The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The first 12 chapters in the gospel of John

In modern theology, clear distinction is made between the first three gospels and the gospel of John. The first three are called the synoptic gospels, whilst the latter is often said to be a composition for teaching purposes and of no historical value. What matters is, however, that everything said relating to the Christ in the gospels is a profound symbol which at the same time is an important historical fact. In reality the first three gospels differ from the gospel of John because they were written by disciples who were less profoundly initiated, whereas the gospel of John was written by the most deeply initiated disciple.

The gospel of John actually makes no direct mention of John, only referring to him as the disciple whom Jesus loved. This is a key word for the one who was most deeply initiated. To indicate that some disciples were the most intimate initiates it would be said that the master loved them.

The disciple who wrote down the gospel of John first of all described something he had himself experienced. Chapters 1 to 12 are experiences in the astral world, chapter 13 and those that follow experiences at the devachanic level. This is highly significant and characteristic of the whole of it. John described experiences on the astral level because he took the view that it is only possible to understand what Christ Jesus accomplished on this earth if one considers it in the light of the spirit. The things the master did and said could only be understood if one put oneself in a higher state of consciousness. Inner development can enable human beings to gain true vision in the astral world. This is only achieved by doing specific meditations. The individual must close himself off from the outside world. He must let eternal truths arise in his soul. A new world then opens up all around him.

What Christ Jesus did on earth could only be properly judged by going into a higher world. Things experienced with Jesus in the physical world only became clear if seen in astral terms. To gain living experience of what Christ Jesus had done, one had to use suitable Christian meditation to enter into a state where the soul gained understanding of the Christ.

John said so first of all in his introduction. This is a meditative prayer from the beginning to ‘and the darknesses did not comprehend it.’ When the soul gains living experience of what lies in those words, the powers arise that enable us to grasp the content of chapters 1 to 12. ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was a god.’ This ancient truth was presented in visible form in all the ancient mysteries, above all those with an Egyptian bias.

Words sound in air-filled space, otherwise we would not hear them. The figures of the words we speak are in that space. If the air could be suddenly made to go rigid as I speak the waves that buzz around in the air would fall down as rigid solid bodies. A mystery teacher would tell his pupil: ‘Just as a human being speaks, wresting his inner life away and passing it into the air, so the cosmic soul also spoke, but into much more subtle matter, into Akasha matter, and this would then become solid.’ Everything around us is condensed word of god. And so, the mystery teacher said, the world all around us is frozen word of God, a frozen logos. ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.’ It was still within itself, it was itself a god. Then it filled space and froze. This logos is now present in everything. Everywhere around us we have the crystals of the logos. But as life evolved, the logos arose from its state of slumber, as it were. In man it became the light of insight. When we gain insight, God, who has originally descended into the world, comes to us out of this world. One must enter wholly into this, penetrating so deeply into the world that one realizes: The logos lives in the world.

Originally there was the creation of the physical human being. The spiritual human being entered into this physical human being. Then light shone into the darkness. But the darknesses did not at first comprehend it. When a human being develops further, there comes to him the content of astral truth vision. He then sees clearly what Christ Jesus was, and what his teaching signified: that the time was ripe in those days to bring forth a reverse Adam. Man had descended into his body, and with this came birth and death. Light then entered into the darkness.

There was need to help humanity to understand again that life is the victor in the struggle with death. John the Baptist thus came as a forerunner. The Baptist made it known that a new kingdom would take all that was old and still wholly in the sign of the original creation by divine powers. Until then it was said that the god would destroy those who went against his laws. The new kingdom was one, however, which man would find in himself through living experience of the god. The idea of the old covenant had been that humanity had to obey God's commandment. The new covenant was that human beings should follow the god in them of their own free will. This is the love of goodness. It was prophetically foretold; it had to increase. The Christ as the representative of the new covenant had to increase; John, being only his forerunner, had to decrease.

Two major elements came together at this point. John saw this in his vision where everything appeared in form of images. At the same time the actual Baptist and his historical mission appeared to his inner eye. The whole mission of Christianity now presented himself to him. He described this in the first chapter.

Let us go back to very early times, at least 2000 years before Christ. Wise individuals had advanced so far that they were initiated into the mysteries. One symbol used was the offering of the water. The mystery priest used water as a symbol. It is a law that man shuts himself off from the higher world of the spirit if he takes alcohol. Someone wishing to enter the worlds of spirit in a living way must not drink wine, not even the wine of the offering.

The marriage in Cana characterizes the Mission of Christianity. The ancient mystery priests had the most sublime teachings, given out of profound understanding in the spirit. But one thing that was lacking in pagan culture was the conquest of the physical world. Their tools were still extremely primitive, the whole of outer civilization was primitive. People had not yet gained a relationship to the things that had to happen directly down here on earth. They had to learn to control the earth and this meant they had to be limited to the physical. They had to grow strong and hallow the lower human being.

This culture was prepared for by great teachers who spoke of the significance of the physical level. Egyptian art was great in its spiritual concepts but not in the form it took at the physical level. The whole of Greek art consisted in bringing the human being down to the physical level. Roman law also brought humanity down to the physical level. The cult of Dionysus was connected with all this. The representative of wine was actually shown as a god. The story of the marriage in Cana shows the introduction of wine into human evolution in sublime fashion. The true purpose was to show that water is greater than wine. It was transformed into wine because humanity had to be taken down to the physical level.

Today we have come down to the physical level in every respect. If there is no moral development to go hand in hand with civilization at the physical level, physical achievements are destructive. Moral development will enable humanity to generate energies that will be very different from those that are now to be found at the physical level. Keely⁴⁴ set his engine in motion with vibrations created in his own organism. Such vibrations depend on a person's moral nature. This is the first hint of a dawn for a technology of the future. We will have engines in future that are only set going by energies coming from people who have moral qualities. Immoral people will not be able to set them going. Purely mechanical mechanism must be transformed into moral mechanism.

The approach used in the science of the spirit is preparing the way for this ascent. Christianity first had to guide humanity down. Now it must guide them upwards again. Wine must be transformed into water again.

John was able to see beyond physical reality. The deed accomplished by the Lord, his mission, thus appeared to John the disciple in the image of the marriage at Cana in Galilee. This is how one should read the first 12 chapters of the gospel of John. It does not say that Mary asked him but the mother of Jesus. This is a mystic term. In mysticism, ‘mother’ always refers to something that needs to be inseminated when the human being ascends to a higher level. Jesus had to take the whole of human consciousness, such as it had been until then, to a higher level. The consciousness of all humanity needed him to take it a step forward. This is why Jesus was able to say: ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’ He would not have said this to his mother.

On the third day, a marriage took place. This means that John lay in the sleep of initiation for three days. There the vision of the marriage in Cana in Galilee occurred. In a sleep lasting three days he went through the events that took place in the world of the spirit. On the third day he experienced the vision of the marriage in Cana. All that follows are events he saw in his astral vision.

In the third chapter we have the talk with Nicodemus. In his astral vision it would always be the Lord himself who appeared to John. In the talk with Nicodemus we hear what was to happen to John. The Lord put things very clearly. Nicodemus did not at first understand him. It is John himself who needed to understand; it was explained to him in the vision that it was a matter of killing off the lower human being, with the higher human being coming alive. He gradually understood who Jesus actually was; that the powers of the world's origin, the father of the world, were alive in him. This is why we then have the words Jesus said about the father. The occult powers Jesus possessed appeared to John as an astral reflection of the actual events. John was thus learning the most profound truths through the Lord himself.

In the fourth chapter we have the meeting with the woman of Samaria. The Lord said to her: ‘You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband’ She was to be raised to the higher self. For this, she had to go through the lower bodies. Those were the old husbands. She now had to be connected with the higher self. That was the new husband. In the story of the man who was born blind it became evident that it was his karma to be unable to see.

The first events described in John's gospel are astral experiences. Surely it is natural that John himself was not present, seeing that he perceived it all in image consciousness? John is not mentioned in the first 12 chapters. He was not yet the disciple, experiencing all these things in the astral level.

He then slept the initiation sleep. He was to rise to a higher degree. This happened as he lived through the experiences of the three days and on into the fourth day. The initiation took 3 ½ days. Then he saw his own initiation, his own resurrection. This was the raising of Lazarus.⁴⁵ Lazarus wrote the gospel of John. Martha and Mary were the states of consciousness in his soul, one divine, the other turned to life on earth. The description of the Lazarus miracle is the description of a higher level of initiation. The 12^th chapter prepares for the actual recognition of the Jesus personality. John himself then says: ‘Now I know him, who has raised me from the dead.’

John's higher development begins with the 13^th chapter. Every word in the gospel of John can be understood if we take it as John's living experience. He then became conscious in his I, and this was no longer an image consciousness. He consciously became the disciple whom the Lord loved.

• 44. Keely, John Worrel (182–1898), American engineer. Rudolf Steiner spoke of him on several occasions, e.g. in Ursprung und Ziel des Menschen. Grundbegriffe der Geisteswissenschaft (GA 53), Berlin, 30 March 1905; The Temple Legend (GA 93). Berlin, 2 Jan. 1906. Tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985; Steiner R. Cosmic Being and Egohood (in GA 169), lecture given in Berlin on 20 June 1916. Typescript translation C 43 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London; Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind (GA 197), Stuttgart, 8 Nov. 1920. Tr. not named. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1987. Considerable detail, but confusing, may be found in in Blavatsky, HP, The Secret Doctrine vol. 1.
• 45. John 11: 1-45. See also Steiner R. Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Mysteries of Antiquity (GA 8). Tr. H. Collison, rev. C. Davy, A. Bittleston. Bristol: RudoIfSteinerPress 1992.

Dornach, June 2, 1921

In the past few weeks, I have repeatedly spoken of the great change that took place in Western civilization during the fourth century A.D. When such a matter is discussed, one is obliged to point out one thing again and again, that has already been the subject of discussion here many times. Yet it is necessary to focus on it time and again. I am referring to the metamorphoses of human development, markedly differing from each other on the soul level. When speaking of such a major point in human evolution as the one in the fourth century, one has to pay heed to the fact that the soul life of humanity changed in a sense with one great leap.

This view is not prevalent today. The prevailing opinion holds that the human race has undergone a certain history. This history is traced back to about the third or fourth millennium along the lines of the most recent documented records. Then, going back further, there is nothing for a long time; finally, one arrives at animalistic-human conditions. But in regard to the duration of the historical development, it is assumed that human beings have in the main always thought and felt the way they do today; at most, they formerly adhered to a somewhat more childish stage of scientific pursuit. Finally, however, human beings have struggled upward to the level of which we say today that it is splendid how far we have come in the comprehension of the world. To be sure, a reasonably unbiased consideration of human life arrives at the opposite view. I have had to indicate to you the presence of a mighty transition in the fourth Christian century; I outlined the other change in the whole human soul life at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Finally, I described how a turning point in human soul life occurred also during the nineteenth century.

Today, we shall consider one detail in this whole development. I would like to place before you a personality who illustrates particularly well that human beings in the relatively recent past thought completely differently from the way we think today. The personality, who has been mentioned also in earlier lectures, is John Scotus Erigena,¹ who lived in the ninth century A.D. at the court of Charles the Bald in France.² Erigena, whose home was across the Channel, who was born approximately in the year 815 and lived well into the second half of the ninth century, is truly a representative of the more intimate Christian mode of thinking of the ninth century A.D. It is, however, a manner of thinking that is still completely under the influence of the first Christian centuries. John Scotus Erigena apparently was intent on immersing himself in the prevalent scholarly and theological culture of his time. In his age, scholarly and theological knowledge were one and the same. And such learning was most readily acquired across the British Channel, particularly in the Irish institutions where Christianity was cultivated in a certain esoteric manner. The Franconian kings then had ways of attracting such personalities to their courts. The Christian knowledge permeating the Franconian kingdom, even spreading from there further east into western Germany, was mainly influenced by those who had been attracted from across the Channel by these Franconian kings.

John Scotus Erigena also immersed himself into the contents of the writings by the Greek Church Fathers, studying also the texts of a certain problematic nature within Western civilization, namely, the texts by Dionysius the Areopagite.³ As you know, the latter is considered by some to be a direct pupil of Paul. Yet, these texts only surfaced in the sixth century, and many scholars therefore refer to them as pseudo-Dionysian writings composed in the sixth century by an unknown person, which were then accredited to Paul's disciple.

People who say that are ignorant of the way spiritual knowledge was passed on in those early centuries. A school like the one in which Paul himself taught in Athens possessed insights that initially were taught only orally. Handed down from generation to generation, they were finally written down much, much later on. What was thus recorded at a later time, was not necessarily anything less than genuine for that reason; it could preserve to some extent the identity of something that was centuries old. Furthermore, the great value that we place on personality today was certainly not attached to personality in those earlier ages. Perhaps we will be able to touch upon a circumstance in this lecture that must be discussed in connection with Erigena, namely, why people did not place much value on personality in that age.

There is no doubt about one thing: The teachings recorded in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite were considered especially worthy of being written down in the sixth century. They were considered the substance of what had been left from the early Christian times, which were now in particular need of being recorded. We should consider this fact as such to be significant. In the times prior to the fourth century, people simply had more confidence in memory working from generation to generation than they had in later periods. In earlier ages, people were not so eager to write everything down. They were aware, however, that the time was approaching when it would become increasingly necessary to write down things that earlier had been passed on by word of mouth with great ease; for the things that were then recorded in the writings of Dionysius were of a subtle nature.

Now, what John Scotus Erigena was able to study in these writings was certainly apt to make an extraordinarily profound impression on him. For the mode of thinking found in this Dionysius was approximately as follows. With the concepts we from and the perceptions we acquire, we human beings can comprehend the physical sensory world. We can then draw our conclusions from the facts and beings of this sensory world by means of reasoning. We work our way upward, as it were, to a rational content that is then no longer visually perceptible but is experienced in ideas and concepts. Once we have developed our concepts and thoughts from the sensory facts and beings, we have the urge to move upward with them to the supersensory, to the spiritual and divine.

Now, Dionysius does not proceed by saying that we learn this or that from the sensory things; he does not say that our intellect acquires its concepts and then goes on to deduce a deity, a spiritual world. No, Dionysius says, the concepts we acquire from the things of the senses are all unsuitable to express the deity. No matter how subtle the concepts we form of sensory things, we simply cannot express what constitutes divinity with the aid of these concepts. We must therefore resort to negative concepts rather than positive ones. When we encounter our fellowmen, for example, we speak of personality. According to this Dionysian view, when we speak of God, we should not speak of personality, for the concept of personality is much too small and too lowly to designate the deity. Rather we should speak of super-personality. When referring to God, we should not even speak of being, of existence. We say, a man is, an animal, a plant is. We should not ascribe existence to God in the same sense as we attribute existence to us, the animals, and the plants; to Him, we ought to ascribe a super-existence. Thus, according to Dionysius, we should try to rise from the sensory world to certain concepts but then we should turn them upside down, as it were, allowing them to pass over into the negative. We should rise from the sense world to positive theology but then turn upside down and establish negative theology. This negative theology would actually be so sublime, so permeated by God and divine thinking that it can only be expressed in negative predicates, in negations of what human beings can picture of the sensory world.

Dionysius the Areopagite believed he could penetrate into the divine spiritual world by leaving behind, so to speak, all that can be encompassed by the intellect and thus finding the way into a world transcending reason.

If we consider Dionysius a disciple of Paul, then he lived from the end of the first Christian century into the second one. This means that he lived a few centuries prior to the decisive fourth century A.D. He sensed what was approaching: The culmination point of the development of human reason. With a part of his being, Dionysius looked back into the days of antiquity. As you know, prior to the eighth century B.C., human beings did not speak of the intellect in the way they did after the eighth century. Reason, or the rational soul was not born until the eigth century B.C., and from the birth of the rational soul originated the Greek and Roman cultures. These then reached their highest point of development in the fourth century A.D. Prior to this eighth century B.C. people did not perceive the world through the intellect at all; they perceived it directly, through contemplation. The early Egyptian and Chaldean insights were attained through contemplation; they were attained in the same manner in which we acquire our external sensory insights, despite the fact that these pre-Christian insights were spiritual insights. The spirit was perceived just as we today perceive the sensory world and as the Greeks already perceived the sensory world. Therefore, in Dionysius the Areopagite, something like a yearning held sway for a kind of perception lying beyond human reason.

Now, in his mind, Dionysius confronted the mighty Mystery of Golgotha. He dwelled in the intellectual culture of his time. Anybody studying the writings of Dionysius sees—regardless of who Dionysius was—how immersed this man was in all that the intellectual culture of his time had produced. He was a well educated Greek but at the same time a man whose whole personality was imbued with the magnitude of the Mystery of Golgotha. He was a man who realized that regardless of how much we strain our intellect, we cannot comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and what stands behind it. We must transcend the intellect. We have to evolve from positive theology to negative theology.

When John Scotus Erigena read the writings of this Dionysius the Areopagite, they made a profound impression on him even in the ninth century. For what followed upon the fourth Christian century had more of an Augustine character and developed only slowly in the way I described in the earlier lectures. The mind of such a person, particularly of one of those who had trained themselves in the schools of wisdom over in Ireland, still dwelled in the first Christian centuries; he clung with all the fibers of his soul to what is written in the texts of Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet, at the same time, John Scotus Erigena also had the powerful urge to establish by means of reason, by what the human being can attain through his intellect, a kind of positive theology, which, to him, was philosophy. He therefore diligently studied the Greek Church Fathers in particular. We discover in him a thorough knowledge, for example of Origen,⁴ who lived from the second to the third century A.D.

When we study Origen, we actually discover a world view completely different from the Christian view, that is from what appeared later as the Christian view. Origen definitely still holds the opinion that one has to penetrate theology with philosophy. He believes that it is only possible to examine the human being and his nature only if he is considered as an emanation of the deity, as having had his origin in God. Then, however, man lowered himself increasingly; yet through the Mystery of Golgotha, he has gained the possibility of ascending once again to the deity in order once more to unite with God. From God into the world and back to God—this is how one could describe the path that Origen perceived as his own. Basically, something like this also underlies the Dionysian writings, and then was passed on to such personalities as John Scotus Erigena. But there were many others like him.

One could say that it is a sort of historical miracle that posterity came to know the writings of John Scotus Erigena at all. In contrast to other texts of a similar nature from the first centuries that have been completely lost, Erigena's writings were preserved until the eleventh, twelfth, a few even until the thirteenth century. At that time, they were declared heretical by the Pope; the order was given to find and burn all copies. Only much later, manuscripts from the eleventh and thirteenth century were rediscovered in some obscure monastery. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, people knew nothing of John Scotus Erigena. His writings had been burned like so many other manuscripts⁵ of a similar content from that period. From Rome's point of view the search was more successful in the case of other manuscripts: all copies were fed to the flames. Yet, of Erigena's works, a few copies remained.

Now, considering the ninth century and also taking into account that in John Scotus Erigena we have an expert in the wisdom and insights of the first Christian centuries, we must conclude the following. He is a characteristic representative of what extended form an earlier age, from the time preceding the fourth century, into later periods. One could say that in these later times, all knowledge had ossified in the dead Latin language. All the wisdom of the spiritual world that had been alive earlier became ossified, dogmatized, rigid, and intellectualized. Yet, in people like Erigena lived something of the ancient aliveness of direct spiritual knowledge that had existed in the first Christian centuries and was utilized by the most enlightened minds to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha.

For a time, this wisdom had to die out in order for the intellect of man to be cultivated from the first third of the fifteenth century until our era. While the intellect as such is a spiritual achievement of the human being, initially it turned only to the material realm. The ancient wealth of wisdom had to die so that the intellect in its shadowy nature could be born. If, instead of immersing ourselves in a scholarly, pedantic manner into his writings, we do so with our whole being, we will notice that through Scotus Erigena something had spoken out of soul depths other than those from which people spoke later on. There, the human being had still spoken out of mental depths that subsequently could no longer be reached by human soul life. Everything was more spiritual, and if human beings spoke intellectually at all, they spoke of matters in the spiritual realm.

It is extremely important for one to scrutinize carefully what the structure of Erigena's knowledge was like. In his mighty work on the divisions of nature that has come down to posterity in the manner I described, he divided what he had to say concerning the world in four chapters. In the first, he initially speaks of the uncreated and the created world (see outline below). In the way Erigena believed himself able to do it, the first chapter describes God and the way He was prior to His approaching something like the creation of the world.

Ancient Legacy

The Human Being

John Scotus Erigena clearly describes this in the way he learned through the writings of Dionysius. He describes by means of developing the most refined intellectual concepts. At the same time, he is aware that with them he only reaches up to a certain limit beyond which lies negative theology. He therefore merely approaches the actual true being of the spirit, of the divine. Among other topics, we find in this chapter the beautiful discourse about the Trinity, instructive even for our age. He states that when we view the things around us, we initially discover existence as an overall spiritual quality (see above). Existence embraces everything. Now, we should not attribute existence as possessed by things to God. Yet, looking upward to existence transcending existence, we cannot but speak summarily of the deity's existence.

Likewise, we find that things in the world are illuminated and permeated by wisdom. To God, we should not merely ascribe wisdom but wisdom beyond wisdom. But when we proceed from things, we arrive at the limit of wisdom-filled things. Now, there is not only wisdom in all things. They live; there is life in all things. Therefore, when Erigena calls to mind the world, he says: I see existence, wisdom, life in the world. The world appears to me in these aspects as an existing, wisdom-filled, living world. To him, these are three veils, so to speak, that the intellect fashions when it surveys all things. One would have to see through these veils, then, to see into the divine-spiritual realm. To begin with, Erigena describes these veils: When I look upon existence, this represents the Father to me; when I look upon wisdom, it represents the Son to me; when I look upon life, it represents the Holy Spirit in the universe.

As you can see, John Scotus Erigena certainly proceeds from philosophical concepts and then makes his way up to the Christian Trinity. Inwardly, proceeding from the comprehensible, he still experiences the path from there to the so-called incomprehensible. Indeed, of this he is convinced. Yet, from the way he speaks and presents his insights we can see that he has learned from Dionysius. Precisely when he arrives at existence, wisdom, and life, which to him represent the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he would really like to have these concepts dissolve in a general spiritual element into which the human being would then have to rise by transcending concepts. However, he does not credit the human being with the faculty of arriving at a state of mind that goes beyond the conceptual.

In this, John Scotus Erigena was a product of the age that developed the intellect. Indeed, if this age had understood itself correctly, it would have had to admit that it could not enter into the realm transcending the conceptual level.

The second chapter then describes something like a second sphere of world existence, the created and the creating world (see above). It is the world of the spiritual beings where we find the angels, the archangels, the Archai, and so on. This world of spiritual beings, mentioned already in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. is creative everywhere in the world. Yet this hierarchical world is itself created; it is begun, hence created, by the highest being and in turn is active creatively in all details of existence surrounding us.

In the third chapter, Erigena then describes as a third world the created world that is noncreating. This is the world we perceive around us with our senses. It is the world of animals, plants, and minerals, the stars, and so on. In this chapter, Erigena deals with almost everything we would designate as cosmology, anthropology, and so forth, all that we would call the realm of science.

In the fourth chapter, Erigena deals with the world that has not been created and does not create. This is again the deity, but the way it will be when all creatures, particularly all human beings, will have returned to it. It is the Godhead when it will no longer be creating, when, in blissful tranquility—this is how John Scotus Erigena imagines it—it will have reabsorbed all the beings that have emerged from it.

Now, in surveying these four chapters, we find contained in them something like a compendium of all traditional knowledge of the schools of wisdom from which Scotus Erigena had come. When we consider what he describes in the first chapter, we deal with something that can be called theology in his sense, the actual doctrine of the divine.

Considering the second chapter, we find in it what he calls in terms of our present-day language the ideal world. The ideal is pictured, however, as existing. For he does not describe abstract ideas but angels, archangels, and so forth. He pictures the whole intelligible world, as it was called. Yet it was unlike our modern intelligible world; instead it was a world filled with living beings, with living, intelligible entities.

As I said, in the third chapter Erigena describes what we would term science today, but he does so in a different way. Since the days of Galileo and Copernicus, who, after all, lived later, we no longer possess what was called cosmology or anthropology in Scotus Erigena's age. Cosmology was still described from the spiritual standpoint. It depicted how spiritual beings direct and also inhabit the stars, how the elements, fire, water, air, and earth are permeated by spiritual beings. What was described as cosmology, was indeed something different. The materialistic way of viewing things that has arisen since the middle of the fifteenth century did not yet exist in Erigena's time, and his form of anthropology also differed completely from what we call anthropology in our materialistic age.

Here, I can point out something extraordinarily characteristic for what anthropology is to John Scotus Erigena. He looks at the human being and says: First, man bears existence within himself. Hence, he is a mineral being, for he contains within himself a mineral nature (see outline above). Secondly, man lives and thrives like a plant. Third, man feels as does the animal. Fourth, man judges and draws conclusions as man. Fifth, man perceives as an angel.

It goes without saying that in our age this would be an unheard-of statement! When John Scotus Erigena speaks of judgment and conclusions, something that is done, for instance, in a legal court where one pronounces judgment over somebody—then, so he says, human beings do this as human beings. But when they perceive, when they penetrate the world in perception then human beings do not behave as human beings but as angels! The reason for pointing this out is that I am trying to show you that for that period anthropology was something different from what it is for our present age. For it is true that you could hardly hear anywhere, not even in a theological seminar, that human beings perceive as angels. Therefore, one is forced to conclude that our science no longer resembles what Erigena describes in the third chapter. It has turned into something different. If we wanted to call Erigena's science by a word that is no longer applicable to anything existing today, we would have to say that it was a spiritual doctrine of the universe and man, pneumatology.

Now to the fourth chapter: This contains, first of all, Erigena's teaching of the Mystery of Golgotha and the doctrine concerning what the human being has to expect in the future, namely, entrance into the divine-spiritual world, hence, what in modern usage would be called soteriology. “Soter,” after all, means savior; the teaching of the future is eschatology. We find that Erigena here deals with the concepts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the emanation of Divine Grace, man's path into the divine-spiritual, world, and so on.

There is one thing that truly holds our attention, if we study attentively a work such as the De divisione naturae by John Scotus Erigena about the divisions of nature. The world is definitely discussed as something that is perceived in spiritual qualities. He speaks of something spiritual as he observes the world. But what is not contained in this work? We have to pay attention, after all, to what is not included in a universal science such as Erigena is trying to establish there.

