The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Mankind is reaching out to apprehend the Mystery of Golgotha once more with all the forces of the human soul; to understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilisation, but so as to unite with it all the forces of man's being. But this will only be possible if we are ready to approach the Mystery of Golgotha once more in the light of spiritual knowledge. Intellectualistic knowledge can never do justice to the full World-impulse of Christianity. For such knowledge only takes hold of the thinking life of man. So long as we have a Science whose only appeal is to our life of Thought, we must derive the sources of our Will (and these for Christianity are the most important) from our instinctive life, and cannot realise their true origin in spiritual Worlds.

Thus it will be indispensable to turn attention in our time once more to this the greatest question of mankind, inasmuch as the essence and meaning of the whole evolution of the Earth lies in the Mystery of Golgotha. I would fain express it in a parable, however strangely seeming. Imagine some Being descending from another planet to the Earth. Unable to become an earthly man, the Being would in all likelihood find the things on Earth quite unintelligible. Yet it is my deepest conviction, arising from a knowledge of the evolution of the Earth, that such a Being—even if he came from distant planets, Mars or Jupiter—would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the Last Supper. For in this picture he would discover that a far deeper meaning lies hidden in the Earth,—in earthly evolution. Beginning from this deeper meaning which belongs to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being from a distant world could then begin to understand all other things on Earth.

We men of to-day little know how far we have gone in intellectual abstraction. We can no longer feel our way into the souls of those who lived a little while before the Mystery of Golgotha. They were very different from the souls of men to-day. We are apt to imagine the past history of mankind far too similar to the events and movements of our day. In reality the souls of men have undergone a tremendous evolution. In the times before the Mystery of Golgotha all human beings—even those who were primitive, more or less uncultured in their souls,—perceived in themselves something of the essence of the soul, which might be thus described: They had a memory of the time the human soul lives through, before he descends into an earthly body. As we in ordinary life remember our experiences since the age of three or four or five, so had the human soul in ancient time a memory of pre-existence in the world of soul and spirit. In a deeper psychological sense, man was as if transparent to himself. He knew with certainty: I am a soul, and I was a soul before I descended to the Earth. Notably in still more ancient times, he even knew of certain details of the life of soul and spirit which had preceded his descent to Earth. He experienced himself in cosmic pictures. Looking up to the stars, he saw them not in the mere abstract constellations which we see to-day. He saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. In a dreamlike way he saw the whole Universe filled with spiritual pictures or Imaginations, and as he saw it thus he could exclaim: “This is the last reflected glory of the spiritual World from which I am come down. Descending as a soul from yonder spiritual World, I entered the dwelling of a human body.” Never did the man of ancient time unite himself so closely with his human body as to lose this awareness of the real life of soul.

What was the real experience of the man of ancient time in this respect? It was such that he might have said: “I, before I descended to the Earth, was in a world where the Sun is no mere heavenly body spreading light around, but a dwelling-place of higher Hierarchies, of spiritual Beings. I lived in a world where the Sun not only pours forth light, but sends out radiant Wisdom into a space not physical but spiritual. I lived in that world where the stars are essences of Being—Beings who make felt their active will. From yonder world I descended.”

Now in this feeling two experiences were joined together for the man of ancient time: the experience of Nature, and the experience of Sin.

The old experience of Sin: the modern man has it no longer. Sin, for the man of modern time, lives in a world of abstract being. It is a mere transgression, a moral concept which he cannot really connect with the necessities or laws of Nature. For the ancients the duality was non-existent, of natural law upon the one hand, and moral on the other. All moral necessities were at the same time natural, likewise all natural [necessities] were moral. In those ancient times a man might say, “I had to descend out of the divinely spiritual World. Yet by my very entry into a human body—compared to the World from which I am descended—I am sick and ill.” Sickness and Sin: for the man of olden time these two ideas were interwoven. Here upon Earth man felt that he must find within himself the power to overcome his sickness. Increasingly the consciousness grew on the souls of olden time: We need an Education which is Healing. True Education is Medicine, is Therapy. Thus there appear upon the scene shortly before the Mystery of Golgotha such figures as the Therapeutæ, as the healers. Indeed in ancient Greece all spiritual life was somehow related to the healing of humanity. They felt that man had been more healthy in the beginning of Earth-evolution, and that he had evolved by degrees farther and farther from the Divine-spiritual Beings. “The sickness of humanity” was a widespread conception, forgotten as it is by modern History, in that ancient world in which the Mystery of Golgotha was placed.

It was by turning their gaze into the past that the men of those ancient times felt the reality of spiritual things. “I must look back beyond my birth, far into the past, if I would see the Spiritual. There is the Spirit; out of that Spirit I am born; that Spirit must I find again. But I have departed far from Him.”

Thus did man feel the Spirit from whom he had departed, as the Spirit of the Father God. The highest Initiate in the Mysteries was he who evolved in his heart and soul the forces whereby he could make manifest the Father in his own external human being. When the pupils crossed the threshold of the Mysteries and came into those sacred places which were institutions of Art and Science and of the sacred religious Rites at the same time, and when at length they stood before the highest Initiate, they saw in him the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher Initiates than the “Sun-Heroes.”

Thus, before the Mystery of Golgotha the Father Principle held sway. Yet it was felt how man had departed ever more and more from the Father, to whom as we look up we say. Ex Deo nascimur. Mankind stood in need of healing, and the seers and initiates lived in expectation of the Healer, the Hælend the healing Saviour.¹ To us the conception of Christ as the Healer is no longer living. But we must find our way to it again, for only when we can feel His presence once more as the Cosmic Physician, shall we also realise His true place in the Universe.

Such was the deep-seated feeling in human souls before the Mystery of Golgotha, of their connection with the spiritual world of the Father. A strange saying coming down to us from ancient Greece—“Better to be a beggar upon Earth than a king in the realm of shades”—bears witness, how deeply humanity had learned to feel the estrangement of their being from the world of Spirit. Yet at the same time their souls were filled with a deep longing for that World.

But we must realise that if a man had gone on evolving with the old consciousness of the Father God alone and unimpaired, he could never have attained the full self-consciousness of the “ I ” and inner spiritual Freedom. Before he could attain true spiritual Freedom, something had to take place in man, which, in relation to his primæval state, appeared as sickness. All humanity was suffering as it were the sickness of Lazarus. But the sickness was not unto Death; it was unto liberation and redemption, unto a new knowledge of the Eternal within man.

Men had increasingly forgotten their past life of soul and spirit before birth. Their attention was directed more and more to the physical world around them. The physical environment was now the real thing. The souls of olden time, looking out through the body into their physical environment, had seen in all the stars the pictures of the world of spiritual Being which they had left behind when they descended to this life through birth. In the light of the Sun they saw the radiant Wisdom which they had indwelt, which had been their very breath of life. In the Sun itself they beheld the choirs of Divine Hierarchies by whom they had been sent down to Earth. These things mankind had now forgotten, and as the Mystery of Golgotha approached—in the 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th centuries B.C.—they felt that it was so. If external History says nothing of these things, that is its failing. He who can follow History with spiritual insight will find it as I have said. He will see at the beginning of human evolution a wonderful consciousness of the Father God; he will see this consciousness gradually weakened and paralysed, till man at length should only see around him a world of Nature, void of spiritual Beings.

Much of these things remained unspoken in the unconscious depths of the soul. Strongest of all, in the unconscious depths, was a question unexpressed in words, but felt the more deeply by the human heart. Around us is the world of Nature, but where is the Spirit whose children we are? In the best of human souls, in the 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st centuries B.C., this question lived, unconscious and unformulated. It was a time of questioning, when mankind felt their estrangement from the Father God,—when human souls knew in their very depths: “It must be so indeed: Ex Deo nascimur. But do we know it still? Can we still know it?”

If we look still more deeply into the souls of those who lived in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, the following is what we find:—First there were the more primitive and simple souls who felt, deeply in their subconscious life, their present separation from the Father. They were the descendants of primæval humanity, which was by no means animal-like as modern Science conceives; for within the outer form, however like the animal, primæval man had borne a soul, in the ancient dream-clairvoyance of which he knew full well: “We have come down from the Divine-spiritual world, and have assumed a human body. Into this earthly world the Father God has led us. Out of Him we are born.” But not only so; the souls of primæval humanity knew that they had left behind them, in the spiritual worlds, That which was afterwards called and which we now call the Christ. For this reason the earliest Christian authors said that the most ancient souls of humanity had been true Christians, for they too had looked up to the Christ and worshipped Him. In the spiritual worlds in which they dwelt before their descent to Earth, Christ had been the centre of their vision—the Central Being to whom they had looked with the vision of the soul. It was this communion with Christ in the pre-earthly life which they afterwards remembered when on Earth.

Then there were the regions of which Plato speaks so strangely, where pupils were initiated into the Mysteries—where the vision of super-sensible Worlds was awakened and the forces in the human being were liberated to gaze into the spiritual Worlds. Nor was it only in dim memory that the pupils of the initiates learned to know the Christ, with whom indeed all human beings lived before their descent to Earth. For by this time Christ was already a half-forgotten notion in the souls of men on Earth. But in the Mysteries the pupils learned to know Him once again in His full stature. Yet at the same time they knew Him as a Being who, if we may put it in these words, had lost His mission in the Worlds beyond the Earth. It was so in the Mysteries of the second and first centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, that as they looked up to the Being in super-sensible worlds who was afterwards called the Christ, they said: We still behold Him in the spiritual worlds, but His activity in those worlds grows ever less and less. For He was the Being who implanted in the souls of men what afterwards sprang forth within them as a memory of the time before their birth. The Christ-Being in the spiritual worlds had been the great Teacher of human souls, for what they would still bear in memory after their descent to Earth. Now that the souls of men on Earth were less and less able to kindle these memories to life, He who was afterwards called Christ appeared to the initiates as One who had lost His activity, His mission.

Thus as the initiates lived on, ever and increasingly there arose in them the consciousness: “This Being whom primæval humanity remembered in their earthly life—whom we can now behold, though with ever lessening activity, in spiritual worlds—He will seek a new sphere of His existence. He will come down to the Earth to re-awaken the super-sensible spirituality in man.” And they began to speak of the Being who was afterwards called Christ, as of Him who would in future time come down to Earth and take on a human body—as indeed He did, when the time was fulfilled, in Jesus of Nazareth. In the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha it was one of the main contents of their speech, to speak of Christ as the Coming One. And in the beautiful picture of the Wise Men of the East—the three Kings or Magi—we see the typical figures of initiates who had learned in their several places of Initiation that Christ would come to Earth when the time should be fulfilled, and the signs in the Heavens would proclaim His coming. Then must they seek Him out at His hidden place. Indeed, there resounds throughout the Gospels what is made manifest as a deeper secret, a deeper Mystery in human evolution, when we approach it once more with spiritual vision.

Meanwhile the simple and primitive among mankind felt as it were forlorn when they looked up to Worlds beyond the realms of sense. Deep in the subconscious they said to themselves, we have forgotten Christ. They saw the world of Nature around them, and there arose in their hearts the question of which I spoke above: “How shall we find the spiritual World again?” But in the Mysteries the initiates knew that the Being who afterwards was called Christ, would come down and would take on a human form. And they knew that what human souls had formerly experienced in their pre-earthly life, they would now experience on Earth by looking up to the Mystery on Golgotha.

Thus, not in an intellectual or theoretic way, but by the greatest fact that ever took place on Earth, answer was given to the question: How shall we come once more to the Supersensible—to the Spiritual that transcends the world of sense? The men of that time, who had a certain feeling for what was taking place, learned from those who knew, that a real God dwelt in the human being Jesus. He had come down to Earth. He was the God whom mankind had forgotten because the forces of the human body were evolving towards Freedom. He, whom man on Earth had forgotten, appeared again in a new form, so that man could see Him and behold Him, and future History could tell of Him as of an earthly Being. The God who had only been known in yonder spiritual World, had descended and walked in Palestine, and sanctified the Earth inasmuch as He Himself had dwelt in a human body.

For those who were the educated men according to the culture of that age, the question was. How did Christ enter into Jesus, what path did He take? In the earliest times of Christianity the question about Christ was indeed a purely spiritual one. Their problem was not the earthly biography of Jesus. It was the descent of Christ. They looked up into the higher Worlds and saw the descent of Christ to Earth. They asked themselves, How did the super-sensible Being become an earth Being?

And the simple men who surrounded Jesus Christ as His disciples were able to converse with Him as a spiritual Being even after His Death. Nay, what He was able to tell them after His Death is the most important of all. Only a few fragments have been preserved, but spiritual Science can re-discover what Christ said to those who were nearest to Him after His Death, when He appeared to them in His purely spiritual being.

Then it was that He spoke to them as the great Healer—the Therapeut, the Comforter—to whom the great Mystery was known, how human beings had once upon a time remembered Him, because they had been with Him in super-sensible spiritual worlds before their earthly life. Now He could say to His disciples upon Earth: In former times I gave you the faculty to remember your spiritual life, your pre-earthly existence in higher worlds. But now, if you receive Me into your hearts and souls, I give you power to go forward through the Gate of Death, conscious of immortality. And you will no longer merely recognise the Father—Ex Deo Nascimur—you will feel the Son as Him with whom you can die and yet remain alive: In Christo morimur.

Such was the purport—though not of course expressed in the words I am now speaking—such was the meaning of what He taught to those who were near Him after His bodily Death. In primæval ages men had not known Death. Since ever they came to consciousness on Earth, they had an inner knowledge of the soul within them; they were aware of that which cannot die. They saw men die, but to them this Death was a mere semblance among the outer facts around them. They felt it not as Death. Only in later years, as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, did men begin to feel the real fact of Death. For by degrees the soul within them had grown so closely united with the body that doubt could arise in their minds: How shall the soul live on when the body falls into decay? In olden times there could have been no such question, for men were aware of the living, independent soul.

But now there came the Christ Himself, and said: I will live with you on the Earth, that ye may have power to kindle your souls to life again, that ye may bear them, once more a living soul, through Death.

This was what St. Paul had not understood at first. But he understood it when the spiritual worlds were opened out before him and he received here upon Earth the living impressions of Christ Jesus. For this reason the Pauline Christianity is less and less valued in our time, for it requires us to recognise the Christ as One who comes from real worlds beyond the Earth, uniting with earthly man His cosmic power.

Thus in the course of human evolution, in the consciousness of man, the “Out of God—out of the Father God—we are born,” was supplemented by the word of life, of comfort and of strength, “In Christ we die”—that is to say, in Him we live.

In order to bring before our souls what came upon humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, I shall best describe the present evolution of mankind, and that which we must hope for the future, from the standpoint of the initiate of modern time. I have already sought to place before you the standpoint of the initiate of olden time, and of the initiate of the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. I will now try to describe that of the initiate of our own time. The initiate is one who does not approach life with external natural Science alone, but in whom those deeper forces of knowledge have been awakened which can be kindled from depths of the human soul by proper methods. Such methods are indicated in the spiritual literature,² and I have referred to them in my other course of lectures in this College.

When the modern initiate enters into the Sciences of our time (which are the glory and triumph of the age, and in the study of which so many people, possessed even of a certain higher consciousness, feel the greatest satisfaction) he finds himself in a tragic situation. For when he unites his soul with that form of Science which is valued above all by the world to-day, the initiate feels it as a slow process of Death. A sphere of existence higher than all earthly things has risen up before his soul. And yet, the more he imbues himself with that which all the world to-day calls Science, the more he feels his soul to die within him. For the modern initiate, the Sciences are indeed the grave of the soul. While he acquires knowledge about the world in the manner of modern Science, he feels himself bound up, even in life, with Death. Again and again he feels this Death deeply and intensely. Then he may well seek the reason why, whenever he acquires knowledge in the modern sense, he dies. Why is it, he asks himself, that he has a feeling comparable even to the presence of a corpse—the odour of decay—just when he rises to the highest points of modern scientific knowledge, the greatness of which he is truly able to appreciate, though to him it is the premonition of Death.

From his knowledge of spiritual worlds he finds the answer, which I will try to convey to you this evening, my dear friends, in a picture.

Before we come down to Earth, we human beings live in a life of soul and spirit. Now of that life in full reality of soul and spirit, in yonder pre-earthly realms, here upon Earth we retain only our Thoughts—our concepts and ideas. These are in our soul: yet how are they there? Look at the human being as he stands before you in the life between birth and death. He is fully alive, filled with the living flesh and blood. We say, he is alive. Then he passes through the gate of death. Of the physical man, the corpse remains behind, and this is given over to the Earth—to the elements. We see the dead physical man; we have the dead corpse before us, all that is left of the man who was filled with living blood. Physically he is dead.

Now we look back, with the vision of Initiation, into our own souls. There we behold our thoughts—the thoughts we have in the present life between birth and death—the thoughts of modern Science, modern wisdom. And we recognise; These thoughts are the dead corpse of what we were before we descended to the Earth. As the dead body is to the human being in the fulness of his life, so are our thoughts (the thoughts which we respect above all things in this age, which bring us knowledge of external Nature)—so are our thoughts to what we were in soul and spirit before we came down to Earth.

This is what the modern initiate discovers, and it is a very real experience. He experiences in Thought, not his real life, but the dead corpse of the soul. I am stating a simple fact. It is not uttered out of any sentimental feeling: on the contrary, it comes before the soul in modern time with all intensity, just when the soul's knowledge is active and courageous. It is not what the sentimental mystic says to himself out of some dark and mystic depths of his being.

He who passes to-day through the Portals of Initiation discovers in his soul the real nature of the thoughts of man. For the very reason that they are unalive, they can make way for living spiritual Freedom. These thoughts are in truth the only ground on which man's spiritual Freedom grows. Because they are dead—because they are not alive—they have no power to compel. Man can become a free Being in our time because he has to do, not with living thoughts, but with dead ones. He can take hold of the dead thoughts and use them towards Freedom. And yet, it is with all the tragedy of Worlds that we experience these thoughts as the dead corpse of the soul—of the soul that was, before it came down to Earth. For in the pre-earthly life all this, which is a corpse in man to-day, was alive and filled with movement. In spiritual Worlds it lived and moved among other human souls—those who had passed through the gate of death and were now dwelling in those Worlds, and those who had not yet descended to the Earth. It lived and moved among the Beings of the Divine Hierarchies above humanity, and in the sphere of the elemental beings that underlie all Nature. There, everything in the soul was alive, while here, the soul possesses Thought as its heritage from spiritual worlds, and Thought is dead.

Yet if as initiates of modern time we fill ourselves with Christ, who made manifest His life in the Mystery of Golgotha; if we take hold in its deepest, inmost sense, of the word of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me,—then will Christ lead us even through this Death. We penetrate into Nature with our thoughts, yet as we do so Christ goes with us in the Spirit. He sinks our thoughts into the grave of Nature. For Nature does indeed become a grave, inasmuch as our thoughts are dead. Yet if, with these dead thoughts, accompanied by Christ Himself, we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of stars, the clouds, mountains and streams, then we experience in modern Initiation the resurrection of dead Thought as living Thought out of all Nature. With the dead Thought, we dive down into the crystal quartz, letting Christ be our companion, according to the word: Not I, but Christ in me. Then the dead Thought arises again as living Thought out of the crystal quartz, out of all Nature. As from the tomb of the mineral world, Thought is lifted up again as living Thought. Out of the mineral world the Spirit is resurrected. And as Christ leads us through the plant-world of Nature, here too, where otherwise only our dead thoughts would dwell, the living thoughts arise.

Truly we should feel that we are sick and ill as we go out into Nature, or gaze into the Universe of stars with the restricted calculating vision of the astronomer, thus sinking our dead thoughts into the world. We should feel that we are sick, and indeed it would be a sickness unto Death. But if we let Christ be our companion, if accompanied by Him we carry our dead thoughts into the world of the Sun, the Moon, the clouds, mountains and rivers, the minerals, plants and animals and the whole physical world of man, then in our vision of Nature it all becomes alive, and there arises from all creation, as from a tomb, the living, healing Spirit who awakens us from Death: the Holy Spirit. Accompanied by Christ, in all that we have hitherto experienced as Death we feel ourselves called to Life again. We feel the living and healing Spirit speaking to us out of all the creatures of this world.

These things must be regained in spiritual knowledge, in the new Science of Initiation. Then only shall we take hold of the Mystery of Golgotha as the true meaning of all Earth-existence. Then shall we know that in this age, when through the dead thoughts human freedom must be evolved, we need the Christ to lead us into a true Knowledge of Nature. For He not only placed His own destiny upon the Earth in the Mystery of Golgotha, but gave to the Earth the mighty liberation of Pentecost, in that He promised to mankind on Earth the living Spirit, which can arise through His help from all things on the Earth. Our Science remains dead—nay, our Science itself is Sin—until we are so awakened by the Christ that from all Nature, from all existence in the Cosmos, the living Spirit speaks to us again.

It is no formula devised by human cleverness: the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is a reality deeply bound up with the whole evolution of the Cosmos, and it becomes for us a living, not a dead, dogmatic knowledge, when we bring to life within ourselves the Christ who as the Risen One is the Giver of the Holy Spirit.

Then do we understand how it is like an illness if man cannot see the Divine out of which he is born. Man must be secretly diseased to be an atheist, for, if he is healthy, his whole physical being will find as it were its summation in the spontaneous inner feeling which exclaims: Out of God I am born. And it is tragic destiny if in this earthly life he does not find the Christ who can lead him through the Death that stands at the end of life's way, and through the Death in Knowledge. But if we thus feel the In Christo morimur, then too we feel what is seeking to come near us through His guidance; we feel how the living Spirit arises again out of all things, even within this earthly life. We feel ourselves alive again even within this life on Earth, and we look through the gate of Death through which the Christ will lead us into yonder Life that lies beyond. We know now why Christ sent us the Holy Spirit, for if we let Christ be our guide we can unite ourselves to the Holy Spirit already in this life on Earth.

If we let Christ become our leader, we may surely say: We die in Christ, when we pass through the gate of Death. Our experience here on Earth, with our Science of the world of Nature, is indeed prophetic of the future. By the living Spirit, what would otherwise be a dead Science is resurrected. Thus we may also say, when the Death in Knowledge is replaced by that real Death which takes away our body:—Having understood the “Out of the Father we are born,” “In Christ we die,” we may say as we look forward through the gate of Death: “In the Holy Spirit we shall be reawakened.” Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

• 1. German Heiland, Anglo-Saxon Hælend, meaning Christ the Saviour
• 2. See especially “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment” (“The Way of Initiation”) by Rudolf Steiner.

My dear friends! Today I would like to say a few more words in continuation of what was said yesterday and the days before, and then I would ask you to use the next discussion hour in such a way that all the individual questions that are on your minds are actually put forward, so that we can then turn the hour into a real discussion. Today I would like to do it differently for the reason that what I said yesterday makes it absolutely necessary to look at the whole thing from the other side as well, namely to also consider the subjective process of redemption. We have, so to speak, set out what belongs to the act of redemption outside of man and must now say something about the other part of the question, about how redemption looks in the Lutheran sense, in the anthroposophical sense and so on, and that in relation to redemption, insofar as it is something subjective.

The first question that arises, my dear friends, is what are we to be redeemed from, what do we need to be redeemed from, what is it about human beings that is in need of redemption? I must confess that I have actually found the most inaccurate ideas about this question in the sphere of Christianity, and this is because people today do not like to go into things in detail and ask questions quite seriously. You know, of course, that the act of redemption is actually something outside the course of the ordinary external development of the world. This can already be seen from all that I said yesterday. Therefore, the relationship between the act of redemption and the human being must also be something that leads the human being out of his subjectivity. Now, the concept of original sin already suggests something that leads out of the human being's subjectivity, because essentially it is about redemption from original sin. Of course, this raises the big question: what is original sin? Now, however, one finds that in many conceptions of original sin there is actually, one can say, in the truest sense of the word, blasphemy. For if one is convinced that everything that works and lives within creation owes its origin to the divine Creator, then one must ascribe to God the presence of a sin that is, as it were, injected into the course of the world. Such such ascribing of sin to God is in fact nothing less than blasphemy, and there is no way to maintain original sin on the one hand and on the other hand to speak of a God who, as the unified Creator, underlies everything. If you want to have any chance of arriving at a concept in this area that does not involve blasphemy, then you have to be able to hold on to the tri-personality of God.

The tri-personality of God does not at all imply a transition from monotheism to a polytheism, to a tri-theism, but it is absolutely, if it is understood, properly compatible with a thoroughly monotheistic world view. But the question arises: by what subjective power do we humans come to a sense of the deity? It may be said that within the mystery, the Christian mystery and the mystery outside of Christianity, no other view of how to reach God has ever been accepted than that God lives in love. And it is actually a matter of clear insight, in the sense in which I expressed it this morning, of complete human insight into the sentence that God lives in love. This sentence can only be understood if we ask ourselves: what other paths could there be to God than the one that, if I may put it this way, is paved with love? What other paths to God could there be, or rather, in what imaginations could we see God except in the imagination of love?

