The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would well understand if anybody considered the whole idea of this talk as an aberration. I would also understand if anybody said how one can abuse Goethe's name while making a relationship to spiritual science, because it is sufficiently known that Goethe's view is typical just because it is directed to the outer nature, and it regarded it as rather dubious to raise the lawfulness of the world to ideal heights, as Schiller did it. Then one can say how Goethe would have behaved negatively if one had related his mental pictures to that which accepts a concrete real spirit from particular inner experiences that places itself beside the natural world. I know very well that to the production of such relation such a rich spirit can be abused like Goethe. Since if one still brings in so many remarks of Goethe to confirm this or that own view, it is always possible of course to bring in other remarks of Goethe to confirm the opposite opinion. However, compared with all that I am allowed to mention from the start that I never wanted in case of my really long-standing occupation with Goethe and the Goethean worldview to state these or those contents of a Goethean sentence to confirm the worldview meant here. I always wanted to characterise the whole way, the inner structure of Goethe's soul life in its relation to the natural phenomena. Since it seems to me if one goes into the inner structure of Goethe's nature that one will also gain an understanding of the fact that such a spirit like Goethe expressed apparently opposite views about the same. One can always easily argue something can from the most different sides against the intention to connect Goethe with the investigation of spiritual life.

At first the philosophers feel called because of their ability of thinking if it concerns the investigation of the supersensible compared with the sensory. One has always reminded that Goethe characterised the whole way of his position to the world repeatedly while he said, he owes everything that he got as knowledge about the world to the fact that he never thought about thinking. With it, the whole philosophical attitude of Goethe seems to be condemned to many philosophically thinking people.

It seems necessary to reject Goethe's nature for the investigation of the world as far as one has to exceed with such an investigation what it presents immediately to the senses. On the other side, religious people who want to direct the soul to a world that is beyond the sensory, of course, are irked by such a concise sentence as he did. He always felt it unpleasant to the highest degree to speak of things of another world. He expresses himself even once about the fact in such a way that he says, as a spot is in the eye, which sees, actually, nothing, a cavity is in the human brain. If this hollow place, which actually sees nothing, dreams all kinds of stuff in the world, so one speaks of such nullities like of the things of another world. When Goethe said this, he also pointed to the fact, that such a person inclined to the spiritual like Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) was worried if one spoke only of the things of another world. Goethe agrees with Hamann in this respect completely. In the most vigorous way, Goethe refused to speak of the things of another world. Yes, the naturalists themselves, although on them the influence of Goethe has worked strongly, can refer if they stand quite sincerely on the ground of modern natural sciences to the fact that Goethe showed, for example, in his theory of colours that he never could penetrate into the strictly scientific way of research that this never was adequate to him, and that he came just thereby to a view deviating from the ruling theory of colours.

Now here it cannot be my task to justify the Goethean natural sciences. I have done this in a number of writings. Today it should be only my task to attach some connections from spiritual science to the Goethean natural sciences. Above all, I would like to go back to something that is exceptionally typical with this spirit for someone who approaches Goethe: the refusal of thinking about thinking. One has the sensation with the Goethean worldview where one only wants to recognise it, that Goethe himself was afraid instinctively of submitting the thinking itself to a consideration. He shrank from it as from something that constitutes, otherwise, the strength of his worldview. At such a place where Goethe characterises himself, you have to stop, because you can rather deeply look from here into the structure of the Goethean mind. If one considers just philosophically disposed people who have struggled with that which the thinking means for the human soul, you can realise if you make the thinking an object of observation like other objects of our world experience that you always evoke something in the soul that appears like an insurmountable obstacle. While you direct the thinking to the thinking itself, you cause a sum of uncertainties in the human being. Although you have always to ask yourself if you want to investigate the supersensible seriously: is this human thinking able to penetrate into the spiritual world?—You still face doubt, indecision.

As a single factual proof of it which could be increased a hundred times I would like to quote the sentence of a thinker who is less famous, indeed, who, however, is counted by those who know him among the deepest ones, among the most impressive thinkers of our time, Professor Gideon Spicker (1840-1912), the philosopher with the strange destiny who has worked his way out of a confessional ecclesiastical worldview to a free philosophical viewpoint. You can pursue how there once a thinking really soared by own power from a traditional viewpoint to a free one if you read his book At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. The Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin that appeared in 1910 as a kind of philosophical autobiography. You find the following sentence there that describes a self-experience with the thinking:

“To whichever philosophy you confess—whether to a dogmatic or skeptical one, to an empiric or transcendental one, to a critical or eclectic one—any without exception takes an unproven and unprovable sentence as starting point, namely the necessity of the thinking. No investigation figures this necessity out one day, as deeply as it may prospect. One must accept it and one can reason it with nothing; every attempt to prove its correctness already requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a spooky darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know where from it comes nor where to it leads. It is uncertain whether a merciful god or a bad demon put it in the reason.”

This is a self-experience of a thinking which tried to bring to mind what is, actually, a thinking which has struggled to grasp the human being in the point where it thinks to find that in this point where the temporal, the transient of the human being is connected with the everlasting. To this point everybody must come who wants to approach the everlasting nature of the human being. However, what does Gideon Spicker find? He finds if one has arrived at the place where one can consider the thinking, indeed, the necessity of the thinking appears, but there also a bottomless abyss appears. Since beyond this thinking—what is there? Is it a merciful god or a bad demon who put the thinking in the reason? An abyss, a desolate darkness is that what Gideon Spicker sees. One can find out immediately that those who cannot get further with the pursuit of thinking than up to the thinking cannot still satisfy themselves within this thinking.

All that is like a spiritually instinctive experience in Goethe's healthy worldview. One cannot say that he was prepared in his inside one day to bring the bottomless abyss home to himself of which Gideon Spicker speaks. However, Goethe felt that such a thing could happen if one wants to solve the world riddles only with the mere thinking. Hence, he did not approach at all this point. We will see immediately which deeper impulses formed the basis of this Goethean instinct. For the time being I only wanted to point out that Goethe was very well at that point where the philosophers are if they want to investigate the everlasting in the human being and in the world that he avoided, however, this point, did not approach it.

You can understand Goethe's character immediately if he does not defer to things of another world. There just the oppose impulse appears with him who argued from immediate spiritual instinctiveness that one does not need to go out of the world which presents itself immediately to the senses to find the spirit. Goethe was clear in his mind that someone who is able to find the spirit does not need to search it in another world, and vice versa, that someone who feels nature as little filled with spirit so that he needs to reflect on another world can only find fantastic, dreamy things in another world but never really the spirit. Goethe searched the spirit so much within the things of this world that he had to refuse to search it in any other world. He already regarded the feeling that one must leave this world to get to the spirit as something brainless.

In particular, you get an impression of the kind of the Goethean world observation if you look at how Goethe behaved to the phenomena of nature how he searched the spirit and the spiritual life really in nature. You know that Goethe did not study the various fields of natural sciences during his school years but approached them only later in his life and that he had to manage the phenomena of nature with mental pictures that he had compiled in his life. Herman Grimm emphasised rightly as a significant characteristic feature in the life of Goethe that, while others are introduced by teachers gradually methodically in this or that scientific approach, Goethe approached scientific attempts as a ripe man by life praxis, so that he had to form own mental pictures of these or those natural phenomena with a certain maturity.

As a rule, he got to mental pictures, which deviated significantly from that what about the same things just the authoritative scientists of his time meant. One can say that the Goethean viewpoint is diametrically opposed not only to the natural sciences of his time but also to the natural sciences of the present in a certain respect.

It is inadmissible if from some side single remarks of Goethe are picked out repeatedly to prove the views of Haeckel or also of his opponents one-sidedly. One can prove and confirm everything with Goethe if one wants it. Goethe got to botany because he wanted to care about the agriculture in the Grand Duchy of Weimar, so out of life praxis. He got to geology by the Ilmenau (little town in Thuringia) mining, to physics because the scientific collections of the University of Jena had been assigned to him. Therefore, from necessity of life he tried to get mental pictures by which he could penetrate into the secrets of nature. You know that he formed views this way that found their confirmation partly in the course of the nineteenth century, as far as they point to outer scientific facts. However, Goethe did not get these views like other naturalists, but rather he was urged by his enclosing way of thinking to think in a way about certain natural processes and essentialities. You can say that immediately with his first, epoch-making discovery this is the case.

When Goethe became acquainted with zoology and human biology by observing the anatomical and physiological collections in Jena, he also familiarised himself with all kinds of teachings which were usual in natural sciences at that time about the human being as sensory being. One looked in those days still for outer differences of the human being and the animals. One looked in a way that the modern natural sciences do no longer understand.

One linked, for example, the difference to a detail, while one stated that in the upper jaw of the human being no intermaxillary existed, while all higher animals would have this bone. Goethe disliked this, simply because he could not imagine at first that the remaining skeleton of the human being would differ in such an unimportant detail. Now Goethe looked, while he himself became an anatomical researcher, while he investigated skeleton after skeleton and compared the human construction to the animals in relation to the upper jaw whether that had an inner significance what the anatomists said. Then Goethe could show really that there is no difference between the human and the animal skeletons in this respect. He already consulted the embryological research that became especially important later and showed that with the human being relatively early during the embryonic development the other parts of the upper jaw grow together with the intermaxillary so that it does not seem to exist with the human being. Goethe had become clear in his mind that it was right what he had felt first that the human being is different from the animals not by such an anatomical detail, but only by his whole posture. Of course, Goethe thereby did not become a materialistic thinker. However, he could get closer to the ideas that immediately suggested themselves to him, above all, by his acquaintance with Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744-1803) who wanted to extend an enclosing way of thinking to all world phenomena, so that the evolution of the world shows an inner necessity that finally generates the human being at its summit.

How can one imagine, Goethe thought in harmony with Herder, that in the evolution a big harmony, an inner lawful necessity prevails, and that then suddenly somewhere a line is drawn so that on this side of the line the complete animal development is and beyond this line the human development which should be different by such an unimportant detail? One can realise from how Goethe speaks, what was near and dear to him, actually. Not to make a single scientific discovery, but to behold a harmonious order in the whole enclosing nature, so that the details put themselves everywhere in a whole so that jumps are nowhere to be found in the evolution of the world. You can notice in a letter to Herder in which he informed his discovery joyfully with the words: “It is there too, the small bone!” that Goethe found something like a confirmation of his worldview in this single fact.

He continued this view just in relation on the animal forms. There he got also to single facts that were important, however, for him not as those, but confirmed his worldview only. He himself tells that he found an animal skull at his stay in Venice on a cemetery that showed him clearly that the cranial bones are nothing but transformed vertebrae. He thought that the ring-shaped vertebrae contain concealed possibilities of growth, can be transformed into the cranial bones that surround the brain. Goethe thereby got to the idea that the human being and the animal, the different beings of organic life generally, are built from relatively simple entities that develop in living metamorphosis into each other or diverge.

One can immediately receive the sensation with the research intentions of Goethe that he wanted to apply this idea of metamorphosis not only to the skeleton, but also to all other parts of the human being. He could carry out his research only on a special field because one human being cannot do everything, and because he worked with limited research means. Someone who knows Goethe's scientific writings knows that Goethe carefully indicated the cranial bones as transformed dorsal vertebrae. However, one can just have the feeling that Goethe's ideas advanced farther in this field. He would generally have had to carry the view in his mind that the complete human brain is only a transformed part of the spinal cord as a physical-sensory organ that the human formative forces are able to transform what is only a part of the spinal cord on a low level into the complex human brain.

I had this feeling when I received the task in the end of 1889 to incorporate the handwritten notes in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive into Goethe's scientific writings published until then. It was especially interesting to me to pursue whether such ideas have really lived in Goethe from which one could have the feeling that they must have been there, actually, with him. In particular, it interested me whether Goethe really had the idea to regard the brain as a transformed part of the spinal cord. Lo and behold, with the examination of the manuscripts it really resulted that Goethe had written the following sentence in a notebook with pencil like an intuition: “The brain is only a transformed cerebral ganglion.” Then the anatomist Bardeleben (Karl von B., 1849-1919) revised this part of Goethe's scientific writings.

Then Goethe applied the same way of thinking to the plant realm. There his views concerning the outer facts have found just as little contradiction as in anatomy. Goethe interprets, actually, the whole plant as composed of a single organ. This organ is the leaf. Backward and forward, the plant is always leaf. The coloured petal is the transformed green leaf, also the stamens and the pistil are to him only transformed leaves, and everything of the plant is leaf. That what lives in the plant leaf as formative force can accept all possible outer forms. Goethe explained this so nicely in his writing Metamorphosis of Plants (1790).

Howsoever one may behave now to the details with Goethe, the way is important how he generally did research. This was and is to many people something strange. Goethe himself was clear about that. Imagine how the human soul that looks at the organic world in Goethe's sense sees such an organ like the plant leaf changing into the petal, then into the filamentous stamen, even into the root. Imagine a simple ring-shaped dorsal vertebra fluffed and flattened by laws of growth, so that it is qualified for enclosing not only the spinal cord, but also the brain which itself is transformed from a part of the spinal cord, and that the inner mobility of his thinking is necessary. He probably felt what prevents us from looking at the world phenomena this way. Someone who has a rigid thinking who wants to develop sharply outlined concepts only forms the firm concept of the green leaf, of the petal and so on; however, he cannot go over from one concept to the other. In doing so, nature breaks into nothing but details. He does not have the possibility because his concepts have no inner mobility to penetrate into the inner mobility of nature.

However, thereby you become able to settle down in Goethe's soul and to convince yourself of the fact that with him cognition is generally something else than with many other people. While with many other people, cognition is joining of concepts which they form apart, cognition is with Goethe immersing in the world of the beings, pursuing that what grows and becomes and transforms perpetually, so that his thinking changes perpetually. Briefly, Goethe sets that in inner motion, which is mere thinking, otherwise. Then it is no longer a mere thinking. About that, I will speak in detail in the next talks. It matters that the human being arouses the only inferring thinking to the inner living thinking. Then thinking is a life in thoughts. Then one can also no longer think about the thinking, but then it generally changes into something else.

Then the thinking about the thinking changes into a spiritual view of thinking, then one faces the thinking as usual outer sensory objects, save that one perceives these with eyes and ears, while one faces the thinking mentally. Goethe wanted to go over everywhere from the mere thinking to the inner spiritual views, to the beholding consciousness as I have called it in my book The Riddle of Man. Hence, Goethe is dissatisfied because Kant said that the human being cannot approach the so-called “things in themselves” or generally the secret of existence, and that Kant called it an “adventure of reason” if the human being wants to ascend from the usual faculty of judgement up to the “beholding faculty of judgement.”

Goethe said, if one accepts that the human being can ascend by virtue and immortality—the so-called postulates of practical reason with Kant—to a higher region, why one should not stand the “adventure of reason” courageously while beholding nature? Goethe demands from the human being this beholding faculty of judgement. From this point, one can understand why Goethe avoided the thinking about the thinking. Goethe knew that if one wants to think about the thinking one is, actually, in the same position, as if one wanted to paint the painting. One could imagine that anybody wants to paint the painting even that he does it. However, then he exceeds the real painting.

In the same way, you have to exceed the thinking if it should become concrete. Goethe knew from a spiritual instinct that the human being can wake concealed forces and abilities in himself and get to the beholding consciousness, so that the spiritual world is around him, just as, otherwise, the sensory world is around his senses. Then you leave as it were not only your usual sensory life but also your usual thinking. Then you look at the thinking as a reality. You cannot think the thinking; you can behold it. Hence, Goethe always understood if philosophers approached him who believed to have the ability to look at the thinking spiritually. He could never understood if people stated, they could think about the thinking. Only a higher ability lets the thinking appear before the human being. Goethe had this ability. This simply shows the kind of his view of nature. Since the ability to put the thinking in living motion to pursue the metamorphosis of the things is on a lower level the same as the beholding consciousness on a higher level. Goethe felt thinking while looking. However, Goethe had a special peculiarity.

There are certain persons who have a kind of naive clairvoyance, a kind of naive beholding consciousness. Now it is far from my mind to state that Goethe had a kind of naive beholding consciousness only, but Goethe had a special disposition by which he differs from someone who only is able to get to the beholding consciousness by the conscious development of the deeper abilities of his soul. Goethe had this beholding consciousness not from the start as the naive clairvoyants have it, but he could put his thinking, the whole structure of his soul in such a motion that he could do research really not only externally and got thereby to physical laws grasped in thoughts, but he could pursue the inner life of the natural phenomena in their metamorphoses.

It is peculiar that this predisposition, if one wants to develop the ability of the spiritual beholding consciously, is impaired at first, it is even extinguished. Goethe had this natural predisposition in himself to develop a certain beholding consciousness gradually in himself with natural phenomena. He did not want such rules, as I have described them in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Goethe did not have the beholding consciousness from the start, but in the course of his development it was to him a self-evident fact to develop certain abilities unlike other people do. This naive talent would have been extinguished at first. If the talent does not exist, one does not want to extinguish it, and then one can quietly develop these abilities consciously. Because it existed with Goethe as an inner spiritual desire, he did not want to disturb it; he wanted that it was left to itself. Hence, his shyness to look at the thinking, which he only wanted to behold, with the thinking. Otherwise, one has to try to go to the point of thinking to grasp the thoughts themselves and to transform them gradually into forces of beholding.

This is a special peculiarity of Goethe that he felt those forces growing up which can be also developed artificially. He did not want to destroy this naive while he spread, I would like to say, too much consciousness about it. However, this shows that it is not unjustified to observe not only how his soul forces work internally, but also how his soul forces immerse in nature. Then without fail Goethe is a model of the development of the beholding consciousness, of those spiritual forces, which really lead into the spiritual world, into the everlasting.

If you settle in Goethe's natural sciences in such a way that you observe them not only externally, but that you try to observe how you yourself become, actually, if you activate such forces in yourself, you can also transfer that what Goethe pursued with his view of nature to the human soul itself. Then comes to light what Goethe omitted because his senses were directed outward at first, to nature which he considered spiritually in her spirituality, namely that one has to look at the human soul life also under the viewpoint of metamorphosis. Goethe became aware of nature due to his special predisposition, and because this predisposition was especially strong, he looked less after the soul life.

However, you can apply his way of looking at the world to the soul life. Then you are led beyond the mere thinking. Most people who deal with these things simply do not believe this. They believe that one can think about the soul exactly the same way as one can think about something else. However, one can direct thoughts only to that what can be perceived outwardly. If you want to look back at the soul itself, on that what activates the human thinking, then you cannot do it with the thoughts. You need the beholding consciousness that exceeds the mere thinking; you get to the Imaginative knowledge, as I called it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other books. One cannot apply the same abstract, pale thoughts with which one grasps nature to the human soul life. One simply does not grasp it with them. Such thoughts are like a sieve, through which you pass the human soul life.

This occurred once in a great historical moment when Goethe and Schiller (1759-1805, German poet) met. Just in this point, you can realise what happens if you want to enter from Goethe's view of nature into a soul view. Schiller had written an important treatise, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794). I want to indicate only briefly, which soul riddle Schiller had in mind. Schiller wanted to solve the problem of the artistic. He wanted to answer the question to himself: what happens, actually, in the human soul if the human being creates or feels artistically if he puts himself in the world of beauty? Schiller found, if the human being is only given away to his sensory drives, he is subject to the physical necessity.

As far as the human being is subject to the physical necessity, he cannot approach beauty and art. Also, not if he dedicates himself only to the thinking if he follows the logical necessity only. However, there is a middle state, Schiller thinks. If the human being impregnates everything that the sensory gives him with his being so that it becomes like the pure spirituality, if he raises the sensory to spirituality and presses the spirituality down into the sensory, so that the sensory becomes spiritual and the spiritual becomes sensory, then he is in beauty, then he is in the artistic. The necessity seems to be reduced by the desire, and the desire seems to be improved by the spirit. Schiller spoke a lot about his intention to Goethe to invigorate the human soul forces so that in the harmony of the single soul forces this middle state appears which enables the human being to create or feel the artistic. In the nineties, from the deeper acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller on, this important life riddle played a big role in the correspondence and in the conversations of Schiller and Goethe. In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man Schiller tried to solve this problem philosophically. Goethe also dealt with this problem because this problem occupied Schiller so much. But Goethe had the beholding consciousness which Schiller did not have; this enabled him to submerge with his thoughts in the world of the things themselves, but also to grasp the soul life more intimately.

He could realise that the human soul life is much more extensive, is much more immense than that what one can grasp with abstract thoughts, as Schiller did in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Goethe did not want simply to put such dashes, such contours of thoughts to characterise this richly structured human soul life. Thus, a little work of quite different nature originated about the same problem.

It is very interesting to consider more closely this point of the acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller. What did Schiller want, actually? Schiller wanted to show that in every human being a higher human being lives, as compared with what the usual consciousness encloses is a lower one. Schiller wanted to announce this higher human being who carries his desires up to the spirit and brings the spirit down to the desires, so that the human being, while he connects the spiritual and sensory necessities, grasps himself in a new way and appears as a higher human being in the human being. Goethe did not want to be so abstract. However, Goethe also wanted to strive for what lives as a higher human being within the human being. This higher being in the human being appeared to him so rich in its single member that he could not grasp it with mere thinking, so he put it in mighty, important pictures. Thus, The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) originated from forms at the end of Conversations of German Emigrants.

Someone who symbolises a lot in this fairy tale does not come close to its deeper sense. The different figures of this fairy tale, they are about twenty, are the soul forces, personified in their living cooperation which lift the human being beyond themselves and to the higher human being. This lives in the composition of The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Only in pictures, Goethe could grasp the problem that Schiller grasped in thoughts philosophically; but in pictures which are an entire world.

You do not need to grasp the soul life pedantically only in Goethean way, so, actually, only in poetic pictures, but one realises—just if one goes into the inner structure of the Goethean worldview if one applies this to the soul life in same way, as Goethe applied his ramble spirituality in the metamorphosis—that the metamorphosis of the soul forces grasps the human being vividly and leads him from the transient that he experiences in the body to the imperishable that he experiences as that which is in his inside and goes through births and deaths. The usual psychology deals a lot with the question: should one take the one or the other soul force as starting point? Is the will original, is the imagination, or is the thinking original? How should one imagine the mutual relation of imagination, thinking, feeling, and percipience? One applied a lot of astuteness to grasp the cooperation of the different soul forces in such a way as the outer natural sciences grasp the interaction of green leaf and petal or the interaction of cranial bones and cerebral ones without considering the inner transformation.

Somebody who can turn his view from the outside inwards with Goethean sense can behold the soul life; however, he has to do it even more vividly than to the outer life of nature because one can rest in the outer life as it were with the spiritual view. The outer life gives you the material; you can go from creation to creation. The inner life seems to disappear perpetually if you want to look at it. However, if you turn the ramble thinking inwards, which just becomes a beholding one, then that becomes what appears as thinking, feeling, willing, and as perceiving, nothing but something intrinsic that changes into each other. The will becomes a metamorphosis of the feeling, the feeling a metamorphosis of imagining, the imagining a metamorphosis of the perceiving and vice versa.

The development of the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, of the meditative thinking, which leads into the spiritual world, is based on nothing but on the living pursuit of the inner metamorphoses of the soul forces. On one side that tries who wants to become a spiritual researcher to develop his imagination, his percipience in such a way that he leads the will which only slumbers, otherwise, in percipience and imagination, into this percipience and imagination repeatedly in such a way that he brings that consciously to mind what, otherwise, appears as an involuntary mental picture. Thereby the usually pale thinking or forced percipience changes into the pictorial beholding. Since one can behold the spiritual only in pictures. The will and the feeling that one can imagine only, otherwise, but not in their real nature are recognised, are transformed by the meditative life, so that they become an imagining life, a perceiving life.

Leading the imagination into the will, leading the will into the imagining, changing the will into imagination and vice versa, the transformation of the imagining into the will in inner liveliness, the transformation of the single soul forces into each other, this is meditative life. If this is pursued, that announces itself for the inner observation what cannot announce itself if one looks only at thinking, at feeling and willing side by side. If one looks at them side by side, only the temporal of the human being appears. If one learns to recognise how imagining changes into feeling and the will changes into imagining and perceiving, one gets to know the metamorphosis of the inner soul life, as vividly as Goethe pursued the metamorphoses in the outer nature. Then the everlasting of the human soul announces itself that goes through births and deaths. The human being thereby enters the everlasting.

What did Goethe want while he removed such a prejudice that the human being differs by a detail like the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw from the animal? He did not want that the human being faces as an isolated being the remaining world, he wanted, completely in harmony with Herder, to survey nature as a big whole and to look at the human being arising from the whole nature. When Schiller had got rid of some prejudices towards Goethe and had reached a pure free recognition of his greatness, he wrote to Goethe, how he had to think about Goethe's way of looking at nature. Among the rest, he wrote the nice words: “You take together the whole nature to get light for the single; in the entirety of her phenomena you look for the explanation of the individual ... A great and really heroic idea which shows only too well, how much your mind holds together the rich whole of its mental pictures in a nice unity.”

It attracts Schiller's attention that Goethe wanted to understand the human being while he assembled him from that which is separated, otherwise, in the different beings of nature but which can change by inner formative forces so that the human being appears like a summary of the outer natural phenomena in his outer figure, the crown of the outer nature.

One has to form a correct mental picture of that which there Goethe wanted, actually, if one envisages the other side now that arises for the soul life. If one envisages the metamorphosis of the inner soul forces as Goethe envisaged the metamorphosis of the outer forms of the human being, that arises what appears in the human being as a summary of the metamorphosing soul forces from the underlying world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, as on the other side if one looks at the human being as a physical being in the Goethean way, this human physical being arises as a summary of the physical world. As Goethe's natural sciences connect the outer human figure to the whole remaining physical world, a Goethean psychology connects the human soul to the everlasting, concrete, enclosing spiritual world and allows it to concentrate in the human being. Not while you take this or that sentence of Goethe to confirm your own view you can build a bridge between spiritual science and the Goethean world consideration, but while you try to solve the problem internally—vividly, not in the abstract—logically how does one come close to such a kind to delve into nature?

