The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! Today I would like to say a few words about the third area that you have mentioned, namely the actual content of the sermon. Of course, all three areas are intimately connected. We have given some indications about the nature of the cult, which of course must be very much completed and worked into the concrete, into what is needed today. We have at least been able to give some indications of the cultic aspect, and I would like to start by telling you how this cultic aspect is in turn related to the actual content of the sermon in practice.

You see, the sermon element appeals to the parishioner's imaginative understanding. Of course, the sermon must be delivered in such a way that what enters the person through the imagination passes as quickly and as intensely as possible into the feeling, the emotional, and, above all, the will impulse. But nevertheless we must work on the parishioner indirectly through the power of the imagination in the sermon. In all our teaching and instruction we must work on the human being through the power of the imagination.

But the conceptual has something inherently contradictory about the whole human nature. Here we enter a realm where today's science proves powerless from the outset to understand things. If you say something like that: the conceptual has something contradictory about the full nature of man, then you will meet with no understanding at all in today's scientific world view. And yet it is so. The conceptual tends to be absorbed once and then retained by the memory. You will easily see that this does not correspond to human nature.

If you look at the other extreme in man, at the purely physical processes, you cannot say: I have eaten or drunk today, so it remains in my organism, so I do not need to eat and drink again tomorrow - but food and drink must be repeated in a rhythmic sequence. What a person does must occur in a rhythmic sequence. And this is basically the actual human nature, to be incorporated into the rhythm in a certain way, while it is already a deviation from human nature when a person absorbs something once and then retains it, when it becomes permanent for him. And this permanence is the character of the conceptual. In the extreme, the conceptual becomes boring when it is repeated too often; and there is a fundamental sin against human nature associated with this theoretical-conceptual, namely not wanting to have repetitions anymore. You can follow this purely externally. Read good translations of the Buddha's discourses; you will find that these discourses have countless repetitions, you progress through nothing but repetitions. In the West, the foolish mistake was made of taking only the content of the Buddha-speeches and omitting the repetitions, because it was not known that Buddha had taken human nature into account.

There we come upon the point where, out of human nature itself, the mere content must of necessity pass over into something to be rhythmically assimilated. Of course, in the past this was done quite instinctively, by inserting prayer as the rhythmic element into the teaching, inserting prayer as the repeatedly recurring content of faith, even though the individual prayer has exactly the same content. The conceptual element merges with the volitional element when repetition occurs. In another way, one does not get a [volitional] content at all. Thus we already have the necessary flow of the doctrinal element into the cultic element. We have to bring the doctrinal content into such forms that we can present pictorial representations to the community members in a certain way. We have to let what we teach gradually become established in pictorial representations and to set the main points in a certain monumental way, so that they can be repeated again and again as a formula. Without this, we will not be able to bring the teaching content beyond the theoretical-conceptual into the practical-volitional, and this is what we must do. The more we stick to merely handing down the teaching content, the less we get to the practical religious exercise.

This is what shows you directly how something like cultic practice is already present in the Buddha-Speeches. The working out of the will element from the mere theoretical element of imagination is actually present in these discourses. While we appeal to people to repeat the Lord's Prayer, we are working our way out of the merely theoretical into the practical religious realm. But we will not be able to do this at all if we ourselves are not completely imbued with the supersensible substance of the world. And here I come today to certain characteristics of the teaching material, which one must nevertheless take into account if one wants to become a practical preacher or if one wants to have an effect on people through the teaching material at all.

You see, the greatest harm in today's religious work lies in the fact that the Gospels are no longer taken seriously. I do not mean any slight by this, but I do mean that people are not aware that the content of the Gospels goes beyond our sensory understanding. It is most significant that we can approach the Gospels again through anthroposophy and say to ourselves: an otherworldly content flows in the Gospels. We must understand them, we must do everything possible to really understand them. Today, however, people only criticize the Gospels; they do not really want to understand them, and this criticism is largely based on the fact that one does not take the content of the Gospels seriously at all, but takes it superficially.

I must refer you to the third sentence of the Gospel of John. In this third sentence, one usually hears the following: All things were made through the Word, and without the Word nothing was made that has been made. - What is all included in this third sentence of the Gospel of John! In reality, one would have to say: All things that came into being came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing of what came into being came into being. This captures the meaning of this sentence. The third sentence points with all its might to what has come into being in the world, to everything that is subject to becoming. And of that which is subject to becoming, it is said, first, that it is tangible. Everything we see as having come into being is created and passes away. And secondly, it is said of this created and passing away that it is made by the word, by the logos.

This sentence would not be there if it were not based on the awareness of a contrast, if it were not subject to the sentence that there is also something in the world that is not created and does not pass away, namely the eternal foundations that merely transform themselves. In our modern education, we have only lost this contrast between what has arisen on the surface and the powers that lie in the depths, which Plato, for example, calls the eternal ideas. We must presuppose these eternal ideas as that which does not pass away and which underlies what has arisen and is passing away, which does not exist in the arising and passing away in the ordinary sense, but subsists.

We must distinguish between existence and subsistence. That which subsists all things is the foundation, that which refers to the Father. We must speak to the community in all popularity in such a way that we bring this Father-God as the content of the absolutely eternal to the consciousness of our community children. That is not as difficult as you think. It is only difficult because today the world is intensively economizing on ideas. I can assure you that the people who understand it most easily are the farmers in the countryside. They understand it immediately, while only the people who have been educated in the current way do not understand it. They do not understand it.

We can learn a great deal by looking at the last remnants of the elementary spiritual that still exist in [unspoilt] human beings. It is relatively easy to convey the most profound ideas to people with an elementary soul life. These ideas are rejected only by those who are spoilt, who have been spoilt for the most part by our schools.

We must understand how to teach people in a popular way the eternal in all things and how to distinguish between what is transient, what has come into being and what is passing away. And we must evoke the idea, in all possible ways and roundabout ways, that the Father-God underlies what is enduring and the Son-God, the Christ as the creative Logos, underlies what is becoming and what is the process of becoming. Therefore, one must also seek understanding of the Father-God before the created and the working of the Christ in the created.

Such things must be worked out again, then we come again to concepts that lie beyond mere scientific concepts. But, my dear friends, you must also be able to speak about them in the right way. You do not learn this through logical speculation, because logical speculation itself suffers from the one-sidedness that it works towards being absorbed once. Logical speculation – if it remains only a matter of speculation – is the worst possible preparation for a sermon. If you want to preach, it is not enough to prepare yourself for the doctrinal content of the sermon; the only possible supplement to this preparation for the content is meditation for the preacher himself.

Anyone who wants to preach must first meditate, that is, call something into their consciousness that brings them into a feeling inwardness so that they feel the God, the divine within them. Those who do not prepare themselves in this meditative way will not be able to let the word resound with the nuance with which it must resound if one is to evoke understanding for what one has to say. You will have to speak of immortality, you will have to speak of the Fall of Man, of Creation, of Redemption and of Grace. But you must not speak of immortality, the Fall of Man, Creation, Redemption and Grace with the consciousness that you have gained from modern scientific education, but you must speak with the consciousness that you have gained from your feeling of the divine existence within you. Then your words will be given the necessary nuance that you need to reach the hearts of those to whom you are to bring the truths about immortality, the Fall of Man, Creation, Redemption and Grace. This is what must be understood by preachers as deeply as possible. They will not come to a deeper understanding of the teaching content unless they prepare themselves meditatively.

The kind of composure that you first acquire in meditation, which brings you to be alone with your whole being – even if only for a short time – that composure is what also prepares you for the proper mood for reading the Gospels. You must assume that only the meditative life can prepare you, on the one hand, for reading the Gospels and, on the other, for the special tone of preaching. This is what the preacher must make a habit of. One should not believe that an understanding of worship, an understanding of the right nuance of preaching, comes through intellectual considerations, through intellectual comprehension of the content of the gospel, but rather that it comes through meditative immersion in the spiritual and volitional element at the same time, which stimulates the human being, thus stimulates the whole human being, and that is what it is really always about.

It is certainly a good thing for the modern preacher to realize, by means of outstanding examples, what inner soul struggles must actually be fought through if one wants to penetrate from what one absorbs today through external education, including external theological education, and what determines the whole form of thought, to a real grasp of the suggested idea about the supersensible.

It is really useful for anyone who wants to become a religious leader today to study such personalities as, for example, Newman, the English Cardinal who started out from Anglicanism and who thus moved within a more modern world view, half consciously, and then fell back into Catholicism, which, even within Catholicism, because such people are only waiting for such people, could make him a cardinal. It is interesting to observe the struggles of such a personality. You see, in the beginning, Newman's struggle was based on wanting to understand Christian truths. But he could not get anywhere with that. In the end, he could not find a way to understand Christian truths in modern terms. He was honest enough not to want to come to the mere “simple man of Nazareth” in Weinel's manner, but there was in him the urge for the supersensible. He could not get along earlier than until he said to himself: Yes, at the starting point of Christianity are not highly educated, scientifically educated people, but there are the fishermen of Galilee, and they actually understood nothing of the sayings they did; they did these sayings without logic, without being imbued with a logical understanding. And then, in fact, everything that is modern theology, which works so hard to be logical, which comes to the point of negation in its criticism imbued with logic, only emerged from the simple words of the fishermen of Galilee. And then Newman comes to say to himself: If there is logic, it can only be born out of illogic, out of that which is lived in such a simple way as Christianity was lived by the people who surrounded Christ Jesus in Galilee. —

And so he comes to a particular conception of the evolution, of the development of that which is experienced [religiously], into the more elaborate. But now he is obliged to take the whole Catholic Church with him, because he remains in the actuality of the unfolding [of religious experience]. Why does he remain? Because he negates the possibility that today, through the logical, one can arrive at the super-logical through beholding. Thus he could, [standing between Scylla and Charybdis,] run the risk, on the one hand, of falling prey to Scylla through a purely rationalistic interpretation, or, on the other hand, of Charybdis through killing the rationalistic way of thinking, but then having to accept the whole tradition and falling back into Catholicism. In fact, everyone who thinks this way falls prey to Catholicism. You only have to consider that people who cannot go along with the contemporary way of entering the supersensible, such as Scheler, who is characteristic of our German education for this matter, fall back into Catholicism. If people seek the supersensible and reject the path that anthroposophy wants to take, [they fall back into Catholicism].

Today, in order to avoid falling between Scylla and Charybdis, we have no other choice than to follow the anthroposophical path, even to accept anthroposophy as a supporting element of religious life, in order to access the supersensible truths. Then you will also find — and this is necessary for you because it occurs in community building — the popular, simple form for that which we cannot do within anthroposophy because something else must come first. We still have to express ourselves too strongly in modern forms of education [for the presentation of supersensible truths], because we speak to those who belong to modern education. But if you are a number of people, then it is quite possible to find the simple form to speak to the people in such a way that the high concepts of the supersensible that have been hinted at become concrete again.

I will only hint at the following. You see, do not disdain to speak to people in such a way that you say to them: Look at the stone, look at the rock crystal, look at a mineral object shaped like this, and you will be able to say to yourself: This mineral object, how was it formed? It has been formed out of the earth; you have no reason to think otherwise than that it has been formed out of the earth. It is a piece of the earth, the earth can create such forms, that is a piece of the earth. But now look at the plants; look at what you can always see around you. Can you imagine that the earth produces plants [on its own]? No; what the earth has as seeds within itself must wait until spring comes, until the sun's rays penetrate from outside, and when the sun's rays lose their strength, the earth also loses the strength to produce plant growth. Look at the growth of plants, and you will notice that when plants try to survive the winter season, they take on a woody, mineral quality; they become trees, which in turn lose the sprouting and budding power in their wood, and take on something of the mineral world themselves. The Earth could never produce what is plant-like out of itself; for that it needs what surrounds the Earth. It is necessary to rise above this, to really teach people that the earth could only be a rocky body if it had only its own forces, but that it would never have vegetation and would be permeated by it if the earth did not form a unity with the cosmos, if the cosmic forces did not play a role and have an effect on the earth. The earth would not have a plant kingdom without the spatial heaven.

And if it was possible in ancient times to teach the slave masses in ancient Egypt such truths as, for example, the transition from solar power to the power of Sirius, if it was possible to teach people that at that time, then we need not despair that today, when we can speak to the simplest people about the fact that the Earth owes what it has as a vegetative being to the extraterrestrial cosmos with its forces. And so we can rescue human beings from their tendency towards the merely earthly by teaching them to feel what the earth draws from the cosmic heavens.

I therefore believe that we must work towards directing the soul's gaze to the whole of cosmic space, and that this can be achieved simply by considering the plant world in a way that can be understood by everyone. It is of great help to us to realize how completely innocent nature actually is. It is impossible to speak of anything in the mineral or plant world that is guilt or sin. And if we work through these concepts well, if we really present the innocence of nature and the possible becoming guilty of man in a concrete way, then we can work out what leads people to understand that something comes into the world with man that cannot be found in space at all. Once man has understood that plants owe their existence to space and are innocent, then we have a way of realizing that that which can make man guilty cannot come from space at all, that we are all compelled to seek the essential soul of man outside of space. We must seek this way to go beyond space. And you see, when we have found the way to go beyond space, then we will find further ways.

You can see how difficult it has become for people with a modern education to go beyond space, from the fact that the most intelligent people in the 19th century opposed the idea of immortality on the grounds that souls would have no place in the universe. They could not get beyond the spatial with the concept of the soul. With the concept of the soul, one must get beyond the spatial. And when one has come this far, one turns one's attention to the animal world and tries to bring to life a concept that one gets there, which not only seizes our imaginative life but also our deepest feelings.

We find that minerals and plants cannot become guilty, but they cannot suffer either. Man must suffer, but can also become guilty. And then we turn our gaze to the animal world; they cannot become guilty either, but they must suffer. And when we gradually learn to understand repeated lives on earth, especially when it is not a theory but a clear understanding, when we feel that there is a connection between guilt and suffering, even if it is not trivially practical, and we just cannot find this connection because we direct our attention to innocent nature and would also like to harness man to this unity of innocent nature, then the great world tragedy becomes clear to us, which consists in the fact that we have chained the animal world to us, that the animals must suffer with us, although they cannot be guilty. Then one arrives at the tragic realization that the animal world exists because of man, must share in his suffering, although it cannot be to blame. Feel this concept through, empathize that the animal world shares in evil, although it cannot go along with evil.

When we form a vivid picture of evil in this way – a picture that is also intuitive – we come into contact with the world. We only have to feel the tragedy of existence in the world, which consists in the fact that the animals around us suffer with us, and then we come to realize that there are duties that go beyond the ordinary legal obligations. This is a point where you can lead the human being completely out of the immediate sense world. For in the immediate sense world you find nothing but the legal concepts that regulate the sensual, the external relationships between human and human. The obligation to redeem the animals comes to us from a completely different world. We cannot do this at all in our present existence. We cannot do anything in our present existence to redeem the animals that suffer for our sake. We can only redeem them if we look ahead to a final state of the earth that no longer prevents us from intervening in the laws of nature to relieve the suffering of the animal world. And so we are moving towards understanding a final state of the earth, in which physics has no right to interfere. We are expanding that which lives in us humans to include an understanding of the interconnection of the world.

We must speak to the people of today, because if we speak in terms of the old religious ideas, people will object that from a scientific point of view none of this is possible. But we must try to find such a way that simply cannot be said by science. Because the suffering of the animal world is there, without the animal world being able to be guilty. And here we come directly to the transition; the possibility exists of knowing something about supernatural obligations, or rather, extra-terrestrial obligations, about duties that can be fulfilled when the earth has found its end, the end of its present physical state. We will be able to lead [people] to an understanding of this state of the earth by overcoming purely scientific thinking in an appropriate way.

But we cannot do this if we merely appeal to people's selfishness in our preaching. And that is what has gradually arisen in humanity and has actually made religious conviction so difficult that today, with the best sermons, we basically appeal to human selfishness; and that has come about because we only speak of immortality and not of being unborn.

What is the situation regarding immortality? From anthroposophy it becomes clear. It becomes clear through knowledge. But how does today's preacher speak about immortality? He shakes up — look at the facts — the selfish needs of people, and in doing so he speaks entirely to the deepest soul egoisms; and he would not reach the hearts at all if the desire did not beat towards him: I may not perish with death. Of course, man will not perish with death. But this view must not arise from desire. The preacher does stir up these desires; he speaks to desire and fear, even if he does not do so consciously, because that is how he is accustomed to speaking. You cannot speak of life before conception in the same way. You cannot speak of life before birth from an egoistic point of view; you can make a person indifferent to it, because deep down he does not care about it. Since he is experiencing existence, he is not interested in whether he has lived before. This interest must be instilled in man, and that can only be done by awakening in him the consciousness that he has been given a mission with his earthly existence, that he is a co-worker in the divine world order, which could not achieve its goal if it had to work without the sensual world. That the Deity has released man, that is one thing. What can be grasped is that the human being experiences freedom, which he could not experience if he had not descended into the body. We have to present the human being as something that has been sent down by God. Without realizing the pre-existence, you do not come to a sermon that takes hold of the whole person and not just the desiring person. And that is a great defect of our [present-day] preaching, that it appeals to the desiring on the one hand and to the fearful on the other, and not to that which represents man as an image of the Godhead, which has released man to work in earthly existence.

You see, that word that comes to us from ancient times, that plays such a great role in the Catholic Church, the Gloria, is inserted into the mass between the Gospel and the offertory. Gloria in excelsis Deo – Glory be to God in the highest, and peace on earth, and goodwill toward men. – This is how it is translated in modern times. Now this translation is somewhat misleading, because the concept of glory is not based on the concept of being worshipped; rather, it is based on the same concept as the Greek exusiai: the concept of shining outwards, of revealing itself. And the saying actually means: May the Divine in the Heights reveal Itself, and on earth may Its reflection be the peace of men of good will. — We must arrive at a new concept of glory, then we will also come to an understanding of these things.

Just think how terribly blasphemous it actually is when the Gospel of the Blindborn is translated: Why was this man born blind? Did he sin or his parents? — And the answer: Not he has sinned nor his parents, but the works of God shall be made manifest in him. Is this not blasphemy, that the man born blind was healed so that the works of God might be seen in him? While it is always translated that the works of God are revealed through him, the truth lies in the fact that he preformed blindness for himself in a pre-existent life, so that God might be revealed in him.

