The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It gives me profound pleasure to be among our Breslau friends. We have been through grave times which have made it all too obvious that mankind today is in need of something which can enable further development to take place. These catastrophic times are the consequence of a loss of upward momentum in human evolution. But in the soil of Anthroposophy we are tilling forces which can serve us in building up a spiritual life. Therefore I shall not speak too much today about contemporary events, but rather about the knowledge which human beings need, knowledge which they must absorb into their moral impulses. A great deal lives in our soul of which we are hardly aware. But because it is there, and because our soul element is linked to our existence on the earth, it is very important for our life.

What weighs on human beings today is the discordance between what the soul really needs and what present-day science can supply. Scientific knowledge is very demanding, and we ought to ask ourselves what it is that it demands of human beings. One thing it demands, for instance, is that we should accept its view of the beginning and end of the earth. Take the Kant-Laplace explanation of how the world began. A glowing ball of gas was formed by chemical and mechanical forces; it cooled, and when it was cool enough the same mechanical forces brought about the further solidification of everything that later became the kingdoms of plant, animal and man. And as for the future of earthly life and existence, we are told of an end to all life brought about by a gradual re-warming of the earth. Scientists say that physical laws will lead to the death of the earth through overheating. The end of the earth stretches before us like a gigantic churchyard. Between the two extremes, of the chemical and mechanical beginning of the world and its death by warmth at the end, lie all our human aspirations and ideals, all the moral purposes we have ever had or are going to have. The question is, why do such ideals and aspirations arise by chemical and physical means in the first place, if all they are destined for is to perish in the general death by overheating? Of course we can retort that these are theoretical considerations which have little influence on ordinary life. But even if we prefer to evade such questions, they still remain as disharmonies which work right into the depths of our unconscious soul life. They lead to the anxious question: What is the point of our moral impulses, what is the point of our religious ideals, if the whole of earth evolution is doomed to destruction?

The way this question is put shows what I am getting at. For all our moral impulses and all our religious ideals would benothing but an immense fraud perpetrated on mankind, they would be a terrible illusion, if they were destined to be buried in the cemetery of the earth. Eloquent examples already exist of the terrible effect of such soul moods brought about by purely scientific knowledge, but we are often not properly conscious of them. So the anxious question lives on in human hearts. Asking it from the point of view of natural science we have to say: We human beings grew out of nature and our moral ideals rose up in us; but they will perish with the earth. These moral ideals will perish in natural science. Natural science does not allow us to concede that our ideals have an independent, actual, reality. And even though this is no more than a theory, it nevertheless weighs heavily on the human soul.

This fatalistic world view is based, in the final analysis, on faith in the imperishability of material forces. But anyone trying to topple this dogma is considered mad. If this dogma were true, there would be no escape for moral ideals; they would simply be a picture of something that human beings have thought up and figured out. There would be no escape for these ideals if spiritual research could not find the means to give back to people a super-sensible content for their consciousness. This is relevant today. And in this relevant matter we are living at an important turning-point of evolution. Those of you who know me are aware that I do not like saying such a thing, because any moment in time can be called a turning-point. We have to consider in what respect a certain moment is a turning-point.

Let us consider where the knowledge given by natural science can lead us. Look first at the human being in his external manifestation living in the physical, sense-perceptible world. If we do this in an absolute sense, we see no more than a corpse. If we leave everything aside except the physical, sense-perceptible being and if we allow only chemical and physical laws to work on this being, then, by following only the external laws of nature, the human being begins to disintegrate, to dissolve. The forces we recognize with ordinary knowledge destroy the human being.

This alone is enough to refute the materialistic world view. If we say that the external forces destroy the human being, this must mean that from birth onwards people have been gathering forces which resist this destruction. As it dissolves, the corpse is absorbed into the world which we perceive with our senses. It is amalgamated into the sense-perceptible world by the death forces of chemical and physical laws. But what takes place at death inwardly at the level of the soul cannot be perceived by external sense-perception. These inward processes of soul can only be experienced by direct vision in the realm where higher knowledge has its source. This vision shows that outside the body the inward soul element is united with the spirit, with all the spiritual forces that stream through the world, giving it strength. The soul which unites with the spirit after death is then bound up in the spirit in the super-sensible world.

This is a fact which takes its place beside the fact of the corpse. In life the physical body was filled by the soul; in death it unites with the forces of nature. Anthroposophy leads us to a fact of life which is diametrically opposed to the fact of death. The merely theoretical statement of the eternal life of man can never be satisfying. But Anthroposophy introduces the fact that the soul unites with the spirit. The knowledge of natural science, on the other hand, leads only to the fact of death.

The higher sources of knowledge given by spiritual science lead us to what is revealed to the spiritual seeker in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. These stages of knowledge are described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds¹ and also in Occult Science. In the first instance you will find that here are descriptions of stages of knowledge. However, more is given to the spiritual seeker than mere stages of knowledge. Just as natural-scientific knowledge is not just knowledge but also possesses other sides and aspects, so it is with higher knowledge.

Today I shall consider with you something that goes beyond Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as stages of knowledge, something that I discussed, for instance, in the Vienna lecture cycle of 1914² about life after death, but now from a somewhat different point of view. The part of the human being that lives here on earth is a corpse which is united with external physical nature. And just as he is united with the mineral forces below, so is he also united with the higher hierarchies above. Just as in the corpse he grows together with the mineral forces, so above he slowly grows together with, and enters into, the hierarchies. Sometimes people say that they might as well wait until they die to find out what happens then. And they might as well wait to grow together with the hierarchies. This is all very well, but it is not actually the point. It is very important for the human being to grow into the hierarchies in the right way, for we have to admit that to start with he stands in the world in a manner which allows him no inkling of his relationships with the higher hierarchies. Much depends on our becoming aware of these relationships.

The first hierarchy with whom human beings have a relationship we may call the world of the angels. But those who do not recognize the spiritual world—for whatever reason—cannot establish a relationship with the world of the angels, any more than someone who lacks physical sense organs can establish a relationship with the physical world. Angels are the beings next above man, closest to man, yet under certain circumstances we cannot approach them. Only by endeavouring to make a picture of the angel world while we are here on earth can we prepare to form relationships with it. The portal of death leads to the world of the angels if human beings can become conscious after death of what is confronting them.

The second group of higher beings is that of the folk spirits, or archangels. Angels are not folk spirits. Real folk spirits have no individual links with human beings, as is the case with angels. Folk spirits are related to communities and groups of human beings. Even natural science sometimes speaks of the national spirit, but this does not denote an actual being, let alone a spiritual one. From higher knowledge the spiritual seeker knows that folk spirits are real spiritual beings whose position is one step above that of the angels. The human being can grow into this hierarchy, too. But if our inner spiritual experience is not intense enough, our angel cannot lead us with our consciousness to the folk spirit. But since we have to be led to the folk spirit, this happens unconsciously by means of the laws of karma. Either we grow into the folk spirit consciously and with love, or we are forcibly led into the sphere of the folk spirits. When, after death, the moment is reached at which we turn to descend once more to the sense-perceptible world for a new incarnation, then it makes a great difference, as our soul is led down, whether we have consciously united in love with the folk spirit, or whether, unaware of what is going on, this takes place forcibly, under coercion.

This finds expression in a spiritual, a soul, fact. We can be born into a nation because we are related by coercion to that folk spirit, or because we are related by inner love. Those who are able to perceive such things find it outstandingly characteristic of our time that a great many people today lack a sufficiently loving relationship to their folk spirit. This statement hints at the cause for what today brings about disorder among nations. The conflict prevailing among nations today stems from the fact that many people are born with little love for their folk spirit and therefore find themselves in a forced relationship to it. The love which leads us to a particular folk spirit can never bring about a conflict with other nations. We must do everything we can to help people regain a love-filled relationship with their folk spirits. This is most urgent.

As we stand here in life, we have Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as stages of knowledge which can lead to real vision in the spiritual and soul realm. But in the realm of spirit and soul, when our soul is to return once more to the physical world, Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are facts governing events, they are facts of action. There our soul stands in a relationship with whatever it is that it has to achieve out of the cosmos. If we are to manage our life properly it must grant us conditions which make the achievement of its aims as nearly feasible as possible. Thus the discarnate, spiritual human being works through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition towards his reincarnation in the physical world, while the incarnated, sense-bound human being can gain through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition a vision of the world of soul and spirit.

Natural-scientific knowledge is not in a position to recognize the profoundest secrets of life. Such knowledge starts, for instance, with the consideration of a chemical compound. Proceeding to the consideration of a more complicated chemical compound, and so on, it arrives in the end at the living cell, which it regards as nothing more than a particularly elaborate chemical compound. Spiritual science shows that externally the cell is indeed a particularly elaborate chemical structure; but when the living cell, the germ of a new life, arises in the mother's womb in such an elaborate fashion, the chemical laws are reversed and become chaotic. In the germ of the embryo in the mother's womb, in the germ of life, the chemical laws are suspended, reversed, and in the realm of nature this means chaos. Because the germ is chaos, the cosmos can work into it.

Between death and a new birth the human being has an inkling of this. In the first step on the way to a new incarnation Imagination is realized and leads towards reincarnation. In the second stage Inspiration is realized, and this is a far clearer consciousness than our brain consciousness, for Inspiration is a cosmic force. A part of this cosmic force is breathed in, as it were, and streams towards the bodily nature without coming fully to consciousness, rather as is the case with the will. We are unaware of how our will moves our hand, yet our hand moves in the manner required. The spiritual human being approaching incarnation through realized Inspiration stands in relation to this realized Inspiration as does the incarnated human being to the air. When we think about our physical body in the ordinary way, we imagine it to consist of muscles, nerves, vessels, bones. We imagine the same of a corpse. The airy part of our organism we assume to be outside it rather than within. Although we know that we cannot live without air, we still do not consider it as so intimately a part of ourselves as, say, our skeleton. Yet it is a part of our organism. The air as it is outside us, and at the next moment within, only to be outside again at the next, is a part of our organism. It lives rhythmically in us. In a far more extended rhythm we live with the element of soul and spirit. Just as we breathe air in and out, so we also breathe the element of soul and spirit in and out, though for the most part this takes place unconsciously. Physically, too, part of what happens through breathing takes place unconsciously. When the human being consisting of soul and spirit breathes in realized Inspiration, he takes a picture into his soul. He takes it into the dampened down part of his consciousness. And what he takes in is the world of moral and religious impulses. He takes this in as his conscience.

The third stage in the descent to a new incarnation is when the human being makes the transition to what his parents give him. In doing this he is enacting a realized Intuition. So you see that what can be achieved, while incarnated, by way of three higher stages of knowledge, is something that is accomplished as a real occurrence in the realm of soul and spirit on the way to incarnation. Here on earth we ascend to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And on our return from the spiritual world to incarnation we descend from the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is the counter-image, in the spiritual world, of the three higher stages of knowledge.

What does this show us? It shows us that Anthroposophy is not merely knowledge but something which is alive. Through Anthroposophy we strive for higher knowledge in order to grasp the reality of the higher realms of life and in order to fill our souls with the content of what lives in the spiritual worlds. Those whose common sense has helped them to understand what the spiritual seeker has to say, experience something else as well. They can say to themselves that human beings in the state of incarnation between birth and death are constantly counteracting the death forces at work in their body. The forces of death are forever present in the human body, but so are those forces which counteract the forces of death. They are there. If we did not bear the forces of death within us we should never have developed our understanding for our physical environment.

One of the most important facts given to us by higher knowledge is that our forces of intellect are bound up with our forces of dying. Death is in a way nothing but a summary of all the forces of dying which are forever at work in us. But a moral ideal, which can intensify until it becomes a religious ideal, lives in us in quite a different way. It is said that certain natural forces exist which bring it about that plants grow upwards; and these forces are taken to be quite real. But when, on looking into the human being, people find there the driving forces of moral and religious ideals, they are not inclined to accept these as having any reality. Yet there they are, working not only in every human being but also in the cultures of all mankind. Higher knowledge teaches us that moral ideals live in man through the burning up of matter. Matter is destroyed when a person makes moral resolves. The breaking down of matter is the precondition for the building up of moral ideals. What is crucial is the manner in which a human being breaks down matter and the manner in which he can build it up again. External research is still caught up in the prejudice about the indestructibility of matter. But spiritual science shows that man can break through external natural forces. Once we are in possession of an anthroposophical world view we can comfort ourselves in face of the idea of the death of the earth through overheating. For it is this very destruction of matter which ensures for the human being the possibility of building up his moral personality.

If you look deeply into your soul you will find something which consumes and gnaws at the soul of modern man. This something, which consumes and gnaws at the soul, is the fact that modern natural science excludes the moral element from the realm of what is real. Anthroposophy shows how human beings break through natural laws; how the moral element destroys matter, which is then built up again as matter which can be the bearer of a moral world order. All that is contained within the confines of our skin is connected with the dying forces of matter. But what the world builds up again—this has been forgotten by the natural sciences.

In order to discover new moral worlds we must proceed to the question of where matter can be built up. Death is in us at every moment, but so is resurrection. This is where we should look. This, out of the anthroposophical world view, is the perspective we must place before human souls, since the natural sciences have turned their attention for far too long and far too one-sidedly to the forces of dying. It is important to develop the courage to attend to what must be done in order to build up new worlds.

I am assuming that these suggestions will give encouragement and lead to meditations on how to see more clearly what is felt and talked about a great deal, but what ought also to be strongly willed.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved?
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and New birth, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London 1959.

Today¹ I should like to discuss a theme which can perhaps lead to some points of view from which to assess present-day cultural and spiritual life in connection with what has gone before in human evolution. As I have often said, cultural life since the first third of the fifteenth century is entirely different from that of earlier times, and now we are faced with the necessity to return, but in full consciousness and with deep thought, to an understanding of the spiritual part of our life in the cosmos. The spiritual part of our life in the cosmos was understood in ancient times by an instinctive clairvoyance, and this was the case most of all in the most ancient ages of earthly civilization. Then the capacity to push through to the spirit receded more and more, until a time came when mankind needed a new impetus, whereupon the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

Today I should like to mention that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, people who were concerned with spiritual life looked to those institutions known in general human cultural life as the Mysteries. In those most ancient days of human evolution it was unthinkable that spiritual vision and spiritual knowledge could have any other source than the Mysteries. When we try to observe the consciousness of those who turned to the Mysteries in those ancient days, if knowledge was what they desired, we arrive at the following picture: All external knowledge not stemming from the Mysteries, all intellectual knowledge gained by human beings by themselves, did not come into being until the later part of the Greek era. Only then did people want to discover certain truths out of themselves, without the help of the Mysteries. That is why the course of scientific development is reckoned, by those who understand these things, to have started in the time of Thales.² I have discussed this in my book Riddles of Philosophy.³ Before that time knowledge was sought with the help of the Mysteries. When we examine the consciousness on which this was founded, we discover that those who conducted the Mysteries, and also their pupils, saw something most important in what they called ‘the prince of this world’—they meant the earth—as opposed to the princes—that is, the spiritual beings—of other worlds.

In today's language, ‘the prince of this world’, as he lived in the consciousness of ancient times, would be called the being of Ahriman. The being of Ahriman would more or less be equivalent to this prince of earthly life. The spiritual revelations which can be derived from ‘the prince of this world’ are none other than those of intellectual knowledge. The leaders of the Mysteries would certainly have considered all that lived in the knowledge that grew up in Greece outside the Mysteries to have been inspired by ‘the prince of this world’. In contrast, they saw it as the task of the Mysteries to lead human beings towards a spiritual vision which tends away from ‘the prince of this world’, which tends to lead human souls into realms which are not ruled by ‘the prince of this world’. We cannot help but make use of such expressions in order to show properly what is meant, and no one should think that there is anything superstitious about using these expressions.

Let me give you a picture of what someone initiated in the ancient Greek, or the Egyptian, or Persian Mysteries would have thought in those old days about ‘the prince of this world’. We have to understand that these people also spoke about the Christ-being, though they used other names. Using the name of Christ is not the only way of speaking about the Christ-being. We naturally use the name of Christ when we want to speak about the Christ-being, for Christ to us actually means that Being who underwent the Mystery of Golgotha and united himself with earthly civilization. Before the Mystery of Golgotha this Being was not yet united with earthly civilization. He still lived as the great Sun-being outside the earthly world. The Mystery of Golgotha denotes the uniting with the earthly world of this Being who lived outside the earthly world. But those initiated in the Mysteries certainly knew this Being who lived outside the earthly world. And the being known as ‘the prince of this world’—that ahrimanic being—also knew him. That being—I am describing what lived in the consciousness of the initiates—felt himself to be the lord of the earth. He considered that whatever human beings possessed through the forces of the earth was something they had from him. But he knew that the Christ-being lived outside the earth and also had an influence on human life by way of the Mysteries, whose teachings were then popularized and brought amongst the peoples.

To describe more closely what lived in their consciousness, we may say that the initiates in the Mysteries thought as follows: The chief influence of ‘the prince of this world’ is on the physical bodies of human beings. These wholly do his bidding and he feels he is the lord of human physical bodies. But he could not feel himself to be the lord of the etheric and astral natures of human beings, of their life-bodies and their souls. The life-body and the soul were seen to be under the influence of a Being who lived outside the earth; the forces of the Christ-being had always been seen to flow into these. But with the forces of their own soul human beings were quite unable to receive what ought to flow into them from the Christ-being. They could only do so by turning to what the Mystery initiate received after the proper preparation. The Mysteries were seen to take hold of what came from outside the earth and pass it on to human beings. So ‘the prince of this world’ said to himself: Here on earth I am the master. From the earth the physical bodies of human beings draw their forces, and one of these forces is the human earthly intellect. Here I am the master and nothing can contest this here on earth. By way of the Mysteries, something from outside the earth flows into it. This I will tolerate.

But ‘the prince of this world’ rebelled against the Mystery of Golgotha because from then on he would have had to share his supremacy with the Christ who descended to the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. ‘The prince of this world’ felt the Christ to be a rival in his mastery of the earth. He would have tolerated the sharing of the rulership with another being from outside the earth, but he would not tolerate a rival here within the earthly realm.

Here, then, out of the spirit of the ancient Mysteries, we have an indication of the real opposition of ‘the prince of this world’ towards the Christ. Among those with knowledge about such things this opposition was strongly felt throughout the Middle Ages until well into the fifteenth century. Any mention of ‘the prince of this world’ and of the Christ took it into account. There was a certain awareness of two dominions. One of these had rightfully ruled the bodily nature of man before the Mystery of Golgotha, but since then this sovereignty over the bodily nature of man has had to be shared with the other, with the Christ. For now Christ no longer influences only man's soul element, that is, his astral and etheric bodies; his purpose is now to influence also man's physical bodily nature, or rather whatever is expressed by this physical bodily nature, namely, everything to do with the intellect and with man's own capacities in the widest sense. Christ should live in every aspect of human nature. This is what entered into mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it never occurred to those who knew about such things to seek knowledge of external matters in any sphere which the human head or even the other soul or heart forces can reach on their own. Such things were left to the Mysteries. So before the Mystery of Golgotha there was certainly a strong awareness of the distinction between earthly wisdom and earthly sensing on the one hand, and a sensing of super-earthly forces on the other. The unique spiritual configuration of the early medieval centuries is only comprehensible in the light of a clear understanding of this fact.

Now this fact can be greatly clarified by something that was regarded as being of paramount importance in very many Mystery centres. The preparation and subsequent trials undergone by the Mystery pupils on the path of initiation varied, of course, in the different centres. But these variations were only really like the different paths up a mountain which, despite their different routes, all lead to one and the same summit in the end. They all led to one and the same Mystery goal. Despite the modifications, there were two measures within the Mysteries which every pupil had to undergo and which could be termed as being of paramount importance. These were, on the one hand, the draught of forgetfulness and, on the other hand, something which worked on the human being during the Mystery procedures like a powerful shock—like entering into a powerful fear. It is no longer permissible to use either of these for the purpose of achieving higher super-sensible knowledge. Today everything has to take place in the realm of soul and spirit, whereas the Mystery pupils in ancient times underwent procedures which always had to call on their physical body. What is achieved today is similar, but higher knowledge must now be striven for in the sphere of consciousness only, whereas in earlier times it took place in the sphere of instincts and dreams. Because all the Mysteries included something akin to the draught of forgetfulness and also something akin to the physical shock, the pupils’ external intellect was damped down. This intellect was less clear than it is today, but it nevertheless held sway in connection with everything relating to the external world.

So the pupil was led into a dulled consciousness both by the draught of forgetfulness and by the shock, which might be compared with the inducement of a state of fear. What was the significance of the draught of forgetfulness? The point was not the forgetting, though the pupil did forget. The effect it was to have came from its ceremonial preparation, from the special way it was mixed, to the accompaniment of certain preparations before it was drunk by the pupil. It was definitely a physical draught which, through the way it was served, brought it about that the pupil forgot the whole of his life since birth. This is something which is achieved nowadays through development in the realm of soul and spirit. Nowadays a clear consciousness of a great tableau of life encompassing everything that has occurred since birth is first conjured up. This is then suppressed and, in consequence, the human being is led into the spiritual form of his life before birth, or before conception. The same was achieved in a more physical way through the ancient draught of forgetfulness.

But the forgetting was not the essential point. Negative things are never the essential point. The positive thing achieved was that the pupil's thinking became more mobile and more intense. At the same time it became less clear. It became dreamy because the effect was achieved by influencing the physical organism. The effect of the draught of forgetfulness on the physical organism—it can be exactly described—was that the brain, if I may put it this way, became more fluid than it is in everyday life. Because the brain was made more fluid, because the pupil began to think more with his cerebral fluid than with the solid parts of the brain, his thoughts became more mobile and more intense.

Nowadays this must be achieved more directly, by means of developing soul and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of Occult Science. But in those days the brain was made more fluid by external influences. The goal was to make the spirit and soul element of the pupil—as it was before he made the connection with a physical body through conception: in other words, as it is in the spiritual world—capable once more of penetrating through the brain. This is the essential point.

In a drawing it would look like this. Suppose this is the mass of the brain (green). Once the human being has been born his spirit and soul element stops short before it (red). The brain is so constituted that the human being's inner spirit and soul element cannot pass through the brain. In his brain the human being is not filled with his spirit and soul element. Instead, external perceptions can enter and make themselves felt in the brain through the senses—let me draw an eye here. Put another way, the constitution of the brain is such today that the eternal aspect of the human being cannot rise up into it. Instead, external impressions can enter. By being given the draught of forgetfulness the pupil gained the possibility of receiving into his brain what was his spiritual and soul element before conception or before birth (red). That is the one side.

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The other side is the shock which was administered to the pupil. Think how a shock affects human beings. They are as though paralysed. There can be shocks which bring about the paralysis of the whole human being. A paralysed person, a cataleptic person, cannot move about because his muscles are rigid. But in a human being who can go about his life in the ordinary way, his body absorbs this eternal aspect (white with red). In our blood, in our muscles down below, the element of spirit and soul, the eternal element, is absorbed. But because of this it cannot be perceived. It cannot penetrate the brain, but lower down it is absorbed. It cannot be perceived, but when the muscles go rigid it steps out freely as a matter of course.

The rigidity of the muscles was brought about by the effect of the shock. As a result, the element of spirit and soul was not absorbed by the rest of the organism—apart from the brain—but was freed. So now the spirit and soul element was in the brain because the brain had been softened by the draught of forgetfulness, while the rest of the organism was at the same time prevented from absorbing it. Thus the element of spirit and soul came to be perceived. From two sides came the possibility of perceiving the element of spirit and soul. In ordinary life the human being was incapable of perceiving it because the brain, with which everything else was perceived, was unable to take it in; it could not enter the brain. Neither could it be perceived from the rest of the organism, the will and so on, for the rest of the organism had absorbed it. But now the pupil's brain was softened—of course, only for the moment at which knowledge was to enter. So his element of spirit and soul rushed into his brain. Meanwhile, the rest of his body became rigid so that it could not absorb the spirit and soul element. There the pupil stood, with his softened brain on the one side and a rigidified organic system on the other, as though encased in a capsule. There he stood in his spirit and his soul which had been given to him from two sides.

This is the aim of these procedures which are described in such a practical manner. I must expressly point out, though, that these things cannot be imitated nowadays. People would, anyway, be at a loss as to how to imitate them and, if they tried, the result would not be agreeable. These days all such things have to be attained by working with soul and spirit. But of the past it can certainly be said: Having been enabled to perceive their element of spirit and soul by partaking of the draught of forgetfulness and by being shocked into physical rigidity, the pupils in the Mysteries became ‘Christians’. In the Mysteries they became Christians.

The early fathers of the church were certainly aware of this. But today people are not told about it, or it is even denied. But the early church fathers knew that human beings had been made Christians through the Mysteries. There are passages in the writings of the early church fathers⁴ which state that Heraclitus and Socrates, though they lived before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, were Christians, even though they were called atheists in their own time. I have often quoted from such passages in the writings of the early church fathers. It was the view of the ancient Mystery leaders and initiates that ‘the prince of this world’ was not interested in that human being who came forth out of the other; he left this human being to Christ. But he did not want Christ to come down to the earth in order to take hold of the human being in his entirety. This is described in the gospels in the way it is said that the demons, the lower servants of ‘the prince of this world’, when they heard that Christ had come, began to rebel. They recognized him and were furious.

We have to understand, when speaking about earthly evolution, that the spiritual powers whose influence on the human physical body was perfectly legitimate before the Mystery of Golgotha had, after the Mystery of Golgotha, to share this influence with the Christ. This is an essential aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why in the Middle Ages ‘the prince of this world’ came to be called ‘the unlawful prince of this world’. This expression would not have been justified in the ancient heathen world but when it came to be used in the Middle Ages it was a correct title, befitting the circumstances.

The essential aspect of all this, with regard to the spiritual evolution of mankind, is that in more ancient times the physical body was withdrawn from the element of spirit and soul. The working of the brain was counteracted because the brain was softened by the draught of forgetfulness, and the powers of absorption of the rest of the organism were counteracted by the hardening of the rest of the organism by means of the shock. So in these older times the body was withdrawn from the element of spirit and soul.

Today, our aspiration is not to withdraw the body but to draw out the spirit, by strengthening and enhancing our forces of spirit and soul. The opposite of what used to take place must happen now; now the spirit must be drawn out. No changes must be allowed to take place in the physical, bodily aspect. Since the fifteenth century the human being has been organized in such a way that changes in the physical body, of the kind that were customary in those of Mystery pupils, would denote a condition of sickness. It would be a pathological condition, which must not be allowed to come about in normal development.

I am describing all this in order to give you an idea of what is to be understood by the concept of ‘the prince of this world’, which keeps recurring in olden times. ‘The prince of this world’, who in the Middle Ages became ‘the unlawful prince of this world’, is an Ahriman-like being. We can find such a being everywhere, in external nature and in the inner being of man. Indeed, only when we are in a position to find such a being in its manifestation both in external nature and in the inner being of man can we gradually come to an understanding of its essence.

Look at external nature. You will find there two contrasts, but what matters is to be able to sense the essence of these contrasts. Think of the blue sky. Of course in southern climes the blue sky must be seen rather differently than is the case here. When the envelope of air round the earth is filled by the effect of the sun, this is not the pure essence of the blue sky, for it is then overcast with something else. But the pure effect of the blue sky is that of coldness. The blue sky as such is cold. What you sense in the coldness of the blue sky, unmitigated by earthly sultriness—this is an all-embracing ahrimanic influence. The ahrimanic influence causes space to be petrified, congealed into blueness. Take note of this expression! It is unusual, but if you gradually come to sense what it means to say that space is petrified, congealed into blueness, you will have discovered the ahrimanic tendency in external nature.

