The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Twelfth Lecture

[ 1 ] Once again, we first remember those who stand out in the vast fields of current events:

Spirits of your souls, watchful guardians,
May your wings bring
The pleading love of our souls
To the earthly people entrusted to your care,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may shine with helping light
Upon the souls it lovingly seeks.

[ 2 ] And for those who have already passed through the gates of death as a result of these events:

Spirits of your souls, watchful guardians,
May your wings carry
The pleading love of our souls
To the beings of the spheres entrusted to your care,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may shine forth in aid
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

[ 3 ] May the Spirit we seek through our striving for spiritual knowledge—the Spirit who brought healing to the Earth and freedom and progress to humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha—be with you and your heavy responsibilities!

[ 4 ] My dear friends, when the karma of the times and the karma of our movement allow the building intended to serve our movement in Dornach to be completed, a sculptural group will stand in a significant location—a location facing east.

[ 5 ] The aim is, through artistic expression—and specifically artistic expression in the sense of Spiritual Science—to truly present before our eyes, before our physical eyes, within our building, what is to be the content and substance of our spiritual movement, and above all that which it is meant to signify for the times and for the further development of humanity in the spiritual and cultural spheres in general. I would like to say: every individual element should be arranged in such a way that it appears not only as part of a whole of Spiritual Science, but also as part of artistic forms, and even of artistic installations. This is how we are attempting to solve the problem of acoustics in this building. Certainly, such problems will not be solved at the first attempt, but at least a direction will be set by showing how the problem of acoustics cannot be solved through geometric calculation or through the usual architectural and external artistic rules, but only through Spiritual Science thinking.

[ 6 ] The dome-shaped superstructure will be a double one, and it will function according to the principle of a violin soundboard, thereby expressing part of the room’s acoustic concept. Many individual elements would come into consideration if one were to clarify the design, particularly with regard to the fact that the word or even the sound is brought to bear in a different way than is so often the case in our time, when, for the most part, it is not circular buildings designed for acoustics that are but rather buildings where, above all, the individual sound—along with its overtones and undertones—cannot come into its own at all, because at certain points in the rooms one sound can always bleed into the other. An effort will be made to ensure that a sound can be clearly distinguished and heard from all points in the room, and that the clearly spoken word can also be heard. But I will only hint at that. I would like to speak primarily about the group that will stand toward the east at a key point of the building. It is intended to represent, initially, a group of three beings. What else will be added may perhaps be mentioned at a later opportunity, because these things are not created according to an abstract idea conceived from the outset, but according to the intuitions of the spiritual world as they arise in the course of the work.

[ 7 ] First, three entities come into consideration. One stands upright. It expresses—if I may say so—not in a figurative or symbolic way, as has so often been attempted in our circles, but in a truly artistic way, what the human being is as such.

[ 8 ] Certainly, one will be able to see in this form that the earthly-human aspect is most intensely expressed in the form in which Christ lived for three years—certainly, one will also be able to see in this form that the expression is that of Christ. But one must not force the issue; one cannot approach the group with the idea: I am now going to look at Christ. If someone arrives at this idea based on their own feelings and artistic intuition, that is fine; but it is not correct to approach the group with the preconceived notion that this is Christ. It is not a matter of approaching the subject immediately with the symbolism that this is Christ.

[ 9 ] There stands this figure on a small slope of a rock; behind her, the rock rises high into the air. She stands with her feet on a ledge of the rock. This ledge has a cave that goes deep inside. In this cave sits another being; I would say she is crouched there; a being who is meant to express something connected to the being standing above her. This being can be seen as radiating, or letting flow out, something like forces from her hands. One can then see these forces radiating into the rock cave. It is the hand inside the rock cave; forces radiate out and imprint themselves in the form of a hand on the rock. The hand is still visible, but it is not the hand; the forces are there and imprint themselves in the form of a hand.

[ 10 ] It is a being that, strictly speaking, only resembles a human in the head—a form similar to that of a human. Otherwise, it has large, powerful bat-like wings and a dragon- or worm-shaped body. One sees something winding around the figure, beneath which the figure itself is writhing. And one sees that what winds around the figure is connected to the upright figure, that it is linked to the figure’s outstretched hand. Forces radiate from it, and these cause something to wind around. If one allows this impression to sink into one’s own soul for a moment, one will come to the sensation that this is the gold flowing there within the crevices of the earth, and that the figure there within is bound by the gold in the crevices of the earth.

