The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear friends,

Pastoral medicine as we think of it here will only be recognized as something from spiritual research that has meaning when humankind once more possesses a common consciousness of a spiritual realm containing positive, active forces. For naturally in an age that has developed materialism, it is inconceivable to the ordinary human being that anyone could have seen something worthy of notice in the spiritual world. But this really happened in the old mysteries. Individuals saw into spiritual realms and found knowledge there that led to valuable cures. And what we still have to say today to round off our studies may perhaps provide a connection to that old mystery wisdom for the medical stream that should now emanate from the Goetheanum.

Indeed this impulse is understood most correctly in its historical connection if what is intended here is thought of as having developed out of the research methods (although, of course, quite different in form) and the artistic healing practices of the old mysteries. Obviously you will have to regard what has been offered in this short course as just a stimulus, as in a certain sense just the first chapter, the beginning of a pastoral medicine that will develop further through the work that is still to be done here by Dr. Wegman and me.

So first I would like to point out how the initiates in the old mysteries described their path of initiation, particularly that path that was pursued at the place where the mysteries were most involved in the secrets of healing. Actually all the mysteries were connected with secrets of healing, but some more than others. They were all connected with them because healing was regarded as related to the entire evolution of human civilization. There were deep reasons for this. People of those ancient times said: When the human being comes down out of spiritual worlds into the physical-earth world through conception and birth, the soul-spiritual entity undergoes a transformation by which it is able to form a physical human body. We have described how this achievement takes place for the first time through the activity of the individual during the first seven years of life. The first body had been given through heredity, the body that in the course of the first seven or eight years is entirely stripped off.

Thus it was conceived very exactly in the ancient mysteries how one came out of spiritual worlds into the world of the physical senses. But there was a universal recognition that a person does not in the first place unite with the physical body in the way that was originally intended by the spiritual powers who direct humanity. It was always believed that through some anomaly of the general evolution the forces that a human being inherits overpower in a certain sense the forces that are brought through the individuality from former earth-lives. This seemed to show a lack of harmony. It was said: If there were complete harmony between soul-and-spirit and physical body in earthly humans, death would not have the form it now has; nor would illness come in the way it now comes. Illness and death were regarded as the symptoms that show that human beings indeed have more to do with the physical-earth world than they were originally meant to. Although today this can no longer be completely understood, still it is an extremely profound idea in which there is very much truth. For the moment one reaches a higher level of consciousness even to a slight degree, one sees at once that death is quite different in character. It appears as a metamorphosis rather than the end of a phase of life.

Therefore for the entire ancient consciousness the education of the human being was related to healing. The entire educational process in very ancient times of human evolution was thought of primarily from a medical point of view. Connected with this was the recognition that the mysteries united the professions of physician and priest, both of whom should be concerned with the healing of human beings on earth. Usually in olden times physician and priest were united in one person. This could only happen out of the old instinctive consciousness; today it would not be possible, at least not as an accepted custom. This recognition of the importance of healing, which was strong even in normally healthy persons, was related for every human being to their knowledge that after the metamorphosis they would undergo through death, they would be guided through their life between death and rebirth on their path to the sun by souls who on earth had been physicians or priests. The first need of every human being after death was to find the sun path—because there they would work out part of what they had to experience between death and rebirth. And these first steps had to be shown to them by a physician or a priest. So it was thought in ancient times. This was included in the deepest mystery wisdom. For us today this wisdom must be regarded differently because the old methods are no longer suitable for us. However, at this present time they can be renewed. Indeed that renewal is to be attempted right here.

When ancient initiates described their initiation they would say that after they had crossed the threshold they were first made acquainted with the activity of the elements. In olden times, “elements” was the name given to what today would be called physical conditions. That is, the solid, which was called “earth”; all fluids, which were called “water”; everything gaseous, which was called “air”; and everything to do with “warmth,” which was ascribed to the warmth ether and which was called an element. Modern physicists deny all this. For them these four elements do not exist. For them there are from sixty to eighty elements, which have qualities. Under certain conditions one is fluid, another solid or gaseous. The condition of warmth belongs to all. What was described as an element in olden times does not exist today. There are now only qualities of things; the qualities have no existence of their own. What today are called elements are actually only “real” in the coarse, tangible physical world. And what in olden times were called elements were understood not as reaching down into tangible matter itself, but only to the intangible, living activity of matter.

It was of no particular importance to an ancient physician whether something was this or that substance with this or that name. Naturally this is important, but it only becomes so after one has first obtained full view of something else, of the living, weaving activity of the substance. Thus one can study a substance in a place where it is exposed to weather conditions. The ancient physicians laid great value on studying a substance while it was being exposed to the weather, to the whole earth process. Also they took care that they did not simply take some substance out of the mineral kingdom if it could be obtained from the plant kingdom. In other words, they looked at the position the substance had in the world process by virtue of its living activity. But to understand that, one needs to accept the concept of the four elements. For then it is of prime importance in what temperature a substance becomes earth, for instance; in what temperature it becomes solid, or fluid, or air. That was the important thing in olden times, to observe what world process must happen so that some substance or other would take on a particular form. That was the first requirement. After that, the substance was examined without restriction. Today one starts out from the substance; formerly one started out from the process. And in fact any substance is only a process suspended at a certain stage. Formerly people were above all concerned with the whole weaving life within the material substance. And so initiates described how they were led to a vision of the weaving life of matter and of how it appeared to them as a fabric woven of the four elements. That was the first experience.

The second description everyone gave, which presented the second step for them, was this: they were led to a place where they could learn to know the “upper and lower gods.” What does that mean? We have already described that, but in a modern way. I told you that if the soul-spiritual entity enters too deeply into the physical and etheric bodies, these bodies overpower the soul-spiritual entity, creating a pathological condition—an aberration of the soul-spiritual entity in the physical-etheric organism. There is, then, this pathological situation, that such people have descended more deeply into the physical organism than they should in ordinary waking life, and down below encounter nonhuman, subnatural activity. For only when we have a normal relation between our soul and spirit and our physical-etheric organism do we live in the natural world. The moment we descend too deeply, too intensely into physical corporeality, we come into relation with the subnatural. We fall to a level at which elemental beings, beings of higher hierarchies at various stages of their development, are all active. We come into relation with those gods who are unfolding their activity below the level of nature.

How would ancient initiates have spoken if they had wanted to use a more neutral expression, veiling the facts so that no one would understand them except other initiates? How could they have implied that they had been led to the lower gods? An ancient initiate would have said: I have learned to know the nature of human illnesses. For that leads to the lower gods.

Now look in the other direction, at the life of the saint: this also, as I have shown you, can be at the borderline between normal and pathological. It can happen that the soul-spiritual entity goes out farther than it should, enhancing the sleep condition. The ancient initiates described their introduction to this state as meeting with the upper gods. Put schematically (see drawing), this corresponds to the facts: nature, subnature, supernature. Visionary life, through the clairvoyant faculty that leads an individual into the spiritual world: the initiate called this “meeting with the upper gods.”

Now when we speak of upper and lower gods someone can very easily entertain the false idea that it concerns rank. You must think of it in this way: if I simply say nature, subnature, supernature, illness, visionary life, then I am tempted to think of the lower gods as being of a lower order. But that is not true. In reality it is like the drawing below.

Imagine we have nature; then above, it leads to a circle; below, it leads to a circle; and what is above joins what is below. If we draw the circle larger and larger, and continue to draw it larger, we finally get a straight line. A piece of circle that continues on, after it has gone into infinity, comes back from the other side. This shows that the terms “upper” and “lower” are not to be understood as signs of rank, but simply as different ways that the gods come to human beings. They have been thought of as working in equal rank with one another, of striving to unite at a point in infinity. Therefore everything in olden times that was either illness or clairvoyance was thought to show that those who gained an understanding of those two human conditions, would then see into the spiritual world. One way to know about the spiritual world was to become well acquainted with illness and with clairvoyance.

When we understand this, we are able to bring into our own modern age what was present in human consciousness in olden times. If we ask what can be identified in modern consciousness with the realm of the lower gods, the answer must be—the Being whom we call the Father when we think of the divine Trinity. The Father belongs in the most eminent sense to subnature. How are we to think about the Father God with truly spiritual comprehension?

Let us consider human beings, first in day-waking consciousness, then in night-sleeping consciousness, and let us compare the two states. We know that in full waking consciousness individuals are living as they have been placed to live within the order of this physical world. Just as the earth has had earlier stages of evolution—Saturn, Sun, Moon—and will undergo further evolution, so must humans themselves be recognized as the result of those earlier evolutionary periods. In this sense they belong in their waking state to the earth; by their nature they stand within the sphere of the earth. In waking condition they stand on a level with nature.

It is not the same when human beings sleep. When we are asleep our physical and etheric bodies lie on the bed, and our astral body and ego are outside them. Let us look at the physical and etheric bodies. Of what do we consist, lying there in our physical and etheric bodies? We have—of course, at a more advanced stage—what we received in the old Saturn evolution and the old Sun evolution. That is now further evolved; we have the further development of our Saturn and Sun existence now during sleep. We do not have our Moon existence in what lies there on the bed. Nature has progressed from Moon existence to Earth existence. And the fact that the sleep condition is essential to us means that nature preserves in the sleeping human being a nature that is now below, a nature that only existed during the Saturn and Sun periods. That is subnature. That lies at the foundation of all beings through the fact that there is a human race. Humans fall during sleep into subnature, and from this fall illnesses appear. That is the realm of the Father God. When we sleep we enter the realm of the Father God, we enter subnature, the realm of the Father.

Human clairvoyance helps illuminate the members of the human being that during sleep are outside the physical and etheric bodies: that is, the ego and astral body. When we become conscious in them, we are in the opposite condition, the opposite pole to illness and have entered the realm of the Spirit with the astral body and ego.

So we can see that the human being is organized on earth in such a way that one is able to go out from nature in two directions, in the direction of subnature to the Father, and in the direction of supernature to the Spirit. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has been the mediator for both worlds. He is the one who permeates the world of nature, the one who permeates normal human existence. He has always to create harmony between subnature and supernature. Subnature is always kept in balance by the normal course of sleeping and waking. Supernature is kept in balance by those seers who are able to return to their ordinary human life at will. If someone is unable upon waking from sleep to balance what is experienced in subnature, then there is illness in the physical and etheric bodies. If someone is unable to bring back into the full waking state, into the natural course of earth-life, what is experienced clairvoyantly in the realm of the spirit, then there are soul illnesses or spiritual illnesses. This is the other pole.

Let us now consider physical illness. What happens when the healing process starts? The human being is led from the experience of subnature to the experience of nature, from the Father to Christ. For Christ is the spiritual life in nature. That is in reality what the physician does. It is the physician's task to know how a person fallen to subnature is brought back to Christ, after the Father has given the leadership over to Christ the Son. That puts into modern speech what mystery wisdom would express. After initiates have attained a Christ-consciousness here on earth, they are led on the one side to the Father, on the other side to the Spirit. If then they are aware how their path leads from the Father to Christ, they will find all the healing processes on this path.

Here the modern mystery begins, the mystery that creates a great test for real medical science. It is this to which I must point at the conclusion of this pastoral medicine course, so that there shall flow from it what should first of all bestow healing upon physicians. We can assume that they will gradually learn the separate healing measures that we have shown in this course by learning which are the defective organs and then what in outer nature corresponds to them and will work with spiritual power. Thus we introduce spirit as the healing agent into the human body. The physicians will learn how it is done in a given case. This will all build up for them into a complete knowledge. This living knowledge that they attain will be different from the current conventional knowledge. If today you open your pathology text or a medical textbook and study it thoroughly, at the end you are no further along than you were at the beginning. Granted, you have digested the entire contents, but even while you worked at it chapter after chapter, still you were making no progress in your general human attitude. It is the nature of real knowledge that it impels one to grow in one's entire human attitude.

If you take up medicine in this sense and as it was meant in this pastoral medicine course, you will advance step by step. And the result will be nothing less than that you can say to yourselves: Now that I have my medical training behind me, I understand all that transpired at the Mystery of Golgotha, up to the moment when Christ went through the gate of death. You will understand the passage of Christ from the Father to the death on Golgotha. That is the mystery. One may not believe at first that medicine is related to this mystery, but it is. It is so truly related that through your understanding of the processes of healing, you will grasp what happened in the cosmos when the Father sent the Son to undergo the death on Golgotha. You will see in the death on Golgotha not death but the working together of all that happened at the death. That was not a death but the overcoming of death and the healing of all mankind. That is the path of the physician, from Father to Son until the Son dies on Golgotha. All separate pieces of medical knowledge bring one a step further toward the final comprehension of this Mystery.

Pastoral medicine is not only what the pastor and the physician are to practice together, it is what is to be brought together so that first through the physician one part of the Mystery of Golgotha can be really understood. That is the high point, the ultimate achievement of medicine: to comprehend all human illness in such a way that one sees the Mystery of Golgotha up to the death as a tremendous healing process. The pathology of evolving humanity and the therapy, the dying on the cross—these will be seen in their true connection when we have real medicine.

The priest has to follow all that is experienced by human beings when they leave their body and enter the other world, the world of the spirit. Thereby priests become more and more aware of the relation of a human being to the Spirit, to the spiritus sanctus, the Holy Spirit. And their path is that of mediation between the Spirit and the Son, the Christ, of developing theology so it will find the way from Christ to the Spirit, from the Spirit to Christ. A great sum of knowledge and life experience can be acquired on this path along which one has to lead one's fellow humans from the Spirit to Christ, from Christ to the Spirit. Its highest service must be that the successive stages of theology are able to clarify the meaning of Christ's path after the death on Golgotha. For his going through the death on Golgotha was the great healing event. Then the question arises: what faculty does this healing event create in human beings that will help them to enter the spiritual world? Theology must have for its crowning endeavor the comprehension of what is happening to the Christ individuality since He went through the death on Golgotha.

Christ's path to Golgotha: the peak of the physician's path.
Christ's path after Golgotha: the peak of the priest's path.

For many contemporary theologians, the two paths seem to have no connection whatever. There are theologians today who do not want to know anything about the risen Spirit and the further activity of the Christ. But if we speak in the sense of a renewal of the mysteries, then the event of Golgotha, the Mystery of Golgotha belongs to it. And then we can say that the path by which the ancient initiate came to initiation could be described in this way: I was led through the elements to the lower and higher gods. The modern initiate would describe it as follows: I have been led through what dissolves the elements into their active processes—the elements are now the chemical elements, eighty of them, that dissolve when they enter into any process—and I am led further, to the Father below and the Spirit above. I perceive the activity of Christ on both paths.

If you would like to take a summary of this course with you for your esoteric study, then take these words:

I will follow the path
That dissolves the elements into activity,
And leads me down to the Father
Who sends illness to work out karma,
And leads me up to the Spirit
Who guides the erring soul toward freedom.
The Christ leads downward and upward,
Creating Spirit-Man in earth humanity
In harmonious union.

Ich werde gehen den Weg,
Der die Elemente in Geschehen löst
Und mich führt nach unten zum Vater
Der die Krankheit schickt zum Ausgleich des Karma
Und mich führt nach oben zum Geiste
Der die Seele in Irrtum zum Erwerb der Freiheit leitet
Christus führt nach unten und nach oben
Harmonisch Geistesmensch in Erdenmenschen zeugend.

When you have become completely permeated by the content of this brief meditation, you will have taken livingly into your spirit what I wanted to give in this Pastoral Medicine course.

[Record of participants: In the presence of Rudolf Steiner, Friedrich Rittelmeyer celebrates the complete human consecration ritual for the first time. Marta Heimeran ministers. During this consecration, Rittelmeyer simultaneously completes the consecration of the first twelve priests. Thus the first 13 original priests are ordained.]

Rudolf Steiner: The first Act of Consecration of Man has been performed here. From this first Holy Act of Consecration of Man may there truly proceed all the power of the word, all the power of the deed and all the power of healing that is to come, my dear friends, through the community that you are founding as a whole, through the communities that you will found as individuals. You must realize the full significance and importance of this fact. You must bear in mind that the Catholic Church, which regards itself as the only legitimate church, traces its authority to properly perform such a human consecration ceremony back to only one historical tradition, namely, that those who perform it have always been consecrated by others who in turn have been consecrated by others, and so on up through all the centuries to the event of Golgotha. And the first consecrator was the Christ Himself, who performed the Act of Consecration of Man with His Apostles. The Catholic Church traces the authority to perform the Act of Consecration of Man back to this apostolic succession.

