The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. The Four Platonic Virtues and Their Connection to the Human Constituents — The Influence of Spiritual Forces on the Physical World

[ 1 ] The task of our Spiritual Science is to bridge, for our consciousness—indeed, for our entire inner life—that chasm that arises for outer human consciousness between the physical world, in which human beings spend the time between birth and death, and the spiritual world, in which human beings spend the other part of their entire life—the time between death and a new birth.

[ 2 ] Such a statement is, of course, so familiar, so self-evident to anyone who lives and breathes Spiritual Science with every fiber of their being. It is only in a moment such as this—the very moment in which I am speaking to you today—that it becomes, one might well say, particularly sacred. After all, we have very recently lost a number of our dear friends and members from the physical plane due to the grave events of war, and we are, so to speak, about to accompany two friends on their final earthly journey. Tomorrow at eleven o’clock, we will hold the cremation here in Zurich of a dear member, Dr. Colazza, who left the physical plane this week, and just now we have received the news that our dear friend Fritz Mitscher left the physical plane near Davos this afternoon at five o’clock. With both of these members, dear souls are departing from the physical plane. Spiritual Science, however, shows us the way to understand how, in a much higher sense than we could otherwise comprehend, we do not lose such souls, but rather how we remain connected to them.

[ 3 ] Since we began our work in this movement, a considerable number of souls who belong to us have passed through the gate of death. Above all, it can be said of those sources from which our spiritual insights flow that, according to their respective capacities, they have become faithful co-workers for us in the spiritual world. And with full responsibility—the kind required when stating something that must be firmly grounded in Spiritual Science—I may say: In them we have gained pillars and columns for our spiritual movement. Many have passed through the gate of death, working within our spiritual movement, looking down upon that which they hold dear in their love. In the time between birth and death, they have come to love the kind of striving represented in our circle. Here in our society, they themselves have left behind something that is on the path between death and a new birth.

[ 4 ] Just as the natural world around us is a world we look back upon, so too can we look back on our physical life from the moment that can be compared to a person’s birth. Immediately after death, a person goes through a state that can be compared to embryonic life, to life within the mother’s womb, except that this life after death is measured in days, and is thus much shorter than embryonic life in relation to physical life. Then follows what can be compared to entering the physical world, to taking the first breath—that which can be called awakening in the spiritual world, which can be described as a realization that the will of the soul, having passed through the gate of death, is received by the beings of the higher hierarchies. Just as here, when a human being physically enters the physical world from the mother’s womb, first finds it possible to take in the outer air, and then gradually awakens the senses, so too, after death, comes that moment when the soul feels: The will, which during physical life was constrained by the limits of the physical body, now flows out of me into the universe. And this soul then perceives how this will is truly received through the activity of the beings of the initially higher hierarchy, the beings of the hierarchy of the Angeloi. This is like taking the first breath in the spiritual world and gradually growing into the spiritual environment, for this is what spiritual experience shows us.

[ 5 ] I would like to speak about the fate of those who have passed from the physical plane over the years. I would like to direct our attention to those who have come to love our spiritual movement here and look down upon it as something they know conveys to human souls—even within the physical body—that which they themselves live. To be able to connect in this way with the memory of earthly life is something that, even here in the physical world, already belongs to the spiritual world. For those who have passed through the gate of death, this is something infinitely precious, infinitely significant. And when they then flow into the stream that rises up to them from the physical world—a stream that draws its source from what they experienced in our movement— flowing into it completely like a tributary into a river, when the thoughts of those who were attached to them out of love or natural bonds pour in, then the community, because it is founded on spiritual bonds, is a much more intimate one than it could otherwise be in our materialistic age.

[ 6 ] And we may say once again: In the case of some who have passed through the gate of death into the spiritual world at an early age, it seems to us as though they had done so out of a deep love for our spiritual movement, in order to be able to help with greater strength from the spiritual world. In the souls of a great many of those who have left us live the most wonderfully clear convictions of the necessity of our spiritual movement. And for those who are able to look into the spiritual world, all those who have passed through the gate of death and now look down upon the movement with which they were connected are, as it were, the spiritual heralds of our movement, those who carry our spiritual mottos forward by ceaselessly calling out to us: “While we were united with you, we were convinced of the necessity of this movement. But now that we have entered the spiritual world, we know that we can help and how we must help in the time when this movement is necessary.”

