The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The character of Spiritual Science is such that the truths and data of knowledge contained in it increase in difficulty the farther we descend from universal principles to concrete details. You may already have noticed this when attempts have been made in different groups to speak about historical details, for example about the reincarnations of the great leader of the ancient Persian religion, Zarathustra, or about his connection with Moses, with Hermes, and also with Jesus of Nazareth.¹ On other occasions too, concrete questions of history have been touched upon. As soon as we descend from the great truths concerning the universe as pervaded and woven through by Spirit, from the great cosmic laws to the spiritual nature of a particular individuality, a particular personality, we pass from matters where the human heart will still accept, comparatively easily, this or that questionable point, into realms teeming with improbabilities. And, as a rule, those who are insufficiently prepared become incredulous when they confront this abyss between universal and specific truths.

Our study is intended to be an introduction to lectures which belong to the domain of occult history and will present historical facts and personalities in the light of Spiritual Science. In these lectures I shall have many things to say to you that will seem strange. You will hear many things that will have to reckon upon the will-for-understanding promoted by all the spiritual-scientific knowledge brought before you in the course of the years. For, after all, the finest, most significant fruit of the spiritual-scientific conception of the world is that, complicated and detailed as the knowledge is, we finally have before us not a collection of dogmas, but within us, in our hearts and feelings, we possess something that carries us beyond the standpoint we can reach through any other world-view. We do not imbibe so many dogmas, tenets, or mere information, but through our knowledge we become different human beings. In a certain respect, the aspects of Spiritual Science we shall now be considering call for more than a purely intellectual understanding—for an understanding by the soul, which at many points must be willing to listen to and accept intimations that would become crass and crude if pressed into too sharp outlines.

The picture I want to call up in your minds is that behind the whole evolutionary and historical process, through the millennia up to our own times, spiritual Beings, spiritual Individualities, stand as guides and leaders behind all human evolution and human happenings, and that in the greatest, most significant events in history, this or that human being appears with his whole soul, his whole being, as an instrument of spiritual Individualities standing and working with set purpose behind him. But we must familiarise ourselves with many a concept unknown in ordinary life if we are to gain insight into the strange and mysterious connections between earlier and later happenings in the course of history

If you will remind yourselves of many things that have been said through the years, you will be able to picture that in ancient times—and in Post-Atlantean times, too, if we go back only a few thousand years before what is usually called the historic era—men fell into more or less abnormal states of clairvoyance. Between our matter-of-fact waking consciousness, limited as it is entirely to the physical world, and the unconscious sleeping state, there was once a realm of consciousness through which man penetrated into spiritual reality. And we know that what is nowadays explained as poetic folk-fantasy by scholars who are themselves the originators of so many scientific myths and legends, is to be traced back to ancient clairvoyance, to clairvoyant states of the human soul which in those times gazed behind physical existence and expressed what it saw in the pictures contained in myths, fairy-tales and legends. So that in old, genuinely old myths, fairy-tales and legends, more knowledge, more wisdom and truth are to be found than in the abstract erudition and science of the present day. Therefore when we look back to very ancient times, we-find men who were clairvoyant; we know too that this clairvoyance faded away more and more among the various peoples in the different epochs. In the Christmas lecture to-day² I told you how in Europe, at a comparatively very late time, abundant remains of this ancient clairvoyance still survived. The extinguishing of clairvoyance and the advent of consciousness limited to the physical plane occur at different times among the different peoples.

You can conceive that through the culture-epochs after the great Atlantean catastrophe—through the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin culture-epochs and an into our own—the effects produced in the plan of world-history by the activities of men have been very diverse—inevitably so, because the peoples all stood in different relationships to the spiritual world. In ancient Persian and also in ancient Egyptian times, what man inwardly felt and experienced extended upwards into the spiritual world, and spiritual Powers played into his very soul. Not until the Greco-Latin epoch did this living connection between the human soul and the spiritual world cease in essentials; nor did it disappear completely until our own times. As far as outer history is concerned, the connection exists in our time only when, with the means that are accessible to man to-day, the link between the human soul and the realities of the spiritual worlds is sought consciously. Thus in ancient times, when man looked into his own soul, this soul enshrined not only what it had learnt from the physical world, had pictured according to the pattern of the things of the physical world, but the spiritual Hierarchies ranging above man up into the spiritual worlds were experienced as immediate realities. All this worked down to the physical plane through the instrument of the human soul, and men knew themselves to be connected with these individual Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we look back, let us say, into the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—but it must be the earlier periods of it—we find men who are, so to say, historical personalities; but we do not understand them if we think of them as historical personalities in the modern sense.

When as men of the materialistic age we speak of historical personalities, we are convinced that it is only the impulses, the intentions, of the actual personalities in question that take effect in the course of history. But with this conception we can in reality understand only the men of the last three thousand years: that is—approximately of course—the men of the millennium which ended with the birth of Christ Jesus, and those of the first and the second Christian millennia in which we ourselves are living. Plato, Socrates, possibly also Thales and Pericles, are men who can still be understood as having at any rate some resemblance to ourselves. But farther back than that it is not possible to understand human beings if we attempt to do so merely by analogy with those living to-day. This applies, shall we say, to Hermes, the great Teacher of the Egyptian epoch, also to Zarathustra, and even to Moses. When we go back before the thousand. years preceding the Christian era we must reckon with the fact that wherever we have to do with historical personalities, higher Individualities, higher Hierarchies stand behind and take possession of these personalities—in the best sense of the word, of course. And now a strange phenomenon comes to light, without knowledge of which the process of historical evolution cannot really be understood.

Five culture-epochs including our own, have been enumerated. Many, many thousands of years ago we come to the first Post-Atlantean culture-epoch, the ancient Indian; this was followed by the second, the ancient Persian; this by the third, the Egypto-Chaldean; this by the fourth, the Greco-Latin; and this by the fifth, our own epoch. When we go back from the Greco-Latin to the Egyptian epoch we must change our whole way of studying history: instead of looking at the purely human aspect—which it is still possible to do in connection with the figures of the Greek world as far back as the age of the Heroes—we must now apply a different criterion by looking behind the single personalities for the spiritual Powers which represent the super-personal and work through the personalities as their instruments. We must have These spiritual Individualities always in mind, so that working behind some human being an the physical plane we can discern discern a Being of the higher Hierarchies who, as it were, takes hold of him from behind and Sets him at the appropriate place in evolution.

From this point of view it is highly interesting to perceive the connections between the really significant happenings—those which were determinative factors in the course of history—in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch and in the Greco-Latin epoch. These two culture-epochs follow one another, and to begin with we go back, let us say to the years from 2800 to 3200–3500 B.C.—which comparatively speaking is not so very far. Nevertheless we shall not understand happenings then—of which ancient history is already able to tell something to-day—unless behind the historical personalities we discern the higher Individualities. But then it also becomes evident to us that in the fourth, the Greco-Latin epoch, there is a kind of repetition of the really important happenings of the third epoch. It is almost as if things that in the earlier epoch an be explained through higher laws, must be explained in the following age through laws of the physical world, as if everything had sunk down, had become a stage more material, more physical. There is a kind of reflection in the physical world of great events of the preceding period.

By way of introduction, I want to draw your attention to how one of the most important happenings of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch is presented to us in a significant myth, and how this event is reflected, but at a lower stage, in the Greco-Latin epoch. I shall therefore be speaking of two parallel happenings which in the occult sense belong together, the one taking place half a plane higher, as it were, and the other entirely on the physical earth but like a kind of shadow-image on the physical plane of a spiritual event of the earlier epoch. Outwardly, it is only in the form of myths that humanity has ever been able to tell of events behind which stand Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But we shall see what lies behind the myth which describes the most significant event of the Chaldean epoch.³ We will look only at the main features of this myth.

There was once a great king, by name Gilgamesh. From the name itself, one who understands such matters will recognise that here we have to do not merely with a physical king, but with a divinity standing behind him, a spiritual Individuality by whom the king of Erech is inspired, who works and acts through him. Thus we have to do with one who in the real sense must be called a god-man.⁴ The story narrates that he oppresses the city of Erech. The city turns to its deity, Aruru, and she causes a helper to arise out of the earth. These are pictures of the myth. We shall see what deeply significant historical events lie behind it. The Goddess of the City produces Eabani out of the earth. Eabani is a kind of human being who, in comparison with Gilgamesh, seems to be of an inferior nature, for we are told that he was clothed in the skins of animals, was covered with hair, was like a wild man. Nevertheless in his wild nature there was divine Inspiration, ancient clairvoyance, clairvoyant knowledge, clairvoyant perception.

Eabani comes to know a woman of Erech and is attracted by her into the City. He becomes the friend of Gilgamesh and this brings peace to the city. Gilgamesh and Eabani together are now the rulers. Then Ishtar, the Goddess of Erech, is stolen by a neighbouring city. There upon Eabani and Gilgamesh go to war with the marauding city, conquer the king and bring the Goddess back again to Erech. Gilgamesh lives near her, and here we come to the strange fact that he has no understanding of the essential nature of the Goddess. A scene takes place, directly reminiscent of a Biblical scene described in the Gospel of St. John. Gilgamesh confronts Ishtar, but his conduct is very different from that of Christ Jesus. He upbraids the Goddess for having loved many other men before she had encountered him, reproaching her particularly for her most recent attachment. Thereupon the Goddess carries her complaints to that deity, that Being of the higher Hierarchies, to whom she belongs. She goes to Anu. And now Anu sends a bull down to the earth; Gilgamesh has to engage in combat with it. Those who recall Mithras's fight with the bull will see a resemblance here. All these events—and when we come to explain the myth we shall see what depths it contains—have led meanwhile to the death of Eabani. Gilgamesh is now alone. A thought comes to him that gnaws at the very fibres of his soul. Under the impression of what he has experienced, he becomes conscious for the first time of the thought that man is mortal; a thought to which he had previously paid no heed comes before his soul in all its terror. And then he hears of the only man of earth who has remained immortal, whereas all other human beings in the Post-Atlantean epoch have become conscious of mortality: he hears of the immortal Xisuthros far away in the West. And because he is resolved to fathom the riddle of life and death, he sets out on the perilous journey to the West.⁵—I can tell you at once that this journey to the West is nothing else than the search for the secrets of ancient Atlantis, for happenings prior to the great Atlantean catastrophe.

Gilgamesh sets out on his journey. The details are interesting. He has to pass through an entrance guarded by giant scorpions; the spirit leads him into the realm of death; he enters the kingdom of Xisuthros and there learns that in the Post-Atlantean epoch all men will inevitably be more and more penetrated with the consciousness of death. Gilgamesh now asks Xisuthros whence he has knowledge of his eternal being; how comes it that he is conscious of immortality? Thereupon Xisuthros says to him: “You too can have this consciousness, but you must undergo all that I had to experience in overcoming the terror, anxiety and loneliness through which it was my lot to pass. When the god Ea had resolved to let perish” (in what we call the Atlantean catastrophe) “that part of humanity which was to live no longer, he bade me to withdraw into a kind of ship. I was to take with me the animals that were to remain, and those Individualities who are truly to be called the Masters. By means of this ship I outlived the great catastrophe.” Xisuthros then tells Gilgamesh: “What was there undergone, you can experience only in your innermost being; but you can attain the consciousness of immortality if for seven nights and six days you refrain from sleep.” Gilgamesh wishes to submit to the test but soon falls asleep. Then the wife of Xisuthros baked seven mystic loaves which by being eaten are to be a substitute for what would have been attained in the seven nights and six days without sleep. With this “life-elixir” Gilgamesh continues his journeying, bathes as it were in a fountain of youth, and again reaches the borders of his own country in the region of the Euphrates and the Tigris. A serpent deprives him of the power of the life-elixir and so he reaches his country without it, but all the same with the consciousness that there is indeed immortality, and filled with longing to see the spirit at least, of Eabani. The spirit of Eabani appears to him, and from the discourse which then takes place we can glean how, for the culture of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, a consciousness of the link with the spiritual world could arise.—This relationship between Gilgamesh and Eabani is very significant. I have now outlined pictures from the significant myth of Gilgamesh which, as we shall see, will lead us into the spiritual depths lying behind the Chaldean-Babylonian culture-epoch. These pictures show that two individualities stand there: the individuality of one—Gilgamesh—into whom a divine-spiritual being has penetrated; and an individuality who is more of a human being, but of such a nature that he may be called a young soul, who has had few incarnations and for that reason has carried over ancient clairvoyance into later times—Eabani.

Eabani is depicted as being clothed in skins of animals. This is an indication of his wild nature; but because of this very wildness he is still endowed with ancient clairvoyance an the one hand, and an the other hand he is a young soul who has lived through far, far fewer incarnations than other souls who have reached a high level of development. Thus Gilgamesh represents a being who was ready for initiation but was not able to attain it, for the journey to the West is the journey to an initiation that was not carried through to the end. On the one side we see in Gilgamesh the actual inaugurator of the Chaldean-Babylonian culture, and working behind him a divine-spiritual Being, a kind of Fire-Spirit.⁶ And beside Gilgamesh there is another individuality—Eabani—a young soul who descended late to earthly incarnation. If you read the book Occult Science, you will find that the individualities returned only gradually from the planets.—The exchange of the knowledge possessed by these two is the root of the Babylonian-Chaldean culture, and we shall see that the whole of this culture is an outcome of what proceeds from Gilgamesh and Eabani. Clairvoyance from the divine man, Gilgamesh, and clairvoyance from the young soul, Eabani, penetrate into the Chaldean-Babylonian culture. This process, enacted by two beings working side by side, each of whom is necessary to the other, is then reflected in the later, fourth culture-epoch, the Greco-Latin, and in fact reflected on the physical plane. We shall of course only very gradually reach complete understanding of such a process. A more spiritual process is thus reflected on the physical plane when humanity has descended very far, when men no longer feel the relation of human personality to the divine-spiritual world.

These secrets of the divine-spiritual world were preserved in the places of the Mysteries. So, for example, many of the ancient, holy secrets which proclaimed the connection of the human soul with the divine-spiritual worlds were preserved in the Mysteries of Diana of Ephesus and in the Ephesian temple. A great deal in these Mysteries was no longer comprehensible in an age when human personality had come into prominence. And like a token of how little the purely external personality understood what had remained spiritually, there stands the half-mystical figure of Herostratus, who has eyes only for the superficial aspect of personality—Herostratus who flings the burning torch into the temple of Ephesus. This deed is like a token of the clash between the personality and what had survived from ancient spirituality. And on the very same day when a man, merely in order that his name might go down to posterity, throws the burning brand into the sanctuary of Ephesus, there is born the man who has achieved more than all others for the culture of personality—and on the very soil where the culture of were personality was meant to be overcome. Herostratus flings the burning torch on the day when Alexander the Great is born—the man who is all personality! Alexander the Great stands there as the shadow-image of Gilgamesh.⁷ A profound truth lies behind this. In the Greco-Latin epoch, Alexander the Great stands there as the shadow image of Gilgamesh, as a projection of the spiritual on to the physical plane. And Eabani, projected on to the physical plane, is Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander the Great.

Here indeed is a strange circumstance: Alexander and Aristotle standing, like Gilgamesh and Eabani, side by side. And we see how in the first third of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch there is carried over, as it were, by Alexander the Great but transformed into the laws of the physical plane—that which had been imparted to the Babylonian-Chaldean culture by Gilgamesh. This comes to wonderful expression in the fact that, as a result of the deeds of Alexander, there was established an the scene of Egypto-Chaldean culture Alexandria itself, the city founded by Alexander in 332 B.C. in order that the great achievements of the Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean culture-epoch might be brought together in one centre. And gradually all the streams of Post-Atlantean culture that were intended to come together did indeed converge on Alexandria, the city established an the scene of the third culture-epoch but with the character of the fourth.

Alexandria outlasted the beginnings of Christianity. Indeed it was in Alexandria that the factors of greatest significance in the fourth culture-epoch developed, when Christianity was already in existence. There the great scholars were working; there the three most important streams of culture flowed together: the ancient Pagan-Grecian stream, the Christian stream and the Mosaic-Hebrew stream. They interpenetrated one another in Alexandria. And it is impossible to conceive that the culture of Alexandria which was built entirely on the foundation of personality—could have been inaugurated in any other way than through the being who was inspired by personality—Alexander the Great. For now, through the very existence of this centre of culture, everything that formerly was super-personal, extending from the human personality upwards into the spiritual world, assumed a personal character. The personalities we find in Alexandria have, as it were, everything within themselves; the Powers from higher Hierarchies who guide the personalities and set them in their allotted places, are very little in evidence. All the sages and philosophers working in Alexandria seem to be embodiments of ancient wisdom transformed into human personality; it is the personal element that speaks out of them. The singular fact is that everything in ancient Paganism that could be explained only by the teaching of how gods came down and united with daughters of men in order to bring forth heroes—all this is transformed into personal forcefulness in the men in Alexandria. And the forms which Judaism, the Mosaic culture, assumed in Alexandria can be described from what is in evidence precisely during the period when Christianity was already in existence. Nothing is to be found of those deep conceptions of a link between the world of men and the spiritual world which were present in the age of the prophets and are still to be found in the last two centuries before the beginning of our era. In Judaism too, everything has become personality. There are gifted, able men in Alexandria, men possessed of extraordinarily deep insight into the secrets of the ancient occult teachings ... but everything has become personal; personalities are working in Alexandria. And it is there that to begin with, Christianity appears, shall we say, in a distorted, debased state of infancy. Christianity, whose real function is to lead the personal element in man upwards into the impersonal, made its appearance in Alexandria in a very ruthless form. Christian personalities, in particular, acted in such a way that we often have the impression: their deeds are anticipations of later actions by bishops and archbishops working on a purely personal basis. This applies both to Archbishop Theophilus in the fourth century and to his kinsman and successor, St. Cyril.⁸ We can judge them only an the basis of their human failings. Christianity, which was to give to mankind the greatest of all gifts, reveals itself to begin with in its greatest failings and from its personal side. But in Alexandria a sign and token was to stand before the whole evolution of humanity.

There again we have a projection on the physical plane of earlier, more spiritual conditions. In the Orphic Mysteries of ancient Greece there was a wonderful personality, one who was initiated in the Mystery-secrets and was among the most loveable, most interesting pupils of these Mysteries, well prepared by a certain Celtic occult training undergone in earlier incarnations. This individuality sought with deepest fervour for the secrets of the Orphic Mysteries. The pupils of these Mysteries had to live through in their own soul what is described in the myth of Dionysos Zagreus, who was dismembered by the Titans but whose body was carried away by Zeus into a higher life. How, as the result of a certain path taken in the Mysteries, man's life is surrendered to the outer world, how his whole being is torn in pieces so that he can no longer find his bearings within himself—this was to become an actual, individual experience in the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries.

When in the ordinary way we study animals, plants and minerals, what we learn is merely abstract knowledge because we remain outside them; but anyone who wishes to obtain knowledge in the occult sense must train himself to feel as if he were actually within the animals, plants and minerals, in air and water, in springs and mountains, in stones and Stars, in other human beings—as if he were one with them. all. Nevertheless, a pupil of the Orphic Mysteries had to develop the inner strength of soul which would enable him, re-established as a self-based individuality, to triumph over the disintegration of his being in the external world. When all this had become an actual human experience, it represented in a certain sense one of the very highest secrets of Initiation. And many pupils of the Orphic Mysteries had undergone such experiences, had lived through this disintegration in the world and, as a kind of preparation for Christianity, had therewith attained the highest experience within reach in pre-Christian times.

Among the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries was the loveable personality of whom I am speaking, whose earthly name has not come down to posterity, but who stands out clearly as a pupil of these Mysteries. Already in youth and then for many years, this person was closely connected with all the Greek Orphics during the period preceding that of Greek philosophy—a period of which no account is given in books an the history of philosophy. For what is recorded of Thales and Heraclitus is an echo of what the Mystery-pupils had accomplished in their way at an earlier period. And one of the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries was the individual of whom I have just spoken, whose pupil in turn was Pherecydes of Syros, referred to in the lecture-course given at Munich last year: The East in the light of the West⁹

Investigation of the Akasha Chronicle reveals that the individuality of that pupil of the Orphic Mysteries was reincarnated in the 4th century A.D. We find this individuality amid the activity and life of those gathered together in Alexandria, the Orphic secrets now transformed into personal experiences of the loftiest kind. It is very remarkable how all the Orphic secrets were transformed into personal experiences in this new incarnation. At the end of the 4th century, A.D., we find this individuality reborn as the daughter of a great mathematician, Theon. We see how there flashes up in her soul all that could be experienced of the Orphic Mysteries through vision of the great mathematical, light-woven texture of the universe. All this was now personal talent, personal genius. These faculties had now to be of so personal a character that it was necessary even for this individuality to have a mathematician as father in order that something might be received from heredity.

Thus we look back to times when man was still in living connection with the spiritual worlds, as was this Orphic pupil; and we see the shadow-image of this pupil among those who taught in Alexandria at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century A.D. This individuality had as yet experienced nothing that enabled men at that time to see beyond the shadow-sides of Christianity at its beginning. For all that had remained in this soul as an echo of the Orphic Mysteries was still too powerful to enable any Illumination to be received from that other Light, the new Christ Event. What arose round about as Christianity, represented by men of the type of Theophilus and Cyril, was in truth of such a nature that this Orphic individuality, working now with personal faculties, had things far greater, far richer in wisdom to say and to give than those who represented Christianity in Alexandria at that time.

Theophilus and Cyril were both filled with the deepest hatred of everything that was not Christian in the narrow ecclesiastical sense in which these two bishops, in particular, understood it. Christianity had assumed in them such an entirely personal character that these two patriarchs levied hirelings in their service; men were collected from far and near to form bodyguards for them. Their aim was power in its most personal sense. They were utterly obsessed by hatred of what originated in ancient times and yet was so much greater than the new that was appearing in caricatured shape. The deepest hatred was directed by the dignitaries of Christianity in Alexandria against the individuality of the reborn Orphic pupil. The fact that she was branded as a black magician will not therefore surprise us. But that was enough to incite the whole mob of hirelings against the noble, unique figure of the reborn pupil of the Orphic Mysteries. She was still young, but in spite of her youth, in spite of the fact that she was obliged to undergo much that in those days, too, imposed great hardships an a woman during a long period of study, she found her way upwards to the light that outshone all the wisdom, all the knowledge existing in those days. And it was wonderful how in the lecture halls of Hypatia—for such was the name of this reincarnated Orphic pupil—the purest, most luminous wisdom in Alexandria was presented to the enraptured listeners. She drew to her feet not only the Pagans, bat also Christians of deep and penetrating insight, such as Synesius. She was an influence of outstanding significance, and the revival of the old Pagan wisdom of Orpheus transformed into personality could be experienced in Alexandria in the figure of Hypatia.

World-karma was working in the truest sense symbolically. What had constituted the secret of her Initiation was now projected, mirrored, on the physical plane. And here we come to an event that is symbolically significant in the case of many things that have taken place in historical times. We come to one of those events that is seemingly only a martyrdom, but is in reality a symbol in which spiritual forces, spiritual intimations are coming to expression.

On a day in March in the year 415 A.D., Hypatia fell victim to the fury of these who formed the entourage of the patriarch of Alexandria. They resolved to rid themselves of her power, of her spiritual power. The utterly uncivilised, wild hordes were rushed in from the environs of Alexandria as well, and the chaste young sage was fetched away under false pretences. She mounted the chariot, and at a given sign the enflamed rabble fell upon her, tore off her clothing, dragged her into a church, and literally tore the flesh from her bones. The fragments of her body were then scattered around the city by these hordes, completely dehumanised by their rapacious passions. Such was the fate of the great woman philosopher, Hypatia.

Symbolically, so to say, there is indicated here something that is deeply connected with the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great—although it happened a long time after the actual founding of the city. In this event, important secrets of the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch are reflected. This epoch, destined as it was to represent the dissolution, the sweeping-away, of the old, contained so much that was great and significant, and with paradoxical grandeur placed before the world a most pregnant symbol in the slaughter—one can call it nothing else—of Hypatia, the outstanding woman at the turn of the 4th-5th centuries of our era.

• 1. See among other lectures by Rudolf Steiner: Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew, lectures II and III; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lectures I, II, III; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, lecture III; From Jesus to Christ, lecture VIII.
• 2. The lecture, not yet printed in English, was entitled: Yuletide and the Christmas Symbols. Stuttgart, 27.12.1910.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner, World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, notably lectures III, IV, V.
• 4. See also: Jastrow (Mords), Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Chapter XXIII. (Boston, 1898.) Budge (E. A. Wallis), The Babylonian Story of the Deluge and the Epic of Gilgamesh. (London, 1920. Revised by C. J. Gadd, 1929.) Thompson (Reginald Campbell), The Epic of Gilgamesh (London, 1928.) Contains a fairly full text.
• 5. See Budge, op. cit., p. 50:
  
  "I myself shall die, and shall not I then be as Enkidi (Eabani)
  Sorrow hath entered into my soul,
  Because of the fear of death which hach got hold of me do I wander over the country ..."
  
  Xisuthros, said to mean "the exceedingly wise," is a Greek corruption of an earlier designation. He is the same being as Uta-Napishtim in the versions of the Epic mentioned abovc, and is the Babylonian Noah. He tells the story of the Deluge to Gilgamesh. Cp. Cory (Isaac Preston), Ancient Fragments, p. 49; also Enc. of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VI, pp. 642—3; and Budge, op. cit., PP. 25—40.
• 6. See Langdon, op. cit., pp. 207—8. The name Gilgamesh is said to mean: " The Fire-god is a commander."
• 7. Cp. Jastrow, op. cit., pp. 516–17
• 8. Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, 385–412. Persecuted the followers of Origen. Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria. Played a prominent patt at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
• 9. The passage on Pherecydes of Syros occurs in lecture 4 of the Course entitled The East in the Light of the West, pp. 67—71 in the English edition.

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and continues to think; but not as a
human being, but as nature.”

That is to say, Goethe is clear about one thing: spinning a mechanical web of concepts about nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can seek out in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust, - is this striving a solitary, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if we consider Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, we clearly see, especially in the way he worked his way from his earlier world view to his later one, how he, despite his reclusiveness, developed out of everything all that in the German national spirit aspired after certainty, and how, owing to this national spirit, he did not come to a narrowing of the human soul to the sphere of mere human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the whole range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development.

One might say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; what has become so dear to the German worldview, especially from the eighteenth century onward, already lives in Kant. This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. overlooks the world and looks at the way in which he is placed in the world, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that he world without this second aspect of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One might say that when the German mind looks at the stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, to speak symbolically, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to recognize: How can we become immersed in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life? How can we become immersed in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal? How does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature? This is a question that cannot be answered lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's world view was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing into the world through human beings. Morality could not be a reality that presents itself indifferently, and against which moral ideas must rebound. When moral ideas from the spiritual world are put into action through human beings, they must not be repelled by the rigid materialistic barrier of the sensory world. This must be taken as a profound insight, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical , but which arose from deep German striving: “All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only the sensualized material of our duty.” The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out as man perceives it in ideas and ideals, and these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. Sensuality has no independent existence for Fichte, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty.

From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must be sought from a natural disposition towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided, but that does not matter when such words are made into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of a striving that lives in a people, that is the significant thing; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought. In order to give thought its vitality, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's Faust, this image of the highest human endeavor, this image that one must first struggle to understand by allowing many German cultural elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? — It is truly not invented, did not come about in such a way that a single person created it out of themselves; rather, it emerged from the legends, from the poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was still familiar with the “puppet show of Dr. Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the arena of thoughts. Nothing is more vivid than Goethe's “Faust” to show how something supreme can emerge from what lives most deeply, most elementarily, most intimately in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but that Goethe brought Faust forth like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it its essence, embodied it in such a way that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought. Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their own nature, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the whole nation, it is the result of German idealism.

