The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we wish to be convinced of what, in the newer sense of the word, Natural Science signifies, we must look back to the sources of our present civilization. As can be seen even front the ordinary historical and scientific observation, these sources must be thought of as lying very far back in time, it is only if one keeps in mind the evolution of man and the gradual appearance of his special powers in more recent times that one can set-how these powers arose front the depths of the human soul, powers which lead to the present observation of nature and the affiliation of this to technique and to life.

There is a certain difficulty in placing more recent historical epochs in their essence before anyone who is wedded to the present day Science. In the previous lecture we attempted by way of introduction to proceed from the present—a present be it understood to which Herder and Goethe belong and to investigate certain streams which lead back to ancient times. We have seen how one of these two streams which existed so characteristically in Goethe led its hack to the Egyptian point of view, the other to the Chaldean. We went back to pre-Christian times and emphasized characteristic distinctions between the soul mood of the Chaldean people living in further Asia which can be traced back to about the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium and that of Egypt, which can be studied still further back even in external history.

We have seen how a view existed among the Chaldeans belonging more to the external world in which the human mind so lost itself in the external world that even time became elastic. This soul mood made it necessary to regard the day hours in summer longer than in winter, whereas with the Egyptians the division of the year throughout the centuries was held rigidly by a method of calculating and not from any grasp of external events. They reckoned 365 days to the year and went on in stages of 365 days, not noticing that in reality they were no longer in harmony with the course of the year as it ran in the sense world externally. While they reckoned the year shorter than it is they encountered contradictions with what is really perceived in the outer world. This shows a significant distinction in the soul moods of two people who were connected with each other through trade relations and by spiritual intercourse, people who stood near to each other outwardly. One can only value such a distinction correctly by entering deeply into the origins of human civilization. This is rendered increasingly difficult because the civilizations which have developed one after the other in time exist to-day side by side in space arrested at different phases of evolution.

If to-day the European or the American who wishes to emerge from his materialism to more spiritual ideas about the human being, if he turn to the present Indian civilization, he finds within this a highly developed spirituality, a mysticism penetrated by acute intellectual concepts. He finds within its philosophy absolutely nothing of what he has learnt to know as the natural scientific view of Western or American civilization. If he feel a longing to experience something concerning humanity, something which modern science cannot give him, and if he do not allow himself to take into consideration what a newer spiritual science can give concerning man, then he will seek to absorb himself in the spiritual view of modern India or at least of what has been preserved from an epoch that is relatively not very ancient.

Whoever is armed with spiritual science, however, and approaches this Indian view of the world will find that from what exists in it to-day or what has been preserved historically from a more or less far distant past, there is expressed something which is no longer quite apparent but which seems to be a kind of lower stratum, as something springing up from dark depths. This plays even into the language and especially into the ideas and images. It must be conceived as something which has undergone many transformations before it has reached its present form. What exists in modern India has only received its form in most recent times but it carries elements in itself which are primaeval, which have required thousands of years in order to be what they have become.

If we turn to other civilizations, the Western Asiatic or the Chinese for instance, we find that something similar is the case; but we have the feeling that we need not go back so far in order to understand the present as we have to do in India. And if we observe Egyptian life as it transpired since about the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium, we have the feeling that what is contained historically in documents is such that we are obliged to immerse ourselves into most ancient times, as we attempted to do, for example, in the last lecture. But we also find that the old has been preserved there with a kind of purity so that its fundamental depth is apparent even in later times, whereas in India it must be sought in the outset of its development.

In a similar way this is the case with the Greek and with our own civilization which, as we shall see, begins about the fifteenth century. The matter so appears that for a penetrating view, primeval elements have continued but are hardly noticeable to ordinary observation.

We will now see how the ancient elements within European and American civilizations are to be discussed.

One might say that the natural scientific element which has entered recent civilization appears to have so thoroughly cleared away what was old that this old element can only be substantiated by definite methods. It is however still there. There exist side by side on earth civilizations of different ages. One must go far back in time in order to understand modern Indian civilization, not so far back to understand the civilizations and literature of Western Asia, still less far back for the Egyptian and again still less to understand the Greco-Roman culture. One can remain almost entirely in the present in seeking to understand modern European and American civilization.

What has developed consecutively in the course of time stands side by side for us now and what stands side by side thus is in reality of varying ages, at least so far as regards external appearances. The temporal is mingled with the spacial and one must first find from a modern standpoint the methods which show from what present day civilizations one can go back into ancient times and from which one can find access to these old times by difficult and devious paths.

Now as you know, the observation of natural science, the so-called anthropological or geological observation, joins on to what history furnishes and we saw in the last lecture how superficially this is often done. We are led back into very early European times by superficial anthropological investigation. Of course there is less said about the people of Asia but as regards European evolution we are led back into ancient epochs. You know that geology, enriched by modern anthropology and history, says that, concerning certain trustworthy artistic remains which have been found in caves in Spain and France, very ancient races of Europe date back thousands of years; that in these extraordinary paintings revealed by the cave explorations we are told how in ancient times men must have lived in Europe in a certain degree of civilization even before that significant event spoken of by anthropology and geology as the European ice-age within which a great part of the European continent was covered with ice and thus made uninhabitable. Such regions as those in which the cave explorations of Southern France and Spain have been undertaken, must have been oases. Amid the wide ice fields men must have dwelt: a relatively rich nature must have existed and a civilization have evolved.

Thus are we led back even to-day into very ancient times of European life. And here, what external investigation can furnish joins on to what Spiritual Science has to say. Spiritual Science can indeed only proceed from what the developed soul powers of man can fathom, what can result from imagination and inspiration; it can speak of what can be consciously per-ceived inwardly. One can say in referring to what external history can investigate: Spiritual Science can in reality only fathom more or less the spiritual part of evolution, least of all that which has occurred in external nature. However, through spiritual investigation one can go back to those epochs which have seen man and his environment in quite different relations to those of the European ice-age.

It will be the task of these lectures to go back to those ancient times when man lived under quite different relationships and in quite different regions of the earth than later; but a feeling ought to be evoked regarding how justified it is to point to a supersensible cognition which traces back the history of human evolution into early times.

If anyone whose soul life, deepened through the view and feeling gained from spiritual science, approaches what outer history gives, he can have experience of the evolutionary path of civilized man. One can admit from the point of view of external anthropology and geology and history, that if one goes back ten to fifteen thousand years one finds quite another kind of life than that of modern civilized Europe. One can admit that in this epoch, during the last ten to fifteen thousand years, the evolution of European, Asiatic and eventually also of ancient American humanity takes place.

But what lies in documents must be illumined in a special manner by spiritual science. One must of course say that out of such considerations as I discussed by way of introduction, if one has acquired the possibility of going back from the present into earlier soul-moods one can then perceive correctly that which exists side by side.

In relation to antiquity, attention must be given first of all to the region of India. What is still there to-day as an extraordinary acute method of interpreting the world leads back to the times of the mighty Indian philosophy in which the Vedas had birth. But even if we let the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy, the Yoga philosophy of India affect us we feel that in order to understand what, in its after effects, still exists beside us on Earth, we feel that we must go back into very early times indeed. If we compare it with, for example, our European method of thinking logically or with the Greek method of building up thoughts, we then find that the European culture of to-day, when compared with the Indian, appears like a descendant, like a grandchild, a child living beside his father and contemporary with him. Indian culture stands there reflecting very early times, but it has become old. In its old age condition one can still fathom what was revealed in ancient times as the highest spirituality, but one only sees it in decadence, in its old age. One sees it as one can see in the child certain early conditions of its father but these are changed because the conditions are experienced in a later date. Think of a man, for example, who was a child in the ninetieth year of the nineteenth century and then turn from him to his father or grandfather. The grandfather was a child in the fortieth or fiftieth year of the nineteenth century but he went through childhood in different conditions to those of the ninetieth year. The child of the latter time knows quite different things to what his grandfather knew with his naïve childhood in the fortieth year. If one acquire this kind of insight into the development of peoples, the present European civilization or even that of Greece appears, so far as we can penetrate into them, as if born late compared with what was born earlier in India or what to-day we find ancient in it. If we can sense this India which has grown old, which was already old at the time of the Vedas and Vedanta philosophy, if we can penetrate this in our mood of soul trained through spiritual science in order to see the earlier from out of the later just as one sees the childhood in a man who has become old, then we can arrive at a perception of primaeval India. But then we must realize that this primaeval India was without doubt a civilization fundamentally different from our own. It must have been absolutely permeated by the spirit and have comprehended man in a special, spiritual way. And if one observes the manifold character of what we find in India, the Veda poems with their imagery which remains however in a fluidic element, the acute Vedanta philosophy, the fervent Yoga philosophy, one must say that in the course of time civilization must have mingled with civilization there; that once upon a time a primaeval civilization of a thoroughly spiritual kind must have existed there.

Then something less spiritual was drawn over this, something which found its expression in the Vedas. What appears in the fervent Yoga philosophy was then founded. It was impossible that all these could have arisen out of one race. Different peoples with different capacities have intermingled. The one brought the teachings of Yoga, the other the Veda poems. These peoples already found a primeval India which they absorbed and from which they took what was ripe and old and had withered in man. The incoming race came with fresh blood; they fashioned that which men in decadence could develop no further. And so it went on.

In this way the present condition gradually arose and one is not far wrong in comparing this primaeval Indian culture with those remnants which exist in the regions where modern civilization has developed. We can compare with the men of primaeval India those who painted the extraordinary pictures in the west of Europe, the lines of which make such a deep impression on us. When we look at these pictures, if we can lose ourselves in what the human soul experienced while producing these pictures, we must say: certainly, something very primitive is contained here, often something like that which modern precocious children paint; but yet there is something else. We see from these pictures how men lived with a love for outer nature and we see that these pictures were painted from out of deep inner impulses. We see that they were painted by men who did not first analyse with the eye so as to decide how they should draw lines or place colours but who fashioned and painted from out of their inner experience what was deeply rooted in their love.

If one compares this with what was founded in the civilization of primeval India, one finds a relationship.

In Western Europe the development is primitive and it remains primitive; over in Southern Asia it evolves further and further because it is continually fructified by other races and it develops right on to the Vedanta philosophy. If I had brought these facts forward, as I have often done, in a spiritual scientific way you would then see that one can approach the matter concretely but quite differently. I now present them as they appear to the spiritual scientist when he takes external documents into consideration. But one cannot approach these matters, as customary to-day, with crude ideas acquired from a crude natural scientific observation. Our ideas must be pliable and plastic, as you will see from the considerations I will now place before you. Naturally one cannot show the connection between the cave civilization of Western Europe and the Indian as one proves the similarity of triangles, but the certainty we attain is not little if we only penetrate these things and if we adopt that soul-mood to which attention has been drawn.

He who deepens his soul life—from this point of view in the wonderful ideas of the Vedanta philosophy, sees these transformed into an abstract spirit in the draughtsmanship of those paintings in the caves of Spain and Southern France. It does not appear striking, therefore, even from external investigation, that spiritual science explains how a common primaeval race, which must be sought for in the eighth pre-Christian millennium, gradually spread over the inhabitable regions of Europe, Africa and Asia and developed according to the different relationships of life. This ancient civilization within which man lived united to outer nature, showed itself in its most gifted form in ancient India. Here was revealed what comes to expression otherwise in a primitive way only.

There was developed also farther that which has astounded people, for instance in the culture of Crete. This arose in the east of Europe. In India it developed as the primaeval Indian culture, and progressed further and further, remaining capable of life even in its old age. It passed through its blossom in that epoch when the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy and other philosophical methods of thought arose. A great many things intermingled in this India which developed at different times but which are there to-day side by side.

If we attend particularly to primeval Indian civilization we must say that everything points to a humanity with a soul mood into which we cannot enter through external means.

I have said that one can press forward to Imaginative Cognition. If one does this consciously one gets an idea of what such men experienced, not consciously yet but instinctively like the ancient Chaldeans or the later Egyptians. Their mood of soul was absolutely different from that of modern men.

Through this advance in Imaginative Cognition man himself becomes a picture; he blends with this picture and thus lives into the 'becoming' (das Werden) of the world. Thus did the Chaldeans for example, live in the 'becoming.' But on the other hand one learns to know also when to rise to Inspiration, how to overcome the separation between the inwardly subjective and the outwardly objective; to feel at one with the cosmic all, to so feel one's being in the Cosmos that one can say: What announces itself through me is the voice, the speech of the Cosmos itself. I only give myself to it in order to be an organ in the Cosmos and to let the world reveal itself through me. We can reach this state consciously in Inspiration.

The Egyptian lived in it instinctively in a late stage. This leads us back to times from out of which a relatively good document obtains in Chinese civilization. What is usually described as such is a late product, but just as in India ancient stages, child stages reveal themselves so are revealed in China primaeval stages of civilization. We can feel how an instinctive Inspiration lives in the Chinese civilization. Through spiritual science we obtain to-day a conscious Inspiration, in China it was more or less instinctive; which means that its results exist as a background in what is imparted to-day in Chinese literature. We are led back to a view of man which presents him as a member of the entire Cosmos.

Just as we speak to-day of a three-fold man, the head man, the member man, and the rhythmic man, and fathom his being in its full depths through Inspiration, in the same way the ancestors of the Chinese civilization once lived in an inspired knowledge of something similar. This however did not relate itself to man because man was only a member of the entire Cosmos but it related itself directly to the Cosmos. Just as we feel conscious of our head, the Chinese felt what he called 'Yang.' If we wish to contemplate our head especially we cannot look at it, we can at most see the tip of our nose if we turn our eyes that way. As we can see the surface portions of our organism when we regard ourselves outwardly but are only conscious of our head to a certain extent in our mind, in the same way the Chinese was conscious of something which he called Yang. And by this Yang he conceived what was to be found above, what spread itself out spiritually; the heavenly, the shining, the producing, the active, the giving. And he did not distinguish himself from what he knew as his head, from this Yang.

Again, as we distinguish man from his environment when we feel the 'member-man' placing us in activity and connecting us with our environment, similarly the Chinese speak of 'Yin,' and in this he points to what is dark, what is earthy, receptive, and so on.

We say to-day that in our limb and digestive system we take up external substances, uniting these through this system with our own being, and we take up the senses-thought element through our head organization, but between these two stands everything which maintains rhythm of breath; the rhythm of blood brings this about. As we feel and cognize man, in the same way the Chinese once saw the whole Cosmos: above the creative, illumining, heavenly; below the earthy, dark, receptive; and the equilibrium between the two, that which forms a rhythm between heaven and earth, that he felt when the clouds appeared in the sky, when the rain fell and when it evaporated, when the plants grew out of the earth towards the heavens. In all this he felt the rhythm of above and below and he called this 'Tao.' Thus he had a view of that with which he grew. It presented itself to him in this three-fold way. But he did not distinguish himself from all this.

This view meets us transformed in Western Asia. What is transmitted to us as a primaeval civilization from the region of Persia, what shows itself in China, this must have once undergone a quite different development, metamorphosed into what is given as the opposition between Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman; Ahura Mazdao the illuminating, radiating God of Light and the dark, gloomy Ahriman, between whom the world is represented as running its course.

The early Indian could not yet distinguish the higher from the lower, heaven from earth, and this is the difference between what was early Indian and what in China was metamorphosed entirely and can be found as the basis for many civilizations in further Asia that I have named the early Persian in my book Occult Science. As yet no difference was spoken about between what was subjective and inward in men and what was outward and objective. In the outer world no distinction was made between what is light spiritually and what inclines to be more bodily dark, while in later times, in the early Persian epoch, the two were distinguished from each other. The interchange of activity between the two was thought of as being brought about through Tao or through some rhythmic equilibrium.

What is it that now took place? Why did men forsake the old standpoint so that they could no longer distinguish the spiritually light from the physically dark and for what reason did they go over to the conception of so opposite an idea as that of polarity or duality?

When we realize what is to be found in documents and when we let the feeling which lies in these documents and in their tradition act upon our souls, we come to the knowledge that in those olden times men played little part in the outer world. They lived mostly, from our own correct point of view, on a high spiritual plane, but on the other hand also, in animal innocence. For everything that they experienced in relation to the universe was instinctive. Later on this was thought of as being the out-breathing of Brahma.

All this was only possible to men who did not take part and work actively in outer nature, but who entered into nature, one might say, as does an animal, as a bird that takes what nature offers for nourishment without first working for it; fetching it merely by flight. These men therefore lived in full harmony with all the kingdoms of nature and extended their love over them all.

When with full human understanding we place ourselves within all existence we realize directly that what was love of animals and plants in the Indian-oriental view of life has arisen out of the great all-love' that does not harm any being and therefore has not yet attained to the fully awakened human consciousness in which men lived in later days. They lived in an atmosphere of spirituality which was instinctive but was higher than that of the Greeks or of the spirituality of today. They lived blameless in nature: they did not kill, they even regarded the plants on which they lived in such a way that they did not sow them but took only those that grew wild.

In such a way one looks back upon the peopling of the southern Asiatic regions thousands of centuries ago.

Later there awoke in men the consciousness of the radical difference between the higher and lower, a consciousness of the spiritual which man cannot alter, which is above the physical upon which he can work and to which he can devote himself.

About the beginning of the 6th or 5th millennium B.C. a change takes place—one can trace it in decadent remnants—in which what surrounded men and what they could alter is looked upon differently and as something over which they could exercise lordship. They begin to tame animals, they make domestic animals out of wild animals, and they become agriculturists.

From the 7th or 6th millennium B.C. is the time of great radical change when men begin to work upon Nature and thus distinguish Nature from that which is radiant and shines upon what they could affect and what can gain form through humanity. But it is not only men that can give form to things: men can make instruments, a primitive axe was the instrument that preceded the plough—probably it was woman who first pursued agriculture—they ploughed the ground by hand, and sowed. But just as man saw that the earth could gain form through him he saw also that it was not through him that in spring the earth is decked out with plants and that in autumn the plants disappear. And therefore as the earth can acquire form through man, form also comes from what illumines him from out of surrounding space, and he comes to the distinguishing of light and darkness, spirit and matter.

All this developed in such a way that men first learnt to distinguish themselves from the outer world through labouring on the land and being agriculturists and through breeding cattle. We can see in later Persian culture how everything depended on agriculture. We can see the connexion of this with what is expressed in the Avesta and we can recognize the progress from the early Indian civilization. But this develops in such a way that man does not as yet know himself as a Self. Humanity identifies itself with the external world. Men on the whole are entirely instinctively inspirational and they pass from instinctive inspiration to an understanding of the soul life which in after times, in the beginning of the third millennium, appears as the Chaldean imaginative civilization of which we can say that men have progressed so far that they not only distinguish the higher from the lower but that they occupy themselves with the stars; that they invent instruments, water-timepieces, etc. If however we study the Chaldeans we will find everywhere how strongly mankind lives in the outer world and that it is difficult for an inner life to be acquired.

In Egypt we see something different. We see the Chaldean arising later than the Egyptian. We can follow the Egyptian back to the time in which we can also set the early Persian civilization with its metamorphosing of the Chinese culture, to the time when the higher and the lower were differentiated. But we can see, just in the beginning of the third millennium B.C., a mighty and radical change within the culture of Egypt. Just as we saw a similar radical change when taming animals and agriculture began, so do we see in the third millennium a still more extensive change. We come upon it in this way. We see how in Egypt the building of pyramids developed in a later period. We can also follow Egyptian culture historically to-day further back than the pyramids. These begin in the third millennium. Egyptian civilization reaches back to the time of Menes before this century. The mighty pyramids were not built then. At the same time that the pyramids were built we see something arising in Egypt which points in a conspicuous way to the fact that the Egyptians experienced intensely an inward development of consciousness. In order to build these pyramids powerful instruments must without doubt have existed. Such instruments could have only arisen through some kind of metal work and this working with metals implies a certain knowledge of the inner nature of metal . We see what was later named chemical knowledge arising in a primitive form with the Egyptians, in other words, we see how men began to make their inner nature strongly active and how they did not yet know that this inner nature was there.

How mankind became aware of this inner nature and its strength can best be recognized by us when we examine from a definite point of view the highly developed Egyptian art of healing. It is quite different from our own medical science. For the illnesses existing in Egypt there were specialists, eye specialists in particular. The healers there made use of the so called Temple sleep. The sick were brought to the Temple and put into a kind of sleep during which they entered a sort of dream condition. What they then remembered was studied in its pictorial characteristics by priests who were versed in such things. These priests found out what taught them pathology through the inner dramatic course of the dreams, through the character of the pictures, whether they were dark on light or dark following light and so on. From another side they discovered indications for remedies in the particular configuration of the dreams. Through observation of what men experienced inwardly and what in dream pictures presented itself to the inner sight, the inward bodily condition of human beings was studied in Egypt.

We see this occurring parallel with what was developing in Chaldea. There men lived more in an external outlook. They invented instruments, their wonderful water clocks for instance evolved from the pictorial character of their souls. They were so immersed in the pictorial element that they looked upon time as transmutable pictures. This picture making element was like an outward one in which they lived. With the Egyptian this element was grasped inwardly, it was so taken that they studied it in dream form. We see here an epoch when men did not feel themselves merely as members of the universe but in which they raised themselves out of the world and individualized themselves in these two ways in the Chaldean and the Egyptian. And we see an evolution in the arising of the pictorial observation of instinctive imagination. In a twofold way this meets us, the one in Chaldea, the other in Egypt. And in the beginning of the building of the pyramid, which in its measurements and geometric relations rests on a perception of proportions in the development of man, on the development of inner forces and on the experiencing of these forces, we see a third epoch of culture in which instinctive imagination gives a definite tint to the evolution of man.

And we see how in this time the social conditions became the natural result of what arose as soul conditions. If we study the social conditions of primeval India we will find that men lived in peace together.

We see in primaeval Persia how a warlike element existed, since there it was that men took up the fight with Nature, and we see how this warlike instinct went over into their imagination. And since they were possessed inwardly, since this instinctive inward possession of men in relation to themselves can only be what is emotional and of the will, those impulses for power showed themselves in the grotesque and great pyramids which are resting places for the dead and at the same time serve as testimonies of the outer power of those who ruled. We see how consciousness of power wells up but also how other folk mix with them bringing new blood into what existed as imaginative, instinctive, in the social conditions also. We see how such stock come more from out of central Asia and mix with the others. What they bring belongs to what is a feeling of 'themselves-now-men,' distinct from their environment.

In Egypt there arose in a definite period what made the Egyptian realize himself as a godlike human being: he felt his self-consciousness so strongly that he looked upon all other people as barbarians and as human only those people who could live in inner pictures. One can see thus arising an intensified value of self-consciousness which runs parallel with an event belonging to this spiritual condition.

If we study the laws of Hammurabi we find that the horse is not yet included among the domesticated animals. It came into civilized life, however, very soon after. Hammurabi speaks of the ass and the ox and soon after his time the horse is named in documents the 'mountain ass.' It was so called because it was brought over from the mountainous East. Races that had penetrated into Chaldea brought the horse with them and with this a war-like element appeared. We see the war-like element, born in olden times, developed further when the horse is tamed and added to the other tamed animals. This also is connected with a certain condition of the soul. One can say that up to this period man had not mounted a horse and strengthened his individuality to a certain extent through fettering the horse to his own movement. The point of development in which he now was awake expressed itself as the pictorial perception of the Chaldean and as the inner dreamlike life of the Egyptian. In this way the external relations of human evolution are intimately connected with the metamorphosis of the soul in the succeeding epochs: on one side the building of the pyramids, on the other the taming of the horse. Regarded externally they express the third epoch of culture, the Chaldean-Egyptian; and these are intimately connected with the arising of the instinctive-imaginative life.

The highly developed civilisation of Egypt at the period in which the pyramids were built expressed itself in a dreamlike imagination. It came to a close relatively early.

We see the first dawn at the beginning of the third millennium. After it had begun to decline its soul mood lived on in Asia, progressing through Western Asia, Asia Minor and over to the European continent. It is clearly perceptible in what comes over from Asia Minor from the older Greek civilization and is still perceptible in the Homeric poems and in their outlook on the world. But in the approach to these Homeric poems we come upon a radical transformation. What lies at their base as a world outlook shows imaginative ideas throughout and also the perception of man which is pictorial.

In order to understand Homer's own peculiar method, one must see plastically with the inner eye of the soul when, apart from the fact that he speaks in pictures that can be seen outwardly of an Achilles or a Hector, he points out the pictorial element, as for example, 'the quick footed Achilles, Hector the hero with the waving crest.' In the whole nature of Homer we see something that is Chaldean.

This becomes different as the Greek civilisation develops which we find with Aeschylus and Sophocles and in the Greek sculpture. We can distinguish this from what is older because we realise how strong was the impulse in Greece to understand man in his own actual human nature.

