The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the two lectures following the performance of the later Walpurgis-night scene, from the second part of Faust, I hoped to evoke the feeling that, in the whole of his inner life, Goethe was in reality on the path to the supersensible world. I wanted you to feel that he succeeded, as perhaps no other artist, no other poet, has ever done, in developing an artistic creation out of this spiritual life, so that in this creation neither the art not the wisdom falls short and, in its own place, each of the spheres—of striving and wisdom—achieves harmonic expression.

I should not like you to think that in what has been said I have been wishing to give an interpretation of this poem; that was not at all my aim. For in this sphere I consider interpretation to be utterly useless. All that was attempted in these studies was to create the possibility for you to absorb and enjoy a poem, a work of art, in the same element in which it was created. Such studies should simply teach the language, as it were, the spiritual language, in which such a work is written, and should not expound or interpret, for as a rule that too often results in misconstruction and misinterpretation.

Now, if we keep to this mood in the matter, the following may perhaps be of use. You see, there are two fundamental feelings at the base of all striving for knowledge, of every kind of striving towards spiritual experience. One of these feelings comes from man having to think, having to form ideas, as he lives his life between birth and death in the physical body. I think you will agree that we should not be complete human beings, were we not to think about things and about ourselves. Then, too, if we wish to make our lives fuller in the physical body, between birth and death, we have not only to think but also to will. And feeling lies midway between thinking and willing; sometimes it partakes more of thinking and forming ideas, sometimes more of willing. Hence, for the purpose of our proposed study, we may ignore feeling, and consider the one pole of forming ideas, thinking, and then turn to the other pole of human activity, the willing. Man is a thinking and a willing being. But there are special features about this thinking and willing. The trivially-minded, average man looks upon what can be attained as the attainment of a goal if, on the one hand, he thinks as clearly and forcibly as possible, in his own opinion, at least, and if he wills in accordance with his needs. What distinguishes the man of learning who is fundamentally honest, is that he finally admits, when he tries to advance on the path of thinking, that with his thinking in the physical body he still only goes a certain distance towards his goal.

With this thinking, my dear friends, it is exactly as if a man were striving towards a goal; he cannot see it though knowing in what direction it lies. He wants to hasten towards it, but although he knows where the goal must be, it is wrapped in darkness. He imagines it will only become clear when he reaches it. And while he is feeling that he is still nowhere near the goal but a considerable distance from it, some being seems to seize from from behind, and to stop him going farther. And he says: Thinking, the forming of ideas, drives me in a certain direction, then I am stopped; were I to pursue the path of thought in this direction, I should never be able to reach the goal thinking itself has indicated.—Thus he comes to one of the boundaries to which he is by nature subject in the life between birth and death. And it may be said that whoever has never experienced the suffering and blows of fate arising from the goal of thought, has certainly no very deep cognitional life. If, by the inner constitution of his soul, a man can fancy he is able to reach the goal of thought by thinking, he is doomed to superficiality. We can be preserved from superficiality only when by trying to think as deeply and clearly as possible, we begin to feel harassed by the hindrances to thought. This feeling of being frustrated in thought is a profound human experience, without which we cannot pass beyond superficiality into a really deep comprehension of life.

And this is not the only boundary set to the human being's full experience between birth and death; the other is encountered where the will is unfolded. This is the sphere in which there germinate men's desires arising out of the life of instinct. Man is driven to willing in the crudest sense through hunger and thirst and other instincts; and there is then a rising scale from instinct up to the purest spiritual ideals. In all these impulses, from grossest instincts up to spiritual ideals, willing is deployed. But now, if we are to try and establish ourselves in life with our will that passes over into action, we again come to a boundary. Fundamentally, Goethe's aim in Faust was to establish Faust in life by means of his will, so that he should be able to experience all that makes life happy, all that shatters life, all that gives freedom and all that is sinful. And if we try to take our stand in life with the will that passes over into action, the will translated into deed, we again find ourselves up against a boundary. But now it is a different feeling that arises. It is not so much that in our thinking we are stopped and hindered from reaching our goal, but rather that, while we are willing, we are seized upon, and our willing goes on no longer in accordance with our own wishes. In the act of willing one is snatched away. Someone else arises in our willing, who carries us off.

This then is the second feeling which, when experienced by man, leads him out of superficiality into a profound conception of life. Self-satisfied philistines, it is true, are of the opinion that a man reaches his goal by sufficiently developing his thinking and willing. But it is on these paths of complacency and self-satisfaction that the superficiality of life lies. There does not lie here what makes it possible in life's testing, after suitable probation and the crossing of an abyss, to enter another world, a world that cannot be lived through with the consciousness developed in the life between birth and death. A man is tested when, with suitable intensity, he realises in his soul the two boundary lines already referred to. Men must understand precisely from what Goethe has given, that it is not merely the bliss of endeavor—often imaginary and based on pure illusion—that can be experienced, but rather what leads a man to his goal over all hindrances, disappointments and disillusions. And whoever strives to avoid disillusionment, and refuses to transform, to metamorphose, the whole human being in certain moments of life, cannot press forward to knowledge of man, to the understanding of man.

We need not realise, my dear friends, that in this connection the Christ-permeated conception of the world and of life must, in the near future, experience a significant change. Hitherto, Christianity through the way it has developed in the different religious denominations is, usually, only at its initial stage. If we want to describe this development, we might say that it has created the feeling in man that Christ did once exist. And even this feeling that Christ once existed has been lost again in the materialistic research of the nineteenth century. What Christ brought into the world, Christ's connection with the striving of the human soul, into all this life will first pour in future through the researches of Spiritual Science, and through a spiritual kind of cosmic feeling—a supersensible experience. This will be seen if, to begin with, in this intellectual age, the majority of mankind can only have the experience in Imaginations, in imaginative pictures.

But these two basic feelings of which I have just spoken as arising from the two boundaries of self-knowledge and self-comprehension, these two feelings must find a crossing-point from a passive to an active Christianity. Just think how, for many people in the past, Christ has been nothing more than a helper in straits where a man is unable to help himself. Think of the strange way in which the Roman Catholic Church took on, at a certain time, the forgiveness of sins; anyone might sin as much as he liked, provided he repented and did due penance afterwards, he was forgiven. In short, Christ was there to help in time of need, to make good what men as a whole had no intention themselves of making good. And then look at the other, more Protestant error, where a man remains passive too, arranging his worldly life, his worldly activities, to suit himself, and then perhaps expecting that merely by belief in Christ, by a passive feeling of being united with Christ, he will be saved. This twofold passive relation to Christ belongs, and must belong, to the past. And what is to take its place must be a relation to Christ that is an active force, a going to meet Him, so that Christ does not do for a man what the man does not want to do, but gives him power through His being to do it himself. An active Christianity—or rather a Christianity that comes to activity—is what must take the place of passive Christianity in which actually (forgive the trivial mode of expression) a man does what he pleases on the physical plane, making God into a kindly friend who pardons everything if only man turns to Him at the right moment.

This my dear friends, will at the same time mark the dividing line between the age which must now belong to the past, the age that has led to so terrible a human catastrophe, and the age that must come. It is only when this coming age has passed over from a Christianity that is passive to one that is active, that it will be qualified to heal those evils that have already shown themselves and will continue to do so increasingly so long as the principles of the past prevail. These evils are rooted deep in human hearts and souls; and they must be healed if earth-evolution is to proceed.

The two basic feelings of the boundaries to thinking and willing may also be described by saying: The one boundary makes it clear that a man cannot arrive at knowledge of his own nature. As human beings we are so constituted that we cannot, on the one hand, arrive at our own human nature, cannot with our thinking reach ourselves. In willing we do this, for willing actually proceeds form ourselves; in willing we lose ourselves; but here another seizes us—another cosmic being is formed simply according to the principle of this duality. He is a dual being, not a monad, but a dual being. The one member of this twofold being cannot reach itself, the other loses itself.

Hence man is never correctly represented when shown as a mere monad, but only when an effort is made to show him as standing midway between being unable to reach himself, and losing himself. And when it is possible for men to feel both at the same time with all intensity, then he feels himself rightly as a man on earth. When he feels a kind of oscillation between the two, then he feels himself man on earth. In spite of this oscillation, what must be arrived at is repose of being. This repose of being is attained in the physical sphere by the pendulum, the balance; in the spiritual, moral sphere, man must be able to attain the condition of repose reached by the balance and the pendulum. He must not aspire to a position of absolute rest; that would make him indolent and corrupt. He should strive for the state of repose midway between the beats, midway between the not-reaching and the losing himself.

In order to develop these feelings correctly it is essential that other feelings be added concerning life and reality.

You know, my dear friends, I have often called your attention to the one-sided way in which evolution is understood today. Think how the whole of evolution is now conceived as if what comes after were always the result of what went before. Actually, the man of today thinks of the successive stages of evolution almost like a set of cardboard boxes fitting into one another. And then, as for development, one box represents the human being between birth and the seventh year; then the second is taken out, and that is the human being from seven to fourteen; the third from fourteen to one-and twenty, and so on—one always coming out of another. To modern man the most acceptable idea is evolutionary advance in a straight line.

This is really at the bottom of all the grotesque notions that are learnt at school nowadays, notions which in future will be regarded as scientific lunacy of the enlighted period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To imagine thus that there was once a nebular condition (the Kant-Laplace theory) and that then, one after another, cardboard box out of cardboard box, the successive stages always proceeded out of the earlier—this is an abnormal idea of present-day science. For things are not like that. Just think how evolution in the individual man between birth and death appears, to even a moderately unprejudiced observation! The actual limit of the first period in life is the change of teeth, as we know—the cutting of the second teeth. I have often drawn attention to this. How what is this second cutting of teeth at about the seventh year, at the close of the first life-period? It is a consolidation, a hardening, of the human being, when a hardening process takes place in men. It is like a drawing together of all the life-forces, so that eventually the densest, most mineralised part, the second teeth, can appear. It is a real concentration and densification of all the forces of life.

The second period in life ends at puberty. And the case here is exactly the reverse. Here there is no concentration of life-forces but, on the contrary, a rarefication of them all, a dispersal, an overflowing. An opposite condition pulses in the organism. And then again, only in a more refined way, in the twenty-first year when the third life-period ends, consolidation takes place in man, the forces of life are once more drawn together. With the twenty-eighth year there is again expansion. The twenty-first year has more to do with the placing of what is within man,the twenty-eighth more with his attitude to the whole wide universe. Approximately at the thirty-fifth year there is again a kind of contraction. That is the middle life—the thirty-fifth year.

Thus, evolution does not go in a straight line but, rather, in waves: contraction, hardening; softening, expansion. That is essentially the life of man as a whole. By being born here in the physical world, we contract into our individual skins; while we are living our life between death and a new birth, we are increasingly expanding.

What follows from all this, my dear friends? It follows that the idea of evolution going in a straight line is of no help at all; it leads mankind astray, and we must reject it. All evolution proceeds rhythmically; all evolution goes with the rise and fall of waves—expanding, contracting.

Contraction, expansion. Goethe sensed this in its elementary stages. Read his Metamorphosis of Plants; read his poem The Metamorphosis of Plants, and you will see how he follows the particular formation from foliage leaf to foliage leaf, then to petal, stamen, on to pistil; how he describes it as a continuous expansion, contraction, not only in external forms, the saps also expand with their forces and again contract—expand, concentrate; expand, concentrate. When in the eighties of the last century I wrote my first introduction to Goethe's scientific works, I tried to reconstruct his archetypal plant, tried to bring into a picture this expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction—on and on right up to the blossom. No one can really understand life who does not picture it in rhythm, as a progressive rhythmic process. It must be repeatedly emphasised that to imagine evolution as proceeding in a straight line does not help us to a true understanding of life.

The same applies to the understanding of man's historical life. In the most recent number of the periodical Das Reich (October 1918) where I dealt with Lucifer and Ahriman in life, I pointed out how luciferic and ahrimanic periods alternate rhythmically in historic evolution. Life never proceeds in a straight line; it goes in waves. But while this is so, it is associated also with an external change. And only by looking clear-sightedly into these relations can we arrive at a deeper comprehension of life. Those who think of evolution as proceeding in a straight line, say: First there existed the most undeveloped animals, then more and more perfect ones, up to the apes, and out of these developed man.—If we apply this to what is moral—I have often called your attention to this—if we extend this further, it follows that the genuine, thorough-going Darwinian says: We already see in the human kindliness, and so on. This again is a worthless idea, for it takes no account at all of the rhythm of life. According to this idea evolution goes on in a straight line, one cardboard box coming out of another. In reality the matter is like this. Imagine the most highly developed animals with their proclivities further developed in a straight line—this way you do not arrive at man, you would never come to man. But the more highly developed animals would evolve those very qualities you find attractive in the animal kingdom, in a most unattractive way. What you admire in animals as companionableness, as incipient good-will and social behaviour, when further developed turns to its rhythmic opposite—to the principle of evil. Mad man developed according to Haeckel's idea, then, my dear friends, there would have evolved from the anthropoid apes a human society inevitably destined to develop the war of all against all. For in all these aptitudes, good as they may be in animals, there lies the further evolutionary impulse to clash together in violent and most bloody conflict. That is rhythm, a wave-like rise and fall, and no one finds what is hidden in nature who does not see the possibilities of evolution in rhythm. To look only on the outside of events can never teach us to realise what in reality is there. Man was able to develop only because, in the higher animals, their evolutionary possibilities did not come to anything, for these were met by another wave of cosmic becoming which subdued the tendency to evil, in a way overcame it, by what men were meant to be in the very beginning. So that we have to picture it thus: The animal kingdom rises to a certain height; then comes the other wave to meet it, and this deadens the evil development.

My dear friends, reincarnation can also be regarded from the moral point of view. What would man have become had he just been born, over and over again on the physical plane, and being thus born physically on the physical plane, he had not been met by all that is constantly being taken up into the spiritual world and again sent down; were man not thus ensouled after birth then he would live always at war on earth. They would only with to live in conflict and would develop the most terrible fighting instincts. These fighting instincts rest on the foundation of the human soul; they are rooted in the human organism. But they are paralysed, if I may so express it, by what comes from above out of the supersensible, from those human beings who are constantly taken up into the spiritual world. This is expressed also in the outward form, my dear friends. It is altogether grotesque for those with inner sight when the human head is represented as having gradually evolved from the animal head. It is indeed complete nonsense. The truth is that, were the animal head to develop further, a fearsome monster would emerge in what, in the present incarnation, you evolve out of the lower part of your body. Were that alone to form the head, were it to form the head out of itself, the result would be a real abortion of a head—a horrible animal-monster. For that is where the possibility of such a monstrosity lies. Only because the spiritual comes from above and, as it were, washes up against it, is the human head able to arise. It springs from the relationship of two forces, the one pressing upward from the body, the other coming to meet it from the cosmos. This human head is constructed in a state of equilibrium; and it is because of its equilibrium that we are not able to deal freely with what we bring with us from the spiritual world. We slip into our physical head and cannot there clearly express what we actually are, when we hurry into existence through birth. If we could think as we did before birth, we should not think a Homunculus, we should think a man, a Homo.

You remember in my Christmas lecture at Basle (December 22, 1918) not long ago, I mentioned in passing that, before his birth, Nikolaus von der Flüe saw scenes that he lived through as a man after his birth. But when a man is born, and does not overcome being asleep in his cognition—that is, when he cannot develop waking existence outside his body, but thinks only with his body—then he never thinks a man but only a Homunculus. A man never reaches the real man by seeking to enter into himself through the head. It is really a fact thgat he seeks to enter in but is held back; somewhere in the middle of man there exists what his is unable to reach. This is within man himself, yet he remains Homunculus and does not come to Homo.

Actually were we in possession of every technical resource, we should put into the phial that represents Homunculus on the stage, only a horrible little monstrosity, small, and therefore not unattractive; and this is really what would come into being were it left to the human body alone, out of itself, to produce something. There would come forth a sort of animal that nevertheless would be no animal but a human abortion; something on the way to becoming human yet not quite succeeding. Neither do we succeed if we do not make the approach by way of this path to becoming men, this path that does not reach man. We do not then succeed for we do not thus enter inside ourselves.

And again, if man grasps himself through his will, he is immediately seized upon by another being. Then he loses himself, then all kinds of strange motives and impulses surge up into his willing. Only when a man endeavours to bring the inner forces into equilibrium does he succeed in becoming complete man.

Now, my dear friends, with what I have said compare three different passages in the second part of Goethe's Faust that you can now have the opportunity on witnessing. Think of the sublime moment when Faust appears before Manto. Goethe is trying here to shed over the whole incident the inner repose of the human soul called forth by experiencing equilibrium. Faust would like, on the one hand, to avoid the sentimentality of the abstract mystic, and one of his last speeches is “O, could I from my path all magic ban”. He did not want external magic, he wanted to find the inner path to the supersensible world. He is near it, and then again far from it. As I explained yesterday Goethe is perfectly honest when Faust is standing before Manto. But Faust, my dear friends, does not hold to this abstract repose; he is tossed from pillar to post. Hence from the one side he is continually thrown to the opposite, where man loses himself through the will. Compare all this with what happens to Faust in the scenes where he is developing his life with Mephistopheles. There you have always the Faust of will, who, however is continually losing himself by his impulses being seized by Mephistopheles. This is where a man goes astray in his willing, where he will lose himself; here you have all the dangers that threaten man's moral impulses. And this is expressed with tremendous depth in Goethe's Faust.

Then take the moment when Mephistopheles joins the Phorkyads, when he himself takes on the form of a Phorkyad, and in all his ugliness goes as far as admitting it. Previously he was lying, but when the Phorkyads surround him he is obliged to admit his ugliness. Read the speech of the Phorkyads again; they too acknowledge their ugliness, and are in a certain way honest in their ugliness. In this moment you have a contrast to that sacred and sublime moment when Faust stands before Manto. What makes us lose ourselves in motives of will is clearly seen when Mephistopheles appears for the last time in the Classical Walpurgis-Night. Faust appears for the last time visibly, in the external drama, precisely in this scene with Manto—Mephistopheles in the scene with the Phorkyads. Goethe wished to indicate from the depths of his profound experience that, fundamentally, what makes us lose ourselves in the motives of will can only be set right if we not merely abhor it morally, but also experience it as something offending our taste. This was at the root of Schiller's feeling too, when he placed what is moral in such close connection with the aesthetic in his Aesthetic Letters.

This is just what is so distressing, my dear friends, that in the recent development of mankind culture has been brought to such a high pitch as, for instance, we see in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, and this has all been forgotten. Imagine how Schiller believed that in these letters, written in the first place to the Duke of Augustonburg, he had brought about a deed of political significance. Whoever grasps the following two facts in their true depth learns much concerning the evolution of mankind. First he learns that Schiller's Aesthetic Letters were the outcome of his conception of Goethe's urge towards becoming; and, secondly, that this could be forgotten, that this forgetting has largely contributed to the present human catastrophe. Those who keep these two facts before them indeed learn much about the evolution of humanity.

And, from the point of view of drama, how great is the moment when in the terrible scene where Mephistopheles is among the Phorkyads we are shown how what is morally impermissible lives in man like a feeling that is aesthetically offensive. There, shown in all its atrocity, is the impulse, the essential impulse, that drives man to lose himself in the pole of will. Should a man fail to recognise this it will prove his ruin; only by realising it is one freed from it. You will find this expressed in the last scene of my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. There it is shown how only knowledge, a clear conception of who it is who tempts and seduces us, can save us from being led astray. It is therefore essential in the age of the consciousness-soul now entered that, in order to overcome temptation, we should strive in the right way to come to know the tempter, not allowing ourselves to sink down into a merely external knowledge of nature and a merely abstract mysticism.

In short, my dear friends, abstract mysticism, the ‘easy understanding of the divine within’, from which nothing results but a terrible egotistical abstraction—this abstract mysticism is just as bad as materialism.

As I said, take three moments in Goethe's Faust. Take purely artistically what you can feel as Faust stands before Manto; what you feel when Mephistopheles becomes a Phorkyad among the Phorkyads. And take the third moment when Homunculus crashes against Galatea's shell-chariot—feel what this Homunculus is. We come from the spiritual world seeking through conception and birth for physical existence. In this physical existence we meet with what, out of this physical existence, is given us as our physical body. Every evening we go back into the world that we leave at birth; every morning we, as it were, repeat our birth when we plunge again into our physical body. Then we can feel how, coming in from without, we do not arrive at what man is; we meet only with Homunculus, the manikin, the human being in embryo, and we realise how difficult it is to come to the real man. We might arrive at the real man could we contrive to have a perfectly clear conception just before waking, when all the evolutionary possibilities of the night are exhausted. This clear conception, my dear friends, would be a world-conception, it would be such that we should no longer feel ourselves hemmed in by any boundary, but feel as if poured out over the whole universe, over all cosmic light, all cosmic sound, all cosmic life, and in front of us a kind of abyss. One the far side of this would be a continuation of what we were feeling before we met the abyss on waking—namely, warmth. Warmth flows out over the abyss. Now, however, we cross the abyss by waking, into air, water and earth of which our organism is composed. Certainly we are approaching man, and by letting Homunculus fructify in the spiritual world, we have prepared ourselves to understand man. But in the ordinary course of life we do not do what I have just mentioned. The living conception we develop when sleep should have had its effect upon us before we wake, would have to be brought with us into waking life. This conception would be an experiencing ourselves in light, in cosmic sound, in cosmic life, a meeting with the beings of the higher hierarchies, just as here the physical body comes into connection with the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. This conception, developed concisely just before waking when sleep has done its work upon us, we should have to bring deep down into our physical body; then we should be able to understand what this human body is. But alas “the Gods will not suffer it”. We plunge down; it flashes, flames up, and we hardly notice it. Instead of looking into ourselves, we hear with our external ears; instead of feeling ourselves within our skin, we feel what is outside with our sense of touch. If we did not sink down into what we are able to reach only by the physical eye, the physical ear, through physical sound and physical touch, Homunculus would receive new life and become man, but against the resistance of the elements he is dashed to pieces. The light of the eye flames up instead of cosmic light, we begin to hear physical sound in the ear instead of cosmic sound, the life of the body is aroused instead of cosmic life—Homunculus is shattered. If we experience this consciously, we experience the end of the Classical Walpurgis-night. Thus, this end scene is taken from actual, true life.

These things are not there merely to be spoken of on Sunday afternoons in the Anthroposophical Society. They are there as truth, to become gradually known to mankind, so that as impulses they may with their being penetrate what must be accepted in the future evolution of man, if he is to advance to what can save and not destroy. For men will really find the correct connection with reality only if they adopt new concepts and from now onwards they begin to see what has always been extolled as the great achievement of the nineteenth century is at an end.

You see, my dear friends, it is not surprising that, from a certain point of view, this achievement of the nineteenth century, that continued into the twentieth, should be felt to be perfect. It is not to be wondered at all. Is it not true that before the tree becomes bare in autumn, it is in its fruiting in its most perfect stage of development. This natural science of the nineteenth century, that still haunts the twentieth, al these technical perfections that have reached a certain height, are the tree before it yields its fruit. All from which it has grown has to wither, and it is not enough that the tree should go on growing, a fresh seed must be sown in the field of human culture, a new tree must be planted. It does not suffice to think we understand the evolution of animals, to think of them as having advanced to the stage of man. It is not enough that frequently some spirit arises, who first writs articles of genius about animals, and later, to follow these, a book about the origin of man. Rather is it essential that men should discard the idea of a straight line in evolution, that they should learn to understand the rhythm of life, flowing like the waves of the sea, that they should learn how, in the inner being of man, the way does not go straight on, but across two boundaries. At the one boundary we feel almost suffocated, for someone seizes us and will not allow us to go where our thinking would take us. On the other side we feel as if the powers of Mephistopheles were dragging us to destruction. We must find the balance between what belongs to Homunculus and what belongs to Mephistopheles, between not being able to reach ourselves in Homunculus, and grasping the self only to lose it in Mephistopheles. The understanding of this equilibrium is what modern man must gain. And Goethe, foreseeing this in feeling, lived himself into this understanding when with absolute honesty he tried in his Faust to speak as he did of the riddle of humanity.

Mankind must strive to grow out of what today is the typical point of view of the crowd. Nothing is more resented at present than this striving, and nothing is more injurious to mankind than this hostility against any effort to rise above the commonplace. On the other hand, as long as this resistance is not definitely opposed by those who recognise the necessity of penetrating into the supersensible, there can be no sure human evolution. At the end of the nineteenth century Hamerling, in his Homunculus sought to make what we might call a last appeal to mankind out of the past, by presenting all that is decadent in modern humanity as Homunculism.

We might picture this to ourselves, my dear friends; suppose someone were now to read this Homunculus of Hamerling's which appeared at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century. I have given many lectures about it, even before the war I actually spoke of it, not without a certain significance. Let us suppose then that someone reads Hamerling's Homunculus and lets work upon him what Hamerling imagines as the evolutionary progress of his Homunculus. He thought it out at that time, when men had already broken away from Goethe and all that he gave, and wished to hear no more of it. Hamerling represented the evolution of his Homunculus, how he was completely under the sway of materialistic thinking, how he lived in a world where people did not enrich themselves with spiritual treasure but became millionaires instead. Homunculus was a millionaire. He pictured the world where men treat even spiritual matters with frivolity, the world in which journalism—with respect be it mentioned—that was already developing, has since sunk yet deeper into the slough. We assume then that someone reads this Homunculus, and he might say: Why, yes, this Hamerling who died in 1889, had, when he wrote his Homunculus, with his physical eyes actually only seen mankind as it then was, hurrying on its chosen path. He might continue: Had people then taken seriously what Hamerling emphasises in his Homunculus, had they let it work upon them a little more deeply and not just as a literary production, but as something to be taken in earnest, then indeed they would not have been surprised to learn that, because of men being as they then were, our present world-catastrophe had of necessity to arise. This is what anyone reading Homunculus today might say to himself. What is there in the development of this world-catastrophe to astonish us, when a writer in the eighties of the last century was able to represent the man Homunculus in this way? But, underlying this representation of man, of Homunculus, is at the same time the appeal not to stop short at the life that can give us only Homunculism, but to cross the abyss where Spiritual Science speaks of the supersensible knowledge that alone can change Homunculus into Homo. And so it might be said: Mankind is placed in the Homunculism which, in the scent we are today presenting, finds itself in a world the man of today is not very eager to enter—in a world leading to the region of the Phorkyads, between Homunculism and Mephistophelianism. Goethe divined this and represented it in his Faust; he also divined that a path must be made that will avoid the crags of fantastic, abstract mysticism, as it avoids the other crags of a phantom-like conception of nature, remote from all reality,a path that leads to supersensible knowledge where fresh social impulses will be found.

This is a very deep layer of consciousness. Let us penetrate it, let us permeate our feeling with it, let us learn to understand the language of this sphere of consciousness, coming as it does from the region where we feel: Through thinking, a man cannot reach himself; through willing he loses himself. To be unable to reach oneself in thinking is Homunculism; losing oneself in willing is Mephistophelianism. And when we feel this then we enter into such profound scenes with a language that makes intelligible what forms the conclusion of the Classical Walpurgis-night. Ultimately, everyone views the universe according to how the forces he has received enable him to represent it. But the present task of mankind consists in raising those forces, so that much of the universe may be seen that, to man's hurt, has not been seen during the last decades.

Thus, going deeply into such a profound scene as the one we are now producing, is a way for men to advance in the direction which mankind at this time should take. What lies in true Goetheanism is what mankind at this time should take. What lies in true Goetheanism is what mankind must seek. This is not the Goetheanism of the professors, not the Goetheanism of the Goethe Society at the head of which is not a Goethe enthusiast at all but a former finance minister bearing the significant name of Kreuzwendedich; neither is it all that men thought they must make out of Goethe's teaching at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. What must be sought will become something good and a good impulse towards man's advancement in the direction he must go—if in the coming age he is to find salvation and not destruction.

Dear attendees, at your request I would like to discuss with you today some aspects of the social impulse, which wants to face the world under the name of the threefold social organism. And it may be carried out into the world from here, for the very reason that spiritual science is to be practised here and actually already today the widest circles could understand that a recovery of the general world conditions can only come about through a deepening of the spirit.

After this short lecture, we still have a tour of the building ahead of us, so you will understand that I want to be brief and can only give you a few aphoristic pointers to the essentials of the idea of threefolding.

This idea of threefold social order is not entirely new. It has its origin in decades of observation of the conditions prevailing in Europe, especially in Central Europe, and especially of those conditions that led to the terrible catastrophe of the last five to six years.

For the person speaking to you today, these circumstances, under which a large part of the world is now suffering terribly, did not come as a surprise. It was in the spring of 1914 that I gave a series of lectures to a small audience in Vienna – in Vienna, you know, the world conflagration started in Vienna! Within these lectures I had to say, simply under the obligation, I would like to say, to the time, that one should not calm down in doing so, but should always praise the great importance of the development of the present in all possible words, but that one should look at what is being prepared. And I had to say at the time – so it was in the early spring of 1914, many weeks before the outbreak of the World War! – Anyone who surveys the social conditions of Europe with a certain expert eye can only compare certain phenomena, especially in our economic life, with a kind of social cancer disease that must come to a terrible outbreak in the shortest possible time.

You see, anyone who said something like that in the spring of 1914 would have been seen as a dreamy idealist with pessimistic views. And those who considered themselves “practitioners” at the time spoke of the general political situation as being relaxed, of the best relations between the governments of Europe, and so on.

Today, it may well be pointed out that it was not the idealist who was wrong with his prediction, but rather the ten to twelve million people who have been killed since then by the world conflagration, and three times as many who have been crippled within the civilized world, who provide sufficient proof that the “idealist” was right to speak such words.

One is also reminded today in a certain way of the position that people who thought they were practical took at that time.

Even today, some will say that one is being pessimistic when making such a prognosis. One is not being pessimistic, one is only speaking out of an understanding of the circumstances.

And just as today, strengthened, so to speak, by spiritual science, one can take a deeper look at the situation, so it has been possible for decades. One could carefully observe how the individual relationships between states in Europe developed more and more into antagonisms, and how the measures taken were by no means sufficient to deal with the tensions that were accumulating everywhere. And one had to foresee what was coming: the years of terror that we now seem to have left behind us.

Today, however, it may be said that just before these terrible years, if I may put it this way, there were no ears to hear these things. It was only when a great part of Europe was struck by the terrible adversity that is now here that people began to listen. So people said at the time, there were no ears to hear, and even today we still have to wait and see if we are really being heard. Nevertheless, despite the hardship, despite the terrible lessons that the last few years have brought us, it cannot be said that the idea of threefolding, which has emerged from careful observation of the circumstances, has already been received in the appropriate way today. And so I would like to tell you right at the outset why people are so opposed to this idea of threefolding, why they consider it a kind of utopia, a kind of fantasy.

You see, the reason for this is that conditions of such a complicated nature, conditions that have spread such devastation and chaos, have actually never existed before in the whole of human development! Humanity has been through a lot; at certain times, a lot has also befallen Europe. Conditions as they are now have really not yet existed in the time of historical development.

Circumstances have brought it about that in the past small groups of humanity have been seized by phenomena of decline. Even when the great Roman Empire was heading for its decline, it was still a small area in relation to the whole earth. Today, the amalgamation of conditions that we have spread across the whole civilized world makes the phenomena of decline more visible. It is no wonder that it is now necessary to have not a small idea of how to improve this or that in a limited area, but rather a comprehensive idea that really intervenes as deeply as the confusion runs deep. The threefold social order is such an idea. It is based not only on observation of the actual situation but also on a consideration of the historical moment in which humanity finds itself today. And it is also because it actually takes into account all of present-day civilized humanity that the idea of threefolding is so rejected. It is considered utopian, it is thought to be something that has been thought up. But it is the most real, or at least wants to be the most real, that has to be integrated into the present circumstances.

If we take a look at the development of intellectual, political and economic conditions in the present day, we have to link them to the same development over the last three to four centuries. Anything further back has a completely different character. The last three to four centuries, and especially the 19th century and the period since then, have brought humanity to a very particular state of development. In some areas, this is not yet apparent. The health of the Swiss people has been rightly mentioned here. It must be counted on for the future. But it is also necessary, in order for this health to remain, that there be no illusions that, in the face of all that is now collapsing, a small area could remain isolated. This cannot be the case.

You see, there are large areas in Central and Southeastern Europe today that you know suffer greatly from the fall of the exchange rate. The economist opposes this fall in the exchange rate, I would say, as a major phenomenon compared to minor phenomena that have always existed in the past. It was known that when the value of a currency falls in any particular area, imports into that area are somewhat undermined; exports are thus all the more encouraged. This law can no longer be applied to the devastation of economic conditions that has occurred in Central and Eastern Europe.

But so far, only the disadvantages of the fall in the value of a currency in certain areas have been shown! It will not take them very long to realize the disadvantages of a currency appreciation in a country! They will come, and it will not take that long, then the countries with depreciating currencies, where economic conditions are declining, will not be alone in their worries; the countries with appreciating currencies will think with fear about their high currencies.

These things show those who can see into the circumstances how, despite the fact that the economic area of the earth basically forms a unit today, despite all state structures, how the weal and woe of a small area of the earth depends on the weal and woe of the whole earth. Therefore, even today, social conditions can only be considered in a completely international sense.

If we look at what has actually brought us to today's situation, we have to say: We see how far we have come – today you do not see it yet – – but you could actually say, you could see it in the malformation of Eastern Europe, in the malformation of Russia. It must be said: such things are deeply significant, as we can now read in Russia, for example – I will mention a small thing, but it is deeply significant – as we can now read in Russia. You could read that Trotsky called on people not to celebrate May 1, but to work on May 1. Please, over there in Russia, the ideal of socialism is to be realized on a large scale – a paradise was promised to the people. That which the proletariat has designated as its sign of manifestation for decades – the May celebration – is something that must be abolished there. It is only one expression of all that must be abolished there! For a long time people have spoken of the evils of militarism, and rightly so. In Russia, labor is currently being militarized. In Russia, it is currently being said that it is nonsense that a person here on this earth should have control over his own person. There can be no such thing as freedom of disposal over one's own person. This is clearly shown by the fruits it has borne in the extreme case to which the development of the last three to four centuries has brought it. We must look at these things. We must realize that this state – I do not mean the individual state, but the state in general – which has developed from quite different conditions over the course of these last three to four hundred years, that this state has overburdened itself with things that the state as such cannot provide. For why?

You see, in order to look at such things soberly and clearly, without fantasy, we have to embrace the idea that the whole life of humanity is something similar to the life of the individual human being. We cannot describe the life of the individual in such a way that we always say: Now, when a person is forty years old, he is in the world the effect of the cause that was present at thirty-nine years, which in turn is the effect of the cause present at thirty-eight years, and so on. We cannot say that, but there is an inner, lawful development in the human being. Man gets second teeth around the seventh year, according to an inner law. He goes through other developmental stages in later years. There is a certain impulse living within man that makes him ripe for something at a certain time. It is the same with all mankind. What has emerged in all mankind over the last three to four centuries is something from which mankind cannot escape.