In John Scotus Erigena's work, you discover as good as nothing of what we call sociology today, social science, and things of that kind. One is almost inclined to say it appears from the way Erigena pictures human beings that he did not wish to give mankind social sciences, no more so than any animal species, say the lion, the tiger, or any bird species, would come out with a sociology if it produced some sort of science. For a lion would not talk about the way it ought to live together with the other lions or how it ought to acquire its food and so on; this is something that comes instinctively. Just as little could we imagine a sociology of sparrows. Surely sparrows could reveal any number of the most interesting cosmic secrets from their viewpoint, but they would never produce any teaching about economics, for sparrows would consider this a subject that goes without saying, something they do because their instinct tells them to do it.

This is what is remarkable: Because we discover as yet nothing like this in Erigena's writings, we realize that he still viewed human society as if it produced the social elements out of its instincts. With his special kind of insight, he points to what still lived in the human being in the form of instincts and drives, namely, the impulses of social living. What he describes transcends this social aspect. He describes how the human being had emerged from the divine, and what sort of beings exist beyond the sense world. Then, in a form of pneumatology, he shows how the spirit pervades the sensory world, and he presents the spiritual element that penetrated into the world of the senses in his fourth chapter on soteriology and eschatology. Nowhere is there a description, however, of how human beings ought to live together. I should say, everything is elevated above the sensory world. It was generally a characteristic of this ancient science that everything was elevated beyond the sense world.

Now, if we contemplate writings such as John Scotus Erigena's teaching in a spiritual scientific sense, we discover that he did not think at all with the same organs humanity thinks with today. We simply do not understand him if we try to understand him with the thinking employed by mankind today. We understand him only when, through spiritual science, we have acquired an idea of how to think with the etheric body, the body that, as a more refined body, underlies the coarse sensory corporeality.

Thus Erigena did not think with the brain but with the etheric body. In him, we simply have a mind which did not yet think with the brain. Everything he wrote down came into being as a result of thinking with the etheric body. Fundamentally speaking, it was only subsequent to his age that human beings began to think with the physical body, and only since the beginning of the fifteenth century did people think totally with the physical body. It is normally not recognized that during this period the human soul life has truly changed, and that if we go back into the thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh centuries, we encounter a form of thinking that was not yet carried out with the physical but with the etheric body. This thinking with the etheric body was not supposed to extend into later ages when, dialectically and scholastically, people discussed rigid concepts. This former thinking with the etheric body, which certainly was the form of thinking employed during the first Christian centuries, was declared to be heretical. This was the reason for burning Erigena's writings. Now, the actual soul condition of a thinker in that age becomes comprehensible.

Going back to earlier times, we find a certain form of clairvoyance in all people. Human beings did not think at all with their physical body. In past ages, they thought with their etheric body and carried on their soul life even with the astral body. There, we should not speak of thinking at all, since the intellect only originated in the eighth century B.C., as I have pointed out. However, certain remnants of this ancient clairvoyance were retained, and it is particularly true of the most outstanding minds that with the intellect, which had already come into being, they tried to penetrate into the knowledge that had been handed down through tradition from former ages. People tried to comprehend what had been viewed in a completely different manner in past times. They tried to understand, but now had to have the support of abstract concepts such as existence, wisdom, life. I would say that these individuals still knew something of an earlier spirit-permeated insight and at the same time felt quite at home within the purely intellectual perception.

Later on, when the intellectual perception had turned into a shadow, this was not felt anymore. Earlier, however, people felt that in past ages insights had existed that permeated human beings in a living way out of spiritual worlds, it was not something merely thought up. Erigena lived in such a divided state. He was only capable of thinking, but when this thinking arrived at perception, he sensed that there was something of the ancient powers that had permeated the human being in the ancient manner of perception. Erigena felt the angel, the angelos, within himself. This is why he said that human beings perceive as angels. It was a legacy from ancient times, extending into his age of intellectual knowledge, that made it possible for a mind like Scotus Erigena's to say that man perceives like an angel. In the days of the Egyptian, Chaldean, and the early ages of the Hebrew civilization, nobody would have said anything else but: The angel perceives within me; as a human being, I share in the knowledge of the angel. The angel dwells within me, he cognizes, and I take part in what he perceives.

This was true of the era when reason did not yet exist. When the intellect had appeared, it became necessary to penetrate this older knowledge with reason. In Scotus Erigena, however, there still existed an awareness of this state of permeation with the angel nature.

Now, it is a strange experience to become involved in this work of Erigena's and to try and understand it completely. You finally arrive at a feeling of having read something most significant, something that still dwells very much in spiritual regions and speaks of the world as something spiritual. But then, in turn, the feeling arises that everything is basically mixed up. You realize that with this text you find yourself in the ninth century when the intellect had already brought much confusion. And this is truly the case. For if you read the first chapter, you are dealing with theology. But it is a theology that is certainly secondary even for John Scotus Erigena, a theology which evidently points back to something greater and more direct. I shall now speak as if all these matters were hypotheses, but what I now develop as a hypothesis can be established by spiritual science as a fact. A condition must once have existed, and we look back on it, when as yet theology was not addressed in such an intellectual manner but was considered to be something one delved into in a living way. Without doubt, it was that kind of theology the Egyptians spoke of, those Egyptians of whom the Greeks—I mentioned it above—report that Egyptian sages told them: You Greeks are like children;⁶ you have no knowledge of the world's origin, we do possess this sacred knowledge of the world's beginnings.

Obviously, the Greeks were being referred to an ancient, living theology. Thus, we have to say: During the time of the third post-Atlantean period, which begins in the fourth millennium and ends in the first millennium B.C. in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in the year 747 B.C., there existed a living theology. It now needed to be penetrated by Erigena's intellect. It was obviously present in a much more vital form to the personality who must be recognized as Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius had a much more intense feeling for this ancient theology. He felt that it was something that existed but could no longer be approached, that becomes negative as one tries to approach it. Based on the intellect, so he thought, one can only arrive at positive theology. Yet, with the term, negative theology, he was really referring to an ancient theology that had disappeared.

Again, when we consider what appears in the second chapter as the ideal world, we could believe that it is something modern. That, however, is not the case, That ideal world actually is identical with a true idea of what appears in the ancient Persian epoch, just as I described it in my Occult Science, hence in the second post-Atlantean period. Among Plato and the Platonists, this ancient Persian living world of angels, the world of the Amshaspands, and so on, had already paled into the world of ideals and ideas due to a later development. Yet, what is actually contained in this ideal world and is clearly discernible in Scotus Erigena goes back to this second ancient Persian age.

What appears in Erigena's book as pneumatology, as a kind of pantheism is not vague and nebulous such as is frequently the case today, but a pantheism that is alive and spiritual, though dimmed in Erigena's writing. This pneumatology is the last remnant, the very last vestige filtered out of the first post-Atlantean, ancient Indian period.

And what about the fourth chapter? Well, it contains Erigena's living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of humanity. We hardly speak of this anymore today. As an ancient tradition, it is still mentioned by theologians, but they know of it only in rigidified dogmas. They even deny that man could attain such insight through living knowledge. But it did originate from what was thus cultivated as soteriology and eschatology. You see, the theology of former times was handed over, as it were, to the councils; there, it was frozen into dogmas and incorporated into Christology. It was not to be touched anymore. It was viewed as impenetrable to perception. It was removed, so to speak, from what was carried out in schools by means of knowledge. As it was, exoteric matters were already being preserved like nebulous formations from ancient times. But at least the activities in schools were to be linked with thoughts that emerged in the age of thinking. They were to be connected, after all, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of mankind. There, one spoke of the Christ being's rule among human beings; one spoke of a future day of judgment. The concepts that people could come up with were used for that.

Thus, we see that Scotus Erigena actually records the first three chapters as though they had been handed down to him. Finally, he applies his own intellect to the fourth chapter but in such a manner that he speaks of things that far surpass the physical, sensory world, yet have something to do with this world. We realize that he took pains to apply the intellect to eschatology and soteriology. After all, we know the kind of scholarly disputes and discussions Scotus Erigena was involved in. For example, he was involved in discussions of the question whether in Communion, that is, in something that was related to the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings confront the actual blood and the actual body of Christ. He took part in all the discussions of human will, its freedom and lack of freedom in connection with divine grace. Hence, he honed and schooled his intellect in regard to everything that was the subject of his fourth chapter. This is what people discussed then.

We could say that the content of the first three chapters was an ancient tradition. One did not change it much but simply communicated it. The fourth chapter, on the other hand, was a living striving; there, the intellect was applied and schooled.

What became of this intellect that was schooled there? What happened to the concepts of soteriology and eschatology arrived at by people like Scotus Erigena in the ninth century? You see, my dear friends, since the middle of the fifteenth century this has become our science, the basis of the perception of nature. Once, people employed the intellect in order to consider whether bread and wine in the Sacrament are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. They pondered whether grace is bestowed on man in one way or another. This same intellect was later used to consider whether the molecule consists of atoms and whether the sun's body consists of one form of substance or another, and so on. It is the continuation of the theological intellect that inhabits natural science today. Precisely the same intellect that stimulated Scotus and the others who were involved with him in the dispute over Communion—and the discussions were indeed very lively in those days—survived in the teachings of Galileo and Copernicus. It survived in Darwinism, even, say, in Strauss's materialism. It has lived on in a straight line. You know that the old is always preserved alongside the new. Therefore, the same intellect that in David Friedrich Strauss hatched the book The Old and the New Faith, which preaches total atheism, occupied itself in those days, with soteriology and eschatology; it continues in a straight line.

We could therefore say that if this book had to be written today based as much on modern conditions as Scotus Erigena based what he wrote on the conditions of his age, then, here (referring to outline above), total atheism would not appear, but rather our natural science. For, naturally, complete atheism would contradict the first chapter. In the ninth century soteriology and eschatology still appeared there, for then the intellect was applied to other things. But here, (see p. 281), materialistic science would emerge today. History reveals to us nothing else but this. Now, we can perhaps see what becomes evident from the whole conception of this work.

Basically, what is listed here (outline above) would have to appear in a different sequence. The third chapter would have to read: world view of the first post-Atlantean age. The second chapter, would have to read: world view of the second post-Atlantean age, and the first chapter: world view of the third post-Atlantean age. In the sense of Scotus Erigena—who lived in the fourth post-Atlantean age that only came to an end in the fifteenth century—the last chapter applies to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The sequence (in the outline) would therefore have to be: III, II, I, IV. This is what I meant when I said earlier that one receives the impression that things are actually mixed up. Scotus Erigena simply possessed bits of the ancient legacy but he did not list them in accordance with their sequence in time. They were part of the knowledge of his age, and he mentioned them in the order in which they were most familiar to him. He listed the nearest at hand as the highest; the others appeared so nebulous to him that he considered them to be inferior.

Yet, the fourth chapter is nevertheless most remarkable. Let us try to understand from a certain viewpoint what it should actually be. Let us go back into pre-Christian times. If we were to seek among the Egyptians a representative mind such as Scotus Erigena was for the ninth century, such a person would still have known something concerning theology in a most lively way. He would have had even more alive concepts of the ideal or angelic world, of the sphere that illuminates and permeates the whole world with spirit. He would still have known all that and would have said: In the very first age, there once existed a human world view that beheld the spirit in all things. But then, the spirit was abstractly lifted up into the heights. It became the ideal world, finally the divine world. Then, the fourth epoch arrived. It was supposed to be even more spiritualized than the theological epoch. This Greco-Latin period was really supposed to be more spiritualized than the third epoch. And above all, the fifth which then followed, namely our time, would have to be an even more spiritualized era, for with materialistic science in place of soteriology or eschatology it would have to be listed in fourth place, or we would have to add a fifth listing with our natural science, and the latter would have to be the most spiritual view.

Yet, in fact, my dear friends, matters are buried. We hear Scotus Erigena saying that man exists as a mineral being, lives and thrives as a plant, feels as an animal, judges and draws conclusions as a human being, perceives as an angel—something Erigena still knew from ancient traditions. Now, we who aspire to spirit knowledge would have to go even further. We would have to say: Right, human beings exist as mineral beings, live and thrive as plants, feel as animals, judge and draw conclusions as human beings, perceive as angels and, sixth, human beings behold—namely, imaginatively, the spiritual world—as archangels. When we speak of the human being since the first third of the fifteenth century, we would have to ascribe to ourselves the following. We perceive as angels and develop the consciousness soul by means of soul faculties of vision—to begin with, unconsciously, but yet as consciousness soul—as archangels.

Thus, we face the paradox that in the materialistic age human beings actually live in the spiritual world, dwelling on a higher spiritual level than they did in earlier times. We can actually say: Yes, Scotus Erigena is right, the angel experience is awakening in man, but the archangel experience is also awakening since the first third of the fifteenth century. We should rightfully be in a spiritual world.

In realizing this, we could really look back also to a passage in the Gospels that is always interpreted in a most trivial way, namely, the one saying: The end of the world is near and the kingdoms of heaven are at hand. Yes, my dear friends, when we have to say of ourselves that in us the archangel is developing vision so that we can receive the consciousness soul, then there results a strange view of this approach of the heavens. It appears that it is necessary to revise such conceptions of the New Testament once more from the standpoint of spiritual science. These views are very much in need of revision, and we really have two tasks: First, to understand whether our age is not actually meant to to be different than the age when Christ walked on earth and whether the end of the world of which Christ spoke might not be something we have behind us already? This is the one task we confront. And if it is true that we have the so-called end of the world behind us and we therefore already face the spiritual world, then we would have to explain why it has such an unspiritual appearance, why it has become so material, arriving finally at that terrible, astounding life that characterizes the first third of the twentieth century? Two mighty and overwhelming questions place themselves before our soul. We shall continue speaking about that tomorrow.

• 1. Johannes Scotus Erigena, 810–877, Irish philosopher of scholasticism in Paris.
• 2. Charles the Bald, 828–877, king of the Franconians, emperor from 875–877.
• 3. Dionysius the Areopagite: connected Christianity with neo-Platonic philosophy. Had strong influence on medieval mysticism.
• 4. Origen, around 185–254, Greek Church Father in Alexandria, later presbyter in Caesarea; basis of his philosophical theology: De principiis (“Peri archon”). Under Justinian I, during the fifth ecumenical council in Constantinople in 553, his teachings were condemned as heretical.
• 5. After the Church had forbidden the reading of Scotus Erigena's texts, all editions were ordered burned in 1225.
• 6. These words are reported by Plato in Timaios, 22 B.C.

Today I'd like to consider the question as to how far religious confessions can be seen, using specific examples, to have their foundation in the science of the spirit, or, as we may also put it, in occult science. I only want to consider a very small part of this subject concerning the spiritual scientific foundation of religions. You are going to see that this concerns a fact known to everyone in our civilization, even the most naive individuals, a spiritual fact that holds the most profound truths and fundamentals of the science of the spirit, and one only has to look for it to see how mysterious and full of wisdom are the connections that exist in cultural life.

Let us start with the question of Christian prayer. You all know 'Christian prayer’, as it is called today. We have spoken of it before and some people may well have asked themselves: ‘How does Christian prayer relate to the view of the world we have in the science of the spirit?’ Through this view of the world, members of the spiritual scientific movement have heard something about another way in which man, the human soul, can rise to the divine spiritual powers in the universe; about meditation, about that particular way of inwardly living with a spiritual thought; also something or other about what the great spirits that guide humanity have given us; or about the spiritual reality that lived and lives in the great civilizations. If we consider those civilizations we are given the means of entering for a short time in our souls into the divine and spiritual streams in this world.

Someone who meditates, even in the simplest way, using one of the meditations given by the spiritual guides of humanity; someone who meditates and thus lets one of the formulae, one of the significant thoughts, be present in his mind—you know it cannot be any kind of thought, but has to be something given by the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Inner Feelings—someone who meditates and lets these formulae come alive in his heart, finds he has entered into the stream of a higher spirituality; a higher power flows through him. He lives in it. First he creates the ability to strengthen his ordinary powers of mind, to elevate them and give them life, and with sufficient patience and perseverance, perhaps having let this power flow into him to strengthen him morally and intellectually, the moment will come when deeper powers are aroused that lie dormant in every human soul, powers awakened by such a meditative thought. From the simplest way of gaining moral strength up to the highest regions of clairvoyant potential, all kinds of stages can be reached by meditating like this. For most people it is just a matter of time, patience and energy to reach the higher levels. Meditating like this is usually considered a more Eastern way of going to higher levels to meet one’s god. In the West, and especially in the Christian world, we have prayer instead, the prayer in which the Christian goes to higher levels, to his god, prayer in which the Christian seeks to gain entrance to the higher worlds in his particular way.

Now above all else we must be clear that much of what is thought to be prayer today would not have counted as such at all in the early Christian sense, and least of all in the view of the founder of the Christian religion, Christ Jesus himself. In truly Christian terms it never is prayer if someone asks his god for something to satisfy his own personal and egoistical desires. When someone pleads or prays for his own personal wishes to be met, he will soon reach the point where he completely forgets the universal and comprehensive nature of anything which is granted in answer to prayer. He thinks the divine spirit will specifically meet his own desires. A farmer who is growing a particular crop may need rain, perhaps, whilst his neighbour needs the sun to shine. One of them prays for rain, the other for sun. What is divine providence to do? And this quite apart from anything divine providence is supposed to do when two armies face one another in the field and each is praying for victory, each considering its own victory to be the only just and fair one. You can see immediately how little universality and general humanity lies in such prayers, and that if a god were to grant them, only one party would be satisfied.

Praying in that way people forget the prayer in which Christ Jesus set the basic mood that should prevail in any prayer, the prayer that says: ‘Father, let this cup pass; but not my will but your will be done.’⁹¹ That is the basic mood of Christian prayer. Whatever people intercede or pray for, this basic mood must be a bright note sounding again and again in the soul as someone seeks to offer Christian prayer. The prayer formula then becomes a means of raising ourselves to higher regions so that we may feel the god within us. The formula will then also drive away any egoistical wish and will impulse, so that the words ‘not my will but your will be done’ will have real meaning. We then give ourselves up to and enter deeply into the divine world. When we achieve this basic mood as the true mood for prayer, Christian prayer is exactly the same—only with more of a feeling note to it as meditation. And this Christian prayer originally was exactly what meditation also is. It is only that meditation is more at the level of thought, seeking to be in harmony with the divine streams that go through the world and doing so by means of the thoughts of the great guides of humanity. The same thing is achieved, but more at the level of feelings, in prayer.

We see therefore that in both prayer and meditation people seek to achieve something which we may call oneness of the soul with the divine streams that go through the world, something which at its highest level is known as ‘mystic union’ with the godhead. Prayer and meditation, are the first step towards this. Human beings could never unite with their god, they could never make connection with the higher spiritual entities if they themselves were not an outflowing from this divine spirit.

As we all know, man is dual by nature. He has the four bodies that make up his essential human nature, bodies we have often mentioned before—physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I. Within the I lies the potential for the future—manas, buddhi, atman, or spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being.

To gain the right insight into the way these two essential realities of human nature are related, we have to go back for a moment to the time when man came into existence. You all know from earlier lectures that man as he is today is a symphony of the two essential realities—threefold potential for the future in manas, buddhi and atman, his three higher principles on the one hand, and physical body, ether body, astral body and I as the four lower principles on the other. We also know that he evolved to be like this in a far, far distant past which we call the Lemurian age of the earth.

Going back from our present age, through the Graeco-Latin, then the Egyptian, Assyrian and Chaldean, the Persian and also the Indian civilizations, we gradually come, as we go further and further back, to the great Atlantean flood that lives on in the mythologies of all peoples, and to our ancestors who lived in the land that lay between Europe and America, a land which we call Atlantis. Further back we come to ancestors who lived in primordial times in a land which then lay between Australia and India. The higher trinity of man—spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being—did not unite with the four lower bodies, as we call them—physical body, ether body, astral body and I—until the middle of that period.

We have the right idea if we see it like this. During Lemurian times on this earth, the highest life form was not the physical human being we know today. There was just a kind of highly developed animal form which today envelops our present-day human being. At that time it consisted of the four lower bodies. Higher human nature, the eternal in man, with the three potential elements that will develop further in the future through manas, buddhi and atman, had until then been in the keeping of the godhead. To imagine what happened at the time, in a way that may be rather commonplace but does help us to see it, think of all the people who today make up the whole of humanity having developed bodies by then that would enable them to absorb the human soul rather the way a sponge is able to absorb water.

Think of a vessel filled with water. You’ll be unable to tell where one drop of water ends and another begins. And then think of a number of tiny little sponges dipped into the water. What had been a uniform mass of water in the vessel, is now divided up among many tiny sponges. That is how it was with the human soul at that time, if we may use such a commonplace analogy. Before, they rested in the care of the divine prime spirit, and they were dependent, having no individuality; then they were absorbed into human bodies and thus made individual, like the water in the tiny sponges. The principle which was then absorbed by the individual bodies, which are the four lower principles, has continued on into our time, developing all the time, and it will continue to develop in the future. In the science of the spirit, or occult science, it was always called the upper trinity, and triangle and square were chosen, above all by the Pythagorean school, to represent this human being who came into being in the middle of the Lemurian age.

But as you can easily imagine, this upper, eternal principle which goes through all incarnations can be considered from two points cf view. On the one hand we may see it as part of humanity for ever and all eternity, and on the other hand as part of the divine spirit which that great spirit gave away at the time as a part or droplet of its own content, which is now down in the fourfold human vessel. A droplet of divinity became individual and independent as it came to rest in us human beings. You can see, therefore, that you may consider the three higher principles of human nature, the eternal in us, to be not only the three highest principles in human nature, but also as three principles in the godhead itself. If you wanted to enumerate the principles of the gods who gave humanity the soul droplet at that time, you would have to start with man and his physical body, continue with the ether body, astral body and I, go on up from manas to atman, beginning with manas, continuing with buddhi and atman, and go on to the principles that lie above atman and of which present-day human beings will only be able to have a idea when they become pupils of the initiates. So you see that we can also consider these three principles, which man has within him as his content, to be three divine principles.

Let us now look at them not as human but as divine principles, and describe them in their essential nature. The highest principle in the human being, atman, something we will develop at the end of this earthly, or, shall we say, present planetary evolution, can be characterized in terms of spiritual or occult science by comparing its essential nature with something of which present-day human beings have only a vague notion, and that is the will element in man. The basic character of this, the highest divine principle in us, is will-like by nature, a kind of will intent. The will, which is least developed in our inner nature today, will be our most outstanding principle at a future time, when we shall ascend higher and higher.

Today man is essentially a creature who seeks insight, with the will really still limited in all kinds of directions. We can grasp the universal nature of the world around us up to a point. But just consider how few of the things we are able to grasp are things we are able to will; how little power we have over the things we are able to grasp. The future will bring what we do not yet have. The will is going to grow mightier and mightier, until we reach our great goal, which in the science of the spirit is called 'the great offering' or 'sacrifice'. This consists in a power of the will where the spirit which wills is able to give itself up completely, not just giving the little a human being is able to give out of the weakness of his powers of feeling and will, but giving one’s whole existence, letting oneself flow out as an essential spirit right down to the level of material nature.

You’ll get an idea of what is meant by 'the great sacrifice', the highest form of the will in divine nature, if you look at it in the following way. Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror and your image is looking at you from this mirror. This image is an illusion but it is your perfect counterfeit. Now imagine you have died, giving up your own existence, your feeling, thinking and your very essence in order to give life to this image, making it into what you yourself are. To give up oneself and one's life to the image—this is something which in the science of the spirit has always been called the emanation, the flowing out. If you were able to do this you would find that you yourself are no longer there, for you have given away everything in order to resurrect life and conscious awareness in the image.

When the will has reached a level where it is capable of performing ‘the great sacrifice’, as it is called, then it makes, it creates a universe, large or small, and this universe is a mirror image that has been given its mission through the essential nature of its creator. We have thus characterized the creative will in the divine spirit.

The second principle we have to characterize in divine nature, in so far as it has entered into humanity, is already contained in the analogy we have made—it is the mirror image itself. Enter as actively as you can into a divine spirit that is the creator of a world and the centre of the universe. If you think of a point in this room and imagine that rather than by these walls, of which there are six, it is surrounded by a hollow sphere, the inner surface of which is a mirror, you will see yourself, the centre, reflected on all sides. You have the image of a divine spirit as a will centre that is reflected on all sides, and the mirror is the image of the godhead itself and also of the universe. For what is a universe? It is nothing but a mirror reflecting the essential nature of the divine spirit.

The universe is alive and active. And this is because the godhead emanates in making its great sacrifice, in reflecting its universe, which is like the enlivening of the mirror image we tried to imagine. The whole universe is given life out of the universal will that comes to expression in infinite variety. This process of infinite variety, infinite replication, this repetition of the godhead is known as the ‘realm’, as distinct from the ‘will’, in every occult or spiritual science. The will is thus the centre; its mirror is the realm, so that you may compare the will with atman or spirit man, and the realm, or mirror image of the will, with buddhi or life spirit.

Now this realm is such that it reflects the essential nature of the divine in infinite variety. Just look at this realm all around, in so far as it is our realm, our rich variety, our universe; look at its visible part in minerals, plants, animals and human beings. The realm manifests in every individual form, and something of this still lives on in the German term Reich [meaning 'rich' as well as 'realm'; tr.], with the major divisions of our universe called the mineral, plant and animal worlds or realms. But if we also go into detail, then every detail, too, is divine by nature. Nature is reflected in all of it, just as the centre would be mirrored in the hollow sphere. And someone who looks at the world in the terms of occult research sees the god, an image and expression of the divine, in every mineral, every plant, every animal and every human being.

The divine spirit shows itself in infinitely many different forms of life in all their variety. If one has reached the level of perception in the science of the spirit that enables one to see the individual entities as having originated in the godhead, they are told apart by giving them a ‘name’. It is the name which the human being thinks of as the individual entity; it serves to distinguish the individual entities in this vast variety from one another. It is the third of the greatest three human principles that flow from the godhead and may be said to correspond to the manas or spirit self. The occult teaching of different religions also used to teach, naively, what had flowed from the godhead and flowed into you, becoming your eternal image.

If you wish to rise to the realm to which you are ultimately destined to rise, you will find that it is will-like by nature.

