The Rudolf Steiner Archive

“The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” If we thoroughly understand this passage we shall also understand that deeply significant event in the history of humanity which took place through the appearance of Christ on the Earth. In the earlier lectures of this course we have traced the evolution of humanity in broad outlines, and we have described the way in which the consciousness of the Ego developed in the distant past whole groups and generations of human beings had one Ego in common. From this we learned to understand the long age of the patriarchs. Gradually this feeling of the Ego became limited more and more to the single personalities. We also showed how two spiritual streams made themselves felt in this evolution: the one was the stream of blood-relationship, which endeavoured to hold men together by natural ties, and the other, the Luciferic, which made men independent and prepared them for the purely spiritual tie which was to come.

During the whole period of the Old Testament one understood by “Law” something which brings order into human society from without. After blood-relationship had lost its binding power, men had to be brought into a certain connection with one another by an outer thought-order. The law was perceived as something coming from outside, and this Law which was given from outside holds good until the “grace and truth,” or devotion and truth, which comes through Jesus Christ, has developed in us from within, the understanding for the true knowledge. Devotion and truth can only develop gradually. Christianity, which is to bring devotion and truth in place of the Law, is only at the beginning of its growth; the further the Earth progresses in its evolution the stronger will be the influence of Christianity on humanity. Humanity is to raise itself to a stage of social life at which each one is drawn, by an impulse arising within himself, to act towards his neighbor as one brother to another. Men could not however, raise themselves of their own power to this high stage of development, and it is the task of Christianity to help them to do this. Men will no longer need any outer law to force upon them this attitude when they have the inner impulse so to act that devotion and truth are the motives for their actions.

We do not mean to say by the above, that humanity no longer needs the Law, but that which we have described is an ideal, which should be striven for. Gradually men will come to where the harmony of the world will be brought about through their voluntary action, but for this goal to be reached the Power which in the Gospel is called Christ had to step in. In the occult schools it is said of one who, of his own inner power, is able to raise himself into this relationship to all his fellow-men, that “he bears Christ within him.” In order to understand what we are about to say, it will first of all be necessary to recapitulate once more the real constitution of man. Recall to mind the contents of the third lecture with the aid of the following sketch:

Through the work of the Ego upon the astral body the latter is transformed into Spirit Self. But this takes place step by step, through the sentient soul being developed first, then the intellectual soul, and finally the spiritual soul; then the Spirit Self pours into the purified and mature spiritual soul. In the same way the Ego works upon the etheric body, and the impulses which are most effective in this case are the influences of art, religion and occult training.

There were also occult schools in pre-Christian times, where pupils were trained, so that they were able to look into higher worlds; but this vision only existed among the true pupils in the most hidden occult schools, and even they only at the actual moment of initiation, when the etheric body was separated from the physical body . The raising of a human being, so that he might be able to see in the spiritual world, was called Initiation. In all initiations of pre-Christian times the one who was to be initiated had to be brought into a kind of sleeping state. This sleep of initiation was distinguished from ordinary sleep by the fact that in the latter the etheric body remains united with the physical body, whereas in the former the etheric body was for a short time separated from the physical body. During this time the Hierophant had to keep the body alive. Through the etheric body being separated, it was possible to lead it, together with the other parts, into the higher worlds, in order there to undergo experiences which could afterwards be imparted to the physical brain. That was the method of initiation in pre-Christian times.

Through the advent of Christ Jesus an entirely new kind of initiation came in. Imagine that a man has transformed the whole of his astral body into Spirit Self. This Spirit Self then impresses itself into the etheric body, as a seal impresses itself into sealing-wax, and gives it its imprint. The etheric body is thereby changed into Life Spirit. When this has come about completely, the Life Spirit then imprints itself in the physical body and makes it into Spirit Man. Now it was only through the appearance of Christ Jesus that it became possible to imprint the Life Spirit directly into the life body; and the experiences undergone in the higher worlds could henceforth be embodied in the physical brain without the necessity of a previous separation of the etheric body. Thus all the pre-Christian initiates had undergone the experiences of initiation outside the physical body; they had then descended again into the physical body and could from that time forward, out of their own experience, announce what had taken place in the spiritual world.

Buddha, Moses and others were initiates of this kind. In Jesus there had come to the Earth for the first time a Being who, while still remaining in the physical body, could see the life of the higher worlds. The teachings of Buddha, Moses, etc., were quite independent of the personality of their agent. Those who accept the teachings of Buddha or Moses are Buddhists or followers of Moses, for these founders of religion only passed on what they had experienced in the higher worlds. With Christ it is different. It is only through His personality that His teachings become Christianity, and in order to be a Christian it is not enough merely to follow the teachings of Christianity. Those alone are true Christians, who feel themselves united with the historical Christ. Certain sentences contained in Christian teaching, or something very similar to them, could also be found in that world before Christ appeared; but that is not the point. The essential thing is, that the Christian believes in Christ Jesus, that he considers Him to be the One Who, while walking in the flesh, represents the perfect man.

In ancient times the statement was often made; ‘The initiate is a divine man.’ The reason for this lay in the fact that during the ceremony of initiation the initiate was above in the spiritual world with the spiritual or divine Beings; He was then the divine man. But one could “see” in the physical body for the first time through Christ Jesus, the Deity,—but never before. Thus we have to take the words of John 1:18. quite literally: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” Formerly the Deity could only be perceived by one who had himself made the ascent. In Christ the Deity had for the first time come down visibly to the Earth. This is told us in St. John's Gospel, (Chapter 1:14): “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.” It was also taught in the Dionysian School. Christ came to show men the way; they are to become His followers; they are to prepare to imprint what is in the etheric body into the physical body; that is to say, to develop within themselves the Christ principle.

The Gospel of St. John is a book of life. No one who has merely enquired into it with his intellect has understood this book; he alone who has experienced it really knows it. If a man meditates upon the first fourteen verses day after day for some time, he will discover the purpose of these words. They are really words which, when one meditates upon them, awaken in the human soul the capacity to see the various parts of the Gospel, such as the marriage at Cana in chapter two, the conversation with Nicodemus in chapter three, as one's own experiences in the great astral tableau. Through these exercises clairvoyance develops in the human being and he can then experience for himself the truth of what is written in St. John's Gospel. Hundreds have experienced this. The writer of St.John's Gospel was a great Seer who was initiated by Christ Himself.

The disciple “John” is never mentioned by name in this Gospel. We read of him as “the disciple whom the Lord loved,” for example in Chapter 19:26. This is a technical expression and signifies the one who was initiated by the Master Himself. “John” describes his own initiation in the story of the “raising of Lazarus.” (Chapter 11). It was only through the writer of St. John's Gospel being initiated by the Lord Himself that the most secret connections between Christ and the evolution of the world could be revealed. As we have already said, the old initiations lasted for three and a half days; hence the raising of Lazarus on the fourth day. It is also said of Lazarus that the Lord loved him (John 3:35-36.)

While the body of Lazarus lay as if dead in the grave, his etheric body was lifted out in order to undergo the initiation, and to receive the same force that is in Christ. Thus the one whom the Lord loved, the one to whom we owe St. John's Gospel, was raised, he was awakened. Not a line in St. John's Gospel, contradicts this fact; the process of initiation is represented in a veiled way.

Let us now consider another scene in this Gospel. In (John 19:25), we read: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, His mother, and His mothers sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.” If we wish to understand this Gospel it is necessary to know who these three women are. We do not usually give two sisters the same name; neither was it the custom in former times. The passage we have quoted proves that, according to St. John's Gospel, the mother of Jesus was not called Mary. If we search through the whole of this Gospel we nowhere find it said that the mother of Jesus was called Mary. In the scene of the Marriage of Cana, for example, Chapter 2, we only read, “the mother of Jesus was there.” In these words something important is indicated, something we only understand when we know how the writer of this Gospel uses his words. What does the expression “the mother of Jesus” mean? We have seen that man consists of physical, etheric and astral bodies. We must not consider the transition of the astral body to the Spirit Self so simply. The Ego transforms the astral body very slowly and gradually into sentient soul, intellectual soul and spiritual soul. The Ego goes on working and only when it has developed the spiritual soul is it able so to purify it that Spirit Self can arise in it.

The following diagram represents the constitution of man.

The Spirit Man will only be developed in the distant future, and Life Spirit is also only germinal in most people of the present day. The development of the Spirit Self has only just begun; it is closely united with the spiritual soul (somewhat like a sword in its sheath). The sentient soul is similarly united with the astral body. The human being thus consists of nine parts or principles; but as the Spirit Self and the spiritual soul, and the sentient soul and the astral body are so closely united, we often speak of seven parts. Spirit-Self is the same as the “Holy Spirit,” who according to esoteric Christianity, is the guiding Being in the astral world. According to the same teaching, Life Spirit is called the Word or the Son; and Spirit Man is the “Father Spirit” or the “Father.”

Those human beings who had brought the Spirit Self to birth within them, were called Children of God; in such men “the light shone into the Darkness and they received the light.” Outwardly they were, men of flesh and blood, but they bore a higher man within them; the Spirit Self had been born within them out of the spiritual soul. The “mother” of such a spiritualised man is not a bodily mother, she lies within him; she is the purified and spiritualised spiritual soul; she is the principle who gives birth to the higher man. This spiritual birth, a birth in the highest sense, is described in St. John's Gospel. The Spirit Self or the Holy Spirit pours into the most highly purified Spiritual Soul. This is referred to in the words, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.” (John 1:32).

As the Spiritual Soul is the principle in which the Spirit Self develops, this principle is called the “mother of Christ,” or, in the occult schools, the “Virgin Sophia.” Through the fertilisation of the Virgin Sophia the Christ could be born in Jesus of Nazareth. In the occult school of Dionysius, the Intellectual Soul was called “Mary,” and the Sentient Soul “Mary Magdalene.”

The Physical man is born of the union of two human beings; but the higher man can only be born of a Spiritual Soul which embraces a whole people. Among all the peoples of olden times the method of initiation was essentially the same. Each initiation had seven stages or degrees. Among the Persians, for example, they were called as follows:—I. The Raven. One at this stage had to bring information from the outer world into the temple. The Raven has always been called the spiritual messenger, for instance in the legend of the Ravens of Barbarossa, and also in the German legends of Odin and his two ravens. 2. The Occult. 3. The Warrior. In the occult school the warrior was allowed to go forth and announce the teachings. 4. The Lion. The Lion was one who was firmly grounded in himself; he not only had the word, but he possessed also the magical forces; he had stood the test which guaranteed that he would not misuse the powers entrusted to him. 5. The Persian; 6. The Sun Hero. 7. The Father.

Let us consider the title of the fifth degree,the “Persian”, a little more closely. In all the occult schools an initiate of the fifth degree was called by the name of the people to whom he belonged; for his consciousness had widened where it included the whole people. He felt all the sorrow of the people as his own; his consciousness had been purified and expanded to the consciousness of the whole people. Among the Jews the initiate at this stage was called an “Israelite.” Only when we grasp this fact do we understand the conversation between Christ and Nathanael (John 1:46-49). Nathanael was an initiate of the fifth degree. The words of Christ Jesus to Nathanael, that he had seen him under the fig tree, refer to a special process in initiation, namely, the reception of the Spiritual Soul.

The following considerations will help towards the understanding of the inner process of initiation. The individual “I”-consciousness of man is in the physical world; men walk the Earth with their Ego. But the egos of the animals are on the astral plane; each group of animals there possesses an ego-consciousness in common. There is, however, in the astral world, not only the ego of the animal, but also the ego of the body which man has in common with the animals, the ego of the human astral body. In the Lower Spirit World we find the ego of the plants and also the ego of the body man possesses in common with the plants, the ego of the etheric body. If we rise still higher, into the Higher Spirit World, we there find the ego of the minerals and the ego of that part which man has in common with the minerals—the ego of the physical body. Thus through our physical body we are connected with the Higher Spiritual World. We are here in the physical world with our individual Ego only. When, in the case of an initiate, the ego of the astral body is permeated by his Individual ego, the consequence is that he becomes conscious in the astral world; he can then perceive the beings around him there and become active in that-world. He then meets Beings who are incarnated in astral bodies; he also meets the group-souls of the animals, and the higher Beings who in Christianity are called angels. On being initiated still more deeply, the ego of the etheric body is also permeated by the individual ego. The consciousness of the human being then extends into the Lower Spiritual World. There he encounters the egos of the plants and the Spirit of the Planet. A still deeper initiation takes place when the individual ego permeates the ego of the physical body,—man then rises to personal consciousness in the higher Spiritual world. There he meets the egos of the minerals and still higher Spirits. Thus continued initiation raises a man to higher and higher worlds, in which he meets with higher and higher Beings.

When the individual Ego has gained full control over the three bodies, it has brought about inner harmony. Christ possessed this harmony to the fullest extent,—he appeared on the Earth in order that men might develop this power of inner harmony. In this Son of Man we see represented the full development of humanity, up to the highest spiritual stage. Formerly this inner harmony did not exist, outer laws worked in its place,—this inner harmony is the new impulse which humanity received through Christ. Man is to acquire the “Christ capacity,” that is to say, he is to develop the inner Christ. Goethe said: “The eye is built by light for light;” in the same way this inner harmony, this inner Christ is only kindled through the presence of the outer, historical Christ; before His appearance it was not possible for man to reach this stage of spiritual development.

Those human beings who lived before the appearance of Christ on Earth are not excluded from the blessings He brought to humanity; for it should not be forgotten that, according to the law of reincarnation, they will come again to the earth and will therefore have the opportunity to develop the inner Christ. It is only when people forget the law of reincarnation that they can speak of injustice. St. John's Gospel shows the way to the historical Christ, to that Sun which enkindles the inner light in man, just as the physical Sun has enkindled the light of the eyes.

The ego of the etheric body may be compared to the engineer who builds a motor-car; the ego of the astral body may be compared to the one who drives it; and the ego of the individual to the one who owns it.

The Initiation of the Ego. The Gospels are the books of the Mysteries. The Life of Christ, a repetition of Initiation on the great plane of world history

From what has already been given out in these Lectures we are led to the conviction that the following are the essential facts of the Christ Event. The stage of human development described as raising the soul to spiritual realms was only attainable in pre-Christian days within the Mysteries, and then only through a certain dimming of the ego. Human development, however, was destined to receive so powerful an impulse that those who could rise to it would be able to retain full ego-consciousness on entering the world of spirit. This condition belongs for the most part to the future, for ego-consciousness at the present day is normal only on the physical planes.

The advance in human evolution imparted by the Christ Event is the greatest that has yet been made, or ever will be made, in human or earthly evolution. Whatever may arise in the future in consequence of this event will be but a further development of this mighty impulse. Therefore we ask ourselves: What then actually had to come to pass through the Event of Christ?

In a certain way there must be a repetition; a repetition in detail, of what belonged to the secrets of the ancient Mysteries. It was characteristic of those Mysteries, as it is to some extent of those of to-day that he who penetrated within his own physical and etheric bodies experienced the temptations of the astral body as described in the last Lecture. In the Greek Mysteries, on the other hand, man had to confront the difficulties and dangers that always approach those who try to pour themselves forth into the macrocosm. This also has been described. Both these types of initiation were experienced as a single impulse of a great outstanding individuality by the Christ as a pattern for mankind. Through this an impetus was given by which men would gradually in future be able to pass through such a development as came to them in initiation.

Let us therefore consider first what was accomplished in the Mysteries. All that the human soul then passed through was experienced with the ego-consciousness reduced to something half dream-like, and in this condition the inner soul nature gained certain experiences. Such a man experienced the awakening of egoism, the desire to be independent of the external world; but, as explained in the last lecture, so long as man is unable to create food magically, unable to dispense with what is acquired through his physical organism, he is dependent on the outer world. Therefore he is exposed to the illusion that all he perceives by means of his physical nature applies only to the world and to the splendour thereof. Every pupil, every would-be initiate went through this experience, though not in the same way as the Christ, Who experienced it on the highest level. Therefore a description of these facts, which are only experienced by a pupil of the Mysteries, would be in a certain way similar to a description of the life of Christ Jesus. What then took place outwardly, once and for all time, on the plane of the world's history, had been confined hitherto to the darkness of the Mysteries.

Let us consider the following case, one that was frequent in the centuries immediately preceding Christ. Let us suppose that an artist or a writer had learnt that this or that procedure was followed during initiation, and, that he had painted or written of it. Such a picture, or writing might well resemble what is related by the Evangelists of the Christ Event; and one can understand how in many ancient Mysteries after due preparation the candidate's physical form was bound with outstretched hands in the form of a cross, so that his soul nature might be liberated. He remained thus for a certain time, so as to draw forth his soul nature, and that he might undergo the experiences already related. These things might have been represented in paintings or described in writing. They might then be discovered by someone to-day, who might deduce from them that the painter had painted a scene of the Mysteries, or the writer had recorded an old tradition. He might then go on to say that the facts of the Gospels are merely records of the rites of an initiation of former days.

This is frequently stated—and to how great an extent is shown in my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, in which I explain how all the secrets of the ancient Mysteries appear again in the Gospels, how in fact the Gospels are but repetitions of ancient accounts of initiation as carried out in the Mysteries. Why in telling of the life of Christ does the Evangelist simply describe facts of the ancient Mysteries? The Evangelist describes the scenes of the ancient Mysteries because he saw these inner processes of the soul carried out as historic facts; because all the events of the life of Christ Jesus were a repetition, exalted to the level of an Ego-Being, of the symbolic or even actual-symbolic acts of ancient initiation.

This fact needs emphasis: Those who take their stand on the ground of the historical truth of the Christ Event may rightly point out the resemblance between the Gospel biographies of Christ Jesus and the occurrences of the Mysteries. To express it more exactly, those who were destined to behold the Christ Event in Palestine beheld the fulfilment of the Essene prophecy; the Baptism in Jordan, the Temptation, the Crucifixion, and all that followed. They could say therefore: We have represented to us here the life of a Being in a human body. What are the essential points in the life of this Being? Strange to relate, we find, enacted here in external historic life, certain events that are the very same as those which occurred to the initiate in the ancient Mysteries. We need only refer to the canon of a Mystery to discover a model for those events which are here described as historical facts.

That in fact is the great secret, that what was formerly hidden within the obscurity of the temple, and only reached the world in its results, was now enacted on the great stage of universal history as the Christ Event, and could be seen by those who had attained spiritual vision. It should be realized that in the days when the Evangelists wrote, biographies such as we have to-day were unknown; biographies for instance of Goethe, Schiller, or Lessing giving in detail every minute scrap of information, in which the most unimportant details are amassed and presented as of the greatest moment. With the attention fixed on this mass of detail, concentration on facts of essential importance is impossible. The Evangelists were content to relate the essential facts of the life of Christ Jesus, and the fact of supremest importance is, that in the great plan of world history, the life of Christ is a repetition of initiation. Can we wonder that this truth which has come to light in our time should be so disconcerting to many people—so really overwhelming. These things which are so disconcerting will strike you even more vividly when you consider what follows.

Myths and sagas come to us from the past. What are they? Anyone who understands them, and knows what they are, will find in them descriptions of what ancient clairvoyance had seen in the spiritual world clothed in happenings of the world of the senses, or he will find other myths that are in essence nothing but descriptions of the Mysteries. The myth of Prometheus, for instance, like many another, is partly a reproduction of deeds enacted in the Mysteries. We often find the scene described when Zeus appears and near him some lower god who—according to the Greek account—tempts him. Zeus, standing on an eminence, is ‘tempted by Pan.’ This is one form; there are many others. Why does this image occur so frequently? Because it expresses the descent of man into his inner being, the descent into the physical and etheric body bringing with it the encounter with his lower nature, his egotistical Pan-nature.

The ancient world is full of such accounts of experiences during initiation, which are in this way given artistic form in myths and symbols. Many people who take a superficial view, make the grand discovery that certain knowledge is here presented in the form of symbols. And this upsets people who do not know, or wish to know the facts. They read of Pan tempting Zeus, and say: ‘It is easy to see from this that the scene of the temptation of Christ had taken place before. The Evangelists have only repeated some ancient allegorical tale, and the Gospels are compiled out of such ancient tales.’ It is but a step from this to the conclusion that the Gospels contain nothing of special import, that they are only pieced together from myths and that Christ Jesus is fictitious. A great movement arose in Germany which took the form of frivolous discussions as to whether Christ Jesus had ever really lived. With a grotesque lack of knowledge, bft with profound learning, the various myths and legends which bore some resemblance to scenes in the Gospel were discussed again and again. It is of little avail to-day to impart anything concerning the true facts, although they are well known to those who have knowledge. This is how spiritual movements develop in our time; truly the way in which they develop is very grotesque

There would be no need to interpolate these remarks were it not that one is constantly obliged to make a stand against misrepresentations that are made from one side or another, with apparently great learnedness, against the statements of Spiritual Science.

The true facts are given in these Lectures. We have to see in the Gospels a recapitulation of events that took place in the Mysteries, though in them the secrets of initiation refer to a very different Individuality, and they really wish to say to us: ‘Behold, what formerly was accomplished in the Mysteries through suppression of the consciousness has now been accomplished in a marvellous and outstanding manner by an Ego-Being in full ego-consciousness!’ We need not therefore wonder at the statement that the Gospels hardly contain anything that did not exist before. What we have to realize is, that what was told formerly, related to the ascent of man to the Kingdom of Heaven; never before had what men call the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ come down into the ego. What was essentially new was this: What formerly had taken place in a state of suppressed consciousness and in super-sensible realms could now take place in full consciousness in Malchut, ‘The Kingdom.’ This is why, after Christ Jesus had experienced what is described in the Gospel of Matthew as the Temptation, He became the preacher of ‘The Kingdom.’ What was the essence of his preaching? He said: What formerly was attained through the darkening of the human ego, and through man receiving other beings into himself; can now be achieved with complete retention of the ego-consciousness! This fact is stressed again and again. Hence the necessity for a repetition of scenes from the Mysteries in the life of Christ Jesus. Hence also the necessity of the ‘Sermon concerning the Kingdom,’ in which Christ declared: Everything promised to those who passed through the Mysteries or accepted their teaching can now come to those who experience in themselves the ego-being and follow the path first traversed for humanity by Christ.

Thus everything had to be a repetition; even as regards the teaching. It need not surprise us that special emphasis is laid on the difference between the old teaching and the new; that stress was laid on the fact that the ego could now achieve in itself what had hitherto been quite impossible for it.

Suppose that Christ had wished to refer specially to this great truth. He would have shown how formerly, in accordance with the teaching of the Mysteries, human beings had ever looked up to the Kingdom of Heaven, and had felt that from heavenly realms something came down to them which blessed them, but did not enter their ego. The Father-Source of Existence had only been attainable with a suppressed Ego. Had it been necessary for Christ to retain this former teaching concerning the Divine Paternal Source of existence, and only change the nuance upon which the teaching depended, He must have expressed it thus: ‘If formerly men said, you must raise your eyes to the realms where the Father dwelleth, the divine Source of all existence, and wait until His Light streams down upon you, now it is possible to say: The Father not only sends down His Light to you, but that which is willed on high must enter the very depths of man's ego-nature, and be willed there also.’

Let us suppose that each separate phrase of the Lord's Prayer had existed previously, only that something in them had to be changed. Christ would have said: ‘In former times man looked up to the ancient divine Father Spirit, feeling that everything there endures, and looks down on your earthly kingdom.’

But now this Heavenly Kingdom was to come down to earth where the ego dwells, and the Will that is done in Heaven was also to be done on Earth. What would be the result of this? The result would be, that those who had a deeper vision and could perceive the finer degrees of difference would not be surprised at the fact that the Lord's Prayer had existed earlier. The superficial observer does not notice these finer shades of difference, nor can he understand the true meaning of Christianity. If he came upon these phrases in ancient times he would have said: ‘There it is, the Evangelists write about the Lord's Prayer, but it existed already before their time!’

You can now realize the difference between a true and a superficial understanding of what is written. It is important that those who note the new shades of meaning should apply them to the old. The others, not seeing the difference, merely assert that the Lord's Prayer existed before.

Such facts require attention and have to be spoken of here, because Anthroposophists should be enabled to meet to some extent the dilettante learning of to-day: a learning which passes through countless hundreds of periodicals, until finally it is accepted as ‘Science.’ One individual has actually compared every possible ancient record, searching each source in the Talmud literature, in an endeavour to find some resemblance to the words of the Lord's Prayer. But what these learned people have accumulated is nowhere found in its entirety outside the Gospels. Scattered phrases resembling those of the Lord's Prayer they have discovered here and there. To reduce this method to absurdity it might as well be said that the first sentence of Goethe's ‘Faust’ was constructed in the following way: In the seventeenth century there was a student who failed in his examination, and who afterwards remarked to his father, With what an infinity of trouble I have studied law! And another failing in medicine might have said, ‘With what infinity of trouble have I studied medicine!’ And that from these two remarks Goethe had composed the opening sentences of Faust! This is paradoxical! But in principle and methods it is exactly what we meet in critics of the Gospels.

You will find this in the following patched-up sentences. I take them from Die-Evangelien-Mythen, John M. Robertson, Jena, Diedrichs, 1910. It is supposed to represent the Lord's Prayer:

‘Our Father Who art in Heaven; O Lord our God, blessed be Thy Name, and may the memory of Thee be glorified in Heaven above as on Earth below. Let Thy Kingdom rule over us now and ever more. Holy men of old have said: Let all men be forgiven whatever they may have done to me. And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from the wicked. For Thine is the Heavenly Kingdom; and Thou shalt reign in splendour for ever and ever.’

These sentences were collected and put together in the manner I have just described, and are called the ‘Lord's Prayer.’ But the subtle shades of meaning necessary to give the unique significance of the Christ Event are lacking. In none of these phrases do we find it stated that the Kingdom of Heaven is to come down. The sentence runs: ‘Let Thy Kingdom rule over us now and ever more,’ not ‘Let Thy Kingdom come to us.’ This is the essential point, which entirely escapes superficial observers and although these sentences are gathered, not from one, but from many libraries, nowhere do we find the words ‘Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’ for these imply its taking hold of the ego.

Even regarded from the external scientific point of view, we have here clearly demonstrated the difference between an apparent investigation and one that is truly conscientious, and takes every fact into consideration. And this true investigation exists if people will only take the trouble to pursue it.

These sentences from J. M. Robertson's book have been deliberately selected, for it is a kind of modern gospel recently translated from English into German to make it available to wider circles. For until now a certain person¹ who has given numerous lectures on the subject of whether Jesus really lived, would have had to read it in English. This book gained popularity, and hence the translation.

It has accordingly been possible for a professor of a German Academy to travel widely giving lectures on the question, ‘Did Jesus live?’ Basing his teaching on the facts just given, he answered the question thus: ‘There is no documentary evidence forcing us to accept the fact that such a person as Jesus has ever lived;’ and among many very excellent works, he referred his hearers to J. M. Robertson's book. But for the protection of Anthroposophists I can say: Even from this book, from these historical investigations of the New Testament records, you can learn many things, and there is something further, something very characteristic that I should like to tell you.

This book informs us that not only in phrases drawn from the Talmud is there a model of the Lord's Prayer, but that traces of it may be discovered in chronicles reaching back for thousands of years. To substantiate the fact of the Lord's Prayer being a collection of phrases already existing, and that no Christ was needed to give it out first to the people, an allusion is made to the discovery of a prayer written on little tablets in the Chaldean tongue, a prayer addressed to the old Babylonian god Merodach. Some of the sentences quoted there are as follows, and should be carefully noted: ‘May the fulness of the world come down into thy midst (or city); may thy precepts be fulfilled in all the ages to come. ... May the evil Spirit dwell far from thee.’²

And the savant upon whom these sentences made such an impression added: ‘Here we have prayer-norms which are in line with the Lord's Prayer and perhaps go back 4000 years before Christ.’

Look carefully, and see if you can find anywhere any resemblance between the sentences of the Lord's Prayer and these phrases! Yet these are regarded by this man as prayer-norms, of which the Lord's Prayer is merely a copy! Such things are accepted nowadays as true investigations in this domain of knowledge.

A further reason for presenting these facts to Anthroposophists is that they may be able to calm and strengthen their consciences when troubled by the constant assertion that this or that fact has been established by external investigation. They may well be troubled upon reading in papers or magazines that a tablet has been discovered in Asia proving the existence of the Lord's Prayer, 4000 years before Christ. In such a case it is necessary to ask how such a fact can be proved. The above example reveals the slender foundations on which scientifically based facts are frequently supposed to have been proved. It is unnecessary for students of Anthroposophy to trouble about the worthless facts so often brought forward against it.

But to return to our main theme; Christ Jesus inaugurated an evolution in human nature, based on the retention of the full consciousness of the ego. He inaugurated the initiation of the ego. We can therefore say that the most essential part of the human being to-day is the ego; in it all human nature is centred; everything brought into the world through the Christ Event for this ego, can enter also into all the other members of man's being. This will naturally come to pass in a quite special way, and in accordance with human evolution.

The possibilities of human development are to be clearly seen from these Lectures. Recognition of the physical world, not only through the senses but also through the understanding, and through the intellect connected with the physical brain, first began to function generally just a short time before the Christ Event. It superseded a certain kind of clairvoyance. This clairvoyance which was mentioned in my Lectures on the early Atlantean evolution was universal at that time, though later it came slowly and gradually to an end. Down to the Christian era there were still many who in the intermediate condition between sleeping and waking were able to gaze into, and participate in, the spiritual world. Such a ‘partaking’ in the spiritual world was not only linked with the fact that the average man who had a certain degree of clairvoyance could state: ‘Behind the tapestry of the world of the senses there is a spiritual world. I know this, for I can perceive it.’ This was not all; something else was connected with it. In long past ages it was comparatively easy for human nature to be aware of the spiritual world. The nature of man to-day is different, and it is exceedingly difficult to pass in the right way through the esoteric training that leads to clairvoyance. In somnambulism and similar things we see a relic, a last remnant of the old-time clairvoyance. These conditions which are irregular to-day were normal in ancient times, and could be enhanced by undergoing certain processes. When human nature was exalted to participation in the life of the spiritual world something else was associated with it. To-day there is so little regard for that in which true history consists that people pick and choose what they will, or will not, believe. But, in face of modern scepticism, it is nevertheless true that in the time of Christ certain acts of healing were performed by rendering people clairvoyant. In our time human beings are so deeply sunk within the physical plane that this is no longer possible; but in that earlier period the soul was still very impressionable, and certain processes were all that were necessary to bring about clairvoyance and an entrance into the spiritual world. The spiritual world, being a health-giving element, sends down health-giving forces into the physical world, so that it was possible to effect cures through it. The person who was ill was put through certain processes which led him to perceive the spiritual world. Then the spiritual stream, flowing down into his whole being brought health. This was the usual method of healing. What is described to-day as ‘Temple healing’ is dilettante in comparison.