[ 11 ] The other hand is pointing upward. And up there on the rock is another figure, human in the head, not with bat wings, but with wings hanging down to the ground; and the body is shaped in such a way that one gets a sense of: yes, what is this body? The body is something like the whole human being having become a face; as if a face had been stretched out lengthwise, elastically extended, and body forms had thereby come into being. This figure is up on the highest peak of the rock, and it is plunging downward. In the plunge downward, the wings are broken. And one sees that the hand reaching upward from the main figure is pressing into the wing.

[ 12 ] So we have three figures: the human being stands there in his true nature; beneath him, as you may have guessed, Ahriman, who is bound in the depths of the earth by the effect exerted by the outstretched hand of the central figure upon the gold lying in the earth’s depths, through which he binds himself. The other hand reaches upward, and it breaks the wings of Lucifer, who thereby plunges into the depths.

[ 13 ] It is now essential that no one—as was attempted to some extent when this idea was first presented in a lecture—attempt to create this work in the present based solely on the laws of sculpture. It is not a matter of mere symbolization, but rather that every single feature in the three beings is created in the most minute of details from the perspective of Spiritual Science. Here one will have to see, in the formation of the two faces of Ahriman and Lucifer that resemble the human, how this contrast is to be conceived. In the case of Lucifer, one will be dealing with a peculiar type of upper head formation, which the human form merely recalls. There is nothing but the movement of the spiritual; there is nothing that compels us to keep the individual features of the forehead within fixed boundaries, as is the case with humans, but rather every single feature on the upper head is as mobile as the fingers and hands on the arm. Of course, one can only conceive of this if the movements are the actual movements as they are found in Lucifer. And then it must be noted above all that in this figure there is that which has remained in the Lucifer being from the lunar existence. This overlays the actual face, which recedes very deeply into the background.

[ 14 ] From this description, you can already surmise that we are dealing with something quite different from the ordinary human face. It is as if the skull were a separate entity, with what constitutes the human face inserted into it from below. And then there is something else: that in Lucifer’s case, a certain connection arises between the ear and the larynx. In humans, the ear and the larynx have only been separated since their earthly existence; in their lunar existence, they were a single organ. What the small wings on the larynx are, were once powerful expansions that then formed the lower auricle. Mighty auricles formed there, so to speak, while the upper ear—which now projects outward—is formed from the forehead. And what is separate today, so that when we speak and sing, this projects outward and we listen only with the ear, went inward during the Lunar period and from there into the music of the spheres. The whole human being was an ear. This is because the ears were the wings; so that you have ear, larynx, and wing formations that move harmonically and melodically according to the vibrations of the world ether, which then bring forth the peculiar appearance of Lucifer; which bring forth what is macrocosmic, for Lucifer has only localized what is actually only cosmic.

[ 15 ] You will see there that concessions must be made so that people are not frightened when they see a face that does not take on a human form. Then you will see that his face must be elongated. Lucifer must look like an elongated face, for he is, after all, all ear; the wings are, after all, all ear—an elongated ear. Ahriman, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite, and it is only natural that in the modeling, wherever something is powerfully expanded in Lucifer—where we fully develop it in Lucifer—in Ahriman there are only hints. While in Lucifer the forehead is powerfully developed, in Ahriman it is the lower jaw. The entire materialism of the world is expressed in the formation of the masticatory and dental system.

[ 16 ] Of course, you can’t do all this based on the description; instead, you have to provide the description afterward. But what is particularly important, my dear friends, is this: it has become necessary, when depicting the main figure, to depart from what seems so natural to everyone—namely, making a human face symmetrical. As a rule, a face appears symmetrical. On a small scale, everyone has asymmetries; they are just not so clearly visible that one notices them. But in this main figure, it is significant that the entire left side tends upward toward Lucifer, and that the shape of the left forehead is different from that of the right, which tends toward Ahriman. This is followed by the left half of the face of the hand moving upward and the right half of the hand moving downward. And this is now expressed in the fact that a greater inner mobility had to be placed into the main figure than can exist in a human being.

[ 17 ] Above this sculptural figure, the entire motif will be depicted in a painterly manner, so that one can see both side by side and understand how, given the differences between the arts, painting cannot convey the same thing in the same way, but rather everything—everything—must be different in its execution.