If you wish to rise to the buddhi, the bearer of this will, of this atman, its realm is of the divine.

And if you wish to rise to that which you perceive to be names, concepts or ideas of things—this is what name is within the realm of the divine.

What we have been considering is the ancient wisdom which tells us that name, realm and will make up the part of the godhead that has flowed into essential human nature to be the eternal part of it. We thus see that the three higher principles in man are part of the divine.

To complete our study, let us now take a look at the four lower principles of mortal man. We know of the three higher principles that they can actually be considered from the other aspect, since we consider them to be parts of the divine principle. In a similar way, the four lower principles of essential human nature can be considered to be parts of the transitory world and parts of human nature.

Consider the physical body. It is made up of the same material and the same forces as the seemingly lifeless world all around it. This physical body could not exist unless matter and energy were continually flowing into it from the physical world that surrounds it, building it up over and over again. Everything we have in the physical body is really in transit within it. Materials flow into and out of it which make up the outer universe as well as being inside us for a time. Mention has been made here on several occasions that the whole material content of the human body is renewed in the course of seven years. None of you have any of the matter in you today that you had in you ten years ago. Human beings renew the substance of their physical bodies all the time. The matter which was in us before is now somewhere else, distributed in the natural world outside, and other matter has come into us. The life of the body requires matter to come in and go out all the time.

Just as we considered the three higher principles in the essential human being to be parts of the godhead, so we can consider the four parts of lower human nature to be parts of the divine natural world.

We may consider the physical body to be part of the material part of our planet; its substance has been taken from this material planet and goes back again to it. If we consider the ether body, we must also see it as part of the world that surrounds us here, and the same holds true for the astral body.

Let us consider the life body or ether body and the astral body in context. You know that the astral body sustains everything we have by way of drives, desires and passions, everything that moves the human soul—joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, whilst the life or ether body relates to qualities of soul that are more lasting, of longer duration and sustains them.

On some occasions when speaking to you I compared the development of the life or ether body and the astral body with the hour and minute hands of a clock. I made you aware that when you recall things which you knew and which happened when you were eight and the things you know and that happen now, you'll notice a great difference. You have learned infinitely many things, taking up many ideas; as to the things you did when you were eight, many feelings of joy and pain may have come to mind again; not only come to mind, but also passed through it. But if you now compare this with your temperament, your character, your lasting tendencies, you will realize that if you had a violent temper as a child you will probably still have a violent temper today. Most people keep these basic characteristics for the whole of their lives. As we have stressed a number of times, occult training is not a matter of theory but of directing evolution to the structures in the ether body, which otherwise tend to be unchanging. A disciple has done more if he has changed one of these temperamental characteristics, his basic inclination, and thus made the hour hand move a little faster than would otherwise have been the case. All the things that evolve so slowly—our lasting habits and basic temperament—are embodied in the ether or life body. Everything that changes relatively more quickly, like the minute hand on the clock, is embodied in the astral body.

If you now apply this to our human environment, to our life in the outside world, you will see that your habits, temperaments and lasting inclinations connect you with your era, your nation and your family. The lasting, unchanging qualities which people have will be found not only in them but in everyone with whom they are in some way connected—family, nation and so on. Individual members of a nation can be seen to have the same habits and temperaments. This basic set of habits and inclinations which need to be changed if we want to go through higher development make up our higher nature. Because of this such an individual is called a 'homeless' person, for he must change his ether body which normally connects him with his people.

If we consider the communities we live in, into which we are born, we find that the character qualities through which we belong to a family, a nation, and through which we feel we have a connection with the members of this nation, are also similar to the character qualities that live in our era. Just think how little you’d have in common with a member of the ancient Greek nation. His ether body would have been very different from the ether body of someone living today. People understand one another because of the common qualities in their ether bodies. The quality that makes people stand out from the common characteristics, making them unique within the family or the nation, so that they are individuals and not just a French or a German person, a quality that can also transcend the sum of gender characteristics, is anchored in the astral body; the astral body sustains it. The astral body thus holds more the individual, personal aspect.

If someone errs through his ether or life body, he is more liable to be a sinner among the people he lives or works with, failing to play his proper role in the social sphere that enables people to have a social life. Sins of a more individual nature, so that a person errs in a personal way, are due to the qualities of the astral body.

Sins against the community that come from a faulty ether body have always been called ‘faults’ in occult science. The way the term ‘fault’ is used for a physical defect is close to its use in a moral sense. The problem is due to a defect in the ether body. Defects in the astral body, on the other hand, are called ‘temptations’. Temptation causes people to commit individual sins. The I can also fall into its own kind of error, as shown in the story of paradise. When the human soul came down, out of the keeping of the godhead, and for the first time entered into an earthly body, it was taken up into that body the way a drop of water is absorbed into a sponge, and the higher soul then developed I-nature.

This higher soul, I-nature, can commit errors within the I. Man does not fall because of faults in his ether and astral bodies, but there is a basic way of falling into sin and this is due to the fact that man has gained his independence. Humanity had to go through selfishness and egoism so that they might gradually gain freedom and independence in full awareness. Man came down as a soul that was part of the godhead, and the godhead cannot fall into egoism. Nothing that is part of an organism would ever imagine itself to be independent of it. If a finger were to think so, for example, it would tear itself away from the body and shrivel up. Human beings could never have gained the independence which they need to develop if they had not first gone through selfishness; this independence will only gain its true meaning once selflessness has become its basic characteristic.

Selfishness entered into the human body and this made man a selfish, egoistical creature. We see, therefore, that the I follows all the drives and inclinations of the body. The human being devours his neighbour, he gives in to all kinds of drives and desires and is wholly caught up in the earthly vessel, just as a drop of water is absorbed by a small sponge.

The paradise story refers to the sins man was able to commit once he had become such an I-creature, a truly independent creature. Before that he drew on the common source, like a drop that is still in water and takes its energy from the common body of water; now he has all impulses within himself. This is indicated by biting into the apple in the paradise story, and not for nothing, for in occult science, all true meanings of words have a deep inner connection. So the Latin malum means both ‘evil’ and ‘apple’. In occult science, the word ‘evil’ is only used for errors arising out of the I.

Evil thus is to do wrong out of the I. A fault is the kind of error the ether body falls into in social life, in the life that human beings live together. Temptation is something that may affect the astral body in so far as it may be defective on the personal, individual level. And so the error which the ether or life body falls into is ‘fault’, that of the astral body is ‘temptation’, and the I is capable of ‘evil’.

When we consider the way the four lower bodies of man relate to the environment, to the surrounding planetary body, we see that the physical body is all the time taking up physical matter to feed and maintain itself. We see that the life of the life or ether body here on earth comes into existence in that the individual maintains community with the people of the community into which he has grown. We see that the astral body maintains itself by not falling into temptation. And finally we see that the I maintains itself and develops in the right way by not succumbing to what we call ‘evil’.

Now imagine you have before your mind’s eye the whole of this human nature with its lower four and higher three principles and are then able to say: ‘A drop of the divine lives in the individual human being, and man is developing towards the divine, to let his deepest, inmost nature come to fruition.’ Once he has done this, he will have gone through a gradual process to transform his own nature into what is called the ‘Father’ in Christian terminology. The great goal of humankind which lies hidden in the human soul is the ‘Father in heaven’. To develop in that direction, we must have the power to develop our higher three and lower four principles to the point where they maintain the physical body in the right way. The ether or life body must then live in such a way with other human beings that compensation is made for anything that lives in it by way of faults; the astral body must not perish in temptation and the I not in evil.

Through the three higher principles, man must seek to rise to the Father in heaven—through the name, the realm and the will. The name should be seen as something holy. Behold all things around you; they reflect the godhead in their manifoldness. Saying their name you must once again know them to be parts of the divine world order. Let everything there is around you be sacred; and see something in the name you give it that will make it part of the divine. Let it be sacred to you, grow into the realm that has come forth from the godhead, and progress to achieve the will that shall be atman, but at the same time also part of the godhead.

Now think of someone who enters deeply in meditation into this aim of evolution, and needs to express this aim in seven petitions in a prayer. How will he put it?

To say what the aim of the prayer is, he will say: ‘Our Father, who are in heaven,’ before he says the seven petitions. This refers to the deepest part of the human soul, the inmost nature of man which according to Christian esoterics belongs to the realm of the spirit. The first three petitions relate to the three higher principles in the human being: ‘Let your name be holy. Let your realm come to us. Let your will be done.’ We now move on from the realm of the spirit to the earthly realm: ‘Let your will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’

The last four petitions relate to the four lower principles in human nature.

What shall we say of the physical body, so that it may be maintained in life on the planet? ‘Give us today our daily bread.’

What shall we say of the ether or life body? ‘Forgive us our faults, just as we shall forgive those who commit faults against us.’

What shall we say with regard to the astral body? ‘Lead us not into temptation.’

And what shall we say with regard to the I? ‘Deliver us from evil.’ You see, therefore, that the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer speak of how the human soul, if it rises to this in the right way, asks the divine will to guide the development of the individual principles of the human being in such a way that he may develop all aspects of his essential nature in the right way. The Lord’s Prayer thus helps the human being to rise in moments of need to the true purpose of developing his sevenfold nature. And even for the most naive of individuals who is quite unable to understand them, the seven petitions reflect human nature as it is seen in the light of spiritual science.

Any meditation formulas that ever existed with the major religions have come from occult knowledge. You may take all real prayers and analyse them word by word—you’ll never find them to be words put together at random. It has not been a matter of following a vague impulse and putting together nice words; no, the great initiates took the prayer formulas from the wisdom of old, something we call the science of the spirit today. There is no true prayer formula that has not come to life out of profound wisdom. Christ Jesus, the great initiate and founder of Christianity, had the seven principles of essential human nature in mind when he taught this prayer, which reflects those seven principles.

All the prayers thus show a particular order. If they did not they would not have had the power which they have had for thousands of years. Prayers have to show this kind of order if they are to be a power also for simple people who may not even understand the meaning of the words.

This will be clearer if we compare what happens in the human soul with something that happens in the natural world. Consider a plant. It delights you and there is no need to know anything about the great universal laws that have made it grow. The plant is there and can lift up your hearts. It could not have been created if it had not been for those original and eternal laws. Naive minds need not understand those laws, but a plant can only come into existence on the basis of these laws. To be effective, a prayer cannot just be invented at will but must have arisen out of the eternal laws of wisdom just as a plant arises on the basis of the eternal laws of wisdom. A prayer can have no real significance for those who understand and those who do not understand unless it has come from that wisdom.

We now live in an age when people who have looked at the plant for so long, letting it lift up their hearts, can be guided towards discovering the wisdom-filled content of those laws. For two millennia, Christians have prayed the way naive people may look at a plant. In future they will perceive how the power of the prayer comes from that profound original wisdom that has given rise to it. All prayers, and especially the Lord’s Prayer as the central, focal prayer of Christian life, reflect that original wisdom. And just as light comes to expression in this world in seven colours, and the tonic in music in seven notes, so does human life, rising to its god in seven ways in the seven different feelings relating to the sevenfold nature of the human being, come to expression in the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer, as we contemplate it in our souls, thus reflects the sevenfold human being.

• 91. Matthew 26: 39.

My dear friends! I sincerely thank Licentiate Bock for his welcoming words, and I promise you that I want to apply everything in my power to contribute at least partly, towards all you are looking for during your stay here.

Today I would like to discuss some orientation details so that we may understand one another in the right way. It will be our particular task—also during the various hours of discussion we are going to have—to express exactly what lies particularly close to your heart for your future work. I hope that what I have to say to you will be said in the correct way, when during the coming discussion hour your wishes and tasks you ask about, will be heard.

Anthroposophy, my dear friends, must certainly remain on the foundation of which I've often spoken, when I say: Anthroposophy as such can't represent religious education; anthroposophy as such must limit its task as a spiritual science to fructify present culture and civilization and it is not its purpose to represent religious education. Actually, it is quite far from such direct involvement in any way, in the evolutionary process of religious life. Nevertheless, it appears to me to be certainly justified in relation to the tasks you have just set yourselves, that for religious activity something can be extracted out of Anthroposophy. Indirectly it can not only be obtained through Anthroposophy, but it must be extracted, and this must be said; your experience is quite correct that religious life as such needs deepening, which can come out of the source of anthroposophical science.

I presume, my dear friends, that you want to actively position yourself in this religious life and that you have looked for this Anthroposophic course because you have felt that religious activity has lead you increasingly towards a dead end, and that through the religious work today—with our traditions, with the historic development and others, which we will still discuss—elements are missing which actually should be within it. We notice how just today even important personalities are searching for a new foundation for religious activity, because they believe this is needed in order to progress in a certain direction. I would like to indicate it as a start, how even the most conscientious personalities ask themselves how one can reach a certain foundation of religious awareness, and how then these personalities actually search more or less for a kind of—one can also call it something else—a kind of philosophy. I remind you only how a home is sought for a kind of philosophic foundation for religious awareness. Obviously, one has to, through the current awareness, recognise something absolutely necessary and one should not ignore that an extraordinarily amount has been accomplished this way. However, one can't comprehend, with unprejudiced observation, what is strived for, and come face to face with this: such an effort, instead of leading into the religious life, actually leads out of the religious life.

Religious life, you will sense, must be something direct, it must be something elementary, entirely connected to human nature, which lives out of the elementary, most inward foundation of human nature. All philosophic thinking is a reflection and is distanced from this direct, elementary experience. If I might express a personal impression, it would be this: When someone philosophises about the religious life and believes that a philosophical foundation is necessary for a religious life, then it always seems to me to be similar to when one wants to turn to the physiology of nutrition in order to attain nourishment oneself. Isn't it true, one can determine the exact foundations of nutritional science but that means nothing for nutrition itself. Nutritional science elucidates nutrition, but nutrition must surely have a sound foundation, it must grow roots in reality; only then can one philosophise about nutrition. So also, the religious life must have roots in reality. It must come to existence out of reality, only when it is there can one philosophise about it. It is certainly not possible at all to substantiate or justify the religious life with some or other philosophic consideration.

That's the one thing. The other one is something which I can best indicate—I always like referring to realities—through a book which had already came into existed several decades ago in Basle, with the title: The Christian Nature of our Theology Today. It is a book by Overbeck. In it he refers to evidence that the current theology is a kind of theology but that it is actually not Christian any longer. Now, when one takes Harnack's book The Being of Christianity and in its arguments everywhere simply exchanges the word "God" in every instance where he has "Christ," then one will not really change anything in the inner content of Harnack's book. This is already expressed in what Adolf Harnack says, that in the Gospels actually only the proclamation of the Father is needed and not those of Christ Jesus, while naturally during the earlier centuries the Christian development of the Gospels was above all regarded according to the proclamations of Christ Jesus. However, if the Gospels are really considered as the actual proclamations of Christ Jesus, then one has to, beside the Father-experience, that means beside the experience of the world in general being permeated by the Godhead, have the Christ-experience as something extra special. One must be able to have both of these experiences. A theology like Adolf Harnack's no longer has both of these experiences, but only a God-experience, and as a result it is necessary for him that what he finds in his imagination of God, he baptises it with the name of Christ; purely out of a historical foundation, because as he is even a representative of Christianity, he calls his God-experience by the name of Christ.

These incisive, important things exist already. Certainly, they are not made properly clear but they are felt, and I presume that currently, where nearly everything is shaken up in people's minds, a young theology in particular needs to show itself, in how these things can't really be completed, as is seen to some extent today with theologians, without being permeated by the actual being of Christ. Out of this experience such a book as von Overbeck's was created regarding the current Christianity of theology, where basically the answer is given to why modern theology is no longer Christian because it deals with a general philosophising about a world permeated by God, and not in the real sense of the Christ experience creating the foundation for the entire treatment of religious problems. Religious problems are dealt with based only as Father-problems and not actually the Christ experience.

Today we basically all have an education inculcated in us, derived from modern science, this science which actually only started in the middle of the 15th century but which has entered into all forms of modern people's thinking. One basically can't be different because one has been educated this way from the lowest primary classes, by forming thoughts according to modern science. This has resulted in theology of the 19th century wanting to orientate itself according to the research of modern science. I'd like to say they feel themselves responsible for the judge's chair of modern science and as a result have become what they are today. One can only find a basis of true religiosity today by, at the same time, considering the entire authorisation and also the complete meaning of the scientific element of life.

To some of you I have possibly already referred to a man who needs to be taken seriously in relation to religious life, Gideon Spicker, who for a long time studied philosophy at the Münster university. He proceeded from a strict Christian conception of the world, which he gradually developed into his philosophy which was never considered a philosophy but more an instrument for the understanding of religious problems. Modern thinking didn't offer him the possibility to find a sure foundation. So we find in his booklet, entitled At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period the hopelessness of modern man which characterised him so clearly, because he says: "Today we have metaphysics without transcendental conviction, we have a theory of knowledge without objective meaning, we have psychology without a soul, logic without content, ethics without liability and the result is that we can't find some or other foundation for religious consciousness."—Gideon Spicker stood very close to the actual crux which lies at the basis of all religious dichotomies in modern mankind. One can take it like a symptom, to indicate where the actual crux, I could call it, lies. If modern man is discerning, if he tries to create an image through his imagination of the world, then at the same time he clearly has the feeling that this discernment doesn't penetrate the depths. Gideon Spicker expressed it like this: "We have a theory of knowledge without objective meaning", which means we have our insights without being in the position to find the power within us to create something really objective out of our assembled insights. So, the modern discerning man sickens because he fails to find the possibility of a guarantee for his knowledge of objectivity in the world, for existence as such. He finds it in what he experiences subjectively in the knowledge, not really out of the thing itself.

All of this of course, because it is philosophy, has nothing to do with religious experience. Still, one can say that religious life today is certainly under an influence which heads in a similar direction. The kind of humanity which is not in the position to say about knowledge: "in this realization there exists objective existence for me"—such a type of humanity feels this same insecurity rise up at another point, and that is religious life. The insecurity is situated at the same pivotal point where actual religious life exists today. We will see how other problems will huddle around this pivot point. This pivotal point lies in prayer, in the meaning of prayer. The religious person must feel that prayer has real meaning; some or other reality must be connected to prayer. However, in a time epoch when the discerning person fails to come out of his subjective knowledge and fails to find reality in knowledge, in the same time epoch religious people won't find the possibility, during prayer, of becoming aware that prayer is no mere subjective deed, but that within prayer an objective experience takes place. For a person who is unable to realise that prayer is an objective experience, for him or her it would be impossible to find a real religious hold. Particularly in the nature of current humanity prayer must focus on the religious life. Various other areas must focus on prayer. However, a prayer which only has subjective meaning would make people religiously insecure.

It is the same root which grows out of us on the one side for the insecurity of knowledge, the Ignorabimus, and on the other side in fear; worry, which do not live in prayer in divine objectivity, but which is involved in subjectivity.

You see, the problem of faith and the problem of knowledge, all problems, which involve people from the theological side, are connected to the same characteristics. Everything which depresses people from the side of direct religious experience, which needs confirmation, which must be maintained, this all comes from the same source. You can hardly answer this question if you don't orientate yourself historically where it will quite clearly show how far we have actually become distanced with our sciences from what we can call Christian today, while on the other hand today there is the constant attempt to proceed by pushing anything Christian out with science. Take everything in the Gospels which is Christian tradition. You can't but say: in this, there is another conception of the human being than what modern science claims. In modern science the human being is traced back to some or other primitive archetypal creature—I absolutely don't want to say that mankind had perhaps developed out of an animal origin—we are referred back to a primitive Ur-human, which gradually developed itself and, in whose development, existed a progression, an advance. Modern humanity is satisfied to look back according to scientific foundations, to the primitive archetypal beings, who through some inherent power, it is said, they created an ever greater and bigger cultural accomplishment, and to behold the unexpected future of this perfection.

If one now places within this evolution, the development of the Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha, then one can in an honest way hold on to the Gospels and say nothing other than: into this He doesn't fit, what fits here is a historic conception which goes around the Mystery of Golgotha and leaves it out, but the Christ of the Gospels don't fit into this conception. The Christ of the Gospels can't be considered in any other way than if one somehow believes what happened in the 18th century especially among the most enlightened, the most spiritual people as a matter of course. Take for instance Saint Martin—I now want to look further from religious development and want to point out someone who was in the most imminent sense a scientist of the 18th century—and that was Saint Martin. He had a completely clear awareness that the human being at the start of his earthly development came from a certain height downwards, that he had been in another world milieu earlier, in another environment and through a mighty event, through a crisis was thrown down to a sphere which lay below the level of his previous existence, so that the human being is no longer what he once had been.

While our modern natural science points back to a primitive archetypal being out of which we have developed; this observation of Saint Martin must refer back to the fallen mankind, to those human beings which had once been more elevated. This was something, like I said, which to Saint Martin appeared as a matter of course. Saint Martin experienced this fall of mankind as a feeling of shame. You see, if the Christ is placed in such a conception of human evolution, where the human being, by starting his earth existence through a descent and is now more humble than he was before, then the Christ becomes that Being who would save humanity from its previous fall, then the Christ bears mankind again up into those conditions where it had existed before.

We will see in what modification this imagination must appear to our souls. In any case this involves a disproportion between our modern understanding of mankind's evolution and the understanding of the Gospels; there is always dishonesty when one goes hither and thither and does not confess that one is simultaneously a supporter of modern scientific thinking and also the Christ. This must actually be clear for every honest, particularly religiously honest sensitive person. Here is something where a bridge must be formed if the religious life is to be healthy once again. Without this bridging, religious life will never ever be healthy again. Actually, there are people who come along like David Friedrich Strauss, and to the question "Are we still Christians?" reply with a No, indicating that they are still more honest than some of the modern theologians, whoever and again overlook the radical differences between what the modern human being regards as pure science and the Gospel concept of the Christ. This is the characteristic of modern theology. It is basically the impotent attempt to treat the Christ conception of the Gospels in such a way that it can be validated in front of modern science. Here nothing originates which somehow can be held.

Yet, theology still exists. The modern pastor is given very little support for his line of work in the kind of theology presented at his schooling currently, from the foundation which has been indicated already and about which we will still come to in the course of our observations. The modern pastor must of course be a theologian even though theology is not religion. However, in order to work, a theological education is needed, and this educational background suffers from all the defects which I've briefly indicated in our introduction today.

You see, the Catholic Church knows quite well what it is doing, because it doesn't allow modern science to come into theology. Not as if the Catholic Church doesn't care for modern science, it takes care of it. The greatest scholars can certainly be found within the Catholic ecclesiastics. I'm reminded of Father Secchi, a great astrophysicist, I remember people such as Wasmann, a significant zoologist, and many others, above all one can remind oneself of the extraordinarily important scientific accomplishments, worldly scientific accomplishments of the Benedictine order and so on. But what role did modern science play in the Catholic Church? The Catholic Church wants to care for modern science, that there are real luminaries in it. However, people want this modern scientific way to be applied in connection with the outer sensory world, it wants to distance itself strongly from the conceptions of anything pertaining to spirituality, no statements should be made about this spirituality. Hence it is therefore forbidden to express something about the spiritual, because scientists must not enter into this mix when something is being said about the legitimacy of the spiritual life. So, Catholicism relegates science to its boundaries, it rejects science from all that is theology. That it, for instance in modernism, gradually came into it, has caused Catholicism to experience it as dispensable; hence the war against modernism. The Catholic Church knows precisely that in that moment when science penetrates theology, extraordinary dangers lie ahead, and it is impossible to cope with scientific research in theology.

It is basically quite hopeless if it is expressed in abstract terms: theology we must have but it will be scorched, burnt by modern science.—Where does this come from? That is the next big burning question. Where does this come from?

Yes, my dear friends, theology as we have it now, is rooted in quite different conditions than those of modern mankind. Ultimately the foundation of theology—if it wants to be correctly understood—is precisely the same foundations as that of the Gospels themselves. I have just expressed a sentence and naturally in its being said, it is not immediately understood, but it has extraordinary importance for our discussions here. Theology as inherited tradition doesn't appear in the form in which modern science appears. Theology is mostly in a form of something handed down, as such it goes back to the earlier ways of understanding. Certainly, logic was later applied to modern theology, which changed the form of theology somewhat; theology no longer appeared as it had been once upon a time. On the other hand, it is Catholicism which actually has something in this relationship which works in an extraordinarily enchanting manner on the more intelligent people and which is firmly adhered to in many Catholic clerics upon studying theology, through what has been handed down as knowledge of the so-called Primordial Revelation (Uroffenbahrung).

Primordial Revelation! You have to be aware that Catholicism does not merely have the revelation which we usually call the revelation of the New Testament, nor this being only the revelation spoken about in the Old Testament, but that Catholicism—as far as it is theology—speaks about a Primordial Revelation. This Primordial Revelation is usually characterised by saying: that which was revealed by the Christ had been experienced once before by mankind, at that time humanity acquired the revelation through another, a cosmic world milieu. This revelation was lost through the Fall, but an inheritance of this great revelation was still available through the Old Testament and through pagan teachings.—That is Catholic thinking. Once upon a time, before people became sinners, a revelation was made to them; had mankind not fallen into sin, so the entire act of salvation of Christ Jesus would not have become necessary. However, the primordial revelation had been tarnished through humanity falling into the sinful world and in the course of time up to the Mystery of Golgotha the human being increasingly forgot what the primordial revelation had been. To a certain extent in the beginning there still remained glimpses of this primordial revelation, then however, as the generation went further and further away, this primordial revelation darkened, and it had become totally dark in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha which came as a new revelation.

This is what Christianity looks like today—under theological instruction—in Old Testament teaching and above all in the pagan teaching it is seen as a corrupted Primordial Revelation. Catholicism has an insight into what I've often spoken about in Anthroposophy, namely the old Mysteries. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I pointed these things out, but, not quite, but only as far as possible because these things are as much unknown as possible in today's world and most people are not prepared for these things. Only, here we can speak about it, and about one point.

Everywhere in the pagan-religious mysteries there are certain experiences which allowed people to learn more than those communicated outwardly, exoterically, to a large crowd. These experiences didn't happen under supervision but through asceticism, through practice, they happened by the person going through certain experiences; a kind of drama was experienced leading to a culmination, with a catharsis, until the person came to sense the lightening of the divine laws of the world. This is simply a fact and within esoteric Catholicism it engendered an awareness of what existed in the Mysteries. It is even said that modern times are filled with worldly science and that this worldly science must not enter theology with arguments; as a result, we'd rather protect our knowledge of the Mysteries so that worldly science doesn't come in to explain it, because explaining the Mysteries would be a great danger under any circumstances. Catholicism was afraid that scientific involvement would reveal what one could possibly know about such things.

