The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Our talk today must bring to a temporary conclusion the studies which, during the last few weeks we have connected in a somewhat loose and irregular way with the Gospel according to Mark.

In the lectures you have heard during this winter we have tried to make you realise that we stand to-day at a period of transition. Even by those who consider spiritual life in a somewhat external way, it can be noticed that a new order of ideas and thoughts is gradually emerging, though the people living within the new order may themselves be unaware of it. It will therefore be well if such a stimulus can be given to your thoughts this evening as will enable you to carry somewhat further the spiritual scientific matter already imparted to you.

In speaking of periods of transition, it is helpful to recall the great “period of transition” through which human evolution passed, often mentioned by me as the great incisive moment of the Event of Palestine. What this moment meant we know from many things that have been spoken of here.

When we try to form a conception of how this most important “idea”—for so we may call it—the Christ-idea, developed out of the thoughts and feelings of the age immediately preceding it, it is well to remember that the Jahve or Jehova-idea meant as much to the ancient Hebrews as the Christ-idea does to the believers in Christ. From other lectures you know that for those who enter deeply into the essence of Christianity Jahve did not really differ very greatly from the Christ Himself. We must realise far more clearly the inward connection between the Christ-idea and the Jahve-idea. It is very difficult to give, in a few words, the whole connection between these two ideas which has been developed by me in many lectures and cycles in recent years, but it is possible to show in a parable how this connection has to be thought of. We have but to recall the symbol of the sunlight to which your attention has often been directed; how this comes to us either directly from the sun or reflected back from the moon at night, especially when the moon is at the full. Sunlight comes to us from the full moon, but reflected sunlight, which is somewhat different from direct sunlight. Were we to compare the Christ with direct sunlight, then Jahve might be likened to sun-light reflected from the moon; this represents exactly what is met with here in the evolution of mankind. Those who understand such things can feel the passing over of the reflection of Christ into Jehova, or of Jehova into Christ, as men feel the difference between moonlight and sunlight—Jahve being an indirect and Christ a direct revelation of the same Being. But in thinking of “evolution,” we must think of things side by side in space, and following each other in time. Those who have to speak of such things from the occult point of view say:—If we call the religion of Christ a “sun-religion” (and we can use this expression when we remember what has been said concerning Zarathustra) then the religion of Jahve can be called a moon-religion.

So in the period preceding Christianity, we have a sun-religion prepared for by a moon-religion. What has just been said will only be rightly appreciated by those who know that symbols are not chosen arbitrarily, but are deeply rooted in the things they represent. When any religion or world-faith is represented by a symbol, this represents, for those who know how to interpret it, the essential thing in that religion. Perhaps men have lost understanding to-day to a certain extent of a symbolism which sees the moon as representing the religion of Jahve, and also of the connection between the Christian religion and the symbol of the sun; but where thoughts are completely filled with the meaning of such symbols they have to be considered.

Call to mind how I have described the whole course of human evolution. First we have a descending evolution which began when man was first driven out of the spiritual world and entered ever more deeply into matter. This is a descending path. When we picture the general course of human evolution we think of the deepest point as having been reached at the time the Impulse of Christ entered, and that through this Impulse the descending direction was gradually changed to an ascending one.

In human evolution we have at first a descending path, then after the deepest point is reached the Christ-Impulse begins to affect it and will continue to do so till earth reaches the end of its mission.

Now evolution occurs in a very complicated way; certain conditions of its progress are the result of Impulses which had been given at an earlier time. It was an evolutionary event such as this that took place through the Christ-Impulse. The Christ-Impulse was poured forth at the beginning of our era and advanced in a direct line, and growing ever more and more powerful it will permeate all human life until earthly evolution has reached its goal. This is an impulse that was imparted once, and we have to picture it as advancing in a straight line; any evolution that arose later, is seen through it to be at a higher and more perfect stage. There are many such impulses, and also others, affecting the evolution of the world which work differently, and cannot he said to advance on straight lines. We distinguished in post-Atlantean evolution the ancient Indian civilisation, following it the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, then the Greco-Latin; and in the middle of this period the Christ-Event took place. In the fifth post-Atlantean age, in which we are now living, certain things are repeated which occurred in the third age—the Egypto-Chaldean—but a somewhat different way, and so that between them and maintaining a certain relationship between the third and the fifth ages we have the Christ-Impulse. This relation-ship is maintained in the same way between the sixth age and the second, and between the seventh and the first. We are here concerned with powerful factors of evolution which are revealed in such a way that in referring to them we can make use of the Biblical expression:—“The first shall be last.” The primeval Indian age will reappear in the seventh age in another form—yet so that it will be recognisable.

There is another way in which an earlier is seen to affect a later, and this is shown through the fact that we can distinguish smaller epochs. Thus, what took place in pre-Christian times during the ancient Hebrew civilisation appears again in a certain way in post-Christian times—overpassing the Christ-Impulse as it were-ideas which had been prepared within the religion of Jehova appeared again, and, in spite of other factors being present, had an effect on these later times.

Were I to explain symbolically what I cannot deal with adequately to-day owing to the short time at my disposal I might say:—If we feel that the religion of Jehova is represented by the symbol of the moon in contradistinction to the sun, we might expect that a similar belief, overpassing Christianity, would re-emerge at a later day. This did occur, and if such things are not accepted in an external sense or smiled at for they are deeply connected with the symbolism of religions—we may say that the old moon religion of Jehova appeared again in the religion of the half-moon, the Crescent, that its influence, which had preceded the Christ-Event, was carried over into post-Christian times. The repetition of an earlier age in a later is seen with overwhelming results in the last third of the Greco-Latin period, which is reckoned by us in an occult sense as continuing to about the 12th-13th century. This means that after having been separated from it by a period of six hundred years, we have a kind of repetition of the moon religion of Jehova in the religion brought by the Arabs from Africa into Spain. It is not possible to specify here all the characteristics it brought with it. But it is important that we should impress on our souls the fact that in the religion of Mahomet the Christ-Impulse was at first disregarded, that in it we have really a kind of revival of the religion of Moses—the religion of the one indivisible God. Only into the idea of this indivisible God-head something was introduced that had come over from the other side—from the Egypto-Chaldean view-point—which preserved very exact traditions concerning the relationship of the starry heavens to worldly events. Hence many of the thoughts and ideas found among the Chaldeans, Babylonians and Assyrians are found again in the religion of Mahomed, but permeated in an extra-ordinary way with what we might call the teaching concerning the indivisible divinity of Jehova. Speaking scientifically what meets us in Arabism is a synthesis of all that was taught by the priests of Egypt and Chaldea, and in the Jahve religion of the ancient Hebrews.

In a union of this kind there is not only a compression, but there is also always something excluded and left behind. Everything which led to clairvoyant perception was excluded from it. What remained was merely a matter of intellectual research, of a combining of thought, so that all the ideas connected with the Egyptian art of healing and Chaldean astronomy, which both among the Egyptians and the Chaldeans was the outcome of ancient clairvoyance, is found in an intellectual and individualistic form in the Arabism of Mahomet.

Something filtered into Europe along with the Arabs by which all the old ideas that had prevailed among the Egyptians and Chaldeans were stripped of their clairvoyant imaginative content and given abstract forms. From this sprang the marvellous science which the Arabs brought from Africa to Europe by way of Spain. If Christianity brought an impulse mainly for the souls of men, then the great Impulse for the human head, for the intellect, came through the Arabs. Those who are not fully acquainted with the course of human evolution have no idea what the mental outlook, which appeared anew under the symbol of the moon, gave to humanity as a whole. Keppler and Copernicus would not have been possible without this Impulse which the Arabs brought to Europe. The whole method of thought, the manner in which different religious views were connected with the laying aside of the old clairvoyance, is seen again in our modern astronomy and modern science when the third period of culture celebrated its revival in our fifth age. Thus we have to see the evolution of man progressing on the one hand, so that the Impulse of Christ reaches the people of Europe directly by way of Greece and Italy; and, on the other hand, we see it taking a more southernly route which, leaving Greece and Italy on one side, unites with what came to us through the Arabs.

By the union of the religion of Christ with that of Mahomet there arose, during this most important period with which we are dealing, what really forms the content of our culture. From causes which cannot be gone into to-day, we must reckon a period of from six to six-and-ahalf centuries for such an impulse to develop; so that the renewed moon-culture actually arose, spread, and entered Europe six hundred years after the Event of Christ, and until the thirteenth century it enriched that Christian civilisation which had received its direct irnpulses by other paths. Even those who only observe the external course of events know that, however much they are opposed to Arabism, Arabian thought and science entered even into the cloisters of Western Europe, and up to the middle of the thirteenth century (which again indicates something important) we have a blending of these two impulses—the Arabian and the direct Christ-Impulse.

We may say that the sun-symbol and the moon-symbol were merged into one from the fifth and sixth centuries until between the twelfth and thirteenth, this being again a period that lasted for about six hundred years. After this direct union had reached its goal some-thing new arose which had been in gradual preparation since the twelfth and thirteenth century. It is interesting to note that even external sciences recognise that some-thing inexplicable passed through the souls of the people of Europe at that time. External science calls it “inexplicable,” but occultism says that, following the direct Impulse of Christ, there was poured by spiritual means into the souls of men what the fourth period of post-Atlantean culture had to give. The age of Greece threw up a following wave of culture called the culture of the Renaissance, it enriched everything that already existed through the centuries that followed. This was because the age of Greece, which occurred in the middle of the seven periods of post-Atlantean civilisation, underwent a certain renewal in the culture of the Renaissance.

This points again to a period of six hundred years—that is up to our own time—in which this wave of Greek culture has to a certain extent been exhausted. We are living within this period. We are living to-day in an atmosphere (as we are again at the beginning of a sixhundred-year-long wave of culture) into which some-thing new is pressing; an age which must again be enriched with something new from the Christ-Impulse. After the Moon-cult had its revival in the religion of the Crescent during the Renaissance, the time is now come when the Christ-Impulse, which continued as the direct stream, has to receive into it a neighbouring stream. Our age is powerfully attracted towards this neighbouring stream; only we must clearly understand what the addition of it to our civilisation means. All these things are absolutely in accordance with the correct progress of an occult system.

If we think of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, according to the old-not the new sequence—we may expect, after the renewal of the Moon-wave during the Renaissance, the influx of another stream to which we can quite correctly assign the symbol of Mercury. We might therefore say theoretically when this symfiol appeared that we were confronted with the influx into our culture of a wave of a kind of Mercury-influence, just as the wave of Arabism was called a Moon-influence.

If we understand the evolution of our own time aright we may describe Goethe as the last great mind who united in himself the fullness of science, of Christianity, and of the culture of the Renaissance; and we might expect that his soul would reveal a beautiful union of these—intellectualism enriched as it had been by Arabism and Christianity. If we study Goethe as we have been accustomed to do for some years past, it is easily seen that these elements did indeed meet within his soul. But in accordance with what has just been announced concerning the repeated cycle of six, and again six centuries, we might expect that nothing of the Mercury element could have appeared as yet in Goethe's soul, that could only appear as something new after his time. Now it is interesting to note that Goethe's pupil, Schopenhauer, reveals this Mercury influence. You can learn from some of my publications that Eastern wisdom entered into Schopenhauer's philosophy, especially in the form of Buddhism. Mercury was regarded as the symbol of Buddhism, and following on the age of Goethe we have a revival of the Buddha-Impulse (in which Buddha stands for Mercury and Mercury for Buddha) in the same way as the moon is symbolic of Arabism. We can now give a name to this neighbouring stream that entered the direct Christ-Impulse as a new tributary at the beginning of a new six-hundred-yearly epoch. We have to see in this neighbouring stream a revival of Buddhism only with the restrictions I explained in my public lectures on Buddha.¹

We now ask—which is the direct stream of the culture of the future? The Christ-stream! It advances in a direct line. And what neighbouring streams are there? We have first the Arabian stream, which flowed into the direct stream, paused for a time, and then received purification through the culture of the Renaissance. At present we are experiencing a renewed influx of the Buddha stream. When these facts are seen in their right light, we realise that we have to absorb certain elements out of the Buddha-stream which until now could not be received into our Western civilisation. We have to see how these elements of the Buddha-stream must pass into the spiritual development of the west. Such things, for instance, as the idea of reincarnation and Karma. These must be accepted. But one fact must be firmly impressed on our souls:—All these neighbouring streams will never be able to throw light on the central facts of our spiritual science. To question Buddhism or any other pre-Christian oriental religion that may have appeared as a revival in our time concerning the Christ, would be as sensible as for a European Christian to have questioned the Arabs of Spain concerning the nature of Christ!

The people of Europe were well aware that no conception of the Christ could come from the Arabs. If they had anything to say their ideas would not accord with the real Christ-idea. The various prophets who arose as false Messiahs up to Schabbathoi Zewi were really the outcome of Arabism, and had no knowledge of the Christ-Impulse. We must understand that the neighbouring stream of Arabism had to he made fruitful by quite other elements, not by solving in any way the central mystery of Christ. This must also be our attitude towards the stream which approaches us to-day, as the renewal of an ancient one, bringing us understanding of reincarnation and karma, but being incapable of imparting understanding of the Christ-Impulse. For this would be as absurd as to think the Arabs could impart a right conception of Christ to the people of Europe. They imparted many ideas concerning false Messiahs to Europe up to the time of Schabbathoi Zewi, and such things will occur again, for human evolution only progresses when strengthened by seeing through such deceptions. We must penetrate ever more deeply and consciously into these connections. Facts will show that the spiritual science founded by European Rosicrucians, with Christ as its central idea, will be established in the souls of men against all opposition and all misleadings.

How the central-idea of the Christ must enter men's souls, how the Christ must be interwoven, not only with the general evolution of man, but with the whole world, can he gathered from my book on Outline of Occult Science.

From it you can find which is the direct, the forward path. Everyone has the possibility of hearing of this path who understands the words from the Gospel of Matthew quoted at the end of the last lecture:—“False Christs and false prophets will appear when people will say unto you: Lo, here is the Christ or lo, there! believe it not.”

Alongside the Buddhistic stream of thought is another far removed from it, which thinks it is better in-formed regarding the Christ than the western spiritual science of the Rosicrucians. It brings all kinds of ideas and teachings into the world which have developed quite naturally out of the neighbouring oriental Buddhist stream. It would show the worst kind of weakness in western souls if they were unable to grasp the fact that the Buddha, or Mercury-stream, has as little light to throw on the direct course of the Christ-idea as Arabism has. This is not put forward from any spirit of dogmatism or fantasy, but from knowledge of the objective course of the evolution of the world. It can be proved by figures or by the trend of civilisations if you wish to follow them up, that things must be as is taught by occult science.

Added to this there is also the necessity to distinguish between an ancient orthodox Buddhism which seeks to transplant a non-progressive Buddhism into Europe, and out of it to develop a “Christ-idea;” and a truly progressive Buddhism. This means, there are people who speak of Buddha as follows:—“Look to Buddha, who lived some five to six hundred years before our era! Look to what he taught!” What such people say is comparable with what spiritual science says in a Rosicrucian sense:—“It is your fault, not Buddha's, that you speak as if Buddha had remained at the same stage at which he stood five to six centuries before our era I Can you not think or imagine that Buddha has progressed?” When speaking thus, these people refer to a teaching suited to a time long past; of a teaching given by Buddha five to six centuries before our era. But we look to a Buddha who has advanced, and who from spiritual realms exercises his enduring influence on human culture. We look to the Buddha we presented to you in our studies on the Gospel of Luke, whose influence came from the Jesus of the Nathan line of the house of David; we look to the Buddha as he has evolved further in spiritual realms, and who imparts truths to us to-day concerning the things of which we are speaking.

Something very curious has happened to dogmatic Christianity in the West; through a strange concatenation of circumstances it has come to pass that a Buddha-like form has appeared by chance among Christian Saints.

You will recall how once I spoke of a legend told all over Europe in the Middle Ages, the legend of Balaam and Josaphat. It was somewhat as follows:—There was once an Indian king on earth. He had a son. This son was brought up at first far removed from all human misery; from all external life. He lived in the king's palace, where he saw only what conduced to human happiness. He was called Josaphat; the name has been much changed and has assumed various forms—Josaphat, Judasaph, Budasaph. Josaphat lived up to a certain age in the palace without learning anything of the world. Then one day it happened that he left his father's palace and learnt something of life. He first saw a leper, then a blind man, then an aged man. We are then told that he met a Christian hermit called Balaam. By him he was converted to Christianity.

You will not fail to notice that this legend has a strong resemblance to the legend of Buddha. But you will also notice that something is added to this legend of the Middle Ages with which Buddha cannot be charged; namely, that he allowed himself to be converted to Christianity. This legend gave rise to a certain consciousness among Christians—among some of them at least—who had made calendars of the saints.

People knew that the name Josaphat or Budasaph is connected with the name “Bodhisattva.” Budasaph passes directly over into Bodhisattva. So that there is here an extraordinary and deep connection between a Christian legend and the figure of Buddha. The oriental legend, as we know, represents Buddha as entering Nirvana and passing on the Bodhisattva crown to his successor the Maytreya-Buddha, who is now a Bodhisattva, and will later become the future Buddha of the world. Buddha appears again in the legend as Josaphat. The connection between Buddhism and Christianity is described marvellously by someone who said:—Josaphat is a saint, and Buddha was himself so holy that according to the legend he was converted to Christianity from being the son of an Indian king; so he can be ranked among the saints although from one side he was regarded as a heathen.

You can see from this that it was known where the later form of Buddhism, or rather of Buddha, has to be sought. Buddhism and Christianity have meanwhile flowed one into the other in the hidden worlds. And Salaam is that strange figure who made the Bodhisattva acquainted with Christianity, so that when now we trace the course of Buddhism as an enduring world-movement in the sense of this legend, we can only see it in the changed form in which it exists at the present time. We are obliged to speak of Buddha as he exists for us to-day, when clairvoyantly we understand what he reveals to us.

Just as Arabism was not Judaism, and the Moon of Jehova did not reappear in Arabism in its old form, so neither does Buddhism reappear in its old form when it returns to enrich the culture of the West, but changed. For a later never appears as an exact replica of an earlier.

These short detached remarks are intended to act as a stimulus to thoughts on human evolution, which you can develop further for yourselves. And I assure you if you accept all the historical knowledge that it is possible to discover, and are really able to follow the spiritually scientific development of Europe, you will see that we are standing at present at the point where Christianity and Buddhism flow one into the other.

Just as at the time of which I have been speaking a union of the Jahve-religion with Christianity occurred, so to-day a union of Buddhism with Christianity is taking place. Test this by accepting all that the historians of Europe are able to give you! Test it, but not as they are wont to do, take all the factors into consideration; you will then find confirmation of what I have said. Only we should have to speak for weeks if we were to give out all that reaches us from the direction of European Rosicrucianism.

But it is not only in history that proof can be found, if you go to work in the right way you can find it also in natural science and in allied realms. You have only to look in the right way to find that new ideas appear everywhere sporadically at the present day, and that old ideas become useless and disappear. Our thinkers and investigators seem to work with ideas that have become ineffectual, because in the widest sense they are incapable as yet of accepting and making use of other lines of thought, such as those of reincarnation and karma, and all that theosophy has to give. You can search the modern literature of the various departments of science, there you will find what is so painful for those who know how fact after fact appears in scientific life and nowhere are ideas capable of grasping them. There is one such idea that plays an important part in science to-day—the idea of heredity. (These things can only be hinted at here.) The idea of heredity as it is put forward in various departments of science and even in popular literatures to-day is simply untenable.

People must learn facts, for the understanding of which other kinds of ideas are required -such, for instance, as those entirely useless ideas concerning “heredity” that are common to-day. Certain facts, well known to-day concerning heredity in man and in other creatures, will only be understood when quite different ideas prevail. When heredity is spoken of to-day, people seem to think that any faculties that appear in the human being can be traced to his immediate forefathers. The idea of rein-carnation and karma will first make it possible for clear ideas to emerge instead of the present confusion. It will be realised that a great part of what is found in human nature has nothing to do with what is called the mutual co-operation of the sexes—for a confused science still teaches that all man is to-day comes from the union of the male and female elements at conception. It is not at all true that all the things appearing in a man have to do with physical inheritance. These matters must be gone into more thoroughly. I only put them before you to-day as a stimulus to further thought.

When you consider the physical body of man you know that it has a long history behind it—it has passed through the Saturn epoch, the Sun epoch and the Moon epoch—now it is passing through the Earth epoch. It was only during the Moon epoch that the influence of the astral body appeared. This did not exist previously, and the physical body has naturally been very much changed by it. Hence we do not see the physical body as it was under the forces of the Saturn and Sun epochs, but only as it has become under the influence of these forces added to those of the astral body and the ego.

Only the physical body can be inherited through co-operation of the sexes, for this depends on the influence of the astral on the physical body; everything appertaining to laws going back to the Saturn and Sun epochs has nothing whatever to do with this. One part of human nature is received directly from the cosmos, not from the opposite sex. This means that what we have in us does not spring altogether from the union of the sexes, for this is dependent on what comes from our astral bodies, but a large part of our human nature—that which comes from the mother for example—is received directly from the macrocosm.

We have therefore to distinguish one part of our human nature as being the result of the intercourse of the sexes, and another part as received directly by the mother from the macrocosm. Clarity will only be reached in respect of this when we succeed in distinguishing the separate parts of human nature, concerning which there is the greatest confusion at the present day. The physical body is not something shut off within itself, but is formed from the combined activity of the ether body, astral body and ego; again we distinguish the forces that have to be ascribed to the direct influence of the macrocosm, and others that have to be ascribed to the co-operation of the sexes.

But something is also received from the paternal nature that has nothing to do with physical inheritance. Just as certain organs and laws having nothing to do with physical inheritance are received directly from the macrocosm, and are implanted in the organism by means of the mother; other laws are received from the macrocosm through the instrumentality of the father's organism and follow a spiritual path. It can be said of that which is received by way of the mother—her organism provides the moment of contact (Angriffsmoment). But this that is active in the organism of the mother has not its source in any co-operation of the sexes, but it co-operates with what comes from the father, and this also does not spring from any union of the sexes, but from the paternal element. It is therefore a world event—a macrocosmic event that takes place, and finds expression in a physical way. People are entirely mistaken when they describe the development of the human embryo as being only the outcome of heredity. It is the result of what is received directly from the macrocosm.

I have spoken here of facts that far transcend the ideas of science; they are ideas originating from very ancient epochs. Does anything show us this? Popular literature tells us very little about it, but it is clearly evident on the plane of occult endeavour. I should like here to tell you something. I can indeed only hint at it, but would like to point out what a remarkable difference there is between two natural scientists and thinkers of the present day who had, however, been brought up in different circles and with widely different ideas. The characters of the two men are clearely revealed in what follows.

We have in the first place Haeckel, who because he elaborated his marvellous facts with most primitive ideas, led everything back to heredity and presented the whole embryonic evolution as dependent on heredity; opposed to him is the investigator His, who held more to facts, concerning whom it was objected, with a certain amount of truth, that he thought too little. His was a Zoologist and Naturalist. Because of the special way he traced out facts, he was constrained to oppose the heredity theory of Haeckel, and pointed out that certain organs and organic formations in man can only be explained when we turn away from the idea that we have to thank the co-operation of the sexes for our origin, Haeckel makes fun of this and writes:—“Therefore Herr His ascribes the origin of the human body to a certain ‘virginal’ influence that does not depend on the co-operation of the sexes!”

This is absolutely correct. For scientific facts force us to acknowledge to-day that what is brought about through co-operation of the sexes has to be kept apart from that which comes directly from the macrocosm, which, naturally, for wide circles is an absurd idea.

From this it can be seen that even on scientific grounds we are driven towards new ideas. We are placed in the midst of an evolution that says:—If the facts that have been imparted to you are to be rightly understood you must acquire a whole host of new ideas, for the ideas that have come down from olden times do not reach far enough.

From what I have said you will see that a neighbouring stream must enter our culture—this is the “Mercury stream”; its presence is revealed through the fact that those who go through an occult development, such as has frequently been described by me, evolve towards the spiritual world, and by doing so experience many new facts. These facts stream towards them, they stream into their souls. We might compare the entrance of man into another world with the passing of a fish from the water into the air; the fish has first to be prepared for this by changing its air bladders into lungs. This resembles the transition from sense perception to spiritual perception, whereby a man's soul is made capable of employing certain forces in a different element. Many things are then revealed to him.

The air is full of thoughts to-day which make it necessary for us to grasp the new facts of science now appearing on the physical plane. As investigator of the super-sensible one participates in things pressing in from all sides. This could not have been before the entrance of the new stream of which I have spoken. When these facts are rightly understood, it will be realised we are living in an extraordinarily important age, one in which it is quite impossible for us to continue to live unless some such change takes place in human thought and feeling as I have declared to be necessary.

Man must learn to live in a new element just as the fish that is accustomed to live in water has to learn to live in a new element when compelled to live in air. We must learn to live with our thoughts within those facts which the physical plane produces. Anyone who rejects these thoughts is like a fish taken out of the water. Man must not remain in the water. If he did, his later life would be “airless” as regards spiritual ideas—he would gasp for air. Those people who desire to live within the monism of to-day resemble fish who have exchanged their watery abode for an airy one, but would like to retain their gills. Only human souls who have changed their faculties, whose thoughts have evolved to a new wait of accepting facts, will grasp what the future has to bring.

So with full understanding we feel we are standing at the confluence of two world-wide streams of thought—the one should bring us a deeper comprehension of the Christ-problem and of the Mystery of Golgotha; the other new conceptions and ideas concerning reality. They must of necessity flow one into the other in our day; and not cease to do so even though they encounter the worst of obstacles. For the periods in which such streams of thought meet are fraught with many checks and hindrances. In some respects it is the people who rely on spiritual science who find themselves in a position to understand such things.

Many of our members might perhaps say with reference to the teaching given here:—What you tell us is difficult of comprehension, we have to work at it for a long time. Why can you not give us a more comfort-able diet, that we might absorb more easily what is able to convince us of the spiritual nature of the world? Why do you lay such stress on understanding the world?” Many might say this and add:—“How much more beautiful it would be if we might believe in a Buddhism that has come down to us from the past; if we did not have to think of the Christ-Event as the single point on which the balance rests, that no other is to be compared with it, but might think that a Being like the Christ would incarnate again and again as other men do. Why do you not say—here or there such a one will appear in the flesh! Instead you say men must make themselves capable of experiencing a renewal of the event of Damascus. If only you would say:—‘One will come in the flesh,’ then we could say:—‘Behold, He is here!’ We could then see Him with our physical eyes! This would be much easier to understand!”

That such things have been said is the concern of others. The task of western spiritual science is to make the truth known; to declare the truth with full responsibility and understanding of what lies within the evolution that has brought us thus far.

Those who desire to be comfortable in the spiritual world must seek spirituality along some other path. But -those who desire the truth, such truth as is required in our day—which has need of all the intelligence won in the time of old clairvoyance and preserved until the dawn of the new clairvoyance—will, I am very sure, follow the path indicated in the words spoken to-day and on many other occasions.

What is most important is not that we should say in what form we desire truth, but that we should know from the whole course of human evolution that the truth must necessarily be spoken at a certain point of time. O! there are many other things that must be said! But for these things you shall not go unprepared.

Therefore again and again within our Rosicrucian spiritual movement things will be said which stand at the very summit of the spiritual knowledge of our day. You need never accept what is said here or elsewhere with blind belief, blind belief is never appealed to here. In your intelligence, in the employment of your own understanding you have the means for testing what is said. You may frequently hear it said: Take the whole of life, all science, everything you are able to experience, and test them by what is given out within the stream of Rosicrucian spiritual life. Do not fail to ex-amine everything—you will find it stands the test! You who live within our movement know this, but you must not fail to apply the test. For it is precisely where opposition stirs, when on the ground of true spirituality perhaps, the direct opposite appears, that belief alone does not suffice. Everything that rests on blind belief is sterile and stillborn. It may be easy to build on blind faith, but those who belong to the spiritual life of the West renounce it. They build on that which the human intellect can scrutinize.r Those who are in touch with the sources from which our Rosicrucian spiritual teaching comes say of it:—After scientific examination, this is how things are found to be! The edifice of spiritual science is raised on a foundation of truth I This is a foundation of no easy belief! Our edifice is raised on the foundation of a carefully tested if perhaps difficult truth, and the prophets of a blind and comfortable faith are in no way able to shake the foundations on which the edifice of Spiritual Science is raised!

• 1. "Buddha," is a public lecture given in Berlin on the 7th of may, 1911, see "Paths of Experience"

My dear friends! Today we will try to bring to a conclusion the things we have been discussing and which are part of our program.

I have given you the annual and monthly moods as a basis for a breviary, and within the annual and monthly moods we must now seek the weekly moods. These weekly moods arise, as I began to indicate yesterday, when we look at how the weekly mood is actually already indicated in the August mood, so that within this August mood we already have the first week within the monthly mood. Just as in a living organism certain limbs have a little more of the whole [organism] and of the other [limbs] than others, so it must also be with what we find out organically as our behavior in relation to the world, and so the August mood would be the mood for meditation for the first week of the month, the September mood for the second week, the October mood for the third week, the November mood for the fourth week. In this way, the weeks intertwine with the months in a corresponding way. It cannot be otherwise, and we must make sure that we go with the months in the weekly arrangements. However, sometimes shifts will have to be made so that we can get the weeks into the course of the year. Then the daily moods follow the weekly moods, and these daily moods, which must follow the weekly moods, lead into the whole context of the world in a different way from the preceding parts of the breviary. I will now read the daily moods slowly, beginning with Saturday: Saturday:

My gaze is directed towards the divine spiritual ground of being
The senses behold the revelation of the essence of Being
The World Spirit rules in the World Matter
The World Spirit weaves in the dead, in the living, in the sentient
The World Spirit creates in man his image of being
The soul reveals the creative power of the spirit
The soul strives for spiritual fulfillment.