The Protestant Church has abandoned the performance of this Act of Consecration of Man, and in so doing has laid the seeds of atomization and worldliness and confined itself to the teaching of an unreal act of consecration. Therefore, everything that cannot take place without a real act of consecration cannot take place through the Protestant Church either. The Catholic Church, however, has externalized the living power that is in the Act of Consecration of Man by objectifying the church, and the priest, within the celebration, actually merely presents himself as a bearer of what magically takes place within the Act of Consecration of Man. Thus, everything that takes place in the Protestant Church is actually taken away from what Christ Jesus instituted. Christ Jesus is made the only world teacher, the only teacher of humanity who has descended from divine heights, but He is not revered as the One who inaugurated an act in the Mystery of Golgotha that continues to be effective through all subsequent earthly circles. For this continuation of the deed inaugurated with the Mystery of Golgotha is, after all, the essential thing that underlies the externalized thing, which the Catholic Church has as apostolic succession. So one can say that the Protestant Church has indeed worked with good forces for a long time. But from the signs that have entered into this present time and that have led you, my dear friends, to seek a revival of religious life from within this church, it is clear that the Protestant Church, if it does not seek a renewal of Christian life by taking up what is alive in the Act of Consecration of Man, proceeding from the Mystery of Calvary and being fulfilled in all further earthly circles, the Protestant Church is in danger of completely running into the Luciferic event.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church has long since exposed itself to this danger [of becoming Ahrimanized] by externalizing the cult, which is not supported by the real flow of the power emanating from the Mystery of Golgotha. By rejecting the knowledge of the real spiritual solar power descending from the spiritual cosmos, by rejecting that which even the Catholic Church has before it in the Symbolum, the Catholic Church has long since exposed itself to the Ahrimanization of everything in its cult. The Catholic Church included the monstrance, the Blessed Sacrament, in its symbols. You see, when you look at the monstrance, the Blessed Sacrament, quite clearly the reproduction of the sun. You see in that which is left out in the middle of the radiant sun and what receives the core of the sun, the consecrated body of Christ. You see the moon at the foot of this consecrated body of Christ. You see Sol and Luna in the Sanctissimum, which, after all, is supposed to fulfill the beginning and the end of the Mass with a blessing during particularly solemn masses. But you see at the same time that this connection of Christ with the cosmos, which is even presented to Christianity in the Symbolum at the Missa solemnis, is no longer felt and experienced in its liveliness. That is the Verahrimanization.

All this, my dear friends, passed through my soul when, according to your will, I had to pluck up the courage to bring to you once more, directly from the spiritual worlds, what has actually been lost, as a ritual act, as a human consecration ritual.

Accept it as requested, longed for and brought down from the spiritual realms, and continue to perform it in the spirit of your own consecration by filling yourselves with the consciousness that was to be generated in your souls, to be strengthened in your hearts, to enter into your will in a healing way. Accept it and fulfill it by virtue of your own act of consecration. Every human consecration ceremony that you perform in the future shall be a repetition of this first human consecration ceremony, which itself, through the power of Christ invoked into that which we have celebrated today, should be an aftereffect of the institution of the human consecration ceremony through the word, the power, the will of Christ.

May God the Father be in us
The Son-God create in us
The Spirit God enlightens us.

The altar server: Yes, let it be so.

My dear friends! Today, we want to prepare ourselves for the coming together that we actually have to accomplish in the first days of our being together here, by letting the Act of Consecration of Man — as I would like to call the sacrifice of the Mass — take effect on us, even if today it is only by interpreting and hinting, because some things simply have to be explained.

It is indeed the case that this Act of Consecration of Man contains everything that should result from the soul shepherd's mood and the soul shepherd's connection with the spiritual world. In the Act of Consecration of Man, the Christian current also lives in perpetual and direct presence, and this current of Christian substance moves through this Act of Consecration of Man, so that this Act of Consecration of Man must actually stand at the center of Christian worship. So for now, we will let it take effect on us as such. From it, much will arise that may need to be added in a few words as a kind of commentary. But in the next few days, we will work to be able to perform a demonstration that is fully adequate for the Mass. So I will hint at what I cannot explain here.

Accompanied by his acolytes, the priest comes out from somewhere, where he has prepared himself in an appropriate manner, carrying the chalice, which he carries covered. The acolyte on the right carries the missal; the acolyte on the left carries a bell, with which he indicates by three rings that the Act of Consecration of Man will begin. The chalice is first placed on the altar, left covered. The priest descends the steps of the altar and says before the altar: “Let us worthily perform the Act of Consecration of Man from the Revelation of Christ, in worship of Christ, in devotion to the deed of Christ.

May the Father-God be in us
The Son-God create in us
The Spirit God enlightens us.

And turning around:

Christ in you.

The altar boy says:

And fill your spirit.

The priest:

May God the Father be in us
The Son of God create in us
The Spirit God enlightens us.

In the consciousness of our humanity, we feel the divine Father. He is in all that we are. Our substance is His substance. Our being is His being. He goes through everything in us through our existence.

In the experience of the Christ in our humanity, we feel the divine Son. He reigns as the Spirit-Word through the world. He creates in all that we create. Our being is His creating. Our life is His creating life. He creates through us in all soul-making.

In the grasping of the spirit by our humanity, we feel the healing God. May He shine as the Spirit-light through the world. May He shine in everything we behold. May our beholding be imbued with His Spirit-light. May our cognition be accepted by Him into His spiritually radiant life. May He spiritualize all the activity of our human soul. [Rudolf Steiner now reads the text of the gospel story (see GA 343, pages 414 f.) and the beginning of the gospel of John:]

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
This was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being that has come into being.
In this was life, and the life was the light of men.
And the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.
There came a man sent from God, whose name was John.
He came for a witness, to bear witness about the Light, so that through him all might believe.
He was not the light, but a witness to the light. For the true light that enlightens all men was coming into the world.
It was in the world, and the world was made through it, but the world did not recognize it.
But it came to individual people (it came to people with a sense of self), and these individual people (people with a sense of self) did not receive it.
But those who received it were able to reveal themselves as children of God through it.
Those who trusted in his name came into being not from blood, not from the will of the flesh, and not from human will, but from God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only Son of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
John bears witness about him and clearly proclaims: This was he of whom I said, 'After me will come the one who has a higher rank than I, for he was before me. For we have all received out of his fullness, and grace upon grace has been bestowed upon us.
For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Christ.
God has never seen anyone with his eyes. The only begotten Son, who was in the bosom of the Father of the world, has become the guide in this beholding.

[Rudolf Steiner now reads the creed (see CW 343, p. 510) and then the text of the offertory, the consecration and the communion (see CW 343, pages 416, 464 and 471) and concludes:)

At the end, the opening epistle is repeated on the right side of the altar. Then:

The Act of Consecration of Man, that was it.

In the next few days, we will demonstrate and perform this act, which I have only hinted at, again in its entirety, as best we can. But it seems to me that from what has just been said, the spirit of this consecration can flow into your hearts, and that by living the spirit of this consecration in our hearts, we can accomplish in a worthy manner what we will have to accomplish in the coming days.

I note that in an original consecration service, a sermon was inserted at the point after the reading of the Gospel, before proceeding to the Creed. Today, the Catholic Church often separates this sermon from the sacrifice of the Mass and regards it as a separate entity. This is understandable, since in modern times preaching has taken on a more intellectual character, whereas in the original services of consecration, precisely at the point where the Christian gospel word, perceived as the word of God, was read, what was then preaching could be spoken in direct connection with this word. It was something that continually needed symbolic, pictorial clothing, something that was not merely shaped out of the subjective will and conviction of the preacher, but something that was felt to be released in the heart by the divine word of the Gospel and that could be given to the faithful as a kind of gift of the continuation of the Gospel word. One must only imagine how this human consecration ritual has emerged from ancient and most ancient cults and has found its way to the corresponding ritual for the flow of Christianity through the evolution of the earth. The further we go back in pre-Christian times, the more we find that the very place where cults of consecration took place was regarded as something that was set apart from the rest of the world, that was consecrated and hallowed in itself. Thus, when one was in this place, one felt as if it were a second world; even in the outer world, this still often resounds in those who have an inkling of such things. Goethe often speaks of the great and the small world. He does not mean a church by the “small world,” but since he had become a Freemason, he meant by the small world the Masonic lodge, and the great world is the universe for him. For it was clear to him that where a ritual act is performed, there is a world, and he calls it the “small world” because it is spatially small compared to the “big world”. Schiller meant something deeper when he made the statement:

Friends, you seek the sublime.
But the sublime does not dwell in space.

By this he meant that in the smaller space, in the “small world”, the sublime should be sought, independently of all external greatness, in the smaller world the greater world.

And so we can say: Since space was already considered sacred and hallowed, it was the case that the performance of the consecration cult was associated with the celebrants - who also placed the teaching brother, the preacher, before the faithful — felt themselves to be representatives here on earth, through whom the continuation of the word of God spoken in the Gospel could flow, in that they refrained from subjective formulation and endeavored to use such a formulation that expressed itself in symbols and images.

For our time, however, it will be entirely in harmony with the spiritual world if you hold a sermon proper alongside the Act of Consecration of Man and if this is inserted between the Gospel reading and the saying of the Creed, and if perhaps something more clothed in symbolic forms, according to the seasons, is spoken to the hearts and souls of the members of the community. This could be brief and calculated not so much to teach as to edify, as a continuation of the gospel word in the symbol.

Then, as the next step, I would like to say, as a preparatory step, that you imagine this human consecration ritual – which, in a sense, is being used by me in this way for the first time – as having been received directly from the spiritual world , whereas all those who have performed the consecrations so far have sought their authorization in the continuous succession within the Christian [church], so that those who have performed these consecrations have said to themselves: I have been ordained by one who was ordained by another, and so on through the centuries until the last one was ordained by one of the apostles, who himself followed the Christ. Apostolic continuity is, after all, what the celebrants in the churches invoke as justification for the Mass, that is, those who have performed the Mass until now. In the Catholic Church, this apostolic continuity has gradually become something that has taken on an external character. Therefore, in this day and age, it is possible for us to receive this authorization directly from the spiritual world, so that you can celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass. And the fact that you can do this should be the focus of our efforts over the next few days.

You will have to create a substitute for the place of receiving the apostolic blessing in Christian tradition, so to speak, through the mood and the state of your soul. At the starting point of your new priestly work, you will have to be completely clear that your will and your feelings, and thus your thinking, which depends on your feelings and your will, are such that everything you accomplish as a pastor is to be accomplished in the name of the Christ, the Christ whom you recognize in the particular spirituality and spiritual worlds as they have been presented from the most diverse points of view within the anthroposophical movement. But above all, you must become aware of the Christ in the present, the Christ who, in the immediate present, sends his power into everything you accomplish in detail and who, above all, is present, really present, in the Act of Consecration of Man. If you did not have the awareness of the presence of Christ in the Act of Consecration of Man and of the meaning of this Act of Consecration of Man, and if you did not take the opportunity to bring about the direct presence of Christ, you would not perform this Act of Consecration of Man in the right spirit.

Now it will be a matter of my bringing a formula with me tomorrow that each of you will speak in the sense that by speaking this formula, you will then take it into your heart in such a way that it becomes, as it were, a that by realizing what is contained in the formula, he feels that he is spiritually part of this community, which you have resolved to be part of. This will constitute the first preparation for what for this group should be ordination to the priesthood, which should also be undertaken during this time. But it will be necessary for you first to feel united with the spiritual that must live in you through inwardly speaking such a formula if you are to live together in the right way in the community you have formed.

Then, however, it will be necessary for you to prepare this community in such a way that it has an authority that is taken for granted, so that when communities are formed, the pastor is not chosen by election, but rather that - even if the initiative to appoint a pastor comes from the community, this community turns to this newly founded original community of priests, which you are to be, so that a pastor may be sent to it, the community. Only in this way, that even if the initiative comes from the community, the soul shepherd is requested by the priestly community you have founded, only in this way is the meaning fully fulfilled, that this priestly community of yours carries the spiritual from spiritual worlds down to those who want to be members of the community.

It will then also be necessary that we — having, as it were, praised ourselves for what we want to be through the formula just mentioned — also establish a kind of hierarchy tomorrow among those who have initially dedicated themselves to this community. The serious event of Dr. Geyer's resignation has shaken what I believe was in harmony with the spiritual worlds: that Dr. Geyer, Dr. Rittelmeyer and Licentiate Bock should initially form this triumvirate, which should set the tone in a certain sense, because the fact of the matter is that such a center must be there. Of course, such a center cannot be created today with the same jurisdiction that similar communities in older times had endowed to a central power. But nevertheless, measures will be necessary that make the cohesion of this circle appear as serious as possible, so that once someone has decided to be in it, they do not simply leave again without the act of leaving being felt as a world fact and then also understood accordingly. Communities that aspire to form spiritual leadership and into which one can freely enter and leave as one pleases, carry within themselves the seed of their own destruction. That is a law of the spiritual world. It is a law of the spiritual world that the decision to enter such a community within one earth life should be so strong that one cannot take an equally strong one a second time. This should indicate the intensity of the idea that must underlie the matter. Therefore, arbitrary entry and exit cannot belong to the real development of this community. Although I am thoroughly convinced that each of you has carefully considered in your soul what your attitude to this community should be, I would still like us to reflect on the question of whether you really want to belong to it, and to discuss it with your soul before tomorrow.

Then tomorrow we will also be able to resolve the question of how we organize the central power, since there cannot be two of them after all. That is a spiritual impossibility. There is no true collaboration of wills when there are two. There can be one, as has been established in the Catholic Church by the dogma of infallibility; but then the connection with the spiritual world is very often lost when external impulses of command are joined by that which is supposed to be connected with the spiritual world. The two are too balanced and do not produce any results, even if this is not always consciously perceived. This is based on a spiritual law. So there must be three. And at this moment we are indeed in a position to look for the third one from the circle. But how we will do this will perhaps only become clear to us tomorrow. For the matter of course was a different one before the matter had progressed as far as it has now; at that time this triad had emerged as a matter of course. Now Dr. Geyer's resignation must be regarded as an extraordinarily serious event, and it forces us to clarify the question of the central orientation tomorrow. I will try to bring you suggestions for this matter, which I believe is in line with the leading spiritual powers, whose leadership we must indeed maintain if what you are founding as a community is to flourish. And in accordance with these leading spiritual powers, who want a new Christian community and implore their blessing, we want to arrange all our further steps.

My dear venerated guests! As an introduction I have been obliged to refer to a notice in the newspaper which has just been handed to me; a notice in “Christian World,” a publication I don't know and obviously have not thought about. In this notice it says: “From 5 to 12 March an Anthroposophic University Course will take place in Berlin. The day for theologians is Friday the 10th. This event on Friday is now an unequivocal challenge of Steiner and his followers to the theologians ...” and so on.

Now, my dear friends, this event may be anything; what it certainly isn't, even if it was believed to be, it would be misunderstood in the most profound sense, if it is regarded as a challenge to the theologians. I myself would not be involved in any other way than having been asked to cooperate through lectures and introductory observations in this university course which didn't come out of my initiative. I'm least involved in today's event (which is an insertion into this program item of the course) by thinking that what we were dealing with today could be understood as an “unequivocal challenge of today's theologians.”

Thus, you will also allow, my dear friends, that not all sorts of misunderstandings will again be linked to what I have to say in a few introductory words today. I want to limit myself to a theme: The relationship of Anthroposophy to Theology. I want no new misunderstandings to arise; I will renounce some of them in my presentation because otherwise I would have to once again find my intention misjudged.

Dear friends, it has never been my purpose—forgive me if I'm forced by this challenge given to me by shortly mentioning some personal details—it has never actually been my intention to challenge theology and from their starting point Anthroposophy had, insofar as it presents a work sphere in which I participate as well, never attempted to set them apart within the work, with today's theology. This has happened so far, and really from me it has happened as little as possible, but unfortunately it has resulted that many attacks against anthroposophy from the side of theology have taken place, and sometimes people—not me particularly but others—defends themselves. Anthroposophy wants to remain thoroughly neutral in its working sphere, I'd like to say, it wants to work out of present day spiritual science.

Towards the end of the previous century one had a certain scientific direction, certain scientific methods, an attitude and method, out of the foundation of which we have already spoken and which can't be spoken about more extensively, established a method and attitude which people apply to the entire development of recent times and particularly apply to scientific research. Through this natural scientific research the greatest possible triumphs—I don't mean in a trivial but in a deeper sense—have come to human progress and human well-being. During this time natural scientific research stands in a somewhat puzzled manner towards philosophy. Philosophy had to separate itself from those methods which are applied to natural science; the difference of a factual sphere made scientific methods inapplicable in philosophy.

