The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! Of the two areas that you yourselves also spoke about yesterday, it seems to me necessary that we deal first with the one that will have to provide the foundation for all our work. Of course, we must first prepare the real ground, and in our time that can be nothing other than community building. We will be able to deal with what is to develop on this real ground all the better in our discussions if we first talk about this community building.

On the one hand, it is undoubtedly the most difficult of your tasks, although it is easy to underestimate, but on the other hand, it is also the most urgent. You can see this from the form that the youth movement has taken. This youth movement, as it lives today in its most diverse forms, has a clear religious background, and this religious background is also always emphasized by the understanding members of the youth movement. And if you look at this youth movement with an open mind, what you notice about it is what is intimately connected with the building of community.

Consider the following phenomenon of this youth movement: it emerged some time ago, years ago. How did it emerge? Initially with the express aim of joining one group with another. It emerged explicitly under the motto of union, of group formation; and the significant thing is that in recent years this youth movement has undergone a metamorphosis into its opposite in many circles. Even those who may have taken it most seriously in those days now advocate isolation and a hermit-like existence. They emphasize the impossibility of joining forces with others. And why is that so?

Perhaps it is, when viewed symptomatically, something that is one of the most significant social phenomena of our time, particularly in central, southern and eastern Europe, that the striving to be a spiritual hermit has emerged so rapidly from the striving for community building in the youth movement, and that there is actually a certain fear of union. If you are familiar with the youth movement, you may find something different here and there, but if you look at it impartially, you will see that the decisive impulses of this youth movement will have to be characterized as I have done.

Now, what is the underlying reason for all this? The underlying reason for all this is that the religious communities have not been able to hold this youth within themselves. It is quite obvious that this youth movement does contain a clear religious impulse. Originally, if we may say so, it was a rebellion against the principle of authoritative life, of paternal life, of looking up to the experience of older people, that gave rise to this youth movement; it was a shaking of the human, paternal principle of authority. The times developed in such a way that people simply no longer believed in their fathers, that they simply no longer had any inner, subconscious trust in their fathers. But man needs man, especially when it comes to action and work. People sought unification, but they could only seek this unification with spiritual life, which is anchored in the hearts of people today when they live and are raised in our ordinary schools, under our religious impulses and so on. Of course, religious longing stirs in young people precisely when something is not right in the external religious life, but it stirs as an indefinite, abstract feeling; as something nebulous, it stirs. On the other hand, it is precisely in connection with this religious urge that the longing for community life arises. But from all that young people could receive, from all that is available, the possibility of real community building does not arise, but rather – if I may express myself somewhat radically – only the possibility of clique formation. That is, after all, the characteristic of our time: that wherever the desire for community arises, what actually arises everywhere is not a real inner sense of community, but the sense of forming cliques, that is, of joining together through the accidental community and feelings of community for what is nearest at hand. What leads one person to another by the accident of place, the accident of circumstances, and so on, leads to the formation of cliques. But these cliques, because they are not based on a solid spiritual foundation, all have the seed of dissolution within them. Cliques dissolve. Cliques are not lasting communities.

Lasting communities do not exist under any other condition than that they are based on a genuine shared commitment in communal life. And for anyone who is familiar with the history of social life, there was nothing surprising in the fact that what only contained the beginnings of cliquish behavior could not develop into community life, and that therefore these young souls became reclusive, received the urge within themselves not to join, and even developed a certain fear of joining. Everyone goes more or less their own way, I would say, who has fully participated in the youth movement. But since this youth movement emerged from a shock to the paternal authority principle, it must be said that this historical life of more recent times does not contain the seeds for real community building.

What you must seek first and foremost is the formation of a community. And if you want to arrive at a goal that is true and rooted in reality, you will have no other choice than to practice threefolding, to be truly aware of how to practice threefolding. In your profession, you absolutely do not need to agitate for threefolding in the abstract. In your profession, it is particularly possible to work very practically for threefolding. But there is no other way than to seek out the way to those to whom you want to speak. A real way must be found to found communities.

Now one need not believe that by doing something like this, one must become a revolutionary in a certain radical sense. There is no need for that at all. It may happen in one case that you get into some kind of regular ministry, into a preaching job, in the completely regular way. It may also happen that you succeed in directing the external material conditions here or there in such a way that you found a completely free community. But such free communities and those in which one strives to bring freedom into religious life must belong together; and that can only be the case if, in a certain way, what you strive for – please do not misunderstand me here to misunderstand me, it is not to preach the pure power principle, but the justified power principle —, if what you strive for becomes a power, that is, if you have a certain number of like-minded people. Nothing else will make an impression on the world. You must actually have the possibility of having people as preachers over a large territory who are from your very own circles. To do this, it will be necessary to make the circle you have now at least ten times larger. That will be your first task, so to speak: to seek out such a large circle of like-minded people, initially in the way that the smaller circle came about. Only when people in the most distant places – relatively distant places, of course – see the same aspiration emerging, when there is cohesion with you over a larger territory, will you be able to proceed to such a community formation, regardless of whether you have come to the ministry of preaching by a path recognized today or otherwise.

You will be able to work in such a way that you can truly bind your parishioners to you inwardly, emotionally. When I say “bind,” it does not mean to put on slave chains. To do that, however, the parishioners must gain the awareness through you that they live in a certain brotherhood. The communities must have concrete fraternal feelings within them and they must recognize their preacher-leader as a self-evident authority to whom they can also turn in specific questions. That means that you must first of all establish a self-evident authority in these communities, which you do not need to call fraternal communities or the like in an agitative way, especially with regard to economic life, however strange it may seem at first. It must be possible for advice to be sought from you in economic matters and in all matters related to economic affairs, based on the personal insight of the community members. It must be possible for people to feel that they are receiving a kind of directive from the spiritual world when they ask the preacher.

You see, when you can look at life, then what should actually be giving direction to it comes to you in seemingly small symptoms. I was once walking down a street in Berlin and met a preacher I had known for a long time. He was carrying a travel bag. I wanted to be polite and asked him some question. The next thing, of course, was that I asked him the question that arose from the situation: “Are you going on a trip?” — “No,” he answered me, “I'm just going on an official act.” — Now you may see something extraordinarily insignificant in it; but from the whole context, the matter seemed extraordinarily significant to me. The pastor in question was more of a theologian than a preacher, but he was a very earnest man. He had the things he needed for a baptism in his traveling bag and yet he spoke and felt in such a way that he could say to someone whom he could reasonably expect to understand a different turn of phrase: “I'm going to an official function.” — That is something like a policeman, when a thief is to be sought, he also goes to an official act.

It should disappear completely from the preacher's work that the connection with the external state or other life should somehow emerge in his consciousness. The whole emotional tenor of the words must express the fact that what is being done is being done by a personality who acts out of the consciousness of her God, out of the free impulse of her human personality. The consciousness must be present: I am not doing this as an official act, I am doing it naturally out of my innermost being, because the divine power leads me to do so.

You may consider this a minor matter. But it is precisely this tendency to regard such facts as unimportant that is perhaps the most important factor in the decline of religious activity today. When, on the other hand, such things are regarded as the main thing, when a person is imbued with the direct presence of the Divine in the physical, right down to the most minute sensation, and when the preacher feels such authority that he knows he am bringing divine life into it, I am not performing an official act in the modern sense, but am carrying out a commission from God – only then will he transmit to his parishioners that which must be transmitted as imponderables.

This seems to be quite far removed from economic life. And yet, as things stand today, we must not consider the things we are striving for here in Stuttgart in the field of threefolding to be decisive for other areas of life. We are working out threefolding from the totality of the social organism. But for your profession, it is a different matter. For your profession, it is a matter of permeating each of the three limbs — which, even if they are not properly organized, are in fact still there — with religious life; so that, although complete freedom of action prevails within the communities, within which, of course, economic life also takes place - it must, so to speak, be a self-evident prerequisite that in economic matters, where it is a matter of spiritual life flowing into the community, the decision is made by the preacher, by the pastor. There must be such harmony, and above all, the pastor must live in intimate connection with the entire charitable life of his community. To some extent, he must be aware of the balance of social inequalities. This must be striven for in the community. One must actually be the advisor of the men, and one must also be, to some extent, the helping advisor of the women; one must help the women's charity, and so on.

Both men and women must, when it comes to organizing their economic affairs, economic aid, and economic cooperation in a higher sense, unquestionably have the natural feeling that the preacher has something to say. Without an interest in economic life, a participatory interest, religious communities cannot be established, especially not in today's difficult economic times.

Is that not right? We can initially present such things as an ideal, but in one area or another we will have the opportunity to approach the ideal to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, you will face endless resistance if you strive for something like this. You will be rejected, but you must make your parishioners aware of this, and through their desire, the necessity to achieve this guiding influence of the preacher in economic life will become apparent.

At this point, I must say that much must remain an ideal. Above all, what must be the part of the one who lives as a preacher in a community in terms of legal and state life must still remain an ideal in many cases today. I will give a specific example. The fact that religious life has increasingly lost its real foundation has led to things that seem extraordinarily enlightened to today's people, but that have thoroughly undermined religious life from within social life. One example is the view that is held today about marriage legislation. There is no doubt that marriage legislation — whether conceived in strict or less strict terms, depending on other circumstances — is necessary. But it is necessary, under all circumstances, that this marriage legislation be integrated into the threefold social organism. For this, however, it is of course necessary to have a clear sense of marriage as a distinct institution that represents the threefold social organism. It is, first of all, an economic community and must be integrated into the social organism in so far as it has an economic part. Thus, a connection must be sought between the economic community that marriage represents and the associations. Today, little more can be thought of this, but this awareness must arise from within the communities, that above all the economic side of marriage must be supported by the measures of the associations, by the measures of economic life.

The second thing is that the legal relationship is clearly perceived as a relationship in itself, and that the state has only to intervene in the legal relationship of marriage, so that marriage between a man and a woman is only of concern to the state insofar as it is a matter of law, which originates from the state.

On the other hand, you will have to claim the spiritual blessing of marriage as your very own within the religious community in a completely free way based on your decision. So you will have to strive for the ideal that the religious blessing of marriage is placed within the freedom of religious decision and that this decision is fully respected, so that it is seen as a basis for the other, so that the trust that exists in the community is actually sought first for the marriage decision of the pastor or the preacher. Of course I know that such a thing is perhaps even regarded by many Protestant people today as something quite out of date, but again I can only say: that such things are regarded as out of date shows the damage of civilization, which inevitably undermines religious life.

So you will have to make your parishioners aware that the actual inner spiritual core of marriage has to do with religious life and that threefolding must certainly be practised in this area, that is, all three parts of marriage must gradually find their expression in social life, that is, all three things must be included. One should not imagine threefolding in such a way that one draws up a utopian program and says that one should threefold things. One threefolds them in the best way when one grasps that threefolding is implicitly contained in every institution of life and how one can shape the individual things in such a way that threefolding underlies them. Perhaps in your profession, in particular, it is not necessary to place too much emphasis on representing the threefold social order in the abstract; but one must understand how life demands that this threefold order comes about, that is, that each of the individual limbs of the social organism is a truly concrete, existing reality.

Of course you will meet with great resistance to this today, but it is precisely in such matters that you can, if you start by educating your community, best develop the relationship between the free spiritual life – in which, above all, the religious element must be included – which is to be, not in, I might say, benevolent mutual addresses, that one tolerates each other, but by actually presenting what is demanded by the matter as one's ideal. Of course, you must be prepared for the greatest resistance.

And thirdly, you must have the opportunity to develop what the free spiritual life should mean in the threefold social organism. Today, in the general social organism, we no longer have a spiritual life at all; we have an intellectual life, but we have no spiritual life. I would say that we have no dealings between gods and humans. We do not have the awareness that in everything that happens externally in the physical world, the divine work should be there through ourselves, and that the real, true spirit should be carried into the world, that therefore both the actions that take place within economic life, as well as the legal determinations that take place within state life, and in particular that the education of youth and also the instruction of old age must be the free deed of the people participating in this spiritual life. — That is what must be understood.

Therefore, you will have no choice but to fight for your complete individual authority for the free will. Of course, this is something that our time demands: that the individual who preaches preaches under his own authority. You see, in this area, one simply has to look at the tremendous clash of contradictions that prevails in our time.

When I go to a Catholic church today and come to the sermon, I know that the preacher is wearing the stole. I know that when he is wearing the stole, the person standing in the pulpit and preaching is not at all relevant to me as a human being. This is also really in the consciousness [of the Catholic priest]. As a human being, he does not feel responsible for any of his words, because the moment he crosses his chest with the stole, the Church speaks. And since the declaration of infallibility, the Roman Pope speaks ex cathedra for all things to be proclaimed by the Catholic Church. So, in [the Catholic preacher], I have a person in front of me who, at the moment [of the sermon], completely empties himself and doesn't even think about somehow representing his opinion, who is absolutely of the opinion that he can have a personal opinion that he keeps to himself, that doesn't even have to agree with what he speaks from the pulpit, because a personal opinion is out of the question there. The moment he crosses his stole over his chest, he is the representative of the church.

You see, that is one extreme. But it is there, and it will play a major role in the cultural movement that is just around the corner. Because as corrupting as we have to regard this power, it is a power, an immense power; and you cannot approach it otherwise than by becoming fully aware of it. They will have no other way of fighting. You will encounter this power at every turn in your life. It is spreading in an immeasurable way today, while humanity sleeps and does not notice.

On the other hand, the task of the time is to trust in – if I may call it that – divine harmony. And that, my dear friends, has absolutely not been understood in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. But it is something that should be understood in the most urgent sense in the present. In my “Philosophy of Freedom”, the legal system is also based on the individual human being acting entirely out of himself. One of the first and most brilliant critics to write about my Philosophy of Freedom in the English Athenaeum simply said that this whole view leads to a theoretical anarchism. This is, of course, the belief of today's people. Why? Because modern man actually lacks any truly divine social trust, because people cannot grasp the following, which is most important for our time: When you really get people to speak from their innermost being, then harmony comes about among people, not through their will, but through the divine order of the world. Disharmony comes from the fact that people do not speak from their innermost being. Harmony cannot be created directly, but only indirectly, by truly reaching people at their core. Then each person will automatically do what is beneficial for the other, and also speak what is beneficial for the other. People only talk and act at cross purposes as long as they have not found themselves.

If you understand this as a mystery of life, then you say to yourself: I seek the source of my actions within myself and have the confidence that the path that leads me inwardly will also connect me to the divine world order outwardly and that I will thus work in harmony with others. This brings, firstly, trust in the human heart and, secondly, trust in external social harmony. There is no other way than this to bring people together. Therefore, what you must achieve if you really want to have a social effect through your profession, a divine social effect, a spiritual social effect, is the possibility to really work from within, that is, everyone for himself, because he has found himself, has the possibility to be an authority.

The Catholic preacher acts without individuality, crosses the stole and is no longer himself, he is the Church. The Catholic Church has the magical means to powerfully influence social life without trust [in individual strength], through external symbolic soul activity. This was necessary to establish social communities towards the end of the 2nd millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha and was most ideally developed in ancient Egypt. In a roundabout way, which can be traced exactly historically, this has become the inner essence of the Catholic Church. The essence of the Catholic Church is that it still stands today at the point of view of the Egyptian priests and their social life in about the second millennium BC. The Catholic is an influence of the old into our time.

In contrast to this, there is a need today to really stand on the standpoint of our time, not to feel that we are anything other than the bearers of divine life within ourselves, which has become intellect. You have to fight for the freedom of speech so that no one can tell you what to preach, and that there is no norm for the content of the sermon. That is what you have to fight for. Otherwise you will not be able to found communities unless you make it a principle to fight for the freedom of preaching.

With this, I have first outlined in some detail what must, so to speak, lead to the formation of a community from within. If you are able to realize these things, then you will also, in turn, encourage young people to form a real community, whereas young people have only been able to form cliques out of themselves. I am convinced and have full confidence that if such communities can be brought into existence, then the young people will gather in such communities and something useful can come out of it, whereas perhaps 15 to 20 years ago the young people sought union in the so-called youth movement, but were leaderless because they no longer believed in their fathers and thus strove towards community building without any real inner impulse. All that came of it was the formation of cliques. Today, people's souls are hermits. But if there were a possibility of coming together, they would join immediately, and where truly free communities arise, that is, communities with inner freedom, young people in particular would flock to them.

You see, in such matters we naturally have a difficult time with our anthroposophical movement. Because of its inner nature, this anthroposophical movement today can be nothing other than a completely universal movement. It must, so to speak, extend itself to all areas of life, and we are in an extraordinarily difficult situation with regard to the anthroposophical movement. We are in the difficult situation that on the one hand a certain anthroposophical good must be communicated to the world today - it must go out into the world, because the world lacks the opportunity to receive spiritual content - on the other hand, the desire to form communities, to form anthroposophical communities, is arising everywhere. Call them branches, call them what you will, the endeavour is there to found anthroposophical branches. And because the anthroposophical movement today still has to be something universal, these anthroposophical branches cannot really come to a real life, because they oscillate back and forth between the religious element and the spiritual element, which is more directed towards all branches of life. Naturally, they do not develop a true sense of brotherhood; they do not even grasp their social task, which consists in founding small communities as models of what is to spread throughout humanity. But either they degenerate into a mere transmission of the teachings, or they feel the human resistance to unification and split into opinions, quarrel and the like. But if we ask ourselves where the fault lies, we find it not in these communities but in the fact that today one cannot really find a true connection to religious life by penetrating the spiritual world with insight. Among all the denominations that exist today, anthroposophists cannot find a religious life. These communities must first come into existence. They cannot come into being in any other way than by people seriously considering all the things that can lead to the founding of such communities. I believe that the external possibilities, the possibilities for establishing institutions, will not be so difficult to find if the attitude that I have tried to characterize for you today really takes hold, provided there are enough of you. If you have ten times as many people who are preparing to fulfill the preaching profession throughout Germany, over a larger territory, then you will also have the opportunity to come to community building out of this attitude. But community building is the foundation. Only when we have become clear about this can we talk further about worship and preaching.

Now I would like to ask you to speak up and ask questions about your own specific thoughts, desires, and so on. Perhaps you have had concerns about some of the things I have mentioned, or you feel that one or the other question has not been fully addressed, that you need more practical information.

A participant: Even if the practical side comes about easily, it may be that this or that practical matter is of the greatest importance to us now, especially since some of us are already in certain practical situations. Therefore, I would ask you to perhaps tell us something about the possibilities for connecting. Initially, there are two possibilities for connecting, either perhaps from the church or from the existing anthroposophical communities. Is it at all possible to connect from church work afterwards? This fear that it cannot be found still holds back many of us, although they could already enter into church service. What should happen then? The question of practical matters is perhaps already included, but the fundamental question of the possibility of making contact is already contained in it, because there is simply no clarity in our own movement about where we can make a practical connection right now. Would we be wasting an opportunity if we entered the church service now in the hope of being able to make a connection later? Should we not rather do something else, because we have to make a connection somewhere.

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is such that the answer to this must be a manifold one. It cannot be given in the same way because, despite the difficulties that the church presents today, there are still possibilities to work from within the church that should perhaps not be left untapped. If you take into account the particular circumstances here or there, you will be able to say that, given the nature of the community as a whole, you can found your community yourself, if you seek out the existing forms of the ministry, but then gradually lead the community out of the current church circumstances, while you would not be able to get the community members together if you placed yourself outside the church and simply tried to gather them. On the other hand, in certain fields it will no longer be possible to work outside the Church at all. In such cases it is of course absolutely necessary to try to found free communities. But I would recommend under all circumstances not to approach the matter with the aim of forming a union with the anthroposophical branches and so on, and not to aim at working out of anthroposophy itself, because in that case you would be pulled down before you got anywhere. Anthroposophy as such will simply be attacked in the most outrageous way from all possible sides in the near future; and in order to arrive at the formation of a quiet community within this battle, you see, the strength that you have today, even if you were ten times as numerous, is not yet sufficient. We do not yet live in social conditions that would make it possible to develop religious communities from anthroposophy itself. They have to form religious communities for themselves and then seek union with the anthroposophical movement. The anthroposophical movement – I can say this quite openly – will never fail to support this union, of course; but it would not be good to form ecclesiastical communities out of the anthroposophical 'communities', so to speak.

You see, when we founded the Waldorf School - it is not an example, but there is at least a similarity - we did not set out to found a school of world view, a school of anthroposophy, but merely to bring into pedagogy and didactics what can be brought in through anthroposophy. I was quite insistent that Catholic children should be taught by Catholic priests and Protestant children by Protestant priests. Now, however, it has become clear that, because the first core of the Waldorf School was working-class children, a great many children would have had no religious instruction at all. And so it became necessary to provide an independent anthroposophical religious education. But I am very particular, especially in my own behavior in this matter, that this anthroposophical religious education does not fall into the constitution of this school, but that it comes from outside in the same way as Catholic and Protestant religious education, so that the school as such gives this religious instruction out of itself, but simply allows the Anthroposophical community to give this Anthroposophical religious instruction to those children for whom the parents want it, just as Protestant religious instruction is given to Protestant children and Catholic religious instruction to Catholic children. In this area, we must be serious about the fact that the spiritual works only through the spiritual. As soon as we would make a school constitution to incorporate religious education into the school curriculum, we would probably achieve more at first than we are achieving now, but slowly dismantling it. We must have faith in the spirit to work through itself. And that is why we in the anthroposophical movement face the great difficulty that as soon as we establish a branch, we do so in the physical world; and there, of course, people always strive to work through external means. But anthroposophy cannot work through external means today; it can only work through that which is in it as spiritual content that works on people. These two things are always in conflict with each other: external branching out – internal effectiveness. This fights terribly with each other. And that would even change into a healthy one at the moment when a community could really be formed out of the religious spirit. Now, of course, it is a matter of overcoming, I would say, higher inconveniences, so to speak.

You see, when I speak to Swiss teachers about the liberation of intellectual life, the liberation of the teaching profession, even the best of them usually reply: Yes, in Switzerland we are actually quite free, we can do what we want at school. — But no one does anything other than what the state wants. In terms of freedom, they are basically as unfree as possible; they just don't feel their unfreedom, they feel their unfreedom as freedom because they have grown so inwardly together with it. We, in turn, must first learn to feel the unfreedom. I was once able to feel it in a very strange way at a threefolding meeting I had held in Switzerland; I would say it was more in a humorous way. During the discussion, someone had become extremely heated in a certain fanatical way about the fact that in Germany, laws and police measures were used to command everyone to behave loyally, to worship the monarchy loyally, and so on, that all this was a commandment. He became so terribly heated about it. I said to him: It may well be that Republicans get worked up in such a way against the monarchy, but I remember that when the German Kaiser was in Switzerland a few years ago, the people behaved in an extremely devotional manner, so that at that time in Zurich the image of devotion far surpassed what people were used to in Germany. — To which he replied: Yes, that is precisely the difference between Germany and Switzerland: in Germany, it is all compulsory, the people have to do it, but we do it voluntarily. —- That is the difference between free people and those who are unfree.

Well, it is not true that we have to, and that all people have to – it is completely international in our time – we actually have to learn what it means to be a free person. And that is why I believe that it must actually be possible to tie in with where some freedom is still possible within the church, to found these free communities from within the church itself.

I am not unaware of the difficulties, but it is true that you only have to consider the real cultural conditions, especially in Central Europe. A certain kind of community was formed at the time – and we really must learn from history – when Old Catholicism emerged after the proclamation of the dogma of infallibility. Now, if you take Old Catholicism in terms of its content, it can be said to have the same in terms of doctrine and priestly behavior as the Protestant pastorate. It is already inherent in Old Catholicism, which has only preserved in a popular way a cultus that we will talk about later. One can say that Old Catholicism, precisely because it arose as a reaction, already contained within it that which, by itself, could have led to the free formation of congregations outside the Church. Now you will know, of course, that Old Catholicism in Germany was received with great enthusiasm. Parishes were formed here and there, but they could not live, could not die. Of course, at that time, because one could not form such parishes within the Catholic Church, they had to form themselves. There was no other way. In Switzerland, where much more of the Old Catholicism has been preserved – because there are many Old Catholic communities there – it has recently become quite blatantly clear that these communities are continuing a conservative life, but are no longer growing, but rather remaining small, even shrinking, so that they are already on the ground of a descending development. This is the difficulty of forming free communities today.

Therefore, it will be necessary to save as many people as you can – not from the church, but from those people who have not yet been able to decide to leave the church in order to found free communities with you – to really grasp them in the church and bring them out. If things develop in this way, you can be quite sure that the connection with the anthroposophical movement will be achieved. For the anthroposophical movement, although it will have to fight terrible battles, will nevertheless establish its validity, even if it is only possible with many sacrifices on the part of those working in it, with great sacrifices. It will establish its validity , but it will hardly be in a position today to found a branch of religious life out of itself — that is why I always spoke today of the special nature of your profession — it will hardly be in a position to shape communities in a particular religious sense. It will be necessary for what I always emphasize to become truth: The Anthroposophical Society as such cannot found new religious communities and so on, but one must somehow form the religious community out of oneself, or - as far as one can - form it with the human material that today, purely out of prejudice, still stands within the old church. But perhaps you can formulate the question further so that we can talk about it in more detail.

Dr. Rittelmeyer – he just got sick – would have had the opportunity, given the way he had behaved towards his parishioners, to found a completely free parish in the middle of Berlin. And once it has a certain power, a certain standing, is it large, then you don't dare approach the pastor in any way. Is it actually your opinion that one should not have this last remnant of consideration for the church?

A participant: I think it will be especially difficult to work in the church, and I don't yet see clearly to what extent we could do that even now. We will have to wait until we can go out together to do the actual work. Would it perhaps be possible to look for points of contact in the church now? But then we would already be scattered until we are ready to go out together.

Rudolf Steiner: As long as you do not have a preaching ministry, you cannot seek such connections now. You must seek what is the preparation for religious work, of course independently of the church, at least inwardly independently. As long as you are, so to speak, students, you cannot seek union with the church. You can only look around to see where it would be possible to pull such congregations out of the church. And if you should find that this is impossible in Central Europe, then you should still proceed to the free formation of congregations, and you should seek the means and ways to proceed to this free formation of congregations.

Now, of course, I would only have two objections to an absolutely free establishment of a congregation, that is, one of you goes to place X and the other to place Y and simply, by preaching first for five and then for ten or twenty people for my sake, gradually creates a free congregation. The only difficulty I can see is that this path is, first of all, a slow one – you will see that it is a slow one – it is the safest, but a slow one. And the second is the material question. Because, isn't it true that if things were to be done this way, it would be necessary for this matter to be financed in the broadest sense, to be properly financed, so that a community would simply be established by you yourselves, and that the financing of this community would be sought.

Now I must say that this would, of course, be the best way; even if it has to be fought for with external material means, it would naturally be the best way. But I must tell you quite frankly that all these paths require great courage on your part. It takes great courage for you to join in the struggle that naturally arises, to join in the difficulties, in the struggle, for the financial foundation as well. It would, of course, be best if we could raise sufficient funds to make you completely independent, so that you could simply choose whether to collect here or there, even if it is only from the smallest circle, my community. It will come about. It takes courage to believe that it will come about. It will come about, but of course you need the financial basis, and there are extraordinary difficulties standing in the way of this today. The community of all today's positive confessions will soon be there, which most strenuously opposes the fact that something like this is done. And you cannot do it in detail, you have to organize it as a large movement. You actually have to establish a community out of all of you who set themselves this goal in life and for whom a financial foundation is then sought.

Now, you can do the math. It would be enough, if, let us say, there were two hundred of you, because this way is, so to speak, a very safe one and does not depend on such speed. Now you can calculate for yourselves what is needed annually. As soon as you have the means to do it, you can do it. Then it is the safest way. But then it is also the most visible way, and that would actually be the more natural one. But in today's social and economic conditions, raising these funds in Central Europe – and that is what it could be about – is extremely difficult. Because you won't find any possibility to do something like this in another empire, in another country. So in both Eastern and Western Europe it is absolutely out of the question; in Central Europe it could be done for internal reasons, and a great thing would be done with it.

Werner Klein: I must say in this regard that I have so far only seen this path, the latter, and actually still consider it the only viable one. We have major difficulties with financing, of course, but we could work to eliminate them. I also believe that you can keep your head above water with your own resources if you create your own field of activity in a city, perhaps try to get money from lectures. You will be able to make friends who will help you. But you can also get into a profession – after all, we live in the age of reduced working hours – so you will be able to fill a less significant position at the town hall or somewhere where you can make a living if necessary, in order to gain the time to pursue what is on your mind. I believe that you will be able to survive. But alongside that, a generous organization would have to be set up and an attempt would have to be made to at least obtain funds. And according to what lives in all of us in Germany, this general yearning for something new and strong, I believe that many things will be found. That will depend on us. — But now, for the first time today, I see the second way in connection with the church and I believe that one can go hand in hand there. The path of the free community requires a completely different tactic, a joint approach to the goal, and a joint approach at a joint point in time, but still each for himself when one emerges as a larger movement; while the other tactic is that everyone starts working on their own and tries to create a new community from the church. The one will not interfere with the other. At the moment when we are perhaps so far along on this safe but also more difficult path that we can, to put it bluntly, get started, then those who have so far taken the other path will join us in our work and then, with can support us with fruits that have already shown themselves to be real and positive, while, if we succeed in one area or another in following up the successes in one or the other area, that would only be to be welcomed and regarded as a factor in itself. If we really want to achieve something socially in view of the social and religious hardship today, then only this first, sure way seems to be available. We must try it in any case. If we fail, we will still take the other path, and if it is taken simultaneously by those who already want to work in order to fill the interim period, it is to be welcomed. If we want great things, we must also strive for the great and try.

Rudolf Steiner: It is indeed the case that here in Stuttgart we have had some experiences with the difficulties that confront something like the surest way that has been characterized here. Of course, I am entirely of the opinion that this path can be taken if sufficient effort is put into it. But please also be aware of the difficulties that are encountered in all areas today. There is an extraordinary amount of goodwill in saying that one can also take on some position and work alongside it in the way that is desirable. But it is an open secret that students at German universities will face terrible financial difficulties in the coming years. People have thought of all kinds of impractical things; even a professor came to me and said that we should think about setting up printing presses because students will no longer be able to afford to print their dissertations, and they should print them themselves there. Of course, I do not have the slightest sympathy for such material inbreeding; because I do not know how the students should earn anything by printing their own dissertations. I thought it would be more rational to abolish the forced printing of dissertations altogether – for the time of need. – So, one thinks of all kinds of impractical things, but the matter is a very serious one. For example, it would be an extremely appealing idea to me if the “Kommende Tag” were able to provide a certain material basis for at least a number of students, that is, it would have to, let's say, take on a group of students in its enterprises for three months on a rotating basis, while employing others for the next three months. Then the latter could go back to university and study. So that would be a nice idea to implement, if it were possible. But in our own company, the moment we tried to implement something like that, i.e. hire a number of students, we would immediately have a revolution by the trade union workers, who would tell us: that's not on. They would throw us out. And, wouldn't you agree, something similar would happen, even if it wasn't exactly in the form of being thrown out, but probably in the form of not being let in. Besides, I don't see any real possibility of being able to pursue such a profession alongside a job, even with today's shorter working hours, where you can give yourself completely, because it requires complete devotion to really fulfill such a profession, which you want to pursue. I don't see any real possibility.

You see, we are simply faced with the fact that today, due to the difficult living conditions, people are actually not as strong as they should be. So I fear that such a path, where the person in question would have to rely on himself in financial terms, would at least lead to a slight neurasthenia. It also seems rather unlikely to me that under present-day conditions it is possible to earn a living by lecturing and working independently in this way. You see, intellectual services are paid for in the old currency, and one has to eat in the new currency. If you take the payment for intellectual performance, then in the old currency you get 30 marks, and in the new currency you would have to spend 300 marks. So this matter would of course be difficult. On the other hand, it would be really worth working for a financing in the broadest sense.

I also think that working together with the church, which seems to be more appealing to Mr. Klein than to some of you, is not a lost cause. Because combining this work with the church would, I believe, have advantages.

You can do both. I still think that experience today suggests that if you first succeed in creating free congregations from within the church, you will find followers simply by your approach. You will find followers. Because it is no exaggeration to say that there are many pastors and priests in the Protestant religious communities today who would like to get out of their jobs and just need a nudge. If you succeed in drawing these people out of their communities, then you will find that some of the pastors currently in office will follow you. That would be a good addition. It would enable the movement to grow rapidly. You would find support from those who, on their own, simply cannot muster the initiative. If the impetus were provided from outside, you would find support.

That would, of course, be extremely desirable if we could somehow at least tackle the question of financing. I deliberately say “tackle it somehow”, because if this financing question is properly tackled, then it is likely to succeed. Tackling it is much more difficult than succeeding once it has been properly tackled. For what is lacking today in the broadest sense is the active cooperation of people in the great tasks of life. People everywhere have become so accustomed to routines that one does not really gain sufficiently active collaborators for the most important tasks.

I believe that we should perhaps make use of our time, and because we have now come directly to the practical issues, which should be discussed preliminarily, I would ask you to come at half past six this evening for the continuation.

Rudolf Steiner: I think it would be best if the honored attendees could express their views on the matters we have begun to discuss today, so that we can get to know each other's wishes and intentions. You certainly have questions about one or two things based on what I have presented.

Emil Bock: ¹ This afternoon, the participants instructed me to report the results. We initially discussed the various options and finally agreed that all of the options would be considered and then we made it clear: In any case, it is about the collection of people and the collection of money and in which direction we want to organize ourselves and whether we only want to strive for a loose association. We agreed that everyone should take the initiative where it seemed advisable to them and then chose a place to which letters would be sent regularly as soon as the need arose, so that we would move into a circular letter organization. What we can do publicly in a religious way can only happen in church. What we do afterwards, we have to wait and see once we have people. Regarding the question of joining, we have been able to make it clear that joining can only be possible if one of those who are now participating in the course is a guarantor. The central office for these letters would have to be transferred to Berlin, so that the initiative for everything possible must be collected and given from Berlin. The gathering of people could be tackled immediately. Then the preparation of an administrative office: the only question is who should be considered. However, we do not want to collect the money in such a way that it goes under the name of our association, because that would also bring us into the public eye. The idea was considered of whether we could attach our administrative office to the “Kommenden Tag”, or what other possibility might present itself.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, so you thought that it would be best to have a loose union of those who might want to join this committee, a central office in Berlin for collecting letters, and the collection of money in a way that the “Kommende Tag” would initially handle. The latter matter is, of course, something that we would also have to make more tangible. Now, isn't it true that the looser union should also be discussed from the point of view of how quickly those present imagine the matter should proceed? After all, they are mostly older people who will soon be coming out into the world, aren't they?

A participant: Different.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course they are different. But in addition, the situation today is such that it is indeed necessary not to lose time when doing something like this. There is no doubt that, for example, much more would have been achieved by the threefolding movement if time had not been lost all the time. And so I would also think that here it is advisable to try not to lose any time, but of course it cannot be rushed either. Have you formed an idea about how you might be able to go public with the matter at the point in time when you want to start collecting money on a large scale? You want to avoid the public in a certain sense. Do you have any particular reasons for this? Let's try to discuss this question.

A participant: I would just like to say that, from what I have experienced in the various cities so far, I have the feeling that there is actually no reason to avoid the public. The lectures are always only of a spiritual scientific nature. I am convinced that more people would join immediately if it were not just spiritual scientific lectures, but if it were to shape culture.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to hear specifically what your objections to publicity are. The reasons may be very important.

A participant: We have considered that it must come down to a cultural struggle, and that we have to wait with the founding of communities, and also with the proclamation of the idea in general. As soon as a request for money appears in public, it is reason enough for us to be met with the greatest difficulties. These were our reasons for waiting with the church planting itself; because it is about the same thing.

Another participant: We believe that we cannot appear as active participants in the founding of the community...

Rudolf Steiner: Well, yes, wait with the founding of the community... A participant:... with the public appearance.

Rudolf Steiner: But what do we do while we are waiting? The task at hand is to find ten times as many people as there are here. That is what you are aiming for with the letter. I believe that if you do it skillfully, it is not that difficult to get ten times as many people. In particular, among the theological student body, there will probably be ten times as many people. You yourself came together relatively quickly. There will undoubtedly be no shortage of people among the theological students. It all depends on the form in which you try to finance the matter. Of course, it's not an easy thing, because it will only succeed if it is done relatively quickly. And the idea is, of course, quite good to first form a loose union and to seek out, through correspondence, all those students who are inclined towards such a cause. How many are you now?

A participant: Eighteen.