Goethe himself possessed this ability to delve into nature naively. If you search it by deepening in his way to look at the world, to bring it back to life in yourself, then you get to the necessity to extend that which Goethe had as disposition for the view of nature also to the world of the mental. Then you get by the human soul life to the everlasting spiritual world as Goethe got by the human natural life to his consideration of the outer physical world. You have to approach Goethe internally; you have to try to want that in love what he wanted concerning nature. Then you get around to wanting the same concerning the spiritual world whose image is the human soul world. You get around to looking from the human soul into the spirit as Goethe looked from the human nature into the remaining nature. In this sense, one can already say that one understands Goethe little if one takes him only in such a way as he behaved at first. Goethe himself did not want to be taken in such a way. Since Goethe was very close to the whole way that must appear again with spiritual research, he was close to it also in the non-scientific areas, in the area of art.

If you yourself try to settle in the beholding consciousness, you realise that it is necessary above all that this settling does not perpetually disturb itself by all kinds of prejudices which are transferred from the sensory world or from the abstract, only logical thinking to the spiritual world. An important viewpoint of the investigation of the spiritual world is that you are able to wait. The soul can exert itself ever so much to investigate something in the spiritual world, it wants to investigate it absolutely, but it will fail, it will fool itself. It can exert itself ever so much unless in it those abilities have still matured which are necessary to the view of certain beings or certain facts, it will not yet be able to recognise them. Maturing, waiting is necessary until in the soul that has grown up which faces you in a certain area of the spiritual world. This is something that is necessary in a particular way for penetrating into the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must have patience and energy to a high degree. I characterise other rules in later talks. Goethe was minded by his whole nature to be also as an artist in such a way that he waited everywhere.

Nothing is more interesting than to pursue those poetries of Goethe that he could not finish if one pursues how he got stuck with the Pandora, how he got stuck with the Natural Daughter which should have become a trilogy and became only one part. If you compare it to that which he finished brilliantly, like the second part of Faust or the Elective Affinities, one recognises his innermost nature. Goethe could not “do” anything, he had always to form that only to which he had advanced by the maturity of his being, and if he did not attain this maturity, he left it, and then he was not able to work on. Someone who creates artistically only combining can work on. Someone who lets the spirit create in himself like Goethe cannot advance sometimes just if he is great as Goethe was. Where Goethe had to stop, he was of particular interest for that who wants to penetrate into his inner being. If one pursues something like the Elective Affinities, one realises that that which lives in it existed already in relatively early time, but not the possibility to develop figures really that could embody this riddle of nature and human being. Goethe left them, and thus he handed over the Elective Affinities to a time when the persons did no longer live who could still have understood it because they had experienced the first youth impulses together with him.

Thus, Goethe was close to spiritual science by this real experience of the mental as it were, he was close to it by the desire not to stop at the abstract thinking but to advance from the thinking to reality, indeed, as a naturalist, but as a naturalist who searched the spirit. Therefore, he was so glad when during the twenties the psychologist Heinroth (Johann Christian H., 1773-1843, German anthropologist) said that Goethe had a concrete thinking. Goethe understood this straight away that he did not have a thinking that keeps on spinning a thread but that submerges in the things.

However, the thinking submerges in the things, it does not find abstract material atoms in them, but the spirit, as well as by the beholding consideration of the soul life the everlasting spirit of the human being is recognised. Therefore, Goethe's view envisaged what reveals itself within the world of the sensory as something spiritual. You can understand from those indications that Goethe did not want to think about the thinking because he only knew too well that one could only look at the thinking. One can also understand well that Goethe did not at all mean anything irreligious when he said that it is antipathetic to him to speak of the things of another world. Since he knew that these things of another world are in this world, penetrate it perpetually, and that someone who does not search these spiritual things and beings in nature who denies them in nature does not want to recognise the spirit in the phenomena of nature. Hence, Goethe did not want to look behind the natural phenomena, but he wanted to search everywhere in the natural phenomena. Hence, it was unpleasant to him to speak of an “inside of nature.”

So about many philosophical minded people look for the “thing in itself.” They face the world of the outer sensory perceptions; they recognise that they are only sensory perceptions, reflections of reality. There they look for the “things in themselves,” but not, while they withdraw from the mirror and search in that which the spirit can grasp as spirit, but while they smash the mirror to reach for the world of the dead atoms from which one can never grasp anything living.

This inside of nature was for Goethe completely beyond his imagination. Hence, with his review on all efforts which he had to do to penetrate into the spirituality of the natural phenomena, that severe quotation which he did about the great naturalist Haller who had become unpleasant to him because he had said once: “No created mind penetrates into the being of nature. Blissful is that to whom she shows her appearance only!” Goethe did not at all want to speak about nature this way. He answered to it:

“No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.”
O you Philistine!
Do not remind me
And my brothers and sisters
Of such a word.
We think: everywhere we are inside.
“Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her appearance only!”
I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I grumble about it, but covertly,
I say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

Goethe believes that someone who looks at nature as something that is an outside of the spirit cannot penetrate into the spirit of nature. While she shows her shell in her different metamorphoses to the human being, it reveals the spirit to him at the same time with her kernel. Spiritual science wants nothing to be in this respect but a child of Goethe, I would like to say. It wants to extend that which Goethe applied in such fertile way to the world of the outer natural phenomena also to the soul phenomena by which they immediately receive active life and reveal the internal spiritual, that spiritual which lives in the human being as his everlasting immortal essence. We look closer at this in the following talks.

I wanted to show this today. Not because one grasps Goethe in his single statements, one can call him a father of spiritual science—since in this way one could make him the father of all possible worldviews—, but while one tries to settle affectionately in that what appeared to him so fertile. Then one does not repeat what he already said, but then spiritual science appears rightly as a continuation of the Goethean worldview. It seems to me that it is in its sense if one ascends from the physical life to the spiritual life.

Goethe himself showed when he wanted to summarise his worldview in his essay about Winckelmann (Johann Joachim W., 1717-1768, German art historian and archaeologist) the living together of the human being with the whole universe as an interaction of spirits, while he said: “If the healthy nature of the human being works as a whole if he feels in the world as in a big nice and worthy whole if the harmonious ease grants a pure, free delight to him, then the universe would shout out and admire the summit of its own being and becoming if it could feel itself because it has attained its goal.” Thus, Goethe lively imagined the essence of the human being together with the essence of nature in interaction: nature, the world perceiving itself in the human being, the human being recognising himself as everlasting, but expressing his eternity in the temporality of the outer world. Between world and human being, the world spirit lives, grasping itself, knowing itself, even confirming itself in the sense of Goethe.

Hence, those who have thought in the sense of Goethe were never tempted to deny the spirit and to apply the Goethean worldview to confirm a more or less materialistic worldview. No, those who have understood Goethe have always thought that the human being, while he faces the things of nature and lives among them, lives at the same time in the spirituality into which he enters if he dies. These human beings have thought in such a way as for example Novalis (1772-1801) did.

Novalis, the miraculous genius, who wanted to submerge in nature in certain phases of his life in quite Goethean way, knew himself immersed in the spiritual world. His many remarks about the immediate present of the spirit in the sensory world go back to the Goethean worldview. Hence, I am allowed, while Goethe is put as it were as a father of a spiritual worldview, to close with a remark, which Novalis did completely in the Goethean sense that summarises that which I briefly outlined today as Goethean worldview in a way:

“The spiritual world is also not closed to us here. It is always manifest to us. If we can make our souls as elastic as it is necessary, we are like spirits among spirits!”

In continuation of yesterday's sketch on the planetary evolution, let us now add some further explanations. We have already explained that our earth once passed through a Saturn, a Sun and a Moon condition. Let me now describe to you these successive states of existence, as they are usually described in occultism. When speaking of the soul's development along the path of knowledge, we shall be able to understand many things which can now only be advanced hypothetically.

If we consider the Saturn state of existence, that condition of our earth lying millions and millions of years before the present time, we find that it presented an aspect greatly differing from the one which is taken for granted through our present physical conditions. Above all, we should bear in mind that man, the most perfect being we know, has passed through the longest course of development. You will therefore hear the description of a course of development which greatly deviates from the Haeckel-Darwin theory of evolution, but the advantages of this purely materialistic theory may be gathered from my book, “Haeckel, the Riddles of the World and Theosophy”.

The first thing to be grasped is that the most perfect beings are those who passed through the longest course of development, and the most perfect being of all is man, especially the physical body of man. All other beings in our environment have not attained to the perfection of man's physical body, which has taken longer than all others for its development. If we look back through spiritual vision, we therefore find that the first foundation of man's physical body was laid upon Saturn. The whole universe, with all the beings and objects which it contained, influenced the first state of the earth's existence. The present human beings on our planet still possess all the organs which were formed upon Saturn and they are the most perfect parts of man's physical body, namely, the sense-organs. These apparatuses can be grasped from a purely physical aspect and their first foundation was then laid. Of course, you must not think that the eye existed on Saturn in the same form in which it exists to-day. But the first foundation of the eye, the ear, of every sense-organ and of all the other purely physical apparatuses of the human being appeared upon Saturn. The only activities existing upon Saturn which may still be found to-day, are those which pertain to the mineral kingdom. (Crystallizations, etc.)

Upon Saturn, the human being existed in the form which was the first foundation of his physical body; everything, else, the blood, the tissues, etc. did not then exist. Physical apparatuses constituted the first basis of man's physical body. Even as the emerald, the mica, etc, arise through physical laws and develop in the form of cubes, hexahedrons, etc, so at that time forms developed which resembled apparatuses and which existed upon Saturn in the same way in which crystals now exist upon the earth. The activity of Saturn's surface essentially consisted in a kind of reflection which went out into the universal space. The Beings in Saturn's environment who were scattered in the universal spaces sent down their influences. Something which we may call the “cosmic aroma” was also then strongly developed. Only a few phenomena of the present day may give you a feeling for what took place upon Saturn: for example, when you hear an echo in Nature, the sound of this echo can convey to you something which went streaming out of Saturn as the result of the impressions which it received. These conglomerations of forces resembling apparatuses which threw back pictures in the universal space, formed the first foundation of that which developed later on as the eye. In a similar way we might follow the development of everything else. What you now have within your body, was once upon Saturn a physical kingdom, which sent out into the world's spaces the reflection of the whole cosmos in a manifold manner.

Myths and legends preserved this knowledge far more clearly than one generally supposes. The Greek myth of Chronos and Rhea, proceeding from the Eleusinian Mysteries preserved, for example such a truth; it contains however, a great displacement of facts due to the way in which the Greeks viewed the great cosmic connections. This myth tells us that Chronos sent down his rays and that these rays then returned to him in many forms: this explains the picture of Chronos devouring his children.

Now you must not think that the Saturn mass was as firm and solid as the physical bodies of to-day; even water and air do not give you an idea of Saturn's fundamental substance. When speaking of bodies in occultism, we speak of solid, liquid and gaseous bodies. And if we speak of the elements in the old manner, they correspond to that which modern chemistry designates as the “aggregate conditions” of matter, for you must not think that the men of olden times, when speaking of the “elements” meant the same thing as we do. Then there is a higher “aggregate state”, designated in ancient occultism as “fire”; a better meaning is however conveyed by calling it “heat”. Even physics will be obliged to recognise that what is designated as heat, may be compared with a kind of fourth aggregate state, with another kind of substance differing from air and water. The Saturn mass was not even condensed to the state of air it consisted of purified heat, and its activity resembled that of the heat your blood, for it was connected with inner life-processes. The physical processes upon Saturn were real life-processes. Saturn consisted of heat-substance, of an immensely fine volume which may be designated as neutral, if compared with our present substances.

If we wish to study the Beings who inhabited Saturn, we must realise that the Beings whom we now see moving about upon the earth, then possessed only the first beginning of a physical body; they were embodied in heat-substance, and their activity consisted in a current of heat which moved about. These currents constituted the deeds of the Beings who filled Saturn with life. Even as to-day you are able to make a table, so these Saturn-beings did their work by producing currents of heat. Nothing else could be observed of these Beings. A greeting exchanged upon Saturn was as if two currents of heat moved to and fro, exchanging their forces.

The Beings who passed through the human stage upon Saturn did not possess a physical body as their lowest member, for they did not descend into matter so deeply as to require a physical body. Their lowest member was the Ego, even as to-day our lowest member is the physical body; then came their Sprit-Self or Manas, their Life-Spirit or Buddhi, then Spirit-Man or Atma. In addition they developed an eighth, ninth and tenth members, which must be included.

Theosophical literature calls these members which the human being has not yet developed, the “Three Logoi”; in Christianity they are called the Holy Spirit, the Son or the Word, and the Father. We may therefore say: Even as the human beings now consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man, so these Beings living upon Saturn, who in regard to their connection with the earth may be compared with the present human beings, consisted of Ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man; of the Holy Ghost, the Son or Word, and the Father. The theosophical terminology designates them as “asuras”. They are the Beings who from the very beginning implanted into the physical foundation of man's body the feeling of independence, of Ego-consciousness, and of Ego-feeling. You could not use your eye in the service of the Ego had your eye's foundation not been prepared at that time, so that now you are enabled to place your eye at the service of the Ego. These members were therefore prepared by the Spirits of the Ego, also
named the Spirits of Egoism. They gave us the wisest thing of all, when developed in the right way. But everything of the highest nature becomes perverted into its opposite if it is not developed in the right way, because then it exercises the most harmful and destructive influence. Man could never reach that high stage which we designate as human dignity, had not these Spirits of Egoism implanted in him the Ego-feeling. There have always been Beings who followed an evil Course, and consequently we must say: The Beings who implanted the Ego into man and who are now upon a stage of development greatly surpassing the human one, those Beings to whom we may look up as the highest of all, gave their Ego as an offering of self-renunciation and sacrifice; but the others followed the development of their Ego in a selfish manner.

In striving after freedom and human dignity we bear within us the influences of the Spirits of the Ego who followed the good path, and we bear within us the seed of evil, because the influence of the Beings who fell away continued to be active. This contrast has always been felt. Christianity itself makes a distinction between God the Father, whom it considers as the most highly developed Spirit of Saturn, and his opponent, the Spirit of all the evil Egos and of everything which is radically immoral, the Spirit who fell away upon the ancient Saturn. These are the two representatives of Saturn.

Even as after death we encounter other forms of existence, so a cosmic body, such as Saturn, passes through a kind of intermediate state, a kind of sleep-condition, before it enters into a new condition; it passes through a “pralaya” in contrast to a “manvantara”, so that we have a kind of resting, passive condition of the planet, between the Saturn and the Sun state of existence. The whole planet then emerges in a new form from its sleeping state, which is, however, a spiritual one.

Saturn thus emerged as the Sun, and a considerable transformation had taken place. Upon the Sun a great number of the germs which had already developed upon Saturn and which are still developing within us to-day, were permeated by an etheric body. During such a planetary transition something evolves which may be compared with the fruit of a plant which we lay in the earth; it decays, but it forms the foundation of a new plant Thus everything which developed upon Saturn arose again upon the Sun with a new foundation and it became permeated with an etheric body.

There were also other beings who had remained behind upon the mineral-physical stage, and they can be compared with the present mineral kingdom. The Sun absorbed them as a kind of subordinate kingdom of Nature, but at the same time another kingdom was raised to the stage of plant-man.

You obtain a right conception of the Sun-atmosphere if you imagine a thick, chemical gas, no longer representing a merely reflecting body, but one which absorbed everything which, came raying towards it, and after having transformed it, reverberated it in the same way in which plants now reverberate colours. The plant forms its green colour and other substances and returns them to the cosmic spaces. That which lived upon the ancient Sun cannot be compared with an echo, nor with a reflected image, as in the case of Saturn, in regard to the beings embodied upon the Sun, we come across a phenomena which can only be compared with a kind of Fata Morgana, with atmospheric phenomena resembling coloured pictures. Such phenomena which can only be perceived to-day in certain regions of our globe, can give you an idea of how these plant-bodies could be perceived. You must imagine that your bodies revealed certain Fata Morgana-like processes, through which your present bodies could pass as if through air. You were then as transparent as a Fata Morgana—but this phenomenon did not only consist of light, but also of tones and smells whirring through the gas- sphere of the Sun.

Whereas the beings living upon the Sun could shine like the fixed stars of to-day, the ancient Saturn kingdom of the beings who had remained behind, could be observed like a dark mass, like dark forms against the light, like obtuse. caverns in the body of the Sun, which disturbed its harmony. Particularly in regard to the “cosmic aroma” these retarded beings mixed into it sensations which provoked all kinds of evil smells. Myths have retained a recollection of this, for they relate that the Devil leaves behind an evil smell. As it progressed, the Sun really left behind a dark part, and the sun-spots which are visible now, are the remnants of the ancient Saturn kingdom which once existed upon the Sun. Hypothetically these spots should be explained exactly as we explain them now; for all these explanations are valid.

In a short sketch you thus have the earth's sun-existence painted, as it were, from its material aspect. Let us now see who were the Beings who attained the human stage upon the Sun. They would have to be described as follows: Their lowest body is the astral body, then comes the Ego, the Spirit-Self, the Life-Spirit, the Spirit-Man or Atma, then the Holy Ghost in the Christian meaning, and finally the Son or the Word. They did not have the Father, for this member was only developed during the Saturn era. These Saturn Spirits meanwhile rose to a still higher stage, and now they stand far above the human being.

The Leader of the Sun Spirits, in so far as He exercised the highest, influence upon the earth, the representative of the Spirits whose highest member was the Son or the Word, is the Christ, in the esoteric meaning of Christianity. He is the real regent of the earth, in so far as the earth is based upon the Sun state of existence. Upon the Sun, Christ would not yet have been called by that name. The old form of Christianity always taught this truth, and the difference between genuine Christianity and, the exoteric form of Christianity, which is in so many cases based upon misunderstandings, is that the older form of Christianity exerted all its thinking power and applied every conception in order to understand that high Being Who took on human shape in Jesus of Nazareth. The ancient form of Christianity wished to gain a conception of what lay at the foundation of this mystery, and no wisdom was too high for it, or too complicated: It explained the Being of Christ within Jesus of Nazareth in accordance with this truth. Many a passage in the Gospel of St. John can only be understood if you grasp it from this aspect. It suffices to draw attention to one point: If you take the words, “I am the Light of the World” literally, these imply that the Christ is the great Sun Hero, and that the Light which belongs to the Sun constitutes His being. We designate the whole hosts of Spirits whose Leader is the Christ as the “Fire Spirits” and we say: The Asuras or the Ego Spirits reached the human stage during the Saturn era. During the Sun existence the Fire Spirits or the Logoi, whose highest representative is named the Logos or the Word, reached this stage. For this very reason, Christ is named the “Word” that existed in “the beginning”, and the “beginning” designates in the Bible a definite point of departure in the cosmic evolution.

Again we have an intermediate condition, a kind of sleeping condition for the whole cosmic body, and then it begins to shine forth again as the ancient Moon.

You must imagine that in the beginning the present Earth and the present Moon formed one body with the Sun. Only when the Sun began to shine forth again, one part of the Beings separated from it with their own environment, so that two celestial bodies arose. One of these bodies, the Sun, begins to develop into a fixed star, and the body which separates from it begins to circle around it. The ancient Sun thus divided itself into two parts; the more highly developed substance remained behind upon the Sun, and the less perfect substance was eliminated. Consequently, that which once pursued the same course, because there was only one body, now followed two separate course: the Sun path and the Moon path. The Sun path was the one which developed upon the Sun-body, whereas the Moon developed its own world. You could reconstruct the ancient Moon by mixing together the present earth and the present Moon; this would enable you to form a conception of the way in which the ancient Moon was constituted. Both physically and spiritually the present Moon is far below the Earth in regard to its quality, and the Earth separated from the Moon just because it needed better conditions of life for Beings who lived upon it. The Earth developed beyond the stage it had reached during the Moon existence; but its best part remained behind upon the Sun.

What was the aspect of things upon the ancient Moon? The Beings who had passed through a preparatory stage upon Saturn by developing the physical foundation of the sense-organs, transformed these organs upon the Sun by permeating them with a etheric body; the sense organs thus became centralised, and the first basis of the organs of growth reaching as far as the glands could unfold upon the ancient Sun under the influence of the etheric body; this was a final product of the Sun existence.

Upon the Moon, the astral body was added in a similar manner. Everything astral first existed in the surroundings; the Fire Spirits had an astral body as their lowest member. The Beings upon the Sun resembled plants; for instance, they could not move from their fixed places. Although the whole body of the Sun was gaseous, you must imagine air-strata of greater density which were the bodies of these human plants. But now the astral body of man was added; this gave rise to the first foundation of a nervous system. The kingdom which had reached the plant stage of development upon the Sun, passed over to the animal stage, to a stage resembling that of animals. The physical ancestors of man upon the Moon thus possessed three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, yet they greatly surpassed the most highly developed apes of our planet; they were human animals which no biology can describe, an intermediate kingdom between man and animal. Our present vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms only developed later, but even as there were human animals; so we must admit the existence of an intermediate kingdom between plant and animal; plants with a kind of sentient capacity, plants which literally squeaked if one touched them. These plant-animals could never have grown upon a mineral soil, such as the present soil of the Earth; in fact, this mineral soil did not exist upon the Moon. Its mass did not consist of the present rocky substances, not even of loose soil. Comparatively speaking, the Moon's foundation consisted of a mass resembling a mash of cooked spinach or salad, and in it a kind of mineral plant, The whole foundation of the Moon was therefore of vegetable nature. A peat bed of to-day would resemble the kingdom which existed at that time as an intermediate kingdom between our plants and minerals. There were no rocks, and anyone walking over the ground would have walked over such a peaty ground or vegetable foundation, and analogously you may think of rocks in the form of woodened portions within this mass.

The plant-animals grew out of this whole foundation, and above them, in the Moon's environment which may be designated as “fire-air”, moved those beings who were man-animals. Imagine the whole atmosphere filled with saltpeter, carbon and sulphur gases; the Moon-men lived in this fiery air which you would thus obtain. Occultists always knew of the existence of this fire-air, and under older conditions of the Earth it was even possible to produce this fire-air artificially. This is only possible to-day in a very restricted circle, but this knowledge has been preserved in genuine alchemy. Consequently, if you read in Goethe's “Faust”, “Let me produce a little fire-air”, this touches the depths of occultism. Fire-air enwrapped; the Moon; this was its atmosphere.

We can understand this Moon-existence even better if we add another fact. Upon the Moon there was a kingdom of plant-minerals, of animal-plants growing out of this vegetable-mineral soil, and then there were the animal-men moving about upon it. But upon each stage there are beings who remain behind—you may, if you like, say that they did not “pass”. This is the case not only at school, but also in the great course of development, where a pupil may have to repeat a class. These beings who did not “pass”, appear in future stages of development in very peculiar conditions. Such stragglers of the plant-minerals who did not “pass” still exist in parasites, for instance in the mistle-toe. It cannot grow upon mineral soil, because it was accustomed to grow upon a vegetable-mineral soil. It proves a fact resembling that of a pupil who did not move on to a higher form; except that the case of the beings who remain behind in the cosmic development is far worse. Particularly in the North we come across a myth which describes this; you are all acquainted with the northern myth of Baldur and his death through Loki.

The Gods were frolicking about in the Aesir's home and in there games they hurled about all kinds of objects. Baldur had just before had dreams foreboding his early death, and the Gods were therefore afraid to lose him. The Mother of the Gods had taken an oath from all the living and inanimate beings and they all had all promised that they would never hurt Baldur, and so the Gods enjoyed the game of throwing all manner of weapons against Baldur. Loki, the opponent of the Gods, had discovered that one being, who was considered to be harmless, had not made any promise, and this was the mistle-toe, which lay in hiding somewhere in the distance. Loki obtained the mistle-toe, gave it to the blind god Hodur, who threw it at Baldur: the mistle-toe wounded Baldur, for it had not sworn the oath, and Baldur died.

This myth indicates that that which is invulnerable upon the Earth can only suffer harm through that which has remained behind from another existence as something evil. In the mistle-toe people saw something which had entered the present state of existence from an earlier one. All the beings now living upon the earth can only suffer harm through that which has remained behind from an earlier one. All the beings now living upon the Earth are connected with Baldur. But it was otherwise upon the Moon; consequently that being which had remained behind from the Moon was able to kill Baldur. All the various customs connected with the mistle-toe arise out of this foundation.

We should also consider the Moon existence from another aspect, from the Spiritual one. The Moon Beings who had reached the human stage must be described as beings whose lowest member was the etheric body, their second one the astral body, then the Ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man or Atma, and then they also had the Holy Ghost. They no longer had the ninth member pertaining to the Fire Spirits upon the Sun. The highest of the Moon Spirits who had reached the human stage is called the “Holy Ghost” in Christian esotericism. In the early original form of Christianity, the threefold Godhead was therefore intimately connected with the evolution of the earth. The Holy Ghost is a Spirit who is above man and Who is able to inspire him in a direct way.

Thus you may see that the Moon Spirits now stand above the human being. They are also called “Lunar Pitris”, “Moon Fathers” and “Spirits of Twilight”. The whole host belonging to the Holy Ghost is called in Christian esotericism the Host of Angels. The Angels are the Spirits immediately above man, who passed through their human stage upon the ancient Moon.

The life of the animal-men and of the plant-animals upon the Moon, differed from that of the beings who developed out of them upon the Earth. The movement of the Moon, which had already severed itself from the Sun, was quite different from the movement of the present earth around the sun. The ancient Moon circled around the Sun in such a way that it always turned the same face towards it, even as the Moon to-day always shows the same side to the earth. The Moon thus turned only once around its own axis, while circling around the Sun. The Moon Beings were therefore dependent upon the Sun in quite a different way than is the case with the present earthly inhabitants. During the Moon's whole epoch of revolution around the Sun, it was always daytime on one of its sides, and a kind of night upon the other. The Moon Beings, who were already able to move about, wandered in a kind of circle around the Moon, so that they passed through one epoch in which they stood under the influence of the Moon. The time in which they stood under the Sun's influence was their time of procreation. For there was already a kind of procreation. The Moon-men could not as yet express joy and pleasure through sounds; their expressions had a more cosmic significance. The sun-epoch was the time of ardour and passion, and it was connected with a great screaming on the part of the Moon Beings, This exists to-day in the animal kingdom.