People were not always, one could call it, theoretically and epistemologically clear in what sense the scientific methods or philosophic methods had to apply. Practice lapsed into experimental philosophy in certain areas where it was more or less apparent or more or less really worked, but the uncertainty is basically there as well. By contrast Anthroposophy worked out of the most varied foundations towards its own working methods. On the one hand it wants to take into account what can be achieved in modern thinking and research methods of science, and on the other hand the human needs for the spiritual world and its knowledge. The human being is confronted on the one hand with the fact of fully recognising scientific methods, and in relation to the treatment of the scientific field—I have already mentioned this—I am today as much a student of Haeckel as I was in the 1890's; not in the sense of scientific methodology not to be developed further and not as if, from the side of science Heackel's writings should not be applied, but it comes down to quite a different area being discussed. In the treatment of the purely natural world I'm as much in agreement with Haeckel as at that time. It deals more with the experience of natural scientific observations through which one is educated in scientific precision, in a natural scientific sense which can result in the creation of ideas and concepts, which are needed for working scientifically. This then holds true for all observations in the world—due to our limited time now, I can't give you proof of this. This remains a truth: for all outer sensory observations this sentence is valid: “there is nothing in the mind which wasn't previously in the senses”—certainly on the other hand, Leibniz's statement applies: “Except in the mind itself.”

In the experience of the mind, that means in the weaving of the soul through the mind's categories where ideas are experienced in objects of nature, the examination of facts of nature which need a formulation of natural laws, in which experience of the world of ideas live, there is something which goes beyond the mere sensory experiences, so that when a natural scientific researcher confronts natural science, he must say to himself, if he is sufficiently unprejudiced: everything in the mind must be created out of the senses, only the mind itself can't be created out of the senses.

Once you have understood this in a lively manner then there is no obstacle to now observe what inwardly to some extent can be looked at in the pursuit of the expansion of the mind's categories through an inner soul-spiritual process, through such a process which is inwardly quite similar to the outer growth processes seen in the plant and animal. One remains always true to one's conviction of natural development when one admits that out of the seedling, if you have an inner image of it, you gain a truth which is that the mind itself can't be created out of the sense world. One remains true to that which is learnt from natural existence when you make an attempt to observe the human mind as a seedling which can grow within. When you make this attempt in earnest then the rest is a direct result of what I've suggested here and in other places, of the growth of human intellect in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is simply a fact for further progress in inner human development. Through this the result is a true observation of the spiritual world. This observation of the spiritual world Anthroposophy tries to clothe, as well as possible, in words of today's language use. Naturally one is often forced that what one is observing—I admit this without further ado—is clothed inadequately in words from the simple basis that speech, as in all modern languages, in the course of the last centuries adapted to the outer material world outlook and today we have the experience, which we have with words, of already being more or less orientated to this world outlook.

As a result, we always struggle with words if we need to dress in words what we have observed through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition in such a way that it can really be proven again through the ordinary, healthy human mind, because this must also be a goal for Anthroposophical research.

So Anthroposophy was simply a field of work and as such a field of work it has become, in the strictest sense of the word, conceived by me. Those individuals—and they make a very small circle—who have the need to hear about such research methods in the supersensible world, will be told and shown what can be discovered in this way. Nobody in this Movement will be forced in any way to participate in something other than through their own free will. What is said about this, that some or other suggestive means is applied, with one person it is a conscious and with another it is an unconscious defamation of what is really striven for in the Anthroposophic Movement. It is true that whoever thinks it over with a healthy mind, what is researched in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in his higher senses becomes a more free person than any other people living in the present. His contemporaries for instance follow currents in parties and are influenced by all kinds of suggestions. From this inner soul dependency Anthroposophy must free people, because it claims that everyone, who wants to live into it, will not merely become immobilised in simple passive thinking, but that this thinking will make them inwardly mobile and powerful, and this empowered thinking makes a person more free.

For reasons, into which I don't want to enter today, it happened that from the scientifically orientated people on which Anthroposophy actually depend, in the beginning only very few drew closer to Anthroposophy. Today we have really made a start. Those people who first entered into the Anthroposophical Movement—with more or less naive minds with strong soul needs—they were never told anything other than what could be found in a conscientious way within anthroposophic research. I'm always delighted when things are said to me, for example by one of those present here today, a very honourable personality: ‘It is actually remarkable that you even get a large audience, because you avoid actually talking in the way which is considered popular, which we call understandable. You speak in such a way that people actually always have to do work to listen and this people don't want these days, so one must actually wonder how you still manage to find such a large audience.’—These are what the words sound like, which I've heard for years and now a seated person here has also said them, after they had heard a course of my lectures at that time. For popularity I have never striven because I have the validity of Anthroposophy which I want to bring to the world.

Now it is extraordinary that people from all kinds of circles of life and circles of commitment have come. Because Anthroposophy came their way simply through their work in a certain relationship to religious streams of the present, it actually never came into conflict with religious needs of people who came to it: to people, like I said, from all walks of life. For instance, I have often been asked by Catholics who find themselves in our midst whether in connection with religious practice it would be possible to remain Catholics when they also take part in the Anthroposophical Movement.

With Catholics I must say: Obviously it is possible for a good Catholic to take part in what Anthroposophy has to offer because Anthroposophy is there, not to limit the knowledge which speaks about the supersensible world, but it forms a foundation on which supersensible research can be done. This is my preference, that what comes out of the supersensible world is spoken about without entering into any kind of polemic. Someone who honestly says what he sees, knows how polemic comes about and how unfruitful that really is. My original striving was simply to honestly say what is found through Anthroposophy and to exclude any polemic considerations. Things don't always happen this way in life. Still, within the Anthroposophical Movement people of all faiths are found together, and so I would like to say that Catholics may obviously take part in the Anthroposophic Movement, but it will only come into one single point of conflict in the practical religious exercises and that is the audible confession. Not on the basis of it being an audible confession because that could be considered as a matter of conscience. I have found enough protestant clergymen who have gloated over a kind of confession in order to develop an intimate relationship with the congregation. One can have various opinions regarding this. However, here the point is that the Catholic Church denies the altar sacrament to anyone who has not made an audible confession before it. Due to this impediment, taking part practically in the most important Catholic church sacrament is difficult because those beliefs which are gained from the supersensible world need to be combined with this behaviour which is not freely done but which have nevertheless to be adhered to in the Roman Catholic Church constitution. The audible confession, as it is handled, tears the Catholic away from freely following the supersensible world, not because of Anthroposophy but because of the Roman Catholic Church constitution.

This could be avoided if confession could be avoided. One can't avoid it because otherwise one can't participate in the communion service. Still you can find many Catholics who search within the Anthroposophical Movement to satisfy their soul needs.

My dear friends, it is of course natural that people of all beliefs come to Anthroposophy, it is natural that simply in our time a strong need has developed to express what Christianity is about within the Anthroposophical Society. Now I would like to say the following. Just as with all other phenomena of research, in as far as the phenomena of the supersensible and sensible world flow together, just so Anthroposophy regards the content of Christology; it likewise tries to help with research into the supersensible regarding the content of Christology, help which can be acquired through anthroposophical methods. Now it is difficult to say in only a few words what characterises the position of Anthroposophy regarding Christology, but I would like to say the following.

We observe people in earthly life between birth and death where they have their soul and spirit life in their physical being, that they are bound to their physical body in relation to what they observe and process whatever is presented to them in their environment, also in relation to work itself, in relation to their life of will and finally in the way in which they place themselves in the sensory physical world. When a person looks back at when he wakes up, naturally in his surroundings, he firstly finds perceptions possible through the senses of his body, through his mind, and all of these experiences and observations of his environment he experiences as combined.

However, because his mind, intellect and ancient spirituality are carried within his own spirit, so he can—if he only thinks enough about himself, if he only looks away from the environment and looks at himself—not deny that through his own activity he comes to the conclusion culminating in a concept which only has spiritual content and that this spiritual content—if I may express it this way—is the Father-godly imagination. Here anthroposophical research must be of help with its methods. I can only briefly characterise this. It makes the entire human cognitive work process clear—this will also emerge out of the lectures in this course. It also wants to point to what happens through people when they try to turn their gaze away from the outer world, in order to gradually observe their own past actions and ask themselves: What have you actually done? What justifies you at all to make an imagination of the outer world?—By researching this experience far enough a person—when I may use this expression again—comes to a Father-godly experience. Whoever examines this divine godly-Father experience through Anthroposophy, arrives at quite a definite judgement. I ask that this judgement, which is a fact, which I speak about radically, should not be misunderstood.

A person arrives at this verdict, a person who is totally healthy—totally in full health in his physical body—comes to this godly Father experience, this means that whoever doesn't arrive at this godly-Father experience carries some or another degenerative symptom, even if hidden. In other words, through Anthroposophical research you can say: To not come to a Father-godly experience indicates some human illness. That is of course radical to say because illness is ordinarily seen through physical means because—if I might say so—it dwells in the subtleties of the human organisation. In fact, it is clear to those who research through Anthroposophy: Atheism is illness.

What I've said yesterday about the development of opinions, right or wrong, this is particularly important here. If a person follows only this route then he will come to a Father-godly experience. When he then goes further in this way, if he becomes aware what shortcomings live in his soul, if he only comes to this Father-god experience, he becomes aware that basically in the limitation of modern humanity leaning towards intellectualism there also lies a kind of limitation of this godly-Father experience, then he will realise he must go further with this godly-Father experience. Here outer observations can support this easily.

It is an extraordinary fact that in western countries where natural science has grown to its maximum intensity and where this scientific attitude doesn't want to enter into discussing the supersensible but that religion must remain preserved, that just in these religious movements of western countries the spirit of the Old Testament has particularly and successfully intervened even in our modern time. We see how in the west, when Christianity is outwardly accepted and preached that it is done totally in the spirit of the Old Testament; in a certain sense Christianity reshapes the Father-god and doesn't discern a difference between the Father-god and Christ.

In the (European) east by contrast, where people's minds don't see the division between religion and science as sharply as in the west; in the east where this bridge for the human soul more or less exists as an elementary inner soul experience—we find that for example in the presentations of the great philosopher Vladimir Soloviev—how the Christ experience, as an independent experience, exists beside the Father experience.

In this way one can say to oneself: indeed, a completely healthy person can't be an atheist if he combines everything around him in the outer world into the culmination of a God-imagination, which he must give a spiritual content; yet he remains with only a Father-imagination. With this Father-imagination one doesn't arrive at a summary of outer natural phenomena, it fails immediately when applied to one's own human development; one is then, as it were, abandoned. By deepening this inner development from this point at which one has arrived, having taken up the outer world into one's soul—then by following this inner development one will, if by open-mindedly pursuing it, come to a Christ experience, which is initially present as an indefinite inner experience. This experience continues to be recognised by Anthroposophy. A person, simply through honest observation of the human evolution on earth, comes to seeing before his own eyes, the Mystery of Golgotha, the historic Mystery of Golgotha. He arrives here through the inner development of spiritual organs which direct him to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. If one with the help of these research means pursues the way human development went from antiquity to the Mystery of Golgotha, then one finds that everywhere in religious imagination—not only in the Old Testament religious imagination—lived a gravitation to the coming of the Christ-Spirit.

Then one can simply through observation, learn to recognise how the Christ-Spirit was not united with the earth in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. By pursuing all of this which was sought for in the mysteries, was popular in pre-Christian religions, then we see how the images they made of their gods, finally all melt together into what the Christ-Imagination is. We see how the minds of people all over the world are lifted to the supernatural when they turn to their gods in their souls. We see how the point of origin for earthly mankind's development was simply more given through the human organisation than what was perceived through the senses or the mind in what could be observed in his surroundings. It entered into the human soul—most strongly in ancient times, and then less and less—what I would call instinctive perception—not earthly—of the world, to which the human being felt he belonged. In the moment when a person, through the mysteries or through popular religion, is brought to where he can lift his soul into seeing extra-terrestrially, and with which he knows he is united in his deepest being, at this moment a person experiences a rebirth within himself.

Now my dear friends, when we follow human evolution from an Anthroposophic point of view up to the Mystery of Golgotha, it shows that these abilities, which dwelt within human beings, actually diminished gradually and were no longer there the moment the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth. Certainly there can be remnants, for evolution doesn't take place in leaps. Individuals preserved, though perhaps inaccurately but still instinctively, an awareness of what had once been seen; this can be pursued in art. Then the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth. In the Mystery of Golgotha Anthroposophy sees the streaming in of that spirit which previously could only be searched for in the extra-terrestrial: the in streaming of the Christ into the human body of Jesus. How this can individually be imagined, can only be discussed with those who have engaged positively in these fields of research. Here Anthroposophy shows how from that time onwards, from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, another time has begun on earth, a time about which all the old religious knowledge confessed about. The Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ who Paul saw on the way to Damascus, the Christ then remained within in the earth with humanity. This is what these words want to say: “I am with you every day until the end of the world.” He lives among us, He can be found again. The Paul experience can, with certain preparation, be renewed time and time again. Then, if Christ is searched for in this way, a person—by looking at his own inner development—just as since the Mystery of Golgotha happened on earth—can see Christ walking; he discovers Christ in his inner life in the same way as when in the outer world—if he is not ill with atheism—he found the Father-god.

Thus, I can only fleetingly, in a sketch, indicate how Anthroposophy through real research of the Christ event, can arrive at an inner objective fact. With all possible detail Anthroposophy tries to present the Christ event as the most important fact of the earthly life of humanity, as something which happened objectively. For this reason, the entire spirit through which the Christ event is presented in Anthroposophy is done in such a way that this event can be absorbed simply as fact. We have within the anthroposophic movement experienced that for example Jewish confessors found themselves in the most genuine, truest and honest sense in recognising the Mystery of Golgotha. With this, my dear friends, the Anthroposophical Movement has already anticipated what after all must enter into human evolution: through directly pointing to what can be seen in the Mystery of Golgotha, how the way to Christianity can be found again.

There is always a question whether there isn't yet a deep meaning in the book by Overbeck, a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, that modern theology is no longer Christian. If this is legitimate then one could even, perhaps with a certain right, say: Anthroposophy is suitable for directing people in a lively way to the Christ experience. It states that during the time in which the Christ event took place there still existed an instinctive insight among some individuals, so that the spiritual foundation, or I might call it, the spiritual substantiality of the Mystery of Golgotha could be seen and acknowledged in the first Christian centuries. We then see how this diminished gradually; we see it completely fade in the figure of Scotus Erigena, we see medieval theology spreading where the attempt was being made to separate itself from what modern humanity had to develop in the intellect, that which, when it is left to the person who no longer develops inwardly, he becomes incapable of accessing the supersensible worlds. It split what wanted to enter into the human soul into what was recognisable by the intellect, and what people could not attain themselves, except through a revelation.

On this basis one can understand the entire medieval theology, especially Thomistic theology which was considered by Catholicism as the only authority. Today something can be said about this. What Anthroposophy was and is, is nothing other than simply to express what exists and is available through spiritual observation.

As Anthroposophy comes to the proposition that atheism is actually a hidden illness, it arrives at a second proposition: Not finding the Christ, not finding a relationship with the Christ is destiny for humanity, is the fate of misfortune. Atheism is an illness, not finding the Christ is the fate of misfortune because one can find Him in an inward experience. Then He positions Himself there as that Being who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. One can only discover Christ through one's inner life; one doesn't need anthroposophical research to be a religious person in the Christian sense. Then again, when one has come to Christ, one becomes a member of the spiritual world and one can really speak about a resurrection of the human being in the spiritual world, because the person who fails to find Christ in regard to his world view, is restricted. Atheism is an illness! Not coming to Christ is a destiny, not reaching the spirit is soul obtuseness!

Now, my dear friends, Anthroposophy relates from such foundations basically only to religion (and not theology) and to religion only in as far as people who have religious needs and who are unable to fulfil them through current declarations, approach Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy will only do what is necessary within the needs of today, and that which others fail to do. What ethos is at this basis—I have to always characterise this again—you can find from the following.

Some years ago, I once held a lecture in a southern German town—at that time it was a German town but it no longer is—a lecture entitled “Bible and Wisdom”. Two Catholic priests were present at the lecture. After the lecture they both approached me and said: “We actually haven't found anything in your lecture which could be challenged from a Catholic point of view.”

I answered: “If only I could always be so lucky!”

To this they both replied: “Yes, but we noticed something, it is not what you say but it is the manner and way how you present it. We must add that you speak to people who are prepared in a certain way. You lecture to a kind of congregation who have a certain education; we, however, speak to all people.”

I said: “Reverend, it doesn't come down to how our subjective experiences decide, but it comes down to us living into our work in evolution, that we don't imagine we speak for all people but that we answer such a question according to what objectively lives in the evolution of humanity. So, I can imagine I speak for all people—and could be very mistaken—you can imagine that. It is very good for enthusiasm to have such an imagination. Still, ask yourselves for once: do all people who have the need to hear something about Christ all come to church?”

Both of them couldn't say yes because naturally they knew that a lot of people who search for a way to Christ, do not come to the church.

So I said: “You see, for those who don't come to you and still search for a way to Christ, it is for those I speak.”

This means finding your task in the evolution of time, and not to imagine you speak for everyone, but to ask: are there minds out there who want to accept this or that in a special way?

Anthroposophy never turns to any other mindset, like to some or other religious confession.