We must eliminate this erroneous concept, which appears in many forms; then we can begin to make it clear that the human being stands as an image of God, that he is there to allow the Godhead to work in him. We cannot arrive at this understanding if we rely only on the hope of a post-existent life and not on pre-existence. We must grasp radically that we are here on earth the continuation of the pre-existent life, not merely the beginning of the post-existent life, and that human minds cannot find the way to selflessness if we speak only of immortality and not of pre-existence. These things must be the subject of glowing preaching, then there will be a possibility of reconnecting human consciousness to the supersensible; and then the rest will follow of itself.

You see, if you want to arrive at a concept such as that of Creation, then you have to evoke in people an awareness of the following: if you look at the mineral nature today, you see that the law of the conservation of matter and of force prevails in it. And this world that we are looking at seems to be eternal. But if you realize that this world is only in space and that only minerals from the earthly and plants from the extra-earthly space have been added to space, that something is already coming in with the animal from a pre-earthly state – because what is natural law on earth today cannot of course, cannot make the animal into a human being – if you realize that the laws of nature themselves have a beginning, then you will be able to understand that the concept of creation also includes the emergence of the laws of nature, whereas today we simply extend the laws of nature forward and backward into infinity. This is how we arrive at the concept of creation. It is intended to draw attention to something that can prove to you that, when speaking to simple minds, one can always find a certain understanding for the highest things. When I was young, if one went to an Austrian farmer who had not been educated at school but had only learned to read and write in his village school and spoke to him about nature as one had learned at school, he would stare at one. He could not reconcile this concept of nature with what he knew at all. You couldn't say to him in the usual way, you look at nature, it produces plants and animals, it is beautiful, nature appears in the light - and so on; you might as well have said something Chinese. There was an Austrian dialect poet who used the word “d'Naduar”. But when the Austrian farmer, who had only learned to read and write, who had no sense of the concept of nature as it appears in modern science, spoke of nature, he had a different concept of nature. For him, “nature” was the male seed and without this connotation he could not understand the word nature. He understood that what lives innocently in nature is in him, but it is drowned out in him by what can become guilty. He regarded nature as a part of himself, which is connected with it if one can speak of birth, and he also had the concept that something else enters into man at birth than nature, which is why he calls the male seed nature, the natural thing, however, that is connected with being born. He had this mysterious connection between our being born and being a work of nature.

And as is the case with this striking concept, if one only seeks, even if one wants to move on to the concept of creation, one can still find the possibility of connecting to concepts that are understandable to the simplest mind. The concept of creation can become something thoroughly understandable, but one must really try to move beyond what modern education gives us with good will. And so one gradually comes to make man understand that the creation of man comes before the creation of nature, that man has entered the world at a time when nature had not yet taken effect, when there was no such thing as heredity, fertilization and so on. One returns to a state where heredity and fertilization did not yet exist, where our present world was not yet an external world order, where the apostasy of the spiritual beings could take place, which then later dragged man along with them; one returns to a state in the pre-natural time, where the fall into sin was not yet a possibility for man.

One can and must come to these things if one wants to find a content for the sermon. For this it is not enough for you to present these concepts of the Fall, redemption, and so on, to people in a theoretical way. You will see that if you only count on formal understanding, if you count on mere doctrinal content and not on varied repetition, then you will not be able to hold the community together. If you count on varied repetition, then you can hold the community together. Then you also bring them to an understanding of grace, then you also bring them to the possibility of understanding a new sense of freedom, and you can teach people that man can come to develop, at least in his consciousness, concepts of the innocent and of non-evil [...] gap], freedom [... gap], and that through all our efforts we can indeed become good people inwardly, but that we can only find our connection to the world of the good when grace is at work, when grace comes to meet us.

I can only hint at this, because I don't have the time to discuss these things properly. But to put it briefly: there are ways, if only they are sought, to get out of the conceptual system of today's education and into a fully human system of ideas that has access to the supersensible world; and to do all this, it is absolutely necessary to allow oneself to be fertilized by anthroposophy in a certain sense. People are quite capable of understanding what you say if you find the right tone by first putting yourself in a meditative state.

In recent times, there has been too much abstract, lifeless preaching. And you see, I can say this to you for further reflection — I do not want to impose it on you like a dogma — I can only say: the worst manner of preaching is to stick to abstractions and then become unctuous. To believe that one speaks to the heart by presenting the abstract in a very inward way is poison for the heart. If one speaks of the “simple man of Nazareth”, if one tries to preach about Christ without taking the supersensible into account, if one allows everything Christian to rest, as it were, on his humanity, and wants to teach this to people by adopting an untrue sentimental tone, then one poisons the minds, because then one lives untruthfully about that which should permeate the sermon.

What should permeate the sermon through the feelings is the connection between the preacher and the supersensible content and impulse of the world itself, and the supersensible content and impulse is never given through the abstract. The preacher must be deeply imbued with the humility that the mere use of logical reason is itself a sin, and that the pursuit of science in modern times is killing the religious, that we must redeem the world from the scientific view through religion, that it belongs to the religious to overcome science, and that it is a commandment of Christ Jesus himself to overcome science, that Christ Jesus lives among us precisely for this reason, and that we express his mission to overcome science when we connect with him.

On the one hand, we must be clear about one thing: the human being must work in the world, and so he must already sin by grasping the world with his senses. We see sin as being necessary. And we see that the pendulum, because there is rhythm in the world, must swing to the other side, to the side of redemption from natural science. We will not be able to eradicate it, because we recognize the necessity for man to make the acquaintance of Ahriman, but we must realize that the pendulum must swing to the other side. But we must realize the rhythm, that only in a state of equilibrium can the two things work together. And for that, you see, I must draw your attention to something that may surprise you, but which must enter your consciousness if you want to find the necessary tone for a future sermon.

You see, we actually live today in a consciousness that is a kind of continuation of the ancient Persian world consciousness, which lived in Ahriman and Ormuzd. In Ahriman, he sees the evil god who opposes Ormuzd, and in Ormuzd he sees the good god who destroys the works of Ahriman. It is not known that the ancient Persian was aware that one must follow neither Ahriman nor Ormuzd [alone], but their interaction. And their interaction manifests itself in a figure such as Mithras. Ormuzd is a Lucifer-like figure who frees us from the world when we surrender to her, who wants to snatch us from heaviness and let us burn in the light. Man must find the way between light and heaviness, between Lucifer and Ahriman, and therefore we must have the possibility to think not in any dualism, but to think in the Trinity. We must have the possibility to say: the Persian duality of Ormuzd and Ahriman is today Lucifer and Ahriman, and the Christ stands in the middle of them, the Christ is the one who brings about the balance. Now all religious development so far, especially the theological, has set up a very pernicious equation, it has brought the Christ-figure as close as possible to the Lucifers. It is almost a resurrection of the old Persian Ormuzd when one experiences how Christ is spoken of today. One always thinks only of duality, thus of evil in contrast to good. The world problem is not solved by duality, but solely and exclusively by the Trinity. For as soon as you have duality, you not only have good and evil, but you have the battle between light and darkness, the battle that must not end with the victory of one over the other, but must end with the harmonization of the two. That is actually what must be brought into the concept of Christ. It is not for nothing that Christ sits with the tax collectors and sinners.

You see, my dear friends, the world in which we live has come about in such a way that it was originally formed by all the influences that were at work in the configuration that we experience as the echoes of race, as the echoes of the individual peoples and the like. Consider this world as it emerges from the element of birth, and consider the mission of Christ. The mission of Christ is to overcome all this naturalness, to plant the love of universal humanity in the place of racial life. That which was there at the beginning of the earth, the Adamite, is to be eradicated by Christ. The particularism of a nation, the national egoism, is to be overcome by the Christ, by the general humanity. Redemption does not consist in being in an equally real way as the natural itself, working against the natural, but in taking up the natural and bringing about a balance between the purely spiritual and the natural.

The concept of Christ has not yet been worked out in its purity between Ormuzd and Ahriman, between Lucifer and Ahriman. The concept of the Christ must be grasped as that which leads us to harmonize the opposing poles. For general humanity, human love, is something other than what arises out of families, peoples, races, nations, and so on. But the one is not to be eradicated by the other; rather, race and individual must be harmonized. The mission of Christ on earth will only be understood when it is known that the Father God is connected with the eternal alone, not with the created and the passing; the Christ impulse has come into temporality because it is connected with the created and the passing, and it makes the temporal into the eternal.

We must learn to take literally again what is written in the Gospels: Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. - Let us translate it into a language that can be spoken today. That which the expanse of space - heaven in the external spatial sense - evokes through the stars in the plants of the Earth, that which the Earth itself brings forth in the minerals, that is, the whole earthly world, will pass away. But when it has passed away, when plants and stones have passed away, then, after this earth has disappeared, that which has come to earth in the Christ will live, that which lives on in the word. And when the Christ is taken up in our word, then, after the destruction of the earth, that which is alive in us through the Christ will continue to live in time, according to the Pauline word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

We must rise to the belief that the laws of nature are not eternal, but that the earth will come to an end, and that what exists can only continue to exist because a creative force will carry it beyond when our earth has perished. Stone and plant will perish, but what is in us must not perish, it must be carried out, and that can only be done if the Christ is in us. Only the animals will come with us, and we will then have to release them. Because they are on earth because at the moment when the possibility of becoming sinful entered the world, they were at a stage of development where they had to be seized by that which was only suitable for people. Before this possibility of sin entered the world, there could be no suffering in the world. Minerals and plants do not need to suffer as such, but minerals and plants will pass away. Animals were at a stage of development when they were dragged along by people into suffering. They must be released from it again when this stage of development is over and the earth no longer exists. The laws that now rule our natural world will then rule the world of the soul, which we now only experience inwardly. We cannot comprehend this if we do not also know that man came before the earth.

We must open up access to understanding of these things to people. This must be reflected in our preaching. You do not need to believe that what I have said today you have to say to the congregation in similar words. But you must understand it, then it is already alive in your sermon, even if you preach in the simplest way. For there is not only the ponderable understanding of things, which consists in your mouth speaking and your ear listening, but there is also the imponderable understanding that works from person to person.

Unfortunately, I could only give you these few hints, my dear friends, but I hope that you will have heard many things in my words that want to come from the human being. Without this will, we will not make any progress. It is not a matter of merely stimulating our intellect; we must stimulate the whole human being.

We will turn our attention to-day to manifestations of the life of soul able to lead us to a kind of self-observation in which a vista of our personal karma, our personal destiny, flashes into life like lightning. When we reflect upon the nature of the life of soul even with more or less superficial self-knowledge, we realise that sense-impressions and the thoughts we form about them are the only clear and definite experiences in the life of soul in which, with ordinary consciousness, we are completely awake. As well as these thoughts, sense-impressions, sense-perceptions, we also have, of course, the life of feeling. But just think how indeterminately our feelings surge through us, how little we can speak of inner, wide-awake clarity in connection with our life of feeling. Anyone who faces these facts with an open mind will certainly admit that as compared with thoughts, his feelings are indeterminate, lacking in definition. True, the life of feeling concerns us in a more intimate, personal way than does the life of thought, but for all that there is something undefined in it and also in the way it functions. We shall not so readily allow our thoughts to deviate from those of other people when it is a question of reflecting about something that is alleged to be true. We shall feel that our thoughts, our sense-impressions must somehow tally with those of others. With our feelings it is different. We allow ourselves the right to feel in a more intimate, more personal way. And if we compare feelings with dreams, we shall say: dreams arise from the night-life, feelings from the depths of soul into the light of day-consciousness. But again, in respect of their pictures, feelings are as indeterminate as dreams. Anyone who makes the comparison, even with such dreams as enter quite distinctly into his consciousness, will realise that their lack of definition is just as great as that of feelings. Therefore we can say: it is only in our sense-impressions and thoughts that we are really awake; in our feelings we dream—even during waking life. In ordinary waking life, too, our feelings make us into dreamers.

And still more so the will! When we say: ‘Now I am going to do this, or that’—how much of the subsequent process is actually in our consciousness? Suppose I want to take hold of something. The mental picture comes first, then this picture completely fades away and in my ordinary consciousness I know nothing of how the impulse contained in the ‘I want’ finds its way into my nerves, into my muscles, into my bones. When I conceive the idea, ‘I want to get hold of the clock,’ does my ordinary consciousness know anything at all of how this impulse penetrates into my arm which then reaches out for the clock? It is only through another sense-impression, another mental picture, that I perceive what has actually happened. With my ordinary consciousness I sleep through what has happened intermediately, just as in the night I sleep through what I experience in the spiritual world. I am as unconscious of the one as of the other. In waking life, therefore, there are three different and distinct states of consciousness. In the activity of thinking we are awake, completely awake; in the activity of feeling we dream; in the activity of willing we are asleep. We are in a state of perpetual sleep as far as the essential core of the will is concerned, for it lies deep, deep down in the region of the subconscious.

Now there is something that in waking life too, is always rising up from the depths of the soul, namely, remembrance, memory. When we contact immediate reality, we have thoughts. This immediate reality makes a definite impression upon us. But the past of this earthly life plays all the time into present reality in the form of thoughts and memories, of recollected thoughts. As you know, these recollected thoughts are much dimmer, much less distinct than the impressions of present reality. Nevertheless they do well up and make their way into ordinary waking life. And when we give memory free play, letting it recall all that we have passed through in life, we realise: here is our own life of soul, rising up once again. We feel that in this earthly life we are that which we can remember. Think only what becomes of a man who cannot remember some period of his life, whose memory of that period is completely obliterated. We may come across such cases and I will give just one example.—There was a man in a respectable position who while his life was pursuing its normal course, remembered his past, what he had done in childhood and during his education, what he had experienced as a student, and then in his profession. But one day his memory was suddenly blotted out. He no longer knew who he was.—I am telling you of an actual case.—Strangely enough it was not the reasoning faculty, not the mental grasp of immediate reality that failed; the memory was completely blotted out. The man no longer knew who he was as a boy, as a youth, as a grown-up; his mind could grasp only what was making an impression upon him at the moment. And because he no longer knew who he was in boyhood, youth or maturity, he could not link his present with his past life; this was impossible from the moment his memory faded.

A case like this makes it easy for us to realise just why we do one thing or another at a particular time; it is not because of the pressure of immediate circumstances but because of certain experiences we have had in the past—primarily in the past of our earthly life. Just think of all that you might do or leave undone if memory played no part in your actions! Man is dependent upon memory to a far greater extent than he imagines. The misfortune that befell the man of whom I told you, was that after the sudden obliteration of his memory he was guided only by the impulses of the present moment, not by any promptings of memory. He put on his outdoor clothes and left his home and family. He was tied to them only through memory—and now this memory was blotted out. Impulses worked in him that had nothing whatever to do with memories of his family. His reason and intelligence remained; and so—because it would have been senseless to do these things while other people were there—he waited until they happened to be absent. He had lived with his family as a sensible, rational individual, but his memory had gone. He went to the railway station and took a ticket for a place a long way off. His mind was absolutely clear in a matter where reason came into play. He got into the train and went off; but the memory of what had happened, even the memory of having taken the ticket was blotted out. He was aware only of the immediate present. The extinction of memory was a pathological condition. But he was so intensely engrossed with the present that he knew when he had arrived at his destination; he could compare this with the timetable. The ability to read—something that had already become habit and was therefore no longer a matter of memory—that too had remained. He alighted and took another ticket to a distant destination. And so he went on, travelling about the world without knowing who he was. One day his memory returned, but he knew nothing of what he had been doing since buying the first railway ticket. When his memory returned and he was himself again, he found himself in a Casual Ward in Berlin. It was only the things that had happened in the trains and the places where he had been that were blotted out, for they did not belong to the present. Just think what a state of confusion! How utterly uncertain of himself such a man must be! You will realise from this how closely our ‘I,’ our Ego, is bound up with our store of memories. We know nothing of the self within us if we are bereft of the store of memories.

What is the nature of these memories? Memories are of the nature of soul. But in the whole range of man's life and being they are present in another form as well. They work purely as soul-forces only in a human being who has reached the age of twenty one or twenty two, and continues living. Before then the memories do not work purely as forces of soul. We must be very conscious of what I have said in these lectures, namely that during the first seven years of earthly existence our physical corporality is an inheritance from our parents. At the change of teeth it is not only the first, milk teeth that are expelled—that is only the final act; the whole of the first body is discarded. We build up the second body—the body we bear until the onset of puberty—out of the soul-and-spirit we brought with us when we came down from the spiritual world to physical existence on the Earth. But from birth until the change of teeth we have received a host of impressions from the environment; Our being was absorbed in what flowed into us through having learnt to speak. Think of all the wonders that stream into us together with the power of speech! Any unprejudiced observer will agree in this respect with the statement made by Jean Paul to the effect that he had learnt more in the first three years of his life than in the three academic years. The meaning of this is clear. For even if the academic years are extended to five or six—not, presumably, because one learns too much but because one learns too little—even if this period is considerably extended we learn only the merest trifle in comparison with what we assimilate during the first three years of life, and thereafter through the years following the first three until the change of teeth. After a certain time all this remains in the form of hazy, indefinite memory. But just think how pale and indistinct are these memories of our first seven years compared with the events of later life. Just try to make the comparison. The memories often seem to loom up like erratic boulders without any obvious connection. And why? What we take in during the first seven years of life and what we take in later on have entirely different tasks to fulfil. What we take in during the first seven years works with intense activity at the plastic moulding of the brain, passes into the very organism. There is a great difference between the relatively undeveloped brain we possess when we come into earthly existence and the beautifully developed brain that is ours by the time of the change of teeth. And the result of this work penetrates from the brain into the whole of the rest of the body. This inner artist we bring with us from pre-earthly existence works in a most wonderful way upon our physical body during the first seven years of life. It is miraculous to see the facial expression, the look, the mobility of the features, the purposeful movements of arms and limbs beginning to appear in a child after the lack of definition characterising early babyhood. We see how spirit begins to permeate the child's being and the impressions he absorbs. The way in which spirit permeates the child during the first seven years of life is one of the most wonderful sights imaginable. When we observe how the physiognomy and gestures of the child develop from birth until the change of teeth, when we read and decipher it all just as we decipher something in a book from the single letters, when we know how to connect the forms of the gestures and the facial expressions appearing in succession just as we can connect the letters of a word and so read the word—then we are gazing at the workings of the brain which has been kindled into activity by the impressions received; these can form themselves only into sparse and scattered memories, because the plastic development of the brain and therewith of the physiognomy has primarily to be provided for.

