The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] At the time of the first beginnings of Christianity there appear in ancient pagan culture conceptions of the world which seem to be a continuation of the Platonic way of thinking, and which may be understood as a more inward, spiritual Mystery wisdom. Such conceptions started with Philo of Alexandria (B.C. 25–A.D. 50). (See) Note 46) From his point of view the processes leading to the divine take place in the innermost part of the human soul. One could say that the mystery temple in which Philo seeks his initiations is simply and solely the innermost part of his being, and its higher experiences. In his case processes of a purely spiritual nature replace the procedures which took place in the Mystery centers. According to Philo sense-observation and cognition gained through the logical intellect, do not lead to the divine. They relate merely to what is transitory. But there is a path by which the soul may rise above these methods of cognition. It must step out of what it accepts as its ordinary “I.” It must be removed from this “I.” Then it enters a state of spiritual exaltation and illumination in which it no longer knows, thinks and cognizes in the ordinary sense. For it has become merged with the divine, identified with it. The divine is experienced in its essence, which cannot be formed in thoughts or imparted in concepts. It is experienced. One who experiences it knows that he can communicate this experience only if he is able to imbue his words with life. The world is a reflected image of this mystical reality, experienced in the innermost recesses of the soul. The world has come forth from the invisible, inconceivable God. A direct image of this Godhead is the wisdom-filled harmony of the world, out of which material phenomena arise. This wisdom-filled harmony is the spiritual image of the Godhead. It is the divine Spirit diffused in the world; cosmic reason, the Logos, the Offspring or Son of God. The Logos is the mediator between the world of the senses and the inconceivable God. When man steeps himself in cognition, he unites himself with the Logos. The Logos becomes embodied in him. The spiritually developed personality is the bearer of the Logos. Above the Logos is God; beneath is the transitory world. Man is called upon to link the two. What he experiences in his innermost being as spirit, is the cosmic Spirit. These ideas are directly reminiscent of Pythagorean thought. The center of existence is sought in the inner life. But this inner life is conscious of its cosmic significance. Augustine's statement, “We see all created things because they are; and they are because God sees them,” derives from a way of thinking essentially similar to that of Philo. And in describing what and how we see, Augustine adds significantly, “Because they are, we see them outwardly: and because they are perfect, we see them inwardly.”^73a We find the same fundamental idea in Plato. Philo, like Plato, sees in the destiny of the human soul the closing act of the great cosmic drama, the awakening of the spellbound God. He describes the inner deeds of the soul in the following words: The wisdom within man followed “the ways of his Father, and shaped the different forms, looking to the archetypal patterns.” It is not a personal matter when man shapes such forms within himself. These forms are the eternal wisdom, they are the cosmic life. This is in harmony with the interpretation of the folk myths in the light of the Mysteries. The mystic searches for the deeper truth in the myths. And as the mystic treats the myths of paganism, Philo handles Moses' story of the creation. For him the Old Testament accounts are images of inner soul processes. The Bible relates the creation of the world. Whoever accepts it as a description of outer events, knows only half of it. Certainly it is written, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” But the true inner sense of such words must be experienced in the depths of the soul. God must be found within; then He appears as the “archetypal essence sending forth myriads of rays, none visible to sense, all to the mind.”⁷⁴ This is how Philo expresses himself. In Plato's Timaeus the words are almost identical with those of the Bible: “And when the Father that engendered the universe perceived it in motion and alive, and a thing of joy to the eternal gods, He too rejoiced.”⁷⁵ In the Bible we read, “and God saw that it was good.” For Plato, for Mystery wisdom, as well as for the Bible, cognition of the divine means to experience the process of creation as one's own destiny. Thus the story of creation and the story of the soul striving toward its apotheosis, flow into one. Philo is convinced that Moses' account of the creation may be used to tell the story of the soul which is seeking God. Everything in the Bible acquires a profoundly symbolic meaning when seen from this point of view. Philo becomes the interpreter of this symbolic meaning. He reads the Bible as the story of the soul.

[ 2 ] We may say that Philo's manner of reading the Bible is in harmony with the trend of his time, which originated in the wisdom of the Mysteries; indeed he relates that the Therapeutae interpreted ancient writings in the same way. “They have also works of ancient authors who were the founders of their way of thinking, and left behind them many monuments of the method used in allegorical interpretation ... the interpretation of the sacred scriptures is based upon the underlying meaning in the allegorical narratives.” Thus Philo's goal was to discover the underlying meaning of the “allegorical” narratives in the Old Testament.

Let us imagine where such an interpretation could lead. We read the account of creation, and find in it not only a narrative of outward events, but a representation of the ways which the soul must take to reach the divine. Thus as a microcosm, the soul must repeat in itself the ways of God, and its mystical striving for wisdom can take only this form. The drama of the universe must be enacted in every soul. The soul life of the mystic is the fulfillment of the prototype given in the account of creation. Moses wrote not only to recount historical facts, but to represent pictorially the ways the soul must take if it desires to find God.

[ 3 ] All this, in Philo's conception of the world, is contained within the human spirit. Man experiences within himself what God has experienced in the world. The Word of God, the Logos, becomes an experience of the soul. God led the Jews out of Egypt into the Promised Land; He made them undergo trials and privations before bestowing the Promised Land upon them. This is the outward event. Let us experience it inwardly. From the land of Egypt, the transitory world, passing through privations which lead to the suppression of sensuous experience and into the promised land of the soul, we reach the eternal. With Philo all this is an inner process. The God Who was poured out into the world, celebrates His resurrection in the soul, if His creative word is understood and re-created in the soul. Then within himself, man has given spiritual birth to God, to the Spirit of God that became Man, to the Logos, to Christ. In this sense, cognition, for Philo and those who thought like him, was a birth of Christ within the world of spirit. The Neoplatonic conception of the world, which developed contemporaneously with Christianity, was a continuation of Philo's method of thought. Let us see how Plotinus (204–269 A.D.) describes his spiritual experience:

[ 4 ] “Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-centered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; rooted within it; attaining the strength to set myself above the higher world: yet, there comes the moment of descent from spiritual vision to reasoning, and after that reposing in God, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did my soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, in its essence, is the high thing it has shown itself to be,” and “What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the Father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and it? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of creation, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self-ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged in their own self-glorification; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. Just as children who are immediately torn from their parents, and have for a long time been nurtured at a great distance from them, become ignorant both of themselves and their parents.”⁷⁶ In the following words Plotinus describes the path of development the soul should seek: “Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, the body's turmoil stilled, but all that lies around; earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens be still. Let the soul be observed, externally as it were, diffusing and flowing into the quiescent cosmos, permeating it from all sides, and pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun, throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering body of the heaven-opened world, bestows life and immortality.”⁷⁷

[ 5 ] It follows that this conception of the world has a profound similarity to Christianity. Among those who acknowledge the community of Jesus it is said, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life ... declare we unto you.” (I John 1: 1–3.) In the same way it might be said in the sense of Neoplatonism, that which was from the beginning, which cannot be heard or seen, must be spiritually experienced as the word of life.—The development of the old world conception thus is split. In Neoplatonism and similar conceptions of the world it leads to a concept of Christ related only to the spiritual realm, and on the other hand it leads to a fusion of this concept of Christ with a historical manifestation, the personality of Jesus. The writer of the Gospel of John may be said to unite these two world conceptions. “In the beginning was the Word.” He shares this conviction with the Neoplatonists. The Neoplatonists conclude that the Word becomes spirit in the innermost soul. The writer of John's Gospel, and with him the community of Christians, conclude that the Word became flesh in Jesus. The more intimate sense, in which alone the Word could become flesh was provided by the whole development of the old world conceptions. Plato says of the Macrocosm: God has stretched the soul of the world on the body of the world in the form of a cross.^77a This soul of the world is the Logos. If the Logos is to become flesh He must repeat the cosmic process in physical existence. He must be nailed to the Cross and rise again. This most significant thought of Christianity had long before been outlined as a spiritual representation in the old world conceptions. This became a personal experience of the mystic during “initiation.” The Logos become Man had to experience this deed as a fact, valid for the whole of humanity. Something which was a Mystery process in the development of the old wisdom becomes historical fact through Christianity. Thus Christianity became the fulfillment not only of what the Jewish prophets had predicted, but also of what had been pre-formed in the Mysteries. The Cross of Golgotha is the Mystery cult of antiquity condensed into a fact. We find the Cross first in the ancient world conceptions; at the starting-point of Christianity it meets us within a unique event which is to be valid for the whole of humanity. From this point of view the mystical element in Christianity can be grasped. Christianity as mystical fact is a stage of development in the process of human evolution; and the events in the Mysteries and their effects are the preparations for this mystical fact.

• 73a. Augustine's Confessions, Book XIII, 38. The Loeb Library translation runs: “We therefore behold these things which thou hast created, because they are; but they are, because thou seest them. And we see without, that they are, and within, that they are good.” Another translation also reads: “... And we see without that they are, and within that they are good.”
• 74. Philo, De cherubim et flammeo gladio, The Cherubim and the Flaming Sword, I, 97. A commentary on Genesis 3:24 and 4:1.
• 75. Plato, Timaeus, 37 D.
• 76. Plotinus, 4th Ennead, On the Nature of the Soul, 8th Tractate, The Soul's Descent into the Body, 1.
• 77. Plotinus, 5th Ennead, The Divine Mind, 1st Tractate, On the Three Hypostases that Rank as the Principle of All Things, 1.
• 77a. See note 43, above.

The mood of the present time is not likely, perhaps, to create in many people that depth of inner feeling of which legends and sagas speak when they refer to the Christmas Holy Nights, when the soul that is prepared for it is able to have some experience of the spiritual world. You know one such impressive legend from the performances given here, that of Olaf &Åsteson. Many similar things point to Christmas time in the same way.

It is clear, not only to a more thoughtful student of the human heart, but to anyone who observes in the external world the general spirit of our time, that a Christmas mood, a Christmas impulse, must now be sought anew by mankind. What lives in the celebration of Christmas, in the thought of Christmas, must take hold of the human soul in a new way. Just think, dear friends—in order to realize the broader aspects of our contemporary religious and spiritual mood—how little inclination there is at this time to contemplate the Christ as such, to direct the eyes of the soul to Him.

People often believe they are speaking about the Christ, and yet you will find they have made hardly any distinction between Christ and God the Father except in name. While it is true that for many believers the Christ still stands at the center of their religious creed and that beside Him all else of a divine nature loses its luster, nevertheless we have seen for some time now the rise of a theology that has really lost the Christ, that speaks of a God in general even when Christ is meant. The specific quality that is essential when the human heart looks up to Christ needs to be found again. And perhaps the most worthy celebration of the Christmas Festival at this time is actually to inscribe in our souls how mankind can find the Christ again. Many historical facts of the evolution of mankind will first have to be considered—in the spiritual scientific sense—if a true impulse is to be reawakened that will lead human souls to Christ.

The Christmas Festival can not only remind us, as is intended, of the entrance of Jesus into earth life, but it can also point to the birth of Christianity itself, the entrance of Christianity into the course of earth evolution. And so let us today direct our spiritual vision primarily to what might be called the Christmas of Christianity itself, the entrance, the birth, of Christianity within the sphere of the earth. The external facts are known, of course, but our knowledge of them needs to be intensified.

Christianity came into the world in the person of Christ Jesus, into the midst of the adherents of the Old Testament. We can observe the phenomena that occurred among these people when Christianity was born. We see how they were externally divided into two separate currents, that of the Pharisees and that of the Sadducees. It is necessary to view all these things henceforth in a new light. When we consider the general course of development of an individual or of humanity itself—indeed, the course of the entire earth—this will become increasingly clear to us if we conceive it as a continual balancing between luciferic and ahrimanic forces. But that is merely the designation we use; there has always existed among the deeper natures of humanity a consciousness of the actual existence of Lucifer and Ahriman and of the condition of balance between them. Fundamentally, the contrast of the Pharisaic element and the Sadducean element in the ancient Hebrew evolution was nothing else than the contrast of ahrimanic and luciferic elements. Jesus, coming into external earth life, entered the balancing stream. He entered earthly existence at that place for which the most important designation up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was that Solomon's Temple had been built there. In a certain sense we can only understand the nature of Solomon's Temple if we are able to perceive it in contrast to the Christianity then being born. It is well-known how quickly after Christianity came into being Solomon's Temple was destroyed, so far as external existence is concerned. This memorial of the earlier evolution out of which the spirituality of Christianity arose was destined to exist no longer at the place from which that spirituality streamed forth. The nature of Solomon's Temple and the nature of Christianity present a strong contrast. Solomon's Temple embraced in marvelous, magnificent, sometimes gigantic symbols all that was contained in the world conception of the Old Testament. It was an image of the entire universe so far as this could be represented by the ancient world conception, in its conformity to law, in its inner structure, in its permeation by divine-spiritual beings. It was nonetheless an image of the universe that in a certain sense and in one direction was extraordinarily one-sided. That is to say, the Temple was a spatial image of the universe, an image that made use of spatial forms and spatial relations to express the mysteries of the universe. But for those who viewed it in the spirit of the Old Testament, its symbolism was endowed with life.

We see, on the one hand, in the Judaism of the Pharisees and Sadducees, the externalization of what had been given to humanity through the Old Testament; on the other hand, we see in the symbolism of Solomon's Temple the means of deepening the life of Old Testament humanity. It might be said that what has flowed into the entire Old Testament revelation came to expression in these two directions: one outward, exoteric, in the Judaism of the Pharisees and Sadducees; the other esoteric, through what was represented in the mysterious symbols of Solomon's Temple. And from this exotericism and esotericism sprang what became Christianity.

This Christianity was at first, at the time of its birth, unknown to the world at large, to that world in which lived the spirituality of the humanity of that time, namely, the Greek world. Within the expanding Roman empire in which the Mystery of Golgotha was being prepared through the birth of Jesus, it was not known what a momentous Event had taken place among the Jewish people. Nothing was known of the significant Event that constitutes the meaning of the earth. Nevertheless, although the humanity of that time allowed it to pass unnoticed outwardly, the most sublime Event of our earth evolution, inwardly the Christianity that was coming into being was connected with what was then considered the whole world.

In what ways, dear friends, was it connected? The meaning that Christmas conceals is revealed later in the Easter conception. What then is the important aspect of Easter that really intensifies the meaning of Christmas? It is the contemplation of the Savior of mankind Who died on the cross: the cross with the dead God. The intention and the deed originated in humanity: to put to death the God Who had appeared in their midst. The profound magnitude, the full power, of this thought should again enter into human souls. Contemplation of the deed by which the God Who appeared on earth was killed by men: this should be put into language by which it can be understood. Let us try to do this, at least from one point of view.

When we look upon the Mystery of Golgotha, we find it to be a great world-historical confluence of spiritual streams that had been present in the ancient Mysteries. (You know this from my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact.) What had taken place in the ancient Mysteries as the sacrificial rite, the rite of initiation, what had taken place in the temple with, one might say, limited importance, was now set out on the great stage of world history; it now took place in the realm of our entire earth existence. In a certain sense, the initiation of humanity itself was brought out of the temples and presented as historical event before the whole world.

Now let us ask: what were the thoughts of someone permitted to take part in the initiation rites of the ancient Mysteries—when these still possessed their true significance? Through his preparatory instruction such a person knew with certainty that what is directly apparent in the external world of the senses, and what can be comprehended by the human intellect, is a world of mere phenomena, a world of appearance. He knew that what a human being experiences immediately in his environment during his waking hours between birth and death is only the outer view, the phenomenal display, of an inner reality, and that in ordinary life this inner reality is concealed. In the Mystery rite itself such a person sought true reality in what streamed to him, as it were, from the depths of existence, in what could be drawn out and separated from the merely phenomenal, illusory existence. Someone who took part in the ancient Mysteries could always say to himself: When I walk through the world and see external nature, it is illusion. When I experience this or that in the world, it is illusion. When I do any kind of work for the world, it is illusion. But when I am permitted to take part in the holy acts of the Mysteries in the Temple, then something happens that is truth, not illusion. Something is drawn forth, so to speak, out of the illusory existence of the world and transformed into a sacramental act; and this act contains exact truth in contrast to the illusion.

If we wish to be quite clear concerning this view of the Mysteries, we must compare it to the view prevailing today in our materialistic age. We must understand that all that is called reality today in this age of materialism was regarded as illusion in the conceptions belonging to the Mysteries; while, for example, the sacramental act performed as the initiation rite, which most people today consider “fantastic”, was esteemed by those acquainted with the Mysteries as the only reality in life. Such an act, therefore, was not performed at random, but at certain times when it was believed that something of the true nature of things might push through the phenomena of outer life and, as it were, be captured through the act. It has often been mentioned that one such important rite consisted in showing the sacrifice of the God, the death of the God, and His resurrection after three days. This pointed to the fact that to someone who penetrates more deeply into the external world, death can reveal the true nature of this world, that reality must be sought beyond death.

Think of all this entering human souls from the content of the Mysteries at the beginning of our Christian era, expressing the most important fact in world phenomena! Someone in that era pondering on the course of our earth evolution would have been able to say: “In ancient times it was possible for man to learn something about the divine-spiritual world through atavistic initiation science. It was formerly revealed to man out of earth evolution itself. That time is now past. The time has come when nothing more can be drawn from the content of this world to guide us to the divine-spiritual world. This world has lost its divine-spiritual life.” That is what such a soul would have said. Where must one look for the meaning of evolution for earth-humanity? Where was the real meaning of the earth at the time when Christianity came into being? Where was the expression of what was willed in man's innermost being at that time? At Golgotha on the cross. It was Death! What formerly had gushed forth from earth evolution for human salvation, was itself dead. To the soul that penetrated more deeply into cosmic reality, an earth impulse, the most profound of all earth impulses, was given at the time of the birth of Christianity, in the contemplation of the dead God.

Only when experienced in this way does the full magnitude appear of the matter with which we are here concerned. The ancient world conception, the ancient world-wisdom had flowed into Solomon's Temple; but it no longer held anything of what had made it great. Something new had to enter world evolution. And so in the course of time the destruction of Solomon's Temple and the rise, the birth, of Christianity exactly coincided. Solomon's Temple: a spatial symbolic image of the content of the cosmos; Christianity, comprehended as a time-phenomenon: a new image of the cosmos. Christianity is not something that appears as a spatial image, as in the case of Solomon's Temple; one only understands Christianity if one grasps it in images of time. One must see that earth evolution proceeded as far as the Mystery of Golgotha; then the Mystery of Golgotha intervened; then, through the Christ pouring Himself into humanity, evolution moves on in this way or that. Its deeper content is not to be equated in the remotest degree with anything appearing in spatial images, not even in the gigantic, magnificent spatial images of Solomon's Temple. Nevertheless, Solomon's Temple, as also the inner aspect of Pharisaic and Sadducean life, contained the soul of the world consciousness of that time. The soul of the world consciousness two thousands years ago was to be found in Old Testament Judaism. Into this soul was laid the seed of Christianity, a new seed that, while growing out of all that may be expressed in space, can only be expressed in time. The becoming following the existing: that is the inner relation of Christianity that was then being born to the soul element of the world of that time, to Judaism that was embodied in Solomon's Temple, which later collapsed. Christianity was born into the soul of ancient Judaism.

As Christianity sought the soul in Judaism, so it sought the spirit in Hellenism. The Gospels themselves, as transmitted to the world (I refer only to what has been handed down), have in the main passed through the Greek spirit. The thoughts through which the world could think Christianity are the spiritual wisdom of Greece. The first apologia of the Church Fathers appeared in the Greek tongue. Just as Christianity was born into the soul that for the humanity of that time lived in Judaism, so it was born into the spirit provided by Hellenism.

Romanism furnished the body. It was Romanism that at that time could provide an external organization for concepts of empire. Judaism soul, Hellenism spirit, Romanism body—body, of course, in the sense that the social structure of humanity is body. Romanism is in reality the forming of external inclinations and institutions; the thoughts concerning external institutions live within them. It is the corporeal element in historical existence, the corporeal element in historical development. Just as Christianity was born into the soul of Judaism and into the spirit of Hellenism, so it was born into the body of the Roman Empire. Superficial people even think that everything contained in Christianity can be explained out of Judaism, Hellenism and Romanism. In the same way, indeed, that materialistic natural scientists believe that everything in a human being is inherited from parents, grandparents, etc., ignoring the fact that the soul comes from spiritual regions and only puts on the body as a garment: so these superficial people like to say that Christianity consists of what in actual fact it has only put on as an outer garment. The essence of Christianity entered the world, of course, with Christ Jesus Himself; but this Christianity was born into the Jewish soul, into the Greek spirit, and into the body of the Roman Empire. That, in a sense, is the birth of Christianity itself, viewed in the light of Christmas thought.

It is important not to accept these facts as mere external theories, but to relate them deeply to our thought of Christmas, to learn what their significance really is in relation to the newborn Impulse that is now entering world evolution with the Spirits of Personality—as I explained here recently.³ Indeed, dear friends, anything new that purposes to enter into the course of world evolution must first struggle through what remains of the old. This is precisely the mystery of world-becoming, that on the one hand there is a normal, progressive evolution; on the other hand, retarded luciferic and ahrimanic forces interfere with it and modify it, but also in a certain sense support it as it advances. I have often called attention to the fact that we cannot escape this ahrimanic-luciferic force; we must look straight at it calmly, and face it consciously. On no account must we simply submit to these things unconsciously. From world impulses shadows remain behind that continue to have an effect even after something new has come into existence; but their luciferic and ahrimanic character must be recognized. This ahrimanic-luciferic element must accompany evolution, but it must not be accepted in an absolute sense; its luciferic- ahrimanic character must be perceived. Something shadowlike has remained behind from Solomon's Temple, something shadow-like also from Hellenism, and something shadow-like from the Roman Empire. Nearly two thousand years ago it was self-evident that from these three—soul, spirit, and body—Christianity was born. But soul, spirit, and body could not immediately disappear; they remained in a certain way as after-effects. Now is the time when this fact must be clearly understood and when the completely unique character of the Christ Impulse itself must be realized.

A shadow remains behind from the most important extract of the esoteric Old Testament, from the Mystery of Solomon's Temple; a shadow remains from Hellenism; also one from the Roman Empire. We must learn to distinguish the shadows from the light. It will be mankind's task from this present time into the immediate future to differentiate between the shadows and the light in the right way.

We see the shadow of the Roman Empire in Roman Catholicism. This is not Christianity; it is the shadow of the ancient Roman Empire into which Christianity had to be born. In its forms there continues to live what had to be built up at that time as a framework for Christianity. But we must learn—humanity must learn—to distinguish the shadow of the old Roman Empire from Christianity. The essence of Christianity is not to be found in the organization of the Catholic Church, or indeed of any of the Christian churches. One sees in their hierarchical aspect what existed and developed in the Roman Empire from Romulus to the Emperor Augustus. The illusion arises only because Christianity was born into this body.

In this sense Solomon's Temple has also remained as a shadow. The Mysteries of Solomon's Temple have—with a few exceptions—been completely absorbed into the Masonic and other secret societies of the present time. As the Roman Church is the shadow of the ancient Roman Empire, so what continues to exist in these societies—however strongly they assert to the contrary, even to the extent of excluding Jews—is the shadow of ancient Judaism, the shadow of the esoteric Jehovah-worship. Again the shadow must be distinguished from the light. Just as the shadow expressed in the perpetuation of the Roman Empire in the Catholic Church, in the churches generally, must be distinguished from the light shining in Christianity, so the element into which Christianity had to be born as soul must be distinguished from the shadow that continues to work in societies founded on symbolism that is reminiscent of Solomon's Temple.

These things must be recognized. They must be looked at in the right way. And they must be illuminated in our time by the new revelations of which we have been speaking during these days.