And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and remains as such confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German idealism, the personality does not merely encounter the thought as it enters the soul, but the thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which vibrates and permeates the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation. Thus, thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German wants to rise through thought to the living spirit, wants to penetrate into that world that lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is related to him. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him. And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so detached from external reality, from external experience, strove for a world view, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his successor Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within him that he considers the knowledge of nature, which only wants to express itself in concepts about nature, as nothing. Only when the human soul comes to regard all of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that rules it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but appropriate word for the essence of Germanness comes from Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Admittedly, this is at first a one-sided saying; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is rightly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the spirit to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself, which penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science, we can find it precisely within this world picture of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel, who is difficult to understand and who is so far removed from many, this lively character of the scene of the thoughts within German idealism appears in the same way. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels himself closely connected with the Goethean direction of nature towards the spirit. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is created for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only create by thinking it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is a consciousness, a certain attitude. This attitude consists in stripping away all sense perceptions, all perceptions of the senses, for a few moments of world-gazing, stripping away everything that one wants and feels as an individual, and surrendering to what as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, — that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world, but no longer his thinking world, so that he no longer says to this world: I think, therefore I am! but: “The spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I offer as soul to the all-encompassing spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming. And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what that soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself within it. One must also see this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic excerpt from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogmatics, on which one can swear or not, but as something that, like a symptom of German striving in a certain time, can stand before us. In Hegel's philosophy, the world spirit appears as a mere thinker; but while it is true that much more than mere thinking was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, to seek logic, is one which produces in man the attitude towards the living that reigns behind existence and which leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which in the experience of thought has experience of the world.

The three idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte tried to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and did not say, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For Fichte, if he had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, would have said: “There I find within me a rigid existence, an existence to which I must look. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. Not through the act of thought, not through mere thinking can I arrive at my ego, but through an act of action. That is a continuous creative process. It does not depend on looking at its being; it leaves its previous being; but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act of doing, it is constantly being reborn. Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively. And Schelling, he tries to recognize nature, and with genuinely German feeling he lives into the secrets of nature, even if, of course, his statements, if you want to take them as dogma, can be presented as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creative nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creative nature as with a human being with whom he is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in the Schellingian nature. Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way from his point of view, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. There Goethe, to describe how far removed every abstract observer is from a contemplation of nature, there he calls what he, as an external naturalist, is to the earth, his friendship with the earth. So human, so directly alive does the German spirit feel itself in Goethe to the spirit that reigns in nature in the striving to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the arena of thoughts. And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares this with what prevails in Hegel's idealistic world-view, then one gets the right impression of the world-importance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel's work, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear, one might say, crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought , but that what the soul experiences in terms of thought is direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in terms of thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German mind rises from its direct and living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that are arrived at, but the soul foundations from which the human soul seeks a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In answer to this it may be said: He who calls Hegel's logic by that name is himself dry and cold. He who is able to approach this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; he can feel in the apparently abstract thoughts, which in Hegel's system are so spun out of one another, the most living warmth of soul that is necessary to strip away all individuality and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing is nebulous in it, a mystical trait prevails in all its details.

Even in our time, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to fathom the fundamental idealism of this German nature in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, if we turn our gaze to them, we still find that the development of Germany consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism.

How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has often been discussed and will be discussed more often. Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German idealism, after it had reached one of its high points in the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. There was a period in this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the 19th century, until the last third of the 19th century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity, was only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, in the sphere of natural science, the same process of thinking can be observed that is expressed in Goethe's Faust. example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creation, is only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, as it were, the field that does not seek to grasp the highest in man by the detour of a work of fiction such as Faust, but that music is the field in which sensuality must be grasped directly. For example, the contrast between the legend of Don Juan and that of Faust has been cited, with a certain amount of justification after the experiences that could be had within the development of humanity, how mistaken it is to legend on the same level as the Faust legend; it has been asserted that what this other legend, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly evokes and seizes sensuality. — The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in modern times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external, emotional element in music, that has sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of the spirit, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most demure element for thought there is nothing that could resist or be opposed to the strength of life that dominates the German spirit. If, through his philosophy and his contemplation of nature, the German has tried to present nature to his soul in such a way that the seemingly mechanical, the seemingly external and rigid loses its mechanical aspect and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself , on the other hand, the element that flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones has been allowed to seek its connection, its marriage, with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thoughts, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected an elevation of an artistic-sensual element into a directly spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side, but a remarkable side, of the nature of the German people, and will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who, I might say, is able to place themselves within the German people in a way that revitalizes thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel so rightly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a fight imposed on it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by having to wage a fight, which it feels is due to it from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves. And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our soul, for which the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. A future history will have to establish more and more the deeper connection between the German soul, struggling through the course of the world, and the bloody events of the times, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering. I wanted nothing with today's reflection but to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as they have been handed down to us by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities – without any arrogance – in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to exalt themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend to the sources of existence in a modest way, as Boutroux thinks, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other nations within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through a period of development, it seemed to me that the German mind was so fully occupied with the sphere of ideas that the way Hegel's disciples thought was felt by Schelling , who was still alive, and by his students, was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. Whereas in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another through logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to sense the thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it was said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is only that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this is the one who will most easily come to terms with things—a piece of wisdom that roughly corresponds to the point of view of studying the world not when it is illuminated by the sun but at night, when all cats are black or gray. But anyone who today surveys the British judgment on the necessity of what is happening within the German character will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking effect and what one does not want to admit even to oneself. The present-day British really need a new mask to characterize their relationship to the Germans, and the foreign philosophers need a new sophistry to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found since the outbreak of the war.

And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will uplift him within the difficult world situation when he thinks of the duty the world spirit has assigned to him, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do will flow to him as realization from the realization of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his resounding words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian national character as he could have. But it is not for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture; but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, masks, to remove the causes of the war from their own soil, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we have already seen emerging in recent years, a strange justification: he needed a new saint, a saint appointed from within the ranks of the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of Italian character repeatedly appeal. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a position within today's historical events; because German character does not arise from such sophistry, such masks, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to be expressed, from what the national spirit of the German people has revealed to the best minds of this people have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying that the German always sought to direct his soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German character must achieve in the future. Today, we can look at what Germans have always loved, believed, and hoped for in the context of their past, present, and future. And so let us end with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the widest circles, but who in lonely thought wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of the German power, in the sixties, a lonely thinker was concerned with the idea: in imagination, in the life of the soul, in idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that can only somehow be sensed by him. He had to develop a strength that must lie in his nature and that gives us hope that this strength will be fruitful, victorious in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German nature holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively placing himself in the German future, spoke as a 65-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the scholarly hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken her,
She has taken the glass from the hothouse with her.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
A mild light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection of those stars
The late grandchildren will learn to see,
To report in prophetically higher visions
Of God and humanity higher things.»

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the Master's word, which looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true in its people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of Faust expects of the coming centuries, German deed too may no longer be a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!

We believe that such hopes, expressed by the best of Germans from the deepest German national sentiment, may be fulfilled in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy of our courageous and active people. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he will find the strength to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits that must blossom for the German people out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history. Thus, in the present difficult times, what may support, uplift and guide the German through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself is integrated into German life, German work, German feeling and sentiment: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future.

Yesterday I spoke of the teacher’s encounter with the children. Today I will try to describe the child, as a growing being, and the experience of encountering the teacher. A more exact observation of the forces active in the development of the human being shows that at the beginning of a child’s earthly life we must distinguish three distinct stages of life. After we have gained a knowledge of the human being and the ability to perceive the characteristics of these three stages, we can begin to educate in a way that is true to the facts—or rather, an education that is true to the human being.

The Nature of Proof in Spiritual Matters

The first stage of life ends with the change of teeth. Now I know that there is a certain amount of awareness these days concerning the changes that occur in the body and soul of children at this stage of life. Nevertheless, it is not sufficient to enable perception of all that happens in the human being at this tender age; we must come to understand this in order to become educators. The appearance of teeth—not the inherited, baby teeth—is merely the most obvious sign of a complete transformation of the whole human being. Much more is happening within the organism, though not as perceptible outwardly; its most radical expression is the appearance of the second teeth.

If we consider this we can see that contemporary physiology and psychology simply cannot penetrate the human being with any real depth, since their particular methods (excellent though they may be) were developed to observe only outer physical nature and the soul as it manifests in the body. As I said yesterday, the task of anthroposophic spiritual science is to penetrate in every way the whole human development of body, soul, and spirit.

First, however, we must eliminate a certain assumption. This preconception is inevitably a stumbling block to anyone who approaches the Waldorf education movement without a basic study of anthroposophy. I do not mean for a moment that we simply ignore objections to this kind of education. On the contrary. Those who have a spiritual foundation such as anthroposophy cannot be the least bit fanatical; they will always fully consider any objections to their viewpoints. Consequently, they fully understand the frequent argument against anthroposophic education. But, these things still must be proven.

Now, people have a lot to say about proofs with no clear idea of what that means. I cannot present a detailed lecture on the methods of proof in the various spheres of life and knowledge; but I would like to be clear about a certain comparison.

What do people mean when they say that something requires “proof”? The whole trend of human evolution since the fourteenth century has been to validate judgments through visual observation—that is to say, through sense perception. It was a very different matter before the current era, or before the fourteenth century. But we fail to realize today that our ancestors had a very different view of the world. In a certain sense we feel proud when we consider the development that has occurred in recent centuries. We look condescendingly at what people did during the Middle Ages, for example, considering them childish and primitive. But it is an age about which we really know nothing and call the “Dark Ages.” Try to imagine how our successors will speak of us—if they are as arrogant in their thinking as we are! If they turn out to be so conceited, we will seem just as childish to them as medieval people appear to us.

During the ages before the fourteenth century, humans perceived the world of the senses, and also comprehended with the intellect. The intelligence of the medieval monastic schools is too often underestimated. The inner intelligence and conceptual faculty was much more highly developed than the modern and chaotic conceptual faculty, which is really driven by, and limited to, natural phenomena; anyone who is objective and impartial can observe this. In those days, anything that the intellect and senses perceived in the universe required validation from the divine, spiritual realm. The fact that sense revelation had to be sanctioned by divine revelation was not merely an abstract principle; it was a common, very human feeling and observation. A manifestation in the world of the senses could be considered valid only when knowledge of it could be proven and demonstrated in terms of the divine, spiritual world.

This situation changed, gradually at first, one mode of knowledge replacing the other. Today, however, it has come to the point where we only acknowledge the validity of something—even in the spiritual world—when it can be proven through the senses. Something is validated when statements about spiritual life can be confirmed by experiment and observation. Why does everyone ask for a demonstration of matters that are really related to spirit? People ask you to make an experiment or sense observation that provides proof.

This is what people want, because they have lost faith in the reality of the human being’s inner activity; they have lost faith in the possibility that intuitions can emerge from the human being when looking at ordinary life, at sensory appearances and the intellect. Humanity has really weakened inwardly, and is no longer conscious of the firm foundation of an inner, creative life. This has had a deep influence on all areas of practical life, and most of all on education.

Proofs, such as external sensory appearances, through observation and experiment, may be compared to a man who notices that an unsupported object falls, and that it is attracted by the Earth’s gravity and therefore must be supported until it rests on solid ground. And then this man says, “Go ahead, tell me that the Earth and the other heavenly bodies hover freely in space, but I cannot understand it. Everything must be supported or it will fall.” Nevertheless, the Earth, Sun, and other heavenly bodies do not fall. We must completely change our way of thinking, when we move from earthly conditions into the cosmos. In cosmic space, heavenly bodies support one another; the laws of Earth do not apply there.

This is also true of spiritual facts. When we speak of the material nature of plants, animals, minerals, or human beings, we must prove our statements through experiment and sense observation. This kind of proof, like the example mentioned, suggests that an object must be supported. In the free realm of the spirit, however, truths support one another. The only validation required is their mutual support. Thus, in representing spiritual reality, every idea must be placed clearly within the whole, just as Earth or any other heavenly body moves freely in cosmic space. Truths must support one another. Anyone who tries to understand the spiritual realm must first examine truths coming from other directions, and how they support the one truth through the free activity of their “gravitational force” of proof, as it were. In this way, that single truth is kept free in the cosmos, just as a heavenly body is supported freely in the cosmos by the countering forces of gravity. A capacity to conceive of the spiritual in this way must become an essential inner quality of human beings; otherwise, though we may be able to understand and educate the soul aspect, we will be unable to understand and educate the spirit that also lives and moves in the human being.

The Individual’s Entry into the World

When human beings enter the physical world of sensation, their physical body is provided by the parents and ancestors. Even natural science knows this, although such discoveries will become complete only in the remote future. Spiritual science teaches that this is only one aspect of the human being; the other part unites with what arises from the father and mother; it descends as a spirit and soul being from the realm of spirit and soul.

Between the previous earthly life and the present one, this being passed through a long period of existence from the previous death to rebirth; it had experiences in the spiritual world between death and rebirth, just as on Earth, between birth and death, we have bodily experiences communicated through the senses, intellect, feelings, and will. The essence of these spiritual experiences descends, unites at first only loosely with the physical nature of the human being during the embryonic period, and hovers around the person, lightly and externally like an aura, during the first period of childhood between birth and the change of teeth. This being of spirit and soul who comes down from the spiritual world—a being just as real as the one who comes from the body of the mother—is more loosely connected with the physical body than it is later in human life. This is the why the child lives much more outside the body than an adult does.

This is only another way of expressing what I said in yesterday’s lecture, namely, that during the first period of life the child is in the highest degree and by its whole nature a being of sense. The child is like a sense organ. The surrounding impressions ripple, echo and sound through the whole organism because the child is not so inwardly bound up with its body as is the case in later life, but lives in the environment with its freer spiritual and soul nature. Hence the child is receptive to all the impressions coming from the environment.

Now, what is the relation between the human being as a whole and what we receive from the father and mother strictly through heredity? If we study the development of the human being with vision that truly creates ideas instead of mere proofs as described—a vision that looks at the spiritual and the evolution of the human being—we find that everything in the organism depends on hereditary forces in exactly the same way as the first, so-called baby teeth do. We only need to perceive, with precise vision, the difference in the ways the second teeth and the first are formed. In this way, we have a tangible expression of the processes occurring in the human being between birth and the change of teeth.

During this stage the forces of heredity hold sway in the physical body, and the whole human being becomes a kind of model with which the spirit and soul element work, imitating the surrounding impressions. If we place ourselves in the soul of a child relative to the environment and realize how every spiritual impulse is absorbed into the whole being—how with every movement of the hand, every expression, every look in the eyes of another the child senses the spirit inherent in the adult and allows it to flow in—then we will also perceive how, during the first seven years, another being is building itself on the foundation of the model provided by heredity. As human beings, the earthly world actually gives us, through hereditary forces, a model on which to build the second human being, who is really born with the change of teeth. The first teeth in the body are eliminated by what wants to replace them; this new element, which belongs to the human being’s individuality, advances and casts off heredity. This is true of the whole human organism. During the first seven years of life, the organism was a product of earthly forces and a kind of model. As such it is cast off, just as we get rid of the body’s outgrowths by cutting our nails, hair, and so on. The human being is molded anew with the change of teeth just as our outer form is perpetually eliminated. In this case, however, the first being, or product of physical heredity, is completely replaced by a second, who develops under the influence of the forces that the human being brings from pre-earthly life. Thus, during the period between birth and the change of teeth, the human hereditary forces related to the physical evolutionary stream fight against the forces of a pre-earthly existence, which accompany the individuality of each human being from the previous earthly life.

The Religious Nature of Childhood

It is essential not to merely understand these things theoretically, which is the habitual way of thinking today. This is the kind of fact that must be understood by the whole inner human being from the perspective of the child, and only then from the standpoint of the educator. If we understand what is happening from the perspective of a child, we find that the soul-being of the child—with everything brought from preearthly life from the realm of soul and spirit—is entirely devoted to the physical activities of human beings in the surroundings. This relationship can be described only as a religious one. It is a religious relationship that descends into the sphere of nature and moves into the outer world. It is important, however, to understand what is meant by such term.

Ordinarily, one speaks of “religious” relationships today in the sense of a consciously developed adult religion. Relevant to this is the fact that, in religious life, the spirit and soul elements of the adult rise into the spiritual element in the universe and surrender to it. The religious relationship is a self-surrendering to the universe, a prayer for divine grace in the surrender of the self. In the adult, it is completely immersed in a spiritual element. The soul and spirit are yielded to the surroundings.

To speak of the child’s body being absorbed by the environment in terms of a religious experience thus seems like we are turning things around the wrong way. Nevertheless, it is a truly religious experience—transposed into the realm of nature. The child is surrendered to the environment and lives in the external world in reverent, prayerful devotion, just as the eye detaches itself from the rest of the organism and surrenders to the environment. It is a religious relationship transferred to the natural realm.

If we want a picture, or symbol, of the spirit and soul processes in the adult’s religious experience, we should form a real idea in our souls of the child’s body up to the change of teeth. The life of the child is “religious,” but religious in a way that refers to the things of nature. It is not the soul of the child that is surrendered to the environment, but the blood circulation, breathing activities, and the nutritional process through the food taken in. All of these things are surrendered to the environment—the blood circulation, breathing, and digestive processes pray to the environment.

The Priestly Nature of Teaching

These expressions may seem contradictory, but their very contradiction represents the truth. We must observe such things with our whole being, not theoretically. If we observe the struggle unfolding in the child before us—within this fundamental, natural religious element—if we observe the struggle between the hereditary forces and what the individual’s forces develop as the second human being through the power brought from pre-earthly life, then, as teachers, we also develop a religious mood. But, whereas the child with a physical body develops the religious mood of the believer, the teacher, in gazing at the wonders that occur between birth and the change of teeth, develops a “priestly” religious attitude. The position of teacher becomes a kind of priestly office, a ritual performed at the altar of universal human life—not with a sacrificial victim to be led to death, but with the offering of human nature itself, to be awakened to life. Our task is to ferry into earthly life the aspect of the child that came from the divine spiritual world. This, with the child’s own forces, forms a second organism from the being that came to us from the divine spiritual life.

Pondering such things awakens something in us like a priestly attitude in education. Until this priestly feeling for the first years of childhood has become a part of education as a whole, education will not find the conditions that bring it to life. If we merely try to understand the requirements of education intellectually, or try to rationally design a method of education based on external observations of a child’s nature, at best we accomplish a quarter education. A complete educational method cannot be formulated by the intellect alone, but must flow from the whole human nature—not merely from the part that observes externally in a rational way, but the whole that deeply and inwardly experiences the secrets of the universe.

Few things have a more wonderful effect on the human heart than seeing inner spirit and soul elements released day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, during the first period of childhood. We see how, beginning with chaotic limb movements, the glance filled with rapture by the outer, the play of expressions that do not yet seem to belong to the child, something develops and impresses itself on the surface of the human form that arises from the center of the human being, where the divine spiritual being is unfolding in its descent from pre-earthly life. When we can make this divine office of education a concern of the heart, we understand these things in such a way that we say: “Here the Godhead Who has guided the human being until birth is revealed again in the impression of the human organism; the living Godhead is there to see; God is gazing into us.” This, out of the teacher’s own individuality, will lead, not to something learned by rote, but to a living method of education and instruction, a method that springs from the inner being.

This must be our attitude to the growing human being; it is essential to any educational method. Without this fundamental attitude, without this priestly element in the teacher (this is said, of course, in a cosmic sense), education cannot be continued. Therefore, any attempt to reform the methods of education must involve a return of the intellectual element, which has become dominant since the fourteenth century, to the domain of soul and feelings, to move toward what flows from human nature as a whole, not just from the head. If we look at the child without preconceptions, the child’s own nature will teach us to read these things.

The Effects of a Teacher’s Inner Development on the Child

Now, what has been the real course of civilization since the fourteenth century? As a result of the great transition, or cultural revolution, that has occurred since then, we can only perceive what is exprEssentialEd, as it were, from internal to external existence. Grasping at externals has become a matter of course for modern human beings to the degree that we are no longer aware of any other possibility. We have arrived at a condition in historical evolution that is considered “right” in an absolute sense—not merely a condition that suits our time.

People can no longer feel or perceive in a way that was possible before the fourteenth century. In those days, people observed matters of the spirit in an imbalanced way, just as people now observe the things of nature. But the human race had to pass through a stage in which it could add the observation of purely natural elements to an earlier human devotion to the world of spirit and soul that excluded nature. This materializing process, or swing downward, was necessary; but we must realize that, in order that civilized humanity not be turned into a wasteland in our time, there must be a new turn, a turning toward spirit and soul. The awareness of this fact is the essence of all endeavors such as that of Waldorf school education, which is rooted in what a deeper observation of human evolution reveals as necessary for our time. We must find our way back to the spirit and soul; for this we must first clearly recognize how we removed ourselves from them in the first place. There are many today who have no such understanding and, therefore, view anything that attempts to lead us back to the spirit as, well, not really the point, shall we say.

We can find remarkable illustrations of this attitude. I would like to mention one, but only parenthetically. There is a chapter (incidentally, a very interesting chapter in some ways) in Maurice Maeterlinck’s new book The Great Riddle. Its subject is the anthroposophic way of viewing the world. He describes anthroposophy, and he also describes me (if you will forgive a personal reference). He has read many of my books and makes a very interesting comment. He says that, at the beginning of my books, I seem to have a level-headed, logical, and shrewd mind. In the later chapters, however, it seems as if I had lost my senses. It may very well appear this way to Maeterlinck; subjectively he has every right to his opinion. Why shouldn’t I seem levelheaded, logical and scientific to him in the first chapters, and insane in later ones?

Of course, Maeterlinck has a right to think this way, and nobody wants to stop him. The question is, however, whether such an attitude is not really absurd. Indeed, it does become absurd when you consider this: I have, unfortunately, written a great many books in my life (as you can see from the unusual appearance of the book table here). No sooner have I finished writing one, than I begin another. When Maurice Maeterlinck reads the new book, he will discover once again that, in the first chapters I am shrewd, levelheaded and scientific, and lose my senses later on. Then I begin to write a third book; the first chapters again are reasonable and so forth. Consequently, if nothing else, I seem to have mastered the art of becoming at will a completely reasonable human being in the early part of a book and—equally by choice—a lunatic later, only to return to reason when I write the next book. In this way, I take turns being reasonable and a lunatic. Naturally, Maeterlinck has every right to find this; but he misses the absurdity of such an idea. A modern man of his importance thus falls into absurdities; but this, as I say, is only an interpolation.

Many people are completely unaware that their judgments do not spring from the source of human nature but from elements implanted in our outer culture since the fourteenth century as a result of the materialistic system of life and education. The duty of teachers, of educators—really the duty of all human beings that have anything to do with children—is to look more deeply into the human being. In other words, we need to become more aware of how anything acting as a stimulus in the environment continues to vibrate in the child. We must be very clear that, in this sense, we are dealing with imponderables.

Children are aware, whenever we do something in their environment, of the thoughts behind a hand-gesture or facial expression. Children intuit them: they do not, obviously, interpret facial features, since what operates instead is a much more powerful inner connection between the child and adult than will exist later between adults. Consequently, we must never allow ourselves to feel or think anything around children that should not be allowed to ripple on within the child. The rule of thumb for all relationships in early education must be this: Whether in perception, feeling, or thought, whatever we do around children must be done in such a way that it may be allowed to continue vibrating their souls.

The psychologist, the observer of souls, the person of broad practical experience, and the doctor thus all become a unity, insofar as the child is concerned. This is important, since anything that makes an impression on the child, anything that causes the soul’s response, continues in the blood circulation and digestion, becoming a part of the foundation of health in later years. Due to the imitative nature of the child, whenever we educate the spirit and soul of the child, we also educate the body and physical nature of the child. This is the wonderful metamorphosis—that whatever approaches children, touching their spirit and soul, becomes their physical, organic organization, and their predisposition to health or illness in later life.

Consequently, we can say that if Waldorf schools educate out of spirit and soul, it is not because we choose to work in an unbalanced way with only the soul and spirit; rather, it is because we know that this is how we physically educate the inner being in the highest sense of the word. The physical being exists within the envelope of the skin.

Perhaps you recall yesterday’s examples. Beginning with the model supplied by the human forces of heredity, the person builds a second human being, experienced in the second phase of life between the change of teeth and puberty. During the initial phase of life, human beings win for themselves a second being through what resulted of a purely spiritual life between death and rebirth. During the second stage of life, however, between the change of teeth and puberty, the influences of the outer world struggle with what must be incorporated into the individuality of the human being.

During this second stage, external influences grow more powerful. The inner human being is strengthened, however, since at this point it no longer allows every influence in the environment to continue vibrating in the body organization as though it were mainly a sense organ. Sensory perception begins to be more concentrated at the surface, or periphery, of the being. The senses now become more individual and autonomous, and the first thing that appears in the human being is a way of relating to the world that is not intellectual but compares only to an artistic view of life.

The Teacher as Artist

Our initial approach to life had a religious quality in that we related to nature as naturally religious beings, surrendered to the world. In this second stage, however, we are no longer obligated to merely accept passively everything coming from our environment, allowing it to vibrate in us physically; rather, we transform it creatively into images. Between the change of teeth and puberty, children are artists, though in a childish way, just as in the first phase of life, children were homo religiosus—naturally religious human beings.

Now that the child demands everything in a creative, artistic way, the teachers and educators who encounter the child must present everything from the perspective of an artist. Our contemporary culture demands this of teachers, and this is what must flow into the art of education; at this point, interactions between the growing human being and educators must take an artistic form. In this respect, we face great obstacles as teachers. Our civilization and the culture all around us have reached the point where they are geared only to the intellect, not to the artistic nature.

Let us consider the most wonderful natural processes—the description of embryonic life, for example, as portrayed in modern textbooks, or as taught in schools. I am not criticizing them, merely describing them; I know very well that they had to become the way they are and were necessary at a certain point in evolution. If we accept what they offer from the perspective of the spiritual force ready to reawaken today, something happens in our feeling life that we find impossible to acknowledge, because it seems to be a sin against the maturity attained by humanity in world-historical evolution. Difficult as it may be, it would be a good thing if people were clear about this.

When we read modern books on embryology, botany, or zoology, we feel a sense of despair in finding ourselves immediately forced to plunge into a cold intellectuality. Although the life and the development of nature are not essentially “intellectual,” we have to deliberately and consciously set aside every artistic element. Once we have read a book on botany written according to strict scientific rules, our first task as teachers is to rid ourselves of everything we found there. Obviously, we must assimilate the information about botanical processes, and the sacrifice of learning from such books is necessary; but in order to educate children between the change of teeth and puberty, we must eliminate what we found there, transforming everything into artistic, imaginal forms through our own artistic activity and sensibility. Whatever lives in our thoughts about nature must fly on the wings of artistic inspiration and transform into images. They must rise in the soul of the child.

Artistically shaping our instruction for children between the change of teeth and puberty is all that we should be concerned with in the metamorphosis of education for our time and the near future. If the first period of childhood requires a priestly element in education, the second requires an artistic element. What are we really doing when we educate a person in the second stage of life? The I-being journeying from an earlier earthly life and from the spiritual world is trying gradually to develop and permeate a second human being. Our job is to assist in this process; we incorporate what we do with the child as teachers into the forces that interwove with spirit and soul to shape the second being with a unique and individual character. Again, the consciousness of this cosmic context must act as an enlivening impulse, running through our teaching methods and the everyday conditions of education. We cannot contrive what needs to be done; we can only allow it to happen through the influence of the children themselves on their teachers.

Two extremes must be avoided. One is a result of intellectualizing tendencies, where we approach children in an academic way, expecting them to assimilate sharply outlined ideas and definitions. It is, after all, very comfortable to instruct and teach by definitions. And the more gifted children learn to parrot them, allowing the teacher to be certain that they retain what has been taught them in the previous lesson, whereas those who don’t learn can be left behind.

Such methods are very convenient. But it’s like a cobbler who thinks that the shoes made for a three-year-old girl should still fit the ten-year-old, whereas only her toes fit into the shoes but not the heels. Much of a child’s spiritual and psychic nature is ignored by the education we give children. It is necessary that, through the medium of flexible and artistic forms, we give children perceptions, ideas, and feelings in pictorial form that can metamorphose and grow with the soul, because the soul itself is growing. But before this can happen, there must be a living relationship between child and teacher, not the dead relationship that arises from lifeless educational concepts. Thus, all instruction given to children between approximately seven and fifteen must be permeated with pictures.