The contrasting effect is that of the reddish, yellowish clouds sailing past. The effect is one of warmth, exactly the opposite. This, too, can be disguised by the coldness of the earth's environment but, all in all, a cloud lined with red, a yellowish cloud, has something warm about it. This is the contrasting effect, the effect of air. Between these two polar opposites something takes place, and that is what benefits the earthly life of man. We can say, then, that the effect on the earth of space petrified, congealed into blueness was seen in the Middle Ages to be the cosmic working of ‘the prince of this world’.

And when we look into human beings we find that they can be in a condition which makes them pale. You know how there is something livid, something blueish about palor in human beings. When human beings turn pale, when they feel their way into coldness, they are then sensing something ahrimanic working in them. Flushed redness, on the other hand, shows something luciferic at work in their nature. Out of all these details together we can gradually build up a full picture of what this ahrimanic being, ‘the prince of this world’, really is. People's pallid, often so clever, thoughts, running along always in straight lines—the whole intellectual aspect of man—this is the ahrimanic influence, the influence of ‘the prince of this world’, on the working of the human head.

These things must be understood from the point of view of spirit and soul. In the livid blueness, in the way human beings grow pale, in the way they devour themselves inwardly and feel their way into coldness, in the way they are filled with pale, abstract thoughts—in all this we have to feel the ahrimanic influence, the rulership of ‘the prince of this world’. And then we have to feel the warming influence of the Christ-impulse.

For the present time it is rather revealing and also necessary to recognize how different was initiation in ancient times compared with the principle of initiation today. There are certainly people today who still lack the courage to approach the Anthroposophical Movement but who have a deep longing for what, in the end, only the Anthroposophical Movement can give. They long for a transformation of their soul, after which they would find their way to the knowledge they seek. Obviously the greater part of mankind today rejects this transformation of the soul and imagines that any knowledge man is capable of reaching can be achieved through the ordinary state of soul which is brought about by our ordinary education and through our ordinary life. On my last tour I met a man who was greatly concerned to achieve some knowledge through the philosophical possibilities offered today, but not through Anthroposophy. He said that it would be interesting and important to ascertain in Anthroposophy how this higher knowledge might be achieved, for everywhere—this ‘everywhere’ is very relative, of course—the different world views were recognizing that the achievement of real knowledge was a matter not only of the intellect but also of the will. And in the ancient Mysteries, too, it was a matter of transforming the will.

In the description of the ancient Mysteries in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact⁵ you will find that the decisive, radical difference between the ancient striving for knowledge and that of today lies in the fact that in ancient times it was necessary to prepare the will. The will had to be turned in a direction different from that of ordinary life. The will had to be purged, purified; it had to be transformed and lifted to a higher stage. The pupil had to give a new direction to his everyday will, which was dominated by ‘the prince of this world’. Through cultivation of his will, the pupil had to reach the point at which knowledge can be attained. Today, on the other hand, people imagine that we can stop at whatever point we have reached through our ordinary studies. And our intellectual life is merely the product of the ordinary configuration of our brain. If it is softened, as I have indicated, there is a strong possibility that thoughts can be willed, that everywhere thoughts can be willed. And when will becomes conscious through the rigidifying of the body, then thoughts appear in the will itself. This can also happen today when, on the path I have described, knowledge of higher worlds has become possible.

It is a very important sign today that once more there are people who know that the intellect alone is not enough and that it is necessary to cultivate the will in order to reach whatever knowledge is possible for man. So by looking at what is going on in a general way we come to see that a great many people are approaching who want to hear about spiritual matters. Also, from things which are shown to us as we go along, we see that there are people who once again realize that the will must be cultivated, if knowledge is to be achieved. All this goes to show that there is an urgent need for spiritual life today. Unfortunately, though, because people lack the courage to approach Anthroposophy, because they think Anthroposophy is something peculiar, they imagine that they can achieve what they are searching for along some other path. The world will have to come to the conviction that what is wanted can only be achieved on the anthroposophical path. Please do not misunderstand me. It is not my intention to maintain that what Anthroposophy has revealed so far is necessarily generally valid or particularly obvious. But I want to point out the importance of the direction in which Anthroposophy is going. This is what can lead to the satisfaction of the powerful longing that exists today, a longing which must be satisfied if human civilization is to move forward at all.

• 1 . Today: In his introduction to this lecture (contained in GA 255), Rudolf Steiner spoke words of appreciation for the way in which Albert Steffen had reported in the journal Das Goetheanum on a lecture denigrating Anthroposophy.
• 2 . Thales of Miletus, c.640-545 B.C.
• 3 . Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1973.
• 4 . For instance, St Justin Martyr, Apologia I, 46.
• 5 . Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972.

Considerations such as those we embarked on yesterday are, of course, not necessarily set out for the purpose of inviting anyone to start practising what is needed for attaining super-sensible knowledge. To a certain extent this intention is, of course, also present. But the main reason is to make known what kind of higher knowledge can be attained by such means. A declaration stating that one thing or another is possible in man's development is, at the same time, a declaration about the intrinsic nature of the human being. It can be stated that the human being seeking initiation is capable of extricating his soul and spirit element from his physical body, either by the means described yesterday with reference to the ancient Mysteries, or by means suitable for today, which I am about to discuss briefly. A statement such as this shows that the element of soul and spirit is an independent entity which has its own existence over and above that of the body. So a discussion about higher knowledge is, at the same time, a revelation about the being of man; this is, in the first instance, what is important for the dissemination of anthroposophical wisdom.

Yesterday I described how in the ancient Mysteries the bodily nature of man was treated so that it became able to free its soul nature in both directions. I said that the two main aspects of this in the ancient Mysteries were, on the one hand, the draught of forgetfulness, and, on the other hand, the occasioning of states of anxiety, fear, shock. The draught of forgetfulness, I said, wiped from memory everything pertaining to ordinary earthly life. But this negative effect was not the main point. The main point was that during the process of coming to Mystery knowledge the brain was actually made physically softer, as a result of which the spiritual element which is usually held off was no longer held off by the brain but allowed through, so that the pupil became aware of his soul and spirit element and knew that this had been in him even before birth, or rather, even before conception.

The other aspect was the shock which caused the organism to become rigid. When the organism grows rigid it no longer absorbs the soul and spirit element in the way it usually does with regard to its expression in the will. On the one hand the rigid bodily organism withdraws from the element of soul and spirit, and on the other hand the element of soul and spirit becomes perceptible to the pupil. Through the softening of the brain the thought aspect of the soul became perceptible to the pupil of the ancient Mysteries, and through the rigidifying of the rest of the organism the will aspect became perceptible. In this way, initiation gave the pupil a perception, a picture of the element of soul and spirit within him. But this picture was dreamlike in character. For what was it that was freed on the one hand towards the thought aspect, and on the other hand towards the will aspect? It was that part which descends from realms of spirit and soul to unite with the physical, bodily nature of man. Only by taking possession of the body can it become capable of making use of the senses and of the intellect. It needs the body for these things. Without the use of the body these things remain dreamlike, they remain dull, twilit. So by receiving his detached soul and spirit element as a result of the processes described, the pupil received something dreamlike, which, however, also contained a thought element.

As I said yesterday, if people were to follow these procedures today, the condition induced in consequence would be a pathological condition. For since the Mystery of Golgotha human beings have progressed in such a way that their intellect has become stronger by comparison with their earlier, more instinctive manner of knowing. This strengthening of intellectual life has come over mankind particularly since the fifteenth century. It is extremely significant that throughout the Middle Ages people still knew that in order to attain higher knowledge, or indeed to lead a higher kind of life, it was necessary to extricate the soul from the body.

If Schiller had managed to write a great drama he had planned, Die Malteser (The Knights of Malta), German literature would probably have been all the richer for a work on this medieval knowledge about the super-sensible world, a work on the relationship of the Middle Ages to super-sensible matters. It is a most interesting aspect of German culture that, precisely in the years when Napoleon destroyed the Order of the Knights of Malta,¹ Schiller was planning to write a drama about them, about the siege of Malta by the Turks and its defence by the grand master of the Order, de La Valette. Schiller was obviously prevented from writing this drama. He left it on one side and wrote Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp) instead. The Order of the Knights of Malta originated at the time of the Crusades. Schiller's drama would have shown clearly that the members of such an Order, which had the external task of working for the community and caring for the sick, considered that they could only do such work if they at the same time strove towards the attainment of a higher life.

At the time when the Order of the Knights Templar and the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St John—which later became the Order of the Knights of Malta—were founded, and indeed throughout the Middle Ages, people had the certain feeling that human beings must first transform themselves before they can undertake such tasks in the right way. This is a feeling about the nature of the human being which has become entirely lost in more recent times. This can be put down to the fact that the human intellect has grown so much more intense and strong, with the result that modern man is totally intellectual because the intellectual aspect predominates entirely.

Now, in our own time, there is once more a great longing amongst mankind to overcome the intellectual aspect. Though literature and, above all, journalism, still express the opposite, nevertheless amongst the broad masses of mankind there is a longing to overcome the intellectual element. One thing that shows this especially is the fact that talks about spiritual matters are extremely well received in the widest circles. Another thing, even though it is not yet fully understood, is the way our eurythmy impresses the widest circles—not intellectually, but in what comes from the imaginative foundation of human beings. This became very obvious during my more recent lecture tours and especially the recent eurythmy tour. Eurythmy makes a very strong impression, even in circles where it cannot be understood in its deepest sense when it is seen for the first time. Nevertheless, it is felt to be something which has been called up out of the profoundest foundations of human nature, something that is more than what comes out of the intellect.

Now what is this intellectual element which is so much a part of the human being today? Let me draw you another diagram. As I said yesterday, with regard to the human brain (white), we can imagine how, as a result of the draught of forgetfulness, the element of spirit and soul, which usually came to a halt before penetrating too far inwards, now penetrated the brain (red). In the pupil of the ancient Mysteries the element of spirit and soul then rose up through the brain which had been thus prepared. Compared with ancient times, let us say prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, today's intellectual faculties are as they are because the element of soul and spirit is inwardly much stronger and more intense. The people of ancient times were far less intellectual. Their soul and spirit element was not etched with such sharp lines of thought as is the case today. Intellectuals think in straight lines, which is not how people thought in more ancient times. In those days thoughts were more like pictures, they were dreamlike and softer. Now, thoughts are endowed with sharp edges, clear contours. Yet, even though the element of soul and spirit is much stronger than it used to be, human beings today are still nevertheless incapable of grasping these thoughts with their soul and spirit element.

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Please do not misunderstand me, my dear friends. Human beings today are considerably stronger in their soul and spirit than were people of old. They dream less than did people of old, and their thoughts are firmer. But their thoughts would be just as dull today as they used to be, if the element of soul and spirit alone were at work in them. Even today, human beings cannot think out of their soul. It is their body which relieves them of the power of thought. Sense perceptions are received by the element of soul and spirit. But to think these sense perceptions we need the help of our body. Our body is the thinker. So nowadays the following takes place: The sense perception works on the human being; the element of soul and spirit (red, top) penetrates and mingles with the sense perception; but the body acts like a mirror and keeps on throwing back the rays of thought (arrows). By this means they become conscious. So it is the body which relieves human beings of the effort of thinking, but it does not relieve them of the effort of perceiving with their senses. So today, if human beings want to strive for initiation with regard to the thought aspect, they must turn their exercises towards strengthening their element of soul and spirit even more. We know these exercises from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and from the second part of Occult Science. Thus will they gradually make their soul and spirit element so independent that it no longer needs the body.

So let us understand one another: When we think in ordinary life today, our element of soul and spirit does participate. Above all it takes in the sense perceptions. But it would be incapable by itself of developing the thoughts which are developed today. So the body comes along and relieves us of the effort of thinking. In ordinary life we think with our body, our body is our thinking apparatus. If we pursue the exercises described in the books mentioned, our soul will be strengthened to such an extent that it would no longer need the body for thinking but would itself be able to think. This is, basically, the first step on the path towards higher knowledge; it is the first step when the soul and spirit element begins to dismiss the body as the organ that does the thinking so far as higher knowledge is concerned. And it cannot be stressed often enough that a person who ascends to higher knowledge—that is, to Imagination—must remain at his own side with his ordinary good sense, keeping a watch on himself and being his own critic. In other words, he must remain the same person he always is in ordinary life. But out of the first person that second one develops, capable now of thinking without the help of the body, instead of with it.

The element of spirit and soul which revealed itself to the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came out of the body and penetrated through the brain, and as it oozed forth the pupil perceived it. Today what is perceived in initiation is a strengthened thinking which does not in any way make use of the brain. The pupil in ancient times drew what he saw in the way of spirit and soul out of his own bodily organization. Today the human being perceives the soul and spirit element, as far as thoughts are concerned, in such a way that they penetrate into him in the same way as sense perceptions penetrate into him. In taking this first upward step towards higher knowledge the human being must accustom himself to saying: I am beginning to perceive myself with regard to my eternal element of soul and spirit, for this comes in through my eyes, it comes in from outside in every way.

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In a public lecture² in the Bernoulli Hall in Basel I said: Anthroposophical spiritual science has to regard perception through the senses as its ideal. We have to take our start from perceiving with our senses. We must not return to dreamlike perception, but have to go forward to even clearer perception than that of perceiving with our senses. Our own being must come towards us, just as colours and sounds come towards our senses.

I showed two things in the last diagram. Both this (top) and this (bottom), the element of soul and spirit, are supposed to be one and the same thing. And they are one and the same, but seen from different sides. When a human being descends from the world of spirit and soul to physical incarnation, his element of soul and spirit, in a way, dies from the point of view of the soul and spirit world. When a human being is conceived and prepares to be born he dies as regards the spiritual world. And when he dies here in the physical world and goes through the portal of death he is born in the spiritual world. These concepts are relative. We die in respect of the spiritual world when we are born. And when we die in respect of the physical world we are born in the spirit. Death in the physical world signifies spiritual birth, birth in the physical world signifies spiritual death. Birth and death, then, are relative concepts. There is something which makes its appearance when the soul is on its way to birth, something that would not be capable of surviving in the spiritual world; it would disintegrate in the spiritual world, and so it streams towards a physical body in order to preserve itself.

In a diagram it can be depicted like this: The element of spirit and soul (red coming from the left) descends from the spirit and soul world. It arrives, you might say, in a cul-de-sac; it can go no further and is forced to equip itself with physical matter (blue). But the physical matter actually only works in the way I have described—from the brain, but not from the rest of the organism. As regards the rest of the organism the spirit and soul element does indeed travel onwards, having recovered through not being allowed to pass by the brain, through finding resistance and support in the brain. It is able, after all, to come to meet itself (red, right) throughout the rest of the organism, especially the system of limbs and metabolism. This blue part in the drawing is the head organism. Here (yellow) is the system

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of limbs and metabolism; under normal conditions it absorbs the element of soul and spirit, but only to a certain extent.

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As we grow up from childhood our spirit and soul element keeps making an appearance. At the moment of conception, and all through the embryonic stage in the mother's womb, the element of spirit and soul descending from the spiritual world is absorbed into matter. But because it finds a support it recovers again. Because of the shape of the embryo, at first that of the head, the element of spirit and soul finds a support (see drawing). Then the rest of the organism begins to grow, and once again the element of spirit and soul oozes through, as I have shown in the diagram.

As we grow up through childhood our element of spirit and soul gradually becomes ever more independent. I have often described this in detail and also shown how at major points of transition, such as the change of teeth and puberty, the element of spirit and soul becomes increasingly independent. As we grow up our physical body recedes more and more as we attain an independent spirit and soul element. This independent element is more intense today than it was in ancient times. But it would still be incapable of thinking. As I have said, it needs the help of the body if it wants to think. If this were not there, whatever grew towards us would remain forever dreamlike.

Initiates in ancient times strove to make their brain porous, so that what was then the element of spirit and soul could ooze through as it descended; in a certain way they could still see their life before birth through their softened brain. Today initiates are not concerned with that; they are concerned with what evolves during the course of life. This awakens a higher intensity with regard to the thought aspect. Initiates in ancient times would not have been capable of this. They would have been unable to take such a firm hold of the new spirit and soul element that begins to develop in the child—to begin with in an unclear way, and which later passes through the portal of death. In a way they slew the physical aspect, they paralysed it, so that the element of spirit and soul could emerge that had existed before conception.

Today we take a firmer hold of what we develop—at first in a weak way—through childhood and into adulthood, strengthening and reinforcing the new element of spirit and soul that has been developing since birth. We endeavour to achieve independence of our spirit and soul element over against our physical body, as far as our thought life is concerned. The pupil in ancient times made manifest the element of spirit and soul belonging to him before birth by toning down his physical body. We today endeavour to make manifest that element of spirit and soul which develops more and more from birth onwards. But we do not make it manifest to a degree which would be necessary in order to be able to see independently into the spiritual world. This is the difference.

As regards the will, the situation is as follows. The initiate in ancient times endeavoured to paralyse his will organization. This made it possible for him to perceive the element of spirit and soul he had from before his birth and which was normally absorbed by his will organization. If the body is rigid it does not absorb the element of spirit and soul, and so it is revealed independently. As modern initiates we do not do this; we do it differently. We strengthen our will by transforming the power of will in the manner described in the books already mentioned. It would be quite wrong to bring about a cataleptic condition by means of shocks or anxiety states as was the case in the ancient Mysteries. For modern man, with his highly-developed intellect, this would be something quite pathological. This must not be allowed to happen. Instead we use retrospective exercises—remembering backwards what has happened through the day—and also other will exercises to transform our will in a way which might be described as follows:

Consider the human eye. What must be its constitution if we are to be able to see? A cataract comes about when the physical matter of the eye makes itself independent so that it dresses itself up in physical matter which is not transparent. The eye must be selfless, it must be selflessly incorporated in our organism if we are to use it for seeing; it must be transparent. Our organism is most certainly not transparent for our will. As I have often said, we can think that we want to raise our hand. We form the thought: I want to raise my hand. But what then happens in our organism as this thought slips over into it and performs the action—this is as obscure for us as are the events which take place between going to sleep and waking up. The next thing we see is our raised hand, another perception. We perceive something at the beginning and we perceive something at the end, but what lies in between is a state of sleep. Our will unfolds in the unconscious just as much as the events of sleep unfold in the unconscious. So we can rightly say that for ordinary consciousness our organism is as untransparent as regards perceiving how the will functions as is an eye afflicted with cataract.

Of course I do not mean that the human organism is ill because of this. For ordinary, everyday life it has to be untransparent. This is its normal condition. But it cannot remain so for higher knowledge; it has to become transparent, it must become transparent for soul and spirit. This is achieved by means of the will exercises. Our organism then becomes transparent. We then no longer look down into something indeterminate when our will works, for our organism becomes as selfless as the eye, which is set selflessly into our organism so that we may perceive external objects properly. Just as the eye is in itself transparent, so our organism becomes transparent with regard to the element of spirit and soul; our whole organism becomes a sense organ. Thus, with regard to the will, we perceive the spiritual beings as objectively as we perceive external physical objects through our external eyes. Our will exercises are not aimed at making our body rigid in order to free our element of spirit and soul. They are aimed at developing the element of soul and spirit to such an extent that it becomes capable of seeing through the physical body. This is the main point. We see into the spiritual world only if we look through ourselves. We see external objects with our eyes only by looking through our eyes. And we do not see into the spiritual world directly, but only by looking through ourselves.

This is the other side: development with regard to the will. The whole of evolution in recent times depends, firstly, on our developing our thinking to an extent which makes it independent of the brain, and secondly, on our developing our will to an extent that the whole human being becomes transparent. It is impossible to see into the spiritual world through a vacuum, just as it is impossible to see the world of colours without looking through the eye. We have to look through ourselves, and this is brought about by means of the will exercises.

This, then, is for modern man what can be carried out by initiation. On the one hand, with regard to thinking, the element of soul and spirit can be made independent of the body, and on the other hand the material nature of the body can be overcome so that it becomes transparent for spirit and soul. Thus the element of spirit and soul has become independent through its own strength. This is the great difference between ancient and modern initiation. Ancient initiation transformed the physical body—the brain on the one hand, and the rest of the organism on the other—and, because the body was transformed in this way, the element of soul and spirit became faintly perceptible. Modern initiation transforms the element of spirit and soul, strengthening it with regard to the thought aspect on the one hand, and the will aspect on the other; thus it becomes independent of the brain, and at the same time so strong that it can see through the rest of the organism.

What the initiate saw in olden times appeared in ghostly form. Whatever beings of the spiritual world were able to reveal themselves when the procedure had been completed, appeared in a ghostly form. I could say that the spiritual world was seen in etheric shapes. The great anxiety of the teachers in the ancient Mysteries was that the pupils, despite the fact that what they saw of the spiritual world was ghostly, would learn to disregard this ghostly aspect. Ever and again they warned their pupils: What you are seeing appears to be material, but you must regard it as a picture; these ghostly things that you are seeing are only pictures of the spiritual world; you must not imagine that what you see around you in a ghostly form is actual reality. In a similar way, when I draw on the blackboard the chalk marks are not reality but only an image. Of course this expression was not used in olden times, but in modern terms it is a good way of putting it. It was the great concern of the teachers in the ancient Mysteries that their pupils should regard as pictures what they saw in a dreamlike, ghostly form.

In modern initiation there must be anxiety on a different score. Here, knowledge of the higher worlds can only be achieved at all by means of Imagination. Here we have to live in a world of pictures; the pictures have a picture character from the start. There is no danger of mistaking them in their picture character for anything else. But we have to learn to assess them correctly. In order to know how to relate these pictures to the spiritual reality they represent, we have to apply to them the exact thought processes we have acquired as modern human beings. We really have to think within this world of pictures in the very way we have learnt to think in the ordinary physical world. Every thoughtless glance is damaging to modern initiation. All the healthy ways of thinking we have developed as modern human beings must be brought to bear on higher knowledge. Just as we can find our way about the ordinary physical world if we can think properly, so can we only find our way about in the world of the spirit—which we enter through modern initiation—if we are able to penetrate with the thinking we have gained here in the physical world into all the knowledge we attain through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. In my book Theosophy,³ as well as in Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have always stated categorically that this is a characteristic of modern initiation.

That is why it is so important that anyone who desires to enter into the higher worlds in a modern way should learn to think with exactitude and practise thinking with exactitude. This is not as easy as people suppose. To help you understand what I mean let me say the following: Think of something really startling: Suppose our present respected company were to be surprised tomorrow here in the Goetheanum by a visit from, say, Lloyd George⁴ of course this is only hypothetical, but I want to give an extreme example. If Lloyd George were to turn up here tomorrow you would all have certain thoughts and certain feelings. These thoughts and feelings would not be the result of simply observing all that went on from the moment of his appearance until the moment of his departure. In order to simply follow all this, you would not need to know that it was Lloyd George. If you did not know who it was, you would simply note whatever can be noted with regard to somebody who is entirely unknown to you. Until you learn to disregard everything you already know and feel from elsewhere about something you are observing, as long as you cannot simply follow what is going on without any of this, you are not thinking with exactitude. You would only be thinking with exactitude if you were capable—should Lloyd George really appear here tomorrow—of entertaining thoughts and feelings which applied solely to what actually went on from the moment you first noticed him to the moment when he disappeared from view. You would have to exclude every scrap of prior knowledge. You would have to exclude everything that had irritated you and everything that had pleased you about him and take in only whatever there was to take in at that moment. Only in this way is it possible to learn to think in accordance with reality.

Just think how far human beings are from being able to think with exactitude as regards reality! Only let something stir in your soul and you will see what feelings, living hidden and unconscious in your soul, you allow to rise up. It is extremely difficult to confine oneself solely to what one has seen. Read a description of something and then ask: Is the writer merely describing what he saw or is he not also calling up hundreds and hundreds of prejudices, both in feeling and in thinking, which are bound up with it? Only if you are capable of restricting yourself solely to what you have seen will you be in a position gradually to attain to thinking with exactitude.

It is necessary to lay aside everything we have been taught or have learned from life with regard to what we see, and follow solely what life presents to us. If you consider this and meditate on it a little you will gradually come to understand what I mean by thinking with exactitude. In ordinary life we have little opportunity under today's conditions to practise thinking with exactitude except in geometry or, over and above that, in mathematics. Here we really do restrict ourselves to what we see.

We have not many prejudices about a geometric form, a triangle for instance. Here is a triangle. Let me draw a parallel line here. This angle equals that angle, and the other one is equal to this one, and the one in the middle equals itself. This is a straight angle, so all three

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angles of the triangle equal a straight angle. I am simply taking account of what I see before me, without applying the colossal prejudices I would bring to bear if Lloyd George were to arrive here tomorrow and I were to know about it in advance. In saying what I have just said, I was, of course, merely endeavouring to point out that thinking with absolute exactitude is a good preparation for seeing properly in the higher spiritual world. A kind of thinking in which you have firm control of the beginning of the thought, as well as a clear view of every step of thought along the way, is necessary in order to enter the higher worlds, that is, in order enter there with understanding. Above all a clearly-defined conscientiousness in thinking is necessary, a calling-oneself-to-account about one's thoughts. Ordinary life is very remiss in this, too. In most cases, people have no interest in thinking with exactitude; they prefer to think in a way in which they can enjoy the thought and feel comfortable with it.

For a Catholic priest, for instance, it is frightfully uncomfortable to entertain the thought that there might be something right about Anthroposophy. In such a case there can be no question of developing any exact thoughts. Instead, the matter is approached with all sorts of misconceptions and prejudices, and judgements are formed on the basis of these. Most things in life are decided on the basis of prejudices. Consider, for instance, what a strange impression is created sometimes when a simple attempt is made to describe something entirely objectively. Here we live in the Goetheanum. Nobody would consider me to be less of an admirer of Goethe than anyone else, and yet have I not said a good many things against Goethe? How often have I not attempted to describe Goethe from a narrow, overseeable point of view, whereas usually when Goethe is mentioned a whole host of prejudgements arises in response to his name alone. Merely to mention the name of Goethe sets up an excitement in the soul. It is impossible to approach any new phenomenon without prejudgement if one brings along a colossal collection of prejudices before even starting.

For the most part these things are not taken into account, and people therefore frequently say: Oh well, we can't get any further with our project of entering the spiritual worlds! Indeed, if elementary matters are not attended to first then, naturally enough, there is no way of entering those worlds. People just feel that unreasonable demands are being made of them if it is suggested that they take account of even the most elementary things.

Here is an example: In the nineties⁵ I happened to be in Jena when Bismarck gave a grand speech after his forced resignation. He appeared on the platform in the wake of Haeckel and Bardeleben and other Jena professors. Imagine the huge crowd in the market square in Jena. They were expected to follow Bismarck's speech as they would a speech made by someone they had previously never heard of! Such a thing is unthinkable under normal conditions. And yet for someone who really desires to undergo a kind of initiation it is certainly necessary to develop an impartiality which enables him to take everything he sees as something entirely new, however many prejudices his soul might previously have harboured in that respect. Everything must be treated as though it had arrived like a bolt from the blue. For it is a special characteristic of the spiritual world that we have to win it afresh at every moment if we desire to enter it. And to do this we have to prepare ourselves in a suitable way.

It can be said that the general drift of civilization indicates that mankind is indeed headed in this direction. But for the moment this still appears in a light that is not all that pleasing, namely, in opposition to any kind of authority, and to any kind of received judgement, and so on. These things will have to be ennobled. But meanwhile mankind is indeed moving in the direction of impartiality and freedom from prejudice. But, for the moment, the more negative, the uglier sides of this are more prevalent. We must, therefore, judge the evolution of civilization with regard to the future in the very manner I have just been describing.

• 1 . Order of the Knights of Malta: In 1798 Napoleon seized and occupied Malta on his way to Egypt.
• 2 . See the lecture of 2 November 1921 in Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophie und Wissenschaft, Dornach GA 75 (not yet published).
• 3 . Rudolf Steiner Theosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1986.
• 4 . David Lloyd George, 1863-1945. British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922.
• 5 . On 16 February 1894 Ernst Haeckel celebrated his sixtieth birthday. Rudolf Steiner was one of the invited guests. Bismarck, much admired by Haeckel, was also present. He had been forced to resign his office in 1890.