The Greek spirit into which Christianity had to be born—in spite of all the beauty of Hellenism, in spite of its esthetic and other important content, in spite of the influence it has upon us—has left its shadow as the modern world conception of the cultured humanity that has brought this fearful catastrophe⁴ upon mankind. When Hellenism existed with its world conception, it was something different. Everything, dear friends, is right in its own time. If something is taken in an absolute sense, and carried on after it has become antiquated, it then becomes the shadow of itself. And the shadow is not the light; it may change suddenly into the opposite of the real thing. Aristotelianism still shows something of the greatness of ancient Greece. Aristotle in modern raiment is materialism. Christianity was born into the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, the Roman body; but the three have left their shadows behind. The challenge sounds through our time, like the call of an angel's trumpet, to perceive the true facts, to look through the shadows to the light.

Truly, anyone who ponders over this present moment in time, who considers impartially, without prejudice, what has brought about the fearful, distressing events of recent years, surely cannot help wondering whether some sort of light can be sought that would shine into the darknesses of earth in a different way from those lights which most people still wish to regard as the only ones. One should find the will to look for a way through the shadows to the light. For the shadows will assert themselves. They will become effective through people who perhaps have endured little themselves of the great suffering of humanity at the present time, who have no sympathy, or very little, for the terrible agony that has flashed through the world, agony that is itself proof that many of the thoughts which have appeared were destined to be shipwrecked. One who tries to examine with deeper understanding what is really not difficult to see today, one who has the resolute will to look without prejudice at what is happening today among men, will feel an impulse to seek the light. He should attach some importance to this impulse in his soul, not listen to those who—depending on the place they occupy—wish only to defend one of the ancient shadows, but listen to his own soul; it will speak clearly enough if only he does not let its voice drown under the external assertions of the shadows.

If today one looks compassionately at what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen, one will be able to see a strange figure standing before men: a distortion of the truly human form, in garments woven of shadows, a figure uniting in itself in its thoughts, sensations, feelings, and will-impulses what has put humanity on a wrong track and gives every promise of taking it farther on the wrong track. Deep within what is happening outwardly dwell those three shadow-thoughts that have been described.

Whoever learns to see that figure in garments woven of shadows, has prepared himself in the right way to look at something else: to look at the tree that can illuminate even today's darkness with its lights. Whoever is pure in heart and does not allow himself to be misled by the threefold shadow-existence—antiquated symbolism, antiquated ecclesiasticism, antiquated materialistic science—will see what wills to shine in the darkness as a real Christmas tree, and lying beneath it the Christ-Jesus Child, illuminated anew by the Christmas light. This is the real aim of our anthroposophically-oriented science of the spirit: to seek the Christmas light, so that the Jesus Child, Who entered the world first to work and then to be understood, may gradually be understood; to illuminate in a modest way the greatest of all events in earth existence. This is the goal of our anthroposophical spiritual science within the religious currents of humanity. People will not understand the light that this spiritual science wants to recognize as its Christmas light unless they have the will really to penetrate the threefold shadow-existence of our time. The times are serious. And whoever lacks the will to take them seriously will perhaps not be able in this incarnation to see what should truly be perceptible at this time to every human being of good will, there for the healing of the many wounds that otherwise mankind will still have to suffer. People of good will should take notice of what may be seen when the anthroposophical science of the spirit enkindles the Christmas light. The light is truly small, and he who professes it remains humble. He does not wish to extol it to the world as something special, for he knows that now it appears small and insignificant, and many men and many generations must still come, to help what now burns dimly to become brighter. But even though the light is weak, it shines on something whose effect within human earthly evolution is not weak, something that is working powerfully as the deepest meaning of human evolution. The light illumines what we may call the birth of Christianity, the Christmas of Christianity. Along with the Easter meaning of anthroposophical spiritual science may this its Christmas meaning be understood. May many, many souls look forward in this spirit to the profound experience of the Christmas Holy Nights. They will then be able to feel that already a call is sounding through the world to contemplate the appearance of Jesus, who awaited here on earth that moment when He was to meet death, in order in His spirit-life after death to give a new meaning to mankind and to earth evolution.

My dear friends, let us feel something of this Christmas mood that is to enter our souls from spiritual science! I would like at this moment to begin Christmas solemnly, by expressing the wish—as my soul's innermost holy Christmas greeting—that you may experience the mood of consecration that wills to receive the new Christ-revelation. I assume that you too are beginning Christmas with that earnestness of which I endeavored to speak today, an earnestness appropriate to the present condition of the world. In this spirit, my dear friends, I wish you with all my heart a holy, solemn Christmas!

• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 20 Dec. 1918, Die Soziale Grundfordentng unserer Zeit/in Geanderter Zeitlage, GA 186 (Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1979).
• 4. World War I.

Yesterday I tried to explain how man, who as a soul-spiritual being has been living in the spiritual world during pre-earthly existence, makes his transition to the physical earth. If we want to place before our souls the very real intervention of the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in the evolution of earth-humanity, it is absolutely necessary to acknowledge the pre-earthly existence of man and thus come to understand the eternal essence of his being. For, in order to comprehend the actual nature of this Mystery, we must be able to follow this Being, the Christ, Who belongs to the spiritual worlds, in His descent from extra-terrestrial regions right down into earth existence. This Being had lived only in those regions where we too spend our pre-natal existence until the time came when in the man Jesus He took on an earthly form and began his earthly activity.

If man wants to arrive at such an understanding of the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in relation to the event of human birth, of which I spoke sketchily yesterday, he must bear in mind first of all that man's soul constitution and his inner experience have passed in the course of mankind's evolution on earth through most significant and important transformations. Today, people often assume that the soul constitution, and those states of consciousness in which modern man finds himself in waking and sleeping, have always belonged to humanity, at least essentially, since human history began. At most, the world view arrived at in natural scientific cosmology points back to a primitive half-animal-like form possessed by early humanity, as we shall be discussing presently. Such a being's inner nature would of course have to be pictured as different from the thinking, feeling and willing of today's human being. But the transformations that man's consciousness, his whole inner soul structure, have passed through since the primeval times of earth evolution, are rarely pointed out today; yet in these transformations there lies something immensely important and substantial.

When we go back to ancient times of human evolution—we need not go back to the most primeval but to about the second or third millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha—we find that mankind had a quite different consciousness, a quite different configuration of soul, than later on. The pronounced difference that exists between waking and sleeping in man today did exist at that time, but it was not the only aspect of the daily change in human consciousness. Today man only knows the states of waking and sleeping, and between them, dreams. While we are aware of a certain content in dreams, we must admit that it is often misleading. In any case, this dream content does not point to any reality that man can control directly with his day consciousness, although he certainly can indirectly. But apart from these three states of consciousness, of which that of dreams is most questionable, at least as far as gaining knowledge is concerned, an intermediate state existed for ancient humanity. It was neither that of dreams, nor of full wakefulness. Nor was it a condition of deep sleep, or half-conscious dreaming as we have it today. Rather, it was a pictorial “waking-dreaming,” as one might put it. Pictures flowed within it as thoughts run today through our waking consciousness. These pictures were similar in form to our dream pictures, but what they contained pointed to a pronounced supersensible reality, as our perceptions point to a physical reality. Just as we know, when we see a physical being with colors and shapes, that it is a physical reality, so did ancient man experience pictures which moved freely and lightly in his consciousness as our dream pictures move in ours, except that it was impossible to doubt that their content pointed to a spiritual reality. Just as today, when our eyes perceive something, we know with certainty that something physical is out there, so did a man of the past know that he perceived something spiritually real when such images passed through his consciousness.

Among what ancient man experienced as spiritually real there was also an echo of pre-earthly existence. The human being of that epoch simply had every day in his soul inner experiences that proved to him beyond all doubt that he had lived in a soul-spiritual condition, in a purely spiritual world, before entering earthly life. Men of this ancient time knew of this throughout their lives. They therefore accepted as fully evident the existence of an eternal core of man's being, and of an extra-terrestrial world to which they belonged as much as they belonged to the terrestrial world. Those who, as initiates of the mysteries, were initiated in the more profound aspects of these truths were able to speak to their followers out of their initiation science in such a manner that these faithful could arrive at the conviction that they looked into an after-image of their pre-earthly existence, and at the same time into a spiritual world to which man belongs with the eternal core of his being. This, they felt, was a gift of grace bestowed by that spiritual being whose physical image is the physical sun we see in the sky.

Thus, someone who accepted the old mystery wisdom could say: I look up to the sun, but this outer, physical sun is only an image of a spiritual sun being. This spiritual sun being permeates the spiritual world from which I myself descended to an earthly existence, and the power of this sun being has endowed my soul with that faculty, which brings it about that among my soul experiences during the sojourn on earth, I also have this, namely, that in looking back upon my pre-earthly existence, I can be sure of the eternal core-being in my soul.

For a man who, in ancient times felt the grace of the Sun Being, human death on earth was no special riddle. He was supported by the power of his initiates and knew of his pre-earthly existence and of his own external nature. He realized that death concerned only the physical human organism. He knew of something within him that had at the beginning of his earthly life descended into his physical organism. For him, death was an event that did not touch his inner being. He knew of it through his outer form of consciousness.

This was the soul condition of human beings in ancient epochs preceding the Mystery of Golgotha. In those epochs, the secret of birth lay open to a vision turned inward that was striving toward the grace of the Sun Being. While they could comprehend this secret of birth, the riddle of death was not yet present in the manner in which it existed for men of a later time. I shall speak in the second part of this lecture about how all this changed in the course of time.

This consciousness of ancient mankind that lived in pictures—and the way it affected the remaining soul constitution—was aware of the soul in such a way that the active, intense ego consciousness, possessed by mankind today, could not yet arise at that time. Man had insight into his own eternal essence but lacked a pronounced inner sensation of his ego-hood. Nor would he ever have achieved it if that ancient picture consciousness had remained with him as his endowment. But in fact, it ceased. Just when the time for the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, it gradually dimmed, to be replaced increasingly by the kind of ordinary consciousness we possess today, with its sharp contrast between sleeping and waking, and, in between, the dubious world of dreams. Mankind had lost that part of self-knowledge that looked back in direct vision to pre-earthly life and with it to the eternal core of man's being. But this was precisely what was necessary if man was to reach gradually his full ego consciousness. Although in that middle period of human evolution, around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, full ego consciousness had not yet appeared in all mankind, it was being slowly prepared. With it people were confronted in full measure and with great intensity with the riddle of death. For they no longer knew anything through direct vision about the world from which they had descended into earthly existence.

In the age when humanity passed through this stage of its evolution the Christ appeared, descending out of the same world from which the human soul always descends again to birth, and, through the events of Palestine, united Himself with the man, Jesus. At that time the old traditions, namely the old methods of the initiation centers were still preserved. Although they were but a vestige of the ancient initiation, even in their weakened form they could still lead to a knowledge concerning the way the spiritual world looks and the kind of connection man has to it. The initiates of that time could address those willing to receive their words and say: The Sun Being, He who formerly bestowed grace upon men by granting them a vision of an after-image of pre-earthly life, He whose physical reflection is the physical sun, this Sun Being has descended to earth. He lived, or has lived in the man Jesus. He took on a physical body in order not only to remain connected from this time onward with the spiritual world, in which man lives between death and a new birth, but also to live within human evolution on earth itself.

Out of the remnants of the old initiation, the initiates, who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, spoke about the secret of the Christ to those who were willing to accept it and had confidence in them. Those who had this trust could learn how the Christ had entered an earthly body, so that not through some kind of teaching but through His deed He could resolve the riddle that only then affected humanity in full intensity—the riddle of death. The initiates pointed out to the people that the Christ had come in order to solve the riddle of death on earth in a way suitable for man. For at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the earth-realm, those who possessed the vestiges of the ancient methods of initiation spoke above all else about the spiritual being of Christ as He appeared in the spiritual world. The path was described which the Christ, Who never before had descended to earth existence, had taken from the spiritual world down to earth. In all these descriptions given by the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, the main teaching was about the way the Christ descended into the man Jesus and Himself became man in him. At that time people did not merely refer to the historical Jesus and ask: What position does this historical Jesus occupy in human evolution?—Ordinary consciousness was, after all, faced with him. Some of his contemporaries were in direct contact with him, while those who came later were aware of him in their physical sense consciousness through historical tradition. But those who knew something about the spiritual worlds because of their knowledge of ancient initiation science could say: That Being Who was once looked upon as the lofty Sun Being, the bestower of the grace we described, has taken the path leading to the earth and to the man Jesus. He has then passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, because man could no longer consciously see into pre-earthly life and so was unable to solve the riddle of death. Indeed, he could no longer be aware of this Being at all—the lofty Sun Being Who, by giving men the vision of the after-image of the world in which they had lived before birth overcame earthly death. This Being Itself descended to earth, took on human form and went through the Mystery of Golgotha in order, through what the event signified, to give back to men on earth—but this time from outside—the after-image of pre-earthly life that in earlier times He had been able to impart to them for their inner soul life in the form of pictures. It was in a manner somewhat like this that the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha expressed themselves.

Formerly, man through grace was blessed with a capacity in his consciousness that enabled him to experience his eternal essence directly when he looked back into his life before birth. But he had to develop further. He had to develop a clear earthly consciousness that could only be kindled and developed by means of the sense world. This is what caused the old consciousness, by means of which man had formerly been able to recognize his eternal nature, to recede. But that Being, Who had earlier enabled man to perceive his own eternal being from the spiritual world, accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha after His descent to earth so that man, by perceiving and understanding this event, might himself experience from outside what earlier he had experienced from within. From the Christ on earth man is to experience further what he had earlier experienced from the spiritual world through Christ.

In the third part of this lecture I shall explain the significance this had for the further course of mankind's evolution.

The vestiges of the old initiation methods through which the initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and even their successors, were able to speak correctly about the descent of the Christ and the path He took until His embodiment in the man Jesus—these vestiges continued until the fourth century A.D., though weakening increasingly in regard to the effectiveness they had for mankind. By that time, they had ceased to call forth in the human organization the kind of capacities that afforded reliable insights into the spiritual world. Mankind now entered a period of its evolution in which it was chiefly dependent upon the perceptions and views that can be attained only in the sense world and upon a thinking based on impressions and observations in this world. This period of humanity's evolution, lasting several centuries, brought about what I have just indicated as the development, the unfolding of ego consciousness.

One cannot study history correctly unless one is able to see during the period from the fourth to about the fifteenth century A.D. how ego consciousness gradually takes form among civilized peoples. Of course, precursors of this developing ego consciousness also lived in earlier times, but fundamentally there is a great difference between even the most educated, cultured person of the fourth or fifth centuries, and one of the fifteenth or sixteenth. A person who can see—I wouldn't even say, into the soul of Augustine, whose ego consciousness can be studied quite clearly in a psychological way—but let us say someone who can look, for example, into the soul of Scotus Erigena in the ninth century, sees how the ego consciousness, possessed later by the simplest person, was only just beginning to develop and form itself. At the same time, the old kind of vision was ceasing through which it was possible, for instance, to develop alchemy, which represented an innate fusion between what the eyes see and the soul experiences when it contemplates things in the external world. Pure sense observation, as the basis of human knowledge, arose first about the fifteenth century. In this turning of man to mere sense observation—which reached a high point in the age of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—to consciousness of the sense world, there also came into being the ego consciousness.

Ego consciousness, however, caused insight into the spiritual worlds to fall into the depths of darkness. The old perception of the mysteries, the initiation knowledge, had faded away by the fourth century A.D. and scarcely a trace of it continued in the ongoing stream of civilization. For what persisted of this knowledge was well hidden, and remained almost unknown to people in general, even to scholarly Occidental peoples. Initiation science had no real influence on general culture and civilization. It, therefore, could throw no light on the path taken by the Christ from the spiritual worlds to mankind on earth, as was still possible in the first Christian centuries, even though that had been but a vestige, but nevertheless a vestige of the old initiation science. As a result, it was only the historical Jesus who was recognized by mankind, even by learned men—that Jesus of whom history tells, a history which did not add to this historical Jesus, either by means of direct human vision or by teachings of initiation, the picture of the Christ Who was united with him.

Thus, for these centuries, the Church's development could not do otherwise than refer its believers ever and again to the historical Jesus, bringing the picture of him to life. Concerning everything, however, that those men, who knew something real about the spiritual world, could still speak about in the first Christian centuries, nothing could now be directly known. Only what was preserved by tradition from those times when there still existed human souls who really knew about the spiritual world from initiation science, only what had been preserved by tradition from old Christian knowledge—only this could be established by the Church in the form of dogmas concerning the Christ. No reference was made to those who still retained a view of the spiritual content of these dogmas, which were made the object of mere faith.

During the time when knowledge became increasingly perfected and extensive in regard to the sense world, alongside this knowledge of the sense world a content of dogmatic faith was placed, a dogmatic content that related to the Jesus figure only by means of an outward determination.

This Jesus figure had become established in mankind's ordinary consciousness and had assumed form. This attitude then continued on through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finally led to a theology purporting to be Christian but concerned only with the man Jesus, because as a result of historical tradition ordinary consciousness was only aware of him.

Meanwhile, the consciousness that had developed experience of the ego and which had investigated the laws of the sense world had less and less inclination to abide by the established contents of faith. It was especially the leading personalities in whom the new consciousness had developed the most, who became emancipated from inclinations toward faith and thus the Christ. So it happened that in the nineteenth century the supposed Christian theology, which had completely lost all knowledge of the Christ in favor of Jesus and spoke only about “Jesus of Nazareth,” came to a special prominence. It wanted to recognize Jesus as a man only, although perhaps the most eminent one who had appeared in human evolution.

In the first Christian centuries, out of the vestiges of the old initiation wisdom, the attempt had been made to describe the path leading from the perception of the Christ Being to his incorporation in Jesus of Nazareth; in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, one started with Christ and later arrived at Jesus. By the nineteenth century, one began with Jesus, who was looked upon at first as a man, and tried to come from Jesus to Christ. But that was the path that as a matter of course led in the end either to the admission (or the refusal to admit) one's inability to rise to the Christ from the historical Jesus of whom ordinary consciousness alone was aware, the “simple man” Jesus who had lived in Palestine.

This situation can be changed only by modern initiation as I have characterized it in its main outlines in the past few days, which can lead to imagination, inspiration and intuition in a new form. By means of this new initiation wisdom it is again possible to go beyond the merely historical image of Jesus to a direct view of man's pre-earthly existence and the world in which this existence is spent. It thereby becomes possible to behold the Christ in His super-earthly spirituality and then, proceeding from Christ, to understand Jesus and thus the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. The path that modern theology has taken, which, in emphasizing Jesus, has lost the Christ, can be reversed. Out of spiritual perception, men again can recognize the Christ, and through the perception of Christ behold Jesus in whom the Christ became Man. With this Christ perception, gained in the spirit, they can then contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha. Through anthroposophical perception, the Christ, Who for one branch of modern theology has already been lost, must now be recovered. I will explain in the fourth part of today's considerations what this signifies for man's inner development.

It has already been mentioned that through the lighting-up of ego consciousness the riddle of death confronted the human soul. This had to happen because, since the ego had become present in full clarity in the inner soul experience, man's physical organism thereby had become the actual basis for this ordinary human consciousness. This ego-permeated consciousness had its foundation in man's physical organism, and man learned to feel instinctively how only what has its foundation in the physical organism can be experienced by the soul. No longer did he see the eternal essence of his being through a direct picture consciousness. It was precisely his ego consciousness, his highest faculty in earth life, that drew his attention exclusively to his physical body and showed how this body, because of its constitution, could allow his ego-saturated consciousness to light up. In this state of consciousness we cannot say that there is anything in our soul that we carry through the gate of death.

It was precisely the ability of a retrospective view into pre-earthly life, which had been given to an older humanity by the grace of the lofty Sun Being, that had enabled ordinary consciousness to see forward into what is beyond death. Now, consciousness had become especially clear because, to its full extent, it had become an experience of the physical organism. But because of this man could not help saying to himself: You possess powers to brighten and illuminate your consciousness, but they come from the physical body. This body disintegrates at death. In this, of which you are aware in your ordinary consciousness, you perceive nothing of what can carry you over into another world. Something of this nature may exist—but with your ordinary consciousness you sense and know nothing of it.

This mystery of death had appeared with special intensity in the first Christian centuries when human beings were still more sensitive to these questions. The initiates, however, had drawn the attention of humanity to the Mystery of Golgotha, and in the following centuries, as Christianity evolved, its leaders had likewise directed humanity to that Mystery through their dogmas of faith. What was this Mystery to signify for man?

A person who can attain an inner person-to-person relationship to the Christ on earth, who can acknowledge and accept the Mystery of Golgotha, must take something into his consciousness that no material sense world can supply. It is precisely the person who looks most deeply into the constitution of the sense world who must deny the Mystery of Golgotha, for no understanding of this Mystery is possible to a comprehension derived from the senses. If, however, he can receive it into his heart, if he is then able, by means of a power of understanding rooted in the human soul (Gemüt), to grasp that event consummated only once in earth's evolution—an event comprehensible only out of the spirit—then, in his ordinary consciousness, he tears himself away from mere sense comprehension, which in its special clearness and intensity is precisely the essential feature of ego consciousness.

No one who wishes to remain only in the world of the senses can come to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. By contrast, if one renounces any understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha based on sense perception and acquires instead a relationship to if of faith and acknowledgement, if one looks up to the Mystery of Golgotha in an attitude of pious veneration and attains to an understanding of what Christ became for humanity when He came down from a spiritual existence into earth life, then one rises above the mere understanding of the sense world with the aid of that very power which, though it is itself a part of earthly consciousness, nevertheless constitutes man's highest faculty. Man thus generates and unfolds a force in his ordinary consciousness that does not spring from his own natural development. He must deepen himself inwardly and intensify his consciousness if he wants to go beyond his understanding of the sense world and develop enough strength to allow the spiritual significance of the Mystery of Golgotha to become a truth for his soul.

If we renounce all understanding based on the senses and acknowledge the truth of the Mystery of Golgotha; if we recognize that the Christ really did once live on earth in Jesus, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha a real, heavenly, super-earthly deed of enduring significance was accomplished in the midst of earth existence—then, by recognizing this truth we succeed in replacing that force that was once a part of ordinary consciousness but has now been lost.

In times past, the power to look back into pre-earthly life was present in ordinary consciousness, and out of this vision consciousness gained the strength to carry the soul through the gate of death. This power which now was no longer there was to enter into the soul through the Mystery of Golgotha; it was to enter through the strengthening that could occur in the soul, if, through inward soul experience, a person confessed to the truth of this Mystery. Then, as the saying of Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me,” came to life in man himself, the Christ, with the power that streamed out from His deed on Golgotha, could carry man beyond the point where, merely because of the condition of his consciousness, physical death could leave him. By these means, it was possible to regain a power of which man knew that with it he was able to reach beyond the portal of death.

How the mysteries of death, the opposite of the mysteries of birth, of which I spoke yesterday, can be described further in relation to the Christ Being, will be the topic of tomorrow's lecture.