If we look at the Chaldeans we see how the plastic perception appeared there in images and we see it especially in one of those races which were near to the Chaldeans locally, the Sumerians. We see how this race tends like the Egyptian towards the outward aspect of humanity. We find among the Greeks in drama and also where drama is led over into the domain of sculpture, how man is to be understood in his outward aspect. This was strongly felt by the man of the third epoch in his expression of deep, instinctive forces. This happened in Egypt during the building of the pyramids when, in their structure, men allowed their forces to grow into gigantic proportions; and in certain races of Asia who lived in an especially warlike way and placed themselves on horseback and felt themselves one with the horse.

The Greek then proceeded to say: 'I do not require external means, all human forces lie within my skin.' And he fashioned plastically those forms of men, perfect in themselves, which take everything into themselves which a previous epoch had to seek through an external embodiment. This entire immersion of oneself, this entire living in what is human and this seeking for the sublime in man, this we find expressed in the Greek spirit. And we meet it later in another form in Rome if we call to mind the passing through the Forum of the Emperor or some other figures in the Roman toga. We can see even to-day how in a much more abstract way than in Greece there was this fashioning of men with the highest forces felt within their bodies.

In the sixth pre-Christian century a new epoch begins; the Homeric age being still earlier. This age which now begins develops especially strong and powerful in Greece where it increases in splendour for about four centuries and then meets with a downfall.

Then Christianity arises. When the Greek had his Zeus statue before him he still felt something fully living there, but when the Roman regarded his statues he saw fundamentally only an abstract idea. This abstraction be came more and more pronounced and even in the fourth post-Christian century when the Senators entered the Roman Senate Hall each one threw a grain of incense into the glowing flame which burned in front of the statue of Victory, before he took his seat as Senator. We see how that which was felt in Greece as the fulness of life in the statues of Zeus, Athene and Apollo is still felt in the statue though in a merely abstract thought form, which was however real. There was still something like the magic weaving of divine forces themselves in the Zeus and Athene statues.

We then see how the Christian Emperor Constantine had this statue removed out of the Senate Hall because he thought it had lost all meaning in the sight of Christianity. And we see how Julian the Apostate once again absorbs himself in the fully human view of the fourth epoch, bringing back again the statue of Victory to the Senate Hall; how he causes the ancient ceremonies to be enacted again by the Senators but how he can no more renew the old and how he succumbs as a consequence. For the arrow which struck him down was the arrow of a murderer hired by his enemies.

And out of all this the epoch develops which I shall have to characterize further, the epoch in which men occupy themselves with inner spirituality, with intellectuality, with the power of understanding. This develops in its own special way through the Middle Ages where the intellect was thought about as we find it in Scholasticism where men fought over Nominalism and Realism.

In the 15th century a quite different spirit leads over to the age of Natural Science. In the beginning this spirit was specially strongly developed in Galileo and Copernicus who brought about the great progress in human consciousness which might be called 'interiorization' as compared with Greek consciousness. It may be so called in spite of having developed during the 18th century into that materialism which in the 19th century revealed so much with regard to external nature.

To-day we stand at a great turning point. I do not want to bring forward epoch fantasies like those of Spengler but I wish to say something different. In the beginning of the Egyptian age we see the first stage of human understanding arising, how the age of the pyramids began and how this stage was announced through other symptoms. We see how the next stage begins in the eighth pre-Christian century, how it develops in Greece and in Rome in the soul mood which understands 'man as man,' how this age comes to an end and the 'interiorization' of the intellect begins in the fifteenth century.

Thus we look back upon three great turning points: the point where the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch begins, we see how the Greek-Latin period begins and we see how that age arose which inaugurated Natural Science. In this last something again is introduced as was the case with the pyramids, something representing the special penetration of human evolution with what is new.

The Romans could not uphold what was to the Greeks full of life; they could only carry out that abstraction and intellectuality which died in the lifeless Latin language. We must take heed of all this to-day because we have more consciousness than the Greeks. And from out of our consciousness we must take heed that we prevent from within that destruction which came upon Greece and which stands as a fearful example before us. We must learn from history in such a way that it will not happen to us as it has happened to men who were weak because they depended upon what was outward. We must conquer what could not be conquered in earlier ages. And when it is said that one must learn from history, we must do this in such a way that we steel ourselves and become attentive to what ancient times can teach us so that we not only learn to avoid those mistakes made by individuals but also what should be named the necessary omissions in human evolution. What threatens to come upon humanity today as it happened in the past must be overcome. We have got to transcend a great crisis. And we can only understand the nature of this present crisis if we understand it in the light of a deep comprehension of human evolution. Together with this we will understand how a spiritual Science arises from out of Natural Science. This can only be understood through being able to grasp it from out of the entire spirit of human evolution.

Before we essay the second part of our programme, I shall permit myself to point briefly to the genesis of poetry – in man’s inner nature. For what ought to lie at the foundation of a knowledge of man is the following perception: in the first instance, the world, the universe, the cosmos is artistically active in man; but man then brings forth from himself again what the aesthetic activity of the cosmos has inlaid in him, as art.

Two elements must collaborate in a man, working through the powers of his spirit and soul, in order for poetry (in the general way of things) to be engendered and given form. It is not thought – even in the most intellectual poetry it is not thought as such – that is shaped by the artist. It is the collaboration, the wonderful interaction between breathing and blood-circulation. In breathing, the human being is entirely conjoined with the cosmos. The air which I have just breathed in was formerly an ingredient in the cosmos, and it will afterwards become an ingredient in the cosmos once more. In breathing I absorb into myself the substantiality of the cosmos, and then release to the cosmos once more what was briefly within me. Anyone who experiences this – anyone with a real feeling for this breathing-process – will find in it one of the most marvellous mysteries of the whole formation of the world. And this interchange between man and the world finds its inner formation in something closely bound up with the breathing-rhythm: the rhythm of blood-circulation. In a mature man the ratio expressed in the relation between respiration and pulse beat is an average one to four: eighteen breaths (or thereabouts) and seventy-two pulse-beats per minute. Between the two is generated that inner harmony which constitutes man’s entire inner life of plastic and musical creativity.

The following remarks are not advanced as exact knowledge, but by way of a picture. We see engendered before us a spirit of light who, on the waves of the air, plays into man through his breathing. The breath takes hold of the blood-circulation, as of the occult workings of the human organism. We see Apollo, the god of light, carried on the billows of air in the breathing-process, and in his lyre the actual functioning of the blood-circulation. Every poetic act, every forming act of poetry ultimately rests on this ratio between breathing, as inwardly experienced, and the inner experience of the circulation of the blood. Subconsciously our breath counts the pulse-beats; and subconsciously the pulse-beats count the breaths dividing and combining, combining and dividing to mark out the metre and the syllable-quantities. It is not that the manifestations of poetry in speech adapt themselves so as to conform either to respiration or to the circulation of the blood: but rather the ratio between the two. The configuration of syllables may be quite irregular, but in poetry they stand in a certain ratio to one another, essentially similar to that between breathing and circulation.

We can see this in the case where poetry first comes before us, in what is perhaps the most congenial and readily comprehensible form – the hexameter. Here we can see how the first three verse-feet and the caesura stand in a mutual ratio of four to one. The hexameter repeats this ratio of blood‑circulation to breathing a second time. Man receives the spiritual into his own inner processes and inner activities when he creates poetry out of what he is at every moment of his earthly life: a product of breathing and blood-circulation. He articulates this artistically through the syllables in quantity and metre. And we approach intensification and relaxation, tension and release, in a properly artistic way when we allow fewer or more syllables to the unit of breath. And these will then balance each other out in accordance with their inherent natural proportions. In other words, we must adjust the timing of the verse in the right way.

If we let the verse proceed according to the proportion ordained by the cosmos itself, which subsists between breathing and blood-circulation, we arrive at epic. If we ascend towards an assertion of our own inner nature; i.e., let the breathing recede, refrain from activating the life of the breath, do not allow it to count up the pulse-beats on the ‘lyre’ of the blood-circulation – when we recede with our breathing into ourselves and make the pulsation of the blood the essential thing, reckoning up the notches (so to speak) scored onto the blood-stream, we arrive at an alternative form of metrical verse. If we are concerned with the breathing, which calculates, as it were, the blood-circulation, we have recitation: recitation flows in conformity with the breathing-process. If the pulsation of the blood is our criterion, so that the blood engraves its strength, weakness, passion, emotion, tension and relaxation onto the flux of the breath – then declamation arises: declamation pays more attention to the force or lightness, strength or weakness of emphasis given to the syllables, with a high or low intonation. Recitation, in accordance with the quietly flowing breath-stream, reckons only the blood-circulation, and this is communication in poetry – whereas declamation is poetry as description. And in fact everyone who practises speech-formation must ask himself when confronted with a poem: Have I to recite here or declaim? They are two fundamentally different nuances of this art-form. We realise this when we see how the poet himself differentiates in a wonderful way between declamation and recitation.

Compare in this respect the Iphigeneia Goethe composed in Weimar, before he became acquainted in Italy with the Greek style. Observe the Iphigeneia he wrote at that time: it is entirely declamatory. Then he comes to Italy and grows absorbed in his own way in what he terms Greek art (it was not really still Greek art, but he does feel in it an after-effect of Greek art): he rewrites his Iphigeneia in the recitative mode. And while declamation, as stemming from the blood, passes over into recitation, which stems from the breathing, here that inwardly more Nordic, that Germanic disposition of feeling comes to adopt an outward artistic form that works through quantities and metre in this play which Hermann Grimm has aptly christened the “Roman Iphigeneia”. For someone with artistic sensibility there is the greatest conceivable difference between Goethe's German and his Roman Iphigeneia. We do not wish today to manifest a special sympathy or antipathy for one version or the other, but to indicate the tremendous difference, which should be apparent upon hearing a passage from the Iphigeneia either in recitation or declamation. Examples from both versions are now to be presented.

As for the hexameter, we shall encounter this in Schiller’s “Der Tanz”. A correct, regular metre – not necessarily the hexameter – we will come upon this in some poems by Mörike, a lyricist who inclines toward the ballad-form.

If we survey the aesthetic evolution of mankind, we may experience decisively how in ancient Greece everything became recitative and man lived altogether more in his natural surroundings. The life of recitation lies in the breathing-process, in quantitative metres. The declamatory emerges out of the northern sense of inwardness, the depths of feeling we find in the soul and spiritual life of Central Europe. It relies more upon weight and metre. And if, in his process of creation, the Divinity holds sway over the world through quantity, weight and proportion, then the poet is seeking through his declamatory and recitative art to hearken to the regency of the Divine – to do so in a poetic intimacy, through observing the laws of quantity and metre in recitation, and through an intimate feeling for metre and weight in the high and low tones of declamation.

In this context we will now present Schiller’s “Tanz” to exemplify the hexameter; then Mörike’s “Schön – Rohtraut” and “Geister am Mummelsee”, which are in a ballad-style; and lastly a short passage from Goethe’s German and Roman Iphigeneia. [Note 30]

DER TANZ

Siehe, wie schwebenden Schritts im Wellenschwung sich die Paare

Drehen! Den Boden berührt kaum der geflügelte Fuss.

Seh ich flüchtige Schatten, befreit von der Schwere des Leibes?

Schlingen im Mondlicht dort Elfen den luftigen Reihn?

Wie, vom Zephyr gewiegt, der leichte Rauch in die Luft fliesst,

Wie sich leise der Kahn schaukelt auf silberner Flut,

Hüpft der gelehrige Fuss auf des Takts melodischer Woge,

Säuselndes Saitengetön hebt den ätherischen Leib.

Jetzt als wollt es mit Macht durchreissen die Kette des Tanzes,

Schwingt sich ein mutiges Paar dort in den dichtesten Reihn.

Schnell vor ihm her entsteht ihm die Bahn, die hinter ihm schwindet,

Wie durch magische Hand öffnet und schliesst sich der Weg.

Sieh! jetzt schwand es dem Blick; in wildem Gewirr durcheinander

Stürzt der zierliche Bau dieser beweglichen Welt.

Nein, dort schwebt es frohlockend herauf; der Knoten entwirrt sich;

Nur mit verändertem Reiz stellet die Regel sich her.

Ewig zerstört, es erzeugt sich ewig die drehende Schöpfung,

Und ein stilles Gesetz lenkt der Verwandlungen Spiel.

Sprich, wie geschiehts, dass rastlos erneut die Bildungen schwanken,

Und die Ruhe besteht in der bewegten Gestalt?

Jeder ein Herrscher, frei, nur dem eigenen Herzen gehorchet

Und im eilenden Lauf findet die einzige Bahn?

Willst du es wissen? Es ist des Wohllauts mächtige Gottheit,

Die zum geselligen Tanz ordnet den tobenden Sprung,

Die, der Nemesis gleich, an des Rhythmus goldenem Zügel

Lenkt die brausende Lust und die verwilderte zähmt.

Und dir rauschen umsonst die Harmonien des Weltalls?

Dich ergreift nicht der Strom dieses erhabnen Gesangs?

Nicht der begeisternde Takt, den alle Wesen dir schlagen?

Nicht der wirbelnde Tanz, der durch den ewigen Raum

Leuchtende Sonnen schwingt in Kühn gewundenen Bahnen?

Das du im Spiele doch ehrst, fliehst du im Handeln, das Mass.

Friedrich Schiller.

[Though by different means, Sir John Davies also managed to devise a highly-polished, regular metre to reproduce in English the classical _.stateliness of a courtly dance. The following section treats of “The Antiquitte of Dancing,” and is taken from his “Orchestra, or A Poeme of Dauncing”:

Dauncing (bright Lady) then began to be,

When the first seedes whereof the world did spring,

The Fire, Ayre, Earth and Water did agree,

By Loves perswasion, Natures mighty King,

To leave their first disorder’d combating;

And in a daunce such measure to observe,

As all the world their motion should preserve.

Since when they still are carried in a round,

And changing come one in anothers place,

Yet doe they neyther mingle nor confound,

But every one doth keepe the bounded space

Wherein the daunce doth bid it turne or trace:

This wondrous myracle did Love devise,

For Dauncing is Loves proper exercise.

Like this, he fram’d the Gods eternall bower,

And of a shapelesse and confused masse

By his through-piercing and digesting power

The turning vault of heaven formed was:

Whose starrie wheeles he hath so made to passe,

As that their movings doe a musick frame,

And they themselves, still daunce unto the same.

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Now, my dear friends, it is still my duty to speak to you about the so-called last rites. The last rites are to be carried out in such a way that they follow a confession and communion. In such a case, where Communion is given outside of Mass, it is natural that the Priest connects this Communion with the thought of his own Communion and that it is celebrated in the same way as it is celebrated during Mass, but only in the thought of the Mass. After this Communion, therefore, the Anointing would have to take place, in the vestments that we already spoke about yesterday. It is of course the case that this sacrament of unction must be administered with the greatest delicacy, so that it does not upset the person to whom it is administered, does him no harm, and also so that he is not placed in a context that would inevitably evoke the realization on all sides: this is a dying person. For he may indeed recover.

So one connects with the distribution of Communion. The priest appears with his altar boy for the anointing and connects with Communion a number of sentences from the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John, which in the version you are to receive should read as follows from the original text. I note in parenthesis that a real translation of the gospel is only possible if this translation happens out of the world consciousness from which these sentences were once written or spoken, and that later translations suffered from the outset from the fact that the one who translated did not have this world consciousness within him, from which these sentences were written. It is a very superficial way of speaking when we say that the Gospel was translated in later times in a “plain” way, for this simplicity is an untruth, and we must do our utmost today to counteract it; so that this seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John reads thus:

Jesus placed himself in the spiritual vision
and spoke: Fatherly ground of the world:
Let the works of Your Son be revealed,
so that through the works of thy Son, thou also mayst be made manifest.

You have made him a creator
in all human bodies of flesh,
that he may lead all who who came to him through you.

They will live in the future because
that their soul's eye is prepared
to behold You as the truly united foundation of the world
and the creative Christ Jesus, whom You have sent to them.

Through me You were again revealed in earthly existence,
when the earth clouded over Thy Revelation.
This was thy will, which worked through me.

So too, Fatherly Ground of the World,
now let the revelation shine,
which was already made through me
before You were revealed in the earthly world.

Through me, the word
that reveals you, was revealed in human souls,
who came to me through you.
You were in them, through You they came to me,
and they have taken in the knowledge of You.

They recognized that that what I spoke to them was spoken by You through me

was spoken to them by you.

Fatherly world-ground, I implore,
that they who have come to You through me may always live with You as I live with You, and that they may behold there Your revelation,
which you lovingly let shine before me,
before the earth was.

Through me was revealed the word
that reveals You,
and I will bear this word into human souls, so that the love with which You love me be preserved in them,
and so my eternal life
preserve their life eternally.

The altar server says, “Yes, Father, may it be according to your word.”

Then the oil is taken from a small capsule in which the oil was brought, with the thumb and index finger of the right hand, and the words are spoken:

In the healing oil
that is outside your body

— by this is meant the sick person — the spirit soars to the heights
Feel yourself living and vibrant

— make a sign of the cross over the right eye with the oil, the altar boy says:

Yes, so be it.

The ceremony continues:

Christ's blessing receive
as life-bearing power
In it lives, lives, which conquers all that is dead.

— make the sign of the cross over the left eye on the forehead, the altar server says:

Yes, so be it.

The words continue:

Christ's strong soul
Leads in the weak body ¹
From existence to existence

Through all the worlds.

The altar boy:

Yes, so be it.

A cross is made with the oil at the top of the forehead, between the eyes, but at the top. Each time after saying the four lines, the altar server says:

Yes, so be it.

That is the ceremony, and when it is properly performed in this manner, the ceremony has the delicacy that it must have if confusion is not to be caused, or at least some kind of agitation in the soul of the sick person. That such a ceremony can be performed without causing such agitation in the soul of the sick person, that would be the task of the ministry of souls for life, so that the sick person is sufficiently prepared to also receive such a ceremony in the right way in his thoughts. Now, in this context, my dear friends, there are still a few words to be said about the one question you asked me regarding the three ages of Peter, Paul and John. Yes, and then you also asked about the periods of church history after the twelve apostles. Now these things are such that they have always only formed the core of teachings that have been handed down and that can, of course, be expressed in the most diverse ways. The fact that they appear in Schelling's work is due to the fact that Schelling once read a writing from around the 13th century in which such things were still spoken of as something self-evident. In terms of content, this can be understood by saying the following: First of all, we are dealing with the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, with his Passion story, with the Mystery of Golgotha, with the Resurrection and with the appearance of the Christ in the etheric body before those who could recognize him in such an etheric body. In this way the Mystery of Golgotha first affected the disciples who were close to Christ Jesus, so that it appeared to them as the conclusion of the old time. Above all, they saw in the first man, Adam, that which had become so within the physical organization of this Adam through the cosmic events - whereby the spiritual cosmos is meant here - with all its adversaries - that in the course of the evolution of the earth up to the Mystery of Golgotha, it had to become more and more fragile and diseased. And they saw in the Mystery of Golgotha, also according to the teaching that was given to them after the Resurrection, that which in turn heals man, so that his fragile body does not allow sins to fall into the earth, which would be corrupted by them, but that sins are kept for redemption. Thus they saw in the most eminent sense in Christ Jesus the man as he now appeared on earth, in order to raise up mankind again that part which man was bound to lose through the special manner of entering into earthly existence through Adam.

This was the most essential idea, and the teaching that can be attributed to Peter was nourished by it. Peter spoke in this sense, he understood this teaching in such a way that, in the esoteric sense, the Petrine Age can be said to have begun at the creation of the earth, when people were led, through the Mysteries, to see the Christ as a supermundane being, and which found its conclusion in the appearance of the Christ on earth. Thus Peter taught in a manner that was almost taken for granted, how the Christ descended to earth.

This was opposed by the teaching of Saul. The teaching of Saul begins with the fact that the Christ is indeed on his way down to earth from the supermundane worlds, but that this event could not be realized at all in the same way as it was realized as the Mystery of Golgotha in Palestine. For from the places of initiation that Saul had gone through came the view that the Christ would appear in the world in glory and not go through what appeared to the Jews to be a shameful death: the death on the cross. Saul balked at the crucifixion, and only came to profess the Christ after the event of Damascus, through which it became clear to him, in a way that was not earthly - and therefore also not from the mysteries - but from the etheric, that the mystery of Golgotha is really the appearance of the Christ on earth. From that time on, there arose the necessity to understand the event of Golgotha more and more with the human mind. However, during the time when Paul lived on earth, the human mind was still so developed that it could easily understand such things as we then find as the interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha in all of Paul's letters, where the idea of the re-establishment of human nature, which had fallen as the Adamic nature, through Christ Jesus, also shines through.

The direct continuation of what is in the Pauline letters forms everything that then emerged as Western theology, through Augustine and the other church teachers, and continues up to our time; so that one can say that Protestant theology is also a continuation of Paulinism, even if Paulinism is already very much veiled there. Yes, well into the 19th century and into our time, of course, this Pauline interpretation prevailed; in our time, however, there was quite strong opposition to this Pauline view among Catholic priests, in that many Catholic priests, whose teaching is considered orthodox, contrast the original Petrine Christianity with the Pauline one. One can say: Petrinism ends with Peter himself, and then Paulinism begins to take effect. And Western Christianity now awaits Johannine Christianity, which will be a Christianity based on the spirit. This is how Schelling understood it in his mature years, at forty or fifty.

The other question was about the periods of Church history after the twelve apostles. Such a division is not only peculiar to Christianity, but is basically characteristic of all mystery religions. It is that the evolution of the world, in which the evolution of the earth is also included, proceeds in periods of twelve epochs each, that after a cycle of twelve epochs the first epoch is repeated and again twelve epochs are traversed on a higher, on a modified level. It can be said that at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was to shine most intensely into physical earthly vision through its direct earthly presence in a certain way, there was a time of darkness for the outer world. And one can say: precisely in contrast to what was to shine as a light into the souls of the apostles, there was the darkness of Judas Iscariot. The cosmic aspect is the one that sees the most apostate spirit of this time as the ruler of the world, the apostate spirit that always follows a time of Michael. This cycle, which always takes up about three centuries, has arrived at the point in our time where the transition has taken place from a Gabrielic cosmic age, from the age of Gabriel, to the age of Michael, which in turn will last about three centuries. The development intertwines in many ways, so that if you express it in a calculation, nothing completely adequate comes out. (It is written on the board: 330 times 12 = 3,960.)

These are things that are also known within the Catholic Church as esoteric wisdom. But I do not think that at the present moment it would have any particular significance for you if anything were added to what I have said about some of the esotericism of the Catholic Church in the course of my lectures. Of course, there would be a lot to say about the esotericism of the Catholic Church, especially that the Catholic Church is well aware that when a new form of clairvoyance emerges today, it reveals something that it wants to conceal from its faithful, and that it has set itself the task, above all, of fighting this newly emerging clairvoyance. This is one of the teachings that the initiates among the Catholic priesthood are already receiving today.

Now, regarding the question you raised: music and chorales in worship, it would have been very nice if something like this could have been tackled already now. When the Mass is celebrated on solemn occasions, it is possible to introduce the Mass before the relay prayer is said, with appropriate choral music, with instrumental table music that may also include singing, which refers to the motif of the relay prayer, and that each individual part of the Mass can then be commented on in the appropriate way. Likewise, the mass can end with a composition of the “The Act of Human Consecration, that was it”. So it is that before Communion everything in the music should be preparatory, and after Communion there should be a dying away of the music, so that Communion would be introduced by a musical motif, which would then fade away, ending with the words “The Act of Consecration of Man, that was its purpose”.

This is something you can study. And those who are seeking to compose from the spirit of the Mass and are looking for a musical stimulus will find the most intense stimulus in Bruckner, who was stimulated by the motif of the Mass. His compositions of the Mass offer more than those of Beethoven and Brahms. You will also gain a great deal here if you follow older [composers], but you must be aware that in this direction, some things have to be done anew. In particular, it should be noted that Bruckner's compositions of the Mass were actually consciously composed for non-ecclesiastical purposes, so that one cannot see completely adequate models in them.

Then there is the question – the other questions, which are more practical in nature, will be best answered this evening – about the Bible: What can be said about textual corruption in the New Testament? How did it come about and with what intention, and how can the sources of error be eliminated?

You see best of all, whenever translations are given, including today's translation, how the consciousness of the connection between the human soul and the cosmic worlds has faded in humanity. Just as a blind person, if he does not hear about it from the outside, could not describe trees, rivers, clouds, so today's person, when he has a text in front of him, cannot interpret it with what he sees; he will interpret what he does not see. Thus, the powerlessness in the face of what lies in the Gospels has gradually led to the lack of translations. And since, in the intellectual age of the mid-15th century, an enormous arrogance and pride has asserted itself in the face of this lack, the view has arisen that it is a purely arrogant conceit to exclude what is cosmic in the gospel texts, that one should speak to the simplest of people.