Now we come to the question: what did the Mysteries actually impart during these olden times? The Mysteries didn't produce a mere theoretical knowledge, it produced an evolution of consciousness, a real transformation of consciousness. A person who had gone through the Mysteries learnt to experience life differently to those people who hadn't gone through them. A person who stands fully awake in the world, experiences outside the sleep state, the outer sense world; he experiences memories, he can through these memories relive his life within himself when after various interruptions he comes to a certain point in his life which lies a couple of years after his birth. With an individual who has gone through hard exercises in the Mysteries, something quite different rises up in his awareness than what he usually can find in his consciousness. In the old Mysteries one expressed this experience as a "rebirth." Why does one call it a rebirth? Because in fact a person goes through a kind of embryonic experience in his consciousness; an awareness comes to the fore in the manner and way the person had lived through during his time as an embryo. During the time of being an embryo, our inner experience is namely of the same kind as are the experiences during thinking, because what is experienced in our senses is only done so through our mother's body. An embryonic experience is woken up, that's why we call it a "rebirth." A person goes back in his embryonic life up to the time of his birth, and so, just like memories rise up, so that what is being experienced also rises up. In this way a person feels himself coming out of a spiritual world, being partially connected to a spiritual world. These were the mysteries of birth, under which time one understood the blossoming of the Mysteries as something which human beings could go through during such an initiation. What he went through during such an initiation was considered a shadowed knowledge of such a state he was in, before he descended into the world of the senses. Thus, through the "rebirth" the human being re-places himself again to a certain extend back into a human form of existence free of sin.

In earlier times, knowledge which was not of this world was called "theology," and this knowledge could be acquired through the return to the wisdom that human beings had had before entering into this world, a wisdom which had been corrupted because people had dragged it into this world.

I'm sketching these things for you and later we will naturally bring today's considerations to our awareness. Theology in olden times was a gift from the gods, which could only be achieved through such exercises which could lift people out of their senses and bring them at least back to the experience of motherly love, enabling them to take up this wisdom again, this uncorrupted wisdom. This cannot be taken up in the form or modern logical concepts. Within the Mysteries people could not be given logical concepts in the modern sense, they received images. All knowledge which is gained in this way is gained in pictures, images. The more a person actually entered into the real world of existence—not only associated himself with existence—the more he lives into this existence, like when he lives within the existence of motherly love, so much more will consciousness stop living in abstract concepts, so much more will he live in images. Thus, what was designated as "theology" in olden times, in pre-Christian times, visual science, was science living in images. For this reason, I could say: this theology certainly had a similar form of expression as the one living in the Gospels, because in the Gospels we find images, and the further we go back, the more we find that the Gospels are still being expressed in the attitude of the old theology; there is certainly no differentiation between religion and theology. Here theology itself is something which has been received from God, here in theology one looks upon a God, and sees how the theology is given through a communication with God. Here is something which is alive, in theology. Then it came about that theology was experienced differently, somewhat like the conditions in which one lives when you grow older. At that time therefore, in olden times, theology was nourished through the religious life. This particular way of living though-oneself in the world of religious experience, this actually was getting lost to humanity at the same time as the Mystery of Golgotha was occurring.

So you see, when we look towards the East as it is connected historically to the source of our religious life, we have, we can say, the Indian religious life. What nourishes the Indian religious life? It is nourished through the observation of nature, but the observation of nature was something quite different then to what it is for modern humanity. Nature observation was for all Indians such that one can say: an Indian observed spiritually when looking at nature, but he only observed the spirit which lay beneath the actual being of humanity. The Indian observed the mineral world spiritually, likewise the plant world, animal world; he was aware of the divine spiritual foundation of these worlds; but when he wanted to attain the human world as well, it didn't reveal itself to him. By wanting to access the actual being of the human being in the world, which he had himself, there he found nothing: Nirvana, the entry in nothingness towards what could be perceived in relation to the human being. Thus, the fervour of the Indian's religious life, which certainly was still present at that time, where theology, religion and science were one, was Nirvana. We have an escape from what is perceived from the natural basis of the image-rich consciousness, an escape into Nirvana, where everything that is given to the senses is obliterated. This self-abandonment to Nirvana must be experienced religiously in order to find a possible form for the religious stream of experience for individuals.

Now, when we consider this religious observation of the world further, with the Persians and later with the Chaldeans, we see how they turn their gaze outward, they don't experience the world like us, they live through a world permeated with spirit, everywhere the spiritual foundation permeates everything, but immobilises it. There is a different disposition with these peoples compared to the Indians. The Indian strived towards mankind and found nothing. The other peoples who lived to the north and west of the Indians didn't strive towards mankind but towards the world, towards the spiritual in the world. They couldn't understand the spiritual world in any other way than to avoid with all their might, what later human evolution could no longer avoid.

It is unbelievably meaningful, my dear friends, to observe how, on the one hand the old Indian striving came from what he saw, while he, when he strived towards human beings, I might call it, fell into unconsciousness, into Nirvana, while the Old Persian remained in what he was looking at. The divine which is the basis of the mineral, the plant and animal worlds, was understood by the Old Persian and from this came his religious striving; but now he was overcome by fear that he might be urged to seek man, and this turned into abstract thoughts which turned into imagery. This is actually the basic feeling of the near-Asian peoples all the way to Africa. They saw the foundation of nature as being a spiritual world; they didn't see people, but they were afraid to search in people because then they would enter an abstract region, a region into which later, the Romans entered with their religion. Before the Roman time, in the second, third Century there was the aspiration everywhere to avoid entering into abstractions, hence the aspiration to capture what is presented in images. There was even the endeavour to express in images, what one understood, in image form. There was an effort to, in relation to the divine, which one perceives, not to search for it through abstract concepts but in actions made visible; this is the origin of ritual, sacramental action. In this religious area which I'm referring to, is the origin of ritual in worship.

Now place yourself into this entire development of the old Hebraic peoples; the Judaism which strongly feels the urge for its people's development to enter into what one possesses in one's consciousness. Today I only want to make indications in my presentation in order for us to orientate ourselves. The members of the Hebrew people wanted above all to feel the God on which human nature is based. The Old Indian only sensed God, or the gods, who lay at the basis of sub human nature, and as he tried to penetrate with his consciousness into the human being, there he wanted to rise up into Nirvana. The other, the Persian, Chaldean and Egyptian peoples searched for the connection to the Divine in images and applied these according to their character dispositions, to get up to the human being. So we can see how this urge, as in Judaism, to draw the divine and the human together, to bring the divine in a relationship with the human being, lead to the divine appearing at the same time the foundation of humanity. There was not predisposition to that in the Indian when they sailed into Nirvana; there was no longer a conception that the human consciousness wanted to be reached. For the Indian this personal route to the human soul was to be avoided. This personal route of the human soul had even lead to gradually slipping out of existence into nonexistence, so to speak. The other, the Prussian route, came to a standstill with imagery, remaining in ritual only.

We see how the Jewish peoples developed, within these strivings, their own special character and this resulted in the impossibility to reach God out of one's own life. One had to wait and see what God himself gave, and it was there that the actual concept of revelation came into being. One had to wait and see what God would give and on the other hand one had to be careful not to search through the route of imagery or symbolism (Bilderweg), which was to be feared. If the route of symbolism was sought, then one arrived at a subhuman God, not at a God who carries humanity. In Judaism the symbolic route was not to be followed, it would not be through ritual an also not through the content of knowledge that one would speak to God. The olden time Jew wanted to meet their god by Him revealing himself, and human beings would communicate in a human way, while from their side, not make outwardly fulfilled sacrifices, but what arises subjectively: the promise—revelation, promise and the contract between both; a judicial relationship one could call it, between the people and their God.

So the Jewish religion positioned itself and thus the Jewish religion stood in the entire evolution of humanity. therefore, one can say: here already a relationship is the example which is performed in our modern time, where science wants to be beside religion but where science has nothing to say about religion, just like the olden time Jew removed everything which appeared as imagery. This is already performed in Judaism, and precisely in the modern differentiation between knowledge and faith, lies unbelievably much Judaism. In Harnack's The Being of Christianity everything is again based on Judaism. You have to see through this that we get sick with these things.

Human evolution is penetrated by more and more things. Something is continuously developing which belongs to the Jews in particular: the awareness of personality, which is urged by ego development. With the Greeks there developed a mighty inner world beside the outer world of observed nature but this inner world could raise doubts, because it was observed merely as a world of mythology. Sensing the religious element rising in Hellenism, which lives in Greek mythology, through mythological fantasy, which people are searching for—because it was not to be found in nature—is what rises up in man. The Greek however didn't grasp the actual important point within the human inner life, resulting from mythological fantasy, which the Romans evolved into abstract thinking, which certainly already started with Aristotle, but which was developed particularly in Rome. This abstract way of thinking which is so powerful as to being people to the point of their I, bringing them to self-consciousness, to I-consciousness, this is something which we today still carry in us today and we carry it heavily in us, in the form of modern agnosticism.

My dear friends, basically there is no spiritual teaching other than modern materialism. This sounds like an extraordinary paradox and yet it is so. What the modern materialistic thinker carries in his head is quite spiritualized, so spiritualised that it is quite abstract and has no connection to reality any more. That's Romanism in full swing. We actually have become unbelievably spiritual in the course of the 19th century, but we deny this spirituality because we maintain that through this spirituality, we can understand matter. In reality our souls are in a spiritualised content, right into our ideas are we spiritualised, but we maintain that through all of this we can only understand a material world. Thus, human beings have grasped their ego through this spiritualisation, but as a result they have become separated from the world. Today humanity must again look for its connection to the world, the search need to be for inner knowledge, there needs to be the possibility to not only have "knowledge without objective meaning" but knowledge with objective meaning, in order for knowledge to reveal the being of the world, and on the other hand to authenticate what is hidden within the human being as objective.

You see, the Greeks had a great advantage compared to the oriental world, they could to draw together their innermost nature so to speak. From within themselves they could draw a content, but this content could first only attach as filled with fantasy, imagination. However, there was something the Greeks didn't know. They had brought the development of humanity to internalisation but didn't attach it to the inner life. The internalisation and the hardening continued in the Roman times and beyond, and man had to learn—today still we need to learn to understand—how one can attach what is within, what permeates this inner being. The Greeks could think about their gods in grandiose fantasy images but what the Greek could not do, was to pray. The prayer only cam about later and for prayer the possibility had to be found of connecting the one praying, to reality. To this we must connect those times in which prayer was not merely spoken, not merely thought or not merely felt, but in which prayer became one with the sacramental ritual. Then again Catholicism knows quite well why they don't separate themselves from ritual, from the sacrificial act, from the central sacrifice of the mass.

We'll talk more about these things.

Allow me to begin today's lecture with a personal recollection. As a quite young man, I once had a slight experience of the kind which seem unimportant and yet can yield pleasant memories again and again in later life.

I was attending a course of university lectures on the history of literature.⁴⁹ The lecturer began by considering the character of cultural life in the time of Lessing, with the intention of going on to discuss various literary developments during the later eighteenth century and part of the nineteenth. His opening words were deeply impressive. In order to characterise the chief innovation which appeared in the cultural life of Lessing's time, he said: “Artistic consciousness acquired an aesthetic conscience.” His lecture showed that what he meant by this statement—we need not now ask whether it was justified—was roughly as follows:

All the artistic considerations and intentions connected with the endeavours of Lessing and his contemporaries were imbued with a deeply earnest wish to make something more of art than a mere appendage to life or a mere pleasure among others. Art was to become a necessary element in every form of human existence worthy of the name. To raise art up to the level of a serious human concern, worthy to be heard in the concert of voices which speak of the great and fruitful activities of mankind—such was the aim of the pioneer thinkers of that period. That is what the lecturer wanted to say when he emphasised that an aesthetic conscience had found its way into the artistic and literary life of those times.

Why was this statement important for a soul seeking to grasp the riddles of existence, as reflected in one or another human mind? Because a conception of art was to be ennobled and given expression in a way that left no doubt as to its importance for the whole character and destiny of human life. The serious nature and significance of artistic work were intended to be placed beyond discussion, and it is indeed true that the experiences denoted by the word “conscience” are such that all the situations to which they apply are ennobled. In other words, when “conscience” is spoken of, the human soul recognises that the word refers to a most valuable element in its own life, and that to be without this element would indicate a serious deficiency.

How often has the significance of conscience been brought out by the words, no matter whether they are taken literally or metaphorically: “When conscience speaks in the human soul, it is the voice of God that speaks.” And one could scarcely find anyone, however unprepared to reflect on higher spiritual concerns, who has not formed some idea of what conscience is. Everyone feels vaguely that whatever conscience may be, it is experienced as a voice in the individual's breast which determines with irresistible power what is good and what is bad; what man must do in order to gain his own approval and what he must leave undone if he is not to despise himself. Hence we can say: Conscience appears to every individual as something holy in the human breast, and that to form some kind of opinion about it is relatively easy.

Things are different, however, if we glance briefly at man's history and his spiritual life. Anyone who is trying to look more deeply into a spiritual situation of this kind will surely wish to consult those in whom a knowledge of such matters may be presupposed—the philosophers. But in this case, as in so many others of wide human concern, he will find that the explanations of conscience given by various philosophers are very different, or so it seems, though a more or less obscure kernel is similar in all of them. But that is not the worst of it. If anyone were to take the trouble to inquire what the philosophers of ancient and modern times mean by conscience, he would be met with all sorts of very fine phrases and also by many that are hard to understand, but he would find nothing of which he could say beyond question that it reflected his feeling: that is conscience.

Of course it would lead us too far if I were to give you an anthology of the various explanations of conscience that have been given over the centuries by the philosophical leaders of mankind. But we may note that from about the first third of the Middle Ages and on through mediaeval philosophy, whenever conscience was spoken of, it was always said to be a power in the human soul which was capable of immediately declaring what a man should do and what he should leave undone. However, these mediaeval philosophers say also that underneath this power of the soul there is something else, something of finer quality than conscience itself. A personality often mentioned here, Meister Eckhart,⁵⁰ tells of a tiny spark that underlies conscience; an eternal element in the soul which, if it is heeded, declares with unmistakable power the laws of good and evil.

In modern times, we encounter once more the most varied accounts of conscience, including some which make a peculiar impression, for they clearly fail to recognise the serious nature of the divine inner voice that we call conscience. There are philosophers who say that conscience is something that a man acquires when, by extending continually his experience of life, he learns what is useful, harmful, satisfying and so on for himself. The sum of these experiences gives rise to a judgment which says: “Do this—don't do that.”

There are other philosophers who speak of conscience in terms of the highest praise. One of these is the great German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who pointed above all to the human ego not the transient personal ego but the eternal essence in man—as the fundamental principle of all human thought and being. At the same time, he held that the highest experience for the human ego was the experience of conscience,⁵¹ when a man hears the inward judgment: “This you must do, for it would go against your conscience not to do it.” The majesty and nobility of this judgment, he believed, could not be surpassed. And if Fichte was the philosopher who laid the strongest emphasis on the power and significance of the human ego, it is characteristic of him that he ranked conscience as the ego's most significant impulse.

The further we move on into modern times, and the more materialistic thinking becomes, the more do we find conscience deprived of its majesty—not in the human heart, but in the thinking of philosophers who are more or less imbued with materialism. One example will be enough to illustrate this trend.

In the second half of the 19th century, there lived a philosopher who for nobility of soul, harmonious human feelings and generous breadth of mind must rank with the finest personalities. I mean Bartholomew Carnieri:⁵² he is seldom mentioned now. If you go through his writings, you find that in spite of his fine qualities, he was deeply imbued with the materialistic thinking of his time. What, he asks, are we to make of conscience? Fundamentally, he says, it is no more than the sum of habits and judgments instilled in us during early youth and strengthened by the experience of life. These influences, of which we are no longer fully conscious, are the source of the inner voice which says: “This you must do—this you must not do,”

Thus the origin of conscience is traced back to external influences and habits, and even these are confined to a very narrow range. Some even more materialistically-minded philosophers of the 19th century have gone further still. Paul Ree,⁵³ for example, who at one time had great influence on Nietzsche, wrote on the origin of conscience. His book is interesting as a symptom of the outlook of our times. His ideas—allowing for some inevitable distortion of details in any brief sketch of them—are roughly as follows. Man, says Paul Ree, has developed in respect of all his faculties, and therefore in respect of conscience. Originally he had no trace of what we call conscience. It is gross prejudice to hold that conscience is eternal. A voice telling us what to do and what not to do did not exist originally, according to Ree. But in human nature there was something else which did develop—something we can call an instinct for revenge. This was the most primitive of all impulses. If anyone suffered at the hands of another, the instinct for revenge drove him to pay back the injury in kind. By degrees, as social life became more complicated, the carrying out of vengeance was handed over to the ruling authorities. So people came to believe that any deed which injured another person had by necessity to be followed by something that had previously been called vengeance. Certain deeds which had bad results had to be requited by other deeds. In the course of time, this conviction gave rise to an association of certain feelings with particular actions, or even with the temptation to commit them. The original urge for revenge was forgotten, but a feeling became ingrained in the human soul that a harmful action must be paid for. So now, when a man believes he is hearing an “inner voice”, this is in fact nothing but the voice of vengeance, changed into an inward form. Here we have an extreme example of this kind of interpretation—extreme in the sense that conscience is portrayed as a complete illusion.

On the other hand, we must admit that it is going much too far to assert, as some people do, that conscience has existed as long as human beings have been living on the earth; in other words, that conscience is in some sense eternal. Since mistakes are made both by those who think more spiritually about it, and by those who regard conscience as a pure illusion, it is very difficult to reach any agreement on the subject, although it belongs to our everyday inner life, and indeed to a sacred part of it.

A glance over the philosophers will show that in earlier times even the best of them thought of conscience differently from the way in which we are bound to think of it today. For when we say that conscience is a voice speaking out of a divine impulse in the breast of the simplest man, saying, “This you must do—that you must leave undone” this is somewhat different from the teaching we find in Socrates⁵⁴ and in his successor, Plato.⁵⁵ They both insist that virtue can be learnt. Socrates, indeed, says that if a man forms clear ideas as to what he should and should not do, then gradually, through this knowledge of what virtue is, he can learn to act virtuously.

Now one could easily object, from a modern standpoint, that things would go badly if we had to wait until we had learnt what is right and what is wrong before we could act virtuously. Conscience speaks with elemental power in the human soul and is heard by the individual as saying “This you must do, and that you must leave alone”, long before we learn to form ideas concerning good and evil and thus begin to formulate moral precepts. Moreover, conscience brings a certain tranquillity to the soul on occasions when a man can say to himself: “You have done something you can approve of.” It would be bad—many people might say—if we had to learn a lot about the nature and character of virtue in order to arrive at an agreed estimation of our behaviour. Hence we can say that the philosopher to whom we look up as a martyr of philosophy, whose death crowned and ennobled his philosophical work—I mean Socrates—sets before us a concept of virtue which hardly tallies with our view of conscience today: and even with later Greek thinkers we always find the assertion that perfect virtue is something that can be learnt, a doctrine not in keeping with the primitive, elemental, power of conscience.

How is it, then, that so pre-eminent and powerful a person as Socrates is not aware of the idea of conscience that we have today, although we feel whenever we approach him, as Plato describes him, that the purest morality and the highest degree of virtue speak through his words? The reason is, that the ideas, concepts and inward experiences which feel today as though they were innate, were in fact acquired laboriously by the human soul in the course of time. When we trace the spiritual life of humanity back into the past, we find that our idea of conscience and our feeling for it were not present in the same way in ancient times, and therefore not among the Greeks. Conscience, in fact, was born. But nothing about the birth of conscience can be learnt by the easy methods of external experience and scholarship, as Paul Ree, for example, tried to do. We have to go more deeply into the matter if we are to gain enlightenment for the human soul.

Now our task in these lectures has been precisely to illuminate the constitution of the soul, with the aid of the light that comes from raising the soul to higher levels of knowledge. The whole life of the soul has been described, as it reveals itself to the inner eye of the seer: the eye which does not gain knowledge of the sense-world only, but looks behind the veil of the sense-world into the region where the primary sources, the spiritual foundations of the sense-world are to be found. And it has repeatedly been shown—for example in the lecture, “What is Mysticism?”—that the consciousness of the seer opens the way into deeper regions of the soul, over and above the soul-life we experience in everyday life. We believe that even in ordinary life we come to know something of this deeper level when we look into ourselves and encounter the experiences of thinking, feeling and willing. But it was pointed out also, that in ordinary waking consciousness the soul reveals only the outer aspect of the spiritual. Just as we have to penetrate behind the veil that is spread over the sense-world if we are to discover the underlying causes of these appearances as they are revealed behind everything we see and hear and our brain apprehends, so we must look behind our thinking, feeling and willing, and thus behind our ordinary inner life, if we are to get to know the spiritual background of our own lives.

From these starting-points, we set out to throw light on the life of the human soul in its many interwoven branches. We saw that it must be conceived as made up of three members which must be distinguished but not—please note—treated as quite separate from one another. We named these three members the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, and we saw how the ego is the unifying point which holds the three members together, plays on them as though on the strings of an instrument, causing them to sound together in the most varied ways, harmonious or dissonant. This activity of the ego developed by gradual stages, and we shall understand how our present-day consciousness and soul-life have evolved from primeval times if we glance at what man can become in the future, or even today, if from within the consciousness soul he develops a higher, clairvoyant form of consciousness.

The consciousness soul in its ordinary condition enables us to grasp the external world perceived through our senses. If anyone wishes to penetrate behind the veil of the sense-world, he must raise his soul-life to a higher level. Then he makes the great discovery that something like an awakening of the soul can occur—something comparable to the outcome of a successful operation on a man blind from birth, when a hitherto unknown world of light and colour breaks in upon him. So it is with someone who by appropriate methods raises his soul to a higher level of development. A moment comes when those elements in our environment which we normally ignored, although they are swarming around us all the time, enter into our soul-life as a wealth of beings and activities because we have acquired a new organ of perception for them.

When someone achieves by training, a conscious seership of this kind, his ego is completely present throughout. This means that he moves among spiritual facts and beings, on which our sense-world is based, just as he finds his way among chairs and tables in the physical world: and he now takes up into a higher sphere of soul-life the ego which had led him through his experiences of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul.

Let us now turn back from this clairvoyant consciousness, which is illuminated and set aglow by the ego, to the ordinary life of the soul. The ego is alive in the most varied ways in the three soul-members. If we have a man whose life is given over to the desires, passions and instinctive urges that arise from his sentient soul, we can say that his ego is hardly at all active; it is like a feeble flame in the midst of the surging waves of the sentient soul and has little power against them. In the intellectual soul the ego gains some freedom and independence.

Here man comes to himself and so to some awareness of his ego, for the intellectual soul can develop only in so far as man reflects upon and elaborates, in inner tranquillity, the experiences that have come to him through the sentient soul. The ego becomes more and more radiant and at last achieves full clarity in the consciousness soul. Then a man can say to himself: “I have grasped myself—I have attained real self-consciousness.” This degree of clarity can be activated by the ego only when it has reached the stage of working in the consciousness soul, after progressing from the sentient soul through the intellectual soul.

If, however, a human being can further rise in his ego to clairvoyant consciousness beyond the consciousness soul, comparable to yet higher soul-principles, we can well understand that the seer, looking back over the course of human evolution, should say to us: just as the ego rises in this way to higher states of soul, so did it enter the sentient soul from a subordinate condition. We have seen how the soul-members sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul—are related to the members of his bodily organisation—physical body, etheric and astral or sentient body. Hence you will find it understandable that as spiritual science indicates—the ego, before rising to the sentient soul, was active in the sentient body, and earlier still in the etheric and physical bodies. In those times the ego still guided man from outside. It held sway in the darkness of bodily life; man was not yet able to say “I” regarding himself, to find the central point of his own being within himself. What are we to think of this ego which held sway in the primeval past and built up man's exterior bodily organisation? Are we to regard it as less perfect, compared with the ego we bear within our souls today?

We look on our ego as the real inner focus of our being: it endows us with inner life, and is capable, through schooling, of endless progress in the future. We see in it the epitome of our human nature and the guarantor of our human dignity. Now when we were not yet aware of this ego, while it was working on us from out of the dark spiritual powers of the world, was it then less perfect, by comparison with what it is now? Only a quite abstract way of thinking could say so.

Consider our physical body; we look on it as having been formed out of the spiritual world in the primordial past as a dwelling for the human soul. Only a materialistic mind could believe that this human body had not been born originally from the spirit. Seen merely from an external point of view, the physical body must appear a miracle of perfection. What do all our intellectual ability and technical skill amount to, compared with the wisdom manifest in the structure of the human heart? Or take the engineering technique that goes into the building of bridges, and so forth—what is it compared with the construction of the human thigh-bone, with its wonderful crisscross of support members, as seen through the microscope. It would be sheer boundless arrogance for man to suppose that he has attained in the slightest degree to the wisdom inherent in the formation of the external physical body. And consider our soul-life, taking into account only our instincts, desires and passions—how do they function? Are we not doing all we can to undermine inwardly the wisdom-filled organisation of our body? Indeed, if we consider without prejudice the marvel of our physical organisation, we have to admit that our bodily structure is far wiser than anything we can show in our inner life, although we may hope that our inner life will advance from its present imperfection towards increasing perfection. We can hardly come to any other conclusion, even without clairvoyance, if we simply look impartially at the observable facts.

Is not this wise activity, which has built up the human body as a dwelling-place for the ego, bound to have something in common with the nature of the ego itself? Must we not think of this formative power as having the character of an immeasurably more advanced ego? We must say: Something related to our ego has worked during primordial times at building a structure which the ego could come to inhabit. Anyone who refuses to believe this may imagine something different, but then he must also suppose that an ordinary house, built for human habitation, has not been designed by a human mind but has been put together merely by the action of natural forces. One assumption is as true as the other. Thus we look back to a primordial past where a spiritual power endowed with an ego-nature of unlimited perfection worked upon our bodily sheaths. In those times our own ego was hidden in subconscious depths, thence it worked its way up to its present state of consciousness.