Today we shall consider the passage of the human spirit and soul through the sense-perceptible physical organism. We shall look first at how this element of spirit and soul prepares for physical incarnation by descending from the spiritual worlds, and then at how it departs from physical incarnation through the portal of death and returns to the spiritual world. We shall take particular account of what happens in the soul during this process, for we must understand that on entering the physical organism, right at the moment of conception, a tremendous transformation takes place, and that another tremendous transformation takes place when the human being departs from physical incarnation through the portal of death.

We have described these things from numerous standpoints already. But today we shall be concerned with the inner experience of the soul itself. What are the last experiences of the soul before it descends to physical life on earth?

Between birth and death our soul is filled with an intricate fabric of thoughts, feelings and impulses of will. All these work together and intermingle to form the total structure of the soul. Our language has words for all the different forms of thought, of feeling, and of will impulses, so that we can describe all these things that are experienced during physical earthly life. And by considering our more subconscious feelings and our soul experiences as a whole, we can throw at least some light on what lives in the soul before it enters earthly life.

First of all we must be clear that the thought element leads a shadowy existence in the soul during physical earthly life. Thoughts are quite rightly described as pale and abstract. At best, the thoughts and mental pictures of the human being during earthly life are no more than mirror images of the external world. Human beings make thoughts about what they have perceived with their senses in the external world. As you know, if you subtract from your thought life everything you have perceived through your senses and everything you have experienced with the help of your senses during the course of earthly life, there is very little left. This is different, of course, if a study of spiritual science has led to the acquisition of other kinds of thought content than those drawn from the sense-perceptible world. Our thought world is shadowy because it has lost its inner vitality as a result of our descent into the physical sense-perceptible world. You could say that as a solid earthly object is to its shadow on the wall, so is the real content of thoughts to what lives in our thinking during earthly existence. If we seek to make the transition from the earthly thoughts of our life between birth and death to the true stature of our thought life, we find that this really only exists in our purely spiritual life before conception has taken place. It is like going from a shadow picture to whatever is casting the shadow. Before birth, or rather before conception, there is a vivid, fully alive existence which later becomes shadowy thoughts. The thought world existing as an inner weaving of soul before conception might well be described as our actual spiritual existence, our actual spiritual being. This inner weaving life before conception is, of course, something that fills the whole of the universe known to us. Before conception we live throughout the totality of the universe which otherwise surrounds us. The thoughts that then live in us during our life on earth are the shadows, confined within our human physical organism, of something that has life on a cosmic scale prior to conception.

This is a description of one element of our soul before birth, or before conception. Before the human being descends to the physical world we find, as one part of the content of his soul, something that is like thoughts when he is on earth but which is actually a spiritual element of his being when he is in the super-sensible world. The other part of the content of his soul cannot be described as anything other than fear, to use a concept taken from earthly life. In the period prior to physical life something lives in the soul which, as fear, fills it entirely. You must understand, however, that fear as an experience outside the physical body is something quite different from fear within the human physical body.

Before descending to earth man is a being of spirit and soul filled with an element of feeling which can only be compared with what is experienced in earthly life as fear. This fear is well justified for that period of human life about which I am now speaking. In the life between death and a new birth the human being has undergone manifold experiences of the kind which are possible while he is united with the cosmos. By the end of the life between death and a new birth he has, in a way, grown tired of this cosmic life, just as he grows tired of earthly life when, towards the end, his bodily organization shrivels up and becomes infirm. This tiring of life beyond the earth is expressed not so much in actual tiredness as in fear of the cosmos. The human being takes flight from the cosmos. He senses that the fundamental aspect of the cosmos is something that has now become foreign to him; it no longer has anything to offer him. He feels a kind of timidity, comparable with fear, towards the element in which he finds himself. He longs to withdraw from this cosmic feeling and contract into a human physical body.

From the earth a certain force of attraction comes to meet this state of fear in the human being. In a diagram it would look like this. Think of the cranium, and the brain within. Here is the base of the cranium. As I have frequently suggested, the human brain with its remarkable convolutions is a kind of copy of the starry heavens, of the universe. This brain structure made up of cells is indeed a copy of the starry heavens (see diagram). While living before birth in the cosmos the

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human being encompasses with his spirituality the whole of the starry world. But now he fears it. He withdraws into an earthly image of the starry heavens, an image in the human brain.

Now we come to the choice made by man's spirit and soul. For now the soul chooses whichever brain—in the process of being formed—most closely resembles the starry constellation in which it stood before descending into the earthly realm. Naturally, the brain of one embryo depicts the starry heavens differently from that of another embryo. And the soul feels attracted towards the brain which has the most similarity with the starry constellation in which it existed before descending to earth.

So it is, in the main, a feeling of timidity which leads the soul down to the confines of a human being—a feeling of fearfulness with regard to infinity, you might say. This feeling of fear pertains more to the soul. And the thought world which unfolds more and more from childhood into adulthood pertains more to the spirit. Both—the feeling of fear and also the spiritual element which is transformed into shadowy thoughts—undergo a substantial metamorphosis which I should now like to describe to you. I can only use expressions which will seem unusual as far as ordinary thinking goes, but ordinary thinking lacks points of reference which might serve to describe these things. Ordinary thinking lies far from all aspects of this theme, so we cannot avoid using unusual expressions if we want to give an adequate description of them.

Let us start with the spiritual element which lives in the cosmos and then makes its way to the confined dwelling place of the human body, unfolding chiefly through the nervous system and the brain and undergoing metamorphosis as it does so. There are two aspects of this. First of all it is definitely true to say that the being who is man in the world of spirit and soul prior to conception dies during the transition into the physical body. Birth in the physical body is a dying for the spirit and soul life of man. And when a death takes place there is always a corpse. Just as a corpse remains when man dies on earth, so a corpse also remains when the element of spirit and soul goes down to the earth through conception and dies in the heavenly region. For the whole of our earthly life we then live, as far as our thoughts are concerned, on what remains as a corpse. The corpse is our world of thoughts. Something that is dead is the world of shadowy thoughts. So we can say that as the spiritual aspect of man descends to life on earth through conception, it dies for the world of spirit and soul and leaves this corpse behind.

Just as the corpse of the physical human being dissolves into the elements of earth, so the element of spirit and soul dissolves in the spiritual world and becomes the force which is unfolded in physical thoughts. Just as the earth goes to work on the corpse when we bury it, or as fire does when we cremate it, so throughout life we go to work on the corpse of our spirit and soul element in our world of physical thoughts. The world of physical thoughts is the continuing in death of what exists as real spiritual life before man descends into physical earthly life.

The other living element which enters into man from his pre-earthly life comes into play in the physical human being, not through the world of thoughts, but in the widest possible sense in everything which we can call feelings—feelings to do with man as well as feelings to do with nature. Everything by which you spread into your environment in a feeling way (see chart) is an element which represents a living echo of pre-earthly life.

You do not experience your pre-earthly life in a living way in your thoughts but only in your feelings for other creatures. If we love a flower or a person, this is a force which has been given to us out of our pre-earthly life, but in a living way. So if we love a person we can say that we love him or her not only out of our experiences in this earthly life, but also out of karma, out of being connected in earlier earthly lives. Something living is carried over from pre-earthly life in so far as the sympathetic sphere of the human being is concerned. On the other hand, what is a living spiritual element between death and a new birth dies into our thought world during earthly life.

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That is why our thought world is so pale and shadowy and dead during earthly life, because it actually represents a part of our pre-earthly experience which has died.

Now let us turn to the second element—timidity, fear—which is also metamorphosed in such a way that it falls into two parts. What we experience prior to our descent into the earthly world as a fear which fills our whole soul and makes us want to flee from the spiritual world, becomes, on entering the body, on the one hand something that I should like to describe as a feeling of self. This feeling of self is metamorphosed fear. Transformed fear from pre-earthly life is what makes you feel that you are a self, that you are self-contained.

The other part into which fear is transmuted is our will. All our will impulses, everything on which our activity in the world is based—all this exists as fear before we descend into earthly life.

You see once again what a good thing it is for earthly life that human beings do not step consciously past the Guardian of the Threshold. I have frequently said that human beings sleep through what the will represents, down there in the human organism. They have an intention, then they carry it out, and then they perceive the consequence. But what lies between the intention to do a deed and the accomplished deed, that in which the will actually consists—this is something in which human beings are as much asleep as they are between falling asleep and waking up again. If they were to look down and see what lay at the foundation of their will they would feel, strongly welling up out of their organism, the fear coming in from their pre-earthly life.

This is also something that has to be overcome in initiation. But if we look into ourselves, the first thing we see is the feeling of self. This is something which must not be caused to increase too much as a result of the training. Otherwise, when the human being finally steps into the spiritual world he might fall into megalomania. But at the foundation of all his will impulses he will find fear and he must therefore be strengthened to withstand this fear.

As you see, in all the exercises contained in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds the aim is to learn to bear the fear which we come to perceive in the way I have described. This fear is something that has to be there amongst the forces of development, otherwise human beings would never descend from the spiritual world into earthly existence. They would not flee from the spiritual world. They would not develop the urge to enter into the limitations of the physical body. The fact that they do develop this urge stems from this fear of the spiritual world, which quite naturally becomes a part of their soul configuration once they have lived for a time between death and a new birth.

So thoughts are attached to us like a corpse—or rather the power of the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. We can describe this even more exactly. However, to consider this more exact description it will benecessary to develop certain very precise ideas. The spiritual force which dies in our thoughts and becomes a corpse when we descend into physical earthly existence is the same force which builds our organs out of the cosmos. Our lung, heart, stomach—all our specific organs—are formed out of the power of thought of the universe.

When we enter into earthly life this power of thought enters the narrow confines of our organism. What does the earth and its environment want of us? It wants us to create an image of it within ourselves. But if we were to create an image in ourselves, then during the course of our lifetime all our inner organs, such as our lungs—but, above all, the manifold convolutions of our brain—would be transformed into crystal-like formations. We should all become statues resembling not human beings but crystals in various contrasting groups. We should gradually come to be inorganic, lifeless shapes—statues after a fashion.

The human organism resists this. It stands by the shape of its inner organs. It will not have it that, for instance, its lungs might be formed to represent, let us say, a range of mountains. It will not allow its heart to be transformed into a cluster of crystals. It resists this. And this resistance brings it about that instead of forming images of our earthly environment in our organs we do so only in the shadow images of our thoughts. So our power of thought is actually always on the way to making us into an image of our physical earth, of the physical form of our earth. We constantly want to become a system of crystals. But our organism will not permit this. It has so much which has to be developed in the living realm, in the realm of sympathy, in the realm of feeling of self and in the realm of will impulses, that it does not permit it. It will not allow our lungs to be transformed into something that looks like crystals growing out of the earth. It resists this formation into earthly shapes, and so the images of earthly shapes only come about in geometry and in whatever other thoughts we form about our earthly environment. As I said, you must think with absolute exactitude if you want to reach the point where you can imagine all this.

But the tendency is always there of coming to resemble the system of our thoughts. We have to fight constantly in order not to take onthis resemblance. We are constantly striving to become a kind of work of art—though given the kind of thoughts human beings have on the whole, it would not be a very beautiful work of art to look at. But we strive to attain an external appearance that resembles what exists in our thoughts as no more than images and shadows. We do not achieve this resemblance, but we mirror back what we are aiming for, so that it turns into our thoughts instead. It is a process that can truly be likened to the creation of mirror images.

If you have a mirror with an object in front of it, then you get a mirror image of the object. The object is not inside the mirror. Everything we see before our eyes constantly wants to bring about an actual structure within us. But we resist this. We keep our brain as it is. Because of this, the object is mirrored back and becomes the mental image. A table wants to make your very brain into a table but you do not allow this to happen. In consequence an image of the table arises in you. This act of rejection is the mirroring process. That is why, in our thought life, our thoughts are only shadow images of the external world. When it comes to our feelings, however, the situation is different. Try once to imagine absolutely accurately what is involved in feeling something. A round table feels different from one with corners. You feel the corners. The thought of this angular table does not affect you very much, whereas getting the feel of the corners is more painful than gently following the curve of a round table. When we feel, therefore, external forms come more to life within us than when we think.

This is an indication of the metamorphosis undergone by our element of soul and spirit when it comes into earthly existence from pre-earthly existence. But now what occurs when we go through the portal of death? Our world of thought is, so far as its strength is concerned, only the corpse of pre-earthly existence. It is of little significance. It disappears when we go through the portal of death, just as our mirror image disappears if we suddenly take away the mirror. So, in speaking of immortality, there is absolutely no point in reflecting on the earthly power of thought for it certainly does not accompany us through the portal of death. What does go through the portal of death with us is everything we have developed in the way of sympathy, of feeling and sensing towards earthly things. Our feeling of sympathy goes through the portal of death. Inasmuch as we have sympathy towards our environment, we develop the strength (see table) in the spiritual world to stand among the spiritual beings in the spiritual element of thought. Our sympathy, which our body keeps separate from our earthly environment, streams out now, after death, into our spiritual environment and unites with the spiritual thought element of the world into which we step on going through the portal of death.

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Because we flow with our sympathy into the spiritual element of thought, we develop once again a kind of thought body, a living thought body which is ours for the time between death and our next birth. And the feeling of self we have on earth becomes a kind of ‘standing within’ other beings. Whilst we are on earth, our feeling of self only lets us know that we are within our body, but once we have passed through the portal of death we learn to know that we are in other beings, the beings of the higher hierarchies. And because we stand within spiritual beings we receive from them forces which lead us onwards on our course through life between death and a new birth. In this way our own being of forces develops. This is the metamorphosis of the element of spirit and soul which takes place when we pass through the portal of death.

Unlike our world of thought, our will does not disappear at death. It is the source of the content of our feelings of self. Imagine that you want something which satisfies you. This wanting in itself gives you something that satisfies you, it gives your feeling of self a particular nuance. If you have done something that does not satisfy you, this too gives your feeling of self a particular nuance. Our will is not only something that acts outwards. It also rays forcefully back into our inner being. We know what we are from what we can do. And this nuance of our feeling of self, this raying back into us of our will element, is something which we take into the spiritual world with us, together with our feeling of self. So we take our will—or rather the raying back of our will into our feeling of self—with us when we submerge ourselves in the beings of the higher hierarchies. And because we take with us this element, which has either strengthened or weakened our feeling of self, we find the force of our karma, our destiny.

Gaining an understanding of these things helps us to see what the human being really is. And we also learn to recognize certain symptoms which accompany earthly life. In earthly life fear certainly puts in an appearance here and there. But it must never be allowed to fill our soul entirely. It would be sad if this were to happen. But before we come down to earthly life our soul is indeed entirely filled with fear, and in that situation fear is what we need so that we really do descend into physical earthly life.

Our feeling of self, though, is something that must not be allowed to exceed more than a certain degree; indeed it really ought not to be felt independently at all in earthly life. Someone who develops his feeling of self with too much independence turns into a person who knows only himself. Our feeling of self is actually only with us during earthly life, so that we keep a hold on our body until we die, returning to it every morning after sleep. If we lacked this feeling of self during earthly life we would fail to return. But after death we need it when we become submerged in the world of spiritual beings, because without it we would all the time lose ourselves.

We do indeed submerge ourselves there in real spiritual beings. The earth, on the other hand, makes no such demands on us. If you go for a walk in the woods, you stay on the path, and the trees are to the left and right of you, and in front and behind. You see the trees but the trees do not expect you to enter into them—they do not expect you to become tree nymphs and submerge yourselves in them. But the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, whose world we enter after death—they do expect us to submerge ourselves in them. We have to become all of them. So if, on passing through the portal of death, we were to enter this spiritual world without our feeling of self, we would lose ourselves. We need our feeling of self there simply in order to maintain ourselves. And moral deeds we have done during earthly life, deeds which have justifiably enhanced our feeling of self—these protect us from losing ourselves after death.

These are thoughts and ideas which, from now on, ought to enter once again into human consciousness for the near future of earthly evolution. These thoughts and ideas simply flowed into mankind in earliest times, when understanding was still instinctively clairvoyant. Human beings used to have a strong feeling of what they had been before they descended into earthly life. This was strongly developed in primeval times. But hope of a life after death was less strongly developed in primeval times. This was something that was taken for granted. Today we are chiefly interested in what we might experience after we die. In primeval times, thousands of years ago, people were more concerned about their life prior to descending to the earth.

A time then came when clairvoyance, which had originally been instinctive, waned, and the intense connection of the soul with life before birth also waned. Then two spiritual streams sprang up which prepared what had now to develop in human civilization. We now have two clearly distinct streams which we have described from varying standpoints. Today we shall approach them from a particular standpoint which will also be a help to us in our considerations tomorrow and the next day.

Take earthly evolution prior to the Mystery of Golgotha. You find, spread over the earth, the heathen culture, and in a certain way separated from this, a culture which one could say was that of the Old Testament. What was particularly characteristic of this heathen culture? It contained a definite awareness of the fact that everything physical surrounding man contained a spiritual element. The heathen culture had a strong awareness of the nature of living thoughts which become transformed into dead thoughts. In the beings of the different kingdoms of nature, this culture saw everywhere the living element of which human thoughts were the dead counterpart. Heathen culture perceived the living thoughts of the cosmos and regarded man as belonging to these living thoughts of the cosmos.

One part of this heathen world that was particularly filled with life was that of the peoples of ancient Greece. You know that the idea of destiny was particularly strong in the world of these ancient Greek peoples. And—think of certain Greek dramas—this idea of destiny permeated human life with laws in the way the natural laws permeate nature. The ancient Greeks felt that they stood in life permeated with destiny, just as natural things stand permeated with the laws of nature. Destiny descended on human beings within this Greek outlook like a force of nature. This feeling was characteristic of all heathen cultures, but it was particularly marked among the Greeks. The heathen world saw spirit in all of nature. There was no specific knowledge of nature in the sense of the natural science we have today, but there was an all-embracing knowledge of nature. Where people saw nature, they spoke of the spirit. This was a science of nature which was, at the same time, a science of the spirit. The heathen peoples were less interested in the inner being of man. They looked on man from the outside as a being of nature. They could do this because they saw all the other natural things as being filled with a soul element too. They did not think of trees, plants, or clouds as soulless objects. So they could look at human beings from outside in a similar way and yet not think of them as being soulless. Filling all nature with soul in this way, the ancient heathen was able to regard human beings as natural creatures. Thus the ancient heathen world was something which contained from the start a spiritual element which inclined towards the world of spirit.

The creed which then ran its course in the Old Testament was the polar opposite of this. The Old Testament knew nature neither in the way we know it—I mean in the way we come to know it as we turn towards spiritual science—nor in the way the ancient heathen knew it. The Old Testament knew only a moral world order, and Jahve is the ruler of this moral world order; only what Jahve wills takes place. So in the world of the Old Testament the view arose as a matter of course that one must not make images of the soul and spirit element. The heathen world could never have come to such a view, for it saw images of the spirit in every tree and every plant. In the world of the Old Testament no images were seen, for everywhere the invisible, imageless spirit ruled.

We ought to see in the New Testament a coming together of these two spiritual streams. People have always given prominence to either one view or the other. Thus, for instance, the heathen element was always predominant where religion was more a matter of seeing the objects of religion. Pictures were made of spiritual beings, pictures copied from nature. In contrast, the Old Testament element developed wherever the newer scientific attitude arose with its tendency towards a lack of images. In many ways modern materialistic science contains an echo of the Old Testament, of the imageless Old Testament. Materialistic science strives for a clear distinction between the material element in which no trace of spirit is left, and the spiritual element which is supposed to live in the moral sphere only, and of which no image may be made, or which we may not be allowed to see in the earthly realm.

This particular characteristic which is prevalent in today's materialistic form of science is, actually, an Old Testament impulse which has come over to our time. Science has not yet become Christian. The science of materialism is fundamentally an Old Testament science. One of the main tasks as civilization progresses will be to overcome both streams and resolve them in a higher synthesis. We must understand that both the heathen stream and the Jewish stream are one-sided and that, in the way they still exercise an influence today, they need to be overcome.

Science will have to raise itself up to the spirit. Art, which contains much that is heathen, has made various attempts to become Christian but most of these attempts have fallen into luciferic and heathen ways. Art will have to lead to a Christian element. What we have today is but an echo of the heathen and the Old Testament elements. Our consciousness is not yet fully Christian. This is what we must particularly feel when we consider factually, as described by spiritual science, the way in which human beings pass through birth and death.

Let us recall the main points we considered yesterday. Through conception and birth into the physical, sense-perceptible world, the human being brings down on the one hand something which inwardly still possesses the living spiritual world, but which then becomes shaded and toned down to the thought world he bears within him. On the other hand he brings down something which fills his element of soul and spirit, something which I have described as being essentially a state of fear. I then went on to point out that the living spirit is metamorphosed into a thought element, but that it also sends into earth existence a living remnant of pre-earthly life that lives in human sympathy. So in human sympathy we have something that maintains in our soul the living quality of pre-earthly existence. The feeling of fear that fills our soul before we descend to the physical world is metamorphosed here on earth on the one hand into the feeling of self and on the other into the will.

What lives in the human soul by way of thoughts is dead as far as spirit and soul are concerned, compared with the living world of the spirit. In our thoughts, or at least in the force which fills our thoughts, we experience, in a sense, the corpse of our spirit and soul existence between death and a new birth. But our present experience during physical earthly life, of a soul that has—in a way—been slain, was not always as strong as it is today. The further we go back in human evolution the greater is the role played here in earthly life by what I yesterday described as sympathy—sympathy not only with human beings but also for instance with the whole of nature. The abstract knowledge we strive for today—quite rightly, to a certain extent—has not always been present in human evolution. This abstract inner consciousness came into being in its most extreme form in the fifteenth century, that is, at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period. What human beings now experience in their thoughts was, in earlier times, filled with living feelings. In older knowledge—for instance, that of the Greek world—abstract concepts as we know them today simply did not exist. Concepts then were filled with living feelings. Human beings felt the world as well as thinking it. Only at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period did people begin to merely think the world, reserving their feelings of sympathy for what is really only the social realm.

In ancient India human beings felt strong sympathy for the whole of nature, for all the creatures of nature. Such strong sympathy in earthly life means that there is a strong experience of all that takes place around the human being between death and a new birth. In thinking, this life has died. But our sympathy with the world around us certainly contains echoes of our perceptions between death and a new birth. This sympathy was very important in the human life of earlier times. It meant that every cloud, every tree, every plant, was seen to be filled with spirit. But if we live only in thoughts, then the spirit departs from nature, because thoughts are the corpse of our spirit and soul element. Nature is seen as nothing more than a dead structure, because it can only be mirrored in dead thoughts. That is why, as times moved nearer to our own, all elemental beings disappeared from what human beings saw in nature.

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So what is this kind of spirituality that human beings still feel within themselves—this living spirituality—when, in reality, they ought to experience nothing but dead spirituality? To answer this question we shall have to consider what I have said with regard to the physical organization of the human being as a threefold organism. Here (see diagram) is the organism of nerves and senses, located mainly in the head. The rhythmical organism is located mainly in the upper chest organs. But of course both systems appear in the total organism too. And here is the organism of the limbs and the metabolism, which is located mainly in the limbs and the lower parts of the trunk.

Let us look first at the head organization which is chiefly, though not exclusively, the bearer of our life of nerves and senses. We can only understand it if we look at it pictorially. We have to imagine that our head is for the most part a metamorphosis—not in its physical substance, but in its form—of the rest of the body, of the organism of limbs and metabolism we had in our previous incarnation on the earth.

The organism of limbs and metabolism of our previous earthly life—not its physical substance, of course, but its shape—becomes our head organization in this life. Here in our head we have a house which has been formed out of a transformation of the organism of limbs and metabolism from our former incarnation, and in this head live mainly the abstract thoughts (see next diagram, red) which are the corpse of our pre-earthly life of soul and spirit.

In our head we bear the living memory of our former earthly life. And this is what makes us feel ourselves to be an ego, a living ego, for this living ego does not exist within us. Within us are only dead thoughts. But these dead thoughts live in a house which can only be understood pictorially; it is an image arising out of the metamorphosis of our organism of limbs and metabolism from our former earthly life.

The more living element that comes over from the life of spirit and soul, when we descend into a new earthly life, takes up its dwelling from the start not in our head, but in our rhythmical organism. Everything that surrounded us between death and this new birth and now plays into life—all this dwells in our rhythmical organism. In our head all we have is an image out of our former earthly life, filled with dead thoughts. In our rhythmical, breast organism lives something much more alive. Here there is an echo of everything our soul experienced while it was moving about freely in the world of spirit and soul between death and this new birth. In our breathing and in our blood circulation something vibrates—forces that belong to the time

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between death and birth. And lastly, our being of spirit and soul belonging to our present earthly incarnation lives—strange though this may seem—not in our head, and not in our breast, but in our organism of limbs and metabolism. Our present earthly ego lives in our organism of limbs and metabolism (green).

Imagine the dead thoughts to be still alive. These dead thoughts live—speaking pictorially—in the convolutions of the brain. And the brain in turn lives in a metamorphosis of our organism from our former incarnation. The initiate perceives the way the dead thoughts dwell in his head, he perceives them as a memory of the reality of his former incarnation. This memory of your former incarnation is just as though you were to find yourself in a darkened room with all your clothes hanging on a rail. Feeling your way along, you come, say, to your velvet jacket, and this reminds you of the occasion when you bought it. This is just what it is like when you bump into dead thoughts at every turn. To feel your way about in whatever is in your head organization is to remember your former life on earth.

What you experience in your breast organism is the memory of your life between death and a new birth. And what you experience in your limbs and metabolism—this belongs to your present life on earth. You only experience your ego in your thoughts because your organism of limbs and metabolism works up into your thoughts. But it is a deceptive experience. For your ego is not, in fact, contained in your thoughts. It is as little in your thoughts as you are actually behind the mirror when you see yourself reflected in it. Your ego is not in your thought life at all. Because your thought life shapes itself in accordance with your head, the memory of your former earthly life is in your thought life. In your head you have the human being you were in your former life. In your breast you have the human being who lived between death and this new birth. And in your organism of limbs and metabolism, especially in the tips of your fingers and toes, you have the human being now living on the earth. Only because you also experience your fingers and toes in your brain do your thoughts give you an awareness of this ego in your earthly life. This is how grotesque these things are, in reality, in comparison with what people today usually imagine.

Thinking with the head about what happens in the present time is something that only became prevalent at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the fifteenth century. But in an ahrimanic way things are forestalled. Things that take place later than they should in the course of evolution are luciferic. Things that come too soon are ahrimanic. Let us look at something which came about in history very much too soon and should not have happened until the fifteenth century. It did happen in the fifteenth century, but it was foreshadowed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. I want to show you how the ideas of the Old Testament, which I partly described yesterday, were transformed into nothing more than allegories by a contemporary of Christ Jesus, Philo of Alexandria.¹

Philo of Alexandria interprets the whole of the Old Testament as an allegory. This means that he wants to make the whole Old Testament, which is told in the form of direct experiences, into a series of thought images. This is very clever, especially as it is the first time in human evolution that such a thing has been done. Today it is not all that clever when the theosophists, for instance, interpret Hamlet by saying that one of the characters is Manas, another Buddhi, and so on, distorting everything to fit an allegory. This sort of thing is, of course, nonsense. But Philo of Alexandria transformed the whole of the Old Testament into thought images, allegories. These allegories are nothing other than an inner revelation of dead soul life, soul life that has died and now lies as a corpse in the power of thinking. The real spiritual vision, which led to the Old Testament, looked back into life before birth, or before conception, and out of what was seen there the Old Testament was created.

But when it was no longer possible to look back—and Philo of Alexandria was incapable of looking back—it all turned into dead thought images. So in the history of human evolution two important events stand side by side: The period of the Old Testament culminated in Philo of Alexandria at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. He makes allegories of straw out of the Old Testament. And at the same time the Mystery of Golgotha reveals that it is not the experience of dead things that can lead the human being to super-sensible knowledge, but the whole human being who passes through the Mystery of Golgotha bearing the divine being within him.