Yes, my dear friends, in the time when one officially translated as you have it today in the Lutheran translation, in that time it was not this translation of the Gospels that spoke to the simplest people, but rather what Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus spoke. They translated the Gospels differently and understood them correctly, and they translated them for simple minds in the right way, quite unlike those who boast that they speak to simple minds. In Paracelsus, you have a personality for whom religion was something that had a much broader meaning than the religion that must be gained in the age of intellectualism by those who want to replace this intellectualism of the head with a very strong intellectualism of the mind by freeing the concept of God from everything, in contrast to which everything must also be freed... [here the stenographer marked a gap]. That is what has become most un-Christian in modern Christianity. Just consider that in Paracelsus there lived a personality for whom religion applied to such an extent that it included medicine. In Paracelsus there lived a conception of religion that enabled him to hold on to the spiritual so firmly that it could permeate him to the point of illness, so that the physician is the one who carries out the will of God on earth in relation to the sick person. For him, medical service was religious service. And that is what is absolutely necessary today: not just to talk endlessly about the eternal, but to bring this eternal into all of life and to make it active and effective in all that is alive.

Now here the synoptic question is also touched upon in relation to the well-known agreement of the first three Gospels down to the details and the contradictions to the fourth, the Gospel of John (second section of the sixth point of the question).

Now, you will understand that these circumstances must be so if you consider the following: Especially about the Mystery of Golgotha and everything connected with it, was spoken of as something secret in the first centuries of Christianity. You know how they dealt with mystery wisdom in ancient times. This mystery wisdom was not something that was taken directly onto the streets, but was considered something that was only given to someone who had been properly prepared with the whole person in the right way. Thus, even in the remnants of mystery wisdom, in which Christianity first appeared before the most intimate of its adherents in the first Christian centuries, the mystery of Golgotha itself was also taught. However, they did not proceed with all the facts in the way that today in external science, where one proceeds according to the so-called historical sources, but rather, great value was placed on determining the day of Jesus' death not from a historical source but from stellar wisdom, thus saying: at this and that stellar constellation, the death of Jesus occurs. Such was the form.

But this knowledge of the stars was no longer very much alive at the time when the Gospels were written down in the form in which they now exist, and so you can very easily find that one person saw it one way and another person saw it another way. As for the similarities, they mostly relate to the teaching content. The fact of the matter is that at that time, when this teaching content was passed down from personality to personality, people had a very different memory than they do today, and what they were told over and over again and continued to say was naturally continued into future times. This must be explained, otherwise we fall back into the old days, which must not be. We must seek to overcome what was customary in the old days on a higher level. In this day and age, it is necessary to write down everything that is said; even the listeners here sit and write, horribile dictu. One should not imagine that the sayings reported in the Gospels were recorded by a proud stenographer. That was not necessary even in those days, the development of memory was quite different, and people memorized everything much more faithfully than they can today. The human brain, the physical brain, is much more fragile today than it was in those times. In those times, the brain cells lived almost to a real life in certain hours of the day, to the life that only clouded consciousness – those cells that cloud consciousness, that underlie the will, those are the white blood cells – not only at night, but also during the day, and even weaker at night. The brain cells did not have such an intense life as the white blood cells, but they did have a certain life, and that caused a very different memory to be present than it is today, so that what had been learned and what should be learned was faithfully preserved. Those who know this fact also know that the synoptic question of the Gospels is answered by the faithful memory of ancient times.

These were the questions that required me to answer them in a way that was conducive to the lecture, insofar as the answer had not already been given in what had been said so far. The further questions should actually be developed in the discussion, so the discussion should really be started in such a way that it can still be continued during your stay here. It is better to develop the things that are still questions here in speech and counter-speech. I know very well, my dear friends, that a great deal more could be said about such questions as historical questions, questions about the Bible and so on, but here we must come to an end. Certainly, there are still many questions to be answered, which in the course of time can be answered on other occasions, but to those who are beginning to question, I would also like to advise them to engage in self-knowledge, which can be done in the right can be done in the right direction by the following little story, which I give without any allusion, but which, if used in the right way in self-knowledge, can lead one to expect the future with regard to certain questions.

Once upon a time there was a little boy who asked questions about everything, and his father was quite disconsolate about it and said one day: “I longingly await the day when my son stops asking questions, because otherwise I'll go crazy over all this questioning.” — Then another person came along, a family friend, who decided to answer the questions the little boy asked until the little boy himself would be in a position where he could no longer ask questions, that is, until no more questions occurred to him. That took a very long time, and the danger was already approaching that the little son would run out of questions, but he kept asking: Why is Friday noon before Friday evening? Why do the stars shine in the evening? And so on. Now, nevertheless, the danger was approaching that the little son would run out of questions, but he wanted to overcome this danger, and so he finally asked the terrible question: Why is the What? Well, we should incorporate such a narrative a little into our soul when we should be sad that in these days the time is approaching when questioning will no longer be possible for some time. But we still want to deal with the questions that are to be discussed in speech and counter-speech now. So from now on I will again be more of a listener and only occasionally interrupt you.

A participant: I would like to ask why Luke has the Risen One eat.

Rudolf Steiner: The matter is such that it can only be properly understood if one is clear about the fact that in order to interpret such things from the consciousness of the time in the right way, it is really necessary to reawaken the idea that was associated with the concept of eating at that time. Today, we simply imagine that we consume physical matter and that this physical matter passes into the human body. Now, as today's physiology tells us, the concept of eating was not always, but in the time when the Gospel of Luke was written down, the old wisdom was still valid in many ways, that man takes what he builds his body with from the etheric world, and that what he takes from the etheric world also appears in the image of eating when one sees the etheric body. So you also see in the image of the physical eating that which is the correlate for eating in the etheric world. If you base your interpretation on this, you will see that the passage could, of course, be expressed in a completely different way than it is expressed, but that it does not need to be eliminated. This is the case with many passages.

A participant asks a question about the marriage ritual [the wording of the question was not written down in shorthand].

Rudolf Steiner: Of course, this is about what marriage is as a sacrament. You have to bear in mind what the content of the church ritual of the sacrament of marriage means. The content of the church marriage sacrament is no more the consummation of the marriage than, for example, the blessing of the ripening of the fruit in the course of the year corresponds to the reality of the ripening of the fruit. The performance of the marriage sacrament in the Christian view is that which is performed by marriage in the civil sense, is elevated to the ecclesiastical, to the ceremonial. So that with regard to the dissolution or the indissolubility of marriage, nothing is given within the content of the sacrament, because what is elevated into the sacrament is what is considered to be the essence of marriage. The Catholic Church has also retained this; of course, originally it fully recognized the marriage performed by civil law and then blessed it in church. In more recent times, when the emancipation of [church from civil] marriage occurred... [larger gap marked by the stenographer in the transcript]. The Catholic Church regards what has been agreed between the spouses as the ecclesiastical and blesses that. With regard to this matter, the Church takes the most liberal position, only that it has been confused by the fact that it speaks out on marriage in all sorts of ways because, in recent times, it has presumed not to bless marriage but to perform it, that is, to assume the function of the secular power of the prince of this world... [further gap]. There the fact is that the church, by entering into the secular, has also secularized the sacraments, and then these secularized sacraments have been taken over by the state. With these explanations, you will also see the relevant passages of the testament in harmony.

A participant asks a question about emergency baptism (the wording was not noted).

Rudolf Steiner: As it stands, emergency baptism can be administered in any situation. It is different from baptism in the course of worship. It is performed when there is danger to the life of the person to be baptized, but a priest cannot be called in time. In this case, baptism can also be performed by a lay person. It does not matter how it is performed. It just has to be rectified by the priest and recognized by the community. What can happen in addition is that the priest includes baptism in the next communion, so to speak making it an ideal baptism if death has occurred; otherwise it is ritually reenacted.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We have a colleague who is Jewish. How should adult baptism be performed?

Rudolf Steiner: Actually no different from the baptism of a child. The ritual does not contradict this at all. He must first be baptized before he is ordained a priest.

A participant: Why is child baptism necessary for the time being and not adult baptism? In the past, it was the custom to baptize adults first.

Rudolf Steiner: I have said that this cannot be avoided in today's world. We cannot introduce the baptism of adults in today's world. You have to take that into account, otherwise you will either bang your head against a wall or smash your head. I believe that we must retain infant baptism, and once it has been performed, we cannot repeat it. We have to let baptism take effect before confirmation.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: How does what is necessary today to bring healing facts to people differ from the proclamation that was possible a few centuries ago?

Rudolf Steiner: Bringing all the facts of salvation to people will have to take the course that you will first do what is possible in order to increasingly move on to what is necessary. The necessary has already been outlined, but it will really differ even in one and the same place, depending on whether you have one community or another there or there. Let us assume that one finds a community of nothing but socialists. He will have to proceed somewhat differently than the one who finds a community of old dethroned German princes. [The following remarks have only been recorded in fragments by the stenographer.] In scholasticism, this type of discussion occurs very frequently. That is something that clarifies the matter, if one says it radically. You must experience that. With what can result from it, one comes to differentiating.

[Questions are asked about the loyalty formula. Friedrich Rittelmeyer proposes an amendment. The stenographer did not write down the wording of the question and Rittelmeyer's vote. ]

Rudolf Steiner: What I consider necessary is this: At first, in a purely intellectual sense, some might believe that someone can separate [from the community] by simply continuing to do the same things within the community after the separation. Now this is against the tradition of the cult. The granting of the right to practise this cult and likewise the speaking out of the mediated Christ-power, which belongs to this cult, must be regarded as belonging to this community. Therefore, the community has the right to deny anyone the right to practise the cult or to teach in connection with this cult. He can, of course, teach, but not in connection with this cult. So he simply loses the right to continue to practise what he has taken on within the cult. The moral evaluation lies in the fact that the conference, the meeting, the community of leaders and senior leaders, has to pronounce on how his relationship to this community can now be understood in relation to real things, that is, that he loses the right to do this and that and so on. The natural connection with this community is such, and that is expressed [in the formula]. You can formulate it differently, you can grasp it more clearly if you are aware that it is so. The interpretation must also be passed on. So in this respect I could not object to this formulation, but it must be recognized not by me but by the community.

[The question was asked about the possibility of distributing it to individual cities. The questions were not noted by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: There is no reason to exclude Vienna. Because it is geographically remote? Well, after all, Vienna is no further from Stuttgart geographically than Königsberg is. That is a question that is only related to whether you find the opportunity to occupy Vienna from the outset. That it is good to occupy it is something that I fully accept. Firstly, there is no reason not to occupy Vienna. Secondly, the situation in Austria is such that the configuration of religious life that you now find in Austria is actually only about fifty years old, and in the years before that, this religious life had a completely different configuration. Austria would have been an extraordinarily favorable ground for such a renewal of Christianity if it had been carefully implemented, because the orthodoxy of Catholic priests has become very alien to many people, not only to the laity but also to priests. Now, the completely untrue Christian-social element has taken over everything that existed in Austria until the 1980s – it is an embodied lie. It has also seized the religious element, and today the situation is such that one would think there was no receptivity at all for the renewal of Christianity in Austria. In Austria one could speak fairly freely about anthroposophy if one did not touch on anything that reminded one of Catholicism... [space in the text marked by the stenographer]. Then it was claimed that anthroposophy was just a form of Jesuitism in disguise. But in fact this earlier current is still there in latent form and, if approached in the right way, is good soil. [Another question is asked that was not noted by the stenographer.]

Rudolf Steiner: In such areas, the need for ritual often arises as a reaction. In the east and in the north, a great deal is suppressed that lives in people's minds. You are not justified in assuming that you would not find a yearning for ritual in the north and in the east.

A participant: I think Silesia is a very good field. I have heard from the people of the social work group that they are much more popular in Breslau, in Silesia, than in Berlin.

Rudolf Steiner: I am very surprised that you think that the Protestant spirit has had such a deep influence in northern and northeastern Germany. That is actually impossible. The influence only goes so far in the north and east because it has been and is being artificially generated. It is the Prussian state power that has worked so extraordinarily, that has brought about what is there and suppressed the religious inclination of the people. What basically holds it back is Prussian militarism and the assessoral spirit, and not the spirit of the people. It cannot be dismissed out of hand that precisely on the way to the East something of what made it possible to Christianize East Prussia in earlier centuries is reviving.

Marie Steiner: I think you should go to places like Essen and Bochum. I don't know of any places that need more spiritual life than these. I felt so sorry for these people from the factories.

Rudolf Steiner: This question is one whose answer depends on whether it is possible to fill these positions.

I must say that I sometimes heard the question: “Why don't you have a Swiss person in your class?” when I came up to you. The last time we were here, there were still Swiss people among you. So with the general process of elimination, all the Swiss left. What you have now is enclosed within the borders of the German Reich, and of course it cannot remain that way, otherwise you would found a German church. Christianity cannot be enclosed within national borders, nor within political national borders. We must think not narrower, but much further. It is something that weighs heavily on me that you have been left so alone by the members living outside the borders of the German Reich. Those of you who were already pastors are few in number. The Swiss pastors had to withdraw. This is very understandable given the special nature of these personalities. But there is a tendency that even the younger Swiss people do not approach this work, who, as Swiss, could found communities in Switzerland just as you can found communities in Germany. This is because there are not as many idealists among young Swiss people as there are among young Germans. They know that they will not receive their salaries in the same way on the new path they are about to take as they would on the old path. The mistake of Old Catholicism is that it has not accepted a new element in an entirely unbiased way, but essentially wants to go back to what was corrupted by ultramontanism. Old Catholicism suffers from its own negation; it is actually only anti-ultramontane.

Gertrud Spörri is Swiss, but initially prefers to work in Germany rather than Switzerland.

Rudolf Steiner: But the Swiss are not coming either. And you must not present it as an ideal that they should also have a war so that they can catch up on what the others went through [during the war]. It would be necessary to do something for the Swiss in particular. I just want to have said that. I realize that it cannot be done the way you are now. But national borders must not be the limits of our work.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer suggests going to the universities and trying to get students to participate.

Rudolf Steiner: Actually, the whole world comes into consideration, where today there is only that name Christianity. Where is true Christianity today? The whole world comes into consideration. When in earlier times such a movement as the present one is to be, was kindled, it necessarily had to have a completely different character: it is the Hussite movement; only it was cut off at that time. But the Hussite movement had, besides the negative elements mentioned in history, also its positive elements. The conditions already exist everywhere beneath an upper stratum that has become purely Ahrimanic.

The question concerns Thuringia and Erfurt. Is it important to start immediately or to think about Thuringia later?

Rudolf Steiner: Thuringia naturally has the one characteristic that the population is the most unintelligent in all of Germany. There is a lot of native wit in Thuringia with regard to everyday life, but in terms of understanding all higher questions, Thuringia is quite backward. That is why it is difficult to work there. But why not overcome these difficulties in this way? Thuringia does not need to be an exception. I could well imagine that a center can be created in Erfurt, for example. I cannot believe it in Weimar, because even today people there are blasé about religious matters. Weimar has the harmful after-effects of the fact that Goethe and Schiller lived there. The fact is that Goethe and Schiller, who are well known by name, are basically two plaster figures in Weimar. The people are satisfied with that. A participant: Is it time to start in Munich?

Rudolf Steiner: No, in Munich it is still the case, even today -— although today much is immersed in untruth -, that everything is still possible, as it was before the war, when Munich was the German city where everything was possible. In Munich you could really do anything. But in most cases, either a very open or at least a hidden path leads from everything to the Hofbräuhaus; of course to the republican Hofbräuhaus, just as in Vienna people were surprised to get the republican roll instead of the Kaiser roll. In Munich, everything leads to the Hofbräuhaus. That is the difficulty. And so in Munich the Catholic movement is also flooded by that standard life, that standard living, the mighty Hofbräuhaus. But I believe, on the other hand, that your movement is precisely about the necessary strength and energy. Other movements will have a much harder time of it than this one of yours. So it's not a matter of saying we can't occupy Munich, but rather of asking how to properly occupy Munich, or rather, who should be admitted as Mr. Klein's helper, because he will cause offense in Munich due to his excessive youthfulness. That will cause some difficulties. But he will be supported.

Emil Bock: This is our concern, especially with regard to the large cities. We are convinced that we do not have enough older personalities who could tackle a larger city in such a way that it would attract public attention. That is why we have the question of how we want to deal with Klein and Munich: Who would be best suited for the job? We are such a small group and, after all, we don't have so many different people among us that it seems possible for us to adequately serve these cities. Therefore, we have hesitated as to whether we want to leave out the big cities because we cannot properly staff them.

Rudolf Steiner: What were the difficulties? Objective difficulties? There were none. It is precisely in Catholic cities – both Munich and Cologne are Catholic cities, although Catholicism manifests itself quite differently in the two – that you meet people who initially have a high degree of neutral feeling. At first everything is more or less the same to them because they have become indifferent; then gradually they are seized. One can achieve a great deal there. I am counting on a great deal in Munich and Cologne, that people will gradually be seized. It could also happen in Vienna, for example, that a larger number of people will simply go there out of curiosity at first, which should not be the worst thing, but the best. It could be the same in Cologne. Catholicism prepares the ground for people to become dulled to the Church out of habit, but actually have a deep urge to experience something true. Among the old Catholic population, there are many who are striving for religious renewal. The only question is: do we have the necessary personalities, and if not, how do we get them?

[Another question is asked about the dangers of sectarianism.]

Rudolf Steiner: It depends on the spirit, on the seriousness, not on the appearance. Sectarianism will arise immediately if you see something in the seclusion that is a danger for the cause. Why should it be sectarian to spread higher insights among the people.

• 1. See note

Translated by Steiner Online Library

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.

It is not the aim of Spiritual Science merely to satisfy curiosity or a greed for knowledge but to be a spiritual impulse penetrating deeply into the culture of the present and immediate future. It will begin to dawn upon us that this is indeed the mission of Spiritual Science when we realise that its impulse has already made itself felt in the form either of clear or vague premonitions, in various domains of modern life. To-day we shall consider how an impulse akin to that of Spiritual Science lived in one of the greatest artists of our time. In speaking of Richard Wagner, I certainly do not mean to imply that he was fully conscious of this impulse. It is so meaningless when people say: ‘You tell us all kinds of things about Richard Wagner, but we could prove to you that he never thought of them in connection with himself.’ Such an objection is so patent that even those who think as we do could raise it. I am not suggesting for a moment that the impulse of which we shall speak lived in Richard Wagner in the form of definite ideas. Whether or not one is justified in speaking of it, is quite another matter. Detailed evidence in support of this point would lead us too far, but a comparison will show that our method of approach is fully justified. Does a botanist not think about a plant and try to discover the laws underlying its growth and life? Is not this the very thing that helps him to understand its nature? And will anyone deny him the right to speak about the plant from this aspect just because the plant itself is not conscious of these laws? There is no need to reiterate the generalisation that ‘an artist creates unconsciously.’ The point at issue is that the laws which help us to understand the achievements of an artist need not be consciously realised by him any more than the laws of growth are consciously realised by the plant. I say this at the outset in order to clear away the above-mentioned objection.

Another stumbling-block which may crop up now-a-days, is connected with the word ‘Mysticism’ itself. Quite recently it happened that somebody used the word among a small group of people, whereupon a would-be learned gentleman remarked: “Goethe was really a Mystic, for he admitted that very much remains obscure and nebulous in the sphere of human knowledge.” He showed by this remark that he associated ‘Mysticism’ with all ideas about which there is something nebulous and vague. But true Mystics have never done this. Precisely to-day we hear it said in academic circles: ‘To such and such a point clear cognition can attain; from that point onwards, however, we grope blindly among the secrets of Nature with vague feelings, and Mysticism begins.’ But the opposite is the case! The true Mystic enters a world of the greatest possible clarity—a world where ideas shine into the depths of existence with a light as radiant and clear as that of the sun. And when people speak of obscure feelings and premonitions this simply means that they have never taken the trouble to understand the nature of Mysticism. In the first centuries of Christendom the word Mathesis was not used because this kind of experience was thought to be akin to mathematics but because it was known that the ideas and conceptions of a Mystic can be as lucid and clear as mathematical concepts. Men must have patience to find their bearings in the domain of true Mysticism, and it is purely in this sense that the word will be used here in connection with the name of Richard Wagner.

And now let us speak of what is really the fundamental conviction of everyone who is a true student of Spiritual Science.—It is that behind the physical world of sense there is an invisible world into which man can penetrate. This, too, is the attitude of Mysticism. Did Wagner himself ever express this conviction? Most certainly he did! And the significant thing is that he expressed it from the musician's point of view, indicating thereby that to him music or art was far more than a mere adjunct to existence, was indeed the most essential element of life. He speaks in a wonderful way about symphonic music. He regarded symphonic music as a veritable revelation from another world, a revelation by which the threads of existence are elucidated far better than by logic. And from his own experience he knew that the convictions which arise in a man when he listens to the speech of symphonic music are so firmly rooted in his being that no intellectual judgment can prevail against them. Such words as these were not uttered at random; they were indications of a deep and profound theory of knowledge.

And now let us see whether we can explain these words of Wagner in the light of the conviction that is characteristic of Mysticism. Again and again we find Mystics describing the nature and mode of their knowledge in definite terms. They say: In the act of knowledge, man uses his intellect when he endeavours to understand the laws of the natural and spiritual worlds. But there is a higher mode of knowledge.—Indeed, the true Mystic realises that this higher kind of knowledge is much more reliable than any intellectual judgment. Curiously enough it is invariably characterised by an image—which is, however, more than an image. Those who really know what they are talking about, speak of music. The ‘Music of the Spheres’ spoken of in the old Pythagorean Schools was no mere figure of speech, in spite of what superficial philosophy may say. The Music of the Spheres is a reality, for there is a region of the spiritual world in which its melodies and tones can be heard. We are surrounded by worlds of spirit, just as a blind man is surrounded by the world of colour which he does not see. But if a successful operation is performed upon his eyes, colour and light are revealed to him. It is possible for the faculty of spiritual sight to awaken in a man. When his higher senses open, the higher world will emerge out of the darkness. To the surrounding spiritual world that lies near us, we give the name of the astral world, or world of light, while a higher, purely spiritual world is designated as that of the ‘Music of the Spheres.’ It is a real world into which man can enter through a higher birth. Initiates speak openly of this world. We are reminded here of certain words of Goethe, albeit they are generally thought to be mere fantasy. Indeed our interpretation of these words will be put down as inartistic because of the current opinion that so far as intelligence and reason are concerned, a poet must necessarily be vague and indefinite. But a poet as great as Goethe does not use phrases; and if there were no deeper underlying truth, he would be using a phrase when he writes:

“The sun with many a sister-sphere
Still sings the primal song of wonder, ...”

These words are either an indication of deeper truth or mere phraseology, for the physical sun does not ‘sing.’ It is unthinkable that a poet with Goethe's deep insight would use such an image without reason. As an Initiate, Goethe knew that there is indeed a world of spiritual sound and he retains the image.

To Richard Wagner the tones of outer music were an expression, a revelation of an inner music, of spiritual sounds and harmonies which pervade the created universe. He felt the reality of this music and stated it in words. On another occasion he said something similar in connection with instrumental music (Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven): “The primal organs of creation and of nature are represented in the instruments. What these instruments express can never be defined in clear, hard-and-fast terms, for once again they convey to us those archetypal moods arising from chaos in the first days of creation, when as yet there was no human being to receive them into his heart.”

Such words must not be analysed by the intellect. We should rather try to live into their mood and atmosphere and then we shall begin to realise how deeply Wagner's soul was steeped in Mysticism. To a certain extent Wagner was aware of his particular mission in art. He was not one of those artists who think they must ‘out’ with everything that happens to be living in their soul. He wanted to realise his destined place in evolution and he looked back to a far remote past when as yet art had not divided into separate branches.

Here we reach a point which was constantly in Richard Wagner's mind when he realised his mission, a point too, upon which Nietzsche meditated deeply, and tried to characterise in The Birth of Tragedy. We shall not, however, go into what Nietzsche says, because we are here concerned with Mysticism as such, and Mysticism can tell us more about Richard Wagner than Nietzsche was able to do. The study of Mysticism carries us back to very early stages in the evolution of humanity—to the Mysteries. What were the Mysteries?

Among all the ancient peoples there were Mystery-centres. These centres were temples as well as institutes of learning and they existed in Egypt, Chaldea, Greece and many other regions. As centres alike of religion, science and art, they were the source of new impulses in the culture of the peoples.