Sunday:

The spirit reigns full of light
Into the darkness it shines
The darkness seems to live from the light
The spirit weaves in the darkness, essentially
Darkness is enlivened by light
Light makes darkness good
The light's glow is the good in the darkness.

Monday:

Darkness seizes the received light
It wants to shine, not be illuminated
It takes possession of what it has received
It lets its own light prevail
It should not flow towards the original light
It should be itself
Darkness deceives the light.

Tuesday:

Light-Unity fades
Darkness turns away from the light
Darkness turns against the light
And so darkness is against darkness
As light is darkness deception
As light is darkness evil
As light is darkness destruction.

Where is the light in darkness?
Where does the soul find the spirit?
On Golgotha stands the cross
Christ shines on the cross
He guides through death
He shines in the darkness
He is the light of my soul.

Thursday:

Christ leads souls
From darkness He leads
Light in the Urlicht is His power
Life from death He wrests
Salvation from evil He wrests
Rise from ruin He wrests
To God's All He leads man's self.

Now, as on a higher level, Friday returns to Saturday:

Friday:

With Christ, my will is done
His cosmic goals flow into my will
Christ reigns for the future of the earth
Christ lives in the Father, shining through himself,
revealing through the healing spirit
Christ creates the spiritual goals in the soul
the soul can absorb the essence of Christ
the soul can feel: Christ in me.

The word pervades heaven and earth
It spoke authoritatively to Moses on the mountain
It forms world beings, for the revelation to man
It weaves in the human interior, to the hidden through itself
It shines as the sun from the light into the darkness
It lives in Christ, bright out of the darkness, gentle in the brightness. It comes to earth in Jesus.

Now comes the third week:

I look into the world with a spirit-borne feeling
The spirit feels my nature
The world sinks into darkness
The inner being shines in prayer in the spirit being
The inner being needs a ruler in the darkness of the world
Oh, the spirit takes a level head.

Thursday:

Christ leads souls
From darkness He leads
Light in the Primordial Light is His power
Life from death He wrests
Salvation from evil He wrests
Rise from ruin He wrests
To the All of God He leads the human self.

Or let us take the first Saturday in August:

The spirit of the world of becoming arises
In darkness, light is born
The spirit rests in the being of the senses
The spirit lives in my life.

The first week repeats the same saying in this case:

The spirit of the world of becoming arises
Light is born in darkness
A spirit of spirit rests in the senses
The spirit lives in my life.

Now Saturday:

My gaze is directed towards the divine spiritual ground of being
The senses behold the ground of being's revelation of being
The world spirit reigns in the world's substance
The world spirit weaves in the dead, in the living, in the sentient
The world spirit creates in man an image of its being
Soul reveals the spirit's creative power
Soul strives for spiritual fulfillment.

So it is possible, my dear friends, to use this breviary by arranging it in the appropriate way, and if you use it correctly, you will gradually find the opportunity to learn to preach in pictures; the word can come alive in you. But do not believe that the word can somehow come to life without practice. Only the practice that is in harmony with the ruling intentions of the world, only the practice that we carry out in us in accordance with the intentions of the world of becoming, draws the power of the living word from within us. And it is important that you connect these things, which are intended for pastoral care, with the appropriate trust, with the appropriate faith. The spirit cannot be given to anyone who does not fully believe that he is living in the weaving of the spirit. I ask you to pay particular attention to this, my dear friends, when I now speak about community building and about ordination.

I am now speaking about these matters as they arise from what has been said to me by those who really want to take on the task they have spoken of in all seriousness. I would like to answer the question: How can communities be founded, how can communities be led?

Of course it is not possible to simply stand up with all the things we have now discussed as our goal and now go into church planting in abstracto, but rather the first work must be done as a beginning. Therefore, I can only imagine that it can be done in a favorable sense by first bringing to the people what we consider to be the right thing to do in our whole context. I can therefore only imagine that such participants in these endeavors appear in the most diverse places, who initially simply take up the way in which one must currently work on people, so that they begin by making known what they want, through lectures that clearly reveal the goal that one sets from the outset, in such a way as to be understood. First of all, the necessity of religious renewal must be proclaimed. It must be made clear that such a religious renewal is necessary. For this, of course, one must be truly convinced of the necessity of such a religious renewal. But for that one must also be imbued with the tremendous seriousness of the situation in which present-day humanity finds itself with regard to inner spiritual and religious matters, and in which it also finds itself with regard to external world events, which, after all, are nothing more than a consequence of the fact that humanity has lost sight of the actual spiritual content of the world. If we succeed in showing from today's overall decline the necessity of a new beginning, which must be taken into the hands of individual serious people, if we succeed in explaining the whole situation of the world and the situation of religious and moral life before humanity, then the spirit will be found that works in the sense of such an ascent, and the first members of the community will emerge from those who can hear it first. For those who look impartially at what is today – which, after all, very few people do – there can be no doubt: If you speak in this way, purely lecturing at first, to all those who want to hear it, and if, above all, you find warmth in your words so that people not only believe in your mind but believe in your heart, the number of community members who come to you will not be small in a relatively short time. For there are very many who are seeking today. There are far more today who are seeking than those who can lead, and if a group can be found that can lead, then it will certainly also find those who are seeking.

My dear friends, it is my unshakable conviction that the saga of Dr. Faustus contains a profound truth in the following: In the time when it was still attributed to Dr. Faustus that he had made a pact with the emissaries of hell, Dr. Faustus was seen as the co-inventor of the art of printing. However useful the art of printing has become for modern humanity, its use is, to a certain extent, of the devil, because the art of printing erects a wall between heart and heart in relation to humanity. We must not take such things so much to mean that we should now become radically conservative, radically reactionary, and say that we must work against the art of printing. On the contrary, we must profess a completely different attitude in this regard. We must be clear about the fact that before the art of printing existed, when a pastor had to speak to a congregation from the pulpit, the congregation was entirely dependent on him for an understanding of spiritual matters. We must realize that the power the pastor had to apply in order to speak intimately to his congregation was small in those days and could be small in relation to the power that must be applied today. And I see, my dear friends, that everywhere people would like to hold on to the fact that this power can remain so small. We must be clear: the art of printing must be there. We must realize that everything that the modern world has brought forth must be there. But our strength must increase in order to make good and overcome that which has been done by the world that Christ described as the kingdom on earth into which He had to bring the kingdoms of heaven.

We must not carelessly say: What was expected in the early days of Christianity did not come to pass, so the statement of the millennial kingdom was wrong. It is a lie to accuse the Bible of making an untrue statement. It is not so. Bit by bit, the de-divinized world has emerged, and bit by bit, what could previously be sought through the world must now be sought through the spirit. The art of printing does not prevail in a world that is standing still and becoming more even, but in a world that is perishing and whose decline must be countered by the dawn. If we cannot get used to thinking about these things in sharp images, then we cannot rise to the occasion in which we want to place ourselves, and above all, we cannot come to trust in the workings of the spirit, which we must have. How can we speak of the spirit if we have no trust that the spirit will work with us? How can we speak of the spirit if we only ever weigh up intellectually whether this or that can be right? How can we speak of the spirit if we are not able to connect with the spirit? Whatever echo the world sends back to us, we connect with the spirit to bring about what we recognize as right in its sense. And we cannot work in the spirit if we do not extend this trust to everything we can do in our community. We must stand in the community objectively and judiciously, we must stand in the community knowingly. The modern pastor has basically become a stranger to his community. He goes around in the community without realizing what tragic worlds are taking place among those who pass him by. The pastor needs knowledge of human nature, and he only gains this knowledge by taking an interest in the experiences of his community. There should be nothing that community members do not see in such a way that they have the judgment: when they come to the pastor with it, they will find an open heart, but also wise judgment. We should not let any opportunity pass us by to find out what the laws of the world's phenomena are. We should thoroughly study everything that is going on in the spiritual, legal, political and economic life of the world in order to be able to help people from these three sources of all human development. We should know how to truly be close to the souls we are responsible for. Much will be well if these souls know that we are aware of their weaknesses and concerns, and that we have a proper judgment for them, one that is accompanied by openness of heart.

My dear friends, we must be careful not to become Catholic, but we must have an open heart and goodwill for what must be regarded as human and humanly necessary within the community. Very few people today know what is going on in many people. Very few people know how the people around us are really struggling in their souls today. In recent times, the misery has become so great that those who still live a little in the abstract intellectualism have no faith at all and no insight into the magnitude of this misery. Today, many souls that cannot be opened up because intellectualism has withered away everything we can say to them, everything we can give them, are on the verge of returning to the Roman Catholic Church, which could experience an immense influx. They are therefore close to converting to the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church – albeit in its external and often disastrous way – really did know how to establish with ironclad consistency what souls need apart from intellectualism, for example through confession. ©, I got to know them, these Protestant pastors, who kept saying: What do we do with our preaching, which has become so intellectualistic, if we don't have something like the Catholic priest has in confession? — and who, as pastors, longed for confession. And I have also met brave Catholic priests who, for certain reasons that are not to be discussed here, felt a deep obligation to remain within the Catholic Church, but who were deeply aware of what they owed to their inner selves by lending an ear in confession to those who had deep emotional suffering to report.

Infinite things, my dear friends, are healed in the world by approaching souls in this way, which can be characterized as I have just done. But we will never be able to rediscover the possibility of relating to souls in this way if we are not also aware that we must become fighters for what is happening in the big wide world, that we have to fight for many of the rights of the spiritual ministry on the ground of the spiritual ministry, but that these rights have been taken away from the spiritual ministry in the materialistic world and continue to be taken away. How much, my dear friends, has been taken from the spiritual ministry by the materialism of doctors! People do not think about it, they do not even know. One of the sad phenomena is that the hearing of confessions has passed from the clergy to the psychoanalysts, who carry it out in a materialistic sense. Such phenomena of the time are usually not understood at all in all their depth and significance. As a servant of Christ, fight against the Ahrimanic effects that express themselves in this way in the world, for without doing so you will not be able to work in the individual as the effect of the community must be! Let no opportunity pass by to again furnish proof that there can be a pastoral psychology and pastoral psychiatry! Try to gain knowledge of the world and knowledge of human nature in this sense! Do not believe that the thoughts and aspirations of the pastor can be fulfilled by disputing the correctness of faith and knowledge. My dear friends, so much has happened in this regard that the salvation of millions of souls has been lost. Take these things seriously and consider the situation of the soul in view of what has happened and in view of the need for religious renewal today. Do not regard it as a digression from the task of the pastor as a religious worker to be expected to know what can affect the lungs of a person from the soul. Look at the spread of lung diseases and do not consider this as something that you can only learn from the materialistic medical world. Notice how worries work, brooding over them in solitude, without being able to hear the words of someone who seems wise and capable of judging such things. Listen, I say, hear something of what takes place in the outer illness as a result of the troubles over which one broods in solitude, and sense how much you can do by contemplating the solitude of those who brood over troubles; sense what you can do for the recovery of the outer life. For there are two kinds of lung disease: one is a disease of the lungs as an organ, the other is a disease of breathing, but this breathing cannot take place in the right way if the lungs are not otherwise healthy, and in the diseased lungs are the afflictions that have been brooded over in solitude. Do not consider it an impertinence, one that cannot be addressed to the office of pastor, when one asks what it is that eats away at the human organs that are supposed to refresh the organism. Unhealthy feelings, about which one is uninformed, make the liver sick and make everything that is to be regenerated by the liver and spleen sick. Do not consider it unnecessary to point out that there should be a pastoral physiology again. Consider it a question of your office: What eats away at the air organs? The unsocial feelings of people eat away at the air organs, those feelings that do not allow the potential for love to be expressed in the appropriate way. And by cultivating social feelings and mutual social respect within your community, you will help your community to breathe healthily, insofar as this is to come from the soul. Do not consider it to be outside your office to ask: What has a destructive effect on the blood and its circulation? Try to find out that the destructive effect on the blood and its circulation is caused by the feeling of the futility of existence, by insensitivity to the word that reveals itself from the Divine-Spiritual. If you can see into the mysterious connections between insensitivity to the word that reveals the divine-spiritual and the disturbances in circulation and heart diseases, and if you look at everything that strikes back - the pendulum not only goes there, it also goes here - of a materialistic attitude that comes from a ruined blood circulation and a ruined heart, which comes from this insensitivity to the spirit-filled word. Then you will be able to gauge what the situation of present humanity has actually become, and then you will feel in the right, serious way what religious renewal must actually mean. Then you will also sense something of how healing can be found in the sacred and how one does not need to lose healing in the abstraction of sanctification. It will depend entirely on this spirit, and above all, it will depend on you speaking the truth at every moment to those who belong to your community, for whose souls you are responsible, so that you are not merely administering an office, but speaking the truth.

My dear friends, mistrust is at an all-time high today. Among the forces that have developed most strongly in recent times is the mistrust from person to person, and also the mistrust of man towards his pastor. Only knowledge of human nature can counteract this increasing mistrust. Today, many people are particularly ill in their souls, but very few know anything about the mysterious connections between mental and physical illnesses. Most of the world's leading people are actually embarrassed to stray even a single step from the path of intellectualism. They always ask questions in an intellectual sense; they ask little with the heart. They ask a lot with the mind, but the hearts that want to hear cannot listen to the mind. And so something has happened that is one of the most terrible phenomena of our time.

You will find, my dear friends, that the members of your community who come to you first are many who will show that they do not come merely because there is strength in your words and your actions that attracts the fundamentally human. Rather, many will come who, when you really talk to them intimately, will say: I come to you because everything else I have tried has offered me nothing, but I don't know if you can offer me more than the other things that offered me nothing. — Many will come with precisely this attitude, and they have not developed any sense of the differences between what approaches them. Should it nevertheless be the case that you speak to people more out of the spirit than others have spoken out of the spirit, then you will find how dulled the souls are and how they can no longer even notice the difference today, and you will have to find ways to overcome precisely the dullness of the souls. Especially with regard to people who come to you with true feelings [of longing] for a life in the spirit, but with dull souls, you will not get by with anything other than being able to evoke a clear feeling of the inner intimate truth of what you have to say. Many will say to you: I cannot tell the difference between what I have been offered so far and what you are offering me. You will only get such questions if you want to convince people with intellectual arguments, but you can do without intellectual arguments if you want to enter into intimate contact with your parishioners; you can do without intellectual arguments. Learn to build on completely different arguments. Learn to build on those reasons that flow, for example, from saying: It is best if you believe me no more than you believed the others, if you believe me perhaps even less than you believed the others; I completely dispense to explain to you the matter that I have to discuss with you, with all kinds of reasons; but look and really observe everything with open eyes; see if you can't see that many things are different; and then don't let me judge, but judge for yourself. And if you then also give such people a sense of how you yourself feel about the reasons that may be put forward against your own pastoral care, if you evoke a feeling that you also know the other side and that you do not even have the slightest spark of fanaticism for the cause you represent, then you will be able to build something that you will never be able to achieve through intellectualism, which is the father of fanaticism. I say with full awareness: intellectualism is the father of fanaticism, because in no religious community has there ever been such great fanaticism as among the modern scientific communities. One must only be familiar with the currents that are flowing. One must realize how far removed from admitting the infallibility of the Roman Pope someone may be who invincibly believes in the infallibility of a professor or even in the abstract “modern science”. The faith in these things is so great because one is not even aware that it exists at all, because one takes the faith in it for granted. One does not even notice how one is stuck in a maximum of fanaticism in this area.

But, my dear friends, you will achieve nothing if your enthusiasm for the cause is not great enough to enable you to rise to such concepts, if you yourself still suffer from something that prevents you from see through the full power of this fanaticism and similar fanaticisms that live in the world today, and if you, so to speak, cannot decide to also confront this fanaticism with the spirit of Christ.

Your church planting can only be one that, first of all, starts from the right attitude, but secondly also from a strong attitude. The time when it was possible to believe that half-measures could achieve something is over. The time is over when it was possible to believe that intellectual discussions about world affairs make a difference. We must never forget that we live in the age in which humanity is to be irrevocably given freedom, and that the coming of freedom means that, if work is to be done in the spirit, it must be done from a source and origin; it means that something truly new must come into the world and that [really everything] must be ruthlessly seen and done in the spirit of this newness. Your work would be a passing one if you did not take into account that this attitude is indispensable for this work.

My dear friends, you must awaken in people everywhere the realization that modern man must be pointed to his deepest inner being and that he must draw from this deepest inner being the impulse for what he thinks, feels, wills and does. It is out of the question to think of carrying out this cult in such a way that it is in any way Catholicized. The cult, the fundamental features of which we have indicated, must be practised in such a way that it is felt to be something that really comes from the spiritual world today. It must be perfectly clear that the Catholic Church has been able to achieve such immense power because, in a sense, it is precisely because it is consistent that it can adapt to all manner of contemporary phenomena; and the Catholic Church does not do this in the way that certain newer currents have, which are characteristic of the intellectualism of modern times.

At the beginning of the 1890s, for example, we saw something emerging in Central Europe that was then called the effort to establish a Society for Ethical Culture. The movement started in America and also took hold in Europe. I was at the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv at the time when the most important events took place to establish this society for so-called ethical culture in Europe, and I asked one of the leading personalities at the time [of the Society for Ethical Culture] at the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv: What do you actually want with ethical culture? — I was told: The name itself says it all. — I could only answer: But first you have to understand the meaning of a name. If you asked people what they wanted with ethical culture, you would get a confession of immense weakness, you would get something like the answer: Yes, in relation to religious beliefs, in relation to world views, people differ so much that in the end everyone can have their own world view and everyone their own religion; religion will become more and more a private matter, but you can't live with that, you have to come to an understanding; so let's make ethics free of religious and ideological foundations and spread an ethics that is free of any religious or ideological basis. I always objected: Yes, but there have never been any other ethics than those that have emerged from the foundations of religions and worldviews and that were their consequences. — As a rule, no answer was given to this, because people were so intent on making an abstract extract from all that could be gained from the various religious beliefs, stripping away the religious character and then handing it down as a non-religious ethic, as a mere “ethical culture”. It really does not need to be directed against people when one speaks out sharply against it, and in an essay on the Society for Ethical Culture at the beginning of the nineties, I showed with all severity the impossibility of getting out of this chaos that one has finally gotten into. A fanatic of this ethical culture published a pamphlet against this essay in which he insulted with a matter of course what can actually be thoroughly substantiated. Other people also could not see that the time had come when these things had to be treated with complete seriousness. After I had written this essay, I came to Berlin, visited Herman Grimm, who said: What do you actually want with this fight against ethical culture? Are you going to this meeting? I found that they are all very nice people. — I never doubted that all the people sitting there were very nice people, but I regretted all the more that these nice people had this monstrosity implanted in their souls as if it were something self-evident. Even the leaders in spiritual life could no longer see at all what the seriousness of our situation was and is. This realization of the seriousness of the situation will actually be the most important thing with which you leave here, because everything else can only be of value if you leave here with this most important thing.

And now, so that we can discuss in the afternoon what is on your minds in relation to this, I would like to say a few words about what might be along the same lines as what is in other confessions as regards ordination. I would ask you to bring up the most important things first.

It is difficult, my dear friends, to speak about ordination today, because the times when the ceremonies that served the old ordination still had a meaning are over, and those who want to recognize these ceremonies are no longer in touch with the present day, not since the middle of the 15th century. For a new age has dawned. But those who have immersed themselves in the spirit of this new age have basically abolished the ordination of priests, and they have also abolished it within the denominations. And so today we are faced with the fact that those who have been ordained no longer live in the times, and that those who live in the times perhorrescize the ordination of priests. It cannot work in the same way today as it did in times gone by; it must be thoroughly brought into line with the spirit of our age. If you take this, so to speak, as a basic condition, I may say a few words to you about the ordination itself and its ceremony, as it is revealed to me for the present time. It is important that you really understand that I am, in a sense, communicating something revealed to me by the spirit.

It would be necessary for the transmission of the priestly ministry to take place in the presence of older priests, so that first of all older priests are gathered together, and that then the process of placing the person to be ordained in the overall context in which he is to be placed is begun. If I say that older priests should be present, it is of course extremely difficult to carry out at the beginning, but the beginning must be made in such a way that you, in the sense of what you impose on your central leadership, also order the beginning of such a matter in this sense. Then the things that need to be ordered in this way will also be available to you. Of course, there may not be older priests present at the beginning, but that must become the custom.

Then, first of all, there must be a very solemn presentation of the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John to the person who is to be ordained. I would like to emphasize that simplicity must be the supreme law in the face of such an act. If this act becomes complicated, it cannot be what it should actually be, that it should be on the mind at least once a day of the person who has gone through this act accordingly. The spiritual experience of this act should always precede the recitation of the rosary. If properly cultivated, it can be accomplished in a relatively short time, in my case in one minute. But this can only be done if the whole act is not complicated but has a unified character.

So the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John, which begins with the words: Let not your heart be troubled. Trust in the power that leads you to the divine foundation of the world and that leads you to me. - And which concludes with the words: The world shall see how I love the foundation of the world, and how I act in the sense of the foundation of the world, as is laid upon me. Do likewise, then we can leave this place in peace. — And this should be followed by the introduction to the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, the resurrection of Lazarus, and so it should affect the person being ordained that he feels through and through from this chapter how the power to resurrect that which is dying lies in the Christ-being. I believe, however, that in order to interpret this chapter in the right way, what I have given in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact” as an interpretation of this chapter can still serve.

Once this has been done – I am stating things fully, perhaps they cannot be done in this fullness at the beginning – the application of the garment that I have shown here in the illustration as the one that represents the etheric body would have to be carried out. This is the beginning of the symbolization of the effect of pastoral care.

Now one has to take oil – there is still a lot to be said about the consecration of oil and water, so that you can be quite clear about it – and apply this oil in the appropriate way to the pulses on the arms and – the person to be admitted has to wear sandals – to the corresponding places on the ends of the balls of the feet. With that, the sacramental act has been performed.

By leaving only what happens to the oil in the picture and making it as clear as possible in the picture, so that all bystanders - I say all bystanders, not just those who are to be introduced to pastoral care - can clearly perceive and remembrance of the picture that has been enacted. Only after the picture has been enacted should the words be spoken, and these words should be simple so that they can always stand before the soul in the way I have described:

In the name of Christ, you are authorized
firstly to administer Communion,
secondly to perform the sacrifice of the Mass,
thirdly to administer the sacraments.

After this has been done, the stole and chasuble are to be put on, that is, everything that leads to the astral body, and then there is something else to be done – so that the matter is simple, but it must be succinct – which must be deeply engraved in the soul of the person to be received: one consecrates the host as one does in the sacrifice of the Mass. One hands the host to the one whom one would not have handed to before the anointing with the oil, and afterwards lets him himself perform the consecration of this host and after this consecration perform one's own communion. Then one consecrates the chalice, as one otherwise does in the sacrifice of the Mass, and hands the chalice to the one who is to be received, so that he consecrates it in the same way and, by drinking from it, pronounces the words that have just been expressed as the words of the sacrifice of the Mass, and which he actually speaks for the first time with authority.

After this has been done, my dear friends, the question is asked in a lapidary way:

Do you vow to continue to work in the sense in which this authority was conferred?

And his answer should be:

I vow:

To teach in Christ's name To work in Christ's name To pray in Christ's name To sacrifice in Christ's name.

All those present say:

Yes, so be it, amen.

After this has been done, the headgear that the priest has to wear only during part of the ceremony and that is to be regarded as the thing with which he sets out to teach and with which he leaves teaching and so on, this headgear is handed over by, as it were, doing that which lies in his ego effect as the crowning of the whole ceremony.

Then it would be a matter of having the person preach a sermon on a topic that has been discussed with him at length, in front of those from whom he has received the ordination, as a trial sermon, but also as a solemn investiture into his office. Then the corresponding ceremony would be over.

That, my dear friends, is what I wanted to tell you this morning. I now ask you to prepare for the afternoon everything you might have to say in connection with this or with earlier events, so that we may part as befits our serious time together.

It might seem presumptuous to talk about the future of man. But if we consider that man is a self-conscious being, called upon to stride ever onward, we must realize that he cannot be called upon to live dulled into the future. If we realize the sacred meaning of the word “self-conscious,” we come closer to the possibility that a self-conscious being is destined to gain foresight into the future. But where do we find this foresight? We find it in the theosophical world and life view, which deals with the inner core of the human being. The word “theosophy” is often translated incorrectly. It is said that theosophy is the knowledge of the divine essence. This is not correct. No one would be so presumptuous as to believe that they could fathom the divine essence.

Last time we talked about the origin and the past of man; today we will deal with the development in the future. If we believe in the development of man, it is clear that man must acquire ever higher and higher abilities in order to learn to understand God and the universe better and better with these abilities. After millions of years, our concepts will be quite different from today, and so it will continue. Our knowledge of God can never be complete. Theosophy is not “knowledge of God”; but it does show us the perspective that leads to knowledge of God.

The question now is: How does man acquire knowledge at all? He acquires knowledge in everyday life through his senses. If man had no senses, he could not get to know the world around him. What man perceives with the eye through the effects of light, the sounds that his ear conveys to him, what he feels, senses, tastes and smells, he absorbs and combines with the intellect. Now, everything he perceives is transient, everything has an end. Even intellectual thinking is fleeting. Eye, ear, brain will fade away, scatter. What the senses have perceived will one day be a thing of the past. Everything that disperses will one day no longer be there; all knowledge that comes from the senses will have to perish; it will also prove to be transitory because it was based on the transitory. Man, animal and plant are transitory, everything is transitory.

But in addition to this transitory nature, human beings also have an immortal core. Within them lie dormant powers that are to be developed, organs of life; just as eyes, ears, brain, organs of the physical body exist, so too there are organs of the spiritual man of an imperishable nature. In short, Theosophy teaches us that we carry within us a higher being that directs its imperishable senses to everything that surrounds it and allows it to recognize the essence of all things.

Theosophy is based on this. Like natural scientists, it directs its research to plants, animals and minerals, but it does not just seek to recognize the transient, but rather that which is imperishable in things; it does not examine anything else, but it does examine things differently from the way science does. It is not only about the past and the present, but also about the future.

What do we know about the future of man? What is this essence that man carries over from the present into the future? What is the new link in the chain of development that establishes the connection between the temporal and the eternal?

Let us try to visualize this in our minds. When earthly life, with all that man has enjoyed, all that has given him joy and caused him sorrow, has vanished away, what remains? — To make this clear to ourselves, let us place ourselves at three points in the life of our Earth. Let us go back a million years, to the present and to the future after another million years. If we go back to the distant past, we see man in a very different form than he is now. He was still untouched by all human activity and activity. Through the forces of nature, he has become what he was; divine forces in the universe have worked together so that man could come into existence.

After man appeared on earth, he has the task of transforming and reworking the earth in turn. A glance at the pyramids, these magnificent giant structures, may serve to illustrate this to us as a small example. If we consider the transformation that Egypt underwent through the work and creation of the pyramids, in which the colossal masses of stone were moved from one place to another so that these structures could be built, and which withstood the floods and inundations, it can give us a small glimpse of the transformation that the whole earth has undergone and will yet undergo through the work of man.

Another image: Take Cologne Cathedral, for example; how much work was needed, human work, to create it! The transportation and cutting of the stones and so on, and so on; just imagine the forces needed to create such a work of art. In the distant future, man will have even more power at his disposal; he will force many more forces of nature into his service and achieve much more than he does today. Today he has learned to use natural forces such as electricity, magnetism and so on; with the gentle push of a button, he can conjure up light. In short, he can do things that were unheard of a hundred or two hundred years ago. Today's man can see that even without theosophy.

Later, the electrical forces of the great rivers will be exploited, as will the sun's rays. That sounds fantastic – but these are perspectives. Man will harness the power of fire and the forces of volcanoes. Man is increasingly forcing north and south magnetic forces to serve him. Just as the earth now looks very different from what it looked like millions of years ago, so after millions of years it will look very different from what it looks like now. Man is always working on the earth.

The creatures are created with the planet to then remodel it into an image of what man will become.

Now you ask, can we get a real picture from this fantasy?

Theosophy does not give a utopian picture; it shows us a very real picture of the future. It can speak of the future in a very real sense. Let us take a comparison: [two people are standing next to each other, one of them is a “savage”, the other is Goethe]. A third person standing in front of them would point to the “savage” and say: What you are now, Goethe was once too, and in the future you will be like Goethe. Thus we point to the individuality of the human being, which develops little by little to the highest perfection. Among us there are people who have already developed within themselves what the average person will only develop in the future. They are no different from us; it is all natural, it is not based on magic. All this will be explained to us if we believe in an ascent.

To show you that it is not necessary to imagine this as something completely incomprehensible, let us clarify the matter by means of a comparison. Two naturalists observed a clumsy Moluccan crab that had fallen on its back and was now trying in vain to turn itself over again. Two of the crab's brothers intervened violently to help him, but they did not succeed; he was too heavy for them. So they left the crab and fetched two more colleagues; now the four of them managed to turn their colleague over. Let us now assume that the two naturalists had turned the crab over while the companions went to get help, and [these] would have found the crab on its legs when they returned; they would certainly have believed that a miracle had occurred; but some of their fellow crab monists would have rebelled against this belief and would claim that everything had happened naturally.

Transferred to humanity, we realize that our knowledge and abilities cannot be concluded with what we have achieved today. As far as Goethe stands above the “Hottentot,” so far will the future race stand above the present one. The present race is gradually producing a race of the future.

Let us assume that we have people before us who have reached the level of development that the race will only reach in later ages. If we were to ask them, what would they show us? It would be about birth and death, about what it will be like in the hereafter, and so on. First of all, we would learn that the beyond is not something future at all. Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21) - not “in you”.

