The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Opening Lecture

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! It is my pleasure to extend a most heartfelt welcome to all of you who have gathered here for the spiritual work that is to be accomplished here at the Goetheanum over the next eight days. You can be assured that this greeting is truly heartfelt, you will believe me when I assure you of my deepest, most sincere conviction that what is to be accomplished here in this Goetheanum is not to spring solely from the subjective whim of a single person or a group of people, but rather is to be the fulfillment of demands that the Spirit of the Age itself places upon the humanity of the present—demands that are clear to everyone who is able to hear them. And so I not only welcome all of you here, but together with all of you who have come together here for sincere work, I would like to welcome precisely this spirit of our time, this spirit of the present, which speaks so clearly of what currently exists as forces of decline in the most diverse areas of life and human work—and what must be replaced by new forces arising from the mind, from the heart, from the souls of human beings—by new forces that can only be found if certain spiritual sources within the human inner being are tapped precisely in the present: This spirit of the times—that is what we wish to welcome through everything that can be accomplished here in this Goetheanum, which itself has its origin in these very demands. But in the present, there are many things that stand in the way of fulfilling this demand. There is an immense amount standing in the way that stems from a certain kind of inner human complacency; there is much standing in the way that stems from a very particular kind of human fear. And finally, there are many things that stand in the way, rooted in old habits of thought that are difficult to overcome. And hardly anyone can offer a completely sincere greeting to the spirit of the modern age without first becoming clear about all the obstacles that lie in this complacency of the soul, in this spiritual fear, and in these traditional habits of thought. People have become so accustomed to the great, significant, and genuine fruits of human development that the past centuries have brought that they now find it quite uncomfortable to seek a transition to anything new.

[ 2 ] At the end of the Middle Ages, humanity made the transition from a belief in external authorities in spiritual matters to a certain inner freedom. But in these last three to four centuries, it has become dependent on something else—on all manner of authorities that it believes it carries within its own heart, but which, when it comes down to it, are once again merely [external] authorities. It is the vague, almost intangible authority of what we have become accustomed to calling “scientificity,” and there are other external authorities found in the social institutions to which modern people are willing to submit, and from which they can only break free if they do so of their own volition, out of complete human freedom, if they actively transcend them—but from which it is so difficult for them to break free because, after all, they would prefer to continue comfortably in the way dictated by the precepts of “scientificity” or by external social institutions; in a certain sense, they immerse themselves in what conventional education, common scientific belief, and general culture have produced. He seeks, as they say, his place in the social world and fails to find the very essence of initiative in spiritual life, the complete freedom of the inner self. For the latter is uncomfortable: one cannot think within well-worn paths; one must step outside of them. This can only be achieved through inner courage, through inner initiative, and from a complete sense of freedom. It is comfortable to move along well-trodden paths that have been laid out over the centuries. It is uncomfortable to seek, out of inner courage, inner freedom, and inner initiative, that which, descending from spiritual heights, constitutes the very demands of the spiritual life of our present age.

[ 3 ] And the second thing, ladies and gentlemen, is—I would almost say—a mysterious fear that pervades humanity today. Many other forms of anxiety are not to be found in the present; but it is as if the sum of all the anxieties that could accumulate in the human mind were to coalesce into a single, shared inner fear—the fear of the new, the fear of the as-yet-unknown emerging forces in all areas of spiritual and external life that we need. But this fear does not appear in its true form. People today would be ashamed if this fear were to appear in its true form and they were forced to reveal it. This fear appears in disguise. It appears in a mask that does not seem all that ugly—in fact, in a very seductive mask. It manifests in such a way that those who are actually merely afraid of the new and unknown in contrast to the old seek all manner of logical and intellectual rationales through which they can justify their fear. We experience it every day: the fear of the new and unknown actually lies within people’s souls. They come and say: “What is being presented to us here contradicts—as can be proven—the established scientific findings.” Often such supposed proof appears as a tightly woven argument, so that one can scarcely escape its web of reasoning. But these webs of reasoning are nothing other than the pleasing mask in which the fear of the new and unknown cloaks itself. And because, deep down, it feels so good to be able to say to oneself: “One can prove something logically; all the individual arguments point against the new”—one simultaneously masks the fact that one is afraid of the new, a fear of which one would be ashamed if it were revealed in its true form. Much of what appears today with seemingly scientific justification, with seemingly rigorous logic, is nothing other than the mask of an inner fear of the new and the unknown. Anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is understood here, seeks nothing more than to bring these inner dangers to the soul—which threaten the further progress of our present age—before the eye of the soul with complete composure.