And now let us briefly consider the nature of the Mysteries. What were the experiences of those to whom the hidden teachings were revealed after certain trials and tests had been undergone? They were able to realise the union of religion, art and science—which in the course of later evolution were destined to separate into three domains. The great riddles of the universe were presented to those who were admitted to the rites enacted in the Mysteries. The rites and ceremonies were connected with the secrets of spiritual forces from higher worlds living in the minerals and plants, reaching a stage of greater perfection in the animal and finally to self-consciousness in the human being. The whole evolution of the World-Spirit was presented in the form of ritual to the eyes of the spectators. And what they saw with their eyes, they also heard with their ears. Wisdom was presented to them through colour, light and sound and to such men the laws of the universe were not the abstract conceptions they have become to-day. Cosmic laws were presented in a garb of beauty—and art arose. Truth was expressed in the form of art, in such a way that men's hearts and souls were attuned to piety and devotion. External history knows nothing of these things and indeed repudiates them. But that matters not.—Just as in the ancient Mysteries, religion, science and art were one, so were the arts which later on broke off along their several paths. Music and dramatic representation were part of one whole, and when Wagner looked back to primeval times he realised that although the arts had once been indissolubly united, they had been forced into divergence as a result of the inevitable course taken by evolution. He believed that the time had now come for a re-union of the arts, and with his great gifts set himself the task of bringing about this re-union in what he termed an “all-comprehensive work of art.” He felt that all true works of art are pervaded by a mood of sanctity and are therefore verily acts of religious worship. He felt too, that streams which had hitherto been separated were coming together in his spirit, there to give birth to his musical dramas. To him, there were two supreme artists: Shakespeare and Beethoven. He saw in Shakespeare the dramatist who, with marvellous inner certainty, staged human action as it unfolds in outer happenings. He saw in Beethoven the artist who was able to express with the same inner certainty experiences which arise in the depths of the heart but do not pass over into deed. And then he asked himself: ‘Is this not evidence of a severance that has taken place in human nature in the course of the development of art?’ Man's inner and outer life is directed and controlled by himself; he is aware of desires and passions which rise up and die down again within him and he expresses in action what he feels and experiences in his inner being. But a cleft arose in art. Richard Wagner found passages in Shakespeare's plays which gave him the impression: There is something at this point which had perforce to remain unexpressed, for between this action and that action there is something in the human heart which acts as a mediator, something that cannot pass over into this kind of dramatic art. Again, when human feeling would fain express itself in a symphonic whole, it is doomed to inner congestion if a musician must limit himself to tones. In Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Wagner felt that the whole soul of the composer is pressing outwards and as it becomes articulate is striving to unite that which in human nature is in reality one and undivided but has been separated in art. Wagner felt that his own particular mission lay in this same direction, and out of this feeling was born his idea of a comprehensive work of art in which the inner life of a human being could express itself outwardly in action. That which cannot be expressed dramatically, must be contained in the music. That which the music cannot express must be contained in the drama.—Richard Wagner was striving to synthesise the achievement of Shakespeare on the one side and of Beethoven on the other. This was the idea underlying all his work—an idea that had arisen from profound insight into the mysteries of human nature. Herein he felt his call.

A way into the inner depths of human nature was thus opened up for art. Richard Wagner could not be a dramatist of everyday life, for he felt that it must once again be possible, as it was in the Mysteries, for the deepest and most sacred experiences to be expressed in art. When he tells us in his own words that symphonic music is a revelation of an unknown world, that the instruments represent primal organs of creation, we can well understand why in his musical dramas he feels it necessary to express much more than the physical part of man's being. Towering above this physical man is the ‘higher man.’ This ‘higher man’ surrounds the physical body like a halo and is much more deeply connected with the sources of life than can be expressed in outer life. It was just because Richard Wagner's aim was to give expression to the higher nature of the human being that he could not draw his characters from everyday life. And so he turned to the myths, for the myths portray Beings far greater than physical man can ever be. It is quite natural that Wagner's stage characters should be mythological figures, for he was thus able to express cosmic laws and the deeds of Beings belonging to an unknown world through the dramatic action and the music—albeit in a form not always understood. I can only give a few examples here, for to enter into every detail would lead too far. But it is everywhere apparent that in the depths of his being, Richard Wagner was connected with the teachings of Spiritual Science.

Now what does Mysticism tell us with regard to the relation of one human being to another? To outer eyes, men stand there, side by side; in the physical world they work upon each other when they speak together or when one becomes dependent on another. But there are also much deeper relationships between them. The soul living in the one man has a deep, inner relationship with the soul living in the other. The laws manifested on the surface of things are the most unimportant of all. The deep laws which underlie the soul are spun from the one man to the other. Spiritual Science reveals these laws, and, as an artist, Richard Wagner recognised and knew of their existence. Therefore he uses themes in which he is able to show that laws far deeper than the outer eye can perceive are working between one character and another.

This urge to reveal the mysterious connections of life is apparent in one of Wagner's earliest works. Do we not feel that something is happening invisibly between the Dutchman and Senta, and are we not reminded of another mysterious influence in the medieval legend entitled Der arme Heinrich, when miracles of healing follow the sacrifice of a virgin? Such images as these are the expressions of truth deeper than the superficial doctrines of conventional erudition. There is a deep reality in a sacrifice made by one being for the sake of another. These mystic threads—unfathomable by the superficial intellect—express one aspect of the universal soul, albeit this universal soul must be thought of as a reality, not as a vague abstraction. Wagner is expressing a profound truth when he uses the image of one human being sacrificing himself for another.

I shall here repeat certain teachings of Spiritual Science which will help you to understand these things. We know that the world evolves and that in the course of its evolution certain beings are continually destined to be thrust down. There is a law of which we learn in Spiritual Science, namely, that every stage of higher evolution is connected with a fall. Later on, compensation is made, but for every saint, a sinner must arise. Strange as this may appear it is nevertheless true, because the necessary equilibrium has to be maintained. Every ascent involves a descent and this implies that at a later stage, the powers of the being who has ascended in evolution must be used for the redemption of the other. If there were no such co-operation between beings, there would be no evolution. Thus is the flux of evolution maintained. And a picture of one human being sacrificing himself for another reminds us of the mysterious link that is created by the ascent of the one and the descent of the other. Such truths can only be expressed with the greatest delicacy. Richard Wagner realised and understood the mysterious thread that binds soul to soul, and when we study the fundamental features of his works we find that the mystical life is the source of them all.

And now when we turn to his most famous work—the Nibelung—we shall see out of what depths of spiritual scientific wisdom it was created. But first we must consider certain things which are explained by Spiritual Science, however contradictory they may be of the views of modern science.

Our remote ancestors lived in a region lying to the West of Europe, between Africa and America. Science itself is gradually beginning to admit the existence of a continent there in the far past—a continent to which we give the name of Atlantis. Atlantis was the home of our ancient forefathers whose form was very unlike our own. As I say, science is already beginning to speak of old Atlantis. An article on Atlantis appeared in a magazine entitled Kosmos, issued under the direction of Haeckel. True, it only spoke of animals and plants and omitted all mention of human beings, but Spiritual Science is able to speak with greater clarity of what natural science is only now beginning to surmise.

In old Atlantis, the atmosphere was quite different from the atmosphere around us to-day. There was no division of water and the sun's rays in the air. The air was permeated with vapours and clouds. Sun and moon were only seen through a rainbow-haze. Moreover man's life of soul was entirely different. He lived in a far more intimate relationship with Nature, with stone, plant and animal. Everything was immersed in cloud-masses. In very truth the Spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters! The wisdom that lived on among the descendants of the Atlanteans was possessed in abundance by the Atlanteans themselves. They understood all that was living in Nature around them; the rippling brooks were not inarticulate but the actual expression of Nature's wisdom. Wisdom streamed into the men of Atlantis from everything in their environment, for those ancient forefathers of ours were possessed of dull, instinctive clairvoyance. Instead of objects in space, colour-phenomena arose before them. They were endowed with clairvoyant powers. Wisdom was there in the mists and clouds and they perceived it with these powers. Such things can, of course, only be indicated here in the briefest outline. As evolution proceeded, the mists condensed into water, the air grew clearer and clearer, and man began, very gradually, to develop the kind of consciousness he has to-day. He was shut off from outer Nature and became a self-contained being. When all men live in close connection with Nature, wisdom is uniform among them, for they live and breathe in a sphere of wisdom. This gives rise to brotherhood, for each man perceives the same wisdom, each man lives in the soul of the other. When the cloud-masses condensed into water, man emerged with the beginnings of Ego-consciousness; the central core of his being was felt to lie within himself, and, when he met another Ego-being, he began to make claims on him.—Brotherhood gave way to the struggle for existence.

Legends and myths are not the phantasies they are said to be by erudite professors. What are legends and myths, in reality? They represent the last echo of the ancient clairvoyant experiences of men. It is nonsense to say that the myths are merely records of struggles between one people and another. Learned professors speak of the ‘poetic folk-phantasy,’ but it is they who are indulging in phantasy when they say that the ‘Gods’ were simply poetical allusions to clouds. That is the kind of nonsense we are expected to believe! But even nowadays it is quite easy to understand the real origin of myths.—The legend of the ‘Noonday Woman’ is still familiar in many regions. This legend is to the effect that when labourers stay out in the fields at noon and fall asleep instead of returning to their homes, a figure of a woman appears and puts a question to them. If they cannot answer within a given time, the woman slays them. This is obviously a dream which comes to a man because he is sleeping out of doors with the full heat of the sun pouring down upon him. Dreams are the last vestige of ancient clairvoyant consciousness.—The example given indicates that legends do indeed originate from dreams. And the same is true of the Germanic myths. For the most part these are myths which originated among the last stragglers of the Atlanteans. The old Germanic peoples looked back to the ages when their forefathers lived away yonder in the West and wandered towards the East in the times when the mists of Atlantis (Nebel-land) were condensing and giving rise to the floods now spoken of as the Deluge, when the air was becoming pure and clear and waking consciousness beginning to develop. The ancient Germanic peoples looked back to the ‘Land of Mists,’ to ‘Nifelheim.’ They knew that they had left Nifelheim and had passed into a different world, but they also knew that certain Spiritual Beings had remained behind at the spiritual level of those times. And they said that such Beings had retained the characteristics and qualities of Nifelheim while sending their influences down into a later age, that they were ‘Spirits’ because they did not live a physical existence.

We can never understand such marvellous interweavings by reference to pedantic text-books. We must rather have an eye to the interweaving of phantasy and clairvoyant faculties, of legend and myth. Nor should we divest these ancient legends of the magic dew upon them.

The ancient Germanic peoples looked back to the time when the mists of Nifelheim were condensing, and they conceived the idea that the water from these same mists was now contained in the rivers in the North of Central Europe. It seemed to them that the waters of the Rhine had flowed out of the mists of old Atlantis. In those ancient times wisdom came to men from the rippling of brooks and the gushing of springs. It was a wisdom that was common to all, a wisdom from which the element of egoism was entirely absent. Now the age-old symbol of a wisdom that is common to all is gold. This gold was brought over from Nifelheim. What became of the gold? It became a possession of the human Ego. The universal Wisdom, once bestowed by Nature herself now became a wisdom flowing from the Ego into human deeds and confronting them as a separate independent power in each individual. Man had built a ‘Ring’ around himself and the Ring changed brotherhood into the struggle for existence among human kind. The element of wisdom common to all men in earlier times lived in water, and the last vestige of this water flowed in the Rhine.

Now just as human beings have developed Ego-consciousness, so too must the Nibelungen. The Nibelungen knew that they possessed the old universal wisdom and they now forged the Ring which thence-forward surrounded them as the Rising of Egoism. This shows, albeit in brief outline, how true realities stream into the world of phantasy and imagination. Gold represents the remaining vestige of the ancient wisdom flowing through the mists; the wisdom-filled Ego builds the Ring which gives rise to the struggle for existence.—Such is the deeper truth underlying the myth of the Nibelungen.

This was a theme which Richard Wagner could reproduce in the form of dramatic action and in the tones of a music expressing the invisible world behind the world of sense. And so he wrote a modern version of the Nibelung myth and in his picture of this whole process of evolution we feel how the new Gods who rule over mankind have come forth from the ancient Gods.

And now think once again of old Atlantis.—Clouds and mists, wisdom sounding from all creation.—As time went on, the Gods could no longer work through a wisdom possessed uniformly by all men; they could work only by means of commandments and decrees. When Wotan, one of the new Gods has to fulfil his covenant to deliver up Freia, since he himself is now entering into the sphere of Ego-wisdom symbolised by the Ring, a figure personifying ancient, primordial consciousness appears before him—a personification of the Earth-consciousness wherein all men were enveloped in the days of Atlantis.

This consciousness is represented in the figure of Erda:

“My musing is the ruling of wisdom;
For when I sleep I dream,
And all my dreams are sovereign wisdom.”

A great cosmological truth is contained in these words, for all things were created by this wisdom as it lived in the springs and brooks, rustled in the leaves and swept through the wind. It was this all-embracing consciousness out of which individual consciousness was born and it was verily sovereign wisdom.

This wisdom was mirrored in the ancient clairvoyant faculties of man, in an age when his consciousness was not confined within the boundaries of his skin. Consciousness flowed through all things. One could not say: here is Ego-consciousness and there is Ego-consciousness.

“All that the depths conceal,
All that pervades the hills and vales,
Water and air, is known to thee.
Thy breath doth blow throughout creation;
Thy mind is there wherever knowledge dwells:
All, it is said, is known to thee.”

All is known to Erda in this consciousness. And so step by step, we can see how through his intuition Wagner was able to draw upon amounts of primordial wisdom and express this in the Nibelung myth.

And now let us consider the time of transition from the old phase of evolution to the new.—Again let it be repeated, however, that Richard Wagner's achievement was not the outcome of any conscious realisation on his part.—The old Atlanteans were possessed of a consciousness of brotherhood in the truest sense of the word. This was followed by the transition to Ego-consciousness. And now think of the beginning of the Rhinegold. Is not the coming of this Ego-consciousness expressed in the opening notes themselves, in the long E flat on the organ? Do we not feel here that individual consciousness is emerging from the ocean of consciousness universal? In motif after motif we find Richard Wagner expressing in the tones of music a world that stands behind the physical world, using the instruments verily as if they were the primal organs of Nature.

And now, if we turn to Lohengrin, what do we find? Lohengrin is the emissary of the ‘Holy Grail.’ He comes from the citadel of the Initiates, where a higher wisdom has its home. The legend of Lohengrin is connected with a universal tradition which indicates that the Initiates send down their influences into human life. We must always turn to legends for enlightenment in regard to significant turning-points in evolution, for the truths they contain are deeper than those recorded in history. Legends show us how the forces and influences of Initiates intervene in the course of history and they are not to be regarded as accounts of happenings in the outer world.

The time of transition from the universal clairvoyant consciousness to individualised Ego-consciousness was of the greatest significance, and we find it set forth in the Lohengrin myth. It is an age when the new spirit emerges from the old. Two ‘Spirits of an Age’ confront one another. Elsa, the feminine principle, represents the soul who is striving for the highest. Conventional interpretations of Goethe's words in the Chorus Mysticus at the end of his Faust are terribly banal, whereas in reality they emanate from the very depths of Mysticism:

“The Eternal Feminine leads us upwards and on.”

The human soul must be quickened by those mighty events through which new principles find their way into evolution. What enters thus into evolution is represented in the Initiates who come from mysterious lands. Spiritual Science speaks of advanced individualities and again and again one is asked: Why do these individualities not reveal themselves? But if they were to do so, the world would enquire about their civic name and rank. This is of no significance in regard to one who is working from spiritual worlds, for the position of an Initiate whose mission is to proclaim the mysteries of existence is so sublime that to ask about his birth, name, rank or calling, is meaningless. To put such questions shows such a lack of understanding of his mission that parting is inevitable.

“Ne'er shalt thou ask
Nor yearn to know,
Whence I have come
And what my name and nature”

These words of Lohengrin might be spoken by all those whose consciousness transcends that of the everyday world, when they are questioned about their name and rank. This is one of the notes struck in Lohengrin, where the clear, true influences of Mysticism are apparent in music and drama alike.

Now there is a certain profound mystery bound up with humanity and it is depicted symbolically in a myth. When at the beginning of our evolution Lucifer fell from the ranks of those Spirits who guide humanity, a precious stone dropped from his crown. This stone was the cup from which Christ Jesus drank with His disciples at the Last Supper and in which the Blood flowing on Golgotha was received. The cup passed to Joseph of Arimathea who brought it to the West. After many wanderings it came into the hands of Titurel through whom the Citadel of the Grail was founded. The cup was guarded by the “holy love-lance,” and the legend says that all who looked upon it took something of the Eternal into themselves.

And now let us think of the mystery contained in this myth as a parallelism of the progress of human evolution, as indeed it is known to be by those who understand the mysteries of the Grail. In the earlier phases of evolution on the earth, all love was bound up with the blood. Men were united by the blood-relationship. Marriage took place between those who were united by the blood-tie. The point of time from whence onwards marriage took place between those who were not of the same kith and kin marked an important turning-point in the life of the peoples. Consciousness of this truth is expressed in many sagas and myths. To begin with, as we have said, love was bound up with blood-kinship and later on, the circle within which human beings were joined by marriage grew wider and wider. This was the one stream in evolution: love that is dependent upon uniformity of flesh and blood.

But later on, a different principle began to hold sway—the principle of individual independence. In the age preceding that of Christendom these two streams were present: the stream expressed in love bound up with the blood-tie, and the principle of independence, freedom. The former represented the power of Jehovah, whose name means “I am the I am,” and the latter the Luciferic principle of independence. Christianity was to bring into the world a love that is independent of blood-kinship. The words of Christ are to be interpreted thus: He who forsakes not father and mother—that is to say, he who cannot substitute for a love that is bound up with flesh and blood, a love that flows from soul to soul, from brother to sister, from a man to all men—he “cannot be my disciple.”

A stone falls from Lucifer's crown and this stone becomes the holy cup wherein the Christ-Principle is united with the Lucifer-Principle. Knowledge of this mighty impulse developed the power of the Ego in the Knights of the Grail. And to those who were pupils in the Mysteries of the Holy Grail the following teaching was given:—(I will give in simple dialogue form what the pupils of the Grail were made to realise step by step. Many people will say: This is unheard of! None the less it is truth but truth that will be subjected to the same fate as those emissaries who were sent from civilised States to the courts of barbarians—as Voltaire relates. First, unworthy treatment and then, afterwards, recognition and acknowledgment.) This, then, was said to the pupils of the Grail: ‘Look at the plant. Its flower may not be compared with the human head. The flower, with its male and female organs of fertilisation, corresponds to the sexual system in man. It is the root of the plant that corresponds to the human head.’ Darwin himself once rightly compared the root of the plant with the head of man. The human being is a plant reversed. He has accomplished the complete turn. In chastity and purity the plant stretches out its calyx towards the light, receiving its rays, receiving the ‘holy love-lance,’ the ‘kiss’ which ripened the fruit. The animal has turned only half-way.—The plant, whose ‘head’ bores into the earth, the animal with its spine in the horizontal direction, and the human being with his upright posture and his upward gaze—these together form the cross. To the pupils of the Grail it was further said: ‘Verily, Plato spoke truly when he said that the World-Soul lies crucified in the Body of the World. The World-Soul, the soul pervading plant, animal and man, lives in bodies which, together, represent the cross.’ This is the original signification of the cross—All other interpretations are meaningless.

In what sense has man accomplished the complete turn? According to the insight of true Mysticism, the plant has the consciousness of sleeping man. When he is asleep, the human being is, in a sense, like a plant. He has acquired the consciousness that is his to-day by having permeated the pure plant-body with desires, with the body of passions. Thereby he has risen higher on the path to self-consciousness. But this has been achieved at the cost of permeating pure plant-substance with desire.

The pupils of the Grail were told of a state to which man would attain in the future. Possessed of clear, alert consciousness, his being would be purified, the substance of his body would become as pure and chaste as that of the plant, and his organs of reproduction transformed. The idea living in the minds of the Knights of the Grail was that the man of the future will have powers of reproduction not filled with the element of desire but as chaste and pure as the calyx which turns towards the ‘love-lance’—the rays of the sun. The Grail Ideal will be fulfilled when man brings forth his like with the purity and chastity of the plant, when he brings forth his own image in the higher calyx and becomes a creator in the Spirit. This ideal was known as the Holy Grail the transformed reproductive organs which bring forth the human being as purely and as chastely as the word is brought forth to-day by the waves of air working through the larynx.

And now let us see how this sublime ideal lived on the heart and soul of Richard Wagner.—In the year 1857, on Good Friday, he was standing on the balcony of the summer-house at the Villa Wesendonck and as he looked out over the landscape he saw the budding of the early spring flowers. The sight of the young plants revealed to him the mystery of the Holy Grail, the mystery of the coming-to-birth of all that is implicit in the image of the Holy Grail. All this he felt in connection with Good Friday and in the mood that fell upon him the first idea of Parsifal was born. Many things happened in the intervening period but the feeling remained in him and out of it he created the figure of Parsifal—the figure in whom knowledge is sublimated to feeling, the figure who having suffered for others, becomes “a knower through compassion.” And the Amfortas-mystery portrays how human nature in the course of evolution has been wounded by the lance of defiled love.

Such, then, is the mystery of the Holy Grail. It must be approached with the greatest delicacy; we should try to get at the whole mood and feeling and let the ideas in their totality stand before our souls. Wherever we look we find that as an artist and as a human being, Richard Wagner's achievements were based upon Mysticism. So clear, so full of mystical feeling was his realisation of his mission that he said to himself: The art which is living in me as an ideal must at the same time be divine worship. He realised that the three streams (religion, science, art) converge into one another and he desired to be a representative of this re-union. Out of his insight was born that feeling which though mystical in essence is yet clear as daylight and which lived in all the great masters. It lived, too, in Goethe who wrote: “The man who overcomes himself breaks that power which binds all beings.” When this urge to give freedom to the Ego, to penetrate into world-mysteries pulsates through all a man's forces and faculties, then he is a Mystic—in every domain of life. No matter whether his activities in the outer world are connected with religion, science or art—he works through to the point of unification. Goethe was trying to express this mystery of man as a whole and complete being, when he clothed the secret of his own soul in the words: “He who has science and art has religion too. He who has not these twain, let him think he has religion!”

Translated by Steiner Online Library

Dear attendees! For many years now, I have had the honor of giving a lecture here almost every winter, as in various cities in Germany, on topics in the field that I dare to call spiritual science. In our fateful time, however, it will be appropriate to turn our attention to the events of which we are all participants and witnesses during this time. This seems all the more appropriate to me, esteemed attendees, as it is my conviction, flowing not from a dark feeling but from spiritual science itself, that precisely what spiritual scientific world knowledge is, is intimately connected with what the German people and the German soul have produced as the world picture of German idealism, which revealed itself most impressively and powerfully out of this German soul at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth century, but which has continued to work and has worked into our days.

In the true sense of being a study of spiritual life, spiritual science wants to be a continuation of what the natural scientific world view has achieved for the outer world of the senses. But to mature the spirit for such an understanding of the spiritual foundations of the world, this world view of German Idealism seems to me – as I said, I say this from the knowledge of the spirit itself – but this world view of German Idealism seems to me to be the actual root and the actual source. Therefore, allow me this evening to present a kind of reflection on this world view of German idealism and its influence on the present, its effect on the whole of time formation and on the world-historical development of humanity.

Of course, this world view of German idealism is born, entirely born, as we shall see, out of the essence of German nationality, and in this respect one could deny it a certain comprehensive validity according to the saying often heard today: All knowledge, all science must actually assume an international character and becomes untrue to itself if it proves to be in any way shaded by the aspect of one nation.

As plausible as it may seem at first, I would like to say, as self-evident as such an assertion appears, one must still say that from a deeper world view point of view it is misleading. It seems self-evident because it is, I would say, the most extraordinary thing that can be said about science and penetration into world knowledge. When we speak of the internationality of knowledge and insight, we are actually saying no more than that the sun or the moon are the common thought of all people. That is what they are; but the way in which what people have to say about the sun and the moon speaks from the souls, from the hearts of people, this way, it is different according to the talents, according to the spiritual directions and dispositions of the different peoples. The most diverse talents are involved in order to make this knowledge fruitful for human spiritual culture in one direction or another. That is precisely what is at stake: the extent to which what can be known can penetrate into all human spiritual development in a healthy way. But in this the talents, the soul directions of the different peoples have their very distinct specificity. Otherwise, how could it be otherwise meaningful to understand that one of the most German minds, Goethe, when he had begun his journey through the world, in order to see not only what was offered to him in the contemplation of art, but also what nature could offer him. How else could it have been possible for him to write to his German friends from Italy: “After all the natural phenomena and facts I have seen in public, I would now most like to take a trip to India - so said Goethe - not to discover it, but to see what I have discovered in my own way.