Rudolf Steiner: Eighteen students, ten times as many is 180. As soon as you have 180 to 200, then it would indeed be a matter of getting down to work; and then the question arises as to what could be done to be able to act as quickly as possible. Of course, working through an exemplary cult – as good as it is in itself – is not designed to work quickly. So the question arises as to whether one should not prepare a calm but very clear presentation of the main points, which could be printed, during the collection through correspondence. This does not need to be published , but which would have to be used to collect money, which would be presented by those personalities who are trying to collect the money, to people who are believed to have money for such a thing. How this could be done by the “Coming Day” is, of course, somewhat difficult to imagine. The “Coming Day” could, of course, be involved in the administration, but how the “Coming Day” could advocate for such a cause with its name is a little questionable. Did you mean that the “Coming Day” as the “Coming Day” takes the matter in hand?

A participant: We only saw the advantage in the fact that they already have many addresses and administrative experience. It does not have to be “Tomorrow”. We have to appoint someone to do this who will then work with “Tomorrow” for practical reasons.

Rudolf Steiner: I do understand the matter. It is perhaps not even an impractical idea to think of someone who might be very interested in this matter. One could think of Heisler for this task. One could think of something so that he or someone in the same situation would be the best person for this position. But how do you feel about a kind of calm, objective, purposeful presentation that you would have to disseminate so that people could educate themselves about what they would spend money on.

A participant: I believe – for my part – that at the moment when the decision is made to undertake major financing, the hidden aspect will have to be abandoned in any case.

Rudolf Steiner: But it is possible that someone like Heisler would be entrusted with the financial work, so to speak, and that one would not shy away from letting the matter as such come to the public's attention. On the other hand, I would say that you could avoid having your name and the names of others who join you become known, so that no one needs to know that you belong to this movement if it is somehow a matter of a pastor or preacher within the church. There is no need to be questioned about it. The participants in this loose association need not be brought to the public, but only the idea and the thing as such.

In Heisler's case, it doesn't do any harm, because he won't get a pastorate anyway.

A participant: I am not reflecting on a position within the church.

Rudolf Steiner: You are not reflecting on a position within the church?

A participant: No, I would not do that.

Rudolf Steiner: There are certainly such candidate preachers who are already so compromised that they can quietly let their names be known. Otherwise, the names of this loose association need not be known. Of course, no one denies their affiliation; but it is only necessary to say so when asked. That seems to me, after all, to be the best that can be done. And you don't think that among the younger people already in pastor positions there will be a number of those who would join your circle, who have thus already entered [into a church office]?

A participant: It is questionable to what extent people already have a relationship with anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, it would be necessary, though, to have a certain core of personalities who are anthroposophists. But it doesn't really seem necessary to me that everyone should be an anthroposophist. Isn't it true that if there is a certain core of energetic personalities, then the whole thing can take on an anthroposophical character simply through the importance of these personalities, without excluding those who are not anthroposophists. You see, the best anthroposophists are usually those who were opponents at first; or at least the best include those who were opponents and have slowly come to anthroposophy. We must not imagine that many of those who have sought their way to a religious world view in the modern sense can be brought to anthroposophy in the twinkling of an eye by a short reading. There will be a certain reluctance in many. Above all, one will not easily get away from the belief that certain research results of anthroposophy are excluded by dogmatics. Many will still believe that repeated lives on earth are irreligious and un-Christian. And it is not really desirable today to exclude all those who cannot yet see this, because the actual religious relationship must be maintained. Just as one could, I might say, be a good Christian at the time of the founding of Christianity without knowing that the earth was round or that America existed, and on the other hand, Christianity was not shaken by the discovery of America, so someone can be a good Christian without having access to the truth of repeated earth lives. Because basically, an essential thing about being a Christian is one's relationship to Christ Jesus himself, to this very concrete being; that is the essential thing. The essential thing about Christianity is a personal relationship with Christ Jesus. And a doctrine as such, which is certainly secured as a doctrine, which is precisely a doctrine about the world context, cannot actually be the hallmark of Christianity in a person. One is a Christian naturally through one's relationship to Christ, as one is a Buddhist through one's relationship to Buddha, not really through the content of the teaching. One needs the content of the teaching, as we will present it in the sermon, but one is not really a Christian through the content of the teaching. No one today can be a Christian in the sense that one must understand it, who does not have a positive relationship to the supersensible Christ-being.

Therefore Adolf Harnack is no Christian to me. A man who is capable of saying that Christ can be taken out of the Gospels and that only the Father has a place in them is not a Christian. In his view, Christ is no different from Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. If you take Harnack's book The Essence of Christianity and cross out the name of Christ and put the name of Yahweh everywhere, you will see that the meaning is not changed. It simply replaces the faith of Jesus in the Father with the knowledge of the essence of Jesus himself. It actually recognizes only one great teacher about the religion of the Father in the Christ. But that is actually the negation of Christianity, not the essence of Christianity. And that is why I think it is not necessary for us to swear people in, so to speak, to the doctrine of reincarnation or karma, because that is something that people find difficult to come to terms with; they will come to terms with it in time; I just think that since you are anthroposophists yourselves and will be able to win over a large number of anthroposophists, the matter will already have the necessary anthroposophical character. The content of anthroposophy itself ensures that the matter has an anthroposophical character, if it succeeds at all. And it must succeed because it has many conditions for success within itself.

A participant: At the University of Münster, the theologians wanted to free themselves. There you would find theologians who meet our needs. The question is whether there will be many anthroposophists there.

Rudolf Steiner: I believe that the ground was prepared in Münster by Gideon Spicker; he was a professor of philosophy in Münster, after all. You know nothing about him?

A participant: Only that the exams were then designed differently. Another participant: In Leipzig it is exactly the same.

Rudolf Steiner: You are bound to find a prepared soil among the younger theologians.

A participant: The theologians who want to free themselves from the church are mostly people who can no longer accept the Trinity doctrine and do not want to recognize Christ as a supersensible being, or they are people from the community movement.

Rudolf Steiner: If there is a core of anthroposophists, it is not a hindrance if we also have these personalities in the loose association. It seems to be a proof that, for example, Mr. Rittelmeyer came to anthroposophy immediately after he wrote this little work about the personality of Jesus. From this point of view, which you have just characterized, it is actually written. It was written with the intention of presenting Jesus Christ as a strong religious personality, but leaving the whole question of the supersensible, of the symbol and so on, completely out of the discussion. So it was entirely what one might call enlightened Protestantism. And then he joined us and relatively quickly recognized the necessity to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and to come to terms with a supersensible conception of this Mystery of Golgotha. So I believe that if they are just people who are seriously studying — they don't have to be swots, but they have to be serious students — then it doesn't hurt if they come from an enlightened Protestantism. You see, the best candidates you could wish for would actually be those young people – there aren't many of them, there are only a few at most – who have just finished their Catholic theology studies and have broken with the Catholic Church completely; they would be the best candidates you could wish for. There is no denying that Catholic theology, as theology, has an extraordinary amount of substance. People are well trained, and that remains. And then, when they are out – as a Catholic theologian, you are of course kept in iron shackles – when they are out, anything can be done with them. I only mention this – there are not many such people, but just a few – to emphasize the possibility. And then, the enlightened Protestants should not be underestimated.

A participant:... people who strive to have something certain, get so far in science that they can no longer recognize the supersensible being of Christ and yet somehow have a longing for it...

Rudolf Steiner: That was the case with Rittelmeyer. He could not possibly have arrived at anything other than a somewhat stronger and also very spirited Weinel view of the simple man from Nazareth. That was the personality of Christ in Rittelmeyer. And very quickly he had arrived at the supersensible view of Christ. So I believe that you need not fear to bring people up.

A participant: The most difficult question remains that of financing.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, the question of finance remains difficult, but it remains difficult until we have the money; it is indeed the case that every new 10,000 marks must present new difficulties. These are difficulties that simply have to be overcome. I do believe, however, that many bitter experiences have to be overcome; many bitter experiences will be made. But I believe that someone like Heisler might not be the wrong person for the job, because, of course, he is embittered by his own fate, but on the other hand he is convinced of the necessity of such things. And he is of a respectable age – excuse me, you are all younger than he is – which one acquires when one has to take on everything that comes along when one collects money. It is not a pleasant thing.

Emil Bock: Now there is still the question of whether anthroposophists who are not theologians could be brought in for our purposes.

Rudolf Steiner: [Do you mean] with this question whether Anthroposophists should be included in this looser association who are not actually in a position to enter the priesthood?

Emil Bock:... who can enter into the situation, who are currently in a different profession.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, of course the question then is what such people should do. At most, they would be considered for fundraising. But it is not easy to muster the necessary enthusiasm for this if you are not involved in the matter. There may of course be individuals, but I believe that these individuals are already so overwhelmed with all kinds of work that they could hardly devote themselves to such a thing in any other way than as a secondary occupation. But I do not actually know of anyone who, without aspiring to a preaching office, even in the freest form, could be useful as an anthroposophist. For anthroposophists are generally so attached to anthroposophy itself, which is something of a religion — yes, how shall I put it? — a kind of religious satisfaction, they are not so much out to regenerate the religious community itself. They would have to be theological anthroposophists, and one would have to look for them among them first. They are certainly not so rare since Rittelmeyer's activity has existed. I think you will find many among theologians; and especially since the book that Rittelmeyer published as a collection, you will find many among theologians. Whether they are all useful is another question. But otherwise, I think it would greatly improve the movement.

Emil Bock: Of course they would have to change tack when they get to know the idea.

Rudolf Steiner: Would many of the students want to change direction? Do you mean students from the Federation for Anthroposophical Higher Education?

A participant: Students who do not study theology because, although they have a strong religious interest, they do not want to study what is currently taught in the church.

Rudolf Steiner: You mean that they would also muster active enthusiasm?

A participant: Yes, if there is an opportunity to work in this sense.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, it is definitely possible, if you have looked at the personalities, to join these personalities, to approach them. I have seen that the Federation for Anthroposophical Higher Education Work, especially when it endeavors to spread anthroposophy itself in the individual branches of anthroposophical higher education work, places more emphasis on an interest in natural science than on theology itself. The theologians themselves should be interested in this.

A participant: Will we be able to wait until one of them has completed the specialized theological examination?

Rudolf Steiner: You think it would take too long? A participant: I don't know how necessary it is.

Another participant: There are some of us who have not yet expected to finish with the theological exams, but want to use the preliminary studies to strive towards this goal, which is to be addressed here.

Rudolf Steiner: Now the question is whether those you are referring to, having realized how necessary the matter is, will not turn to the preaching ministry after all, even if they have so far thought that they would not complete the exam but do something else. Of course not. This is connected with a very general cultural idea. You see, the ideas that Spengler described in his 'Decline of the West' are really more well-founded than one might think. They are so well-founded that one can say that if only cultural tendencies were at work, without a new impact, then what Spengler calculates would come about would come about. We are in the midst of a full decline, in a full current of decline. On the other hand, you must not forget the corruption of culture. The corruption of the general intellectual life is not limited to the more educated classes, but is very widespread. It is actually the case that the majority of the population is affected by it, and the religious impulses that may still have existed in the 70s and 80s have already disappeared among the less educated people today. So we are in the midst of a complete current of decline, and it is hardly possible to get out of it unless religious life as such creates new impulses. And so I certainly believe that those who, having undergone theological studies and having the opportunity to do so, should act as priests. It is necessary that precisely those who have studied theology should act as priests, because we need it so badly.

A participant:... but then also within the church?

Rudolf Steiner: Within the church? I would like to stick to what I have said. You can stay within the church if you can gradually lead the members out of the current church communities; you can therefore turn to the establishment of free congregations. I do not believe that the church as such can be reformed or regenerated in any way, that is not the case. The church community is so corrupted that we can only count on the fact that one leads them out [...] and founds something new with them [...] [further gaps in the transcript]. On the other hand, to think of a reform of the church itself, I may say – this is not just my opinion, but this is an objective realization of the facts – that these church communities are doomed. Except for the Catholic Church, of course, which must be understood in such a way that it is not at all doomed, because it works with extensive means and must therefore be regarded as something completely different.

A participant: We are partly philosophers and partly natural scientists, having dropped out of an unsatisfactory course of study in theology. Should we do a doctorate and then turn to studying theology again after the doctorate? Or should it be said that, given our background, we can start religious work right away?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, that is merely a question of the success that we will have. In this respect, we must not underestimate the transitional character of our work. When the Waldorf School was founded, I had nothing in mind but the purely personal suitability of the teachers, and the pedagogy and didactics were developed in a relatively few weeks. Such a thing must simply be possible in the transitional state. I do not believe that any of you who, let us say, failed in their studies of theology, turned to some other field of study, became philosophers or natural scientists, that any of you need to strive for anything other than formally completing the academic program. This is something that is desirable, but not absolutely necessary. It is desirable that the academic side should be concluded in some way, let us say with a dissertation. On the other hand, we do not need to consider in the least that someone would need to return to their theological studies. We must regard it as absolutely right, even for the transitional period, not to adhere to the old system of examinations and the like; of that there is no doubt. If, for example, Mr. Husemann has even finished his studies in chemistry and is preparing his rigorosum in chemistry, then nothing prevents him – if he would otherwise like to become a preacher – from becoming a preacher as a chemist.

You know, the nested study of theology – you don't have to take this as something that might be offensive – it is even a hindrance to the work of the preacher and the pastor in the community. It is a fact that the theological student does not learn enough about the world; he is actually too unfamiliar with what his task is. He is placed in it and is supposed to carry out such agendas as I have described in economic life. So a special course of study like today's 'theology course, where you become an entirely impractical person - I don't want to offend you with that - is not suitable for that. It is actually the case, as I have experienced, that, for example, excellent theological graduates really hardly knew what the Pythagorean theorem says. These are exceptional cases, but they do occur. But quite apart from the fact that they are not up to date in real practical life, which is above all needed, with the discussions about the validity of dogmatics, with the discussions about what is done in theological faculties, with that we certainly do not solve the world's problems. One could even well imagine that non-students with a certain religious genius could also be among us; one could well imagine that.

What we do need, of course, is for you to find the person within you before you leave here, to whom you could, as it were, transfer the secretariat of your loose association. It would be good if we could then stay in contact with this person, precisely from the “Coming Day”. But now you have the Central Office for Letters in Berlin.

A participant: We had thought of another place in Tübingen, which is still close to Stuttgart.

Rudolf Steiner: And what would the tasks of this center be?

A participant: So that these things that could be solved in relation to Stuttgart could be solved through personal contact.

Rudolf Steiner: What other tasks would the central office have? Searching for such personalities and then, don't you think, you are thinking of such a position separately from how Mr. Bock imagines it as a follow-up to the “Kommenden Tag” (The Coming Day).

Emil Bock: First of all, the financing would have to be tackled, work would have to be done in various places. A great deal has to be collected at a central office, so the central office would have to have full authority. We have taken Berlin because that is where most of us are.

Rudolf Steiner: So you would then think of having central offices in Berlin and Tübingen for finding suitable personalities and here in Stuttgart a personality who would prepare the financing?

Well, I can't make any kind of binding statement for the “Kommende Tag” at this moment, but it is my opinion that such a thing, if it is considered, could be done. Could it not be – of course I do not want to give any binding advice regarding the choice of personality, I am only giving Heisler as an example –: If Heisler were commissioned to start with the financing question and this were done in connection with the “Coming Day” , one would have to think about creating the position for Heisler right away, and of course I would have to bring that up for discussion in the “Kommen Tag” so that you would know what could be done on the part of the “Kommen Tag” when you leave here. I think that a lot of transitions from one to the other naturally lead a bit into the unknown. It seems to me that it would not be a bad idea if we were to create such a central office right away, which would start work, so to speak. Of course, it can't be too early, because I appreciate all the reasons against proceeding too quickly. But really, what can be done by such a center after two years or after a year can also be done today. I cannot make a binding statement today on behalf of “Kommendes Tag”, but it seems to me that if it is thought of at all, not under the name of “Kommendes Tag”, but in connection with it, then it would actually have to be done immediately.

A participant: Do we have the material basis? If you employ someone, you have to have the salary for him.

Rudolf Steiner: Well now, the question is of course whether a way out could not be found after all in this direction, whether in a sense the concern would now already be for the salary of this particular person. Will you still be here the day after tomorrow? We can talk tomorrow or the day after tomorrow about how to solve the problem of finding such a person immediately. Of course, it is not possible for you to arrange financing for the person so quickly, as they should take charge of the financing themselves. We can talk about it tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. But in principle, would you be opposed to starting the matter immediately, if possible?

A participant: I would also like to ask whether we could now agree on the person in charge of the position.

Rudolf Steiner: I will only say this: I always start from real, practical points of view, and there are reasons that could probably make the realization very quick if Dr. Heisler could be considered. With him, the matter could probably be dealt with more quickly than if it were a matter of choosing any other person.

• 1. Note from the editor: Only a few of the participants were known to the stenographer. Therefore, the names of some of the individual participants are missing from his documents. So where it says “a participant” below, this means that the name of the person concerned was not recorded by the stenographer.

My dear friends! Today, we will first continue our reflections from yesterday and then see how we can further develop the matters touched on yesterday. Yesterday, I wanted to talk to you about the inner side of community building in the religious field. I would now like to move on to the second area, which you yourselves have identified as particularly important to you: to the cult.

It is absolutely true that without the inauguration of a certain cult with its so-called symbolism, the religious deepening of humanity cannot be brought about, and I would like to explain this to you with a few words, because one can only work within a field if one understands the conditions and forces involved.

You see, in more recent times, the whole process of human development in the civilized part of humanity has basically taken on an intellectual form, a form that makes mere concepts in their abstractness the content of consciousness. And such a thorough feeling has arisen from it that one can only gain real insights in this abstractness, that this feeling has passed over to actually only appreciate the abstract content of consciousness in a certain way. Now one can understand that this abstract content of consciousness had to be appreciated at a time when the assertion of the individual emerging from the whole human being was increasingly emerging as a human demand. After all, abstract content of consciousness presents us with something completely universal. One has the feeling that through abstract world comprehension one can bring all understanding of the world into the individual human being.

Where should our concepts reach? They should initially suffice to comment on that which presents itself to us in the sense world as perception, in the most diverse ways, and to find laws there, the so-called laws of nature or historical laws. But then this intellectual content also sets about forming hypotheses about that which is not perceived, partly such hypotheses that extend to that which is not perceptible in time and space, partly to that which is not perceptible for reasons of principle. The beginning and end of the earth, for example, is not perceptible in time and space. From the intellectualism of modern times we have received hypotheses about the origin of the earth and about the end of the earth arising out of physical and geological connections. We have hypotheses regarding the spatial, let us say, about the inner nature of the sun or other world bodies, such as the world nebula, as they are called, and so on. One usually does not consider that when one says that the sun is so or so constituted, that this is nothing more than a hypothesis, and one even believes that one has a physical result in this hypothesis. The physicists would be very astonished if they could perceive, could see, what really is at that point in space, where they put a kind of very thin gas out into space as a solar ball. In reality, there is not something comparable to our gases, not even to our ether, at that point; it is not just empty space at that point, but something that we describe as negative in comparison to the intensity of our empty space; it is a recess in space at the point where we speak of the sun. There is not only space emptied of matter, there is not even the intensity of the void that we usually call space in the abstract. There is less present at the point than space, and in this way we move from the physical to the spiritual. One can only speak of the sun in a spiritual sense.

I only mention this today to draw your attention to the way in which intellectualism, which is perfectly justified in the field of natural science, has taken hold of all fields in recent times. It then extends to the imperceptible, to the world of molecules and atoms, which, in principle, cannot be perceived for the simple reason that heat, light and sound are said to arise from the movements of these molecular and atomic structures, so that nothing perceptible is introduced into the atomic world. Something is hypothetically introduced that is supposed to be present.

Thus, intellectualism has spread over the temporal and spatial of the external world of space and time and over the unperceivable in principle; but it has also spread over everything that is historical and over everything that is religiously historical. If you follow the entire literature and scholarship of the Gospels, and indeed all of 19th-century biblical scholarship, it will become clear how this entire biblical scholarship gradually moved from a completely different kind of soul content to an intellectualistic grasp of the Bible and the Gospels. It can be said that by the end of the 19th century, so much intellectualism had been applied to the Gospel that there was actually nothing left of the Gospel even for theologians. It must be characteristic that this intellectualism has taken on those forms that it shows, for example, in the theologian Schmiedel, where we see that the personality of Christ is no longer inferred from what is in the Gospels, but a number of passages in the Gospel are sought where something detrimental is said about Christ Jesus, where, for example, it is said that he did not care about his mother and siblings. And from this small number of defamations, which are compiled about the personality of Christ Jesus in the Gospels, it is concluded that they must refer to something true, because one would not, if one wanted to invent something, have added such a defamation, but one would have invented hymns of praise.

Now you can see the depths to which the intellectual approach has sunk in its attempts to get at the Gospels at all. I mention this because it has emerged from the theological side, for what has been achieved by the non-theological side in terms of extravagance has, after all, reached the point of the monstrous. You only need to remember that there is extensive psychiatric research on the Gospels today, that we have literary works today that clearly express the view that one cannot understand what the Gospels actually contain and that describe the messages [in the Gospels] as abnormal things, as one would view things from a psychiatric point of view. It is even the case that the origin of Christianity is assumed to be a mental illness of Christ Jesus, which has had an infectious effect on all Christians. Thus, the origin of Christianity is derived from the mental illness of Christ Jesus, which he fell prey to.

It would be an understatement to say that any description is too strong when one wants to point out that the entire so-called intellectual life of the present, which moves in intellectualisms, must actually lead to the undermining of precisely the Christian-religious element, and with the greatest speed. The fact that this fact is not sufficiently examined is one of the great damages of our time. If one were to look at it, one would come to the conclusion that, above all, those who take religious life seriously must ensure that this religious life is wrested from intellectualism.

I do not want to dwell critically on the fact that in the last four centuries, through Protestantism itself, a great deal has been done to achieve this intellectualism in the religious sphere as well. More and more, perhaps unconsciously, one finds a pagan element in the cult and the symbolism. Now, what has prevented us from adhering more to the cult and to the symbolism does not lie in the feeling that we have something pagan in it, but rather it lies in the fact that we no longer have any sense for those forms of expression that lie in the cult and in the symbolism. Consider this: through intellectual comprehension of the world, man is led to believe that he can make sense of the whole world with the content of his soul, that he can bring everything into intellectual concepts. Therefore, the intellectual man feels in possession of the whole world when he has his intellectual concepts. It is precisely because man deceives himself into believing that he has grasped the entire content of the world, it is precisely through this universal element that man feels intellectually satisfied and believes that he no longer needs any other element to comprehend the world, to feel the world. It is understandable that intellectualism has been able to gain the upper hand in our time, because man believes that he can understand the world in intellectual terms. But because man is satisfied in this way, in that he seemingly gets the whole world into his ego, he loses the social connection with the rest of the world, and that which should live as a social being is atomized, atomized right down to the individual. We have already seen this in the youth movement in modern times, that simply by the prevalence of the intellectualist, people fall apart into individual atoms, so that everyone wants only their own religious belief. They are absorbed in saying that religion is a thing that cannot go beyond the human skin. That is what indicates the reasons why the universalistic intellectual life in particular fragments and atomizes religious life, so that the particular form of modern science must undermine religious life. And the strongest force for the destruction of religious life is actually present in those university and other educational theologians who have adopted the scientific thinking of our time in order to understand the religious, the facts of religion as such.

Not as much is being done to undermine religious life through the laity of today as through modern theology; and it is a pity that such efforts have not made more progress than those of Overbeck, which were set out in the extraordinarily significant book “On the Christianity of Our Present-Day Theology,” in which the case is made that the modern theologian is unchristian. Overbeck, the Basel church historian, who was a friend of Nietzsche and on whom he had a very deep influence, wanted to prove that modern theology is the most un-Christian, has completely thrown off Christianity and contributes most to the undermining of Christianity because it has become purely intellectualistic through the universal suggestion that intellectualism has exerted on the modern educated world. Until you realize that modern theology, as it is taught at the modern faculties, leads to the undermining of Christianity, you will not get the right impulse into your endeavors.

Now, what is at stake is that we learn again to progress to a form of experiencing the world other than the purely intellectual one, and the other form consists precisely in the pictorial, in that which can pass over into cult and into symbolism.

You see, when we set up the Waldorf School here – I would like to show you things from the perspective of the here and now – when we set up the Waldorf School here, the first thing that had to be done was to act more in line with the spirit of the times and to make it clear to the world that our aim in setting up this Waldorf School was not to found a school of world view. It is the worst slander against the Waldorf School when people outside say, and this is already being repeated as far away as America, that it exists to teach anthroposophy to children. That is not its purpose! It is not a school of world-view. What can be gained through anthroposophy can be incorporated into pedagogy and didactics. Only that which can be fathomed by anthroposophy should lie in the pedagogical treatment itself. Therefore, from the very beginning — because it cannot be any different as long as you have not yet worked — we have had a Catholic priest teach religious education to Catholic children and a Protestant priest teach religious education to Protestant children. Now, the Waldorf School was initially created for the children of the Waldorf-Astoria workers; they were the foundation. Many children of Social Democrats and dissidents came along. The question arose: should these children grow up without any religion? There was a certain kind of concern. But there were also parents who did not want their children to grow up without religion. So we were obliged to give some kind of anthroposophical religious education, just as we had Catholic instruction given to Catholic children and Protestant instruction given to Protestant children. And most children found it useful, at least I think so, isn't that right?

Ernst Uehli: By far the majority.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, by far the most children. On the other hand, there are a relatively large number of children who are taught Catholic religion, and the children taught Protestant religion are in the minority. Well, we couldn't help it, we certainly didn't want to take business away from the Protestant religion teacher, and at first we even thought it was unfortunate for our school when the Protestant religion teacher once said that he couldn't really make any progress because the children were gradually moving over to the Anthroposophical religion lessons. It was up to him to keep them. We couldn't help it if they ran over. We don't have anthroposophy as just any subject in the school curriculum, but just as the Catholic and Protestant religious education is brought in from outside. We have tried to get a methodology for it and so on. All this is, of course, in its infancy, because things that work with reality cannot be created overnight; it is something that can only come from practical, extensive experience, but it must be started with that. From an unbiased observation, the need arose – and this is important for our consideration yesterday – to add a cult to religious instruction, namely our Sunday activity, which two of your colleagues observed last Sunday. Of course, this is also something that is just beginning. So far, we have a ritual for such a Sunday activity — every Sunday — and a ritual for children who have reached the age of fourteen, the completion of elementary school, and who in this ritual first experience what is thought to be experienced through confirmation. But you have to look at it all as being at the beginning, but the necessity to move on to a kind of cult, to a kind of working through ritual, that has arisen entirely from the matter. And if you follow your matter with real inner participation, you will have no choice but to say to yourself: cult, ritual, symbolism must be added.

Because, you see, it is the case that all religious life must disappear if it cannot represent reality, if religious life is only supposed to be something that can be spoken of in such a way that everything can be expressed in intellectualized thought. Then this religious life cannot be cultivated at all. Something must be able to happen through religious experience; there must be processes that, as such, as processes, have not only an eternal significance [for man], but are something in world events.

And here we must admit that everything we intellectually grasp in our soul, everything that modern science recognizes as a scientific achievement – not what we form in our soul as living concepts , we gradually acquire during our childhood, and this then transforms itself in the course of our lifetime – but the intellectualized content, even if it extends to the most complex natural laws, is mortal with us.

Do not take this sentence lightly. That which is the intellectual content of the soul is, at best, only an image of the spiritual; it is mortal like the human body. For it is precisely the intellectual that is completely mediated by the body. All soul experiences that are mediated intellectually arise after birth and perish at death. That which is eternal in the soul comes only after the intellectual. So, no abstract concept goes through the gate of death with us, but only what we have experienced in life beyond abstract concepts. That is why many souls from the present population have to lead a long 'sleeping life' after death, because they were only involved in intellectuality and because intellectuality fades away after death and it takes a long time for a person to acquire a super-intellectual content, which he can then process for the next life on earth. It is a fact that much of the present life is lost to man in his overall development through intellectual life.

This is regarded as foolishness by our contemporaries today, at least by our theologians; but it is a proven spiritual-scientific result. The fact that our entire education today is based only on intellectualism, the fact that we are so proud of this intellectualism, means that we deprive the human being of immortal content to the same extent that we instill this mortal intellectualism into him from the most diverse points of view. You must take this to heart.

My dear friends, it is absolutely right to statistically count how many of a population are non-literate, how many can read and write in relatively early childhood. But if education is built only on intellectualism, as it is in today's schools, then this means killing the soul-spiritual and not awakening the soul-spiritual. This is how it must be for the earth. But on the other hand, a counterweight must also be provided. That is why we do not have an intellectual approach to teaching reading and writing in our pedagogy and didactics at the Waldorf School. Here, too, the child learns from the pictorial, from the artistic, precisely in order not to kill everything immortal. It learns by being given the letter out of the pictorial, the abstract out of the concrete pictorial, which is our letter today, in order at least not to take from the child what is still a real soul life. This pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf school always emerges from the anthroposophical understanding of the whole of human life. And the strong hatred that is shown towards it shows how much people feel that here, once again, something is being addressed that has been extinguished in the outside world over the last three to four centuries – albeit to the detriment of the life of modern humanity. We should hardly be surprised that religious life has been dampened, because we have a science that simply can no longer talk about the immortal. And the further culture that has emerged shows even more clearly that science has become nothing but a bauble; a froth of thinking has shown itself in the general culture of humanity.

We have a word for “immortal” in the newer languages; but man has only done so out of his egoism, out of his desire to be eternal. We have a word for “immortal,” but we have no word for “to be unborn.” We do not have a word for “to be unborn” that can be used in everyday speech. But we would have to have that, as well as the word “immortal.” We see only one end of life when we speak of the eternal in the soul. And with this goes hand in hand the atomization, the fragmentation, the weaving of the intellectual into the individual life, where today it is even sought in the subconscious, as in the James School in America and so on. If we are serious about cultivating the religious, we must confront this with the power of the image, of action, of ritual in the best sense of the word. Just consider – I will show it with an example – what this ritual as such means.

I certainly do not want to do the opposite of the iconoclasts who wanted to eradicate images and the cultic stormers who wanted to eradicate cult, and I do not want to express the opposite of that here today. But I would like to use an example to show what the cult means.

Take the Mass offering. The Mass offering cannot, strictly speaking, be considered a Roman Catholic institution. It must not be, because the Mass offering goes back to ancient, pre-Christian times. It can be said, however, that the Mass offering was shrouded in the mysteries of the ancient cultic rites in the mysteries, that it has been greatly transformed over time; but as we see the Mass offering today in Roman Catholicism, it is just something that has been partially transformed from the Egyptian and Near Eastern mysteries.

And what was it then? What was that ritual that eventually developed into the Mass Sacrifice, the meaning of which only the most initiated Catholics really know, while the broad masses of Catholics have some idea of it? What was it that underlies the Mass Sacrifice?

It was an outward image of what is called initiation or ordination. It is absolutely so. If one follows the Mass sacrifice and disregards what has been added to the basic components – partly quite rightly, partly through misunderstanding – if one looks only at these basic components, then the Mass sacrifice is an outward pictorial expression of initiation or ordination.

The four parts are: the reading of the Gospel, the offertory, the consecration – transubstantiation – and communion. The essence of the Mass lies in these four parts.

What does the reading of the Gospels mean? It means the resounding, the revelation of the word into the community. This is clearly based on the awareness that the word only has real content when it is not discovered by man through intellectual work, but when man experiences the inspired word that comes from the spiritual world. Without this consciousness, without the awareness that the supersensible world is embodied in the word, the reading of the Gospel would not be a real reading. Thus, in the first part of the Mass Sacrifice we have the divinely glorified proclamation of the teaching. What the supersensible world gives to man in the sensual world, we have in the Gospel reading.

What the human being can give of himself to the supersensible world, what is attempted of him in the offering of the sacrifice, so to speak as a counter-gift, the real prayer, that comes before us figuratively in the offertory. The offertory, the sacrifice, symbolically expresses what a person can feel in his soul as a sense of consecration to the supersensible. This is said through the symbolic action of the offertory, in a sense in response to the gospel reading. This is the second part.

The third part, transubstantiation, the change, consists in the fact that it is symbolically represented that consciousness which develops in man when he feels the divine substance within him, when he feels the divine substance in his own soul. For the Christian, this transformation is nothing other than the expression of the Pauline saying: It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. He does not just sacrifice himself, he becomes aware that the supersensible lives in himself. This is what is meant by the image of transubstantiation. And it is always a beautiful and significant side effect of transubstantiation that, while the Holy Sacrament is being raised up over the chalice, the faithful are actually supposed to close their eyes and turn inward, so that they experience transubstantiation not through outward looking but through their innermost consciousness. It is also significant that the Holy Sacrament actually consists of the bread and the bread holder, which has a moon-shaped form, so that in the Sacrament Symbol, which envelops the Holy Sacrament (see drawing $.100), sun and moon are present in the picture, which clearly indicates that in the times when the sacrifice of the Mass was being developed in its original form, there was an awareness of the connection between Christ and the sun and between Yahweh and the moon. What the world has received in Christianity and what has been built on the lunar religion of Yahweh is fully expressed in this placement of the host on the lunar form, and it is truly a symbol of the confluence of the mortal in man with the immortal.

image

And the fourth part of the Mass is Communion, which is meant to express nothing other than this: after the human being has grown together with the supersensible, he allows his entire earthly being to be poured into union with the supersensible. This fourth part pictorially represents what the person to be initiated, the one to be initiated, also had to experience in the older and newer mysteries.

The first main section consists of learning to transform what one receives as knowledge and feeling for the world into an abstract form, so that one can say with inner honesty: In the beginning was the Word, and through the Word everything came into being. — I ask you, my dear friends, to consider how far modern Christianity has strayed from an understanding of the Gospel of John. Consider that today, in general, there is only the awareness that the Creator of the world is found in the Father God. God the Father, who is also confused with the Jewish god Yahweh, is regarded as the Creator God, whereas the Gospel says: “In the beginning was the Word, and all things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. — That which we have within us as something created is the creative, the word in the truest sense of the word, and one should actually have the idea of the Father God that he subsists in everything, and in the Son of God he has given the world that which signifies the creative of the world.

I only want to say this because the understanding of the person to be initiated has to advance to the fact that the word that is proclaimed sounds entirely from the supersensible, while our word that is currently in vogue sounds from the intellectual, from the transitory. That is the first act of initiation: that the content of the soul is formed into a word as a supersensible revelation, as a real event, an event that emerges from the Angelion All, from the sum of the spiritual world. What is raised up out of the spiritual world and takes on the form of a word in us is the first act of the sacrifice of the Mass. In the conscious speaking through itself one should become aware that this is a proclamation of the supersensible, and that it does not represent a proclamation of the sense world.

The second thing is that through sacrifice man enters into a real relationship with the supersensible. If we can find a way to hint at the sacrifice, that is, to hint at the counter-gift to the divine, then we actually have before us in all its many-sidedness what must surely be there. You see, in modern times Catholicism has allowed itself to become obscured. Modern Catholicism actually wants to receive everything from the Godhead and give nothing back to the Godhead.

Now, we did not want to go against the prejudice of today's world too much in our ritual [the Sunday service at the Waldorf School]. But we were obliged, simply in the question of the one who performs the sacrificial act, to address the child, asking whether it wants to strive for the Spirit of God, and in response: “Yes, I will seek Him, I will seek for the Spirit of God,” to give at least a hint in words of the real relationship. Something should happen, something should be said, when each child is asked whether he wants to seek the Spirit of God. We had to at least hint at the Lord's Supper [in our Sunday service], and the rest just has to come later.

Now, you see, in the third act, it becomes clear that the supernatural is not merely present, but that the human soul can connect with it. And in the fourth act of the Mass, during Communion, the fourth act of initiation is then depicted, which consists of man completely permeating himself with the supersensible, so that he feels himself to be only an external sign, an external world symbol, that he makes the word true: Man is the image of the Godhead.

The awareness of these connections has been so lost that today one can only point them out with certain difficulties. One can therefore say that in the sacrifice of the Mass – which of course cannot simply be taken over from Catholicism, but must be developed in the sense of our present time – one has before one's eyes that which so often presents the profoundly significant spiritual path of the human being in the image. And so it should be that we accompany important stages in life with such ritualistic acts, such as the transition from school to life, but that we also work with adults through ritual, that is, through the image, because the image works not only on the intellectual, but on the whole human being. If I am to grasp something intellectually, then I grasp it entirely within myself. When I stand before a picture, it goes much deeper into the layers of my humanity than the intellectual aspect does. And when what happens through the ritual enters into the members of a community, they experience something supersensible together, and what is atomized by the teaching material is synthesized in the act of worship. What is reproduced in the teaching material, if you put it in abstract terms, from intellectual forms of ideas, which leads to fragmentation, to analysis in the individual, is reunited, synthesized, when one tries to speak in images.

