how man got away from the correct feeling about himself and his connection to the world. The same thing comes out in other connections. Failing to grasp how the mathematical with its three-dimensional character dwells in man, the thinkers likewise could not understand man's spirituality. They would have had to see how man is in a position to comprehend right-left by means of the symmetrical movements of his arms and hands and other symmetrical movements. Through sensing the course taken, for example, by his food, he can experience front-back. He experiences up-down as he coordinates himself in this direction in his earliest years. If we discern this, we see how man inwardly unfolds the activity that produces the three dimensions of space. Let me point out also that the animal does not have the vertical direction in the same way as man does, since its main axis is horizontal, which is what man can experience as front-back. The abstract space framework could no longer produce anything other than mathematical, mechanistic, abstract relationships in inorganic nature. It could not develop an inward awareness of space in the animal or in man.

Thus no correct opinion could be reached in this scientific age concerning the question: How does man relate to the animal, the animal to man? What distinguishes them from one another? It was still dimly felt that there was a difference between the two, hence one looked for the distinguishing features. But nothing could be found in either man or animal that was decisive and consistent. Here is a famous example: It was asserted that man's upper jawbone, in which the upper teeth are located, was in one piece, whereas in the animal, the front teeth were located in a separate one, the inter-maxillary bone, with the actual upper jawbone on either side of them. Man, it was thought, did not possess this inter-maxillary bone. Since one could no longer find the relationship of man to animal by inner soul-spirit means, one looked for it in such external features and said that the animal had an inter-maxillary bone and man did not.

Goethe could not put into words what I have said today concerning primary and secondary qualities. But he had a healthy feeling about all these matters. He knew instinctively that the difference between man and animals must lie in the human form as a whole, not in any single feature. This is why Goethe opposed the idea that the inter-maxillary bone is missing in man. As a young man, he wrote an important article suggesting that there is an inter-maxillary bone in man as well as in the animal. He was able to prove this by showing that in the embryo the inter-maxillary bone is still clearly evident in man although in early childhood this bone fuses with the upper jaw, whereas it remains separate in the animal. Goethe did all this out of a certain instinct, and this instinct led him to say that one must not seek the difference between man and animal in details of this kind; instead, it must be sought for in the whole relation of man's form, soul, and spirit to the world.

By opposing the naturalists who held that man lacks the inter-maxillary bone Goethe brought man close to the animal. But he did this in order to bring out the true difference as regards man's essential nature. Goethe's approach out of instinctive knowledge put him in opposition to the views of orthodox science, and this opposition has remained to this day. This is why Goethe really found no successors in the scientific world. On the contrary, as a consequence of all that had developed since the Fifteenth Century in the scientific field, in the Nineteenth Century the tendency grew stronger to approximate man to the animal. The search for a difference in external details diminished with the increasing effort to equate man as nearly as possible with the animal. This tendency is reflected in what arose later on as the Darwinian idea of evolution. This found followers, while Goethe's conception did not. Some have treated Goethe as a kind of Darwinist, because all they see in him is that, through his work on the inter-maxillary bone,⁵⁸ he brought man nearer to the animal. But they fail to realize that he did this because he wanted to point out (he himself did not say so in so many words, but it is implicit in his work) that the difference between man and animal cannot be found in these external details.

Since one no longer knew anything about man, one searched for man's traits in the animal. The conclusion was that the animal traits are simply a little more developed in man. As time went by, there was no longer any inkling that even in regard to space man had a completely different position. Basically, all views of evolution that originated during the scientific age were formulated without any true knowledge of man. One did not know what to make of man, so he was simply represented as the culmination of the animal series. It was a though one said: Here are the animals; they build up to a final degree of perfection, a perfect animal; and this perfect animal is man.

My dear friends, I want to draw your attention to how matters have proceeded with a certain inner consistency in the various branches of scientific thinking since its first beginnings in the Fifteenth Century; how we picture our relation to the world on the basis of physics, of physiology, by saying: Out there is a silent and colorless world. It affects us. We fashion the colors and sounds in ourselves as experiences of the effects of the outer world.

At the same time we believe that the three dimensions of space exist outside of us in the external world. We do this, because we have lost the ability to comprehend man as a whole. We do this because our theories of animal and man do not penetrate the true nature of man. Therefore, in spite of its great achievements we can say that science owes its greatness to the fact that it has completely missed the essential nature of man. We were not really aware of the extent to which science was missing this. A few especially enthusiastic materialistic thinkers in the Nineteenth Century asserted that man cannot rightly lay claim to anything like soul and spirit because what appears as soul and spirit is only the effect of something taking place outside us in time and space. Such enthusiasts describe how light works on us; how something etheric (according to their theory) works into us through vibrations along our nerves; how the external air also continues on in breathing, etc. Summing it all up, they said that man is dependent on every rise and fall of temperature, on any malformation of his nervous system, etc. Their conclusion was that man is a creature pitifully dependent on every draft or change of pressure.

Anyone who reads such descriptions with an open mind will notice that, instead of dealing with the true nature of man, they are describing something that turns man into a nervous wreck. The right reply to such descriptions is that a man so dependent on every little draft of air is not a normal person but a neurasthenic. But they spoke of this neurasthenic as if he were typical. They left out his real nature, recognizing only what might make him into a neurasthenic. Through the peculiar character of this kind of thinking about nature, all understanding was gradually lost. This is what Goethe revolted against, though he was unable to express his insights in clearly formulated sentences.

Matters such as these must be seen as part of the great change in scientific thinking since the Fifteenth Century. Then they will throw light on what is essential in this development. I would like to put it like this: Goethe in his youth took a keen interest in what science had produced in its various domains. He studied it, he let it stimulate him, but he never agreed with everything that confronted him, because in all of it he sensed that man was left out of consideration. He had an intense feeling for man as a whole. This is why he revolted in a variety of areas against the scientific views that he saw around him. It is important to see this scientific development since the Fifteenth Century against the background of Goethe's world conception. Proceeding from a strictly historical standpoint, one can clearly perceive how the real being of man is missing in the scientific approach, missing in the physical sciences as well as in the biological.

This is a description of the scientific view, not a criticism. Let us assume that somebody says: “Here I have water. I cannot use it in this state. I separate the oxygen from hydrogen, because I need the hydrogen.” He then proceeds to do so. If I then say what he has done, this is not criticism of his conduct. I have no business to tell him he is doing something wrong and should leave the water alone. Nor is it criticism, when I saw that since the Fifteenth Century science has taken the world of living beings and separated from it the true nature of man, discarding it and retaining what this age required. It then led this dehumanized science to the triumphs that have been achieved.

It is not a criticism if something like this is said; it is only a description. The scientist of modern times needed a dehumanized nature, just as chemist needs deoxygenized hydrogen and therefore has to split water into its two components. The point is to understand that we must not constantly fall into the error of looking to science for an understanding of man.

• 52In the night from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day 1922/23 the Goetheanum burned down. It was built in ten years, with the help of various artists from many countries. This primarily wooden building, in which each surface and corner was formed artistically (see Steiner, Ways to a New Style in Architecture [London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. and New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1927]) had been designed in all details by Rudolf Steiner who also managed the construction work through all these years. From the first of January on, the activities had to be transferred into the so-called “Schreinerei,” a building that was used during the construction of the Goetheanum. For the work itself, Rudolf Steiner did not allow any interruption; the afternoon after the fire, the “Three Kings Play” was performed, as was written on the invitations of the ongoing course (see Christmas Plays from Obervfer, trans. A.C. Harwood [London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973]). Rudolf Steiner introduced it with a short address, in which he spoke the following words: “great suffering knows how to keep silent about what it is feeling ... The building that was created in ten years through the love and compassion of innumerable friends of the movement was destroyed in one night. But just today the silent suffering experiences what our friends have put in this work. Since we feel that everything we do in our movement is necessary in our present civilization, we will want to continue whatever we can in the given frame, and therefore even in this hour as the flames outside still burn and rise, although such suffering is present, still perform this play which we promised our participants in connection with our course, and which these participants expect. I also will hold the lecture I offered, here in the ‘Schreinerei’ this evening at 8:00 P.M.” (printed in Ansprachen zu den Weihnachtsspielen aus Altem Volkstum [Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974], GA Bibl. Nr. 274). The beginning of the course's lecture was then devoted to the fire, which is printed in The Younger Generation (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984).
• 53. One can find the basic reality explained in the chapter “Sleep and Death” in An Outline Of Occult Science and in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 54. Paracelsus, Theophrastus von Hohenheim: Einsiedein, Kanton Schwytz 1493–1541 Salzburg, Md. Ferrara, Professor in Basel. Accomplished physician, scientist, and philosopher. Wrote about chemistry, medical science, biology, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, and theology. The myths about Paracelsus as goldmaker, magician, or charlatan were made up after his death and distorted the picture of his character. Most complete work published by Karl Sudhoff (fourteen volumes). See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 55. Helmont, Johann Baptist van: Brussels 1577–1644. Physician and iatrochemist. He managed the differentiation and separation of gases (hydrogen, carbon). He coined the name “gas” for the airy state.
• 56. See Steiner, Goethe the Scientist. Especially see Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15.
• 57. Lecture of April 8, 1911, at the 9th International Philosophical Congress, “The Psychological Foundations of Anthroposophy,” in Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Development, Spring Valley, NY: 1982), pp. 25–55.
• 58. See Steiner, Goethe the Scientist.

I would like to repeat what I told you yesterday: Please don't expect too much content from this very brief language study. I will make only a few remarks about the development of language in this improvised course. However, it is certainly worthwhile to stir up some thoughts on the subject, and perhaps from the way I present things, you will discover guidelines. I won't go into the usual facts, but I will try to show you a number of important ways to look at the life of language with a view to its organic evolving.

In my first lecture I referred to the development of our German language through “invasions” into its word-stock. We pointed to the significant one, which coincided with the streaming in of Christianity into northern cultures, and its consequences. Christianity did not simply bring in its own content; it brought this content in the form of word images. Considered outwardly, the folk religions of the northern and central European peoples were not at all similar to what came to them as a new religion; nor was it possible for them to grasp the content of Christianity with the words and sounds of northern and central Europe. Therefore, those who brought Christian concepts and Christian perceptions also brought their “word clothing.” We have cited a group of such words that were carried northward, we can say, on the wings of Christianity. In the same way, everything connected with schooling streamed northward, too, words like Schule ‘school' itself, Tafel ‘blackboard’, and so forth, with the exception of a few like Lesen, Buchstabe, Lehrer (see Lecture 1, pages 19-20). The former are of Latin origin, but have been integrated into the German language organization so thoroughly that no one today would recognize them as loan-words. I also described how later, beginning in the twelfth century, a new invasion arrived from the West, bringing in many language elements. After that came a Spanish wave and finally one from England, as late as the nineteenth century.