The way in which we view what is given to everyone is what matters when we consider the actual impulses and driving forces for the progress of humanity as a whole.

Now it is precisely possible for spiritual science to look at the souls of nations in a truly cognitive way. To do so, however, one must start from a spiritual-scientific insight that - like so many insights today - may be regarded by some as paradoxical, perhaps even fantastic. But what I will say next about the souls of different peoples from a spiritual-scientific point of view is something that may still seem fantastic and paradoxical to the present day, but which human knowledge wants to incorporate, just as certain physical and certain scientific knowledge has incorporated.

If we consider the soul today in the light of current psychology, we see everything that swirls and lives in the soul in terms of impulses of will, feelings, perceptions, thoughts and ideas as a unity. Of course it is; but that does not lead to any real knowledge. Nor does one come to a real understanding of the soul itself, as one might come to a real understanding of light if one did not perceive its interaction with material existence, with material things that confront it, in such a way that one would believe that one would emerge from the light the different shades of colors: the reddish-yellow nuance on one side, the green nuance in the middle, the bluish-violet nuance on the other side - just as the physicist, in his interaction with material existence, must observe these color shades, structured from this one light , and how he cannot come to an understanding of the deeds of light, as Goethe says, in any other way, one cannot come to an understanding of what the human soul actually is if one does not, I would say, also divide it into three shades of its being. And so we call the first shade of the soul being - corresponding, as it were, to the red-yellow shades of light in the rainbow - [...] then the human sentient soul. The human sentient soul contains everything that often wells up unconsciously and subconsciously from the dark depths of the soul. Everything that lives in a person without them immediately having an intellectual grasp of it – their passions, their desires and so on, as well as what gives people this or that temperament – all this wells up in the sentient soul. But in this sentient soul is contained at the same time, in a certain way, if also, one might say, in a natural way, that which can be called the eternal powers of the human soul, which pass through births and deaths and can reappear in repeated earthly lives.

Let us distinguish – as it were, as a parallel phenomenon for the greenish shading of the light – let us distinguish the so-called intellectual or emotional soul. This is the part of the soul through which man acquires an overview, a rationally considered overview, a level-headed overview of that which would otherwise live indeterminately and unconsciously in his soul as affects, as inner tremors.

And as the third shade of life - corresponding to the color blue-violet in the light - we speak of the consciousness soul. It is that through which the human being is most connected, from his soul existence, with the surrounding physical world in which he finds himself; it is that which contains within itself the most temporal, the most transient, power of human being; it is also that through which the human being appears individually as a personality, through which he puts the world to use, through which he puts that which he deliberately lets flow out of the subconscious soul life into practical life.

And just as the one light, the one sunlight, lives in the different colors of the rainbow, so the one I, the one, self-aware being of man, lives in the totality of the shades of the soul. And just as the light appears as the unity of that red and green and blue, as the unity of everything, so the self appears, so the personality, the individuality of man, the actual I appears.

I cannot say more today in the way of an introduction to this scientifically well-founded fact, law of the soul, because it seems appropriate to me to apply this law of the soul to the different national souls, insofar as they are spread over European intellectual life.

We have to say that [...] what can be called the soul of a nation is just as much a reality for spiritual science, something alive in itself, not just an abstract concept that summarizes the characteristics of a nation, but something alive in itself. You will also find the necessary references for this in our spiritual science literature, especially in my Theosophy.

And here we must say that the individual nations differ so much that in one nation more of the shades of the sentient soul comes to the fore, in another nation more of a different shade of soul life. In this way the European peoples are structured according to their folk souls – not the individual people, but to the extent that these individual people belong to the folk soul – they bring to manifestation that which lives as the shade of the rainbow in the individual folk souls.

In this context, the approach that I would like to say is justified by spiritual science shows us that when we look to the south, to the Italian people – to some extent this also applies to the Spanish people – when we look to the Italian people, we see that the folk soul of the Italian people is expressed through the shades of the and everything that can be observed in the various expressions of this Italian national soul, in its good and bad aspects, is connected with the fact that the Italian national soul is dominated by the shades of the sentient soul, that everything springs from the sentient soul.

Today, we only want to emphasize the best qualities of the Italian people that come from their emotional soul; but it will be seen that the Italian people, insofar as they appear as a national soul – not as individual human beings, as I said – must have a certain one-sidedness because their expressions and revelations come from the emotional soul. Yes, if we take the greatest – I will refrain from the development of art, the actual visual arts, but they could very easily prove exactly what I have to say – if we take the greatest – Dante, Giordano Bruno – we learn, precisely when we immerse ourselves in them, that what they have achieved in a gloriously designed world view is created entirely from the sentient soul. One only has to read Giordano's work to see how he has become a great inspirer. When one delves into what he has brought, it is like an expression of feeling for the world view that man can create out of the abundance of the world's phenomena. Feeling lives in this one of the greatest [spirits of] Italians, in Giordano Bruno. I would just like to hint at this.

It is particularly important to look at the French national soul from the point of view that has been gained. This French national soul shows itself to the spiritual-scientific gaze in such a way that it actually sets the tone for the chiseling of the intellectual soul. Everything in the French spirit that appears great but also one-sided stems from the fact that the intellectual soul finds particular expression there. And today we shall mention only that which has influenced the development of an actual world view. The greatest Frenchman in this field, under whose influence French world-view life still stands today, was born at the end of the sixteenth century and lived into the seventeenth century, namely Descartes or Cartesius; but it is precisely in this Descartes or Cart esius, the man of world-view who emerged at the dawn of the newer development of world-view — one can see how in him in particular everything lives that can lead from the intellect to a world-picture. His saying, “I think, therefore I am,” has become famous. Thinking, that is, that which lives in the soul of the intellect, is now based on the being of the soul itself.

The human mind still has the peculiarity of building the world as if it were externally mechanical. It is indeed the peculiarity of the mind that it is unable to penetrate the inner vitality of the world, that it shrinks back, as it were, from the inner vitality, and that it wants to construct everything. But this is particularly evident in Descartes, in Cartesius. And now we will draw attention to one particular way in which this world view of Descartes came about: I would say that it is the one-sided expression of intellectual life. Descartes looks at the world; and after he has given himself over to doubting everything (and this doubt is also, in turn, an expression of the intellectual way of looking at the world), he comes to saying to himself how he can form a world picture that has sensuality. Indeed, this world view becomes such that everything mechanical only wants to be included in it. The world appears as a great mechanism. And it is characteristic of this – I would say genuinely French – world view that Descartes explicitly states: we can only perceive soul in ourselves, as humans. Animals are moving machines. Descartes denies that animals, or indeed all of nature except for human beings, have souls. Animals are automatons.

Thus, for Descartes, the whole of nature except for human beings is like a complicated machine, and animals are within this complicated machine. Indeed, it is precisely the rational mind that recoils from the living. And this intellectualism, it remained in its one-sidedness, and in the end it led to the fact that precisely from France and right up to our times the impetus has been given to establish the actual materialism of the world view, of mechanism, one might say, the world view,

Dear attendees, one could very easily reproach the one who describes the relationships of the folk souls in this way today: Yes, you are describing the feelings of the present time, because the war has brought about a situation in which what we ourselves regard as our world view, as the source of our national identity, is being vilified and even defamed from all sides in Europe. And so we are now trying – I would say – in this time to either justify or avenge ourselves.

Now, esteemed attendees, there are listeners here who know that what I am saying about the different national souls in these difficult times of European events is something I have said again and again for many years, long before this war, and not only to Germans but also to members of other European nations. I consider this to be a firm result of spiritual scientific knowledge about European conditions.

The mechanistic nature of this worldview has been so ingrained in French culture to this day that it has allowed what was French, materialistic or mechanistic world view to emerge. And today we may recall how Goethe, even as a young man, confronted the French mechanistic worldview from his German consciousness, which seeks to take account of the living soul and the vitality of the worldview. He said: They bring us this mechanical play, a mechanism only, a worldview as if the whole world were just a game, a real automaton! Yes, if only what one sees in the world of phenomena could at least be explained to one! These are moving atoms! But then, when he has explained how the atoms collide, he withdraws and leaves the whole world unexplained.

This is what repels Goethe, even as a young man, about the one-sidedness that arises from a purely intellectual development of a world view. And basically, to this day, we can see how this mechanistic world view affects what we seek in a worldview, a folk worldview. For only a few individuals have tried to work their way out of it, for example, the famous philosopher Bergson, I don't know whether one can still mention him today, after the beginning of the war, after the mood of the French, or whether the word Bergson is now taboo as his name in France, I don't know. It is precisely Bergson who, since the war broke out, one might say, has continually presented his French to his French in the most savage manner against the German essence, namely against the German world view, and has managed to that it is precisely the Germans – who were great in a certain way, especially during the period of German idealism – but who have now fallen so low in the present day, [the Germans] have become a nation that only trains itself mechanically and in a machine-like way. The Germans have become a nation that itself represents only a kind of machine!

Bergson probably thought – Bergson, who formed this view of the German people because the Germans opposed the French with cannons and rifles – he probably formed this view because he believed that the Germans will oppose the products of what he calls the “greatness, the great age” of the Germans to the French cannons and French rifles by reciting Novalis and Schiller and Goethe, because that is all they would rely on, right!

Well, this Bergson, he has in a sense worked his way out. But I showed in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” - which was not written during the outbreak of the war, but appeared at the very beginning of the war and was finished long before - that those of Bergson's thoughts that are reasonably plausible could be found long before that in much more intense and much more thorough form in the minds of German thinkers! But quite apart from that, Bergson always wants to be seen as the one who brought the French a world view that went far beyond the mechanistic and materialistic view of things.

Now, this world view, how did Bergson himself present it to the Germans in his lectures, to these Germans who are said to have come down so much since the time of their greatness? It is just a shame that it has been possible to prove, especially in recent times, that Bergson copied entire pages – not just repeating, but copying – from the German philosopher Schelling, the German philosopher Schopenhauer, and so on, and so on!

What the Frenchman is able to counter as a higher world view to the German, whom he defames, esteemed attendees, is something he himself has copied! It is necessary to bear these things in mind more often in the present if one wants to have an understanding of the mutual relationship between the European peoples and what is now being said about this relationship by the opponents of this German essence.

And, dearest attendees, when we turn our eye to the British national soul, we find that this British national soul bears the very shade of the consciousness soul. And in every detail of this British national soul, one can see how it expresses this consciousness soul, how the British, the Englishman in particular, has the intention of putting what wells up from his inner being into the service of practical life alone.

This is what English culture has in itself, without taking into account the development of the whole world view. Starting with Milton and Bacon, it can be seen everywhere that a world view was actually sought that was to be placed only at the service of the actually immediately tangible life. But I will refrain from that now, I will only point out that in the very last period, this English national character, insofar as it really arose from the British national character, has led to a very peculiar direction: truth, that is what a person who has a sense of truth regards as something that is intimately and genuinely connected to the soul as a reality. Ladies and gentlemen: The English – and in this case in harmony with the Americans – have developed a world view that they call pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? Well, this pragmatism, dear attendees, is characterized above all by the fact that it treats the truth, the concept, the idea of truth itself, in a highly peculiar way. Truth as something that connects the soul with reality, with spiritual reality, is something that this pragmatism, this primeval English product, does not recognize at all. Man perceives truth as an idea, as an idea - in the sense of pragmatism - purely for the purpose of dealing with the external world of the senses, with external tangible reality, in order to intervene in it. In the sense of this pragmatism, truth is a concept that proves useful for practical life. One could say that truth is a tool for usefulness in the very outermost sense, including scientific truth, when understood in this way. Truth has no independent significance, but only serves as a tool for finding one's way in the outer life – that is what this pragmatism has brought forth.

Do we not see this consciousness soul, which places everything that the human being produces in a spiritual way only at the service of the external life? Do we not see it at work in all the details - most honored attendees - that are found in the three peoples mentioned, that order and inner understanding will come into the matter when they are considered in terms of the guidelines that can only be briefly sketched here, but which can be fully substantiated from the insights of spiritual science?

And if we now turn our gaze to the center of Europe, let us turn our gaze to German spiritual life, insofar as it is rooted in its national character. Let us turn our gaze to that spiritual striving within the German people that is to lead to a world view, to such a world view that at least corresponds to the German being, the German national character, then we find confirmed in the most comprehensive way that spiritual science also shows in other respects that this German soul is shaded in such a way that it appears like light in three different color shades: in reddish-yellow, in greenish, and in bluish-violet. That the German soul is such that the I, the self-awareness, works through the three different soul nuances, the unity of the soul-living, working through all three soul nuances, this turns out to be the essence of the German national spirit, the German national soul, in a truly lively, penetrating observation.

And this can be said in a completely objective sense; it does not require any kind of one-sided nationalistic view, as we see it emerging from the Italian, French, and British national souls.

The German is in a position to be able to truly rely on what an insight into his nature, striven for in the soul, gives him, and [he is in a position] to understand his nature from this insight.

And if one wants historical proof that this I, this self, the whole living personality in German national character is really effective through the three soul nuances, then one can present precisely the three great world-view men who, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, so clearly emerged within German intellectual life and sought to reveal German national character at the highest spiritual level. Kant, who tried to educate himself from philosophy, was indeed ahead of them; but we do not want to look at him, although he provided the foundation for the others, so to speak.

But before our soul we want to place one of the most German men, one of those men who knew - even when they strove with their thoughts to the highest, to a world view - that they can only gain this world view in the right sense, in the living sense, within the German essence if this world view is the result of a conversation with the German national spirit itself. And so Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, knew that in the world view he created, German essence was most wonderfully revealed. How does he appear to us when we first consider his personality only in terms of appearance?

Allow me, esteemed attendees, to mention just a few essential traits of his life, so that we can see how this whole man, Fichte, attempts to obtain, from the unity of human life, from the self itself, that which illuminates the world in its deepest life and can bring it to knowledge for man.

The young Fichte, how does he appear to us? Two traits, wonderfully real in this sensitive beauty, we can hardly find them in any other mind: the six-year-old son of a simple, rural man is first of all a decent student; and because he is such a good student, he is given the book “Gehörnte Siegfried” by his father as a Christmas reward - he can already read. It soon becomes apparent that Johann Gottlieb Fichte is becoming somewhat inattentive in his studies; he is reproached for this. We see him one day standing by the stream that flows past his parents' house, throwing into it the “Gehörnte Siegfried”, which has become so dear to him, on which he has pinned his entire soul. And when his father comes along, the father realizes the reason for the boy's strange behavior: he could not tolerate, in the face of the iron concept of duty that was already living in him at the root of his soul, that what was dear to him as a human being, as a personality, should remain with him if he could violate his duty over it. Thus, even the boy Fichte, the six-year-old boy, feels trapped in a world that is, I would say, completely permeated by forces of duty.

Later, when Johann Gottlieb Fichte was nine years old, the village where his parents lived was visited by the estate neighbor. He actually wanted to hear the sermon on Sunday; but he came too late. What happened? Because the pastor had already delivered the sermon, they showed him the young boy, the nine-year-old boy in the blue farmer's coat, who at first behaved awkwardly, but then, when he saw what they wanted from him, came to life and now the whole sermon, which he had listened to as a nine-year-old boy, had listened to as a nine-year-old boy, and he now recites it word for word to the neighbor of the estate, so that everything he said comes from his soul – he had connected with the innermost view of his soul with what he had just heard, and so he could let it flow out again from the innermost. Thus he lived a spiritual life in the immediacy of his own being. Thus he was prepared to find in Fichte the world picture of German idealism, which was able to flow to him, I might say, admittedly from a certain one-sided point of view, but still from a genuinely German one.

Fichte's fundamental awareness of the fact that what lives in the human being, what is inside this I, how it contains the source forces of the world itself – that which pervades and permeates the world in a divine-spiritual way – how this can be found if only man plunges completely into the depths of his inner being, this is evident in all of Fichte's work. He was appointed to the professorship in Jena relatively early, which at that time was the center of German intellectual life. But the way in which Fichte as a teacher affected his listeners is really quite different from what one - I would say usually dreams of.

People who heard Fichte characterize him in the following way: When Fichte spoke, it was like rolling thunder that discharged in sparks of lightning; and when he spoke, he wanted to educate not only good, but great individuals. And one of those who had listened to some of those standing nearby said: What Fichte said revealed that he had not practical, but bold images, energetic images, that his imagination was not graceful in the proper sense but forceful and powerful, and that he speaks in the realm of thought, in the realm of ideas, not like one who merely makes grand words, but like one who is able to rule in this invisible, in this supersensible world.

When Fichte spoke to his listeners, he did not merely seek to communicate to them the content of what he had to say to them. He never spoke the same thing twice about a subject; he never spoke in such a way – I would say that he had only a certain content in his soul that he wanted to convey to his listeners, but rather he had in his own inner being an overall feeling of what he wanted to say, an overall feeling, and above all he sought to establish an inner bond between himself and each individual listener. He wanted that which lived in his soul to become active, not just as a word, but as a force in each individual listener, [but] that it resound in each individual listener himself. He wanted to pour a living fluid over his entire audience. He wanted the listeners, when they had heard his phrases, to leave with a different inner life than when they came. He wanted to awaken something in them. But that is how he worked, vividly, seizing the self.

And so Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was able to completely negate, I would say, that which emerged from Descartes' rational world view. Striving to be in one's own self and to strive for the divine in the self, by starting from thinking, and because one thinks, one shows – Fichte could not approve of that either – so the self would have been something dead. For him, the ego was something that could never become dead, for the reason that it constantly creates itself. It cannot cease to be - because it constantly creates itself. That is to say: He saw the essence of the ego - Fichte - in the will. And by the fact that the ego wills itself, it places itself into the world through its own power.

But this also had to result in a world view for Fichte that saw in the will that pervades the world as the actual active force in the world. And the wonderful thing about Fichte is that he says: This external sense world, as it presents itself to us, is not the true, real one. Why is it there? It is there so that man can appear within this sensory world as a sensual being; so that in this human being the will that permeates the world and expresses itself as the divine duty that permeates the world, so that this will forms a material, in order to fulfill the duty, in order to fulfill the moral. Thus, for Fichte, the whole world is permeated by moral substance, by moral reality. For him, the whole world is a spiritual whole of duty, and that which exists as an individual is so that duty, so that the will, so that the divine that is alive in the will can live out itself.

Fichte calls the external sensual world matter, the sensualized material of duty. If one tries to hold together Fichte's placing in a divine-moral world order with the mechanistic materialism that emerged from a unified rational world view, as with Descartes —- Cartesius —, one tries to recognize how this Johann Gottlieb Fichte lived - I would like to say - a certain inner connection of the soul with what, as the divine, flows through and permeates the world, how he then tried to see this connection in the individual national spirits. But Fichte could only ascribe to the German national spirit the ability of a national spirit to grasp this living connection with the universal spirit in the ego. And so Fichte became quite aware that the German national spirit, in connection with the development of humanity, would be called upon to bring living knowledge in place of mechanistic, dead knowledge.

But what is true is that the “Addresses to the German Nation” are pulsating with an ethos, a world-historical sense of duty. Fichte delivered these magnificent addresses in Berlin, in the midst of the enemies who had invaded Berlin at that time, and during his Address to the German Nation, where he sought to show how the German national spirit is called upon to grasp, out of the living self, the connection of the human being with the spirit of the world, when he delivered these speeches, which can still have a wonderfully inspiring effect on the German mind today, the marching French regiments drummed outside. He could have been captured by the enemy at any moment. But he also stood firm as the German man, aware that he had to express the world-historical mission of the German national spirit.

One need not, honored attendees, take a one-sided view today that one should accept the philosophy, the worldview, of such a mind in terms of its content as dogma. Today we can go beyond that. We do not have to profess everything that Fichte said here or there, or what the others said, which we will discuss later; we can turn our attention to the way these people strive and how, in this striving, they show – which Fichte was also fully aware of – that they wanted to draw from the depths of the German national spirit.

Thus, we see Johann Gottlieb Fichte as one of those who, out of German Idealism, sought a world view. We want to look at this striving in him, and also in the others, not at what they said. One need not be a follower of anyone whom one finds to be a great and admirable personality, but one can continue to be inspired by the individual striving, even in those areas where one believes that one cannot go with him in terms of the content of a teaching. But it is not the doctrine that matters, it is the personality that matters, which, as it stands, can serve to characterize the German people themselves, because it must lie in the essence of the German people if, as I would say, with Fichte, such a thing can arise from this German essence with such awareness as Fichte brought forth from this German essence.

Then we see Fichte's succession from another, from Schelling. Schelling is also such a personality. I am convinced, dear attendees, that precisely these three figures, whom I am speaking of here, will be called upon again when the time, which is certainly a time of great hopes and activity that we are living through, but which is also a difficult time of trial, when this time will bear fruit.

We see Fichte's successor in Schelling. In him, too, we have a personality who wants to create a world picture directly from the depths of the ego, because he is clear that the divine-spiritual is at work in what man experiences in his innermost being, and that this divine-spiritual floods through all nature and all being and can be grasped in its activity in the world. If only man is able to experience his ego strongly enough within himself.

If for Fichte the divine essence is something that permeates the world – I would like to say – like a great weaving and working morality, then for Schelling the divine essence is first of all the great artist who, out of the artistic weaving of his own being, first confronts nature in order to see his own truth, his own being and working in the mirror of nature. For Schelling, God's work of art is nature. No natural science that is to be abstractly intellectual - a natural science that works in such a way that with every idea that is brought forth about nature, the human soul feels at the same time related to nature. But Schelling feels this nature in such a way that he says: Now man has emerged, now other animated beings have emerged in nature. But all of nature had preceded this, as it were, as the unconscious and subconscious, which had to be present beforehand like a skeleton. The whole spiritualized world view is nature; as the past and at the same time as the solid ground for the present; as the past in terms of material on which the spirit can stand, having prepared its existence in the existence of nature. And so, for Schelling, nature and spirit grow together, but they grow together in such a way that what lives out of Schelling as a world view of German idealism is again connected to the entire personality, not just one-sidedly with the sentient soul, one-sidedly with the consciousness soul, one-sidedly with the mind soul, but out of the fullness of the soul's being. One would like to say: This whole Schelling was there.

Those who knew him personally described how, even in old age, he spoke with his eyes sparkling, as if he wanted to pour out to his listeners through the shining gaze of his eyes what lived in his inner being as a spiritualized, ensouled nature, whereby he always felt that the soul of man was interwoven with all of nature. Schelling felt that this world view, which I would describe as having been woven out of the German mind, out of the soul of the emotions – as was the case with Fichte, out of the soul of the will – carried him to ever greater heights, to the point where he could ultimately be understood only to a limited extent. God as the artist, nature as a wonderful work of art, knowledge of nature through the senses, which Schelling believed was so interwoven with the human ego that he was carried away to say: To recognize nature is to create nature.

Of course, these spirits were one-sided; but they were as one-sided as all human beings are one-sided, who have the faults of their virtues, not the faults of their small characteristics. - To recognize nature is to create nature! He felt that whatever lives as a force in nature can be grasped by the soul if that soul only grasps itself in its own ego, that nature can be recreated.

And the third one is the much-maligned Hegel, who is, however, revered by some in the present day. If Fichte tried to revive in the will that can permeate everything, in the ego, if Schelling tried to create an idealistic world view in the world mind that comes to life in the ego and spiritualizes and ensouls everything, then Hegel tries to create a world view out of pure concepts, out of the idea. And with Hegel in particular it is obvious that he wanted to grasp a world picture in concepts, in ideas, to compare this Hegelian world picture with the mechanistic, with the intellectual one of Cartesius, of Descartes: there everything is intellectual! But what did Hegel want? Hegel did not want the concept, the idea, in such a way that his world picture was only an instrument, as it were, to recognize an external reality. Hegel wanted to have this world in such a way that the human soul, for its part, experiences the concepts themselves, that it lives with its I into the icy regions, but thereby also forms the experience of the pure concept. For Hegel had the inner experience - one may call it the inner experience - that when man grasps the ideas of the world in their purity, that he may then partake with the innermost part of his I-being in what, as divine thought itself, underlying all of the world, participating in the thought-work of the Godhead, because a thought in the soul is, so to speak, only an ideational representation of that which, as a divine thought, permeates the world - that is what Hegel wanted.

This world view is also one-sided, because it reduces the divine spiritual beings that underlie the world to mere logic, because the whole world is reduced to a mere skeleton of its reality. But it is significant that for once — I would like to say — there appeared a stage in the development of the German being, this inwardly living feeling and interweaving of a thought that permeates the world: I want to unite myself with the thought that is active in the world, and I am convinced that in so doing I have not only something in my soul that outwardly reflects the world, but that when thoughts flow through my soul, it is divine activity itself that allows its thoughts to appear in my soul — those thoughts according to which minerals, plants, animals and human beings are created. Outside, God creates the form and the facts according to the ideas; then, having stripped them of the material, he lets these ideas flow through the human soul, and man participates by surrendering to this flow in a mysticism that is not vague, not an emotional mysticism, but an idea-mysticism, crystal clear: Man participates in the efficacy of divine thoughts in the world!