[ 7 ] This is something that will be felt more and more by those who remain here on the physical plane, who have lost dear relatives and friends on the physical plane, and for whom these very words can be the deepest comfort, to have here everything that still forges a deeper bond between souls, even if we are no longer able to be connected to those souls in the outer realm, through physical eyes and physical words.

[ 8 ] This spiritual movement, in which we are to participate, will have to bring about many, many things. From the various things it is to bring us, I would like to single out one particular aspect today. A time like ours, in which external culture, despite the last echoes of the old religions, is built entirely upon materialistic consciousness—such a time can, in essence, only build up the impulses of moral life in such a way that only the life between birth and death is taken into account. Among the many things that will come through our spiritual movement will be a new structure for the entire moral life, the entire life of virtue of humanity. For people will learn to view moral life, the life of virtue, from a perspective that extends beyond birth and death, that takes into account that the human soul passes through repeated earthly lives, that takes into account that the human soul, just as we experience it in the life between physical birth and death, has passed through many lives and can look forward to other lives that it must continue to pass through. Once we have expanded our perspective from a single life to successive earthly lives, a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of life will follow, as well as a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of virtue and the moral life.

[ 9 ] When we speak of human virtues, we can essentially distinguish four such virtues at first, which, so to speak, can be discussed in ordinary conversation among people. One virtue, as we shall indicate later, is one that dwells in the depths of the human soul, but of which, as we shall see, one must speak as little as possible for sacred reasons. All other virtues present in life, which constitute the moral life, can be understood as special cases of the four virtues we intend to consider—those four virtues of which antiquity, in particular, spoke at length.

[ 10 ] Plato, the great philosopher of ancient Greece, distinguished these four virtues because he was still able to draw his wisdom from the echoes of the ancient mystery traditions. Drawing on the echoes of the ancient mystery traditions, Plato was able to classify virtue more accurately than later philosophers, or even those of our own time, when knowledge of the wisdom of the mysteries has become so distant and chaotic.

[ 11 ] The first virtue we must consider when speaking of a moral life—in the sense that arises from a comprehensive understanding of human nature—is the virtue of wisdom. But this wisdom must be understood in a somewhat deeper sense, and in a way that relates more to ethics and moral teaching than is usually the case. We cannot say that wisdom is something that can simply come to a person, as it were. Even less is wisdom something that a person can learn in the ordinary sense. It is not even easy to characterize in a few words what wisdom is meant to signify to us. If we live our lives in such a way that we allow what comes to us in this life to affect us, if, prompted by the various events of life, we learn from one event how we could have handled this or that more correctly, how we should have made our strengths more skillful or stronger in relation to one thing or another, if we pay attention to everything we encounter in life—in the sense that when something similar comes our way a second time, we do not let ourselves be taken in the second time as we were the first, but feel ourselves to have been taught. And if we maintain throughout life the disposition to be able to learn from life, and to view everything that nature and life bring our way in such a way that we learn something—not merely to acquire knowledge, but so that we become ever better and more valuable inwardly—then we grow in wisdom, and our inner life is such that what we have experienced has not passed us by in vain.

[ 12 ] Life passes us by in vain if, after living for decades, we judge something we have experienced at a later point in time in exactly the same way as we judged it at an earlier age. If we spend our lives in this way, we are furthest from wisdom. Karma may have caused us to become angry in our youth, to judge this or that person harshly. If we continue in this way, we have misused our lives. We have used it well if, having judged others disparagingly in our youth, we judge them not disparagingly but with understanding and forgiveness at a certain age, if we strive to understand. If we were born in such a way that certain things made us fly into a rage, and yet in old age we no longer fly into a rage as we did in our youth—if our rage has left us through what life has taught us, and we have become more gentle—then we have lived our lives in the spirit of wisdom. If we were materialists in our youth, but then allowed ourselves to be influenced by what time has sought to tell us through revelations from the spiritual world, then we have lived our lives in the spirit of wisdom. If we close ourselves off to the revelations of the spiritual world, then we have not lived our lives in the spirit of wisdom.