There was no other way for humanity than to call for democracy. Whatever ideals have been set in the external social life, the ideal of democracy is the one that has most powerfully seized and must seize humanity of the present. The state must become democratic, democratic in the broadest sense. Especially in Switzerland, where there is an old democracy, people should feel this, but they will also gradually perceive the necessity to relieve this democracy of certain areas.

What does democracy mean? Democracy means that people should have the opportunity to decide for themselves, either by referendum or by representation, on matters that are the same for everyone and that are the concern of every mature person. That is the ultimate ideal of democracy: equality among people with regard to decisions, in other words, everything that is equal among people of legal age. But what did the state, which has just developed in the course of history and emerged from very different circumstances, strive for? There are two fields in human life where democratic decisions can never be taken: one is the field of intellectual life and the other is the field of economic life. Those who are sincere in their belief in democracy must realize that if democracy is to be complete, intellectual life must be excluded from the sphere of the purely democratic state, as must economic life.

Anyone who is able to observe in this area can see from obvious examples how impossible it is to carry intellectual life as such into the democratic political sphere. I will not speak of the conditions here; that is not for me; but it is not at all possible to look at these conditions only from a small point of view today, but one must look at the whole world, at least the whole civilized world.

But if you look at the former German Reichstag, which apparently existed until 1914 and beyond, you have a perfect example of how the state – whether it is more or less democratic is not important in this case – has become overburdened with purely spiritual matters. Among the parties in the German Reichstag, they had a very large party, the so-called Center. In the present metamorphosis of the old Reichstag, which is called the National Assembly, the Center Party is again playing a role. This Center Party had no interests except purely religious, that is, spiritual matters. If any economic or political question came up, it was decided by some compromise which the Center Party made with other parties. But it is quite natural that this Center always had only the interest to promote its own spiritual interests. In short, if you follow the train of thought to its conclusion, it becomes clear that matters of purely spiritual concern have no place in the political parliament.

Take economic life. You see, Austria is the country that really shows, I would say is the textbook example of what has developed under the newer conditions, of the fact that the countries must perish. Only, Austria is the textbook example of what is perishing!

Anyone who, like myself, has spent thirty years of their life in Austria and has been able to see the developments that took place in the last third of the 19th century could see all the conditions coming about that have developed there, could see all the newer social conditions occurring. They also thought of making a parliament in Austria. But how was this parliament formed? Four curiae were formed: the curiae of the cities, the curiae of the provinces, the curiae of the municipalities, and the curiae of the big landowners. These were purely economic curiae, economic associations that were elected to the political parliament. They then decided from their economic point of view what should be public law. There you have the other example! In the German Reichstag you have the example of how a party that seeks purely intellectual goals turns out to be a troublemaker in a purely economic parliament. In Austria you have built up a parliament based on purely economic curiae, and anyone who has observed the situation knows that this parliament was never able to deal with what would have been necessary in Austria, for example: to regulate the spiritual conditions insofar as they manifested themselves in the secular conditions of the nationalities.

In Austria one could see something else. There the state was only a political entity. There were thirteen official languages. These thirteen official languages could not be brought under one roof; one could not bring them under one roof under the impression, because the people with the different languages had the most diverse intellectual interests in Austria. They tried to preserve some of it through private channels. Oh, I was often there when, you know, such long straws, the ones in the so-called Virginia cigars, were auctioned off in America in favor of the school associations! The school associations were founded to do something out of the intellectual interests themselves that the state as such could not do. But the idea of a unified state was too much in people's minds for such private foundations to achieve any great or widespread effect. And so I could go on telling you about the impossibility of keeping together certain things that the modern state wants to keep together.

The medium-sized states of Europe and Russia have had to learn the hard way that the centralized state cannot survive as it has existed up to now. Those who have not yet been affected by this fate still believe that it can be averted. It cannot be averted unless we grasp the legal idea of how to remedy the situation by human will. And here, based on ample observation and consideration of historical circumstances, is where the idea of threefold social order comes in. It says: People must become ever more honest and sincere in their striving for democracy. But then the democratic principle must be limited to the mere state principle, in which every person has to decide in the same way on everything that concerns all mature people. As I said, this can be done either by referendum or by representation. But then, the entire intellectual life, on the one hand, must be separated out from this state structure, from what is to be administered strictly by parliament. This entire intellectual life has increasingly come into the power of the state in recent centuries, and even today most people regard it as a great advantage of the modern state idea to absorb intellectual life, especially the school system. There is still a great deal of resistance to the most terrible prejudices. But the world does not see the connections.

But if you ask yourself: how did it actually come about that today we are not only faced with class struggles, but with the approval of class struggles? That we are faced with a complete lack of understanding between people? That we are witnessing the tyrannical rule of a few hundred thousand people in Russia over millions of people today, pretending to be democratic? Where did it all come from? It has been slowly prepared. One needs to think of a single word – I have pointed this out in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question in Present-Day Necessities of Life' – to see why, out of error, a large part of humanity today, the part of humanity that includes the proletariat, stands up and believes: Only by means of what you are all too familiar with, can they bring about any kind of change in the circumstances. The only word that needs to be mentioned is the one that could be heard at all, all social democratic events over decades: it is the word “ideology”. And this word, ideology, ladies and gentlemen, points to the entire course that the materialistic world view has taken in modern times.

Whatever one may think of the earlier conditions of humanity, we certainly do not want to restore the earlier conditions, we want forward and not backward; but one must still say: look at the man of the past! He knew that there lived in his soul something that had a direct connection with the spiritual that permeates the world. What, after all, has man known since the middle of the 15th century about these connections between his inner being and a spiritual in the world! The sun, they say, is a glowing ball of gas. What do people know today about the stars, about the sun! If you ask our scholars: what was the origin of the evolution of the earth? — they will tell you: it was once a nebula; then the sun and planets were formed over thousands of years. People have also surrendered to this realization! I have often referred to the description by Herman Grimm, who said: “Future people will have a hard time understanding the madness that speaks of the origin of the earth from the primeval mist in this Kant-Laplacean idea.” — But today it is regarded as a great development and science.

What was cultivated there then drove out the most diverse currents, and these currents flowed into the proletariat. And basically, what is being advocated in Russia today by Trotsky and Lenin is only the final consequence of what our scholars taught as materialism at the universities.

Here in Switzerland, there was a man who ranted a lot in the 1970s, but he saw what was coming. They didn't like him because he ranted a lot, Johannes Scherr. But besides a lot of ranting, he also saw important things. And he said as early as the 1970s: If you look at the economic development, if you look at the spiritual life, as it had to come down more and more, you will finally come to the point where Europe has to say: nonsense, you have won!

In the last five to six years, people have been saying, and still do: “Nonsense, you have won!”

Ideology, what does it mean? It means nothing other than: All spiritual life is ultimately only a smoke that rises from mere economic life. Economic conditions are the only reality, as Marxism preaches in all keys. And that which arises from economic conditions is that which man carries within himself as the content of his soul. Law, custom, religion, science, art: all ideology. This is the seed that has sprouted: ideology, disbelief in the spiritual life.

Where does this disbelief come from? This disbelief comes from the amalgamation of the spiritual life with the state life in recent centuries. For intellectual life, ladies and gentlemen, can only flourish if it is placed entirely on its own ground. Consider – I will pick out only the school system, because it is the most important area of the public intellectual life – the school system is organized so that those who teach and educate are at the same time the administrators of the teaching and education system. Just imagine: the teacher of the lowest class in the school has no one to obey but someone else whom he does not obey but whose advice he follows, who is himself involved in teaching and education. Someone who is so far relieved that he can simultaneously administer the teaching and education system, so that no one from any political department can interfere in the spiritual life itself, so that the spiritual life itself stands on its own feet. You can read about this in my book. I have tried to make the matter as clear as possible, that only a spiritual life that is left to its own devices can free us from all the harmful effects that have plunged us into misfortune. But only one that is drawn directly from the spiritual can, in turn, generate faith in the spiritual, the connection with the spiritual.

I would like to be clear. We founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart because there is still a school law there that I would say leaves a small gap. This Waldorf School is a real unified school, because the children of the workers from the Waldorf Astoria factory are next to the children of the factory owners and so on, all together; it is a real unified school, a complete elementary school, up to the fourteenth, fifteenth year of age.

I held a pedagogical course for the teachers I selected myself, in order to prepare the teachers for this school, where teaching should only be done according to the knowledge of human nature, according to the observation of what what is in man; where teaching should not be based on some or other prejudice that it must be so and so, but on observation of what comes into the world through man, what should be taught from it. I have reported on this in a wide variety of journals, including here, on how the methods in the Waldorf School have been established. But what I want to mention to you now is this: if you consider such a course to be the way to teach and educate, then you are guided by what knowledge of human nature, what real spiritual science, reveals. But in today's school system, there is something else. There is also what the teachers believe to be the right thing for the education of the child. But then more and more something else has come. I had to look at it, precisely because I had to proceed very practically when I founded the Waldorf School with regard to its spiritual content. Coming from political life, the decrees are: First class: this and that must be taught, that and that is the teaching goal. Second class: this and that must be taught, that is the teaching goal. — You see, that comes from political life! Is it not obvious that it does not belong there, that the person who does not look inside, who understands nothing of teaching and education, must give the instructions? The prescriptions must come only from those who are educators, and they should not be called over as experts to the ministry, but should be involved in the living process of educating and teaching. Spiritual life must be placed on its own ground in all areas of the school system. Then the spirit will take hold of people again.

So that one must say: the state honestly realizes democracy by relieving itself of the intellectual life, which is based entirely on expertise and professional competence, in which, after all, one truly cannot decide by majorities, but only according to what one knows. There it is a matter of only the specialized and the factual being the deciding factors, of the decisions coming from the self-administration of the school system. That is one area that must be excluded from the state. The other area is the economic one. Do you see where all the things come from that are driving the world more and more into a general economic crisis today? Where do such things come from, as for example in 1907 in Europe, which could be very well noticed by individual people? But it happened at that time, even if not without pain, it still passed without major catastrophes for the world economy, I would say, only with the pain of some. Then again there was rejoicing among everyone about the great economic progress and “how we have come so gloriously far” in more recent times. No one noticed how certain characteristic phenomena were pointing to what is now gradually developing into a general world crisis. These characteristic phenomena...

All these things have taken place everywhere, on a small and large scale. They can essentially be traced back to the fact that since the beginning of the 19th century, money has gradually become the ruler over the entire economic life. Money as the ruler over the entire economic life; what does that mean? You see, whether it is wheat – because you have to look at the monetary value – it costs so and so many francs. When you buy skirts, if you just look at the monetary value: francs. In short, money is not specified, it is not based on the concreteness of economic life. It is something that exists in the non-real world, like the abstract concepts in the intellectual life, with which you cannot lure a dog behind the stove in reality. Except that the abstract, fantastic concepts do not cause as much harm as this generalized abstractness of money. One can point out how, in the course of the 19th century, the money lender gradually became the actual driving force in our economic life. Whereas before, it was only the economic, economic man who mattered. Gradually, the possibility also arose for states to become involved in economic affairs, so that states themselves became economic actors.

If one examines the causes of war impartially, one will find that they arose and had to arise from purely economic circumstances, because the circumstances I have mentioned developed. Here again, careful study provides insights into what is at stake: that we must return to a coming together of man with economic production itself. Man must again be brought close to what he produces. Man must again grow together with wheat and rye and everything else he produces, and he must change economic life according to what he produces. And people must not be allowed to multiply this money purely for the sake of it. Without thinking about these things, we will not get anywhere. A recovery of economic life is only possible if man is brought together with the economy again, working out of the needs of the economy.

But this can only come about if one does not organize from the state, but if one allows the people who are in the corresponding economic sectors to come together in associations, if one builds an economy of interests merely on expertise and skill and craftsmanship in economic life. Two things are necessary: first, that one can do what one wants to produce, and second, that one has the trust of the people. But this can only be achieved if one is involved in the corresponding branch of the economy and has grown together with it.

But this is how the individual occupations arise, this is how the laws of production and consumption arise. On the other hand, the various economic methods can only be brought into a certain relationship with each other if the various associations work independently, without interference from the state or any other authority. Just as intellectual life must be set apart from state life and stand on its own two feet, so must economic life. Intellectual life can flourish only if the individual who has the abilities can also develop these abilities for the benefit of his fellow human beings. Spiritual life is most ideal and most socially beneficial when the individual, who is gifted, can work in the service of his fellow human beings. Economic life is most effective when those who produce in any field, or when the consumer circles, combine in such a way that simply through the existence of the associations and connections, there is a real trust that is not dependent on money, when the credit system is a real one and not a mere fiction , as was the case in the previous period, and when you know that you can support any branch of production because the people you have now got to know and who have grown together with their branch of production are in that branch of production.

This is certainly still the case in small communities; in the large-scale conditions that have actually brought about the decline, it is no longer the case.

You see, I have only been able to sketch out what threefolding is about. I could only show you that, to a certain extent, the development of humanity has reached the point where what was once charged to the state as a unified entity now wants to be divided into three independent areas: the spiritual life, which administers itself independently, in the democratic state life, which will be the legal life in particular, and in the economic life, which is standing on its own two feet and is in turn a separate area. That alone is the essential thing: we can see from what the civilized world should and actually wants to strive today, except that people have not yet become aware of it, and that people want to hold on to the old conditions.

You see, it is very strange how one can see precisely in Social Democracy, as it is developing today, the most conservative principle. For what does Social Democracy want? It wants to turn the state into a single large cooperative, through which it could militarize everything. This could be said today when looking at Russia, where everything is being militarized. The militarization of labor is already being discussed from a Russian perspective, because social democracy with a Marxist slant says: the state is there. We now load everything onto it, education and economic life and everything. That is the unhealthy thing! The socialist idea in particular represents the last, most unhealthy consequence of what has developed over the last few centuries.

The healthy thing is to recognize that what has been charged to the state, what it cannot decide out of its democratic nature, must be separated from it and put on its own two feet, intellectual life and economic life. Of course, one can understand that many people today cannot go into such ideas, because people today have been brought up to regard the state as something that works best through a certain omnipotence. One is not really serious about the democratic idea if one wants to saddle the state with everything. One is only serious about the democratic idea if one wants to see that which can be treated equally among all mature people. If it depends on the individual person, on the abilities that he carries into this world from other worlds through his birth, then it is a matter of this world, this spiritual world, also having to be organized out of these abilities. In economic life, it is important that we do not impose an abstract organization on everything, which the monetary economy is by its very nature, but that it should be possible to manage out of the concrete economic life. But out of the concrete economic life, only associations can be formed that join together and that, through their mutual relationship, really achieve what can be a healthy relationship between consumers and producers. Of course, such a concept, which, as it were, addresses everything that is currently being pushed aside in the wake of decline, and which recognizes that decline can only be stopped by thoroughly seeking a new formation, such a concept cannot be understood immediately. One realizes that it cannot be understood immediately. For people are actually organized to always think to themselves: Yes, things are bad now, but they will get better again. They think that improvement will come from some unknown quarter. That is how it was done, for example, in Germany during the war. Whenever things went badly, people waited for improvement to come from some unknown quarter. It did not come! So today we should not wait for things to improve, from somewhere, we don't know where! No, humanity today – as the advent of democracy itself testifies – is called upon to act in a mature way. But one is only mature when one does not expect improvement to come from some vague source, but when one says to oneself: Improvement can only come from one's own will, from an understanding will that sees through the effect. [Gap] If only one percent of today's civilized humanity could bring themselves to a clear recognition of the danger for the whole civilized world, and could see, could see how urgently the conditions strive for threefolding! But threefolding is being trampled underfoot everywhere. If only one percent of people would understand things to a certain degree, things would get better. Because only through people can improvement come! The worst thing for humanity has always been fatalism.

But the worst thing today is precisely this fatalism! Recently, you could read here in a paper that appears in Basel a letter from a German who says: We in Germany must now accept going through Bolshevism. Then, when we have gone through Bolshevism, then — one does not know from where! — the better will come.

This is the most terrible fatalism. It is the consequence of the fact that, basically, the deepest essence of Christianity is still not understood today. The Christ came into the world for all men. He did not come into the world merely for the one people from which He proceeded; He did not fight merely for the one national God, for He taught: Not this one national God, but that which is God for all men, that is what matters. Have not people in the last five or six years looked back to the old Jehovah again, have they not fought everywhere for the folk gods by giving these folk gods the name of Christ? Was it the real Christ, the Christ to whom all people are entitled, that they spoke of? No, it was not the Christ to whom all people are entitled that was spoken of; it was the individual folk gods! And, of course, the individual peoples are spoken of in this sense today, as they were then, as embodying their separate ideals. Christianity, in turn, must be understood as a general one; but not just in words, but in mature ideas.

You see, just by giving a few sketchy thoughts in this short time today, but by speaking again and again to people about threefolding, there were also people who appeared who are “good Christians” today, that is, they appeared with phrases. They talked about all sorts of things, but they thought it should be said today that Christianity should be fulfilled, that Christ should really come. — I could only reply: There is a commandment: You shall not take the name of your God, the name of your Lord, in vain. — Does that make one a bad Christian because one does not always have the name of Christ on one's tongue? The Christ did not just want to be addressed with the name “Lord! Lord!” – but he wanted to bring an attitude among people that, when developed, takes on concrete forms, that do not always just refer to his name, but that bring about social conditions in his spirit that embrace all people equally.

It may appear that the words used do not mention Christianity, but this threefold social organism is intended to be in the spirit of true, genuine, practical Christianity. And I am deeply convinced, dear ladies and gentlemen, that one day it will be recognized that the idealists who speak of threefolding today are the true practitioners. And the others, who say: Oh, pipe dreams! — these are the ones who speak that way today, well, just as, for example, the foreign ministers of the German Reichstag and the Austrian delegation spoke almost identically in June 1914. These two practical gentlemen said something similar in Berlin and Vienna: Our friendly relations with St. Petersburg are the very best there are. The political situation has relaxed; we are approaching peaceful conditions in Europe - in May, June 1914! Negotiations are in progress with England, the practitioners said in Berlin, which will soon lead to satisfactory results. The satisfactory results then came in August 1914! So the “practitioners” spoke, so the practitioners foresaw things.

We should bear this in mind, ladies and gentlemen, when we hear such a proposal as the threefold social order being dismissed as the mere idealism of a few visionaries, whereas it should be seen as the most practical of proposals, the one that takes reality most fully into account and seeks to align itself with our times!

I thank you, my dear attendees, for listening to what I had to present. I can only ask for your indulgence, since in the short time available to me I could, of course, only present a few pure thoughts without the necessary proofs, but which you can find in the corresponding books and magazines, which are also available here in Switzerland, and which you can also find in “Social Future”, published by Dr. Boos. I have only been able to give you a few guiding ideas; and I only hope that these guiding ideas may perhaps be able to evoke in you the feeling that this impulse of the threefold social order is not a randomly thrown-out idea, but that this threefold is a response to the deepest needs of humanity today, but one that can truly lead humanity out of its current plight. It can lead us out of chaos and decline and towards a new beginning, which so many people today long for, and rightly so.

[Closing words of the organizer.

To-day I should like to make some introductory remarks to what I am going to lay before you in the coming days. My reason for doing this is that you may know the purpose of these talks from the outset.

It will not be my task during the following days to deal with any narrowly defined, special branch of science, but to give various wider viewpoints, having in mind a quite definite goal in relation to science. I should therefore like to warn people not to describe this as an ‘Astronomical Course’. It is not meant to be that. But it will deal with something that I feel is especially important for us to consider at this time. I have therefore given it the title “The relation of the diverse branches of Natural Science to Astronomy,” and today in particular I shall explain what I actually intend with the giving of this title.

The fact is that in a comparatively short time much will have to be changed within what we call the sphere of science, if it is not to enter upon a complete decline. Certain groups of sciences which are now comprised under various headings and are permitted to be represented under these headings, in our ordinary schools, will have to be taken out their grooves and be classified from quite other aspects. This will necessitate a far reaching regrouping of our sciences. The grouping at present employed is entirely inadequate for a world-conception based upon reality, and yet our modern world holds so firmly to such traditional classification that it is on this basis that candidates are chosen to occupy the professorial chairs in our Universities. People confine themselves for the most part to dividing the existing, circumscribed fields of Natural Science into yet further special branches, and they then look to the specialists or experts as they are called. But a change must come into the whole scientific life by the advent of quite different categories, within which will be united, as in a whole new field of science, things that today are dealt with in Zoology or Physiology, or again, let us say, in the Theory of Knowledge. The older forms of scientific classification, often extremely abstract, must die out, and quite new scientific combinations must arise. This will meet with great obstacles at first, because people today are trained in the specialized branches of science and it will be difficult for them to find an approach to what they will urgently need in order to bring about a combination of scientific material in accordance with reality.

To put in concisely, I might say: We have today a science of astronomy, of Physics, of Chemistry, of Philosophy, we have a science of Biology, of Mathematics, and so on. Special branches have been formed, almost, I might say, so that the various specialists will not have such hard work in order to become well grounded in their subject. They do not have too much to do in mastering all the literature concerned, which, as we know, exists in immense quantities. But it will be a matter of creating new branches which will comprise quite different things, including perhaps at the same time something from Astronomy, something from Biology, and so on. For this, a reshaping of our whole life of science will of course be essential. Therefore, what we term Spiritual Science, which does indeed aim to be of a universal nature, must work precisely in this direction. It must make it its special mission to work in this direction. For we simply cannot get any further with the old grouping. Our Universities confront the world today, my dear friends, in a way that is really quite estranged from life. They turn out mathematicians, physiologists, philosophers, but none of them have any real relation to the world. They can do nothing but work in their narrowly confined spheres, putting before us a picture of the world that becomes more and more abstract, less and less realistic.

It is the change here indicated—a deep necessity for our time—to which I want to do justice in these lectures. I should like you to see how impossible it will be to continue the older classifications indefinitely, and I therefore want to show how other branches of science of the most varied kinds, which, in their present way of treatment, take no account of Astronomy, have indeed definite connections with Astronomy, that is, with a true knowledge of universal space. Certain astronomical facts must perforce be taken into account in other branches of science too, so that we may learn to master these other fields in a way conformable to reality.

The task of these lectures is therefore to build a bridge from the different fields of scientific thought to the field of Astronomy, that astronomical understanding may appear in the right way in the various fields of science.

In order not to be misunderstood, I should like to make one more remark about method. You see, the manner of presenting scientific facts which is customary nowadays must undergo considerable change, because it actually arises out of the scientific structure which has to be overcome. When today facts are referred to, which lie somewhat remote from man's understanding,—remote, just because he does not meet with them at all in his scientific knowledge,—it is usual to say: “That is stated, but no proved.” Yet in scientific work is often quite inevitable that statements must be made at first purely as results of observation, which only afterwards can be verified as more and more facts are brought to support them. So it would be wrong to assume, for instance, that right at the beginning of a discourse someone could break in and say, “That is not proved.” It will be proved in the course of time, but much will first have to be presented simply from observation, so that the right concept, the right idea, may be created.

And so I beg of you to take these lectures as a whole, and to look in the last lectures for the plain proof of many things which seem in the first lectures to be mere statements. Many things will then be verified which I shall have to handle at first in such a way as to evoke the necessary concepts and ideas.

Astronomy as we know it today, even including the domain of Astrophysics, is fundamentally a modern creation. Before the time of Copernicus or Galileo men thought about astronomical phenomena in a way which differed essentially from the way we think today. It is even extraordinarily difficult to indicate the way in which man still thought of Astronomy in, say, the 13th and 14th centuries, because this way of thinking has become completely foreign to modern man. We only live in the ideas which have been formed since the time of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus; and from a certain point of view that is perfectly right. They are ideas which treat of the distant phenomena of universal space, in so far as they are concerned with Astronomy, in a mathematical and mechanical way. Men think of these phenomena in terms of mathematics and mechanics. In observing the phenomena, men base their ideas upon what they have acquired from an abstract mathematical science, or an abstract science of mechanics. They calculate distances, movements and forces. But the qualitative outlook still in existence in the 13th and 14th centuries, which distinguished Individualities in the stars, an Individuality of Jupiter, of Saturn ... this has become completely lost to modern man. I will make no criticism of the things at the moment, but will only point out that the mechanical and mathematical way of treating what we call the domain of Astronomy has become the exclusive one. Even if we acquaint ourselves with the stars in a popular fashion without understanding mathematics or mechanics, we still find it presented, even if in a manner suitable for the lay-mind, entirely in ideas of space and time, of a mathematical and mechanical kind. No doubts of any kind exist in the minds of our contemporaries—who believe that their judgment is authoritative—that this is the only way in which to regard the starry heavens. Anything else, they are convinced, would be merely amateurish.

Now, if the question arises as to how it has actually come about that this view of the starry heavens has emerged in the evolution of civilization, the answer of those who regard the modern scientific mode of thought as absolute, will be different from the reply which we are able to give. Those who regard the scientific thought of today as something absolute and true, will say: Well, you know, among earlier humanity there were not yet any strictly scientifically formed ideas; man had first to struggle through to such ideas, i. e., to the mathematical, mechanical mode of regarding celestial phenomena of the Universe, a later humanity has worked through to a strictly scientific comprehension of what does actually correspond to reality.

This is an answer that we cannot give, my dear friends. We must take up our position from the standpoint of the evolution of humanity, which in the course of its existence, has introduced various inner forces into its consciousness. We must say to ourselves: The manner of observing the celestial phenomena which existed among the ancient Babylonians, the Egyptians, perhaps even the Indian people, was due to the particular form which the development of the human soul-forces was taking in those times. Those human soul-forces had to be developed with the same inner necessity with which a child between the 10th and 15th year must develop certain soul-forces, while in another period it will developing other faculties, which lead it to different conclusions about the world. Then came the Ptolemaic system. That arose out of different soul-forces. Then our Copernican system. That arose from yet other soul-forces. The Copernican system did not develop because humanity had happily struggled through to objectivity, whereas before they had all been as children, but because humanity since the middle of the 15th century needed precisely the mathematical, mechanical faculties for its development. That is why modern man sees the celestial phenomena in the picture formed by the mathematical, mechanical faculties. And he will some day see them again in a different way, when in his development he has drawn up out of the depths of the soul other forces,—to his own healing and benefit. Thus it depends upon humanity what form the world-concept takes. But it is not a question of looking back in pride to earlier times when men were “more childlike,” and then thinking that in modern times we have at last struggled through to an objective understanding which can now endure for all future ages.

There is something which has become a real necessity to later humanity and has given color to the requirements of the scientific mind. It is this: Men strive on the one hand for ideas that are clear and easy to control—namely, mathematical ideas—, and on the other hand they strive for ideas through which they can surrender most strongly to an inner compulsion. The modern man at once becomes uncertain and nervous when he does not feel the strong inner compulsion presented, for instance, by the argument of the Pythagorean theorem, but realizes, let us say, that the figure which is drawn does not decide for him, but that he must develop an activity of soul and decide for himself. Then he at once becomes uncertain and nervous and is no longer willing to continue the line of thought. So he says: That is not exact science; subjectivity comes into it. Modern man is really dreadfully passive; he would like to be led everywhere by a chain of infallible arguments and conclusions. Mathematics satisfies this requirement, at least in most cases; and where it does not, where man have interposed their own opinion in recent times,—well, my dear friends, the results are according! Men still believe that they are being exact, while they hit upon the most incredible ideas.

Thus in mathematics and mechanics men think they are being led forward by leading-strings of concepts which are linked together through their own inherent logic. They feel then as if they had ground under their feet, but the moment they step off it they do not want to go on any further. Concepts which are easy to grasp on the one hand, and the element of inner compulsion on the other: this is what modern man needs for his “safety.” Fundamentally, it is on this basis that the particular form of world-conception, supplied by the modern science of Astronomy, has been built up. I am not at the moment speaking of the single facts, but merely of the world-conception as a whole.

This attitude towards a mathematical, mechanical conception of the world has so penetrated the consciousness of humanity, my dear friends, that people have come to regard everything that cannot be treated in this way as more or less unscientific. From this feeling proceeded such a phrase as that of Kant, who said: In every domain of science there is only so much real science as there is mathematics in it; one ought really to bring Arithmetic or Geometry into all the sciences. But this idea, as we know, breaks down when we think how remote the simplest mathematical ideas are to those, for instance, who study Medicine. Our present division of the sciences gives to a medical student practically nothing in the way of mathematical ideas.

And so it comes about that on the one hand what is called astronomical knowledge has been set up as an ideal. DuBois-Raymond has defined this in his address on the limits of the knowledge of Nature by saying: We only grasp truths in Nature and satisfy our need of causality inasmuch as we can apply the astronomical type of knowledge. That is to say, we regard the celestial phenomena in such a way that we draw the stars upon the chart of the sky and calculate with the material which is there given us. We can state exactly: There is a star, it exercises a force of attraction upon other stars. We begin to calculate, having the different things, to which our calculations apply, visibly before us. This is what we have brought into Astronomy in the first place. Now we observe, let us say, the molecule. Within the complex molecule we have the atoms, exercising a force of attraction on one another, moving around each other,—forming, as it were, a little universe. We observe this molecule as a small cosmic system and are satisfied if it all seems to fit. But then there is the great difference that when we look out into the starry sky all the details are given to us. We can at most ask whether we understand them rightly, whether after all, there might not be some other explanation than the one given by Newton. We have the given details and then we spin a mathematical, mechanical web over them. This web of thought is actually added to the given facts, but from a scientific point of view it satisfies the modern need of man. And now we carry the system, which we have first thought out and devised, into the world of the molecule and atom. Here we add in thought what in the other case was given to us. But we satisfy our so-called need of causality by saying: What we think of as the smallest particle, moves in such and such a way, and it is the objective counterpart of what we experience subjectively as light, sound, warmth etc. We carry the astronomic form of knowledge into every phenomenon of the world and thus satisfy our demand for causality. Du-Bois Raymond has expressed it quite bluntly: “When one cannot do that, there is no scientific explanation at all.”

Yes, my dear friends, what is here claimed should actually imply that if, for example, we wished to come to a rational form of therapy, that is to say, to understand the activity of a remedy, we should have to be able to follow the atoms in the substance of the remedy as we follow the movements of the Moon, the Sun, the planets and the fixed stars. They would all have to become little cosmic systems. We should have to be able to calculate how this or that remedy would work. This was actually an ideal for some people not so very long ago. Now they have given up such ideals. Such an idea collapses not only in reference to such a far off sphere as a rational therapy, but in those lying more within reach, simply because our sciences are divided as they are today. You see, the modern doctor is educated in such a way that he masters extraordinarily little of pure mathematics. We may talk to him perhaps of the need for a knowledge of astronomy but it would be of no use to speak of introducing mathematical ideas into his field of work. But as we have seen, everything outside mathematics, mechanics and astronomy should be described, according to the modern notion, as being unscientific in the strict sense of the word. Naturally that is not done. People regard these other sciences too as exact, but this is most inconsistent. It is, however, characteristic of the present time that the demand should have been made at all for everything to be understood on the model of mathematical Astronomy.

It is hard today to talk to people in a serious way about such thing; how hard this is I should like to make clear to you by an example.

You know of course that the question of the form of the human skull has played a great role in modern biology. I have also spoken of this matter may times in the course of our anthroposophical lectures. Goethe and Oken put forward magnificent thoughts on this question of the human skull-bones. The school of Gegenbauer also carried out classical researches upon it. But something that could satisfy the urge for a deeper knowledge in this direction does not in fact exist today.

People discuss, to what extent Goethe was right in saying that the skull-bones are metamorphosed vertebrae, bones of the spine. But it is impossible to arrive at any really penetrating view of this matter today, because in the circles where these things are discussed one would scarcely be understood, and where an understanding might be forthcoming these things are not talked of because they are not of interest. You see, it is practically impossible today to bring together in close working association a thoroughly modern doctor, a thoroughly modern mathematician,—i.e., one who is master of higher mathematics—, and a man who could understand both of them passably well. These three men could scarcely understand one another. The one who would sit in the middle, understanding both of them slightly, would be able at a pinch to talk a little with the mathematician and also with the doctor. But the mathematician and the doctor would not be able to understand each other upon important questions, because what the doctor would have to say about them would not interest the mathematician, and what the mathematician would have to say—or would say, if he found words at all,—would not be understood by the doctor, who would be lacking the necessary mathematical background. This is what would happen in an attempt to solve the problem I have just put before you. People imagine: If the skull-bones are metamorphosed vertebra, then we ought to be able to proceed directly, through a transformation which it is possible to picture spatially, from the vertebra to the skull. To extend the idea still further to the limb-bones would, on the basis of the accepted premises, be quite out of the question. The modern mathematician will be able, from his mathematical studies, to form an idea of what it really means when I turn a glove inside out, when I turn the inside to the outside. One must have in mind a certain mathematical handling of the process by which what was formerly outside is turned inward, and what was inside is turned to the outside. I will make a sketch of it (Fig. 1)—a structure of some sort that is first white on the outside and red inside. We will treat this structure as we did the glove, so that it is now red outside and white inside (Fig. 2).

But let us go further, my dear friends, and picture to ourselves that we have something endowed with a force of its own that does not admit of being turned inside out in such a simple way as a glove which still looks like a glove after being inverted. Suppose that we invert something which has different stresses of force on the outer surface from those on the inner. We shall then find that simply through the inversion quite a new form arises. The form may appear thus before we have reversed it (Fig. 1): we turn it inside out and now different forces come into consideration on the red surface and on the white, so that perhaps, purely through the inversion, this form arises (Fig. 3). Such a form might arise merely in the process of inversion. When the red side faced inward, forces remained dominant which are developed differently when it is turned outward. And so with the white side; only when turned towards the inside can it develop its inherent forces.