These examples will be elaborated on later, but they indicate that during the time Christianity and everything related to it were making their way northward, the genius of the language was still able to accept and transform it inwardly by means of the folk sensitivity in that region. I illustrated this unique fact not by a word pertaining to Christianity but by the connection of the word Schuster ‘shoemaker’, which seems so truly Germanic, with sutor: it is one and the same word (page 22-23). There was still so much speech-forming strength in the genius of the Germanic folk that it was possible to transform a word like sutor that belongs to the earliest invasion. The further we proceed from this to the next invasion, which was concerned with education, the more we find the sound of the word in German closer to the sound in Latin. And so it continued. Languages flowing in later found the German language spirit ever less capable of transforming whatever came toward it. Let us keep this in mind. It remains to be seen whether, in due time, such phrases as five o'clock tea will be changed; that is, whether the German language genius can develop over a relatively long span of time the power of more rapid transformation it possessed in early times. We will have to wait and see. At the moment, it is not important.

We must ask ourselves what significance it has for a people that its language-forming power is decreasing, at least temporarily; that in fact it no longer exists as it once was. You do find it more strongly today in dialects. For instance, we could search for the origin of a very strange word in the Austrian dialect: pakschierli or bakschierli. The Austrians sitting here certainly know it. You can quickly sense what pakschierli means: ‘a cunning little girl who bobs and curtseys when presented to strangers, a ‘charming little girl—that’s pakschierli—or a ‘funny little thing made of marzipan' that doesn't exactly make you laugh, but causes an inward state of being ready, if the impression you get grows a little, to burst out in a loud laugh. ‘A funny little thing made of marzipan'—that’s pakschierli Now what is this word? It is not really connected with the rest of the Austrian dialect, for it is none other than the German word possierlich ‘funny, cunning, cute’, a word that has been transformed.

In a way, then, this language-forming power can be studied in the dialects. It is also a good approach to the active, creative folk soul, and an understanding of the folk soul would contribute immeasurably toward an understanding of the cultural life of a country. It would lead back to what I referred to in The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity,¹ which was ridiculed by such minds as the all-too well-known Professor Dessoir.² Spiritual science makes it possible to determine clearly what I described there: that the formation of consonant sounds in language is connected to an imitation of something externally perceptible. Consonants express for us what we have experienced inwardly of outside events. To put it more graphically: If you are setting in a fence post, you can feel this action inwardly by bearing down (aufstemmen, as ‘stem’ for skiers) on your foot. This is the perception of your own act of will. We no longer feel this inner act of will in the sound [št, pronounced sht] of aufstemmen, but in the early age of language development, you did feel in your acts of will an imitation of what was happening outside yourself. The consonant element has thus become the imitation of events outside the human being, while the vowel element expresses what is truly an inner feeling. ‘Ah!" is our astonishment, a standing back, in a sense. The relationship of the human being to the outer world is expressed in the vowels. It is necessary to go back a long way in time if one wants to penetrate to these things, but it is possible to do so; then one arrives at the insight that such theories as the “bow-wow” or “ding-dong” theories are horribly wrong. They are incorrect and superficial. An understanding of the human being, however, can lead us toward discovering inwardly how a speech sound is connected with whatever we want to reveal of soul and spirit. Let us consider this as a question to ask ourselves, in order to find answers during the course of this study. In order to look rightly at the many and varied links in the chain of language, I will try to find characteristic examples to help us reach what we are trying to understand.

Today I should like to take some examples to show how language proceeds slowly from the concrete to the abstract. If we really want to study actual facts, turning to dialect again will be helpful. Let me mention one small example:

When Austrian peasants get up in the morning, they will say something about their Nachtschlaf ‘night sleep’ but not at all as you are apt to speak about it. You think of it basically as something quite abstract, for you are educated people. Austrian peasants are close to nature. To them, all that surrounds them partakes of spirit and soul, and they have a strong awareness of it. Even for them this is dying out now, but in the seventies and eighties of the last century, it was still very much present for anyone who, like me, wished to observe it. Even though peasants may still perceive the elemental forces in everything around them, they will never express it in abstractions but always concretely. A peasant will say, ‘I have to wipe the night sleep (Nachtschlaf) out of my eyes To peasants the substance excreted from the eyes during the night that can be washed away, is the visible expression of sleep; they call it Nachtschlaf To understand language that was still quite alive a short time ago, there is this secret: a factual understanding is not at all hindered by finding spiritual elements linked up with it. Austrian peasants are in fact thinking of an elemental being, but they express this by describing its action, that it put an excretion into their eyes. Never would they take this word as the abstraction arrived at by an educated person. However, if peasants have gone to school a little while or have been exposed to the city, they have a way of addressing themselves to an invisible, concrete fact. They will still say, ‘T must wipe the night sleep out of my eyes,” but at the same time they will make a sort of gesture to imply that for them it is something really superficial and yet concrete.

We should be aware that such an observation leads us to realize that an abstract term always points back to something more concrete. Take the following example. In the Scandinavian countries you still find the word barn for ‘child’ [Scotland and northern England, bairn]; we no longer have it in German. What is its history? On one hand, it leads us back to the Gothic; we will find it in Ulfilas’s Bible translation,³ where we find the expression bairan, meaning ‘to bear’. If we know the law of consonant shift, discovered by Jakob Grimm,⁴ for the Germanic languages and for all those related to them [see lecture 3, page 41-42], we will go back from the Gothic bairan to pherō in Greek and fero in Latin, both meaning ‘to carry’ or ‘to bear’. A /b/ in Germanic appears in Greek and Latin as /f/ or /ph/. Bairan is simply a Germanic sound-shift from fero; the word widens out into a different direction. There exists the Old High German word beran, ‘to carry’ [beran is also the Anglo-Saxon forerunner of English ‘to bear’. The barrow of ‘wheelbarrow’ goes back to beran.]. Gradually the verbal aspect of the word receded; in modern German we no longer have the possibility of thinking back to the original, strongly felt, active meaning. Why is the child called barn in Scandinavia? Because it is being borne or carried before it comes into the world. A child is something that is carried: we look back at our origin. The only word left over from all this in modern German is gebären ‘to bear, give birth'.

But we do have something else—we have retained the suffix -bar. You will find that in fruchtbar ‘fertile’, kostbar ‘costly’, ‘precious’ and other words. What is kostbar?—that which carries a cost. What is fruchtbar?—that which bears fruit. It was expressed very graphically, not as an abstraction as it would be today, for the actual carrying, bearing was visualized.

You can imagine this quite vividly when you say something is becoming ruchbar ‘known’, ‘notorious’, not always in the most positive sense; literally, ‘smell bearing’. When a smell is being carried toward you, a matter is becoming ruchbar. For many words like this we should be able to find the clear, direct imagery that in ancient times characterized the language-forming genius.

I will write down for you a phrase from Ulfilas’s Bible translation:

jah witands Jêsus thôs mitônins izê qath

This means approximately, ‘And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, spoke thus.” [Note qath = Anglo-Saxon, cwaeth/ quoth.] The word mitonins means ‘thoughts’ and this takes us to miton, meaning roughly ‘to think’. In Old High German it grew into something different: mezzôn; related to this is the word mezzan which means messen ‘to measure’. Measuring, the outer visible act of measuring, experienced inwardly, simply becomes thinking. Thus an action carried out outside ourselves has provided the foundation for the word thinking ‘I am thinking’ actually means: ‘T am measuring something in my soul’. This in turn is related to the Latin word meditor and the Greek medomai, which have given us ‘meditate’.

Whenever we go back in time and observe the genius of language at work, we find this presence of imagery, but we must also try to observe it with inner understanding. You all know the term Hagesfolz ‘a confirmed bachelor’; you know its approximate meaning today. However, the connection of this word with what it meant formerly is very interesting. It goes back to the word Hagestalt, in which the word Stalt is embedded [modern German retained only the word Gestalt: ‘figure, form, stature’]. What is Stalt? It is a person who has been put, placed, or ‘stood’ somewhere. According to medieval custom, the oldest son inherited the farm; the younger son got only the hedged-in field, the Hag. The younger son, therefore, who only owned the Hag was placed or ‘stood’ in this fenced-in field, and was often not able to marry. The stalt is the owner. The ‘hedge’ owner is the Hagestalt. As awareness of the word stalt gradually disappeared, people turned stalt into stolz (proud). It has no connection with the modern word stolz (proud); there is simply a resemblance of sounds. But an awareness of this stalt ‘placed or stood’ can be found in other, older examples still in existence, for instance in the Oberufer Nativity Play.⁵ One of the innkeepers says I als ein Wirt von meiner G'stalt, hab in mei’ Haus und Losament G'walt [I, an innkeeper of my stature—or an innkeeper placed here—take full charge in my house]. People think he means physical stature, but what he really means is ‘Placed in this respected house, stood here...." With the words that follow, “Take full charge,” he means that he attracts his guests. There is still the consciousness in G'stalt of what originally was in Hagestalt. We should follow with our whole inner being the development of words and sounds in this way, in order to ponder inwardly the unusual and delicate effects of the genius of language.

In the New Testament, describing how the disciples were astonished at Christ’s healing of the man sick of the palsy, Ulfilas uses a word in his translation related to silda-leik = selt-sam-leich ‘seldom-like’. Considering the way Ulfilas uses this word in the context of his Bible translation, we discover that he means here—for what has been accomplished by Christ—das Seltsamgestaltete ‘that which has been formed miraculously'. It is the bodily-physical element that arouses astonishment at this point. This is expressed more objectively in silda-leik. In the word leik we must sense: it is the gestalt, the form, but as an image. If the word gestalt were used in the earlier sense, it would be to express ‘being placed’. The form (Gestalt today), as it earlier was felt, described the image of a thing and was expressed by leik. We have this word in leichnam ‘corpse’. A corpse is the image of what was once there. It is a subtle expression when you sense what lies in this Leich, how the Leich is not a human being but the ‘likeness’ of one.

There are further examples I can bring you for the development of terms springing from visual imagery to express a quality of soul. We learn from Ulfilas that in the Gothic language ‘bride’ is brûths. This bruths in the Bible translation is closely related to ‘brood’ (Brut), so that when a marriage is entered upon, the brood is being provided. The “bride” is the one who ensures the ‘brood’. Well then, what is the Bräutigam (the ‘bridegroom’)? Something is added to the bride; this is in Gothic guma, in Old High German gomo [in Anglo-Saxon, guma), derived by consonant shift from the Latin word homo, ‘man’, ‘the man of the bride’, the man who for his part provides for the brood [the addition of /r/ in the English groom is due to confusion with, or substitution of groom, servant]. You see, we have to look at the unassuming syllables sometimes if we really wish to follow the genius of language in its active forming of language.

Now it is remarkable that in Ulfilas’s translation the Gothic sa dumba ‘der Dumpfe’, ‘the dull one’, appears, denoting the man unable to speak, the dumb man whom the Christ heals (Matthew 9:32). With this, I would like to remind you that Goethe has told us how in his youth he existed in a certain kind of Dumpfheit ‘dullness’. “Dullness” is a state of being unable to see clearly through one’s surroundings, to live in shadows, in fogginess; this hinders, for one thing, the capacity for speech, renders mute. Later this word became dumm, took the meaning of ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’, so that this dumb means nothing more than ‘not able to look about freely’ or ‘to live in dullness’ or ‘in a fog.” It is truly extraordinary, my dear friends, how many changes and transformations of a word can exist.⁶ These changes and recastings show how the conscious and the unconscious are interwoven in the marvelous being called the genius of language that expresses itself through the totality of a folk, tribe, or people.