[ 4 ] And the third is the persistence of those habits of thought that have been cultivated over the last three, four, or five centuries—admittedly not from worthless sources; they have emerged from what has truly developed in a spirit of rigorous scientific inquiry since the time of Galileo, reaching a certain culmination in the 19th century. Rigorous internal disciplines, as well as disciplines of external observation and experimentation, have come upon humanity; they have permeated even the lowest levels of schooling with the spirit of their activity and work. But along with this have also arisen those habits of thought which—because they are, in essence, so easily acquired, even if the methods are rigorous—take root most deeply in the human soul; those habits of thought that we find everywhere today whenever we hear any discussion of science and faith, of art, of human progress, or of social life. And these habits of thought are, of course, most intimately connected with external life. Human beings have learned, in a magnificent way, to cope technically with external life precisely through these habits of thought. Therefore, these habits of thought have also become most deeply intertwined with egoism, with everything that has carried the human being into modern social life. And so these habits of thought—which are, after all, merely the product of the last four to five centuries—appear to people today as something that leads to thinking in a completely absolute sense. And while people, once they have acquired certain habits, cling to them so strongly that—out of an unconscious belief—they think that if they were to abandon these habits, they would lose a part of their own being, the situation is far worse with habits of thought, particularly those that have formed within humanity in the most recent epoch. People regard what is merely a habit of thought as the very essence of thinking itself. And since they rightly believe that thinking is connected to the deepest essence of the human being, they cling to these habits of thought because they believe them to be the only correct way of thinking and fear that they will lose their self—their human essence—along with these habits. They believe they must lose all foundation for a worldview, a conception of life, if they abandon these habits of thought. And often they do not even have the slightest inkling of how much they have become victims of these habits of thought from the last four to five centuries—habits that must be overcome just as the habits of thought from earlier epochs have been overcome.

[ 5 ] Only when one fully grasps the magnitude of the task before one’s soul—a task that arises from overcoming inner complacency, spiritual fear, and habitual patterns of thought—will one truly find the path to that place where, in a language that can be heard, the Spirit of the Present seeks to speak of the demands that are necessary, so that the forces of decline do not prevail over the forces of ascent. They have indeed led humanity down into chaos. And this spirit of the times speaks quite clearly of the need for people to seek an understanding, a vision of the supersensible, of the imperishable, of the eternal—as opposed to the sensible, the perishable, and the temporal. Precisely that which has become so deeply ingrained in the habits of the soul and in the habits of thought of modern times—precisely that, my esteemed audience—is always connected with a human inclination toward the transitory, the temporal, and the sensory.

[ 6 ] This does not imply any criticism of the temporal and transitory. Nor does it imply any cheap criticism of the temporal and transitory. On the contrary, precisely when one stands on the ground of anthroposophical spiritual science, it is fully acknowledged that humanity once had to go through the process of having a worldview that thoroughly addresses the transitory and the temporal. It is recognized, for example, that the greatness of the nineteenth century rests on the fact that human beings learned to see through—with the strictest insights—the nature of the transitory, the nature of the temporal. But humanity would be in a dire state if the eternal, the imperishable, were not once again beheld above the transitory and the temporal. But this eternal, this imperishable—it cannot be perceived with those powers of the soul that were very, very useful for research into the transitory and the temporal. These powers of the soul—the intellectualistic powers, the powers of abstract reason and experimental research—have been developed to their peak over the last few centuries. Indeed, over the past few centuries, these powers have also cultivated within human beings everything that could lead to a sense of freedom and the awakening of inner human values of personality. But what one develops within one’s own human soul when one is educated solely in outward transience and temporal existence does not penetrate inwardly to the full human being; and so, in a certain sense, in his most recent ascent, man has lost precisely that which is connected with his very essence as a human being.