It is of course quite conceivable to give a mathematical presentation of such a subject, but people are thoroughly disinclined nowadays to apply to reality what is arrived at conceptually in such a way. The moment, however, we learn to apply this to reality, we become able to see in our long bones or tubular bones (that is, in the limb bones), a form which, when inverted, becomes our skull bones! In the drawing, let the inside of the bone, as far as the marrow, be depicted by the red, the outside by the white (Fig. 4). Certain forms and forces, which can of course be investigated, are turned inward, and what we see when we draw away the muscle from the long bone is turned outward. But now imagine these hollow bones turned inside out by the same principle as I have just given you, in which other conditions of stress and strain are brought into play;

then you may easily obtain this form (Fig. 5). Now it has the white within, and what I depicted by the red comes to the outside. This is in fact the relationship of a skull-bone to a limb-bone, and in between lies the typical bone of the back—the vertebra of the spinal column. You must turn the tubular bone inside out like a glove according to its indwelling forces; then you obtain the skull-bone. The metamorphosis of the bones of the limbs into the skull-bones is only to be understood when keeping in mind the process of inversion, or ‘turning inside-out’. The important thing to realizes is that what is turned outward in the limb-bones is turned inward in the skull. The skull-bones turn towards a world of their own in the interior of the skull. That is one world. The skull-bone is orientated to the world, just as the limb-bone is orientated outward, towards the external world. This can be clearly seen in the case of the bones. Moreover, the human organism as a whole is so organized that it has on the one hand a skull organization, and on the other a limb-organization, the skull-organization being oriented inward, the limb-organization outward. The skull contains an inner world, the limb-man an outer world, and between the two is a kind of balancing system which preserves the rhythm.

My dear friends, take any literature dealing with the theory of functions, or, say, with non-Euclidean geometry, and see what countless ideas of every kind are brought forward in order to get beyond the ordinary geometrical conception of three-dimensional space;—to extend the domain—widen out the concept of geometry. You will see what industry and ingenuity are employed. But now suppose that you have become an expert at mathematics, who knows the theory of functions well and understands all that can be understood today of non-Euclidean geometry. I should like now to put a question concerning much that tends in this direction (Forgive me if it seems as if one did not value them highly, speaking of these things in such trivial terms. And yet I must do so, and I beg the audience, especially trained mathematicians, to turn it over in their minds and see if there is not truth in what I say.) The question could be put as follows: What is the use of all this spinning of purely mathematical thoughts? What is it worth to me, so to speak, in pounds, shillings and pence? No one is interested in the spheres in which it might perhaps find concrete application. Yet if we were to apply to the structure of the human organism all that has been thought out in non-Euclidean geometry, then we should be in the realm of reality, and applying immeasurably important ideas to reality, not wandering about in mere speculations. If the mathematician were so trained as to be interested also in what is real,—in the appearance of the heart, for example, so that he could form an idea of how through a mathematical process he could turn the heart inside out, and how thereby the whole human form would arise,—if he were taught to use his mathematics in actual life, then he could be working in the realm of the real. It would then be impossible to have the trained mathematician on the one hand, not interested in what the doctor learns, and on the other, the physician, understanding nothing of of how the mathematician—though in a purely abstract element—is able to change and metamorphose forms. This is the situation we must alter. If not, our sciences will fall into decay. They grow estranged from one another; people no longer understand each other's language.

How then is science to be transformed into a social science, as is implied in all that I shall be telling you in these lectures? A science which leads over into social science is not yet in existence.

On the one hand we have Astronomy, tending more and more to be clothed in mathematical forms of thought. It has become so great in its present form just because it is a purely mathematical and mechanical science. But there is another branch of science which stands, as it were, at the opposite pole to Astronomy, and which cannot be studied in its real nature without Astronomy. It is however, impossible, as science is today, to build a bridge between Astronomy and this other pole of science, namely, Embryology. He alone is studying reality, who on the one hand studies the starry skies and on the other hand the development of the human embryo. How is the human embryo generally studied today? Well, it is stated: The human embryo arises from the interaction of two cells, the sex-cells or gametes, male and female. These cells develop in the parent organism in such a way as to attain a certain state of independence before they are able to interact. They then present a certain contract, the one cell, the male, calling forth new and different possibilities of development in the other, the female. The question is put: What is a cell? As you know, since about the middle of the 19th century, Biology has largely been built upon the cell theory. The cell is described as a larger or smaller, spherule, consisting of albuminous or protein-like substances. It has a nucleus within it of a somewhat different structure and around the whole is an enclosing membrane. As such, it is the building-stone for all that arising by way of living organisms. The sex-cells are of a similar nature but are formed differently according to whether they are male or female, and from such cells every more complicated organism is built up.

But now, what is actually meant when it is said that an organism builds itself up from these cells? The idea is that substances which are otherwise in Nature are taken up into these cells and then no longer work in quite the same way as before. If oxygen, nitrogen or carbon are contained in the cells, the carbon, for instance, does not have the effect upon some other substance outside, that it would have had before; such power of direct influence is lost to it. It is taken up into the organism of the cell and can only work there as conditions in the cell allow. That is to say, the influence is exerted not so much by the carbon, but by the cell, which makes use of the particular characteristics of carbon, having incorporated a certain amount of it into itself. For example, what man has within him in the form of metal—iron for instance—only works in a circuitous way, via the cell. The cell is the building-stone. So in studying the organism, everything is traced to the cell. Considering at first only the main bulk of the cell, without the nucleus and membrane, we distinguish two parts: a transparent part composed of this fluid, and another part forming sort of framework. Describing it schematically, we may say that there is the framework of the cell, and this is embedded, as it were, in the other substance which, unlike the framework, is quite unformed. (Fig. 6) Thus we must think of the cell

as consisting of a mass which remains fluid and unformed and a skeleton or framework which takes on a great variety of forms. This then is studied. The method of studying cells in this way has been pretty well perfected; certain parts in the cell can be stained with color, others do not take the stain. Thus with carmine or saffron, or whatever coloring matter is used, we are able to distinguish the form of the cell and can thus acquire certain ideas about its inner structure. We note, for instance, how the inner structure changes when the female germ-cell is fructified. We follow the different stages in which the cell's inner structure alters; how it divides; and how the parts become attached to one another, cell upon cell, so that the whole becomes a complicated structure. All this is studied. But it occurs to no-one to ask: With what is this whole life in the cell connected? What is really happening? It does not occur to anyone to ask this.

What happens in the cell is to be conceived, my dear friends, in the following way,—though to be sure, it is still a rather abstract way. There is the cell. For the moment let us consider it in its most usual form, namely the spherical form. This spherical form is partially determined by the thin fluid substance, and enclosed within it is the delicate framework. But what is the spherical form? The thin fluid mass is as yet left entirely to itself and therefore behaves according to the impulses it receives from its surroundings. What does it do? Well, my dear friends, it mirrors the universe around it! It takes on the form of the sphere because it mirrors in miniature the whole cosmos, which we indeed also picture to ourselves ideally as a sphere. Every cell in its spherical form is no less than an image of the form of the whole universe. And the framework inside, every line of the form, is conditioned by its relationship to the structure of the whole cosmos. To express myself abstractly to begin with, think of the sphere of the universe with its imaginary boundary (Fig. 7). In it, you have here a planet, and there a planet (a,a₁). They work in such a way as to exert an influence upon one another in the direction of the line which joins them. Here (m) let us say—diagrammatically, of course,—a cell is formed; its outline mirrors the sphere. Here, within the framework it has a solid part which is due to the working of the one planet on the other. And suppose that here there were another constellation of planets, working upon each other along the line joining them (b,b₁).

And here again there might be yet another planet (c), this one having no counterpart;—it throws the whole construction, which might otherwise have been rectangular, out of shape, and the structure takes on a somewhat different form. And so you have in the whole formation of the framework of the cell a reflection of the relationships existing in the planetary system,—altogether in the whole starry system. You can enter quite concretely into the formation of the cell and you will reach an understanding of this concrete form only if you see in the cell an image of the entire cosmos.

And now take the female ovum, and picture to yourselves that this ovum has brought the cosmic forces to a certain inner balance. They have taken on form in the framework of the cell, and are in a certain way at rest within it, supported by the female organism as a whole. Then comes the influence of the male sex-cell. This has not brought the macrocosmic forces to rest, but works in the sense of a very specialized force. It is as though the male sex-cell works precisely along this line of force (indicated by Dr. Steiner on the blackboard) upon the female ovum which has come to a condition of rest. The cell, which is an image of the whole cosmos, is thereby caused to relinquish its microcosmic form once more to a changing play of forces. At first, in the female ovum, the macrocosm comes to rest in a peaceful image. Then through the male sex-cell the female is torn out of this state of rest, and is drawn again into a region of specialized activity and brought into movement. Previously it had drawn itself together in the resting form of the image of the cosmos, but the form is drawn into movement again by the male forces which are, so to speak, images of movement. Through them the female forces, which are images of the form of the cosmos and have come to rest, are brought out of this state of rest and balance.

Here we may have some idea, from the aspect of Astronomy, of the forming and shaping of something which is minute and cellular. Embryology cannot be studied at all without Astronomy, for what Embryology has to show is only the other pole of what is seen in Astronomy. We must, in a way, follow the starry heavens on the one hand, seeing how they reveal successive stages, and we must then follow the process of development of a fructified cell. The two belong together, for the one is only the image of the other. if you understand nothing of Astronomy, you will never understand the forces which are at work in Embryology, and if you understand nothing of Embryology, you will never understand the meaning of the activities with which Astronomy has to deal. For these activities appear in miniature in the processes of Embryology.

It is conceivable that a science should be formed, in which, on the one hand, astronomical events are calculated and described, and on the other hand all that belongs to them in Embryology, which is only the other aspect of the same thing.

Now look at the position as it is today: you find that Embryology is studied on its own. It would be regarded as madness if you were to demand of a modern embryologist that he should study Astronomy in order to understand the phenomena in his own sphere of work. And yet it should be so. This is why a complete regrouping of the sciences is necessary. It will be impossible to become a real embryologist without studying Astronomy. It will no longer be possible to educate specialists who merely turn their eyes and their telescopes to the stars, for to study the stars in that way has no further meaning unless one knows that it is out of the great universe that the minute and microscopical is fashioned.

All this,—which is quite real and concrete,—has in scientific circles been changed into the utmost abstraction. It is reality to say: We must strive for astronomical knowledge in cellular theory, especially in Embryology. If DuBois-Raymond had said that the detailed astronomical facts should be applied to the cell-theory, he would have spoken out of the sphere of reality. But what he wanted corresponds to no reality, namely that something thought-out and devised—the atoms and molecules—should be examined with astronomical precision. He wanted the astronomical type of mathematical thoughts, which have been added to the world of the stars, to be sought for again in the molecule.

Thus you see, upon the one hand lies reality: movement, the active forces of the stars and the embryonic development in which there lives, in all reality, what lives in the starry heavens. That is where the reality lies and that is where we must look for it. On the other hand lies abstraction. The mathematician, the mechanist, calculates the movements and forces of the heavenly bodies and then invents the molecular structure to which to apply this kind of astronomical knowledge. Here he is withdrawn from life, living in pure abstractions.

These are the things about which we must think, remembering that now we must renew, in full consciousness, something which was in a certain sense present in earlier times. Looking back to the Egyptian Mysteries, we find astronomical observations such as were made at that time. These observations, my dear friends, were not used merely to calculate when an eclipse of the Sun or Moon would take place, but rather to arrive at what should come about in social evolution. Men were guided by what they saw in the heavens, as to what must be said to the people, what instructions should be given, so that the development of the whole social life should take its right course. Astronomy and Sociology were dealt with as one. We too, though in a different way from the Egyptians, must again learn how to connect what happens in social life with the phenomena of the great universe. We do not understand what came about in the middle of the 15th century, if we cannot relate the events of that time to the phenomena which then prevailed in the universe. It is like a blind man talking about color to speak of the changes in the civilized world in the middle of the 15th century without taking all this into account.

Spiritual Science is already a starting point. But we shall not succeed in bring together the complicated domain of Sociology—social science—with the observations of natural phenomena, unless we first begin by connecting Astronomy with Embryology, linking the embryonic facts with astronomical phenomena.

When we set out today to speak about Anthroposophy and the Threefold Movement with its various consequences—which indeed arise out of Anthroposophy, and must really be thought of as arising out of it,—then we must first of all hold before our souls that it is difficult to make oneself understood. And, without this feeling—that it is difficult to make oneself understood—we shall hardly be able to succeed as lecturers for anthroposophical Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it, in a way satisfying to ourselves. For if there is to be speaking about Anthroposophy which is appropriate, then this speaking must be entirely different from what one is accustomed to in accordance with the traditions of speaking. One has often fallen into the habit of speaking also about anthroposophical matters in the way one has become used to speaking in the age of materialism; but one is more apt thereby to obstruct the understanding for Anthroposophy, rather than to open up an approach to it.

We shall first of all have to make quite clear to ourselves what the content of the matter is that comes towards us in Anthroposophy and its consequences. And in these lectures I shall deal as I said yesterday, with the practice of lecturing, but only for anthroposophical and related matters, so that what I have to say applies only to these.

We must now make clear to ourselves that primarily it is the feeling for the central issue of the threefold order that must at first be stirred in our present humanity. It must after all be assumed that an audience of today does not begin to know what to do with the concept of the threefold order. Our speaking must slowly lead to the imparting first of a feeling for this threefold order in the audience.

During the time in which materialism has held sway, one has become accustomed to give expression to the things of the outer world through description. In this one had a kind of guidance in the outer world itself. Moreover, objects in the outer world are, I would say, too fixed for one to believe that, in the end, it makes much difference how one speaks about the things of the outer world; one need only give people some guidance on the way for perceiving this outer world. Then, in the end it comes to this: if, let us say, one delivers somewhere a popular lecture with experiments, and thereby demonstrates to people how this or that substance reacts in a retort, then they see how the substance reacts in the retort. And whether one then lectures this way or that way—a bit better, a bit less well, a hit more relevantly, a hit less relevantly—in the end makes no difference. And gradually it has tended to come to the point that such lectures and such talks are attended in order to see the experimenting, and what is spoken is just taken along as a kind of more or less agreeable or disagreeable side noise. One must express these things somewhat radically, just in order to show the exact direction in which civilization is moving in regard to these things.

When it is a matter of what to stimulate in people for doing, for willing, one is of the opinion that one must just “set up ideals”. People would have to accustom themselves to “apprehend ideals”, and thus one gradually glides more and more over into the utopian, when it is a matter of such things as the threefold order of the social organism.

So it has also happened in many an instance that many people who lecture about the threefold idea today absolutely call forth the opinion, through the manner in which they speak, that it is some utopia or other that should be striven for. And, since one is always of the opinion that what should be striven for in most cases cannot be expected to come in less than fifty or a hundred years—or many extend the time even further—so one also allows oneself, quite unconsciously, to approach speaking about things as if they would first ripen in fifty or a hundred years. One glides away from the reality very soon, and then talks about it thus: How will a small shop be set up in the threefold social organism? What will be the relation of the single person to the sewing machine in the threefold social organism?—and so on. Such questions are really put in abundance to any endeavor such as the threefolding of the social organism. As regards such an endeavor, which with all of its roots comes out of reality, one should not at all speak in this utopian fashion. For one should always evoke at least this feeling: the threefold order of the social organism is nothing which can be "made" in the sense that state constitutions can be made in a parliament—of the kind for example, that the Weimar National Assembly was. These are made! But one cannot speak in the same sense of making the threefold social organism.

Just as little can one speak of "organizing" in order to produce the threefold order. That which is an organism, this one does not organize; this grows. It is just in the nature of an organism that one does not have to organize it, that it organizes itself. That which can be organized is no organism. We must approach things from the start with these feelings, otherwise we shall not have the possibility of finding the appropriate expression.

The threefold order is something which indeed simply follows from the natural living together of people. One can falsify this natural living together of people—as has been the case, for example, in recent history—by extending the characteristic features of one member, the states-rights member, to both others. Then these two other members will simply become corrupted because they cannot prosper, just as someone cannot get on well in an unsuitable garment, that is too heavy, or the like.

It is in the natural relation of people that the threefold order of the social organism lives, that the independent spiritual life lives, that the rights or states life, regulated by the people's majority, lives, that the economic life, shaped solely out of itself, also lives. One can put strait jackets on the spiritual life, on the economic life, although one does not need them; but then its own life asserts itself continually nevertheless, and what we then experience outwardly is just this self-assertion. It is hence necessary to show that the threefolding of the social organism is implicit in the very nature of both the human being and the social life.

We see that the spiritual life in Europe was entirely independent and free until the 13th or 14th centuries, when, what was the free, independent spiritual life was first pushed into the universities. In this time you find the founding of the universities, and the universities then in turn slip by and by into the life of state. So that one can say: From about the 13th to the 16th or 17th century, the universities slip into the states-life, and with the universities, also the remaining educational institutions, without people really noticing it. These other institutions simply followed. This we have on the one hand.

On the other hand, until about the same period, we have free economic rule that found its true, middle-European expression in the free economic village communities. As the free spiritual life slipped into the universities, which are localized at first, and which later find shelter in the state, so does that which is the economic organization first receive a certain administration in the “rights” sense, when the cities emerge more and more. Then the cities, in the first place, organize this economic life, while earlier, when the village communities were setting the pace, it had grown freely. And then we see how increasingly, that which was centralized in the cities seeks protection in the larger territories of the states. Thus we see how the tendency of modern times ends in letting the spiritual life on the one hand, the economic life on the other, seek the protection of states which increasingly take on the character of domains constituted according to Roman law. This was actually the development in modern times.

We have reached that point in historical development where things can go no further like this, where a sense and a feeling for free spiritual life must once again be developed. When in a strait jacket, the spirit simply does not advance; because it only apparently advances, but in truth still remains behind—can never celebrate real births, but at most renaissances. It is just the same with the economic life.

Today we simply stand in the age in which we must absolutely reverse the movement which has developed in the civilized world of Europe with its American annex, the age in which the opposite direction must set in. For what has gone on developing for a time must reach a point at which something new must set in. Otherwise one runs into the danger of doing as one would when, with a growing plant, one were to say it should not be allowed to come to fruition, it should grow further, it should keep blooming on and on.—Then it would grow thus: bring forth a flower; then no seed, but again a flower, again a flower, and so on. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to familiarize oneself inwardly with these things, and to develop a feeling for the historical turning point at which we stand today.

But, just as in an organism every detail is necessarily formed as it is, so is everything in the world in which we live and which we help to shape, to be formed as it must be in its place in the sense of the whole. You cannot imagine, if you think realistically, that your ear lobe could be formed the very least bit differently from what it is, in conformity with your whole organism. Were your ear lobe only the least bit differently formed, then you would also have to have quite a different nose, different fingertips, and so forth. And just as the ear lobe is formed in the sense of the whole human being, so must also the lecture in which something flows be given—in the sense of the whole subject—that lecturing which is truly taking on new forms.

Such a lecture cannot be delivered in the manner which one could perhaps learn from the sermon-lecture. For the sermon-lecture as we still have it today, rests on the tradition which really goes back to the old Orient,—on a special attitude which the whole human being in the old Orient had toward speech. This characteristic was continued, so that it lived in a certain free way in Greece, lived in Rome, and shows its last spark most clearly in the particular relationship which the Frenchman has to his language. Not that I want to imply that every Frenchman preaches when he speaks; but a similar relationship, such as had to develop out of the oriental relationship to language still continues to live on in a definite way in the French handling of speech, only entirely in a declining movement.

This element which we can observe here in regard to language came to expression when one still learned speaking from the professors, as one could later, but now in the declining phase—professors who really continued to live on as mummies of ancient times and bore the title, “professor of elocution”. In former times, at almost every university, in every school, also in seminaries and so on there was such a professor of elocution, of rhetoric. The renowned Curtius [Note 1] of Berlin actually still bore the title “professor of elocution” officially. But the whole affair became too dull for him, and he did not lecture on elocution, but only demonstrated himself as a professor of elocution through being sent out by the faculty council on ceremonial occasions, since that was always the task of the professor of elocution. Nevertheless, in this Curtius made it his business to discharge his duties at such ceremonial occasions by paying as little regard as possible to the ancient rules of eloquence. For the rest, it was too dull for him to be a professor of elocution in times in which professors of elocution did not fit in any more, and he lectured on art history, on the history of Greek art. But in the university catalog he was listed as “professor of elocution”. This refers us back to an element that was present everywhere in speech in olden times.

Now, when we consider what is quite especially characteristic in the training of speech for the middle European languages, for German, for example, then indeed everything denoted in the original sense by the word “elocution” has not the least meaning. For something flowed into these languages that is entirely different from that which was peculiar to speaking in the times when elocution had to be taken seriously. In the Greek and Latin languages there is elocution. In the German language elocution is something quite impossible, when one looks inwardly at the essential.

Today, however, we are living definitely in a time of transition. That which was the speech element of the German language cannot continue to be used. Every attempt must be made to come out of this speech element and to come into a different speech element. This also is the task, in a certain sense, to be solved by him who would speak productively about Anthroposophy or the threefold idea. For only when a fairly large number of people are able to speak in this way, will Anthroposophy and the threefold idea be rightly understood in public, even in single lectures. Meanwhile, there are not a few who develop only a pseudo-understanding and pseudo-avowal for these.

If we look back on the special element in regard to speaking which was present in the times out of which the handling of elocution was preserved, we must say: then it was as if language grew out of the human being in quite a naive way, as his fingers grow, as his second teeth grow. From the imitation process speaking resulted, and language with its whole organization. And only after one had language did one come to the use of thinking.

And now it transpired that the human being when speaking to others about any problem had to see that the inner experience, the thought experience, to a certain extent clicked [einschnappte] into the language. The sentence structure was there. It was in a certain way elastic and flexible. And, more inward than the language was the thought element. One experienced the thought element as something more inward than the language, and let it click into the language, so that it fitted into it just as one fits the idea of a statue or the like into marble. It was entirely an artistic treatment of the language. Even the way in which one was meant to speak in prose had something similar to the way in which one was to express oneself in poetry. Rhetoric and elocution had rules which were not at all unlike the rules of poetic expression. (So as not to be misunderstood, I should like to insert here that the development of language does not exclude poetry. What I now say, I say for older arts of expression, and I beg you not to interpret it as if I wanted to assert that there can be no more poetry at all today. We need but treat the language differently in poetry. But that does not belong here; I wanted to insert this only in parenthesis, that I might not be misunderstood.)

And when we now ask: How was one then supposed to speak in the time in which the thought and feeling content clicked into the language? One was supposed to speak beautifully! That was the first task: to speak beautifully. Hence, one can really only learn to speak beautifully today when one immerses oneself in the old way of speaking. There was beautiful speaking. And speaking beautifully is definitely a gift which comes to man from the Orient. It might be said: There was speaking beautifully to the point that one really regarded singing, the singing of language, as the ideal of speaking. Preaching is only a form of beautiful speaking stripped of much of the beautiful speaking. For, wholly beautiful speaking is cultic speaking. When cultic speaking pours itself into a sermon, then much is lost. But still, the sermon is a daughter of the beautiful speaking found in the cult.

The second form which has come into evidence, especially in German and in similar languages, is that in which it is no longer possible to distinguish properly between the word and the grasping of the thought conveyed—the word and the thought experience; the word has become abstract, so that it exempts itself, like a kind of thought. It is the element where the understanding for language itself is stripped off. It can no longer have something click into it, because one feels at the very outset that what is to be clicked in and the word vehicle into which something is to click are one.

For who today is clear, for example in German, when he writes down “Begriff” [concept], that this is the noun form of begreifen [to grasp; to comprehend] be-greifen (greifen with a prefix) is thus das Greifen an etwas ausfuehren [the carrying out of the grasping of something]—that “Begriff” is thus nothing other than the noun form for objective perceiving? The concept “Begriff” was formed at a time when there was still a living perception of the ether body, which grasps things. Therefore one could then truly form the concept of Begriff, because grasping with the physical body is merely an image of grasping with the ether body.

But, in order to hear Begreifen in the word Begriff it is necessary to feel speech as an organism of one's own. In the element of speaking which I am now giving an account of, language and concept always swim through one another. There is not at all that sharp separation which was once present in the Orient, where the language was an organism, was more external, and that which declared itself lived inwardly. What lived inwardly had to click into the linguistic form in speaking; that is, click in so that what lives inwardly is the content, and that into which it clicked was the outer form. And this clicking-in had to happen in the sense of the beautiful, so that one was thus a true speech artist when one wanted to speak.

This is no longer the case when, for example, one has no feeling any more for differentiating between Gehen [to go] and Laufen [to run] in relation to language as such. Gehen: two e's—one walks thither without straining oneself thereby; e is always the feeling expression for the slight participation one has in one's own activity. If there is an au in the word, this participation is enhanced. From running (Laufen) comes panting (Schnaufen) which has the same vowel sound in it. With this one's insides come into tumult. There must be a sound there that intimates this modification of the inner being. But all this is indeed no longer there today; language has become abstract. It is like our onward-flowing thoughts themselves—for the whole middle region, and especially also for the western region of civilization.

It is possible to behold a picture, an imagination in every single word; and one can live in this picture as in something relatively objective. He who faced language in earlier times considered it as something objective into which the subjective was poured. He would as little not have regarded it so, as he would have lost sight of the fact that his coat is something objective, and is not grown together with his body as another skin.

As against this, the second stage of language takes the whole organism of language as another son' skin, whereas formerly language was much more loosely there, I should like to say, like a garment. I am speaking now of the stage of language in which speaking beautifully is no longer taken into first consideration, but rather speaking correctly. In this it is not a question of rhetoric and elocution, but of logic. With this stage, which has come up slowly since Aristotle's time, grammar itself became logical to the point that the logical forms were simply developed out of the grammatical forms—one abstracted the logical from the grammatical. Here all has swum together: thought and word. The sentence is that out of which one evolves the judgment. But the judgment is in truth so laid into the sentence that one no longer experiences it as inherently independent. Correct speaking, this has become the criterion.

Further, we see a new element in speaking arising, only used everywhere at the wrong point—carried over to a quite wrong domain. Beautiful speaking humanity owes to the Orient. Correct speaking lies in the middle region of civilization. And we must look to the West when seeking the third element.

But in the West it arises first of all quite corrupted. How does it arise? Well, in the first place, language has become abstract. That which is the word organism is already almost thought-organism. And this has gradually increased so much in the West, that there it would perhaps even be regarded as facetious to discuss such things. But, in a completely wrong domain, the advance already exists.

***

Humanism and pragmatism. The need for developing a true ethics of speaking.

You see, in America, just in the last third of the 19th century, a philosophical trend called “pragmatism” has appeared. In England it has been called “humanism.” James [Note 2] is its representative in America, Schiller [Note 3] in England. Then there are personalities who have already gone about extending these things somewhat. The merit of extending this concept of humanism in a very beautiful sense is due to Professor MacKenzie [Note 4] who was recently here.

To what do these endeavors lead?—I mean now, American pragmatism and English humanism. They arise from a complete skepticism about cognition: Truth is something that really doesn't exist! When we make two assertions, we actually make them fundamentally in order to have guide-points in life. To speak about an “atom”—one cannot raise any particular ground of truth for it; but it is useful to take the atom theory as a basis in chemistry; thus we set up the atom concept! It is serviceable, it is useful. There is no truth other than that which lives in useful, life-serviceable concepts. “God,” if he exists or not, this is not the question. Truth, that is something or other which is of no concern to us. But it is hard to live pleasantly if one does not set up the concept of God; it is really good to live, if one lives as if there were a God. So, let us set it up, because it's a serviceable, useful concept for life. Whether the earth began according to the Kant-Laplace theory and will end according to the mechanical warmth theory, from the standpoint of truth, no human being knows anything about this—I am now just simply reporting—, but it is useful for our thinking to represent the beginning and end of the earth in this way. This is the pragmatic teaching of James, and also in essence,the humanistic teaching of Schiller. Finally, it is also not known at all whether the human being now, proceeding from the standpoint of truth, really has a soul. That could be discussed to the end of the world, whether there is a soul or not, but it is useful to assume a soul if one wants to comprehend all that the human being carries out in life.

Of course, everything that appears today in our civilization in one place spreads to other places. For such things which arose instinctively in the West, the German had to find something more conceptual, that permits of being more easily seen through conceptually; and from this the “As If” philosophy originated: whether there is an atom or not is not the question; we consider the phenomena in such a way “as if” there was an atom. Whether the good can realize itself or not, cannot be decided; we consider life in such a way “as if” the good could realize itself. One could indeed quarrel to the end of the world about whether or not there is a God: but we consider life in such a way that we act “as if” there were a God. There you have the “As If” philosophy.

One pays little attention to these things because one imagines: there in America James sits with his pupils, there in England Schiller sits with his pupils; there is Vaihinger, who wrote the “As If” philosophy: there are a few owls who live in a kind of cloud-castle, and of what concern is it to other people!

Whoever has the ear for it, however, already hears the “As If” philosophy sounding everywhere today. Almost all human beings talk in the sense of the “As If” philosophy. The philosophers are only quite funny fellows. They always blab out what other people do unconsciously. If one is sufficiently unprejudiced for it, then one only seldom hears a human being today who still uses his words differently, in connection with his heart and with his whole soul, with his whole human being, who speaks differently than as though the matter were as he expresses it. One only does not usually have the ear to hear within the sound and the tone-color of the speaking that this “As If” lives in it,—that fundamentally people over the whole of civilization are seized by this “As If.”

Whereas things usually come to be corrupted at the end, here something shows itself to be corrupted at the beginning, something that in a higher sense must be developed for handling of speech in Anthroposophy, in the threefold order and so on. These things are so earnest, so important, that we really should speak specially about them. For it will be a question of elevating the triviality, “We need concepts because they are useful for life,” this triviality of a materialistic, utilitarian theory, of raising it up to the ethical, and perhaps through the ethical to the religious. For, if we want to work in the sense of Anthroposophy and the threefold order, we have before us the task of learning good speaking, in addition to the beautiful speaking and the correct speaking which we can acquire from history. We must maintain an ear for good speaking.

Until now, I have seen little sign that it has been noticed, when, in the course of my lectures I have called attention to this good speaking—I have done it very frequently. In referring to this good speaking I have always said that it is not only a question today that what is said be correct in the logical-abstract sense, but it is a matter of saying something in a certain connection or omitting it, not saying it in this connection. It is a question of developing a feeling that something should not only be correct, but that it is justified within its connection—that it can be either good in a certain connection or bad in a certain connection. Beyond rhetoric, beyond logic, we must learn a true ethics of speaking. We must know how we may allow ourselves things in a certain connection that would not be at all permitted in another connection.

Here I may now use an example close to hand, that could perhaps have already struck some of you who were present lately at the lectures: I spoke in a certain connection of the fact that, in reality, Goethe was not born at all. I said that Goethe for a long time endeavored to express himself through painting, through drawing, but that nothing came about from it. It then flowed over into his poetic works, and then again in the poetic works, as for example Iphigenia, or especially in Naturliche Tochter [“Daughters of Nature”], we have indeed poetic works not at all in the sentimental sense. People called these poems of Goethe's “marble smooth and marble cold,” because they are almost sculptural, because they are three-dimensional. Goethe had genuine capacities which really did not become human at all; he was actually not born.—You see, in that connection in which I spoke lately, one could quite certainly say it. But imagine, if someone were to represent it as a thesis in itself in the absolute sense! It would be not only illogical, it would be of course quite crazy.

To speak out of an awareness of a life connection is something different from finding the adequate or correct use of a word association for the thought and feeling involved. To let a pronouncement or the like arise at a particular place out of a living relationship, that is what leads over from beauty, from correctness, to the ethos of language—at which one feels, when a sentence is uttered, whether one may or may not say it in the whole context. But now, there is again an inward growing together, not with language, but with speaking. This is what I should like to call good speaking or had speaking; the third form. Aside from beautiful or ugly speaking, aside from correct or incorrect speaking, comes good or bad speaking, in the sense in which I have just presented it.

Today the view is still widespread that there can be sentences which one forms and which can then be spoken on any occasion, because they have absolute validity. In reality, for our life in the present, there are no longer such sentences. Every sentence that is possible in a certain connection, is today impossible in another connection. That means, we have entered upon an epoch of humanity's development in which we need to direct our view to this many-sidedness of living situations.

The Oriental who with his whole thinking lived within a small territory, also the Greek still, who with his spiritual life, with his rights life, with his economic life, lived on a small territory, poured something into his language that appears as a linguistic work of art must appear. How is it though in a work of art? It is such that a single finite object really appears infinite in a certain realm. In this way beauty was even defined, though one-sidedly, by Haeckel, Darwin and others: It is the appearance of the idea in a self-contained picture.—The first thing which I had to oppose in my Vienna lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics,” was that the beautiful is “the appearance of the idea in outer form.” I showed then that one must mean just the reverse: that the beautiful arises when one gives to form the appearance of the infinite.

And so it is with language, which in a certain way also acts as a limited territory—as a territory which encloses the possible meaning within boundaries. If that which is actually infinite in the inner soul- and spirit-life is to click into this language, it must there come to expression in beautiful form.

In correct speaking the language must be adequate; the sentence must fit the judgment, the concept, the word. The Romans were compelled to this, especially as their territory became ever larger and larger; their language transformed itself from the beautiful into the logical. Hence the custom has been retained, of conveying logic to people precisely in the Latin language. (You have indeed learned logic quite well by it.)

But we are now once again beyond this stage. Now, it is necessary that we learn to experience language with ethos—that, to a certain extent we gain a kind of morality of speaking in our lecturing, while we know that we have in a certain context to allow ourselves something or to deny ourselves something. There, things do not click-in, in the way I described earlier, but here we make use of the word to characterize. All defining ceases; here we use the word to characterize. The word is so handled that one really feels each word as something insufficient, every sentence as something insufficient, and has the urge to characterize that which one wishes to place before humanity from the most varied aspects—to go around the matter to a certain extent, and to characterize it from the most varied aspects.

You see, for free spiritual life—that is to say spiritual life that exists out of its own laws—there is as yet not very much understanding in present-day humanity. For, mostly what is understood by free spiritual life is a structure in which people live, where each one crows his own cock-a-doodle-doo from his own dung heap—excuse the somewhat remarkable picture—and in which the most incredible consonances come about from the crowing. In reality, in free spiritual life, harmony comes about through and through, because the spirit, not the single egoists, lives—because the spirit can really lead its own life over and above the single egoists.

There is, for example,—one must already say these things today—a Waldorf School spirit definitely there for our Waldorf School in Stuttgart that is independent of the body of teachers,—into which the body of teachers grows, and in which it becomes ever more and more clear that possibly the one can be more capable or less capable, but the spirit has a life of its own.

It is an abstraction, which people today still represent to themselves, when they speak of “free spirit.” This is no reality at all. The free spirit is something that really lives among people—one must only let it come into existence; and what works among people—one must only let it come into existence.

What I have said to you today I have also said only so that what we are meant to gain here may proceed from fundamental feelings, from the feeling for the earnestness of the matter. I cannot, of course, suppose that every one will now go right out and, as those in olden times spoke beautifully, in the middle period correctly, now all will speak well! But you may not for this reason object: of what help, then, are all our lectures, if we are not at once able to speak in the sense of good speaking?—It is rather a matter of our really getting the feeling of the earnestness of the situation, which we are thus to live into, so that we know: what is wanted here is something in itself so organically whole, that a necessity of form must gradually express itself even in speech, just as a necessity of form expresses itself in the ear-lobe, such as cannot be otherwise depending on how the whole human being is.