[ 18 ] What I want to emphasize is this: It will be essential that we sculpturally capture the hand movements of the main figure—the upward movement of the left hand and the downward movement of the other hand. For what anyone might take for granted at first glance—that the central figure reaches upward toward Lucifer with his left hand and, through his radiance, breaks Lucifer’s wings, while with his right hand he wraps around Ahriman’s golden veins—must be avoided, precisely because, especially in our time, it is only through Spiritual Science that we are beginning to truly understand Christ. Christ is neither one who hates nor one who loves unjustly. He does not stretch out his hand to break Lucifer’s wings, but Christ is the one who stretches out his hand because he must do so out of his inner being. He does not break Lucifer’s wings, but Lucifer above cannot bear what radiates from this hand and breaks his own wings. It must therefore be expressed in the figure of Lucifer that it is not Christ who breaks his wings, but that he breaks his own wings. It is a common occurrence in life that people who live in the company of good people cannot bear it, because they feel uncomfortably touched by what emanates from good people. Lucifer feels something within himself that causes him to break his own wings. This is self-knowledge in Lucifer, a self-experience. The same is true of Ahriman. Christ does nothing to either of them, so that neither the left nor the right hand is outstretched as if he were doing something to Lucifer or Ahriman. He does nothing to them; rather, they do to themselves what happens to them.

[ 19 ] And this brings us to the point where Spiritual Science intervenes in our time to provide a truly authentic understanding of Christ. And once one understands this, one must say the following. These things are said in all humility, for this work is only a beginning, a very first beginning, a weak, imperfect beginning, intended merely to show where the path—which in no way claims to be perfect—is leading. Therefore, what is said should not be taken as something arrogant, but only as a purely factual statement.

[ 20 ] World history has seen many depictions of Christ; among them, one of the greatest is the one found in the Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment.” If you study the Christ in this “Last Judgment,” as he hovers up there in his Napoleonic grandeur, yet at the same time with immense power in the air, pointing the good to one side and the wicked to the other, there you have a Christ who cannot be the Christ of the future, because on the one hand he rewards the good and on the other he condemns the wicked; whereas for the Christian of the future, it must be the case that each person, through what is present in Christ, rewards and condemns themselves. Michelangelo lived at a time when it was not yet possible to express something of the deepest significance regarding Christ. The figure Michelangelo depicts has, rather, something Luciferic on the one hand and something Ahrimanic on the other. Today, this is, to put it bluntly, something of a painful truth. But it is only through this that human development in its culture moves forward—by showing how the ideals of past times can no longer be the ideals of the future. It will be a feature of the ideals of the future that the Christ-being is understood for what it is, not merely for what it does or will do when the end of Earth’s development comes: a being who, through his very being, brings about what must happen within the souls themselves. In this respect, the group we are placing in the significant location of our building is an expression of the fact that the previous conception of Christ cannot be one that looks toward the future, because the correct relationship between Christ, Lucifer, and Ahriman has not been understood at all. One cannot understand Christ unless one has the right relationship to the forces that are regarded, on the one hand, as Luciferic and, on the other, as Ahrimanic, and which are real world forces.

[ 21 ] This can be made clear through an analogy, by repeatedly referring to a pendulum. The pendulum swings to the left and to the right. When it swings to one side, it is not in its position of equilibrium, and when it swings to the other side, it is not in its position of equilibrium. But it would be doing nothing, being inert, idling away, if it always wanted to be in the position of equilibrium, if it did not want to swing. It is in the correct position when it is in the middle; but it cannot simply remain in the middle—it must swing to the right and to the left.