As life continues its course from the time of the change of teeth to the onset of puberty, the forces working in this way are more or less lost to sight. As I said, until the beginning of the twenty-first year, work continues upon the shaping and elaboration of the organism; but from the seventh year onwards this work is less concerned with the bodily nature—and still less from puberty until the beginning of the twenties. But something else comes to our help. If we have any aptitude for this kind of observation and mellow it by contemplating the marvellous phenomenon of the child's physiognomy which reveals itself month by month, year by year in greater clarity, above all if we can perceive what the child's gestures reveal, how the awkward, unskilful movements of the limbs turn in a most wonderful way into movements filled with intelligence and purpose—this sensitive perception can be deepened and finer organs of sense will develop. Then, when we have before us a child between the ages of seven and fourteen, that is to say between the second dentition and puberty, when the changes in the physiognomy and the gestures are less marked and the development less obvious, it is possible through inner feeling which has all the certainty of an eye of soul to perceive how the child's development is proceeding in a more hidden way. And from this delicate, intimate observation of the bodily development of a child between the seventh and fourteenth years, there can arise the faculty to gaze into the life preceding the descent to earthly existence, the life between death and a new birth.

These things must again be within our reach, enabling us to affirm of a child between the ages of seven and fourteen: around you there is not only the sense-world of nature; in everything that is revealed in sense-perceptions, in colours, in forms, lives the spirit! It is truly wonderful to see the spirit becoming articulate in all things and then, as it were in a mirror-image, to perceive a reflection of this in the way in which spirituality reveals itself more and more distinctly in the physiognomy of a child. If we feel this deeply and inwardly and with a certain reverence make the experience a living power in the soul, then, as we observe the child between the ages of seven and fourteen, this reverence will lead to an understanding of how the pre-earthly existence of a human being between death and a new birth works into him here on Earth. And we shall feel that this bodily development is governed, not by the forces of the earthly environment but by the second physical organism which we ourselves mould according to the model provided by the first.

This can be of great importance in life. Humanity will have to learn to perceive the essential nature of Man. Life will then undergo the deepening without which the further progress of civilisation is simply no longer possible. Our civilisation has become totally abstract! In our ordinary consciousness we are no longer able to think in the real sense; we can only think what has been inculcated into us. We are no longer capable of perceptions as delicate as those of which I have been speaking. Hence men to-day pass each other by in ignorance. They learn a great deal about animals, plants, minerals, but nothing whatever about the subtle, impalpable processes of the development of the human being. The whole life of soul must become more intimate, more delicate, purer, and then we shall again perceive something of the real nature of human development itself; and this will lead us eventually to a vista of pre-earthly existence.

Next comes the period immediately following puberty, the period between the onset of puberty and the twenty-first or twenty-second year. Just think of all that a human being reveals to us in this phase of his life! Even with our ordinary consciousness we see evidence of a complete change in his life, but it takes a crude form. We speak of the hobbledehoy years, of the ‘awkward’ years and this in itself indicates our awareness that a change is taking place. What is actually happening is that the inner being is now emerging more clearly. But if we can acquire sensitive perception of the first two life-periods, what emerges after puberty will appear as a ‘second man,’ actually as a second man, who becomes visible through the physical man standing there before us. And what expresses itself in the awkwardness, but also in very much that is admirable, appears like a second, cloudlike man within the physical man. It is important to detect this second, shadowy being, for questions on the subject are being asked on all sides to-day. But our civilisation gives no answer.

The turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century was accompanied by momentous changes in the spiritual and physical evolution of the Earth. Men of the ancient East had divined this and said that Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, would come to an end at the close of the nineteenth century when an Age of Light would begin. This Age of Light has begun in very truth but men are still unaware of it because in their minds they are still living in the nineteenth century and their ideas flow on lethargically. Nevertheless around us there is clear, radiant light and if we pay heed to what will reveal itself from the spiritual world, we can become aware of this light. And because youth is peculiarly sensitive, with the turn of the century an undefined longing arose in the hearts of the young for a more intimate knowledge, a much more intimate perception of Man. Human beings born about this time—at the turn of the nineteenth century—have the instinctive feeling: we need to know a great deal more about Man than people are able to tell us. Nobody tells us what we long to know! There was this striving, this urgent, insistent striving for an understanding of Man. Children and young people were ill at ease with their elders for they longed to hear from them something about Man, and these elders knew nothing. Modern civilisation can say nothing, knows nothing about the spirit of Man. But in earlier epochs people were able, speaking with real warmth of heart, to tell the young very much about Man. When thoughts were still quick with life, the old had a very great deal to say—but now they knew nothing. And so there came an urge to run, run no matter where, in order to learn something about Man. The young became wanderers, path-finders; they ran away from people who had nothing to tell them, seeking here, there and everywhere for something that could tell them something about Man.

There you have the real origin of the Youth Movement of the twentieth century. What is this Youth Movement really seeking? It is seeking to find the reality of this second, cloudlike man who comes into evidence after puberty and who is actually there within the human being. The Youth Movement wants to be educated in a way that will enable it to apprehend this second man.—But who is this second man? What does he actually represent? What is it that emerges as it were from this human body in which one has observed the gradual maturing of physiognomy and gesture, in connection with which one is also able to feel how in the second period of life from the change of teeth to puberty, pre-earthly existence is coming to definite expression? What is making its appearance here, like a stranger? What is it that now comes forth when, after puberty, the human being begins to be conscious of his own freedom, when he turns to other individuals, seeking to form bonds with them out of an inner impulse which neither he nor the others can explain but which underlies this very definite urge. Who is this ‘second man?’ He is the being who lived in the earlier incarnation and is now making his way like a shadow, into this present earthly life. From what breaks in upon human life so mysteriously at about the age of puberty, mankind will gradually learn to take account of karma. At the time of life when a human being becomes capable of propagating his kind, impulses to which he gave expression in earlier earthly lives also make their appearance in him. But a great deal must happen in human hearts and feelings before there can be any clear recognition, any clear perception of what I have just been describing to you.

Think of the great difference there is in the ordinary consciousness between self-love and love of others. People know well what self-love is, for every individual holds himself in high esteem—of that there is no doubt! Self-love is present even in those who imagine that they are entirely free from it. There are very few indeed—and a close investigation of karma would be called for in such cases—who would dream of saying that they have no self-love in them. Love of others is rather more difficult to fathom. Such love may of course be absolutely genuine, but it is very often coloured by an element of self-love. We may love another human being because he does something for us, because he is by our side; we love him for many reasons closely connected with self-love. Nevertheless there is such a thing as selfless love and it is within our reach. We can learn little by little to expel from love every vestige of self-interest, and then we come to know what it means to give ourselves to others in the true and real sense. It is from this self-giving, this giving of ourselves to others, this selfless love, that we can kindle the feeling that must arise if we are to glimpse earlier earthly lives. Suppose you are a person who was born, let us say, in the year 1881; you are alive now; once upon a time, in an earlier earthly life, you were born, say, in the year 737 and died in 799. The man, personality B, is living, now, in the nineteenth/twentieth century; formerly this personality—you yourself—lived in the eighth century. The two personalities are linked by the life stretching between death and the new birth. But before even so much as an inkling can come to you of the personality who lived in the eighth century, you must be capable of loving your own self exactly as if you were loving another human being. For although the being who lived in the eighth century is there within you, he is really a stranger, exactly as another person may be a stranger to you now. You must be able to relate yourself to your preceding incarnation in the way you relate yourself now to some other human being; otherwise no inkling of the earlier incarnation is possible. Neither will you be able to form an objective conception of what appears in a human being after puberty as a second, shadowy man. But love that is truly selfless becomes a power of knowledge, and when love of self becomes so completely objective that a man can observe himself exactly as he observes other human beings, this is the means whereby a vista of earlier earthly lives will disclose itself—at first as a kind of dim inkling. This experience must be combined with the kind of observation I have been describing, whereby we become aware of the essential, fundamental nature of man. The urge to apprehend the truth of repeated earthly lives has been present in humanity since the end of Kali Yuga and is already unmistakably evident. The only reason why people do not speak about it is because it is not sufficiently clear or defined. But let us suppose that a thoroughly sincere member of the modern Youth Movement were to wake up one morning and for a quarter of an hour be vividly conscious of what he had experienced during sleep—and suppose one were to ask him during this quarter of an hour: what is it that you are really seeking?—he would answer: ‘I am striving to apprehend the whole man, the being who has passed through many earthly lives. I am striving to know what it is within me that has come from earlier stages of existence. But you know nothing about it; you have nothing to tell me!’

In human hearts to-day there is a longing to understand karma. Therefore this is the time when the impulse must be given to study history in the way I have illustrated by certain examples; it is this kind of study which, if earnestly and actively pursued, will lead human beings to an understanding of their own lives in the light of reincarnation and karma. That is why in these lectures I am combining studies of historical personages with indications that will gradually lead to perception of man's own individual karma. By the time we come to the last lecture we shall have gained a clear idea of how man can begin to glimpse his own karma. But the only way to achieve this is to observe things first of all in the great setting and structure of world-history. The primary aim of this lecture was to shed light on the inner nature and being of man and it has also been possible to elucidate the inner aspect of the strivings of a promising Movement of the times.—And now let me conclude with a picture drawn from world-history.

Study of history in the future must be concerned with the whole man, must realise that man himself carries over from one epoch into the next the impulses that work in history, in the development of world-history. Let us think of the days when Charlemagne was reigning in Europe—it was from 768 to 814 A.D.. Just recall for a moment everything you know about Charlemagne and what he accomplished. As so much about him is taught in school, I am sure that countless details will come into the minds of my listeners! At the same time as Charlemagne, a very important personage was living in the East, namely, Haroun al Raschid. He was a product of the scholarship associated in those days with Mohammedanism and he was fired with the will to foster and promote this oriental scholarship at a centre of learning and culture. Extraordinary results were achieved at his Court, for the highest attainments of the physical sciences, of astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, geography, as they were in those days, converged, so to speak, in him. Art, literature, history, pedagogy—all these branches of culture flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. When one can perceive what was actually accomplished at this Court, the spectacle is far grander, far more impressive than that of the achievements of Charlemagne's Court, above all in respect of spiritual culture. Moreover there is a great deal in the campaigns of Charlemagne that the modern mind will not exactly admire! Living at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was another personality, one who in those days was simply a very wise man, but who in a much earlier incarnation, a long time previously, had been an Initiate. I have told you that the results of Initiation in an earlier incarnation may recede into the background in a later epoch. A most wonderful academy was established over in the East at that time and this other personality of whom I am speaking possessed real genius as an organiser. Scholarship, art, poetry, architecture, sculpture, the sciences—all were organised and brought together by this man at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. Both Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor passed in due course through the gate of death and their evolution proceeded. This was the time when Arabism was spreading over Europe. The spread of Arabism came to a halt, but Haroun al Raschid himself, as well as his Counsellor, continued to be associated with its influence. Whereas the gaze of Haroun al Raschid in his life between death and rebirth was directed to Arabism as it swept through the North of Africa, across to Spain and further upwards to Western Europe, the attention of the other, the wise Counsellor, was directed from the East across the regions North of the Black Sea and from thence towards Middle Europe. It is strange that in following the life of a man between death and a new birth, one can also follow those things upon which his gaze is directed as he looks downwards. As I have told you, what he is actually beholding are the deeds of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones whose workings are connected with what is happening on the Earth. In the life between death and a new birth we look downwards to the Earth, just as on the Earth we look upwards to the Heavens. The work of these two souls continued long after the close of their physical lives. Outwardly, they were reborn as men of very different characters. Haroun al Raschid appeared again as Lord Bacon of Verulam, the originator of the modern scientific mentality. Those who are capable of unprejudiced observation can see in everything that was forced upon the world by Bacon, a new edition of what was once cultivated over in the East. In the East men had turned away from Christianity. Bacon was outwardly a Christian, but inwardly, in his real aims, unchristian. The other man, the one who had once been the wise Counsellor, followed the path which led across to Middle Europe via the regions North of the Black Sea. It was he who as Amos Comenius brought Arabism over in a quite different form—a much deeper, more inward form than that in which it was introduced by Bacon—but who did, nevertheless, bear Arabism into the modern age.

And so at the dawn of modern spiritual life, two streams intermingled. We can perceive this development of history quite clearly—it is a phase when Christianity is temporarily forgotten, when on the one side scientific culture is externalised, but on the other becomes all the more inward. In his incarnation which had its roots in the East and then ran its course amid the deeper spiritual life of Middle Europe, much of the Eastern element persisted. It is not by casually opening some book ... in a certain dialect there is an expression ‘ochsen’ (to ‘swot’) and I can think of no other word at the moment ... and then swotting up Bacon and Amos Comenius, that we can discern the inner evolution of the human race; we must rather begin to perceive how the development of the several epochs is brought about by men themselves, how the impulses are carried over from earlier into later times. Try for a moment to picture quite clearly what happened here. Christianity has spread, has taken a certain hold in the regions of Middle and Northern Europe. But through men like Bacon of Verulam, the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, and Amos Comenius, the reincarnated Counsellor, something creeps in that is not genuine Christianity, but merges nevertheless with all that is working like so many spiritual streams in world-evolution. Only in this way is it possible to grasp what is really happening and to understand the great world-processes in which man is rooted.

If we go back to the time preceding Haroun al Raschid, to a man who was an immediate disciple of Mohammed, we must be quite clear about what it was that had been indoctrinated into oriental spiritual life through Mohammedanism. Study of original Christianity reveals the deep significance of the fact that it has the Trinity. When we think of the Spiritual in nature, the Spiritual Power which places us in the world as physical human beings and operates in the laws of nature, namely, the Father Being, we may ask ourselves: What should we be if the Father Being alone worked in us? Through the whole of life from birth till death, we should be under the same sway of necessity as prevails in the world around us. But in point of fact, at a certain age in life we become free beings, not in any way losing our manhood but awakening to a higher form of it. The principle that is working in us when we attain our freedom, when we release ourselves altogether from the sway of nature, this principle is the Son Being, the Christ—the Second Form of the Godhead. But it is the Power of the Holy Spirit that quickens within us the recognition that we live not in the body alone but having been associated with the body through its phases of development, we awaken, we are awakened as beings of Spirit. Man in the fullness of his being can be understood only through the Trinity; it is there that we perceive the concrete reality. But over against the Trinity, Mohammedanism proclaims an abstraction: There is no other Divine Being save the Father God, the one and only God. The Father is all; it is not lawful to speak of a threefold Godhead. In Mohammed himself, and in his followers, this doctrine of the one Father God was personified.

In an epoch when the highest human faculty capable of development was that of thinking in cold, barren abstractions, when men knew only the one, abstract God, they began more and more to identify this God with thinking, to deify the life of thought and the human intellect—forgetting that real thinking has an essentially altruistic tendency. In Mohammed's followers, this talent for thinking about the world in pure abstractions was expressed with a certain originality and grandeur. One of these followers was Muawija. I wish you could look him up in history. You would find there a strange mental configuration, the prototype, as it were, of men who think in pure abstractions, who want to shape the world according to tenets contained in a few simple paragraphs. Muawija, one of Mohammed's followers, appeared again in our time as Woodrow Wilson. A revival of the abstract thinking of Mohammedanism gave rise to the view that it is possible to shape a whole world by applying the principles set forth in fourteen prosaic, abstract paragraphs, void of any real substance. Truth to tell, there has been no greater illusion than this in all world-history; no other illusion has proved such a pitfall for well-nigh the whole of mankind. Before the war, when I spoke in the Helsingfors Lecture Course¹ of Woodrow Wilson's shortcomings—his fame was then just beginning—people were unwilling to understand when over and over again, wherever I had the opportunity of speaking, I indicated that the calamity looming ahead was by no means unconnected with the idolisation of Woodrow Wilson then going on in the world. Now, since the impulse of our Christmas Foundation, the time has come when such things will be spoken of openly and without reserve, when our studies of history will also be connected with matters that are potent impulses at this very time. Esotericism must permeate the whole Anthroposophical Movement in order that what lies hidden beneath the shroud of external history may be brought into the light of day. Men will not be equal to the task of coping with world-events nor of doing what needs to be done until they begin to study karma and until individuals learn to observe their own being, as well as world-history, in the light of karma.

• 1. The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad Gita. 28th May–5th June, 1913.

My dear friends!

For the kind of striving you are involved in, it is of primary importance to cultivate a true impulse for feeling yourselves within the spiritual world as well as striving towards the achievement of such an impulse, but taken from the viewpoint of your Movement, of which I intend speaking to you today. You see it really involves establishing a connection with a definite point to enable you to link to a spiritual impulse, if you want to be a sure, broad minded, active person, which you all want to be. It involves enlivening the appropriate impulses for this particular activity. From my observations in the spiritual world as such, it appears that the following will be helpful to you.

A connection can be established with the manifestation of the spirit of speech, the wielding of the speech genius. We must firstly be very clear, my dear friends, how far we are removed as a rule from the real spiritual, inner self-activation of grasping speech within ourselves. We basically are involved with speech but without its divine quality. We take up speech in such a manner that by the very act of applying it to ordinary life, we actually profane it. We allow ourselves as contemporary people to use speech by not venerating it in any way at all. We basically speak in sinfulness and this can awaken the awareness that our speaking sinfully enables us to acquire an attitude, I may say, to develop a relationship with speech towards obtaining a spiritual impulse. Examples to confirm this arise of course from all areas.

How many people today have obtained some guidance which empathises with any of the sounds in speech? This naturally means a large number of sounds are spoken conventionally and inhumanely, without comprehension, uttered as if without human input. Who feels at the moment the word “harden” is spoken, that in expressing the word the speaker's mood is permeated by something which hardens it like a mineral and simultaneously cools down his mood? Who feels, when the word “Word” is spoken that it is linked to life from ancient times, a past spiritual weaving which has been killed in the present time, the past crystallized in the present, and so on? We have absolutely no experience of the most important words any more. I would like to know how many people today have the experience with the word “thinking,” how many people have an experience with the word “feeling,” the word “willing.” This I'm only saying to you with reference to what I really want to entrust you with today.