[ 7 ] One might easily object: So, from the tried-and-true, outwardly practical nature of the world, anthroposophical spiritual science—Goetheanism—leads us away into dizzying, bottomless castles in the air, into that which seeks to rise to fantastical heights, far removed from the strict methodology of the past centuries. One might object that here—in this Goetheanum—people want to forget and overlook everything that the age of Galileo brought, and instead dream themselves back to the eternal, in a Platonic sense, so to speak. One wants to wax lyrical in Plato’s world of ideas about the eternal and the imperishable, because one lacks the patience to engage with the achievements that the past few centuries have brought forth in relation to the real external world. But if one were only to get to know it truly and without prejudice—this Anthroposophy, as it seeks to be cultivated here in this Goetheanum—one would find that here one does not seek to take refuge by frivolously skipping over Galileanism into a dreamt-of Platonic world, but rather that here one seeks everything that human beings can attain through genuine insight into this external, transitory sensory world—what they can gain through practical life experience—and that we seek to fully embrace Galilean science in order to carry its rigor and discipline up to those heights to which Plato was able to ascend without this modern culture. Plato lived in his world of ideas, which was indeed a living one for him; he was able to do so drawing on the forces of his own era, even without Galileanism. We would plunge into an abyss of fanaticism and fantasy if, without the preliminary stages of what the eras of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Giordano Bruno have brought us, we were to venture dreamily into the Platonic world of the heights. One need only understand what the anthroposophy referred to here aims to achieve; then one will not accuse it of wanting to turn away from life by fantasizing and raving about a Platonic world of ideas. No, it seeks precisely to draw forces full of reality from the spirit itself in order to penetrate practical, real life. And just as the anthroposophy referred to here does not wish to rave and dream in relation to the external world, neither does it wish to lead people so deeply into their inner lives that they, as mystics, become recluses from life—that they, like hermits, would wish to slip away from all that is their task in real, external, practical life.

[ 8 ] Anthroposophy knows very well that methods such as those practiced in India—for example, the yoga method—have had their day; it knows full well that anyone who, with a complete misunderstanding of the spirit of the modern age, wishes to retreat into old mystical systems is striving for something that should be avoided here. He is striving for a certain kind of mysticism about which one can say nothing other than the following:

[ 9 ] Ladies and gentlemen, there is a kind of superficiality toward the external world that refuses to engage with the real facts, that refuses to trace the finer nuances of those facts, and that—I would say—wants to enjoy life arbitrarily, in broad strokes, as it appears on the surface. There is such superficiality outwardly; but there is also a superficiality of the heart. This is the kind of superficiality that, without a profound experience of the inner human mysteries, merely speaks over and over again of the need to withdraw from engaging with the external world and to cultivate what is most inner. Such a mystical striving, as it is making its way into many circles today, does not correspond to the demands of the spirit of the age; rather, it adds to outward superficiality the superficiality of the heart. And in many circles that today consider themselves particularly mystically exalted, nothing else exists but that mysticism which is inner spiritual superficiality. With this superficiality of the soul, one does not penetrate the eternal mysteries of life. One penetrates them only if one has the patience to truly awaken the powers slumbering in the soul—or at least to engage intellectually with what these slumbering powers can discover step by step. Only in overcoming the superficiality of the heart, in overcoming this superficial mysticism, lies the possibility of finding those powers of the soul that, in the proper way indicated earlier, lead upward from the temporal, from the transitory, into the eternal, into the imperishable. But what is grasped in this way is then truly capable of having a fertilizing effect on the most diverse areas of contemporary life. And this fertilization—we need it. We have a magnificent science that has established itself out of intellectualism and out of external observation of the outward course of things. We need a shift from this sensory science to a spiritual science, accomplished in the same way as the pursuit of sensory science itself. Just as if it were always required to account for itself before the strict methods and disciplines of external sensory science, so too would the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here like to enrich contemporary scientific life as a whole.

[ 10 ] Other branches of life sometimes seem downright incapable of being enriched by conventional science in its current form. The artist shuns the intellectualism and abstract concepts that modern times have brought forth; the artist believes, in fact, that the entire elemental power and force of his artistic experience would be taken from him if this science were to pour its mildew into his heart, if he were to attempt, with the help of today’s conventional science, to delve into what his artistic experience is. And so many people come and say: Yes, spiritual science also aims to enrich artistic life, but we understand how destructive scientific life is to artistic life. — People speak this way only as long as they do not know how intimately related to artistic experience is what the soul of the true spiritual scientist must go through in order to enter the realms where spirit and soul truly live: it is on this path that one encounters what artistic experience is. On this path, one need not think; one must create; one must connect with that which lives and breathes in the essence of things—that which constitutes the mystery of things. And the soul’s powers are released from within by the very same vividness, by the immediately effective presence, as they live in artistic experience. And once one comes to know the extraordinary vitality, once one comes to know the creative and formative aspect of spiritual science, then one will come to realize that this spiritual science does not offer abstract concepts, but rather immediate inner impulses of life that rise back up to those spiritual realms from which the artist must draw, if he does not wish to imitate mere external nature in a superfluous manner and thereby fall prey to a superfluous naturalism. What the scholar of the spiritual sciences must go through is intimately related to what the artist must go through. And just as the artist’s imagination shapes his art, so too does the scholar of the spiritual sciences shape his understanding through supersensible intuition. These are two different paths through which one can come to a deep understanding—as some did in earlier times, such as those who, out of a profound sense of the world’s mysteries, set before their souls something akin to what lives on in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna or in Leonardo’s Last Supper. Once again, we must enter regions of spiritual life—but in the sense of the newer, modern era—so that we may once more have something in the artistic realm that is not merely an imitation of nature. For no one succeeds in imitating nature. Whatever one seeks to imitate in nature, nature can always do better. Only when one finds the path to the spirit does one find the path to art.