You see, in modern times only one community has actually learned to speak in images, but that is a community that abuses this symbolic, imaginatively inspired speech, namely Jesuitism. And you see, I must keep pointing out how, in Jesuit educational institutions, but precisely to the detriment of humanity, it is taught quite methodically to always summarize something when you have taught something.

I will give you a very vivid example, because I myself once experienced the tremendous significance, theoretically I might say, since I wanted to see for myself how the thing works. It was about a famous Jesuit pulpit speaker – it was ten years ago – he preached about the institution of Easter confession. He wanted to reduce to absurdity what the opponents of Catholicism say: that Easter confession, the demand for Easter confession, is a papal and not a supernatural institution. He wanted to reduce this to absurdity before his faithful. I also looked at it. If Klinckowström, that was the name of the Jesuit preacher, had wanted to teach his former audience in the abstract form in which one otherwise preaches, in this way, as one is accustomed to preaching in the Protestant area, he would not have achieved anything; he would not have achieved the slightest thing. He did it in the following way, by saying in summary: “Yes, my dear Christians, you see, when we say that the Pope has instituted the Easter confession, it is really as if we were saying the following: Imagine a cannon, and at the cannon stands the gunner; the gunner holds the fuse in his hand, and then the officer stands a little further away. What happens? The gunner holds the fuse, the officer gives the command; and at the moment when the officer gives the command, when the word of command sounds, the gunner pulls the fuse, the gun goes off, and through the powder in the gun, everything that happens when the gun is fired is produced.” “This whole congregation was like one soul when this image was vividly presented to them.” ‘Now,’ he continued, ”imagine that someone came and said that the gunner did everything, that everything actually happened through him. But he only pulled the fuse at the officer's command, and the officer could not have ordered the shot without the powder. Those who say that the Pope introduced the Easter confession go much further, because that would be the same as if someone claimed that the gunner, if he only pulls the fuse at the officer's command, invented the powder! It is just as wrong when people say that the Pope introduced the Easter confession. He was only present, he, as the representative of the transcendental world, pulled the fuse."

Everything was imbued with the truth of what Father Klinckowström proclaimed. It is not that this was due to the particularly happy disposition of this priest. You can see for yourselves that it is part of the Jesuit method of teaching to express everything in such images. There is even a work of literature today – why it has been published? I have not checked it; the Catholic Church will also have some kind of intention there, because it always has intentions -, in which it is described in detail how to move the index finger when speaking this or that word, how to move the hand when saying this or that. There are even drawings for this; there is a methodical work down to the smallest detail, a work that is incorporated into the picture. And one must just say: Why is no attempt made to develop that which is developed for the harm of people on the one hand, also for the good of people? Because it can also be developed for the good, it can and must also be developed for the good, the strength must come from the earnest spiritual intentions to transform the abstract into the pictorial, and this pictorial must be experienced with the community. In this way the soul of the community is uplifted, and only in this way is the sense of community truly established. The cultic service is what holds the community together; without it the community can only disintegrate. To oppose this on theoretical grounds is to start from prejudice.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that a friend of our cause, an Old Catholic pastor – as such, he reads the mass in German, in the national language, and performs other rituals in the national language – did not want to perform the rituals in the strange translation that one reads in many cases today. He prompted me to bring some of the practicable Catholic rituals into the form that was actually originally in them. Only through this does one see how the spiritual world in these things comes to life in many ways, and one sees what has been distorted since the time of Jerome.

Now, you need not think, as has often been said, that I am somehow tainted by Catholicism when I talk about the Catholic Church's worship. I just want to see things objectively and draw your attention to the fact that it is quite impossible to truly cultivate religious life without making the transition to worship, to speaking in the symbolum. No matter how well you know how to convince, how to work through intellectual presentation, in the religious field you will only achieve something if you can let the theoretically presented in your speech fade away into the symbolum in the appropriate places. You must experience the symbolum yourself as a truth, so you should only think of such symbolic representations that are really connected with what is real in the world.

But there are still many difficulties to be faced, and I want to draw your attention to them. Take for instance the following case: someone is supposed to imagine the physical becoming of a human being on earth. Yes, if you turn to science today with all the things it gives you about the female ovum, the male fertilizing cell, the growing out, the growing in of the fertilized ovum and so on, then despite the scientific achievements, despite the fact that one must admire what has been achieved through purely scientific thinking about such things, you do not get ideas that help you to grasp the being, but you get ideas that directly cover the truth piece by piece. You see, the most important component of the human, the animal, the organic in general, is protein. Compare the constitution of albumen with the constitution of any mineral substance in the world. It is so different that today, of course, the scientist says – and he is right to say so – the constitution of albumen is an extraordinarily complicated one, we cannot get at it, and we cannot find a bridge between any crystallized, inorganically constituted matter and what is present in albumen as a constitution. But, you see, today's science does not know that if we have any — I will draw it symbolically — inorganic form, which we can simply follow in this way (a), and we compare it with the protein constitution (b), then we initially have something that appears to be tremendously complicated; in all the substances of our food, everywhere in the organic, this seemingly complicated constitution fits in. We then say: the inorganic is more intricately constituted in the organic, and only then is the human body, for example, built up from this intricately constituted organic substance; this happens through cell division, through a certain configuration of the tissue, and so on. But the whole thing is, isn't it, nothing but nonsense. Because what really happens is the complete annihilation of all inorganic forms. The complexity of the protein consists in the fact that everything inorganic comes into chaos. The protein is always on the way to chaos, in order to dissolve the form corresponding to the inorganic and to transfer matter into chaos; and the matter that is most strongly transferred into chaos is that which is present in the fertilized egg cell. This is simply matter driven into chaos. The entire earthly natural law can no longer do anything with this chaos; it is eliminated. To have become albumen at any level means to be eliminated from the earthly natural law. And what is the consequence? That the extra-earthly natural law, the constellation of the planets, the whole extra-earthly world begins to act on this chaos in order to give this chaos a constitution again. Through the transmutation into protein, the matter enters into chaos, and thus becomes ready to receive again; not only to receive from the earthly, but to receive its constitution from the whole universe, from the cosmic. And in this consists the reproduction of the human head, which after all reproduces the vault of heaven.

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Of course, we will only have a true natural science when we go beyond these earthly things. The whole of natural science has become accustomed to deriving everything purely from the inorganic. Today, natural science is something that leads to everything dying, because natural science only accepts as valid for the intellect what can be researched in abstracto. At the moment when you have to think about the transition from that which can only be investigated in intellectual form to chaos, you have to stop thinking and start looking, and move on to a different kind of knowledge. And that is where the difficulty lies. For you see, intellectualism not only makes us into people who reject the pictorial, it even prevents us from getting out of the intellect and forming pictures ourselves. Once you have become completely intellectualized and abstract, you simply cannot do it!

The fact is that this intellectualistic culture of modern times has such great power over people that they all seem like someone who, as a little girl or even as a little boy, wants to learn to embroider in a Waldorf school and only manages to let the different threads run from top to bottom and from bottom to top; he can embroider, but he cannot create real pictures. He cannot do that. The soul activity of our modern culture, in which we have harnessed ourselves, presses so hard that no one has the spirit to be flexible enough to realize that in the egg white, everything is simply erased by these scientific results, and that matter is opened up to conception from the cosmos. This is what then points to the necessity of seeking religious renewal through anthroposophy. That is why I emphasized yesterday: Of course it is the case that we must also draw on those from today's preaching stand who come with an honest heart as so-called Protestants and who therefore reject what I have just discussed today. But the effective core on which everything should be built must actually be anthroposophists. For anthroposophy seeks to achieve what is sought in vain everywhere else: it seeks to lead to a true grasp of reality. Without having gone through this process ourselves, this coming out of the natural scientific comprehension of the world, which has already taken hold of theologians today, we will not be able to find symbolic images with which we can truly express ourselves before the believing community. And if one can approach this anthroposophical grasp of the world — you can follow it everywhere in my cycles —, at certain points one simply has to let it run out into the picture. And if you read my “Geheimwissenschaft” (Occult Science), in which I described the preliminary stages of the earth as the sun and moon, I was speaking only in images. When I say that something looks like a taste sensation, then a whole dozen of scientists like Dessoir, Oesterreich and so on cannot understand it, cannot do anything with it.

In the practical exercise of the ministry, anthroposophy is what is meant by inspiration, so that one can actually enter into the handling of the symbolic, the ritual and the cultic, and thereby have the possibility of forming a community. Otherwise one will only have the opportunity to speak to individuals. The formation of communities will never be achieved through the abstract in life.

I would like to present the matter so far and then continue it tomorrow and move on to the actual content of the sermon. We will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m., and I suggest that we also continue our discussion today about the other areas today at 7 p.m.

Now I would just like to say: Yesterday I suggested to the gentlemen from “Der Kommende Tag” that a kind of bridge should be created through “Der Kommende Tag” to what is to take place in your circle here. I have emphasized the most important thing, namely that this matter be financed, so to speak. However we think of our matter, it must be financed. It must lead immediately to the free formation of communities, even if this must be won primarily from the present church. I must say that I believe that if we work in a truly appropriate way, it could be possible to get so far in three months that the financing work will pay for itself. In other words, I think that there will at least be enough to pay for the financing work and to fill a position with someone who will start this work. “Der Kommende Tag” will agree to take care of these three months; and I believe that you have agreed to ask Dr. Heisler to take on this financing work. Initially, the matter will be on firm ground if Dr. Heisler takes it on. I am thoroughly convinced that when one has come as far as we have with such a matter, one cannot afford to wait long, because circumstances are pressing, and one often does not notice how strong the forces of decline are today, and how easy it can be to miss the boat altogether if one waits too long.

We would be much further along with the threefold order today if the matter had been properly grasped back in the spring of 1919. At that time, a cultural council was established on the basis of my cultural appeal. It was rightly imagined that people in office and dignity would also make the matter their own. They even took people in office and authority into consideration, and they worded the matter in such a way that they did not get too many goose bumps, because they wanted to appear realistic. But of course the people could not be kept in line. It is true that they could not be kept in line and that nothing helped. They will therefore be forced to turn to young people, to the younger generation, who have realized that the older generation has simply grown old and can no longer keep up. We must try not to lose any time. That is why I would like to say to you that we should try to build a bridge across, because I believe it is a legitimate feeling that, for this in particular, the financing, if it is done properly, cannot be too difficult. You will find people who are sympathetic to this, and I believe that Dr. Heisler's eloquence will find open doors if he limits himself in the next few months to persuading individuals to open the stock exchange or write the bills. Of course, you can't win people over with lectures. People won't give anything away there. You have to go to the individuals. He will have to see his task as spending all his time going to the individuals. The only unpleasant thing is that you are dismissed with words – but only with words, other cases have not yet occurred. There is no other way, you just have to accept it, and in the majority of cases you are not dismissed with words. For example, in the collection of the Swiss “Futurum AG,” I heard from all the gentlemen who were commissioned with the collection that a single instance of being thrown out with words had taken place; otherwise, people limited themselves to being extremely friendly and amiable and finding the matter extremely interesting, but just not opening the stock market. Some people then write a letter afterwards; of course, there is no need to answer that. Of course you have to realize that you will only achieve something in a small percentage of cases, but you just have to try. It's no different than having to work only towards selections, having to try a lot to have success in a few cases.

Would it perhaps be possible to discuss something else, or to pursue this further? Perhaps some of you have something to say about this. We will then extend the discussion this evening to include all three main topics that you mentioned yesterday.

Gottfried Husemann: I think we would like to talk about the extent to which we now have to prepare ourselves for the preaching profession, for speaking in a pictorial way. We cannot expect the university to prepare us for this.

Rudolf Steiner: Are you saying that something can be done in this direction? Positives, right? In these lessons I can only give the guidelines; of course I cannot go into individual points. To go into details requires at least a fortnightly course. So, one could certainly think along these lines, that if our circle has grown in the next few months, we will organize such a course, which will then give in a fortnight what is taught in the teaching institutions under the title 'symbolism', but which is actually nothing. Only in the Catholic Church faculty does symbolism still mean something. You may not yet see its inner structure quite clearly.

You can see this inner structure best from the facts. I have experienced that a large number of Catholic priests who held a position as a high school teacher - which was still quite common in Austria at the time - or who had read as a university lecturer not only at the theological faculty, but also at the philosophical and other faculties, that such Catholic priests - they were mostly religious who were later called modernists - have been reprimanded by Rome. Now I once spoke with a man who was tremendously significant in exegesis, and I asked how it was that he had been reprimanded by Rome for the content of his speech, which actually did not deserve a reprimand at all, while – if if one starts from the point of view from which the reprimand was issued, one had to say that Professor Bickell, who belonged to the Jesuits, went much further than just being an extreme liberal, but was persona grata in Rome. I told him that, and he replied: I am a Cistercian, and [in Rome] one expects of the Cistercians that the moment they no longer say what the content established by Rome is, they might then follow their convictions and gradually depart from Catholicism. — This is assumed with Cistercians. With the Jesuits, as with Professor Bickell, one knows that, however liberally they speak, they are loyal sons of Rome; they do not stray [from Rome]; one is quite certain about them, they are allowed liberalism, they may base their teachings on completely different things than on the doctrinal material.

The Catholic Church does not have this lack [of flexibility], so it is much more viable in its approach. For example, about forty years ago I once got into a conversation with a Catholic theologian who was a professor at the Vienna Theological Faculty and so learned that people said of him that he knew the whole world and three more villages into the bargain. He was a profoundly learned Cistercian. Even a Cistercian was able to discuss the subject matter in the following way. During the conversation, we came to speak about the [dogma of the] conceptio immaculata, and I said to him: Yes, you see, if you remain within Catholic logic, you can admit the immaculate conception, the conceptio immaculata Mariae. That is not the dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus, which has always been there in the Church. But the immaculate conception, as it is claimed by Catholics on the part of St. Anne, that is, the ascent from the immaculate conception of Mary to the immaculate conception of St. Anne? If you use the same logic, you have to go further up through all the following generations. – Yes, he said, that doesn't exist, we can't do that, logic doesn't demand that. We have to stop at St. Anna; if we went further, we would end up with “Davidl,” and with Davidl we would have a bad time with the conceptio immaculata. –

Such words do not express a pure sense of truth. When the man speaks outside the Church, a completely different formulation of the truth impulse speaks, and that is present everywhere [in the Catholic Church]. The concepts are formed in such a way that they can be assimilated by the broad masses – they are not formed according to any kind of logic – that is what makes Catholicism so great. This cannot be approved of in any way, but it must be recognized. You have to know who you are dealing with.

It is the case, for example, that a real engagement with the world – in the sense of thinking, not only in an intellectualist sense, but in the sense of pure thinking, is engaged with the world – is sometimes present in Catholic priests to a certain extent. I have met many Catholic priests through the circumstances of my life. Among them was the church historian at the University of Vienna. The man was an extraordinarily interesting person, but very traditionally Catholic, so Catholic that he even admitted that he no longer goes out on the street when it is dark in the evening and the lanterns are not yet fully lit. When I asked him why he no longer walked on the streets, he said: “There you only see people in vague outlines, and in Vienna you also encounter Freemasons, and you can only see a Freemason in sharp outline because you can only pass him if you can clearly distinguish yourself from him.” You can be absolutely learned and steeped in all of theology and still have the opinion that it means something in the real world when you walk past a Freemason without rejecting him through the sharp outline. The auras merge, and it is not possible to have such a mishmash of Catholic priest and Freemason.

Ernst Uehli: The Catholic Church has worked very much with legends; and I think it is true that the Catholic movement has been very much supported by the legend. It is easy to imagine that a future church community could lead to a new formation of legends.

Rudolf Steiner: That is how it is. And if you read some of my lectures that I gave in Dornach, you will even find the attempt to express certain things that can now be expressed in legend form. I gave whole lectures in legend form; and I draw your attention to one thing. I once tried to characterize the essence of the arts. You cannot get into the essence of the arts with concepts; everything that is built up in the abstract remains external. If you want to depict such a thing, you have to resort to images. The booklet 'The Essence of the Arts' is presented entirely in images. And here again one is misunderstood. When I had spoken these words entirely out of my imagination, an old theosophist stepped forward and said, “Yes, so you have transformed the nine muses.” – Wasn't it? It was as far from my mind as anything could be to think of the nine muses; it all resulted from the necessity of the case. It was far from my mind to reheat old stories, but one could think of nothing else but that it was an abstract procedure.

So it must be said that the need to resort to images is definitely there again. For example, we still don't have an image for a very important thing. Consider the abundance of bull legends, bull narratives at the beginning of the 3rd millennium at the transition of the vernal point into the constellation of Taurus. Consider the legends of the Argonauts' journey when, in the pre-Christian 8th century, the sun entered the constellation of Aries. Now it is in the constellation of Pisces. This legend still has to be made up. We need a pictorial legend. Although the matter is already alive, we still have no legend for it. This imaginative element still needs to be developed. And so there are numerous other things that today only live in the abstract, that should be transformed into images from world events. This needs to be worked on. It is through this that we must find our way back to the world. Today, the world is actually only that which can be grasped intellectually. What is the world for today's human being? One could almost say: for the intellectual man of today the whole cosmos is nothing but rigid mathematics and mechanics. And we must again come to go beyond mere mathematics and mechanics, we must come to the imaginative, to the pictorial and also to the legendary.

We just have to realize that research such as that presented by my late friend Ludwig Laistner in his book 'The Riddle of the Sphinx', which is about sagas, myths and the formation of legends, can be of great help. I would like to emphasize that Ludwig Laistner knew nothing about spiritual science. I would just like to say that the book can help with research, although Laistner traces all myths and legends back to dreams. But it is interesting to follow how he does not seek the formation of legends in the insane way in which today's Protestant and Catholic researchers seek them, by saying to themselves: the ancient peoples made things up, they imagined the gods in a thunderstorm, and in the struggle of winter with summer. As if people had never known a peasant mind; the peasant mind never writes poetry. These people, to whom the poetry is attributed, are as far from poetry as the peasants are. It was all imaginative. Ludwig Laistner traces everything back to dreams; nevertheless, it is interesting [to read how he sees a connection between a person's inner experiences in the Slavic legend of the Lady of Noon and the legend of the] Sphinx in Greece. That is why the book is called “The Riddle of the Sphinx”. Legends must flow out of life, now in full consciousness. This is extremely important.

Rudolf Steiner: I think this should be a kind of discussion hour again, and I think you will have a lot on your minds. Please feel free to express yourselves in all directions!

Emil Bock: The question of worship is close to our hearts because we cannot create the new form of worship on our own.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, it will of course be necessary to develop some symbolism in this direction, that is to say that in the cultus we have spoken of, we develop individual examples of cultic forms, so to speak. The shaping of the cultus is actually such that one comes to it when one has the prerequisites for it. Of course, it is definitely a matter of becoming accustomed to the pictorial shaping of what one is so accustomed to today, to look at it intellectually. And Mr. Uehli, I believe, said something today, didn't he, about something cult-like, as it is practiced in the Waldorf School. That it is difficult to shape the cultic aspect may be clear to you from the fact that for a long time all cults have been limited to adopting the traditional. All the cultic forms that exist today are actually very old, only somewhat transformed in one way or another. And in the time when humanity lost the ability to create pictorially, in that time, cult was also fought against in a sense. Perhaps it can help you to understand cult if we add a few words to what we said this morning about a very different form of cult.

You know that wherever real community is sought, inner community, that cultus plays a certain role. I only remind you that when the somewhat questionable Salvation Army movement spread, even this Salvation Army movement sought a certain cultus; and it is also known that even the temperance movement has very few cultic surrogates. Wherever the aim is to achieve a true community movement, there the striving for some form of cult is everywhere.

Now, as you know, the Freemasonry movement in modern times is a very extensive community. Isn't it true that this freemasonry movement also seeks to achieve the cultivation of community through cult, and one can say that the freemasonry movement shows how cult must become when it turns into a purely materialistic movement. For actually the freemasonry movement is the materialistic form of a spiritual movement.

You see, the secret of the human essence is essentially part of the rituals and symbols of the Masonic movement. If you want to look at the human being and study the actual essence of the human being in its connection with the world, then today the materialistically minded researcher will tell you: the human being actually only has the same muscle forms, the same bone forms as the higher animals, even the same number of these organic forms – he is a higher developed animal, a transformed animal. That is, after all, what more or less clearly expressed underlies our current knowledge. This realization is immediately dispelled when one considers how humans integrate into the cosmos quite differently [than animals]. The essence of the animal – if one disregards the individual forms of deviation, which are everywhere, after all – the essence of the animal is that its backbone is built on the horizontal. Please do not misunderstand what I mean by this. Of course, an animal can sit up like a kangaroo, and that can seemingly make its spinal column form an angle with the horizontal. But that is not actually required by the organic constitution. Similarly, certain birds, parrots, can have a more or less upright posture; but the animal's plastic structure is not designed to lift the spinal column out of the horizontal. In contrast to this, the essential thing about man is the formation of his spinal column in a vertical direction. Man has thus formed the spinal column in a vertical direction. This gives one of the essential characteristics for distinguishing man from the animal world. You just have to bear in mind that you cannot consider a being in the world in isolation.

You see, when someone looks at a compass needle, it does not occur to him to say that the compass needle takes on a certain direction through that which is only in it, but he says quite naturally that the earth has a magnetic north and south pole, and the compass needle is directed by the whole earth. Only when it comes to the organic does man prefer to explain everything that is in the organism only from the organism itself, and not to relate the human being at all to the whole universe. But the person who sees through things also relates the organism to the whole universe. The fact of the matter is that systems of forces run through the whole universe; some circle the earth horizontally, while others act in such a way that these horizontal forces are interspersed with forces that run in a radial direction, so that the human being aligns his spine with the radial forces. In this way he is integrated into the universe quite differently from the animal, which has its backbone, the most important bodily line, integrated horizontally, that is, parallel to the earth's surface. Now, many other things depend on this.

You see, the human brain, which weighs 1300 to 1400 grams, would, if it were to exert its full weight, immediately crush all the blood vessels underneath the brain. The brain is quite capable of crushing the blood vessels with its weight. Why doesn't the brain crush them? Because the brain is embedded in the cerebral fluid. The cerebral fluid oscillates through the arachnoid space, which is formed by the spinal column on the inside; the cerebral fluid flows up and down under the influence of breathing. The entire brain floats in cerebral fluid. From physics, you may know that a body loses as much weight as the displaced fluid volume weighs, so that instead of weighing 1300 to 1400 grams, the brain exerts a maximum of 20 grams of pressure on the blood vessels. So you see, the human brain is designed not to insist on its heaviness, but to have an uplift, to escape heaviness. This is only possible if the human spine is vertical. In animals, the whole heaviness of the brain presses, and that is because the arachnoid space goes horizontally into the brain. The circulation that is caused takes place in a completely different way.

One must not only look at the structure of the human being, but also at the position in the universe. So that one can say: If one considers the outstanding position of man in the universe, several important lines arise above all. (It is drawn on the board).

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Firstly, the line parallel to the earth's surface, the horizontal. Secondly, the thing that distinguishes humans from animals: the fact that the backbone is vertical to the horizontal. You have drawn two shapes with this: firstly, the horizontal, and secondly, the right angle. If you are aware of the significance of the horizontal line, which basically creates animality, and the significance of the right angle for the placement of man in the universe, then you associate certain ideas with the horizontal line and with the right angle, which can thus become symbols.

Freemasonry, which seeks to characterize the essence of man, has the spirit level and the right angle among its symbols. The other symbols are also modeled on the forces of the universe. How they are modeled on the forces of the universe will become clear from the following consideration.

If we imagine the earth here; man moves on the earth, let us say so, so I will draw it radially, then it is the case that man here has his direction in the vertical and that the way he connects to the center of the earth is a triangle. You have the triangle again as a symbol in the Freemasons' cult. Everything in this Freemasonry is — in the first degree — taken from the configuration of the human being. There you see the formation of symbolism. Symbolism is there where it occurs in its reality, not arbitrarily invented. You only come to the symbolism when you study it in reality. Symbolism is grounded in the universe, it is there somewhere. It is the same with the cult.

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You see, in his temporal life between birth and death, man is constituted in such a way that he has within him the forces that continually kill him. These are the forces that solidify him, that are effective in the formation of the bone system, and that, in their morbid development, can lead to sclerosis, gout, diabetes, and so on. I would say that these forces are found in every human being, as forces of solidification. That is one system of forces. The other system of forces that a person has within them is what continually rejuvenates them. This system of forces is particularly evident when one falls prey to pleurisy, feverish illnesses, in fact, anything that burns a person internally. In the anthroposophical world view, I have called the solidifying forces Ahrimanic forces, and the forces that lead to fever, which are therefore warming forces, I have called Luciferic forces. Both forces must be kept in perpetual equilibrium in the human being. If they are not kept in balance, they will lead the human being to some pernicious extreme, physically, mentally or spiritually. If the feverish and solidifying forces, the salt-forming forces, were not kept in constant physiological balance, then man would necessarily end up either in a state of sclerosis or in a feverish state. If man develops only the powers of understanding, if he is inclined only towards intellectualism, he falls prey to the Ahrimanic; if he develops only the fiery elements, passion, the emotional, then he falls prey to the Luciferic. And so man is always caught between two polarities and must maintain his balance. But think how difficult it is to maintain balance. The pendulum that should be in balance always tends towards a deflection. These three tendencies: the tendency towards balance, the tendency towards warmth and the tendency towards solidification are in man. He must maintain himself upright, so that man can be seen symbolically as a being who continually seeks to maintain himself upright against the forces that continually endanger his life.

This is represented by the third degree of Freemasonry. The Mason who is initiated into the third degree is symbolically shown how man is threatened by three unruly powers that approach him and endanger his life. This is done in different ways. The simplest form is this: a man is presented in a coffin and three assassins creep up who want to kill him. In the contemplation of this threefold danger in which man is immersed, he is taught an awareness that he is in danger of death at every moment and must rise up.

Thus, in this symbolic clothing, man experiences a kind of real cultic action; he experiences something really important in a ceremonial way that is connected with life. And so it is indeed that one must try to get to know life, because then the symbols arise out of life. The dark side of Freemasonry is that although these symbols are used, although rituals are performed – in the first three degrees of Blue Masonry, in high-grade Freemasonry there are many other things – and that this ceremonial is drawn from ancient traditions, but that they are no longer understood. There is no longer any connection with the origins, which I wanted to present to you in a brief sketch. People only look at the ceremony and - and this is the dangerous thing - they get stuck on the ceremony; they are not introduced to the ceremony in such a way as to gain access to the spiritual through the ceremony.

You see, another way in which, relatively late, even as late as the 18th century, one still had a very vivid sense of the pictorial visualization of the secrets of the world, is for example this: If you open some books with pictures that were still in circulation in the 18th century – they were in circulation to make people aware of things that cannot be grasped by the intellect – you will see a picture that keeps recurring: a man with a bull's head and a woman with a lion's head. The man with the bull's head and the woman with the lion's head stand side by side. At first glance, the image is shocking for anyone who does not look at it more closely. But it is indeed the case that we human beings are actually constituted in such a way that we are most perfectly shaped in our physical body. That is where we are actually human. The physical body, as you will find described in my 'Occult Science', is the one that goes back to the oldest foundations; it is the most perfect. The human ether body is shaped like the physical body. If the physical body could be removed from the ether body, it would only adapt to the astral body, then this ether body would probably take on an animal form to the annoyance of many people, because then it becomes the expression of the emotional, the passionate. It is shaped in different ways in different people.

If we regard the male head, the etheric head, as an expression of what lives in the emotional nature, then, taken as a type, as an average, there is something bull-like in the male head. In the female head, as soon as one looks at the ether head, there is something lion-like. These are average forms. One can also feel this morally if one opens oneself to what the nature of woman encompasses, how she is the type of the lion-like. One can feel the bull in the man and feel the lion in the woman.

These are things that seem to be merely figuratively spoken, but they are taken from the supersensible nature [of man]. When the astral body [is considered] taken out of the physical body, it takes on complicated plant forms, and the human ego is a purely mineral, crystal-like being, it is completely geometrically shaped. So that one can say: In form, man is human in the physical body, in the etheric body he is actually animal-like, in the astral he is plant-like and in the I he is mineral-like. When one knows all these things, then one comes to realize how, in an earlier clairvoyant state, people really knew about higher worlds and formed these images from these higher worlds.

Now, this is just to indicate how symbols came into being and how they then traditionally propagated themselves. In our time, it is only possible to arrive at symbols if one delves lovingly into the secrets of the world; and only out of anthroposophy can a cult or a symbolism actually arise today.

You see, it is necessary to start from the elements. The first thing is that one grows into the genius of the language itself. Our language, especially where civilization is at its highest, has taken on a terribly external, abstract form. We speak today without feeling in our speech. You see, our way of speaking today is actually something terribly inhuman, because we no longer live in our language. Take the German word “Kopf”. When we feel it, we also feel how it is completely connected with the round form, with the rounded. On the other hand, the Romance word 'testa' is related to the idea of making a will, bearing witness, establishing something. It comes from a completely different background. And if you feel what is in the two words, you also feel the difference between the Romance and the Germanic element. The Germanic element forms the word from the plastic, the Romance, the Latin element forms it from the soul's manifestations. Take the word 'foot', which is related to 'furrow'; 'pied' is related to 'to set up'. This can be seen throughout the language, and you can feel it everywhere, how the special world feeling actually comes to light in the genius of the language. Consider how strongly the pictorial quality of language was still felt in the time when Goethe was writing. Do you remember the scene where the poodle appears on the stage, following Faust and Wagner, and where Wagner talks about the poodle and says, “he doubts” — by that he means that he moves his tail; with the word “doubt” he expresses the movement of the tail. If you look at what is still alive in the picture and compare it with our abstractions today, you can really feel your way into the pictorial way in which the genius of language has worked, by observing how the word “doubt” contains this wagging, this to and fro.

This is the first element of the pictorial soul life when one lives into the pictorial language. It is really the case that one grows into the pictorial language if one only wants to; and that is already a good education of the soul, to grow into the pictorial language. Today we speak in abstracto, the words no longer mean anything to us. You see, in my homeland a certain kind of lightning that you see in a special way is called “Himmlatzer”. I would like to know how one should not feel the image of lightning in “Himmlatzer”, the word paints it. And so it is also quite possible, if you go more into the dialect-like, into the dialects, to grow even more into the pictorial. One should educate oneself to have the pictorial in language. Today it is sometimes almost impossible to express something that one has because the pictorial quality of language has been lost. Of course, one must disregard all artificially induced things. Anyone who is in any way eccentric will experience what happened to the Falb. He was walking with a friend and speaking animatedly – and stepped into a pool, and thought – pool? — temple! — Of course, one must not be eccentric by seeking external similarities. One must delve inwardly into the imagery of language. Then one will really understand the word “two.” Originally, the “two” was not thought of in terms of adding one and one, but rather the “two” was thought of in terms of dividing one in two. The older way of forming numbers is based on analysis, not synthesis. You can still see this if you take, for example, Arabic arithmetic in the 12th century AD.

An interesting booklet has now been published by our friend Ernst Müller about Abraham Ibn Ezra – I will give you the exact title tomorrow – which deals with numbers and is extremely interesting for understanding the earlier way of forming numbers. If you follow this, you will find, without making any crazy claims, the similarity of the word “two” with the word “doubt”; you will also be led to the suffix “el”. In this way you can find your way into the imagery of language. This is the alphabet of pictorial imagination.

Furthermore, it is about finding your way into the whole complicated way in which, for example, a human being is constructed. I have given some examples today. As I said, if you arrive at real knowledge in this way, the images first arise for the symbolism, and then you come to really understand historical life. Then you also come to be able to imagine cultic acts.

Take the following example. You see, the Greeks did not yet have the possibility of having the concepts completely separate from the things. Just as we perceive colors, the Greeks perceived the concepts in the things; for them, they were perceptions. If we start from this, we really come to understand how humanity has changed since the time of the Greeks. If, for example, one wanted to depict a type of altar that would be more suitable for the Greeks, one would depict it in bright colors. If one wanted to depict an altar that would be suitable for a person who lives more in the modern world, who is not attuned to bright colors (the Greeks did not perceive colors in the way we do), one would have to build it in a more blue color today.

If you want to approach a community with a cult today, you would have to make it extraordinarily simple. A complicated cult would not satisfy people today, so you have to make it extraordinarily simple. Above all, we need an expression of the inner transformation of the human being in the cult everywhere. This inner transformation of the human being, which one could call the pervasion of the human being with Christ, for man is actually not born at all in a state in which he is already permeated with Christ from the outset, as a result of heredity; he must find Christ within himself. This could now be expressed symbolically in the most diverse ways through simple but effective cultic acts.

Let me give you an example: if someone were to formulate a saying, it would consist of seven lines. In the first three lines one would express essentially how the human being still stands under the influence of the conditions of heredity, how he is born out of the father principle of the world. The fourth line, the middle one, would then show how these principles of heredity are overcome by the principles of the soul. And the last three lines would show how, through this, the human being becomes a seer of the spiritual. Now, one could read such seven lines to a community in such a way that one presents the first three lines with a somewhat more abstract, rougher language, then in the middle, the fourth, one transitions to a somewhat warmer language, and the last three lines are presented in elevated language, with a raised tone. And one would have in it a simple cultic act that would represent the becoming-Christed and becoming-spiritualized of the human being.

It is not important that something like this is explained afterwards – that is precisely what should not be done – but it should be made tangible. The image should be felt, and one should act accordingly. So you see how it is possible, after all, to ascend to the cultural. Then one must get a feeling for how everything that relates to the thinking is similar to light, and how everything that relates to love is similar to warmth. Now think what a means of expression you have in language when you can, wherever you wish to express something tending towards the thinking, associate it with light. When you say, “Let wisdom illuminate the human being,” you have said something real. You will feel how the thinking is actually the captured light that becomes a thought. Likewise, when speaking of love, we everywhere use images taken from warmth relationships. If one says, “A common idea spreads warmly over a community of people,” then you have the image of warmth in it, but you have spoken in real terms. Thus, when you feel the inner wisdom of language, you enter into the pictorial realm.

This is one such path, and I will give you very detailed examples later when we meet again. One can even develop modern culture on the basis of these things. Today I just wanted to hint to you at the practical way in which one is actually led. But it is always about our — forgive the harsh expression — emaciated souls. We are not human at all, we have become so dead through materialistic education. Today man feels everything separately. He does not feel at all that his nerves are the receptacle of light, that his nerves are glowing with light. He believes that vibrations are at work. But it is from light that the thought is formed. It is not just an image, but reality, when it is said: “Man is permeated by thoughts”.

This is far too little known, which is why it is not possible to visualize it. But I believe that if you read my book “Die Geheimwissenschaft” (The Secret Science), for example, and immerse yourself in how I present the three metamorphoses of Moon, Sun and Saturn, in order to visualize how it all unfolds in pictures, then you will be able to visualize it all by yourself. If you do not stop at the abstraction or even believe that I have constructed or invented something, but if you feel the necessity that it must be presented in this way, then you already have a school for pictorial imagination. And there is every reason to move on to cultic actions. From what I have presented, one must also acquire a feeling for the inner numerical structure of the universe.

Today, of course, people often laugh when you talk about the number seven or the number three. But these numbers can easily be empirically derived from the universe. I would like to know how anyone can avoid thinking of the number three when they think of a human being. Man is, after all, a threefold being, and if you think about it properly, you come across the number three everywhere. If, for example, you are speaking to a group of children, or to older children, “May the light of your thinking shine through you,” you have not finished speaking until you also say, “May the life of your feeling stir you,” or “permeate you”; and “May the fire of your will empower you.” The elements combine of their own accord, and this then flows over into the form of the ritual. You have to get a feeling for the fact that something is incomplete if you just say, “May the light, your thinking, illuminate you.” It is just like putting up a human head alone. That cannot be, I cannot imagine that someone just puts up the human head, it cannot be like that, something else is needed. So I must also have the feeling when I say: “The light, your thinking, illuminates you,” that is not complete, I must also say: “The life, your feeling, permeates you” and “The fire, your will, empowers you.” If I take only one, I have just as much as if I only have the human head. So you come to think of the other. Then one enters into the self-creative aspect of the world's numerical organization, and so the cultic form arises out of the thing itself:

May the light of your thinking permeate you. May the life of your feeling imbue you. May the fire of your will empower you.

This is, after all, the basis of what Mr. Uehli will have told you today [about the Sunday lesson in the Waldorf school]. It is all there in the formula; it is formed in this way everywhere. It is so difficult to understand when it occurs in life.