Everything is in a state of evolution, and, since the time of which we have been speaking, souls have progressed from clairvoyance to non-clairvoyance. Formerly through enhancement of the clairvoyant condition men could be cured of certain illnesses by the spirit streaming from the spiritual into the physical world. We need not, therefore, be surprised at the statements of the Evangelists, that the Christ Event meant that the spiritual world could now be attained not only by those who possessed the old clairvoyance but also by those who had lost it.

Men could say: ‘Looking back into olden times we see men endowed with vision of the spiritual world; but now, through the advance of evolution, they have become poor in the spirit, beggars for the spirit. But Christ has brought this great Mystery into the world, that into the ego—even into the ego of the physical plane—the forces of the Heavenly Kingdoms can enter; thus those who have lost the old clairvoyance and with it the riches of the spiritual realms can yet receive the spirit within themselves and be blessed!’ Hence the wonderful declaration Henceforth not only those are blessed who are rich in the spirit through the old clairvoyance, but those also who are poor or beggars for the spirit; for when Christ has opened the way, into their ego will flow what may be described as the Kingdoms of the Heavens!

In ancient times the physical organism was of such a nature that a partial withdrawal of the soul could be brought about even in normal conditions, and through this withdrawal men became clairvoyant, that is, rich in spirit. With the gradual densification of the human body, which however is quite imperceptible anatomically; is associated poverty as regards the Kingdoms of the Heavens. Man had become a ‘beggar for spirit;’ but through the Event of Christ it is now possible for him to experience the Kingdoms of the Heavens within himself. This is a possibility that can be rightly associated with the physical body.

If we were now to describe what takes place through the ego-man, we should have to show how each principle of human nature can be blessed in itself in a new way. The sentence: ‘Blessed are the beggars for the spirit, for within themselves they will find the Kingdoms of the Heavens!’ is the new truth as regards the physical body.

The blessedness of the etheric body is expressed differently. The etheric body contains the principle of suffering as you can find in many of the lectures. A living being, although it has an astral body, can only suffer through injury to the etheric body. If the healing which formerly poured into the etheric body from the spiritual world were to be described according to the new teaching it would be said: Sufferers can now find comfort not only by passing out of themselves and being united with the spiritual world as in earlier days, but they can find comfort within themselves by entering into a new relationship with the spiritual world, for Christ has brought a new power to the etheric body. Hence the new truth concerning the etheric body declares: ‘Sufferers can now be blessed, not only through entering the spiritual world clairvoyantly and allowing the outpourings of the spirit to come to them in this state, but they can be blessed when lifting themselves up to Christ they fill themselves with the new truth, and find in themselves the solace for every sorrow.’

And what of the astral body? When men of an earlier day endeavoured to suppress their emotions and passions and the egoism of their astral nature, they sought power from the Kingdom of Heaven; they submitted themselves to processes by which the harmful instincts of the astral body were destroyed. But the time had now come when through the act of Christ man had received power into the ego itself by which he could bridle and tame the passions and emotions of his astral body. So the new truth concerning the astral body must read as follows: ‘Blessed are those who have become meek through the power of their own ego, for they will inherit the kingdom of earth!’ Profound indeed is the thought contained in this third Beatitude. Let us examine it in the light of Occult Science.

The astral body was incorporated into man's being during the Moon evolution, and the Luciferic beings who had gained influence over him had established themselves especially in this body. Therefore man from the beginning was unable to reach his highest earthly goal. These Luciferic beings, as we know, remained behind at the Moon stage of evolution, and hindered man from progressing in the right way; but since the descent of Christ to earth, when it has been possible for the ego to be impregnated with His power, man has been enabled to fulfil the mission of the earth by finding in himself the power to bridle his astral body and drive out the Luciferic influences. Therefore, it can be said: ‘He who can curb his astral body, who is so strong that he cannot be moved to anger without the consent of his ego, he who is even-tempered and inwardly strong enough to overcome the astral body, will fulfil the purpose of earthly evolution.’ So in the third Beatitude we have a formula which Spiritual Science has made comprehensible to us.

How can man succeed in controlling the remaining members of his being and bless them through the indwelling Spirit of Christ? He can do this when his soul-nature is controlled by the ego as truly and worthily as is his physical body. Passing on to the sentient soul, we can say: As man gradually evolves to a consciousness of the Christ, he must arrive at experiencing a feeling of longing in his sentient soul similar to what he previously experienced unwittingly as the physical longing we call hunger and thirst. He must thirst for the things of the soul, as the body hungers and thirsts for food and drink. What can be attained through the indwelling Christ-force is that which is described comprehensively in the old-fashioned phrase as thirsting after righteousness; and when a man has filled his sentient soul with the Christ-force he can reach a point where it is possible for him to satisfy this thirst through the power that is in him.

The fifth Beatitude is especially noteworthy, as might be expected, for it refers to the rational, or intellectual soul. Those who have studied my books, Occult Science or Theosophy, or have listened to the lectures on Spiritual Science given during many years, are familiar with the idea of the ego holding together the three principles of the human soul—the sentient soul, the rational, intellectual or mind-soul, and the consciousness-soul or spiritual soul. The ego, though present in the sentient-soul, is as yet in a dulled condition; it comes to life in the intellectual-soul, and through this, man first becomes a complete human being. While man's lower principles and even the sentient-soul are dominated by divine spiritual beings, he becomes an individual in the rational-soul, in it the ego dawns. Therefore we must speak of the reception of the Christ-force into the intellectual or rational-soul in a different way from that used when treating of the lower principles. In the lower principles—the physical, etheric, and astral sheaths, and also in the sentient-soul, divine beings are at work, and to them anything in the way of virtues man has acquired are again taken up. But the qualities evolved in the rational-soul, when this has developed what it receives from the Christ, must above all be human attributes. When a man begins to discover this soul within himself he grows less and less dependent on the divine forces around him. We have here something that belongs to man himself. When he absorbs the power of Christ into this soul he can develop virtues which go from like to like, which are not besought from Heaven as a loan, but go forth from man and return to a being similar to himself. We must try to feel that something streams forth from the virtues of the rational soul in such a way that something similar streams to us again. Wonderful to relate, the fifth Beatitude actually shows us this distinctive quality.

Even a faulty translation cannot conceal the fact; it is different from all the others in that it says: ‘Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy.’ What goes forth returns again—as it must if we accept it in the sense of Occult Science.

In the sixth Beatitude, which refers to the spiritual-soul, we arrive at that principle in man which enables the ego to attain full expression, after which he can make further ascent, in a new way. You know that at the time of the coming of Christ the rational soul first came to expression; in our time it is the spiritual-soul that is destined to find expression—the soul by means of which man will ascend again to the spiritual world. While human self-consciousness first dawned within the rational soul, it is in the spiritual-soul that the ego attains full development and rises once more to the spiritual world. The man who becomes a receptacle for the Christ-force, because he experiences the Christ in himself, will, by pouring his ego into the consciousness-soul or spiritual-soul, and experiencing it in its purity for the first time, be able in this way to find his God. Now it has been said that the blood is the expression of the ego in the physical body, and that its centre is in the heart. Therefore this sixth Beatitude has to express in a practical way how the ego, through the qualities with which it endows heart and blood, can partake of divinity. How does this verse run? ‘Blessed are those who are pure in heart for they shall see God.’ Though not a specially good translation it serves our purpose.

This is how Spiritual Science pours light on the whole structure of these wonderful sentences in which Christ gives instruction to His most intimate pupils, after He had withstood the Temptation in the wilderness.

The remaining Beatitudes refer to a man's raising of himself to the higher principles of his being; to the spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man. They give but an indication of what it will be possible to experience in the future, of what is only possible in our day to a few exceptional individuals. Thus the seventh Beatitude, referring to the spirit-self, says: ‘Blessed are those who draw down into themselves the spirit-self, the first of the spiritual principles, for they will be called the children of God.’ The first of the higher triad has, in this case, entered into these men. They have received God into themselves; they have become an outer expression of the Godhead.

In what follows it is clearly shown that only exceptional beings can attain to what is spoken of in the eighth Beatitude, those who fully understand what the future is to bring to the whole of humanity. This, the ‘complete reception of Christ into a man's inner being,’ is only for a few chosen ones. Because these are exceptional individuals, they are persecuted, for others are unable to understand them. Hence, referring to the persecution of these representatives of the future race, this Beatitude declares: ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake; for in themselves they will find the Kingdom of Heaven.’

The ninth and last Beatitude has especial reference to the most intimate disciples only. It is associated with the ninth member of man's being—the spirit-man: ‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you for my sake.’

Thus in these wonderful lines reference is made to the nine principles of human nature, and we are shown how the ego is constituted when it becomes ‘Christ-filled’ as regards the different principles of man's being, and blesses them. In the portions following on the Temptation, the Gospel of Matthew shows in grand and majestic way how the influence of Christ works in the nine-fold human nature in the present, and then how it will work in the near future, when those in whom the spirit-self has dawned are already called ‘Children of God,’ even if these children of God are only to be found in a few blessed examples. Especially remarkable is the distinct language used concerning the first principles which are already in being, and the lapse into indeterminate language in the last sentences where the far future is referred to.

Once more let me touch on the superficial method of research. Suppose someone were investigating if sentences could anywhere be found similar to those of the Sermon on the Mount, or if the Evangelists had perhaps compiled these from something else. Suppose also that this person had no idea of what was referred to in the Beatitudes: that the important matter there dealt with was the filling of man's ego-nature with the Christ. If reference to this marvellous enhancement of the ego-nature had not been noticed, he could indicate the following. One has only to read a little further in the book already mentioned to find in it a chapter headed ‘The Beatitudes,’ in which reference is made to ‘Enoch’ (this is not the usual Enoch), and herein nine ‘Beatitudes’ are cited. The author has this much in his favour, that he acknowledges that this document belongs to the very beginning of the Christian era, and he believes that what we have described as being a document of the very profoundest importance and depth could have been copied from the following nine Beatitudes of this Slavonic Enoch.

1. Blessed is he who fears the name of the Lord, and incessantly serves before his face, etc.
2. Blessed is he who does not give a false judgment on account of payment, but in the cause of fairness, not expecting anything in exchange; he will receive a just judgment later.
3. Blessed is he who clothes the naked with his raiment, and feeds the hungry with his bread.
4. Blessed is he who judges rightly the fatherless and widows and supports all those who are oppressed.
5. Blessed is he who turns from the restless path of this vain world, travelling the true way which leads to eternal life.
6. Blessed is he who sows good seed, he will reap sevenfold.
7. Blessed is he in whom is truth, and speaks truth to his neighbours.
8. Blessed is he who has love on his lips, and kindness in his heart.
9. Blessed is he who understands each word of the Lord, and extols His name, etc., etc.

These phrases are certainly beautiful; but consider their whole construction, and the matter with which they are concerned, namely, the recounting of a few worthy platitudes suitable to any period other than one of such tremendous upheaval—the age in which the power of the ego was first being made known. If these lines are likened by anyone to the Beatitudes of the Gospel of Matthew, he stands at the external point of those who compare the religions of mankind in an external way, who, whenever they discover something in any way similar, instantly state an identity, paying no heed to the essential point.

Only when the essential point is recognized does one realize that there is progress in human evolution, and that man advances from stage to stage; that he is not born anew in a physical body in a later millennium to experience over again what he has experienced already, but so that he may experience that in which humanity has progressed meanwhile. That is the meaning of history and of human evolution. Of history, and of human evolution in this sense the Gospel of Matthew speaks on every page.

• 1. Dr. Arthur Drews.
• 2. In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Oct., 1891, Mr. T. G. Pinches publishes for the first time the translation of a tablet found at Sippara in the year 1882, in which the sentences quoted above appear as an incantation to Merodach.

My dear friends! Yesterday we started by addressing a wish which licentiate Bock had expressed at the beginning of our course and we find that what we need to build on to what I said yesterday afternoon about sacramentalism relevant to today, can be discovered if we link the possible reflections, which are necessary, to the 13th chapter of the Gospel of St Mark. It is important for us to certainly try again, in all seriousness, to derive specific meaning from what is expressed in living words. To me it is impossible that pastoral care can be developed in the future, without yourself developing the application of living words and even experiencing living words. However, it is impossible for current mankind which is so strongly gripped by materialism, to be able to handle the living Word in itself, without a historical deepening. It is simply so, that in dealing with intellectualistic concepts and ideas we are only dealing with dead words, with the corpse of the Logos. We will only deal with the living Word when we penetrate through the layer in which man lives today, only, and alone, by penetrating through the layer of the dead, the corpse-like words.

My dear friends, the Catholic Church has to a certain degree understood very well how to misplace and obstruct access to these living words for those who, in their opinion, should be the true believers. In pastoral care the Catholic Church in a certain sense considers these enlivening words already, but in an outward sense. All these things will only become understood when we take what I presented yesterday and think them through deeply, and, if we can still penetrate them further, to yield clarity. I'm saying that the Catholic Church understood very clearly in this regard, to exterminate the life of the Word, because it belonged to one of the most significant epochs of all human development, and which had contributed briefly before and some three centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, just to the civilized part of humanity.

When we ask our contemporaries about the essence of the Gnosis, for example the essence of the Montanistic heresy, then with the current soul constitution you basically can't understand anything correctly relating to it. That which would outwardly be informative in the becoming church has been carefully eradicated and the things that archaeologists, philosophers, researchers of antiquity discover from this characterised epoch, will indeed be deciphered word for word, but the decipherment does not mean reaching an understanding. All of this must actually be read differently, in order to enter the real soul content of olden times. It is for instance possible for modern humanity, to take the Deussen translation, which has exterminated all real meaning of the Orient, and, while thinking these translations are great, while mankind can't eradicate all understanding for what Deussen translated, devote yourself to such a Deussen translation. In order to understand, you need to penetrate the meaning of the first Christian centuries, more specifically the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha happened.

I would like to give you access, somewhat in the way I have out of Anthroposophy, by means of a presentation, which you can visualise as symptomatic of what history brings. One of the most extinct things belonging in the first Christian centuries was referred to as the Pistis, placed in contrast to the Gnosis. The Gnosis can't be understood if one doesn't know that in that time epoch, in which, let's say, you appeared in the form of a Basilides or Valentinus, people who lived in the spirituality of that time, were fighting a very terrible battle, which can be characterised by them asking a question: What do we poor people have to do on the one hand with the spirit that juts in our souls, and on the other hand our physical body into which our soul likewise juts into? In a terrifying manner this question played out in the soul battle among religious people. The two opposite poles, to a certain extent, of this battle was the Gnosis and Montanism sect.

The Gnosis was, for people who wanted to become Gnostics, being aware that within a person, where the soul resides, the spirit can only be reached through knowledge, through clear, lucid, light-filled knowledge. However, it was already during a time in which intellectualism was being prepared in the dark, in a time when intellectualism was regarded as the enemy of the human soul's relation to the spirit. To a certain extent people prophetically saw how intellectualism would push in, in the future; this arrival of intellectualism was seen as stripping the world of spirituality, wanting to completely make the world void of the Divine, like I have characterised for you yesterday. People saw this and people experienced intellectualism as a danger. People wanted to hold on to something spiritual which didn't come from intellectualism. That's roughly the soul battle Basilides fought, the Gnostic who wanted to stick to what was revealed in the course of the year. He said to himself: When a person submits himself to his forthcoming intellect, then he separates himself from the Divine spirituality of the cosmos; he must connect to what lies in his environment, which has come into being through the Divine spiritual cosmos; he must adhere to that which has the venerable image of cosmic creation in the circling of the world and thus the Divine process in matter; he must adhere to the course of the year.—Basilides did the following: He looked up - but with him it was actually still only tradition, so no longer an inner imaginative perception as in older times, which I characterised as the reading of the movement of the stars—he looked up and said: Last but not least, the spiritual gaze is lost; when we feel, that when we become aware the spiritual gaze is lost, then we talk about the unknown God, the God who can't be grasped in words and concepts, from whom the fist aeon this unknown God manifests himself, revealing himself—this concept of manifestation which later unified things as with Basilides, will be totally misunderstood if compared with what we understand today under "manifestation"; one should not say "it manifests itself" but "it is formed out of," it is individually shaped—out of the unknown God is formed the Nous, which also appeared with Anaxagoras as the first creation of the unknown God.

That is the first principle, which exists in people as a copy, when the human mind, not the intellectual mind but the lively mind I've characterised for you during these days, still existed within Greek philosophy (up to Plato), and which then appeared in a weaker form still in Aristotle.

What comes next is the Logos, in which from the Nous we descend further down. In human beings it is expressed by perceiving sound and tone. In the neck area we find five other principles which we need not characterise in detail now. With this we have what was first called the holy days of the year, which gives people, when they read the cosmos, an understanding of the human body, leading to the human head organisation.

Besides these principles we find others in the human organization, 364 in total, which gives 364 + 1=365, the outer symbol which is expressed as the 365 days of the year. The word Day (Tag) originally was inwardly connected to God, so what Basilides, by speaking about 365 days, spoke about 365 gods which all partake in the creation of the human organism. As the last one of the gods—i.e. if you take one plus 364, and then take the last day of the year as a symbol for one God—Basilides saw the God who was worshipped by the Jews in the Old Testament. You see, this is what is extraordinary in the Gnosis, that it is in such a relationship to Jahve, the Jewish God, that he is not the unknown God connected to the Nous and Logos but with the Jewish God as the 365, as the last day of the year.

By understanding the Gnosis in this way, the experience of the soul was to be permeated spiritually. If I were to give you a characteristic aspect of the Gnosis, in relation to inner human experience it is this: that the Gnostic aspired in everything to penetrate the Highest with knowledge, so that his gaze rose above the Logos up to the Nous. The Gnostic says: In Christ and in the Mystery of Golgotha the Nous is embodied in the human being; not the Logos, the Nous is embodied. This, my dear friends, if it is grasped in a lively way, has a distinct result for our inner soul life. If you consider these things abstractly, as is in our intellectual time presented to many people, well, then it is heard that people in olden times didn't speak about the Logos in which Jesus became flesh, but of the Nous, which became the flesh of Jesus. That's the thing then, if you have pegged such a term. For a person who spiritually lives within a lively experience of concepts, he would not be able to do otherwise, than to grasp such a soul's content, as to imagine sculpturally what the Nous becoming flesh is. The Nous having become flesh however, can't speak; this can't be the Christ, can't go through death and resurrection. The Christ of the Gnostic, which is actually the Nous, could only come as far as being embodied in people; it could not die or accomplish resurrection.

For Basilides, this darkened his observation. His gaze becomes clouded the moment he approaches the last acts of the Mystery of Golgotha with his inner gaze; it clouds his gaze when it comes to dying and resurrection. His gaze is drawn to the route towards Crucifixion, the route to Golgotha of Jesus Christ, but he couldn't accomplish, out of a lively imagination, that the Christ carried the cross to Golgotha, was killed on the cross and resurrected. He regards it in such a way that Simon of Cyrene took the cross from the Christ, that he carried it up to Golgotha, and instead of Christ, that Simon of Cyrene is crucified. This is the Christ imagination of the Gnostic in as far as the image of Basilides appears and is basically the historical expression of the Gnosis.

So we see how the Christ in his final deed, is omitted by the Gnostic, how the Gnostic can't grasp the final result of Golgotha, how in their imagination the Christ is merely accomplished through the Nous, how it ends at the moment the Christ gives the cross away to Simon of Cyrene. On the one hand we have Gnosis, which is so strongly afraid of intellectualism that it did not let the legitimate power of intellectualism into human vision and as a result could not enter into the last act of the Mystery of Golgotha.

What did the Gnosis do? It stood in quite a lively way, I could say, in relation to the most extraordinary and powerful question of that current age: How does one penetrate the supersensible spirit from which the soul originated?—The Gnostic pointed away from that which somehow wanted to flow in from intellectualism and result in the image of Christ up to the point when he hands the cross to Simon of Cyrene. This is the one side of the human battle which at the time had the result of creating the influence of the great question, which I have set before you. What comes forth from this wrestling?

From all this wrestling another great question arises which became the crux for the Christian Gnostics. My dear friends, because the Gnostics regarded 365 as the Divine god of the Jews, they experienced the Fatherly and the Divine at the end of this row. When the Jews worshiped their god, they experienced it as Fatherly, while what later appeared as the Holy Ghost, they experienced the opposite pole, in the Nous. As a result, the Gnostics gave an answer to the primordial question in the first Christian centuries, an answer which is no longer valid today. Their answer was: The Christ is a far higher creation than the Father; the Christ is essentially equal to the Father. The Father, who finds his most outward, extreme expression in the Jewish god, is the creator of the world, but as the world creator he has, out of its foundations allowed things to be created simultaneously, the good and evil, the good and bad, simultaneously health and illness, the divine and the devilish. This world, which was not made out of love, because it contains evil, the Gnostics contrasted with the more elevated divine nature of the Christ who came from above, downward, carrying the Nous within, who can redeem this world that the creator had to leave un-liberated.

Christ is not essentially the Father, said the Gnostics, the Father essentially stood lower than the Son; the Son as Christ stood higher. This is the fundamental feeling permeating the Gnosis: however, it has been completely obstructed by what later occurred in the Roman Catholic continuation. Basically, we can't look back at what the big question was: How does one relate to the greater Christ in contrast to the less perfect Father? The Gnostic actually saw things in such a way that the Father of the worlds was still imperfect, and only by bringing forth his Son, he created perfection; that through the propagation of his Son, the act of procreation of his Son, He would complete the development of the world.

In all these things you see exactly what lived in the Gnosis. If we now look at the opposite side, which comes into the strongest expression with Monatunus, already weaker but still clearly with Tertullian, then we look over to those who said to themselves: If we want to reach into the Gnosis, everything disappears; we can't through the outer world, not through the contemplation of the seasons, not through reading the stars, reach the divine, we must enter into man, we must immerse ourselves in man.—

While the Gnosis directed its gaze to the macrocosm, so Mantanismus dived into the microcosm, in the human being himself. Intellectualistic concepts were at that time only in its infancy and could not yet be fully expressed; theology in today's sense did not arise in this way. What existed in all the exercises, in particular those prescribed by Mantanus for his students, were inner stories, something which was enlivened within the students as visions. These atavistic visions for the Montanists were particularly indigenous. All those who were to separate themselves from belonging to the mere pastoral care of the Montanists were allowed to practice, and all of them were allowed to practice to the extent that they could answer the question: how does the soul-spiritual in man, in the microcosm, relate to the physical-bodily aspect?

During ancient times, long before the Mystery of Golgotha, what I've just said was something obvious; had a self-evident answer. For those who lived in the time epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha, such an obvious answer didn't exist. People first had to dive into physicality. Because a fear existed of bringing intellectualism into this physicality, one entered the corporality with the power of the imagination and we get to know the descriptions of the forming of Montanist visions, which have also disappeared. In descriptions of Montanist visions—and this is characteristic—we always find the repetitive idea of the Christ soon returning in a physical body to the earth. One can't think of Montanism without thinking of the imminent return of the Christ to earthly corporeality. While the Montanist was familiar with the idea of finding the returning Christ, he strongly set before his soul what happened at the cross, what was accomplished through the death on the cross, what is involved in dying, what is involved in resurrection. The re-descent of the Christ, the physical-bodily immersion that takes place, was tinged by materialistic feelings in this view of the Montanists; they lived in the idea that Christ would come again and live in time and space. This was pronounced and those who believed this in the schools were only those who responded to the belief of the imminent coming of Christ Jesus to the earth, where he would stride along as if he is in a physical body.

This is in contrast to the Gnosis, this is the other pole: it had a different danger, the danger that all historic development of humanity is to be imagined in space and time. The urge to imagine such an idea of the world is what Augustinus for instance experienced in his exchange with the Bishop Faustus. Through Faustus a method of imagination is introduced which is completely tinged with the senses as images presented to Augustinus, and this became a materialistic experience of the world for Augustinus, from where he approached the world. Augustinus' words are gripping: I search for God in the stars, and do not find Him. I search for God in the sun, in the moon, and don't find Him. I search for God in all the plants, in all the animals, and don't find Him. I search for God on the mountains, in the rivers; I don't find Him.—

He means that in all the images there is no inner experience of the Divine, as it is with the Montanists. Through this Augustinus learnt, as it happened in his exchange with Faustus, to recognise materialism. This created his soul battle, which he overcomes by turning to himself, to faith, towards believing what he doesn't know.

We must let this rise out of history because the important things do not happen in a way, we can control it, by taking a document in hand which has lain in the archives, or by looking at the entire history of these fore-mentioned men from outside—that is an outer assessment of history. The most important part of history takes place in the human soul, in human hearts. We need to look into the soul of Basilides, into the soul of Montanus, into the soul of Faustus, into the soul of Augustinus, if we want to look into what really happened in the historic fields which one then can develop into what actually became a covering of Christianity in the Church of Constantine. The Constantine Church took on the outer life of worldly realms in which the spiritual no longer lived—in the sense of the 13th Chapter of the Mark Gospel—depicted as an already un-deified earth, a perished earth, into which the divine kingdom must again live as brought by him in its real spiritual soul form.

You see, in the course of both these viewpoints, one on the side the Gnosis which only came up to the Nous, and on the other side Montanism, which remained stuck in a materialistic conception, you see, how in these contrasts present during the first Christian century, the writer of the St John Gospel was situated. He looked on one side to the Gnosis, which he recognised from his view as an error, because it said: In the primordial beginnings was the Nous and the Nous was with God, and God was the Nous, and the Nous became flesh and lived among us; and Simon of Cyrene took the cross from Christ and thus accomplished a human image of what happened on Golgotha, after Christ only went up to carrying the cross and then disappeared from the earthly plane.—For the gaze of the Gnostic Christ disappeared the moment Simon of Cyrene took over the cross. That was a mistake.

Where do you arrive if you succumb to all thought being human and having nothing to do with the spirit? No, this is not the way the writer of John's Gospel experienced it. It was not the Nous which was at the primordial beginnings, not the Nous with God and a veil covering everything which is related to the Christian Mystery, but: In the primordial beginnings was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and a God was the Logos and the Logos became flesh and lived among us.—So the first actions are connected to the final actions: a unity comes about when we understand it with the spirit. We wish for something which doesn't lift us above human heights, to where we must find the Nous, because that is only one perspective of the spiritual.

Just as much spirit is needed for the spiritual orientation to let people form the idea that Jesus and the Christ God is one, so much spirituality exists in the Logos. When we hold on to the Nous, we only reach Christ; when we hold on to a Montanistic vision we only reach Jesus who in an unbelievable way returns as Christ, but then again only as a physical Jesus. No, we should not turn ourselves to the Nous coming from humanity, we must turn to the Logos, in which the Christ became man and walked among us.

The origin of the St John Gospel has really come about through an immense spiritual time context. I can't do otherwise, my dear friends, than to make a personal remark here, that I need to experience it as the greatest tragedy of our time, that theologians do not experience the majesty of the John Gospel at all, that out of a deep struggle preceding it, out of a struggle, the big question arose: How can mankind manage to, on the one hand, find a way to his soul-spiritual in the spiritual-supersensible where his own soul-spiritual nature originated from? On the other hand, how can mankind reach an understanding for how his soul is within the physical-bodily nature?

On the one hand the question could be answered by the Gnosis, and on the other hand it could be answered by an imagination towards the Pistis, which then came to Montanism in a visionary manner. The writer of the St John's Gospel was continuously placed in the middle, between these two, and we feel every word, every sentence only intimately if we do it in such a way as it flowed out of the course of the times, and in such a way that you feel the course of time during the Mystery of Golgotha as if it can be experienced forever in the human soul. With an anthroposophic gaze we can look back at the turning point in time, to the most important turning point in the earth, when one wanted to have this experience of adoration of the St John's Gospel. The day before yesterday I said to you, one has, and must, have an experience when one reads the Gospels with an anthroposophical approach, by reading them time and time again. This admiration of the reader is always renewed with each reading by the conviction that one can never learn everything from the Gospels because they go into immeasurable depths. In Gnosis, my dear friends, you can learn everything because it adheres to outer nature and cosmic symbols. In Montanism one can learn all about it because everyone who is familiar with such things knows what a tremendous suggestive persuasiveness all this has, that can be experienced through microcosmic visions, stronger than any outer impression. You must first learn, my dear friends, in order to be able to talk someone out of a vision, you first need to learn how to do it. You could, if you want to convince a person religiously, rather talk him out of what he has experienced with his outer senses, than anything he has experienced as visions, as atavistic clairvoyance, because atavistic visions are far deeper in a person. By allowing atavistic visions into a person, he is far more connected to them than to his sense impressions. It is far easier to determine an error in sense impressions than an error related to visions. Visions are deeply imbedded in the microcosm. Out of such depths everything originated which the writer of John's Gospel saw from the other side, the side of the Montanists.

Montanism was the side of the Charybdis while the Gnosis was the side of the Scylla. He had to get past them both. I feel it at once, as our current tragedy, that our time has been forced—really out of the very superficial honesty, which prevail in such areas—that the Gospel of St John has been completely eliminated and only the Synoptics accepted. If you experience the Gospels through ever greater wonderment at each renewed reading, and when you manage to delve ever deeper and deeper into the Gospels, then it gives you a harmony of the Gospels. You only reach the harmony of the Gospels when you have penetrated St John's Gospel because all together, they don't form a threefold but a fourfold harmony. You won't accomplish, my dear friends, what you have chosen to do in these meetings for the renewal of religion in present time, if you haven't managed to experience the entire depths, the immeasurable depths of the St John's Gospel. Out of the harmony of John's Gospel with the so-called synoptic Gospels something else must come about as had been established by theology. What can really be experienced inwardly as a harmony in the four Gospels must come about in a living way, as the living truth and therefore just life itself. Out of the experience, out of every experience which is deepened and warmed by the history of the origin of Christianity, out of this experience must flow the religious renewal. It can't be a result out of the intellect, nor theoretical exchanges about belief and knowledge, but only from the deepening of the felt, sensed, content which is able to be deepened in such a way as it was able to truly live in the souls of the first Christians.