There are two other ways to approach God through inner experience, besides love. There are two other possibilities, namely the way of wisdom and the way of power. And from there one could have the three judgments: God lives in wisdom, God lives in love, God lives in power. After all, something like this has emerged from certain confessional backgrounds, which already lack the full human clarity in this area: all differentiations have been swept aside, so to speak, and God is worshipped or prayed to as the Almighty, the All-loving, the All-knowing. It is impossible to arrive at a pure and correct relationship between human beings and humanity and God for our time after the Mystery of Golgotha if one starts from the sentence: God is attainable through wisdom. It was one of the most profound sentences that has been spoken through the Gospel: God is not attained through wisdom. Of course, God lives in wisdom, but this must not be revealed to humanity in such a way that humanity in this day and age simply wants to find God through wisdom. For if we imagine the wise God, then, if we attach any real, concrete value to the idea, we must imagine this wisdom of God, which then works in the world, as surpassing all human wisdom; and then we immediately come to find no bridge to God by the way of wisdom. We lack the bridge if we want to seek God on the path of wisdom, because God's wisdom must infinitely outshine all human wisdom and we could never enter into the weaving and essence of God if we wanted to build the bridge with human wisdom.

We will always find an abyss, my dear friends, if we want to seek God on the path of wisdom, the abyss at which we must absolutely stop. It is not the case that we cannot regard our human wisdom as a gift from God, it is. But we must not seek God on the path of wisdom, nor must we seek God on the path of power. For if we were to seek God by the way of might, the might of God would tower so high above all in the one seeking Him that all individual freedom would be excluded. And so it would be impossible for any freedom of the human being to develop on this earth if we were to seek God only by the way of that which is truly involved in Him as Almighty.

The only way that truly leads to God, that connects the creature with the Creator, is the way of love, the love that man freely gives to God, which is nothing other than the universal human understanding of the love that God gives to man. This is the one thing that really does not lead us to an abyss, but rather leads us to finding a way to God, so that we do not have to look for some image when it is said that God lives in love, but that we have to imagine this as a reality before our soul. I am not speaking of something individual, my dear friends, but of something that, as I said, is the mystery wisdom of all times, whether it is brought out from the beginning of all knowledge or not, that is not important at this moment. What is important is that this knowledge: God is love – or: God lives in love – is the common mystery wisdom of all times.

Now, when we understand this in a living way, it has a certain consequence that we can visualize when we look at the overall development of man on earth. We live in a certain state of consciousness in our time. You already know from the lectures of the past few days that this state of consciousness has not always been there in the development of mankind, but that the present state was preceded by a much duller, dream-like state, which was, however, brightened up so that at that time man could perceive the divine in images which were like images in a dream, and that the actual dream-like awareness of God in all of nature has ceased around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so that a new approach, a new way of finding the path to the divine has become necessary. We must therefore clearly distinguish the path that the human race has taken up to the proximity of the Mystery of Golgotha, from generation to generation, where consciousness was by no means awakened in the same way as it is today. Of course, for external activities it was similar to our present state of consciousness, but [people were] always able to put themselves, as it were, into states that lie between waking and sleeping and that led them to the divine through direct atavistic, imaginative contemplation, through contemplation of the divine in images. The oldest documents speak a great deal about this way of approaching the divine; that was the way, my dear friends, to approach the divine through wisdom, through human wisdom.

Why was it possible in those days to approach the divine through human wisdom? Yes, you see, the state of consciousness was subdued; as a result, man was protected from experiencing in the fullest sense, with the intensity that exists today, those qualities in his organization that are inherited qualities, that is, from experiencing everything that comes into the individual human being through inheritance. Of course, even in ancient times people attached importance to their inherited characteristics, to racial characteristics, to consanguinity and similar things, but this was always counterbalanced by the assumption of a spiritual element in these inherited characteristics. One has to imagine that, by entering the earth, man has come into such a community with the physical process of development that he had to absorb inheritance into himself, so that something is actually inherited through the blood. But man had not yet reached the stage of consciousness where he could fully live by these inherited qualities. In fact, man experienced the inherited qualities of original sin within himself when he was dreaming. These were the impulses that constantly pushed him away from the divine, constantly urging him to sink below the level of his humanity. But he had, as it were, the counterweight in the atavistic clairvoyance, so that he did not completely merge within this hereditary current. That he entered into this hereditary current with full consciousness only became clearly established around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; there man enters into this hereditary current more deeply and more intensely. Thus one can say: In the course of his evolution, man was led down to the experience of original sin, and he became in need of redemption from this inherited evil; but he only needed this redemption from the moment when the Mystery of Golgotha approached in the evolution of mankind. When man — if I may use the biblical image — entered the earthly element on earth through Adam's [fall into sin], he was lowered into the region of inherited qualities, but his consciousness was not yet so far advanced that he could be carried away by all that comes from inherited qualities. Original sin also developed, and so did being pushed into the inherited qualities. This is something that is given to the whole human race. It is something that lives in evolution as an impulse for the whole human race. This had to be counteracted by another impulse, which can now lift human consciousness up again, out of the sphere of inherited traits. This impulse was to be given by the Christ impulse. In a spiritual-soul way, man was to become acquainted with everything that he had previously experienced only in the blood, in the succession of generations, but which had become so that he was no longer allowed to experience it only in the blood.

Thus, in ancient times, mankind was allowed to seek the way to God through wisdom, and that is through human wisdom, which had not yet been fully entangled in original sin. This was corrupted in the last phases of paganism, and it was also corrupted in the last phases of Judaism; it is just that actually the historical records report only on these last phases and not on what preceded them.

What is it, then, that actually carries a person down into the region of inherited qualities within the earthly world? Let us ask what it is. We come across concepts that, I would say, are quite embarrassing for today's earthman, because one comes to speak about an area that today's man either very easily helps himself with all sorts of tirades, or or that he understands it in the sense in which it has become customary in recent times — as it can only be understood by anthroposophy as the culmination of the recognition of sin — in the psychoanalytical sense. We come to an area where the lowest phase of love life must be touched upon — only with regard to world orientation the lowest — that is, sexual love life. From the same source that a person is born human, from the same source arose what a person experienced in ancient wisdom. Only in this ancient wisdom, I would say, was the human being not fully awakened to life in the impulses of inheritance. Man is fully awakened here on earth through love, first of all as sexual love, and as a continuation of sexual love through child love and parental love, which, as long as they are bound by blood, always have something that pushes man deeper down than he should actually be in the world according to the original divine intention.

And so it becomes necessary, starting from love itself, to sanctify this love by replacing the blood ancestor, the blood-ancestral rule, with the ancestor to whom one professes allegiance, not because of inherited qualities but because of one's own qualities, which one can develop as a human being beyond inherited qualities, or which can be developed in a person beyond inherited qualities. To profess such an ancestor means to include in one's consciousness, in addition to blood relationship, the relationship that arises from free choice, from free decision, that is, to add to blood relationship the elective affinity with Christ, with the ancestor who appears as the ancestor of love, spiritualized love, which now has nothing to do with blood, and which can therefore take hold of the whole human race because it arises from free choice, because it is a choice affinity. Now arose the idea of seeking the inner impulses for freely choosing a being, that is, of being educated in the course of one's individual life in such a way that this choice is a free one, but that one then professes this ancestor, chosen in free election, just as one used to profess the God of Abraham through blood relationship. After all, all ancient religions are based on direct blood relationships. That which was lived in the polytheism of later times was nothing more than a transformation of the service to the ancestors, that is, the kinship felt with the ancestral god as the blood relative.

Now came the great realization that what had previously lived on earth only in the blood, what was somehow connected with the blood, had been handed over to the earthly life of the spirit and soul. Who handed it over? He who lives in the blood relationship and who sent the old wisdom out of the blood relationship into human consciousness. Who was it? It was the Father-God. It had to be recognized that the Father-God lives in such a way that human beings could remain human in a certain sense, right up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then he had to make a decision – and human consciousness is only possible because it understands something like this, because it moves beyond everything earthly not only to a supermundane experience, but to an [understanding of the] supermundane decision – to give up the one who was always connected with him, to give the son to the earth, to let him go through an event, as a result of which the son was no longer united with the father as he had been before, but where a different relationship between the son and the father had come about through the relationship of the son to humanity.

It is extremely difficult to put these things into words, but I will try to put it into words as clearly as possible, as clearly as I can.

We are referred back to the ancient recognition of the Father-God, who, subconsciously, passed through the generations with the blood, who enclosed the Son within himself, who, with wisdom, gave people the experience of love, and we are also referred to the ancient sacrificial service.

You see, my dear friends, in the later corrupted times of the Gentiles and also in the later corrupted times of the Jews, people did not seek the essence of the sacrifice in what the sacrifice actually is. Let us take the characteristic sacrifice, the animal blood sacrifice. What is its essential nature? That the animal sacrifice was performed did not alone constitute the essence of the sacrifice, but rather that something that belonged to someone or to a community was given up, and in such a way that this individual or this community no longer had the possession. That is an essential part of the sacrifice. The further back we go in the evolution of time, the more we find that this concept is inseparable from the concept of sacrifice: the giving up of something one possesses. Animal sacrifice only became such because the animal was given to the fire; in older times, all animal sacrifices were carried out on living animals. When the sacrifice was made on the living animal, the life also perishes; something living is sacrificed. It was therefore definitely intended that through the sacrifice one should redeem and free oneself from a possession that one had, a possession which, if understood in the usual egoistic sense, consisted in something that benefited one, in something that one had inherited. If you understand it in a spiritual sense, then the possession was something that brought you down below humanity, something that you only had through blood. This was also to be given up again in the blood sacrifice, insofar as it was to be taken away from people.

But one could only think in this way as long as one was allowed to believe that the innocent degree of consciousness, which does not reach down into original sin, is maintained, even when going through the moment when the blood fire, because the merging of the blood in the fire is, after all, the opposite act of what happens to the blood when it enters and pulses in the human organism, and what is precisely the carrier of original sin. But in order that what lies in the blood in the activity of the Father-God might be taken away for the whole human race in a uniform manner, the event of Golgotha had to be given to mankind through the sacrifice of the Son, so that henceforth the Son does not live in the succession of births as he formerly lived with the Father, but that he lives in that in which human consciousness immerses itself without falling into the powers that go through the succession of births, and that looks to him who has gone through death on Calvary. This victory over death and the feeling of what can be felt in this context, pulls one out of the context of being placed into original sin, as people said in ancient Christianity, in mystery Christianity. The elective affinity with Christ pulls one out of the original sin of blood relationship. You may sense your relationship to the event of Golgotha in a shadowy way, then this sense of yours brings about nothing but at most again wisdom, which was also there before the event of Golgotha, but you can also sense your connection with the Christ so strongly, you can strengthen your relationship to the Christ so much that you love him as you loved out of the blood. If you can do that, then your feeling of love for Christ works in you in the opposite way to how original sin worked in you. Then you heal the original sin in you. And then the Father God, the underlying of the world as the one aspect, the one person of the Godhead, the one mask or form of the Godhead, but which is connected to the other mask, the other form, the other person of the Godhead, to the person of the Son of God.

But in the succession of time, especially when we think of the time that lies behind the mystery of Calvary in the gray time of the origin of mankind, we think of the God who works through the blood and through the succession of generations. And we think of God the Father, who sacrificed his Son, to whom love – which, as we have said, is the only real way to God for man – to whom love in the spiritual and soul life in man can be kindled so much can be so strengthened when he contemplates the full tragedy, the full horror of the Mystery of Golgotha; and when this love becomes so strong, then there is indeed in man a power that counteracts original sin. This then asserts itself from the body, in the effect of the blood in the original sin, in the inherited qualities, but we do not then merge into these inherited qualities; we rise with the feeling and willing gaze that we direct to Golgotha, above life in the original sin in consciousness itself and thereby bring about such a strong power in consciousness that it counteracts original sin. There is no other way to counteract original sin than to look at the Mystery of Golgotha. My dear friends, there is no self-redemption to counteract this original sin, there is only the redemption through Christ, the redemption through the vision of Christ passing through the Mystery of Golgotha. And by developing this feeling towards Christ, which consists of nothing but love, we may now look up to the God of might, to the Father-God, who underlies the creative activity in the blood and who allowed this might of his to pass over into the working of the Son. So that we can say: We do not need to look to the omnipotence of God, as we stand today in the development of the times; we leave that beyond love; it is in God, but we do not find the way to God if we go this way of power.

The last emanation of the principle of original sin, my dear friends, is human knowledge that relies entirely on inherited characteristics. In the moment when – as a final phase – that which emerges from the impulses that lie in the blood flowing through the generations merges into knowledge, it becomes intellectualistic knowledge, it becomes the knowledge of modern natural science. It is the last phase of the original human sin; it is the spirit of antiquity transferred into the abstract; it is that which requires healing; it is that which makes it necessary for man now no longer to believe that he comes to God through the spirit alone, as it was possible in ancient times, when the divine was attained through wisdom. What is needed is the realization that man cannot attain the divine through wisdom alone, but that this path of wisdom must be sanctified. This is what has now come through the consequence of the event of Golgotha through the experience of knowledge in the power of the Holy Spirit. We have the third form of the Godhead. We have to look at the unified God in three forms. We now know that we may not behold the God of might without the mediation of the Christ in love, by reflecting back to the God of might what is given to us in the Christ, to whom we cleave through true love, and we also know that we may not receive any wisdom without sanctifying it, healing it through the Spirit sent to humanity through Christ. We must lift up human wisdom by the power of Christ, by the power that we have within us when we contemplate the event of Golgotha; we must regard it as sick and heal it by letting that supersensible permeate it, which can come to us and which is meant by permeation, by sanctification through Christ.

So, my dear friends, there can be no other redemption from original sin than that through Christ Jesus; the other sins are consequential sins. Individual sins are committed by man because he can be weak through original sin, can be inclined to sin. These individual sins find their atonement in what must be achieved through self-redemption; they must be atoned for through self-redemption in the course of earthly or supermundane life. But that which is the original sin, the mother of all other sins, that could only be taken out of the human race through the act of redemption by Christ. And the moment someone, through something like – call it anthroposophy, call it Christianity, call it religion, it does not matter – the moment someone comes to a true realization of these things, there can be no doubt about it. And if there is still doubt, it stems from the inability to put it into words. For in itself there must be something directly convincing, something freely convincing in what leads to the historical Christ in love and to His deed, to the event of Golgotha.

Not that which lives in Harnack's 'Essence of Christianity' (to give a specific example), can be a path that leads to Christ; the path can actually only lead away from Christ if one has the Christ merely as [the proclaimer] of the doctrine of the Father-God, where the main thing lies in the teaching. No, the path to the Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha, does not lie in a teaching, it lies in freely developing, freely flowing love. Only through this is the path to the Christ attainable. And when this freely flowing love is present, our wisdom will also take up within itself the Spirit, which is the healing, the Holy Spirit. This is the same Word, but it means at the same time that no other human relationship can redeem man than the relationship to the historical Christ, to the one who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. There is no other human relationship that can take away original sin from a person than the relationship to the historical Christ, who went through the mystery of Golgotha. The wisdom that only reveals itself as the last descendant of original sin says, with Harnack: “We don't want to talk about what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, after all, no eye has seen it; in any case, however it may have happened with the resurrection, the belief in resurrection, that is, the Easter belief, emerged from it. It is not Christian to speak in this way. And once, in an association called the Giordano Bruno Association (it was not the Giordano Bruno League), I explained how someone who speaks in the spirit of Harnack has no right to call himself a Christian, especially not in the sense of the newest spiritual consciousness, I pointed out the passage where Harnack says in his “Essence of Christianity” that what matters is not the factuality of the resurrection but the belief in the resurrection. Then the chairman, who was a well-informed man and who felt he was a well-informed Christian, told me that it was nowhere in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity,” that he had not read it in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity”; and if it were in there, it would not be Protestant, it would be pagan-Catholic, because it simply resembled the statement – not me saying this, but him saying this – that was made by the Catholic side about the origin of the Holy Robe of Trier; there it also did not depend on where it actually came from, it depended on the faith that one associates with the Holy Robe of Trier; but that is not Protestant, that is pagan-Catholic. He had not found this in Harnack's Essence of Christianity, he said.

I told him that I did not have the book with me and that I would send him the page number tomorrow. But at the same time I saw from this how such ideas are received today and in what a trivial sense one takes such things seriously and lives into them. One does not feel at all that the literary products that appear in the theological field are no longer Christian at all, and that the Overbeck, who made a great impression on Nietzsche in Basel, was quite right in all that he wrote about modern theology [in his book] “On the Christianity of Our Present-Day Theology”, in which he had actually already provided proof in the 1870s that modern theology, whatever it may be, is no longer a product of Christianity. And Harnack's 'Essence of Christianity' is the least of all that has something to do with Christianity. If you replace the name Christ with the name Yahweh, the Father-God, wherever Harnack uses the name Christ, you are justified in saying that the person who wrote this book no longer knows the real relationship that the Christian must have with his Christ.

I do not believe, my dear friends, that we can feel the full seriousness of what needs to be done to renew Christian religious life if we do not feel how far removed from Christianity those are who often think they can uphold Christianity before the world today by sacrificing everything in this great apologetic process that theology undertakes before the world, ultimately even their relationship to Christ himself. One cannot imagine anything more un-Christian than Harnack's principle that the gospel does not belong to the Son, but only to the Father, and that the gospel is not a message from the Son, but only the message of the Son from the Father. Someone might confess something like this today under the pressure of modern materialism, but they would have to have the honesty to then stop calling themselves Christian.

There is no other way than to present these things in all their complexity and thereby rise to the realization: redemption from original sin means having such a relationship with the historical Christ, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, that this relationship pulses through our veins in a spiritual-soul way just as truly as blood pulses through our veins in a physical way. That is the power, that is the strength that can be called the power and the strength of faith. One should not seek an abstract concept for faith, but this strength, this power for faith. To believe means to find in one's soul such strength and such power for the Christ that this soul power, this soul strength is as great as that which the blood ties can achieve in us. Then we will find the way to the unified Christ of all humanity, to that unified Christ who, through the event of Golgotha, is also the real objective cause for every subjective act of redemption. But then we will no longer seek the act of redemption in external signs; on the contrary, we will seek through the sacraments that which is the real relationship of the human soul to the Christ. We will have to talk about this in the other part. Then we also do not seek in an abstract or mystical way a relationship to a Christ who eludes us, but we establish in the human spirit and in the human heart and in the whole human being an elective affinity to the Christ, just as we have a consanguineous relationship to the life of the Father-God, in so far as this life expresses itself in the blood of mankind, that is to say, in the life-creative power of mankind in the physical realm.

I have tried to present to you the subjective side of the idea of redemption. I do not believe that in this day and age one can arrive at an objective understanding of the subjective idea of redemption from other premises, from other antecedents.

I would now like to ask you, my dear friends, to prepare your questions well so that we can really get into a discussion, a back-and-forth of words, in the afternoons over the next few days.

Human beings must return to the point where they can understand the mystery of Golgotha with all the forces that live in the human soul. We must understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilization but in a way that allows all the forces of our human being to be united with the mystery of Golgotha. But this will only become humanly possible if we are prepared to approach the mystery of Golgotha once more from the point of view of spiritual science. There is no intellectual knowledge in a position to do justice to Christianity and the impulse it carries for the world; for every form of intellectual knowledge reaches only as far as our thinking life. And if we have a science that speaks only to our thinking, then we must seek the sources of our will impulses (and these are the most important for a true Christianity) within our instincts; we cannot sense them within the world where they are really present, within the spiritual world. In our present time it is essential to turn our attention to the great question for humanity: How and in what sense is the mystery of Golgotha the meaning of the entire development of the earth?

What I am here speaking of I would like to express in a picture that appears somewhat paradoxical. If a being were to descend to the earth from another planet, this being—because it could not be a human being in the earthly sense—would probably find everything on the earth unintelligible. But it is my deepest conviction, arrived at from the knowledge of earth evolution, that such a being, even if it came from Mars or Jupiter, would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper. Such a being would find in this painting something that says to him that a deeper meaning is associated with the earth and its development. And beginning with this meaning, which encompasses the mystery of Golgotha, a being from an entirely different world would be able to understand the earth and everything appearing on it.

We who live in the present age have no idea how far we have gone into intellectual abstraction. For this reason we can no longer feel our way into the souls of people who lived a short while before the mystery of Golgotha. Those human souls were entirely different from the souls of human beings today. We imagine human history as being more similar to the events and processes that happen today than it really was. But the souls of human beings have undergone a very significant development.

In the times before the mystery of Golgotha human souls were such that all human beings, even those with only a primitive education, could see within themselves a being of soul. This soul being could be called a memory of the time the human being lived through before descending into an earthly body. Just as we today in ordinary life can remember what we have experienced since our third, fourth, or fifth year of life, in the same way the human soul in ancient times had a memory of its life before birth in the world of soul and spirit. In terms of their souls, human beings were, in a certain sense, transparent to themselves. They knew: I am a soul and I was a soul before I came down to earth. And they also knew certain details of their life of soul and spirit before the descent to the earth! They experienced themselves in cosmic pictures. They looked up and saw the stars not merely as abstract configurations as we see them today; they saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. They saw the whole world filled with dreamlike Imaginations. They could say: That is the last glimmer of the spiritual world from which I have come. When I descended as a soul from this spiritual world I entered a human body. Human beings of ancient times never united so intensively with the human body that they lost the ability to experience real soul life.

What did these human beings in ancient times experience? They experienced something that enabled them to say: Before I had descended to the earth I was in a world in which the sun is not merely a heavenly body radiating light. I was in a world in which the sun was a gathering place for higher spiritual hierarchies. I lived not in a physical space but in a spiritual space, a world in which the sun sends out not merely light but radiant wisdom. I lived in a world in which stars are essences of beings whose wills are manifest. And for these ancient people two distinct experiences were united with this feeling: the experience of nature and the experience of sin.

Modern humanity no longer has this natural experience of sin. For us sin lives only in a world of abstract existence; for us, sin is merely something projected upon nature from the world of moral abstractions. We cannot bring sin together with the necessity found in nature. For people in ancient times these two separate streams of existence, this duality, natural necessity on the one hand and moral necessity on the other, did not exist apart. All moral necessity was a necessity of nature; all necessity in nature was also a moral necessity.

So a person in ancient times could say: I had to descend from the divine spiritual world. But in entering into a human body I have actually become sick when compared with the world from which I have descended. The concepts of sickness and sin were interwoven for the ancients. Here on the earth man felt that he had to find within himself the power to overcome sickness. Therefore, these ancient souls increasingly came to the consciousness: We need an education that is, at the same time, a healing. Education is medicine, education is therapy. And so, shortly before the mystery of Golgotha, we see the appearance of such figures as the Therapeutae, the healers. In Greece, too, the spiritual life was thought of as connected with the healing of humanity. The Greeks felt that the human being had been healthier at the beginning of earth's development and had evolved gradually in such a way as to distance himself from divine-spiritual beings. That this was the concept of “sickness” has been forgotten. But this concept was widespread throughout the world in which the mystery of Golgotha was placed in history.

In ancient times the human being felt the reality of all spiritual things by looking into the past. He said to himself: I must look back to the time before my birth if I want to seek the spirit, back into the past. That is where the spirit is. I was born out of this spirit; I must find it again. But I have distanced myself from it.

In the past the human being felt the spirit, from whom he had separated himself, as the spirit of the Father. In the mystery religions the highest initiate was an individual who had developed himself within, within his heart, within his soul forces; through this development as a human being he could represent the Father in the external world of earth. When the students of the mystery religions entered through the gates of the mystery centers, when they entered those sacred places that were institutions of art, science, and religious consecration, when they stood before the highest initiate, they saw this highest initiate as the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher initiates than the “Sun Heroes.” The Father principle ruled before the mystery of Golgotha.

Humanity felt how it had distanced itself more and more from the Father, the one to whom we can say: Ex deo nascimur. Humanity needed healing, and those who knew were expecting the healer of humanity, the healing savior, to come. Christ is no longer alive for us as the healing savior; only when we once again experience him as the world physician, as the great healer, only then will we be able to understand his true place in the world.

That was the underlying feeling that lived in human souls before the mystery of Golgotha, a feeling for the connection with the super-sensible world of the Father. In Greece it was said: “Better to be a beggar upon earth than a king in the realm of shadows.” This saying expresses what was felt at that time; it bears witness to how deeply humanity had learned to feel the distance it had placed between its own being and the being of super-sensible worlds. At the same time a deep longing for the super-sensible lived in the souls of human beings.

But if humanity had gone on evolving with a consciousness only of the Father God it could never have come to full consciousness of self, of the I, it could never have come to inner freedom. In order to come to inner freedom something that could only be seen as a sickness had to make a place for itself in the human being. It was a sickness compared to humanity's former, pristine condition. In a sense, all humanity was suffering from the Lazarus sickness. The sickness was not unto death but rather for liberation and for a new knowledge of the eternal in the human being. We can say that human beings had increasingly forgotten their past life of soul and spirit. Their attention was directed more and more to the physical world around them. When souls in ancient times looked out through the body into the physical world surrounding them, they saw, in the stars, pictures of spiritual beings they had left behind when they descended to this life through birth. They saw in sunlight the radiant wisdom that had been like an atmosphere for them in the spiritual world, an atmosphere in which they had lived and breathed. They saw in the sun itself choirs of the higher hierarchies from which they had been sent down to earth. But humanity came to forget all that.