There is, for instance, the name of the Nordic god Fjögyn. This name appears in a clarifying light through Ulfilas’s use of the word fairguni as Gothic for ‘mountain’, in telling of Christ’s “going up into the mountain” with his disciples. Its meaning shifted a little but we still find the word in Old High German as forha, meaning ‘fir tree’ or ‘fir mountain’. Fjögyn is the elemental god or goddess who resides on the fir mountain. This in turn (and we can sense it in fairguni) is related to the Latin word quercus ‘oak tree’, which also names the tree.

I should like to point out how in earlier ages of languageforming there prevailed—though somewhat subconsciously—a connection between sound and meaning. Nowadays it is almost impossible for us with our abstract thinking to reach down to the speech sounds. We no longer have a feeling for the sound quality of words. People who know many languages are downright annoyed if they are expected to consider anything about speech sounds. Words in general have the most varied transitions of form and meaning, of course; translations following only the dictionary are artificial and pedantic. First of all, we should follow the genius of language, which really has something other in mind than what seems obvious at first glance.

In German we say Kopf ‘head’; in the Romance languages it is testa, tête. Why do we say Kopf? Simply because in German we have a sculptural language genius and we want to express the roundness of the head. Kopf is related to kugelig ‘spherical’, and whether we speak of Kohlkopf ‘cabbage head’ or human Kopf it has originated from the same language-molding process. Kopf expresses what is round. Testa, however, ‘head’ in Latin, denotes something in our inner being: testifying, ascertaining, determining. We always have to consider that things may be named from various points of view. One can still feel this—though it’s possible to miss the details—if we try to trace our way back to older forms from which the present word originated. Finally we arrive far back in time when the genius of language was able to sense the spiritual life within the sounds themselves.

Who can still sense that meinen ‘to mean’ and Gemeinde ‘community, parish’ belong together? Nowadays this is difficult to perceive. In Old High German Gemeinde is gimeinida. 1f you look at a further metamorphosis to mean as an English cognate [Anglo-Saxon, maenan, ‘to recite, to tell' and AngloSaxon, gemaene, ‘common, general’], it is evident that gemeinida expresses what is ‘meant’ or ‘arrived at’ by several people in common; it derives strength from the fact that several people are involved. And this act of receiving strength is expressed by adding such a prefix as gi- [related to Anglo-Saxon be-, in bedazzle, behold, and so forth. In modern German ge- is the prefix of most past participles.].

We have to reach back and try to find the element of feeling in the forming of speech. Today when we say taufen, an ancient German word, ‘to baptize’, we no longer have a feeling for what it really is. We get more of a picture when we go back to Old and Middle High German, where we find toufan, toufen, töufen and find this related to diups [who can resist finding a connection to dip, Anglo-Saxon, dyppan?], and in Ulfilass daupjan related to daupjands, the Baptist. We have in Old High German the close cognate tiof in Modern German tief ‘deep’'—so there we have the relationship taufen ... hineintiefen ... tauchen ‘dip in, dive in’. It is simply a dipping into the water.

These things should help us to look carefully at the language-forming genius. Observing changes of meaning is especially important. In the following example there is an interesting shift of meaning. ‘Bread” was in Gothic hlaifs Old High German leiba, Middle High German leip, Anglo-Saxon, hlaf modern German das Brot. Hlaifs/hlaf has not retained the meaning ‘bread’; it has changed into laib/loaf. It means now only the form in which bread is made; earlier it was the bread itself.

You can observe this change of meaning in the metamorphosis from Old English hlaford from the earlier hlafweard, ‘bread keeper or guard.” The hlaford was the person who wards or guards the bread, the one you had to ask if you wanted bread, who watched over the bread, had the right to plant the field, make the bread, give the bread to those who were not freemen. And by means of a gradual transformation—the /h/ is lost—the word lord developed; ‘lord’ is the old hlafweard.

The companion word is equally interesting. Whereas hlaifs becomes ‘loaf of bread’, another word appeared through metamorphosis: hlaefdige in Old English. The first part of the word is again ‘loaf of bread’; dige developed from an activity. If dough (Anglo-Saxon dag Modern German Teig is being kneaded, this activity is expressed in the word dige, digan, to knead dough. If you seek the person who carries out this activity, you will arrive at the wife of the lord. The lord was the bread-warden; his wife was the bread-kneader, bread-giver. The word ‘lady’ grew out of hlaefdjge. In a mysterious way, ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ are related to the loaf of bread and show their origin as ‘bread-warden’ and ‘bread-kneader’.

We must really try to grasp the difference between our modern abstract attitude toward language and one that was truly alive in earlier times. People felt then that speech-sounds carried in themselves the spirit qualities, the soul qualities, that human beings wanted to communicate.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1992.
• 2. Max Dessoir (1867-1947). Author, Von Jenseits der Seele: Die Geisteswissenschaft in kritischer Betrachtung (Stuttgart, 1917).
• 3. Ulfilas or Wulfila (Little Wolf) 331-383. Bishop of the Goths. He is said to have invented the alphabet he used in order to translate the Bible. It is our only remnant of the Gothic language, which became extinct in 400 A.D.
• 4. Jakob Grimm (1785--1863), German philologist and creator of Grimm's law. Interested principally in the relationship between the various Germanic languages, he was one of the great founders of comparative philology. He wrote German Grammar, German Mythology and—with his brother Wilhelm—the famous collection of German folk and household tales. The Brothers Grimm also planned and inaugurated the great German dictionary.
• 5. A.C. Harwood, Christmas Plays from Oberufer (Bristol, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993).
• 6. See also Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Relations in the Human Organism, lecture 2 (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1984).

Those who look at the historical development of humanity only in terms of the sequence of cause and effect, as is customary today, will not be able to gain from history itself that which it can be in terms of forces, of impulses for the individual human being, if one tries to penetrate into the true essence of this historical becoming. Historical development can only reveal itself to someone who is able to perceive a wise working through the succession of facts. Today it is almost the case that one is of the opinion that anyone who sees a wise event in the context of the world and especially in the historical development of humanity is indulging in superstition and attributing to things something that only he himself has thought up. However, one must not impose one's own ideas onto things. One must not force one's way of thinking onto things, but one must try to let things speak for themselves. If one is open enough, one will perceive something like an active wisdom everywhere in historical development, especially at significant turning points in human evolution.

Now, one of the things that has emerged from history is, above all, the establishment of the individual festive days of the year, especially the great festive days. It is striking when we realize that Christmas is a so-called fixed feast, falling every year near the winter solstice, on December 24 and 25. In contrast to this, Easter is a so-called movable feast, which appears to be arranged according to the constellation of the sun and moon, the observation of which is thus, to a certain extent, brought in from the extra-terrestrial cosmos. It is the case that if a person takes these festive days of the year seriously, they have a meaning for their life, they are significant in their life. That is what they should be. Meaningful, penetrating thoughts should arise on these festive days. Profound feelings and emotions should well up from the heart and soul. It is precisely through what we experience inwardly during such festive seasons that we should feel connected to the passage of time and to that which is effective in the course of time.

Now, these festive seasons have been fixed for certain historical reasons, and one has to reflect on such a fact that Christmas is an immovable festival and Easter is a movable one, that Christmas falls at a time when the earth is, so to speak, most closed off from the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos. When the sun has the least effect on the earth, when the earth, out of its own forces, which it has retained from the summer and autumn season, produces its own covering for the shortest days, when the earth, out of itself, makes what it can with its own forces with the least influence from the cosmos, we celebrate Christmas. |

When the time begins again when the earth experiences the most significant influences from the extraterrestrial cosmos, when the warmth of the sun, the light of the sun, causes vegetation to grow out of the ground, when heaven, so to speak, works together with the earth to weave the earth's garment, then we celebrate Easter. And in that such conceptions have emerged from the thoughts of humanity, not in an abstract way conceived by the one or the other arbitrarily, but from thoughts that have, as it were, permeated humanity through long epochs, that have developed themselves, into the historical evolution something has flowed that, when recognized, at the same time evokes the possibility of deeply venerating it, the possibility of looking back to the times of our ancestors with reverence, devotion, and love. And by drawing attention to something like this, one can indeed say: Contemplation of the active wisdom in historical becoming allows those forces and impulses to emerge from this history that can then, in the right way, become rooted in the human soul and work in the human soul in the right way.

Christmas, as we celebrate it today at the shortest time of the year, on December 24th and 25th, has only been celebrated in the Christian Church since the year 354. It is not usually thought about in a forceful way that even in Christian-Catholic Rome in the year 353, Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ, was not celebrated on that day. It is one of the most interesting aspects of historical reflection to see how this Christmas celebration has become established, out of a historical instinct and from deeper sources of wisdom, which may have worked largely unconsciously.

Something similar, but fundamentally different, was celebrated before: January 6, which was the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ. And this Feast of the Epiphany of Christ meant the remembrance of the baptism of John in the Jordan. This Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated in the first centuries of Christianity as the most important. And only from the time I have indicated does the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ, the Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan, so to speak, wander through the twelve holy nights back to December 25 and is replaced by the Feast of the Birthday of Christ Jesus. This is connected with deep, meaningful inner processes of the historical development of Christianity.

What does the fact that in the first centuries of the Christian worldview the memory of the baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated indicate? What does this baptism of John in the Jordan mean? This baptism of John in the Jordan signifies that from the heights of heaven, for extraterrestrial, cosmic reasons, the entity of the Christ descends and unites with the entity of the man Jesus of Nazareth. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan therefore signifies a fertilization of the earth from cosmic expanses. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan signifies an interpenetration of heaven and earth. And in celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, we celebrated a supersensible birth, the birth of the Christ in the thirty-year-old man Jesus.

In the first centuries of Christian development, attention was focused primarily on the appearance of Christ on earth, and of less importance, alongside this view of the appearance of an extraterrestrial Christ-being in the earthly realm, was the earthly birth of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who only received the Christ in his own body when he was thirty years old. This was the conception in the early centuries of Christianity. In these centuries, therefore, the descent of the supermundane Christ was celebrated. And an attempt was made to understand what had actually happened in the course of his incarnation.

If we allow the historical development up to the Mystery of Golgotha to take effect on us, it presents itself in such a way that in primeval times humanity was endowed with an original wisdom of a supersensible kind, an original wisdom that one must have the deepest reverence for if one is able to contemplate it in its entire inwardness, in its entire essence. In the first, only externally childlike appearing wisdom of mankind, an infinite amount is revealed not only about the earthly, but above all about the extra-earthly, and how the extra-earthly affects the earth. Then one sees how, in the course of the development of mankind, this light of primeval wisdom shines less and less in human minds, how people increasingly lose touch with this primeval wisdom. And this primeval wisdom has faded and disappeared from the human mind precisely in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching. All phenomena of historical development in Greek and especially in Roman life show in the most diverse ways that precisely the best of humanity were aware that a new heavenly element must enter into earthly life so that the earth and humanity could continue to develop.

For the unprejudiced observer, the entire evolution of mankind on earth falls into two parts: the time that waited for the Mystery of Golgotha, waited not only in the simple, childlike minds of men, but waited with the highest wisdom — and in the part that then follows on from the Mystery of Golgotha, in which we are immersed and for which we hope for an ever broader and broader fulfillment, again in the supersensible world, again in the influence of the extraterrestrial cosmic reality on earthly events within the evolution of the earth. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha stands at the very center of earthly evolution, giving it its true meaning.