You may of course name yourself in the most varied expressions of language. You can call yourself “I” as one does usually, or you can start to theorise about it and say to yourself you can be called a “human-being” (Mensch).¹ Then you substitute the speech genius and determine your own being out of the being of the language. However today a person has the feeling when he does something like that, he is applying a word which he designates to himself. When a person of today says to himself he can be called a “human-being,” he thinks that under all circumstances he has in a comprehensive way with a word, he believes, described an idea.

Now, when the starting point is feeling, it is good: in the true sense of the word language is so little understood, making the description which a person as a human-being applies to himself actually something whose understanding must first be wrestled with, whose understanding must first be arrived at. Feeling should actually always be a starting point so that when I believe I can describe myself in some or other words, even in my mother tongue, they designate an infinite pride in me. When we permeate ourselves with the feeling that we believe we can manage a language, even our mother tongue, so far removed from the spirit that we can legitimately name ourselves with the word “human-being,” if we consider this belief as terribly proud then we start to draw courage for the preparatory feeling towards a specific spiritual impulse such as I am indicating today. We should much more often be able to say: ‘I am placed on the earth as a human-being through some or other divine circumstances unknown to me and this leads me to call myself a “human-being,” but the basis for this description lies high above my horizon. It is the will of God who prevails here, who has lead me out of the unconscious deep substrate, to describe me as “human-being.” I have as a human-being, as this human individuality standing on earth, actually not the right to characterize myself.’ Then the next step must be to say to oneself: Before I can become capable at all of understanding the entire preliminary stages in existence which leads to me saying “I” to myself, I must undergo three developmental steps—right up to the judgement which I may express as the following: I have no right to call myself “human-being,” I need to first go through three steps of development, I must push through three tests. When I have passed these three tests to satisfy my own judgement, will I have earned the right to say to myself: ‘You are a human-being.’

This we should actually feel toward every spoken word: an extraordinary noble humility towards the point of origin for the development of spiritual impulses. We need to say to ourselves: Just like we as human-beings stand on earth today in our 5^th Post-Atlantean period, we may, if we are honest people, start by falling quiet, name nothing and then start to conquer the three steps which will give us the right to rename things out of ourselves. Through this can we first get a feeling for how extraordinary a meaningful cosmic experience it had been, as indicated in scripture, that in the presence of God Adam was permitted to name animals and things, which only God's proximity could enable. We come through such experiences which need indeed to be concrete personal experiences, to the necessary depths of the scripture, so that it, through its inner power which we can give it, reach the necessary nuances and coloration and out of every word in each verse let it ring out, to which we can't merely say: ‘We don't have the right to name things’—but we could say: ‘Through God the right has been given to us, to name things out of ourselves.’

These things must firstly be experienced through the depths of our soul in a priestly way to really encounter the world. Outer gestures do not make a priest, because the priest expresses what comes out of the deepest depths within. When we designate the words “human-being” as such to ourselves, we should only be able to do so when we have gone through these three stages:

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has depths which I must first need to fathom;

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has heights to which I need to rise first;

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has widths which I first have to look at and grasp.

These three sentences contain something meaningful: being a human-being. By deepening these sentences through meditation, they can take you a long way.

In truth it is so: by the human-being placing himself in earthly existence he places himself outside spiritual heights. Solely through the fact that our earth existence is a cooperative task towards human development, cosmically validated, do we contribute a part of our totality as earthlings. Earth shapes us while we walk on it between birth and death, as earthlings, and everything which is shaped out of the earth come out of the depths which cooperates in everything, even in the most minute parts of the smallest organs in us. Just imagine the earth as a being in space has endless secrets within it which work creatively. How your eyes, your ears are formed, how every singular, how every smallest member of your body is formed and fashioned, for all this the creative forces lie within the earth. If we succeed in gradually grasping what the earth's expression of its inner being is in its countenance, with thinking, feeling and willing as an unveiling of her inner secrets, so we meditatively, gradually come to search for an answer to the question: How do I fathom the depths of the being of man?

When we succeed in placing ourselves into our bodies as the multitudinous ways of crystallised earth, which dissolves the crystallisation again, atomised to a powder, when we succeed in observing this development, pulverising and re-crystallising which in the course of time was characterised for the sensitive human-being, for example with Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; if we succeed in experiencing this entire process which will be for us a kind of bed of the Godhead, by us being embedded in it, so that the bedding within this Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva process becomes something like a cosmic sleep for us during our earth existence, if we experience this crystallisation and dissolving as something which weaves through us with a cosmic urge for sleep, so that we could say: the human-being is so profound, so deeply fashioned in earthly existence that the depths of consciousness doesn't endure but with the entire created earth as a physical body it expires into a cosmic sleep—then we gradually approach the feeling of what it means: what it is for the human-being to be connected to the depths of the earth. If we can finally say to ourselves: the earth forms us out of its depths, permeates us out of its depths with earthly sleep, while out of the depths of earthly sleep the archetypal divine works fully consciously, then we experience something of this earthly depths within the human-being. If we could say something like: the harder the earth appears to us, diamond hard, the harder in its parts, just so more true, so powerfully speaks from this diamond hard heart the condition of sleep of the spiritual world, the light filled spirituality which works in the earth as awakened, active divinity.

Thus we need to go through our meditation in an ever more deepening feeling way and transfer the earthly foundation and say:

‘Oh man, before you can name yourself, before you can establish your depths, you need to ever more deepen yourself into the foundations of the earth.’ When we observe plants sprouting out of the earth, we may acquire a more lofty feeling of piety, a feeling of reverence, that in every plant morsel we can behold something of ourselves, something like a revelation of what is happening below in the earth. We must really clearly understand the exchange of activities taking place between the earth's depths and the breadths of the heavens. See how the blossoming roses grow out of the earth, look at the particular way the rosebud pinches its petals so tightly together as to complement the ground of the earth, counter positioned to the central point of the earth as a mighty rose of light, permeated with divine thought gestures which need to wait until the rose unfolds its bud upwards. Every sleeping rosebud you empathise with the waiting, creating, living light rose in the earthly depths. So it is with all plants. Look at the green cover of plants over the earth and experience that which sprouts out of the earth as green, in the depths of the earth, as quite light-filled but permeated with deep violet, which appears in the world, weaving through it with life. Then you have something which I have said to you: ‘I may only call myself a human-being, when I have explored myself in the earth's depths.’

So the feeling must be reached towards becoming worthy through such meditative penetration, through the conquering of this first step, for the word “human-being” to be used for people. When one takes what the profane person takes as obvious, as a level hovering high above and think one can only reach this level by climbing up to it; through humbling yourself three times more than an ordinary person, becoming three times more humble than an ordinary person believes himself to be, then one is only starting to sense oneself gradually approaching the calling of a priest.

When one has gradually in such a way led oneself to reach the first step, then one takes on the second step which lets us look into the infinite widths of the worlds and one says to oneself at the present moment: Oh, how trivial this world has become, where humanity has only developed trivial images of the wide world. Yes truly, wiser than the wisest student was Stifter's grandmother who was asked about the evening red glow and answered it was the mantle of God's mother, which is hung out in the heaven to be aired. This naive, picturesque imagination is in contrast to scientific knowledge much wiser, much wiser than the most learned astronomy.

This one must be able to absorb: To actually see the shining stars in wide space, stars with essentially the eyes of divine spiritual beings who glance down at us, children of the earth, while their spiritual hands reach out to us, while our spiritual hands reach up to their spiritual hands because we were with them before we came down to an earthly existence. The gods look after us out of space, out of the heights above worlds, in order to explore how we feel towards their predisposition while our spiritual hands reached their spiritual hands. When we are able to possibly develop many imaginations of the heights and become more and more empathic, how the being of humanity originate out of the heights, towards which it needs to climb up once again, then we will be able to come one step closer to earn the right to, as people, call ourselves ‘human beings.’

The word ‘human-being’ must first be dipped into the depths of the earth, as I have indicated, so that its absorption during this immersion becomes part of our minds and enable us to say: We understand this. Now this word ‘human-being’ need to rise up with the mists into the heights and give us the feeling that it will come again in the falling rain, when the word “human-being” will carry within itself the possibility of learning to understand it. We really must initially be clear about everything which works between the depths of the earth and the heavenly heights. In a lively way we must follow the haze rising from woods and mountains. We must not believe that the haze is rising from an area which belongs to the earth. We must develop every kind of modesty towards those people who see in a drop the dragon rising in a thermometer or a barometer, to facilitate measurements. The tendency is to immerse everything in earthly images only. We must reach a point where we can say: ‘How foolish to believe thunder develops out of the friction between clouds; clouds consist of water as every child knows, all moisture is completely kept away from a glass rod if electricity is to be created.’—Naturally this foolishness comes to the fore when a person tries to experience something in the heights of heaven which he experiences on earth for he has descended down from the heavenly heights and now he needs to feel related to it again before he can truly call himself a human-being. We must clearly understand that while the fog rises out of the mountains and forests, where water is somewhat different than it is on earth, in regions where water itself becomes spiritualised, it is ‘de-watered’ and goes through spiritual processes so that it can materialise once again until it descends again as rain out of spiritual spheres. We must know that if we rise up into such regions then we need to be familiar with these regions of our origination, out of which we descended from in a previous existence. We need to know that lightening is something which rules and weaves in spiritual regions and take the imagination of ancient times, where lightening was the arrow of the Gods, as an imagination far more wise than we can ever make today.

In total stillness we must be able to develop such meditative imaginations in the depths of our minds, enabling us to be the leaders turning a completely de-spiritualised world culture towards the Spirit. When we turn towards the hard earth, we must also turn towards the gentle, flowing water, combining with one another in the depths, right into the most concentrated minute matter, which expands in the heights and must atomise, then coalesce to become rain again in their descent to earth. We must discover all the secrets of water, everything relating to water and draw it all together in our minds. We must meditate over it, we must ask ourselves: ‘How does the sun's warmth come out of the world expanse during summer and into the earth to enable plants to bear fruit which turn ripe? How does this warmth of the sun sink into the earth to enable the farmer to entrust his seeds in the earth's warmth during winter?’ At the end of winter it is this warmth which expands again into the vastness of existence. This warmth, found in all areas of existence, working in all cosmic undertakings, is a communion of the opposites between the heavenly heights and the earthly depths. As human-beings we originate from both. We must fathom the earth's depths before we can enter into the world's expanse.

By increasingly entering into such meditations we come to a kind of feeling, a mindfulness, towards the second step, which gives us the right to apply the word ‘human-being’ to ourselves. We must achieve an awareness that all languages can only be provisional, until through the third step we have reached that union with the linguistic genius who actually speaks unconsciously within us while we, when we have made ourselves the tool of God's Word, only then need to have the right to apply the word ‘human-being’ to ourselves.

As a third step we must try and observe the world's expanse. This we can perceive when the rising and the setting sun becomes a reality in our minds. Similarly with the rising and sinking stars when we learn to understand the great journey of the sun chariot going through the world, then we are really able to recognise what the variations are between East and West, what is different from Southeast compared to Northwest and so on. This we can observe when we are able to say to ourselves: You as human-being may take five steps and so change your position on the earth's surface. For you to be able to do so, like the animal as well, is as a result of forces which draw from East to West in width and breadth, also working on you. You are also shaped out of the earth's depths. While the heights of heaven throw light on you from above and forms and enlivens you, you are all given the ability to be formed into beings able to walk on the earth's surface. The world's expanse you should sense and you can sense this by placing yourself in some distant landscape and experience the air as becoming something increasingly more real. In your immediate surroundings the air appears transparent to you, you don't see it; when you look at a mountain you can paint the air with it because it appears as dew on the surface; when you look at the air in the distance then you see the blue sky. Drenched with it you experience the beings of light as a feeling which becomes real because the experience is bound to actions of will. Thus you rise to the third step in your meditation which leads you to earn the right to name yourself a ‘human-being.’

When you deepen this step in the secret of breathing, you start to understand what the air and the widths of the world are; what is working in the heights and depths and in the horizon and you admit: what permeates your breathing lives in the wide world—it is how the wide world experiences you—and it is this that you must sense in your breath. Further, you must sense in your breathing that an act of will is the basis of penetrating your entire being with the powerful impulses of breathing. You get an inkling of how the depths of the earth give material cohesion to your entire body which you transform according to thoughts given to you from the wide world. So they work together in the whole person:

Depths of earth in your Physical
World widths in your Astral
Heavenly heights in your Etheric

Thus you can feel entire cosmic dimensions in yourself. You can sense when you enter with your feeling into the diamond hard earth how you are a sleeping being. You can feel, when you raise your gaze to the heavenly heights, you are snatched from sleep and become a dreaming being. Yet you can also feel how you are a being who is awake in the width of the world. Gradually you learn to recognise the comic human in the earthly human-being.

In this way you learn to recognise how the human-being is actually formed by God out of the entire cosmos, placed by God on earth. Thus you sense the threefold positioning in the cosmos. This is how you learn to feel how the Father God works out of the earth, whose lively activity must preferably be looked for in the past because what has remained is the firm ground on which we stand, the fixed forms repeated in the world, all that has remained appears to us in fixed images. By meditating with our mind sunk into the earthly depths we hear the words of the Father God sounding up to us. Out of the heavenly heights we hear how the presence of God speaks to us but the words are more profound and more complicated that human speech. God has descended from the heavens down to earth and had to go through the Mystery of Golgotha to allow heavenly speech to penetrate our words. The actual communion of the earthly with the heavenly we can depict in the rising water vapour, in the rain which falls down again, in the rising and again descending warmth of the world. When we allow that to work in us it will permeate us with spirit and we will sense the presence of Christ in those who we feel are under the influence of the heavenly heights. When we penetrate into our breath as coming out of the widths of space and we humbly link our feeling to what happens at every instant, when we in our physicality, ruled by the forces of earthly depths, feel formed and shaped under the leadership of Christ Jesus out of the heavenly heights then we come to really experience, and are permeated by, the activity of the Holy Ghost as the fulfilment of the Trinity and thus out of this our meditation could be:

The Father God has given me the strength which lies in my material existence, as solidified Spirit.

The Son God is always the heavenly which lives in me, which works and weaves like a watery cosmic existence, which is a symbol, an image of it. I sense Christ-God in all my weaving and living, in all which has made me from a child to an adult, in all which grows in me daily and needs to perish again, enabling me to be an earthling through my becoming.

I feel the Spirit God carry into the future that which Christ Jesus has become in us, in the past.

You see, when you meditate like this on the content born out of a word, a word previously only used provisionally, then you have earned the right to call a person a ‘human-being.’ We must begin by developing reverence towards the genius of speech because through such a meditation real reverence is cultivated. Our starting point must not be to refer to the outer impression of the human form only but as a human-being created by God, as a thought from God, as a God-filled human-being, when we speak.

When we prepare ourselves as we have through our meditation on a word such as ‘human-being,’ then the impulse is born for these three steps to be applied to some other words and for the human speech on earth to be implemented in this way. The genius of speech will teach us how we can become living tools for the Word of God when we allow the congregation to experience this Word of God. The Word of God is always there, and what we are doing, is but a moment's experience of the continuous spiritual cosmic weaving Word of God. In the very first beginnings the word existed, in ancient beginnings it was already divine. When we are however not in the position to sense the holiness in the words ‘human-being’ for the people, then our approach is not right, we do not have dignity to also express the first words of the St John's Gospel in the correct way. The priest today has not yet come so far as to be able to say these words in this way.

In our time the primary importance for priests, if they continue in their calling, is to further such things. What has actually been left over from the ancient words revealed from the holy heights above the earth? What has remained from the words such as “Deus,” “Christus,” “Spiritum”? Earthly sounds they now are, hardened by dogma. The truth within words need to be awakened in us, the truth of these words must live in us. We may not neglect anything which will still make it possible for the old, hardened and therefore dogmatic words to become alive again within us. We may no longer turn and twist in the way it was done with God's words in past times in which the Catholic Church extracted the Mystery of the Mass.

In the Old Mysteries priests were far more humble than those of today, when they are like I have just described them. The priest of old said to himself he couldn't be a priest if he was just as he was. As a result, before he was allowed to speak, those things were performed in which the last remainder of incense was still held. As a result of the sensing, which has come to its right in our Consecration of Man ritual, there is indicated that in the Mysteries of old, outer substances were used to shift the consciousness of the priests. This resulted in them feeling shifted out of their bodies and enchanted by the genius of speech, taking them to the higher Genius so that the priest of old, out of his body, experienced the Being of God. No priest was of the opinion that he could move his tongue when he expressed the Word of God; he knew he had to first go out of himself and allow his tongue to be moved from outside. We can no longer do this today and nor should we try. We should through inner spiritual means, with internalized feeling and will work towards the understanding of the foregoing, when we can call ourselves ‘human-beings.’

Just consider, my dear friends, what the Act of Consecration will become under your handling when you start from today taking these things I've spoken about into your priest meditations. These things can also just gradually be taken in by us. Mankind has distanced itself from the divine and must find its way back again. We have absorbed the Act of Consecration into the Christian Movement for Religious Renewal like religious artists. Today we have come to the point where what can only be accepted like a religious art must be taken up in such a way that we are in the position to make it into a lively organism, in order for the Act of Consecration to become really alive and in this way be experienced within the Christian Community as ever new at each fulfilment of the ritual, just like the physical body experiences something new each time it takes in nourishment.

My dear friends, take this into your souls: the Act of Consecration is to become alive. Through this you will earn the right to place yourselves in the earth's becoming and through the Act of Consecration be present within the earth's becoming. Then may you express the following truth: If this Act of Consecration is not performed then the earth will waste away and remain without nourishment. It would be just as if no plants would grow. Plants grow in the physical world; the Act of Consecration of Man must grow in the spiritual realm. If it was not enacted there on this higher level it would be the same as if on the lower level of the physical earth no plants would grow. A human-being only has the right to say this when he or she succeeds in continuously enlivening the Act of Consecration so that this self-expressed word ‘human-being’ has been achieved in the correct manner and being and weaving, within the earthly existence, through achieving the three steps of inner soul development.