Today, I would like to close my remarks by referring to what an old initiate said to those whose souls—as early as the first Christian centuries—were confronted with this whole riddle of death. He said: “Behold the condition of the human body, now that man has arrived at the use of ego consciousness. In this stage, the physical body conceals man's total entity. Since the unfolding of ego consciousness, man is so constituted that in and through his physical body alone he could never take hold of that element in him that belongs to the spirit. Look,” said such an initiate to his followers in the first Christian centuries, “look at the physical human organism just when the stage is reached when it is to offer the highest potentiality for ego consciousness; it turns out to be inadequate. The physical organism is therefore sick; it would be healthy only if it could give to man a consciousness of his spiritual significance. This physical organism developed in such a way that from the beginning there was sickness in it in relation to the life of the spirit. For this reason, the Christ descended and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, not only as a teacher but as the Physician of the soul, Who, through man's soul, heals him from what has fallen ill in his physical organism.” This is how those initiates of the first Christian century—who are no longer acknowledged by today's theology and who have been erased from memory—presented the Christ as the Physician of the soul, the Healer, the Savior of mankind. In presenting Him thus, they gave Him his due place as the true meaning of the whole of earth evolution. They showed how man's evolution took a descending course, descending to the point where his physical organism became completely corrupt and useless for the highest tasks of human consciousness. Then the Divine Savior as the Physician of the soul intervened to heal the relationship between man's soul condition and the divine-spiritual world. Thus, through the initiates of the first Christian centuries, a deeper understanding of the Christ came into being, namely, that of Christ as the Soul Physician of the world, the Healer of mankind, the Savior.

Because of all this one can say that in ancient times, before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, the initiates could speak to wider circles of humanity, who were open to their teachings, about a spiritual, a divine existence that permeated and was the foundation of all sense existence. If man brings this teaching to life again in modern consciousness through imaginative insight, then, what otherwise is an abstract, thought-out philosophy is enlivened—not only in the sense I have earlier characterized it here, but by becoming permeated by Christ. By means of the knowledge through which modern imagination leads men again to an insight into the spiritual world, philosophy is filled with the Christ. What once existed in ancient humanity, namely, the awareness of the Divine-Spiritual Father of all physical existence can awaken in humanity again. It was basically toward this Divine Father-consciousness that the ancient, pre-Christian initiates strove along with the rest of mankind. In the highest grade of initiation in the mysteries, the initiate represented the Divine-Spiritual, Cosmic Father, and was called “The Father.”

If man allows this conception to arise in his mind, what may be called a Christian philosophy comes into being. Furthermore, through modern inspiration, he becomes acquainted with what was already prophetically expressed by the initiates of the early Christian centuries, who still possessed vestiges of an ancient inspiration. He learns to perceive how a Divine-Spiritual Being, the Christ, descended out of spiritual worlds, placed Himself into man's earthly development, and thus constitutes in Himself the fulcrum of this evolution. A meaningful content is thus brought into humanity's earthly evolution and its laws when man learns through the Mystery of Golgotha to link this evolution to the cosmos by means of looking up to the cosmic Christ Being. Further, man learns to recognize how earthly evolution has been a concern of heaven, how the cosmos has cared about the affairs of mankind. In this way, the nature of that cosmology, which I have always characterized here as a spiritual cosmology, is extended so as to become a Christian cosmology.

If, then, man achieves a living relationship to the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in the sense of the words of Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me,” the Christ, by helping him solve the riddle of death, leads him into a renewed life in the spirit. He becomes acquainted with the new spirit, which once again is to make it clear to mankind that beyond the physical world there exists a spiritual world that rules, orders and permeates the physical. He learns to know the mission of the Healing Spirit, Who proceeds from Christ and is sanctified by Christ Himself. He learns to know the mystery of the Holy Spirit as the foundation for a new religious perception.

The Trinity, so long spoken of as a dogma, again comes to live for man. Looking back to the pre-Christian mysteries one can say that in these lived God the Father, Who also has a cosmic meaning for us. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, God the Son, in Christ, drew near mankind, and through what God the Son has brought to humanity, the connection was established with the Healing, the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is again a living conception; no dogma.

Through the vitalizing of the Father consciousness there arises a Christ-permeated philosophy. Through the vitalizing of the Son consciousness comes a Christ-permeated cosmology. In accordance with what the Christ referred to and has called the Healing Spirit and has mercifully poured over mankind, a new basis arises for a Christian religion, founded in knowledge.

Starting from such a Christian philosophy, a Christian cosmology and a Christian religious insight, we shall speak further tomorrow about the mystery of death in relation to the Christ Being and the course of humanity's evolution.

Since we are still able to meet today, it seems right to me to refer again to some things that have been said just recently, and which are of some importance for the whole attitude of man in our time.

That there is such a thing as the necessity for a new attitude of man in our time should be clear from the considerations that have been presented to you here and elsewhere in this time. That the kind of judgment that was usual in the previous epoch can no longer carry man into the future is something that must be recognized today. This must be emphasized again and again, because it is precisely against this that the feelings and perceptions of the present-day human being still most resist. The present-day human being would also like to be present, so to speak, when a new era is ushered in – it is so obvious to him that a new era must approach – but he does not want to become a different person himself. He would like to continue judging things in the way he has been accustomed to judging them so far. And even when he does manage to bring himself to admit that a new way of judging things must take hold, he always falls back into the old way of thinking. He does this particularly because the new attitude actually demands a radical introspection of the person. And this radical introspection is actually very, very unpleasant for the modern person.

Now, if we want to grasp the full depth of what underlies what has just been said, we have to take a good look, with good will, at the whole way in which we have become accustomed to living our lives in the modern era, especially since that point in time that I have often characterized as the point of a major turning point in the development of humanity, since the middle of the fifteenth century. One can say: That which today arises in a radical way from human hearts as demands has actually always been smoldering to a greater or lesser extent below the surface of people's consciousness since that time; but all things that develop always develop unnoticed for a time and only then become fully ripe to break out and enter into existence quite radically.

Now, in our recent endeavors, we have had to point out a certain threefold structure from a variety of perspectives. You know that our entire external public work is permeated by the impulse of threefold structure. But here I have also had to point out that human knowledge, if it is not to lead people astray, must also be based on the threefold nature of the human being itself. Science, which human beings have developed out of a certain necessary lack of clarity, this science, which, as it is now, also began in the mid-fifteenth century, regards the human being more or less as a unity. It is not clear to it that the human being really is a threefold being, which must be described as a main human being or nerve-sense human being, as a rhythm human being or breathing and circulation human being, and as a metabolism human being. These three aspects of human nature are quite distinct in their essence. The reason why people do not really want to admit that human beings themselves live in this threefold structure is because, when they want to structure something, they want to arrange the things so nicely next to each other. We see time and again that when people do make an effort to organize something, they want to have this organization side by side, they want to store the parts of this organization next to each other so that they can see them nicely with their external powers of perception. This is the basis of the strange essay that the Tübingen professor wrote against the threefold order. I have already mentioned that the good Professor von Heck, with complete disregard for what is actually said in the threefold social order, has constructed his own threefold order. He cannot understand the kind of thinking that is at issue here at all; he cannot penetrate to the feeling that we live in an age in which a new thinking, a new feeling, is necessary. And so he hears about a spiritual, a legal or state, and an economic member of the social organism. Three members, he says. In the one member we have known so far, we have gradually become accustomed to a parliamentarism. It has been hard enough for people of this kind to get used to it; they prefer to be governed centrally, from the top down, but they have got used to parliamentarism. But if you do go in for it, then paragraph A, paragraph B and paragraph C must stand side by side. Intellectual, legal, economic, that must be so outwardly tangible if one is to get involved in it at all. Yes, in this way, by approaching the new with the old way of thinking, one will certainly not make any headway. And one can very well criticize the threefold order, as Professor von Heck does, but it is still his own absurd threefold order that he criticizes, and not the one that the Federation for Threefolding is currently sending out into the world.

Now, all this is connected with the fact that man instinctively resists what is most necessary in our time, the reorientation of all thinking and feeling. And this reorientation of thinking and feeling will not come either until one is willing to gain at least subjective, initial relationships to spiritual science, to the real knowledge of spiritual life. And on the one hand, people will have to be willing to recognize the threefoldness in social life as a necessity, but also to acknowledge the threefoldness of the human being himself as a fact given by nature. But the fact that the human being does not have these threefoldness neatly nested side by side, but that one link always merges into the other, that is precisely what confuses the new human being who is bound to his old ideas. For, of course, when I speak of the head organization, of the nerve-sense organization, this head organization, when viewed externally, is first of all centered in the head. It has its center in the head, in the head itself. But it sends out the necessary extensions into the whole of the rest of the human being; for the sense capacity is, of course, in the whole human being. That is to say, as a head human being, the human being is only a nerve-sense human being in terms of the main thing; the whole human being is a nerve-sense human being. And as a rhythm human being, the human being is a chest human being. The rhythmic system, the breathing and circulation system, has its center in the chest. So the point is that man, as a rhythmic being, is a chest being. The respiratory and circulatory systems are localized in the chest system, but of course the rhythm, the rhythmic activity, is sent into both the main system and the metabolic system. So only in the main sense is the chest human being a rhythmic human being. And it is the same with the metabolism. Of course, metabolism is also present in the head, also in the chest, but it is regulated by the limb system, as I have always characterized it. So what has to be listed as limbs runs into the other. Of course, this confuses people who always want to draw lines and who only want to have what occurs to them standing side by side.

A different way of looking at things, a completely different way of relating to reality, is therefore necessary for the human being who wants to engage in thinking and also in willing and doing for the near future. But one should not think that these things have only one meaning for cognition or for the world view. These things have their own special significance for the life of humanity, for our whole attitude towards life. And this must be taken into account very carefully. We must judge our whole life from this point of view and then ask ourselves the question: How must it be reshaped? In a sense, we have a threefold structure in our lives, but this threefold structure demands, firstly, a precise understanding and, secondly, further development. The precise understanding must arise from the fact that, with a certain fertilization of knowledge through spiritual-scientific contemplation, one looks at what is actually present in our lives. What is there in our lives? What we demand as a special link through the threefold order is, of course, there, but it is only mixed up in a chaotic way with the other two, the legal and the economic links. The spiritual is part of our real life, in that man simply needs a certain spiritual guidance for external culture, for external life. Without spiritual guidance there is no external cultural life. In our present life, this spiritual guidance is not based on an original, elementary expression of human nature, but on something that has been handed down. It is based on something that has been transmitted to man historically. You will surely remember that when one speaks of the newer spiritual life that arose with the great transformation in the fifteenth century, one speaks not of a new creation but of a renaissance or reformation. One speaks, and rightly so, not of a new creation but of a rebirth, of a re-establishment of something old. And in a certain sense, spiritually we live only in a re-established old age. Spiritually speaking, we live from the inheritance of what has, in a certain sense, been concentrated out of much older, oriental and Egyptian spiritual culture in Greek culture. The fact that we have our old Greek gymnasium today is, I would say, only a clear indication that our spiritual life is actually a Greek renaissance.

But what is Greek intellectual life based on? It is difficult to see through this because Greek intellectual life has, in a certain way, very strongly developed that on which it is based: oriental intellectual life. But it has greatly transformed this oriental spiritual life. As a result, if you delve into Greek intellectual life with a mere sense of knowledge, without taking into account spiritual-scientific presuppositions, you do not realize what this Greek intellectual life is actually based on. It is entirely dependent on the fact that the members of the conquering class were instinctively granted the right to reveal the spiritual, while the members of the conquered class were not granted this right. Greek culture actually contains a dual population: the ancient population that inhabited the Greek peninsula in European primeval times and which had a very different social structure from that of later Greeks. The later Greeks, we can actually begin with the incursion of that intellectual power that found its expression in the royal dynasties of Agamemnons and so on. This Greek life spread over a native population. And these conquerors were of a different blood than the native population. You notice this different blood in what I have already mentioned here, in Greek sculpture. This Greek sculpture has clearly separate types: the Zeus type, which has different ears, a different nose, and a different position of the eyes than the Hermes-Mercury type, which in turn has a different nose than the satyr type. These last two types point to the Greek indigenous population, who were of a different blood than those we know as the bearers of Greek culture. This means that the entire configuration of Greek intellectual life, which we have adopted as the Renaissance, is of an aristocratic nature, a reformed theocracy of the Orient and Egypt. It is built on the view that the things of the world do not reveal themselves, as was later believed, through proof, but that they want to reveal themselves through revelation: on the one hand through revelation on the part of the oracles or the like, that is, through that which breaks into the human world as spiritual revelation; but that which is to rule the world also reveals itself as deeds. Man does not want to decide about these deeds with his reason and intellect, but he lets powers decide that are outside of him. Among the latter, Greek culture adopted the martial principle of the Orient. It has only transformed it, so we do not notice that in Greek culture two things have merged: theocracy and militarism. But theocracy and militarism are the elements of aristocracy. So we take into our spiritual life, precisely with the grammar school, with the adoption of Greek, an aristocratic element that has, on the one hand, theology and, on the other, military decision. Theology, which does not arrive at its truths by way of proof; military decisions, which do not arise out of human reason but, according to human views, are the result of an external judgment by God or nature. We have this, so to speak, in our social organism through Greek culture, which achieved so much in its state and in its epoch. Through Greek culture we have the aristocratic way of feeling of human beings. And these things must be taken psychologically. Of course, none of the people of the present day will become a Greek in his attitude when he absorbs the aristocracy of the classical period into himself, but he will become something that no longer fits into our time: he will become a bearer of an aristocratic principle that must be overcome. No matter how much enthusiasm there may be for this aristocratic element in our time, no matter how much it may be accepted, in so far as it expresses itself in the life of the mind and in the forms of the life of the mind, this aristocratic element is based on something very agreeable, on Greek culture, which we certainly do not want to do without. But in the way it is based on Greek culture today, it cannot become the general basis of human culture. Therefore, it must be introduced into our culture in a completely different way. This is something that we, so to speak, carry within us as the first element: a spiritual life configured from Greek culture.

Now, however, we also carry a second element within us, namely Roman life. We not only carry Greek life, chaotically mixed into our social culture, into our spiritual life, in terms of its form, its design, its structure, but we also carry Roman legal life within us. We basically carry within us the obsession of shaping that state which was only good and right for the development of humanity in the time when Roman civilization flourished and in the place where it flourished. Greek intellectual life and Roman legal life are within us. It is extremely interesting to see how, in the middle of the fifteenth century and later, European legal life actually wanted to establish itself on its own foundations, how it wanted to develop something quite different from what actually emerged. The ideas of Roman law broke in and permeated the structure of the states, just as Greek intellectual life permeated the structure of the states. And so our legal life did not become something that emerged from an original, elementary impulse of human nature, but something like a kind of renaissance, an adoption of an old one.

But where they could not take up an old one was the basis of economic life. You can cling to an old spirit, you can cling to old legal forms, but you cannot eat what the Greeks ate, nor what the Romans ate. Economic life does not tolerate this transfer of the old. Economic life developed out of Central European, Germanic, Frankish and other conditions, and it did so with a certain elemental force. But it was permeated by the renaissance of spiritual life and by the renaissance of legal life. And it is interesting how people feel: yes, in our social organism only economic life is viable, in the newer sense, viable. Marx and Engels in particular have this feeling. I have described it somewhat in the fourth number of our threefolding newspaper under the title “Marxism and Threefolding”. Marx and Engels feel: Yes, in relation to economic life, it is moving forward according to newer impulses, and these newer impulses only have to be properly developed; they are not yet present in the external world of facts, but they are present in human longing. And so Marx and Engels want an economic life that no longer influences people, as Greek life did, by governing them in relation to their spiritual powers. Marx and Engels no longer want a social structure that influences social life in the sense of Roman law. They see this as a foreign body of modern economic life. They feel the strangeness and therefore want to throw it out. They want to establish something in economic life that no longer rules over people, and a law that only administers production processes, economic circulation of goods, and so on. But that is not the only task of modern times. The task of the modern age is to recognize that, while economic life must be transformed and given the configuration demanded by human longings, we can no longer make do with a legal life that no longer fits into our economic life, nor with a spiritual life that is based only on the Renaissance. In our time we need not only a reasonable organization of economic life, we need a reorganization of the legal system to take the place of Roman law, and we need a complete renewal of intellectual life. That is to say, we need not only a spiritual renaissance, but a spiritual re-creation. And Christianity, too, which has fallen into the Greek and Roman ages, cannot be understood by us as it was understood through the medium of the Greek and Roman, but must be newly understood by us with a newly created spiritual life. That is the secret of our time.

Look around you at the old in the European East. There you will find that in this European East, Christianity in Russian Orthodoxy has been permeated with the Greek world view. We have taken up Christianity in the Roman world view, not in the Greek. As a result, we no longer have anything inside us that comes from the Greek world view, but we do have inside us in Christianity what comes from the Roman conception of law. Let us try to recognize the basic structure of this Roman conception of law. The Roman conception of law is based on not regarding people in terms of their blood. In Greece, one was worthy if one belonged to the teutonic blood, the aristocratic blood. What the gods revealed through members of the aristocratic blood was also the right thing, the wise thing. In the Roman cultural element, it was different. There it gradually emerged that one was what one became through one's incorporation into the abstract state, into the constitutional state. One did not become, as with the Greeks, a person of blood, but a person of the state, a citizen. One was nothing special except as a citizen of the state. It was inconceivable that a person should stand there with body, soul and spirit, but it was important that he should be registered in the state system, that the state system should stamp him as a citizen. And when citizenship spread from the Italian peninsula, from Rome, to the whole of the Roman Empire, it was a tremendous event. For in those days people felt that it was something connected with life. But has it not remained so for us in a sense? It has remained for us in a sense that we organize our entire public life according to our system of government, which is derived from Roman thought and feeling.

I once had an old acquaintance who had acquired a childhood sweetheart when he was eighteen, but he could not marry her in his eighteenth year. He had to wait and first earn some money. And so the man had become sixty-four years old. In order to be able to marry, he went back to his hometown, because the love of his youth had remained faithful to him and he wanted to marry her. But what had happened? The church and parsonage, where the baptismal records were kept, had burnt down and the baptismal records had been destroyed. The man had no baptismal certificate. He wrote to me from his hometown and said: Yes, according to my common sense, it seems to me that the fact that I was born is proof that I am here, but people don't believe me because I don't have a baptismal certificate that testifies in writing that I am here. So, first of all, it must be stated that one is there, that one is outwardly categorized. Of course, when you tell someone something like this, they say it's an exaggeration. But it is not an exaggeration. Because this plays a major role in our public relationships. This is the way of thinking that has taken the place of the theocratic way of thinking of the Orient, and which has been somewhat transformed by Greek culture. The Roman way of thinking is an abstract one. The Orient believed in divine powers that enter into man through blood. In the Orient, the person open to the divine was the person related by blood. In the Roman cultural element, one was imbued with the belief in concepts, in ideas, in abstractions. This belief, which was a metaphysical one, in contrast to the theological belief of the Orient, was joined by jurisprudence. Just as militarism is the sister phenomenon of theocratic aristocratism, so jurisprudence is the sister phenomenon of the abstract civil principle of ideas that already appeared in Romanism. Metaphysics and jurisprudence are siblings. The time is coming when not only things will be accepted as revelations, but when everything is to be proved. Just as one proves in jurisprudence that someone has stolen, so it should be proved that not only is 2 times 2 four, but also that there is a God. This led to the recurring proof of God's existence. All the proof of our scientific logic is nothing more than a metamorphosed legal logic. That this legalism has entered into our public life, you can, if you care to, truly recognize everywhere even today. Just think how people complain that in the most diverse administrative offices in the administrative apparatus, which is entirely formed out of the Roman Empire, that where people should sit who understand something of the technical, lawyers sit, not technicians. That is really the case. Lawyers sit in these positions everywhere. That is the second thing that has entered our lives, just as theocracy and militarism were the first sibling couple. Theocracy and militarism, that is, Greekness, is rooted, however strange it may sound, in the spiritual constitution of man; Romanism is rooted in its conception of law. And from these foundations, which I have mentioned to you, the Western Roman Catholic Church also differs from the Eastern Greek Catholic Church. The Eastern Greek Catholic Church has remained more of a spiritual matter. The Roman Catholic Church is actually, at its core, a completely civil and legal institution. It has always asserted itself as such. It has transformed what should be purely spiritual into legal institutions. But it has even introduced legal concepts into the Catholic worldview. The justification of man before God through confession and such things, which arise entirely from legal thought, can be found at every turn in later Catholic dogmatics, which is not originally Christian but Roman dogmatic, permeated by Roman thought. And what has passed through Roman thought, the strongest, most abstract expression of it, is actually found in Protestantism, which is based entirely on a legal concept: on the justification of man by faith.

These are the old elements that are in our cultural life. One must turn one's gaze to these old elements without prejudice, because in our time they are ripe to die. Marx and Engels realized this. But they did not realize that we now need something new to take their place. They believed that economic life should continue in the mere administration of the branches of production, goods and things; the rest would come by itself. It does not come by itself. In addition to the material administration of the branches of production and goods, we need a democratic legal structure and a new creation of spiritual life. Nothing material can give birth to anything spiritual. Therefore, the threefold social order is intimately connected with the whole challenge of our time. It emphasizes the necessity of replacing the old spirit that has been squeezed out of our culture with a new spirit, with a new creation of the spirit. We, as people of culture, cannot be satisfied with a new Renaissance. We cannot reheat the old, but need a new creation of the spirit. This is what spiritual science, oriented to anthroposophy, seeks to be. It will therefore be most contested, because people cling to the old. And secondly, we need a new creation of the legal system, which must be brought completely into the democratic channel, which must be created in such a way that it cannot be created from the old conditions, because never in the old conditions does man face man as man, but always with some class or privilege involved. That is the task of the man of the present: to really put himself in the position of the new creations. In many cases he lacks the courage to do so. But this courage will have to be mustered. It will be mustered when the most lethargic part of our population, and that is the part that has gone through academic studies – on the whole it is so, there are exceptions of course – when this drowsiest part of our population, when it is willing to break with tradition, whether it be in the form of revelations that came to us from Greece or abstract ideas that came to us from Rome. One must consider the possibility of developing a right through a democratic state, of developing a spiritual life through a new creation that stands on completely free ground and must therefore break with all the nonentities that are based only on the preservation of the old or on anything nebulous and unclear. Please consider from this point of view what is taking place in these days.

The Social Democratic Party claims – I am not talking about nuances here – to be the party that will bring about a reorganization of modern economic life. Leninism within this social democracy is actually the most consistent expression of this social democratic view, because Lenin is truly a worthy successor to Marx. This Leninism wants to create a spiritual life out of mere economic life on the ground, where that is least likely to happen because it is contrary to the instincts of the people. It wants to do this through Lunacharsky's alchemy. I am not speaking about these things in response to any news, so that one can say that fairy tales are being told about Russia and the like. There is no need to listen to the descriptions, because they are naturally colored by subjective perception. The bourgeois will describe it differently than the Social Democrat. No, I am basing myself on what Lenin himself said in his work. I know that what underlies his view is not the creation of a new culture, but the destruction of an existing one. I do not want to talk about the school system as it is described, but about the laws that are being given to the Russian school system, and from that no intellectual life can arise. It is not what is described that matters to me, but what the same people do when they want to create something new out of their illusions. We in Central Europe are not yet so far advanced, we cannot yet make these great mistakes, but we are well on the way to ruining everything that wants to come in the future.

Do not Marx and Engels take the view that economic life is everything, and that spiritual life must develop out of it? That is theory, that is utopia. What happens in reality? One feels: Yes, if we merely make economic institutions in relation to the present culture, then a real spiritual life does not seem to come of it after all. So one makes compromises with the old spiritual life: social democracy with the center. According to Marx and Engels, it should not be the Center that rises from the smoke that would enter into our brains and those of future generations in a stimulating way, but it should arise from the independence of economic life as the superstructure. Very strange, in the Marxian and Engelsian theory: economic substructure, economic substructure; spiritual, ideological superstructure, law, custom, intellectual life in general, however, — illusionistic theory. In reality: the economic foundation, social democracy; the superstructure is taken care of by the Center and the Roman clericalism. The foundation: the Marxist-inspired economic state or the Marxist-inspired economic cooperative; the illusory superstructure: the ideal man who arises from the illusion and is supposed to surrender; the reality: the fat Erzberger. You see, these things look grotesque when you say them out loud, but they express reality and, if they are seriously considered, they show where we actually stand and what errors we are heading towards. But they also show that we will not escape from these errors unless we decide to approach the re-creation of a spiritual life and treat this re-creation of the spiritual life sympathetically. We must treat it sympathetically because the time has come when spiritual life cannot remain merely a world view, cannot remain merely a theory, but must be incorporated into the practical treatment of life.

