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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 4491 through 4500 of 6551

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164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Relationship Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science IV 03 Oct 1915, Dornach

As I have often said, Christianity is not just a doctrine, but encompasses a reality. To understand this reality, which can be expressed as the “mystery of Golgotha”, is part of understanding the essence of Christianity.
Franz Hartmann. Nor has the form which Theosophy has taken under the leadership of Mrs. Besant or even under Leadbeater anything to do with Western culture, as it is now making its self-evident cultural demands.
Through spiritual science, we want to learn to understand Christian truths better than we can understand them without spiritual science. But we do not want to leave it in our heads that we are dealing with a new religion, with a new religious worldview, in theosophy.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Relationship Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science V 04 Oct 1915, Dornach

There it was almost a kind of custom to pick out all kinds of old tomes and to read in them things that one really did not understand very well, because basically it takes a lot to read a scientific work, for example, from the 14th century.
One wants to investigate the kind of movement that underlies heat, light, magnetism, electricity, and so on, and one comes to assume that certain atomic movements are the cause of sensory perception.
We do not need to withhold the true judgment, but we must understand what is going on outside. Then we will also be able to counter what is going on outside in the right words.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Relationship Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science VI 09 Oct 1915, Dornach

Now think of the ethical and social consequences of such a view and then you will know what it means to have to accept these facts under the auspices of the current materialistic world view – I do not mean the prevailing natural science.
There you see a raising of sensory perception into the imaginative that arises in man when one does not disdain to add his etheric body to sensory perception. You will not understand what Goethe wrote about animals and plants if you do not consider that he included the etheric body.
Now you will also understand that a bleak world view must arise if spiritual science does not take hold, because philosophy will naturally be completely powerless with its concepts in the face of the human being.
165. The Ancient Christmas Plays and a Forgotten Spiritual Current in Humanity: Lecture One 26 Dec 1915, Dornach

We must not forget that the liturgy was in Latin and that the people understood nothing. Only gradually did people begin to see something more in the sacrifice of the Mass, which was fixed for Christmas, besides the sacrifice of the Mass that was celebrated three times at Christmas.
And it was only in the 13th or 14th century that the mood began to develop within the communities that could be described as people saying to themselves: We also want to understand something of what we see, we want to penetrate into the matter. And so people began to be allowed to play individual parts in what was initially only played by the clergy. Now, of course, one must know life in the middle of the Middle Ages to understand how that which was connected with the most sacred was at the same time taken in such a way as I have indicated.
165. The Ancient Christmas Plays and a Forgotten Spiritual Current in Humanity: Lecture Two 27 Dec 1915, Dornach

The time had not yet come to understand the matter in the way we understand it now, by drawing from the original spiritual worlds truths that need not be written down because they are directly present in the spiritual world in a living way.
When they stir this up within themselves, then they understand His word in truth. «‹This essence of all souls, which becomes understandable through what I tell you in the course of my word.
That which could only have been understood through that wisdom that has been eradicated is entering in. It is no wonder that this fact has entered in a way that can only be understood little by little through our science.
165. The Ancient Christmas Plays and a Forgotten Spiritual Current in Humanity: Lecture Three 28 Dec 1915, Dornach

They no longer knew exactly how the old Gnosticism was able to understand the Christ, but they knew that He must be understood as a spiritual being with spiritual abilities.
And so, building on this, one can also understand how the Christ comes together with the Jesus. Of course, it is complicated and not easy to understand, but it can be understood. And so you see how, from the original, that which has been lost for humanity must be restored through spiritual science, also in relation to the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. When the Christ appeared in the world, it was not possible to understand Him.
165. Transformations of the Human Element of Sensation and Thought from the Fourth to the Fifth Cultural Epoch: Lecture One 06 Jan 1916, Dornach

But he could not emerge from hiding until the two related brothers had undertaken the great military expedition to Troy. After their departure, he knew how to beguile the passionate queen.
And so, these Greek poets, who were still in some respects Greek sages because they combined wisdom and beauty, tried to understand what happened to the Greeks. And so it came about that these Greek poets portrayed the fate of Greek civilization in these abnormal generations.
You only need to read what I have said about the mysteries and the origin of art and religion from the mysteries to understand that there was no Greek Professor Dr. Lövius alongside the Greek Ibsen: they would have been one and the same.
165. Transformations of the Human Element of Sensation and Thought from the Fourth to the Fifth Cultural Epoch: Lecture Two 07 Jan 1916, Dornach

And this desiccating element will gradually be brought about under the influence of one-sided physical, biological and so on knowledge, a desiccating, a killing element.
It is quite nonsensical to believe that. When the Greeks undertook the expedition to Troy and thus prepared for the march to Troy, it would have been quite impossible for them to proceed with such an undertaking for any reasons that are acquired by reason or animated by feeling as they are experienced today.
— But this makes it clear that today's soul lives gasping under the yoke of physicality, gasping even in its perception, in its sensation. Basically, my dear friends, we can see this gasping beneath the physicality when we look at what has become of people under a certain 19th-century world view.
165. The Conceptual World and Its Relationship to Reality: Lecture One 15 Jan 1916, Dornach

Only the realists could still think of the three persons under one universal. But for that, the universal concept had to have a reality; for that, one had to be a realist.
It must be revitalized if we are to make progress. Long-term attempts must be made to understand, theoretically, with the mere concept of the image, what significance thinking has for divinity.
We also have to work our way into the whole course of human development in the individual, because then we understand more and more clearly the meaning underlying the spiritual current to which we belong. And we really do become more and more objective through these things, but that is also necessary.
165. The Conceptual World and Its Relationship to Reality: Lecture Two 16 Jan 1916, Dornach

Basically, what is called gnosis is usually nothing more than the echo of old clairvoyant concepts. They tried to understand the Mystery of Golgotha with old clairvoyant concepts, and clairvoyant concepts were no longer understood later, only abstract concepts.
Only this made it possible to understand how the Christ, as a kind of cosmic ego, permeates the bodies, so that you first knew something about these bodies. For those who in the future will seek an understanding of the Christ, knowledge of the structure of the human being must be the essential preparation.

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