[ 13 ] To be enriched in this way, to broaden our horizons—this is what we might call living life in the spirit of wisdom. And what Spiritual Science seeks to give us is precisely what enables us to open ourselves to life and to grow wiser through it. Wisdom is something that, in the most eminent sense, stands in opposition to human egoism. Wisdom is something that always takes into account the course of world events. We therefore allow ourselves to be instructed by the course of world events because this enables us to move away from the narrow judgment formed by our ego. A wise person, fundamentally speaking, cannot judge selfishly, for when one learns from the world, one learns to understand the world; one learns to allow one’s judgment to be corrected by the world, so that wisdom, as it were, pulls us out of our narrow, limited perspective and brings us into harmony with itself. Much more could be cited that might gradually provide us with a description of wisdom. We should not seek a definition of such concepts, but rather keep our minds open so that we may always become wiser, even regarding wisdom itself.

[ 14 ] Here in the physical world, everything that a human being must experience in waking life must make use of the instruments of the external physical and etheric nature. As human beings between birth and death, we are outside our physical and etheric bodies with our soul being—insofar as it consists of the ego and the astral body—only when we sleep. When we are in the conscious waking state, we make use of the instruments of our physical and etheric bodies. To the extent that we fill ourselves with wisdom, to the extent that we strive, in our actions and thoughts, our feelings and perceptions, to live in the spirit of wisdom, we make use of those organs of our physical and etheric bodies which are, so to speak, the most perfect within our earthly life—those organs that took the longest to develop, that were already prepared by Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon, and have been passed down to us as an inheritance, and have reached a certain point of completion.

[ 15 ] I would like to give you another perspective on what is meant by more or less perfect organs. Take, for example, our brain. The brain is not yet the most perfect organ, but we can at least call it more perfect than other organs, since it took longer to develop than these other organs. Let us compare the brain with the middle part of our body, where our hands are located. When we set out to do something with our hands, we have the thought: I reach out my hand, I take the vase, I pull my hand back. What have I done there? I have not only extended my physical hand, but also my etheric and astral hands and a limb of my I, but the physical hand has gone along with it.

[ 16 ] When I merely think, when I merely entertain thoughts, then the clairvoyant consciousness can see how something like spiritual arms reach out from the head, but the physical brain remains within its shell. Just as my etheric and astral hands belong to my physical hand, so too does something etheric and astral belong to the brain. The brain cannot follow, but the hands can follow. At a later time, however, the hands will also become solid, and we will eventually be able to move only their astral part. The hands are on their way to becoming what the brain already is today. In earlier times, during the ancient Sun and Moon eras, that which today extends from the brain and is purely spiritual was also accompanied by the physical organ. Now only the skull has stretched over it, so that the physical brain is firmly confined within it during Earth’s evolution. The brain is an organ that has undergone several stages of development. The hands are on their way to becoming similar to the brain, for the whole human being is on the way to becoming a brain. There are thus organs that are more perfect, that have completed their development to a greater extent, and those that are less perfect. The most perfect organs are used for what we accomplish through wisdom. Our ordinary brain is actually used only as a tool for the lowest form of wisdom, for earthly cleverness. But the more wisdom we acquire, the less we depend on our large brain; the more—as external anatomy does not know—the activities retreat to our small brain, to that which is enclosed within our skull as the small brain, which looks like a tree. We humans, when we have become wise, when we have become wisdom, actually find ourselves beneath a “tree,” which is our small brain and which then, in particular, begins to unfold its activity.

[ 17 ] Imagine a person who has attained great wisdom extending the organs of his wisdom out powerfully, like the branches of a tree. They have their source in the cerebellum, which sits within the skull, but the spiritual organs extend outward, and he is beneath the tree, the Tree of Wisdom, in reality, in spiritual reality.

[ 18 ] But here we also see that what we do in wisdom is the most spiritual part of us, or at least belongs to the most spiritual part, for the physical organs are already at rest. When we do something with our hand, we still have to devote part of our energy to the movement of the hand. When we judge something with wisdom, when we decide something with wisdom, the organs remain at rest; no energy is spent on the physical organ; we are more spiritual, and those organs that we use on the physical plane to live in wisdom are the ones to which we need to apply the least energy—they are, so to speak, already the most perfect.