Only then, my dear friends, when you have experienced it in this sensitive way can you really place yourself in the right way in our present time. According to your need to gather again after a certain time, I may say this to you, because it belongs to the entire development of the Christian Community. Thus you have taken something full of life into yourselves which can work in an enlivening way in yourselves. I wish that today's words are taken in all seriousness, in the right way.

• 1. Translator's note: “Mensch” has no English equivalent. Collins Dictionary considers mensch used in English as “a well-meaning person.” Reverso suggests ‘human,’ ‘person’ and ‘man.’ Google adds ‘individual’ to this list. The word ‘human’ is seen in contrast to ‘animal’ or ‘robot.’ To translate “Mensch” as ‘human-being’ is not quite correct, nor is ‘individuality’—the latter indicating a person being different from others in some way. “Mensch” has a humane as well as individual character so the best solution is using the expression “human-being” in this translation. As “the Word” is under examination, a hyphen is an attempt at forming a single inseparable concept.

Due to Dr. Rittelmeyer's indisposition, we are only able to discuss the ceremony today that we would otherwise have completed. It is in the nature of things that, as long as not all the equipment and robes are in place, we cannot do some things in full. But that is not the main thing either; for us, the main thing is that the spirit should prevail in what we accomplish here, and so today I would like to give you a kind of preliminary discussion of it.

It is, after all, a ceremony that is to take place for each individual in front of the entire audience; and if I am to present the meaning of this ceremony, I must say that these ceremonies, which we perform step by step, signify the gradual becoming a priest. Today would be the first stage of contemplation. It should be noted first of all that in the cultus that will be incumbent upon you, the sacrifice of man's consecration forms the center everywhere, so that everything always tends back to the sacrifice of man's consecration. You must be aware that in the modern conception of religion, the more external conception of man's consecration is the usual one. There one actually grasps the Act of Consecration of Man only as an after-effect of the Lord's Supper, which Christ Jesus practiced with his disciples, while the Mass, the Act of Consecration of Man, is basically a continuous event that flows from the Mystery of Golgotha. For in the proclamation of the gospel, in the sacrifice, in the transubstantiation, in the communion lie all the spiritual events - expressed through external cultic acts - which are a continuation, a perpetuation of the working of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now, every truly Christian activity should be connected to and placed within the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore, it is quite natural that the human sacrifice includes everything that otherwise happens within the Christian community. In a sense, the human sacrifice is the envelope for everything that happens validly. This also applies to the ordination of priests. One could say that one celebrates a Mass in which the ordination of a priest is included, of which the ordination of a priest is a component. For this Mass is based on this four-part structure of Gospel reading, offertory, transubstantiation and communion, and within these parts the most diverse acts of consecration can now take place, including the ordination of a priest. So that when the priestly ordination is complete, one has said a mass that in its own substance contained the priestly ordination. The human consecration sacrifice must also be understood in this sense. It encompasses everything. It encompasses all the mysteries of Christianity in a spiritual but real presence.

And so the first part of the consecration would be to begin in the way that has already been shown before you, in front of the altar with the relay prayer:

Let us worthily perform the Act of Consecration of Man out of the Revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to the deed of Christ.

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

If the consecration had already begun today, it would be necessary for Rittelmeyer to receive it from the spiritual world, so to speak, directly through my mediation; he would then pass it on to the others. So Dr. Rittelmeyer would have been sitting here, facing the altar. I would have received from the spiritual world, as it were, what would otherwise have been performed in person. From the second part onward, everything is performed in person. One of the guides would have ministered.

[Now the Act of Consecration of Man is read aloud up to the Gospel, combined with the words of the ordination (see pages 53ff. and the facsimiles on pages 97-99, as well as GA 343, page 414f.), then:]

The celebrant: It is now proclaimed for the first time, out of this Spirit, through your mouth, the Gospel of John in the first chapter.

The ordinand then reads the Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word...” to “...has become the leader in this vision.”

The celebrant: We lift up our soul to You, O Christ.

The one to be consecrated: The words of the Gospel extinguish whatever is impure in our words.

My dear friends! That would be the essential content of the first part of the consecration. The second part would follow when the Credo is spoken and the Offertory is spoken, immediately before the Transubstantiation. We will then, when the matter can become real, transfer the consecration first to Rittelmeyer, and then Rittelmeyer will transfer it to the others. In this way we will make the process a real one.

We will leave it at that for today.

Today I would like to talk about the formation of the cosmos according to Annie Besant's “Ancient Wisdom”. I would like to show how to try to read the relevant passage. It starts on page 325, where Annie Besant attempts to describe how the transition from the lunar epoch took place, in which our ancestors underwent their development and then came to our earth. During the lunar Manvantaras, evolution produced seven classes of beings, who were called Father because they produced the beings of terrestrial evolution.

Just as we have the task during our earthly epoch to bring the mind and so on to the highest development, these beings on the moon had to bring the sentient being to the highest refined form. That is the chemical principle, so that they had developed the sentient life in the idealized way. When the seventh round had been completed, these beings entered into a state of Nirvana. That was the full image of Yahweh, the being that was their ideal. As seeds overwinter, so they overwintered through a pralaya. They thus developed soul.

There were also two other races. Solar Pitris were those who had progressed further than the ordinary lunar development. They had reached the highest level of similarity with their deity. But even during the lunar epoch there were Moon Pitris, Moon Pithakas. The more developed beings were solar Pitris. Those who had already become masters on the moon were, in terms of the development of the human mind, higher than the moon gods. The moon gods did not develop the element of reason. It would be futile for the deity to only come as far as it was in the beginning. Something must be produced that goes further than the beginning. If the Masters are looked upon as the end of our life development, they are found to be of a much higher wisdom than that which has been incarnated as Earthly Wisdom. The wisdom that has been incarnated is only sufficient to guide the Earthly development to its end. Therefore, it must be realized that the Master is, under certain circumstances, much higher than the Deva.

Yahweh only became the first person of the Trinity through an error. He is the god of earthly forms, who therefore forms the Adam out of matter. Of course, the Jews have the Father-God. But they don't talk about him. That is namely the one who was never spoken of.

People are called such lunar-age beings who advance the Pitris - Dhyanis. No one had developed the causal body on the lunar epoch. Those who had causal bodies had progressed beyond the lunar epoch into the earthly, human epoch. Plato will bring the highest development of the causal body into the next round.

The lunar Pitris had a certain intelligence, similar to that of animals. The earth is the fourth incarnation. The first incarnation is the planetoids, the second is at the position of Mars, the third at the position of the moon. The fourth incarnation of the planetary chain is the earth. The elementary essence is what I have described as world dust. Just as seeds absorb substances from the earth, the Pitris absorbed earthly materiality. [...]

Sphere a) is the archetypal world. The red sphere emerging from the archetype, developing out of the darkness. The archetypal world. The archetype of all understanding. The mind must be shaped. It must be formed into the body. There was only a solar plexus, no nerve plexus that emanated from the head. The planetary spirits are above the corresponding development. The planetary spirits are at work from the outside; they have the highest task. They determine the succession; they have a task that stands above the individual. They never enter.

The mental world is limited to one kind of sphere. Instead of the stars and constellations, the Akasha Chronicle appears. The formers are not active in the mental sphere, they are active in the realm of Budhi, so the planetary formers can only be found in the sphere of Budhi. At first, the thought is only a point, then it takes shape. The archetype of the plant and the archetype of the minerals arise. On the sphere b) the forms of lower-level formers are reproduced until they have matured into a denser matter. There are small signs and colors in it. The color is the astral matter. The sphere, which was red, has turned orange, and now it is turning yellow. Now it is filled with astral matter.

And now sphere c). On sphere c) the form reaches its densest consistency. From this point on, the nature changes. Spheres e), f), g) follow. On spheres e) and f), consciousness first manifests itself on the ethereal plane. On the blue sphere f), the beings begin to will from within, they begin to move. So the first automatic mind manifests itself. The Lunarpitris are the soul forces of form; they bring it to maturity and later inhabit it. That which they have here in black is the soul. That they think is spirit.

The earthly epoch is destined to make the marriage between spirit and soul complete. Fire is the element of the first round. It is actually fire air, ether fire. In the second round, the first-class Pitris continue their involution. In the second round, the archetypal forms of the plants come into being, which then take on their completion in the fifth round. The mineral is at the stage of highest perfection. The human brain, as a mineral substance, is only a carrier. The mineral kingdom is already dissolving. In the next round, the plant kingdom dissolves, followed by the animal kingdom. And only in the seventh round will man reach his perfection. The mineral has developed seven principles. It is the most perfect of what we have. We have three spiritual realms: the first, second and third logos; then the first elemental realm, the arupic realm; secondly the rupic realm; thirdly the astral, fourthly the physical, the mineral. The mineral is perfect in the fourth round. The plant will have reached its perfection when it has become astral. Genesis, with its seven days, indicates the seven rounds. The first four days are the first four rounds, the seventh day is the resting. The fourth day is the present round. The fifth, sixth and seventh days are yet to come.

The more you get to know Genesis, the more you will have to understand it literally. When you are ready to take the meaning of Genesis literally, then you have really understood it. Air is the element of the second round. The Pitris reach the beginning of the human stage here. The Solarpitris make their first appearance here, on sphere d), to take the lead in human evolution. The beings are always ready four rounds later. The archetypes of human forms were already given in the fourth round.

[For the following meeting, Rudolf Steiner was handed a series of written questions. This “questionnaire” is available in Emil Bock's handwriting and has the following wording:]

1. The change of cult colors (especially in the non-festive half of the year) and their meaning in relation to the course of the year in its psychological relationship (cultic optics)? The colors of the altar servers' vestments, the altar cloths, the chasuble, the figures and borders of the chasuble in relation to the primary colors of the chasuble itself? Colors used in the baptismal ceremony (red and blue)?

2. The spiritual meaning of the vestments, insofar as this has not yet been hinted at. Is it possible to derive an understanding of the cult vestments from the history of human clothing in general within the history of customs (the cultic origin of all clothing in general, the difference between men's and women's clothing)? What is the meaning of the vestments worn by altar servers? In what vestment does the priest serve? When is the beret worn and why only in these cases? Form of the stole, its spiritual justification? Vestments for casualities (baptism, burial, etc.)?

3. What else can be said about the substances used in worship? Incense, oil, wine, bread, salt, ash, water, mercury, sulfur, salt (cultic alchemy)? Which substances and objects are consecrated before cultic use, on what occasion and by what words? Water, salt, ashes in the baptismal ritual in relation to the Trinity. Water is associated with the Father God, salt with the Son God, whereas we expect the opposite. Connection between the four parts of the mass and the four elements? Holy water and incense at the grave?

4. Details about cultic forms, devices and gestures. Use of a monstrance and what use? Use of wooden goblets possible (social reasons)? Why turn the left cheek in the case of a community communion? Why signs on the forehead, chin, chest of the infant? Is it possible to use incense in bowls instead of the usual censer, or can a simplified form of this be considered at least? The right and left sides of the altar in their alternation during the consecration. Which direction should the altar

face and why? 5. What is the more precise distribution of the pericopes for the gospel reading over the course of the year? Use of the Pauline letters, the Apocalypse, etc.? Can we hope for translations of individual pericopes by Dr. Steiner?

6. Parish regulations and pastoral care: What conditions must be met for the first performance of the rites in the individual cities? In front of which audience should the cult be introduced?, in public or in invited circles? Who can communicate? Only community members? Is it the duty of community members to communicate? Is it possible to exclude members of the community from communion? Is it advisable to make the ritual texts accessible to the community members? (The Credo?)

Questions about the Bible:

What can be said about textual corruption in the New Testament? How did it come about and with what intention? How can it be eliminated as a source of error? The synoptic question: literal agreement of the first three Gospels down to the smallest details and contradictions in statements about facts (the date of Jesus' death, etc.)?

Historical questions:

We would like to hear as much as possible about church history, because current research leaves us in the lurch there. In particular: How and where can the origin of the Mass from the mysteries be studied and shown exoterically in order to refute the accusation of theft? The ages of Peter, Paul and John in Schelling, etc., and Dr. Steiner's suggestion of the periods of church history after the twelve apostles (the time of Judas, etc.)? Esotericism in the Catholic Church?

Individual aspects:

Music and chorales in worship. Training of priests and important books (study plan).

Practical aspects:

Our proposal for admission requirements and disciplinary regulations. Financing. Guidelines for differentiating pastoral care according to profession, temperament and age, especially in religious education, about which we would still like to hear a lot, apart from what we can learn from Waldorf teachers. Preparation for the youth celebration for those children who have already reached the appropriate age and have so far only received confessional religious education? How long will a child participate in the youth celebration? Guidelines for pastoral psychology and pathology?

What illnesses are particularly to be expected? How can meditation be used as a remedy? The sexual question in a pastoral relationship: What is the karmic and physiological basis of homosexuality, and how can we help to overcome it?

Can special prayers be given for our pastoral care work (morning, evening, table, children's prayers)?

7. Questions about the sacraments:

Why no adult baptism (conversions of Jews)? The sacrament of marriage. Solubility of marriage, divorce? Sense of the Bible passages dealing with this topic: Genesis II, 1 Cor. 6 and 7, Romans 7, Matthew 19, 1-12?

8. Questions about the texts:

In the Credo: “To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity” or “to spiritually heal the body of humanity from the sin-sickness”? Breviary: Why monthly sayings as weekly sayings?

[ 1 ] At the time of the primal beginnings of Christianity there appear in antique pagan culture conceptions of the universe which present a continuation of the Platonic philosophy, and which may also be taken as a deepening and spiritualization of the wisdom of the Mysteries. They began with Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C.-50 A.D.). From his point of view the processes leading to the Divine take place in the innermost part of the human soul. We might say that the temple in which Philo seeks initiation is solely his inner being and its spiritual experiences; and processes of a purely spiritual nature replace the initiatory cere: monies of the sanctuary.

According to Philo, sense-observation and knowledge gained through the logical intellect do not lead to the Divine. They have merely to do with what is perishable. But there is a way by which the soul may rise above these methods. She must leave what she calls her ordinary self; must be lifted out of it. Then she enters a state of spiritual exaltation and illumination in which she no longer knows, thinks, and learns in the ordinary sense of the words; for she has become merged, identified with the Divine. The Divine is experienced in its essence which cannot be fashioned in thoughts nor communicated in concepts.

It is experienced, and one who goes through this experience knows that he can speak about the Divine only if he is able to imbue his words with life. The visible world is an image of this mystic reality experienced in the inmost recesses of the soul. The world has come forth from the invisible, inconceivable God. The harmony of the cosmos, which is steeped in wisdom and to which sense-phenomena are subject, is a direct reflection of the Godhead, its spiritual image. It is divine spirit poured out into the world—cosmic reason, the Logos, the off-spring or Son of God. The Logos is the mediator between the world of sense and the unimaginable God. By steeping himself in cognition man unites with the Logos. The Logos becomes embodied in him. The person who has developed spirituality is the vehicle of the Logos. Above the Logos is God; beneath is the perishable world. It is man’s vocation to form the link between the two. What he experiences in his inmost being as spirit is the universal Spirit. Such ideas are directly reminiscent of the Pythagorean manner of thinking (cf. p. 48 et seq.).

The center of existence is sought in the inner life, out this life is conscious of its cosmic import. St. Augustine was thinking in virtually the same way as Philo when he said: “We see all created things because they are; but they are, because God sees them.” And he adds, concerning what and how we see: “And because they are, we see them outwardly; because they are perfect, we see them inwardly.”

Plato has the same fundamental idea (cf. p. 53 et seq.) . Like Plato, Philo sees in the destiny of the human soul the consummation of the great cosmic drama, the awakening of the divinity that is under a spell. He thus describes the inner actions of the soul: the wisdom in man’s inner being “emulates the ways of the Father, and shapes the forms by beholding the archetypes.” It is accordingly no personal matter for man to create forms in his inner being: they are eternal wisdom, they are cosmic life.

This is in harmony with the interpretation of th¢ myths of the people in the light of the Mysteries. The mystic searches for the heart of truth in the myths (cf. p. 77 et seq.). And as the mystic treats the myths of paganism, Philo handles the Mosaic story of the creation. The old testament accounts are for him images of inner soul-processes. The Bible relates the creation of the world. One who takes it merely as a description of outer events knows but half of it. It is certainly written: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters.” But the real inner meaning of such words must be experienced in the depths of the soul. God must be found within, then He appears as the “Primal Splendor, who sends out innumerable rays, not perceptible by the sense, but wholly thought.” This is Philo’s expression. In the Timæus of Plato the words are almost identical with those in the Bible: “Now when the Father, who had created the universe, saw how it had become living and animated, and an image of the eternal gods, he felt pleasure therein.” In the Bible we read, “And God saw that it was good.”

The recognition of the Divine is for Philo, as well as for Plato, and in the wisdom of the Mysteries, to experience the process of creation as the destiny of one’s own soul. The history of creation and the history of the soul who is becoming divine in this way flow into one. Philo is convinced that the Mosaic account of the creation may be used for writing the history of the soul who is seeking God. Everything in the Bible thereby acquires a profoundly symbolical meaning, of which Philo becomes the interpreter. He reads the Bible as history of the soul.

[ 2 ] We may say that Philo’s manner of reading the Bible corresponds to a feature of his age that originated in the wisdom of the Mysteries. He even relates that the Therapeuta interpreted ancient writings in the same way. “They also possess works by ancient authors who once directed their school and left behind many explanations about the customary method pursued in allegorical writings... The interpretation of such writings is directed to the deeper meaning of the allegorical narratives” (cf. p. 161). Thus Philo’s aim was to discover the deeper meaning of the “allegorical” narratives in the Old Testament.

Let us try to realize whither such an interpretation could lead. We read the account of creation and find in it not only a narrative of outward events, but an indication of the way the soul must take in order to attain to the Divine. The soul must reproduce in herself the ways of God microcosmically, and in this alone can her striving for wisdom consist. The cosmic drama must be enacted in each individual soul. The inner life of the mystic sage is the realization of the model given in the account of the creation. Moses wrote not only to relate historical facts, but to represent pictorially the paths the soul must travel if it would find God.