Then, my dear friends, we see how Christianity was submerged by all that Christ experienced in Romanism—as I've presented to you—in the downfall of the world. Those who still understand Christ today will have to feel that the downfall is contained in all that is held by the powers of Romanism. By allowing the powers of Romanism to be preserved by the peoples who lived in this Romanism—the Roman written language, the Latin language had long been active—by our preservation of Roman Law, in our conservation of the outer forms of the Roman State, by our even uprooting the northern regions which contained the most elementary Germanic feelings experienced out of quite a different social community, in the Roman State outstripping all that is from the north, we live right up to our present days in a Roman world of decay because in Christendom, as it was considered in the vicinity of Christ Jesus himself, no other site could be found. This is because the Christianity of Constantine, which found such a meaningful symbol in the crowning of Constantine the Great in Rome, was a Christianity which expressed itself in outer worldliness, in Roman legalities. Augustinus already experienced, as I characterised yesterday and today, the feeling in his soul: Oh, what will it be then, if that gets a grip on the world, that which streams out of godless intellectualism, out of godless Romanism into the world? The principle of civil government will become something terrible; the Civitas of people will be opposed by the Civitas Dei, the God State.—So we notice the rise—earlier the indications had already been there, my dear friends—we see an interest emerging that was just seized in the following times in its fullest power in religious fields, that a light is cast on all later religious battles in the soul, which has just felt these religious battles most deeply.

Already with Augustinus this question emerged: How do we save the morality in the face of outward forces of law? How can we save morality, the divinely permeated morality? Into Romanism it can't spread.—This is the striving for internalization we find in the commitments and confessions of Augustinus, if we penetrate them correctly.

This occurs in the later striving in the most diverse forms. It appears in the tendency towards outer moral stateliness, which had to be developed according to Roman forms of the Roman Papal church, develop through the coronation of the kings becoming Roman emperors, in which the kings were accepted as instruments of the Roman Papal church, which itself was only fashioned out of ungodly Romanism. I speak in the Christian sense, in the sense of the first Christianity, which experienced Romanism as an enemy. How could one escape this which was being prepared? The first way one could get out was to not allow the internalised Christ to submit to the nationalization of morality, as it had evolved in the Roman Papal church. The nationalization, the outer national administration of morality was what Augustinus still accepted on the one hand, while, however, in the depths of his soul there were forces which he rebelled against.

We see in this rebellion, one could call it, the tendency of morality to withdraw within, at least to save the divinity within morality, according to what one had lost in outer worldliness. We see this morality being turned inward, being searched for as the "little spark" mentioned by Meister Eckhard, by Tauler, by Suso and so on, and how in particular it profoundly, intimately appears in the booklet Theologia Deutch. This, my dear friends is the battle for the moral, which now came to the fore, not to be lost within the divine spirituality, when it has already been lost in outer world knowledge and administration of the world. However, for a long time one was not ready to use such force like Suso regarding morality and seize the divine to penetrate the moral.

At first it was a question of arranging the whole in a kind of vague form, always envisioning the side of the outside world, for there had to be someone like a Carolus Magnus, who on the one hand was a worldly administrator, and who could transfer the state administration of morality to the crown of the emperor as an outward gesture, while the church worked in the background. It was imagined in such a way, I could say, that it became a kind of moral dilemma, a conscience that has become historical. This started in the 9th, 10th centuries and this inner conscience steered towards people looking at the world, and that man, because he stood in the middle of the search for the divine in the moral, didn't manage it in the world and searched for the enemies in the world which he felt within. Man looked in the world to find enemies. This resulted in the danger of Christians looking for enemies in the outer world, this led, my dear friends, to the mood of the crusades.

The crusade mood stands in the middle of the quests for internalization, yet people still didn't reach that place within themselves where the divine was grasped through the moral. The crusade mood lived in two forms; it lived above all in the moral impact of Godfrey of Bouillon and his comrades. From them the call went out against Rome: Jerusalem against Rome! To Jerusalem! We want to replace Rome with Jerusalem because in Rome we have become acquainted with outwardness, and in Jerusalem we will perhaps find inwardness, when we relive the Mystery of Golgotha in its holy places.—This is how the imagination came to Godfrey of Bouillon who we may think of as finding the enemy inwardly, even though he still looked for it outwardly, looking for it in the Turks. The striving to turn more inward and there find the ruler of the world, but at the same time to crown a king of Jerusalem, all this expressed itself in the historic mood of the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. All this lived in the people. For once try to place yourself, in both the worldly and the spiritual reasons of the crusades and you will discover this historical mood everywhere.

Rome saw this. Rome felt it indeed, something was happening in the north: Jerusalem against Rome. In Rome one felt the externalization, but Rome was careful. Rome already had its prophets; it was careful and looked into the future, seeing what people wanted: Jerusalem against Rome. So it did something which often happens in such cases, it introduced in its own way what the others first wanted, and the Pope allowed his creatures, Peter of Amiens and his supporters, to preach about the crusade in order to carry out from Rome what actually went against it. Study the history with understanding; take it as an impulse and you will see that already the first steps of the crusades took place in what Rome had anticipated and that which Godfrey of Bouillon and his supporters strived for.

So we see in the historic mood how outer actions were searching for what lay within. I could say we can understand this historic mood in a spiritual way when we see how the Order of the Temple has grown out of the crusades, orders which are already further in their turning within. As a result of the crusades it brought an inwardness with it. It only takes things in such a way that it knows that one does not actually internalize them if one does not penetrate the exterior at the same time, when one doesn't, in order to save the moral, see it as an enemy in an exterior way. As paradoxical as this might appear, my dear friends, what Godfrey of Bouillon saw outwardly in the realm of the Turks, this is like Luther's battle at Wartburg Castle with its devils as an inner power. The struggle is directed inward.

If you now look at all of this, what appears in programs about such people as Johannes Valentin Andrea, Comenius, what lives in the Bohemian brothers, then you will understand how in the later centuries of the crusades the pursuit of internalization has gone. I must at least mention the most symptomatic picture seemed to me always to be in a single place when I looked at this lonely thinker who lived in Bohemia, the contemporary of Leibniz, Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz. For the first time, in all clarity—we don't only know this today—he stripped morality of legality. Everywhere in the early days of writing in the Roman spirit, the legal was bound to the moral. What lived in a religious way in most people, lived in a philosophic way in the contemporaries of Leibniz. He wanted the moral element to be purely philosophic. Just like Luther wanted to get the inner justification, because in his time it was no longer possible to get justification in the outer world, so Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz as a lonely thinker, saw the task: How do I save, purely conceptually, morality from the encirclement and transformation of legality, with those poor philosophic concepts? How do I save the purely human-moral?—He didn't deepen the question religiously. The question was not one-sidedly, intellectually posed by Hoditz—Wolframitz. However, just because it is put philosophically, one notices how he struggles philosophically in the pure shaping of the substantial moral content living in the consciousness.

In order to understand these times which after all form the foundation of ours, in which the feelings of our contemporaries live—without knowing it—you should, my dear friends, always look back at the deep soul battles experienced in the past, also when a modern person feels that he has "brought it so delightfully far"; by looking back at this time of the most terrible human soul battles, only one period of superstition is seen.

So, I could say, the historic development of the struggle for morality came about. What was being experienced in this struggle shows up right into our present day, and it can be imposed on the spiritual search into religion, for religious behaviour, even into aberrations. Still, no balance has been found between Pistis and Sophia, between Pistis and Gnosis. This abyss is still gaping in contrast to the writer of the Gospel of St John who had infinite courage to stand above it and find the truth in between it all.

This summoning of strength in the search for the moral, in the will to save the divine, by applying it only to the moral, was felt in their simple, deep but imperfect way by those southern German religious people who are regarded as sectarians today, the Theosophists, who we find on the one hand in Bengel, and on the other, in Oetinger, but who are far more numerous than only in these two. They use all their might to strive, in complete earnestness, for attaining the divine in the moral, yet by trying to attain the divine in morality they realise: We need an eschatology, we need a prophecy, we need foresight into the course of the world's unfolding. This is still the unfulfilled striving of the Theosophists in the first half of the 19th century, started at the end of the 18th century when we must see the dawn of that which was completely buried at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and which must, from all those who experience the necessity for religious renewal, be seen.

For this reason, my answers to your wishes which are in pursuit of such religious renewal, can't turn out in any other way than they do. I would quite like to give you what I must believe you are actually looking for.

Our attention has been called to the fact that to human beings at a certain stage of evolution, the external phenomena of warmth, air, water, etc., become living and permeated with spirit, and it has been said that this stage may be designated as that of ‘penetration into the world of Spirits of the Elements.’ I would ask those who have been students of Spiritual Sciences for some time to note the words carefully, and to realise that they are used, not in an approximate, but in an exact sense. ‘Spirits of the Elements’ was the expression I used, and not ‘Elementary Spirits.’

It must be pointed out that when we ascend into super-sensible realms, other worlds, two of which shall be named, are added to the ordinary world experienced by means of the sense organs they are to be found behind what is perceptible by the senses and comprehensible to the intellect. There are certain striking characteristics which give an idea of the difference between our world and the two higher ones adjoining it. The first region hidden behind our ordinary world is named, as everyone knows, the Astral or Soul world; the Spiritual world is still more deeply hidden. In the physical world one of the most comprehensive laws is that of growth and decay, of coming into being and passing away. Look where we will in the physical world we find that a characteristic of its highest beings is that they are born and that they die within it; the inanimate kingdom of the minerals, belonging to the lower realms of nature, may arouse an illusion of permanence within the physical world, but if the mineral kingdom be observed over long periods of time, the law of growth and decay is found there.

Observation of the astral world, however, reveals the fact that here the capacity of transformation or metamorphosis is as predominant as is the law of birth and decay in the physical world. In the astral world we have to do with moving images changing one into the other, in a state of perpetual metamorphosis. Even the astral body of man, which is of all astral phenomena the most intimately bound up with us, visible to the seer as a kind of aura or cloud-like formation around the physical body, shares this characteristic of continual transformation. That which envelopes and penetrates the human being in the form of an astral auric cloud changes practically every moment as higher or lower impulses develop in him, as he experiences wilder or calmer passions, or cultivates thoughts of different nature according to the character of the will impulses. Images and shapes arise in the astral auric cloud, and as different thoughts rise and fade away, its colour and form may continually change. There is, however, a certain fundamental character and colour in the astral aura of every individual, corresponding to his more or less permanent type of character. Self-metamorphosis, then, is of the very nature of the human astral body. We have seen that the beings visible to a man in the astral world after he has reached the stage of illumination meet him as good or as evil beings according to his own preparation. So strong is the capacity of metamorphosis in those Beings which are invisible upon the physical plane and only perceptible in the astral and higher worlds, that they may change from good into evil, from light into dark.

In the real spiritual world there is permanence, even if it is relative. For this reason the inner being of man, if it is to exist without a break from one incarnation to another, must pass through the spiritual worlds, because only there is to be found a certain—not external—but relative permanence or continuity.

The rhythm of growth and decay is the pre-dominant characteristic of the physical world; metamorphosis from one form to another of the astral world; permanence or continuity of the spiritual world. First we must realise that the materials for the building up of the human being have been obtained from these worlds; man has been constructed out of them. The physical world lies before him the other worlds open up to him through initiation—through preparation and development of super-sensible faculties of perception. Man then first learns to know what is hidden from him in the ordinary world, but what has just as real an existence. When in ordinary life an outer sheath or expression of some being is found, as for example, fire or air, the being itself is to be sought in a higher world. In order to meet the beings whose expression is physical fire, man must ascend to a region higher than the physical world. That which is the cause and origin of fire, for instance, can only be discovered by rising from the physical plane to the world above it, because the Beings in question send down an expression of themselves into the lower world, but remain as to their essential nature in the higher region. This holds good not only for external phenomena such as fire, air, water or earth, but also for everything living within us in the physical world. Our feelings, perceptions and thoughts exist in the physical world along with phenomena of colour, sound, tastes, scent, etc. It must be clear to us that everything which constitutes man in an incarnation, every feeling experienced between birth and death, every thought, every idea, is a phenomenon of the physical world. And spiritual beings live behind our feelings and the whole of our soul life just as they do behind the external phenomena of colour, sound, scent, or as we say in Spiritual Science, behind fire, air, water and so on. In the same way, the ego, the self within the physical world is not our real being, is not what is called our Higher Self, for that is to be found in a super-sensible world behind our feelings and sensations. This Higher Self is experienced in a true sense only by attaining to super-sensible worlds, where it manifests itself in quite another form. I will show you by a definite example the relation of the self of man living in the physical world to the Higher Self; this example holds good for present conditions of life only since anyone who has spiritual sight knows that the nature of these things changes in the course of time. Let us suppose that a man has done an injustice to another and experiences the pang of conscience. I refer here to those special psychic experiences usually expressed by the word conscience. In ordinary life, conscience is a term used of certain inner voices demanding that we should set right any wrong we may have committed. Most people hardly ever come to the point of thinking about the nature of conscience; they recognise as a kind of vague feeling that an injustice should be righted; the soul is uneasy when this has not been done. For men in the physical world conscience is an inner experience of the soul. The spiritual Seer, however, observing from the astral world the man who has done the act of injustice, sees the pang of conscience surrounding him in remarkable astral shapes—shapes which are absent if no pang of conscience has been felt. The origin of these forms may be explained as follows: Suppose somebody has done an injustice: from thoughts which have led to the unjust act other thought-forms develop as the metamorphosis of the first. Everything that a man thinks and feels exists in his astral aura as a form or shape of the nature of thought or of feeling. A thought which is, let us say, distinct, definite, can be seen in sharp outline hovering round a man, and wild thoughts or passions in confused outlines. At the time when a man is doing an injustice he has certain thoughts and feelings; these forms detach themselves from him and live in his environment, but the essential point is that they do not remain in this condition but draw nourishment from certain worlds. Just as the wind rushes into empty spaces, beings from definite regions (of which more later) rush into the forms created by the pang of conscience and fill them with living substance. Thus in his own thought-forms a man offers opportunity for other beings to live in his environment, and these beings are really the cause of the sting of conscience. If the beings were not present the conscience would not sting. When a man begins to feel these beings unconsciously, the first gnawing of an uneasy conscience is experienced.

This example shows us that spiritual sight reveals a reality very different from that presented to physical sight. If a man is to contact the spirits of conscience, who live upon the Astral plane, he must look through his conscience into the higher worlds in the same way as would be necessary in order to perceive the spiritual beings who animate physical life.

From different lectures we know that the human soul has changed in the course of long periods of time;—human consciousness of today is different from the consciousness, let us say, of the ancient Indian people in the first Post Atlantean epoch, and it in its turn was very different from the consciousness of the Atlantean age. The clear waking consciousness of the physical world has developed from a dim, primitive clairvoyance. The farther we go back in evolution, the more traces do we find of this primitive clairvoyance.

We need not go further than some thousands of years, and we shall find that many people were then able not merely to perceive physical, fire, but to look through it to the spirits of the element of fire. Gradually it came about that the higher world withdrew from human consciousness and the latter came to be limited to the physical world. This holds good not merely for the external sense world, but for the whole of the life of the soul in the physical world. So it is stated that in a phenomenon like conscience a modern spiritual seer perceives astral forms around human beings, and the ancestors of this modern man, being endowed with clairvoyance, must have been able to see these astral forms. Just as fire conceals, the spirits of the fire, so does human conscience—the inner voice—conceal the world of the spirits of conscience. The astral phenomena must have been perceptible to men of ancient times; but they could at that time have had no inner conscience, since it had not yet developed. What we of today call the psychic phenomenon of conscience was not present in our forefathers, but on the other hand they could see in the Astral aura what is now only perceptible to the eye of the seer; modern men feel the inner voice of conscience and the spirits of conscience are hidden behind it.

I have brought forward this example deliberately, because it affords concrete evidence of these matters. It is possible to indicate precisely the epoch in external history when the transition took place from perception of the outer spirits of conscience, to the awakening of conscience as an inner voice. Compare the Orestes of Aeschylus with the same theme as treated by Euripides, who lived a short while later. Between the age of Aeschylus and that of Euripides—a few years only—occurred the transition which confirms what I have just said. In the story of Orestes as related by Aeschylus, Agamemnon returns home after the war and is murdered by his unfaithful wife. His son, Orestes, who is absent, returns and takes vengeance upon his mother for the death of his father, because one of the gods demands that he shall do so; his act is in harmony with the national feeling of those times that declares that his act is righteous and that he has done his duty. But as the result of the murder of his mother, Orestes sees the Erinyes, the avenging goddesses, approaching. These avenging goddesses of Greek mythology are simply a pictorial image of what has just been described as a reality for spiritual perception. And now let us see whether in this old drama there is any phenomenon which could be described by the modern word conscience. There is not even a word for it in any ancient language, as research would testify. In the poem of Euripides who used the same story a few decades later, we find no Furies, no avenging goddesses; there men hear instead the inner voice of conscience. Concretely perceptible, in the interval between the lives of these two poets, conscience arose. Clairvoyance was so vivid and real in human evolution before this age, that the feeling experienced by man, as the result of an unrighteous act, was entirely different from what it became later. Man's clairvoyant vision was still open; he saw in his environment what I have described in Greece as the Erinyes. The inner feeling which he experienced in presence of this vision was one in accordance with the character of the astral world he wanted to change, to transform the images surrounding him. As soon as an unrighteous or unjust deed has been wiped out by turning it into a good one, the Erinyes change into the beneficent Eumenides. Man felt that an evil deed brought about a terrible result in the astral world, that it must be transformed, and that he must by a positive act bring about the metamorphosis. His actions then were in accordance with what he saw in his environment. The inner voice of conscience was non-existent.

Everything in the world and in the inner life of the soul as well has developed or evolved, conscience among the rest. If anyone were to go back some thousands of years in search of an instance of our modern soul life, he would make a great mistake. For transitions such as this take place with considerable suddenness. Just as in the plant there is a sudden metamorphosis from leaf to flower, so does one occur in spiritual evolution. The phrase ‘nature makes no jumps’ is untrue; Nature continually makes jumps at decisive moments. And such sudden transitions are perceptible in spiritual life. For centuries and millennia there is slow and gradual development; but then there is a sudden change, as in the case of the conscience in the fifth century BC where an earlier tragic poet makes no mention of conscience in his dramas and only a few decades afterwards it is introduced for the first time. With this is connected the fact that clairvoyant perception of the spirits of conscience, the Erinyes, has disappeared. The spiritual beings are of such a nature that our inner experience of conscience comes between us and them in the same way as the outer expression of fire hides the spirits of the element of fire.

This points to the fact that so far as the physical world is concerned, limits of experience are set in two directions. The external phenomena of external colour form, and so on, form the boundary line at which the external spirits are to be found. But behind the inner phenomena of conscience, memory, feeling, will and thought, a spiritual element exists as it does behind fire, air, water or earth. The spirit is hidden behind them. When conscience came to be a voice speaking in the human soul, it interposed itself in front of the world of the Furies and hid that from human sight. The historical life of humanity becomes intelligible only when considered from this inner point of View. Mankind can understand nothing of what has come to pass in the world if it leaves spiritual facts out of sight in considering evolution, or becoming.

We may now ask, what is the relation of the inner and the outer spiritual realms to each other? We know that Man as a fourfold being is composed of Physical, Etheric, Astral bodies and ego, and that this fourfold constitution is to be traced back to the very source and origin of humanity. Man did not originate on the Earth, for the Earth itself has passed through other incarnations, that of Saturn, of Old Sun and Old Moon. The first germ of the physical body of man arose on Old Saturn, on Old Sun the Etheric body was added, and on Old Moon, the Astral body. The ego was first incorporated into this threefold constitution on Earth. Evolution is by no means such a simple matter as to involve merely a transition from the Saturn period into the Sun period, thence to Old Moon and thence again to Earth; the process is much more complicated than that. Even if we speak of the transition from Saturn to Old Sun and of this to Old Moon, we could not speak thus simply of the Old Moon evolution itself. I have said that during the Old Moon evolution there was a separation of Earth and Sun (the Earth was then Old Moon) or properly speaking, of Moon and Sun. Saturn and Sun may perhaps be spoken of as single bodies, but during the Old Moon period two bodies emerged from the one; the Old Moon existed at the same time as the Old Sun. These two bodies united again after a time, passed through an intermediate condition and arose later as Earth. During the earliest period of Earth evolution the substances and beings now to be found in the present Sun and Moon were united with the Earth; the present Sun beings separated from Earth, which remained in connection with what later separated off as our Moon; after the separation of Moon, Earth remained alone, between it and Sun. These three bodies were one in the beginning; only later did the Sun and the Moon develop out of the Earth.

Let us now enquire as to the spiritual meaning of this separation. We will leave-out of consideration the first separation occurring during the Old Moon period and look at what happened in this connection during the Earth period.—Certain beings pass through their evolution on Earth, and Sun and Moon afford evolutionary opportunities to others. Beings at a different stage of development from that of man separated from the Earth with the Sun, because their evolution could not proceed otherwise. At the time, therefore, of the separation of Sun from Earth, we are faced with the fact that man was left behind, since the nature of his evolution demanded the conditions afforded by Earth. The other beings, whose evolution could not proceed upon Earth, separated from it the substances necessary for them, and built their Sun abode. Thence they influence and work upon the Earth. In the physical sunbeams as they lighten and warm the Earth, we see streaming the activities of the sun spirits; the sunbeams are the outer, corporal manifestation of sun beings. That is the meaning of the separation of Sun from Earth.

What was the meaning of the separation of Moon? Man could not have kept pace with the evolutionary tempo of the sun-beings if they had remained in union with Earth. The evolutionary tempo of Earth was slackened by the separation of Sun, but still it was not suitable for human beings—it was too slow. Man would have become hardened or mummified, if Moon had remained in connection with Earth. Earth would gradually have become a planetary body from which the men would have developed with forms like dead bodies that lack inner spiritual and psychic life. Moon had to withdraw from Earth in order that the right evolutionary tempo for the being of man might be set up. If Sun had remained with Earth, man would have been forced into an outer life and activity which he could not have endured; if Moon had remained he would have become impervious to stimulus, he would have dried up, lacking vital force. The stimulus received by man from Sun was an external one which would have produced too rapid a tempo. In the same way as Sun stimulates the life of the flowers in the fields, would man's thoughts, feelings and will have been stimulated from without, but at such a rate that he would have been burnt up by physical and spiritual sun fire. The source of this stimulus left Earth and in this way its influence was weakened. At first, because of the hardening tendency inherent in Earth, the Sun's influence had too little effect, and a portion of these hardening factors had to leave with Moon. Therewith came into the evolution of Earth and of man a new vitalising principle, the stimulating influence of which was exactly contrary to that of Sun from without. The new stimulus came from within. The life of the soul in the physical world could develop only because man was saved from this hardening and mummification by the withdrawal of Moon.

Ask of one whose spiritual sight is able to penetrate into the Cosmos as to the origin of man's perception of the external world, and his answer will be that it is to be found in the physical or spiritual sun elements. Ask what lies at the basis of inner experience, of thought, of feeling, of conscience, for example, and it will be found that all this is due to the moon, to those beings who separated their substance from the earth with the moon. The presence of moon substances in the earth would have prevented the inner mobility of soul life.

We must remember that it was not merely for the sake of man that the separation of the sun and moon from the earth came to pass, but also for the sake of those beings whose evolution was at first bound to that of humanity. In the sun dwell beings who need the sun for their evolution, just as the evolution of man needs the earth. To remain with the earth would have been death to their existence; but the separation resulted in their becoming able by degrees to reach a stage where their beneficent influences could flow down to the earth from without. When the seer observes the light, when her perceives external objects, he realises at a certain stage of his evolution that it is the sun beings which live behind the physical phenomena of colour, sound, and so on, but that these beings themselves had to develop to their present stage. These sun spirits are the upper spiritual beings contacted through the phenomena of the sense world.

Let us now ask how the inner stimulus was given to save mankind from hardening, from ossification. Certain beings were needed which at the appropriate time, withdrew the moon substances from the earth. These beings realised that the act of the sun beings was not sufficient, and that they must protect the earth from ossification by withdrawing the moon from the earth. They were in a certain respect higher than the sun spirits. These latter, when the sun was still united with the earth, felt themselves obliged for the sake of their development to find another dwelling place, but the other spirits were able to remain with the Earth even after the sun spirits had gone out. And this made it possible for them to save human evolution at a certain point of time by separating the moon from the earth. Thus they were in a certain respect higher than the sun beings ... they were able to separate a substance from the earth relatively coarser than that connected with the sun spirits and by becoming rulers of this coarse substance to prove their greater power. For those who are able to transform evil into good are more powerful than those who rule over the good and make it, possibly, a little better.

Those are the beings behind the phenomena of the life of the soul, who by separating the moon from the earth, made thinking, feeling, willing, and conscience possible. They come from the moon region, a spiritual kingdom which in a certain respect is higher, more powerful than that of the sun spirits, which are to be found behind external Maya. Maya is twofold; there is the external Maya of the sense world, and the inner Maya of soul life. Behind the first stand those spiritual beings who have their centre in the Sun; behind the Maya of the inner life stand the other beings who belong to a more powerful kingdom. Just here we can see the truth of Greek mythology as portrayed in the story of Orestes. Orestes is told by the ruling gods that he has performed a good deed, but the Erinyes approach him, and they are felt to be older beings than those belonging to the kingdom of Zeus. Goddesses who take vengeance even though the external goddesses of the sun kingdom (the kingdom of Zeus) had given their consent to the act. Man is here confronted by beings of an older spiritual race, who intervene as a corrective in what he undertakes under the guidance and leadership of the beings who withdrew from the earth with the sun. This remarkable example clearly shows how the conceptions of ancient peoples, expressed in their mythology, confirm what spiritual investigations of today teach in another way.

At this point I ask you to bear in mind the fact that at a certain point of time during the Earth evolution, a spiritual being, Whom we name the Christ, a being previously united to the Sun, descended from the Sun, and at the time of the life of Jesus of Nazareth united Himself to the earth. The Christ being entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is an absolutely unique phenomenon and cannot be thought of in the same connection as other occurrences here mentioned. It has been said that after the separation of the sun, the earth would have hardened if the moon had not also been ejected; human beings would have mummified. This is perfectly true for a very large part of earth life, but not for the whole of it. In spite of the withdrawal of sun and moon, something in the earth would have fallen a prey to death if the Christ event had not come to pass. Though the withdrawal of the moon made an inner soul life possible, yet it was the Christ's descent from the sun which gave this inner life a new stimulus.

When a spiritual seer looks back to the time preceding the Christ event, a striking vision comes before him. The external form of the earth, confronting the physical senses as Maya, vanishes and something comparable to the human form appears, but only a form, a figure. To spiritual vision the outer Mayavic earth (and I say the earth deliberately) changed into the form of man with arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, a male-female form. This reminds us of the wonderful words of Plato, words that he drew from the Mysteries, that the world soul is crucified on the cross of the world's body. This is exactly the image which presents itself to the eye of the spiritual seer: the Christ died on the cross, and thereupon the earth, which had been mere form and figure, became filled with life. The coming of the Christ principle into the earth had something in common with the withdrawal of the moon; life poured into what otherwise would have remained mere form. To understand ancient times aright is to realise that they all lead up to the Christ event. Just as men of today look back to the Christ as a being Who at a certain point of time entered into human evolution, so pre-Christian initiates all pointed to the coming of the Christ as fore-shown by events. Nothing could have been a surer herald of the Christ than the mighty phenomenon, visible under certain conditions to spiritual sight, of the disappearance of the physical form of the earth and the vision of the world soul crucified on the world's body. In dim Indian antiquity it was said by the sages that when their spiritual vision arose, they saw, deep down under the mountains of the earth, near its central point, a cross, and upon it a male-female human being, having on its right side the symbol of the sun and upon its left side the symbol of the moon, and over the rest of the body the various land and sea formations of the earth. That was the clairvoyant vision which the sages of ancient India had of the form waiting until our earth could be brought to life by the Christ principle. And inasmuch as those ancient sages pointed to the most important prophecy of the Christ event, they were justified, when they looked still more deeply into existence, in saying: the Christ will come because that which points to Him is in existence. Ancient wisdom at its highest level becomes prophetic; it looks towards that which will come to pass in the future. What the future holds is entirely the result of the present and so present spiritual vision can receive intimations of a spiritual event, which is to take place in the future. Indications of the Christ event were not given in any outwardly abstract way, but were revealed to spiritual sight by the phenomenon of the world soul crucified on the cross of the world's body, waiting to receive the life of the Christ when He should unite Himself with the earth. The wisdom of all egos is a harmonious unity if considered in its fundamentals. Starting from this point let us look at the wisdom of different epochs in a light that will reveal it in its true aspect.

From everything we have heard in the foregoing lectures it is clear that the essence of the Christ Event may be indicated in the following way.—The stage of evolution denoted by an ascent of the human soul to the realms of the Spirit was attainable in pre-Christian times only within the Mysteries, and through the dimming of the degree of Ego-consciousness then present in man. This stage of evolution was to receive an impulse—the fruits of which still lie, for the most part, in the future—whereby on rising into the spiritual world a man can retain the full Ego-consciousness that is normally his on the physical plane alone. This advance in evolution, made possible by the Christ Event, is truly the greatest advance that has ever taken place or ever will take place in the history of the Earth and of humanity. Whatever else may develop in Earth-evolution in this connection will simply be an elaboration of the mighty impulse given by the Christ Event.

Let us now ask: What was it that was to be brought about by that Event? There was to be a repetition, in a particular case, of certain happenings connected with the secrets of the ancient Mysteries. It was, for example, part of those secrets—and to some extent it is still the same to-day—that on penetrating into his own physical body and etheric body a man experienced in his astral body the temptations of which we spoke yesterday. And in the Greek Mysteries a candidate for Initiation had perforce to encounter all the difficulties and dangers approaching those who pour themselves out into the Macrocosm.