Many other things have remained from that time. You know how one tries to investigate the true reason for the birds migration, why they circle around the globe in a certain manner. Many things which are mysteriously concealed to-day, can be understood if the whole course of earthly evolution is borne in mind. There was a time when the lunar beings could only procreate when they wandered towards the Sun; this may be called their epoch of sexual life. General processes of lunar life expressed themselves in sounds at certain seasons of the and at other times, the beings upon the Moon were dumb.

We have thus learned to know time earth' s passage through the three preceding conditions of its existence: that of Saturn, of the Moon and of the Sun.

As you know from the spirit of our anthroposophical work over the years, our work is not based on a striving for sensations. Instead, we want to calmly examine the facts of spiritual life that are important in our lives. It is not by speaking of what lies on the surface of daily life that we serve our age spiritually, but by gaining knowledge of life's larger connections. Our individual lives are closely connected with the great events of existence, and only when we judge our own life on the basis of the greatest phenomena of life can we assess it rightly. That is why we have tried in the last three years to deepen our fundamental views in relation to universal questions. We spent the first four years in this first seven-year cycle in the existence of the German Section of the Theosophical Society establishing our views and insights. From what you heard in the various lecture cycles, you will have realized that the lectures on the Gospels are part of the work of these last three years. Those lectures not only helped us understand the contents of the Gospels, but also showed what we can learn from them about human nature. Today, we will talk more about how the Gospels can be applied to our personal lives.

Conventional science is less and less willing to consider the Gospels historical documents about the greatest individuality ever to intervene in human evolution, Christ Jesus. The attitude toward the Gospels in the first Christian centuries and even in the Middle Ages was quite different from what it has become in modern times. These days, the Gospels are indeed seen as four mutually contradictory documents, and nothing seems more natural than to ask how they can be considered historical records when they contradict each other as much as they do in giving an account of what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era.

Now, if people did not love to overlook the most important things, their thinking would inevitably have to lead them to the following realization. They would have to admit that it does not really take much to see that the Gospels contradict each other in our modern sense of the word. One could say that even a child can see the contradictions. But we could also add that nowadays the Gospels are available to everybody, and everybody can read them. However, before the invention of printing, they were not available to all people but were read only by a few people. These few were spiritual leaders. The content of the gospels was then taught to other people in a way they could understand. Now we have to ask if those few people who read the gospels, the spiritual leaders, were really such tremendous fools that they did not realize what every child can see these days, namely, that the gospels contradict each other.

When we investigate this matter, we soon notice that people's whole world of feeling toward the Gospels was different in the past. Today it is the critical intellect, trained in outer sensory reality, that has a field day with the Gospels. It has no problem at all finding the intellectual contradictions there; this is, after all, child's play.

How, then, did those leaders of spiritual life, who were reading the Gospels, come to terms with these contradictions? On account of the Gospels, people in ancient times had a tremendous reverence we can't even imagine today for the great Christ event. Indeed they felt that precisely because they had four Gospels they should revere and appreciate the Christ event all the more. This is because these early readers of the Gospels thought quite differently than we do today. Modern readers are no cleverer than somebody who photographs a bouquet of flowers from one angle. Then he has a picture of the bouquet and shows it around. People look at it and remember the picture, thinking they now have a clear idea of what the bouquet looked like. But then someone takes a picture of the same bouquet from another angle and gets quite a different picture. He also shows it to everyone but now people say it cannot possibly be the same bouquet because the two photographs contradict each other. And if the bouquet is photographed from all four sides, the four pictures will not be at all similar; yet they will be four pictures of the same thing.

This was how the early readers of the four Gospels felt. They believed the four Gospels are four different representations of one event, each taken from another point of view. They provide a complete picture of the event precisely because they are not alike. It is only when all four sides are combined that a complete idea of the event in Palestine emerges. People back then felt they had to look up to the Christ event with even more humility precisely because it was presented from four perspectives, for clearly this event is so great that it cannot be understood if it is presented from only one point of view. They felt they had to be grateful to have four Gospels describing this event from four points of view. However, they saw they had to understand how these four different points of view originated. Then they could develop an idea of what the individual can derive from the four Gospels.

What we call the Christ event is a tremendous, mighty event in the spiritual evolution of humanity. What place does that event in Palestine have in this evolution? We can say that everything humanity had previously experienced spiritually merged in this event in Palestine and from then on continued in one common stream. For example, the ancient Hebrew teaching, as it is recorded in the Old Testament, is one part of this common stream. It flowed in as the event in Palestine took place. Another stream proceeded from Zarathustra. This, too, entered into Christianity, which then flowed through the world as a kind of mainstream. Likewise, what we might call the oriental spiritual stream, which found its most significant expression in Gautama Buddha, also joined the one great mainstream. All these various streams are now contained in Christianity. You do not learn what Buddhism is nowadays from people who warm over the teachings of Buddha from 600 B.C. Those teachings have flowed into Christianity. Likewise, you do not learn what Zarathustrianism really is from people who want to explain its nature on the basis of ancient Persian documents. For the one who taught in ancient Persia what was recorded in these ancient documents has evolved further. He has let his contribution to the spiritual life of humanity flow into Christianity, and we will have to look for it there.

To get a clear picture of the facts, let us consider how these three streams, Buddhism, Zarathustrianism, and the ancient Judaic stream, flowed into Christianity. To understand how Zarathustrianism flowed in, we should remember that the individuality we call Zarathustra was the great teacher of the second post-Atlantean epoch who first taught among the ancient Persians and was then incarnated again and again. Through each incarnation he ascended higher and higher, and finally he appeared around 600 B.C. as a contemporary of Buddha. He appeared in the secret schools of the ancient Chaldean-Babylonian culture and was the teacher of Pythagoras, who had gone to Chaldea to perfect himself. Then this Zarathustra, who in 600 B.C. was known as Zarathas or Nazarathos, was reborn at the beginning of our era to parents called Joseph and Mary, as described in Saint Matthew's Gospel. This child of Joseph and Mary, the so-called Bethlehem parents, was one of the two Jesus children born at the beginning of our era. Thus, we see the individuality who was the bearer of Zarathustrianism—one of the significant streams mentioned above—transplanted to ancient Palestine.

This was not the only spiritual stream that was to revive and in a new form flow on in Christianity. Many different things had to come together to bring this about. For instance, Zarathustra had to be born in a body so organized that it was possible for him to develop further the faculties he had acquired through ascending from incarnation to incarnation. We must keep in mind that no matter how highly developed an individuality is, if it descends into an unsuitable body because it cannot find a suitable one, this individuality cannot express his or her soul-spiritual faculties because it lacks the necessary physical instruments. It takes a certain kind of brain to express such faculties as Zarathustra possessed. That is, he had to be born into a body that had inherited the qualities making it an appropriate instrument for such faculties. Thus, the Jesus child described in Saint Matthew's Gospel had to have a high soul-spiritual organization in his reincarnating I, which would allow him to have the powerful effect that was necessary, and he also had to have a perfect physical organization, which was inherited, for his soul to be born into. Zarathustra had to find a suitable physical brain.

This perfectly adapted physical organization was the contribution of the ancient Hebrews to Christianity. A suitable physical body for Zarathustra, a body with the most perfect imaginable physical instruments, had to be created in the Hebrew people through purely physical heredity. This had to be prepared far back in the past through many generations so that the right qualities were passed on and then inherited by the body that was born at the beginning of our era.

Let us look at how this life flowed into the mainstream of our present spiritual life. Just as we have seen the mission of Zarathustra in relation to Christianity, so we will now find out about the mission of the ancient Hebrews. Here I must tell you that the more spiritual-scientific research progresses, the more it has to admit that the Bible, not outer cultural history, is right. What cultural history digs up appears childish in comparison with what is written in the Bible and what only needs to be read properly to be understood. For spiritual science the Bible is more correct than historical research. For example, it is true that Judaism descended, in a sense, from a common forefather called Abraham or Abram. It is indeed absolutely correct that as we trace the generations back into the past, we come to a forefather who was endowed with very special powers by the spiritual world. What were these powers? To understand what special capabilities were given to Abraham, we must recall various things we have already spoken about here.

As we have said, when we look at ancient times, we find that people had other faculties of soul than we have today; these can be called a kind of dim clairvoyance. Back then, people could not look at the world in the self-confident, intellectual way we do, but they were able to perceive the spiritual around them, spiritual phenomena, facts, and beings. Since this seeing took place in a state of dimmed consciousness, it was like a living dream, but a dream that had a vital connection to reality. This ancient clairvoyance had to become weaker so people could develop our modern way of thinking and our intellectual culture.

Human evolution is a kind of education through which the various faculties are gradually developed. For example, in our present way of seeing, we perceive, let's say, a flower without seeing its astral body winding all around it. The ancients, however, still saw the flower and its astral body. We had to be trained in our modern perception that sees objects with the sharp contours of the intellect; this training required that the ancient clairvoyance vanish. Now, there is a certain law that prevails in spiritual evolution. According to this law, every capacity humanity acquires must have its beginning in one individuality. Faculties that are to become common to a large number of people must first appear in one person. Thus, the faculties having to do with reasoning not related to clairvoyance, with evaluating the world by measure, number, and weight—faculties that aim not at seeing into the spiritual world but at understanding sensory phenomena—were first implanted by the spiritual world in the individuality known as Abraham or Abram. He was chosen to be the first to develop the powers that are especially bound to the physical brain. It is not for nothing that Abraham is called the discoverer of arithmetic, that is, of the capability to quantify the world and calculate it according to measure and number. In a sense, he was the first of those in whose soul the ancient dreamy clairvoyance was extinguished and whose brain was prepared so that the faculty using the brain as instrument could become effective. Thus, the mission given to Abraham was a significant and profound one.

Now this faculty that had been given to Abraham in rudimentary form was to become more and more perfect. As you can imagine, everything in the world must develop, and the ability to perceive the world through the physical brain was no exception. This faculty was developed through being transmitted from Abraham to the succeeding generations. However, something different had to happen in this case than is usual when a mission is passed on from the older generation to the younger. After all, other missions, especially the greatest ones, were not connected to a physical instrument, the physical brain.

For example, let us look at Zarathustra. He gave his disciples a higher, more advanced clairvoyant vision than other people had. It was not bound to a physical instrument but was transmitted from teacher to pupil. The pupil then in turn became a teacher and gave this higher clairvoyant vision to his pupils, and so on. Abraham's mission, however, was not a teaching or method of clairvoyant perception but something bound to the brain. Thus, it could be transmitted to later generations only through physical inheritance. The mission given to Abraham depended on being transmitted physically from one generation to the next, that is, the perfected organization of Abraham's brain had to be inherited by his descendants generation after generation. Because Abraham's mission consisted in perfecting the physical brain, the latter became more and more perfect from generation to generation. In other words, the mission of Abraham depended on procreation for its gradual perfection in the course of physical evolution.

There was yet something else connected with this contribution of the ancient Hebrew people, and we will understand what it was when we consider people in other civilizations who had dim clairvoyance. We can ask how they received what was most important to them, what they revered most in all the world. They received it as inspirations that lit up within them. They did not have to do research as we do. Nowadays, we establish sciences by investigating the world outside us, by experimenting and deducing laws from the external facts. The ancients did not gain their knowledge in this way; rather, it lit up within them as an inspiration like a flash of lightning. They received their knowledge in their inner being; their souls had to give birth to it within them. They had to turn their gaze away from the outer world in order to allow the highest truths to blossom forth within them as inspirations.

This was to become different for those who derived their mission from Abraham. Abraham had to bring to humanity precisely the results of observation and reasoning. When people in those civilizations that were built on ancient clairvoyance looked up to the highest, they felt, “I am grateful to the God who reveals himself to me within me. I turn my gaze away from the outer world, and the Godhead is most present to me when, without looking at the outside world, I let his inspirations light up within me.”

However, the descendants of Abraham were to renounce inspirations coming from within themselves and prepare themselves to turn their gaze to the world around them. They were to observe what is revealed in air and water, in mountain and plain, and in the starry world, and to ponder how all things exist side by side. They were to connect external things with one another and to gain an all-embracing thought from this. When they condensed what they saw in the outer world into one single thought, they called what the outer world told them Yahweh or Jehovah. They were to receive the highest through a revelation that speaks through the outer world.

In contrast to what other peoples were to contribute, the mission of the Abrahamic people was to give humanity what came as revelation from outside. Therefore, the instrument of spiritual life had to be inherited so that its organization was appropriate for the revelations from outside, just as earlier the inner powers of soul had to be adapted to the revelations from within.

Let us look at what happened when the clairvoyants of ancient times yielded to revelations from within themselves. They turned their gaze away from the outer world because what was revealed there could tell them nothing about the spiritual world. They even turned their gaze away from the sun and stars and listened only to what was within. There, a great inspiration about the secrets of the world was revealed, and they had a picture of the structure of the cosmos. What these ancient clairvoyants knew about the stars and their movements, about the laws of the starry world, and about the spiritual worlds was not acquired through external observation. Rather, the ancients knew something about Mars, Saturn, and so on because they had revealed themselves within these people. The laws of the universe, which are inscribed in the stars, were also inscribed within the human soul and revealed themselves there in inspirations. Just as the laws of the universe, which rule the stars, were revealed in the soul, so the laws that rule the world were now to be revealed to the Abrahamic people through outer reasoning and deduction—that is, those laws had to be grasped through outer revelation.

For this purpose, heredity had to be guided in such a way that the brain could acquire the qualities enabling it to perceive the right relationships between things. This wonderful lawfulness was implanted into the predispositions transmitted to Abraham, predispositions that developed through the generations in such a way that their organization corresponds to the great cosmic laws. The brain had to be transmitted so that its inner capabilities and its structure developed like the laws of numbers in the stars in the universe. This is why Jehovah said to Abraham, “You will see generations descend from you that will be ordered and arranged in accordance with the numbers of the stars in the heavens.” The generations following Abraham were to be arranged in harmonious numerical relationships just as the stars in the sky are ordered in harmonious relations. In other words, these generations were to bear within them laws that are like the laws of the stars in the heavens.

In the heavens, there are twelve constellations. An image of this was to appear in the twelve tribes of descendants of Abraham so that the faculties that were implanted in rudimentary form in Abraham could be carried down through the generations. In the organic structure of this people, developing further from age to age, an image was to be created of number and measure in the heavens. In one Bible translation this is rendered as, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore.” In truth, however, the passage should read, “Your descendants shall be grouped regularly in their blood relationships so that their arrangement is an image of the laws of the stars in the heavens.” The Bible is profound, but the way it is presented these days is colored by the modern view of the world. Thus, we read, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore,” while a true translation would be, “Your descendants shall be so regularly grouped that, for example, twelve tribes will arise that correspond to the twelve constellations.”

Thus, the individual characteristics had to express that the Abrahamic people was to realize that their mission was a gift from outside, not something that came to life within them. They had to know that what they have to bring to the world is given to them from the outside. The Bible wonderfully expresses that Abraham's mission comes to him from outside in contrast to the old revelations that were given from within. What was this mission? Abraham's mission was to provide what flows through the blood up to the time of Christ Jesus. The entire spirituality of a certain stream had to be placed into this. It was to work as if it came as a gift from outside. Abraham had to give to the world the ancient Hebrew people. That was his mission.

If this people was to be in keeping with this mission, it had to be given to Abraham as a gift from outside. Abraham had a son, Isaac, and he was asked to sacrifice this son, as the Bible tells us. As Abraham was about to carry out the sacrifice, his son was given back to him by Jehovah. What was Abraham given there? The entire Hebrew people descended from Isaac. If Isaac had been sacrificed, it would not have come into being. Thus, the whole Hebrew people was given to Abraham as a gift. The sparing of Isaac wonderfully expresses the nature of this gift. It was Abraham's mission to father the Hebrew people, and with Isaac he received it as a gift from Jehovah.

This is how profound the stories in the Bible are; all of them correspond in their impressive details to the inner character of the progressive development of humanity. The Old Testament Hebrews gradually had to relinquish the ancient clairvoyance that continued within the other civilizations. This clairvoyance was connected to faculties coming from the spiritual world, which were designated according to their nature by expressions taken from the names for the constellations. The last faculty to be given up in exchange for the gift of the Hebrew people was connected with the sign of the Ram. Therefore, a ram was sacrificed in place of Isaac. This is the external expression of the sacrifice of the last clairvoyant power, making it possible for Abraham to receive the Hebrew people as a gift. The Hebrews were chosen to develop the faculties for observation of the outer world. Nevertheless, every new development contains also atavistic remnants of earlier things. That is why everything that was not purely in the blood and still recalled ancient clairvoyance had to be excluded for the sake of the transmission of the new outer-directed faculties. Thus, the Hebrews always had to exclude what came as an inheritance from other peoples.

We come now to a subject that is difficult to discuss because it contains a truth far removed from modern thinking. Nevertheless, it is a truth, and those who have worked for a while in anthroposophical groups may be able to accept a truth that is foreign to the conventional modern thinking. We must be aware that certain classes of people in ancient times retained their earlier faculties into later ages, especially faculties related to knowing. Clairvoyant powers lived in human souls, and people were closely connected with spiritual beings who revealed themselves in their souls. In certain people, who were the products of the decline of these ancient times, there developed ultimately a lower form of this connection to the spiritual world around them. While the actual clairvoyants were connected with the whole universe through spiritual intuition and inspiration, those who were part of the process of decline and who developed this connection to the spiritual in a phase of decadence were actually lower types of people. They were not independent because their I was undeveloped, and at the same time their clairvoyant faculties were already declining. Such individuals appeared throughout history, and in them we can see the relationship between certain physical organs and the clairvoyant organs.

Now we arrive at the truth that will sound strange to you. What we call ancient clairvoyance, this lighting up of the cosmic secrets within human souls, had to enter the soul somehow. We have to picture this as streams flowing into human beings. The ancients did not perceive them, but when these streams had occurred and lit up within them, people perceived them as their inspirations. In other words, certain streams flowed into people from their environment; in later periods these streams were transformed. In the distant past, these streams were purely spiritual, and clairvoyants could perceive them as purely astral-etheric streams. But later these purely spiritual streams dried up, as it were, and condensed to etheric-physical streams. What became of them? They developed into hair. Our hair is the result of these ancient streams. The hair on our body was formerly spiritual streams that flowed from outside into human beings. Our hair is nothing else but dried up astral-etheric streams.

Such facts are preserved only where the old truths have been retained externally in writing or through tradition. In Hebrew the characters for the words “hair” and “light” are approximately the same because people were conscious of the kinship between the light streaming in astrally and hair. In general, the greatest truths are contained in ancient Hebrew literature in the words themselves.

So, we can say human evolution is progressive. However, in those people whose ancient faculties were declining the incoming streams changed and dried up, but no new faculties appeared to take their place. Those people were connected with the new in an old way, yet unconnected because the streams were dried up. Such people were very hairy, while those who developed further were less hairy because new powers replaced those that later condensed into hair.

It will take a long time for science to arrive at these significant truths. Nevertheless, they can be found in the Bible. The Bible is far wiser than our science, which is still at the stage of a child beginning to learn his ABC's. Read the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob was the one who progressed a step further and developed the new faculty; Esau, on the other hand, remained at an earlier stage, and compared to Jacob he was a simpleton. When they were presented to their father Isaac, their mother had covered Jacob with false hair to make Isaac confuse his younger son with Esau. This shows us that the Old Testament Hebrews still had retained something that was inherited from other cultures and that had to be discarded. Esau is cast out, and what was to live on as sense-based reasoning is transmitted through Jacob. Here, what had remained in a retarded form was expelled in Esau. Similarly, the ancient clairvoyant faculties, an atavistic inheritance, appeared in Joseph, who was consequently expelled by his brothers to Egypt. Joseph had dreams through which he could interpret the world—this faculty was not to be developed in the mission of the Abrahamic people. Therefore, Joseph was cast out and had to go to Egypt.

There we see how a stream evolved in the Hebrew people that is built on the blood relationships of generations and from which the remnants of the old inheritance are gradually expelled. It was the special faculty of the ancient Hebrews to turn what is inherited down through the generations into a more and more perfect instrument so that finally a body could be produced that could be the instrument for Christ who would incarnate in it. If the Hebrews could no longer receive revelations from within, they had to receive them from without. They had to receive through external revelation even those things other peoples received through direct inspiration. That is, the Jews, led by Joseph, had to go to a people that still possessed the old inspiration. There, Joseph was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries, and the Jews attained through external means the knowledge they needed about the spiritual worlds. They even received their moral laws from the outside rather than as something lighting up within them. After they had assimilated what they had to take in from outside, they returned to Palestine.

We must now show how the Hebrews gradually developed from generation to generation so that finally the body of Jesus could be produced, and the ancient Hebrew stream flow into Christianity. Remember our discussion of the development of rudimentary characteristics in individuals. The life of an individual can be divided into periods of seven years. The first period, in which the physical body simply builds its forms, extends from birth to the change of teeth at the age of seven. The second period, in which the etheric body is active in growth and forming, continues until puberty. The forms are defined until the age of seven and the already-defined forms are then enlarged. From fourteen to twenty-one the astral body is especially predominant, and at twenty-one the true I is born and becomes independent. The life of the individual runs its course in certain periods until the birth of the human I.

In the same way the gifts of the people that was to provide a body for the most perfect I had to develop gradually. What takes place over years in an individual, however, develops in a people over generations. Each successive generation must further develop the characteristics of the preceding one. To explain the occult reasons for this would lead us too far afield, but you might recall a quite ordinary phenomenon. Just remember that certain qualities are inherited not directly, but skip a generation. For example, it is the grandson who resembles the grandfather in those characteristics. It was the same in the inheritance of qualities in successive generations of the Hebrews; every other generation was skipped.

What is one period of seven years in an individual's life corresponds in the successive generations of a people to two periods or fourteen generations. We can therefore say the Hebrews developed in twice seven or fourteen generations, which corresponds to the period from birth to the change of teeth in the individual. The following period corresponds to that between the change of teeth and puberty and again comprises twice seven generations. A third period of twice seven generations corresponds to the years between fourteen and twenty-one, when the astral body is especially prominent. It was then possible for the I to be born in the Hebrew people after three times twice seven or three times fourteen, that is, forty-two generations.

To describe the body that became Zarathustra's instrument, I had to show how the seed given to Abraham developed through thrice fourteen generations so that the I could be born, just as in the individual the I is born into the threefold corporeality after thrice seven years. The writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel shows this. He describes thrice fourteen generations—the generations from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian Captivity, and from the Babylonian Captivity to the birth of Jesus. Here, from the profundity of knowledge Saint Matthew's Gospel points to the mission of the Hebrews, showing how the forces were gradually developed that made it possible for the perfect I attained by Zarathustra to be born in a body produced by this people.

Looking at the destiny of the Hebrews, we find that the Babylonian Captivity occurred at the period when the individual, after the age of fourteen, prepares for life, when the hopes of youth to be realized later take root. The Babylonian Captivity was the time when the astral body of the Hebrews developed, and what gives this astral body its impulse in the final fourteen generations of the forty-two was implanted into it then. That is why the Hebrews were led into the Babylonian Captivity where, six hundred years before our era, Zarathas or Nazarathos was incarnated as the teacher in the Mystery schools of the Babylonians. There, the most prominent Hebrew leaders came in contact with Zarathas, the great teacher of that era. Zarathas joined them and became their teacher. From him the Hebrew leaders received the impulse that, in their last fourteen generations, prepared them for the birth of Jesus.

History as we know it then unfolded, and we see the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel take into account a law in the spiritual sphere that will be recognized more and more as significant for all life. This is the law that whatever has happened earlier is repeated at a higher stage. This is expressed in science in a somewhat distorted form in the axiom that what occurs at a lower stage of the species throughout long epochs is repeated in brief in each individual. The writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel shows this in a magnificent way by saying that the I of Zarathustra was to incarnate in a body that was gradually developed within the Abrahamic people.

Abraham proceeded from Ur in Chaldea, the place where Babylonian civilization originated, through Asia Minor to Palestine. Through the dreams of Joseph, his descendants were led farther south to Egypt, and after they had received the Egyptian impulse, they returned to Canaan. This was the fate of the whole people. First, they were led through Canaan to Egypt, and then back again to Canaan. This fate of the whole people was to be repeated in brief. After all that had originated in Abraham had been developed, after the sheaths had been prepared, Zarathustra's I again took Chaldea as its point of departure. His spirit was connected with Chaldea, and in his last incarnation he was the Mystery teacher there.

What path does Zarathustra's soul take when it incarnates in Bethlehem? He had remained connected with the Magi, who had been initiated in the Chaldean Mystery schools. They remembered that they had heard him say he would reappear and that his soul, which had always been called “the golden star,” would proceed at a particular time to Bethlehem. When the time came, they followed the path his soul took, thus repeating the path of the Old Testament Hebrews. As Abraham traveled the road to Canaan, so this star, the soul of Zarathustra, also followed it. The three Magi followed the star of Zarathustra, and he led them to the place where he was born into the body from the Abrahamic people that was destined for him. Thus, the I of Zarathustra repeated in spirit the path Abraham had taken to Palestine.

The Old Testament Hebrews then had to seek the way to Egypt. They were led there by Joseph's dreams. Now the I that was born in the Jesus-child of Bethlehem was led through the dreams of another Joseph to Egypt along the same path the Abrahamic people had followed earlier. Zarathustra's I repeated in Jesus' body the ancient Hebrews' destiny, going first to Egypt and then returning to Palestine. Here, we have a recapitulation in spirit through the I of Zarathustra, reflecting the earlier fate of the Hebrews.

Based on his knowledge of the spiritual law that what appears at a higher stage is a brief repetition of what has occurred earlier, the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel faithfully describes all this. How profoundly these Gospels record the event that inaugurated our era! That event is so great that the four evangelists found that each of them could only describe it from his own standpoint. Each of them has described this event according to his own limited powers. When we see someone from one of four sides, we get only one picture, and only by combining mutually contradictory pictures do we get an overall idea of the person. Similarly, the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel described what he knew through initiation about the law of thrice twice seven, the law of forty-two, and about the preparation of the body for the great I of Jesus of Nazareth. Through his initiation, the writer of this gospel knew the Mysteries according to which Jesus’ body was prepared as the mission of the Hebrews. The writer of Saint Luke's Gospel described, on the basis of his initiation, how the stream of the Buddha flowed into Christianity. The other evangelists have described the event on the basis of their initiations. The event they recorded is so profound that we must be grateful to find it described from the point of view of four initiates.