[ 19 ] Wisdom is therefore something in moral human life that allows a person to experience themselves in a spiritual way. Related to this is the fact that the wisdom a person acquires enables them to reap the greatest possible benefits from their past incarnations. Because we live in wisdom in the spiritual realm without the exertion of physical organs, it is through this life of wisdom that we are best able to make what we have acquired in previous incarnations fruitful for this life—to bring this wisdom over from previous incarnations.

[ 20 ] In German, we have a good expression for someone who does not want to become wise. We call him a Philistine. A Philistine is a person who resists becoming wise, who wants to remain just as he is his whole life, who does not want to come to a different judgment. But a person who wants to become wise strives to bring over from earlier incarnations what he has accomplished and stored up through his work in those earlier incarnations. The wiser we become, the more we bring over from past incarnations into the present one; and if we do not wish to become wise, so that we leave the wisdom gained from past incarnations fallow, then one comes who cuts it down: Ahriman.

[ 21 ] No one wants us not to become wiser more than Ahriman. We have the power to do so. We have acquired much, much more in our past incarnations than we realize, and much more during the times when we passed through the states of ancient clairvoyance. Everyone could become much wiser than they actually do. No one should use the excuse that they were unable to bring much over. To become wiser means to bring forth what one has acquired in past incarnations, so that it fulfills us in this incarnation.

[ 22 ] Another virtue is what we might call, using a term that is actually difficult to formulate, the virtue of courage. It is a state of mind such that it does not remain passive in the face of life, but is inclined to exert one’s strength. Courageous virtue, one might say, comes from the heart. Of someone who possesses this virtue in everyday life, one can say: He has his heart in the right place. — And that is also a good way of expressing it when we are able not to cowardly withdraw from the things that life demands of us, but when we are capable of taking charge, of knowing how to intervene where necessary. If we are inclined to set our activity in motion in this way—in short, if we are brave—the term “brave” is also a good one for this virtue—then we possess this virtue of a brave life. One could also say that this virtue, which is connected to a healthy emotional life that generates courage at the right moment—the lack of which brings cowardice into life—can, of course, be exercised in the physical course of life only through certain organs. These organs, which include the physical and etheric hearts, are not as perfected as those that serve wisdom. These organs are still in the process of changing and will continue to change in the future.

[ 23 ] There is a great difference between the brain and the heart in terms of cosmic becoming. Suppose a person passes through the gate of death and goes through the life between death and a new birth. The brain is, in fact, a product of the gods. The brain is permeated by forces that, when one passes through the gate of death, actually depart entirely, and in the next life the brain is then completely rebuilt, including the inner forces associated with it, not just the material aspect. So the associated forces are also rebuilt. This is not the case with the heart. With the heart, the situation is such that it is not the physical heart itself, but rather the forces active within the physical heart that remain. These forces return to the astral realm and to the ego, and they also remain between death and a new birth. The same forces that beat within our heart will also beat in our next incarnation. What functions in the brain is gone; it does not carry over into the next incarnation. But the forces that course through the heart are there again in the next incarnation. When we look into a head, we can say: In it, invisible forces are at work that make up the brain. But when a person has passed through the gate of death, these forces are handed over to the cosmos. Yet when we hear a person’s heartbeat, we hear spiritual forces that are not only present in this incarnation but will also live on in the next, passing through death and into new birth.

[ 24 ] The popular imagination sensed such things in a wondrous way. That is why it places so much value on the sensation of a heartbeat—not because we value the physical heartbeat so highly, but because we are looking toward something far more eternal when we consider a person’s heartbeat. If we possess the virtue of courage, of bravery, we can use only a portion of certain powers for this courage. We must use the other portion for the organs that serve as tools for courage. These are organs for which we must still use a portion of our powers. If we are not gifted with courage, if we do not develop the virtue of bravery, if we let ourselves go, if we cowardly withdraw from life, if we surrender to the heaviness of our being, then we cannot enliven those powers that must live in harmony with the practice of the virtue of bravery, of courage.

[ 25 ] While we stand by cowardly in life, the forces that are meant to stir our hearts also remain dormant. They are a seed for Lucifer. He seizes them, and we then lack them in our next life. To be cowardly in the face of life means surrendering to Lucifer a number of forces that we will lack when, in our next incarnation, we wish to build up our hearts—which are, in fact, the organs, the tools of the courageous. We come into the world with defective, undeveloped organs.