You see, if you were to take a piece out of my Philosophy of Freedom, a chapter, it would be almost like cutting off a limb of the human being. It is only intended to be read as a whole, because it is a special form of thinking. It is not a combination of individual parts, it has been allowed to grow. And that can be further developed.

Paul Baumann: Doctor, could you tell us something about the musical element in the cult?

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is as follows: we human beings are placed in the world in such a way that — if I may use a pictorial image (diagram 2 is drawn on the board) — on the one hand we are organized in our heads. This organization of the head is essentially conditioned by the fact that the external world penetrates into it and is inhibited everywhere. Everything that penetrates from the world into the head is actually reflected in the head, and what we perceive outside is the reflection, that is, what we usually have inside in our waking consciousness. And if you take the human body, especially what is made of the eye, but also of the other sense organs, then you find that it all tends to be defined at the back; something is mirrored. On the other hand, the human being develops the bone system, the muscle system and so on. In the case of the head, we actually have the round, closed skull capsule. Then we have the tubular bones, the muscles and so on (see plate 2). The head is actually quite impenetrable for what affects it, just as the mirror is impenetrable for light; that is why it reflects. This is different in what is broadly termed the limb-metabolic-organism; here the world reaches into the tubular bones and muscles, so that one can say: In the head organization everything is repelled, but the limbs absorb, so that actually the processes of the limb-metabolic organism are brought about from outside through the way in which I am integrated into the world organism. Nothing is repelled; it is, as it were, organized through, it is taken in. And that then accumulates, especially in the lungs. The lungs are such an accumulation organ where the external world takes shape. And a second, already sieved accumulation is in the organ of hearing. The organ of hearing is actually a lung at a higher level. Anyone with an eye for it can see even in the structure of the outer ear how it is not formed like the eye. The eye is formed from the outside in. The ear is closed and encloses what is the actual sensory organ. So everything that is visible on the ear is formed in such a way that the human being is formed from two vortices. One of these is thrown back, reflected, and actually returns to itself; the other forms an organism, develops the form, and meets the first, and they then come together here (see plate 2), so that everything that comes from the outside inwards is reflected here and gives the ordinary memory, for example the memory for the images seen. On the other hand, that which builds up the human being is movement, it is movement throughout, it is forms of vibration that run within him. I have told you about the brain water, haven't I? Man is 92% water and only 8% solid; what is solid is only incorporated. The whole is all movement. What organizes the human being out of movement, that organizes him out of the word. Man is truly the Word made flesh in the most literal sense, and this Word made flesh comes together with that which is reflected in it, so that we can say: We are built first of all for the visual, but this is organized entirely for being reflected back; and then we are built for the auditory, for that which forms the human being, for sound formed into words, which then accumulates in listening, which becomes heard sound.

The human being becomes aware of the external world through the direct or the transformed visible. Through that which becomes sound in himself, which becomes musical, the human being is the being who rises from the sphere of the musical and is fertilized by the sphere of the optical, of the visible, so that the musical is indeed that which continues to work in us from the world. We are built through music; our body is an embodied music. This is the case in the fullest sense. And light plays a role here (see Chart 2) and is reflected. This also accounts for the great difference between ordinary memory, which we have in relation to the outside world, where we retain the visual, and musical memory. Musical memory is something quite different – it will also seem wonderful to you – musical memory arises in the opposite way, it arises from the accumulation of the sound that flows through; in this way, the human being throws back his own nature within himself. It is therefore that which works musically in the human being, his very innermost nature.

Now you may think that we place images in some way, whether we place them visibly before people in worship, or whether we evoke the images by speaking, and then we imbue these images with the musical, whether with instrumental music or song. It is nothing other than the fact that, fundamentally, the two main principles of the world are juxtaposed. What the human being is as a creature of light is brought into connection with what the human being is as a creature of sound. And through this, the cult [...] becomes a polarity. Admittedly, this is already the case with the word, and the older cults did not use abstract speech for this reason either, but rather the recitative, which already has something song-like about it. And this recitative, which played such an important role in the ancient sacrifice of the Mass because the Mass was sung, was intended to represent the interpenetration of the luminous with the tonal, so that in the cult the musical that which most essentially internalizes man, that which furthers the mystical element, while the rest furthers that which furthers the pantheistic, the outpouring of man to the universe.

We thus have the possibility, on the one hand, of driving man into expansion through everything luminous and conceptual, and on the other hand, of leading him into contraction, into the absorption of the supersensible through the musical. And while, for example, the non-musical, the luminous in cult is suited to teaching us a sense of the world, the musical is suited to deepening our sense of the I to the point of the divine. The ideal would be to take the luminous to a certain degree and then let it merge into the musical, letting it merge quite organically into the musical. In this way, one would actually have recreated the human being in his constitution through cult.

Gottfried Husemann asks whether the church music of the past, for example Bach, is still needed. Would the new cult not also need a new kind of music?

Rudolf Steiner: It is true that if one is obliged to do something quickly today, then one will revive these older musical things. But it is certainly the case that people can no longer develop an entirely inward relationship to these older forms, just as an adult cannot develop the same life forms as a child. It is absolutely necessary that musical forms be created out of today's feeling. Naturally, one must begin where one has the possibility to do so. You will have noticed that where we do eurythmy and work with music, our friends have already found quite good musical forms out of the musical feeling of today. This will be based on the fact that more and more people will relearn in the musical sphere, just as in the pictorial sphere. There are indeed tentative attempts, which need not be condemned, but one must know that they are just tentative attempts, and the same applies to the musical sphere, for example with Debussy, who lives in the individual note, who lives in the individual tone. But it must not become tone painting. It is the case that more and more will be experienced of what arises in the individual tone as a secret, and then one will seek to analyze the individual tone. Perhaps one will have to expand the scale, insert some tones, but mainly one will enrich by experiencing the character of the individual tone. And thereby special musical possibilities will arise. [To Mr. Baumann:] You also hope that one will then experience melodies in the individual tone? — It is actually the case that you can. There is then a training opportunity. There the anthroposophical musicians will have to meet the others halfway. I am absolutely convinced that anthroposophical musicians will still have a great deal to do, that anthroposophical musicians in particular will have a great mission. Before Wagner, old music was actually at an impasse. But Wagner did not really advance music. He broadened music by bringing a side-current into it. One can see this as great and ingenious, but it is still a side-current. One will have to take up the development of music before Wagner and find there precisely that which can give much to culture. Until then it will, of course, be very good to use older works. There are actually some truly wonderful things there, both in Protestant and Catholic church music. For the modern person, the relationship will no longer be a completely inward one; one will have to try to delve into the musical itself.

Emil Bock asks a question concerning the Quaker movement.

Rudolf Steiner: I have always had the feeling with the Quakers that this is actually a movement that comes specifically from the Anglo-American element. I have not been able to find any significant predispositions in Central Europe for the kind of community building that comes to light in Quakerism. I am not familiar with this endeavour from my own experience and therefore cannot know whether anything fruitful can come of it or not, but I doubt that something similar to Quakerism can arise out of the Central European spirit. You see, the Anglo-American element actually experiences religion in a completely different way than the Central European can experience it. The Central European experiences religion first and foremost in thinking. That is the archetypal phenomenon. It is a mysticism thoroughly illuminated by the intellectual light. This is everywhere, even where very radical religious forms and sectarian aspirations arise. In Central Europe you will find everywhere mysticism illuminated by the light of thinking, while the Anglo-Americans let the religious element be immersed in the instinctive part of man. Of course this appears in different ways, and it would be interesting to investigate somehow from which blood mixtures the Quakers recruit themselves. One must go to the instinctive, blood-related, and there one will find the subsoil. You will see that one will surely find something like an instinctive disposition there, but the Central European never founds anything community-building on instinctive dispositions.

This is really a clear difference between the West, the Center and the East. The West seeks the higher more or less in the subconscious, in the center one seeks it in consciousness, and in the East one seeks it in the superconscious, there one is always looking up. The American especially looks to the earth and expects everything from the earth, the Russian - even more the Asian - actually always looks up. The Central European looks straight ahead. It is already the case that we could end up on dangerous ground in the religious field in particular if we were to imitate the actually Western element. We must not do that in any field. It has caused us great damage in science and leads to rigidity in the religious field in particular. We have to work more with the soul than with the body.

Emil Bock: We have heard that there are already rituals that have been handed out on occasion: a baptismal ritual, a funeral ritual, and an adapted version of a mass. I would like to ask whether there is a possibility that we could get to know such pieces in order to live into them.

Rudolf Steiner: Certainly, these things would be considered as starting points. The funeral ritual came about because a member of our movement wanted such a funeral ritual. Of course, we had to tie in with the usual funeral rituals, but by translating the usual ritual, not lexicographically, of course, but correctly, something essentially different emerged. I would ask for these things back some time and would very much like to use them as a basis for our course consideration. I will simply ask our friend to transcribe them and then perhaps send them here; that is quite possible. In the case of the Mass offering, I initially only gave a translation of the [Catholic] Mass offering, but something new actually emerged. But I only got as far as the offertory with the translation, it is not finished yet. In the Old Catholic service, the Mass is read in the local language. Our friend went so far as to read the Mass in this translation up to the offertory in the Old Catholic service.

Things take time, and we have little time. But all of this can really be made available to you. Of course, it would be necessary to create a new baptismal ritual in particular, because the old baptismal ritual is not entirely suitable because it was always aimed at baptizing adults, and then it was transferred to the child. If you want to baptize children today, a [new] ritual must first be found. Elements for this already exist, which I can also make available to you. The baptismal rituals have grown out of baptisms for adults. When you baptize a child, you are speaking to an unconscious person, and it must be a corresponding action. The child knows nothing about it. We must not go so far as to rebel against infant baptism itself, but many things need to be renewed in the ritual. If you take the St. John's baptism, it is based on the fact that the person was submerged in the water, the adult was submerged. You know that a person can be brought to the point where his earthly life appears to him in a mere tableau. His life appears to him in a kind of tableau, and through this he experiences unconditionally that he belongs to a spiritual world. He has an experience of belonging to a spiritual world. This is actually also expressed in the baptismal ritual. We cannot do that with children. We need a ritual for children that expresses how the child is accepted into our community, and the communal religious supersensible substance that lives in the community must flow over to the child. We must express this in the baptismal rite, and it can indeed be done.

You see, there has been no reason in the anthroposophical movement to develop these things in a concrete way for the simple reason that we wanted to avoid them. There have been more than a few cases where people wanted to introduce such things. I always rejected it for the reason that, of course, it would have killed the anthroposophical movement stone dead from the start. We just had to stick with what was more or less allowed.

Twenty years ago it was more, today it is less the case that the Catholic Church regarded the ritual as its monopoly. We would have been killed on the spot, and so there was little reason to develop the ritual in that direction. The other thing, where the form of a ritual was developed, was interrupted by the war, where one could no longer continue; because as soon as these things would have been continued, one would have been treated as a secret society.

These are the reasons why the ritual side has not been developed within the anthroposophical movement. But it will be possible to develop it in your movement, because it can be regarded as something quite natural for ritual to be developed in a religious movement. Even though Protestantism has a certain horror of the cultic, I still believe that [the necessity of ritual] could be felt again.

A participant: To begin with, Catholics have more sacraments than Protestants. What is the basis for this and what is the actual significance of the ritual of Holy Communion?

Rudolf Steiner: What is contained in Catholic dogma goes back to certain forms of older knowledge. It is imagined that between birth and death, the human being passes through seven stages. First, birth itself, then what is called maturing, puberty, then what is called the realization of one's inner self around the age of 20, then the feeling of not corresponding to the world, not being fully human, that is the fourth. And then, isn't it, the gradual growth into the spiritual. These things have then become somewhat blurred, but one imagined the whole human life, including the social one, in seven stages, and one imagined that the human being grows out of the spirit between birth and death. The Catholic Church does not recognize pre-existence in more recent times. There is only one thought of God, and this growing out of the thought of God is presented in seven stages. These seven stages must be counteracted by other forces. Birth is an evolution, maturing is an evolution, and each form of evolution is counteracted by a form of involution: baptism for birth, confirmation for puberty. Every sacrament is the inverse of a natural stage in evolution. One can say that Catholic doctrine presents seven stages of evolution, to which it juxtaposes seven stages of involution, and these are the seven sacraments, four of which are earthly, namely baptism, confirmation, the sacrament of the altar, and penance. These four are as universal as the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. As you go higher, you come to the spirit self, the spirit of life and spiritual people. Just as the shining in from the spiritual world, the last three sacraments are those that go into the social: marriage, ordination and extreme unction. The penetration of the spiritual world is expressed in ordination. So these are the seven sacraments, of which the last are extreme unction, ordination and marriage. They are simply the sacraments of the inverse processes for the natural processes that take place for humans, and the corresponding cultic acts are also set up accordingly.

The concept of the seven sacraments is certainly not arbitrary. What is arbitrary is to limit these seven sacraments to two. This happened at a time when people no longer had a feeling for the inner numerical constitution of the world. It is these things, of course, that make truly serious Catholic priests, especially those in religious orders, such opponents of Protestantism. They all consider it to be a form of rationalism, something that knows nothing. There are genuine spiritualized natures among the clergy – the Jesuits, aren't they, they are prepared – I found one among the clergy of Monte Cassino, Father Storkeman, with whom I also spoke about Dionysius the Areopagite, who showed me the altar where he usually says mass. He spoke to me about his feelings at mass, and you could see that it had nothing to do with the usual confession of the Catholic Church.

And another time, in Venice, there was a patriarch who was a terrible fellow. Another, a younger cleric, preached, and I could see occultly that the one who had preached was truly spiritualized. The sermon was also really very fine. It is precisely through the ceremonial that individuals who stand out show themselves. I also saw one read the mass on the lower ground floor [of a church] in Naples, where I could really see the transubstantiation that underlies the Catholic transformation. It is actually the case that when transubstantiation is performed by a real priest, the host acquires an aura. Now, you may believe that or not, I can only relate it.

There is no need to hold back [saying this]: there is an inner reality to the cult, that is undoubtedly the case. You can see the damage in Catholicism when you see what it has been, and what was lost in the rationalist period. It makes no sense that [Protestantism] took two out of seven sacraments; there is no reason for that.

Emil Bock: May we also ask what the significance of laying on of hands was in the early days of Christianity?

Rudolf Steiner: You must be clear about the fact that humanity has undergone a development and that certain spiritual forces that were present in prehistory are increasingly receding as humanity becomes more intellectual and develops freedom. Certain powers in relation to natural life have definitely declined, and that is why we do not understand many things that are told in biblical history and that mean something quite different from what man associates with them today. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in modern times, something like Socrates' relationship with his students is viewed in a mean and disgustingly mean way. People talk about a kind of homosexuality, whereas it points to a side of the powers of the soul where something was achieved not only through the word, but also through the presence of Socrates with his students. The human presence meant something to them. It is a disgusting slander of things when today the concepts of homosexuality are applied to these things in Greek culture. And so it is with the touch of the laying on of hands. The hand of a person essentially not only has a feeling meaning, but it also has an emanation, and in earlier times the emanation was stronger, it could have a healing effect. I have often expressed this in lectures in a certain formula: human life is a whole, and childhood belongs together with later life. No person attains the power to bless in later life who is not able to pray in childhood. Anyone who has never folded their hands in prayer as a youth can never hold their hands in blessing. The laying on of hands was simply an initiation process [.. gap in the postscript], what is involved there, is involved in the laying on of hands. That was something that was trained earlier, and the healing effect of laying on hands should definitely be considered. Isn't it true that today's people are no longer in the same situation, they are not encouraged to develop something like that in their youth. Such things were taught in the past, they were a reality once. But it is not out of the question that in a more spiritualized future these things will be taught again. Would you not consider that desirable? — The folding of the hands is a preparation for blessing. Likewise, for example, in older Catholicism it was taught that If you learn to kneel, you will learn to say the 'Dominus vobiscum' in the right way. Do you find that strange? You know how to say the 'Dominus vobiscum', don't you? You learn to say it by kneeling, otherwise it is not as powerful.

A participant: It has been said that the priests in ancient Egypt had an extraordinary position of leadership. We have heard that initiates have led humanity, that they have worked through real thoughts. The question is how this would have to be modified today by the new.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, it must become new in so far as we must no longer return to this strongly unconscious, atavistic element, but we must go through the much more conscious element, taking more account of the fact that every human being must develop into a personality. Even today in Catholicism, the personality of the priest is completely suppressed. When the stole is crossed, the priest is only a figurant of the church, he is no longer a human being. We must not cultivate this. In the Egyptian priesthood, in particular, much was based on the fact that, as long as the highest priest lived, the others were only allowed to be figurants. Only when he died could another enter. There was always only one. We must exclude all this today.

A participant: What about the priest's vestments?

Rudolf Steiner: The liturgical vestment came about in such a way that one imagined the coloration of a personal feeling in relation to the real, so, for example, one imagined the blessing priest. This naturally gives a very definite coloration of the astral body, and the liturgical vestment is formed accordingly. Isn't it so? When blessing, one's own personality is absorbed into the supersensible world and the blessing is allowed to flow over to the congregation; this gives a blue undergarment and a red outer garment. One simply models the astral body. The same is true for the other acts, for praying and so on. For example, they imagine that one has an outpouring of the spiritual. This can be followed quite precisely: the coloring of the astral body – the priestly robe. The liturgical robe is simply the coloring of the astral body. This could certainly be recreated, and the only question is to what extent humanity is ready to accept something like that again.

I had an excellent Protestant clergyman as a friend who had a great ideal, that is, he had many very beautiful ideals, but among others he had one, and that was the abolition of the Luther skirt. He wanted to go like an ordinary dandy. It embarrassed him that he could not go like a dandy when he was a pastor. Therefore, it was very painful for him not to be able to walk around in this modern, aesthetic man's garment, where one is clamped in two stovepipes. This monstrosity is, of course, regarded today as the only possible garment, and anything else that may arise is considered to be something foolish. The greatest folly is our man's suit. A human race that puts on a tailcoat and a top hat – it is obvious that such a human race cannot have any understanding for cultic vestments. This must be cultivated again in humanity. Perhaps when women can also take up this profession, when female preachers come along, there will be a way to arrive at cultic vestments sooner. Because women will have to do something to get to the pulpit. But today men want to do it like a Swiss speaker. He thought it was right, for example, not to give sermons, but to give speeches while walking back and forth on the lectern with a cigarette in his mouth. That's how he gave his lectures.

That's right. You know that cult robes were not limited to the church, because judges also had cult robes – and if you asked a judge today to put on the old cult robes, he would also remonstrate against it – yes, even the court ceremonial went hand in hand with a kind of cult robe. And finally, at the universities, you still have the rector's robes, which always pass from one rector to the next. In this respect, we just need to change our aesthetic ideas, and that's that.

My dear friends! Today I would like to say a few words about the third area that you have mentioned, namely the actual content of the sermon. Of course, all three areas are intimately connected. We have given some indications about the nature of the cult, which of course must be very much completed and worked into the concrete, into what is needed today. We have at least been able to give some indications of the cultic aspect, and I would like to start by telling you how this cultic aspect is in turn related to the actual content of the sermon in practice.

You see, the sermon element appeals to the parishioner's imaginative understanding. Of course, the sermon must be delivered in such a way that what enters the person through the imagination passes as quickly and as intensely as possible into the feeling, the emotional, and, above all, the will impulse. But nevertheless we must work on the parishioner indirectly through the power of the imagination in the sermon. In all our teaching and instruction we must work on the human being through the power of the imagination.

But the conceptual has something inherently contradictory about the whole human nature. Here we enter a realm where today's science proves powerless from the outset to understand things. If you say something like that: the conceptual has something contradictory about the full nature of man, then you will meet with no understanding at all in today's scientific world view. And yet it is so. The conceptual tends to be absorbed once and then retained by the memory. You will easily see that this does not correspond to human nature.

If you look at the other extreme in man, at the purely physical processes, you cannot say: I have eaten or drunk today, so it remains in my organism, so I do not need to eat and drink again tomorrow - but food and drink must be repeated in a rhythmic sequence. What a person does must occur in a rhythmic sequence. And this is basically the actual human nature, to be incorporated into the rhythm in a certain way, while it is already a deviation from human nature when a person absorbs something once and then retains it, when it becomes permanent for him. And this permanence is the character of the conceptual. In the extreme, the conceptual becomes boring when it is repeated too often; and there is a fundamental sin against human nature associated with this theoretical-conceptual, namely not wanting to have repetitions anymore. You can follow this purely externally. Read good translations of the Buddha's discourses; you will find that these discourses have countless repetitions, you progress through nothing but repetitions. In the West, the foolish mistake was made of taking only the content of the Buddha-speeches and omitting the repetitions, because it was not known that Buddha had taken human nature into account.

There we come upon the point where, out of human nature itself, the mere content must of necessity pass over into something to be rhythmically assimilated. Of course, in the past this was done quite instinctively, by inserting prayer as the rhythmic element into the teaching, inserting prayer as the repeatedly recurring content of faith, even though the individual prayer has exactly the same content. The conceptual element merges with the volitional element when repetition occurs. In another way, one does not get a [volitional] content at all. Thus we already have the necessary flow of the doctrinal element into the cultic element. We have to bring the doctrinal content into such forms that we can present pictorial representations to the community members in a certain way. We have to let what we teach gradually become established in pictorial representations and to set the main points in a certain monumental way, so that they can be repeated again and again as a formula. Without this, we will not be able to bring the teaching content beyond the theoretical-conceptual into the practical-volitional, and this is what we must do. The more we stick to merely handing down the teaching content, the less we get to the practical religious exercise.

This is what shows you directly how something like cultic practice is already present in the Buddha-Speeches. The working out of the will element from the mere theoretical element of imagination is actually present in these discourses. While we appeal to people to repeat the Lord's Prayer, we are working our way out of the merely theoretical into the practical religious realm. But we will not be able to do this at all if we ourselves are not completely imbued with the supersensible substance of the world. And here I come today to certain characteristics of the teaching material, which one must nevertheless take into account if one wants to become a practical preacher or if one wants to have an effect on people through the teaching material at all.

You see, the greatest harm in today's religious work lies in the fact that the Gospels are no longer taken seriously. I do not mean any slight by this, but I do mean that people are not aware that the content of the Gospels goes beyond our sensory understanding. It is most significant that we can approach the Gospels again through anthroposophy and say to ourselves: an otherworldly content flows in the Gospels. We must understand them, we must do everything possible to really understand them. Today, however, people only criticize the Gospels; they do not really want to understand them, and this criticism is largely based on the fact that one does not take the content of the Gospels seriously at all, but takes it superficially.

I must refer you to the third sentence of the Gospel of John. In this third sentence, one usually hears the following: All things were made through the Word, and without the Word nothing was made that has been made. - What is all included in this third sentence of the Gospel of John! In reality, one would have to say: All things that came into being came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing of what came into being came into being. This captures the meaning of this sentence. The third sentence points with all its might to what has come into being in the world, to everything that is subject to becoming. And of that which is subject to becoming, it is said, first, that it is tangible. Everything we see as having come into being is created and passes away. And secondly, it is said of this created and passing away that it is made by the word, by the logos.

This sentence would not be there if it were not based on the awareness of a contrast, if it were not subject to the sentence that there is also something in the world that is not created and does not pass away, namely the eternal foundations that merely transform themselves. In our modern education, we have only lost this contrast between what has arisen on the surface and the powers that lie in the depths, which Plato, for example, calls the eternal ideas. We must presuppose these eternal ideas as that which does not pass away and which underlies what has arisen and is passing away, which does not exist in the arising and passing away in the ordinary sense, but subsists.

We must distinguish between existence and subsistence. That which subsists all things is the foundation, that which refers to the Father. We must speak to the community in all popularity in such a way that we bring this Father-God as the content of the absolutely eternal to the consciousness of our community children. That is not as difficult as you think. It is only difficult because today the world is intensively economizing on ideas. I can assure you that the people who understand it most easily are the farmers in the countryside. They understand it immediately, while only the people who have been educated in the current way do not understand it. They do not understand it.

We can learn a great deal by looking at the last remnants of the elementary spiritual that still exist in [unspoilt] human beings. It is relatively easy to convey the most profound ideas to people with an elementary soul life. These ideas are rejected only by those who are spoilt, who have been spoilt for the most part by our schools.

We must understand how to teach people in a popular way the eternal in all things and how to distinguish between what is transient, what has come into being and what is passing away. And we must evoke the idea, in all possible ways and roundabout ways, that the Father-God underlies what is enduring and the Son-God, the Christ as the creative Logos, underlies what is becoming and what is the process of becoming. Therefore, one must also seek understanding of the Father-God before the created and the working of the Christ in the created.

Such things must be worked out again, then we come again to concepts that lie beyond mere scientific concepts. But, my dear friends, you must also be able to speak about them in the right way. You do not learn this through logical speculation, because logical speculation itself suffers from the one-sidedness that it works towards being absorbed once. Logical speculation – if it remains only a matter of speculation – is the worst possible preparation for a sermon. If you want to preach, it is not enough to prepare yourself for the doctrinal content of the sermon; the only possible supplement to this preparation for the content is meditation for the preacher himself.

Anyone who wants to preach must first meditate, that is, call something into their consciousness that brings them into a feeling inwardness so that they feel the God, the divine within them. Those who do not prepare themselves in this meditative way will not be able to let the word resound with the nuance with which it must resound if one is to evoke understanding for what one has to say. You will have to speak of immortality, you will have to speak of the Fall of Man, of Creation, of Redemption and of Grace. But you must not speak of immortality, the Fall of Man, Creation, Redemption and Grace with the consciousness that you have gained from modern scientific education, but you must speak with the consciousness that you have gained from your feeling of the divine existence within you. Then your words will be given the necessary nuance that you need to reach the hearts of those to whom you are to bring the truths about immortality, the Fall of Man, Creation, Redemption and Grace. This is what must be understood by preachers as deeply as possible. They will not come to a deeper understanding of the teaching content unless they prepare themselves meditatively.

The kind of composure that you first acquire in meditation, which brings you to be alone with your whole being – even if only for a short time – that composure is what also prepares you for the proper mood for reading the Gospels. You must assume that only the meditative life can prepare you, on the one hand, for reading the Gospels and, on the other, for the special tone of preaching. This is what the preacher must make a habit of. One should not believe that an understanding of worship, an understanding of the right nuance of preaching, comes through intellectual considerations, through intellectual comprehension of the content of the gospel, but rather that it comes through meditative immersion in the spiritual and volitional element at the same time, which stimulates the human being, thus stimulates the whole human being, and that is what it is really always about.

It is certainly a good thing for the modern preacher to realize, by means of outstanding examples, what inner soul struggles must actually be fought through if one wants to penetrate from what one absorbs today through external education, including external theological education, and what determines the whole form of thought, to a real grasp of the suggested idea about the supersensible.

It is really useful for anyone who wants to become a religious leader today to study such personalities as, for example, Newman, the English Cardinal who started out from Anglicanism and who thus moved within a more modern world view, half consciously, and then fell back into Catholicism, which, even within Catholicism, because such people are only waiting for such people, could make him a cardinal. It is interesting to observe the struggles of such a personality. You see, in the beginning, Newman's struggle was based on wanting to understand Christian truths. But he could not get anywhere with that. In the end, he could not find a way to understand Christian truths in modern terms. He was honest enough not to want to come to the mere “simple man of Nazareth” in Weinel's manner, but there was in him the urge for the supersensible. He could not get along earlier than until he said to himself: Yes, at the starting point of Christianity are not highly educated, scientifically educated people, but there are the fishermen of Galilee, and they actually understood nothing of the sayings they did; they did these sayings without logic, without being imbued with a logical understanding. And then, in fact, everything that is modern theology, which works so hard to be logical, which comes to the point of negation in its criticism imbued with logic, only emerged from the simple words of the fishermen of Galilee. And then Newman comes to say to himself: If there is logic, it can only be born out of illogic, out of that which is lived in such a simple way as Christianity was lived by the people who surrounded Christ Jesus in Galilee. —

And so he comes to a particular conception of the evolution, of the development of that which is experienced [religiously], into the more elaborate. But now he is obliged to take the whole Catholic Church with him, because he remains in the actuality of the unfolding [of religious experience]. Why does he remain? Because he negates the possibility that today, through the logical, one can arrive at the super-logical through beholding. Thus he could, [standing between Scylla and Charybdis,] run the risk, on the one hand, of falling prey to Scylla through a purely rationalistic interpretation, or, on the other hand, of Charybdis through killing the rationalistic way of thinking, but then having to accept the whole tradition and falling back into Catholicism. In fact, everyone who thinks this way falls prey to Catholicism. You only have to consider that people who cannot go along with the contemporary way of entering the supersensible, such as Scheler, who is characteristic of our German education for this matter, fall back into Catholicism. If people seek the supersensible and reject the path that anthroposophy wants to take, [they fall back into Catholicism].

Today, in order to avoid falling between Scylla and Charybdis, we have no other choice than to follow the anthroposophical path, even to accept anthroposophy as a supporting element of religious life, in order to access the supersensible truths. Then you will also find — and this is necessary for you because it occurs in community building — the popular, simple form for that which we cannot do within anthroposophy because something else must come first. We still have to express ourselves too strongly in modern forms of education [for the presentation of supersensible truths], because we speak to those who belong to modern education. But if you are a number of people, then it is quite possible to find the simple form to speak to the people in such a way that the high concepts of the supersensible that have been hinted at become concrete again.

I will only hint at the following. You see, do not disdain to speak to people in such a way that you say to them: Look at the stone, look at the rock crystal, look at a mineral object shaped like this, and you will be able to say to yourself: This mineral object, how was it formed? It has been formed out of the earth; you have no reason to think otherwise than that it has been formed out of the earth. It is a piece of the earth, the earth can create such forms, that is a piece of the earth. But now look at the plants; look at what you can always see around you. Can you imagine that the earth produces plants [on its own]? No; what the earth has as seeds within itself must wait until spring comes, until the sun's rays penetrate from outside, and when the sun's rays lose their strength, the earth also loses the strength to produce plant growth. Look at the growth of plants, and you will notice that when plants try to survive the winter season, they take on a woody, mineral quality; they become trees, which in turn lose the sprouting and budding power in their wood, and take on something of the mineral world themselves. The Earth could never produce what is plant-like out of itself; for that it needs what surrounds the Earth. It is necessary to rise above this, to really teach people that the earth could only be a rocky body if it had only its own forces, but that it would never have vegetation and would be permeated by it if the earth did not form a unity with the cosmos, if the cosmic forces did not play a role and have an effect on the earth. The earth would not have a plant kingdom without the spatial heaven.

And if it was possible in ancient times to teach the slave masses in ancient Egypt such truths as, for example, the transition from solar power to the power of Sirius, if it was possible to teach people that at that time, then we need not despair that today, when we can speak to the simplest people about the fact that the Earth owes what it has as a vegetative being to the extraterrestrial cosmos with its forces. And so we can rescue human beings from their tendency towards the merely earthly by teaching them to feel what the earth draws from the cosmic heavens.

I therefore believe that we must work towards directing the soul's gaze to the whole of cosmic space, and that this can be achieved simply by considering the plant world in a way that can be understood by everyone. It is of great help to us to realize how completely innocent nature actually is. It is impossible to speak of anything in the mineral or plant world that is guilt or sin. And if we work through these concepts well, if we really present the innocence of nature and the possible becoming guilty of man in a concrete way, then we can work out what leads people to understand that something comes into the world with man that cannot be found in space at all. Once man has understood that plants owe their existence to space and are innocent, then we have a way of realizing that that which can make man guilty cannot come from space at all, that we are all compelled to seek the essential soul of man outside of space. We must seek this way to go beyond space. And you see, when we have found the way to go beyond space, then we will find further ways.

You can see how difficult it has become for people with a modern education to go beyond space, from the fact that the most intelligent people in the 19th century opposed the idea of immortality on the grounds that souls would have no place in the universe. They could not get beyond the spatial with the concept of the soul. With the concept of the soul, one must get beyond the spatial. And when one has come this far, one turns one's attention to the animal world and tries to bring to life a concept that one gets there, which not only seizes our imaginative life but also our deepest feelings.

We find that minerals and plants cannot become guilty, but they cannot suffer either. Man must suffer, but can also become guilty. And then we turn our gaze to the animal world; they cannot become guilty either, but they must suffer. And when we gradually learn to understand repeated lives on earth, especially when it is not a theory but a clear understanding, when we feel that there is a connection between guilt and suffering, even if it is not trivially practical, and we just cannot find this connection because we direct our attention to innocent nature and would also like to harness man to this unity of innocent nature, then the great world tragedy becomes clear to us, which consists in the fact that we have chained the animal world to us, that the animals must suffer with us, although they cannot be guilty. Then one arrives at the tragic realization that the animal world exists because of man, must share in his suffering, although it cannot be to blame. Feel this concept through, empathize that the animal world shares in evil, although it cannot go along with evil.

When we form a vivid picture of evil in this way – a picture that is also intuitive – we come into contact with the world. We only have to feel the tragedy of existence in the world, which consists in the fact that the animals around us suffer with us, and then we come to realize that there are duties that go beyond the ordinary legal obligations. This is a point where you can lead the human being completely out of the immediate sense world. For in the immediate sense world you find nothing but the legal concepts that regulate the sensual, the external relationships between human and human. The obligation to redeem the animals comes to us from a completely different world. We cannot do this at all in our present existence. We cannot do anything in our present existence to redeem the animals that suffer for our sake. We can only redeem them if we look ahead to a final state of the earth that no longer prevents us from intervening in the laws of nature to relieve the suffering of the animal world. And so we are moving towards understanding a final state of the earth, in which physics has no right to interfere. We are expanding that which lives in us humans to include an understanding of the interconnection of the world.

We must speak to the people of today, because if we speak in terms of the old religious ideas, people will object that from a scientific point of view none of this is possible. But we must try to find such a way that simply cannot be said by science. Because the suffering of the animal world is there, without the animal world being able to be guilty. And here we come directly to the transition; the possibility exists of knowing something about supernatural obligations, or rather, extra-terrestrial obligations, about duties that can be fulfilled when the earth has found its end, the end of its present physical state. We will be able to lead [people] to an understanding of this state of the earth by overcoming purely scientific thinking in an appropriate way.

But we cannot do this if we merely appeal to people's selfishness in our preaching. And that is what has gradually arisen in humanity and has actually made religious conviction so difficult that today, with the best sermons, we basically appeal to human selfishness; and that has come about because we only speak of immortality and not of being unborn.

What is the situation regarding immortality? From anthroposophy it becomes clear. It becomes clear through knowledge. But how does today's preacher speak about immortality? He shakes up — look at the facts — the selfish needs of people, and in doing so he speaks entirely to the deepest soul egoisms; and he would not reach the hearts at all if the desire did not beat towards him: I may not perish with death. Of course, man will not perish with death. But this view must not arise from desire. The preacher does stir up these desires; he speaks to desire and fear, even if he does not do so consciously, because that is how he is accustomed to speaking. You cannot speak of life before conception in the same way. You cannot speak of life before birth from an egoistic point of view; you can make a person indifferent to it, because deep down he does not care about it. Since he is experiencing existence, he is not interested in whether he has lived before. This interest must be instilled in man, and that can only be done by awakening in him the consciousness that he has been given a mission with his earthly existence, that he is a co-worker in the divine world order, which could not achieve its goal if it had to work without the sensual world. That the Deity has released man, that is one thing. What can be grasped is that the human being experiences freedom, which he could not experience if he had not descended into the body. We have to present the human being as something that has been sent down by God. Without realizing the pre-existence, you do not come to a sermon that takes hold of the whole person and not just the desiring person. And that is a great defect of our [present-day] preaching, that it appeals to the desiring on the one hand and to the fearful on the other, and not to that which represents man as an image of the Godhead, which has released man to work in earthly existence.

You see, that word that comes to us from ancient times, that plays such a great role in the Catholic Church, the Gloria, is inserted into the mass between the Gospel and the offertory. Gloria in excelsis Deo – Glory be to God in the highest, and peace on earth, and goodwill toward men. – This is how it is translated in modern times. Now this translation is somewhat misleading, because the concept of glory is not based on the concept of being worshipped; rather, it is based on the same concept as the Greek exusiai: the concept of shining outwards, of revealing itself. And the saying actually means: May the Divine in the Heights reveal Itself, and on earth may Its reflection be the peace of men of good will. — We must arrive at a new concept of glory, then we will also come to an understanding of these things.