Thus I shall try to bring still closer together what is for us the content of Anthroposophy and the threefold order with the way in which it should be presented to people. And, from the consideration of principles I shall come more and more into the concrete, and to that which should underlie the practice of lecturing.

I have often emphasized that this must be Anthroposophy's manner of presenting things. I have often emphasized that one should not indeed believe that one is able to find the adequate word, the adequate sentence; one can only conduct oneself as does a photographer who, in order to show a tree, takes at least four views.

Thus a conception that lives itself out in an abstract trivial philosophy such as pragmatism or humanism, must be raised up into the realm of the ethical. And then it must first of all live in the ethos of language. We must learn good speaking. That means that we must experience as regards speaking something of all that we otherwise experience in relation to ethics, moral philosophy.

After all, the matter has become quite clear in modern times. In the speaking of theosophists we have an archaism simply conditioned through the language—archaic, namely as regards the materialistic coloration of the last centuries: “physical body”—well, it is thick; “ether body”—it is thinner, more nebulous; “astral body”—once again thinner, but still only thinner; “I”—still thinner. Now, new members of the human being keep on coming up: they become even thinner. At last one no longer knows at all how one can reach this thinness, but in any case, it only becomes ever thinner and thinner. One does not escape the materialism. This is indeed also the hallmark of this theosophical literature. And it is always the hallmark that appears, when these things are to be spoken about, from theoretical speaking, to that which I once experienced within the Theosophical Society in Paris, (I believe it was in 1906). A lady there who was a real rock-solid theosophist, wanted to express how well she liked particular lectures which had been given in the hall in which we were; and she said: “There are such good vibrations here!” And one perceived from her that this was really thought of as something which one might sniff. Thus, the scents of the lectures which were left behind and which one could sniff out somehow, these were really meant.

We must learn to tear language away from adequacy. For it can be adequate only for the material. If we wish to use it for the spiritual, in the sense of the present epoch of development of humanity, then we must free it. Freedom must then come into the handling of language. If one does not take these things abstractly, but livingly, then the first thing into which the philosophy of freedom [spiritual activity] must come is in speaking, in the handling of language. For this is necessary; otherwise the transition will not be found, for example, to the characterization of the free spiritual life.

Notes:

Note 1.Ernst Curtius, 1814–1896, archeologist and historian.

Note 2.William James. 1842–1910, American philosopher.

Note 3.F. C. S. Schiller. 1864–1937. Representative of pragmatism in England which he combined with humanism.

Note 4.S. MacKenzie, born 1860. Professor in Cardiff.

When we set out today to speak about Anthroposophy and the Threefold Movement with its various consequences—which indeed arise out of Anthroposophy, and must really be thought of as arising out of it,—then we must first of all hold before our souls that it is difficult to make oneself understood. And, without this feeling—that it is difficult to make oneself understood—we shall hardly be able to succeed as lecturers for anthroposophical Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it, in a way satisfying to ourselves. For if there is to be speaking about Anthroposophy which is appropriate, then this speaking must be entirely different from what one is accustomed to in accordance with the traditions of speaking. One has often fallen into the habit of speaking also about anthroposophical matters in the way one has become used to speaking in the age of materialism; but one is more apt thereby to obstruct the understanding for Anthroposophy, rather than to open up an approach to it.

We shall first of all have to make quite clear to ourselves what the content of the matter is that comes towards us in Anthroposophy and its consequences. And in these lectures I shall deal as I said yesterday, with the practice of lecturing, but only for anthroposophical and related matters, so that what I have to say applies only to these.

We must now make clear to ourselves that primarily it is the feeling for the central issue of the threefold order that must at first be stirred in our present humanity. It must after all be assumed that an audience of today does not begin to know what to do with the concept of the threefold order. Our speaking must slowly lead to the imparting first of a feeling for this threefold order in the audience.

During the time in which materialism has held sway, one has become accustomed to give expression to the things of the outer world through description. In this one had a kind of guidance in the outer world itself. Moreover, objects in the outer world are, I would say, too fixed for one to believe that, in the end, it makes much difference how one speaks about the things of the outer world; one need only give people some guidance on the way for perceiving this outer world. Then, in the end it comes to this: if, let us say, one delivers somewhere a popular lecture with experiments, and thereby demonstrates to people how this or that substance reacts in a retort, then they see how the substance reacts in the retort. And whether one then lectures this way or that way—a bit better, a bit less well, a hit more relevantly, a hit less relevantly—in the end makes no difference. And gradually it has tended to come to the point that such lectures and such talks are attended in order to see the experimenting, and what is spoken is just taken along as a kind of more or less agreeable or disagreeable side noise. One must express these things somewhat radically, just in order to show the exact direction in which civilization is moving in regard to these things.

When it is a matter of what to stimulate in people for doing, for willing, one is of the opinion that one must just “set up ideals”. People would have to accustom themselves to “apprehend ideals”, and thus one gradually glides more and more over into the utopian, when it is a matter of such things as the threefold order of the social organism.

So it has also happened in many an instance that many people who lecture about the threefold idea today absolutely call forth the opinion, through the manner in which they speak, that it is some utopia or other that should be striven for. And, since one is always of the opinion that what should be striven for in most cases cannot be expected to come in less than fifty or a hundred years—or many extend the time even further—so one also allows oneself, quite unconsciously, to approach speaking about things as if they would first ripen in fifty or a hundred years. One glides away from the reality very soon, and then talks about it thus: How will a small shop be set up in the threefold social organism? What will be the relation of the single person to the sewing machine in the threefold social organism?—and so on. Such questions are really put in abundance to any endeavor such as the threefolding of the social organism. As regards such an endeavor, which with all of its roots comes out of reality, one should not at all speak in this utopian fashion. For one should always evoke at least this feeling: the threefold order of the social organism is nothing which can be "made" in the sense that state constitutions can be made in a parliament—of the kind for example, that the Weimar National Assembly was. These are made! But one cannot speak in the same sense of making the threefold social organism.

Just as little can one speak of "organizing" in order to produce the threefold order. That which is an organism, this one does not organize; this grows. It is just in the nature of an organism that one does not have to organize it, that it organizes itself. That which can be organized is no organism. We must approach things from the start with these feelings, otherwise we shall not have the possibility of finding the appropriate expression.

The threefold order is something which indeed simply follows from the natural living together of people. One can falsify this natural living together of people—as has been the case, for example, in recent history—by extending the characteristic features of one member, the states-rights member, to both others. Then these two other members will simply become corrupted because they cannot prosper, just as someone cannot get on well in an unsuitable garment, that is too heavy, or the like.

It is in the natural relation of people that the threefold order of the social organism lives, that the independent spiritual life lives, that the rights or states life, regulated by the people's majority, lives, that the economic life, shaped solely out of itself, also lives. One can put strait jackets on the spiritual life, on the economic life, although one does not need them; but then its own life asserts itself continually nevertheless, and what we then experience outwardly is just this self-assertion. It is hence necessary to show that the threefolding of the social organism is implicit in the very nature of both the human being and the social life.

We see that the spiritual life in Europe was entirely independent and free until the 13th or 14th centuries, when, what was the free, independent spiritual life was first pushed into the universities. In this time you find the founding of the universities, and the universities then in turn slip by and by into the life of state. So that one can say: From about the 13th to the 16th or 17th century, the universities slip into the states-life, and with the universities, also the remaining educational institutions, without people really noticing it. These other institutions simply followed. This we have on the one hand.

On the other hand, until about the same period, we have free economic rule that found its true, middle-European expression in the free economic village communities. As the free spiritual life slipped into the universities, which are localized at first, and which later find shelter in the state, so does that which is the economic organization first receive a certain administration in the “rights” sense, when the cities emerge more and more. Then the cities, in the first place, organize this economic life, while earlier, when the village communities were setting the pace, it had grown freely. And then we see how increasingly, that which was centralized in the cities seeks protection in the larger territories of the states. Thus we see how the tendency of modern times ends in letting the spiritual life on the one hand, the economic life on the other, seek the protection of states which increasingly take on the character of domains constituted according to Roman law. This was actually the development in modern times.

We have reached that point in historical development where things can go no further like this, where a sense and a feeling for free spiritual life must once again be developed. When in a strait jacket, the spirit simply does not advance; because it only apparently advances, but in truth still remains behind—can never celebrate real births, but at most renaissances. It is just the same with the economic life.

Today we simply stand in the age in which we must absolutely reverse the movement which has developed in the civilized world of Europe with its American annex, the age in which the opposite direction must set in. For what has gone on developing for a time must reach a point at which something new must set in. Otherwise one runs into the danger of doing as one would when, with a growing plant, one were to say it should not be allowed to come to fruition, it should grow further, it should keep blooming on and on.—Then it would grow thus: bring forth a flower; then no seed, but again a flower, again a flower, and so on. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to familiarize oneself inwardly with these things, and to develop a feeling for the historical turning point at which we stand today.

But, just as in an organism every detail is necessarily formed as it is, so is everything in the world in which we live and which we help to shape, to be formed as it must be in its place in the sense of the whole. You cannot imagine, if you think realistically, that your ear lobe could be formed the very least bit differently from what it is, in conformity with your whole organism. Were your ear lobe only the least bit differently formed, then you would also have to have quite a different nose, different fingertips, and so forth. And just as the ear lobe is formed in the sense of the whole human being, so must also the lecture in which something flows be given—in the sense of the whole subject—that lecturing which is truly taking on new forms.

Such a lecture cannot be delivered in the manner which one could perhaps learn from the sermon-lecture. For the sermon-lecture as we still have it today, rests on the tradition which really goes back to the old Orient,—on a special attitude which the whole human being in the old Orient had toward speech. This characteristic was continued, so that it lived in a certain free way in Greece, lived in Rome, and shows its last spark most clearly in the particular relationship which the Frenchman has to his language. Not that I want to imply that every Frenchman preaches when he speaks; but a similar relationship, such as had to develop out of the oriental relationship to language still continues to live on in a definite way in the French handling of speech, only entirely in a declining movement.

This element which we can observe here in regard to language came to expression when one still learned speaking from the professors, as one could later, but now in the declining phase—professors who really continued to live on as mummies of ancient times and bore the title, “professor of elocution”. In former times, at almost every university, in every school, also in seminaries and so on there was such a professor of elocution, of rhetoric. The renowned Curtius¹ of Berlin actually still bore the title “professor of elocution” officially. But the whole affair became too dull for him, and he did not lecture on elocution, but only demonstrated himself as a professor of elocution through being sent out by the faculty council on ceremonial occasions, since that was always the task of the professor of elocution. Nevertheless, in this Curtius made it his business to discharge his duties at such ceremonial occasions by paying as little regard as possible to the ancient rules of eloquence. For the rest, it was too dull for him to be a professor of elocution in times in which professors of elocution did not fit in any more, and he lectured on art history, on the history of Greek art. But in the university catalog he was listed as “professor of elocution”. This refers us back to an element that was present everywhere in speech in olden times.

Now, when we consider what is quite especially characteristic in the training of speech for the middle European languages, for German, for example, then indeed everything denoted in the original sense by the word “elocution” has not the least meaning. For something flowed into these languages that is entirely different from that which was peculiar to speaking in the times when elocution had to be taken seriously. In the Greek and Latin languages there is elocution. In the German language elocution is something quite impossible, when one looks inwardly at the essential.

Today, however, we are living definitely in a time of transition. That which was the speech element of the German language cannot continue to be used. Every attempt must be made to come out of this speech element and to come into a different speech element. This also is the task, in a certain sense, to be solved by him who would speak productively about Anthroposophy or the threefold idea. For only when a fairly large number of people are able to speak in this way, will Anthroposophy and the threefold idea be rightly understood in public, even in single lectures. Meanwhile, there are not a few who develop only a pseudo-understanding and pseudo-avowal for these.

If we look back on the special element in regard to speaking which was present in the times out of which the handling of elocution was preserved, we must say: then it was as if language grew out of the human being in quite a naive way, as his fingers grow, as his second teeth grow. From the imitation process speaking resulted, and language with its whole organization. And only after one had language did one come to the use of thinking.

And now it transpired that the human being when speaking to others about any problem had to see that the inner experience, the thought experience, to a certain extent clicked [einschnappte] into the language. The sentence structure was there. It was in a certain way elastic and flexible. And, more inward than the language was the thought element. One experienced the thought element as something more inward than the language, and let it click into the language, so that it fitted into it just as one fits the idea of a statue or the like into marble. It was entirely an artistic treatment of the language. Even the way in which one was meant to speak in prose had something similar to the way in which one was to express oneself in poetry. Rhetoric and elocution had rules which were not at all unlike the rules of poetic expression. (So as not to be misunderstood, I should like to insert here that the development of language does not exclude poetry. What I now say, I say for older arts of expression, and I beg you not to interpret it as if I wanted to assert that there can be no more poetry at all today. We need but treat the language differently in poetry. But that does not belong here; I wanted to insert this only in parenthesis, that I might not be misunderstood.)

And when we now ask: How was one then supposed to speak in the time in which the thought and feeling content clicked into the language? One was supposed to speak beautifully! That was the first task: to speak beautifully. Hence, one can really only learn to speak beautifully today when one immerses oneself in the old way of speaking. There was beautiful speaking. And speaking beautifully is definitely a gift which comes to man from the Orient. It might be said: There was speaking beautifully to the point that one really regarded singing, the singing of language, as the ideal of speaking. Preaching is only a form of beautiful speaking stripped of much of the beautiful speaking. For, wholely beautiful speaking is cultic speaking. When cultic speaking pours itself into a sermon, then much is lost. But still, the sermon is a daughter of the beautiful speaking found in the cult.

The second form which has come into evidence, especially in German and in similar languages, is that in which it is no longer possible to distinguish properly between the word and the grasping of the thought conveyed—the word and the thought experience; the word has become abstract, so that it exempts itself, like a kind of thought. It is the element where the understanding for language itself is stripped off. It can no longer have something click into it, because one feels at the very outset that what is to be clicked in and the word vehicle into which something is to click are one.

For who today is clear, for example in German, when he writes down “Begriff” [concept], that this is the noun form of begreifen [to grasp; to comprehend] be-greifen (greifen with a prefix) is thus das Greifen an etwas ausfuehren [the carrying out of the grasping of something]—that “Begriff” is thus nothing other than the noun form for objective perceiving? The concept “Begriff” was formed at a time when there was still a living perception of the ether body, which grasps things. Therefore one could then truly form the concept of Begriff, because grasping with the physical body is merely an image of grasping with the ether body.

But, in order to hear Begreifen in the word Begriff it is necessary to feel speech as an organism of one's own. In the element of speaking which I am now giving an account of, language and concept always swim through one another. There is not at all that sharp separation which was once present in the Orient, where the language was an organism, was more external, and that which declared itself lived inwardly. What lived inwardly had to click into the linguistic form in speaking; that is, click in so that what lives inwardly is the content, and that into which it clicked was the outer form. And this clicking-in had to happen in the sense of the beautiful, so that one was thus a true speech artist when one wanted to speak.

This is no longer the case when, for example, one has no feeling any more for differentiating between Gehen [to go] and Laufen [to run] in relation to language as such. Gehen: two e's—one walks thither without straining oneself thereby; e is always the feeling expression for the slight participation one has in one's own activity. If there is an au in the word, this participation is enhanced. From running (Laufen) comes panting (Schnaufen) which has the same vowel sound in it. With this one's insides come into tumult. There must be a sound there that intimates this modification of the inner being. But all this is indeed no longer there today; language has become abstract. It is like our onward-flowing thoughts themselves—for the whole middle region, and especially also for the western region of civilization.

It is possible to behold a picture, an imagination in every single word; and one can live in this picture as in something relatively objective. He who faced language in earlier times considered it as something objective into which the subjective was poured. He would as little not have regarded it so, as he would have lost sight of the fact that his coat is something objective, and is not grown together with his body as another skin.

As against this, the second stage of language takes the whole organism of language as another son' skin, whereas formerly language was much more loosely there, I should like to say, like a garment. I am speaking now of the stage of language in which speaking beautifully is no longer taken into first consideration, but rather speaking correctly. In this it is not a question of rhetoric and elocution, but of logic. With this stage, which has come up slowly since Aristotle's time, grammar itself became logical to the point that the logical forms were simply developed out of the grammatical forms—one abstracted the logical from the grammatical. Here all has swum together: thought and word. The sentence is that out of which one evolves the judgment. But the judgment is in truth so laid into the sentence that one no longer experiences it as inherently independent. Correct speaking, this has become the criterion.

Further, we see a new element in speaking arising, only used everywhere at the wrong point—carried over to a quite wrong domain. Beautiful speaking humanity owes to the Orient. Correct speaking lies in the middle region of civilization. And we must look to the West when seeking the third element.

But in the West it arises first of all quite corrupted. How does it arise? Well, in the first place, language has become abstract. That which is the word organism is already almost thought-organism. And this has gradually increased so much in the West, that there it would perhaps even be regarded as facetious to discuss such things. But, in a completely wrong domain, the advance already exists.

You see, in America, just in the last third of the 19th century, a philosophical trend called “pragmatism” has appeared. In England it has been called “humanism.” James² is its representative in America, Schiller³ in England. Then there are personalities who have already gone about extending these things somewhat. The merit of extending this concept of humanism in a very beautiful sense is due to Professor MacKenzie⁴ who was recently here.

To what do these endeavors lead?—I mean now, American pragmatism and English humanism. They arise from a complete skepticism about cognition: Truth is something that really doesn't exist! When we make two assertions, we actually make them fundamentally in order to have guide-points in life. To speak about an “atom”—one cannot raise any particular ground of truth for it; but it is useful to take the atom theory as a basis in chemistry; thus we set up the atom concept! It is serviceable, it is useful. There is no truth other than that which lives in useful, life-serviceable concepts. “God,” if he exists or not, this is not the question. Truth, that is something or other which is of no concern to us. But it is hard to live pleasantly if one does not set up the concept of God; it is really good to live, if one lives as if there were a God. So, let us set it up, because it's a serviceable, useful concept for life. Whether the earth began according to the Kant-Laplace theory and will end according to the mechanical warmth theory, from the standpoint of truth, no human being knows anything about this—I am now just simply reporting—, but it is useful for our thinking to represent the beginning and end of the earth in this way. This is the pragmatic teaching of James, and also in essence,the humanistic teaching of Schiller. Finally, it is also not known at all whether the human being now, proceeding from the standpoint of truth, really has a soul. That could be discussed to the end of the world, whether there is a soul or not, but it is useful to assume a soul if one wants to comprehend all that the human being carries out in life.

Of course, everything that appears today in our civilization in one place spreads to other places. For such things which arose instinctively in the West, the German had to find something more conceptual, that permits of being more easily seen through conceptually; and from this the “As If” philosophy originated: whether there is an atom or not is not the question; we consider the phenomena in such a way “as if” there was an atom. Whether the good can realize itself or not, cannot be decided; we consider life in such a way “as if” the good could realize itself. One could indeed quarrel to the end of the world about whether or not there is a God: but we consider life in such a way that we act “as if” there were a God. There you have the “As If” philosophy.

One pays little attention to these things because one imagines: there in America James sits with his pupils, there in England Schiller sits with his pupils; there is Vaihinger, who wrote the “As If” philosophy: there are a few owls who live in a kind of cloud-castle, and of what concern is it to other people!

Whoever has the ear for it, however, already hears the “As If” philosophy sounding everywhere today. Almost all human beings talk in the sense of the “As If” philosophy. The philosophers are only quite funny fellows. They always blab out what other people do unconsciously. If one is sufficiently unprejudiced for it, then one only seldom hears a human being today who still uses his words differently, in connection with his heart and with his whole soul, with his whole human being, who speaks differently than as though the matter were as he expresses it. One only does not usually have the ear to hear within the sound and the tone-color of the speaking that this “As If” lives in it,—that fundamentally people over the whole of civilization are seized by this “As If.”

Whereas things usually come to be corrupted at the end, here something shows itself to be corrupted at the beginning, something that in a higher sense must be developed for handling of speech in Anthroposophy, in the threefold order and so on. These things are so earnest, so important, that we really should speak specially about them. For it will be a question of elevating the triviality, “We need concepts because they are useful for life,” this triviality of a materialistic, utilitarian theory, of raising it up to the ethical, and perhaps through the ethical to the religious. For, if we want to work in the sense of Anthroposophy and the threefold order, we have before us the task of learning good speaking, in addition to the beautiful speaking and the correct speaking which we can acquire from history. We must maintain an ear for good speaking.

Until now, I have seen little sign that it has been noticed, when, in the course of my lectures I have called attention to this good speaking—I have done it very frequently. In referring to this good speaking I have always said that it is not only a question today that what is said be correct in the logical-abstract sense, but it is a matter of saying something in a certain connection or omitting it, not saying it in this connection. It is a question of developing a feeling that something should not only be correct, but that it is justified within its connection—that it can be either good in a certain connection or bad in a certain connection. Beyond rhetoric, beyond logic, we must learn a true ethics of speaking. We must know how we may allow ourselves things in a certain connection that would not be at all permitted in another connection.

Here I may now use an example close to hand, that could perhaps have already struck some of you who were present lately at the lectures: I spoke in a certain connection of the fact that, in reality, Goethe was not born at all. I said that Goethe for a long time endeavored to express himself through painting, through drawing, but that nothing came about from it. It then flowed over into his poetic works, and then again in the poetic works, as for example Iphigenia, or especially in Naturliche Tochter [“Daughters of Nature”], we have indeed poetic works not at all in the sentimental sense. People called these poems of Goethe's “marble smooth and marble cold,” because they are almost sculptural, because they are three-dimensional. Goethe had genuine capacities which really did not become human at all; he was actually not born.—You see, in that connection in which I spoke lately, one could quite certainly say it. But imagine, if someone were to represent it as a thesis in itself in the absolute sense! It would be not only illogical, it would he of course quite crazy.

To speak out of an awareness of a life connection is something different from finding the adequate or correct use of a word association for the thought and feeling involved. To let a pronouncement or the like arise at a particular place out of a living relationship, that is what leads over from beauty, from correctness, to the ethos of language—at which one feels, when a sentence is uttered, whether one may or may not say it in the whole context. But now, there is again an inward growing together, not with language, but with speaking. This is what I should like to call good speaking or had speaking; the third form. Aside from beautiful or ugly speaking, aside from correct or incorrect speaking, comes good or bad speaking, in the sense in which I have just presented it.

Today the view is still widespread that there can be sentences which one forms and which can then be spoken on any occasion, because they have absolute validity. In reality, for our life in the present, there are no longer such sentences. Every sentence that is possible in a certain connection, is today impossible in another connection. That means, we have entered upon an epoch of humanity's development in which we need to direct our view to this many-sidedness of living situations.

The Oriental who with his whole thinking lived within a small territory, also the Greek still, who with his spiritual life, with his rights life, with his economic life, lived on a small territory, poured something into his language that appears as a linguistic work of art must appear. How is it though in a work of art? It is such that a single finite object really appears infinite in a certain realm. In this way beauty was even defined, though one-sidedly, by Haeckel, Darwin and others: It is the appearance of the idea in a self-contained picture.—The first thing which I had to oppose in my Vienna lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics,” was that the beautiful is “the appearance of the idea in outer form.” I showed then that one must mean just the reverse: that the beautiful arises when one gives to form the appearance of the infinite.

And so it is with language, which in a certain way also acts as a limited territory—as a territory which encloses the possible meaning within boundaries. If that which is actually infinite in the inner soul- and spirit-life is to click into this language, it must there come to expression in beautiful form.

In correct speaking the language must he adequate; the sentence must fit the judgment, the concept, the word. The Romans were compelled to this, especially as their territory became ever larger and larger; their language transformed itself from the beautiful into the logical. Hence the custom has been retained, of conveying logic to people precisely in the Latin language. (You have indeed learned logic quite well by it.)

But we are now once again beyond this stage. Now, it is necessary that we learn to experience language with ethos—that, to a certain extent we gain a kind of morality of speaking in our lecturing, while we know that we have in a certain context to allow ourselves something or to deny ourselves something. There, things do not click-in, in the way I described earlier, but here we make use of the word to characterize. All defining ceases; here we use the word to characterize. The word is so handled that one really feels each word as something insufficient, every sentence as something insufficient, and has the urge to characterize that which one wishes to place before humanity from the most varied aspects—to go around the matter to a certain extent, and to characterize it from the most varied aspects.

You see, for free spiritual life—that is to say spiritual life that exists out of its own laws—there is as yet not very much understanding in present-day humanity. For, mostly what is understood by free spiritual life is a structure in which people live, where each one crows his own cock-a-doodle-doo from his own dung heap—excuse the somewhat remarkable picture—and in which the most incredible consonances come about from the crowing. In reality, in free spiritual life, harmony comes about through and through, because the spirit, not the single egoists, lives—because the spirit can really lead its own life over and above the single egoists.

There is, for example,—one must already say these things today—a Waldorf School spirit definitely there for our Waldorf School in Stuttgart that is independent of the body of teachers,—into which the body of teachers grows, and in which it becomes ever more and more clear that possibly the one can be more capable or less capable, but the spirit has a life of its own.

It is an abstraction, which people today still represent to themselves, when they speak of “free spirit.” This is no reality at all. The free spirit is something that really lives among people—one must only let it come into existence; and what works among people—one must only let it come into existence.

What I have said to you today I have also said only so that what we are meant to gain here may proceed from fundamental feelings, from the feeling for the earnestness of the matter. I cannot, of course, suppose that every one will now go right out and, as those in olden times spoke beautifully, in the middle period correctly, now all will speak well! But you may not for this reason object: of what help, then, are all our lectures, if we are not at once able to speak in the sense of good speaking?—It is rather a matter of our really getting the feeling of the earnestness of the situation, which we are thus to live into, so that we know: what is wanted here is something in itself so organically whole, that a necessity of form must gradually express itself even in speech, just as a necessity of form expresses itself in the ear-lobe, such as cannot be otherwise depending on how the whole human being is.

Thus I shall try to bring still closer together what is for us the content of Anthroposophy and the threefold order with the way in which it should be presented to people. And, from the consideration of principles I shall come more and more into the concrete, and to that which should underlie the practice of lecturing.

I have often emphasized that this must be Anthroposophy's manner of presenting things. I have often emphasized that one should not indeed believe that one is able to find the adequate word, the adequate sentence; one can only conduct oneself as does a photographer who, in order to show a tree, takes at least four views.

Thus a conception that lives itself out in an abstract trivial philosophy such as pragmatism or humanism, must be raised up into the realm of the ethical. And then it must first of all live in the ethos of language. We must learn good speaking. That means that we must experience as regards speaking something of all that we otherwise experience in relation to ethics, moral philosophy.

After all, the matter has become quite clear in modern times. In the speaking of theosophists we have an archaism simply conditioned through the language—archaic, namely as regards the materialistic coloration of the last centuries: “physical body”—well, it is thick; “ether body”—it is thinner, more nebulous; “astral body”—once again thinner, but still only thinner; “I”—still thinner. Now, new members of the human being keep on coming up: they become even thinner. At last one no longer knows at all how one can reach this thinness, but in any case, it only becomes ever thinner and thinner. One does not escape the materialism. This is indeed also the hallmark of this theosophical literature. And it is always the hallmark that appears, when these things are to be spoken about, from theoretical speaking, to that which I once experienced within the Theosophical Society in Paris, (I believe it was in 1906). A lady there who was a real rock-solid theosophist, wanted to express how well she liked particular lectures which had been given in the hall in which we were; and she said: “There are such good vibrations here!” And one perceived from her that this was really thought of as something which one might sniff. Thus, the scents of the lectures which were left behind and which one could sniff out somehow, these were really meant.

We must learn to tear language away from adequacy. For it can be adequate only for the material. If we wish to use it for the spiritual, in the sense of the present epoch of development of humanity, then we must free it. Freedom must then come into the handling of language. If one does not take these things abstractly, but livingly, then the first thing into which the philosophy of freedom [spiritual activity] must come is in speaking, in the handling of language. For this is necessary; otherwise the transition will not be found, for example, to the characterization of the free spiritual life.

You see, for free spiritual life—that is to say spiritual life that exists out of its own laws—there is as yet not very much understanding in present-day humanity. For, mostly what is understood by free spiritual life is a structure in which people live, where each one crows his own cock-a-doodle-doo from his own dung heap—excuse the somewhat remarkable picture—and in which the most incredible consonances come about from the crowing. In reality, in free spiritual life, harmony comes about through and through, because the spirit, not the single egoists, lives—because the spirit can really lead its own life over and above the single egoists.

There is, for example,—one must already say these things today—a Waldorf School spirit definitely there for our Waldorf School in Stuttgart that is independent of the body of teachers,—into which the body of teachers grows, and in which it becomes more and more clear that possibly the one can be more capable or less capable, but the spirit has a life of its own.

It is an abstraction, which people today still represent to themselves, when they speak of “free spirit.” This is no reality at all. The free spirit is something that really lives among people—one must only let it come into existence.

What I have said to you today I have also said only so that what we are meant to gain here may proceed from fundamental feelings, from the feeling for the earnestness of the matter. I cannot, of course, suppose that every one will now go right out and, as those in olden times spoke beautifully, in the middle period correctly, now all will speak well! But you may not for this reason object: of what help, then, are all our lectures, if we are not at once able to speak in the sense of good speaking?—It is rather a matter of our really getting the feeling of the earnestness of the situation, which we are thus to live into so that we know: what is wanted here is something in itself so organically whole, that a necessity of form must gradually express itself even in speech, just as a necessity of form expresses itself in the earlobe, such as cannot be otherwise depending on how the whole human being is.

Thus I shall try to bring still closer together what is for us the content of Anthroposophy and the threefold order with the way in which it should be presented to people. And, from the consideration of principles I shall come more and more into the concrete, and to that which should underlie the practice of lecturing.

• 1. Ernst Curtius, 1814–1896, archeologist and historian.
• 2. William James. 1842–1910, American philosopher.
• 3. F. C. S. Schiller. 1864–1937. Representative of pragmatism in England which he combined with humanism.
• 4. S. MacKenzie, born 1560. Professor in Cardiff.

[ 1 ] A few questions were put to me last time. I will now answer them, but in a somewhat different order than they were asked. The questions are:

[ 2 ] What is the relationship between coming to see the secrets of the universe and one's conception of the world and of life?

[ 3 ] How far must one go before one finds higher worlds on the path of natural science?

[ 4 ] Do the forces from the cosmos influence the whole of humanity?

[ 5 ] What connection do plants have with the human being and the human body?

[ 6 ] These are, of course, very complicated questions and so I would like to organize my remarks in such a way that the answers emerge gradually. One cannot do otherwise with such complicated questions because if you ask, How can I come to see the secrets of the universe?—this means, How can I arrive at a true spiritual science? Now, you must not imagine that this is something easy to do nowadays. Most people, when they hear that something like Anthroposophy or spiritual science exists, think to themselves: Very well, if that is so, I too will acquire for myself the capacity to see the spirit. I will manage it within a week then I will be able to know everything for myself.

[ 7 ] Needless to say, it is not as simple as that. One has to realize that a great deal is required to master even ordinary science. In order to undertake the simplest observations, one must first learn how to use the instruments. Of course it is comparatively easy to use a microscope, but if one wants to investigate something with the help of a microscope one cannot simply say: I will now put a piece of muscle or the like under the microscope and look into it; then I will know what goes on in the muscle. If you were to proceed like that, you would see nothing. To see something under a microscope, one must first prepare the slides. A piece of muscle is no use by itself: one must make very thin slices with a fine razor, and sometimes a little must be removed and another cut made so that finally one has a very thin film. And very often even then the microscope does not help. For if you have such a sliver of muscle or cell under the microscope, you will probably still see nothing. What one must do is ask oneself: How can I make visible what is under the microscope? Then, often, what one must next do is color what one wants to see with certain dyes to make it visible. But then one must realize one has changed something. One has to know how it would be if one had not changed it. But these things are still really quite simple.

If one wants to observe the stars with a telescope one must first learn how to handle a telescope, although this is much simpler than a microscope. You know there are people who set up telescopes in the streets for people to look through. By itself, this does not help much. For this again requires lenses and a clock, which in turn one must then also learn to handle, etc. These are only examples to show you how complicated it is to investigate the simplest things in the physical world.

[ 8 ] Now, to investigate the spiritual world is really much more difficult, for more preparation is necessary. People imagine they can learn to do it in a week. But this is not so. Above all, one must realize that one has to activate something one has within oneself. What ordinarily is not active must be made active.

[ 9 ] To make things clear for you I must explain that in all investigation of the spiritual world, as in normal science, one must frequently start with some knowledge of what is not normal. You can only learn how things really are if you know how they are when they are not normal. I once gave you a particular example of this. We have to consider this because people in the outside world call people mad who investigate the spiritual world, however normal they may be. We must therefore set about our investigations in such a way that in the end we arrive at the truth. Of course one must not think one can achieve anything by concerning oneself overmuch with what is diseased and abnormal, but one can learn much from it.

[ 10 ] For instance, there are people who are not normal because they are, as is said, mentally deranged. What does this mean? There is no worse word in the world than "mentally deranged" (geistesgestört) for the spirit can never be deranged. Consider the following case for instance: If somebody is deranged for twenty years—this happens—and afterward recovers, what has occurred? Perhaps for twenty years this person says that he is being persecuted by others—that he suffers, as one says, from paranoia—or he says that he sees all kinds of specters and apparitions which are not there, etc. This can continue for twenty years. Now somebody who has been deranged for twenty years can become normal again. But in these cases you will always notice one thing. If someone was deranged for three, five or twenty years and recovers, he will not be quite the same as he was before. Above all you will notice that he will tell you, after he has recovered, that throughout the time he was ill he was able to look into the spiritual world. He will tell you all sorts of things that he saw in the spiritual world. If one then pursues the matter with the knowledge one has gained of the spiritual world as a completely healthy person, one finds that some of what he says is rubbish but. that also much of it is correct. This is what is so strange, someone can be deranged for twenty years, recover, and then tell you that he has been in the spiritual world and has experienced these things. And if one knows the spiritual world as a healthy, normal person, one must admit that he is right in many instances. [ 11 ] If you speak to him during his mental ill-ness, he will never be able to tell you anything sensible. He will tell you the nonsense he experiences. People who are mentally disturbed over a long period do not actually experience the spiritual world during their illness. They have not experienced anything of the spiritual world. But after they have recovered they can, in a certain way, look back to the time they were ill, and what they have not experienced appears to them like glimpses into the spiritual world. This conviction that they have seen much of the spiritual world only appears when they have recovered.

[ 12 ] One can learn much from this. One can learn that the human being contains something that is not used at all during the time he or she is insane. But it was there, it was alive. And where was it? It was not in the outer world for the person told you that the sky was red and the clouds green—all kinds of things. The sick one saw nothing properly in the outer world, But the inner being, which the person cannot use in the deranged state, is in the spiritual world. When he or she can use the brain again and can look back on what the spiritual being lived through, then spiritual experiences come.

