The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Today I would like to introduce a kind of historical reflection into the course of our discussions—not so much to present this as a historical reflection in and of itself, to draw something out of history, so to speak, but rather because the reflection we intend to undertake can bring us closer to various aspects of the intellectual climate of the present, the intellectual climate that immediately surrounds us.

[ 2 ] It was in 1775 that a very remarkable book was published in Lyon, a book that very soon—as early as 1782—found its way into certain circles of German intellectual life, and whose impact is much greater than is commonly believed; but whose impact was, above all, such that it had to be more or less suppressed precisely by that which constitutes the principal impetus of nineteenth-century intellectual development. The book is of the utmost interest precisely to those who wish to gain an understanding, from a spiritual-scientific perspective, of what has actually taken place from recent times right up to the present day. I am referring to the book *Des erreurs et de la vérité* by Saint-Martin. If anyone were to pick up this book today—whether in its original language or in the German edition prepared by Matthias Claudius of the *Wandsbecker Bote*, which is accompanied by a beautiful foreword by Matthias Claudius—it would, in essence, be extraordinarily difficult for modern readers to understand, indeed, even for Matthias Claudius—that is, even for people at the end of the eighteenth century—it was already somewhat difficult to understand, as Matthias Claudius himself admits. He says in his—as I mentioned—very beautifully written preface: “Most people will not understand this book. I don’t really understand it either. But its content has touched my heart so deeply that I believe it must be made accessible to the widest possible audience.” — In particular, those who base their worldview on the physical, chemical, and other concepts—without, of course, possessing even a hint of scholarship in these matters—that are acquired today through school or general education will find the content of this book completely incomprehensible. Nor will anyone be able to make sense of the book if they derive their current—how shall we call it?—let’s say worldview, so as not to touch on the word “politics”—from ordinary newspapers or from what is reflected in the magazines surrounding these newspapers, which mirror today’s education.

[ 3 ] There are several reasons why I am speaking to you today—now that the two public lectures from last Thursday and last Saturday have passed—in connection with this book. In those two lectures, I spoke about the nature and structure of the human being, about the connection between the human soul and the human body—in the sense that we will one day speak of this connection when the scientific findings that are already available today, but which we are currently unable to make full use of, are viewed in the proper light. It must be the conviction of the spiritual scientist who truly understands spiritual science that, once the findings of natural science have been properly applied, we will no longer speak of the relationships between the life of imagination, the life of feeling, and the life of will to the human organism in the same way as we still do today. That is why I also believe that the content of these two lectures marks the beginning of what must come—a process that may take a long time in the outer world, given the great resistance that scientists, though not science itself, offer to such ideas. Even if it takes a long time, it will nevertheless come to pass that the relationship between the human soul and the human body will be viewed in the manner outlined in these two lectures.

[ 4 ] Now, in these two lectures of mine, I have spoken in the way that one simply—I would say—must speak about these things in the year 1917. By this I mean the way one must speak after taking into account all that has gone before in terms of scientific research and other relevant human experiences. One could not have spoken about all these things in this way, for example, in the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, one would have spoken about all these things quite differently. People simply do not always take sufficiently into account the immense significance of what I have often elaborated on: that around the end of the first third of the nineteenth century—in the 1830s and 1840s—an extraordinarily severe crisis occurred, spiritually speaking, in the development of European humanity. I have often characterized this by saying: At that time, the tide of materialism was reaching its peak. And I have, in fact, discussed this frequently and drawn attention to the fact that one very often hears the trite saying: “Our time is a transitional era!” Of course, every era is a transitional period, and the statement “Our time is a transitional period” is extraordinarily trite, because every era is one. But the point is not simply to note that any given era is a transitional period; rather, what matters is to determine what the transition consists of. Then, however, one will come to certain turning points in history that represent profound transitions in human development. And one such profound transition in human development—even if it goes unnoticed today—occurred at the specified point in time. It must therefore be understandable that, when it comes to the mysteries that directly concern human beings, we must speak today in entirely different words and with entirely different turns of phrase; in a sense, we must approach these matters from entirely different perspectives than was possible in the eighteenth century.

[ 5 ] In the eighteenth century, perhaps no one drew attention as intensely to the scientific ideas of the time—regarding questions very similar to those we are discussing here—as Saint-Martin did. However, with everything he says, Saint-Martin does not stand—as we do now, at the dawn of a new era—but rather he stands at the twilight of the old era and speaks from the twilight of the old era. So that, were it not for the perspective I will discuss shortly, it might seem almost irrelevant today whether one engages with Saint-Martin at all, or whether one truly internalizes this peculiar elaboration of the ideas inspired by Jakob Böhme as found in Saint-Martin. It might, I say, seem irrelevant, were it not for a very different, profoundly significant perspective that I will mention in the course of today’s discussion.