The fact that modern medicine could only rely on one natural science and build itself on one natural science, which did not take into account the threefold human being, the nerve-sense human being, the rhythmic human being and the metabolic human being, has made this modern medicine, which is now something practical, both as hygiene and as a healing method, one-sided, which is already felt not only by many people, but also by many doctors, thank God. But our medicine will never be placed on a sound foundation if it is not based on the threefold nature of man. Oh, the head man, who is modeled on the cosmos, is something quite different. Therefore, something quite different are those irregularities in human nature, the pathological irregularities that are of cosmic origin. Something else is the damage to human nature that has a telluric origin and that essentially comes from the detour through the metabolism, that has an earthly origin, not a cosmic one. Something else is everything that is connected with what is between the cosmos and the earth, with what lives partly in the air and also in the water. In the future, this must become the starting point for a truly freely pursued medical study. For it is indeed peculiar that of these three things, which I have just mentioned and which, in truly practical medicine, must be built up on the basis of the threefold nature of the human being, only one can actually, I might say, be learned in the official, scholastic way. One can only study that which is based on the human metabolic system through the methods that exist today solely through our university teaching, which is modeled on Greek and Roman life. And actually, our whole medical-scientific way of thinking is a way of thinking based on the metabolic system. Because the way we have science today, there is actually only the science of metabolism. But if you want to add the other things, that which can occur in human nature as damage through air and water, then you are actually dealing with a lot of individual things. What occurs in humans as damage from air and water is very individual, and can only be learned through dedicated interaction with older physicians who already have experience in this field. This can only be acquired by a young person joining an old, experienced doctor, not in a school-like way, but as an assistant, which is what happens in today's clinical assistantships, but as a caricature, pushed down into the metabolic sphere. It must be the case that a certain medical instinct, a certain medical intuition, which in some people is more pronounced and in others less so, borders on clairvoyance, occurs in the case of someone who is an assistant to an older doctor, and so that he does not even think of treating things in a merely typical and schematic way, but that he combines, out of instinct, new individuality and older individuality, in which he has been trained and which he does not merely imitate. And what comes to the human organism in the way of damage from the head, which, as I said before, although it permeates the whole person, is only centered in the head, cannot be taught at all. There is no method by which one can learn to recognize from the outside those diseases that arise in the human organism from the head. These can only be recognized through original talent, and this talent must be awakened. Therefore, it is necessary to consider from the very beginning whether such abilities can be awakened in a particular person.

You see, this is where the attitude comes into play, which must develop in the independent spiritual organism, and which will go to the point of paying attention to human talent, that is, putting each person in the place to which he is led by his particular talent. It is therefore necessary that this particular spiritual life be truly placed on its own feet, for only in a free spiritual life, where the talents are allowed to rule freely, will the talents also be truly recognized. In this way, by entering into the spiritual, man returns in a certain way to the natural, the nature-like, and this in turn will give rise to possible relationships. You all know that today we suffer from the fact that all conditions can no longer be properly cared for because we do not administer the things of the world from a natural way of thinking, that is, from a spiritual way of thinking. There are certain positions in the state or elsewhere; but there are always far too many people for these positions. There are always many more applicants than are needed. Other positions are not filled because people are not trained. Certain professions cannot exist because people are not educated. In the free spiritual life, as envisaged by the idea of a threefold social organism, none of this can happen, because the human being does not shape things out of arbitrariness, but because he shapes in harmony with the great laws of the world. And where that happens, things usually go well. Wherever human arbitrariness is used to shape things contrary to these great laws of the world, things usually do not go well. And the Roman system has the greatest predisposition to arbitrariness. The purely metaphysical-legal system has the greatest predisposition to mere arbitrariness. The Greek system had a certain instinct arising from consanguinity, even if this instinct only thinks for the minority. The economic system has its own natural necessity. The metaphysical-legal system is what distances man most from the foundations of nature in terms of his feelings and perceptions. The Roman-legal system is what we should consider first and foremost without prejudice. Because until we have overcome it in all areas, we will not make any further progress. If someone were to ask today: Will there really be enough people in the future, or not too many, for a particular profession in the leading positions, arising out of an independent spiritual life? then one can only answer: These things cannot be answered in the way that logic works, which is constructed according to the pattern of Roman jurisprudence, but rather in the way that the logic of facts works. Some decades ago, the news spread from Vienna to the educated world, as they say, that people had been found who could regulate the type of births in the future. That is, in the future it would be possible to regulate whether what is to be born will be a boy or a girl. You know, this Schenk theory caused quite a stir, and people had great hopes for it. Do you know what the real effect would be? The effect would be that in this approximate order, in which about the same number of men and women are born, the greatest disorder would arise if gender were left to human arbitrariness. The greatest disorder would result. And so it will be when, with regard to other, less natural things, people again apply their arbitrariness. The fact that we have too many people for one occupation and too few for another is due to the unnatural nature of human thinking and human institutions. The moment this arbitrary, metaphysical-legal Roman way of thinking and organizing is replaced by one that is inspired by spiritual science and intuition, and which in turn merges with what was also an older instinct, we will once again enter into a life that regulates the social order in such a way that it can endure.

As you can see, the new social thinking cannot be properly grasped from a merely abstract way of thinking. In a sense, one must already have entered into a kind of marriage with nature itself. And those people who today believe most in thinking naturally think most unnaturally, because they think in a distorted Roman-legal way, which has spread into all our affairs. One would not believe how, for example, even in something as far removed as possible from Roman law, in medicine and medical thinking, this abstract quality has crept in.

And now we must not forget that this whole abstract being has become so unnatural since the 1870s. We can only distinguish between what came before and what came after. Until the 1870s, old traditions were still in place in all areas. The good elements of the various renaissances were still at work. For in the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear to see that the old was losing its validity for human progress, and that humanity must strive for new creations, both in the legal sphere and in the entire spiritual life. For only in this way will economic life, which is quite clearly demanding its own reorganization, be imbued with such human thoughts, which are necessary.

But the necessary practical activities, such as medicine, can only be enriched if something completely new is created from spiritual life, not if renaissances are started from spiritual life. New creation of spiritual life, that is what we need.

It was truly a product of the necessity of our time that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science was combined with social action in the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism. And in recent months, the necessity has also arisen to seek a closer connection between the social and the spiritual. Of course, the old guard will have something against it too. They had something against the threefold social order in general; they will also have something against this hand-in-hand approach. People have no sense of how strong the old guard is. They also have no sense of how necessary it is in our time to cut off the plaits and thus overcome European Chinese culture, otherwise Asian Chinese culture could become far too dangerous for us if we continue to wear the plaits of European Chinese culture.

Now, in our circle, a certain understanding of this necessity arising from the spiritual-scientific foundations has begun, and we have indeed seen that the elements are present to at least prepare humanity for a certain receptivity for the new spiritual striving. Friends of ours have worked to spread the anthroposophical worldview here in Stuttgart and in the surrounding area, and it has been a great success. It is to be hoped that these things, which are also eminently necessary socially today, will be understood. It is wrong to believe that humanity at large is not open to these things. In the present time, if we want to understand what is socially necessary, we need a thinking that has been trained by those concepts and ideas that come from spiritual science. Because, you see, in addition to all the other contradictions in the present, there is also this contradiction: legal-Roman, merely logical thinking and spiritual-scientific thinking. Spiritual scientific thinking, which everywhere is based on the logic of facts – Roman Catholic legal thinking, which is only based on the logic of concepts, only on the selfish logic of man. This thinking will never be strong enough to see through reality. I have given you a clear, concrete example of this.

In Zurich, Avenarius taught, in Prague and Vienna Mach taught, and one of his students was Fritz Adler, the son of old Adler. Mach and Avenarius, with their purely positivistic sensory assurance, were good average people, they were good present-day people, or, for that matter, good past-day people, for there is supposed to be something new in the present. And all those who represented the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach naturally believed themselves to be good present-day people. This was still the case, as a rule, with the first generation of students, when they formulated purely positivistic theories of sense perception, but no longer with the next generation of students. Then the logic of the facts came into play, and it was characterized by the fact that Avenarius and Mach are the political philosophers of Bolshevism. Imagine these honest Central European citizens, who certainly never went too far in this direction, as the idols, the philosophical idols of the Bolsheviks. This is the logic of facts, it is a logic that can be seen through by anyone who engages in spiritual scientific knowledge that goes with the facts. Those who think only in Roman-legal terms analyze the philosophy of Mach, the philosophy of Avenarius. Yes, they find nothing in it that could be logically extracted and then become a practical system of Bolshevism. Oh no! Even what people could do according to the views of such a purely conceptual logic, such a purely metaphysical logic, is also good. That is to say, what the Roman-minded logician must think of as the consequence of Avenarius's world view is good bourgeois. But what the logic of reality develops from it is Bolshevism. Today we need concepts that master reality, that enter into reality. We have strayed very far from reality through the Roman-legal essence, which has crept into everything, everything. Today people believe that they are expressing their own free human nature. In reality, they only express what has been instilled in them by the Roman or Catholic - but that is also Roman - legal being. That is why it is difficult today to bring to people that which does not arise from human arbitrariness, but which springs from the facts themselves. Of course, spiritual science itself must sound different in the way it is presented than what has been produced in this way. But in the depths of human nature there is already a yearning that meets the moods of spiritual science. And if there is enough perseverance and courage, it is precisely from these currents, which can be found today in some of our friends, that spiritual science will be carried out into the world; it will arise out of these currents that which the present time needs. Today, we should not be deterred by the appearance of opinions that come only from the Romanic bourgeoisie in their way of thinking, saying: Oh, if humanity is to advance through what you mean, then it will take decades! That is nonsense again in the face of reality. It is again nothing more than Roman-legal logic. The truth must be thought differently. If you look at a plant as it grows, it develops leaf after leaf, slowly at first. And anyone who thinks that it will always continue at that pace is quite mistaken. Then there is a jolt, and the calyx and petals develop rapidly from the leaf. And so it will be, if only we ourselves have the strength to persevere with what we can achieve spiritually and socially. It depends on the will. It may look for a long time as if things are going very slowly. But then, when everything that can grow has come together, the turnaround will come suddenly. But it will only work well if as many people as possible are prepared for it. That is what I wanted to tell you right now as a kind of conclusion to our work during these weeks, which I would like to call our “Stuttgart Weeks”. For it is a matter of not slackening our efforts to work for the good of our own cause. Not looking to the left, not looking to the right, but looking to the good that flows from our own cause, that is what matters. And avoiding, even if only in our thoughts and feelings, to have any mistrust of what flows from this cause itself. No matter how much the things that flow from our cause are attacked, we must not be deterred by such attacks. For these attacks, we need only take a closer look at them all, and we will soon find that they sound and resonate from the old, even if they want to be “confessions of renewal”. For all renewal today can only come about if economic thinking is joined by new legal thinking and a new spiritual life. This is what we must regard as a necessity, what we want to infuse into everything, what we must permeate ourselves with in order to participate in the social reorganization of humanity.

That, my dear friends, was what I wanted to say to you today, because I firmly believe that the iron we have forged so far must not cool, it must remain warm. Then it will achieve everything that can lead humanity along the path it should take. That is why I would like to summarize this reflection, which sought to summarize some of what we have been doing here in recent weeks, in two words. These two words are very old, but modern man must grasp them in a new way, in such a way that he encounters them with the feelings and emotions that arise from spiritual science. And these words are: Learn and work!

We cannot today indulge in the naive belief that we already know everything and that we can draw up programs from what we know. We have to find ideas from life today, but life renews itself every day, and we have to have the confidence to learn something new from life every day. And we must not be cowards who believe that they can only work when they can build on so-called secure ideas, whereby they always mean those ideas that have been handed down from time immemorial. We must have the courage to learn while working and to work while learning. Otherwise, man will not be able to enter the future and its demands. This will also be his new Christianity. Many people today go through a certain conflict. They remind you when you speak in the anthroposophical sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, that according to their opinion, according to the Gospel, Christ died on the cross to redeem souls through his deed, that therefore the souls that only believe in Christ are redeemed without their doing anything. It is certain – you can read about it in my book, “Christianity as Mystical Fact” – that something happened through the Mystery of Golgotha, in which the human being, with his present consciousness, has no direct part, for the present consciousness only begins in the middle of the fifteenth century. But that is not the point today, that we lazily surrender to what takes care of us outside of ourselves. We must not speak today as some Catholic church dignitaries, for example, speak, whether high or low, and say: You will not advance socially unless Christ is at the center of all social activity. — Recently, I have experienced in many a gathering that the Christ was also mentioned in this way. Yes, my dear friends, I used my spiritual ear a little while listening, so that I heard that outwardly resounded through the hall, one does not advance socially without the Christ, but inwardly only the Benedictus resounded, not the Christ. Inwardly it was not about the Christ, but about the Benedictus. I mean the one who now sits on the Roman See. And that is precisely why humanity is not making progress today, because it relies on something other than what connects with its own soul. The Christ must also be understood anew. The external church cannot take the place of Christ. Only what man experiences within himself can help him to progress. Therefore, no one understands the Christ who does not understand that he must be reborn in the soul of every single person. But man must also work on his spiritual formation. Only when we believe that our actual human powers are not born with us, but that our actual human powers for the future will be those that we ourselves develop within us, only then do we stand on truly Christian ground. Not the Christ who is born with us – that is only God the Father – but the Christ whom we experience in ourselves by developing towards him, that is the Christ who must be grasped.

Today there are books by Protestant Christians, for example Harnack's book “The Essence of Christianity”. Cross out the word “Christ” everywhere in this book, and the book changes from a lie to a truth. As it is, it is a lie, because wherever “Christ” is written, it should say: the Father-God. What Harnack writes refers only to the general fatherly nature-god. There is nothing in the book about the Christ. That has been added by way of lies. The Christ can only be found by the transformed, transmuted human nature, by human nature that is engaged in its own activity.

That is what must be overcome today, but with which, unfortunately, instead of thinking of overcoming, the world makes compromises. The compromises that are made outside today are also made within the soul, and if our souls were not so terrible compromisers, then there would be no such terrible compromises in the outer life as the one that now comes from Weimar, the school compromise. Today, people of a compromising nature slink through existence, and they are the ones who experience everything in retrospect, who do not move forward. We can only move forward if we have the will to learn and the courage to incorporate what we have learned into life. Only from this will and courage can the new motto arise:

I want to learn, I want to work.
I want to learn by working.
I want to work by learning.

This lecture is the thirteenth of nineteen lectures in the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy.

Today we will occupy ourselves with an important document of mankind, although it appears far removed from the realm of our present line of study, yet nevertheless stands in an inner relationship to it. It is the Ten Commandments, which we will strive to illuminate from the basis of spiritual science because perhaps through spiritual science the right light may help clarify our understanding of this document.

From the side of learned theology it is often maintained that these Ten Commandments concur with various laws and commandments of other ancient folk and don't really depict anything extraordinary. They are considered at most only noteworthy as part of a collection in which laws and orders are to be found among various ancient peoples, as for example with Lycurgus of Sparta or the law tablets of Hammurabi.

What we have examined in the developmental route of mankind in the post Atlantic time and having allowed this to work on our souls, can become a specific connecting thread allowing an understanding of the revelation regarding the greatness, the enormity, which struck mankind, in the Ten Commandments given in Sinai. Let's remind ourselves about our contemplation of the evolution of mankind during the post-Atlantic time. We saw how the five cultural epochs - the Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Egyptian-Judaic, the Greek-Roman and Germanic cultural epochs - are a gradual conquering of the physical plane by mankind. Now we stand at the end of the third and at the beginning of the fourth epoch which we could call the “Mission of Moses.” Out of what did this Mission exist?

We will strive to direct our souls more precisely to how inspiration of the Initiates actually occurred in the successive time intervals. Yesterday we spoke about the Rishis, the inspirational ones in the ancient Indian time. The Rishis announced that they were mere common people in ordinary life who became however at specific times an instrument, a mouth piece for the inspirations of higher, spiritual beings. This fact was particularly prevalent in the ancient Indian times and these ancient Rishis, these great teachers of the post-Atlantean time could speak of lofty spiritual truths. We can ask ourselves in which spiritual regions these Rishis moved when they wanted to be permeated and surged through inwardly by higher Beings, who spoke through them? The Rishis were raised up while higher forces lived within them, not only to the astral or lower Devachan planes but above, right to the upper Devachan, so their learning originated in upper Devachan. In these ancient times, shortly after the Atlantic catastrophe, the old Indian bodies still gave mankind possibilities to go out of their bodies, and thus step into a relationship with Beings of Higher Worlds.

Now the cultural epochs continued. In the cultural epoch of Zarathustra, the ancient Persian, the highest initiates certainly knew how to speak about the highest spiritual Beings but their rise could not without further ado reach to the upper parts of Devachan. They could only rise to lower Devachan. Despite that however they could be taught about the higher planes because these elevated beings of the lower Devachanic planes knew about the higher planes.

In the world in which the Egyptian initiates were mainly indigenous, they could usually rise to the astral plane and it was not only a small circle which could still rise up to the astral plane in the old Egyptian time. A relatively large number of people, through their own observation, still knew what was happening on the astral plane. At least in certain in-between conditions of life, between waking and sleeping for instance, many experienced community with these Beings who did not descend to the physical plane but were at home on the astral plane. Thus the ancient Egyptian initiates who could enter and exit the astral plane found it easy to reveal things happening in the Higher Worlds.

The more we approach the later cultural epochs, the more the veil in front of the spiritual worlds drew to a close. The number of people who were capable of making observations in the spiritual worlds diminished ever more, and as a result, from the fourth cultural epoch onwards, a particular form of proclamation was required from the Initiates. One of these Initiates, familiar with all the occult arts of the Egyptian Initiates, was Moses; he moved freely throughout the astral plane. Even his people were chosen to behold certain revelations, and were capable of being something to the people even if they could no longer see into the higher worlds. It required Initiates, although diminished in their numbers, who knew directly or indirectly about the higher worlds, because they could consciously live out of their bodies. The largest part of the people however had to restrict their lives to the physical plane. The task which mankind had to fulfil in this time when the mission of Moses began, was this: those people who were completely dependent on the physical plane were to be given a revelation out of the spirit, which stands behind the physical, according to which they could regulate their lives. How could this Mission of Moses be formulated then? Just consider the necessity to clarify to the people that what is around them, what they can see and touch, is the physical plane - here is nothing spiritual. This was not to be looked at as something representative of the spiritual, but there had to be a clear understanding that the spiritual was to be sought in the spiritual, and only a few could do this spiritual research.

In ancient Indian times, when the holy Rishis spoke out of the upper parts of Devachan, images were given which could be seen as outer symbolic pictures in comparisons and indications coming from Upper Devachan. Images and portraits could be given and it was relatively easy for people to understand: we give you as it were images but because you see the outer world as an illusion, as Maya, these images are nothing more to you than images, reflections of the supersensible world.—In no way was there a danger leading to worship of these images. How could it have been with a people where everything sense perceptible was seen as Maya, illusion? These people could never practice worship. That only came much later. Certainly later in the oriental culture symbols and images of God appeared in some places. It was easy however for the holy Rishis to make it clear to the entire Indian people: that which we revealed, originated out of the higher planes of Devachan, while the visible or physical is a symbol for something so high and serene that it can only be taken in as a symbol.

During the Persian cultural epoch however, the students of Zarathustra couldn't proceed in the same way. They could only establish a kind of relationship between the people and the lower parts of the Devachanic planes. They were only capable of talking of images, spiritual images, of the supersensible. They referred to no sensory image. Above all they spoke amongst their people of an actual, spiritual, good being, who they called Ahura Mazdao, the being who had his outer corporeality in the sun and who connected himself with mankind and against the dark spirit: Ahriman. This was presented in a sensory-supersensory image so to speak, to the people. They had to imagine him for themselves as a spiritual light Being. However, not a finished image, not a portrait should they fashion. At most they could imagine this godly Ahura Mazdao as precursor within fire, for example, and not as a stiff, outer, sensory image. Everything which appeared as sensory pictures or idols came at a much later time. The ancient Persian culture had pictorial precursors which had to reveal the super-sensory. That was the progress.

Now we come to the third cultural epoch which we encounter mainly in the Egyptian time. Here stands the form of Osiris, as we know, at the central point of all religious thought and feeling. We can easily understand what now has to be said. What kind of being is Osiris, mainly in his godly form? Consider what the Egyptian cultural leaders said to the people: when you really fulfil your tasks in the physical world, when you have done everything related to your soul striving towards becoming a worthy person, then you will be united with Osiris after death. - On the other hand they are told: Osiris had only a short life on earth, because he was conquered by his brother Typhon - Seth—and has been living for a time in the worlds which are celestial, above the ground. His lower regions are no longer the physical but the astral plane, he will not descend lower. It is no longer possible for Osiris to step on the physical plane. Therefore people can't meet Osiris in life. After death however, when they have become sufficiently worthy, they will be united with Osiris because then they are within the world in which Osiris stays. A person can therefore meet Osiris, either after they have died or if they enter as an Initiate into the astral plane. Through this the disciples of the Osiris religion were prepared: the supersensible to which you are related, should place before your soul nothing other than pictures which your own soul imagines, ‘soul’ as is imagined under the concept of the astral body. Osiris became considered the ideal human form, possessing all possible virtues, and while desires as well as virtues exist in the astral body, so the human astral being was thus represented as the Being of Osiris.

For the Semites who gradually went through the Egyptian schools and who had to prepare the great event through which the spiritual, the Christ, descended into the physical world - not like Osiris to the astral plane, but like Christ, who came right down to the physical plane - they dared to live with God as a parable, a symbol, just like in the ancient Indian epoch they dared worship a god in a sensory-supersensory image, just like in the Persian culture in images of an astral presence, and in the Egyptian culture, now single and alone beneath the non-sensory imagination of the “I” (Ich). All images, originally given in ancient Indian times with which to imagine the spiritual, were of the physical world, borrowed from the mineral kingdom; they were images in distinct physical-mineral forms. The form through which the Initiates of the Persian culture made the supersensible clear to their people was removed from that which also lives in the human astral body, the lively etheric, because Ahura Mazdao also became visible to them as a result of his etheric form, the sun aura, becoming known to them. Osiris was represented by the Egyptians in an astral form. That divinity however, which the Jewish people proclaimed, had to have no other qualities than the “I,” the fourth member of the human being. Under the “I” we grasp something which only we can call “I.”

This is connected to something else. At this point people had to allow the Mission of Moses to flow into them; he had to be the representative of the image of the “I” of God. From that moment onwards people had to be told: Just as an “I” lives in every person and is the ruler of the members of human nature, so you must imagine the Being who weaves in the world as creative Being, who lives, rules and prevails over everything that's been and is created. Nothing sensory, neither etheric nor an astral image can represent this. Merely under the form of the “I,” only under the name “I am the I-am” should you imagine this highest Being. - In the “I am” itself every person should experience a reflection of the godhead. It was the Mission, the proclamation of Moses to say: Look within ourselves, only there will you find the real image of the pure godhead. - As a result all activity amongst people should from this moment onward only be from one “I” to another “I.” This had to be prepared through the Mission of Moses.