Yes, esteemed attendees, with these three figures – who, much more than one might think, also in the period when they were rarely mentioned, in the second half of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, live on in the German essence – in these three figures, the world view of German idealism presents itself to us, that German idealism that was called upon – and we can see this directly and objectively in these minds, the spirits of this German idealism, - was called upon - I would say cognitively, I emphasize explicitly, not religiously, but cognitively - although the cognitive is a support of the religious, the religious emerges from another part - to conjure up the second great tidal wave in terms of a human world view from the depths of human existence.

Let us look across to Asia. Asia, especially India, still retains, I would say, an ancient world view in which the human being has also tried to come to that from the depths of his being, which as divine-spiritual flows through, works through and lives through the world. But how does the Asian and the descendant of this ancient Asian, the present-day Indian, attempt to make the divine-spiritual activity and flow in the world present in their own soul being? By attenuating and paralyzing the soul and paralyzing the I. The I must be extinguished so that the human being can give themselves over to the general flow of Brahman. This is the ancient striving for a world picture, I would say, the primeval striving for a world picture. Characteristic of this is that the ego is tuned down, paralyzed to the point of extinction, so that what the human being experiences in his ego does not stand in the way when he wants to revive in his soul that which flows through the world in a divine-spiritual way, giving it soul. To extinguish himself so that the Divine may work in him, that is the ideal of this Pan-Asiatic world picture.

This world picture was no longer possible when the greatest event in the world development of humanity had taken place. This world picture was no longer possible when the Christ Impulse had entered into humanity. From the religious side, humanity was given a deepening, of such magnitude that the Asian religion may never again emerge in its strength, for it could never again be adequate to this event, in which the Christ Impulse lives as the highest event. It was the destiny of the German national spirit to have created an understanding of earthly existence that is adequate to the Christ Impulse.

And these three spirits are like the three symptoms in which the striving for such a world view is expressed. As I said, how does one not seek such a world view by extinguishing the self! We have seen how these three spirits in particular – Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – want to fully live out the I, how they place it at the center of the three soul shades, not by extinguishing the I, but precisely by fully experiencing it, by elevating the I; how the divine-spiritual flows into this I, that is what was incumbent on the German national spirit. And it could do so because it was able to let the I shine through the three soul nuances, just as the unified light shines through the three rainbow nuances.

To place oneself in the more recent development of the world as those who now place everything that is recognized of the existence of nature and soul in the service of such an idealistic world view, that was the duty of the greatest German thinkers, who knew themselves to be one with what the truly German national spirit wants in the further development of humanity.

It seems appropriate to me to point this out to you today, esteemed attendees. What will become of the great external events will be decided by weapons and other circumstances. But it seems appropriate to me, especially in the present, to delve into the nature of the German national spirit itself, which is now being reviled and slandered from all sides, and which, precisely because it must work in the manner indicated, is so little understood by those who, out of their hatred, today all around us, not only misunderstand the German world view, but also want to misunderstand it. But they cannot understand it because they work in a one-sided way, in the one-sidedness of their particular shade of soul; whereas the German must work out of his nature, out of his whole being, towards a wholeness.

A kind of reverent mood is poured out over what the German spirit is meant to achieve in the world. This German national soul is particularly predisposed to acquiring knowledge through nature and the soul, and then enriching this knowledge in the soul so that this knowledge is like the soul's approach to the divine being.

If we do not see this – and I would like to read these words to you literally – if we do not see this beautifully when we look at those who always wanted to visualize from the depths of the German being, that which is the German folk spirit? Do we not see this striving - to know what the German can know, how to make it accessible to the divine-spiritual, to develop a devout mood in science as well? How beautiful and wonderful it is, for example, when a German — and that is precisely why he may perhaps be mentioned today — who appears in Austria as one of the greatest German-Austrians, delves into the German essence, even if he has not perhaps arrived at the concepts that have been developed today and presented to us, so as to feel the full expression of what has been developed in ideas today here: I am referring to Robert Hamerling, Austria's greatest German poet of modern times, who spoke the beautiful words, feeling like a German in Austria, spoke the beautiful words: Austria is my fatherland; but I feel it: Germany is my motherland - thus expressing the unity that has been so firmly forged today through Germany and Austria, through Central Europe. All these peculiarities of the German national soul, which I have been trying to develop today from the idealistic world view of the Germans - at the time when they believed they could turn back the tide, when the Germans came over from Asia, bringing with them the urge to grasp the Allgeist, which they would later express in their art, in their education, in their philosophy, in all their being and working in the world, by elevating the ego, not by dampening the ego. And there, as in a beautiful poet's dream in his “Germanenzug”, Robert Hamerling remembers - the old ancestors of the Germans are still sitting over there in Asia, while these old ancestors of the Germans are moving into Europe, into the West , Robert Hamerling describes beautifully how these Teutons are camped on the border of Asia and Europe, how the sun goes down - he beautifully describes the moon that rises, the whole landscape -, how the Teutons are camped. Only one is awake: the blond Teut, the youth. But in front of Teut, the future destinies of the Germans are written in the stars in wonderful signs. And the genius of the Germans, the spirit of the German people, speaks to the blond Teut, to the leader of the Germanic peoples to the German West. And Hamerling says beautifully:

"To whom does the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so tender, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the sounds of the strings
His innermost self? Who draws the senses so magnificently
Into the blue of heaven, granite hieroglyphics
of the soul's upsurge from the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
of the searching thought to the stars
so boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Who is led so high, so deep by his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps the near and the far so faithfully?
Where are all the zones of earth and heaven
reflected as in your thinking, O Teuton?

Not from such a self-exalting consciousness, not from national immodesty, as we often find among our opponents today, but from a devout consideration of the nature of the German, of the spiritual nature that has prevailed throughout world history.

The poet speaks of duty, the Austrian poet, in complete harmony with those who have created a German world view, an imaginative world view of the Germans, out of the German world view.

That is why it is so profoundly true what the “Philosophus teutonicus” Jakob Böhme said about all research and reflection on that world view that has a right to exist, which, fundamentally, for the German national character - so Jakob Böhme believes - the search for knowledge, for science, must be a path to God, even if it does not encroach on religion. Jakob Böhme expresses this, thereby characterizing the guiding principle for the world view of German idealism, beautifully from the depths of the German mind. Jakob Böhme says:

“When you see the depths”

he means the depths of heaven

"When you look at the depths of heaven

This is the union of the most beautiful sense of the German national character with the highest striving for knowledge of that which, in a divine and spiritual sense, permeates, interweaves and suffuses the world. Thus, in order to elevate his ego, the German seeks to penetrate into the innermost nature of things, and this is indeed something that can be understood only to a limited extent.

One can see how little it can be understood! There is one of those who, shortly before the beginning of this war, used to move around in Germany as foreign spirits, talking about all kinds of friendships with the German essence, about all kinds of understanding that they claim to have acquired for the German essence: that is Emile Boutroux. Shortly before the war, he even lectured at German universities about how one should revere the depths of the German spirit. And now the true Frenchman [Boutroux] is telling his fellow Frenchmen – he wants to be funny, of course, the good [Boutroux] wants to be funny – he is telling them what a difference there is between the French, the English and the Germans; what we - though for the French, certainly in a joking way - have sought today from the depths of the German character, yes, Boutroux talked about that in a similar way to his French not too long ago. He said: Yes, when the French want to recognize a lion or a hyena – you don't get the news exactly, but that's roughly how he spoke – and in any case, what I am saying is essentially not inaccurate – when the French describe a lion or a hyena, they go to the menagerie and observe the lion or the hyena; when the English want to recognize a lion or a hyena, they travel around the world and observe the life of the lion or the hyena. But when the Germans want to recognize a lion or a hyena, they neither go to a menagerie nor travel around the world, but retreat to their study and design the image of the lion and the hyena from within, without looking at the outside!

It is certainly a witty saying, and we are accustomed to the French speaking wittily from their intellectual culture; it is just a shame that this joke is by Heinrich Heine, repeated by Boutroux, because it comes from Heine; and the Frenchman, who we are accustomed to making good jokes, made a German joke in this case, to make a witty comment about the English and the French! This is another illustration of how the opponents of Germanness try to ascribe to themselves something higher than what a German can live with!

However, this same man recently told his Parisians what a barbaric people the Germans actually are; one can already deduce this from the word. For example, he said: the Germans have no word for generosity; therefore they don't even have this quality, they lack it, only the French have it. On the other hand, the Germans have a word that the French don't have: that is the word 'Schadenfreude'; so only the Germans have the quality of Schadenfreude. The French don't have this ignoble quality. And similar things more are what indicates the spirit from which one today vilifies and degrades the German essence.

But one has not always looked at this German essence in this way! And it would be particularly interesting to see which minds have tried to find their way into this German essence, as one can also see from this just how little account is taken of the actual meaning of this German essence, this spirit. Take, for example, the writer of “The Life of Jesus” — Ernest Renan — he wrote in a corresponding way even during the Franco-Prussian War about German essence to David Friedrich Strauß, who wrote about German essence. Strangely, the Frenchman, Ernest Renan, wrote; he says that at a certain age he realized what this German essence actually means. And he makes an interesting comparison. He says that after he had absorbed the French character in his education, he approached the German character through Goethe and Herder, and it was as if he encountered realities instead of mere concepts, whereas before he had only seen a lot of faded paper flowers. And then he compares the height of German intellectual life, which has been revealed to him in this way, by saying that everything he got to know outside of this German essence seems to him, well, like elementary mathematics to differential and potential mathematics. We shall see in a moment how such a mind itself utilizes, in terms of feeling, what has come to it through contact with the German essence.

But first, let us see a little more of how this Central European, German essence is viewed in the East, in that East from which the European West, that is to say our West, is currently suffering so much for what is, after all, its sphere of influence, its work for freedom and democracy today, this European West. If we have to consider the Russian national soul, we have to say: in Russia's national soul, the direct driving force of the I, everything still lives as something external. The Russian receives his religion as a foreign one, the Greek-Christian religion, which he does not have within him in the form of rebirth, as the German has experienced it from his innermost being, but which he accepts as something like a cloud that hovers over him, that he has from outside. While the Italian works from the sentient soul, the Frenchman from the intellectual and mind soul, the Englishman, the Briton from the consciousness soul, the German from the actual self, the person who truly belongs to the Russian national soul, works from the subconscious of the ego, which still has the ego that the ego has not yet absorbed into itself, which the ego still wants to see in a mystical darkness. This Russian soul, this eastern Russian soul, works like the national soul that has not yet fully come to consciousness.

And this is why this still immature national soul has not only so misunderstood the German national soul, but also all the national souls of Western Europe, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and up to our own times, so infinitely misunderstood them.

People have not even noticed what the relationship is, let us say, between the nature of the German spirit and the Russian spirit. In selfless German modesty, one has naturally included the great Russians – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. They are not to be disparaged here; they can be fully recognized; but one must become aware of the gulf that exists between the Russian and the German essence, and which, especially in the Russian essence, has come to such an immature outbreak and revelation in our own time.

In the course of the nineteenth century, we encounter the best Russian minds, which - I would like to say - philosophically and artistically express, as in a world view, what, in political terms, the “Testament of Peter the Great” – whether it is forged or not, that is not the point now – which, in political terms, aims to achieve the complete annihilation and replacement of Western and Central Europe, as it exists today, with Eastern Europe! [The “Testament of Peter the Great” is the only thing that should be considered sustainable.] But everything, I would like to say, even Russian literary-philosophical and artistic thought, is in the service of this “Testament of Peter the Great”. And this is what we encounter again and again in all of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life.

Then we encounter the best minds in Russia, who turn their gaze to what minds like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel have achieved. I would say that Herzen is able to observe this in a single such spirit. He seeks to delve into what Western culture has brought forth; he finds that it has all grown old, has become decrepit, that it must all disappear, that it is all superficial, because he cannot comprehend how this world view of German Idealism is inwardly lived and interwoven; and so it becomes worthless to him. In his book From the Other Bank, Herzen expresses how all these ideals that have sprung up in Western Europe must be destroyed and how something else must take their place.

One of Herzen's opponents, also a Russian, wrote to Herzen: So you want to destroy everything that has emerged in Western Europe: Greater, more significant – as a Russian wrote to Herzen, one of his Russian opponents, to appeal to his conscience – Greater than all the ideals of Central Europe, is the Russian sheepskin coat to you? – the friend wrote to Herzen!

What does he mean by the “Russian sheep's clothing”? Well, Herzen said it: In what this European culture, this European spiritual life has brought forth, there cannot be anything redemptive, anything salvific for humanity; but that which is salvific for humanity is the Russian peasant; that is, the one who, in all his originality, contains within him that which must flood the whole of Western and Central Europe. And this appears to be so deeply ingrained in Russian souls, especially in the most Russian of Russians, for example in Dostoyevsky, the great artist – whom we want to acknowledge in terms of his skill – that it is increasingly apparent in his work, when we take a closer look at it, that he regards German culture in particular as decrepit and obsolete, and that he already sees Russia as destined to be the redeemer. Basically, the delusional rage that is now to be poured out over Europe is nothing more than the brutal expression of this tendency, which has even found expression in great Russian writers; however, care has been taken to ensure that the good Germans do not become too aware of this, which, I might say, has always lived and breathed between the lines of Russian intellectual life! And so it comes about that - and those who know me better know how much I appreciate Tolstoy - but what is in Tolstoy, especially in such older works as “Anna Karenina” and so on, that shows how he - Tolstoy - always aimed to depict the German character in such a way that it appears decrepit and inferior.

Why have the Germans paid so little attention to such things? Why are they now surprised at the fact that hatred is being heaped on them from all sides? Well, you only have to take the fact that, for example, the older translations of Tolstoy, namely those works by translators that people still read, up to the last translation in the middle of the nineteenth century by [Raphael Löwenfeld], which people no longer read, these translations all either left out the passages in question entirely or translated them differently, so that no one actually knows the real Tolstoy!

It will be necessary, dear honored attendees, to go a little deeper into the nuances that live in the expressions of souls, so that the German knows how to fulfill his mission in the world. And so it came about that even insightful Russian minds, such as the great philosopher Soloviev, rebelled against this generally Russian view, against the view of those who, according to a Russian world view, had grown old and died, and that Russianism should overthrow this European essence.

If I emphasize individual personalities, it is because I want to cite facts and show by individual characteristics how many there are.

There is, for example, one Danilewski, who attempts to address the question in broad terms, entirely in the spirit of the Russian essence I have just hinted at, how Russia must expand, how Europe's west and center are ripe to because the European West and the Center have fulfilled their task; and Danilewski once asks the question in a book that is so completely formed from the Russian point of view: Why does Europe not love us, why does Europe fear us? Now he seeks to answer this question from his own point of view, and Danilevsky writes for his Russians something like this: Europe does not love us because Europe instinctively senses that we are the ones who are actually the only ones still entitled to exist, and who are to replace what lives in the rest of Europe. But Soloviev takes up this question, and Soloviev is one of those who has drawn from this life himself. And the great philosopher Solowjow, who, unbiased by his own Russian nature, takes up this question: Why does Germany not love us? He does not answer this question in the way Danilewski and the spirits of the most diverse kinds of Russians speak, that Europe feared Russia, but Solowjow answers Danilewski's question: Why does Europe not love us? Why does Europe fear us?” and Danilevsky's answer to this: ‘Because Europe instinctively senses that the Russians are the only ones who are still entitled to exist and should replace what is still alive in the rest of Europe,’ Solowjow replies to these words of Danilevsky:

“And yet both the content of his book and his later admissions, as well as those of his like-minded friend”

referring to a certain Strachow

“point to a different answer: Europe looks at us with apprehension and fear”

Solovyov wrote his reply, and it is certainly necessary for anyone who wants to get to know the conditions in the Russian east to listen to these Russians. Solovyov himself says:

"Europe regards us with apprehension and mistrust because dark and obscure elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and inadequate, but because its demands are clearly and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out to Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, conquer Germany, and seize Constantinople and, if possible, India.

And when we are asked how we intend to replace what we have destroyed and failed to accomplish, how we plan to rejuvenate the world intellectually and culturally, we either have to remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill, then instead of dealing with the question “Why doesn't Europe love us,” we would have to deal with another, more important question that is closer to us: “Why and how did we become ill?” Physically, Russia is still quite strong, as it showed in the last Russian war; so our suffering is a moral one. We are burdened, according to the words of an old writer, by the sins hidden in the national character and not conscious to us - and so it is necessary above all to bring these into the light of clear consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts must only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question of true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of the sins of Russia."

Thus the Russian Solowjow, from a spiritual insight into the Russian character, thus the great philosopher Solowjow about Russia itself. And it is interesting to see this in conclusion: how have others perceived this relationship between Russia and the West, even the further West – with whom they are now in league or who is in league with them, one does not quite know how to say – how have others perceived this relationship with their further West? Oh, there are also interesting facts here! For example, a book by the Russian writer Yushakov was published in 1885. In 1885, he wrote a book in which he speaks quite differently from how he was later spoken of regarding the views that he attributes to his Russian people. It is interesting to take a look at Yushakov's ideas.

This man looks across to Asia and says: Yes, over there in Asia, we have peoples who have brought a very old culture from ancient times into more recent times. These peoples, how they have been mistreated by the Europeans. Russia must look across to Asia, and must bring redemption to this sacred, venerable, but by the Europeans mistreated Asian culture, this spiritual culture of Asia. Nice words Jushakow speaks. He says that Russia alone is capable – because it cannot yet grasp the human interior in such a way that it has been made sick and aged by the ego as in the European West – Russia alone can feel related to this Asia, which is now lying prostrate, groaning under the rape of Europe. And an old myth brings Yushakov back to mind when he says: Over there in Asia, Iranian, Turanian peoples are fighting. He himself also includes the Indians, the Persians, and so on, among the Iranian peoples. And then Yushakov says: These have found a wonderful, ancient myth of Ormuzd and Ahriman for their destiny. But we always see Ahriman and Ormuzd at work over there in Asia forever. And there, in his book, Yushakov says – in 1885 – and he points this out in his memoirs, that the Iranians worshiped the good Ormuzd over there in Asia; the good Ormuzd gave the Iranians all the fruits and crops that the earth can produce; they took them for themselves. Then they joined forces with Ahriman. These Europeans have worked like Ahriman, like the evil Ahriman himself. But Russia, by working across into Asia, will liberate people from the evil Ahriman. What the Asians have received under the blessing of the good Ormuzd, the selfish Europeans have appropriated for themselves. Russia will cross over to Asia and help by founding an alliance, yes – Yushakov says it, I have to repeat it to you – an alliance that will be formed with the greatest ideals in the world, as the most spiritual alliance in the world – Yushakov says it all, I am only repeating it. It will be formed by Russian peasants and Cossacks, who will rush over to Asia, which is groaning under European rule, and will carry over what Russia will be able to bring. Then the peasantry and Cossacks will advance into Asia, and Russia will redeem Asia from Ahriman. 1885, think Sic, written by Jushakow. It is interesting to hear some of what Jushakow said at the time in the book, which is called: “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. It says that the comrades of Ahriman, the evil god – from whom Russia must liberate Asia and bring order and harmony – are primarily the English.

The English – says Yushakov – have behaved in this Asia as if they believed that the Asian peoples existed only to clothe themselves in English fabrics, to fight each other with English weapons, to work with English tools, to eat from English vessels and to play with English baubles. And then he says:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but her very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula.”

And so he continues, Yushakov:

“I do not wish anything similar for my homeland – I can only be pleased that it is sufficiently far removed from this state, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

Apparently because these Russians were so keen to distance themselves from this Englishness, so that they could free Asia from this hideous England, they soon allied themselves with this England, not to free Asia, but to destroy Europe.

One must also look at world development from this intellectual perspective in the nineteenth century, and in this way delve into what actually constitutes the German character and how it stands now, this German character, which has to defend itself in a way against the ring that has been formed around it, yes, in a way that can be simply hinted at when numbers are spoken.

These people – who want to keep Germany and Austria locked up in a big fortress today – are taking a stand for freedom, for the rights of small nations, and for all sorts of things they believe in. You only have to look at the numbers: 777 million people in the so-called Entente around the Central European powers, against 150 million; 777 million are “fighting” - let's put that in quotation marks - “fighting” against 150 million, and fighting in such a way that to this day still want to strike at the very essence of their actual bravery, they also want to strike at the German spirit, which they believe they understand so well, that 777 million people are turning against 150 million, joining forces to starve them out, to defeat them with starvation, the better part of bravery.

Actually, they had no need to be envious of what the Central Europeans were taking away from them; for the Entente Powers possess 68 million square kilometers of the earth, compared to 6 million square kilometers of the Central European Powers. One need only let these numbers speak. These numbers speak to this day, and will also speak in world history, ladies and gentlemen, that after all, within these 150 million present-day Central Europeans and on these 6 million square kilometers of Central European soil, those people live who have the world-historical, spiritual mission that we were allowed to speak of, and which they ascribe to themselves not ascribe it to themselves out of national chauvinism, but out of their spiritual gifts, out of the spirit of their Germanness, to which they have not devoted themselves through their egoism, but to which they have to approach if they want to offer the best of their being on the altar of this their national spirit. And those who feel this German essence in Central Europe feel a close bond with it, especially the best in Austria and Germany – and I am allowed to speak about this since I have spent thirty years of my life in Austria:

Precisely the best Austrians, those who have grown up with Central European culture, like the excellent philosopher Carneri, know how to experience and fathom the relationship between their own people and the German national spirit and German essence not out of national chauvinism but out of a sure knowledge of the essence of their own people.

For example, Carneri, the most important Austrian philosopher, says of the English: “Carneri, a wonderful man who, out of the deepest suffering, has founded a spiritual world view that is so completely in line with our time, a conceptual world view from German-Austria. Carneri talks about how the English have really focused their attention on external practical culture and he says: It has become so practical, this culture, that the English had to learn from the Germans the fact that the great playwright and poet Shakespeare lived among them. For it is true that it is only through the Germans delving into Shakespeare that Shakespeare has been recognized at all. And if one day someone has to write the story of Shakespeare's greatness, it will not be an English chapter in intellectual history that they have to write, but a German one.

All this characterizes the nature of the German world view, which creates out of all intellectual inner life, in contrast to everything around it. And so we may well believe that this is what the German must strive for above all else: spiritual science, knowledge of the spirit, just as there is knowledge of nature. Knowledge of the spirit, which must be based above all on the sources, on the roots that lie in the world view of German idealism. This is, as I said, not a conviction born out of blind national sentiment, but a conviction born out of knowledge. It is that which humanity is to scientifically fathom in the future about the spirit, that this must grow out of German national culture – and above all out of the ideal world view of German national culture – as it has been attempted to describe today.

And how little understanding there is among other nations today – let me say this in conclusion – this war can show the German so clearly how little understanding there is on the part of other nations towards the world view of German idealism and the German spirit, and how he must first ensure and strive to ensure that what he is called upon to create out of the depths of the German being can become part of the world development of humanity. The French, how did they look at this world view of German idealism? Or the Russians, for example, how did they look at this world view that the Germans have formed, this world view? The Russians look at it as if it only existed to be destroyed by them, as something decrepit and worn out. While we must see roots and leaves in it, from which the blossoms and fruits must first ripen in the future! We want to commit ourselves to this view! But the Russians need a new delusion; because the ego does not yet live in their soul, they must dream of a new delusion. They need a new delusion.

What do the French need? What do the French need today if they want to characterize their relationship to the German essence? Well, perhaps one could refer to one of their youngest poets to avoid doing them an injustice. What do the French want? They have been so accustomed to their nature being everywhere in Europe, just as the Germans were accustomed to their nature living in the Germans themselves, just as the Germans were accustomed to the way they felt the power, the driving force of what, for example, also lived in this world view of German idealism, up to Lessing, until they had to free themselves, the Germans, [so] these French were so accustomed that their nature lived everywhere in Europe. And after that, they believed that nothing could actually be done without what they did and what they produced intellectually, that everything had to come from them, that they had to be the cause of everything. In a very interesting and witty poem, Rostand, one of their own poets, recently illustrated how the French – that is, his own – national character can be compared to the cock crowing in the morning; and when the cock crows, the sun rises. And because the sun rises when the cock crows, the Frenchman believes that with his crowing he makes the sun rise. So he says to himself: If I don't crow, the sun can't rise!