[ 6 ] Saint-Martin speaks to highlight certain specific points, attempting to explain the errors to which people may be subject in their worldview, and what the paths to truth might be— “Des erreurs et de la vérité” is, after all, the title of his book—he speaks in such a way that he handles certain concepts and ideas, which were commonplace within certain circles well into the eighteenth century, in the most appropriate manner conceivable. He speaks in such a way that one can see he is fully immersed in the handling of these concepts and ideas. Thus we find that, as Saint-Martin sets out to consider the relationship of human beings to the entire cosmos and to moral life, he employs the three main ideas that also played such a major role in the thought of Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus—the three main ideas through which people at that time sought to understand nature and human beings: Mercury, Sulfur, Salt. Through these three elements—mercury, sulfur, and salt—people in those days sought to gain the key to understanding external nature and to understanding human beings. Just as these ideas were used back then, people today—who would speak in the same sense as a contemporary natural scientist—cannot possibly handle them in the same way anymore, because it is simply impossible to think of the same thing when hearing the three words “mercury,” “sulfur,” and “salt” as a person of the eighteenth century did. Back then, when speaking of Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt, people posited a trinity that people today, when speaking with scientific insight, will only be able to correctly re-establish if they divide the human being as I have done: into the metabolic human, the respiratory human, and the nervous human, from which the whole human being appears to be composed. For everything belongs in some way to one of these three components. And if one thinks it does not belong to any of them—as might be the case with bones—that would only be an illusion. Yet people of the eighteenth century likewise understood that the entire human being can be comprehended if one has a comprehensive conception of mercury, sulfur, and salt. Now, of course, when today’s “day-time person” or even the chemist speaks of salt, they are referring to the white grains on the table or to the salts the chemist processes in their laboratory. When speaking of sulfur, the average person thinks of matches, and the chemist thinks of all the experiments he has conducted with the retort and the collecting flask regarding the transformation of sulfur. When it comes to mercury, one thinks of ordinary mercury, and so on.

[ 7 ] That was not how people of the eighteenth century thought. And even today it is difficult to imagine what was going on in the mind of such a person from the eighteenth century when he spoke of mercury, sulfur, and salt. In his own way, Saint-Martin also posed the question at that time: How do I structure the human being if I regard his physicality as a reflection of his soul? And he said: I first consider the human being in relation to the instruments, the organs of his thinking—he expresses this somewhat differently, but we must interpret it a little; otherwise, the discussion would take too long—I first consider the human being in relation to the organs of his head. What is the main thing there? What comes into consideration? What is actually the active agent in the head—we would say today, in the nervous system? He says: salt. And by “salt” he does not mean, first of all, the white grains, nor what chemists understand by “salt,” but rather the sum of those forces that act primarily in the human head when a person imagines. And everything that constitutes the external effect of salt, he regards only as a manifestation, as an external revelation of the very same forces that otherwise act within the human head. Then he asks: Which element acts primarily in the human chest? In my outline of the human being from last Thursday, we would ask: What is at work in the respiratory human? Saint-Martin says: Sulfur is at work there. Thus, everything connected with the functions of the chest is, according to Saint-Martin, under the influence of those actions that have their origin in sulfur and sulfurous substances. And then he asks: What is at work in the rest of the human being? Today we would say: in the metabolic human. And he says: “Mercury is at work there.” — And now, in his own way, he has brought the whole human being together. Admittedly, in the way he speaks now, in the way he sometimes throws things together, one can see that he stands in the twilight of this entire system of thought. But on the other hand, one sees that, even as he stands in the twilight, he has still taken on an immense wealth of colossal truths that were understood back then and are now buried; truths he can express by working with what is contained in the three concepts of Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt. Thus, in his book *Des erreurs et de la vérité*, he offers a very beautiful treatise—which, of course, is complete nonsense to today’s physicist—a very beautiful treatise on thunderstorms, lightning, and thunder, in which he shows how, on the one hand, one can use mercury, sulfur, and salt to explain the human body to people; and on the other hand, how one can use mercury, sulfur, and salt in their interaction to explain such atmospheric phenomena. In one case, these elements interact within the human being; in the other, they interact out in the world. Within the human being, they produce that which perhaps shines forth as a thought or an impulse of the will; out in the world, the same elements produce, for example, lightning and thunder.

[ 8 ] As I said, what Saint-Martin explains there is, for the eighteenth century, something that anyone immersed in the mindset of that time can still fully understand. For today’s physicist, it is complete nonsense. But when it comes to lightning and thunder, modern physics has—I would say—a certain catch. For modern physics tends to take the easy way out when it comes to explaining these phenomena. For example, one must teach that lightning is produced, followed by thunder, when the electrical charges between two clouds—one positively charged, the other negatively charged—balance each other out. A schoolboy who might be a bit cheeky—and who has just seen how the teacher, when conducting electrical experiments, carefully wipes away all moisture so that the instruments are dry, because electricity doesn’t work that way when moisture is present—might say: “Yes, but teacher, the clouds are so damp—how can the electricity work inside them the way you’re describing?” — To which the teacher would reply: “You’re a silly boy; you don’t understand!” — For he would hardly know what else to say today.