[ 13 ] From this we see that a human being who is mentally ill lives spiritually in the spiritual world. The spirit in the person is perfectly healthy. What, then, is ill in a mentally ill patient? It is, in fact, the body: the body cannot use the soul and spirit. When a person is called mentally ill, there is always something ill in the body, and obviously when the brain is ill one cannot think properly. In the same way, when the liver is ill, one cannot feel properly.

[ 14 ] This is why "mentally ill" (geisteskrank) is the most incorrect expression that one can use, for "mentally ill" does not mean that the spirit (geist) is ill. It means the body is so ill that it cannot use the spirit which is always healthy. Above all you must be quite clear that the spirit is always healthy. Only the body can become ill, with the result that it cannot use the spirit in the right way. When someone has a diseased brain it is like having a hammer that breaks with every blow. If I say to someone who does not have a hammer, You are a lazy fellow, you are not even able to strike a blow—then this is, of course, nonsense. He could well strike a blow but he does not have a hammer. It is therefore nonsense to say someone is mentally ill. The spirit is perfectly healthy, only it lacks the body through which to act.

[ 15 ] A good example of what one can learn in this way comes from considering how our thinking works. From what I have told you, you will see that, though one has the spirit, one needs a tool for thinking, and this is the brain. In the physical world one needs the brain. It is not particularly clever of materialism to say one needs a brain. Obviously one needs a brain. But this postulate explains nothing about the spirit. We can also learn that the spirit can completely withdraw itself. In the case of mental illness the spirit does withdraw completely. And it is important to know this, because this shows that people today—and now I am going to tell you something that will really surprise you—cannot think at all. They delude themselves that they can think, but they cannot. I will show you why people cannot think.

[ 16 ] You will object: But people go to school; nowadays one already learns to think quite well even in grade school. So it seems, at least. Nevertheless, people today cannot think at all. It only appears as if they could. In grade school we have grade school teachers. These have also learned something; ostensibly they have also learned to think. Those from whom they have learned have, as one says in Stuttgart, "swollen heads." These are very clever people according to present ideas. They have been to a university. Before they went to university they went to high school. There they learned Latin. If you think back a bit you might say: But my teacher did not know Latin. Perhaps not, but he learned from teachers who did. And what they learned was entirely under the influence of the Latin language. Everything one learns today is under the influence of the Latin language. You can see this from the fact that when someone gives you a prescription, he writes it in Latin, It stems from the time when everything was written in Latin. It is not so long ago, only thirty to forty years, that if one went to university one was obliged to write one's thesis in Latin. [ 17 ] Everything one learns today is under the influence of Latin. This is because in the Middle Ages, up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—this is not so long ago—all teaching was in Latin. For instance the first person to lecture in German was a certain Thomasius¹ in Leipzig. This was not long ago, it was in the seventeenth century. Everywhere lectures were given in Latin. Everybody who learned anything had to go through the Latin language and in the Middle Ages everything one could learn was in Latin. If one wanted to learn anything new one had to learn Latin first. You may protest: But surely not in the grade schools. But there were no grade schools before the sixteenth century. Only gradually, as the vernacular was adopted by science, did grade schools come into existence. So, you see, Latin influences our whole thinking. All of you think like people who have learned to think under the influence of Latin. And if you were to say that the Americans, for instance, could not have learned Latin so long ago—well, today's Americans emigrated from Europe! They too depended on the Latin language.

[ 18 ] Latin has a certain peculiarity. It was developed in ancient Rome in such a way that it thinks by itself. It is interesting how Latin is taught in high schools. One learns Latin; and then one learns thinking, correct thinking according to Latin syntax. So one's whole way of thinking does not depend on anything one does, but on what the Latin language does. You understand, don't you, that this is something quite significant. Anybody today who has learned something does not think for himself: the Latin language thinks in him, even if he has not learned Latin. Strange as it is, one meets independent thinking today only in the few people who have not been to school very much.

[ 19 ] I am not suggesting that we return to illiteracy. We cannot do this. In no realm do I advocate going backward, but one must understand how things have become as they are. Therefore it is important to be able to go back to what the simple person knows, though he has not had much schooling. He is not very forthcoming because he is used to being laughed at. In spite of everything, it is important to know that contemporary human beings do not think for themselves, but that the Latin language thinks in them.

[ 20 ] You see, as long as one cannot think for oneself, one can in no way enter the spiritual world. This is the reason why modern science is opposed to all spiritual knowledge; because through Latin education people can no longer think for themselves. This is the first thing to learn—independent thinking. People are quite right when they say: the brain thinks. Why does the brain think? Because Latin syntax goes into the brain and the brain thinks quite automatically in modern humanity. What we see running round the world are automatons of the Latin language who do not think for themselves.

[ 21 ] In recent years something remarkable has happened. I hinted at it last time, but you may not have noticed it, because it is not easy to see. Something remarkable has happened in recent years. Now, as you know, besides the physical body, we have the etheric body. (I will not speak for the moment of the rest.) The brain belongs to the physical body. The etheric body is also in the brain and one can only think independently with the etheric body. One cannot think independently with the physical body. One can think with the physical hotly only when—as with Latin—the brain is used like an automaton. But as long as one only thinks with the brain, one cannot think anything spiritual. To think something spiritual one must start to think with the etheric body—with the etheric body which, in the case of the mentally ill, is often not used for years. It has to be awakened to an inner activity.

[ 22 ] This is the first thing one has to learn: to think independently. Without independent thinking, one cannot enter the spiritual world. But it is, of course, necessary first of all to find out that one has not learned to think for oneself in one's youth! One has only learned to think what has been thought for centuries through the use of the Latin language. And if one really grasps this then one knows that the first condition for entry into the spiritual world is this: Learn to think independently!

[ 23 ] Now we come to what I wanted to point out when I said that in recent times something remarkable has happened. The people who, more than anyone else, thought along Latin lines were the people of learning—those who, for instance, created physics. They worked it out with thoughts derived from Latin and with the physical brain. When we were small, when I was about as old as young E. here, we learned physics which was worked out with a Latin brain. We only learned what was thought out with a Latin brain. Since then a lot has happened. When I was small the telephone was just being invented. Until then it did not exist. After this followed all the other great inventions that everyone now takes for granted as if they had always been there. They only appeared in the last decades. This caused more and more people to become involved in science who were not Latin trained. This is rather a strange thing. When one looks into the scientific life of the last decades one finds more and more technicians of this kind involved in science. These people had not had much to do with Latin and so their thinking did not become so automatic. And this non-automatic thinking was then picked up by others. This is why today physics is full of concepts and ideas that fall apart. They are most interesting. There is, for instance, Professor Gruner² in Bern who two years ago spoke about the new direction in physics. He said that all the concepts have changed in the last years.

[ 24 ] The reason that one does not notice this is because if you listen to lectures on popular science people tell you what was thought twenty years ago. They cannot tell you what is thought today because they themselves cannot think yet. If you take the thoughts of thirty years ago as valid, it is just like taking a piece of ice and melting it; the ideas melt away. They are no longer there if one wants to follow them exactly. We must see this. If someone learned physics thirty years ago, and sees what has become of it today, he wants to tear his hair out, because he has to confess: I cannot handle all this with the concepts I have learned. This is how it is. And why? Because in recent years, through the development of humanity, the human being has reached the point when the etheric body is supposed to begin to think, and human beings do not want this to happen. They want to go on thinking with the physical body. The concepts fall apart in the physical body, and yet human beings do not want to learn to think with the etheric body. They do not want to think independently.

[ 25 ] Now you see why, in the year 1893, it became necessary for me to write the book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,³ It is not the contents of this book that are so important, though obviously at that time one wished to tell the world what is said in it, but the most important thing is that independent thinking appeared in this book for the first time. No one can possibly understand this book who does not think independently. From the beginning, page by page, a reader must become accustomed to using his etheric body if he would think the thoughts in this book at all. Hence this book is a means of education—a very important means—and must be taken up as such.

[ 26 ] When this book appeared in the nineties people did not know at all what to make of it. It was as if someone in Europe wrote Chinese and no one could understand it. It was of course written in German, but people were completely unaccustomed to the thoughts expressed in it, because all connection with Latin was purposely cast off. For the very first time, quite consciously, it was intended that there should be no thoughts in it that are influenced by Latin, but only independent thoughts. Only the physical brain is a Latin scholar. The etheric body is no Latin scholar. And therefore one has to try to express such thoughts in a language one can only have in the etheric body.

[ 27 ] I will tell you something else. People have noticed, of course, that concepts have changed in the last decades. When I was young the professor filled the whole blackboard with writing. You had to learn it all and then you did well in your exams. But recently, people have begun to notice what Gruner said in his inaugural lecture: none of our concepts would remain valid if there were no solid bodies, only fluids. If the whole world were liquid, as Gruner imagined in his lecture, then our concepts would be invalid and we would have to think quite differently.

[ 28 ] Yes, of course one would have to think differently if there were no solid bodies. In that case you, as you sit here, could do nothing with the concepts you learned in school. If you, say, as a fish, suddenly became clever and had the idea that, as a fish, you wanted to attend a human university, then you would learn something that does not exist for a fish, because it lives in water. A fish only has a boundary sensation of a solid body; the moment it touches the body, it is immediately repulsed. So, if a fish began to think, it would have to have thoughts quite different from those a human being has. But a human being likewise needs such different thoughts, because other thoughts escape him, so that he has to say to himself: If everything were liquid I would have to have quite different thoughts. [ 29 ] Well, have I not told you about the condition of the earth when there were no solid bodies and when everything was fluid, even the animals? I have told you of this condition. Can you not then understand that present day thinking cannot reach back to these conditions? It cannot think them. So present day thinking cannot make anything of the beginning of the world. Naturally, then, a human being today begins to say to himself: Good heavens! If the world were fluid we would have to have quite different concepts. But in the spiritual world there are no solid bodies. So, with all the concepts with which Latin has gradually schooled us, we are unable to enter the spiritual world. We must wean ourselves of these concepts.

[ 30 ] Here is another hidden truth. In Greek times, which preceded the Latin era (the Latin era only began in the fifth or sixth century B.C. but the Greek period is much older), in Grecian times there was still a knowledge of the spirit, One could still see into the spiritual world. When Rome emerged with the Latin language, this was gradually extinguished. Now I must again say something you will find curious, but you will understand it. Who has used Latin, only Latin, throughout the centuries? More than anyone, the Church. It is precisely the Church that claims to teach humanity about the spirit that has contributed the most to drive out the spirit. In the Middle Ages all universities were ecclesiastical. Of course one must be grateful to the Church for founding the universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but it founded them in Latin, and Latin thought has no possibility of attaining the spirit. And so it gradually came about that human beings only have concepts relating to solid bodies. Just look at the Romans, they only introduced dry, prosaic and unspiritual concepts into the world. And this was the reason that all ideas became so material. How would the Greeks have described the sacrament of the Eucharist? They would certainly not have described it as if the elements were actually blood and flesh. This stems from materialism. So even the concept of the Eucharist has become materialistic and this is connected with the Latin language.

[ 31 ] Latin is entirely logical. I have worked with many people who were Latin in their whole attitude to life, although they spoke German. If one wanted to make something clear one quickly translated it into Latin, because since the time of Christ only in Latin does one think logically. But this logical thinking only applies to solid bodies. If one wants to enter the spiritual world one needs fluid concepts.

[ 32 ] There is for instance the Theosophical Society. It also wanted to reach the spiritual world. The Theosophical Society says that man has a physical body, an etheric body, etc. But these people are materialistic because they think the physical body is dense, the etheric body is a little thinner and the astral body thinner still. But all these are still bodies, they never become spirit. If one wants to reach the spirit one has to find concepts which are constantly changing.

Even when I draw something on the blackboard you will notice that I take this into consideration. When I draw the physical body I try to portray physical man as he is. But if I try to draw the etheric body, I would never dream of representing it in the same way. I would do it like this. The human being has an etheric body which expands.

But you must know that this is not so much the etheric body, but the picture of one instant. In the next moment it is different. So if I wish to draw the etheric body, I would have to draw, quickly wipe it off, draw differently, again wipe it off, draw again and wipe it off. It is in constant movement. With the concepts we have today, we cannot catch up with these movements. This is what you have to keep in mind, concepts must become mobile. People must get into the habit of it, This is why it is necessary that thinking become completely independent.

[ 33 ] But this is not enough. I will tell you something more. As you know a human being develops, but one does not usually notice it. However, when a person is quite young, one does notice it. One knows that a child who is only four years old can neither write nor read nor do sums. An eight year old child can perhaps do these things. Here one can see development. But in later life when we have made our way, we are so terribly superior that we don't admit that we can still develop. But we do, throughout our lives, and it is remarkable how we develop. Our development goes like this: Imagine this is man:

I will draw him diagrammatically. When the child is quite young its development proceeds from the head. After the change of teeth, the development proceeds from the chest. Therefore one must watch how a child between seven and fourteen breathes—that it breathes adequately, etc. So this is a picture of the older child. (Nowadays one would have to say it differently. Children do not like to be called children any more. From fourteen onward one must call them "young ladies" and "young gentlemen.") Only at puberty does the development proceed from the limbs and from the whole human being. So one can say that only when one has reached puberty is one developing from the whole being. And this goes on throughout our twenties and thirties. But when one becomes older—some of you can already see it in yourselves—there is a certain retrogression. This need not be the case if one has adopted a spiritual mode of life, but in normal life there is a certain retrogression as one gets older. It is just the task of Anthroposophy to see to it that in the future one does not regress as one gets older. Slowly and gradually this must happen.

[ 34 ] Now there are people whose mental capacities diminish alarmingly. But the mind, the spirit, cannot diminish. It is again only the body. It is interesting that often it is the most brilliant people who regress very much in old age. You may have heard that Kant was reckoned to be one of the wisest men, but in old age he became feeble-minded. His body regressed so much that he could not express his wise mind any more. And so it often is. Especially the very intelligent become feeble-minded in old age. It is an exaggerated form of what happens to everybody. Eventually in old age there comes a point when one can no longer use the physical body. The reason for this is mainly be-cause the arteries harden with excessive deposits of calcium, And the more this happens, the less one can make use of the physical body. As, up to the fortieth year, development proceeds from the head into the whole body, so, in the same degree, the process reverses. As one proceeds from the forties to the fifties one comes back to using the chest more, and in old age one goes back to using the head. So if one becomes really old, one again has to use one's head much more. But now one would have to use the finer head—the etheric head. But this is not learned in Latin education. And it is just those who, in the last decades, had a materialistic Latin education who were most strongly affected by senility.

[ 35 ] In old age one must go back to childhood. There are people in whom this is very noticeable. They become mentally weaker and weaker. The mind, the spirit, however, remains completely intact. Only the body becomes weaker and weaker. In the end such people can no longer do the things they first learned to do in life. Such things happen. Let us say somebody gets old. He can no longer do the work he used to do. He can only do what he did as an older child. Finally he cannot even do this. He can only play and can only understand ideas he learned when playing. There are even very old people who can only understand what their parents or their nurse told them in the very first years of their lives. The saying about returning to second childhood is well founded. One really does return to childhood.

[ 36 ] Actually it is not a misfortune, that is, if one has developed a spiritual life. In fact it is rather fortunate, for as long as one is a child, one can use one's etheric body. If a child tears around and shouts and does all kinds of things, this is not done by the physical body—except if it has a stomachache, but even then the stomachache has to be transferred to the etheric and astral bodies so that the child throws itself about as a result. What tears around is not the physical body. Now one grows old and returns to childhood. Gradually one has learned not to tear around any more, but one no longer uses the etheric body like a child, but for something more sensible. So it can be fortunate that one returns to childhood.

[ 37 ] This is the second point. The first was that in order to enter the spiritual world one has to learn to think in the right way. We shall have to speak further about how one achieves this. The matter is very complicated. Today we have to concentrate on the question why there has to be independent thinking. One must break away from much in modern education, for what one learns in modern education is not independent thinking, it is Latin thinking. Do not imagine that the thinking emerging from socialist theories being developed today is free thinking! It has all been learned from what originally came from Latin, but people do not know it. The worker may have this or that intention in his will, but when he begins to think he thinks in bourgeois concepts and these originate in Latin thinking. So the first thing one has to learn is independent thinking. [ 38 ] The second thing is that one must learn not only to live in the present moment, but to be able to turn back into the life one led in childhood. If you want to penetrate into the spiritual world you must continually remember to ask yourself how it was when you were twelve years old. What did you do? One must not do this superficially, but imagine it in great detail. Nothing is better than to begin to try to picture: Oh yes, there I was twelve years old—I can see it quite clearly—there was a pile of stones by the roadside and I climbed up on it. Once I fell off it. There was a hazel bush and I took out my pocket knife and cut off some branches and cut my finger. It is important really to visualize what one did so many years ago; in this way one gets away from just living in the present. If you think the way one learns to think today, you think with your present physical body. But if you turn back to when you were twelve, you cannot think with your physical body as it then was, for it is no longer there (I told you the physical body is renewed every seven years) so you have to think with your etheric body. If you think back to something that happened twelve or fourteen years ago, you call on your etheric body. This is the way to call up inner activity.

[ 39 ] Above all, one should get accustomed to think in a new way, different from one's usual thinking. How do you think? You know we met here at nine o'clock. I began by reading to you the questions on the slips of paper. Then I proceeded with various observations and we have now arrived at saying: We have to think back into the life we lived when we were twelve or fourteen years old. Now when you get home, you can, if you find it really interesting, think through these thoughts again. One can do this. Most people do it. They go through it once again. But you can do something different. You can ask yourself: What did he say last? The last thing he said was that one should think back to one's early life, to the age of twelve or fourteen years. Before that he said one has to have independent thinking. Earlier still he described how Latin gradually took over. Before that, how a person who was mentally ill for a time and then looks back on it, says he has experienced extraordinary things. It was further explained to us how the inner being cannot be mentally ill—only the body can be ill. Now you have run backward through the whole lecture.

[ 40 ] But in the world things do not run backward. I could possibly have given you the lecture backward in the first place, but then you would not have understood it. One has to begin at the beginning and then look at the whole as it gradually unfolds, but once one has understood it, one can think it backward. But things do not run backward. So I tear myself free from things. I say: Just to be contrary, I will think things exactly not the way they go in the outer world, but I will think them backward. This requires a certain strength. When I think backward I have to make myself inwardly active. A person who wants to look through a telescope has to learn how to handle it. In the same way a person who wants to see into the spiritual world must learn how to handle it. He must think backward many times. One day the moment will come when he knows: Ah, now I am entering the spiritual world.

[ 41 ] You see, throughout your whole life you have accustomed your physical body to thinking forward, not backward. When you begin to think backward your physical body does not take part in it. Something strange happens. This is the first advice to those who ask: How can I reach the spiritual world? You can also read this in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.⁴ What is said there repeatedly is: At least learn to go backward through the course of the day; then other things, People have, of course, only learned to think with their physical body. They notice this and have to make a great effort to think backward, but they have only learned to think with the physical body, not with the etheric body. Now there is an all-out strike by the etheric body; yes, a real "general strike." And if people would not fall asleep so easily, they would know that, if they began to think backward, they would arrive at the spiritual world. But the moment the vision begins, they fall asleep. People fall asleep, because the effort is too great. So one must exert one's entire will and all one's strength not to fall asleep. In addition, one must have patience. Sometimes it takes years, but one must have patience.

[ 42 ] If somebody could tell you what you experienced unconsciously when you went to sleep after thinking backward, you would see that it was something very wise. The most stupid people begin to have extraordinarily wise thoughts in their sleep, but they do not know anything about it.

[ 43 ] So today I have drawn your attention to the fact that one must first learn to think independently. Well, one can do this. I do not want to say—for I am not a conceited fool—that only my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity serves this purpose, but it was quite consciously written in a way that would lead to independent thinking. Independent thinking; thinking backward accurately over things that happened when you were ten or twelve years old, or over other things one has experienced—with these we have at least begun to describe how one tears oneself free from the physical body and how one finds one's way into the spiritual world.

We will pursue this further and eventually deal with all four questions.

• 1. Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), philosopher and jurist, delivered the first lectures in the German language at Leipzig University in 1687.
• 2. Dr. P. Gruner, Professor of Theoretical Physics, gave the Presidential Address, entitled New Guidelines for Physics (1922)," at the eighty-seventh Founder's Day celebration of the University of Bern on the 26 November, 1921.
• 3. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (also called The Philosophy of Freedom). First published in German in 1894 and in English in 1916, this basic work of Rudolf Steiner exists at present in two English editions: Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York, 1986 (translated by William Lindemann) and Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1988 (translated by Rita Stebbing).
• 4. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. First published in book form in German in 1909. English editions appeared in 1909 and 1910. Two versions are currently available in English: Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York, 1983 (translated by Henry B. and Lisa D. Monges); and Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1985 (translations by Max Gysi (1909) and Clifford Bax (1910) revised by D.S. Osmond and C. Davy).

Often one still confuses the Theosophical Society with the Buddhist world view. On occasion I ventured to remark in these monthly meetings that at the Theosophical Congress in Chicago in 1893 the Indian Brahman G. N. Chakravarti himself said that also for him theosophy has brought something absolutely new or at least a complete renewal of the world view. At that time he expressed that any spiritual world view, also of his people in India, has given way to materialism, and that it was the Theosophical Society which renewed the spiritual world view in India.

From that one can already conclude that we did not get theosophy from India, as well as one has to admit, on the other hand, if one follows the theosophical movement, as it has developed in last decades, that it has tried more and more to explain all other religious systems that it has tried more and more to bring the core of truth to light not only of the more oriental, but also of the western religions.

Today it is only my task to outline the way how true, real theosophy is to be found in the really understood Christianity, or rather, it is my task to characterise the standpoint of the Theosophical Society compared with Christianity.

The theosophical movement wants to be nothing else than a servant of Christianity. It wants to serve trying to extract the deepest core, the real being from the Christian denominations. Thereby it expects to take nothing away from anybody who is attached to Christianity whose heart is connected with Christianity. On the contrary, those who understand the theosophical movement know that just the Christian can receive a lot that many disputes, which have today taken place everywhere in the Christian confessions, must disappear if the true core, which can be, nevertheless, only a core, comes to the fore.

Of course, I cannot exhaust this big topic in great detail and comprehensiveness, and, hence, I ask you to make do with few lines which I am able to give. But it is time to give this just now what I am able to give.

Our present is not a time which likes to rise to the lively spirit. Indeed, there are ideals at which the human beings look up, and they speak a lot of ideals, but that they could realise the ideals that the spirit could be active and that it is the task to recognise it, the 19th and the beginning 20th centuries do not want to know. Our time thereby differs quite substantially from the time of the great spirits who developed Christianity originally following the founder of Christianity. Go back to the early times of Christianity, possibly to Clement of Alexandria, and you will find that at that time all scholarship, all knowledge was there only to understand one matter: to understand how the living word, the light of the world could become flesh. Our time does not like to rise to such heights of the spiritual view. As well as we have limited ourselves with regard to the scientific view to see the purely actual what the eyes see what the senses can perceive, also the confessions are really full of such materialistic views. Just the representatives of such materialistic views will believe to understand the confession best of all. They do not know how strongly unconsciously materialistic thoughts have taken place there. Let me only give a few examples.

The 19th century has tried to put up with Christianity in serious work. One went to work critically above all and tried to investigate the documents in strictly scientific way, to which extent historical-actual truth exists in them. Yes, “actual” truth, this is that which also religious scholars strive for today. To the letter one investigated in every way whether the one or the other evangelist says the pure, actual truth what could have really occurred what could have taken place before the eyes of the human beings once. It is the object of the so-called historical-critical theology to investigate this. We see how under these tasks the image of the God Who became flesh has taken on a materialistic colouring gradually. Let me state something that always preoccupies those who search for truth.

David Friedrich Strauss started during the thirties of the 19th century to historically investigate the actual core of the Gospels. After he had tried to make clear what such a core of historical truth is, he tried to outline a picture of Christianity independently. Now this picture which he outlined is really out of the spirit of his time, out of the spirit which could not believe that once something could have been realised in the world that outshines humankind by far, something that comes from the heights of spirit, something that is born out of the real spirit. What did David Friedrich Strauss find? He found that the real Son of God cannot present himself in a single personality. No, only the whole humankind, the human kind, the type can be the real representation of God on earth. The struggle of the whole humankind, symbolically understood, is the living God, but not a single individual. All the stories about the person Jesus Christ that formed in the times in which Christianity came into being are nothing else than myths which the imagination of the peoples created.—The Son of God evaporated to a divine ideal with David Friedrich Strauss as a result of his endeavours to show the Son of God as the struggle and striving of the whole humankind.

Now, look around in the Gospels, look in the Christian confessions—you never will find a certain word in them, and you will nowhere find a certain idea with Jesus: the idea of the ideal human being in the way as Strauss formed it. One does nowhere find the human type, thought in the abstract. This is characteristic that the 19th century has come to an image of Jesus from an idea which Jesus did never suggest nor express in his life.

Also still others tackled this task bit by bit to verify the content of the Gospels critically. I cannot give you examples of the different phases; this would go too far. But during the last years a word was often said which shows how little sympathetic it is to our time to look up to God, to the spiritual being, which should have found fulfilment in a personality, in similar way as in the first Christian century when all scholarship, all wisdom, all knowledge was to be used to understand this unique phenomenon. A word was said there, and this word is: the simple man from Nazareth. One dropped the concept of God. One wants—this is, finally, the trend which is included in these words—one wants to accept this personality which stands at the beginning of Christianity only as a human being and wants to understand everything that one regards as dogma as imagination floating in the clouds. One wants to remove everything and consider the personality of Jesus only as a human being, who is of a higher rank, indeed, than the other human beings who is, however, a human being among human beings who is equal in certain respects to the other human beings. Thus also the theologians want to pull down the image of Christ to the field of the purely actual.

These are two extremes which I have demonstrated, on the one side, the concept of God evaporating the image of God, presented by David Friedrich Strauss, on the other side, the simple man from Nazareth, which contains nothing but a doctrine of general humanness. This is basically nothing else than what also those can accept who want to know nothing at all about a founder of Christianity.

We have also seen adherents of a general moral philosophy working out that Jesus basically had and taught the same moral philosophy as it is preached today by the “Society for Ethical Culture.” They believe to raise Jesus if they show that already before the 19th century people have born witness to that which we got from Kant’s speculation or from the Enlightenment.—However, in truth we deal with doctrines which were once the highest mystery, and the contents of this wisdom were only given to those who had risen to the heights of humanity.

Do we ask ourselves, are we still anyhow on the ground of the Gospels if we take the one or the other of these concepts of Christ? Today I cannot explain why I do not share the view of many of the learnt theologians that the fourth Gospel should be less significant than the three other ones. Somebody who checks the procedure clearly sees no reason why the St. John’s Gospel—which just raises us so much—was deposed, so to speak, because one strove for real facts.

One believes that the three Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke show more the human being, the simple man from Nazareth, while the John’s Gospel demands to recognise the Word that became flesh in Jesus. Here the unaware wish which lives in the souls was the father to the thought. If, however, the John’s Gospel is less entitled to authenticity, it is impossible to keep up Christianity. Then we cannot say anything about the Christian doctrine of the personality of Jesus than that he is the simple man from Nazareth. But nobody, neither I nor others who look into the old confessional writings can say anything different as those who spoke originally of Christ Jesus, really spoke of the God Who had become flesh, of the higher spirit of God which manifested itself in Jesus of Nazareth.

It is the task of theosophy to show how we have to understand “the Word became flesh” used by John above all. You do not really understand the other Gospels if you do not take St. John’s Gospel as basis. What the other evangelists tell is getting bright and clear, if you add the words of St. John’s Gospel as an interpretation, as an explanation.

I cannot describe in all details what leads to any statement I make today. But I can at least point to the central issue which is indecent to the materialistically minded theologian. Already the story of the birth belongs to it which says that Jesus should not be born like other human beings. David Friedrich Strauss also had this as an objection to the truth of the Gospels.

What did the higher birth mean? It becomes clear to us easily if we understand St. John’s Gospel correctly. The first sentences of this Gospel, the real message of the Word that became flesh are: “In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God’s presence, and what God was, the Word was. He was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; without him no created thing came into being.” It is said that the Word was always there in other way that it finds fulfilment, however, in this externally visible personality. We hear then that through the same Word, or we say, through the spirit of God who lived in Jesus, the world itself came into being. “In him was life, and that life was the life of mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it. There appeared a man named John. He was sent from God, and came as a witness to testify the light, so that through him all might become believers. He was not himself the light; he came to bear witness to the light.”—What should come to Jesus Christ? But immediately we hear that it was already there. “He was in the world; but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognize him. It came to his own, and his own people would not accept him. But to all who did accept him, to those who put their trust in him, he gave the right to become children of God, born not of human stock, by the physical desire of a human father, but of God.”

Here you have the meaning of the Word that became flesh in a fairly right translation giving the gist and at the same time the meaning of the saying: “Christ is not born of human stock.” The “Word” was there always, and every single human being should bear Christ in his inside, in his primal beginning. In our heart we all have claim to Christ. But while this living Word, Christ, should have room in every single human being, the human beings have not perceived him. It is this just what is shown us in the Gospel that the word existed forever that the human being could accept it and did not accept it. It is said to us that single human beings accepted it. Always were there single human beings who waked up the living spirit, the living Christ, the living Word in themselves, and those who called themselves Christians did not come into being from the blood, from the desire of the flesh, from human will, but always from God.

This finally throws the right light on the St. Matthew’s Gospel. Now we understand why the birth of Christ is called “from God.” This refutes best of all what David Friedrich Strauss wants. Not the whole human genus was able to accept Christ in itself; although he was for the whole human genus and for the whole humankind. Now somebody should come who once showed the whole fullness of the infinite spirit in himself. This personality thereby got his unique significance for the first Christian teachers who understood what was there. They understood that it concerns neither an abstract, shadowy concept nor a single human being in its reality, but really the God-Man, a single personality in the fullness of truth.

That is why we can understand that all those who proclaimed Christ in the first times of the good news stuck not only to the teaching and to the actual person, but above all to the view of the God-Man that they were convinced that He whom they had seen was a lofty real God-Man. Not the teaching held the first Christians together, not that what Christ taught; it was not that through which the first Christians thought to be connected with each other.—Already only this contradicts those who wanted to replace Christianity with an abstract moral philosophy. However, then they are no longer Christians.

It was not a matter of indifference who brought this teaching to the world, but its founder had really become flesh in the world. Hence, in the beginning of Christianity one attached less value to proofs than to the living memory of the Lord. This is always emphasised. It is the personality, the God-imbued personality who holds the biggest communities together.

Therefore, the first Church Fathers say to us again and again that it is the merit of the historical event from which Christianity made its start. We have the information from Irenaeus that he himself still knew people who had for their part still known apostles who had seen the Lord face to face. He emphasises that the fourth pope, Pope Clement I, had still known many apostles who had also seen the Lord face to face. This is fact. And why does he emphasise this? The first teachers wanted to speak not only about the teaching, not only about logical proofs, but they wanted above all to speak about the fact that they themselves saw with their eyes that they perceived with their hands that which entered the world from above; that they were not there to prove something, but to bear witness to the living Word. However, this was not the personality who one could see with eyes, perceive with senses.

Not that personality who announces the first teaching of Christianity is that who could then be called the simple man from Nazareth. One single word of an indeed significant witness must speak for the fact that something higher forms the basis. One cannot emphasise this word of Paul enough: “If Christ was not raised, our faith and message is null and void.” Paul calls the risen Christ the basis of Christianity, not the Christ who walked in Galilee and Jerusalem. The faith would be null and void if Christ had not risen. The Christian is null and void if he cannot bear witness to the risen Christ.

What did they understand by the risen Christ? We can also learn this from Paul. He says it to us clearly on what the confession of resurrection is based. Everybody knows this; everybody knows that Paul is, so to speak, a posthumous apostle that he had the appearance of Christ to thank for his conversion to Him who did not stay long since on earth. Only the theosophist can truly recognise this appearance of a lofty spiritual being. Only he knows what an initiate, like Paul, means, if he speaks of the fact that the risen Christ appeared to him as a living being. Paul says to us even more, and we have to take this to heart. He says to us in I Corinthians 15: 3-8: “First and foremost, I handed on to you the tradition I had received: that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas and afterwards to the Twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, and afterwards to all the apostles. Last of all he appeared to me too; it was like a sudden, abnormal birth.”

He equated his experience with that on which the higher faith of the other apostles was based. He equated it with the appearance of Christ that the apostles had generally received after He had died. We have to do it with a spiritual appearance which we have to imagine not in shadowy way, as shadowy ideal, but as reality, as the theosophist imagines the spirit; with an appearance of the spirit which is not physical, indeed, but real and more real than any external, sensory reality. If we keep this in mind, we realise that it cannot be different at all, as that one has to do it during the first Christian centuries with the Word that became flesh that the God-Man is not the simple man from Nazareth, but the higher spirit of God which fulfilled itself. If we look at this, we stand completely on the ground of theosophy. Perhaps, nobody is more to be called a theosophist in the true sense of the word than the preacher of the miracle of resurrection: the apostle Paul. No theosophist would deny that the apostle Paul is a lofty initiate, one of those who know what it concerns.

I have still to emphasise one matter, and this is that one not allowed to pull down this sublime appearance, which stands there as a unique one in the world, to the materialistic world view; the fact that the way of understanding the founder of Christianity is not found in the regions where only “simple men” where only ideals are, but that it must lead up to the lofty spirit of Christ. The first Christians did this; they wanted to go this way to understand the living Word.

Now you can say that you believe that everything has changed bit by bit, and this is well founded. Only because in the course of the centuries the factual sense has developed that the human being learnt above all to train the senses to arm them with instruments, he has progressed in the knowledge of the external world. But this enormous progress of international trade and communication, penetrating the starry heaven with the Copernican world view, penetrating the smallest living beings with the microscope, they all brought us, as any thing throws its shades, their negative sides too. They brought us particular ways of thinking, which stick to the real, to the sense-perceptible. Then it has happened that in the most natural way of the world this kind of thinking turning only to the purely sensory has become habit that it has also approached the highest religious truth and tried to understand the spirit and its contents as the naturalist tries to understand the external nature with his senses.

