The Rudolf Steiner Archive

81. The Ideals of Humanity and Its Initiates

[ 1 ] Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin gave a lengthy theosophical lecture on Tuesday evening in the auditorium titled “The Ideals of Humanity and Its Initiates.” The speaker explained that there are no more fruitful feelings than those of devotion; they are the first step toward the ideal. The first ideals were prophetic (the idea of the Messiah); these were followed in the Middle Ages by the ideals of Christ and Mary, and then by the ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood of the French Revolution. Just as the man born blind, upon regaining his sight, beholds a completely new worldview, so too in the spiritual realm can an awakening of the “sixth sense”—as Fichte aptly termed it—take place, and indeed in everyone. Redner referred to the great idealists Buddha, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Plato, Moses, and Christ as “initiates.” Only by ascending to the lives of the great initiates does one find the ultimate source of these ideals. Redner then spoke at length about “repeated earthly lives” and the law of compensatory justice, which resolves all contradictions in life. According to Goethe, all spiritual development takes place through giving and receiving, and it is on this foundation that the Theosophical Movement is built—a movement that has been particularly active for 30 years and is destined to become the common heritage of humanity, in order to awaken a sense of unity among all people. A bond from soul to soul is to be forged to make this spiritual inquiry more widespread and universal, and to counteract the materialistic trend of the present. The task of the theosophical worldview is to promote universal spiritual morality. Theosophy does not aim at dogma or the formation of sects, but rather at spiritual inquiry whose goal is for love to triumph over the selfishness of one’s own opinion.