I have often tried to express this pictorially for my listeners by saying that one should look at something like the significant painting by Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper in Milan, which unfortunately no longer exists in its artistic perfection. How one sees the Redeemer within His Twelve, how one sees Him contrasted on one side with John and on the other with Judas, and how one then has the whole thing before one in its coloring. And here, precisely with regard to this most characteristic image, when contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, one must say: If any being were to come down to Earth from a foreign heavenly body, it would in the outer reality, would be amazed, for we must assume that such a being from another planet would have a completely different environment around it, and it would be amazed at all the things that human beings have created on earth. But if he were to be led to this picture, in which this Mystery of Golgotha is shown in its most characteristic form, he would intuitively sense something of the meaning of earthly existence from this picture, simply through the way in which Christ Jesus is placed among his twelve disciples, who in turn represent the whole human race.

One can sense the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha actually gives meaning to the evolution of the earth from the most diverse backgrounds. But one only fully senses that this is the case when one can rise to the vision that with the baptism of John in the Jordan a supersensible being, the Christ, has entered into a human being. This is how the Gnostics saw it, not with the world view that we are again trying to gain today through anthroposophy, but with their world view, which was the last remnant of the ancient wisdom of mankind. One might say that so much of the instinctive wisdom of humanity remained that, in the first centuries after Christ's appearance, a number of people were still able to grasp what actually happened with the appearance of Christ on earth. The wisdom that the Gnostics had can no longer be ours. We must, because humanity must be in a state of continuous progress, advance to a much more conscious, less instinctive view of the supersensible as well. But we look with reverence at the wisdom of the Gnostics, who had retained so much of the first instinctive primal wisdom of man that one could grasp the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

From this comprehension of the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha and of the central phenomenon of John's baptism in the Jordan, the first great festival was established. But it was already so arranged in the developmental history of mankind that the ancient wisdom was dying out and becoming paralyzed. And it was precisely in the fourth century A.D. that one could do nothing with this ancient wisdom. Yesterday I presented another point of view, showing how this ancient wisdom gradually darkened. In a certain sense, the fourth century is the one in which man made the first beginning of being completely dependent on himself, having nothing around him for his contemplation other than what the senses can perceive and what the combining mind can make of the sensory perception. In order to gain its freedom, which could never have been gained through dependence on unearthly things, if ancient wisdom had not been paralyzed, humanity had to lose ancient wisdom, had to be thrown into materialistic observation. This materialistic outlook first appeared at dawn in the fourth century A.D. and grew stronger and stronger until it reached its culmination in the nineteenth century.

Materialism also has its good side in the history of the development of mankind. The fact that man no longer had the supersensible light shining into his mind, the fact that he was dependent on what he saw with his senses in the world around him, gave rise to the independent power within him that tends towards freedom. It also appeared wise in the developmental history of humanity that materialism has emerged. But precisely at the time when materialism took hold of the earthly nature of man, it was no longer possible to understand how the influence of the extraterrestrial, the heavenly, in the symbol of John's baptism in the Jordan presented itself to humanity. As a result, people lost their understanding of the meaning of the Feast of Epiphany, January 6, and resorted to other explanations. All the feelings and emotions that were related to the Mystery of Golgotha were no longer associated with the supermundane Christ, but began to be associated with the earthly Jesus of Nazareth. And so the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ became the Feast of the Epiphany of the Child Jesus. Admittedly, the development has taken a course that has now reached a peripeteia, which must create new necessities in the striving of humanity for our present-day world view.

We see how, as early as the 4th century, human beings' full and wise comprehension of the impossibility of comprehending the appearance of Christ was already confronted with it. But human feeling, human perception, human emotion and will develop in the course of history at a slower pace than thoughts. While thoughts had long since ceased to be directed towards the appearance of Christ, hearts still turned to this appearance of Christ. Deeply intimate feelings lived on in Christendom. And these profound feelings now formed the content of historical development for many centuries. And these profound feelings expressed it - but as if from instinctive impulses - what a significant event the appearance of Christ was for the development of the earth. The festival of the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth was connected to the Adam and Eve Day, the festival of the beginning of the earth of mankind. Adam and Eve Day falls on December 24, and Jesus' birthday celebration on December 25. In Adam and Eve, people saw the beings with whom the evolution of the earth began, the beings who descended from spiritual heights, who became sinful on earth, who became entangled on earth in material events, who lost their connection with the supersensible worlds. The first Adam was spoken of in the Pauline sense; and the second Adam was spoken of as the Christ: that man can only be fully man in the post-Christian era if he unites within himself the forces that fell away from God through Adam and the forces that through Christ bring him back to God. This was expressed by bringing together the Adam and Eve festival and the Jesus birthday festival. The sense of this connection, which gives earthly life its true meaning, has been preserved in a heartfelt way over the centuries.

One example of this is the occurrence of the very heartfelt 'Paradeisspiele' (Paradise Plays) and 'Christi-Geburtspiele' (Plays about the Nativity), of which we have brought samples to be performed here, which date from the last Middle Ages, from the beginning of the modern era, when German tribes living in the western regions took them with them to the east. In present-day Hungary, such tribes settled. We find such tribes north of the Danube in the Pressburg area, we find them south of the Carpathians in the so-called Spiš area, we see them in Transylvania. We find mainly Alemannic-Saxon tribes in these areas. We then find Swabian tribes in the Banat. All these German tribes took with them the one thing from their original homeland that had been imbued with the most heartfelt sentiments, which united humanity during these centuries with the most important experience on earth.

But human wisdom increasingly took a course that also intertwined the Christ event with the materialistic conception of the world. In the nineteenth century we see the rise of a materialistic theology. The criticism of the Gospels begins. The possibility of having an inkling — as must be the case with supersensible representations — that what appears as an imagination of the supersensible is different depending on whether it is viewed from one point of view or another, is lost. One has no conception of the fact that the sages of former centuries must also have recognized the so-called contradictions in the Gospels and that they did not criticize them in a critical way. One sinks philistinely into these contradictions in the Gospels. One resolves the contradictions, one removes everything supersensible from the Gospels. One loses the Christ out of the story of the Gospel. One tries to make something out of the story of the Gospels, something like an ordinary, profane story. Gradually, one can no longer distinguish what the theological historians say from what a secular historian like Ranke says about the Mystery of Golgotha.

When one looks for the figure of Jesus in the famous historian Ranke, as he presents him as the simple but most outstanding human being who ever walked the earth, when one reads all the lovingly described in Ranke's profane history, one can hardly tell the difference between this and what the materialistic theologians of the 19th century had to say about Jesus. Theology is becoming materialistic. Precisely for enlightened theology, the Christ disappears from the view of humanity. The “simple man from Nazareth” is gradually becoming that which only those who undertake to describe the essence of Christianity want to point to. And Adolf Harnack's description of the essence of Christianity has become famous.

In this book, “The Essence of Christianity” by Adolf Harnack, there are two passages that could be truly devastating for anyone who has a sense for the real essence of Christianity. The first is that this theologian, who wants to be a Christian, says that the Christ does not actually belong in the Gospels, that the Son does not belong in the Gospels; only the Father belongs in the Gospels. And so Christ Jesus, who walked the earth in Palestine at the beginning of our era, becomes simply the human proclaimer of the Father's teaching. The Father alone belongs in the Gospels, says Adolf Harnack, and yet he believes himself to be a Christian theologian! One must say: the essence of Christianity has completely disappeared from this “Essence of Christianity”, I mean that which Adolf Harnack describes, and actually such a view should no longer call itself Christian.

The other thing that can have a devastating effect in this writing “The Essence of Christianity” occurred to me once when I was present at a lecture given in a society called the Giordano Bruno Society. In connection with the remarks of a speaker there, I had to say how the most important part of the essence of Christianity has disappeared from modern theology. I had to point to Harnack's remark in this book “The Essence of Christianity,” where he says: Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, the idea of resurrection, the Easter faith, emerged from this event; and it is this faith that we want to hold on to. — So the resurrection itself has become unimportant to modern Christian theologians. They do not want to concern themselves with this resurrection as a fact. Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, people have begun to believe that the resurrection occurred there, and it is not the resurrection that we want to hold on to, but this belief.

I pointed out at the time that the essence of Christianity had been expressed by Paul, who said, based on his experiences outside Damascus: And if the Christ had not been resurrected, we would all be lost. Not the man Jesus is the essential thing in Christianity, but the supersensible entity, which through the baptism of John in the Jordan entered into the man Jesus, which arose from the tomb at Gethsemane, and which became visible to those who had the capacity for such visibility. Paul, as the latest of them, saw it, and Paul refers to the risen Christ. I therefore had to point out at the time how the remark of one of the most famous modern so-called Christian theologians fails to see the very essence of Christianity, its supersensible nature. The chairman of the society replied to me in a most peculiar way at the time. He said that such a thing could not be contained in Harnack's book, for Harnack was a Protestant theologian, and if Harnack asserted such a thing, it would be on a par with an assertion that could only come from the Catholic side, for example, about the Holy Robe of Trier. For the Catholic, it is not important whether it can be proven that this holy robe in Trier really comes from Jerusalem, but rather that faith is attached to this holy robe. The chairman of this society was so embarrassed that he did not even admit that this remark was in Harnack's book. I told him that since I did not have the book at hand, I would write him the page number on a postcard the next day. This is also characteristic of the modern thoroughness with which books are read that have an importance in the first place. You read a book and believe that it makes a significant impression on life, and you do not even notice one of the most important remarks, but you think it is impossible that it could be in it. It is in it! All this proves to us how the supersensible Christ has been thrown out of the evolution of humanity by a theology that is becoming ever more materialistic, how people have clung only to the outward physical appearance of the man Jesus.

Now, the festive customs and dedications of the simple minds that resorted to Christmas plays were beautiful; they arose from sacred feelings. Even if people could no longer provide each other with more information about the full meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha, they also had it in their hearts where they outwardly adhered to the material appearance of the child Jesus. And in this form, the celebration of the birth of Christ is beautiful and heartfelt.

The thought that destroys the Christ in the man Jesus is not beautiful and, from the highest point of view, it is not true, even from the Christian world view. It is as if the wisdom-filled guidance of humanity had first taken into account what had to happen in order for the materialistic view and thus the development of humanity to freedom to begin and continue. Just as materialism had to come in order to liberate humanity, so the Feast of the Epiphany, which can only be understood through supersensible vision and falls on January 6, had to be moved back to the Feast of the Nativity, December 25.

The twelve holy nights lie in between. In a sense, humanity made its way back through the entire zodiac by going through a twelvefold number, at least in the symbol, when this festival was moved.

Today, by summarizing everything that is connected with the Christ through the man Jesus, we can certainly unfold all the intimacy and depth of feeling for Christmas. And in my Christmas meditation yesterday, I wanted to express in words what is beneficial in this respect for the present time. But we must, after materialism has celebrated its highest triumphs in theology, after Christ Jesus has become, precisely for enlightened theology, only the simple man Jesus, again find our way back to the intuition of the supersensible, extraterrestrial Christ-being.