And that is what people were experiencing as the mystery of Golgotha approached in the eighth and the seventh and the following centuries before Christ's appearance on earth. If external history says nothing of this, that is simply a failing of external history. One who can follow history with spiritual insight can see that a mighty consciousness of the Father God was present at the outset of the evolution of humanity, that this consciousness was gradually paralyzed, and that, with time, humanity was gradually supposed to see around it only nature without spirit.

Much of this process remained unspoken at the time, much was in the unconscious depths of the human soul. However, what was most of all at work in unconscious realms of the human soul was a question that was not so much expressed in words as felt in the heart: Around us is the world of nature but where is the spirit whose children we are? Where can we see the spirit whose children we are? This question lived in the best souls of the fourth, third, second, and first centuries before Christ without being consciously formulated.

It was a time of questioning, a time in which humanity felt distanced from the Father God. In the depths of their souls people felt: It must be true: Ex deo nascimur! But do we still know it? Can we still know it?

If we look even deeper into the souls of those people living at the time when the mystery of Golgotha was approaching we see the following. There were the simpler, more primitive souls who were able only to feel deep within their unconscious life how they were now separated from the Father God. They were the descendants of primeval humanity, which was in no way as animal-like as natural science today imagines. These primitive human beings carried within their animal-like form a soul that enabled them, in an ancient dreamlike clairvoyance, to know this: We have descended from a divine-spiritual world and have taken on a human body. The Father God has led us into the world of earth. We are born out of him.

But the oldest souls of humanity knew they had left something behind in the spiritual worlds from which they had just descended. What they left behind was afterward called, and we now call: the

Christ. For this reason the earliest Christian writers maintained that the most ancient souls had been Christian; they also had known how to worship Christ. In the spiritual worlds in which they had lived before descending to the earth Christ was the center of their attention. He was the central being, toward which they directed the vision of their souls. The people on earth remembered being together with Christ in their pre-earthly existence.

Then there were other regions (Plato speaks of them in a very special way) where students were initiated in the mystery religions, in which vision of the super-sensible world was awakened, in which forces were released from the being of man that allowed him to see into the spiritual worlds. Nor was it only in dim memory that the students of the initiates learned to know the Christ, the one with whom all human beings lived before their descent to earth. In the mysteries the students learned to know Christ once again in his full stature. But they knew him as a being who had lost his mission, as it were, in the worlds above the earth.

In the mystery religions of the second and third centuries before the mystery of Golgotha initiates looked, in a very special way, to that being in the super-sensible worlds, who was later called the Christ. In looking at him they said: We see this being in the worlds above earth but his activity in those worlds has become less and less. This is the being who had planted into human souls memories of the time before birth, memories which then came alive in earthly existence. In super-sensible worlds this being was the great teacher for what the soul could still remember after having descended to the earth. The being who was later called Christ appeared to the initiates as a being who had lost his mission. This was because human beings gradually could no longer have, could no longer even receive, these memories.

As the initiates lived on, the consciousness arose in them more and more: This being, whom primeval humanity could remember during its life on earth, this being, whom we see having an ever lessening amount of activity in spiritual worlds, will have to seek a new sphere of life. He will descend to the earth in order to awaken super-sensible spirituality in man once again.

And they began to speak of that being later known as Christ as the one who in the future would come down to earth and take on a human body—as he later took on a body in Jesus of Nazareth. Speaking of the Christ as the one who is to come formed the chief content of much of their teaching in the last centuries before the mystery of Golgotha. In the beautiful and powerful picture of the wise men from the Orient, the three kings or magi, we see representatives of the initiates who in their places of initiation had learned: the Christ will come when the time has been fulfilled; signs in the heavens will proclaim his coming. Then we must seek him at his hidden place. A deeper secret, a deeper mystery can be heard sounding through the Gospels. When the evolution of humanity is looked at with spiritual vision this deeper mystery is revealed.

Primitive human beings looked up, as if lost, to the super-sensible. In their unconscious they said to themselves: We have forgotten Christ. They saw the world of nature around them and the question rose in their hearts: How can we again find the super-sensible world? And the initiate in the mysteries knew: This being, who will later be called the Christ, will come and take on human form; what human souls had formerly experienced in their pre- earthly existence they will then experience in looking upon the mystery of Golgotha.

Thus, through the mighty fact of the greatest event ever to take place on earth—not in an abstract intellectual fashion—answer is given to the question: How can we again come to higher worlds that transcend the world of sense? The people of that time who had developed a feeling for what had happened, these people learned from those who knew that a real God dwelt in the human being Jesus. A God who had come down to earth. He was the God whom humanity had forgotten because the forces of the human body were evolving toward freedom. He appeared in a new form so that he could be seen and so that history could now speak of him as of an earthly being. The God who had only been known by human souls in the spiritual world descended and walked in Palestine. He consecrated the earth through the fact that he entered an earthly body. For this reason the great question for those souls educated according to the culture of that age was this: What path had Christ taken in order to come to Jesus?

In the earliest times of Christianity the question concerning Christ was purely spiritual. The earthly biography of Jesus was not an object of research. The object of research was Christ and how he had descended from heaven. They looked up to super-sensible worlds, saw the descent of Christ to the earth, and asked themselves: How has this supra-earthly being become an earthly being? For this reason it was possible for the simple people who surrounded Christ as disciples to speak with him as a spirit also after his death. The most important part of what he could say after his death is preserved in only a few fragments. But spiritual science can find out what Christ said to those who were nearest to him after his death when he appeared to them in his purely spiritual form.

He spoke to them as the great healer, as the Therapeut, the comforter who knew the secret, the secret that human beings had once had a memory of him because they had been together with him in super-sensible worlds in their pre-earthly existence. Now he could say to them on earth: Earlier I gave you the ability to remember your super-sensible, pre-earthly existence. Now, if you take me into your souls, if you take me into your hearts, I give you the power to go through the gate of death with consciousness of immortality. And you will no longer recognize the Father alone—Ex deo nascimur. You will feel the Son as the one with whom you can die and yet remain alive—In Christo morimur.

What Christ taught those who were near him after his bodily death was not, of course, expressed in the words I just used, but the meaning was the same. Primeval human beings had not known death, for from the moment they awakened to consciousness, they were aware of the soul that lived within. They knew about what lived in the soul and could not die. They could see people dying around them but this dying was a mere appearance, an illusion, among the facts surrounding them. They did not feel it as death. Only as the mystery of Golgotha approached did human beings begin to feel the fact of dying. By then their soul life had become so much bound up with the life of the body that they could feel doubt concerning how the soul could continue to live when the body decays. In more ancient times no such question could have arisen because human beings knew the soul.

Christ now came as the one who said: I will live with you on the earth so that you can have the power to awaken your soul with a new inner impulse. Your soul will be alive when you carry it through death. This is what Paul did not at first understand. He only understood it when access to super-sensible worlds was opened to him and he received living impressions of Christ Jesus here on the earth. Pauline Christianity is less and less valued today for this reason—that it claims that Christ can be seen as coming from supra-earthly worlds and uniting his supra-earthly power with earthly man.

Thus, in the evolution of humanity, in human consciousness, the “out of God (that is, out of the Father God) we are born” was supplemented by the words of comfort, of life, and of power: “In Christ we die.” That is: We live in him.

We will best be able to place before our souls what humanity has become through the mystery of Golgotha if I now describe, from the point of view of a present day initiate, the evolution of humanity in the present and how we must hope for human beings to evolve in the future. I have already attempted to place before your souls the point of view of the ancient initiates, the point of view of the initiates at the time of the mystery of Golgotha. Now I would like to attempt to describe the point of view of an initiate of the present day, of someone who approaches life with more than a mere knowledge of external nature, of someone in whom deeper powers of knowledge have awakened. These are powers we can awaken in the soul with the means given by spiritual literature.

When a modern initiate acquires the scientific knowledge that is the triumph of our time, the glory in which so many people feel so comfortable (a comfort subtly enjoyed even by a certain higher consciousness) when they acquire it, the initiate feels himself in a tragic situation. When the modern initiate unites his soul with forms of knowledge especially useful and valuable in the world today, he experiences a kind of dying. The more a modern initiate, in whose soul the world of supra-earthly spheres has been resurrected, is permeated with what the modern world calls science, the more he feels his soul dying. For the modern initiate the sciences are the grave of the soul. The soul feels itself living united with death when it acquires knowledge of the world in the fashion of modern science. Sometimes he feels this dying deeply and intensively. He then seeks the reason why he always dies when knowing things in the modern sense, why he experiences something like the odor of a corpse just when he rises to the heights of modern scientific knowledge, the greatness of which he can truly appreciate, even though such knowledge brings him a premonition of death. Then, from his knowledge of the super-sensible world he says something to himself that I would like to express through a picture. We live a life that is soul-spiritual before we come down to the earth. What we experience in its full reality in the spiritual world during our pre-earthly existence we now experience on the earth in our souls as mere ideas, concepts, and mental pictures. These are in our souls. But how do they live in our souls?

Let us look at the human being as he stands in life between birth and death. He is fully alive, filled with living flesh and blood. We say that he is alive. Then he steps across the threshold of death. Of the physical human being only the corpse remains, the corpse which is then given over to the elements of the earth. We look at the physically dead human being. We have the corpse in front of us, the remains of the living, blood permeated human being. The human being is physically dead.

With the vision of initiation we now look back into our own souls. We look at our thoughts in the life between birth and death, at the thoughts arising from modern wisdom and science. And we recognize that just as the corpse of a human being is related to a fully alive human being, so too, our thoughts, the ones we revere as the highest riches knowledge of external nature can bring us, are merely the corpse of what we were before we descended to the earth. That is what the initiate can experience. In his thoughts he does not experience his real life; in his thoughts he experiences the corpse of his soul. That is a fact. That is not spoken out of any sentimentality. It is rather what comes before the soul today with all intensity just when the soul is actively seeking knowledge with energy. This is not something that a sentimental, mystical dreamer would say to himself out of some dark and mystic depths of his own being.

Someone who walks through the gates of initiation today discovers these thoughts in his soul, thoughts that, precisely because they are not living, can make living freedom possible. These thoughts, which are the whole basis of human freedom, do not coerce us, precisely because they are dead, because they are not alive. The human being today can become free because he works not with living but with dead thoughts. Dead thoughts can be grasped by us and used for freedom; but they are also experienced as a tragedy, as the corpse of the soul. Before the soul descended into the earthly world, everything that is a corpse today was full of life and movement. The beings of the higher hierarchies standing above us in the spiritual-super-sensible worlds moved between the souls of human beings who had already passed through death and now lived in the spiritual world or had not yet descended to earth. Elemental beings who underlie all nature were also moving within this sphere. There everything in the soul was alive. Here the thoughts in our soul are the heritage from spiritual worlds and these thoughts are dead.

However, if as modern initiates we fill ourselves with Christ, who makes his life manifest in the mystery of Golgotha, if we understand Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” in their deepest sense, then Christ will also lead us through this death; then we can penetrate nature with our thoughts. Christ walks with us spiritually and he sinks our thoughts into the grave of the earth. In as much as we usually have dead thoughts nature becomes a grave for us. Yet, if, with these dead thoughts, accompanied by Christ in the sense of the words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of stars, clouds, mountains, and streams, then we experience in modern initiation—if for example we immerse ourselves in quartz crystal—that thought arises from nature, from the quartz crystal as a living thought. As from the tomb of the mineral world, thought is raised up again as a living thought. The mineral world allows the spirit to resurrect in us. And just as Christ leads us everywhere through the plant world of nature, here too, where otherwise only dead thoughts would be found, living thoughts arise.

We would feel sick and unhealthy if we were to approach nature, looking up into the world of stars, with only the calculating vision of the astronomers, and if we then allowed these dead thoughts to sink into the world; we would feel sick and the sickness would be unto death. But if we let Christ accompany us, if we carry our dead thoughts in the presence of Christ into the world of stars, into the world of the sun, of the moon, of the clouds, mountains, rivers, minerals, plants, and animals, into the whole physical world of man, then in our vision of nature everything comes alive. As if from a grave, from all beings in nature, the living spirit, the Holy Spirit arises, the one who heals and awakens us from death.

We must regain this in a spiritual knowledge, in a new knowledge of initiation. Then we will understand the mystery of Golgotha as the meaning of the entire earth existence; we will know that we need Christ to lead us to knowledge of nature now when human freedom is being developed through dead thoughts. We will know how Christ joined not only his own destiny to the earth with his death in the mystery of Golgotha, but, furthermore, how he gave to the earth the great freedom of Pentecost when he promised earthly humanity the living spirit—the spirit who, with his help, can arise from everything on the earth. Our knowledge remains dead, remains a sin even, if we have not been awakened by Christ so that from all nature, from all existence in the cosmos, the spirit speaks to us, the living spirit.

The idea of the Trinity of the Father God, of the Son God, and God of the Holy Spirit is not a cleverly thought-out formula. It is something deeply united with the entire evolution of the cosmos. When we bring Christ himself as the Resurrected One to life within us, then our knowledge of the Trinity is not dead but alive, for Christ is the bringer of the Holy Spirit.

We understand it is like a sickness to not be able to see the divine from which we are born. The human being must secretly be sick if he is an atheist. He is only healthy if his physical nature is so constituted that he can say, “From God I am born!” as the summation of how he feels within his own being. It is a blow of destiny if, in his earthly life, a man does not find Christ, the one who can lead him, who can lead him through death at the end of his earth life, can lead him through death to knowledge. If we feel the In Christo morimur, then we also feel what can approach us through the presence of Christ, through the guidance of Christ. We feel how the Spirit resurrects again from all things, resurrects even in this lifetime. We again feel ourselves to be alive in this earthly life. We look through the gate of death, through which Christ leads us; we look at the life that lies on the other side of death and know now why Christ sent the Holy Spirit—because we can unite with this Holy Spirit already here on earth if we let ourselves be led by Christ. Then we can say with certainty that we die in Christ when we walk through the gate of death.

Our experience of nature on earth with our natural scientific knowledge points significantly to the future. What otherwise would be dead science is resurrected through the living Spirit. For this reason, if we have understood the saying “Out of the Father are we born; in Christ we die,” then when the death of knowledge is replaced by the real death that takes away our body, then in looking through the gate of death we can also say: In the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. Per spiritum scanctum reviviscimus.

My dear friends! Yesterday during the afternoon meeting here, a number of things came up that oblige me to say a few words before I move on to the ritual of the consecration and the communion. It seems to me that it is necessary to achieve a very fundamental understanding about certain things, because it would be of no use if this understanding were to remain in the background, so to speak. Here, too, it must be spoken about very clearly. Above all, it is necessary to really understand the essence of a ritual, so that it is not possible to say that what emanates from a ritual can also have a suggestive effect. There is absolute uncertainty today about what has a suggestive effect, and perhaps only the representatives of a religious world view are suited to correct the thoroughly unhealthy conditions that have arisen in this field as a result of our science. Our science has no possibility, if it wants to come to clarity even about the most elementary things of the soul, that through it somehow a correct insight into the facts would arise. It does not have that possibility. One must also have experience in this, my dear friends; these experiences come to one when one participates in something like I did. I was able to observe, I would like to say, the development of psychoanalysis from its very beginning. It was a friend of mine who first wanted to make accessible to science that which is justified in psychoanalysis. Then it came into the hands of Freud. The man who originally had the idea withdrew, and that in itself was proof of how impossible it is to arrive at clarity about these things from the foundations of today's science. Unfortunately, one does indeed experience that these concepts of modern science, which has no discernment at all for what takes place in the soul, are penetrating more and more into religious and theological concepts as well.

Why, my dear friends, is so much care taken in the realization of the rituals from the supersensible? It is done for no other reason than to exclude even the last vestige of suggestion. That is the basic requirement, that even the last vestige of suggestion be excluded. And how is this achieved? You see, all the rituals I have given and will give you are conceived on the principle that they express in words what comes from the supersensible, the normal evolutionary forces, only in their development by man. When one speaks of suggestion here, one applies the term to something to which it is absolutely not applicable, because one would then also have to apply it [for example] to the forces that are involved in the growth of the child — I do not mean those those that come from the parents or the environment, but those forces that work inwardly, from the spiritual-mental, that shape the heart, kidneys, liver, spleen and so on – and one would also have to say of these that they have a suggestive effect on the person. Here it ceases to be possible to associate any meaning with the word 'suggestive'. One can only associate a meaning with this word when it is a matter of an influence being exerted on a person who is separated from the other people by his individuality, which falls outside the straight evolution of natural events, where something flows from one individuality to another. To exclude this is part of the path that must be taken when conceiving rituals. Here, then, we are not dealing with what passes from one person to another, but with a deepening into the divine-spiritual movement of development and the developmental forces of the human being himself, and these are to be brought into the word as they are. So here the possibility of speaking of suggestion ceases, just as in the case of a square the possibility ceases of speaking of the laws of the triangle.

But these are distinctions that can only be made by a more profound science. Today's science is dreadfully dilettantish and dreadfully powerless with regard to the soul, and the things that are said about the soul by psychoanalysts or even by experimental psychologists and other psychologists are maddeningly impotent. One can say that ordinary science somehow does not have the possibility to grasp suggestion.

That is what I have to say in principle first of all. The other thing is that our modern theory of development has led us to limit the content of consciousness so much to the human ego and to develop little interest in how the human ego is connected to the entire universe, so that such things, as I again spoke of yesterday, the necessity of the death of the moral in the downfall of the earth, are no longer felt with the necessary strength at all. It is easy for the modern consciousness to speak of superstition in such cases. But this superstition is based solely on the fact that one has become completely entangled in the selfish conception of the world. And so it happens that one actually does not attach any special importance, my dear friends, to what happens within man himself today. And he who attaches no importance to what happens within man himself will never be able to understand the ritual and never the sacrament in reality.

Look around you, you see the stars, you see the sun and the moon, you see the formations in the air, you see clouds, waves, rivers, you see the beings of the mineral, animal and plant kingdoms – all of this will one day no longer be, all of this will one day have disappeared. Heaven and earth will come to an end. Everything you can see with your eyes, perceive with your senses, grasp with your reasoning mind, all that will perish. Only that which is grounded in the individual human being, which the individual human being has taken in, will not perish when the individual passes through death and will live beyond earthly existence. With Christ we say: My words will not pass away. Only that which is within the human skin will not perish. Today, everything else will perish. And as man passes through the gate of death, all mere intellectual effects and experiences perish with it. All that perishes, and only what is the wholly human comprehension can remain. But you cannot come to the wholly human comprehension without going beyond everything that takes place in your environment in earthly existence. If you only perform actions that are realized in earthly existence, no matter how important they may be, then you are only working for earthly existence, and that has only value for man between birth and death. In that case you do not fertilize man's soul, and man's soul gains nothing through you, however well meant everything may be.

The very thrust of modern development — and that is why the present moment is so infinitely serious — is that everything that is connected with the eternal in man is to be taken away from him. And a human soul to which you make the ritual, the sacrament, accessible, such a human soul simply penetrates more deeply into the eternal through what is experienced in the ritual. He who does not understand this in its full depth will not understand ritual and sacrament. One must look at what is done to the soul of man and to his eternal part. The soul would die with the end of the earth and the soul would sleep after death if nothing were done to this human soul in our time, which lies after the mystery of Golgotha. The idea of resurrection must be taken very seriously, and Paul's conclusion that if Christ had not been resurrected, we would simply have no eternity. This must not be immersed only in the sphere of the intellectual; it must be taken so seriously that we know in fact: we are working to make the soul more and more alive by continuing in ceremony that which took place at Calvary.

But, my dear friends, this is in turn intimately connected with making the word of the gospel come alive. The documentary is not the only thing in the words of the gospel; establish the gospel as you will, you have not yet done everything with it. You have then created the possibility of proclaiming the gospels as they had to be spoken to the contemporaries of the apostles, but you still have no way of making these gospel words as alive as they can and should be in today's living. In what I present to you here as a ritual, nothing lives but the living word of the Gospel. And anyone who believes that the living word of the Gospel does not live in it seems to me like someone who sees a 15-year-old boy and says that he does not know him, that he must first have a picture of him at the age of three and know what he looked like then. We must have the possibility today of having the gospel word within us and of handling it in full freedom, even though Christ lives in it. This must be allowed to flow into the ritual word; only then is the ritual word true in the modern sense. Only then do I truly understand the gospel. Therefore, what is to be achieved today cannot be achieved merely by repeating the gospel. On the contrary, anyone who knows how these things are constituted also knows that if you merely develop the gospel word of this or that soul in the dead, then unfortunately you can contribute to the opposite of what you are striving for. If you do not have a living relationship with the soul to whom you proclaim the gospel word, then the gospel word can be destructive, just as an otherwise healthy area can be destructive for someone who has a weak constitution, because he has not adapted to that area.

We only have to look at these mysteries of existence in the right way. And we must come to something else. We must come to understand, my dear friends, why for all earlier consciousness healing and knowledge were one and the same, or at least belonged to one and the same. In the times when knowledge and religion were one, knowledge was never taken as anything other than an instruction for man to find healing at the same time. Here we come to realize that original sin in reality represents an illness of man. When consciousness is seized with this illness, then healing does not occur, but rather a further illness. We must snatch consciousness, the soul with all its powers, from the sphere of the illness of sin.

We must therefore take into account the possibility that with the end of the earth, everything that is morally grounded could perish if we do not keep it alive through Jesus Christ and lead it beyond the end of the earth to future stages of existence. This awareness must permeate everything that flows into ritual and ceremony. And so you will see that precisely when we approach the mysteries of the sacrifice of the Mass, this beholding, this full human beholding of that which above all works and lives in man himself as the eternal, and of that which must be healed through its connection with Christ Jesus, becomes ever more and more apparent. If someone were to come today and say, “Why should we need the sacraments when we have the Word?” the answer from the anthroposophical standpoint would be, “True, you have the Word, but do you also have the power of the Word?” “Are you sure that your Word will not decay with the death of the earth?” This certainty must be established today! Therefore, he who knows this connection cannot speak about these things as another would who does not know it. It is from this point of view that I ask you to understand what I am now going to say about the continuation of the sacrifice of the Mass in the following. Here too, I must say in advance: some things may still be imperfect, but they are as good as they can be according to my ability today.

So the reading of the Gospel is over, the sacrifice is over. Accordingly, the host is on the altar, the chalice, in which wine and water are mixed, is on the altar, and the host has this form - I am now describing how I think I should describe it (it is drawn on the board) -; it can be broken here, here (see drawing) a piece can be broken off. It is consecrated. We shall have to speak about the consecration later.

During the consecration, it waits for what is to happen to it, so that the words can be true in the direct experience of the sacramental act, which I shall now communicate to you. First, we have to do with the preparation for the sacramental act. Then, at first, there is speaking without the ceremony being performed:

Our prayer penetrates to you, O foundation of the world
Through Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord.
Your blessing shines over the pure sacrifice, the sacrifice done in love
The sacrifice accomplished with good will.
Receive it from our pure thinking, our loving
Heart, our willing devotion.
We unite in sacrifice, that we may be the community of Christ. Feel the blessing, O Christ, the confession of You and hear our prayers, we who are united in Your name;
Receive, O Father God, the Christ sacrifice as it may come to life in us, through us;
It is brought for the redemption of souls,
For the attainment of true salvation,
For walking with Christ.
Our prayers unite with all who have gone before us, living Christ in them; may their protective power shine upon us.

Christ in us.

Hear us, O Father God, as we pray to you for the acceptance of our sacrifice;
This sacrifice is sent to you
the Christian community,
which freely recognizes Christ as its helping leader.

Christ in us.

Father God, in this sacrifice of Christ,
let us have life, body and blood
of Thy loving Son.

Now, during these words, the ceremony is performed:

Before His sorrowful departure,
He took the bread for the revelation of salvation
and He looked up to You, His Father,

— the host is lifted up —

thanking You and thereby uniting His soul with Yours.
Then He gave it to the disciples as food.

The Host is broken, the small triangle taken out and mixed with the wine and water in the chalice.

And He said:
Take, eat, of the bread my body.
He took, after the journey's food of bread
the chalice to invigorate salvation
And He looked up to You, His Father,

— the chalice is raised —

thanking You and thereby uniting His soul with Yours.
Then He gave it to the disciples to drink.
And He spoke:
Take, then, with this wine My blood.

The ceremony is complete.

And He continued:
With these words the Divine is given back to
men, for on the cross the body will bear the new
creed; and from the cross will flow in the blood the new faith.
Take this up into your thinking.
And so let live in our thoughts:
The new confession
The new faith –
So think of us Christ's death of suffering; His resurrection;
His revelation through all the following times on earth.

To you, O Father God, be the sacrifice brought,
thinking in purity
hoping for salvation
acting from Christ,

Christ reigns:
in the bread that bears salvation
in the wine that gives strength.

You, O Father God, once received the sacrifices of those who had not yet
received Christ; so receive the sacrifice of those
who do it in Christ's name, essence, power.
Thy Spirit's grace-power work earthward, as this sacrifice, heavenward strives.
Let the bread be Christ's body
Let the wine be Christ's blood
We would sacrifice thus, that

Christ may be in us.