These are the two great polar opposites: the world of abstraction foreshadowed in an ahrimanic way by Philo, and the world which is to enter into human evolution with Christianity. The abstract thinker—and Philo of Alexandria is perhaps the abstract thinker of the greatest genius, since he foreshadowed in an ahrimanic way the abstractness of later ages—the abstract thinker wants to fathom the mysteries of the world by means of some abstract thought or other which is supposed to provide the answer to the riddle of the universe. The Mystery of Golgotha is the all-embracing living protest against this. Thoughts can never solve the riddle of the universe because the solution of this riddle is something living. The human being in all his wholeness is the solution to the riddle of the universe. Sun, stars, clouds, rivers, mountains, and all the creatures of the different kingdoms of nature, are external manifestations which pose an immense question. There stands the human being and, in the wholeness of his being, he is the answer.

This is another point of view from which to contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha. Instead of confronting the riddle of the universe with thoughts in all their deadness, confront the whole of what man can experience with the whole of what man is.

Only slowly and gradually has mankind been able to find the way towards understanding this. Even today it has not yet been found. Anthroposophy wants to open the gate. But because abstraction has become so firmly established, even the awareness that the way must be sought has disappeared. Until abstraction took hold, human beings did wrestle with the quest for the way, and this is seen most clearly at the turn of the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. As Christianity spreads externally, the best spirits wrestle to understand it inwardly.

Both streams had come down from the far past. On the one side there was the heathen stream which was fundamentally a nature wisdom. All natural creatures were seen to be inhabited by elemental spirits, demonic spirits, those very demonic spirits who, in the Gospels, are said to have rebelled when Christ came amongst mankind, because they knew that their rule was at an end. Human beings failed to recognize Christ, but the demons recognized him. They knew that he would now take possession of human hearts and human souls and that they would have to withdraw. But for a long time they continued to play a role in the minds and hearts of human beings as well as in their search for knowledge. Heathen consciousness, which sought the demonic, elemental spirits in all creatures in the old way, continued to play a role for a long time. It wrestled with that other form of knowledge which now sought in all earthly things the substance of Christ that had united with the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This heathen stream—a nature wisdom, a nature Sophia—saw the spirit everywhere in nature and could therefore also look at man as a natural creature who was filled with spirit, just as all nature was filled with spirit. In its purest, most beautiful form we find it in ancient Greece, especially in Greek art, which shows us how the spirit weaves through human life in the form of destiny, just as the natural laws weave through nature. We may sometimes recoil from what we find in Greek tragedies. But on the other hand we can have the feeling that the Greeks sensed not only the abstract laws of nature, as we do today, but also the working of divine, spiritual beings in all plants, all stones, all animals, and therefore also in man. The rigid necessity of natural laws was shaped into destiny in the way we find it depicted, for instance, in the drama of Oedipus. Here is an intimate relationship between the spiritual existence of nature and the spiritual existence of man. That is why freedom and also human conscience as yet play no part in these dramas. Inner necessity, destiny, rules within man, just as the laws of nature rule the natural world.

This is the one stream as it appears in more recent times. The other is the Jewish stream of the Old Testament. This stream possesses no nature wisdom. As regards nature, it merely looks at what is physically visible through the senses. It turns its attention upwards to the primal source of moral values which lies in the world between death and a new birth, taking no account of the side of man which belongs to nature. For the Old Testament there is no nature, but only obedience to divine commandments. In the Old Testament view, not natural law, but Jahve's will governs events. What resounds from the Old Testament is imageless. In a way it is abstract. But setting aside Philo of Alexandria, who makes everything allegorical, we discern behind this abstract aspect, Jahve, the ruler who fills this abstraction with a supersensibly focused, idealized, generalized human nature. Like a human ruler, Jahve himself is in all the commandments which he sends down to earth. This Old Testament stream directs its vision exclusively to the world of moral values; it absolutely shies away from looking at the externally sense-perceptible aspect of the world. While the heathen view saw divine spiritual beings everywhere, the god of the Jews is the One God. The Old Testament Jew is a monotheist His god, Jahve, is the One God, because he can only take account of man as a unity: You must believe in the One God, and you shall not depict this One God in any earthly manner, not in an idol, not even in a word. The name of God may only be spoken by initiates on certain solemn occasions. You must not take the name of your God in vain.

Everything points to what cannot be seen, to what cannot come to expression in nature, to what can only be thought. But behind the thought in the Old Testament there is still the living nature of Jahve. This disappears in the allegories of Philo of Alexandria.

Then came the early Christian struggles—right on into the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries—to reach a harmony between what can be seen as the spirit in external nature and what can be experienced as the divine when we look at our own moral world, our own human soul. In theory the matter seems simple. But in fact the quest for harmony, between seeing the spirit in external nature and guiding the soul upwards to the spiritual world out of which Christ Jesus had descended, was an immense struggle. Christianity came over from Asia and took hold of the Greek and Roman world. In the later centuries of the Middle Ages we see the struggle taking place most strongly in those parts of Europe, which had retained much of their primeval vitality. In ancient Greece the old heathen element was so strong that although Christianity passed through Greek culture and assimilated many Greek expressions on the way, it could not take root there. Only Gnosis, the spiritual view of Christianity, was able to take root in Greece.

Next, Christianity had to pass through the most prosaic element of world evolution: Roman culture. Being abstract, Roman culture could only comprehend the abstract, as it were foreshadowing in an ahrimanic way what is later alive in Christianity. A truly living struggle then took place in Spain. Here, a question was asked which was not theoretical but vital, intensely alive: How can man, without losing sight of the spirit in natural creatures and processes, find the whole human being revealed to him by Christ Jesus. How can man be filled with Christ? This question lived most strongly in Spain, and we see in Calderón² a poet who knew how to depict this struggle with great intensity. The struggle to fill the human being with Christ lived—if I may put it like this—dramatically in Calderón.

Calderón's most characteristic drama in this respect is about Cyprianus, a kind of miracle-working magician; in other words he is, in the first instance, a person who lives in natural things and natural processes because he seeks the spirit in them. A later metamorphosis of this character is Faust, but Faust is not as filled with life as is Calderón's Cyprianus. Calderón's portrayal of how Cyprianus stands in the spirit of nature is still filled with life. His attitude is taken absolutely for granted, whereas in the case of Faust everything is shrouded in doubt. From the start, Faust does not really believe that it is possible to find the spirit in nature. But Calderón's Cyprianus is, in this respect, a character who belongs fully to the Middle Ages. A modern physicist or chemist is surrounded in his laboratory by scientific equipment—the physicist by Geissler tubes and other things, the chemist by test tubes, Bunsen burners and the like. Cyprianus, on the other hand, stands with his soul surrounded by the spirit, everywhere flashing out and spilling over from natural processes and natural creatures.

Characteristically, a certain Justina enters into the life of Cyprianus. The drama depicts her quite simply as a woman, but to see her solely as a female human being is not to see the whole of her. These medieval poets are misunderstood by modern interpretations which state that everything simply depicts the material world. They tell us, for instance, that Dante's Beatrice is no more than a gentle female creature. Some interpretations, on the other hand, miss the actual situation by going in the opposite direction, lifting everything up allegorically into a spiritual sphere. But at that time the spiritual pictures and the physical creatures of the earth were not as widely separated as they are in the minds of modern critics today. So when Justina makes her debut in Calderón's drama, we may permit ourselves to think of the element of justice which pervades the whole world. This was not then as abstract as it is now, for now it is found between the covers of tomes which the lawyers can take down from their shelves. Jurisprudence was then felt to be something living.

So Justina comes to Cyprianus. And the hymn about Justina which Cyprianus sings presents another difficulty for modern scientific critics. Modern lawyers do not sing hymns about their jurisprudence, but Cyprianus sensed that the justice which pervades the world was something to which he could sing hymns. We cannot help repeating that spiritual life has changed. Now Cyprianus is at the same time a magician who has dealings with the spirits of nature, that world of demons among whose number the medieval being of Satan can be counted. Cyprianus feels incapable of making a full approach to Justina, so he turns to Satan, the leader of the nature demons, and asks him to win her for him.

Here we have the deep tragedy of the Christian conflict. What approaches Cyprianus in Justina is the justice which is appropriate for Christian development. This justice is to be brought to Cyprianus, who is still a semi-heathen nature scholar. The tragedy is that out of the necessities of nature, which are rigid, he cannot find Christian justice. He can only turn instead to Satan, the leader of the demons, and ask him to win Justina for him.

Satan sets about this task. Human beings find it difficult to understand why Satan—who is, of course, an exceedingly clever being—is ever and again prepared to tackle tasks at which he has repeatedly failed. This is a fact. But however clever we might consider ourselves to be, this is not the way in which to criticize a being as clever as Satan. We should rather ask ourselves what it could be that again and again persuades a being as clever as Satan to try his luck at bringing ruin on human beings. For of course ruin for human beings would have been the result if Satan had succeeded in—let me say—winning over Christian justice in order to bring her to Cyprianus. Well—so Satan sets about his task, but he fails. It is Justina's disposition to feel nothing but revulsion for Satan. She flees from him and he retains only a phantom, a shadow image of her.

You see how various motifs which recur in Faust are to be found in Calderón's drama, but here they are bathed in this early Christian struggle. Satan brings the shadow image to Cyprianus. But Cyprianus does not know what to do with a phantom, a shadow image. It has no life. It bears within it only a shadow image of justice. This drama expresses in a most wonderful way what ancient nature wisdom has become now that it masquerades in the guise of modern science, and how, when it approaches social life—that is, when it approaches Justina—it brings no life with it, but only phantom thoughts. Now, with the fifth post-Atlantean period, mankind has entered upon the age of dead thoughts which gives us only phantoms, phantoms of justice, phantoms of love, phantoms of everything—well, not absolutely everything in life, but certainly in theory.

As a result of all this, Cyprianus goes mad. The real Justina is thrown into prison together with her father. She is condemned to death. Cyprianus hears this in the midst of his madness and demands his own death as well. They meet on the scaffold. Above the scene of their death the serpent appears and, riding on the serpent, the demon who had endeavoured to lead Justina to Cyprianus, declaring that they are saved. They can rise up into the heavenly worlds: ‘This noble member of the spirit world is rescued from evil!’

The whole of the Christian struggle of the Middle Ages is contained in this drama. The human being is placed midway between what he is able to experience before birth in the world of spirit and soul, and what he ought to experience after passing through the portal of death. Christ came down to earth because human beings could no longer see what in earlier times they had seen in their middle, rhythmic system which was trained by the breathing exercises of yoga. The middle system was trained, not the head system. These days human beings cannot find the Christ, but they strive to find him. Christ came down. Because they no longer have him in their memory of the time between death and a new birth, human beings must find him here on earth.

Dramas such as the Cyprianus drama of Calderóndescribe the struggle to find Christ. They describe the difficulties human beings face now that they are supposed to return to the spiritual world and experience themselves in harmony with the spiritual world. Cyprianusis still caught in the demonic echoes of the ancient heathen world. He has also not sufficiently overcome the ancient Hebrew element and brought it down to earth. Jahve is still enthroned in the super-sensible worlds, has not descended through the death on the cross, and has not yet become united with the earth. Cyprianus and Justina experience their coming together with the spiritual world as they step through the portal of death—so terrible is the struggle to bring Christ into human nature in the time between birth and death. And there is an awareness that the Middle Ages are not yet mature enough to bring Christ in in this way.

The Spanish drama of Cyprianus shows us the whole vital struggle to bring in the Christ far more vividly than does the theology of the Middle Ages, which strove to remain in abstract concepts and capture the Mystery of Golgotha in abstract terms. In the dramatic and tragic vitality of Calderón there lives the medieval struggle for Christ, that is, the struggle to fill the nature of the human being with the Christ. When we compare Calderón's Cyprianus drama with the later drama about Faust—this is quite characteristic—we find first in Lessing³ the awareness: Human beings must find the Christ during their earthly life because Christ endured the Mystery of Golgotha and united himself with earthly mankind. Not that this lived in any very clear ideas in Lessing, but he did have a definite sense for it. The fragment of his Faust which Lessing succeeded in getting down on paper concludes when the demons—those who were still able to prevent Cyprianus from finding the Christ during earthly life—receive the call: ‘You shall not conquer!’

This set the theme for the later Faust of Goethe. And even in Goethe the manner in which the human being finds Christianity is rather external. Think of Goethe's Faust: In Part One we have the struggle. Then we come to Part Two. In the Classical Walpurgis-Night and in the drama of Helena we are shown first how Christianity is taken up with reference to the Grecian world. Goethe knows that human beings must forge their links with Christ while they are here on the earth. So he must lead his hero to Christianity. But how? I have to say that this is still only a theoretical kind of knowledge—Goethe was too great a poet for us not to notice that this was only a theoretical kind of knowledge. For actually we find that the ascent in the Christian sense only comes in the final act, where it is tacked on to the end of the whole drama. It is certainly all very wonderful, but it does not come out of the inner nature of Faust. Goethe simply took the Catholic dogma. He used the Catholic cultus and simply tacked the fifth act on to the others. He knew that the human being must come to be filled with Christ. Basically the whole mood that lives in the second part of Faust contains this being filled with the Christ. But still Goethe could not find pictures with which to show what should happen. It is really only after Faust's death that the ascent into Christianity is unfolded.

I wanted to mention all this in order to show you how presumptuous it is to speak in a light-hearted way about achieving a consciousness of the Mystery of Golgotha, a consciousness of Christianity. For to achieve a consciousness of Christianity is a task which entails severe struggles of the kind I have mentioned. It behoves mankind today to seek these spiritual forces within the historical evolution of the Middle Ages and modern times. And after the terrible catastrophe we have all been through, human beings really ought to realize how important it is to turn the eye of their souls to these spiritual impulses.

• 1 . Philo of Alexandria, c.20 B.C. – c.40 A.D. Jewish philosopher and theologian.
• 2 . Pedro Calderön de la Barca, 1600-1681. Greatest Spanish dramatist. The drama about Cyprianus, El mägico prodigioso (The Miracle-working Magician) was written in 1637. The story was taken from a late version of an old tale in the Golden Legend. It is set in Antioch at the time of the Roman Emperor Decius.
• 3 . Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729-1781. German dramatist, critic and writer on aesthetics; one of the great seminal minds in German literature.

We have once more pointed out in these lectures that in the most recent cultural period of human evolution, the fifth post-Atlantean period, the main force governing human soul life is the force of the intellect, the force of ideas living in thoughts. To this we had to add the statement that the force of thoughts is actually the corpse of our life of spirit and soul as it was before birth. More and more strongly in recent times this force of thought has emancipated itself from the other forces of the human being, and this was clearly felt by those spirits who wanted to attain a full understanding of the Christian impulse.

Yesterday I endeavoured to describe this, using the example of Calderón's Cyprianus. That drama depicts, on the one hand, the struggles which arise out of the old ideas of a nature filled with soul and, on the other, the strong sense of helplessness encountered by the human being who distances himself from this old view and is forced to seek shelter in mere thoughts. We saw how Cyprianus had to seek the assistance of Satan in order to win Justina—whose significance I endeavoured to explain. But in consequence of the new soul principle, which is now dominant, all he could receive from Satan was a phantom of Justina.

All these things show forcefully how human beings, striving for the spirit, felt in this new age, how they felt the deadness of mere thought life and how, at the same time, they felt that it would be impossible to enter with these mere thoughts into the living realm of the Christ concept. I then went on yesterday to show that the phase depicted in Calderon's Cyprianus drama is followed by another, which we find in Goethe's Faust. Goethe is a personality who stands fully in the cultural life of the eighteenth century, which was actually far more international than were later times, and which also had a really strong feeling for the intellectual realm, the realm of thoughts. We can certainly say that in his young days Goethe explored all the different sciences much as did the Faust he depicts in his drama. For in what the intellectual realm had to offer, Goethe did not seek what most people habitually seek; he was searching for a genuine connection with the world to which the eternal nature of man belongs. We can certainly say that Goethe sought true knowledge. But he could not find it through the various sciences at his disposal. Perhaps Goethe approached the figure of Faust in an external way to start with. But because of his own special inclinations he sensed in this Faust figure the struggling human being about whom we spoke yesterday. And in a certain sense he identified with this struggling human being.

Goethe worked on Faust in three stages. The first stage leads us back to his early youth when he felt utterly dissatisfied with his university studies and longed to escape from it all and find a true union of soul with the whole of cultural life. Faust was depicted as the struggling human being, the human being striving to escape from mere intellect into a full comprehension of the cosmic origins of man. So this early figure of Faust takes his place beside the other characters simply as the striving human being. Then Goethe underwent those stages of his development during which he submerged himself in the art of the South which he saw as giving form on a higher plane to the essence of nature. He increasingly sought the spirit in nature, for he could not find it in the cultural life that at first presented itself to him. A deep longing led him to the art of the South, which he regarded as the last remnant of Greek art. There, in the way the secrets of nature were depicted artistically out of the Greek world view, he believed he would discover the spirituality of nature.

And then everything he had experienced in Italy underwent a transformation within his soul. We see this transformation given living expression in the intimate form of his fairy-tale¹ about the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in which, out of certain traditional concepts of beauty, wisdom, virtue and strength, he created the temple with the four Kings.

Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, we see how, encouraged by Schiller, he returns to Faust, enriched with this world of ideas. This second stage of his work on Faust is marked particularly by the appearance of the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, that wonderful poem which begins with the words: ‘The sun makes music as of old, Amid the rival spheres of heaven.’² In the drama as Goethe now conceives it, Faust no longer stands there as a solitary figure concerned solely with himself. Now we have the cosmos with all the forces of the universe ascending and descending, and within this cosmos the human being whom the powers of good and evil do battle to possess. Faust takes his place within the cosmos as a whole. Goethe has expanded the material from a question of man alone to a question encompassing the whole of the universe.

The third stage begins in the twenties of the nineteenth century, when Goethe sets about completing the drama. Once again quite new thoughts live in his soul, very different from those with which he was concerned at the end of the eighteenth century when he composed the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, using ancient ideas about nature, ideas of the spirit in nature, in order to raise the question of Faust to the level of a question of the cosmos. In the twenties, working to bring the second part of the drama to a conclusion, Goethe has returned once more to the human soul out of which he now wants to draw everything, expanding the soul-being once more into a cosmic being.

Of course he has to make use of external representations, but we see how he depicts dramatically the inner journeyings of the soul. Consider the ‘Classical Walpurgis-Night’ or the reappearance of the Helena scene, which had been there earlier, though merely in the form of an episode. And consider how, in the great final tableau, he endeavours to bring to a concluding climax the soul's inner experience, which is at the same time a cosmic experience when it becomes spiritual. Finally the drama flows over into a Christian element. But, as I said yesterday, this Christian element is not developed out of Faust's experiences of soul but is merely tacked on to the end. Goethe made a study of the Catholic cultus and then tacked this Christianizing element on to the end of Faust. There is only an external connection between Faust's inner struggles and the way in which the drama finally leads into this Christian tableau of the universe. This is not intended to belittle the Faust drama. But it has to be said that Goethe, who wrestled in the deepest sense of the word to depict how the spiritual world should be found in earthly life, did not, in fact, succeed in discovering a way of depicting this finding of spirituality in earthly life. To do so, he would have had to come to a full comprehension of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. He would have had to understand how the Christ-being came from the expanses of the cosmos and descended into the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and how he united himself with the earth, so that ever since then, when seeking the spirit which ebbs and flows in the stormy deeds of man, one ought to find the Christ-impulse in earthly life.

Goethe was never able to make the link between the spirit of the earth, ebbing and flowing in stormy deeds, in the weaving of time, and the Christ-impulse. In a way this may be felt to be a tragedy. But it came about of necessity, because the period of human evolution in which Goethe stood did not yet provide the ground on which the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha could be comprehended. Indeed, this Mystery of Golgotha can only be fully comprehended if human beings learn to give new life to the dead thoughts which are a part of them in this fifth post-Atlantean period. Today there is a tremendous amount of prejudice, in thought, in feeling and in will, against the re-enlivening of the world of thought. But mankind must solve this problem. Mankind must learn to give new life to this world of thought which enters human nature at birth and conception as the corpse of spirit and soul; this corpse of thoughts and ideas must be made to live again. But this can only happen when thoughts are transformed—first into Imaginations, and then the Imaginations transformed into Inspirations and Intuitions. What is needed is a full understanding of the human being. Not until this becomes a reality, will what I told you yesterday be fully understood: That the world around us must come to be seen as a tremendous question to which the human being himself provides the answer. This is what was to have been given to mankind with the Mystery of Golgotha. It will not be understood until the human being is understood.

Let us look at a diagram of threefold man once more: the human being of the head or of the nerves and senses as discussed yesterday;

Earth

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the human being of the rhythmic system or of the chest; and the human being of the metabolism and limbs.

Looking at the human being today, we accept him as the external form in which he appears to us. Someone dissecting a body on the dissecting table has no special feeling that the human head, for instance, is in any way very different from, say, a finger. A finger muscle is considered in the same way as is a muscle in the head. But it ought to be known that the head is, in the main, a metamorphosis of the system of limbs and metabolism from the preceding incarnation; in other words, the head occupies a place in evolution which is quite different from that of the system of limbs that goes with it.

Having at last struggled through to a view of the inner aspect of threefold man, we shall then be in a position to come to a view of what is linked from the cosmos with this threefold human being. As far as our external being is concerned, we are in fact only incarnated in the solid, earthly realm through our head organization. We should never be approachable as a creature of the solid earth if we did not possess our head organization, which is, however, an echo of the limb organization of our previous incarnation. The fact that we have solid parts also in our hands and feet is the result of what rays down from the head. But it is our head which makes us solid. Everything solid and earthly in us derives from our head, as far as the forces in it are concerned.

In our head the solid earth is in us. And whatever is solid anywhere else in our body rays down through us from our head. The origin of our solid bones lies in our head. But there is also in our head a transition to the watery element. All the solid parts of our brain are embedded in the cerebral fluid. In our head there is a constant inter-mingling vibration of the solid parts of our brain with the cerebral fluid which is linked to the rest of the body by way of the spinal fluid. So, looking at the human being of nerves and senses, we can say that here is the transition from the earthly element (blue) to the watery element. We can say that the human being of nerves and senses lives in the earthy-watery element. And in accordance with this, our brain consists of an intercorrespondence between the earthy and watery elements.

Now let us turn to the chest organism, the rhythmic organism. This rhythmic organism lives in the interrelationship between the watery and the airy element (yellow). In the lungs you can see the watery element making contact with the airy element. The rhythmic life is anintermingling of the watery with the airy element, of water with air. So I could say: The rhythmical human being lives in the watery-airy element.

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And the human being of metabolism and limbs then lives in the transition from the airy element to the warmth element, in the fiery element (red, next diagram). It is a constant dissolving of the airy element in the warmth, the fiery element, which then seeps through the whole human being as his body heat. What happens in our metabolism and in our movements is a reorganization of the airy, gaseous element up into the warm, fiery element. As we move about, we constantly burn up those elements of the food we have eaten which have become airy. Even when we do not move about, the foods we eat are transformed airy elements which we constantly burn up in the warmth element. So the human being of limbs and metabolism lives in the airy-fiery element.

Human being of nerves and senses: earthy-watery element

Rhythmical human being: watery-airy element

Human being of limbs and metabolism: airy-fiery element

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From here we go up even further into the etheric parts, into the light element, into the etheric body of the human being. When the organism of metabolism and limbs has transferred everything into warmth, it then goes up into the etheric body. Here the human being joins up with the etheric realm which fills the whole world; here he makes the link with the cosmos.

Ideas like this, which I have shown you only as diagrams, can be transformed into artistic and poetic form by someone who has an inner sense for sculpture and music. In a work of poetry such as the drama of Faust such things can certainly be expressed in artistic form, in the way certain cosmic secrets are expressed, for instance, in the seventh scene of my first Mystery Drama.³ This leads to the possibility of seeing the human being linked once more with the cosmos. But for this we cannot apply to the human being what our intellect teaches us about external nature. You must understand that if you study external nature, and then study your head in the same way as you would external nature, you are then studying something which simply does not belong to external nature as it now is, but something that comes from your former incarnation. You are studying something as though it had arisen at the present moment; but it is not something that has arisen out of the present moment, nor could it ever arise out of the present moment. For a human head could not possibly arise out of the forces of nature which exist. So the human head must not be studied in the same way as objects are studied with the intellect. It must be studied with the knowledge given by Imagination. The human head will not be understood until it is studied with the knowledge given by Imagination.

In the rhythmical human being everything comes into movement. Here we have to do with the watery and the airy elements. Everything

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is in surging movement. The external, solid parts of our breast organization are only what our head sends down into this surging motion. To study the rhythmical human being we have to say that in this rhythmical surging the watery element and the airy element mingle together (see diagram, green, yellow). Into this, the head sends the possibility for the solid parts, such as those in the lungs, to be present (white). This surging, which is the real rhythmical human being, can only be studied with the knowledge given by Inspiration. So the rhythmical human being can only be studied with the knowledge given by Inspiration.

And the human being of limbs and metabolism—this is the continuous burning of the air in us. You stand within it, in your warmth you feel yourself to be a human being, but this is a very obscure idea. It can only be studied properly with the knowledge given by Intuition, in which the soul stands within the object. Only the knowledge given by Intuition can lead to the human being of metabolism and limbs.

The human being will remain forever unknown if he is not studied with the knowledge given by Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. He will forever remain the external shell which is all that is recognized today, both in general and in science. This situation must not be allowed to remain. The human being must come once more to be recognized for what he is. If you study only the solid parts of the human being, the parts which are shown in the illustrations in anatomy textbooks, then, right from the start, you are studying wrongly. Your study ought to be in the realm of Imagination, because all these illustrations of the solid parts of the human organism ought to be taken as images brought over from the previous incarnation. This is the first thing. Then come the even more delicate parts which live in the physical constituents. These can only be studied with the knowledge given by Inspiration. And the airy-watery element can only be studied with the knowledge given by Intuition. These things must be taken into European consciousness, indeed into the whole of modern civilization. If we fail to place them in the mainstream of culture, our civilization will only go downhill instead of upwards.

When you understand what Goethe intended with his Faust, you sense that he was endeavouring to pass through a certain gateway. Everywhere he is struggling with the question: What is it that we need to know about this human being? As a very young man he began to study the human form. Read his discourse on the intermaxillary bone and also what I wrote about it in my edition of his scientific writings.⁴ He is endeavouring so hard to come to an understanding of man. First he tried by way of anatomy and physiology. Then in the nineties he explored the aspect of moral ideas which we find in the fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Then, in Faust, he wants to depict the human being as he stands in the world. He is trying to pass through a gateway in order to discover how the human being does, in fact, stand in the world. But he lacks the necessary prerequisites; he cannot do it.

When Calderón wrote his drama about Cyprianus, the struggle was still taking place at a previous level. We see how Justina tears herself free of Satan's clutches, how Cyprianus goes mad, how they find one another in death, and how their salvation comes as they meet their end on the scaffold. Above them the serpent appears—on it rides the demon who is forced to announce their salvation.

We see that at the time when Calderon was writing his Cyprianus drama the message to be clearly stated was: You cannot find the divine, spiritual realm here on earth. First you must die and go through the portal of death; then you will discover the divine spiritual world, that salvation which you can find through Christ. They were still far from understanding the Mystery of Golgotha through which Christ had descended to earth, where it now ought to be possible to find him. Calderon still has too many heathen and Jewish elements in his ideas for him to have a fully developed sense for Christianity.