If you come with this point of view, then you will make enemies of precisely the materialistic theology of today. Just as the sun materially sends down its light from extraterrestrial cosmic expanses, so the spiritual sun of Christ descended to men and united with Jesus of Nazareth. Just as one can see the revelation of the soul and spirit in the outer physiognomy of man, in his facial features and in his gestures, so one can see the outer physiognomy in that which takes place in the cosmos, in the gestures that are into the cosmos through the course of the stars, in that which, as the inner warmth of the soul of the universe, manifests itself externally through the radiation of the sun, in that one can see the outer physiognomy of what permeates the whole world spiritually and soulfully. And in the concentrated spiritual descent of Christ upon the earth, one can see the inward aspect as the outward physiognomy of the concentrated rays of the sun streaming down upon the earth. And one will understand in the right way when it is said: The solar nature of Christ descended upon the earth.

We must come back to this supersensible understanding of Christ. We must learn to direct our thoughts back to the other birth, which took place as an extra-terrestrial birth through the baptism of St. John in the Jordan, despite the heartfelt devotion we wish to preserve for the birthday of Jesus, for which Christmas alone has become. We also want to learn to understand what takes place in the Jordan baptism of John in a meaningful historical symbol before our soul, as well as what happened in the stable of Bethlehem or in Nazareth. We want to learn to understand the words as they are communicated in the Gospel of Luke in the right way: This is my son, today he was born to me. — We want to learn to understand the Christmas mystery in such a way that it becomes for us again the source of understanding for the appearance of Christ on earth. We want to learn to understand the birth of the spirit in addition to the memory of our physical birth.

Such an understanding can only gradually arise from a general spiritual comprehension of the mysteries of the universe. We must gradually struggle towards a spiritual conception of the mystery of Golgotha. To do this, however, we need insight into the origin of such impulses within the earthly development of humanity, as there was in the 4th century AD, when the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ was moved from January 6 to the day of Jesus' birthday on December 25 out of the innermost need of developing humanity. One must learn to see how the wise guidance of human history works there. One must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Then one will recognize the wise guidance in human history without superstition, and without bringing one's own fantasies into it. One must learn not only to immerse oneself in history with abstract ideas and to look at cause and effect, but one must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Only then will we understand what makes our time a truly transitional time, a time in which a spiritual world view must again be wrested from the materialistic view, and a natural elevation to the supersensible must again be wrested. And an expression for this elevation to the supersensible will be a new understanding of the appearance of Christ on earth, the mystery of Golgotha.

Thus for the modern man who is really able to delve into the spirit of the time, Christmas has a twofold significance: it is that which has been approaching through recent history since the 4th century AD, that which has produced such wonderful has produced such wonderful beauties precisely in the simple, unadorned folk tradition, and that which still arouses our heartfelt delight today when we see it again in the renewal of folk plays such as we are attempting through our anthroposophical science. It is all that human warmth and affection has poured into life through the centuries during which the idea of Christianity has taken on more and more materialistic forms, until in the 19th century it has come so far that it must turn around through its own absurdity and return to the spiritual. This gives us, as people of today, the second thing about Christmas: in addition to the feeling that we have for the traditional Christmas that has been handed down since the 4th century AD, for this heartfelt feeling that we want to feel with, a new Christmas should be born from our contemporary understanding, a second Christmas to the old Christmas.

The Christ shall be reborn anew through humanity. Christmas is traditionally a celebration of the birth of Jesus; in spirit it shall become a celebration of the birth of a new conception of Christ, not new in relation to the first centuries, but new in relation to the centuries since the 4th century AD. And so Christmas itself should not be just a celebration of the memory of the birth, but, as it is experienced from year to year in the near future, it should become a direct, contemporary birthday celebration, the celebration of a present-day event. This birth of the new Christ-idea must come to pass. And Christmas must become so intense that every year at this very time man will be able to reflect anew and with special intensity on the fact that a new Christ-idea must be born.

Christmas must become a festival not of remembrance but of the present, a consecration of that which the human being experiences as a birth in his immediate present. Then it will truly enter into our more recent historical becoming, then it will strengthen itself more and more in this historical becoming of humanity, also into the future, which will have such need of it. Then it will become a consecration of the world.

We will turn our thoughts to-day to the Festival which every year revives remembrance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

There are three such main Festivals in Christendom: at Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. Each of these Festivals brings man's life of soul into a different relation with the great events from which the whole of earth-evolution receives purpose and meaning.

The Christmas Festival is connected more directly with man's life of feeling. In a certain sense it has the most popular appeal of all the Festivals, because when rightly understood it deepens the life of feeling and is always dear to the human heart.

The Easter Festival makes great demands upon man's powers of understanding, because here some measure of insight is essential into the Mystery of Golgotha itself, into how a super-sensible Being entered the stream of earthly evolution. Easter is a Festival which carries the faculty of human understanding to the highest level, a level which is, of course, ultimately accessible to everyone; but the appeal of the Easter Festival can never be as widespread as that of Christmas.

Through the Whitsuntide Festival, relationship is established between the will and the super-sensible world to which the Christ Being belongs. It is of the impulses of will which then take effect in the world that the Whitsuntide Festival makes men conscious when its meaning is rightly understood.

And so the great Christian Mystery is illustrated in a threefold way by these Festivals. There are many aspects of the Christmas Mystery and in the course of years we have studied them from different points of view at the time of the Festival. To-day we will think of an aspect brought graphically before us in the Gospels.

The Gospels tell of two proclamations of the birth of Christ Jesus. The one proclamation is made to the simple shepherds in the fields, to whom—in dream or in some kindred way—an Angel announces the birth. In this case, knowledge of the event was brought by inner soul-forces which were of a particular character in the shepherds living near the birthplace of Christ Jesus. And the Gospels tell of another proclamation made to the Three Kings, the Three Magi from the East who follow the voice of a star announcing to them that Christ Jesus has come into the world.

Here we have an indication of two ways in which higher knowledge came to men in earlier times. This is again a matter of which the modern mind has no understanding. The idea prevailing nowadays is that man's faculties of apprehension and thinking—that is to say, inner powers of the soul—have for thousands and thousands of years been fundamentally the same as they are to-day, except that in earlier times they were more primitive. But we know from spiritual science that the tenor and mood of the human soul has undergone great changes in the course of the ages. In times of antiquity, let us say about six or seven thousand years ago, man had a quite different conception not only of his own life but also of the universe around him. His attitude of soul underwent continual change until, in the modern world, it amounts simply to intellectual analysis and a purely physical conception of things in the outer world. This development proceeds from an instinctive clairvoyance in ancient times, through the phase of our present mood-of-soul, in order, in the future, to return to a form of clairvoyant vision of the world pervaded by full, clear consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth, the old instinctive clairvoyance had already become dim. Although men's attitude of soul differed widely from that of to-day, they no longer possessed the powers of that ancient clairvoyance; neither were they able to apply the old forms of wisdom in seeking for intimate and exact knowledge of the world. The teachings of the ancient wisdom, as well as the faculties of instinctive clairvoyance, had lost their power when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Nevertheless, echoes still survived, as the Gospels clearly indicate if we understand them aright. Echoes of the ancient wisdom survived here and there in certain exceptional individuals. These individuals might well have been the simple shepherds in the fields who with their great purity of heart possessed a certain power of clairvoyance which came over them like a dream. And there might also well have been individuals who had reached the heights of learning, like the Three Magi from the East, in whom the ancient faculty to gaze into the how of cosmic happenings had been preserved.

In a kind of dream-condition, the simple shepherds in the fields were able inwardly to realise what was drawing near in the event of the birth of Christ Jesus. On the other hand, the knowledge possessed by the three Magi from the East enabled them, by contemplating the phenomena of the heavens, to discern that an event of a significance far transcending that of the ordinary course of life was taking place on the earth.

Our attention is therefore directed to two definite but quite distinct forms of knowledge. We will think, first, of the knowledge possessed by the three Magi as a last remnant of an ancient wisdom. It is clearly indicated that these Magi were able to read the secrets of the movements of the stars. The story of the three Kings or Magi points to the existence of an ancient lore of the stars, an ancient knowledge of the secrets of the worlds of stars in which the secrets of happenings in the world of men were also revealed. This ancient lore of the stars was very different from our modern astronomical science—although in a certain respect it too is prophetic in that eclipses of the sun, of the moon, and the like, can be predicted. But it is a purely mathematical science, speaking only of conditions and relationships in space and time in so far as they can be expressed in terms of mathematics. What plays with a higher significance into man's inner life from beyond space and time, but into the world of space and time, was read by an ancient star-lore from the courses and movements of the stars, and it was this star-wisdom that formed the essential content of the science belonging to an earlier epoch. Men sought in the stars for explanations of what was happening on the earth. But to such men the world of stars was not the machinelike abstraction it has now come to be. Every planet was felt to have reality of being. In a kind of inner speech of the soul, these men of old conversed, as it were, with each planet, just as to-day we converse with one another in ordinary speech. They realised that what the movements of the stars bring about in the universe is reflected in man's inmost soul. This was a living, spirit-inwoven conception of the universe. And man felt that as a being of soul and spirit he himself had his place within this universe. The wisdom relating to cosmic happenings was also cultivated in Schools of the Mysteries where the pupils were prepared, carefully and intimately, to understand the movements of the stars in such a way that human life on earth became intelligible to them.

What form did these preparations take? These preparations for knowledge of the stars and their workings consisted in training the pupils, even in the times of instinctive clairvoyance, to unfold a more wide-awake consciousness than that prevailing in normal life. The masses of the people possessed faculties of instinctive clairvoyance which were natural in a life of soul less awake than our own. In ancient times the wide-awake thinking of to-day would not have been possible. Nor could mathematics or geometry be grasped in the way they are grasped by the modern mind. Man's whole life between birth and death was a kind of dreamlike existence, but on that very account he had a far more living awareness of the world around him than is possible in our fully wide-awake consciousness. And strange as it seems, in the age which lasted into the second millennium or even as late as the beginning of the first millennium B.C. (—it was to the last surviving remains of this age that men like the three Magi belonged—) individual pupils in the Mysteries were initiated into a kind of knowledge resembling our geometrical or mathematical sciences. It was Euclid¹ who first gave geometry to the world at large. The geometry presented to mankind by Euclid had already been cultivated for thousands of years in the Mysteries, but there it was communicated to chosen pupils only. Moreover it did not work in them in the same way as in men of later time. Paradoxical as it seems, it is nevertheless a fact that the geometry and arithmetic learnt by children to-day was taught in the Mysteries to individuals specially chosen from the masses on account of their particular gifts who were then received into the Mysteries.

One often hears it said to-day that the teachings given in the Mysteries were secret and veiled. In their abstract content however, these so-called ‘secret’ teachings were no different from what is now taught to children at school. The mystery does not lie in the fact that these things are unknown to-day but that they were imparted to human beings in a different way. For to teach the principles of geometry to children by calling upon the intellect in an age when from the moment of waking until that of falling asleep the human being has clear day-consciousness, is a very different matter from imparting them to pupils specially chosen because of their greater maturity of soul in the age of instinctive clairvoyance and dreamlike consciousness. A true conception of these things is rarely in evidence to-day.