[ 3 ] All this, in Philo’s world-conception, is enacted within the human soul. Man experiences within himself what God has experienced in the universe. The Word of God, the Logos, becomes an event in the soul. God brought the Jews from Egypt into Palestine; He caused them to suffer distress and privation before giving them that Land of Promise. That is the outward event. Man must experience it inwardly. He goes from the land of Egypt, the perishable world, through the privations that lead to the suppression of the sense-nature, into the Promised Land of the soul; he attains to the Eternal. In Philo’s philosophy, all that is an inner process. The God who poured Himself forth into the world consummates His resurrection in the soul when that soul understands His creative word and echoes it. Then man has spiritually given birth within himself to Divinity, to the Divine Spirit which became man, to the Logos, Christ. In this sense enlightenment was, for Philo and those who thought like him, the birth of Christ within the world of spirit. The NeoPlatonic philosophy, which developed contemporaneously with Christianity, was an elaboration of Philo’s thought.

Let us see how Plotinus (204-269 A.D.) describes his spiritual experiences:

[ 4 ] “Often when I come to myself on awaking from the sleep of my bodily nature and, turning from the outer world, enter into myself, I behold wondrous beauty. Then I am sure that I have been conscious of the better part of myself. I live my true life, I am one with the Divine and, rooted in the Divine, gain the power to transport myself beyond even the super—world. After thus resting in God, when 1 descend from spiritual vision and again form thoughts, I ask myself how it has happened that I now descend and that my soul ever entered the body at all, since, in her essence, she is what she has just revealed herself to me... What can the reason be for souls forgetting God the Father since they come from the beyond and belong to Him, and, when they forget Him, know nothing of Him or of themselves? The first false step they take is indulging in presumption, the desire to become, and in forgetfulness of their true self and in the pleasure of only belonging to themselves. They coveted self-glorification, they rushed about in pursuit of their desires and thus went astray and fell completely awayThereupon they lost all knowledge of their origin in the beyond, just as children, early separated from their parents and brought up elsewhere, do not know who they themselves and their parents are.” Plotinus delineates the kind of life the soul should strive to develop: “The life of the body and its longings should be stilled, the soul should find calm in all that surrounds her: in earth, sea, air, and heaven itself 10 movement. She should learn to see how the soul pours herself from without into the serene cosmos, streaming into it from all sides; as the sun’s rays illuminate a dark cloud and make it golden, so does the soul, on entering the body of the world encircled by the heavens, give it life and immortality.”

[ 5 ] It is evident that this world conception has a profound similarity to Christianity. Believers of the community of Jesus said: “That which has occurred from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life... declare we unto you.” In the same way it might be said in the spirit of Neo-Platonism: That which has occurred from the beginning, which cannot be heard and seen, must be spiritually experienced as the Word of Life.

And so the development of the old world conception suffers a split. It leads in Neo-Platonism and similar systems to an idea of Christ that is purely spiritual; on the other hand, it leads to a fusion of the idea of Christ with a historical manifestation, the personality of Jesus. The writer of the Gospel of St. John may be said to have united these two conceptions. “In the beginning was the Word.” He shares this conviction with the NeoPlatonists. The Word becomes spirit within the soul, thus do the Neo-Platonists conclude. The Word was made flesh in Jesus, thus does St. John conclude, and with him the whole Christian community. The inner meaning of the manner in which the Word alone could be made flesh was made clear through the whole development of the ancient cosmogonies. Plato says of the macrocosm: God has extended the soul of the world on the body of the world in the form of a cross. The soul of the world is the Logos. If the Logos is to be made flesh He must recapitulate the cosmic process in fleshly existence. The Logos must be nailed to the cross and rise again. In spiritual form this most momentous thought of Christianity had long before been prefigured in the old cosmogonies. The mystic went through it as a personal experience at initiation. The Logos become man had to go through it as a fact valid for the whole of humanity. Something which was present in the development of ancient wisdom as an incident in the Mysteries becomes a historical fact through Christianity. Hence Christianity was the fulfilment, not only of what the Jewish prophets had predicted, but also of the truth prefigured in the Mysteries.

The Cross on Golgotha is the Mystery cult of Antiquity epitomized in a fact.

We find the cross first in the ancient cosmogonies. At the starting-point of Christianity it confronts us in a unique event intended for the whole of mankind. It is from this point of view that reason is able to apprehend the mystical element in Christianity. Christianity as mystical fact is a milestone in the process of human evolution; and the incidents in the Mysteries, with their attendant results, are the preparation for that mystical fact.

on Vladimir Solovyov: Twelve lectures on the God-humanity, Stuttgart 1921

Anyone approaching Solovyov with Western or Central European concepts of the world and humanity and wanting to relive his worldview will feel as if they are in unsafe emotional waters. They have to find their way into ideas and contexts that are foreign to them. Ideas that discussions of worldviews with which he is familiar do not lead him to. You only need to let some of Solovyov's ideas approach you, and you will immediately experience this. Take the ideas of “grace,” “sin,” and the way the Russian thinker talks about the “experience of Christ.”

But Solovyov speaks in the terms of a philosopher educated on Kant, Schelling, Hegel, the modern positivists and natural science. He not only speaks differently in these terms than Western and Central European thinkers; he also talks about different things.

This otherness can be found by reading Scotus Erigena. The content and state of mind of this ninth-century thinker lives on in Solovyov. And in Solovyov it is steeped in an inner warmth that is no longer found in Scotus Erigena, but must have been present in his predecessors. And so, when reading Solovyov, one can feel transported back to the time of the development of the Christian worldview from the fourth to the eighth century. The spirit of modern European concepts is spread over everything that Solovyov's soul experience becomes for the reader as a result of this development.

In Western and Central Europe, too, one can still find thinkers of Solovyov's soul condition. Anyone who reads Willmann's important “History of Idealism” will feel this. But with such a thinker, something else prevails. He is burdened with all the nuances of concepts that arise from the rejection of Locke-Hume and Kantian-Protestant thinking. His soul is burdened by the intellectual experiences that Europe has undergone since the tenth century. This is not the case with Solovyov. He uses modern philosophical ideas as a tool of thought, but he lives untouched by those experiences of thought in the state of mind that still resonates with Scotus Erigena, but which in his case has already passed over into the coldness of abstract thought.

Ideas such as “sin”, “grace” and the “experience of Christ” appear in both Solovyov and Scotus. As a result, his idea of “nature” is also similar to that of the ancient philosopher. His concept of “nature” is different from that of Western and Central European thinkers. For them, “nature” is a much more comprehensive concept that is based on the results of observation, experiment and intellectual consideration. Everything that is thought about man and his relationship to the world must be incorporated into this concept. By reflecting on human soul experiences, one arrives at ideas about the way in which nature continues to develop in man. But one cannot arrive at the concepts of “grace” and “sin” through straight-line progressive thinking. If one wants to speak of these, then one must seek their origin in the purely ideal sphere of human consciousness. And if one wants to ascribe an objective meaning to them, then one must seek it in a world of which one is convinced in a different way than of the natural world. One must resort to a belief in addition to the knowledge of natural knowledge. From the knowledge one can form ideas about “perceiving”, “sensing”, “comprehending”; one can speak of a causation of “will” through thoughts; but one cannot say that “grace effects” take place in the human soul life. For these presuppose that, in addition to the natural world, there is an objective spiritual world in which man knows himself to be as in the world of air or weather.

Nor can the concept of “sin” be found in the series of concepts of nature. For, objectively conceived, “sin” is man's submergence in the natural order. In avoiding sin, man breaks away from the natural order, not merely to fit into an ideal order, but to fit into an objective spiritual order.

In Solovyov there lives a concept of nature that makes the ascent to such spiritual concepts possible. In Scotus too, the concepts of grace and sin are such that there is no gaping abyss between them and the concept of nature.

With the “Christ experience”, however, one enters a different realm. But in relation to Solovyov's attitude to the European state of mind, a similar thing applies. Within the Western and Central European view of life, the human being can sense within himself a spiritual foundation of the world order. He can say to himself: I am pointed to a divine in all of nature. This divine is then that which is called the “Father” in the religious creeds. But modern religious life does not provide any inner motives for progressing from this Father principle to the Christ. People who speak of the inner Christ experience on the basis of this experience actually only have the Father experience. They then relate the sense of the divine to the Jesus of historical tradition or dogma. But the actual inner experience they have in doing so cannot be distinguished from the experience of the general Deity, the Father-God. For such Christians, any possibility of gaining an understanding of the relationship between the Father and the Son through knowledge is lost. It is quite understandable that modern theology has arrived at the point of seeing Jesus only as the bearer of the doctrine of the Father, that it takes the Gospel as a revelation about the Father through Jesus, no longer as a message about the nature of the Son. For Solovyov these things are quite different. For him there is a Christ experience so strictly separated from the Father experience that he, like the Christian Fathers of old, can philosophize about whether the Son has an essence with the Father or not. Such philosophical discussions are not in line with the path that leads from the newer philosophical worldviews into the realm of the spiritual world. In Solovyov's work, the philosopher speaks about these things in the conceptual language of the nineteenth century.

What lives in the human community through Christ is for Solovyov just as much an objective reality as what lives through gravity. In his state of mind, the power of Christ is no different than gravity. This is something else that can still be found in Western Europe in Scotus, but which can no longer be viewed in this way. For Soloviev, the Christ is a Being directly present in the whole of humanity. What He speaks in human souls must become the starting point for social structures. These structures have a right to exist only if Christ lives in them as the invisible ruler.

The historical development of Christian culture comes to life in the soul when a Westerner or Central European studies Solovyov. In him, the first centuries of Christianity come to life in a contemporary who is also philosophically at the height of the nineteenth century. And his world view radiates a wonderful warmth of soul. Philosophy has the effect of religious contemplation; religion has the effect of philosophy experienced in the soul. Russia and Europe in the nineteenth century appear in Solovyov's works as in a mirror of the mind. In Solovyov one feels a spiritual light that shone in earlier centuries and that has faded for Europe. One senses how the first Christian impulses were preserved in the East and how they progressed in the West, but at the same time fell into abstract coldness. One must think about how the thinking of the East and West can mutually enrich each other, and how something higher can arise from this enrichment in relation to both.

Solovyov, as a man of the East, speaks in terms that are more flexible and alive than those of a Western thinker. But at the same time he points the way to greater flexibility of thought. For he is a modern philosopher, but at the same time a sage in terms of ancient concepts.

In all this there is something that makes Solovyov a highly important personality for our present time in the West and in Central Europe.

With these remarks I did not want to give an exhaustive characterization of Solovyov; nothing that claims to treat him as a “thinker”. I only wanted to say what I felt about the treatises that I was able to get to know from him. How little it can be exhaustive, how much it is a very personal judgment, I feel from the fact that he has written a lot that I could not get to know.

Rudolf Steiner.

Throughout the millennia, different peoples have sought to satisfy their deepest needs in life through religion. In our time, it is easy to misjudge the significance of the religious aspirations of nations. It is easy for a modern person to harbor illusions about the nature of religion. Since one of the principles of Theosophy is to fathom the wisdom of religions, some light will also be shed today on the aims and tasks of the Theosophical movement in general.

At first, our topic was discussed by learned religious scholars from a cultural-historical point of view. In the past, such things were not considered at all. In the past, individuals were aware that they could find the truth in their religion. It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that people decided to compare different religions. This has revealed a remarkable fact: a consensus in the various religious beliefs of different human races. But they did not get much further than the assumption that the childlike imagination of the nations forms ideas about God and man in the same way. It has become common practice to see in the different religions of different peoples childlike stages of human spiritual development, and no more. If one delves deeper into the question hinted at here, one comes to the conclusion that one underestimates even the simplest religious ideas if one does not take them deeply and thoroughly. If you go deeper, you acquire the right kind of humility, the humility that says: You understand something of the great, powerful images, but there is still much you cannot fathom. You learn to recognize more and more by climbing the ladder of human development yourself.

Go down to ancient Egyptian culture. There you find the male deity Osiris and the female deity Isis. If you learn to understand the deity Osiris from the perspective of the Egyptian people, it reveals itself as a meaningful religious concept. It is said that Osiris was dismembered by his brother Typhon, and the individual pieces were buried in different places. The idea is associated with this that everything that lives on earth emerged from Osiris. Everything that happens on earth is seen as a resurrection of Osiris. When a person experiences their spiritual core, they say to themselves: Osiris rises within me. The earth is the dismemberment of Osiris. The human being is the resurrection of Osiris.

Now let us go up to the legends and myths of the Nordic world. There we meet the giant Ymir, who was overcome by Wotan, will and woe. We learn that he was dismembered, that the rocks were made from his bones, the streams and seas from his blood, the vault of heaven from his brain, and so on. This Earth is an enlarged, idealized human being. She is a sleeping giant.

We find similar ideas in the religions of different peoples everywhere. We should not believe that the religions of “lesser” peoples are childlike compared to our own. Let us take an example of how a sublime religion can be found in another nation. When the ancient Indians of North America were increasingly pushed back by the peoples of Europe, the latter believed that they were far superior to the North American Indians. At a meeting with the Europeans, a Native American chief gave a speech that beautifully reflects the religious beliefs of the Native American tribes. The way the chief spoke is how many representatives of these peoples spoke about God.

They had been promised land, but this had not been done. The chief now said the following to the representatives of Europe: You learn about God and what He says from books, in which small black characters appear. The white man only knows about his God from the black signs in the books, but the brown man recognizes the great spirit as it speaks to him from the whispering of the wind, from the lapping of the waves, [from lightning and thunder]. You promised us to give us land, but did not do it. Your God has not taught you to speak the truth, etc.

This is how many peoples thought about the great spirit before there was what we call religion. Religion comes from “religere”, to reconnect. We want to understand why religion is important for reconnecting.

Before our present human race populated Europe, Asia and Africa, it was preceded by the Atlantean population on the Atlantic continent, between America and Europe. This continent was inhabited by the Atlantean race. There they lived, the Atlanteans, with a peculiar spiritual life. What remains of Atlantean culture can be found in the seemingly wild, but in fact only backward culture on the periphery of the former Atlantis.

There they felt in a primitive and elementary way what one might call the equivalent of religion. What was the religion of the most ancient ancestors of early man is preserved in the form that we can find in the religion of China, in the so-called Tao religion.

When the Chinese pronounce the Tao, they feel something similar to how that Indian spoke of the great spirit. It was a completely different way of feeling and thinking; it was a sense of belonging to the whole world. Man did not feel like a special being, as we do today. Today's man does not think much of breathing in and out. The breathing process is carried out as a purely mechanical process. In the ancestors of yore, a feeling was awakened in response to breathing. They felt gratitude to the great spirit. They felt that he united with them with every inhalation. They united with him with every exhalation. When they felt their pulse, they attributed this power to the great spirit. They felt at one with the universal spirit. The breath was spirit to them, the blood that pulsed in their veins was spirit to them. They felt part of the great world spirit. One must try to feel what is going on in a human soul that feels itself as one piece with the great world spirit flowing through it, the divinity within itself, and within the divinity, how our ancestors were completely blissful in this sensation, one must learn to empathize.

There is only one feeling that comes close to this - when the Vedantist feels the “Tat twam asi”: “That art thou,” he says to the world around him. But in the main, our nature has lost the feeling of our ancestors. Sympathy for the whole world was called Tao. Tao is what lives in the wind, what lives in lightning and thunder, what lives in animals and plants, what is in man, what pulses through him as his life. It was a unified feeling. Our thinking is itself a product of development. Those who felt the Tao did not yet have this intellect. It is precisely a characteristic of our present race. When our race developed from the Atlantean race, intellectual thinking developed from the clairvoyant gift of the Atlanteans. Now people learned to think in terms. The consequence of conceptualization was that man strictly separated himself from his environment. This had a significance when man conquered intellect. The Atlanteans did not feel that they were separate from others. Tao was the blood, the air, Tao was the other human being. The feeling of separation arose in them through the intellect working within. Everything they felt in the world, they had to experience within.

The God who pulsed through man was a unity that flowed outside and flowed inside. Now the separation had taken place. Now the “religere” - “reconnect” had to occur, the religion that connected the outside with the inside. The entire fifth root race strives in religion to reconnect with the divine All-Spirit.

On the basis of what has just been said, one must ask oneself: How can man of our present cycle imagine his God? He must first seek him within himself. But when he realizes that this is the same God as out there, then he has achieved something in his own way, as the ancient Atlantean felt in Tao. This is expressed in the ancient, sacred religion that the Rishis taught their disciples, the religion that preceded the Vedas. The Vedas are only an echo of that ancient, sacred religion of ancient India. This religion of ancient India can be brought to life within oneself even without esoteric knowledge. For it lives everywhere between the lines and words. It is a religion of life, which assumes that the divine is found within the human being. Whereas in the past people felt the connection with the God in their environment, in ancient India people sought the God in the separate individual soul. They sought to develop themselves to the point of direct realization that what lives in the individual soul lives in all souls. If one could experience one's own divinity in this way, if one had found what led beyond all separateness; beyond the deception of separateness, then one called it the divine Brahman. One could not theorize about that. One had to experience it within oneself. Then one gradually came to recognize this unified divinity from three points of view. This is found in all religions, these threefold aspects, under which the Brahman is sought.

The three aspects of the divine are understood roughly as follows in the intimate life of the different religions: The divine spirit lives in you. But the divine spirit also lives outside in the universe. And a spark of this divine spirit lives in you. The spirit that lives in you when you have an urge, a passion, an ideal, also lived when it built the house in which you now feel and sense everything. The deeper you penetrate into the structure of human wisdom, the clearer it becomes how this divine spirit has worked in you. Your passions, your sense of truth, are still subject to error. But the human body is not subject to error. Only the soul makes mistakes. It continually attacks the wonderful organism that the Deity has built as a housing for man. The structure of the human body is perfect. Every bone, for example, is wonderfully designed. It is composed of fine beams in such a skillful way that no engineer today could imitate it. The thigh bone has a reciprocating structure that allows it to support the body with the least amount of force.