These experiences encountered in one or another mode of Initiation, were undergone by a great and sublime Individuality, by Christ Jesus, as a pattern for mankind. The impulse thus given made it possible for men in the course of their future evolution gradually to achieve the development resulting from Initiation.

What happened formerly in the Mysteries may be described in the following way.—Although Ego-consciousness was dreamlike and dim, certain experiences were nevertheless undergone by the candidate in his inner life of soul. Egoism was aroused in him, making him wish to be independent of the external world. But as was said yesterday, every human being is and must always be dependent on the external world, for the simple reason that he cannot create his means of nourishment by magic or dispense with what he acquires through his physical body. Because this is so he is exposed to the illusion of believing that what is acquired merely through the physical body constitutes the world and its glory. This experience was undergone by every pupil, every candidate for Initiation, but in a condition different from that in which it was undergone at the very highest level by Christ Jesus. Therefore if someone were to describe what happened to a candidate in the ancient Mysteries and then write of the same experiences in the life of Christ Jesus, there would in certain respects necessarily be similarity in the descriptions. For what had come to pass was that happenings formerly shrouded in the secrecy of the Mysteries had now moved to the arena of world-history.

Occurrences such as the following were very frequent in antiquity, especially in the last centuries before the appearance of Christ.—Suppose some painter or scribe, having been told about a certain rite enacted during an Initiation, set to work to portray or describe it. Such a painting or description might well bear a resemblance to the account of the Christ Event given in the Gospels. We can therefore imagine how in many centres of the ancient Mysteries the candidate for Initiation, having completed certain preparations, was bound with outspread arms and hands to a kind of cross in order that his soul might be released from his body. He remained in this condition for a time, undergoing the experiences already described. All this might have been painted or related in writing, and then some scholar, finding it to-day, might assert that what was undergone in the Mysteries had been founded on some older tradition; he might then add that the Gospels themselves are simply repetitions.

Statements to this effect are very widespread. In the book Christianity as Mystical Fact I have explained the sense in which secrets of the ancient Mysteries come to light in the Gospels, and that the Gospels, fundamentally, are repetitions of the descriptions of Initiation in the Mysteries. Why, in relating events in the life of Christ, was it possible to describe the processes enacted in the Mysteries? It was possible because everything that took place in the Mysteries in the inner life of the soul, had become historic fact; because the Christ-Jesus-Event was a re-portrayal of symbolic rites enacted during the process of the old Initiation, but fulfilled now at the higher level of full Ego-consciousness. This fact must always be kept in mind. The similarity of episodes in Christ's life—as narrated in the Gospels—with procedures in the Mysteries will certainly be realised by those who are convinced that such procedures became historic reality through His coming, although they were enacted on an entirely different level of consciousness.

The following could also be said.—Those destined to witness the Christ Event in Palestine observed the fulfillment of the Essene prophecy and were aware of the Baptism by John, the Temptation and what followed it, the Crucifixion, and the ensuing happenings. They could say to themselves: Here is a life lived through by a sublime Being in the body of a man. What are the all-important points in this life? Certain things take place as external events and they are identical with experiences undergone in the Mysteries by candidates for Initiation. We need therefore simply turn to the canon of a Mystery-rite and there we should find the prototype of a process that may now be described as an historical fact!

Here, then, is the great secret. What had formerly been shrouded in the darkness of temple-sanctuaries, perceptible—but only in its effects—to those in the outer world possessed of spiritual vision, was now enacted as the Christ Event on the stage of world-history itself. It must of course be realised that in the days of the Evangelists, no biographies were produced of the kind familiar to us to-day. In a biography, let us say, of Goethe, of Schiller, or of Lessing, every detail of their lives is probed into and every scrap of information collected, usually resulting in a mass of unimportant data purporting to convey the essentials of a life-history. Whereas all these details hinder one from discerning the points that really matter, the Evangelists were content to describe what was of central and fundamental importance in the life of Christ Jesus, namely that in this life there was a repetition of the process of Initiation—but enacted here in the great setting of world-history. Is it any wonder that in our time numbers of people have been taken aback by a certain disconcerting development which comes home to us even more forcibly in the light of the following facts.—

Myths and sagas have come down to us from the past. Anyone who understands their origin and character will realise that many of them are narratives of happenings in the spiritual worlds, seen by ancient clairvoyance and clothed in imagery of the sense-world; other myths again are portrayals of happenings in the Mysteries. For example, the myth of Prometheus, among many others, is partly a presentation of acts performed in the Mysteries. We often find the scene described of Zeus with a god of lower rank who is destined, according to the Greek account, to be his tempter. Zeus standing on a mountain being tempted by Pan—this theme is portrayed in many and various ways. What was the purpose of such imagery? It was meant to give expression to the process of man's descent into his inner being, where he encounters his own lower nature, his egoistic Pan-nature, when he penetrates into his physical and etheric bodies.

The ancient world is full of accounts of experiences undergone by a candidate for Initiation along the path leading into the spiritual world, and in the myths and sagas these accounts are given artistic form.

Scholarship of to-day which fails to penetrate below the surface—and this is what bewilders many people who either cannot or will not recognize the facts—declares when it finds the story of Pan tempting Zeus on a mountain that this shows clearly that the story of the Temptation told by the Evangelists is merely the repetition of an allegory already familiar to them. Scholars then draw the conclusion that there is nothing of unique importance in the Gospels, which appear to them to be compilations pieced together from ancient mythology in order to present a fictitious figure called Jesus Christ. In a certain widespread movement in Germany there were many vapid discussions as to whether Christ Jesus ever lived at all. And with a really grotesque lack of understanding—although with ostentatious erudition—all the sagas and myths alleged to contain earlier parallels of the Gospel scenes were enumerated. It is useless to-day to attempt to give an idea of the actual state of affairs, although it is well known to those who are conversant with these matters. But spiritual movements in our time develop along very strange lines!

I should not have spoken of these things if it were not constantly necessary to take a stand against arguments levelled by ostensibly profound scholarship against the facts and expositions of Spiritual Science.

The real truth of these matters is what I have presented in these lectures. Accounts originating in the Mysteries are necessarily recapitulated in the Gospels, but the secret of Initiation is now connected with an Individuality altogether different. The intention is to show that the experiences formerly undergone in a condition of dimmed consciousness were passed through by this Individuality, this Being, without any loss of Ego-consciousness. Therefore when it is said that the Gospels contain hardly anything for which there is no earlier parallel, we need not be surprised but we must realise that in former times it was a matter of the human being having to rise into the Kingdoms of Heaven, because the Kingdoms of Heaven had not then already ascended to Ego. The really new thing was that what could formerly only be experienced in other realms, and through a kind of attenuation of the Ego, could now be experienced in Malkhut in the ‘Kingdom’, with the Ego erect and self-supporting.

Hence after Christ Jesus had undergone the experience described in St. Matthew's Gospel as the Temptation, He began to preach of the ‘Kingdom.’ What was the gist of His teaching? It was this: What a man formerly attained through suppressing his Ego and receiving other beings into himself, is now and henceforward to be attained in full Ego-consciousness.—That is the essential point. Hence it is not repetition of events connected with Initiations only that are repeated in the life of Christ, but the vital point in the ‘preaching of the Kingdom’ is this: Everything promised to those who were formerly admitted into the Mysteries or who accepted their teachings, is now offered to those who learn to experience in themselves the reality of the ‘I’, the Ego, in the way prefigured for mankind by Christ.

Everything, therefore, even features of the doctrine, must necessarily appear again in some form. But it must not surprise us that emphasis was laid upon the difference between the old teachings and the new, that it was stressed: What could not, in former times, be attained through the Ego, can now be attained by the Ego itself—in full, consciousness! Let us suppose Christ had wanted to draw attention to the great truth that in former times, according to teachings that had reached them from the Mysteries, men had always looked up to the Kingdoms of Heaven, saying: Blessedness can stream down to us from there—but it does not penetrate into our Ego.—In those circumstances it would have been necessary for Christ still to uphold what was formerly said about the Divine Father-Source of existence, for contact with it was indeed attainable when Ego-consciousness was dimmed, and it was the nuances only that needed to be changed. He would have had to speak to the following effect: If you were formerly bidden to look up to the realms of the Divine Father-Source of existence and wait until His radiance streamed upon you, it may henceforward be said that not only does His radiance stream down to you, but whatsoever is willed on high must penetrate into the deepest core of the human Ego and , be willed there also.

Again, let us suppose that each single phrase in the Lord's Prayer had existed previously, and that the only one needing to be altered was to the effect that when in former times men looked up to the Divine Father-Spirit in the Heights everything there remained unchanged, shining down into the earthly realm.—Christ would now have had to say that the heavenly realm must come down to the Earth where the Ego has its dwelling-place; and the will that is fulfilled above in the Heavens must also be fulfilled upon the Earth.—It follows that those who are possessed of deeper insight and perceive the finer shades of difference, will not be in the least surprised that the phrases used in the Lord's Prayer may also have existed in ancient times. A superficial thinker, however, will not notice these fine shades of difference, for in so far as he does not understand the purpose of Christianity he fails to perceive their importance! And when he finds that these phrases were current in earlier times, he will say: ‘There you have it; the Gospels record the Lord's Prayer—but it was already in existence before they were written!’ The essential shades of difference, however, have escaped him.

You can now realise what a vast difference there is between genuine understanding of the scriptures and extern al study. The important factor is for those who discern the new shades of meaning to compare them with the old. The scholar who lacks the deeper understanding and fails to perceive these shades of difference will continue to insist that the Lord's Prayer had already been in existence before the time of Christ.

Attention must be paid to these things and mention made of them here because anthroposophists ought to be able to some extent to make a stand against the dilettante learning that makes its superficial interpretations and its voice heard to-day and by way of innumerable channels in newspapers and periodicals comes to be accepted as ‘science’.

Let me say something further in connection with the Lord's Prayer. There was once a certain individual who set out to collect from every available ancient tradition, from every relevant passage in Talmudic literature, sentences bearing some sort of resemblance to those of the Lord's Prayer. Mark well: the compilation produced by this learned scholar is nowhere to be found originally in this form; the single sentences have been taken piecemeal from one document or another. Carrying this method to the point of absurdity, we might also say: The first sentences of Faust were put together by Goethe in the same way! It might be possible to produce evidence that in the 17th century there was a student who had failed in his examination and afterwards said to his father: Have I not studied jurisprudence with toil and sweat! And another who had failed in his medical examination said: Have I not studied medicine with toil and sweat! And from this the first sentences in Faust are supposed to have been composed. It is an absurdity, but the principle and method are exactly the same as those of the trend in Gospel criticism to which I allude.

The following sentences, pieced together as stated, are sup-posed to have produced the Lord's Prayer:

‘Our Father which art in Heaven; O Lord Our God, hallowed be thy name, and let the remembrance of thee be glorified in heaven above, and upon earth here below. Let thy kingdom reign over us now and for ever. The holy men of old said: remit and forgive unto all men whatsoever they have done against me. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil thing. For thine is the kingdom, and thou shalt reign in glory for ever and for evermore.’¹

The Lord's Prayer is alleged to have been compiled from these sayings which, as I said, were collected from many sources. But the nuance that would indicate the unique significance of the Christ Event is entirely lacking. Nowhere is it said that the Kingdom of Heaven is to come down. The words are ‘Let thy kingdom rule over us now and for ever’—not: Thy Kingdom shall come to us! That is the essential point, but superficial scholarship entirely fails to perceive it. And although these sayings came not from one source but from records in many archives, the words of salient importance in the Lord's Prayer are nowhere to be found: ‘Thy will be done on Earth as it is done in Heaven.’ That is to say, the Ego itself is to participate actively. There you have an example of the difference between superficial research and really thorough and conscientious research which pays attention to every detail. The findings of conscientious research are available, if only people will take account of them.

I have purposely read you these sentences which are quoted in Robertson's book. It has now been translated into German as a kind of modern gospel, in order that it may become widely known; for until now, a certain Professor² who has given a number of lectures on the subject of whether Jesus actually lived, was obliged to read it in English. The book has quickly become famous and the translation of it has meant that people need no longer make the effort to read it in a language not their own. It has been possible for a Professor at a German Academy to travel about lecturing on the question: ‘Did Jesus live?’—and then, on the basis of the facts I have mentioned, to give the answer that there is no documentary evidence whatever to prove that a personality such as Jesus ever lived. Robertson's book is also recommended as an excellent work of reference. Anthroposophists should, however, be warned that they will hear many other things from these investigations into New Testament texts, and I want still to speak of something particularly characteristic.

The book attempts to show that versions of the Lord's Prayer existed not only in the Talmud but also in chronicles of great antiquity. To strengthen the contention that the Lord's Prayer was a compilation of phrases previously in existence and needed no Christ to utter it for the first time, the book quotes certain lines from a prayer in the Chaldaic language, inscribed on tablets, invoking Merodach, the ancient Babylonian god. Listen to this passage which occurs in a footnote:³

‘In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for October, 189x, Mr. T. G. Pinches published for the first time a translation of a tablet found at Sippara in 1882, in which there occur, in an invocation of Merodach, the lines: “May the abundance of the world descend into thy (the city's) midst; may thy command be accomplished in time to come... may the evil spirit dwell outside of thee.” ’

And the learned scholar who was so deeply impressed by this passage, adds: ‘Here we have prayer norms, on the lines of the Lord's Prayer, dating perhaps from 4000 B.C.’

Can you detect any similarity between the Lord's Prayer and these sentences? Nevertheless the author of the book regards them as prayer-norms of which the Lord's Prayer is simply a copy! Such things are accepted to-day as the findings of genuine research.

There is another reason for bringing this to the notice of anthroposophists, for they must be able to reassure their consciences which might well be troubled by hearing that something or other has been established by external research, or by reading in newspapers or journals of the discovery of a tablet in Asia proving that the Lord's Prayer was already in existence 4,000 years before Christ. A very necessary question would be: Upon what basis has this been proved?—I am trying to show you the kind of foundations underlying many things that are said to-day to be ‘scientifically established’. Such examples are everywhere to be found and it is well for anthroposophists to realise the worthlessness of much that is so often held against Spiritual Science.—But we will proceed.

The all-essential point is that Christ Jesus inaugurated an evolutionary process based upon the human Ego, upon the retention of fill Ego-consciousness. The Initiation of the Ego—that was what He inaugurated. We can say that the Ego, the is the kernel of man's whole being, that all human nature to-day centres in the Ego, and that what was brought through the Christ Event to the Ego, and hence into the world, can also lay hold of, all the other members of man's being. But this, naturally, will have to take place in a very particular way and in keeping with the evolution of humanity.

These lectures show clearly what it is that can be developed. Properly speaking, knowledge of the surrounding physical-material world acquired by man not through the senses alone but also through the intellect using the brain as its instrument, has been possible only since times shortly preceding the Christ Event. Before then, men were endowed with a kind of clairvoyance. As you know from my lectures, this was the case from the early epochs of Atlantis onwards. But the faculty that was still universal and functioning in full strength during the first epochs of post-Atlantean evolution, gradually declined. Until the time of the Christ Event, however, there were still many human beings who in intermediate states of consciousness between waking life and sleep, were able to gaze into and participate in happenings of the spiritual world. Such participation did not merely mean that a man endowed with clairvoyance to a slight extent was able to assert: ‘I know that behind everything physical and material there is the spiritual, for I actually see it.’—This was not all. Human nature in ancient times was such that it was possible, without difficulty, to enable a man to partake in the happenings of the spiritual world, To-day it is very arduous, relatively speaking, to undergo the true esoteric training leading to the attainment of clairvoyance. Natural clairvoyance manifests to-day as a last remnant, a heritage from olden times, in somnambulistic and kindred conditions. These conditions cannot be regarded as regular in our age; but in the distant past they were normal and could be sublimated and enhanced by certain measures.—Something else, too, was connected with this.

To-day, people are not guided by true history and what they happen to believe decides what is or is not historical fact. But however strongly it may be doubted, the truth is that up to the time of Christ, processes of healing, for instance, could be made effective by inducing clairvoyance. In the present age, when humanity has descended more deeply into the the physical world, this is no longer possible. But in those earlier times it was still easy, by applying certain specific measures, to enable the soul to become clairvoyant and to penetrate into the spiritual world. And because the spiritual world is health-giving, in itself and sends its forces into thc physical world, it was possible to bring about healings in this way. In a case of illness certain processes were put in motion, enabling the person concerned to see into the spiritual world. And the streams of the spiritual world flowing down into his whole being had a curative effect. This indeed was the usual method of healing. (The ‘temple healing’ spoken of nowadays is sheer dilettantism.) The fact that souls have lost the clairvoyance that was universal in former times, signifies an advance in evolution. But the earlier clairvoyant condition could be so sublimated that healing forces streamed from the spiritual into the physical world and in the case of certain illnesses cures could be effected, We need not therefore be surprised when it is said by the Evangelists that as a result of the Christ Event not only those possessed of the old clairvoyance would be able to reach the spiritual world, but also those who, owing to the evolution of humanity, had lost contact with it.

In ancient times the riches of the spiritual world were revealed to men's clairvoyant vision. Now, however, it could be said: Evolution has progressed and those who can no longer gaze into the spiritual world have become poor in spirit, beggars for the spirit. But because, through Christ, the forces of the Kingdoms of Heaven can now flow into the Ego, even when the Ego is functioning on the physical plane, those who have lost the old clairvoyance and the riches of the spiritual world, they too can experience the spirit in themselves and be blessed. Hence the momentous words: From now onwards, not only those who through the old clairvoyance are rich in the things of the spirit are blessed; but those too who are beggars for the spirit, are blessed; for when the path has been opened for them by Christ the Kingdoms, of Heaven flow into their Ego.

In earlier times the nature of the human physical organism was such that even in the normal state the soul was able to some extent to emerge from the body; this meant that a man became clairvoyant, rich in the treasures of the spirit. The densification of the physical body—for which, admittedly there can be no anatomical proof—meant that man could no longer be rich in the things of the spiritual world, of the Kingdoms of Heaven. In describing existing conditions, one would have to say: Man has become a beggar for the spirit; but the powers brought down by Christ enable him to experience within him-self the Kingdoms of Heaven.—That, then, is what might be said in reference to the processes of the physical body.

If it were a matter of describing what actually took place in man as an Ego-being, one would have to show how each of his members could be blessed inwardly, in a new way. The new truth relating to the physical body is expressed in the words: Blessed are they who are beggars for the spirit; for within themselves they will find the Kingdoms of Heaven.

In regard to the etheric body, this could be said: In the etheric body lies the principle of suffering. Only a living being can suffer as the result of injury to the etheric body—an astral body must, of course, be there as well—but the seat of the suffering must nevertheless be looked for in the etheric body. To express the new truth applying to healings brought about in earlier times through forces streaming from the spiritual world, one would have to say: Those who suffer can henceforth find consolation not only by passing out of their bodies and thus being linked with the spiritual world as was formerly the case; if they now establish a different relationship with the world they can find consolation within themselves, because through Christ a new force has been imparted to the etheric body. Hence concerning the etheric body it could be said: Those who suffer can now be blessed not only through reaching a spiritual world and in a clairvoyant condition allowing the forces of that world to stream upon them; now, if they can find the path to Christ, to the new truth, they can find within themselves consolation for all suffering.

And what would have to be said about the astral body? In former times, when a man was striving to subdue the emotions, passions and egoistic impulses of his astral body, he turned his gaze to higher spheres, pleading that strength might be vouchsafed to him from the Kingdoms of Heaven; through certain measures to which he was then subjected, the harmful instincts of his astral body were quelled. But now the time had come when through Christ's Deed he was able to receive into his Ego the power to curb and tame the passions and emotions of his astral body. The new truth relating to the astral body would therefore be expressed as follows: Blessed are those who have become meek through the power of their own Ego; for it is they who will inherit the Earth! This third Beatitude is indeed profound. Let us study it in the light of what we have learnt from Spiritual Science.—The astral body was incorporated into human nature during the Old Moon period of evolution. The Luciferic beings who had gained influence over man, established themselves in his astral body, and in consequence of this he could not, at the beginning, hope to reach his highest earthly goal. As we know, the Luciferic beings had remained at the Old Moon stage and prevented man from progressing in the right way along his path of development. But now that Christ had come down to the Earth and the Ego gould be filled with His power, it was possible for man to fulfil the essential principle of Earth-existence, inasmuch as he could now find within himself the power to curb the astral body and expel the Luciferic influences. Hence it could be said: He who curbs his astral body, he whose own inner strength keeps him from being moved to anger without the consent of his Ego, he who is inwardly serene and at the same time strong enough to keep his astral body in check—such a man will fulfil the purpose of Earth-evolution. Infinite light is thus shed by Spiritual Science on the third Beatitude.

How will man succeed in bringing about the sublimation and beatification of the other members of his nature through the Christ-power within him? He will succeed if his soul and body alike are laid hold of worthily by the power of the Ego. Concerning the Sentient Soul we can say : If a man desires to experience the Christ within himself, he must develop in his Sentient Soul a longing as strong as the instinctive longing he otherwise feels in his body and calls hunger and thirst. He must be capable of thirsting after the things of the soul with the same intensity as the body hungers and thirsts for food and drink. What man can develop through the Christ-power within him has always been referred to as ‘thirst after righteousness’. And when he fills his Sentient Soul with the Christ-power, he can find within himself the possibility of satisfying his thirst after righteousness.

The fifth Beatitude, as might be expected, is especially note-worthy, for it concerns the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. Anyone who has studied the book Occult Science, or Theosophy, and has also followed what has been said for years in lectures, knows that the three members of the human soul—Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul and Spiritual Soul (Consciousness-Soul) are held together by the Ego is present in the Sentient Soul in a dull condition; in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul it lights up and only then does man become wholly and completely man. Whereas in the lower members of his being, in the Sentient Soul too, he is ruled by divine-spiritual Powers, he becomes a self-dependent being in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. Here the Ego flashes up and is active. Therefore when the Intellectual or Mind-Soul has received into itself the CHrist-power, this cannot be expressed in the same way as in the case of the lower members of human nature. In the lower members—physical body, etheric body, astral body and Sentient Soul too—man is connected with certain divine Beings who penetrate into these members, and whatever qualities he develops there are carried up again to these divine Beings. But whatever evolves in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul will be an essentially human attribute when it develops the Christ-quality. When a man begins to be conscious of the working of the Intellectual Soul, this makes him less and less dependent upon the divine-spiritual Powers around him. When he takes the Christ-power into himself he can unfold in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul those qualities which pass like to like, which are not besought from Heaven but which go forth from and return again to the same being. We must therefore feel that something streams from the qualities of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and that something of a like character a truly wonderful way the fifth Beatitude points to this very quality. The wording here differs from that of all the other Beatitudes, and although the various translations are not particularly good, they have not been able entirely to conceal the essential point.—Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.'‘What streams forth streams back again—these words convey the true meaning when understood in the light of Spiritual Science.

With the sixth Beatitude, relating to the Spiritual Soul, we come to that principle in man in which the real nature of the the Ego, comes fully into expression; ascent to the spiritual world can now take a new form. As we know, the Intellectual or Mind-Soul came to active expression in the epoch when Christ appeared. We are living now in the epoch when the Spiritual Soul must come to expression and when man is to rise again to the spiritual world. Whereas consciousness of self first lights up in man in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, in the Spiritual or Consciousness-Soul his ‘I’ unfolds to the -full extent and now ascends again into the spiritual world. A man who takes the Christ-power into himself will find the way to his God when he pours his ‘I’ into the Spiritual Soul. In experiencing Christ in his Ego at the level of the Spiritual Soul, he will find his God.—Now it has been said that the expression of the Ego in the physical body is the blood; the blood has its centre in the heart. Therefore the sixth Beatitude will have to indicate that through the quality imparted to the blood and to the heart, the Ego can experience God. What are the words? ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.’ Again this is not an entirely adequate translation but it suffices.

Spiritual Science sheds light upon the whole structure of these wonderful words spoken by Christ Jesus to his intimate disciples after the Temptation. The further Beatitudes relate to the development of the higher members of man's being: Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man. Therefore the words do no more than indicate what man will experience in the future and what only a few chosen ones are able to experience at the present time.

The seventh Beatitude relates to the Spirit-Self : Blessed are they who draw to themselves the Spirit-Self as the first purely spiritual member of their being; for they will be called the children of God.—The first member of the higher triad has entered into them. They have received the Divine into themselves and have become an outward expression of the God-head.

But it is now clearly shown that only chosen ones, only those who fully understand what the future is to humanity as a whole can succeed in unfolding the Life-Spirit. What men of the future, having received Christ into themselves in the fullest sense, will call the ‘Life-Spirit’ is now within the reach of a few individuals only. But because they are chosen individuals, the others are unable to understand them and they are persecuted. With reference, therefore, to those who are persecuted because as individuals they represent a stage that belongs only to the future, the words are uttered: Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for in themselves they find the Kingdoms of Heaven.

And the last Beatitude concerns the closest, most intimate disciples only; it refers to the ninth member of Man's being: Spirit-Man.—‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you... for my sake.’

And so these wonderful utterances relating to the nine members of man's being show how the when filled with Christ, works in the different members and brings them blessedness. In the verses following the account of the Temptation, the Gospel of St. Matthew expresses with majestic grandeur the effect of the Christ-power in the ninefold nature of man, first in the present and then in the immediate future, when those into whom the Spirit-Self already shines are called ‘children of God’—although of these there are only a few specially blessed ones. What is so wonderful is that the indications are quite definite when concerned with members of man's being that have already developed, but become indefinite in the later utterances which relate to the distant future.

But once again we have an example of superficial scholar-ship. Suppose someone were investigating the question of whether similar utterances are also to be found elsewhere and whether the Evangelists might have strung them together from other sources. And suppose this investigator had no notion of the all-important point—that the Beatitudes apply to the Christ-filled Ego! Failing to notice the wonderful enhancement indicated in the utterances, he might well quote the following—and indeed two or three pages later in the book already mentioned,⁴ in a chapter entitled ‘The Beatitudes’, reference is made to an ‘Enoch’—who is not the usual (Ethiopic) Enoch—and nine so-called ‘Beatitudes’ are cited. The author admits that the original record can be assigned to the first period of the Christian era but he considers that the utterances we have characterized as being so profound could have been copied from the following nine 'Beatitudes’ of the 'Slavonic' Enoch:⁵

1. Blessed is he who fears the name of the Lord, and serves continually before his face.

2. Blessed is he who executes a just judgment, not for the sake of recompense, but for the sake of righteousness, expecting nothing in return: a sincere judgment shall afterwards come to him.

3. Blessed is he who clothes the naked with a garment, and gives his bread to the hungry.

4. Blessed is he who gives a. just judgment for the orphan and the widow, and assists every one who is wronged.

5. Blessed is he who turns from the unstable path of this vain world, and walks by the righteous path which leads to eternal life,

6. Blessed is he who sows just seed; he shall reap sevenfold.

7. Blessed is he in whom is the truth, that he may speak the truth to his neighbour.

8. Blessed is he who has love upon his lips, and tenderness in his heart.

9. Blessed is he who understands every word of the Lord, and glorifies the Lord God.

Certainly there is beauty in these sayings. But when you study their whole construction and realise that they simply set forth a few principles suitable for any epoch but not specifically for the one of drastic transformation due to the inauguration of the power of the ‘I’—then, if you still think it possible to place these Slavonic sayings on a par with the Beatitudes of St. Matthew, you will not be far removed from those who make superficial comparisons between the various religions of mankind and whenever they come across similarities at once insist that there is uniformity, ignoring what is of essential importance.

To understand these things is to realise that human evolution progresses, that humanity advances from stage to stage, and that a man is not born in a new physical body in a later millennium in order to repeat experiences already undergone, but to experience in what respects humanity has advanced in the intervening time. That is the purpose alike of history and of human evolution. And of this the Gospel of St. Matthew speaks on every page!

• 1. See p. 417, in Christianity and Mythology, by John M. Robertson. Second edition. First published in 1900 by Watts & Co. London. It is stated that this compilation was made more than two centuries ago by the Rev. John Gregorie, from the Jewish Euchologues.
• 2. Dr. Arthur Drews.
• 3. Op. cit. pp. 418-
• 4. Christianity and Mythology, p. 422.
• 5. From the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, trans. from the Slavonic by W. R. Morfill, and edited, with introd. notes, by R. H. Charles. (Clarendon Press, 1896).

It is perhaps important and especially a propos where the kind of considerations now in point are concerned, to look back on many things connected in former times with some particular spiritual stream. For you have seen that it is a question of spiritual events that lie at the basis of the physical world, making it necessary at present for man to take a new standpoint in relation to the whole understanding of his connection with the world and with the rest of mankind. Yesterday we pointed out how much must be differently understood which, apparently well founded, shines forth here and there into the spiritual life of mankind. You must really be clear, my dear friends, that when impulses founded in this way are taken seriously then, as life goes at the present time, opposition arises against this seriousness and against these impulses generally, the opposition of hate, the opposition of envy, of fear, which proceed from the pettiness of men and so on. Only a deep understanding of things can help to clear away the many hindrances to which the adherent of such a spiritual revolution is exposed. For this deep understanding is well adapted to strengthen the soul, so that this soul is a match for much that always makes itself felt precisely in opposition to the most earnest endeavours in world activity. And so we wish today to enlarge in many ways upon what was said yesterday.