Just think how terribly blasphemous it actually is when the Gospel of the Blindborn is translated: Why was this man born blind? Did he sin or his parents? — And the answer: Not he has sinned nor his parents, but the works of God shall be made manifest in him. Is this not blasphemy, that the man born blind was healed so that the works of God might be seen in him? While it is always translated that the works of God are revealed through him, the truth lies in the fact that he preformed blindness for himself in a pre-existent life, so that God might be revealed in him.

We must eliminate this erroneous concept, which appears in many forms; then we can begin to make it clear that the human being stands as an image of God, that he is there to allow the Godhead to work in him. We cannot arrive at this understanding if we rely only on the hope of a post-existent life and not on pre-existence. We must grasp radically that we are here on earth the continuation of the pre-existent life, not merely the beginning of the post-existent life, and that human minds cannot find the way to selflessness if we speak only of immortality and not of pre-existence. These things must be the subject of glowing preaching, then there will be a possibility of reconnecting human consciousness to the supersensible; and then the rest will follow of itself.

You see, if you want to arrive at a concept such as that of Creation, then you have to evoke in people an awareness of the following: if you look at the mineral nature today, you see that the law of the conservation of matter and of force prevails in it. And this world that we are looking at seems to be eternal. But if you realize that this world is only in space and that only minerals from the earthly and plants from the extra-earthly space have been added to space, that something is already coming in with the animal from a pre-earthly state – because what is natural law on earth today cannot of course, cannot make the animal into a human being – if you realize that the laws of nature themselves have a beginning, then you will be able to understand that the concept of creation also includes the emergence of the laws of nature, whereas today we simply extend the laws of nature forward and backward into infinity. This is how we arrive at the concept of creation. It is intended to draw attention to something that can prove to you that, when speaking to simple minds, one can always find a certain understanding for the highest things. When I was young, if one went to an Austrian farmer who had not been educated at school but had only learned to read and write in his village school and spoke to him about nature as one had learned at school, he would stare at one. He could not reconcile this concept of nature with what he knew at all. You couldn't say to him in the usual way, you look at nature, it produces plants and animals, it is beautiful, nature appears in the light - and so on; you might as well have said something Chinese. There was an Austrian dialect poet who used the word “d'Naduar”. But when the Austrian farmer, who had only learned to read and write, who had no sense of the concept of nature as it appears in modern science, spoke of nature, he had a different concept of nature. For him, “nature” was the male seed and without this connotation he could not understand the word nature. He understood that what lives innocently in nature is in him, but it is drowned out in him by what can become guilty. He regarded nature as a part of himself, which is connected with it if one can speak of birth, and he also had the concept that something else enters into man at birth than nature, which is why he calls the male seed nature, the natural thing, however, that is connected with being born. He had this mysterious connection between our being born and being a work of nature.

And as is the case with this striking concept, if one only seeks, even if one wants to move on to the concept of creation, one can still find the possibility of connecting to concepts that are understandable to the simplest mind. The concept of creation can become something thoroughly understandable, but one must really try to move beyond what modern education gives us with good will. And so one gradually comes to make man understand that the creation of man comes before the creation of nature, that man has entered the world at a time when nature had not yet taken effect, when there was no such thing as heredity, fertilization and so on. One returns to a state where heredity and fertilization did not yet exist, where our present world was not yet an external world order, where the apostasy of the spiritual beings could take place, which then later dragged man along with them; one returns to a state in the pre-natural time, where the fall into sin was not yet a possibility for man.

One can and must come to these things if one wants to find a content for the sermon. For this it is not enough for you to present these concepts of the Fall, redemption, and so on, to people in a theoretical way. You will see that if you only count on formal understanding, if you count on mere doctrinal content and not on varied repetition, then you will not be able to hold the community together. If you count on varied repetition, then you can hold the community together. Then you also bring them to an understanding of grace, then you also bring them to the possibility of understanding a new sense of freedom, and you can teach people that man can come to develop, at least in his consciousness, concepts of the innocent and of non-evil [...] gap], freedom [... gap], and that through all our efforts we can indeed become good people inwardly, but that we can only find our connection to the world of the good when grace is at work, when grace comes to meet us.

I can only hint at this, because I don't have the time to discuss these things properly. But to put it briefly: there are ways, if only they are sought, to get out of the conceptual system of today's education and into a fully human system of ideas that has access to the supersensible world; and to do all this, it is absolutely necessary to allow oneself to be fertilized by anthroposophy in a certain sense. People are quite capable of understanding what you say if you find the right tone by first putting yourself in a meditative state.

In recent times, there has been too much abstract, lifeless preaching. And you see, I can say this to you for further reflection — I do not want to impose it on you like a dogma — I can only say: the worst manner of preaching is to stick to abstractions and then become unctuous. To believe that one speaks to the heart by presenting the abstract in a very inward way is poison for the heart. If one speaks of the “simple man of Nazareth”, if one tries to preach about Christ without taking the supersensible into account, if one allows everything Christian to rest, as it were, on his humanity, and wants to teach this to people by adopting an untrue sentimental tone, then one poisons the minds, because then one lives untruthfully about that which should permeate the sermon.

What should permeate the sermon through the feelings is the connection between the preacher and the supersensible content and impulse of the world itself, and the supersensible content and impulse is never given through the abstract. The preacher must be deeply imbued with the humility that the mere use of logical reason is itself a sin, and that the pursuit of science in modern times is killing the religious, that we must redeem the world from the scientific view through religion, that it belongs to the religious to overcome science, and that it is a commandment of Christ Jesus himself to overcome science, that Christ Jesus lives among us precisely for this reason, and that we express his mission to overcome science when we connect with him.

On the one hand, we must be clear about one thing: the human being must work in the world, and so he must already sin by grasping the world with his senses. We see sin as being necessary. And we see that the pendulum, because there is rhythm in the world, must swing to the other side, to the side of redemption from natural science. We will not be able to eradicate it, because we recognize the necessity for man to make the acquaintance of Ahriman, but we must realize that the pendulum must swing to the other side. But we must realize the rhythm, that only in a state of equilibrium can the two things work together. And for that, you see, I must draw your attention to something that may surprise you, but which must enter your consciousness if you want to find the necessary tone for a future sermon.

You see, we actually live today in a consciousness that is a kind of continuation of the ancient Persian world consciousness, which lived in Ahriman and Ormuzd. In Ahriman, he sees the evil god who opposes Ormuzd, and in Ormuzd he sees the good god who destroys the works of Ahriman. It is not known that the ancient Persian was aware that one must follow neither Ahriman nor Ormuzd [alone], but their interaction. And their interaction manifests itself in a figure such as Mithras. Ormuzd is a Lucifer-like figure who frees us from the world when we surrender to her, who wants to snatch us from heaviness and let us burn in the light. Man must find the way between light and heaviness, between Lucifer and Ahriman, and therefore we must have the possibility to think not in any dualism, but to think in the Trinity. We must have the possibility to say: the Persian duality of Ormuzd and Ahriman is today Lucifer and Ahriman, and the Christ stands in the middle of them, the Christ is the one who brings about the balance. Now all religious development so far, especially the theological, has set up a very pernicious equation, it has brought the Christ-figure as close as possible to the Lucifers. It is almost a resurrection of the old Persian Ormuzd when one experiences how Christ is spoken of today. One always thinks only of duality, thus of evil in contrast to good. The world problem is not solved by duality, but solely and exclusively by the Trinity. For as soon as you have duality, you not only have good and evil, but you have the battle between light and darkness, the battle that must not end with the victory of one over the other, but must end with the harmonization of the two. That is actually what must be brought into the concept of Christ. It is not for nothing that Christ sits with the tax collectors and sinners.

You see, my dear friends, the world in which we live has come about in such a way that it was originally formed by all the influences that were at work in the configuration that we experience as the echoes of race, as the echoes of the individual peoples and the like. Consider this world as it emerges from the element of birth, and consider the mission of Christ. The mission of Christ is to overcome all this naturalness, to plant the love of universal humanity in the place of racial life. That which was there at the beginning of the earth, the Adamite, is to be eradicated by Christ. The particularism of a nation, the national egoism, is to be overcome by the Christ, by the general humanity. Redemption does not consist in being in an equally real way as the natural itself, working against the natural, but in taking up the natural and bringing about a balance between the purely spiritual and the natural.

The concept of Christ has not yet been worked out in its purity between Ormuzd and Ahriman, between Lucifer and Ahriman. The concept of the Christ must be grasped as that which leads us to harmonize the opposing poles. For general humanity, human love, is something other than what arises out of families, peoples, races, nations, and so on. But the one is not to be eradicated by the other; rather, race and individual must be harmonized. The mission of Christ on earth will only be understood when it is known that the Father God is connected with the eternal alone, not with the created and the passing; the Christ impulse has come into temporality because it is connected with the created and the passing, and it makes the temporal into the eternal.

We must learn to take literally again what is written in the Gospels: Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. - Let us translate it into a language that can be spoken today. That which the expanse of space - heaven in the external spatial sense - evokes through the stars in the plants of the Earth, that which the Earth itself brings forth in the minerals, that is, the whole earthly world, will pass away. But when it has passed away, when plants and stones have passed away, then, after this earth has disappeared, that which has come to earth in the Christ will live, that which lives on in the word. And when the Christ is taken up in our word, then, after the destruction of the earth, that which is alive in us through the Christ will continue to live in time, according to the Pauline word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

We must rise to the belief that the laws of nature are not eternal, but that the earth will come to an end, and that what exists can only continue to exist because a creative force will carry it beyond when our earth has perished. Stone and plant will perish, but what is in us must not perish, it must be carried out, and that can only be done if the Christ is in us. Only the animals will come with us, and we will then have to release them. Because they are on earth because at the moment when the possibility of becoming sinful entered the world, they were at a stage of development where they had to be seized by that which was only suitable for people. Before this possibility of sin entered the world, there could be no suffering in the world. Minerals and plants do not need to suffer as such, but minerals and plants will pass away. Animals were at a stage of development when they were dragged along by people into suffering. They must be released from it again when this stage of development is over and the earth no longer exists. The laws that now rule our natural world will then rule the world of the soul, which we now only experience inwardly. We cannot comprehend this if we do not also know that man came before the earth.

We must open up access to understanding of these things to people. This must be reflected in our preaching. You do not need to believe that what I have said today you have to say to the congregation in similar words. But you must understand it, then it is already alive in your sermon, even if you preach in the simplest way. For there is not only the ponderable understanding of things, which consists in your mouth speaking and your ear listening, but there is also the imponderable understanding that works from person to person.

Unfortunately, I could only give you these few hints, my dear friends, but I hope that you will have heard many things in my words that want to come from the human being. Without this will, we will not make any progress. It is not a matter of merely stimulating our intellect; we must stimulate the whole human being.

Rudolf Steiner: So, now you come full of plans – yes, then we will begin.

Emil Bock: This afternoon we met in a commission and tried to determine what we ourselves can contribute to clarity, what we ourselves must do. And at the root of our work was the question of the extent to which we should work publicly. Now that we have achieved such clarity among ourselves, we realize that this matter cannot be reduced to a single issue, but that we simply have to consider it as a question of modus operandi, and that in each individual case, each individual must know what he is allowed to do. We now have a concrete goal in mind, and that is the course that has been promised to us. We have set ourselves the goal of bringing together at least a hundred people for this course. After the course, we will then have to take a big step into the public, and we will do that. We have even discussed the whole question of joining our loose organization and drafted a text for those who want to participate. So we have not prepared an accession for individuals, but an attachment to the request for a course. This would be the most practical way to attract people. This wording is as follows:

The undersigned, who feels the urge to work towards the awakening of a new spiritual life to overcome the present forces of decline and hopes to achieve this goal in a new synthesis of worship and Christian teaching, hereby registers for a religious teaching course under the direction of Dr. Steiner and undertakes to treat the information provided for this purpose in strict confidence.

Representative (name, address)

Rudolf Steiner: When would you like to start the course?

Emil Bock: We have planned to continue into September if possible. I have been instructed to ask for an approximate date.

Rudolf Steiner: Not true, given my Swiss circumstances, it would be desirable if it could be at the same time as the other events here, if it coincided. They are counting the days I can be away from Switzerland. It is a tricky business. It would be desirable if [the course could coincide with other events]. It will be around September. [To Ernst Uehli:] When are the [Stuttgart] events planned?

Ernst Uehli: The start is planned for the last days of August, with the events continuing into September.

Rudolf Steiner: How much time would you need? Ernst Uehli: Ten days.

Rudolf Steiner: This course should have fourteen lectures. Possibly two lectures could take place on one day.

Ernst Uehli: A different event is planned for each day.

Rudolf Steiner: But not from me. I can of course devote myself entirely to this course, with the exception of the time when it is my responsibility to give lectures [at the conference]. If no other demands are made, this can work perfectly well.

Ernst Uehli: Yes, I hope not that such demands will be made; as I said, we want to start at the end of August, if it is possible for the gentlemen to come here. Are there any events in Dornach immediately afterwards?

Rudolf Steiner: I have checked, the last day in Dornach is August 27, and a eurythmy event on the 28th will not be possible. Of course, one must also rehearse for Goethe's birthday; one cannot have a eurythmy performance without rehearsal on Goethe's birthday. So nothing will be possible on the 28th if you want to have the eurythmy event. Of course, you can start with the general matter. But it seems to me that you are a little short of time. It would be possible, since there are still two and a half months left before September 1. It would not be necessary to start earlier than September 1. Do you think you will be ready by September 1?

Emil Bock: We hope to have a hundred people by then.

Rudolf Steiner: It is to be assumed that you will need more than two and a half months if you want to get more people than you can in two and a half months.

Emil Bock: We are also considering people at the universities. Rudolf Steiner: You think that is difficult?

Emil Bock: We have certain possibilities there, of course it is just a different set of possibilities.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, if you are not able to get the matter done by September 1, then it will be problematic to start in the fall. If you only get the people after the universities have opened, then we will have to wait again, probably until the second half of October, November I think. Isn't it?

Emil Bock: Then it is better to wait, because the way of recruiting people outside the semester is usually not suitable either. Would we also be allowed to ask for a course if there are fewer of us?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, certainly, I will say this: It would of course be the most wonderful thing if we could organize this course in Dornach — if it were somehow possible — and if it were financially feasible. That would be best. Because, isn't it true, it is of course easier to give samples of cultic things and so on there. So it would be more possible to organize the course better in Dornach. Well, we managed to hold the college course last fall by trying to get members from the Entente countries to keep [participants], so that the audience from Germany were guests. Of course, that would have to be the case here too. It would then only be a matter of possibly finding a way to get the money for the trip, which for many would not be much more expensive to Basel than it is here. Well, I think the fare from Berlin to Basel would not be much more than from Berlin to Stuttgart, and the stay in Dornach would have to be organized there. But that is not a question for us to decide now; it can be decided later. I just think it would be better in many ways if we could have the thing in Dornach. You would not rule that out in principle? The difficulty, my dear friends, lies only in the fact that one could well make the proposal to members from Entente countries to support a general study course, because that is an international matter, but whether many people from the Entente countries would agree to support German theologians in particular is the question. And of course we have to say why we need the support. That is the question. I almost believe that they would do such a thing, but whether they have a heart for supporting German theologians in particular...?

Because, it may interest you to know – I didn't emphasize it particularly in my discussions – that what I told you would only apply to German theologians. The question is nowhere more pressing than in the medium-sized states. Even in Switzerland it would be quite hopeless, in France, in England even more so, everywhere actually in the Entente countries it would be quite hopeless, one would be rejected immediately; one would not understand at all that one could do such a thing.

A participant: I thought that perhaps financial help could be expected from Holland. I also know young Dutch theologians who are sympathetic to our cause. Would Holland not come into question?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, if anything can be considered, then Holland most of all. I do believe that there are a few of them among the theologians themselves, but they will not be the ones who have the money. I do not doubt that there are individuals among the Dutch theologians who can be considered; but on the whole, no one has a heart for it, while I believe that the matter can also be financed here. To raise the money for the course in Dornach would be unaffordable from here.

A participant: What about Sweden and Norway?

Rudolf Steiner: I hardly think you would meet with a favorable response there. In Sweden and Norway there is such a strong consciousness that a reform can arise out of the church itself. In Sweden I was directly offered the prospect of negotiating with this or that person. People there have the idea that they can actually reform the church, and where this idea is still very much rooted, it has a very strong effect. Here in Germany it is not very deeply rooted.

A participant: We are not officially opposing the church to begin with. The Swedes could easily assume that it is a movement that is on a neutral footing with the church.

Rudolf Steiner: But they would ask you: What do you actually want? Do you want to found free congregations or work from within the church? — As soon as you say: found free congregations - it will be very questionable. Holland is then still the most likely option. In France and England, it is not understood. In Switzerland, it is completely out of the question. But I believe that there is as much to be gained from Germany as we need here. We cannot negotiate how to do this financing yet; we can negotiate that as soon as you are in office and in office. We will certainly try that. But as I said, I have my doubts about abroad.

You have no idea how terribly conservative Switzerland is. There were almost no Swiss students present at the Easter course. And theologians are simply naive. I don't think that what happened to me just before I left can happen to you. Two theology students from Basel came to me and asked if I would like to co-lecture against Heinzelmann. I can't possibly be involved in giving a co-lecture. Well, they weren't committed in any way, they didn't care. They said I should give independent lectures as well. Then they started talking about the subject itself – and that was really very naive. One of them said, 'I recently read the speeches of Luther; if there were something like that again, we would be fine; all we need is someone to speak as Luther spoke.' Yes, there is a great deal of naivety among Swiss theologians. Don't you have colleagues there? No? Switzerland is very conservative, it will be a strong obstacle to progress in Europe.

Nevertheless, quite apart from the fact that we have the course at all, it would be a very nice idea for me to have the course in Dornach. We could also combine it with the other courses so that you could also attend other lectures. But you would have to see to it that you manage to get a few more people.

Emil Bock: Do we now have to wait until we get a hundred?

Rudolf Steiner: I have nothing against it if there are fewer. I don't think at all in this direction, as you mean. I think that everyone who can be found in two months – if it's not the university vacation period – is perhaps not eighty, but perhaps only sixty.

Then we would just do the course at the age of sixty. We would then have the course rewritten, and those who come afterwards would have to commit themselves to reading it then. You would have to include that in your commitment formula, that those who come when the course is over would read the course. That is one way of doing it. I think you misunderstood that too; I did not claim that a certain large number of people had to come to the course.

Emil Bock: We thought that we would have to get two hundred people together for that.

Rudolf Steiner: What I actually meant was that you must have such a number if you want to do something practically.

Emil Bock: There would have to be two hundred people ready for action.

Rudolf Steiner: I can hold the course under certain circumstances for those who can be reached at all in two and a half months.

Emil Bock: Would the course in Dornach then coincide with the college course?

Rudolf Steiner: No School of Spiritual Science course has yet been planned. We have a kind of course in Dornach, a series of events from August 20 to 27. These are mainly British people who come, but of course we don't want to limit it to the British. And after that we are supposed to come here [to Stuttgart]. So that would be in the first fortnight of September. That would be an opportunity to hold the course here, in the same days of September.

Emil Bock: And the second half of September would not be considered?

Rudolf Steiner: Here it would be out of the question for the reason that I must return to Switzerland. However, if it can be arranged in Dornach, then the second half of September would be very well considered. I cannot say that today. It is extremely difficult to raise the financial resources for what is needed.

Emil Bock: Perhaps Dr. Heisler's first successes can [then] be recorded.

Rudolf Steiner: Consider, if the course here cost you 10,000 marks for my sake, that is very little, then in Dornach it would cost you 100,000 marks if you had to pay, wouldn't it? Of course we can do it over there if we get 10,000 Swiss francs there. It is much easier for us to get 10,000 Swiss francs over there than it is for you to raise 100,000 marks here.

Emil Bock: But it would not be a question of paying for everything for us. Many of us could perhaps pay for the thing itself. If we could live in barracks, that would be perfectly sufficient.

Rudolf Steiner: We have accommodation. But you have to calculate 4 Swiss francs per day for each participant. That's 400 Swiss francs for 100 people. For 14 days that's 5600 Swiss francs. So it will probably take 6000 Swiss francs. 6000 Swiss francs would be 60000 German Marks here. It is quite possible that we can get it there.

A participant: As for the time, the end of September would be much more favorable; there are many on their way to the School for Spiritual Science then.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question that we cannot decide now. I think it would be easier to do it over in Dornach. It could also be done here, but then it would have to be in the first half of September because I have to go back to Switzerland; and then there would have to be a gap of six weeks before I can come back.

Emil Bock: It is very helpful if we know when to prepare for. Then we have discussed all the possibilities of bringing in people, and we have, after the previous discussions, drawn up the plan to consider pastors who are close to anthroposophy in order to bring in theologians. We would do this by sending circulars to all possible places. All the possibilities have also been discussed at universities, to enter into similar movements that have a longing to reform cults, and into certain youth movements. People have already declared themselves willing to do certain things.

Then we tried to divide the German universities among us and saw that some universities would not be reached by us, and we considered setting up a small travel organization to prepare so that a small number of us should travel to any such university town.

Then we want to exchange the experiences we have in our advertising work; the newsletter should serve this purpose.

Then we propose, at least here, to put together a brochure that will briefly explain what it is all about, especially for those who are to become collaborators. And it has been deemed practical for this brochure to contain three articles: Firstly, an orientation on the general cultural situation, under the title “Intellectualism and Religious Life”; the second article on worship and the third on the communication of religious teaching. - At least initially, we have set three assignments for each article in our circle of collaborators, so that the most valuable material from the contributions sent in can then be compiled.

Study groups should then be formed everywhere to study the transcripts of the lectures heard here. However, we have found it best to ensure that Mr. Uehli is given a signature for such transcripts, so that we use them correctly and only for ourselves, and that if the group is expanded, I should be contacted so that I can initially take personal responsibility. When the signatures have been collected, they could then be presented to Mr. Uehli. This group would also be greatly helped if we could get from Dr. Steiner the wording of the rituals already prepared, which we would also send from our headquarters to the various participants.

Then we found something valuable that does not directly aim at our cause, but indirectly, in that one should, of course, give lectures on the side to prepare the foundation and to support the advertising activity to a certain extent. These lectures should not advertise, but should create understanding for the fact that a renewal of religion is possible from anthroposophy and all sorts of suggestions were made, for example, that perhaps one of us could travel with the Haass-Berkow troupe and give lectures after the plays about the relationship between anthroposophy and religious renewal, that we could give such lectures where we are.

And then I have another request, which is perhaps a bit much to expect, along the lines of clearing up a certain general misunderstanding, namely that one works against this misunderstanding: that anthroposophy has a not so positive relationship to religious practice as we have found here. We have often found that people, particularly in anthroposophical circles and otherwise, think that anthroposophy has a rather negative relationship to religious practice, and that some people would be very surprised to learn what has been said in the main lines. We have therefore decided to ask Dr. Steiner to give a public lecture on anthroposophy and the renewal of religion in the near future if possible, so that, if it is possible, this lecture could be printed and made available to the public immediately. This would make the public aware of the positive relationship between anthroposophy and religion and prepare the ground for our work in every respect.

Rudolf Steiner: Do you think it would be particularly good if I gave this lecture? You see, the only thing to consider, of course, is how it will work best. So, if such a lecture were given and were well given by someone who is really involved in religious activity, it would undoubtedly be much better than if I gave it. I personally have no objection to giving this lecture; I would say what I have to say, but it would make a big difference if Rittelmeyer were to give such a lecture today. I would very much like to talk to him about it, and I think it would be very beneficial for the cause.

Ernst Uehli: This coincides with a thought regarding the conference. I had intended to include a lecture by Dr. Rittelmeyer in the program if possible; however, he is not well.

Rudolf Steiner: Dr. Rittelmeyer is not well, and it is hardly easy to find a replacement – at least not at the moment. It would indeed be very good if a churchman were to give the lecture.

Emil Bock: We have also discussed this and found that it would only add to the opinions already expressed. In fact, there is no unified opinion among theologians close to us, and as far as I know, there is always an antithesis between Heisler and Geyer.

Rudolf Steiner: I don't know it at all.

Emil Bock: Pastor Geyer says: Anthroposophy is not a religion at all, it is only science and can thus, like any world view, fertilize religion, while on the other hand at least one of Dr. Heisler's writings has been understood to mean that anthroposophy should replace religious practice; and in the discussions that one knows, the antithesis was always there. When Rittelmeyer comes in as a third party, people find it even more difficult to believe. We thought it should not be a lecture but a small booklet. The request for the lecture was only to tone down our presumptuous request for a booklet.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, it must be stated categorically: it is necessary in the general cultural process that the origin and source of anthroposophy lies in scientific considerations. That is the first thing, it must be stated. So that one could not claim that anthroposophy can directly take the place of religion or that anthroposophy as such is only a religious renewal. What I emphasized to you is that anthroposophy is needed for religious renewal and that a particular religious current must be sought that can use anthroposophy. This must be emphasized.

Hermann Heisler: The antithesis came about because Geyer said that if I accepted everything that Dr. Steiner said, it would have no meaning for my religious life. And I said: That is wrong, because anthroposophy is certainly not a religion, but it becomes religion when it is properly grasped, and forms religion. If the theology is right, it strives for religion; it does not matter what kind of theology I have; and it is the same with anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, with Geyer, it must be taken into account that, above all, he does not want to come into conflict with his church authorities. Geyer is not at all of the opinion that he does not expect essential religious impulses from anthroposophy for himself. On the contrary, he has received a great many religious impulses from anthroposophy and undoubtedly also impulses for his sermons. But what he says there, he has to say today, because if you don't draw this line of demarcation, you will be thrown out [of the church]. You don't really want to allow content for religious work and that's why he says he only cares about God and not about the world. But that is, forgive me, in reality just foolish - it is nothing more. God took care of the world, he just created it. I don't know how to do it - forgive the comparison - to take care of the turner without taking care of the turnery. It's just foolish, but you have to do foolish things if you don't want to be thrown out of the church.

A participant: Pastor Geyer gave a lecture and there was a very clear polemic against Pastor Heisler, and if another pastor comes forward with something like that, it will only create the impression that this is just another new opinion. — And it would depend on what is actually said.

Rudolf Steiner: Just take the tenor of how these things are said. If there is a real difficulty, then I will do it myself. But take the tenor. The tenor is the following: It is said that anthroposophy claims to found a religion. It cannot be, because no content such as that given by anthroposophy can found a religion. Gogarten, for example, says that anthroposophy wants to found a religion. In our circles, no one would be surprised if I myself were to argue that anthroposophy can bring about a renewal of religion. This does not weaken anything, but only reintroduces the whole discussion. But if Rittelmeyer delivers this lecture, quite objectively – he is basically pushed out of the church – that he is still inside is a consequence of his popularity with his large congregation – if Rittelmeyer were to do the whole thing and do it from his standpoint as a representative of the Protestant church – as such he feels – I think it might perhaps work.

One could even try something more daring. I think Rittelmeyer would be willing to collaborate if it were a brochure; he can write, after all. One could also think of combining the two, with me delivering one half and someone from the other side the other half. Maybe that wouldn't be so terrible. Now the question is whether someone other than Rittelmeyer could write. No one else [from the theological side] wrote the “life's work”?

Ernst Uehli: Apart from Geyer, no one.

Rudolf Steiner: Geyer wrote, and we don't really have a Protestant theologian other than Rittelmeyer and Geyer.

A participant: There are still some, but they are no longer in the public eye to the same extent; Schairer, for example.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, yes, he made a great story. Schairer gave a lecture full of warmth for anthroposophy, and on the same evening, when he did not quite finish his lecture, he received a rebuke. The next day was the continuation and that was against anthroposophy. That is the shining example.

Hermann Heisler: I don't have the list here, but there would be another one to consider, Pastor Klein, and then the old pastor over in the Palatinate...

Rudolf Steiner: Sauter, you mean, an old gentleman like that, he can't do it.

Hermann Heisler: Jundt in Mannheim...

Rudolf Steiner: You could do it. Don't you have the courage to come forward with it? Don't misunderstand me, I have nothing against writing such a brochure, but I believe that it would not have the same impact as if it came from someone who wants a renewal of religion, a renewal of religion from a religious point of view. “Well, he wants anthroposophy, and he wants to renew all areas of life” — that is what people will say about me. There are many such lectures on religious renewal, they just have not been printed. I have given such lectures in Berlin: ‘Bible and Wisdom,’ which contains them. I only need to renew what I have said many times about these things. I don't know, you seem to think that people believe Anthroposophy is not a religion. But neither Mr. Bruhn nor Mr. Gogarten believe that. All those who have written from the Protestant side do not start from the premise that Anthroposophy does not want to renew religion. They are fighting it precisely because they believe it wants to do so.

A participant: Rittelmeyer could do the brochure. Rudolf Steiner: He would be able to write.

Emil Bock: We were also thinking about the prejudices that exist among anthroposophical members, especially regarding religious issues.

Rudolf Steiner: Among the members?

Emil Bock: There are certain prejudices. Rudolf Steiner: Where do you see these prejudices?

Emil Bock: You never really find the right attitude towards those who are theologians.

Rudolf Steiner: That is only because the kind of theologian you describe has not yet emerged. You would not expect anthroposophists to have much different judgments about the majority of theologians than you have yourself. The anthroposophists are positioning themselves as you have positioned yourself, and that is entirely justified. We will be increasingly compelled, in order to protect anthroposophy, even more than has been the case, to seek out the lie in every field and to seek out folly in every field and to be unyielding against it.

And I can assure you that Protestant theologians indulge in as much folly as they do falsehood. An example of folly is Professor Traub, who says that I claim in my “Geheimwissenschaft” that spiritual beings move like tables and chairs. He wrote that. When he was asked for an authoritative judgment, Professor Traub wrote that I claimed that spiritual beings move in Devachan like tables and chairs in the physical world. Since he will not admit that he wrote this in a state in which tables and chairs move for him, I cannot help but assume that this is foolishness. You will find these follies at every turn. Read Gogarten and so on for logical fallacies!

And then they lie, these people; they are so terrible when it comes to dishonesty, it is quite monstrous. It is really true. Read the mischievous manner in which a Protestant church newspaper – its name is the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt – which invented this story about Bernhard of Clairvaux, takes up and exploits Rittelmeyer's response. You really have to study to see the level of dishonesty they come up with. They are capable of the following; I think I am quoting correctly: In his reply to the claim [in the Sonntagsblatt] that I appointed him as Bernhard of Clairvaux in gratitude for his book 'The Life Work of Rudolf Steiner', Dr. Rittelmeyer expressed his astonishment that someone would claim such a thing [which is untrue] in the Sonntagsblatt. Now it says [in the paper] that Rittelmeyer was astonished that I had named him as Bernard of Clairvaux. No, they twist it so that he would have been amazed that I did that. That's how cunningly dishonest people are. It's so cunning what people do, and you can't be expected to appreciate these things because modern theology is so unclear that it is perceived as untrue. It's not a matter of somehow being hostile to religion as such. There are some people among us who do some things, but at least that is not really the point. It has just been made impossible for us to continue to cultivate the cult-like through various events. Before the war, it was cultivated to a certain extent. In Seiling's brochure, which is also completely dishonest, you can even find it mentioned. We have already done things there, we can even talk about our experiences there, it is already like that.

In anthroposophical circles, since I have been active, perhaps a maximum of eight to ten people have left the church. That is very few. We have 8,000 members today – not followers – so eight or ten people are of course very few; those who have left the church are limited to that number. They have left for various reasons. Recently someone wrote again asking if I could advise them to leave the church. I do not advise anyone to leave the church, not even Catholics. I advise Catholics not to leave because, according to the current church constitution, they have no right to leave. Taken quite seriously. The Catholic has no right to leave the church because the infallibility dogma has made such a decision ex cathedra that the Catholic cannot leave the church; he is simply still in it, even if he himself declares that he is leaving. Since the dogma of infallibility was established, such things have been possible. It may seem a strange theory, but it is absolutely correct in the sense of Catholicism. As a Catholic, you cannot leave the church.

Hermann Heisler: Isn't a Catholic automatically excluded if he does not follow the commandment of Easter confession?

Rudolf Steiner: This is nowhere written, and it has never been asserted.

Hermann Heisler: I have been told this by Catholics. Catholics say that this is taught in class.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, it is possible that it is taught. But you know, many things are taught and said. I recall an exchange between a secular priest and a Jesuit priest. The Jesuit said: “Under no circumstances should a Catholic priest read newspapers, because they are godless today.” The secular priest, who is freer in his views, said: “Yes, but how are we supposed to preach? We have to know something about the world when we preach, and we can only do that if we read newspapers; and you also preach about all matters.” — “I don't read the newspaper.” — “Yes, but you know what's going on in the world.” — “I don't read the newspaper.” — “Yes, but how do you do it then?” “I have them read to me.” The Jesuit strictly observes the commandment. ”But, Doctor Heisler, you see, I don't know how one is excommunicated. Suppose a Catholic has not attended church for years. If I went to confession tomorrow, do you think I would be turned away? I don't know how it would show that one is excluded.

Well, the strangest thing happened with the philosopher Brentano. Not only did he resign – he was a priest, an ordained priest – but he not only resigned, he converted to Protestantism and got married. But the Catholic Church declared that he could not be appointed to a professorship at the university because he was still a priest. He was not considered a Catholic, he was even excommunicated and converted to Protestantism, but he was not admitted to the Vienna professorship he had previously held. Brentano had been appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1873. Then he wanted to marry; he could not do so because Austrian law prohibited the marriage of priests and an Austrian citizen who is a priest is therefore not allowed to marry. Brentano became a Saxon citizen, a Protestant, and married a Jewish woman. So he had to give up his professorship. He was promised that he would be reappointed later. This was not done because the church protested. They declared: He is a Protestant, but the consequence of the [Catholic] ordination is not taken away from him, and a priest who behaves in such a way may not become a professor in Austria. - Then the minister Conrad took heart, went to Emperor Franz Joseph and wanted to push it through in this way. The emperor looked at the story and said: “Yes, that's the devil's work, is the Jewess at least clean?” — “Clean,” that is, pretty. She was neither, and Conrad could not truthfully say that she was “clean.” “Then it will come to nothing,” said the Emperor. —

So, if you think I should write such a brochure – there is nothing to stop me from doing it, but it might be good if something were also written from another quarter.

Emil Bock: Rittelmeyer has now written precisely about anthroposophy and religious renewal, but I don't know if that is decisive, since Rittelmeyer does not know what we have heard here.

Rudolf Steiner: But tell me, do you not believe that it is not necessary for it to be a renowned practitioner of religion? Don't you think that something like that could be written by someone in your circle, by a younger person? Something that works purely through its inner goodness and solidity? That someone who is aiming for religious renewal does it themselves, and not someone who is known for writing from an anthroposophical point of view? Even if someone does it who doesn't want to become a priest at all, it would work. I don't know why a younger man couldn't do it. It just has to be done well. Think about the question. Well, I will never refuse to do it; I would do it.

Emil Bock: I have concluded my report by saying that a central office should be set up in Berlin so that, from Berlin, at least for the time being, the valuable work could be done, and that, if possible, we should be allowed to remain in constant contact with Dr. Steiner.

Rudolf Steiner: That will work very well.

Emil Bock: Then we have something that touches on Mr. Heisler's area. We have been working on the advertising flyer for the funds, but have not yet come to a clear conclusion. Now I would ask Mr. Heisler to present the report on the financial plans.

Hermann Heisler: We were clear about the fact that one must begin in a very planned way, and in such a way that one starts at a place where one has acquaintances, that one goes there. The acquaintances will be won from the circles of anthroposophists. It is not good to officially address the branches, but to seek out some people from the anthroposophists who appear suitable and to have these people provide addresses, and then to visit these addresses in order to obtain funds. We are convinced that our members would subscribe in the greatest number, but it would be better to turn to others first. The members are assured of us, we do not need to work on them now. The person concerned should now bring together the people he has collected into a committee of trusted people, who will then receive the instructions and continue the work.

Rudolf Steiner: I would certainly advise not to make the matter official through the branches, but to do it personally and to take great care to ensure that the members deign to give further addresses in non-member circles. I would certainly advise that. You will also find that, especially for this aspect of the matter, you will find a great many people who do not want to officially join as members but who have a great deal of interest in doing something in this direction. Unfortunately, it is a little too late for a very fruitful gathering. Of course, that will not prevent you from achieving a great deal nevertheless. It is quite remarkable how strongly the desire was everywhere two years ago, two and a half years ago, in Germany to give the money that people had available for such things. A large number of wealthy people had said to themselves at the time: We absolutely do not want to have the money taken from us by the state. The Keyserling matter lives only on such funds and there were many such people at the time.

Hermann Heisler: Is this aspect not still important now?

Rudolf Steiner: It is no longer as good as it was two years ago, but it is still available.