After that, a good deal of time passed before Goethe started to work on his Faust. He sensed that it was necessary for Faust to find his salvation here on earth. The question he should therefore have asked was: How can Faust discover the truth of Paul's words: ‘Not I, but Christ in me’?⁵ Goethe should have let his Faust say not only, to ‘Stand on free soil among a people free’,⁶ but also: to ‘stand on free soil with Christ in one's soul leading the human being in earthly life to the spirit’. Goethe should have let Faust say something like this. But Goethe is honest; he does not say it because he has not yet fully understood it. But he is striving to understand it. He is striving for something which can only be achieved when it is possible to say: Learn to know man through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. That he is striving in this way gives us the feeling that there is much more in his struggle and in his endeavour than he ever managed to express or than has filtered through into today's culture. Perhaps he can only be fully recognized by doing what I did in my early writings when I endeavoured to express the ‘world view which lived almost unconsciously in him. However, on the whole, his search has met with little understanding amongst the people of today.

When I look at this whole situation in connection with modern civilization, I am constantly reminded of my old teacher and friend, Karl Julius Schröer.⁷ I think particularly of how, in the eighties of the last century, Schröer was working on Faust and on Goethe's other plays, writing commentaries, introductions and so on. He was not in the least concerned to speak about Goethe in clearly defined concepts but merely gave general indications. Yet he was at pains to make people understand that what lived most profoundly in Goethe must enter into mainstream modern culture. On the fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's death, in 1882, Schröer gave an address: ‘How the future will see Goethe’. He lived with the dream that the time had already come for a kind of resurrection of Goethe. Then we wrote a short essay in Die Neue Freie Presse which was reprinted in the booklet ‘Goethe and Love’. This and other of his writings have now been acquired by our publisher, Der Kommende Tag, so remaindered copies can be acquired there, and there will also be new editions eventually. This essay ‘Goethe after 50 Years’ is a brief extract from that lecture, at which I was present. It contains a good deal of what Schröer felt at that time regarding the need for Goethe to be assimilated into modern culture. And then in this booklet ‘Goethe and Love’ he endeavoured to show in the notes how Goethe could be made to come alive, for to bring Goethe to life is, in a sense, to bring the world of abstract thoughts to life. In the recent number of Das Goetheanum I referred to a beautiful passage about this in the booklet ‘Goethe and Love’. Schröer says: ‘Schiller recognized him. When an intuitive genius searches for the character of necessity in the empirical realm, he will always produce individuals even though these may have a generic aspect. With his intuitive method of seeing the eternal idea, the primeval type, in the mortal individual, Goethe is perhaps not as alone as one might assume.’

While Schröer was writing this booklet in 1882 I visited him a number of times. He was filled to the brim with an impression he had had. He had heard somewhere how Oppolzer, a physician in Vienna, used a rather vague intuitive faculty when making his diagnoses. Instead of examining the patient in the usual way, he allowed the type of the patient to make an impression on him, and from the type of the patient he deduced something of the type of the illness. This made a strong impression on Schröer, and he used this phenomenon to enlarge on what he was trying to explain: ‘In medicine we extol the ability of great diagnosticians to fathom the disease by intuitively discerning the individual patient's type, his habitude. They are not helped by chemical or anatomical knowledge but by an intuitive sense for the living creature as a whole being. They are creative spirits who see the sun because their eyeis sunlike. Others do not see the sun. What these diagnosticians are doing unconsciously is to follow the intuitive method which Goethe consciously applied as a means of scientific study. The results he achieved are no longer disputed, though the method is not yet generally recognized.’

Out of a conspectus which included Oppolzer's intuitive bedside method, Schröer even then was pointing out that the different sciences, for example, medicine, needed fructifying by a method which worked together with the spirit.

It is rather tragic to look back and see in Schröer one of the last of those who still sensed what was most profound in Goethe. At the beginning of the eighties of the last century Schroer believed that there would have to be a Goethe revival, but soon after that Goethe was truly nailed into his coffin and buried with sweeping finality. His grave, we could say, was in Central Europe, in the Goethe-Gesellschaft, whose English branch was called the Goethe Society. This is where the living Goethe was buried. But now it is necessary to bring this living element, which was in Goethe, back into our culture. Karl Julius Schroer's instinct was good. In his day he was unable to fulfil it because his contemporaries continued to worship the dead Goethe. ‘He who would study organic existence, first drives out the soul with rigid persistence.’⁸

This became the motto, and in some very wide circles this motto has intensified into a hatred against any talk of spiritual things—as you can see in the way Anthroposophy is received by many people.

Today's culture, which all of you have as your background, urgently needs this element of revival. It is quite extraordinary how much talk there is today of Goethe's Faust, which after all simply represents a new stage in the struggle for the spirit which we saw in Calderón's Cyprianus drama. So much is said about Faust, yet there is no understanding for the task of the present time, which is to bring fully to life what Goethe brought to life in his Faust, especially in the second part. Goethe brought it to life in a vague, intuitive sensing, though not with full spiritual insight. We ought to turn our full attention to this, for indeed it is not only a matter of a world view. It is a matter of our whole culture and civilization. There are many symptoms, if only we can see them in the right light.

Here is an essay by Ruedorffer⁹ entitled ‘The Three Crises’. Every page gives us a painful knock. The writer played important roles in the diplomatic and political life of Europe before the war and on into the war. Now, with his intimate knowledge of the highways and byways of European-life, and because he was able to observe things from vantage points not open to most, he is seeking an explanation of what is actually going on. I need only read you a few passages. He wants to be a realist, not an idealist. During the course of his diplomatic career he has developed a sober view of life. And despite the fact that he has written such things as the passages I am going to read to you he remains that much appreciated character, a bourgeois philistine.

He deals with three things in his essay. Firstly he says that the countries and nations of Europe no longer have any relationship with one another. Then he says that the governing circles, the leaders of the different nations, have no relationship with the population. And thirdly he says that those people in particular who want to work out and found a new age by radical means most certainly have no relationship with reality.

So a person who played his part in bringing about the situation that now exists writes: ‘This sickness of the state organism snatches leadership away from good sense and hands responsibility for decisions of state to all sorts of minor influences and secondary considerations. It inhibits freedom of movement, fragments the national will and usually also leads to a dangerous instability of governments. The period of unruly nationalism that preceded the war, the war itself, and the situation in Europe since the war, have made monstrous demands on the good sense of all the states, and on their peace and their freedom to manoevre. The loss of wealth brought about by necessary measures has completed the catastrophe. The crisis of the state and the crisis in world-wide organization have mutually exacerbated the situation, each magnifying the destructive effect of the other.’ These are not the words of an idealist, or of some artistic spirit who watched from the sidelines, but of someone who shared in creating the situation. He says, for instance: ‘If democracy is to endure, it must be honest and courageous enough to call a spade a spade, even if it means bearing witness against itself. Europe faces ruin.’

So it is not only pessimistic idealists who say that Europe is faced with ruin. The same is said especially by those who stood in the midst of practical life. One of these very people says:

‘Europe faces ruin. There is no time to waste by covering up mistakes for party political reasons, instead of setting about putting them to rights. It is for this reason alone, and not to set myself up as laudator temporis acti, that I have to stress that democracy must, and will, destroy itself if it cannot free the state from this snare of minor influences and secondary considerations. Pre-war Europe collapsed because all the countries of the continent—the monarchies as well as the democracies and, above all, autocratic Russia—succumbed to demagogy, partly voluntarily, partly unconsciously, partly with reluctance because their hand was forced. In the confusion of mind, for which they had only themselves to thank, they were incapable of recognizing good sense, and even if they had recognized it they would have been incapable of acting on it freely and decisively. The higher social strata of the old states of Europe—who, in the last century, were certainly the bearers of European culture and rich in personalities of statesmanlike quality and much world experience—would not have been so easily thrown from the saddle, rotten and expended, if they had grown with the problems and tasks of new times, if they had not lost their statesmanlike spirit, and if they had preserved any more worthwhile tradition than that of the most trivial diplomatic routine. If monarchs claim the ability to select statesmen more proficiently and expertly than governments, then they and their courts must be the centre and epitome of culture, insight and understanding. Long before the war this ceased to be the case. But indictment of the monarchs’ failures does not exonerate the democracies from recognizing the causes of their own inadequacies or from doing everything possible to eliminate them. Before Europe can recover, before any attempt can be made to replace its hopeless disorganization with a durable political structure, the individual countries will have to tidy up their internal affairs to an extent which will free their governments for long-term serious work. Otherwise, the best will in the world and the greatest capability will be paralysed, tied down by the web of the disaster which is the same wherever we look.’

I would not bother to read all this to you if it had been written by an idealist, instead of by someone who considers his feet to be firmly on the ground of reality because he played a part in bringing the current situation about.

‘The drama is deeply tragic. Every attempt at improvement, every word of change, becomes entangled in this web, throttled by a thousand threads, until it falls to the ground without effect. The citizens of Europe—thoughtlessly clutching the contemporary erroneous belief in the constant progress of mankind, or, with loud lamentations trotting along in the same old rut—fail to see, and do not want to see, that they are living off the stored-up labour of earlier years; they are barely capable of recognizing the present broken-down state of the world order, and are certainly incapable of bringing a new one to birth. On the other hand, the workers, treading a radical path in almost every country and convinced of the untenability of the present situation, believe themselves to be the bringers of salvation through a new order of things; but in reality this belief has made them into nothing more than an unconscious tool of destruction and decline, their own included. The new parasites of economic disorganization, the complaining rich of yester-year, the petit bourgeois descending to the level of the proletariat, the gullible worker believing himself to be the founder of a new world—all of them seem to be engulfed by the same disaster, all of them are blind men digging their own grave.’

Remember, this is not written by an idealist, but by one who shared in bringing about this situation!

‘But every political factor today—the recent peace treaties of the Entente, the Polish invasion of the Ukraine, the blindness or helplessness of the Entente with regard to developments in Germany and Austria—proves to the politician who depends on reality that although idealistic demands for a pan-European, constructive revision of the Paris peace treaties can be made, although the most urgent warnings can be shockingly justified, nevertheless, both demands and warnings can but die away unnoticed while everything rolls on unchanged towards the inevitable end—the abyss.’

The whole book is written in order to prove that Europe has come to the brink of the abyss and that we are currently employed in digging the grave of European civilization. But all this is only an introduction to what I now find it necessary to say to you. What I have to say is something different. Here we have a man who was himself an occupant of crucial seats of office, a man who realizes that Europe is on the brink of the abyss. And yet—as we can see in the whole of his book—all he has to say is: If all that happens is only a continuation of older impulses, then civilization will perish; it will definitely perish. Something new must come.

So now let me search for this new thing to which he wants to point. Yes, here it is, on page 67; here it is, in three lines: ‘Only a change of heart in the world, a change of will by the major powers, can lead to the creation of a supreme council of European good sense.’

Yes, this is the decision that faces these people. They point out that only if a change of heart comes about, if something entirely new is brought into being, can the situation be saved. This whole book is written to show that without this there can be no salvation. There is a good deal of truth in this. For, in truth, salvation for our collapsing civilization can only come from a spiritual life drawn from the real sources of the spirit. There is no other salvation. Without it, modern civilization, in so far as it is founded in Europe and reaches across to America, is drawing towards its close. Decay is the most important phenomenon of our time. There is no help in reaching compromises with decay. Help can only come from turning to something that can flourish above the grave, because it is more powerful than death. And that is spiritual life. But people like the writer of this book have only the most abstract notion of what this entails. They say an international change of heart must take place. If anything is said about a real, new blossoming of spiritual life, this is branded as ‘useless mysticism’. All people can say is: Look at them, bringing up all kinds of occult and mystical things; we must have nothing to do with them.

Those who are digging the grave of modern civilization most busily are those who actually have the insight to see that the digging is going on. But the only real way of taking up a stance with regard to these things is to look at them squarely, with great earnestness—to meditate earnestly on the fact that a new spiritual life is what is needed and that it is necessary to search for this spiritual life, so that at last a way may be found of finding Christ within earthly life, and of finding Him as He has become since the Mystery of Golgotha. For He descended in order to unite with the conditions of the earth.

The strongest battle against real Christian truth is being fought today by a certain kind of theology which raises its hands in horror at any mention of the cosmic Christ. It is necessary to be reminded again and again that even in the days when Schröer was pointing to Goethe as a source for a regeneration of civilization, a book appeared by a professor in Basel—a friend of Nietzsche—about modern Christian theology. Overbeck¹⁰ considered at that time that theology was the most un-Christian thing, and as a historian of theology he sought to prove this. So there was at that time in Basel a professor of theological history who set out to prove that theology is un-Christian!

Mankind has drifted inevitably towards catastrophe because it failed to hear the isolated calls, which did exist but which were, it must be said, still very unclear. Today there is no longer any time to lose.

Today mankind must know that descriptions such as that given by Ruedorffer are most definitely true and that it is most definitely necessary to realize how everything is collapsing because of the continuation of the old impulses. There is only one course to follow: We must turn towards what can grow out of the grave, out of the living spirit.

This is what must be pointed out ever and again, especially in connection with the things with which we are concerned.

• 1 . Floris Books, Edinburgh 1979. See, for instance, Rudolf Steiner, The Portal of Initiation & The Character of Goethe's Spirit as Shown in the Fairy Story (incl. a translation of the Fairy Story by Thomas Carlyle), Rudolf Steiner Press, New Jersey 1961.
• 2 . Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One, ‘Prologue in Heaven’. The English versions of the quotations from Faust are taken from the translation by Bayard Taylor, with the exception of these lines from the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, which are translated by Shelley. (Tr.)
• 3 . The Portal of Initiation. A Rosicrucian Mystery through Rudolf Steiner, transl. Ruth and Hans Pusch, Steiner Book Centre, Toronto, 1973.
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, mit Einleitungen, Fussnoten und Erlauterungen im Text (Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings) in Kürschners Deutsche National-Litteratur. On the intermaxillary bone see Volume 1.
• 5 . Galatians 2, 20
• 6 . Part Two, Act 5, Great Outer Court of the Palace.
• 7. Karl Julius Schröer, 1825-1900. On his booklet Goethe und die Liebe (Goethe and Love) see Rudolf Steiner's collected essays 1921-1925 in Der Goetheanumgedanke inmitten der Kulturkrisis der Gegenwart, p.111. GA 36.
• 8 . Faust Part One. The Study.
• 9 . J.J. Ruedorffer, Die drei Krisen. Eine Untersuchung fiber den gegenwartigen politischen Weltzustand (The Three Crises. A consideration of the present state of world politics.) Stuttgart/Berlin 1920.
• 10. Franz Overbeck, 1837-1905.

The turning-point, between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods,¹ which falls in the fifteenth century, is very much more significant for human evolution than is recognized by external history, even today. There is no awareness of the tremendous change which took place at that time in the condition of human souls. We can say that profound traces of what took place at that time for mankind as a whole became deeply embedded in the consciousness of the best spirits. These traces remained for a long time and are indeed still there today. That something so important can take place without at first being much noticed externally is shown by another example—that of Christianity itself.

During the course of almost two thousand years, Christianity has wrought tremendous transformation on the civilized world. Yet, a century after the Mystery of Golgotha, it meant little, even to the greatest spirits of the leading culture of the time—that of Rome. It was still seen as a minor event of little significance that had taken place out there in Asia, on the periphery of the Empire. Similarly, what took place in the civilized world around the first third of the fifteenth century has been little noted in external, recorded history. Yet it has left deep traces in human striving and endeavour.

We spoke about some aspects recently. For instance, we saw that Calderón's² drama about the magician Cyprianus shows how this spiritual change was experienced in Spain. Now it is becoming obvious—though it is not expressed in the way Anthroposophy has to express it—that in all sorts of places at this point in human evolution there is a more vital sense for the need to gain greater clarity of soul about this change. I have also pointed out that Goethe's Faust is one of the endeavours, one of the human struggles, to gain clarity about it. More light can perhaps be thrown on this Faust of Goethe when it is seen in a wider cultural context. But first let us look at Faust himself as an isolated individual.

First of all in his youthful endeavours, stimulated of course by the cultural situation in Europe at that time, Goethe came to depict in dramatic form the striving of human beings in the newly dawning age of the intellect. From the way in which he came across the medieval Faust figure in a popular play or something similar, he came to see him as a representative of all those seeking personalities who lived at that time. Faust belongs to the sixteenth, not the fifteenth century,³ but of course the spiritual change did not take place in the space of only a year or even a century. It came about gradually over centuries. So the Faust figure came towards Goethe like a personality living in the midst of this seeking and striving that had come from earlier times and would go on into later centuries. We can see that the special nature of this seeking and striving, as it changed from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period, is perfectly clear to Goethe. First he presents Faust as the scholar who is familiar with all four academic faculties. All four faculties have worked on his soul, so that he has taken into his soul the impulses which derive from intellectualism, from intellectualistic science. At the same time he senses how unsatisfying it is for human beings to remain stuck in one-sided intellectualism. As you know, Faust turns away from this intellectualism and, in his own way, towards the practice of magic. Let us be clear about what is meant in this case. What he has gone through by way of ‘Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine and even, alas, Theology,’⁴ is what anyone can go through by studying the intellectualized sciences. It leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction. It leaves behind this feeling of dissatisfaction because anything abstract—and abstraction is the language of these sciences—makes demands only on a part of the human being, the head part, while all the rest is left out of account.

Compare this with what it was like in earlier times. The fact that things were different in earlier times is habitually overlooked. In those earlier times the people who wanted to push forward to a knowledge of life and the world did not turn to intellectual concepts. All their efforts were concentrated on seeing spiritual realities, spiritual beings, behind the sense-perceptible objects of their environment. This is what people find so difficult to understand. In the tenth, eleventh, twelfth centuries those who strove for knowledge did not only seek intellectual concepts, they sought spiritual beings and realities, in accordance with what can be perceived behind sense-perceptible phenomena and not in accordance with what can be merely thought about sense-perceptible phenomena.

This is what constitutes that great spiritual change. What people sought in earlier times was banished to the realm of superstition, and the inclination to seek for real spiritual beings was lost. Instead, intellectual concepts came to be the only acceptable thing, the only really scientific knowledge. But no matter how logically people told themselves that the only concepts and ideas free of any superstition are those which the intellect forms on the basis of sense-perceptible reality, nevertheless these concepts and ideas failed, in the long run, to satisfy the human being as a whole, and especially the human heart and soul. In this way Goethe's Faust finds himself to be so dissatisfied with the intellectual knowledge he possesses that he turns back to what he remembers of the realm of magic.

This was a true and genuine mood of soul in Goethe. He, too, had explored the sciences at the University of Leipzig. Turning away from the intellectualism he met in Leipzig, he started to explore what in Faust he later called ‘magic’, for instance, together with Susanne von Klettenberg and also by studying the relevant books. Not until he met Herder⁵ in Strasbourg did he discover a real deepening of vision. In him he found a spirit who was equally averse to intellectualism. Herder was certainly not an intellectual; hence his anti-Kant attitude. He led Goethe beyond what—in a genuinely Faustian mood—he had been endeavouring to discover in connection with ancient magic.

Thus Goethe looked at this Faust of the sixteenth century, or rather at that scholar of the fifteenth century who was growing beyond magic, even though he was still half-immersed in it. Goethe wanted to depict his own deepest inner search, a search which was in him because the traces of the spiritual change from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period were still working in him.

It is one of the most interesting phenomena of recent cultural evolution that Goethe, who wanted to give expression to his own youthful striving, should turn to that professor from the fifteenth and sixteenth century. In the figure of this professor he depicted his own inner soul life and experience. Du Bois-Reymond,⁶ of course, totally misunderstood both what lived in Goethe and what lived in the great change that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when he said: Goethe made a big mistake in depicting Faust as he did; he should have done it quite differently. It is right that Faust should be dissatisfied with what tradition had to offer him; but if Goethe had depicted him properly he would have shown, after the early scenes, how he first made an honest woman of Gretchen by marrying her, and then became a well-known professor who went on to invent the electro-static machine and the air pump. This is what Du Bois-Reymond thought should have become of Faust.

Well, Goethe did not let this happen to Faust, and I am not sure whether it would have been any more interesting if he had done what Du Bois-Reymond thought he should have done. But as it is, Goethe's Faust is one of the most interesting phenomena of recent cultural history because Goethe felt the urge to let this professor from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries stand as the representative of what still vibrated in his own being as an echo of that spiritual change which came about during the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.

The sixteenth century Faust—that is the legendary Faust, not the one who ought to have become the inventor of the electro-static machine and the air pump—takes up magic and perishes, goes to the devil. We know that this sixteenth century Faust could not be seen by either Lessing or Goethe as the Faust of the eighteenth century. Now it was necessary to endeavour to show that once again there was a striving for the spirit and that man ought to find his way to salvation, if I may use this expression.

Here, to begin with, is Faust, the professor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Goethe has depicted him strikingly well, for this is just what such personalities were like at the universities of that time. Of course, the Faust of legend would not have been suitable, for he would have been more like a roaming vagabond gipsy. Goethe is describing not the legendary Faust but the figure of a professor. Of course, at the profoundest soul level he is an individual, a unique personality. But Goethe does also depict him as a type, as a typical professor of philosophy, or perhaps of medicine, of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. On the one hand he stands in the midst of the culture of his day, occupying himself with the intellectual sciences, but on the other he is not unfamiliar with occult things, which in Goethe's own day were considered nothing more than superstition.

Let us now look at Goethe's Faust in a wider world context. We do make the acquaintance of his famulus and Goethe shows us the relationship between the two. We also meet a student—though judging by his later development he does not seem to have been much influenced by his professor. But apart from this, Goethe does not show us much of the real influence exercised by Faust, in his deeper soul aspects, as he might have taught as a professor in, say, Wittenberg. However, there does exist a pupil of Faust who can lead us more profoundly into this wider world context. There is a pupil of Faust who occupies a place in the cultural history of mankind which is almost equal to that of Professor Faust himself—I am speaking only of Faust as Goethe portrayed him. And this pupil is none other than Hamlet.

Hamlet can indeed be seen as a genuine pupil of Faust. It is not a question of the historical aspect of Faust as depicted by Goethe. The whole action of the drama shows that although the cultural attitudes are those of the eighteenth century, nevertheless Goethe's endeavour was to place Faust in an earlier age. But from a certain point of view it is definitely possible to say: Hamlet, who has studied at Wittenberg and has brought home with him a certain mood of spirit—Hamlet as depicted by Shakespeare,⁷ can be seen in the context of world spiritual history as a pupil of Faust. It may even be true to say that Hamlet is a far more genuine pupil of Faust than are the students depicted in Goethe's drama.

Consider the whole character of Hamlet and combine this with the fact that he studied in Wittenberg where he could easily have heard a professor such as Faust. Consider the manner in which he is given his task. His father's ghost appears to him. He is in contact with the real spiritual world. He is really within it. But he has studied in Wittenberg where he was such a good student that he has come to regard the human brain as a book. You remember the scene when Hamlet speaks of the ‘book and volume’ of his brain.⁸ He has studied human sciences so thoroughly that he speaks of writing what he wants to remember on the table of his memory, almost as though he had known the phrase which Goethe would use later when composing his Faust drama: ‘For what one has, in black and white, one carries home and then goes through it.’⁹ Hamlet is on the one hand an excellent student of the intellectualism taught him at Wittenberg, but on the other hand he is immersed in a spiritual reality. Both impulses work in his soul. The whole of the Hamlet drama stands under the influence of these two impulses. Hamlet—both the drama and the character—stands under the influence of these impulses because, when it comes down to it, the writer of Hamlet does not really know how to combine the spiritual world with the intellectual mood of soul. Poetic works which contain characteristics that are so deeply rooted in life provide rich opportunities for discussion. That is why so many books are written about such works, books which do not really make much sense because there is no need for them to make sense. The commentators are constantly concerned with what they consider to be a most important question: Is the ghost in Hamlet merely a picture, or does it have objective significance? What can be concluded from the fact that only Hamlet, and not the others characters present on the stage, can see the ghost? Think of all the learned and interesting things that have been written about this! But of course none of it is connected with what concerned the poet who wrote Hamlet. He belonged to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And writing out of the life of that time he could do no other than approach these things in a way which cannot be fixed in abstract concepts. That is why I say that it is not necessary to make any sense of all the various commentaries. We are talking about a time of transition. Earlier, it was quite clear that spiritual beings were as real as tables and chairs, or as a dog or a cat. Although Calderon lived even later than Shakespeare, he still held to this older view. It would not have occurred to him even to hint that the spiritual beings in his works might be merely subjective in character. Because his whole soul was still open to spiritual insight, he portrayed anything spiritual as something just as concrete as dogs and cats.

Shakespeare, whose mood of soul belonged fully to the time of transition, did not feel the need to handle the matter in any other way than that which stated: It might be like this or it might be like that. There is no longer a clear distinction between whether the spiritual beings are subjective or objective. This is a question which is just as irrelevant for a higher world view as it would be to ask in real life—not in astronomy, of course—where to draw the line between day and night. The question as to whether one is subjective and the other objective becomes irrelevant as soon as we recognize the objectivity of the inner world of man and the subjectivity of the external world. In Hamlet and also, say, in Macbeth, Shakespeare maintains a living suspension between the two. So we see that Shakespeare's dramas are drawn from the transition between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods.

The expression of this is clearest in Hamlet. It may not be historical but it is none the less true to suggest that perhaps Hamlet was at Wittenberg just at the time when Faust was lecturing not so much about the occult as about the intellectual sciences—from what we said earlier you now know what I mean. Perhaps he was at Wittenberg before Faust admitted to himself that, ‘straight or crosswise, wrong or right’, he had been leading his scholars by the nose these ten years long. Perhaps Hamlet had been at Wittenberg during those very ten years, among those whom Faust had been leading by the nose. We can be sure that during those ten years Faust was not sure of where he stood. So having taken all this in from a soul that was itself uncertain, Hamlet returns and is faced on the one hand with what remains from an earlier age and what he himself can still perceive, and on the other with a human attitude which simply drives the spirits away. Just as ghosts flee before the light, so does the perception of spiritual beings flee before intellectualism. Spiritual vision cannot tolerate intellectualism because the outcome of it is a mood of soul in which the human being is inwardly torn right away from any connection with the spirit. The pallor of thoughts makes him ill in his inner being, and the consequence of this is the soul mood characteristic of the time from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries and on into even later times. Goethe, who was sensitive to all these things, also had a mood of soul that reached back into this period. We ought to be clear about this.

Take Greek drama. It is unthinkable without the spiritual beings who stand behind it. It is they who determine human destinies. Human beings are woven into the fabric of destiny by the spiritual forces. This fabric brings into ordinary life what human beings would otherwise only experience if they were able consciously to go into the state of sleep. The will impulses which human beings sleep through in their daytime consciousness are brought into ordinary life. Greek destiny is an insight into what man otherwise sleeps through. When the ancient Greek brings his will to bear, when he acts, he is aware that this is not only the working of his daytime consciousness with its insipid thoughts. Because his whole being is at work, he knows that what pulses through him when he sleeps is also at work. And out of this awareness he gains a certain definite attitude to the question of death, the question of immortality.

Now we come to the period I have been describing, in which human beings no longer had any awareness that something spiritual played in—also in their will—while they slept. We come to the period in which human beings thought their sleep was their own, though at the same time they knew from tradition that they have some connection with the spiritual world. Abstract concepts such as ‘Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even, alas! Theology’ begin to take on a shadowy outline of what they will become in modern times. They begin to appear, but at the same time the earlier vision still plays in. This brings about a twilight consciousness. People really did live in this twilight consciousness. Such figures as Faust are, indeed, born out of a twilight consciousness, out of a glance into the spiritual world which resembles a looking over one's shoulder in a dream. Think of the mood behind such words as ‘sleep’, or ‘dream’, in Hamlet. We can well say that when Hamlet speaks his monologues he is simply speaking about what he senses to be the riddle of his age; he is speaking not theoretically but out of what he actually senses.

So, spanning the centuries and yet connected in spirit, we see that Shakespeare depicts the student and Goethe the professor. Goethe depicted the professor simply because a few more centuries had passed and it was therefore necessary in his time to go further back to the source of what it was all about. Something lived in the consciousness of human beings, something that made the outstanding spirits say: I must bring to expression this state of transition that exists in human evolution.