The materialistic naturalist can still imagine the ideals at most which contain abstractions. Then he speaks of truth, beauty, goodness which should be realised in the world more and more. He imagines shadowy ideas. He can still rise to “simplicity” in the human imagination, but to something even higher, to seizing real spirituality this scientific sense cannot progress with his way of thinking instilled for centuries. These habits of thinking have arrived at their top height. As everything that has formed unilaterally needs a supplement, the justified materialistic sense needs the spiritual deepening on the other side. It needs that knowledge which raises us to the heights of spirituality. Theosophy wants this raising to the spirit and its reality. Therefore, it wants to stick to that about which one does not speak in materialistic views, but which rises to the highest levels of human knowledge. From there is to be understood what it means that the Word became flesh, what it means to conceive the spirit out of the divine in the human body.

Christ could not always express frankly what he meant. You know the word: he spoke to the people in parables; however, if he was together with his disciples, he explained these parables to them.—Where did this intention of the founder of Christianity come from to speak two languages, so to speak? The simple comparison can say it to us. If you need any object, a table, you do not go to anybody but to somebody who knows how to make a table. If he has made it, you did not claim to have made the table yourself. You admit calmly to be a layman of making tables. However, people do not want to admit that one can also be a layman with regard to the highest matters that the simple reason, which is, so to speak, in the natural state, must climb the top heights first. The longing has arisen from that to pull down this highest truth to the level of the general human reason. But just as we know as laymen of making tables if a table is good how we have to use it, we know if we have heard the true whether it speaks to our hearts whether our heart can use it. But we must not claim to be able to produce the knowledge from our hearts, from our simple human minds. The differentiation which was forever made in old times between priests and laymen arose from this view. We deal with priest sages in ancient times and with the loftiest truth which was not proclaimed outdoors in the streets but in the mystery sites.

The highest truths were only explained to those who were sufficiently prepared. Those who were rich of spirit heard them because they are the deeper truths of the world, the human soul and God. One had to become an initiate, and then a Master, and then one got the concept, the immediate image of that which the highest wisdom contained. It was in such a way that wisdom had flowed into the mystery temples for centuries. Outdoors, however, there stood the crowd and got nothing to hear as that what the wisdom of the priests thought to be good for them. The gap had become bigger and bigger between the priesthood and the laymen. Initiates are those who knew the wisdom of the living God. One had to go up many steps, until one was led up to the altar at which one was informed what the wisest men had explored and revealed of the wisdom of the living God.

That was the custom for centuries. Then there came a time, and this is the time of the origin of Christianity when on the big scene of world history as a historical fact that took place before the eyes of the world, for all human beings which had only taken place before those who were rich of spirit, for those who were initiated into the mysteries. Only those who beheld the secrets of existence in the mystery temples could come in ancient times to real salvation, according to the view of the priest sages. However, in the founder of Christianity the higher compassion lived to go another way with the whole humankind and also to let become blessed those who did not behold there that is they could not penetrate into the mysteries, those who should be led only by the weak feeling, only by faith to this salvation.

Thus a new confession, good news had to sound according to the intentions of the founder of Christianity which speak in other words than the old priest sages had spoken; a message which is spoken out of the deepest wisdom and the immediate spiritual cognition which could find response in the most simple human heart at the same time. Hence, the founder of Christianity wanted to bring up disciples and apostles for him. They should be initiated into the mystery if there were stones that mean human hearts, to strike sparks out of them. Thus they had to experience the highest that is the victory of the Word. He spoke to the people in parables; but when he was alone with the disciples, he explained the parables to them.

Let me only give a few examples how Christ tried to enkindle the living Word how he wanted to knock life out of the single human hearts. We hear that Christ leads his disciples Peter, James and John up to the mountain and that he experiences a transfiguration there before the eyes of his disciples. We hear that Moses and Elijah were at both sides of Jesus.

The theosophist knows what the mystic term means: going up to the mountain. One has to know such expressions, know competently, exactly as one has to know the language, before one is able to study the spirit of a nation. What does it mean: leading up to the mountain? It means nothing else than to be led into the mystery temple where one can get through beholding, through mystic beholding the immediate conviction of the eternity of the human soul, of the reality of the spiritual existence.

These three disciples had to get an even higher knowledge than the other disciples by their Master. They had to get the conviction here on the mountain above all that Christ was really the living Word that had become flesh. Therefore, He appears in his spirituality, in that spirituality which is elated above space and time; in that spirituality for which “before” or “after” do not exist in which everything is present. Also the past is present. The past is essential there, when Elijah and Moses appeared beside the presence of Jesus. The disciples now believe in the spirit of God. But they say: nevertheless, it is written in the scriptures that Elijah comes and announces Christ before He comes.

Read the Gospel now. These are really the words which follow that which I have told. They are significant to the highest degree: “Elijah has already come, but they failed to recognize him, and did to him as they wanted.”—“Elijah has already come;” we keep these words in mind. Then you read further: “Then the disciples understood that he meant John the Baptist.” And before: “Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone of the vision until the Son of Man had been raised from the dead.” We are led into a mystery. Christ considered three disciples only worthy of experiencing this mystery. Which is this mystery? He informed that John is the reincarnated Elijah.

Reincarnation was taught within the mystery temples at all times. Christ has informed his close disciples about no other than this occult theosophical teaching. They should get to know this teaching of reincarnation. However, they should also get the living Word which must come from their mouths if it is invigorated and spiritualised by conviction, until something different would enter. They should have the immediate conviction that the spirit has risen. If they have this behind themselves, they should go out into the world and strike the sparks out of simple hearts which have been kindled in them. This was one of the initiations, this was one of the parables that Christ gave and explained to his confidants.

I give another example. The Communion is also nothing else than an initiation, an initiation into the deepest meaning of the entire Christian teaching. Somebody who understands the Communion in its true meaning understands the Christian teaching in its spirituality and in its truth only. It is risky to express this teaching which I want to report to you now, and I probably know that it can experience attacks from all sides because it is contradictory to the letter. The letter kills, the spirit brings back to life. Only laboriously one can ascend to the insight of the true meaning of the Communion. You do not hear about that in detail today, but allow me to suggest that which belongs to the deepest mysteries of Christianity, actually. Christ gathers his apostles to celebrate the installation of the bloodless sacrifice with them. We want to understand this.

To clear the way to us to understand this event, let us once come back to another fact which is little attention paid to and which should show us how we have to understand the Communion. We hear in the Gospel that Christ passed a blind-born man. And those who were around asked Him: “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” Christ answered: “It is not that he or his parents sinned, but he was born blind, so that God’s power might be displayed in curing him.” Or better: “so that God’s way of ruling the world becomes obvious.” The words “God’s way of ruling the world” justify that he is born blind. Because neither he sinned in this life nor his parents, the cause has to be looked for somewhere else. We cannot stop at the single personality and not at the parents and forefathers, but we have to regard the inside of the soul of the blind-born as something eternal, we have to be clear in our mind to look for the cause in the souls existing before, in those souls which have experienced the effect of a former life. What we call karma is suggested here, not expressed. We hear immediately why it is not expressed. Christ lived in a surrounding in which the doctrine prevailed that the sins of the fathers are avenged in the children and grandchildren. The sins of the fathers are expiated in children and grandchildren. This doctrine does not correspond to the view which Christ expressed towards the blind-born. If anybody sticks to the doctrine that it can only be the sin of the fathers that there is guilt and atonement only within the physical world, then he has to suffer for the deeds of his fathers.

This shows us that Christ raises his adherents to a quite new concept of guilt and atonement, to a concept which had nothing to do with that which takes place in the physical world, to a concept which cannot be valid in the sense-perceptible reality. Christ wanted to overcome the old concept of sin, the concept which fixes to physical heredity and physical facts. Was it not such a concept of guilt which keeps to the physical-actual which formed the basis of the old offerings? Did they not go, the sinners, to the altar and did offer their expiatory sacrifices, was it not a merely physical event to take off the sins? The old sacrifices were physical facts. But in the physical reality, Christ taught, one cannot look for guilt and atonement. Therefore, even the highest; the spirit of God, the living Word, can become enslaved by the physical reality up to death by which Christ became enslaved without being guilty. Any external offering cannot align with the concept of guilt and atonement. The Lamb of God was the most innocent; it is able to do the sacrificial death.

With it should be testified on the scene of history to the whole world that guilt and atonement do not have their embodiment in the physical reality, cannot exist in the physical reality, but has to be looked for in a higher region, in the region of spiritual life. If the culprit only made himself liable to prosecution in the physical life if the culprit only needed to make sacrifices, the innocent lamb on the cross would not have to die. Christ took the sacrifice of the cross on Himself; so that the human beings are released from the belief that guilt and atonement are found in the sense-perceptible reality that it should be a result of the externally inherited sin. That is why He really died for the faith of all human beings to bear witness to the fact that the consciousness of guilt and atonement is not to be searched for in the physical consciousness. Therefore, everybody should remember this: even the sacrifice on the cross does not matter, but if the human being rises above guilt and atonement to search for the cause and effect of his actions in the spiritual region, and then only he has reached truth. Therefore, the last sacrifice, the bloodless offering is also the proof of the impossibility of the external sacrifice at the same time, so that the bloodless offering is established, so that the human being has to seek for guilt and atonement—the consciousness of the connection of his actions—in spiritual realm. This one should remember. Therefore, the sacrificial death should not be considered as that on which it depends, but the bloodless spiritual sacrifice, the Communion, should replace the bloody sacrifice. The Communion is the symbol that guilt and atonement of human actions live in the spiritual realm. However, this is the theosophical teaching of karma that everything that the human being has caused anyhow in his actions has its effects according to purely spiritual laws that karma has nothing to do with physical heredity. An external symbol of that is the bloodless offering, the Communion.

But it is not expressed in words in the Christian confession that the Communion is the symbol of karma. Christianity just had another task. I have already indicated it. Karma and reincarnation, the concatenation of destiny in the spiritual realm and reincarnation of the human soul were deep esoteric truths which were taught inside of the esoteric temples. Christ, like all great teachers, taught his adherents in the inside of the temple. Then, however, they should go out into the world, after the strength and the fire of God had been kindled in them, so that also those who could not behold could believe and become blessed.

Therefore, he called his disciples together, immediately in the beginning, to say to them that they are not only teachers in the spiritual realm, but that they should be something else. This is the deeper sense of the first words of the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdoms of Heaven are theirs.” If it is correctly translated one can understand how it is possible to come to knowledge out of living beholding. Now, however, the poor in spirit should find the ways to the spirit, to the kingdoms of Heaven because of their simple hearts.

The apostles should not talk about the highest knowledge outdoors; they should dress this knowledge in simple words. But they themselves should be perfect. Therefore, we see those who should be bearers of the Word of God teaching a truthful theosophy, spreading a truthful theosophical teaching. Take and understand the words of Paul, understand the words of Dionysius the Areopagite and then Scotus Eriugena who taught in his book De divisione naturae (On the Division of Nature) the sevenfold nature of the human being like all theosophists, then you know that their interpretation of Christianity was identical with that of theosophy. Theosophy wants to bring to light again nothing else than what the Christian teachers taught in the first centuries. It wants to serve the Christian message; it wants to explain it in spirit and truth. This is the task of theosophy toward Christianity. Theosophy is there not to overcome Christianity but to recognise it in its truth.

You need nothing else than to understand Christianity in its truth, then you have theosophy in its full size. You do not need to turn to another religion. You can keep on being Christians and need to do nothing else than what real Christian teachers did: ascending to exhaust the spiritual depths of Christianity. Then also those theologians are disproved who believe that theosophy is a Buddhist doctrine, but also the belief is disproved that one should not recognise the deep teachings of Christianity ascending to the heights but pulling down to the depths. Theosophy can only lead to better and better understanding of the mystery of incarnation to understand the word which, in spite of all rationalistic denials, is in the Bible. Who sinks in the Bible cannot bear witness to rationalism, to David Friedrich Strauss and those parroting him. He can bear witness solely to the word which Goethe said who saw deeper into these matters than some other. He says: nevertheless, the Bible remains the book of books, the world book which—understood correctly—must become the Christian aid to education of humankind in the hand not of the wise guys but of the wise human beings.

Theosophy is a servant of the Word in this regard, and it wants to produce the spirit that is willing to ascend to the founder of Christianity; to produce that spirit which does not have only human, but cosmic significance, that spirit which had understanding not only for the simple human heart, which moves in the everyday, but such a deep understanding just for the human heart because He beheld into the depths of the world secrets. There is no better word to show this, as a word which is not, indeed, in our Gospels, but has come down in another way. Jesus with his disciples passed a dead dog which had already started to rot. The disciples turned away. But Jesus looked at the animal with pleasure and admired his nice teeth.

This parable may be paradoxical; however, it leads us to the deeper understanding of the being of Christ. It is a testimony that the human being feels the word living in himself if he passes no thing of the world without understanding if he knows how to become engrossed and to sink in everything that is there and cannot pass anything apparently disgusting, without tolerance without practicing understanding. This understanding allows us to look into the smallest and raises us to the highest, to which nothing is hidden which passes nothing which allows everything to come close in perfect tolerance. It carries the conviction in its heart that really everything is “flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood” in any form. Somebody who fought his way to this understanding only knows and understands what it means: the living spirit of God was realised in one single human being, the living spirit of God Who created the universe.

This is the sense which the theosophist wants to animate again. That sense which, by the way, had not completely become extinct during the past centuries, that sense which does not look for the criterion of the highest from the average mind, from a subordinated point of view but above all it tries to raise itself and to develop the highest knowledge because it is convinced: if it has purified itself, has spiritualised itself, the spirit bows down to it. “If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you are still lost forever.” The great mystic Angelus Silesius said this. He also knew what a teaching means, if it becomes the highest knowledge if it becomes life. Jesus said to Nicodemus: somebody who is born again who is born from above speaks that which he says no longer only from human experience, he expresses it “from above.”—He speaks words like Angelus Silesius has spoken them at the end of the Cherubinic Wanderer: “If you want to read more, go and become yourself the word and the being.”

This is the demand which somebody makes who speaks out of the spirit. You should not listen to him, not to his words only, but let evoke in yourself what speaks out of him.

To such a word, to such good news Jesus chose those who said there: that which was there from the beginning, the eternal world law, what we have seen with own eyes, what we have felt with hands of the word of life we preach this to you.—It was He Who was a single human being, and lived in the word of the disciples at the same time.

But he still said one matter of which theosophists must be aware above all that He not only was there in the time in which He taught and lived, but the important word came down us: “I will be with you always, to the end of time.” Theosophy knows that He is with us that He can stamp our words today as well as at that time, that He can inspire our words that He can also lead us today like at that time that our words express that which He is Himself. However, theosophy wants to prevent one thing. It wants to prevent that one must say: He has come, He is there, but they have not recognised Him. The human beings wanted to do with Him as they wished.—No, the theosophist wants to go to his own sources. Theosophy should raise the human beings spiritually to spirituality, so that they recognise that He is there, so that they know where they have to find Him, and that they hear the living Word from Him who said there:

During these three days, I would like to speak about a topic that one normally considers from a more formal aspect, and whose contents one normally only considers that the position of the philosophical worldview to Christianity was fixed as it were by the underlying philosophical movement of the Middle Ages. Because just this aspect of the matter was recently refreshed because Pope Leo XIII called on his clerics to do Thomism the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, our present topic has a certain significance from this side.

However, I would just like to look not only from this formal aspect at the matter that is connected as medieval philosophy with the central personalities of Albert the Great (1193-1280) and Thomas Aquinas (~1225-1274), but in the course of these days I would like to show the deeper historical background from which this philosophical movement arose which our time appreciates too little. One can say that Thomas Aquinas tried to grasp the problem of knowledge, of the complete worldview in a quite astute way in the thirteenth century, in a way that is hard to comprehend with our thinking today because conditions are part of reflection that the human beings of the present hardly fulfil, even if they are philosophers. It is necessary that you can completely project your thoughts in the way of thinking of Thomas Aquinas, his predecessors and successors that you know how you have to understand the concepts which lived in the souls of these medieval people about which, actually, the history of philosophy reports quite externally.

If you look now at the centre of our consideration, at Thomas Aquinas, he is a personality that disappears, compared with the main current of Christian philosophy in the Middle Ages, as a personality as it were who is, actually, only the exponent of that which lives in a broad worldview current and expresses a certain universality with him. So that Thomism is something exceptionally impersonal, something that only manifests by the personality of Thomas Aquinas. Against it, you recognise immediately that you look at a full, whole personality if you envisage Augustine (354-430) who is the most important predecessor of Thomism. With Augustine, we deal with a struggling person, with Thomas Aquinas with the medieval church that determines its position to heaven, earth, human beings, history et cetera. It expresses itself—indeed, with certain restrictions—as church by the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

A significant event takes place between both men, and without looking at this event, it is not possible to determine the position of both personalities to each other. This event took place in 553 when Emperor Justinian I (527-565) branded Origen (185-~254) as a heretic. The whole colouring of Augustine's worldview becomes clear only if you consider the historical background from which Augustine worked his way out. However, this historical background changes because that powerful influence on the West stops which had originated from the Greek academies in Athens and somewhere else. This influence lasted until the sixth century, and then it decreased, so that something remained in the western current that was quite different from that in which Augustine had still lived.

I ask you to take into consideration that I would like to give an introduction only today that I treat the real being of Thomism tomorrow, and that the purpose of my executions will completely appear, actually, only at the third day. Since I am in a special situation, also with reference to the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages, in particular of Thomism,—you forgive for this personal remark. I have emphasised many a time what I experienced once when I reported that before a proletarian audience what I have to regard as truth in the course of western history. It caused that the students took kindly to that, however, the leaders of the proletarian movement believed that this was no real Marxism. Although I appealed to freedom of teaching, one answered to me in the decisive meeting that this party knows no freedom of teaching but only reasonable compulsion!—Hence, I had to finish my teaching, although I had many students of the proletariat who supported me.

I experienced something similar another time with that which I wanted to say about Thomism and the medieval philosophy twenty years ago. At that time, the materialist monism was on its climax. To the care of a free, independent worldview, but only to the care of this materialist monism, the Giordano Bruno Association was founded in Germany in those days. Because it was impossible for me to take part in all empty gossip and phrases that appeared as monism in the world, I held a talk on Thomism in the Berlin Giordano Bruno Association. I tried to prove in this talk that Thomism is a spiritual monism, which manifests by an astute thinking of which the modern philosophy—influenced by Kant and Protestantism—has no idea or has no strength for it. Thus, I fell out also with monism! Today it is exceptionally difficult to speak of the things in such a way that the spoken arises from the real thing and is not put into the service of any party. Hence, I would like to speak about the phenomena, which I have indicated, during these three days again.

Augustine positions himself as a struggling personality in the fourth and fifth centuries, as I have already said. The way in which Augustine struggles makes a deep impression if one is able to go into the special nature of this struggle. Two questions rose in Augustine's soul of which one has no idea today where the real cognitive and psychological questions have faded, actually. The first question is that which one can characterise possibly while one says, Augustine struggles for the being of that which the human being can acknowledge, actually, as truth fulfilling his soul. The second question is, how can one explain the evil in a world that has, nevertheless, sense only if at least the purpose of this world deals with the good? How can one explain that never the voice of the evil is silenced in the human nature also not if the human being strives honestly and sincerely for the good?

I do not believe that one approaches Augustine really, if one interprets these two questions in such a way, as the average human people of the present would like to understand them. One has to look for the special colouring that these questions had for this man of the fourth and fifth centuries. Augustine experiences an internally moved, excessive life at first. However, in this life both questions appear repeatedly in him. He is in a conflict. The father is a pagan; the mother is a devout Christ. The mother did her best to win the son over to Christianity. At first, the son attains a certain seriousness of life and turns to Manichaeism. We want to look at this worldview later that Augustine got to know when he changed from a dissolute life to a serious one. Then, however, he felt more and more rejected—indeed, only after years—by Manichaeism, and a certain scepticism seized him from the whole trend of the philosophical life in which at a certain time the Greek philosophy had ended, and which survived then until the time of Augustine.

However, now scepticism withdraws more and more. Scepticism is only something to Augustine that brings him together with Greek philosophy. This scepticism leads him to that which exerted a deep influence certainly on his subjectivity on his whole attitude for some time. Scepticism leads him to a quite different direction, to Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism influenced Augustine even more than one normally thinks. One can understand his whole personality and his struggle only if one recognises how much he is involved in the Neoplatonic worldview. If one goes objectively into his development, one hardly finds, actually, that the break, which in this personality took place with the transition from Manichaeism to Neoplatonism or Plotinism, recurred with the same strength, when Augustine turned from Neoplatonism to Christianity. Since one can say, actually, Augustine remained a Neoplatonist to a certain degree. That is why his destiny induced him to get to know Christianity. It is, actually, not at all a big leap, but it is a natural development from Neoplatonism to Christianity. One cannot judge the Christianity of Augustine if one does not look at Manichaeism, a peculiar way to overcome the old pagan worldview at the same time with the Old Testament, with Judaism.

At that time, Manichaeism had expanded over North Africa where Augustine grew up in which many people of the West already lived. In the third century, Manichaeism came into being by Mani, a Persian (216-277). History hands down exceptionally little of it. If one wants to characterise Manichaeism, one must say, it depends more on the attitude of this worldview than on the literal contents.

It is typical for Manichaeism above all that the separation of the human experience into spiritual and material does not yet make sense. The words or ideas “spirit” and “matter” have no sense for Manichaeism. Manichaeism sees in that what appears material to the senses something spiritual and does not tower above that which presents itself to the senses if it speaks of the spiritual. It applies to it much more than one normally thinks that it assumes spiritual phenomena, spiritual facts, indeed, in the stars and in their ways that it assumes that with the sun mystery something spiritual takes place here on earth at the same time. Something material manifests as something spiritual at the same time and vice versa. Hence, it is a given for Manichaeism that it speaks of astronomical phenomena, of world phenomena in such a way as it also speaks of moral and of events within the human evolution. Thus, the contrast of light and darkness which Manichaeism teaches—copying the ancient Persian worldview—is something naturally spiritual at the same time even more than one thinks. Manichaeism still speaks of that what moves there apparently as sun at the firmament, of something that is also concerned with the moral entities and impulses within the human evolution. It speaks of the relations of this moral-physical, which is there at the firmament, to the signs of the zodiac like to twelve beings by whom the primal being, the primal light being of the world, specifies its activities.

However, something else is still distinctive of Manichaeism. It considers the human being by no means as that which the human being is to us today. The human being appears to us as a kind of crown of the earth creation. Manichaeism does not concede this. It considers the human being, actually, only as a scanty rest of that which should have become a human being on earth by the divine light being. Something else should have become a human being than that which now walks around as a human being on earth. That which now walks around as a human being on earth originated because the original human being whom the light being had created for supporting him in his fight against the demons of darkness lost this fight against these demons and was moved by the good powers into the sun. However, the demons still managed it to snatch a part of this original human being as it were from the real human being escaping to the sun and to form the earthly human race from it, which walks about on earth like a worse issue of that what could not live on the earth here because it had to be carried away into the sun during the big spiritual fight. The Christ Being appeared to lead the human being who was like a worse edition of his original destiny on earth, and Its activity shall erase the effect of the demons from the earth.

I know very well that not everything that one can still put into words of this worldview by our word usage, actually, is sufficient; since all that just arises from the depths of the soul life that are substantially different from the present ones. However, the essentials are that what I have already emphasised. Since as fantastic it may appear what I tell you about the progress of the earth in the sense of Manichaeism, it did not imagine that as something that one can only behold spiritually, but that a sense-perceptible phenomenon happens at the same time as something spiritual.

That was the first to work powerfully on Augustine. We understand the problems that are connected with the personality of Augustine, actually, even by the fact that one envisages this mighty effect of Manichaeism, of its spiritual-material principle. One must ask himself, why did Augustine become dissatisfied with Manichaeism? Not, actually, because of its mystic contents but because of the whole attitude of Manichaeism.

First, Augustine was taken in by the sensory descriptiveness, the vividness of this view, in a way. Then, however, something stirred in him that could not be content just with the vividness with which one considered the material as spiritual and the spiritual as material. One really does not manage it differently, as if one goes over from that which one has often only as a formal consideration to reality if one looks at the fact that Augustine was just a person who resembled very much the people of the Middle Ages and maybe even modern people than those people who were the natural bearers of Manichaeism. Augustine already has something of a renewal of mental life.

In our intellectual time that is prone to the abstract, one considers that which goes forward historically in any century as result of the preceding century and so on. It is pure nonsense if one states that that which happens, for example, in the eighteenth year of a human being is a mere effect of that which has happened in the thirteenth, fourteenth years. Since in between something takes place which works its way up from the depths of human nature which is not a mere effect of the preceding in the sense as one speaks of effect and cause justifiably, but which is the sexual maturity which just emerges from the nature of humanity. One has to acknowledge such leaps also at other times of the individual human development, where something works up its way from depths to the surface; so that one cannot say, what happens is only the immediately straight effect of that which has preceded.

Such leaps also take place in the evolution of humanity, and you have to suppose that the spiritual condition of Manichaeism was before such leap and Augustine lived after the leap. He could not help ascending from that which a Manichaean considered as material-spiritual to the purely spiritual. Hence, he had to turn away from the vivid worldview of Manichaeism. That was the first to experience in his soul intensely, and we read his words: “the fact that I had to imagine bodily masses if I wanted to meditate on God and believed that nothing could exist but of that kind—this was the most substantial and almost the only reason of error which I could not avoid.”

Thus, he points back to that time in which Manichaeism lived in his soul; and thus he characterises this lifetime as an error. He wanted something at which he could look up as to something that forms the basis of the human being. He needed something that one cannot see as something material-spiritual immediately in the sensory universe, as the principles of Manichaeism did. As everything struggles intensely seriously and strongly to the surface of his soul, also this: “I asked the earth, and it spoke, I am not that. And what is on it, confessed the same.”

What does Augustine look for? He looks for the actual divine.—Manichaeism would have answered to him: I am that as earth, as far as the divine expresses itself by the earthly work.—Augustine continues: “I asked the sea and the abysses and what they entail as living: we are not your God, search Him above us.—I asked the blowing winds and the whole atmosphere with all its inhabitants: the philosophers who looked the being of the things in us were mistaken, we are not God.” Neither the sea, nor the atmosphere, nor everything that you can perceive with the senses. “I asked the sun, the moon, and the stars. They said: we are not God whom you search.”

Thus, he got free of Manichaeism, just of the element of Manichaeism that one has to characterise, actually, as the most significant. Augustine looks for a spiritual that is free of anything sense-perceptible. He lives just in that epoch of soul development when the soul had to break away from mere considering the sense-perceptible as something spiritual, the spiritual as something sense-perceptible; since one also misjudges the Greek philosophy in this respect absolutely. Hence, people have difficulties to understand the beginning of my Riddles of Philosophy because I tried to characterise it in such a way as it was.

If the Greek speaks of ideas, of concepts, the today's human beings believe that he means that with his ideas that we call thoughts or ideas today. This is not the case, but the Greek spoke of ideas as of something that he perceives in the outside world like colours and tones.

What appeared in Manichaeism with an oriental nuance exists in the entire Greek worldview. The Greek sees his idea as he sees a colour. He still has the sensory-spiritual, spiritual-sensory, that soul experience which does not at all ascend to that which we know as something spiritual that is free of anything sense-perceptible as we understand it now—whether as a mere abstraction or as real contents of our soul, this we do not yet want to decide at this moment. The soul experience that is free of anything sense-perceptible is not yet anything that the Greek envisages. He does not differentiate between thinking and sense perception.

One would have to correct the whole conception of the Platonic philosophy, actually, from this viewpoint, because only then it appears in the right light. So that one may say, Manichaeism is only a post-Christian elaboration of that what was in Hellenism. One also does not understand the great philosopher Aristotle who concludes the Greek philosophy if one does not know that—if he still speaks of concepts—he already stands, indeed, hard at the border of abstract understanding that he speaks, however, still in the sense of tradition seeing the concepts close to sense-perception.

Augustine was simply forced by the viewpoint, which people of his epoch had attained by real processes that took place in them among whom Augustine was an outstanding personality, no longer to experience in the soul as a Greek had experienced. He was forced to a thinking that still keeps its contents if it cannot talk of earth, air, sea, stars, sun and moon that does not have vivid contents. He has to push his way to a divine that should have such abstract contents. Only such worldviews spoke to him, actually, which had originated from another viewpoint that I have just characterised as that of the sensory-extrasensory. No wonder that these souls came to scepticism because they strove in uncertain way for something that was not yet there and because they could only find that which they could not take up.

However, on the other side the feeling to stand on a firm ground of truth and to get explanation about the question of the origin of the evil was so strong in Augustine that, nevertheless, Neo-Platonism influenced him equally considerably. Neo-Platonism or Plotinism in particular concludes Greek philosophy. Plotinus (~204-270) shows—what strictly speaking Plato's dialogues and in the least the Aristotelian philosophy cannot show—how the whole soul life proceeds if it searches a certain internalisation. Plotinus is the last latecomer of a kind of people who took quite different ways to knowledge than that which one later understood generally about which one developed an idea later. Plotinus appears to the modern human being, actually, as a daydreamer.

Plotinus appears just to those who have taken up more or less of the medieval scholasticism as an awful romanticist, even as a dangerous romanticist. I experienced that repeatedly. My old friend Vincenz Knauer (1828-1894), a Benedictine monk who wrote a history of philosophy and a book about the main problems of philosophy from Thales to Hamerling was the personified gentleness. This man scolded as never before if one discussed the philosophy of Neo-Platonism, in particular that of Plotinus. There he got very angry with Plotinus as with a dangerous romanticist. Franz Brentano (1838-1917), the brilliant Aristotelian, empiricist, and representative of the medieval philosophy wrote a booklet What a Philosopher Is Epoch-making Sometimes (1876). There, he got just angry with Plotinus, because Plotinus is the philosopher who was epoch-making as a dangerous romanticist at the end of the ancient Greek era. It is very difficult for the modern philosopher to understand Plotinus.

About this philosopher of the third century, we may say at first, that what we experience as our mind contents, as the sum of concepts that we form about the world is to him not at all, what it is to us. I would like to say if I may express myself figuratively (Steiner draws): We understand the world with sense perception, then we abstract concepts from the sense perception and end up in the concepts. We have the concepts as an inner soul experience and we are aware more or less that we have abstractions. The essentials are that we end up there; we turn our attention to the sensory experience and end up where we form the sum of our concepts, our ideas.

That was not the way for Plotinus. To Plotinus this whole world of sense perception hardly existed at first. However, that which was something for him about which he spoke as we speak about plants, minerals, animals and physical human beings, that was something that he saw now above the concepts, this was a spiritual world, and this spiritual world had a lower border for him. This lower border was the concepts. We get the concepts by turning to the sensory things, abstracting and forming the concepts and say, the concepts are the summaries, the essences of ideal nature from sense perception. Plotinus said who cared little about sense perception at first, we as human beings live in a spiritual world, and that which this spiritual world reveals as a last to us that we see as its lower border this are the concepts.

For us the sensory world is beneath the concepts; for Plotinus a spiritual world, the real intellectual world, is above the concepts. I could also use the following image: we imagine once, we would be immersed in the sea, and we looked up to the sea surface, the sea surface would be the upper border. We lived in the sea, and we would just have the feeling: this border surrounds the element in which we live.

For Plotinus this was different. He did not care about this sea around himself. However, for him this border which he saw there was the border of the world of concepts in which his soul lived, the lower border of that what was above it; so as if we interpreted the sea border as the border with the atmosphere. For Plotinus who was of the opinion that he continued the true view of Plato is that what is above the concepts at the same time that which Plato calls the world of ideas. This world of ideas is definitely something about which one speaks as a world in the sense of Plotinism.

It does not come into your mind, even if you are followers of modern subjective philosophy, if you look out at a meadow to say: I have my meadow, you have your meadow, the third one has his meadow, even if you are persuaded by the fact that you all have the mental picture of the meadow only, isn't that so? You talk about one meadow that is outdoors; in the same way, Plotinus speaks about one world of ideas, not of the world of ideas in the first head, or in the second head, or in the third head. The soul takes part in this world of ideas. So that we may say, the soul, the psyche, develops as it were from the world of ideas, experiencing this world of ideas. Just as the world of ideas creates the psyche, the soul, the soul for its part creates the matter in which it is embodied. Hence, that from which the psyche takes its body is a creation of this psyche.

There, however, is only the origin of individuation, there only the psyche divides, which, otherwise, participates in the uniform world of ideas, into the body A, into the body B and so on, and thereby the single souls originate only. The single souls originate from the fact that as it were the psyche is integrated into the single material bodies. Therefore, in the sense of Plotinism the human being can consider himself as a vessel at first. However, this is only that by which the soul manifests and is individualised. Then the human being has to experience his soul that rises to the world of ideas. Then there is a higher kind of experience. Talking about abstract concepts did not make sense to a Plotinist; since a Plotinist would have said, what should abstractions be? Concepts cannot be abstract, cannot be in limbo, they must be the concrete manifestations of the spiritual. One is wrong if one interprets in such a way that ideas are abstractions. This is the expression of an intellectual world, a world of spirituality. That also existed in the usual experience with those people out of whom Plotinus and his followers grew up. For them such talking about concepts generally did not make sense, because for them the spiritual world projected into their souls. At the border of this projection, this world of concepts originated. However, only if one became engrossed, if one developed the soul further, that resulted which now the usual human being could not know which just someone experienced who soared a higher experience. Then he experienced that which was still above the world of ideas which was the One if you want to call it this way, so he experiences the One what was for Plotinus that which no concept reaches if one could delve into it without concepts in the inside, and which one calls Imagination spiritual-scientifically. You can read up that in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? What I called Imagination there delves into that which is above the world of ideas according to Plotinus.

Any cognition about the human soul also arose for Plotinus from this worldview. It is already contained in it. One can be an individualist only in the sense of Plotinus, while one is at the same time a human being who recognises that the human being rises to something that is above any individuality that he rises to something spiritual in which he rises upwards as it were, while we are more used today to submerging in the sensory. However, everything that is the expression of something that a right scholastic considers as a rave is nothing fictional for Plotinus, is not hypothetical. For Plotinus this was sure perception up to the One that could be experienced only in special cases, as for us minerals, plants, animals are percepts. He spoke only in the sense of something that the soul experiences immediately if he spoke about the soul, the Logos that participates in the Nous, in the world of ideas and in the One.

For Plotinus the whole world was a spiritual being as it were; again it has a nuance of worldview different from that of Manichaeism and that of Augustine. Manichaeism recognises a sensory-extrasensory; for it, the words and concepts “matter” and “spirit” do not yet make sense. From his sensory view, Augustine strives for attaining a spiritual experience that is free of the sense-perceptible. For Plotinus the whole world is spirit, for him sensory things do not exist. Since that which seems material is only the lowest manifestation of the spirit. Everything is spirit, and if we penetrate deeply enough into the things, everything manifests as spirit.