And we would join in prayer with those from whom
You received Your Son's sacrifice before us.
We cannot do works before You;
We would conquer sin before You
through Christ, through whom You, O Father God
create, heal and inspire
through Christ, through whom You, in union with the healing Spirit, perform the
revelation, the ordering of space, the course of time.
So be it.

The old canon, as it is used, already breathes something of this spirit, but it is focused on the Church, on the particular Catholic Church.

"You, most gracious Father, we humbly implore through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, that You may bless these gifts, these pure offerings, these presentations that we send to You , thanking You for giving us Your Holy Catholic Church, to whom You give: peace, protection and concord; which You ordain over the whole circle of the earth through Your servant, the Roman Pontiff.

— which is then deleted for the Old Catholics, [instead of which it says] -:

“together with our most reverend bishop N and all those who live in the true faith and profess the Catholic and Apostolic doctrine.”

Now, of course, masses are read [in the Catholic Church] for people who seek them, for the living or the dead. This is brought about by many externalizations, to which that which is actually the inner life is always exposed. We encounter something here that can hardly concern us, and that does not occur when the ritual is restored today.

"Look with blessing, O Lord, on your servants and servant N.N. and on all those present, whose faith and prayer reaches you, for whom we send you this sacrifice in joy, for the salvation of their souls, so that they may hope for health and well-being; they send their supplication to you, eternal, true, living God.

This plea unites with those of those we remember in clarity: Mary, ever virgin, our Lord's mother, divine; Your holy apostles and martyrs Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon , Thaddeus, Linus, Cletus, Clement, Xystus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John, Paul, Cosmas, Damian, and all the saints, through whose works and prayers you may grant us your protection forever; through Christ our Lord. Yes, so be it.

These things are then accompanied by the appropriate ceremonies, which I will discuss later.

"Hear us, O Lord, as we pray for the acceptance of this sacrifice, which Your entire community sends to You; may Your peace prevail over our days, so that we may not be rejected but may enter into the group that You choose as Your own.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Bless, receive, let be welcome, spiritualize, O Lord, this sacrifice, that it may become in us the body and blood of Thy beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who on the day before He suffered took the bread into His holy and revealing hands, , turning his eyes to You, O God, who art his almighty Father, and thanked You for it, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take, eat, all of you, for this is my body.

And so, after supper, He took the cup into His holy and revelatory hands, thanked You again for it, blessed it and gave it to the disciples, saying: Take and drink from it, for it is the cup of my blood, the newly-made and never-ending communion, the bearer of faith, which will be given for you and for many for the cleansing of sin. And as often as you do the same, take me into your thoughts.

The ceremony is complete.

"Therefore, we also want to include in our thoughts, we who profess ourselves as Your servants and want to count ourselves among Your holy disciples, Your suffering, O Son of the Father, our Lord, and also Your resurrection and the glorious glorious manifestation of Thy ascension; and we will bring to Thee, who art gloriously triumphant on high, a pure sacrifice, a holy sacrifice, a sinless sacrifice, with the holy bread of eternal life and the ever-saving chalice.

Let thine eye look with favor and mercy on our sacrifice, and receive it with goodwill, as thou once receivedst with goodwill the sacrifice of thy righteous servant Abel and that of our patriarch Abraham and that which the high priest Melchizedek brought thee, a sinless host.

In humble supplication we turn to You, Almighty God, send Your holy angel, that his hands may carry to You and lay down the sacrifice upon Your heavenly altar, before Your radiant eye, so that we, who eat the Holy Body and drink the Holy Blood of Your Son at the earthly altar, may be imbued with the breath and grace of heaven.

And this too through Christ our Lord.

And hear, O Lord, Thy servants and Thy handmaid N.N.,

— now the names are mentioned again for whom the Mass is being read, if it is for the dead —

"who have gone before us, bearing well thy cross of confession, and are at rest. To them all, Lord, mayest thou give deliverance, light, and peace.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ,

Yes, so be it.

We implore You to accept us as servants who may be deemed worthy of Your gracious presence in the company of Your holy apostles and martyrs, John, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander , Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Cecilia, Anastasia and all the saints; in whose company you may admit us, not for merit's sake, but for repentance from sins. Through Christ our Lord, through whom you, Lord, create, sanctify, vivify, and give us everything.

Through him,

With him,

In him,

Almighty God the Father, in union with the Holy Spirit,

in all revelation,

in all world orders,

through all ages,

The altar server says:

“Yes, so be it.”

You see what the tradition is, and you see how it seems to me that the sacrament must be endowed with a ritual today. In the Catholic Church, there are some intermediate things that we will talk about, but then we move on to the fourth main part of the Mass, to Communion, which is taken in the two forms, in bread and wine. Before the taking of the bread and wine, the following is spoken:

Thou, O Christ, hast spoken to those who walk with you: Peacefully I stand by the world; this peace with the world can also be with you because I give it to you.

So, O Christ, the strength in me that frees itself from the burden of sin and unites with you in thought and will, so that it may stand peacefully in relation to the world and become one with its becoming, that can happen through you in all subsequent circles of time.

Yes, so be it.

O Christ, who went forth from the Father God without illness, and who, with the healing Spirit, gives human spirits the gift of continued life, quench the power of the disease of sin through Your body bearing the Holy Spirit; and strengthen me in my struggling soul through Your blood that bestows salvation, so that I may live forever with You. You who carry and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and make it healthy through the Spirit in all subsequent periods of time.

Yes, so be it.

May I, who is ill, not receive your body, O Christ, unto death; but unto life of soul and of my formative powers as the healing medicine. This be through you, who bear and order the life of the world as you receive it from the Father and make it healthy through the Spirit in all subsequent circles of time.

Yes, so be it. I take the bread and do this in the name of the Lord, calling: © Christ, the dwelling in which you enter is sick; but my soul will be healed by your word. (Three times)

Now the bread is taken.

The body of our Lord shall heal my soul, so that it may live. Yes, so be it.

Take me for giving myself to you.

I take the cup and do this in the name of the Lord, calling, O Christ, to whom I confess, what has been revealed through You, and You take the power of man's adversary from me. (Three times)

The cup is drunk.

The blood of the Lord gives strength to my soul, so that it may not die in the future. Yes, so be it.

What my mouth has received, let it be in my soul, and what has been sacrificed in time, let it be transformed into eternal medicine. May your body, O Christ, which I have received, and your blood, which gives me life, penetrate me, so that the disease of sin may be healed by the healing medicine, the sacrament. May it be done through You, who bear and order the life of the world as You receive it from the Father and, through the Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Yes, so be it.

This is what the act of Communion amounts to and what it says in the Catholic Church:

"O Jesus Christ, our Lord, who spoke to Your Apostles: My peace be with you, I give you my peace: do not look at my sin-laden person, but at Your Church, which confesses You and give it, according to Your will: peace and unity, You who live in the world and order it as its divine Creator through all the following ages.

Yes, so be it.

That is the “per omnia saecula saeculorum”. You see, here it is clearly stated how the priest in Catholicism differs from the Church. He stands as a member of the Church before the altar, and according to the dogma, his person is not actually considered at all.

"O Jesus Christ, Son of the God who gives life to the world, who, according to His will, through the assistance of the Holy Spirit, hast given the world life through Thyself, take from me the power of the sins of the world through Thy body, which bears our sins, and through Thy blood, which redeems us, and unite me inseparably to Thyself. You who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit in all the ages to come.

Yes, so be it.

May the receiving of Your body, O Jesus Christ, our Lord, by me, an unworthy one, not be for my condemnation, but according to Your mercy for the salvation of soul and body as a healing remedy. You who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit in all the ages to come.

Yes, let it be so.

Taking the bread heavenward I call on the Lord's name. © Lord, I am unready for You to enter under my roof; but just say the word and my soul shall be healed. (Three times)

The body of the Lord brings my soul to life.

Yes, so be it. What shall I give to the Lord for all that He has given me? Taking the cup, I call on the name of the Lord. Confessing His revelation, I will call upon the name of the Lord with joy and my adversaries will flee from me. The blood of the Lord strengthen my soul in survival.

Yes, so be it.

What the mouth has received, may the pure soul absorb, and from the temporal sacrifice may come medicine for eternity. May your body, O Lord, that nourished me, and your blood, that strengthened me, penetrate my soul forever, and in me may the disease of sin be wiped out as the pure and healing sacraments. You who live and reign in all the ages to come.

Yes, it shall be so.

So you see, the Sacrifice of the Mass is indeed the sacramental fulfillment of the four main parts of which I have spoken to you. And it is important that the entire meaning of Christianity is fully alive in the ritual of the Sacrifice of the Mass. The Gospel must live in every single word of the ritual, the Gospel must be alive, and without this life of the living Gospel the ritual would be impossible. Of course, it must be assumed that the following is recognized in order to understand something like this: one is dealing with people who live according to the Mystery of Golgotha, with people, that is, for whom there could never be anything that would be a mere external act, that takes place in the world of the senses, or that is performed by the human being in the world of the senses , and with those, therefore, for whom there could also be nothing that could be spoken out of ordinary human consciousness in an intellectualistic way, that could strengthen the moral world in man so that that which must be conquered can be conquered.

For this, an action is needed that goes beyond everything that lies within the bounds of our present-day possibilities for action and speech, if we are not to move on to an awareness of the sacramental. I know, my dear friends, how much is said against the sacramental in the hearts of modern people, but anyone who has experience in these matters may also say something else. One could think that my annoyance at the ceremonial, which is so common among modern people, might even come from a Christian or Protestant consciousness. But I must confess to you – it is a personal comment, but in this case it is very factual – I have actually never seen a person in whom what was angry against the sacramental came from love and from goodness, but always from secret evil that is in human nature. Of course, this is a process that we see occurring in many cases today, but what is primarily angry is actually the resistance, the resistance to salvation, of human nature. It is the incitement by the same forces that say in the Gospel: we recognize you – and then begin to fight Christ Jesus because they recognize him. I would not say this at all if it were not a thoroughly observable fact. Whoever overcomes that which asserts itself as evil in his soul is given the strength to overcome. But whoever cannot overcome this evil is also deprived of what strength he had to overcome before. These things are quite serious, and in the human soul things are constantly happening that cannot be grasped by ordinary external consciousness. One might say that the human soul is actually constantly walking over an abyss. That is indeed the case, it is just not aware of it. But it must become aware of it, and how it is to become aware of it must be guided in the right way. As long as we merely have the belief that we are to moralize the human soul, and as long as we have the belief from our present consciousness that we could do this with the powers that are present in the outer world, so long we have no idea of what the human soul actually is in the whole context of the world.

Therefore, do not take something like an externality when certain sentences are spoken three times in Communion. Why are they spoken three times? The first time is spoken:

I take this bread and do this in the name of the Lord, calling: © Christ, the dwelling in which You enter is sick; but through Your word my soul shall be healed.

The first time the word is spoken so that it may be taken up into one's understanding. The second time the word is spoken:

I take the bread and do this in the name of the Lord, calling: © Christe, the dwelling into which You enter is sick; but through Your word my soul shall be healed.

so that we experience this in our feeling. And only the third time can the word be spoken in such a way that our volition is sufficiently kindled through our thinking and feeling, so that the word may also live in our volition:

I take this bread and do it in the name of the Lord, calling: © Christ, the dwelling in which you enter is sick; but through your word my soul will be healed.

Likewise with the words of the cup:

I take this cup, and do this in the Lord's name, calling: © Christe, to whom I profess myself, what through Thee is revealed, and the power of man's adversary Thou takest from me.

The second time:

I take this cup, and do this in the Lord's name, calling to mind that Thou takest away the power of Thine enemies.

The third time:

I take the cup and do this in the name of the Lord, calling: © Christe, to whom I profess my faith, what has been revealed through you, and you take away from me the power of man's adversary.

All details are important in such a ritual, and if they are incorrect, it is already roughly the same as if, let us say, any limb of the human body is wrongly formed due to a malformed development. We must have the feeling that these things are alive in truth. Of course, what lives in the succession of time changes its body in the succession of time, precisely because it is alive, but this change of body is precisely only a consequence of the living.

With the help of the point of view just mentioned, it is now quite easy to find the differences that exist between what is in the Catholic sacrifice of the Mass and what is in the ritual that I spoke of as possible today. But it is also clear to see how it is almost impossible to truly depict the full concrete experiences through a mere translation, even if it attempts to restore the old words' values. This is because, in fact, for the entire civilization of modern times, the actual meaning of the original words has been lost. We no longer live in the life that the words once had. We live in words, in that they have become mere signs for us. We no longer listen inwardly to the words either. The sensation of the sound of the words has become for us a sensation of a sign of memory. I have already spoken about these things from a different point of view. But such a ritual cannot be performed without coming back to the real listening to the words.

I have told you: When we read in the Gospel of John today, “In the beginning was the Word,” we have to say that according to a literal translation. But what we associate with the word “Word” today is not at all what was once associated with the word “Word.” And when we translate the old word logos as wisdom, then the two are even further apart, for wisdom is something much more abstract than logos was. And by translating logos as wisdom we actually enter the sphere, well, not of Christ, but of the spirit. And while we can still feel the word to some extent in the “verbum” [the Latin translation], if “logos” were translated as “wisdom”, we would actually have to feel spirit, “sapientia”. These things should actually be thoroughly brought to perception in today's theology classes. Many have an enormous fear of this. Because they have learned that one should be a theo-logian, and they fear that if something else comes over their outer perception of “logia,” it is “sophia,” and then they are terribly afraid that they might come to theosophia instead of theologia. This is a terrible fear that is present in theologians today. They consider it an insult to be called “theosophists”. Why? Because they have no belief that the Christ works through the spirit that lives in wisdom, because they would like to deny the spirit; and the denial of the spirit, in many respects, is what causes such a feeling.

We must see these things in their true light, only then can we also feel - and we will come back to this, my dear friends - how different our direct experience can be with regard to the Father-God and to the Christ Himself.

To-day I want to speak of the spiritual powers and beings that live in man's environment. They are super-sensible powers and beings we cannot perceive them with our senses; nevertheless they are there, and they play their part in our earthly existence. The things that take place among such spiritual beings, the dealings they have with one another, are of course altogether different from the actions and deeds of man during his earthly life; it is therefore difficult to tell in human language, which has been created expressly for human conditions and human relationships, about the nature and activities of these super-sensible Intelligences, these super-sensible beings. Since, however, it is important that these things should in our age, be brought to man's knowledge, we must speak of them in the only way that is possible,—namely, in pictures. This will mean that I shall frequently describe things as if I were referring to human conditions and relationships. The things that are told in this way will be quite true and correct; only, since the language has to be borrowed from human relationships, the truth will be presented in a picture.

We have around us, to begin with, the world of Nature in her various kingdoms, mineral, plant and animal,—and we may also add to these the human kingdom, in so far as man's physical being is concerned. Behind Nature lies a kind of second Nature,—a spiritual, super-sensible Nature. The first, the Nature to which we are accustomed, man perceives with his senses. The super-sensible Nature that is behind, he does not perceive. It has, for all that, a great influence upon him.

And then we have to recognise that we human beings have something of physical Nature also within us. When we look within, we perceive this physical nature in our instincts and our passions. These are of course astral, but they rise up from the physical Nature. And this physical Nature that we have within us and that we perceive in our instincts and urges and passions, has again—this time we have to say beneath it, a kingdom of beings, who are intimately connected with man, but are really sub-human.

Thus, looking around us with the help of our senses, we behold the surface of Nature, her external appearance; and behind it we have to divine the presence of a super-sensible nature. When on the other hand we look within and perceive ourselves in our instincts and passions, then we have to divine beneath these the presence of a subsensible Nature.

The super-sensible Nature that is around us can be understood and appreciated only by one who is equipped with spiritual insight, and who is not always focusing attention, as Natural Science does to-day, on the strict laws of Nature and on what takes place within their framework. For Natural Science, as we know, is concerned with the investigation of what takes place in accordance with firm laws of Nature. The super-sensible that is behind external Nature will never reveal itself to these researches. It will however become manifest when we have learned to look with keen and discerning spiritual vision upon things which are not to be explained by natural law, but are generally regarded as subject to chance.

Of this character are the phenomena of the weather, all the irregularities of the atmosphere throughout, the four seasons of the year. If you stop to consider, for example, in detail how a London fog [There was an unusual thick fog in London during Dr. Steiner's visit at this time.] takes its course, you will perhaps find that in its main events you can trace the working of certain laws. You will not however be able to do this for all its continual changes and movements. When it comes to the particular single phenomena of wind and weather, there we are inclined to say that we are at the mercy of chance. You can of course read in the newspapers a description of what kind of weather we are likely to have in the near future, but you will not build upon it with certainty with which you rely on the sun rising tomorrow morning. Phenomena which show the working of natural law are in quite another category from the phenomena of wind and weather, which are more or less generally ascribed to the working of chance. People can and do acquire a certain prophetic gift in regard to these phenomena, but this prophetic gift cannot be given to place within the framework of natural law, it has more the character of inspiration or intuition.

As a matter of fact, beings live in all the various manifestations of wind and weather,—beings who are only not seen because they lack a body that is visible to the senses. They are present and alive, notwithstanding. The beings who live in wind and weather have a body that consists of air and warmth, a body that has in it no water—no fluidity, that is, of any kind—and no solid earth; it consists of nothing but air and warmth. And this body is continually undergoing sudden changes. At one moment it will assume form and shape, then again it will dissolve and pass away. The changing cloud formations that we observe in the sky, the play of the currents of the wind,—these are not the body, which remains more hidden, they are but the outer expression, the deeds, of the beings of whom I speak. When therefore we look out into the atmosphere which surrounds our Earth, and within which we ourselves are living, we have there around us a world of beings, who are composed merely of air and warmth. They are of the same kind as the beings whom I have called in my books and frequently spoken of in lectures as the Luciferic beings.

Now these beings have a specific end in view in regard to man. Notwithstanding the fact that they inhabit an element which we often find far from agreeable and pleasant—living, as we have said, in the weather!—these beings attach great value to the moral element in the human social order. So highly do they prize it, that in their opinion it would be best for man not to have a physical body at all—not, at any rate, a body that partakes of the watery or earthly elements. If they could have formed man in their own way, they would have made of him a moral being, pure and simple. Man would not of course in that case have had freedom, he would have been moral without being inwardly free. As it is these beings wage a fearful battle in the course of the year, struggling to wrest man away from the Earth and draw him into their own sphere. They would like him to be cut off from the Earth,—a complete stranger to it. On this account they are particularly dangerous for people who are inclined to any kind of visionary idealism or vague mysticism. Such persons readily fall a prey to these beings who seek to entice man away from the Earth and endow him with a kind of angel nature, so that under no circumstances shall he find himself tempted to be otherwise than purely moral.

Strange therefore and paradoxical as it may sound, dear friends,—inhabiting the forces that pulsate through the encircling air in all the vagaries of wind and weather, are beings who, abhorring human freedom and desiring nothing better than its complete annihilation, want to make man a moral automaton, want to make of him indeed a kind of good angel. And they fight hard to attain their end; to use an earthly expression, they wage war to the teeth.

In addition to these beings who build, as it were, their strongholds in the air—do not cavil at the word, I told you. I am obliged to speak in pictures—there are also beings of a contrary nature, to whom I alluded in my last lecture in another connection. And this latter class of beings has to do with all that comes to expression in man's instinctive urges and impulses, in his desires and passions. You must not however think of them as belonging first and foremost to man. In man we can see the results of their activity. But they have their home, so to speak, right on the Earth. Only we cannot see them, for these beings too have not a body that is formed in such a way as to be visible to us. They have, in fact, a body that lives entirely in the elements of earth and water. And their deeds are to be seen in the ebb and flow of the tides, in volcanic eruptions and in earthquakes. Natural Science, as is well-known, can find no satisfactory explanation for these phenomena. One who has keen spiritual perception can however see behind them a world of sub-human beings, who are under the control of the powers to which I have always given the name of the Ahrimanic powers.

Now, these Ahrimanic powers also cherish a particular aim as regards man. With the help of their various sub-spirits, which inhabit the earth and water elements of our Earth and can, for example, be recognised even in the kobolds or brownies of fairy lore—aided by these, the Ahrimanic powers have set themselves to carry out another and a different project.

If one considers these Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings by themselves, just as they are, one cannot, you know, be angry with them. Why be angry with the Luciferic beings, for instance? They want to make man into a being who is moral entirely as a matter of course. What could be better? Man would, it is true, never under their influence be free, he would be an automaton; but what they seek and desire for him can nevertheless be truthfully described as good.

Now let us see what is the aim of these other beings, who build their strongholds immediately below the surface of the Earth, and whose activities rise up into man’s metabolism,—for the phenomena we observe in the tides and less frequently in volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are always present also in the ebb and flow in man's metabolism. Whilst the Luciferic spirits build, as we said, their strongholds in the air, in order to fight for the moral—as against the earthly—element in man, the Ahrimanic beings struggle to harden man; they want to make him like themselves. Were they to be successful, man would become extremely clever in the material realm—incredibly clever and intelligent. They cannot achieve their end directly, but they aim at doing so indirectly. And their efforts, which have actually been going on for thousands of years, have in fact succeeded in producing a whole race of sub-human beings. Their method is as follows.

Suppose a man has strong and rude instincts. These beings will clutch at his instinctive nature and seize hold of it. The man then falls victim to the Ahrimanic powers. He is completely given up to his passions and leads a wild and dissolute life. When a man has in this way become a prey, during his earthly life, to the Ahrimanic powers, then these powers will be able to hold on to his instinctive nature and tear it out of him after death. There exists already on the Earth a whole population of beings who have arisen in this way. They are there, in the elements of earth and water, a sub-human race. And then what is it the Ahrimanic powers intend with this sub-human race? As we have seen, they draw out of a human being his instinctive nature and make of it an earth-and-water being. These earth-water beings inhabit the strata immediately below the surface of the Earth; and those who go down into mines, if they are able to look with spiritual vision, are quite familiar with them. They are beings that have been snatched out of man in the moment of death. And with what ultimate aim? Ahriman is waiting. The Ahrimanic powers are waiting for the time when men will descend to incarnation and, on account of a karma that their instincts and passions have prepared for them, feel particularly drawn to certain of these beings and say to themselves: “I will not go back to the spiritual world; when I have left my physical body”—out of which, as you know, man generally goes forth to a super-sensible life—“I will incorporate myself in a subsensible being of this kind. And that will mean, I shall be able to stay on the Earth. I shall not die any more, but be permanently united with the Earth. Yes, I will choose to be a subsensible being.”

It may sound incredible—and indeed it is astonishing, considering how extraordinary clever they are,—but it is a fact that the Ahrimanic beings persist in believing they will ultimately be able in this way to entice such a vast number of human beings into their own race that the Earth will one day be peopled entirely with such Ahrimanic sub-human beings. By this means they hope to make the Earth itself immortal, so that the hour may never come for it to perish and be dispersed in cosmic space.

We have thus around us in our earthly environment two hosts of beings; one in the air, that wants to make man moral but to lift him away from the Earth, and then we have also, immediately below the surface of the Earth, the Ahrimanic beings who want to draw man down and fasten him permanently to the Earth.

When we come to consider the relation in which these two classes of beings stand to one another, we find that in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, and even in the human kingdom as it is by nature before man’s passions and desires begin to get the better of him, the two classes of beings have perforce to agree, they must bear with one another. In a remote primeval past the Godhead who is called in the Christian religion the Father God, established peace in this respect. Peace was established by the Father God for minerals, plants and animals, and also for man in his animal nature, in so far as he does not allow himself to be perverted and contaminated by passion and desire.

Take up in your hand a crystal, or any other mineral, or again a plant; you will not find that in that crystal or plant any conflict is taking place between these two classes of beings. But the moment you direct your observation to a man whose body is permeated and suffused with soul, you will at once discern signs of their conflict. The Luciferic beings are saying to Ahriman: “We promised the Father God that we would not fight nor do battle for the minerals, the plants, the animals, nor for man so long as he remained an unconscious being as in olden times and had not acquired the power of reflection, but lived more like an animal; but as for men who have acquired self-consciousness—for them we will fight to the teeth.” And it is so: a fearful war is waged all the time between the air-fire beings and the earth-water beings; they fight to get possession of man. And it is important that man should be aware of this war that is perpetually being waged for him; he must not be blind to it. In our day we have advanced far in our knowledge of external Nature. Here, as we have seen, the conditions are quite different; here the Luciferic beings live at peace with the Ahrimanic. But man's knowledge does not reach to that which lies behind the world of the senses, does not reach to super-sensible Nature, nor has he any knowledge of sub-human Nature. And these two realms harbour beings who carry on, as I have said, a terrible warfare, fighting for the possession of man.

*

The Being who in the Old Testament is called Jahve, has his seat—I need not remind you of what I said at the beginning of the lecture about the use of such expressions—has his seat in the Moon. That is to say, Jahve is that spiritual Being in the Cosmos who finds expression in the physical phenomena of the Moon. And in the whole ordering of the world this Being has the following task to perform.

When man is descending from the divine spiritual world in order that he may clothe himself in a body, then it is Jahve who leads him down to Earth. Nor does the Jahve Being lose all part in man's life when man has already come to Earth; he takes in hand the ordering of everything that is connected with generation. The Jahve Being, who has his seat in the Moon and who leads man down to Earth, claims control in man over all that has to do with the instincts and impulses of generation.