[ 11 ] And if we look at another area in which modern life has led many individuals to a genuine inner human tragedy, we see how, in the religious sphere, that depth has been lost which is necessary for a true attainment of the religious. Anthroposophy, as understood here, is not intended to be a new foundation for religion! To say such a thing is to slander it. For we do not need a new religion; what we need is a deepening of the religious impulses in the human heart and soul—and this can be achieved when human beings rediscover the paths to the spiritual essence of the world. Just as science and art can be enriched by the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, so too can religious life be deepened through it. And I believe I need not even mention—for all those who look just a little beyond the immediate everyday—how, in the social life of the civilized world, we have fallen into a chaos that truly threatens to grow greater with each passing year, a chaos that is already dreadful enough today. We have certainly not lacked all manner of speculations, based on old ways of thinking, about how this or that arrangement should be made, or what should be done from state to state and from people to people. Much has been said about such matters, often and at length, but nowhere is there any prospect that the social chaos might be resolved in a fundamental way and move toward a better future.

[ 12 ] Does this not point to how essential it is that individual human beings find their way into social life—those individual human beings who find the paths to the very depths of the human soul, from which understanding can be gained for what is necessary between one person and another, between one people and another, and between one race and another! Only when social life is absorbed into every single individual with spiritual clarity will the age of individualism also be able to become a social age. But it is not by, for example, crafting fine-sounding phrases about a deepening of the human inner life, or about all manner of social impulses that people are supposed to cultivate, that one arrives at truly establishing these social impulses and social feelings within human individuality. One arrives at this only when people learn just as they have learned over the past three to four centuries, to belong to the sensory world through their sensory organism; when they learn to belong to a soul world through their soul organism; when they learn to belong to a spiritual world through their spiritual organism; and when they are able to translate ideas about humanity’s great destiny into their individual everyday lives.

[ 13 ] Humanity has become so proud of the way of life it has developed in recent times. What has this way of life revealed itself to be? As something that, in certain aspects of daily life, has increasingly withdrawn into ever-smaller circles—and which has ultimately led to people being unable to keep up, in their thoughts, with the overwhelming course of world events as they descend into chaos. What has developed is not a true way of life, but rather routine in individual areas—mere daily routine. What the human body would be without soul and spirit is this routine of life without the enrichment provided by ideas, which can come only from the recognition and understanding of the spiritual realms. The most mundane, the smallest things in life become routine rather than practice if they cannot be properly directed toward that which can pulse within a person out of a sense of connection with the all-encompassing spiritual world. We will not arrive at a form of practice capable of sustaining our social life unless we transcend all routine and introduce the spirit into everyday life. For only a life of the everyday that is truly imbued with spirit and soul is, in reality, practical.

[ 14 ] Therefore, what is to be spiritually developed here in this Goetheanum is not meant to become something detached from the world, something fanciful, or something that leads people away from the practical realities of life like a hermit; on the contrary, it is meant to place them fully within it. True, genuine practical life—that is what we need. Every day today shows us this, as we are told how, with each passing day, humanity is being dragged further into decline. That is why, during these eight days, we shall speak here of that which leads back to ascent—what the spirit of the times demands of people today, and what it demands in the sense that only through insight into the eternal, the supersensible, and the imperishable can we gain the strength needed to transform the forces of decline into forces of ascent. One need only recognize in the true sense how the inner obstacles of spiritual complacency, intellectual fear, and habitual ways of thinking lie before us, and one will sense that what we need—inner initiative, activity of the spiritual life, full courage for something new, fearlessness toward the new, the unknown—that this can be attained when we are so seized by the Spirit that the Spirit itself is what lives in all our impulses. For just as the world is created by the Spirit, so too will human action, human endeavor, and human knowledge be true if they are permeated by the Spirit. May everything that is to be developed through experimentation—as on previous such occasions, and also during these eight days here at the Goetheanum—bear witness to such spirit-imbued practice and such spirit-imbued knowledge. And inspired by this desire that we may work together here in accordance with these great demands of the spirit of our time, I wanted to extend to you today—out of the spirit that is to reign here in this Goetheanum dedicated to anthroposophy—my warmest greetings at the beginning of these working days, and I wanted to welcome the spirit itself, which is to reign here during these eight days and may reign ever more fully.