If we look at this evolution from the far-distant past, when the ego was hidden within its sheaths as though in the darkness of a mother's womb, we find that although the ego had no knowledge of itself, it was all the closer to those spiritual beings who worked on our bodily vehicles and were related to the human ego, but of incomparably greater perfection. Clairvoyant insight thus looks back to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged. In those times, also, we find in man a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth. The faculty that man in the future will acquire with his ego was present in the primeval past without the ego. Clairvoyant consciousness entails that spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream. Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual. He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character. When he thought of something, he could not have said to himself, “I am thinking”, as a man might do today; his thought stood before his clairvoyant vision. And to experience a feeling he had no need to look into himself; his feeling radiated from him and united him with his whole spiritual environment.

Such was the soul-life of man in primordial times. From out of his dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness he had to develop inwardly in order to come to himself, and in himself to that centre of his being which today is still imperfect but will advance ever more nearly towards perfection in the future, when man with his ego will step forth into the spiritual world.

Now if light is thrown on those primordial times by means of clairvoyance in the way already described, what does the seer tell us concerning the human consciousness of those times when a man had, for example, committed an evil deed? His deed did not present itself to him as something he could inwardly assess. He beheld it, with all its harmfulness and shamefulness, as a ghostly vision confronting his soul. And when a feeling concerning his evil deed arose in his soul, the shamefulness of it came before him as a spiritual reality, so that he was as though surrounded by a vision of the evil he had wrought.

Then, in the course of time, this dreamlike clairvoyance faded and man's ego came increasingly to the fore. In so far as man found this central point of his being within himself, the old clairvoyance was extinguished and self-consciousness established itself more and more clearly. The vision he had previously had of his bad and good deeds was transposed into his inner life, and deeds once clairvoyantly beheld were mirrored in his soul.

Now what sort of forms were beheld in dreamy clairvoyance as the counterpart of man's evil deed? They were pictures whereby the spiritual powers around him showed how he had disturbed and disrupted the cosmic order, and they were intended to have a salutary effect. It was a counteraction by the Gods, who wished to raise him up and, by showing him the effect of his deed, to enable him to eliminate its harmful consequences. This was indeed a terrifying experience for him, but it was fundamentally beneficial, coming as it did from the cosmic background out of which man himself had emerged. When the time came for man to find in himself his ego-centre, the external vision was transferred to his soul in the form of a reflected picture. When the ego first makes its appearance in the sentient soul, it is weak and frail, and man first has to work slowly upon himself in order that his ego may gradually advance towards perfection. Now what would have happened if, when the external clairvoyant vision of the effects of his misdeeds had disappeared, it had not been replaced by an inward counterpart of its beneficial influence? With his still frail ego, he would have been torn to and fro in his sentient soul by his passions, as though in a surging boundless sea. What, then, was it that was transferred at this historic moment from the external world to the inner life of the soul? If it was the great cosmic Spirit that had brought the harmful effects of a man's deed before his clairvoyant consciousness as a healing influence, showing him what he had to make good, so, later on, it was the same cosmic Spirit that powerfully revealed itself in his inner life at a time when his ego was still weak. Having previously spoken to man through a clairvoyant vision, the cosmic Spirit withdrew into man's inner life and imparted to him what had to be said about correcting the distortion caused in the world-order. Man's ego is still weak, and the cosmic Spirit keeps a perpetual, unsleeping watch over it and passes judgment where the ego could not yet judge. Behind the weak ego stands something like a reflection of the powerful cosmic Spirit which had formerly shown to man through clairvoyant vision the consequences of his deeds. And this reflection is now experienced by him as conscience watching over him.

So we see how true it is when conscience is naively described as the voice of God in man. At the same time we see how spiritual science points to the moment when external vision became inward experience and conscience was born.

What I have now been saying can be drawn purely from the spiritual world. No external history is required; the facts I have described are seen by the inward eye. Anyone who can see them will experience them as incontestable truths, but a certain necessity of the times may lead us to ask: Could external history perhaps reveal something that would confirm, in this case, the facts seen by inner vision?

The findings of clairvoyant consciousness can always be tested by external evidence, and there is no need to fear that the evidence will contradict them. That could seem to happen only if the testing were inexact. But we will give one example that can show how external facts confirm the statements here derived from clairvoyant insight.

It is not so very long since the time when the birth of conscience can be seen to occur. If we look back to the fifth and sixth centuries BC, we encounter in ancient Greece the great dramatic poet Aeschylus,⁵⁶ and in his work we find a theme which is especially remarkable for the reason that the same subject was treated by a late Greek poet in a quite different way.

Aeschylus shows us how Agamemnon, on returning from Troy, is killed by his wife, Klytemnestra, when he arrives home. Agamemnon is avenged by his son Orestes, who, acting on the advice of the gods, kills his mother. What, then, is the consequence for Orestes of this deed? Aeschylus shows how the burden of matricide calls forth in Orestes a mode of seeing which was no longer normal in those times. The enormity of his crime caused the old clairvoyance to awake in him, like an inheritance from the past. Orestes could say: “Apollo, the god himself, told me it was a just act for me to avenge my father upon my mother. Everything I have done speaks in my favour. But the blood of my mother is working on!” And in the second part of the Orestean trilogy we are powerfully shown how the old clairvoyance awakens in Orestes and how the avenging goddesses, the Erinyes—or Furies, as they were later called by the Romans—approach.

Orestes sees before him, in dreamlike clairvoyance, the effect of his act of matricide in its external form. Apollo had approved the deed; but there is something higher. Aeschylus wished to indicate that a still higher cosmic ordinance obtains, and this he could do only by making Orestes become clairvoyant at that moment, for he had not yet gone far enough to dramatise what today we call an inner voice. If we study his work, we feel that he was at the stage when something like conscience ought to emerge from the whole content of the human soul, but he never quite reached that point. He confronts Orestes with dreamlike, clairvoyant pictures that have not yet been transformed into conscience. Yet we can see how he is on the verge of recognising conscience. Every word that he gives to Klytemnestra, for example, makes one feel unmistakably that he ought to indicate the idea of conscience in its present-day sense; but he never quite gets that far. In that century, the great poet could only show how bad deeds rose up before the human soul in earlier times.

Now we will pass over Sophocles and come to Euripides,⁵⁷ who described the same situation only a generation later. Scholars have rightly pointed out—though spiritual science alone can show this in its true light—that in Euripides the dream-pictures experienced by Orestes are no more than shadowy images of the inward promptings of conscience—somewhat as in Shakespeare. Here we have palpable evidence of the stages whereby the idea of conscience was taken hold of by the art of poetry. We see how Aeschylus, great poet as he was, cannot yet speak of conscience itself, while his successor, Euripides, does speak of it. With this development in mind, we can see why human thinking in general could work its way only slowly towards a true conception of conscience. The force now active in conscience was active also in ancient times; the pictures showing the effects of a man's deeds rose before his clairvoyant sight. The only difference is that this force became internalised; but before it could be inwardly experienced, the whole process of human development, which led gradually to the concept of conscience, had to take its course.

Thus we see in conscience a faculty which comes to the fore by degrees and has to be acquired by man's own endeavours. Where, then, should we look for this most intense activity of conscience? At that point where the human ego was beginning to make itself known and was still weak, that is something which can be shown in human development. In ancient Greece it had already advanced to the stage of the intellectual soul. But if we look further back to Egypt and Chaldea outer history knows nothing of this, but Plato and Aristotle were clairvoyantly aware of it—we find that even the highest culture of those times was achieved without the presence of an inwardly independent ego. The difference between the knowledge that was nurtured and put to use by the sanctuaries of Egypt and Chaldea and our modern science is that our science is grasped by the consciousness soul, whereas in pre-Hellenic times it all depended on inspirations from the sentient soul. In ancient Greece the ego progressed from the sentient soul into the intellectual soul. Today we are living in the epoch of the consciousness soul, which means that a real ego-consciousness arises for the first time. Anyone who studies the evolution of mankind, and in particular the transition from eastern to western culture, can see how human progress has been marked by ever-increasing feelings of freedom and independence. Whereas man had formerly felt himself entirely dependent on the Gods and the inspirations that came from them, in the West, culture first came to spring from the inner life.

This is especially evident, for example, in the way Aeschylus strives to bring about a consciousness of the ego in the human soul. We see him standing on the frontier between East and West, with one eye on the East and the other on the West, gathering from the human soul the elements that will come together to form the concept of conscience. He strives to give this new form of conscience a dramatic embodiment, but is not yet quite able to do so. Comparisons are apt to be confusing; we must not only compare, but also distinguish. The point is, that in the West everything was designed to raise the ego from the sentient soul to the consciousness soul. In the East the ego was veiled in obscurity and had no freedom. In the West, by contrast, the ego works its way up into the consciousness soul. If the old dreamlike clairvoyance is extinguished, everything else tends to awaken the ego and to evoke conscience as guardian of the ego as a divine inner voice. Aeschylus was the corner-stone between the worlds of East and West.

In the Eastern World men had retained a living awareness of their origin in the divine cosmic Spirit, and this made it possible for them to gain understanding of the event which took place a few hundred years after endeavours had been made by many—or Aeschylus for example—to find something that spoke as the voice of God within themselves. For this event brought to mankind the impulse which from all spiritual standpoints must be seen as the greatest impulse ever to enter into the evolution of the earth and man—the impulse we call the Christ-Impulse.

It was the Christ-impulse that first made it possible for humanity to realise that God, the Creator of things and of the external sheaths of man, can be recognised in our inward life. Only by understanding the divine humanity of Christ Jesus were men enabled to understand that the voice of God could be heard within the soul. In order that men should be able to find something of the divine nature in their own inner life, it was necessary for Christ to enter into the evolution of humanity as an external historical-event. If the Christ, a Divine Being, had not been present in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, if he had not shown once and for all that God can be discerned in our inner life, because he had once been present in a human body; if he had not appeared as the conqueror of death through the Mystery of Golgotha, men would never have been able to comprehend the indwelling of Divinity in the human soul.

If anyone claims that this indwelling could be discerned even if there had been no historical Christ Jesus, he could equally well say that we should have eyes even if there were no sun. As against this one-sided view of some philosophers that, since without eyes we could not see the light, the origin of light must be traced to the eyes, we must always set Goethe's aphorism: The eye is created by light for light.⁵⁸ If there were no sun to fill space with light, no eyes would ever have developed in the human organism. The eyes are created by light, and without the sun there would be no eyes. No eye is capable of perceiving the sun without having first received from the sun the power to do so. In the same way, there could be no power to grasp and recognise the Christ-nature if the Christ-Impulse had not entered into external history. What the sun out there in the cosmos does for human sight, so the historical Christ-Jesus makes possible what we call the entry of the divine nature into our inner life.

The elements necessary for understanding this were present in the stream of thought that came over from the East; they needed only to be raised to a higher level. It was in the West that souls were ripe to grasp and accept this impulse—the West, where experiences which had belonged to the outer world were transferred to the inner life most intensively, and in the form of conscience watched over a generally weak ego. In this way souls were strengthened, and prepared to hear the voice of conscience now saying within them: The Divinity who appeared in the East to those able to look clairvoyantly into the world—this Divinity now lives in us!

However, what was thus being prepared could not have become conscious experience if the inward Divinity had not spoken in advance in the dawning of conscience. So we see that external understanding for the Divinity of Christ Jesus was born in the East, and the emergence of conscience came to meet it from the West. For example, we find that conscience is more and more often spoken of in the Roman world, at the beginning of the Christian era, and the further westward we go, the clearer is the evidence for the recognised existence of conscience or for its presence in embryonic form.

Thus East and West played into each other's hands. We see the sun of the Christ-nature rising in the East, while in the West the development of conscience is preparing the way for understanding the Christ. Hence the victorious advance of Christianity is towards the West, not the East. In the East we see the spread of a religion which represents the final consequence—though on the highest level—of the eastern outlook: Buddhism takes hold of the eastern world. Christianity takes hold of the western world, because Christianity had first created the organ for receiving it. Here we see Christianity brought into relation with the deepened element in western culture: the concept of conscience embodied in Christianity.

Not through the study of external history, but only through an inward contemplation of the facts, shall we come to knowledge of these developments. What I am saying today will be met with disbelief by many people. But a demand of the times is that we should recognise the spirit in external phenomena. This, however, is possible only if we are at least able initially to discern the spirit where it speaks to us in the form of a clear message. Popular consciousness says: When conscience speaks, it is God speaking in the soul. The highest spiritual consciousness says that when conscience speaks, it is truly the cosmic Spirit speaking. And spiritual science brings out the connection between conscience and the greatest event in the evolution of mankind, the Christ-Event. Hence it is not surprising that conscience has thereby been ennobled and raised to a higher sphere. When we hear that something has been done for reasons of conscience, we feel that conscience is regarded as one of the most important possessions of mankind.

Thus we can see how natural and right it is for the human heart to speak of conscience as “God in man”. And when Goethe says that the highest experience for man is when “God-Nature reveals itself to him”, we must realise that God can reveal himself in the spirit to man only if Nature is seen in the light of its spiritual background. This has been provided for in human evolution, on the one hand by the light of Christ, shining from outside, and on the other by the divine light within us: the light of conscience. Hence a philosopher such as Fichte, who studies human character, is justified in saying that conscience is the highest voice in our inward life. On this account, also, we are aware that our dignity as human beings is inseparable from conscience. We are human beings because we have an ego-consciousness; and the conscience we have at our side is also at the side of our ego. Thus we look on conscience as a most sacred individual possession, inviolable by the external world, whose voice enables us to determine our direction and our goal. When conscience speaks, no other voice may intrude.

So it is that on one side conscience ensures our connection with the primordial power of the world and on the other guarantees the fact that in our inmost self we have something like a drop flowing from the Godhead. And man can know: When conscience speaks in him, it is a God speaking.

• 49. Held by his teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer, 1825–1900. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner's remarks in the lecture of 29th October 1914 in Berlin, in: Aus schicksaltragender Zeit, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 64)
• 50. See notes 14 and 13.
• 51. See J.G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 1800, Book 3: Glaube.
• 52. Bartholomew Carnieri, 1821–1909. Cf. his characterisation of conscience in the introduction to Der moderne Mensch. Versuch einer Lebensführung, Stuttgart, 1904.
• 53. Paul Ree, 1849–1901. Die Entstehung des Gewissens, Berlin, 1885.
• 54. Socrates, 470–399 B.C.
• 55. Plato, 427–347 B.C.
• 56. Aeschylus, 525–456 B.C., in his Oresteia trilogy.
• 57. >Euripides, c. 480–406 B.C., deals with this subject in Electra and in Orestes.<
• 58. See note 4.

The Gospel of John is therefore not only an historical account of the event in Palestine, but also a description of the seven stages of the Christian initiation. Those who have undergone this do not need external evidence of the historical event, because they already know it from the Akasha Chronicle. This is also the path from the historical to the mystical Christ.

With the help of these documents, it is no longer difficult for us to resolve the apparent contradictions in the Gospels. The men who wrote them describe the events in Palestine according to what they each knew from their own initiation. That is why, as far as the inner experiences are concerned, the Gospel written by the man initiated by the Christ Himself is the most important. The other evangelists were initiated in different mystery temples. So when they saw the same great drama, which had been presented in an exemplary way in the initiation temples, unfold as a real event in physical life at Golgotha, they knew that the great initiator of humanity had come and that they could now describe the initiation drama and apply it to Christ Jesus. According as they turned their attention to one or another feature of his life, they saw and understood different phases of it.

But the ceremony of initiation was not the same in different temples, so they often gave the same events in different ways and in different words. So they also gave different versions of Jesus' last words on the cross. In Matthew and Mark, they are as follows: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? [Elohai, Elohai lama sabachthani! - My gods, why have you left me, why have you forsaken me?]

These words are not an initiation formula in the strict sense in Matthew and Mark. After the initiate in the Egyptian or Pythagorean mysteries had been placed in a coffin or stretched out on a cross by hierophants, he lived in the spiritual world for three and a half days. When he was resurrected, everything he had experienced was clearly present in his consciousness. It was a deeply moving moment for him when all these experiences arose from within him like powerful, living images. At that moment, words such as “My God, how you have glorified me!” escaped his lips.

In the Nordic mysteries, in which the initiate had, as it were, extinguished his own soul life and merged with the cosmos, another exclamation escaped him, such as: “My God, why have you forsaken me!” The experiences he then had in the spiritual world gave him the answer to this question. These words are therefore not an exclamation of pain, but a repetition of the initiation ceremony and an expression of the overwhelming impressions that the initiate has received in the spiritual world.

[The two initiations were to merge: the extinguishing of one's own inner self, merging into the great cosmos, was compressed into the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The answer was given to him by the spiritual world outside.

The fact that the evangelists rendered Jesus' words from the cross in different ways is due to their different initiations. They saw the Golgotha mystery as an act in the initiation drama, and each of them had focused their attention on words and expressions that corresponded to what they were accustomed to seeing and hearing on that occasion. That is why Mark, who was initiated into the northern mysteries, was able to hear the words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” While Luke, the therapist, who had developed a particular ability for great self-mastery as an instrument of the healing powers of the cosmos, naturally had to hear different words. In the temples where the therapists were trained, it was understood that the initiate's own inner self must first be silenced if the spiritual powers of the cosmos were to be able to work through him, and the success of his work was based precisely on his ability to completely forget himself and to be only a tool for higher powers. That is why Luke heard the words from the cross: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” For these words were the words of the initiated therapist in the last act of initiation - and which Luke was accustomed to hearing.

[Overcoming the powers of thought - John.
Overcoming the powers of feeling - Luke.
Training of the magical powers of the will - Mark.
Harmony - Matthew.

In Christ, as the greatest of all initiates, the magical art of healing and wisdom were united, and therefore each of the evangelists was able to place into his mouth the words that he already knew from his own temple of initiation.

John, as the one initiated by Christ Himself, looked deeper into His nature than anyone else and therefore understood His mission on earth better than anyone else. To understand Jesus' mission, we must first realize the goal of our earth. What is the actual mission of the earth? Our earth is, as we know, a reincarnation of other planetary beings. In a previous incarnation, it was the moon; before that, the sun; and before the solar period, it had been Saturn. If we look back at the last one, the lunar period, we find no signs of what we might call love – neither at the lower nor at the higher stages of development. There was no inner attraction from being to being, no spiritual love on the Moon. Instead, the beings that lived there were driven to work together by an unconscious, instinctive law. When a weight pushes down a scale, one does not speak of love. Nor can this law, which drove these beings to each other, be called love. Wisdom was slowly implanted during the development of the moon, and that is why we find wisdom everywhere on our earth.

In the same way, love is to be implanted during the evolution of the earth, so that during the next incarnation on earth, love will radiate towards all beings – just as we now encounter wisdom everywhere. This love, which during the Lemurian period only functioned at the lowest level as physical love, should become more and more perfected and spiritualized with the evolution of the Earth, so that in the next incarnation on Earth, as Jupiter, everything should be permeated and radiate with love, just as everything is now permeated with wisdom.

Six hundred years before Christ, humanity received the teaching of compassion and love for the first time through Buddha. But if some people in our day are mature enough to be able to realize this teaching, it is through the spiritual power that the Christ has brought to the human race. Let us demonstrate this with an example. If we think, for example, of the Sistine Madonna: we can evoke the image in our memory, we can also partially understand it. But does that mean we can paint it? There is a big difference between understanding a thing and executing it. And just as it is greater to be able to paint the picture than merely to understand it, so too is the power of love more than just the teaching of love and compassion.

The Christ poured this power of love and compassion into humanity, but this could not happen without the Golgotha mystery. The great mission of the Christ was to give people the first impulse of love in the spiritual sense. And the disciple whom he himself initiated was, of course, the closest to understanding and recognizing this. He could entrust his deepest secret to him. Until then, only blood ties had united people. Now a spiritual bond was to be established that would connect soul with soul just as intimately and closely as the blood tie between mother and son. In the words that the Christ spoke from the cross to his mother: “Mother, behold your son,” and to the disciple: “Behold your mother,” he established a completely new relationship between people. The whole future of earthly love speaks from the cross at this moment. This was the great brotherly love of men, the bond of universal brotherhood, which was established here as a model for the future development of the earth. It was a spiritual relationship between a mother in spirit and a son in spirit; and in the words spoken from the cross at this moment lies the whole future of love. John had to write these words down so that people could understand the great impulse that the Christ has given them.

Jesus could not tell his disciples everything at the time. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

But the spirit should reveal what lies in the seed buried in the earth, what springs forth from the night of death; and then it will be understood what lies hidden in the soul of man.

Around the year 3101 BC, as we already know, the old clairvoyance had slowly begun to fade in individuals; and the spiritual world had become increasingly inaccessible to them. However, as clairvoyance disappeared, self-awareness had been developed to the same extent – and by the time of Jesus it had reached full development. But in order to maintain it, Christ's message was necessary, that the Kingdom of Heaven had come.

But the time of Kali-Yuga, the dark age of humanity, which began in 3101 BC, ended in 1899. And in our time we are facing a different development. New soul powers are to be developed in people, and in 1932 to 1933 the time will come when certain clairvoyant powers will arise almost automatically from the depths of the soul in a larger number of people. But in order to prevent dismay and confusion from spreading too much during this time, it is necessary that there are guides who can tell people what to do with these new powers. For only the spiritually prepared know what to seek. Only they know and recognize that there is a spiritual world.

Through occult training, a person can already now get spiritual eyes and can then see the spiritual being of Christ in the astral atmosphere of the earth, because these words are true: “I am close to you every day until the end of the world.” But at a certain point in time, a large number of people will be able to see into the spiritual world in a natural way. And if they are not taught by spiritually prepared people, they can easily be driven to madness by fear and terror because they do not know and understand what they are seeing. [When they are told, when they will know that there is a spiritual world, they will be able to recognize it and create harmony. What will appear to the spiritual eyes in the astral sphere of the earth for a number of people is the spiritual appearance of Christ. This is what is called the return of Christ.

Just as Christ once walked on earth in a physical body and was seen by a number of people with their physical eyes, so in the next period he will be visible to all people in the astral world. This era will last approximately five hundred years from 1899 to 2500. During this time, people will begin to ascend to the spiritual world, where he is, and all eyes will be opened so that humanity in its entirety will understand and recognize who the Christ is.

But we must start preparing people for this great moment now. Just as John the Baptist was to prepare people for the coming of Christ on Earth in his time, so Theosophy must help people in our day to face the times that lie ahead. For the time is near when people shall receive the strength to realize the Kingdom of Christ here on Earth. If we embrace our mission in this spirit, Theosophy will spread more and more peace and tolerance in the world. And when the ability to see the Christ becomes more common, other abilities will also arise. Then the great helpers of the Christ will gradually emerge again. First of all, the great Buddha, who was the first to spread the teaching of compassion and love. After him come the messengers of the Great Lodge, the twelve leaders of Earth's evolution, who see in the Christ the thirteenth and most noble, around whom they gather. Other teachers have preceded them to prepare men, and after them others will come to explain clearly the great mission of the Christ.

Those who have venerated Buddha in one incarnation will understand in the following incarnation that Buddha pointed to the Christ. What Buddha himself said six hundred years before Christ is not the same as what he has to say in our days. Each of these teachings is meant to say its word about the great Christ impulse. All religions have their roots, but all religions also have their development. And all have had the same message for humanity. Thus Zarathustra, thus the Old Testament, thus also the Chaldean-Egyptian records, thus also theosophy in our days. We are to accept all these messengers from heaven so that the great wisdom teaching can develop in the most diverse ways. The great initiates were all in agreement, for they knew that each had his contribution to make and that all these contributions were to flow together. So also each Rishi had his special mission, but what the seven Rishis proclaimed each for himself melted into one great message to mankind.

But what was meant to sound harmonious, men changed into disharmony. The sons of the gods had brought to men what they each had to give them. But among them there were some who joined with human egoism to disturb the harmony. And so the disharmony grew greater and greater. This happened when the sons of the gods took a liking to the daughters of men. In other words, when divine wisdom descended to earth and united with human selfishness. We must approach the truth and develop through love.

Not only souls, but also worldviews must love each other. The Christ has given the impulse for the great brotherhood that will unite all people and all religions. When human wisdom has been sacrificed for divine wisdom, we will rediscover the daughters of the gods, spiritual wisdom. Then the sons of men will rise to the daughters of the gods. And with that, the other half of the Earth's evolution begins. The Christ impulse is the great unifying and harmonizing force that we must allow to work on our soul life. We must allow this impulse to work not only on our minds but also on our feelings, and then we will feel the infinite warmth that flows towards us, then we will sense how even the dead letter has the power to convey to us the impulse that has poured out from Golgotha over the whole world to lead humanity ever higher and higher.

Through theosophy and spiritual science, people should understand the Gospels better and better. And the deeper we penetrate into them, the more warmth will flow to us from there. Not theory, but feeling is the essential thing. But it is vain to preach love if people do not receive wisdom through spiritual science, for without wisdom no one can come to love. As in the beginning of time the Sons of God descended and united with the daughters of the earth, so in the end of time the Sons of Man shall find the Sons of God and ascend to them.

[The ascent will then appear as the second half of the Earth mission. The Gospel of John has the power to convey the impulse of Christ directly to us. The more we will be aglow with that fire in the spirit of which Christ spoke, the more we will read the Gospel of John.

On March 13, the fourth lecture evening of the winter took place at the "Freie Literarische Gesellschaft" in Berlin. A one-act drama "Märtyrer" by Georg Reicke and modern Iyrian poems were performed, both by the royal court actor Arthur Kraußneck. The lecture was preceded by a conference held by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. In particular, he sought to derive Nietzsche's Iyrian poems and two ballads by Maurice Maeterlinck, which were presented, from the nature of these two personalities. Nietzsche's poetry mostly emerges from a mood that at first glance makes us wonder at the proud philosopher who, rejoicing, has replaced the God of the hereafter with the superman of this world, who wants to show people that they should be creators, not recipients of divine powers. But Nietzsche, the poet, is Nietzsche, the man on whom individual life weighs heavily, who has known happiness all too little. Nietzsche created an image of the laughing philosopher out of the suffering human being. The greatness of this image crushed Nietzsche, the human being. His poems grew out of such moods. What Nietzsche, the suffering individual, felt towards the lofty image of his superman flows out of his poems. - Maeterlinck is averse to the crude, in-your-face facts of life. Not the big words, not the strong feelings and passions are for him the heralds of the deepest things in the world. When I see a person only fleetingly, something can happen between his soul and mine that is deeper and more divine than what is expressed in the words of a Plato or a Fichte or in the passion of an Othello. Such crude sayings, such passions only obscure for us the deeper things that can be seen in the seemingly most mundane events. The two ballads performed show how simple means Maeterlinck uses to express shocking truths.