[ 22 ] Such is human life. It is not as though one could say: I flee from Lucifer, I flee from Ahriman. — If one were to say, “I flee from Lucifer, I flee from Ahriman,” that would not be life. It would be like a pendulum that does not swing. Human life truly swings; on one side toward Lucifer, on the other toward Ahriman. And the important thing is not to be afraid of that. If one were to flee from Lucifer, there would be no art; if one were to flee from Ahriman, there would be no external science. For all art that is not permeated by Spiritual Science is Luciferic, and all external science, insofar as it is not Spiritual Science, is Ahrimanic. Thus does the human being swing back and forth. And for him to realize that he wants to be in balance and not at rest—that is what matters. There was a time when people said: one must flee from the Luciferic and free oneself from it through asceticism. Not to flee from the Luciferic, but to truly face the Luciferic countenance—that is what matters: to truly swing toward Lucifer on one side and toward Ahriman on the other. That is precisely why they are truly opposing forces, like other natural forces, for example the two types of electricity or the two poles of magnetism, and so on. So what will matter is that one recognizes this triad—the Luciferic, the Ahrimanic, and that which is the Christ-being—and that one recognizes inwardly the true greatness of Christ built within oneself, which the Christ of Michelangelo does not yet possess. That, my dear friends, is the task of Spiritual Science work. But we are only at the beginning of a realization that must truly first become commonplace.

[ 23 ] You see, I have also mentioned here in recent weeks that, from certain perspectives, one cannot speak of any greater work of poetry than Goethe’s *Faust*. Goethe’s “Faust,” precisely because it draws out the human condition from such a profound depth, truly represents one of the greatest works humanity has ever produced. Now, Goethe did indeed attempt to portray Faust as a true representative of humanity.

[ 24 ] I have often pointed out that Mephisto is, in essence, nothing other than a mixture of Lucifer and Ahriman. But what was the situation with Goethe? With Goethe, the situation was that he knew nothing yet of this duality of Lucifer and Ahriman, and that in Mephistopheles he concocted Ahriman and Lucifer together. Both are present in his Mephisto, and as a result, Goethe’s entire “Faust” did not become what it could have been if Goethe had been able to place Lucifer on one side and Ahriman on the other alongside Faust, so that one could have seen the triad running through all of humanity. That was, after all, the whole difficulty Goethe faced with regard to his “Faust.” You see, when Goethe began his “Faust,” he was only able to take this “Faust” as far as he himself had come by the 1770s. He felt: with this external science, which expresses itself in the fourfold of philosophy, law, medicine, and, as he says, unfortunately also theology, it is not possible. This Ahrimanic knowledge does not satisfy Faust; through it he enters only into an Ahrimanic, intellectual connection with the fabric of the world; he truly wants to experience this fabric of the world, to experience the living through the sources of life—that which is not merely a figment of the imagination. The living: the Earth Spirit comes. But Faust cannot bear him. And afterwards, through the door comes in—in the very first draft it is so—through the door comes in Wagner. Yes, when many people today often speak of Faust, and also of Wagner, one gets the feeling that Wagner is speaking of Wagner, for in our time the stage Faust is mostly discussed in “Wagnerian” terms. What, then, is this Wagner? Yes, what is it that enters with the Earth Spirit?

[ 25 ] We know, of course, that all knowledge of the world is self-knowledge. It is a part of Faust himself that enters the Earth Spirit—albeit of the expanded soul that identifies with the cosmos. But Faust cannot yet comprehend it. He has not yet reached up to that which is also part of his own self. Now it is shown how far he has come. And if one were to portray Faust correctly—more correctly than perhaps Goethe himself did—one would have to allow Wagner to enter today as a somewhat caricatured likeness wearing the mask and costume of Faust, for a different aspect, a different part of Faust enters through Wagner. Faust himself says afterward: he was “a fearfully twisted worm.” Now he understands himself. “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me!” the Earth Spirit called out to him. Now the spirit he comprehends arrives—Wagner arrives. And so it goes on, I might say. And since the Earth Spirit has not been comprehended, what actually appears is merely another form of the Earth Spirit: Mephisto, who now appears both as Lucifer—when he leads Faust through everything a human being can experience by merely following his passions, base passions in Auerbach’s Cellar, nobler passions that are, however, led into witchcraft and black magic—until, in the second part, Ahriman must take Lucifer’s place. All of this can indeed be seen if one reads “Faust” with true understanding. But there is also ample external evidence for it. I have already mentioned that among the elements Goethe later removed, there was a passage where Mephisto is once referred to as Lucifer.

[ 26 ] Goethe always felt a sense of unease when he portrayed this figure, who is actually composed of two distinct entities. In particular, one sees the Luciferian aspect where Faust’s religious sentiments also emerge—sentiments that are elevated to something particularly curious in the *Wagner-Gespräche*. When Faust, catechized by Gretchen, says in the conversations about God:

Feeling is everything,
A name is but smoke and mirrors,
A haze obscuring the sky's glow!