When we, in the Waldorf School, manage to apply teaching in a practical way out of Anthroposophy we still completely avoid making the Waldorf School a school which will splice Anthroposophy into the heads of the children. With regards to religious instruction, we leave the Catholic children to be instructed by a catholic priest and the evangelists by an evangelist priest. Only for the dissident children there is a freer kind of religious instruction, but in the thorough Christian sense. We don't introduce abstract Anthroposophy—also no concrete anthroposophy which is presented to grown-ups—but we try with all our good intensions to bring to the children what is suitable to the stage of their development; all of that must first be searched for and determined according to the content and method. Through those of us who have given free religious instruction, we have managed to bring those children who have no religious instruction as such, towards Christianity and they come in droves to take part in this kind of religious instruction. Never have we preached some or other kind of religious propaganda within the Anthroposophical Movement and even less would Anthroposophy embark on something against single theological systems. With this in mind, anthroposophy can only apply itself to finding differences in separate theological systems in order to understand them and not to oppose them. Thus, I've always regarded it to be my task when I speak to people who have come to Anthroposophy: to make it understandable why Catholicism has become Catholic, Protestants Protestant, Judaism Jewish and Buddhism Buddhistic and how all of them—I believe that is a Christian concept—have within them a Being who through their destiny will let them experience the true Christ.

So it is not possible, if attacks have not originated from the other side, to start a struggle between Anthroposophy and theology, and also today I want to utter these words, while it has been asked for from those who organised today's theologian's day. The only task of Anthroposophy is the pronouncement of anthroposophic research results about the supersensible worlds. This is why I have always been reticent in particular regarding attacks originating from the theological side.

Anthroposophy doesn't want to act as a fighter on the scene but to satisfy the legitimate demands of human soul needs of the time. Everyone who in this sense wants to work together with Anthroposophy and wants to bring to the surface the fulfilment of legitimate, soul foundations of human soul needs, everyone who wants to work with her in this sense, is welcome!

[The stenographer only recorded parts of this meeting.]

Rudolf Steiner: Tomorrow, we will need the candelabrum and the picture of Christ again for the ceremony. As you (turning to Friedrich Rittelmeyer) carry out the ceremony, you will also become immersed in it. Today, what was presented yesterday should be repeated so that you are immersed in it to begin with, and then I will be able to continue the ceremony. It is not to be completed today, but we will see that it can be taken a stage further. Tomorrow we will need: a censer, the two pictures of Christ, then the oil and the two water jugs with a tray and the chalice. We can form bread. We should have that tomorrow.

Today I will try to get everything out of my mind for the time being, and no one needs to think that the ceremony is not complete because some things that are connected to it are still missing. Dr. Rittelmeyer will figure out the rest. I already explained yesterday how the whole ceremony is to be thought. It is not possible – it has been weighing heavily on my mind – to perform the ordination in the simple way [suggested last year]; [we will perform it as] it has now been revealed from the spiritual world. And so I will carry out [the beginning] to a certain extent, and then Dr. Rittelmeyer can continue the ceremony under my assistance tomorrow.

The first thing will be for you to provide the vestments here; the first task is to consecrate the vestments themselves, so that they may appear suitable for the purpose for which they will serve. In this case, I will try to invoke the blessing upon them.

In the name of the Father of God, who is in us,
In the name of the Son of God, who works in us,
In the name of the Holy Ghost, who enlightens us:
The power that should be in all the work of those
who have dedicated themselves to the divine service here,
the power of Christ is symbolized by these robes.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer is now given his robe and alb, and Gerirud Spörri his vestment.

Now the first part of the Act of Consecration of Man is read [in the expanded form for priestly ordination, as had already been indicated the previous day. During this, Friedrich Ritielmeyer is given the stole. After that, he reads the Gospel of John 1:1-14.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear Friends! We have completed the first part of the consecration ritual. Since the consecration ritual will not be completed today, it will be possible to carry out the second part here in spirit without actually performing the ceremony, and this should now follow on from the first part. I am entitled to assume that a fully valid act will now be carried out.

[Rudolf Steiner now reads the offertory (see CW 343, page 416 ff.), combined with the words of the ordination (see the facsimile on page 100), during which Friedrich Rittelmeyer is given the surplice.]

Rudolf Steiner: Having spoken the word that gives strength, I empower you with the symbol of the reading of the Act of Consecration of Man.

[Rudolf Steiner hands the chasuble to Pastor Dr. Rittelmeyer. The following words are spoken three times: “The Father-God...”]

Rudolf Steiner: This completes the second part of the act of consecration. The person to be consecrated has thus received the power to read with full justification the part of the mass that has just been read up to this point. And tomorrow the consecration of the next of you will have to be done by the one who has just been consecrated, and the one who has just been consecrated will receive the completion of the consecration at the end of the sacrifice of the mass tomorrow. Then tomorrow he will perform the act of consecration, and the consecration of the shepherds of souls will gradually be carried out in stages.

The next step is to continue in such a way that transubstantiation is now celebrated, that after transubstantiation the Paternoster is prayed, and after praying the Paternoster, before Communion, the third part of the priestly ordination will be performed tomorrow on the newly ordained. But tomorrow we will first perform the further ordinations, and for each one the ordination will be completed in the same way. So after the one ordained today has received the ordination in full, he will in turn continue the ordination for the others, so that the complete ordination as a pastor of souls will be carried away by each of you from here.

That is what I wanted to do with you today. Now we will conclude the ceremony so that our dear Dr. Rittelmeyer can recover a little. Tomorrow at a quarter to three.

There follows the answering of a few questions by Rudolf Steiner.

— The person performing the consecration must wear the robe.

— The oil that has just been used can be stored in such a way that it remains for this purpose and is not used for anything else or even poured away.

— We can use ordinary bread. - A goblet could be used, a chalice-like glass, simple white glass, which is a bit wide at the bottom.

— Squeezing ripe grapes? An eighth of a liter may suffice. Only a few drops are needed. Ripe grapes are just right.

— It takes only one to be ordained, and he can pass on the ordination. Anyone ordained a priest can pass on the ordination.

— They must have the opportunity to perform the cult at all times.

— The ceremony performed after the prayer for the relay must be for each individual, as must the ceremony with anointing after the offertory.

— The act of consecration itself is inserted as often as there are candidates for ordination. The Mass is celebrated as far as the Gospel reading, then the sequence of actions following the Gospel as the actual act of consecration is performed in such a way that everyone reads the Gospel. The offertory is then completed, followed by the brief act of consecration with the anointing.

On the following pages, the words of the ordination are given in Rudolf Steiner's handwriting (reduced in size).

We have already pointed out in these lectures that in the words of Christ-Jesus to Nicodemus, we must recognize a conversation between Christ and a personality who is able to perceive what can be beheld outside of the physical body by means of higher organs of cognition if developed to a certain stage. For those who understand such things, this is clearly and distinctly indicated in the Gospel wherein it is stated that Nicodemus came to Christ-Jesus “in the night,” meaning in a state of consciousness in which the human being does not make use of his outer sense organs. We shall not enter into the trivial explanations which have been presented by different people concerning these words, “in the night.” You know that in this conversation the problem is one of rebirth of the human being “out of water and Spirit.” These are very important words concerning rebirth which the Christ speaks to Nicodemus in the 4th verse of the 3rd Chapter:

Nicodemus said unto Him:—How can a man be reborn when he is old?

Jesus answered:—Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.

We have already said that these words must be carefully weighed and we should keep definitely in mind that the words of a religious document of this kind must be taken in a literal sense on the one hang, but on the other we must first discover and understand this literal meaning. The words are often quoted, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life!” Those who quote these words often employ them in a very peculiar manner. They find in them a license for reading into them their own phantasy, which they call the “spirit of the thing,” and then they say to someone who has taken the trouble to learn the letter before coming to the spirit: “What have we to do with the letter? The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” One who speaks in this manner, stands about on the same level with a man who would say: “The spirit is what truly lives, but the body is something dead. Therefore let us destroy the body, then will the spirit become alive.” Whoever speaks in this way does not know that the spirit is formed gradually, that the human being must use the organs of his physical body for reception of what he experiences in the physical world, which he then raises into spirit. First we must know the letter, then we can kill it; likewise, when the spirit has drawn everything it can out of the human body, the latter falls away from the human spirit.

There is something extraordinarily profound just in this very chapter of the Gospel of St. John. We can only enter into the meaning of it, when we follow human evolution still further back than we have already in our consideration of the Gospel up to the present. Today we must trace the human being back into still more remote periods of the earth's evolution.

In order that you may not, at the very beginning, be too much shocked at what I shall have to say about these early human states, I should like to lead you back once more to the ancient Atlantean epoch.

We have already called attention to the fact that before that great cataclysm of our earth, a memory of which is retained in the sagas of the Flood, our human progenitors lived out there in the west in a region which no longer exists, but which now forms the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. This continent which is called the ancient Atlantis harbored our forefathers. When we examine the later epochs of this Atlantean period of human evolution, we find, even in these epochs of the far distant past, that at least the form of the human being was not so very much unlike his present one. However, if we should go back to the earliest periods of this Atlantean continent, we would find the human form quite different from that of the present. We can go still further back.

Before the Atlantean age, the human being lived in a land which, in the language of today, is called Lemuria. This continent also perished through great changes on our earth. It occupied approximately the region which now lies between southern Asia, Africa, and Australia. When we examine the human forms which lived in Lemuria, as they present themselves to clairvoyant sight, we find them very different from those of present day humanity, and it is not necessary that I describe them to you in detail nor those of the early Atlantean period. Although you have already had to endure a great deal in the descriptions of Spiritual Science, nevertheless the forms of these ancient Lemurians, fundamentally so different from the present forms, would appear to you quite improbable. However, we must in a certain respect describe them, although quite superficially if we wish to understand what has happened to the human being in the course of the earth's evolution.

Let us suppose, for example, something in reality quite impossible, but we shall assume it for the sake of an understanding. Let us suppose that with your present senses, which of course you did not at that time possess, you could look into the latter part of the Lemurian and the first part of the Atlantean epochs of human evolution, and observe the surface of the earth in its various parts. If you should expect to be able to find the human being upon the earth by means of this physical sense perception, you would be greatly disappointed. At that time he did not exist in a form which you would be able to see with your present physical senses. It would appear to you as though certain regions of our earth's surface, already resembling islands, protruded out of the rest of the still fluidic earth, which was either surrounded by sea-water or enveloped in vapour. But those regions which thus protruded like islands were not yet dry land like our present solid earth, but soft earth masses in the midst of which fiery forces played. These island regions were continually being thrown up and then again submerged by the volcanic forces of that time. In short, there was still in the earth an element active in fire; all was still actively in a state of flux, continually changing. In certain regions which already existed, and which had been cooled to a certain degree, you would find precursors of our present animal world. Here and there you would have observed grotesque shapes; you would have found strange forms, forerunners of our reptiles and amphibians. However, you would have been able to see nothing of the human being, because at that time he did not possess a physical body dense and solid enough to be seen. You would have had to seek him elsewhere, as it were, in the masses of water and vapour. It would be, perhaps, as though you were to swim out to sea at the present time and could see there not much more of certain lower animals than a soft, slimy mass. You would then find the human physical form of that time embedded in the regions of aqueous vapour. The further back we go, the more attenuated and like his vapoury, watery environment do we find the human form of that period. Not until the Atlantean period does it begin to condense, and were we able to follow with our eyes the whole of evolution, we should be able to see how, out of the water, this human being becomes condensed, gradually descending upon the surface of the earth. As a matter of fact, it is true that the physical human being set foot upon the ground of our earth's surface relatively late. From this region of water and air, he gradually descended, crystallizing out of it. We have now obtained a sketchy picture of a human being who is not distinguishable from his environment, who consists of the same element in which he lives. When we follow very far back in the evolution of the earth, we find that this human body becomes more and more tenuous.

Now let us go back to the very beginning of our present earthly planet. We know that it arose out of the ancient Moon. This ancient Moon we have called the “Cosmos of Wisdom.” At a certain stage of its evolution, this ancient Moon did not contain what we would call solid earth, and we must understand very clearly that the physical conditions were quite different on the embodiment of our planet which just preceded our present Earth. If you follow back as far as the ancient Saturn condition, you must not imagine that it would appear as our earth now appears, that you would find rocks upon which you could walk, and trees which you could climb. None of all this existed at that time. If you had approached ancient Saturn during the middle period of its evolution from far out in cosmic space, you would not, perhaps, have seen any special cosmic body moving about, but you would have been able to detect something very strange, namely, that you had come into a region where you felt as though you had crept into an oven. The only reality of this Saturn state was that it possessed a different degree of warmth from its environment. In no other way could it have been perceived. Occultism does not, like the present ordinary physics, distinguish three conditions of matter only, but it discerns still others. The physicist declares that at present there are solid, fluidic and gaseous bodies. Saturn, however, was not yet even gaseous. Our gaseous state is much denser than the densest state on Saturn. In occultism, we distinguish also the state of warmth which is not simply a state of matter in vibration, but a fourth substantial state. Saturn consisted only of this warmth and if we proceed from Saturn to the Sun, we experience a condensation of that ancient fiery planet. The Sun is the first gaseous embodiment of our planet; it is the first gaseous or airy body. The ancient Moon-state then condenses still further; it is a fluid body which only later, when the sun departs from it, assumes a more dense condition. The actual middle condition, however, while it is still united with the sun, is the fluidic state. All that we today call mineral earth, the mineral, rocks, surface soil, all this did not exist on the ancient Moon. This appeared for the first time upon our Earth, crystallizing itself out of it.

When the Earth commenced its evolution, it began by first repeating once more all the various earlier conditions. Every substance and every being in the cosmos always repeats earlier conditions at the beginning of any new stage of evolution. Thus our Earth passed quickly through the Saturn, Sun and Moon states. When it was passing through the Moon evolution, it consisted of water, mixed with vapour—not like our present water, but a watery, that is to say, a fluidic condition of substance. The fluid state was its densest condition. This watery sphere which swam about in cosmic space was not like the water of the present, but water mixed with vapour, in other words, something gaseous and something fluidic permeating each other, and within this we find the human being. He could exist in this watery sphere, because no solid substance had yet been precipitated. Of the present human being, only his ego and his astral body were present. This ego and astral body did not yet feel themselves as separate entities, but as though embedded within the body of divine spiritual beings. They did not yet feel themselves severed from a being whose body is the water-vapour earth. Then within these ego-endowed astral bodies, enclosures were formed, very tenuous, fine human germs. This is shown in the first diagram.

The upper part of the diagram is intended to represent the astral body and ego which, insensible to outer perception, were embedded in the water-earth sphere; these draw from themselves the first germ of the physical body which together with the ether body was in a very rarefied condition. This then took form out of this watery earth-water sphere. If you were to follow this clairvoyantly, you would see the first germ of the physical and ether bodies surrounded by the astral body and ego as shown in the first figure. That part of you—namely, your physical and ether bodies—which at present lies in bed when you sleep, formed in its very first beginnings in this Earth-state the first human germ still wholly enveloped by the astral body and the ego. The watery vapour mass then densified, and the astral body with the ego gave the impulse to this first human germ to become a part of this primal water-earth. (We cannot now follow further the evolution of the animals and plants.) The next thing that occurred was the condensation of the water, and, in a certain sense, air and water appeared. No longer were vapour and water mixed together, but water and air were separated from one another. As a result, the human corporeality—physical and ether bodies—again became somewhat more densified and because the air had separated from the water, it became airy and took into itself the fiery element. Thus what was formerly watery now became aeriform. The physical ether human germ now consisted of air permeated by fire; the astral body and ego enveloped it and all this moved about in what remained of the water, fluctuating back and forth alternately in water and air.

We thus have before us the human being of that time, whose incipient state has reached even the density of air and has been made incalescent by fire. This has become the same human being who lies sleeping in bed today. To each of these human fire-beings belong an astral body and an ego, but they are completely embedded within the bosom of the Godhead, that is, they do not yet feel themselves individualized.

You must meditate deeply upon these things, for these conditions are so different from the present conditions of the earth, they seem shocking and unbelievable. Now you will ask:—What is the fire element which you have indicated there in the air? The fire which human beings possessed at that time still exists within you. It is the fire that pulses through your blood, it is the heat of the blood. What is left over from the ancient air also lives on within your organism. When you inhale and exhale, you have air within your otherwise solid body which flows in and out of it. When you inhale deeply, the air is then taken up into the blood and this is the reason for the warm air-breath. Imagine this air permeating the whole body, penetrating into all its parts. Now, think away all that is solid and fluid and picture only the form that remains, the form of a human being who has just inhaled; that means that he has driven the oxygen into the outermost parts of the body. A form remains which is very similar to the human, but which, however, consists only of air. The air which streams through the human being takes on the exact form of the body. A kind of shadow body remains consisting of air permeated with warmth. That is the kind of human being you were at that time; you did not then have the form which you now possess, but the physical and ether bodies were enveloped by the astral body invested with the ego. This condition continued on into the Atlantean period. Those who yield to the illusion that in the earliest epochs of Atlantis men walked about as they do today, are quite in error. The human creature first descended out of the airy sphere into the denser region of matter. There were at that time upon the earth only the animals who could not hold back their incarnation in physical form, thus they remained at the animal stage, since the earth was not yet mature enough to yield up its substance for the physical human form. Therefore the animals remained in lower forms because they could not hold back their descent into matter.