The higher bodies of man are much more imperfect than the physical. This perfect physical casing was built by the great spirit; then he was drawn into this shell like a spark. Now take this whole world of this structure that lives around you, apart from what lives in you as a soul, and you have the third aspect of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. Then take your own soul and the souls of your fellow brothers and fellow creatures. That is the Son, the second aspect of the Godhead, the second form in which the Godhead appears. At the beginning of the world process, we have everything that surrounds us as the perfect world. That is the Holy Spirit. What now lives in it as soul, that is the Son. That which the Son will become and that to which we will come through the Son, what we will be at the end of the days, that is the first aspect, the Father. Religions look at the primal essence from these three aspects, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

You can go through all religions and you will always find this Trinity as the basic concept of all religions. The disciples were spoken to in this way countless times. When I speak, my words break free from my soul. They vibrate in the air. Then the vibrations go out to the other souls. Imagine that the organ of hearing is switched off – I speak – the words could be made visible – then you could see what I am saying. Imagine that you could turn the vibrating air into water and then into something solid. Imagine that you could very quickly condense the [vibrating] waves. Then the words would fall down as pieces of solid matter. They would lie at the bottom of the ground. This is how religion imagines everything around us, only by thinking the macrocosm formed similarly to how the words do here.

The macrocosm was once a very fine substance. Now the deity spoke a word, a primal name. The substance condensed, and so everything came into being. This is how rock crystal was formed too. The words of God were spoken into this substance, and it condensed. Everything was the thought of God, everything was spirit. That from which the spirit emerges is the original word. The Word of God that resounded into space was called the “Word”, the second aspect of the Deity. The thought of God that had condensed was the third aspect of the divine essence. The Word that resounded was the second aspect of the divine essence. God was in the Word and in the Word was God. (John 1:1) But before the Word can be spoken, something must precede it. That was the Father-God, the beginning. A deep connection has been recognized in all religions between what was in the beginning, the Father-God, and the life of the present. The Son is the life of the present. In the soul lives the Son as the Word. Veda - Edda means: the word. That which is called the actual revelation in the different religions always goes back to the word. The divine documents express this word. That is why they are also called the Word. In the religious records is that which the Spirit of God has spoken into the world. An echo of this lives in the human soul.

Another part of the core wisdom of all religions is the awareness that man is in a process of development, that he can reach ever higher and higher levels of development. The soul can increasingly resemble God. In my body, I see that the forces and materials of nature have worked together to create the perfect physical body for me. Plants and animals are experiments. A development has taken place. In the human being, the keystone of this development is opposed to us. In us, we carry the spirit germ like a bud. This is how we participate in the spiritual world. Thus, the human being lives in a physical environment and, on the other hand, grows into a spiritual world. Within himself, he has powers and abilities through which he is connected to the spiritual world. Stones, plants, animals are beings in different degrees of perfection. The soul also exists in various degrees of perfection, existing in a sequence. This begins with us. We are the most imperfect in the spiritual world. We have to live ourselves into a community with supersensible beings, with spiritual beings that form the connection between man and the Supreme Divinity, Devas, Dhyan Chohans, Angels, Archangels, etcetera. Everywhere, in all religions, there is the core of wisdom of a spiritual world, of a sum of entities of a supersensible nature. Just as man belongs to the rest of the [physical] world through his physical body, so he belongs to the spiritual world through his core of being.

Another core wisdom of all religions is that all development occurs in cycles, which can be compared to breathing in and out, day and night. The life of a human being, the life of the soul, also runs in such cycles. Man alternates between this side of existence, where he gathers experiences, and another where he lives in community with spiritual beings, in Devachan. In rhythmic succession, physical life on earth appears again and again, and again the life of the spirit. The idea that one earthly life is one among many is a common basic law of all developed religions.

It is a mistake to say that Christianity does not teach reincarnation. In its esoteric form, it teaches reincarnation. It just doesn't teach it on the outside. Christ spoke to his intimate disciples about reincarnation. When he was alone with his disciples, he explained many things to them on the mountain. He only spoke most intimately to his most intimate disciples, James, John, Peter, at the Transfiguration. The expression “building huts” is there. (Mk 9,5) These are the most intimate disciples who have risen to the level where huts are built. You experience what you experience when you can build huts. Space and time are overcome. Moses and Elijah appear. The deepest secret is shown to the disciples. Elijah is the Way. “El” means Way. Moses is the Truth, and Christ is the Life. He stands in the middle. The Way, the Life, the Truth. This ancient wisdom of the Christian religion stands here in bodily form; it appears to the disciples in the devachanic, raptured state. Christ said to them: Elijah has returned. They just did not recognize him (Mk 9:19). He spoke to them of reincarnation, but continued: “But do not tell anyone until I return” (Mk 9:9). The Second Coming refers to the point in human development when they will be ready to find the inner Christ.

Angelus Silesius points to the essence of this inner Christ and its significance:

A thousand times if Christ were born in Bethlehem and not in you, you would be a thousand times lost.

The inner experience of Christ enables us to grasp the Christ in the world. When people have come so far, then one can speak again of reincarnation. Until then, it should be kept secret. Among the Egyptian slaves, there was a living awareness: This is one life among many. In the other life, I will be like the one who now commands me. Thus he recognized the law of reincarnation and karma, the connection between cause and effect in the moral world. He felt this to be the law of his life. Then we understand the deep significance that the law of karma and reincarnation had in the souls.

But this humanity would have only looked up and lost the appreciation of the one life between birth and death. Once the soul had to go through a life where it knew nothing of reincarnation. About 1500 [or 2600] years is the period that elapses between two embodiments. In the 2000 years after Christ, the soul has gone through one such embodiment. Therefore, the disciples should not teach reincarnation until people could grasp the Christ within themselves.

The doctrine of reincarnation is contained in Christianity, not as a mere teaching, but as a legacy for the future. The teaching was not lost in Christianity by accident or disgrace, but was deliberately not taught for 2000 years. Man has grown out of the whole of nature. Goethe felt the Taoist feeling in the words he addressed to nature in the Hymn to Nature. This contains an examination of how he empathized with nature.

Man had to become a special being, but then he had to be reconnected to the divine. The search for the way back to the divine is what the old mystics of the Middle Ages called deification. This is how man expresses that he is eminently created for a development. In order for him to grow towards deification, the divine must be present in him in a seed-like way.

To make this one's content is to be a religious person. And to know what then lives in the soul and flows through it is theosophy. This is, in another form, what religions give to man. It makes religions understandable to him. Divine wisdom is the antitype of the soul's content, which itself is permeated and pulsated by the truth. The earlier religious conceptions were more or less the content of faith. This content of feeling must be raised into full, bright day-consciousness. The deepening of all religions into wisdom, so that it permeates us completely with its living content, so that the soul thereby reaches the goal of deification; that is what Theosophy will lead us to.

[ 1 ] In Johannes Tauler (1300–1361), Heinrich Suso (1295–1366), and Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) one encounters personalities in whose life and work appear in most impressive manner those movements of the soul which a spiritual path such as that of Meister Eckhart causes in profound natures. If Eckhart seems to be a man who, in the blissful experiencing of spiritual rebirth, speaks of the qualities and nature of knowledge as of a picture he has succeeded in painting, then the others appear as wanderers to whom this rebirth has shown a new road which they mean to walk, but the end of which for them has been removed to an infinite distance. Eckhart describes the splendors of his picture, they the difficulties of the new road. One must be quite clear about man's relationship to his higher insights in order to be able to represent to oneself the difference between such personalities as Eckhart and Tauler. Man is entangled in the world of the senses and in the laws of nature, by which the world of the senses is dominated. He himself is a result of this world. He lives because its forces and substances are active in him, and he perceives and judges this world of the senses in accordance with the laws by which it. and he are constructed. When he directs his eye upon an object, not only does the object appear to him as a sum of interacting forces dominated by the laws of nature, but the eye itself is already constructed according to such laws and forces, and the act of seeing takes place in harmony with these laws and forces. If we had attained the utmost limits of natural science, in all likelihood we could pursue this play of natural forces in accordance with natural laws into the highest regions of the formation of thought.—But in doing this we already rise above this play. Do we not stand above all mere conformity to natural laws when we survey how we ourselves are integrated into nature? We see with our eye in accordance with the laws of nature. But we also understand the laws in accordance with which we see. We can stand on a higher elevation and survey simultaneously the external world and ourselves in interplay. Is not then a nature active within us which is higher than the sensory-organic personality which acts according to natural laws and with natural laws? In such activity is there still a partition between our inner world and the external world? That which judges here, which gathers insights, is no longer our individual personality; rather it is the universal essence of the world, which has torn down the barrier between inner world and outer world, and which now embraces both. As it is true that I still remain the same individual in external appearance when I have thus torn down the barrier, so it is true that in essence I am no longer this individual. In me now lives the feeling that the universal nature speaks in my soul, the nature which embraces me and the whole world.—Such feelings live in Tauler when he says: “Man is as if he were three men, an animal man, as he is according to the senses, then a rational man, and finally the highest god-like man ... One is the external, animal sensual man; the other is the internal, rational man, with his rational faculties; the third man is the spirit, the highest part of the soul.” (cf. Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystik, History of German Mysticism, Vol. 3, p. 161.) How this third man is superior to the first and second, Eckhart has expressed in the words: “The eye by which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye and one seeing and one knowing and one feeling.” But in Tauler another sentiment lives with this one. He struggles through to a real conception of the spiritual, and does not constantly intermingle the sensory-natural with the spiritual, as do false materialists and false idealists. If Tauler, with his way of thinking, had become a scientist, he would have had to insist that everything natural, including the whole man, the first and the second, was to be explained in entirely natural terms. He would never have transferred “purely” spiritual forces into nature. He would not have spoken of a “functionalism” in nature, imagined in accordance with human examples. He knew that where we perceive with the senses no “creative thoughts” are to be found. Instead, there lived in him the strongest consciousness that man is a merely natural being. And since he felt himself to be a curator of the moral life, not a scientist, he felt the contrast which separates this natural being of man and the seeing of God, which arises in a natural way within the natural, but as something spiritual. It was just in this contrast that the meaning of life appeared before his eyes. Man finds himself to be an individual being, a creature of nature. And no science can reveal anything more to him about this life than that he is such a creature of nature. As a creature of nature he cannot go beyond the state appropriate to a creature of nature. He must remain within it. And yet his inner life leads him beyond it. He must have confidence in something no science of external nature can give and show him. If he calls this nature the existing, he must be able to advance to the view which acknowledges the non-existing as the higher. Tauler does not seek a God who exists in the sense of a natural force; he does not seek a God who has created the world in the sense of human creations. In him lives the recognition that even the concept of creation of the teachers of the Church is only an idealized human creating. It is clear to him that God is not found in the same manner as science finds natural processes and natural laws. Tauler is conscious that we cannot simply add God to nature in our thoughts. He knows that one who thinks God in his sense, does not have any other content in his thoughts than one who has grasped nature in thought. Therefore Tauler does not want to think God; he wants to think divinely. The knowledge of nature is not enriched by knowing God; it is transformed. The knower of God does not know something different from the knower of nature: he knows differently. The knower of God cannot add a single letter to the knowledge of nature, but through his whole knowledge of nature a new light shines.

[ 2 ] What basic sensations dominate the soul of a man who looks at the world from such points of view will depend on how he regards the experience of the soul which spiritual rebirth brings. Within this experience man is wholly a natural being if he looks at himself in interaction with the rest of nature; and he is wholly a spiritual being if he considers the state to which his transformation brings him. One can therefore say with equal justice: The greatest depths of the soul are still natural, and also, They are already divine. Tauler, in conformity with his way of thinking, emphasized the former. No matter how deeply we penetrate into our soul, he said to himself, we always remain individual human beings. But nevertheless, universal nature glows in the depths of the individual soul. Tauler was dominated by the feeling: You cannot detach yourself from individuality, you cannot cleanse yourself of it. Therefore the universal essence cannot appear in you in its purity; it can only shine into the depths of your soul. Thus in these only a reflection, an image of the universal essence appears. You can transform your individual personality in such a way that it gives back the image of the universal essence; this universal essence itself does not shine in you. From such conceptions Tauler came to the idea of a Divinity which never entirely merges with the human world, never flows into it. He even expressly insists upon not being confused with those who declare the interior of man to be something divine in itself. He says that the union with God “is taken by ignorant men to occur in the flesh, and they say that they should be transformed into the divine nature; but this is wrong and a mischievous heresy. For even in the highest and most intimate union with God the divine nature and God's essence are high, indeed higher than all height; this leads into a divine abyss, and no creature will ever partake of it.” Tauler wants to be deservedly called a believing Catholic, in the sense of his time and of his vocation as a priest. He is not intent upon confronting Christianity with another point of view. He simply wants to deepen and spiritualize Christianity through his views. He speaks of the contents of Scripture as a pious priest. But nevertheless, in his world of ideas the Scriptures become a means of expression for the innermost experiences of the soul. “God accomplishes all His works in the soul and gives them to the soul; and the Father brings forth His only-begotten Son in the soul, as truly as He brings Him forth in eternity, neither less, nor more. What is brought forth when one says: God brings forth in the soul? Is it a similitude of God, or is it an image of God, or is it something of God No, it is neither image nor similitude of God, but the same God and the same Son whom the Father brings forth in eternity, and nothing but the lovely divine Word, which is the other Person in the Trinity; this does the Father bring forth in the soul . . . and it is from this that the soul has such a great and special dignity.” (cf. Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystik, History of German Mysticism, Vol. 3, p. 219f.)—For Tauler the narratives of the Scriptures become the garment in which he clothes the events of the inner life. “Herod, who drove away the Child and wanted to kill Him, is an image of the world, which still wants to kill this Child in the pious man, wherefore one should and must flee it if one wants to keep the Child alive within oneself, while the Child is the enlightened, believing soul of every man.”

[ 3 ] Because Tauler directs his attention to the natural man, he is less concerned with describing what happens when the higher man enters into the natural man than with finding the paths which the lower faculties of the personality have to take if they are to be translated into the higher life. As a curator of the moral life he wants to show man the ways to the universal essence. He has absolute faith and confidence that the universal essence will begin to shine in man if the latter so arranges his life that there is a place for the divine in him. But this universal essence can never begin to shine if man shuts himself off in his bare, natural, separate personality. Thus isolated within himself, in the language of Tauler, man is only a part of the world, an individual creature. The more man encloses himself within his existence as part of the world, the less can the universal essence find a place within him. “If man is truly to become one with God, all the faculties of the inner man too must die and be silent. The will must be turned away from even the good and from all willing, and must become will-less.” “Man must escape all the senses, turn all his faculties inward, and attain to forgetfulness of all things and of himself.” “For the true and eternal word of God is spoken only in the desert, when man has left his own self and all things behind, and stands alone, deserted, and solitary.”