It is extremely interesting to expand on this world situation still further, because out of it there arise a multitude of all-embracing questions and riddles about life and the world. It is interesting to note, for instance, that amongst the works of Shakespeare Hamlet is the one which depicts in its purest form a personality belonging to the whole twilight condition of the transition—especially in the monologues. The way Hamlet was understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could have led to the question: Where was the stimulus for what exists in Hamlet's soul? The answer points to Wittenberg, the Faust source. Similar questions arise in connection with Macbeth. But in King Lear we move into the human realm. The question of the spiritual world is not so much concerned with the earth as with the human being—it enters into the human being and becomes a subjective state of mind which leads to madness.

Then Shakespeare's other dramas could also be considered. We could say: What the poet learnt by taking these human characters and leading them to the spiritual realm lives on in the historical dramas about the kings. He does not follow this specific theme in the historical dramas, but the indeterminate forces work on. Taking Shakespeare's dramas all together, one gains the impression that they all culminate in the age of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare wanted to depict something that leads from the subconscious, bubbling forces of his people to the intellectual clarity that has especially shone forth from that corner of the civilized world since the age of Elizabeth. From this point of view the whole world of Shakespeare's dramas appears—not perhaps quite like a play with a satisfactory ending, but at least like a drama which does lead to a fairly satisfying conclusion. That is, it leads to a world which then continues to evolve. After the transition had been going on for some time, the dramas lead toShakespeare's immediate present, which is a world with which it is possible to come to terms. This is the remarkable thing: The world of Shakespeare's dramas culminates in the age in which Shakespeare lived; this is an age with which it is possible to come to terms, because from then on history takes a satisfactory course and runs on into intellectualism. Intellectualism came from the part of the earth out of which Shakespeare wrote; and he depicted this by ending up at this point.

The questions with which I am concerned find their answers when we follow the lines which lead from the pupil Hamlet to the professor Faust, and then ask how it was with Goethe at the time when, out of his inner struggles, he came to the figure of Faust. You see, he also wrote Götz von Berlichingen. In Götz von Berlichingen, again taken from folk myth, there is a similar confrontation. On the one side you have the old forces of the pre-intellectual age, the old German empire, which cannot be compared with what became the later German empire. You have the knights and the peasants belonging to the pre-intellectual age when the pallor of thoughts did not make human beings ill; when indeed very little was guided from the head, but when the hands were used to such an extent that even an iron hand was needed. Goethe refers back to something that once lived in more recent civilization but which, by its very nature, had its roots in the fourth post-Atlantean period. Over against all this you have in the figure of Weislingen the new element which is developing, the age of intellectualism, which is intimately linked to the way the German princes and their principalities evolved, a development which led eventually to the later situation in Central Europe right up to the present catastrophe.

We see that in Götz von Berlichingen Goethe is attacking this system of princes and looking back to times which preceded the age of intellectualism. He takes the side of the old and rebels against what has taken its place, especially in Central Europe. It is as though Goethe were saying in Götz von Berlichingen that intellectualism has seized hold of Central Europe too. But here it appears as something that is out of place. It would not have occurred to Goethe to negate Shakespeare. We know how positive was Goethe's attitude to Shakespeare. It would not have occurred to him to find fault with Shakespeare, because his work led to a satisfying culmination which could be allowed to stand. On the contrary, he found this extraordinarily satisfying.

But the way in which intellectualism developed in his own environment made Goethe depict its existence as something unjustified, whereas he spiritually embraced the political element of what was expressed in the French Revolution. In Götz von Berlichingen Goethe is the spiritual revolutionary who denies the spirit in the same way as the French Revolution denies the political element. Goethe turns back in a certain way to something that has once been, though he certainly cannot wish that it should return in its old form. He wants it to develop in a different direction. It is most interesting to observe this mood in Goethe, this mood of revolt against what has come to replace the world of Götz.

So it is extremely interesting to find that Shakespeare has been so deeply grasped by Lessing and by Goethe and that they really followed on from Shakespeare in seeking what they wanted to find through their mood of spiritual revolt. Yet where intellectualism has become particularly deeply entrenched, for instance in Voltaire,¹⁰ it mounts a most virulent attack on Shakespeare. We know that Voltaire called Shakespeare a wild drunkard. All these things have to be taken into account.

Now add something else to the great question which is so important for an understanding of the spiritual revolution which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. Add to all this the extraordinary part which Schiller played in this spiritual revolution which in Goethe is expressed in a Goethean way in Götz von Berlichingen. In the circle closest of all to Schiller he first met what he had to revolt against. It came out of the most one-sided, unhealthy intellectualism. There was of course as yet no Waldorf school¹¹ to do battle against one-sided intellectualism. So Schiller could not be sent to the Waldorf school in Wurttemberg but had to go to the Karlsschule instead. All the protest which Schiller built up during his youth grew out of his protest against the education he received at the Karlsschule. This kind of education—Schiller wrote his drama Die Räuber (The Robbers) against it—is now universally accepted, and no positive, really productive opposition to it has ever been mounted until the recent foundation of the Waldorf school.

So what is the position of Schiller—who later stood beside Goethe in all this? He writes Die Räuber (The Robbers). It is perfectly obvious to those who can judge such things that in Spiegelberg and the other characters he has portrayed his fellow pupils. Franz Moor himself could not so easily be derived from his schoolmates, but in Franz Moor he has shown in an ahrimanic form¹² everything that his genius can grasp of what lives in his time. If you know how to look at these things, you can see how Schiller does not depict spiritual beings externally, in the way they appear in Hamlet or Macbeth, but that he allows the ahrimanic principle to work in Franz Moor. And opposite this is the luciferic principle in Karl Moor. In Franz Moor we see a representative of all that Schiller is rebelling against. It is the same world against which Goethe is rebelling in Götz von Berlichingen, only Schiller sets about it in a different way. We see this too in the later drama Kabale and Liebe (Love and Intrigue).

So you see that here in Central Europe these spirits, Goethe and Schiller, do not depict something in the way Shakespeare does. They do not allow events to lead to something with which one can come to terms. They depict something which is there but which in their opinion ought to have developed quite differently. What they really want does not exist, and what is there on the physical plane is something which they oppose in a spiritual revolution. So we have a strange interplay between what exists on the physical plane and what lives in these spirits.

In a rather bold way I could draw it like this: In Shakespeare the events he depicts carry on in keeping with the way things are on earth

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(blue). What he takes in from earlier times, in which the spirit still worked, goes over (red) into a present time which then becomes a factual world evolution.

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Then we see in Goethe and Schiller that they had inklings of an earlier time (red) when the spiritual world was still powerful, in the fourth post-Atlantean period, and that they bring this only as far as their spiritual intentions, whereas they see what is taking place on earth (blue) as being in conflict with it. One thing plays into the other in the human struggle for the spirit. This is why here in Central Europe the question became a purely human one. In the time of Goethe and Schiller a tremendous revolution occurred in the concept of man as a being who stands within a social context. I shall be able to expand on this in the coming lectures.

Let us now look towards the eastern part of Europe. But we cannot look in that direction in the same way. Those who only describe external facts and have no understanding for what lives in the souls of Goethe and Schiller—and also of course many others—may describe these facts very well, but they will fail to include what plays in from a spiritual world—which is certainly also there, although it may be present only in the heads of human beings. In France the battle takes place on the physical earth, in a political revolution. In Germany the battle does not come down as far as the physical plane. It comes down as far as human souls and trembles and vibrates there. But we cannot continue this consideration in the same way with regard to the East, for things are different there. If we want to pursue the matter with regard to the East we need to call on the assistance of Anthroposophy. For what takes place in the souls of Goethe and Schiller, which are, after all, here on the earth—what, in them, blows through earthly souls is, in the East, still in the spiritual world and finds no expression whatsoever down on the earth.

If you want to describe what took place between Goethe's and Schiller's spirits in the physical world—if you want to describe this with regard to the East, then you will have to employ a different view, such as that used in the days of Attila when battles were fought by spirits in the air above the heads of human beings.

What you find being carried out in Europe by Goethe and Schiller—Schiller by writing Die Räuber (The Robbers) and Goethe by writing Götz von Berlichingen—you will find in the East to be taking place as a spiritual fact in the spiritual world above the physical plane. If you want to seek deeds which parallel the writing of Die Räuber (The Robbers) and the writing of Götz, you will have to seek them among the spiritual beings of the super-sensible world. There is no point in searching for them on the physical plane. In a diagram depicting what happens in the East you would have to draw the element in question like a cloud floating above the physical plane, while down below, untouched by it, would be what shows externally on the physical plane.

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Now we know that, because we have Hamlet, we can tell how a western human being who had been a pupil of Faust would have behaved, and could have behaved. But there can be no such thing as a Russian Hamlet. Or can there? We could see a Russian Hamlet with our spiritual eyes if we were to imagine the following: Faust lectures at Wittenberg—I mean not the historical Faust but Goethe's Faust who is actually more true than historical fact. Faust lectures at Wittenberg—and Hamlet listens, writing everything down, just as he does even what the ghost says to him about the villains who live in Denmark. He writes everything down in the book and volume of his brain—Shakespeare created a true pupil of Faust out of what he found in the work of Saxo Grammaticus,¹³ which depicts things quite differently. Now imagine that an angel being also listened to Faust as he lectured—Hamlet sat on the university bench, Faust stood on the platform, and at the back of the lecture hall an angel listened. And this angel then flew to the East and there brought about what could have taken place as a parallel to the deeds of Hamlet in the West.

I do not believe that it is possible to reach a truly penetrating comprehension of these things by solely taking account of external facts. One cannot ignore the very profound impression made, by these external facts, particularly on the greatest personalities of the time, when what is taking place is something as incisive as the spiritual revolution which took place between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods.

• 1 . Lecture Three, Note 1
• 2 . Lecture Nine, Note 2
• 3 . The first mention of Faust appeared in 1506. In 1587 the first Faustbuch, a popular chapbook, was published in Frankfurt-am-Main.
• 4 . Faust Part One. The Study.
• 5 . Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803. Called Kant's system ‘a kingdom of never-ending whims, blind alleys, fancies, chimeras and vacant expressions.’
• 6 . Emil Du Bois-Reymond, 1818-1896: In ‘Goethe und kein Ende’ (No end to Goethe), address of 15 October 1882 in Reden (Speeches), Leipzig 1886.
• 7 . William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Hamlet is one of his later plays.
• 8 . Hamlet, Act One, Scene 5.
• 9 . ‘what one has in black and white’: Faust Part One, The Study.
• 10. Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, 1694-1778. One of the greatest French authors.
• 11. Lecture Four, Note 3
• 12. Lecture One, Note 3
• 13. Saxo Grammaticus, d.1204. Danish historian who wrote the Gesta Danorum.

We have been speaking about the tasks facing the leaders of spiritual and cultural life, tasks arising out of the great change that took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. I endeavoured to describe the forces which emanated from this, such as those which were made manifest in the figure of Faust and the figure of Hamlet. When you consider the essential core of the matter, you find that spiritual leaders such as the poets who created these figures found themselves faced with the task of answering, in poetic form, the question: What will become of the human being when he has to find inner satisfaction of soul from intellectual life alone, living exclusively in abstract thoughts? For obviously the soul's mood as a whole must arise from the impression made on it because it is forced to contemplate, with the help of abstract thoughts alone, all that is most dear to it, and all that is most important for it. All the evolutionary factors we considered yesterday were what Goethe and Schiller had to draw on in their creative work.

We also saw how Goethe and Schiller felt themselves to be ensnared in these evolutionary factors. We saw how both express the feeling that truly great poetic creation cannot be accomplished without some inclination towards the real spiritual world. But the inclination towards the spiritual world which was still characteristic for western cultural development in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth centuries was no longer possible in ensuing times. It retreated, you might say, in the face of the stark intellectual view. Yet on the other hand this intellectual view, this living in thoughts, had not yet developed sufficiently to allow access to real, genuine spiritual aspects in the thought life.

What typifies the position of Schiller and Goethe within the cultural evolution of humanity is the fact that their most important creative period falls in an age when the old spirituality has gone, but when it is not yet possible for living spirituality to burgeon out of the new intellectualism. I described a little while ago¹ how that which fills the soul in an intellectual way is actually the corpse of the spiritual life lived by the soul in the world of spirit and soul before birth, or before conception. This corpse must be brought back to life. It must be placed once more within the whole living context of the cosmos. But this point had not yet been reached at that time, and what Goethe and Schiller were wrestling to achieve, particularly in their most important period, was a mood of soul which could somehow be satisfying during this period of transition, and out of which poetic creation could be achieved.

This shows most clearly and most intensively in the collaboration between Goethe and Schiller. When they met, Goethe had completed a considerable part of Faust, namely the Fragment which appeared in 1790 and some additional parts as well. Goethe held back the dungeon scene, even though it was by then already completed. The Fragment has no Prologue in Heaven, but begins with the scene ‘I've studied now Philosophy ...’ If we examine this Fragment, and also the parts which Goethe omitted, we find that here Faust stands as a solitary figure wrestling inwardly to find a satisfying mood of soul. He is dissatisfied with stark intellectualism and endeavours to achieve a union with the spiritual world. The Earth-Spirit appears, as in the version now familiar to us. Goethe was certainly striving towards the world of spirit and soul, but what is still entirely lacking, what was still quite foreign to him at that time, was the question of placing Faust within the whole wider cosmic context. There was no Prologue in Heaven. Faust was not yet involved in the battle between God and Satan. This aspect only came to the fore when Schiller encouraged Goethe to continue working on the drama.

Schiller's encouragement inspired him to change Faust's solitary position and place him within the total cosmic context. Encouraged more or less by Schiller, the Faust which reappeared in the world in 1808 had been transformed from a drama of personality, which the 1790 version still was, into a drama of the universe. In the Prologue—‘The sun makes music as of old, amid the rival spheres of heaven’—in the angels, indeed in the whole spiritual world, and in the opposition with Satan, we see a battle for the figure of Faust which takes place in the spiritual world. In 1790, Faust was concerned only with himself. We see this personality alone; he alone is the focus. But later a tableau of the universe appears before us, in which Faust is included. The powers of good and evil do battle to possess him. Goethe wrote this scene in 1797, placing Faust in a tableau of the universe, after Schiller had demanded of him that he continue work on Faust.

As shown in the ‘Dedication’, Goethe felt somehow estranged from the manner in which he had approached his Faust when he was young. We see also in Schiller what was actually going on in the souls of the most outstanding human beings. He began as a realist. I showed you yesterday how the luciferic and ahrimanic elements confront one another in Karl Moor and Franz Moor. But there is no suggestion of any appearance of the spiritual world in some archetypal figure or other; we see the luciferic and the ahrimanic element simply in the character traits of Karl Moor and Franz Moor. It is quite typical of Schiller to make his point of departure a perfectly realistic element. But when he has completed the plays of his youthful phase, when he has met Goethe, and when he takes up writing again in the nineties, we see that now he is compelled to let the spiritual world play into his poetic creations. It is one of the most interesting facts that Schiller now feels compelled to let the spiritual world play into his poetic figures.

Consider Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp). Wallenstein makes his decisions in accordance with his belief in the stars. He acts and forms resolves in accordance with his belief in the stars. So the cosmos plays a role in the figures Schiller creates. The Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp) drama is comprehensible only when we take into account that Wallenstein feels himself to be filled with the forces which emanate from the starry constellations. At the end of the eighteenth century Schiller felt compelled to return to a contemplation of the stars which was familiar in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to those who thought about such things. He felt he could not depict significant events in human life without placing this human life within the cosmos.

Or take Die Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina). He is experimenting. He tries to shape the dramatic action in accordance with the ancient idea of destiny in connection with the wisdom of the stars. It is perfectly obvious that he is trying to do this, for we, too, can experiment with this drama. Take out everything to do with the wisdom of the stars and with destiny, and you will find that in what remains you still have a magnificent drama. Schiller could have written Die Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina) without any wisdom of the stars and without any idea of destiny. Yet he included these things. This shows that in his mood of soul he felt the need to place the human being within the cosmos. This quite definitely parallels the situation which led Goethe, on once again taking up work on his Faust drama, to place Faust within the tableau of the universe.

Goethe does this pictorially. Angels appear as starry guides. The great tableau of the Prologue in Heaven presents us with a picture of the cosmos. Schiller, who was less pictorial and tended more towards abstraction, felt obliged during the same period to bring into his Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp) and his Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina) something which would hint at the position of the human being within the universe. He even went so far as to include the destiny concept of ancient Greek tragedy.

But look at something else too. Just at the time when he was getting to know Goethe, Schiller, in his own way, adopted the French Revolution's ideas about freedom. I mentioned yesterday that in France the revolution was political, whereas in Central Europe it was spiritual and cultural. I would like to say that this spiritual revolution took on its most intimate character in something Schiller wrote which I have quoted here in all kinds of connections: his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays).

Schiller asks: How can people achieve an existence which is truly worthy of human beings? Something that might have been called a philosophy of freedom was not yet possible at that time. Schiller answers the question in his own way. He says: A person who follows the course of a logical thought is unfree. Of course he is unfree, because what logic says cannot be developed freely in any way, and so he is subject to the dictates of reasoning. He is not free to say that two times two is six, or perhaps five. On the other hand he is also subject to the dictates of natural laws if his whole organism is given over to the dictates of nature.

So Schiller sees the human being occupying a position between the dictates of reason and the dictates of nature, and he calls the balance between these two conditions the aesthetic condition. The human being shifts the dictates of reason downwards a little into whatever likes and dislikes he may have, thus gaining freedom in a certain sense. And if he can also moderate his urges and instincts—the dictates of nature—raising them up to an extent to which he can rely on them not to debase him to the level of an animal, then they meet up in the middle with the dictates of reason. The dictates of reason take a step down, the dictates of nature take a step up, and they meet in the middle. By acting in accordance with what pleases or displeases him, the human being is in a condition which is subject to neither dictum; he is permitted to do what pleases him, because what pleases him is good by virtue of the fact that at the same time his sensual nature also desires what is good.

This exposition of Schiller's is naturally quite philosophical and abstract. Goethe greatly approved of the thought, but at the same time it was quite clear to him that it could not lead to a solution of the riddle of man. He is sure to have felt deeply for the exceptional spiritual stature of the exposition, for what Schiller achieved in these Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays) is indeed one of the best treatises of recent times. Goethe sensed the genius and power of these thoughts. But at the same time he felt that out of such thoughts nothing can come which in any way approaches the being of man. The being of man is too rich to be fathomed by thoughts such as these.

Schiller, if I may say so, felt: Here I am in the intellectual age, but intellectualism makes the human being unfree, for it imposes the dictates of reason. So he sought a way out by means of aesthetic creativity and aesthetic enjoyment. Goethe, though, had a feeling for the infinitely abundant, rich content of human nature. He could not be satisfied with Schiller's view, profound and spiritually powerful though it was. He therefore felt the need to give his own expression to the forces working together in the human being. Goethe, not only by nature, but also because of his whole attitude, was incapable of expressing these things in the form of abstract concepts. Instead, under the influence of the kind of thoughts developed by Schiller, he wrote his fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Here, about twenty figures appear, all of which have something to do with the forces of the human soul. They work together, not only as the dictates of reason and the dictates of nature but as twenty different impulses which, in the end, depict in the most manifold way something signifying the rich nature of the being of man. We must take note of the fact that Goethe gave up speaking about the being of man in abstract concepts altogether. He felt bound to move away from concepts.

In order to characterize the relationship of Schiller to Goethe in connection with the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays) and the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, we have to say the following: Goethe wrote the fairy-tale under the immediate influence of Schiller's letters. He wanted to answer the same questions from his point of view and out of his feelings. This can be proved. Indeed I proved it historically long ago and it was seen to make sense.² So in order fully to characterize what took place between these two personalities we should have to say: In olden times when, in seeking knowledge, human beings caused beings from the spiritual world to visit them; when they still worked in their laboratories of knowledge in order to penetrate to the mysteries of the universe, and when spiritual beings came into their laboratories—just as the Earth Spirit and many another spirit visit Faust—this was very different from how things are today. In those days people felt themselves to be relatives of those spiritual beings who visited them. They knew, although they were living on the earth and had perforce to make use of the instrument of a physical body, that before birth and after death they were nevertheless beings just like those who visited them. They knew that for earthly life they had sought out an abode which separated them from the spiritual world, but that this spiritual world nevertheless visited them. They knew that they were related to this spiritual world and this gave them an awareness of their own being.

Suppose Schiller had visited Goethe in 1794 or 1795 and had said: Here are my letters on the aesthetic education of man, in which I have endeavoured, out of modern intellectualism, to give people once more the possibility of feeling themselves to be human beings; I have sought the ideas which are necessary in order to speak about the true being of man; these ideas are contained in these letters about aesthetic education. Goethe would have read the letters and on next meeting Schiller he would have been able to say: Well, my friend, this is not bad at all; you have provided human beings once more with a concept of their worth, but this is not really the way to do it; man is a spiritual being, but just as spirits retreat from light, so do they also retreat from concepts, which are nothing other than another form of ordinary daylight; you will have to go about this in a different manner; we shall have to go away from concepts and find something else.

You can find everything I have expressed here, in the form of direct speech, in the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. It is all there, in hints and intimations. In the process, Goethe wrote his fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, which was to depict how the soul forces work in man. It is Goethe's admission that to speak about man and the being of man it is necessary to rise up to the level of pictures, images. This is the way to Imagination. Goethe was simply pointing out the path to the world of Imaginations. This fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is so very important because it shows that out of his own struggles, and also in his Faust, Goethe felt impelled, at a most important moment, to the path towards Imaginations.

To Goethe, the statement that thinking, feeling and will work together in man would have seemed philosophical. He did not say this, but instead he depicted a place where there were three kings, one of gold, one of silver and one of iron. These images signify for him something which cannot be expressed in concepts. We see that Goethe is on the way to a life of Imagination. This brings us to one of the most profound questions with which Goethe is concerned. He himself did not care to discuss the true profundity of this question with anyone. But we can see how this question concerned him, for it appears in all sorts of places: What is the point of fathoming the being of man by using the kind of thinking to which intellectualism has led? What use would it be? This is a riddle of earthly evolution, a riddle belonging to this epoch, for in this strong form it could only have come into question in this epoch. Sometimes, in all its profundity, it makes its appearance in paradoxical words. For instance in Faust we read

The lofty might
Of Science, still
From all men deeply hidden!
Who takes no thought,
To him 'tis brought,
'Tis given unsought, unbidden!³

This is extraordinarily profound, even if it is only the witch who says it: ‘The lofty might of Science, still from all men deeply hidden! Who takes no thought’—in other words to one who does not think—'tis given unsought, unbidden!’ However much we think, the lofty might of science remains hidden from us. But if we succeed in not thinking, then it is given unsought, unbidden. So we should develop the might to not think, the skill to not think, in order to achieve not science or knowledge—for this cannot of course be achieved without thinking—but in order to achieve the might of science or knowledge.

Goethe knows that this might of science works in the human being. He knows that it is at work, even in the little child who as yet does not think. What I said in my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man⁴ was taken very much amiss. On the very first pages I pointed out that if the human being had to fashion all the wisdom-filled things found in the form of the human body by means of his thoughts—consciously using the might which also holds sway in science—then he would reach a ripe old age without ever discovering those delicate formative forces which work with the skill of a sculptor! The might of science is indeed needed in the early years of childhood to transform this brain from a rather formless lump into the sublime structure it has to achieve.

This is a question with which Goethe is profoundly concerned. He of course does not mean merely a dull absence of thinking. But he is quite sure that the might of science can be discovered if we do not destroy our links with it by means of our intellectual thinking. This is even the reason why he makes Mephisto take Faust to the witches’ kitchen. Commentaries on these things always distort matters. We fail to know Goethe if we do not link his purpose—in creating a scene like that in the witches’ kitchen—with what we sense to be the essence of his own being. Faust is presented with the draught of youth. In one sense he is given a perfectly realistic draught to drink. But the witch says:

See, thus it's done!
Make ten of one,
And two let be,
Make even three,
And rich thou'lt be.
Cast o'er the four!
From five and six
(The witch's tricks)
Make seven and eight,
'Tis finished straight!
And nine is one,
And ten is none.

Now imagine Goethe standing there. If you have a sense for his essential being you cannot but ask: Why is the witch made to declaim this witches’ multiplication table? Goethe did not like speaking about these things, but if he were in the right frame of mind he might reply: Well, the lofty might of science, still from all men deeply hidden! Who takes no thought, to him 'tis brought. You see, the power of thought fades when you are told, make ten of one, and two let be, make even three, and rich thou'lt be, and so on. Thinking comes to a standstill! So then you enter into a state of mind in which the lofty might of science can be given to you without any thinking.—Such things are always an aspect of Goethe's Faust and indeed of all Goethe's poetic work.

So Goethe was faced with this question, which was for him something exceptionally profound. What was it that Faust lacked, but gained through his sojourn in the witches’ kitchen? What did he not have before? If you think of Faust and how he could have been Hamlet's teacher, disgusted by philosophy and jurisprudence, medicine and theology, and turning instead to magic—if you imagine what he is like even in the Easter scene, you will have to admit that he lacks something which Goethe possessed. Goethe never got to the bottom of this. He felt he was like Faust, but he had to say to himself: Yes, all the things with which I have invested Faust are also in me, but there is something else in me as well. Is it something I am permitted to possess? What Faust does not have is imagination, but Goethe did have imagination. Faust gains imagination through the draught of youth which he receives in the witches’ kitchen. In a way Goethe answered his own question: What happens when one wants to penetrate to the universal secrets with the help of the imagination? For this was the most outstanding power possessed by Goethe himself.

In his youth he was not at all sure whether looking into the universal secrets with the help of the imagination was anything more than a step into nothingness. This is indeed the Faustian question. For stark intellectuality lives only in mirror images. But once you come to the imagination you are a step nearer to the human being's forces of growth, to the forces which fill the human being. You approach, even though only from a distance, the formative forces which, for instance, shape the brain in childhood. There is then only one more step from the ordinary imagination to the faculty of Imagination! But for Goethe this was the all-important question.

Thus Goethe takes Faust to the witches’ kitchen so that he can extricate himself from that confounded capacity of thinking—which may lead to science but does not lead to the might of science—in order that he may be allowed to live in the realm of the imagination. Thenceforward Faust develops his imagination. By means of the draught in the witches’ kitchen, Goethe wins for Faust the right to have an imagination. The rejuvenation he experiences is simply a departure from the arid forces he had as, say, a thirty-five year old professor, and a return to his youth where he takes into his soul the youthful formative forces, the forces of growth. Where the imagination flourishes, the youthful formative forces remain alive in the soul.

All this was present as a seed within Goethe, for he wrote the scene in the witches’ kitchen as early as about 1788. It was there as a seed, beginning to sprout and demanding a solution. But from Schiller he received a new impulse, for now he was urged on to the path towards the faculty of Imagination. Schiller was at first nowhere near to seekingfor the faculty of Imagination. But in Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp) and in Die Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina) he sought the cosmic element.⁵ And in Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans) he endeavoured to fathom the subconscious forces of the being of man.

The immense profundity of the struggle going on may be seen in the fragment Demetrius which Schiller left behind when he died. The dramatic power of this fragment surpasses that of everything else he wrote. In his desk there was also the draft of a play about the Knights of Malta. This, too, if he had succeeded in writing it, would probably have been truly magnificent. The whole principle of the Order of the Knights of Malta—a spiritual order of knighthood resembling that of the Templars—unfolds in their battle against Sultan Suleiman. If Schiller had succeeded in depicting this, he would have been forced to face the question: How will it be possible to bring the vision of the spiritual world down into human creative activity? For this question was indeed alive for him already.