The next thing that occurred was the division of the human being, in respect of his physical body, into airy, warmth and fluid parts. This means, in an occult sense, that he became a water-man. You may say that the human being was previously already a water-man. But that would not be quite correct. Previously the earth was a watery sphere, and within it—although only in a spiritual state—were astral body and ego. They swam about in the water as spiritual beings; they were not yet individualized. Now we have for the first time reached the point where we could have found the physical human body contained within this water, but in a sort of jelly fish formation. If you had swum out into this primeval sea, you would have found in it, condensed out of the water, forms which would have been transparent to you. This is the way these human beings appeared in the beginning. First they had a water body and at the same time their astral body and ego continued to remain deeply embedded in the divine, spiritual beings. At that time, when the human being possessed this watery body the apportioning of his states of consciousness was very different from what it became later on. The separation into unconscious night and conscious day did not exist as it does now, but then, when the human being was still embedded in the beings of the divine-spiritual world, he had a dreamy astral consciousness. When, during the day, he dipped down into his fluidic, physical body, this was night to him and when he was again out of his physical body, he beheld the dazzling, astral light. When he plunged into the physical body in the morning, there all was dull and dreary and a sort of unconscious state began. Gradually, however, the present physical organs were formed in his physical body and with these he gradually learned to see. Day consciousness became brighter and brighter, and he was thereby cut off from the divine matrix. It was only toward the middle of the Atlantean period that this human creature was dense enough to become flesh and bone. After the cartilage had solidified, the bones then gradually appeared. At the same time the earth also became more solid and the human being then descended upon the surface of the earth. Thus that consciousness which he had possessed in the divine-spiritual world gradually disappeared, and he became more and more an observer of the outer world, preparing himself thereby to become a true earth dweller. In the last third of the Atlantean period, the human form became more and more like the present one.

Thus literally and truly the human being descended from spheres which we must designate water-vapour, water-air spheres. As long as he remained in the water-air sphere, his consciousness possessed the faculty of a clear astral perception, because whenever he was outside of the physical body he was above in the presence of the gods, but by virtue of the densification of the physical body, he cut himself off, as it were, from the divine substance. Like something that had acquired a shell, he slowly severed himself from his earlier connections, when he ceased to be watery and gaseous. As long as he was fluidic and airy in form, he remained above with the gods. He was not able to develop his ego, for he had not yet released himself from the divine consciousness. Because he descended into physical matter, his astral consciousness became ever more darkened. If we wish to characterize the significance of this evolutionary process, we may say that formerly, when the human being was still living with the gods, his physical and ether bodies were fluidic and gaseous in form, and were only gradually, simultaneously with the solidification of the earth, condensed to their present material form. That is the descent, but just as he has made this descent, so will he also ascend again. After he has had the experiences that are to be had in solid substance, he will again mount into those regions where his physical body will be fluidic and gaseous. He must bear within him the consciousness that if he wishes to unite himself again consciously with the gods, his true existence will be in those regions from which he has sprung. He has become condensed out of water and air and he will again become diffused into them. He can only spiritually anticipate this condition today by gaining within his inner nature a consciousness of the future state of his physical body. Only by becoming conscious of it today, however, will he gain the power to do so. When we have acquired this consciousness, our earthly goal will have been reached, our earthly mission attained. What does that mean? It means that human beings were at one time born, not of flesh and earth, but of air and water and that they must later be truly re-born in the Spirit, of air and water.

In the linguistic usage of those epochs in which the Gospels were written, (which we should also study), “Water” was called water; but “Pneuma,” which is now used for “Spirit,” was then called “Air.” It had at one time exactly that meaning. The word “Pneuma” should be translated “Air” or “Vapour,” otherwise a misunderstanding arises. Thus we should interpret the words in the conversation with Nicodemus in the following manner: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and air he cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The Christ is pointing to a future condition into which the human being will develop, therefore in this conversation we have before us a deep mystery of our evolution. We have only to understand the words correctly and employ them in the manner Anthroposophy can teach us. In the common language of every day, we still have remains of this former usage, when volatile substances are spoken of as spirit. Originally the word “Pneuma” meant air. You can see that it is very important for words to be understood in a very accurate and exact sense and to be carefully weighed. Then out of this very literal meaning arises the most wonderful spiritual interpretation.

Now let us try for a little while to direct our spiritual glance toward another fact of evolution. Let us once more look back to the time when the human astral body with the ego was immersed in the matrix of a common divine astral substance. As you follow this evolutionary course, you find that development took place in such a way that it is possible to describe it schematically. In the beginning, your whole astral being was embedded in the common astral substance and through the processes which we have just described, the physical and etheric enclosed it like surrounding shells. Thus individual human beings became separated from the general astral substance as detached parts. It was as though you had a fluid substance here before you and were dipping out parts of it. The detachment of the individual human consciousness from the divine consciousness runs parallel with the formation of the physical body. Thus we may say that the further we progress, the more we see how the separate individual human beings enclosed in the shell of the physical body, develop themselves as parts which are severed from the common astrality. It is true, the human being had to pay for this becoming independent by the darkening of his astral consciousness. Therefore he looked out from the sheath of his physical body and beheld the physical plane. The ancient clairvoyant consciousness, however, gradually disappeared.

Thus we see coming into existence the human inner being, an independent individual human inner being which is the bearer of the ego. When you observe the sleeping human being of the present, you have before you in the physical and ether bodies, which have remained behind in bed, what these sheaths, formed during the course of the ages, have produced through condensation. What had previously separated from the common astral substance returns to it each night in order to receive strength from it. Of course it does not enter so deeply into this divine substance as it did at that time, otherwise it would be clairvoyant. It retains its independence. This, then, is the independent individuality that came into existence in the course of evolution.

It may be asked, to what is this independent individual human being indebted for its very existence, this inner being that seeks its strength outside the physical and ether bodies? It is indebted to the physical and ether human bodies which were gradually formed in the course of evolution. They gave birth to that which dipped down into the physical senses and looked out into the physical world during the day, but which at night sank down into a state of unconsciousness, because it had severed itself from that condition in which it previously existed. In occult language, the part remaining in bed is called the real earth-man. That was “man.” And that part in which the ego remained day and night, that part born out of the physical and ether bodies was called the “child of man” or the “son of man.” The “son of man” is the ego and astral body, born out of the physical and ether bodies in the course of earthly evolution. The technical expression for this is the “son of man.”

Then comes the question, for what purpose did Christ Jesus come to earth; what was imparted to the earth through His Impulse? The “son of man” who had severed himself from existence in the bosom of the Godhead and had broken away from his earlier connections, and in place of which developed a physical consciousness will come again to a consciousness of the spirit through the force of the Christ Who appeared upon the earth. He will not only perceive in his physical environment with physical senses, but by means of the force of his own inner being of which he is now unconscious, a consciousness of his divine existence will flash up within him. Through the force of the Christ Who came upon the earth, the son of man will again be raised to his divine estate. Previously, after the manner of the ancient Mystery initiation, only chosen individuals could perceive the divine-spiritual world. In ancient times there was a technical expression for this. Those who could look into the divine-spiritual world and could become witnesses of it were called “serpents.” Those men of ancient times who were initiated into the Mysteries in this way were “serpents.” The “serpents” were the forerunners of the deed of Christ Jesus. Moses showed his mission by lifting up before his people the symbol of the elevation of those who could perceive in the spiritual worlds; he lifted up the serpent. What these chosen few had then become, now every “son of man” could attain through the force of the Christ present upon the earth. This the Christ expresses in his further conversation with Nicodemus when He says:—“Just as once upon a time Moses lifted up the serpent, even so will the son of man be lifted up.” Throughout, Christ Jesus made use of the technical expressions of that age. First the literal sense of the expressions must be discovered, then the true meaning can be understood; this is also identical with the Anthroposophical teaching. Therefore, in ancient times only a prophecy of the “I AM” teaching could gain a footing. Only on the outer authority of the initiated could the people hear something of the power of the “I AM” which should be enkindled in every “son of man.” But we are quite sufficiently informed about this.

We have seen what the “I AM” signifies in the Gospel of St. John and can ask whether this “I AM” in the course of time has been imparted to humanity. Has it been gradually proclaimed? Did the Old Testament prophetically point to and prepare for what was brought to mankind as an impulse through the descent of the incarnated “I AM?”

Please remember that all that occurs in the course of the ages has been slowly and gradually prepared before-hand. Like the child in the mother's womb, all that was brought by Jesus-Christ had been slowly matured in the followers of the Old Testament through the ancient Mysteries. On the other hand what had been prepared in the followers of the Old Testament among the ancient Jewish peoples had grown to maturity among the ancient Egyptians. Among them were highly developed initiates who knew what was to come upon the earth. We shall now learn how the Egyptians, who were the third sub-race of the post-Atlantean root-race, developed by degrees the complete impulse of the “I AM,” and how they furnished, like the mother's womb, the outer structure for this “I AM,” but did not go far enough to give birth to the Christ Principle. Then we shall learn how at last the ancient Hebrew peoples separated from them.

Moses is represented to us as one chosen from among the people of Egypt to become the prophet of God, of the incarnated “I AM.” He prophesied the coming of the “I AM” to those who could understand something of It. He announced that for the words, “I and Father Abraham are one,” will be substituted these other words, “I and the Father are one,” which means, I and the spiritual foundation of the World are directly one. The followers of the Old Testament looked up to the folk group-soul in its plurality and in this group-soul, each individual felt sheltered as though within the Divine. Through Moses, an initiate of the old order, it was prophesied that the Christ would come; in other words, that there is a divine principle which is higher than the blood-principle flowing down through the generations. It is true, God has been active in the blood since the time of Abraham, but this blood-father is only the outer manifestation of the spiritual Father.

Moses said unto God, Who am I that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?

He said, I will be with thee: and this shall be a sign that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth my people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain.

And Moses said unto God: Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them: The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you, and they say unto me: What is his name? What shall I say unto them?

He had to announce prophetically a more exalted God, Who exists within the God of Father Abraham, but Who is at the same time a higher Principle. What is His name?

And God said unto Moses, I am the “I AM!”

Here is foretold the profound truth about the Word which later appeared incarnate in Christ-Jesus.

And he said: Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: the “I AM” hath taught it to me.

This is the literal wording. In other words, this means that the “name,” that name which is the basis of the blood-name, is the “I AM”—and this “I AM” appears incarnate in the Christ of the Gospel of St. John.

And God said further unto Moses, Thus thou shalt say unto the children of Israel, the Lord, God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob hath sent me unto you.

What has been seen only externally streaming through the blood, is in its deeper meaning, the “I AM.”

Thus was proclaimed what was later to enter the world through Christ-Jesus. We hear the name of the Logos, we hear Him at that time calling to Moses, “I am the I AM!” The Logos proclaims His name, that part of Himself which can be comprehended through the understanding, through the intellect. What is here proclaimed appears in the flesh as the Logos, is incarnated in Christ-Jesus.

Now let us consider the external sign of the flowing down of the Logos into the Israelitish people, as far as this can be grasped abstractly in thought. This outer sign is the “Manna” of the Wilderness. The word “Manna” is, in fact, (those who understand Spiritual Science know this) the same as “Manas”¹, the “Spirit-Self.” Thus there streams into that people which has by degrees acquired an I-consciousness, the first trace of the Spirit-Self. However that which lives and appears in Manas itself must be called by another name. It is not something that can be simply known, but it is a force which can be taken into oneself. When the Logos simply proclaimed His name, it could be understood and grasped with the intellect. But when the Logos became flesh and appeared among men, then it became a Force-Impulse which is not only a teaching and a concept, but exists in the world as a Force-Impulse in which humanity can participate. He then calls Himself no longer “Manna,” but the “Bread of Life,” which is the technical expression for Budhi or Life-Spirit.

The water transformed by the spirit, which was offered in symbolic form to the Samaritan woman, and the “Bread of Life” are the first heraldings of the influx of Budhi or Life-Spirit into mankind. Tomorrow we shall continue this discussion.

• 1. Note by translator. Dr. Steiner was giving these lectures to Theosophists who were familiar with the oriental terminology. By degrees he dropped this as the students became familiar with his own new occidental terms.

Of all the Elohim, Jah-veh is the one who has turned to the world of physical processes in human development; to nature in humanity. His rule over human nature is the result of a struggle that ended with man coming into natural necessity with his soul life: Jah-weh is not originally “born”, but is present in the cosmic-soul element within the sphere of elective affinity; but he leaves this sphere to enter the “realm of birth” by starting a fight against the other Elohim, whom he expels into those realms that are accessible to man only through the powers of “illusion” as long as man stands at the level of intellectual consciousness - they only become apparent again at a different level of consciousness. The worship of God in the form of the child is essentially a beginning of a liberation from Jah-veh; for the latter can only reveal himself in processes that end with birth; Jah-veh's birth is an apparent one - he cannot enter into earthly forms that are “born”. He can only be represented in symbols whose content belongs to a form of life that reveals itself in the “unborn” state: the mineral-mathematical and part of the plant world.

Jah-veh is not the “Word made flesh”.

The development of the consciousness that man has a relationship to Christ that is not inherent in his natural existence, that in him he has a being to whom he is related through the powers that transform the air in him (in his heart) make him a being that can grasp thought; through the flesh, which does not live in the process of the prenatal natural order, but only in that which begins with birth; which proceeds personally in the interrelationship of man to the world.

As a Christian, one cannot see in the manifest universe the revelation of “God the Father”, but that it comes from the same source as the “born human being”: what is manifest in the universe is only insofar as it is reclaimed through Christ], for Jah-weh has confined divinity to the embryology of the world, pushing the other Elohim into the “sphere of illusion”. The fate of humanity, which can no longer see Jah-weh in the revealed universe, is therefore atheism - the worship of the mere natural order, which, however, only came about because Jah-weh removed the other Elohim from this natural order in the human realm. Yahweh has chosen his people; but in so doing, he has inserted them into the mere order of nature; they have thus become the opponents of all other spirit beings, all spirit beings that do not reveal themselves through human nature; they have also become the opponents of the spirit being that reveals itself in the flesh after birth – the opponents of a spiritualized natural science. Man can attain knowledge through the powers he has at birth; but with this knowledge he cannot consciously bring himself into a relationship with the spiritual world; he must gain this through other spiritual beings if it is not to remain instinctive. otherwise he remains an “animal with the capacity for abstraction,” ideas remain images, and his reality is guided by instincts - that is, by the spiritual beings whom Jah-veh has pushed into the “sphere of illusion.” In order to make man free from the other Elohim, he has driven the other Elohim out of the nature of man – he has moved back in time, that is, materially effected what would later have been spiritually The totality of the Eloh[lim] has been led back [by Christ]; first the “healer” - the “Hermes” - the next will be the “seer”. —

Yahweh is working through the process of the sleeping, not the waking, fleshly organism – therefore the waking is exposed to lower spirit beings – it is now the age in which Yahweh himself cannot sustain himself against the lower spirit beings. –

When the body is alone, it decays: that is to say, the causes of its continued existence do not belong to this world.

Because Jah-weh has assumed the autocracy of consciousness, the flesh in man, which is included in the waking process of life, has come under the rule of lower spirit beings than those in whose spheres Christ lives. The establishment of the personal relationship with Christ] returns to man his conscious kinship. Otherwise, only reason remains, turned to the Christ-Divine, as it was in fact in pre-scriptural times; but now reason too is seized by the animalistic.

Now the consciousness nourished by Jah-weh, the Christ-Christus-Revelation, is in preparation.

My dear Friends,

Suppose that we observe an animal during the course of a year. We will find that its life follows the cycle of the seasons. Take for example an insect: according to the time of year it will form a chrysalis (pupate), at another season it will emerge and shed its chrysalis-form, at another time lay its eggs, and so on. We can follow the course of nature, follow the stages of such an insect's life, and find a certain connection between them, for the animal organizes its life according to its natural surroundings.

If we then go on to consider people—say, the people of one of the larger human communities during earlier stages of the earth's evolution—we find that they too experienced, more or less instinctively, the Life of nature. But as humanity developed further, those instincts, which enabled people to experience their natural surroundings so directly, largely died out. Among more advanced humanity, therefore, we will not find that spontaneous harmony—a harmony between what arises from the human side and the immediate setting or natural surroundings. That has to do with the fact that humanity itself is undergoing a development, which constitutes its history, and which will form a whole within the long planetary development of the earth.