[ 9 ] Saint-Martin attempts to explain how the mercurial and the sulfurous can be bound in a particular way by the salt in the air, and seeks to demonstrate how, in a manner similar to how saltpeter and sulfur are bound in gunpowder by charcoal, explosions can result from a specific reaction between the mercurial and the sulfurous with the aid of salt. And this discussion, in the context of the time and using the terminology of the day regarding the mercurial, the sulfurous, and the salty, is extraordinarily insightful. Now, I cannot go into further detail, but we do want to consider the matter more from a historical perspective. And in particular, Saint-Martin beautifully demonstrates how, with certain properties of the air after a thunderstorm, the peculiar relationship between lightning and salt—which he calls “salt”—is confirmed. In short, Saint-Martin combats, in his own way, the materialism that was just beginning to take hold, drawing upon the foundation of traditional wisdom, which found in him an immensely significant interpreter. In doing so, Saint-Martin strives for a comprehensive explanation of the world and, after offering such explanations—in which he employed the elements we have just discussed—moves on to an explanation of the formation of the Earth. In this, he is not as foolish as later thinkers, who believe in the primordial nebula and think that one can reach the beginning of the world through physical concepts; rather, when seeking to explain the primordial formation of the Earth, he immediately turns to imaginations. And we find a marvelous abundance of imaginative concepts in the aforementioned book, where he seeks to speak of the Earth’s formation—real imaginations that, just like his physical concepts, can only be understood within the context of his own era. We would no longer be able to use the same imaginations today, but they show that, from a certain point onward, he sought to grasp things through imaginative cognition.

[ 10 ] Then, after attempting this, he moves on to understanding human life as it unfolds in history. And there he seeks to establish that historical life can only be understood by recognizing that, from time to time, truly spiritual impulses have indeed intervened from the spiritual world into the world of the physical plane here. He then attempts to apply all of this to the deeper nature of the human being by showing how what biblical legend portrays as the Fall from Paradise is, according to his imaginative insight, based on specific facts—namely, how the human being has transitioned from a primordial state to his present condition. He now attempts to understand the historical phenomena of his time—and of historical time in general—as it were, from the perspective of the fall of spiritual life into matter. — All of this is not meant to be defended, but merely described. Of course, I do not intend to substitute Saint-Martin’s teachings for spiritual science, our anthroposophy; I merely wish to recount history in order to show how Saint-Martin proceeded in those days.

[ 11 ] Throughout all of this, we come across a remarkable observation time and again, chapter after chapter, in the book *Des erreurs et de la vérité*. For when one picks up Saint-Martin’s book, one sees that he speaks from a rich store of knowledge, and that what he offers—I would say—are merely the outermost tendrils of a knowledge that lives within his soul. But he also alludes to this in several places throughout his book. He says something like this: “If I were to go even deeper at this point, I would have to speak truths that I am not permitted to speak.” At one point he even says: “If I were to finish speaking here, I would have to speak truths that, for the majority of people, are best shrouded in the deepest darkness of the night.” — The true spiritual scientist knows exactly what to make of all these remarks and also understands why they appear at specific points in certain chapters. There are simply certain things that cannot be discussed under all circumstances. It will only be possible to speak about certain things once the impulses provided by spiritual science have become moral impulses; once people have attained a certain nobility of spirit through spiritual science, so that one can speak about certain questions differently than in an age in which peculiar scientific figures roam about—I need only recall Freud and his ilk. But these things will indeed be achieved.

[ 12 ] In the last third of his book, Saint-Martin moves on to discussing certain political matters. In our present day, it is hardly possible to even hint here at how one should relate the way Saint-Martin thought back then to the way humanity, well, let’s say, “thinks” now. For it is, after all, forbidden to speak of such things. I can only say that the entire stance Saint-Martin adopts in this final third of his book is an extraordinarily peculiar one. When reading this chapter today, one must always bear in mind: This chapter was published along with the entire book in 1775; the French Revolution did not occur until after this chapter had been written. One must consider this chapter in the context of the French Revolution; one must read this very chapter by truly reading between the lines. But Saint-Martin proceeds, I would say, as an occultist. Anyone who lacks the capacity to recognize the deep impulses present in this very chapter by Saint-Martin will likely find the introduction Saint-Martin provides to this chapter quite satisfying. For in this chapter, Saint-Martin says: Let no one, under any circumstances, believe that I wish to offend anyone. Anyone who has anything to do with the ruling powers of the earth, anyone involved in any way in government affairs, must not, under any circumstances, believe that I am offending them. I am a friend to everyone, everyone, everyone.—But after this disclaimer has been made, he nevertheless says things against which Rousseau’s remarks are truly child’s play. Well, I cannot speak further about these things either.

[ 13 ] In short, we are dealing with a man of profound significance, who was the product of a particular school of thought, and without whom Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and German Romanticism are inconceivable—just as he himself is inconceivable without Jakob Böhme. And yet, when one reads him today, when one allows his words to sink in, it is just as I have just said: It would be of no value whatsoever to address the audience in Saint-Martin’s style—as I did last Thursday and Saturday, and as I will do again next Thursday—by attempting to outline a worldview that, on the one hand, fully does justice to the foundations of the humanities and, on the other hand, also fully does justice to even the most meticulous scientific discoveries of our time. Saint-Martin’s mode of thought simply no longer fits into the way one must think today, or the way one must rightly formulate things today. Just as for someone who moves from one linguistic region to another, the language of the first region no longer fits, but rather that of the second, so it would be nonsense today to attempt to discuss things using Saint-Martin’s thought forms; and it is nonsense primarily because there lies between us and them that immense dividing line in intellectual development, which falls in the year 1842—that is, at the end of the first third of the nineteenth century.

[ 14 ] As you can see from this: In the spiritual development of humanity lies the possibility of entering the twilight with a certain way of thinking. But when one delves into Saint-Martin, one does not get the feeling that everything has already been extracted from it. This is by no means the case; on the contrary, one has the feeling that there is such an immense wealth of untapped treasures of wisdom within it that a great deal could still be drawn from it. And yet, on the other hand, it is necessary that, as humanity’s spiritual development progresses, this way of thinking cease and another begin. This is the situation. For with the other way of thinking, the outer world is still very much in its infancy; it has only just reached its most extreme materialistic phase. Therefore, one will only be able to truly understand what has actually happened when one surveys longer periods of time, during which what spiritual science seeks to inspire today has unfolded over a longer span. For, of course, what Saint-Martin expressed at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was still in its dawn, also appeared differently than it does today.

[ 15 ] Now, back then, during that entire period, something had indeed come to an end. Not only has it come to an end in the sense that concepts such as those mastered by Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, Saint-Martin, and others—even in the relatively later twilight period—can no longer be applied; not only has that happened, but something very significant has also occurred in terms of sensibility. If, I might say, the human spirit more attuned to nature is particularly vividly revealed to us in relation to this twilight phenomenon in Saint-Martin, the same phenomenon manifests itself in a somewhat different way when we turn our gaze to a phenomenon occurring almost in parallel in time—the twilight of theosophy, the fading, fading of the theosophical worldview. Certainly, Saint-Martin is also commonly called a theosophist, but when I characterize Saint-Martin now, I mean a form of theosophy oriented more toward the natural sciences; and what I now wish to characterize is a more religious form of theosophy, which was called theosophy back when it prevailed. It did, however, prevail in this particularly precise form, so that it reached a high point in—well, one cannot even really say “Southern Germany”—in Swabia, where, amidst this general era of theosophical decline—which nevertheless attained its particular maturity precisely during this twilight era—two figures stand out among the various others: Bergel and Oetinger. They are surrounded by a whole host of others. I will mention only those with whom I am more closely acquainted: Friedrich Daniel Schubart, the mathematician Hahn, then Steinhofer, then the schoolmaster Hartmann, who had a great influence on Jung-Stilling, also exerted a certain influence on Goethe, and was even personally acquainted with Goethe, then Johann Jakob Moser — a large number of distinguished minds in relatively modest positions, who did not even form a cohesive circle, but who all lived during the time when Oetinger’s star was also shining. Oetinger was, after all, the one who lived through almost the entire eighteenth century. He was born in 1702 and died in 1782 as a prelate in Murrhardt; a most remarkable figure, in whom, in a certain sense, was concentrated what took place within this entire circle.

[ 16 ] An echo of this eighteenth-century theosophy was then provided by Richard Rothe, who taught at other universities as well but primarily at Heidelberg; he wrote a very fine preface to a book edited by Carl August Auberlen on “The Theosophy of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger”; in this preface, Richard Rothe—who, after all, represents an echo that has preserved the traditions of this circle— draws, out of his theosophical conviction, on the one hand, still recalls the theosophy of those great theosophers whose names I have just mentioned; on the other hand, however, he speaks in such a way that one can clearly recognize how Richard Rothe himself feels—that he stands behind a period of twilight, even with regard to those mysteries of life that he, as a theologian, has in mind. And so Richard Rothe speaks about Oetinger in this preface. And I would like to read a passage from this preface to you here. The preface itself was written in 1847. I would like to read it to you so that you can see how Richard Rothe—who was in Heidelberg at the time—was a person who looked back on Oetinger and who still saw in Oetinger a person who strove, above all, to read the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments in his own way; but to read them with a theosophical understanding of the world. And Richard Rothe looks back on this particular way of reading Scripture and compares it to the way he himself had learned to read it—he died only in his sixties, after all; he is an echo of that era—and to the way it was customary around him. He compares this way of reading Scripture with what Bengel, Oetinger, Steinhofer, the mathematician and astronomer Hahn, and others strove for.

[ 17 ] Richard Rothe says some very strange things:

“Among the men of this school of thought—to which Bengel, with his apocalyptic views, certainly belongs—Oetinger stands at the forefront. Dissatisfied with the academic theology of his time, he thirsts for a richer and fuller—and, precisely for that reason, of course, also purer—understanding of Christian truth. Orthodox theology does not satisfy him; it strikes him as insipid. He demands more than it offers—not because it places too great a burden on his faith, but because his profound spirit requires more than it has to give. It is not its “supernaturalism”—the supernaturalism of conventional theology—that offends him, but rather the fact that it does not take the supernatural seriously enough. The spiritualism familiar to it—which reduces the realities of the world of the Christian faith to pale abstractions, to mere mental images—repels him in the depths of his soul. Hence his fiery zeal against all idealism...»

[ 18 ] Such a statement might seem strange, but one must understand it. After all, Germans understand idealism to be a system that exists only in ideas, whereas Oetinger—and Rothe along with him—sought a genuine intellectual life: real minds that drive history forward, not what the Rankes and then all the others have portrayed with their pale ideas as so-called historical ideas. As if ideas—well, one can’t quite find the right word when one wants to speak “realistically”—could simply wander through history and thereby move things forward. These people wanted to replace the abstract and lifeless with the living. “Hence his fiery zeal against all idealism, his realism—which, admittedly, though contrary to his intention, veered toward materialism—and his energetic insistence on ‘massive’ concepts.”

[ 19 ] These are concepts that truly grasp the spiritual realm—concepts that do not speak of an ideal archetype underlying things, but rather seek the spirits—substantial thoughts and concepts.

“His inclination toward nature and the natural sciences is also closely linked to this fundamental scientific orientation of his. The contemptuous disregard with which the idealist so readily treats nature was foreign to him; he sensed a real existence behind its crude materiality and was deeply imbued with the conviction that without nature there could be no true—and therefore no real—existence anywhere, whether divine or created. It is surprising—and serves as a new legitimation of the historical validity of the movement we are discussing here—how, in this thirst for a genuine understanding of nature, not only in our Oetinger but also in the earlier and contemporary Protestant theosophers, most powerfully in Jakob Böhme, the original scientific tendency of the Reformation era—as it is manifested in his philosophical endeavors—breaks through anew. “Such realism, for which Oetinger yearned, is inherent in the very essence of Christianity,” says Richard Rothe, “but when grafted onto a different school of thought, it must always endure dilutions, and most of all in its most distinctive doctrinal points. It is then also capable of sustaining a Christian world of miracles that is rich in a wholly different way than the idealism instilled in us all from childhood, which is everywhere plagued by the fear of conceiving divine things too realistically and of taking divine words too literally. Indeed, this Christian realism positively demands such a world of miracles, as it unfolds particularly in the doctrine of the last things. He therefore does not allow himself to be misled in his eschatological hopes by the pitying head-shaking of those who consider themselves the only sensible ones; rather, he cannot understand how an intellectual understanding of created things and their history could be possible without a clear and distinct conception of the ultimate outcome of the world’s development—which, as the purpose and goal of creation, alone can shed light on its meaning and significance. Finally, he does not shy away from the idea of a real, corporeal, and therefore truly living spirit world, nor from the equally real contact that humans have with it even in their present state. The reader can see for himself how precisely all of this applies to Oetinger.»

[ 20 ] Here you have a reference to a time when people sought not the ideas of nature, but a living spiritual world; and indeed, Oetinger attempted to gather together in his lifetime all the treasures of human knowledge available to him in order to attain a living connection with the spiritual world. And what lay behind this man? He was not yet the kind of man who lives in the present. The task of the person of the present, above all else, is to show how modern natural science must be corrected by spiritual science so that true knowledge may come about. Oetinger strove for something else as well: he sought to demonstrate how to attain the living spiritual world in order to arrive at an understanding of the Bible, the Scriptures, and specifically the New Testament. Richard Rothe also speaks very beautifully about this:

“However, in order to understand him, one must also take into account, in particular, his position—or rather, his attitude”—namely, Oetinger’s attitude—“toward Holy Scripture, his keen awareness that the true, that is, the complete and full, and therefore also the truly pure understanding of the Bible is still lacking, and that it is not yet present, particularly in the Church’s interpretation of it. I can perhaps make what I wish to say here about Oetinger clearest by recounting how I myself have experienced Holy Scripture for more than thirty years now,”—so says Richard Rothe—“especially the New Testament, and within it, above all, the Sermons of the Savior and the Pauline Epistles. The impression Scripture gives me when I approach it with our commentaries is an awareness—one that grows ever more vivid the longer I engage with it—of its exuberance, not merely with regard to the, admittedly, inexhaustible sea of emotion that surges through it (the πάθη Sacrae Scripturae, as Bengel calls it), but no less so with regard to the intellectual content set forth in its words. I stand before it with a key that the Church has placed in my hand—one that has been tested over many centuries. I cannot say outright that it does not fit, but even less so that it is the right one. It opens the door with some difficulty, but only with the help of the force I apply to the lock. Our traditional exegesis—I do not mean the neological kind—allows me to understand Scripture, but it is not sufficient to enable me to understand it fully and purely. It is certainly able to bring out the general content of its ideas, but it cannot account for the unique form in which these ideas appear within it. It still lies over the text like a veil, even after the interpretation has taken place. This veil remains attached to the Scripture as an irrational residue which—if the exegesis has otherwise done its job competently—places the biblical authors and those who merely paraphrase their words in a very unfavorable position. Indeed, if the Lord and his apostles intended to say only that—and precisely that—which the interpreters make them say, then they expressed themselves very awkwardly and clumsily—or, to put it more accurately, very strangely—and unnecessarily complicated understanding for those who heard them and those who read them. The vast body of our exegetical literature serves in this case as a serious indictment against them, accusing them of having spoken so unclearly and indistinctly, so evasively and with such ambiguous language, about matters of such incomparable importance and for a purpose of such incomparable significance. But who has not felt that this accusation does not hold against them? The true reader of the Bible receives the entirely unambiguous impression that the language is exactly as it should be—that these are not meaningless flourishes, which our exegesis must always first prune away from the text of Scripture like wild vines before it can penetrate its meaning, — that the long-established practice of exegetes—to first “dust off” the Word of Scripture, because it is so old and archaic, before interpreting it—amounts to first wiping away its inimitable luster, through which it has now shone for millennia in the imperishable springtime radiance of eternal youth. The masters of biblical exegesis may smile as they please, but the fact remains, — there is simply something written between the lines of their text that they are unable to read, despite all their skill, yet which one must be able to read above all else in order to understand the thoroughly unique form in which the ideas of divinely revealed truth—generally recognized among us—are presented to us in Holy Scripture, in a manner distinct from all other representations of the same truth. Our interpreters explain to us only the figures in the foreground of the scriptural tableau, but they ignore its background with its distant, wondrously shaped mountain ranges and its resplendent, deep-blue cloudy sky. And yet it is precisely from this background that a magical light—entirely unique in its kind—falls upon those figures, bestowing upon them a transfiguration that is, for us, the very mystery of their existence. We lack the distinctive fundamental ideas and perspectives that underlie the manner in which Scripture speaks as an unspoken prerequisite; and with them, we lack nothing less than the very bond that organically holds together all the individual elements of Scripture’s thought—the very soul, the inner connection among the individual elements of the biblical sphere of thought. No wonder, then, that with regard to a hundred passages in our Bible—which, for this very reason, remain perpetual “cruces interpretum”—we cannot arrive at a precise understanding, nor at an understanding that fully recognizes the motivation behind every minute detail of the text. No wonder that, in so many passages, we have a whole host of different interpretations that have been at odds with one another since time immemorial, without the conflict ever being resolved. No wonder; for they are likely all wrong, since they are all imprecise, all only approximate, only capturing the meaning in broad strokes. We approach the biblical text armed with the alphabet of our basic concepts of God and the world; we assume in good faith—as if it were self-evident and could not be otherwise—that the biblical authors’ underlying premise, which stands as a tacit assumption in the background of everything they individually think and write and shines through it all, must be the same. But this, unfortunately, is an illusion from which experience should have cured us long ago. Our key simply does not fit; the right key has been lost, and until we regain possession of it, our interpretation of Scripture will get us nowhere. We lack the system of fundamental biblical concepts—one that is not explicitly set forth in Scripture itself but is merely presupposed; it is simply not the system of our schools—and as long as we engage in exegesis without it, the Bible must remain a half-closed book to us. We must approach it with fundamental concepts other than those familiar to us—which we tend to regard as the only possible ones; and whatever these may be, and wherever they may be to be found, at least one thing is undoubtedly clear from the overall tone of Scripture’s melody in its natural fullness: they must be more realistic, “more substantial.” I have merely recounted my individual experience here. Far from wishing to impose it on those to whom it is foreign, I may nevertheless confidently believe that Oetinger “would understand me and attest that this was precisely his own experience as well. But even among my contemporaries, I count on there being those who will agree with me on this point, despite all other objections raised against me. Instead of many, I will name just one: the excellent Dr. Beck in Tübingen.”

[ 21 ] Oetinger had just attempted to gain an understanding of the Bible by—he lived in the twilight, just as Saint-Martin — sought to breathe life into the concepts still alive in that twilight era, and by seeking to establish a living connection with the spiritual world; for only then did he hope that the true language of the Bible might be revealed to him. For his firm conviction was that one, by relying solely on abstract intellectual concepts, would miss the very essence of the Bible—especially the New Testament—and that one can only approach the true meaning of the New Testament if one is able to understand that this New Testament arose from the direct perception of the spiritual world itself, that it requires no interpretation, no exegesis, but that, above all, one must be able to read the New Testament. To this end, he sought a *Philosophia sacra*. This was not to be a philosophy modeled on those that came later, but one in which is written what a person can truly experience when living in communion with the spiritual world.

[ 22 ] Just as we cannot speak today in the sense of Saint-Martin when we seek to examine the presuppositions of the humanities from a scientific perspective, so too, when we speak of the Gospels today, we cannot speak in the sense of Oetinger, much less in the sense of Bengel. The edition of the New Testament that Bengel produced will still prove fruitful; but modern people will initially have no idea what to make of what was particularly close to Bengel’s heart: apocalyptic thought. Apocalyptic thought was foreign to Oetinger himself; to his elder, Bengel, it was very close to his heart. And in his apocalyptic studies, he placed particular emphasis on calculations; he thus calculated the periods of history accordingly. And he considered one number to be particularly important. And the fact that he considered this number particularly important is, of course, reason enough for modern-thinking people—and I say “modern-thinking people” in quotation marks, of course—to regard Bengel as a madman, a fantasist, a fool; for according to his calculations, the year 1836 was to be a particularly important one in human development. He made some grand calculations. He lived, after all, in the first half of the eighteenth century, so he was still a century away from the year 1836. He calculated this, albeit still in his own way of conceiving of history. But if one looks at them and delves deeper into the matter—without the insight of a modern mind—then one realizes that the good fellow was off by only six years. This error stems from a mistaken calculation of the year Rome was founded; this can be easily proven. What he meant by his calculation was the year 1842—the year we must specify for the materialist crisis. Bengel, Oetinger’s teacher, was referring to that profound turning point. It was only because, in his quest for weighty concepts, he went too far—conceiving them as too weighty—that he imagined the outward course of history as if something extraordinary were happening, something like a Day of Judgment; that is how he envisioned it. It was only a Day of Judgment for the old wisdom!

[ 23 ] Thus, we will not have to wait very long to see a theosophical age come to an end. And if someone writes a history or a work of philosophy today, he will—if he mentions these people at all—devote at most a few lines to them, which usually mean very little. Nevertheless, these people have exerted a profound influence. And if someone today asks about the meaning of the second part of Goethe’s *Faust* and interprets it as many commentators do, one can only marvel that “all hope does not vanish from the mind that clings ceaselessly to stale evidence, digs for treasures with a greedy hand, and is glad when it finds earthworms.” This second part of *Faust* contains a vast amount of occult wisdom and accounts of occult facts, though expressed in a truly poetic form. All of this would be unthinkable had it not been for the world that preceded it, which I wished to characterize for you in just two main aspects. People today have no idea how much was still known about the spiritual world in a time that is, relatively speaking, not so long ago, or how much has been buried only in the very last few decades. However, it is extremely important to draw attention to this fact—for we are just beginning to learn how to read the Gospel, including with what we can offer today from spiritual science—namely, the fact that we have only taken the very first steps in re-reading the Gospel. |

[ 24 ] With Oetinger, the matter is just as strange. In Oetinger’s writings there is a sentence that is quoted time and again but consistently misunderstood—a sentence that, on its own, would be enough for a discerning person to say: “This Oetinger is one of humanity’s greatest minds.” Here is the sentence: “Matter is the end of God’s ways.” — To offer such a definition of matter, one that so closely corresponds to what a spiritual scientist can know, is possible only for an immensely developed soul, possible only if one is capable of comprehending how the divine-spiritual creative forces act and concentrate to bring about a material form—such as the human being, for example—which in its form expresses the culmination of an immense concentration of forces. If you read what unfolds at the beginning of the second Mystery Drama in the conversation between Capesius and Benedictus regarding the relationship of the macrocosm to the human being—and what ails Capesius there— then you will gain an understanding of how, in the spirit of today’s spiritual science, these things can be expressed—translated into our own words—for which Oetinger, in his own sense, was able to utter that significant phrase, which one can only understand once one has rediscovered the essence of the matter: “Matter represents the end of God’s ways.” — But even with him, it is the case that one can no longer speak in his words, any more than one can in the words of Saint-Martin. Whoever speaks them must simply have a penchant for preserving that which can no longer be understood today.

[ 25 ] But it is not only ideas that have undergone such a transformation; feelings, too, have undergone a tremendous transformation. For just imagine a typical person of our modern age. Imagine a prime example of such a person of modern times, and imagine what kind of idea he would form if he were to open Saint-Martin’s *Des erreurs et de la vérité* and happen to come across the sentence: “Human beings have been spared from knowing the principle of their external physicality; for if they knew the principle of their physicality, they would never be able to look upon a naked person without feeling shame.” — In an age when people yearn for nudity on stage—which is precisely what the finest specimens of modern humanity do—one naturally cannot make sense of such a sentence. Imagine a great philosopher, Saint-Martin, who comprehends the world, stepping forward and declaring: It is part of a higher sense of modesty that one actually blushes when looking at a human form. — And yet, for Saint-Martin, this is an absolutely comprehensible matter. An absolutely comprehensible matter!

[ 26 ] You see, my initial intention today was, first of all, to point out that something of immense significance has been lost; but then I wanted to draw particular attention to the fact that people are speaking in a language that we can no longer speak. We have to speak differently. The very capacities for thought necessary to speak in this language today have been lost. But in both Oetinger and Saint-Martin, we find that these ideas are by no means fully thought through; they can be developed further. One can continue to discuss them, but not with a modern person. I would like to go even further and say: There is no need to discuss them at all when inquiring today into the mysteries of the world, because we must understand ourselves not with old concepts, but with concepts of the present. That is why so much emphasis is placed here on linking everything pertaining to spiritual scientific endeavors precisely to concepts of the present. This is a curious phenomenon: One can place immense value on not falling back on these concepts at all, yet they were not invented; they demonstrate by their very nature that there is still an immense amount to be thought with them. One has no idea at all how these concepts are connected to general consciousness, because today one pursues the strange idea that one has, in fact, always thought the way one does today.

[ 27 ] The prime example I mentioned earlier thinks: Well, I’ll call those little white crumbs over there—the white powder in the salt shaker—I’ll call that salt. Now, this prime example knows that salt has different names in different languages, but that people have always understood it to mean the same thing that people today understand by it. Of course, this is always taken for granted. But that is simply not true. Even the farmer, even the most uneducated person, when he said “salt” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and even long afterward—had a much more comprehensive conception of it. Rather, he had a conception of which Saint-Martin’s was a condensed version; he did not have this materialistic conception—he had something connected to spiritual life when he spoke of salt. The words were not as materialistic as they are today; they did not deal merely with what is immediately and specifically material. And now read in the Gospel how Christ says to the disciples: “You are the salt of the earth.” Yes, when this is said today in today’s words: “You are the salt of the earth,” it is simply not what Christ said, because one automatically associates the word “salt” with the feeling, the entire spiritual disposition, that a person today has when hearing the word “salt”; one may indeed have quite broad concepts, but that is of no use at all. One must translate it so that it does not say “salt” at all, but something else, in order to evoke in people today the same feeling that was intended back then with the word “salt” and its value at that time. And this is what must be done with regard to a great many texts, most of all with the Holy Scriptures. And many sins have been committed with regard to the Holy Scriptures precisely in this regard. And so it is not at all incomprehensible that Oetinger attempted to undertake endless historical studies in order to get to the bottom of the values of the words, to get to the true feeling behind the words. Of course, a mind like Oetinger’s is considered crazy today, because Oetinger locks himself away in his laboratory, where he conducts alchemical experiments and studies Kabbalistic books not for weeks, but for months on end, simply to figure out how the words of a sentence are actually to be understood; for his entire endeavor is directed toward the words of the sentences in the Holy Scriptures.

[ 28 ] Well, starting from one point of view—to show that today, because we are in a time of dawn, we must speak differently than we did back then in a time of twilight—but also to start from another point of view, I have spoken of the things I have discussed here today. Here I would like to return once more to the peculiar fact that, in light of what constitutes the essence of our time—from which spiritual science must also develop—it might seem irrelevant to delve into the mode of thought of that era, of Bengel, Oetinger, Saint-Martin, and others. For when speaking of education today, one must speak of the metabolic body, the respiratory body, and the nervous system body; one cannot speak of the mercurial body, the sulfuric body, or the salt body. For these concepts, which were still understandable in the age of Paracelsus, in the age of Jakob Böhme, in the age of Saint-Martin, and in the age of Oetinger to those who engaged with them, are no longer understandable today. Nevertheless, it is by no means worthless to engage with these things, and it would not be worthless even if one had absolutely no way of incorporating these concepts into contemporary education in any way. Indeed, I will go even further: It would actually be unwise to introduce such old concepts as mercury, sulfur, and salt into contemporary thinking today. I find it unwise; it is not good at all. And anyone who understands the pulse of their time will not fall into the trap of wanting to revive these old concepts, as certain so-called occult societies do, which place particular value on clinging to old clichés. And yet, it is of immense importance to master that language which is no longer spoken today, but which has not yet been fully articulated by Saint-Martin, by Oetinger, or in earlier times by Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme. |

[ 29 ] Why? Yes, why? People today don’t speak that way, so one could simply stop using that language, and at most one could consider the historical phenomenon: How could such a historical epoch have failed to run its course? How is it that there is still something there that could continue, yet comes to an end even though it could go on? How is that possible? What lies at the root of this? It might well be true that one cannot communicate with anyone at all if one can learn everything one needs to learn without these concepts.

[ 30 ] Here, however, something of immense significance becomes apparent: The living no longer speak of these concepts, have no need to speak of them, and do not need to speak of them; this makes the language of these concepts all the more important for the dead, for those who have passed through the gate of death. And if one needs to communicate in some way with the dead, or with certain other spirits of the spiritual world, then one comes to realize that, in a certain sense, one must master that unspoken language, which once came to an end for earthly physical life on the physical plane. And it is precisely among those who have passed through the gate of death that what lives within these concepts gradually becomes active and alive, becoming a language familiar to them—the very language they seek. And the more one tries to immerse oneself in these concepts—just as they were once thought, sensed, felt, and imagined—the more one succeeds in communicating with the spirits who have passed through the gate of death. One then learns to understand them all the better. And this is where the peculiar, the wondrous mystery reveals itself: that a certain kind of thought-form lives on this earth, but only up to a certain point; after that, it is no longer further developed on earth, but is instead further developed among those who then enter the life between death and a new birth. One must not, however, believe that one derives benefit solely from what one can grasp today regarding the formation of sulfur, mercury—Mercury is not quicksilver—sulfur, mercury, and salt. If one has only these concepts, then these concepts are of no use in establishing a connection with the dead in their language. But if one takes these concepts as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme did—namely, as I might say, in a certain exuberance, as Saint-Martin, Bengel, and Oetinger did—then one realizes how this builds a bridge between this world and the other world. And here, no matter how much people may laugh at Bengel’s calculations—they certainly have no tangible value for outward, physical life—for those who stand between death and a new birth, these calculations have all the more great significance, a profound meaning. For at that juncture, turning points such as the one Bengel attempted to calculate—in which he was off by only six years—are of profound significance.

[ 31 ] As you can see: The world here on the physical plane and the spiritual world are not merely connected in such a way that the relationship can be bridged by abstract formulas; rather, they are connected in a very concrete way. That which, so to speak, loses its meaning here ascends into the spiritual world and lives on there with the dead, while among the living it must be replaced by something else. — More on this next time.