[ 26 ] The third virtue, which takes into account the most imperfect faculties—those that will only take shape in the future, of which only the seed is present now—is what we might call prudence. In a certain sense, it can also be called a life of temperance. So we have three virtues: wisdom, courage, and prudence. Temperance could also be called prudence.

[ 27 ] One can be imprudent in a wide variety of ways. One can be imprudent by overeating and overdrinking. That is the lowest form of imprudence. There, the soul is completely submerged in physical desire, and we live out our lives entirely through our bodies. But when we take control of our desires, when we actively command the body what it may and may not do, then we are prudent—or, one might say, moderate. And through such temperance, we also keep in proper order those forces that are meant to ensure that, in our next incarnation, we do not surrender the relevant organs to Lucifer. For we surrender to Lucifer the forces that we expend through devotion to a life of passion. It is worst of all when our passions plunge us into a state of intoxication, when we feel at ease in daydreaming and drifting off.

[ 28 ] Whenever we lose our composure, we always give our strength to Lucifer. He takes these forces, but in doing so he also takes from us the forces we need for our respiratory and digestive organs, and we will then return with poor respiratory and digestive organs if we do not practice the virtue of moderation. Those who love to let themselves be carried away by their life of desire, who surrender to their life of passion, are the candidates for the decadent people of the future, for those people of the future who will suffer from all manner of defects in their physical bodies.

[ 29 ] One might say that this virtue of prudence depends on the most imperfect organs of human beings—on organs that are in the early stages of development and still have a great deal of transformation ahead of them. When we look at our digestive organs and what is connected with them, we must, in order to set them in motion, employ the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body. When we turn to the organs that are the instruments of courage, the situation is quite different. There we remain more or less outside with our ego; we move freely there, and only our astral and etheric bodies enter into the physical. When we come to the virtues encompassed by wisdom, we keep the ego and the astral body freely outside. For as we become wiser and wiser, we organize the astral body; we take the astral body into our own hands. This is the essential point: as we become wiser, we transform the astral into the Spirit-Self, and only the etheric remains united with the physical. In the brain, the etheric is united only with the physical. And while we are very strongly connected to the rest of the body—at least to the astral and physical bodies—when we are awake, we retain the state of sleep most fully for the brain. That is why we need physical sleep most of all for the brain. For when we are awake, we are with our ego and our astral body also outside the brain, and they must then exert themselves most within themselves, without having any support from the external organ.

[ 30 ] Thus we find a connection between our human nature and the virtues. We can call wisdom a virtue that befits the human being as a spiritual being, where he acts freely with his I and his astral body and has only a kind of support in the physical and etheric bodies. We can call courage a virtue where the human being is free only with his I and has his support in his astral, etheric, and physical bodies. Finally, we can speak of prudence where we become free with our ego-germ, where we are bound with our ego to the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, and work our way out of this bondage with our ego.

[ 31 ] But there is a virtue that is the most spiritual of all. This most spiritual virtue is, in a sense, connected to the whole human being. There is a faculty of the human being that we essentially lose at an early age, one that we possess only during our earliest childhood years. I have mentioned this before. The fact is that when we enter the physical plane, we do not have the posture required for our human dignity: we crawl on all fours. I have pointed out that it is only through our own strength that we bring ourselves into the correct posture and stand upright. In the same way, we develop through the forces that enter into language. In short, in the first years of our lives we develop forces that essentially—pay attention to the expression—position us in the posture we have as true human beings in the world. We are not born in such a way that we are “properly” oriented in the world. We crawl. But we are properly positioned when we raise our heads toward the stars. This corresponds to inner forces.

[ 32 ] We lose these abilities later in life. They no longer manifest. Nothing else occurs that intervenes in human life as energetically as learning to walk and standing upright. We grow increasingly weary of the effort required to maintain our upright posture. When we begin to live with our brain early in the morning, by the end of the day we become tired and feel the need for sleep. That which keeps us upright in childhood when we are tired remains quite tired throughout our entire life and slips into a state of lethargy, and we no longer employ anything similar to the upright posture of childhood in later life.