Let's place ourselves once more in the Egyptian culture. Much activity took place but it didn't move from one “I” to another “I” but from one astral to another astral body. What is this called? Just think how one of the gigantic pyramids were built. A great army of people was needed to bring such a pyramid into existence. The construction workers of such pyramids followed the order of the master builder and those were the temple priests, the spiritual guides of culture. Don't believe that these orders were given as they are today, from one “I” to another “I.” That was not the case. You will most easily understand what was happening when the word “suggestion” is implied. Physical powers of nature were employed to guide the masses. The Egyptian priests controlled such powers to a high degree. They didn't work on the “I” by saying: Do this or that - but they controlled the masses by managing their physical powers, so that the people meekly followed the priests who bypassed the “I.” These priests stood as Initiates in lofty service. They were incapable of abusing these powers; they placed themselves in service of the Good. Thus it was inspired, physically inspired, through them working; the freedom of the “I” in opposition to the priests of the temple was not in question. If you understand that, then you will also understand how in ancient India the Holy Rishis applied even higher spiritual powers. With them it was as follows: when they appeared and gave meaningful proclamations from the spiritual worlds, it was self-evident that the entire folk would follow meekly. Just as the hand follows the head, so the masses followed their leaders, the Initiates. This diminished ever more, the further humanity sunk into the physical plane, but in ancient Egypt there was still great effectiveness of these physical forces. To withdraw people from this kind of involvement and the predictive manifestation in the ego-opposition, was the Mission of Moses. For each human being to search for the godly fountainhead, the great World-I, that the realm of the surging, wafting “I” can be perceived as the archetypal image of the individual “I,” that was the great call which is linked to the Mission of Moses.

From these viewpoints we will understand how this great World-”I” had to be proclaimed through Moses. In this way we must translate the announcement of the “I”-Laws into everyday language, in order to really go through what was felt, experienced and thought when for instance the First Commandment was heard at that time. All lexicographic translations give the most inconceivable inaccuracies. Now I want to present the first commandment to you as it really needs to be translated, to bring it to such an expression as people then imagined they had heard.

First Commandment: I am the everlasting Divine, which you experience within yourself. I have led you out of the land of Egypt where you couldn't follow me within yourself. Henceforth you will not place other gods above me. You will not acknowledge gods as higher, who show you an image of something which appears above in the heaven, which works out of the earth or between heaven and earth. You shall not worship what is beneath the divine which is within you. I am the everlasting in you and a continual divinity. If you don't recognise Me within you, I will disappear as the divine in your children, parents and grandparents and their bodies will become stultified. If you acknowledge Me within you, I will live forth in you for up to thousands of generations and the bodies of your people would prosper.

This gives us the indication how the single “I” is within the archetypal “I,” how to recognise the after-image of the archetypal divine “I” and also, the indication of how, through acknowledgement of one's own “I” as divine, the way is given to become free from the opposition experienced between people and their leaders in ancient Egypt. “I have led you out of the lands of Egypt, where you can follow Me within you. The will of the Initiate followed you there, and there you were not free.” These Initiates applied their psychic powers which the people followed. The first dawning of this human freedom, which rose as the freedom of mercy in Christianity, shows itself in this reference: “I led you out of the Egyptian lands where you couldn't follow Me within you.” “Henceforth you shall not place other gods above Me.” Therefore, in order for the Jewish people to become the most prepared people for the proclamation in Christendom, it had to be made clear that all other representatives of the divine, the archetypal images of the “I,” had to fall away. Outer representations of the divine, even the signs of the Zodiac or something else, had to fall away. Nothing was to illustrate the divine, because people had to, in order to become free, find the source of everything within them: everything which was to be experienced regarding the divine had to be after-images of the great World-I and experienced in their “I.” “You should not acknowledge anything higher than the Divine, who appears as an image of something which shines above in the heaven, which originates from the earth or is active between the heaven and the earth.” An image-free divine! The only legitimate expression for this is the human “I,” the image of the “I am the I-Am.” “You shall not worship anything which is beneath the godly which is within you.”

We have emphasized: out of the physical body the image was taken in ancient India, out of the ether body in the Persian culture, out of the astral body with the Egyptians. Those all stand below the “I.” From out of this no image should be taken and called divine. We know that the physical body was formed from mineral nature, the ether body from the etheric in nature, and the astral body from that realm where the animal astral body is also formed. From all which exits in the members of human nature, having originated from the rest of nature, from all that which is below the “I,” nothing should be worshipped. “I am the everlasting in you and a continual divinity.” Here we have an important sentence. This was given to the Jews as a commandment, which was previously a fact. We have already remarked that when common blood flows in any people, a particular awareness runs through the generation, how the son feels bound through the blood with his father and grand-father. Common blood felt like a common “I.” This “I” lived through generations. The god who announced himself primarily as an “I” to the Jews, had to announce Himself by saying the He was this, which worked as God through the generations. “When you really understand Me, then you will understand what continues to work from generation to generation.” This has been translated with: “I am a striving God,” or even “I am an angry God,” while the actual meaning is: “I am the god working continually from generation to generation.”

“Don't seek to find an incorrect imagination of Me, protect the truth within you, as an imagination of Me, then you plant within the blood enduring health from gender to gender.” A real medicinal imagination is linked to that which this commandment gave, linked to the imagination that when the human being has a pure imagination of his relationship to the divine, then a healthy “I”-image will flow through the blood and people will remain healthy from one generation to the next. We don't come to a real understanding of the lively form in which Moses presented this to his people when he announced the laws, if we only think abstractly about what he said. No, it was said under the presupposition that correct thoughts are an active reality. “When you create a false imagination of the Divine, then you will, from gender to gender, bequeath it into an expression of disease and infirmity.” Correct thoughts activate health, false ones, illness. This is in the genuine sense an anthroposophic or occult image. This has to be thought about or otherwise no real understanding can be reached, no real picture formed regarding this First Commandment. The Jewish people were instructed: Don't place your God under false images. When they knelt in front of the golden calf, a false image flowed from the gods into them and this false image of god produced, because it works through the blood and goes down the generations, the effectively continuous sin which translates into illness. “If you don't recognise Me within you, I will disappear as the divine in your children, parents and grandparents and their bodies will become stultified.” You produce children, parents, grandparents capable of surviving, when you take up the correct imagination of the Divine, otherwise that which depends on the blood will die out. By truly acknowledging Me within you, the source of the “I,” the power transmits from one generation to the next because I am a continually effective Divinity. I will disappear from the bodies if I live in you as a false image. This is again quite an occult and medicinal indication. “If you acknowledge Me within you, I will live forth in you for up to thousands of generations and the bodies of your people would be purified and therefore would prosper.” Thus the physical will prosper, in the genuine occult sense, when the human being forms the true spiritual imagination. Through this a simultaneous breath of human freedom is drawn in human development: right at the peak, so to speak, of the continual “I” the human being is placed and then formed with the divine “I.” One can't allow comparisons with any other legislation; it is real dilettantism to place the Ten Commandments beside other legislation and compare it one-sidedly, just because they are outwardly similar in words, they can be seen as the same. The legislation of the Ten Commandments from Sinai is unique and only allows illumination through the unique Mission of Moses. As with this First Commandment, so it is with all the other Commandments when they are correctly translated. It becomes clear to us from the spirit of Moses' Mission, with reference to the “I”-impulse, how this now had to be poured into humanity.

Second Commandment: You will not speak in error of Me in you, because every error about the “I”-in-you will corrupt your body. - Thus the necessity for the correct thought process is established, the actual creator of the real healthy body. Errors about the ruler of the highest divine in you produce sickliness in the body to the fullest degree. It is extraordinarily important to have insight into the content of the Second Commandment: “The error about the “I” in you will be spoilt.” There is a further saying: In a beautiful body lives a beautiful soul. - Modern materialistic humanity now and then interprets it as: if I take good care of my body, then I will have a beautiful soul. - It actually means that a soul is inwardly strong because it has brought something from previous incarnations which has inspirationally worked through the soul and is now the correct creator for the sheath of a healthy, vigorous body. The body does not create the soul, exactly the opposite. So we see that sometimes it doesn't at all come down to stating a precise wording. Every time it is according to impulses in your life to find a different interpretations of the same wording. Depending on how you feel or are disposed, so it is interpreted. Accordingly one doesn't always have the correct proof that you are indicating an equivalent wording, but only through penetrating into the soul of the time and thoroughly seeking understanding for this or that word.

Third Commandment: You shall separate the workday from the festive day, so that the image of Your Being becomes the image of My Being. Because, what lives in you as My “I,” has built the world in seven days and lives within it on the seventh day. Thus your actions and your son's activities and your daughter's actions and your servant's activity and your cattle's actions and everything that is with you, is within the outer boundary of the six days, but on the seventh day your gaze should seek My gaze within you. - This is the kind of absolute translation corresponding to the Third Commandment. Not in outer images should the Divine within people be portrayed as the archetypal-”I,” but through what the “I” does, the archetypal-”I” must be portrayed and how this archetypal-”I” had created the world in six world days and on the seventh day found rest, so mankind must separate workdays and festive days, six days for creation and the seventh day to seek the Divine with the help of the “I.” So we see in what a wonderful way This Third Commandment is the portrayal of the archetypal-”I” in us and is placed there as guiding God.

In these three first Commandments we have indications of how the human being related to divinity, during the time of the Mission of Moses, which was revealing itself in a new way. In the fourth Commandment we go out on to the physical plane. The first three Commandments sets out how the human being can relate in the right way towards the higher Worlds through the activities of his “I.”

The Fourth Commandment says: Work forth with your fathers and mothers in mind, so that you retain possession of the property you acquired through the power which I have built in you.

Here you have the meaningless: “Honour father and mother, that you may fare well and live long on earth.” It is about actual outward action which really sprouts from what had been planted spiritually in the “I” within man, as we have understood, how the divine works medicinally, like a drop. This Fourth Commandment is a practical commandment. It says: Observe your descendants as your ancestors; then you as a descendent stand in contrast to them—a peaceful, beneficial, continual development will never take place. Just as you inwardly convey the “I” through the blood, so also must that, which you posses after your “I” has worked through it, be maintained. The strong “I” that was created, flowed from the one side through the blood in the generations; on the other side however had to, in order for the human being to strengthen the “I,” work in the outer world. What had been founded as a strong “I” had to be preserved and evolve continuously, without interruption. Work forth with the fathers in mind in order to maintain coherence in the work your father and mother did in creating your “I.” - This shows you how also the outer rules of conduct are given in order not to destroy from outside the creation of a new culture, given as an inner impulse.

Now we come to the Commandments where your independent “I” is confronted by the “I” of others, and how this should in fact rule in the social world. This is actually a repeat of what Paul said, which the Bible gives as: Love they neighbour as thyself (Gal.5,14).—See in other people the same “I” as in yourself. - In an extraordinary way this old Hebraic folk received the impulse to pursue the godly right into the weaving of the “I” within the human soul. Therefore this people had to preserve the Commandments, which do not only prescribes the protection of their own “I” but also prescribes respect and protection of the “I” in the other.

Fifth Commandment: Murder not.

Sixth Commandment: Don't break the marriage.

Seventh Commandment: Don't steal.

All three expand on the one commandment: Recognise in your fellow men the “I” which you have in yourself!

In this deed the Jewish people were led from the lands of Egypt, enabling them to also recognise the “I” in others through the evaluation of the other's “I,” for in Egyptian lands one didn't work through the respect of others but through the suppression of the “I” through suggestion. Now further:

The Eighth Commandment: Do not undermine the worth of your fellow men by telling untruths about them. - Not only through deeds could one damage and impair the rights of the “I” within the other, but one should not once in a spoken word diminish the worth of his “I.” One should not state untruths about the “I” of another. Whoever states an untruth about the “I” of another, does not realize that the “I” of the other is the same as your own “I.” So it proceeds systematically with the Ten Commandments. Reference is made [to] what you express damagingly in community of life from one “I” to another “I.” A deed penetrates directly, damagingly into the sphere of the “I” of the other, but a word more secretively. However, if you want to earnestly acknowledge the “I” of the other, then you also do not dare intervene from the basis of your wants and desires into the sphere of your fellow man. [It is] Not only through this that you rob him, but already through also desiring something of his, do you penetrate into his “I”-sphere. You acknowledge the full equal evaluation of the other's “I” through not allowing yourself to desire what he has. Now the two last Commandments:

Ninth Commandment: Do not look grudgingly at what your fellow man possesses as property.

Tenth Commandment: Do not begrudge your fellow man his wife nor the helpers and others through whom he gains his earnings.

The only way to find healthy relationships between one person and another is by not resenting what the other person owns. So a person is placed beside others in order for him or her to notice and venerate the divine image in every “I.” Thus the existence of the single “I” amongst others is regulated. This was one of the biggest spiritual impacts which entered into mankind. Yet, what had to come through Christ was not pronounced, yet lay within the words here, that each one can find the interrelation with the Father-God. “No one comes to the Father but through Me.” At this time the legislation was given in relationship to the communal “I” which flowed through the generations. Yet at the same time the earlier proclamation was given, that the “I” is not only an image of the Divine, but that God Himself is a living Being within this “I.” The “I” is substance and Being identical to the Father. “I and the Father are one.”

So we see how the impulse, conveyed through the world's development, follows one after the other. It is easy to say: In the world's development all causes and effects are connected by a wisdom-filled world guidance and world command but nothing is visible. - When we however look back in world evolution, as we have done in this examination, we arrive at the notion that at the right time the right thing always happens to direct human development further, then, I may say, nothing else is left over than to acknowledge the wisdom-filled directing and guidance in world development.

When one sees through occult research how at the exit of the third cultural epoch into the fourth time period the proclamation of the Ten Commandments took place in order for people to have time to prepare for the greatest event, the Mystery of Golgotha, then one sees exactly what a great expression of wisdom this is within world guidance.

In the entire tone of the Ten Commandments, when we really understand them, we see how the Divine reveals itself in an archetypal way in images in preparation for the moment when the Divine Spirit will really be embodied in an individual. In order for people to be steered towards an understanding of God in the flesh, an incarnated God, they must first learn to grasp God's substance and Being within their deepest, innermost soul. Considering this document of mankind, the Ten Commandments, we notice from the entire tone, that God speaks through it to mankind and that this address throughout is in line with the ever further emergence of people on the physical plane and that this can only really happen when the Divine is grasped in the right way. Repeatedly it is pointed out that bodies prosper when the Divine is properly grasped. Indications are given that to venerate the Divine also brings prosperity to outer things on the physical plane. In the correct way it is pointed out that a gradual, healthy development must ensue, in order for the outer social relationships to prosper.

Through the Mission of Moses it is regulated that the Divine remains protected within the Being of man, while man's conquering of the physical plane can be carried out in the right way in the sense of the post-Atlantic development remaining in harmony with the Divine.

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Today I would like to return to a few things concerning human principles. We must seek out what is in the world as it is in ourselves. A clock is a device that is only possible because of an intelligence that has designed it and put it together. It is foolish to say that the clock has given itself this wise arrangement. It would be equally foolish to say that man has created himself in his design.

We have a small organ in our ears, the 'Organ of Corti'. There are hairs on it; and the hairs are tuned to a certain tone. This sounds when a note is struck on the piano. The vibrations of the air are transferred to the hairs, which then resonate. The same is true of the eye. The eye is also a complex apparatus that has come into being through wisdom. Man is wisdom materialized in this way. The world has been made according to thought.

We call the wisdom in space 'cosmic wisdom' or ['Mahat']. Mahat is the sum of wisdom that is spread throughout the world. So it is a distillation of wisdom from the clock. This is just as man draws wisdom from nature.

Mahat is the archetype of wisdom. “Mala” is the image of Mahat in man. According to Indian teaching, it was like this: Brahma was initially alone, slumbering, then he awakened. One night of Brahma was over. The creative wisdom awakens in him. Nothing else existed yet except for the creative wisdom of Brahma. And this creative wisdom is Mahat. A solar system exists as a thought in the mind of Brahma. We think this cosmic thought after him.

Wisdom is present everywhere in the world. It flows from a kind of spiritual seed into our soul. Cosmic wisdom is in the soul. Mala lives in many. Mahat only lives once. When Mahat becomes individual, that is, becomes Mala, it needs a connecting link. That is Ahankara. Through Ahankara, every person is connected to the general wisdom of the world.

I withdraw into myself and step back from the external sense world. By breaking this bridge, I am allowed to look inward. Through Ahankara, I have within me that which is common to all. I have to go back to world wisdom. First, man finds Manas within himself and then he finds Ahankara, which leads him back to unity, to divine wisdom. When we go through Ahankara, you will realize that we are going through an important spiritual process. We generally go up more. It is the awareness that one's own self is a piece of the divine self. I then do not persist in my self, but I begin to feel as a link in the general Mahat. I am only because I was originally brought into the world by a divine thought. Ahankara leads to absorption in the world of God's thoughts. I and the Father are one. I do not speak because I want to, but because I let Ahankara flow in. For the physical sense world, we would be wrong to say, “I and the others are one.” Mahat is at the same time what we call Atma in Theosophy.

I think two thoughts. First: “I want to go to town tomorrow”; and second: “I want to visit a friend.” These are two thoughts that are present in my soul as one. So people are thoughts of Mahat. People are together in Mahat. Mahat has many Atmas, but all Atmas are together in Mahat. This Mahat of the world system in which we develop is the “third Logos”. And so we can say: we consist of three principles, firstly of Manas, secondly of Budhi and thirdly of Atma. When we rise to this, we are no longer individuals.

At the level of the Atma, we call the thought an image. Let us now try to grasp the difference even more clearly. What lives in us as thought is, in its true significance, a shadow image, in its true essence. It behaves like a shadow in relation to an object. The shadow image is only there when the lamp is there and I am there. But one can also sit in such a way that one only ever sees the shadow images. If we could go out into that sphere where the true essence of these shadows is, we would recognize the archetypes. And we also call these archetypes “spirits”. Spirit is a spiritual essence that is both thought and will. Thus it is a creative thought. The living entities are realities, they are individuality. An intellectual thought is what lives with kama manas. If we free the intellectual thought from the symbols, we are left with only a gray generality, an abstract thought. The soul must have passed through this abstract thinking. Then, instead of from below, new content flows in from above. When we walk down the street, our thoughts are stimulated from the outside. But they must also be able to receive impressions from within.

We can make ourselves passive, that is, we can surrender to Mahat, the third Logos. We then call this “spiritual” or “intuition.

In this way, the spiritual flows into us through Ahankara, through Manas. Therefore, Manas can be influenced from above, by Budhi, and from below, by Brahma, by the sense world. We thus have nine principles. Then we still have to deal with the tenth. The seventh principle is the third Logos. We can [also] only speak of seven principles. When a principle disappears downwards, one must enter from above.

Man has currently developed four principles. The fifth principle is emerging, and the following two are still quite undeveloped. What we discard below must be replaced above. Our consciousness does not fill the whole body. We have as little control over the manas body in Kamaloka as you have over the physical body here. After Devachan, Ahankara or Budhi occurs.

It is not as cold in Devachan as it is often made out to be, because the spirits that pass through do not feel. While we are attached to the particular in physical life and Kamaloka, here we feel the great, the whole, the great primal essence of the world, in which all things flow together. Ahankara comes to life all the more once we have freed ourselves from particularity in Kamaloka. The more Kama disappears, the more Budhi arises in us.

The development of Budhi is an essential development of the emotional life, but in such a way that the world of special interests is transformed into the world of common interests. The mystic calls this the purification of the astral body. It would be wrong to think that the mystic should become insensitive. On the contrary, one should not be cold towards the world, but aligned with the center, of which every single being is a part. We must become objective.

Justice in feeling is the same as what St. Paul calls the law. St. Paul says: Through the law sin entered into the world. Without the law sin would have been dead.

You will not be able to call the Kama nature of the lion or the tiger sinful. Because the animal is not capable of awakening in itself, ennobled, that which lives outside as Kama. It is different when the being is capable of uniting all special interests under the law. Budhi is subject to the law. If there were only animal kama natures, there would be no sin in the world.

Out of Budhi is born the law. So long as Kama appears only in nature, there is no sin. Only after there were beings through whom Budhi could work, that is, beings who could shape the law, was there sin. I use the power of feeling to come to the great unity of nature. The animal can find satisfaction in sensual pleasure. Man cannot, because Budhi demands more. Budhi is the sum total of the world of feelings. This has been distributed among the individual creatures. Not a single drop of the world of feelings should be lost. What remains unrefined is still alive, but our task is to lead it back to the common reservoir from which it emerged. That is why Theosophy demands joint action. Our task is to collect the feelings so that they can pass over to the new planet as a unity. What is left over from the moon has been left behind as the eighth sphere, unprocessed. This remainder of our moon is connected with the unprocessed part of our ancestors. It is what pulls us down. These are milestones that have to be dragged along, and this is what causes the delays in cosmic development. This also has to do with what we have come to know under the Brothers of Shadow and their influence.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer to the question:

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

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

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

My dear friends! We shall now continue our discussions of the various rituals. I would just like to start by adding a discussion of the so-called Credo, which is inserted between the Gospel and the Offertory in the Catholic Mass and which plays a certain role in the confessions. Before I discuss this Credo, however, I must explain something about how the point of view from which I must treat such a Credo is to be characterized. First of all, in view of the many discussions that take place about the Credo, it must be said to what extent such a Credo can play a role at all within a confessional community of Christianity. When the Credo is discussed today, the question is often whether one should include this or that sentence or not, and how the Credo should be formulated for this or that occasion, or rather, for this or that reason for using it, and so on.

Now it seems to me that a credo, that is, a confession of faith, could at most only make sense to those who are simultaneously willing to recognize that they have reasons of an inner, cognitive nature that compel them to utter such a credo or at least make it possible for them to utter such a credo. Of course, it is quite impossible to demand such a credo from a confirmand, for example, that is, to demand a credo from a confirmand at all. Is it even possible to have such discussions – as they have been held about the credo – whether a person who is perhaps 15 or 16 years old should profess one or the other, which basically cannot be understood in a lifetime? Nevertheless, the discussion proceeds from the standpoint of what can be signed by one or the other of these creeds? You have seen that the Jugendfeier ceremony that I showed you here, of course, contains nothing of such a creed. When I first treated the ritual of the Mass Sacrifice in its main parts, I pointed out that in the Catholic Church the Creed is inserted between the reading of the Gospel and the Offertory. But if one wants to either justify or refute the insertion of the Credo at this point in the Mass, then again various things must be taken into consideration. I am not here to justify or refute anything that concerns the Catholic Church, but to discuss the issues. What would have to be asserted in the face of the Creed at this point, what could be said in justification, is this: First the Gospel is read, and now the one who celebrates the Mass, who is thus the actual agent in the Mass, can give a kind of response in the Creed to what is heard as the inspired word in the Gospel. If the Mass sacrifice is now understood to mean that it is actually only the sacrifice celebrated by the ordained priest, then all the faithful who participate in this Mass sacrifice are naturally not at all connected with it – in principle – to recognize everything that the priest confesses during the act of celebration as that which lives in him. Besides, the priest also says silent masses where he is at most concerned with the others in the idea. What is expressed in the Credo of the Catholic Mass must not be understood as if it were a confession for those who participate in the sacrificial act of the Mass, sentence by sentence. It is a different matter as to what extent the Catholic Church demands confession of the Credo from its faithful. That is certainly the case to a certain extent. What is required here is actually all based on a somewhat liberal interpretation of church practice, but the idea is that the confession of the Credo is required, as I have read it to you. The Credo also forms the content of [Catholic] catechism lessons and is taught to children in the very form that I have read to you. The Credo also forms the content of a certain part of the ordination of a priest, which we shall have to discuss later. Here it takes on a completely different meaning and is undoubtedly justified in this context, since it contains what can really be advocated within the Church. Thus, it is quite impossible to demand a credo, to incline towards a credo that contains, as the usual credo does, I might say, a certain essence of world wisdom, of all world feeling and world will — for that is what is usually contained in a credo. In so far as the Catholic Credo contains this, one cannot help saying that it cannot, in the Christian sense, be taught to the faithful in the way it is. If it is to be discussed from an anthroposophical point of view, only the following can be said, because it really requires a great deal of knowledge to meaningfully accept what can be offered by a creed.