This is said by the French poet Rostand himself as a characteristic of the French nature. The Frenchman thinks: If he doesn't crow, nothing at all can happen in the world. And that is why it is so incredible that he no longer occupies the position he once did; for it is actually the case that the German character, as expressed by Ranke, for example, is to be defended against the delusion of the crowing of the French national spirit, as early as 1870, when the Germans had to face the French: “We are still fighting against Louis XV!”

The French need a new delusion. The Russians need a new mission. The English – well, one really doesn't want to do them an injustice. What should one say so as not to do them an injustice? They declaim to the world: for the sake of the violation of Belgium's neutrality, for the sake of justice and democracy, we must undertake this war to the point of destroying the German essence; for these Germans are disgraceful people. They preach the principle of might over right. It is likely that one only forgets, as a result of a particularly refined education, that the English minister who decreed this – only recently – that the phrase “might over right” comes from the English philosopher, English utilitarian philosopher Thomas Hobbes. But: “might over right” – and England has adhered to this phrase for centuries. [gap in the transcript] as a professor in England himself, where he said: freedom and democracy, that is something that cannot be united, which should be advocated after the last English history, but that Great Britain's expansion [gap in the transcript], he says, is also a truth, also a practical truth, as the English world view must strive for. Yes, what can you say? “Might is right” – since Thomas Hobbes this principle has been winding its way through English history, concealing the real reasons why England tramples underfoot the entire mission of the German people. Yes, one would not want to do such things an injustice, but one must say: the English need a new lie to drown out that which cannot be compensated for.

The Russians need a new delusion; the French need a new conceit; the English need a new lie. The Italians – yes, a very outstanding man told me even before the Italian war broke out: “Italy needs this war!” There are people, of course, who are not so naive as to have believed that Italy could not join the Entente in this war. Italy needs this war; we must have this war; the Italians have become lethargic, sluggish and lazy; they are actually on the road to the abyss - said this important political figure at the time - and need to have something that will shake them up again, that will awaken them to life, otherwise they will become completely rotten and sluggish! What do these Italians need? These Italians needed a new sensation in order to have something at the same time – just as the French needed imagination, the English needed a new lie, the Russians needed a new delusion, a new mission, so the Italians needed a new saint, something very special! – They truly have a saint, namely, holy egoism – sacro egoismo – which is preached everywhere and on whose altar people are sacrificed. And the apostle of modern Italian nationalism, the hierophant, is Gabriele d'Annunzio! Perhaps history will one day rank him among the buffoons of the mind – that can be said without any national chauvinism. But he will nevertheless stand without dignity as the one who also made sacrifices to this new egoism, the sacro egoismo, which Italy represents and to which they have dedicated themselves, this new saint!

When we see all this going on around us, we can truly say that, without the Germans needing to become as nationally egotistical as those who want to surround, encircle and contain them, we can truly say that, from the inner fertility and knowledge of the greatness of the German essence, to which we humbly bow, we cannot, in arrogance, say that we experience in the German essence: It is the germs, it is the roots, it is the leaves – and the blossoms and the fruits must develop from them. And we can look to the future with confidence and hope!

And finally, I would like to say that – as if in a unified thinking – those who understood the German essence in Central Europe always felt it. One of my teachers in Austria once spoke a beautiful word. I may perhaps read it to you at the end, a little poem. It is called “Austria and Germany”. Today, when Austria and Germany are welded together, I may perhaps read it, this little poem:

"Let Russia and England wisely deliberate,
Perhaps not even find it unwelcome
If we get into a little bit of a fight here,
If they take away our good right!

You, German brothers, will not - advise here,
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And all ambition will fade among us
Before: being one people in word and deed.

And if one among us has failed,
If discord has reigned in a German heart,
There is only one thing that now inspires us:
What we have in common, in joy and in sorrow!
So may we also have in common:
A German war, if not a German peace!

Thus spoke the German of Austria in 1859. Those who feel that they are part of the German national spirit, who recognize it without national chauvinism, are so united in their awareness that loyalty springs from the soul to this German essence. Then this Karl Julius Schröer, who has remained so unknown, but who felt German essence in Austria quite extraordinarily, then he said:

A spirit arises, a giant to behold
[Who does not yet long gather all his strength
The German spirit rises up, aflame with courage
Wherever you look in all German regions.
He has been called a master in many a field,
In art and knowledge, in the building system,
he is first to be seen
then he will be truly recognized by the world.

To see him as a whole, this also includes the symptom that so clearly shows how the immortal martial forces come from the German essence. Likewise, the idealistic world view of the German stems from the primal power of the German essence, which has borne its roots and its leaves, and - looking towards it - we may have faith in the future: it must struggle through to its blossoms and fruits in the future, undisturbed by the hatred of the opposition.

This awareness wells up in us as 150 million people facing 777 million, as standing on 6 million square kilometers against 68 million square kilometers; this wells up in us from the spiritual, from the soul, from the heart of the German spiritual being!

So let us speak out of the knowledge itself and out of the most justified feeling: Yes, by being aware of our essence, we may believe, we may hope that the blossoms and fruits to the roots and leaves of the German being will unfold in the future.

Therefore, we can confidently live into the future of this German national spirit, also from the depths of the German endeavor.

And so may it be, because it must be so!

Dear attendees! For many years now, I have been able to give spiritual science lectures in this city every winter. Even in these fateful times, our friends in the spiritual science movement have asked me to give this lecture today. Now it will seem understandable that in this time, in which such tremendous but also such painful things are happening, in which something so immeasurably significant for European and world history is preparing, that in this time I want to tie such considerations to what moves us all, to that which those who stand in the East and West and who have to stand up for what the great duty of the time demands through blood and death. In such a time, words also want to be directed where feelings and emotions take them, where blood and death defend the great goods of Central Europe, where tremendous decisions must be made. And so today my words are dedicated to the contemplation of that which is being defended in our present time, which is being attacked, defamed and reviled from all sides in this our time. I would like to begin by touching on what I would call the basic principle and aspiration of spiritual science, and then show how this basic aspiration, this innermost impulse of spiritual science – which wants to be a motive that penetrates into the spiritual cultural movement of the present and into the future – how these spiritual scientific impulses are firmly anchored in the supporting forces of the German spirit. And then some highlights will be thrown on the way in which Germany's enemies today disparage, misunderstand and more of this kind this German spirit, this German nature, this Germanness in the east and the West.

I have often had the opportunity to explain here how spiritual science wants to be the true successor of the scientific world view, but that it is in turn the opposite pole of this scientific world view in that it wants to approach the worlds of spiritual life with a truly scientific character. For the spiritual-scientific world view, spirit is not just something that can be grasped in terms, ideas, or abstract concepts. Rather, for spiritual science, spirit is that which reigns in a world that is behind our sensory world, that contains the reasons and driving forces for everything that our sensory world and life, including historical development, offer us, and that takes place within the sensory world. As I said, I can only touch on this today and must refer you to the reading.

Spiritual science prepares the human soul, if he wants to prepare himself for it, so that a realization, a real experience of this soul takes place, which is not bound to the forces of the body, is not bound to the senses, not bound, like the ordinary mind, to the brain, but spiritual science prepares the soul for a body-free cognition through what has been mentioned here more often: meditation, concentration of the life of thought. You can find a more detailed description in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds?” or in the second part of the book “The Secret Science” or in the book “Theosophy”. These books describe the paths that lead people, through inner activity and inner experience, to free the soul-spiritual from its bondage to the body, so that it can dwell in the life and activity, in the reign and work of the spiritual world. What still appears to many people today as fantasy, as absurdity, is to be introduced into today's culture precisely through spiritual science. It is understandable that people say: spiritual science contradicts everything that the five senses comprehend.

It is understandable that people who speak in this way regard spiritual science as a form of dreaming or fantasizing. But people once also regarded the Copernican worldview as a form of dreaming and fantasizing, which, it was said, should also contradict the five senses and their statements. Just as people's thinking habits have become accustomed to accepting the Copernican worldview, so people's thinking habits will also find it increasingly more and more soul-satisfying, a necessary soul experience, a necessary soul harmony to accept spiritual science , which shows how the soul can truly penetrate into a spiritual world in a body-free knowledge, a spiritual world that is not merely a sum of concepts and ideas, but something very concrete, a real spiritual world, a living spiritual world. Thus, as a spiritual researcher, one looks at something that must come, as Copernicanism once entered into human development.

When we take a good look at this view of the living spirit and the relationship of the human soul to it, and then look at what has been prepared over many centuries in the development of the German people and the German character, we may say that all the forces that the German character has applied over the course of many centuries are ultimately aimed at leading to this spiritual science. There is nothing that spiritual science could not find as a germ of itself in what the German spirit has striven for over the centuries. Let me first present you with a characteristic example from more recent times.

The German essence, which for example in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Lessing, when Herder entered the horizon of this German essence, could not be satisfied with a spirit that is only an abstraction, only a sum of ideas. Herder, the great pioneer of the German intellectual world, once called out to Voltaire: “Ideas can only [bring forth ideas].”

For Herder, it was about man finding a way in his soul to experience a truly living, vibrant and vital spiritual world through inner development, just as he lives in the world of the senses through his eyes and ears. And history was not to be understood in such a way that one could speak of history being dominated by ideas, but for Herder history was such that real spiritual beings are active within historical activity, to whom man can look up as to beings of a supersensible world, just as he looks down into the realms below him to the sensual beings of the three natural kingdoms. And so convinced was Herder, the great predecessor, indeed one can say, the teacher of Goethe, that true science of the spirit comes to a real spirit and that humanity is aiming to find such a spiritual science, that he himself, Herder, expresses with beautiful words: [“The human race will not pass away until everything has happened! Until the genius of enlightenment has traversed the earth!”]

By enlightenment he means that knowledge which the German mind has always sought, not through the outer senses and the intellect, but through the inner experience of the soul, which, however, takes one further than happens in everyday life. In his way, Herder took up again what we encounter centuries earlier in the German mystic who stood at the dawn of modern times. In the moment when Angelus Silesius speaks in his images, in which he gives instructions for the path of the soul into a spiritual world. He expresses in one of his images: “It is not I who live and die, but the God-spirituality reigns in me, it is born in me, it lives and dies in me.

The German soul has always sought such a connection with the living spirit. And so the soul's intimate search for this connection with the active spirit was so intense that even the idea of immortality for Angelus Silesius follows directly from the spiritual inner knowledge, the spiritual inner life. For in that he was conscious that the eternal God reigns in me, he also knew that this eternal God is in my soul at the moment of death, where the eternal God cannot die. Since that which lives in the soul is at the same time experienced by God, the idea of immortality is experienced from the spiritual. The idea of immortality, of merging into a spiritual world, is an experience for Angelus Silesius.

As the soul becomes aware of the God within it, it knows that this God cannot die, that death leads into the spiritual world.

And let us think of the great mystic at the beginning of the modern era of German intellectual life, Jakob Böhme. Not to preach a false allegorical activism, but to point out that the life of the senses is only understood when man comprehends that which is not only alive between birth and death, but which passes through the gate of death, I would like to quote Jakob Böhme. He realized that man must penetrate the secrets of death during life. That his powers are kindled when he knows what calls him to a new life in dying, that these powers must already be recognized in this life. That is what the wonderful saying of Jakob Böhme means:

He who does not die before he dies;

He perishes when he dies.

When such words resound from the German spiritual life, one feels how the best souls of German development are permeated by the living supporting forces of the spirit. For it is the supporting power of the German spirit through which the soul, in its highest striving, knows itself to be inwardly and vitally connected with the spirit, so that it experiences that what it can do as the highest, the spirit itself does in it. The soul feels carried by the concrete spirit, not merely by ideas and concepts, which are an abstraction of the human mind and reason and which do not vividly represent the spirit that truly prevails in life. This spirit therefore develops its carrying capacity for the whole of German intellectual life.

And when we look at our best intellectuals, one can see how this sustaining power of the German spirit works in their hearts and souls, how they demonstrate it everywhere in their lives and in their intellectual endeavors.

Truly not to evoke sentimental feelings in you, esteemed attendees, but to show how the sustaining power of the German spirit works in the best German minds right down to the most immediate life, two great minds are taken as the starting point for today's reflection. And these two great minds, let them be considered at the moment of death, Schiller is the first.

We can look into the last days of our Schiller, right into his death chamber, through a friend, the son of the translator of Homer, Voß, the so-called younger Voß. There you see how this Schiller, as his last weeks approach, one could say, already walks around as if he were almost dead, but still participates in all that can be called intellectual interests in his Weimar residence. You can literally see how the strong cohesive forces within him carry him through his last weeks and days with intellectual life. Then we are led into the death chamber. We experience with the description of the young Voß, how Schiller can hardly look out of his eyes, which always looked so benevolent, so loving, so spirited. He has his youngest child brought to him. Voß describes how his eyes, from which on one side death, but also still the mighty soul of fire, how his eyes look at the child. And we can believe that Voß is right when he says in his description that something like the thought spoke from these eyes: “You, my child, I have to leave you so small, I should have been a father to you in so many ways.” Then the dying Schiller handed the child back and turned away, towards the wall.

In reliving these moments, we as a German nation feel as if we could relate to Schiller as this child did. We feel that the sustaining power of the German spirit, which Schiller carried into death, lives on in the German people. But looking up at such great minds, we have to say: Not only much that is great, much that is powerful has been achieved by them, but also much that is embryonic and has yet to be developed. Schiller's thoughts also apply to the German people, that he could still have given them much. But how was Schiller also connected to what can be called the fundamental power of the German spirit? We have a remarkable document that was only found long, long after Schiller's death. In this document, Schiller expresses the following beautiful words about the spirit that the one who gets to know it feels as its supporting force.

He who forms and rules the mind
must ultimately become master, because
finally, at the goal of time, if the
world has a plan, if human
life has any meaning at all, finally
must custom and reason triumph,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all the
fast, fleeting ones.
[...]
Him

– the German –

is destined for the highest,
and just as he is in the middle of
Europe's nations,
he is the core of humanity,
they are the flower and the leaf.
He is chosen by the world spirit, during
the struggle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
, to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was estimable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with the times,
he has preserved;
the treasures of
centuries are not lost to him.
Not to shine in the moment and
to play his role, but to win the great
process of time. Every nation
has its day in history, but
the day of the Germans is the harvest of
all that time.

Thus Schiller felt connected to what can be called the driving force of the German spirit.

And if we now turn our gaze to another great mind, to a mind that, so to speak, has summarized all the power of the German mind, a philosopher who, out of a strong humanitarian character, has created a philosophy of dramatic clarity, we turn to the speaker of the “Speeches to the German Nation,” we turn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Let us also look to him for the driving force of German intellectual life, with which Fichte felt so connected that he knew how to inspire German hearts in a rare way through his speeches during one of Germany's most difficult times. Let us see how the driving force of the mind had an effect on his immediate, everyday life. When Germany took up its great struggles against Western foreign domination, Fichte consulted with himself as to whether he was called to help in any way, and in the end he knew that he could achieve the most through intellectual activity. His wife, however, devoted herself to nursing. She was the one who brought the fever home from the military hospitals, but she recovered. But Fichte was infected by his wife's illness. And as he lay there sick, it was remarkable how, in the last days, his philosophical thoughts, which are among the strongest of this kind in the development of mankind, among the most luminous, how they merged into the feverish fantasies of the dying man. And strangely, Fichte, the clear-thinking, diamond-bright philosopher, he guided in his soul, which was completely occupied with the spirit that reigns through the German being, his philosophical thoughts in such a way that he believed himself outside on the battlefields, in the midst of the armies, as Blücher's Rhine crossing took place.

Thus we see a confluence of the highest intellectual development even in the feverish fantasies of a dying German. His son brought him a medicine. Fichte felt as if he were connected to the power of the German spirit, which he firmly believed would lead the German people to victory. He pushed the medicine away and said, “I do not need medicine, for I feel that I shall recover.” Then he died. These were, so to speak, his last moments. This is the Fichte from whose soul the sustaining power of the German spirit speaks in such a way that one sees how, in his case, knowledge is directly grasped by the will that rules in his soul, so that one can say: In every word of Fichte we feel this power of the German spirit penetrating through, which cannot but confess that the spirit is not an abstraction, but something that permeates and flows through the world and works in it, and in which the soul knows itself, can experience itself. How beautifully Fichte expresses something like this when he says:

There is no doubt about it, it is the most certain thing there is, [indeed the basis of all other certainties, the only absolutely valid objective, that there is a moral world order, that every rational individual is assigned his or her specific place in this order and counted on for his or her work.

That is the confession of the spiritual world made by the sustaining power of the German spirit. And so closely does Fichte feel connected with this spiritual world that he once said the following to his students in words that are as much thoughts as they are the will welling up from the whole soul: “You stars that walk above me, you mountains all, ... if you all collapse at once, when lightning strikes you, when the elemental forces crush you so that not a speck of dust remains of you, you tell me nothing about the nature of my own soul. This defies your power, this is not eternal, as you are not eternal.” Thus Fichte spoke out of the direct power of connection with the spiritual world in his own soul. This is not mere philosophical speculation, these are not just thoughts, but this is inner soul life, a confluence of the soul with the spirit. This is the result of the sustaining forces of the German spirit.

And as a spiritual scientist today, one can truly refer to Fichte. One example among many that can prove how one can refer to Fichte today with today's spiritual science: It is written in the “Addresses to the German Nation”, and many may perhaps overlook it, but it is important for those who do not want to grasp Fichte merely on the surface of his words, but want to penetrate into the depths of his views. Fichte held the “Addresses to the German Nation” before his people, for his people, through which he wanted to stir up the German spirit in the German hearts, so that the German essence would triumph in Europe. And the means he recommended at the time was a completely new kind of education. Regardless of one's opinion of his plan today, one must admit that it was a grand and bold idea, an idea that truly contained something of the fundamental strength of the German spirit. But Fichte knew that by expressing this before an audience that was indeed willing to receive the word dedicated to the service of humanity, by expressing what characterized his plan, he was saying something that had to permeate all ideas about the education and development of the human being. In doing so, he demanded something completely new of people. And so he made a comparison between what he thought of as something new for previous habits of thought and what they had already grasped as a /Lücke im Text>.

And now we ask ourselves: How could spiritual science, which is a science of the spiritual life, how could it use a comparison if it wanted to characterize what it wants, what it strives for? After all, spiritual science wants to lead to a real inner enlightenment, so that the soul outside the body looks at the body with its physical experiences in the same way as one looks at an external object. In this way the spiritual researcher gains knowledge of how this soul behaves after death, how the soul looks at the body with spiritual eyes, how it surveys it like an external element. And so today, by standing firmly on the ground of this spiritual science, the spiritual scientist comes to say: this new thing behaves like a soul that leaves the body and looks back at the body. One would take a symbol that today, however, people still see as a reverie. But let us ask what symbol Fichte himself chose when he wanted to characterize the new of his education system in relation to the old.

[Time seems to me like a shadow that stands over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the once so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of her sisters already greet her joyfully and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, in order to develop the more magnificent form into which it is to grow; but as yet it has no feeling for these breezes or hearing for these voices, or, if it had, it is absorbed in pain over its loss, with which it believes itself to have been lost at the same time.

That is the living Fichte! Must we not say that what today's spiritual science wants to unfold and recognize out of a real knowledge of the spirit, we encounter it where Fichte abandons himself to the deep intentions of his spirit and chooses a comparison that is deeply rooted in the supporting forces of the German people. It is the confession of the real, living, flowing and weaving spirit. And so it is rooted in the best of this German intellectual life.

And do we not see how these supporting forces of the German spirit also work in Goethe? Is it not already apparent from the fact that Goethe, even in his youth, had to declare himself unsatisfied with everything that can only enter the human soul as concepts and ideas through speculation of the intellect, as a reflection of the external world of the senses, that he felt something like the Faustian urge not only to indulge in abstract concepts and sensual perceptions, but to unite with the innermost powers of the soul with the spirit that rules the world. And it was out of this urge, which then sought to express itself artistically, that Goethe created what he presented in his Faust; in that Faust, which in its entirety represents a work of art that no other nation can have. For everything that man can strive for through the deepest powers of his soul on the path to the spiritual world is to be seen in this Faust. Do we not see how Faust, after feeling unsatisfied in the outer world of the senses, wants to reach the sources of life? How he passes through error and overcoming, through temptation and seduction, and how he first stands and recognizes in the spirit that seizes him in his innermost self, at the same time, what surges and weaves as spirit through the world. Thus, in the first part of the drama, Faust comes to recognize this spirit that reigns not only in nature but also in the human soul. He feels a connection to this spirit, which he perceives as a living entity truly rooted in German intellectual life, in the following words, which could be quoted again and again:

[Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature for a kingdom,
the power to feel and enjoy it. Not
only dost thou allow cold-eyed visitors,
allow me to look into her deep chest,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And neighbor trunks squashing down
And the hill muffled hollow thundering,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself, and my own chest
Secret deep wonders open up.]

How these sublime words express how man, when he has found the sustaining powers within himself, also wants to find them in all that is sensual. And how Faust is then led back, after he has thus recognized the spirit, to the rule of the spirit in his own breast.

Then You lead me to the secure cave, and then You show me myself, and in my own breast deep, secret wonders are revealed.

We can call this: the weaving of the spirit in the spirituality of the world, in which beings are of a supersensible nature, as in the sense world there are beings of the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom. And so we see how this spirit reigns and works in our greatest and sustains them.

But we also see how, in German spiritual culture, efforts are being made to truly unite with this spirit, to penetrate with it in a living way, to marry with it. One could point to hundreds of important historical events to show how in German intellectual life the longing arises to unite with the spirit that has carried the German essence through the centuries; to seek how it works not only in the present, but how it has worked through all the times of development. And wherever a German can find something, wherever the spirit confronts him as a figure, wherever he has encountered it, there you can see how fervently the German is able to grasp the German spirit that can carry him. I would like to give an example, an event during Goethe's lifetime.

A world view of German intellectual life emerged, the so-called Romanticism; a view that wanted to go back to an earlier stage of German intellectual life, because something occurred, so to speak, in which the German spirit appeared before the German soul in a form in which it wanted to grasp the German spirit with religious fervor. That was the case when, after the republican masters of the West, of that West that claims today that it had to fight against the German “barbarians”, when these masters, just as the masters of the West today - of course, they did it in their opinion back then and they also do it today for the freedom and for the rights of the people - went to war. These gentlemen invaded the Lower Rhine region and the Dutch territories. We can see these gentlemen ravaging palaces, churches, monasteries, and everything in their path. As in those days, the devastation was immense and incalculable, and the finest works of art in these regions were scattered and looted all over the world. Of course, the gentlemen said at the time that they were fighting for freedom, justice and humanity. And then you could see how the remains of these devastated works of art turned up again, of course only sparse remains, fragments in the Rhenish cities. The broken, the devastated, then came into the hands of a number of people, including the brothers Boisserée, who professed the worldview of the young Romantic school. And at that time something emerged in this school that can be called /gap in the text]. Something emerged for these younger German Romantics that they perceived as the divine rule of the German spirit itself, which they tried to introduce into life. And if we were to study the development of art in Central Europe in the nineteenth century, we would find how that which emerged from the devastated ruins, from the sustaining forces of the German spirit, continued to work in poetry and in the best works of art. We would find it everywhere.

But not only did this power impress itself on the soul of what was already there, the souls were also prepared for such a seizure. And even if he does not belong to the younger, but to the older Romanticism, one of those German poets is - one may believe it, more and more he will be appreciated in his wonderful way of thinking - I mean Novalis. He is one of those in whom the sustaining power of the German spirit reveals itself so clearly that in much of what he has left us, in part fragmentarily, we see something that emerges from the unconscious of his soul, but which only needs to be developed in order to lead to what humanity will one day have to grasp as spiritual science.

And one can say: the world has already grasped to some extent what Novalis developed out of the sustaining power of the German spirit. This is even being grasped not only by the “barbaric Germans,” as the enemy nations are now expressing themselves, but even by some French writers who understand something of the nature, even among those who today so revile the German essence and decry it as “barbaric.” We know, of course, how not long after the outbreak of the war Maurice Maeterlinck could not find enough words to revile and insult German “barbarism”.

Now one would like to point out to Maeterlinck another, perhaps a different French spirit, who has delved into what Novalis can give of himself, who has written about what Novalis has inspired in his soul. And this French poet, philosopher and artist, what did he find in Novalis, in the now so despised, let us say in Maurice Maeterlinck, so despised German “barbarism”? He felt compelled to say: Yes, what Sophocles, even Schiller and other poets have produced, what the figures of the poets do, Hamlet and so on have to do with each other and with their surroundings, these are certainly feelings and sensations that interest earthly souls. But, as this French writer says, one must assume that if beings were to gaze down from the cosmos, they could not be interested in what Schiller, Sophocles and others created, and what these figures have to do with each other. But Novalis would be a person – so this French poet-philosopher believes – who has something to say from his soul about things that could not only interest earth people, but that must interest even spirits who visit the earth from heavenly spheres.