In Eastern literature there is a Hymn to the God Varuna which says that Varuna is revealed in the air and in the winds blowing through the forests, in the thunder rolling from the clouds, in the human heart when it is kindled to acts of will, in the heavens when the sun passes across the sky, and is present on the hills in the soma juice. You will generally find it stated in books today that nobody knows what this soma-juice really is. Modern scholars assert that nobody knows what soma-juice is, although, as a matter of fact, there are people who drink it by the litre and from a certain point of view are quite familiar with it. But to know things from the vantage-point of the Mysteries is quite different from knowing them as a layman from the standpoint of the experiences of ordinary waking consciousness. You may read to-day about the ‘Philosopher's Stone’ for which men sought in an epoch when understanding of the nature of substances was very different from what it is today. And again, those who write about alchemy assert that nothing is known about the Philosopher's Stone. Here and there in my lectures I have said that this Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most people, only they do not know what it really is nor why it is so called. It is quite well known, because as a matter of fact it is used by the ton.

The modern mind with its tendency to abstraction and theory and its alienation from reality, is incapable of grasping these things. Nor is there any understanding of what is meant by saying that our geometrical and arithmetical sciences were once imparted to mature souls quite different in character from the souls of modern men, In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I have indicated the special nature of the Mystery-teachings but these significant matters are not as a rule correctly understood; they are taken far too superficially. The way in which the subject-matter of the Mystery-teachings in ancient times was imparted—that is what needs to be understood.

Novalis was still aware of the human element, the element of feeling in mathematics which, in utter contrast to the vast majority to-day, he regarded as being akin to a great and wonderful Hymn.² It was to an understanding of the world imbued with feeling but expressed in mathematical forms that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when this mathematical understanding of the universe had developed in such a pupil, he became one whose vision resembled that of the men described as the three Magi from the East. The mathematics of the universe which to us has become pure abstraction, then revealed reality of Being, because this knowledge was supplemented and enriched by something that came to meet it. And so the science and knowledge of the outer universe belonging to an ancient culture which in its last echoes survived in the Magi, was the origin of the one proclamation—the proclamation made by way of wisdom pertaining to the outer universe.

On the other side, inner feeling of the secrets of the evolution of humanity could arise in men of a disposition specially fitted for such experiences. Such men are represented by the shepherds in the fields. These inner forces must have reached a certain stage of development and then instinctive-imaginative perception became direct vision. And so, through their faculty of inner vision, the simple shepherds in the fields were made aware of the proclamation: ‘The God is revealing Himself in the heavenly Heights and through Him there can be peace among all men who are of good-will.’

Secrets of the cosmos were thus revealed to the hearts of the simple shepherds in the fields and to those who were the representatives of the highest wisdom attainable by the human mind at that time. This is the revelation made to the three Magi from the East. The great mystery of earth-existence was proclaimed from two sides.

What was it that came to the knowledge of the Magi? What kind of faculties developed in specially prepared pupils of the Mysteries through the mathematics imparted to them?

The philosopher Kant says of the truths of mathematical science that they are a priori. By this he means that they are determined before the acquisition of external, empirical knowledge.³ This is so much lip-wisdom. Kant's a priori really says nothing. The expression has meaning only when we realise from spiritual-scientific knowledge that mathematics comes from within ourselves, rises into consciousness from within our own being. And where does it originate? In the experiences through which we passed in the spiritual world before conception, before birth. We were living then in the great universe, experiencing what it was possible to experience before we possessed bodily eyes and bodily ears. Our experiences then were a priori—a form of cognition independent of earthly life. And this is the kind of experience that rises up, unconsciously to-day, from our inmost being. Man does not know—unless, like Novalis, he glimpses it intuitively—that the experiences of the life before birth or conception well up when he is engrossed in mathematical thought. For one who can truly apprehend these things, mathematical cognition is in itself a proof that before conception and birth he existed in a spiritual world. Of those to whom this is no proof of a life before birth, it must be said that they do not think deeply and fundamentally enough about the phenomena and manifestations of life and have not the faintest inkling of the real origin of mathematics.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who had absorbed the kind of wisdom which in its last echoes had survived in the three Magi from the East, had this clear impression: If as we contemplate the stars we see in them the expressions of mathematical, arithmetical progression, we spread over universal space the experiences through which we lived before birth. A pupil of the Mysteries said to himself: Living here on the earth, I gaze out into the universe, beholding all that is around me in space. Before my birth I lived within these manifestations of cosmic realities, lived with the mysteries of number connected with the stars, with all that I can now only mentally picture in terms of mathematics. In that other existence my own inner forces led me from star to star; I had my very life in what is now only a mental activity. Such contemplation made vividly real to these men what they had lived through before birth, and these experiences were sacred to them. They knew that this other world was a spiritual world—their home before they came down to the earth. The last echoing remains of this knowledge had survived in the Magi from the East and through it they recognised the signs of the coming of Christ.

Whence came the Christ Being? He came from the world in which we ourselves live between death and a new birth, and united Himself with the life that extends from birth to death. Knowledge of the world in which our existence is spent from death to a new birth can therefore shed light upon an event like the Mystery of Golgotha. And it was through this knowledge that the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery too, was announced to the Magi.

While man is living on the earth and unfolding the forces which bring knowledge of the world around him, while he is unfolding the impulses for his actions and social life, he is unconsciously experiencing something else as well. He has no knowledge of it, but just as he experiences the aftereffects of his life before birth, so does he also experience what finally passes through the gate of death to become the content of the life after death. These forces are already present in germ between birth and death but come to fruition only in the life after death. They worked with intense strength in the old, instinctive clairvoyance, and in their last echoes they were still working in the simple shepherds in the fields because of their purity of heart. We live within the play of these forces above all during sleep, when the soul is outside the body, within the outer universe. The soul is then living in the form of existence in which it will live consciously after death, when the physical body has been laid aside.

These forces from the world of sleep and dream which in certain conditions can penetrate into waking life, were very active in the old, instinctive clairvoyance, and they were working in the simple shepherds to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was proclaimed in a way other than to the three Magi.

What kind of knowledge is brought by the forces that are paramountly active between death and a new birth, if, as was the case with the Magi, they have been kindled during life between birth and death? It is a knowledge of happenings in the world beyond the earth. The human being is transported from the earth into the world of the stars in which he lives between death and a new birth. This was the world into which the three Magi from the East were transported—away from the earth into the heavens.

And what kind of knowledge is brought by the forces that well up from the inmost being of man, above all in the world of dream? These forces bring knowledge of what is coming to pass within the earth itself. In this kind of knowledge it is earthly forces that are most strongly at work, the forces we have through the body, through existence in the body. These are the forces which are particularly active between sleeping and waking. Then too we are within the outer universe, but the outer universe that is especially connected with the earth.

You will say: this contradicts the statement that during sleep we are outside the body. But in reality there is no contradiction. We perceive only what is outside us; we do not perceive that within which we actually live. Only those who lack real knowledge and are satisfied with phrases speak of such things in glib words to the effect that it is meaningless to base spiritual science upon knowledge acquired outside the human being, for what really matters is that knowledge of outer nature shall be gained through the forces within man. ‘Schools of Wisdom’ like the one in Darmstadt⁴ may be based on high-sounding principles of this kind, but a man can remain a phrasemonger in spite of being the founder of such a ‘School of Wisdom.’ We must understand the inner nature of the world before we can acquire super-sensible knowledge, and it is only then that we can penetrate into the nature of our own inmost being. Men like Keyserling speak of the need to view things from the vantage-point of the soul, but they do not penetrate into the inmost being of man; they simply pour out phrases.

The truth is that between sleeping and waking we look back, feel back, as it were, into our body. We become aware of how our body is connected with the earth—for the body is given by the earth. The revelation to the shepherds in the fields was the revelation given by the earth, proceeding from their bodily nature. In a state of dream the voice of the Angel made known to them what had come to pass.

And so the contrast is complete:

To the Magi: revelation through heavenly lore.
To the Shepherds: revelation given by the earth.

That the revelation should have been from two sides is entirely in keeping with the Mystery of Golgotha. For a heavenly Being, a Being Who until then had not belonged to the earth, was drawing near. And the coming of such a Being must be recognised through wisdom pertaining to the heavens, through wisdom that is able to reveal the descent of a Being from the heavens. The wisdom of the shepherds is knowledge proceeding from the earth; the weaving life of the earth becomes aware of the coming of the Being from heaven. It is the same proclamation, only from another side—a wonderful, twofold proclamation to mankind of a single Event.

The attitude with which the Event of Golgotha was received by mankind is to be explained by the fact that only vestiges of the ancient wisdom remained. In the first centuries of our era, certain Gnostic teachings were able to shed light upon the Mystery of Golgotha, but as time went on, men strove more and more to understand it through purely intellectual analysis and reason. And in the nineteenth century, naturalism invaded this domain of belief. There was no longer any understanding of the super-sensible reality of the Event of Golgotha. Christ became the ‘wise man of Nazareth’—in the naturalistic sense. What is necessary is a new, spiritual conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha as such must never be confused with the attitude adopted to it by the human mind.

The mood-of-soul prevailing in the shepherds and in the Magi was in its final phase at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything in the evolution of humanity undergoes constant change and metamorphosis. What has the wisdom possessed by the Magi from the East now become? It has become our mathematical astronomy. The Magi possessed super-earthly knowledge which was actually a glorious remembrance of life before birth. This knowledge has shrivelled away into our mathematical-mechanistic conception of the heavens, to the phenomena of which we apply only mathematical laws. What wells up from within us in our mathematical astronomy is the modern metamorphosis of the knowledge once possessed by the Magi.

Our outer, sense-given knowledge, conveyed as it is merely through eyes and ears, is the externalised form of the inner knowledge once possessed by men like the shepherds in the fields. The mood-of-soul in which the secrets of earth-existence were once revealed to the shepherds now induces us to look at the world with the cold detachment of scientific observation. This kind of observation is the child of the Shepherd-wisdom—but the child is very unlike the parent! And our mathematical astronomy is the child of the Magi-wisdom. It was necessary that humanity should pass through this phase. When our scientists are making their cold, dispassionate researches in laboratories and clinics, they have very little in common with the shepherds of old, but this attitude of soul is nevertheless a metamorphosis leading back directly to the wisdom of the shepherds. And our mathematicians are the successors of the Magi from the East. The outer has become inward—the inner, outward. In the process, understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has been lost, and we must be fully conscious of this fact. Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has vanished most completely of all, perhaps, in many of those who claim to be official ministers of Christianity to-day.

With the forces of knowledge, feeling and belief possessed by modern men, the true reality of the Event of Golgotha can no longer be grasped. It must be discovered anew. The Magi-wisdom has become inward; it has become our abstract, mathematical science by which alone the heavens are studied. What has become inward in this way must again be filled with life, re-cast, re-shaped from within.

And now, from this point of view, try to understand what is contained in a book like my Outline of Occult Science.

The Magi gazed at the worlds of the stars; therein they beheld the Spiritual, for they could behold man's experiences in his life before birth. In our mathematics this has become pure abstraction. But the same forces that are unfolded in our mathematical thinking can again be filled with life, enriched and intensified in Imaginative perception. Then, from our own inner forces there will be born a world which, although we create it from within, can be seen as the outer universe, embracing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We then behold the heavens through inner perception, inner vision, as the Magi discerned the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha through outer perception. The outer has become inward, has become mathematical abstraction. Therefore what is now inward must be expanded into perception of the outer universe; inward perception must lead to a new astronomy, to an astronomy inwardly experienced.