Anyone who professes to believe in a pedagogy that is truly based on knowledge of human nature will never advocate teaching children only things that they immediately understand. Anyone who did so would not take into account the whole of human life; for example, he would not take into account what it means in terms of rejuvenating strength, in terms of the real influx of inner life force when, let us say, in the fortieth year of one's life one remembers something that one authority in the tenth year, and now, in the fortieth year, you say to yourself: You have come through your life experience so far that you now understand from your own inner being what you learned by heart in the tenth year. Simply the fact that you understand things later on, which you can recall from memory, means that you are receiving real vitality. Another educational theory might advocate the following: the child should not be encouraged to do anything that it cannot immediately put into practice, or perhaps one should only teach the child what its hands naturally want to do.

Now, I have made this pedagogical digression so that you can see what kind of attitude can prevail in a pedagogy that is based on real human knowledge. But then, when it comes to something like the credo, the feeling must be evoked not to urge the child to believe these things, but the child must have the clear idea: the person who is dealing with him, believes in them. That is the most extreme idea that can be evoked: the person who is dealing with the child believes in it because he knows the things, and the child must also have the feeling that he can grow into an understanding of what the adult believes. Without this feeling, it is not possible to establish a community that is permeated by inner truth; but above all, this must be the case in a Christian community.

Having said that, my dear friends, I would like to present to you some of the elements of a credo that could arise out of anthroposophical knowledge. I ask you to listen to it as it is meant, namely that it arises out of anthroposophical knowledge, and that anyone who has a certain anthroposophical knowledge can , but that it is really extremely difficult to find even remotely adequate words in which to express what can only come about in the course of a wide-ranging anthroposophical realization. The words must be chosen in such a way that for someone who is not immersed in the whole process from which these words ultimately arise, they are in many respects merely a sound. I have tried by every possible means to express in concise words what, according to anthroposophical conviction, should be in such a credo, but do not think that I believe I have succeeded in doing so. What needs to be said is perfectly clear to me; but it is extraordinarily difficult to put into words, because our words have lost their values in all languages, because our words are often only external signs. So, even if some of it shocks you, I would ask you to accept what I am about to read as a possible anthroposophical credo, bearing this in mind.

An almighty spiritual-physical being of God is the reason for the existence of heaven and earth, fatherly preceding his creatures.

Christ, through whom people attain the revival of dying earthly existence, is to this divine being like the eternally born son.

In Jesus, the Christ entered the earthly world as a human being. Jesus' birth on earth is an effect of the Holy Spirit, who, in order to spiritually heal the “sickness of sin in the flesh of humanity,” prepared the son of Mary to be the vessel of the Christ.

Christ Jesus suffered death on the cross under Pontius Pilate and was buried in the grave of the earth.

In death, he became the helper of the deceased souls who had lost their divine being; then he overcame death after three days.

Since that time, he has been the Lord of the heavenly powers on earth and lives as the fulfiller of the paternal deeds of the foundation of the world.

In the progress of the world He will unite Himself with those whom He can snatch from the death of matter through their behavior.

Through Him the healing spirit can work.

Communities whose members feel the Christ within themselves may feel united in a church to which all who feel the saving power of Christ belong; they may hope for the overcoming of the disease of sin, for the continued existence of the human being and for the preservation of their life destined for eternity.

They naturally find in it essentially what is already contained in the traditional Creed. But I cannot help saying that in the traditional Creed, insofar as it is translated into newer languages, what is actually in it can no longer be found. That is why I tried to translate the Credo of the Catholic Mass in the way I have already read out, which I will now present again. But it is one thing to try to reconstruct what is available as tradition and quite another to try to express what can really be advocated today. In my opinion, the Credo would be translated as follows:

“I believe in the One God, the almighty Father, who made heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible.”

The word “made” is already in it, although it contradicts the Gospel of John; no other text is possible in opposition to the Gospel of John than:

An almighty spiritual-physical being of God is the reason for the existence of heaven and earth, who fatherly precedes his creatures.

Christ, through whom men attain the revival of the dying earthly existence, is to this being of God as the son born in eternity.

But here it says further:

“And in the One Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God. Who also proceeded from the Father before all time. He is God from God. Light from Light, true God from true God.”

Well, my dear friends, it must be translated like that, but it is impossible to imprint in such words what can be experienced today originally from the spiritual worlds. The most striking fact that can prove this to you, for quite external reasons, is that in the dictionary [by Fritz Mauthner] the two most problematic articles are those about “spirit” and about “God”. This dictionary of philosophy has really emerged from the essence of more recent philological scholarship, and in this German dictionary the article “God” is treated in such a way that one must say: The deepest scholarship is no more capable of filling the word “God” with a living concept than anything else that can be found. In the very word that is most important to humanity, a word sound is pronounced that cannot be filled with a living concept if one wants to somehow arrive at the origin of the word “God” etymologically, philologically. Today's science cannot do it. Fritz Mauthner brings it together with the word “gießen” (to pour), that is, that which is poured out, which pours itself out into the world, and that would then lead back to an old word “Götze” (idol), which would be related to “Gott” (God). You see, that is the situation today with those who have spent a lot of time trying to find the origin of the word “God”.

What can be said from the spiritual scientific point of view is that the word 'God' points to something that expresses a relationship, and which still resonates in the common language in individual dialects that have the word 'God': the feminine 'Godel', which is also found in the name 'Goethe', which originally was 'Goede'. It is the godfather, it is the one to whom there is a spiritual kinship. The word is intimately connected with the fact that this kinship was felt in the monotheistic sense, that the one great godfather of the world, whom one felt like the father imagined in the spirit, was contrasted with some random godfather. So the word probably grew out of primitive, monotheistic stages of religion and probably once meant in North Asia the “Ongod”, the one great godfather, and this prefix “On” definitely points to the monotheistic origin of those ideas that correspond to the word of God.

So you see, anyone who chooses words with true inner conscientiousness is not in a position to utter them as lightly as is usually the case today. Empathizing with these words, living into them, must actually be a process of life. Today, when people believe that they can translate from one language into another by simply using a dictionary and then inserting the word that appears in the dictionary into the sentence, no one can have any sense of what is actually involved. This is because the word in the dictionary is usually the least useful one if you want to translate the real meaning. At best, the dictionary word can help us arrive at what is meant, and it is characteristic of this that even school dictionaries have become terribly poor in this regard over the course of fifty years. We are hardly familiar with all the dictionary blunders that have been made since then.

But now we find in this creed, in addition to “he who is God of God, true God of true God”, also “light from light”. Now, my dear friends, perhaps twenty or twenty-one years ago I once wrote an essay that contained something like the following. I wrote: In physics, light is spoken of as if it were given as a gift; but I ask: has light ever been seen? You can see colors; all colors, including white, are something that arises from light, but light is something that no one can see with their eyes. It is the mediator of seeing objects in color, but light itself remains invisible in the light-filled space. Just imagine standing in the middle of a room that contains no objects, only light. Would you see anything? You would be just as if in darkness, only you would feel differently, but you could not see the light. Everywhere one speaks as if one could see the light. Physics has — most terrible of horrors — instead of a color theory a light theory. They know, of course, what light is: wave motion. Now imagine that and compare it with the idea of light that you cannot have from external experience, then you will see what significance such a theory has. This is roughly how modern man must feel in his truth when he hears the words “light from light”.

Now there is a sentence in the Creed which, if it is a mere translation, cannot be translated differently than as it stands here:

“Descended, but not produced, of one essence with the Father: through whom all things were made.”

Christ... is to this divine being like the Son born in eternity.

which does not refer to a birth in time, but indicates that the Word is now born and must not now be taken in the sense in which it is usually taken.

"Who descended from the heavens for us men and for our healing. Who also came in the flesh by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

I cannot get any other text than this:

In Jesus, the Christ entered the earthly world as a human being. Jesus' birth on earth is an effect of the Holy Spirit, which, in order to spiritually heal the sin of the body of humanity, prepared the son of Mary to be the vessel of Christ.

If it is desired, we can also talk about the virgin birth in another context that does not belong to the ritual.

“Who was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, who died and was buried.”

Now, it is the case that one must express it in this way:

Christ Jesus suffered crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and was laid in the tomb of the earth.

Yes, now it continues:

“And who was resurrected on the third day in the sense of the scriptures. And who was raised up into heaven again.”

These are, of course, ideas that must be given correctly:

Since that time He has been Lord of the heavenly powers on earth and lives as the fulfiller of the Fatherly deeds in the foundation of the world.

[In the translation of the Credo]:

"And he who has been lifted up on high, who sits at the right hand of the Father, will reveal himself again to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom is endless. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. Who is worshiped and revealed together with the Father and the Son, who spoke through the prophets. And in the only holy catholic and apostolic church. I profess one baptism for the wiping out of wrongdoing. And I hope for the resurrection of the dead and for a life in future time circles. Yes, so be it.

So, as I said, I cannot say anything other than what I have shared here with regard to what can now, with all the difficulties, be summarized from anthroposophical foundations as a real credo. You can regard what is summarized here in such a way that it can truly be signed off in the sense of anthroposophical knowledge in every single word, if the word is now really taken with all its inner values. For it turns out that this anthroposophical insight, too, requires us to hold fast to the idea of resurrection, and to hold fast to what we encounter in the words that you also find in the Catholic Creed, at least in most versions, namely that Christ descended to the dead – or as it is also called, “into hell”. I had to express this by saying:

In death, he became the helper of the deceased souls who had lost their divine being; then, after three days, he overcame death.

It is indeed a fact that is perfectly recognizable to spiritual science that not only does the evolution of the living take place in all its differentiation in the successive epochs of earthly existence, as you know from anthroposophical descriptions, but that the life of the dead also evolves. And this life of the dead at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was such that the ancient Greek saying, which was connected with the Mysteries of that time, was indeed true: better a beggar in the Upper World than a king in the realm of shadows – that is, the dead, for the dead in those days were in danger of losing the divine, the astral, that which was present in humanity, and they had to give up their divine existence altogether. The Christ came to them to save their lives.

This is truly not at all a reminiscence from Catholicism, as one might easily believe when spiritual science presents it. A very clever person of the present day, a philosophically educated person, as they are called today, would necessarily say that only someone who experiences it as a reminiscence would come up with something like that. Well, I can give you the assurance that I never had the opportunity to experience Catholic reminiscences, but I had to be forced by the knowledge of the facts of the supersensible world to each of these things.

If the formation of new communities in the Christian sense is at issue, then I do believe that this Credo could initially serve as a basis for the cohesion of the communities through the leading priestly figures. But I also believe something else: I believe that long theological studies on the exegesis or interpretation of what is contained in this Credo should be established, at least for those who want to prepare for the priesthood. I cannot believe otherwise, because these things can indeed only be achieved step by step, and because it seems to me that after a certain transitional period – if, as I hope, the revival of religious life, as it is being pursued by our friends, is successful – then indeed the theological study must be established afterwards. And then it seems to me that a few years of theological study will be necessary to understand the Credo. But if this will evoke a true sense of truth in the person, it will naturally prevent demanding a credo or the like from confirmands.

Christian Geyer asks Dr. Steiner to read the Credo again.

Rudolf Steiner:

An almighty spiritual-physical being of God is the reason for the existence of heaven and earth, and walks before his creatures as a father.

Christ, through whom human beings attain the revival of dying earthly existence, is to this divine being as the eternally born son.

In Jesus, the Christ entered the earth as a human being. Jesus' birth on earth is an effect of the Holy Spirit, who, in order to spiritually heal the disease of sin from the body of humanity, prepared the son of Mary to be the vessel of the Christ.

The Christ Jesus -

Please note that here the two words are combined: Earlier was “Christ”, and then was “Jesus”. Now the two words are combined here:

The Christ Jesus suffered crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and was buried in the tomb of the earth.

I can only express it this way.

In death, He became the support of the deceased souls who had lost their divine being; then He overcame death after three days.

Since that time, He has been the Lord of the heavenly powers on earth and lives as the fulfiller of the Fatherly deeds of the foundation of the world.

In the future He will unite with those whom He can snatch from the death of matter through their behavior for the progress of the world.

Through Him the healing spirit can work.

Communities whose members feel the Christ within themselves may feel united in one church, to which all who feel the saving power of Christ belong;

They may hope for the conquest of the disease of sin, for the continued existence of the human being,

And on the preservation of their life destined for eternity.

And now, before I go further in discussing the sacrifice of the Mass, which after all has already been discussed in its four main parts, I would like you to see how the things we are dealing with here can also lead to the living word of the gospel being incorporated into everything , talk about how a funeral ritual can come about, and specifically the funeral ritual that our friend, Pastor Schuster, used at funerals in my presence, so that for me the use is thoroughly tried and tested from direct observation.

This funeral rite, which can also be used for cremations, has the following content. First, the part that is performed at the house of the deceased. It is, as it seems to me, as befits a funeral rite, simple:

Into the peace of the soul's being
wanders the soul of our dear departed.
Into the light of the spiritual world
steps the spirit of our dear departed.
Eternal Spirit, who art with him,
Eternal Spirit, who art with us,
fill our souls.
Christ, who art in us,
Christ, who art in him,
Fill our thoughts.

The Lord's Prayer is now recited. After the Lord's Prayer:

Let him find, eternal Spirit,
The power of life in the light of the soul,
Let him weave in your world will.

— here the name is mentioned —

leaves
and goes into the realm of the infinite
of the timeless world existence,
into which he now enters,
to live in the power of the will,
which in Christ has been able to gain eternity for humanity,
Who has opened the soul's eye for humanity
To see the world of eternal being.
Into the calm of the soul's being
The soul of the dear... (name)
Into the light of the spiritual world,
The spirit of the dear... (name)

Now follows a sprinkling with holy water. This is the ceremony in the house.

The ceremony at the grave or at the cremation site:

The sign of the cross is made over the grave or the cremation site, then the following is spoken:

At the place where we unite

Your mortality with the transient nature of the elements, our thoughts rise to the place of your soul, in the revelation of the Father (sign of the cross), the Son (sign of the cross) and the Holy Spirit (sign of the cross). Amen.

Eternal Spirit,
In whose will the souls weave,
Grasp your servant's soul weaving
And let him experience the spirit of the spirits
Through the power of the Christ,
Who is in him
Who is in us.
I am the rebirth in death,
I am the life in dying,
Thus speaks Christ,
Who is in us.
Whoever feels me in himself,
He lives,
Even if he dies;
Whoever receives me in his thoughts,
He passes through time into the timeless.
Eternal Spirit,
Look upon us.
Christ in us.

And now follows the Lord's Prayer again. After:

Let him find, eternal Spirit,
The power of life in the light of the soul.
Let him weave in your world will.
Hear, eternal Spirit, your servant's thinking,
That rises to you.
May the spirit fill the hearts of those present.
Those present send their thoughts
From the realm of the earthly,
From the realm of the dear... (names) departs
Into the realm,
Into which he enters,
And where the love of the spirit weaves
The soul's eye to the blessed spirit
To see the world of spirits.
There he sees the existence of the spirit,
There he works in the realm
To which he is inclined
His thoughts,
Rather than the realm
That his soul
Called his home.
Through Christ, who is there in him.
therefore our thoughts follow him
where he works as a spirit among spirits.
Through Christ, who is in him. Amen.

The Weihwedels are dipped into the Weihwasserfaß and the corpse, or rather what it is in, is sprinkled with holy water:

With the Breath of Light

— so it is spoken further —

let this soul be imbued

with the triune Spirit,
the Father (sign of the cross), the Son (sign of the cross) and the Holy Spirit (sign of the cross). Amen.

Eternal Spirit, grant him

The peace of soulfulness,

And may the light of the spiritual world shine upon him.

Incense is poured over the corpse.

Remember, O man,

That you are indebted to the spirit

For everything you accomplish

In thought, word and deed.

May you find, eternal soul,

In death, rebirth through the power of Christ,

Who through his death has overcome

the death of the soul;

May you receive

His strength,

as you leave the earthly for the spiritual. Amen.

Eternal Spirit,

let him find the peace of the soul's being.

May the light of the spiritual world shine upon him.

This funeral ritual could basically be understood as an adaptation of common funeral rituals. As I said, it is a tried and tested funeral ritual. When this funeral ritual is spoken with the right attitude, it is actually the spiritual processes that are at work, those that best guide the soul of the dead person from the world of physical existence into the world of spiritual existence. When we speak of a ritual, it really is a matter of living in it to the full, according to one's ability and capacity, in the things that are at stake. There is much to be learned from what has been handed down. For example, there is a great deal to be learned from studying the ancient church constitutions regarding the performance of the sign of the cross by the faithful and by the priest. The faithful make the sign of the cross by saying: In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The sign of the cross is made on the forehead for the Father, on the chin for the Son, and on the chest for the Holy Spirit. The priest does not make the sign of the cross in this way, but rather makes the sign in one go over the whole upper body. This is meant to point to a profound mystery, I would say to that mystery that shows us how the one who is on the way to becoming immersed in life, which must be called the religious life, feels in a different way than the one who has reached the end of this path to a certain degree. These two different signs of the cross show that it requires a profound experience to gradually find the three in the one.

Of course, my dear friends, I have an understanding and perhaps I may even say a heart for all the criticisms that have been raised against the fact that three should be one and one three in the divine Trinity. I have an understanding and a heart for it, and I can understand it in the case of anyone, whether it be a person who today, let us say, is one of the very clever, or the youthful, high-spirited Goethe. But true understanding of these things lies so deep that critical discussion of them is usually nothing more than proof that one has no access to understanding. You see, it is easy to say that three is not one. Arithmetic certainly teaches that, and the outer sensory perception also teaches that. But this arithmetic, which we only carry into the outer sensory perception, is, after all, first shaped by ourselves on the basis of this outer sensory perception. And the arithmetic we have today does not go back very far in the history of humanity. Even Pythagoreanism, which lies only a few hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, cannot be understood from the present-day arithmetic. For how does present-day arithmetic count? One, two, three. Each is one, and all three are just three. That is how you count. If you just adjust your counting for the physical world, it is quite good. But this counting loses all meaning when you want to apply it to the supersensible world. There you have to count quite differently. Of course you can enter the supersensible world and, if you calculate that which is inspired there in much the same way as you calculate things on earth, then you can apply earthly arithmetic; of course you can apply it, but you won't gain anything from it. There is no need to count money there, and you would get nothing out of the other things if you were to treat them with arithmetic as in the physical world and count them in an earthly way. You have to count differently there, I can only sensualize it (it is drawn on the board):

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Here you have everywhere \(1=1\), \(1=2\), \(1=3\), \(1=4\), and so on. Not the law of counting, but the law of analysis is the one that allows for real practical application in the world of the soul — not just in the intellectual world. While we can manage with counting here in the physical world, when we synthesize, the arithmetic of the supersensible is an analytical one. The point here is that all numbers are contained in the one. And it will only be possible to study psychology again when the dreadful doctrine of association, which is a subjective thing where one thought is added to another, which does not correspond to reality in the slightest, has finally been removed from the doctrine of the soul. For one is dealing [in the supersensible] with such processes that can only be grasped by such counting and calculating, where unity includes every number. Only when one begins to understand how that which is a unity in a higher world, which can be seen as a unity, actually appears as three in a lower world, does one gradually begin to understand the mystery of three in one and one in three, although it is by no means merely something arithmetic. The arithmetic is only the very least, the beginning of these things. When we enter into the qualitative, which is also contained in the God of the Trinity, then we must also come to count in this way (it is written on the board):

That is, one must proceed to qualitative counting, and qualitative counting is something that is connected with the inner nature of things. Qualitative counting always leads to concrete differentiations, while our synthetic counting leads more and more to abstractions. Try to use today's usual synthetic counting: 1 apple, 2 apples, 3 apples. Well, yes. But if there is an apple, a pear and a plum here, you can no longer remain in the concrete when you add them up: 1, 2, 3; you cannot say that there are 3 apples or 3 pears or 3 plums, but at most you can say that there are 3 pieces, which means that you are entering into the abstract. It is precisely the opposite path that quantitative arithmetic takes to qualitative arithmetic, which leads more and more into the concrete. It has a creative element in the concept of the number contained in the sentence: “For God has ordered the world according to measure, number and weight”. He certainly did not order it like a general orders his troops, but according to the creative, qualitative, analytical order of numbers.

If you say that such things are not necessary today, because we can develop a good religious life without knowing these things, then I say to you: certainly, all this may apply to the faithful, but the pastor must know these things because he must fulfill his task in harmony with the whole course of human development. He must know that these things have a very real significance.

Let me give you an example of where these things can have a very real meaning today. You see, today you learn the Copernican theory of the world at an early age. This Copernican theory of the world is traced back to two sentences of Copernicus, while his third sentence is always suppressed. What today's astronomers do is this: they add up the revolutions of the earth around itself. These rotations of the Earth around itself, around its axis, are now made each year in the path of an ellipse, progressively, over the course of 365 days to 24 hours. But while the Earth is turning around itself, astronomers say that it turns around itself yet another time. You can imagine it like this: When you turn around on your own axis, you make one revolution when you are back to where you started. But if you simultaneously turn around a central point or an interior, you have to turn a little further than one revolution each time. If you now add up 365 plus one, you do not realize that in the world things are different than when a person turns around like that. When the Earth or the world turns once, then the matter becomes concrete, then you have to say: 365 Earth days plus one world day; and if you add that up to 366, it is exactly the same as if you add up 4 pears and 1 apple gives 5 pears. And the error that underlies this has led to the fact that even today people believe that the earth revolves around the sun in the course of a year, which is not the case in reality. It follows behind the sun in a curve, the sun moves in a spiral – (during the following demonstration, it is demonstrated on the board) – the earth follows it in the same spiral. If you look at it this way, the sun is on the line when the sun has set and the earth is here, so look at it this way; this creates the illusion that the earth is moving around the sun. In reality, it follows it in a spiral.

I only mention this, of course I cannot explain it in the breadth in which it should be explained, but it is actually based essentially on a lack of insight into the way in which creating arithmetic and creating geometry work in relation to that which we use as arithmetic and geometry applicable to the sensory world. One must know how little it is right to simply take up the scientific concepts of today; the most important ones are not right. They can easily be taught to people; one can then move from this rolling [of the earth] around the sun to the circling of a nebula, as in the Kant-Laplacean theory and the splitting off [of the solar system] from it. This can even be done very vividly; the object lesson in the sense of today's pedagogy can achieve anything, can't it? You take water and alcohol and let a ball form out of a substance that floats on water, an oil ball, take a piece of a map that you stick with a pin exactly in the middle of the ball. Now you start turning: Tiny spheres separate out and the miniature world system is created. Why shouldn't it be the same outside? For the simple reason that it would be necessary for the great teacher to stand there and stick the giant pin through. When describing an observation, one must describe it very precisely. Otherwise, unselfishness is very good, but this omission of the teacher from an experiment is scientifically far too much unselfishness; because he is there and he must not be denied.