[ 33 ] And how do we orient ourselves in life as we learn language? Even as we learn to speak, forces of alignment are at work. The same forces we employ in early childhood are not lost to us later in life. They remain with us, but they are now connected to a virtue—the virtue associated with what is right and just, the virtue of universal justice, the fourth virtue. The same force we use as children when we rise from a crawling position lives within us when we possess the virtue of justice, the fourth of those listed by Plato.

[ 34 ] Those who truly practice the virtue of justice place every thing and every being in its rightful place, stepping outside themselves and into others. This means living in all-encompassing justice. To live in wisdom means to reap the best fruits from the powers we have stored up in previous incarnations. And if we had to point out what was bestowed upon us in those earlier incarnations, when divine powers still permeated us, we must point this out even more clearly when it comes to justice: We originate from the cosmos. We practice justice when we unfold the forces through which we are connected to the entire cosmos, but in a spiritual sense. Justice represents the measure of how a human being is connected to the Divine. In practical terms, injustice is equivalent to the godless, to one who has lost his divine origin, and we blaspheme God—the God from whom we descend—when we do wrong to any human being.

[ 35 ] Thus we have two virtues, justice and wisdom, which point us back to what we were in earlier times, in other incarnations, in the days when we ourselves were still in the bosom of the gods. And we have two other virtues—the courageous and the prudent life—which point us toward later incarnations. The less we give to Lucifer, the more strength we direct toward these. We have seen how the courageous and the prudent enter into the organs and how, through this, the organs are prepared for the next incarnation. Likewise, moral life extends into the future life when we fill ourselves with spirituality. Two virtues shine forth over past incarnations: wisdom and justice. Courage and prudence, however, shine forth over future incarnations.

[ 36 ] The time will come when human beings will realize that they are throwing themselves into Ahriman’s jaws when they close themselves off from justice and wisdom. That which was his in former incarnations, that which belonged to the divine world, he would cast to Lucifer through what he accomplishes in life out of rashness or cowardice. Whatever Lucifer seizes is withdrawn from us in terms of the forces needed to build our body in the next life.

[ 37 ] We cannot practice wisdom and justice without, as already indicated, becoming selfless. Only those who are selfish can be unjust. Only those who are selfish can choose to remain unwise. Wisdom and justice lead us beyond ourselves and make us members of the entire human organism. Courage, bravery, or boldness, and prudence make us, in a certain sense, members of the entire human organism. Only by experiencing courage and prudence, by living our lives with them, do we ensure that we will place ourselves within humanity in the future with a stronger organization. We are then not deprived of that which we would otherwise throw to Lucifer. Egoism transforms itself into selflessness when it is expanded in the right sense across the entire horizon of life and the human being places themselves in the light of the fourth virtue. This is what the spiritual wisdom of the human future will bring, which will extend to ethics and moral life. This will then also flow into education. Because wisdom and justice are understood in the way I have indicated, people will want to learn throughout their entire lives. They will see that one must truly begin to learn only after one’s youth is behind them, whereas now people think that, once their youth is behind them, they have nothing more to learn. Thus even the greatest and noblest fruits of art, the works of humanity’s great poets, are lost. They would take root in us best if we were to take up their works again as older people. When people read Goethe’s *Iphigenia* or Schiller’s *Tell*, they usually think: We’ve already read that in school. — But that is not correct, for one must not forget that these works have the greatest impact when read in old age, for then they serve justice and wisdom.

[ 38 ] And once again, early childhood education will bear special fruit if the virtues of courage and prudence are viewed in the proper light. These virtues must be taken into account individually when educating children, by repeatedly reminding them to face life courageously, not to shy away from everything possible or withdraw from everything possible, and to approach life with prudence and moderation, so that they may gradually overcome their passions. This is what can do an immense amount for the education of children. We will have to elaborate on these things more and more in the course of our reflections on Spiritual Science.

[ 39 ] Thus we see how that which, in the moral life of humanity, otherwise has laws only for the outer, physical plane—for life between birth and death—is expanded across an infinitely broad horizon through considerations of Spiritual Science. Here, too, it is as it is with the rest of Spiritual Science. After all, humanity has also had to undergo a broadening of its horizons in relation to natural science. Giordano Bruno points out to people that it is not only the Earth that exists, but that there are many other worlds out there in the cosmos. Spiritual Science points out to people that there is not just one earthly life, but that there are many earthly lives. People before Giordano Bruno believed that there was a boundary up there. Giordano Bruno drew attention to the fact that there is no boundary, that the blue of the sky does not represent a boundary. Spiritual Science shows that birth and death do not exist at all, but that we insert them into life through the limitations of our understanding.

[ 40 ] This is how the gap between the physical and the spiritual is bridged. And this is how things stand on the ground of Spiritual Science for those who establish a genuine, true monism. Those who often call themselves monists today take a very simplistic approach to their monism. They take one part of the world and make it into a unity by discarding the other half of the world. True monism arises when one allows the two halves to flow into one another in a meaningful way. This happens through Spiritual Science. But it is not enough for this to arise meaningfully in our consciousness; it must also take root in our entire lives. We must increasingly come to truly know, when we look out into the world: there is, all around us, in everything that lives and acts, something supersensible—not only in what our eyes see, but also in what the intellect, which is bound to the brain, can perceive. Spiritual forces are everywhere, behind every phenomenon, behind the appearance of the rainbow, behind the movement of the hand, and so on.

[ 41 ] If you read the series of lectures I gave in Leipzig around the turn of the year last year, you will see how the Christ impulse has worked through the Mystery of Golgotha, how Christ lives in the most important matters of humanity, not just in what people have known. For example, they quarreled over dogmas. But while they were quarreling, the Christ impulse worked its way through and brought about what was to happen.

[ 42 ] Let us consider the figure of the Virgin of Orleans. In the development of Europe, the simple shepherdess appears. She appears in such a remarkable way that not only do the forces that are normally found in human beings live within her soul, but the Christ impulse is also at work in this personality, enlivening and sustaining her through its powerful force. She became, as it were, a manifestation of the Christ impulse itself for her time. She was able to do this only because the Christ impulse took root within her.

[ 43 ] You know that we celebrate Christmas at a time when the sun’s power is at its weakest, in the deepest darkness of winter, because that is when we can be certain that the inner light, the spiritual light, is at its most intense.

[ 44 ] Ancient legends tell us that from Christmas through January 6, people have experienced something quite special, because that is when earthly life and the inner forces of the earth are at their most concentrated. Those who are predisposed to it do indeed experience the spiritual forces within the earth’s energies during this time. Countless legends attest to this. The best time for this is the thirteen days leading up to January 6.

[ 45 ] The Maid of Orleans spent these thirteen days in a special state, a state in which her mind was not yet receptive to the outside world. Strangely enough, the time during which the Maid of Orleans was carried in her mother’s womb coincided with the Christmas season of 1411. She was born on January 6, after spending her final thirteen days in her mother’s womb. Before she took her first breath, before she saw physical light with her physical eyes, she experienced the earthly realm during those thirteen days in the sleep that a human undergoes before entering the physical world. |

[ 46 ] I am pointing here to something of immense significance that shows how the world is governed by the spiritual, how what happens outwardly in the physical world is directed by the guiding force of the spiritual world, and how the spiritual world flows beneath the physical.

[ 47 ] In the present age, we must increasingly use Spiritual Science to bridge the gap between the physical and the spiritual. In one respect, we do this for life when we become aware that within our movement itself are the forces of those who, during their earthly lives, united soul and body with our movement and have passed through the gate of death. When we look toward the other bank of the stream, where they are active, and feel united with them and direct our thoughts toward them, we do so out of full consciousness—the consciousness we acquire through Spiritual Science. We know ourselves to be in the most living connection with those who have passed through the gate of death, and we know them to be the best forces among us. If we can do or think this, we regard life as a field of sowing. Amidst what we ourselves plant, we see everywhere within it those plants that sprout without our having been able to make them sprout ourselves. And then we can know: These plants are planted by those who are granted a place in the world of the spirit, those with whom we feel connected, with whom we become one.

[ 48 ] A brotherhood of humanity that includes even those who no longer possess a physical body—this will be the defining characteristic of this movement and of those who consider themselves members of it and will join it in the future. Other societies, founded solely on earthly matters, will remove many barriers between people. The barriers between the living and the dead will be increasingly removed by the movement that will unite those who wish to come together under the banner of Spiritual Science. Let us all carry this in our souls and take to heart as a lasting feeling precisely that characteristic which connects us to this spiritual movement that has become so dear to us.