Hermann Heisler: The merchants have a lot of money in the drawer. It is the purest art for the business people now to get rid of the money, and they may give the money away quite easily.

Rudolf Steiner: The tax situation at that time was not yet like that, now the stupid tax story comes into it. I have no doubt that something can be obtained for this purpose. It is one thing to obtain funds for the “Coming Day”. But for such a cause one is more likely to obtain funds.

Hermann Heisler: I have also considered Austria. I have a plan to start in Baden first. I would go to Freiburg first – I have a specific thing in mind there – and then I would like to go down the Rhine to Cologne. I think it would take a good month. If it is to be fruitful, it has to happen quickly. And I had the further plan that some of our friends could help. The matter is urgent and I cannot possibly do everything alone. If the course is to be held at the beginning of September, I hardly have a month, because August will be very bad; this time is very inconvenient, September and October are better, I expect little from August. Therefore, I thought, if time is pressing, to ask Mr. Meyer to take over Hanover, then the gentlemen in Berlin would work for themselves. If I have enough time, which I doubt, then I will briefly visit the southern German cities; otherwise it would have to be done later. And then it would turn out that you would have a break in August. Then I would consider a trip to Saxony, perhaps also to Lake Constance, to Constance. There is no point in making further plans, because the rest must only arise from practical experience. Would the doctor like to say something about this?

Rudolf Steiner: I will think about it while I am here, we can talk about it later.

Hermann Heisler: I thought that we would not approach the branches officially, but we could knock on the doors of members of the branch.

Rudolf Steiner: Certainly, but only with the personalities, not officially; you won't get much by approaching the branches. They collect and then people give one mark each. That's how it is with collections. But if you approach individuals, you can achieve more.

Hermann Heisler: I always wanted to approach the board members and ask them to call together suitable people. Now, the question was what to do with the money initially. I was of the opinion that a postal cheque account should be opened in my name, and we would then invest the money in “Der Kommende Tag”, where we hope to get very high interest. Then there is a certain lack of clarity about the favor that “Der Kommende Tag” wants to do us. In addition to my salary, there would be travel expenses for the gentlemen who help us, such as Mr. Meyer and so on, then postage and the like, and for printed matter and everything that is needed. Then there is also the course for theologians. We hope that the “Kommende Tag” will support us for the first three months.

Rudolf Steiner: I have only engaged the “Kommende Tag” for the first three months; after that you would have to cover it from your income. I thought that the “Kommende Tag” would create the bridge, but that it would later get back what are travel expenses. You have to work much more thoroughly with the “Kommende Tag”. I had to be satisfied that I found out.

Hermann Heisler: I hope so.

Rudolf Steiner: He who says A sometimes also says B, if it is started right.

Hermann Heisler: Then we thought that this would be just the first step in having people everywhere we could turn to. Then we would take up a circular letter and the obvious follow-up work. When all this work is done, the course would be the next step. After the course, the main thing is the conceptual work.

Rudolf Steiner: The spiritual activity would have to begin as soon as one takes office or founds communities, if it is not to be detrimental. It must be approached practically, not just advocated theoretically.

Hermann Heisler: It might also be good to allow the religious element to flow into the lectures.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, I am of the opinion that it will succeed if all the young theologians who are now coming together in this loose association work directly towards entering into office and into practical religious activity. To propagandize the idea, to work for the idea in an agitating way – I don't know whether that will actually be of any real use. I rather think that it will weaken the momentum.

Emil Bock: We have not yet come to a decision about whether we should organize a cult or prepare for it by working.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, at the moment when you can think of founding communities, of starting your real pastoral work, at that moment you have to start to carry the real pastoral care with the cult.

A participant: Perhaps some are already so old that they could prepare themselves. In any case, very many are not yet; they should then follow behind them.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, but you are mostly younger theologians. Especially here are those who do not have much longer to go into office. I don't know if you should aim to wait until you have finished your studies. You can found free churches quite well when you have only three semesters behind you; if you just try to really get into the things. The course will help you to delve deeper into the subject. You must believe that you are doing a better job of pastoral care than the others, who have eight semesters under their belts, even now. Otherwise you will lack the necessary drive if you don't believe it. You can't get involved in that.

A participant: There is a danger that the academic degree will not be achieved.

Rudolf Steiner: But in other fields, too, many have done it in such a way that they were enrolled somewhere and then did a doctorate, for example, as an academic degree later on. That would be possible there.

A participant: We might not be allowed to do it.

Rudolf Steiner: That is the question. Of course it is necessary to achieve this academic degree, because otherwise the prejudice would arise that the failed existences do something like that; that should not be. If you educate yourself for a while and then graduate after a few years, it can still be done. People have done it that way, they stayed enrolled and then, right, did their rigorosum.

A participant: If it is enough to be a Scelsorger, then it doesn't have that much significance.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, do you think it is difficult to do a doctorate?

A participant: It takes six semesters.

Rudolf Steiner: Somehow it has always worked out. For example, about twenty years ago, Mr. Posadzy came to me and said: I want to do my doctorate in philosophy, could you not look through my dissertation? I want to write about Herder. —- And he did a good dissertation. He only made the big mistake of quoting my “Christianity as Mystical Fact”. And then he was told: No, if you quote Steiner, we will not accept the dissertation. — He did not want to cross it out, so he came to me again and I told him to go to Gideon Spicker, and that is where he received his doctorate cum laude. You can do it somewhere. Of course you can't do it with Gideon Spicker in Münster, he's no longer alive. In the past, you could also do it with the person who followed Spicker, who was actually a windbag, but he's not the worst; his name is Braun.

Ernst Uehli: Who wrote about Schelling?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes. There is also a colleague of yours who wants to do his doctorate in Basel, Altemüller, who also belongs to you.

Hermann Heisler: Lauer, Doldinger...

Rudolf Steiner: They are theologians. I am convinced that there are other students (to Gottfried Husemann) who are taking the opposite path. They have gone to chemistry? If there is a movement now, there will be philosophers who will turn to religious practice. Is Frau Plincke not also interested? There are undoubtedly many who will come to theology.

A participant: I would like to ask how one can get the lectures on “Bible and Wisdom”.

Rudolf Steiner: I'll see when I come to Berlin. There were still copies available. Dr. Steiner will know. I'll see if any are still available.

A participant: Perhaps there is some other literature?

Rudolf Steiner: I will have the lectures looked up. I have already spoken many times about the relationship to religion. It is so very difficult to deal with people, especially in the face of so much literature by theologians. If you refute something, they twist it a little differently; you never get done with people. It is much easier to write something than to talk to people about it. These people cannot actually be truthful in their minds. This leads them to tell untruths in other things as well. They find it quite appropriate to tell untruths. For example, in this article, where he has done the other thing I mentioned, Traub is so brazen as to write that he cannot remember the cultural appeal, nor has he read it carefully, but he can only say that he has rarely encountered anything so bombastic. — That is in this essay, which he should write as an authority; there are lots of things like that in it. It says this nice thing: Anthroposophy calls itself a secret science; but what is secret is not a science. And he calls that a self-contained contradiction. — Above all, the “secret science” is not secret, and even if it is, that does not prevent it from being a science, because “secret” and “science” are two different things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But this literature is full of such things, it is terrible literature. One of our members has taken the trouble to compile the objective untruths in Frohnmeyer's brochure; I believe there are 183. - Then tomorrow at 8 o'clock.

My dear friends! I would like to start by adding a few things to what we have discussed. It will certainly be possible for later discussions to present something concrete in terms of both the teaching material and the cult. Today I should like to put before you a few thoughts on the way in which one can find the inner path that binds the teaching together with the cultic, and then the path that leads to our present-day, quite un-cultic thinking science. The things that are at issue need only be understood correctly, but today's consciousness is very far removed from this understanding. I will give you an example, and from this example you will see that today there is an abstract juxtaposition between the material world — which man perceives through his senses and then combines through his intellect into its individual phenomena and entities in order to arrive at so-called natural and historical laws — and what is called the spiritual.

We must always bear in mind that in the development of the Western world, an external clouding has occurred – it was necessary in another respect in the historical development of civilization – a clouding in relation to the relationship between the physical body on the one hand and the spiritual soul on the other, that at the well-known Eighth General Ecumenical Council in the year 869 it was dogmatically established that the trichotomy, which until then had also been valid within Christianity, was replaced by the duality that man consists of body and soul. The dogma was formulated at that time as follows: “The Christian has to believe that man consists only of body and soul and that the soul has some spiritual properties.” So, a dualism was set in place of the trichotomy, and some spiritual properties were attributed to the soul. Present-day philosophy, which claims to be an unprejudiced science and to draw only from experience, does not question that which has come down as a dogmatic definition from the year 869, and speaks only of body and soul, and does not know that in so doing it is merely conforming to the Council's decision. The Council's effect has penetrated even into secular philosophy. This is something that one must know if one wants to look at the fact that the actual Trinity in man was veiled in the 9th century and that since that time difficulties have arisen in the world view in general.

Now, this in particular has brought about the state of affairs that has gradually separated the physical body from the spiritual, that allows people to look at the physical body as if it were completely devoid of spirit and actually speaks of the soul and spiritual as if it were something completely abstract. Just try to realize today what people imagine when the three aspects of the Trinity, namely the soul forces, are presented to them: thinking, feeling, willing. Take today's textbooks on psychology and see the nonsense that is written when ideas of thinking, feeling and willing are presented. And take a look at what has been achieved in this regard by the – as it has rightly been said – “philosopher by the grace of his publisher”, Wilhelm Wundt, who, although he started from a psychology of the will, never revealed any insight into the essence of the will.

It is absolutely true that anyone who is truly able to study the soul sees a division into thinking, feeling and willing in the way it is present when one differentiates between young, mature and elderly people. The three terms refer to three different states of the one spiritual being.

That which exists in thinking or imagining is, as it exists, a legacy from our pre-existent life, our life before conception. That which we can think mentally can be described as the hoary, as that which has become old, which needed the time between death and a new birth, in which the present earth life began, for its development. The oldest of our spirit is thinking. Feeling is the middle one, and the will differs from thinking in that it is only the spirit of childhood. And when we take the human being spiritually, when we describe the human being in terms of soul, then we have to say that he brings with him the old age, which simply involves itself. He gradually develops into the middle, into feeling, and he develops the will, which only becomes so strong at the end of life that it can lead to the dissolution of the body. For it is essentially the will that ultimately, when it has become fully powerful, brings about the dissolution of the body. The will is also the part of man that continually strives for dissolution, that breaks down, which, spiritually, is nothing other than a youthful form of thinking that, as we physically age, prepares to develop further. It can develop further when man goes out of physical existence, between death and a new birth.

In this way, one gradually comes to an interlocking of the soul and the body. The same can be done with the spiritual, so that one comes to an interlocking of the spiritual, the soul and the body. The one who studies things knows that at the moment of waking up, when we wake up from sleep, the spirit is most active in penetrating the body; there the spirit manifests itself, reveals itself most on the outside, because it penetrates the body. In this way man shows the strongest spiritual activity in relation to the physical, the strongest overcoming of the physical when waking up. He shows the strongest flight from physical influence when falling asleep. And no one comprehends human nature who does not take this activity of the spiritual into account.

What must be striven for is that the spiritual, the soul, and the physical are again seen to permeate each other. One should see the spiritual, the soul, and the physical interacting with each other, and not matter without seeing the spirit in it and the spirit without matter. One should see the creative, that which brings forth, that which matter forms out of itself. One should actually see the unified effect of spirit and matter everywhere. When we look at our pre-existent life, at our life before conception, our spiritual self is active in the universe. And anthroposophy teaches that the phenomena that are out there in nature should gradually be interpreted in such a way that they are at the same time revelations of human existence as it is beyond earthly, physical existence.

I am telling you all this only to draw your attention to a phenomenon that you can observe everywhere today, where the Church's dogmatic side is trying to fight anthroposophy, as it is said, “scientifically”.

You see, when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, in the Near East, in Greece, down to the north of Africa and as far as Italy, there was an interaction of matter and spirit everywhere in what was then called science - mathesis. A separate matter was not known; Everywhere you saw spiritual work, which has learned Augustine and no longer understood, and his great struggle we understand only by the fact that we learn to know that Augustine has passed through the decadent Manichaeism. This view, of which Augustine understood nothing more, that which was present at that time in the Near East, in the north of Africa, in Greece, Italy, Sicily, and even further afield, is what was later usually referred to as Gnosticism.

Anthroposophy does not want to be a renewal of what is called gnosis. Gnosis is the last phase of the old atavistic science, while anthroposophy represents the first phase of a fully conscious science. It is a slander to lump the two together. Having said that, I may say that it was Gnosticism that first tried to understand the mystery of Golgotha. And it was a profound spiritual science - albeit of an instinctive, atavistic kind - that tried to understand the mystery of Golgotha in those days. This Gnosticism, which was widespread in those days, was then completely eradicated. It was so completely eradicated that little remains in a positive sense, only a few writings, and they say little about it. The form of Christianity that gradually became completely Roman, which imbued Christianity with Roman state concepts, ensured that everything that was present in the first conception of spiritualized Christianity in Gnosticism was eradicated root and branch. And when theologians speak of Gnosticism today, they only know of it from its opponents. Harnack and others expressed their doubts about what Hilgenfeld and other opponents of Gnosticism bring.

Imagine that all existing anthroposophical literature were to be destroyed, root and branch; then only the writings of [General] von Gleich and so forth and the writings of [opposing] theologians would be available to posterity. If posterity were to reconstruct the matter from the quotations of these people, then they would have the same of anthroposophy as theologians today have of Gnosticism. You must be absolutely clear about the falsehoods that theologians have spread throughout the world. And just as thoroughly false is what is happening today. The hypocrisy is not seen because people constantly tell themselves that the holy people could not do such a thing, that such a thing simply does not exist. But it is there, even though people believe that it cannot be there. They do not even imagine that such immorality can exist.

Only then will you muster the necessary enthusiasm to muster the moral indignation at what is present in this historical research. But what has happened in the development of the world is that the understanding of the interweaving and interworking of spirit and matter has been completely lost, and as a result, much of what existed has become nothing more than an external, quite abstract understanding of words.

Today, my dear friends, the form of the Lord's Prayer as found in the Gospel of Matthew is taught in the communities. One concludes: “... and deliver us from evil; for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever. Amen.” — No one who teaches about the Lord's Prayer [in today's theology] understands this final sentence of the Lord's Prayer. Through the treatment of Gnosticism, of spiritualized Christianity [by theologians], debris has been thrown over the understanding of this last sentence. What does it mean?

In the mysteries from which it was taken, this conclusion was linked to a certain symbol, to a transition of the whole meaning into the symbolic view. One said thus: If one sets up the symbol for the “kingdom,” then it is this (see plate 3). The limitation, that is the symbol for the kingdom. That which is the kingdom encompasses a definite area. But it makes sense to speak of the “kingdom” only if one represents this area in its limitation, if one represents that to which the kingdom, the area, extends.

But such a “realm” has meaning only if it is permeated with power, if it is not only a limited area, but if this area is radiated through by power. Power must be at the center and the realm must be radiated through by power. So that you have a spreading in the area of the “realm”. The power that radiates from the center, that is the “might”. The radiating power that rules the realm is the “power”. — But all this would take place within. If only this were present, then this “realm” with the “power” within it would be self-contained and would only exist for itself. It is only there for other things in the world, for other beings, when that which radiates out from within penetrates to the surface and from there radiates out into the surroundings, so that that which radiates out into the world is a splendor to be found on the surface, a “glory”. The radiance from within is the “power”, the power stuck on the surface and shining outwards from there, that is the “glory”. If you look at the structure that leads to Mathesis, to a vivid presentation of what can be conceived in the ideas of realm, power, glory, then you have this transition to Mathesis, to a vivid presentation. Then one seeks that which one has had spiritually and soulfully in the contemplation, also outwardly in the real reality. You look at what you had grasped mathematically; you seek that in the external world and find it in the sun, for that is the image. And instead of concluding with the words of the Protestant Lord's Prayer: “... for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory”, you can also conclude the Lord's Prayer: “... for Thine is the sun”.

Every being was seen in terms of the Trinity; and anyone who still has some knowledge of the real Gnostic understanding knows that the Lord's Prayer was simply prayed at the end, so that the members of the Solar Trinity were put forward in words, and that one was conscious that by saying the Lord's Prayer one had actually expressed, by concluding the Lord's Prayer, having presented the seven petitions, and having referred to oneself: «deliver us from evil», because Thou who dwellest in the sun art the One who can do it. There was an awareness everywhere that nature outside is not unspiritual, that nature everywhere is spiritualized, and the means to really make this spiritualization present was found by having the Trinity working everywhere.

Look at the objective facts and read all the accusations that are made – even if they are untrue – when people want to prove that anthroposophy is a renewal of gnosticism. Everywhere efforts are being made to blacken Gnosticism and then to say: Those who are Gnostics today are leading humanity back into the fog. What is the aim of theology? To distract people's minds from what existed before the Council of Constantinople, which was particularly strong before the Emperor Justinian closed the last Greek schools of philosophy in the 6th century, so that the last philosophers under the leadership of Damaskios and Simplikios fled with five others to Asia and found a place of refuge in Gondhishapur, where the people worked whose work had also been completely wiped out.

It is absolutely necessary that today we overcome the antagonism that exists between a merely abstract science of words, which is fully recognized as a science today, and the contemplation of the real as something spiritualized. We must come back to this contemplation of the real as something spiritualized. Without this contemplation, a foundation of religion, a foundation of religious work, is absolutely impossible.

And if you want to speak in cultic terms, then you must also gradually advance in your understanding of the external. You must be able to see in the sun that which is the objectification of that which is power, empire and glory. In many cases, you have to understand what is expressed in this way throughout the entire Gospel only in the sense that it is expressed in a language in which the word consciously flows into the forms, into what is created out of the spirit into the world. You will only really understand the Gospel if you can imbue yourself with this awareness.

Now, if we consider this, we will see how far removed from true reality present-day science is, despite believing itself to be completely realistic. Because, you see, after people had thrown debris at the understanding of reality – at such conceptions as that the sun is contained in the final words of the Lord's Prayer – and after they had managed to that today anyone who associates the concept of the sun with the concept of Christ is denounced as an un-Christian, the time came when people no longer understood how what the human soul experiences relates to reality.

You see, in the time when in the 9th century AD certain remnants of earlier knowledge were still preserved by a figure like Scotus Eriugena, in that time, when Eriugena still knew how to find a harmony between what the soul experiences and what is outside in the physical-sensual world, — in this time then [little by little] arose the other [ways of looking at things], in which man made himself concepts of facts and began to brood over whether his concepts have anything at all to do with reality. Then came the time of the scholastics, of Albertus Magnus, of Thomas Aquinas, who still sensed something of the old consciousness in its last echo, that concepts and ideas only have a meaning if they can be found outside in the world as reality; in them lived the realism of [early] scholasticism. But the others, who had lost the awareness of the harmony of ideas with reality, who were the forerunners of today's theology, who considered it heretical to speak of the harmony of the sun with empire, power and glory, they developed nominalism. The great controversy between nominalism and realism arose from the council decision of the year 869, which cast a veil over the view [that man consists of body, soul and spirit]. And today we have come so far that on the one hand we see a polemic unfold when it is pointed out that in the Lord's Prayer, when it says, “Thy is the kingdom, the power and the glory in aeons, Amen,” the Christ is actually meant inwardly in a spiritual-soul sense, and outwardly that which corresponds to him in the surrounding world is meant: the sun. What is meant, when the Trinity – the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory – are summarized outwardly: “... for Thine is the Sun”, if one wants to look at the inner, spiritual-soul, and – addressing the Father, the One subsisting in the world –: “for Thine is the Son, Christ-Jesus, He is with Thee”.

The Protestant Church has reached a state of complete unconsciousness regarding these matters; it knows nothing of these things and does not even know why it knows nothing, because it does not educate itself about the nature of such things. The Catholic Church, which has preserved the tradition, knows a great deal about it, and especially in the bosom of Jesuitism, a great deal is known about these things. But the following religious policy is observed: It is said that if people again come to the conclusion that the spirit also rules alongside body and soul, then they are not far from the path to the supernatural. We must prevent people from knowing anything about the spirit.

Therefore you see that especially in Jesuitism, where an excellent scientific ability is cultivated, a scientific policy is adhered to in the following way. They say to themselves, today the world demands science, it demands it in the sense in which it has been called science since the time of Galileo and Copernicus. The Catholic Church resisted this science until 1829; only then were Catholics allowed ex cathedra to believe in the revolution of the earth around the sun. But since then, a different policy has been pursued, the policy of carrying the Galilean-Copernican natural science into the most extreme materialism. Therefore, you will find everywhere in the literature inspired by the Jesuits that science should only deal with what can be perceived by the senses. Science should stop at what is spatial-temporal, and science cannot move up to what goes beyond the spatial-temporal. Thereby they want to keep humanity from having any science except one that deals with the spatial-temporal, and relegate the rest to the realm of faith, encompassing with faith whatever the infallible Pope prescribes to be believed, or rather, the college advising him. A strict separation between what should be the subject of science and what should be believed is carried to the most extreme degree by Jesuitism. The Jesuits excel in the field where there is materialistic science; indeed, no one has taken materialism as far as the Jesuit science, which trains its pupils to become particularly clever researchers in the field of materialistic science, so that they shine and excel in this field in order to make all the more of an impression when they say: science must never go beyond what Christ handed over to the Roman See as its right to be the representative of spiritual teaching, or, as it is expressed dogmatically: the Christian must see in the head of the Church the holder of the divine teaching office. Now, this is intended more and more to anchor science in the outwardly material and to prevent a spiritualization of science.

You see, my dear friends, there was a Strauß, a Renan, a Büchner, a Bölsche; there was a Haeckel who was not a materialist at heart and can only appear to be one because of the abundance of his writings. There have been many materialists, but they were mere children compared to what has been achieved in the way of introducing materialism in the way I have just explained to you. The real creators of materialism in the scientific field were the theologians of the last four centuries. And it was always very difficult in the church to defend itself against this encroaching scientific materialism.

Just think how little was understood by someone like Oetinger, who coined the phrase: “All material phenomena are the final phenomena of the spirit” — by which he wanted to express that what is outwardly present in creation originally comes from the spirit, that the spirit, in creating, comes to an end, comes to its utmost expression and thereby creates material phenomena. This beautiful presentation, you will only find it mixed with nebulous mysticism, but such erratic blocks of a spiritualized world view still protrude, and when you read people like Oetinger, you have to realize that you cannot accept the whole, but you must be inspired by much of what you find in it. You must see the concepts that appear like flashes of lightning from a spiritualized worldview.

That is what I wanted to tell you, to characterize the relationship between the development of theology and science. Just as the universities emerged from the founding of theological schools, so what our science is today, even if it appears secular, is still the result of the developmental path of theology. And it must be firmly held that people like Strauß, Büchner and so on are mere orphans in the substantiation of materialism compared to what has been achieved by theologians.

On the other hand, another element has worked its way into the scientific movement of modern times, and that is what has come over from the Orient.

And through the confluence of what has survived as feeling Christianity, as mind Christianity, as true Christianity, with theological Christianity, from the confluence of mind Christianity with the power that came from the peoples of the migration of peoples, migration, the one wave of Christianity continues; it does not deliver the outer world-science as the other wave did, which came into being through the bringing of Aristotelian knowledge by the Arabs to Spain and from there took such a great influence on Spinoza. In this was contained that which influenced the newer natural science for centuries. The newer natural science has from the very beginning proceeded from a kind of protest... [Gap in the transcript], who is always in danger of losing God. It can only lose God, never hold on to him, and the new godless science emerged, which, however, is a true science with regard to nature, only just cannot go beyond certain limits as such, but at the same time it has significantly advanced the education of man to freedom. Today we have arrived at the point where, out of this science, spiritualization itself must be sought again, where science must be led up from a merely anthropological [science], from a kind of knowledge that knows nothing of man except the physical, that has only empty words about the soul and knows nothing at all about the spirit, that the path must be made up from such an anthropological science to an anthroposophical science, through which the material in its interpenetration with the spiritual is recognized, especially in man.

And in this way the moment can be brought about in which science and religious life meet, but in no other way than by finding the spirit in all material things, by overcoming the view that there is materiality somewhere without it also leading to the spirit. When you imbibe this consciousness, when it gains such strength in you that you speak out of this consciousness when you preach, then you will find the possibility, especially in your field of work, to seek access to the hearts of men, not only to the intellect. You will gradually have to find the way to people's hearts, even if it does not appear so at first, by speaking out of the strength that comes to you when you raise your consciousness to the point of seeing through the spiritualization of all matter. For without coming to this awareness of the spiritualization of all matter, you will not come to a real living conception of God.

But if you want to speak in the sense in which you have set out, then what you say must be an outward expression of what is meant at the beginning of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word...” because it is indicated, by pointing to the word, to the Logos, that this Logos existed before matter came into being and that matter emerged from the Logos. You must combine this realization with the other, that it is possible for you, by speaking, to let resound out of your words that which you yourself experience in your mind, in your soul, when you sense the divine within through spiritual knowledge and prepare yourself in God-sensing meditation for your preaching office. In this preparation for speaking, not only in the abstract preparation with regard to the content of the teaching material, but also in the meditative familiarization with each individual sermon, the strength must arise for you through which you can achieve the formation of a community.

That is what I wanted to recommend to you today, and I ask you to take it more as a feeling than as a thought. I hope that when we meet again, we will be allowed to continue these reflections.

Perhaps there was a desire yesterday to tie one thing or another to the debate.

Emil Bock: Yesterday evening I thought that we would be able to present the text of the flyer today. But I don't know if it can remain in this form.

Rudolf Steiner: We will remain in contact in any case, and if you are also leaving today, you will let me know if I should give you advice so that I can give it then. But do you have an idea of what this advertising leaflet will essentially contain?

Emil Bock: As far as we have thought about it, we simply want to take the line of thought that we start from the need of religious life in the face of intellectualism, that we then point to the necessity of a new worldview in which religion is possible, to the necessity of coming to a religious renewal precisely through the renewal of worldview. We will then point out how this is conceived, by reviving the pictorial and so on, and we could then say a word about the fact that it is a particular renewal of Christianity. But we also want to say that we have a project in mind that is specifically related to the work of the church, and then a transition should be made to an appeal for generosity. We can only do this if the free spiritual life is given the opportunity. Spiritual life must be liberated through an act, that is, through a donation. In this way, spiritual life is to be liberated at one point, initially in the religious sphere. That was the train of thought that, as far as I could see, was agreed upon for the time being. However, we were not yet sure whether we had hit the right note.

Rudolf Steiner: It is a collection of thoughts that are certainly the right ones. I just want to point out the following so that you find the right tenor: Everything that comes from anthroposophy in such matters today is firmly grounded in reality and always aims not to leave the ground of reality. The threefolding movement began in the spring of 1919, at a time when a mood of expectation was particularly widespread among large sections of the population in Central Europe. This mood of expectation was, however, present in different ways, but it was there, I would simply put it this way, that a large number of people believed that we had been thrown into chaos and that we had to move forward by reasonably harmonizing the social forces. This mood was widespread when I started working for the threefold order in April 1919.

Now, in those days, the form I gave to my lectures on threefolding very often led me to conclude that what was meant should very soon be put into practice, because it could very soon be too late. You can find this formula “It could very soon be too late” very often in the lectures written down at the time.

The economists are so mired and corrupted in their views that there can be no question of understanding the threefold order; they can never be moved to do so. It is terribly obvious how little the threefold order has been understood in this area. I will give you an example: here in this place, when a threefold order meeting was held at the beginning, a very well-known chairman of a well-known party stood before me — we had brought together a large committee and he was among them at the time — and said to me: “The thing about the threefold order, would be quite nice if we could have it, but for the time being nobody understands it, and you can only understand it if you talk to people' — I am not saying this out of immodesty, but only to illustrate something with this example —, 'and it must not be built on two eyes. We know, of course, that in 15 to 20 years the last remnants of what we have there will come to a decline. Today we could still stop that if we were to carry out the threefold social order. But nobody knows about it, and so we would rather apply the old ideas for these 15 to 20 years than your threefold social order."

This is an example of the understanding that politics has shown for the matter. It is to be hoped that for the time being it will still be possible to gather the last remnants of spiritual impulses in order to attempt this liberation of spiritual life in the religious sphere, in the sphere of art and in the scientific sphere. These are, after all, the three sub-forms; each of the three limbs has three sub-areas. The spiritual area has religion, science and art as sub-areas. If we succeed in achieving the liberation of spiritual life in these areas, then, perhaps sooner than we think, people will find their way to the model of equality in political life and fraternity in economic life from the example of a free and liberated spiritual life. The next step, then, is to work with all our might to achieve the independence of the one limb. For the time being, one thing is important for you: to work for the liberation of the religious sphere; that is what you must do. One should not use the word threefold social order in the abstract, but must use it in the concrete form, by placing the greatest emphasis on the independence of the one sphere that has been particularly ruined by the mendacity. It would be an illusion not to see how frantically we are heading for decline. If you look at the facts, you cannot really imagine that things can go on like this for long. The interest on the debts of the German Reich is 85 billion in the last year 1920/21 - the interest, not the debt. It is pointed out that the tax burden on the inhabitants of Central Europe must be increased threefold. How do you expect to cope? Today there are people who pay 60% tax on their income; if they then have to pay three times as much, they will have to pay 180%, and I ask you to consider how one is to pay 180% tax and what the reality logic is among people who talk about public affairs. We are sliding into the most terrible chaos. Today, it is still the case that one must say that things are still being presented in a distorted way.

Some time ago I gave a lecture to a group of industrialists and pointed out the true fact that the cities are on the verge of bankruptcy with their budgets; they have held out because of a correction on the part of the savings banks, but you can only go so far with such a correction until the coffers are empty. You can still keep a skirt if you don't have the means to buy a new one; then you just keep wearing the old clothes – just as you are now continuing the old economic practices – but one of these days they will just fall off. It is only a delusion when people feel comfortable and talk about progress. We are definitely in a state of decline.

If it is possible to save spiritual life, then civilization is also saved. But it is necessary to be aware of the changing times again today. Don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that threefolding must be abandoned, but the way it was pursued in the past, as it would have been possible by constituting the three coexisting links, is no longer possible today. Today we must save what can still be saved, and that is what is present in human souls. To liberate spiritual life is what we must naturally try to do today.

Then we have probably come to the end.

Emil Bock: Since we are now at the end, I would like to express our sincere and heartfelt thanks to Dr. Steiner on behalf of the course participants. We cannot express this in words, but we believe we have tried to show by our work that we are indeed grateful and that thanks can only be expressed in deeds. And I believe I can speak from the hearts of the participants when I make a certain promise, so to speak, in a small rallying of our forces, that we will do what is within our power.

Rudolf Steiner: I need say no more than that it gives me a deep inner satisfaction that you have come together for this work. May something of value arise out of this work within anthroposophical life. It will be very significant if precisely that part of spiritual life that is yours is stimulated by this anthroposophical life. I hope that we understand each other inwardly and continue to work together and find each other. — Goodbye!

[ 1 ] My dear friends! I sincerely thank Licentiate Bock for his welcoming words, and I promise you that I want to apply everything in my power to contribute at least partly, towards all you are looking for during your stay here.

[ 2 ] Today I would like to discuss some orientation details so that we may understand one another in the right way. It will be our particular task—also during the various hours of discussion we are going to have—to express exactly what lies particularly close to your heart for your future work. I hope that what I have to say to you will be said in the correct way, when during the coming discussion hour your wishes and tasks you ask about, will be heard.

[ 3 ] Anthroposophy, my dear friends, must certainly remain on the foundation of which I've often spoken, when I say: Anthroposophy as such can't represent religious education; anthroposophy as such must limit its task as a spiritual science to fructify present culture and civilization and it is not its purpose to represent religious education. Actually, it is quite far from such direct involvement in any way, in the evolutionary process of religious life. Nevertheless, it appears to me to be certainly justified in relation to the tasks you have just set yourselves, that for religious activity something can be extracted out of Anthroposophy. Indirectly it can not only be obtained through Anthroposophy, but it must be extracted, and this must be said; your experience is quite correct that religious life as such needs deepening, which can come out of the source of anthroposophical science.

[ 4 ] I presume, my dear friends, that you want to actively position yourself in this religious life and that you have looked for this Anthroposophic course because you have felt that religious activity has lead you increasingly towards a dead end, and that through the religious work today—with our traditions, with the historic development and others, which we will still discuss—elements are missing which actually should be within it. We notice how just today even important personalities are searching for a new foundation for religious activity, because they believe this is needed in order to progress in a certain direction. I would like to indicate it as a start, how even the most conscientious personalities ask themselves how one can reach a certain foundation of religious awareness, and how then these personalities actually search more or less for a kind of—one can also call it something else—a kind of philosophy. I remind you only how a home is sought for a kind of philosophic foundation for religious awareness. Obviously, one has to, through the current awareness, recognise something absolutely necessary and one should not ignore that an extraordinarily amount has been accomplished this way. However, one can't comprehend, with unprejudiced observation, what is strived for, and come face to face with this: such an effort, instead of leading into the religious life, actually leads out of the religious life.

Religious life, you will sense, must be something direct, it must be something elementary, entirely connected to human nature, which lives out of the elementary, most inward foundation of human nature. All philosophic thinking is a reflection and is distanced from this direct, elementary experience. If I might express a personal impression, it would be this: When someone philosophises about the religious life and believes that a philosophical foundation is necessary for a religious life, then it always seems to me to be similar to when one wants to turn to the physiology of nutrition in order to attain nourishment oneself. Isn't it true, one can determine the exact foundations of nutritional science but that means nothing for nutrition itself. Nutritional science elucidates nutrition, but nutrition must surely have a sound foundation, it must grow roots in reality; only then can one philosophise about nutrition. So also, the religious life must have roots in reality. It must come to existence out of reality, only when it is there can one philosophise about it. It is certainly not possible at all to substantiate or justify the religious life with some or other philosophic consideration.

[ 5 ] That's the one thing. The other one is something which I can best indicate—I always like referring to realities—through a book which had already came into existed several decades ago in Basle, with the title: The Christian Nature of our Theology Today. It is a book by Overbeck. In it he refers to evidence that the current theology is a kind of theology but that it is actually not Christian any longer. Now, when one takes Harnack's book The Being of Christianity and in its arguments everywhere simply exchanges the word "God" in every instance where he has "Christ," then one will not really change anything in the inner content of Harnack's book. This is already expressed in what Adolf Harnack says, that in the Gospels actually only the proclamation of the Father is needed and not those of Christ Jesus, while naturally during the earlier centuries the Christian development of the Gospels was above all regarded according to the proclamations of Christ Jesus. However, if the Gospels are really considered as the actual proclamations of Christ Jesus, then one has to, beside the Father-experience, that means beside the experience of the world in general being permeated by the Godhead, have the Christ-experience as something extra special. One must be able to have both of these experiences. A theology like Adolf Harnack's no longer has both of these experiences, but only a God-experience, and as a result it is necessary for him that what he finds in his imagination of God, he baptises it with the name of Christ; purely out of a historical foundation, because as he is even a representative of Christianity, he calls his God-experience by the name of Christ.

[ 6 ] These incisive, important things exist already. Certainly, they are not made properly clear but they are felt, and I presume that currently, where nearly everything is shaken up in people's minds, a young theology in particular needs to show itself, in how these things can't really be completed, as is seen to some extent today with theologians, without being permeated by the actual being of Christ. Out of this experience such a book as von Overbeck's was created regarding the current Christianity of theology, where basically the answer is given to why modern theology is no longer Christian because it deals with a general philosophising about a world permeated by God, and not in the real sense of the Christ experience creating the foundation for the entire treatment of religious problems. Religious problems are dealt with based only as Father-problems and not actually the Christ experience.

[ 7 ] Today we basically all have an education inculcated in us, derived from modern science, this science which actually only started in the middle of the 15th century but which has entered into all forms of modern people's thinking. One basically can't be different because one has been educated this way from the lowest primary classes, by forming thoughts according to modern science. This has resulted in theology of the 19th century wanting to orientate itself according to the research of modern science. I'd like to say they feel themselves responsible for the judge's chair of modern science and as a result have become what they are today. One can only find a basis of true religiosity today by, at the same time, considering the entire authorisation and also the complete meaning of the scientific element of life.