How are we to understand this?

The things that surround us appear spiritual when the dormant forces within us are awakened. Two people love each other, live together; death comes, she leaves him, he leaves her. But what is above it, the result of life, the essence, remains from one embodiment to another; it will often come back to Earth.

What is the purpose and meaning of this? — The purpose is that life should teach people ever higher lessons.

Let us imagine ourselves in the time of the Odyssey. People at that time did not know how to read or write; they had not learned that. It was quite different from what people took out of the world at that time. It will not be useless for him to live on earth again now. From earliest childhood, he is surrounded by very different things than in Odysseus' time. He is always collecting new things, and the fruits of his experiences benefit him and the Earth.

What the soul has experienced remains with it. Not only has it become purer and stronger, but it has also learned.

In the time between death and a new birth, the human being processes what he has learned between birth and death. When he is then reborn, he brings with him new things that he can use to learn more. When we have learned everything, the earth will fall away. What has emerged from the human soul then remains; as new souls, they will live for a new stage of existence.

Now it will be clear that there are people who know more than the average person. They are people who have learned more and faster than their brothers.

What is the point of living in other worlds if we leave with death? We want to try to understand the whole of life. Here in this life, our senses are the tools through which we perceive the world around us. Without senses, we could not experience anything. We need eyes to see the beauty of the world, ears to hear sounds, tongue and palate to taste, the brain and tongue to think and speak.

What happens when the cover falls off us? The soul, the carrier of desires and instincts, is now free. Its life continues in the astral, uninfluenced and uninhibited by the earthly shells. If it was attached to a tasty food, it still feels the desire for such a tasty food; it would like to enjoy it, but it lacks the senses. It would like to enjoy it and cannot; this causes it agony. The soul has to unlearn desires and cravings. This happens on the plane or level of consciousness called Kamaloka; Kama - desire; Loka - place: the place of desires.

When the soul has stripped away all desires and cravings that can only be satisfied by the senses, what remains?

These are the experiences that we have absorbed through the senses, but they do not cling to the senses. The senses are the gates through which all experiences flow into us; but the senses tell us nothing about the essence of things themselves; nothing about the unity of all things, about numbers, about beauty, about all artistic activity, about good, about ideals. All this comes from the essence of man; this is how something arises that goes beyond the senses. The essence of man does not come to light brightly and clearly in Kamaloka if the soul still looks back at what it has left behind; but if it has broken the habit, the fruit of the whole life experience shines out of the soul. We live out what we have formed in blissful rapture. We lead a divine existence between our life on earth and our next birth. Devachan, or heaven, is the place where we will dwell when we have worked on earth beyond the call of earthly things. There we will feel kinship with the supermundane forces.

We will recognize the inner essence of plants and see the other, now invisible, side of nature. If your mind lives in the spiritual, you will be among those forces there that bring things into being, the forces that build the plants, that build the animals. If you look at a plant closely through the microscope, you will see a structure of wisdom with which the largest and most ingenious bridge construction of a master builder cannot compare. Or look at the marvel of the brain! Is it not condensed wisdom? We can only try to absorb it from the world around us by searching and intuiting; and we try to deduce the cause of things from what we intuit. In Devachan, we live among the creative powers and forces. The soul marries the spirit there. It rises higher and higher because it has lived among the creative spirits.

What we learn here can be compared to what the student learns on the map, for example, about Asia Minor. How completely different the country appears to him when he sees it with his own eyes than when he sees the names, points and lines on the map. The knowledge of the everyday person is also different from the knowledge of life in Devachan, the life among the things themselves. Here are the foundations of our being. A genius soul did not arise from swirling atoms. Those who have genius today have experienced it in many lives on earth. In one life we gain experience that we apply in the next. First we build the tools, then comes the application. What I can do today, I have acquired earlier.

A person can also tell himself all this from his own mind. But there are people who recognize it from their own experience because they are able to consciously put themselves in these states while they are surrounded by the shell of the flesh. We call them “chela” or disciple. They have learned to see into spiritual development; the spiritual world lies open before them. The chela can develop to the point of becoming a master.

How does a person become a chela? The preparations necessary to become a disciple can be read about in many scriptures. To become a disciple, a certain degree of development is necessary. There have always been people who have crossed the threshold of death, from which, supposedly, no one returns. But the chela and the master really do return. They can consciously pass through the gate and come back. The preparation requires only that the person learn to truly live within themselves. We can achieve this if we are completely within ourselves at least once a day. The true Christian attains this state in prayer, others through meditation and contemplation. If we are able to meditate and work on ourselves in meditation, we can gradually be accepted into the spiritual world.

Disciples are required to be strict and earnest. First, they must be able to distinguish the essential from the inessential. It does not matter whether it is a mineral, a plant, an animal or a human being; whether it is a wild animal, a criminal or a noble person; they must be able to separate the essential from the inessential at a glance. This first quality, which leads to fellowship, does not, as some might believe, exist in some kind of cloud-cuckoo-land, so that those who possess it would have no sense of everyday things and would not recognize them as essential either; that would be a false view. The way you bring a spoonful of soup to your mouth can be more essential than the whole plate of soup you eat. What is essential is what reveals the essence of the thing or the person, not what the senses perceive externally. To achieve this quality, one must start from the right place. If, for example, one believes that enriching the world with printed paper is better than drawing wire, then one is mistaken.

The second virtue is – Vairagya – not to cling to the ephemeral, but to the fruit of the ephemeral. One must familiarize oneself with the eternal core of things.

Third: Shatsampat – six virtues or qualities that are necessary to prepare for the future.

First: control of thoughts – Shama. You should not let your thoughts stray. A person who wants to become a chela must achieve complete control of his thoughts. This is still an ideal, but you have to take time to strive for this ideal. I have to get to the point where my soul does not harbor any thoughts that I have not presented to it. The more mastery I gain over my thoughts, the closer I come to my core being.

The second thing that arises from the mastery of thoughts is the mastery of actions - Dama. You should not just let yourself be driven by circumstances. It is not the outside world that should drive us, but our own inner world. In a sense, we should take our own destiny into our own hands. We should seek to achieve what we want to achieve according to our own well-thought-out plan. This control over our actions gives us a previously unknown calmness of mind. There will be a transformation of our whole life. Not that you have to do something extraordinary now that you have set out and neglected your duty to your neighbor. But man becomes master of every destiny. He remains the master and rules over fate; fate no longer rules him. In every situation in life, he will see at a glance what is needed at that moment. This is the ideal to strive for.

Thirdly: The third quality – Uparati – is best translated as fruitfulness. To face everything that comes our way with a certain equanimity. Not to be sky-high and then sad to death, but to be fruitful. To greet happiness with joy, but without excitement, and to endure misfortune, albeit seriously, but calmly. Always keep the same temperature.

Fourth: General, loving understanding of people, understanding of all beings, tolerance – Titiksha. Do not condemn or detest the criminal, but try to ennoble him; do not say “I do not like him,” but try to bring him to a higher level, look for the essence everywhere. We say to ourselves: This criminal was no worse than I; circumstances may have made him a criminal. Can I help him? I do not want to judge him, but to try to understand him. And so the disciple must be tolerant towards all beings.

Fifth: Unbiasedness towards all events - Shraddha. When we are told or told something new, we are inclined to exclaim or think: Oh, I don't believe that. - If we do that, we take the unbiased view of something new. The chela never says: I cannot believe that. He believes that he can always experience something new and higher. Impartiality leads to faith and trust.

The sixth virtue, inner harmony – samadhana – arises from the five previous qualities.

From all this it follows: Fourth: The will to freedom - mumuksha. Man usually has more will to be unfree than to be free. He feels dependent on the outside world and inwardly unfree because his passions dominate him. But if he has realized the aforementioned virtues in himself, then the will to freedom is there, which enables him to become completely free, which is what makes it possible for him to become established in the life of the spirit. When this has been achieved to a certain degree, chelaship begins. This comprises four stages.

First stage: The homeless person. He no longer clings to the external world, does not look back longingly at the world of the senses. He is not unloving towards the world of the senses, but he does not allow himself to be captured by it. He himself gives equal love to all the world. He now begins to look consciously into the spiritual world, into those regions which are otherwise open to the average person only after death. Then all superstition and doubt disappear forever, because he sees how things are. But then all illusion of the self also disappears.

We can already realize this in the physical. Our existence depends entirely on the context we have with the globe. If we were to rise above it, we would perish, because the living conditions we need are not available up there. We can only live in the environment we were born into because it is in the right proportion to the temperature of our own blood. If the temperature were only 30 degrees higher or lower, our existence would be endangered.

The personal self will be overcome, the “Tat twam asi” - “That art thou”, fully awakened, that is, the human being feels at one with the universe.

[The] second stage of chelaship is referred to as “building huts”. He sees the kundalini light. This is presented to us in the account of the Transfiguration, where the Lord Jesus introduces his three disciples to chelaship. Then they want to build huts.

Third degree of chelaschaft: Then the light shines out of the disciple. “Every thing says its own name to him.” He sees things from the other side through the rays of the spirit,

Fourth degree of chelaschaft: cannot be described; it cannot be explained in ordinary words; it can only be spoken of in secret schools.

Only a hint can be given of the higher stages.

What only a few individuals attain now, the whole human race will possess in the future. New powers will be revealed, and people will consciously work from the realm of the spirit.

Theosophy is not utopian, not a figment of the imagination. What is now only realized in individual instances will be the future of the human race. It is not idle talk about interesting problems, but active work into the future. Whoever begins to immerse themselves in it is working for the future. Theosophy points out the seeds; it indicates means and ways in which we can work into the future. It is not an abstract teaching method. It shows what man will become if he lives in such and such a way.

Someone might ask: Is it certain that what is proclaimed here will come to pass? This cannot be answered simply with yes or no. The means have been given to man, but whether he will use them, no one can know. It depends on whether people will be willing to work together. The Theosophical Society has been founded for the purpose of educating people who want to work towards this goal. The deification of humanity depends on whether some of them will come together to tackle the work.

In this they must be completely free, they must make their own decision completely uninfluenced. From what we have heard here, we can see that

only Theosophy reveals the true meaning of life to us.

[Note from the stenographer] At Mr. Hubo's request, Dr. Steiner said a few more words about the Theosophical Society's position on Christianity:

Our second principle and goal is to cultivate knowledge of the core of truth in all religions and religious life. There is no intention of transplanting the Buddhist religion to our West. We have no need to do so. Christianity contains the purest form of theosophy. It is only just beginning. It is the religion of the future. The earlier religions contained the same essence, but their form was calculated for earlier times. However, we have lost the key to Christianity, the origin of all religions.

A small scene from North America should make this clear to us. The so-called culture had driven the Indians out of their hunting grounds. They were promised certain areas in which to settle. But the promises had not been kept. It was in 1847 when a great Indian chief faced a senior official and said something like the following: You white people promised us land, but you did not keep your word. You are one who gets the teachings of the great spirit from books, from leaves on which all kinds of signs are written. But the great spirit did not teach you the truth, otherwise you would not have betrayed us. Our ancestors taught us to seek the great spirit Tao in everything around us. We feel it in the wind, in the sunshine, in the rustling of the leaves, in the flowing water, everywhere it speaks to us, we are one with it. And Tao has taught us truth that you do not know. — 'Tao is the concept for God, who is thought of as half concrete and half spiritual. In Tao, man does not yet feel separate from God, inside and outside.

Religion seeks to reconnect what has been separated from Tao. One seeks now what one has felt before. The Brahmans say of Tao: It is what it is.

Orpheus has wisely developed this thought and described the laws by which man can regain this conscious feeling of unity with Tao: You are created and you will create. The son has given himself and thus brought back light and

life and communion with the Father.

Yesterday I began to speak to you of the spiritual-scientific strivings of the ninth or tenth century after Christ. We learnt how such strivings were still seriously followed as late as the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries; and I endeavoured to tell you something of the content of these strivings. Today I should like to touch more on their historical aspect. We have to remember that the Mysteries of ancient times were of such a nature and character that in the places of the Mysteries an actual meeting with the Gods was able to take place. I described in the lectures recently given at the Christmas Foundation how the human being who was an Initiate or was about to receive Initiation could verily meet with the Gods. And it was also possible, in the Mysteries, to discover places which by their very locality were expressly fitted and prepared to induce such meeting with the Gods.

The preparation of these centres and the adoption of them as the official places—if I may use so crude an expression—is at the foundation of the impulses for all the older civilisations. Gradually, however, knowledge and understanding of these places disappeared; we may even say that from the time of the fourth century it is no longer to be found in its old form. Here and there we can still find survivals, but the knowledge is no longer so strict and exact. Notwithstanding this, however, Initiation never ceased; it was only the form in which the candidates found their way that changed. I have already indicated how things were in the Middle Ages. I have told you how here and there were individuals, living simple, humble unpretentious lives, who did not gather around them a circle of official pupils in one particular place, but whose pupils were scattered in various directions in accordance with the karma of mankind or the karma of some people or nation. I have described one such instance in what I said about Johannes Tauler in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought. There is no need for me to speak about that here. I should like however to tell you of another typical example, one that had very great influence, lasting from the twelfth and thirteenth on into the fifteenth century. The spiritual streams that were working during these centuries are in large measure to be traced to the events of which I would like now to speak. Let me give you first, as it were, a sketch of the situation.

The time when these events took place is round about the year 1200 A.D. There were at that time a great number of people, especially younger people, who felt within them the urge for higher knowledge, for a union with the spiritual world—one may truthfully say, for a meeting with the Gods. And the whole situation and condition of the times was such that very often it looked as though a man who was searching and striving in this way found his teacher almost by chance. In those days one could not find a teacher by means of books, it could only come about in an entirely personal way. And often it looked from without like a chance happening, although in reality deep connections of destiny were at work in the event. And it was so in the case of the pupil of whom I am now going to tell you.

This pupil found a teacher in a place in Middle Europe through just such an apparently chance event. He met an older man of whom he at once had the feeling: He will be able to lead me farther in that search which is the deepest impulse of my soul. And now let me give you the gist of a conversation between them. I do not of course mean that only one such conversation took place between teacher and pupil, but I am compressing several into one.

The pupil speaks to the teacher and tells him of his earnest desire to be able to see into the spiritual world; but it seems to him as though the nature of man as it is in that time—it is about the twelfth century—does not allow him to penetrate to the spiritual worlds. Nevertheless, he feels that in Nature one has something that is the work, the creation of divine-spiritual Beings. When one looks at what the objects of Nature are in their deeper meaning, when one observes how the processes of Nature take their course, one cannot but recognise that behind these creations stands the working of divine-spiritual Beings. But man cannot come through to these spiritual Beings. The pupil, who was a young man somewhere between 25 and 28 or so, felt strongly and definitely that the humanity of the time, because of the kind of connection of the physical body with the soul, cannot come through, it has hindrances in itself.

The teacher began by putting him to the test. He said to him: You have your eyes, you have your ears: look with your eyes on the things of Nature, hear with your ears what goes on in Nature; the Spiritual reveals itself through colour and through tone, and as you look and listen, you cannot help feeling how it reveals itself in these.

Then the pupil replied: Yes, but when I use my eyes, when I look out into the world, with all its colour, then it is as though my eye stops the colour, as though the colour suddenly turns numb and cold when it reaches the eye. When I listen with my ear to tones, it is as though the sounds turn to stone in my ear; the frozen colours and the dead, hard sounds will not let the spirit of Nature through. And the teacher said: But there is still the Revelation of the religious life. In Religion you are taught how Gods made and fashioned the world, and how the Christ entered into the evolution of time and became Man. What Nature cannot give you, does not Revelation give?

And the pupil said: Revelation does indeed speak powerfully to my heart, but I cannot really comprehend it, I cannot connect what is out there in Nature with what Revelation says to me. It is impossible to bring them into relation with one another. And so, since I do not understand Nature, since Nature reveals nothing to me, neither do I understand the Revelation of Religion.

And the teacher made answer: I understand you well; it is even so. If you must speak thus, if it is with your heart and soul as you say, then you, as you stand in the world today, will not be able to understand either Nature or Revelation: for you live in a body that has undergone the Fall—such was the manner of speaking in those days—and this “fallen” body is not suited to the earthly environment in which you are living. The earthly environment does not afford the conditions for using your senses and your feeling and your understanding in such a way that you may behold in Nature and in Revelation a light, an enlightenment that comes from the Gods. If you are willing, I will lead you away out of the Nature of your earthly environment, which is simply unsuited to your being, I will lead you away from it and give you the opportunity to understand Revelation and Nature better. And the teacher and the pupil discussed together when this should take place.

One day, the teacher led the pupil up a high mountain, whence the surface of the Earth with its trees and flowers could no longer be seen at all—you know how this is so on high mountains—but as the pupil stood there with his teacher he could see below him as it were a sea of cloud, which completely covered the Earth with which he was familiar; up there one was far removed from the affairs of Earth—at all events, the situation suggested this. One looked out into space with its great masses of cloud, and one saw below as it were a sea, a moving, surging sea composed entirely of cloud. Morning mist, and the breath of morning in the air! Then the teacher began to speak to the pupil. He spoke of the wide spaces of the worlds, he spoke of the cosmic distances, of how, when one gazes out into these vastnesses in the night time, one sees the stars shining forth from thence. He told him many things, so that gradually the heart of the pupil, removed as it were far away from the Earth, became wholly given up to Nature and the manner of Nature's existence.

The preparation continued until the pupil came into a mood of soul which may be indicated by the following comparison. It was as though, not for a moment only, but for quite a long time, all that he had ever experienced during his earthly life in this incarnation were something he had dreamed. The scene now spread out before him, the rolling waves of cloud, the wide sea of cloud, with here and there a drift rising up like the crest of a wave; the far spaces of the worlds, broken here and there by rising shapes of cloud—and scarcely even that, for there was no more than a glimpse here and there of cloud forms at the farthest end of space—this whole scene showing so little variation, having so little content in comparison with the manifold variety of all his experiences down below on the surface of the Earth, was now for the pupil like the content of his day-waking consciousness. And everything he had ever experienced on Earth was for him no more than the memory of a dream he had dreamed. Now, now, so it seemed to him, he had woken up. And whilst he continued to grow more and more awake, behold, from a cleft in the rock which he had not hitherto noticed, came forth a boy of 10 or 11 years old. This boy made a strange impression upon him, for he at once recognised in him his own self in the 10th or 11th year of his age. What stood before him was the Spirit of his Youth.

You will easily guess, my dear friends, that to this scene is due one of the impulses that made me introduce into the Mystery Plays the figure of the Spirit of Johannes' Youth. [Footnote: The Soul's Awakening. Scene 6. Four Mystery Plays.] It is the “motif” alone you must think of, certainly not of anything like photography. The Mystery Plays are no occult romances where you have but to find the key, and all is plain!

The pupil stood before the Spirit of his boyhood, his very self. He, with his 15 or 28 years, stood face to face with the Spirit of his youth. And a conversation could take place, guided by the teacher, but in reality taking place between the pupil and his own younger self. Such a conversation has a unique character; you may see that for yourselves in the Mystery Plays, from the style that is there followed. For when a man is face to face with the Spirit of his own youth—and such a thing is always possible—then he gives something of his ripe understanding to the childlike ideas of the Spirit of his youth, and at the same time the Spirit of his youth gives something of his freshness, his childlikeness, to what the man of older years possesses. The meeting becomes fruitful in a spiritual way through the very fact of this mutual interchange. And this conversation had the result that the pupil came to understand Revelation, the Revelation that is given in religion.

The conversation turned especially on Genesis, the beginning of the Old Testament, and on the Christ becoming Man. Under the guidance of the teacher and because of the special kind of fruitfulness that worked in the conversation it ended with the pupil saying these words: “Now I understand what Spirit it is that works in the Revelation. Only when one is transplanted, as it were, far away from the earthly into the heights of the Ether, there to comprehend the Ether-heights with the help of the power of childhood—this power of childhood being projected into the later years of life—only then does one understand Revelation aright. And now I understand wherefore the Gods have given to man Revelation—for the reason that men are not able, in the state in which they are on Earth, to see through the works of Nature and discover behind them the works of the Gods. Therefore did the Gods give them the Revelation which is ordinarily quite incomprehensible in the mature years of life, but which can be understood when childhood becomes real and living in the years of maturity. Thus it is really something abnormal, to understand the Revelation.”

All this made a powerful impression on the pupil. And the impression remained; he could not forget it. The Spirit of his youth vanished. The first phase of the instruction was over. A second had now to come. And the second took its course in the following way.

Once more the teacher led the pupil forth, but this time on a different path. He did not now lead him to a mountain top, but he took him to a mountain where there was a cave, through which they passed to deep, inner clefts, going down as far as the strata of the mines. There the pupil was with the teacher in the deep places of the Earth, not now in the Ether-heights raised high above the Earth, but in the depths, far down below the surface of the Earth.

Once again it was for the consciousness of the pupil as though all that he had ever experienced on Earth went past him like dreams. For he was living down there in an environment in which his consciousness was particularly awakened to perceive his relation with the depths of the Earth. What took place for him was really none other than what lies behind such legends as are told, for example, of the Emperor Barbarossa and his life in Kyffhauser, or of Charles the Great and his life beneath a mountain near Salzburg. It was something of this nature that took place now, if only for a short time: it was a life in the depths of the Earth, far removed from the earthly life of man.

And again the teacher was able, by speaking with the pupil in a special way, to bring to his consciousness the fact—this time—of his union with the Earth-depths. And now there came forth out of a wall an old man, who was less recognisable to the pupil than the Spirit of his Youth, but of whom he nevertheless felt that after many years he would himself become that old man. He knew that there stood before him his own self in future old age. And now followed a similar conversation, this time between the pupil and his own older self—himself as an old man—once more a conversation under the guidance of the teacher.

What resulted from this second conversation was different from what came from the first; for now there began to arise within the pupil a consciousness of his own physical organisation. He felt how his blood flowed, he felt every single vein in his body; he went with it, went with the nerve fibres; he was made aware of all the single organs of his human organisation and the meaning and significance of each for the whole. And he felt too how all that is related to man out in the Cosmos works into him. He felt the inworking of the plant-world, in its blossoming, in its rooting; he felt how the mineral element in the Earth works in the human organism. Down there in the depths he felt the forces of the Earth—how they are organised and how they circulate within his being; he felt them creating there within him, undergoing change, destroying and building substances; he felt the Earth creating, and weaving and being, in man. The result of this conversation was that when the old man, who was himself, had disappeared, the pupil could say: “Now has the Earth, in which I have been incarnated, at last really spoken to me through her beings; now a moment has been mine when I have seen through the things and processes of Nature, seen through them to the work of the Gods that is behind these things and processes of Nature.”

The teacher then led the pupil out again on to the Earth, and as he took leave of him, said: Behold now! The man of today and the Earth of today are so little suited to one another that you must receive the Revelation of Religion from the Spirit of your own Youth, receiving it on the mountain high up above the Earth, and you must receive the Revelation of Nature deep below the Earth, in clefts that are far down below the surface of the Earth. And if you can succeed in illuminating what your soul has felt in the hollow clefts of the Earth, with the light your soul has brought from the mountain, then you will attain unto wisdom.

Such was the path by which a deepening of the soul was brought about in those times—it was about the year 1200 A.D.—this is how the soul became filled with wisdom. The pupil of whom I have told you was thereby brought verily to Initiation, and he now knew what power he must put forth in his soul to arouse to activity the light of the heights and the feeling of the depths. Further instruction was then given him by the teacher, showing him how self-knowledge really always consists in this:—one perceives on the one hand that which lies high above Earth-man, and on the other hand that which lies deep below Earth-man: these two must meet in man's own inner being. Then does man find within his own being the power of God the Creator.

The Initiation that I have described to you is a characteristic example of the Initiations which led afterwards to what we may designate as “mediaeval Mysticism.” It was a mysticism that sought for self-knowledge, but always in order to find in the self the way to the divine. In later times this mysticism became abstract. The concrete union with the external world, as it was given for these pupils who were carried up into the Ether-heights and down into the Earth-depths, was no longer sought for. Consequently there was not the same deep stirring of the soul, nor did the whole experience attain to such a degree of intensity. And yet there was still the search, there was still the inner impulse to seek within for the God, for God the Creator. Fundamentally speaking, all the seeking and striving of Meister Eckhart, of Johannes Tauler and of the later mystics whom I have described in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought owes its impulse to these earlier mediaeval Initiates.

Those who worked faithfully in the sense of such mediaeval forms of Initiation were however very much misunderstood, and it is by no means easy for us to find out what these pupils of the mediaeval Initiates were really like.

It is, as you know, possible to come a considerable distance along the path into the spiritual world. Those who follow thoroughly and actively what is given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment do find the way into the spiritual worlds. Everything that has been physically real in the past is of course only to be found now by way of the spiritual world—therefore also such scenes as I have now described, for there are no material documents that record such scenes. There are however regions of the spiritual world which are hard of access even for a very advanced stage of spiritual power. In order to research into these regions, we must have come to the point of actually having intercourse with the Beings of the spiritual world, in a quite simple, natural way, as we have with men on Earth. When we have attained so far, we shall come to perceive and understand the connection between these Initiates of whom I have told you, and their pupils, e.g., such a pupil as Raimon Lull, who lived from 1235 to 1315 and who, in what history can tell of him, seems to leave us full of doubts and questions.

What you can learn of Raimon Lull by studying historical documents is indeed very scanty. But if you are able to enter into a personal relationship with Raimon Lull—you will allow me to use the expression: perhaps, in the light of all I have been telling you lately, it will not sound so paradoxical to you after all—if you are able to do this, then he shows himself to you as someone quite different from what the historical documents make him out to be. For he shows himself to be pre-eminently a personality who, under the influence and inspiration of the very Initiate of whom I have spoken to you as the “pupil,” made the resolve to use all his power to bring about a renewal in his own time of the Mysteries of the World, of the Logos, as they had been in olden times. He set himself to renew the Mysteries of the Logos by means of that self-knowledge for which so powerful an impulse was working in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The so-called Ars Magna of Raimon Lull is to be adjudged from this point of view. He said to himself: When man speaks, then we really have in speech a microcosm. That which man utters in speech is in truth the whole man, concentrated in the organs of speech; the secret and mystery of each single word is to be sought in the whole human being, and therefore in the world, in the Cosmos.

And so the idea came to Raimon Lull that one must look for the secret of speech first in the human being, by diving down, as it were, from the speech organs into the whole organism of the human being; and then in the Cosmos, for the whole human organism is to be explained and understood out of the Cosmos. Let us suppose, for example, we want to understand the true significance of the sound A (as in “father”). The point is that the sound A, which comes about through the forming and shaping of the outgoing breath, depends on a certain inner attitude of the etheric body, which you can easily learn to know today. Eurhythmy will show it you; for this attitude of the etheric body is carried over in Eurhythmy to the physical body and becomes the Eurhythmic movement for the sound A.

All this was not by any means fully clear to Raimon Lull; with him it was more of a dim, intuitive feeling. He did however get so far as to follow the inner attitude or gesture of the human being out into the Cosmos and say, for example: If you look in the direction of the constellation of the Lion (Leo), and then look in the direction of the Balance (Libra), the connection between the two lines of vision will give you A. Or again, turn your eye in the direction of Saturn. Saturn stops your line of vision, comes in the way. And if Saturn, for example, stands in front of the Ram (Aries), you have, as it were, to go round the Ram with Saturn. And then you have from out of the Cosmos the feeling of O. [Footnote: Readers unfamiliar with the movements in Eurhythmy for the sounds of speech, are recommended to turn to the first three chapters of the book Eurhythmy as Visible Speech (15 lectures) by Rudolf Steiner]

From ideas like these, though dimly perceived, Raimon Lull went on to find certain geometrical figures, the corners and sides of which he named with the letters of the alphabet. And he was quite sure that when one experiences a feeling and impulse to draw lines in the figures—diagonals, for instance, across a pentagon, uniting the five points in different ways—then one has to see in these lines different combinations of sounds, which combinations of sounds express certain secrets of the World-All, of the Cosmos. Thus did Raimon Lull look for a kind of renaissance of the secrets of the Logos, as they were known and spoken of in the Ancient Mysteries. You will find it all quite misrepresented in the historical documents. When however one enters little by little into a personal relationship with Raimon Lull, then one comes to see how in all these efforts he was trying to solve once more the riddle of the Cosmic Word. And it is a fact that the pupils of the mediaeval Initiates continued for several centuries to spend their lives in endeavours of this kind. It was an intensive striving, first to immerse oneself in man, and then to come forth as it were, to rise out of the human being into the secrets of the Cosmos.

Thus did these wise men—for we may truly call them so—seek to unite Revelation with Nature. They believed—and much of their belief was well-founded—that in this way they could come behind the Revelation of Religion and behind the Revelation of Nature. For it was quite clear to them that man, as he is now living on the Earth, was destined and intended to become the Fourth Hierarchy, but that he has “fallen” from his true and proper nature, and become more deeply involved in physical existence than he should be, thereby at the same time losing the power adequately to develop his soul and spirit. It was from such strivings that there arose, later on, what we know as the Rosicrucian Movement.

It was at a place of instruction of the Rosicrucians, of the first, original Rosicrucians, that the scene I have depicted to you today, the scene between the teacher and the pupil, at first upon a high mountain and then down in a deep cleft of the Earth, emerged like a kind of Fata Morgana, came again as it were like a ghost, reflected within a Rosicrucian school as knowledge. And it taught the pupils to recognise how man has by inner effort and striving to attain to two things, if he would come to a true self-knowledge, if he would find again his adjustment to the Earth and be able at last to become in actual reality a member of the Fourth Hierarchy. For within the Rosicrucian School the possibility was given to recognise what it was that had taken place with the pupil when he had seen before him in bodily form the Spirit of his Youth. A loosening of the astral body had taken place; the astral body, that was stronger at that moment than it otherwise ever is in life, was loosened. And in this loosening of the astral body the pupil had come to know the meaning and significance of Revelation. And again, what took place with the pupil in the depths of the Earth was also made clear and comprehensible in the Rosicrucian School. This time the astral body was drawn right back within. It was contracted and drawn together, so that the pupil was able to perceive and apprehend the certainty of man's own inner being.