Today I just wanted to mention a few details of the spiritual origin of Christianity to show how our knowledge of the world and of humanity grows when we study this greatest of human events. I wanted to give you an idea of how deeply this event should be taken and how the Gospels really are when we know how to read them.

[ 1 ] At the time of the first beginnings of Christianity there appear in ancient pagan culture conceptions of the world which seem to be a continuation of the Platonic way of thinking, and which may be understood as a more inward, spiritual Mystery wisdom. Such conceptions started with Philo of Alexandria (B.C. 25–A.D. 50). (See) Note 46) From his point of view the processes leading to the divine take place in the innermost part of the human soul. One could say that the mystery temple in which Philo seeks his initiations is simply and solely the innermost part of his being, and its higher experiences. In his case processes of a purely spiritual nature replace the procedures which took place in the Mystery centers. According to Philo sense-observation and cognition gained through the logical intellect, do not lead to the divine. They relate merely to what is transitory. But there is a path by which the soul may rise above these methods of cognition. It must step out of what it accepts as its ordinary “I.” It must be removed from this “I.” Then it enters a state of spiritual exaltation and illumination in which it no longer knows, thinks and cognizes in the ordinary sense. For it has become merged with the divine, identified with it. The divine is experienced in its essence, which cannot be formed in thoughts or imparted in concepts. It is experienced. One who experiences it knows that he can communicate this experience only if he is able to imbue his words with life. The world is a reflected image of this mystical reality, experienced in the innermost recesses of the soul. The world has come forth from the invisible, inconceivable God. A direct image of this Godhead is the wisdom-filled harmony of the world, out of which material phenomena arise. This wisdom-filled harmony is the spiritual image of the Godhead. It is the divine Spirit diffused in the world; cosmic reason, the Logos, the Offspring or Son of God. The Logos is the mediator between the world of the senses and the inconceivable God. When man steeps himself in cognition, he unites himself with the Logos. The Logos becomes embodied in him. The spiritually developed personality is the bearer of the Logos. Above the Logos is God; beneath is the transitory world. Man is called upon to link the two. What he experiences in his innermost being as spirit, is the cosmic Spirit. These ideas are directly reminiscent of Pythagorean thought. The center of existence is sought in the inner life. But this inner life is conscious of its cosmic significance. Augustine's statement, “We see all created things because they are; and they are because God sees them,” derives from a way of thinking essentially similar to that of Philo. And in describing what and how we see, Augustine adds significantly, “Because they are, we see them outwardly: and because they are perfect, we see them inwardly.”^73a We find the same fundamental idea in Plato. Philo, like Plato, sees in the destiny of the human soul the closing act of the great cosmic drama, the awakening of the spellbound God. He describes the inner deeds of the soul in the following words: The wisdom within man followed “the ways of his Father, and shaped the different forms, looking to the archetypal patterns.” It is not a personal matter when man shapes such forms within himself. These forms are the eternal wisdom, they are the cosmic life. This is in harmony with the interpretation of the folk myths in the light of the Mysteries. The mystic searches for the deeper truth in the myths. And as the mystic treats the myths of paganism, Philo handles Moses' story of the creation. For him the Old Testament accounts are images of inner soul processes. The Bible relates the creation of the world. Whoever accepts it as a description of outer events, knows only half of it. Certainly it is written, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” But the true inner sense of such words must be experienced in the depths of the soul. God must be found within; then He appears as the “archetypal essence sending forth myriads of rays, none visible to sense, all to the mind.”⁷⁴ This is how Philo expresses himself. In Plato's Timaeus the words are almost identical with those of the Bible: “And when the Father that engendered the universe perceived it in motion and alive, and a thing of joy to the eternal gods, He too rejoiced.”⁷⁵ In the Bible we read, “and God saw that it was good.” For Plato, for Mystery wisdom, as well as for the Bible, cognition of the divine means to experience the process of creation as one's own destiny. Thus the story of creation and the story of the soul striving toward its apotheosis, flow into one. Philo is convinced that Moses' account of the creation may be used to tell the story of the soul which is seeking God. Everything in the Bible acquires a profoundly symbolic meaning when seen from this point of view. Philo becomes the interpreter of this symbolic meaning. He reads the Bible as the story of the soul.

[ 2 ] We may say that Philo's manner of reading the Bible is in harmony with the trend of his time, which originated in the wisdom of the Mysteries; indeed he relates that the Therapeutae interpreted ancient writings in the same way. “They have also works of ancient authors who were the founders of their way of thinking, and left behind them many monuments of the method used in allegorical interpretation ... the interpretation of the sacred scriptures is based upon the underlying meaning in the allegorical narratives.” Thus Philo's goal was to discover the underlying meaning of the “allegorical” narratives in the Old Testament.

Let us imagine where such an interpretation could lead. We read the account of creation, and find in it not only a narrative of outward events, but a representation of the ways which the soul must take to reach the divine. Thus as a microcosm, the soul must repeat in itself the ways of God, and its mystical striving for wisdom can take only this form. The drama of the universe must be enacted in every soul. The soul life of the mystic is the fulfillment of the prototype given in the account of creation. Moses wrote not only to recount historical facts, but to represent pictorially the ways the soul must take if it desires to find God.

[ 3 ] All this, in Philo's conception of the world, is contained within the human spirit. Man experiences within himself what God has experienced in the world. The Word of God, the Logos, becomes an experience of the soul. God led the Jews out of Egypt into the Promised Land; He made them undergo trials and privations before bestowing the Promised Land upon them. This is the outward event. Let us experience it inwardly. From the land of Egypt, the transitory world, passing through privations which lead to the suppression of sensuous experience and into the promised land of the soul, we reach the eternal. With Philo all this is an inner process. The God Who was poured out into the world, celebrates His resurrection in the soul, if His creative word is understood and re-created in the soul. Then within himself, man has given spiritual birth to God, to the Spirit of God that became Man, to the Logos, to Christ. In this sense, cognition, for Philo and those who thought like him, was a birth of Christ within the world of spirit. The Neoplatonic conception of the world, which developed contemporaneously with Christianity, was a continuation of Philo's method of thought. Let us see how Plotinus (204–269 A.D.) describes his spiritual experience:

[ 4 ] “Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-centered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; rooted within it; attaining the strength to set myself above the higher world: yet, there comes the moment of descent from spiritual vision to reasoning, and after that reposing in God, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did my soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, in its essence, is the high thing it has shown itself to be,” and “What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the Father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and it? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of creation, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self-ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged in their own self-glorification; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. Just as children who are immediately torn from their parents, and have for a long time been nurtured at a great distance from them, become ignorant both of themselves and their parents.”⁷⁶ In the following words Plotinus describes the path of development the soul should seek: “Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, the body's turmoil stilled, but all that lies around; earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens be still. Let the soul be observed, externally as it were, diffusing and flowing into the quiescent cosmos, permeating it from all sides, and pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun, throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering body of the heaven-opened world, bestows life and immortality.”⁷⁷

[ 5 ] It follows that this conception of the world has a profound similarity to Christianity. Among those who acknowledge the community of Jesus it is said, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life ... declare we unto you.” (I John 1: 1–3.) In the same way it might be said in the sense of Neoplatonism, that which was from the beginning, which cannot be heard or seen, must be spiritually experienced as the word of life.—The development of the old world conception thus is split. In Neoplatonism and similar conceptions of the world it leads to a concept of Christ related only to the spiritual realm, and on the other hand it leads to a fusion of this concept of Christ with a historical manifestation, the personality of Jesus. The writer of the Gospel of John may be said to unite these two world conceptions. “In the beginning was the Word.” He shares this conviction with the Neoplatonists. The Neoplatonists conclude that the Word becomes spirit in the innermost soul. The writer of John's Gospel, and with him the community of Christians, conclude that the Word became flesh in Jesus. The more intimate sense, in which alone the Word could become flesh was provided by the whole development of the old world conceptions. Plato says of the Macrocosm: God has stretched the soul of the world on the body of the world in the form of a cross.^77a This soul of the world is the Logos. If the Logos is to become flesh He must repeat the cosmic process in physical existence. He must be nailed to the Cross and rise again. This most significant thought of Christianity had long before been outlined as a spiritual representation in the old world conceptions. This became a personal experience of the mystic during “initiation.” The Logos become Man had to experience this deed as a fact, valid for the whole of humanity. Something which was a Mystery process in the development of the old wisdom becomes historical fact through Christianity. Thus Christianity became the fulfillment not only of what the Jewish prophets had predicted, but also of what had been pre-formed in the Mysteries. The Cross of Golgotha is the Mystery cult of antiquity condensed into a fact. We find the Cross first in the ancient world conceptions; at the starting-point of Christianity it meets us within a unique event which is to be valid for the whole of humanity. From this point of view the mystical element in Christianity can be grasped. Christianity as mystical fact is a stage of development in the process of human evolution; and the events in the Mysteries and their effects are the preparations for this mystical fact.

• 73a. Augustine's Confessions, Book XIII, 38. The Loeb Library translation runs: “We therefore behold these things which thou hast created, because they are; but they are, because thou seest them. And we see without, that they are, and within, that they are good.” Another translation also reads: “... And we see without that they are, and within that they are good.”
• 74. Philo, De cherubim et flammeo gladio, The Cherubim and the Flaming Sword, I, 97. A commentary on Genesis 3:24 and 4:1.
• 75. Plato, Timaeus, 37 D.
• 76. Plotinus, 4th Ennead, On the Nature of the Soul, 8th Tractate, The Soul's Descent into the Body, 1.
• 77. Plotinus, 5th Ennead, The Divine Mind, 1st Tractate, On the Three Hypostases that Rank as the Principle of All Things, 1.
• 77a. See note 43, above.

The mood of the present time is not likely, perhaps, to create in many people that depth of inner feeling of which legends and sagas speak when they refer to the Christmas Holy Nights, when the soul that is prepared for it is able to have some experience of the spiritual world. You know one such impressive legend from the performances given here, that of Olaf &Åsteson. Many similar things point to Christmas time in the same way.

It is clear, not only to a more thoughtful student of the human heart, but to anyone who observes in the external world the general spirit of our time, that a Christmas mood, a Christmas impulse, must now be sought anew by mankind. What lives in the celebration of Christmas, in the thought of Christmas, must take hold of the human soul in a new way. Just think, dear friends—in order to realize the broader aspects of our contemporary religious and spiritual mood—how little inclination there is at this time to contemplate the Christ as such, to direct the eyes of the soul to Him.

People often believe they are speaking about the Christ, and yet you will find they have made hardly any distinction between Christ and God the Father except in name. While it is true that for many believers the Christ still stands at the center of their religious creed and that beside Him all else of a divine nature loses its luster, nevertheless we have seen for some time now the rise of a theology that has really lost the Christ, that speaks of a God in general even when Christ is meant. The specific quality that is essential when the human heart looks up to Christ needs to be found again. And perhaps the most worthy celebration of the Christmas Festival at this time is actually to inscribe in our souls how mankind can find the Christ again. Many historical facts of the evolution of mankind will first have to be considered—in the spiritual scientific sense—if a true impulse is to be reawakened that will lead human souls to Christ.

The Christmas Festival can not only remind us, as is intended, of the entrance of Jesus into earth life, but it can also point to the birth of Christianity itself, the entrance of Christianity into the course of earth evolution. And so let us today direct our spiritual vision primarily to what might be called the Christmas of Christianity itself, the entrance, the birth, of Christianity within the sphere of the earth. The external facts are known, of course, but our knowledge of them needs to be intensified.

Christianity came into the world in the person of Christ Jesus, into the midst of the adherents of the Old Testament. We can observe the phenomena that occurred among these people when Christianity was born. We see how they were externally divided into two separate currents, that of the Pharisees and that of the Sadducees. It is necessary to view all these things henceforth in a new light. When we consider the general course of development of an individual or of humanity itself—indeed, the course of the entire earth—this will become increasingly clear to us if we conceive it as a continual balancing between luciferic and ahrimanic forces. But that is merely the designation we use; there has always existed among the deeper natures of humanity a consciousness of the actual existence of Lucifer and Ahriman and of the condition of balance between them. Fundamentally, the contrast of the Pharisaic element and the Sadducean element in the ancient Hebrew evolution was nothing else than the contrast of ahrimanic and luciferic elements. Jesus, coming into external earth life, entered the balancing stream. He entered earthly existence at that place for which the most important designation up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was that Solomon's Temple had been built there. In a certain sense we can only understand the nature of Solomon's Temple if we are able to perceive it in contrast to the Christianity then being born. It is well-known how quickly after Christianity came into being Solomon's Temple was destroyed, so far as external existence is concerned. This memorial of the earlier evolution out of which the spirituality of Christianity arose was destined to exist no longer at the place from which that spirituality streamed forth. The nature of Solomon's Temple and the nature of Christianity present a strong contrast. Solomon's Temple embraced in marvelous, magnificent, sometimes gigantic symbols all that was contained in the world conception of the Old Testament. It was an image of the entire universe so far as this could be represented by the ancient world conception, in its conformity to law, in its inner structure, in its permeation by divine-spiritual beings. It was nonetheless an image of the universe that in a certain sense and in one direction was extraordinarily one-sided. That is to say, the Temple was a spatial image of the universe, an image that made use of spatial forms and spatial relations to express the mysteries of the universe. But for those who viewed it in the spirit of the Old Testament, its symbolism was endowed with life.

We see, on the one hand, in the Judaism of the Pharisees and Sadducees, the externalization of what had been given to humanity through the Old Testament; on the other hand, we see in the symbolism of Solomon's Temple the means of deepening the life of Old Testament humanity. It might be said that what has flowed into the entire Old Testament revelation came to expression in these two directions: one outward, exoteric, in the Judaism of the Pharisees and Sadducees; the other esoteric, through what was represented in the mysterious symbols of Solomon's Temple. And from this exotericism and esotericism sprang what became Christianity.

This Christianity was at first, at the time of its birth, unknown to the world at large, to that world in which lived the spirituality of the humanity of that time, namely, the Greek world. Within the expanding Roman empire in which the Mystery of Golgotha was being prepared through the birth of Jesus, it was not known what a momentous Event had taken place among the Jewish people. Nothing was known of the significant Event that constitutes the meaning of the earth. Nevertheless, although the humanity of that time allowed it to pass unnoticed outwardly, the most sublime Event of our earth evolution, inwardly the Christianity that was coming into being was connected with what was then considered the whole world.

In what ways, dear friends, was it connected? The meaning that Christmas conceals is revealed later in the Easter conception. What then is the important aspect of Easter that really intensifies the meaning of Christmas? It is the contemplation of the Savior of mankind Who died on the cross: the cross with the dead God. The intention and the deed originated in humanity: to put to death the God Who had appeared in their midst. The profound magnitude, the full power, of this thought should again enter into human souls. Contemplation of the deed by which the God Who appeared on earth was killed by men: this should be put into language by which it can be understood. Let us try to do this, at least from one point of view.

When we look upon the Mystery of Golgotha, we find it to be a great world-historical confluence of spiritual streams that had been present in the ancient Mysteries. (You know this from my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact.) What had taken place in the ancient Mysteries as the sacrificial rite, the rite of initiation, what had taken place in the temple with, one might say, limited importance, was now set out on the great stage of world history; it now took place in the realm of our entire earth existence. In a certain sense, the initiation of humanity itself was brought out of the temples and presented as historical event before the whole world.

Now let us ask: what were the thoughts of someone permitted to take part in the initiation rites of the ancient Mysteries—when these still possessed their true significance? Through his preparatory instruction such a person knew with certainty that what is directly apparent in the external world of the senses, and what can be comprehended by the human intellect, is a world of mere phenomena, a world of appearance. He knew that what a human being experiences immediately in his environment during his waking hours between birth and death is only the outer view, the phenomenal display, of an inner reality, and that in ordinary life this inner reality is concealed. In the Mystery rite itself such a person sought true reality in what streamed to him, as it were, from the depths of existence, in what could be drawn out and separated from the merely phenomenal, illusory existence. Someone who took part in the ancient Mysteries could always say to himself: When I walk through the world and see external nature, it is illusion. When I experience this or that in the world, it is illusion. When I do any kind of work for the world, it is illusion. But when I am permitted to take part in the holy acts of the Mysteries in the Temple, then something happens that is truth, not illusion. Something is drawn forth, so to speak, out of the illusory existence of the world and transformed into a sacramental act; and this act contains exact truth in contrast to the illusion.

If we wish to be quite clear concerning this view of the Mysteries, we must compare it to the view prevailing today in our materialistic age. We must understand that all that is called reality today in this age of materialism was regarded as illusion in the conceptions belonging to the Mysteries; while, for example, the sacramental act performed as the initiation rite, which most people today consider “fantastic”, was esteemed by those acquainted with the Mysteries as the only reality in life. Such an act, therefore, was not performed at random, but at certain times when it was believed that something of the true nature of things might push through the phenomena of outer life and, as it were, be captured through the act. It has often been mentioned that one such important rite consisted in showing the sacrifice of the God, the death of the God, and His resurrection after three days. This pointed to the fact that to someone who penetrates more deeply into the external world, death can reveal the true nature of this world, that reality must be sought beyond death.

Think of all this entering human souls from the content of the Mysteries at the beginning of our Christian era, expressing the most important fact in world phenomena! Someone in that era pondering on the course of our earth evolution would have been able to say: “In ancient times it was possible for man to learn something about the divine-spiritual world through atavistic initiation science. It was formerly revealed to man out of earth evolution itself. That time is now past. The time has come when nothing more can be drawn from the content of this world to guide us to the divine-spiritual world. This world has lost its divine-spiritual life.” That is what such a soul would have said. Where must one look for the meaning of evolution for earth-humanity? Where was the real meaning of the earth at the time when Christianity came into being? Where was the expression of what was willed in man's innermost being at that time? At Golgotha on the cross. It was Death! What formerly had gushed forth from earth evolution for human salvation, was itself dead. To the soul that penetrated more deeply into cosmic reality, an earth impulse, the most profound of all earth impulses, was given at the time of the birth of Christianity, in the contemplation of the dead God.

Only when experienced in this way does the full magnitude appear of the matter with which we are here concerned. The ancient world conception, the ancient world-wisdom had flowed into Solomon's Temple; but it no longer held anything of what had made it great. Something new had to enter world evolution. And so in the course of time the destruction of Solomon's Temple and the rise, the birth, of Christianity exactly coincided. Solomon's Temple: a spatial symbolic image of the content of the cosmos; Christianity, comprehended as a time-phenomenon: a new image of the cosmos. Christianity is not something that appears as a spatial image, as in the case of Solomon's Temple; one only understands Christianity if one grasps it in images of time. One must see that earth evolution proceeded as far as the Mystery of Golgotha; then the Mystery of Golgotha intervened; then, through the Christ pouring Himself into humanity, evolution moves on in this way or that. Its deeper content is not to be equated in the remotest degree with anything appearing in spatial images, not even in the gigantic, magnificent spatial images of Solomon's Temple. Nevertheless, Solomon's Temple, as also the inner aspect of Pharisaic and Sadducean life, contained the soul of the world consciousness of that time. The soul of the world consciousness two thousands years ago was to be found in Old Testament Judaism. Into this soul was laid the seed of Christianity, a new seed that, while growing out of all that may be expressed in space, can only be expressed in time. The becoming following the existing: that is the inner relation of Christianity that was then being born to the soul element of the world of that time, to Judaism that was embodied in Solomon's Temple, which later collapsed. Christianity was born into the soul of ancient Judaism.

As Christianity sought the soul in Judaism, so it sought the spirit in Hellenism. The Gospels themselves, as transmitted to the world (I refer only to what has been handed down), have in the main passed through the Greek spirit. The thoughts through which the world could think Christianity are the spiritual wisdom of Greece. The first apologia of the Church Fathers appeared in the Greek tongue. Just as Christianity was born into the soul that for the humanity of that time lived in Judaism, so it was born into the spirit provided by Hellenism.

Romanism furnished the body. It was Romanism that at that time could provide an external organization for concepts of empire. Judaism soul, Hellenism spirit, Romanism body—body, of course, in the sense that the social structure of humanity is body. Romanism is in reality the forming of external inclinations and institutions; the thoughts concerning external institutions live within them. It is the corporeal element in historical existence, the corporeal element in historical development. Just as Christianity was born into the soul of Judaism and into the spirit of Hellenism, so it was born into the body of the Roman Empire. Superficial people even think that everything contained in Christianity can be explained out of Judaism, Hellenism and Romanism. In the same way, indeed, that materialistic natural scientists believe that everything in a human being is inherited from parents, grandparents, etc., ignoring the fact that the soul comes from spiritual regions and only puts on the body as a garment: so these superficial people like to say that Christianity consists of what in actual fact it has only put on as an outer garment. The essence of Christianity entered the world, of course, with Christ Jesus Himself; but this Christianity was born into the Jewish soul, into the Greek spirit, and into the body of the Roman Empire. That, in a sense, is the birth of Christianity itself, viewed in the light of Christmas thought.

It is important not to accept these facts as mere external theories, but to relate them deeply to our thought of Christmas, to learn what their significance really is in relation to the newborn Impulse that is now entering world evolution with the Spirits of Personality—as I explained here recently.³ Indeed, dear friends, anything new that purposes to enter into the course of world evolution must first struggle through what remains of the old. This is precisely the mystery of world-becoming, that on the one hand there is a normal, progressive evolution; on the other hand, retarded luciferic and ahrimanic forces interfere with it and modify it, but also in a certain sense support it as it advances. I have often called attention to the fact that we cannot escape this ahrimanic-luciferic force; we must look straight at it calmly, and face it consciously. On no account must we simply submit to these things unconsciously. From world impulses shadows remain behind that continue to have an effect even after something new has come into existence; but their luciferic and ahrimanic character must be recognized. This ahrimanic-luciferic element must accompany evolution, but it must not be accepted in an absolute sense; its luciferic- ahrimanic character must be perceived. Something shadowlike has remained behind from Solomon's Temple, something shadow-like also from Hellenism, and something shadow-like from the Roman Empire. Nearly two thousand years ago it was self-evident that from these three—soul, spirit, and body—Christianity was born. But soul, spirit, and body could not immediately disappear; they remained in a certain way as after-effects. Now is the time when this fact must be clearly understood and when the completely unique character of the Christ Impulse itself must be realized.

A shadow remains behind from the most important extract of the esoteric Old Testament, from the Mystery of Solomon's Temple; a shadow remains from Hellenism; also one from the Roman Empire. We must learn to distinguish the shadows from the light. It will be mankind's task from this present time into the immediate future to differentiate between the shadows and the light in the right way.

We see the shadow of the Roman Empire in Roman Catholicism. This is not Christianity; it is the shadow of the ancient Roman Empire into which Christianity had to be born. In its forms there continues to live what had to be built up at that time as a framework for Christianity. But we must learn—humanity must learn—to distinguish the shadow of the old Roman Empire from Christianity. The essence of Christianity is not to be found in the organization of the Catholic Church, or indeed of any of the Christian churches. One sees in their hierarchical aspect what existed and developed in the Roman Empire from Romulus to the Emperor Augustus. The illusion arises only because Christianity was born into this body.

In this sense Solomon's Temple has also remained as a shadow. The Mysteries of Solomon's Temple have—with a few exceptions—been completely absorbed into the Masonic and other secret societies of the present time. As the Roman Church is the shadow of the ancient Roman Empire, so what continues to exist in these societies—however strongly they assert to the contrary, even to the extent of excluding Jews—is the shadow of ancient Judaism, the shadow of the esoteric Jehovah-worship. Again the shadow must be distinguished from the light. Just as the shadow expressed in the perpetuation of the Roman Empire in the Catholic Church, in the churches generally, must be distinguished from the light shining in Christianity, so the element into which Christianity had to be born as soul must be distinguished from the shadow that continues to work in societies founded on symbolism that is reminiscent of Solomon's Temple.

These things must be recognized. They must be looked at in the right way. And they must be illuminated in our time by the new revelations of which we have been speaking during these days.

The Greek spirit into which Christianity had to be born—in spite of all the beauty of Hellenism, in spite of its esthetic and other important content, in spite of the influence it has upon us—has left its shadow as the modern world conception of the cultured humanity that has brought this fearful catastrophe⁴ upon mankind. When Hellenism existed with its world conception, it was something different. Everything, dear friends, is right in its own time. If something is taken in an absolute sense, and carried on after it has become antiquated, it then becomes the shadow of itself. And the shadow is not the light; it may change suddenly into the opposite of the real thing. Aristotelianism still shows something of the greatness of ancient Greece. Aristotle in modern raiment is materialism. Christianity was born into the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, the Roman body; but the three have left their shadows behind. The challenge sounds through our time, like the call of an angel's trumpet, to perceive the true facts, to look through the shadows to the light.

Truly, anyone who ponders over this present moment in time, who considers impartially, without prejudice, what has brought about the fearful, distressing events of recent years, surely cannot help wondering whether some sort of light can be sought that would shine into the darknesses of earth in a different way from those lights which most people still wish to regard as the only ones. One should find the will to look for a way through the shadows to the light. For the shadows will assert themselves. They will become effective through people who perhaps have endured little themselves of the great suffering of humanity at the present time, who have no sympathy, or very little, for the terrible agony that has flashed through the world, agony that is itself proof that many of the thoughts which have appeared were destined to be shipwrecked. One who tries to examine with deeper understanding what is really not difficult to see today, one who has the resolute will to look without prejudice at what is happening today among men, will feel an impulse to seek the light. He should attach some importance to this impulse in his soul, not listen to those who—depending on the place they occupy—wish only to defend one of the ancient shadows, but listen to his own soul; it will speak clearly enough if only he does not let its voice drown under the external assertions of the shadows.

If today one looks compassionately at what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen, one will be able to see a strange figure standing before men: a distortion of the truly human form, in garments woven of shadows, a figure uniting in itself in its thoughts, sensations, feelings, and will-impulses what has put humanity on a wrong track and gives every promise of taking it farther on the wrong track. Deep within what is happening outwardly dwell those three shadow-thoughts that have been described.