In many ways, this runs counter to the ordinary tendencies of modern culture, and we of course belong to this modern culture. We read books that impart much significant substance through little squiggles we call a, b, c, and so on. We fail to realize that we have been damaged by being forced to learn these symbols, since they have absolutely no relationship to our inner life. Why should a or b look the way they do today? There is no inner necessity, no experience that justifies writing an h after an a to express a feeling of astonishment or wonder.

This was not always the situation, however. People first made images in pictographic writing to describe external processes, and when they looked at the sheet or a board on which something had been written, they received an echo of that outer object or process. In other words, we should spare the child of six or seven from learning to write as it is done today. What we need instead is to bring the child something that can actually arise from the child’s own being, from the activities of his or her arms and fingers. The child sees a shining, radiant object and receives an impression; we then fix it with a drawing that represents the impression of radiance, which a child can understand.

If a child strokes a stick from top to bottom and then makes a stroke on the paper from top to bottom, the meaning is obvious. I show a fish to a child, who then follows the general direction of the form, followed by the front and back fins that cross in the opposite direction. I draw the general form of the fish, and this line across it, and say to the child, “Here, on the paper, you have something like a fish.” Then I go into the child’s inner experience of the fish. It contains an f, and so I draw a line crossed by another line, and thus, out of the child’s feeling experience, I have a picture that corresponds to the sound that begins the word fish. All writing can be developed in this way—not a mere copying of the abstract now in use, but a perception of the things themselves as they arise from a child’s drawing and painting. When I derive writing from the drawing and painting, I am working with the living forces of an image.

It would be enough to present the beginning of this artistic approach; we can feel how it calls on the child’s whole being, not just an intellectual understanding, which is overtaxed to a certain extent. If we abandon the intellectual element for imagery at this age, the intellect usually withdraws into the background. If, on the other hand, we overemphasize the intellect and are unable to move into a mode of imagery, the child’s breathing process is delicately and subtly disrupted. The child can become congested, as it were, with weakened exhalation. You should think of this as very subtle, not necessarily obvious. If education is too intellectual between the ages of seven and fourteen, exhalation becomes congested, and the child is subjected to a kind of subconscious nightmare. A kind of intimate nightmare arises, which becomes chronic in the organism and leads in later life to asthmas and other diseases connected with swelling in the breathing system.

Another extreme occurs when the teacher enters the school like a little Caesar, with the self-image of a mighty Caesar, of course. In this situation, the child is always at the mercy of a teacher’s impulsiveness. Whereas extreme intellectualism leads to congested exhalation, the metabolic forces are thinned by overly domineering and exaggerated assertiveness in the teacher. A child’s digestive organs are gradually weakened, which again may have chronic effects in later life. Both of these excesses must be eliminated from education—too much intelectualizing and extreme obstinateness.

We can hold a balance between the two by what happens in the soul when we allow the will to pass gently into the child’s own activity and by toning down the intellect so that feelings are cultivated in a way that does not suppress the breathing, but cultivates feelings that turn toward imagery and express the buoyant capacity I described. When this is done, the child’s development is supported between the change of teeth and puberty.

Thus, from week to week, month to month, year to year, a true knowledge of the human being will help us read the developing being like a book that tells us what needs to be done in the teaching. The curriculum must reproduce what we read in the evolutionary process of the human being. Specific ways that we can do this will be addrEssentialEd in coming lectures.

Protein, Fats, Carbohydrates, Salts

(Dr. Steiner asks if anyone has a question.
A question is asked about nutrition and about the potato as a foodstuff in Europe and elsewhere.)

DR. STEINER: We will think about the general question of nutrition and its relation to the spiritual world. As you know, it was not until the modern age that the potato was introduced as a foodstuff: I have told you that in earlier times people in Europe did not eat potatoes but food of quite a different kind. The subject cannot, of course, really be understood without studying the relation of the spiritual world to the whole process of nutrition.

You will remember that I once spoke to you of four substances upon which man's life essentially depends. Firstly, there is protein. Protein is a constituent of all food; it is found in its most characteristic form in the hen's egg, but it is present in all foodstuffs. Protein, then, is the first of these four essential substances.

Then there are the fats. Fats are consumed not only when the flesh of animals is eaten; all foodstuffs contain fat. Other substances, too, as you know, are transformed into fat-containing foodstuffs, for example, milk into cheese.

Carbohydrates are the third essential constituent of food. Carbohydrates come from the plant kingdom; they are of course present in other foodstuffs, too, but essentially in substances like wheat, rye, lentils, beans, potatoes—especially in potatoes.

Finally there are the salts. Salts are usually considered to be mere accessories but they play a particularly important part in man's life. The most common form, of course, is cooking salt, but all foodstuffs contain salts. It may therefore be said: In order that man may be able to live at all, his food must contain protein, fats, carbohydrates and salts.

I will now speak of how these different substances nourish the human being as constituents of the various kinds of foodstuffs. First of all we will think about the salts.

Even when salts are consumed in tiny quantities they not only add flavour but are an extremely important means of nourishment. We take salt with our food not only to make it tasty but really in order that we may be able to think. The salts that are contained in food must reach the brain if we are to be capable of thinking. If a person is so ill that all the salt in his food is deposited in the stomach or intestines and not carried by the blood into the brain, he becomes stupid, dull-witted. That is the point to which attention must be called.

We must of course be quite clear that the spirit is a reality, but if spirit is to be an active power on the earth, it must work in the earth's substances. In Spiritual Science, therefore, we must be able to perceive how the spirit works in the various substances. Otherwise it would be like saying: Oh, but we are spiritua1 people and machines are entirely material; we do not want anything material, therefore we shall not buy iron or steel but make machines entirely out of spirit. That, of course, is sheer nonsense! Substance is absolutely essential. The spirit working as the creative power in nature needs substance. And if spirit is prevented from making use of substance—for example, if salts are deposited in the stomach and intestines instead of reaching the brain by way of the blood—then a man becomes stupid and dull.

Needless to say, things are not as simple as all that. Man cannot derive nourishment from salt in the form in which it is present in external nature. If you were to make a tiny perforation in the brain and let salt trickle in, it would be quite useless. The salt must pass into the stomach and intestines and be brought into a finer and finer state of solution—even on the tongue it begins to dissolve. The result of what the human organism does with the salt is that it is already in a spiritualised condition when it reaches the brain. The process is by no means one of simply introducing salt into the brain—it is by no means as simple as that. But if a man's condition is such that the effects of salt cannot work in his brain, he becomes dull and stupid.

Now let us think of the carbohydrates. When we eat peas, beans, wheat, rye or potatoes—above all potatoes—we consume carbohydrates. The carbohydrates have a great deal to do with shaping the human form. If our food contained no carbohydrates, all kinds of distortions would appear: malformations of the nose or the ears, for example. It is due to the carbohydrates that we bear the outward stamp of man. If a person's constitution is such that the carbohydrates are not carried into the brain but deposited in the intestines and stomach, we shall see him becoming shrivelled and feeble, as though incapable of holding himself erect. The carbohydrates, therefore, help to give the human form its proper shape.

You see, therefore, that it is important for us to get hold of the right kind of foodstuffs. The salts work mainly upon the front part of the brain, the carbohydrates farther back. A man who cannot thoroughly digest the carbohydrates, whose organism is incapable of carrying them into the proper area of the brain, will very soon become permanently hoarse and be unable to speak with a really clear voice. Therefore if you have in front of you someone who used to speak quite normally but has suddenly developed hoarseness, you may surmise that he has digestive trouble of some kind. He cannot thoroughly digest the carbohydrates; they do not reach the right area of the brain and the consequence is that something goes wrong with his breathing and his speech. And so we may say: the salts work mainly upon thinking. The carbohydrates work, for example, upon speaking and the organic processes allied with it, and are an essential constituent of food. The carbohydrates help to give our human form its proper shape, but if left to themselves their tendency would be to make us into a mere form and leave it at that. They do not fill out the form—that is done by the fats. The carbohydrates have, so to speak, merely outlined the form and the fats provide the filling material. That is their function—to provide us with material substance. In fat itself, of course, this material has a definite character.

I have told you that the human being consists of an “I,” an astral body, an etheric body and a physical body. Fat, needless to say, accumulates and is deposited in the physical body. But the all-important function of enabling the fat to be deposited and at the same time to remain living fat, is performed by the etheric body. Feeling and perception, however, depend upon the astral body.

When a man is awake, the astral body is within him; when he is asleep the astral body is outside. When he is awake and the astral body is working in the etheric body, fat is assimilated and absorbed all the time. Fat acts as a lubricant for the whole body. When a man is asleep and the astral body is outside him, fat is not assimilated but deposited. During waking life, fat acts as a constant lubricant; during sleep, fat is deposited. And both are necessary: deposited fat and lubricating fat.

If someone passes his days in a kind of continuous sleep ... such cases are less frequent now than they used to be, but think of some leisured gentleman who does no work at all. Fat is actually deposited during what is called his waking life—although it really amounts to sleep! Such a man grows very corpulent and fat accumulates all over his body. Healthy depositing of fat, therefore, depends upon proper assimilation and absorption, for fat is being produced inwardly all the time. A man who consumes just the quantity he can assimilate, keeps healthy; but if anyone goes on eating, eating, eating, and assimilates nothing, he will become corpulent, pot-bellied.

Country folk know these things by instinct. They know that when pigs are being fattened the life of these animals must be so arranged that their bodies are no longer lubricated and that everything they eat is deposited.

It may, of course, be impossible for fats to be properly deposited in the organism; if this is the case, a man is ill. In this respect a man of leisure is healthy. But another trouble may be that the carbohydrates are not deposited and then the voice gets hoarse. It may also be that the fats are not deposited in the right way but simply pass away in the faeces; when this happens there is too little fat in the organism and therefore inadequate lubrication. This is what happens, too, when our food is insufficient and we suffer from actual hunger. Fat is the material we supply to the body. What happens to a man who has to go hungry or whose digestion is such that instead of the fats being deposited, they pass out of the body in the faeces? A person who has not enough physical material in his body becomes more and more spiritual. But this is not the right way to become spiritual, for under these conditions spirit consumes him, burns him up. Not only does he wither and become more and more emaciated, but gasses form in his organism and this condition leads, eventually, to actual delusions. There is always some disturbance in the spiritual life when a man is ill. Inadequate absorption of fat leads to wasting—or consumption as it may also be called.

Now let us speak about protein. The presence of protein is essential from the very outset. It is present in the egg before a human being or an animal comes into existence. We can therefore say that protein is the substance which really builds up the human body and is the basis upon which it develops; it is the primary and fundamental substance out of which everything else in the body must unfold. Protein is present in the mother's womb as a tiny egg; the fertilisation of the egg enables the protein to become the basis of the human body. But man needs protein all the time; it must be a constituent of his regular food. If his organism contains too little protein, or he cannot thoroughly digest it, he will gradually waste away; but if at any moment of his life he were without protein he would immediately die. Protein is essential both for the beginning of existence and for man's very life. Absence of protein means death.

Now let us think again about the different kinds of foodstuffs. The salts have a special connection with the front part of the head; that is where they are chiefly deposited. The carbohydrates are deposited a little farther back. Upon the carbohydrates depends the proper shaping of the human form. The fats are deposited still farther back and from there they begin to fill out the body. The fats do not enter directly into the body but pass from the blood into the head and are distributed to the body from there. All the substances, including protein, pass through the head.

Now there is a great difference among the carbohydrates. In foodstuffs such as lentils, beans, peas, rye, wheat, it is the fruit that is the source of the carbohydrates. The wheat we get from the earth is the fruit of the plant; the lentil is fruit. A property peculiar to fruits is that they are already digested in the stomach and intestines and it is only their forces that reach the head. Typical conditions which follow the eating of lentils and beans are evidence to us all that the whole process of digestion is taking place in the intestines. The characteristic of fruits is that they are already fully digested in the intestines.

But we cannot eat the fruit of the potato plant, because it is poisonous. There is a difference between the potato as a foodstuff and lentils, beans, peas, rye, wheat, etc. What part of the potato plant do we eat? We eat the tuber, the bulb. Now the bulb is just that part of a plant or root which is not digested in the intestines. Fruits are digested in the intestines. But the fruit of the potato plant cannot be eaten, and the bulb is not a root in the real sense. Very well, then, when a potato is eaten it passes into the stomach and intestines where it cannot be digested; the blood carries it upwards in an undigested state. Instead of reaching its own area of the brain in a fine, etherealised condition and being at once sent down into the body—as happens with foodstuffs like rye or wheat—the digestion, properly speaking, has to take place in the brain. When we eat bread made of pure rye or wheat, it is fully digested in the stomach and intestines; the onus of digestion does not devolve upon the head but the head is left free for its task of providing for the distribution over the body. On the other hand, when we eat potatoes or potato-bread, the head has to cope with the actual digestion. But when the head has to be employed primarily for the digestion of the potatoes, it becomes incapable of thinking in the real sense, because in order to think its forces must be kept free; the abdomen should relieve it of the task of digestion. So if potatoes are eaten in excessive quantities ... this is a habit which has been steadily on the increase since the potato was introduced as an important foodstuff in Europe ... the head is gradually thrown out of gear for the purpose of really active thinking and little by little man loses the capacity to think with the middle part of his brain; he thinks, then, only with the front part of the brain—which is dependent on the salts. This tends more and more to make him a purely intellectual, materialistic thinker. The front part of the brain is incapable of genuinely spiritual thinking. It is through the front part of the brain that man becomes intellectualistic.

What has happened is that really deep and inward thinking began to wane in Europe from the moment the potato became an important constituent of food. We must realise, of course, that the human being is not a product of the forces of the earth alone. I have told you many times that man is created by the forces of the whole surrounding universe, by the forces of sun, moon and stars. When a man feeds on potatoes, the middle part of his head is used solely for the purpose of digesting them. The result is that having shut himself off from the universe around, he no longer acknowledges its existence and declares: All this talk about spirituality streaming down from the universe is so much twaddle! ... And so it may be said that too much potato food has helped to drive the modern age into materialism.

Needless to say, it is chiefly the poor who are obliged to fall back on potatoes simply because they are cheap; the well-to-do can afford to buy food containing substances like spices and salts which work upon the front part of the head. Spices have the same effect as salts in the front part of the head. And so these people become thorough-going intellectualists; and the others, being incapable of really active thinking, can easily be imposed upon. The potato as a foodstuff is related in a very special way to man's spiritual activity; it has actually furthered materialism.

Thinking now of the different members of man's being, we shall say: the physical body originates in the first place from protein. Protein is connected with the birth and death of the physical human being. The etheric body is at work in the fats, the astral body in the carbohydrates; the “I,” or Ego, in the salts.

It is the astral body that enables man to have feeling and perception. When I feel a blow on my hand, it is not the physical body in which the feeling arises; if it were, then everything physical would have the faculty of feeling. The flesh is pressed back, and then the muscle; the flesh in the muscle is forced away from the astral body and then I feel something—in the astral body. All feeling arises in the astral body. But the astral body must be able to carry out its functions in the right way. I have told you that if the astral body, even by day, is in a sleepy condition and not actively at work, corpulence sets in and deposits of fat accumulate. Or again—if a man is active only in his head, in his intellect, fats are deposited. But the astral body which is also at work, for example in speech, needs the carbohydrates to be present all over the body, not only in the head. The astral body has to move the legs, the hands, and so on. It needs the presence of carbohydrates all over the body. If a man's food contains carbohydrates in the form of rye or wheat, the forces of these substances stream into the whole body; but if the food consists only of potatoes, the forces accumulate up there in the head and the man becomes weak and debilitated; his astral body cannot be as active as it ought to be. So that what is spiritual in the human being becomes exhausted, less and less active, when he cannot provide his organism with carbohydrates. This is impossible if he feeds entirely on potatoes because the head has so much to do that the body has to suffer.

And now let us consider how science sets to work. Investigations are made in order to discover what quantities of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulphur and other substances—the four named being the main ones—are contained in protein. It is then found that carbon or hydrogen are present in protein in such and such percentages; in fat the percentages are different and in the carbohydrates different again. But science has no idea of the significance of substances in themselves; science only knows the percentages in which the various constituents are present. But that does not really lead anywhere. The constituents of the potato and the constituents of rye or wheat work in quite different ways. The important thing to know is that when the flower or fruit of a plant is eaten it is digested in the intestines; when a root is eaten it is really digested in the head. Upon no other basis can these things be applied in medicine.

Anyone who can think in a truly therapeutic way will know that a medicament prepared from flowers, or seeds, or fruits, has its main effect in the intestines; a preparation of roots, on the other hand, will have a remedial effect upon the head. When we eat roots, an effect is made upon the head—a material effect. It is very important to know this.

But we can go further. If a human being has been so debilitated by feeding on potatoes that he is not only incapable of moving his hands and feet properly but is so exhausted that the organs connected with propagation are no longer active, then the matter becomes still more serious. Let us suppose that the effect of feeding on potatoes is so overpowering that the organs of procreation in the female are weakened and impaired. ... Man, as you know, is not only a product of his ancestors but as a being of soul-and-spirit he comes from the spiritual world; this being of soul-and-spirit unites with what is provided by the ancestors. I will make a rough sketch—everything of course is very much enlarged. (Dr. Steiner makes a sketch on the blackboard.)

The human being originates from the fertilised female ovum. Star-like formations then appear, cells separate off and from these separated cells the body gradually takes shape. But no human body can form unless the being of soul-and-spirit coming from the spiritual world unites with what is developing here.

Now if circumstances are such that the mother or the father has been eating too much potato food, the seed from which the embryo develops will from the outset be of such a nature that a great deal of work devolves upon the head. If the father and mother have been properly nourished with bread made of rye or similar substances, the embryo will have more or less this appearance. (Sketch.) But if potatoes have been eaten in excessive quantities the following happens. The preponderating part of an embryo is the head—it is a round dome. The soul-and-spirit must penetrate into the head and, once there must begin to be active. The soul-and-spirit works chiefly on the head while the human being is still an embryo in the mother's body.

If the soul-and-spirit finds in the embryonic head elements which derive from the rye- or wheat-components of the mother's food, then it can work in the proper way. For you see, the flowers containing the grains of rye or wheat have grown upwards from the earth and the Spiritual has already streamed towards the plant, is already allied with the plant. The being of soul-and-spirit is able to work when conditions arising from food composed of the fruits of plants are encountered in the mother's body. It is a different matter altogether if the being of soul-and-spirit finds an embryonic head that is the result of the mother having eaten excessive quantities of potatoes. ... For just think of it: the potato lies right down in the earth, it is covered by the soil, has to be dug up from the ground; it grows in the darkness, it has no bond with the Spiritual; the being of soul-and-spirit descending from the spiritual world encounters a head that is a product of darkness; the spirit cannot penetrate it, and the result is hydrocephalus—water on the brain. The embryo develops a gigantic head (sketch.) For if the spirit is unable to make any real approach, the Physical grows apace and hydrocephalus develops. If the spirit is able to approach, the water is held in check; the spirit is able to work in the physical substances and the head develops in its proper and normal proportions. The gigantic heads often to be seen in embryos are the outcome of faulty nutrition for which potato food taken in excess is often responsible. And so this kind of food not only causes exhaustion and weakness in the adult human being but even at birth the soul-and-spirit was not, in the real sense within the physical body.

You know that man consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and “I” but these members of his being do not interact in the same way at every age of life. Until the age of seven, ether body, astral body and the “I” are still only making their way down into the physical body of the child. When the ether body has penetrated fully into the physical body, the second teeth appear; when the astral body has penetrated fully into the physical body, puberty is reached. Therefore if potato food taken in excess has made it difficult for the soul-and-spirit to enter into the embryo in the real sense, this will also have an injurious effect upon what happens at the age of 14 or 15. All through his life such a human being will go about as if his body did not really belong to him, as if it were hanging about him like a bag. The effect of too much potato food may therefore be that human beings are born without sufficient strength to cope with life and its demands.

These are matters of tremendous importance! Social conditions depend upon many factors other than those mooted at the present time. Social conditions depend, too, upon really wise cultivation of the fields: for example, not using the soil for the production of more potatoes than people can consume if their strength is to be maintained. Social science must go hand in hand with a true knowledge of nature. That is absolutely essential. To speak only about surplus values, capital, and so forth, is of no fundamental value. If Communism ever succeeded in wiping out capital and assuming control of everything ... well, it would all come to nothing if the science at its disposal did not know how to utilise the fields wisely, did not know that potatoes are not so good for the stomach, as rye or wheat. These are the kind of things to bear in mind. Continual talking in circles leads nowhere. What we need is a real science, a science which understands how the spirit can work in matter.

Anthroposophy is obliged, quite against its will, to battle on two fronts. And why Scientists to-day are occupied only with matter, with the percentages of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen contained in protein and so forth. But this tells us nothing essential about matter itself. Physical science does not really understand matter, because to understand matter one must know how the spirit is working within it. Suppose a man wants to know all about a watch. He says to himself: This watch is made of silver. The silver came from such and such a mine; then it was taken by train to such and such a town and delivered to merchants. The watch has a china face inscribed with figures. The china was manufactured in such and such a town, then sent somewhere else ... and so on and so on. But at the end of it all he knows nothing essential about the watch! Nor will he until he knows exactly what the watchmaker did. To understand why a watch goes, it is not at all essential to know how and where the silver was mined; what is important is to know how the watchmaker made the watch go, how he adjusted the wheels and so forth.

To know in the abstract that foodstuffs are composed of so much carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, fat, carbohydrate, makes no difference at all to health and disease; but what is very important for health and illness is to know, for example, that potatoes nourish the mental life of human beings as little as they nourish their physical bodies. For other purposes it is, of course, quite useful to know about the silver coming from mines and the rest of the process, but for any understanding of health or sickness among men this kind of knowledge is of no importance. Because it does not realise its own shortcomings, science puts up a fight when Anthroposophy tries to provide what is lacking. The one battlefront is therefore against materialism which declares that the explanations given by Anthroposophy are sheer fantasy and reproaches it for speaking of the spirit. That is the one front.

The other front is constituted by the attitude of theology and of the representatives of religion. A great deal is said about the soul reaching heaven through prayer and the sacraments. Well and good ... but if a man is not able to make proper use of his body and therefore lives in the physical world without being rightly adjusted to the conditions of earthly life, then it will be very difficult for him to find his bearings after death. Of this, however, the theologians do not speak. Man must be able to cope with practical life; he must know how to take hold of matter. Religion and theology talk a great deal but do not succeed in making the human being so strong in earthly life that after it is over he can find a firm basis. Prayer that has no foundation in knowledge actually sidetracks men from recognising the essentials of a really healthy life. It is hardly likely that you will ever have listened to sermons on subjects like the respective merits of potatoes or wheat as food! At any rate it will not be your experience that most clergymen think it important to preach about the effect of rye or wheat upon health. They attach no importance to these matters because in their opinion they are not sacred. To pray or to expound the Gospels, that and that alone is sacred according to their way of thinking. ... But the Divine is at work in the whole of nature, not only when men pray or converse on the subject of Holy Writ. The Spiritual is an active power in nature. If man prevents the Spiritual from having access to his head because by eating potato food to excess he gives the head too much to do ... well, he may pray, but it will be to no purpose because he has been sidetracked from the Spiritual. That too is something that escapes notice. God did not find the earth as a clod out of which all things were then made; the Divine Power is active everywhere, in every single particle, and it is there that we must seek for its manifestations. But when this is done, the theologians accuse us of materialism! By the scientists we are called deluded spiritualists, by the theologians, materialists. This shows how much weight can be attached to such statements! It was just the same in 1908 when Anthroposophy was said to be under Jesuitical influences; it was stated that anthroposophists were being delivered by their leaders into the hands of the Jesuits. In the meantime things have changed and now the Jesuits are saying that anthroposophists have been delivered into the hands of the Freemasons!

But these are not the things that really matter. What does matter is that men shall acquire a kind of science able to explain, for example, why hydrocephalus develops in the embryo instead of a perfectly proportioned head.

You will be saying to yourselves that after all there are plenty of people who show no signs of hydrocephalus. That, of course, is true, because other forces counteract the tendency and then, at the time of birth, the head is not as disproportionately large as it was in the embryo; it may actually be quite small but still hydrocephalic. The fact is that since the introduction of potato food, embryonic heads are always much too large. In the later stages they contract but this very contraction has an injurious effect because they are not able to take in what is needful—they can only take in water. When the human being has been born, hydrocephalus is not only indicated by the size of the head. Typical hydrocephalus, it is true, is to be recognised from the size of the head, but the point of real importance is whether water is serving its proper purpose or whether other elements are playing a part. This is just as important as anything else that may be brought to the knowledge of mankind by science on the one hand or theology and religion on the other. But it is something that must be approached from the right point of view.

What sort of treatment is meted out to Anthroposophy to-day? A little while ago, people who called themselves “non-anthroposophical students of Anthroposophy” held a kind of congress in Berlin. They state that they are not Anthroposophists but desire to know about Anthroposophy. Well ... a certain Dr. G. who was here at one time but subsequently left us, had a great deal to say. He addressed an audience of clergyman, licentiates, professors. And now, on the basis of what he said, people are lecturing against Anthroposophy here, there and everywhere. You will suppose that what Dr. G. told these people convinced them that Anthroposophy is very harmful. But I ask you—just think of the average mind of a typical clergyman or professor to-day, and then listen to what Dr. G. said to them. He said: Anthroposophy is particularly harmful because the anthroposophists are being duped ... what Dr. Steiner and Frau Dr. Steiner would really like would be to cut off a portion of the earth, make a planet of their own and together with all the anthroposophists establish a planetary colony in the universe! That is what Dr. G. said to these enlightened people. As you can imagine, none of them really believe it, yet they act as if this kind of talk had convinced them of the harmfulness of Anthroposophy.

What lunacy it is! But these same enlightened people participate in many different kinds of meetings as well, where destinies are determined. At these meetings they are no shrewder than they were at the other ... and so one cannot help wondering what kind of people are ruling the world to-day! The hostility to Anthroposophy is really hostility to truth. People are determined not to allow these things to come into the open. So they say that Anthroposophy is very secret. But how, I ask you, how can it be anything else? There is, in reality, no greater secrecy about it than there is when a man has stolen something and bidden it; until it is found it is secret. Anthroposophy is secret in the same sense—because it has been cast into obscurity by science and the other branches of cultural life. That is why Anthroposophy seems to suggest a kind of secrecy. But it ceases to be secret the moment it is found! Anthroposophy has no desire at all to be mysterious but to bring into the light of day things that have been obscured and hidden by other influences. ... Now I have to travel to Vienna and I will let you know when we can continue these lectures.

Automated Translation

When we penetrate more deeply into the human soul and consider its nature from the point of view here intended, we are repeatedly reminded of the ancient saying by the Greek sage, Heraclitus¹⁶ “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search; so all-embracing is the soul's being.” We shall be speaking here of the soul and its life, not from the standpoint of contemporary psychology, but from that of Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science stands firmly for the real existence of a spiritual world behind all that is revealed to the senses and through them to the mind. It regards this spiritual world as the source and foundation of external existence and holds that the investigation of it lies within the reach of man.

In lectures given here, the difference between Spiritual Science and the many other standpoints of the present day has often been brought out; and need be mentioned only briefly now. In ordinary life and in ordinary science it is habitually assumed that human knowledge has certain boundaries and that the human mind cannot know anything beyond them. Spiritual Science holds that these boundaries are no more than temporary. They can be extended; faculties hidden in the soul can be called forth, and then, just as a man born blind who gains his sight through an operation emerges from darkness into a world of light and colour, so it is with a person whose hidden faculties awake. He will break through into a spiritual world which is always around us but cannot be directly known until the appropriate spiritual organs for perceiving it have been developed. Spiritual Science asks: How are we to transform ourselves in order to penetrate into this world and to gain a comprehensive experience of it? And Spiritual Science must ever and again point to the great event which enables a man to become a spiritual investigator and so to direct his gaze into the spiritual worlds, even as a physicist sees into the physical world through his microscope. Goethe's words are certainly valid in their bearing on the spiritual world:

Secretly, in the light of day,
Nature's veil may not be lifted.
What'er to your inquiring spirit
She will not freely reveal,
You cannot forcibly extract it,
Not with levers, not with screws.¹⁷

Of course, the investigator in the sense of Spiritual Science has no such instrumental aids. He has to transform his soul into an instrument; then he experiences that great moment when his soul is awakened and the spiritual world around him reveals itself to his perception. Again, it has often been emphasised here that not everyone needs to be a spiritual investigator in order to appreciate what the awakened man has to impart. When knowledge resulting from spiritual research is communicated, no more is required of the listener than ordinary logic and an unbiased sense of truth. Investigation calls for the opened eye of the clairvoyant; recognition of what is communicated calls for a healthy sense of truth; natural feeling unclouded by prejudice; natural good sense. The point is that teachings and observations concerning the soul should be understood in the light of this spiritual research when in later lectures we come to speak of some of the humanly interesting characteristics of the soul. Just as anyone who wants to study hydrogen or oxygen or any other chemical substance has to acquire certain capabilities, so is observation of the life of the soul possible only for someone whose spiritual eye has been opened. The investigator of the soul must be in a position to make observations in soul-substance, so to speak. We must certainly not think of the soul as something vague and nebulous in which feelings, thoughts and volitions are whirling about. Let us rather remind ourselves of what has been said on this subject in previous lectures.