Mr. Kraußneck's performance made a deep impression on the audience. Reicke's one-act play depicts the sad situation of the family of a pastor who has to give up his office because his conscience has brought him into conflict with the teachings of the church. The wife is dead. The daughter alone has to earn a living for her father and siblings. She could marry and find happiness. But she is not allowed to leave her position within the family. The way her father tries to keep her in this position and her heartbreaking renunciation of happiness is portrayed in a gripping way in connection with the characters. Mr. Kraußneck found a way to bring out the subtle psychology of the work. No less effective was the expression he gave to the poignant poems of Nietzsche and Maeterlinck.

The final piece was a legend "The Four Robbers" by Ludwig Jacobowski, written in a genuinely folksy tone. This poet seeks the simplest, unaffected tones and thus achieves a height of art that we admire in the perfect folk song.

In these two lectures I should like to speak to you from the point of view of Spiritual Research, on the question so frequently and urgently put: “What is the meaning of life?” If in these two evenings we are to get anywhere near this subject we shall have to create first of all a kind of foundation or basis, on which to construct the edifice of knowledge, and from this deduce the answer in outline.

When we contemplate the things around us, those which exist for our ordinary sense-perception and our ordinary experience, and then turn to our own life, the result is at best the formulation of a question—the presentation of an oppressive, a painful problem. We see how the beings of external nature arise and decay. We can observe every year in spring how the earth, stimulated by the forces of the sun and the universe, bestows on us the plants which sprout and bud and bear fruit through the summer. Towards autumn, we see how they decay and pass away. Some remain indeed throughout the year, some for very many years, for instance, our long-lived trees. But of these also we know that even though in many cases they may outlive us, they also pass away at last, disappear and sink down into that which, in the great world of nature, is the realm of the lifeless. Especially do we know that even in the greatest phenomena of nature there rules this growth and decay: even the continents on which our civilisations develop did not exist in times past, for they have only risen in the course of time, and we know for certain that they will one day pass away.

Thus we see around us growth and decay; we can trace it in the plant kingdom and in the mineral kingdom as well as in the animal kingdom. What is the meaning of it all? Ever an arising, ever a passing away all around us! What is the meaning of this arising and this passing away? When we consider our own life, and see how we have lived through years and decades, we can recognise there also this coming into being and decay. When we call to mind the days of our childhood: they are vanished and only the memory of them remains. This stirs within us anxious questionings about life. The most important thing is that we ourselves have progressed a little through it, that we have become wiser. Usually, however, it is only when we have accomplished something, that we know how it ought to have been done. If we are no longer in a position to do a thing better, we still know how much better it might have been done, so that actually our mistakes become a part of our life; but it is just through our mistakes and errors that we gain our widest experiences.

A question is put to us, and it seems as if that which we can grasp with our senses and our intellect is unable to answer it. That is the position of man to-day; all that surrounds him confronts him with the problem, with the question: “What is the meaning of existence as a whole?” and particularly “Why has man his peculiar position within this existence?”

An extremely interesting legend of Hebrew antiquity tells us that in those old Hebrew times there was a consciousness that this anxious question which we formulated as to the meaning of life, and especially as to the meaning of man, occurs not only to man, but to beings quite other than man. This legend is extremely instructive and runs as follows:—When the Elohim were about to create man after their own image and likeness, the so-called ministering angels, certain spiritual beings of a lower grade than the Elohim themselves, asked Jahve or Jehovah: “Why is man to be made in the image and likeness of God!” Then Jehovah collected—so continues the legend—the animals and the plants which could already spring forth on earth before man was there in his earthly form, and He gathered together the angels also, the so-called ministering angels—those who immediately served Him. To those He showed the animals and plants and asked them what they were called, what were their names? But the Angels did not know the names of the animals and plants. Then man was created, as he was before the Fall. And again Jehovah gathered around him Angels, animals and plants, and in the presence of the Angels he asked man what the animals whom He made to pass by in succession before man’s eyes, were called, what their names were. And behold! Man was able to answer: “This animal has this name, that animal has that, this plant has this name, that plant has that,” Then Jehovah asked man: “And what is thine own name?” And man said: “I must be called Adam.” (Adam is related to Adama, and means: “Out of the earth: earth-being”). Jehovah then asked man: “And what am I myself to be called?” “Thou shalt be called Adonai,” man replied, “Thou art the Lord of all created beings of the earth.” The Angels now began to have an idea of the meaning of man’s existence on the earth. Though religious tradition and religious writings often express the most important riddle of life in the simplest way, there are many difficulties in understanding them, because we have to get behind their simplicity. We must first penetrate into the meaning behind them. If we succeed in this, great wisdom and deep knowledge are revealed. It may well be so with this legend, which we shall just keep in mind for a moment, for these two lectures will give us, in some sort, an answer to the question which it contains.

Now you know that there is a religion which has put the question as to the meaning and value of life by placing it in a wonderful form into the mouth of its own founder. You all know the story of the Buddha, how it tells us that when he left the palace in which he was born, and came face to face with the real facts of life, of which in that incarnation he had as yet learned nothing, he was most profoundly dismayed, and pronounced the judgment: “Life is suffering,” which as we know comprises the four statements: “Birth is suffering—disease is suffering—old age is suffering—death is suffering,” and to which is added “to be united with those we do not love is suffering, to be separated from those we love is suffering, not to be able to attain that to which we aspire is suffering.” We know then that to the adherents of this religion the meaning of life can be summed up by saying: “Life, which is suffering, only acquires a meaning when it is conquered, when it transcends itself.” All the various religions, all philosophies and views of life, are, after all, attempts to answer the question as to the meaning of life. Now, we are not going to approach the question in an abstract, philosophical way. Rather we shall review some of the phenomena of life, some of the facts of life, from the point of view of Spiritual Science, in order to see if a deeper occult view of life furnishes us with something wherewith to approach this question as to the meaning of life. Let us take the matter up again at the point we have already touched—the annual growth and decay in physical nature, the life, growth and decay in the plant world. In Spring we see the plants spring up out of the earth, and that which we see there as germinating, budding life, calls forth our joy and delight. We become aware that the whole of our existence is bound up with the plant world, for without it we could not exist. We feel how that which springs up out of the earth at the approach of Summer is related to our own life. We feel in the Autumn how that which in a certain sense belongs to us, again decays.

It is natural for us to compare with our own life that which we see germinating and decaying. For an external observation based only on what can be perceived by the senses and judged by the intellect, it is very natural to compare the vernal springing up of the plants with, let us say, man’s awakening in the morning; and the withering and decaying of the plant world in Autumn with man’s falling asleep at night. But such a comparison is quite superficial. It would leave out of account the real events with which we can already become acquainted through the elementary truths of occultism. What happens when we fall asleep at night? We have learned that we leave our physical and etheric bodies behind in bed. With our astral body and our ego we withdraw from our physical body and etheric body. During the night, from the moment of our falling asleep to the moment of our waking, we are with our astral body and our ego in a spiritual world. From this spiritual world we draw the forces which we require. Not only our astral body and our ego, but our physical and etheric bodies go through a kind of restorative process during our sleep at night, when the latter lie in bed, separated from the astral body and ego.

When one looks clairvoyantly down from the ego upon the astral, the etheric and physical bodies, one sees what has been destroyed by waking life; one sees that that which finds its expression in fatigue, is present as a destructive process and is made good during the night. The whole conscious life of the daytime is in fact, if we look at it in its connection with human consciousness and in its relation to the physical and etheric bodies, a kind of destructive process as regards the physical and etheric bodies. We always destroy something by it, and the fact that we destroy expresses itself in our fatigue. That which is destroyed is made good again at night.

Now if we look at what happens when we have withdrawn our astral body and our ego out of the etheric and physical bodies, it is as if we had left behind us a devastated field. But in the moment we are out of them, out of the physical and etheric bodies, they begin gradually to restore themselves. It is as if the forces belonging to the physical and etheric bodies begin to bud and blossom, and as if an entire vegetation should arise on the scene of destruction. The further night advances and the longer sleep lasts, the more do the forces in the etheric body bud and blossom. The nearer morning approaches and the more we re-enter our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body, the more a kind of withering or drying up sets in as regards the physical and etheric bodies.

In short, when the ego and the astral body look down from the spiritual world on the physical and etheric bodies, they see at night, at the moment of falling asleep, the same phenomenon which we see in the great world outside, when the plants bud and germinate in Spring. Therefore, to make a real comparison, we must compare our falling asleep and the earlier part of the sleep condition at night with Spring in nature; and the time of our awakening, the time in which the ego and the astral body begin to re-enter the physical and etheric bodies, with Autumn, in external nature. Spring corresponds to our falling asleep and Autumn to our awakening.

But how does the matter stand, when the occult observer, he who really can look into the spiritual world, directs his gaze to external nature and watches what takes place there in the course of the year? That which then presents itself to the occult vision teaches us that we must not compare things in an outward, but in an inward way. Occult observation shows that just as the physical and etheric bodies of man are connected with his astral body and his ego, so is there connected with our earth what we call the spiritual part of the earth. The earth also must be compared with a body, a widespread body. If we consider it only as far as its physical part is concerned, it is just as if we were to consider man with regard to his physical body only. We consider the earth completely when we consider it as the body of spiritual beings, in the same way in which, in the case of man, we consider the spirit as being connected with the body, yet there is a distinction. Man has a single nature controlling his physical and etheric bodies; a single psycho-spiritual nature belongs to that which is his physical human body and etheric human body. But there are a great many spirits belonging to the Earth-body. What in man’s psycho-spiritual nature is a unity, is, as regards that of the earth, a multiplicity. This is the chief distinction. With the exception of this difference everything else is in a certain way analogous. To occult vision is revealed how in the same measure as green plants come forth from the earth in Spring, those spirits whom we call the earth-spirits, withdraw from the earth. Only here again they do not, as is the case with man, absolutely leave the earth; they move round it, they pass in a certain way to the other side of the earth. When it is Summer in one hemisphere it is Winter in the other. In the case of the earth, the spiritual part moves from the northern to the southern hemisphere when Summer is approaching in the north. But that does not alter the fact that to the occult vision of a man who experiences the Spring on any given part of the globe, the spirits leave the earth; he sees how they rise and pass out into the cosmos. He does not see them move to the other side, but he sees them go away, in the same way as he sees the ego and the astral body leave man at the moment of his falling asleep. In the Autumn the earth-spirits approach and re-unite themselves with the earth. During the Winter, when the earth is covered with snow, the earth-spirits are directly united with the earth. In fact something similar then begins for the earth to what is found in man: a kind of self-consciousness. During the Summer the spiritual part of the earth knows nothing of what goes on around it in the universe. But in Winter the spirit of the earth knows what is happening in the universe around, just as man, on waking, knows and beholds what is taking place around him.

The analogy is thus complete, only it is the reverse of that which the outer consciousness draws. It is true that if we wish to go into the question fully, we cannot simply say: “When, in Spring, plants bud and spring from the earth, the earth spirits go away,” for with the budding and sprouting of plants there arise, as if out of the depths, out of the interior of the earth, other and mightier spirits. Therefore the mythologies were right when they distinguished between the higher and the nether gods. When man spoke of the gods who left the earth in Spring and returned in Autumn, he spoke of the higher gods. But there were mightier, older, gods, called by the Greeks the Chthonic gods. These arise in Summer when everything is budding and flourishing, and they descend again when in Winter the real earth spirits unite with the body of the earth.

Now, I should here like to mention that a certain idea, taken from scientific and occult research, is of immense importance for human life. For this shows us that when we consider the individual human being, we have really before us something like an image of the great Earth-being itself. What do we see when we turn towards plants which are beginning to sprout and bud? We see exactly the same as takes place in man when his inner life is active, we see how the one exactly corresponds to the other. How single plants are related to the human body, what their significance is for the human body, can only be recognised when such connections are understood. For it is in fact true that, on close examination, one sees how, when man falls asleep, everything begins to sprout and bud in his physical and etheric bodies: how a whole vegetation springs up in him: how man is in reality a tree or a garden in which plants are growing.

Whoever follows this with occult vision sees that the sprouting and germinating within man corresponds to what is germinating and budding in nature without. Thus you can form an idea of what will be possible when, in the future, Anthroposophy—often considered as foolishness to-day—is applied to life and made fruitful. We have for example, a man who has something wrong in his bodily life-activities. Let us now observe, when he falls asleep, what kind of plants are wanting when his physical and etheric bodies begin to develop their vegetation. When we see that on earth whole species of plants are missing, we know that something must be wrong with the life of the earth. And it is the same with the deficiency of certain plants in the physical and etheric bodies of man. In order to make good the defect we have only to seek on the earth for the plants which are missing in the man in question, and introduce their juices either in the form of diet or medicine and then we shall find the relation between medicine and disease. From this example, we see how Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science will intervene directly in life, but we are only at the beginning of these things.

In what I have just said I have given you, in a comparison drawn from nature, some idea of the composition of man and the connection of his whole being with the environment in which he is placed. We shall now look at the matter from a spiritual point of view. Here I would like to call attention to a matter that is of great importance, namely, that our anthroposophical outlook on life, while letting its gaze range over the evolution of mankind from the point of view of occultism, in order to decipher the meaning of existence, gives no preference to any one special creed, or any one view of life over any other. How often has it been emphasised in our occult movement that we can point to that which our earthly humanity experienced and developed immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe—the Flood. We passed through, as the first great post-Atlantean civilisation, the sacred civilisation of Ancient India. Here, at Copenhagen, we have already spoken of this old sacred Indian civilisation, and we laid stress upon the fact that it was so lofty, that that which has survived in the Vedas or in written tradition is only an echo of it. It is only in the Akashic Records that we can catch glimpses of the primeval teachings that issued from that time. There we gaze on heights which have not been re-attained.

The later epochs had quite a different mission. We know that a descent has taken place since then, but we know also that there will be again an ascent and that, as already mentioned, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science has to prepare this ascent. We know that in the seventh post-Atlantean age of civilisation, there will be a kind of renewal of the ancient, holy Indian civilisation. We do not give preference to any religious view or creed, for all are measured with the same measure, in every particular they are described: in each the kernel of truth is sought.

The important thing is that essentials be kept in view. We must not allow ourselves to stray in the consideration of the nature of each separate creed, and if we keep this in mind, in approaching the various points of view, we find one fundamental difference. We find views on life which are of a more oriental nature, and others which have permeated our Western civilisation. Once we make this clear to ourselves, we have something which throws light on the meaning of existence. We then find that the ancients were already in possession of something which we have to regain with difficulty, viz., the doctrine of reincarnation. The oriental stream possessed this as something springing from the profoundest depths of existence. You can still realise how the oriental mind shapes the whole of life from this doctrine, when you look at the relation of the oriental to his Bodhisattvas and his Buddhas. If you keep in view how little it concerns the oriental to select a single figure with this or that definite name, as the ruling power in human evolution, you see at once how he attaches much more importance to tracing the individuality which goes on from life to life. Orientals say that there are such and such a number of Bodhisattvas, high beings who have sprung from men, but who have gradually evolved to a height which we can describe by saying: A Being has passed through many incarnations, and then has become a Bodhisattva, as did Gautama, the son of King Sudhodana. He was Bodhisattva and became Buddha. The name Buddha, however, is given to many, because they passed through many incarnations, became Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the next higher stage, that of Buddhahood. The name Buddha is a generic name. It denotes a degree of human attainment, and has no sense apart from the spiritual being who goes through many incarnations. Brahmanism fully agrees with Buddhism in regarding the individual who goes through the different personalities, rather than the single person. It comes to the same whether the Buddhist says:—“A Bodhisattva is destined to ascend to the highest degree of human attainment, and for this he has to go through many incarnations; but for me the highest is the Buddha.” Or whether the adherent of Brahmanism says: “The Bodhisattvas are indeed highly developed beings, who ascend to Buddhahood, but they are inferior to the Avatars, who are higher spiritual individualities.” You see, consideration of the persisting spiritual entity is what characterises both these oriental points of view.

But now let us turn to the West, and see what is the thing of greatest importance there. In order to enter a little more deeply into this connection, we must consider the ancient Hebrew point of view, where the personal element enters. When we speak of Plato, of Socrates, of Michelangelo, of Charlemagne, or of others, we are always speaking of a person: we place before men the separate life of the personality with all that this personality has done for mankind. In our Western life we do not direct our attention to the life which has gone from personality to personality, for it has been the mission of Western civilisation to direct attention for a time to the single life. When in the East the Buddha is spoken of, it is understood that the designation “Buddha” is an honourable title which may be applied to many personalities. When, on the contrary, the name “Plato” is uttered, we know that this refers only to a single personality. This has been the education of the West.

Let us now turn to our own day. In Western civilisation, mankind has been trained for a time to direct his attention to the personality, but the individual element, the “individuality” has now to be added to the personal element. We stand now at the point where we must reconquer the individual element, but strengthened, vivified, by the contemplation of the personal.

Let us take a definite case. In this connection we look back to the old Hebrew civilisation, which preceded that of the West. Let us turn our attention to the mighty personality of the prophet Elijah. To begin with, we may describe him as a personality. In the West he is seldom regarded in any other way. If we leave aside details and look at the personality from a wider point of view, we see that Elijah was something very important for our evolution. He gives the impression of a forerunner of the Christ-Impulse.

On looking back to the time of Moses, we see how something had been proclaimed to the people; we see that the God in man was proclaimed. “I AM the God Who was, Who is, Who is to come.” He has to be comprehended as in the ego, but among the ancient Hebrews He was comprehended as the Folk-soul of the race. Elijah went beyond Moses, though he did not make clear that the ego dwells in the single human individual as Divinity, for he could not make clear to the people of his time more than the world was then able to receive. While even the Mosaic Culture of the old Hebrews was conscious of the fact that “the Highest lies in the Ego,” and that this Ego found expression in the time of Moses in the Group-Soul of the people, we find Elijah already pointing to the individual human soul. We see a forward leap in evolution. But a further impulse was needed, and again a forerunner appeared, whom we know as the personality of John the Baptist. Once more it was in a significant expression that the quality of John the Baptist as a “Forerunner” found expression. A great occult fact is here indicated that man, as primeval man, once possessed ancient clairvoyance, so that he could look into the spiritual world—into Divine activity—but he gradually approached towards materialism; the vision of the spiritual world was cut off. To this fact John the Baptist alludes when he says: “Change the attitude of your soul; look no longer at what you can gain in the physical world: be watchful, a new impulse is at hand (he means the Christ-Impulse). Therefore I say unto you, seek the spiritual world that is in your midst; there the spiritual element appears with the Christ-Impulse.” Through this saying John the Baptist became a forerunner of the Christ-Impulse.

Now we can direct our gaze to another personality, to the remarkable personality of the painter Raphael. This remarkable personality presents itself to us in an unusual way. In the first place, we need only compare Raphael to—let us say—Titian, a painter of a later period. Whoever has an eye for such things, even if he look at the reproductions, will find the distinction. Look at the pictures of Raphael and at those of Titian! Raphael painted in such a way that he put Christian ideas into his pictures. He painted for the people of Europe as Christians of the West. His pictures are comprehensible to all Christians of the West, and will become so more and more. Take, on the other hand, the later painters. They painted almost exclusively for the Latin race, so that even the schisms of the Church found expression in their pictures.

With which pictures was Raphael most successful? With those in which he was able to demonstrate the impulses that lie in Christianity. He is at his best where he could represent some relationship of the Jesus-Child to the Madonna, where this Christ-relation appears as something that is an impulse to feeling. These are the things which he really painted best. We have for instance, no Crucifixion of his, but we have a Transfiguration. Wherever he can paint the budding and germinating aspect, that which is self-revealing, he paints with joy and there he paints his greatest and best pictures.

It is the same with the impression which his pictures produce. If some day you come to Germany and see the Sistine Madonna in Dresden, you will realise that that work of art—of which it is said that the Germans may rejoice to have such a celebrated picture among them, Yes! that they may even regard it as the flower of the painters’ art—you will realise that this work discloses a mystery of existence.

When Goethe in his time traveled from Leipsic to Dresden, he heard something quite different about the picture of the Madonna. The officials of the Dresden Gallery said something like this to him: “We have also a picture of Raphael’s, but it is nothing particular. It is badly painted. The look of the Child, the whole Child itself, everything to do with the Child, is common. The same with the Madonna. One can only think that she is painted by a dauber. And then these figures down below of which one does not know whether they are meant for children’s heads or angels!” Goethe heard this coarse opinion, so that at first he had no right appreciation of the picture. Everything which we hear about the picture at the present time only came to be understood later on, and the fact that Raphael’s pictures made their triumphal march through the world in reproductions, is a result of this better appreciation. We have only to call to mind what England has done for the reproduction and circulation of these pictures. But what was effected in England by the trouble which has been taken for the reproduction and circulation of Raphael’s pictures, will only be recognised when people have learned to look at the matter from the point of view of spiritual science.

Thus through his pictures, Raphael becomes for us the forerunner of a Christianity which will be cosmopolitan. Protestantism has long regarded the Madonna as specially Catholic; but to-day the Madonna has penetrated everywhere into Protestant countries and we are rising more to the occult interpretation, to a higher inter-denominational Christianity. So it will be more and more. If we may hope for such results as regards interdenominational Christianity, what Raphael has done will also help us in Anthroposophy.

It is remarkable that the above three personalities confront us in this manner: all three have the quality of being forerunners of Christianity. Now let us direct occult observation to these three persons. What does it teach us? It teaches us that the same individuality lived in Elijah, in John the Baptist and in Raphael. However impossible it may seem, it is the same soul which lived in Elijah and in Raphael.

When it is revealed to occult vision—which searches and investigates and does not merely compare in a superficial way—that it is the same soul that is present in Elijah, in John the Baptist and in Raphael, we may ask how it is possible that Raphael the painter becomes the vehicle for the individuality which lived in John the Baptist? One can conceive that this remarkable soul of John the Baptist lived in the forces which were present in Raphael.

Occult research comes in here again, not merely to put forth theories, but to tell us how things actually are in life. How do people write biographies of Raphael to-day? Even the best are so written that they simply state that Raphael was born on Good Friday of the year 1483. It is not for nothing that Raphael was born on a Good Friday. This birth already proclaimed his exceptional position in Christianity and shows that in the deepest and most significant way he was connected with the Christian Mysteries. It was on a Good Friday that Raphael was born. His father was Giovanni Santi. He died when Raphael was eleven years old. At the age of eight years his father sent him as a pupil to a painter, who was, however, not of any special eminence. But if one realises what was in Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, one gets a peculiar impression which is further strengthened when the matter is investigated in the Akashic Records. There it appears that there lived in the soul of Giovanni Santi much more than could be expressed in his personality and then we can agree with the duchess, who at his death said: “A man full of light and truth and fervent faith has died.” As occultist, one can say that in him there lived a much greater painter than appeared outwardly. The outer faculties, which depend on the physical and etheric organs, were not developed in Giovanni Santi. That was the original cause why he could not bring the capacities of his soul to full expression; but really a great painter lived in him.

Giovanni Santi died when Raphael was eleven years old. If we now follow what takes place, we see that man certainly loses his body, but that the longings, the aspirations, the impulses of his soul continue to exist, and continue to be active where they are most closely connected.

There will come a time when Anthroposophy will be made fruitful for life, as it can already be made fruitful by those who have grasped it vitally and not merely theoretically. Permit me here to interpolate something before going on with Raphael. What I tell you in the examples I give is not mere speculation; on the contrary, it is always taken from real life. Let us suppose that I had children to educate. Whoever pays attention to the capabilities of children can notice the individual element in every child, but such experiences can only be made by those who educate children. Now if one of the parents of a child dies while the child is still young and the other parent is still living, the following may be noticed: Certain inclinations will show themselves in the child which were not there before and which consequently cannot be explained. But one who has charge of children has to occupy himself with these things. Such a one would do well if he said: “People generally look upon what is in Anthroposophical books as mere folly: I will not take this for granted, but will try whether it is right or not.” Then he will soon be able to say “I find forces at work which were already there and again there are other forces playing into those which were already there.” Let us suppose that the father has passed through the gates of death and there now appears in the child, with some strength, certain qualities which had belonged to the father. If this assumption is made and if the matter is looked upon in this way, the knowledge which comes to us through Anthroposophy is applied to life in a sensible way, and then, as is soon discovered, we find our way in life, whereas before we did not. Thus the person who has gone through the gateway of death, remains united, through his forces, with those with whom he was connected in life. People do not observe things closely enough, otherwise they would see more often that children are quite different before the death of their parents from what they are afterwards. At present there is not enough regard for these things, but the time is coming when they will receive attention.

Giovanni Santi, the father, died when Raphael was eleven years old; he had not been able to attain great perfection as a painter, but powerful imagination was left to him and this was then developed in the soul of Raphael. We do not depreciate Raphael, if, while observing his soul, we say: Giovanni Santi lives on in Raphael, who appears to us as a completed personality, as one incapable of higher attainment because a dead man gives life to his work.

We now realise that in the soul of Raphael are reborn the vigorous forces of John the Baptist and in addition, there live in his soul the forces of Giovanni Santi; that together these two were able to bring to fruition the result which confronts us as Raphael. It is true that to-day we cannot yet speak publicly of such extraordinary things, but in fifty years’ time this may be possible, because evolution is progressing quickly, and the opinions held to-day are rapidly approaching their decline. Whoever accepts such things, sees that in Anthroposophy our task is to regard life everywhere from a new point of view. Just as in the future people will heal in the way to which I have referred, so they will reflect on the strange miracle of life wherein men attract to their assistance, from the spiritual world, the achievements of those who have passed through the gates of death.