I pointed out yesterday how man, just by standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, can be absolutely objective towards other spiritual streams, how he certainly has no need to misjudge other spiritual streams. From this standpoint I said that on certain points, compared with many of the statements made today by philosophers and theologians outside the Church, through their training the representatives of the Catholic clergy are superior. Just at present we live at a time in which everyone wishing to take the questions concerning a world-conception seriously should come to an understanding about these things. The different currents of world-conception and the social currents of the present day both require this. Without very fundamental observation, the temptations arising from the scholarly approach cannot be properly fathomed, cannot be recognised in their actual lack of significance in the light of the greater demands of the present. The temptation to fall in with the objections of scholarly opponents of the endeavours of Spiritual scientists today is not to be underrated. It is true that if men have sufficient power of discriminations if they would bestir themselves to go into the facts concerning the basis of Spiritual Science, the broad base on which it stands, they would be less exposed to this temptation. But such power of discrimination is rare. What as Spiritual Science, according to how we understand it, wishes to join in with the world current accounts for many kinds of attacks, including those, for example. from the standpoint of the Catholic faith. It is necessary to grasp such things at this time because in the chaos that is about to break upon us, unfortunately far too little appreciated, far too little heeded by men—in this chaos many different things of a disconcerting nature will proceed from what is contained in the Catholic doctrine.

Now today I should like to make you familiar with the kind of judgment about some particular spiritual scientist that an orthodox Catholic may pronounce if he has reason to assume this spiritual scientist to be an unintelligent reader or listener. One of the most common objections against what we here mean by Spiritual Science is its being pantheistic. One of the chief objections made, for example, in the articles by the Jesuit, Zimmermann, in the publication “Voices of the Time” is this—that Spiritual Science is Pantheism.

You know how often I have spoken about this point. You know how I have said that the only wad of overcoming this commonplace Pantheism, so dominant in many places today, is to put in its place the concrete spiritual world of which Spiritual Science speaks. It is naturally not intended, on the part of those from whom the objections come, to go deeply into the truth; taking into account all the prejudice belonging to certain religious partisanship, their efforts go much more in the direction of bringing forward what has a definite suggestive or hypnotic effect. Pantheism is indeed the view that in everything spread out in Nature, spread out anywhere in the phenomenal world, there lives the divine, that, in a way, nature herself is to be looked upon as direct revelation of the divine. It is just this which I have always attacked—this watered-down Pantheism that is forever talking of how behind the outspread world of phenomena there is spirit, spirit, spirit. I have always called your attention to how this is much the same as refusing on the physical plane to recognise tulips, roses or lilies as anything but plants, plants, plants. Spiritual Science goes straight to the individual, concrete spiritual beings and does not speak in the pantheistic general may about the spirit. Another characteristic of Pantheism lies in saying: Pantheism has no wish to separate outer nature from the divine spiritual but would mingle both together. Now, my dear friends, one must indeed be a Jesuit to make it appear that it is believed where the actual ranks of the beings of the higher hierarchies are spoken of in this way as being individualised among themselves and having a personal and superpersonal existence in themselves—it is believed that there can be any question of the mingling of this hierarchical world as a whole with external nature. Whoever can think in accordance with reality will be unable to make anything at all of the accusation of Pantheism, where such a description of the world of the hierarchies, and the connection of the individual beings of the hierarchies with nature, is concerned.

There is a further thing that is quite unique and is given particular prominence in the articles from “Voices of the Time”, namely, that in sir Spiritual Science it is said—and this is supposed to be heretical in the Catholic churd—that the divine is living in man's soul, that the soul of man is itself a drop in the ocean of this divine. Such and similar utterances are collected there and established as heresies within the Catholic confession.

Thus it is shown how the teaching that a divinity should live immediately in the soul is heretical and to be condemned. Now faced with this a reasonable man might say: There is no need for you to draw my attention to such foolishness. But, my dear friends, that is not important, that is not the question. But it must be a matter of these things playing a real part in the world, that where men would deceive themselves these things should play a really powerful part, and that we must already be alive to such things. But they are connected with something besides. And now we will turn our attention from any particular attack that has been made. Let us imagine a man, a Jesuit, who has either been made apathetic where his own reflections are concerned or consciously lives in them—what I mean is, he knows that for himself he has no need to reflect about things but has only to judge the faithful according to the sense of the officially recognised creed. For once we will look at the kind of pronouncements such a man can make about the path of Spiritual Science. I an simply telling you here the average—I should not like to say opinion for opinion does not meet the case, but average utterance of an official representative of the Roman Catholic Church about the path of Spiritual Science, as this would come from a modern believer.

He would perhaps say: The Catholic Christian would not dare take such a path as the one recommended by Spiritual Science for gaining insight into the supereensible. For all the Church Fathers and every exponent of Church doctrine—the cleric of today would perhaps say—condemn such a path. By such a path man is supposed to acquire the special faculty of rising to the supersensible world. That, however, is heresy, that should never be an aim at all. All that may be striven for by an orthodox Catholic is what their teachers of religious doctrine hold to be the legitimate vision. This 'legitimate vision' is that the present day hall-marked cleric of Rome considers valid. What does ne understand by it?

You will be able to form a concept of what he understands by it when you distinguish between two kinds of gifts which, in the sense of the orthodox Catholic Church, man can receive as a believing Catholic. The one kind of gift is the so-called gratiae grate detae, what is given through grace, the supernatural gifts of grace, one might say the Greek charisms. The other gifts are those which may be called the universal human gifts. The gifts that ae out of the ordinary, the charisms are bestowed by God in a way that is out of the ordinary upon men who are out of the ordinary. The Maid of Orleans would perhaps be given as an example. These gifts cannot be striven for, they are bestowed as special gifts of grace upon outstanding men and may not be striven after, accouding to the dictates of the Church. What may be striven for, however, is a certain enhancement of the general life of the soul which does not bring men to any extra-ordinary faculty but to a raising og the faculties that are universal and human. Such a raising of universal human faculties has nevertheless the effect—so says the Roman Catholic Church today of making man capable of being permeated with the Holy Spirit.

Therefore this is what we say: The ordinary mortal thinks something, feels something or does something. According to the dictates of the Church, according to the dictates of the State, he has in duty bound to do these things in a certain ways with his ordinary mortal reflection he can endeavour to perform his action in accordance with the Church, in accordance with the State: in the opinion of the Church this is the same as being in accordance with God. He may also notice, however, if in other things he is an ordinary Catholic Christian, that the Holy Ghost often intervenes in his acting, thinking, feeling, and that because the Holy Ghost is working in him the practice of certain virtues becomes easy which otherwise is difficult. This, however, may not be striven for in such a way that man would go beyond the ordinary point of human endeavour, and develop special faculties for penetrating to the supersensible worlds all striving of such a kind is reprehensible.

Now here I have described the objections an orthodox, hallmarked, Roman Catholic cleric would make to what is found, for example, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. He would say: man strives for special faculties that would place him in a position to unite himself in a certain way with the spiritual world. But he may not do this. He must remain perfectly passive until he notices that in his mind and soul there enter impulses of the Holy Spirit. He may not bring about ax qualitative change in his behaviour, only an enhancement, as it were, a facility in becoming virtuous, a facility in other faculties exercised ter man on the external physical plane.

You can read this kind of thing today not only against our Sairitual Science but against all man-made endeavours towards producing a human being who sees a spiritual world ground him just as rhynical men with his physical senses, sees around him a physical world. This is familiar even among those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of Christian belief dictated by Rome. And it in widely recognised that anyone thinking differently about the things I have just been describing to you, is a heretic. In giving such a description it must alters be made clear that these things still have tremendous influence today upon millions of human beings. We must not be so egoistic as to think that because one has ceased to believe in thaw oneself (and this too is only a matter of belief) there is no further need to worry. This is exactly what is such a pity today, particularly where the social movement is in question, men are so egoistic that they look only to the needs of their own soul and have no wish to extend their gaze to what unites men, to what is permeating millions and millions of men, as a drivinfr impulse which, when it then breaks forth, can appear in the font we nee things now arising in the word, Today it is necessary to be quite clear about the sources of these things and the necessary attitude to take towards the things themselves.

Now these clerics stamped with the mark of Rome as a rule appeal to the Fathers of the Church. They go back to the Church Fathers of earlier centuries and from their sayings take what they believe to be in harmony with all I have just described. Now, naturally, I cannot read out to you for hours at a time the doctrines of the Church Fathers; I should like, however, to draw your attention to something in this direction, namely, the attitude to these things that can be taken by man in this age of the consciousness soul which began with the fifteenth century.

First, therefore, we must keep in mind that the way into the spiritual world, as Spiritual Science understands it, is held to be heretical; so says the modern cleric recognised by orthodox Rome. In the second place we have to remember the accusation against Spiritual Science—that it speaks oft man being able to partake of the divine; this also is heretical, as once more stated today by the Catholic cleric approved by Rome.

Let us be willing to look for once rather more closely at what an outwardly—not inwardly as we shall soon see—an outwardly well-reputed Church Father, outwardly well-reputed also by Rome, says about a matter like the vision of which I have previously given you a description. John of the Cross,¹ for example, speaks about what vision should be for orthodox Catholic Christians who through this vision my be said to get beyond the mere general belief of the Church and rise to a kind of higher perception of the divinity pulsing through the world. The Catholic Church today allows a man through vision to get beyond purely general belief. But it forbids him to get as far as superphysical faculties, that is, faculties leading into the super-physical world in the same way as external senses lead into the world of the senses. Now St. John of the Cross says: “The time has come (he is referring to the time of vision) when the reflection and contemplation undertaken previously by the ordinary powers of the soul should gradually cease, when the soul sees itself bereft of its former enjoyments and palpable delights.”

Thus St. John of the Cross admits the state in which ordinary reflection is silenced, the reflection by which man comes to terms with the things of the physical plane that are perceived by the senses and understood by the intellect. He admits, therefore, that man deprives himself ordinary contemplation which the soul experiences in such contemplation and in such relation to external nature ceases. This he admits.

Condemned to a state of barrenness and aridity (he goes on to say) the soul can no longer deliberate by means of the intellect.

Thus, by shutting off his senses, by stopping the activity of his intellect, (and this is necessary for the attainment of vision) man with his soul comes to a kind of barrenness and aridity. By this he really comes to that participation in the divine, held by St. John of the Cross to be permissible. When therefore the soul no longer reflects with the intellect or even finds any physical support, then the senses are no longer enriched. The spirit has the advantage without receiving anything from the senses. It can thus be seen that in this state, God is the principal agent.

Now let us go minutely into this matter. St. John of the Cross says: Man can reflect, he can take up outer perceptions through his senses, the soul can become passive, the soul of itself does nothing further. Thereby God becomes the principal agent in the soul. He Himself instructs the soul and gives it suitable knowledge. In visions he presents the soul with wholly spiritual possessions, more particularly knowledge and love of God, without the soul having to reflect or enter upon other exercises which are no more possible to it than formerly.

Take these words of the canonised John of the Cross, one who is still recognised today in Rome as an orthodox Father of the Church. Take these words first in relation to the accusation of Pantheism recently made against Spiritual Science for having spoken, for example, of the life of soul as being like a drop in the ocean of the divine, therefore having itself a divine nature, which today according to preaching and believing clerics is heresy. But, my dear friends, St. John of the Cross describes the possibility of coming to a passive condition of the soul when reflection and sense perception are shut off and God is the chief agent, when, in his own words, God presents the soul during vision with wholly spiritual benefits Himself, instructing the soul, imparting to it an infusion of wisdom.

Now I ask you: What sense have these words if it is said further that the human soul is never brought into a real connection with the divine Being? What does the statement mean that God Himself is alone active in the soul, when it is supposed to be heretical to speak of men coming into direct, conscious connection with God? When anyone says: the soul is related to the sum of the divine-spiritual like a drop in the ocean that is of the same nature an the water of the ocean as a whole—should this be understood as unpermitted Pantheism if truth held good, and when at the same time it is recognised, for example, that an orthodox Father of the Church, St. John of the Cross, admits the possibility of God Himself taking over the chief activity in the soul? To recognise how far truth is the governing factor in official circles you must keep consciously in your soul the following fact—that, at the sane time, such masters are appealed to as St. John of the Cross who really teaches Pantheism (if one is to call it Pantheism) in a far more marked way than Spiritual Science. But this is held to be heresy! So, what is one to do? St. John of the Cross is allowed to pass for a Church Father of authority, and people are deceived by being told that Pantheism is forbidden. But this means further that nobody may assert it to be heretical if it is said: God is so directly present in the soul that the human soul can be conscious of this!

No, my dear friends, people today should not be loose in their thought; they dare not think loosely if still greater misfortune is not to befall mankind. Today men should be able consciously to keep the fact before them that it is possible officially to convey this kind of misrepresentation of the truth throughout the world.

Another utterance of St. John of the Cross is: ”Priceless are the inner benefits imprinted by this silent vision into the soul when it is unconscious. In short they are nothing but the extraordinarily tender and most mysterious anointing by the Holy Ghost who, as he is God, acts as God.”

“The Holy Ghost acts as God immediately in the soul,” says St. John of the Cross (this was Catholic doctrine at the time of John of the Cross before the age of the consciousness soul) “And works upon, and inundates the soul in secret with such a measure of riches, gifts and graces that it is beyond description.”

And now I would ask you: what are we supposed to understand when one of those who write about heresy today says it is heretical to assert that God is identical with the human soul!

This is the position of things. But men are so little awake that they pay no attention today to how the truth is 'managed'. in the final analysis it rests on man having troubled so little about what has been given out as truth in the world, that so fearful a catastrophe should have fallen upon it. And it rests on this also that truth can be hated in the way it is still hated at present by certain people.

Today in Rome the approved clerics take particular pains constantly to emphasise that no difference should be said to exist between the ordinary faculties the faithful develop by belief, and the enhancement of belief that is expressed in vision. No difference is supposed to exist or at the most a difference of degree; for when a real difference is striven for, this is heretical. But St. John of the Cross says: “The difference consists in man seeing only darkly through belief, whereas with perception of the soul theveils are removed from Him”. (He means God). At the time when St. John of the Cross wrote these things down, before the age of the consciousness soul, this was Catholic doctrine. What today holds sway as Catholicism where these things are concerned is only the shadow and no longer the light. It is really very beautiful how John of the Cross describes for that age the mystical path of Knowledge, the way into the tensible. He says: “The narrow portal is the night of the senses. To pass through it, the soul has to get free from itself and cast its shell.” At that time these things were said not in the way that Rome speaks, but rather as Spiritual Science speaks. Spiritual Science is the real continuation of the noble strivings to enter the spiritual world as they appear in John of the Cross. But Spiritual Science is the continuation suited for the present age: it reckons with the progress of mankind

The narrow portal is the night of the senses. To go through it the soul must become free of itself and cast its shell. And by then taking beliefs which has nothing to do with the senses, for its guide, the soul travels along the narrow path to the second night—the night of the spirit.

And very beautiful is the description by St. John of the Cross of the union with the divine-spiritual: “The union is accomplished when the two wills, namely, the will of the soul and the divine will, become one.”

It could not be more clearly expressed that a divine will exists holding sway over the world, and a will belonging to the soul, both of which merge in vision. But today that is said to be heresy. Truth would be honestly upheld were it said: Today St. John of the Cross is no longer a saint but a heretic. This is what the cleric of Rome would be bound by duty to say if he wished really to uphold his assertions.

Thus, St. John of the Cross says that union is brought about by the two wills, that of the soul and the divine will, becoming uniform, which means, when there is nothing in the one will that is opposed by the other.

But then in the sphere of the orthodox Roman Catholic clericalism it is definitely intended that the path of individual knowledge should be barred to the mere believers and also to the bumbler clerics. Today, therefore, while misrepresenting people like John of the Cross, people such as John of the Cross are constantly having attention drawn to them. It is pointed out that John of the Cross would at that time have only allowed vision to be resorted to if men first received three signs. The first of these signs by which the soul felt itself summoned to vision, that is, to mystical vision, would be inability to contemplate and to make use of imaginative powers, antipathy towards outer contemplation. Thus when the soul feels loath to receive sense-perceptions and to reflect, the time has arrived when it should give itself up passively to the will of God.

The second sign would be perceiving that one no longer desired to employ the imaginative power of the senses in special outer and inner imaginations. Thus the first sign is becoming tired, the second is ceasing to have desire. The third inner sign would be the sensation of most intimate joy felt by the soul in being alone, therefore without sense-perceptions and reflection, but with attention focussed purely on the divine.

Now, my dear friends, you will not read what is in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds intelligently without saying to yourself something which it is true, is modified to suit the time, namely: with those three signs I can now first find myself completely in harmony. There is absolutely nothing against the three signs. One has only to meet them with understanding in accordance with existing conditions. Let us then consider the three signs, which John of the Cross sets up as signs on receiving which the soul may turn to mystical vision, and thus to the path into the spiritual supersensible world.

The first sign would be the inability to contemplate and use one's imaginative power, reluctance towards contemplation. We must remember how these words were written before the age of the consciousness soul was fully established. Than when the age of the consciousness soul is established man turns his gaze upon nature as she is presented to him by modern science. But the historical development of mankind must still be reckoned with. We have to reckon that the men around St. John of the Cross were not soaked and steeped in the conceptions that shower in all directions out of modern natural science. St. John of the Cross had only those about him who led a life of devotion to the Catholic Faith, who took their world outlook from this Catholic Faith and were preached to from the pulpits of Catholic Churches. One has to speak differently to such men from how one speaks in the twentieth century to men soaked through by scientific conceptions. For what does it actually mean to be permeated by a scientific outlook? Whether they admit it or not all men are that nowadays down to the last peasant in the last cottage, if he is not just an illiterate, and even illiterates are permeated by scientific conceptions in the form of their thought. Anyone who looks at the world today in the way it must be looked at in the sense of the modern world, if he has a living need for knowledge must, because scientific conceptions inform him only about what is dead, must come to see that scientific observations make it impossible for him to be satisfied with them. There arises exactly what St. John of the Cross describes as the first sign. This sign is produced by the scientific kind of conception. At the time he wrote it was granted to few, today it is granted to all who even begin to think. We must take note of this difference. Were St. John of the Cross to write today he would say: Certainly at that time to those men who felt incapable of observing things outwardly and of setting the imaginative power in movement, mystic vision had to be recommended. Today everyone given up to unprofitable conceptions of science, at a definite point of time becomes capable of abandoning these conceptions, particularly when in their souls they have a longing to find some kind of path to the divine-spiritual. St. John of the Cross spoke to very few candidates; today all thinking men are candidates. This exactly represents the progress of mankind. Thus when man who lives in the scientific age feels this longing today, it is the fulfilment of what St. John of the Cross accepted as the granting of the sign.

The second sign is man's perceiving that he no longer desires to use the imaginative power of the senses for special outer or inner imaginations. My dear friends, the moment science can do no more than afford man a view, a perception, of how he has developed from what is animal, the soul in reality begins to perceive that the desire has flown simply to observe in the outer world what the senses reveal. For these reveal that man has descended from the animals; one no longer has any desire in that direction. And bemuse the time has come—formerly only for the few, now for all thinking men—in the actual sense of John of the Cross one turns to what is the idea behind evolution, that is, one turns to the path into the spiritual world.

The third sign is the experience of joy in the depths of the sea en feeling itself alone in its contemplation of God. Now this inward joy will certainly be felt, as soon as they find their way into the supersensible world, hy all who in this scientific age have absorbed only those concepts offered them by science.

Once again we are faced by the fact, the significant fact, that it is just our Spiritual Science of today that so thoroughly fulfils what, for his time and in his sense, was demanded by such a man as John of the Cross.

The stream of development flows on and today fulfilment has a different appearance from What it then had. There are other contributing factors. whoever looks today with an honest sensefor truth at the evolution of mankind, will say to himself: Because we have entered upon the scientific age, the feeling for super-sensible knowledge must be kept alive in men. Such demands as those of John of the Cross will be fulfilled without further adoif man treads the path marked out, for example, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. If he takes this way there will be revealed to him not what was revealed at the time when St. John of the Cross was writing, but there will be revealed to man what lies today on the path of human evolution. At this point we can no longer speak in the sense of pure positivist Christianityas did St. John of the Cross, for the serious fact lies before us, referred to both yesterday and many times previously that today in a certain respect man either consciously or unconsciously passes by the Guardian of the Threshold. There he comes to recognise that he must speak not only of a single divinity but of the divine hierarchies. There he comes to know how Ahriman and Lucifer are to be contrasted with the divine hierarchies. But, my dear friends, just as the Catholic Church wanted to hold men back from accepting the Copernican view until the year 1827, in a similar way it will want to keep men from the supersensible knowledge that is a necessity for our times. Why in this? It is because it does not wish men to be awake to what is streaming into the evolution of mankind from spiritual heights.

It is true that there may be some and there are some who with a certain honesty say the following: Man today is not prepared to approach directly with his soul what comes from the spiritual world; this only does him harm. Then when he meets the Guardian of the Threshold he will not be able to distinguish illusion from reality. Therefore let us give him a grizzly picture of setting out on the spiritual path so that he runs no risk. - Such people do not reckon with the necessities of the age, they reckon with a narrow, limited conception, but it is possible that they are sincere. The majority, however, of those who say things such as: “One dare not set out today on the path to supersensible knowledge” mean something else. From various directions a certain feeling of fear towards truth holds the truth back from flowing in. This feeling of fear, this anxious feeling, is present in the official upholders of widely extended religions; it is also prevalent in certain societies of Freemseons and similar brotherhoods. I have already drawn attention to this from another point of view.² There are, too, within these Societies some people who are honest from their point of view, but the force with which they hold up the progress of mankind is terribly strong. The following calls for attention. There are those, particularly in the higher grades of these Orders, who say: Man as a rule is not sufficiently mature to come to an immediate knowledge of the spiritual world, therefore he should be held back from direct entrance into the spiritual world. It is a forbidden thing to enter and man shold only be permitted to get as far as the practice of ceremonies prescribed in certain ancient rituals. He should be referred to all manner of symbols which do not lead him directly into the spiritual world but which as far as possible would indeed be symbols of great antiquity. I have told you that in this respect certain Masonic Orders, shall we say, hold to what is in contrast to the dearest impulse of most of the ladies. Most ladies you must know are young, most masonic societies would like to be as old as possible! Where possible, very ancient ritual is indicated or very ancient traditions. Not always, but very frequently it has an untrue intention, but sometimes it is honestly meant when it is said Rituals that are very old can do no harm when carried out by men today, for they are obsolete, they have become rigid, they are merely the shadows of what they have been. Besides, human souls have lived so long with rituals, with their symbols mid what these represent, that they have became habituated to them and will no longer receive shock from the impression of an immediately experienced truth. If people are made acquainted with what is thoroughly old, what still exists only as a shadow, they will be lass exposed to danger. All these things may be argued, my dear friends, but they have to collapse in face of the necessity belonging to this turning point of time. The evil that would come were man to throw back the breaking wave of the spiritual tide, would be greater than all the rest of evil beside. Our real duty in face of all those cosmic spirits who have to do with the evolution of mankind, is to make man realise what, simply throw present cosmic lrws in any case in the unconscious, is taking place in the soul of every man today. In the age of the consciousness soul it is an absolute necessity to call this up into consciousness. It is necessary, also, where what is arising with such power in social dew ads is concerned, that that is actually present in the soul of ran should be recognised. For, externally, existence becomes ever more like a mask, and elmsys merely phenomenal. The possibility absolutely exists for man to have such experience in his soul that he posses by the Guardian of the Threshold; but because of the materialism of the time his consciousness of this passing will be suppressed. What is suppressed, however, what is not conscious, not for that reason non-existent! In spite of all, it is there. Any man passes by the Guardian, but by reason of present education he suppresses this. What it then represents can be something quite different. It may be the deeds of Lenin, it may be the deeds or a member of some kind of Spartacus League. Heed must be paid today to the fact that we have arrived at the age when through the delusive impulses of materialism the passing through certain spiritual impulses may be outwardly masked in a way that is very highly dangerous to mankind.

The times are serious. But action will be in accordance with this seriousness if in man the honest will is only there to interpret with his sound human understanding that can be brought from the spiritual world through a real Science of the Spirit.

• 1. San Juan de la Cruz, born 1542, died 1591, studied under the
  Jesuits in Medina del Campo, became Abbot of the Carmelite Monastay at Menrezo about 1568; successfully defended himself on an indictment brought against him by the Inquisition, and founded the Monastery of Ban= in lam In 1581 the Order of the Carmelites hauled aver to his the direction of their pal Monastery at
  Granada. The Curia appointed him as Pro al Vicar of
  We-UM in lam, and in 1566 as Definitor. Through the discipline of his Order he acquired enemies vho, by their influmea vg Philip II, sumeoded in eausing, John of thi Woos to be co
  the Monastery of Ubede. In 1675 Benedict XIII canonised the "ecstatic Doctor."
• 2. See a XLVII, Leettlres 8 and 9.

My dear friends! Up to now I've been introducing my lectures by indicating what the Anthroposophic path is like, implementing my lectures out of Anthroposophy in order to lead towards the initiation of the renewal of religious life, out of the wishes present in the souls of contemporaries.

Naturally first of all it is necessary to look more closely at what would be needed for the actual renewal of religious life. I would like to, in order to bring this into a clearer light, still today refer to the relationship, not of religion to Anthroposophy but the reverse, that of Anthroposophy to religion; but I have to say in advance, my dear friends, it is necessary, if we want to understand one another here, for a clear awareness of the seriousness of the relevant question in relation to its meaning in world history. If someone in a small circle sees some or other deficiency, finds this or that imperfection and is not able to perceive its relationship in our world's entire evolution, they will not quite rightly develop in their heart, or have a sense to develop, what is actually needed at present.

We live in a time where humanity has been deeply shaken and with all the means at its disposal to do something, with all these means humanity has actually failed to move forward. As a result I particularly want to be clear that I believe, even if it perhaps doesn't appear as pertinently—let me quite sincerely and honestly express my opinion on this matter—that I believe the rift between those who have lived for a longer time in pastoral work and those younger ones who stand before this need today, and only enter it today, is far greater. Even though it might not yet be felt so strongly, yet it is still there, and it will appear ever more clearly; I believe that for many the question between older and younger people, if I might express it this way, is to experience its formulation very differently. It seems to me that for the younger ones the formulation as we saw it yesterday, appears no longer to carry the same weight; it has already been dismissed. Let's be quite honest with ourselves, and clear, that there is a difference whether we can, in a sense defend a cause in which we are, or whether it takes strength to get into it. We don't want to have any illusions about that. Of course, when one is older one could say one has the same earnest interest as a youngster.—Yet, we need to take into account all possible subconscious impulses, and for this reason I ask you already, because we are dealing with things of a serious nature, to accept what I want to say today.

You see, Anthroposophy is quite at the start of its work, and anyone who uses Anthroposophy to develop some or other area, certainly has the experience that all he can still experience for himself in anthroposophical knowledge, the biggest difficulty arrives when he wants to share this with the world. This is just a fact, this is the biggest difficulty. Why? Because today we simply don't have the instrument of speech which is fully suited to concisely express what is seen through Anthroposophy. The Anthroposophist has the expectation that through Anthroposophy not merely such knowledge should come which live within the inner life, which they see as an inner observation, because it is unattainable for the human race in its entirety. For us this must be of foremost importance: What is possible in the human community?—and not: What can the individual demand?—Let us be clear, my dear friends, whoever is an Anthroposophist speaks out of reality, and in me speaking to him I don't feel as if I'm merely speaking in general, but when I speak to such a person it seems that either he is a priest or he should become someone who cares for the soul. Theoretically one can thus in the same manner shape one's endeavours in the most varied human areas. As soon as one enters into such a specialised field, one has to always state the most concrete of opinions which one can only take in. Please observe this. I'm making you aware that Anthroposophy certainly knows it stands at the start of its willing, a will which has to develop quite differently than the way in which it has already stepped in front of the world today. On the other hand, one can see that the world longs very, very strongly for what lies as a seed in Anthroposophy.

Something exists as a seed in Anthroposophy, which is rarely noticed today. This is the speech formation element itself. If you read Saint Martin's words, who was still a guardian of a religious belief katexochen in the 18th century—Matthias Claudius has translated the work of Saint Martin entitled Errors and Truth which should be republished—if you read Saint Martin, you find him speaking from a certain implicitness that humanity possessed an ancient speech which has been lost, and that one can't actually express in current differentiated languages what could be said about the supersensible worlds, and which should be expressed about the supersensible. So the Anthroposophist often has the feeling he would like to say something or other, but when he tries to formulate it, it leaves him speechless and doesn't come about. Yet Anthroposophy is creative speech. No one is able to meet something in such a way as Anthroposophy—what once was encountered in this way was in olden times and always occurred at the same time as religious formation—no one can encounter anything without a certain theological approach to final things in life like death, immortality, resurrection, judgement, without a certain anticipation of the future, therefore Anthroposophy must in her inward convictions look, at least for a short span of time, into the future and it must to some extent predict what must necessarily happen in the future and for the future of humanity. That is, that mankind is able to strip off all such connections with single individual languages which still exist today, and which more than anything have drawn nations into war and hardship. Ever again one must address the comparison of the Tower of Babylon construction and understand it today when one sees how the world is divided. Anthroposophy already has the power to sense something expressed between the differentiated spoken languages by looking from the original being of the sounds themselves; and Anthroposophy will, and not in the course of many centuries but in a relatively short time—even at is was initially suppressed, it soon rejuvenated—Anthroposophy will, through the most varied languages, not create a type of Yiddish language unit which is an abstraction from another, but it will out of itself creatively enter into the language and become reconciled with what is already in the human language.

Therefore, I want to tell you that Anthroposophy not only provides formal tasks of knowledge but that Anthroposophy has to face historical creative tasks. You can see what is in the hearts of people today who can create such things. I've been wanting for years to take the most important components in anthroposophical terminology, as paradoxical as this may appear, to try and give words formed out of sound. The time has not been ripe yet to accept this. But it is quite possible.

For this reason, I must call your attention to the real tasks of Anthroposophy. Why do I feel myself compelled to call your attention to it? Simply from the basis that as soon as mankind is ripe for the perception of the sound, for the word creative power itself, then everything which has up to now been in other spheres, in a more instinctive-animal way taking its course, must in future take place in the spiritual-human sphere. If humanity has come this far then it can sense the truth in a deed, sense what lives in the proclamation, in the message, in the Gospel, because the truth can't be sensed in the Gospel if one doesn't live in the creative power of a language. To really experience the Gospels, my dear friends, means to experience the details of the Gospels in every moment in which one lives, from having really recreated them within oneself.