But Schiller dies. Goethe no longer benefits from the stimulus he gave. Later, stimulated by Eckermann—who was less of a spiritual giant than Schiller, if I may put it this way—he finishes Faust, working on the second part from about 1824 until his death. Shortly before his death he has the package containing the work sealed. It is a posthumous work. We have considered this second part of Faust from many different angles, and have discovered, on the one hand, deeply significant, sublime insights into the manifold mysteries of the spiritual world. Of course we can never understand it entirely if we approach it from this one angle, and we must seek ever higher viewpoints.

But there is another angle too.⁶ Goethe felt compelled to complete this poetic work of Faust. Let us examine the development of the philosophy of Faust and go back a stage further than we have done so far. One of the stages was the figure of Cyprianus, about whom we have already spoken. Before that, in the ninth century, the legend of Theophilus was written down.⁷ Theophilus is once again a kind of Faust of the eighth, or ninth century. He makes a pact with Satan and his fate very much resembles that of Faust.

Consider Theophilus, this Faust of the ninth century, and consider the legendary Faust of the sixteenth century, to whom Goethe refers. The ninth century profoundly condemns the pact with the devil. Eventually Theophilus turns to the Virgin Mary and is saved from all that would have befallen him, had his pact with Satan been fulfilled. The sixteenth century gives the Faust legend a Protestant slant. In the Theophilus legend, incipient damnation redeemed by the Virgin Mary is described. The sixteenth century protests against this. There is no positive end; the story is told in a manner suitable for Protestantism: Faust makes a pact with the devil and duly falls into his clutches.

First Lessing and then Goethe now protest in their turn. They cannot accept that a character—acting with worldly powers and in the manner of worldly powers—who gives himself over to the power of Satan, entering into a pact with him, must of necessity perish as a consequence of acting out of a thirst for knowledge. Goethe protests against this Protestant conception of the Faust legend. He wants Faust's redemption. He cannot abide by the conclusion of Part One, in which he made concessions and let Faust perish. Faust must be saved. So now Goethe leads us in sublime fashion through the experiences depicted in Part Two. We see how the strong inner being of man asserts itself: ‘In this, thy Nothing, may I find my All!’⁸ We need only think of words such as these with which a strong and healthy human nature confronts the one who corrupts.

We see Faust experiencing the whole of history up to the time of ancient Greece. He must not be allowed to perish. Goethe makes every effort to arrive at pictures—pictures which, though different in form, are nevertheless taken from the Catholic cultus and Catholic symbolism. If you subtract everything that is achieved out of Goethe's own imaginative life, fuelled as it is by the great riches of the tremendously rich lifetime's experience that was his—if you subtract all this, you find yourself back with the legend of Theophilus in the ninth century. For in the end it is the Queen of Heaven⁹ who approaches in all her glory. If you subtract all that specifically belongs to Goethe, you come back to the Theophilus described by the saintly nun Hrosvitha—not identical, of course, but nevertheless something which has not succeeded in an independent approach to the poetic problem but still has to borrow from what has gone before.

We see how a personality as great as Goethe strives to find an entry to the spiritual world. In the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily he is seeking for an Imagination which will make the human being comprehensible. In Faust he is also seeking for an Imagination, but he cannot achieve an independent Imagination and has to draw on help from Catholic symbolism. Thus his final tableau resembles the clumsy depiction by Hrosvitha in the ninth century—though of course in Goethe's case it is obviously executed by one of the greatest poets.

It is necessary to indicate the intricate paths followed by the spiritual and cultural history of humanity in order to arrive at an understanding of all that is at work in this spiritual history. Only then can we come to realize how the working of karma goes through human history. You need only consider hypothetically that certain things happened which did not actually happen—not in order to correct history in retrospect, but in order to come to an understanding of what is actually there. Imagine that Schiller, who died young, had remained alive. The drama about the Knights of Malta was in his desk and he was in the process of working on Demetrius. In collaboration with Goethe the highest spirituality developed in him, living in them both at once. But the thread broke. Look at the second part of Wilhelm Meister, look at Elective Affinities, and you will see what Goethe was striving for but failed to achieve. Everywhere he was striving to place the human being within a great spiritual context. He was unable to do so, for Schiller had been taken from him.

All this is an expression of the way in which the recent spiritual and cultural evolution of mankind is striving for a certain goal, the goal of seeking the human being in his relationship with the spiritual world. But there are hindrances on every side. Perhaps something like Goethe's Faust can be comprehended in all its greatness only when we see what it does not contain, when we see the course on which the whole spiritual evolution of mankind was set. We cannot arrive at an understanding of the spiritual grandeur present in human evolution by merely giving all sorts of explanations, and exclaiming: What an incomparably great masterpiece! We can only reach such an understanding by contemplating the striving of the whole human spirit towards a particular goal of evolution. We are forcefully confronted with this when we consider these things. And then, in the nineteenth century, the thread breaks entirely! The nineteenth century, so splendid in the realm of natural science, sleeps as far as the realm of the spirit is concerned. The most that can be achieved is that the highest wisdom of natural science leads to fault-finding with a creation such as Faust.

Goethe needs Schiller, in order to place Faust—whom he first depicted as a personality—within the context of an all-embracing universal tableau. We can sense what Goethe might have made out of the philosophy of Faust if he had not lost Schiller so soon. Yet those who think about these things come along and say that Faust is an unfortunate work in which Goethe missed the point entirely. Had he done the thing properly, Faust would have married Gretchen and made an honest woman of her, and then gone on to invent the electro-static machine and the air-pump. Then mankind would have been presented with the proper Faust!

A great aesthete, Friedrich Theodor Vischer,¹⁰ said: Faust Part Two is rubbish. So he drafted a plan of what it ought to have been. The result was a kind of improved Eugen Richter out of the nineteenth century, a man of party politics, only a bit more crude than were party men in the nineteenth century. It was not an unimportant person but a very important person—for Friedrich Theodor Vischer was such a one—who stated: The second part of Faust is a piecemeal, fragmented construction of Goethe's old age!

Any connection with a striving for the spirit was lost. The world slept where spirituality was concerned. But out of this very situation the people of today must find their tasks with regard to a new path to the spiritual world. It is of course not possible for us to refer back to:

The lofty might
Of Science, still
From all men deeply hidden! Who takes no thought,
To him 'tis brought,
'Tis given unsought, unbidden!

We cannot simply decide to stop thinking, for thinking is a power which came with the fifth post-Atlantean period, and it is a power which must be practised. But it must be developed in a direction which was actually begun by Goethe in his fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It must be practised in such a way that it leads to Imagination. We must understand that the power of the intellect chases away the spirit, but if the power of the intellect itself can be developed to become the faculty of Imagination, then we can approach the spirit once more. This is what we can learn by considering in a living way what has taken place in the field we have been discussing.

• 1 . For instance see Rudolf Steiner The Bridge Between Universal Spirituality and the Physical Constitution of Man, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1958, lecture of 19 December 1920; and Rudolf Steiner, The Shaping of the Human Form out of Cosmic and Earthly Forces, lecture of 26 November 1920. English text available in typescript only.
• 2 . See Rudolf Steiner, Goethe as Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics [Goethe als Vater einer neuen Ästhetik], Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London 1922; and Rudolf Steiner, Goethe's Secret Revelation and The Riddle of Faust, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London 1933.
• 3 . Faust, Part One, Witches' Kitchen. The quotation ‘See, thus it's done!’ is also from this scene.
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1983.
• 5 . See Rudolf Steiner, Schiller und die Gegenwart (Schiller and the Present Time), Dornach 1955, lecture in Berlin on 4 May 1905.
• 6 . See Rudolf Steiner Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethes Faust, (Goethe's Faust Illumined by Spiritual Science), Dornach 1967, GA 272 and 273.
• 7 . This legend, of Greek origin, came to the West some time around the tenth century and was recounted both in prose and in verse in almost every known language. Hrosvitha, the poetess from Lower Saxony, a nun in Gandersheim, told the story in Latin verse.
• 8 . Faust to Mephisto in Faust Part Two, A Gloomy Gallery.
• 9 . Faust Part Two, last scene.
• 10. Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887), philosopher and aesthete. In 1862 he wrote a satire Faust. Der Traglidie dritter Teil (The Tragedy of Faust, Part Three).

The two previous lectures were devoted to considerations intended to show how that tremendous change, which entered into the whole soul constitution of civilized mankind with the fifteenth century—that is, with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period—continued to have an effect on outstanding personalities. Let me introduce today's lecture with a brief summary of these preceding considerations. I showed how intensely a personality such as Goethe sensed the continuing vibrations of the great change, how he sensed that it was a concrete experience to find intellectual reasoning entering into the human soul. He sensed that it was necessary to come to terms with the intellectual element of the soul and he also had an inkling of the direct intercourse between human beings and the spiritual world which had preceded this intellectual stage. Even though it was no longer as it had been in the days of ancient atavistic clairvoyance, there was nevertheless a kind of looking back to the time when human beings knew that it was only possible for them to find real knowledge if they stepped outside the world of the senses in order to see in some way the spiritual beings who existed behind the sense-perceptible world.

Goethe invested the figure of his Faust with all these things sensed in his soul. We saw how dissatisfied Faust is by stark intellectualism as presented to him in the four academic faculties:

I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end ...

He is saying in different words: I have loaded my soul with the whole complexity of intellectual science and here I now stand filled with the utmost doubt; that is why I have devoted myself to magic.

Because of dissatisfaction with the intellectual sciences, Goethe invests the Faust figure with a desire to return to intercourse with the spiritual world. This was quite clear in his soul when he was young, and he wanted to express it in the figure of Faust. He chose the Faust figure to represent his own soul struggles. I said that although this is not the case with the historical Faust of the legend, we could nevertheless find in Goethe's depiction of Faust that professor who might have taught at Wittenberg in the sixteenth or even in the seventeenth century, and who had, ‘Straight or crosswise, wrong or right’, led his scholars by the nose ‘these ten years long’. This hypothesis allows us to see how in this educational process there was a mixture of the new intellectualism with something pointing back to ancient days when intercourse with the spiritual world and with the spiritual powers of creation was still possible for human beings.

I then asked whether—apart from what is given us in the Faust drama—we might also, in the wider environment, come up against the effects of what someone like Faust could have taught in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. And here we hit upon Hamlet, about whom it could be said: The character which Shakespeare created out of Hamlet—who in his turn he had taken from Danish mythology and transformed—could have been a pupil of Faust, one of those very students whom Faust had led by the nose ‘these ten years long’. We see Hamlet interacting with the spiritual world. His task is given to him by the spiritual world, but he is constantly prevented from fulfilling it by the qualities he has acquired as a result of his intellectual education. In Hamlet, too, we see the whole transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Further, I said that in the whole mood and artistic form of Shakespeare's plays, that is, in the historical plays, we could find in the creativity of the writer of Shakespeare's plays the twilit mood of that time of transition. Then I drew your attention to the way in which Goethe and Schiller in Central Europe had stood in their whole life of soul within the dying vibrations of the transition, yet had lacked, in a certain sense, the will to accept what the intellectual view of the world had since then brought about in the life of human beings. This led them back to Shakespeare, for in his work—Hamlet, Macbeth and so on—they discovered the capacity to approach the spiritual world; from his vantage point, they could see into the world of spiritual powers which was now hidden from the intellectual viewpoint.

Goethe did this in his Götz von Berlichingen by taking the side of the dying echoes of the old time of the fourth post-Atlantean period and by rejecting what had come into being through intellectualism. Schiller, in the dramas of his youth, especially in Die Räuber (The Robbers), goes back to that time—not by pointing to the super-sensible world, but by endeavouring to be entirely realistic, yet putting into the very words characterizing Karl Moor something which echoes the luciferic element that is also at work in Milton's Paradise Lost.¹ In short, despite his realism, we detect a kind of return to a conception of reality which allows the spiritual forces and powers to shine through.

I indicated further that, in the West, Shakespeare was in a position—if I may put it like this—to work artistically in full harmony with his social environment. Hamlet is the play most characteristic of Shakespeare. Here the action is everywhere quite close to the spiritual world, as it is also in Macbeth. In King Lear, for instance, we see how he brings the super-sensible world more into the human personality, into an abnormal form of the human personality, the element of madness. Then, in the historical dramas about the kings, he goes over more into realism but, at the same time, we see in these plays a unique depiction of a long drawn-out dramatic evolution influenced everywhere by the forces of destiny, but culminating and coming to an end in the age of Queen Elizabeth.

The thing that is at work in Shakespeare's plays is a retrospective view of older ages leading up to the time in which he lives, a time which is seen to be accepted by him. Everything belonging to older times is depicted artistically in a way which leads to an understanding of the time in which he lives. You could say that Shakespeare portrays the past. But he portrays it in such a way that he places himself in his contemporary western social environment, which he shows to be a time in which things can take the course which they are prone to take. We see a certain satisfaction with regard to what has come about in the external world. The intellectualism of the social order is accepted by the person belonging to the external, physical earthly world, by the social human being, whereas the artistic human being in Shakespeare goes back to earlier times and portrays that aspect of the super-sensible world which has created pure intellectualism.

Then we see that in Central Europe this becomes an impossibility. Goethe and Schiller, and before them Lessing, cannot place themselves within the social order in a way which enables them to accept it. They all look back to Shakespeare, but to that Shakespeare who himself went back into the past. They want the past to lead to something different from the present time in which they find themselves. Shakespeare is in a way satisfied with his environment; but they are dissatisfied with theirs.

Out of this mood of spiritual revolution Goethe creates the drama of Götz von Berlichingen, and Schiller the dramas of his youth. We see how the external reality of the world is criticized, and how in the artistic realm there is an ebbing and flowing of something that can only be achieved in ideas, something that can only be achieved in the spirit. Therefore we can say: In Goethe and Schiller there is no acceptance of the present time. They have to comfort themselves, so far as external sense-perceptible reality is concerned, with what works down out of the spiritual world. Shakespeare in a way brings the super-sensible world down into the sense-perceptible world. Goethe and Schiller can only accept the sense-perceptible world by constantly turning their attention to the spiritual world. In the dramas of Goethe and Schiller we have a working together of the spiritual with the physical—basically, an unresolved disharmony. I then said that if we were to go further eastwards we would find that there is nothing on the earth that is spiritual. The East of Europe has not created anything into which the spirit plays. The East flees from the external working of the world and seeks salvation in the spirit above.

I was able to clothe all this in an Imagination by saying to you: Let us imagine Faust as Hamlet's teacher, a professor in Wittenberg. Hamlet sits at his feet and listens to him, after which he returns to the West and accustoms himself once again to the western way of life. But if we were to seek a being who could have gone to the East, we should have had to look for an angel who had listened to Faust from the spiritual world before going eastwards. Whatever he then did there would not have resembled the deeds and actions of Hamlet on the physical plane but would have taken place above human beings, in the spiritual world.

Yesterday, I then described how, out of this mood, at the time when he was making the acquaintance of Schiller, Goethe felt impelled to bring the being of man closer to the spiritual world. He could not do this theoretically, in the way Schiller, the philosopher, was able to do in his aesthetic letters, but instead he was urged to enter the realm of Imagination and write the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Then Schiller felt the urge to bring the external reality of human life closer to the spirit—I might say experimentally—in Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp), by letting a belief in the stars hold sway like a force of destiny over the personality of Wallenstein, and in Die Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina) by letting a destiny run its course virtually entwined with a belief in the stars. These personalities were impelled ever and again to turn back to the time when human beings still had direct intercourse with the spiritual world.

Further, I said that Goethe and Schiller lived at a time when it was not yet possible to find a new entry into the spiritual world from out of a modern soul constitution. Schiller in particular, with his philosophical bent, had he lived longer and finished the drama about the Knights of Malta, would have come to an understanding of how, in an order like this, or like that of the Templars, the spiritual worlds worked together with the deeds of human beings. But it was not granted to Schiller to give the world the finished drama about the Knights of Malta, for he died too soon. Goethe, on the other hand, was unable to advance to a real grasp of the spiritual world, so he turned back. We have to say that Goethe went back to Catholic symbolism, the Catholic cultus, the cultus of the image, though he did so in an essentially metamorphosed form. We cannot help but be reminded of the good nun Hrosvitha's legend of Theophilus² from the ninth century, when Goethe in his turn allows Faust to be redeemed in the midst of a Christianizing tableau. Although his genius lets him present it in a magnificently grand and artistic manner, we cannot but be reminded, in ‘The Eternal Feminine bears us aloft’, of the Virgin Mary elevating the ninth-century Theophilus.

An understanding of these things gives us deep insight into the struggle within intellectualism, the struggle in intellectualism which causes human beings to experience inwardly the thought-corpse of what man is before descending through birth—or, rather, through conception—into his physical life on earth. The thoughts which live in us are nothing but corpses of the spirit unless we make them fruitful through the knowledge given by spiritual science. Whatever we are, spiritually, up to the moment when earthly life begins, dies as it enters our body, and we bear its corpse within us. It is our earthly power of thought, the power of thought of our ordinary consciousness.

How can something that is dead in the spiritual sense be brought back to life? This was the great question which lived in the souls of Goethe and Schiller. They do not bring it to expression philosophically but they sense it within their feeling life. And they compose their works accordingly. They have the feeling: Something is dead if we remain within the realm of the intellect alone; we must bring it to life. It is this feeling which makes them struggle to return to a belief in the stars and to all sorts of other things, in order to bring a spiritual element into what they are trying to depict. It is necessary for us to be aware of how the course of world evolution is made manifest in such outstanding personalities, how it streams into their souls and becomes the stuff of their struggles. We cannot comprehend our present time unless we see that what this present time must strive for—a new achievement of the spiritual world—is the very problem which was of such concern for Goethe and Schiller.

What happened as a result of the great transition which took place in the fifteenth century was something of which absolutely no account is taken in ordinary history. It was, that the human being acquired an entirely different attitude towards himself. But we must not endeavour to capture this in theoretical concepts. We must endeavour to trace it in what human beings sensed; we must find out how it went through a preparation and how it later ran its course after the great change had been fulfilled in its essential spiritual force.

There are pointers to these things at crucial points in cultural evolution. See how this comes towards us in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.³ You all know the story. You know how crucial it was for the whole of Parzival's development that he first of all received instruction from a kind of teacher as to how he was to go through the world without asking too many questions. As a representative of that older world order which still saw human beings as having direct intercourse with the spiritual world, Gurnemanz says to Parzival: Do not ask questions, for questioning comes from the intellect, and the spiritual world flees from the intellect; if you want to approach the spiritual world you must not ask questions.

But times have changed and the transition begins to take place. It is announced in advance: Even though Parzival goes back several more centuries, into the seventh or eighth century, all this was nevertheless experienced in advance in the Grail temple. Here, in a way, the institutions of the future are already installed, and one of them is that questions must be asked. The essential point is that with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period the situation of the human being changes. Previously it was inappropriate to ask questions because conditions held sway about which Goethe speaks so paradoxically:

The lofty might
Of Science, still
From all men deeply hidden!
Who takes no thought,
To him 'tis brought,
'Tis given unsought, unbidden!

In those times it was right not to ask questions, for that would have driven away the spirits! But in the age of the intellect the spiritual world has to be rediscovered through the intellect and not by damping down the processes of thought. The opposite must now come into play; questions must be asked. As early as Parzival we find a portrayal of the great change which brings it about in the fifth post-Atlantean period that the longing for the spiritual world now has to be born out of the human being in the form of questions to be formulated.

But there is also something else, something very remarkable, which comes to meet us in Parzival. I should like to describe it as follows. The languages which exist today are far removed from their origins, for they have developed as time has gone on. When we speak today—as I have so often shown—the various combinations of sounds no longer remind us of whatever these combinations of sounds denote. We now have to acquire a more delicate sense for language in order to experience in it all the things that it signifies. This was not the case where the original languages of the human race were concerned. In those days it was known that the combination of sounds itself contained whatever was experienced in connection with the thing depicted by those sounds. Nowadays poets seek to imitate this. Think, for instance, of ‘Und es wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt’.⁴ Poetic language has here imitated something of what the poet wants us to see externally. But this is mere derived imitation. In olden times every single sound in language was felt to have the most intimate connection with what was happening all around. Today only some local dialects can lay claim to giving us some sense for the connection between external reality and the words spoken in dialect. However, language is still very close to our soul—it is a special element in our soul.

It is another consequence of the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period that this has become deposited as something very deeply sensed within the human soul, again a fact which is left out of account by both philology and history. The fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean period human beings lived more within their language and that in the fifth post-Atlantean period this is no longer the case, brings about a different attitude by human beings towards the world. You can understand that human beings with their ego are linked quite differently to what is going on around them if, in using language, they go along with all the rushing of waves, the thundering and lightning, and whatever else is happening out there. This becomes ever more detached as the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period progresses. The ego becomes more inward, and language together with the ego also becomes more inward, but at the same time less meaningful as regards external matters. Such things are most certainly not perceived by the knowledge of today, which has become so intellectual. There is hardly any concern to describe such things. But if what is taking place in mankind is to be correctly understood, they will have to be described.

Imagine what can come into being. Imagine vividly to yourselves, here the fourth post-Atlantean period, and here the fifth. The transition is of course gradual, but for the sake of explanation I shall have to talk in extremes. In the fourth post-Atlantean period you have here the things of the world (green). The human being with his words, depicted within him, here in red, is still connected with the things. You could say he 'lives over' into the things through the medium of his words. In the fifth post-Atlantean period the human being possesses his words within his soul, separated off from the world.

Imagine this clearly, even almost in grotesque detail. Looking at the human being here in the fourth post-Atlantean period, you might say of him that he still lives with the things. The things he does in the outside world will proceed to take place in accordance with his words. If you see one of these human beings performing a deed, and if at the same time you hear how he describes the deed, there is a harmony between the two. Just as his words are in harmony with external things, so are his deeds in harmony with the words he speaks. But if a human being in the fifth post-Atlantean period speaks, you can no longer detect that his words resound in what he does. What connection with the deed can you find today in the words: I have chopped wood! In what is taking place out there in the activity of chopping we can no longer sense in any way a connection with the movement of the chopper. As a result, the connection with the sounds of the words gradually disappears; they cease to be in harmony with what is going on outside. We no longer find any connection between the two. So then, if someone listens pedantically to the words and actually does

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what lies in the words, the situation is quite different. Someone might say: I bake mice. But if someone were actually to bake mice, this would seem grotesque and would not be understood.

This was sensed, and so it was said: People ought to consider what they actually have in their soul in conjunction with what they do externally; the relationship between the two would be like an owl looking in a mirror! If someone were to do exactly what the words say, it would be like holding up a mirror to an owl. Out of this, in the second half of the fourteenth century, Till Eulenspiegel arose.⁵ The owl's mirror is held up in front of mankind. It is not Till Eulenspiegel who has to look in the mirror. But because Till Eulenspiegel takes literally what people say with their dry, abstract words, they suddenly see themselves, whereas normally they do not see themselves at all. It is a mirror for the owls because they can really see themselves in it.

Night has fallen. In past times, human beings could see into the spiritual world. And the activity of their words was in harmony with the world. Human beings were eagles. But now they have become owls. The world of the soul has become a bird of the night. In the strange world depicted by Till Eulenspiegel, a mirror is held up before the owl.

This is quite a feasible way of regarding what appears in the spiritual world. Things do have their hidden reasons. If we fail to take note of the spiritual background, we also fail to understand history, and with it the chief factor in humanity today. It is especially important to depart from the usual external characterization of everything. Look in any dictionary and see what absurd explanations are given for Eulenspiegel! He cannot be understood without entering into the whole process of cultural and spiritual life. The important thing in spiritual science is to actually discover the spirit in things, not in a way that entails a conceptual knowledge of a few spiritual beings who exist outside the sense-perceptible world, but in a way which leads us to an ability to see reality with spiritual eyes.

The change which took place, between the time when human beings felt themselves to be close to the spiritual world and the later time when they felt as though they had been expelled from that world, can be seen in other areas too. Try to develop a sense for the profound impulse which runs through something like the Parzival epic. See how Parzival's mother dresses him in a simpleton's clothes because she does not want him to grow up into the world which represents the new world. She wants him to remain in the old world. But then he grows up from the sense-perceptible world into the world of the spirit.

The seventeenth century also possesses a kind of Parzival, a comical Parzival, in which everything is steeped in comedy. In the intellectualistic age, if one is honest, one cannot immediately muster the serious attitude of soul which prevails in Parzival. But the seventeenth century too, after the great change had taken place, had its own depiction of a character who has to set out into the world, lose himself in it, finally ending-up in solitude and finding the salvation of his soul. This is Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus.⁶ Look at the whole process of the story. Of course you must take the whole tone into account, on the one hand the pure, perhaps holy mood of Parzival, and on the other the picaresque, comical mood. Consider Simplicissimus, the son of well-to-do peasants in the Spessart region. In the Thirty Years’ War their house is burnt down. The son has to flee, and finds his way to a hermit in the forest who teaches him all kinds of things, but who then dies. So here he is, abandoned in the world and having to set off on his travels. He becomes immersed in all the events and blows of fate offered by the Thirty Years’ War. He arrives at the court of the governor of Hanau. Externally he has learnt nothing, externally he is a pure simpleton; yet he is an inwardly mature person for all that. But because externally he is a pure simpleton the governor of Hanau says to himself: This is a simpleton, he knows nothing; he is Simplicissimus, as naive as can be. What shall I train him to be? I shall train him to be my court fool.

But now the external and the internal human being are drawn apart. The ego has become independent in respect of the external human being. It is just this that is shown in Simplicissimus. The external human being in the external world, trained to be the court fool, is the one who is considered by all and sundry to be a fool. But in his inner being Simplicissimus in his turn considers all those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. For although he has not learnt a thing, he is nevertheless far cleverer than all those who have made him into a fool. He brings out of himself the other intellectuality, the intellectuality that comes from the spirit, whereas what comes to meet him from outside is the intellectuality that comes from reasoning alone. So the intellectualists take him for a fool, and the fool brings his intellectualism from the spiritual world and holds those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. Then he is taken prisoner by some Croats, after which he roams about the world undergoing many adventures, until finally he ends up once more at the hermitage where he settles down to live for the salvation of his soul.

The similarity between Simplicissimus and Parzival has been recognized, but the crucial thing is the difference in mood. What in Parzival's case was still steeped in the mind-soul has now risen up into the consciousness soul. Now caustic wit is at work, for the comical can only have its origin in caustic wit. If you have a feel for this change of mood, you will be able to discover—especially in works which have a broader base than that of a single individuality—what was going on in human evolution. And Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did indeed secrete in Simplicissimus the whole mood, the whole habit of thought of his time. Similarly you can in a way find the people as a whole composing stories, and gathering together all the things which the soul, in the guise of an owl, can see in the mirror, and which become all the tall tales found in Till Eulenspiegel.

It would be a good thing, once in a while, to go in more detail into all these things, not only in order to characterize the various interconnections. I can only give you isolated examples. To say everything that could be said I should have to speak for years. But this is not really what matters. What is crucial is to come closer to a more spiritual conception of these things. We have to learn to know how things which are presented to us purely externally are also connected with the spirit. So we may say: That tremendous change which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period can be seen everywhere, vibrating through the cultural and spiritual evolution of mankind. As soon as you step back a bit from this turning- point of time, you come to see how all the different phenomena point to the magnititude of the change.

Only by taking the interconnections into account is it possible to understand what lies hidden in the figures brought by spiritual and cultural life out of the past and into the present. Take Lohengrin, the son of Parzival. What does it mean that Elsa is forbidden to ask after his name and origin? People simply accept this. Not enough deep thought is given to the question as to why she is forbidden to ask, for usually there are two sides to everything. Certainly this could also be described differently, but one important aspect may be stated as follows: Lohengrin is an ambassador of the Grail; he is Parzival's son. Now what actually is the Grail community? Those who knew the mystery of the Grail did not look on the Grail temple as a place solely for the chosen knights of the Grail. They saw that all those who were pure in heart and Christian in the true sense went to the Grail while they slept—while they were between sleeping and waking. The Grail was seen as the place where all truly Christian souls gathered while they slept at night. There was a desire to be apart from the earth. So those who were the rulers of the Grail also had to be apart from earthly life. Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, was one of these. Those who desired to work in accordance with the Grail impulse had to feel themselves entirely within the spiritual world. They had to feel that they belonged entirely to the spiritual world and certainly not at all to the earthly world. In a certain sense you could say that they had to drink the draught of forgetfulness.