And now exercises were found within Rosicrucianism, comparatively simple exercises, consisting in symbolic figures, to which one gave oneself up in devotion and meditation. The force and power of which the soul became possessed through devotion to these figures, enabled the students on the one hand to loosen the astral body and become like the pupil on the mountain top in the Ether-heights, and on the other hand, through the compression and contraction of the astral body, to become like the pupil in the clefts of the Earth. And it was then possible, without the help, as before, of external environment, simply through performing a powerful inner exercise, to enter into the inner being of man.

I have given you here a picture of something to which I have made a slight allusion in my preface to the new edition of the book Mysticism and Modern Thought. I said there that what we find in Meister Eckhart, in Johannes Tauler, in Nicolas Cusa, in Valentine Wiegel and the rest, is a late product of a great and mighty striving of mankind, an earlier, original striving that preceded them all. And this earlier striving in the Spirit, this search for self-knowledge, in connection on the one hand with Revelation and on the other hand with the illumination of Nature—I wanted to show you today how this is one of the currents that take their course in the so-called “Dark Ages.”

The man of modern times conjures darkness into the Middle Ages out of his own imagination. In reality there were in those times many enlightened spirits, of such a kind however, that the “enlightened” spirits of today cannot understand their light and consequently remain in the dark.

It is indeed characteristic of modern times, that men take light for darkness and darkness for light. If however we can look into what lies behind the literature of those earlier times and are able to see that of which the literature gives only a dim reflection, then we may receive a powerful and lasting impression.

Something of this I wanted to show you today: tomorrow we will complete the picture.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I should like in these three days to speak on a subject which is generally looked at from a more formal angle, as if the attitude of the philosophic view of life to Christianity had been to a certain extent dictated by the deep philosophic movement of the Middle Ages. As this side of the question has lately had a kind of revival through Pope Leo XIII's Ordinance to his clergy to make “Thomism” the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, our present subject has a certain significance. But I do not wish to treat the subject which crystallized as mediaeval philosophy round the personalities of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, only from this formal side; rather I wish in the course of these days to reveal the deeper historical background out of which this philosophic movement, much underrated to-day, has arisen. We can say: Thomas Aquinas tries in the thirteenth century quite clearly to grasp the problem of the total human knowledge of philosophies, and in a way which we have to admit is difficult for us to follow, for conditions of thought are attached to it which people to-day scarcely fulfil, even if they are philosophers. One must be able to put oneself completely into the manner of thought of Thomas Aquinas, his predecessors and successors; one must know how to take their conceptions, and how their conceptions lived in the souls of those men of the Middle Ages, of which the history of philosophy tells only rather superficially.

If we look now at the central point of this study, at Thomas Aquinas, we would say: in him we have a personality which in face of the main current of mediaeval Christian philosophy really disappears as a personality; one which, we might almost say, is only the co-efficient or exponent of the current of world philosophy, and finds expression as a personality only through a certain universality. So that, when we speak of Thomism, we can focus our attention on something quite exceptionally impersonal, on something which is revealed only through the personality of Thomas Aquinas. On the other hand we see at once that we must put into the forefront of our inquiry a full and complete personality, and all that term includes, when we consider the individual who was the immediate and chief predecessor of Thomism, namely Augustine. With him everything was personal, with Thomas Aquinas everything was really impersonal. In Augustine we have to deal with a fighting man, in Thomas

Aquinas, with a mediaeval Church defining its attitude to heaven and earth, to men, to history, etc., a Church which, we might say, expressed itself as a Church, within certain limitations it is true, through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

A significant event separates the two, and unless one takes this event into consideration, it is not possible to define the mutual relationship of these mediaeval individuals. The event to which I refer is the declaration of heresy by the Emperor Justinian against Origen. The whole direction of Augustine's view of the world becomes clear only when we keep in mind the whole historical background from which Augustine emerged. This historical background, however, becomes in reality, completely changed from the fact that the powerful influence—it was actually a powerful influence in spite of much that has been said in the history of philosophy—that this powerful influence on the Western world which had spread from the Schools of Philosophy in Athens, ceased to exist. It persisted into the sixth century, and then ebbed, but so that something remains which in fact, in the subsequent philosophical stream of the West, is quite different from that which Augustine knew in his lifetime. I shall have to ask you to take note that to-day's address is more in the nature of an introduction, that we shall deal tomorrow with the real nature of Thomism, and that on the third day I shall make clear my object in bringing before you all I have to say in these three days.

For you see, ladies and gentlemen, if you will excuse the personal reference, I am in rather a special position with regard to Christian mediaeval philosophy, that is, to Thomism. I have often mentioned, even in public addresses, what happened to me once when I had put before a working-class audience what I must look upon as the true course of Western history. The result was that though there were a good many pupils in agreement with me, the leaders of the proletarian movement at the turn of the century hit on the idea that I was not presenting true Marxism. And although one could assert that the world in future must after all recognize something like freedom in teaching, I was told at the final meeting: This party recognizes no freedom in teaching, only a rational compulsion! And my activity as a teacher, in spite of the fact that at the time a large number of students from the proletariat had been attracted, was forced to a sudden and untimely end.

I might say I had the same experience in other places with what I wanted to say, now about nineteen or twenty years ago, concerning Thomism and everything that belonged to mediaeval philosophy. It was of course just the time when what we are accustomed to call “Monism” reached its height, round the year 1900. At this time there was founded in Germany the “Giordano-Bruno-Bund” apparently to encourage a free, independent view of life, but au fond really only to encourage the materialistic side of Monism. Now, ladies and gentlemen, because it was impossible for me at the time to take part in all that empty phrase-making which went out into the world as Monism, I gave an address on Thomism in the Berlin “Giordano-Bruno-Bund.”

In this address I sought to prove that a real and spiritual Monism had been given in Thomism, that this spiritual Monism, moreover, had been given in such a way that it reveals itself through the most accurate thought imaginable, of which more recent philosophy, under the influence of Kant and Protestantism has at bottom not the least idea, and no longer the capacity to achieve it.

And so I fell foul also of Monism. It is, in point of fact, extraordinarily difficult to-day to speak of these things in such a way that one's word seems to be based sincerely on the matter itself and not to be in the service of some Party or other. I want in these three days to try once more to speak thus impartially of the matters I have indicated.

The personality of Augustine fits into the fourth and fifth centuries, as I said before, as a fighting personality in the fullest sense. His method of fighting is what sinks deep into the soul if we can understand in detail the particular nature of this fight. There are two problems which faced Augustine's soul with an intensity of which we, with our pallid problems of knowledge and of the soul, have really no idea.

The first problem can be put thus: Augustine strives to find the nature of what man can recognize as truth, supporting him, filling his soul. The second problem is this: How can you explain the presence of evil in a world which after all has no sense unless its purpose at least has something to do with good? How can you explain the pricks of evil in human nature which never cease—according to Augustine's view—the voice of evil which is never silent, even if a man strives honestly and uprightly after the good?

I do not believe that we can get near to Augustine if we take these two questions in the sense in which the average man of our time, even if he were a philosopher, would be apt to take them. You must look for the special shade of meaning these questions had for a man of the fourth and fifth centuries. Augustine lived, after all, at first a life of inner commotion, not to say a dissipated life; but always these two questions ran up before him. Personally he is placed in a dilemma. His father is a Pagan, his mother a pious Christian; and she takes the utmost pains to win him for Christianity. At first the son can be moved only to a certain seriousness, and this is directed towards Manichaeism. We shall look later at this view of life, which early came into Augustine's range of vision, as he changed from a somewhat irregular way of living to a full seriousness of life. Then—after some years—he felt himself more and more out of sympathy with Manichaeism, and fell under the sway of a certain Scepticism, not driven by the urge of his soul or some other high reason, but because the whole philosophical life of the time led him that way. This Scepticism was evolved at a certain time from Greek philosophy, and remained to the day of Augustine. Now, however, the influence of Scepticism grew ever less and less, and was for Augustine, as it were, only a link with Greek philosophy. And this Scepticism led to something which without doubt exercised for a time a quite unusually deep influence on his subjectivity, and the whole attitude of his soul. It led him into a Neoplatonism of a different kind from what in the history of philosophy is generally called Neoplatonism. Augustine got more out of this Neoplatonism than one usually thinks. The whole personality and the whole struggle of Augustine can be understood only when one understands how much of the neoplatonic philosophy had entered into his soul; and if we study objectively the development of Augustine, we find that the break which occurred in going over from Manichaeism to Platonism was hardly as violent in the transition from Neoplatonism to Christianity. For one can really say: in a certain sense Augustine remained a Neoplatonist; to the extent he became one at all he remained one. But he could become a Neoplatonist only up to a point. For that reason, his destiny led him to become acquainted with the phenomenon of Christ-Jesus. And this is really not a big jump but a natural course of development in Augustine from Neoplatonism to Christianity. How this Christianity lives in Augustine—yes—how it lives in Augustine we cannot judge unless we look first at Manichaeism, a remarkable formula for overcoming the old heathenism at the same time as the Old Testament and Judaism.

Manichaeism was already at the time when Augustine was growing up a world-current of thought which had spread throughout North Africa, where, you must remember, Augustine spent his youth, and in which many people of Western Europe had been caught up. Founded in about the third century in Asia by Mani, a Persian, Manichaeism had extraordinarily little effect historically on the subsequent world. To define this Manichaeism, we must say this: there is more importance in the general attitude of this view of life than in what one can literally describe as its contents. Above all, the remarkable thing about it is that the division of human experience into a spiritual side and a material side had no meaning for it. The words or ideas “spirit” and “matter” mean nothing to it. Manichaeism sees as “spiritual” what appears to the senses as material and when it speaks of the spiritual it does not rise above what the senses know as matter. It is true to say of Manichaeism—much more emphatically true than we with our world grown so abstract and intellectual usually think,—that it actually sees spiritual phenomena, spiritual facts in the stars and their courses, and that it sees at the same time in the mystery of the sun that which is manifest to us on earth as something spiritual. It conveys no meaning for Manichaeism to speak of either matter or spirit, for in it what is spiritual has its material manifestation and what is material is to it spiritual. Therefore, Manichaeism quite naturally speaks of astronomical things and world phenomena in the same way as it would speak of moral phenomena or happenings within the development of human beings. And thus this apposition of “Light” and “Darkness” which Manichaeism, imitating something from ancient Persia, embodies in its philosophy, is to it at the same time something completely and obviously spiritual. And it is also something obvious that this same Manichaeism still speaks of what apparently moves as sun in the heavens as something which has to do with the moral entities and moral impulses in the development of mankind; and that it speaks of the relation of this moral-physical sun in the heavens, to the Signs of the Zodiac as to the twelve beings through which the original being, the original source of light delegates its activities. But there is something more about this Manichaeism. It looks upon man and man does not yet appear to its eyes as what we to-day see in man. To us man appears as a kind of climax of creation on earth. Whether we think more or less in material or spiritual terms, man appears to man now as the crown of creation on earth, the kingdom of man as the highest kingdom or at least as the crown of the animal kingdom. Manichaeism cannot agree to this.

The thing which had walked the earth as man and in its time was still walking it, is to it only a pitiful remnant of that being which ought to have become man through the divine essence of light. Man should have become something entirely different from the man now walking the earth. The being now walking on earth as man was created through original man losing the fight against the demons of darkness, this original man who had been created by the power of light as an ally in its fight against the demons of darkness, but who had been transplanted into the sun by benevolent powers and had thus been taken up by the kingdom of light itself. But the demons have managed nevertheless to tear off as it were a part of this original man from the real man who escaped into the sun and to form the earthly race of man out of it, the earthly race which thus walks about on earth as a weaker edition of that which could not live here, for it had to be removed into the sun during the great struggle of spirits. In order to lead back man, who in this way appeared as a weaker edition on earth, to his original destination the Christ-being then appeared and through its activity the demonic influences are to be removed from the earth.

I know very well, that all that part of this view of life which is still capable of being put into modern language, can hardly be intelligible; for the whole of it comes from substrata of the soul's experience which differ vastly from the present ones. But the important part which is interesting us to-day is what I have already emphasized. For however fantastic it may appear, this part I have been telling you about the continuation of the development on earth in the eyes of the Manichaeans—Manichaeism did not represent it at all as something only to be viewed in the spirit, but as a phenomenon which we would to-day call material, unfolding itself to our physical eyes as something at the same time spiritual.

That was the first powerful influence on Augustine, and the problems connected with the personality of Augustine can really only be solved if one bears in mind the strong influence of this Manichaeism, with its principle of the spiritual-material. We must ask ourselves: What was the reason for Augustine's dissatisfaction with Manichaeism? It was not based on what one might call its mystical content as I have just described it to you, but his dissatisfaction arose from the whole attitude of Manichaeism. At first Augustine was attracted, in a sense sympathetically moved by the physical self-evidence, by the pictorial quality with which this philosophy was presented to him; but then something in him appeared which refused to be satisfied with this very quality which regarded matter spiritually and the spiritual materially. And one can come to the right conclusion about this only if one faces the real truth which often has been advanced as a formal view; namely, if one considers that Augustine was a man who was fundamentally more akin to the men of the Middle Ages and even perhaps to the men of modern times than he could possibly be to those men who through their soul-mood were the natural inheritors of Manichaeism. Augustine has already something of what I would call the revival of spiritual life. In other places I have often pointed, even in public lectures, to what I mean. These present times are intellectual and inclined to the abstract, and so we always see in the history of any century the influences at work from the preceding century, and so on. In the case of an individual it is of course pure nonsense to say: something which happens in, let us say, his eighteenth year is only the consequence of something else which happened in his thirteenth or fourteenth year. In between lies something which springs from the deepest depths of human nature, which is not just the consequence of something that has gone before in the sense in which one is justified in speaking of cause and effect, but is rather something which is inherent in the nature of man, and takes place in human life, namely, adolescence. And such a gap has to be recognized also at other times in human evolution—in individual human evolution, when something struggles from the depths to the surface; so that we cannot say: what happens is only the direct uninterrupted consequence of whatever has preceded it. And such gaps occur also in the case of all humanity. We have to assume that before such a gap Manichaeism occurred, and after such a gap occurred the soul-attitude, the soul-conception in which Augustine found himself. Augustine could simply not come to terms with his soul unless he rose above what a Manichaean called material-spiritual to something purely spiritual, something built and seen in the spiritual sphere; Augustine had to rise to something much more free of the senses. So he had to turn away from the pictorial, the evidential philosophy of Manichaeism. This was the first thing that developed so intensively in his soul. We read it in his words: the heaviest and almost the only reason for error which I could not avoid was that I had to imagine a bodily substance when I wanted to think of God.

In this way he refers to the time when Manichaeism with its material spirituality and its spiritual materiality lived in his soul; he refers to it in these words and characterizes this period of his life thus as an error. He needed something to look up to, something which was fundamental to human nature. He needed something which, unlike the Manichaean principles, does not look upon the physical universe as spiritual-material. As everything with him struggled with intensive and overpowering earnestness to the surface of his soul, so also this saying: “I asked the earth and it said: `I am not it,' and all things on it confessed the same.”

What does Augustine ask? He asks what the divine really is, and he asks the earth and it says to him, “I am not it.” Manichaeism would have: “I am it as earth, in so far as the divine expresses itself through earthly works.” And again Augustine says: “I asked the sea and the abysses and whatever living thing they cover:” “We are not your God, seek above us.” “I asked the sighing winds,” and the whole nebula with all its inhabitants said: “The philosophers who seek the nature of things in us were mistaken, for we are not God.”

(Thus not the sea and not the nebula, nothing in fact which can be observed through the senses.)

“I asked the sun, the moon, and the stars.” They said: “We are not God whom thou seekest.”

Thus he gropes his way out of Manichaeism, precisely out of that part of it which must be called its most significant part, at least in this connection. Augustine gropes after something spiritual which is free of all sensuousness. And in this he finds himself exactly in that era of human soul-development in which the soul had to free itself from the contemplation of matter as something spiritual and of the spiritual as something material. We entirely misunderstand Greek philosophy in reference to this. And because I tried for once to describe Greek philosophy as it really was, the beginning of my Riddles of Philosophy seems so difficult to understand. When the Greeks speak of ideas, of conceptions, when Plato speaks of them, people now believe that Plato or the Greeks mean the same by ideas as we do. This is not so, for the Greeks spoke of ideas as something which they observed in the outer world like colours or sounds. That part of Manichaeism which we find slightly changed, with—let us say—an oriental tinge, that is already present in the whole Greek view of life. The Greek sees his idea just as he sees colours. And he still possesses that material-spiritual, spiritual-material life of the soul, which does not rise to what we know as spiritual life. Whatever we may call it, a mere abstraction or the true content of our soul, we need not decide at the present moment; the Greek does not yet reckon with what we call a life of the soul free from matter; he does not distinguish, as we do, between thinking and outward use of the senses. The whole Platonic philosophy ought to be seen in this light to be fully understood.

We can now say, that Manichaeism is nothing but a post-Christian variation (with an oriental tinge) of something already existing among the Greeks. Neither do we understand that wonderful genius who closes the circle of Greek philosophy, Aristotle, unless we know that whenever he speaks of concepts, he still keeps within the meaning of an experienced tradition which regarded concepts as belonging to the outer world of the senses as well as perceptions, though he is already getting close to the border of understanding abstract thought free from all evidence of the senses. Through the point of view to which men's souls had attained during his era, through actual events happening within the souls of men in whose rank Augustine was a distinctive, prominent personality, Augustine was forced not just only to experience within his soul, as the Greeks had done, but he was forced to rise to thoughts free from sense-perceptions, to thoughts which still kept their meaning even if they were not dealing with earth, air and sea, with stars, sun and moon; thoughts which had a content beyond the sense of vision.

And now only philosophers and philosophies spoke to him which spoke of what they had to say from an entirely different point of view, that is, from the super-spiritual one just explained. Small wonder, then, that these souls striving in a vague way for something not yet in existence and trying with their minds to seize what was there, could only find something they could not absorb; small wonder that these souls sought refuge in scepticism. On the other hand, the feeling of standing on a sound basis of truth and the desire to get an answer to the question of the origin of Evil was so strong in Augustine, that equally powerful in his soul lived that philosophy which stands under the name of Neoplatonism at the end of Greek philosophic development. This is focused in Plotinus and reveals to us historically what neither the Dialogues of Plato and still less Aristotelian philosophy can reveal, namely, the course of the whole life of the soul when it looks for a greater intensiveness and a reaching beyond the normal. Plotinus is like a last straggler of a type which followed quite different paths to knowledge, to the inner life of the soul, from those which were gradually understood later. Plotinus must appear fantastic to present-day men. To those who have absorbed something of mediaeval scholasticism Plotinus must appear as a terrible fanatic, indeed, as a dangerous one.

I have noticed this repeatedly. My old friend Vincenz Knauer, the Benedictine monk, who wrote a history of philosophy and who has also written a book about the chief problems of philosophy from Thales to Hamerling was, I may well say, good-nature incarnate. This man never let himself go except when he had to deal with Neoplatonism, in particular with Plotinus, and he would then get quite angry and would denounce Plotinus terribly as a dangerous fanatic. And Brentano, that intelligent Aristotelian and Empiric, Franz Brentano, who also carried mediaeval philosophy deeply and intensely in his soul, wrote a little book: Philosophies that Create a Stir, and there he fumes about Plotinus in the same way, for Plotinus the dangerous fanatic is the philosopher, the man who in his opinion “created a stir” at the close of the ancient Greek period. To understand him is really extraordinarily difficult for the modern philosopher.

Concerning this philosopher of the third century we have next to say this: What we experience as the content of our understanding, of our reason, what we know as the sum of our concepts about the world is entirely different for him. I might say, if I may express myself clearly: we understand the world through sense-observations which through abstraction we bring to concepts, and end there. We have the concepts as inner psychic experience and if we are average men of to-day we are more or less conscious that we have abstractions, something we have sucked as it were out of things. The important thing is that we end there; we pay attention to the experiences of the senses and stop at the point where we make the total of our concepts, of our ideas. It was not so for Plotinus. For him this whole world of sense-experience scarcely existed. But that which meant something to him, of which he spoke as we speak of plants and minerals and animals and physical men, was something which he saw lying above concepts; it was a spiritual world and this spiritual world had for him a nether boundary, namely, the concepts. While we get our concepts by going to concrete things, make them into abstractions and concepts and say: concepts are the putting-together, the extractions of ideal nature from the observation of the senses, Plotinus said—and he paid little heed to the observation of the senses: “We, as men, live in a spiritual world, and what this spiritual world reveals to us finally, what we see as its nether boundary, are concepts.” For us the world of the senses lies below concepts: for Plotinus there is above concepts a spiritual world, the intellectual world, the world really of the kingdom of the spirit. I might use the following image: let us suppose we were submerged in the sea, and looking upward to the surface of the water, we saw nothing but this surface, nothing above the surface, then this surface would be the upper boundary. Suppose we lived in the sea, we might perhaps have in our soul the feeling: This boundary would be the limit of our life-element, in which we are, if we were organized as sea-beings. But for Plotinus it was not so. He took no notice of the sea round him; but the boundary which he saw, the boundary of the concept-world in which his soul lived, was for him the nether boundary of something above it; just as if we were to take the boundary of the water as the boundary of the atmosphere and the clouds and so on. At the same time this sphere above concepts is for Plotinus what Plato calls the “world of ideas” and Plotinus throughout imagines that he is continuing the true genuine philosophy of Plato. This “idea-world” is, first of all, completely a world of which one speaks in the sense of Plotinism. Surely it would not occur to you, even if you were Subjectivists or followers of the modern Subjectivist philosophy, when you look out upon the meadow, to say: I have my meadow, you have yours, and so and so has his meadow; even if you are convinced that you each have only before you the image of a meadow, you speak of the meadow in the singular, of one meadow which is out there. In the same way Plotinus speaks of the one idea-world, not of the idea-world of this mind, or of another or of a third mind. In this idea-world—and this we see already in the whole manner in which one has to characterize the thought-process leading to this idea-world—in this idea-world the soul has a part. So we may say: The soul, the Psyche, unfolds itself out of the idea-world and experiences it. And the Soul, just as the idea-world creates the Psyche, in its turn creates the matter in which it is embodied. So that the lower material from which the Psyche takes its body is chiefly a creation of this Psyche.

But precisely there is the origin of individuation, there the Psyche, which otherwise takes part in the single idea-world, becomes a part of body A, and body B, and so on, and through this fact there appear, for the first time, individual souls. It is just as if I had a great quantity of liquid in one mass, and having taken twenty glasses had filled each with the liquid, so that I have this liquid, which as such is a unity, thus divided, just so I have the Psyche in the same condition, because it is incorporated in bodies which, however, it has itself created. Thus in the Plotinistic sense a man can view himself according to his exterior, his vessel. But that is at bottom only the way in which the soul reveals itself, in which the soul also becomes individualized. Afterward man has to experience within him his very own soul, which raises itself upward to the idea-world. Still later there comes a higher form of experience. That one should speak of abstract concepts—that has no meaning for a Plotinist; for such abstract concepts—well, a Plotinist would have said: “What do you mean—abstract concepts? Concepts surely cannot be abstract: they cannot hang in the air, they must be suspended from the spirit; they must be the concrete revelations of the spiritual.”

The interpretation therefore that ideas are any kind of abstractions, is therefore wrong. This is the expression of an intellectual world, a world of spirituality. It is also what existed in the ordinary experience of those men out of whose relationships Plotinus and his fellows grew. For them such talk about concepts, in the way we talk about them, had absolutely no meaning, because for them there was only a penetration of the spiritual world into souls. And this concept-world is found at the limit of this penetration, in experiencing. Only when we went deeper, when we developed the soul further, only then there resulted something which the ordinary man could not know, which the man experienced who had attained a higher stage. He then experienced that which was above the idea-world—the One, if you like to call it so—the experience of the One. This was for Plotinus the thing that was unattainable to concepts, just because it was above the world of concepts, and could only be attained if one could sink oneself into oneself without concept, a state we describe here in our spiritual science as Imagination. You can read about it in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It. But there is this difference: I have treated the subject from the modern point of view, whereas Plotinus treated it from the old. What I there call the Imagination is just that which, according to Plotinus stands above the idea-world.

From this general view of the world Plotinus really also derived all his knowledge of the human soul. It is, after all, practically contained in it. And one can be an individualist in the sense of Plotinus if one is at the same time a human being who recognizes how man raises his life upwards to something which is above all individuality, to something spiritual; whereas in our age we have more the habit of reaching downwards to the things of the senses. But all this which is the expression of something which a thorough scientist regards as fanaticism, all this is in the case of Plotinus, not something thought out, these are no hypotheses of his. This perception—right up to the One which only in exceptional cases could be attained—this perception was as clear to Plotinus and as obvious, as is for us to-day the perception of minerals, plants and animals. He spoke only in the sense of something which really was directly experienced by the soul when he spoke of the soul, of the Logos, which was part of the Nous, of the idea-world and of the One. For Plotinus the whole world was, as it were, a spirituality—again a different shade of philosophy from the Manichaean and from the one Augustine pursued. Manichaeism recognizes a sense-supersense; for it the words and concepts of matter and spirit have as yet no meaning. Augustine strives to reach a spiritual experience of the soul that is free from the sense and to escape from his material view of life. For Plotinus the whole world is spiritual, things of the senses do not exist. For what appears material is only the lowest method of revealing the spiritual. All is spirit, and if we only go deep enough into things, everything is revealed as spirit.

This is something which Augustine could not accept. Why? Because he had not the necessary point of view. Because he lived in his age as a predecessor—for if I might call Plotinus a “follower” of the ancient times in which one held such philosophic views,—though he went on into the third century,—Augustine was a predecessor of those people who could no longer feel and perceive that there was a spiritual world underneath the idea-world. He just did not see that any more. He could only learn it by being told. He might hear that people said it was so, and he might develop a feeling that there was something in it which was a human road to truth. That was the dilemma in which Augustine stood in relation to Plotinism. But he was never completely diverted from searching for an inner understanding of this Plotinism. However, this philosophical point of view did not open itself to him. He only guessed: in this world there must be something. But he could not fight his way to it.

This was the mood of his soul when he withdrew himself into a lonely life, in which he got to know the Bible and Christianity, and later the sermons of Ambrosius and the Epistles of St. Paul; and this was the mood of his soul which finally brought him to say: “The nature of the world which Plotinus sought at first in the nature of the idea-world of the Nous, or in the One, which one can attain only in specially favourable conditions of soul, why! That has appeared in the body on earth, in human form, through Christ-Jesus.” That leapt at him as a conviction out of the Bible: “Thou hast no need to struggle upward to the One, thou needest but look upon that which the historical tradition of Christ-Jesus interprets. There is the One come down from heaven, and is become man.” And Augustine exchanges the philosophy of Plotinus for the Church. He expresses this exchange clearly enough. For instance, when he says, “Who could be so blind as to say: 'The Apostolic Church merits no Faith” the church which is so faithful and supported by so many brotherly agreements that it has transmitted their writings as conscientiously to those that come after, as it has kept their episcopal sees in direct succession down to the present Bishops. This it is on which Augustine, out of the soul-mood described, laid the chief stress:—that, if one only goes into it, it can be shown in the course of centuries that there were once men who knew the Lord's disciples, and here is a continuous tradition of a sort worthy of belief, that there appeared on earth the very thing which Plotinus knew how to attain in the way I have indicated.

And now there arose in Augustine the effort, in so far as he could get to the heart of it, to make use of this Plotinism to comprehend that which had through Christianity been opened to his feeling and his inner perception. He actually applied the knowledge he had through Plotinism to understand Christianity and its meaning. Thus, for example, he transposed the concept of the One. For Plotinus the One was something experienced; for Augustine who could not attain this experience, the One became something which he defined with the abstract term “being”; the idea-world, he defined with the abstract concept “knowing,” and Psyche with the abstract concept “living,” or even “love.” We have the best evidence that Augustine proceeded thus in that he sought to comprehend the spiritual world, with neoplatonic and Plotinistic concepts, that there is above men a spiritual world, out of which the Christ descends. The Trinity was something which Plotinism made clear to Augustine, the three persons of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.

And if we were to ask seriously, of what was Augustine's soul full, when he spoke of the Three Persons—we must answer: It was full of the knowledge derived from Plotinus. And this knowledge he carried also into his understanding of the Bible. We see how it continues to function. For this Trinity awakens to life again, for example, in Scotus Erigena, who lived at the court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and who wrote a book on the divisions and classification of Nature in which we still find a similar Trinity: Christianity interprets its content from Plotinism.

But what Augustine preserved from Plotinism in a specially strong degree was something that was fundamental to it.

You must remember that man, since the Psyche reaches down into the material as into a vessel, is really the only earthly individuality. If we ascend slightly into higher regions, to the divine or the spiritual, where the Trinity originates, we have no longer to do with individual man, but with the species, as it were, with humanity. We no longer direct our visualization in this bald manner towards the whole of humanity, as Augustine did as a result of his Plotinism. Our modern concepts are against it. I might say: Seen from down there, men appear as individuals; seen from above—if one may hypothetically say that—all humanity appears as one unity. From this point of view the whole of humanity became for Plotinus concentrated in Adam. Adam was all humanity. And since Adam sprang from the spiritual world he was as a being bound with the earth, which had free will, because in him there lived that which was still above, and not that which arises from error of matter—itself incapable of sin. It was impossible for this man who was first Adam to sin or not to be free, and therefore also impossible to die. Then came the influence of that Satanic being, whom Augustine felt as the enemy-spirit. It tempted and seduced the man. He fell into the material, and with him all humanity.