Returning to our example of a lower animal, in insect, where these matters are revealed most clearly, we find that its experience spans a comparatively short space of time—a year. Then the cycle repeats itself. With regard to mankind, a certain law of development is found to run like a thread through long ages of our earth's planetary evolution, as we have repeatedly observed during our historical studies. We have become familiar, for instance, with the type of instinctive clairvoyance belonging to earlier peoples. Their pictorial consciousness gradually diminished during an intermediate period of human development, eventually giving place to modern consciousness which is intellectual, conceptual. Our own historical time, dating from the first third of the fifteenth century, is the time of the developing Consciousness Soul. It is that time when man will step fully into his capacity of intellectual thinking in its narrower sense, which will then bring him fully to free consciousness of the Self.

If we consider a longer space of time from this point of view, we begin to find certain observable laws in the development of humanity. We can compare these developmental laws with those which, say, an insect experiences during the course of a year. Now in ancient times people still instinctively lived together with their natural surroundings and with the cycle of nature but these instincts have more or less died away, and nowadays we live in a time in which conscious inner life must replace them. What would happen nowadays if a man were to give himself up entirely to chance! Suppose he were not to adopt any inner guiding principles or rules, or that he did not tell himself at a certain moment: ‘This is how you should orientate yourself’—suppose that he were not to arrive at any such inner orientation but lived his life though, from birth to death, as chance directed. Man who by virtue of his higher soul development is ranged above the animals would sink because of the manner in which he handled his soul-life, below the animal level.

We may say, therefore, that the insect has a certain direction in its life through spring, summer, autumn and winter. It does not give its development up to chance, placing itself as it does within certain laws in each succeeding phase of its life. Mankind, however, has left behind the age of instinctive co-existence with nature. In his case it was more ensouled than that of the animals, but still instinctive. His life has taken on a newer, more conscious form. Yet we find that man, in spite of his higher soul-life and capacity to think, has given himself over to a more chaotic life. With the dying away of his instincts he has fallen, in a certain way, below the level of the animals. However much one may emphasize man's further steps forward, towering above the animals, one must still concede that he has lost a particular inner direction in his life. This directing quality of his life could be found once more by seeing himself as a member of the human race, of this or that century. And just as, for a lower form of life, the month of September takes its place in the course of the year, so does this or that century take its place in the whole development of our planet. And man needs to be conscious of how his own soul-life should he placed historically in a particular epoch.

This is an idea to which man needs to grow accustomed so as to step even further into the development of the Consciousness Soul. A man should be able to say to himself: ‘I live in this or that epoch. I am not man in the full sense of the word if I give myself over to chance. Chance has deposited me into earthly life through birth. But to give myself up to change as far as my consciousness is concerned would be simply to abandon myself to karma. I am only man, in the full sense of being man, if I take account of what the historical development of humanity asks from my soul-life, belonging as I do to this particular epoch.’ An animal lives within the cycle of the year: man must learn to live as part of the earth's history.

We have placed as the most vital event in the earth's history the Mystery of Golgotha. And we have often considered what it meant to live before the Mystery of Golgotha, or at some point after it. We have here a kind of fulcrum in historical development, from which vital, historical deed one can reckon backwards and forwards. But to do justice to such reckoning we must keep in mind the particular tasks awaiting the human soul in each historical age. The kind of presentation of the past which is customary cannot lead to such an understanding of each particular age. We may be told in bald terms, how Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek or Roman history unfolded, but that leaves us without any key to the position of each in the whole regular historical development of our planet—in the whole regular way an animal stands within the course of the year. Now, in order to gain a concept of what we need to arouse in our own soul-life in this age, we have had to consider the various ages of history from many points of view. Life is rich and diverse, and if one wants to reach some reality concerning our life on earth, we shall have to look at human life from ever-differing points of view, from which the particular tenor of soul-life in our own time.

If we look back to ancient times in human history we shall find, scattered about the inhabited earth, what are know as the Mysteries. We find that various groups of people, living their lives scattered about the earth, develop under the influence of the Mysteries. They do so outwardly—but more particularly in regard to culture and the life of the soul. We find that individuals are accepted into the Mysteries, according to their degree of maturity. There they undergo further development, which is to lead them to a particular grade of knowledge, of feeling, and willing. Then, when they have advanced in knowledge, in higher feeling, and higher willing, they step out again and move among the majority of mankind, giving guidance for the details of daily life, for the strengthening of the soul's inner work and of their will, their actual deeds. With regard to past ages of man, the best place in which to study such guidelines is actually the training of those preparing for initiation in the Mysteries.

Though not of course in the abstract, intellectual manner of today, the pupils in the Mysteries were led to know the world about them. Most importantly, they learned to know the so-called three kingdoms of nature and all that lives in them. In the lowest classes of our schools we learn, by way of all sorts of concepts and pictures, how we stand within the three realms of nature. Through concepts and ideas we learn to know mineral, plant and animal. We then seek there the key to understanding human life itself. Such concepts, with the intellectual soul-content imparted to people these days, did not exist among those working for initiation in the ancient Mysteries. Concepts did exist then; but they were not won, as today, through the exercise of observation and logic. Rather, people had to exercise their souls inwardly, so as to arrive eventually at inner pictures of mineral, of plant, and animal. These people did not absorb the abstract concepts of today but experienced pictures—pictures that intellectual modern man might find fantastic but, nevertheless, pictures. And man knew from direct experience that what he discovered, when he experienced these pictures, actually yielded him something that lived in the mineral, plant or animal—of what grew there, took form, and unfolded within them. This he knew: and he knew it from those pictures which to modern man would appear fantastic myths.

Ancient man knew that reality expressed itself in things which today are considered mere mythology. He could certainly say: ‘The animal before me has firm visible outlines.’ But these firm outlines were not what he tried to grasp or understand. He tried rather to follow the flowing, mobile, fluid quality of its life. He could not do this, however, in sharp outlines, in sharply defined concepts. He had to teach in pictures that were fluid, metamorphosing, changing. And thus it was taught in the Mysteries.

But when, on the basis of this Mystery-knowledge, a man was to rise to self-knowledge, he underwent a significant crisis in his soul. According to the type of knowledge available in those ancient times, early man obtained pictures of mineral, plant and animal. With his dreamlike consciousness, he could then see, as it were, into the inner realms of nature. From the content of the Mysteries he also received the guiding principles of self-knowledge, much as he did in later times. ‘Know Thyself’ has been an ideal in all civilizations, in all ages of human cultural development. But in progressing from his kind of imaginative, natural knowledge towards knowledge of himself, ancient man underwent an inner crisis of the soul. I can only describe the nature of the crisis by saying that when he learned to look at the nature of the mineral as it was spread before him man found fulfillment in his soul-life. He bore in himself the effects of physical-mineral processes. He bore in himself pictures of interweaving vegetative life, and also of animal life. In his world he was able to bring all these together: mineral, plant and animal. Looking back from the vantage point of the world around him into his own inwardness, he had, in his primitive type of memory, an inner picture of mineral, plant and animal, and of how they worked together.

Undertaking to obey the injunction ‘Know Thyself’, however, he found himself suddenly at a stand. He had a world of inner pictures, varied, richly diverse in form and colour, and sounding with inner music—this was his experience of his earthly surroundings. Yet he felt that this world of forms, diversity, and constant flux, this world that trembled with glowing colour and radiance and musical tones, let him down when he made the attempt to know himself. The pictorial way in which he tried to grasp the nature of man itself baffled him in his attempt. He was able to attain pictures of man too: but even while experiencing them he knew that the reality of man's being, the source of his human dignity, escaped him—it was not there.

In his Mystery-initiation man lived through this crisis. Yet out of it, arising from the impotence of self-knowledge, something else developed: a particular conviction about Life, a conviction on which every ancient civilization was based. It meant that really enlightened people in those ancient times could say: ‘Man does not reveal his true nature here on earth. The minerals, plants and animals all achieve their end here on earth; they can reveal themselves fully in the pictures which I have of them.’ This is at the root of all ancient civilizations: this living conviction that man does not belong to the earth in the same sense as do the other realms of nature. His home is elsewhere than on the earth. His home lies essentially in the super-sensible world. And this belief was no arbitrary figment. It was achieved through a crisis of the soul—after gaining the knowledge available at that time about the world external to man. And a solution to the crisis was only possible because people still had the capacity to turn their minds to life before birth, and from there to life after death. Everyone then knew instinctively of life before birth. It was part of earthly life, like a pre-natal memory. And they learned about life after death on the basis of life before birth.¹

On the basis of those capacities which he then had, man learned that after crossing the threshold of death the moment would come when he would not only have around him the natural world, external to man, but his own being would arise before his soul. For it was characteristic of the more ancient stages of human development that, between birth and death, man developed an exclusively pictorial consciousness. I have often spoken about this. He did not yet possess the intellectual consciousness which we have today. In those days this was only developed immediately after death. And people retained it then, after death. It is a peculiarity of man's progress that, in ancient times, man's consciousness after death was an intellectual one; whereas we experience a purely pictorial panorama of our life during the three days after death. There lies the peculiarity, that in ancient times men had a dreamy pictorial consciousness on earth, whereas nowadays we have an intellectual consciousness. Then after death, they grew into an intellectual consciousness which enabled them, once free of the body, to gain freedom. In ancient times man became an intellectual and free being after death.

On being initiated into this fact, the pupil in the Mysteries would be told that he could win knowledge of the world external to man through his picture-consciousness. If however he obeys the imperative ‘Know Thyself’, and looks back upon himself, he will not find his full human dignity there. He will not find it in earthly life before death. He will only become fully human when he has crossed the threshold of death, and pure thinking becomes his; for with pure thinking he can become a free being. It is a strange thing that this type of consciousness occurred after death in past ages of human development, whereas today after death we have the panorama of past life spread out before us. In a sense this consciousness has entered man's life in a counter-stream. It has moved from the life after death into his actual earthly life. And what we have gained, particularly since the first third of the fifteenth century, has trickled into earthly man from post-earthly man. The pupil in the ancient Mysteries knew clearly that the essence of man could only be found in super earthly life, after death. This has now taken its place in life on earth. A real super-sensible stream has entered into our life on earth. This sets up an opposition to the direction of our human life, moving from ‘before’ to ‘after’, the super-sensible stream moving from ‘after’ to ‘before’. Thus, as modern people, we take part in super-earthly life. We have undertaken to become worthy—worthy of what has been drawn from super-sensible into sensible existence. We now have to win our freedom by inner right. We must recognize fully the import of the super-sensible for the development of the Consciousness Soul.

For the people of ancient times, when the injunction ‘Know Thyself’ loomed before them, their response had to be that there is no self-knowledge on earth: for the essence of humanity is simply not fulfilled here on earth. Man reaches it only when he has gone through the threshold of death into the super-sensible world.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and for centuries afterwards, man as he lived on earth was still called, in the language of ancient Mystery wisdom, the ‘natural man’. And it was considered that this natural man was not the real human being. The natural man was clearly differentiated from the spiritual being which bore the essence of man. The view then was that one only became spiritual man with the laying aside of the physical body. Only after crossing the threshold of death did one become spiritual man and, as such, ‘fully human.’ Initiation in the ancient Mysteries led to great humility with regard to earthly consciousness. Earthly man could not be made arrogant through Mystery-initiation. For whilst on earth he did not even feel that he was man in the fullest sense. He felt that he was more a candidate for humanity, and that he needed to use his life on earth in such a way that, after death, he could become fully man. So, according to Mystery-wisdom, man, as he went about his business on earth, was not a revelation of full humanity.

Now we must come to ancient Greece, and the time when Greek culture was widely influential. For it was then that people began to be aware, with their intellect and in freedom, that the true being of man was pouring from the sphere of after-death into man's earthly being. In Greek civilization the individual on earth was not regarded as entirely fulfilling his humanity. Men saw the work of the super-earthly, as it was drawing into the earthly. They saw in the detail of man's physiognomy, his way of going about, his shape—in all this they beheld with reverence, the super-earthly streaming into the earthly.

With the recent development of humanity all that has changed. Now man says: My great task is to become aware of my humanity. My task on this earth is to reveal, at least to some degree, man's being in its fullness. I too stand under the banner of the exhortation ‘Know Thyself’. I can compose my soul for freedom, because I have gained intellectual consciousness. I can lay hold of the inner strength of pure thinking in the act of self-knowledge. Before the eye of my soul man can appear. Not that man should grow proud in the partial fulfillment of this injunction ‘Know Thyself’. He should realize how at every moment this freedom of his has to be wrestled for. He should realize how, in his passions, emotions, feelings and sensibilities, he is always dependent on the subhuman. What was seen by that high form of pictorial consciousness in the world around, by ancient humanity, was also this realm of subhuman. They recognized that all their knowledge was of the subhuman realm in those ancient times. That was a significant point. For, they said, true man does not exist on earth. To grasp the intellectual nature of man they would have needed intellectual capacities themselves. With their non-intellectual form of knowledge they could only grasp the subhuman.

I have described in my (Philosophy of Freedom) how the intellectual is further developed into conscious, exact clairvoyance. It then lives in a free inner constitution of the soul. Only then can man know himself and his relation to the other parts of his being, outside his pure thinking and his free will. Through such a higher consciousness—imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness—man may reach in self-knowledge beyond his intellect and know himself as part of the super-sensible world. And then it will be clear to him that although he is fully human, as has become clear to him in his self-knowledge, full humanity requires of him that he perfect it ever more and more.

Thus modern man cannot develop the same sort of humility that he needed in ancient times, which arose when he had to say of himself: ‘Living in a physical body you are not yet fully human, you are only a candidate for humanity, not yet fulfilling your human dignity and worth. All you can do is prepare yourself for consciousness and freedom as they will arise in you immediately after death.’ A more modern man, who has meanwhile lived under Greek conditions in a different incarnation, would say: ‘Take heed that in your fleshly body between birth and death you do not neglect to be fully man. For as a modern man your inner task is the working-out of what has entered earthly life from the realm of the pre-earthly. You can become man on earth, and you must therefore take upon yourself the difficulty of becoming man on earth.’

All this is expressed in the development of man's religious consciousness. On a previous occasion we saw how in earlier times man looked up principally to the Father God, and in Christ he had the Son of God. In God the Father he saw the creative source of substance and the super-sensible origin of divine providence. Of this the earthly, perceptible world is merely an impress. He looked up to the cosmos from the earth; and in religious consciousness he looked up to God the Father. The pupils in the Mysteries had always been conscious that the most they could learn about man would be a preparation for the life after death. Now, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Son of God has united with the earth's life, and man is able to develop an awareness of what St. Paul meant when he said ‘Not I, but Christ in me’. Now man can so direct his inner life as to let the Christ-impulse come to flower in him; he can let Christ's life flow and breathe through him. He can absorb the stream which has come to us from pre-earthly life and bring it to fruition in his life on earth.

A first stage in the reception of this stream consists in man noticing that at a particular point in his life he feels something flowering and coming alive in him. Previously it sat under the threshold of his consciousness, and he notices for the first time that it is there. It rises, filling him with inner light, inner warmth, and he knows that this inner life, inner warmth, inner light, has arisen in him during life on earth. He acquires a greater knowledge of life on earth than was his birthright. He learns to know something which arises within his humanity during his life on earth. And if man is sensible of the light and Life, of the love arising in him, and feels there the flowing, living presence of the Christ, he will receive strength—strength to grasp the fully human, the post-earthly, in the free activity of his own soul. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ-impulse are intimately bound up with the attainment of human freedom, of that consciousness which is able to suffuse with inner life and warmth our mere thinking that is otherwise dead and abstract.

The exhortation ‘Know Thyself—bring your humanity to fruition in your own inner life’ has been addressed to humanity through all time, and is still in force today. But the experience of Christ in man is essential to our own day. It takes its place alongside the injunction ‘Know Thyself’, and must be given its full weight.

This indicates once again the enormous difference between the soul-constitution of the present day and that which prevailed in times past. We learn to consider man over great periods of time. The whole process is compatible with what takes place when the insect is sensitive to the period of summer in the setting of this world. For man should be able to live in the whole history of the earth as an animal lives in the course of the year. The insect ensures that it notices the transition to autumn, and it sets in motion another aspect of its life accordingly, as it did for spring and summer. And man knows: Once upon a time we were instinctively clairvoyant; we were unfree; our consciousness was pictorial; we were unable to obey the injunction ‘Know Thyself’; we know we could fully realize our humanity only on the other side of the gate of death; that time was analogous to spring in the life of the insect. Then came the Greek era, as summer and autumn come round for the insect. This was a bridge to that later era in which we now live. Our soul's work is different. We should be able to know ourselves to a certain degree here on earth, and accordingly be free after death to reach higher stages of development than in previous ages of man. Then one was wholly man only after death. In those ancient times man's task on the earth was to be a candidate for life, becoming fully man after death. In this, our own age, it is man's task to realize himself here in earth, that after death he may rise to higher stages of development than he could in former ages.