Today's tendency is to only basically criticize the Gospels, one can't recreate them; but the possibility for their creation must be reworked. Where are the obstacles? The obstacles lie in already referring to the very first elements which were available for the creation of the Gospels. In fact, Gospel examination is placed on another foundation when the Gospel is thought about this way, than how it needs to happen from the character of the words. You see, under the objections which Dr Rittelmeyer mentioned, not as his but those of others, it is also one which is mentioned besides. It's the objection that it does not interest the religious today whether there are two Jesus children. I can completely understand how, in the religious mood of today, little value is placed in such things. Now there is something else. During the coming days we see, published in the Kommenden Tag-Verlag, how unbelievable the Gospel understanding is regarding the promotion of this "trivial matter"—it is however no small matter—how the power which created the Gospels is promoted by simply referring to a proof of what stands in the Gospels, regarding the two Jesus children. People don't understand the Gospels, they don't know what is written in them. However, the creative power of speech must be drawn out of further sources, and as a result, develop the heart and mind for these sources so that from the heart and mind the first of the four sections which I've given you in the description of the Mass can be given. You see, it doesn't mean the Mass is only being presented symbolically, but that the Mass symbolism becomes an expression for the totality of the pastoral process. If the totality of the pastoral work does not flow together into the Mass as its central focus, then the Mass has no meaning; the coming together of the pastoral ministry in the Mass or the modern symbolism that can be found—we will speak about this more—only then, in the full measure of the four main sections of the Mass, which I have mentioned, can it be fully experienced.

The reading of the Gospel to the congregation is only a part; the other part is expressed in the sermon. The sermon today is not what it should be, it can't be as it is intellectual because as a rule the preparation for the sermon is only intellectual and arising out of today's education, out of today's theology, can't be anything else. The sermon is only a real sermon when the power of creative speech ensouls the sermon, in other words when it doesn't only come out of its substance but speaks out of the substance of the genius of the language. This is something which must first be acquired. The genius of language is not needed for religiosity which is in one's heart, but one needs the genius of language for the religious process in the human community. Community building must be obligatory for the priest, as a result, elements must be looked for which are supportive of community building. Community building can never be intellectual, because it is precisely the element which creates the possibility of isolation. Intellectualism is just agreed upon by the individual as an individual human being and to the same degree, as a person falls back on his singularity, to that degree does he become intellectual. He can understandably save his intellectualism through faith because faith is a subjective thing of individuals, in the most imminent sense one calls it a thing of the individual. However, for the community we don't just need the subjective, but for the community we need super-sensory content.

Now, just think deeply enough about how it would be possible for you to effectively bring the mere power of faith to the community, without words. You wouldn't be able to do this, it is impossible. Likewise, you couldn't sustain the community by addressing it through mere intellectualism. Intellectual sermons will from the outset form the tendency to atomise the faithful community. Through an intellectual sermon the human being is thrown back onto himself; every single listener will be rejected by himself. This shakes up in him those forces which above all do not agree but are contradictory. This is a simple psychological fact. As soon as one looks deeper into the soul, every listener becomes at the same time a critic and an opponent. Indeed, my dear friends, regarding the secrets of the soul so little has been clarified today. All kinds of contradictions arise in objection to what the other person is saying when the only method of expression he uses is intellectual.

This is precisely the element which split people up today, because they are permeated thoroughly with mere intellectualism. You are therefore unable, through the sermon, to work against atomising, if you remain in intellectualism. Neither in the preparation of the sermon, nor in the delivery of the sermon must you, if you want to build community today, remain in intellectualism. Here is where one can become stuck through our present-day education and above all in the present theological education, because in many ways it has become quite intellectual. In the Catholic Church it has become purely intellectual, and all that which is not intellectual, which should be alive, is not given to individuals but has become the teaching material of the church and must be accepted as the teaching material of the church. A result of this is, because everything which the Catholic Church gives freely as intellectual, the priest is the most free individual one can imagine. The Catholic Church doesn't expect people to somehow submit to their intellect, inasmuch as it releases them from what is not referred to as the supernatural. All they demand is that people submit to the teaching material of the church. Regarding this I can cite an actual example.

I once spoke to a theologian of a university, where at that time it paid general homage to liberal principles, not from the church but from liberal foundations. Of course, the theological faculty was purely for the Catholic priesthood. This person I spoke to had just been given a bad rebuke by Rome. I asked him: How is this actually possible that it is precisely you who received this rebuke, who is relatively pious in comparison to the teacher at the Innsbruck University—who I won't name—who teaches more freely and is watched patiently from Rome?—Well, you see, this man answered, he is actually a Jesuit and I'm a Cistercian. Rome is always sure that a man like him, who studies at the Innsbruck University never drops out, no matter how freely he uses the Word, but that the Word should always be in the service of the church. With us Cistercians Rome believes that we follow our intellect because we can't stand as deeply in our church life as the Jesuit who has had his retreat which has shown him a different way to the one we Cistercians take.—You see how Rome treats intellectualism psychologically. As a rule, Rome knows very clearly what it wants because Rome acts out through human psychology, even though we reject it.

Now, what is important is that above all, the sermon should not remain in intellectualism. All our languages are intellectual, we don't have the possibility at all, when we use common languages, to come away from the intellect. But we must do it. The next thing you come to, with which you need work as purely formative in the power of creative speech, is symbolism, but now formed in the right way, not by remaining within intellectualism but by really experiencing the symbols. To experience symbols indicates much more than one ordinarily means.

You see, as soon as the Anthroposophist comes to imaginative observation or penetrates the imaginative observation of someone else, he actually knows: The human being who stands in front of him is not the same person he had been before he had seen the light of Anthroposophy. You see, this person, who stands in front of us, is considered by current science to be a more highly developed animal; generally speaking. Everything which science offers to corroborate these views and generally justifies it is by saying a person has exactly as many bones and muscles as the higher animals, which is all true, but science comes to a dead end when one really presents the difference between people and animals. The differences between people and animals are not at all to be referred to through comparative anatomy, whether the whole human being or a single part of it, and an entire animal or part of an animal is similar, but to grasp what is human is to understand what results when human organs are situated vertically while the animal organs lie parallel with the surface of the earth. That one can also observe this in the animal kingdom as far as it proves the rule, is quite right, but that doesn't belong here, I must point out the limitations.

Because the human being is organised according to the vertical plane with his spine, he relates in quite a different way to the cosmos than does the animal. The animal arranges itself in the currents circulating the earth, the human being arranges itself in currents which stream from the centre point of the earth in the direction of the radius. One needs to study the human being's situation in relation to space in order to understand him. When one has completed one's study of the human being's relationship to space, and make it alive once again, as regards to what it means that the human being is the image of God. The human being is not at all what comparative anatomy sees, he is no such reality as anatomy describes him to be, but he is, in as far as he is formed, a realization of an image (Bildwirklichkeit). He represents. He is sent out of higher worlds into conception and birth so that he represents what he brings from before his birth. Out of the divine substance we have our spiritual life before birth. This spiritual life dissolves through conception and birth and achieves a representation in the physical person on earth, an imagination. Imagination, drawn out of the world all, becomes the form of man, but what is drawn out of the world all needs to be understood according to its position in the world all. Every single human organ takes place in the verticalization. The human being is placed into the world by God.

This happens directly as an inner experience as the human being is grasped by the imagination. One can no longer intellectually say and believe that when I say the words "Man is the image of God" that we are only talking about a comparison. No, the truth is expressed; super-sensibly derived similarities from the Old and New Testaments can be found not as allegorical similarities, but as truths. We need to reach a stage when our words are again permeated by such experiences, that we learn to speak vividly in this way. In the measure to which we in a lively way enter into vivid characterisation, not through contriving something intellectually, we come to the possibility of the sermon, which should be an instruction.

I have often pointed out that when a teacher stands in front of a child and wants to teach him in a popular form about the immortality of the soul, he should do so through an image. He will need to refer to the insect pupa, how the butterfly flies out of it, and then from there go over to the human soul leaving the human body like a pupa shell; permeating this image with a super-sensible truth. I have always, when I deal with this alleged parable, said: there is a big difference whether a teacher said to himself: I am clever and the child is stupid, therefore I must create a parable for the child so that he can understand what I can understand with my mind.—Whoever speaks in this way has no experience of life, no experience of the imponderables which work in instructions. Because the convincing power with which the child grasps it, what I want to teach with this pupa parable, means very little if I think: I am clever and the child is stupid, I must create a parable for him which works.—What should be working firstly comes about within me, when I work with all the phases and power of belief in my parable. As an Anthroposophist I can create this parable by observing nature. Through my looking at the butterfly, how it curls out of the pupa, I am convinced through it that this is an image of the immortality of the soul, which only appears as a lower manifestation. I believe in my parable with my entire life.

This facing of others in life is what can become a power of community building. Before intellectualism has not been overcome to allow people to live in images once again, before then it will be impossible that a real community building power can occur.

I have experienced the power of community building, but in an unjust field. I would like to tell you about that as well. Once I was impelled to study such things as to listen to an Easter sermon given by a famous Jesuit father. It was completely formulated according to Jesuit training. I want to give you a brief outline of this sermon. It dealt with the theme: How does the Christian face up to the assertion that the Pope would set the Easter proclamation according to dogma, it wouldn't be determined as God's creation but through human creation?—The Jesuit father didn't speak particularly deeply, but Jesuit schooled, he said: Yes my dear Christians, imagine a cannon, and on the cannon an operator or gunner, and the officer in command. Now imagine this quite clearly. What happens? The cannon is loaded, the gunner holds the fuse in his hand, the gunner pulls on the fuse when the command is sounded. You see, this is how it is with the Pope in Rome. He stands as the gunner beside the cannon, holds the fuse and from supernatural worlds the command comes. The Pope in Rome pulls on the fuse and thus gives the command of the Easter proclamation. It is a law from heaven, just like the command does not come from the gunner but from the officer. Yet, something deeper lies behind this, my dear Christians—the father says—something far deeper lies beneath it, when one now looks at the whole process of the Easter proclamation. Can one say the gunner who hears the command and pulls on the fuse, is the inventor of the powder? No. Just as little can one say that the Catholic Pope has instituted the Easter proclamation.

The faithful are drawn by a feeling into the congregation through the use of this image, this representation but obviously in an unjust a field as possible.

The symbol can be a way for the human heart to actually find the supersensible, but we, like I've indicated with the comparison to the insect pupa, need to learn to live within the symbol; to be able to faithfully take the symbol itself from the outside world. I clearly understand when someone wants to appeal to mere faith as opposed to knowledge. I take this so seriously, that this faith must also manifest and be active in the living of oneself in the face of outer nature, so that the entire outer nature becomes a symbolum in the true sense of the word, an experienced symbolum. My dear friends, before the human being again realizes that in the light not mere comparisons of wisdom live and weave, but that in the light wisdom really live and weave ... (gap in notes) ... light penetrates into our eyes, what is light is then no longer light—with "light" one originally referred to everything which lay at the foundation of human beings as their inner wisdom—because by the light's penetration it becomes inwardly changed, transubstantiated, and each thought which rises within, my dear friends, is changed light in reality, not in a parable. Don't be surprised therefore that the one who has got to know through appropriate exercises that to some extent outer phenomena describe inner human thoughts, by describing them in light imagery. Do not be surprised because that corresponds to reality.

Things were far more concretely taken in the ancient knowledge of mankind than one usually thinks. You must also become knowledgeable with the fact that the power which then still lived in the Gospels, have in the last centuries also got lost, like the original revelation of man has really been lost as has the original language been lost. Now I want to pose the question: do we grasp the Gospels today? We only grasp them when we can really live within them and presently, out of our intellectualized time epoch, we can't experience them thus. I know very well about the opposition expressed against my interpretations presented in my various Gospel lectures, from some or other side, and I'm quite familiar that these are my initial attempts, that they need to become more complete; but attempts to enliven the Gospels, these they are indeed.

I would like to refer back to times, my dear friends, when there were individuals who we today, when you imagine the world order at that time there also existed, those we call chemists. Alchemists they were called in the 12th and 13th centuries, and they were active with the material world which we usually can observe in chemists. What do we do today in order to create a real chemist? Today our preparations for the creation of a chemist is his intellectual conceptions of how matter is analysed and synthesized, how he works with a retort, with a heating apparatus, with electricity and so on. This was not enough, if I may express it this way, for a real chemist, up to the 13th and 14th centuries—perhaps not to take it word for word—but then the chemist had opened the Bible in front of him and was permeated in a way by what he did, in what he did, by what flowed out of the Bible in a corresponding force. Current humanity will obviously regard this as a paradox. For humanity, only a few centuries ago, this seemed obvious. The awareness which the chemist had at that time, in other words the alchemist, in the accomplishment of his actions, was only slightly different to standing at the altar and reading the mass. Only slightly different, because the reading of the mass already was the supreme alchemical act. We will speak about this more precisely in future.

Should one not be creating knowledge out of these facts that the Gospels have lost their actual power? What have we done in the 19th century? We have analysed the Gospels of Mark, John, Luke and Matthew, we have treated them philologically, we have concluded that John's Gospel can be nothing, but a hymn and that one can hardly believe it corresponds to reality. We have compared the various synoptists with one another and we have reached the stage which ties to the famous blacksmith where distillation takes place: what is said iniquitously about the Christ is the truth because you won't find that with mere hymns of praise.—This is the last consequence of this path. On this path nothing else can happen than what has already happened: the destruction of the Gospels will inevitably arise in this way. While we are still so much into discussing the division between knowledge and faith, it will not be sustained if science destroys the Gospels. One must certainly stand within reality and need to understand how to live out of reality, and therefore it is important that the pastor must come to a living meaning of the perceptible representations, the perceptible-in-image representations. The living image must enter into the sermon. That it should be an acceptable, a good image, it obviously must have a purity of mood, of which we will speak about. It's all in the image; the image is what we need to find.

Now my dear friends, for the discovery of the image you will be most successful with the help of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is mocked because of its pictoriality. If you read how the intellectuals—if I may use the word—apply their opposition to my depiction of evolution, you will soon see how easy it is from the intellectual point of view to mock the images which I have to use in my depiction of the Old Saturn-, Sun- and Moon existence. I have to use images otherwise things would fall out of my hands, because only though images I can grasp the reality which has to be searched for. I would like to say, Anthroposophy has in each of its parts definitely a search for images and is for this reason the helper for those who use images. Here lies the real field, where the pastor can firstly benefit much from Anthroposophy. Not as if he has to undertake to believe in Anthroposophy, not as if he has to say: Well now, let's study anthroposophical images and books, then we can use them.—This is no argument. It needs to come, so to speak, to the opposite of what had to develop in philosophy, into an age that lived contrary to Anthroposophy.

To this I would like to say the following. Philosophers today who are students of a content or a system, or of the belief that a system needs to be established, such philosophers are antiquated; such philosophers have remained behind. Such system-philosophies are no longer possible in the intellectual time epoch. When Hegel presented his purely intellectualism in his last thoughts of the human conception and placed this in his overall system, he had created what I would like to call the corpse of philosophy. Exactly like science studies the human corpse, so can one in Hegel's philosophy in a corpse-like way study what is philosophy—as only that, it is very good. That is why the Hegelian philosophy is so great, because nothing disturbs the flow of intellectualism to really study it. The amazing thing I admire for example, is to develop something pure which is purely intellectualistic. However, after Hegel there can no longer be such endeavours which take thought content to create a philosophic system. That is why people create such awful somersaults. Yes, one can't think of worse somersaults than the philosophy of Hans Vaihinger, called the "As-if" (Als Ob). As if one can have something like a philosophy called: "As if." It is created from experience in the mind, this philosophy of "As if." It is not even a philosophy out of what humanity was, but the last imaginative remnants in humanity, which are translated into thoughts. What philosophers are obliged to study today should be a practice in pure thinking. To study philosophy today is meditative thinking and should not be practiced in any other way. I believe that if one looks at these things in an unprejudiced way, one will soon see that what I have offered in my Riddles of Philosophy as the development of philosophy, that it constantly proposes one can work through the most diverse philosophic systems as an exercise in thinking. One can learn unbelievably much out of the latest systems, in the Hartmann system and the American system linked to the name of James. One can learn unbelievably much in as far as one lets it work on one to such a degree that one asks: How is thinking trained; what does one gain from thought training?—Please forgive the hard words. Nietzsche had already made an effort to introduce such thought training in philosophy.

This will draw your attention, regarding philosophy, to today's need that man must direct thought content into direct living content, not by positioning oneself as a subject against the truth from outside, but in such a way that truth becomes an experience. Only one who has understood current philosophising in this way will actually be able to understand the contrary; for readers of anthroposophical writing and hearing anthroposophical lectures it does not mean things are to be taken up as dogma. That would be the most incorrect attitude to have. Just think, what is given in Anthroposophy has actually been brought down out of the supersensible, it may have been awkwardly put into words, but when one allows oneself to reach deeper, it will be as if the true philosopher in his thoughts reaches deeper into other philosophies. He would not take anything from other systems, he takes the blame. The image capability for the pictorial, for the sake of clarity, is the first step to educate students in Anthroposophy. When words are encountered which have flowed out of imaginative thinking, when such thoughts are taken up, then it is necessary, in order to really understand them, to raise the pictorial power out of them from soul foundations. Above all, that's what we can do to help Anthroposophy.

One therefore appeals less by saying: Well, I must first for my own sake become clairvoyant, then I can make some decisions about Anthroposophy.—One appeals in such a way that one firstly, quite indifferently, get to know the content of truth in Anthroposophy; one simply takes the sum of all the images which shows how one or other soul paints it. That is at least a fact which they paint for themselves. One takes this and first allows the inherent truth to remain undecided, but then one tries to find within it, how the person speaks who has such supersensible images, and one will see that this is the best way to enter in to seeing for oneself. With many people who encounter Anthroposophy today it is as if they set the wagon straight but then incorrectly spans the horse to it. (A stenographer's note indicates that a horse was drawn on the blackboard with the wagon positioned in one way, while the horse is drawn with its head towards the wagon and its tail pointing to the road ahead. The original drawing was not preserved.) There is no need for this; that one must first learn to be a seer. It could, in fact happen due to a certain arrogance and then the thing as a whole is passed by. If one has the humility to want to experience the seeing adequately, then one can come to the perception without the fear of receiving a suggestion. The fear of receiving a suggestion can only be had by philosophers alien to reality; which we have for instance with Wund, the latecomer of system philosophers who of course from his point of view, argued: Yes, how would I know if what I've first perceived of the supersensible world and look at it, that it was not suggested to me?—One should reply the Wund: How do you actually know the different between a piece of iron with a temperature of 100 degrees or higher which you can only imagine, or another one which is lying in front of you? You can discuss this for a long time but by looking at it you will never discover whether the iron is really lying in front of you or whether it is suggested; but when you grab hold of it and look at your fingers, then you will find the difference—through life. There is no other criterion.

It is however an unmistakable criterion, if one places oneself into life in such a way to come into Anthroposophy. One may however not take on the point of view that one knows everything already. In my life I have found that people learn the least when they believe they already know what they should learn.

It is for instance only possible to be a real teacher when you are a teacher of attitude. How often is it said to teachers in the Waldorf schools—and you have understood, in the course of years it has happened that teaching is characterised by this attitude; it is clearly noticeable—how often is it not said: When one stands in front of a child, then it is best to say to oneself that there is far more wisdom in the child than in oneself, much, much more because it had just arrived from the spiritual world and brings much more wisdom with it. One can learn an unbelievable amount from children. From nothing in the world does one basically learn so much in an outer physical way, as when one wants to learn from a child. The child is the teacher, and the Waldorf teacher knows how little it is true that with teaching, one is the teacher and the child the scholar. One is actually—but this one keeps as an inner mystery for oneself—more of a scholar than a teacher and the child is more teacher than scholar. It seems like a paradox, but it is so.

You see, Anthroposophy directs us to new knowledge about the world, in many special areas in life, so it is worthy of questions which are thought through ... (Gap in notes). Yes, Anthroposophy appears consistently in this mood, with this attitude. Anthroposophy just can't appear without a religious character as part of it. This must also be stressed about Anthroposophy: Anthroposophy does not strive to appear as creating religious instruction, as building a sect; it strives to give humanity a content to their inner experiences which lets them strive to what comes quite out of themselves, which is expressed with religious characteristics. Anthroposophy is not a religion but what it gives is something which works religiously.

Very recently I had to speak to a person whose earlier life situation was not quite over confident, but of a joyful nature, and who descended into a deep depression, a depression which had various, even organic, causes. This man is an Anthroposophist, he wanted to speak about his mood to me. I pointed out that a mood comes out of the totality of a person, and one gets a mood out of what one absorbs from the world in that one confronts the world as a human being.

Anthroposophy itself is a person (Mensch). If it wasn't a person, it wouldn't transform us. Out of us it makes us into someone different. It is a person itself, I say it in the greatest earnestness. Anthroposophy is not a teaching, Anthroposophy has an element of being, it is a person. Only when a person is quite permeated by it and Anthroposophy is like a person who thinks, but also feels, senses and has emotions of will, when Anthroposophy thinks, feels and wills in us, when it is really like a complete person, then one can grasp it, then you have it. Anthroposophy acts like a being and it enters present culture and civilization like a kind of being. One experiences this entering as by a kind of being. With this at the same time one can say: Religion—spoken from the anthroposophic stand point—religion is a relationship of human beings to God. However, Anthroposophy is a person, and because it is a person, it has a relationship with God; and like a person has a relationship to God, so it has a relationship to God. Thus, it has the direct characteristic of the religious in itself.

I will now summarise this finally in some abstract sentences which do however have life in them. What I have said before and what I say now are interrelated and I don't say it without purpose, my dear friends. The first one which is experienced in this way is that one leans to recognise how godly wisdom acts in the child, where it is creative, where it not only comes to revelation in a brain, but where it still shapes the brain. Yes, "if you would not become like little children, you shall never enter into the kingdom of the heavens ..." That is the way to penetrate into what you notice in the deep humility of the child, that which lies before becoming a child, that which even Goethe experienced so lovingly, that he used the word "growing young" (Jungwerden) for entering into the world, like one can say "growing old" (Altwerden). Growing young means stepping out of the spiritual state, into earthly existence. One goes in a certain sense really through childhood and back to such a state where one still had a direct relationship with the divine. The old Biblical questions become quite real: Can one return into the mother's body, to experience a rebirth?—In spirit one can do this. However, in the old way where the Bible lay in front of the alchemists, and the new way which prepares us for handling the world, lies an abyss. The abyss must be bridged over. We will however not find the old ways, because we need to find a new way.

I have often spoken out among Anthroposophists what we might find when we are willing to do some kind of manipulation of nature. The "Encheiresis naturae" (an intervention by the hand of nature—Google) we must accomplish again, but we mustn't say "don't cut your nose to spite your face"; we must be able to take it in the greatest earnest then we will have an ideal , in any case only as an ideal, but an ideal which becomes reality. The laboratory workbench will in a certain sense become an altar, and the outer action in the world will become a service of divine worship and all of life be drenched by the light of acts of worship. Now for the second thing: Anthroposophy as speech formation. Anthroposophy needs to strive to have such a grasp in the world, that I can apply the reality which I've presented today as an apparent contradictory image: the laboratory bench of the chemist, the physics-chemistry of clinical work must in human experience take on the form of an altar. Work on humanity, also the purely technical work—must be able to become a service of divine worship. That one will only be able to find when one has the good will to cross over the abyss which separates our world from the other side where the Gospels lay before the alchemists.

In occultism we differentiate in man firstly his actions, in so far as by actions we understand everything which proceeds from any kind of activity connected with his hands; secondly speech and thirdly thoughts. Everything which in this sense he accomplishes with his hands brings about its karmic results in his next earthly existence. What we speak concerns not only ourselves alone, but also a group of human beings having the same language, and this affects the karma of the group or race. In words lies a greater responsibility than in deeds alone: for with them we are preparing the configuration of a future race. What we think works on even into a new formation of our earth. We therefore distinguish three stages. Firstly: Human action is individual, with the exception of those actions in man that arise from nothingness. Secondly: Man cannot speak for himself alone; words concern a group of human beings. Thirdly: Thoughts are the concern of the whole of humanity.

With this, something else is connected. When we act we stand quite alone behind our actions. When we speak we are not quite alone in our words. Behind our words a spiritual being is working with us, standing behind us. Just as truly as the words we utter are imprinted quite exactly in the Akasha, so is it true that with every word we utter we impinge upon the body of a spiritual being who is incarnated in this Akashic substance into which our words penetrate. We must take this up into our feeling life; this is why we must pay such heed to our words. When we think, we are seemingly quite alone within ourselves; nevertheless beings of a spiritual nature are active with us in our thoughts, beings still higher and more significant than those active in our speech.

More lies in these things than in a whole world-history. Through them much can be explained. Let us consider a thought within us. Behind this thought a spiritual being is present. If we imagine ourselves enveloped on all sides by the body of a spiritual being, we can realise that a thought is only the expression of the body of the spiritual being working into us. Every time a thought flashes through our soul it is an impression, a kind of foot-print of a higher spiritual being, just as if we were walking over damp ground, leaving footprints, and were to say: ‘Here a person walked’. This spiritual being is formed of the same substance as that of which thought consists. The thought in us can only become the imprint of a higher spiritual being because this higher being has a body formed of the same substance as our thoughts.

When our foot imprints itself in the damp earth, this imprint is a negative, a counter-image of our foot. So is it too with our thoughts. In the higher spiritual world there is a counter-image for every thought. Image and counter-image are as interconnected as seal and sealing wax. The substance is the higher spiritual being which corresponds in our analogy to the sealing wax. Now we call thought, in so far as it corresponds to the sealing wax, intuition, and the impression we call abstract thought. We can say when we think: ‘I feel the traces of what is happening in higher worlds.’ It is with regard to this fact that in religious writings, for instance in the Revelation of St. John, the expression ‘seal’ is used. This corresponds with reality. It is also because a higher being is working with us in our words that every word is the impression of a seal. With the mystics the counter-image is called Imagination. Thus we have three levels of the thought element: the intuitive, the imaginative and the ordinary abstract thinking.

When man develops further, when abstract thought itself develops to the stage on which the beings are incarnated who work with us when we speak, then he is a Chela, an occult pupil. To be a Master means: To work in the substance in which the beings are incarnated who work with us in our thoughts. Imagination gives the picture. This is why the great religious teachers of earlier times spoke pictorially, for imagination gives the picture, not abstract thoughts. In all religions, teachings were expressed in pictures. At first the picture is for man something of lesser importance, but when he understands how to form again for himself a picture out of every thought, then he has reached a higher stage. This is the pre-requisite for a quite new kind of perception. Everything depends on a man developing to the point at which he no longer thinks merely abstractly, but at all times has his thoughts in pictures.

As a rule man forms merely thoughts. The more highly developed man must think in pictures, in images; that means ‘to imagine’. In this expression there already lies what is meant: ‘By means of a certain power to make an imprint in something, (to imagine).’ In creative fantasy, in the case of poet and artist, we find only a weak reflection of imagination. When a man who is seeking higher development speaks, he will try in certain cases, while speaking, to have before him the counter-image, the Imago. This is the source of the mighty pictures in religious writings. Whoever develops himself so far that he can create such pictures has attained the stage of the spiritual beings who are involved in the creation of races. One who develops in himself not only pictures, but intuitions, is not only involved in the creation of races, but in the creation of the next planetary existence. From the pictures there will resound what later will be manifested on the earth, but whoever works out of intuition creates something which is not yet existent, which is nowhere manifested, that is to say he creates out of Nirvana. This concept is inherent in every apocalypse: What will be manifested in the future can only be created out of intuition.

Through abstract thinking one makes a copy of something that exists. Through Imagination a man allows himself to be fructified by the formative spirit within him. Imagination corresponds to hidden realities which have arisen through the fructifying impulse of higher beings; thus one can see these higher spiritual beings on the Astral Plane. The prerequisite for this is to develop a speech that is not the expression of abstract thoughts, but of pictures. This is why mediums also speak in imaginations, in pictures and symbols, but unconsciously. Behind them the spirit is forming the symbols. The occult pupil does this in full consciousness, nevertheless in a way that is not arbitrary. In so doing he allows himself to be fructified by the spirit.

Just as man develops himself to the stage when he can create pictures and receive intuitions, so before he came into existence the external world was active; and indeed in such a way that in everything which is around us as mineral existence, as purely physical nature, Intuitions are working as creative forces. The crystal is external in so far as it reveals itself to the senses; it is however created by means of Intuitions. Behind the entire physical world lies a cosmos of Intuitions and finally a being, the Planetary Spirit, who produces the Intuitions. Behind all language Beings of Imagination are working and with them the Spirit of the Race. In all living things, Beings at the same spiritual level are at work. Behind all plants Imaginations are active. The completed form of the plant comes forth from Imagination and behind it stands a spiritual being: and everything imbued with consciousness and perception has arisen out of Thought itself

Now let us look at the whole universe, to begin with in its physical aspect: Earth, Sun, Moon and stars, the Milky Way and so on. Behind it stands a great intuitive Spirit. It is the same Spirit that manifests in our actions; he also stands behind the whole universe. Christianity calls him the Father. Because he is so little known he is also called the Unknown God, and in theosophical literature the first Logos.⁵²

Behind everything living stands the Spirit of Imagination. It is the same Spirit who is also working in our speech; this is why the Christian religion calls Him the Word. Here something quite exact and actual is meant. This spirit who stands behind everything living is still working today in our speech, in each of our words, and is therefore rightly called ‘the Word’, another designation is: The Son or Christ. He is the Spirit who lives as imagination in everything that has life.

Then we ascend to what is conscious, what has a certain degree of perception, of consciousness, everything of an animal nature and what in man [Gap in text ...] This can already be grasped by thoughts. It is contained in every being. What takes place in the animal occurs in the first place within itself: abstract consciousness. All consciousness existent in the world also lives in man, in abstract thinking. Within himself man calls it ‘Spirit’; in so far as it works outside in the creative forces of Nature he calls it ‘Holy Spirit’. This is what underlies all perception and consciousness. Illness exists only in separateness. Spirit as such cannot be ill, but only when it is incarnated in lower bodies. The word ‘Heilig’ (healthy) means ‘heil sein’, to be well: it expresses the fact that the Spirit which flows through the world outside, is healthy. The Holy Spirit is nothing other than Spirit which is healthy through and through: this is why anyone who truly unites himself with the Holy Spirit (Heiliger Geist) receives the power of healing (heilen). This must be in harmony with the Holy Spirit flowing through the world. This is the Spirit which works from man to man as the true healer.