The process of generation cannot however be regular or regulated by itself, for it is connected with the other instincts and impulses. Consequently, the Jahve Being needs helpers, he needs beings who will, for instance, regulate the instincts connected with eating and drinking, and bring these into harmony with the instincts of generation. He needs helpers who will in fact see to the ordering of the whole instinctive life of man. And Jahve—the Moon God, if we may call him so—finds such helpers in Mercury and Venus.

A kind of compact has been made in the spiritual universe between the Moon,—that is, the Jahve Being and the beings that dwell with him in the Moon—and Mercury and Venus, And it is the will and concern of the beings who have joined together in this way, to control, from Moon, Mercury and Venus, the whole flesh-and-blood nature of man. Man is by no means merely an earthly being; influences play into him from the whole great Universe.

Turning now again to the beings whom I called Ahrimanic and who have their stronghold just below the surface of the Earth—the earth-water beings—how do these compare with Jahve and the Mercury and Venus beings? What place is assigned to them in the world order? They are not ripe to take up their abode in a heavenly body, in the way that Jahve has his abode in the Moon, and his helpers in Mercury and Venus. No, these Ahrimanic beings are doomed to look for a dwelling place just below the surface of the Earth, You will accordingly not be surprised to find that it is not with the air-fire beings alone that these earth-water beings feel themselves in opposition, but particularly also with Jahve and with the powers of Venus and Mercury. And this, notwithstanding the fact that they are themselves devoid of morality. (Man's instinctive nature, being regulated by Jahve from outside and beyond the Earth, is thereby subject to another rulership than that of the aforesaid ‘moral’ beings, but it would not under this rulership become immoral). The Ahrimanic beings wage war continually on Jahve and on the Venus and Mercury powers, and are determined to usurp from Jahve his rightful sovereignty. For it is owing to the rightful sovereignty of Jahve that the human race as we know it has come into existence on the Earth; it needed the powers of Moon and also of Mercury and Venus for this to be accomplished.

In a spirit of retaliation, the Ahrimanic beings are founding—over against the Jahve race, which is mankind—this other race of which I have been telling you. And a prime means for them to attain their end is the device I explained in our last lecture. You will remember I told you how they approach man in his sleep and say to him: “Good is evil; evil is good,” Man hearkens to this all too easily when he is asleep, and then he brings it back with him into his physical and his ether-body. The Ahrimanic beings are confident they will be able to achieve their end by means of these vicious whisperings.

Man should, you see, depend entirely—in his lower nature—on the Moon, Venus and Mercury powers. The lower nature of man is not in itself evil or degenerate; it is so only because powers that are antagonistic to Jahve insinuate themselves into it in the manner I have described. What Jahve would desire is that these earth-water beings should express themselves merely in the ebb and flow of the tides, in volcanic eruptions, in earthquakes. But they strain every nerve to establish themselves also in man, to make their presence felt in man too; and not content with attacking there the air-fire beings, they launch their attacks with particular force against Jahve and his helpers.

Man therefore finds himself placed right in the very midst of a conflict. On one side are ranged Jahve and his hosts, who are fighting for righteousness; on the other side the hosts of Ahriman, who, in respect of cleverness, far outstrip man, and whose concern it is utterly to repudiate man’s moral nature and make him into a sheer automaton of cleverness.

Such then are the influences that stream up from earth and water, and work in man. For man is obliged to eat of the products of earth and water; he cannot nourish himself on air, nor live on warmth alone!

In the other direction are the beings who incorporate themselves in air and warmth. These also, like the enemies of Jahve, are immature. And the corresponding mature beings are in their case beings who dwell on Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And so we find these air-fire beings making sallies from their strongholds not only upon the Ahrimanic powers, but upon the influences that should be continually reaching man from Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Now, the influences of these more distant planets,—or rather, of their spiritual beings—are to be found particularly in the eyes, in the ears,—in short, in the sense organs of man. So that, whilst Moon and Venus exercise their influence in the interior organs of man's body, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars work on man's exterior, work in his sense organs. The influences, for example, of Saturn are to be met with primarily in the human eye.

These beings,—Saturn beings, Jupiter beings and Mars beings—have it as their special concern to make man a real Earth man; that is to say, they want first to give him senses that are properly inserted into the human organism and that remain at its surface, and then to supply him with nerves that run from the senses and extend inwards into the organism. Saturn gives the senses, Jupiter gives their continuation in the nerves, and Mars exerts the kind of control that endows man, for example, with the faculty of speech. The whole aim and purpose of these beings is to furnish man with all that is on the surface of his body. For the senses, and the nerves too, have come about through a ‘turning outside in’ of the human skin.

Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars are however resisted in their activities by the air-fire beings of whom we were speaking. Here again, a furious fight goes on all the time. The air-fire beings sit fast, so to speak, in their airy strongholds and display their power and might in the fiery flashes of the lightning. They would like to make the whole of man what he should properly be on the surface only, so that the entire physical being of man should partake of the nature that is actually assigned only to eye and ear and nose. They would like to pour the surface of man's organism right through him, to make him all surface, so that he would do nothing but see and hear,—never eat nor drink, but only see and hear, be in fact a kind of angel being.

The Mars, Jupiter and Saturn beings, who work as we have seen in man's senses, acquit themselves most praise-worthily—if I may employ the expression in speaking of such sublime beings—in the world of external nature. For they permeate what to our eyes appears mere Nature, with morality. In this manner they bring morality to man; for it is actually so, morality enters into us through the senses. When therefore the air-fire beings seek to permeate man through and through with his sense nature, it is with the intention that man, seeing nothing but what is moral, may become a moral automaton.

If we look out on the world of Nature, we can know that whatever manifests as forces in that world comes from the Mars beings, whatever manifests as natural law from the Jupiter beings, and whatever manifests as colour and sound from the Saturn beings. And the air-fire beings would have man become nothing but force, law (that is to say, thought), colour and sound. They want man not to have a physical body at all, but to be insubstantial, rarefied; they would like him to be, as we said, an angel being.

And so you see, whilst in external nature. Moon, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn live at peace with one another and are held in balance by the Sun, they wage a double fight for the possession of man. First of all, there is the conflict that goes on between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic beings; and then we have on the one hand, the fight that is put up by the Luciferic beings against the planetary forces beyond the Sun,—the Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn influences—whilst on the other hand the Ahrimanic forces are waging war on the influences that proceed from Moon, Venus and Mercury.

Behind Nature and within man the hard-fought battle goes on; and it is with this conflict raging all around him that man has to press forward in his development and win his freedom. In an older time man had the teaching of the Mysteries to aid him on his path; now he must turn to what spiritual investigation can tell him concerning what lies behind Nature and below man. For ignorance on these matters would inevitably lead to the deterioration and ruin of mankind.

You will have seen, my dear friends, from the descriptions I have given you, that the beings we are accustomed to call Luciferic and Ahrimanic, are particularly highly developed in respect of certain qualities—the Luciferic beings, namely, in morality, and the Ahrimanic in cleverness and intelligence. And yet both these classes of beings never relinquish the belief that they will one day achieve their ends, and they are therefore always ready to begin the fight over again. For, time after time, when they think they are on their way to success, they experience frustration and disappointment. So that when a modern initiate encounters such beings behind Nature or below man, he sees how on the one hand they will not be deterred, but press forward again and again to their goal with renewed confidence in ultimate victory, and then how, on the other hand, they are perpetually being frustrated. This kind of being may indeed be said to live in a mood that oscillates between jubilation and triumph on the one side and constantly recurring disappointment on the other.

I will show you how this can be observed in particular instances. Let us see, in the first place, how the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings suffer disillusionment through what happens with the physical part of man's being. One can form a very good impression of the disappointments that await Lucifer and Ahriman in this connection, when one pays a visit to one of our hospitals or asylums. Sickness, whether in mind or body, means disappointment for Lucifer or Ahriman. These beings are, you see, fighting a battle to get possession of the nature of man. But it does not help them at all, if within man's nature one of them gains a victory over the other. The situation is different if Ahriman gains a victory over the Moon Godhead; or again, if the air-fire beings gain a victory over Jupiter, Mars and Saturn. Such victories are, however, always incomplete. They can only become complete if reinforced by some success that the Luciferic or Ahrimanic beings achieve in their own mutual conflict. But, as a matter of fact, by far the greater number of these successes are only apparent; hence the disillusion that ensues. Let us suppose for a moment that the Ahrimanic powers were victorious in the physical body of some person, victorious, that is, over the Luciferic powers who try to permeate man throughout with what should by rights be only on the surface, only in the senses. The result would be that the person would succumb to illnesses producing tumours or carcinoma, or else to illnesses of the metabolism, such as diabetes. Whenever an illness of this description shows itself in a man's physical nature, it means that Ahriman has won a victory over Lucifer. Since however, as a result, that physical nature is temporarily ruined, it is of course of no use to Ahriman; he cannot possibly pull up out of it the man's instincts and impulses in order to create from these a race of his own.

We have in this way arrived at a perhaps paradoxical, but nevertheless correct picture of illness. Illness is in very many cases the sole means left to the good Powers, to rescue man from the fangs of Ahriman.

If on the other hand Lucifer gains a victory in a man's physical nature over the Ahrimanic powers, who would like to harden man and drag him down into their race of earth-water beings,—if Lucifer gains a victory over these powers, then the person concerned succumbs to illnesses of a catarrhal nature, or else to insanity. Once again, for Lucifer this time, the victory turns out to be quite indecisive.

The Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers, who work unceasingly with all their might for the attainment of their ends, are thus compelled to turn away sad and disappointed from beds of sickness, from hospitals and from mental asylums. These show them all too clearly that though they may continue to carry on their fight, they cannot ever be really victorious.

And now, if you are able to look with real insight into man's etheric nature,—not merely into his physical, but into his etheric nature—you will find there too, occasion for disappointment to the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. For when the Luciferic powers are victorious over the Ahrimanic in the ether-body, then the person becomes a liar, he becomes an habitual liar. In that case he is obviously not moral; and so he falls out of the world within which Lucifer would like to secure him. Instead of making him a moral automaton, Lucifer has turned him into a liar. And, strange as it may seem, the fact that the person becomes addicted to lying is a weapon in the hands of the good Powers, to aid them in rescuing him from Lucifer. For when someone turns liar,—well, that can be ameliorated in the further course of karma; whereas if Lucifer were really to gain the victory he seeks, the Earth would lose that human soul, it would soar right away above the Earth. If, on the other hand, Ahriman were to conquer, or come near to conquering, in the ether body, then the person would become possessed—possessed by his own cleverness. And since he is inwardly possessed by it, the cleverness must needs remain within him. It has hold of him; his ether-body is absolutely charged with it. And so there is no possibility for Ahriman to draw out the instincts and impulses; they are stuck fast in the ether-body, because the person is possessed by his cleverness. Here too, then, will be plenty of opportunity for Lucifer and Ahriman to experience bitter frustration and disappointment, when addiction to lying, or on the other hand, obsession follows as a consequence of their apparent victories.

Let us now see what can happen with the astral body. Suppose the Ahrimanic powers come near to being victorious in the astral body. The person in question will in this case tend to become an out-and-out egoist. But that will mean that he, as an egoist, keeps fast hold of his instincts, and there will be no chance for Ahriman to snatch them away. So once more, Ahriman's prize escapes him. Suppose on the other hand, Lucifer nearly gains a victory. Then the person is liable to turn into a dreamer in the astral body, to become an ego-less dreamer, who is, as one says, “not in his right mind.” Such things happen; it can well be that people succumb, if only for a time, to such a condition. The Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are thus subject to disillusionment on earth in many directions.

But do you see in what a critical situation man stands to-day? In olden times it was different. Let us look back and see how things were for man in the past. The first great teachers in the Mysteries were messengers of the Father God. They had disciples, the Gurus; and then there were the Chelas who were disciples of a second grade, for they were disciples of the Gurus. The highest Gurus however received their instruction direct from the messengers of the Father God, And these messengers of the Father God were able to find remedies with which to heal man. Illnesses are, as we have seen, the occasion of deep disappointment and frustration to Ahriman and Lucifer, so much so that they leave these beings quite benumbed and bewildered. For, outstandingly clever and moral as the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings are, just because their consciousness is so particularly keen and wide-awake, they are all the more liable to suffer a clouding of it; and so the messengers of the Father God were on this account able to approach the sick person undisturbed by Lucifer and Ahriman, and could then find the remedy for the illness. I told you last time, you will remember, how an illness due to Saturn influence could be cured with a remedy taken from the Moon, and so on. This, then, is how things were in the time of the ancient Mysteries. The messengers of the Father God were able to intervene directly and extricate man from the confusion in which he finds himself owing to the fight which is going on, as, I have explained to you, all the time, behind Nature and below man.

My dear friends, the confusion that reigns within man to-day is no whit less than it was in olden times. That man is unaware of it makes no difference, the confusion is there, just the same. Man is perpetually being torn and tossed, this way and that, while the powers behind Nature and below himself fight to get possession of him. And when one crosses the Threshold and, looking consciously into the spiritual world, observes this terrific battle that is going on, this complicated game that is being played with man as the prize, then one may look now in vain for the messengers of God who in an earlier age would come forward with the staff of Mercury, for example, and with other symbols of that nature, ready to give them into the hands of the Mystery doctors, who could then use them to bring healing to man. At the present time, when you cross the Threshold, you find yourself only in the midst of the terrific conflict of which we have spoken, between beings of the upper planets who have remained behind in their evolution,—immature Mars, Jupiter and Saturn beings—and beings of the lower planets who have remained behind,—immature Moon, Mercury and Venus beings. Like two armed encampments they stand facing one another; on one side, the air-fire beings,—Saturn, Jupiter and Mars beings that have failed and fallen out of their true evolution; and on the other side, facing them, the earth-water beings,—Moon, Mercury and Venus beings who have also failed and fallen behind. And there, beyond the Threshold, the fight goes on with such fury that the Sun becomes first of all fiery and aflame, and then grows darker and darker, until at last it shows like a terrible black disk. It was not so for the initiates of long ago. They saw right through the black disk; and from the direction of the black disk itself came towards them the messengers of God, of the Father God, who were also in those times the bearers of the knowledge of healing. But for us, when we cross the Threshold and see before us the terrific battle and behold how the Sun becomes fiery red and then black,—for us, the Sun remains black, it remains a black disk. And we are rebuffed, we are turned back; for if we men of modern times are to find our way amid all this confusing and perplexing conflict, it is on the Earth that we must look for help.

And then, my dear friends, then we are guided to turn our eyes to the Christ. Christ stands before us, the Spirit Being who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, united Himself with the Earth. And He says to us: Be not dismayed that the Sun has become black; it is black because I, the God of the Sun, am no longer in it; for I have come down and united myself with the Earth.

And if, with inner devotion, and with quick and sensitive recognition of all that a knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha can bring, we draw near to Christ, and then the Sun does not, it is true, become bright again, it remains the black disk that it was, but the Sun begins to make audible for us what Christ is saying to us. And this experience reveals to us the relationship of Christ with the Sun. Yes, the Sun, although still a black disk, becomes a being who enables us to listen to the Christ, if we are duly prepared and approach Him in the right mood and attitude of soul.

And it is the Christ who provides now for man the means of reconciliation so that in man too the upper then the lower powers may be reconciled,—the powers that are above the black Sun disk and that make themselves known around our Earth as air-fire beings, and the powers that manifest as lower beings. And we can receive guidance, we men, for the healing of diseases, and for the true understanding of all the other evils that are constantly leaving Lucifer and Ahriman disappointed. Through the power of Christ and through the power of the Mystery of Golgotha we then become able to speak to these beings, and what we say to them is wonderful enough. “Ye creatures of Lucifer and Ahriman,” we say, “the disappointment and great frustration that you meet with, time and again, are due to evils of your own making, evils that are bound to arise on Earth in consequence of your own partial victories. And that must go on; for you will not cease from making people sick and ill and obsessed, nor from turning people into liars and self-seekers and ego-less dreamers. And so you have no choice but to continue this restless alternation between triumphant joy and the grief of acute disappointment.”

But as for man, if he can find the right relation to the Christ, then it will be given him not to despair, even in face of the despair of higher beings than himself,—beings however whose will it is to go another way than the way of the Gods to whom man belongs and to whom he should remain true throughout the further course of the Earth. At the centre of these sublime God Beings is the Christ Being, who spoke to the initiates of old through the Sun disk and who speaks also to us—but now from the Earth with the help of the Sun.

When therefore we speak of Christ to-day, we are speaking of One who can be at our side here on Earth as our Leader, guiding us out of the terrible conflict that the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are waging,—with one another and with the worlds of the Upper and Lower Gods.

In my next lecture, on Sunday at 7:o'clock, I will say more of this.

This lecture is included in Volume 220 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 11 of 12 from the lecture series A Living Knowledge of Nature, the Fall of the Intellect into Sin, the Spiritual Resurrection.

The spiritual life of the Middle Ages, from which the modern one derives, is essentially contained—as far as Europe is concerned—in what we call Scholasticism, that Scholasticism of which I have repeatedly spoken. At the height of the scholastic age two directions can be distinguished: Realism and Nominalism.

If we take the meaning of the word Realism, as it is often understood today, we do not grasp at once what was meant by medieval scholastic Realism. It was not called Realism because it approved only of the outer sense-reality and considered everything else an illusion; quite the contrary was the case—it was called Realism because it considered man's ideas on the things and processes of the world as something real, whereas Nominalism considered these ideas as mere names which signified nothing real.

Let us look at this matter quite clearly. In earlier days I explained the conceptions of Realism, by using the arguments of my old friend, Vincenz Knauer. Vincenz Knauer held that people who consider only the outer sense-reality, or that which can be found in the world as material substance, will not be able to understand what takes place, for instance, in the case of a caged wolf, which is fed exclusively on lamb's flesh for a long time. After a certain time the wolf has changed his old substance; this would consist entirely of lamb's flesh and in reality the wolf should turn into a lamb, if its substance is now lamb's substance! But this does not happen, for the wolf remains a wolf—that is, the material aspect does not matter; what matters is the form, which consists of the same substance in the lamb's case and in the wolf's case. We discover the difference between lamb and wolf because we gain a conception of the lamb and a conception of the wolf. But when someone says that ideas and conceptions are nothing at all, and that the material aspect of things is the only one that matters, then there should be no difference between lamb and wolf as far as the material substance is concerned, for this has passed over from the lamb into the wolf! If an idea really means nothing at all, the wolf should become a lamb if it keeps on eating lamb's flesh.

This induced Vincenz Knauer, who was a Realist in the medieval scholastic sense, to form the following conception:—What matters, is the form in which the substance is coordinated; this is the idea, or the concept. Also the medieval scholastic Realists were of this opinion. They said that ideas and concepts were something real, and that is why they called themselves Realists.

Their radical opponents were the Nominalists. They argued that there is nothing outside sense-reality, and that ideas and concepts are mere names through which we grasp the outer things of sense-reality.

We might adopt the following argument:—Let us take Nominalism and then Realism, such as we find it, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas, or in other scholastic philosophers; if we contemplate these two spiritual currents in quite an abstract way, their contrast will not be very evident. We might look upon them as two different human aspects. In the present day we are satisfied with such things because we are no longer kindled and warmed by what is expressed in these spiritual currents. But these things contain something very important. Let us take the Realists who argued that ideas and conceptions—that is, forms taken up by the sensory substance—are realities. The scholastic philosophers already considered ideas and thoughts as something abstract, but they called these abstractions a reality, because they were the result of earlier conceptions, far more concrete and essential.

In earlier ages, people did not merely look at the idea “wolf”, but at the real group-soul “wolf”, living in the spiritual world. This was a real being. But scholastic philosophers had subtilized this real being of an earlier age into the abstract idea. Nevertheless, the realistic scholastic philosophers still felt that, the idea does not contain a nothingness, but a reality. This reality indeed descended from earlier quite real beings, but people were then still aware of this descendancy or progeny. In the same way the ideas of Plato (which were far more alive and essentially endowed with Being than the medieval scholastic ideas) were the descendants of the ancient Persian Archangeloi-Beings, who lived and operated in the universe as Anschaspans. They were very real beings. For Plato they had grown more dim, and for the medieval scholastic philosophers they had grown abstract. This was the last stage of the old clairvoyance. Of course, medieval realistic scholasticism was no longer based upon clairvoyance, but what it had preserved traditionally, as its real ideas and conceptions, living in the stones, in the plants, in animals and in physical man, was still considered as something spiritual, although this spirituality was very thin indeed. When the age of abstraction or of intellectualism approached, the Nominalists discovered that they were not able to connect anything real with thoughts and ideas. For them these were mere names, coined for the convenience of man.

Medieval scholastic Realism, let us say, of a Thomas Aquinas, has not found a continuation in the more modern world conception, for man no longer considers ideas and thoughts as something real. If we were to ask people whether they considered thoughts and ideas as something real, we would only obtain an answer by placing the question somewhat differently. For instance, by asking someone who is firmly rooted in modern culture:—“Would you be satisfied if, after your death, you were to continue living merely as a thought or an idea?” In this case he would surely feel very unreal after death! This was not so for the realistic scholastic philosophers. For them, thoughts and ideas were real to such an extent, that they could not conceive that, as a mere thought or idea, they might lose themselves in the universe, after death. But as stated, this medieval scholastic Realism was not continued. In a modern world conception, everything consists of Nominalism. Nominalism has gained the upper hand more and more. And modern man (he does not know this, because he does not concern himself any more about such ideas) is a Nominalist in the widest meaning.

This has a certain deeper significance. One might say that the very passage from Realism to Nominalism—or better, the victory of Nominalism in our modern civilization—signifies that humanity has become completely powerless in regard to the grasping of the spiritual. For, naturally, just as the name “Smith” has nothing to do with the person standing before us, who is somehow called “Smith”, so have the ideas “wolf”, “lion”, conceived as mere names, no meaning whatever as far as reality is concerned. The passage from Realism to Nominalism expresses the entire process of the loss of spirit in our modern civilization. Take the following instance, and you will see that the entire meaning is lost as soon as Realism loses its meaning.

If I still find real ideas in the stone, in the plant, in the animals, and in physical man—or better still, if I find in them the ideas as realities—I can place the following question:—Is it possible that the thoughts that live in stones and plants, were once the thoughts of the Divine Being who created stones and plants? But if I see in thoughts and ideas mere names which man gives to stones and plants, I cut myself off from the Divine Being, and can no longer take it for granted that during the act of cognition I somehow enter in connection with the Divine Being.

If I am a scholastic Realist, I argue as follows:—I plunge into the mineral world, into the vegetable world and into the animal world; I form thoughts on quartz, sulphide of mercury and malachite. I form thoughts on the wolf, the hyena and the lion. I derive these from what I perceive through my senses. If these thoughts are something which a god originally placed into the stones and plants and animals, then my thoughts follow the divine thoughts. That is, in my thinking I create a link with the divinity.

If I stand on the earth as a forlorn human being, and perhaps imitate to some extent the lion's roar in the word “lion”, I myself give the lion this name; then, however, my knowledge contains no connection whatever with the divine spiritual creator of the beings. This implies that modern humanity has lost the capacity of finding something spiritual in Nature; the last trace of this was lost with scholastic Realism.

If we go back to the days in which men still had an insight into the true nature of such things through atavistic clairvoyance, we will find that the ancient Mysteries consisted more or less in the following conception: the Mysteries saw in all things a creative productive principle, which was looked upon as the “Father-principle”. When a human being proceeded from what his senses could perceive to the super-sensible, he really felt that he was proceeding to the divine Father-principle.

Only when scholastic Realism lost its meaning, it became possible to speak of atheism within the European civilization. For it was impossible to speak of atheism as long as people still found real thoughts in the things around them. There were already atheists among the Greeks; but they were not real atheists like the modern ones. Their atheism was not clearly defined. But it must also be said that in Greece we often find the first flashes of lightning, as if from an elementary human emotion, precursory of things which found their real justification during a later stage of human evolution. The actual theoretical atheism only arose when Realism, scholastic Realism, decayed.

However, this scholastic Realism continued to live in the divine, Father-principle, although the Mystery of Golgotha was enacted thirteen or fourteen centuries ago.

But the Mystery of Golgotha—I have often spoken of this—could really be grasped only through the knowledge of an older age. For this reason, those who wished to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha through what remained from the ancient Mystery wisdom of God the Father, looked upon the Christ merely as the Son of the Father.

Please consider carefully the thought which we shall form now. Imagine that someone tells you something concerning a person called Miller; you are only told that he is the son of the old Miller. Hence, the only thing you know about him is that he is the son of Miller. You wish to know more about him from the person who has told you this. But he keeps on telling you:—The old Miller is such and such a person, and he describes all kinds of qualities and concludes by saying—and the young Miller is his son. It was more or less the same when people spoke of the Mystery of Golgotha according to the ancient Father-principle. Nature was characterized in such a way that people said—the divine creative Father-principle lives in Nature, and Christ is the Son. Essentially, even the strongest Realists could not characterize the Christ otherwise than by saying that he was the Son of the Father. This is an essential point.