Man, as he stands before us, is a far more complicated being than he is held to be by exoteric science. For Spiritual Science, the knowledge drawn from external physical observation covers only a part of man—the external physical body which he has in common with all his mineral surroundings. Here, the same laws apply as in the external physical-mineral world, and the same substances function. As a result of observation, however, and not on the strength merely of logical inference, Spiritual Science recognises, beyond the physical body, a second member of man's being: we call it the etheric body or life-body. Only a brief reference can here be made to the etheric body—our task today is quite different—but knowledge of the underlying members of the human organism is the foundation on which we have to build. Man has an etheric body in common with everything that lives. As I said, only the spiritual investigator, who has transformed his soul into an instrument for seeing into the spiritual world, can directly observe the etheric body. But its existence can be acknowledged by a healthy sense of truth, unclouded by contemporary prejudices. Take the physical body: it harbours the same physical and chemical laws that prevail in the external physical-mineral world. When are these physical laws revealed to us? When we have before us a lifeless human being. When a human being has passed through the gate of death, we see what the laws that govern the physical body really are. They are the laws that lead to the decomposition of the physical body; their effect on it is now quite different from their action during life. They are always present in the physical body; the reason why the living body does not obey them is that during life an antagonist of dissolution, the etheric or life-body, is also present and active there.

A third member of the human organism can now be distinguished: the vehicle of pleasure and pain, of urges, desires and passions—of everything we associate with the emotional activities of the soul. Man has this vehicle in common with all beings who possess a certain form of consciousness: with the animals. Astral body, or body of consciousness, is the name we give to this third member of the human organism.

This completes what we may call the bodily nature of man, with its three components: physical body, etheric body or life-body, astral or consciousness-body.

Within these three members we recognise something else; something unique to man, through which he has risen to the summit of creation. It has often been remarked that our language has one little word which guides us directly to man's inner being, whereby he ranks as the crown of earthly creation. These flowers here, the desk, the clock—anyone can name these objects; but there is one word we can never hear spoken by another with reference to ourselves; it must spring from our own inner being. This is the little name ‘I’. If you are to call yourself ‘I’, this ‘I’ must sound forth from within yourself and must designate your inmost being. Hence the great religions and philosophies have always regarded this name as the ‘unspeakable name’ of that which cannot be designated from outside. Indeed, with this designation ‘I’, we stand before that innermost being of man which can be called the divine element in him. We do not thereby make man a god. If we say that a drop of water from the sea is of like substance with the ocean, we are not making the drop into a sea. Similarly, we are not making the ‘I’ a god when we say it is of like substance with the divine being that permeates and pulses through the world.

Through his inner essence, man is subject to a certain phenomenon which Spiritual Science treats as real and serious in the full sense of the words. Its very name fascinates people today, but in its application to man it is given full rank and worth only by Spiritual Science. It is the fact of existence that we call ‘evolution’. How fascinating is the effect of this word on modern man, who can point to lower forms of life which evolve gradually into higher stages; how enchanting when it can be said that man himself has evolved from those lower forms to his present height! Spiritual Science takes evolution seriously in relation, above all, to man. It calls attention to the fact that man, since he is a self-conscious being with an inner activity springing from the centre of his being, should not limit his idea of evolution to a mere observation of the imperfect developing towards the more nearly perfect. As an active being he must himself take hold of his own evolution. He must raise himself to higher stages than the stage he has already reached; he must develop ever-new forces, so that he may approach continually towards perfection. Spiritual Science takes a sentence, first formulated not very long ago, and now recognised as valid in another realm, and applies it on a higher level to human evolution. Most people today are not aware that as late as the beginning of the 17th century the learned as well as the laity believed that the lower animals were born simply out of river-mud. This belief arose from imprecise observation, and it was the great natural scientist, Francesco Redi,¹⁸ who in the 17th century first championed the statement: Life can arise only from the living. Naturally, this statement is quoted here in the modern sense, with all necessary qualifications. No-one, of course, now believes that any lower animal—say an earth-worm—can grow out of river-mud. For an earth-worm to come into existence, the germ of an earth-worm must first be there. And yet, in the 17th century, Francesco Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno,¹⁹ for his statement had made him a terrible heretic.

This sort of treatment is not usually inflicted on heretics today, at least not in all parts of the world, but there is a modern substitute for it. If anyone upholds something which contradicts the belief of those who, in their arrogance, suppose they have reached the summit of earthly wisdom, he is looked on as a visionary, a dreamer, if nothing worse. That is the contemporary form of inquisition in our parts of the world. Be it so. Nevertheless, what Spiritual Science says concerning phenomena on higher levels will come to be accepted equally with Francesco Redi's statement regarding the lower levels. Even as he asserted that “life can issue only from the living”, so does Spiritual Science state that “soul and spirit can issue only from soul and spirit”. And the law of reincarnation, so often ridiculed today as the outcome of crazy fantasy, is in fact a consequence of this statement. Nowadays, when people see, from the first day of a child's birth, the soul and spirit developing out of the bodily element; when they see increasingly definite facial traits emerging from an undifferentiated physiognomy, movements becoming more and more individual, talents and abilities showing forth—many people still believe that all this springs from the physical existence of father, mother, grandparents; in short, from physical ancestry.

This belief derives from inexact observation, just as did the belief that earth-worms originate from mud. Present-day sense-observation is incapable of tracing back to its soul-spiritual origin the soul and spirit that are manifest before our eyes today. Hence the laws of physical heredity are made to account for phenomena which apparently emerge from the obscure depths of the physical. Spiritual Science looks back to previous lives on earth, when the talents and characteristics that are evident in the present life were foreshadowed. And we regard the present life as the source of new formative influences that will bear fruit in future earthly lives.

Francesco Redi's statement has now become an obvious truth, and the time is not far distant when the corresponding statement by Spiritual Science will be regarded as equally self-evident—with the difference that Francesco Redi's statement is of restricted interest, while the statement by Spiritual Science concerns everyone: “Soul and spirit develop from soul and spirit; man does not live once only but passes through repeated lives on earth; every life is the result of earlier lives and the starting point of numerous subsequent lives.” All confidence in life, all certainty in our work, the solution of all the riddles facing us—it all depends on this knowledge. From this knowledge man will draw ever-increasing strength for his existence, together with confidence and hope when he looks towards the future.

Now what is it that originates in earlier lives, works on from life to life, and maintains itself through all its sojourns on earth? It is the Ego, the ‘I’, designated by the name which a person can bestow on no-one but himself. The human Ego goes from life to life, and in so doing fulfils its evolution.

But how is this evolution brought about? By the Ego working on the three lower members of the human being. We have first the astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, of instinct, desire and passion. Let us look at a person on a low level, whose Ego has done little, as yet, to cleanse his astral body and so is still its slave. In a person who stands higher we find that his Ego has worked upon his astral body in such a way that his lower instincts, desires and passions have been transmuted into moral ideals, ethical judgments. From this contrast we can gain a first impression of how the Ego works upon the astral body.

In every human being it is possible to distinguish the part of the astral body on which the Ego has not yet worked from the part which the Ego has consciously transformed. The transmuted part is called Spirit-Self, or Manas. The Ego may grow stronger and stronger and will then transmute the etheric body or life-body. Life-spirit is the name we give to the transformed etheric body. Finally, when the Ego acquires such strength that it is able to extend its transforming power into the physical body, we call the transmuted part Atma, or the real Spirit-man.

So far we have been speaking of conscious work by the Ego. In the far-distant past, long before the Ego was capable of this conscious work, it worked unconsciously—or rather sub-consciously—on the three bodies or sheaths of man. The astral body was the first to be worked on in this way, and its transmuted part we call the Sentient Soul, the first of man's soul-members. So it was that the Ego, working from the inner being of man, created the Sentient Soul at a time when man lacked the requisite degree of consciousness for transmuting his instincts, desires and so forth. In the etheric body the Ego created unconsciously the Mind-Soul or Intellectual Soul. Again, working unconsciously on the physical body, the Ego created the inner soul-organ that we call the Consciousness Soul. For Spiritual Science, the human soul is not a vague, nebulous something, but an essential part of man's being, consisting of three distinct soul-members—Sentient Soul, Mind-Soul, Consciousness Soul—within which the Ego is actively engaged.

Let us try to form an idea of these three soul-members. The spiritual investigator knows them by direct observation, but we can approach them also by means of rational thinking. For example, suppose we have a rose before us. We perceive it, and as long as we perceive it we are receiving an impression from outside. We call this a perception of the rose. If we turn our eyes away, an inner image of the rose remains with us. We must carefully distinguish these two moments: the moment when we are looking at the rose and the moment when we are able to retain an image of it as an inner possession, although we are no longer perceiving it.

This point must be emphasised because of the incredible notions brought forward in this connection by 19th century philosophy. We need think only of Schopenhauer,²⁰ whose philosophy begins with the words: The world is my idea. Hence we must be clear as to the difference between percepts and concepts, or mental images. Every sane man knows the difference between the concept of white-hot steel, which cannot burn him, and white-hot steel itself, which can. Perceptions bring us into communication with the external world; concepts are a possession of the soul. The boundary between inner experience and the outer world can be precisely drawn. Directly we begin to experience something inwardly, we owe it to the Sentient Soul—as distinct from the sentient body, which brings us our percepts and enables us to perceive, for example, the rose and its colour. Thus our concepts are formed in the Sentient Soul, and the Sentient Soul is the bearer also of our sympathies and antipathies, of the feelings that things arouse in us. When we call the rose beautiful, this inward experience is a property of the Sentient Soul.

Anyone who is unwilling to distinguish percepts from concepts should remember the white-hot steel that burns and the concept of it, which does not. Once, when I had said this, someone objected that a man might be able to suggest to himself the thought of lemonade so vividly that he would experience its taste on his tongue. I replied: Certainly this might be possible, but whether the imaginary lemonade would quench his thirst is another question. The boundary between external reality and inner experience can indeed always be determined. Directly inner experience begins, the Sentient Soul, as distinct from the sentient body, comes into play.

A higher principle is brought into being by the work of the Ego on the etheric body: we call it the Mind-Soul, or Intellectual Soul. We shall have more to say about it in the lecture on the Mission of Truth; today we are concerned especially with the Sentient Soul. Through the Intellectual Soul man is enabled to do more than carry about with him the experiences aroused in him by his perceptions of the outer world. He takes these experiences a stage further. Instead of merely keeping his perceptions alive as images in the Sentient Soul, he reflects on them and devotes himself to them; they form themselves into thoughts and judgments, into the whole content of his mind. This continued cultivation of impressions received from the outer world is the work of what we call the Intellectual Soul or Mind-soul.

A third principle is brought into being when the Ego has created in the physical body the organs whereby it is enabled to go out from itself and to connect its judgments, ideas and feelings with the external world. This principle we call the Consciousness Soul, because the Ego is then able to transform its inner experiences into conscious knowledge of the outer world. When we give form to the feelings we experience, so that they enlighten us concerning the outer world, our thoughts, judgments and feelings become knowledge of the outer world. Through the Consciousness Soul we explore the secrets of the outer world as human beings endowed with knowledge and cognition.

So does the Ego work continually in the Sentient Soul, in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, and in the Consciousness Soul, releasing the forces inwardly bound up there and enabling man to advance in his evolution by enriching his capacities. The Ego is the actor, the active being through whose agency man himself takes control of his evolution and progresses from life to life, remedying the defects of former lives and widening the faculties of his soul. Such is human evolution from life to life; it consists first of all in the Ego's work on the soul in its threefold aspect.

We must, however, recognise clearly that in its work the Ego has the character of a “two-edged sword”. Yes, this human Ego is, on the one hand, the element in man's being through which alone he can be truly man. If we lacked this central point, we should be merged passively with the outer world. Our concepts and ideas have to be taken hold of in this centre; more and more of them must be experienced; and our inner life must be increasingly enriched by impressions from the outer world. Man is truly man to the degree in which his Ego becomes richer and more comprehensive. Hence the Ego must seek to enrich itself in the course of succeeding lives; it must become a centre whereby man is not simply part of the outer world but acts as a stimulating force upon it. The richer the fund of his impulses, the more he has absorbed and the more he radiates from the centre of his individual self, the nearer he approaches to being truly man.

That is one aspect of the Ego; and we are in duty bound to endeavour to make the Ego as rich and as many-sided as we can. But the reverse side of this progress is manifest in what we call selfishness or egoism. If these words were taken as catchwords and it were said that human beings must become selfless, that of course would be bad, as any use of catchwords always is. It is indeed man's task to enrich himself inwardly, but this does not imply a selfish hardening of the Ego and a shutting off of itself with its riches from the world. In that event a man would indeed become richer and richer, but he would lose his connection with the world. His enrichment would signify that the world had no more to give him, nor he the world. In the course of time he would perish, for while striving to enrich his Ego he would keep it all for himself and would become isolated from the world. This caricature of development would impoverish a man's Ego to an increasing extent, for selfishness lays a man inwardly waste. So is it that the Ego, as it works in the three members of the soul, acts as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it must work to become always richer, a powerful centre from which much can stream forth; but on the other hand it must bring everything it absorbs back into harmony with the outer world. To the same degree that it develops its own resources, it must go out from itself and relate itself to the whole of existence. It must become simultaneously an independent being and a selfless one. Only when the Ego works in these two apparently contradictory directions—when on one side it enriches itself increasingly and on the other side becomes selfless—can human evolution go forward so as to be satisfying for man and health-giving for the whole of existence. The Ego has to work on each of three soul-members in such a way that both sides of human development are kept in balance.

Now the work of the Ego in the soul leads to its own gradual awakening. Development occurs in all forms of life, and we find that the three members of the human soul are today at very different stages of evolution. The Sentient Soul, the bearer of our emotions and impulses and of all the feelings that are aroused by direct stimuli from the outer world, is the most strongly developed of the three. But at certain lower stages of evolution the content of the Sentient Soul is experienced in a dull, dim way, for the Ego is not yet fully awake. When a man works inwardly on himself and his soul-life progresses, the Ego becomes more and more clearly conscious of itself. But as far as the Sentient Soul is awake, the Ego is hardly more than a brooding presence within it. The Ego gains in clarity when man advances to a richer life in the Intellectual Soul, and achieves full clarity in the Consciousness Soul. Man then comes to be aware of himself as an individual who stands apart from his environment and is active in gaining objective knowledge of it. This is possible only when the Ego is awake in the Consciousness Soul.

Thus we have the Ego only dimly awake in the Sentient Soul. It is swept along by waves of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, and can scarcely be perceived as an entity. In the Intellectual Soul, when clearly defined ideas and judgments are developed, the Ego first gains clarity, and achieves full clarity in the Consciousness Soul.

Hence we can say: Man has a duty to educate himself through his Ego and so to further his own inner progress. But at the time of its awakening the Ego is still given over to the waves of emotion that surge through the Sentient Soul. Is there anything in the Sentient Soul which can contribute to the education of the Ego at a time when the Ego is still incapable of educating itself?

We shall see how in the Intellectual Soul there is something which enables the Ego to take its own education in hand. In the Sentient Soul this is not yet possible; the Ego must be guided by something which arises independently within the Sentient Soul. We will single out this one element in the Sentient Soul and consider its two-sided mission for educating the Ego, This element is one to which the strongest objection may perhaps be taken—the emotion we call anger. Anger arises in the Sentient Soul when the Ego is still dormant there. Or can it be said that we stand in a self-conscious relation to anyone if their behaviour causes us to flare up in anger?

Let us picture the difference between two persons: two teachers, let us say. One of them has achieved the clarity which makes for enlightened inner judgments. He sees what his pupil is doing wrong but is not perturbed by it, because his Intellectual Soul is mature. With his Consciousness Soul, also, he is calmly aware of the child's error, and if necessary he can prescribe an appropriate penalty, not impelled by any emotional reaction but in accordance with ethical and pedagogical judgment. It will be otherwise with a teacher whose Ego has not reached the stage that would enable him to remain calm and discerning. Not knowing what to do, he flares up in anger at the child's misdemeanour.

Is such anger always inappropriate to the event that calls it forth? No, not always. And this is something we must keep in mind. Before we are capable of judging an event in the light of the Intellectual Soul or the Consciousness Soul, the wisdom of evolution has provided for us to be overcome by emotion because of that event. Something in our Sentient Soul is activated by an event in the outer world. We are not yet capable of making the right response as an act of judgment, but we can react from the emotional centre of the Sentient Soul. Of all things that the Sentient Soul experiences, let us therefore consider anger.

It points to what will come about in the future. To begin with, anger expresses a judgment of some event in the outer world; then, having learnt unconsciously through anger to react to something wrong, we advance gradually to enlightened judgments in our higher souls. So in certain respects anger is an educator. It arises in us as an inner experience before we are mature enough to form an enlightened judgment of right and wrong. This is how we should look on the anger which can flare up in a young man, before he is capable of a considered judgment, at the sight of injustice or folly which violates his ideals; and then we can properly speak of a righteous anger. No-one does better at acquiring an inner capacity for sound judgment than a man who has started from a state of soul in which he could be moved to righteous anger by anything ignoble, immoral or crazy. That is how anger has the mission of raising the Ego to higher levels. On the other hand, since man is to become a free being, everything human can degenerate. Anger can degenerate into rage and serve to gratify the worst kind of egoism. This must be so, if man is to advance towards freedom. But we must not fail to realise that the very thing which can lapse into evil may, when it manifests in its true significance, have the mission of furthering the progress of man. It is because man can change good into evil, that good qualities, when they are developed in the right way, can become a possession of the Ego. So is anger to be understood as the harbinger of that which can raise man to calm self-possession.

But although anger is on the one hand an educator of the Ego, it also serves strangely enough, to engender selflessness. What is the Ego's response when anger overcomes it at the sight of injustice or folly? Something within us speaks out against the spectacle confronting us. Our anger illustrates the fact that we are up against something in the outer world. The Ego then makes its presence felt and seeks to safeguard itself against this outer event. The whole content of the Ego is involved. If the sight of injustice or folly were not to kindle a noble anger in us, the events in the outer world would carry us along with them as an easy-going spectator; we would not feel the sting of the Ego and we would have no concern for its development. Anger enriches the Ego and summons it to confront the outer world, yet at the same time it induces selflessness. For if anger is such that it can be called noble and does not lapse into blind rage, its effect is to damp down Ego-feeling and to produce something like powerlessness in the soul. If the soul is suffused with anger, its own activity becomes increasingly suppressed.

This experience of anger is wonderfully well brought out in the vernacular use of sich giften, to poison oneself, as a phrase meaning “to get angry”. This is an example of how popular imagination arrives at a truth which may often elude the learned.

Anger which eats into the soul is a poison; it damps down the Ego's self-awareness and so promotes selflessness. Thus we see how anger serves to teach both independence and selflessness; that is its dual mission as an educator of humanity, before the Ego is ripe to undertake its own education. If we were not enabled by anger to take an independent stand, in cases where the outer world offends our inner feeling, we would not be selfless, but dependent and Ego-less in the worst sense.

For the spiritual scientist, anger is also the harbinger of something quite different. Life shows us that a person who is unable to flare up with anger at injustice or folly will never develop true kindness and love. Equally, a person who educates himself through noble anger will have a heart abounding in love, and through love he will do good. Love and kindness are the obverse of noble anger. Anger that is overcome and purified will be transformed into the love that is its counterpart. A loving hand is seldom one that has never been clenched in response to injustice or folly. Anger and love are complementary.

A superficial Theosophy might say: Yes, a man must overcome his passions; he must cleanse and purify them. But overcoming something does not mean shirking or shunning it. It is a strange sort of sacrifice that is made by someone who proposes to cast off his passionate self by evading it. We cannot sacrifice something unless we have first possessed it. Anger can be overcome only by someone who has experienced it first within himself. Instead of trying to evade such emotions, we must transmute them in ourselves. By transmuting anger, we rise from the Sentient Soul, where noble anger can flame out, to the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul, where love and the power to give blessing are born.

Transmuted anger is love in action. That is what we learn from reality. Anger in moderation has the mission of leading human beings to love; we can call it the teacher of love. And not in vain do we call the undefined power that flows from the wisdom of the world and shows itself in the righting of wrongs the “wrath of God”, in contrast to God's love. But we know that these two things belong together; without the other, neither can exist. In life they require and determine each other.

Now let us see how in art and poetry, when they are great, the primal wisdom of the world is revealed.

When we come to speak of the mission of truth, we shall see how Goethe's thoughts on this subject are clearly expressed in his Pandora, one of his finest poems, though small in scale. And in a powerful poem of universal significance, the Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, we are brought to see, though perhaps less clearly, the role of anger as a phenomenon in world history.

Probably you know the legend on which Aeschylus based his drama. Prometheus is a descendant of the ancient race of Titans, who had succeeded the first generation of gods in the evolution of the earth and of humanity. Ouranus and Gaia belong to the first generation of gods. Ouranus is succeeded by Kronos (Saturn). Then the Titans are overthrown by the third generation of gods, led by Zeus. Prometheus, though a descendant of the Titans, was on the side of Zeus in the battle against the Titans and so could be called a friend of Zeus, but he was only half a friend. When Zeus took over the rulership of the earth—so the legend continues—humanity had advanced far enough to enter on a new phase, while the old faculties possessed by men in ancient times were dying out. Zeus wanted to exterminate mankind and install a new race on earth, but Prometheus resolved to give men the means of further progress. He brought them speech and writing, knowledge of the outer world, and, finally, fire, in order that by learning to master these tools humanity might raise itself from the low level to which it had sunk.

If we look more deeply into the story, we find that everything bestowed by Prometheus on mankind is connected with the human Ego, while Zeus is portrayed as a divine power which inspires and ensouls men in whom the Ego has not yet come to full expression. If we look back over the evolution of the earth, we find in the far past a humanity in which the Ego was no more than an obscurely brooding presence. It had to acquire certain definite faculties with which to educate itself. The gifts that Zeus could bestow were not adapted to furthering the progress of mankind. In respect of the astral body, and of everything in man apart from his Ego, Zeus is the giver. Because Zeus was not capable of promoting the development of the Ego, he resolved to wipe out mankind. All the gifts brought by Prometheus, on the other hand, enabled the Ego to educate itself. Such is the deeper meaning of the legend.

Prometheus, accordingly, is the one who enables the Ego to set to work on enriching and enlarging itself; and that is exactly how the gifts bestowed by Prometheus were understood in ancient Greece.

Now we have seen that if the Ego concentrates on this single aim, it finally impoverishes itself, for it will be shutting itself off from the outer world. Enriching itself is one side only of the Ego's task. It has to go out and bring its inner wealth into harmony with the world around it, if it is not to be impoverished in the long run. Prometheus could bestow on men only the gifts whereby the Ego could enrich itself. Thus, inevitably, he challenged the powers which act from out of the entire cosmos to subdue the Ego in the right way, so that it may become self less and thus develop its other aspect. The independence of the Ego, achieved under the sting of anger on the one hand, and on the other the damping down of the Ego when a man consumes his anger, as it were, and his Ego is deadened—this whole process is presented in the historic pictures of the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus.

Prometheus endows the Ego with faculties which enable it to become richer and richer. What Zeus has to do is to produce the same effect that anger has in the individual. Thus the wrath of Zeus falls on Prometheus and extinguishes the power of the Ego in him. The legend tells us how Prometheus is punished by Zeus for the untimely stimulus he had given to the advancement of the human Ego. He is chained to a rock.

The suffering thus endured by the human Ego and its inner rebellion are magnificently expressed by Aeschylus in this poetic drama.

So we see the representative of the human Ego subdued by the wrath of Zeus. Just as the individual human Ego is checked and driven back on itself when it has to swallow its anger, so is Prometheus chained by the wrath of Zeus, meaning that his activity is reduced to its proper level. When a flood of anger sweeps through the soul of an individual, his Ego, striving for self-expression, finds itself enchained; so was the Promethean Ego chained to a rock.

That is the peculiar merit of this legend: it presents in powerful pictures far-reaching truths which are valid both for individuals and for humanity at large. People could see in these pictures what had to be experienced in the individual soul. Thus in Prometheus chained to the Caucasian rock we can see a representative of the human Ego at a time when the Ego, striving to advance from its brooding somnolence in the Sentient Soul, is restrained by its fetters from indulging in wild extravagance.

We are then told how Prometheus knows that the wrath of Zeus will be silenced when he is overthrown by the son of a mortal. He will be succeeded in his rulership by someone born of mortal man. The Ego is released by the mission of anger on a lower plane, and the immortal Ego, the immortal human soul, will be born from mortal man on a higher plane. Prometheus looks forward to the time when Zeus will be succeeded by Christ Jesus, and the individual Ego will itself be transformed into the loving Ego when the noble anger that fettered it is transformed into love. We behold the birth from the Ego enchained by anger of that other Ego, whose action in the outer world will be that of love and blessing. So, too, we behold the birth of a God of love who tends and cherishes the Ego; the very Ego that in earlier times was fettered by the anger of Zeus, so that it should not transgress its proper bounds.

Hence we see in the continuation of this legend an external picture of human evolution. We must ourselves take hold of this myth in such a way that it gives us a living picture, universally relevant, of how the individual experiences the transformation of the Ego, educated by the mission of anger, into the liberated Ego imbued with love. Then we understand what the legend does and what Aeschylus made of his material. We feel the soul's life-blood pulsing through us; we feel it in the continuation of the legend and in the dramatic form given to it by Aeschylus. So we find in this Greek drama something like a practical application of processes we can experience in our own souls. This is true of all great poems and other works of art: they spring from typical great experiences of the human soul.

We have seen today how the Ego is educated through the purification of a passion. In the next lecture we shall see how the Ego becomes ripe to educate itself in the Intellectual Soul by learning to grasp the mission of truth on a higher plane. We have seen also how in our considerations today the saying of Heraclitus is borne out: “You will never find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search for them; so wide and deep is the being of the soul.”

Yes, it is true that the soul's being is so far-reaching that we cannot directly sound its depths. But Spiritual Science, with the opened eye of the seer, leads into the substance of the soul, and we can progress further and further into fathoming the mysterious being that the human soul is when we contemplate it through the eyes of the spiritual scientist. On the one hand we can truly say: The soul has unfathomable depths, but if we take this saying in full earnest we can add: The boundaries of the soul are indeed so wide that we have to search for them by all possible paths, but we can hope that by extending these boundaries ourselves, we shall progress further and further in our knowledge of the soul.

This ray of hope will illumine our search for knowledge if we accept the true words of Heraclitus not with resignation but with confidence: The boundaries of the soul are so wide that you may search along every path and not reach them, so comprehensive is the being of the soul.

Let us try to grasp this comprehensive being; it will lead us on further and further towards a solution of the riddles of existence.

• 16. Cf. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Herakleitos aus Ephesus, Nr. 45. Also: The art and thought of Heraclitus.
• 17. An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary by Charles H. Kahn. CUP, Cambridge, 1979, No. XXXV.
• 18. Francesco Redi, 1626–98. Italian doctor, scientist and poet. Cf. his work Osservazione intorno agfi animafi viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi, 1684.
• 19. Giordano Bruno, born 1548, was burnt in 1600 in Rome as a heretic.
• 20. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860. Cf. his work The World as Will and Representation, Book 1, par. 1.