[ 27 ] Thus it is regarded as the highest representation of the divine, celebrated as the highest representation of the religious. There is no need to think: “Feeling is everything”; by saying this, one implies that the only thing one wants as religious is what a Gretchen can grasp, and one simply always forgets that Faust gives this lesson to the sixteen-year-old Gretchen and that in it he gives only what Gretchen can grasp. What Faust says about “the mist-shrouded heavenly blaze” is not meant for philosophers, and it is poorly understood when one repeatedly encounters Gretchen’s “science” in professorial garb.

[ 28 ] All of this shows that Goethe initially expressed the Luciferic entity through its dual mask. In the second part, it is more the Ahrimanic aspect, where Mephisto leads to the creation of the homunculus, to the conjuring up of Helena, and to all that Faust now truly brings to the world’s attention—a world that is entirely different from everything Faust “studies thoroughly with fervent effort.”

[ 29 ] Now it must be said: even in our time, many things are still repeatedly misunderstood in the details. For example, when it is explicitly suggested that the homunculus desires something within the human being that must be developed into full humanity: “and you have time until you become human,” since one must first pass through the lower realms; it is said: “Just do not strive for higher orders.” What has already been explained there is quite curious. In reality, it naturally means—for Goethe was once again speaking in the Frankfurt dialect—“Just do not strive for higher places,” and is not an indication that beings such as the Homunculus are adorned with human honors.

[ 30 ] Another is the scene where the homunculus is created, in which Wagner describes how something stirs in the retort:

It is happening! The masses are becoming more aware,
Their conviction more genuine, more genuine!

[ 31 ] Conviction is derived from generation, just as the Übermensch is derived from man. It is only since Nietzsche spoke of the Übermensch that people have been talking about the existence of a superhuman; Goethe had spoken of the Übermensch long before that. And so people read “conviction” here, but in contrast to “generation,” it is a conviction, as one says: man and Übermensch.

[ 32 ] These are matters that must first be understood in detail before one can grasp what Goethe meant to say. But one must adopt a broad, open perspective; one must truly comprehend the mission of our time with regard to Spiritual Science and recognize that a spirit like Goethe sought to prepare his time for this mission.

[ 33 ] When Schiller urged him in 1797 to finish *Faust*, Goethe said he had brought back the old Tragelaph—a creature that is half-animal, half-human. Goethe calls it a Tragelaph, and at the end of the eighteenth century he calls it a barbaric composition. This must be taken very seriously, for Goethe already understood how good and how bad his *Faust* was. All of this is part of what Spiritual Science should draw upon, so that we may rise to a free standpoint regarding these matters. That Goethe wanted to depict the work of the spiritual self, of the immortal in man, ascending toward the higher, is shown by the fact that he made a sketch at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of what Faust was to become, where he first wrote: “The person’s enjoyment of life, seen from the outside”; then he writes: “The enjoyment of creation from within,” and finally, after tracing Faust’s entire path, he wrote: “Epilogue in chaos on the way to hell.”

[ 34 ] The discussions I’ve had to listen to on this subject are truly something that can cause one deep surprise; for people have pondered: Did Goethe, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, still believe that his Faust had to go to hell? The answer is simply that it is not Faust who speaks, but rather the departing Mephisto who delivers the epilogue after Faust has walked the path to his immortal self.

[ 35 ] Thus, in Goethe’s *Faust*, we also see something that lies along the path, but only on the path toward what is to be expressed through the main group of our building: a truly concrete conception of the human form, in which, on the one hand, appears that toward which the soul must always strive, and, on the other hand, that toward which the soul must also strive. As long as one holds everything together or seeks only a duality, one cannot arrive at a true understanding of the human being. This is the essential point to be noted. It must be noted that it is truly from German culture that the embodiment of precisely this idea arises. There are two cultural poles on earth that have their own justification; they are not presented as unjustified, but rather in their justification when one points to them. On the one hand, we have purely Oriental culture. What does this Oriental culture consist of? The Oriental aspect of culture consists in the pursuit of a purely inner deepening, with the shedding of everything that is the outer process of existence. And so we see how, in the highest flowering of this Oriental culture, in Indian culture, all instructions, all knowledge, are directed toward shaping the soul so that it becomes free from what the physical body is. It is a purely Luciferic culture, a purely Luciferic culture. The further east we go, the more we encounter the Luciferic.