It is true that anyone approaching the renewal of religious life must deal very thoroughly with all those things that today confuse the concepts, that create such confused concepts. He must deal with the fact that they are held to with no less authority than the concepts that are church dogmas. For truly, the Trinity has never been more firmly believed in than modern people believe in such world theories, and they do the latter not with more reason than the others have done or do the former. Today, the belief in authority is only attracted to a different area. And people are truly white ravens when they talk like Herman Grimm – I think I have already told you – who, with reference to the Kant-Laplacean theory, said that a carrion bone around which a hungry dog circles is to be regarded as a more appetizing piece than this world theory, the madness of which later times would wonder at, and will wonder at the fact that this delusion in a time like ours could be adopted by wide circles. Understanding this will one day become a difficult problem for the cultural history of later times.

My dear friends! I would now like to speak here about what a ceremony of the sacrifice of the Mass could be, and I would like to show how one can move towards such a ceremony of the sacrifice of the Mass while at the same time taking into account the modern consciousness of humanity, out of which these reflections, which I am making here before you, should always flow. I would like to convey as much as possible of what is necessary to you. This will probably enable you to build on what you have learned.

Before I approach the ritual of the sacrifice of the mass, I would first like to say a few words, my dear friends, that are not connected with the external, but with the outward appearance of the mass sacrifice, and which we will then expand in a corresponding way to other ceremonies. How the priest himself relates to the mass sacrifice is intimately connected with it. This should already be apparent in the outward appearance in which the priest rode up to the altar. It is indeed the case that, by approaching the altar in his appropriate robes, the priest indicates that the sacrifice of the Mass is something for which I used the term “wholly human” yesterday. In our age, the whole human being can only be exhausted when we speak of the physical human being, the etheric human being or the human being of the formative forces, the astral human being, who already appears in the internalization, but is connected with the astral of the cosmos, and the I-human being. The higher members need not be taken into account here, because in the course of earthly development they are for the time being hidden within man as mere active forces. Now it is a matter of the fact that for a complete human insight, the human being as he stands before us first is the physical human being, and that if the complete human being is to be seen, it must be indicated, at least outwardly, how the other members of human nature relate to the human being. This is indicated for the Mass sacrifice in the vestments. (During the following explanations, the following is written on the board.)

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The physical body of the priest is first of all contained in the etheric body, which is essentially represented by a kind of extended white surplice that reaches the floor. I will write “white robe”. It still has various parts that are separate from the actual surplice cut, but these things have also been added over time for various reasons, and I will speak here only of the essential. When we look at the white of the surplice, we must realize that it contains a hint of the part of the human being that is integrated into the cosmos, just as the physical human being is integrated into the forces of the earth. And just as one has to look for man's guilt in the forces of the earth, so one has to see innocence in the white robe that man puts on.

Now, as you know, the human being, as he walks on earth, first has a firm connection with the physical and etheric bodies, and then these have a looser connection with the astral body and the ego – during sleep, these two are detached – and then again has a firm connection with the astral body and the ego. During sleep, the astral body and the ego separate from the physical body and the etheric body. During the whole of life, therefore, on the one hand the physical body and the etheric body, and on the other hand the astral body and the ego, remain connected to a certain extent in the body, but now they can be abstractly separated within consciousness, just as they also appear in an organized way, with the human being having a clear differentiation of the inner being in thinking, feeling and willing. In the will there is a strong impulse of the ego, in the astral body there is a strong impulse of thinking and feeling, coming from the side of the etheric body and from the side of the physical body, so that the human being is already differentiated in terms of the ego and the astral body for his consciousness, while the differentiation of the etheric and physical bodies does not confront him at all. But precisely that which otherwise forms a looser connection between the etheric and the astral body in a natural way in man must be hinted at during the actual central priestly action, during the sacrifice of the Mass and also otherwise during priestly actions, in that for the priest the interweaving of the etheric and the astral is actually always directly present. So the working over of the astral body into the etheric body must be indicated in some way, and this is the case in that the priest wears the stole. By wearing the stole, the connecting link between the astral and etheric bodies is indicated in the stole. We have the astral body (it is drawn). You see, the connection with the etheric of the cosmos is, so to speak, in itself a permanent one in man from birth to death and is only tinged by what the astral body as such sends into the etheric and physical bodies, that is, what emanates from human will emotions, from emotional content. With all these emotions of will and feeling, the human being must now place himself in that which I spoke to you about yesterday as the course of the year. I tried to draw your attention to the different ways in which people relate to the universe within themselves when they understand these festivals in the original way.

He then places himself with his mood in these festivals, if his astral body is placed in them accordingly. The astral body is now expressed accordingly in the robe worn by the priest during the sacrifice of the Mass, in the actual chasuble, which is designed so that the priest can slip through it at the top, and which then hangs down at the front and back in a not quite identical form. It is, I would say, the symbol of the astral body. This symbol of the astral body must actually be adapted to the moods that the human soul must have in relation to the course of the year, and it is adapted by giving this, I say now “astral body”, the color mood that expresses how the soul mood stands in relation to the whole course of time at the turn of the year, in the course of the year. (See drawing, plate 12.)

Let us begin with the preparations for Christmas. I say what I am about to say with full awareness of how it must sound to modern man. You will find the most diverse deviations from what I have to say in the Catholic Church, but these are deviations that have arisen from misunderstandings over time. If the colors of the chasubles were really taken from the spirit of the supersensible world, they would have to be as I am now going to show you. We must therefore have a certain mood, which is the mood of expectation towards Christmas. This mood can only be expressed in color by everything that belongs to the chasuble being blue for this time. So we have blue for the Advent season. This does indeed express that mood of devotion in which man does not feel what is around him, let us say, as if the forces of sunlight were working through him, but so that he feels that what is transformed into the spiritual, what is preserved by the forces of light, is working through him from the earth.

But a mood of hope will have to find expression in the Christmas festival itself. It is the festival of expectation, it is the festival of hope, it is therefore the festival that must brighten, that must have a faint light in what was the earlier blue. We will therefore have the chasuble in the color at Christmas that we have mixed a red with the blue, in a kind of purple. We then have this purple gradually becoming lighter as we approach the time encompassing the first weeks of the year, and we then come to the expectation of Easter, of death, where we now have the chasuble in black to suggest the right mood. For the period before Easter, the chasuble is black.

We now come to the Easter season itself, and there the chasuble turns to the earlier blue-red-purple in a rather abrupt transition – just as there is a sharp transition from purple to black – then reddish-yellow.

We approach the time of Pentecost. At Whitsuntide, the chasuble is essentially white and then, until it returns completely to blue, it is in shades of white with all kinds of colorful embroidery, which indicates that during the summer season, when the soul is united with the cosmos, so to speak, the soul of the earth is subdued and the fertilizing forces of growth are sent from the cosmos. In a true priest's vestment, one should therefore see, as a symbol, that which is sent down from the heavens in the form of plant and animal growth forces. As autumn approaches, these forces find expression in that which corresponds to the fruitfulness of the harvest, until it in turn opens out into the blue of the Advent season.

In fact, the Catholic Church has ritual prescriptions for these changes in chasubles. If they appear in different colors, it is only because of a misunderstanding; but essentially it is true that what appears in the Catholic Church as the color of the chasubles goes back to ancient traditions and ancient visions, to ancient knowledge of the supersensible world and man's relationship to the supersensible world. So that an extraordinary amount can be studied from the chasuble itself, although, if one includes the errors, one can also err a great deal.

First of all, we have to consider the color of the chasuble. We will always see the stole, which is worn under the chasuble and crossed over the chest, in a slightly lighter tone than the chasuble itself, but essentially, since it is the connection between the astral and etheric bodies, in a lighter color than the seasonal color of the chasuble. We must then seek, by going further, that which is the symbol for the human ego. I would just like to add the following about the chasuble: the chasuble is essentially a revelation of the astral body. This is also expressed in the embroidery or the other dyes of the chasuble, let us say, in gold, if one follows either good old traditions or if one brings things directly from the spiritual worlds. so that this figure will always be found in some variation on the front of the chasuble (see plate 12, top right) and on the back of the chasuble (plate 12, bottom right). This is to suggest that, to a certain extent, the currents from the spiritual life extend into the astral life, and that the human being himself — precisely as he crosses the axes of his eyes, as he can fold his hands, as he can touch one hand with the other — comes to perceive the self through the crossing of the curves here on the chasuble representing the astral body.

When we now ascend to the ego, it is the case that what man calls his ego is, in fact, most separate in human consciousness; it is the case that man, through his ego, has, in fact, his particular relationship to the outer world, that he can either consciously establish this relationship to the external world, which is established by the ego, or that he can also withdraw into his ego, that this is something that is only loosely connected to the unconscious being. Therefore, everything that is an outer work, such as the head covering, or everything that the priest only wears, symbolically points to the ego. Everything that can be taken off at the altar, everything that the priest only wears, everything that can really be taken off or put on, actually belongs to the ego area. The power of the ego rests in everything the priest wears; hence the power of command and the power of the law, which is inherent in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, is expressed primarily in the headgear. If you take the ordinary priest's headdress, it is the most inconspicuous; go up to the provost, go up to the bishop, and you will have the headdress becoming more and more complicated, and you will finally have the most complicated headdress at the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope, the tiara of the Roman Pope. The triple headdress of the Roman Pontiff expresses the fact that no one is a worthy Pope who has not come to have control over the thinking, feeling and willing of his ego, and to rule the earthly kingdom of Christendom from this organization of thinking, feeling and willing.

These symbols, which are also used in the vestments for the sacrifice of the Mass, are important down to the smallest detail, but that is not important for us. You may also know that the priest does not wear the chasuble, which is specifically intended only for the performance of the Mass, during other ceremonies, such as baptisms or funerals, requiems (I will talk about these later) or afternoon ceremonies. Instead, he wears a mantle over the stole, which now also has to appear with a similar figure to the one shown here, but which is intended to suggest how this astral body is supposed to behave in a different way during the other ceremonies, is in a different mood, above all is in a mood that is less devoted, but more blessing-like and the like. This is expressed in the particular cut of the so-called surplice, which is also worn at other ceremonies.

The point is that for the Catholic priest, not only is the daily breviary prescribed – we will have to talk about that again – but the Catholic priest also has to check the ecclesiastical calendar, especially before celebrating the Mass, in order to determine exactly how he has to wear the chasuble on the relevant days according to the signatures, which are in line with cosmic processes. Of course, in poor churches it is not possible to change the chasuble every day or even every week, but there the change of the chasuble could be based on the respective constellations of the stars; a varied chasuble could certainly be used for each day according to the ecclesiastical calendar, which, according to the Catholic view, essentially gives us the constellations of the stars, the sun and the moon.

Thus clothed, the priest celebrates the sacrifice of the Mass. I have already explained to you the structure of the sacrifice of the Mass in its four main parts. I would like to explicitly mention that these four main parts of the Catholic Mass are surrounded by a wealth of other prayer-like or ceremonial acts, which I will discuss later. Today, I will first talk about the first two main parts of the Mass, the reading of the Gospel, the proclamation of the Good News and the offertory.

So after the preparatory prayers have been said – as I said, we will talk about these later – the priest enters the left side of the altar and then has to read the mass from the left side of the altar.

There are differences here too. The ordinary daily mass is relatively shorter than the solemn mass. The solemn mass has additional elements, but each mass has the four parts that I will now discuss, with a preface, with prayers that lie between these main parts, or with ceremonial acts that lie before or in the middle. But first we must become thoroughly familiar with the nature of these main parts.

So, first of all, I would like to show rituals in the way that is generally possible today directly from the spiritual world. I would like to emphasize that I am not claiming that the rituals I am about to show are perfect. But they are to be given in the way that is possible for me, in that I will first present what can be drawn directly from the spiritual world today.

After the prayers and ceremonies have been performed, the gospel of the day is read on the left side of the altar. How the gospel falls on the day again, according to such a calendar as I have spoken to you about, we will speak briefly about in the next few days. So when the priest prepares to read the Gospel, he would say the following, either silently, at so-called silent masses, which every priest must read every day, or by reciting it aloud, or by accompanying it with singing and music at high solemn masses. I will now only have to communicate what the content should be. The priest will therefore first speak as he prepares to read the Gospel:

My heart be filled with Thy pure life, O Christ.
From my lips, let the word flow, cleansed through Thee.
For when Thy grace does me honor, pure
may my heart and pure my word be.
So may Your Word live worthily on my lips and May your blessing, O Christ, flow livingly through the word.
You may be in my heart.
Your word may flow from my lips.
Thus, from a worthy source and in the right stream,
your gospel is proclaimed.

The priest has the altar servers at the altar, the ministers of the sacrifice of the Mass. What I have just spoken is spoken by the priest alone. What I now have to speak is a dialogue between the priest and the altar boy – usually, if there are two, between him and the one standing on the right side of the altar, while the one standing on the left side has more of a silent role. The priest now speaks:

Christ in you.

This is not the case in Catholic masses, [where it is] Dominus vobiscum – the Lord be with you. This is something that arises from a misunderstanding of the ritual, because it makes the mass not a Christian sacrifice, but a sacrifice for the Father. So the priest would have to say:

Christ in you.

And the altar server:

And fulfill you with your Holy Spirit.

The Priest says:

The Gospel of Mark will now be proclaimed,

Matthew, John, Luke, chapter such-and-such.

The altar server says, after the priest has said this announcement:

May Christ reveal himself through you, O Christ.

Now, what I have just said is spoken in such a way that the first words, “My heart be filled...” to “...proclaim your gospel” are spoken by the priest, looking towards the altar, the word “Christ in you” is spoken looking towards the congregation, and the word “It is now proclaimed the gospel of Mark...” is spoken with the priest always turning around in between. The priest now turns around again and approaches the actual reading of the Gospel. But before that, he turns to the congregation. It is a custom in Catholicism today for the priest to often read the Gospel with his face turned towards the altar – especially at silent masses. However, it corresponds to the actual meaning, as is also done at the most solemn masses, that the priest reads the Gospel at least half turned towards the congregation.

The altar server says after the Gospel is read:

We lift up our soul to Thee, O Christ.

The priest says:

May the word of the Gospel blot out whatever is impure in our words.

Thus the ceremony of reading the Gospel is complete. It is certainly the case that the Gospel should not be read without the things that preceded its reading and those that follow. The Gospel should be read in a dignified manner, with the appropriate mood. This should be done by the priest dignifying the Gospel with the appropriate words.

Now there are some intermediate prayers and ceremonies, which I will discuss later, and then the second main part of the Mass follows: the sacrifice, the offertory.

We have already spoken about the essence of the sacrifice, and it will reveal itself to you in the sacrificial act itself when I communicate it to you now. This sacrifice consists, first of all, of offering wine and water as a sacrifice by mixing them, and that what is spoken into the mixing of wine and water is transferred, thus transferred as a word with the waves of the smoke clouds that stream out of the censer and that are supposed to carry up what is in the words of the sacrifice to the heights, so that grace may descend. Such a correct mass offering, a mass offertory, would then have to proceed in the following way: First the priest will uncover the chalice, which is initially covered with a small rug-like thing, and will have to speak opposite the covered chalice – this is how it should be:

Receive, divine World Ground, weaving in the expanses of space and in the remote times, this sacrifice, brought to you by me, your unworthy creature.

Thus the sacrifice is brought to the World Ground, to the paternal principle: Receive, divine World Ground, you who are weaving in the widths of space and in the remote of time, this sacrifice through me, your unworthy creature, offered to you.

I bring it because my straying from You, my denial of Your nature, my weaknesses, have also flowed to You.

With me, all who dwell here bring it.

With me, may all true Christians who have been born bring it.

With me, may all who have died bring it.

So that they do not bury their eternal for the sake of their temporal.

Yes, so be it.

Now, after the acolyte has brought [the vessels] in which there is wine in one and water in the other, and after the priest has poured from one water and from the other wine into the chalice, the following is spoken in the chalice during this mixing of water and wine:

Divine World Ground, which has ordained beings in the supersensible out of its essential members, and which has transformed the ordained, turn my will to You; may the power of this willing arise from a feeling that unites.

– now the mixture is ready; the following will be spoken after it has already been mixed –

with Christ, who lives in Your life and may my thinking live in the Holy Spirit's life through all the following earthly cycles.

This “per omnia saecula saeculorum” [of the Catholic Mass] is actually always to be replaced [by the words] “through all the following earthly realms,” that is, all the following earthly cycles, all the following time cycles.

Now the chalice is raised, which is the actual symbol of the sacrifice. The believing community sees the raising of the chalice, and during the raising of the chalice the words are spoken:

Be thou sacrificed, O foundation of the world, this draught of health. May it quicken what is good, so that what has fallen to earth may also be raised up to the heavens. May the fragrance ascend, as this divinely willed being has descended.

Yes, so be it.

The chalice is placed on the altar. The incense for the chalice is now prepared. In the Catholic Mass, this is done in two acts, but as far as I can see, this is not the intention. First the chalice is incensed and then the altar. But as I said, I cannot see that this is the intention. Before the incense is burned, the following is said:

We all approach You with our soul, O Christ, so that You may offer us with You and Your light may shine upon our day, and You may accept us.

Come to us, Spirit of the vastness of space and the remoteness of time, and sanctify our sacrifice with Your holy being.

May our resurrection in spirit fill the smoke with a blessing spirit, through Christ living in our prayers. Yes, so be it.

Now the altar boy takes the censer and incense is burned. During the burning of incense, the word is spoken that is actually to be taken up by the smoke and carried upwards:

Christ in us. From our thoroughly Christianized soul may the smoke ascend, and may Thy grace descend to us.

Christ in us. Christ in our prayer. Our prayer may be heard by Thee.

The faithful then join the priest in raising their hands.

Christ in our lifting up of hands. The Christ light in our daylight.

After lowering the hands:

Let the threshold guard my mouth; let a wall bar my error, to keep me from going astray.

Let all evil be removed from my words, and let good will flow into them.

During these words incense is continually being smoked. After these words the censer is given to the acolyte and carried away from the altar. Usually the priest then has to descend to turn around and also smoke the faithful congregation. Then the censer is handed over, and the priest has to speak the prayer as an echo:

In the sacrifice, may the fire of love that creates substance arise, and the flame generate timeless being, so that good may endure.

Yes, so be it.

That, more or less, is what I am able to give, my dear friends, what can be given today when the question is how to find it from the spiritual worlds today – that which is to be done as gospel reading and sacrificial act.

But I also want you to become familiar with the traditional, and so I would like to introduce you to what I have attempted at the suggestion of our dear friend, Pastor Schuster, as a translation of the Mass ritual.^{1The translation of the Catholic mass ritual is placed in quotation marks ”} but with spiritual scientific foundations, which is the result of this approach. If one were to translate the traditional ritual of the mass, but not by proceeding in a lexicographic manner, but rather by first ascertaining what the text really means in terms of word-value and soul-content, then the aim would be to express before the Gospel:

"Cleanse my heart and lips, Almighty God, who cleansed the lips of the prophet Isaiah with a burning coal: cleanse me, then, by Your compassionate mercy, that I may worthily proclaim Thy Holy Gospel. Through Christ our Lord. Yes, so be it.

O Lord, pour forth Your blessing. May the Lord be in my heart and on my lips: that I may worthily and rightly proclaim his Gospel. Yes, so be it.

The priest says:

“The Lord fulfill you.”

The altar server says:

“And your Holy Spirit.”

The priest says:

“It follows from the Gospel of St. Mark, Matthew, John, Luke.”

The altar server then says:

“May the Lord reveal himself through you, O Lord.”

The Gospel of the day is read. After the reading, the altar server says:

“Praise be to you, O Christ.”

The priest then says:

“By the words of the Gospel, may our corruptions be blotted out.”

So, my dear friends, what you have just heard would, in today's time consciousness, have to be said in preparation:

My heart be filled with Thy pure life, O Christ.

It cannot be said in the Christian sense, if one takes up today's time consciousness: “Cleanse my heart and lips, Almighty God.” Yesterday afternoon I pointed out the reasons to you clearly. So:

My heart be filled with Thy pure life, O Christ.

From my lips, O let the purified word flow through Thee.

For when I am worthy of Thy grace, my heart can be pure, my word pure.

So may Thy word live worthily on my lips and, carried by Thy spirit, reach those to whom it is to be proclaimed.

Thy blessing, O Christ, flow livingly through the word.

It cannot be “Pour out Thy blessings, O Lord”; nor can it be “The Lord be in my heart and on my lips,” but it must be:

Thou shalt be in my heart.

Thy word shall flow from my lips.

Thus, from a worthy source and in the right stream,

Your Gospel is proclaimed.

Yes, so be it.

In the correct understanding of Christianity, it cannot be “dominus vobiscum”, but [it must be]:

Christ in you.

The altar boy:

And may He fill your spirit.

The priest:

The Gospel will now be proclaimed...

The altar server:

May Christ reveal himself through you.

The Catholic Mass Office still has the ritual: “May Christ reveal himself through you, O Lord”; these are echoes from the old days, which are not really understood in a Christian way.

The Gospel reading follows. After the reading of the Gospel, if we translate the text properly, we have to say:

"Praise be to you, O Christ.

But what these words actually mean is:

We lift up our soul to you, O Christ.

The priest then says:

The word of the gospel erases what is impure in our words.

The Catholic text reads:

“Through the words of the Gospel, may our corruptions be wiped out.”

In the Catholic liturgy, the offertory would have the words:

"Receive, O Holy Father, Almighty, timeless God, this pure offering which I, your unworthy disciple, bring to you, my living and true God, for my innumerable transgressions and offenses and negligences and for all present, but also for all believing Christians, living and deceased: so that it may be to my and their salvation for lasting life. Yes, so be it.

We have the words for this because the words must be so – they also reveal themselves in this way – in the sense that the sacrifice is offered to the Father, the ground of the world:

Receive, divine ground of the world, weaving in the vastness of space and in the distance of time, this sacrifice, brought to you by me, your unworthy creature.

I bring it because my straying from You, my denial of Your nature, my weaknesses, have also flowed to You.

When I read the supersensible directly, my dear friends, I must read:

I am bringing it because my deviations from You, my denials of Your nature, my weaknesses, have also flowed to You.

If I read the traditional text, I have to read:

“... which I, your unworthy disciple, offer to you, my living and true God, for my innumerable offenses and negligences.”

And it is the same with the following. In the original text:

”... and for all the faithful...

in the text that can be given today:

With me may it be brought by all true Christians who are born.

Then in the old text:

”... but also for all believing Christians who are living and who have died:

and in the new text:

Those who have died may also bring it with me.

In the old text:

”... so that it may benefit them and me for eternal life.

In the new text:

Lest they should bury their eternal for the sake of their temporal.

This verse is closely connected with the full understanding that we must have today, in the sense in which it was expressed yesterday. With regard to the mixing of the wine and water, the old text would read:

"O God, who has composed the essence of man in a wonderful way and transformed it in an even more wonderful way: through the secret nature of water and wine, give us the communion of divine being with him who has made himself a partaker of our human nature, Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in unity with the God of the Holy Spirit through all ages. Yes, so be it.

Today it says:

Divine Ground of the World, who has ordained out of the essential parts of his being the essence of mankind in the supersensible, and who hast transformed what was ordained, to Thee do I turn my volition; may the power of this volition arise out of a feeling that unites with Christ, who lives in Thy life and may my thinking live in the life of the Holy Spirit through all the following circles of the earth.

When the chalice is raised, that is, at the sacrifice, in the old text:

"We sacrifice to you, O Lord, the chalice of healing, beseeching your goodness: that it may rise for your divinely exalted looking down upon us and the whole world with a gentle fragrance of healing. Yes, so be it.

In a spirit of devotion and with a soul aware of its weakness, we approach You, O Lord, and may the sacrifice of our day penetrate Your perception so that it may please You, You divine Lord. O come, Bringer of Healing, Almighty Timeless God: and give Your blessing to this sacrifice, which is prepared for Your holy revelation of Being.