[ 8 ] To some of you I have possibly already referred to a man who needs to be taken seriously in relation to religious life, Gideon Spicker, who for a long time studied philosophy at the Münster university. He proceeded from a strict Christian conception of the world, which he gradually developed into his philosophy which was never considered a philosophy but more an instrument for the understanding of religious problems. Modern thinking didn't offer him the possibility to find a sure foundation. So we find in his booklet, entitled At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period the hopelessness of modern man which characterised him so clearly, because he says: "Today we have metaphysics without transcendental conviction, we have a theory of knowledge without objective meaning, we have psychology without a soul, logic without content, ethics without liability and the result is that we can't find some or other foundation for religious consciousness."—Gideon Spicker stood very close to the actual crux which lies at the basis of all religious dichotomies in modern mankind. One can take it like a symptom, to indicate where the actual crux, I could call it, lies. If modern man is discerning, if he tries to create an image through his imagination of the world, then at the same time he clearly has the feeling that this discernment doesn't penetrate the depths. Gideon Spicker expressed it like this: "We have a theory of knowledge without objective meaning", which means we have our insights without being in the position to find the power within us to create something really objective out of our assembled insights. So, the modern discerning man sickens because he fails to find the possibility of a guarantee for his knowledge of objectivity in the world, for existence as such. He finds it in what he experiences subjectively in the knowledge, not really out of the thing itself.

[ 9 ] All of this of course, because it is philosophy, has nothing to do with religious experience. Still, one can say that religious life today is certainly under an influence which heads in a similar direction. The kind of humanity which is not in the position to say about knowledge: "in this realization there exists objective existence for me"—such a type of humanity feels this same insecurity rise up at another point, and that is religious life. The insecurity is situated at the same pivotal point where actual religious life exists today. We will see how other problems will huddle around this pivot point. This pivotal point lies in prayer, in the meaning of prayer. The religious person must feel that prayer has real meaning; some or other reality must be connected to prayer. However, in a time epoch when the discerning person fails to come out of his subjective knowledge and fails to find reality in knowledge, in the same time epoch religious people won't find the possibility, during prayer, of becoming aware that prayer is no mere subjective deed, but that within prayer an objective experience takes place. For a person who is unable to realise that prayer is an objective experience, for him or her it would be impossible to find a real religious hold. Particularly in the nature of current humanity prayer must focus on the religious life. Various other areas must focus on prayer. However, a prayer which only has subjective meaning would make people religiously insecure.

[ 10 ] It is the same root which grows out of us on the one side for the insecurity of knowledge, the Ignorabimus, and on the other side in fear; worry, which do not live in prayer in divine objectivity, but which is involved in subjectivity.

[ 11 ] You see, the problem of faith and the problem of knowledge, all problems, which involve people from the theological side, are connected to the same characteristics. Everything which depresses people from the side of direct religious experience, which needs confirmation, which must be maintained, this all comes from the same source. You can hardly answer this question if you don't orientate yourself historically where it will quite clearly show how far we have actually become distanced with our sciences from what we can call Christian today, while on the other hand today there is the constant attempt to proceed by pushing anything Christian out with science. Take everything in the Gospels which is Christian tradition. You can't but say: in this, there is another conception of the human being than what modern science claims. In modern science the human being is traced back to some or other primitive archetypal creature—I absolutely don't want to say that mankind had perhaps developed out of an animal origin—we are referred back to a primitive Ur-human, which gradually developed itself and, in whose development, existed a progression, an advance. Modern humanity is satisfied to look back according to scientific foundations, to the primitive archetypal beings, who through some inherent power, it is said, they created an ever greater and bigger cultural accomplishment, and to behold the unexpected future of this perfection.

If one now places within this evolution, the development of the Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha, then one can in an honest way hold on to the Gospels and say nothing other than: into this He doesn't fit, what fits here is a historic conception which goes around the Mystery of Golgotha and leaves it out, but the Christ of the Gospels don't fit into this conception. The Christ of the Gospels can't be considered in any other way than if one somehow believes what happened in the 18th century especially among the most enlightened, the most spiritual people as a matter of course. Take for instance Saint Martin—I now want to look further from religious development and want to point out someone who was in the most imminent sense a scientist of the 18th century—and that was Saint Martin. He had a completely clear awareness that the human being at the start of his earthly development came from a certain height downwards, that he had been in another world milieu earlier, in another environment and through a mighty event, through a crisis was thrown down to a sphere which lay below the level of his previous existence, so that the human being is no longer what he once had been.

[ 12 ] While our modern natural science points back to a primitive archetypal being out of which we have developed; this observation of Saint Martin must refer back to the fallen mankind, to those human beings which had once been more elevated. This was something, like I said, which to Saint Martin appeared as a matter of course. Saint Martin experienced this fall of mankind as a feeling of shame. You see, if the Christ is placed in such a conception of human evolution, where the human being, by starting his earth existence through a descent and is now more humble than he was before, then the Christ becomes that Being who would save humanity from its previous fall, then the Christ bears mankind again up into those conditions where it had existed before.

[ 13 ] We will see in what modification this imagination must appear to our souls. In any case this involves a disproportion between our modern understanding of mankind's evolution and the understanding of the Gospels; there is always dishonesty when one goes hither and thither and does not confess that one is simultaneously a supporter of modern scientific thinking and also the Christ. This must actually be clear for every honest, particularly religiously honest sensitive person. Here is something where a bridge must be formed if the religious life is to be healthy once again. Without this bridging, religious life will never ever be healthy again. Actually, there are people who come along like David Friedrich Strauss, and to the question "Are we still Christians?" reply with a No, indicating that they are still more honest than some of the modern theologians, whoever and again overlook the radical differences between what the modern human being regards as pure science and the Gospel concept of the Christ. This is the characteristic of modern theology. It is basically the impotent attempt to treat the Christ conception of the Gospels in such a way that it can be validated in front of modern science. Here nothing originates which somehow can be held.

[ 14 ] Yet, theology still exists. The modern pastor is given very little support for his line of work in the kind of theology presented at his schooling currently, from the foundation which has been indicated already and about which we will still come to in the course of our observations. The modern pastor must of course be a theologian even though theology is not religion. However, in order to work, a theological education is needed, and this educational background suffers from all the defects which I've briefly indicated in our introduction today.

[ 15 ] You see, the Catholic Church knows quite well what it is doing, because it doesn't allow modern science to come into theology. Not as if the Catholic Church doesn't care for modern science, it takes care of it. The greatest scholars can certainly be found within the Catholic ecclesiastics. I'm reminded of Father Secchi, a great astrophysicist, I remember people such as Wasmann, a significant zoologist, and many others, above all one can remind oneself of the extraordinarily important scientific accomplishments, worldly scientific accomplishments of the Benedictine order and so on. But what role did modern science play in the Catholic Church? The Catholic Church wants to care for modern science, that there are real luminaries in it. However, people want this modern scientific way to be applied in connection with the outer sensory world, it wants to distance itself strongly from the conceptions of anything pertaining to spirituality, no statements should be made about this spirituality. Hence it is therefore forbidden to express something about the spiritual, because scientists must not enter into this mix when something is being said about the legitimacy of the spiritual life. So, Catholicism relegates science to its boundaries, it rejects science from all that is theology. That it, for instance in modernism, gradually came into it, has caused Catholicism to experience it as dispensable; hence the war against modernism. The Catholic Church knows precisely that in that moment when science penetrates theology, extraordinary dangers lie ahead, and it is impossible to cope with scientific research in theology.

It is basically quite hopeless if it is expressed in abstract terms: theology we must have but it will be scorched, burnt by modern science.—Where does this come from? That is the next big burning question. Where does this come from?

[ 16 ] Yes, my dear friends, theology as we have it now, is rooted in quite different conditions than those of modern mankind. Ultimately the foundation of theology—if it wants to be correctly understood—is precisely the same foundations as that of the Gospels themselves. I have just expressed a sentence and naturally in its being said, it is not immediately understood, but it has extraordinary importance for our discussions here. Theology as inherited tradition doesn't appear in the form in which modern science appears. Theology is mostly in a form of something handed down, as such it goes back to the earlier ways of understanding. Certainly, logic was later applied to modern theology, which changed the form of theology somewhat; theology no longer appeared as it had been once upon a time. On the other hand, it is Catholicism which actually has something in this relationship which works in an extraordinarily enchanting manner on the more intelligent people and which is firmly adhered to in many Catholic clerics upon studying theology, through what has been handed down as knowledge of the so-called Primordial Revelation (Uroffenbahrung).

[ 17 ] Primordial Revelation! You have to be aware that Catholicism does not merely have the revelation which we usually call the revelation of the New Testament, nor this being only the revelation spoken about in the Old Testament, but that Catholicism—as far as it is theology—speaks about a Primordial Revelation. This Primordial Revelation is usually characterised by saying: that which was revealed by the Christ had been experienced once before by mankind, at that time humanity acquired the revelation through another, a cosmic world milieu. This revelation was lost through the Fall, but an inheritance of this great revelation was still available through the Old Testament and through pagan teachings.—That is Catholic thinking. Once upon a time, before people became sinners, a revelation was made to them; had mankind not fallen into sin, so the entire act of salvation of Christ Jesus would not have become necessary. However, the primordial revelation had been tarnished through humanity falling into the sinful world and in the course of time up to the Mystery of Golgotha the human being increasingly forgot what the primordial revelation had been. To a certain extent in the beginning there still remained glimpses of this primordial revelation, then however, as the generation went further and further away, this primordial revelation darkened, and it had become totally dark in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha which came as a new revelation.

This is what Christianity looks like today—under theological instruction—in Old Testament teaching and above all in the pagan teaching it is seen as a corrupted Primordial Revelation. Catholicism has an insight into what I've often spoken about in Anthroposophy, namely the old Mysteries. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I pointed these things out, but, not quite, but only as far as possible because these things are as much unknown as possible in today's world and most people are not prepared for these things. Only, here we can speak about it, and about one point.

[ 18 ] Everywhere in the pagan-religious mysteries there are certain experiences which allowed people to learn more than those communicated outwardly, exoterically, to a large crowd. These experiences didn't happen under supervision but through asceticism, through practice, they happened by the person going through certain experiences; a kind of drama was experienced leading to a culmination, with a catharsis, until the person came to sense the lightening of the divine laws of the world. This is simply a fact and within esoteric Catholicism it engendered an awareness of what existed in the Mysteries. It is even said that modern times are filled with worldly science and that this worldly science must not enter theology with arguments; as a result, we'd rather protect our knowledge of the Mysteries so that worldly science doesn't come in to explain it, because explaining the Mysteries would be a great danger under any circumstances. Catholicism was afraid that scientific involvement would reveal what one could possibly know about such things.

[ 19 ] Now we come to the question: what did the Mysteries actually impart during these olden times? The Mysteries didn't produce a mere theoretical knowledge, it produced an evolution of consciousness, a real transformation of consciousness. A person who had gone through the Mysteries learnt to experience life differently to those people who hadn't gone through them. A person who stands fully awake in the world, experiences outside the sleep state, the outer sense world; he experiences memories, he can through these memories relive his life within himself when after various interruptions he comes to a certain point in his life which lies a couple of years after his birth. With an individual who has gone through hard exercises in the Mysteries, something quite different rises up in his awareness than what he usually can find in his consciousness. In the old Mysteries one expressed this experience as a "rebirth." Why does one call it a rebirth? Because in fact a person goes through a kind of embryonic experience in his consciousness; an awareness comes to the fore in the manner and way the person had lived through during his time as an embryo. During the time of being an embryo, our inner experience is namely of the same kind as are the experiences during thinking, because what is experienced in our senses is only done so through our mother's body. An embryonic experience is woken up, that's why we call it a "rebirth." A person goes back in his embryonic life up to the time of his birth, and so, just like memories rise up, so that what is being experienced also rises up. In this way a person feels himself coming out of a spiritual world, being partially connected to a spiritual world. These were the mysteries of birth, under which time one understood the blossoming of the Mysteries as something which human beings could go through during such an initiation. What he went through during such an initiation was considered a shadowed knowledge of such a state he was in, before he descended into the world of the senses. Thus, through the "rebirth" the human being re-places himself again to a certain extend back into a human form of existence free of sin.

In earlier times, knowledge which was not of this world was called "theology," and this knowledge could be acquired through the return to the wisdom that human beings had had before entering into this world, a wisdom which had been corrupted because people had dragged it into this world.

[ 20 ] I'm sketching these things for you and later we will naturally bring today's considerations to our awareness. Theology in olden times was a gift from the gods, which could only be achieved through such exercises which could lift people out of their senses and bring them at least back to the experience of motherly love, enabling them to take up this wisdom again, this uncorrupted wisdom. This cannot be taken up in the form or modern logical concepts. Within the Mysteries people could not be given logical concepts in the modern sense, they received images. All knowledge which is gained in this way is gained in pictures, images. The more a person actually entered into the real world of existence—not only associated himself with existence—the more he lives into this existence, like when he lives within the existence of motherly love, so much more will consciousness stop living in abstract concepts, so much more will he live in images. Thus, what was designated as "theology" in olden times, in pre-Christian times, visual science, was science living in images. For this reason, I could say: this theology certainly had a similar form of expression as the one living in the Gospels, because in the Gospels we find images, and the further we go back, the more we find that the Gospels are still being expressed in the attitude of the old theology; there is certainly no differentiation between religion and theology. Here theology itself is something which has been received from God, here in theology one looks upon a God, and sees how the theology is given through a communication with God. Here is something which is alive, in theology. Then it came about that theology was experienced differently, somewhat like the conditions in which one lives when you grow older. At that time therefore, in olden times, theology was nourished through the religious life. This particular way of living though-oneself in the world of religious experience, this actually was getting lost to humanity at the same time as the Mystery of Golgotha was occurring.

[ 21 ] So you see, when we look towards the East as it is connected historically to the source of our religious life, we have, we can say, the Indian religious life. What nourishes the Indian religious life? It is nourished through the observation of nature, but the observation of nature was something quite different then to what it is for modern humanity. Nature observation was for all Indians such that one can say: an Indian observed spiritually when looking at nature, but he only observed the spirit which lay beneath the actual being of humanity. The Indian observed the mineral world spiritually, likewise the plant world, animal world; he was aware of the divine spiritual foundation of these worlds; but when he wanted to attain the human world as well, it didn't reveal itself to him. By wanting to access the actual being of the human being in the world, which he had himself, there he found nothing: Nirvana, the entry in nothingness towards what could be perceived in relation to the human being. Thus, the fervour of the Indian's religious life, which certainly was still present at that time, where theology, religion and science were one, was Nirvana. We have an escape from what is perceived from the natural basis of the image-rich consciousness, an escape into Nirvana, where everything that is given to the senses is obliterated. This self-abandonment to Nirvana must be experienced religiously in order to find a possible form for the religious stream of experience for individuals.

[ 22 ] Now, when we consider this religious observation of the world further, with the Persians and later with the Chaldeans, we see how they turn their gaze outward, they don't experience the world like us, they live through a world permeated with spirit, everywhere the spiritual foundation permeates everything, but immobilises it. There is a different disposition with these peoples compared to the Indians. The Indian strived towards mankind and found nothing. The other peoples who lived to the north and west of the Indians didn't strive towards mankind but towards the world, towards the spiritual in the world. They couldn't understand the spiritual world in any other way than to avoid with all their might, what later human evolution could no longer avoid.

[ 23 ] It is unbelievably meaningful, my dear friends, to observe how, on the one hand the old Indian striving came from what he saw, while he, when he strived towards human beings, I might call it, fell into unconsciousness, into Nirvana, while the Old Persian remained in what he was looking at. The divine which is the basis of the mineral, the plant and animal worlds, was understood by the Old Persian and from this came his religious striving; but now he was overcome by fear that he might be urged to seek man, and this turned into abstract thoughts which turned into imagery. This is actually the basic feeling of the near-Asian peoples all the way to Africa. They saw the foundation of nature as being a spiritual world; they didn't see people, but they were afraid to search in people because then they would enter an abstract region, a region into which later, the Romans entered with their religion. Before the Roman time, in the second, third Century there was the aspiration everywhere to avoid entering into abstractions, hence the aspiration to capture what is presented in images. There was even the endeavour to express in images, what one understood, in image form. There was an effort to, in relation to the divine, which one perceives, not to search for it through abstract concepts but in actions made visible; this is the origin of ritual, sacramental action. In this religious area which I'm referring to, is the origin of ritual in worship.

[ 24 ] Now place yourself into this entire development of the old Hebraic peoples; the Judaism which strongly feels the urge for its people's development to enter into what one possesses in one's consciousness. Today I only want to make indications in my presentation in order for us to orientate ourselves. The members of the Hebrew people wanted above all to feel the God on which human nature is based. The Old Indian only sensed God, or the gods, who lay at the basis of sub human nature, and as he tried to penetrate with his consciousness into the human being, there he wanted to rise up into Nirvana. The other, the Persian, Chaldean and Egyptian peoples searched for the connection to the Divine in images and applied these according to their character dispositions, to get up to the human being. So we can see how this urge, as in Judaism, to draw the divine and the human together, to bring the divine in a relationship with the human being, lead to the divine appearing at the same time the foundation of humanity. There was not predisposition to that in the Indian when they sailed into Nirvana; there was no longer a conception that the human consciousness wanted to be reached. For the Indian this personal route to the human soul was to be avoided. This personal route of the human soul had even lead to gradually slipping out of existence into nonexistence, so to speak. The other, the Prussian route, came to a standstill with imagery, remaining in ritual only.

[ 25 ] We see how the Jewish peoples developed, within these strivings, their own special character and this resulted in the impossibility to reach God out of one's own life. One had to wait and see what God himself gave, and it was there that the actual concept of revelation came into being. One had to wait and see what God would give and on the other hand one had to be careful not to search through the route of imagery or symbolism (Bilderweg), which was to be feared. If the route of symbolism was sought, then one arrived at a subhuman God, not at a God who carries humanity. In Judaism the symbolic route was not to be followed, it would not be through ritual an also not through the content of knowledge that one would speak to God. The olden time Jew wanted to meet their god by Him revealing himself, and human beings would communicate in a human way, while from their side, not make outwardly fulfilled sacrifices, but what arises subjectively: the promise—revelation, promise and the contract between both; a judicial relationship one could call it, between the people and their God.

[ 26 ] So the Jewish religion positioned itself and thus the Jewish religion stood in the entire evolution of humanity. therefore, one can say: here already a relationship is the example which is performed in our modern time, where science wants to be beside religion but where science has nothing to say about religion, just like the olden time Jew removed everything which appeared as imagery. This is already performed in Judaism, and precisely in the modern differentiation between knowledge and faith, lies unbelievably much Judaism. In Harnack's The Being of Christianity everything is again based on Judaism. You have to see through this that we get sick with these things.

[ 27 ] Human evolution is penetrated by more and more things. Something is continuously developing which belongs to the Jews in particular: the awareness of personality, which is urged by ego development. With the Greeks there developed a mighty inner world beside the outer world of observed nature but this inner world could raise doubts, because it was observed merely as a world of mythology. Sensing the religious element rising in Hellenism, which lives in Greek mythology, through mythological fantasy, which people are searching for—because it was not to be found in nature—is what rises up in man. The Greek however didn't grasp the actual important point within the human inner life, resulting from mythological fantasy, which the Romans evolved into abstract thinking, which certainly already started with Aristotle, but which was developed particularly in Rome. This abstract way of thinking which is so powerful as to being people to the point of their I, bringing them to self-consciousness, to I-consciousness, this is something which we today still carry in us today and we carry it heavily in us, in the form of modern agnosticism.

[ 28 ] My dear friends, basically there is no spiritual teaching other than modern materialism. This sounds like an extraordinary paradox and yet it is so. What the modern materialistic thinker carries in his head is quite spiritualized, so spiritualised that it is quite abstract and has no connection to reality any more. That's Romanism in full swing. We actually have become unbelievably spiritual in the course of the 19th century, but we deny this spirituality because we maintain that through this spirituality, we can understand matter. In reality our souls are in a spiritualised content, right into our ideas are we spiritualised, but we maintain that through all of this we can only understand a material world. Thus, human beings have grasped their ego through this spiritualisation, but as a result they have become separated from the world. Today humanity must again look for its connection to the world, the search need to be for inner knowledge, there needs to be the possibility to not only have "knowledge without objective meaning" but knowledge with objective meaning, in order for knowledge to reveal the being of the world, and on the other hand to authenticate what is hidden within the human being as objective.

[ 29 ] You see, the Greeks had a great advantage compared to the oriental world, they could to draw together their innermost nature so to speak. From within themselves they could draw a content, but this content could first only attach as filled with fantasy, imagination. However, there was something the Greeks didn't know. They had brought the development of humanity to internalisation but didn't attach it to the inner life. The internalisation and the hardening continued in the Roman times and beyond, and man had to learn—today still we need to learn to understand—how one can attach what is within, what permeates this inner being. The Greeks could think about their gods in grandiose fantasy images but what the Greek could not do, was to pray. The prayer only cam about later and for prayer the possibility had to be found of connecting the one praying, to reality. To this we must connect those times in which prayer was not merely spoken, not merely thought or not merely felt, but in which prayer became one with the sacramental ritual. Then again Catholicism knows quite well why they don't separate themselves from ritual, from the sacrificial act, from the central sacrifice of the mass.

We'll talk more about these things.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Yesterday my stating point was to indicate in a few words how Anthroposophy can certainly not be considered as an education of religion and in no way can it directly enter into the development of religious life, but only, as I indicated, indirectly. Anthroposophy must, according to its nature, live as a free deed in the human spirit, it must depend on the free deeds of the human spirit—like natural science as well, which heads in the opposite direction—while religious life must be based on communication with the Godhead with whom one knows one is connected and with whom one knows one is dependant in religious life.

[ 2 ] At first a serious abyss could open up between those who can offer Anthroposophy to contemporary civilization, and the blossoming of religious life. Perhaps in the totality of what we will talk about here will show you that this abyss doesn't exist. I would just like to call your attention today to how anthroposophical life intervenes in the academic world in such a way that it lends a religious colouring to it.

[ 3 ] It is quite without doubt that the modern world rules the relationship of humanity to the cosmos and its earthly environment with agnosticism, and religious people who do not acknowledge this, will come up against a very serious mistake. They would like to remain, to a certain extent, stuck in the comfortable old form and would not contribute anything to ensure that the essence of the old form can remain intact for the earth's development. This mistake unfortunately applies to many people at present. They shut themselves off from the necessity that the epoch we are entering into, requires that we clarify and move towards a conscious, awakened knowledge with human prudence in every area. If religious life is artificially distanced from this knowledge, so it would—while undoubtedly knowledge of a larger authority is being addressed—cause this knowledge to perish, as it once before had threatened to do in the 19th century, when the materialistic knowledge wanted to destroy religious life in a certain sense.

[ 4 ] What I have said regarding this must simply penetrate our sensitivities, it must be clear, and when it is clear, my dear friends, then our mental picture, as I bring it up in front of you, will not seem like such a paradox, as it might be for those who encounter and hear it for the first time.

[ 5 ] The agnosticism, the Ignorabimus, is something which has sprung up out of the scientific way of thinking of modern time. What kind of knowledge is it which professes ignorance or agnosticism? It is based on something which it agrees with completely; it is based on the fact that people have gradually been trying to totally shut out their life of soul from knowledge. It is namely so that the ideal human knowledge according to the modern scientist, also the historian, is to shut out subjectivity and only retain what is objectively valid. As a result, the process of obtaining knowledge—for scientific research as well—is completely bound to the physical body of man. Please understand this, my dear friends, in all earnest. Materialism namely has the right when it takes this knowledge which is available to it, not only in regard to what is totally due to material conditions, but which appear as material processes. What really happens between people, in their search for scientific knowledge and the outer world, moves between the outer material things and the relationship to the sense organs; this means their relationship with the material, physical body. The real process of seeking knowledge in connection to the earthly world is a material process right into the final phases of cognition. What the human being experiences in this cognition, is lived through as an observer; he experiences it with his soul-spiritual "side-stepping," so that the human being actually is quite right in the cognitive process as being understood physically and to recognise this as the only decisive conception. The human being as observer, which has no activity within himself—this has already often been mentioned by scientists who have thought about this, recognised it and spoken about it.

[ 6 ] You see, for in this process of acquiring knowledge, where the human being is actually a mere observer, everything a person has as inner journeys in his soul life, is discounted by the observed reality. The human being observes the outer things, he thinks about these outer objects, he is reminded by outer things, but he certainly also observes how in his reminiscences, his memories, how his emotions of feelings and willing come into it, only how this happens, he doesn't know because he is completely unsure about the origin of these feelings and willing, so that for this knowledge, which can only be acknowledged in the present, the only thing which comes into consideration is what happens between the observation and the memory. This is only a picture; it runs as a parallel occurrence next to the real materialistic process running alongside it. The material process is the reality and the recognition runs alongside the material process.

[ 7 ] If one had the means for really absorbing what was approaching in the epoch leading up to the Mystery of Golgotha, in the teachers and pupils of the mysteries, and what in that time, one could say, through three decades during which it happened, the then Gnostic orientated mystery teachers spoke about their most inner heartfelt convictions, then one can do no other than to say: they anticipated that the human being will experience himself as a mere observer in the world, and that even his process of acquiring knowledge will occur without his soul's participation. This experience ruled throughout the prevailing mood of the beings of the mysteries during the times of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 8 ] How can we come to terms with this knowledge today regarding ignorance and agnosticism? We arrive, as we've said, at something which appears as a paradox. Knowledge is the result of the material process, even tied to the material world, while the human being experiences spiritually, but is a mere observer in his spirit. If we now expand the Christian point of view of this phenomenon, then we finally reach a point of integrating this knowledge into the process itself that the Christian view of the various human processes ever had. We reach a point in a sense, which we characterised yesterday, to regard the recognition of human sinfulness in our time as the final phase of the Fall of mankind from its former conditions. Only then will we understand our current science out of religious foundations, when we can regard science as the final phase of the expression of the sinful human being, when we can place it into the realm of sin. This is what appears as a paradox. Out of sinfulness comes ignorance, out of sinfulness, religiously expressed, comes agnosticism.

[ 9 ] Only when we feel this way regarding modern science, can we feel Christian towards science. Then again—and we will actually see this in the following days—quite a necessary path results from the understanding of the sinfulness of today's science, an inner human path which can be understood as grace.

[ 10 ] With this I have initially indicated what we will be undertaking in the following days; because sometimes you have to do things a little differently to what is customary with today's science, when one wants to explain things in a proper way. To a certain extent one must first draw the outer circle and go inward from there and not start with a theory and draw conclusions from that.

[ 11 ] With this at least something real is indicated in humanity. If we simply remain stuck in the ordinary knowledge of current science, then we remain stuck in images. The moment we sense within these images—and all of science today is an image—the sinfulness within this modern scientific element, we comprehend matter with a reality within ourselves, then we are on the way to take science itself into reality. One must be able to develop a feeling, if one wants to rise to it, to ask questions in such a way that something of reality is felt: how is it possible, in a religious sense that, what the human being initially experiences as an observer, can be brought into something real through which human life here on earth is not merely a nonhuman, material life and that the human being is not a mere observer but that a person with his own true being can express himself by processing material existence? When does inner life reach into outer reality so that something is created out of the inward experience and a person is no longer only a mere observer?

[ 12 ] You see, there have been attempts to answer this question from time immemorial with the essence of sacramentalism, and one doesn't arrive at another understanding of the essence of sacramentalism than on the basis of such considerations as I've pointed out. First of all, one thing confronts us in human beings and that is the Word.

[ 13 ] The Word is actually for current science something quite mysterious, something secretive; because uttered words are at the same time perceived through the sense of hearing. In man there is a moment which lies in the words, when he utters words and he hears them at the same time. In the eyes, in the ability to see, the process has an active and a passive element completely intertwined; it is also present there but is not yet analysed in physiology today. Actually, it is present in all the senses but in relation to hearing and speaking both the active and passive elements are clearly separated from one another. When we speak, we certainly don't consider ourselves as observers of our lives; when we speak, we participate creatively in our life because speaking is simultaneously connected to our breathing process. What takes place in speaking streams over the breathing process. When we breathe in we bring the pressure of the breathing right into our spinal cord canal and in this way, pressure is translated to the brain and works creatively on the cerebral fluid. In the breathing process the outer world streams into us, moulding ourselves. The air we breathe is firstly outside, it enters into us, works formatively on our cerebral fluid and thus also works formatively in the semi-solid parts of the brain. We only understand the brain correctly if we don't just look at it as something which has grown in humans, but if we look at it as something in progressive interaction with the outer world.

[ 14 ] In this in-streaming of breath we weave the words which we express. I want to firstly only indicate these things, as I suggested, I want to draw an outer circle and then move gradually inward. By our interweaving our words with our breath—which is indicated in the Old Testament as giving humans their origins—blowing in the air to breathe—through which our word unifies with what is considered in the breath of air as divine, we experience the Word as the Creator within us. We observe something in the world process where we are not merely observers but feel our soul's life working creatively into our body.

[ 15 ] We have reached an understanding which allows us to say: in the original creation of mankind was the Word, and everything in human beings was created through the Word.—Just study what it means that the human being, by learning to speak, slowly disentangles his physical organisation through speech. We haven't yet considered the words of the Gospel of St John, but we have discovered the manifestation of something of the bodily nature of the human being in this Gospel. When we contemplate the human being we first of all have his spiritual soul expression and from here the Word comes, which then draws into his bodily organism and shapes him, and thus we have many of these bodily forms which in the course of our lives develop from words themselves, because this is the way we are, we develop out of our words.

[ 16 ] What speech/language means to human beings can only really be studied fully in its depths through spiritual science. Already in the sense of the Testaments we have an interweaving of the words which moves through man as the first divine process, that of breathing. Mere thinking which moves in the sphere of the observer is pushed into the creative sphere. When thinking becomes transformed into words, the Divine empowers these thoughts; it is, one could say, the deification of thoughts occur in the words. When one becomes aware that there is much more to words than speech, then words become something through which a person discovers his first connection, his first communication with the Divine in his own behaviour, a behaviour which is like a condensing; like a thought immersed in feeling. While this is to some extent a route from subjective to objective thought, we have the possibility for something which is spiritually objective, to flow into the word. This can be followed by the idea that much more can exist in words than what is in merely man-made thinking; that to a certain extent something divine can flow into the words and that in the words something divine can be expressed, that a divine message can be contained in the words.

[ 17 ] So we have the first element, that people from out of themselves, find their way going out into the environment, permeated with what is divine in the words. This is somewhat the way the Words of the Gospels were experienced, the in-streaming of the divine in the words of the Gospels which we can feel in the creative activity of the words for ourselves; here we have the first element how man can change from his subjectivity to the objective, like in ritual.

[ 18 ] Now, one can look at what a person doesn't think regarding the world, but what actions he performs in the world. Simply look at human actions. These human actions are seldom regarded in the right light by modern materialism.

Once again, I can only make indications about what this actually involves; we will later enter into them again.

[ 19 ] Just imagine the following contrivance: around a pulley a rope, here a weight, and on the other side a larger weight. The rope is pulled down on the side of the heavier weight and pulled up on the opposite side. The same thing can happen if you now pull on the lighter side and lift the heavier side. You could accomplish something yourself which can also happen as an objective process. In the first place, depending on the heavier weight, it happens without you being there; but when you are there, you can shift the weight. What happens in the outer world can also happen without you.

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[ 20 ] This is however a process in inorganic nature. When you study what a person accomplishes in the outer world you realize what is of importance is that it happens in such a way, that it comes from spiritual interrelationships, and that the body of a person only presents the possibility for the action. In our actions we namely—in that we gain knowledge of the world as soul-spiritual observers—only have our body as one ingredient. In our bodies processes take place—processes of movement, of nourishment, of dissolving and so on. What takes place in our bodies is an ingredient, something that is added to what happens objectively. Our body doesn't take part in our actions; we only understand our actions when we consider them when separated from the body. Just as we in the cognitive process, seen materialistically, have something which turns us into observers, so we have in the process of actions for the world, in the process of action, which takes place in the world, something in which the body doesn't participate. Processes which take place in the body remain without cosmic meaning, just like materialistic knowledge has no cosmic meaning. A person remains in materialism in his actions when they only pertain to the earthly, like a hermit standing in the world has no relationship to anything outside of himself. If he searches for this relationship, then he must mix something spiritual into his actions, accomplish actions in such a way that they aren't separated from him, like all earthly actions, then he must allow his thoughts and feelings to enter in a vital way into his actions, so that the actions become signs for what lives in them. Then the actions are a sacrificial act, then they are the sacrifice.

[ 21 ] When we look at knowledge in this way, we see knowledge objectified by the validation of the message in words; if we look at the actions, we have the objectification of action, the drawing out of man alone in what is given in the sacrificial act. Here we first have the relationship of a person to the outer world in the sense that it originates out of the human spirit-soul. Out of the spiritual soul now also rises the imagination—in relation to words, which are no longer experienced as a human, but as a divine revelation—and in relation to the sacrificial act, which is no longer being experienced as the manipulation of the human world, in which man is not involved, but as such is involved with his thoughts, his feelings; this he experiences again in his inner life.

[ 22 ] The other relationship of the human being to the outer world, we find in human nutrition. We actually have three relationships to the outer world: observation through the senses, breathing and nutrition. Everything else can be referred back to these. Breathing is actually positioned between perception and nutrition because one could say that breathing is half perception and half nutrition. It is undeniable that the breathing process stands between the process of perception and nutrition. You see, it is simultaneously connected to the processes of perception and nourishment. Breathing is the synthesis between observation and nutrition.

[ 23 ] Physiology considers nutrition incorrectly. Physiology is of the opinion that we take in nourishment, that we take out of the food what we need and repel the rest. This is not so. That we absorb substance is only a side-effect. The process of life means we are actually constantly opposed and fight back against what is caused by the ingestion of foodstuff into ourselves. We eat, we drink—and the result is something which lies truly very deep in our consciousness, beneath our conscious soul life. What happens there is a constant defensive action. In this physical-physiological process of defence are found the actual processes of life and of nutrition. The life process of nourishment is an averting process. Only when we realize how the organism is organised in this way, to receive the suggestion for a defence—for us to have a defence there naturally has to be suggestion—only when we understand that by the defence against a substance coming from outside as a suggestion in the process of nourishment, will we be able to really understand nourishment. With nourishment a process of aversion is involved, while the absorption of substances is only a side effect through which the finest filaments of the human being the suggestion for resistance is directed from the outside, in order for the aversion to take place in the most outer periphery of the organism. Only at this point of averting does the actual life process of nutrition take place, so that the ordinary earthly process of nourishment is actually a resistance to the earthly. The earthly pushes the nourishing items into us, and we must absorb it, but this is a process of resistance.

[ 24 ] This is the reality, but it is not the way science looks at the whole thing. What is actually happening with this repulsion? Something happens which lies completely outside of human consciousness. When we take up nourishment, it is actually a process of the material world. Each substance is actually a concentrated, reduced world process. Processes of the outer world we take into ourselves, we repel them, but by repelling them, a counter process comes about: the process of the outer world becomes something quite different, transformed, and in this transformation, something happens in us. Outer matter is transformed in us. What becomes of it? It becomes spirit within us. This is something which is ordinarily not seen, that the human being in his actual process of digestion, in his transformation of the outer world steers outer material processes to spiritualization.

In the outer world nature goes through world processes, and as a fragment of this world process, we could call it the origin of a seed, from which all other things originated through the seed serving as nourishment. What happens in the outer world becomes firstly transformed within the human being before it goes further on its way to spirituality. It can't be transformed into the spiritual in the outer world, only within the human being can it change into the spiritual. This is simply an objective fact, which I state here, nothing else. However, what I'm presenting here for you happens outside the world of human thoughts. It happens in the deeper regions of human will and partially in the feeling realms. Only certain parts of the feeling life, and will, take part in the process of nourishment, which I've recently indicated. Thought processes don't take part in it; it goes in the opposite direction; through the Word it goes from below into the formation. Here beneath, we have, coming from outside in the opposite direction, like the way the thought process does it, the process of transformation.

[ 25 ] If one wants to place this transformative process within the human being so that when one looks at a person according to the manner in which he looks at the outer world, then one must place something in the outside world which actually doesn't happen in the outside world, but only within the human being. With this one had placed a sacramental act in the outside world, something which doesn't take place in natural phenomena, but which takes place within the human being as a human mystery. If one wants to take what belongs to the most inner part of man, which we have just characterised, and place this in front of the human being, then one arrives at the conversion of the bread and the wine as the body and blood (of Christ), which is the transubstantiation. The transubstantiation is not an experience of the outside world; the transubstantiation is revealing to the outside world what is fulfilled within the most inner part of the human being. We see in the transubstantiation what we are unable to see in the outside world, because the outside world is a fragment of existence, not a totality; in the sacraments we add that to the outside world in addition to what the kingdom of nature accomplishes within the human being.