Then came a kind of reaction to all these forms of thought adhering to the stream which came from the Mystery of Golgotha, but which grasped it according to the Father-principle. As a kind of counter-stream, came all that which asserted itself as the evangelic principle, as protestantism, etc., during the passage from medieval life to modern life. A chief quality among all the qualities of this evangelization, or protestantism, is this that more importance was given to the fact that people wished to see the Christ in his own being. They did not base themselves on the old theology which considered the Christ only as the Son of the Father, according to the Father-principle, but they searched the Gospels in order to know the Christ as an independent Being, from the description of his deeds and the communication of the words of Christ. Really, this is what lies at the foundation of the Wycliffe and Comenius currents in German protestantism:—to consider the Christ as an independent Being.

However, the time for a spiritual way of looking at things had passed. Nominalism took hold of all minds and people were no longer able to find in the Gospels the divine spiritual being of the Christ. Modern theology lost this divine spiritual more and more. As I have often said, theologians looked upon the Christ as the “meek man of Nazareth”. Indeed, if you take Harnach's book—“The Essence of Christianity”, you will find that it contains a relapse; for in this book a modern theologian again describes the Christ very much after the Father-principle. In Harnach's book, the “Essence of Christianity”, we could substitute the word “Christ” wherever we read the word “God-Father”—this would make no great difference.

As long as the “wisdom of the Father” considered the Christ as the Son of God, people possessed in a certain sense a way of thinking which had a direct bearing on reality. However, when they wished to understand the Christ himself, in his divine spiritual being, the spiritual conception was already lost. They did not approach the Christ at all. For instance, the following case is very interesting (I do not know if many of you have noted it):—when one of those who wished at first to take part in the movement for a religious renewal,—but he did not take part in the end—, when the chief pastor of Nuremberg, Geyer, once held a lecture in Basle, he confessed openly that modern protestant theologians did not possess Christ—but only a universal God. This is what Geyer said, because he honestly confessed that people indeed spoke of the Christ, but the Father-principle was in reality the only thing that remained to them. This is connected with the fact that the human being who still looks at Nature spiritually (for he brings the spirit with him at birth) can only find the Father-principle in Nature. But since the decay of scholastic Realism he cannot even find this. Not even the Father-principle can be found, and atheistic opinions arose.

If we do not wish to remain by the description of the Christ, as being merely the Son of God, and wish instead to grasp this Son in his own nature, then we must not consider ourselves merely such as we are through birth; we must instead experience, during earthly life itself, a kind of inner awakening, no matter how weak this may be. We must pass through the following facts of consciousness and say to ourselves:—if you remain such as you were through birth, and see Nature merely through your eyes and your other senses and then consider Nature with your intellect, you are not a full human being, you cannot feel yourself fully as a human being. First you must awaken something in you which lies deeper still. You cannot be content with what you bring with you at birth. You must instead bring forth again in full consciousness what lies buried in greater depths.

One might say, that if we educate a human being only according to his innate capacities, we do not really educate him to be a complete human being. A child will grow into a full human being only if we teach him to look for something in the depths of his being, something he brings to the surface as an inner light, which is kindled during life on earth. Why is it so? Because the Christ who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, and is connected with earthly life, dwells in the depths of man. If we undertake this new awakening, we find the living Christ, who does not enter the usual consciousness which we bring with us at birth, and the consciousness that develops out of this innate consciousness. The Christ must he raised out of the depths` of the soul. The consciousness of Christ must arise in the life of the soul, then we shall really be able to say what I have often mentioned:—If we do not find the Father, we are not healthy, but are born with certain deficiencies. If we are atheists, this implies to a certain extent, that our bodies are ill. All atheists are physically ill to a certain extent. If we do not find the Christ, this is destiny and not illness, because it is an experience to find the Christ, not a mere observation. We find the Father-principle by observing what we ought to see in Nature. But we find the Christ, when we experience resurrection. The Christ enters this experience of resurrection as an independent Being, not merely as the Son of the Father. Then we learn to know that if we keep merely to the Father, in our quality of modern human beings, we cannot feel ourselves as complete human beings. The Father sent the Son to the earth in order that the Son might fulfill his works on earth. Can you not feel how the Christ becomes an independent being in the fulfillment of the Father's works?

In the present time, Spiritual Science alone enables us to understand the entire process of resurrection—to understand it practically, as an experience. Spiritual Science wishes to bring these very experiences to conscious knowledge out of the depths of the soul; they bring light into the Christ-experience.

Thus we may say, that with the end of scholastic Realism, it was no longer possible to grasp the principle of the Father-wisdom. Anthroposophical Realism, or that kind of Realism which again considers the spirit as something real, will at last be able to see the Son as an independent Being and to look upon the Christ as a Being perfect in itself. This will enable us to find in Christ the divine spiritual, in an independent way.

You see, this Father-principle really played the greatest imaginable part in older times. The theology which developed out of the ancient Mystery-wisdom was really interested only in the Father-principle. What kind of thoughts were predominant in the past?—Whether the Son is at one with the Father from all eternity, or whether he arose in Time and was born into Time. People thought about his descent from the Father. Consider the old history of dogmas; you will find throughout that the greatest value is placed on the question of Christ's descent. When the Third Person of the Trinity, the Spirit, was considered, people asked themselves whether the Spirit proceeded from the Father, with the Son or through the Son, etc. The problem was always connected with the genealogy of these three Godly Persons—that is, with what is connected with descent, and can be comprised in the Father-principle. During the strife between scholastic Realism and scholastic Nominalism, these old ideas of the Spirit's descent from the Father and from the Son were no longer understood. For you see, now they were three Persons. These three Persons who represent Godly Persons, were supposed to form one Godhead. The Realists comprised these three Godly Persons in one idea. For them, the idea was something real, hence the one God was something real for their knowledge. The Nominalists could not very well understand the Three Persons of the one God—consisting of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. When they summarized this Godhead, they obtained a mere word, or name. Thus the three Godly Persons became separate Persons for them, and the time in which scholastic Realism strove against scholastic Nominalism was also the time in which no real idea could be formed concerning this Godly Trinity. A living conception of the Godly Trinity was lost.

When Nominalism gained the upper hand, people understood nothing more of similar ideas, and took up the old ideas according to this or to that traditional belief; they were unable to form any real thought. And when the Christ came more to the fore in the protestant faith—although his divine spiritual being could no longer be grasped, because Nominalism prevailed—it was quite impossible to have any idea at all concerning the Three Persons. The old dogma of the Trinity was scattered.

The things had a great significance for mankind in the age when spiritual feelings were predominant, and played a great part in the human souls for their happiness and unhappiness. These things were pushed completely in the background during the age of modern narrow-mindedness. Are modern people interested in the connection between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, unless the problem happens to enter into theological quarrels? Modern man thinks that he is a good Christian, yet he does not worry about the relationships of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He cannot understand at all that once this was one of mankind's burning soul-problems. He has grown narrow-minded, and for this reason we can term the age of Nominalism the narrow-minded age of European civilization, for narrow-minded people have no real feeling for the spiritual, that continually rouses the soul. These kinds of people live only in their habits. It is not possible to live entirely without spirit, yet the narrow-minded people would like to live without any spirit at all—get up without the spirit—breakfast without the spirit—go to the office without the spirit—lunch without the spirit—play billiards in the afternoon without the spirit—in fact they would like to do everything without the spirit! Nevertheless the spirit permeates the whole of life, but narrow-minded people do not bother about this—it does not interest them.

Hence we may argue: Anthroposophy should therefore strive to maintain the Universal-Divine. But it does not do this. It finds the divine-spiritual in God the Father; it also finds this divine-spiritual in God the Son. If we compare the conceptions of Anthroposophy with the earlier wisdom of the Father we will find more or less the following situation:—Please do not mind my using a somewhat trivial expression, but I should like to say, that, as far as Christ was concerned, the wisdom of the Father asked above all—”Who was his Father? Let us find out who his Father was and then we shall know him.” Anthroposophy is, of course, placed into modern life, and in working out natural sciences it should of course continue the wisdom of the Father. But Anthroposophy works out the wisdom of the Christ and begins with the Christ. Anthroposophy studies, if I may use this expression, history, and finds in history a descending evolution. It finds the Mystery of Golgotha and from thence an ascending evolution. In the Mystery of Golgotha it finds the central point and meaning of the entire history of man on earth. When Anthroposophy studies Nature it calls the old Father-principle into new life, but when it studies history it finds the Christ. Now it has learned two things. It is just as if I were to travel into a city where I make the acquaintance of an older man; then I travel into another city and I learn to know a younger man. I become acquainted with the older and with the younger, each one for himself. At first they interest me, each one for himself. Afterwards I discover a certain likeness between them. I follow this up and find that the younger man is the son of the older one. In Anthroposophy it is just the same—it learns to know the Father, and later on it learns to know the connection between the two; whereas the ancient wisdom of the Father proceeded from the Father and learned to know the connection between Father and Son at the very outset.

You see, in regard to all things, Anthroposophy must really find a new way, and if we really wish to enter into Anthroposophy, it is necessary to change the way of thinking and of feeling in respect to most things. In Anthroposophy, it is not enough if anthroposophists consider on the one hand a more or less materialistic world conception, or a world conception based more or less on ancient traditional beliefs, and then pass on to Anthroposophy, because this appeals to them more than other teachings. But they are mistaken. We must not only go from one conception to the other—from the materialistic monistic conception to the anthroposophical one—and then say that the latter is the best. Instead we must realize that what enables us to understand the monistic materialistic conception does not enable us to understand the anthroposophical conception. You see, theosophists believed that the understanding of the materialistic monistic conception enabled them also to understand the spiritual. For this reason we have the peculiar phenomenon that in the monistic materialistic world conception people argue as follows:—everything is matter; man consists only of matter—the material substance of the blood, of the nerves, etc.

Everything is matter. Theosophists—I mean the members of the Theosophical Society—say instead:—No, this is a materialistic view; there is the spirit. Now they begin to describe man according to the spirit:—the physical body which is dense, then the etheric body somewhat thinner, a kind of mist, a thin mist—these are in reality quite materialistic ideas! Now comes the astral body, again somewhat thinner, yet this is only a somewhat thin material substance, etc. This leads them up a ladder, yet they obtain merely a material substance that grows thinner and thinner. This too is a materialistic view. For the result is always “matter”, even though this grows thinner and thinner. This is materialism, but people call it “spirit”. Materialism at least is honest, and calls the matter “matter”, whereas, in the other case, spiritual names are given to what people conceive materialistically.

When we look at spiritual images, we must realize that we cannot contemplate these in the same way as we contemplate physical images; a new way of thinking must be found.

Things become very interesting at a special point in the history of the Theosophical Society. Materialism speaks of atoms. These atoms were imagined in many ways and strong materialists, who took into consideration the material quality of the body, formed all kinds of ideas about these atoms. One of these materialists built up a Theory of Atoms and imagined the atom in a kind of oscillating condition, as if some fine material substance were spinning round in spirals.

If you study Leadbeater's ideas on atoms, you will find a great resemblance with this theory.

An essay which appeared recently in an English periodical discussed the question of whether Leadbeater's atom was actually “seen”, or whether Leadbeater contented himself with reading the book on the Theory of Atoms and translating it into a “spiritual” language.

These things must be taken seriously. It matters very much that we should examine ourselves, in order to see if we still have materialistic tendencies and merely call them by all kinds of spiritual names. The essential point is to change our ways of thinking and of feeling—otherwise we cannot reach a really spiritual way of looking at things. This gives us an outlook, a perspective, that will help us to achieve the rise from sin as opposed to the fall into sin.

The battle against occult endeavors is greater today than ever before. It's true that people always fought against them with blood and fire, but never as much as today. You brothers and sisters can help to mitigate this battle that's only brought about by envy You can do a lot by not referring to me as a leader, as so often happens. You can be certain in your hearts and know where you stand, but you shouldn't speak about this publicly.

One can observe a certain periodicity in human life, just as one perceives a periodicity in the outer world. Say that we have an event in our life. This event passes. Things go on for a while, and then there's a repetition of the event. On the schema one sees that the circles get bigger each time. In ordinary human life one can observe that one tries to discard ambition and vanity, also love of ease and laziness. One may have won a certain victory over these defects in ordinary life. When one has gone through an esoteric development for awhile, these defects suddenly stand before us again, and as one can see from the schema, they're much worse than the first time. Now one can try to overcome this vanity, ambition, etc., again, until they approach us again in ever worse forms. But one can also stand still, not overcome, and then one will bring this vanity, etc., into one's esoteric life as poison. The following threefold force will be a good way to overcome these defects.

When our ego and astral body slip into our etheric and physical bodies again in the morning, consciousness arises through the shock of this slipping-in process. There would be no consciousness in this world without the etheric and physical bodies. These two parts that we need for consciousness don't belong to us—we inherited them from our ancestors. It might occur to us on waking that these parts that we got for nothing could also be taken way from us someday then we can understand what sages always said in the morn: “I thank you God that you enabled me to wake up again,” and so on. It's the Father God who enables us to dive down into the physical body again in the morn. When we say the words: It weaves me, we have force that enables us to feel thankfulness for this submersion in the physical body. We have a very powerful mantra in these words. A great feeling of thankfulness must go through us with these words: It weaves me. We have a great source of strength every time we say them. One who can't generate a great feeling of thankfulness shouldn't say them. Our first thought on awakening in the morn will be a prayer of thanks to the Father God who enables us to return to this physical body.

When a man has a life behind him, something will meet him in the spiritual world. What met him in BC times was different from what meets him now. A shock is experienced when one slips into the physical body, which awakens consciousness. After death, we have no physical body, and without this, an I has no consciousness today. What preserves consciousness for the I is the power of the Son, whom we can meet in the spiritual world after death. Here, too, we have a powerful mantra And that is: It works me. We should say it with devotion and reverence and thereby get a preservation of consciousness between death and a new life.

What must also come about is that we go over into spiritual worlds, that we wake up through the Holy spirit, who leads us over there. Here we have the mantra: It thinks me. This must be said with piety. And so we have hope, love and faith. Then threefold love will awaken in man—love of truth, life and creativity. We often run into love of truth, but love of life not so often. Love of life will put every man in the right position to other men. For how can one love life rightly without loving other men? Giving in to someone in everything out of passion isn't a love of life. It's only love of life if one does not excuse all wrongs out of kindness; sometimes it's love if one doesn't give in. The third love, of creativity, is hard to find. We should love all creativity and work. But look at how men turn against anything creative.

Vanity hinders us in the love of truth. And who can still be vain if he cultivates the love of truth. We must increasingly cultivate the love of truth.

Through the love of life we develop sympathy for all life. Egoism is melted by this love. One who has the right love of all life can't remain in egoism.

The love of creativity eliminates all laziness and love of ease.

And so we can say: I love the truth through the Holy Spirit who thinks in me. I love life through the Son who works in me. I love creativity through the Father who weaves in me. Or we can say: We're born in the Father God. We die in Christ, and we'll be resurrected through the Holy Spirit. E D N, I C M, P S S R. We were born in this physical body through the Father Sprit, we die through the Son, and the Holy Spirit gives us the certainty of a resurrection.

And so we'll say the words that were us out of the truth:

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.

Once again we want to look back at those principles of initiation described in yesterday's lecture as having been paralyzed by the advancing intellectualization of culture. Looking back we shall see how those people, in whom these older, atavistic principles of initiation were still alive, confronted Christianity. Out of their perceptions they formulated what subsequently became the contents of dogma and, as such, could no longer be understood after about the eighth or ninth century.

We need only to remember that before the mystery of Golgotha the impulse of the true principle of the human self, the I, was essentially missing in human civilization. The human being was, of course, always organized in such a way as to have the I principle within him; furthermore, he or she was created to shape outer and inner being out of the I principle. But only slowly and by degrees did people come to feel and be conscious of the essence and power of the I. Thus we can say that although the human being, even in the times preceding the mystery of Golgotha, consisted of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the I, human consciousness did not include within it this I being. The I was more or less unconscious. In those olden times people walked on the earth who basically did not live with full consciousness of the I. But it is actually only possible for the I to be active in the human being when the physical body is no longer developing in its full, original freshness. Those human beings who were still unconscious of their I developed their physical bodies in greater freshness than those who had entered into a full consciousness of the I. This arrival of the full consciousness of the I did not occur suddenly; it was taking place both before and after the mystery of Golgotha, but it is clearly perceptible to a spiritual-scientific observation of history.

That which can be maintained in its full freshness in the human physical, etheric, and astral bodies—that can only be maintained as long as something from the divine, spiritual nature is flowing into the human being out of the cosmos. But we could never have become free beings if the I had not appeared on the scene, if the divine-spiritual had not ceased to flow into us in the old sense. Human beings only became free through at the same time achieving mastery of the I within their consciousness. But that was only possible when humanity became involved in the sphere of abstract thoughts. Abstract thoughts are, however, actually the corpses of the spiritual world. I have already pointed this out in these lectures. Just as a corpse is left over from our physical nature when we die on the earth, so too, there remains a corpse left over from the being of soul and spirit that we were in the spiritual world before coming down into the physical world. However, this has only been the case since the human being has been equipped with consciousness of his I. And thoughts, abstract thoughts, represent this corpse. When we become able to take hold of abstract thoughts, we take hold of the corpse of our spiritual and soul being as it was before our descent into the earthly world. But a precondition for our taking hold of the corpse of our spiritual and soul being is that something of the dying and paralyzing principle of death must enter our physical body.

Indeed, the evolution of the human being is such that his nature has changed in the course of his development on earth. The bodies of human beings in olden times were different from those of the newer bodies. The bodies of old were such that within them the human being was unfree, but as he moved about, all the freshness of primal being was manifested in his physical, etheric, and astral activity. Thus one can say that in the civilized world we already live in a period of the evolution of humanity when the body is beginning inwardly to decay. And we attain our freedom precisely through this decaying body, which is the base for our intellectual, abstract thoughts. Through this decaying body the human being has attained all that which a person, as an intellectually imbued scientist, is so proud of today.

Considering this, we must say that before the mystery of Golgotha full consciousness of the self as an I was not yet present in human beings on the earth. Nevertheless, in those times there were a few people who had already developed this full I consciousness, who had developed it through the mystery cults. These people were called initiates. We have already said much concerning what happened to those who underwent initiation in the places of the ancient mysteries, how they ascended to the experience of the fully conscious I at a time when it was the general condition of humankind not yet to have a fully conscious I. But the initiate of old could ascend to this fully conscious I because something entered into him through the sacred enactments in the mysteries, something which had been felt and experienced in all ancient civilizations as the eternal Father in the cosmos. And when the initiate, the mystic, had reached a certain point of his initiation in the ancient mysteries he had an experience that allowed him to say to himself (if we were to imagine such an initiate within the ancient Hebrew civilization): The Father lives in me.

This initiate would characterize what had happened within him through his initiation in the following way: The nature of human beings in general is such that the Father indeed sustains and bears them, but the Father does not enter their consciousness and does not kindle their consciousness to an experience of the I. To ordinary human beings the Father gives only the spirit of breath; he breathes in the human being the breath which is the living soul. But the initiate felt that the living soul that had been breathed into a person was a special spiritual reality, the living Father principle of the cosmos which also entered into the human being. And then when this divine Father principle had entered into such an initiate of the ancient Hebrew world and he had become conscious of it, then he could say, with full justification, what the I meant to him: “I am the I am.” Such a person who went about among ancient peoples and, through the divine Father principle dwelling in him, was qualified to speak the I—which in the entire ancient world was the unutterable name of the Godhead, of the Father God—such a person was seen as the representative of the Father on the Earth. These initiates were called the Fathers who walked among the peoples. They were called Fathers because they represented the divine principle of the Father to other human beings. It was said of them that the divine Father had entered into them in the mysteries. Thus the mysteries were seen as the places within the earthly world where the principle could develop that otherwise only weaves and surges externally through the entire cosmos. Within the mystery centers and through the mystery centers, a tabernacle was built in the human being for the divine Father principle. The human being himself became a tabernacle for the divine Father principle.

Through the mysteries human beings felt the surge of God the Father through the earthly world; and looking out into the cosmos, into the great world beyond, they called it the macrocosm, the great world, inasmuch as they thought of it as permeated by and woven through and through by the divine Father principle. They looked then to the mystery centers, within which a tabernacle had been built for this Father God, within which human beings had themselves become tabernacles of the Father God through initiation; and they called the mysteries, and what a human being had become through the mysteries, the little world, the microcosm. This distinction persisted even into the days of Goethe, for when Goethe became a member of certain lodges he picked up the phrase, “The great world and the little world.” By “great world” he understood the macrocosm and by “little world,” the lodge that was, for him, an image of the “great world.”²⁹

All of this entered into another phase when the mystery of Golgotha was drawing near in the evolution of humanity. Hence, something essentially different had to be considered. During the mystery of Golgotha there were human beings walking on the earth who experienced within themselves something of the independent I. The consciousness of the I had begun to enter into human beings. But at the same time something else began to appear: The human physical body began to be inwardly brittle, to decay. And so at this time, in the middle of earth evolution, human evolution faced a great danger. There was the danger of more and more losing connection with the spiritual world and now there was the danger that the physical body could increasingly decay and fall apart.

To help with this danger the being we know as the Christ resolved to pour himself into Jesus of Nazareth just as the divine Father principle had poured into the initiates in earlier times. This divine Father principle had poured into the initiates. In this way the I was enkindled in, and added to, the physical body, etheric body, and astral body. As I have already said, only those into whom the divine Father had entered were allowed to speak the I, which was itself the unutterable name of God.

But now, in the middle of earth evolution there lived human beings who were beginning to say I of themselves, human beings who had raised the I into consciousness. The Son principle, the Christ principle, now entered into just such a human being, into Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ principle now entered into the I. Whereas in earlier times the Father principle had entered into physical body, etheric body, and astral body, now the Christ principle entered into the human being who had developed himself to that stage further in evolution.

Now remember how I described the human being in the second lecture. I said to you that the plant nullifies within itself physical nature. One might also say that the plant corrupts physical nature. The animal then corrupts the physical and the etheric. And the human being corrupts the physical, the etheric, and the astral. The human being did not corrupt them completely in the period of human development before Golgotha. But thereafter he corrupted them completely as the I really entered fully into our being. Of course, the initiate of the ancient mysteries freed himself entirely from physical body, etheric body, and astral body when he let the divine Father principle flow into him and, already in those days, became an I.

In entering into Jesus of Nazareth, Christ nullified, through his entrance, not only the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, but also the I, to the extent that it was developed in Jesus of Nazareth at that time. So that in Jesus Christ there dwelt the higher Christ principle, which is related to the I in the same way the I of the human being is related to the astral body.

The Christ event was something that the old initiates, in whom higher faculties of vision had developed, were still just able to perceive. When these ancient initiates observed the human being as he was in their time they found him uniting within himself all the forces of the other beings of nature and, as it were, standing above them uniting them all. They saw how one can find in the human physical body the mineral kingdom, in the human etheric body the plant kingdom, in the human astral body the animal kingdom, and then they saw what is actually human. When tidings of this Christ event, of the approaching event of Golgotha, came to the initiates who had achieved clairvoyant seeing in ancient times, to these Fathers of the peoples, at least to those few who were still present—when these tidings came, these initiates could see a being in Christ in whom still more was contained, in whom not merely had earthly being been elevated to the human level but in whom humanity itself had been elevated to the level of being that is spiritual and divine.

If we bear in mind how there is present in the human being something that lives in the external physical body as an expression of essential humanity then we can understand how these initiates saw more in Christ Jesus than a mere man, how they saw walking around on the earth something that went beyond the human, beyond humanity. These initiates saw Christ Jesus in a special radiance. They saw him covered not only with the color of human flesh but with a special shimmering radiance.

Initiates in ancient times could, of course, see this special shining radiance in their fellow initiates. It was the power of the Father principle that dwelled within them. But now they perceived not only that which lived in the old initiates as the divine Father principle; now they perceived something that radiated forth from Christ Jesus in a special way, because not only had physical body, etheric body, and astral body been nullified in him, but also the I—to the extent that the I could be present in a human being at that time.

For this reason not only initiates but also other specially gifted people were able to see Christ Jesus as an especially radiant being. And this was the radically new reality at the time of the mystery of Golgotha—new even to the initiates: that other human beings, though perhaps few in number, who were only endowed with natural powers, not with powers otherwise acquired only in the mysteries, could recognize in Christ Jesus this higher nature.

From this fact came the realization that now, with the mystery of Golgotha, something was supposed to happen that, in earlier times, had taken place only within the mysteries themselves. Something that had formerly taken place only within the mysteries—within the microcosm, the “little world”—had been carried out into the macrocosm, the “great world.” And it is actually the case that, to begin with, the Christ mystery was proclaimed in its clearest and most pure form in the last remaining mystery centers of antiquity. And precisely this proclamation of the mystery of Christ was lost to later civilization in the course of the first four centuries of European evolution. Because in Christ Jesus there lived, not the Father principle alone, but also the Son principle, the old initiates knew that he represented something absolutely unique in earthly development. It was unique in this respect: In the further advance of the earth never again could another mystery of Golgotha appear, never again could such an indwelling of the Son principle in a human being take place, an indwelling such as had occurred in Jesus of Nazareth.