It is only by striving for a new understanding of Christ that we can truly celebrate the Christmas Festival to-day. Can it be said that this Festival still has any real meaning for the majority of people? It has become a beautiful custom to take the Christmas Tree as the symbol of the Festival, although as a matter of fact this custom is hardly a century old. The Christmas Tree was not adopted as a symbol of the Festival until the nineteenth century. What is the Christmas Tree, in reality? When we endeavour to discover its meaning and know of the legend telling that it grew from the tiny branch carried in the arms of the boy Ruprecht on the 6th of December, when we follow its history, it dawns upon us that the Christmas Tree is directly connected with the Tree of Paradise. The mind turns to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. This is one aspect of the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha can again be proclaimed in our time. The mind turns from the Mystery of Golgotha, back to the world's beginning. The meaning of world-redemption is not understood and the mind turns again to the Divine creation of the world. This comes to expression in the fact that the real symbol of Christmas—the Crib—so beautifully presented in the Christmas Plays of earlier centuries, is gradually being superseded by the Christmas Tree which is, in reality, the Tree of Paradise. The old Jahve religion usurped the place of Christianity and the Christmas Tree is the symbol of its recrudescence. But in its reappearance the Jahve religion has been split into multiple divisions. Jahve was worshipped, and rightly worshipped, as the one, undivided Godhead in an age when his people felt themselves to be a single, self-contained unity not looking beyond their own boundaries and full of the expectation that one day they would fill the whole earth. But in our time, although people speak of Christ Jesus, in reality they worship Jahve. In the various nations (this was all too evident in the war), men spoke of Christ but were really venerating the original Godhead who holds sway in heredity and in the world of nature—Jahve. Thus we have the Christmas Tree on the one side, and on the other, national Gods at a level inferior to that of the Christian reality. These were the principles by which men's comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha was diverted back again to the conceptions belonging to a much earlier epoch. The assertion of the principle of nationality, the claiming of national Gods, denotes a step backward into the old Jahve religion. Those who see fit to worship Christ as a national God—it is they who deny Him most deeply.

What must never be forgotten is that the proclamations to the Shepherds and to the Kings contained a message for all mankind—for the earth is common to all. In that the revelation to the shepherds was from the earth, it was a revelation that may not be differentiated according to nationality. And in that the Magi received the proclamation of the sun and the heavens, this too was a revelation destined for all mankind. For when the sun has shone upon the territory of one people, it shines upon the territory of another. The heavens are common to all; the earth is common to all. The impulse of the ‘human universal’ is in very truth quickened by Christianity. Such is the aspect of Christmas revealed by the twofold proclamation.

When we think of the Christmas Mystery, our minds must turn to a birth, to something that must be born anew in our time. For true Christianity must verily be born anew. We need a World-Christmas-Festival, and spiritual science would fain be a preparation for this World-Christmas-Festival among men.

• 1. About 300 B.C.
• 2. None really comprehend mathematics who do not undertake the study with reverence and devotion as a revelation from God." (From Thoughts on Physics).
• 3. "Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences of reason which have to determine their objects a priori." (From the Preface to the 2nd ed. of The Critique of Pure Reason, 1787).
• 4. Founded in 1920 by Count Hermann Keyserling (1880-1946).

A teacher: I tried to schedule all the language classes for the same time. However, it was not possible because there are not enough language teachers. I then tried to do that at least for groups of classes. There were also other things that were not possible.

Dr. Steiner: Have you discussed the schedule? It would be desirable not to change teachers for the individual classes. We need to see if we really need Tittmann here as a new teacher. That would be reasonable if we want to unburden the present faculty.

(Dr. Steiner looks at the completed schedule.) The first thing is that the schedule must be correct. Miss D. gave English in class 3b, and Mr. N. gave French. If N. were to take French here, would that be a problem here? This schedule is not comprehensible the way it is, you can’t find your way in it. You get dizzy. If only people knew what they were doing. We need some room to write notes. It would be best if language class directly followed main lesson. The main thing is that in general, language instruction should be given from 10:00 until 12:00.

On Monday, language class for the first through fifth grades from 10:00 until 11:00. It would not be good to assign the classes to different teachers. Changing teachers would not now be possible. So, now we have languages on Monday from 10:00 until 11:00. That would be every day, Monday through Saturday from 10:00 until 11:00. That can stay as it is. What you need to realize is how it will be now. Mr. N. also has the 7a class. How much French and English do we have in 7a? One hour each on Wednesday through Saturday from 11:00 until 12:00. We need a class schedule for the present situation. That would work. We need to take the present situation into account. What I’m asking is, is there a list of what is now happening? (Dr. Steiner takes a piece of paper and writes the names of all the teachers on it.) Now I want you to write down where you are teaching. It is hard to believe we are holding a meeting about the best class schedule. A teacher makes some other suggestions.

Dr. Steiner: I just said it is not desirable to change the teachers for the classes.

A teacher: We also talked about arranging the language classes so that we can move the children around.

Dr. Steiner: We could do that later. For now, I only want to see if it is at all possible to hold the language classes in the morning and, when possible, directly after main lesson. We will be able to see that after we put everything together. I see no reason why a division into groups would not be possible if we do it right after main lesson. I do not know why that would not be possible. Dr. Steiner then takes the list of teachers and goes through the language classes in detail, class for class, in order to see whether languages can all be taught at the same time.

Dr. Steiner: We should divide them into groups. We need to begin somewhere. In general, the result will be that, with the exception of Latin and in some of the higher grades, the division into groups would be according to class. The majority of the students will remain with their class. We can achieve our goal by making the group the class. There can be only a small number of children who would need to move from one group to another.

A teacher: It will be difficult to find a plan that is not somewhat arbitrary.

Dr. Steiner: I am clear that I do not know what is happening.

A teacher: Perhaps we could ask you to give some guidelines.

Dr. Steiner: First, foreign languages should be taught immediately after main lesson when possible. Second, the language teachers should, in general, remain with their present groups. Third, after we have accomplished that for the foreign languages, the subjects we previously discussed should be taught in the morning, also. We would not need anything more than a division of things. Now, it makes no difference whatsoever whether it is classes or groups. We can use groups if we can do that. The lower grades have the least need for other groups. Of course, we have a problem when the Protestant and Catholic ministers cannot come at another time. We have fourteen teachers for English and French. There are nineteen classes, so each teacher would have seven periods. I am against overburdening the teachers and in favor of getting an additional language teacher. However, aside from that, it would be inefficient to divide the language classes into so many groups. That all came about because there was a desire to divide the languages by class. Pedagogically, there is no reason to hold to that principle past the third grade. Until that time, I admit that the main lesson teacher should also have the students for foreign languages. But there is no need to strictly follow that later.

A teacher: Partly, the question concerned grouping students according to their knowledge.

Dr. Steiner: We have too many class groups for modern languages. We do not need to have so many.

A teacher: The students in the eleventh grade want a middle certificate, and for that reason need complete instruction in English and French. Only three or four students would remain in Greek if they had to give up French and English.

Dr. Steiner: That is a radical change from when the students want to pass the humanistic examinations.

A teacher: Most of them do not want to give up modern languages.

There is a discussion about the different kinds of final examinations. There must be some clarity about which ones the students want.

Dr. Steiner: That was not the original perspective of the Waldorf School. The ancient languages were included to the extent necessary for inner reasons. Now the situation has changed, since the students want to take final examinations. We have tried to take that perspective into account in Greek and Latin by preparing the students for their final examination. We spoke about dividing things and that those taking Greek and Latin also want French, and that those taking English and French could also take Latin. That was our perspective.

A teacher: We need to know only whether the student wants to take the humanistic or the business final examination. Both would be possible through a division in our curriculum.

Dr. Steiner: I would go still further. I would say that for those students who want to take the humanistic examination, we can certainly have Latin and Greek in the morning. We could have it as part of main lesson, and we could give the classes in natural science at a later time.

A teacher: There is not much interest in Greek.

Dr. Steiner: The parents would have to decide whether the students are to take the humanistic examination.

A teacher: If there are only four or five students, should we still give Greek for them?

Dr. Steiner: Occasionally, there is the situation when a teacher works only for a few students.

A teacher: There seems to be a desire for the Middle School examination. Would it be responsible of us to allow them to leave school without English, like it is at the college prep high schools?

Dr. Steiner: We could take that responsibility if we had students who wanted to take the final examinations.

A number of teachers talk about the difficulties of dividing the students. Some students want to learn Greek, but they do not intend to take the humanistic examinations.

Dr. Steiner: We could have saved ourselves this whole discussion. We began with the assumption that we could not continue Greek and Latin in the present way simply because it is not possible to prepare the students for their final examinations. Today, though, the discussion is that there is no need at all to prepare them for that examination. We began with the assumption that we needed this terrible Greek and Latin in our curriculum so that some students who have sufficient talent might eventually be able to pass their final examinations. As I said, I thought that would be possible. Then you said it is not possible without undertaking some changes. Now, it seems that its not at all necessary to offer Latin and Greek for the examination.

What we need here is some sort of compromise. Until now, the opinion was that it was absolutely necessary to provide what a number of students would need to pass their humanities examinations in spite of the fact that for their age, they are insufficiently prepared. From that standpoint, we wanted to include Greek and Latin in the best possible way.

A teacher: The students do not want to give up English.

Dr. Steiner: Those who want to take the humanities examination will have to drop English. If they do not want to drop English, they will not be able to take the humanities examination.

Are there really only four or five who want to take the humanities examination? If we want to continue Greek, we must arrange things so that those four or five can take their examinations.

Two things are interwoven here: the requirements for the examination and whether we want to provide an opportunity for the children to learn Greek. Latin is not so important to me. We could arrange the division so that the children begin Latin and Greek together in the sixth grade and continue into the seventh, but that in the eighth grade and afterward, we have a division so that those who decide later would no longer have Greek. They would have had it, however, in the sixth and seventh grades. What is important is that what we provide is pedagogically sound. Until the end of the seventh grade, we would try to provide so much Greek as we believe is pedagogically necessary. A split would then occur in the eighth grade, and they could choose. Those who choose the humanistic direction would no longer have English, and those who decide to go in the Middle School direction would no longer have Greek.

A number of teachers raise objections to dividing the class too early.

Dr. Steiner: Then we could do it this way. Greek until the end of the eighth grade and Latin and Greek together would be required in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. But some students might drop these subjects if their parents find them unimportant. Our general goal was to teach what people think is necessary. No one would think that students must decide at the age of ten whether they should have one subject or not. We would divide the ninth grade into either Greek or English, and at that time we would separate the Latin and Greek class. I think we would come back to the basic Waldorf School principle of giving Greek and Latin in the fifth through eighth grades, along with modern languages, and that there would be a division only in the last grades. And then the children would not be prepared for final examinations!

If we use that principle, we need to say firmly that if you want English, you can’t have Greek, but you will have Latin. Greek can conflict with English, all kinds of conflicts could arise.

There is nothing else to do other than move away from having the eleventh-grade main lesson in the first two hours of the day. We will have to have the main lesson at a later time.

There is no school that completely takes into account both the eminently important pedagogical principle of having these two periods one after another, and also preparation for the examination. That is something I have seen in English schools. Everywhere, subjects arbitrarily follow one after the other. Sometimes it is really grotesque.