Hermann Grimm, the eminent thinker on Art, has tried to follow Raphael's influence and fame through the ages down to the present day. Grimm has been able to show that Raphael's creations went on working after the painter's death as a living element, and that a uniform stream of spiritual development has flowed onwards from the life of Raphael to our own time. Grimm has shown how the evolution of humanity has proceeded since the creations of Raphael, and on the other side of the spiritual conception of history it may be said that preceding ages too give the impression as if they were themselves pointing to the Raphael who was later to appear in world evolution like a limb inset in a whole organism. We may here recall an utterance once made by Goethe and from the world of Space apply it to the world of Time. Goethe once wrote these significant words: “What would all the starry world and all that is spread out in Space amount to if it were not at some time reflected in a human soul, celebrating its own higher existence for the first time in the experiences of this human soul?” Applying these words to the evolution of the ages, we may say that in a certain sense, when we cast our eyes back into antiquity, the Homeric gods who were described so gloriously by Homer nearly 1000 years before the founding of Christianity, would seem less to us if they had not risen again in the soul of Raphael, finding their consummation in the sublime figures of his pictures. What Homer created long ages before the appearance of Christianity unites in this sense into an organic whole with what was born from the soul of Raphael in the 16th century. Again, we turn our gaze to the figures of the New Testament, and in the face of Raphael's pictures we feel that something would be lacking if the creative, formative power in the Madonnas and other pictures which have sprung from Biblical tradition and legend, had not been added to the Biblical description. Therefore we may say: not only does Raphael live on through the following centuries but his creations form one organic whole with all preceding ages. Most ages indeed already pointed to one in whom they should find their consummation, although this, it is true, could only be discovered in later history.

The words of Lessing when he speaks of “the Education of the Human Race” assume great significance when we thus see how a uniform spiritual essence flows through the evolution of humanity, flashing up in figures like Raphael. The truth of repeated earthly lives that has so often been emphasized from the spiritual-scientific standpoint in connection with the spiritual evolution of humanity is perceived with special vividness when we bear in mind what has just been said. We realize then for the first time what it means that the being of man should appear again and again in repeated earthly lives through the epochs, bearing from one life to the other what is destined to be implanted in the spiritual evolution of humanity. Spiritual Science is seeking the meaning and purpose in the evolution of mankind. It does not merely seek to portray the consecutive events of human evolution in one straight, continuous line, but to interpret the various epochs in such a way that the human soul, appearing again and again over the course of the ages, must have ever new experiences. Then we can truly speak of an “Education” which the human soul undergoes as the result of its different earthly lives,—an education proceeding from all that is created and born from out of the common spirit of humanity.

What will here be said from the standpoint of Spiritual Science in regard to Raphael's relationship to human evolution as a whole during the last few centuries, is not intended to be a philosophical or historical study, but the result of many-sided study of Raphael's creative activity. There is no question of giving a philosophical survey of the spiritual life of humanity for the sake of bringing Raphael into it. Everything that I myself have experienced after study and contemplation of his different works has crystallized quite naturally into what I propose to say tonight.

It will be impossible, of course, to enter in details into single creations of Raphael. That could only be if one were able by some means to place his pictures before the audience. A general impression of the creative power of Raphael arises in the soul and then the question arises: what place has this in the evolution of humanity? The gaze falls upon a significant epoch,—an epoch to which Raphael stands in inner relationship when we allow him to work upon us—I refer to the Greek epoch and its development. All that the Greeks not only created but experienced as the outcome of their whole nature and constitution appears as a kind of middle epoch when we study human evolution during the last few thousand years. Greek culture coincides in a certain sense with the founding of Christianity and all that preceded it seems to bear a different character from following ages. Studying humanity in the Pre-Grecian age of civilization we find that the soul and spirit of man are much more intimately bound up with the corporeal, with the outer corporeality than is the case in later times. What we speak of today as the “inwardness” of the human soul,—the inward withdrawal of the soul when applying itself to the spiritual or the spiritual becoming conscious of the Spiritual underlying the universe,—this inwardness did not exist to the same degree in Grecian times. When man made use of his bodily organs in those days, the spiritual mysteries of existence simultaneously lit up in his soul. Observation of the sense-world was not so detached and aloof as is ordinary Science to-day. Man beheld the objects with his senses, and with his sense impressions he simultaneously perceived the spirit and soul-elements weaving and living within the objects. The Spiritual was there with the objects as they were perceived. To press forward to the Spirituality of the universe in ancient times it was not necessary for man to withdraw from sense impressions or to give himself up wholly to the inner being of the soul. Indeed in very ancient times of evolution “clairvoyant perception of things”—in the very best sense of the word—was a common possession of man. This clairvoyant perception was not attained as the result of certain given conditions, but was as natural as sense perception.

Then came Greek culture with the world peculiar to it,—a world where we may place the beginning of the inward deepening of spiritual life, but where the inner experiences of the spirit are still connected with the outer, with processes in the world of sense. In Greek culture the balance is between the Sensible and the Psychic-Spiritual. The Spiritual was not so immediately present in sense perception as was the case in Pre-Grecian times. It lit up in the soul of the Greek as something inwardly apart, but that it was perceived when the senses were directed to the outer world. The Greek beheld the Spirit not in the objects, but with the objects. In Pre-Grecian times the soul of man was poured out, as it were, into corporeality. In Greek culture the soul had freed itself to some extent from the corporeality, but the balance between the Psychic-Spiritual and the bodily element was still held. This is why the creations of the Greeks seem to be as fully permeated with the spirituality as that which their senses perceived.

In Post-Grecian ages the human spirit undergoes an inward deepening and is no longer able to receive, simultaneously with the sense impression the, Spiritual living and weaving in all things. These are the ages when the human soul was destined to withdraw into itself and experience its struggles and conquests in an inner life before pressing forward to the Spiritual. Spiritual contemplation and the sense perception of things became two worlds which the human soul must experience. How clearly evident this is in a spirit like Augustine, for instance, who in the Post-Christian epoch is really not so far removed from the founding of Christianity as we are from the Reformation. The experiences and writings of Augustine as compared with the traditions of Greek culture are highly characteristic of the progress of humanity. The struggles of the inward turned soul, the scene of action existing in the inner being of the soul apart from the external world that we see in Augustine,—how impossible all this appears in the Greek spirits who everywhere reveal how deeply their soul-content is united with the processes of the external world.

The evolutionary history of humanity shows evidence of a division, a mighty incision. Into this evolutionary picture there enters on the one side Greek culture, where man holds the balance between the Psychic-Spiritual and outer corporeality; on the other side there is the founding of Christianity. All the experiences of the human soul were thereafter to become inward, to take their course in inner struggles and conquests. The mission of the founding of Christianity was not to direct man's gaze to the world of sense in order that he might become conscious of the riddles of existence, but to all that the spirit might intuitively behold when giving itself up wholly to the powers of the spirit and soul. How utterly different,—divided by a deep, deep cleft, are those beautiful, majestic Gods of Greece, Zeus or Apollo, from the figure dying on the Cross,—a figure, it is true, full of inner profundity and power, but not beautiful in the external sense. Already here we find the outer symbol of the deep incision made by Christianity and Greek culture in the evolution of humanity. And in the spirits of the Post-Grecian ages we see the effects of this incision as an ever more intense inward deepening of the soul.

Thence forward this inner deepening has been characteristic of the onward progress of evolution. And if we would understand human evolution in the sense of Spiritual Science we must realize that we are living in an age which represents a still greater inward deepening, the more we observe it in relation to the immediate past and the prospect of the future in which a cleft, still deeper than that which the contemplation of the past reveals, will appear between all that is proceeding in the world in a more or less mechanical, technical life of the outer world, and the goal ahead of the human soul as it endeavors to scale the heights of spiritual being,—heights which open up only in our inner being as we attempt to ascend to the Spiritual. More and more we are advancing into an age of inner deepening.

A mighty incision in the progress of humanity in Post-Grecian times toward an energy being is what has remained to us in the creations of Raphael. Raphael stands there as a mighty spirit at a parting of the ways in human evolution. All that preceded him marks the beginning of the process of this inner deepening; what follows him represents a new chapter. Although much that I have to say in this lecture may have the appearance of symbology, it should not be taken merely as a symbolical mode of expression, but as an attempt to create as broad a conception and idea as possible, that which can be clothed only in the “trivial concepts of man” on account of Raphael's towering greatness.

When we try to penetrate into the soul of Raphael we are struck, above all, by the way in which the soul appears in the year 1483 in a “spring-like” birth, as it were, passing through an inner development radiating forth its glory from the most marvellous creations. Raphael dies at an early age, at 37. In order so to deepen ourselves in this soul so that we can follow all its stages, let us turn our attention for the moment away from all that was going on in world history and concentrate wholly on the inner nature of this soul.

Hermann Grimm has pointed out certain regular cycles in the inner development of Raphael's soul. And indeed it may be said that Spiritual Science today has no need to be ashamed of directing the attention of modern skeptical mankind to the existence of cyclic laws holding sway along the path to the spirit, in all evolution andalso in that of individual human beings, if so eminent a mind as Hermann Grimm was led, without Spiritual Science, to the perception of this regular inner cyclic development in the soul of Raphael. Grimm speaks of the picture called “The Marriage of the Virgin” as being a new phenomena in the whole evolution of Art, saying that it cannot be compared with anything that had gone before. From infinite depths of the human soul, Raphael created something entirely new in the whole of spiritual evolution. If we thus gain a conception of the gifts lying in Raphael's soul from birth onwards, we can readily agree with the following passage of Hermann Grimm: “We now see Raphael's soul developing onwards in regular cycles of four years duration. It is wonderful to observe how this soul advances onwards thus, and studying one such period we find that at the end of it, Raphael stands at a higher stage of his soul's development. Four years after the picture The Marriage of the Virgin comes The Entombment; four years later again the frescoes in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican,—and so on, by four year stages up to The Transfiguration which stood unfinished by his death bed.”

We feel the desire to study this soul for its own sake because its development is so harmonious. Then however we get the impression that in the Art of Painting itself an inwardness had to develop,—an inwardness such as that expressed in figures which only Raphael could create. It is an inwardness borne out of the depths of the soul experience although it appears in pictures of the world of sense, and it then becomes part of history itself.

Having thus contemplated the inner nature of the soul of Raphael, let us allow the age in which he lived and all that was around him, to work upon us. While Raphael was growing up more or less as a child in Urbino, his environment was of a kind that could stimulate and awaken any decisive talents. The whole of Italy was excited at that time about a certain palace that had been built in Urbino. This was something that imbued the early talents of Raphael with an element of harmony with their nature. After that, however,we find him transplanted to Perugia, thence to Florence, thence to Rome. Fundamentally speaking, his life ran its course within narrow circles. These towns seem so near when we study his life. His world was enclosed within these circles so far as the world of sense was concerned. It was only in the spirit that he rose to “other spheres.” In Perugia, however, which was the scene of his youthful soul development, fierce quarrels were the order of the day. The town is populated by a passionate, tumultuous people. Noble families whose lives were spent in wrangling and quarreling fought bitterly against each other. The one drove the other out-of-town, then after a short banishment the other family would try again to take possession of it. More than once the streets of Perugia flowed with blood and were strewn with corpses. One historian describes a remarkable scene, and indeed all the descriptions of that epoch are typical. A nobleman of the town enters it as a warrior in order to avenge his relatives. He is described to us as he rides through the streets on horseback like the spirit of War incarnate, beating down everything that crosses his path. The historian evidently has the impression that the revenge was justifiable and there arises before his soul the picture of St. George bringing the enemy to his feet. Later on, in a work by Raphael, we feel the scene as described by the historian rise up before us in picture form and our immediate impression is that Raphael must surely have allowed this to affect him; and then what seemed so terrible in the outward sense is deepened and rises again from out of his soul in the subject of one of the most wonderful pictures.

Thus Raphael saw around him a quarreling humanity; disorder upon disorder, battle upon battle, surrounded him in the town where he was studying under his master Pietro Perugino. One gets the impression of two worlds in the town,—one, the scene of cruelty and terror, and another, living inwardly in Raphael's soul, which had really little to do with what was going on around him in the physical world.

Then, later again we find Raphael transplanted to Florence in the year 1504. What was the state of Florence then? In the first place the inhabitants give the impression of being a wearied people who had passed through inner and outer tumults and were living in a certain ennui and fatigue. What had been the fate of Florence? Struggles, just as in the case of the other town, bitter persecutions among different patrician families, and of course, quarrels with the outer world. And on the other hand the stirring event that had thrown every soul in the town into a state of upheaval when Savonarola, a short time previoulsy, had been martyred. This extraordinary figure of Savanarola appears before us uttering words of fire against the current misdeeds, the cruelty, materiality and heathendom of the Church. The words of Savonarola seem to resound again in our ears, words by which he dominated the whole of Florence and to such an extent that the people not only hung upon his lips but revered him as deeply as if a spirit from a higher world were standing before them in that ascetic body. The words of Savonarola transformed Florence as if the direct radiations of the Reformer of Religions Himself had permeated not only the religious conceptions, but the very social life of the town. It was as though a citadel of the Gods had been founded. Such was Florence under the influence of Savonarola. He fell a victim to those Powers whom he had opposed, morally and religiously. There rises before our soul the moving picture of Savonarola as he was led to the fire of martyrdom with his companions, and how from the gallows whence he was to fall onto the burning pyre, he turned his eyes—it was in May 1498—down to the people who had once hung upon his words, but who had now deserted him and were looking with apparent disloyalty at the figure who had for so long inspired them. Only in a very few,—and they were artists,—did the words of Savonarola still resound. There were painters at that time who themselves donned the monk's robe after Savonarola's martyrdom in order to work on in his Order under the influence of his spirit.

One can visualize the weary atmosphere lying over Florence, Raphael was transplanted into this atmosphere in the year 1504. And he brought with him in his creations the very Spirit's breath of Spring, although in a different way from Savonarola. When they contemplate the soul of Raphael in all its isolation,—a soul so different from the mood surrounding it in this town, visualizing him in the company of artists and painters working at his creations in lonely workshops in Florence or elsewhere, another picture rises up, showing us visibly in history how Raphael's soul stands out inwardly aloof from the outer life around it. And there arises before us the figures of the Roman Popes, Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X, in fact the whole Papal system against which Savonarola directed his words of scorn, the Reformers their attacks. Yet this Papacy was the Patron of Raphael who entered its service, although inwardly his soul had little in common with what we find in his Patron Pope Julius II for instance. It was said of Julius II that he gave the impression of a man with a devil in his body, who always likes to show his teeth to his enemies.

How was this possible? We see the contrast between outer life and Raphael's inner being in the early student days in Perugia, but we see it's still more intensely in Rome where his all-conquering works were created in the midst of an officialdom of Cardinals and Priests which had been intolerable to Savonarola. True, the two men were different, but we must nevertheless contrast Raphael with his environment in this way if we are to obtain a true picture of what was living in his soul.

Let us allow the picture of Raphael to work upon us. This cannot be done in detail in a lecture, but we can at least call up before the mind's eye one of the more widely known works for the purpose of contemplating the peculiar qualities living in Raphael's soul,—I mean the Sistine Madonna which is familiar to everybody in the innumerable copies existing all over the world. The Sistine Madonna is one of the greatest and noblest works of Art in human evolution. The “Mother with the Child” hover towards us on clouds which cover the Earth globe,—hover from the shadowy world of spirit and soul, surrounded in clouds which seem naturally to form themselves into human figures, one being the Child Himself. Feelings arise which, when we permeate them with soul, seem to make us forget all those legendary conceptions which culminate in the picture of the Madonna. We forget all that Christian traditions has to tell of her. I say this not for the sake of giving any dry description, but in order to characterize as fully as may be the feelings that arise within us at the site of the Madonna.

Spiritual Science raises us above all materialistic conception of human evolution. Although it is difficult to understand in the sense of Natural Science according to which the development of lower organisms proceeded until finally it reached the stage of the human being,—nevertheless it is the fact that man is a being whose life transcends everything below him in the kingdom of Nature. Spiritual Science knows that man contains a something within him much more ancient than all the beings who stand in greater or lesser proximity to him in the kingdom of Nature.

Man existed before the beings of the animal, plant and even of the mineral kingdom. In a wider perspective we look back to ages when that which now constitutes our inner being was already in existence andwhich only later was incorporated into the kingdoms which now stand below man. We see the being of man proceeding from a super-earthly world and realize that we can only truly understand it when we rise above all that the Earth can produce out of herself to something super-terrestrial and pre-terrestrial. Spiritual Science teaches that even if we allow all the forces, all the living substances connected with the Earth herself to work upon us, none of this can give a true picture of the whole essence and being of man. The gaze must rise beyond the Earthly to the Supersensible whence the being of man proceeds. Speaking figuratively we cannot but feel how something wafts towards the Earthly when, for instance, we gaze at the golden gleaming morning sunrise,—and especially is this the case in a region like that in which Raphael lived. Forces which work down into the Earth seem here to flow into the Earthly elements,—forces which inhere in the being of the Sun. And then out of the golden radiance there rises before our soul the sense image of what it is that is wafting hither in order to unite itself with the Earthly.

Above all in Perugia we may feel that the eye is beholding the very same sunrise once seen by Raphael, who in these phenomena was able to sense the nature of the Super-Earthly element in man. And gazing at the Sun-illuminated clouds there may dawn on us a realization that the picture of the Madonna and Child is a sense picture of the eternal Super-Earthly element in man that is wafted to Earth from super-earthly realms themselves and meets, in the clouds, those elements that can only proceed from the Earthly. Our perception may feel itself raised to the loftiest spiritual heights if we can give ourselves up—not theoretically, or in an abstract sense, but with the whole soul—to what works upon us in Raphael's Madonnas. This perfectly natural feeling may arise before the world-famous picture in Dresden. And to prove to you that it has indeed had this effect upon many people I should like to quote words written about the Sistine Madonna by Karl August, Duke of Weimar, the friend of Goethe, after a visit to Dresden: He says:

“In regard to the Raphael picture that adorns the collection, I felt as if the whole day long I had roamed over the heights of the Gotthard, through the Urner cleft and looked down from thence to the green, blossoming valley. As I looked at the picture and again away from it, it always seemed to me a revelation of the soul. Even the most beautiful Correggios were pictures only of the human; the memory of them tangible like beautiful forms. Raphael, however, remained with me as a breath, as one of those revelations sent to one in women's form by the Gods to bring us happiness or sorrow, like a figure that arises before one again and again in waking or dream life, whose gaze, once experienced, is with one forever, day and night, moving the innermost being.” (Karl August to his friend Knebel, 14th October, 1763)

Another remarkable thing is that if we study the literature of those who speak of the experiences of deep emotion at the site of this Sistine Madonna and also of other pictures of Raphael, we shall always find that they use the analogy of the Sun, all that is radiant and spring-like.

This gives us a glimpse into Raphael's soul and we realize how from amid the environment already described, it held converse with the eternal mysteries of the genesis of man. And then we feel the uniqueness of this soul of Raphael, realizing that it is not a “product” of its environment, but points to a hoary antiquity. There is no longer any need for speculation. A soul like this, looking out into the wide universe,—a soul which does not express the mystery of existence in ideas, but senses and gives it form in a picture like the Sistine Madonna, stands there in its inner perfection quite naturally as mature in the highest degree. Truly, the gifts inherent in this soul represents something that must have passed through other epochs of human evolution, not many such epochs which poured into it a power able to reemerge in what we call the “life of Raphael”. But from what it re-merges?

We see the living content of Christian legends and traditions appearing again in Raphael's pictures in the midst of an age when Christendom had, as it were, become heathenised and was given up to outer pomp and show, just as Greek paganism was represented in the figures of its gods and honoured above all else by the Greeks in their intoxication with beauty. We see Raphael giving form to the figures of Christian tradition in an age when treasures of Greek culture which had for long centuries been buried under ruins and debris on Roman soil were unearthed, Raphael himself assisting. It is a remarkable spectacle, the Rome where Raphael found himself at this time. Let us consider what had gone before.

First there are the centuriesof the Rise of Rome,—a Rome built upon the Egoism of individual men whose aim it was above all to establish a human society in the external physical world on the foundation of what man, as the citizen of a State, was meant to signify. Then during the age of the Emperors, when Rome had reached a certain eminence, it absorbs the Greek culture which streams into Roman spiritual life. Rome subdues Greece in the political sense, but in the spiritual sense Greece conquers Rome. Greek culture lives on within Roman culture; Greek art, to the extent to which it has been imbibed by Rome, lives on there; Rome is permeated through and through by the essence of Greek culture.

But why is it that this does not remain through the following centuries as a characteristic quality of the development of Italy? Why was it that something entirely different made its appearance? It was because soon after Greek culture had streamed into the life of Rome there came the influx of that other element which impressed its signature strongly into the spiritual life that was developing on the soil of Italy, I mean, Christendom. The mission of this inward deepening of Christendom was not that of the external sense element in the Greek State, Greek sculpture, or Greek philosophy. A formless element was now to draw into the souls of men and to be laid hold of by dint of inner effort and struggle. Figures like Augustine appear,—men whose whole being is inward turned. But then,—since everything in evolution proceeds in cycles, we see arising in men who have passed through this inward deepening and whose souls have long lived apart from the beauties of external life, a yearning for beauty. Once again they behold the inner in the outer. It is significant to see the inwardly deepened life of Francis of Assisi in Giotto's pictures for those pictures express the inner experiences called forth in the soul by Christianity. And even if the inner being of the human soul speaks somewhat haltingly and imperfectly from Giotto's pictures, we do nevertheless see a direct ascent to the point where the most inward elements, the very loftiest and noblest in external form confronts us in Raphael and his contemporaries. Here we are directed once again to a characteristic quality of this soul of Raphael.

If we try to penetrate into the kind of feelings and perceptions which Raphael himself must have had, we cannot help saying to ourselves: “Yes, indeed, in the contemplation of pictures like the Madonna della Sedia, for instance, the whole way in which the Madonna with the Child, and the Child John in the foreground are here represented, makes us forget the rest of the world, forget above all that this Child in the arms of the Madonna is connected with the experiences of Golgotha. Gazing at Raphael's pictures we forget everything that afterwards proceeds as the “life of Jesus”; we live entirely in the moment here portrayed. We are gazing simply at a Mother with a Child, which in the words of Hermann Grimm, is the great Mystery to be met with in the outer world. Peace surrounds this moment; it seems as though nothing could connect with it, before or afterwards; we live wholly in the relationship of the Madonna to her Child and separate it off from everything else. Thus do the creations of Raphael appear to us,—perfect and complete in themselves, revealing the Eternal in one moment of Time.

How shall we describe the feelings of a soul able to create like this? We cannot compare them to the feelings of a Savonarola, who when he uttered his words of scorn or was speaking those uplifting, godly words to Christian devotees, was seized with inner fire and passed through the whole tragedy of the Christ. We cannot conceive that Raphael's soul burst forth suddenly like the genius of a Savonarola, or others like him; nor can we conceive that it was swayed by the so-called “fire of Christendom.” Raphael could not however have portrayed the Christian conceptions in such inner perfection if his soul had been as foreign to this “Christian fire” as may appear to have been the case.

On the other hand, the forms in all their objectivity and roundness could not have been created by a soul permeated with Savonarola's fire and winged by the experience of the whole tragedy of the Christ. Quite a different peace, quite a different Christian feeling must have flowed into the soul. And yet no soul could have created these pictures if the very essence of Christian inwardness were not living within it. Surely it is almost natural to say: here indeed is a soul which brought with it into the physical existence of the artist Raphael, the fire that pours forth from Savonarola. When we realize how Raphael brings this fire with him through birth from earlier experiences, we understand why it is so illuminating and inwardly perfect; it does not come forth as a consuming and shattering element but as the reliance of plastic creation. In Raphael's innate gifts one already feels the existence of something that in an earlier life might have been able to speak with the same fire that is later found in Savonarola. It need not astonish us to find in Raphael a soul reincarnated from an age when Christianity was not yet expressed in picture form or in Art, but from the age of its founding, the starting point of the whole mighty impulse which then worked on through the centuries.

In the attempt to understand the soul like Raphael's, it is perhaps not too bold to say something of this kind, for those who have steeped themselves again and again in the works of Raphael and have thus learnt to reverence this soul in all its depth, cannot but realize what it is that speaks from those wonder-works into which the artist poured his soul. Thus the mission of Raphael only appears in the right light when,—to use an expression of Goethe,—we seek in a life already past for the Christian fire that is revealed in the radiance of the Raphael life. Then we understand why his soul was necessarily so isolated in the world and why it was that having possessed to an intense degree in an earlier existence something of the nature of a Savonarola. It was able to refresh and renew all that had arisen in the spiritual evolution of Italy in the 16th century.

I have already described how in the age of the Rise of the Empire, the influence of Greek culture has entered into Roman development and how an inward deepening of the soul had set in. Later on, in the age of Raphael,—the Renaissance,—we see on the one side the reappearance of this old Greek culture that had long been buried under ruins and debris. We see in Rome with the remnants of this Greek culture, the reappearance of the Greek spirit that had once adorned and beautified the city; the eyes of the Roman people turn once again to the forms that had been created by this Greek spirit. On the other side, however, we see how the spirit of Plato, of Aristotle, of the Greek Tragedians, penetrates Roman life in the epoch. Once again the victory of Greek culture over the Roman world! The Greek culture which was emerging from ruins and debris and spreading over the Italian peninsula could not help having a refreshing and renewing effect on a spirit like Raphael's, who in an earlier existence was imbued, to the exclusion of everything else, with the moral-religious conception of Christendom.

If we see the moral-religious impulse of Christendom born in the gifts of Raphael, we also see that element which these gifts did not at first contain rising before his eyes in the resurrected culture of Greece. And just as the city, rising out of ruins and debris, influenced this soul more deeply than all others, so also did the spiritual yields of Greek culture that were unearthed in the hidden manuscripts. Raphael's inborn gifts, united with his “super-spiritual” devotion to everything of a cosmic nature, worked hand-in-hand with the Greek spirit that was emerging again in his age. These were the two elements that united in Raphael's soul; this is why his works express the inwardness proceeding from the post-Grecian age,—the inwardness poured by Christianity into the evolution of humanity which was expressed in outward manifestation in a world of artistic forms permeated with the purest Greek spirit.

We are faced, then, with the remarkable phenomenon of the resurrection of Greek culture within Christendom through Raphael. In him we see the resurrection of a Christendom in an age which in a certain respect represents the “Anti-Christian” element around him. In Raphael there lives a Christianity far transcending what had gone before him and rose to a much loftier conception of the world as it was at that time. Yet it was a Christianity that did not dimly and vaguely direct the attention to the infinite spheres of the Spiritual, but was concentrated into forms that delight the senses too, just as in earlier times the Greeks expressed in artistic forms their ideas of the gods united with the formless element living and weaving in the universe.

This is what we find when we try to form a general picture of Raphael, allowing one or another of his creations in all their sublime perfection yet marvellous superfluity of youth,—for Raphael died at the age of 37,—to work upon us. Not for the sake of any colorless theory, or for the purpose of building any kind of philosophical history, but as the result of a conception born out of Raphael's works themselves, it must be said that the law holding sway in the course of human spiritual life finds its true revelation in a mighty spirit such as his.

It is not correct to think of this course of spiritual life as a straight line where effect follows cause as a natural matter of fact. It is only too easy in this connection to quote one of the so-called “golden sayings” of humanity to the effect that the life and nature does not advance by leaps and bounds. Well and good, but the fact is that in a certain respect both life and nature do continually do so, as can be seen in the development of the plant from the green leaf to the blossom, from the blossom to the fruit. Here everything does indeed “develop” but sudden leaps are quite obvious.

So too is it in the spiritual life of humanity, and this, moreover, is bound up with many mysteries, one of them being that a later epoch must always have its support in an earlier. Just as the male and female must work in conjunction, so may it be said that the different “Spirits of the Age” must mutually fertilize and work together in order that evolution may proceed. Roman culture, already at the time of the empire, had to be fertilized by Greek culture in order that a new “Spirit of the Age” might arise. This new Spirit of the Age had in its turn to be fertilized by the Christ Impulse before the inwardness which we then find in Augustine and others was possible. This human soul that had been so inwardly deepened, had once again to be fertilized by the spirit of the Greek culture which, although it was doubly buried, doubly hidden, was made visible again to the eyes of man in the works of Art resting beneath the soil of Italy, and to their souls in the rediscovered literary manuscripts.