This is something with which Augustine could not completely go along. Why? Because he did not have the view. Because Augustine just lived already as a forerunner in his epoch—as I would like to call Plotinus a latecomer, Augustine was just a forerunner of those human beings who do no longer feel that in the world of ideas a spiritual world manifests. He did not behold this world. He could learn it only from others. He could only find out it that one said this, and he could still develop a feeling of the fact that something of a human way to truth is contained in it. This was the conflict, in which Augustine faced Plotinism. However, actually, he was never completely hostile to an inner understanding of Plotinism, even if he could not behold. He only suspected that in this world something must be which he could not reach.

In this mood, Augustine withdrew into loneliness in which he got to know the Bible and Christianity, and later the sermons of Aurelius Ambrosius (St. Ambrose, ~340-397, Bishop of Milan) and the Epistles of Paul. This mood persuaded him finally to say, what Plotinus sought as the being of the world in the being of the world of ideas, of the Nous, or in the One that one reaches only in special preferential soul states this appeared on earth in the person of Christ Jesus.—This arose to him as a conviction from the Bible: you do not need to soar the One; you need only to look at the historical tradition of Christ Jesus. There the One descended and became a human being.

Augustine swaps the philosophy of Plotinus for the church. He pronounces it clearly when he says: “Who could be so blinded to say that the church of the apostles deserves no faith which is so loyal and is supported by the accordance of so many brothers that it handed its scriptures conscientiously down to the descendants that it also maintained their chairs up to the present bishops with apostolic succession.” Augustine now places much value on the fact that one can prove, in the end,—if one only goes back through the centuries—that there lived human beings who still knew the disciples of the Lord, and an ongoing tradition of plausible kind exists that on earth that appeared which Plotinus tried to gain in the mentioned way.

Augustine was now eager to use Plotinism, as far as he could penetrate into it to the understanding of that which had become accessible to his feeling by Christianity. He really applied that which he had received from Plotinism to understand Christianity and its contents. Thus, he transformed, for example, the concept of the One. For Plotinus this One was an experience; for Augustine who could not penetrate to this experience the One became something that he called with the abstract term “being,” the world of ideas was something that he called with the abstraction of “essence,” psyche something that he named with the abstraction “life” or also with the concept “love.” The fact that Augustine proceeded in such a way characterises best of all that he tried to grasp the spiritual world from which Christ Jesus had come with Neoplatonic, with Plotinist, he thought that there is a spiritual world above the human beings from which Christ comes. The tripartition was something that had become clear to Augustine from Plotinism. The three personalities of trinity—Father, Son, and Spirit—became clear to Augustine from Plotinism.

If one asks, what filled the soul of Augustine if he spoke of the three persons? One has to answer, that filled him, which he had learnt from Plotinus. He also brought that which he had learnt from Plotinus into his Bible understanding. One realises how this works on, because this trinity comes alive again, for example, with Scotus Eriugena (John Scotus Eriugena, ~815- ~877, Irish theologian, philosopher) who lived at the court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century. He wrote a book about the division of nature (De divisione naturae, original title: Periphyseon) in which we still find a similar trinity. Christianity interprets its contents with the help of Plotinism.

Augustine kept some basic essentials of Plotinism. Imagine that, actually, the human being is an earthly individual only, because the psyche projects down to the material like into a vessel. If we ascend a little bit to the higher essential, we ascend from the human to the divine or spiritual where the trinity is rooted, then we do no longer deal with the single human beings but with the species, with humanity.

We do no longer direct our ideas so strongly to the whole humanity from our concepts as Augustine did this from Plotinism. I would like to say, seen from below the human beings appear as individuals; seen from above—if one may say it hypothetically—the whole humanity appears as a unity. For Plotinus now from this viewpoint the whole humanity grew together, seen from the front, in Adam. Adam was the whole humanity. While Adam originated from the spiritual world, he was a being, connected with the earth, that had free will, and that was unable to sin because in it that lived which was still up there—not that which originates from the aberration of the matter. The human being who was Adam at first could not sin, he could not be unfree, and with it, he could not die. There the effect of that came which Augustine felt as the counter-spirit, as Satan. He seduced the human being who became material and with it the whole humanity.

You realise that in this respect Augustine lives with his knowledge completely in Plotinism. The whole humanity is one to him. The single human being does not sin, with Adam the whole humanity sins. If one dwells on that which often lives between the lines in particular of the last writings of Augustine, one realises how exceptionally difficult it was for Augustine to consider the whole humanity as sinful. In him, the individual human being lived who had a sensation of the fact that the single human being becomes responsible more and more for that which he does and learns. It appeared almost as something impossible to Augustine at certain moments to feel that the single human being is only a member of the whole humanity. However, Neo-Platonism, Plotinism was so firm in him that he was able to look at the whole humanity only. Thus, this state of all human beings—the state of sin and death—transitioned into the state of the inability to be free and immortal.

The whole humanity had fallen with it, had turned away from its origin. Now God would simply have rejected humanity if he were only fair. However, He is not only fair; He is also merciful. Augustine felt this way. Hence, God decided to save a part of humanity—please note: to save a part of humanity—God decided that a part of humanity receives His grace by which this part of humanity is led back to the state of freedom and immortality which can be realised, however, completely only after death. The other part of humanity—they are the not selected—remains in the state of sin. Hence, humanity disintegrates into two parts: in those who are selected, and in those who are rejected. If one looks in the sense of Augustine at humanity, it simply disintegrates into these two parts, into those who are without merit destined to bliss only because the divine plan has wisely arranged it this way, and in those who cannot get the divine grace whatever they do, they are doomed. This view, which one also calls the doctrine of predestination, arose for Augustine from his view of the whole humanity. If the whole humanity sinned, the whole humanity would deserve to be condemned.

Which dreadful spiritual fights did arise from this doctrine of predestination? Tomorrow I would like to speak how Pelagianism, Semipelagianism grew out of it. However, today I would still like to add something in the end: we realise now how Augustine as a vividly struggling personality stands between that view which goes up to the spiritual and for which humanity becomes one. He interprets this to himself in the sense of the doctrine of predestination. However, he felt compelled to ascend from the human individuality to something spiritual that is free of any sense-perceptible and can arise again only from the individuality. The characteristic feature of the age whose forerunner Augustine was is that this age became aware of that of which in antiquity the human being did not became aware: the individual experience.

Today one takes many things as phrases. Klopstock (1724-1803, German poet) was still serious, he did not use commonplace phrases when he began his Messiah with the words: “Sing, immortal soul, on the sinful men's redemption.”—Homer began honestly and sincerely: “Sing, o goddess, to me about the rage ...” or: “Sing, o muse, to me of the man, the widely wandered Odysseus.”—These men did not speak of that which lived in the individuality; they spoke of that which speaks as a general humanity, as a type soul, as a psyche through them. This is no commonplace phrase if Homer lets the muse sing instead of himself. The fact that one can regard himself as an individuality arises only gradually. Augustine is one of the first to feel the individual existence of the human being with individual responsibility. Hence, he lived in this conflict. However, there just originated in his experience the individual pursuit for the non-sensory spiritual. In him was a personal, subjective struggle.

In the subsequent time, that understanding was also buried which Augustine could still have for Plotinism. After the Greek philosophers, the latecomers of Plato and Plotinus, had to emigrate to Persia, after these last philosophers had found their successors in the Academy of Gondishapur, in the West this view to the spiritual disappeared, and only that remained which the philistine Aristotle delivered as filtered Greek philosophy to future generations, but also only in single fragments. This propagated and came via the Arabs to Europe. This was that which had no consciousness of the real world of ideas. Thus, the big question was left; the human being has to create the spiritual from himself. He must bear the spiritual as an abstraction. If he sees lions, he thinks the concept of the “lion” if he sees wolves, he thinks the concept “wolf” if he sees the human being, he thinks the concept of the human being, these concepts live only in him, they emerge from the individuality.

The whole question would not yet have had any sense for Plotinus; now this question still gets a deep different sense. Augustine could still grasp the mystery of Christ Jesus with that which shone from Plotinism in his soul. Plotinism was buried; with the closing of the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens by Emperor Justinian in 529, the living coherence with such views ended. Different people felt deeply, what it means: the scriptures and tradition give us account of a spiritual world, we experience supersensible concepts from our individuality, concepts which are abstracted from the sensory. How do we relate to existence with these concepts? How do we relate to the being of the world with these concepts? Do our concepts live only as something arbitrary in us, or does it have anything to do with the outer world?

In this form, the questions appeared in extreme abstraction, but in an abstraction that were very serious human and medieval-ecclesiastical problems. In this abstraction, in this intimacy the questions emerged in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Then the quarrel between realists and nominalists took place. How does one relate to a world about which those concepts give account that can be born only in ourselves by our individuality? The medieval scholastics presented this big question to themselves. If you think which form Plotinism accepted in the doctrine of predestination, then you can feel the whole depth of this scholastic question: only a part of humanity could be blessed with the divine grace, can attain salvation; the other part was destined to the everlasting damnation from the start whatever it does. However, that which the human being could gain as knowledge to himself did just not arise from that into which Augustine could not yet transform his dreadful concept of predestination; this arose from the human individuality. For Augustine humanity was a whole, for Thomas every single human being was an individuality.

How is this big world process of predestination associated with that which the single human being experiences? How is that associated which Augustine had completely neglected, actually, with that which the single human being can gain to himself? Imagine that Augustine took the doctrine of predestination because he did not want to assert but to extinguish the human individuality for the sake of humanity; Thomas Aquinas only faced the single human being with his quest for knowledge. In that which Augustine excluded from his consideration of humanity, Thomas had to look for the human knowledge and its relation to the world.

It is not enough that one puts such a question in the abstract, intellectually and rationalistically. It is necessary that you grasp such a question with your whole heart, with your whole personality. Then you can estimate how this question weighed heavily on those persons who were its bearers in the thirteenth century.

In the introductory lecture yesterday our attention was drawn to the fact that certain events in the more ancient history of mankind can be rightly understood only when we not merely observe the forces and faculties of the personalities themselves, but when we realise at the outset that through the personalities in question, as through instruments, Beings are working who allow their deeds to stream down from higher worlds into our world. We must realise that these Beings cannot take direct hold of the physical facts of our existence because, on account of the present stage of their development, they cannot incarnate in a physical Body which draws its constituents from the physical world. If, therefore, they desire to work within our physical world, they must make use of the physical human being—of his deeds, but also of his intellect, his powers of understanding. We find the influence and penetration of such Beings of the higher world the more clearly in evidence the farther back we go in the ages of the evolution of humanity. But it must not be imagined that this downpouring of forces and activities from the higher worlds into the physical world through human beings has ever ceased; it continues even into our own time.

To the spiritual scientist who for years now has been absorbing principles which lead his feelings and ideal to accept the existence of higher worlds—to him a fact such as this will certainly, from he outset, be to some extent comprehensible; for he is accustomed always to draw the connecting threads which link our knowledge, our thinking, our willing, with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But from time to time the spiritual scientist is also in the position of having to guard against the materialistic conceptions which are so prevalent in the present age and make it impossible for those who stand aloof from the development of the spiritual life even to enter into what has to be said about the working of higher worlds into our physical world.

Fundamentally speaking, it is considered an antiquated attitude in our time even to speak of the influence of abstract ideas in the events of history. Many people to-day regard it as quite impermissible, in face of the genuinely scientific approach, to speak of certain ideas, abstract ideas which properly speaking can live only in the wind, taking effect in the successive epochs of history. A last semblance, at least, of belief in the influence of abstract ideas—although how they are to work is incomprehensible precisely because they are abstract ideas!—was still in evidence even in the 19th century, in Ranke's exposition of history¹⁰ But even this belief in ideas as factors in history is gradually being discarded by our progressively materialistic development, and in a certain respect to-day it is regarded as the sign of an enlightened mind in the domain of history to believe that all the characteristic features of the several epochs merely represent the convergence of physically perceptible actions, outer needs, outer interests and ideas of physical human beings. The time is now past when spirits such as Herder, as if through a certain inspiration, still portrayed the development of human history in a way which enables one to perceive that it is based on the assumption, at least, of the existence of living powers, living super-sensible powers manifesting through the deeds and the lives of men.¹¹ Those who want to be accounted very clever to-day, will say: “Well yes, a man such as Lessing certainly had many really intelligent ideas, but then, at the end of his life, he wrote nonsense such as you find in The Education of the Human Race, where the only way in which he could help himself out of his difficulties was by linking the strict conformity to law shown by the flow of historical development with the idea of reincarnation.” In the last sentences of The Education of the Human Race,¹² Lessing has actually expressed what is described by Anthroposophy on the basis of occult facts—namely, that souls who lived in ancient epochs and then absorbed active, living forces, carry over these forces into their new incarnations, so that behind physical happenings there is not an abstract onflow of ideas but an actual and real onflow of the spirit. As I said, a clever ass will insist that in his old age Lessing hit upon ideas as confused as that of reincarnation, and that these ideas must he ignored.—This reminds one again of the bitterly ironic yet brilliant note once written by Hebbel in his diary, to the effect that a fair motif would be that a master, taking the subject of Plato in his school, has among his pupils the reincarnated Plato, who understands what the master is teaching so little that he has to be severely punished!

The conception of the historical evolution of humanity has lost much of the earlier, spiritual insight, and Spiritual Science will really have to guard against the onslaught of materialistic thinking which comes from all sides and regards communications which are based on the spiritual facts as so much lunacy. That things have come to a pretty pass is shown, for example, in the fact that all those mighty pictures, those grand symbolical conceptions which emanated from the old clairvoyant knowledge and are expressed in the characters of legends and fairy-tales, have interpreters of the very oddest kind. The most curious production in this domain is undoubtedly Solomon Reinach's little book Orpheus, which has caused a certain furor in many circles in France. Everything from which the ideas of Demeter, of Orpheus, and of other mythological cycles are supposed to have sprung, is traced back in this book to purely materialistic happenings and it is often utterly grotesque how the historical existence of this or that figure, standing, let us say, behind Hermes or Moses, is alleged to have originated, and with what superficiality an attempt has been made to explain these figures as the inventions of poetic license, of human fantasy. According to Solomon Reinach's method it would be easy, sixty or seventy years hence, when outer memory of him will have faded somewhat, to prove that there never was such a man, but that it was simply a matter of popular fantasy having transferred the old idea of Reinecke Fuchs to Solomon Reinach. According to his method this would certainly be possible. The absurdity of the whole book is on a par with what is said in the Preface—that it has been written “for the widest circles of the educated public, even for the very young.” “For the very young”—since he emphasises that he has avoided everything that might cause a shock to young girls—although he has not avoided tracing back the idea of Demeter to a pig! He promises, however, that if his book gains the influence he hopes for, he will write a special edition for mothers, which will include everything that must still be withheld from their daughters.—That is the kind of thing we have come to!

One would like to remind students of Spiritual Science particularly, that it is possible to prove on purely external grounds that spiritual powers, spiritual forces have worked through human beings right up to our own century—and this quite apart from the purely occult, esoteric research with which we shall be mainly concerned here. But in order that we may understand how it is possible for Spiritual Science to maintain, on purely external grounds, that super-sensible powers exercise sway in history, let me point to the following.

Anyone who gains a little insight into the development of modern humanity, let us say in the 14th and 15th centuries and on until the 16th, will realise how infinitely significant in this outer development was the intervention of a certain personality, one in respect of whom it can be proved from completely external evidence that spiritual, super-sensible Powers worked through her. In order to throw a little light on the occult understanding of history, we may ask the question: What would the development of modern Europe have been if at the beginning of the 15th century the Maid of Orleans had not entered the arena of events? Anyone who thinks, even from an entirely external point of view, of the development that took place during this period, must say to himself: Suppose the deeds of the Maid of Orleans were erased from history ... then, according to the knowledge obtainable from purely external historical research, one cannot but realise that without the working of higher, super-sensible Powers through the Maid of Orleans, the whole of France, indeed the whole of Europe in the 15th century, would have taken on an altogether different form. Everything in the impulses of will, in the physical brains of those times, was directed towards flooding all Europe with a general conception of the State which would have extinguished the folk-individualities and under this influence a very great deal of what has developed in Europe during the last centuries through the interplay of these folk-individualities would quite certainly have been impossible.

Imagine the deed of the Maid of Orleans blotted out from history, France abandoned to her fate without this intervention, and then ask: Without this deed, what would have become of France? And then think of the role played by France in the whole cultural life of humanity during the centuries following! Add to this the facts which cannot be refuted and are confirmed by actual documents concerning the mission of the Maid of Orleans. This young girl, certainly not highly educated even by the standards of her time, suddenly, before she is twenty years old, feels in the autumn of 1428 that spiritual Powers of the super-sensible worlds are speaking to her. True, she clothes these Powers in forms that are familiar to her, so that she is seeing them through the medium of her own mental images; but that does not do away with the reality of these Powers. Picture to yourselves that she knows that super-sensible Powers are guiding her will towards a definite point—I am speaking to begin with, not of what can be told about these facts from the Akasha Chronicle, but only of what is confirmed by documentary evidence.

We know that the Maid of Orleans confided her vision first of all to a relative who—one would almost say, by chance-happened to understand her; that after many vicissitudes and difficulties she was introduced to the Court of King Charles who, together with the whole French Army, had come to his wit's end, as the saying goes. We know too, how after every conceivable obstacle had been put in her way, she finally recognised and went straight to the King, who was standing among such a crowd of people that no physical eye could have distinguished him. It is also known that at that moment she confided to him something—he wanted to test her by it—of which it can be said that it was known only to him and to the super-sensible worlds. You also know from ordinary history that it was she who, under the unceasing impulse and urge of her intense faith—it would be better to say, through her actual vision—and in face of the greatest difficulties, led the armies to victory and the King to his crowning.

Who intervened at that time in the course of history?—None other than Beings of higher Hierarchies! The Maid of Orleans was an outer Instrument of these Beings, and it was they who guided the deeds of history. It is possible that someone may say to himself: “If I had guided these deeds I would have guided them more wisely!”—because he finds one thing or another in the procedure of the Maid of Orleans at variance with his own way of thinking. Adherents of Spiritual Science, however, should not wish to correct the deeds of gods through human intellect—a very common practice in our so-called civilisation. There have also been people who quite in the Spirit of the present age, have wanted, as it were, to unburden modern history of the deeds of the Maid of Orleans. A characteristic modern work with this materialistic trend has been written by Anatole France. One would really like to know how materialistic thinking manages to reconcile itself with much irrefutable evidence—I am still speaking only of actual historical documents. And so because we are in Stuttgart and I sometimes like to take account of local matters, I want to quote from a document to which reference has already been made here.

Those who belong to Stuttgart certainly know that there once lived here a man¹³ who carried out important research on the Gospels. As spiritual scientists we certainly need not agree with the things—some of them extremely clever—that were brought forward by Gfrörer—that was his name—and we may be quite sure that if he had heard what is now being given in the domain of Spiritual Science he would have used terms he was often wont to apply to his opponents—whom he, with his stubborn-headedness, by no means always let off lightly. He would have said that these Theosophists, too, are people who are “not quite right in the head.” But this was before the time when, as is the case to-day, historical documents can be passed over for purely materialistic reasons if they happen to deal with inconvenient facts and obviously point to the working of higher forces in our physical world. And so I will again quote from a short document—a letter published in the first half of the 19th century. I will read you just a few paragraphs from this letter, which was quoted by Gfrörer at that time in justification of his belief. I will read a passage characterising the Maid of Orleans, and then ask you to think of the implications of such a vivid description.

After the writer of this letter has set forth what the Maid of Orleans accomplished, he continues:

“This and much more has the Maid brought about, and with God's help she will accomplish still greater things. The girl is of appealing beauty and manly bearing; she speaks little and shows remarkable sagacity; when she speaks she has a pleasing, delicately feminine voice. She eats little and abstains from wine. She takes pleasure in fine horses and weapons and admires well-accoutred and noble men. To be obliged to meet and converse with large numbers of people is abhorrent to her; her tears often overflow; she loves a happy face, endures unheard of toil, and is so assiduous in the manipulation and bearing of weapons that she remains uninterruptedly for six days—day and night—in full armour. She says that the English have no right to France, and therefore—as she says—God has sent her to drive them out and conquer them, but only after previous warning. For the King she shows the deepest veneration; she says he is beloved by God, is under special protection, and will therefore be preserved. Of the Duke of Orleans, your nephew, she says that he will be delivered in a miraculous way, but only after a demand for his release has been made to the English who hold him prisoner.

“With that, revered Duke, I bring my report to a conclusion. Still more wonderful things are happening and have happened than I can write of or describe to you in words. While I write this, the afore mentioned Maid has already gone to the neighbourhood of the city of Rheims in Champagne, whither the King has hastily set off for his anointing and crowning under God's protection. Most respected and powerful Duke, and greatly venerated master! I commend myself to you in all humility, while praying the Almighty to protect you and fulfil your desires. Written at Biteromis, the 21st day of June in the year 1429.

Your humble servant
PERCEVAL
Lord of Bonlaninth. Counsellor and
Chamberlain of the King of the French
and of the Duke of Orleans, Seneschal of
Berry.”

This letter¹⁴ was written by one who knew the Maid and was in close contact with the King. It is indeed amazing when one discovers all these things on purely occult grounds and with occult means of proof—for they are indeed to be found in the Akasha Chronicle—and then sees how, in cases like this, actual historical documents can also be produced. In short, it seems almost madness to doubt what was working through the Maid of Orleans. And when we also take into consideration the fact that through her deeds the whole history of modern time assumed a different aspect, this gives us the right to say that here, verified by documentary evidence, we can see the direct intervention of the super-sensible worlds. When the spiritual researcher goes further and seeks in his own way for the one who was the real Inspirer of the Maid of Orleans, he finds something very remarkable as he investigates the successive epochs of time. He finds that the same Spirit who worked through the Maid of Orleans as his instrument at that time had inspired—in a quite different form, a quite different way—another personality who was a philosopher at the Court of Charles the Bald. This was Scotus Erigena, through whose philosophical and theological ideas in an earlier period Europe had been so deeply influenced. And so we see that the same Powers work in different epochs in a different way through human beings who are their instruments; that there is continuity, an onflowing stream of happenings in what we call history.

I showed you yesterday how a significant myth of Babylonian-Chaldean times points to the penetration of the spiritual worlds into men upon whom much depended for the third Post-Atlantean period, for the whole of historical development in ancient Chaldea, in ancient Babylonia. But we must now also observe from the standpoint of occult science the two personalities hidden behind the legendary names of Gilgamish and Eabani. In the Sense of occult history we have to see in them personalities who stand at the starting-point of the Babylonian-Chaldean epoch of culture. The impulses proceeding from them are to be discerned again in the development of the really spiritual culture of ancient Babylonia and Chaldea.—Now Gilgamish was a personality who had many incarnations behind him and may therefore be called an “old” soul within the evolution of humanity.

You know from the book Occult Science that during the Lemurian epoch of earth-evolution only very few human beings had outlasted, on the earth itself, the happenings of this evolution, that only a few remained on the earth during the Lemurian epoch; that before the actual danger of the mummification of everything human began, the majority of souls withdrew from the earth to other planets, continuing their life on Mars, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, arid so forth. Then, from the end of the Lemurian epoch and during the Atlantean epoch, these souls gradually came down to the earth in order to incarnate in earthly bodies under the changed earthly conditions, and to appear in ever new incarnations. Thus there are souls who came down comparatively early from the planetary worlds and others who came down late; indeed not until the later periods of Atlantean evolution. The souls who came down early have therefore more incarnations behind them in earth-evolution than those who came down later; hence we can call these latter, in contrast to the former, “younger” souls—souls who have taken less into themselves.

The individuality hidden behind the name Gilgamish was an old soul, and a younger soul was incarnated in Eabani, at the starting-point of the Babylonian civilisation. Indeed, in connection with human souls being younger or older in this sense, something very remarkable discloses itself—something that might almost be said to cause astonishment even to the occultist. If someone has reached the point to-day of giving a little credence to the truths of Spiritual Science, but otherwise still clings to the prejudices and criteria of the external world, it will seem plausible to him that modern philosophers or scholars, for example, should be accounted among the older souls. But, strangely enough, occult research finds just the opposite; and for the occultist himself it is surprising to find that in Kant, for example, there lived a young soul. Yes, the facts show that it is so ... it cannot be gainsaid. It can also be intimated here that younger souls—the majority at any rate—incarnate in the coloured races, so that it is the coloured races, especially the negro race, which mainly brings younger souls to incarnation. The characteristic quality of that kind of thinking which comes to expression in erudition, in the materialistic science of to-day, calls for younger souls. And it can be shown that in the case of many a personality where one would not in the least expect it, the preceding incarnation was in an uncivilised race. That again is what the facts tell us! It must be kept strictly in mind, for it is so. Naturally this does not in the least detract from the significance or value of the opinions we have formed about the world around us; nevertheless it must be grasped in order fully to understand the essentials here. In this sense, in Eabani we have to do with a young soul and in Gilgamish with an old soul in ancient Babylonia. The whole nature of an old soul will enable it early in life to grasp not only the essential element, the essential factor, in the existing culture, but also that which strikes into it as a new impulse, opening up a wide vista into the future.

There will be many, of course, who will protest if one tries to make it plausible to them that the Theosophists whom they are wont to look down upon are, generally speaking, older souls than people who deliver scientific lectures. Investigation shows, however, that this is so; and although spiritual research must not be misused for the purpose of forcing people to change their criteria of judgment, or of scoffing at what is after all part of the very make-up of our civilisation, nevertheless the truth must be faced fairly and squarely. Gilgamish, then, was a personality who, owing to his particular condition of soul, participated in the most progressive spiritual elements and spiritual factors of the age—in everything that threw light far into the future and at that time could be attained only if such a personality went through a kind of initiation. Through the imparting of something that can be received only through a certain initiation, Gilgamish was to be enabled to provide a kind of leaven for the Babylonian culture. He had to experience an initiation up to a certain degree.

Let us think of this Gilgamish at the point where he stood in the evolution of humanity before this initiation. He was a man of the third Post-Atlantean epoch. But in this epoch twilight had already fallen over the natural human clairvoyance, over what men were able to achieve through forces that were innate in them. These forces were no longer present to the degree that could enable any great number of men to look back into their earlier incarnations. If we were to go farther back, into the second or into the first Post-Atlantean epoch, we should find that the majority of human beings then on the earth could look back into their earlier incarnations, into the course of their soul-life before their present birth. But that faculty had been lost. In the case of Gilgamish, the Being who was to reveal himself through him, and who could do so only by leading him presently to a kind of initiation, kept a guiding hand upon him from the outset and set him at the place where he came to recognise his own position in the history of the world. As it were through super-sensible events, presented to us in the pictures of the myth I outlined to you yesterday, a friend was placed at the side of Gilgamish, a friend whose barbarity and uncivilised nature are indicated by the statement that his outer form was half animal. It is said that this friend had skins of animals on his body, which means that he was still covered with hair like the men of primeval times, that his soul was so young that it built for itself a body which showed the human being still in a savage state. Thus the more advanced Gilgamish had in Eabani a man at his side who, because of his young soul and the bodily Organisation conditioned by it, still possessed ancient clairvoyance. This friend was given to Gilgamish in order that he might find his own bearings in life. With the help of this friend he was then able to achieve certain things, such as the retrieval of that spiritual Power presented to us in the myth in the picture of Ishtar, the Goddess of the city of Erech. I told you how this Goddess had been stolen by the neighbouring City and that for this reason Gilgamish and Eabani together waged war against this city, vanquished its king and brought the Goddess back.

If we are to understand in the true historical sense such things as are presented to us in these old myths, we must investigate their occult background. Behind this rape of the City Goddess there lies something similar to the rape of Helen, who was carried off to Troy by Paris. We must realise that there are good grounds for what is stated in my little book, Blood is a very special Fluid. It is pointed out there that in the peoples of ancient times there was a kind of collective consciousness. A man did not merely feel his personal ego within his skin, but he felt himself as a member of the tribe, of the city-community. Just as the individual human soul is felt to be the centralising factor for our organism as a whole, uniting fingers, toes, hands, legs, so did man in very ancient times feel himself a member of the group-soul. Something of the kind still persisted in the early city-communities, even in ancient Greece. One common spirit, a folk-egohood, a tribal egohood, lived and weaved through the single personalities of the tribe or folk. But whatever could come to men's consciousness from this collective egohood had to be under the guidance of the Mysteries in the secret temples, where the priests directed the common spiritual affairs of a city or a tribe. And it is not a mere figure of speech, but in a certain sense an actual reality, to say that such a temple-sanctuary served as a dwelling-place for the city-ego, for the group-soul. There this group-soul had its habitation, and the priests of the temple were its servants. It was they who received the instructions of this group-soul through inspiration—through what was known as an Oracle—and bore them out into the world in order that one thing or another might come to pass. For we must think of the Oracles exactly in the sense I have indicated.

Now the direction of these temple-sanctuaries was bound up with certain secrets, and many conflicts in ancient times arose because the temple-priests of one city were carried off by the neighbouring city, so that in this way, together with the priests, the most important secrets of a city came into the hands of the neighbouring one. There you have the reality behind the picture of the abduction of Ishtar, the city Goddess, the group-soul of Erech, by the neighbouring city. The priests, the trustees of the temple secrets were made prisoners, because the neighbouring city hoped in this way to come into possession of the holy secrets and therewith of the power of the city in question. That is the real background.

In the condition of soul at first prevailing in him, Gilgamish could not himself be aware of such things; he did not see their full implications. But a younger soul could be for him as it were the clairvoyant sense which enabled him to recapture the temple treasure for his own city. Gilgamish now realised that in human life, especially in times of transition, there is such a thing as is described in the legend of the blind man and the cripple: each is helpless alone, but together they can make progress inasmuch as the blind man carries the cripple on his shoulders and the cripple lends the blind man his power of sight. In Gilgamish and Eabani, whose respective gifts differed so greatly, we see the same kind of co-operation transformed into the spiritual. In the historical facts of ancient times we find this at every turn. And it is important to understand it, for only then do we realise why it is that myths and sagas so often tell of friends who have to achieve something together—friends who are generally as unlike in their nature of soul as were Gilgamish and Eabani. But what Gilgamish also acquired through his friend Eabani was this: he was as it were “infected” by Eabani with a clairvoyant power of his own, so that to a certain extent he could look back into his own earlier incarnations. This would certainly have been beyond his normal faculties. And now let us picture vividly how Gilgamish must have been influenced by this vision of his past incarnations.

What was he able to experience from the moment when it became possible for him to look back into what his soul had lived through in earlier incarnations? At first it all seemed alien to him. He could not penetrate fully into what he himself had been in these earlier incarnations; he did not, as it were, recognise himself. So it would be with any human being if he began to look back into his previous incarnations. In most cases things would be different from what they are in the vain imaginings which are always so much in evidence when there is talk of some person or other being an incarnation of this or that individual. We may well come across a person who cites a whole series of great names in history as those of his former incarnations ... in fact numbers of people are convinced that they were never below the rank of a queen or a princess! In these matters, which should be treated with great earnestness, there must be no unlawful play of fancy, no misusage.

Now one who, like Gilgamish at that time, begins to look back on his successive incarnations, may also now and then be veritably astonished. Gilgamish himself looked back to incarnations when he was still involved in all kinds of conditions determined by the sway of the group-soul. To be sure he had, in a certain respect, as a person, worked his way out of these connections; through Eabani he had also come to know for the first time the whole import of what is symbolised in the myth through the figure of the city Goddess. But when he looked back there was much in his earlier incarnations that did not please him, that went against the grain. He found, for example, that in these incarnations his soul had had unusual friendships, human connection, of a kind which in his present life he would have regarded as shameful. Thus, in face of what the City Goddess had revealed to him indirectly, through Eabani, he began in a certain way—as the myth indicates—to upbraid, to reproach his own soul. In the myth it is said that he reproaches the Goddess about her lovers, for he is jealous of them. He is looking as it were across the horizon of his own soul and the visions are living realities before him, as real as human beings who stand around someone in the physical world, eliciting feelings of sympathy or antipathy towards them. In the reproaches leveled by Gilgamish against the Goddess we perceive that he is really speaking in terms of what is happening in his own soul. Thus, for example, when it is said that he reproaches the Goddess about her previous relationship with one who is called Ishullanu (Ischlanu) in the myth, this signifies that his own friendship with a certain person who had been his master's gardener in the preceding incarnation was not pleasing to him.¹⁵ What took place in the soul of Gilgamish and which first imparted to it that inner content, that inner realisation, which he needed in order to become the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation—all this is shown to us in the picture of the regaining of a certain clairvoyance, of the ascent into super-sensible worlds which, because he was an old soul, were in a certain sense lost to him. This is shown to us in the myth.

And then Gilgamish was to undergo a kind of initiation by being led back to that kind of vision which his own soul had possessed during Atlantean incarnations. What the myth presents as the journey over the sea, and the wanderings of Gilgamish to the West, is nothing else than the inner path towards initiation by which his soul is led upwards to spiritual heights where it can perceive its ancient Atlantean surroundings, when, still clairvoyant, it had gazed into the spiritual world. The myth tells that an this, his spiritual journeying, Gilgamish was brought to the great Atlantean Being, Xisuthros, This was a Being who belonged to certain higher Hierarchies and who during the Atlantean time lived in the sphere of humanity but was afterwards transported from the world of men to dwell in higher regions. Gilgamish was to meet this personality in order that through beholding him he might come to know the condition of souls when they are able to look into the spiritual worlds. Thus he was to be led upwards again into the spiritual spheres by being transported in his life of soul into Atlantean times. And when he is bidden not to sleep for seven nights and six days, this signifies nothing else than an exercise which was to make the soul capable of penetrating fully into the corresponding spiritual regions. When we are now told that he was not able to endure the test, Isis again signifies something of great importance, namely that Gilgamish is represented as a personality who was brought to the very brink of Initiation—who was destined, as it were, to look through the portal of Initiation into the mysteries of the spirit but owing to the conditions of the times was not able to penetrate fully into their depths. In short, this is intended to indicate that the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation had remained at the portal of Initiation, that he could not look with full clarity into the higher worlds, with the result that he gave Babylonian culture the stamp that is a sign of no more than a glimpse into the secrets of Initiation.

We shall now see that the nature of external Babylonian culture was indeed such that it confirms what has just been said. Whereas, for example, everything points to the fact that Hermes was a personality who gazed into the very depths of the holiest secrets of Initiation and could therefore become the great inaugurator of ancient Egyptian culture, it must be said that the Babylonian culture was prepared in the way I have just described: through a leading personality who had in his soul all those qualities which develop when penetration into the innermost essence of Initiation has not been fully achieved. Hence historical development in ancient Babylonia gives clear evidence of an external culture and an inner, esoteric culture running parallel to one another. Whereas in the life of ancient Egypt there was greater interplay between these two aspects, in the ancient culture of Babylonia they fell apart. And within what must be regarded as the Babylonian culture inaugurated by Gilgamish, there was enshrined the content and substance of the most sacred, most hidden Mysteries of the Chaldeans.