Augustine stands, with what I might call his derived knowledge, right in the midst of Plotinism. The whole of humanity is for him one, and it sinned in Adam as a whole, not as an individual. If we look clearly between the lines particularly of Augustine's last writings, we see how extraordinarily difficult it has become for him thus to regard the whole of mankind, and the possibility that the whole fell into sin. For in him there is already the modern man, the predecessor as opposed to the successor; there lived in him the individual man who felt that individual man grew ever more and more responsible for what he did, and what he learnt. At certain moments it appeared to him impossible to feel that individual man is only a member of the whole of the human race. But Neo-Platonism and Plotinism were so deep in him that he still could look only at the whole of humanity. And so this condition in the whole man, this condition of sin and mortality—was transferred into that of the impossibility to be free, the impossibility to be immortal; all humanity had thus fallen, had been diverted from its origin. And God, were He righteous, would have simply thrown humanity aside. But He is not only righteous, He is also merciful—so Augustine felt. Therefore, he decided to save a part of mankind, note well, a part. That is to say, God's decision destined a part of mankind to receive grace, whereby this part is to be led back from the condition of bondage and mortality to the condition of potential freedom and immortality, which, it is true, can only be realized after death. One part is restored to this condition. The other part of mankind—namely, the not-chosen—remains in the condition of sin. So mankind falls into these two divisions, into those that are chosen and those who are cast out. And if we regard humanity in this Augustinian sense, it falls simply into these two divisions: those who are destined for bliss without desert, simply because it is so ordained in the divine management, and those who, whatever they do, cannot attain grace, who are predetermined and predestined to damnation.

This view, which also goes by the name of Predestination, Augustine reached as a result of the way in which he regarded the whole of humanity. If it had sinned it deserved the fate of that part of humanity which was cast out. We shall speak tomorrow of the terrible spiritual battles which have resulted from this Predestination, how Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism grew out of it. But to-day I would add as a final remark: we now see how Augustine stands, a vivid fighting personality, between that view which reaches upward toward the spiritual, according to which humanity becomes a whole, and the urge in his soul to rise above human individuality to something spiritual which is free from material nature, but which, again, can have its origin only in individuality. This was just the characteristic feature of the age of which Augustine is the forerunner, that it was aware of something unknown to men in the old days—namely individual experience. To-day, after all, we accept a great deal as formula. But Klopstock was in earnest and not merely the maker of a phrase when he began his “Messiah” with the words: “Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man's salvation.” Homer began, equally sincerely: “Sing, O Goddess, of the wrath. ... “: or “Sing, O Muse, to me now of the man, far-travelled Odysseus.” These people did not speak of something that exists in individuality, they interpreted something of universal mankind, a race-soul, a Psyche. It is no empty phrase, when Homer lets the Muse sing, in place of himself. The feeling of individuality awakens later, and Augustine is one of the first of those who really feel the individual entity of man, with its individual responsibility. Hence, the dilemma in which he lived. The individual striving after the non-material spiritual was part of his own experience. There was a personal, subjective struggle in him. In later times that understanding of Plotinism, which it was still possible for Augustine to have, was—I might say—choked up. And after the Greek philosophers, the last followers of Plato and Plotinus, were compelled to go into exile in Persia, and after they had found their successors in the Academy of Jondishapur, this looking up to the spiritual triumphed in Western Europe—and only that remained which Aristotle had bequeathed to the after-world in the form of a filtered Greek philosophy, and then only in a few fragments. That continued to grow, and came in a roundabout way, via Arabia, back to Europe. This had no longer a consciousness of the idea world, and no Plotinism in it. And so the great question remained: Man must extract from himself the spiritual; he must produce the spiritual as an abstraction. When he sees lions and thereupon conceives the thought “lions” when he sees wolves and thereupon conceives the thought “wolves,” when he “sees man and thereupon conceives the thought” man these concepts are alive only in him, they arise out of his individuality. The whole question would have had no meaning for Plotinus; now it begins to have a meaning, and moreover a deep meaning.

Augustine, by means of the light Plotinism had shed into his soul, could understand the mystery of Christ-Jesus. Such Plotinism as was there was choked up. With the closing by the Emperor Justinian of the School of Philosophy at Athens in 529 the living connection with such views was broken off. Several people have felt deeply the idea: We are told of a spiritual world, by tradition, in Script—we experience by our individuality supernatural concepts, concepts that are removed from the material How are these concepts related to “being?” How so the nature of the world? What we take to be concepts, are these only something spontaneous in us, or have they something to do with the outer world? In such forms the questions appeared; in the most extreme abstractions, but such as were the deeply earnest concern of men and the mediaeval Church. In this abstract form, in this inner-heartedness they appeared in the two personalities of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Then again, they came to be called the questions between Realism and Nominalism. “What is our relationship to a world of which all we know is from conceptions which can come only from ourselves and our individuality?” That was the great question which the mediaeval schoolmen put to themselves.

If you consider what form Plotinus had taken in Augustine's predestinationism, you will be able to feel the whole depth of this scholastic question: only a part of mankind, and that only through God's judgment, could share in grace, that is, attain to bliss; the other part was destined to eternal damnation from the first, in spite of anything it might do. But what man could gain for himself as the content of his knowledge came from that concept, that awful concept of Predestination which Augustine had not been able to transform—that came out of the idea of human individuality. For Augustine mankind was a whole; for Thomas each separate man was an individuality.

How does this great World-process in Predestination as Augustine saw it hang together with the experience of separate human individuality? What is the connection between that which Augustine had really discarded and that which the separate human individuality can win for itself? For consider: Because he did not wish to lay stress on human individuality, Augustine had taken the teaching of Predestination, and, for mankind's own sake, had extinguished human individuality. Thomas Aquinas had before him only the individual man, with his thirst for knowledge. Thomas had to seek human knowledge and its relationship to the world in the very thing Augustine had excluded from his study of humanity.

It is not sufficient, ladies and gentlemen, to put such a question abstractly and intellectually and rationally; it is necessary to grasp such a question with the whole heart, with the whole human personality. Only then shall we be able to assess the weight with which this question oppressed those men who, in the thirteenth century, bore the burden of it.

The subject of our lecture today may at first seem surprising. But Theosophy does not just want to bring messages of supersensory research, but wants to let them flow into human life, bringing strength and the joy of working for life. It wants to be a kind of art of living, albeit under certain conditions. It is not something that wants to be quickly established, but rather, Theosophy draws from sources of deep knowledge. Therefore, it cannot seek to win over many people; it is not a doctrine that wants to be promoted with fanaticism to broad circles. [A movement of this kind must keep its distance from fanaticism.] The theosophist must make the opposite of fanaticism his most important quality – [understanding of people should be the theosophist's hallmark.] He must be able to penetrate [into the souls of others], into the souls of opponents [and gain understanding for the justified refutations].

And who would want to deny that there is much to be said against Theosophy in a deeply justified way? After all, Theosophy or spiritual science speaks of the most sacred and dignified matters, and does so more to the heart than to reason. And the heart is easily inclined to surrender to things that might speak of an increase in vitality. To penetrate into the depths of what Theosophy means, a long journey is necessary, which by no means all those who agree with the Theosophical life out of the heart take.

If someone approaches Theosophy in our time, it must be admitted that this is very difficult. One concern after another piles up. Therefore, a scientifically educated person in particular cannot easily find his way around – with a genuine sense of truth. In addition, there are many things today that are called Theosophy, but which are not very useful. Therefore, the elementary principles of what we would like to call Theosophy should be described first, [before moving on to the concerns].

First of all, we must be clear about the structure of the human being. Man does not consist only of the physical body, not only of what we can perceive with our brain-bound mind, but it must be asserted that the physical body is integrated with a sum of higher, supersensible , namely, first of all, the etheric or life body, by which the physical body is permeated throughout. The etheric body ensures that the physical body does not follow the forces of the external physical world. It only follows these forces when it is abandoned by the etheric body at death. Then the physical forces act on the components of the human body and cause them to disintegrate and dissolve. The existence of this etheric body can be determined through clairvoyant research. But it can also be seen that it is necessary, that we need a fighter against the otherwise inevitable physical decay. Other living beings are also endowed with an etheric body as long as they are living beings. Plants also have it.

In addition to this, human beings also have a consciousness soul or an astral body. This we have in common with the animal world. It is the carrier of all the drives, passions and desires we have in our lives. What we no longer have in common with animals is what we call our human sense of self. The fact that we can say “I” to ourselves makes us human beings the pinnacle of creation. From the moment when the child becomes capable of saying “I” to itself, our human consciousness, our memory begins. We therefore distinguish between a physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I.

But that is not the only way in which Theosophy differs from the generally held view. It also considers the inner core of a person's being, the I, to be more than just an earthly existence between birth and death. Theosophy seeks to show that not everything that is expressed through the I in a person has been determined in just one lifetime. Rather, this central core of the human being comes from earlier stages of existence. In a sense, the human being forms his own body before he fully enters it with his sense of self. Then there is the further claim of Theosophy: After death, the human being only discards his physical shell, but the core of his being also lives on after physical death, only to enter into a renewed physical life later on.

The changing fortunes of human beings can only be understood by grasping the repeated lives of the same human being on earth. We see one person living a miserable and unhappy life, while another is happy. Science must ask about the causes of this tremendous inequality of life's destinies. Spiritual science claims that a person has built his own destiny in his previous life; depending on how he lives now, his following destiny in the future life will be shaped.

That it can be so is already evident to a certain degree from the course of his present life. If someone emigrates to America, for example, his fate will essentially be shaped by what he was in Europe. What he has learned here will be very important for his progress and the way he lives over there. Whether he was a shoemaker or a banker here, for example, will have a very significant influence on the way he lives his life over there. But after he has been in America for a while, he will have learned new things and will have become a different person. In order for a person to mature, different destinies are necessary; this cannot possibly all happen in a single life between birth and death. The fruits of our previous lives ripen for us in the present life, and what we learn now will benefit our later life.

Theosophy thus teaches the immortality of the central core of the human being. Between death and a new birth, the soul goes through very different, purely spiritual states of longer duration.

Regarding the state of sleep, Theosophy says that in this state, the physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed; the astral body and the ego, that is, that which is the carrier of consciousness, emerges and lives during sleep in supersensible worlds.

The whole appears as a closed system. We will see in what way theosophy draws its knowledge of this system. This happens through clairvoyant research. How do you acquire this ability? It can be said that these clairvoyant powers can be awakened in man through meditation. In this way, the soul can be made into an instrument of spiritual research, and indeed into a research that is just as exact and methodical as the research that chemists and physicists use physical means for to study matter. In this way, dormant powers are brought to the surface within the human being. We recall Goethe's words about the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears that can be opened in man.

Having said this, we turn to the objections to Theosophy. Of course, we cannot exhaust all the objections to Theosophy. We will only consider a few that may present serious and significant difficulties for an honest conviction. If you are completely under the spell of modern science, you may come to the following conclusion when you first study Theosophy; you can [rightly] say: Yes, I believe that women who are not critically minded [who do not critically examine science but follow the urge of the heart] and have not learned to think logically, can have their world puzzles solved by this spiritual science. And, as far as I am concerned, the same applies to men who do not know science. Just note this: you believe that you need an etheric body as the carrier of the life forces in the body. Do you not know that you are thereby amateurishly reaching back into the time when it was assumed that organically formed substances could not be produced in the laboratory, but only in the living organism? Therefore, in those days, it had to be assumed that special vital forces were at work in all living things. But progressive research [in the nineteenth century] has shown that the simplest of these substances can be produced in the laboratory by purely chemical means, just as they can in a living organism. This dealt a fatal blow to the old doctrine of the life force – vis vitalis – or life ether, because it proved, albeit initially only in the simplest of organisms, that the organic structure of nature is built in the same way as the non-living, inorganic. It is a very serious and worthy thought that once the beginning of the chemical production of the organic has been made, it will continue, even if few substances can be produced in this way at present. This is experimental proof that the same laws apply to the inanimate as to the animate. It is therefore ignorance when Theosophy still speaks of the fact that life in a body can only be explained by a life body. Such a researcher can say: What subtle research had to gradually strive to elucidate, you theosophists simply want to make easy with your fantastic life body. You claim that it is visible to the supersensible faculty of cognition, but the above proves that it is not needed at all, it is not necessary. But it must be a serious first requirement for serious knowledge that it makes no unnecessary assumptions. He who weighs things as theosophists should do, should feel that there is much earnestness and dignity in such an objection.

But let us look further. Theosophy claims that an astral body and an ego are needed to explain the phenomena of consciousness. We can indeed concede what even strict researchers such as Du Bois-Reymond say, that what we experience in us as inner life is not possible from purely material processes within the brain. So let us assume that we have to do without an explanation for the time being and write the famous “Ignorabimus” below it. But is it justified to say that when something different, something supersensory, emerges from matter, that this is an independent entity? An opponent of Theosophy could say this with some justification. He could point to magnetic forces, which do indeed emanate from an inorganic substance, the magnet, and are bound to it. So after all, a supersensible power such as magnetism is produced out of material substance. Furthermore, it is no different with the development of the other forces, for example, with the force of gravity that is bound to the planets. Why should it not be the same with what we scientifically know as states of excitation of the brain, and what takes place in the consciousness and inner life of man? There is absolutely no compulsion to explain the phenomena of consciousness differently. Even what has not yet been researched can be explained in this way. In any case, the hasty assumption of an astral body to explain these processes is amateurish. Even where we are still forced to remain ignorant, we must wait patiently for serious research to say something about it.

What used to be the horror of horrors in science, the so-called theory of potentialities [in psychology], lies behind us. There, a system was built on the premise that if the soul can think, then it has the potential to think. It can feel, so it has the potential to feel. According to this, the soul was a system of nothing but nested concepts of capacity, without realizing that they had not explained anything, but had only put words in the place of something. Now the opponent can say: Isn't your astral and etheric body just as much something nested and unrecognized as the old doctrine of capacity was? Such a thing can rightly be objected.

So Theosophy is not for someone who stands on the ground of in-depth modern scientific knowledge. To such a person, Theosophy appears to be somewhat dilettantish compared to the demands of rigorous research. Furthermore, Theosophy says: During sleep, the astral body and the ego leave the human body with the consciousness. Since they are not present with what remains in bed, they must still be found somewhere. Where else should they be present than in a spiritual world? On the other hand, serious science asks: Is it necessary to invoke a special, supernatural explanation for this state of sleep when the scientifically given explanations are sufficient? It is perfectly possible to explain sleep quite simply. The scientifically applied method views the matter quite differently. It says: When we are awake, the organism wears out. Toxins are formed as a result of the activity carried out by the excited brain during the waking state. When so many toxins have accumulated, they kill consciousness through mechanical or chemical action, which means that sleep sets in. Now it is not the organs that otherwise generate consciousness that are at work, but other organs that continue to work in the human being, which in turn destroy the poisons in the body that the activity of the organs of consciousness has produced, and so on. Such a self-regulatory hypothesis is entirely possible. But if it is possible to explain the alternation of sleep and waking with it, then it is not permissible to say anything else about it. The theosophical theory is at least a daring assumption. The true facts will only be able to be explained gradually, and until then one must stick to the obvious and simplest explanation of these phenomena.

What about the theosophical assertion of the repetition of earthly lives? Theosophy shows how man develops from childhood; this cannot possibly be explained by mere inheritance. Children of the same parents are fundamentally different, and so on. Therefore, something must be added that is not inherited, that is already present in the life germ of the newborn human being, and that can only be explained by repeated lives on earth. For example, twins can be different despite simultaneous inheritance.

The scientific objection to this is as follows: What constitutes the essence of a person is not something that is inherited from a single father or mother, but from a long chain of ancestors. If Theosophy now says: If you attribute everything to heredity, why is there any individuality at all in the development of each person? The objection is as follows: People must therefore be different because so many different influences flow into each individual's life, [which has a transforming effect on people from early childhood on]. Genius is a particularly good example of this. It emerges, endowed with special qualities, which we can, however, already find in the various ancestors. In the case of genius, they are then combined as a grand total. Brentano explains the soul work in geniuses as being able to quickly piece thoughts together, and thus only in a certain increase over ordinary human thought activity. This easier mobility in the brain molecules can only be inherited. The spiritual researcher says, however, This is actually not very logical. The genius is at the end of an inheritance line; it should be at the beginning of the same if it is to be inherited by the descendants. The objection [against this] of the easier excitability in the brain of the genius must apply, and it can therefore be concluded on the part of science: this increased excitability causes the brain to wear down more quickly. Is it any wonder that the reproductive process is affected in a genius, because his brain wears down more quickly? This is a legitimate objection. However, modern science is particularly suspicious of what is referred to as clairvoyant talent. We have to admit that extrasensory experiences do exist. Such perceptions are different from natural perception. This also occurs pathologically in what we usually call hallucinations, for example. It is therefore not surprising when the scientist says: Where is the possibility to recognize the truth and establish objective facts? How do we know that these are not simply subjective experiences? The strict scientist is careful to only call scientifically that which can be objectively verified. But the strict scientific epistemological methods are not applicable to the results of training in the humanities. What supposedly presents itself to the clairvoyant is only a world of images. Even in pathological conditions, it is only reminiscences of reality. It turns out, for example, that clairvoyants have only been able to see a train since trains have existed. In books about clairvoyant experiences, we only ever find what was actually present at the time, combined just a little differently. After all, it is combined from the warmth and cold, light and shade of real life. For example, it is said that the astral body is blue, red, yellow and so on, just like the known physical paints. These are the colors of the physical as they are seen, so nothing new. Such appearances have a pathological background, are only hallucinations and really add nothing new to our knowledge. The mere ability to combine external properties is quite sufficient to explain them.

Theosophists must understand that such objections arise from the deepest, most earnest deliberation of precisely the most serious contemporaries. Those who have grown old in scientific ideas are not easily convinced by theosophical objections.

But Theosophy also comes with religious, moral and ethical ideas and impulses. Can that be right?

The first objection that comes to mind is this: if Theosophy views life in such a way that the present life is seen as the result of past experiences, then interest in life itself wanes. Such a view thus amounts to an education in fatalism. It is a paralysis of life when you can think, “I have time; there are many lives ahead of me.” The objection is actually trivial to take, but it is practically correct, because people are indeed casual by nature.

And the prospect of a supersensible world, how does it express itself ethically? Necessarily in such a way that interest in practical life diminishes. You can see this, for example, in the artist who does not want to devote himself to the practical. Such a view of life makes one ascetic, hostile to life, and paralyzing instead of stimulating. One often sees wonderful people among the Theosophists who live in a kind of cloud-cuckoo-land. Women in particular are easily found to have become self-indulgent and out of touch with reality. This cannot be logically refuted, but only through life itself.

Furthermore, one could say: You have made ethics a result of selfishness. Whoever does good, according to your view, expects a reward in karmic compensation. Whoever does evil, or wants to do evil, refrains from it out of fear of the corresponding evil in the next life. So the doctrine of karma is actually a doctrine of education? A higher form of selfishness! What a person sows, he must reap - [this] is ultimately a selfish principle of life. Thus, Theosophy is also ethically and morally life-threatening.

Furthermore, you transfer divine world justice into the human being himself by letting him work out his destiny in various earthly lives. You thereby transfer that which otherwise lives in the Godhead outside of us as a punishing or rewarding God into the human being himself. Man is thereby deified. Where is the free love of God when the divine is transferred into one's own inner being? Into the inner being of man? - The opponent can say: It is in contradiction to a truly religious world view when one transfers the self-sacrifice of God, the redemption of man out of divine grace, into the inner being of man himself.

Such objections could be multiplied many times over. Devotion to an external God is a fundamental condition of ethics and religion, and this finds no justification in Theosophy. This is how it can be expressed; and we must learn to understand this fully as Theosophists, only then can we keep ourselves free from fanaticism. Only the most important guidelines could be given here. They should also teach us tolerance towards our opponents. We should not try to beat them out of the field, but above all strive to learn to understand them.

Let us now show by way of example how this is to be understood. In 1868, the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann wrote a book called “The Philosophy of the Unconscious”. Although some of it is unmethodical and flawed and not useful to us, it is based on certain spiritual principles and touches on deep existential issues. This book caused quite a stir when it was published. It was, after all, the time of the reign of the most blatant materialism. This book strangely touched the fanatical materialists such as Haeckel and other Darwinists. They found the book extremely amateurish. Many counter-writings against the book were published. But one anonymous refutation caused a particularly great stir. It presented everything that could be objected to Eduard von Hartmann's book in such a methodical and complete way, and with such keen insight, that Oscar Schmidt, for example, said: “It's a shame that the unknown author didn't identify himself.” Haeckel himself said, “He should identify himself, and we will consider him one of our own.” Soon the second edition of this writing was necessary. This time the anonymous author named himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann! This second edition did not have the same success with Hartmann's opponents – [their praise soon died down.]

This is a good example of how one can see beyond one's opponent and judge more correctly in the opponent's interest than the opponent himself.

Much more could be said, but for now we must be satisfied with what has been said. It does not take the worst to be seen sprouting from Theosophy. We must therefore endeavor to learn to understand our opponents.

I have tried to show how Theosophy can be refuted. The day after tomorrow it should become clear whether the refutation is final or whether, nevertheless, reasons can be put forward that will be valid against this fight - which, as we have seen, can be waged with a certain justification.

This evening's public lecture will discuss re-embodiment and karma, and it may be appropriate for us to choose a topic for our branch lecture that delves deeper into some questions of the law of karma and, in some respects, provides a more intimate supplement to what can only be given in general terms in the public lecture.

Karma, the great law of existence, the law of fate, can be discussed, so to speak, in the very first rudiments of spiritual science, because it is something that belongs to the most elementary things in the world view. But the more intimate questions are such that, in order to understand them, a familiarity with spiritual science is needed that can only be found if one has worked for a while in a study group and has not acquired empty theories, but what flows quite unnoticed from the spiritual teachings into the human soul: a certain kind of sensations and feelings. This is something that every spiritual aspirant soon notices: that spiritual science is something other than just another worldview, because it gives us concepts and ideas that are transformed into feelings and sensations in our hearts, and that we become different people through it, people with a completely different way of relating to our fellow human beings.

This kind of preparation is meant when we speak of a relative inner maturity, which one acquires in this way through spiritual science. We know that karma initially means the spiritual causation of a later event, a later quality or ability in a person, through a previous one. It does not matter whether this spiritual causation occurs in a life between birth and death, or whether it extends through the various earthly lives as the great law of fate for humanity, so that the causes for something happening in one life lie in a previous life or one that lies far in the past – this law, this all-encompassing law of fate, is what we call karma. If one wants to consider the details of karma, one can talk for many months and even longer, and only slowly and gradually can one grasp the things associated with it. Therefore, in a lecture one can only state the facts of the law of karma in a narrative way, and then the maturity of the spiritual seeker shows itself in that he can accept these things as facts, as results, and then reflect on them further and seek them out in life. The individual life shows the effects of karma in the most diverse ways; only the human view of life usually does not go very far. People usually observe themselves or their fellow human beings with attention for only a short period of life, because their view is not sharpened by the spiritual eye.

I would first like to discuss how little this is the case, so that you can get an idea of how the spiritual view can be developed in ordinary life. This will be done by means of a kind of personal experience. Some of you may already know that I have spent fifteen years of my life as an educator, with a wide range of educational responsibilities, including perhaps difficult ones, where problems arose that could only be solved through prolonged observation and study. It is obvious that in the course of such activities I had the opportunity to make observations, not only of the children directly under my charge, but also of their relatives, their cousins, who were always around. One sees how they grow up, and one can observe a large circle of people entering the world. Now, anyone who has followed life a little, sharpened with spiritual vision, can perceive many things in such details. For example, during the time when I was engaged in that activity, a widespread but then extremely respected medical bad habit was in vogue, which consisted of wanting to keep the children “in good shape” by giving them a small glass of red wine every day. It was fashionable at the time for doctors to have the little tykes take a glass of red wine with each meal. This prescription was conscientiously followed by the parents. Now I had the opportunity to observe such children, those who had been treated this way and those who had not. When you are in the prime of life, you can observe people who were still children when you met them in a variety of ways. The children who were treated to this wine back then are now people between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-eight.

So I have had the opportunity, in the most diverse ways, not only to look at a few years, but also to survey larger periods of time. The people who were one to three years old when I met them and are now twenty-eight years old can be divided into exactly two groups: those who were given their glass of red wine to “strengthen them for life,” and those who were not given it. The former have become people who today, in the physical sense, have to struggle terribly with their nervous system - in spiritual terms, with their astral body. They have become people who lack what is called: holding firmly to a goal in life, having backbone; while those who went without wine in their youth have become people who have backbone, who are firmly grounded, who know what they want, who don't need to go here and there for recreation when their business allows them the least, and who, because they have become fidgety people, don't get that recreation after all. The others, on the other hand, have become firmer individuals. I do not just want to point out how it is when you approach such a person again after years, but rather that life looks a little different when you look at it in terms of the connection between cause and effect, not just as far as the person's nose reaches, but also the larger and deeper connections of causes and effects.

This, too, is the highest form of observation of life when we try to observe people with regard to the qualities that are of an inner, karmic nature. Unfortunately, it is a fact that people do not usually connect the beginning of a person's life with its end. People do observe children, but who has the patience, where they have the opportunity to do so, to observe what follows the way a person's soul life was in the first childhood years and then again what life is like when the course of life is coming to an end? And yet there is a very definite karmic connection between the beginning and the end of life. Certain things that occur at the end of life or in the second half of life are based on very specific causes in the early years or youth of life.

Let us take a specific case, for example a person who, in early youth, is angry, hot-tempered, and easily inclined to become angry about something that happens in his or her environment. This anger, and especially the sudden anger that occurs in children, can take on two forms. It can be, so to speak, merely what is called a bad habit, which in a sense is merely an outburst, a rage-like outburst of excessive selfishness. But it can also be something else. One must learn, especially as an educator, to distinguish these two types from each other. A child's outburst of anger can also be what we encounter when a child sees an injustice happening around him. A child does not yet have the power of judgment, cannot yet say to himself with his mind what is happening. If one were to try to explain that what is happening is not wrong, one would soon become convinced that the child cannot yet understand this. Therefore, it is grounded in the world order, in the spiritual guidance of the world, that what later appears as the power of judgment comes to light in childhood in the form of affects, emotions. The child cannot yet understand what is happening, but it becomes angry. This anger, this affect is a preceding soul proclamation of what later is the power of judgment. These two types of anger and irascibility must be clearly distinguished from each other. Anger in the first case must be treated in such a way that the child lives out this anger as much as possible by really feeling the effects of this anger in the right way and also the wrong of the anger. For if, for instance, out of love, one always does for the child the things by which it gets the fulfillment of its will, then anger misses its effect. Anger always has an effect in the soul. Where anger arises in the soul and is not resolved by achieving what it strives for, it strikes back into the inner being. And that is good. That is why popular language, which often has a keen sense for such things, calls anger “poison” in various places where the German language is spoken. To be angry is to poison oneself. This word is truly taken from the facts of mental life. Anger enters the soul, and through the effect of anger within, when it strikes back, the excess egoism is pushed out. So even anger has its good. It is an educator of the human being, it works like a poison that dampens excessive selfishness.

Something quite different is the anger that arises when a child sees an injustice. This anger is a judgment in advance. It is justified. In this case, one must not merely try to punish – by punishing one would merely drive the anger back inside – but one must try to use this emotion in the child to gradually teach him understanding, to teach him the power of judgment. This anger can be overcome by developing the power of judgment. If a child becomes angry when witnessing an injustice, then the following would happen: The child would be introduced to a kind of understanding that the injustice is done by human nature; depending on his maturity, he would be given an explanation of what happened. Then such anger will also have its right effect. It will prepare the child to judge the world, because it is a harbinger of the power of judgment. This is said to draw attention to the fact that man is not always unjustifiably angry. Anger has its value for the development of man. Man must purify himself, he must overcome anger. Anger is something that has a beneficial effect when it is overcome. Man could never ascend to perfection without overcoming anger.

Now one might ask: Why is there anger in the world government? There is anger because one becomes strong by overcoming it; one becomes more powerful over oneself by overcoming it. If you observe someone who had that noble anger in their youth, in the years when idealism arises, when something filled them with anger because they were not yet able to see the deeper connections, then in their later years, you can see that in old age the good effect of this arises. On the other hand, anyone who in youth was unable to overcome anger, to purify himself, to become master of his passions, will not easily attain in later years that mild activity which touches so pleasantly. For mildness is precisely the effect of anger overcome. Mildness in old age is the effect of anger overcome in youth.

A quite different effect is produced by the soul quality of devotion, which likewise makes its appearance in youth. It consists in man's acquiring a feeling for what he is not yet able to comprehend. Wrath is a rejection of what we cannot yet understand; devotion is a looking up to what we cannot yet comprehend, an attitude of respect for what we are not yet equal to. No one can come to knowledge who cannot worship that which is above him in devotion. Devotion is the best path to knowledge. Men would never come to knowledge if they had not first worshipped from the dark background those spiritual powers that stand above them. Devotion is a force that leads up to what one wants to achieve. Therefore it is basically necessary that devotion be developed. The person who, in later life, can look back on many moments of devotion will look back on them with bliss. If it has occurred to you that in your early childhood you have heard your family talk about a family member who is said to be very revered, and if as a child you have also taken this feeling in, and the day approaches when you can see this personality for the first time – if you then have a holy awe to press the latch of the door behind which the revered person is to appear, that too is a very devout feeling, and we will have much of it in later life if we have had several such moods in our youth.