He speaks such words in connection with Novalis, in reference to what he experienced with Novalis. We must call these words literally before our soul:

But if he needed other evidence, it would lead him among those whose works almost touch silence. She would open the gate of the kingdom where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances to our higher worlds. She would go with him to the boundaries of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be constantly on his guard.

He is always talking about Novalis. He wants to turn to areas where Novalis dwells, to worlds for which human words are no longer sufficient to characterize them. That is why he says “their works almost border on silence”. He then continues:

On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly lit peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; but [the people I am talking about have] come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

So this French poet-philosopher on Novalis, on that which Novalis has inspired in him. This Novalis, who is borne entirely out of the primal power and destiny of the German genius. Would this poet-philosopher not hurl at Maurice Maeterlinck when he comes and speaks of “barbarism”: Look to Novalis, whose works are so sublime that they “almost touch silence”.

One might think that these words, coming from the philosophical poet, would be hurled at Maurice Maeterlinck. But the fact of the matter is that these words I just read were actually written by Maurice Maeterlinck himself! Admittedly, by the Maurice Maeterlinck who lived years ago and allowed the German spirit to influence him; not by the Maurice Maeterlinck who now calls the Germans a “barbarian people”.

Such are the experiences of Germanness in European culture today, besieged as it is in a great fortress. It may be said that this Germanness, so misunderstood today, has truly not always been misunderstood in this way in the world. The world has felt the sustaining power of the German spirit. And one can present evidence of how this German spirit has been regarded in the world. It is somewhat uncomfortable to express certain sympathetic, I would even say emotional judgments about the German spirit in German. So then another way must be chosen. Let us first consider what a leading English thinker of the nineteenth century in America had to say about the German essence. Emerson, a great and characteristic personality, once brought the German character before his soul. And to show how the sustaining power of the German spirit has been felt and sensed, Emerson says, speaking of Goethe – and we shall see from the words themselves how he sees in Goethe almost the representative of the newer German spirit – Emerson says:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America

— please, it is not in German, but written by an American, an American Englishman in English —

in England and America, talent is respected, but one is only satisfied when it is working for or against a party of one's convictions. In France, one is already delighted when one sees brilliant thoughts, no matter where they want to go.

And it was not a German who said this; it was said by an English American to characterize the Germans, the German character!

In all these countries, however, talented men write to the extent of their gifts. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed by practicality, nor, finally, the American spirit of adventure. But what it does have is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?”

One might think that it was said by a German, it would be vainly oriented.

The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself about them. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it stand for? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get all these thoughts from?

The English [...] always see only the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

Consider, not a German is saying this!

For this reason, the terms of distinction used in high-level conversation are all of German origin. While the English and the French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, even though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind [...] He has that awe-inspiring independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

Now, of course, one could say that Emerson has been dead for a long time, and that this is a characteristic that was already given about the German character a decade ago. After all, such minds as the one who is regarded as the most important French philosopher today [gap in the text], after the speech he gave in which he portrayed the Germans of today as devoid of everything that lived in them during their great era. One also finds in him, in this French philosopher with the name that sounds so beautifully French, at least before the war, one also finds in him an emphasis on how these Germans have become so different in recent times.

And so it is that we also look again at what is being said on the German side, but instead listen to an English voice. And now we will even choose critical voices that were uttered not long ago, barely two years before the war; voices characterizing the German essence. Lectures were held in Manchester under the title “Germany in the Nineteenth Century.”

The preface emphasizes why these lectures on the German character were given in Manchester. It is said that the newspaper people in England should learn something about the German character. Perhaps two things can be seen from this introduction, this preface: that at the time, those who gave these lectures as learned Englishmen considered the newspaper people to be in need of such an education. But the other thing can also be seen; I can leave it to your judgment whether what was said to the newspaper people was of much use, based on today's experience. But what was said to the English newspaper people back then? As I said, the lectures were not given in German in Leipzig or Berlin or Hamburg, but in English for the English foreigners. There it was said:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German researchers.

As I said, not spoken in Berlin or Leipzig, but in Manchester!

Imagination, feeling, and will asserted their right to be heard alongside or beyond reason, and under their transformative pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of enlightenment; wisdom was sought from children and flowers; science, philosophy, and poetry came close together.

This was how the German essence was characterized in Manchester.

Over here in England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left the sciences and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the whole period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a portrayal of present-day Germany, a Germany of restless, daring will and action, and we can understand all the better why the great citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable position as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

Thus, the German character was characterized by English scholars in Manchester.

You will have come across a name that, after the outbreak of war, could not find enough words to describe the high morality that guided the British government in declaring war on the German Reich: Haldane. He wrote the preface to the lectures that were collected and in which you can find what I have just read. And that Lord Haldane wrote the following in the preface, although it was some time before the war:

The source of the stream of

— Germany's —

spiritual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a great extent practical and concrete. [...] Only the influence of true knowledge can dispel the clouds of mistrust and free us from the burden of arming ourselves against attacks that in reality none of us has in mind.

Thus spoke this leading English intellectual. You know how he spoke after the outbreak of the war. The same scholar who spoke the words that were read out spoke even more words back then in Manchester to enlighten the newspaper people. He said:

On the whole, there is no question that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace.

Spoken in Manchester.

This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is for history to shed light on the tangled web of the present, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For if we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And our ancestors had good reason to fear them. [...]

To sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 put an end once and for all to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the previously unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed a temptation to war that had so often often tempted into the wrong channels; they put the German people in a position to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved in one fell swoop what Great Britain, despite all her expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to accomplish, namely, to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a great war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

It is fair to say that these words were spoken in praise of the sustaining power of the German spirit, indeed, one might even say of the soul-sustaining power of the German spirit for Europe. Can one say more than this Englishman said in Manchester to the newspaper people, with whom it then had such a good impact!

And right up to the most recent days, we can follow such phenomena. We have seen how Emerson expressly emphasized how little the English can actually understand of what is the fundamental force of the German character. But once they have really got to their feet and got to know this German spirit, they have learned to think differently about it. Just a few words should be mentioned, which an Englishwoman wrote down shortly before the outbreak of the war, after spending eight years in Germany. She did not get to know it in the way that most English people get to know Germany, but she was in schools, clinics, she got to know philosophy and other lecture halls. I could now quote many words that are deeply characteristic, but I will just read one passage that was written by an English expert on the German character. Miss Wylie writes the following words:

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence. And it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany has already reached its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago. (...]

At every border and across the water, opponents sit, both commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, so that they can pounce on her and bring her down.

There is truly no need to boast about the sustaining power of the German spirit; one need only listen to what people have to say when they are speaking out of consciousness, and not out of unconsciousness, if that is said by the countries whose objectivity has been proven. If you look around, you will find many judgments similar to these about the German character and its sustaining power. This sustaining power of the German spirit is demonstrated precisely by the fact that this German spirit, in every soul of the German being that seeks the path to the spirit, has an illuminating effect on these souls, so that it can indeed be said: In what emerged as German idealism at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century lie the seeds for an ever-more-vibrant and vibrant spiritual experience. And so it came about that not only in the course of the nineteenth century, through spirits who in later times would play a great role, Troxler and Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, great beginnings of today's spiritual science can be found; of that which we ourselves can bring out of the spiritual world again. These fundamental forces of the German spirit can be found in the entire development of German intellectual life. And here again is a case in point, the case of one of the best, the deepest, the most German of Germans from the second half of the nineteenth century: Herman Grimm.

Herman Grimm is an extraordinary art historian who has written about many artists and works of art with inner experience. One often has the feeling: where does Herman Grimm get what he has to say about art and works of art not from ordinary evidence but from direct experience of aesthetic judgment? Then one must go to the artistic and poetic works that he has produced. There one finds in his novellas that the sustaining power of the German spirit is also evident in them, which is transferred there, albeit not as spiritual science, but into the artistic. Of course, one cannot cite artistic products as evidence for the results of spiritual science. But if the spiritual scientist can say that the sayings in the work of art are almost expertly correct for the described spiritual experiences, then it is permissible to point to such an occurrence, as is to be done today.

Herman Grimm always wants to point out that one can only understand the world if one is able to look not only at what [gap in the text], but also at what protrudes from the supersensible into the sensual. He then presents spiritual processes that show how he strives to show that the world is more than just the sensual world. There he wrote a novella: 'The Songstress'. He describes the fate of a somewhat flirtatious songstress who is nevertheless endowed with a deep soul. There is a man who loves the songstress, but she rejects him. The novella continues in an extremely meaningful way until the songstress's death. A friend leads the singer straight to the house where her lover, whom she rejected, committed suicide. The suicide occurs the moment she enters. She is consumed by guilt and is unable to sleep from that hour on. The friend, the owner of the house, has to watch over her. Now Herman Grimm describes how the singer sees the spirit of the deceased rising up in bed and approaching her. And Herman Grimm presents this in such a way that it is clear from this description that he does not want to reflect on an imagination; rather, in a spiritual experience that the guilt-ridden singer has, he wants to show how forces are effective beyond death, and wants to point to the fate that works beyond death. The singer dies after her beloved; she is, as it were, taken. Spiritual science would say: what can be announced as the next phenomenon to appear to a person after they have passed through the gate of death is presented to the soul of the singer: the appearance of the etheric body, which has to bear the fate that is to be borne beyond death.

But this is not the only case with Herman Grimm. He has written a cultural-historical novel: “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces).

The most important thing is: the young heroine Emmy is portrayed. Emmy is also brought to the point where the fate of the beloved dead man affects the living, not only through the inner forces of the soul, but in such a way that this effect is meant by the soul - after passing through the gate of death - still having a real effect on life. Herman Grimm describes how Emmy, as it were, dies after her beloved. And we find a wonderful scene at the end of the novel 'Unüberwindliche Mächte' (Insurmountable Forces). Emmy dies, and Herman Grimm describes how a figure rises out of the dying Emmy, out of the physical body, a figure with arms similar to the physical arms, with a face similar to Emmy's face, which disappears over and into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm is able to grasp the moment of death artistically, just as spiritual science can grasp it in a living vision.

One can see that the sustaining power of the German spirit also works in this poet's soul, which comes from German idealism to grasp the living spirit life. The fact that Herman Grimm can present the matter in a novelistic way, but in the fullest reality, that he is capable of doing so, is the power of spiritual life that prevails through the German spirit. Herman Grimm felt - he had, after all, grown up entirely in what had entered into German intellectual life from Goethe's intellectual life - he felt with all his soul in the stream of German intellectual life. He knew this German spiritual life because every phase of this German spiritual life was a phase of his own life. And how did Herman Grimm characterize this mood of the German being in 1895, shortly before his death? Anyone who knows German life knows that this description is true; what I am about to read from Herman Grimm is true as words that are intended to represent the mood of the German being. He wants to express – he who has so often pointed out how dear to him repeated lives on earth are – he wants to express how German spiritual life aims to recognize the spiritual world, but not to develop a nationality in a one-sided way, but to absorb the most general human element. The words are beautiful, but also deeply significant for the characterization of German intellectual life, which Herman Grimm spoke in 1895.

The solidarity of the moral convictions of all people today is the church that unites us all. We are seeking more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious endeavors of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that no national distinction applies to the ethical worldview.

Then he continues:

We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this could happen through war. The assurance that keeping the peace is our [all] most sacred wish is not a lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men” permeates us.

This is how Herman Grimm describes the mood in Central Europe. But then he shows that he is not a dreamer, but that he can judge the situation well. For he continues:

Recognizing people as a totality, they see themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which they consider it a misfortune not to be allowed to exist, and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt to their internal disputes. With anxious eagerness they seek their right here. How the French today are trying to present the war against Germany, which they are planning, as a moral imperative, demanding recognition of it from other nations, even from the Germans themselves.

Anyone who is familiar with the mood in Central Europe will know that Herman Grimm spoke the truth at the time. And they will then be able to judge what is actually meant when those who today want to assert this truth from Central Europe are repeatedly called out from left and right, from west and east: “Who wanted the war?” One must say that this “who wanted the war” comes across as if a number of people with threatening gestures are standing around a house and the master of the house sees that they want to attack the house, and he then goes out and can't help but beat them up. And then the question would be: “Who wanted this beating?” It is the same logic. Yes, one can even say many things about this logic that prevails in the world today. One can even say: this logic is - one is almost embarrassed to say it, because it is so flimsy when it is said: “We did not want the war, but in Central Europe it was wanted.” it is the same logic as when it is said: “Yes, we could not wage war if the Germans had not invented gunpowder, because then there would be no war; so who wanted the war?” It would be the same logic if the people in Central Europe wanted to blame us for using printing ink to accuse the German people of being “barbarians”. The Germans, after all, invented the process of printing with printing ink on paper. But with this intention it does indeed look strange to those who not only look at what has happened in the last few months before the war, but look at what has been preparing for decades as the driving impulses. Those who have really been able to look with open eyes at what is going on in Europe, who have wanted to see it, have already seen how this war, so to speak, in its basic impulses, was preparing itself from the East. And the one who would correctly ask the question today: Who could have prevented the war? will of course have to point to Russia. But those who saw clearly knew that. We see this in the words that were spoken long before the war.

As for me, I am in no doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic world is imminent, that it will ignite either through the Orient, specifically Turkey, or through the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and brimstone against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. It has been a long time since Russia gathered itself after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered expedient in [St. Petersburg] to take up the Oriental question once again. If the Mediterranean Sea was once to become a “French Sea”, according to the expression that was more pompous than true, Russia has the even more positive intention of making a Russian lake out of the Black Sea and a Russian pond out of the Sea of Marmara. It is an established goal of Russian policy that Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia, which finds its lever of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism. The Danube would then be closed at the Iron Gate by the Russian turnpike.

But this was not said recently, but in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War; and it was said by those who were not speaking off the top of their heads, but who knew how forces were gradually gathering from the east , how the Austrian soul was permeated with distorted Slavophilism, in order to finally lead to what led to the war today and which the Western powers fell for.

I would like to read you one more passage that can show you how the connection with the active forces and impulses presents itself to those who really want to see them. When looking at what happened in the summer of 1914 and what then led to the war from the eastern side, could one not use the following words - I will read out words that could be coined for the time in the first half of 1914:

[...] a kind of press campaign gradually began in St. Petersburg, [...] I was personally suspected in my intentions. These attacks increased during the following year, 1879, to strong demands for pressure to be exerted on Austria in matters where we could not readily attack Austrian law. I could not lend my support to this, because if we alienated Austria, we would necessarily become dependent on Russia if we did not want to be completely isolated in Europe. Would such dependence have been tolerable? I had previously believed it could be, telling myself: We have no conflicting interests; there is no reason why Russia should ever break off friendship with us. At least I had not directly contradicted my Russian colleagues who explained such things to me. The incident at the Congress disappointed me, and showed me that even the complete subordination of our policy (for a certain period) to the Russian one would not protect us from coming into conflict with Russia against our will and against our aspirations.

What has happened, however, shows that the European center can save itself from such an attack. The words I have read to you could be a characteristic of the forces that played in 1914. But I have in fact only changed a few words that were not written or spoken in 1914, but were said by Bismarck in the German Reichstag on February 6, 1888. And I will now read them to you in their true form. You will see how they correspond to what I read to you as being appropriate for the spring of 1914. Bismarck said these words when he spoke out against the military bill in the Reichstag:

[...] a kind of press campaign gradually began in St. Petersburg, attacking German politics and personally suspecting me of ulterior motives. These attacks intensified during the following year, until in 1879 there were strong demands for pressure to be exerted on Austria in matters where we could not readily challenge Austrian law. I could not lend my hand to this; for if we estranged ourselves from Austria, we would necessarily fall into dependence on Russia if we did not want to be completely isolated in Europe. Would such dependence have been tolerable? I had believed earlier that it could be, saying to myself: We have no conflicting interests, there is no reason why Russia should ever break off friendship with us. At least I had not directly contradicted my Russian colleagues who had explained this to me. The incident at the Congress disappointed me, and showed me that even the complete subordination of our policy (for a certain period) to the Russian one would not protect us from coming into conflict with Russia against our will and against our aspirations.

So one can say: The balance of power between the European East and the Center had to be characterized in 1888 in exactly the same way as for the year 1914. One dares to say again that people were living in Central Europe in 1914 who brought about this war. Anyone with a healthy sense of fact will not be able to make such an assertion. One must, however, have a healthy sense of facts. How was the mood prepared in this European East, which then led to the fact that this firebrand, through the connection of the East with the West, finally led to the present-day siege of the European center - what was prepared there in the European East?

We saw, among other things, the mood of Slavophilism emerge in the nineteenth century. Among these Slavophiles there were idealists, but there were also people who later transformed the Slavophile sentiment into complete absorption and idolization of what is now present in Russia; they did not see Russia's mission in pursuing the inner soul forces of the Russian people, but in the power and might that now prevails there. And those who are the best among these Slavophiles have worked in such a way that the conviction has spread widely that the culture of Western Europe, and especially of Germany, is a culture of decline and that a rebirth of European life must come from the East. This has become a dogma. And this dogma has slowly and gradually become established in what can be called Russian life. Certain perceptions of this Russian life are completely imbued with it. The best minds, by being interwoven with Russian life, are also interwoven with this idea of Slavophilism.

Even the great Soloviev had a time in his life when he was a Slavophile, when he believed, albeit in a different way than [Aksakov, Katkov and Danilevsky], that something could already be in Russian life that had the mission to cover all of Europe, so to speak, with a new culture. But then he became more and more familiar with what had become of Slavophilism in present-day Russia. He learned to consider how what had become of Slavophilism in present-day Russia would have to affect the European center, the European West. And there it was, at the time when he said the following to himself – these are Soloviev's, the Russian philosopher's, own words; he says that Slavophilism had become a “commodity of the fair trade” that “filled all the dirty streets, squares and alleys of Russian life with wild, animalistic shouting”. These are Solowjow's own words. At the time when Solowjow was faced with the question of conscience that it is important to ask yourself from time to time; that question of conscience that goes like this: “Why doesn't Europe love us?”

He actually wanted to raise the question: What must Europe see when it looks at us? And Solowjow, the great philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century, answers this question from the Russian spirit:

Europe [...] looks at us with apprehension and with displeasure, [since the elemental power of the Russian people is dark and mysterious, its spiritual and cultural powers inferior, but its demands] clear, definite and great.

These are not the words of a German, but of a Russian, about the forces that have been at work for decades and that have now been expressed with the firebrand. Solowjow continues:

[The clamor of our nationalism can be heard loudly in Europe, which wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, beat the Germans, conquer Constantinople and, if it succeeds, India as well. But if we are asked what we will do for humanity after taking and destroying all of that, we can only remain silent or babble senseless phrases.

"Thus [...] the most essential, indeed the only important question that an honest and reasonable patriotism should address is not Russia's power and mission, but Russia's sins.]

Thus the great Russian on Russian character. Must not then the question be put from the center of Europe to the east: “What do you want?” If you could somehow get the center of Europe in your hands, what do you want?” The best, the most significant, the most beneficial Russian of the nineteenth century answers:

If we are asked [what we will do to benefit humanity after conquering and destroying everything, we can only remain silent or spout meaningless phrases.

Then we see what it is that needs to be defended, what the forces that have taken up the defense of the German character to the left and to the right have to defend in reality.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is no wonder that this German essence, this fundamental force of the German spirit, is misunderstood everywhere. It arises, one might say, from the intimate association of the individual German with the German spirit, which the individual German must feel to be a living one. And from this arise those misunderstandings that we encounter everywhere when we ask people who are not as enlightened as we have come to know them today among other nations. We sometimes hear that what Herman Grimm, who also knew Goethe well, said about the German character with reference to Lewes' biography of Goethe is true; what Herman Grimm said about this book is true: Lewes wrote a book about Goethe, that is, he wrote a book about a man who was born in Frankfurt, to whom he attributes Goethe's works, and who he claims died in 1832. But the way he describes him, what he presents as the soul of the man in the book, bears no resemblance to the feelings of anyone who feels connected to Goethe in German intellectual life.

And so, wherever we try to find a relationship to the German spirit, we only find misunderstandings. Finally, I would like to mention something that may be a more or less inconsequential but perhaps interesting episode.

The movement to which we belong had some connection with the movement that started from Adyar. [Our friends could no longer go along with it because of their lack of involvement in German intellectual life and its supporting forces] when English materialism, masquerading as Theosophy, went so far that the absurdity was believed by some that the spirit of Christ had revealed itself in a little Hindu boy. We know under what guises all this was practiced. It was then that the German sense of truth arose and the German mind had to turn away from those activities calling themselves theosophical. Now, however, the president of that movement has the following to say, inspired by the English spirit, about the connection between the separation of the German spiritual-scientific movement, which is united in the Anthroposophical Society. The following was truly written in England. Please excuse me for bringing my insignificant person into the whole context, but this was written months after the war had broken out.

Now, looking back in the light of German methods as revealed to us by the war, I realize that the long-standing efforts to capture the Theosophical Society and place a German at its head, the anger against me when I frustrated these efforts, the complaint that I had spoken of the late King Edward VII as the protector of European peace instead of giving the honor to the Kaiser - that all this was part of the widespread campaign against England, and that the missionaries were tools, cleverly used by the German agents here to carry out their plans. If they could have turned the Theosophical Society in India, with its large number of officials, into a weapon against the British government and got them to look up to Germany as their spiritual leader, instead of standing up, as it has always done, for the equal alliance of two free nations, then it could gradually have become a channel for poison in India. To achieve this, it was first necessary to overthrow her president, who, as is well known, has stood for the alliance of the two peoples for the last twenty years.

So, we are supposed to have been annoyed that she did not present the German Kaiser, but Edward VII, as a stronghold of peace, and therefore broke away from her, while the break occurred because we could not go along with what was said on that side about the Christ presence. But then she gives us far too much honor by mentioning all that the German spiritual science movement is said to have done to initiate the present war; that is, those who spoke on the other side about our spiritual science movement. Now we are learning about their plans from an English point of view. It is remarkable what we are said to have done, what we are said to have intended. One can see how this is viewed from this side, which necessarily had to happen for the sake of the German sense of truth, the German sense of truth, for the sake of what feels like being within the supporting power of the German spirit. Then one must say: When one sees how this German spirit with its supporting power has worked in hundreds and thousands, how it has brought German idealism, which contains the seeds for grasping and experiencing the living spirit , then one must say that Goethe's words, which Friedrich Lienhard also cites in his pamphlet 'Germany's European Mission', are deeply true. Goethe spoke these words in 1813 in a conversation with Luden:

The destiny of the Germans is not yet fulfilled. If they had had no other task than to break up the Roman Empire and create and organize a new world, they would have perished long ago. But since they have continued to exist, and in such strength and efficiency, I believe that they must still have a great destiny.

This conversation of Goethe's is still valid today. And if we now live in these fateful times, we, dear attendees, feel that everything that has to do with the great historical development of the German character, which stands before us as a living organism. If we look at what has lived in the German spirit, what has lived in a Wolfram von Eschenbach, in Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and in Herman Grimm, we see what has been achieved by the German spirit in terms of spiritual and intellectual power, as if from a single source. This is the driving force of the German spirit.

Now the German spirit has another task. It must flow into the sacrificial deeds that must be accomplished through death and blood in defense of what we wanted to contemplate with these admittedly insufficient words today. But what this shows us is that the German spirit, as it has emerged, has not yet fulfilled its task in the world, that it is to be defended, because it has a mission for the world that it must still fulfill in order to fully grasp the living spiritual life. And so, when we consider the fundamental strength of the German spirit, we can draw hope and confidence for the future of Germany. But all of this also speaks to our feelings and emotions, which on the one hand make us look wistfully, but also consolingly, but also with the greatest admiration, at what Germany has to do now in this fateful time. Our feelings and sentiments are with all those who bleed and suffer, but who also accomplish great deeds in the East and the West, when we see in all this only another expression of the German character. And those who, as mothers and fathers, as brothers and sisters, lose a dear relative, they know that they lose him for that which must be worked out as German spirit, as German future, as the whole German essence that still has something to do in the world, to which one must look as to an essence that has not yet been completed.

And so let us summarize, in terms of feeling and sentiment, the impulses that arise from this contemplation, in the words: Yes, this German essence, we see it growing, and only a lack of understanding can speak of a decline of this German essence. Rather, something else is true. What is true is what I, in summary, would like to express the thoughts of this evening in words that express how what can be observed in the German character ultimately comes together in our minds in a hope, a confidence, a certainty of the further development of the German character:

The German spirit has not yet accomplished
What it is to bring to the world.
It lives in hopes for the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerful
Hidden things that must still mature.
How can a wish for his end arise in the power of the enemy without understanding, so long as life reveals itself to him, which holds him in the roots of his being?