Whoever learns to see that figure in garments woven of shadows, has prepared himself in the right way to look at something else: to look at the tree that can illuminate even today's darkness with its lights. Whoever is pure in heart and does not allow himself to be misled by the threefold shadow-existence—antiquated symbolism, antiquated ecclesiasticism, antiquated materialistic science—will see what wills to shine in the darkness as a real Christmas tree, and lying beneath it the Christ-Jesus Child, illuminated anew by the Christmas light. This is the real aim of our anthroposophically-oriented science of the spirit: to seek the Christmas light, so that the Jesus Child, Who entered the world first to work and then to be understood, may gradually be understood; to illuminate in a modest way the greatest of all events in earth existence. This is the goal of our anthroposophical spiritual science within the religious currents of humanity. People will not understand the light that this spiritual science wants to recognize as its Christmas light unless they have the will really to penetrate the threefold shadow-existence of our time. The times are serious. And whoever lacks the will to take them seriously will perhaps not be able in this incarnation to see what should truly be perceptible at this time to every human being of good will, there for the healing of the many wounds that otherwise mankind will still have to suffer. People of good will should take notice of what may be seen when the anthroposophical science of the spirit enkindles the Christmas light. The light is truly small, and he who professes it remains humble. He does not wish to extol it to the world as something special, for he knows that now it appears small and insignificant, and many men and many generations must still come, to help what now burns dimly to become brighter. But even though the light is weak, it shines on something whose effect within human earthly evolution is not weak, something that is working powerfully as the deepest meaning of human evolution. The light illumines what we may call the birth of Christianity, the Christmas of Christianity. Along with the Easter meaning of anthroposophical spiritual science may this its Christmas meaning be understood. May many, many souls look forward in this spirit to the profound experience of the Christmas Holy Nights. They will then be able to feel that already a call is sounding through the world to contemplate the appearance of Jesus, who awaited here on earth that moment when He was to meet death, in order in His spirit-life after death to give a new meaning to mankind and to earth evolution.

My dear friends, let us feel something of this Christmas mood that is to enter our souls from spiritual science! I would like at this moment to begin Christmas solemnly, by expressing the wish—as my soul's innermost holy Christmas greeting—that you may experience the mood of consecration that wills to receive the new Christ-revelation. I assume that you too are beginning Christmas with that earnestness of which I endeavored to speak today, an earnestness appropriate to the present condition of the world. In this spirit, my dear friends, I wish you with all my heart a holy, solemn Christmas!

• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 20 Dec. 1918, Die Soziale Grundfordentng unserer Zeit/in Geanderter Zeitlage, GA 186 (Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1979).
• 4. World War I.

Yesterday I tried to explain how man, who as a soul-spiritual being has been living in the spiritual world during pre-earthly existence, makes his transition to the physical earth. If we want to place before our souls the very real intervention of the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in the evolution of earth-humanity, it is absolutely necessary to acknowledge the pre-earthly existence of man and thus come to understand the eternal essence of his being. For, in order to comprehend the actual nature of this Mystery, we must be able to follow this Being, the Christ, Who belongs to the spiritual worlds, in His descent from extra-terrestrial regions right down into earth existence. This Being had lived only in those regions where we too spend our pre-natal existence until the time came when in the man Jesus He took on an earthly form and began his earthly activity.

If man wants to arrive at such an understanding of the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in relation to the event of human birth, of which I spoke sketchily yesterday, he must bear in mind first of all that man's soul constitution and his inner experience have passed in the course of mankind's evolution on earth through most significant and important transformations. Today, people often assume that the soul constitution, and those states of consciousness in which modern man finds himself in waking and sleeping, have always belonged to humanity, at least essentially, since human history began. At most, the world view arrived at in natural scientific cosmology points back to a primitive half-animal-like form possessed by early humanity, as we shall be discussing presently. Such a being's inner nature would of course have to be pictured as different from the thinking, feeling and willing of today's human being. But the transformations that man's consciousness, his whole inner soul structure, have passed through since the primeval times of earth evolution, are rarely pointed out today; yet in these transformations there lies something immensely important and substantial.

When we go back to ancient times of human evolution—we need not go back to the most primeval but to about the second or third millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha—we find that mankind had a quite different consciousness, a quite different configuration of soul, than later on. The pronounced difference that exists between waking and sleeping in man today did exist at that time, but it was not the only aspect of the daily change in human consciousness. Today man only knows the states of waking and sleeping, and between them, dreams. While we are aware of a certain content in dreams, we must admit that it is often misleading. In any case, this dream content does not point to any reality that man can control directly with his day consciousness, although he certainly can indirectly. But apart from these three states of consciousness, of which that of dreams is most questionable, at least as far as gaining knowledge is concerned, an intermediate state existed for ancient humanity. It was neither that of dreams, nor of full wakefulness. Nor was it a condition of deep sleep, or half-conscious dreaming as we have it today. Rather, it was a pictorial “waking-dreaming,” as one might put it. Pictures flowed within it as thoughts run today through our waking consciousness. These pictures were similar in form to our dream pictures, but what they contained pointed to a pronounced supersensible reality, as our perceptions point to a physical reality. Just as we know, when we see a physical being with colors and shapes, that it is a physical reality, so did ancient man experience pictures which moved freely and lightly in his consciousness as our dream pictures move in ours, except that it was impossible to doubt that their content pointed to a spiritual reality. Just as today, when our eyes perceive something, we know with certainty that something physical is out there, so did a man of the past know that he perceived something spiritually real when such images passed through his consciousness.

Among what ancient man experienced as spiritually real there was also an echo of pre-earthly existence. The human being of that epoch simply had every day in his soul inner experiences that proved to him beyond all doubt that he had lived in a soul-spiritual condition, in a purely spiritual world, before entering earthly life. Men of this ancient time knew of this throughout their lives. They therefore accepted as fully evident the existence of an eternal core of man's being, and of an extra-terrestrial world to which they belonged as much as they belonged to the terrestrial world. Those who, as initiates of the mysteries, were initiated in the more profound aspects of these truths were able to speak to their followers out of their initiation science in such a manner that these faithful could arrive at the conviction that they looked into an after-image of their pre-earthly existence, and at the same time into a spiritual world to which man belongs with the eternal core of his being. This, they felt, was a gift of grace bestowed by that spiritual being whose physical image is the physical sun we see in the sky.

Thus, someone who accepted the old mystery wisdom could say: I look up to the sun, but this outer, physical sun is only an image of a spiritual sun being. This spiritual sun being permeates the spiritual world from which I myself descended to an earthly existence, and the power of this sun being has endowed my soul with that faculty, which brings it about that among my soul experiences during the sojourn on earth, I also have this, namely, that in looking back upon my pre-earthly existence, I can be sure of the eternal core-being in my soul.

For a man who, in ancient times felt the grace of the Sun Being, human death on earth was no special riddle. He was supported by the power of his initiates and knew of his pre-earthly existence and of his own external nature. He realized that death concerned only the physical human organism. He knew of something within him that had at the beginning of his earthly life descended into his physical organism. For him, death was an event that did not touch his inner being. He knew of it through his outer form of consciousness.

This was the soul condition of human beings in ancient epochs preceding the Mystery of Golgotha. In those epochs, the secret of birth lay open to a vision turned inward that was striving toward the grace of the Sun Being. While they could comprehend this secret of birth, the riddle of death was not yet present in the manner in which it existed for men of a later time. I shall speak in the second part of this lecture about how all this changed in the course of time.

This consciousness of ancient mankind that lived in pictures—and the way it affected the remaining soul constitution—was aware of the soul in such a way that the active, intense ego consciousness, possessed by mankind today, could not yet arise at that time. Man had insight into his own eternal essence but lacked a pronounced inner sensation of his ego-hood. Nor would he ever have achieved it if that ancient picture consciousness had remained with him as his endowment. But in fact, it ceased. Just when the time for the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, it gradually dimmed, to be replaced increasingly by the kind of ordinary consciousness we possess today, with its sharp contrast between sleeping and waking, and, in between, the dubious world of dreams. Mankind had lost that part of self-knowledge that looked back in direct vision to pre-earthly life and with it to the eternal core of man's being. But this was precisely what was necessary if man was to reach gradually his full ego consciousness. Although in that middle period of human evolution, around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, full ego consciousness had not yet appeared in all mankind, it was being slowly prepared. With it people were confronted in full measure and with great intensity with the riddle of death. For they no longer knew anything through direct vision about the world from which they had descended into earthly existence.

In the age when humanity passed through this stage of its evolution the Christ appeared, descending out of the same world from which the human soul always descends again to birth, and, through the events of Palestine, united Himself with the man, Jesus. At that time the old traditions, namely the old methods of the initiation centers were still preserved. Although they were but a vestige of the ancient initiation, even in their weakened form they could still lead to a knowledge concerning the way the spiritual world looks and the kind of connection man has to it. The initiates of that time could address those willing to receive their words and say: The Sun Being, He who formerly bestowed grace upon men by granting them a vision of an after-image of pre-earthly life, He whose physical reflection is the physical sun, this Sun Being has descended to earth. He lived, or has lived in the man Jesus. He took on a physical body in order not only to remain connected from this time onward with the spiritual world, in which man lives between death and a new birth, but also to live within human evolution on earth itself.

Out of the remnants of the old initiation, the initiates, who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, spoke about the secret of the Christ to those who were willing to accept it and had confidence in them. Those who had this trust could learn how the Christ had entered an earthly body, so that not through some kind of teaching but through His deed He could resolve the riddle that only then affected humanity in full intensity—the riddle of death. The initiates pointed out to the people that the Christ had come in order to solve the riddle of death on earth in a way suitable for man. For at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the earth-realm, those who possessed the vestiges of the ancient methods of initiation spoke above all else about the spiritual being of Christ as He appeared in the spiritual world. The path was described which the Christ, Who never before had descended to earth existence, had taken from the spiritual world down to earth. In all these descriptions given by the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, the main teaching was about the way the Christ descended into the man Jesus and Himself became man in him. At that time people did not merely refer to the historical Jesus and ask: What position does this historical Jesus occupy in human evolution?—Ordinary consciousness was, after all, faced with him. Some of his contemporaries were in direct contact with him, while those who came later were aware of him in their physical sense consciousness through historical tradition. But those who knew something about the spiritual worlds because of their knowledge of ancient initiation science could say: That Being Who was once looked upon as the lofty Sun Being, the bestower of the grace we described, has taken the path leading to the earth and to the man Jesus. He has then passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, because man could no longer consciously see into pre-earthly life and so was unable to solve the riddle of death. Indeed, he could no longer be aware of this Being at all—the lofty Sun Being Who, by giving men the vision of the after-image of the world in which they had lived before birth overcame earthly death. This Being Itself descended to earth, took on human form and went through the Mystery of Golgotha in order, through what the event signified, to give back to men on earth—but this time from outside—the after-image of pre-earthly life that in earlier times He had been able to impart to them for their inner soul life in the form of pictures. It was in a manner somewhat like this that the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha expressed themselves.

Formerly, man through grace was blessed with a capacity in his consciousness that enabled him to experience his eternal essence directly when he looked back into his life before birth. But he had to develop further. He had to develop a clear earthly consciousness that could only be kindled and developed by means of the sense world. This is what caused the old consciousness, by means of which man had formerly been able to recognize his eternal nature, to recede. But that Being, Who had earlier enabled man to perceive his own eternal being from the spiritual world, accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha after His descent to earth so that man, by perceiving and understanding this event, might himself experience from outside what earlier he had experienced from within. From the Christ on earth man is to experience further what he had earlier experienced from the spiritual world through Christ.

In the third part of this lecture I shall explain the significance this had for the further course of mankind's evolution.

The vestiges of the old initiation methods through which the initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and even their successors, were able to speak correctly about the descent of the Christ and the path He took until His embodiment in the man Jesus—these vestiges continued until the fourth century A.D., though weakening increasingly in regard to the effectiveness they had for mankind. By that time, they had ceased to call forth in the human organization the kind of capacities that afforded reliable insights into the spiritual world. Mankind now entered a period of its evolution in which it was chiefly dependent upon the perceptions and views that can be attained only in the sense world and upon a thinking based on impressions and observations in this world. This period of humanity's evolution, lasting several centuries, brought about what I have just indicated as the development, the unfolding of ego consciousness.

One cannot study history correctly unless one is able to see during the period from the fourth to about the fifteenth century A.D. how ego consciousness gradually takes form among civilized peoples. Of course, precursors of this developing ego consciousness also lived in earlier times, but fundamentally there is a great difference between even the most educated, cultured person of the fourth or fifth centuries, and one of the fifteenth or sixteenth. A person who can see—I wouldn't even say, into the soul of Augustine, whose ego consciousness can be studied quite clearly in a psychological way—but let us say someone who can look, for example, into the soul of Scotus Erigena in the ninth century, sees how the ego consciousness, possessed later by the simplest person, was only just beginning to develop and form itself. At the same time, the old kind of vision was ceasing through which it was possible, for instance, to develop alchemy, which represented an innate fusion between what the eyes see and the soul experiences when it contemplates things in the external world. Pure sense observation, as the basis of human knowledge, arose first about the fifteenth century. In this turning of man to mere sense observation—which reached a high point in the age of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—to consciousness of the sense world, there also came into being the ego consciousness.

Ego consciousness, however, caused insight into the spiritual worlds to fall into the depths of darkness. The old perception of the mysteries, the initiation knowledge, had faded away by the fourth century A.D. and scarcely a trace of it continued in the ongoing stream of civilization. For what persisted of this knowledge was well hidden, and remained almost unknown to people in general, even to scholarly Occidental peoples. Initiation science had no real influence on general culture and civilization. It, therefore, could throw no light on the path taken by the Christ from the spiritual worlds to mankind on earth, as was still possible in the first Christian centuries, even though that had been but a vestige, but nevertheless a vestige of the old initiation science. As a result, it was only the historical Jesus who was recognized by mankind, even by learned men—that Jesus of whom history tells, a history which did not add to this historical Jesus, either by means of direct human vision or by teachings of initiation, the picture of the Christ Who was united with him.

Thus, for these centuries, the Church's development could not do otherwise than refer its believers ever and again to the historical Jesus, bringing the picture of him to life. Concerning everything, however, that those men, who knew something real about the spiritual world, could still speak about in the first Christian centuries, nothing could now be directly known. Only what was preserved by tradition from those times when there still existed human souls who really knew about the spiritual world from initiation science, only what had been preserved by tradition from old Christian knowledge—only this could be established by the Church in the form of dogmas concerning the Christ. No reference was made to those who still retained a view of the spiritual content of these dogmas, which were made the object of mere faith.

During the time when knowledge became increasingly perfected and extensive in regard to the sense world, alongside this knowledge of the sense world a content of dogmatic faith was placed, a dogmatic content that related to the Jesus figure only by means of an outward determination.

This Jesus figure had become established in mankind's ordinary consciousness and had assumed form. This attitude then continued on through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finally led to a theology purporting to be Christian but concerned only with the man Jesus, because as a result of historical tradition ordinary consciousness was only aware of him.

Meanwhile, the consciousness that had developed experience of the ego and which had investigated the laws of the sense world had less and less inclination to abide by the established contents of faith. It was especially the leading personalities in whom the new consciousness had developed the most, who became emancipated from inclinations toward faith and thus the Christ. So it happened that in the nineteenth century the supposed Christian theology, which had completely lost all knowledge of the Christ in favor of Jesus and spoke only about “Jesus of Nazareth,” came to a special prominence. It wanted to recognize Jesus as a man only, although perhaps the most eminent one who had appeared in human evolution.

In the first Christian centuries, out of the vestiges of the old initiation wisdom, the attempt had been made to describe the path leading from the perception of the Christ Being to his incorporation in Jesus of Nazareth; in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, one started with Christ and later arrived at Jesus. By the nineteenth century, one began with Jesus, who was looked upon at first as a man, and tried to come from Jesus to Christ. But that was the path that as a matter of course led in the end either to the admission (or the refusal to admit) one's inability to rise to the Christ from the historical Jesus of whom ordinary consciousness alone was aware, the “simple man” Jesus who had lived in Palestine.

This situation can be changed only by modern initiation as I have characterized it in its main outlines in the past few days, which can lead to imagination, inspiration and intuition in a new form. By means of this new initiation wisdom it is again possible to go beyond the merely historical image of Jesus to a direct view of man's pre-earthly existence and the world in which this existence is spent. It thereby becomes possible to behold the Christ in His super-earthly spirituality and then, proceeding from Christ, to understand Jesus and thus the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. The path that modern theology has taken, which, in emphasizing Jesus, has lost the Christ, can be reversed. Out of spiritual perception, men again can recognize the Christ, and through the perception of Christ behold Jesus in whom the Christ became Man. With this Christ perception, gained in the spirit, they can then contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha. Through anthroposophical perception, the Christ, Who for one branch of modern theology has already been lost, must now be recovered. I will explain in the fourth part of today's considerations what this signifies for man's inner development.

It has already been mentioned that through the lighting-up of ego consciousness the riddle of death confronted the human soul. This had to happen because, since the ego had become present in full clarity in the inner soul experience, man's physical organism thereby had become the actual basis for this ordinary human consciousness. This ego-permeated consciousness had its foundation in man's physical organism, and man learned to feel instinctively how only what has its foundation in the physical organism can be experienced by the soul. No longer did he see the eternal essence of his being through a direct picture consciousness. It was precisely his ego consciousness, his highest faculty in earth life, that drew his attention exclusively to his physical body and showed how this body, because of its constitution, could allow his ego-saturated consciousness to light up. In this state of consciousness we cannot say that there is anything in our soul that we carry through the gate of death.

It was precisely the ability of a retrospective view into pre-earthly life, which had been given to an older humanity by the grace of the lofty Sun Being, that had enabled ordinary consciousness to see forward into what is beyond death. Now, consciousness had become especially clear because, to its full extent, it had become an experience of the physical organism. But because of this man could not help saying to himself: You possess powers to brighten and illuminate your consciousness, but they come from the physical body. This body disintegrates at death. In this, of which you are aware in your ordinary consciousness, you perceive nothing of what can carry you over into another world. Something of this nature may exist—but with your ordinary consciousness you sense and know nothing of it.

This mystery of death had appeared with special intensity in the first Christian centuries when human beings were still more sensitive to these questions. The initiates, however, had drawn the attention of humanity to the Mystery of Golgotha, and in the following centuries, as Christianity evolved, its leaders had likewise directed humanity to that Mystery through their dogmas of faith. What was this Mystery to signify for man?

A person who can attain an inner person-to-person relationship to the Christ on earth, who can acknowledge and accept the Mystery of Golgotha, must take something into his consciousness that no material sense world can supply. It is precisely the person who looks most deeply into the constitution of the sense world who must deny the Mystery of Golgotha, for no understanding of this Mystery is possible to a comprehension derived from the senses. If, however, he can receive it into his heart, if he is then able, by means of a power of understanding rooted in the human soul (Gemüt), to grasp that event consummated only once in earth's evolution—an event comprehensible only out of the spirit—then, in his ordinary consciousness, he tears himself away from mere sense comprehension, which in its special clearness and intensity is precisely the essential feature of ego consciousness.

No one who wishes to remain only in the world of the senses can come to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. By contrast, if one renounces any understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha based on sense perception and acquires instead a relationship to if of faith and acknowledgement, if one looks up to the Mystery of Golgotha in an attitude of pious veneration and attains to an understanding of what Christ became for humanity when He came down from a spiritual existence into earth life, then one rises above the mere understanding of the sense world with the aid of that very power which, though it is itself a part of earthly consciousness, nevertheless constitutes man's highest faculty. Man thus generates and unfolds a force in his ordinary consciousness that does not spring from his own natural development. He must deepen himself inwardly and intensify his consciousness if he wants to go beyond his understanding of the sense world and develop enough strength to allow the spiritual significance of the Mystery of Golgotha to become a truth for his soul.

If we renounce all understanding based on the senses and acknowledge the truth of the Mystery of Golgotha; if we recognize that the Christ really did once live on earth in Jesus, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha a real, heavenly, super-earthly deed of enduring significance was accomplished in the midst of earth existence—then, by recognizing this truth we succeed in replacing that force that was once a part of ordinary consciousness but has now been lost.

In times past, the power to look back into pre-earthly life was present in ordinary consciousness, and out of this vision consciousness gained the strength to carry the soul through the gate of death. This power which now was no longer there was to enter into the soul through the Mystery of Golgotha; it was to enter through the strengthening that could occur in the soul, if, through inward soul experience, a person confessed to the truth of this Mystery. Then, as the saying of Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me,” came to life in man himself, the Christ, with the power that streamed out from His deed on Golgotha, could carry man beyond the point where, merely because of the condition of his consciousness, physical death could leave him. By these means, it was possible to regain a power of which man knew that with it he was able to reach beyond the portal of death.

How the mysteries of death, the opposite of the mysteries of birth, of which I spoke yesterday, can be described further in relation to the Christ Being, will be the topic of tomorrow's lecture.

Today, I would like to close my remarks by referring to what an old initiate said to those whose souls—as early as the first Christian centuries—were confronted with this whole riddle of death. He said: “Behold the condition of the human body, now that man has arrived at the use of ego consciousness. In this stage, the physical body conceals man's total entity. Since the unfolding of ego consciousness, man is so constituted that in and through his physical body alone he could never take hold of that element in him that belongs to the spirit. Look,” said such an initiate to his followers in the first Christian centuries, “look at the physical human organism just when the stage is reached when it is to offer the highest potentiality for ego consciousness; it turns out to be inadequate. The physical organism is therefore sick; it would be healthy only if it could give to man a consciousness of his spiritual significance. This physical organism developed in such a way that from the beginning there was sickness in it in relation to the life of the spirit. For this reason, the Christ descended and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, not only as a teacher but as the Physician of the soul, Who, through man's soul, heals him from what has fallen ill in his physical organism.” This is how those initiates of the first Christian century—who are no longer acknowledged by today's theology and who have been erased from memory—presented the Christ as the Physician of the soul, the Healer, the Savior of mankind. In presenting Him thus, they gave Him his due place as the true meaning of the whole of earth evolution. They showed how man's evolution took a descending course, descending to the point where his physical organism became completely corrupt and useless for the highest tasks of human consciousness. Then the Divine Savior as the Physician of the soul intervened to heal the relationship between man's soul condition and the divine-spiritual world. Thus, through the initiates of the first Christian centuries, a deeper understanding of the Christ came into being, namely, that of Christ as the Soul Physician of the world, the Healer of mankind, the Savior.

Because of all this one can say that in ancient times, before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, the initiates could speak to wider circles of humanity, who were open to their teachings, about a spiritual, a divine existence that permeated and was the foundation of all sense existence. If man brings this teaching to life again in modern consciousness through imaginative insight, then, what otherwise is an abstract, thought-out philosophy is enlivened—not only in the sense I have earlier characterized it here, but by becoming permeated by Christ. By means of the knowledge through which modern imagination leads men again to an insight into the spiritual world, philosophy is filled with the Christ. What once existed in ancient humanity, namely, the awareness of the Divine-Spiritual Father of all physical existence can awaken in humanity again. It was basically toward this Divine Father-consciousness that the ancient, pre-Christian initiates strove along with the rest of mankind. In the highest grade of initiation in the mysteries, the initiate represented the Divine-Spiritual, Cosmic Father, and was called “The Father.”

If man allows this conception to arise in his mind, what may be called a Christian philosophy comes into being. Furthermore, through modern inspiration, he becomes acquainted with what was already prophetically expressed by the initiates of the early Christian centuries, who still possessed vestiges of an ancient inspiration. He learns to perceive how a Divine-Spiritual Being, the Christ, descended out of spiritual worlds, placed Himself into man's earthly development, and thus constitutes in Himself the fulcrum of this evolution. A meaningful content is thus brought into humanity's earthly evolution and its laws when man learns through the Mystery of Golgotha to link this evolution to the cosmos by means of looking up to the cosmic Christ Being. Further, man learns to recognize how earthly evolution has been a concern of heaven, how the cosmos has cared about the affairs of mankind. In this way, the nature of that cosmology, which I have always characterized here as a spiritual cosmology, is extended so as to become a Christian cosmology.

If, then, man achieves a living relationship to the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in the sense of the words of Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me,” the Christ, by helping him solve the riddle of death, leads him into a renewed life in the spirit. He becomes acquainted with the new spirit, which once again is to make it clear to mankind that beyond the physical world there exists a spiritual world that rules, orders and permeates the physical. He learns to know the mission of the Healing Spirit, Who proceeds from Christ and is sanctified by Christ Himself. He learns to know the mystery of the Holy Spirit as the foundation for a new religious perception.

The Trinity, so long spoken of as a dogma, again comes to live for man. Looking back to the pre-Christian mysteries one can say that in these lived God the Father, Who also has a cosmic meaning for us. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, God the Son, in Christ, drew near mankind, and through what God the Son has brought to humanity, the connection was established with the Healing, the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is again a living conception; no dogma.

Through the vitalizing of the Father consciousness there arises a Christ-permeated philosophy. Through the vitalizing of the Son consciousness comes a Christ-permeated cosmology. In accordance with what the Christ referred to and has called the Healing Spirit and has mercifully poured over mankind, a new basis arises for a Christian religion, founded in knowledge.

Starting from such a Christian philosophy, a Christian cosmology and a Christian religious insight, we shall speak further tomorrow about the mystery of death in relation to the Christ Being and the course of humanity's evolution.

Since we are still able to meet today, it seems right to me to refer again to some things that have been said just recently, and which are of some importance for the whole attitude of man in our time.

That there is such a thing as the necessity for a new attitude of man in our time should be clear from the considerations that have been presented to you here and elsewhere in this time. That the kind of judgment that was usual in the previous epoch can no longer carry man into the future is something that must be recognized today. This must be emphasized again and again, because it is precisely against this that the feelings and perceptions of the present-day human being still most resist. The present-day human being would also like to be present, so to speak, when a new era is ushered in – it is so obvious to him that a new era must approach – but he does not want to become a different person himself. He would like to continue judging things in the way he has been accustomed to judging them so far. And even when he does manage to bring himself to admit that a new way of judging things must take hold, he always falls back into the old way of thinking. He does this particularly because the new attitude actually demands a radical introspection of the person. And this radical introspection is actually very, very unpleasant for the modern person.