And these initiates knew that Christ had entered into humanity as the healer, as the great healer, as the being who prevents the human body from suffering damage caused by the brittleness which was brought about through the entrance of the I. For what would have happened if Christ had not appeared as the healer? If Christ had not appeared as the healer, then when human beings die, when they lay aside the decaying body, the products of this decay would radiate back into the soul being that the human being unfolds after death. The dead would have been disturbed, tortured, by what the decaying physical body represented in earth existence. These souls who had passed through death would have been forced to see how the earth itself suffers injury when it has to take in a decaying body. And the old initiates knew how those who called themselves Christians in the true sense of the word, who had filled themselves inwardly with the Christ principle, how such men could now look down upon the body taken from them by death, and say: Because we received Christ into ourselves while we were children of the earth we have healed the physical body to the extent that it can be placed into the earth without becoming a principle of decay for the earth itself. What the human being needed in order to become an I had to be healed for the sake of the earth. For in order to become an I he had to have a decaying body; but if this decaying body had persisted the earth would have been harmed. And after death the souls, looking down upon the physical bodies now received by the earth, would have been tormented because they could feel the harm being inflicted upon the earth itself by their decaying physical bodies.

What entered through the mystery of Golgotha was this, that the souls of human beings could say to themselves after they had passed through the gate of death: Yes, we carried this fallen physical body on the earth and we can thank it for the possibility of developing a freer I in our human being. But Christ through his dwelling in Jesus of Nazareth, has healed this physical body so that it is no longer harmful to the earth's existence; and we can calmly look down into earthly existence knowing that after the mystery of Golgotha bad seed is not falling into the earth with the physical body that the human being otherwise needs for the development of the I. And so Christ passed through the mystery of Golgotha in order to heal and sanctify the human physical body for the earth.

But now think what would have happened in the course of earth evolution if things had remained as they were after the Christ event. If things had remained that way then the following could have been said: In ancient times the Father God entered into human beings so they, as souls, could rise up to the I and as initiates could proclaim to others the actual essence of the human being, the being of the I. Then the Son, the Christ, entered into the being of humanity. Those who raise themselves so that Christ can dwell in them rescue their bodies for the earth. Just as through the Father principle, and the indwelling of the Father principle made possible by the mysteries, the human soul nature was rescued—so now the bodily nature of the human being has been saved through the healer, the savior-redeemer, through Christ who went through the mystery of Golgotha.

If this had remained the situation, then those who knew of the redemption of their bodies would have had to bear Christ as the being who is actively working within them, as the being who is even actively working on their bodily nature. And then again human beings could not have become free beings. When inner freedom would have arrived in the fourteenth century A.D., human beings would have evolved so that they could receive the Christ into themselves for the peace of their souls after death, so that their souls would be able to look down upon the earth as I have just described. But they could not have become free. If they had wanted to become good then they would simply have had to let Christ work within them in the same way that the Father worked in ancient times in human beings who were not initiates. In those times human beings became free when the I was developed within them. The initiates became free human beings in ancient times whereas others were unfree, because the Father lived in them beneath their consciousness. If Christians had been beings who were merely conscious of the Christ within them, then whenever they wanted to be good they would have had to extinguish their own I consciousness in order to let Christ awaken within them through the extinguishing of their own I-consciousness. They themselves actually would not have been able to be good; it would only have been Christ in them who was good. Human beings would have had to walk about upon the earth with the Christ dwelling within them, and inasmuch as Christ would have availed himself of the bodies of human beings, the healing of these bodies would have occurred. But the good deeds accomplished by human beings would have been the deeds of Christ, not the deeds of human beings.

That was not the task, the mission, of the divine Son, who had united himself with the evolution of the earth through the mystery of Golgotha. He wanted to live within humanity without clouding the dawning I consciousness of human beings. He did this once—in Jesus, in whom, from the baptism onward, the consciousness of the Son God lived in place of the I consciousness of Jesus. But this was not to happen in the human beings of the times to come. In the people of future times the I was to be able to raise itself to full, clear consciousness, while Christ nevertheless continued to dwell within them.

For this to happen it was necessary for Christ, as such, to disappear from the immediate sight of human beings. Although he remained united with earthly existence, he disappeared from the direct view of human beings. A saying common in the ancient mystery centers became also applicable to him. In the mysteries it was said that when a physically visible being, a being whose existence can be followed by human beings with their perception in the physical world, ceases to be visible—it was said that such a being had “ascended to the heavens,” and passed into those regions where physical visibility no longer exists. And so Christ ascended to heaven and became invisible. In a certain sense he would have retained his visibility if he had dwelled in human beings and eliminated the I, so that they could have become good only because, in reality, the Christ was acting in them.

The kind of vision that enabled the apostles, the disciples, to behold Christ even after his resurrection—that kind of vision disappeared. Christ had ascended to the heavens. But he sent to human beings that divine being who does not extinguish I consciousness. This is the being to whom the human being raises himself, not with earthly perception, but with imperceptible spirit. Christ sent humanity the Holy Spirit.

So actually it is the Holy Spirit who is sent by Christ in order that man might retain his consciousness of self, of his I, while Christ himself lives in the unconsciousness of human beings. Thus, if he realizes in the full sense of the word what his being really is, the human being will say: When I look back to what the ancient initiates knew, then I see that in me lives the Father principle which fills the cosmos and which arose in these initiates and developed the I in them. That is the principle that lives within us before we come down into the physical world. Through the Father principle dwelling in them, the ancient initiates remembered, with complete clarity, the way they had lived before they descended into the physical world. They sought the divine in the realm of being that precedes birth, in the realm of preexistence: Ex deo nascimur.

After the mystery of Golgotha human beings could no longer say, “I behold the Christ.” Otherwise they could not have become good through themselves, only Christ within could have done the good. And the truth could only have been In Christo morimur. The human being could die in Christ, through the principle of death within him he could unite with Christ. But the human being's new consciousness could be awakened through the Holy Spirit, the being sent to him by Christ: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

There you have the inner connection of the Trinity. This shows you, too, something else that is definitely a part of Christianity. Even without perception of Christ within, a human being can achieve the awakening of the spirit. By sending the Holy Spirit Christ gave humanity the ability to raise itself to an understanding of the spiritual out of the life of intellect itself. Hence it should not be said that the human being cannot grasp the spiritual, the super-sensible, through his own spirit. A man could only justify his inability to understand the spirit if he ignored the Holy Spirit, if he spoke only of the Father God and the Christ God. For those willing to see and read it is also clearly indicated—for it is a revelation in and of itself—that the human being can understand the super-sensible through the spirit dwelling within him, if he only inclines himself to Christ. It is for this reason that we are told that the Holy Spirit appeared at the baptism of Christ. And with the appearance of the Holy Spirit these words resound through the cosmos: “This is my beloved Son; this day I have begotten him.”

The Father is the unbegotten begetter who places the Son into the physical world. But at the same time the Father uses the Holy Spirit in order to tell humanity that in the spirit, the super-sensible is comprehensible, even if this spirit is itself not perceptible but only works inwardly to elevate the merely abstract intellect to the realm of the living. In the spirit the super-sensible can be understood when the corpse of thoughts that we have from our pre-birth existence is raised to life through the Christ dwelling within us. And when Christ sent the Holy Spirit to his disciples—this imparting occurred through the Christ, through the Son. For this reason it was an ancient dogma that the Father is the unbegotten begetter, that the Son is the one begotten by the Father, and that the Holy Spirit is the one imparted to humanity by the Father and the Son. This is not some kind of arbitrarily asserted dogma but rather the wisdom of initiation living in the earliest Christian centuries; only later was it covered over and buried along with the teachings concerning the Trichotomy and the Trinity.

The divine principle working as Christianity within evolving humanity cannot be understood without the Trinity. If, in the place of the Trinity, some other teaching concerning God were to enter, then basically speaking it would not be a fully Christian teaching. One must understand the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit if one would understand the teaching concerning God concretely and in a genuine way.

The Gospel itself was no longer understood when Scholasticism decreed that the human being has revelation only in faith, that he cannot reach the super-sensible through his own human knowledge. This decree concerning human knowledge, which was separated off from faith, was itself a sin against Christianity: it was a sin against the proclamation of the Holy Spirit through the Father at the baptism of Jesus and through Jesus himself when he sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Thus within the development of European civilization many sins were committed in what continued to call itself Christianity, many sins were committed against the original impulses of Christianity. Today it is really necessary for humanity to turn back to these original impulses of Christianity. In many ways these original Christian impulses have hardened into dogmas. But if one penetrates into the living spirit then what is essentially true in these dogmas can catch fire. Then they will cease to be dogmas. What is false in the Church is not that it has propagated the dogmas but that it has frozen and crystallized them, has taken them away from the realm of human knowledge. Because human knowledge was limited to only what is in the world of the senses the dogmas had to be crystallized, had to become no longer understandable. For it is an impossibility that faith alone could ever really bring understanding. What must be rescued within humanity is knowledge itself; knowledge must be led back to the super-sensible.

Fundamentally speaking, this challenge reaches to us from Golgotha when we rightly understand it, when we know how, after going through the mystery of Golgotha, Christ sent into humanity, in addition to this divine Father principle, the Holy Spirit. Whoever beholds the cross on Golgotha must at the same time behold the Trinity, for in reality Christ shows and makes manifest the Trinity in all the ways he is interwoven with the earthly evolution of humanity.

This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to bring to you today, which will provide us with the basis for further studies in the future.

• 29. Goethe was a member of the secret fraternal order of Free and Accepted Masons. Not restricted to stoneworkers, it retains much of the spirit and code of the medieval mason's guild.

A study of two of the most significant pictures in the world can help us to see the way in which the Theosophist should make his life's ideal into the very content of his soul. By means of these two pictures Raphael was able, in an age of great artistic development, to give utterance to the impressions and feelings which passed through his soul concerning the evolution of mankind through many centuries. The picture called “The School of Athens” (so-called in Baedeker, but it would be better if this name were allowed to disappear), and the picture called the “Disputa”—what do these, pictures represent when we study them in order to discover the great thoughts that underlie them, as well as the artistic impression they make upon us?

I have had the opportunity of seeing these pictures several times; as you know, they are in Rome, at the Vatican, in the famous Raphael Room ... You can always see people standing there with their guide-books and reading: This is Socrates, that is Plato, that other is Aristotle, and so on. They are immensely pleased when Baedeker enables them to discover whom this or the other figure represents, whether this one here is a bishop or an early Father of the Church, whether another is Paul or Peter or Moses … But how little has all this to do with the artistic value of the pictures! I should like to suggest by rather a grotesque supposition how one can approach such pictures in an artistic way. In this case the artistic and theosophical methods of approach are one and the same.

We know that there are inhabitants of Mars, although they are of course very different in appearance from the inhabitants of Earth. For us however they are very real beings. To be sure, we do not interest ourselves in that wild idea of some modern visionaries as to whether it might not be possible to draw the theorem of Pythagoras in lines of electric light over a great tract of Siberia and in this way set up communication with the inhabitants of Mars. We will leave such dreaming to the materialistic visionaries of our day. Anyone who takes his stand on the ground of reality knows that the inhabitants of Mars are of quite a different nature from those of Earth. But now let us suppose that one of these Mars inhabitants were to descend to Earth and let us imagine that he visited the Vatican picture-galleries and saw there these two pictures by Raphael. We could not expect that he should at once study the whole history of Greek philosophy and the whole spiritual development of the Middle Ages, in order that we might be able to converse with him in our own way. For it would, you know, seem quite ridiculous to him if we were to begin explaining, “Here is Augustine, there is Ambrose,” and so on. If he could speak an earthly language at all, he would probably reply, “I do not know these gentlemen!” We have a general acquaintance with them, having assimilated certain ideas about them—whether right or wrong need not concern us now. The artistic impression produced upon one by these pictures is not altered in the least because the beholder happens to be an inhabitant of Mars, who knows nothing of Mr. Aristotle or Mr. Plato or Mr. Socrates; for the artistic impression depends solely and entirely upon what confronts us in the picture, and makes itself best felt when we pay no attention at all to anything but what speaks from the picture itself. The inhabitant of Mars would therefore really be the best observer from a purely artistic point of view.

Let us try to enter into the feelings of such a one on his first descent to Earth, who has not been given a handbook of Greek and Mediaeval philosophy. He would say to himself: “I see figures, human figures, in these pictures—but I see no figures like them among the men of to-day.” For indeed it is hardly likely that among the people standing there with him and looking at the pictures he should recognise any as being persons of like dignity and importance.

He would however become aware in the pictures of something that must have grown out of the life of Earth itself. He would read in them that the inhabitants of Earth desire to say something which is not connected with any particular moment of time, but with the whole of Earth. He could contemplate the one picture and say “Here I see very remarkable forms,—two figures in the centre, and on their right and left other figures. I notice a certain expression—the uplifted hand of the one, the hand of the other pointing to the ground,”—and so on. (He would see all this without having any knowledge of Plato or Aristotle.) “There are also persons doing something or other in various parts of the picture. And around all these human beings is nothing but quite simple architectural forms. It can however also be seen that in the hearts and souls of these people something is living. That can quite clearly be noticed!”

Now suppose the inhabitant of Mars turns his attention to the other picture. It has quite a different appearance. There he sees, down below, a world which looks much the same as our external world to-day. Up above, he finds a scene that could only be represented by bringing together things which do not belong together in the external world. For there we behold human forms among the clouds—and yet in such a way as to recall something quite real and true. And higher up still, above this interweaving of the forms of clouds and men, figures are to be seen on a golden background which have little left to remind one of the human form. What would the visitor from Mars say,—who knows nothing of the spiritual life of Earth, and only judges the pictures by what they themselves tell him?

He would be compelled to say: “These men have the Earth around them; but there are times when they feel the need to express a world the physical eyes do not see, a world completely remote from the senses, and which they can only represent by clouds and human forms interwoven together, and by forms on a golden background that bear no resemblance to man. There must therefore be something by means of which these men are able to raise themselves; they must have inner forces, stronger than all, they meet with in the world of sense. That other world must have come into some relation with them.” And he would ask himself the question: “How did these men come into touch with that other world?”

He would then see the wonderful group which we call “God the Father,” “God the Son,” and “The Dove” as the expression of the Spirit; and, below, an Altar, and upon it the Host, the symbol of the Lord's Supper. Since the evolution of Mars is not yet so far advanced as the evolution of Earth, there is nothing on Mars like what we have on Earth in the two thousand years' tradition of Christianity. The visitor from Mars would accordingly not know what this picture represents. But from the relation of the groups on the right and left to the central group he could see that through the power of the symbol something is being given to the souls which opens to them the higher worlds.

Our visitor would then examine the pictures more closely and discover that in the first picture there are all manner of figures, but among them in particular two female figures, one on the right hand and one on the left. And remarkable figures they are! As one looks at them it is evident that they differ totally in their expression and even in their dress. Let us study them a little.

Looking at the one on the left (we are standing in front of the so-called “School of Athens”), we see in the whole expression something indicative of the Earthly kingdom of sense here below, and of what the senses directly give us. Male figures stand all around; and one dimly feels that what dwells in the heads of these men belongs to the world of sense. What presents itself to us in the female figure? Her expression conveys to us that which is living in the heads and souls of the men, until we come to her white garment, the garment of innocence, showing us that the force which comes from the mere working of the things of sense has not yet been active in her. We understand the countenances of the men when we understand what this female figure expresses.

And now let us pass to the other female figure on the right-hand side of the same picture. She is quite different, and already begins to notice what the men are doing. Whereas the left-hand figure indicates only the physical environment, the right-hand figure is following what the men have done, her gaze follows what the human spirit has brought forth. Even if we know nothing of Greek Philosophy, we can quite clearly see that there is an advance from the left to the right side of the picture. On the right hand we see what the men have made of their environment. (It really goes much further; it is expressed also in the colour.)

Now these two women appear also in the other picture, which is called the “Disputa.” Here again we see the figure first on the left, where people are standing, contemplating with rapture the symbol in the centre. We are looking into early times when the Christian religion was still entirely a religion of feeling, when Wisdom itself was still nothing but feeling. On every countenance we can see a kind of enthusiasm for Christianity, and all hearts are filled with warm feeling. This is reflected too in the female figure. And now when we pass to the other side of the picture we see again a progress. Here we have the Christian philosophers who have brought their knowledge to bear on the whole content of the Christian Wisdom.

There is St. Augustine dictating, and the woman writing it down. We could really reconstruct a great part of the history of man from the whole way in which Raphael has worked out this motif, with his great knowledge and understanding and his wonderful artistic powers. All that is living in the souls of the men is brought to expression in this woman figure, which we find four times repeated in the pictures.

The above is no more than a first rough sketch for a consideration of these pictures. The two paintings have to be studied together one after the other. They are an expression of what happened from the pre-Christian age down to the later part of the Middle Ages, and they express it in artistic form. Just imagine how great and mighty must have been the impression made upon a really sensitive soul who saw these pictures, first one and then the other, and said to himself:—“I am myself inter woven into this onward path of Wisdom, which mankind follows in the course of evolution; I am part of it, I belong to the march of events as it is shown in these pictures.” For the man who understood the sense of evolution in those days really felt this. He looked back to the pre-Christian age when men were surrounded only by the world of sense, just as the architecture surrounds the people in the picture; and he beheld too a time when through the entrance of Christ Jesus into human evolution the spiritual was revealed to mankind. He felt that he belonged to all this; he felt how his own existence takes part in the life of thousands and thousands of years. What lived in men's souls was borne along the flow of fantasy and streamed into the hand of the painter, who painted these pictures in order that men should meet in the outer world that which dwells in the inner world. For the Theosophist these pictures can he an earnest call and summons to inscribe the great ideal into his soul.

Let us look with the eye of the spirit at the “Disputa.” In the centre we see “God the Father,” then “God the Son” or Christ, and below, the Dove or the Holy Spirit. And now let us recall many other pictures that are to be found in various galleries. Whenever you have opportunity to visit picture galleries, you will find pictures of this kind, created out of good and great traditions. You will often meet with the following motif,—Christ coming forth from a figure like a bird, Christ being born as it were from a winged being. For the whole mystery of Christ, His whole descent from the higher worlds was formerly felt as a kind of breaking loose from a nature which had itself been born as a higher world,—higher even in the spatial sense. Hence the descent out of a birdlike form. Christ born from the bird,—let us hold the motif before our soul, and with that study the “Disputa.”

Here we find another “bird-being,”—the. Dove of the Spirit. The Dove of the Spirit, what a great riddle that is among all the Christian symbols! Much, very much is contained within it. The painters of the future will have to paint what comes to birth from out of this Dove of the Spirit. This Dove of the Spirit is a transitory symbol; something else will take its place in the Trinity. The day will come when from the Dove of the Spirit will be born, as it were, the human soul that is liberated by the wisdom of Theosophy. Every human soul that has the will to receive the spirit of Theosophy will be born again at a higher stage—spiritually, in a new form. This Dove of the Spirit will break its form, and from it will come forth the human soul which will have for its life-blood the spiritual conception of the world which meets us to-day in its first form as Theosophy. Other figures, new figures, will be around the symbol. And these liberated ones will show in their countenances what is living in their souls,—how through the events of the spiritual world as they reveal themselves to one who can rise above the world of sense, the soul is set free, and how then these liberated souls can each confront every other with real brotherly love.

And so it seems to me good that we should sometimes have these pictures before us, inasmuch as they are at the same time a prophetic foreshadowing of a third picture, A pre-Christian conception of the world is expressed in the first picture; the second expresses what has come about through Christ in the world of form; and what will come about through the Spirit, which has been sent by Christ and will divest itself of its coverings, will be expressed in the third picture that can stand before the soul of every Theosophist as a great and mighty ideal. This picture cannot be painted yet, for the models are not yet here; but in our own souls the two pictures must already be finding their completion in the third …

Anthroposophical friends in Berne have already heard that the aim of the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum was to bring a new trend into the Anthroposophical Movement. The importance of becoming conscious of this new trend cannot be stressed too often, for the gist of the matter is this: before the Christmas Foundation Meeting—in practice at any rate, even if not invariably—the Anthroposophical Society was regarded as a sort of administrative centre for the content and the impulse of Anthroposophy. This, essentially, has been the position since the Anthroposophical Society made itself independent of the Theosophical Society.

You know that I myself had no place on the Society's Executive, but have so to say held a completely free position within the Society. And in this situation the Society's development has not proceeded as it certainly could have done. The fact is that Members have been too little alive to what might have developed on this basis. What happened was that from about the year 1919 onwards—after the War, during which the problem of leadership of the Society was a very difficult one—all kinds of efforts were made and undertakings set on foot within the Society. These undertakings were the outcome of ambitions among the Membership and proved to be detrimental to the real anthroposophical work—detrimental in the sense that they aroused very strong hostility from the outside world. Naturally, when such undertakings are set on foot in a Society resting upon occult foundations, one must, for esoteric reasons, let them be. For think of it—if from the beginning I had stood in the way of all these undertakings, most of those engaged in them would have been saying to-day that if only this or that had happened it would have led to favourable results. But there is no doubt at all that these things made the position of the Anthroposophical Movement in the world increasingly difficult.

I do not want to go into details but to take a more positive line: let me say only that the time had come to counteract by something positive the negative trend that had gradually appeared in the Society. Before the Christmas Foundation Meeting I often found it necessary to emphasise that a real foundation like the Anthroposophical Movement—which is in truth a spiritual stream guided and led from the super-sensible worlds by spiritual Powers and spiritual Forces which are reflected here in the physical worlds—should not be identified with the Anthroposophical Society, which is simply an administrative body for the cultivation—as far as it is capable of this—of the anthroposophical impulse.

But since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum this has completely changed. And it was only because of this change that there was reason and purpose in my taking over the Presidency myself, in cooperation with an Executive which as a unified organism can work with great intensity for the Anthroposophical Movement. This means that the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society are now one. Therefore what was not the position before the Christmas Foundation Meeting has changed fundamentally since that Meeting. Henceforward the Anthroposophical Society is to be identical with the Anthroposophical Movement as presented in the world. But it has thus become essential that the esoteric impulse flowing through the Anthroposophical Movement shall also find expression in the whole constitution of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore since this Christmas Foundation Meeting in Dornach it must be recognised, unconditionally, that the establishment of the Dornach Executive is itself an esoteric matter, that a stream of true esotericism must flow through the Society, and that the institution of the Executive is to be regarded as an esoteric deed. This was the premise on which the Executive was formed.

Further, it must always be remembered that from now onwards the Anthroposophical Society will no longer exist merely as a body for the administration of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy itself must be practised in everything that happens in the Anthroposophical Society. What is done must itself be anthroposophical. That, apparently, is what it is so difficult to realise. Nevertheless friends must gradually get it into their consciousness that this fundamental change has taken place.

As a first step, in the News Sheet appended to the Goetheanum Weekly, an effort has been made to introduce into the Society something that can provide unified substance for the membership, can further a unified flow of spiritual reality through the Movement. A unified trend of thought is made possible, particularly through the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’ which should be a kind of basic seed for work in the Groups. It is really remarkable that so much misunderstanding still exists as to what the Anthroposophical Movement really is.

A short while ago I received a letter from a fairly recent Member of the Anthroposophical Society. This letter expatiated on the alleged incorporation of the Christian Community into the Anthroposophical Society. (The matter is of no importance here in Switzerland, but I mention it as an example.) At a certain point I had made it quite clear from the Goetheanum in Dornach how the relationship between this Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society is to be thought of. I emphasised that I cannot in any way be regarded as the Founder of the Christian Community on the basis of the Anthroposophical Society, but that the Christian Community formed itself, through me, by the side of the Anthroposophical Society. At the time I used the expression “through me as a private individual.” The letter referred to seizes hold of this expression, “private individual,” after saying that a renewal of religion cannot come about through a human being but only from the higher spheres, for a renewal of religion can be achieved only by divine-spiritual Powers. That is quite right, but something has been overlooked ... and it is essential for this ‘something’ to be fully grasped in the Anthroposophical Society. What must be grasped is that the Anthroposophical Movement as such—in which moreover there also lies the source for a renewal of religion—certainly does not owe its origin to a human impulse alone but has been sent into the world under the influence of divine-spiritual Powers and by their impulse. Only when Anthroposophy itself is seen to be a spiritual reality which flows as an esoteric impulse through civilisation will it be possible to have the right point of view when some other body comes into being with its source in Anthroposophy ... and an objection like that contained in the letter cannot arise. The consciousness must be there that henceforward the Anthroposophical Society will be led from the Goetheanum on an esoteric basis.

Connected with this is the fact that a completely new trend will pervade the Anthroposophical Movement as it must now be conceived. Therefore you too, my dear friends, will notice how differently it has been possible to speak since that time. In the future it will amount to this: in all measures taken by the Anthroposophical Movement, which is now identical with the Anthroposophical Society, the responsibility is to the spiritual Powers themselves. But this must be correctly understood. It must be realised that the title “General Anthroposophical Society” may not be used in connection with any event or fixture organised without understanding having first been reached with the Dornach Executive; that anything inaugurated by Dornach may not be made further use of without corresponding agreement with the Executive. I am obliged to speak of this because it is constantly happening that lectures, for instance, are given under the alleged auspices of the General Anthroposophical Society without any application for permission having been made to Dornach. Matters which have an esoteric foundation, formulae and the like, are sometimes adopted without obtaining the agreement of the Dornach Executive ... and this is absolutely essential, for we have to do with realities, not with administrative measures or formalities. So for all these and similar matters, agreement must be sought from or a request made to the Dornach Executive. If agreement is not forthcoming, the arrangements in question will not be regarded as issuing from the Anthroposophical Movement. This would have in some way to be made plain.