I should like to draw your attention to two things, when speaking on the riddles of life; things which so truly can illuminate the meaning of life. One is the fate that has befallen the works of Raphael. Whoever looks to-day at the reproductions of his pictures, does not see what Raphael painted. And if he travels to Dresden or to Rome, he finds them so much spoiled that he can hardly be said to see the pictures of Raphael. It is easy to see what will become of them when we consider the fate of Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” which is falling more and more into decay. These pictures, in times to come, will fall into dust, and everything which great men have created will disappear. When these things have vanished, we may well ask: “What is the meaning of this creation and decay!” We shall see that really nothing remains of what the single personality has created.

Still another fact I should like to put before you, and that is the following: If when to-day, with Anthroposophy as an instrument, we desire to understand, and must understand, Christianity as an Impulse that works for the future, we have need of certain fundamental ideas through which we know how the Christ-Impulse will continue to work. This we require. And we can point to a development of Christianity for which Anthroposophy is necessary. We can point to a person who presents Anthroposophical truth in special form—namely, that of aphorisms. When we approach him we find much that is significant for Anthroposophy. This person is the German poet Novalis. When we study his writings, we find that he describes the future of Christianity from out of the occult truths it contains. Anthroposophy teaches us that we have here to do with the same individuality as is in Raphael, John the Baptist and Elijah.

We have here again to glance into the further development of Christianity. That is a fact of an occult nature, for no one reaches this result by reasoning. Let us once more put the different pictures together. We have the tragic fact of the destruction of the creations and works of single personalities. Raphael appears and allows his interdenominational Christianity to flow into the souls of men. But we have a foreboding that some day his creations will be destroyed, that his works will fall to dust. Then Novalis appears to take in hand the fulfilment of the task and continue the work he had begun. The idea is no longer now so tragic. We see that just as the personality dissolves in its sheaths, so the work dissolves, but the essential kernel lives on and continues the work it had begun. Here once again it is the individual to which our attention is directed. But because we have kept firmly in mind the Western view of life and therewith the personality, we are able to grasp the full significance of the individuality. Thus we see how important it is that the East directed its attention to the individuality, to the Bodhisattvas, who go through many incarnations; and how important it is that the West first directed its attention to the contemplation of the single personality, in order, later on, to grasp what the individuality is.

Now I think there are many Anthroposophists who will say: “Well, this is something we have just to believe, when Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis are mentioned.” For many the main thing is that they must just believe. It is essentially the same as when from the scientific side some fact is asserted that many people have to believe, such as that this or that spectrum appears when certain metals are examined by spectrum analysis, or when for instance, the nebula in Orion is so examined. Some people have certainly investigated it, but the others, the majority, have to believe. But that is after all not the essential point. The essential point is that Anthroposophy is at the beginning of its development, and will bring souls to the point of examining for themselves such matters as we have discussed to-day. In this respect, Anthroposophy will help forward human evolution very rapidly.

I have put before you a few instances, which I submit as resulting from the occult point of view regarding life. Take only the three points which we have considered and you will see that by knowing in what way life is related to the Spirit of the Earth, the art of healing can be given a new direction and supplied with new impulses; how Raphael can only be understood when not only his personal forces are taken into account, but also those forces which came from his father. The third point is that we can educate children when we know the interplay of forces acting on them. Outwardly people admit that they are surrounded by numberless forces which incessantly influence them, that man is continually influenced by air, the temperature, his surroundings and the other Karmic conditions under which he lives. That these things do not interfere with his freedom everyone knows. They are the factors with which we have to reckon to-day. But that man is continually surrounded by spiritual forces and that these spiritual forces must be investigated is what Anthroposophy has to teach men: they will have to learn to take these forces into account and will have to reckon with them in important cases of health and disease, of education and life. They will have to be mindful of such influences as come from without, from the super-sensible world, when, for instance, some one’s friend dies and he then shares those sympathies and ideas that belonged to him. What has been said does not hold good for children only, but for all ages. It is not at all necessary that people should know with their ordinary consciousness in what way the forces of the super-sensible world are active. Their general frame of mind may show it, even their state of health or illness may show it. And those things which signify the connection of man’s life on the physical plane with the facts of the super-sensible worlds have a still wider bearing.

I should like to put before you a simple fact which will show you the nature of this connection, a fact which is not invented, but has been observed in many cases. A man notices at a certain time that he has feelings which formerly he did not know; that he has sympathies and antipathies which formerly he did not know; that he succeeds easily where before he found difficulties. He cannot explain it. His surroundings cannot explain it to him, nor do the facts of life itself give him any clue. In such a case it can be found, when we observe accurately (it is true that one must have an eye for such things), that now he knows things which he did not know before and does things which he could not do before. If we examine matters further and have had experience of the teachings of Anthroposophy, it may be that we shall hear something like the following from him: “I do not know what to think of myself. I dream of a person whom I have never seen in my life. He comes into my dreams, though I never had anything to do with him.” If we follow the matter up it will be found that till now he had no occasion to occupy himself with this person. But this person had died and now first approaches him in the spiritual world. When he had come near enough to him he appeared to him in a dream which was yet more than a dream. From this person, whom he had not known in life, who, however, after death, gained influence on his life, came the impulses which he had not known before. It is not a question of saying: “It is only a dream.” It is far more a question of what the dream contained. It may be something which, although in the form of a dream, is nearer to reality than the outer consciousness. Does it matter at all whether Edison invents something in a dream or in clear waking consciousness? What matters is whether the invention is true, is useful. So also it does not matter whether an experience takes place in dream-consciousness or in physical consciousness; what is of importance is whether the experience is true or false.

If we now summarise what we are able to understand from what has just been said, we may say “It is clear to us when we learn to apply Anthroposophy, that life appears to us in quite a different light from before.” In this respect people who are very learned in materialistic ways of thought are but children. We can convince ourselves of this at any time. When to-day I came here by train I took up the pamphlet of a German physiologist in its second edition. In it the writer says that we cannot speak of “active attention” in the soul, of directing the attention of the soul to anything, but that everything depends on the functioning of the various ganglia of the brain; and because the tracks have to be made by thoughts, everything depends on how the separate brain cells function. No intensity of the soul intervenes, it depends entirely upon whether this or that connecting thread in our brain has been pulled or not. These learned materialists are really children. When we lay our hands on anything of this kind one cannot help thinking how guileless these people are! In the same pamphlet one finds the statement that lately the centenary of Darwin was celebrated, and that on that occasion, both qualified and unqualified people spoke. The author of the pamphlet thought himself of course quite specially qualified. And then follows the whole brain-cell theory and its application. But how is it with the logic of the matter? When one is used to considering things in accordance with truth and then sees what these great children offer people concerning the meaning of life, the thought occurs to one that after all it comes to the same as if someone should say that it was simply nonsense that a human will had any part in the way the railways intersect the face of Europe! For it is just the same as if at a given time one considered all the engines in their varied parts and functions, and said that these are organised in such and such a way and run in so many directions. But the different roads meet at certain junctions and through them the engines can be turned in any direction. What would occur if this were done would be a great disarrangement of trains on the European railways. Just as little, however, can it be asserted that what takes place in the human brain cells as the life of human thought depends only on the condition of the cells. If such learned people then happen, without previous knowledge, to hear a lecture on Anthroposophy, they look upon that which is said as the most utter nonsense. They are firmly convinced that a human will can never have anything to do with the mode and manner in which the European engines run, but that it depends on how they are heated and driven.

So we see how at the present day we stand confronted by questions regarding the meaning of life. On the one side there is darkness, on the other the spiritual facts press in upon us. If we grasp what has been said to-day we can, with this as a basis, put the question before our soul in the way in which it has to be put in Anthroposophy, namely: What is the meaning of life and existence, and especially of human life and human existence?

If we observe with clairvoyant consciousness the present form of a human being, composed as it is of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, there emerges most clearly the important fact that as regards size and shape—at least in the upper portions—the physical and etheric bodies are approximately equal. The head in particular, if we think of it as it appears physically, coincides almost completely with its etheric counterpart: the latter protrudes only slightly beyond the physical head. This is by no means the case in animals. Even in the higher animals there is a tremendous difference between the shape and size of the etheric head and the physical head. If you observe, for example, a horse clairvoyantly, you see that the etheric head extends far beyond the physical head and has a decidedly different shape. If I were to draw a picture of what hovers above the trunk and head of an elephant you would be greatly astonished at the true being of that animal; for all that physical perception sees of such an animal is merely the solidified part in the center.

Let us examine this fact. The degree of man's perfection on our physical plane is basically due to the fact that his etheric body so nearly coincides with his physical body, that they so nearly cover. But that was not always the case. There have been periods in the evolution of our Earth, treated in the foregoing lectures, in which man's etheric body by no means thus coincided with his physical body, as it does today. In fact, man's progress during the course of his development is due to the circumstance that gradually his protruding etheric body crept into his physical body, as it were, until in time the two came to coincide. Here it is essential to keep in mind that this interpenetration of the etheric and physical bodies had to take place at a very special moment in Earth evolution if mankind was to achieve its development in the right way. Had it occurred earlier, man would have reached a certain stage of development too soon: he would have hardened there, and not been able to proceed. But a possibility for him to develop resulted from the fact that his etheric and physical bodies came to coincide at just the right time.

In order to understand this, let us examine more closely evolution as we viewed it in its larger outlines yesterday and the day before. Visualize once more how, at the beginning of our Earth evolution, the earth was united with the sun and the moon. At that time man had arisen again out of the potential germ that comprised the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. He existed, so to speak, in his first earth form, that is, the only form possible for him at a time when the Earth still contained both sun and moon. In spiritual-scientific literature this period of Earth evolution which man passed through, together with his planet, is usually called the Polarian period. It would lead too far afield today to explain this name, so let us simply accept it. Then came the time when the sun prepared to withdraw from the Earth, and when the beings that could not continue, so to speak, with the denser and constantly solidifying substances of the Earth departed with the finer substances of the sun. This period we call the Hyperborean. And then followed an epoch in which only the moon remained united with the Earth, a time in which increasing barrenness spread over our Earth life. Yesterday we learned how human souls abandoned this Earth and only withered human forms remained. In spiritual-scientific literature this period is called the Lemurian. It is the period in which the splitting off of the moon occurred, resulting in a revival on earth of all the kingdoms established there. The mineral kingdom stood least in need of reanimation, the plant kingdom more, and still more, the animal kingdom, while the further development of the human race called for the most outstanding and powerful forces.

This revival commenced with the moon's exit. As mentioned yesterday, only a handful of human beings were left, and these consisted of the three principles acquired during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, to which the potential ego was added on the Earth. But at the time of the moon's exit the human being did not bear the flesh substance in which we encounter him later: he was composed of the most tenuous matter of that time. In the Lemurian period the solid minerals of today were still liquid, dissolved in the other substances that nowadays are segregated as aqueous matter, like water. The air was still saturated with dense vapors composed of a great variety of substances. Pure air and pure water, as we know them today, did not exist at that time except in very limited areas of the earth.

It was out of the purest substances of the period, then, that man molded his evanescent, tenuous body. Had he employed coarser substances his body would have acquired a form with definite outline, with sharply defined contours; and these contours would have been inherited by the descendants, and the human race would there have come to a standstill. But it was not intended that man should create his form in matter of that sort: rather had he to see to it that he could freely move his corporeal substance according to the impulses of his soul. The matter forming his body was at that time so soft that it obeyed the impulses of will in all directions. Nowadays you can stretch out your hand, but by no effort of the will can you make it ten feet long. You cannot coerce matter because form, as it is today, is bequeathed. At the time of which we are speaking that was not the case. The human being could be shaped at will, could build the form according to the dictates of his soul. His further development demanded, so to speak, that he incorporate himself, after the withdrawal of the moon, in the softest possible substances, leaving his body plastic and flexible, capable of obeying the soul's every wish.

Then came the time when certain elements, indispensable for our present-day life—air and water—were purged of all they contained in the way of dense matter: what had formerly been dissolved in the water was now precipitated. Just as dissolved substances precipitate in cooling water, so the dissolved matter sank, as it were. The water became pure water and the air was rid of denser matter: air and water were reconditioned, and man was able to use this rarefied matter for his physical development.

From this third age human beings gradually passed over into an evolutionary epoch we call the Atlantean, because during that time the greater part of the human race inhabited a continent, now submerged, situated in the area now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean—between America, and Europe-Africa. So after the Lemurian age had continued yet a while, the human race carried on its evolution on the Atlantean Continent; and that was the scene of all that I shall now describe, as well as of much that was mentioned yesterday.

At the time the moon withdrew from the earth only a small number of the human souls that were to incarnate later were on the earth: most of them were distributed over the various cosmic bodies; but during the last part of the Lemurian and the first part of the Atlantean age these souls descended to the earth. Only few human beings, as I told you, had been able to experience the crisis of the Lemurian epoch, for only the most robust—those capable of living in the ever hardening substance prior to the moon's exit—had survived the moon crisis of the earth. But when everything that had solidified during the moon crisis began to soften again, when descendants appeared who were no longer compressed within fixed outlines through hereditary exigency, but were mobile, then the souls gradually descended from the various planets and moved into these bodies. Those forms, however, that incorporated very soon after the withdrawal of the moon retained their rigid form through heredity, and could not receive human souls even after the separation.

We can visualize the process accurately by imagining the craving of these souls to return to earth. Down there, forms came into being in the greatest variety, descendants of those that had been left over after the separation; and among these, many different degrees of solidification obtained. Those human souls—in fact, all soul beings—that in a certain respect felt as yet the least urge to unite completely with a physical substance now selected the softest forms for occupation, and soon abandoned them again. But the others, those that united at this early stage with the hardened forms, were imprisoned in them and consequently were compelled to remain behind in evolution. In fact, the animals ranking closest to man came into being as a consequence of this impatience on the part of certain souls descending from cosmic space. These souls sought earth bodies prematurely and made definitely bounded forms of them before they could be wholly permeated by etheric bodies. The human form remained plastic until such time as it could adapt itself completely to the etheric body; and it was thus that the physical and etheric bodies came to cover, as explained, approximately during the last third of the Atlantean age. Previously, the human soul principle that descended kept the earthly body in a fluid state and guarded against a complete amalgamation of the etheric body with any part of the physical body. This interpenetration of the etheric and physical bodies came about at a definite point in time. The Atlantean epoch was already under way when the physical human body assumed a definite form and began to harden.

Had nothing else occurred at this point in the Atlantean development, had no other factor intervened, evolution would have taken a different course: man would have passed rather rapidly from an earlier to a later state of consciousness. Before he became a complete unit as regards the principles of body and soul he was a clairvoyant being, but his clairvoyance was dim and dull. He was able to see into the spiritual world but he could not address himself as “I”, could not distinguish himself from his surroundings. What he lacked was self-consciousness, for this only entered during the period of evolution in which the physical body united with the etheric body.

Well, if nothing else had intervened, the following is what would have occurred in a comparatively short time: Hitherto man had had a consciousness of the spiritual world. Plants, animals, and so on, he could not see distinctly, but what he did see was spirit enveloping them. He would not have seen the form of an elephant, for instance, very clearly, but he would have seen the etheric principle extended over its physical body. This form of human consciousness would have gradually disappeared, the ego would have evolved along with the coincidence of the physical and etheric bodies, and man would have seen the world confronting him as though from another side. While previously he had beheld clairvoyant pictures he would thenceforth have perceived an outer world; but at the same time he would have perceived as well the spiritual beings and spiritual forces underlying this outer world. He would not have seen the physical image of the plant as we see it today: he would have perceived the spiritual being of the plant coincident with the physical image.

We may ask why, in the course of evolution, the dim, clairvoyant form of consciousness was not simply superseded by a consciousness of objects which at the same time would have provided perception and knowledge of spirit. That is because precisely during the moon crisis, when man was reviving, he began to be influenced by beings that must be characterized as retarded, although they are on a higher plane than man. We have already acquainted ourselves with a. number of such higher beings and we know that some of them ascended to the sun, others to various planets. But there were also spiritual beings that had failed to complete the tasks they were obligated to perform on the moon. These beings, ranking lower than the Gods and higher than man, we designate Luciferic beings after their leader, Lucifer, the highest and most powerful among them.
At the time of the moon crisis man had evolved to the point of possessing a physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. For his ego, he was indebted to the influence of the Spirits of Form; for his astral body, to the Spirits of Motion; for his etheric body, to the Spirits of Wisdom; and for his physical body, to the Thrones. The Spirits of Form—Exusiai, or Mights, in Christian esotericism—were those who made it possible for the germinal ego to join the other principles. Now, if man had been involved only in the normal stream of development, and if all the beings surrounding him had properly absolved their tasks, certain beings would have worked on his physical body, others on his etheric body, others on his astral body, and still others on his ego—as they should have done, to put it that way—each being working on the principle assigned to him. But here were those beings that had lagged behind on the Moon, the Luciferic beings. If they had been able to carry on their work in the right way they would have been appointed to work on the ego; but on the Moon they had only learned to work on the astral body, and that entailed a significant consequence. Had it not been for these Luciferic spirits man would have received his ego principle; and his further development would have taken a course, in the last third of the Atlantean age, involving the exchange of his dim, clairvoyant consciousness for the consciousness of outer objects. As it was, however, the effects of the Luciferic spirits penetrated his astral body like powerful rays.

And the nature of these effects? Well, the astral body is the vehicle of impulses, desires, passions, instincts, and so forth; and in the constitution of his astral body man would have developed quite differently had he not been affected by the Luciferic spirits. He would have developed only such impulses as would have guided him surely and advanced him unfailingly. The spirits would have led him to see the world as consisting of objects behind which the spiritual beings revealed themselves. But what would have been lacking is freedom, enthusiasm, the sense of independence—a passion for these loftier considerations. Man would have lost his former clairvoyant consciousness and would have regarded the glories of the world as a sort of God, for he would have become a component part of divinity. Furthermore, such a view of the world would have induced a perfect reflection of itself in his mind, but in all his perfection he would have remained a reflection of the universe.

But before this could occur the Luciferic spirits filled his astral body with passions, instincts, desires which merged with all that became part of him in the course of his evolution. This meant that he was able not only to perceive the stars, but at the same time to warm to a rapturous enthusiasm in beholding them; not merely to follow the divinely inspired instincts of his astral body, but to unfold impulses of his own through freedom. That is what the Luciferic spirits had infused into man's astral body; but it implied another factor, something else that they had given him as well: the potentiality of evil, of sin. This would not have existed had he been led forward step by step by the more sublime Gods. The Luciferic spirits made man free and endowed him with the capacity for enthusiasm; but at the same time they created the eventuality of base desires. Given a normal course of development, man would in every case have associated the normal sensations with whatever cropped up, so to speak. As it was, however, he derived greater pleasure from things of the sense world than he should, he clung to these with undue interest. And the result was that the process of physical solidification set in at an earlier stage than it would have done otherwise.

So man attained to a solid form sooner than the divine-spiritual beings had intended, so to speak. It was in the last third of the Atlantean age that he really should have descended from a gaseous to a solid form; as it was, however, he descended prematurely and became a solid being. That is what the Bible describes as the “fall of man”.

But during the period just considered there were also lofty spiritual beings at work on the ego with which they had endowed man. In the same measure as these human beings descend again and unite with human bodies, the spiritual beings infuse the forces that advance man on his cosmic path: they hold a protecting hand over him. But on the other hand we have the activity of those beings who failed to learn to work on the ego, who now work on the human astral body, and there develop quite special instincts.

Observing the physical life of man in this period we see an image of these two mutually antagonistic powers: the divine-spiritual powers at work upon the ego, and the Luciferic beings. Let us now trace the spiritual factor of this process. During the time of desolation on earth the human souls ascended to the various cosmic bodies belonging to our solar system. Now they returned in as far as they were able to find bodies in the line of physical heredity. Remembering that the earth was most sparsely populated precisely at the time of the moon's withdrawal, you can imagine that the expansion of the human race started from a mere handful of people. Gradually the number increased, more and more souls descended and occupied the bodies coming into being on earth. Throughout a long period there were descendants only of the few who were present at the time of the moon's exit, and upon these the lofty sun forces themselves acted: these human beings had retained sufficient vigor to present to the sun forces a point of contact, even during the moon crisis. They and their descendants felt themselves to be sun men, so to say.

Let us understand this clearly. For simplicity's sake, imagine that during the moon crisis there existed all told but one human couple. (I do not wish to decide whether this was actually the case.) This couple has descendants, these in turn have descendants, and so on; and thus the human race branched out. Now, as long as there existed only the progeny, in the narrower sense, of the old sun men, all these enjoyed a quite special form of consciousness by reason of their ancient clairvoyance. At that time human memory included not only experiences that had occurred since birth, or as is the case today, since a certain point of time after birth, but everything that the father, grandfather, and even early progenitors, had experienced. Memory reached back to the ancestors, to all with whom a man was related by blood. That was because in a certain sense the sun forces held a protecting hand over those of blood relationship, those who traced their descent to the human beings who had survived the moon crisis. The sun forces had engendered the ego consciousness and maintained it throughout the line of blood generation.

Now the human race multiplied and the souls that had ascended into cosmic space returned to earth. Those souls, however, in whom the sun forces were strong enough still felt these forces, although they had descended and become related to spheres quite different from those of the sun. But then came the time when these souls, as later descendants, lost that connection, and with it the common ancestral memory. The more the human race multiplied, the dimmer became this living consciousness that was connected with blood heredity. This was because the powers that led men forward and implanted the ego in them were opposed by the Luciferic powers that influenced the astral body. The Luciferic powers obstructed everything that cemented men into a unit. What they wanted to teach them was freedom, self-consciousness.

So the oldest survivors of the moon's withdrawal thought of the word “I” as referring not only to what they experienced themselves, but to what their ancestors had experienced. They felt the common sun being that worked in their blood. And even after this state, too, had passed, those who had come down, for instance, from Mars felt the bond that united them with the protecting Spirit of Mars. Having been recruited from Mars souls, the descendants of those who had come down from Mars felt the protecting hand of the Mars Spirit.

It was against this group feeling, in which love held sway, that the Luciferic spirits attempted their attack. They learned how to cultivate the individual human ego, as opposed to the common ego developed by such groups. The farther back we seek, the more firmly we find the community consciousness bound up with consanguinity, and passing on in time we see it decreasing: man's feeling of independence becomes ever stronger, and he senses the necessity for developing an individual ego, as opposed to the common ego.

Thus two realms were at work in the human being, the realm of the Luciferic spirits and that of the divine-spiritual beings. The divine-spiritual powers brought men together, but did so by means of blood ties, while the Luciferic beings sought to separate them, to segregate them individually. These two forces were active throughout the Atlantean age, and they remained so even after the Atlantean Continent perished through the great catastrophies, and Europe, Asia, and Africa on one side, and America on the other, had assumed their present form. They are still active in the fifth earth epoch, right into our own time.

Thus we have described five earth epochs: the Polarian, in which the earth was still united with the sun, the Hyperborean, in which the moon was still united with the earth, and the Lemurian; then the Atlantean; and finally, the post-Atlantean, our own age. We learned how the Luciferic spirits intervened and worked against the divine-spiritual powers that drew men together, and we have come to understand that something very different would have occurred had the Luciferic spirits not taken a hand in human evolution. In the last third of the Atlantean epoch the old form of clairvoyant consciousness would have been exchanged for a consciousness of objects—but an object consciousness permeated by spirit. As it was, however, the Luciferic spirits brought about a premature hardening of the physical body, enabling man to get his bearing in the physical world at an earlier stage than would otherwise have been the case; and the result of all this was that man entered upon the last third of the Atlantean age in a totally different state than he would have done if the divine-spiritual beings alone had guided him. Instead of an outer world aglow and spiritualized by higher beings, he now beheld a physical world only, for the divine world had withdrawn from him.

The Luciferic spirits had taken a hand in the shaping of man's astral body; and now, because he had united with the physical world, Zarathustra's “Ahrimanic spirits”—we can also call them “Mephistophelian” spirits—interfered with his outer perception, with the relation of his ego to the outer world, with his ability to distinguish his ego from the outer world. The constitution of his physical, etheric, and astral bodies is not as it would have been had only the superior Gods worked on them. Beings we term Luciferic gained access to his astral body and expelled him from Paradise sooner than was intended; and the consequence of this Luciferic activity was the interference of the Ahrimanic, or Mephistophelian, spirits in his perception of the outer world, which they now showed him in its physical form only, not as it is in reality. That is why these spirits that dupe mankind with what is spurious are called by the Hebrew People mephiz-topel: mephiz, the corrupter, and topel, the liar. This eventually became Mephistopheles; and it is merely another name for Ahriman.

Now, what did Ahriman effect in man, as opposed to Lucifer? Lucifer brought about a deterioration of the forces of the astral body greater than it should have been, as well as the premature induration of man's physical substance though it must be kept in mind that thereby the attainment of freedom was made possible. The Mephistophelian spirits, on the other hand, prevented man from discerning the spiritual basis of the world, tricking him instead with a mere illusion of it. Mephistopheles induced in men the belief that the outer world is nothing but a material existence, that there is no such thing as spirit underlying and permeating all material substance. The scene so beautifully portrayed in Goethe's Faust has been enacted by mankind throughout the ages. On the one hand we see Faust seeking the path into the spiritual world; on the other, Mephistopheles, who calls that spiritual world “nothingness”, because it is to his interest to represent the sense world as being all that exists. Faust replies, as would every spiritual scientist in this case, “In what is nothingness to thee I hope to find my all”.—Only when we know that in every tiniest particle of matter there is spirit and that the idea of matter is a lie; only when we recognize Mephistopheles as that spirit in the world who vitiates our conceptions—only then can the outer world appear to us as it really is.

What was needed to carry mankind onward, to prevent its succumbing to the fate prepared for it by Lucifer, by Ahriman? As early as in the Atlantean age the influence of the Luciferic beings had to be checked. Even then there were men who worked on themselves in such a way as to counteract the Luciferic influence in their astral bodies, who were on the alert for what emanated from Lucifer, who examined their own souls for Luciferic passions, instincts, and desires. And as a result of eradicating these Luciferic qualities they recaptured the capacity for seeing in its pure form what all men would have seen had they not been exposed to the influence of the Luciferic, and later of the Ahrimanic, spirits. By means of pure living and conscientious self-knowledge certain human beings of the Atlantean epoch sought to rid themselves of this Luciferic influence; and this enabled them, at a time when remnants of the old clairvoyance still survived, to see into the spiritual world and discern loftier things than could the others, whose physical substance had hardened as a result of the Luciferic influence. Such men—those that cast out the Luciferic influence by means of strong-minded self-knowledge—became the leaders of the Atlantean age. We can call them the Atlantean Initiates.