Lohengrin is sent down from the Grail castle. He unites with Elsa of Brabant, that is with the people of Brabant. In the train of Heinrich I he sets out to fight the Hungarians. In other words, at the instigation of the Grail he carries out important impulses of world history. The strength he has from the Grail temple enables him to do this. When we go back to the fourth post-Atlantean period we find that all these things are different. In those days spiritual impulses played their part together with external impulses that could be comprehended by the intellect. This is hardly noticeable in the way history is told today.

We speak quite rightly today of meditative formulae, simple sentences which work in the human being's consciousness through their very simplicity. How many people today understand what is meant when history tells us that those required to take part in the Crusades—they took place in the fourth post-Atlantean period—were provided with the meditative formula ‘God wills it’ and that this formula worked on them with spiritual force. ‘God wills it’ was a kind of social meditation. Keep a look out for such things in history; you will find many! You will find the origins of the old mottos. You will discover how the ancient titled families set out on conquering expeditions under such mottos, thus working with spiritual means, with spiritual weapons. The most significant spiritual weapons of all were used by knights of the Grail, such as Lohengrin. But he was only able to use them if he was not met with recollections of his external origins, his external name, his external family. He had to transport himself into a realm in which he could be entirely devoted to the spiritual world and in which his intercourse with the external world was limited to what he perceived with his senses, devoid of any memories. He had to accomplish his deeds under the influence of the draught of forgetfulness. He was not allowed to be reminded. His soul was not permitted to remember: This is my name and I am a scion of this or that family. So this is why Elsa of Brabant is not allowed to question him. When she does, he is forced to remember. The effect on his deeds is the same as if his sword had been smashed.

If we go back beyond the time when everything became intellectual, so that people also clothed what had gone before in intellectual concepts, imagining that everything had always been as they knew it—if we go back beyond what belongs to the age of the intellect, we find the spiritual realm working everywhere in the social realm. People took the spiritual element into account, for instance, in that they took moral matters just as much into account as physical medicines.

In the age of the intellect, in which all people belong only to the intellect, whatever would they think if they found that moral elements, too, were available at the chemist's! Yet we need only go back a few centuries prior to the great change. Read Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue,⁷ who was a contemporary of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Before you stands a knight, a rich knight, who has turned away from God, who in his soul has lost his links with the spiritual world, and who thus experiences this moment of atheism which has come over him as a physical illness, a kind of leprosy. Everyone avoids him. No physician can cure him. Then he meets a clever doctor in Salerno who tells him that no physical medicine can do him any good. His only hope of a cure lies in finding a pure virgin who is prepared to be slain for his sake. The blood of a pure virgin can cure him of his illness. He sells all his possessions and lives alone on a smallholding cared for by the tenant farmer. The farmer has a daughter. She falls in love with the leprous knight, discovers what it is that alone can cure him, and decides to die for him. He goes with her to the doctor in Salerno. But then he starts to pity her, preferring to keep his illness rather than accept her sacrifice. But even her willingness to make the sacrifice is enough. Gradually he is healed.

We see how the spirit works into cultural life, we see how moral impulses heal and were regarded as healing influences. Today the only interpretation is: Ah, well, perhaps it was a coincidence, or maybe it is just a tale. Whatever we think of individual incidents, we cannot but point out that, during the time which preceded the fifteenth century, soul could work on soul much more strongly than was the case later; what a soul thought and felt and willed worked on other souls. The social separation between one human being and another is a phenomenon of intellectualism. The more intellectualism flourishes and the less an effort is made to find what can work against it—namely the spiritual element—the more will this intellectualism divide one individuality from another.

This had to come about; individualism is necessary. But social life must be found out of individualism. Otherwise, in the ‘social age’ all people will do is be unsociable and cry out for Socialism. The main reason for the cry for Socialism is that people are unsocial in the depths of their soul. We must take note of the social element as it comes towards us in works such as Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich. It makes its appearance in cultural works in which it can be sensed quite clearly through the mood. See how different is the mood in Der arme Heinrich. You cannot call it sentimental, for sentimentality only arose later when people found an unnatural escape from intellectualism. The mood is in a way pious; it is a mood of spirituality. To be honest about the same matters in a later age you have to fall back on the element of comedy. You have to tell your story as Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did in Simplicissimus, or as the people as a whole did in Till Eulenspiegel.

This sense of having been thrown out of the world is found everywhere, not only in poetic works arising out of the folk element. Wherever it appears, you find that what is being depicted is a new attitude of the human being towards himself. From an entirely new standpoint he asks: What am I, if I am a human being? This vibrates through everything. So from the new intellectual standpoint the question is asked over and over again: What is the human being? In earlier times people turned to the spiritual world. They truly sought what Faust later seeks in vain. They turned to the spiritual world when they wanted to know: What actually is the human being? They knew that outside this physical life on earth the human being is a spirit. So if he wants to discover his true being, which lives in him also in physical, earthly life, then he will have to turn to the spiritual world. Yet more and more human beings are failing to do this very thing.

In Faust Goethe still hints: If I want to know the spirit, I must turn to the spiritual world. But it does not work. The Earth Spirit appears, but Faust cannot recognize it with his ordinary knowledge. The Earth Spirit says to him: ‘Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, not me!’⁸ Faust has to turn away and speak to Wagner. In Wagner he then sees the spirit which he comprehends. Faust, ‘image of the Godhead’, cannot comprehend the Earth Spirit. So Goethe still lived in an age which strove to find the being of man out of the spiritual world. You see what came once Goethe had died. Once again people wanted to know what the human being is, this time on the basis of intellectualism. Follow the thread: People cannot turn to the spiritual world in order to discover what the human being is. In themselves, equally, they fail to find the answer, for language has meanwhile become an owl in the soul. So they turned to those who depicted olden times at least in an external fashion. What do we find in the nineteenth century?⁹ In 1836 Jeremias Gotthelf: Bauernspiegel; in 1839 Immermann: Oberhof, Die drei Mahlen, Schwarzwalder Bauern geschichten; George Sand: La Petite Fadette; in 1847 Grigorovich: Unhappy Anthony; in 1847-51 Turgeniev: Sportsman's Sketches.

We have here the longing to find in simple people the answer to the question: What is the human being? In olden times you turned to the spiritual world. Now you turned to the peasant. During the course of two decades the whole world develops a longing to write village stories in order to study the human being. Because people cannot recognize themselves, at best looking in the mirror as if they are owls, they turn to simple folk instead. What they can prove in every detail, from Jeremias Gotthelf to Turgeniev, is that everything is striving to get to know the human being. In all these village stories, in all these simple tales, the unconscious endeavour is to achieve a knowledge of man. From this kind of viewpoint spiritual and cultural life can become comprehensible.

This is what I wanted to show you in these three lectures, in order to illustrate the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is not enough to describe this transition with a few abstract concepts—which is what was naturally done at first. Our task is to illumine the whole of reality with the light of the spirit through Anthroposophy. These lectures have beenan example of this.

• 1 . John Milton, 1608-1674. English poet and puritan politician. His epic poem Paradise Lost was finished by 1665.
• 2 . Lecture Twelve, Note 7
• 3 . Wolfram von Eschenbach, c.1170-1220. One of the greatest medieval German poets. Parzival was probably written between 1200 and 1210.
• 4 . #8216;And it bubbles and seethes, and it hisses and roars’, Der Taucher by Friedrich von Schiller, translated by E. Bulwer Lytton in The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, Leipzig 1844.
• 5 . Till Eulenspiegel, a popular German peasant jester, was supposed to have died in Winn in 1350. The first extant text of the chapbook in High German chronicling his escapades was published in 1515. The name ‘Eulenspieger means, literally, ‘owl's mirror’. (Tr.)
• 6 . Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, d.1676. German writer. Simplicissimus, published in 1669, is said to be the greatest German novel of the seventeenth century.
• 7 . Hartmann von Aue, c.1170-1213. Middle High German poet. Der arme Heinrich (Poor Henry).
• 8 . ‘Thou'rt like the spirit’: Faust Part One. The Study.
• 9 . Jerennas Gotthelf (A. Bitzius), 1797-1854; Karl Immermann, 1796-1840; George Sand (A.A.L. Dupin-Dudevant), 1804-1876; D.W. Grigorovich, 1818-1883; I.S. Turgeniev, 1818-1883.

Many reasons have led us to consider how the age of intellectualism—which we have often also called the age of the fifth post-Atlantean culture—begins in the transition from the thirteenth to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this age, human beings come to regard the intellect as the dominant factor in all their endeavours. We have often spoken of the way in which this intellectualism has come to develop in the various realms of inner life. Everything that is characteristic for human evolution has its more inward aspect through which it live:, more expressly in people's feelings, in their views, in their dominant will impulses, and so on. At the same time it also has an outward aspect which manifests in the conditions and circumstances which arise historically in human evolution. In this connection it has to be said that the most significant expression of the intellectualistic age so far has been the French Revolution, that great world-wide movement of the end of the eighteenth century.

For long ages before it took place, much in the life of mankind pointed to ways of striving for the very kind of social community which then came to be expressed so tumultuously in this French Revolution. And since then much has remained of the French Revolution, flickering into life here or there in one form or another in the external social conditions of mankind. Only consider that the French Revolution, in the way it manifested at the end of the eighteenth century, could not have been possible previously. For prior to those days human beings did not seek full satisfaction on this earth with regard to everything they were striving for.

You must understand that before the time of the French Revolution there was never a period in the history of mankind when people expected everything human beings can strive for, in thought, feeling and will, to find an external expression in earthly life. In the times which preceded the French Revolution, people knew that the earth can never provide for every single requirement of man's spirit, soul and body. Human beings always felt that they had links with the spiritual world and they expected this spiritual world to satisfy whatever requirements cannot be satisfied by the earthly world.

However, long before the French Revolution expressed itself in such a tumultuous fashion there were endeavours in many realms of the civilized world to introduce a social order which would allow as many human needs as possible to be satisfied here on earth. The fundamental character of the French Revolution itself was the endeavour to found a social environment which would be an expression here on earth of human thinking, feeling and willing. This is essentially what intellectualism seeks, too.

The realm of intellectualism is earthly existence. Intellectualism wants to satisfy everything that is present in the sense-perceptible physical world. So it wants to organize the social situation here on earth to be an expression of the intellectual element. The endeavour to create in social conditions something which man can strive for here on earth, even goes to the extent of the worship of the goddess of reason—which means, of course, the goddess of the intellect. So we can say: In very ancient times human beings ordered their lives according to the impulses which came to them from initiates and mystery pupils; through them they took into their social order the divine spiritual world itself. Then social conditions moved on to those of, let us say, Egypt, when the social order took in what the kings learnt from the priests about the will of human evolution as it was expressed, for instance, in the stars. Later still, in older Roman times, the times of the Roman kings, the endeavour was made to bring about social conditions based on research into the spiritual world. The meeting of Numa Pompilius with the nymph Egeria is an expression of this.¹ More and more out of this interweaving of the spiritual with the earthly, social realm came the requirement: Everything on earth is to be arranged in such a way as to be a direct expression of the intellect.

To express this in a diagram you would have to draw a downward curve. The French Revolution comes at the lowest point (see sketch), and from here onwards things had to start moving upwards once more. This upward movement was indeed immediately attempted as a reaction to the French Revolution. Read Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays). There we can see quite clearly, for instance, how he was stimulated by what was expressed in the French Revolution in an external way to seek a new connection to the spiritual world within man's inner being. For Schiller the question arose: If it is impossible to create a perfect social order here on earth, how can human beings achieve satisfaction with regard to their thinking, feeling and will? How can they achieve freedom here on this earth?

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And Schiller answered this question by saying: If human beings live logically, in accordance with the dictates of reason, they are servants of the dictates of reason and not free beings. If they follow their physical urges and instincts alone, then in turn they are following the dictates of nature and are unfree. He then came to say: The human being is actually only free when he is working artistically or when he is enjoying something artistic. The achievement of freedom in the world can only come about when the human being works artistically or enjoys art. Artistic activity balances what is otherwise either a dictate of reason or a dictate of nature, as Schiller puts it. Living in the artistic realm, the human being feels the compulsion of thoughts less with regard to an artistic object than he does in the case of logical research. Similarly, what comes to him from the object of art through his senses is not a sensual urge. The sensual urge is ennobled by the spiritual seeing of something artistic. So inasmuch as a human being is capable of working artistically he is also capable of unfolding freedom within earthly existence.

Schiller seeks to answer the question: How can man as a social being achieve freedom? And the conclusion he reaches is that the human being can only achieve freedom if he is a being who is receptive to art. He cannot achieve freedom by being devoted to the dictates of reason or the dictates of nature.

At the time when Schiller was writing his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays) this came to expression in a wonderful way in the interaction between Goethe and Schiller. This is shown in the way Schiller perceived how Goethe was rewriting his Wilhelm Meister at that time. Schiller was full of enthusiasm for this way of writing and for this depiction of inner freedom, because Goethe as an artist was a creative spirit—not in his intellect but in the freedom of his thoughts—yet one who, on the other hand, still remained within a sensual experience of art. Schiller sensed this. He felt that Goethe in his artistic activity was as free as is a child at play. We see how Schiller is enthused by a free human artistic activity which is reminiscent of a child at play. His enthusiasm led him to say in one of his letters to Goethe: The artist is the true human being; in comparison even the best philosopher is a mere caricature.² But his enthusiasm also led him to say: The human being is only truly human when he is at play, and he only plays when he is truly human.³ Frivolous or merely entertaining play is not meant, but artistic activity and artistic enjoyment. The human being dwells within artistic experience, which means that the human being becomes truly free: This is what Schiller is saying.

At the point where the line starts to curve upwards from what had been—with regard to a social order—the goal of the French Revolution, towards something for which human beings have to wrestle inwardly and which cannot be given to them by institutions of the state; at this point, what price was the human being willing to pay for this social freedom? He was prepared to pay the price that it could not be given to him through logical thinking and that it could not be given to him through ordinary physical life, but that he could receive it only in the exclusive activity of artistic experience.

These feelings were indeed engraved within the best spirits of that age, in Schiller in a theoretical form, and in Goethe too, who actually practised this life in freedom. Let us look at the characters Goethe created out of life itself in order to reveal genuine humanity, the true human being. Look at Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm Meister is a personality through whom Goethe wanted to depict the true human being. Yet seen from an overall view of life he is actually a layabout. He is not a person who is seriously searching for a world view which includes the human soul. Neither is he someone who can manage to hold down a job in external life. He loiters his way through life. This is because the ideal of freedom striven for in the work of Goethe and Schiller could only be achieved by people who had removed themselves from a thoughtful and hard-working way of life. It is almost as if Schiller and Goethe had wanted to point to the illusion of the French Revolution, to the illusory belief that something external, like the state, might make human beings free. They wanted to point out that human beings can only wrestle for this freedom within themselves.

Herein lies the great contrast between Central Europe and Latin western Europe. Latin western Europe believed in an absolute sense in the power of the state, and it still believes in it today. In Central Europe, on the other hand, came the reaction that the human ideal can only be found within. But the price for this would have to be the inability to stand squarely in life. Someone like Wilhelm Meister had to disentangle himself from life.

So we see that at the first attempt it proved impossible to find full humanity within a true human being. Naturally, if everybody is to become an artist so that, as Schiller put it, society can become entirely aesthetic, this may be all very well, but such an aesthetic society would not be very good at coping with life. I cannot imagine, for instance—let me be really down to earth for a moment—how in such an aesthetic society the sewers will be kept clear. Neither can I imagine how in this aesthetic society certain things will be achieved which ought to be achieved in accordance with strictly logical concepts. The ideal of freedom shone before mankind, but human beings were unable to strive for this ideal of freedom when they stood fully within life. It became necessary to search once more for an impetus upwards to the super-sensible world, but now this had to be done consciously, just as in former times there had been an atavistic downward impetus. A new upward impetus into the spiritual world had to be sought. It was necessary to hold on to the ideal of freedom but, at the same time, the upward impetus had to be sought. First it had to be made possible to secure freedom for human activity, for active involvement in life. It seemed to me that the only possible way was that described in my Philosophy of Freedom.⁴

If human beings can achieve the impetus to rise up to an inner constitution of soul which enables them to find moral impulses in pure thoughts, in the way I have just described, then they will be free beings even though they remain squarely within full, everyday life. This is why I had to introduce into my Philosophy of Freedom the concept of moral tact, which is otherwise not found in moralizing sermons, the concept of acting as a matter of course out of moral tact, by means of which moral impulses can flow over into habitual deeds.

Consider the role played by tact, by moral good taste, in my Philosophy of Freedom. There you see that in an aesthetic society true human freedom is only applied to the feelings, whereas it actually ought to be brought also into the will, that is, into every aspect of the human being. A human being who has achieved a soul constitution in which pure thoughts can live in his will as moral impulses, can enter fully into life, however burdensome it may be, and he will be able to stand in this life as a free being in so far as this life calls for actions, deeds.

Furthermore, with regard to the dictates of reasoning, that is, the grasping of the world in thoughts, a way also had to be sought of finding what it is that guarantees freedom for the human being, independence from external compulsions. This could only come about through anthroposophical spiritual science. Learning to find their way into what can be experienced in spirit with regard to cosmic mysteries and cosmic secrets, human beings live in thoughts with their humanness into a closeness with the inner spirit of the world. Through freedom they achieve knowledge of the spirit.

What is going on here is best demonstrated by the way in which people, with regard to this, are still strenuously resisting becoming free. This is a point of view from which opposition to Anthroposophy can very well be understood. Human beings do not want freedom in the spiritual realm. They want to be compelled, led, guided by something. And since every individual is free either to recognize or deny the spirit, most deny it and choose instead something which they are not free either to recognize or deny.

No free decision is required to recognize or deny thunder and lightning, or the combination of oxygen or hydrogen in some laboratory process. But human beings are free to recognize that angeloi and archangeloi exist. Or they can deny their existence. But those who truly possess an impulse for freedom come through this very impulse for freedom to the recognition of the spiritual in thinking. In Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays), in the whole of Goethe's creative work, the achievement of human freedom through inner effort and struggle was first attempted. But this can only be achieved if we recognize that to our freedom in the realm of artistic experience must be added a free experience in the realm of thinking and a free experience in the realm of the will. These are things which must be properly developed.

Schiller simply took what the age of the intellect had to offer. In Schiller's time art still arose out of this intellectualism. Within this, Schiller still discovered human freedom. But what intellectualism has to offer in the realm of thinking is something unfree, something which is subject to the dictates of logic. And Schiller failed to recognize the possibility that freedom might also hold sway here, just as little as it might hold sway in deeds, in ordinary, hard life. What we have had to achieve through the introduction of anthroposophical spiritual science is the recognition that freedom can also be recognized in the realm of thinking and in the realm of the will. Schiller and Goethe recognized freedom solely in the realm of feeling.

But the path to a full recognition of human freedom can only be trodden if human beings are able to achieve an inner vision of the connection between the spiritual realm they can experience in their soul, and the realm of nature. So long as two abstract concepts, nature and spirit, are seen by human beings as being mutually exclusive, it will not be possible for them to progress to a proper conception of the freedom I have been describing. But even those who do not work their way towards life in the spiritual world, by means of meditation, concentration exercises and so on, can certainly experience something, if they are willing to recognize, simply with their healthy commonsense, what has been found through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Simply by reading in books or hearing in lectures what is brought to the fore in the world through Imagination—and provided they remain alert—people will soon need to approach these revelations from the spiritual world in a way that differs from their approach, say, to a book on physics or chemistry, or on botany or zoology, even though this different approach can just as much take a course which follows ordinary healthy common sense.

Without developing any great inner activity it is possible to absorb everything written today in a book about botany or zoology. But it is not possible to absorb what I have described, for instance, in my book Occult Science, without inner energy and activity such as that needed also for ordinary healthy common sense. Everything in this book can be understood, and those who maintain that it is incomprehensible are simply unwilling to think actively; they want to absorb it as passively as they absorb a film in the cinema. In the cinema there is certainly no need to think very much, and it is in this manner that people today want to absorb everything. What they find in the laboratory can also be absorbed in this way. But what is said in my book Occult Science cannot by absorbed in this way. Occasionally some professorial souls do attempt to absorb it in this way. In consequence, they then make the suggestion that those who perceive such things ought to be examined in psychological laboratories, as they are called today. This suggestion is just as clever as requiring someone who solves mathematical problems to be examined in order to ascertain whether he is capable of solving mathematical problems. To such a person it is said: If you want to find out whether these mathematical problems have been solved correctly, you will have to learn how to solve them, and then you will be able to check. Only if he were stupid would he retort: No, I don't want to learn how to check on the solutions; I shall go to a psychological laboratory in order to find out whether they are correct! These are the kinds of demands made today by some professorial souls, and their words are taken up by all sorts of ‘generals’⁵ and repeated parrot-fashion with evil intent. Such demands are foolish and stupid, but this does not prevent them from being made with the greatest aplomb.

But those who enter with inner activity into what comes from Imagination will certainly find that something bears fruit in their soul. It is not insignificant for the soul when an effort is made to understand something that has been discovered through Imagination. For instance, it is extremely difficult today to make medicines effective for the treatment of illnesses. But someone who has made the effort to understand something given through Imagination will have reactivated his vital forces to such an extent that medicines will once more be effective for him—provided they are the right ones—because his organism will no longer reject them.

It is stupidly suggested nowadays that anthroposophical medicines are supposed to heal people spiritually through hypnosis and the power of suggestion. You can read this in all manner of magazines which refer to remarks I have made on my lecture tours in recent months. But this is, in the first instance, not the point. The point is that today's medical knowledge needs to be advanced positively through spiritual knowledge. Of course it is not possible to heal somebody by inoculating him with an idea. Yet spiritual life, taken quite concretely, does have significance for the effectiveness of medicines. If a person endeavours to understand something given through Imagination, he makes his organism more receptive to medicines—provided they are the ones needed for his illness—than is the organism of a person who remains in the thought structure of today's external intellectualism, that is, of today's materialism.

Mankind needs to take in what can be given by Imagination, if only for the reason that the human physical body will otherwise succumb more and more to a condition in which it cannot be healed if it falls ill. Healing always requires assistance from the element of spirit and soul. All the processes of nature find expression not only in what takes place on the sense-perceptible plane. These processes on the physical plane are everywhere steeped in the element of spirit and soul. To make a sense-perceptible substance effective in the human organism you need the element of soul and spirit. The whole process of human evolution requires that the soul make-up of human beings should once more be filled with what can be grasped by soul and spirit.

It is true to say that amongst human beings there is certainly much longing for soul and spirit. But for the most part this longing remains within the unconscious or the subconscious realm. Meanwhile, what remains within human consciousness is no more than a mere remnant of intellectualism, and this rejects—indeed resists—anything spiritual. The manner in which spiritual things are resisted is sometimes quite grotesque. Before a performance of eurythmy I usually explain that eurythmy is based on an actual, visible language. Just as the language of sounds develops out of the way the physical organism is arranged, so it is with the visible language that is eurythmy. Just as—sound for sound—all vowels, all consonants struggle to be born out of the experience of the human organism, so in eurythmy is sound for sound gathered together, resulting in genuine language. You would think that on being introduced to eurythmy people might endeavour to find their way into the fundamental impulse which tells us that eurythmy is a language, is speech.

Of course it is perhaps not immediately obvious as to what is meant. But with serious intent it is not too difficult to find one's way quite quickly into what is meant. The other day someone read something really funny in a review of a eurythmy performance. The critic pointed out that the impossible nature of this eurythmy performance was revealed in the fact that the performers first gave a rendering of some earnest, serious items, and that they followed these with some humorous pieces. The extraordinary thing, said this witty critic, was that the humorous items were depicted with the same gestures as the serious ones. That is the extent to which he understood the matter. He thought that humorous things ought to be shown with sound gestures that are different from those used to depict serious matters. Now if you take seriously the fact that eurythmy is a visible language, then what this critic says would amount to saying that any language ought to have one set of sounds for serious things and another for humorous things! In other words, somebody reciting something in German or French would use sounds such as I or U, or whatever, but that on coming to a humorous item they would use other sounds. I don't know how many people noticed what utter nonsense this critic was writing in one of Germany's foremost newspapers; but this is what he was saying in reality. This shows that in such heads every capacity for thinking clearly has ceased; they are entirely unable to think any more.

This is the final consequence of intellectualism, which is gaining ground today in all realms of life. People begin by allowing their thoughts to become the dead inner content of their soul. How rigid, how dead are most thoughts which are produced these days; how little inner mobility they have, how much are they parroted from models created earlier on! There are extraordinarily few original thoughts in our present age. But something that has died—and thoughts today are mostly thoughts that have died—does not remain constantly in the same state. Look at a corpse after three days, after five years or after forty years. It goes on dying, it goes on decomposing. If somebody states that a eurythmy performance is impossible because it uses the same gestures for humorous and for serious items, this is a thought that is decomposing. And if this is not noticed it is simply because people are incapable of schooling their common sense by means of inspired truths such as those arising out of Anthroposophy. If people school their common sense by means of inspired truths, even if they do not undertake any spiritual development, then they acquire a delicate sense for the living truth, and for what is healthy and unhealthy in human thinking and in human endeavour. And then—if you will pardon my saying so—statements such as the one I have just quoted begin to stink. People acquire the capacity to smell the stench of such decomposing thoughts. This capacity, this sense of smell, is for the most part lacking amongst our contemporaries. Most of them do not notice these things, they read them without taking them in.

It is certainly necessary to look very thoroughly into what mankind needs. For human beings definitely need that freedom of thinking in their soul constitution which can only become possible if they raise themselves to a position in which they can take in spiritual truths. Without this we come to that decline of culture which is clearly to be seen all around us today. Healthy judgment, the right immediate impression—these are things which mankind has for the most part already lost. They must not be allowed to get lost, but only if human beings can press through to an acceptance of spiritual things will they not be lost.

We must pay attention to the fact that human beings can find in Anthroposophy a meaningful content for their lives if they turn with their healthy common sense to what can be won through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. By opening themselves to what can be discovered, for example, through Imagination, they can recapture that inner vitality which will make them receptive to medicines. Or, it may be that they will also become free personalities who are not prone to succumb to all sorts of public suggestions.

By entering in a living way into the truths revealed by Inspiration, they can gain a sure sense for what is true or false. And they can become skilful in putting this sure sense into practice in the social sphere. For instance, how few people today are able to listen properly! They are incapable of listening, for they react immediately with their own opinion. This capacity to listen to other human beings can be developed most beautifully by entering in a living way into the truths given by Inspiration.

And by entering in a living way into the truths given by Intuition, human beings can develop to a high degree something else which they need in their lives: a certain capacity to let go of their own selves, a kind of selflessness. Entering in a living way into the truths given by Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, this gives human beings a meaningful content for their lives.

Of course, it is easier to say that people can gain a content for their lives out of what Ralph Waldo Trine⁶ promises. It is easier to say they need only read the content of something in order to gain a content for their lives, whereas it is more difficult to obtain a content for life in an anthroposophical way. For along this path you have to work; you have to work in order to enter in a living way into what research reveals through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But then it becomes a content for life which unites intensely with the personality and with the whole human being. This secure life content is what is given by what wishes to enter the world as Anthroposophy.

• 1 . Numa Pompilius, 715-672 BC. Roman King. By tradition, the nymph Egeria was his wife and adviser.
• 2 . Letter to Goethe of 7 January 1795.
• 3 . Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 15.
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1988.
• 5 . This is a reference to speeches given by General von Gleich.
• 6 . Ralph Waldo Trine, 1866-1958. In Tune with the Infinite, London 1915.