Everything that savours of bureaucracy, all administrative formalities must in the future be eliminated from the Anthroposophical Society. Relationship within the Anthroposophical Society is a purely human relationship; everything is based upon the human reality. Perhaps I may mention here too that this is already indicated by the fact that every one of the 12,000 Membership Cards now being issued are personally signed by me. I was advised to have a rubber stamp made for the signature, but I shall not do so. It is only a minor point but there is, after all, a difference when I have let my eyes rest on the name of a Member; thereby the personal relationship—abstract though it be—has been made. Even if it is an external detail it should nevertheless be an indication that in future we shall endeavour to make relationships personal and human. Thus, for example, when it was recently asked in Prague whether the Bohemian Landesgesellschaft can become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, the decision had to be that this is not possible; individual human beings alone can become members of the Anthroposophical Society; they can then join together to form Groups. But they become Members as individuals and have the Membership Card as such. Legal entities—in other words, non-human entities—will have no such Card. Similarly the Statutes are not official regulations but a simple statement of what the esoteric Executive in Dornach wishes, out of its own initiative, to do for the Anthroposophical Movement. In future, all these things must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Only so will it be possible to bring into being in the Anthroposophical Society the attitude which, if it were absent, would make it impossible for me to take over the Presidency of the Society.

Through the Christmas Foundation, a new character and impulse is to enter into all our work. In the future, whatever is said will have a spiritual source—so that many things that have happened recently, can happen no longer. A great deal of the hostility, for instance, has arisen as a result of provocative actions in the Society. Naturally, all kinds of questionable elements play a part, but in the future we can no longer adopt towards the hostility the attitude we have adopted in the past. For the Lecture-Courses are available for everyone and can be obtained from the Anthroposophisch-Philosophischer Verlag. We shall not let them be advertised in the Book Trade; their release is not to be taken to mean that they will be handed over to the Book Trade, but they will be accessible to everyone. This fact in itself refutes the statement that the Anthroposophical Society is a secret society with secret literature. In the future, however, a very great deal will flow through the Anthroposophical Movement in respect of which no kind of relation with a hostile outside world will be possible. Much of what will be introduced into the teachings of the Anthroposophical Society in the future will be of such a nature that it will inevitably evoke hostility in the outside world; but we shall not worry about it because it is a matter of course.

And so I want to speak to you to-day in this spirit, to speak particularly of how different a light is shed upon the historical evolution of mankind when the study of karmic relationships in world-existence is pursued in real earnest.

At the very first gathering held in Berlin for the purpose of founding the German Section of the Theosophical Society, I chose for a lecture I proposed to give, the title: Practical Questions of Karma. I wanted to introduce then what I intend to achieve now, namely, the serious and earnest study of Karma.

In the German Section of the Theosophical Society at the time there were several old Members of the Society. They literally quaked at my intention to begin in such an esoteric way. And in actual fact the attitude and mood for it were not there. It was quite obvious how little the people were prepared in their souls for such things. It was impossible at that time to proceed with the theme ‘Practical Questions of Karma’ in the form that had been intended. Conditions made it necessary to speak in a much more exoteric way. But now, with more than two decades of preparatory work behind us, a beginning must be made with real esotericism. The Christmas Foundation Meeting, when the esoteric impulse came into the Society, has actually taken place, and so now a link can be made with that time when the intention was to introduce this esoteric trend into the Society.

What is the historical evolution of humanity, when we consider what is revealed by the fact of repeated earthly lives? When some personality appears as a leading figure in the evolution of humanity, we must say: This personality is the bearer of an Individuality of soul-and-spirit who was already present many times in earthly existence and who carries over into this earthly life the impulses from earlier incarnations. Only in the light of his earlier earthly lives can we really understand such a personality. From this we see at once how what was working in earlier epochs of world-history is carried over from those earlier epochs by human beings themselves. The civilisation of to-day has developed out of the human beings who belong to the present in the wider sense. But they, after all, are the same souls who were there in earlier epochs and assimilated what those earlier civilisations brought into being; they themselves have carried it over into the present. The same applies to epochs other than the present. Only when we can discover what has been carried over by human souls from one epoch into the other can we understand this onflowing stream of the impulses working in civilisation. But then we have history in the concrete, not in the abstract. People usually speak only about ideas working in world-history, about moral will or moral impulses in general which carry over the fruits of civilisation from one epoch into the others. But the bearers of these fruits of earlier civilisations are the human souls themselves, for they incarnate again and again. Moreover it is only in this way that an individual realises what he has himself become, how he has carried over that which forms the basis of his bodily destiny, his destiny in good and evil alike. When, as a first step, we ponder how history has been carried from one epoch into another by the human beings themselves in their repeated earthly lives, then, and only then are the secrets, the great enigmas of historical evolution, unveiled.

To-day I want to show by three examples how karma works through actual personalities. One of these examples leads us into the wide arena of history; the other two deal more with the reincarnations of particular individuals.

Our modern civilisation contains a great many elements that are really not altogether in keeping with Christianity, with true Christian evolution. Natural science is brought even into the elementary schools, with the result that it has an effect upon the thinking even of people who have no scientific knowledge. These impulses are really not Christian. Whence do they originate?

You all know that about six hundred years after the founding of Christianity, Arabism, inspired by Mohammed, began to spread abroad. In Arabism, Mohammed founded a body of doctrine which in a certain sense was at variance with Christianity. To what extent at variance? The concept of the three forms of the Godhead—Father, Son, Spirit—is of the very essence of Christianity. The origin of this lies away back in the ancient Mysteries in which a man was led through four preparatory stages and then through three higher stages. When he had reached the fifth stage, he came forth as a representative of the Christ; at the seventh and highest stage as a representative of the Father. I want only to make brief mention of this.

It is the Trinity that makes it possible for the impulse of freedom to have its place in the evolution of Christianity. We look upwards to the Father God, seeing in the Father God the spirituality implicit in all those forces of the Universe which go out from the Moon to Earth existence. All those forces which in Earth existence have to do with the impulses of physical germination—in man, therefore, with propagation—proceed from the Moon. It must, of course, always be remembered that the human process of reproduction has its spiritual side. From the pre-earthly existence of spirit-and-soul we come down to earthly existence, uniting with a physical body. But everything that is responsible for placing the human being, from birth onwards, into earthly life, is a creative act of the Father God, a creative act for the Earth through the Moon forces. Therefore inasmuch as throughout an earthly life man is subject to the working of the Moon forces, he is already predestined when he enters earthly existence to be exposed to impulses of a very definite kind. Hence, too, it is the essential characteristic of a Moon religion, a religion like that of the ancient Hebrews, in which the Father Principle is predominant, always to attach value in the human being only to what has been bestowed upon him through the forces of the Father God, through the Moon forces. When Christianity was founded, ancient Mystery-truths were still current in Christ's environment—truths deriving, for example, from specific phenomena of life in the earliest period of post-Atlantean evolution. Grotesque as they seem to-day, these phenomena were grounded in the very nature of man.

During the first epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation, the ancient Indian epoch, when a man had reached the age of thirty a radical change, a complete metamorphosis, took place in his earthly life. So radical was the change that, expressed in modern words, it would have been perfectly possible for a man who had passed his thirtieth year to meet a younger man whom he had known quite well, perhaps as a friend, but when this younger man greeted him the other would simply not understand what he was trying to do. ... When the older man had passed the age of thirty he had forgotten everything he had hitherto experienced on the Earth! And whatever impulse worked in him in the later years of his life was imparted to him by the Mysteries. This is how things were in the earliest period after the Atlantean catastrophe. If he wanted to know what his life had been before his thirtieth year, a man was obliged to enquire about it from the little community around him. At the age of thirty the soul was so completely transformed that the man was veritably a new being; he began a new existence, just as he had done at birth. In those days it was known that until the thirtieth year of life the forces of youth were at work: thereafter, it was the task of the Mysteries, with the very real impulses they contained, to see to it that a genuinely human existence should continue in the man's soul. And this the Mysteries were able to do because they were in possession of the secret of the Son.

Christ lived in an age when the secrets of the Son—I can do no more than touch upon them here—had been lost, were known only to small circles of men. But because of the experience undergone in His thirtieth year, Christ was able to reveal that He, as the last to do so, had received the Son-impulse directly from the Cosmos—in the way it must be received if after his thirtieth year a man is to be dependent upon the Sun forces just as hitherto he was dependent upon the Moon forces. Christ has enabled men to understand that the Son-principle within him is the Sun Being once awaited in the Mysteries but then as a Being not yet on the Earth. And so, just as in the ancient Mysteries men had gazed into the secrets of the Sun, it was made clear to them that their gaze must now turn to the Christ, realising that now the Sun Mystery had entered into man. In the first centuries of Christianity this wisdom was completely exterminated. Star-wisdom, cosmic wisdom, was exterminated and a materialistic conception of the Mystery of Golgotha gradually took shape; Christ was thought of as nothing more than a being who had dwelt in Jesus but men were unwilling to realise what had actually come to pass.

Those who were true knowers in the first Christian centuries were able to say: As well as the Father God there is God the Son, the Christ God. The Father God rules over whatever is predetermined in man because it is born with him and works in him as the forces of Nature. It is upon this principle that the Hebrew religion is based. But by the side of it, Christianity places the power of the Son which during the course of man's life draws into his soul as a creative force, making him free and enabling him to be reborn, realising that in his earthly life he can become something that was not predetermined by the Moon forces at birth.—Such was the essential impulse of Christianity in the first centuries of its existence.

Mohammedanism set its face against this impulse in its far-reaching decree: There is no God save the God proclaimed by Mohammed. It is a retrogression to the pre-Christian principle, but clothed in a new form—as was inevitable six hundred years after the founding of Christianity. The God of Nature, the Father God—not a God of freedom by whom men are led on to freedom—was proclaimed as the one and only God. Within Arabism, where Mohammedanism was making headway, this was favourable for a revival and renewal of the fruits of ancient cultures, and such a revival, with the exclusion of Christianity, did indeed take place in the Orient, on a magnificent scale. Together with the warlike campaigns of Arabism there spread from East towards the West—in Africa as it were enveloping Christianity—an impulse to revive ancient culture.

Over in Asia, Arabism was cultivated with great brilliance at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—at the time when Charles the Great was reigning in Europe. But whereas Charles the Great hardly progressed beyond the stage of being able to read and write, of developing the most primitive rudiments of culture, great and illustrious learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. It cannot, perhaps, be said that Haroun al Raschid in himself was an entirely good man, but he possessed a comprehensive, penetrating and ingenious mind—a universal mind in the best sense. He gathered at his Court all the sages who were the bearers of whatever knowledge was available at that time: poets, philosophers, doctors, theologians, architects—all these branches of learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Rashid, brought thither by his genius.

At this Court there lived a most distinguished and significant personality, one who—in an incarnation earlier than the one at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—had been an Initiate in the true sense. You will ask: Does an Initiate, then, not remain an Initiate as he passes through his incarnations? It is possible for a man to have been a deep Initiate in an earlier epoch and then, in a new epoch, he must use the body and receive the education which this later epoch has to offer. In such a case the forces deriving from the earlier incarnation will have to be held in the subconsciousness and whatever is in keeping with the current civilisation will have to be developed. There are men who seem, outwardly, to be products of the particular civilisation in which they are living; but their manner of life enables one to perceive in them the existence of deeper impulses; in earlier times they were Initiates. Nor do they lose the fruits of Initiation; out of their subconsciousness they act in accordance with its principles. But they cannot do otherwise than adapt themselves to the conditions of the existing civilisation.

The personality of whom tradition says that he made magnificent provision for all the sciences at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was only one of the most eminent sages of his time, with a genius for organisation so outstanding that he was virtually the source of much that was achieved at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

The spread of Arabism continued for many centuries, as we know from the wars waged by Europe in an attempt to keep it within bounds. But that was not the end of it: the souls who were once active in Arabism passed through the gate of death, developed onwards in the spiritual world and remained connected, in a sense, with their work. This was what happened in the case of the Individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of the wise Counsellor who lived at his Court.

To begin with, let us follow Haroun al Raschid. He passes through the gate of death and develops onwards in the spiritual world. In its external form, Arabism is repulsed; Christianity implants itself into Middle and Western Europe in the exoteric form it has gradually acquired. But although it is impossible to continue to be active in the old form of Mohammedanism, of Arabism, in Europe, it is very possible for the souls who once shared in this brilliant culture at the Court of Haroun al Raschid and there received the impulse for further achievements, to work on. And that is what they do.

We find that Haroun al Raschid himself reincarnates in the renowned personality of Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon—the distinguished Englishman whose influence has affected the whole of modern scientific thinking, and therewith much that is to be found in the minds of human beings to-day. Haroun al Raschid could not disseminate from London, from England, a form of culture strictly aligned with Arabism ... this soul was obliged to make use of the form of Arabism that was possible in the West. But the fundamental trend and tendency of what Bacon poured into European thinking is the old Arabism in the new form. And so Arabism lives in the scientific thinking of to-day, because Francis Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid.

The sage who had lived at his Court also passed through the gate of death, but he took a different path. He could not come down into a stream of culture as materialistic as that into which Francis Bacon could enter; he had inevitably to remain within a more spiritual stream. And so it came about that in the epoch when the influence of Francis Bacon was also taking effect, another individuality was working—in this case in Middle Europe—one who in his life of soul encountered what had issued from the soul of the reborn Haroun al Raschid. We see the Bacon stream pouring out from England to Middle Europe, from West to East, bringing Arabism in the form it had acquired in its sweep across Spain and France. It is comprehensible, therefore, that the tenor and content of this soul should differ from the tenor and content of that other soul—who passed through the gate of death, during the period of existence in the spiritual world directed its gaze toward Eastern and Middle Europe, and was reborn in Middle Europe as Amos Comenius. He resuscitated what he had learned from oriental wisdom at the Court of Haroun al Raschid inasmuch as in the seventeenth century he was the one who with much forcefulness promulgated the thought that the evolution of mankind is pervaded by organised spirituality. It is often said, superficially, that Comenius believed in the Kingdom of a Thousand Years. That is a trivial way of putting it. The truth is that Comenius believed in definite epochs in the evolution of humanity; he believed that historical evolution is organised from the spiritual world. His aim was to show that spirituality surges and weaves through the whole of Nature; he wrote a “Pan-Sophia.” There is a deeply spiritual trend in what he achieved. He became an educational reformer. As is known, his aim in education was to achieve concrete perceptibility (Anschaulichkeit) but a thoroughly spiritual perceptibility, not as in materialism. I cannot deal with this in detail but can only indicate how Arabism in its Western form and in its Oriental form issued from what arose in Middle Europe from the meeting of the two spiritual impulses connected with Bacon and Comenius.

Many aspects of the civilisation of Middle Europe can become intelligible to us only when we see how Arabism—in the form in which it could now be re-cast—was actually brought over from Asia by individuals who had once lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. This shows us how human Individuality is an active factor in the evolution of history. And then, by studying examples as striking as these, we can learn from them how karma works through the incarnations. As I have said on various occasions, what we learn from this study can be applied to our own incarnation. But to begin with we must have concrete examples.

Let us now take an example in which this country will be particularly interested. Let us take the example of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet. The very personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, apart from his poetry, may well arouse interest. He is certainly a remarkable personality. When he was composing his poems which flow along in wonderful rhythms, one can perceive how at every moment the soul was prone to slip out of the body. In the wonderful forms of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's poems and of his prose-poems too, there is a quality belonging intrinsically to the soul. Many times in his earthly life he was destined to suffer from a clouding of consciousness when this separation of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body became too pronounced. There was only a loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the physical body—this is quite apparent when we study the poems or the personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. We say to ourselves at once that this Individuality which in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation was only loosely connected with the physical body, must surely have passed through very remarkable experiences in earlier earthly lives.

Now investigation of earlier earthly lives is by no means always easy. Disillusionments and set-backs of every description have to be encountered in the course of such investigation. For this reason, what I say about reincarnations is most emphatically not for the purpose of satisfying cravings for sensation but always in order to shed deeper illumination upon the course of history.

As we follow the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, particularly in the light of this loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the body, we are led back to a very early incarnation in the sixth century A.D. We are led to an Individuality who, to begin with, eludes the spiritual intuition with which these things are investigated. Spiritually we are thrust back from this Individuality who in his life in Italy was finding his way into Christianity in the form in which it was spreading at that time ... we can never get really near him. And then we seem to be thrown back again to the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, so that when in this investigation of an earlier incarnation we really seem to have got hold of the incarnation in the sixth century, we have to come back again to the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, without having properly understood the connection between these two incarnations. .. until at last the solution of the riddle dawns. We notice that in the mind of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer there is a thought that puzzles and misleads us—a thought which was also expressed in his story The Saint, dealing with Thomas Becket, the Chancellor-Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century at the Court of Henry (II) of England.

It is not until we follow the connections of the thoughts and feelings working in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer while he was writing this narrative that we gain any real insight into how his mind was working. We are led as it were from a clouding of consciousness into clarity, then again a clouding, and so on. And finally we come to the conclusion that there must be some special significance in the thought that runs through Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's story; it must have deep roots. And then we hit upon the clue: this thought comes from an impulse in an earlier earthly life, the life when the Individuality of the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived at a minor Court in Italy and played an important part in the development of Christianity. In that life he had an unusual experience. Gradually we discover that this Individuality was sent with a Christian Mission from Italy to England and this Mission founded the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The Individuality who later became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was, on the one side, deeply affected by that form of art which has since died out but was prevalent in Italy in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and subsequently elaborated in the Italian mosaics. The Individuality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived and worked in this environment and then, filled with the impulse of contemporary Christianity, accompanied the Mission to England. After having participated in the founding of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, this individual was murdered, in strange circumstances, by an Anglo-Saxon chieftain.

This happening lived on as an impulse in the soul. And when this soul was born as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the destiny of that earlier time was still alive in the subconscious ... the murder in England ... it has something to do with the Archbishopric of Canterbury! Just as a remembrance is often evoked by the sound of a word, so it was in this case ... “I once had something to do with Canterbury.” And the impulse becomes an urge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul to describe, not his own destiny, for that remains in the subconscious, but the similar destiny of Thomas Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England and at the same time Archbishop of Canterbury.

The strange infirmity of soul suffered by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer also causes experience of his own destiny to slip over into that of the other personality known to him from history.

During the period of the Thirty Years' War, when such chaotic conditions prevailed in Middle Europe, this Individuality had been incarnated as a woman. And all the chaos of those times profoundly affected the Individuality now incarnate in a female body. This woman married a rather uncouth, unpolished personality who fled from the conditions then prevailing in Germany to the region of Graubünden in Switzerland. And there this couple lived ... the woman deeply sensitive to the chaos of the impressions around her, the man more plebeian.

From the far-reaching events of that time the soul had absorbed all that struggles to come forth again in Jürg Jenatsch. The thoughts and emotions rise up again in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from what he had experienced in those earlier circumstances. The difficulty is that the impressions welled up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul but that he felt compelled to transform them, because his life in the world was such that impulses were constantly rising up into his soul-and-spirit which then, in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, were responsible for the very loose connection between his soul-and-spirit and his physical body.

This will indicate to you how impulses from olden times work over in a remarkable way into a man's thinking, feeling, perception and artistic achievements. The truth of such things will quite certainly never be discovered by speculation or intellectual thinking but only in genuine spiritual vision.

Personalities who attract one's attention in some earthly life are especially interesting from the point of view of their reincarnations. There is a personality who is greatly loved and held in high esteem, above all in this country, through whom we can discern how souls pass through their earthly lives. When we have real knowledge of these matters they turn out to be different from what one would naturally assume.

There is a soul ... I was able to find this soul for the first time occupying a kind of priestly office in ancient Mysteries. I say, a kind of priestly office, for although he was not a priest of the highest rank his position in the Mysteries enabled him to do a great deal for the education of souls. In that incarnation he was a noble character, full of goodness of heart which his connection with the Mysteries had developed in him. About a hundred years before the birth of Christ it was the destiny of this personality, in line with the customs of the times, to serve under a cruel slave-owner as the foreman or manager of a host of slaves whose work was hard and heavy and who could only be handled in the way that was the accepted practice in those days. This personality must not be misjudged or misunderstood. The conditions prevailing in ancient civilisations must be seen in a different light from those of to-day; we must understand above all what it meant for this fundamentally noble personality to have been incarnated a hundred years before the founding of Christianity as a kind of foreman-manager of a host of slaves. It was impossible for him always to act in accordance with his own impulses—that was his hard destiny. But at the same time he had established a definite relationship with the souls living in the hard-worked slaves. He obeyed the crueller personality of whom I have spoken (his ‘chief’ we should say to-day) but in such circumstances antipathies and sympathies are formed. ... And when the one who often with a bleeding heart had carried out the orders he received, passed through the gate of death, his soul encountered the souls who had felt, for him too, a certain hatred. This lived itself out in the life between death and rebirth and established connections of soul-and-spirit which then worked as impulses, preparing for the next earthly life.

In the nature of things, karmic connections are formed between all human beings who have to do with one another. It was also destiny that the Individuality of whom I am speaking, who was a kind of slave-overseer and connected karmically with the chief whose orders he was bound to obey, should have made himself guilty in a certain way—it was really innocence and guilt at the same time—of all the misery caused by the cruelty of his chief. He acquiesced in it, not out of any impulse of his own but impelled by the force majeure of customs and circumstances. Thus a karmic tie was established between the two. In the life between death and rebirth this took shape in such a way that the former slave-overseer was born again in the ninth century A.D. as a woman: she became the wife of the one who had been the cruel chief—and in this relationship lived through much that constituted the karmic adjustment of what I have described as a kind of ‘innocent guilt’ in connection with the cruelties that had been committed. But these experiences deepened the soul: much of what had been present in the ancient, priestly incarnation emerged once again, but overshadowed by great tragedy. Circumstances in the ninth century brought this wedded couple into connection with many human beings in whom there were living the souls, now reincarnated, of those who had been together with them as slaves. As a general rule, human souls are reborn during the same time-period. And again in this case there was a connection in the life on the Earth.

The souls who had once worked under the slave-overseer now lived together in spatial proximity as a fairly extensive community. The official servant of the community—but a servant of fairly high rank—was the individual who had once been the cruel slave-owner. He had dealings with all the inhabitants of the community and experienced from them nothing but trouble; he was not their governor but it was his duty to look after many of their affairs. The wife lived through all this at his side. We find, therefore, that a number of human beings are associated with these two personalities. But the karma that had bound the two together—the erstwhile slave-owner and his overseer—this karmic tie was thereby done with. The ancient priest-individuality was no longer bound to the other; but the tie with the other souls remained, precisely because in the incarnation about 100 B.C. he had been at least the instrument for much that had been their lot. As a woman, this Individuality brought only blessing to the community, for her deeds were performed with the greatest goodness and kindness, despite the infinitely tragic experiences she was obliged to undergo.

All these shared experiences, all that wove the threads of karma—it all went on working, and during the next period of life between death and rebirth (after the ninth century and on into the modern age) impulses took shape once again whereby these human beings were held together. And now, the souls who had once been the slaves and later on came together in a village community—these souls were born again, not in any kind of external community but at least during the same period of time. So that there was again the possibility of relationship with the Individuality—now reborn—who had been the slave-overseer a hundred years before the Christian era, and the woman in the ninth century A.D. For this Individuality was reborn as Pestalozzi. The souls who were also reborn more or less as contemporaries in order that karma might be fulfilled—these souls whose relationship to him was as I have described, became the pupils for whom Pestalozzi now performed deeds of untold blessing!

When one studies life and behind life as it presents itself perceives the working of souls from incarnation to incarnation ... certainly it is disturbing and astounding, for things are always different from what the intellect might conjecture. Yet life's content is immeasurably deepened when it is studied in this kind of context. I think, moreover, that a man himself has really gained something when he has studied such connections. If they are drawn forth—often with very great difficulty—from their spiritual backgrounds, and if one points, as I have only been able to do in sketchy outline to-day, to what is present in visible existence, one perceives how karma works through the course of human life. Verily, life acquires serious backgrounds when we pay attention to studies of this kind; and they can be understood if with unprejudiced minds we observe what then presents itself in the external world.

Anthroposophy does not exist in order to expound theories about repeated earthly lives or to give tabulated details of every kind, but to reveal, in all their concrete reality, the spiritual foundations of life. Men will look into the world with quite different eyes once the veils are lifted from these things. One day, if destiny permits, we shall have to speak of how they can play a part, too, in the actual deeds of men. Such knowledge will certainly show that concrete studies of karma are needed by our civilisation as an impetus and a deepening. I wanted to-day merely to lay before you these actual examples of karma. The personalities in question are well-known figures in history. Study them closely and you will find confirmation of much that I have said.