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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 851 through 860 of 1057

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4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1963): Are There Limits to Knowledge?
Translated by Rita Stebbing

This need of naive man is the reason why primitive forms of belief in revelation arise. For naive consciousness, the God who is given through thinking always remains a God merely “thought.” Naive consciousness demands that the manifestation should be through means accessible to physical perception. God must appear in bodily form; little value is attached to the evidence of thinking, but only to the Divine Nature being proved by the changing of water into wine in a way which can be testified by the senses.
His studies were interrupted by the death of his father, which left him in poverty. After he supported himself by tutoring for 9 years, the kindness of a friend enabled him to resume his studies, to graduate as a doctor and to qualify as a privatdocent.
195. The Cosmic New Year: The Three Streams in the Life of Civilization 21 Dec 1919, Stuttgart
Translated by Harry Collison

Thus we find humanity in the later Greek civilization still grouped in a way which had a meaning for that ancient time, when the leaders of the Mysteries were actually messengers of the Gods. That which once was wisdom with an impulse for life, was transformed into Greek logic and dialectic, into the wisdom of the Greeks, wisdom which is already strained thin compared with its old Oriental origin.
It became that great System of Law which we call the Roman Catholic religion. There, God with his attendant gods, is essentially a Being who rules according to the Roman conception of justice, only He is in the super-sensible world.
Everything which finds expression in life can assume a form of beauty, but we must confess that even that juristic-political scene in which the God of the World becomes the Judge of the World, and winds up the whole evolution of the earth by a legal Act, even that magnificent painting of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, is only a glorious expression of Christianity saturated by legalism.
65. Why is Spiritual Investigation Misunderstood? 26 Feb 1916, Berlin
Translator Unknown

For more than a hundred years philosophers have been chewing the old saying of Kant's with which he tried to rescue the conception of God from the dilemma in which he found it. If we merely think of a hundred coins,12 they are not a coin less than a hundred real coins.
And those who are inclined to be materialists may, we suggest, thank God! They no longer need to create their eyes, for these eyes are created from the Spiritual. They already have them, and in taking in the world around them they are using these ready made eyes.
But in the eyes of one who knows something of how misunderstandings arise, it matters little in the soul's achievement whether men swear by a Church Father such as Gregory, Tertullian, Irenus or Augustine and accept him as authority, or whether they look upon Darwin, Haeckel and Helmholtz as authorities, and in so far as these are really their Church Fathers, give them their allegiance.
117. Deeper Secrets of Human Development in the Light of the Gospels: The Gospels 14 Nov 1909, Stuttgart

That which appears as unity there appeared as unity in the external world, as God behind the phenomena of the physical plane. That was one difference compared to the other views of God. The other views of God said: The idea of God arises from within. But this individuality directed his gaze everywhere, organized the phenomena, looked at the different kingdoms of nature, brought them under one unity, in short, he was the great organizer of the world phenomena according to measure and number, who was chosen from the whole of humanity.
Abraham must receive this himself as a gift from God. This happens when he is first called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac and then prevented from doing so.
65. From Central European Intellectual Life: The Question of Immortality and Spiritual Research 24 Mar 1916, Berlin

One would like to say that it is good that a kind God has withheld from people the knowledge that they create the light of the sun for themselves, otherwise they would deny it, as they deny the essence of the spiritual world.
When I seriously oppose something, I turn to those whom I actually hold in high esteem. So I also hold in high esteem the actual father, I might say, of modern materialism, Lamettrie. He is an astute man, and his reasons are plausible.
Every day, we read in the newspapers the long lists of young men full of hope and fathers devoted to their families, who in the prime of life have sacrificed their lives for the Fatherland.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: Why do you Call the People of Schiller and Fichte “Barbarians”? 11 Mar 1915, Nuremberg

How the days of suffering and pain, with their events, affect families, how fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters are connected with them! Therefore, it must be important to us to introduce our reflections on the spiritual development and spiritual hopes of humanity with a few thoughts and feelings that are directed towards the difficult situation of our time.
It was as if Schiller wanted to say to the child – what he could only express in these rasping words: I should have been your father for much longer, I still have much to do for you. Then he handed the child back, turned away and looked at the wall again.
For how could one, in the soul experiencing and knowing God in the soul, not be aware of this immortality? For if the God in the human soul dies, then death is precisely a new resurrection.
65. From Central European Intellectual Life: Austrian Personalities in the Fields of Poetry and Science 10 Feb 1916, Berlin

There the future is spoken of: But however proudly you aspire, highly soaring, always still a blaze you will keep the ancient sacred fire. The dream-filled drunkenness of God will live on in you... You only strive because you love: your boldest thought will be devotion that wants to sink into God.
He grew up in the Neögrader district. He lost his father very early. His mother was a spiritually strong woman. Madách became a dreamy, contemplative person.
Bartholomäus von Carneri is precisely one of those minds for whom it is true when Asia says to the blond Teut that the most serious thinking in the German spirit wants to arise out of love and come to the intimacy of God. Even if this intimacy with God comes to us, as it were, in atheistic clothing in Carneri, it still comes to us from the most intense and honest spiritual striving.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: The Rejuvenating Power of the German National Soul 18 Feb 1915, Hanover

How the words of Master Eckhart resound in us: “If you love God, then you can do whatever you want, [for then you will only want the eternal and the one, which God also wills.
When it is so pure that it sees through itself, then it need not seek God in the form, but it sees Him in itself and enjoys all creatures in God and God in all creatures, and whatever it does, it does in God and] God does in you.”
When a person feels connected in their soul to the divine source of existence, they say: “I neither die nor live. God himself dies in me.” There is the certainty that God does not die; but that it is God who goes with me through death.
182. Death as a Way of Life: The Rebelliousness of Men Against the Spirit 30 Jun 1918, Hamburg

How many people are there today who say: I do not look up to the various hierarchies, to angels, archangels and so on, but I look up to “my God”. And how many continue to declaim what great progress it is that humanity has come to the one God, to monotheism.
This can only be one of two things: either it is the one angel that protects him, whom man then calls God, who is no higher god than an angel – and since every human being has an angel whose task it is to protect him, we are in a pluralism – or he means his own ego.
That is the concrete thing they call God: either the angel that protects them intervenes – it is only the angel, they call it God – or it is only the individual ego.
100. The Gospel of St. John (Basle): Lecture VI 21 Nov 1907, Basel
Translator Unknown

He learned to distinguish especially between good and evil, represented by the Gods Ormuzd and Ahriman; he strove to unite himself with the former in order to combat the latter. The Earth was for him a place for work, in order to embody the Spirit in physical existence.
When Christ said: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple,”—these words refer to a stage of human evolution that will be reached in the sixth age.

Results 851 through 860 of 1057

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