Now, if we want to grasp the full depth of what underlies what has just been said, we have to take a good look, with good will, at the whole way in which we have become accustomed to living our lives in the modern era, especially since that point in time that I have often characterized as the point of a major turning point in the development of humanity, since the middle of the fifteenth century. One can say: That which today arises in a radical way from human hearts as demands has actually always been smoldering to a greater or lesser extent below the surface of people's consciousness since that time; but all things that develop always develop unnoticed for a time and only then become fully ripe to break out and enter into existence quite radically.

Now, in our recent endeavors, we have had to point out a certain threefold structure from a variety of perspectives. You know that our entire external public work is permeated by the impulse of threefold structure. But here I have also had to point out that human knowledge, if it is not to lead people astray, must also be based on the threefold nature of the human being itself. Science, which human beings have developed out of a certain necessary lack of clarity, this science, which, as it is now, also began in the mid-fifteenth century, regards the human being more or less as a unity. It is not clear to it that the human being really is a threefold being, which must be described as a main human being or nerve-sense human being, as a rhythm human being or breathing and circulation human being, and as a metabolism human being. These three aspects of human nature are quite distinct in their essence. The reason why people do not really want to admit that human beings themselves live in this threefold structure is because, when they want to structure something, they want to arrange the things so nicely next to each other. We see time and again that when people do make an effort to organize something, they want to have this organization side by side, they want to store the parts of this organization next to each other so that they can see them nicely with their external powers of perception. This is the basis of the strange essay that the Tübingen professor wrote against the threefold order. I have already mentioned that the good Professor von Heck, with complete disregard for what is actually said in the threefold social order, has constructed his own threefold order. He cannot understand the kind of thinking that is at issue here at all; he cannot penetrate to the feeling that we live in an age in which a new thinking, a new feeling, is necessary. And so he hears about a spiritual, a legal or state, and an economic member of the social organism. Three members, he says. In the one member we have known so far, we have gradually become accustomed to a parliamentarism. It has been hard enough for people of this kind to get used to it; they prefer to be governed centrally, from the top down, but they have got used to parliamentarism. But if you do go in for it, then paragraph A, paragraph B and paragraph C must stand side by side. Intellectual, legal, economic, that must be so outwardly tangible if one is to get involved in it at all. Yes, in this way, by approaching the new with the old way of thinking, one will certainly not make any headway. And one can very well criticize the threefold order, as Professor von Heck does, but it is still his own absurd threefold order that he criticizes, and not the one that the Federation for Threefolding is currently sending out into the world.

Now, all this is connected with the fact that man instinctively resists what is most necessary in our time, the reorientation of all thinking and feeling. And this reorientation of thinking and feeling will not come either until one is willing to gain at least subjective, initial relationships to spiritual science, to the real knowledge of spiritual life. And on the one hand, people will have to be willing to recognize the threefoldness in social life as a necessity, but also to acknowledge the threefoldness of the human being himself as a fact given by nature. But the fact that the human being does not have these threefoldness neatly nested side by side, but that one link always merges into the other, that is precisely what confuses the new human being who is bound to his old ideas. For, of course, when I speak of the head organization, of the nerve-sense organization, this head organization, when viewed externally, is first of all centered in the head. It has its center in the head, in the head itself. But it sends out the necessary extensions into the whole of the rest of the human being; for the sense capacity is, of course, in the whole human being. That is to say, as a head human being, the human being is only a nerve-sense human being in terms of the main thing; the whole human being is a nerve-sense human being. And as a rhythm human being, the human being is a chest human being. The rhythmic system, the breathing and circulation system, has its center in the chest. So the point is that man, as a rhythmic being, is a chest being. The respiratory and circulatory systems are localized in the chest system, but of course the rhythm, the rhythmic activity, is sent into both the main system and the metabolic system. So only in the main sense is the chest human being a rhythmic human being. And it is the same with the metabolism. Of course, metabolism is also present in the head, also in the chest, but it is regulated by the limb system, as I have always characterized it. So what has to be listed as limbs runs into the other. Of course, this confuses people who always want to draw lines and who only want to have what occurs to them standing side by side.

A different way of looking at things, a completely different way of relating to reality, is therefore necessary for the human being who wants to engage in thinking and also in willing and doing for the near future. But one should not think that these things have only one meaning for cognition or for the world view. These things have their own special significance for the life of humanity, for our whole attitude towards life. And this must be taken into account very carefully. We must judge our whole life from this point of view and then ask ourselves the question: How must it be reshaped? In a sense, we have a threefold structure in our lives, but this threefold structure demands, firstly, a precise understanding and, secondly, further development. The precise understanding must arise from the fact that, with a certain fertilization of knowledge through spiritual-scientific contemplation, one looks at what is actually present in our lives. What is there in our lives? What we demand as a special link through the threefold order is, of course, there, but it is only mixed up in a chaotic way with the other two, the legal and the economic links. The spiritual is part of our real life, in that man simply needs a certain spiritual guidance for external culture, for external life. Without spiritual guidance there is no external cultural life. In our present life, this spiritual guidance is not based on an original, elementary expression of human nature, but on something that has been handed down. It is based on something that has been transmitted to man historically. You will surely remember that when one speaks of the newer spiritual life that arose with the great transformation in the fifteenth century, one speaks not of a new creation but of a renaissance or reformation. One speaks, and rightly so, not of a new creation but of a rebirth, of a re-establishment of something old. And in a certain sense, spiritually we live only in a re-established old age. Spiritually speaking, we live from the inheritance of what has, in a certain sense, been concentrated out of much older, oriental and Egyptian spiritual culture in Greek culture. The fact that we have our old Greek gymnasium today is, I would say, only a clear indication that our spiritual life is actually a Greek renaissance.

But what is Greek intellectual life based on? It is difficult to see through this because Greek intellectual life has, in a certain way, very strongly developed that on which it is based: oriental intellectual life. But it has greatly transformed this oriental spiritual life. As a result, if you delve into Greek intellectual life with a mere sense of knowledge, without taking into account spiritual-scientific presuppositions, you do not realize what this Greek intellectual life is actually based on. It is entirely dependent on the fact that the members of the conquering class were instinctively granted the right to reveal the spiritual, while the members of the conquered class were not granted this right. Greek culture actually contains a dual population: the ancient population that inhabited the Greek peninsula in European primeval times and which had a very different social structure from that of later Greeks. The later Greeks, we can actually begin with the incursion of that intellectual power that found its expression in the royal dynasties of Agamemnons and so on. This Greek life spread over a native population. And these conquerors were of a different blood than the native population. You notice this different blood in what I have already mentioned here, in Greek sculpture. This Greek sculpture has clearly separate types: the Zeus type, which has different ears, a different nose, and a different position of the eyes than the Hermes-Mercury type, which in turn has a different nose than the satyr type. These last two types point to the Greek indigenous population, who were of a different blood than those we know as the bearers of Greek culture. This means that the entire configuration of Greek intellectual life, which we have adopted as the Renaissance, is of an aristocratic nature, a reformed theocracy of the Orient and Egypt. It is built on the view that the things of the world do not reveal themselves, as was later believed, through proof, but that they want to reveal themselves through revelation: on the one hand through revelation on the part of the oracles or the like, that is, through that which breaks into the human world as spiritual revelation; but that which is to rule the world also reveals itself as deeds. Man does not want to decide about these deeds with his reason and intellect, but he lets powers decide that are outside of him. Among the latter, Greek culture adopted the martial principle of the Orient. It has only transformed it, so we do not notice that in Greek culture two things have merged: theocracy and militarism. But theocracy and militarism are the elements of aristocracy. So we take into our spiritual life, precisely with the grammar school, with the adoption of Greek, an aristocratic element that has, on the one hand, theology and, on the other, military decision. Theology, which does not arrive at its truths by way of proof; military decisions, which do not arise out of human reason but, according to human views, are the result of an external judgment by God or nature. We have this, so to speak, in our social organism through Greek culture, which achieved so much in its state and in its epoch. Through Greek culture we have the aristocratic way of feeling of human beings. And these things must be taken psychologically. Of course, none of the people of the present day will become a Greek in his attitude when he absorbs the aristocracy of the classical period into himself, but he will become something that no longer fits into our time: he will become a bearer of an aristocratic principle that must be overcome. No matter how much enthusiasm there may be for this aristocratic element in our time, no matter how much it may be accepted, in so far as it expresses itself in the life of the mind and in the forms of the life of the mind, this aristocratic element is based on something very agreeable, on Greek culture, which we certainly do not want to do without. But in the way it is based on Greek culture today, it cannot become the general basis of human culture. Therefore, it must be introduced into our culture in a completely different way. This is something that we, so to speak, carry within us as the first element: a spiritual life configured from Greek culture.

Now, however, we also carry a second element within us, namely Roman life. We not only carry Greek life, chaotically mixed into our social culture, into our spiritual life, in terms of its form, its design, its structure, but we also carry Roman legal life within us. We basically carry within us the obsession of shaping that state which was only good and right for the development of humanity in the time when Roman civilization flourished and in the place where it flourished. Greek intellectual life and Roman legal life are within us. It is extremely interesting to see how, in the middle of the fifteenth century and later, European legal life actually wanted to establish itself on its own foundations, how it wanted to develop something quite different from what actually emerged. The ideas of Roman law broke in and permeated the structure of the states, just as Greek intellectual life permeated the structure of the states. And so our legal life did not become something that emerged from an original, elementary impulse of human nature, but something like a kind of renaissance, an adoption of an old one.

But where they could not take up an old one was the basis of economic life. You can cling to an old spirit, you can cling to old legal forms, but you cannot eat what the Greeks ate, nor what the Romans ate. Economic life does not tolerate this transfer of the old. Economic life developed out of Central European, Germanic, Frankish and other conditions, and it did so with a certain elemental force. But it was permeated by the renaissance of spiritual life and by the renaissance of legal life. And it is interesting how people feel: yes, in our social organism only economic life is viable, in the newer sense, viable. Marx and Engels in particular have this feeling. I have described it somewhat in the fourth number of our threefolding newspaper under the title “Marxism and Threefolding”. Marx and Engels feel: Yes, in relation to economic life, it is moving forward according to newer impulses, and these newer impulses only have to be properly developed; they are not yet present in the external world of facts, but they are present in human longing. And so Marx and Engels want an economic life that no longer influences people, as Greek life did, by governing them in relation to their spiritual powers. Marx and Engels no longer want a social structure that influences social life in the sense of Roman law. They see this as a foreign body of modern economic life. They feel the strangeness and therefore want to throw it out. They want to establish something in economic life that no longer rules over people, and a law that only administers production processes, economic circulation of goods, and so on. But that is not the only task of modern times. The task of the modern age is to recognize that, while economic life must be transformed and given the configuration demanded by human longings, we can no longer make do with a legal life that no longer fits into our economic life, nor with a spiritual life that is based only on the Renaissance. In our time we need not only a reasonable organization of economic life, we need a reorganization of the legal system to take the place of Roman law, and we need a complete renewal of intellectual life. That is to say, we need not only a spiritual renaissance, but a spiritual re-creation. And Christianity, too, which has fallen into the Greek and Roman ages, cannot be understood by us as it was understood through the medium of the Greek and Roman, but must be newly understood by us with a newly created spiritual life. That is the secret of our time.

Look around you at the old in the European East. There you will find that in this European East, Christianity in Russian Orthodoxy has been permeated with the Greek world view. We have taken up Christianity in the Roman world view, not in the Greek. As a result, we no longer have anything inside us that comes from the Greek world view, but we do have inside us in Christianity what comes from the Roman conception of law. Let us try to recognize the basic structure of this Roman conception of law. The Roman conception of law is based on not regarding people in terms of their blood. In Greece, one was worthy if one belonged to the teutonic blood, the aristocratic blood. What the gods revealed through members of the aristocratic blood was also the right thing, the wise thing. In the Roman cultural element, it was different. There it gradually emerged that one was what one became through one's incorporation into the abstract state, into the constitutional state. One did not become, as with the Greeks, a person of blood, but a person of the state, a citizen. One was nothing special except as a citizen of the state. It was inconceivable that a person should stand there with body, soul and spirit, but it was important that he should be registered in the state system, that the state system should stamp him as a citizen. And when citizenship spread from the Italian peninsula, from Rome, to the whole of the Roman Empire, it was a tremendous event. For in those days people felt that it was something connected with life. But has it not remained so for us in a sense? It has remained for us in a sense that we organize our entire public life according to our system of government, which is derived from Roman thought and feeling.

I once had an old acquaintance who had acquired a childhood sweetheart when he was eighteen, but he could not marry her in his eighteenth year. He had to wait and first earn some money. And so the man had become sixty-four years old. In order to be able to marry, he went back to his hometown, because the love of his youth had remained faithful to him and he wanted to marry her. But what had happened? The church and parsonage, where the baptismal records were kept, had burnt down and the baptismal records had been destroyed. The man had no baptismal certificate. He wrote to me from his hometown and said: Yes, according to my common sense, it seems to me that the fact that I was born is proof that I am here, but people don't believe me because I don't have a baptismal certificate that testifies in writing that I am here. So, first of all, it must be stated that one is there, that one is outwardly categorized. Of course, when you tell someone something like this, they say it's an exaggeration. But it is not an exaggeration. Because this plays a major role in our public relationships. This is the way of thinking that has taken the place of the theocratic way of thinking of the Orient, and which has been somewhat transformed by Greek culture. The Roman way of thinking is an abstract one. The Orient believed in divine powers that enter into man through blood. In the Orient, the person open to the divine was the person related by blood. In the Roman cultural element, one was imbued with the belief in concepts, in ideas, in abstractions. This belief, which was a metaphysical one, in contrast to the theological belief of the Orient, was joined by jurisprudence. Just as militarism is the sister phenomenon of theocratic aristocratism, so jurisprudence is the sister phenomenon of the abstract civil principle of ideas that already appeared in Romanism. Metaphysics and jurisprudence are siblings. The time is coming when not only things will be accepted as revelations, but when everything is to be proved. Just as one proves in jurisprudence that someone has stolen, so it should be proved that not only is 2 times 2 four, but also that there is a God. This led to the recurring proof of God's existence. All the proof of our scientific logic is nothing more than a metamorphosed legal logic. That this legalism has entered into our public life, you can, if you care to, truly recognize everywhere even today. Just think how people complain that in the most diverse administrative offices in the administrative apparatus, which is entirely formed out of the Roman Empire, that where people should sit who understand something of the technical, lawyers sit, not technicians. That is really the case. Lawyers sit in these positions everywhere. That is the second thing that has entered our lives, just as theocracy and militarism were the first sibling couple. Theocracy and militarism, that is, Greekness, is rooted, however strange it may sound, in the spiritual constitution of man; Romanism is rooted in its conception of law. And from these foundations, which I have mentioned to you, the Western Roman Catholic Church also differs from the Eastern Greek Catholic Church. The Eastern Greek Catholic Church has remained more of a spiritual matter. The Roman Catholic Church is actually, at its core, a completely civil and legal institution. It has always asserted itself as such. It has transformed what should be purely spiritual into legal institutions. But it has even introduced legal concepts into the Catholic worldview. The justification of man before God through confession and such things, which arise entirely from legal thought, can be found at every turn in later Catholic dogmatics, which is not originally Christian but Roman dogmatic, permeated by Roman thought. And what has passed through Roman thought, the strongest, most abstract expression of it, is actually found in Protestantism, which is based entirely on a legal concept: on the justification of man by faith.

These are the old elements that are in our cultural life. One must turn one's gaze to these old elements without prejudice, because in our time they are ripe to die. Marx and Engels realized this. But they did not realize that we now need something new to take their place. They believed that economic life should continue in the mere administration of the branches of production, goods and things; the rest would come by itself. It does not come by itself. In addition to the material administration of the branches of production and goods, we need a democratic legal structure and a new creation of spiritual life. Nothing material can give birth to anything spiritual. Therefore, the threefold social order is intimately connected with the whole challenge of our time. It emphasizes the necessity of replacing the old spirit that has been squeezed out of our culture with a new spirit, with a new creation of the spirit. We, as people of culture, cannot be satisfied with a new Renaissance. We cannot reheat the old, but need a new creation of the spirit. This is what spiritual science, oriented to anthroposophy, seeks to be. It will therefore be most contested, because people cling to the old. And secondly, we need a new creation of the legal system, which must be brought completely into the democratic channel, which must be created in such a way that it cannot be created from the old conditions, because never in the old conditions does man face man as man, but always with some class or privilege involved. That is the task of the man of the present: to really put himself in the position of the new creations. In many cases he lacks the courage to do so. But this courage will have to be mustered. It will be mustered when the most lethargic part of our population, and that is the part that has gone through academic studies – on the whole it is so, there are exceptions of course – when this drowsiest part of our population, when it is willing to break with tradition, whether it be in the form of revelations that came to us from Greece or abstract ideas that came to us from Rome. One must consider the possibility of developing a right through a democratic state, of developing a spiritual life through a new creation that stands on completely free ground and must therefore break with all the nonentities that are based only on the preservation of the old or on anything nebulous and unclear. Please consider from this point of view what is taking place in these days.

The Social Democratic Party claims – I am not talking about nuances here – to be the party that will bring about a reorganization of modern economic life. Leninism within this social democracy is actually the most consistent expression of this social democratic view, because Lenin is truly a worthy successor to Marx. This Leninism wants to create a spiritual life out of mere economic life on the ground, where that is least likely to happen because it is contrary to the instincts of the people. It wants to do this through Lunacharsky's alchemy. I am not speaking about these things in response to any news, so that one can say that fairy tales are being told about Russia and the like. There is no need to listen to the descriptions, because they are naturally colored by subjective perception. The bourgeois will describe it differently than the Social Democrat. No, I am basing myself on what Lenin himself said in his work. I know that what underlies his view is not the creation of a new culture, but the destruction of an existing one. I do not want to talk about the school system as it is described, but about the laws that are being given to the Russian school system, and from that no intellectual life can arise. It is not what is described that matters to me, but what the same people do when they want to create something new out of their illusions. We in Central Europe are not yet so far advanced, we cannot yet make these great mistakes, but we are well on the way to ruining everything that wants to come in the future.

Do not Marx and Engels take the view that economic life is everything, and that spiritual life must develop out of it? That is theory, that is utopia. What happens in reality? One feels: Yes, if we merely make economic institutions in relation to the present culture, then a real spiritual life does not seem to come of it after all. So one makes compromises with the old spiritual life: social democracy with the center. According to Marx and Engels, it should not be the Center that rises from the smoke that would enter into our brains and those of future generations in a stimulating way, but it should arise from the independence of economic life as the superstructure. Very strange, in the Marxian and Engelsian theory: economic substructure, economic substructure; spiritual, ideological superstructure, law, custom, intellectual life in general, however, — illusionistic theory. In reality: the economic foundation, social democracy; the superstructure is taken care of by the Center and the Roman clericalism. The foundation: the Marxist-inspired economic state or the Marxist-inspired economic cooperative; the illusory superstructure: the ideal man who arises from the illusion and is supposed to surrender; the reality: the fat Erzberger. You see, these things look grotesque when you say them out loud, but they express reality and, if they are seriously considered, they show where we actually stand and what errors we are heading towards. But they also show that we will not escape from these errors unless we decide to approach the re-creation of a spiritual life and treat this re-creation of the spiritual life sympathetically. We must treat it sympathetically because the time has come when spiritual life cannot remain merely a world view, cannot remain merely a theory, but must be incorporated into the practical treatment of life.

The fact that modern medicine could only rely on one natural science and build itself on one natural science, which did not take into account the threefold human being, the nerve-sense human being, the rhythmic human being and the metabolic human being, has made this modern medicine, which is now something practical, both as hygiene and as a healing method, one-sided, which is already felt not only by many people, but also by many doctors, thank God. But our medicine will never be placed on a sound foundation if it is not based on the threefold nature of man. Oh, the head man, who is modeled on the cosmos, is something quite different. Therefore, something quite different are those irregularities in human nature, the pathological irregularities that are of cosmic origin. Something else is the damage to human nature that has a telluric origin and that essentially comes from the detour through the metabolism, that has an earthly origin, not a cosmic one. Something else is everything that is connected with what is between the cosmos and the earth, with what lives partly in the air and also in the water. In the future, this must become the starting point for a truly freely pursued medical study. For it is indeed peculiar that of these three things, which I have just mentioned and which, in truly practical medicine, must be built up on the basis of the threefold nature of the human being, only one can actually, I might say, be learned in the official, scholastic way. One can only study that which is based on the human metabolic system through the methods that exist today solely through our university teaching, which is modeled on Greek and Roman life. And actually, our whole medical-scientific way of thinking is a way of thinking based on the metabolic system. Because the way we have science today, there is actually only the science of metabolism. But if you want to add the other things, that which can occur in human nature as damage through air and water, then you are actually dealing with a lot of individual things. What occurs in humans as damage from air and water is very individual, and can only be learned through dedicated interaction with older physicians who already have experience in this field. This can only be acquired by a young person joining an old, experienced doctor, not in a school-like way, but as an assistant, which is what happens in today's clinical assistantships, but as a caricature, pushed down into the metabolic sphere. It must be the case that a certain medical instinct, a certain medical intuition, which in some people is more pronounced and in others less so, borders on clairvoyance, occurs in the case of someone who is an assistant to an older doctor, and so that he does not even think of treating things in a merely typical and schematic way, but that he combines, out of instinct, new individuality and older individuality, in which he has been trained and which he does not merely imitate. And what comes to the human organism in the way of damage from the head, which, as I said before, although it permeates the whole person, is only centered in the head, cannot be taught at all. There is no method by which one can learn to recognize from the outside those diseases that arise in the human organism from the head. These can only be recognized through original talent, and this talent must be awakened. Therefore, it is necessary to consider from the very beginning whether such abilities can be awakened in a particular person.

You see, this is where the attitude comes into play, which must develop in the independent spiritual organism, and which will go to the point of paying attention to human talent, that is, putting each person in the place to which he is led by his particular talent. It is therefore necessary that this particular spiritual life be truly placed on its own feet, for only in a free spiritual life, where the talents are allowed to rule freely, will the talents also be truly recognized. In this way, by entering into the spiritual, man returns in a certain way to the natural, the nature-like, and this in turn will give rise to possible relationships. You all know that today we suffer from the fact that all conditions can no longer be properly cared for because we do not administer the things of the world from a natural way of thinking, that is, from a spiritual way of thinking. There are certain positions in the state or elsewhere; but there are always far too many people for these positions. There are always many more applicants than are needed. Other positions are not filled because people are not trained. Certain professions cannot exist because people are not educated. In the free spiritual life, as envisaged by the idea of a threefold social organism, none of this can happen, because the human being does not shape things out of arbitrariness, but because he shapes in harmony with the great laws of the world. And where that happens, things usually go well. Wherever human arbitrariness is used to shape things contrary to these great laws of the world, things usually do not go well. And the Roman system has the greatest predisposition to arbitrariness. The purely metaphysical-legal system has the greatest predisposition to mere arbitrariness. The Greek system had a certain instinct arising from consanguinity, even if this instinct only thinks for the minority. The economic system has its own natural necessity. The metaphysical-legal system is what distances man most from the foundations of nature in terms of his feelings and perceptions. The Roman-legal system is what we should consider first and foremost without prejudice. Because until we have overcome it in all areas, we will not make any further progress. If someone were to ask today: Will there really be enough people in the future, or not too many, for a particular profession in the leading positions, arising out of an independent spiritual life? then one can only answer: These things cannot be answered in the way that logic works, which is constructed according to the pattern of Roman jurisprudence, but rather in the way that the logic of facts works. Some decades ago, the news spread from Vienna to the educated world, as they say, that people had been found who could regulate the type of births in the future. That is, in the future it would be possible to regulate whether what is to be born will be a boy or a girl. You know, this Schenk theory caused quite a stir, and people had great hopes for it. Do you know what the real effect would be? The effect would be that in this approximate order, in which about the same number of men and women are born, the greatest disorder would arise if gender were left to human arbitrariness. The greatest disorder would result. And so it will be when, with regard to other, less natural things, people again apply their arbitrariness. The fact that we have too many people for one occupation and too few for another is due to the unnatural nature of human thinking and human institutions. The moment this arbitrary, metaphysical-legal Roman way of thinking and organizing is replaced by one that is inspired by spiritual science and intuition, and which in turn merges with what was also an older instinct, we will once again enter into a life that regulates the social order in such a way that it can endure.

As you can see, the new social thinking cannot be properly grasped from a merely abstract way of thinking. In a sense, one must already have entered into a kind of marriage with nature itself. And those people who today believe most in thinking naturally think most unnaturally, because they think in a distorted Roman-legal way, which has spread into all our affairs. One would not believe how, for example, even in something as far removed as possible from Roman law, in medicine and medical thinking, this abstract quality has crept in.

And now we must not forget that this whole abstract being has become so unnatural since the 1870s. We can only distinguish between what came before and what came after. Until the 1870s, old traditions were still in place in all areas. The good elements of the various renaissances were still at work. For in the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear to see that the old was losing its validity for human progress, and that humanity must strive for new creations, both in the legal sphere and in the entire spiritual life. For only in this way will economic life, which is quite clearly demanding its own reorganization, be imbued with such human thoughts, which are necessary.

But the necessary practical activities, such as medicine, can only be enriched if something completely new is created from spiritual life, not if renaissances are started from spiritual life. New creation of spiritual life, that is what we need.

It was truly a product of the necessity of our time that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science was combined with social action in the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism. And in recent months, the necessity has also arisen to seek a closer connection between the social and the spiritual. Of course, the old guard will have something against it too. They had something against the threefold social order in general; they will also have something against this hand-in-hand approach. People have no sense of how strong the old guard is. They also have no sense of how necessary it is in our time to cut off the plaits and thus overcome European Chinese culture, otherwise Asian Chinese culture could become far too dangerous for us if we continue to wear the plaits of European Chinese culture.