We need to schedule modern languages so that we can group the children. That will be possible only if you were to—in London, when they had the election there, people had a similar line of thought. On election day the students at Oxford got together and publicized that a Mr. Bohok had been elected with twelve million votes. That was published everywhere. The city council gathered to congratulate him, but there was no such man. It is just like your class schedule—Tittmann does not exist. They even made a mannequin there. There was quite an uproar about it in England.

We said we wanted to have voice and eurythmy lessons in the morning, but we did not want to be pedantic about that. In that case, of course, we can form groups, and in the event we can form a group only at the cost of having some voice lessons in the afternoon, that is what we will do. (Speaking to a Latin and Greek teacher) How many hours do you have?

A teacher: Seventeen.

Dr. Steiner: You have one too many. You should not have more than sixteen hours in Greek and Latin. For the more scientific subjects in the higher grades, where experiments are done, you could have twenty hours. That is not possible in subjects that require real concentration.

A teacher: Perhaps we need to have some of the shop classes in the morning.

Dr. Steiner: Then we will have a mess in our class schedule again. It would certainly be desirable if we could have a different perspective. That is what is so difficult, you always bring this schematic bureaucratic perspective to the fore, and put the really important things on the back burner. This kind of thinking really has no content. I would need to have both the teaching plan and the meeting plan in front of me. They should have been here today. The problem is that we moved the division of the classes up to the ninth grade.

I once considered work on a class schedule as the opposite of pedantic. If we had it, we could see which class had which subject at what time. We would know where all the classes are, and that each class had such a schedule. From those two things, we could see where we are. We would have nineteen sheets from which we could see that one class has this and from a different sheet we could see that at the same time, one or another class is doing something else. If you have to do something like this occasionally, you can accept that you might have a light fainting spell. But when you have to spend a whole evening on it, you become dizzy. Imagine how simple it would be if I had one schedule for each class and a timetable from which I could see that this or that class is here from two until four.

The problem is that we are not doing what would actually be right, namely that we do not consider the elementary school alone, but recognize that the language teachers move throughout the different grades. If we were to make a radical change, which is not the case, and some teachers would only work in the upper grades, and those who worked there would not work in the lower grades, it would be easier. The whole problem has become quite difficult since we have lost a language teacher because he took over a class. It is really a problem that we are missing one language teacher.

Is there a student here by the name of D.L.? Is there some problem with him? Why did you write a letter?

A teacher: He caused an explosion in the physics room. We gave him a warning and wrote his mother.

Dr. Steiner: There shouldn’t be anything in the physics room that could cause an explosion. It is, in any event, troubling that something like that could occur. I once knew of a student in an upper grade who poisoned himself because the chemistry teacher was not paying attention to things. In any event, you should have left it at giving the student a warning. You should not have written anything. You never think how difficult it is when I have to fight against these things, and that people say, “That’s quite some leadership when a ten-year-old is allowed to create an explosion.” Do you think you can still do that, considering the situation we are now in? It is horrible how people think only about how they can protect themselves, but never about what the school looks like publicly. This is really astonishing. His mother is really a nice woman, but you need only imagine what kind of an impression it would make upon her to learn her boy caused an explosion. Everyone she tells this to would say, “Don’t send you child to the Waldorf School.” That is obvious. We cannot have many such occurrences.

Always feel responsible. Didn’t you think about how it would affect the school? If you provide the material for an explosion, then any boy would cause problems. I do not want to ask who was responsible for this, but someone must have left the material there. It was in the physics and laboratory rooms. The doors need to be locked.

A teacher: No one should be in the physics room when a teacher is not there.

Dr. Steiner: Thus, the room was not locked up?

A teacher: The error was that the student had permission to remain in the physics room.

Dr. Steiner: I do not understand why the laboratory is not locked. This is a really beautiful situation. Explosives and poisons are kept in the laboratory, but it is not locked so the students have easy access to them. It is quite apparent that it is not sufficient to agree that students should not be in there. It is also clear that no laboratory teacher was there when the boy was. These kinds of things are always happening.

A teacher: It was my fault. I allowed him to remain in the physics room.

Dr. Steiner: But we must have principles in such things! Then we could say that a teacher was there, and the boy did it during that time. That would show that the teacher would have to be fired. When such things happen, we have a fear that something more will happen.

(Replying to an objection) It is horrible that that word could be used here. Who cares what happens in Buxtehude? It’s still worse that it could be said here. That is no position to take. Such things simply must not occur here.

The gymnastics teacher talks about holding class outdoors. Problems could arise for the school because the students catch cold.

Dr. Steiner: If there are such complaints, we can do nothing more than wait until we have a gymnasium.

A teacher asks whether they should yield to the parents.

Dr. Steiner: The parents want their children to be here with us. In individual cases, we will have to give in to the desire of the parents. There is nothing more we can do than wait until the gymnasium is complete. It is disgruntling that it is always being put off. In the first grade, there is a boy in the first row in the corner, R.R. He needs some curative eurythmy exercises. He needs to consciously do the movements he now does for a longer period and at a much slower speed. Have him walk and pay attention to how fast he moves, and then have him do it half as fast. If he takes twenty paces in five seconds, then have him take twenty paces in ten seconds. He needs to consciously hold back. He needs to do some curative eurythmy, then these exercises, then curative eurythmy again.

You also have that boy in the yellow jacket, E.T. That is a medical problem. He could certainly do the “A, E, I exercise.” Also, he should eat some eggs that are not completely cooked. He needs to develop protein strength. In many cases, it is possible to know what we need to do to heal something. People cannot say something untrue about us if what we say needs to be done cannot be done. We need to take up a collection so the boy can have two eggs a day, at least four times in a week. He would need eight eggs. The Cologne News costs twenty-five marks, but it does not have the same nutritional value.

The school doctor asks a question concerning medicine. He needs to see quite a number of students.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to speak about the principles. That is hardly possible before Christmas. Our English visitors will come on the eighth or ninth of January and be here for a week. If only we could at least have gymnastics then! Perhaps I could speak about medical questions in that connection. Now, we have to speak about individual students. In the future, I would like to handle that in principle. In every class, there are undernourished children. The children in the first grade were born in 1915. The health of the children born in 1914 has suffered some. That was a shock. Now we have those who are undernourished. People should have seen this coming in 1916. The war went on too long. I would like to give a basic overview of this topic, the basis of school health.

A teacher: A mother is complaining that her children do not sleep enough.

Dr. Steiner: You need to ask when the children go to bed. She should try having them go to bed a half-hour later. Concerning K.P. in the 4b class.

Dr. Steiner: He is anemic. The boy does not have enough metabolic residues. Due to the tea, he has used more of himself inwardly, and now he needs a strengthening diet. Before, he looked bad because of the bad food, and that is having an effect now. Try to get him some bread every day. If you give him malt for fourteen days, he would get used to it, and then it would be difficult to feed him normally. It would be better to give him a good piece of bread. It is quite clear that he is undernourished. In curative eurythmy, he could do the bright vowels, A, E, and I. A comment about E.V.M. in the 3b class who has headaches.

Dr. Steiner: We can easily help that through the diet. Give her some cooked cranberries every day for three weeks.

An eighth-grade teacher: Twenty-five children will be leaving at Easter, but they have not really reached the goals of elementary school. Perhaps we should take them aside and teach them the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Dr. Steiner: I would agree with that. Do it. It would also be nice if Graf Bothmer could help you.

A teacher asks about W.S. in the tenth grade. Her thyroid glands are not functioning properly.

Dr. Steiner: I once said something about this. She was in a eurythmy performance and looked as though she would not be able to complete it. The way she seems now, I think that we need to give her a preparation: 0.5% agaric (extract of amanita muscaria), then 5% berberis vulgaris, the juice of the fruit, and a little hyoscyamus niger (henbane). Thus, this berberis vulgaris 5%, 0.5% agaric, a homeopathic amount of hyoscyamus niger, 5X. There is a danger that her glands might degenerate because there is something wrong toward the back of her head.

A teacher asks about two students in the seventh grade who are misbehaving.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult to do anything because the problem can be traced back to an abnormal growth of the meninges. It is difficult to do anything. It is too bad that our physicians do not pay more attention to such special cases. There is hardly anything more we can do other than have one of the doctors from the Therapeutic Institute come up here every week and really undertake some systematic exercises. Otherwise, we would have to put them into an institution. These are problems with the meninges. You could try to get them more interested in school.

A teacher: I cannot teach the seventh grade properly. I have too much to do for foreign languages.

Dr. Steiner: We will have to be patient until we have an additional person. I do not think you should allow your courage to wane. Things went quite well recently, particularly in that subject. The children were really interested in the perspective that you presented. I would not want you to get depressed.

A teacher asks about some particularly weak children.

Dr. Steiner: Try to include them more during class. Call upon them more often so that they remain attentive.

A teacher asks about a performance by the children in Holland.

Dr. Steiner: I only meant that you should agree upon the age of the students. We cannot drag ten-year-old children to The Hague. The very young children cannot go, only those children about whom we can say it would be responsible. Otherwise, there is nothing to say against it.

A teacher presents a request for a seminar.

Dr. Steiner: If we were to hold such a course, it would be much more reasonable if you formulated your questions and uncertainties during your meetings. Perhaps you could find two dozen pedagogical questions that would provide the basic content and theme. You already know what needs to be said. You have not studied the seminar sufficiently. It is not reflected in the way school is being held. Occasionally, one thing or another occurs, but in general, it is not visible. I would like to give such a course, but you must have specific questions. The course would include a number of things I have already addressed.

A teacher asks about the Oberufer Christmas play and whether Dr. Steiner could help.

Dr. Steiner: I cannot help you since I have not been at the rehearsals. My wife told me about it. The story is this: We were sent something from Brietkopf and Härtel that X. had printed. It states that the rights of performance are reserved. X., who knew the plays here, published the things he stole from us. People are used to such things from social parasites. He may have gone secretly to Schröer’s heirs. The Malatitsch family in Oberufer has the performance rights. Schröer bought the printing rights in 1858. I always assumed we would present it publicly before it was stolen from us. People have often asked me to publish it, but I did not think it would be responsible today. Today, the text would have to be completely revised from beginning to end. I would not have taken the responsibility of publishing something like that without a careful revision. I think it is silly to perform Brietkopf’s text. Most of the things I corrected during the rehearsals in Dornach. I made a number of important corrections, but people are like that.

A teacher asks about parents who pay no tuition.

Dr. Steiner: Why don’t you send somebody to them. We need to do this kind of work efficiently. There would be an impossible amount of work if the school association had three thousand members. We should send the secretary of the school association.

A teacher asks whether children whose parents do not want to pay should remain at the school.

Dr. Steiner: It may be that their parents do not know how to write. The school association has a secretary, and he certainly does not have much to do. Nothing is being done to increase membership.

I wish there was as much enthusiasm for the school as there is for the performance. People’s attention is diverted from the teaching. If the children were to perform something, it would not be so dangerous. I think it would be best to let it go, otherwise, you will get even deeper into the problem.

I have not really said anything against the performance. I actually believe that the better the performance is, the worse it will be for the school. I think you are as enthusiastic about it as a roly poly is about standing up.