The Initiates of these Mysteries were indeed initiated into the innermost secrets, but this influence flowed through the external culture only as a tiny stream. This external culture proceeded from the impulse given by Gilgamish. Everything that has been said points to the fact that Gilgamish, as a personality, had not actually reached the point where he could have experienced complete Initiation. But just because at the time in which he was working he did not give effect to his own, personal impulses, did not impart his own personal forces to the world, he was very specially able to let one of the spiritual Beings we place in the rank of the Fire-Spirits, the Archangeloi, work through him. Such a Being did indeed work through Gilgamish, and it is in a Fire-Spirit that we must see the source of the ordering of Babylonian life and its impelling forces, for which Gilgamish was the instrument. So we shall rightly conceive of this Gilgamish in a picture that suggests the symbol of the ancient centaur. Such ancient symbols correspond more closely to reality than is generally supposed. A centaur—half man, half animal—was always intended to represent how in the more mighty of men of old the highest spiritual manhood and that which united the single personality with the animal organisation in a certain sense actually fell apart. Gilgamish gave the impression of a centaur to those who were capable of judging what he was, and it is the same to this day.

Remarkably enough, this picture of the centaur is cropping up again in the field of modern scientific thought. There has recently been published a book which sets out to base itself entirely on scientific facts, and yet goes to work with a certain absence of prejudice, hence it does not produce such an amateurish, senseless hotch-potch as do those who call themselves Monists. The author makes a genuine effort to understand man, and how, as an independent being of soul-and-spirit, he is related to the physical organism. And then this author, who bases himself on natural science, comes out with a remarkable picture. Quite certainly he was not thinking of the centaur when he conceived this picture, but referring to what results from natural-scientific ideas about the relation of the soul to the body, he says: This may be likened to a horseman riding upon his horse. The facts of natural science, when rightly understood, compel one to say: The soul is independent and uses the body as its instrument, as a rider uses his horse.—Yes, the centaur is here again; things will develop rapidly, and before people are aware of it, spiritual-scientific ideas will take root in our contemporaries under the compulsion of the facts of natural science itself. Not long ago I was talking to a philosopher who sets great store by materialistic ideas, and he said to me: “Of course the picture of the centaur arose because the old inhabitants of Greece saw certain tribes coming down from the North on their horses, and as it was generally misty, they thought that horse and rider were a single form. With all their superstition they might easily imagine this.”

That is a really ingenuous idea—perhaps not exactly philosophical—but certainly ingenuous! This picture of the centaur, which did not arise because the Greeks could not distinguish the rider how his horse but because the earlier peoples inevitably thought of the spiritual being of man as independent of the bodily nature—this idea of the centaur is again cropping up in our time out of the very concepts of natural science. It must therefore be said that despite all materialistic ideas we are coming to the point to-day when materialism itself, if only it will take the facts as they really are, will lead by and by to what Spiritual Science has to say from its occult sources. But if, in line with our studies, we want to focus our occult observation upon a figure such as Gilgamish—who has already become an object of interest to external research—we must realise that there we have to do with penetration by a Being of the spiritual Hierarchies. So that while we must in truth see every human being, in respect of his spirituality, in the picture of the centaur, in the case of one who works as Gilgamish worked, we must recognise, in addition, that the spiritual part of the centaur is directed by higher Powers who are sending down their forces to further the progress of humanity. And we shall find an going farther back into history that this is revealed even more clearly. We shall also see how modification takes place in the course of the ages up to our own time and how spiritual forces, when they work through human beings, assume constantly different forms the nearer we come to the immediate present.

---

• 10. Leopold von Ranke, 1795–1886. See Rudolf Steiner, Karmic-Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Vol. II, lecture XIV.
• 11. J. G. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, written between 1784 and 1791. Tr. by T. Churchill; Outline of a Philosophy of the History of Man. (London, 1803.)
• 12. G. E. Lessing. The last paragraphs of The Education of the Human Race, published in 1780, are as follows:
  
  “But ... why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world?
  “ Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human widerstanding, before the sophistries of the Schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
  “Why may not even I have already performed those steps of my perfecting which bring to man only temporal punishments and rewards ?
  “And once more, why not another time all those steps, to perform which the views of Eternal Rewards so powerfully assist us?
  “Why should I not come back as often. as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge, fresh expertness ? Do I bring away so much from one, that there is nothing to repay the trouble of coming back?
  “Is this a reason against it? Or, because I forget that I have been here already? Happy is it for me that I do forget. The recollection of my former condition would perrnit me to make only a bad use of the present. And that which even I must forget now, is that necessarily forgotten for ever?
  “Or is it a reason against the hypothesis that so much time would have been lost to me? Lost?—And how much then should I miss?—Is not a whole Eternity mine? "
  
  Tr. F. W. Robertson (1872).
  Reprinted (1927) by Anthroposophical
  Publishing Co.
• 13. August Friedrich Gfrörer, 1803—1861.
• 14. Letter of Perceval de Boulainvilliers, 21st June, 1429. See: Procés de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d' Arc, ed. Quicherat, Tome V, pages 114—21. (Paris, 1849) where the text is in Latin. The name Boulainvilliers is said to have been incorrectly rendered in several of the earlier translations.
• 15. See Thompson, op. cit., p. 33. (Gilgamish is reproaching Ishtar):
  
  Lovest thou, too, Ishullanu, the gardener he of thy Sire, Bringing delights to thee ceaseless, while daily he garnish'd thy platter...."
  
  (From the Sixth Tablet.)

We must now turn our attention to the relation between ordinary religious consciousness and the knowledge that can be gained through higher clairvoyant powers concerning the higher worlds in general, and in particular—this is specially relevant to our theme—concerning the relation of Christ Jesus to these higher worlds.

It will be clear to you all that the evolution of Christianity so far has been such that most persons have not been able to attain through their own clairvoyant knowledge to the mysteries of the Christ-Event. It must be granted that Christianity has entered into the hearts of countless human beings, and to a certain degree its essential nature has been recognised by countless souls; but these hearts and souls have not been able to look up to the higher worlds and so to receive clairvoyant vision of what really took place in human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha and everything connected with it. Hence the knowledge that can be gained through clairvoyant consciousness itself, or through a person having accepted on one or other ground the communications of the seer concerning the mysteries of Christianity, must be carefully distinguished from the religious inclination to Christ and the intellectual leanings towards Him of a person who knows nothing of clairvoyant investigation.

Now you will all agree that during the centuries since the Mystery of Golgotha there have been men of all degrees of intellectual culture who have accepted the mysteries of Christianity in a deep inner way, and from what has been said lately in various lectures you will have felt that this is quite natural, for—as has been emphasised again and again—it is only in the twentieth century that a renewal of the Christ-Event will take place, for this is when a certain general heightening of human powers of cognition begins. It brings with it the possibility that in the course of the next 3,000 years, and without special clairvoyant preparation, more and more persons will be able to attain a direct vision of Christ Jesus.

This has never happened before. Until now there have been only two—or later on today we may perhaps discover three—sources of knowledge concerning the Christian mysteries for persons who could not rise by training to clairvoyant observation. One source was the Gospels and all that comes from the communications in the Gospels, or in the traditions connected with them. The second source of knowledge arose because there have always been clairvoyant individuals who could see into the higher worlds, and through their own knowledge brought down the facts of the Christ-Event. Other persons followed these individuals, receiving from them a ‘never-ending Gospel’, which could continually come into the world through those who were clairvoyant. These two seem at first to be the only two sources in the evolution of Christian humanity up to the present time. And, now from the twentieth century onwards, a third begins. It arises because for more and more people an extension, an enhancement, of their cognitional powers, not brought about through meditation, concentration and other exercises will occur. As we have often said, more and more persons will be able to renew for themselves the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus. Hence we can say of the ensuing period that it will provide a direct means of perceiving the significance and the Being of Christ Jesus.

Now the first question that will naturally occur to you is this: What is the essential difference between the clairvoyant vision of Christ which has always been possible as a result of the esoteric development described yesterday, and the vision of Christ which will come to people, without esoteric development, in the next 3,000 years, beginning from our twentieth century?

There is certainly an important difference. And it would be false to believe that what the seer through his clairvoyant development sees today in the higher worlds concerning the Christ-Event, and what has been seen clairvoyantly concerning the Christ-Event since the Mystery of Golgotha, is exactly the same as the vision which will come to an ever greater and greater number of people. These are two quite different things. As to how far they differ, we must ask clairvoyant research how it is that from the twentieth century onwards Christ Jesus will enter more and more into the ordinary consciousness of men. The reason is as follows.

Just as on the physical plane in Palestine, at the beginning of our era, an event occurred in which the most important part was taken by Christ Himself—an event which has its significance for the whole of humanity—so in the course of the twentieth century, towards the end of the twentieth century, a significant event will again take place, not in the physical world, but in the world we usually call the world of the etheric. And this event will have as fundamental a significance for the evolution of humanity as the event of Palestine had at the beginning of our era. Just as we must say that for Christ Himself the event of Golgotha had a significance that with this very event a God died, a God overcame death—we will speak later concerning the way this is to be understood; the deed had not happened before and it is an accomplished fact which will not happen again—so an event of profound significance will take place in the etheric world. And the occurrence of this event, an event connected with the Christ Himself, will make it possible for men to learn to see the Christ, to look upon Him.

What is this event? It consists in the fact that a certain office in the Cosmos, connected with the evolution of humanity in the twentieth century, passes over in a heightened form to the Christ. Occult clairvoyant research tells us that in our epoch Christ becomes the Lord of Karma for human evolution. This event marks the beginning of something that we find intimated also in the New Testament: He will come again to separate, or to bring about the crisis for, the living and the dead.¹ Only, according to occult research, this is not to be understood as though it were a single event for all time which takes place on the physical plane. It is connected with the whole future evolution of humanity. And whereas Christianity and Christian evolution were hitherto a kind of preparation, we now have the significant fact that Christ becomes the Lord of Karma, so that in the future it will rest with Him to decide what our karmic account is, how our credit and debit in life are related.

This has been common knowledge in Western occultism for many centuries, and is denied by no occultist who knows these things. But recently it has been verified again with the utmost care, by every means available to occult research. We will now enter more exactly into these matters.

Ask all those who know something of the truth about these things, and you will find everywhere one fact confirmed, but a fact which only at this present stage in the development of our Movement could be made known. Everything which can make our minds receptive towards such a fact had first to be gathered together. You can find in occult literature information concerning these matters if you wish to search for it. However, I shall take no account of the literature; I shall only bring forward the corresponding facts.

When certain conditions are described, including those I have dealt with myself, a picture has to be given of the world a man enters on passing through the gate of death. Now there are a great many men, especially those who have gone through the development of Western civilisation—these things are not the same for all peoples—who experience a quite definite event in the moment following the separation of the etheric body after death. We know that on passing through the gate of death we separate ourselves from the physical body. The individual is at first still connected for a time with his etheric body, but afterwards lie separates his astral body and also his Ego from the etheric body. We know that he takes with him an extract of his etheric body; we know also that the main part of the etheric body goes another way; generally it becomes part of the cosmic ether, either dissolving completely—this happens only under imperfect conditions—or continuing to work on as an enduring active form. When the individual has stripped off his etheric body he passes over into the Kamaloka region for the period of purification in the soul-world. Before this, however, he undergoes a quite special experience which has not previously been mentioned, because, as I said, the time was not ripe for it. Now, however, these things will be fully accepted by all who are qualified to judge them.

Before entering Kamaloka, the individual experiences a meeting with a quite definite Being who presents him with his karmic account. And this Being, who stood there as a kind of bookkeeper for the karmic Powers, had for many men the form of Moses. Hence the mediaeval formula which originated in Rosicrucianism: Moses presents man in the hour of death—the phrase is not quite accurate, but that is immaterial here—Moses presents man in the hour of his death with the record of his sins, and at the same time points to the ‘stern law’. Thus the man can recognise how he has departed from this stern law which he ought to have followed.

In the course of our time—and this is the significant point—this office passes over to Christ Jesus, and man will ever more and more meet Christ Jesus as his Judge, his karmic Judge. That is the super-sensible event. Just as on the physical plane, at the beginning of our era, the event of Palestine took place, so in our time the office of Karmic Judge passes over to Christ Jesus in the higher world next to our own. This event works into the physical world, on the physical plane, in such a way that men will develop towards it the feeling that by all their actions they will be causing something for which they will be accountable to the judgment of Christ. This feeling, now appearing quite naturally in the course of human development, will be transformed so that it permeates the soul with a light which little by little will shine out from the individual himself, and will illuminate the form of Christ in the etheric world. And the more this feeling is developed—a feeling that will have stronger significance than the abstract conscience—the more will the etheric Form of Christ be visible in the coming centuries. We shall have to characterise this fact more exactly in the next few days, and we shall then see that a quite new event has come to pass, an event which works into the Christ-development of humanity.

With regard to the evolution of Christianity on the physical plane, let us now ask whether for the non-clairvoyant consciousness there was not also a third way, over against the two already given. Such a third way was in fact always there, for all Christian evolution. It had to be there. The objective evolution of humanity is not directed in accordance with the opinions of men, but in accordance with objective facts.

Concerning Christ Jesus there have been many opinions in the course of the centuries, or the Councils and Church assemblies and theologians would not have disputed so much among themselves; and in no period, perhaps, have so many people held various views of the Christ as in our own. Facts, however, are not determined by human opinions, but by the forces actually present in human evolution. These facts could be recognised by many more people simply through noticing what the Gospels have to say, if people had the patience and perseverance to look at things really without prejudice, and if they were not too quick and biased in considering the objective facts. Most people, however, do not want to form a picture of Christ according to the facts, but one that suits their own likings and represents their own ideal. And it must be said that in a certain respect Theosophists of all shades of opinion do this very thing today. When, for example, certain highly developed individuals who have attained an advanced stage of human evolution are spoken of in theosophical literature as Masters, or Adepts, this is a truth that cannot be disputed by anyone who knows the facts. It applies to individuals who have had many incarnations; through exercises and holy life they have pressed on in advance of mankind and have acquired powers which the rest of humanity will acquire only in the future. It is natural and right that a student of Theosophy who has acquired some knowledge concerning the Masters, the Adepts, should feel the highest respect for such lofty individuals. If we go on to contemplate so sublime a life as that of Buddha, we must agree that Buddha should be looked on as one of the highest Adepts. And we shall then be able to gain through our minds and feelings an inward relationship to such a person.

Now because the Theosophist approaches the figure of Christ Jesus on the ground of this theosophical knowledge and feeling, he will naturally feel a certain need—and a very comprehensible need—to connect with his Christ Jesus the same concept he has formed of a Master, of an Adept, perhaps of Buddha; and he may be impelled to say: ‘Jesus of Nazareth must be thought of as a great Adept!’ This preconceived opinion would turn upside down any knowledge of the real nature of Christ. And it would be no more than a preconceived opinion only prejudice, although an understandable one. How shall someone who has won the deepest, most intimate relationship to the Christ not place the bearer of the Christ-Being in the same rank as the Master, the Adept, or the Buddha? Why should he not? This must seem to us quite comprehensible. Perhaps to such a person it would seem like a depreciation of Jesus of Nazareth if we were not to do so. But by applying this concept to Jesus of Nazareth we are led away from directing our thought according to the facts, at least as these facts have found their way to us through tradition. Anyone who examines without bias the traditional records—disregarding all opinions offered by Church Councils and Fathers and so on—will not fail to recognise one fact: Jesus of Nazareth cannot be called an Adept.

Where in tradition do we find anything which allows us to apply to Jesus of Nazareth the concept of the Adept as we have it in theosophical teaching? In the first periods of Christianity one thing was emphasised: that Jesus of Nazareth was a man like any other, a weak man like any other. And those who uphold the saying, ‘Jesus was truly man’ understand most nearly who it was that came into the world. Thus if we pay proper heed to the tradition, no idea of ‘Adept’ is to be found there. And if you remember all that has been said in past lectures concerning the development of Jesus of Nazareth—the history of the Jesus-child in whom up to his twelfth year Zarathustra lived, and the history of the other Jesus-child in whom Zarathustra then lived up to his thirtieth year—you will certainly say: Here we have to do with a special man, a man for whose existence the world's history, the world's evolution, made the greatest preparations, evident from the fact that two human bodies were formed, and in one of them up to the twelfth year, and in the other from the twelfth to the thirtieth year, the Zarathustra-individuality dwelt.

Since these two Jesus-figures were such significant individualities, Jesus of Nazareth certainly stands high; but not in the same way as an Adept does, for the Adept goes forward continuously from incarnation to incarnation. And apart from this: in the thirtieth year, when the Christ-Individuality enters into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, this very Jesus of Nazareth forsakes his body, and from the moment of the Baptism by John—even if we do not now speak of the Christ—we have to do with a human being who must be designated in the truest sense of the word as a ‘mere man’, save that he is the bearer of the Christ. But we must distinguish between the bearer of the Christ and the Christ Himself. Once the body which was to be the bearer of the Christ had been forsaken by the Zarathustra-individuality, there dwelt in it no human individuality who had attained any specially high development. The stage of development shown by Jesus of Nazareth sprang from the fact that the Zarathustra-individuality dwelt in him. As we know, however, this human nature was forsaken by the Zarathustra-individuality. Thus it was that this human nature, directly the Christ-Individuality had taken possession of it, brought against Him all that otherwise comes forth from human nature—the Tempter. That is why the Christ could go through the extremities of despair and sorrow, as shown to us in the happenings on the Mount of Olives.

Anyone who leaves out of account these essential points cannot come to a real knowledge of the Being of the Christ. The Christ-bearer was truly man—not an Adept. Recognition of this fact will open for us a first glimpse into the whole nature of the events of Golgotha, the events of Palestine. If we were to look upon Christ Jesus simply as a high Adept, we should have to place Him in a line with other Adept-natures. Some people may perhaps tell us that we do not do this because from the very outset, owing to some preconceived idea, we want to place Christ Jesus beyond all other Adepts, as a still higher Adept. Those who might say this are not aware of what we have to impart as the results of occult research in our time.

The question is not in the very least whether the prestige of other Adepts would be impaired. Within the world-conception to which we must adhere according to the occult results of the present time, we know just as well as others that there existed as a contemporary of Christ Jesus another significant individuality whom we regard as a true Adept. And unless we go into exact details, it is even difficult for us to distinguish inwardly this human being from Christ Jesus, for he really appears quite like Him. When, for instance, we hear that this contemporary of Christ Jesus was announced before his birth by a heavenly vision, it reminds us of the annunciation of the birth of Jesus, as told in the Gospels. When we hear that he was not designated merely as of human birth, but as a son of the Gods, this reminds us again of the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. When we hear that the birth of this individuality took his mother by surprise, so that she was overwhelmed, we are reminded of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and of the events in Bethlehem, as told in the Gospels. When we hear that the individuality grew up and surprised all around him by his wise answers to the questions from the priests, it reminds us of the scene of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple. When we are told that this individuality came to Rome and met there the funeral procession of a young girl, that the procession was brought to a halt and that he awakened the dead, we are reminded of an awakening from the dead in the Gospel of Luke. And if we wish to speak of miracles, numberless miracles are recorded in connection with this individuality, who was a contemporary of Christ Jesus. Indeed, the similarity goes so far that after the death of this individuality he is said to have appeared to men, as Christ Jesus appeared after His death to the disciples. And when from the Christian side all possible reasons are brought forward either to depreciate this being or to deny altogether his historical existence, this is no less ingenious than what is said against the historical existence of Christ Jesus Himself. The individuality in question is Apollonius of Tyana, and of him we speak as a really high Adept.

If we now ask about the essential difference between the Christ Jesus event and the Apollonius event, we must be clear what the important point in the Apollonius event is.

Apollonius of Tyana is an individuality who went through many incarnations; he won for himself high powers and reached a certain climax in his incarnation at the beginning of our era. Hence the individual we are considering is he who lived in the body of Apollonius of Tyana and had therein his earthly field of action. It is with him that we are concerned. Now we know that a human individuality takes part in the building up of his earthly body. Hence we must say: the body of this individuality was built up by him to a certain form for his own particular use. This we cannot say of Christ Jesus. In the thirtieth year of Jesus of Nazareth the Christ came into the physical body, etheric body, and astral body of Jesus; hence He had not himself built up this body from childhood. The relationship between the Christ-Individuality and this body is quite different from that between the Apollonius-individuality and his body. When in the spirit we turn our gaze to Apollonius of Tyana, we say: ‘It is the concern of this individuality, and his concern plays itself out as the life of Apollonius of Tyana.’ If we want to represent in a diagram a life-course of this kind, we can do it like this:

Let the continuous individuality be shown by the horizontal line; then we have in (a) a first incarnation, in (b) a life between death and a new birth, in (c) a second incarnation followed again by (d) a life between death and a new birth, then a third incarnation, (e) and so on. That which passes through all these incarnations—the human individuality—is like a thread of human life, independent of the sheaths of the astral body, etheric body and physical body, and also, between death and a new birth, independent of those parts of the etheric body and astral body which remain behind. Thus the life-thread is always separated from the external Cosmos.

If we want to represent the nature of the Christ-life, we must draw it otherwise. When we consider the preceding incarnations of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ-life certainly develops in a certain way. But when we draw the life-thread, we have to show that in the thirtieth year of the life of Jesus of Nazareth the individuality forsakes this body, so that from now onwards we have only the sheaths of physical body, etheric body and astral body.

The forces which the individuality develops, however, are not in the external sheaths. They lie in the life-thread of the Ego, which goes from incarnation to incarnation. Thus the forces which belonged to the Zarathustra-individuality, and were present in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, preparing that body, pass out with the Zarathustra-individuality. Hence the sheaths which remain are a normal human organism, not in any sense the organism of an Adept, but the organism of a simple man, a weak man. And now the objective event occurs: whereas in other cases the life-thread simply goes farther, as in (a) and (b), it now turns along a side path (c); for through the Baptism by John in Jordan the Christ-Being entered into the threefold organism. In this organism the Christ-Being lived from the Baptism until the thirty-third year, until the Event of Golgotha, as we have often described.

Whose concern, then, is the life of Christ Jesus from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year? It is not the concern of the individuality who went from incarnation to incarnation, but of that Individuality who from out of the Cosmos entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth; the concern of an Individuality, a Being who was never before connected with the earth, who from out of the Universe connected Himself with a human body. In this sense the event which took place between the thirtieth and thirty-third years of the life of Christ Jesus, between the John-Baptism and the Mystery of Golgotha, are those of the Divine Being, Christ, not of a man. Hence this event was not a concern of the earth but a concern of the super-sensible worlds, for it had nothing to do with a man. As a sign of this—that it had to do with no man—the human being who had dwelt in this body up to the thirtieth year forsook it.

These happenings have originally something to do with events that took place before such a life-thread as our human one had passed into a physical human organization. We must go back to the ancient Lemurian time, into the age wherein human individualities, coming from Divine heights, incarnated for the first time in earthly bodies; back to the event which is indicated for us in the Old Testament as the Temptation through the Serpent. This event is of a very remarkable kind. From its outcome all men suffer as long as they are subject to incarnation. For if this event had not happened, the whole evolution of mankind on the earth would have been different, and men would have passed in a much more perfect condition from incarnation to incarnation. Through this event, however, they become more closely entangled in matter, allegorically designated as the ‘Fall of Man’. But it was the Fall that first called man to his present individuality; so that, as he goes as an individuality from incarnation to incarnation, he is not responsible for the Fall. We know that the Luciferic spirits were responsible for the Fall. Hence we must say that before man became man in the earthly sense, there occurred the divine, super-sensible event by which a deeper entanglement in matter was laid upon him. Through this event man has indeed attained to the power of love and to freedom, but through it something was laid upon him that he could not lay upon himself by his own power. This becoming entangled in matter was not a human act, but a deed of the Gods, which happened before men could cooperate in their own fate. It is something which the Higher Powers of progressive evolution arranged with the Luciferic powers. We shall have to go into all these events and characterise them more exactly. Today we will place only the chief point before our minds.

What happened at that time needed a counterpoise. The pre-human event—the Fall of Man—needed a counterpoise, but this again was a concern not of human beings, but of the Gods among themselves. And we shall see that this action had to take its course as deeply in matter as the first action had taken place above it. The God had to descend as deeply into matter as He had allowed man to sink into matter.

Let this fact work upon you with its full weight; then you will understand that this incarnation of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth was something that concerned Christ Himself. And what part was man called upon to take in it? First of all, as spectator, to see how the God compensates for the Fall, how He provides the compensating act. It would not have been possible to do this within the personality of an Adept, for an Adept is one who by his own efforts has worked his way out of the Fall. It was possible only in a personality who was truly man—who, as man, did not surpass other men. This personality had surpassed them before he was thirty years of age—but no longer. Through that which then took place, a Divine event was accomplished in the evolution of mankind, just as had been done at the beginning of human evolution in the Lemurian time. And men were partakers in a transaction which had taken place among Gods; men could look upon it, because the Gods had to make use of the world of the physical plane in order to let their transaction play itself out to the end. Hence it is much better to say: ‘Christ offered to the Gods the atonement which He could offer only in a physical human body’, than to use any other form of words. Man was a spectator of a Divine occasion.

Through this atonement something had happened for human nature. Men simply experienced it in the course of their development. Thereby the third way was opened, besides the two already indicated.

Men who have gone deeply into the nature of Christianity have often pointed out these three ways. From among the large number of those who could be named I will mention only two who have given eminent testimony to the fact that Christ—who from the twentieth century onwards will be seen through the more highly developed faculties—can be recognised, felt, experienced, through feelings which were not possible in the same form before the Event of Golgotha.

There is, for example, a man who in his whole cast of mind can be looked upon as a sharp opponent of what we have characterised as Jesuitism: Blaise Pascal, a great figure in spiritual history, standing forth as one who has set aside all that had arisen to the detriment of the old Churches, but has also absorbed nothing of modern rationalism. As always with great minds, he really remained alone with his thoughts. But what is the fundamental feature of his thinking at the beginning of the modern period? When we look into the matter we see from the writings he left behind, particularly from his inspiring Pensées—a book accessible to anyone—how he perceived and felt what man must have become if the Christ-Event had not taken place in the world.

In the secrecy of his soul, Pascal set himself the question: What would have become of man if no Christ had entered into human evolution? And he replied: We can feel that in his soul man encounters two dangers. One danger is that he should recognise God as identical with his own being: knowledge of God in knowledge of man. Whither does this lead? When it arises so that man recognises himself as God, it leads to pride, haughtiness, arrogance; and man destroys his best powers because he hardens them in haughtiness and pride. This is a knowledge of God that would always have been possible, even if no Christ had come, even if the Christ-Event had not worked as an impulse in the hearts of all men. Human beings would always have been able to recognize God, but they would have become proud through this consciousness in their own breasts. Or there might be human beings who hide themselves from the knowledge of God, who want to know nothing about God. Their gaze falls on something else; it falls on human powerlessness, on human misery, and then of necessity there follows human despair. That would have been the other danger, the danger of those who had put away from them the knowledge of God.

Only these two ways, said Pascal, are possible: pride and arrogance, or despair. Then the Christ-Event entered into human evolution, and worked so that every man received a power which not only enabled him to experience God, but the very God who had become like unto men, who had lived with men. That is the sole remedy for pride: when we turn our gaze upon the God who bowed Himself to the Cross; when the soul looks to Christ bowing Himself to death on the Cross. And that, too, is the only healing for despair. For this is not a humility that makes a man weak, but a humility that gives healing strength which transcends despair. As the mediator between pride and despair, there dawns in the human soul the Helper, the Saviour, as Pascal understood Him. This can be felt by every man, even without clairvoyance. This is the preparation for the Christ who from the twentieth century onwards will be visible for all men; who as the Healer for pride and despair will arise in every human breast, but earlier could not be felt in the same way.

The second witness I would summon from the long line of men who have this feeling, a feeling that every Christian can make his own, is one already mentioned in many other connections, Vladimir Soloviev. Soloviev also points to two powers in human nature, between which the personal Christ must stand as a mediator. There is a duality, he says, for which the human soul longs: immortality, and wisdom or moral perfection; but neither belongs to human nature from the start. Human nature shares the characteristic of all natures, and nature leads not to immortality, but to death. In beautiful meditations this great thinker of modern times works out how external science shows that death extends over everything. If we look at external nature, our knowledge replies, ‘Death is!’ But within us lives the longing for immortality. Why? Because of our longing for perfection. We have only to glance into the human soul to see that a longing for perfection lives in us. Just as truly, says Soloviev, as the red rose is endowed with red colour, so truly is the human soul endowed with the longing for perfection. But to strive after perfection without longing for immortality, he continues, is to give the lie to existence. It would be meaningless if the soul were to end with death, as all natural being ends. Yet all natural existence tells us, ‘Death is!’ Hence the human soul is under the necessity of going beyond natural existence and seeking the answer elsewhere.

Proceeding from this thought, Soloviev says: Look at the natural scientists, what answer do they give when they wish to teach the connection of the human soul with nature? A mechanical natural order, they say, prevails and man is part of it. And what do the philosophers answer? That the spiritual, meaning an empty abstract thought-world which pervades all the facts of nature, is to be recognised philosophically. Neither of these statements is an answer for a man who is conscious of himself, and asks from out of his consciousness, ‘What is perfection?’ If he is conscious that he has a longing for perfection, a longing for the life of truth, if he asks what Power can satisfy this longing, there opens for him an outlook into a realm, the realm of Grace over and above nature, which at first stands before the soul as a riddle; and unless the answer to it can be found, the soul is constrained to regard itself as a falsehood. No philosophy, no natural science, can connect the realm of Grace with existence, for natural forces work mechanically, and thought-powers have only thought-reality. But what is it that is able, with full reality, to unite the soul with nature? He Who is the personal Christ working in the world. And only the living Christ, not one that is merely thought of, can give the answer. Anything that works merely in the soul leaves the soul alone, for the soul cannot of itself give birth to the kingdom of Grace. That which transcends nature, which like nature itself stands there as a real fact, the personal historic Christ—He it is who gives not an intellectual answer but a real answer.

And now Soloviev comes to the most complete, the most fully spiritual answer that can be given at the end of the period now closing, before the doors open to that which has so often been intimated to you: the vision of Christ which will have its beginning in the twentieth century. In the light of these facts, a name can be given to the consciousness which Pascal and Soloviev have so memorably described: we can call it Faith. So, too, it has been named by others.

With the concept of Faith we can come from two directions into a strange conflict regarding the human soul. Go through the evolution of the concept of Faith and see what the critics have said about it. Today men are so far advanced that they say Faith must be guided by knowledge, and a Faith not supported by knowledge must be put aside. Faith must be dethroned, as it were, and replaced by knowledge. In the Middle Ages the things of the Higher Worlds were apprehended by Faith, and Faith was held to be justified on its own account.

The fundamental principle of Protestantism, also, is that Faith, alongside knowledge, is to be looked upon as justified. Faith is something which goes forth from the human soul, and alongside of it is the knowledge which ought to be common to all. It is interesting to see how Kant, whom many consider a great philosopher, did not get beyond this concept of Faith. His idea is that what a man should attain concerning such matters as God, immortality and so forth, ought to shine in from quite other regions, but only through a moral faith, not through knowledge.

The highest development of the concept of Faith comes with Soloviev, who stands before the closed door as the most significant thinker of his time, pointing already to the modern world. For Soloviev knows a Faith quite different from all previous concepts of it. Whither has the prevailing concept of Faith led humanity? It has brought humanity to the atheistic, materialistic demand for mere knowledge of the external world, in line with Lutheran and Kantian ideas, or in the sense of the Monistic philosophy of the nineteenth century; to the demand for the knowledge which boasts of knowledge, and considers Faith as something that the human soul had framed for itself out of its necessary weakness up to a certain time in the past. The concept of Faith has finally come to this, because Faith was regarded as merely subjective. In the preceding centuries Faith had been demanded as a necessity. In the nineteenth century Faith is attacked just because it finds itself in opposition to the universally valid knowledge which should stem from the human soul.

And then comes a philosopher who recognises and prizes the concept Faith in order to attain a relationship to Christ that had not previously been possible. He sees this Faith, in so far as it relates to Christ, as an act of necessity, of inner duty.

For with Soloviev the question is not, ‘to believe or not to believe’; Faith is for him a necessity in itself. His view is that we have a duty to believe in Christ, for otherwise we paralyse ourselves and give the lie to our existence. As the crystal form emerges in a mineral substance, so does Faith arise in the human soul as something natural to itself. Hence the soul must say: ‘If I recognise the truth, and not a lie about myself, then in my own soul I must realise Faith. Faith is a duty laid upon me, but I cannot do otherwise than come to it through my own free act.’ And therein Soloviev sees the distinctive mark of the Christ-Deed, that Faith is both a necessity and at the same time a morally free act. It is as though it were said to the soul: You can do nothing else. If you do not wish to extinguish the self within you, you must acquire Faith for yourself; but it must be by your own free act! And, like Pascal, Soloviev brings that which the soul experiences, in order not to feel itself a lie, into connection with the historic Christ Jesus as He entered into human evolution through the events in Palestine. Because of this, Soloviev says: If Christ had not entered into human evolution, so that He has to be thought of as the historic Christ; if He had not brought it about that the soul perceives the inwardly free act as much as the lawful necessity of Faith, the human soul in our post-Christian times would feel itself bound to extinguish itself and to say, not ‘I am’, but ‘I am not’. That, according to this philosopher, would have been the course of evolution in post-Christian times: an inner consciousness would have permeated the human soul with the ‘I am not’.¹ Directly the soul pulls itself together to the point of attributing real existence to itself, it cannot do otherwise than turn back to the historic Christ Jesus.

Here we have, for exoteric thought also, a step forward along the path of Faith in establishing the third way. Through the message of the Gospels, a person not able to look into the spiritual world can come to recognition of Christ. Through that which the consciousness of the seer can impart to him, he can likewise come to a recognition of the Christ. But there was also a third way, the way of self-knowledge, and as the witnesses cited, together with thousands and thousands of other human beings, can testify from their own experience, it leads to a recognition that self-knowledge in post-Christian time is impossible without placing Christ Jesus by the side of man and a corresponding recognition that the soul must either deny itself, or, if it wills to affirm itself, it must at the same time affirm Christ Jesus.

Why this was not so in pre-Christian times will be shown in the next few days.

• 1. Acts 10:42 "to testify that He is the one ordained by God to be judge of the living and dead." and II Timothy 4:1 "Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead."
• 1. Cf. Carlyle's famous account in Sartor Resartus, Book II, Chapter VII, of his encounter with a repudiation of the ‘Everlasting No’. (Translator's note.)