If we now turn our attention to the physical plane we find in the first place that we perceive through the senses. Behind is the great intuitive Spirit. Everything physically present has been made by this Spirit. Thus behind everything that lives in form as such, that can be perceived by the senses, stands the Father Spirit, the first Logos. Through merely observing we do not alter anything, but an alteration comes about when we act. Then we not only change what exists outside in the world, but also the forces working outside in the world. The moment we act we bring about an alteration on the physical plane. Behind these alterations however there lies also an alteration in the underlying force corresponding to the first Logos. This we influence by our actions; it remains, is there, cannot again be got rid of, unless it be eradicated by the same force which called it forth. And the alteration which is called forth through our deeds is what takes hold of us again as Karma. That which draws man into the physical world once more, if looked at from the point of view of Karma is called: Rupa. This is because it was accomplished in Rupa, through the body, through man's external nature. Thus we create in the body, in Rupa, when we work upon the outer Intuitions.

The second sphere in which today man is not entirely independent, but where another Spirit is working with him, is speech. Here we make impressions in a world behind which lies not only what is physical, but what has life. In the world of life the Imaginations about which we are speaking remain behind, formative forces which create new races. Our present race has been created out of what lay behind the words of earlier races. This is embodied in our race. In addition we have to consider everything which belongs in any way to Imagination. This shows us that with our words we produce impressions in the realm of the Son, in the realm of the second Logos. These return as the collective Karma of the whole race, for the word is not created by us alone; the Spirit of the Race is working with us. What is the foundation for this form of Karma? Where is the Spirit of the Race working? The Spirit of the Race is active in man's feeling, permeates the entire world of feeling. This resounds into what a human being has in common with his group.

What works in a much wider sense on Karma is feeling (Vedana). Thus firstly: Rupa, the corporality; secondly: Vedana, feeling. For those people who have not yet become Chelas, feeling has great importance where the perception of the second Logos and everything living is concerned. The aim of science is to study animals and plants apart from life. Even the greatest men of learning today have not yet advanced beyond the stage of comprehending life with feeling. It is the Imaginative understanding which first enables them to look into life itself.

In the outer world thought is connected with everything having sensation and consciousness. This has one thing in common with us: perception. The fact that we can in any way perceive the outer world in physical space as a world of colour and sound is only possible because we are able to transpose it into thoughts. We receive perceptions; we think about them. If there were no thoughts in the perceptions it would be the greatest folly on man's part to form thoughts about them. Thoughts would then be mere illusions if the perceptions had not arisen through thoughts. From the combination of perceptions it follows that in the first place perceptions are built up by thoughts which we can then extract from them: the laws of nature. These are nothing other than thoughts; it is the creative Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Perception is the boundary between the two, where our thoughts come in contact with the creative thoughts outside. Thus with a thought that we have we cannot work directly on life, but on the consciousness which in the outer world is itself thought.

Through thought we leave behind traces in all the spiritual beings who have brought about consciousness. What man builds up on the basis of perception in the way of thoughts, and what he produces as thoughts, has its repercussions on everything which makes perception necessary. Thirdly therefore we differentiate: Perception or Sanjna, the third element which has an effect on Karma.

Through all actions we call forth counter-actions as Karma, because we make an impact on the Intuitive World: Rupa.

Through all words we make an impact on the World of Creative Feelings around us: Vedana.

With our thoughts about perceptions we make an impact on the whole World of Thoughts outside us: Sanjna.

What we perceive around us will no longer be there when we appear again on Earth. Everything therefore which we think in connection with the world of perception will have no effect whatever on the future incarnation; only in this incarnation will it have a Karma-building force. Thought works upon our present character.

What comes forth from feeling, that is essentially connected with our surroundings; what enters into the world of Imagination, comes back to us in the following incarnation, in such a way that it appears within us as inborn tendencies and outside us as opportunities. Through our inborn tendencies we call towards us opportunities offered by the world, which form our destiny, through tendencies which have their source in Karma. Thoughts form the character: the tendencies or disposition lead karmically to the opportunities. Actions bring about the external destiny, all the bodily circumstances into which man is born. What we carry out through Rupa, our bodily nature, that is our actual destiny, that comes back to us karmically.

One can only create inborn tendencies for further incarnations consciously by reaching the stage of Imagination. Herein we find the secret of how the great founders of religions projected their influence beyond their own time. The pictures which they gave the people released dispositional tendencies for the following incarnations. Every picture that they instilled into the soul reappeared in the entire feeling-world of the human being. Either he wins such Imaginations for himself, or he receives them from his teacher. We win them for ourselves when we have gained control over our entire life of feeling: this is the case with the occult pupil. His feelings are subject to his own control; the rest of humanity is cared for in this respect by the founders of religions. A religion is the feeling-world of future races; outwardly therefore it can be submerged, for it lives on in human tendencies. Today tendencies are coming to the surface which were implanted in mankind in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is important that the materialistic images of the present day do not take root in human hearts, for in future times they would fill human beings with the most brutal instincts which are only directed to the world of the senses, if they were not opposed by spiritual ideas. Those desires and wishes live in man which are produced out of imagination. This is his desire-nature = Sanskara. Everything intuitive in man, the great impulses which he receives from the highest initiates, these actually overcome the Karma of Deeds. He who raises himself to Intuitions as such, penetrates through the physical world up to the Father Spirit. He who possesses intuitive knowledge can affect the Karma arising out of deeds. He begins to limit his Karma consciously.

For the ordinary person only those beings are comprehensible who also have consciousness. When he progresses to Imagination, life also becomes comprehensible; when he progresses to Intuition he can advance as far as the Intuitive forces.

A person can affect his Karma to the degree in which he himself possesses Intuition; or he must receive it from the high initiates in the form of great moral laws. Vijnana is the name used for the consciousness necessary for the overcoming of Karma. And now let us think of a man living in the world, carrying out his actions and dying. After his death something of him nevertheless remains here in this world which he has woven into it: Rupa, Vedana, Sanjna, Sanskara and Vijnana. These five are the balance of his account: his personal destiny as Rupa; the destiny of the nation into which he is born, as Vedana; the actual fact of his birth on this earth as Sanjna. In addition, working with Sanskara, the desire nature, and Vijnana, the consciousness. These are the five Skandhas.

What a man gives out into the world remains as the five Skandhas in the world. These are the foundation of his new existence. They have progressively less effect when he has consciously developed something of the last two. The more he has gained conscious power over Vijnana, the more does he gain the power of consciously incarnating in the physical body. In their essential nature the Skandhas are identical with Karma.

• 52. Compare Rudolf Steiner's notes for Edouard Schuré May 1906. Zeichnen und Entwicklung der drei Logoi in der Menschheit published in No. 14 of Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung Michaelmas 1965.

My dear friends! I have the following to say to you, in continuation of our conversation yesterday morning. The point is that you feel in the right way the sending out by the spiritual powers present in the spiritual world and connected with Christ's life on earth, and that you feel your own connection with these spiritual powers as your mission. And in this sense I have read to you the words from the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 5, verses 9 and 10, in the way they present themselves when we try to penetrate their real meaning in our language:

After Christ brought his bodily life to an end, he is the healer of sins through all earthly times for all who are filled with him, and is referred to with the word of the spirit as the highest savior of souls according to the rite of Melchi-Sadek.

Only when you feel your own calling in the spirit of these words, with which at the beginning of the Christian era those who were to fulfill the mission of Christ to the full were sent out, will you be able to see in them a renewal of Christian work. Now, however, it is important that we are able to let this word - which is an old word, but has been renewed in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews - have the right effect on our souls. This word, which designates the actual mission of the Christian priesthood, points out to us that only those in the early days of Christian development, that is, in the first centuries of Christianity, sensed their priestly mission in the right way, who said: We do not want to understand alone, in the sense of the Levitical rite, that which we have to bring into the world as a cult, but we want to see through the look through the Levitical rite to that rite which stands nearer to the divine world order and according to which the priest-king Sadek, Adonai Melchi-Sadek, performed the sacrificial service before the priest-king of the ancient Jews, and that is a sacrificial service which Abraham, the old priest-king of the Jews, to whom the Levitical priestly service is to be traced back, also recognized as the higher one for that time. This indicates to us that the sacrificial service of the Jews, insofar as it is traced back to the sacrifice of Abraham, must be understood as a lower one in the early days of Christianity compared to that which was then accomplished in its archetypal old way by Melchi-Sadek, and which in a higher sense, closer to the spiritual world, was again accomplished, is being accomplished and is to be further accomplished by the Christ Jesus Himself. It is pointed out that what Christ's sacrifice is - which is to be renewed on the altar in the way it can happen -, is a higher act than the act that was offered in the days before Abraham - not to the God Jehovah - by Melchi-Sadek, and we must now understand what is actually in these words.

It is said that Melchi-Sadek offered his sacrifice through bread and wine, which were considered inferior to the offerings made by Abraham – the underlying concept here is quite clear. However, we must also bear in mind that the expression “bread and wine” is one that came from later, exoteric Judaism and no longer shows the original full understanding. Because this original and complete understanding was no longer present in those who had a hand in formulating the text of the Old Testament, but only in those initiates who still had an understanding of the ancient initiation in the early centuries of Christianity, it can no longer be fully determined from the text of the Old Testament what is actually meant by the sacrifice of Melchizedek. And yet, those who are sent out into the world as priests today must also have a correct understanding of these offerings of Melchi-Sadek.

If one goes back to what is really meant, in the sense of the initiatory knowledge, when it is said that the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek was offered in the form of bread and wine, one comes to see that in the bread, in the right initiatory knowledge, has always been seen as a carrier of salt. The Jews actually no longer acted in the right sense and with the right understanding when they forgot the salt and even emphasized that it was necessary to use unleavened bread for the sacred sacrificial act. In the bread that was originally meant, salt was seen, just as in the wine it was not the wine as such that was seen, as it presents itself in its wine substance, but it was sought in the wine the extraordinarily volatile, fluctuating content of sulfur or phosphorus, which in the old term is one and the same. If we speak in the right sense, we must actually say that the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek - that is, the sacrifice that was performed according to his rite - was offered through salt and sulfur - or through salt and phosphorus - as found in the foodstuffs bread and wine. That is the original conception, and initiation is called “initiation” because it always goes back to the original conception. In the ancient Hebrew priesthood, the real bread, which contains salt, was replaced by unleavened bread for a certain reason that was not human, because certain secrets were no longer known.

What is it, then, that is contained in salt and phosphorus when a person absorbs them through bread and wine? In salt and phosphorus, through salt, lies the connection between man and the earth. The more salt a person absorbs, the more he connects with the earth, and the more phosphorus he absorbs, the more he breaks away from it and frees himself from it. What takes place in the human body – not outside of the human body – through the combination of salt and phosphorus is a process that properly connects the person to earthly existence, because the salt connects him to the earth in the right way, while the phosphorus snatches him away from earthly existence in the right way, making him free from it again. It is so that the man who has salt and phosphorus in the right way in him stands on the earth in the right way, is properly connected to the earth, but also receives the necessary ethereal and astral lightness to be free again from the earth forces in his being. The fact that the Jews of later times laid the main emphasis on the unleavened in bread showed that they no longer wanted to be connected with the earth, but wanted to have in the bread itself that which would carry them above the earth. Thus they wanted a supermundane and not an earthly priesthood; they wanted a priesthood that would rule the earth from the outside. This was the case with Judaism in particular at the time of Christ. Because Judaism, through long periods of time, had established a priesthood in its mysteries that was not properly connected with the earth, it could not understand that the Being of whom its initiates spoke as the coming Messiah could come to perfection in an earthly body; and it never dawned on the initiated Jews either that the Christ could have walked on earth in an earthly body, in the body of Jesus. Only Paul realized this when he received the help that the Christ revealed Himself not in the earthly body but in the etheric body.

Thus are all things connected, and this you must feel, for the words from the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which were given to those who were sent out as priests in the first Christian centuries, these words can only be understood in the right way from these foundations. But what is gained by going back to the actual original form of the offering of “salt and brimstone”? We can imagine what is gained by doing so if we imagine the contrast that existed between the high priest, between Melchi-Sadek, who was also a priest-king, an Adonai, and Abraham. In the current of intellectual life in which Melchi-Sadek also stood, the idea of repeated earthly lives was alive. It lived precisely in the mystery community to which Melchi-Sadek belonged in such a way that it was kept hidden from the uninitiated as a mystery, but it was handed over to all those who had been initiated into these mysteries. The Abrahamitic Hebraism was characterized by the fact that it restricted human perception to what arises as something spiritual for man when one disregards repeated earth lives, when one does not go into them, when one still takes scantily into account the pre-earthly life that preceded one's earth life and then considers the post-earthly life.

At least that was the teaching of the Pharisees. Abraham was the forefather of Judaism, who had the mission, within the education of mankind on earth, not to allow the teaching of repeated earthly lives to be active at first, in contrast to the higher priest, whom he recognized and who applied this teaching to those who were consecrated by him when they offered a sacrifice. He was opposed to the view of Melchi-Sadek, as described in the Old Testament. We must visualize this view of Melchi-Sadek in the following way.

It was the case that those who became disciples of Melchi-Sadek, which Abraham did not fully become, came to recognize that a person who, here on earth, in addition to doing good and right, also does wrong, needs a power that passes from his present body to the body of the next earthly life. Man cannot by himself carry over into the body, that is to say into the physical and etheric organization of the next earth-life, that which he accomplishes as activity in one earth-life; he can carry it over - and that now in sense of the time of human evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, in that what is accomplished through the cult with salt and phosphorus is done for him, in the sense that Melchi-Sadek accomplished the sacrifice through bread and wine. This enabled people in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha to take with them into the bodies they took on in the next life on earth the consequences of the good and evil they had committed in the previous life on earth. In other words, it was only through this that people were able to develop karma. None of the moral actions of one earthly life would have been passed on to a future life if it had not been for this kind of passing from body to body of what must be borne, so that there is karma, the cosmic destiny of man.

And what would have happened if there had been no such sacrifices of salt and phosphorus, if there had been no priest-kings to perform these sacrifices and thus become human beings who, so to speak, carried the other bodies along with them through their own momentum and enthusiasm, thus carrying the power of karma from one earthly life to another? Then the good and evil that people have done in one earthly life would have fallen away from them in that particular earthly life and become an inheritance of that power which, in the sense of the Gospel, is referred to as the “prince of this world”, not as the prince to whom man, with his innermost being, belongs. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the constant struggle of the time was that the so-called prince of this world - a spirit that had become Luciferic-Ahrimanic, namely a spirit that had become strongly Ahrimanic - took possession of that which tends towards evil in man, so that he could use the power of this evil for himself in the cosmic order. Human beings would then have become increasingly free from this evil. They were not allowed to do so; they were not allowed to do so because otherwise a new existence of their own would have begun in each new life on earth, and they would never have been able to atone for what is called 'sin' themselves. The sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek therefore consists in the fact that the healing of sins was preserved for men by continually snatching them from the prince of this world, and thus giving men the possibility of effecting a sin-atoning through their own nature in a subsequent life on earth. The Catholic Church was careful later on not seriously to consider this secret, which it has known for many centuries, even as late as the Middle Ages, and which is still known today by individual initiates of the Catholic Church, as religious content, for the reason that it is easier to tell people that their sins are forgiven, that is, that they are wiped out of the earth, even with the help of indulgences, to blot them out, instead of telling them that one is working to ensure that they are not blotted out on earth and do not become prey to the prince of this world and thereby corrupt the world for eternity instead of telling them that the healing of sins consists precisely in the fact that man is given the opportunity to make up for sins in the following earthly life.

In the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek, therefore, in the right sense for that time, the remedy for sins is given, and the healing consisted in giving men the strength to keep their sins and not to deliver them up to the prince of this world. All that lies in the meaning of these words, you, my dear friends, will find renewed and exalted in what the Christ accomplished on earth. And only this illumination, which is now being given, will lead you on the path to recognize in the right sense what the word means: Christ took upon Himself the sins of men, united with them. Christ did not come to unite human piety with Himself, but He was the One who united Himself with the sins of men in order to take upon Himself the burden of sin. And when Paul says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” he means: You humans should accept the Christ in you, and thus accept the current in you that goes into the future of the earth, which contains your stream of sins, but the stream of sins that does not lead to death, but to the atonement of sins. And as priests you will become real healers of sins, not repulsors of sins, whereby men would perish in the light of their existence on earth. Again, this mystery is not explained in the church because it does not want to say what speaks to the courage, but what speaks to the cowardice of men. And it speaks to the cowardice of men when one says: Your sins will be taken from you. But one must speak to the courage and strength of men when one tells them: Your sins will be kept from you, you can carry them into the following earthly lives and can create the compensation for them so that you do not spoil earthly development, and in this way you can carry what you have worked for into future earthly cycles. But this is what you must feel with dignity again if you want to understand your priestly office in the right way. For then you will unite in your mission the three things that the Christ wants to see united in the mission of those who follow him and acknowledge him as the true Master, who in a higher sense has renewed the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek, who acknowledge him in such a way that they continue his work among men in the threefold sense:

Firstly: in the name of the Father, by feeling truly imbued with God and the spirit, by feeling themselves to be priests not merely by profession, by virtue of their office, but by feeling themselves to be priests through the spirit. Those who do not perform their priestly duties with enthusiasm but merely as a job – which is always the heritage of the prince of this world – do not perform them in the sense of Christ.

"The second is that the word of the gospel is not externalized in the sense of the prince of this world, but proclaimed in the sense of the living Christ, so that the proclamation of the gospel is based on spiritual understanding in the heart of the priest. The continuing churches have sinned very grievously against the second, that which Christ demanded of his servants; they have sinned very grievously by bringing about conditions that are still visible today in their extremes. Especially those who want to be priests or teachers of the gospel very often most often criticize when anyone wants to base the gospel on the living spirit again. And then, in a seductive way that actually contains a Luciferic impulse, it is said that the Gospel should not be interpreted in a “complicated” way – but it is not a matter of a complicated interpretation, but of an interpretation in keeping with the spirit – it should be interpreted in simple words, as they stand. But that means nothing other than that it should not be interpreted at all. Because the way it is proclaimed today is not the gospel; that is, the way it is proclaimed today is actually denied by many theologians. The second thing you should feel as priests of a renewed priesthood is that you should carry out your ministry with enthusiasm, that you have the will to fulfill Scripture in a spiritual sense.

The third thing is that you want to be and should be in the right sense soul doctors of people, soul healers, by your word actually being fulfilled by that power that is given with the commission you have received, by that power through which you, when you perform the cult in the right sense and teach from inner enthusiasm, from inner knowledge, interpreting the scriptures , then in your work you have the power to heal souls, that is, to truly continue the work that the Christ accomplished with the Mystery of Golgotha and that is indicated by the words that he who struggles for the inheritance of evil in human nature, so that this human nature may not bring sin from one from one life to another, has been bound by the Mystery of Golgotha in the earthly life for a thousand years, that is, for a period at the end of which people should have become so strong that they can no longer fall prey to him; then he will be released again, and then people will have to have greater strength to resist him.

We live in the time, my dear friends, in which, on the one hand, Christ wants to show Himself to people again to strengthen their power; in this time we must prepare ourselves for this in the appropriate way. But we also live in the time when the thousand years are fulfilled, when the adversary wants to break his fetters and will do his utmost to achieve his intentions. And that is the time when the real secret of human evolution will be revealed to people, that those who truly feel the “Christ in me” take their sins with them by having the intention not to repel sins and thereby deliver them to the adversary, but to take them within themselves and, through what happened at Golgotha, to have a healing effect on humanity.

My dear friends, I believe you expected to learn not an unctuous reworking of what has already been taught, but something that really contains the secrets of initiation; and you will see that much of what has been taught so far is the very opposite of what is real. And if you cannot feel very keenly that you have to bring something new into the world, which in many respects is the very opposite of what is not a teaching from God but a teaching from the prince of this world, then you will not be able to enter into what you want in the right way. It is therefore an important matter. And the words that I have to add, so to speak, as the “first sermon” at the first mass that has been held here, must not only be words spoken in theory, but they must contain something that can shake your souls in a certain way and bring them to a new state of mind. Because the time has come when people must again be told: Change your minds! And those who want to lead people in a new priestly sense must also speak in such a way that it is said: Change the mind by which, in misunderstanding the facts, the Christian mind has been veiled to man so far!

In this way, after the preceding ceremonies, it falls to me to address the word of sending to you, the word of sending that was spoken in the sense of the first Christian sending of those who had been called to the apostolate, this word of sending forth, which is recorded in the second letter of St. Paul to Timothy, chapter 1, verse 6. And this word I have to speak to you at this moment in the manner in which we can express it in our present language:

I exhort you always to stir up the gift of the Holy Spirit that is in you, which was given to you by the touch of the power of the Spirit world.

And I have to add the word from the first epistle of Timothy, chapter 4, verse 14, which in turn is translated into the language that is expressed by our present words with liveliness, so it means:

Do not lose the excited spiritual power from the eyes of your soul, which is given to you through the spirit word that touches the power of the spiritual world and works in the future.

Those who were sent out in the first Christian centuries to become the apostles were sent out in the spirit of the words of truth contained in these letters to Timothy, and became true followers of the apostles. And if you want to carry out what you have set out to do in the right way, you must become successors of the apostles. You can only do that if you say to yourselves: The apostles will speak to us in the mind of Christ; but we must bring the right understanding to the language of the apostles! And in order for you to have the right understanding of the language of the Apostles, I followed the solemn ceremony of the ordination of the shepherds of souls by connecting, so to speak, the first sermon for the Apostle ministry, which can lead you in the right sense to an understanding of your Apostle ministry. But only if you know that it is precisely in the alchemy of salt and phosphorus – or sulphur – that is, in the bread and wine, that you renew what happened on the cross and as a result of the death on the cross, then you will know that you have to consider the third as part of your mission. The three components of your mission are as follows:

First, that you should discharge your office in the enthusiasm with which the divine spiritual world permeates us;

secondly, that you should bring strength to the communities in the living word, not in the dead word, which actually denies the real spirit and which today, out of a Luciferian inclination, is called the “simple” word; and

thirdly, that you feel like real healers, like real doctors for the sins of humanity, that is, that you can accomplish, in addition to your own state of soul, in addition to the interpretation of the word the miracle of the remission of sins, that is, the transformation of the inheritance of the prince of this world into a good that the Christ carries into the souls of men through all subsequent eras and circles of the earth for the atonement of sins. As one imbued with God, as a teacher of God and as a healer of sins – in this sense you must give to your communities and tell them what you yourselves experience in your enthusiasm, what you can learn as a teacher of God within you, and that it may become manifest to them what you have attained as the living power of the healing of sins. That is what I had to place upon your souls today.

A participant: What about the breaking off of a piece of the host? Does that have something to do with the human constitutional elements?

Rudolf Steiner: If we see in the whole host what lives as solar power in man, we first take in nine-tenths, which we initially let work through their salt content. In this way, we connect nine-tenths of what is in us with our earthly existence, in the way I have just described. The question is: what happens to the remaining tenth? We immerse it in the wine, and before it enters our organism, we mix it with the phosphorus of the wine. It is in this mixing of the phosphorus with the salt that the part of the action taken out of the human being lies. The other part of the action takes place when we allow the salt to combine with the phosphorus merely through inner alchemy. The fact that we also take a small part out of this inner alchemy and leave it to the power that lives on the altar, that is what lies in the breaking away of the tenth from the host.

If we consider the whole human being, in the sense in which I have presented it in my “Theosophy”, according to its nine parts, we find, if we go down from above: spirit man, spirit of life, spirit self, consciousness soul, mind soul, sentient soul, sentient body, etheric body, physical body. These are the nine members. They would not connect with earthly life in the right way if there were not a synthesis: this is the tenth (see the larger circle drawn around the nine smaller circles in the diagram on Plate 3). This gives us ten members, which also appear in the ten Sephirot of the pre-Christian era, albeit in the way that corresponds to that time, when full self-awareness did not yet exist. If you now think of the host in connection with the ten members of the human being, you have in it a member that is the physical body, the ninth (in the drawing, the small red circle), which is actually the tenth. This physical body is in a special position, it is in a different position from the other links in human nature. You have to bear in mind that if you look out into the vastness of space from the earth, in the parts bordering on the earth, in a very, very fine resolution, you have everything that is on the earth, except for the salt-like. The salt-like is a property of the earth itself. There was once a period in the evolution of the Earth when salt formations also occurred in the Earth's immediate surroundings, but they no longer developed into solids, remaining instead in a liquid or gaseous state. Then a time came in the evolution of the earth when salt formation only occurred on the earth itself and in its immediate vicinity, so that the ether, which permeates the earth but extends beyond it, has no part in the formation of salt. Salt is something that has only a meaning for earthly existence itself, and this is shown by the fact that for no other celestial body but the Earth has salt formation become the peculiar characteristic of planetary formation. If you take the physical body, then, simply through its organization, it has a share in salt. And at the moment when you break out of the whole human being, which the host represents, the 'physical body', you can say: I cannot have this body connected in any other way with the one in which the other parts are already inside, than by me letting what can no longer take place on earth in the right way, what only takes place in a decadent way – by forming phosphoric acid salts, , but which make up precisely the heaviest part of the human being, his bony part, which belongs solely and exclusively to earthly existence. By allowing this to combine in an extra-terrestrial way – that is, allowing the salt to combine with the phosphorus that is in the wine – I allow, through what I do in the rite, through Christ, that which would not be effected in my own body. So I must consume a part of the host in such a way that it does not work like the other part of the host; so that [by breaking off a part of the host] it should be shown that man himself is not the alchemist who effects the transmutation, but it should be shown how that which man cannot do is done by the power of Christ at the altar.

This is how the matter presents itself when we consider it in terms of the new spiritual alchemy.

A participant: What about the seven candles on the altar?

Rudolf Steiner: It is good to put into words everything that is present in the cultus in a physical form, because the physical form of the cultus should speak to us. If we wanted to express in a single sentence what is contained in the seven candles, we would have to say: Just as there are seven human constitutional elements within you, a sevenfold power radiates out of the ritual for you, each part of which belongs to a part of your own being.

A participant: What can be said about the figures on the chasuble?

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the processes that take place in the cosmos and which either close in on human beings, so that they participate in cosmic processes, or which are expressed in a different way so that they develop images or replicas of them, then, if we want to express this in words, we can only do so in the following way: Panel 3

We can say that ascending and descending forces are at work everywhere in the cosmos. These ascending and descending forces can best be visualized by a line like this:

We would then have the ascending forces on one side and the descending forces on the other.

On the one side we would have the ascending forces and on the other the descending forces. You can imagine it something like this: if you were to stand on one pan of a set of scales, you would be heavy, i.e. you would take part in the general ponderability of the earth, in gravity. You would join the forces that work downwards. There are, of course, other forces at work than those that we initially think of as represented by gravity. You could live in connection with everything that manifests itself as gravity, but you could never develop a soul life permeated by thoughts. For if you were only exposed to these forces of gravity, your brain would weigh 1500 grams; but a brain weighing 1500 grams would immediately crush all the fine veins beneath it. If the brain were to press down on the lower surface of the head with this weight, a person would not be able to think, and would therefore not be able to develop a soul life. How do we develop a soul life? You develop a soul life, to put it bluntly, through Archimedes' principle. Archimedes said that when he was once in the bath, he observed that he felt lighter than outside the water. And in physics we learn the law that every body, when immersed in water, loses as much weight as the weight of the amount of water displaced by it, so that when you are in the water, you lose as much weight as a human formed from water would weigh. Now our brain is floating in the brain fluid and as a result it loses so much of its weight that instead of pressing down with 1500 grams, it only weighs 20 grams. In physics, what counteracts the force of gravity in the fluid, which now works upwards and not downwards, is called buoyancy. Thus man lives with his soul not in the forces of gravity, the ponderable forces, but in those forces that draw upward; he himself is a physical cosmos, which, as regards his soul life, does not live in what is heavy in him, but in what continually strives to escape from gravity in him.

Thus we can say: We need only look at the human being very roughly in physical terms, and we cannot think materially at all. The human being has the characteristic of being heavy. But if we were to think with the material, we would have to think with the heaviness. We cannot think with heaviness, but only with uplift. It is therefore nonsense to believe that we think with heaviness. We think with that which strives upward to heaven; thus we join the forces that work upward. We human beings live in the forces that draw downward and those that work upward; our inner being is in the upward-working forces, our outer being in the downward-drawing ones. The physical body is heavy, the etheric body is neutral in relation to gravity, the astral body pulls up and the I is carried up through the astral body, not down. Thus the outer man is integrated into the cosmos. But what does he do as an organism that also has an inner organic life? The following happens:

Everything that takes place in the head is a true reflection of what is happening in the metabolic-limb organization. When, for example, a person digests and his kidney and liver systems work together to regulate digestion in the right way, a process takes place in the kidney and liver systems that is also reflected in the left part of the brain. There is never just something going on below or just above, but there are always corresponding processes taking place below and above. Thus, just as the human being is outwardly embedded in the cosmos of ascending and descending forces, so too is he inwardly endowed with these forces; those forces that are in the left part of the brain act down in the liver and kidneys; those forces that are in the upper right part of the brain act down in the stomach (see diagram, plate 3).

And if we follow the effects of these forces, the ascending and descending ones, we get this second line:

Plate 3

There is a neutral point in the human being where these two forces intersect. If you show yourself as a spiritual person to the believing community, and you show yourself from the front, you show yourself in this form (see drawing). If you turn around, then that part of you which is more an image of your own inner being shows itself in the other line. With regard to the upper, dotted part, it is then a matter of taking it up through yourself, that is, letting it go within you and leaving it to the gods to properly effect the transformation of the ascending into the descending forces. So that you simply show what is right when you are vested. You pronounce the secrets of the world through the vestment.