In those times the danger was that if he did not live his life on earth properly, man would not arrive at his full humanity. Today we face something different. We have to achieve our full humanity while on earth. If we fail in this, we betray ourselves and in the life after death plunge further down into the subhuman. In ancient days things could be left undone; today destruction follows. Then, not to become a candidate for life was an omission; today a man destroys, through his own humanity, something in the whole human race if he does not strive after full humanity in his own life. In past ages he merely left something undone; by doing so today he betrays mankind.

Thus we must grasp the need to place ourselves consciously in the world on a higher Level of being, as the insect does instinctively, on a lower Level, in its world. Otherwise man delivers himself up to chaos, which the animal instinctively does not do. We must learn through Anthroposophy to be really human, that we may not experience the scandal of being less in the world-order than the animals—despite the Gods having determined us for higher things. The animals do not neglect their part in the cosmic harmony, yet we as mankind turn the cosmic harmony into dissonance. And thus, I may say, we shall heap upon ourselves cosmic scandal, if we do not learn to think in this way and make our consciousness accord with the demands of the age. This we must learn in these days to join our feeling to our intellectual life. We must take in what would follow upon our not striving after that knowledge which makes us fully man. It would be a scandal before the Gods themselves.

• 1. I refer to my remarks in the so-called ‘French Course’.(Published as Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy)

I have often spoken to you of how the human soul has altered in the course of mankind's development, how short-sighted it is to believe that the constitution of the modern soul can be understood if one will not look back to the different changes it has passed through. We look back—I do not need to recapitulate it—to the most varied epochs of earthly evolution; we have in particular often characterised the post-Atlantean epochs in order to show how the constitution of man's soul continually altered. In speaking of such things one must advance from the abstract to the concrete. One must try to give as clear an answer as possible to the question: What was the nature of the human soul in the ages of antiquity? We look back to a far-off age in which—and this may be stated in more than a figurative sense—divine teachers themselves instructed men about the sacred mysteries of existence. We know that from this ancient epoch onwards men have come to learn of these mysteries of existence in most manifold ways. From epoch to epoch the conceptions of the human soul have actually become more and more different. The concepts and ideas which we have today, which live in us and which we put every moment into words, these lived too in earlier conditions of our soul but in an utterly different way. Many of our most ordinary ideas lived quite differently. Today I will speak of what are apparently the most ordinary concepts, two concepts living in man's soul. People denote them at every moment from their word-store, but they lived in the human soul in earlier times in an entirely different way. I will speak of the two concepts: Space and Time.

Space for modern man is the most abstract thing conceivable. What do men mostly picture as space? Three dimensions standing at right angles to each other—or if one reads philosophical text books: the state of extension of physical objects—or there are still other definitions of space. But all that—think how prosaic, cold, abstract, that all is! Three dimensions standing at right angles to one another, or even all that geometry has to say about space,—how frightfully abstract, how prosaic and poverty-stricken, so poverty-stricken that the whole of space—with time as well—has become for Kant subjective shadow, merely a form of conceiving sense-phenomena. This abstraction, space, of which modern man knows little more than that it has length, breadth and height, this abstraction, space, was a very different conception in the far past, of which, however, something still exists today for especially sensitive people—though indeed it is only a trace. One need not go back so extremely far; in the 6th, 7th, 8th pre-Christian centuries one may definitely say that space, as it was then experienced, was very different for the human soul from the prosaic abstraction that it is for man today. Even in the early Greek ages when the soul experienced space, it felt it to be something with which it was livingly united. It felt itself placed into a living Something, in feeling itself placed into space.

Today man has at most a vestige of the sense of standing with his personality, his human self within space. But the man of antiquity expressed a significant relation of himself to the universe, if he distinguished above and below, right and left, in front and behind. The living feeling that one expressed when in ancient times one spoke of above and below, of right and left, of before and behind, has terribly little to do with our abstract three dimensions, which have no other occupation at all than standing at right angles to each other. What a very monotonous occupation it would be through eternity, if one did nothing else at all but stand at right angles to one another like the three dimensions of geometry.

Above and below: it was something living when in ancient times man still experienced how he was first a little child and raised himself from below upwards, when he felt how the course of life consists in an unfolding in the direction of above and below. The course of life consisted in the experience of the direction of above and below. One only travels a tiny distance from the earth (unless one lives in the Ahrimanic age of aeroplanes, or in the Atlantean age but there it was not very high above the earth—you know of this from my description of Atlantis), only a very little distance in normal life does one travel upwards from the earth in growing, and thus experience the above and below, the opposition of above and below. But this opposition was felt in antiquity as the contrast of the world of consciousness and the objective world,—of the conscious and the unconscious world. How subject is related to object—that was a deep experience when one felt above and below. Above, and ever farther and farther upwards come the divine worlds, downwards the worlds which are opposed to the Gods, and the human being is placed within the Above and Below.

As late as to such men as Goethe (you only need study his “Faust”) you still find remains of the consciousness of above and below. In addition to the above and below men felt the right, and left. Today we must use abstractions if we speak of right and left. To the man of antiquity a living in right and left was an actual experience, one might say a genuine world of observation. The Above and Below is the line from infinity to infinity or from the conscious to the unconscious. Right and left: in experiencing right and left one experienced the connection in the world between mind and figure, between wisdom and form. You only need draw a symmetry-axis, what is left and right of it gives together the form and you cannot combine the right and the left without doing it purposefully, without relating the one to the other.

If above and below is pointing to man's mysterious relation to the spiritual and material worlds, then the experience of right and left is his relation to the worlds spreading out in form. And by relating the form in the right and left to one another, by letting wisdom prevail in the forms arranged symmetrically right and left, he experiences himself in the second element of space. This experience of sense in the shape, of wisdom in the form in all possible variations, this feeling of oneself within this harmony of sense and shape, of wisdom and form, was experienced by the man of old as what today is the abstract second dimension. The above and below, the right and left belonged to the flat plane, to the surface which can have no existence for the senses, which requires thickness, needs before and behind if it is to exist in the element of the sense-perceptible.

And in this third, in the before and behind, ancient mankind felt the entrance of the material into the spiritual. (See diagram) Above and below, left and right he experienced as something still spiritual. It can have no material existence if something is merely above and below, and right and left—it is pure picture, must be pure picture in space; it becomes material only through thickness. In ancient times man felt vividly that in growing he made a few steps upwards from the earths surface in the direction of the above and below. He felt that in walking, he could move freely that he was in the element of his will: before and behind. In between stood the completely free self-movement to right and left while standing still.

Ancient man experienced in his being this threefold contrast as placed into the All; the remaining still with regard to right and left, the striding into the world with regard to before and behind, the gradual movement from below upwards in the direction of the above-below. This was the experience of the man of old. In experiencing the above and below he felt weaving in the universe all that today we call the intelligence, the reasoning of the universe. All that rules in the universe as intelligence was interwoven in space with his idea of the above and below, end since he could share in this intelligence of the world through his growth from below upwards, man felt himself to be intelligent. The participation in the above and below was at the same time a participation in cosmic intelligence. And participation in the right and left, in the interweaving of sense and shape, of wisdom and form, was for him the feeling that weaves through the world. And his restful remaining still, surveying the world, was to him a uniting of his own feeling with the universal feeling. His striding through space in the direction of forwards or back was the unfolding of his will, the placing of himself, with his own will, into the universe, the universal will, He felt his own life to be interwoven with the above and below, the right and left, the before and behind. The conscious and the unconscious: above and below; wisdom and form: right and left; spirit and matter: in front and behind. Such was the experience of the man of antiquity.

At the same time, however, he experienced the indefinite—if I put it crudely—when one stands on one's head then the under is above and the above under. So too is it for the antipodes, and if one counts oneself in with the earth, the below is above and the above underneath. One can imagine too through some circumstance or other that what is normally right is in front, what is normally left is behind. These directions are just as living and weaving in space as in a certain respect they are indistinguishable, weaving into one another. Ancient man felt as he thus experienced himself in the three-divisioned space that the Divinity ruled in the threefoldness. The divine ruling in space directed man then to the divine in duration.

He experienced—and what I am saying now was actually experienced—he experienced in space the divine manifestation, ruling in threefold manner. It was the image in him of the threefold God: Father, Son and Spirit or by what other terms the three-membered God was known. Threefoldness is truly not thought out in the mind, is not an invention. The threefoldness with all its qualities was experienced in its reflection when ancient man experienced livingly the three dimensions of space.

And just as in a certain respect want of clearness can prevail about the above and below, just as right and left can also be before and behind, so in certain circumstances an uncertainty can also enter into the reciprocal relationships of God, Son, Spirit. In the sphere of the transitory, the sphere of space, man experienced the three dimensions concretely, not abstractly or geometrically as we do. And as he experienced concretely how the divine expressed itself in space, in the transitory, he therefore related the transitory to the element of duration; the three-dimensioned space became for him the reflected image of the three-dimensioned spirituality.

The idea of ancient man was approximately: If I live here below on earth I live in the threefoldness of space, but this is to me the reflected proof of the threefold nature of the divine origin of the world.

Today space has become an abstraction and only a few people perceive the depth-dimension, the thickness-dimension, that is, the above and below, the in front and behind, or the plane-dimension of right and left. Even among philosophers little of this experience is to be found. But yet some few who reflect on things and are not entirely asleep come to realise that the depth-dimension really arises in the unconscious observation lying not so very far below the consciousness. Men still feel the depth, but that is the last shadowy relic of space-experience. In the evolved religions an understanding for the Oneness of God has taken precedence of the real understanding of the threefoldness. The understanding for the unity of God has an origin similar to that for the threefold nature of God through space.

My dear friends, spiritual science seeks its information out of the divine facts themselves. Simple-minded people that come and say that no external proof for this or that is given. Well, we have gone into a great deal. I could still relate many things, but it shall not occupy our time today. I will only point out that it is largely the unscientific nature of modern science, so-called, if the verification cannot be found. Just this one thing I will say, and it is as it were an external proof of the fact that the man of antiquity felt in the same way I have described today. Why have the ancient Rabbis called God also Space? Because in earlier time, even in Judaism, they felt what I have shown you today concerning mankind. If science could really think in different domains it would find countless riddles which at the same time, however, are true proof, external proof of what spiritual science has at any rate to find out of the spiritual facts. One of the names for God among the Rabbis is Space; Space and God denote the same.

The unity of the divine has an origin similar to that of the threefoldness of the divine. It is connected with the living experience of Time. Time too was not the abstraction to the man of old that it is to us today. But the concrete experience of time was lost still earlier than the concrete experience of space. If one reads Plato or Aristotle today with a real understanding, and not in the way many schoolmasters read—well, I have often quoted the note written by Hebbel in his diary where the reincarnated Plato sits before the schoolmaster as a pupil, and the teacher reads a dialogue of Plato's with his class and the reincarnated Plato is given very poor marks. Hebbel noted this in his diary. One who reads Plato and Aristotle today, not as is often done by a schoolmaster, but with really deep understanding, finds that this feeling for space was still fully in existence in the 6th, 7th, 8th pre-Christian centuries. It was however already shadowy in Plato and Aristotle, and the living experience of time was lost still earlier than those pre-Christian centuries. It was strongly alive in the second post-Atlantean epoch the ancient Persian, where a cold shiver would have been produced among, for instance, the pupils of Zarathustra, if one had spoken to them of time as a line running from the past to the future. It runs quite uniformly, but does nothing else than run its course from the past to the future.

Again in the Gnosis there existed a more shadowy feeling—but scarcely still to be recognised—for the living nature of time. They did not speak of a line running from past to future but they spoke of Aeons, the creators who were there earlier and from whom the later proceeded, where one Aeon always passed on the impulse of creation to others. Time was so imagined pictorially that in the hierarchical succession the preceding Being always gave the impulse to the one following; the following was ever, as it were, brought forth by the preceding, the preceding Being enclosed the next following. One looked up to the preceding Being, as more divine than the one succeeding. “Later” one experienced as more non-divine, “earlier” one experienced as more divine. This looking towards the change in evolution from the divine to the non-divine was contained in the living experience of time. Everything would fall apart if one were not to weave the divine and the non-divine to a unity. That is identical with our modern abstractions of past and future.

But in this picture of time, looking right back to the “Ancient of Days”, and encompassing the ever more and more encompassing, one experienced the image of God as Unity. Just as the three-divisioned, threefold Space was experienced as the image of the threefoldness of God, so was Time experienced as the image of the oneness of God. The basis of monotheism lies in the ancient time-experience, the basis for perceiving the Trinity lies in the ancient space-experience. Thus has the constitution of man's soul changed, thus has what was once alive became abstract and dry. However paradoxical this may sound: modern man most certainly has an abstract picture when he speaks of space, and he pictures or so I believe—a living relationship when he speaks of a friend. But that concreteness, that elementary experience, which today speaks from friend to friend, that is still abstract in comparison with the intensive experience of the universe which ancient man had when he experienced space and time, which to him were the images of the Unity and Trinity of the Divine.

Thus have we become dry and abstract in respect of space and time, and something else must take their place, something that we must again experience, that must be more and more inwardly realised. We must learn to feel that duality, that contrast in the world of which I have spoken during recent weeks. My dear friends, think for once that someone were to see only the rippled surface of water. This crinkly, rippled water-surface is in fact an abstract line. What is the concrete? There below, the water; there above, the air. And out of the duality air and water, in the co-operation of their forces, there arises the maya, the rippled surface. But so is our world the rippled surface, so too are we as men if we behold ourselves only as we look within maya; if we behold ourselves in reality then here too we must see: below, the water; above, the air.

Below the water—we see it if we observe transitory evolution, as I have brought it before you recently, where man develops in such a way that what he can conceive as a child he would grasp only as an old man. What he conceives in the age of puberty, he knows somewhat earlier, but still only towards old age. I depicted the course of human life, where it is only in old age that one grasps in oneself what one has been in childhood and youth. Life runs thus not apparently, but in reality on the surface, I have said that perhaps one does not need such a perspective today for life on the surfaces but for dying one needs it.—That the conception of the below; and belonging to it, the conception of the real above the region of duration. I spoke of this region in a recent lecture,¹ where man does not evolve, but has that which belongs to duration his whole life through from birth to death. But we cannot consider today how the below and the above interweave, if we do not realise the below, there where it threatens to become fixed, where it threatens to harden; and if we do not realise the above there where it threatens to dissolve, to spiritualise itself—if we do not develop the feeling for the contrast: the Divine—the Luciferic the Ahrimanic. Man of old had something alive in his soul when he spoke of his space-experience, his time-experience; the man of the Earth-future must develop inner concepts, inner impulses representing: Divine—Ahrimanic Luciferic.

• 1. 15th September 1918

In the foregoing studies we have indicated how necessary it is to study Man in his entirety if we would see how exact a copy he is in all his nature of the Universe as a whole. It is specially important to receive this knowledge not only into our intellect, but also into our feeling and will; for only by regarding Man in his totality as born out of the whole Universe, can a deeper understanding be gained for that which Christianity wishes to be for the world. It might easily be objected that if this is so, a complicated understanding of the details of the Universe and of Man is demanded of modern humanity in order that Man should become complete Man in his consciousness. Yet just reflect that this demand, which now approaches humanity as a cardinal demand, is not peculiar to Spiritual Science. In order to indicate exactly what I mean, let me first put the question: What demand did Christianity bring when it first came into the world? In reality it claimed an understanding of the Universe which originally belonged to the ancient heathen conceptions, but which has in course of time been completely forgotten. Just consider what has been gradually lost to Man in course of time of the fundamental views and characteristics of Christianity. Christianity first appeared in such a way that it could only be understood by comprehending e.g. the Trinity: The Nature of God the Father, God the Son—that is, Jesus Christ—and the Spirit. In the sense in which Christianity understood these three aspects of the Divine Spiritual, the understanding of them demanded no less than does the understanding of such things as are given by Spiritual Science today. Only all that leads to the comprehension of this idea of Father, Son and Spirit has been gradually eliminated; it has been thrown out of the intelligible and become empty words; empty husks of words have alone been retained. For centuries man has had these empty word-husks. This has gone so far that, after having first dogmatically rejected them, people have begun to ridicule them. The best of men have ridiculed these empty husks. Ridicule has been poured upon them. ‘Dogmatic Theology’, it is said, ‘claims that One is Three and Three One!’ it is indeed a terrible delusion, it is sheer deception to believe that the Christian movement has ever demanded less understanding, less self-sacrificing knowledge, than that demanded by modern Spiritual Science—and demanded by it in order to regain Christianity. The most important and basic facts have been cast out of Christianity, and if we leave out of account that these live on in the different confessions as words, we can ask: What really remains to man of the fundamental ideas of Christ Himself? How does modern man discriminate between Christ and the Universal Cosmic God who can be met with in the ideas of Jahveh or Jehovah? I have drawn attention to the fact that even theologians such as Harnack do not discriminate. How many people today are clear as to what is to be understood by the Spirit? People have become such ‘abstractlings’, satisfied with the mere empty husks of words; either they remain in the churches and are satisfied; or if they are—as they call it—‘enlightened’, they turn all to ridicule. What is given in empty husks of words can never have the power to bring light to the individual activities of human knowledge.