Devotion is the reason, the karmic cause of the power of blessing in later life, in the second half of life. That power, which flows out and enables us to be a comforter to others, is gained through nothing other than a devotional mood in youth. Look around you, wherever there is a person who comes to others who are sad, who then only needs to be there to comfort the sad with his mere presence, to be their comforter, to spread active love - you will find: the karmic cause for this active power lies in those devotional moods of youth. The power that is poured into the soul of the growing person as devotion is something permanent in him; it runs like a current through the soul and comes to light as a blessing power at a later age. We could consider many cases where the law of karma is already working distinctly between birth and death.

Let us now take a closer look at the law of karma in a specific case in a particular life. Suppose a young person had been studying. At the age of eighteen, the father would have gone bankrupt. The young person would therefore have to stop studying, he would be torn out of the profession for which he had been prepared; he would have to take a different career path. Now, of course, all professions are equal; we are only interested in the facts of the change of profession. So the young man had to become a merchant. Now, if you are not a student of life, you will say: Well, the event happened, and you will observe what happened before and what happened after. But only someone who really observes life with a keen eye will discover a connection between what came before and what came after. If the young man is now in the other profession and everything goes normally – I will not say that it always goes normally, but it can go normally – we will be able to see something different in the later years of life. At first, the profession is new to him. He grasps what is relevant to him. But already in the twenty-first year it will become apparent that something is different about this man compared to a man who has been prepared for the commercial profession from the very beginning: in the twenty-first year it already becomes apparent that he has less interest in what is incumbent upon him in his profession. Certain feelings arise in his soul and separate him from what he should be doing, so that he cannot do what is demanded of him with true satisfaction. If one now investigates the cause of this, one will perceive the following: When a particular point is reached where the course of life is changed, a life knot, for example when a change of occupation occurs, then according to the law of karma little is noticeable in the first few years. But then it comes, so that in the twenty-first year feelings, sensations, moods assert themselves, which can be explained from what comes from the preparations for the other profession in the eighteenth year, feelings that he has taken up but not led to realization. At first he suppressed them, but then they asserted themselves to such an extent that he no longer felt satisfied with his new profession. What was placed in him three years before the change of career will emerge three years after that change in such a way that the person concerned can no longer find the right satisfaction. And from there, things can happen in such a way that in the twenty-second year, the fourteenth year of life is repeated, and in the twenty-third year, the thirteenth. It can also turn out differently because everything in life intersects. In the twenty-third year, for example, he can start a household; interests arise that intersect with the past ones and make them run differently. But the law is still valid. Even when a new interest arises, the earlier interests are still there, having been deflected. From such an example you can see the course of the life process as it presents itself to spiritual science. It is the least that one can gain all kinds of insights through spiritual science; but the most important thing is that through it one can penetrate into the life process. Let us suppose – I never relate cases that have not occurred; one must acquire the habit of never inventing anything, but always choosing cases that have actually occurred – so a mother comes to me who has to lead her only son into another profession because his father has been taken from him. In today's world, the right thing is hardly likely to happen, because true observation of life can hardly be reconciled with today's view of life. If such a mother becomes acquainted with spiritual science, she learns to reckon with the law of karma and can become a good friend of the young man who is to be guided through the years of such a career change. This was the case some time ago. A mother came to me and said, “What is my best life's work?” I said she should use the next few years to gain her son's trust. Then she could use spiritual science to educate his mind so that she could help him when certain events occur. The feelings of piety that had been implanted in his soul would assert themselves strongly in all later years, and she would be able to see correctly what would certainly happen. If one day the son comes home and says, “I don't know what to do with my life, my job gives me no satisfaction,” then she will be able to trace it back to what happened earlier. She will recognize the cause and will instinctively find out how to help her son overcome his difficulty. She will certainly be better able to do so than if she had no idea how karma works and only believed that mood swings and depression arise out of something trivial. Nothing comes into being without a cause; but often the causes lie much closer than one might think. We just have to observe such a node, trace life back from there and see what takes a different course. It is like this: Imagine you have a violin string. You have stretched it and stroke it with a suitable object. The string produces a certain sound. If you now hold it in the middle, something happens on both sides: the string vibrates on both sides. There are events in life of which one can observe how what happens before is reflected afterwards.

The middle of life is also such a crossroads. What is prepared in youth comes out in old age. It is necessary to pay attention to these things so that one can gradually really get a feeling that spiritual science is not impractical, but that one's whole life can be shaped practically from a spiritual point of view. A mere life of love is of no use if wisdom is not combined with love. Love must combine with wisdom, with the realization of what is right. Love alone is not enough to live by.

We can mention another case that occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century and has been carefully examined. A mother raised her little daughter. She had seen how this little daughter started to take things, to steal. But she could not bring herself to punish her in her love, which is, after all, an excellent quality. The little daughter stole once or twice, a third time and did other things; and if you follow the course of her life, you will see that the child became a famous poisoner. Here you have love that is not united with wisdom. Love must be imbued with the light of wisdom. Love can only truly unfold when it is imbued with wisdom. How else can a friend help a young person to develop, to guide them through important moments in their lives, if one knows that there is a law that sometimes shows the causes of an event quite clearly, causes that would not be understood without knowledge of the law? It would be right not just to know in general terms that there is a law of karma, but to follow karma in detail by acquiring a correct worldview. The student of spiritual science must seriously endeavor to familiarize himself with the concrete working of these laws and know how they manifest in life. This is the most important thing: not to bandy phrases about Karma, but to get involved in observing the laws in life. This is necessary!

Now I would like to tell you something else. One can also single out a few cases that relate to karma that passes from one life to another. Of course, here too one can only limit oneself to individual cases. So let us consider a question regarding a person's inner karma, which comes about because basically a person must always be a dual entity in life. If you observe life, you will have to say to yourself: when a person comes into existence through birth, two things have to be distinguished. One is what he has inherited from his ancestors. For example, Schiller inherited the shape of his nose from his grandfather; but what is specifically Schiller's, he has not inherited, but that comes from his previous incarnations, his previous embodiments. On the one hand, there is the hereditary stream of that which is passed on through generations; on the other hand, there is that which the person takes from one life to the next. Those who have acquired an eye for the spiritual will always ask themselves how much a person has from their parents and how much comes from their previous incarnation.

In a rational sense, one cannot teach differently unless one can make this distinction. The art of education will only receive the right form when people have learned to distinguish between these two currents. Only at the end of the evolution of the earth will these two currents flow together so that the human being will be able to find the body into which he fits. At the present time this is not yet possible. If a complete fitting together of outer physicality and inner individual organization were to take place in our present time, it would be impossible for a person to die before normal age due to inner causes; because dying is not something accidental, but a disharmony, then premature dying could not occur, since harmony would prevail in man. But as it is, this disharmony between what has been inherited and what has been brought from a previous incarnation can become so strong that it causes death to occur earlier.

If people would only pay a little attention to spiritual teachings, they could grasp reincarnation with their own hands today – this is not to be taken figuratively, but literally – if only materialistic theories would interpret the corresponding facts correctly instead of incorrectly. This can be demonstrated in certain cases. There are people who have not progressed very far in their development, so that their feelings are still completely rooted in their sentient soul. Their whole consciousness is connected with the sentient soul. And this can be seen from people's outward gestures: they betray certain causes that lie in the astral body. When a person is still completely immersed in the sentient soul, when he feels really good inside, it happens, for example, when he has had a good meal, that he slaps his body with pleasure. This is a sign that he still has a too strong sentient soul. When a person is deeply immersed in the mind soul, this also manifests itself. Because the sense of truth is located in the mind, a person who is immersed in the mind soul or mind will pat himself on the chest when affirming a truth. A person who is deeply immersed in the consciousness soul will touch his nose when he is deeply pondering something. What relates to the sentient soul is expressed in the lower body; what relates to the mind or emotional soul is expressed in the chest, and what relates to the consciousness soul is expressed in the head: one also scratches behind the ears. I only mention this to show how what is in the astral body is expressed in the physical body.

Now the following can occur. Man can take into his consciousness the highest feelings and ideas and ideals that he can have at all in this cycle of time; for example, our ethical ideals, which alone should be proof enough for man of the existence of a spiritual world. If we are inspired by an inner voice for these ethical ideals, and devote ourselves to these high ideals, the stimulus for this cannot come from outside. Now this can go so far that a person elevates something that he feels without ideals to the level of these ideals, so that he does not live according to a particular idea out of a sense of duty, but because he can no longer do otherwise. For the one who allows himself to be permeated by a moral idea, it will come about that he becomes so immersed in this idea that he commands himself what is right in its sense. Thus the ideals must light up in the consciousness soul, then they flow down and become instincts.

When this happens, when man has so imbued his feelings with his ideals, then something special asserts itself. These instincts strive to express themselves all the way to the physical body. But between birth and death, man can no longer work on his physical body. So certain currents go through the chest to the head. If someone is enthusiastic about an ideal, is glowing for it and full of fire, so that he feels with love: that should happen - he will devote himself to it in this life, will do anything for it. But that is not all. Through this activity, currents go up to the upper part of the human head. These are forces that seek to work up to the physical body; but they can no longer change the head in this life, because even if one ennobles oneself in such a way, one's physical body is no longer capable of being shaped. But these forces still flow upwards. These currents remain with the person in his soul, and when the person passes through death and a new birth, he brings them with him into a new existence. This is where phrenology finds its individual justification: these acquired forces emerge in the bumps on the skull. You cannot say that this bump expresses this in general, but rather that which the individuality has often associated with it in this way during the previous life and which could no longer reshape the body, that is expressed here.

So these predispositions go through life between death and new birth, and we really grasp what the person has so often let flow into himself in the previous life. You really grasp reincarnation and karma when you feel the different bumps and humps on the head. But we must be aware that each person has their own laws; these humps must not be judged in general, but on an entirely individual basis. So, for example, we take a hump and know: it is the work that the person did on their soul in their previous life. So you can grasp karma and reincarnation, grasp them with your hands! In this way, you can learn from spiritual science right down to the shape of the body.

Just as the physical form lives on from a previous life into a later one, so do other things carry over. However, one must not look at all these things in a fussy way. One must not believe that the law of karma is as cut as a civil code; it can only be understood through extensive studies.

Let us consider a great misfortune that causes deep pain. We often look at it wrongly because we only ever look at the effect. We then see that an event has occurred that has made us unhappy and thrown us off course. We only see the effect. However, we should look for the cause. We might find the following: Yes, in a previous life there was the possibility of acquiring this or that ability. But we did not do it, we neglected it. So we passed through the gate of death without having acquired this ability. Now, in the following life, those forces, which are already karmic forces, drive us to misfortune. If we had acquired that ability in the previous life, the power would not have driven us to misfortune. It is through this misfortune that we now acquire this ability. Suppose this misfortune befalls us in the twentieth year, and in the thirtieth year we look back on it and ask ourselves: What made us acquire these or those abilities? Thus we recognize the purpose of this misfortune. We gain infinitely if we look at things not as an effect but as a cause for what they make of us. That is also an achievement of the doctrine of karma, to look at things as a cause. All these things are details of the law of karma. So you see that one should participate in anthroposophical life because one can learn a lot that otherwise remains only a general concept.

Something quite significant, which is connected with the law of karma, should still be pointed out. A person who comes into spiritual science and hears that there is the possibility of acquiring spiritual abilities, of growing up to the gift of clairvoyance, might ask: Why is it always so difficult to learn what spiritual science says? This question may be justified, but it really does arise mostly from a misunderstanding on the part of many people who become acquainted with spiritual science only superficially, a misunderstanding they have about the connection between physical and spiritual life. They know that physical life is by no means inserted into human life unnecessarily. It has its mission, just like the life between death and a new birth in the spiritual world.

Let us ask ourselves the question: What about two people, one of whom, due to his karma from a previous life, is unable to develop his clairvoyant gift in this incarnation, but has to content himself with diligently acquiring anthroposophical knowledge through study, so that he can see how these things are to be understood – so he could only progress through study – and another to whom the opportunity was given to develop his clairvoyant gifts and to penetrate into the spiritual world? The latter could have the following attitude. He says to himself: I see into the spiritual world, I can see spiritual beings, why should I then still study books? I know there is a spiritual world, so why should I study anthroposophy? It is unfounded and boring. It is a recurring fact that people who are karmically fortunate enough to be clairvoyant say to themselves: We don't want to learn anything more now; why should we study now what is only given in dry terms? One person is able to study all the harder, but he cannot acquire the gift of clairvoyance; the other despises study, but his karma is so favorable that he can become a clairvoyant. What about these people after death, what is the overall picture? A person who has attained the gift of clairvoyance between birth and death, who could see into the spiritual world and see different things, but did not want to learn the theoretical concepts, who did not want to grasp the spiritual scientific information with logical thinking, who despised all of this, has nothing of it after death. He is no better informed than he was without the gift of clairvoyance that he had during his lifetime. That person is even better off who has not yet been able to see clairvoyantly in his physical life, but who was not prevented from forming a logical concept of the spiritual world by reading.

However, this is not meant as an instruction to be lazy and do nothing to develop the spiritual senses. No one can know whether he will not yet acquire the gift of clairvoyance before his death. For those who have studied the spiritual-scientific world view, these concepts now transform into real insights. What one acquires here through concepts will not be lost, it remains. There is an obligation: No matter how highly initiated one is, if one could see so highly but could not penetrate what one has seen with concepts, one would still gain nothing from it. Man should not stop at mere looking, but should invest everything with concepts drawn from physical life. Human beings are called upon to really absorb within themselves all that they can experience on earth. That which is lacking in the spiritual world must be acquired in the physical world and must be carried up.

The above is connected with something much more significant. There is something that people could never have learned in the spiritual world. No event could ever have been learned in the spiritual world if man had not been led down to the physical earth and gone through the incarnations. All spiritual beings that do not incarnate cannot learn about one event: that is death. There is no death in the astral world and even higher; one cannot experience it there. Hence there is the old principle in esoteric philosophy: If gods want to learn how to die, they have to go to Earth to learn it. This is a very profound truth. And there is something else connected with death: Man would never have attained self-awareness. Only by repeatedly passing through the gate of death and shedding his covers at the end of each incarnation does he come to true awareness of the self. Man must learn to overcome death. Without death entering the world, man would not have come to know self-awareness. Thus death had to become the great teacher of the physical world. This is connected with a great event. If it had never descended to physical earth, if it had always remained up in the spiritual spheres, man would never have been able to experience what is the greatest event in the evolution of the earth: the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Christ event can only be experienced between birth and death. And precisely therein consists the greatness of this event, that a God descended from the heights of heaven and shared the fate of men. Only on earth could He fulfill this mystery. Never could the Mystery of Golgotha have been established anywhere in the spiritual world. To teach people the victory over death, a God had to descend from spiritual heights to die on earth. And this event, understood by man on earth, is the greatest thing that can flow into the earthly incarnation of man. This is the greatest thing that man can take with him when he leaves the physical earth through the gate of death. Man could never comprehend the magnitude of the Christ if he had not learned on earth what the Christ is. When he has learned this on earth, he can retain it and take it with him into the spiritual world.

Humanity could never have come to know the Christ if He had not descended, developed the physical body and had the opportunity on earth to understand the death of a God. This event had to take place, for it is of significance for all future times. Humanity will in turn develop backwards in the spiritual world. Before, it knew nothing of the Christ Impulse; on earth it had to learn it, and now it will be carried up, taken along by all those who on earth have acquired an understanding for it. With this understanding, which is gradually acquired on earth, with that event in the soul, man lives on in the following incarnations and also in those lives that elapse between death and birth. People will understand more and more what Golgotha is. The Christ will live more and more. And when the earth is physically destroyed, when only the souls, the spirits of people remain, they will look back on the evolution of the earth and say: We had to go through a development in a world where we prepared ourselves for the Christ. Then this mystery came, the development continued, we understood the event of Palestine better and better, we digested it in our lives between birth and death, and when this great mystery was understood, the earth was ripe to disappear again, because we incorporated what was the most important thing in the whole earth evolution. We had to be on earth, we had to go through it to experience what cannot be experienced anywhere else. Now it has been carried up into the spiritual world, but the origin of what is now in the spiritual world was down there.

This is how your souls will feel when they have gone through many incarnations, when the earth as a physical planet has died and people will have ascended to a new existence. What is the most important heirloom of earth's evolution? What is the most important thing that we have taken with us, and that can only be experienced and lived on earth? The Mystery of Golgotha. Now we have the Christ in us. That is the significance of the sacrifice, that the Christ descended and underwent that event which people experience as death: to become ever more self-aware, to gain ever more strength, in order to take on the karma of the power of the Christ to an ever greater extent.

Thus we see how karma works in this significant instance, and how the understanding of the Christ is connected with the entire earthly karma of humanity. And humanity is to receive the Christ within itself. Man cannot fulfill earthly karma without having attained this understanding of the Christ. And the achievement of the goal on earth will be a karmic effect of the acquisition of the understanding of Christ. Thus we can say: We will understand the smallest as well as the greatest event when we consider the law of karma.

It is not without significance to observe in the anthroposophic movement itself, particularly amongst those first people who began, as one might say, by being just an ordinary audience, how the ground had, so to speak, to be conquered for Christianity. For the theosophic movement, in its association with Blavatsky's special personality, started out in every way from an anti-christian orientation.

This anti-christian orientation, which I mentioned in connection with the same phenomenon in a very different person, Friedrich Nietzsche, is one which I should like to examine a little in a clearer light before going further.

We must be quite clear ... it follows, indeed, from all the various studies which, in our circles more especially, have been directed to the Mystery of Golgotha ... we must be quite clear that the Mystery of Golgotha intervened as a fact in the evolution of mankind on earth. It must be taken, in the first place, as a fact. And if you go back to my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, and the treatment of the subject there, you will find already the attempt made there to examine the whole Mystery-life of ancient times with a view to the various impulses entering into it; and then to show how the different forces at work in the different, individual mysteries all came together in one, met in a harmony, and thereby made it possible for that which first, in the Mysteries, came before men so to speak in veiled form, to be then displayed openly before all men as an historic fact. So that in the Mystery of Golgotha we have the culmination in an external fact of the total essence of the ancient Mysteries. And then, that the whole stream of mankind's evolution became necessarily changed through the influences that came into it from the Mystery of Golgotha.—This is what I tried to show in this particular book.

Now, as I have often pointed out, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was enacted as a fact, there were still in existence remnants of the ancient Mystery-Wisdom. And by aid of these remnants of ancient Mystery-Wisdom, which passed on into the Gospels, as I described in the book,—it was possible for men to approach this Unique Event, which first really gives the Earth's evolution its meaning. The methods of knowledge which they needed to understand the Mystery of Golgotha could be taken from the ancient Mysteries. Rut it must be noted at the same time, that the whole life of the Mysteries is disappearing,—disappearing in the sense in which in old times it had existed and found its crown and culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha. And I pointed out too, that really, in the fourth century after Christ, all those impulses vanish, which mankind could still receive direct from the ancient way of knowledge, and that of this ancient way of knowledge there only remains more or less a tradition; so that here or there it is possible—for particular persons, for peculiar individuals, to bring these traditions again to life; but a continuous stream of evolution, such as the Mysteries presented in the old days, has ceased. And so all means, really, of under-standing the Mystery of Golgotha is lost.

The tradition continued to maintain itself. There were the Gospels,—at first kept secret by the ecclesiastical community, and then made public to the people in the various countries. There were the ritual observances. It was possible, during the further course of human history in the West, to keep the Mystery of Golgotha alive, so to speak, in remembrance. But the possibility of thus keeping it alive ceased with the moment when, in the fifth post-atlantean century, intellectualism came on the scene, with all that I spoke of yesterday as modern education. At this time there entered into mankind a science of natural objects,—a science which, were it only to evolve further the same methods as it has done hitherto, could never possibly lead to a comprehension of the spiritual world. To do so, these scientific methods require to be further extended: they require the extension they receive through anthroposophy. Rut if one stopped short at these natural science methods in their mere beginnings, as introduced by Copernicus, Galileo and the rest, then, in the picture of the natural world, as so seen, there was no place for the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now only just consider what this means. In none of the ancient religions was there any cleft between the Knowledge of the World and what we may call the Knowledge of God. Worldly learning, profane learning, flowed over quite in course of nature into theology. In all the heathen religions there is this unity between the way in which they explain the natural world, and in which they then mount up in their explanation of the natural world, to a comprehension of the divine one, of the manifold. divinity that works through the medium of the natural world, ‘Forces of nature,’ forces of the abstract kind, such as we have to-day, such as are generally accepted on the compulsion of scientific authority,—such ‘forces of nature’ were not what people had in those days. They had live beings, beings of the natural world, who guided, who directed, the various phenomenon of nature; beings to whom one could build a bridge across from that which is in the human soul itself. So that in the old religions, there was nowhere that split, which exists between what is the modern science of the natural world, and what is supposed to be a comprehension of the spiritual and divine one.

Now Anthroposophy will never make any pretension that it is going, itself, to establish the grounds of religion. But although religion must be always something that rests upon itself and forms in itself an independent stream in the spiritual life of mankind; yet, on the other hand, man's nature simply demands that there should be an accordance between what is knowledge and what is religion. The human mind must be able to pass over from knowledge to religion without having to jump a gulf; and it must again be able to pass over from religion to knowledge, without having to jump a gulf. But the whole form and character assumed by modern knowledge renders this impossible. And this modern knowledge has become very thoroughly popularized, and dominates the mass of mankind with tremendous authority. In this way no bridge is possible between knowledge of this kind and the life of religion;—above all, it is not possible to proceed from scientific knowledge to the nature of the Christ. Ever more and more, as modern science attempted to approach the nature of the Christ, it has scattered it to dust, dispelled and lost it.

Well, if you consider all this, you will then be able to understand what I am going to say, not now about Blavatsky, but about that very different person, Nietzsche.—In Nietzsche we have a person who has grown up out of a Protestant parsonage in Central Europe,—not only the son of religious-minded people in the usual sense, but the son of a parochial clergyman. He goes through all the modern schooling; first, as a boy at a classical school. But since he was not what Schiller calls a ‘bread-and-butter scholar,’ but a ‘lover of learning’, ... you know the sharp distinction made by Schiller in his inaugural address between the bread-and-butter scholar and the lover of learning ... so Nietzsche's interest widens out over everything that is knowable by the methods of the present age. And so he arrives consciently and in a very uncompromising way at that split-in-two, to which all modernly educated minds really come, but come unconsciently, because they delude themselves, because they spread a haze over it. He arrives at a tone of mind which I might describe somewhat as follows:—

He says:—Here we have a modern education. This modern education nowhere works on in a straight line to any clear account of the Christ-Jesus, without jumping a gap on the road. And now, stuck into the midst of this modern education which has grown up, we have something which has remained left over as Christianity, and which talks in words that no longer bear any relation whatever to the various forms of statement, the terms of description, derived from modern scientific knowledge. And he starts by saying to himself very definitely: If one in any way proposes to come to a real relation with modern scientific knowledge, and still at the same time to preserve inwardly any sort of lingering feeling for what is traditionally told about the Christ,—then one will need to be a liar. He puts this to himself; and then he makes his decision. He decides for modern education; and thereby arrives at a complete and uncompromising denunciation of all that he knows of Christianity.

More scathing words were never uttered about Christianity than those uttered by Nietzsche, the clergyman's son. And he feels it, with really, I might say, his whole man. One need only take such an expression of his as this,—I am simply quoting; I am, of course, not advocating what Nietzsche says; I am quoting it only—but one need only take such an expression as this, where he says: Whatever a modern theologian holds to be true is certainly false. One might indeed make this a direct criterion of truth.—One may know what is false—according to Nietzsche's view,—from what a modern theologian calls true. That is pretty much his definition, one of Nietzsche's definitions, as regards Truth. He decides, moreover, that the whole of modern philosophy has too much theological blood in its veins. And then he formulates his tremendous denunciation of Christianity, which is of course, a blasphemy, but at any rate an honest blasphemy, and therefore more deserving of consideration than the dishonesties so common in this field to-day. And this is the point which one must keep in sight: that a person like Nietzsche, who for once was in earnest in the attempt to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha, was not able to do so with the means that exist,—not even by means of the Gospels as they exist.

We have now in our Anthroposophy interpretations of all the four Gospels. And what emerges from the Gospels as the result of such interpretation is emphatically rejected the theologians of all the churches. But Nietzsche in that day did not possess it. It is the most difficult thing in the world, my dear friends, for a scientific mind (and almost all people at the present day may be said in this sense to have, however primitively, scientific minds), to attain possession of the Mystery of Golgotha. What is needed in order to do so?

To attain to this Mystery of Golgotha, what is needed, is not a renewal of the ancient form of Mysteries, but the discovery of a quite new form of Mystery. The rediscovery of the spiritual world in a completely new form,—this is what is necessary. For, through the old Mysteries, not excepting the Gnosis, the Mystery of Golgotha could only be uttered haltingly and brokenly. Men's minds grasped it haltingly and brokenly. And this halting, broken utterance must to-day be raised to speech.

It was this urgent need to raise the old halting utterance to speech which was at work in the many homeless souls of whom I am speaking in these lectures. With Nietzsche it went so far as a definite and drastic—not denial only—but appalling denunciation of Christianity.

Blavatsky, too, drew her impulse mainly from the life of the old Mysteries. And, truly speaking, if one takes the whole of Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, one cannot but see in it a sort of resurrection of the old Mysteries,—in the main nothing new. The most important part of what one finds revealed in the works of Blavatsky is simply a resurrection of the old Mysteries, a resurrection of the know-ledge through which in the old Mysteries men had become acquainted with the divine spirit-world.

But all of these Mysteries are only able to comprehend what is a preparation for the Christ. The people, who, at the time when Christianity began, were still in a way con-versant with the old Mysteries and their impulses,—these persons had a positive ground still, from which to approach the Unique Event of Golgotha. So that down, in fact, to the fourth century, there were people who still could approach the Event of Golgotha on positive ground. They were still able in a real sense to comprehend the Greek Fathers of the Church, in whom there are everywhere connections with the old Mysteries, and who—rightly understood—speak in quite a different key from the later Fathers of the Latin Church.

Within what dawned upon Blavatsky's vision there lay the ancient wisdom, which sees the natural world and spirit-world in one. And much as a soul, one might say, before the Mystery of Golgotha, beheld the world of Nature and Spirit, so Blavatsky beheld it now again. That way,—she said to herself—lies the Divine and Spiritual; that way a vista opens up for men into the region of divine spirit. And from this aspect she then turned her eyes upon what modern tradition and the modern creeds say about Christ-Jesus.

The Gospels, of course, she had no means of understanding as they are understood in Anthroposophy: and the understanding that is brought to them from elsewhere was not of a kind that could approach what Blavatsky had to offer in the way of spiritual knowledge. Hence her contempt for all that was said about the Mystery of Golgotha in the outside world. She said to herself, as it were: ‘What all these people say about the Mystery of Golgotha is on a far lower level than the sublime wisdom transmitted by the ancient Mysteries. And so the Christian God too must be on a lower level than what they had in the ancient Mysteries.’

The fault lay not with the Christian God; the fault lay with the ways in which the Christian God was interpreted. Blavatsky simply did not know the Mystery of Golgotha in its essential being; she could only judge of it from what people were able to say about it. Such things must be regarded with perfect objectivity. For as a fact, from the time of the fourth century after Christ, when with the last remnants of Greek civilization the sun of the old Mysteries had set, Christianity was taken over and adopted by Romanism. Romanism had no power, from its external civilization, to open up any real road on into the spirit. And so Romanism simply yoked Christianity to an external impulse. And this Romanized Christianity was, in the main, the only one known to Nietzsche and Blavatsky.

One can understand then that the souls I described as homeless souls, who had gleams from their former earth-lives, and were principally concerned to find a way back into the spiritual world, took the first thing that presented itself. They wanted only to get into the spiritual world, even at the risk of doing without Christianity. Some link between their souls and the spiritual worlds,—that was what these people wanted.

And so one met with the people who at that time were groping their way towards the Anthroposophical Society.

Let us be quite clear, then, as to the position which Anthroposophy held towards these people, when it now came upon the scene,—towards these people who were homeless souls. They were, as we saw, questing souls, questioning souls; and the first thing necessary was to recognize: What are these souls asking? What are the questions stirring in their inmost depths?—And if now from the anthroposophic side a voice began to speak to these souls, it was because these souls were asking questions about things, to which Anthroposophy believed that it could give the answers. The other people of the present day have no questions; in them the questions are not there.

Anthroposophy, therefore, had no sort of call to go to the theosophists in search of knowledge. For Anthroposophy, Blavatsky's phenomenal appearance, and what had come into the world with it, was so far a fact of great importance. But what Anthroposophy had to consider, was not the knowledge that came from this quarter, but principally the need for learning to know the questions, the problems that were perplexing a number of souls.

One might have said, had. there been any possibility at that time of putting it plainly into words: As to what the leaders of the Theosophical Society have given the people, one doesn't need to concern oneself at all; one's concern is with what the people's souls are asking, what their souls want to know. And therefore these people were, after all, the right people in the first instance for Anthroposophy.

And in what form did the answers require to be worded?—Well, let us take the matter as positively, as matter-of-factly, as possible. Here were these questioning souls: one could plainly read their questions. They had the belief that they could arrive at an answer to their questions through the kind of thing which is found in Mrs. Besant's Ancient Wisdom: Now you can easily tell yourselves that it would have been obviously very foolish to say to these people that there are a number of things in this book, Ancient Wisdom, which are no longer appropriate to the modern age; for then one would have offered these souls nothing; one would only have taken something away from them. There could only be one course, and that was, really to answer their questions; whereas from the other side they got no proper answer. And the practical introduction to really answering was that, whilst Ancient Wisdom ranked at that time as a sort of canonical work amongst these people, I did not much trouble about this Ancient Wisdom, but wrote my book, Theosophy, and so gave an answer to the questions which I knew to be really asked. That was the positive answer; and beyond this there was no need to go. One had now to leave the people their perfect liberty of choice: Will you go on taking up Ancient Wisdom? or will you take up Theosophy?