So you can't say: why is that so? In the material world, man is simply Maya. During the sacred act, he can show himself as he is in relation to the cosmos and to himself. You make sure that the person shows himself not in an illusory form, but in his truth. The image is intended to suggest what is a reality in the human being in the spiritual sense, but what is also reproduced in the physical human being. You just need to form a picture of how the blood circulation in the human being proceeds in the left and right halves of the heart, how the blood flows from the right atrium to the right ventricle, through the lungs, back to the left atrium , from there to the left ventricle, and again supplies the upper part of the human being, this is visible in an approximate way, corresponding to earthly conditions. Only when one follows this line, the point of intersection is somewhat shifted in the physical and is more towards the bottom.

A participant: Does a donation formula have to be given for the community communion?

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is as follows: the Act of Consecration of Man, the Mass, can be read and the faithful merely listen. The Communion of the faithful can also be incorporated into the Act of Consecration of Man; in that case it takes place after the Priestly Communion. And so it should actually be that all the breads are in the paten, to be used for the Communion of the faithful, and that all the wine is in the chalice, to be used for the Communion of the faithful. So the Priestly Communion is coming to an end.

May Your Body, O Christ, which I have received, and Your Blood, which gives me life, penetrate me, so that the disease of sin may be cured by the healing medicine, the sacrament.

It is done through You, who bear and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and, through the Holy Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Altar server: Yes, let it be so.

Now the priests' communion is over; now the faithful's communion begins:

The body of Christ which you receive and the blood of Christ which gives you life may permeate you so that the disease of sin may be healed by the healing medicine, the sacrament.

It is done through You, who bear and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and, through the Holy Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Altar server: Yes, Lord, let it be so.

The host is given, placed on the tongue. The believer is touched lightly with the fingers of the right hand on the left cheek, and it is said again:

Peace be with you.

Then the chalice is passed. The left cheek is again touched with the fingers of the right hand, and again it is said:

Peace be with you.

This is the transition from the priest's communion to the faithful's communion.

Of course, Holy Communion is not to be distributed at every Mass, but in any case it should not happen that the faithful proceed to Communion without an opening of the Mass. Now it may be that in some places the Mass cannot be read. Then it would of course still be good, even without celebrating the Mass, at least to develop the whole spirit of the Mass, so that - since the community will certainly demand the explanation of the Mass right from the start - the Communion of the faithful can at least be incorporated into the Mass action in spirit.

A participant asks whether the Communion of the faithful should also take place without the Priestly Communion.

Rudolf Steiner: The action can certainly be performed in an appropriate manner. It is not good if the communion of the faithful is brought about without the communion of the priests. The communion of the priests should come first.

A participant: What about the mixing of water and wine?

Rudolf Steiner: This is a given in actual alchemy, in that the human being - I only hinted at this yesterday by way of example - continually develops alcohol within himself as he needs it. Now, the human being is also 90% water column, the other is only incorporated in it. Therefore, in the chalice, we also have an image of the human being made of water and wine, in that you do not just take the wine, but the wine, which is a product of the human being, mix it with the water.

You can only unite with Christ by entering into the phantom of the physical human body. This is contained in the words: “entering into the physical earth”; and this is what man finds when he

physical, even when it is already corrupted in the physical, is linked precisely to Christ. Thus renewal takes place in union with Christ, which is there as a consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer asks whether words could also be given for the laying out of the robes in the sacristy.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course one could think of something like that, but I would actually like to warn against the danger of over-Catholicizing. The situation is this: if you take a missal in your hands today – the good missals include instructions for this – you will find an extraordinarily strong externalization. Every second, when the priest dresses or walks to the altar, he is doing something prescribed for him; he cannot escape the words contained in the missal. A Missa solemnis is, after all, something extraordinarily complicated, and only by first tormenting candidates for the priesthood to learn how to put together a mass, for example at Christmas, at Easter and so on, does one make it possible for the matter to proceed without difficulty. Otherwise, the composition of a mass, for example a Christmas mass, where many individual priests work together, would take an extremely long time to prepare, because everything is externalized and has to be coordinated. Now this is simply postponed to the time of the candidates, and later the priests can spare themselves the trouble, because it actually happens automatically. So it is precisely in the Catholic Church that it is the “catholic” that it has externalized everything, and one must go back to feeling one's way through the action of the Mass with such moods, as I have just indicated through the two fundamental sermons, so that one does not have to specify. And you have indeed given the priest the means to keep this alive in his mind, in the breviary, if it is used in the right way and is brought into the right connection with the preparation for and the celebration of the Mass. I would therefore like to warn against the fact that the matter is too formulaic. I must strive to bring back what is Catholic in the Ahrimanic externalized, to the original real spiritual. So I would like to warn against feeling too strong a tendency towards Catholicism. They would quickly end up on the same path that Catholicism actually took in the 5th century, but especially between the 10th and 12th centuries, where everything was really externalized. I believe that we would have to avoid that if we act correctly. So: do not go too far when formulating. Formulate what needs to be formulated, but do not go too far.

What I said yesterday and today, and what I may still have to say, offers the opportunity to experience the original spiritual dimension in a very concrete way, not just in a general, abstract way, but in a very concrete way, during the preparation, the celebration and the aftermath of the Mass. There it comes to life every day. We do not run the risk that the Roman Catholic priest does, namely – and of course one must express things as they are – when you celebrate the great lines of the rite, it is also a real process. What you perform as a rite is imprinted in the ether of the universe; and when you read the tenth mass, it is not the same as the first time. The first time you excite the vibrations in the cosmic ether, the tenth time you already place yourself in the vibrations; thus, more and more an objective arises. If you now permeate everything with formulas too strongly, you get the same result as when a Catholic priest performs the service. The actual rite breaks away from the person, but the rite that clings too strongly to the person causes a terrible hardening in the person: he repeatedly enjoys the same thing that he enjoyed the day before, he enjoys, so to speak, his own sputum over and over again. And that must be avoided. A participant: How should we understand 'to the right and left of the altar' at Mass?

[Rudolf Steiner's answer is only poorly recorded by the stenographer. See note.)

A participant asks about sobriety when celebrating the Act of Consecration of Man.

Rudolf Steiner: You can imagine how much more undisturbed the whole process of celebrating the Mass is when there is no nourishment at work within you. The Catholic Church has the idea that the consumption of the sacrament at Mass is made the first consumption of the day, with the exception of those who have dispensation because otherwise their health would be harmed. Now, the idea is that the mass is basically performed for others, so it is detached from the priest, so that the question of whether the priest should perform the mass on an empty or a full stomach is actually a personal matter for the priest. Of course, it has an effect on him, because he also has to read it for himself. Now he can arrange it in such a way as he needs for his own strengthening. He has to read the Mass every day. But if one priest says, “I feel the power of the Mass for eight days,” another says, “I feel it for a month.” This is true for the priest himself.

The act should be celebrated at sunrise, not at sunset. A mass at sunset cannot be considered a real mass for the cosmos. During the Christmas season, a mass should be read around midnight, at the transition from the descent to the ascent of the sun, between December 24th and 25th. This is how it is now; originally it was between December 22 and 23. This is now also correct in the Catholic Church. A mass is to be read at midnight between December 24 and 25, immediately where the sun begins to rise. A participant: How often should incense be burned during the ceremony?

Rudolf Steiner: Only one incense is necessary. But of course, if you want to celebrate the service solemnly, you can even do it up to three times. You don't have to limit it to a clever system. It is a process that develops. You must not ask: What difference does it make if I do it three times? - The first time invokes the process.

We will now continue with the interpretations that we have linked to the Wrangell brochure “Science and Theosophy”. We left off at the chapter “Essence of Jesus' Teaching”, according to which the essence of Jesus' teaching is said to consist of “the raw message that the creator and ruler of the universe, to the human being whom he created in his image, is a loving Father, that love for God and fellow man is the highest moral commandment, that the soul of man is immortal and that after death a fate is prepared for it which corresponds to the moral behavior of man during his life.

We had to point out that it is indeed possible to describe the teaching of Jesus in this way, but that the essence of Christianity in the spiritual-scientific sense is not captured if one does not become aware of the facts that are present in the appearance of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth and in the Mystery of Golgotha, which must be understood by anyone who gradually wants to find their way into the essence of Christianity. These facts belong to the essence of Christianity. As I have often said, Christianity is not just a doctrine, but encompasses a reality. To understand this reality, which can be expressed as the “mystery of Golgotha”, is part of understanding the essence of Christianity.

Then attention is drawn to the fact that the various religions have caused a conflict between faith and science: “The obvious aberrations into which the organized Christian communities, the historical churches, have fallen, have brought their dogmas into opposition to some firmly established scientific achievements, thereby causing the conflict between faith and knowledge, religion and science, which has been corroding the spiritual life of European culture. This situation explains the interest that has turned to other religious systems that claim not only to be in harmony with science, but to expand it. Among these teachings, Theosophy deserves special attention. Since H.P. Blavatsky drew the attention of European culture to this teaching, which originated in India, it has found various representations.

From the spiritual scientific point of view, it must be pointed out in particular that what spiritual science is for modern humanity must not be described as a doctrine originating in India, but that it has formed purely out of itself, out of the impulses of the present cycle of development. And when outsiders repeatedly point out a relationship between our spiritual science and Indian teachings, it is only because the concept of repeated earthly lives is so foreign to the Occident that everyone who hears about repeated earthly lives immediately thinks of India, because there this teaching has become a dogma within religious beliefs. It is important to emphasize again and again that our spiritual-scientific content is built up out of the needs of the counterweight itself and is not a doctrine that comes from here or there, but is to be grasped and understood out of itself.

Finally, it must also be said with regard to Blavatsky that she was initially quite independent of any orientalizing cultural trend with her teachings, as expressed in the “Entschleierte Isis”, for example; that what she wrote in the early days belongs entirely to European intellectual culture. It was only through various complications that Blavatsky felt more and more drawn to the Indian. As a result, she imposed a kind of Indian vignette on the current that originated with her and swore by her, which in turn must be removed because it would be impossible to accomplish even the slightest thing in modern culture with any old religious system. This is extraordinarily important and remains so for our consideration of the particularly interesting chapter in our brochure in which the theosophical teachings are summarized. The chapter is entitled: “The Nature of the Theosophical Teachings.” Here Mr. von Wrangell does not describe what spiritual science is as such, but rather what he has found in the literature of the various world views that call themselves theosophical. I will read this chapter and then we will link our considerations to it. So:

The Nature of the Theosophical Teachings

The most essential assumptions common to the various presentations and conceptions of Theosophy can be expressed as follows.

1. There are other spiritual worlds besides the one perceptible to our five senses, with each higher world having an effect on the lower ones.

2. There are people who have other means of perception in addition to the usual five senses, so-called “occult senses”.

3. Thoughts, feelings, impulses of will, in short, what we call “spiritual phenomena” in human experience, are - even if they have not expressed themselves in the sense world as words or deeds - living entities capable of producing effects in the spiritual worlds and indirectly in the sense world.

4. The soul life of every human being leaves imperishable traces in the higher worlds, which in their totality are called the “Akasha Chronicle” by secret researchers and can be investigated by some qualified people (initiates).

5. The living human being is not a simple being consisting of the living body, but the physical body is only the tool by which the actual essence of the human being, his indestructible “I”, can enter into a relationship with the physical world. These relationships are mediated by intermediate links: firstly, the “etheric body”, which is the carrier of unconscious, vegetative life and forms the material substances of the body according to its own laws; secondly, the “astral body”, carrier of desires, passions, instincts.

6. The human “ego”, the seat of self-awareness, is endowed with freedom, i.e. it can guide its desires, impulses, thoughts, etc., setting them a goal and direction.

7. Depending on whether the ego utilizes the external possibilities offered to it in life in accordance with the eternal laws and the purpose of the world as a whole, or neglects to do so, it shapes its “karma,” i.e., the measure of satisfaction or torment due to it in the world as a whole.

8. After physical death, the immortal “I” of man passes through various spiritual worlds, carrying with it the sum of the eternal values that it has gained in earthly life. After a period of time that is different for each individual, the “ego” begins the return journey from the higher worlds to the lower ones, enriched by the insights gained in those worlds, and begins a new life on earth through re-embodiment, which takes shape according to its karma and the aspirations of its changed “ego”.

9. World affairs are regulated in accordance with the purpose of the whole by spiritual beings who intervene in events either favorably or unfavorably, according to their nature or volitional direction.

10. These beings are hierarchically structured according to their sphere of activity and power and, like everything in the world, are subject to evolution from lower to higher levels.

11. The supreme law of all world events is “free sacrifice out of love”. The Godhead, following this law, sacrificed Itself through manifestation in the outer world by endowing the spiritual beings that originated from It with the ability of free impulses of will. The Cosmos, brought into being through this act, is left to its own development.

12. This development leads through eons from unconscious to conscious comprehension of the supreme law of the world and through realization of it to the reunification of the individual with the whole.

We will now go through the individual points. In point 1, it says: “There are other spiritual worlds besides the one perceivable by our five senses, and each higher world has an effect on the lower ones.” We can agree with this. Under 2. it says: there are so-called occult senses. - I already said yesterday that it is necessary to emphasize that spiritual science stands on the standpoint that through special treatment of ordinary abilities, spiritual perceptual abilities can also be developed in man, and that in today's cycle of development, these methodically developed abilities are of primary importance. One can also find such abilities in man that still come from earlier times. They can be awakened, since they are present in almost every person, but they must be developed in the way described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. It is therefore not good to say it as Mr. von Wrangell says, but one should say: It is possible that man, just as he develops his five senses through prenatal development and continues to develop them in extra-maternal existence, he also develops inner powers in the purely spiritual; develops abilities to see purely spiritual worlds. Such abilities are conscious transformations of older abilities, which were appropriate for earlier epochs on earth, and which awaken in every person already by themselves, either through external influence or during systematic training through the methods described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. The expression “occult senses” should be avoided, because one cannot say that a person acquires occult senses, but rather that it is a completely different way of perceiving. What organizes what are called lotus flowers should not be called senses, but at most sensory faculty.

In point 3, it says: “Thoughts, feelings, volitional impulses, in short, what we call ‘spiritual phenomena’ in human experience, are - even if they have not expressed themselves in the sense world as words or deeds - living entities capable of effect in the spiritual worlds and indirectly in the sense world.” Now, this has often been described in great detail, especially recently, when I described the transition from the perception of thoughts to the experience of living thoughts. And it would be even better if one were to say: That which appears in man as thoughts, feelings and impulses of will is, as it appears to man in the soul, the image of entities of the higher worlds, the elemental world and the still higher worlds, so that we actually have the true reality in what we initially have as thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, in the same way that one has the true reality in sensory perceptions. It lies behind the one as well as behind the other.

The 4th point is: «The soul life of every human being leaves imperishable traces in the higher worlds, which in their totality are called the 'Akasha Chronicle' by secret researchers and can be explored by some qualified people (initiates).» This has often been described, and it is of particular importance to take into account the fact that when one enters the Akasha world, one enters a living world and not a world of dead images.

Then, in point 5, it is pointed out that a person consists of different aspects of his being. You know this much better than it is stated here.

Regarding point 6, about freedom, we have often said that people are led towards freedom on their path, that people become more and more free.

Point 7 is about karma, which you also know very well.

Point 8 is: “After physical death, the immortal ‘I’ of man passes through various spiritual worlds, carrying with it the sum of the eternal values that it has gained in earthly life. After a period of time that is different for each individual, the “I” begins the return journey from the higher worlds to the lower ones, enriched by the insights gained in those worlds, and, through re-embodiment, begins a new life on earth, which takes shape according to its karma and the aspirations of its changed “I”. — You can experience to a certain extent what is said about this in the lecture cycle “The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and a New Birth”.

Point 9: “World affairs are governed, in accordance with the purpose of the whole, by spiritual beings who intervene in events in a promoting or inhibiting way, depending on their nature and volitional direction.” — You are familiar with this too.

Point 10 reads: “These entities are hierarchically structured according to their sphere of activity and power and, like everything in the world, are subject to development from lower to higher levels.” — It is not good when everything is generalized again in this way. The idea of development also has a limited validity. I have often said that it is necessary to form new thoughts when ascending into the higher worlds. Thus, one can say that when ascending into the higher worlds, one first penetrates regions in which time still plays a role; but then one comes to regions that can be described as regions of duration. In these, time no longer plays a role. One can only speak of the fact that the law of development applies only as a symbolic, as I have done in my “Secret Science”.

Point 11 reads: “The highest law of all world happenings is ‘free sacrifice out of love’. The Godhead, following this law, has sacrificed Itself through manifestation in the outer world by endowing the spiritual entities that originated from It with the faculty of free will impulses. The Cosmos, brought into being through this act, is left to its own development.

Now Mr. von Wrangell tries to recapitulate and characterize the points mentioned, saying:

All secret researchers in European culture agree on these basic teachings: H.P. Blavatsky, Mrs. A. Besant, Leadbeater, Dr. Hartmann, Dr. R. Steiner, among others. The same teachings are also said to apply in the Indian secret schools from which H.P. Blavatsky took them.

But here we now know that spiritual science – as it presents itself in its purity to the world, little by little – must not be mixed with other things, for it can truly fulfill its mission only if it takes into account the essentials of Western culture and therefore also of Western science. But this cannot be said of such personalities as the late Dr. Franz Hartmann. Nor has the form which Theosophy has taken under the leadership of Mrs. Besant or even under Leadbeater anything to do with Western culture, as it is now making its self-evident cultural demands.

And here I may well refer those who, as seekers, are beginning to develop a certain interest in our spiritual science and attach great importance to our spiritual science breaking away from what otherwise often prevails in the world as Theosophy, to a very nice and dear article written by Dr. Rittelmeyer in the journal “Christianity and Contemporary Life”. The reason I mention this article is not that Dr. Rittelmeyer says a few things about me in it. Those who know me better are aware that I am not mentioning this for that reason, but because the article speaks of our work with a certain loving understanding and characterizes it with loving attention to one side or the other. It seems important to me to highlight one passage from this article, which I received this morning:

It is therefore important for those who, from within Western culture, are interested in what spiritual science seeks to be, that we do not want to reheat ancient Indian teachings, but that we want to create something out of the spiritual world that is suitable for our own time cycle.

Perhaps I may still refer you to the article. I can do so with reservation; because after the many things that are said about our movement and my writings, something can be said that does not complain, but responds with some understanding. The article is in issue 10 of the journal “Christianity and Contemporary Life” from October 1915, which is published in Nuremberg, Ebnergasse 10, bookstore of the Association for Inner Mission. As I said, do not misunderstand this reference when you read the article. But since I have said that it would be good to get to know the ideas that connect the outside spiritual life with us, it might interest you if something were to appear that does the opposite of what usually happens with our movement. The article is called: “Two Buildings of the German Future (Dornach and Elmau).” Elmau was founded by Dr. Müller. In this article, particular attention is paid to the differences between the Dornach and Elmau buildings. Perhaps I may read this passage. There is another passage I am not allowed to read because it mentions me too much; but perhaps I may read the following:

What Rittelmeyer is saying here is that those of us at Elmau want to keep the old ways alive, while we here want to create something new. We can be quite satisfied with that. It is very gratifying that there are some people who have an understanding of the spiritual science movement, while it is so denigrated in such an unpleasant way by those who do not want to educate themselves about it.

Now Mr. von Wrangell continues:

The occult abilities, similar to the sensory abilities in the earthly life of man, are said to be of very different degrees. The highest degree of initiation that can be attained at present enables a person, in an awakened state and in full possession of his mental faculties, to go with his ego at will into higher spiritual worlds, even into that world where the Akasha Chronicle provides information about the past of the whole world and of every single human being.

So on the whole, one can very much agree with the presentation. It is only necessary to know what our spiritual scientific movement wants in particular and to keep this clearly in mind. It is indeed necessary not to be confused with others who also deal with the spiritual worlds, but who mix everything together and speak of a deepening into the divine and so on. It is important to keep this clearly in mind.

This is followed by the chapter:

Secret teachings

The results of the knowledge gained by the secret researcher were previously only communicated in secret schools, but are now partially revealed in writings and lectures accessible to everyone. These communications naturally bear the stamp of the personality of the secret researcher in form and content. Since they are based on occult perceptions, their truth can only be independently verified by people who possess the same degree of occult gifts and the same power of judgment. For from the perceptions gained in the spiritual world, judgments must first be drawn and these conclusions must be translated into the language of the earthly sense world in order to be able to communicate them to fellow human beings.

On the other hand, it should be noted that although the content of the spiritual worlds can only be explored in the presence of the abilities that have been mentioned, anyone can actually check what has been explored. This is because the world that everyone can observe is, in a sense, a reflection of the spiritual world, which can be seen through the ability of spiritual perception. And if someone just looks at the world around them with truly open eyes and asks themselves: Does what the secret researcher has discovered in the world of spiritual reality correspond to what happens in life, then they can judge everything without developing occult abilities. It is not because one cannot judge when one says that one must “trust” the researcher of secrets, but because one does not want to engage in a test. What is said about spiritual science proves itself in life and in the world, and everyone can test it. He who says he cannot test is basically saying: I do not want to get involved in whether spiritual teachings can be tested in life and in the world; I do not want to get involved in this alert observation, I want to sleep with my intellect and my judgment. And because people like to sleep with their intellect and their judgment, that is why they say: You cannot test.

But again and again I would like to impress upon the world, so to speak, that it is important that spiritual science is not accepted on authority, but can be tested by what happens in the sensual world. Just because science still observes sensually, it does not engage in a spiritually alert contemplation of life. Therefore, one does not see the correctness of what the spiritual researcher says. And that is why I try not to rely on an authority, not to claim a belief, but I try again and again, through this or that in external science, in philosophical directions of striving, to show how people stand before the spiritual world and just do not want to admit to themselves that they should go further. One need not rely on authority, but only have open eyes, then the striving in spiritual science proves to be a genuine and necessary one in our time.

On the other hand, one must be clear about the fact that much of what is called spiritual science is likely to bar the mind of man from the real spiritual world. This is the case with world views that otherwise mean well, for example Eucken's. But it blinds people by speaking of spirit in words, words, words, that describe nothing other than what the physical soul reflection gives. Therefore, one need not be unjust. You will see that in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” I have shown that what is said about people like Eucken cannot be called unjust. But one must also know that the wrong spiritual science obscures the view of the right one. It is infinitely more convenient to speak of the spiritual in Eucken's way than to concern oneself with the real spiritual that can be investigated.

The next chapter:

Difference between sense science and spiritual science

In this respect they differ essentially from the truths that can be gained by means of the ordinary senses, for here the testing of the facts can be undertaken by countless people and the logical chain of these is subject to the judgment of each one. In the case of occult knowledge, the most important criterion for the credibility of the communications of a secret researcher is the moral value of his personality.

— Not that is the important thing, but the important thing is that he stands on the ground of true spiritual striving, that he endeavors to lead people into the spiritual world in the right way. If one sees the paths that lead into ordinary science and can thus imagine the possibility of how it is to be passed on, then one gets a basis that is not met with the objection that one simply believes the spiritual researcher as a decent human being.

If there are reasons to doubt his truthfulness, then his occult communications are of course of little value.

- It would be as if, when someone has achieved something in ordinary science, we were to make our personal approval of his research dependent on his personality.

If you have no confidence in his judgment in ordinary life, it is highly unlikely that he should prove it under the infinitely difficult conditions, for example, of researching the Akasha Chronicle.

— One can indeed investigate whether what has been discovered from the Akasha Chronicle is in line with life.

But even with unusual occult gifts, with the highest development of the intellect, with the full impartiality of the researcher, it is not likely that people who are never infallible in earthly things should be so in unearthly ones.

- One should not speak of infallibility at all, but only of the fact that the spiritual researcher presents things from a certain point of view. But that has basically nothing to do with the way we relate to the secret researcher's messages.

One is therefore compelled to confront the secret investigator's communications with much sharper criticism than is required of any witness of earthly perceptions.

— So do not confront it with rejection or criticism. Most of what is achieved is rejection or criticism; if one were to reject 72:7 criticism, so much rejection would not come out.

A more or less reliable sense of probability must guide the inner agreement of the various messages, but above all, trust in the person of the secret researcher.

- So we must not have false ideas about this trust. On the other hand, what comes next is particularly important:

If his communications from those worlds, inaccessible to most people, contradict what has been proven by means of sensory perception, then no unbiased person will hesitate as to which communication deserves preference. If, for example, I really know all the facts that speak for the earth rotating freely in space, and a secret researcher tells me that he has learned from occult perceptions that the earth does not rotate, but that the fixed stars move around the earth, a person of sound mind will pay no attention to such occult research.

— Thus, occult science must agree with external science; and if it does not agree, it must indicate why and try to come into line with science.

Of course, such a contradiction can only refer to facts of the sensory world, and not to transcendental questions that lie beyond all sensory experience.

Nevertheless, even transcendental questions can be considered.

Thus, to cite another example, an astronomer who considers the Kant-Laplace hypothesis about the origin of the solar system to be probable cannot tell the secret researcher, who communicates a completely different cosmogony, as in the first case, that his assertion is erroneous, because the rotation of the Earth is considered proven by every healthy person, whereas the formation of the solar system from a nebula, according to the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, can be considered probable, but not proven.

— Mr. von Wrangell is quite right. I have always pointed out the inadequacy of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis that the world formed out of a primeval nebula, which is demonstrated to children in school by the well-known experiment. You pour a drop of oil on water, pierce it with a needle to which a piece of a map is attached, turn it, move this needle and then see how the individual drops split off. If you forget yourself, you have the process of the formation of a world system. But when you do this experiment, you have to point out that the teacher is there, turning the pin, because otherwise you also forget the teacher, the great one who turns the world system.

It is therefore, and this is my deepest conviction, in a dispute between really proven facts of the sensory world and the results of occult research, that victory will always remain on the side of science.

— There will be no victory, but when the facts of sensory science have been reliably researched and on the other hand the facts of spiritual science have been reliably researched, they will agree.

When some occultists express the view that there is nothing certain in earthly science, this is only possible for those who are only familiar with sciences at second hand, but not with the foundations in question.

However, the leading Theosophists in Europe at the time, Mrs. A. Besant, Dr. R. Steiner and others, claim that there is no contradiction between their occult research and the certain results of earthly science, and Dr. Steiner in particular is well qualified to judge about the methods of the exact sciences through his extensive and thorough knowledge of them. Whether the secret researcher is mistaken in detail may be left open, and in my opinion it is not of great importance, because if such a contradiction were proven, it seems to me that the question of whether the basic teachings of Theosophy correspond to the truth or not is not affected. All these teachings relate to spheres that lie beyond sense experience and can therefore be neither confirmed nor refuted by science, which is based exclusively on sense perceptions.

This is important because it shows that anyone who professes to be a scientist comes to the conclusion that a spiritual world view is necessary on the basis of his scientific convictions, and that one is necessarily led to it if one is a scientific person in our time.

The next chapter is headed:

Theosophy – a religion

The theosophical teachings claim to provide information about the purpose and goal of the world as a whole and of the individual human life, and thus to be a religious worldview.

My dear friends, it is necessary that we realize that the actual spiritual science, our spiritual scientific movement, really has nothing to do with religion, that it does not want to be a religious movement. Let us be clear about the fact that in relation to religious life, spiritual science can give nothing other than an inner relationship of the human soul with Christ. That is the religious moment, that is the religious element, but that is Christianity. The humanities recognize that Christianity is the fulfillment of the religious striving of humanity, that new religions will neither take place nor be able to take place. One should get to know the spiritual facts and for that, the humanities is a new instrument, but does not want to found a new religion. It does not want to set itself up as a new movement alongside Christianity, but only presents the research, just as Copernicus made his discovery.

But how was it in those days? In the 15th century, Copernicus came and gave what he had to give, but the Catholic Church did not allow people to believe in the Copernican doctrine until 1822. And Luther said: “The new astrologer, Copernicus, wants to prove that the earth moves and not the sky, the sun and the moon.” Now think how long it took before Copernicus was recognized. When people come along and say that it is a fantasy to teach repeated lives on earth, that is understandable, but it is not for us to teach people as if it were a matter of founding a new religion. Christianity is the synthesis, the confluence of world religions. Through spiritual science, we want to learn to understand Christian truths better than we can understand them without spiritual science. But we do not want to leave it in our heads that we are dealing with a new religion, with a new religious worldview, in theosophy. Spiritual science must defend itself against this. It wants to be science and thereby also deepen religious life. But religious life is also deepened by Copernicanism. In the nineties, the Catholic theologian Müllner, whom I mentioned when reciting Delle Grazie's poems, said about Galilei: “The one who is truly Christian and understands the religious relationship of the human soul to the divine worlds can only experience a deepening of religious life by exploring the world more closely, and not a threat.

It must be emphasized again and again that it is a weakness to resist what is brought by spiritual science in terms of deepening the religious. Imagine if someone had told Kolurmbus: not discover America, because there might be other people, other gods. Imagine what a weakness it would be not to stand so firmly on the ground of Christianity as to be able to say: Whatever will be discovered, the ground of Christianity is so strong that it will hold firm! Therefore, it is nothing but proof of the weakness of those who say that we must reject spiritual science. To them we must say: It is not Christianity if you believe that your teachings could be overthrown by spiritual science. Copernicus did not overthrow either, on the contrary, religious life was deepened by him. It is weak and timid cowardice that imposes the fight from the external, official, so-called Christian point of view, against what spiritual science wants.

This is the point of view we must take against those who come to us with their feeble, timid objections to Theosophy.

[The chapter “Theosophy - a Religion” is read to the end:] It seems doubtful whether any solution to the world riddle can fully satisfy the critically educated person of the present day in terms of its intellectual justification. It will always be a matter of how far the mind and soul of the person are satisfied by the solution to the great eternal questions that presents itself to him. Since it is not possible to prove this intellectually, the feeling for the greater or lesser probability of one or the other solution must also be taken into account.

We want to compare some of the world views as they present themselves to the educated person of European culture from this point of view.

In the following chapters, Wrangell compares materialism, agnosticism, and occultism with each other, and then has a chapter on re-embodiment and karma. He then comes to Lessing's view of reincarnation and a recapitulation of the whole train of thought. There is no longer enough time to discuss the final chapters. We will therefore continue the discussion tomorrow at seven o'clock, because we still have a few important things to say about the final chapters.