The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] My task today will be to add a few points to supplement what has been developed in the main ideas as a kind of foundation for seeking an understanding of the mysteries of our time. It is certainly a legitimate and well-founded need of people today not to sleep through this era, to truly take note of the numerous impulses for transformation that are affecting us in relatively short periods of time, and then to familiarize themselves with what is necessary for the fruitful further development of the spiritual—and thus also the other cultural—impulses present in our time.

[ 2 ] I have now attempted, from various perspectives, to draw your attention to that great period—the understanding of which alone can truly make the present comprehensible—the great post-Atlantean period. I have described details of it to you, as well as broad perspectives which—by allowing the development of humanity throughout the entire post-Atlantean era to sink in—can also lead to a certain understanding of the present. Today I would like to discuss that same period once more—again from different perspectives—and present some other characteristic features of this period to your soul. Of course, what I am about to say today can only be understood if one considers the rejuvenation of the human race—that process of becoming ever younger and-younger-becoming from an age immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe—which we have designated as the 56th year of humanity—to the age of today’s human being, who is naturally capable of development only up to the age of 27, unless he is inclined to build upon free impulses of the soul that arise from the spirit itself, rather than relying on his own self-constructed impulses. Let us therefore bring to mind what has come to our attention regarding today’s twenty-seven-year-old human being. Let us now look back once more to the time immediately following the great Atlantean catastrophe. I have already pointed out how very different social life was, how very different people’s social sensibilities were during that time. Today I would like to draw attention to the particular state of mind of the first post-Atlantean people, especially those who inhabited southern Asia, and to once again highlight what you are well acquainted with as the primordial Indian culture, as described in my writings. Above all, among the various social concepts that people held at that time, there was one thing entirely absent—something that people today can hardly imagine our social life without. You know the context and the immense significance with which we speak today of law, justice, and similar concepts. In the early post-Atlantean period, these things were not discussed at all. They were completely unknown. The concept of “justice,” the word “justice,” the word “law,” and similar terms—which today are inseparable from our social way of thinking—could not have been associated with any concept at all. Instead, when people wanted guidance on what to do or not to do, or what arrangements to make in public or private life, they looked to those who had reached what was then considered patriarchal age—those who had reached their fifties. It was taken for granted that, because people remained capable of development well into their fifties—because, in a sense, they remained capable of development much like children well into their fifties— and since they remained capable of development—and thus attained a certain maturity during this time, in a completely natural way—it was believed that one need only be told by those who had reached their fifties what to do and what to avoid. There was complete agreement that these were the wise ones, that they knew how to organize the world and how to manage human affairs. It would never have occurred to anyone at that time to doubt that people who developed normally well into their fifties could not have found the right path in terms of wisdom. For because people remained capable of development well into this age, something revealed itself within them in such a natural way—just as something now reveals itself in the souls of children when they reach sexual maturity—so too did something reveal itself in those in their fifties, through which they attained precisely this ability I have alluded to. So people turned to the elders, the wise ones, and they were the natural lawmakers.

[ 3 ] How, then, did they actually come to possess this profound wisdom? They possessed this profound wisdom because they knew they were at one with the Spirit—or rather, the spirits—that lived in the light. Today we feel the warmth of our surroundings; today we feel the air as we breathe it in and out; we feel the power of water as it rises and falls as rain—but we perceive all of this only physically, through our senses. It was not so for the first post-Atlantean humans once they had lived through the Fifties; rather, they perceived the spiritual everywhere—in the warmth, in the air and its currents, and in the water cycle. But because they sensed the spiritual in the elements—because, in a sense, they did not merely sense the wind but the spirits of the wind, did not merely feel warmth but the spirit of warmth, did not merely see water but also the spirits of the water—they listened inwardly, at certain stages of life (though only in certain waking states), to the revelations of these elemental spirits; and what these elemental spirits communicated to them was the very foundation of the wisdom they shared with others. These people, when they were normally developed, were not merely what we today call geniuses, but something far beyond what we today call geniuses. It was simply possible in those days for human nature itself to provide the conditions for wisdom to reveal itself within it, just as today the stages of the soul gradually reveal themselves through the child’s physical development up to a certain age. And the fact that wisdom revealed itself was connected to the fact that human beings remained capable of development not only as long as the body was growing, flourishing, and ascending, but also when the body began to decline, when the body in turn became sclerotic and mineralized. This decline of physicality, this calcification of physicality, led to the development of the soul-spiritual. This, however, was linked to something else, which you will easily understand if you vividly imagine what has just been explained. Such people vividly perceived the spiritual beings of the elements. When night fell, their senses at that time were not normally suited merely to seeing the stars; rather, they saw imaginations—truly the spiritual—which also lived in the starry sky. That is why I have often pointed out: The old star charts, which feature such strange figures, were not created by imagination—as the fanciful notions of modern natural science would have it—but through direct visions. These things were truly seen.