Now what, exactly, was the nature of Lucifer's activity? In the main, Lucifer directed his attack against everything that united human beings, against blood ties that expressed themselves in love. But the leaders just mentioned knew how to resist Lucifer's influence, and by doing so they acquired the ability to envision this connection spiritually: they came to realize that the factor conditioning man's progress lies not in separation, in segregation, but in that which unites men. Hence these initiates endeavored to restore, as it were, the ancient state of affairs in which the upper spiritual world was not yet threatened by Lucifer's power. They aimed at eradicating the personal element: Kill that which endows you with a personal ego! Gaze back to olden times when the ties of blood spoke so eloquently that a descendant experiened his ego as reaching back to his earliest forebear; when the first ancestor, long since dead, was still held sacred!—The age of the primeval human community—that is the age into which the Atlantean leaders endeavored to lead men back. Throughout this whole period of evolution there appeared such leaders of mankind again and again, proclaiming, Endeavor to resist the influences that would drive you to a personal ego; try to learn what it was that bound men together in olden times! Then you will find the way to the divine spirit.

This attitude had retained its purest form among those we know as the ancient Hebrew People. Just recall and try to understand the exhortations of the leaders of this old Hebrew nation. They stood before their people and proclaimed: You have reached a state in which each of you stresses the personal ego in him—each of you seeks his being within himself alone. But development will be furthered only by subduing the personal ego and exerting all those forces that guide you to the consciousness of being all connected, of having descended one and all from Abraham, of being members of a great organism reaching back to Abraham. If you are told, “I and Father Abraham are one”, and you take these words to heart, ignoring all that is personal, then you have the right consciousness that will lead you to the divine; for the path to the divine leads by way of the original ancestor.—The vital impulse determining the leadership of those who contended against the Luciferic influence was preserved longest by the Hebrew People. But man had been entrusted with the mission to develop and cultivate the ego, not to destroy it. The old initiates had no quarrel with the personal ego, but they maintained that the ascent to the old Gods should be made by way of the early forebears.

With the coming to earth of the great impulse, as we characterized it yesterday—the Christ impulse—a new utterance resounded for the first time clearly and distinctly; and it was among the Hebrew People that it could be heard with special clarity and distinctness, because this was the people that had longest preserved what we may consider an echo of the old Atlantean initiate teaching.

Christ transmuted that teaching of the old initiates, and said: It is possible for man to cultivate his own personality. He need not obey the physical bonds of blood brotherhood alone: he can look into his own ego and there seek, and find, the divine.—What we have characterized as the Christ impulse bears within it the force which, if we unite with it, offers us the possibility of establishing a spiritual bond of brotherhood among human beings, in spite of the individuality of the ego. Thus the Christ force was very different from the one prevailing in the community into which He was placed. There the idea was, I and Father Abraham are one. That is what I must know if I am to find the way back to the divine.—But Christ said: There is another Father through Whom the ego will find the way to the divine; for the ego, or the I am, is one with the divine. There is something eternal thou canst find if thou remainest within thyself.

That is why Christ could characterize the force He would transmit to men with the words we find in the Gospel of St. John, Before Abraham was, was the I am. And the “I am” was nothing other than the name which Christ called Himself. If men can enkindle the thought within them: Within me there dwells something that existed long before Abraham; I have no need to go back to Abraham, for I find the divine Father Spirit within me—then they can turn into good all that Lucifer contributed to the cultivation and fostering of the ego, which had proved an obstacle in the path of humanity. The transformation of Lucifer's influence into good: that was the deed of Christ.

Supposing that only the high divine-spiritual beings had been at work, those who had restricted love to blood ties, who kept demanding of men that they go back through the whole line of descent if they would find the way to the Gods. Had that occurred, mankind would have been herded together into one human community without enjoying full consciousness; and never would men have risen to a complete awareness of their freedom and independence. But that is what the Luciferic spirits inoculated in man's astral body before the advent of Christ. They segregated men, tried to make them independent of each other. But Christ turned to good the evil that would inevitably have resulted had the Luciferic influence become extreme. If the latter had run its full course mankind would have lost its capacity for love. Lucifer endowed man with freedom and independence; Christ transmuted this freedom into love. And the bond Christ brought mankind is what will lead men to spiritual love.

This point of view throws a different light on the deeds of the Luciferic spirits. Are we still justified in thinking of their once having lagged behind as due to indolence and laziness? No indeed, for it was done in order to fulfill a definite mission in Earth evolution: to prevent men from becoming fused into a mere mass through purely natural ties, as well as to prepare the way to Christ. It is as though they had said to themselves on the Moon: We will renounce our present goal in order to be able to work on the Earth in conformity with progressive development. This is one of the examples that show how an ostensible evil, a seeming error, can turn out for the best in the whole context of world events. To enable the Christ to intervene in Earth evolution at the right moment, certain Moon spirits had to sacrifice their Moon mission and prepare for Him. This shows us that Lucifer's retardation on the Moon can also be regarded in the light of a sacrifice.

In this way we come ever closer to a truth which should be engraved in the human soul as a lofty moral maxim: When you see something evil in the world, do not say, Here is evil—that is, imperfection; ask, rather, How can I attain to the enlightenment which will show me that on a higher plane this evil is transformed into good by the wisdom of the cosmos? How can I learn to tell myself: Here you see naught but imperfection because you are as yet unable to grasp the perfection of this imperfect thing?

Whenever man sees evil he should look into his own soul and ask himself, Why am I not yet able to recognize the good in this evil that confronts me?

I may say that the question of how one should speak about the arts is one with which I have actually wrestled throughout my whole life, and I will take the liberty of taking as my starting point two stages within which I have attempted to make some headway with this wrestling. It was for the first time when, at the end of the 1880s, I had to give my lecture to the Viennese Goethe Society: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.” What I wanted to say at the time about the essence of the arts made me feel like a person who wanted to speak but was actually mute and had to use gestures to express what he actually had to point out. For at that time it was suggested to me by certain conditions of life to speak about the nature of the arts through philosophical judgments. I had worked my way out of Kantianism into Herbartianism in philosophy, and this Herbartianism met me in Vienna in a representative personality, in the esthetician Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had completed his great History of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Science a long time before. He had also already presented to the world his systematic work on Aesthetics as a Science of Form, and I had faithfully worked my way through what Robert Zimmermann, the Herbartian aesthetician, had to communicate to the world in this field. And then I had this representative Herbartian Robert Zimmermann in front of me in the lectures at the University of Vienna. When I met Robert Zimmermann in person, I was completely filled by the spirited, inspired, excellent personality of this man. What lived in the man Robert Zimmermann could only be extraordinarily and deeply appealing. I must say that, although Robert Zimmermann's whole figure had something extraordinarily stiff about it, I even liked some things about this stiffness, because the way this personality, in this peculiar coloring that the German language takes on in those who speak it from German-Bohemia, from Prague German, from this linguistic nuance, was particularly likeable. Robert Zimmermann's Prague German was exceptionally appealing to me in a rare way when he said to me, who was already intensively studying Goethe's Theory of Colors at the time: Oh, Goethe is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! A man who couldn't even understand Newton is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! And I must say that the content of this sentence completely disappeared behind the flirtatious and graceful manner in which Robert Zimmermann communicated such things to others. I was extremely fond of such opposition.

But then I also got to know Robert Zimmermann, or perhaps I already knew him, when he spoke as a Herbartian from the lectern. And I must say that the amiable, likeable person completely ceased to be so in aesthetic terms; the man Robert Zimmermann became a Herbartian through and through. At first I was not quite clear what it meant when this man entered, even through the door, ascended the podium, laid down his fine walking stick, strangely took off his coat, strangely walked to the chair, strangely sat down, strangely removed his spectacles, paused for a moment, and then, with his soulful eyes, after removing his spectacles, let his gaze wander to the left, to the right, and into the distance over the very small number of listeners present, and there was something striking about it at first. But since I had been intensively studying Herbart's writings for quite some time, it all became clear to me after the first impression, and I said to myself: Oh yes, here we are entering the door to Herbartism, here we are putting down the fine walking stick of Herbartism, here we are taking off our Herbartism coat, here we are gazing at the audience with our glasses-free eyes. And now Robert Zimmermann, in his extraordinarily pleasant dialect, colored by the Prague dialect, began to speak about practical philosophy, and lo and behold, this Prague German clothed itself in the form of Herbartian aesthetics.

I experienced this, and then, from Zimmermann's subjective point of view, I understood well what it actually meant that the motto of Zimmermann's aesthetics on the first page was the saying of Schiller, which was indeed transformed into Herbartianism by Robert Zimmermann: The true secret of the master's art lies in the annihilation of material by form – for I had seen how the amiable, likeable, thoroughly graceful man appeared to be annihilated as content and reappeared in Herbartian form on the professorial chair. It was an extraordinarily significant impression for the psychology of the arts.

And if you understand that one can make such a characterization even when one loves, then you will not take amiss the expression that I now want to use, that Robert Zimmermann, whom I greatly admired, may forgive me for using the word ” Anthroposophie', which he used in a book to describe a figure made up of logical, aesthetic and ethical abstractions, that I have used this word to treat the spiritualized and ensouled human being scientifically. Robert Zimmermann called his book, in which he carried out the procedure I have just described, “Anthroposophy”.

I had to free myself from this experience, in which the artistic, so to speak, appeared to be poured into a form without content, when I gave my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. I was able to accept the fully justified part of Zimmermann's view, that in art one is not concerned with content, not with the what, but with what is made out of the content of what is observed and so on through the imagination, through the creativity of the human being. And from Schiller we also saw Herbart taking form. I could well see the deep justification for this tendency, but I could not help but contrast it with the fact that what can be achieved as form by real imagination must be elevated and must now appear in the work of art in such a way that we get a similar impression from the work of art as we otherwise only get from the world of ideas. To spiritualize what man can perceive, to carry the sensual into the sphere of the spirit, not to extinguish the material through form, that was what I tried to free myself from at the time, from what I had absorbed in a faithful study of Herbart's aesthetics.

However, other elements had also been incorporated. A philosopher of the time, whom I liked just as much as Robert Zimmermann, who is extremely dear to me as a person, Eduard von Hartmann, he wrote in all fields of philosophy, and at that time he also wrote about aesthetics, about aesthetics from a partly similar, partly different spirit than Robert Zimmermann had written. And again, you will not interpret the objectivity that I am trying to achieve as if I were being unkind for that reason. Eduard von Hartmann's aesthetics can be characterized by the fact that Eduard von Hartmann took something from the arts, which were actually quite distant from him, and called it aesthetic appearance. He took what he called aesthetic appearance from the arts, just as one would roughly proceed by skinning a living person. And then, after this procedure, after he had, so to speak, skinned the arts, the living arts, Eduard von Hartmann made his aesthetics out of them. And the skinned skin — is it wonderful that it became leather under the hard treatment it then received at the hands of the aesthete, who was so far removed from the arts? — That was the second thing I had to free myself from at the time. And I tried to include in my lecture at the time what I would call the mood: the philosopher, if he wants to talk about the arts, must have the renunciation to become mute in a certain respect and only through chaste gestures to hint at that which, when speaking, philosophy can never quite penetrate, before which it remains unpenetrating and must hint at the essential like a silent observer.

That was the mood, the psychological characterization, from which I spoke at the time in my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then later on I was given the task of making a second stop on the way to the question that I characterized at the beginning of my present consideration. It was when I spoke to anthroposophists about the “essence of the arts”. And now, in view of the mood of the whole environment at that time, I could not speak in the same way. Now I wanted to speak in such a way that I could remain within artistic experience itself. Now I wanted to speak artistically about art. And I knew once more that I was now on the other side of the river, beyond which I had stood at the time with my lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. And now I spoke in such a way that I carefully avoided slipping into philosophical formulations. For I felt that slipping into philosophical characterization immediately takes away the actual essence of art from the words. The inartistic quality of mere concepts used to stir up the forces from which speech arises. And I tried to speak about the arts from that mood, which in the strictest sense avoids slipping into philosophical formulations. Today I am supposed to speak about the psychology of the arts again.

It is not particularly easy, after having lived through the other two stages, to stop at any other point. And so I could not help but turn to life with my contemplation. I sought some point through which I could enter into life through my contemplation of the artistic. And lo and behold, I found the amiable romantic Novalis as if he were something self-evidently given. And when, after this glimpse of Novalis, I ask myself: What is poetic? What is contained in this special form of artistic experience in poetic life? — the figure of Novalis stands before me alive. It is strange that Novalis was born into this world with a peculiar basic feeling that lifted him above the external prosaic reality throughout his entire physical life. There is something in this personality that seems to be endowed with wings and floats away in poetic spheres above the prose of life. It is something that has lived among us humans as if it wanted to express at one point in world history: this is how it is with the external sensual reality compared to the experience of the truly poetic. And this personality of Novalis lives itself into life, and begins a spiritual and thoroughly real love relationship with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. And all the love for the girl, who is still sexually immature, is clothed in the most magnificent poetry, so clothed in poetry that one is never tempted to think of anything sensually real when considering this relationship. But all the fervor of human feeling that can be experienced when the human soul floats freely above prosaic reality, as in poetic spheres, all the fervor of this feeling lives in this love of Novalis for Sophie von Kühn. And this girl dies two days after her fourteenth birthday, at the time when other people are so strongly touched by the reality of physical life that they descend into the sexuality of the physical body. Before this event could happen to Sophie von Kühn, she was transported into spiritual worlds, and Novalis, out of a stronger consciousness than the instinctive-poetic one that had been with him before, decided to die after Sophie von Kühn in his living soul experience. He lives with the one who is no longer in the physical world. And those people who approached Novalis after that time with the most intimate human feelings say that he, walking around alive on earth, was like someone who had been transported into the spiritual worlds, who was talking to something that is not of this earth, does not really belong to this earth. And within this poetic reality, transported into prose, he himself feels that what other people see only in the control of external forces, the fullest expression of the will, merging into reality, already appears within the poetic-ideal world, and he speaks of “magical idealism” to characterize his direction in life.

If we then try to understand everything that flowed from this wonderfully formed soul, which was thus able to love without touching reality, external reality, which was thus able to live with what was truly wrested from it before a certain stage of external reality was reached, if we open ourselves to all that then flowed from this Novalis soul, then we receive the purest expression of the poetic. And a psychological question is resolved simply by immersing oneself in the artistic stream of poeticization that flows from Novalis's poetic and prose writings.

But then one has a strange impression. One has the impression, when one delves psychologically into the essence of the poetic in this way, into a reality of life, into that of Novalis, that one then has something floating behind the poetic that resonates through everything poetic. One has the impression that this Novalis emerged from spiritual and soul spheres, bringing with him what, with poetic radiance, showered the outwardly prosaic life. One has the impression that a soul has entered the world that has brought with it the spiritual and soul in its purest form, so that it has inspired and spiritualized the whole body, and that it has absorbed space and time into the state of mind, which was spiritual and soul, in such a way that space and time, stripping off their outer being, reappeared poetically in the soul of Novalis. In Novalis' poetry, space and time seem to be devoured.

You see, with a strong soul and a strong spirit, poetry enters the world, and out of its strength it integrates space and time. But it overwhelms space and time, melting space and time through the power of the human soul, and in this melting of space and time through the power of the human soul lies the psychology of poetry. But through this process of melting space and time in Novalis, something resounds that was like a deep fundamental element within it. You can hear it everywhere, you can hear it through everything that Novalis has revealed to the world, and then you cannot help but say to yourself: What soul, what spirit is, it came to light there, to remain poetic, to poetically melt space and time by appropriating space and time. But there remained at first something as the foundation of this soul, something that lies most deeply within the human soul, so deeply that it can be discovered as a creative power by shaping the deepest inner conditions of the human organism itself, by living in the innermost being of the human being as soul. Musicality, the musical, the sounding artistic world, was a fundamental element in all of Novalis's poetry. This reveals itself out of the harmony of the world and is also what creates artistically out of the cosmos in the most intimate aspects of the human being.

If we try to enter the sphere in which the spiritual and soul-life in man create most intimately, then we come to a musical form within the human being, and then we say to ourselves: Before the musician sounds his tones out into the world, the musical essence itself has taken hold of the musician's being and first embodied, shaped into his human nature the musical, and the musician reveals that which the world harmony has unconsciously placed in the depths of his soul. And that is the basis of the mysterious effect of music. That is the basis for the fact that, when speaking about music, one can really only say: The musical expresses the innermost human feeling. — And by preparing oneself with the appropriate experiences for contemplation, by entering into this Novalis poetry, one grasps what I would call the psychology of music.

And then one's gaze is drawn to the end of Novalis's life, which occurred in his twenty-ninth year. Novalis passed away painlessly, but surrendered to the element that had permeated his poetry throughout his life. His brother had to play for him on the piano as he died, and the element that he had brought with him to infuse his poetry was to take him back when he died, passing from prosaic reality into the spiritual world. To the sound of the piano, twenty-nine-year-old Novalis died. He was searching for the musical homeland that he had left in the full sense of the word at his birth, in order to take the musicality of poetry from it.

So one settles in, I think, from reality into the psychology of the arts. The path must be a tender one, the path must be an intimate one, and it must not be skeletonized by abstract philosophical forms, neither by those that are taken from rational thinking in the Herbartian sense, nor by those that are a bone from external observation of nature in the Gustav Fechnerian sense.

And Novalis stands before us: released from the musical, allowing the musical to resonate in the poetic, melting space and time with the poetic, not having touched the external prosaic reality of space and time in magical idealism, and then drawing it back into musical spirituality.

And the question may arise: What if Novalis had been physically organized to live longer, if what had musically resonated and poetically spoken in the inner effective psychology of the human soul and human spirit had not returned to its musical home at the age of twenty-nine, but had lived on through a more robust physical organization, where would this soul have found itself? Where would this soul have found itself if it had had to remain within the prosaic reality from which it had departed at the time when it was still time, without contact with outer space and outer time, to return to the spaceless world of music?

I have no desire to give this answer in theoretical terms. Again, I would like to turn our gaze to reality, and there it is; it too has played itself out in the course of human development. When Goethe had reached the age at which Novalis withdrew from the physical world out of his musical and poetic mood, the deepest longing arose in Goethe's soul to penetrate into that artistic world which had brought it to the highest level in the development of that entity which can express itself in space and time. At this stage of his life, Goethe felt a burning desire to go south and to discern in the works of art of Italy something of that from which an art was created that understood how to bring the genuinely artistic into the forms of space and time, especially into the forms of space. And when Goethe stood before the Italian works of art and saw that which could speak not only to the senses but to the soul from out of space, the thought escaped his soul: here he realizes how the Greeks, whose work he believed he recognized in these works of art, created as nature itself creates, and which natural creative laws he believed he was tracking down. And he was overwhelmed by the spiritual and the soul-stirring that met him in the forms of space, the religious feeling: There is necessity, there is God. — Before he had moved to the south, he had searched for God together with Herder in the reading of Spinoza, in the spiritual and soul-stirring expression of the supersensible in the external sensual world. The mood that had driven him to seek his God in Spinoza's God together with Herder had remained. He had not found satisfaction. What he had sought in Spinoza's philosophy about God was awakened in his soul when he stood before the works of art in which he thought he could again discern Greek spatial art, and the feeling escaped him: There is necessity, there is God.

What did he feel? He apparently felt that in the Greek works of art of architecture and sculpture, what lives in man as spiritual and soulful has been created, what wants to go out into space and what gives itself to space, and when it becomes pictorial, also spatially to time. And Goethe has experienced the other thing psychologically, which is on the opposite pole to the Novalis experience. Novalis has experienced how, when man penetrates into his innermost being in space and time and wants to remain poetic and musical, space and time melt away in human comprehension. Goethe experienced how, when the human being works and chisels his spiritual soul into the spatial, the spatial and temporal does not melt away, how it surrenders in love to the spatial and temporal, so that the spiritual soul reappears from the spatial and temporal in an objectified way. How the spirit and soul of the human being, without stopping at the sensory perception, without remaining seated in the eye, penetrates to get under the surface of things and to create the architecture out of the forces that prevail under the surface of things, to shape the sculpture, experienced Goethe in those moments that led him to the saying: “There is necessity, there is God.” There is everything that is of divine-spiritual existence in the human subconscious, that man communicates to the world without stopping at the gulf that his senses form between him and the world. There is that which man experiences artistically when he is able to impress, to chisel, to force the spiritual-soul into the forces that lie beneath the surface of physical existence. — What is it in Novalis that makes him, psychologically, musical-poetic-creative? What is it in Goethe that impels him to feel the utter necessity of nature-making in the plastic arts, to feel the utterly unfree necessity of nature-making in 'the spatial, in the material works of art? What is it that urges him, despite the feeling of necessity, to say: there is God?

At both poles, with Novalis and with Goethe, where at the one pole lies the goal that the path to the psychological understanding of the poetic and the musical must take, and where at the other pole lies the goal that the psychological understanding must take if it grasp the plastic-architectonic. At both poles lies an experience that is inwardly experienced in the field of art, and in relation to which it is its greatest task of reality to also carry it outwardly into the world: the experience of human freedom.

In ordinary mental, physical and sensual experience, the spiritual and soul-like penetrates to the organization of the senses; then it allows the senses to glimpse what external physical and material and in the senses, external physical-material reality encounters inner spiritual-soul existence and enters into that mysterious connection that causes so much concern for physiology and psychology. When someone is born into life with the primal poetic-musical disposition, which is so self-sustaining that it seeks to die out under the sounds of music, then this spiritual-soul-like does not penetrate to the sensory organs Then it permeates and spiritualizes the whole organism, shaping it like a total sensory organ, and then it places the whole human being in the world in the same way as otherwise only the individual eye or the individual ear is placed in the world. Then the soul-spiritual takes hold within the human being, and then, when this soul-spiritual engages with the material world externally, it is not absorbed into the prosaic reality of space and time, but space and time are dissolved in the human perception. That is how it is at one pole. There the soul lives poetically and musically in its freedom, because it is organized in such a way that it melts the reality of space and time in its contemplation. There the soul lives without touching the ground of physical prosaic existence, in freedom, but in a freedom that cannot penetrate into this prosaic reality.

And at the other pole, there lives the soul, the spiritual part of man, as it lived, for example, in Goethe. This soul and spiritual part is so strong that it not only penetrates the physical body of man right down to the sense openings, but it penetrates these senses and extends even beyond the senses. I would say that in Novalis there is such a delicate soul-spirituality that it does not penetrate to the full organization of the senses; in Goethe there is such a strong soul-spirituality that it breaks through the organization of the senses and beyond the boundaries of the human skin into the cosmic, and therefore longs above all for an understanding of those areas of art that carry the spiritual-soul into the spatial-temporal. That is why this spirituality is organized in such a way that it wants to submerge with that which extends beyond the boundaries of the human skin, into the ensouled space in sculpture, into the spiritualized spatial power in architecture, into the suggestion of those forces that have already internalized themselves as spatial and temporal forces, but which can still be grasped externally in this form in painting.

So it is here too a liberation from necessity, a liberation from what man is when his spiritual and soulful self is anchored in the gulfs of the sensory realm. Liberation in the poetic-musical: freedom lives in there, but it lives in such a way that it does not touch the ground of the sensual. Liberation in sculptural, architectural, and pictorial experience: but freedom is so strong that if it wanted to express itself in any other way than artistically, it would shatter the external physical-sensual existence because it dives below the surface.

This is felt when one truly engages with what Goethe so powerfully said about his social ideas, let us say in “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”. What cannot be entrusted to reality, if it is to be shaped in freedom, becomes musical-poetic; what in contemplation one must not bring to the reality of sensual physical imagination, if it is not to destroy external reality, what must be left in the formation of spatial and temporal forces, must be left in the mere reproduction of the block of wood, because otherwise it would destroy the organic, to which it is death, becomes sculpture, becomes architecture.

No one can understand the psychology of the arts without understanding the greater soul that must live in the sculptor and the architect than in normal life. No one can understand the poetic and musical without penetrating to the more that lives in the spiritual and soul life of a human being, who cannot allow this spiritual more, this spiritual projection of the physical organization to the physical and sensual, but must keep it behind it in freedom. Liberation is the experience that is present in the true comprehension of the arts, the experience of freedom according to its polar opposites.

What is man's form is what rests in man. This form is permeated in human reality by what becomes his movement. The human form is permeated from within by the will and from without by perception, and the human form is initially the external expression of this permeation. Man lives in bondage when his will, his inwardly developed will, which wants to enter into movement, must stop at the sphere in which perception is taken up. And as soon as man can reflect on his whole being, the feeling comes to life in him: There lives more in you than you, with your nervous-sensory organization, can make alive in your intercourse with the world. Then the urge arises to set the dormant human form, which is the expression of this normal relationship, in motion, in such movements that carry the form of the human form itself out into space and time. Again, it is a wrestling of the human interior with space and time. If one tries to capture it artistically, the eurhythmic arises between the musical-poetic and the plastic-architectonic-picturesque.

I believe that one must, in a certain way, remain inwardly within the arts when one attempts to do what still remains a stammering when talking about the arts and about the artistic. I believe that not only is there much between heaven and earth that human philosophy, as it usually appears, cannot dream of, but that what lies within the human interior, when conditions with the physical body enter into, first brings about liberation within the artistic towards the two poles. And I believe that one cannot understand the artistic psychologically if one wants to grasp it in the normal soul, but that one can only grasp it in the higher spiritual soul of the human being, which goes beyond the normal soul and is predisposed for supersensible worlds.

When we look at two such eminently artistic natures as Novalis and Goethe, I believe the secrets of the psychology of the arts reveal themselves to us phenomenally, out of reality. Schiller once felt this deeply when he spoke the words at the sight of Goethe: Only through the dawn of the beautiful do you enter the realm of knowledge. In other words, only by artistic immersion into the full human soul can you ascend into the regions of the sphere toward which knowledge strives. And it is a beautiful, I believe an artist's saying, when it is said: Create, artist, do not speak — but a saying against which one must sin, because man is, after all, a speaking being. But just as it is true that one must sin against such a word: “Form, artist, do not speak” – it is also true, I believe, that one must always atone for this sin, that one must always try, if one wants to talk about the arts, to form in speaking. Artist, do not speak; and if you are obliged to speak about art as a human being, then try to speak in a creative way, to create through speech.