The first Christian centuries in Italy were extraordinarily uninfluenced by what lived in Greek Philosophy and Poetry. Greek culture was buried in a double grave and waited in a realm beyond as it were, for an epoch when it could once again fertilized human soul that had meantime passed through a new phase. It was buried, this Greek culture, hidden from the eyes of men and from souls who did not know that it would live and flow onwards like a river that sometimes takes a track under a mountain and is not seen until it once again comes to the surface. Hidden, outwardly from the senses, inwardly from the depths of the soul was this Greek culture and now it appeared once again. For sense perception it was brought to the light of day from out of the soil of Italy and flowed into the works of art; for spiritual perception it was not only unearthed from the ancient manuscripts; men began once again to feel in the Greek sense how the material is the manifestation of the Spiritual. They began to feel all that Plato and Aristotle had once thought.

It was Raphael in whom this Greek culture could bring forth its fairest flower because the Christ Impulse had reached a greater ripeness in his soul than in any other. This twice buried and twice resurrected Greek culture worked in him in such a way that he was able to impress into forms the whole evolution of humanity. How marvellously was he able to accomplish this in the pictures in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican! The ancient spiritual contests rise again before our eyes,—the struggles and activities of those Spirits who developed onwards during the epoch of inward deepening, who were not there in the Greek culture as it reappeared in the time of Raphael. The whole period of inward deepening was necessary before Greek culture could become visible in this particular form, and then it is painted on the walls of the Papal Chambers.

What the Greeks had conceived of in forms only, has now become inward; we see the inner struggles and conflicts of humanity itself charmed onto the walls of the Vatican in the spirit of Greece, of Greek Art and beauty. The Greeks poured into their statues their conception of the way in which the Gods worked upon the world. How this working of the Gods is experienced by man, so that he presses onwards to the foundations and causes of things,—this is what is expressed in the picture so often called “The School of Athens”. The conceptions which the human soul had learned to form of the Greek Gods is expressed in the Parnassus, with its new and significant interpretation of the Homeric gods. These are not the gods of the Iliad and Odyssey; they are the gods as perceived by a soul that had passed through the period of inward deepening.

On the other wall there is a picture that must remain indelibly in the memory of everyone, whatever their religious creed,—I refer to the fresco of the “Dispute about the Mass” which portrays the deepest inner truths. Whereas the other pictures,—in a Greek beauty of form it is true,—express the goal to be attained as the result of a certain philosophical striving, we have in the “Dispute about the Mass”, the fairest thing that the soul of man may experience. Here we find “Brahma”, “Vishnu”, “Shiva” portrayed in quite a different sense,—a proof to us that there is no need to adhere rigidly to a narrow Christian dogmatism. What can be inwardly experienced by every human soul, irrespective of creed or confession, as the “Trinity”, faces us in the symbolism,—though the portrayal is not merely “symbolical”, in the upper part of the picture. We see it again in the countenances of the Church Fathers, in their every gesture, in the whole grouping of the figures, in the wonderful coloring, indeed in the picture as a whole which portrays the inwardness of the human soul in a beauty of form permeated by the spirit of Greece.

And so the inward deepening experienced by the soul man in the course of 1500 years rises again in outer revelation. Christianity, not as the heathendom of the Roman popes and cardinals, but as the wonderful paganism of Greece with its mighty Gods, is resurrected in the works of Raphael.

Thus the soul of Raphael stands at the turning point of ages, pointing back to days of yore, containing within itself all that had developed up to the time of Christendom in the beauty of external revelation, and yet at the same time permeated by what had been brought about by the so-called “education of the human race”, namely an inward deepeningin the reincarnated soul. These wonderworks of so rare and art stand before us like a fusion of two ages, each clearly different from the other,—the pre-Grecian and the post-Grecian epochs, the one of external, the other of inner life. But the pictures also open up a glimpse into the future. Those who realize what the fusion of external beauty and the inner wisdom-filled urge of the human soul may signify, cannot but feel security and hope that this inward deepening—despite all the materiality that must develop more and more as humanity progresses,—must increase in the course of evolution and that the soul of man through successive lives will enter into greater and greater depths of inwardness.

If we now turn to literature and study not as “Art critics” or mere readers, the works of a spirit like Hermann Grimm, who tried with his whole soul to portray the workings of human fantasy, we can understand the depths of inner sympathy with which he contemplated the creations of Raphael. If we ourselves study a spirit like Hermann Grimm with this same inner sympathy, we can understand the significance of certain words of his which express what was passing through his soul when he makes a somewhat tentative utterance at the beginning of his books, in a passage dealing with the way in which Raphael is a product of all the ages. Grimm's formal descriptions of the various works of Raphael do not show us whence this particular thought has sprung. In the middle of other wider historical considerations into which Raphael is introduced, Hermann Grimm is struck by a thought which he records somewhat tentatively in these words: “When we contemplate the spiritual creations of humanity and see how they have passed over from days of yore into our own time, we may well be aware of a longing to tread this Earth once more in order to see what has been their fate as they have lived on.”

This desire for “reincarnation” expressed by Hermann Grimm in the introduction to his book on Raphael is remarkable, and moreover, deeply characteristic of the feeling living in the soul of a man of our own time,—I mean of course one who tried to penetrate into the very soul of Raphael and his connection with other epochs. Surely this makes us feel that works like those of Raphael are not merely a “natural product”; they do not only induce a sense of gratitude for all that the past has hitherto bestowed. They rather give birth to a feeling of hope, because they strengthen our belief in an advancing humanity. We feel that these works could not be what they are if progress were not the very essence of humanity. A feeling of security and hope arises when we allow Raphael to work upon us in the true sense and we are able to say: Raphael has spoken to humanity itself in his artistic creations.

In front of the Stanzas in the Camera della Segnatura we do indeed feel the transitoriness of the outer work and that those ofttimes repaired frescoes can no longer give any conception of what Raphael's magic once charmed on those walls. We realize that at some future time men will no longer be able to gaze at the original works, but we know too that humanity will never cease progressing. Raphael's works began their march of triumph when out of sheer love of them the innumerable reproductions now in existence were made. The influence of the originals live on, even in the reproductions. We can so well understand Hermann Grimm when he says that he once hung a photograph of the Sistine Madonna in his room but always felt that he had no right to go into that room; it seemed to him to be a sanctuary of the Madonna in the picture. Many will have realized that the soul is changed after they have entered livingly into some picture of Raphael, even though it is only a reproduction. True one day the originals will disappear, but may it not be said that they exist nonetheless in other worlds?

The words of Hermann Grimm in his book on Homer are quite true: “Neither can the original works of Homer truly delight us in these days for when we read the Iliad and Odyssey in ordinary life without higher spiritual faculties, we are no longer able to enter fully into all the subtleties, beauty and power of the Greek language. The originals exist no longer; yet in spite of this Homer speaks to us through his poems.” What Raphael has given to the outer world however will always remain as a living witness of the fact that there was once an age in the evolution of humanity when the mysteries of existence were indeed revealed through mighty creations, although at that time men could not penetrate into these mysteries through printed writing. In the age of Raphael men read less, but they beheld a great deal more.

Raphael's eternal message to humanity will bear witness to this epoch,—an epoch differently constituted but that will nevertheless work on through all the ages to come, because humanity is one complete organism. Thus Raphael's creations will live on in the outer course of human evolution and inwardly in the successive lives of the spirit of man, bestowing ever mightier and more deeply inward treasures.

Spiritual Science points to a twofold continuation of life, one aspect of which has been described in previous lectures here, and will be still further described, and to another spiritual life towards which we are ever striving. This spiritual life becomes our guide as we pass through the epochs of earthly existence. Hermann Grimm spoke words of truth when he expressed what his study of Raphael imparted to his feeling and perception. He says: “A time must come when Raphael's work will have long since faded and passed away. Nonetheless he will still be living in mankind, for in him humanity blossomed forth into something that has its very roots in man and will forever germinate and bear fruit.” Every human soul who can penetrate deeply enough into Raphael's soul will realize this. Indeed we can only truly understand Raphael when we can sublimate and deepen in the sense of Spiritual Science a feeling which permeated Hermann Grimm when he turned again and again to the contemplation of the painter. (In the last lecture we saw how near Hermann Grimm stood to Spiritual Science.) It will help us to understand our own relation to Raphael and the sense in which thoughts such as have been given today may grow into seeds. If we conclude with a passage from Grimm which expresses what I have really wished to say: “Men will always long to understand Raphael, the fair young painter who surpassed all others, who was fated to die early and whose death was mourned by all Rome. When Raphael's works are lost his name will nevertheless remain engraven in the memory of man.”

Thus wrote Hermann Grimm went in his own particular way he began to describe Raphael. We can understand these words and also those with which he concludes his book: “All the world will long to know of the life work of such a man for Raphael has become one of the basic elements in the higher development of the human spirit. We would fain draw nearer to him nay, we need him for our healing.”

This lecture is the 1st of 15, in the lecture series entitled, Spiritual Scientific Note on Goethe's Faust Vol. I.

That which strives to enter our modern culture under the name of Spiritual Science claims to be nothing new and thereby differs from various current world conceptions and other spiritual movements which base the justification of their existence upon their claim of being in a position to bring something new regarding this or that question of spiritual life. But this Spiritual Science aims at emphasizing that the fountains of its knowledge and its life were available at all times when humanity has thought and striven after a solution of the sublime questions and problems of existence. This I have often emphasized in this city, when I had the pleasure of speaking to you in earlier lectures.

It must be especially attractive for man not only to examine, from this point of view, the many and various religious beliefs and world conceptions as they appeared during human evolution, but also to study personalities which have passed before us in history. For, if Spiritual Science is true, at least the nucleus of this truth must be present and discoverable in all those personalities who honestly and energetically strove after knowledge of the core of true human existence.

Whenever today Spiritual Science is spoken of, a variety of opinions are expressed from one side to the other, and anyone who has not penetrated this field sufficiently or formed a merely superficial idea of it from lecturers or brochures will certainly judge it from his own standpoint, as the fantasy or dreaming of a few people alienated from the world and its affairs, who indulge in curious notions about life and its foundations. It must be admitted that such a judgment is perfectly comprehensible if one does not go deeper into the subject; and though we cannot deal today with the deeper facts—having a special theme to speak upon—I nevertheless intended to bring to your notice several of the principal facts of this Spiritual Science. And even when such facts shall have been named and described, a feeling, quite honest, may easily arise within the minds of our contemporaries to the effect that all this is a most curious viewpoint.

Spiritual Science as a whole rests, in the first place, upon the preconception that all that surrounds us in the world of sense—all we can perceive through our senses and understand with our intellect—which is bound to the senses—is not the whole world, but that behind it all lies a spiritual world. And this spiritual world lies not in some undefined “beyond” but surrounds us here and now in exactly the same way as color and light phenomena surround a person born blind. But in order to perceive our environment we need an organ of perception. And just as a blind man cannot see color or light, so man of our age cannot, as a rule, perceive the spiritual facts and beings surrounding him here if he possesses only his normal powers of perception. But when we are lucky enough to perform a successful operation upon a blind person, there comes to him the moment of and “awakening” of the eye, and what previously did not exist for him—color and light, now flows into him. A new world is now perceptible to him. In a similar manner a higher awakening is possible on the Spiritual plane—that awakening which leads to initiation into the world of spirit. To use Goethe's words: there are spiritual eyes and ears, but human souls are not, as a rule, advanced far enough to use these. But when we apply the means and methods calculated to develop these powers, something happens within us similar to the new power given to the man born blind through the operation. A man becomes “awakened” when these new eyes and ears are opened; a new world surrounds him—a world that was always present, but remained invisible to him before his awakening. And now, when he has advanced thus far he learns to make his own the various sources of knowledge which illuminate life, give him power and security for his work and the ability to penetrate into the fundamentals of human destiny and the secrets of it.

One of these cognitions—one of those appearing to modern man, if not crazy, at best chimerical—shall now be dealt with, if only introductorily. It is the restoration or revival of a primeval process of perception, it's continuation upon a higher plane, pure truth which only comparatively recently has been attained for a lower plane. Humanity as a whole has a very short memory for great events in the world of spirit; hence little is thought to-day of the fact that in the 17th century not only the laity but also scientists believed that from riverslime lower animals, even worms and fishes, could develop. It was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who first said that no worm nor fish issues from riverslime unless a worm or fish germ has first been deposited therein. He said that life can spring only from life, and from this assertion we realize that it is only a superficial, inexact observation which can conclude that from lifeless slime can evolve life in the shape of fish or worm; accurate examination shows that we must go back to the living germ, and that this germ can only attract from out of its environment the forces contained therein in order to bring to the highest state of development all that reside as life within the germ or seed.

Redi's precept that life develops only from life is in modern science recognized as self-evident. But when Redi, in his day, gave utterance to it, he barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. It is the same with the evolution of man. First, a truth pronounced thus brings accusation of heresy; then it becomes self-evident and common knowledge of humanity. What Redi did for natural science is to be done for the spiritual man through Spiritual Science by transferring Redi's precept through the cognition of the awakened spiritual eye and ear to the psychic sphere. And then this precept runs: the Psycho-Spiritual can develop only from the Psycho-Spiritual, in other words, it is an inexact method of observation that claims the genesis of a man being dependent only upon father, mother and ancestors. As we must return from the living worm to the living worm-germ, so we have to go back in the case of man, who has evolved from the germ to a definite being, to an earlier spiritual existence and realize that this being, which enters life through birth, only attracts from his physical ancestors the powers for his own development, as does the worm from his lifeless surroundings. And by corresponding extension of Redi's precept we get another: The present life, entering existence through birth, leads not only back to physical ancestors, but through the centuries to an earlier, psycho-spiritual condition. And if you delve yet deeper into this idea, you'll find it shown quite scientifically that there are not only one, but repeated earth lives; that that, which resides in us as life between birth and death, is a repetition of a psycho-spiritual condition already present in earlier stages of existence, and that our present life is, in its turn, the starting point for succeeding lives. The psycho-spiritual comes from the psycho-spiritual, returns to the psycho-spiritual which existed before birth and which descends from the spiritual world to exist in a physical incarnation. From this point of view we observe something very different when we, for example, study a child from the position of parent or teacher, and see the gradual development of inner powers. At birth we are confronted by something indefinite in its features; then we notice how step-by-step something is developed from within, becoming ever more and more definite—something not inherited, but issuing from a former life. We see how, from birth onwards, this psycho-spiritual center develops by degrees through the talents.

That is the message of Spiritual Science today in relation to repeated earth lives. Today it may be considered as dreaming—like the conviction uttered by Francesco Redi in the 17th century—but tomorrow, in the not-too-distant future, it will take its place as a self-evident truth, and the sentence: the psycho-spiritual comes from the psycho-spiritual will become the universal possession of humanity.

In our day the heretic is not treated as he was formally. He is no longer delivered to the stake, but looked upon as a dreamer and fool speaking from some fantastic imagination. He is made ridiculous by those who sit upon the lofty seat of science saying that all this is irreconcilable with true science, unaware that it is the true, pure science which is demanded by this truth. We could give hundreds of such truths that would show how Spiritual Science can illuminate life by demonstrating that an immortal germ resides in man, a germ which goes into the spiritual world at death, to return again to physical existence when its task in the higher world has been completed, so that new experiences may be gathered which are once again carried into the realms of spirit through the gates of death. We would see how the bond created between man and man, from soul to soul in every walk of life, those attractions of the heart uniting one soul with another—can be explained by their earlier creation in former life conditions; and how those new inner connections and sympathies formed today do not cease to be when death passes over physical life but are immortal like the human soul itself; how these accompany us through the world of spirit and later live again in future earthly conditions and new incarnations. And it is only a matter of further evolution for man to remember his former earth experiences—those psycho-spiritual events of earlier lives and conditions of existence.

These truths will, in a not very remote future, permeate, as necessary concepts, human life, and man will gain power, hope and confidence from these. Today we can only see that a few people in the world are, through their healthy sense of truth, attracted to what spiritual investigators can communicate of their experiences in the spiritual world. But true knowledge of the facts of spiritual science will become universal among men as a result of earnest search for the truth. And all those who have trodden the path of this research in the past have always given to mankind the profound wisdom and understanding which is today offered again them by Spiritual Science.

Let's consider an example taken from a time that lies very near to our own—the example of Goethe, and also the work which occupied him during his whole life as his greatest most comprehensive: his “Faust”.

Where we thus approach Goethe and try to illuminate his striving with the insight given us a Spiritual Science, we can begin very early. True it is, that from his predispositions one can discern the state of his soul and spirit. Everything within him which urged him to seek a spiritual background behind all the phenomena of nature was an early predisposition. We see the seven year old boy—Goethe—who could have absorbed quite ordinary ideas from his environment as any other boy would be able to do; but that did not satisfy him. He himself tells us so in his “Poetry and Truth”. There we see this boy begin something quite extraordinary in order to express his longing for the Divine. He takes a music stand from his father's effects and transforms it into an altar by placing upon it all kinds of minerals and plants and other products of nature from which the spirit of nature speaks. With a certain premonition this boy-soul builds an altar, places a candle upon it, takes a burning-glass, waits for the first rays of the rising Sun, gathers these with his glass and focuses them upon the candle 'til the smoke rises. And in advanced age he remembers how he, as a boy, sends his pious feelings to the great God of nature Who speaks through plants and mineral and sends us His fire through the rays of the Sun. All this develops further in Goethe. We see how it comes to expression, at a more mature age, after he arrives in Weimar and is called as advisor to the grand Duke—in the beautiful prosahymn, in which he says: Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by thee, unable to leave thee, and unable to enter deeper into thee. Unwarned and unmasked she takes us into the cycles of her dance, hurrying along with us until we fall exhausted from her arms. Not we, but she has done what is done; she thinks and meditates perpetually, looks with 1000 eyes into the world.—And again, later, he says in the book about Winckelmann “Antiques”: “When the healthy nature of man acts as one whole; when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, majestic and worthy whole; when that harmonious ease endows him with a pure, free rapture, then would this universe, could it perceive itself, feel itself at its goal and admire, joyfully, the culmination of its own being and evolution”. In this manner did Goethe sense how everything living and moving in outer nature celebrates a new resurrection in the human soul, and how a higher nature—a spiritual nature—is borne out of the soul and spirit of man. But only gradually does Goethe fight his way to full clarity of spiritual knowledge of nature. And in nothing else do we see plainer and clearer how Goethe during his entire life remained striving, with rest, to transform his knowledge again and again and so to rise to a higher stage than in his life's work—“Faust”.

In his earliest youth he began to incorporate into his poem all that filled his longing and feeling soul; and as aged man, in his last years, shortly before his death, he completed this work upon which he had spent fifty years of his life and laid into it the best fruits of his existence. At his death the second part lay there sealed, like the great testament to be bestowed upon humanity. It is a significant document, which we understand only if we follow Goethe in his efforts to win through to cognition. We find him, for example, a student at the University in Leipzig. He should have become a lawyer, but this occupied him only as a secondary interest. An unconquerable urge towards the secrets of the world—toward the spiritual—already existed within this young student, even in those days. He therefore absorbed all that Leipzig had to offer on natural science, and to hearken to the world for her problems of existence. But in order to transform what natural science offered him, into that urge which permeated all his inner forces, and aimed not at abstract knowledge, but a warm perception of the heart, he needed for its development a great experience—one that leads man to that knowledge in reality—the gate towards which we gaze with uncertain feelings and which shuts away from the normal human being of today the super physical, the invisible—the gate of death. Death passed him by at the end of his studies in Leipzig. A severe illness brought him near death's door. Hours, days, passed by where he felt that that mysterious portal would open to him at any moment and let him pass through. The exceptionally powerful urge towards knowledge demanded the higher degree of endeavor. And with this developed mood of perceptive he returned to his native city Frankfurt. There he found a circle of persons at whose head stood a woman of deep, extensive ability: Suzanne von Klettenberg. Goethe has erected a wonderful monument to her in the form of “The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”. In it he showed that in this soul, which he at that time became spiritually intimate, something lived that cannot be expressed in any other way than to say: in Suzanne von Klettenberg lived a soul that endeavored to contain within itself the Divine and through this find the Divinity interpenetrating the world. Through this circle Goethe was introduced to studies which, were they applied today to any truly modern man, would appear crazy. They were medieval writings, and Goethe absorbed their contents. Anyone who today should study these could do little or nothing with them. When one observes the remarkable signs therein, one asks: what really is all this as compared with today's striving after truth by our science? At that time there was one book, The Golden Chain of Homer—Aurea catena Homeri. When opening this, one finds a remarkable symbolic drawing—a dragon full of life in the upper half circle bordering on another dragon, one which is dried-up and dying. Various signs are connected with this: symbolic keys, two intersecting triangles and the planetary signs. All this is mere fantasy for our contemporaries of a scientific bent, because they know not what to do with them. Goethe feels that they represent something. They do not express directly something to be found here or there in our world. But if these symbols are allowed to work upon us by, so to speak, becoming blind and deaf to our physical environment, letting only these signs act upon us, then we experience something highly peculiar—we feel, that the soul becomes aware of something that has been asleep—like a spiritual eye which has opened. And if one has sufficient perseverance, one takes to what is called meditation and concentration which so develop the soul that, as an actual fact, something like a spiritual eye operation is performed and a new world makes its appearance. Such a new world could not disclose itself to Goethe at that time, for he had not developed so far. But in his soul arose a presentiment that there exist keys for that spiritual world and that one can enter it. We have to realize this mood of Goethe's: The living sensation or feeling; something within me becomes active, compelling me to the belief that something exists which leads into the world of spirit. But simultaneously he feels his powerlessness to enter that world. If at anytime Goethe had been identical with Faust, we could say that he was in the same position as Faust when we see him at the beginning of the first part, where Faust, after studying the most varied departments of science, opens books containing those signs and symbols, feels himself encompassed by a spiritual world, but lacks the means of entry. But Goethe never was identical with Faust in that way; one part of him was Faust, but he himself grew beyond that part of himself. And so developed that which transcended Faust, through his disregard of any inconvenience, more and more and his continuous striving brought him to the conclusion that one cannot get behind the secrets of existence at one bound, not through formula and incantations, but through the patient and energetic effort to penetrate all that surrounds us in the physical world—gradually, step by step—with a true, psycho-spiritual perception. It is easy to say: this higher knowledge must arise in the soul. True, but it arises in its true form only if we are striving with patience and endurance to recognize, step-by-step, the real nature of the phenomena of the physical world and then, behind them, seek the spiritual. But Goethe could compress all this, could see it all in a different light, with what he had gained in his Frankfurt period.

Goethe came from Frankfurt to this city—Strassburg—we could indicate much that has here led him higher. Especially characteristic was the effect upon him of something that has so great a significance for this city—the Cathedral. The idea behind this building came to him and he understood why each single line must be as it is. With spiritual perception—gained during his Frankfurt meditations—he observed each triangle, each angle of this beautiful erection as part of the whole; and in his soul this great idea of the architect celebrated a resurrection and he believed he could recognize the thought, the idea, behind it. And so we could mention many instances where, so to speak, a marriage took place in his soul between his inner perception and the things it absorbed from the outer world. It is therefore not to be wondered at that, when later he returned to Weimar, he began to take up natural science from a new angle—botany, zoology, osteology, etc. and consider them all in the light of letters which together produce the book of life and lead into the secrets of existence. Thus originated his studies of the development of plants, of the animal world, in the same manner as he dealt with these subjects during his student days, except that everywhere he sought the spirit behind the sensual phenomena of existence. So we see him during his Italian Journey consider, on the one side, art, and nature's creations on the other, as he studied the plant world so as to recognize the spirit ruling within. Great and beautiful are the words he wrote to his friends who were familiar with this kind of spiritualized natural science: “Oh, everything here appears to me in a new guise; I would like to travel to India and there study, in my own way, what is already discovered ...” that is, study it in a manner demanded of him by his development. We see how he considers the works of art he meets with. He writes in one letter: "This much is certain, the old artists possessed a knowledge of nature and as sure a conception of what can be presented and how it must be presented as had Homer. Unfortunately is the number of works of art of first-class value much too small. But when one sees them one has nothing else to wish for as to understand them rightly and pass on in peace. These sublime artistic creations are, like the highest of man's natural works, built up in accordance with true and natural laws; everything imaginary, arbitrary collapses; there is only necessity—there is God”. Just as the great Spirit of Nature spoke to the boy of seven from his self constructed altar, so now did the great Spirit of Existence in the world of Spirit speak to him through the works of art which he looked upon as a unity. Thus did Goethe advance more and more towards the contemplation of the unity (of things) by energetic and devoted work. He could now quietly await the moment when, out of his observations, there should grow a real cognition of the world of Spirit, a true Spiritual Science, which we meet - transformed by the artistic treatment, in his “Faust”.

The first parts of “Faust” thus display the mood of a man who suspects the mysteries of existence but cannot penetrate them. We see then how Faust lets himself be influenced by those signs which surround him with the spiritual, and also that he is not yet ripe to really feel this spiritual environment. This is shown by the lines where Faust is acted upon by the symbolic signs of the macrocosm and the Earth spirit and the latter appears before him. With wonderful words Faust characterizes the Earth spirit. We perceive how he suspects that the planet Earth is not simply that physical globe which is described by natural science, but has within it a soul, as our physical body contains a spirit.

In the currents of life, and action's storm, I float and wave With billowy motion! Birth and the grave, A limitless ocean, A constant weaving With change still rife, A restless heaving, A glowing life—Thus time's whirring loom unceasing I ply, And weave the life-garment of deity.

That is the spirit residing in the Earth, as our spirit lives in us. But Goethe presents to us Faust as unripe, his spirit as incomplete. He must turn away from that fear-inspiring sign like a crooked worm. The Earth spirit answers him: “Thou'rt like the spirit thou dost comprehend, not me!” Goethe's soul knew, if only surmisingly, that we must not be satisfied with any of the steps we take, but strive ever higher; that we cannot claim to have achieved something but must go forward yet further. Goethe centers upon these mysteries his assiduous studies, and we now see him growing. The same spirit whom he first called and of whom he could only say “Dreadful Shape”, Goethe addresses through Faust after Goethe himself has attained a step higher, subsequent to his Italian Journey, regarding which I said that he endeavored to penetrate both nature and art according to his lights. Faust is now of the same frame of mind as Goethe himself. Faust now stands before the spirit and says:

Spirit sublime! Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all.
For which I prayed! Not vainly hast thou turn'd
To me thy countenance in flaming fire:
Gavest me glorious nature for my realm,
And also power to feel her and enjoy;
Not merely with a cold and wondering glance,
Thou dost permit me in her depths profound,
As in the bosom of a friend to gaze.
Before me thou dost lead her living tribes
And dost in silent grove, in air and stream
Teach me to know my kindred. And when roars
The howling storm—blast through the groaning wood,
Wrenching the giant pine, which in its fall
Crashing sweeps down its neighbor trunks and boughs,
While with the hollow noise the hill resounds:
Then thou dost lead me to some shelter'd cave,
Dost there reveal me to myself, and show
Of my own bosom the mysterious depths,
And when, with soothing beam, the moons pale orb
Full in my view climbs up the pathless sky,
From crag to dewy grove, the silvery forms
Of bygone ages hover, and assuage
The joy austere of Contemplative Thought.”

Here we see Goethe, and with him Faust, arrived at the height where he will not again turn away from the Spirit whom he had wanted to reach at one leap. Now this spirit faces him as one from whom he does not need to turn. Now he recognizes him in everything living, in all the kingdoms of nature, in the forest and water, in the still bush, in the giant pine, in storm and thunder. And not only in these. After his appearance in the magnitude of nature he knows him also within his own heart: his secret, profound wonders are revealed.