Now, in our circle, a certain understanding of this necessity arising from the spiritual-scientific foundations has begun, and we have indeed seen that the elements are present to at least prepare humanity for a certain receptivity for the new spiritual striving. Friends of ours have worked to spread the anthroposophical worldview here in Stuttgart and in the surrounding area, and it has been a great success. It is to be hoped that these things, which are also eminently necessary socially today, will be understood. It is wrong to believe that humanity at large is not open to these things. In the present time, if we want to understand what is socially necessary, we need a thinking that has been trained by those concepts and ideas that come from spiritual science. Because, you see, in addition to all the other contradictions in the present, there is also this contradiction: legal-Roman, merely logical thinking and spiritual-scientific thinking. Spiritual scientific thinking, which everywhere is based on the logic of facts – Roman Catholic legal thinking, which is only based on the logic of concepts, only on the selfish logic of man. This thinking will never be strong enough to see through reality. I have given you a clear, concrete example of this.

In Zurich, Avenarius taught, in Prague and Vienna Mach taught, and one of his students was Fritz Adler, the son of old Adler. Mach and Avenarius, with their purely positivistic sensory assurance, were good average people, they were good present-day people, or, for that matter, good past-day people, for there is supposed to be something new in the present. And all those who represented the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach naturally believed themselves to be good present-day people. This was still the case, as a rule, with the first generation of students, when they formulated purely positivistic theories of sense perception, but no longer with the next generation of students. Then the logic of the facts came into play, and it was characterized by the fact that Avenarius and Mach are the political philosophers of Bolshevism. Imagine these honest Central European citizens, who certainly never went too far in this direction, as the idols, the philosophical idols of the Bolsheviks. This is the logic of facts, it is a logic that can be seen through by anyone who engages in spiritual scientific knowledge that goes with the facts. Those who think only in Roman-legal terms analyze the philosophy of Mach, the philosophy of Avenarius. Yes, they find nothing in it that could be logically extracted and then become a practical system of Bolshevism. Oh no! Even what people could do according to the views of such a purely conceptual logic, such a purely metaphysical logic, is also good. That is to say, what the Roman-minded logician must think of as the consequence of Avenarius's world view is good bourgeois. But what the logic of reality develops from it is Bolshevism. Today we need concepts that master reality, that enter into reality. We have strayed very far from reality through the Roman-legal essence, which has crept into everything, everything. Today people believe that they are expressing their own free human nature. In reality, they only express what has been instilled in them by the Roman or Catholic - but that is also Roman - legal being. That is why it is difficult today to bring to people that which does not arise from human arbitrariness, but which springs from the facts themselves. Of course, spiritual science itself must sound different in the way it is presented than what has been produced in this way. But in the depths of human nature there is already a yearning that meets the moods of spiritual science. And if there is enough perseverance and courage, it is precisely from these currents, which can be found today in some of our friends, that spiritual science will be carried out into the world; it will arise out of these currents that which the present time needs. Today, we should not be deterred by the appearance of opinions that come only from the Romanic bourgeoisie in their way of thinking, saying: Oh, if humanity is to advance through what you mean, then it will take decades! That is nonsense again in the face of reality. It is again nothing more than Roman-legal logic. The truth must be thought differently. If you look at a plant as it grows, it develops leaf after leaf, slowly at first. And anyone who thinks that it will always continue at that pace is quite mistaken. Then there is a jolt, and the calyx and petals develop rapidly from the leaf. And so it will be, if only we ourselves have the strength to persevere with what we can achieve spiritually and socially. It depends on the will. It may look for a long time as if things are going very slowly. But then, when everything that can grow has come together, the turnaround will come suddenly. But it will only work well if as many people as possible are prepared for it. That is what I wanted to tell you right now as a kind of conclusion to our work during these weeks, which I would like to call our “Stuttgart Weeks”. For it is a matter of not slackening our efforts to work for the good of our own cause. Not looking to the left, not looking to the right, but looking to the good that flows from our own cause, that is what matters. And avoiding, even if only in our thoughts and feelings, to have any mistrust of what flows from this cause itself. No matter how much the things that flow from our cause are attacked, we must not be deterred by such attacks. For these attacks, we need only take a closer look at them all, and we will soon find that they sound and resonate from the old, even if they want to be “confessions of renewal”. For all renewal today can only come about if economic thinking is joined by new legal thinking and a new spiritual life. This is what we must regard as a necessity, what we want to infuse into everything, what we must permeate ourselves with in order to participate in the social reorganization of humanity.

That, my dear friends, was what I wanted to say to you today, because I firmly believe that the iron we have forged so far must not cool, it must remain warm. Then it will achieve everything that can lead humanity along the path it should take. That is why I would like to summarize this reflection, which sought to summarize some of what we have been doing here in recent weeks, in two words. These two words are very old, but modern man must grasp them in a new way, in such a way that he encounters them with the feelings and emotions that arise from spiritual science. And these words are: Learn and work!

We cannot today indulge in the naive belief that we already know everything and that we can draw up programs from what we know. We have to find ideas from life today, but life renews itself every day, and we have to have the confidence to learn something new from life every day. And we must not be cowards who believe that they can only work when they can build on so-called secure ideas, whereby they always mean those ideas that have been handed down from time immemorial. We must have the courage to learn while working and to work while learning. Otherwise, man will not be able to enter the future and its demands. This will also be his new Christianity. Many people today go through a certain conflict. They remind you when you speak in the anthroposophical sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, that according to their opinion, according to the Gospel, Christ died on the cross to redeem souls through his deed, that therefore the souls that only believe in Christ are redeemed without their doing anything. It is certain – you can read about it in my book, “Christianity as Mystical Fact” – that something happened through the Mystery of Golgotha, in which the human being, with his present consciousness, has no direct part, for the present consciousness only begins in the middle of the fifteenth century. But that is not the point today, that we lazily surrender to what takes care of us outside of ourselves. We must not speak today as some Catholic church dignitaries, for example, speak, whether high or low, and say: You will not advance socially unless Christ is at the center of all social activity. — Recently, I have experienced in many a gathering that the Christ was also mentioned in this way. Yes, my dear friends, I used my spiritual ear a little while listening, so that I heard that outwardly resounded through the hall, one does not advance socially without the Christ, but inwardly only the Benedictus resounded, not the Christ. Inwardly it was not about the Christ, but about the Benedictus. I mean the one who now sits on the Roman See. And that is precisely why humanity is not making progress today, because it relies on something other than what connects with its own soul. The Christ must also be understood anew. The external church cannot take the place of Christ. Only what man experiences within himself can help him to progress. Therefore, no one understands the Christ who does not understand that he must be reborn in the soul of every single person. But man must also work on his spiritual formation. Only when we believe that our actual human powers are not born with us, but that our actual human powers for the future will be those that we ourselves develop within us, only then do we stand on truly Christian ground. Not the Christ who is born with us – that is only God the Father – but the Christ whom we experience in ourselves by developing towards him, that is the Christ who must be grasped.

Today there are books by Protestant Christians, for example Harnack's book “The Essence of Christianity”. Cross out the word “Christ” everywhere in this book, and the book changes from a lie to a truth. As it is, it is a lie, because wherever “Christ” is written, it should say: the Father-God. What Harnack writes refers only to the general fatherly nature-god. There is nothing in the book about the Christ. That has been added by way of lies. The Christ can only be found by the transformed, transmuted human nature, by human nature that is engaged in its own activity.

That is what must be overcome today, but with which, unfortunately, instead of thinking of overcoming, the world makes compromises. The compromises that are made outside today are also made within the soul, and if our souls were not so terrible compromisers, then there would be no such terrible compromises in the outer life as the one that now comes from Weimar, the school compromise. Today, people of a compromising nature slink through existence, and they are the ones who experience everything in retrospect, who do not move forward. We can only move forward if we have the will to learn and the courage to incorporate what we have learned into life. Only from this will and courage can the new motto arise:

I want to learn, I want to work.
I want to learn by working.
I want to work by learning.

This lecture is the thirteenth of nineteen lectures in the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy.

Today we will occupy ourselves with an important document of mankind, although it appears far removed from the realm of our present line of study, yet nevertheless stands in an inner relationship to it. It is the Ten Commandments, which we will strive to illuminate from the basis of spiritual science because perhaps through spiritual science the right light may help clarify our understanding of this document.

From the side of learned theology it is often maintained that these Ten Commandments concur with various laws and commandments of other ancient folk and don't really depict anything extraordinary. They are considered at most only noteworthy as part of a collection in which laws and orders are to be found among various ancient peoples, as for example with Lycurgus of Sparta or the law tablets of Hammurabi.

What we have examined in the developmental route of mankind in the post Atlantic time and having allowed this to work on our souls, can become a specific connecting thread allowing an understanding of the revelation regarding the greatness, the enormity, which struck mankind, in the Ten Commandments given in Sinai. Let's remind ourselves about our contemplation of the evolution of mankind during the post-Atlantic time. We saw how the five cultural epochs - the Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Egyptian-Judaic, the Greek-Roman and Germanic cultural epochs - are a gradual conquering of the physical plane by mankind. Now we stand at the end of the third and at the beginning of the fourth epoch which we could call the “Mission of Moses.” Out of what did this Mission exist?

We will strive to direct our souls more precisely to how inspiration of the Initiates actually occurred in the successive time intervals. Yesterday we spoke about the Rishis, the inspirational ones in the ancient Indian time. The Rishis announced that they were mere common people in ordinary life who became however at specific times an instrument, a mouth piece for the inspirations of higher, spiritual beings. This fact was particularly prevalent in the ancient Indian times and these ancient Rishis, these great teachers of the post-Atlantean time could speak of lofty spiritual truths. We can ask ourselves in which spiritual regions these Rishis moved when they wanted to be permeated and surged through inwardly by higher Beings, who spoke through them? The Rishis were raised up while higher forces lived within them, not only to the astral or lower Devachan planes but above, right to the upper Devachan, so their learning originated in upper Devachan. In these ancient times, shortly after the Atlantic catastrophe, the old Indian bodies still gave mankind possibilities to go out of their bodies, and thus step into a relationship with Beings of Higher Worlds.

Now the cultural epochs continued. In the cultural epoch of Zarathustra, the ancient Persian, the highest initiates certainly knew how to speak about the highest spiritual Beings but their rise could not without further ado reach to the upper parts of Devachan. They could only rise to lower Devachan. Despite that however they could be taught about the higher planes because these elevated beings of the lower Devachanic planes knew about the higher planes.

In the world in which the Egyptian initiates were mainly indigenous, they could usually rise to the astral plane and it was not only a small circle which could still rise up to the astral plane in the old Egyptian time. A relatively large number of people, through their own observation, still knew what was happening on the astral plane. At least in certain in-between conditions of life, between waking and sleeping for instance, many experienced community with these Beings who did not descend to the physical plane but were at home on the astral plane. Thus the ancient Egyptian initiates who could enter and exit the astral plane found it easy to reveal things happening in the Higher Worlds.

The more we approach the later cultural epochs, the more the veil in front of the spiritual worlds drew to a close. The number of people who were capable of making observations in the spiritual worlds diminished ever more, and as a result, from the fourth cultural epoch onwards, a particular form of proclamation was required from the Initiates. One of these Initiates, familiar with all the occult arts of the Egyptian Initiates, was Moses; he moved freely throughout the astral plane. Even his people were chosen to behold certain revelations, and were capable of being something to the people even if they could no longer see into the higher worlds. It required Initiates, although diminished in their numbers, who knew directly or indirectly about the higher worlds, because they could consciously live out of their bodies. The largest part of the people however had to restrict their lives to the physical plane. The task which mankind had to fulfil in this time when the mission of Moses began, was this: those people who were completely dependent on the physical plane were to be given a revelation out of the spirit, which stands behind the physical, according to which they could regulate their lives. How could this Mission of Moses be formulated then? Just consider the necessity to clarify to the people that what is around them, what they can see and touch, is the physical plane - here is nothing spiritual. This was not to be looked at as something representative of the spiritual, but there had to be a clear understanding that the spiritual was to be sought in the spiritual, and only a few could do this spiritual research.

In ancient Indian times, when the holy Rishis spoke out of the upper parts of Devachan, images were given which could be seen as outer symbolic pictures in comparisons and indications coming from Upper Devachan. Images and portraits could be given and it was relatively easy for people to understand: we give you as it were images but because you see the outer world as an illusion, as Maya, these images are nothing more to you than images, reflections of the supersensible world.—In no way was there a danger leading to worship of these images. How could it have been with a people where everything sense perceptible was seen as Maya, illusion? These people could never practice worship. That only came much later. Certainly later in the oriental culture symbols and images of God appeared in some places. It was easy however for the holy Rishis to make it clear to the entire Indian people: that which we revealed, originated out of the higher planes of Devachan, while the visible or physical is a symbol for something so high and serene that it can only be taken in as a symbol.

During the Persian cultural epoch however, the students of Zarathustra couldn't proceed in the same way. They could only establish a kind of relationship between the people and the lower parts of the Devachanic planes. They were only capable of talking of images, spiritual images, of the supersensible. They referred to no sensory image. Above all they spoke amongst their people of an actual, spiritual, good being, who they called Ahura Mazdao, the being who had his outer corporeality in the sun and who connected himself with mankind and against the dark spirit: Ahriman. This was presented in a sensory-supersensory image so to speak, to the people. They had to imagine him for themselves as a spiritual light Being. However, not a finished image, not a portrait should they fashion. At most they could imagine this godly Ahura Mazdao as precursor within fire, for example, and not as a stiff, outer, sensory image. Everything which appeared as sensory pictures or idols came at a much later time. The ancient Persian culture had pictorial precursors which had to reveal the super-sensory. That was the progress.

Now we come to the third cultural epoch which we encounter mainly in the Egyptian time. Here stands the form of Osiris, as we know, at the central point of all religious thought and feeling. We can easily understand what now has to be said. What kind of being is Osiris, mainly in his godly form? Consider what the Egyptian cultural leaders said to the people: when you really fulfil your tasks in the physical world, when you have done everything related to your soul striving towards becoming a worthy person, then you will be united with Osiris after death. - On the other hand they are told: Osiris had only a short life on earth, because he was conquered by his brother Typhon - Seth—and has been living for a time in the worlds which are celestial, above the ground. His lower regions are no longer the physical but the astral plane, he will not descend lower. It is no longer possible for Osiris to step on the physical plane. Therefore people can't meet Osiris in life. After death however, when they have become sufficiently worthy, they will be united with Osiris because then they are within the world in which Osiris stays. A person can therefore meet Osiris, either after they have died or if they enter as an Initiate into the astral plane. Through this the disciples of the Osiris religion were prepared: the supersensible to which you are related, should place before your soul nothing other than pictures which your own soul imagines, ‘soul’ as is imagined under the concept of the astral body. Osiris became considered the ideal human form, possessing all possible virtues, and while desires as well as virtues exist in the astral body, so the human astral being was thus represented as the Being of Osiris.

For the Semites who gradually went through the Egyptian schools and who had to prepare the great event through which the spiritual, the Christ, descended into the physical world - not like Osiris to the astral plane, but like Christ, who came right down to the physical plane - they dared to live with God as a parable, a symbol, just like in the ancient Indian epoch they dared worship a god in a sensory-supersensory image, just like in the Persian culture in images of an astral presence, and in the Egyptian culture, now single and alone beneath the non-sensory imagination of the “I” (Ich). All images, originally given in ancient Indian times with which to imagine the spiritual, were of the physical world, borrowed from the mineral kingdom; they were images in distinct physical-mineral forms. The form through which the Initiates of the Persian culture made the supersensible clear to their people was removed from that which also lives in the human astral body, the lively etheric, because Ahura Mazdao also became visible to them as a result of his etheric form, the sun aura, becoming known to them. Osiris was represented by the Egyptians in an astral form. That divinity however, which the Jewish people proclaimed, had to have no other qualities than the “I,” the fourth member of the human being. Under the “I” we grasp something which only we can call “I.”

This is connected to something else. At this point people had to allow the Mission of Moses to flow into them; he had to be the representative of the image of the “I” of God. From that moment onwards people had to be told: Just as an “I” lives in every person and is the ruler of the members of human nature, so you must imagine the Being who weaves in the world as creative Being, who lives, rules and prevails over everything that's been and is created. Nothing sensory, neither etheric nor an astral image can represent this. Merely under the form of the “I,” only under the name “I am the I-am” should you imagine this highest Being. - In the “I am” itself every person should experience a reflection of the godhead. It was the Mission, the proclamation of Moses to say: Look within ourselves, only there will you find the real image of the pure godhead. - As a result all activity amongst people should from this moment onward only be from one “I” to another “I.” This had to be prepared through the Mission of Moses.

Let's place ourselves once more in the Egyptian culture. Much activity took place but it didn't move from one “I” to another “I” but from one astral to another astral body. What is this called? Just think how one of the gigantic pyramids were built. A great army of people was needed to bring such a pyramid into existence. The construction workers of such pyramids followed the order of the master builder and those were the temple priests, the spiritual guides of culture. Don't believe that these orders were given as they are today, from one “I” to another “I.” That was not the case. You will most easily understand what was happening when the word “suggestion” is implied. Physical powers of nature were employed to guide the masses. The Egyptian priests controlled such powers to a high degree. They didn't work on the “I” by saying: Do this or that - but they controlled the masses by managing their physical powers, so that the people meekly followed the priests who bypassed the “I.” These priests stood as Initiates in lofty service. They were incapable of abusing these powers; they placed themselves in service of the Good. Thus it was inspired, physically inspired, through them working; the freedom of the “I” in opposition to the priests of the temple was not in question. If you understand that, then you will also understand how in ancient India the Holy Rishis applied even higher spiritual powers. With them it was as follows: when they appeared and gave meaningful proclamations from the spiritual worlds, it was self-evident that the entire folk would follow meekly. Just as the hand follows the head, so the masses followed their leaders, the Initiates. This diminished ever more, the further humanity sunk into the physical plane, but in ancient Egypt there was still great effectiveness of these physical forces. To withdraw people from this kind of involvement and the predictive manifestation in the ego-opposition, was the Mission of Moses. For each human being to search for the godly fountainhead, the great World-I, that the realm of the surging, wafting “I” can be perceived as the archetypal image of the individual “I,” that was the great call which is linked to the Mission of Moses.

From these viewpoints we will understand how this great World-”I” had to be proclaimed through Moses. In this way we must translate the announcement of the “I”-Laws into everyday language, in order to really go through what was felt, experienced and thought when for instance the First Commandment was heard at that time. All lexicographic translations give the most inconceivable inaccuracies. Now I want to present the first commandment to you as it really needs to be translated, to bring it to such an expression as people then imagined they had heard.

First Commandment: I am the everlasting Divine, which you experience within yourself. I have led you out of the land of Egypt where you couldn't follow me within yourself. Henceforth you will not place other gods above me. You will not acknowledge gods as higher, who show you an image of something which appears above in the heaven, which works out of the earth or between heaven and earth. You shall not worship what is beneath the divine which is within you. I am the everlasting in you and a continual divinity. If you don't recognise Me within you, I will disappear as the divine in your children, parents and grandparents and their bodies will become stultified. If you acknowledge Me within you, I will live forth in you for up to thousands of generations and the bodies of your people would prosper.

This gives us the indication how the single “I” is within the archetypal “I,” how to recognise the after-image of the archetypal divine “I” and also, the indication of how, through acknowledgement of one's own “I” as divine, the way is given to become free from the opposition experienced between people and their leaders in ancient Egypt. “I have led you out of the lands of Egypt, where you can follow Me within you. The will of the Initiate followed you there, and there you were not free.” These Initiates applied their psychic powers which the people followed. The first dawning of this human freedom, which rose as the freedom of mercy in Christianity, shows itself in this reference: “I led you out of the Egyptian lands where you couldn't follow Me within you.” “Henceforth you shall not place other gods above Me.” Therefore, in order for the Jewish people to become the most prepared people for the proclamation in Christendom, it had to be made clear that all other representatives of the divine, the archetypal images of the “I,” had to fall away. Outer representations of the divine, even the signs of the Zodiac or something else, had to fall away. Nothing was to illustrate the divine, because people had to, in order to become free, find the source of everything within them: everything which was to be experienced regarding the divine had to be after-images of the great World-I and experienced in their “I.” “You should not acknowledge anything higher than the Divine, who appears as an image of something which shines above in the heaven, which originates from the earth or is active between the heaven and the earth.” An image-free divine! The only legitimate expression for this is the human “I,” the image of the “I am the I-Am.” “You shall not worship anything which is beneath the godly which is within you.”

We have emphasized: out of the physical body the image was taken in ancient India, out of the ether body in the Persian culture, out of the astral body with the Egyptians. Those all stand below the “I.” From out of this no image should be taken and called divine. We know that the physical body was formed from mineral nature, the ether body from the etheric in nature, and the astral body from that realm where the animal astral body is also formed. From all which exits in the members of human nature, having originated from the rest of nature, from all that which is below the “I,” nothing should be worshipped. “I am the everlasting in you and a continual divinity.” Here we have an important sentence. This was given to the Jews as a commandment, which was previously a fact. We have already remarked that when common blood flows in any people, a particular awareness runs through the generation, how the son feels bound through the blood with his father and grand-father. Common blood felt like a common “I.” This “I” lived through generations. The god who announced himself primarily as an “I” to the Jews, had to announce Himself by saying the He was this, which worked as God through the generations. “When you really understand Me, then you will understand what continues to work from generation to generation.” This has been translated with: “I am a striving God,” or even “I am an angry God,” while the actual meaning is: “I am the god working continually from generation to generation.”

“Don't seek to find an incorrect imagination of Me, protect the truth within you, as an imagination of Me, then you plant within the blood enduring health from gender to gender.” A real medicinal imagination is linked to that which this commandment gave, linked to the imagination that when the human being has a pure imagination of his relationship to the divine, then a healthy “I”-image will flow through the blood and people will remain healthy from one generation to the next. We don't come to a real understanding of the lively form in which Moses presented this to his people when he announced the laws, if we only think abstractly about what he said. No, it was said under the presupposition that correct thoughts are an active reality. “When you create a false imagination of the Divine, then you will, from gender to gender, bequeath it into an expression of disease and infirmity.” Correct thoughts activate health, false ones, illness. This is in the genuine sense an anthroposophic or occult image. This has to be thought about or otherwise no real understanding can be reached, no real picture formed regarding this First Commandment. The Jewish people were instructed: Don't place your God under false images. When they knelt in front of the golden calf, a false image flowed from the gods into them and this false image of god produced, because it works through the blood and goes down the generations, the effectively continuous sin which translates into illness. “If you don't recognise Me within you, I will disappear as the divine in your children, parents and grandparents and their bodies will become stultified.” You produce children, parents, grandparents capable of surviving, when you take up the correct imagination of the Divine, otherwise that which depends on the blood will die out. By truly acknowledging Me within you, the source of the “I,” the power transmits from one generation to the next because I am a continually effective Divinity. I will disappear from the bodies if I live in you as a false image. This is again quite an occult and medicinal indication. “If you acknowledge Me within you, I will live forth in you for up to thousands of generations and the bodies of your people would be purified and therefore would prosper.” Thus the physical will prosper, in the genuine occult sense, when the human being forms the true spiritual imagination. Through this a simultaneous breath of human freedom is drawn in human development: right at the peak, so to speak, of the continual “I” the human being is placed and then formed with the divine “I.” One can't allow comparisons with any other legislation; it is real dilettantism to place the Ten Commandments beside other legislation and compare it one-sidedly, just because they are outwardly similar in words, they can be seen as the same. The legislation of the Ten Commandments from Sinai is unique and only allows illumination through the unique Mission of Moses. As with this First Commandment, so it is with all the other Commandments when they are correctly translated. It becomes clear to us from the spirit of Moses' Mission, with reference to the “I”-impulse, how this now had to be poured into humanity.

Second Commandment: You will not speak in error of Me in you, because every error about the “I”-in-you will corrupt your body. - Thus the necessity for the correct thought process is established, the actual creator of the real healthy body. Errors about the ruler of the highest divine in you produce sickliness in the body to the fullest degree. It is extraordinarily important to have insight into the content of the Second Commandment: “The error about the “I” in you will be spoilt.” There is a further saying: In a beautiful body lives a beautiful soul. - Modern materialistic humanity now and then interprets it as: if I take good care of my body, then I will have a beautiful soul. - It actually means that a soul is inwardly strong because it has brought something from previous incarnations which has inspirationally worked through the soul and is now the correct creator for the sheath of a healthy, vigorous body. The body does not create the soul, exactly the opposite. So we see that sometimes it doesn't at all come down to stating a precise wording. Every time it is according to impulses in your life to find a different interpretations of the same wording. Depending on how you feel or are disposed, so it is interpreted. Accordingly one doesn't always have the correct proof that you are indicating an equivalent wording, but only through penetrating into the soul of the time and thoroughly seeking understanding for this or that word.

Third Commandment: You shall separate the workday from the festive day, so that the image of Your Being becomes the image of My Being. Because, what lives in you as My “I,” has built the world in seven days and lives within it on the seventh day. Thus your actions and your son's activities and your daughter's actions and your servant's activity and your cattle's actions and everything that is with you, is within the outer boundary of the six days, but on the seventh day your gaze should seek My gaze within you. - This is the kind of absolute translation corresponding to the Third Commandment. Not in outer images should the Divine within people be portrayed as the archetypal-”I,” but through what the “I” does, the archetypal-”I” must be portrayed and how this archetypal-”I” had created the world in six world days and on the seventh day found rest, so mankind must separate workdays and festive days, six days for creation and the seventh day to seek the Divine with the help of the “I.” So we see in what a wonderful way This Third Commandment is the portrayal of the archetypal-”I” in us and is placed there as guiding God.

In these three first Commandments we have indications of how the human being related to divinity, during the time of the Mission of Moses, which was revealing itself in a new way. In the fourth Commandment we go out on to the physical plane. The first three Commandments sets out how the human being can relate in the right way towards the higher Worlds through the activities of his “I.”

The Fourth Commandment says: Work forth with your fathers and mothers in mind, so that you retain possession of the property you acquired through the power which I have built in you.