[ 36 ] And when we turn to the West, where do we end up? Let’s take the farthest West. It is natural to us—especially if we have taken in something of Spiritual Science—and I would like to show you this with an example—it is clear to us that when we see a person moving from a more materialistic worldview to a more spiritual one, we ask ourselves: what is going on in the soul of such a person? It is precisely when we perceive such a transformation in a person’s soul that we must enter into the innermost being of that person to experience with them what they have gone through in their soul. And nothing seems more significant to us than to experience this together with a person.

[ 37 ] You see, in America they’ve also observed that people go through what is called a “conversion” there—that is, a shift from a materialistic worldview to a spiritual one. What do you do in that case? You sit down—even if I’m describing it a bit radically, that’s how it is—you sit down and write a letter to people who have gone through something like that, asking them to explain the reasons behind their shift. And then, well, then you create a framework, you establish categories, for example:

1. Category: Fear of death and hell (and puts such letters in a pile).
2. Category: Altruistic motives, selflessness.
3. Category: Egocentric motives.
4. Category: Striving for the moral ideal.
5th category: Remorse and a sense of sin. 1, 2, 3 letters.
6th category: Following teachings. 1, 2, 3 letters.
7th Category: that people have reached this or that age. 1, 2, 3 letters. Then
8. Imitation. 1, 2, 3 letters. Again, a category of people who saw that others believed in a god and imitated them. Then
9. Punishment.

14% Fear of hell.
6% Other motives.
7% Striving for the ideal.
8% Sense of sin.
13% Imitation and example.
19% Beatings.

[ 38 ] Now there has been a conversion.

[ 39 ] So we have the opposite. In India, there is no regard for what is happening on the outside. An Indian would find this absurd; he would use the word “crazy” if one were to cite percentages of those who have converted; that they have converted for this or that reason. In the West, people do not concern themselves with the inner life, for in the West everything has been wiped out from this inner life. The outermost of the outer, purely Ahrimanic. Let us turn to the East: the innermost of the inner, purely Luciferic. Thus, I would say, the globe itself presents us with the contrast between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And between this Ahrimanic and Luciferic, one is not at rest, but in equilibrium. It is not a matter of merely rejecting one or the other, but of becoming aware that a culture that truly reaches into the future consists in knowing how to bring both into the right balance, what one must have in relation to the other.

[ 40 ] And there, you see expressed, I would say, the entire fate of the world in our group. It is, after all, Europe’s task to bring about a balance between the East and the West. In the East, the pendulum swings to one side; in the West, to the other. It is not merely our role in Europe to be, so to speak, the monkeys of the East or the monkeys of the West, but rather it is our role to stand quite independently on our own ground and to fully acknowledge the legitimacy of both sides. This is expressed in our group. And so what is placed in a special location within our building is also connected, in a geographical sense, to our task. It is positioned toward the East, yet with its back to the East; it looks toward the West, yet stands in balance, carrying within itself what it has experienced on a long journey in the East, and does not content itself with what the West, in its purely Ahrimanic culture, can bring to humanity.

[ 41 ] When our time, my dear friends, comes to understand these things—but to understand them through thought, feeling, and deep insight—there need be no arrogance in this— then it will become clear to this age that even the most painful, most oppressive events of the present are there only to bring to humanity a sense of the task that humanity will have to fulfill in the near future. One can only hope that the great and painful things humanity experiences can also bring about a genuine and true deepening of the spirit. It is certainly true that, unfortunately, in what is expressed—namely in the spoken and written word—one does not at all recognize the great seriousness that our time demands of us; that much, much more must yet enter into people’s minds so that this great seriousness, I would say, this comforting gravity, truly fills people’s minds so that they can be sustained by the tasks set before them. On the one hand, the task set before us is a serious one, but on the other hand, it is a comforting, hopeful, confidence-inspiring seriousness. One need only realize that we live in a time when great things are demanded of us, but that these great things can also be accomplished by us. And even in this time, one will not be able to arrive at a pessimistic worldview.

[ 42 ] To explore all these matters in greater depth and with greater intensity—and to discuss what humanity’s next task for the future is, and how Spiritual Science will help solve this task—I will continue the discussion from today on Tuesday, June 22.