That is a step forward in Goethe's spiritual perception and he takes no rest, but endeavors to make still further progress. We then see how he, encouraged by Schiller, he tries to go still deeper, especially during the nineties of the 18th century. These years brought him the possibility of transcending that indefinite characteristic of consciousness of the spirit limited to the conception that in everything there is spirit. He succeeded in grasping this spirit in the concrete. But Goethe needed much preparation before he was able to present the life of the human spirit in the sense that the psycho-spiritual can arise only from the psycho-spiritual. That Goethe never neglected the effort to enter still further into this, is shown by various works created before the completion of the second part of “Faust”; and the degree of his progress in that direction is found in that second part. Many turned away from Goethe when they came to know him—an introspective Goethe—in the “Pandora”. Even today we hear it uttered: the first part of Faust is full of life, breathes direct naturalness; but the second part is a product of Goethe's advanced age, crammed with symbolisms and artificialities. Such people have no idea of the eternal wisdom embodied in this second part, a wisdom to which Goethe could attain only in the evening of his life, and leave it as testament behind him. And, because of this, we can understand Goethe, in connection with many works which already breathe the spirit of Faust, writing lines from which we see Faust presented as a contending soul—a soul into which a new element has penetrated. We realize it in his anger poured out over those who have called "Faust" and inferior work of age. He says of them:

My Faust some people praise
And what not else
That I in writings phrase
To their advantage tells.
The oldest tag-and-rag
Pleases the pit;
The rabble cannot see
There's more in it.

(My Translation. P.S.)

Here Goethe has for once clothed his opinion in words which he thought justifiable in reference to those who believed that only Goethe's more youthful accomplishments had any value; those who would not ascend to the work of his maturer years.

After Goethe has introduced his Faust to the life that closely surrounds us, has had him experiencing that wonderful Gretchen-tragedy, he leads him out into the great, exterior world—the world of the Emperors Court. Goethe here will show that Faust shall really enter in spirit into the secrets of this world. And then he was to be led into the true spiritual world—the Supersensual.

In the very beginning of the second part we see how Goethe has Faust surrounded by diverse spiritual beings in order to indicate that he was not only to be introduced into an exterior physical world, but should experience all that can be experienced by one whose spiritual eye is opened and whose spiritual ear sensitized. Hence does Goethe show us in the second part the essence of the human soul—of human evolution. What are Faust's experiences to be? The perception of the super-physical world into whose mysteries he is to be initiated. Where is this super-physical world?

Here is an opportunity—if we consider the spiritual content of Faust—in the first place to become occupied with Mephistopheles—that spirit who environs Faust from the beginning, who plays his part in everything Faust undertakes. But only in the second part, where Faust is to be introduced into the world of Spirit, can we realize the actual role Mephistopheles plays. After Faust has passed through the events in the Imperial Court, he begins to see that which is no longer a part of the physical world—the spirit of Helena, who lived many centuries ago. She has to be found for Faust. But that is impossible in the physical world; so Faust must descend into the spiritual world. Mephistopheles has the key to that world, but cannot enter there himself. He can describe it reasonably; he can say: you will descend, or we may say—ascend; and he then actually describes the world into which Faust is to submerge in order to familiarize himself with it and therein find the spirit, the immortal, the eternal, that remains of Helena. A word is sounded—a wonderful word—: Faust shall descend to the Mothers. Who or what are the “Mothers”? One could speak for hours to explain what they are. Here we need only say that the Mothers were for spiritual science at all times that which man learns to know when his spiritual eye is opened. When he looks into the physical world, he sees all things limited, bounded; when he enters the world of spirit he merges with something from which come all things physical, as does the ice from a pond. Just as someone unable to see water would say that there is nothing but ice which towers up out of nothing, so can a man who is ignorant of the spirit, claim that only physical things exist. He does not discern the spirit within and behind the physical, out of which all things physical are formed, as is ice out of water. There, at the foundation of physical things, no more discernible by the physical eye—there are the Mothers. Mephistopheles is that being which is to represent the kind of intelligence able to understand only the things formed in outer space, though aware of the existence of a spiritual realm, but unable to enter it. Mephistopheles stands at the side of Faust as today the materialistic thinker stands by him, saying: O, you Spiritual Scientist: you Theosophist: you want to look into a spiritual world? Why, there is nothing in it; you are only dreaming! And to this Materialist, who wants to build upon what the microscope and the telescope disclose, but denies all that lies behind physical appearance, the Spiritual investigator calls: “In your nothing I hope to find the All.” Thus the materialist thinker compared with the spiritual man who hopes to discover the spirit where the other perceives nothing. These two powers stand in opposition eternally. And from the very beginning Mephistopheles stands before Faust as the Spirit who can lead to the door, but no further. The Theosophist or Spiritual Scientist does not say that physical science is valueless and unnecessary, and possesses the key only. Instead he maintains: We must take this science earnestly and study it, and although the key is in its hand, it leads us to where the true spiritual life can finally be found.

Then Faust descends into the realm of the Mothers—the spiritual world; he succeeds in bringing up with him the spirit of Helena. But he is not ripe enough to unite this spirit with his own soul. Hence the scene where desire stirs in Faust, where he wishes to embrace the archetype of Helena with sensual passion. He is therefore thrust back. That is the fate of everyone who seeks to approach the Spiritual World harboring personal, egotistical feelings; he is repelled like Faust. He must first mature; must learn the real relationship between the three members of man's nature: the immortal spirit which goes on from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation; the body, commencing and ending its existence between birth and death, and the soul between the two of them. Body, soul and spirit—how they unite, how they mutually react—that is the lesson Faust must learn. The archetype of Helena, the immortal, the eternal, that passes from life to life, from one incarnation to the other, Faust has already tried to find, but was then immature. Now he is to become ripe so that he is worthy to truly penetrate into the spirit realm. For this purpose he had to learn that this immortality comes to man only when he can be re-embodied repeatedly within physical existence—have new lives extending from birth to death. Therefore must Goethe show how the soul lives between spirit and body, how the soul is placed between the immortal spirit and the body which exists only between birth and death. The second part of Faust shows us this.

Goethe conceals the soul in that wonderful form about which investigators of his Faust have little to say, while spiritual investigators who are experienced perceive therein the archetype of the soul. That form is nothing else than the Homunculus—the little man. It is a picture of the human soul. And what has this soul to do? It is the mediator between body and spirit; it must attract all the elements of the body out of all the kingdoms of nature in order to ally itself with them. Only then can it become united with the immortal spirit. In that way we can see how Faust is led by the Homunculus to the classical Walpurgisnight as far as the natural philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales who have investigated the origin of nature and life.

And there is given that true teaching of evolution which says, that not only is the animal at the foundation of man's development but a soul-element that gathers together the elements of nature and with them gradually commences to build. Hence Homunculus receives the counsel: You must begin with the lowest kingdom and rise higher and higher. The human soul is, in the first place, sent to the mineral kingdom. There man is informed that he has to pass through the vegetable kingdom: there the soul gathers all the natural elements so as to develop further. It is expressly said: “And up to man thou hast sufficient time.” There we see approaching the spirit of love, Eros, after the soul has formed the body from out of the kingdoms of nature. There the soul unites with the spirit. Body, soul and spirit are united. That which is the soul of the Homunculus, with its newly organized body, comes into union with the spirit of Helena who now, in the third act of the second part, can appear to us incarnate. The teaching of reincarnation we see artistically and practically interspersed in the second part of Faust. One cannot unite with Helena by approaching her with stormy passion, but must experience the mysteries of existence in reality—pass through rebirth.

Goethe, in his days, was as yet unable to express the idea of reincarnation as we do today; but he inserted it into the second part of Faust nevertheless. Hence he could say to Eckermann: I have written my Faust in a way suitable for the stage; and the illustrations presented are, exteriorly, sensually interesting for him who will see only the exterior—the sensual. But the initiated will at once perceive that profound spiritual truth has been included in the second part of Faust. And so has Goethe indicated that we can find his life conception—his spiritual attitude—in this work; and we can now understand that Goethe could demonstrate in this reunion of Faust with Helena the nature of true mysticism.

Faust unites with the spiritual world. Not an ordinary child is the result, but Euphorion who is just as true as he is poetic. Just as truthfully does he show, what comes to life in our soul when it unites with the spiritual world—when the soul penetrates into the secrets of the world of spirit—in it's evolution a moment arrives which is of enormously profound meaning for the soul. Before the soul progresses further, it experiences, only for short moments, its unity with the spiritual world; it knows, for quite short periods, what the spiritual world is. Then it is as if, from out of this spiritual perception, were born a spiritual child. But then again come the moments of ordinary life, when this child vanishes into the spiritual world. This one has to grasp vitally with one's whole heart, and one feels how Euphorion, the spiritual child of the mystic, and despite all poetic truths of life, sinks down into the realm of spirit into which Faust cannot, as yet, quite enter; but how he also draws across something else. It is an experience of the spiritual investigator, the seeker, when our soul has her hour of really feeling her relationship to the spiritual world, and where the knowledge, or perception, appears like the child of a marriage with the spiritual world. Then the soul has the profound experience—when returning to everyday life—of losing or leaving behind the best of her possessions. It is as though our own soul might altogether escape and remain in the spiritual world. If one has felt this, one hears the echo of the spiritual words of Euphorion who has descended and calls from out of the depths:

Leave me in realms forlorn,
Mother, not all alone!

This voice is known to the true mystic—the voice of the spiritual child calling to our soul as its Mother.

But this soul must go on. She must be severed from all that is only personal desire. Quite impersonally must we merge into the spirit existence. As long as there remains one selfish aim, one tinge of self-will, we will fail to perceive the spiritual world. That is possible only when every personal interest is eradicated. Only then can we really grasp the world of spirit permanently. But even then come various moments—after we have gone through the one that forces us back into the physical world—moments which deprive us of all mysticism for prolonged periods. They are those moments of which we must say: Yes, when we have overcome all that savours of selfishness and self-will, something still remains, as it did in Faust after he had said that “now I stand upon a free foundation; I will endeavor to gain from nature everything that I can use for the benefit of others.” But he has not advanced so far. As he gazes upon the hut of Philemon and Baucis and the sight attracts him, he shows that the egoism which wishes to experience pleasure through this view is not yet exterminated. He wanted, unselfishly, to create a place for himself within that realm, but could not yet bear the sight of what spoiled the view—the hut of Philemon and Baucis. And once more the spirit of evil approaches him. The hut is destroyed by fire. Now he sees what anyone sees who passes through this development: the anxiety which meets anyone still harboring selfish aspirations which present his ascent into the spiritual world. Here it faces us—this anxiety, here we learn to know it in its true form; and simultaneously it is something which can really lead us to the true spiritual perception. This does not mean that man shall become alienated from this world—feel any antagonisms towards it—but that he shall learn to know what it is that will not allow him to sever himself from it. Through wise self-knowledge we are to face this trouble so that we may become freed from the egotism of the anxiety, and not from the anxiety itself; from the feeling awakened and it is said that it slips through the keyhole. When we come to know this—trouble—not merely feel, but learn to bear it—then we attain that degree of development which opens our spiritual eye. This is presented to us by Faust's blindness in advanced age; his physical site has gone, but he can see the spiritual world. Night penetrates deeper and deeper, but within is a bright light—a light capable of illuminating the world in which lives the soul between death and birth—the realm of the Mothers. Only now can Faust commence his journey into the spiritual world, so beautifully presented by his ascension.

Now can Goethe compress all that Faust has achieved since the time of premonitory striving, the time when he despaired of science and turned away from it, till he gained his highest degree of spiritual perception. This he does in the chorus mysticus which, by its name alone, indicates that it contains something very deep. Here, in this chorus, is to be condensed in few words—paradigmatically—that which offers the key to all the world mysteries: how everything temporal is only a symbolism for the eternal. What the physical eye can see is only a symbol for the spiritual, the immortal of which Goethe has shown that he, when entering into this spiritual realm, even gains the knowledge of reincarnation. He will finally show man's entrance into the spiritual kingdom coincides with the knowledge that what was premonition and hope in the physical is truth in the spiritual; what was aspiration in the physical becomes attainment in the spiritual world.

It may sound almost pedantic if I mention something here which must be known if the final words are to be understood.

Goethe spoke rather indistinctly in his late years because of the absence of teeth. He dictated the second part of his Faust to a writer. As he still retained something of his Frankfurt dialect, several words and sounds were not quite clearly pronounced. Thus has a “G” been substituted for several “Ch's”. For instance, for “Erreichnis” (attainment) was written “Ereignis” (event). Goethe, in his final lines of Faust said “Erreichnis”. Here, the inadequate becomes something attainable or “erreichbar”—to be written with two “r”s and a “ch”. Everywhere, in all Goethe publications, we find “Ereignis”. So little can these Goethe-investigators enter into the sense of the work. The “inadequate” of the physical world becomes the “attained” in the spiritual; what here cannot be described, becomes there a living fact.

Finally we touch that Great Fact, which Goethe incorporated into his final words: the “ever-womanly.” It is a sin against Goethe to say that here he means the female sex. He refers to that profundity signifying the human soul as related to the mystery of the world; that which deeply yearns as the eternal in man, the ever-womanly which draws the soul to the eternally immortal, the eternal wisdom, and which gives itself to the “eternal masculine.” The ever-womanly draws us towards the ever-masculine. It has nothing to do with something feminine in the ordinary sense. Therefore can we truly seek this ever-womanly in man and woman: the ever-womanly which aspires to the union with the ever-manly in the cosmos, to become one with the Divine-Spiritual that inter-penetrates and permeates the world towards which Faust strives. This mystery of man of all ages pursued by Faust from the beginning, this secret to which Spiritual Science is to lead us in a modern sense, is expressed by Goethe paradigmatically and monumentally in those five words at the conclusion of the second part of Faust represented as a mystic Spirit Choir; that everything physical surrounding us in the sense world is Maya, illusion; a symbol only of the spiritual. But this spiritual we can perceive if we penetrate that which covers it like a veil. And in it we see attained what on earth was impossible of attainment. We see that, which for ordinary intellect is indescribable, transformed into action as soon as the human spirit unites with the spiritual world. “The ineffable wrought in love.” And we see the significance of the moment when the soul becomes united with the eternal masculine of the cosmic world. That is the great secret expressed by Goethe in the words:

All of mere transient date
As symbol showeth;
Here the inadequate
To fullness groweth;

Here the ineffable
Wrought is in love;
The ever-womanly
Draws us above ...

How could Goethe say: I have now completed my life's work. It is now almost immaterial what I may do during the rest of my life on Earth.—He sealed up the second part of Faust, and only after his death was it given to humanity, and this humanity will need to concentrate deeply upon Spiritual Science in order to penetrate the mysteries of this powerful work.

It was unfortunately impossible to do more than deal with this subject in a sketchy manner today. One could illuminate by all methods of Wisdom this testament of Goethe for hours and weeks. May humanity enter more and more into its contents! Seal after seal will fall if mankind has the will to penetrate the secrets of this second part. Dumb will be the voices that say: “you seek something which Goethe never intended.” Those who speak thus, know nothing of the depths of Goethe's soul. Only those realize these depths who can see the highest in this work and in all that he condenses in the mystic choir as meditations leading to the spirit.

[ 1 ] When I observe how a billiard ball, when struck, communicates its motion to another, I remain entirely without influence on the process before me. The direction and velocity of the motion of the second ball is determined by the direction and velocity of the first. As long as I remain a mere spectator, I can say nothing about the motion of the second ball until after it has happened. It is quite different when I begin to reflect on the content of my observations. The purpose of my reflection is to construct concepts of the process. I connect the concept of an elastic ball with certain other concepts of mechanics, and consider the special circumstances which obtain in the instance in question. I try, in other words, to add to the process which takes place without any interference, a second process which takes place in the conceptual sphere. This latter process is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I can rest content with the observation, and renounce all search for concepts if I have no need of them. If, therefore, this need is present, then I am not content until I have established a definite connection among the concepts, ball, elasticity, motion, impact, velocity, etc., so that they apply to the observed process in a definite way. As surely as the occurrence of the observed process is independent of me, so surely is the occurrence of the conceptual process dependent on me.

[ 2 ] We shall have to consider later whether this activity of mine really proceeds from my own independent being, or whether those modern physiologists are right who say that we cannot think as we will, but that we must think exactly as the thoughts and thought-connections determine, which happen to be in our minds at any given moment. (Cp. Ziehen, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Jena, 1893, p. 171.) For the present we wish merely to establish the fact that we constantly feel obliged to seek for concepts and connections of concepts, which stand in definite relation to the objects and processes which are given independently of us. Whether this activity is really ours, or whether we are determined to it by an unalterable necessity, is a question which we need not decide at present. What is unquestionable is that the activity appears, in the first instance, to be ours. We know for certain that concepts are not given together with the objects to which they correspond. My being the agent in the conceptual process may be an illusion; but there is no doubt that to immediate observation I appear to be active. Our present question is: what do we gain by supplementing a process with a conceptual counterpart?

[ 3 ] There is a far-reaching difference between the ways in which, for me, the parts of a process are related to one another before, and after, the discovery of the corresponding concepts. Mere observation can trace the parts of a given process as they occur, but their connection remains obscure without the help of concepts. I observe the first billiard ball move towards the second in a certain direction and with a certain velocity. What will happen after the impact I cannot tell in advance. I can once more only watch it happen with my eyes. Suppose some one obstructs my view of the field where the process is happening, at the moment when the impact occurs, then, as mere spectator, I remain ignorant of what goes on. The situation is very different, if prior to the obstructing of my view I have discovered the concepts corresponding to the nexus of events. In that case I can say what occurs, even when I am no longer able to observe. There is nothing in a merely observed process or object to show its relation to other processes or objects. This relation becomes manifest only when observation is combined with thought.

[ 4 ] Observation and thought are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, in so far as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our minds. Philosophers have started from various ultimate antitheses, Idea and Reality, Subject and Object, Appearance and Thing-in-itself, Ego and Non-Ego, Idea and Will, Matter and Mind, Matter and Force, the Conscious and the Unconscious. It is, however, easy to show that all these antitheses are subsequent to that between observation and thought, this being for man the most important.

[ 5 ] Whatever principle we choose to lay down, we must prove that somewhere we have observed it, or we must enunciate it in the form of a clear concept which can be rethought by any other thinker. Every philosopher who sets out to discuss his fundamental principles, must express them in conceptual form and thus use thought. He therefore indirectly admits that his activity presupposes thought. We leave open here the question whether thought or something else is the chief factor in the development of the world. But it is at any rate clear that the philosopher can gain no knowledge of this development without thought. In the occurrence of phenomena thought may play a secondary part, but it is quite certain that it plays a chief part in the construction of a theory about them.

[ 6 ] As regards observation, our need of it is due to our organization. Our thought about a horse and the object “horse” are two things which for us have separate existences. The object is accessible to us only by means of observation. As little as we can construct a concept of a horse by mere staring at the animal, just as little are we able by mere thought to produce the corresponding object.

[ 7 ] In time observation actually precedes thought. For we become familiar with thought itself in the first instance by observation. It was essentially a description of an observation when, at the beginning of this chapter, we gave an account of how thought is kindled by an objective process and transcends the merely given. Whatever enters the circle of our experiences becomes an object of apprehension to us first through observation. All contents of sensations, all perceptions, intuitions, feelings, acts of will, dreams and fancies, images, concepts, ideas, all illusions and hallucinations, are given to us through observation.

[ 8 ] But thought as an object of observation differs essentially from all other objects. The observation of a table, or a tree, occurs in me as soon as those objects appear within the horizon of my field of consciousness. Yet I do not, at the same time, observe my thought about these things. I observe the table, but I carry on a process of thought about the table without, at the same moment, observing this thought-process. I must first take up a standpoint outside of my own activity, if I want to observe my thought about the table, as well as the table. Whereas the observation of things and processes, and the thinking about them, are everyday occurrences making up the continuous current of my life, the observation of the thought-process itself is an exceptional attitude to adopt. This fact must be taken into account, when we come to determine the relations of thought as an object of observation to all other objects. We must be quite clear about the fact that, in observing the thought-processes, we are applying to them a method, which is our normal attitude in the study of all other objects in the world, but which in the ordinary course of that study is usually not applied to thought itself.

[ 9 ] Some one might object that what I have said about thinking applies equally to feeling and to all other mental activities. Thus it is said that when, e.g., I have a feeling of pleasure, the feeling is kindled by the object, but it is this object I observe, not the feeling of pleasure. This objection however is based on an error. Pleasure does not stand at all in the same relation to its object as the concept constructed by thought. I am conscious, in the most positive way, that the concept of a thing is formed through my activity; whereas a feeling of pleasure is produced in me by an object in a way similar to that in which, e.g., a change is caused in an object by a stone which falls on it. For observation, a pleasure is given in exactly the same way as the event which causes it. The same is not true of concepts. I can ask why an event arouses in me a feeling of pleasure. But I certainly cannot ask why an occurrence causes in me a certain number of concepts. The question would be simply meaningless. In thinking about an occurrence, I am not concerned with it as an effect on me. I learn nothing about myself from knowing the concepts which correspond to the observed change caused to a pane of glass by a stone thrown against it. But I do learn something about myself when I know the feeling which a certain occurrence arouses in me. When I say of an object which I perceive “this is a rose,” I say absolutely nothing about myself; but when I say of the same thing that “it causes a feeling of pleasure in me,” I characterize not only the rose, but also myself in my relation to the rose.

[ 10 ] There can, therefore, be no question of putting thought and feeling on a level as objects of observation. And the same could easily be shown of other activities of the human mind. Unlike thought, they must be classed with any other observed objects or events. The peculiar nature of thought lies just in this, that it is an activity which is directed solely on the observed object and not on the thinking subject. This is apparent even from the way in which we express our thoughts about an object, as distinct from our feelings or acts of will. When I see an object and recognize it as a table, I do not as a rule say “I am thinking of a table,” but “this is a table.” On the other hand, I do say “I am pleased with the table.” In the former case, I am not at all interested in stating that I have entered into a relation with the table; whereas, in the second case, it is just this relation which matters. In saying “I am thinking of a table,” I adopt the exceptional point of view characterized above, in which something is made the object of observation which is always present in our mental activity, without being itself normally an observed object.

[ 11 ] The peculiar nature of thought consists just in this, that the thinker forgets his thinking while actually engaged in it. It is not thinking which occupies his attention, but rather the object of thought which he observes.

[ 12 ] The first point, then, to notice about thought is that it is the unobserved element in our ordinary mental life.

[ 13 ] The reason why we do not notice the thinking which goes on in our ordinary mental life is no other than this, that it is our own activity. Whatever I do not myself produce appears in my field of consciousness as an object; I contrast it with myself as something the existence of which is independent of me. It forces itself upon me. I must accept it as the presupposition of my thinking. As long as I think about the object, I am absorbed in it, my attention is turned on it. To be thus absorbed in the object is just to contemplate it by thought. I attend not to my activity, but to its object. In other words whilst I am thinking, I pay no heed to my thinking which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking which is not of my making.

[ 14 ] I am, moreover, in exactly the same position when I adopt the exceptional point of view and think of my own thought-processes. I can never observe my present thought, I can only make my past experiences of thought-processes subsequently the objects of fresh thoughts. If I wanted to watch my present thought, I should have to split myself into two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking. But this is impossible. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts. The observed thought-processes are never those in which I am actually engaged but others. Whether, for this purpose, I make observations on my own former thoughts, or follow the thought-processes of another person, or finally, as in the example of the motions of the billiard balls, assume an imaginary thought-process, is immaterial.

[ 15 ] There are two things which are incompatible with one another: productive activity and the theoretical contemplation of that activity. This is recognized even in the First Book of Moses. It represents God as creating the world in the first six days, and only after its completion is any contemplation of the world possible: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” The same applies to our thinking. It must be there first, if we would observe it.

[ 16 ] The reason why it is impossible to observe the thought-process in its actual occurrence at any given moment, is the same as that which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process, in detail, takes place. What in the other spheres of observation we can discover only indirectly, viz., the relevant objective nexus and the relations of the individual objects, that is known to us immediately in the case of thought. I do not know off-hand why, for perception, thunder follows lightning, but I know immediately, from the content of the two concepts, why my thought connects the concept of thunder with that of lightning. It does not matter for my argument whether my concepts of thunder and lightning are correct. The connection between the concepts I have is clear to me, and that through the very concepts themselves.

[ 17 ] This transparent clearness in the observation of our thought-processes is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thought. I am speaking here of thought in the sense in which it is the object of our observation of our own mental activity. For this purpose it is quite irrelevant how one material process in my brain causes or influences another, whilst I am carrying on a process of thought. What I observe, in studying a thought-process, is not which process in my brain connects the concept of thunder with that of lightning, but what is my reason for bringing these two concepts into a definite relation. Introspection shows that, in linking thought with thought, I am guided by their content not by the material processes in the brain. This remark would be quite superfluous in a less materialistic age than ours. Today, however, when there are people who believe that, when we know what matter is, we shall know also how it thinks, it is necessary to affirm the possibility of speaking of thought without trespassing on the domain of brain physiology. Many people today find it difficult to grasp the concept of thought in its purity. Anyone who challenges the account of thought which I have given here, by quoting Cabanis' statement that “the brain secretes thoughts as the liver does gall or the spittle-glands spittle, etc.” simply does not know of what I am talking. He attempts to discover thought by the same method of mere observation which we apply to the other objects that make up the world. But he cannot find it in this way, because, as I have shown, it eludes just this ordinary observation. Whoever cannot transcend Materialism lacks the ability to throw himself into the exceptional attitude I have described, in which he becomes conscious of what in all other mental activity remains unconscious. It is as useless to discuss thought with one who is not willing to adopt this attitude, as it would be to discuss colour with a blind man. Let him not imagine, however, that we regard physiological processes as thought. He fails to explain thought, because he is not even aware that it is there.

[ 18 ] For every one, however, who has the ability to observe thought, and with good will every normal man has this ability, this observation is the most important he can make. For he observes something which he himself produces. He is not confronted by what is to begin with a strange object, but by his own activity. He knows how that which he observes has come to be. He perceives clearly its connections and relations. He gains a firm point from which he can, with well-founded hopes, seek an explanation of the other phenomena of the world.

[ 19 ] The feeling that he had found such a firm foundation, induced the father of modern philosophy, Descartes, to base the whole of human knowledge on the principle “I think, therefore I am.” All other things, all other processes, are independent of me. Whether they be truth, or illusion, or dream, I know not. There is only one thing of which I am absolutely certain, for I myself am the author of its indubitable existence; and that is my thought. Whatever other origin it may have in addition, whether it come from God or from elsewhere, of one thing I am sure, that it exists in the sense that I myself produce it. Descartes had, to begin with, no justification for reading any other meaning into his principle. All he had a right to assert was that, in apprehending myself as thinking, I apprehend myself, within the world-system, in that activity which is most uniquely characteristic of me. What the added words “therefore I am” are intended to mean has been much debated. They can have a meaning on one condition only. The simplest assertion I can make of a thing is, that it is, that it exists. What kind of existence, in detail, it has, can in no case be determined on the spot, as soon as the thing enters within the horizon of my experience. Each object must be studied in its relations to others, before we can determine the sense in which we can speak of its existence. An experienced process may be a complex of percepts, or it may be a dream, an hallucination, etc. In short, I cannot say in what sense it exists. I can never read off the kind of existence from the process itself, for I can discover it only when I consider the process in its relation to other things. But this, again, yields me no knowledge beyond just its relation to other things. My inquiry touches firm ground only when I find an object, the reason of the existence of which I can gather from itself. Such an object I am myself in so far as I think, for I qualify my existence by the determinate and self-contained content of my thought-activity. From here I can go on to ask whether other things exist in the same or in some other sense.

[ 20 ] When thought is made an object of observation, something which usually escapes our attention is added to the other observed contents of the world. But the usual manner of observation, such as is employed also for other objects, is in no way altered. We add to the number of objects of observation, but not to the number of methods. When we are observing other things, there enters among the world-processes—among which I now include observation—one process which is overlooked. There is present something different from every other kind of process, something which is not taken into account. But when I make an object of my own thinking, there is no such neglected element present. For what lurks now in the background is just thought itself over again. The object of observation is qualitatively identical with the activity directed upon it. This is another characteristic feature of thought-processes. When we make them objects of observation, we are not compelled to do so with the help of something qualitatively different, but can remain within the realm of thought.

[ 21 ] When I weave a tissue of thoughts round an independently given object, I transcend my observation, and the question then arises, what right have I to do this? Why do I not passively let the object impress itself on me? How is it possible for my thought to be relevantly related to the object? These are questions which every one must put to himself who reflects on his own thought-processes. But all these questions lapse when we think about thought itself. We then add nothing to our thought that is foreign to it, and therefore have no need to justify any such addition.