Through the intercession of the blessed archangel Michael, who stands at the right hand of the altar, and of all who are counted by him as followers, may the Lord bless the sacrificial smoke and accept it in a gentle fragrance, through Christ our Lord. Yes, so be it.

Then follows the incense-burning for the chalice. I will first say what is said here when the chalice is raised:

Be sacrificed to you, O foundation of the world, this draught of health. May it quicken that which is good, so that what has fallen to earth may also be raised up to the heavens. May the fragrance ascend, as this divinely willed being has descended. Yes, so be it.

We all draw near to You with our soul, O Christ, that You may offer us with You and let Your light shine upon our day, and that You may accept us. Come to us, Spirit of the expanses of space and the remote times, and sanctify our sacrifice with Your holy nature.

May our resurrection in the Spirit fill the smoke with a blessing, so that Christ may live in our prayers. Yes, so be it.

During the incense-burning of the chalice, the old text is spoken:

“Imbued with your blessing, O Lord, this sacrificial smoke rises up to you, and your gracious mercy descends upon us.”

And then at the following incense of the altar:

“Cause, O Lord, that through my prayer, which like the sacrificial smoke enters into thy sight, the lifting up of my hands may be an offering made perfect by the day. – Set, O Lord, a guard before my mouth and a wall around my lips: that my heart may not pour out in evil words, and fall into excuses for my transgressions.”

And this is what we now say (according to the new text) during the incense-bearing:

Christ in us

or, if a silent Mass is being read:

Christ in me. From a soul permeated with Christ may the smoke rise up and to us – or to me – may your grace descend, Christ in us.

Christ in our prayer. Our prayer be for your ear.

Christ in our raising of hands. The Christ light in our daylight.

Let the threshold be guarded before my mouth; let a wall hinder my error, in order to flow.

All evil be removed from my words and good will pour into them.

The censer is removed and the prayer to be said is in the old text:

“May the Lord enkindle in us the fire of his love and the flame of timeless kindness. Yes, may it be so.”

New text:

In the sacrifice, may the fire of the love that creates and the flame that engenders timeless being arise, so that good may endure.

Yes, so be it.

Actually, the text that I read to you as the old text is part of the Credo, which is inserted between the Gospel and the Offertory in the Christian Mass as the recitation of the Creed. In fact, the passage is absolutely correct; the question is rather that the Credo is inserted at this point, between the Gospel and the Offertory. We will have to talk about the Credo on the following days. Today, I will merely familiarize you with the Credo that goes with the old text I have read. This Credo reads:

"I believe in one God, the Almighty Father, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, who was begotten before all ages. He is God from God, light from light, true God from true God, Of one substance, though not having begotten, with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who for us men and for our salvation descended from heaven. Who also came in the flesh by the Holy Spirit, being born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. Who also was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, who died and was buried. And on the third day He rose again in the sense of the scriptures. And was taken up into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will reveal Himself again, to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom is endless. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeded from the Father and the Son. Who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and revealed, who spoke through the prophets. And in the only holy catholic and apostolic church. I confess one baptism for the remission of sins. And I hope in the resurrection of the dead and in life in the future age. Yes, so be it.

The Priest says, after reciting the Credo:

“Dominus vobiscum – the Lord be with you.”

the acolyte:

“And with you, O Lord.”

The Priest says:

“Oremus – we pray.”

And now follows the prayer.

My dear friends, it is necessary for you to grasp the connection between the entire ancient sacrificial rite and this Credo, so that you will see how necessary it is for the modern consciousness to approach the sacrificial rite in an original way. Tomorrow we will deal with the ritual of consecration and communion.

In looking back at the considerations set forth here during the last few days, we shall see, on the one hand, standing there before our soul the relations existing between the individual man and the universe, and, on the other, the relations existing between a single human being living at a certain time and mankind's whole earthly development.

Today I should like to round out these considerations by adding a few thoughts. You will have inferred from what was said that the human being, in ancient times preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, stood much closer than we do today to outward nature, to the external world. This statement goes counter to the present-day belief that we, by means of our science, stand extremely close to nature. We do nothing of the kind. We have intellectual thoughts on nature drawn only from external observation, but we no longer experience nature.

Had the human being remained dependent on the spiritual element in nature, he would not have become the free being into which he developed during the recent stages of historical evolution. He would not have attained his full ego-consciousness.

If today we look into our own self, into that which we carry within us as the memory images of things experienced by us previously, what do we find in ourselves (and rightfully so)? We find our ego with all its experiences. When ancient man, living several millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, looked into himself, he did not find his ego. He did not say: “I have experienced this or that ten or twenty years ago.” Just by means of his memory, it was clear to him that he had to say: “the Gods let me have this or that experience.” And he did not say: “the ego within me had this or that experience,” but: “the God within me had the experience.” It was just because the human being participated spiritually, by means of his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body, in the processes of nature outside of himself, just because he stood in a closer, more intimate relationship to nature, he could say: “The God within me experiences the world.”

Today man acquires a knowledge of nature by means of his intellect. His knowledge is concerned exclusively with dead nature. Thus he has become able to speak of himself, out of his innermost feeling, as an ego; to be a free ego-being.

This was felt with especial strength by Paul when passing through the event of Damascus. For Paul, before passing through the event of Damascus, was an initiate in the sense of ancient initiation. He had learned in the Semitic wisdom-schools of those days that the God Whom one might justifiably call the Christ could be seen only in pre-earthly existence. This he had been told in the wisdom-schools.

The disciples and pupils of the Christ, however, whom he came to know, made the following assertion: “The Christ has dwelt among us within the man Jesus of Nazareth. He was here on earth. While we were His contemporaries, we experienced Him not only in our memory going back to a pre-earthly existence, but here on earth itself.” And Paul answered out of his initiatory knowledge: “That is impossible, for the Christ can be seen only in pre-earthly existence.”

And he was an unbeliever persecuting Christianity until the vision, the imagination of Damascus revealed this to him: The Christ lives now in connection with the earth. Then he, Paul, coined the expression which has since become so significant for inner Christianity: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

Man can recognize his ego in a natural way. He simply needs to look into himself. But in order to reach God anew, he must unite himself, in full consciousness, with the Mystery of Golgotha and say to himself: “the Christ in me.”

The men of ancient times have said: “We were together with the Christ, and hence with God the Father, before descending to earth.” Now they had to say: “the Christ is on earth.” Physically, Christ was on earth during the Mystery of Golgotha. Spiritually He has, since the Mystery of Golgotha, remained united with all men on earth.

Such knowledge is also contained in Christianity. We are told that the Christ revealed to man that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. Yet just the interpretation of this word shows clearly that the human beings, although outwardly believing, are inwardly unbelieving. You need only consider what many modern theologians have to say about this coming near of the Kingdom of Heaven. They say: “Well, in this respect the Christ depended on the judgment of his age. Then people believed that the earth would become more spiritual at a certain time. Here the Christ was mistaken.”

It is not the Christ, however, Who was mistaken. Human beings were mistaken. They have interpreted these words in such a way as though the Kingdom of Heaven, by coming near, would make the grapes grow ten times larger and let the earth overflow with milk and honey. Such was not the meaning of what the Christ said. The Christ spoke of the Kingdom of the Spirit which He had brought near. It is not allowable to say: “What the Christ told us was a mistake. Today we must think differently.” Instead of this we should ask ourselves: “How can I understand what the Christ has said?”

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, it has indeed become more and more necessary for us to find the spiritual within the earthly and perceive the truth of the saying: “The spiritual worlds are descended to the earth.” They are descended. We need only to look for the path upon which they can be found. In order that we find something of that which leads towards this path, I would like to discuss once more certain points that are apt to bring about a better comprehension of these matters.

In those ancient times when men, in their fifties, felt the paralysis of their physical bodies setting in, it was still possible to recognize individual destinies by means of the stars. Since then, every sort of astrological calculation has become the practice of amateurs. The ancient human being felt himself related to the transformation of his physical body into the earthly element. But this transformation of the physical body into the earthly element, this perception of the earth by means of the physical body enabled him to recognize, in the course of the stars, the spiritual element within destiny. Thus, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha, the wisdom of the stars was highly estimated.

Then came the age during which, as I have told you, the human being acquired a greater feeling for his surroundings. After reaching the forties, he felt language in such a way that he could say: “Within me the folk spirit, the folk genius is speaking.” Man learned to regard language as something objective.

In connection with this feeling, the human being experienced that which rotated around him, as it were, in a circle. At a later time, he still experienced the daily sunrise, the daily sunset. To a certain extent, he arranged his life in accord with these phenomena. The course of the year, however, was no longer really understood by him.

Yet there was a time, during the sixth, fifth and fourth millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, when men lived in unison not only with day and night, but also with the year. This unison with the year has been partly preserved, especially up here in the North. For instance, a relic of this past unison can still be felt in the Olaf-Saga, where Olaf experiences the course of the year in such a way that around and after Christmas he enters the life of the spiritual world. Here appears a memory of the unison between human life and the course of the year as it came to flower in very ancient times in the Orient, which was the scene of mankind's loftiest civilization.

At that time, human beings understood what later became known to them only by means of tradition, namely, how to arrange their festivals in accord with the course of the year. They took part in the course of the year. In what way was this accomplished?

Today we have no immediate experience of the fact that we breathe in and breathe out; that the air is alternately within and without us. The present-day human being would be hardly aware of these things were he not told by science. He does not experience, so vividly as did the people of ancient times, the process of inspiration and expiration.

Yet it is not only man that breathes, but also, even though in a different way, our earth. Just as man possesses a soul element, so does the earth possess a soul element. In the course of one year, the earth first breathes in, and then breathes out her soul element. And the wintry days, during which the Christmas Festival takes place, approach at a time when the earth's breathing-in process is at its height; when the earth-soul is entirely within the earth. Then the earth has the greatest amount of soul-life within herself. Hence, at this time, the spirit and soul element becomes visible in the earth.

If we can inwardly experience how the earth, having concluded this breathing-in process, is now inhabited by her whole soul and thereby lets come out of the earth-element the elemental beings, who live with the snow-covered trees, who live with the earth's surface where the water congeals at a time when the earth covers herself with a blanket of ice—if we can inwardly experience all this, then the spiritual beings within the earth begin to stir. The mere naturalist would say: The husbandman scatters the seed, which lies in the earth all winter and sprouts forth in the spring. This, however, could not happen unless the elemental beings preserved, during the winter, the spiritual force of the seeds. The spiritual beings, the spirits of nature, are most wakeful when the earth has breathed in during the winter-time, during the Christmas-time, her whole soul. Thus the birth of Jesus could be best understood through the fact that it took place at Christmas, when the earth is inhabited by her entire soul.

Yet, even at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, there were very few people who had been able to retain an understanding of this spirit and soul element contained in the earth during winter.

Men of earlier ages, however, knew that in mid-summer—around the Day of St. John, on the twenty-fourth of June—the state of the earth is just the opposite to her wintry state. In midsummer, the process of exhaling is at its height. Then the earth has given her soul to the extra-terrestrial cosmos. From Christmas until the Day of St. John, this breathing out of the soul-element into the vast universe is perceived more and more. The soul of the earth is striving towards the stars. The soul of the earth wishes to know something about the life of the stars. And, in its own way, the soul of the earth is most firmly united through the light of the summer sun with the star movements at the season of St. John's Day.

All this could be recognized, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha, in certain parts of the world. And out of this knowledge arose the inception of Summer Mysteries.

In the mid-summer mysteries, the mysteries of St. John that were celebrated especially in the North, the pupils of initiates under the guidance of these initiates, tried to accompany the earth-soul to the vast expanse of the stars, in order to read out of the stars what spiritual happenings and facts are connected with the earth. And, during the time between Christmas and the Day of St. John, they pursued this soaring of the earth-soul towards the world of the stars, this striving of the earth-soul towards the stars. And an echo—but only a traditional echo—of this striving of the earth-soul towards the stars is still to be found in the way the date for the Easter Festival is set.

The Easter Festival is set for the first Sunday following the vernal full moon and thus takes place in conformity with the stars. The reason for this must be sought in ancient times, when it was said: the soul of man desires to follow the earth-soul on her path to the stars and consider the star-wisdom as something whereby man may be guided.

Thus the Spring Festival, the Easter Festival, was set not according to earthly calculation, but according to heavenly calculation, to star calculation.

Especially in the span of time between the eighth pre-Christian century and the fourth post-Christian century, the feeling prevailed in the folk souls of civilized people that human beings were saddened by mankind's cosmic destiny. For there still existed the longing to follow the earth-soul, which desired to soar up to the stars in springtime. But the human soul, which was tied to the body, could do so no longer. There was no possibility of gaining from nature the ability to soar upward to the world of stars, such as it had existed in ancient times.

Human beings, therefore, could easily comprehend why the Easter Festival, which was to celebrate the Christ's death and resurrection, should occur just in springtime.

And the Deity came to their aid, by letting the death of Christ Jesus occur in the spring. Even the setting of the Easter Festival, however, revealed the fact that it was not permissible to use earthly calculations. The Christmas Festival could be computed by earthly means; for then the world-soul was inhabiting the earth. Thus the Christmas Festival had to be set for a definite day.

This setting of the Easter Festival contains profound wisdom. Yet the modern age thinks differently. About twenty-four years ago, I had weekly meetings with a well-known astronomer. Our meetings took place in a small circle of friends. This astronomer could reason only in the following way: All the account books of the earth are thrown into disorder by having the Easter Festival take place on different days. According to his opinion, the least one could do was to set the Easter Festival for the first Sunday in April, or regulate the date in some abstract way. As you know, a movement exists in the world which strives for such an abstract regulation of the Easter Festival. People want to have order in their debits and credits, which play such an important part in modern life. And now the Easter Festival, whose celebration, after all, requires several days, causes a great deal of disorder. It would be much more efficient to set one definite day of the year for its observance!

These things are an outward symbol of the fact that people want to banish from the world all that conforms to spiritual standards. Here is preeminently shown that we have become materialists who want to banish the spiritual more and more from human existence.

Formerly, however, the human being experienced the course of the year in such a way that, by accompanying the earth-soul into the cosmos in springtime and around the time of St. John's Day, he also learned every year how to follow the spiritual entities of the higher Hierarchies and, above all, the human souls who had passed out of this world.

In ancient times, people were conscious of the fact that, by experiencing the course of the year, they learnt how to follow the souls of the dead; learnt to find out, as it were, how their dead kinfolk were faring. And people felt that springtime not only brought them the first blossoms, but also the opportunity of discovering how their kinfolk were faring. Something spiritual was united, in a very concrete way, with this experiencing of the seasons.

And people in ancient times were much concerned with that which is connected with the earthly element, to the degree that the earthly is influenced by the stars. All this, however, has been outgrown by modern man. When we observe St. John's Day—the time when we could accompany the earth-soul soaring upward to unite itself with the stars—the antipodes celebrate Christmas. Thus, in that part of the world, the earth-soul retires into the earth.

You must consider that human beings during ancient, spiritualized times knew so little of the antipodes that the earth was thought of as a disk. Therefore it was impossible to have any relation to the antipodes.

By learning to think of the earth as a rounded body, one became independent of the course of the year. As long as one lived in a restricted region, the course of the seasons was an absolute fact. Today, when one travels across the globe without hindrance and, entering different localities, minimizes the incidents of the seasons, one is unable to experience their course. One also lacks the former intensive relation to the Festivals. You will realize how much less concrete and much more abstract our Festivals have become. People know by tradition that Christmas is the time for exchanging presents—and, besides, children enjoy their few days' vacation. At Easter, one or the other ritual may be witnessed. But in what way do present-day people concretely experience the spiritual world by means of the seasons? Today we are unable to understand the connection between our Festivals of the year and the course of the seasons.

Not only the human being has, in regard to his own person, become an Ego-being, a free being, but also the earth has emancipated herself from the universe. In modern times, the earth stands no longer in so close a relation to the universe as was formerly the case, at least as far as mankind's evolution is concerned. Hence man has become increasingly obliged to seek in his inner being what he cannot find outside.

As men became more and more intellectual, they acquired a natural science concerned with all that is outside of man. What I have in mind is not physics or chemistry which, in a purely external sense, are concerned only with what lies outside of man. I am speaking of biology. This science occupies itself in an intensive way with the lower, and also the higher animals, right up to the very highest species. And we have attained to a marvelous, admirable science in regard to the animal form, so that we are able today to have conceptions of how one animal form has developed out of another. Out of this grew the Darwin-Haeckel conception that the human form has developed out of the animal form. Yet this theory teaches us extraordinarily little about our own nature. It only marks the end of a zoological line. The human being does not attain a knowledge of himself as man, but only as the highest animal. This is a great scientific accomplishment, but it must be interpreted in the right way. People must learn to concede that science can only teach us what man is not.

As soon as it has become general knowledge that science must concern itself not with what man is, but with what man is not, then science will become enlightened. Then we shall be able to study all the forms living in the animal kingdom, as well as those in the plant kingdom.

Then we shall be able to say: “There outside, we have all the animal shapes. These we had to leave behind in the outer world; for, if they were still within us, we could never have become men. Natural science tells us of the things that we had to conquer within ourselves. We evolved by discarding, more and more, the natural forms, by ejecting them and retaining that which is not nature, but which pertains to spirit and soul.”

Man must come to the point where he can address science in the following way: “You are great, for you have taught me what man is not. Hence I must look for man's being in a sphere totally different from external, physical science. I can become a true scientist only by recognizing that man is not a product of nature, topping the line of animals, but that the animals are formations cast off and left behind by man. Only thus can I attain a correct relation to science.” In order to speak such words, man will be compelled to recognize things, now not through external observation, but out of his inner nature. And at the moment when man is able to say to himself: “Science, in the modern sense, does not inform us about man, but it only informs us concerning what man is not”—at this moment it will be recognized how much the world has need of spiritual science. For there is nothing else that gives us the possibility of recognizing man as Man. Without spiritual science, we can come to know only the external sheath of man as the final product of the animal kingdom.

Just by standing correctly on natural-scientific ground, we may fully appreciate natural science as something lying outside of man. To attain a knowledge of man—also with regard to his physical attributes—we must pursue a different path.

Anthroposophy has to strive for this spiritual observation. I shall demonstrate this fact by a few concrete examples.

Because we are influenced by the materialistic spirit of the age, there is a tendency in our schools to educate children by pointing to their bodily nature. Nowadays people make experiments involving the memory, even the faculties of willing and thinking. I do not object to such things, which may be quite interesting, inasmuch as science is concerned. It is, nevertheless, terrible to apply such experiments in a pedagogical way. If we can approach the child only by means of external experiments, this proves how completely estranged we have become from man's real being. Anyone inwardly connected with the child does not need external experiments. I wish, however, to emphasize once more that I am not opposed to experimental psychology. Yet we must acquire the faculty to enter man's being by the inward means of spirit and soul.

For instance, we are told: “A child's memory, his power of remembering, may be exerted too much or too little in his ninth or tenth year.” The clamor against over-exerting the memory can lead to the result of exerting it too little. We must always try to find the middle course. For instance, we may make too great demands on a nine or ten-year-old's memory. The real consequences will not appear before the person in question has reached the age of thirty or forty, or perhaps still later. Then this person may develop rheumatism or diabetes. By overexerting a child's memory at the wrong time—let us say between the ninth and tenth year—we cause during this youthful stage an exaggerated depositing of faulty metabolic products. These connections, lasting during a man's entire earth-life, go generally unnoticed.

On the other hand, by exercising the memory too little—that is, by letting a child's memory remain idle—we bring forth a tendency to all kinds of inflammations appearing in later years.

What is important to know is the following: that the bodily states of a certain life-period are the consequences of the soul and spirit states of another.

Or let us mention something else. We make experiments as to how quickly eight, nine, or ten-year old children in the grammar school tire during a reading lesson. We can work our graphs which show that the pupils tire after a certain length of time when doing arithmetic, and again after a certain length of time when doing gymnastics. Then the lessons are arranged according to these charts.

Of course, these charts are very interesting for purely objective science, to which I pay all due respect. I have no quarrel with such methods; but, with regard to education, they are of no use whatsoever. For between the change of teeth and puberty—that is, just at the grammar school age—we can educate and teach in the right way only by not over-exerting either the head or the limbs, but by stressing the use of the respiratory and circulatory system, the rhythmical system. Above all, we should inject into gymnastic exercises rhythm and time-beat: an element of art should be introduced.

Hence the art of eurythmy is so well adapted to educational purposes. Here the artistic element enters into the child's movements. Similarly, we should relieve the child's head by keeping him away from too much thinking; but teach him instead in a pictorial, imaginative way, present things to the child pictorially. For then he is not made to exert either his nervous-sensuous or his motor system, but mostly his rhythmic system. And this system does not become tired.

You only need to consider that our hearts must beat all night long, even when we are tired and want to rest. We must ceaselessly breathe between our birth and death. It is only the motor and sensuous-nervous systems that tire. The rhythmic system never tires. Therefore the child's schooling, at a time when he must take into his soul things of the greatest importance, should be organized in such a way that those of the child's faculties are called forth which never tire. If we calculate, however, that some subject exhausts the child in a stated period, and then employ charts of this kind, the educational methods are worked out in a wrong way, and not in a correct way. We must realize one thing: What experimental psychology makes clear is essentially the non-human. The human must be inwardly recognized.

In this way, medicine too will be penetrated by thoughts pertaining to spirit and soul. In ancient times, medicine was dominated by such thoughts, and the activities of healing and educating were designated by the same word. When the human being entered the world, he was considered of being in need of healing. Education was tantamount to healing. This will again be possible once the knowledge given by spirit and soul will have advanced to a point where the deeper connections of these things can be discerned. As I said before: Too little exertion of the memory causes subsequent inflammations; too great exertion causes deposits of metabolic products.

By looking at the effect of the action of spirit and soul on the physical, the spiritual element can be found in every single illness. And, conversely, we learn to recognize the cosmos; to recognize the spiritual state of matter within the cosmos. Then therapy may be added to pathology. And here we are filled with the thought that since the Mystery of Golgotha we are obliged to appeal to the soul's inner essence. We can no longer draw the spirit-soul element out of our external surroundings. By considering, in the lecture-halls of anatomy, merely the physical-sensible, we shall call forth a cry such as was uttered during a recent medical Congress. Impelled by the misery of the age, a medical scientist called out: “Give us corpses! Then we shall be able to advance in medicine. Give us corpses!”—Certainly, this cry is perfectly valid today; and, again, I do not fight against this demand for corpses. All this, however, can develop in the right way only if, on the other hand, the cry is uttered: “Give us the possibility of looking into spirit and soul, so that we may recognize how they continually build up the body, and continually destroy it.”

All this is connected with the right comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. For the Christ wanted us to comprehend again how to heal out of our inner being. Because of this, He sent the Healing Spirit. What He wanted to implant into mankind will bring us physical knowledge, but a physical knowledge permeated by the spirit.

Thus we comprehend the Christ correctly by grasping, in the right way, this word of the Gospel: “Whoever utters incessantly the cry: Lord, Lord! or Christ, Christ! should not, therefore, be considered a true Christian.” Anthroposophy is often reproached for speaking less of the Christ than does external religion. Then I often say to those who blame Anthroposophy: “Is there not an ancient Commandment recognized also by Christians, but forgotten in this eternal mentioning of the Christ: `Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain?' This is one of the ten Commandments.”

Whoever speaks ceaselessly of the Christ; whoever has the Christ's name constantly on his lips, sins against the sacredness of His name. Anthroposophy wants to be Christian in all it does and is. Therefore it cannot be reproached for speaking too little of the Christ. The consciousness that the Christ is living permeates everything brought forth by Anthroposophy. And thus it does not want to have Lord, Lord! incessantly on its lips. The less it speaks of the name “Christ,” the more truly does it desire to be Christian.