Here you have the meaningless: “Honour father and mother, that you may fare well and live long on earth.” It is about actual outward action which really sprouts from what had been planted spiritually in the “I” within man, as we have understood, how the divine works medicinally, like a drop. This Fourth Commandment is a practical commandment. It says: Observe your descendants as your ancestors; then you as a descendent stand in contrast to them—a peaceful, beneficial, continual development will never take place. Just as you inwardly convey the “I” through the blood, so also must that, which you posses after your “I” has worked through it, be maintained. The strong “I” that was created, flowed from the one side through the blood in the generations; on the other side however had to, in order for the human being to strengthen the “I,” work in the outer world. What had been founded as a strong “I” had to be preserved and evolve continuously, without interruption. Work forth with the fathers in mind in order to maintain coherence in the work your father and mother did in creating your “I.” - This shows you how also the outer rules of conduct are given in order not to destroy from outside the creation of a new culture, given as an inner impulse.

Now we come to the Commandments where your independent “I” is confronted by the “I” of others, and how this should in fact rule in the social world. This is actually a repeat of what Paul said, which the Bible gives as: Love they neighbour as thyself (Gal.5,14).—See in other people the same “I” as in yourself. - In an extraordinary way this old Hebraic folk received the impulse to pursue the godly right into the weaving of the “I” within the human soul. Therefore this people had to preserve the Commandments, which do not only prescribes the protection of their own “I” but also prescribes respect and protection of the “I” in the other.

Fifth Commandment: Murder not.

Sixth Commandment: Don't break the marriage.

Seventh Commandment: Don't steal.

All three expand on the one commandment: Recognise in your fellow men the “I” which you have in yourself!

In this deed the Jewish people were led from the lands of Egypt, enabling them to also recognise the “I” in others through the evaluation of the other's “I,” for in Egyptian lands one didn't work through the respect of others but through the suppression of the “I” through suggestion. Now further:

The Eighth Commandment: Do not undermine the worth of your fellow men by telling untruths about them. - Not only through deeds could one damage and impair the rights of the “I” within the other, but one should not once in a spoken word diminish the worth of his “I.” One should not state untruths about the “I” of another. Whoever states an untruth about the “I” of another, does not realize that the “I” of the other is the same as your own “I.” So it proceeds systematically with the Ten Commandments. Reference is made [to] what you express damagingly in community of life from one “I” to another “I.” A deed penetrates directly, damagingly into the sphere of the “I” of the other, but a word more secretively. However, if you want to earnestly acknowledge the “I” of the other, then you also do not dare intervene from the basis of your wants and desires into the sphere of your fellow man. [It is] Not only through this that you rob him, but already through also desiring something of his, do you penetrate into his “I”-sphere. You acknowledge the full equal evaluation of the other's “I” through not allowing yourself to desire what he has. Now the two last Commandments:

Ninth Commandment: Do not look grudgingly at what your fellow man possesses as property.

Tenth Commandment: Do not begrudge your fellow man his wife nor the helpers and others through whom he gains his earnings.

The only way to find healthy relationships between one person and another is by not resenting what the other person owns. So a person is placed beside others in order for him or her to notice and venerate the divine image in every “I.” Thus the existence of the single “I” amongst others is regulated. This was one of the biggest spiritual impacts which entered into mankind. Yet, what had to come through Christ was not pronounced, yet lay within the words here, that each one can find the interrelation with the Father-God. “No one comes to the Father but through Me.” At this time the legislation was given in relationship to the communal “I” which flowed through the generations. Yet at the same time the earlier proclamation was given, that the “I” is not only an image of the Divine, but that God Himself is a living Being within this “I.” The “I” is substance and Being identical to the Father. “I and the Father are one.”

So we see how the impulse, conveyed through the world's development, follows one after the other. It is easy to say: In the world's development all causes and effects are connected by a wisdom-filled world guidance and world command but nothing is visible. - When we however look back in world evolution, as we have done in this examination, we arrive at the notion that at the right time the right thing always happens to direct human development further, then, I may say, nothing else is left over than to acknowledge the wisdom-filled directing and guidance in world development.

When one sees through occult research how at the exit of the third cultural epoch into the fourth time period the proclamation of the Ten Commandments took place in order for people to have time to prepare for the greatest event, the Mystery of Golgotha, then one sees exactly what a great expression of wisdom this is within world guidance.

In the entire tone of the Ten Commandments, when we really understand them, we see how the Divine reveals itself in an archetypal way in images in preparation for the moment when the Divine Spirit will really be embodied in an individual. In order for people to be steered towards an understanding of God in the flesh, an incarnated God, they must first learn to grasp God's substance and Being within their deepest, innermost soul. Considering this document of mankind, the Ten Commandments, we notice from the entire tone, that God speaks through it to mankind and that this address throughout is in line with the ever further emergence of people on the physical plane and that this can only really happen when the Divine is grasped in the right way. Repeatedly it is pointed out that bodies prosper when the Divine is properly grasped. Indications are given that to venerate the Divine also brings prosperity to outer things on the physical plane. In the correct way it is pointed out that a gradual, healthy development must ensue, in order for the outer social relationships to prosper.

Through the Mission of Moses it is regulated that the Divine remains protected within the Being of man, while man's conquering of the physical plane can be carried out in the right way in the sense of the post-Atlantic development remaining in harmony with the Divine.

Today I would like to return to a few things concerning human principles. We must seek out what is in the world as it is in ourselves. A clock is a device that is only possible because of an intelligence that has designed it and put it together. It is foolish to say that the clock has given itself this wise arrangement. It would be equally foolish to say that man has created himself in his design.

We have a small organ in our ears, the 'Organ of Corti'. There are hairs on it; and the hairs are tuned to a certain tone. This sounds when a note is struck on the piano. The vibrations of the air are transferred to the hairs, which then resonate. The same is true of the eye. The eye is also a complex apparatus that has come into being through wisdom. Man is wisdom materialized in this way. The world has been made according to thought.

We call the wisdom in space 'cosmic wisdom' or ['Mahat']. Mahat is the sum of wisdom that is spread throughout the world. So it is a distillation of wisdom from the clock. This is just as man draws wisdom from nature.

Mahat is the archetype of wisdom. “Mala” is the image of Mahat in man. According to Indian teaching, it was like this: Brahma was initially alone, slumbering, then he awakened. One night of Brahma was over. The creative wisdom awakens in him. Nothing else existed yet except for the creative wisdom of Brahma. And this creative wisdom is Mahat. A solar system exists as a thought in the mind of Brahma. We think this cosmic thought after him.

Wisdom is present everywhere in the world. It flows from a kind of spiritual seed into our soul. Cosmic wisdom is in the soul. Mala lives in many. Mahat only lives once. When Mahat becomes individual, that is, becomes Mala, it needs a connecting link. That is Ahankara. Through Ahankara, every person is connected to the general wisdom of the world.

I withdraw into myself and step back from the external sense world. By breaking this bridge, I am allowed to look inward. Through Ahankara, I have within me that which is common to all. I have to go back to world wisdom. First, man finds Manas within himself and then he finds Ahankara, which leads him back to unity, to divine wisdom. When we go through Ahankara, you will realize that we are going through an important spiritual process. We generally go up more. It is the awareness that one's own self is a piece of the divine self. I then do not persist in my self, but I begin to feel as a link in the general Mahat. I am only because I was originally brought into the world by a divine thought. Ahankara leads to absorption in the world of God's thoughts. I and the Father are one. I do not speak because I want to, but because I let Ahankara flow in. For the physical sense world, we would be wrong to say, “I and the others are one.” Mahat is at the same time what we call Atma in Theosophy.

I think two thoughts. First: “I want to go to town tomorrow”; and second: “I want to visit a friend.” These are two thoughts that are present in my soul as one. So people are thoughts of Mahat. People are together in Mahat. Mahat has many Atmas, but all Atmas are together in Mahat. This Mahat of the world system in which we develop is the “third Logos”. And so we can say: we consist of three principles, firstly of Manas, secondly of Budhi and thirdly of Atma. When we rise to this, we are no longer individuals.

At the level of the Atma, we call the thought an image. Let us now try to grasp the difference even more clearly. What lives in us as thought is, in its true significance, a shadow image, in its true essence. It behaves like a shadow in relation to an object. The shadow image is only there when the lamp is there and I am there. But one can also sit in such a way that one only ever sees the shadow images. If we could go out into that sphere where the true essence of these shadows is, we would recognize the archetypes. And we also call these archetypes “spirits”. Spirit is a spiritual essence that is both thought and will. Thus it is a creative thought. The living entities are realities, they are individuality. An intellectual thought is what lives with kama manas. If we free the intellectual thought from the symbols, we are left with only a gray generality, an abstract thought. The soul must have passed through this abstract thinking. Then, instead of from below, new content flows in from above. When we walk down the street, our thoughts are stimulated from the outside. But they must also be able to receive impressions from within.

We can make ourselves passive, that is, we can surrender to Mahat, the third Logos. We then call this “spiritual” or “intuition.

In this way, the spiritual flows into us through Ahankara, through Manas. Therefore, Manas can be influenced from above, by Budhi, and from below, by Brahma, by the sense world. We thus have nine principles. Then we still have to deal with the tenth. The seventh principle is the third Logos. We can [also] only speak of seven principles. When a principle disappears downwards, one must enter from above.

Man has currently developed four principles. The fifth principle is emerging, and the following two are still quite undeveloped. What we discard below must be replaced above. Our consciousness does not fill the whole body. We have as little control over the manas body in Kamaloka as you have over the physical body here. After Devachan, Ahankara or Budhi occurs.

It is not as cold in Devachan as it is often made out to be, because the spirits that pass through do not feel. While we are attached to the particular in physical life and Kamaloka, here we feel the great, the whole, the great primal essence of the world, in which all things flow together. Ahankara comes to life all the more once we have freed ourselves from particularity in Kamaloka. The more Kama disappears, the more Budhi arises in us.

The development of Budhi is an essential development of the emotional life, but in such a way that the world of special interests is transformed into the world of common interests. The mystic calls this the purification of the astral body. It would be wrong to think that the mystic should become insensitive. On the contrary, one should not be cold towards the world, but aligned with the center, of which every single being is a part. We must become objective.

Justice in feeling is the same as what St. Paul calls the law. St. Paul says: Through the law sin entered into the world. Without the law sin would have been dead.

You will not be able to call the Kama nature of the lion or the tiger sinful. Because the animal is not capable of awakening in itself, ennobled, that which lives outside as Kama. It is different when the being is capable of uniting all special interests under the law. Budhi is subject to the law. If there were only animal kama natures, there would be no sin in the world.

Out of Budhi is born the law. So long as Kama appears only in nature, there is no sin. Only after there were beings through whom Budhi could work, that is, beings who could shape the law, was there sin. I use the power of feeling to come to the great unity of nature. The animal can find satisfaction in sensual pleasure. Man cannot, because Budhi demands more. Budhi is the sum total of the world of feelings. This has been distributed among the individual creatures. Not a single drop of the world of feelings should be lost. What remains unrefined is still alive, but our task is to lead it back to the common reservoir from which it emerged. That is why Theosophy demands joint action. Our task is to collect the feelings so that they can pass over to the new planet as a unity. What is left over from the moon has been left behind as the eighth sphere, unprocessed. This remainder of our moon is connected with the unprocessed part of our ancestors. It is what pulls us down. These are milestones that have to be dragged along, and this is what causes the delays in cosmic development. This also has to do with what we have come to know under the Brothers of Shadow and their influence.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

We have passed by the basic ideas in the Platonic worldview. I call them basic ideas because they are actually the most important for understanding Platonic mysticism, namely the Platonic ideas of the eternity of the soul and the ideas of love. The one idea has been revealed to us through an examination of the Platonic discussion "Phaidon", the other through an examination of the "Banquet". We have seen that these two ideas, which perhaps play the greatest leading role in the spiritual development of mankind - the great goal of the eternity of the soul and the path of love - are also among the most important and fundamental ideas in Platonic mysticism.

This is also the point where we can best understand the influence of Platonism on Christianity, i.e. how Christianity developed under the influence of Plato. It would not be making the most necessary contribution to clarity if we did not, on the occasion of the consideration of the eternity of the soul and love, at the same time draw attention to how these two basic ideas have reappeared in Christianity. I will pass over the intermediate stages. They will become all the more understandable if we touch on the relationship between Platonism and Christianity. I have thought a lot about this. You will therefore forgive me if I have to address some of the more difficult questions.

I am of the opinion that the views and relationships that exist between Platonism and Christianity have not unjustly given rise to such a great literature, a literature that is centuries old, because through the shadowing, through the peculiar way in which the Platonic spirit has settled into the Occident through Christianity, one can see how the Occident is influenced by Platonism. It can only be understood - and it is only possible to show the true relationship between Platonism and Christianity - if one looks at its mystical elements and considers the core ideas of Christianity.

The liberal, theological approach still insists that the relationship between Platonism and Christianity should be presented according to a mystical method. And so we must be clear about the fact that we must seek out the actual core ideas of Christianity in their original meaning. Only in this way will we be able to understand where Platonism meets Christianity and thus understand what Plato presents to Christianity as a kind of world view. Only the theosophical-mystical direction has the possibility of really grasping the core. All exoteric methods do not have the possibility of grasping what had to come from ancient mysticism in order for Christianity to emerge.

But in order to show what has happened, I would like to show the characteristic features, illustrated by the consciousness of the builders, those who have contributed to its development. I would like to show how it presented itself to the souls of the first [church fathers and teachers]. Then the most important key point is that [Christianity] presents something fundamentally new compared to Platonism. This fundamentally new thing is nothing other than that Christianity is direct, real life, life as it presents itself before our eyes and ears. If you do not hold on to this core point, you will not be able to see what distinguishes it from the old religions and also from the mysteries and Platonism.

I would like to point out once again what is emphasized in Platonism and Christianity. It was the immediate life, that which the everyday person perceives directly, that Platonism was supposed to overcome; and on the other hand, it was that it rose to something higher, which cannot be perceived with the senses, into the eternal view. Plato's "Phaidon" wants nothing other than eternity of the soul. He does not want to prove the eternity of the soul. It is not about logical proofs. His aim is to bring to life that which gathers around Socrates and to bring it into a new world. The soul should rise by turning away from what can be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears. In short, eternity should be something that one acquires, that one acquires through the introduction to the mysteries. Plato's pupil says: "The soul can become immortal when it rises to the vision of eternity. When it sees the spiritual, it participates in spiritual life. This makes it eternal. This is a developmental process that we went through in the Platonic "Phaidon", and also a developmental process that we see in the "Banquet". We see that it was Diotima who lifted us up to the higher standpoint.

I drew attention to what Goethe said about his view of such eternal conversations. He says: "If I have inserted myself into the spiritual course of development of the universe, then I am entitled to have a place assigned to me by nature. We are not immortal in the same way. We must first acquire this right. We have to develop this first claim first.

This is the basic element that runs through Plato's "Phaedo". Plato says [in essence]: You can see what you want, but if you only perceive what your eyes, ears, the external senses give you, then you cannot enter the spiritual. The supersensible is what guarantees you the eternity of the soul. - He could not have soul eternity proven. The disciples should acquire it, they should become immortal. This is the basic conception of the Platonic method. - Logic can only link together perceptions that you already have.

And now let us look at what lived in the first centuries of Christianity. The experience of the senses was what was emphasized. The message of salvation was to consist in the fact that the Savior, the one who brought the right to eternity for man into the world, was visibly there. So it is the Savior who is perceived by the senses. - Here are a few passages that show that it is about becoming visible, about the Good News:

"We behold his glory. - He who has seen it testifies to it, and his testimony is true, and he is conscious of speaking the truth so that you may believe." [John 19:35]

We have not preached the presence of Jesus Christ to you in a sophisticated way, but as eyewitnesses. We have heard his voice. - I am not saying that this is to be understood symbolically, I am saying that this is to be understood literally, not symbolically. - What we have heard and touched, we tell you so that you may have the message with us.

It is essential that we are assured by Irenaeus that we can be assured of this by people who have known such people themselves. Irenaeus himself still knew people who were disciples of the apostles, and he says that they still had personal experiences. This is the sensual truth that lived in the consciousness of the first Christians. This sensual truth, which was there for the eyes to see and the ears to hear, lives on in the Church. This [truth] is there for all time. It is not only the temporal truth that took place at the time when Jesus lived, but it lives on as such. This is what we call Christian mystery.

The Lord's Supper is not just a symbol and must not be just a symbol if we do not want to end up with something completely watered down. Christ has appeared today - Christmas. We must take this as an eternal truth, that what has happened once can happen again and again. So it does not happen symbolically, but in such a way that it is really there in the present.

This mystical view existed in the first centuries when Christianity was formed. I would therefore like to agree with [Möhler] and consider it to be the only correct thing to say: viewed from one side, the Church is one in which the living Christ lives, whose personality is repeated and continues uninterruptedly. Not in the way of a deceased person. He does it in a sensual way. In baptism he always takes us into his fellowship. The Savior has been foretold. And for the apostles and the first Christian teachers, the word and sensory perception are valid. They relied on the Old Testament as well as on visual evidence.

We must be clear about the fact that they see an incomprehensible continuation of life. What has happened once must be there forever. This must be emphasized, just as the words of Augustine must be emphasized again and again, which show us that even at the time of Augustine, appearances compelled him to do so, for he says: I would not profess it if the sensually perceptible authority of the Church did not compel me to do so. This is what guarantees the truth of the message of salvation.

There are two aspects to this: firstly, being a naturalized eye and ear witness and secondly, the authority of the truly continuing church. Without this continued existence of the church, even Paul would not have felt comfortable believing in it. The church must be the embodiment of the mystery, it must be a mystical community, it must be added to the testimony of the apostles and apostles' disciples. It must be clear to us that these views became firmer and firmer in the first centuries, and that they also became firm in Augustine's worldview.

What I have now explained as the basic characteristic of Christianity in the first centuries is the necessity that the content cannot be proven, but only vouched for, that human thinking has nothing to do with this content, that it can at most be a point of reference for understanding this content. We have to keep that in mind. It is essentially linked to Christianity that it is based on certainty.

The mysteries also have nothing to do with logic, they are also based on experience. Plato was familiar with the mysteries. Anyone who wanted to become a Mystic had to personally submit to the required process. He had to take part in it personally and allow himself to be initiated. He had to ascend to the pinnacles of knowledge. They had to climb up personally. And so it was in the Platonic initiation.

In Christianity, something new was added: the substitution by a single personality living in history. It was something that antiquity had in mind as an exemplary type of commitment in a historical act by a single historical personality. Three things had to come together - and that is the important thing that had to happen in order for Christianity to come into being. It had to be there:

- firstly, what lived in the ancient mystery cults as an explanation of the world;
- secondly, the initiation process that everyone who wanted to be initiated had to undergo;
- thirdly, a transformation had to take place.

Let's take a closer look at what this transformation was like. Platonic mysticism has already shown us the beginnings. This [transformation] is that we are dealing with a - I may best say - first materialization of the eternal being, let us say with a materialization of God. And then again we are dealing with the ascending process of the development of the worldly into the divine. We have to do - now let us say - with the divine, in order to make the conception that comes into consideration clear - with the eternal, divine essence, and on the other side with the Logos that forms itself in matter, that develops, that transforms itself in the most manifold ways, with a sequence of stages in the development of the Logos. [We need only follow Philon of Alexandria], and we will find this sequence of stages of the Logos.

First, we have the Logos before us in its pure spiritual form. No human being can grasp it, although human individuality rests in it. According to [Philon], this spiritual entity is the primordial Logos. It is a [prototype] of what appears in the world as the divine world order. Whoever lives and works in the world and recognizes the world must - and this must be noted - consider on the one hand the descending line that goes from the spiritual to the material, and on the other hand the line that ascends and goes from the material to the spiritual. Only by standing in the middle can he understand why he is an individual. Only through this can he understand why he is a being appearing as a duality. By realizing that he can have hope of entering into the spiritual primordial being, but also by realizing that this being forms the world order itself.

Because the world itself is spiritualized, he becomes aware that he is dealing with a twofold Logos, with a Logos that cannot be reached and with a Logos that is poured out, with the Logos that has become flesh, with the Logos that has become material. The material world is an exact image of the divine world; but it is not the same as the original divine essence.

[Philon] distinguishes between these two entities. God is the Father of all things, the primordial Logos; and the Son of God, the children of God are the materialized Logos in the world. It is that which develops, transforms, strives upwards towards the primordial Logos. This upward striving in one form or another can be found in mysticism. We will see this in neoplatonic theosophy, which form mysticism can still take. Then we have the basic skeleton that underlies all mysticism. That is one element.

The other element is the initiation process; and here I must try to express myself particularly clearly, because - according to the experiences of others - they say things somewhat differently. I am compelled by my experiences to express myself somewhat differently. I will try to be as clear as I can. We have to understand what it was all about. I will only be able to prove this with a few glimpses, let's say, of the initiation process of the Egyptian schools. [Gap in the transcript]

We must be clear that man, by moving further along this path, is making a journey that leads back in the true sense of the word. Now I would like to draw your attention to this: Initiation is that which a person achieves when he walks back along his path, goes through it, when his consciousness is illuminated. Deeper and deeper truths can be revealed to people. And these are the initiations that man encounters on his path into his inner being. These initiations are the same as the Principia of the world. They are the fundamentals and the foundations of the world that come to development in the world. Let us call the principles of development in the world "Logos. If man can really progress on the path of initiation to the real principles of the world, then he will find within himself the same thing that he finds outside as a principle. Thus initiation was a real, actual process, something that man actually goes through. It is not of subjectively human significance, but of objectively divine significance. The path of knowledge is a way back, a reconnection of man with the original source of existence. What he finds in himself is what he rests with in the objective of the world, that is what leads man to deification, to divinization. The path of knowledge is the path of deification.

The second way is that which is based on principles, on the Logos. This is also a real process. It is a real process, not an allegory. The idea that it is a real process can only be obtained through spiritual experience. Think of the initiation process that every Myste had to go through, intertwined with the process of the creation of the world. And now, instead of understanding this as an exemplary process that every Myst had to go through, think of a unique historical process, think of a single initiate and think of him as the original initiate, as the representative initiate for all others, then you have the image of the "Christ as it developed in the first century of Christianity. The materialization, the incarnation of the divine Logos conceived as a one-time event, but in such a way that it is the real incarnation of the divine Logos, then you have the Christ-appearance.

Three things must therefore be distinguished:
1. the old doctrine of the origin of the world,
2. the initiation process and
3. the combination of these two things with a historical

conceived, individual act. This is the view that Theosophy has of the origin of Christianity, and this is the one against which, of course, not the slightest objection can be raised from the esoteric point of view, because the esotericist must regard precisely this way of looking at the truth as much deeper.

Here you have what lived in the consciousness of the old Christians. They claimed that which was presented to them as a process of development in the old schools and which then happened as a single act. And that made it necessary to make it dependent on appearance. The purpose of the initiation process is to raise the lower aspects of man, to divinize them, so that the Word becomes flesh in the individual, so that the individual struggles upwards, is sanctified upwards. This was demanded as something done.

So instead of continuing the mysteries of antiquity, Christianity had to bring a new mystery into the world. Spiritual survival is not merely an allegory, but a matter of faith, and the ecclesiastical principle of authority had to take its place. For Plato, the concept of love was central. He regarded it as a kind of demon. It is that which leads people from the lower levels to the higher levels of knowledge, which transforms people from the temporal to the eternal. Love is the mediator between the temporal and the eternal. But love is also the demonic agent that brings about the process of development in each individual human being, the passage from the temporal to the eternal. And to the extent that this love is not at work, to that extent the review of ideas, as Plato says, cannot take place.

What is achieved through this initiation process, which is described to us as the initiation process of ideas, is an introduction to the divine, to seeing. This can only be mediated through love, which is a guide for every personality. Platonic love is something else. It is not to be confused with what "Christian love is. What can be found in Christian writings is not to be put together with Platonic love. Just think that the path was there in the ancient mystical teaching. The path of the mystics was a personal one. It was such for an individual. Now we are dealing [in Christianity with a vicarious mystery] with a historical event that happened once. It is a question of what used to serve as the idea of the origin of the world becoming, as it were, the map according to which the path is traveled. This whole world, which Plato calls the world of ideas, was removed from the personal perspective, it was removed from personal observation. It was that which was guaranteed by historical tradition or ecclesiastical authority. But that which underlies the ancient mystery, the eternal truth of the incarnation of the Logos, was that which was moved beyond the human perspective. For the people of Platonic philosophy, this was called the way of love. This love, this Eros, took on a different, a new form. It now became a principle through which man could look up to something that was beyond human comprehension. Everything Plato said boiled down to this: knowledge was there to lead to where one could make perceptions; but this knowledge could not lead there [because the Eternal born in the midst of knowledge, in the midst of light - Brahma, so to speak - was not accessible to knowledge]. What had to take the place of love was not something that had an end, but something that offered a view, that led to remaining in the apparent, in the historical. At the same time, a path was closed which the old Myste wanted to reach, but which can no longer be traveled. This is why Christianity had to put forward a different idea for the "path of love". And that is "faith. Faith is that [which no human knowledge can achieve, it is that] which can only be revealed, which must be guaranteed by sight. The Christian can believe, but not strive for the content of the infinite. This is what took place at the beginning of Christianity, because these views were actually transformed, because in each individual the mystical initiation process was re-stamped as a unique historical event. The element of Hermes, the guide from the earthly to the divine, was also transformed into an abstract element that had only a subjective meaning. The way in which the Platonic conception and the mystery doctrine in particular still had to take on an earthly form in everything that presents itself to us as Christianity is something I would like to talk about next time.

Answer to the question:

The Christ has been completely eliminated. Two things are to be distinguished, the believers and the teacher who taught the doctrines of the ancient mysteries. The parables reveal a teacher of the Essaean community. He spoke to the people as it was appropriate for the people. Behind Jesus stands the actual teacher, as with Krishna, Ramah and so on. What Jesus taught is no different from what the Orient taught. But what Christianity has become is something else. What was demanded by the mystics is something else[: to believe in] a unique historical fact.

The content of the Christian dogmas of the first centuries is exactly the same as in the old mystery schools. The content of the mystery teachings is presented as a diabolical imitation of the divine word in order to be able to say that they teach something else after all.

Philon deepened the Platonic philosophy. Philon broke through the principle of strict isolation from the outside world. The external dissemination of doctrine through the parable was cultivated. The esoteric core disappeared, the exoteric shell remained. Paul deepened the exoteric nature of Christianity.