[ 22] Schelling says: “To know Nature means to create Nature.” If we take these words of the daring philosopher of Nature literally, we shall have to renounce for ever all hope of gaining knowledge of Nature. For Nature after all exists, and if we have to create it over again, we must know the principles according to which it has originated in the first instance. We should have to borrow from Nature as it exists the conditions of existence for the Nature which we are about to create. But this borrowing, which would have to precede the creating, would be a knowing of Nature, and that even if after the borrowing no creation at all were attempted. The only kind of Nature which it would be possible to create without previous knowledge, would be a Nature different from the existing one.

[ 23 ] What is impossible with Nature, viz., creation prior to knowledge, that we accomplish in the act of thought. Were we to refrain from thinking until we had first gained knowledge of it, we should never think at all. We must resolutely think straight ahead, and then afterwards by introspective analysis gain knowledge of our own processes. Thus we ourselves create the thought-processes which we then make objects of observation. The existence of all other objects is provided for us without any activity on our part.

[ 24 ] My contention that we must think before we can make thought an object of knowledge, might easily be countered by the apparently equally valid contention that we cannot wait with digesting until we have first observed the process of digestion. This objection would be similar to that brought by Pascal against Descartes, when he asserted we might also say “I walk, therefore I am.” Certainly I must digest resolutely and not wait until I have studied the physiological process of digestion. But I could only compare this with the analysis of thought if, after digestion, I set myself, not to analyse it by thought, but to eat and digest it. It is not without reason that, while digestion cannot become the object of digestion, thought can very well become the object of thought.

[ 25 ] This then is indisputable, that in thinking we have got hold of one bit of the world-process which requires our presence if anything is to happen. And that is the very point that matters. The very reason why things seem so puzzling is just that I play no part in their production. They are simply given to me, whereas I know how thought is produced. Hence there can be no more fundamental starting-point than thought from which to regard all world-processes.

[ 26 ] I should like still to mention a widely current error which prevails with regard to thought. It is often said that thought, in its real nature, is never experienced. The thought-processes which connect our perceptions with one another, and weave about them a network of concepts, are not at all the same as those which our analysis afterwards extracts from the objects of perception, in order to make them the object of study. What we have unconsciously woven into things is, so we are told, something widely different from what subsequent analysis recovers out of them.

[ 27 ] Those who hold this view do not see that it is impossible to escape from thought. I cannot get outside thought when I want to observe it. We should never forget that the distinction between thought which goes on unconsciously and thought which is consciously analysed, is a purely external one and irrelevant to our discussion. I do not in any way alter a thing by making it an object of thought. I can well imagine that a being with quite different sense-organs, and with a differently constructed intelligence, would have a very different idea of a horse from mine, but I cannot think that my own thought becomes different because I make it an object of knowledge. I myself observe my own processes. We are not talking here of how my thought-processes appear to an intelligence different from mine, but how they appear to me. In any case, the idea which another mind forms of my thought cannot be truer than the one which I form myself. Only if the thought-processes were not my own, but the activity of a being quite different from me, could I maintain that, notwithstanding my forming a definite idea of these thought-processes, their real nature was beyond my comprehension.

[ 28 ] So far, there is not the slightest reason why I should regard my thought from any other point of view than my own. I contemplate the rest of the world by means of thought. How should I make of my thought an exception?

[ 29 ] I think I have given sufficient reasons for making thought the starting-point for my theory of the world. When Archimedes had discovered the lever, he thought he could lift the whole cosmos out of its hinges, if only he could find a point of support for his instrument. He needed a point which was self-supporting. In thought we have a principle which is self-subsisting. Let us try, therefore, to understand the world starting with thought as our basis. Thought can be grasped by thought. The question is whether by thought we can also grasp something other than thought.

[ 30 ] I have so far spoken of thought without taking any account of its vehicle, the human consciousness. Most present-day philosophers would object that, before there can be thought, there must be consciousness. Hence we ought to start, not from thought, but from consciousness. There is no thought, they say without consciousness. In reply I would urge that, in order to clear up the relation between thought and consciousness, I must think about it. Hence I presuppose thought. One might, it is true, retort that, though a philosopher who wishes to understand thought, naturally makes use of thought, and so far presupposes it, in the ordinary course of life thought arises within consciousness and therefore presupposes that. Were this answer given to the world-creator, when he was about to create thought, it would, without doubt, be to the point. Thought cannot, of course, come into being before consciousness. The philosopher, however, is not concerned with the creation of the world, but with the understanding of it. Hence he is in search of the starting-point, not for creation, but with the understanding of the world. It seems to me very strange that philosophers are reproached for troubling themselves, above all, about the correctness of their principles, instead of turning straight to the objects which they seek to understand. The world-creator had above all to know how to find a vehicle for thought, the philosopher must seek a firm basis for the understanding of what is given. What does it help us to start with consciousness and make it an object of thought, if we have not first inquired how far it is possible at all to gain any knowledge of things by thought?

[ 31 ] We must first consider thought quite impartially without relation to a thinking subject or to an object of thought. For subject and object are both concepts constructed by thought. There is no denying that thought must be understood before anything else can be understood. Whoever denies this, fails to realise that man is not the first link in the chain of creation but the last. Hence, in order to explain the world by means of concepts, we cannot start from the elements of existence which came first in time, but we must begin with those which are nearest and most intimately connected with us. We cannot, with a leap, transport ourselves to the beginning of the world, in order to begin our analysis there, but we must start from the present and see whether we cannot advance from the later to the earlier. As long as Geology fabled fantastic revolutions to account for the present state of the earth, it groped in darkness. It was only when it began to study the processes at present at work on the earth, and from these to argue back to the past, that it gained a firm foundation. As long as Philosophy assumes all sorts of principles, such as atom, motion, matter, will, the unconscious, it will hang in the air. The philosopher can reach his goal only if he adopts that which is last in time as first in his theory. This absolutely last in the world-process is thought.

[ 32 ] There are people who say it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether thought is right or wrong, and that, so far, our starting-point is a doubtful one. It would be just as intelligent to raise doubts as to whether a tree is in itself right or wrong. Thought is a fact, and it is meaningless to speak of the truth or falsity of a fact. I can, at most, be in doubt as to whether thought is rightly employed, just as I can doubt whether a certain tree supplies wood adapted to the making of this or that useful object. It is just the purpose of this book to show how far the application of thought to the world is right or wrong. I can understand anyone doubting whether, by means of thought, we can gain any knowledge of the world, but it is unintelligible to me how anyone can doubt that thought in itself is right.

A direct enrichment gained from symbolic seasonal festivals as full of meaning as the Easter festival is that they make our hearts and souls better fitted to penetrate more and more deeply into the riddle of man and his nature. So we will think once again of the Easter legend which gave us an inkling yesterday of its bearing on this riddle, the legend of Kashiapa, the great sage and enlightened pupil of Shakyamuni. With a vast range of vision and after stupendous endeavours, Kashiapa had absorbed all the wisdom of the East, and it was rightly said of him that of those who came after him no-one else was capable, even in the remotest degree, of preserving what he had drawn from Shakyamuni's deep fount of wisdom and—as the last possessor of this primal wisdom—had bestowed upon mankind.

The legend, you will remember, goes on to say that when Kashiapa was on the point of death and felt his entry into Nirvana approaching, he went into a cave in a mountain. There he died in full consciousness, and his body remained immune from decay, hidden from outer humanity and discoverable only by those who through Initiation were able to fathom such secrets. It rested uncorrupted in a cave, mysteriously concealed. Furthermore, it was predicted that a great proclaimer of the primeval wisdom in a new form, the Maitreya Buddha, will appear, and having reached the supreme height of his earthly existence, will go to the cave where rests the corpse of Kashiapa. With his right hand he will touch the corpse, and a miraculous fire coming down from the universe will transport the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa into the spiritual worlds.

The Oriental who understands this wisdom waits for the Maitreya Buddha to appear and perform his deed on the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa. Will these two events come about? Will the Maitreya Buddha appear? Will the uncorrupted remains of Kashiapa then be transported by the miraculous fire from heaven? With true Easter feelings we shall be able to glimpse the profound wisdom contained in this legend if we try to understand the nature of the miraculous fire into which the remains of Kashiapa are to be received.

In the previous lecture we saw how in our epoch the Godhead reveals Himself from two poles: from the macrocosmic fire of lightning and from the microcosmic fire of the blood. We saw that it was the Christ Who proclaimed Himself to Moses in the burning thorn-bush and in thunder and lightning on Sinai; that it was the Christ and no other Power than He Who declared to Moses: “I am the I AM.” Out of the lightning on Sinai He gave the Ten Commandments as a preparation for His coming. Later, He appeared in microcosmic form in Palestine.

In the fire in our blood lives the same God Who had announced Himself in the heavenly fire and Who then, in the Mystery of Palestine, incarnated in a human body in order that His power might permeate the blood where the human fire has its seat. And if we follow the consequences of this event and what it signifies for earth-existence, we shall be able to find the flaming fire into which the remains of Kashiapa will be received.

World-evolution consists in the gradual spiritualisation of all that is material. In the material fire of the burning thorn-bush, and on Sinai, an outer sign of the Divine Power was revealed to Moses; but through the Christ Event this fire was spiritualised. Now, since the Christ Power has penetrated the earth, by what can the flame of the spiritual fire be perceived? By what can it be seen? By eyes of the spirit that have been opened and awakened through the Christ Impulse itself. To the eyes of the spirit this material fire of the thorn-bush is spiritualised. And ever since the Christ Impulse awakened the eyes of the spirit, this fire has worked in a spiritual way upon our world.

When was this fire seen again? It was seen again when the eyes of Saul, illumined by clairvoyance on the road to Damascus, beheld and recognised in the radiance of heavenly fire the One Who had fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha. And so both Moses and Paul beheld the Christ: Moses beheld Him in the material fire in the burning thorn-bush and in the lightning on Sinai, but only inwardly could he be made aware that it was the Christ Who spoke with him. To the enlightened eyes of Paul, Christ revealed Himself from the spiritualised fire. Matter and Spirit are related in the evolution of worlds as the miraculous, material fire of the thorn-bush and of Sinai is related to the glory of the fire from the clouds that shone before Saul who had now become Paul.

Now what were the consequences of this event for the whole evolution of worlds? Let us look back over the great succession of benefactors and saviours of mankind—those great figures who were the outer expressions of the Avatars, the incarnations of the Divine-Spiritual Powers who from epoch to epoch descended from spiritual heights and took human form in order that mankind should be able to find the way back into the spiritual worlds. Such, for example, was Krishna, one of the Avatars of Vishnu. In earlier times man could only find this way by the descent of a Divine Being. But through the Mystery of Golgotha man was endowed with the faculty to draw from his own innermost being the forces that can raise and lead him upwards into the spiritual worlds. Christ descended far more deeply than the other Guiding Spirits, cosmic and human, for not only did He bring heavenly forces into an earthly body, but He spiritualised this earthly body to such a degree that now, out of these earthly forces, men could find the way to the spiritual worlds. The pre-Christian saviours redeemed mankind with Divine forces. Christ redeemed mankind with human forces. These human forces were then made manifest in all their original, pristine power.

What would have happened on the earth if Christ had not appeared? We will ask ourselves this solemn, crucial question. One world-saviour after another might have descended from spiritual worlds, until finally they would have found on the earth below only human beings so entrenched in matter, so immersed in substance, that the pure, divine-spiritual forces would no longer have been able to raise men again out of this corrupted, impure substance. It was with grief and profound sorrow that the Eastern sages looked into the future, concerning which they knew that the Maitreya Buddha will one day appear in order to renew the primal wisdom, but that no disciple will be capable of retaining this wisdom. “If the world continues along this course,” they said, “the Maitreya Buddha will preach to deaf ears; he will not be understood by men wholly engulfed in matter. Moreover, the materiality prevailing on the earth will cause the body of Kashiapa to wither away so that the Maitreya Buddha will not be able to bear his remains into the divine-spiritual heights.”

It was those with the deepest understanding of Eastern wisdom who looked with such sorrow into the future, wondering whether the earth would be capable of receiving the coming Maitreya Buddha with greater understanding and discernment.

It was necessary that a powerful heavenly force should stream into physical matter, and in physical matter should sacrifice itself. This could not be accomplished by a god merely within the mask of a human form; it had to be accomplished by a man in the real sense, a man with human forces, who bore the God within himself. The Mystery of Golgotha had to take place in order that the matter into which man has descended should be made fit, cleansed, purified and hallowed in such a way as to enable the primal wisdom again to be understood. Humanity to-day must be brought to realise what the Mystery of Golgotha actually effected in this respect. What then was the real significance of the Event of Golgotha for mankind? How deeply did it penetrate into man's whole nature and existence?

We will let our mind's eye sweep across twelve centuries—from six hundred years before the event of Golgotha to six hundred years after it—and think of certain experiences that arose in the souls of men during this period. Truly, nothing greater or more significant can come before the discerning human soul than that stupendous occurrence of the gradual enlightenment of the Buddha, as it is preserved in the legend. He comes from a kingly environment. He is not born in a manger among simple shepherds. The emphasis, however, is not to be placed on this, but on the fact that he leaves this kingly environment and then encounters what he had not hitherto encountered: life in its diverse forms and manifestations. He comes upon a child, weak and ailing. Suffering is the child's lot in the existence it has entered through birth. The Buddha feels: birth is suffering. And again with all his sensitivity of soul the Buddha sees one who is diseased. This can be the lot of man when thirst for existence bears him into the earthly world-illness is suffering. The Buddha meets a man decrepit with the infirmities of old age. What is it that life imposes on man so that gradually he loses control of his limbs? Old age is suffering. And then the Buddha sees a corpse. Death stands before him with all the disintegration and destruction of life that are its accompaniment. Death is suffering. And through further observation of life the Buddha is led to the realisation: To be separated from what we love is suffering; to be united with what we do not love is suffering; not to attain that for which we yearn is suffering.

The teaching of suffering rang with power and insistence through human hearts and human breasts. Men without number learned the great truth that freedom from suffering depends upon elimination of the thirst for existence, learned that they must strive to free themselves from earthly, physical existence, to pass beyond earthly incarnations, and that only the elimination of the thirst for existence can lead to redemption and release from suffering. Truly, a sublime goal of human evolution is presented to us here.

And now we will cast our mind's eye over twelve centuries, embracing the whole period from 600 B.C. to 600 A.D. One particular event stands out: in the middle of this period the Mystery of Golgotha took place. We will think of a single feature only from the times of the Buddha: the corpse, and what the Buddha experienced at the sight of it and then taught. Six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha the eyes of countless human souls turn to a Cross of wood on which hangs a corpse. But there issue from this corpse the impulses which permeate life with spirit, which make life victorious over death. This is the very antithesis of what the Buddha experienced at the sight of a corpse.

The Buddha had seen a corpse and had recognised from it the nothingness of life. Men who lived six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha looked up with fervent devotion to the corpse on the Cross. For them it was the token of life, and in their souls dawned the certainty that existence is not suffering, but leads across death into blessedness. Six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha the corpse of Christ Jesus on the Cross became the token of life, of the resurrection of life, the overcoming of death and of all suffering, just as six hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha the corpse was the sign that suffering must be the lot of man driven into the physical world by the thirst for existence. Never was there a greater reversal in the whole course of human evolution.

If, six hundred years before our era, entrance into the physical augured suffering for man, how does the great truth that life is suffering present itself to the soul after the Mystery of Golgotha? How does it present itself to men who look with understanding at the Cross on Golgotha? Is birth, as the Buddha declared, suffering? Those who look with understanding at the Cross on Golgotha, and feel united with it, say to themselves: “Birth, after all, leads men to an earth able from its own elements to provide a raiment for the Christ. Men will gladly tread this earth upon which Christ has walked. Union with Christ kindles in the soul the power to find its way up into the spiritual worlds, brings the realisation that birth is not suffering but the portal to the finding of the Redeemer, Who clothed Himself with the very same earthly substances which compose the bodily sheaths of a human being.”

Is illness suffering? No!—so said those who truly understood the Impulse of Golgotha—no, illness is not suffering. Even if men cannot yet understand what the spiritual life streaming in with Christ is in reality, in the future they will learn to understand it, and they will know that one who lets himself be permeated by the Christ Impulse, into whose innermost being the Christ Power draws, can overcome all illness through the strong healing forces he unfolds from within himself. For Christ is the great Healer of mankind. His Power embraces everything that out of the spiritual can unfold the healing force whereby illness can be overcome. Illness is not suffering. Illness is an opportunity to overcome an obstacle by man unfolding the Christ Power within himself.

Mankind must arrive at a similar understanding about the infirmities of age. The more the feebleness of our limbs: increases, the more we can grow in the spirit, the more we can gain the mastery through the Christ Power indwelling us. Age is not suffering, for with every day that passes we grow into the spiritual world. So too, death is not suffering for it has been conquered in the Resurrection. Death has been conquered through the Event of Golgotha.

Can separation from what we love still be suffering? No! Souls permeated with the Christ Power know that love can forge links from soul to soul transcending all material obstacles, links in the spiritual that cannot be severed; and there is nothing either in the life between birth and death or between death and rebirth to which we cannot spiritually find the way through the Christ Impulse. If we permeate ourselves with the Christ Impulse, permanent separation from what we love is inconceivable. The Christ leads us to union with what we love.

Equally, to be united with what we do not love cannot be suffering because the Christ Impulse received into our souls teaches us to love all things in their due measure. The Christ Impulse shows us the way and, when we find this way, “to be united with what we do not love” can no longer be suffering; for there is nothing that we do not encompass with love. So too, if Christ is with us, “not to attain that for which we yearn” can no longer be suffering, for human feelings and desires are so purified and sublimated through the Christ Impulse that men can yearn only for what is their due. They no longer suffer because of what they are compelled to renounce; for if they must renounce anything, it is for the sake of purification, and the Christ Power enables them to feel it as such. Therefore renunciation is no longer suffering.

What, in essence, does the Event of Golgotha signify? It signifies the gradual elimination of the facts associated by the great Buddha with suffering. There is nothing that affects more deeply cosmic evolution or cosmic existence than the Event of Golgotha. Therefore we can also understand that its influence works on, with positive and momentous consequences for mankind of the future. Christ is the greatest of all the Avatars who have come down to the earth and when such a Being as the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth descends into earthly existence, this marks the beginning of a mysterious and supremely significant process. On a small scale it is the same in the spiritual world as when we sow a grain of corn in the earth; it germinates and blade and ear spring from it, bearing innumerable grains which are replicas of the one grain of corn we laid into the soil. “Everything transient is but a semblance,” and in this multiplication of the grain of corn we can perceive an image, a semblance, of the spiritual world.

When the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished, something happened to the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Through the Power of the indwelling Christ they were multiplied and ever since that time in the spiritual world many, many replicas of the astral body and etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth have been present—with great spiritual consequences.

A human individuality descending from spiritual heights into physical existence is clothed with an etheric body and an astral body. But when something is present in spiritual worlds such as the replicas of the etheric body and astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, a very special occurrence takes place in men whose karma permits it. After the Mystery of Golgotha, when the karma of a particular individuality allowed it, a replica of the etheric body or of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into him. This was so in the case of Augustine, for example, in the early part of our era. When this individuality came down from spiritual heights and clothed himself in an etheric body, a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own etheric body. This individuality bore his own astral body and ego, but into his etheric body was woven a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth.

And so the sheaths that had enveloped the Divine Man of Palestine were transmitted to other men, whose task it then was to carry forth the influence of this great impulse into the rest of humanity. It was because Augustine remained dependent upon his own ego and his own astral body that he was subject to all the doubt, all the vacillation and error which, since they emanated from these still imperfect members of his being, it was so difficult for him to overcome. All the experiences he endured were due to his mistaken judgment and the errors of his ego. But when he had wrestled through, when his etheric body began to operate, he came upon the forces woven into his etheric body from the replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. And then he became the one who was able to proclaim to the West some of the great Mystery-truths.

There were many whom we recognise as the great bearers of Christianity in the West, whose mission was to spread Christianity during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, on to the tenth, in whom the great Ideas could light up as examples. These were persons into whose etheric bodies a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth had been woven. That was the reason why there could arise in them the great visions and prototypal Ideas which were then elaborated and given form by the great painters and sculptors.

How did the prototypes for these pictures that still delight us come into being? They came into being when through the inwoven replicas of the hallowed etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth there came to men of the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries of our era great illuminations of the truths of Christianity which made them independent of historical tradition. In addition to the content of Christ's teaching there had been woven into these men a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, and they needed no longer the historical tradition of the facts of Christianity; they knew through inner illumination that the Christ lives, because they bore within them part of the being of Jesus of Nazareth. They knew that Christ lives, just as Paul knew of Christ as living reality when He appeared to him in the spiritualised fire of heaven. Up till then, had Paul allowed himself to be converted by stories of the events in Palestine? No single one of the events of which he could have been told was able to make Saul into Paul; yet it was from Paul that the most powerful impulse for the outer spread of Christianity proceeded—from one who had remained unconvinced by narrations of events on the physical plane, but who became a believer through an occult event taking place in the spiritual world. It is a strange attitude to wish to have Christianity without the factor of spiritual illumination! For without Paul's spiritual illumination Christianity would never have spread through the world. The early spread of Christianity was due to a super-sensible happening. So again, in later times, Christianity was propagated in the same way through those who were able to experience the Christ in inner illumination. It was the Christ of history, too, because they bore within them what had remained from the historical Christ and His sheaths.

In the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries replicas of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth were woven into other human beings when their karma so permitted and they were sufficiently mature. Francis of Assisi, Elisabeth of Thüringen, for example, and others too, bore within them a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Without this knowledge, the lives of Francis of Assisi and Elisabeth of Thüringen are unintelligible to us. Everything that seems so strange to-day in the life of Francis of Assisi is because the ‘I’ was the human ‘I’ of that individuality; but the humility, the devoutness and the fervour we so admire in him are due to the fact that a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own astral body. And it was so in the case of many other personalities living at that time. When we know this, they become examples for us. How can anyone who really studies the matter understand the life of Elisabeth of Thüringen if he does not know that a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into her? And very many were called in this way by the onworking Christ Power to bear this mighty Impulse forward to posterity.

But there was something else, too, which was preserved for still later times, namely, innumerable replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth. True, his original higher ‘I’ had departed from the three sheaths when the Christ drew into them; but a replica, exalted yet further as a result of the Christ-indwelling, remained present, and this replica of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth was multiplied many times. This replica of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth is present to this day in the spiritual world. Moreover it can be found, together with the glory of the Christ Power and Christ Impulse it bears within it, by men who are sufficiently mature.

Now the outer, physical expression for the ‘I’ is the blood. This is a great mystery; but there have always been men who knew of it and were aware that replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth are present in the spiritual world. There have always been men whose task it was, through the centuries since the Event of Golgotha, to ensure in secret that humanity gradually matures, so that there may be human beings who are fit to receive the replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, just as there were persons who received replicas of his etheric body and astral body. To this end it was necessary to discover the secret of how, in the quietude of a profound mystery, this ‘I’ might be preserved until the appropriate moment in the evolution of the earth and of humanity. With this aim a Brotherhood of Initiates who preserved the secret was founded: the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail. They were the guardians of this secret. This Fellowship has always existed. It is said that its originator took the chalice used by Christ Jesus at the Last Supper and in it caught the blood flowing from the wounds of the Redeemer on the Cross. He gathered the blood, the expression of the ‘I’ in this chalice—the Holy Grail. And the chalice with the blood of the Redeemer, with the secret of the replica of the ‘I’ of Christ-Jesus, was preserved in a holy place, in the Brotherhood of those who through their attainments and their Initiation are the Brothers of the Holy Grail.

The time has come to-day when these secrets may be made known, when through a spiritual life the hearts of men can become mature enough to understand this great Mystery. If souls allow spiritual science to kindle understanding of such secrets they become fit to recognise in that Holy Chalice the Mystery of the Christ-‘I,’ the eternal ‘I’ which every human ‘I’ can become. The secret is a reality—only men must allow themselves to be summoned through spiritual science to understand this, in order that as they contemplate the Holy Grail, the Christ-‘I’ may be received into their being. To this end they must understand and accept what has come to pass as fact, as reality.

But when men are better prepared to receive the Christ Ego, then it will pour in greater and greater fullness into their souls. They will then evolve to the level where stood Christ Jesus, their great Example. Then for the first time they will learn to understand the sense in which Christ Jesus is the Great Example for humanity. And having understood this, men will begin to realise in the innermost core of their being that the certainty of life's eternity springs from the corpse hanging on the wood of the Cross of Golgotha. Those who are inspired and permeated by the Christ-‘I’, the Christians of future time, will understand something else as well—something that hitherto has been known only to those who reached enlightenment. They will understand, not only the Christ Who has passed through death, but the triumphant Christ of the Apocalypse, resurrected in the spiritual fire, the Christ Whose coming has already been predicted. The Easter festival can always be for us a symbol of the Risen One, a link reaching over from Christ on the Cross to the Christ triumphant, risen and glorified, to the One Who lifts all men with Him to the right hand of the Father.

And so the Easter symbol points us to the vista of the whole future of the earth, to the future of the evolution of humanity, and is for us a guarantee that men who are Christ-inspired will be transformed from Saul-men into Paul-men and will behold with increasing clarity a spiritual fire. For it is indeed true that as the Christ was revealed in advance to Moses and to those who were with him, in the material fire of the thorn-bush and of the lightning on Sinai, so He will be revealed to us in a spiritualised fire of the future. He is with us always, until the end of the world, and He will appear in the spiritual fire to those who have allowed their eyes to be enlightened through the Event of Golgotha. Men will behold Him in the spiritual fire. They beheld Him, to begin with, in a different form; they will behold Him for the first time in His true form, in a spiritual fire.

But because the Christ penetrated so deeply into earth-existence—right into the physical bony structure—the power which built His sheaths out of the elements of the earth so purified and hallowed this physical substance that it can never become what in their sorrow the Eastern sages feared: that the Enlightened One of the future, the Maitreya Buddha, would not find on the earth men capable of understanding him because they had sunk so deeply into matter. Christ was led to Golgotha in order that He might lift matter again to spiritual heights, in order that the fire might not be extinguished in matter, but be spiritualised. The primal wisdom will again be intelligible to men when they themselves are spiritualised—the primal wisdom which, in the spiritual world, was the source of their being. And so the Maitreya Buddha will find understanding on the earth—which would not otherwise have been possible—when men have attained deeper insight. We understand far better what we learnt in our youth, when tests in life have matured us, and we can look back upon it all at a later time. Mankind will understand the primal wisdom through being able to look back upon it in the Christ-light streaming from the event of Golgotha.

And now—how can the uncorrupted remains of Kashiapa be rescued, and whither will they be transported? It was said: the Maitreya Buddha will appear, touch these remains with his right hand, and the corpse will be transported in fire. In the fire made manifest to Paul on the road to Damascus we have to see the miraculous, spiritualised fire in which the body of Kashiapa will be enshrined. This fire will rescue for future times all that was great and noble in the past. In the spiritualised fire in which the Christ appeared to Paul, the body of Kashiapa, untouched by corruption, will be saved through the Maitreya Buddha. Thus we shall see the greatness, the splendour and the wisdom of all the past stream into what mankind has become through the Event of Golgotha.

A resurrection of the Earth-Spirit itself, a redemption of humanity—this is what lies before us in the symbol of the Easter bells. To everyone who understood it, this symbol was an inspiration of how through the Easter Mystery man climbs to spiritual heights. It is not without meaning that Faust is called back by the Easter bells from the brink of death to a new life which leads him to the great moment when, blinded and facing death, he cries: “But in my inmost spirit all is light.” Now he can make his way up into the spiritual worlds where the ennobled elements of humanity are in safe keeping.

In the purified spirituality that has poured over the earth and into humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, everything that has existed in the past is rescued, purified, sustained: just as one day, when the Maitreya Buddha appears, the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa, the great sage of the East, will be purified in the miraculous fire, in the Christ-light which was revealed to Paul on the road to Damascus.