In epochs of momentous decision, when world-history is being made, things do not lie so rationalistically, along straight lines of reasoning, as people are apt to conceive.

And so I could very well understand, when theosophists attended that other set of lectures on ‘Anthroposophy’, which I gave in those days, at the founding of the German Section, that these theosophists said the same thing as I have been pointing out to you here: ‘But that doesn't in the very least agree with what Mrs. Besant says!’ Of course it didn't agree, and couldn't agree! For the answer had to be one which proceeded from all that the mind of this age can give out of its deeper consciousness. And so it came about,—just to give for the moment the broader lines only,—that, as a fact, to begin with—down to about 1907—every step on behalf of Anthroposophy had to be conquered in opposition to the traditions of the Theosophical Society. The only people, to begin with, whom one could reach with these things, were the members of the Theosophical Society. Every step had to be conquered. And controversy at that time would have had no sense whatever; the only thing was to hope and build upon the alternative selection.

Matters went on by no means without internal obstacles. Everything—in my opinion at least—had its proper place, in which it must be done properly. In my Theosophy I went, I think, no single step beyond what it was possible at that period to give out for a number of people publicly. The wide circulation which the hook has found since then of itself shows that the supposition was a right one: Thus far one could go.

With the people who were more intently seeking, and had, accordingly, come into the stream set going by Blavatsky, with these people it was possible to go further. And with these one now had to make a beginning towards going further. I could give you any number of instances; but I will pick out just one, to show how, step by step, the attempt was made to get away from an old, bad tradition, and come to what was right for the present day, to the results of direct present-day research.

For instance, there was the description usually given in the Theosophical Society of the way Man travels through so-called kamaloca, after death. The description of this, as given by the leading people in the Theosophical Society could only be obviated in my Theosophy by my leaving the Time notion so far out of account in this book. In the circles inside the society, however, I tried to work with the right notions of time.

So it came about that I delivered lectures in various towns, amongst what was then the Dutch Section of the Theosophical Society, on the Life between Death and New Birth, and there for the first time, quite at the beginning of my activities, pointed out that it is really nonsense to conceive of it simply so, that if this, B D, is the life on earth from birth to death, that then the passage through kama-loca were simply a piece joined on, as it were, in one's consciousness. I showed, that time, here, must be conceived backwards; and I depicted the life of kama-loca as a living backwards, stage by stage, only three times as quick as the ordinary earth-life, or the life that was spent on earth: B ---------- D.

In outer life, of course, nobody to-day has any conception of this going on backwards as a reality, a reality in the spiritual field; for Time is simply conceived as a straight line from beginning to end; and a going on backwards is something of which people to-day form no notion whatever.

Now the theory was, amongst the leaders of the Theosophical Society, that they were renewing the teachings of the old wisdom. They took Blavatsky's book as a basis; and all sorts of writings came out, linked onto Blavatsky's book. But in these writings everything was presented to the mind in just the same way as things are conceived under the materialist world-conception of modern-times. And why?—Because they would have needed to become again knowing, not merely to renew the old knowledge, if they had wanted to find the truth of the matter.

The old things were for ever being quoted. Amongst other things always being quoted from Buddha and the old Oriental wisdom, was the Wheel of Births. Rut that a wheel is not of such a nature that one can draw a wheel as a straight line—, this the people did not reflect; and that one can only draw a wheel as running back into itself.

—There was no vitality in this revival of ancient wisdom, for the simple reason that there was no direct knowledge.

What was needed, in short, was: that something should be brought into the world by direct, living knowledge; and then this might also throw light upon the old, primeval wisdom.

And so one conclusion, from these first seven years especially of anthroposophic labour, amounted to this: that there were people who were ... well ... just as well pleased that there should not be any renovations, or,—as they called it,—‘innovations’ in the theosophic field; and who said: Oh, all that he says is just the same thing as the other! There's no difference! The differences are quite inessential! And so they were argued away. But this awful thing that I had, so to speak, ‘gone and done’ at the very beginning of my work in the Dutch Section of the Theosophical Society, when I lectured ‘from the life’ instead of simply rehearsing the doctrines contained in the canonical books of the Theosophical Society as the others did,—that was never forgotten! It never was forgotten. And those of you, who may perhaps go back in memory to those days in the growth of our movement, need only recall in the year 1907, when the Congress was held in Munich, at a time when we were still within the fold of the Theosophical Society, how the Dutch Theosophists turned up all primed and loaded, and were quite furious at this intrusion of a foreign body, as they felt it to be. They had no sense, that here a thing of the living present was matched against something merely of tradition,—they simply felt it to be a foreign body.

But something else could not fail to occur even then. And at that time the conversation took place in Munich between Mrs. Besant and myself, in which it was definitely settled that what I have to stand for, the Anthroposophy which I have to represent, would carry on its work in perfect independence, without any regard to anything else whatever that might play a part in the Theosophical Society. This was definitely settled, as a modus vivendi, so to speak, under which life could go on.

Even in those days, however, in the Theosophical Society, there were already dawning signs on the horizon of those absurdities by which it afterwards did for itself. For as a vehicle for a spiritual movement, the society to-day—despite the number of members still on its lists—may truly be said to have done for itself. Things, you know, may live on a long while as dead bodies, even after they are done for. But what was the Theosophical Society is to-day no longer living.

One thing, however, must be clearly understood: At the time when Anthroposophy first began its work, the Theosophical Society was full of a spiritual life, which, though traditional, nevertheless rested on sound bases, and was rich in material. What had come into the world through Blavatsky was there; and the people really lived in the things that had come into the world through Blavatsky.

Blavatsky had now, however, been dead for ten years past as regards earthly life. And one can but say of the tone in the Theosophical Society, that what lived on in it as a sequel of Blavatsky's influence and work was some-thing quite sound as a piece of historical culture, and could undoubtedly give the people something. Still, there were even then unmistakable germs of decay already present. The only question was, whether these germs of decay might not possibly be overcome; or whether they must inevitably lead to some kind of total discord between Anthroposophy and the old Theosophical Society.

Now one must say that amongst the tendencies that existed in the theosophic movement, even from the days of Blavatsky, there was one tendency in particular that was a terribly strong disintegrating element.

One must make a distinction, when considering the subject in the way I am doing now. One must make a clear distinction, between what was flung as spiritual information into the midst of modern life through the instrumentality of Blavatsky, and what was a result of the particular way in which Blavatsky was prompted to give out this information, out of her own person, in the manner I described. For in Blavatsky there was, to begin with, this particular kind of personality,—such as I described to you recently,—one who simply, having once been given, so to speak, an instigation from some quarter—through a betrayal, if you like,—then, out of her own person, as though in recollection of a previous life of incarnation on earth, and though only as a reawakening of an old wisdom, yet did bring wisdom into the world, and transmitted it in book-form to mankind.—This second fact one must keep quite distinct from the first. For this second fact, that Blavatsky was instigated in a particular way to what she did, introduced elements into the theosophic movement which were different from what they should have been if the theosophic movement was to be one of a purely spiritual character.

That it was not. For the fact of the matter was, that Blavatsky in the first instance received an instigation from a quarter of which I will say no more, and put forth, out of herself, what is in her Isis Unveiled; and that then, through all sorts of machinations, it came about that Blavatsky, the second time, was subjected to the influence of esoteric teachers from the Orient; and behind these there was a certain tendency of a political-cultural kind and egoistic in character. From the very first, there lay an orientalist policy of a one-sided character in what it was now hoped to obtain in a roundabout way by means of Blavatsky. Within it all lay the tendency to show the materialistic West, how far superior the spiritual knowledge of the East is to the materialism of the West. Within it was concealed the tendency to achieve, in the first place, a spiritual, but, more generally, any kind of dominion, an ‘empire’ of some kind, of the Orient over the Occident: And this was to be done, in the first place, by indoctrinating the spirituality or unspirituality of the West with the traditions of Eastern wisdom.—Hence came what I might call that shifting of the axis which took place, from the altogether-European of Isis Unveiled, to the altogether-Oriental of Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine.

There was every variety of factor here at work; but one of the factors was this one, that wanted, namely, to join India on to Asia and so create an Indo-Asiatic Empire with the assistance of Russia. And so this ‘Doctrine’ of Blavatsky's was inoculated with the Indian vein, in order, in this way, to conquer the West spiritually.

Now this, you see, is a one-sided vein, egoistic,—nationally egoistic. And this one-sided vein was there from the very beginning. It met one directly with symptomatic significance. The first lecture I ever heard from Mrs. Besant was on ‘Theosophy and Imperialism’. And when one inwardly tried to answer the question: Does really the main impulse of this lecture lie in the continuation-line of the strictly spiritual element in Blavatsky? or does the main impulse of this lecture lie in the continuation-line of what went along with it;—then one could only say: the latter.

With Mrs. Annie Besant it was often the case, that she said things of which she by no means knew the ultimate grounds. She took up the cudgels for something or other of which the ultimate grounds were unknown to her; she was ignorant of the connections that lay at their root. But if you read this lecture, ‘Theosophy and Imperialism’ (which is printed), and read it understandingly, with all that lies underneath it, you will then see for yourselves, that, supposing there were somebody who wanted to split India off from England,—to split it off in a certain sense spiritually after a spiritual fashion,—a good way of taking the first unobtrusive step, would be with a tendency such as there was in this lecture.

This was always the beginning of the end with all such spiritual streams and spiritual societies, that they began to mix up one-sided political interests with their own sphere. Whereas a spiritual movement—above all to-day—can only possibly pursue its course through the world, and it is indeed, to-day, one of the most vital life conditions for a spiritual movement that would lead to real, actual spirituality, that it should be universally human, wholly and undividedly human. And everything else, which is not wholly and universally human, which sets out in any way to split the body of mankind, is from the first an element of destruction in any spiritual movement that would lead to the real spirit-world.

Just consider how deep one strikes with all such things into the sub-conscious regions of man's being. And hence it is one of the life-conditions of any such spiritual movement,—for instance, such as the anthroposophical movement, too, would be,—that there should be at least an earnest, honest endeavour to get beyond all partial, sectional interests in mankind, and really to rise to the universal interests of all mankind. And therein lay the ruin of the theosophic movement, that from the beginning it had an element of that kind in it. On occasion, as we know, this kind of element is quite capable of reversing steam: later, during the Great War, this opposite tendency turned very anglo-chauvinist. Rut this very circumstance should make it perfectly clear, that it is quite impossible successfully to cultivate a real spiritual movement, so long as there is some kind of sectionalism which one is not pre-pared to leave behind one.

Amongst the external dangers, therefore, which beset the anthroposophic movement to-day, there is this especially: That people in the present age, which is wandering astray in nationalisms on all sides, have yet so little courage to get beyond these nationalisms.

What then lies at the root of a one-sidedness like that of which we were speaking?—At its root lies the desire to acquire power as a society through something else than simply the revelations of the spiritual source itself. And one can but say that whereas, at the turn of the century, there was still a fairly healthy sense in the Theosophical Society as regards conscious aspirations after power, this was by 1906 all gone, and there existed a strong ambition for power.

It is necessary, do you see, that one should clearly recognize this growth of the anthroposophical life out of universal human interests, common to the whole of mankind; and that one should clearly see, that it was only because the questioners were there, in the Theosophical Society, and because of this only, that Anthroposophy was obliged to take growth in the Theosophical Society, to take up its lodging there, one might say, for a while; since otherwise it had nowhere to lodge.

The first period—so to speak—was scarcely over, when, as you know, the whole impossibility of the theosophical movement for Western life demonstrated itself quite peculiarly in the question of the Christ. For what with Blavatsky was in the main a theory,—although a theory that rested on emotions,—namely, the depreciation of Christianity, was afterwards carried in the theosophic movement to such a very practical depreciation of Christianity, as the education of a boy in whom they said they were going to train-up the soul of the re-arisen Christ.

One could hardly conceive anything more nonsensical. And yet an Order was founded amongst the Theosophical Society for the promotion of this Christ-Birth in a boy, who really, as one might say, was already there.

And now it very soon came to the perfection of nonsense.—With all such things, of course, there very soon come muddles which border terribly close on falsehoods. In 1911, then, there was to be a Congress of the Theosophical Society in Genoa. The things leading to this nonsense were already in full bloom, and it was necessary for me to announce as my lecture for this Genoa Congress From Buddha to Christ. It must then necessarily have come to a clear and pregnant settlement of relations; for the things, that were everywhere going about, would then necessarily have come to a head. But, lo and behold! the Genoa Congress was cancelled.—Of course excuses can be found for all such things. The reasons that were alleged all looked really uncommonly like excuses.

And so the anthroposophic movement may be said to have entered on its second period, pursuing its own straight course; which originally began, as I said, with my delivering a lecture, quite at the beginning, to a non-theosophical public, of whom only one single person remains, (who is still there!) and no more, although a number of persons attended the lecture at the time. Anyhow, the first lecture I delivered (it was a cycle of lectures, in fact) bore the title From Buddha to Christ. And in 1911 I proposed again to deliver the cycle From Buddha to Christ. That was the straight line. But the theosophical movement had got into a horrible zigzag.

Unless one takes the history of the anthroposophic movement seriously, and is not afraid to call these things by their right name, one will not be able to give the proper reply to the assertions continually being made about the relation of Anthroposophy to Theosophy by those surface triflers, who will not take the trouble to learn the real facts, and refuse to see, that Anthroposophy was from the very first a totally separate and distinct thing, but that the answers, which Anthroposophy has the power to give, were naturally given to those people who happened to be asking the questions.

One may say, then, that down to the year 1914 was the second period of the anthroposophic movement. It really did nothing very particular—at least, so far as I was concerned—towards regulating relations with the theosophic movement. The Theosophical Society regulated relations by excluding the Anthroposophical one. But one was not affected by it. Seeing that from the first one had not been very greatly affected by being included, neither was one now very greatly affected by being excluded. One went on doing exactly the same as before. Being excluded made not the slightest change in what had gone on before, when one was included.

Look for yourselves at the way things went, and you will see that, except for the settlement of a few formalities, nothing whatever happened inside the anthroposophic movement itself down to the year 1914, but that everything that happened, happened on the side of the Theosophical Society.

I was invited in the first place to give lectures there. I did so; I gave anthroposophic lectures. And I went on doing so. The lectures for which I was originally invited are the same newly reprinted in my book, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age of Thought. And I then carried on further what is written in this Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age of Thought, and developed it in a variety of directions.

By this same society, with the same views, I was then excluded, and of course, my followers, too. For one and the same thing I was first included, and afterwards excluded. Yes ... that is the fact of the matter. And no one can rightly understand the history of the anthroposophic movement, unless they keep plainly in sight as a fundamental fact, that as regards the relation to the theosophic movement, it made no difference whether one were in- or excluded.

This is something for you to reflect upon very thoroughly in self-recollection. I beg you to do so. And then, on the grounds of this, I should like tomorrow to give a sketch of the latest and most difficult phase, from 1914 until now, and then to go into various details again later, in the subsequent lectures.

At the start of the hour, various participatory questions and objections were presented. The stenographer didn't add to these words, but Rudolf Steiner had jotted down the following key words in one of his notebooks (See the fax page 38-40 NB 127 in the documentary supplements):

• Discussion
• Can we define religion?
• Impossibilities—
• Luther as an answer—
• Do without knowledge to reach religion!—
• Spine of the world—and turn to the divine—
• Gulf—world = God
• ?—another: Contrast between God and World isn't found
• Rel. Connection with God—3 ways

Thinking Feeling Willing

• Anthrop unclear: due to transformation of world through science or not making religion dependent on knowledge—so that people who have no knowledge, come short—Good faith =
• Dr Geyer: It is said: Anthrop in the world Religion belongs to God. Paradox
• Another: Can religion become independent?
  or Art—science?
  will religion stop being independent
• Another: if it repulses someone
  faith—endangered
  Secret—deepest being. Despite all unravelable difficulties on hand ... submit/go through to* the soul-like
• and another: religion—relation between one soul and God—but the effects change towards others—this is increased by Anthroposophy
• and another: ? leads us to God today?
• and another: Is a value judgement of Anthrop to religion both necessary? (Ist ein Wertunterschied z. A. u. Rel. beide nötig?)*
and another: Living relationship to concepts—are concepts in contrast with corrupted form—
• Main concept: Pledge faith
  Faith has knowledge content—gradually got lost
  awareness, which gives knowledge content—
  the results of today—

(*—words are abbreviated which can create various interpretations—Translator)

• To what extent does the Pauline contrast with the Pistis and Gnosis.—

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: I would prefer at best to answer you more concretely than in abstractions. First, I would like to approach a difficult question by saying the following.

[ 2 ] In Anthroposophy we currently have very few people who are engaged in spiritual activity. Anthroposophy is in the beginning of her work and one can admit that in a relatively short time it may work differently into the human soul, compared with today. One thing is quite remarkable today, and perhaps you'll find that reprehensible, but it is perhaps much better to side with what appears currently than to express it with an abstract reprimand.

[ 3 ] Anthroposophy is taught, recited, written in books and I have the basic conviction that the way those questioners here, at least some of them, require Anthroposophy to be a knowledge—and that such a knowledge which is understood by most, at least a good many, for the majority who interest themselves intensively in Anthroposophy, this is not yet the case. Many people today accept something which they have heard about in Anthroposophy, on good faith. Why do they do this? Why are there already such a large number of people who accept Anthroposophy on good faith? You see, among those the majority have acquired religious natures in a specified direction and without them actually claiming to understand things in depth, they follow Anthroposophy because they have become aware of a certain religious style throughout the leadership of Anthroposophical matters. It is just a kind of religious feeling, a religious experience, which brings numerous people to Anthroposophy, who are not in the position of examining Anthroposophy, like botanists who examine botany; this is what is promoted here.

[ 4 ] One doesn't usually intensely observe that in relation to what I mean here, Anthroposophy is quite different to the other, the outer, more scientific sciences. Scientific knowledge is in fact quite so that one can say about it: take the human being into consideration and it will in fact be quite dangerous for faith, you'll impair faith. It is not just about science making you uncomfortable, but it is about having the experience of the mystery of faith being disturbed. In the practical handling of this question one finds, as far as it goes beyond where it is another kind of science, as is the case with Anthroposophy, that numerous people experience a consistent religious stance in the way Anthroposophy is presented. Despite it not wanting, as I often repeat, to be a religious education, it is nevertheless felt that it is moving in the direction where a religious feeling can go along with it. Actually, this idea that knowledge kills faith—I have much understanding for this—must be revised regarding Anthroposophy. One must first ask if it is not because Anthroposophy is a not conceptual knowledge, but a knowledge based on observation, that the relationship between faith and knowledge becomes something quite different. Let us not forget that this observation of knowledge killing faith has only been created on the hand of a science which is completely conceptual, completely intellectual. Intellectualism is for Anthroposophy only a starting point, it is only regarded as the basis and foundation, then one rises to observation quite indifferently whether it is one's own or a shared observation.

[ 5 ] My view is that it is not necessary at all, to place a wall in front of Anthroposophy, that things should be accepted in good faith. This is not quite so. A certain shyness remains today, to shine a very thorough light into what is said by single anthroposophical researchers. When this shyness is overcome then one doesn't need some of other perception or clairvoyance. Just like one can take a dream as an error or a truth, even if one only experiences the dream for what it is, which is a perception; in the same way one can recognise the truth or error in a painted image. Basically, it's the same for life. This is not easily understood—those involved with spiritual research know. One gets much more out of life when one looks at things yourself rather than being told about them, because observation of life demands a great deal. Yet, these things need to be researched so they can enter into life.

[ 6 ] Now, something like the viewpoints of conceptual knowledge which we are already familiar with, is what I noticed in the inquiries of our questioners, whose first point was: How can we define religion? One could—this is how it can be said in the course of the discussion—renounce knowledge, leave the world lying on its back and turn to the Divine because there is an abyss between the world and God, and so on. This is said about it.

[ 7 ] Now if you are familiar with my arguments you will have found that I do not give definitions anywhere; in fact, I am sharply against giving definitions in Anthroposophy. Sometimes, since I speak about popular things, I conceptualise them. Even though I know quite well that definitions can certainly be a help in the more scientific or historic sense of today's kind of knowledge, even though I'm aware of the limited right of definitions, I remind myself how, within Greek philosophy, defining a human being was recommended. The definition is such that a human being is alive, that it has two legs and no feathers. So the next day someone brought along a plucked chicken and said, this is a human being.—You see how far a person is from the immediate observation, even with practical definitions. These things need to be examined.

[ 8 ] That is the peculiarity of intellectualistic knowledge, and in it, is to be found many such things which have led to the judgement which sharpens the boundary between belief and knowledge even more. One needs to enter into the intricacies a bit more. You see, already in our simplest sciences are definitions which actually have no authority at all. Open some or other book on physics. You find a definition like the following: What is impenetrability? Impenetrability is the property of objects, that in the place where an object is present, another body cannot be at the same time.—That is the definition of impenetrability. In the entire scope of knowledge and cognition, however, not everything can be defined in this way; the definition of impenetrability is merely a masked postulate. In reality it must be said: One calls an object impenetrable when the place where it is in, can't at the same time be occupied by another object.—It is namely merely to determine an object, to postulate its individual character; and only under the influence of materialistic thinking, postulates masked as definitions are given.

[ 9 ] All of this creates an entire sea of difficulties which current mankind is not aware of at all because people have really been absorbing it from the lowest grade of elementary school; mankind really doesn't know on what fragile ground, on what slippery ice he gets involved with, in reality, when educated through the current system of concepts. This conceptual system which is in fact more corrupt than theological concepts—a physicist often has no inkling that their concepts are corrupt—this is something which not only kills belief, but in many ways, it also kills what relates to life. These corrupt scientific concepts are not only damaging to the soul, but even harmful to physical life. If you are a teacher, you know this.

[ 10 ] Therefore, it is no longer important that the spiritual scientist, the Anthroposophist has to say: Precisely this scientific concept must be transformed into the healing of mankind.—Here is where the Anthroposophist becomes misled, when the religious side insists that an abyss be created under all circumstances between belief and knowledge, because, between what one observes with the senses, and Anthroposophy, there is really a great abyss. This is what even from the anthroposophical side needs to be clarified.

[ 11 ] Now I would like to consider this question from the religious side and perhaps as a result of me approaching it from the religious side, it will be better understood religiously. You see I can completely understand that the following may be said—that one must turn away from the world to find the way to God. The basic experience that exists, the paths that will have to be taken, those I know. I can also certainly understand when someone talks about how it would be necessary, in a certain sense, that the dew of mystery should cover anything with religious content. I would like to express myself succinctly only; it has already surfaced in the questions. Briefly, I can fully understand if someone strives in a certain way to place everything that can be known on the one side and on the other side, look for a religious path according to such fundamentals as are searched for by a whole row of modern evangelists. This search should take place not through events but in a far more direct way. In the elaboration of Dr Schairer, it was again correctly described: also in the questioning of Bruno Meyer which was given to me yesterday, it is expressed clearly. So, I can understand it well. But I see something else.

[ 12 ] You see, what people take from Anthroposophy, quite indifferently now, how far their research comes or in how far they have insight—and as we said, it can be seen without being a researcher or an observer through what you get from Anthroposophy—means they must relinquish quite a few things from their "I," I mean from their egotism. In a certain sense selflessness belongs to this point of departure from one's self, when entering the world. One could say a person needs to radically tear out inborn egoism in order to really find a human relationship to the simplest Anthroposophical knowledge. A feeling for the world as opposed to an ego feeling for oneself must be developed to a high degree, and gradually grow just by following this apparent path of knowledge, which is not only similar to fervent love but equal to it; everything grows from here. Basically, one learns about true submission to objectivity by following anthroposophic content.

[ 13 ] In opposition to this, I propose something else. One can relinquish all such involvement in the world, all such conceptual submission of oneself and then try, out of oneself, I don't want to call it "in feelings" but for instance how Dr Schairer expressed it, through "connecting to God" make one's way. One can try to stretch the entire sum of inner life, one could call it, electrically, to find what the direct communication with God is. Also there, I must say, I know what can be achieved by that strong relationship of trust in God, without entering into some kind of unclear mysticism, up to certain mystics who have remained with clear experiences. I've seen it before. Yet I find despite everything that is attempted in devotion to the world, in connecting to the world, in connecting to divine world forces and so on, a large part of egoism, even soul-filled egoism, remains. Someone can be extraordinarily religious out of the most terrible egoism. Prove it for yourself by looking with the eyes of a good psychologist at the religiosity of some monks or nuns. Certainly, you could say, that is not evangelistic belief. It may differ qualitatively, but in relation to what I mean now, it still differs qualitatively. If you prove this, you perhaps find the performing of a devotion to the utmost mortification, yet it sometimes harbours—the true observation of psychologists reveals this—the most terrible egoism. This is something questionable which can give up even a superficial view of an important problem. You see, to find an exchange with God in this way is basically nothing extraordinary because God is there and whoever looks for Him, will find Him. He will obviously be found. Only those who don't find Him are not looking for Him. One can find him, sure, but in many cases, one asks oneself what it is one has found. I may say out of my own experience: What is it?

[ 14 ] In many cases it is the discovery the forces of the inner life, which only exists between birth and death. One is able to, with these forces which exist between birth and death, to be a very pious person. However, these forces are laid down with us in our graves, we have no possibility of taking these forces with us through the gate of death. Should we acquire thoughts of eternity, acquire thoughts of the supersensible, these we will take with us through the gate of death and while we do so, we must already have become selfless, as I have indicated. You see, this is something which is always questionable to me, when I discover it—what I can quite rightly understand—like Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion. Licentiate Bock has recently told me that with Schleiermacher one could discover something quite different. It would be lovely if something could happen, but according to the usual way Schleiermacher is interpreted, I find in the Schleiermacher way the reference and exchange with the Divine as only created through the forces which are lost when we die. What is this then, that is lost though death, my dear friends? Even if it's religious, if it is lost with death it is nothing more than a refined lust of the soul, an intensification of temporal life. One feels oneself better for it, when one feels secure with God.

[ 15 ] You see, I want to speak religiously about the necessity to achieve a concept of belief which lives within the danger of connecting temporal forces to people. This of course has a relationship to the Divine. Here something terrible always appears to me in the great illusion within the numerous people's current lives which consist of people being unable to see how the rejection of a certain content, which must always have a content of knowledge—you could call this observational content, but finally this is only terminology—how the judgement of such content severely endangers religious life. Old religions didn't exist without content and their content of Christian teaching was once full of life, and it only turned into what we call dogma today, at the end of the fourth century after Christ. So one could say this distaste for content, this selfish fear of so-called wisdom—I'm fully aware of calling it "so-called wisdom"—that, my dear friends, always reminds me of people living in this illusion, that this fear of knowledge of the supersensible actually is also produced by materialism. Within this concept of faith, I see a materialistic following, I can't help myself; this following of materialism is no conscious following but something which exists in subconscious foundations of the soul as a materialistic following.

[ 16 ] I really believe that it will be through religious foundations, particularly for the priest, if he could bring himself to it, to overcome the shyness of the so-called gulf between belief and knowledge. The world and God, and the gulf between them—yes my dear friends, this is indeed the deepest conviction of Anthroposophy itself; what Anthroposophy seeks, is to create a bridge between the two. When this gulf has been bridged, then only will the higher unity of God and world be possible. At first, from the outside, this abyss appears, and only when man has gone through everything which makes this bridging necessary, can the abyss be overcome, and only then does man discover what can be called the unity of God with the world.

[ 17 ] Let's consider the religious connection with God. Would a religion—this question was asked in three ways and called thinking feeling and willing—would a religion still be approachable through Anthroposophy, which is dependent on knowledge, to people who do not have knowledge, or will they get a raw deal?—Anthroposophy certainly doesn't make religiousness dependent on knowledge. I must confess in the deepest religious sense I actually can't understand why a dependent religious life should exists beside Anthroposophy because the course of an anthroposophic life becomes such that firstly, of course, single personalities become researchers, who to some extend break through to the observation; then others will apply their healthy human minds to it—yes, this is what it is about. Just recently in Berlin this word was taken as evil from a philosophic view, and opposed on the grounds of the human mind being unable to understand anything super-sensory, and that the human mind which is able to understand something super-sensory, would surely not be healthy.—

A healthy human mind can simply look through the communications of spiritual researchers when he only wants to, if he doesn't put a spoke in his own wheel because of today's scattered prejudices. Certainly, there will be numerous other people who take it on good faith. Now, we can't compare something small with something big, but if this is only about using comparisons, one could perhaps do it. You see, I assume that the Being, Who we call the Christ, possesses an immeasurable higher content within, than human beings who call themselves Christians, and you have but trust in Him. Why should that be unjustified? That knowledge appears through this, knowledge which is not immediately clear, but which arrives in an earnest manner, that is to say as it comes out of personal research, clarifies what is discovered with no need to somehow try to understand why that would let people be given a raw deal. In this I actually find something which ultimately amounts to the fact that one can't acknowledge anything which one has not discovered oneself.

[ 18 ] We won't get far in life at all if we are not also presented with something through other means than only direct observation. You see, it is obvious for a spiritual researcher to say: You, living in the present, haven't seen the deeds of Alexander the Great, but there is a connection between the life at present and the regarded-as-truth unseen deeds of Alexander the Great. Here a theologian objected: Yes, Alexander the Great don't interest me any longer, but that which is claimed in Anthroposophy I must see for myself, otherwise it doesn't interest me.—One can't say that everything of interest must always come from something observed. Just imagine if someone could only believe in his father and mother after he has looked at the truth of his belief in them. So, as I've said, I can't quite grasp something by applying precise terms to what is really meant; I would like to rather say, that I find a certain contradiction between, on the one hand, it is said that Anthroposophy wants to be wisdom and therefore appears dubious, and on the other hand, one could accept it, if you knew about things. This doesn't seem like quite a good match.