[ 26 ] This, my dear friends, is the original idea of the sacrament, that something is added to outer world phenomena, something which inner man doesn't experience consciously but which is within the human being, and because it is not recognised but exists subconsciously, it can through signs be placed into the outside world. To consummate transubstantiation, a person must feel something unconsciously connected with the innermost being of his self to the symbols. He is indeed paving the way for intercommunications with the spirits of the outside world by presenting the transformation, which would otherwise take place behind the veil of memory within him, as a sacrament.

[ 27 ] With this we have not yet grasped what the highest achievable thing is by human beings, we have only grasped the spiritualisation process of substance in the human being, the transformation, the transubstantiation. What happens in man as an objective process takes place, I would say, only as separated from our consciousness by a thin veil, behind our consciousness. This happens because from this side, at every moment of our lives, our "I" is stirred up. We dive down below this transformed substance and by our absorbing the matter of the outside world, our process of life exists in this transformation, by our spiritual soul diving under into the transformation of the outside world, our "I" is continually nourished, our "I" is continuously encouraging the union with the substance transformed by this process. The union with the substance after its transformation represents the accessibility of the ego-manifestation to spiritualisation. Let's consider this in a sacramental way.

If we place the sacramental before us then the participation in the sacrament is such that it is materially represented through symbolism; as soon as it is transubstantiated it becomes united with the human being and here we have the fourth link of what in the ritual can be represented as the sacramental signs in the relationship of the human being to the world.

[ 28 ] If we look at the human beings in as far as they are involved with the outside world, then we have, what I would call, the realization of the process of knowledge (in spirit) in Words, and in the sacrificial act, which appear outwardly in signs, we have indicated everything which a person can unite with in his soul-spirit and actions. If we look at human beings absorbing the outside world, where we have the proclamation of the message in word and the sacrificial act, if we look at human beings who continuously give birth out of the spiritual, then we have realized this in the sacramental acts of transubstantiation and communion.

[ 29 ] With this we have thus the possibility to connect the human being in his relationship to all his actions in the outside world in a real sense. Actions distance themselves from him, his own body walks beside him. In transubstantiation that which does not take place in the world is presented as an event, because the outside world is only a fragment of possible events. In communion a person unites himself with the outside world to which he can't connect through his thinking. Objective processes precede transubstantiation and communion. As a result of this we place a person through a physical-soul-spiritual way in a relationship with the world. We have stopped regarding the human being as in a hermit's existence removed from the world; we've started seeing him as a member of the whole world. We have learnt to regard the world as material, but there, where we see it as a fragment, to look at it as if the spiritual foundation on which matter is based is only a part, spiritualising and perfecting; and we have taken the divine cycle, which is in the outer and inner part of man, and placed it before us ... (Some gaps in stenographer's text made the publisher shorten the text here.)

[ 30 ] This is what the people wanted to present to those who said: The human physical-soul-spiritual relationship to the universe can be brought back through the sacraments; recognised through the proclamation, through the sacrificial act, performed through the transubstantiation and communion. You could live together with the entire world by taking what is usually spread over two halves in a person, the soul-spiritual, which just watches, and the physical, which is just an addition to external actions. These can be united by taking what the mere observer wants to remain in relation to the outside world, sacramentalize it in the proclamation of the Word, in the Gospel—which comes out of the "Angelum," out of the realm permeated by the spiritual world—and in the sacrificial act, experienced in his inner life and through which the human being only becomes complete, sacramentalised in the transubstantiation, the transformation, and then by incorporating the human being into this whole in communion, in union. Here you have a real process which is no mere process of knowledge but a process which is connected to your feeling and will, while the process of knowledge takes place in a cold, frozen region of mere abstraction.

[ 31 ] What takes place in the coldness of knowledge is warmed somewhat by the proclamation of the Word and in the sacrificial act. That which, however, through overheating can no longer exist consciously, because heat numbs consciousness and thus can't be perceptive, which can happen when the phenomenon is elevated to a noumenon/psyche, means that in place of external processes which are perceived by the senses, the external process of sacramental action is imitated by the human being itself, in which sacramental action is regarded as what lies behind nature, which can't be produced by anything else, with an objective meaning in the world, because it places the events of human life itself in the cosmos.

[ 32 ] With this we have given something which our current abstract process for acquiring knowledge actually presents in life. However, a question remains, which is an important question. We can understand that something happens in people through the Word, because the Word works into the corporeality and man forms himself through words. We can also understand that through the sacrificial act something happens in the inner part of man because the sacrificial act is executed in such a way that he is not just holding back what is in his body, but that his feeling and willing takes part in the sacrificial act. As a result, an earthly event in the body is connected to a super-earthly event. This can be comprehended. In fact, quite different feelings are experienced during the sacrificial act than any during any other processes in ordinary outer activities. A dampening of the consciousness which is carried within, is numbed. If we can now say something happens within human beings, then the great question arises which we want to address in future: does this event, which is primarily an independent event, does it not take its course in outer events? Is it not also a world event? If so, then we should ask ourselves, what a person experiences as in an outer action, which is symbolic and thus somehow withdraws from the course of events in natural phenomena—do such actions in their turn somehow weave into the course of events in natural phenomena? Are they something real, outside of the human being? This is the other component of the question. As we said, we will occupy ourselves with this question in the next days.

[ 33 ] You will have already noticed in what has come in front of you, that there are four main elements of the sacrifice of mass which rest on the primordial experiences of consciousness, in the mysteries. The four principal constituents of the sacrifice of mass are namely: reading the Gospel, the Offering, the transubstantiation (transformation) and communion (unification).

[ 34 ] In everything which I present to you, my dear friends, I have no other goal than to share these things firstly with you. Everything that is to happen now will be based on the fact that, despite our communal confrontations which we know about, the tasks of our time will especially come out of a truly religious consciousness. We will speak about this further, tomorrow.

An Open Letter To Dr Rudolf Steiner

September 1921

Honourable Doctor!

After the devastating impressions of the last years which have gone through the German world, a longing has developed for religious renewal. It is true that on the whole, quite small circles have these longings which are really serious and alive. However, these are circles in which one can hope to find the power for how this can be developed. Some really strong will glows here in the youthful hearts waiting for the aim and leadership. There where one didn't dare to think about it not long ago, lectures are being held regarding the rebirth of the German nation, and one allows certain religious sounds to become agreeable even if one doesn't want to know anything about church life. In newspapers and magazines, and much more so in innumerable dialogues, there is a turn towards higher questions. The feeling that something new and great could come into the inner realm lives in a clear or less clear way in many of the best of us. As hopeful as we at times evoke this mood, at closer inspection we still discover a hopelessness, which is truly a call for mercy. Nearly superstitiously one waits in these circles for religious leaders, but one has no idea in which direction one is steered and vacillates between hope and a deep mistrust in one's own hope. Inspired, one celebrates soon the one and then the other which on the region of the inner life appears strong and safe to talk about, yet to which one has to admit shortly after, that one was disappointed and that the word of fulfilment is not mentioned again. One hopes for intuitions, does not know the at least where it should come from and which are the most believable, and confuses ever more dangerous tendencies of instinctive life with divine revelations. One regards the great personalities of the past, Fichte, Goethe, also Luther, and tries drawing inspiration from their work without really liberating contemporary solutions.

People look for substitutes in community feelings and community experiences and completely forget that each and every great soul had been given by community. There's a demand for a new "ritual" and they don't know that only a new spirit can bring a new ritual/worship, that the right spirit on its own can bring about a satisfactory form of worship from out of himself. People create all kinds of dance and play and enjoy the sure spirit of times gone by, expecting from this to create something which one can't create yourself but should create.

In this general hopelessness, which becomes ever more evident and could bring about a change of heart, Anthroposophy steps in and—multiply this hopelessness! Those who experience Anthroposophy for the first time, express much of the passionate rejection they experience. As one of those who have entered into such a circle where an understanding for your work can be found, I would here like to be the spokesman for these circles. In this way I would like to advise you to make something of the coherence and mood of these people, in order to help them understand Anthroposophic thought and actions better. As vividly as I am empathic on the one hand, how strange, yes, repulsive these people at first encounter Anthroposophy, so sure is my experience on the other hand that a fulfilment of the great, deep longing of our time can be achieved through the correct knowledge of anthroposophic accomplishments.

The people of whom, and for whom, I want to talk about here, long for a great purpose in life. They imagine this purpose of life, consciously or unconsciously, as a unified, powerful thought, as a singular soul-powerful feeing, which carries the whole of life and lift it up. Now the find Anthroposophy and discover an abundance of assertions in all kinds of fields, a mass of individual insights, big and small, which they initially don't know how to approach and towards which they feel helpless. It is as if they want to dangerously push everything away by saying 'One is necessary', which they still experience as a deep human need.

They want a clear, safe way to be indicated up high, which recommends itself to them convincingly and invitingly, a way they can walk forward to with a clear conscience and joyful courage. Now they hear of all kinds of exercises, which could and should be done, through which one laboriously acquires all kinds of abilities which do not seem essential and decisive to them—how one for example focuses your mind on the blossoming and withering of a plant in order to get an impression of the transience of life, the spirituality of a flower and so on. A confusing wealth of advice spreads itself out before them, on the one hand from the moral, known and obvious side and on the other hand, from the 'occult' strange or even questionable side. They would gladly feel free and great, striving at the pinnacle of humanity so to speak, but now they must find that some individuals with deep insights should be far ahead of them, and that they have no prospect in life to even come close to reaching them. As a result, they feel themselves pushed into a lower human class and even robbed of their human kingdom. They feel like an assassination attempt on their human dignity, even if they don't say it out loud.

Many of these people strongly feel that help can only come from a higher world. It is precisely here that Anthroposophy seems to be gradually thrown back on itself. It is for them as if people gradually want to and must push themselves higher, with unending effort and boredom while they long to be seized from above and be filled with new, powerful life forces from above.

Many of them have worked through a large part of knowledge of our time. Just from current science they have received powerfully chilling and paralysing impressions. And now also the realm of belief and the realm of knowledge needs transformation? Must their most precious and highest experiences of their inner soul realm be sacrificed for research and a descriptive 'science'? They fear that this will fall back into a dull intellectualism; they rear a falsification, even desecration of the inner life. It looks to them like a basic, dangerous underestimation of the deep distinction is presented between knowledge which appear through the senses and phenomena, and belief, the inner truth freely acknowledged. Not only a few of these people carried a strong knowledge within, that help must somehow be expected from Christ, not from churchlike Christianity, but from the correctly understood Christ himself. Yes, in individuals you find an instinctive awareness of the "living Christ" as the great helper of mankind. Now they are told that in Anthroposophy, Christ is regarded as the "regent of the sun" or that to begin with the two Jesus children in our time reckon with all kinds of extraordinary details; sincere claims which, as far as they had not found this quite repulsive initially, now in any case mean absolutely nothing and above all doesn't appear to be of help.

Some of them are also influenced by the "culture" of the last decades—the word "culture" itself has become so questionable that it can hardly be heard any more. They all look rather at everything else as a "new culture." Now they experience Anthroposophy penetrating into all outer areas, in architecture, the art of dance, which all want to renew our culture. There it appears that the power of humanity regarding religion as the main focus is pushed aside to a busyness and all kinds of outer work of vain distraction.

Above all, however, we must also remember those by whom the social question has been raised precisely by religious sentiment, becoming the mighty burning question of our time, and who can only through a new spirit, which grasps and truly fulfils humanity with a pure, strong brotherly mood make the salvation possible for the world. To them Anthroposophy seems neither simple nor warm, neither convincing nor contemporary or popular enough to somehow help humanity recover from their current main dilemma.

How much the present theological striving of anthroposophy has remained inadequate, I know all too well. During the last years I've had many hours of embarrassment about it, that this great spiritual movement has been regarded as failed by my theological colleague, in a spiritual and unfortunately also human way. In the above-mentioned mood I believe deeper reasons need to be looked for regarding this strong instinctive antipathy which anthroposophy meets in theologians, but also in other religious circles.

Let me at least indicate to ignorant readers—who can say one gets the clear impression that I am again being mistaken through Anthroposophy—that I believe I have the right to know what to expect from all these objections which I have to handle almost daily. I clearly see that the antipathies partly originate out of a false understanding of the tasks which Anthroposophy proposes, which is quite inclusive yet simultaneously humble, when many of its opponents think, partly out of an inadequate insight into the depth and character of the current spiritual crises, and out of a similar inadequate knowledge of the real possibilities for their solution. While you have up to now not according to my knowledge entered explicitly and in detail into this whole circle of concern, I believe that for many there is really a need for you to once and for all answer such questions. Particularly enlightening it could be as well, if you can express yourself regarding how you from your point of view, out of your abilities judge the actual present human being to have "religious impressions" at all. Does one not turn to soul powers which are dwindling relentlessly, when one in some old sense of "pure religious" way want to address current humanity? What exists for the future when people today still speak about a "religious experience" and impressions of God? How can powers, which make people susceptible for the higher worlds, be enlivened and in which way can they be renewed? How do you imagine an active religious proclamation in future? The main issue would be to hear what you have to say, how you see the current religious crisis from your point of view, and how Anthroposophy can and will contribute.

As always with immense gratitude and veneration.

Yours,
Friedrich Rittelmeyer.

[ 1 ] Emil Bock: I would like to open the hour of our discussion with my immediate task in asking Dr Steiner to give answers regarding the letter of Dr Rittelmeyer. This letter has indeed grown out of various wishes for guidelines regarding possible answers to those who made these objections.

[ 2 ] Rudolf Steiner: If we have to start with it, please permit me to make a few points. I ask you however, to link your remarks to those comments I will be making, because obviously some of you here can approach what Dr Rittelmeyer has formulated, from another point of view.

[ 3 ] Firstly, I think there is a feeling for many today that some kind of impact is needed in religious life, that religious life needs a kind of renewal in the most diverse areas. Dr Rittelmeyer has formulated the experience which he indicates is present with those familiar with it and I have to admit, something similar has at times confronted me. Already in relation to his first point presented here, one expects unified thoughts, a soul-powerful feeling—and this is summarised in the words "one thing is necessary"—while one finds in Anthroposophy a sum, even perhaps a very large sum of declarations regarding the world content and so for a person, who knows no sure approach, has to say: it appears to me through this experience that in many respects it has already been there for such a long time and has now contributed a lot to the fact that we in our current western civilisation have entered into a dead end.

[ 4 ] Just think how vague, how uncertain an experience would be to presume it could perhaps be more succinctly formulated in order to solve the problem. One could even make references to this in our domain. In our domain another kind of domain has arisen out of Anthroposophic foundations where something similar has happened as what is meant with this point, if I understand it correctly. This is in the domain of social thinking. Something like a unified thought has come about, I could say, in the domain of the Threefold social organism. Firstly, I only want to make characteristic comparisons. I must confess this example doesn't show anything significant when it appears publicly in such a short formulation. In life such short formulations don't prove to be really effective; having a decisive importance. I always encounter an objection for instance when someone says: You want to tell me something about the human organism, and instead of giving me a uniform idea, you present an entire physiology.—One must try and understand how the doubt-free comfortable thoughts of modern time have contributed largely to our unhappiness and inner and outer relationships, and what we are suffering from is based on the vague manner of our desire to understand everything in a summary. One has to say to oneself: precisely because such ideas arise, proves that something must change when things happen, which many expect in a vague way. In particular, when it is then said, instead of such "uniform ideas." instead of "mighty soul feelings," a number of exercises are given, some of them could be of a moral nature—and others—they are called "occult" in the letter, which makes an unusual, thoughtful impression on others—yes, it must even be said: What can one then actually expect?—One can expect that there will simply be a debate about what current humanity is missing. I'm speaking firstly in this way, how in the anthroposophical domain it is by all means necessary; we will soon address the particular religious questions given in the letter itself.

[ 5 ] You see, the moral exercises, which are mentioned here as familiar, are such that according to their wording, they certainly would be known if they were moral instructions. Firstly, according to the anthroposophic context, this is not what they are. In an anthroposophic context they are indications for the attainment of higher knowledge. It is certainly presented in such a way that it must be clear: they are indication for the attainment of a higher, supersensible knowledge. One must after all admit: If I would say a person necessarily longs for the attainment of supersensible knowledge, as opposed to if I say, that a kind of tranquillity in relation to "exulting to the skies, grieving to death" provides humanity with a moral stand, there is certainly a more radical difference between them. By me expressing something like the demand for serenity, I'm expressing something which could perhaps be quite well known, and which could initially sound like an obvious moral instruction, but which is not a discussion based on the demand for serenity. Is it said in my book 'Knowledge of the higher Worlds and its attainment' that for the purpose of morality, for the purpose of obtaining moral support it is necessary to develop serenity? No! Something quite different is said. It is said that an exercise needs to be done, it is said that this exercise needs to be repeated, in this way the exercise should be done in a certain rhythm in such a way that one could describe it as done in tranquillity. To repeat a certain exercise is quite different to a moral action. Above all you need to consider what is given in my book Knowledge of the higher Worlds and its attainment.

You see, it is actually the most natural thing that one person can say to another: you need to make an effort to search for the truth. That is a self-evident fact. Here the important thing is that within the rhythmic sequence of thoughts, thoughts are rendered to the truth, in relation of human beings to the truth. This exercise, this making-oneself-conscious-in-the-present within such a content, this repeated rhythmic making-oneself-conscious-in-the-present is what is involved. It is about applying quite a particular mood for spiritual knowledge. I want to explain this attitude to you in more detail. I will deviate from the strict formulation of the letter but maybe this will make some things much clearer.

[ 6 ] Let's see, take for example a professor, lecturer or some scholar who gives lectures. Very often it happens that he prepares his lecture, then memorises it and then delivers it. This is indeed not possible if one really allows spiritual science to live within it. If you lived within spiritual science, this would be unworthy of you. Preparation can only be that a certain inner accumulation regarding the subject matter comes about. As a result of this inner assembly you do indeed step—even though you have a been connecting with the subject matter a thousand times—each time again with a new approach regarding the subject matter, so that you gradually grasp it clearly and speak out of the direct observation of it once again. You see, when you learn about something, for example a chapter in geography—good, you learn it, you have it, and then you retain in your thoughts. This doesn't happen in spiritual science at all if it is to be alive. Whoever wants to be a spiritual scientist in reality, must just again and again allow the most elementary things to draw through the soul. What I have written for example in my book Theosophy doesn't have a conclusive meaning. What it contains, I had to repeatedly allow to be drawn through my soul for it to have meaning. It can't be said: The book Theosophy is there, I know its contents.—It would, on the basis of spiritual science, be the same if one would say: I don't believe that there is a person who could say: I have eaten for 8 days so now I don't need to repeat it.—Every day we sit down to eat and do the same thing. Why? Because it is Life, it is not something which can be merely stored in thought form. The life in spiritual science is Life, and it declines if it is not ever and again lived through. This is what needs to be considered.

[ 7 ] If you have through spiritual science approached life you would have become acquainted with the possibility for instance, that you can help those who have passed through the gate of death, by giving them a kind of meditative content based on the spiritual world which they have entered through the gate of death. This doesn't mean that one, for example, reads something to them once and now recon: now they understand it—no, it involves repeating it ever and again, this living-yourself-into the content, each time, as something new. This is far too seldom respected. People are used to observe everything as theory. Spiritual science is no theory, it is Life; but if one treats it by thinking one can learn it, like you learn about other things, then you make it into a theory. Obviously one can make it into a theory but then if you take it up this way, it is only a theory. Every serious spiritual scientist knows that one must live in it; the exercises are not exhausted by knowing their contents.

[ 8 ] These are things which have disappeared from Western consciousness. What this Western consciousness is, shows also in other things. People have come to me who say: There's something awful about the Buddha speeches, they contain mere repetitions; one should surely produce a publication with only the contents of the speeches and leave out the repetitions.—Yet, no one really understands the Buddha-speeches who can make such a statement because the essence of the Buddha speeches depend upon following the rhythmic sequence in very small slots, always repeating the same one. This is an oriental method which does not coincide with our work here and in order to clarify this, I will make some comments.

[ 9 ] Continuing with the letter, there is further mentioned about the exercises, that some are strange and questionable. Yes, we must look at the kind of judgement or the basis upon which this assessment is made today. If one speaks about the desire present today for something new, then one must acquaint oneself with why such a desire exists; and what exists must really be characterised. I could, in order to make myself clear, perhaps bring to mind the book of Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West. Spengler followed up with a small brochure entitled Pessimism? I will quote a sentence from Pessimism. He says: It is not important to recognise truth, but to make facts matter.—Now a discussion follows regarding this statement, regarding what he understands as "truth" and as "facts". In one place he says: "Truths are the greats of thought ... what stands in a dissertation is truth, that a candidate fails his dissertation is a fact."—Now one must imagine that with such a sentence something must somehow be said, but it is complete nonsense. Yet people read over something like this, they take it all in, which says something, and they don't notice anything strange and consider it as something outlandish. One can't possibly have a discussion about such a statement, it is total nonsense. Something like this is not even discussed when it is such nonsense; you don't even notice it. It can't fail that in a time in which such a judgment prevails, many strange and questionable things are found. However, we can imagine where we have actually arrived—in any case in another connection than meant by Spengler. We graduate today, so to say without a fuss, up to the highest levels of our study; here in our knowledge itself there are actually no disasters or turning points. You could say that a disaster happens when a student fails, but not knowledge itself. This involvement of the whole person, so that you are able to live with a problem in such an inner way as you have any other outer experience, is something which is rarely found. When you have written a book or if you are a private tutor you may feel very satisfied, but you don't experience disasters or turning points because of the material. This is something which has, one could say, spread over the entire scientific life.

[ 10 ] It is necessary that we come to live within the spirit once again, that the spirit becomes a reality in whose processes we participate. This is no contradiction against tranquility. Precisely though cultivating tranquility you acquire the right way to participate more strongly and concretely towards what happens objectively; finally, it is no contradiction against tranquility when one observes all the horror of a volcanic eruption or some similar events this way.

[ 11 ] I would like to say that in our modern time there is hardly any receptivity necessary for the particular way to spiritual science, simply the entire way of thinking, the quite different way of experiencing truth, is first necessary. You see, when someone says: Yes, we don't need thinking, we don't need intellectualism, we need feelings!—it is because he doesn't get the feeling that he's being moved inwardly; what should be given is what is lacking.

[ 12 ] You see, is it really enough today, to adhere to ancient religious rules? When one gives a single lecture—and I speak from experience—when one gives a single lecture, let's say, from certain details regarding the social question, then there are many listeners who could say or write: Sure, this is all possible but in this lecture the name of Christ is not mentioned even once.—Yes, my dear friends, there is still a divine commandment which says: You should not pronounce the name of God in vain—and there is the commandment: You should not continuously say, God, God. It can be something very Christian, no not continuously say the name of Christ; perhaps it is even Christian for this reason, because the name of Christ is not misused. It is not through the use of Christ's name in every third line that something becomes Christian.

[ 13 ] All these things should stop in the old thinking's comfortable way. Those who don't drop this comfortable thinking—they would also have the vague feeling that something must change—they can't be informed about the demands of the time because everything which exists in the demands of the time is something which they are unable to experience; they can't, because they are merely taught that these demands must be experienced basically as they have always been, and not commit to actually moving to solutions which must be investigated to really meet the demands of the time. Often the enormous difference between theoretical thought and immersed-in-spirit-living, is not considered. However, already during the first step into spiritual science there must be a living-within-the-spirit. I'm not saying you need to be clairvoyant or something of the kind, but that there needs to be a living-in-spirit; there must be another form of experience of truth, of content, than what one is accustomed to these days.

[ 14 ] Another objection which Dr Rittelmeyer expressed took me quite by surprise, I must admit, but this is the way it's going to happen. The objection is that people feel insulted when, instead of something being pointed out as within them, they are made aware of what individuals perhaps know, what individuals have seen. People feel, they expressed it as "their human kingdoms having been stolen", they had felt great and now they must feel small.—Yes, I must admit, this objection surprised me because I don't really understand its content. Isn't it true, what is said consequently in the letter, that people expect something to happen from above, but now they feel thrown back on to themselves, on to exercises they need to do, on to efforts needed to understand something.—I initially feel an extraordinary contradiction between both these allegations. Secondly, I must add this: my whole life I have been—and it has been already quite long—extremely glad if a truth appears somewhere, and I actually find it disturbing when someone rejects the truth, because it has not grown out of their own soil. This is quite an egotistical subjective judgment, but we are stuck in such egotistical subjective judgments, and as a result we need a renewal of thinking in our current time, because it exists.

[ 15 ] Here we have a bunch of judgements which indicates how necessary it is that a shift takes place. If these judgemental directions, which have been created by our time, continue to exist, then we will get nowhere. It is already necessary to say, even though it may sound rough, it is above all necessary to mention that the objectors must think about their objections, to what a degree they should not be making them, in order for the entry of the renewal not to be disturbed by the most ancient judgments. This is what has to be said above all things.

[ 16 ] Another objection which is of course often made is that Anthroposophy appears in the form of a science and the inference is made that the realm of belief and the realm of knowledge must metamorphose. Actually, the objection depends, when it is made, on the inexact understanding of the context in Anthroposophy. In Anthroposophy the claim is never made that a belief must be transformed into knowledge or something similar, but in Anthroposophy this first positive element appears: it is shown that through knowledge not only can one have something in the sensory world of appearance, but also in the spiritual world. The question can at least be: Are the methods which are applied directed to the real, safe and equivalent?—This can then be examined and re-examined. When the issue is expressed in a way of objecting to imagination, objecting to inspiration and so on, then there is nothing to be discussed. However, no judgment can be made when one says: I feel uncomfortable if something is to be known about it.—It isn't important if something is unpleasant, but it is important that a certain method regarding the super-sensory can be known, just as in the sensory world something can be known. What can be known can't be judged in a way so that one can say the objects of faith were based on the free recognition of inner truths because Anthroposophy is a knowledge forced through "hallucination and proof."—Anthroposophy is just a science and is established as a science, it can't get involved with such an objection because it is a science. One could have the same objection against mathematics; one could say it would be detestable if mathematical truths were actual truths. Such an objection can't actually be made, because it is basically pointless.

[ 17 ] An objection which I have heard with the most diverse nuances, is this, that something is expected, which could be something shocking, which you accept and get away with by listening to such things as "Christ is the ruler of the sun" or the issue about the "Two Jesus children." which are equally indifferent to you.

My dear friends, I must admit I don't really understand how these things can be indifferent, when they are understood. The unbelievably important question of the present day is: How can the realm of morality be founded in the realm of natural necessities? We live today on the one side within a scientifically acknowledged realm of natural necessities and one allows that within this realm of necessities, hypotheses are made which are not supported by direct observation. One takes for instance the example of the development of the earth according to geology and so on, spanning only a certain time in history and then according to these impressions arrive at the origin of the earth as coming out of the ancient mists, or like the modified hypotheses in the sense of the Kant-Laplace theories which are no more valid these days; then out of this comes the imagining of the earth's origin and out of the second main statement of the mechanical heat theory, the theory of entropy, the imagining how everything is heading for death through heat (Wärmetod). Who constructs this hypothesis regarding the earth's origin and evolution must say to himself—because according to the scientific point of view on which it is based, it can't be assumed otherwise—that this ancient mist was there as the sovereign entity with laws of aerodynamics and laws of aerostatics, and out of this the laws of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics were created, and then luckily such conditions arose through which connections were created as we find in the simplest cells, the amoebas, and then all that turned into complicated organisms, also humans, and in humans moral ideals rose through which human worth could be felt.

[ 18 ] What would we be as humans if we hadn't had our moral ideals, and if through these moral ideals we didn't, through the acceptance of a divine world order in the entire global context, become ennobled? It is useless to just let it go; to say we will separate the realm of the certainty of faith which we have in moral ideals, from what we have as the natural order. Such a separation can only happen with those who aren't really inwardly serious about what they see presented in the natural order.

[ 19 ] My dear friends, I once became acquainted with someone who at the time was involved with the great problem of death in the world, explored from Haeckel's point of view. With an earnest attitude, an inner enthusiasm to understand such a point of view, he approached this view which is quite honestly based on the foundation of science. What did he have to say about moral-religious ideals? He said: "Those are religious foam bubbles rising in human life, it is something people put in front of themselves, it is something on which the human race lives, from which they take their dignity; but one day the great graveyard of the heat death will arrive, and then all outer forms of organisms, everything which appeared as moral-religious foam bubbles will be buried, and in the world's space a sloop will be circling in some curve that can be said to be something which people once created according to mechanistic or dynamic laws, these people allowed bubbles to rise and from this the people derived their worth; and all of that has turned out to be a cosmic cemetery."

[ 20 ] You see, out of this person's honesty, because he couldn't unhook himself from it, he returned to the blissful womb of the Catholic Church for some years. This is only one example out of many.

[ 21 ] This abyss has opened up between the moral-religious world order and the scientific-mechanic world order. There are only a few people capable of enough sensitivity, who doesn't tolerate the entire world view regarding the earth's origin or demise according to science. For example, Herman Grimm said a rotting and decaying carcass bone would be an appetizing piece compared to what the Kant-Laplace theory made of the earth.—What Herman Grimm added is true, future generations of scholars will be able to make astute treatises to explain the nonsense which the Kant-Laplace theory introduced into people's heads, to their detriment.

[ 22 ] My dear friends, if with your deepest insight you want to look at what such a point of view has caused for the doom of the human soul, starting in the lowest classes in school, then in order to do what needs to be done today, you must search much deeper than is normally done. You can't get stuck half way and say: We must withdraw religious content from the general view of the world, we must have our own religious certainty and beside it, science may exist.—For then, at most, man's moral-religious view of the world will help him return to the bosom of the blessed Roman Catholic Church to numb himself if he still comes under such an anesthetic.

[ 23 ] In the course of evolution, we have reached the point where we no longer know that the spiritual lives in all-natural laws, that for example what happens within man himself, where there is actually a hearth within him, is accomplished outside in nature. My dear friends, the people from the 19th century quite correctly were strongly affected by for example what Julius Robert Mayer expressed as a law of conservation of energy and of matter. (Erhaltungssatz der Kraft.) It has really come to the fore that the law of the conservation of power and of matter in the 19th century dominates our physics today. However, this is valid for outer nature only and there only within certain boundaries which become more limited as time goes by; but in terms of time it doesn't apply to human beings. It is simply true that within man there is a hearth where all material things which he takes into himself, is transformed into nothing, where matter is destroyed, matter is dissolved. By letting our pure thoughts be assimilated by our etheric body and letting these thoughts work on our physical body through the etheric, matter is destroyed in our physical body. (During the next explanation drawings were made on the blackboard. The originals are no longer available.)

I'm sketching diagrammatically, it is intensively spread over the entire human being, I draw it in such a way as if it is only a part. This place in a person where matter becomes destroyed is at the same time the place where matter is created again, when morality, when religious perceptions glows through us. What is created here simply by our perceptions through moral and religious ideals, this is like a seed for future worlds. If the material world perishes, when the material world has been destroyed in the heat death then this earth will be transformed into another world body, and this body of a world will be made from the moral ideals created into material forms. Because our science is not capable of penetrating deeply enough into matter, it is not capable of grasping the thought that matter itself is an abstraction. We may speak about the thermal death of the earth, but at the same time we have to speak of what is cast off from plants, in wilting and drying out, and about the seed surviving into the next year; even as we can speak in relation to the heat death, we can speak about the seed which remains to us and survives the world death.

[ 24 ] There is a sphere where scientific truths end; mere scientific truths in the sense of today, where moral ideals end being bubbles of foam, when the earth will expire in the heat death. There is an accessible region for man, where moral ideals are received when physical matter is destroyed, a sphere where the Word becomes a natural scientific truth: "Heaven and Earth will pass away but My words will not pass away!"—There is a sphere where the Bible becomes science; and before this—it needs to be acknowledged in the background of today's aspirations—no healing can occur, before we have the opportunity to advance to a science, not a one-sided science like today, nor one which is a one-sided abstract spiritual science.

[ 25 ] Today the term "spiritual science" is applied only to the science of ideas. For Anthroposophy spiritual science is not only what can be grasped on the other side of materiality, but it is something whose processes penetrate matter.

[ 26 ] With results of this research it is then possible, certainly by applying diligent spiritual scientific methods, to consider everything regarding the relationship between the sun and Christ. These things must be considered in the right light. With a certain authority we have during the course of the last three centuries come to see something regarding the stars, sun and moon, which can be calculated. What has brought us misfortune is that we only calculate. We need to once again observe that by looking at the arithmetic of the world's structure, we are in fact investigating a corpse. We need to learn to investigate the spirit of the cosmic whole. Everything depends on this. We won't find the spirit, if we allow matter to violate us in such a way that it presents itself in the universe as something which can only be calculated, or at most be judged according to basic mechanical laws. For this reason, it can already be said that it depends entirely on the individual human being who says: "For me it is not important that the Christ is the ruler of the sun".—This sentence must be understood in the correct way: "For me it is a matter of indifference".

[ 27 ] My dear friends, I've heard a few people say they are indifferent to what the Christ has to do with the sun, but they were not indifferent when their taxes increase by fifty percent. Yet it is more necessary for the overall salvation of mankind that Christ and the sun are seen to be related than the rising tax of fifty percent is.

[ 28 ] How we think in detail about the two Jesus children may be discussed again. However, what would one say to an objection which claims we should practice something that, yes, I don't know what it is, and then the issue about the two Jesus children is put on the table, which leaves us indifferent. I open the Gospel and read a great deal which is presented there, similar to the issue about the two Jesus children mentioned in Anthroposophy. Then again, you don't say: We want religion, but we are quite indifferent whether Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary or something similar, every single Gospel truth leaves us completely indifferent.—I don't know to what else you don't care about. One doesn't want to enter into something which is of no interest to you, but an objection is not the same, it is definitely not.

[ 29 ] Now I would still like to enter into point eight which I've written down for myself, because time is marching on. It is said that a certain progress is expected in people's internalizing; yet through the way culture has been created, people have come to hate culture, they don't want to hear anything more about culture, and now (with Anthroposophy) something arrives which doesn't only speak about internalization, but even what strives to have an effect on architecture and the art of movement.

[ 30 ] Yes, my dear friends, if you take life seriously you won't want anything other than what appears in Anthroposophy, what appears to you as spiritual foundations penetrating everything in outer life. I'm still talking about Anthroposophy; we will still touch on what religion has to say about it. That's just the trouble, we are no longer in the position to bring what we experience in the spiritual into our outer life, and finally this happens just in those areas where it is the most noticeable. Just imagine you had said to a Greek that he couldn't express his spiritual experiences in outer life. Just as the Greek thought about his Apollo, as he thought about Zeus, he created his Zeus temple accordingly, his colonnaded temple. We no longer create, we imitate what is old; we don't have the possibility of taking those areas relating to the spirit and also create an external physiognomy of life. The only thing we can create is a department store. The department store is the grandiose creation of the materialistic spirit of the present day. However, if we wanted a home for the spirit and turn to a builder, then he would build it in a Romantic, Gothic or some or other style, and we would have no feeling, when we stand there within the walls, of anything being expressed of what we had inwardly lived through spiritually.

[ 31 ] You see, when the thought was created—not through me but through others—to build a house for Anthroposophy, not for an instant would an idea exist to approach a builder and let him erect a Renaissance or Baroque building and then to move in there, but the idea could come about in the following way. In this building this and that would be spoken about and the forms which would be visible all around should say exactly the same as what is being spoken within it. If this is not only theoretical but life, if the forms are creative, then they are presented—as living—in the world. It is impossible to measure what is created here as a matter of course in comparison with the dishonest cultural activity of the times which has brought us into all this trouble.

[ 32 ] This is what I wanted to present primarily, my dear friends. There are too many questions to deal with in one stroke; I will continue with them tomorrow. I've limited myself today by entering into what has been raised against Anthroposophy in general. I will however expand on what in particular will be raised against the service which Anthroposophy will bring towards religious renewal. I would like to stress the following: if somehow an idea develops that it equally represents an existing religious confession, or a creed, which one thinks to justify only through Anthroposophy as its basis, then you do Anthroposophy a wrong because it has never claimed to be a religious education nor is it a religion or wants to establish a religion. This Anthroposophy will not do. Anthroposophy follows impulses to knowledge, goals to knowledge; and whoever says that Anthroposophy is not a religion because it doesn't have the characteristics of religion—say something which Anthroposophy must say about itself from the outset. You can't accuse someone of being something he doesn't even want to be! The objections which are actually made from a religious side, appear to me as if, let's say, someone is active in a field and is accused of not doing what he could in another field.

The objections raised by Dr Rittelmeyer, as far as I have taken into account, certainly involve the relationship people have to Anthroposophy. For this reason, I approached it from this side and will enter into it from the religious side, tomorrow.