Only reflect how far we have actually gone in this direction. All that was comprised in the knowledge of ancient Greece was at the same time a healing principle. The healer was a priest and at the same time the teacher of the people. That the teacher and priest was also a healer presupposes that something unhealthy was present in the whole process of civilisation; otherwise there would be no ground for speaking of a healer. They spoke of the healer because from an instinctive knowledge they had still an understanding of the whole cosmic process, more comprehensive and intense than we possess today. Today man pictures the cosmic process as running its course in such a way that what comes later is always the effect of what was earlier; but this is not so in reality. The older instinctive knowledge was aware that this was not so. Today men imagine, especially those who speak of progress in the abstract, that evolution is bound continually to ascend. We find this notion of an ascending evolution among the superficial philosophers of modern times. A man who is simply carried along by the general prejudices of the time, such as Wilhelm Wundt, the non-philosopher, who became the philosopher of the hour for many, also spoke as an alleged philosopher of such “Universal Progress”, without the slightest knowledge of what really lies in the actual stream of human development. We must realise that in the real stream of human development there is always a tendency to degenerate. There is not a tendency towards progress there, least of all in history. There is a continual tendency towards degeneration, and only because what we call teaching, or knowledge, works steadily against it, is that raised up which would otherwise be drawn down into the depths. Only in this way do we have progress.

Consider from this standpoint how the matter stands with the child. The child is born. People speak of heredity, but we inherit only what would lead to decline. If the child were not educated by his whole environment and later by school and by life, he would degenerate. Education is a preservative from degeneration, it brings healing. The old instinctive knowledge of Man would still regard as a healing process everything connected with knowledge, education or priesthood. In olden times the office of the doctor could not be separated from that of the priest, they were one and the same. Modern evolution has separated natural science from the science of soul and spirit, as I explained in yesterday's lecture. Thus man leaves to medical science the healing of all that which, according to Julius Robert Mayer, has nothing to do with human aims, but is concerned only with the use of the forces of the horses and their transmutation to heat in the horses, in the wagon-axles, in the streets on which the wheels ran, and so forth. This is, roughly speaking, left to the physician; and people like Rubner in Berlin, who is only a representative of this mode of thought, calculate what is necessary to human life almost as though Man were a kind of complicated stove.

But now draw the social-ethical conclusion of such a conception, and recognise that if of all that takes place in the transmutation of force the purposes and aims of Man are only a secondary effect, then we are confronted with the possibility of believing that the world could get on without these secondary effects. As a matter of fact that is really the secret belief of modern man, that the real consists only of the physical, and everything else is a side-stream, a secondary effect.

In face of such a view it would be only consistent to reject Christianity, as the materialists of the middle of the nineteenth century did. They actually carried out to its logical conclusion the materialistic cosmic conception, by saying: If naturalism is correct, then there is nothing for it but to ridicule the idea of any difference between a transgressor and a good man—for of course, just the same amount of force is transmuted into heat in the one as in the other! The questions that flash through the world at the present time are really often questions of honesty, courage and consistency. At a time when man certainly does not possess this honesty in respect of the outer things of life, it is indeed not surprising to find that it is not there in respect of these cardinal questions.

Thus it comes about that modern humanity still talks of Christ, without really knowing that He must be distinguished from the Universal God underlying all nature. If the Christ-Concept has been gradually changed into the simple God-concept, that signifies a retrogression of humanity, back to before the Mystery of Golgotha. In order to understand Christianity rightly it is necessary to take this principle of degeneration seriously, and place in opposition to it the necessity of working out of something quite different from what bears the germ of degeneration within it. The attention of present-day man must be drawn to the fact that at that time in the course of Earthly events when the Earth moved—together with man, of course—through the Mystery of Golgotha, something took place as a happening on Earth which had significance not merely for humanity, but for the entire Earth-life.

To comprehend this, Nature and Spirit must of course be studied with much greater earnestness than lies in the inclination of modern humanity. In order to explain this, let me point back to something which lived in the consciousness of man, perhaps up to the eighth century before Christ. Man did not then perceive himself as an isolated being, as he does today. Today he feels himself as a being enclosed in his skin, but up to the seventh or eighth century BC. he felt himself to be a member of the whole Universe, taking part in the events of the whole Universe. Grotesque as it may seem today, it is a fact that in those olden times man did not feel his head so strongly shut off by his skull, he felt that that which lived in his head extended into the Cosmos, and belonged to the whole starry heaven. Strange as it seems today, he felt himself in the sphere of the stars, for he felt his head in living connection with them. Thus he said to himself: ‘When the night-sky arches over me, it is really I myself, who live there in living communion of my head with the stars.’ He said: ‘I follow the course of time further, when after the night the day appears. Then the stars which rose on the one side set on the other, and in their place the Sun rises. The configuration of the stars then no longer works in my head, for the Sun takes the place of the starry heavens and my eyes it is that are co-ordinated with the Sun.’ And because he vividly felt: ‘My eyes are co-ordinated with the Sun when I am busy on Earth during the day,’ he said to himself: ‘Just as now there is an earthly existence and my eyes are co-ordinated to the Sun, so in the existence preceding the Earth (we call it the Moon existence) my whole head was a kind of eye; not as now, perceiving the objects in a twofold way, but, looking out into the Cosmos there were within me, in my brain, as it were, as many little eyes as there are stars. Out of these little eyes has grown all that lives now in my brain; and my sense-eyes are but later products, co-ordinated to the Sun as was my brain to the starry heavens. Therefore my brain is a later product of evolution of an eye, or really of many separate eyes, as many in number as the stars shining out there in the night. Thus my brain has grown out of a sense; and what is now in Earth-existence, my eye, whereby I am in communication with my Earth-environment, will be an inner organ, as is now in my brain, when the Earth has been replaced by another planet (which as you know we call the Jupiter-condition). What is now on my outer surface will draw into my inner being. People will then look different. What they now have as corresponding with their environment will form an inner organ in future times.’ Ancient humanity felt this instinctively and said: ‘Light penetrates; through the eye of my senses, but in my inner being I preserve the light of olden times. It works in me as thought. Thought was a sense-perception before the Earth became Earth, when it was an earlier planet; and my sense-perception will be thought in the future.’ In ancient times man perceived all this as wisdom, which he felt ‘instinctively’ as we should say today. The ancients did not throw about the word ‘instinctive’ as is done today, they said: ‘It is the wisdom which the Gods in heaven have brought down to us on Earth.’ Of what arose in them instinctively concerning the past, present and future they said: ‘This was brought to us by the Immortals.’ This they represented to themselves in Pictures. What does the Isis-picture tell us? ‘I am the All; I am the Past, the Present and the Future. My Veil has no mortal ever lifted.’ The modern interpretation of this is really in truth a strange one! People today think in materialistic terms about a saying containing the term ‘mortal’. They do not think, in the case of this saying of Isis: ‘I am the Past, I am the Present, I am the Future. My veil hath no Mortal yet lifted;’ but they think of it as: ‘I am the Past, the Present and the Future; my veil hath no man yet lifted.’ The people of today do not reflect how on the other hand they hold themselves to be immortal and that therefore ‘My veil hath no mortal ever lifted’ cannot be regarded as a final sentence. Novalis said: ‘Well then, we must become immortal, so that we may lift the veil of Isis.’

Let us reflect on the underlying thought brought forward by modern materialists. It gives them pleasure to think: ‘I am the All. I am the Past, the Present and the Future. My veil no man hath ever raised.’ For they are thus spared the effort of lifting it, and their philosophers can teach that man has now reached the boundaries of knowledge. In reality they mean that man is too indolent to tread the path of knowledge. They do not like to say this, so they say that man has reached the boundaries of knowledge.

In our age, which wants to be independent of authority, these things are accepted, but they must not be carried into the future, if man is not to fall into decadence. It should not be overlooked that no one has the right to call himself a Christian who believes only in a general progress and does not realise that if the Earth had been left to itself since the Mystery of Golgotha, it would have fallen into decadence. Hence it is necessary for us to oppose to this decadence something which we cannot obtain from the Earth, nor from that from which the Earth is derived—the Father-God—but which must be obtained from God the Son, and must be injected into the continuous evolution of mankind. It is an absolute deviation of man from his task of today if he continues unwilling to admit that the Universe is to be brought into relation to the Christ-Event. Think what it really means when, though stormed at by Catholic and Evangelical confessions, Spiritual Science asserts that the Christ-concept and the Cosmos-concept must be united, while against that it is always said: ‘Spiritual Science has no idea that Christ is only to be understood in an ethical sense, as something inserted only into the moral order of the world.’ If man holds the moral order of the world as a secondary effect of the transmutation of forces, then the Christ-concept inserted only into the moral order of the world, also appears as a mere secondary effect in the cosmic system.

We have spoken of one thing whereto the old instinctive knowledge of mankind pointed, namely that the human brain stands in relation to the starry sphere, and that the human eyes are in a certain way co-ordinated with the Sun-sphere. Going back into earlier periods, when man still possessed a qualitative knowledge of astronomy and of the earthly elements, we see that Light was brought into relation with what is nearest our Earth, with Air. With their instinctive knowledge, the ancients could not think of Light without Air. Modern thinkers with their abstract knowledge do not bring what they explain as Light into relation with Air. Certainly they describe it in a wonderful way—as a vibratory movement of the ether; but in relation to Air, the farthest they go is to regard the Air as a medium through which the Light passes. It is really most remarkable how little people reflect upon what is imposed upon them! Earth: Infinite Space: Stars. Among these stars are some whose Light needs millions of years to reach the Earth. Night falls. Here is a star whose Light needs a shorter time to reach the Earth. Just imagine for a moment: What have we in the rays of its Light? Certainly we do not see the star itself when we look in the direction of the Light-rays. The Light-ray which meets our eye, according to this theory, comes from something millions of years back; it may even have perished long ago, but its Light is still traveling hither. Nothing is told us of what is really out there in the Cosmos. All we are told is how channels of Light are approaching, which may perhaps lead back to some still existing star but which may also lead to some star no longer there.

We must make ourselves acquainted with the thought of how for us the Light-phenomena as such make themselves apparent in the phenomenon of Air; for although the Light passes through the apparently airless space, by us it is not seen in airless space, but in the Air-filled space, for only in such can we exist. Thus for us Light and Air are experienced together. In this way we can go more deeply into the human constitution; we can go a step further. In the human head we can pass from the eyes to the nose. The nose (and oriental philosophy knows a great deal about this), the nose is the organ through which one breathes in and breathes out. The eye is the receptive organ for Light. The nose and eye are divided. The nose is adapted to the Air, and all that is adapted to the Air extends to the world of the planets. The Sun makes the beginning in working in our earthly part; but the rest of the planets work on the rest of our constitution; and as we come down from the starry world into that of the Sun and planets we arrive, in the case of man, as it were, at the nose. Then we come down quite to the earthly, passing from the nose to the mouth, to the organ of taste, and, taking up the substances of the Earth through that organ, we descend from the planetary into the Earth-world. We have the rest of man as an appendage; the head as appendage of the eyes, the breast as appendage of the nose, and all the rest of man, the limb-man, the metabolic man as appendage of the organ of taste. We have now apportioned man, taking him in his totality, to the starry world, the solar and planetary world and the Earth-world. We have placed him into the whole Universe and when we look at his brain—inwardly, not outwardly; not by physical anatomy, but by inner knowledge—we see in the human head, inasmuch as it is the bearer of the brain, a direct copy of the starry world. We see in all that extends from the nose to the lungs, a copy of the planetary system with the Sun. If we then consider the remainder, we see that part of man which is Earth-bound, as e.g. are animals. In this way only do we arrive at the true parallel between man and the rest of the world. Thus should man be understood, even in detail.

Consider for a moment the circulation of the blood. The blood, transmuted by the outer air, enters the left auricle, passes into the left ventricle, and from thence branches off through the aorta into the organism. We can say: Blood passes from the lungs to the heart, thence into the rest of the organism, but branching off also to the head. The blood however in passing through the organism takes up the nourishment. And into this is introduced all that is dependent on the Earth. All that the digestive apparatus introduces into the circulation of the blood is earthly. What is introduced through the breathing, when we bring oxygen into the blood-course, is planetary. And then we have the blood-circulation that goes to the head, which includes all that composes the head. Just as the circulatory course of the lungs with its absorption of oxygen, and giving out of carbonic acid, belongs to the planetary system, just as what is introduced through the digestive apparatus belongs to the Earth, so that part of the circulatory course that branches off above, belongs to the starry world. It is, as it were, drawn away from the aorta and then streams back and unites with the blood streaming back from the rest of the organism, so that they stream conjointly back to the heart. That which branches off above says, as it were, to the whole of the rest of the circulatory course: ‘I do not share either in the oxygenating process nor in the digestive process, but I separate myself out. I invert myself upwards.’ That it is that belongs to the starry world. And the nervous system might be followed up in the same way.

One arrives at no perception of man by thinking that he can be studied from his physical aspect only. In so doing we only find in the cranium that pulp described by our physical anatomy! What it describes is simply non-existent. It is in reality the confluence of forces of the starry heavens. To describe the physical brain by itself, is like describing a rose by itself. That has no sense, for a rose is no entity for itself. It cannot be dissociated from its bush. It is nothing apart from its bush. So too, the human brain is nothing apart from the starry heavens.

Let us however here recall the true nature of the Sun. Again and again I have emphasised how astonished the physicists would be if they could fit out an airship (it actually forms part of their ideal to do so), and could journey to the Sun, imagining they would find there a glowing ball of gas. They would not find this, but a suction-sphere, trying to absorb everything possible into itself, really an empty space, nay even less than empty, a negation of matter. Within the circumference of the Sun there is nothing comparable to our matter. It is not merely empty, but less than empty; it is blank, just like a hole, in comparison with the rest of matter. It is really important that one should not, in these days, begin to speculate on things of the world, without any accord with reality, but fill oneself with the spirit of reality. I have recently said a good deal on the Theory of Relativity. You will remember what I brought forward regarding the Einstein box by means of which the theory of gravity is to be overcome. Another affirmation of Einstein's is that even the dimension of a body is merely relative, and depends on the rapidity of movement. Thus, according to the Einstein theory, if a man moved through cosmic space with a certain velocity, he would not retain his bulk from front to back, but would become as thin as a sheet of paper. This is discussed in all seriousness. Such dwelling in thoughts foreign to reality forms the ‘science’ of today. And it is the opposite pole to what we have on the other hand as faith.

The physician has been relegated to the purely physical, the priest to what is purely of the soul. As for the Spiritual, it is abolished. But when it comes to considering everything outside the physical as a side-issue—horses, coach, these are real to the physical senses; and the forces of the horses, these are transmuted into heat, heat of the horses, heat of the axles, and heat of the furrows of the road; and for the rest, well, we cannot even call the rest a ‘fifth wheel’ of the wagon, for it is less that that, it is a mere side-issue, a secondary effect. As regards the priest, one cannot even say that he is the fifth wheel of the wagon in the modern conception—for what does he achieve if all the ‘rest’ is a side-issue? When physicians such as Julius Robert Mayer make philosophy, they make physics; and when the adherents of soul-substance, or whatever it is, make philosophy, it becomes abstract concepts; and the two world-streams flow on side by side quite foreign to one another, the materialistic physician of the middle of the nineteenth century and the preaching pastor; they have really neither understood nor even paid attention to one another, at most perhaps they have contended politically. A time has assuredly now come in which there is but little honesty or consistency, and this state of things must be seriously combated and overcome.

We have not only to combat ill-will, but what perhaps has also to be taken into account, namely all kinds of stupidity and ignorance. That is how things are.—Let me draw your attention especially to the fact that from a certain motive I intend at Whitsun to give three lectures on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. [*See The Redemption of Thinking. English translation of these lectures by A. P. Shepherd and Mildred Robertson Nicoll. Published by Hodder and Stoughton (1956).] I do not know whether our opponents will deny us the right to study Thomas Aquinas here. As you know, by an order of Pope Leo XIII, the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas was declared the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church and I wonder whether this, which we are about to study here, will be described as an unlawful propaganda issuing from Dornach! We will wait and see. Let the wind whistle from whatever quarter, we will await it. But perhaps it is well that we should once meet all the talk that comes from that particular quarter with a serious study of the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas.