The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] It must be emphasized again and again that the most essential point of our spiritual scientific endeavor is that which shows us how mere knowledge—insights that exist solely in ideas and concepts—must increasingly belong to times past, and how we must seek a form of knowledge—a synthesis of ideas and concepts, of sensations and impulses of the will—that becomes real life for us, that comes alive within us in the most profound sense of the word. It is necessary that we occasionally direct our reflection, our meditation, precisely toward this cardinal point of our endeavor. For the light that can radiate from this point will only be able to fully illuminate our souls if we return to it again and again in faithful reflection. It must surely be a heartfelt need for us—who wish to commit ourselves with heart and soul to a spiritual-scientific endeavor—in these serious times of ours, to translate that which can become real through insight into actual life, into the immediate life of the soul. We must do our part to ensure that everything that is merely theoretical insight, that is, purely scientific endeavor, is gradually and truly transformed into lived experience, so that it may be enriched from the spiritual world by that which enables it to become a lived experience. Otherwise, we are heading toward a time of spiritual desolation; for theories—mere scientific convictions—are capable of drying up the human soul and human life as a whole. But deeply, deeply rooted in our time is the belief that one must get by in life with convictions organized according to the model of scientific knowledge.

[ 2 ] The great events unfolding in our time should serve, in particular, as a call to those souls inclined toward spiritual science to truly come to terms with the difference between life and mere knowledge—between life and mere conviction formed according to a scientific model. We must make at least a small effort to arrive at a kind of self-knowledge—purely human self-knowledge; we must make this effort, we must reflect on just how deeply the demon of theoretical conviction currently dwells in human hearts. We must clearly direct the eye of the soul toward how this demon of theoretical conviction seeks to take root. And we will not make what anthroposophy is meant to be for us an innermost experience if we do not attempt this, if we do not turn our gaze toward facts that can, so to speak, surprise even the anthroposophist in his own inner life—facts that point out how far removed one is, when one surrenders oneself in this way to modern inner life, from the immediate experience of the spiritual, and how close one is to seeking a theoretical conviction. One must look such facts in the eye with complete impartiality.

[ 3 ] Ever since the grave events have swept across Europe and the world—and what I am about to mention is intended merely as an example—I have been able to speak in various places throughout the German-speaking world about experiences related to these serious times. I have, in fact, had the opportunity to do so here in Stuttgart as well. Here and there, I have spoken about such experiences. What was one of the consequences of discussing these experiences? One of the consequences was that people from other countries came to us with the request that what had been spoken within our German-speaking region be brought to them as well. This was often requested under the well-meaning assumption that the truth is, of course, the same for all people, and that conveying what is spoken in one place to another could readily serve to shed light on the truth in our difficult times. It has, after all, become fashionable within our spiritual movement to write down everything that is spoken—including that which is spoken out of the immediate impulse not only of the time but also of the place and the people to whom it is addressed—and to believe that this must serve everyone in the same way, because one makes the theoretical assumption that the truth can be formulated in only one way. Well, my dear friends, that nonsense—which consists in transcribing the spoken word exactly and believing that it still retains its content when it is read aloud or repeated here and there as a transcribed text—would grow into something monstrous if one were to believe what has just been suggested.

[ 4 ] If the things that the people of Europe and the world are currently facing could be expressed in words, then there would be no need for those immense rivers of blood that must flow today as a result of the eternal necessities of the Earth’s evolution. If it were readily possible for souls to understand one another through national aspirations, then they would not need to turn their cannons against one another. We must prove ourselves—with what has been described as the character of the experience, and with spiritual-scientific knowledge—precisely where it matters most: in facing this great gravity. To use occult truths in a playful manner for everyday spiritual needs cannot be the task of our spiritual-scientific endeavor. As long as we are unable to come to the understanding that spiritual forces are truly at work in the worldly phenomena we encounter on the physical plane, and that we need spiritual science to assess and penetrate the value and inner truth of these spiritual forces—as long as we are unable to do this, we have not yet established the proper relationship to our spiritual science.

[ 5 ] We must be clear about this: When we stand on purely anthroposophical ground, when we develop for our souls the high truths that touch the highest essence of the human being, then we stand on ground that is beyond all nationality, indeed even beyond all racial differences. If we stand firmly on the ground of what we can gain through spiritual insight into the human being, then the same truths apply throughout the entire globe, and indeed, within certain limits, to other planets in our solar system: as soon as we stand on this ground, as soon as we consider the highest thoughts concerning the human being. The situation is different when we consider matters from which something other than this highest essence of the human being speaks—and must speak: When peoples stand opposed to one another, we are not dealing with that which, in the human being, extends beyond all the distinctions of humanity. When peoples stand opposed to one another, it is not merely human beings but spiritual worlds that stand opposed to one another; it is such entities in spiritual worlds that stand opposed to one another—entities that act through human beings and live within them. And to believe that what must apply to human beings must also apply to that complex world of demons and spirits that acts through human beings when nations fight one another—to believe that one could discern, through simple human logic, what drives the demons against one another—means, after all, that one has not yet found faith in a concrete spiritual world.

[ 6 ] What do I mean by that? — Isn’t it true that when we look out now at what is happening out there in the outside world—leaving aside for the moment the actual, painful events of war—we find that people of different nationalities are pitted against one another? We find that one nationality sometimes overwhelms the other with its hatred in the most terrible way. Then people try to make sense of it all—that is, to ask themselves which side has more right to hate, this people or that people, or which one should be hated more than the other. People also reflect on which nation bears particular blame for this war. They ponder these matters much as one rightly does in a court of law, where one weighs the various circumstances. But what, fundamentally speaking, are we doing when we engage in what has just been described—and what dominates current literature—what are we doing then? In doing so, one denies all spiritual life, even if one does not wish to admit it, for one adheres to the dogma that those demons, for example, who have carried discord from the East into European life, are to be judged according to the model of reason—let us say, of understanding—that human beings possess. For one does not believe that there is any intellect or power of judgment other than that which human beings possess. Anything judged from a purely human standpoint in the face of such events that shake the very foundations of evolution is a denial of spiritual scientific life. We commit ourselves to true spiritual scientific life only when we realize that spiritual causes play out in physical events—causes that also necessitate a power of judgment different from that of the physical plane. When people with differing views fight one another on the physical plane, one might perhaps decide the matter according to human judgment. But this is not possible when nations fight one another, because invisible forces express themselves through national life. Inhuman beings, too, invisible forces do express themselves, but in such a way that they fit into human judgment. This is not the case in the life of nations, however. There, the point is precisely that we prove ourselves in our recognition of concrete spiritual life and realize that impulses entirely different from those that can be mastered by earthly reason are at work in the human soul when such great events unfold.

[ 7 ] When one reads this or that today—what is being said there and what is widely echoed even by those who claim to have received an impulse from spiritual science—one finds that much of it is written or spoken as if world history had only begun around July 20, 1914. Even when seeking the causes of the current complications, people speak as if they had begun just last year. Among many other things, spiritual science will have to yield the practical result that people will want to learn to form judgments not based on what the day immediately presents, but rather from the larger contexts. That will be the most fundamental step; the next step will consist in testing that judgment against what spiritual science is able to provide. Let us use an example to clarify how this spiritual science must bear fruit when it comes to contrasting our understanding with experience, and then making that experience our own.

[ 8 ] We have, after all, repeatedly emphasized that the development of the world—the development of the Earth—proceeds in distinct cultural periods during the post-Atlantean era. We have listed these cultural periods: the ancient Indian cultural period, the Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Greek-Latin, and then the one that is our own in the present; we have also pointed out that a sixth and a seventh epoch will have to succeed ours. However, we did not content ourselves with simply presenting a schematic overview of the succession of these cultural periods; rather, we attempted to characterize what is distinctive about each individual cultural period. And through this, we have sought to gain an understanding of our own time—of the transitional impulses that are alive in our time, in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We have also made it clear to ourselves that such characterizations are by no means meant to be schematic; for example, one cannot say that the distinctive features of this cultural epoch extend across the entire Earth. It manifests in certain places, while other parts of the world, other territories, lag behind. They do not necessarily have to lag behind, but they remain with old forces, so that these old forces can later be appropriately integrated into a different cultural epoch as evolution progresses. One need not even think in terms of value judgments, but only of distinctive characteristics. How could people fail to notice the profound difference—when it comes to spiritual culture—between, say, the European and Asian peoples? How could they fail to notice the differentiation linked to external skin color? When we look at the European-American nature and the Asian nature—setting aside all questions of value for the moment—we must recognize the difference that the Asian peoples have retained certain cultural impulses from past epochs of Earth’s history, while the European-American peoples have moved beyond these cultural impulses. Only those caught up in a not entirely healthy spiritual life can be particularly impressed by what Oriental humanity has preserved from ancient times as “Oriental mysticism”—a time when people had to live with lower clairvoyant powers. Such an unhealthy spiritual life has, however, taken hold in Europe in many ways; people have believed that they must learn the way to the spiritual worlds through Asian yoga and similar practices. This tendency, however, proves nothing other than an unhealthy soul life. A healthy soul life must be built upon the transformation of the experiences of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch into spiritual life and spiritual knowledge, and not upon the revival of anything within humanity that, while certainly interesting to understand from a scientific perspective, so to speak, must not be revived for European humanity without it falling back into times that are not appropriate for it. But other times will come in the course of Earth’s evolution—subsequent eras. In these subsequent eras, outdated forces will once again have to unite with advanced forces. Therefore, they must remain at some point in order to be present there, so that they can unite with the advanced forces. A sixth cultural epoch will follow the fifth. Abstract thinking—this dreadful abstract thinking, which is a daughter of purely theoretical-scientific conviction—cannot help but regard the sixth epoch as superior to the fifth, precisely because the sixth represents a later stage of development. We should, however, be clear that there are times of ascent and times of decline; we should be perfectly clear that the sixth epoch, which follows the fifth in the post-Atlantean era, must necessarily be part of the decline, and that what develops in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must be the seed for the earthly era that will in turn follow the seventh cultural epoch. One must view these things in such a living way, not abstractly or theoretically, so as to allow the sixth age—as a more perfect one—to follow the fifth—as an imperfect one.

[ 9 ] In the Atlantean epoch, the fourth cultural epoch was the one in which the seeds of our present time lay. In our own time, it is the fifth cultural epoch in which the seeds of what must follow the post-Atlantean epoch lie. And what is the defining characteristic that must develop particularly in this fifth cultural epoch? It is the characteristic that has been kindled above all by the Mystery of Golgotha: that the spiritual impulses have been brought down into the immediate physical-human realm, that, so to speak, the flesh must be seized by the spirit.

[ 10 ] "It has not yet happened. It will only have happened once spiritual science has gained a broader foothold on earth and many more people express it in their immediate lives—when the Spirit is expressed in every movement of the hand, in every movement of the finger, one might say, when it is expressed in the most everyday actions. But it was for the sake of this bringing down of spiritual impulses that Christ became incarnate in a human body. And this bringing down, this permeation of the flesh with the spirit—that is the defining characteristic of the mission, the mission of white humanity as a whole. Human beings have white skin for the reason that the Spirit works within the skin when it wishes to descend onto the physical plane. That which is the outer physical body becomes a vessel for the Spirit—this is the task of our fifth cultural epoch, which has been prepared by the other four cultural epochs. And our task must be to familiarize ourselves with those cultural impulses that show a tendency to introduce the spirit into the flesh, to introduce the spirit into everyday life. When we fully recognize this, we will also be clear about the fact that where the spirit is still meant to act as spirit—where it is, in a certain sense, meant to remain behind in its development — because in our time it has the task of descending into the flesh — that where it lags behind, where it takes on a demonic character, the flesh is not fully permeated, that white skin color does not appear because there are atavistic forces that prevent the spirit from coming into complete harmony with the flesh.

[ 11 ] In the sixth cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean era, the task will be, above all, to recognize the spirit as something that, so to speak, hovers more in the surroundings than within oneself; to acknowledge the spirit more in the elemental world, because this sixth cultural epoch has the task of preparing for the recognition of the spirit in the physical environment. This cannot be achieved easily unless ancient atavistic forces are preserved that recognize the spirit in its purely elemental life. But these things do not happen in the world without the fiercest struggles. White humanity is still on the path of absorbing the spirit ever more deeply into its own being. Yellow humanity is on the path to preserving those ages in which the spirit is kept at a distance from the body, in which the spirit is sought outside the human-physical organization, and only there. But this must lead to the transition from the fifth cultural epoch to the sixth cultural epoch taking place as nothing other than a fierce struggle between white humanity and colored humanity in the most diverse fields. And what precedes these struggles, which will take place between white and people of color, will occupy world history right up until the great struggles between white and people of color are fought out. Future events are often reflected in past events. For when we view what we have acquired through our various reflections from a spiritual-scientific perspective, we stand before something colossal that we can foresee as inevitably unfolding in the future.

[ 12 ] On the one hand, we have a portion of humanity whose mission is to introduce the spirit into physical life in such a way that the spirit permeates every aspect of physical life. And on the other hand, we have a portion of humanity that must, so to speak, now take on the task of descending development. This can only happen if those who truly commit themselves to the permeation of the physical by the spiritual generate cultural impulses—vital impulses that are enduring for the Earth, that cannot disappear from the Earth again. For what follows as the sixth and seventh cultural epochs must draw its spiritual sustenance from the creations of the fifth; it must take the creations of the fifth cultural epoch into itself. The fifth cultural epoch has the task of deepening external idealistic life into spiritual life. But what is thus conquered by idealism as spiritual life must later be received; it must live on. For in the East, people will not have the strength to productively bring forth a spiritual life of their own, but only to take in what has already been brought forth. Thus, history must unfold in such a way that the present humanity—which carries within itself the true cultural impulses—creates a spiritual culture that is the true historical successor to the fifth cultural epoch, and that this culture is assimilated by what follows.

[ 13 ] Let us try, quite objectively and without bias, to understand the difference between these two currents of humanity. Try to understand how, ever since the arrival of that part of humanity known as the Germanic peoples, there has been a struggle to infuse the outer physical realm with the spiritual, and how the depths of Christianity have been embraced. The starting point was the outer physical realm—that which, as it were, contained within the physical the seed of a physical-spiritual reality. Let us look back at the summer sacrifice, the solstice sacrifice to the god Baldur. Its true, deeper meaning was lost long ago, but what is that true, deeper meaning? It can only be understood by directing our gaze to how, with the rising spring sun, in the light and warmth, spiritual powers rise, just as the god of spring ascends, and how, with the lighting of the St. John’s Fire, human beings incline toward union with the forces of spring reigning within the forces of nature—how they light fires as a sign that they are uniting their understanding with the death of the god of spring at the summer solstice. This is the Baldur legend: The god Lenz burns in the solstice fire because people sensed the fruiting and sprouting in nature—in the outer, physical world—because they loved the god Lenz and followed him into his death. But this is because, as it were, they had in the outer, physical world the model of Christ, who does not die at the summer solstice, but is born at the winter solstice—note this contrast between the physical and the spiritual—because people had the model of the summer solstice god for the winter solstice god, because they had the physical as the opposite of the spiritual, that is why they imbued themselves with what was related and yet opposite. If the god Baldur is the god of spring who dies at the summer solstice, then the Christian God is the one who is born at the winter solstice. The one and the other interpenetrate like the physical, which plays out in the outer physical realm, interpenetrating with the spiritual, which is veiled by physical darkness, by the darkness of winter. The spirit of winter permeates the body of summer. And how do these things interpenetrate? In the immediate, personal struggle of cultural impulses. What, then, is the history of Central Europe if not a continuous struggle for the emergence of the divine spark in the personal soul, for the emergence of the spiritual within the physical? One may disregard everything else, but one must see through to the truth and recognize the characteristic nature of this Central European being.

[ 14 ] And consider the other part of humanity. How far removed it is, in essence, from this personal impulse of the spiritual striving upward within the physical! One might say: From a “natural history” perspective, it is extremely interesting to observe how Chinese culture has preserved its Taoist and Confucian religions, and how Asian religions in general have preserved their oldest forms—the most abstract forms— those forms in which the theoretical intellect feels so at home, but which are rigid in the face of personal experience—forms that do not allow personal experience to engage in a struggle, precisely because this personal experience is to be preserved until the time when what has been achieved is so incorporated into human culture that it can be assimilated. In the fifth cultural epoch, the spiritual must be attained through one’s own efforts; in the sixth cultural epoch, people will come and accept what has been worked out and achieved as their worldview, as their experience, but as something they have not attained themselves. They will be preserved within forces that do not struggle, but rather receive the spiritual as something external and self-evident. And the prelude to that much broader struggle is the one that must gradually develop as the struggle between the Germanic and Slavic worlds. One need only consider that the Slavic world is, in a certain sense, an outpost for what the sixth cultural epoch represents—indeed, that the very seed of the sixth cultural epoch lies within it. One need only consider this properly in a true, genuine, spiritual-scientific sense. Then one will realize that within this Slavic element there must lie something receptive, something that has nothing to do with this struggle, something that positively rejects the struggle itself. One can almost touch it with one’s hands. While in Central Europe souls have struggled—struggled with their inner selves—to attain a grasp of God through personal achievement, the Slavic element preserves the religion, the grasp of God, and the cult that simply already exists; it preserves; it does not bring the spirit to life within, but rather allows the spirit to drift over it like a cloud and lives within this cloud, remaining alien to the spirit through the personality.

[ 15 ] Central Europe could not remain stuck in any old form of external Christianity, because it had to struggle. The East has remained stagnant, and even its forms of worship have become rigid and abstract, because it is meant to prepare itself for external reception—for accepting what the West acquires through personal striving—since this East is not prepared to attain things through personal striving. And how can one bring about mutual understanding based on the model of purely theoretical reason when there are entirely different spiritual impulses at play? How can one reach any kind of arbitration between two distinct spiritual currents that behave exactly as differentiated entities must? Do not misunderstand the comparison: How can one determine—I might say, in an “elephant-like” manner—what is “lion-like” custom? Events, however, take shape out of eternal necessities and unfold as these eternal necessities flow. The East had to resist what was necessary for it and is becoming ever more necessary: the connection with the West and its culture. For, fundamentally speaking, it could not have been given the proper understanding before it had matured. And an outward expression of this is the conflict between what is called “Germanic culture” and what is called “Slavic culture”—that which, in essence, is only just beginning to take shape and will hover over European life as a long-standing source of unease: the clash between the Germanic and the Slavic. One might say that just as a child resists learning the achievements of the ancients, so the East resists the achievements of the West—resists them to the point of hating them, even when it feels compelled at times to accept those achievements. Shedding the light of truth on these matters requires something other than what people cherish today; although one sometimes senses this “other,” one is reluctant to turn one’s eyes toward these things and truly understand them from their innermost impulses. For if one is touched even slightly by these innermost impulses, much of the idle chatter soon ceases; what is accomplished—and what arises merely from confusion, the confusion that seeks to remain trapped in the outer Maya—must come to an end.

[ 16 ] What is to be understood by the sixth cultural epoch? It will be understood to mean a cultural epoch within which a large portion of the people of the East will have sacrificed their humanity to what has been achieved in folk culture, in that the Eastern, as it were, like a woman, will have allowed itself to be fertilized by the masculine West. What will live in the souls of the sixth cultural epoch will be the very same thing that was achieved by the souls of the fifth cultural epoch. This means that from the East, the immature and the unripe will surge forth, resisting what must inevitably come to pass. Just as the Greco-Roman world once had to resist the Germanic, so must the Slavic resist the Germanic; but just as the transition from the Greco-Roman to the Germanic occurred during the ascending phase of development, so does the transition from the Germanic to the Slavic occur during the descending phase. Since the true mission of the fifth cultural epoch was taken on by the Germanic element, it was this Germanic element that had to—and still must—incorporate into Earth’s evolution, through inner striving, the true understanding of Christianity for this fifth cultural epoch. And it would have been the greatest misfortune if, in the long run, the Germanic element had been defeated by the Roman one, for then what came about through the fifth cultural epoch could not have happened: this Germanic element was precisely meant to embody the personal struggle. And it would be the greatest misfortune if the Slavic element were ever to defeat the Germanic one. Note the difference. It would be the most bleak and abstract form of schematism to describe as a misfortune during the transition from the fifth to the sixth cultural epoch what one would have to describe as a misfortune during the transition from the fourth to the fifth cultural epoch. A Roman victory would have meant rendering the mission of the fifth cultural epoch impossible; a victory of the Slavic element would likewise mean this impossibility for the sixth cultural epoch. For the meaning of the sixth cultural epoch can consist only in the passive acceptance of that which the fifth cultural epoch brings forth.

[ 17 ] One must sense what follows from these insights—quite independently of ambitions or national aspirations—when these insights come to life. But one must also be clear about how difficult it becomes for people to understand when the truth contradicts their passions, when the truth contradicts their aspirations. If, for example, one tries today—from Central Europe—to convince a Western European or an Englishman through human reason, one is doing something whose futility one should recognize—truly recognize—as long as national antagonisms are involved. On the purely spiritual-scientific plane, we understand one another as human beings. But when one leaves this plane and enters into the realm of conflicts between nations, one should be clear about the difficulties that stand in the way of mutual understanding. There will be only one way for people in, say, the French West of Europe to gain an understanding of what one is actually doing. It is the path that will one day spring from the realization of how unnatural it actually is that the French West is now allowing itself to be driven forward on a leash by the European East. Only the realization of what one has done oneself will bring some understanding of the matter, but not the words that come from others—from those who stand on different national ground. Such things are sometimes sensed or intuited, but then forgotten again. For the most characteristic events that unfold are, as a rule, forgotten. If only it had been possible, over the past forty years, to reprint time and again that significant correspondence that once took place between Ernest Renan, the Frenchman, and David Friedrich Strauss, the German from Württemberg! It would have been useful if the key letters that were exchanged had been brought back to people’s attention, say, once every four weeks: one would then have sensed something of what was bound to come. One need only point to a single passage in one of Renan’s letters, where he expresses a longing to collaborate with Central Europe for the sake of Western European culture: that was an impulse that sprang from the forces of eternity. But then Renan immediately adds: “Yet that contradicts my patriotism.” For if Alsace-Lorraine is taken away from the French, then as a Frenchman I can only be in favor of protecting Western culture against the East. Everything that followed is already contained in the seed of such a statement; that is the seed of what would later come to pass. It simply shows that even an enlightened, educated mind, when it came down to it, openly admitted: Yes, I can see where the path lies, the one marked out by eternal necessities, but I do not wish to follow it, because I want to be more French than human. — I say that people have sensed, intuited, how things stand in the sense of eternal necessity; but through spiritual science one must gradually learn to follow these intuitions and feelings with one’s judgment. One must learn to truly arrive, through judgment, at the place where the real facts lie. And one cannot grasp the real facts without penetrating the spiritual world. One cannot do so unless one takes refuge in that which, from the spiritual world, gives the facts their evolutionary impulses.

[ 18 ] We see how what emerges from spiritual science can bear fruit for us, how we can shed light on life in its most serious events when we unite within our hearts what follows from genuine spiritual scientific knowledge—for example, regarding the post-Atlantean cultural epochs. There we gain an objective standard; there we gain the possibility of transcending personal aspirations, even on the delicate ground of national experience. And this is the distinctive feature of the Central European experience: that this Central European experience truly gives people the possibility of transcending what is merely national. One need only try to grasp how, in the successive cultural epochs, Central Europe in particular—in that struggle of the human soul in Central Europe—overcomes the personal within the personal, precisely where it does not stand on the ground of passions and immediate, instinctual impulses.

[ 19 ] Other peoples have certainly also sensed what beauty is: but only in Central Europe has anyone reflected as deeply on beauty and its place in human experience as Schiller did in his “Aesthetic Letters.” Other peoples have certainly waged struggles and will continue to do so: but to become so deeply immersed in a struggle that it evoked the deepest philosophical impulses—and to infuse that struggle with these impulses, as Fichte did in his “Addresses to the German Nation”—this has been done only in Central Europe. Religious struggles have also been waged elsewhere: but nowhere in the world were they so closely intertwined with all branches of human experience as was the case with the religious struggles in Central Europe.

[ 20 ] And take our anthroposophical movement itself—take it as we have developed it among ourselves, as at least some of us have struggled, fought, and also suffered within it in recent years. For a time, we were associated with the Theosophical Movement of the English school. What, then, was the deep impulse that prevented this association with that Theosophical Movement from continuing? Let us be clear about this, my dear friends: what was the deep impulse? Just look at the movement. What could have led to that absurdity surrounding Krishnamurti and similar follies? It has led to the conviction of spiritual life being attached to the rest of the culture as an external element. These are two distinct things: there is England’s external view of life and its philosophical view of life, and then, attached to them—without the two having much to do with one another—is a spiritual conviction. There is not even a need to interweave the two. Here we sense that we can only arrive at a spiritual conviction if it grows out of us, so to speak, like the head growing out of the body—growing out of all that was driven by Johannes Tauler, Meister Eckhart, and Angelus Silesius in medieval mysticism—and through the spiritual groundwork laid by German philosophy and German poetry—when what we want and must want necessarily grows out of it like a new organic limb. We cannot simply attach spiritual life to the rest; we need a living organism, not a living mechanism. One can make such things clear to oneself without falling into arrogance, for one needs clarity about how the spiritual must be embedded within life, and how one can grasp and embrace the rest of life through the spiritual. As adherents of the spiritual-scientific worldview, we must be able to become souls who will in the way that is required in Central European spiritual life, in accordance with the characterization just given. Certainly, this, too, involves a struggle; indeed, it is precisely this that makes one want to say: The truth must first be attained by pushing the errors to both sides of the path. — How difficult it is sometimes to recognize that one must push the errors to both sides of the path! One has had tragic experiences in this regard over the past few decades.

[ 21 ] I would like to illustrate something for you. It is particularly significant right now to highlight how the natural connection between these two Central European countries has emerged in our time. — In Austria, during the second half of the 19th century, lived one of the most German of poets, Robert Hamerling. He was also German in that he truly sought to give birth to the entire world anew within his own soul. In his *Ahasver in Rome*, he traces the errant human soul back to Cain, and in the juxtaposition of Ahasver with Nero, he sought to unravel the profound mysteries of the human soul. In his *Aspasia*, he sought to give birth anew to Greek cultural life from within the German soul. He sought to resolve for himself, as a mystery of life, the depth of religious life that had been sought at a certain time in his Anabaptist epic *The King of Zion*. He attempted to clarify for himself the driving forces behind the French Revolution in his drama *Danton and Robespierre*. And finally, he sought to elucidate the impulses reaching into the future and overwhelming the spiritual in his *Homunculus*. But I could cite many examples to show how Robert Hamerling was truly a Central European, a German spirit. This Robert Hamerling spent a large part of his life in bed; for the last three decades, he was almost always ill. He wrote his greatest works while lying in bed in pain. Yet one would never guess from these works that they were written by a seriously ill man. Everything is sound; one may judge them however one likes, but everything is sound. Certainly, the works have gone through a large number of editions; but in the 1880s—I could say that it appeared before my eyes, almost symbolically vivid, what such a spirit could have become for a part of Central European humanity if his impulses had flowed into people’s souls. Once, when we were discussing in a gathering precisely such matters as those that entered into the development of the spirit through Robert Hamerling, a man walked in who was accustomed to listening mainly to himself and paying little attention to what others said—there are, after all, such people who like to hear themselves speak. As if with a bombshell, he declared: the greatest thing to enter humanity was Dostoevsky’s “Raskolnikov”! Certainly, one need not underestimate the unique greatness of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, but this clinging to the material, to the soul that is trapped in the material and leaves the spiritual outside—this stands in stark contrast to the interpenetration of the spiritual and the material that Hamerling sought. It may certainly be more interesting and sensational to contemplate the soul that refuses to emerge from the material world—a soul that Dostoevsky portrays so magnificently—but for the Central European, recognizing the interpenetration of the spiritual and the physical means recognizing his entire being and his entire purpose. Here, too, a struggle must be waged,

[ 22 ] The external struggle will be joined by an internal one—that inner struggle against the resistant forces that are rebelling against the recognition of the spiritual. We are already experiencing the strangest of circumstances: On the one hand, we are being warned not to pay too much attention to how the spiritual forces in Europe currently stand in opposition to one another; for if the purely German side were to prevail—we have been warned from the German side! — then one would have to fear a resurgence of the very ideas produced by Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, and Goethe: one would have to fear metaphysical daydreaming. — It is a peculiar fear that is being spoken of here; but this fear could grow ever greater, and those who harbor this fear will certainly not be able to accept the spiritual. In truth, however, it must be recognized that the idealism of Central Europe, just as a child grows into a man, must develop into spiritualism; for this idealism of Central Europe is the child of spiritualism, the child that is to become spiritualism. When Fichte spoke, he spoke only of idealism, but of a kind of idealism that strives toward spiritualism. This impulse of spiritualism must not disappear from the evolution of the Earth.

[ 23 ] With these simple words, one can express much of the spirit of the times. Individual people have, after all, sensed and felt such things. But these intuitions pass by without being grasped in their depth, without their significance being recognized. We fail to connect the secondary with the primary. And that is what matters: not losing sight of the broad outlines, truly seeing what is essential in the currents that flow through Earth’s evolution. And we arrive at what is most essential when we allow ourselves to be instructed by what this Earth evolution reveals to us in the light of the spirit. In the specific case where we truly take the teaching of the successive post-Atlantean cultural epochs seriously—it must be said again and again—people should move beyond that narrow perspective which cannot see the main point.

[ 24 ] Let me give an example. Among ourselves, it is necessary to draw attention to such matters. Let us suppose that someone were to say the following today, and let us then try to consider what it would mean if someone were to say that today: As for me, I have not a moment’s doubt that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic worlds is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the East—specifically Turkey—or by the ethnic strife in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will assume leadership on one side in this conflict. This power is already preparing for this eventuality; the Russian nationalist press is spewing fire and brimstone against Germany. The German press is already sounding its warning. A long time has passed since Russia regrouped after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now deemed expedient in St. Petersburg to take up the Eastern Question once again.

[ 25 ] If the Mediterranean were ever to become, to use an expression that is more pompous than true, “a French lake,” Russia has the even more concrete intention of turning the Black Sea into a “Russian lake” and the Sea of Marmara into a “Russian pond.” That Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia is a fixed objective of Russian policy, which finds its basis of support in their shared religion and in Pan-Slavism. The Danube would then be closed off at the Iron Gate, as it were, by the Russian barrier. —

[ 26 ] Let’s suppose someone were to speak that way. One might then say: Well, then he has just been taught a lesson by what has happened—and those who emphatically preach that the war was desired only by Central Europe and did not necessarily develop from the East might, after all, be right. — But that was written in 1870! And in any case, not a single year has passed in which something like that could not have been written. How foolish it is to believe that one need not look to the forces at work over long periods of time for the cause of what is happening today! These words were written in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. To believe that things did not have to come to pass, and to believe that not all the impulses originated in the East, is—to put it mildly—unhistorical; it is a failure to recognize all that constitutes truly effective forces. It simply must not be allowed—and spiritual science must prevent it—that people, including journalists, time and again judge as if the beginnings of the events now unfolding had only taken shape five or six months ago! If people are trained through spiritual science to know that the great is prepared in the small, and that the small can only be judged from the perspective of the great, then something from spiritual science can also be gained for ordinary life; then what spiritual science enables us to experience will be prepared within this ordinary life.

[ 27 ] I wanted to speak—indeed, I might say I had to speak to you in today’s introductory lecture, once again from a certain perspective that has been called into question by the events of our time—I had to speak about what spiritual science is meant to be for us in assessing the world and our relationship to it. I had to speak about this. Fundamentally, we must allow ourselves to be reminded again and again: to take seriously—deeply seriously—what spiritual science seeks to give us, and not to want to live, so to speak, two lives: the life in which we explain the things of the world to ourselves in the spirit of spiritual science, and the life in which we, in turn, become absorbed in everyday life and do things just like everyone else. But less through words than through the way I have set out these things here in this smaller circle, I would like to evoke in you the feeling and sense that these words truly are nothing other than eternal truths—in the sense that eternal truths are also the most individual ones. These words are addressed to you, my dear friends, with your feelings here in southern Germany, with that nuance of feeling that these words must have here. And if it were enough for these words to simply be transcribed and read aloud everywhere to people with different life contexts, then it would indeed suffice for me to merely write down my words and not travel around. We must finally recognize in our spiritual life that these words must be spoken from a context of feeling and sensation, because wherever people come together, there is a shared human aura from which they must be spoken. What matters is that we bring these things to life—not that we merely pay lip service to the idea that we must bring them to life, but that we truly bring them to life. And this includes taking them truly individually. After all, things happen individually because they must happen individually. And it is an abstract belief to assume, for example, that what I will say the day after tomorrow in a public lecture in that building across from the one where the memorial plaque for Hegel is located—that what is contained within the living, immediate, individual—is meant to speak abstractly to all nuances of feeling, as it were, to convert the whole world. One must also realize that what one person can grasp, another cannot. And if anthroposophical lectures must already bear a certain individual character here and there, this is even more the case when one is faced with matters as serious as those we are dealing with now. But only when one takes the truth seriously, and when one does not believe that what is alive can be captured in words that are lifeless and unmoving—and can therefore be carried everywhere—only then will one understand precisely that which is universally valid, which lies within the most individual of things. I would like you to reflect on this aspect of life as well. It will be a way for what I, in my own way, must draw from the spiritual world to come alive in your own souls in your own way—so that it is not merely a repetition of what must arise within me in my own way. For just as sunlight is reflected differently in every little stone and yet is always the same sunlight—because it is present within life itself—so spiritual science must become something that lives differently in each individual and yet is always and forever the same. Spiritual science cannot live in the same way within an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Russian, or a German when it comes to national matters, and what most fruitfully enlivens one person’s sensibility cannot be used to convert another. Such a craving for conversion arises from the theoretical tendency of our time. What external, purely material science can do—namely, to treat everything with a one-size-fits-all approach—cannot be the case with the spiritual, because it is a living reality, and because I must speak to you not as an abstract scientific mind demands of me, but as it comes alive within me precisely as I stand before you. For it is not from my heart, but from your hearts, that I do this, as best I can. And I wish to serve the impulse of spiritual science, which instructs those who can look up into the spiritual world to set themselves aside and give voice to what lies in the depths of the souls of those who are listening to them. In a certain sense, it may be said: What is expressed in this or that reflection springs from the depths of the listeners’ souls. Please reflect on this as well! We must regard spiritual science as something that lives, and not as something known in an abstract sense. Abstract knowledge appeals to our pride, to our stubbornness, which so readily expresses itself through the art of persuasion. What is spiritual simply wants to be shared. And what I have to share would want to be shared, even if not a single person were sitting here who believed a single word I said. If we approach another person with the intention of persuading them at all costs, with the expectation that they should accept our opinion, then we are not experiencing the spiritual in a true sense. And this experience—this grasping of the spiritual world through direct experience—will give rise to the aura that humanity must possess in the future.

[ 28 ] It must be said again and again: What we are now witnessing—these rivers of blood—will mean for humanity only what it is meant to mean when something truly new emerges, even in culture and in humanity itself. But this new reality will spring forth when there are people from whose souls spiritual thoughts arise; these thoughts are forces. And into the atmosphere that will be created once the twilight of war has passed and the sun of peace shines again, the thoughts that pour into the spiritual horizon must flow. Then those whose souls look down—those who had to leave their bodies prematurely on the battlefields—will know why they actually fell on the battlefields. And the anthroposophist must tell himself that he is living through this time in the true sense only if he takes this character of spiritual scientific endeavor to heart. When certain souls, in the consciousness of the spirit, send their meaning into the spirit realm, then a horizon of light for the future development of humanity will truly rise from our horizon of blood.

[ 29 ] We will continue this discussion tomorrow, focusing on a specific topic. For today, however, let us turn our thoughts to the serious events of our time:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the forsaken,
From the sacrifices of the people
The fruit of the spirit grows—
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Direct their minds toward the spirit realm.