[ 19 ] A particularly important question to me is the following. Perhaps its difficulty has resulted from what I've said myself: A person experiences through the anthroposophic life at the same time something which can meet the religious need. The next question then comes: When art assumes religious form, when science and social life take on religious form, will religion stop being independent and gradually only become something which exists with everything else in the world?—Well, that seems to me or at least seemed to me to be a complete misjudgement of the religious when it is indicated that art will develop in future in such a way, in the anthroposophic sense, and that it will develop social life in such a way according to the anthroposophic sense, that religion as something independent will vanish. Religion has indeed other living conditions, quite other needs than Anthroposophy.

[ 20 ] It was so that the old religious foundations always had wisdom in the background. One can say there is no old religion which doesn't have wisdom in its background, and because knowledge existed there, it is not involved in religion. Religion is only created through the relationship of man to what is known. When so much anthroposophic art produced in future is not looked at with a religious mood, it will never make a religious impression. One would never be able to cultivate religion, no matter how hard one tried, in order to say about the social life what can be said out of spiritual science, out of Anthroposophy, when in reality people don't experience in all earnest the meaning of the words: "What you do to the least of my brothers, you also do to me."—The most beautiful anthroposophical impulses could never become a reality in life, if so much should be done, it would remain an empty science if religious life wasn't cultivated.

[ 21 ] However, something has to be taken into account. In Shairer's defences there are three images: The first image is that man can approach water in a dual manner, either as a chemist and analyst in H₂O, or one can drink water. The supersensible world analyses a person whether he comes as an Anthroposophist, or when he takes possession of a direct experience, then he is a religious person. The religious person equals someone who drinks the water, the Anthroposophist is someone who analyses water and finds H₂O. Dr Shairer's second image is the following: Let's assume I've deposited a large amount of bank notes or gold on the table and I count, divide it and so on, so I calculate the money; but I may also possess this money, that is another relationship. The person who calculates the money is an Anthroposophist; the one who possesses it all, is a religious person. Shairer's third image is particularly characteristic. A person could have studied every possibility of human health and illness; he could know every branch of medicine. The other person can be healthy. So the one who is healthy, is the religious person, and the one who studies everything about illness and health, is the Anthroposophist.

[ 22 ] The three examples are, considered abstractly, are extraordinarily accurate but still, only thought about abstractly. They are actually only valid for today's common knowledge. You see, with the water analysis, something can be done. For someone who doesn't study Anthroposophy, it is useless. Because one has to, if one wants to approach it, begin by "drinking" it. Water in Anthroposophy is not there for mere outer analysis; it must be drunk at the same time. The activity of drinking and the activity of the analysing or synthesizing are the same. That one believes something else about it, results from the fact that recently an otherwise excellent man has written in "Tat" that he would have no interest in my statements regarding the Akasha-Chronicle unless I honour him with them in a splendid illustrated edition.—Yes, my dear friends, to use such an image at all, one must acknowledge that the Akasha-Chronicle can only exist for those who allow themselves to experience it spiritually. It can't be allowed to be compared in this way. Already upon this basis I'm quite sure that the modern bad habit of the cinema will not be applied to Anthroposophy—hopefully not.

[ 23 ] Therefore, the comparison between drinking water and water analysis is relevant for ordinary science but has no relevance to Anthroposophy. The second image was about counting money and possessing money. This also is not quite so; it is tempting, but it doesn't work this way. I can namely possess money but when I'm too foolish to be unable to count it, then its possession doesn't matter much. Under some circumstances I could possess the whole world but if I can't enter into it, then under the circumstances the world can mean very little.

[ 24 ] Now; the thing about medicine. Materialistic medicine can certainly be studied on the one hand while on the other hand one could be healthy. One could certainly, if it's your destiny, be sick despite anthroposophical medicine. However, the comparison on this basis is not entirely true for the reason that materialistic medicine, what one knows about it, actually has nothing to do with being healthy in earthly life, but it is a knowledge and from this knowledge action can result. With Anthroposophy it is namely so, that anthroposophical medicine has to certainly also be a deducted knowledge, but the human being is approached much more closely. Here is something which can be proven with great difficulty, and it is because of the following. Take for example, this is necessary, someone aged forty and recommend, for a start, that he should stop smoking and drinking wine or something, and say to him, it would in fact improve his health, he would live longer than he would otherwise. Now he dies aged 48; and people say he already died at 48, it didn't help him.—I can't prove that if he hadn't avoided wine, he could perhaps have died at 44 already. When one encounters such things, there are small stumbling blocks. It is extraordinarily difficult to deliver proof when that which is to be accomplished, must be created as proof out of the world.

[ 25 ] People certainly sometimes think curiously about things. I knew an anatomist, Hyrtl, who was an extraordinary big man who equally had a stimulating influence on his students and had a long life after he retired. He became over 80 years old then he died in a small place into which he had withdrawn. Just after Hyrtl's death, a widow who was a farmer encountered a man and she said to him: "Yes, now Hyrtl has died, we liked him so much, but he studied so much, and that's why he had to die; it doesn't bode well if one studies so much."—To this the man asked: "But you husband, how old was he when he died?" She said: "45 years."—Now the man asked if her husband has studied more than old Hyrtl?—You see, similar things actually happen on closer examination.

[ 26 ] Now I don't want to deviate from serious things and would like to say the following. For Anthroposophists it is not important that there should be a distinction between drinking water and water analysis, but there is in fact something where in place of abstract knowledge, of discursive knowledge, an experience occurs within the knowledge of analysis; yet it remains above all knowledge. Only the Leese licentiate has resented calling an experience knowledge while he claimed—not out of a Christian but out of another scientific dogma—he may never take what he has experienced as an object of knowledge. Well, I mean, the thing is, if you really understand what Anthroposophy is as a human experience, this alien-to-life of the scientific no longer applies.

[ 27 ] In relation to the secret, the Mystery, I may here insert what I said yesterday. I said it is not so that Anthroposophic knowledge can be obtained and then through thoughts, change into ordinary knowledge. In order to have the correct relationship to it, one must repeatedly return to it. It exists in quite another kind of inner relationship to people than does scientific knowledge. There still exists something of a sacred shyness in the relationship people have to anthroposophical knowledge and it is certainly not the case that clarity is thus undermined according to what is attained through Anthroposophy. You see, basically it's like this: when we go through the Portal of Death and before we enter the Portal of Birth into this earthly world, we live in that world which Anthroposophy speaks about. That is in fact the reality. Through Anthroposophy we take part in the riddle of creation and in the riddle of death, to a certain degree. That one doesn't understand these things in the same way in which one understands ordinary intellectual knowledge, something else must make this possible. You are not going to be guided into such a world as some people suppose. I have heard among thousands of objections, also heard that it is said Anthroposophy wants to solve all world riddles, and when the time comes where there are no more riddles in the world, what will people do with this knowledge? Then the earth will not be interesting anymore; everything which one can know about the earth, exists in them being riddles.—

[ 28 ] Certainly, in an abstract sense, this can be an objection. However, even understood abstractly, the riddles do not become smaller, but they become ever bigger. Life has not been made easier by entering into the spiritual world, but at first the immeasurability of the world and the immeasurability of knowledge becomes apparent. That is why, in the case of the Mystery there is no reduction or degradation of the Mystery, but there is actually an elevation of the Mystery. This at least is apparent in experience.

[ 29 ] Regarding the question whether there's a difference in value between Anthroposophy and religion or if both are necessary, I would like to say the following. Value differences lead into a subjective area and one has no sure foundations if one wants to assert differences in value. In any case you may from the scant anthroposophic explanations which I've given today and before, actually say that Anthroposophy and religion are both necessary in the future and that Anthroposophy is only necessary for the foundation of the work, which you need towards the renewal of religious life. Anthroposophy itself doesn't want to appear as endowed with religion but it wants to offer every possible help when religious life wants to find renewal.

[ 30 ] Now my dear friends, I could, as I see, not answer everything exhaustively, I still want to put some things on hold. I have certainly had feelings through experiences with which I now want to give an answer to the question, which perhaps has not already appeared in the question, for instance this: I also have my religious objections to the faith which serves only those human forces which actually die with us, and that one—according to my experience I can say this—also through religious instruction, say something in a sense of: avoid the world and develop something completely different—and precisely in this way, strongly refer to man's egoism.

I have experienced the following phenomenon. For example, a good Anthroposophist who tried to work with all his might in order to find a path in Anthroposophy, but without a necessary measure of selflessness and without enough self-confidence, when courage failed him, became a Roman monk. I'm not speaking hypothetically but from experience. Yes, this person has experienced nothing other than having failed due to a lack of selflessness which he would have needed and the lack of confidence which he would have needed. This is the strongest appeal to those forces which dissipate with death; it doesn't serve these forces to go through the gate of death with the soul, to penetrate to reality. People just want to go down to where they don't have to be so strong, so there arises a sinking courage, this attach-oneself-on-to-something which through its submission into activity brings a certain inner satisfaction—which is only a kind of inner desire or lust—to become a Roman monk.

[ 31 ] It is indeed from a religious basis needed to say that the priest should give a person something which doesn't only work for his communications with God up to death, but beyond death. In this connection Anthroposophy must be honest throughout with its knowledge. If one could know more—which is possible—about what goes beyond the gate of death and what doesn't remain, where for instance one has a mystic like saint Theresa, with an involvement only with the transient, so one could, even if you weren't a mystic, prepare yourself for life after death, where one enters atrophied for being a mystic with desires in life. One does enter, but in such a way of course as one would enter into life without hands or feet.

[ 32 ] Through Anthroposophical knowledge a religious impulse can be discovered. To all of this the shyness must be overcome to unite belief and knowledge, which is what Anthroposophy strives for.

If you follow present-day developments with full awareness, in all humanity you will find a trend little adapted to direct thinking towards what the purely perceptible facts at work in the world themselves demand. There exists a general aversion to thoughts that do not run in the old grooves. But never before, perhaps, would it have been so apt to ask how it comes about that people are quite unready to entertain thoughts new to them. We experience today a fundamental phenomenon running through the whole evolution of the times. I have often pointed out how this came to expression some years ago. One could quote quite a collection of speeches delivered in the spring and early summer of 1914 by European statesmen, and find much the same in all their utterances—in what, for example, the Secretary of State, Jagow, said when addressing the Reichstag. This was to the effect that by the efforts of the European Cabinets it had been possible to create a satisfactory relation between the great powers, and that peace in Europe had been secured for a long time to come. Again and again you might find this kind of speech, repeated with variations by these self-styled ‘practical’ men. Thus it was at that time. A few weeks later began the world-conflagration now merely entering on a different phase.

What else do we experience today in the aims and actions of men so largely the children of their times? I have recently attended a so-called League of Nations Conference at Berne. There people talked of many things. Fundamentally everything concerning recent previous events was of the same caliber as the speeches of the European statesmen in the spring and summer of 1914. These men talk on the old customary lines of thought as for years they have been accustomed to talk. In truth, during the last four-and-half years they have actually learnt nothing, nothing at all from the lessons speaking to them out of the depths of world-existence. This is a fact to which the Anthroposophist should give his most earnest attention; for this depressing indifference in face of facts is widespread throughout the greater part of the continent of Europe. Despite many variations there repeatedly appears, quite typically, what is produced out of powerful depths, which are, however, ruinous for these times. This appears from the direction of a certain current in world-outlook, which on account of indifference and lack of interest among Europeans has every prospect of making impression upon impression, conquest upon conquest. When I was quite a boy—a long time ago now—in my religious books the following could be read, which was intended to lead boys to knowledge of Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ was either a hypocrite, a lunatic, or what He Himself said—the Son of the living God. Since one dare not accept His being either a hypocrite or a lunatic, there remains only the other possibility, namely, that it is true that He was, as He said, the Son of the living God! What was there in print in my religious books decades ago, I heard again recently in an address given in Berne by a Graz Professor Ude, in connection with the so-called Berne League of Nations Conference. Once again one could hear the words Jesus was either a hypocrite, a lunatic, or as He Himself said the Son of the living God. “And as we dare not call Christ”—this was hurled at the audience—“a lunatic or a hypocrite. He can only have been what He said, the Son of the living God!” With Jesuitical fervour this was cast at the audience, and there were few indeed in the hall who today in face of such things would ask the only really significant question: Has not this been repeated over and over again before the faithful, and in spite of it has not destruction descended upon mankind? Is there no one with heart and sense today in whom the thought can arise of the senselessness in the midst of the great world catastrophe of crying aloud to the multitude things that have shown such strong proof of their fruitlessness: And I heard another talk, by the same professor, on the social question, which from beginning to end gave no hint of what should happen, what must happen. It was solely a kind of condemnation of many immoral practices that, in the present time, are certainly both prevalent and predominant. But here, too, one realised that nothing had been learnt from the sad experiences of these four-and-a-half years.

This is a better example than many because, among the numerous speeches given in Berne these of Professor Ude were by far the best. For behind them was at least a world-outlook, even though one which if preached today must have its dangers. The other speeches had their roots in a lack of power to rise to any kind of world-outlook or understanding of life. We must continually emphasise that men's thoughts today have become dull and summary. They are unable to penetrate into realities. They move among illusions and are entirely superficial. Men cannot see into what it is that these times demand from those who would speak about the necessary organisation of things.

We should remind ourselves again and again, my dear friends, that during the last four centuries we Europeans, with the new blood of America, have produced a thinking only fit to understand what is lifeless. We have brought into being a thinking entirely dominated by mathematical technics. We have become incapable of directing our thought to what is living in nature, and comprehend only what is dead. What official science has to say about the living organism is only valid for the organism when dead, and is actually acquired from the corpse. So accustomed have people become to this thinking that it is also applied to the social organism. This simply means that mankind in general today is incapable of any creative thinking about the living social organism, at least they find it very difficult. But what thoughts do they find easy? They find easy such thoughts as have been drubbed into them for centuries through the method of catechism and as run in the ruts they have made; or those thoughts born of thinking that relates only to what is dead in the living organism. But today it is the living social organism we have to comprehend.

Let us start from a concrete example. Modern socialist thinking is directed against capitalism. Socialism demands the association of all private capital for means of production. There was already much talk about this socialisation in what I believe was called the National Assembly of Weimar. The way in which capitalism is now spoken of absolutely conforms with the dead thinking of recent centuries, which has greatly increased in the world-conception of purely materialistic natural science. What exactly have we in capitalism? We have something that fundamentally has become a terrible oppressor of the great mass of human beings, and we have the fact that there is very little to be said in answer to what is urged, and will continue to be urged from the side of the proletariat against the oppressive nature of capitalism in its relation to the spheres of the spiritual, of the economic, and of rights. But what conclusions are drawn by the socialist thinker from these undeniable facts? The conclusion that capitalism must be done away with! Capitalism is the oppressor, something dreadful, it has proven itself a scourge of modern mankind, so it must be destroyed. What should appear more comprehensible, more fruitful, for the usual agitator than this demand for the abolition of capitalism. But it has resulted in terrible deeds all over Europe. For those who do not confine themselves to these dead thoughts of the last four hundred years, but are able to turn to living thinking needed above all for our Spiritual Science—for those, this talk of the necessity for abolishing capitalism as an oppression and a scourge, is just as logical, based on just such factual as the following: We continually breathe in oxygen end breathe out dead carbonic acid; in us the oxygen is transformed into carbonic acid. Then why should we first inhale it? For it only produces a deadly poison in us, it becomes a deadly poison! There is no doubt that oxygen changes inside us to deadly poison, but for our life's sake we have to breathe it in; the life process in both human and animal bodies is unthinkable without the inhaling, of oxygen. And the social life is just as unthinkable without the continual building up of capital; without the constant building-up of the means of production which, strictly speaking, is nothing more nor less than capital. There is no social organism that would not show the interworking of individual human capacities. Were the demands of the social organism widely understood the worker would say: It is a question of having confidence in the director of the undertaking, for unless he takes the responsibility for it I cannot do my work. When there are directors of undertakings, however, the accumulation of capital necessarily follows. It is impossible to escape the accumulation. If socialistic thinkers, well-meaning up to a point, but mistaken, put the question: How is capitalism to be done away with? this is as significant as to ask: How is the social organism itself to be done away with? How, best is the social organism to be driven to its death?

It is quite clear for anyone who has insight into the matter that capital is accumulated even in the wisest social order, and equally clear that it is idle to ask: How can the amassing of capital be prevented; how can we arrange that no capital is accumulated?—But you see, people today find it too difficult to face up to these things; they prefer to avoid such thoughts. Where thinking is concerned they prefer everything to be easy. But this is not allowed by the times. It is always forgotten that everything living is in a state of becoming, that to comprehend the living time must be taken into account; what is living is one thing at one time and later something different. With a little thought it is not hard to become aware that to understand in its concrete nature anything living, we must take time into account. For the human organism in something alive. Think of your organism about half-past-one; you are all busy people who do not stay long over your meals; coming out after having eaten you have—at least it is to be hoped you have—satisfied your hunger, you are no longer hungry. You can describe your organism, taking it in its concrete condition at half-past-one, as a human organism that is a living being without hunger. But at half-past-twelve on entering the restaurant it was otherwise; then you were all hungry; then you would say: a human organism is something having hunger. The fact is that you are looking at the concrete, the living, at two different points of time, and that, at two different points of time, two entirely contrasting conditions are needed for the well-being of the organism, and something has to be brought about in the the organism that has the effect of causing its opposite to arise. It is the same in what is living in nature as it is in what is socially alive. In a living society capital can never be prevented from arising as a natural symptom of the work of individual human capacities; private property can never be prevented from becoming the means of production. When anyone devotes himself to the direction of some branch of production, and also shares equally in the resulting products with the manual workers working with him, the social organism would never be able to exist unless capital appeared as an attendant phenomenon. For the individual possesses this just as much as he possesses what he needs for his own use, what he produces so that he can exchange it for what he needs.

But we can think just as little whether or not we should eat since we shall certainly become hungry again, as we can think about how the building-up of capital can be permanently prevented. We can think only how this capital is to be transformed at some future date, what must become of it. You cannot wish to prevent the accumulation of capital without undermining the whole social organism in its capacity for life; you can only want what is thus accumulated not to cause harm to the soundness of the social organism.

What is demanded in this way for the soundness of the social organism to be found only in the threefold ordering. For only in the threefold social organism, as in the human natural organism, can the different members work in their various directions. It is in the interest of the individual that a member should be there in the social organism in which individual human capacities come to expression; but it is in the general interest that these individual human capacities should not take on a form that sooner or later would injure the organism. In the course of the economic life capital will always be accumulated. If just left there it will simply pile up to an unlimited extent. Capital piled up through the capacities of human individuals cannot be left in the economic sphere, it must be transferred to the sphere of rights. For the moment man acquires more than he needs of what is produced by him alone or in association with his fellows, the moment capital is accumulated, what he possesses is no more a commodity than is human labour. Possession is a right. Possession is nothing more nor less than an exclusive right, a matter of using or disposing of a thing—be it land, house, or anything of the sort—with utter disregard of others. No other definition of possession is fruitful for understanding the social organism. The moment a man acquires a possession, it must come under the political State and be directed from within the Rights State. But the State may not itself acquire, for then it would itself become economist. It has only to pass over what is acquired to the spiritual organism where the individual capacities of men are dealt with. Now-a-days a process of this kind is carried out only with goods today considered of least value. What I have just been stating holds good for these; it does not hold good for what is of value. When today anything spiritual is produced, a fine poem for instance, an important work by writer or artist, the proceeds from it can be left to his heirs for thirty years after his death, then it passes ever as the free property of all men in common. Thirty years after his death an author's works can be reprinted without any restriction. This originates in the sound idea that man has society to thank for his own individual capacities. Just as a man cannot learn to speak on a desert island but only in the company of others, it is also only from society that he has his individual capacities—on the basis of his karma, certainly, but that has to be developed in society. The fruits of individual activity must return to society. For a time only the individual has command of it because this is better for the social organism. A man himself best knows what he has produced, so to begin with he can be its best administrator. The goods valued least by modern mankind, the spiritual goods, are thus socially estimated in a certain way by taking into account the current concepts.

Some apparently capitalistic members of my recent audience in Berne are supposed to have been very angry—so I was told—when I asked in a lecture why it should not be possible for a capitalist to be obliged by law to assign his capital, a certain number of years after his death, to the free control of a corporation of the spiritual organisation, the spiritual part of the social organism. One can surely think out different ways of establishing a concrete right. But, if it should be expected of people today to return to what was a matter of right in the old Hebraic times, namely, that after a definite time: goods should be apportioned anew, it would be regarded as something unheard of. But what is the consequence of men looking upon it in this way? The consequence is that in the last four-and-a-half years ten million people have been killed, eighteen million crippled, and we have the prospect of more happening in this way. Reflection above all is needed in these matters. It is really not without importance that there should be a desire for the concept of time to be brought to the understanding of the social organism The social organism is thought of as being timeless if it is said that already in a condition of arising something should be done with the incipient capital. But one has to allow capital to come into existence, end even let it for a time be controlled by those who have caused it to arise. We must, however, have the possibility of letting it actually pass over again to men in general through a sound organisation, a sound organism, that is to say, an organism functioning as one that is threefold.

You cannot just ask why a social organism consisting in only one member should not be capable of doing all this. Today people still believe that it is possible, but when they believe it they must reckon badly with the human soul. Only think what it means—for the human soul must be reckoned with—when a near, or even distant, relation of a judge stands before him. As a relation he has his special feelings, but when he has to pronounce judgment it will not be in accordance with his feelings but obviously in accordance with the law. He will give his decision from this other source. Thought out in an all-embracing psychological way this gives you an idea of the necessity for men to judge from three directions, to control from three sources, whatever streams into the social organism. Our times demand that we should go into these things. For ours is the time of the epoch of consciousness, that wishes man to have concrete ideas as guiding impulses for his actions. Many people claim today that we should not keep to the intellect, and to abstract thinking (which is all the thinking they know) but that we should judge out of feeling and, since thinking is only for scientific matters, should hold above all to belief in principles that concern life between man and man.

This is all very doubtful because in our time men are inclined to the most abstract thinking and hold fast to the most straight-forward concepts. And when they have grasped these they cling to them with tremendous tenacity. This abstract thinking has for its organ chiefly the human head, is bound up at least with the physical organ. Formerly, in the time of atavistic clairvoyance, there entered into this thinking from the rest of the human organism a thinking directed to the spiritual. This time is past. Henceforward man must rise consciously to Imagination and grasp the spiritual life consciously. For without this penetration into spiritual life today man's thoughts remain empty.

Now why is this? You know from our recent discussions that what belongs to every human head today is brought over from the rest of the organism of the previous incarnation, excluding the head. I have often dwelt upon this with you. Naturally this does not mean the physical substance but the formative forces of the head,which even in the roundness of its form, resembles the cosmos, these forces after death merge into the cosmos. What remains over for our life as forces between death and a new birth, what in the next life will become the head, is the rest of the body of the previous incarnation. To this is appended the rest of the organism which, fertilised by the father, then comes from the body of the mother. On passing through death we lose what belongs to the head as forces, and transform the forces of the rest of the body into the head of our next incarnation. The great mass of mankind of the present day was in its former incarnation so placed on earth that in the way they thought, in a truly Christian sense, they despised this earthly vale of tears. This scorn is a feeling that is connected not with the head but with the remaining organism. When these human beings re-incarnate today, what appeared in their former incarnation as an exalted Christian feeling, being now reincarnated and developed into the head organism, is transformed into its opposite and becomes a longing for the material, a yearning after material life. Present-day man has reached a turning point in evolution of which we must say that very little from the previous incarnation has come into the head. And just because of this something fresh must enter man, something that as a revelation from the present is manifested anew from the spiritual world. It is no longer possible today simply to hold to the Gospels; it is necessary to listen to what man is now being told about the spiritual. The Catholic Church is sharing in this dead thinking that cannot grip the living organism. Here in Berne the preachers of the Catholic Church too never tire in their professions of faith in the Christ, the Son of the Living God. But of what use is it to believe in the Christ, the Son of the living God, if one grasps Him only with dead thinking, that is, if He becomes a dead ideal in one's own thoughts? Our need today is not to call on the Christ, the Son of the living God, but to call on Christ, the living Son of God, which means to call on the Christ who is living now in the new revelations He is sending to mankind.

Spiritual Science wishes to make what as new revelation is striving directly towards the earth out of the spiritual worlds, into the impulse behind all thoughts. Through this men would receive thoughts capable of diving deep down into reality. These thoughts, it is true, would in many respects be the opposite of those holding sway in men today. Present-day men would like to hold to the most audacious thoughts, as far as possible from reality. And when they have such thoughts they cling to then tenaciously without noticing what the realities are that alter the circumstances with regard to thoughts. I will quote you a striking example of this.

Just as in the Spring and early Summer of 1914 statesmen talked of world peace, so now in Berne the various so-called ‘internationally’ thinking people talk of the coming League of Nations. You know that this idea came from the head of Woodrow Wilson. In his speech of January, 1917, Wilson made public this idea of a League of Nations. He set it up as a model of what men must strive for if he is not again in the future to suffer the terrible catastrophe into which we have today been driven. He described the striving for such a league as an absolute necessity. At the same time he said—and this is important—that the realisation of this League of Nations would depend upon a certain assumption without which there could be no talk of founding a league of the sort. This necessary assumption would be that the war should end without victory on either side for a League of Nations could never be founded in a world where there was definite conquest on the one side, definite defeat on the other.

This is the assumption Wilson made for the setting up of a League of Nations. What has arisen is the exact reverse of this assumption. Nevertheless men will establish the League of Nations in the way that, in January, 1917, Wilson spoke of it as a hypothesis. This means he was very far from reality in his thinking, that he clung to a thinking that offers no possibility of going with these thoughts deeply into reality, comprehending reality, of coming to terms with reality through thought. But that is just what is most needed. for the present time. People do not in the least realise that they dare not hold to their old way of thinking but that it is absolutely essential with thought to look deep into reality.

Now at Berne, as an example of a well-meaning man, we might point to the pacifist, Schücking. There was a discussion about the League of Nations and its organisation. It was curious to listen to the words that the aim would have to be a super-State and a super-Parliament resembling the parliaments of the individual States. For example, Schücking said: The objection will be made that the various States remain individualities and will not submit to the control of a single centralised super-State. The answer to that is what is being done in the national Assembly in Weimar. In that Assembly small local principalities are also individuals, nevertheless there exists a sense of the collective whole.—Here we have, close at hand, an obvious thought for those who love abstractions; for what could be more illuminating than to see that what can be done in miniature with a number of principalities, by joining them into a National Assembly, is now sought to be realised on a large scale with this super-State? But who ever thinks realistically, concretely, whoever makes straight for reality in his thinking, will ask why it was possible in Weimar? It was possible only because a German revolution took place! Otherwise there would have been no talk of doing away with the small States.

Today it is very difficult to make people see that a completely new thinking is necessary, a thinking in sympathy with reality, and that setting things right in present conditions depends upon how much inclination men have for this kind of thinking. A thinking, however, that wishes to know nothing of the spiritual world cannot dive into reality for in all reality there lives the spiritual world. And when we know nothing of the spiritual world we are unable to grasp reality, either today or in the future. Therefore, for the healing of the world today the chief condition is that man should turn to the knowledge of spiritual science. This must form the foundation, this can form the foundation, this can easily form the foundation. Do not keep repeating the superficial chatter that it is difficult to apply Spiritual Science to reality because people are not ready to receive it. Abolish State control over universities, schools, all schools, and. in ten years, in place of the present science which harms and kills the human soul, Spiritual Science, at least in its rudiments, will have arisen! Then what today can grow out of the emancipated third part of the sound social organism, out of the spiritual organisation, will have a different appearance from what is supervised by the State. For this State wishes to develop only its own spirituality, which means that it tolerates only a State theology, or would train its own jurists so that State jurists alone are recognised. Not to speak of medicine! How stupid, how ridiculous it is that medical practice should vary from one State to another, that the same knowledge should not be supposed to heal human beings on both sides of a frontier!

I have often emphasised that to socialistic thinking all spiritual life is mere ideology. What is the deeper reason of this being so for the masses of the proletariat? The reason is that all knowledge is supposed to be controlled by an external political State, and that it is only the shadow of the political State. It is indeed an ideology! If the spiritual life is not to be mere ideology, it must continually out of its own forces, be proving its reality, that means being established on its own foundation. The spiritual life must continually be showing its reality and may not depend upon outward support. Only this kind of independent spiritual life, which sees itself established solely on human ability and has entire control over itself, only a spiritual life of this kind will let its tributaries flow into capitalism with healing effect. For the control of capitalism too is brought about simply by human ability. Make the sources healthy, and spiritual life where it joins with capitalism in guiding economic life, will also be healthy. Thus things hang together and we must become conscious of the connection. The thinking of the present abstractionists must be avoided, the thinking estranged from reality which meets us at every step. It created the conditions that caused our present conditions; but this is not yet understood.

Today men ask how the super-State must be created, and they think of the former State. What was done by that should be done also by the super-State.—But is it not more to the point to ask what the State should leave undone? When the States have landed us in a European catastrophe is it not more apt to askr what it should not do? It should have done with its meddling in spiritual life and its acting as economist; and it should limit itself to the political sphere! It can no longer be asked how a League of Nations should be established, by taking as model what the States have done or should do; it is better and more suitable to the times to ask what the States should give up doing.

People are still little inclined to look deeply into these things. But upon their doing so the destiny of man today will depend.