[ 4 ] When Tauler had reached his highest point the following question came to occupy the center of his mental life: How can man destroy and overcome his individual existence within himself, so that he can take part in life in the sense of the universal life? For one who is in this situation, his feelings toward the universal essence become concentrated in the one thing: reverence for this universal essence, as for that which is inexhaustible and infinite. He says to himself: No matter what level you have attained, there are still higher prospects, still more sublime possibilities. As definite and clear for him as is the direction his steps must take, so clear is it to him that he can never speak of a goal. A new goal is only the beginning of a new road. Through such a new goal man has reached a degree of development; the development itself extends into the immeasurable. And what it will achieve on a more distant level it never knows on the present one. There is no knowing the final goal; there is only a trusting in the road, in the development. There is a knowing of everything man has already achieved. It consists in the penetration of an already existing object by the faculties of our spirit. For the higher inner life such a knowing does not exist. Here the faculties of our spirit must first translate the object itself into existence; they must first create an existence for it which is like the natural existence. Natural science examines the development of living beings from the simplest to man himself, the most perfect. This development lies completed before us. We understand it by penetrating it with our mental faculties. When the development has arrived at man, he does not find a further continuation already existing. He himself accomplishes the further development. He now lives what he only knows for earlier levels. He creates objectively what, for that which precedes, he only re-creates in line with its spiritual nature. That the truth does not coincide with what exists in nature, but embraces both what exists naturally and what does not exist: Tauler is wholly filled by this in all his sentiments. We are told that he was led to this conviction by an enlightened layman, a “Friend of God from the Oberland.” There is a mysterious story in this. There are only conjectures about the place where this Friend of God lived, and about who he was there are not even conjectures. He is said to have heard much about Tauler's manner of preaching, and thereupon to have decided to go to Tauler, who was then a preacher in Strasbourg, in order to fulfill a certain task concerning him. The relationship of Tauler to the Friend of God and the influence which the latter exercised on him are described in a work which is printed together with Tauler's sermons in the oldest editions under the title, Das Buch des Meisters, The Book of the Master. In it a Friend of God, in whom the one who entered into relations with Tauler is said to be recognizable, tells of a “master,” who has been identified with Tauler himself. He tells how a revolution, a spiritual rebirth, has been brought about in a “master,” and how the latter, when he felt his death approaching, called the Friend to him and asked him to write the story of his “enlightenment,” but to take care that no one should ever find out who the book deals with. He asks this because all the insights which proceed from him are yet not of him. “For know that God has performed everything through me, poor worm that I am, and thus it is not mine, but God's.” A scholarly dispute which has developed in connection with this matter is not of the least important as far as its essentials are concerned. On the one side (Denifle, Die Dichtugen des Goltesfreundes im Oberlande, The Writings of the Friend of God in the Oberland) the attempt has been made to prove that the Friend of God never existed, that his existence was invented, and that the books attributed to him originated with someone else (Rulman Merswin). Wilhelm Preger (Geschichte der deutschen Mystik, History of German Mysticism) has endeavored with many reasons to support this existence, the genuineness of the writings, and the correctness of the facts relating to Tauler.—It is not incumbent upon me here to illuminate by obtrusive research a human relationship of which one who knows how to read the relevant writings knows full well that it is to remain a secret. (These relevant writings, among others, are: Von eime eiginwilligen weltwisen manne, der von eime heiligen weltpriestere gewiset wart uffe demuetige gehorsamme, Of a self-willed worldly-wise Man who was shown the Way to Humble Obedience by a holy secular Priest, 1338; Das Buch von den zwei Mannen, The Book of the Two Men; Der gefangene Ritter, The Captured Knight, 1349; Die geistliche stege, The Spiritual Stairs, 1350; Von der geistlichen Leiter, Of the Spiritual Ladder, 1357; Das Meisterbuch, The Book of the Master, 1349; Geschichte von zwei jungen 15jährigen Knaben, Story of Two Young 15-Year-Old Boys.) It is entirely sufficient to say of Tauler that at a certain stage of his life a change such as the one I am about to describe occurred in him. Here Tauler's personality is no longer in question, but rather a personality “in general.” As regards Tauler we are only concerned with the fact that we have to understand the transformation in him from the point of view indicated below. If we compare his later activity with his earlier, the fact of this transformation is immediately evident. I omit all external circumstances and relate the inner soul processes of the “master” under “the influence of the layman.” What my reader imagines the “layman” and the “master” to be, depends entirely upon the disposition of his spirit; I do not know that what I myself imagine them to be is applicable to anyone else.—A master instructs his listeners about the relationship of the soul to the universal essence of things. He speaks of the fact that man no longer feels the natural, limited faculties of the individual personality to be active within him when he descends into the profound depths of his soul. There it is no longer the individual man who speaks; it is God. There man does not see God, or the world; there God sees Himself. Man has become one with God. But the master knows that this teaching has not yet fully come to life within him. He thinks it with the intellect, but he does not yet live within it with every fiber of his personality. Thus he teaches about a state which he has not yet fully experienced within himself. The description of this state corresponds to the truth, but this truth is worth nothing if it does not acquire life, if it does not bring itself forth as existence in the real world. The “layman” or “Friend of God” hears of the master and his teachings. He is not less penetrated with the truth the master utters than is the latter himself. But he does not possess this truth as a thing of the intellect. He possesses it as the whole force of his life. He knows that one can utter this truth when it has come to one from the outside, without living in its sense in the least. In that case one has nothing within oneself beyond the natural understanding of the intellect. One then speaks of this natural understanding as though it were the highest, identical with the action of the universal essence. This is not so, because it was not acquired in a life which, when it approached this knowledge, was already transformed and reborn. What one acquires as a merely natural man remains merely natural, even if later one expresses the main feature of the higher knowledge in words. The transformation must come out of nature itself. Nature, which in living has developed to a certain stage, must be developed further by life; something new must come into being through this further development. Man must not merely look back upon the development which has already taken place, and consider as the highest what is re-formed in his mind concerning this development; he must look forward to what has not yet been created; his knowledge must be the beginning of a new content, not an end of the content of the previous development. Nature advances from worm to mammal, from mammal to man in a real, not in a conceptual process. Man is not merely to repeat this process in spirit. The spiritual repetition is only the beginning of a new real development, which, however, is a spiritual reality. Man then understands not merely what nature has brought forth; he carries nature further; he transforms his understanding into living action. He brings forth the spirit within himself, and from then on this spirit advances from one stage of development to another, just as nature advances. The spirit initiates a natural process on a higher level. When one who has understood this speaks about the God who sees Himself within man, this speaking takes on another character. He attaches little value to the fact that an insight already obtained has led him into the depths of the universal essence, but his spiritual disposition acquires a new character. It continues to develop in the direction determined by the universal essence. Such a man not only looks at the world in a different way from one who is merely rational: he lives his life differently. He does not speak of the sense which life already has through the forces and laws of the world; rather he gives a new sense to this life. No more than the fish has in itself what appears as mammal at a later stage of development, does the rational man already have in himself what is to be born out of him as a higher man. If the fish could understand itself and the things around it, it would regard being a fish as the sense of life. It would say: The universal essence is like the fish; in the fish the universal essence sees itself. Thus the fish might speak as long as it merely holds fast to its intellectual understanding. In reality it does not hold fast to it. In its actions it goes beyond its understanding. It becomes a reptile, and later a mammal. In reality the sense it gives to itself goes beyond the sense which mere reflection suggests to it. Thus must it also be with man. In reality he gives himself a sense; he does not stop at the sense he already has, and which reflection shows him. Understanding leaps beyond itself, if only it understands itself aright. Understanding cannot derive the world from an already completed God; from a germ, it can only develop in a direction toward a God. The man who has understood this does not want to look at God as something that is outside of him; he wants to treat God as a Being that walks with him toward a goal which, at the outset, is as unknown as the nature of the mammal is unknown to the fish. He does not want to be the knower of the hidden or self-revealing, existing God, but the friend of the divine action and operation, which is superior to existence and non-existence. The layman who came to the master was a “Friend of God” in this sense. And through him the master was transformed from a contemplator of the nature of God into “one who lives in the spirit,” who not merely contemplated, but lived in the higher sense. Now the latter no longer brought concepts and ideas of the intellect from within himself; these concepts and ideas sprang from him as living, real spirit. He no longer merely edified his listeners; he moved them deeply. He no longer plunged their souls within themselves; he led them into a new life. This is told us symbolically: through the effect of his sermon about forty people fell down and were as if dead.

[ 5 ] A leader into such a new life is represented by a work, the author of which is unknown. Luther first made it known by having it published. The philologist, Franz Pfeiffer recently reprinted it from a manuscript of the year 1497, with a translation in modern German facing the original text. The introduction to the work announces its intention and its goal: “Here the Frankfurter begins and says exceedingly high and beautiful things of a consummate life.” This is followed by “the preface concerning the Frankfurter:” “This booklet the omnipotent, eternal God has uttered through a wise, judicious, truthful, righteous man, his friend, who was formerly a Teutonic Knight, a priest and a custodian in the house of the Teutonic Knights in Frankfurt; it teaches many lovely insights into divine truth, and especially how and by what one can recognize the true and righteous Friends of God, and also the unrighteous, false, free spirits, who do much harm to the holy Church.”—By “free spirits” one is to understand those who live in a world of ideas like that of the “master” described above before his transformation by the “Friend of God,” and by the “true and righteous Friends of God” those with the way of thinking of the “layman.” One can further ascribe to the book the intention of acting upon its readers in the same way as the “Friend of God from the Oberland” acted upon the master. One does not know the author. But what does this mean? One does not know when he was born and when he died, and what he did in the external life. That the author wanted these facts of his outer life to remain forever secret is something which belongs to the way he wanted to act. Not the “self” of this or that man, born at a certain time, is to speak to us, but the selfhood on the basis of which the “particularity of individualities” (in the sense of the words of Paul Asmus, cf. above) first develops. “If God were to take unto himself all men who are now and who have ever been, and were to become man in them, and were they to become God in Him, and if it did not happen in me too, my fall and my estrangement would never be remedied, unless indeed it happened also in me. And in this restoration and improvement I can and should do nothing but merely and purely suffer what is done, so that God alone does and accomplishes everything within me, and I suffer Him and all His works and His divine Will. But if I do not want to suffer this, and possess myself in attributes of the self, that is in My and I, in Me and the like, then God is hindered, so that He cannot, pure and alone and without obstacle, accomplish His work within me. Therefore also my fall and my estrangement remain unremedied.” The “Frankfurter” does not wish to speak as an individual; he wants to let God speak. Of course he knows that he can only do this as an individual, separate personality, but he is a “Friend of God,” that is, a man who does not want to depict the nature of life through contemplation, but who wants to point out, through the living spirit, the beginning of an avenue of development. The discussions in the book represent various instructions on how this road is to be attained. The basic idea always returns: man is to cast off everything connected with the view that makes him appear as an individual, separate personality. This idea seems to be carried out only with respect to the moral life; it must also be applied to the life of higher understanding. One must destroy in oneself what appears as separateness, then the separate existence ceases; the all-life enters into us. We cannot possess ourselves of this all-life by drawing it to us. It comes into us when we silence the separate existence within us. We possess the all-life least just when we regard our individual existence as if the All already reposed within it. The latter only appears in the individual existence when this individual existence does not claim that it is something. The book calls this claim of the individual existence the “assumption” (Annehmen). Through the “assumption” the “self” makes it impossible for the all-life to enter into it. The self then puts itself as a part, as something incomplete, in the place of the whole, of the complete. “The complete is a being which comprises and embraces all beings in itself and in its being, and without and outside which there is no true being, and in which all things have their being; for it is the being of all things and is in itself unchangeable and immovable, and changes and moves all other things. But the divided and incomplete is what has sprung from the complete, or which it becomes, just like a brilliance or a shining which flows from the sun or from a light and appears as something, as this or that. And this is called creature, and none of these divided ones is identical with the complete. And therefore the complete also is not identical with any of the divided ones ... When the complete appears one rejects what is divided. But when does it come? I say: When, insofar as it is possible, it is known, felt, and tasted in the soul; for the lack is wholly in us and not in it. For just as the sun illuminates the whole world and is as close to one man as to another, a blind man nevertheless does not see it. But that is not a defect in the sun, but in the blind man ... If my eye is to see something it must be cleansed of, or freed from, all other things ... One might want to ask: Insofar as it is unknowable and incomprehensible for all creatures, and the soul is a creature, how can it be known in the soul? Answer: Therefore it is that one says that the creature is to be known as a creature.” This is as much as to say that all that is creature is to be regarded as creature-ness and as created, and is not to regard itself as an I and as selfhood, which latter makes this knowing impossible. “For in that creature in which the complete is to be known, creature-ness, being created, I, selfhood and the like must be lost and come to nothing.” (Chapter I of the work of the Frankfurter.) Thus the soul must look into itself; there it will find its I, its selfhood. If it stops at this, it separates itself from the complete. If it regards its selfhood only as something loaned to it, as it were, and destroys it in spirit, it will be seized by the stream of the all-life, of the complete. “If the creature takes on something good, such as being, life, knowledge, insight, capacity, in short all that one should call good, and deems that it itself is this or that this belongs to it, the creature, or is of it: as often and to the extent that this happens, it turns itself away.” There are “two eyes in the created soul of man. One is the possibility of looking into eternity; the other, of looking into time and into the creature.” “Man should thus stand and be free without himself, that is without selfhood, I, Me, My and the like, so that he seeks and purposes himself and what is his as little in all things as if it did not exist; and he should also estimate himself as little as if he did not exist, and as if another had performed all his works.” (Chapter 15.) With relation to the author of these sentences too it must be considered that the conceptual content to which he gives a direction through his higher ideas and feelings is that of a pious priest of his time. Here it is not a matter of the conceptual content, but of the direction; not of the ideas, but of the spiritual disposition. One who does not live in Christian dogmas as this author does, but rather in concepts of natural science, imprints other ideas on his sentences; but with these other ideas he points in the same direction. And this direction is what leads to the overcoming of selfhood through this selfhood itself. It is in his self that the highest light shines for man. But this light only gives the right reflection to his world of ideas when man is aware that it is not the light of his self, but the universal light of the world. Therefore there is no more important knowledge than self-knowledge; and at the same time there is none which so completely leads beyond itself. When the “self” knows itself aright it is already no longer a “self.” In his words the author of the book under discussion expresses this as follows: “For God's nature is without this and without that and without selfhood and I; but the nature and peculiarity of the creature is that it seeks and wills itself and what belongs to it, and the “this” and “that”; and from everything it does or leaves undone it wants to receive profit and advantage. But where the creature or man loses his own being and his selfhood and himself, and goes out of himself, there God enters with His own Being, that is with His Selfhood.” (Chapter 24.) Man ascends from a conception of his “self” in which the latter appears to him as his essence, to one where he sees it as a mere organ in which the universal essence acts upon itself. In line with the ideas of our book it is said: “If man can reach the point where he belongs as much to God as a man's hand belongs to him, then let him rest content and seek no further.” (Chapter 54.) This is not to say that man should stop at a certain point of his development; rather, when he has come as far as is indicated in the words above, he should no longer pursue investigations about the meaning of the hand, but rather use the hand, so that it can serve the body to which it belongs.—

[ 6 ] Heinrich Suso and Jan van Ruysbroeck had a spiritual disposition which can be described as genius of soul. Their feelings are drawn by something resembling instinct to the point to which Eckhart's and Tauler's feelings were led through a higher life of ideas. Suso's heart turns ardently toward a primordial essence which embraces the individual man as well as the whole remaining world, and in which, forgetting himself, he wants to be absorbed like a drop of water in the great ocean. He speaks of this yearning for the universal essence not as of something which he wants to grasp in his thoughts, but he speaks of it as of a natural impulse which makes his soul drunk with the desire for the annihilation of his separate existence and for the rebirth in the all-embracing activity of the infinite essence. “Turn your eyes to the being in its pure and bare simplicity, so that you may abandon this and that partial being. Take only being in itself, which is unmixed with non-being, for all non-being denies all being; thus the being in itself also denies all non-being. A thing which is still to become, or has been, does not exist now in its essential presence. Mixed being or non-being can however be recognized only by the aid of a mark of the universal being. For if one wants to understand a thing the reason is first met by being, and that is a being which effects all things. It is not a divided being of this or that creature, for the divided being is ever mingled with the otherness of a possibility of receiving something. Therefore the nameless divine being must in itself be a universal being, which sustains all divided beings with its presence.” Thus speaks Suso in the autobiography which he composed with the aid of his disciple, Elsbet Stäglin. He too is a pious priest and lives wholly in the Christian realm of ideas. He lives in it as if it were completely unthinkable for someone with his spiritual direction to live in a different spiritual world. But of him too it is true that one can combine another conceptual content with his spiritual direction. This is clearly indicated by the way the content of the Christian doctrine becomes an inner experience for him, while his relationship to Christ becomes one between his spirit and the eternal truth, of a purely conceptual-spiritual kind. He has written a Büchlein von der ewigen Weisheit, Little Book of Eternal Wisdom. In this he lets the “eternal wisdom” speak to its “servant,” that is, presumably, to himself: “Do you not recognize me? How is it you are even sunk down, or has consciousness deserted you because of your great distress, my tender child? It is I, compassionate wisdom, who have opened wide the depths of bottomless compassion, which is even hidden to all the saints, in order to receive you and all repentant hearts in kindness; it is I, the sweet, eternal wisdom, who became poor and miserable in order to bring you back to your dignity; it is I who suffered bitter death in order to bring you back to life! Here I stand, pale and bloody and loving, as I stood by the high gallows of the Cross, between the strict judgment of my Father and you. It is I, your brother; look, it is I, your spouse! Everything you ever did against me I have utterly forgotten, as if it had never happened, if only you now turn completely to me and do not part from me again.” For Suso, everything material-temporal in the Christian conception of the world has, as one can see, become a spiritual-ideal process within his soul.—From some chapters of the above-mentioned autobiography of Suso it might appear as if he had let himself be led not by the mere activity of his own spiritual faculties, but by external revelations, by spirit-like visions. But he clearly expresses his opinion on this. One attains the truth only by exercise of reason, not through some revelation. “The difference between pure truth and doubtful visions in the professing substance ... I shall also tell you. A direct seeing of the bare Divinity is the right, pure truth, without any doubt; and any vision is the nobler the more reasonable and imageless it is, and the more like this bare seeing.”—Meister Eckhart also leaves no doubt that he rejects the view which sees the spiritual in substantial-spatial forms, in apparitions that can be perceived in he same way as sensory ones. Thus spirits like Suso and Eckhart are opponents of a view such as that which expresses itself in the Spiritualism that developed in the 19th century.

[ 7 ] Jan van Ruysbroeck, the Belgian mystic, walked the same paths as Suso. His spiritual road found a spirited opponent in Jean de Gerson (born 1363), who was for some time Chancellor of the University of Paris, and played an important role at the Council of Constance. It throws some light on the nature of the mysticism cultivated by Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroeck if one compares it with the mystical endeavors of Gerson, whose predecessors were Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventura, and others.—Ruysbroeck himself fought against those whom he counted among the heretical mystics. The latter he considered all who, on the basis of an unconsidered intellectual judgment, hold all things to be the amanation of one primordial essence, and who thus see in the world a diversity only, and in God the unity of this diversity. Ruysbroeck did not count himself among these, for he knew that one cannot reach the primordial essence by a contemplation of things themselves, but only by raising oneself from this lower to a higher way of thinking. Similarly he turned against those who without further ado wanted to see in the individual man, in his separate existence (in his creature-ness), his higher nature also. He much lamented the error which effaces all differences in the world of the senses, and lightly says that things are different only in appearance, while in essence they are all the same. For a way of thinking such as Ruysbroeck's this would be just as if one were to say: That for our eyes the trees of an avenue converge in the distance does not concern us. In reality they are everywhere equally distant, therefore our eyes must accustom themselves to seeing correctly. But our eyes do see correctly. That the trees converge is due to a necessary law of nature, and we should not object to our way of seeing, but rather understand in the mind why we see thus. The mystic too does not turn away from the things of the senses. He accepts them as being sensory, as they are. And it is also clear to him that they cannot become other through any intellectual judgment. But in the spirit he goes beyond the senses and beyond reason, and only then does he find unity. He has an unshakeable belief that he can develop to the point of seeing this unity. Therefore he ascribes to human nature the divine spark which can be made to shine in him, to shine of itself. It is different with spirits of Gerson's kind. They do not believe in this shining of itself. For them what men can see always remains something external, which must come to them externally from one side or another. Ruysbroeck believed that the highest wisdom must become apparent to the mystical seeing; Gerson believed only that the soul could illuminate the content of an external teaching (that of the Church). For Gerson mysticism was nothing but one's having a warm feeling for everything which is revealed in the content of this teaching. For Ruysbroeck it was a belief that all content of this teaching is also born in the soul. Therefore Gerson reproves Ruysbroeck for imagining not only that he possesses the capacity to see the universal essence with clearness, but that an activity of the universal essence manifests itself in this seeing. Ruysbroeck simply could not be understood by Gerson. They were speaking of two totally different things. Ruysbroeck has his eye fixed on that life of the soul which lives its God; Gerson sees only a life of the soul which wants to love a God whom it never will be able to live within itself. Like so many others Gerson too fought against something which was foreign to him only because it could not be fitted into his experience² ).

• 2. Addendum II to the 1923 Edition:
  In my writings, “mysticism” is spoken of in different ways. The apparent contradiction which some persons have claimed to find in this is elucidated in the annotations to the new edition of my Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, The Theory of Knowledge in Goethe's Conception of the World.—Addendum II to the 1923 Edition