[ 4 ] And so these ancients, these ancient sages, created and counseled based on their direct perception, and organized social life in this spirit. At that time, however, they were also in intimate contact—in very intimate contact—with the piece of earth they inhabited, for they saw the spiritual essence of this piece of earth they inhabited: the spiritual essence of the water that sprang from this earth they inhabited; they saw the spiritual essence of the air that blew above it, the spiritual essence of the other climatic conditions; they saw the conditions that existed in the warmth, and so on. These conditions were different everywhere—different in Greece than in India, different than in Persia, and so on. That is why the sages of that time truly perceived things as they were in accordance with their particular part of the earth. And in India, a culture developed that was bound to emerge from the earth; likewise, in Greece, a culture developed that was bound to emerge from the earth, in harmony with the elements of the earth. The Earth was perceived as something concrete. Isn’t that so? Today we perceive it this way, at most, only in relation to human beings: we would find it grotesque today if someone tried to convince us that the ear could be in the place of the nose and the nose in the place of the ear; isn’t that so? The entire organism is constructed in such a way that the nose is situated in a specific place, and the ear in a specific place. But today people no longer have a true concept of this—that the Earth is a complete organism, and that when a particular culture develops—if it truly does so under the influence of the Earth elemental spirits—it must also bear a certain physiognomy. What flourished in ancient Greece could not have been transplanted to ancient India, nor vice versa. Thus, a culture developed on Earth that reflected the spiritual physiognomy of the Earth. That is what is significant about that ancient era. Today, people know nothing of this because, during the times when they could have known it, they remained incapable of developing. People give little thought to why, in eastern America, when white settlers immigrate, these settlers take on a completely different appearance there than in California, in western America. In eastern America, the eyes and gaze of the white settlers become quite different; their hands grow larger than in Europe; and their skin color even changes somewhat. This is the case in the eastern United States, but not in the western United States. These connections to the specific location within the Earth’s organism where a culture develops are no longer taken into account at all. This is related to the fact that people today no longer know which spiritual entities, which spiritual beings, live within the elements of the Earth. Today, people have become abstract; they no longer think about concrete things at all.

[ 5 ] What I have described to you regarding the earliest period naturally changed in the next period, when humanity went through the stage of life from age 48 to 42. During this second post-Atlantean period, people remained capable of development only into their forties. So they did not attain the same level of wisdom they had attained in the first period; rather, they remained dependent on the physical in their soul-spiritual life only until their forties. Consequently, their ability to still sense a connection with the elements diminished. People could no longer sense the connection with the elements. But this ability had only diminished somewhat; it was still there. People at that time felt that they knew: When their soul is outside the body during sleep, they are within the spiritual world. They knew this once they had reached the maturity of their forties. And they also knew: When they re-enter their body upon waking, the spiritual world grows dark for them. This is why the true origin of the later teachings of Ormuzd and Ahriman—the teachings of light and darkness—took shape. It is truly rooted in experience. People knew: While asleep, your soul is within the spiritual world of light; when you descend into the body, you descend into spiritual darkness. It was no longer a matter of close dependence on the piece of land where one lived, but rather a living in harmony with day and night. The constellations were also still seen as nothing more than imaginings, in pictorial form. But precisely the fact that one saw them pictorially when outside the body—this ability had remained atavistic since Atlantean times. Therefore, people knew: You have a living soul that, during sleep, is within a spiritual world—a world that can be grasped through imagination.

[ 6 ] The ability to place oneself concretely within the entire universe in this way had declined even further during the third cultural epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean one. By then, it had diminished even more. People no longer felt as strongly as before. In Persia, the tradition remained, but not the direct experience. Zoroaster then taught this to his disciples as “star training.” But where human culture actually developed normally—during the Egyptian-Chaldean cultural period—people’s capacity for sensory perception increased, while the old spiritual perception declined. This is why people in this third period were primarily engaged in star service. In ancient Persia, there was no service to the stars; instead, there was the spiritual world of imagination and the music of the spheres. By then, people had already begun to interpret things, to see the images, so to speak, only vaguely, and to look right through the stars. Thus, the actual service to the stars developed during this third period.

[ 7 ] And then comes the fourth period, in which awareness of the spiritual world all around had faded, in which people were already approaching the form of perception that we have even now, in which one could see the sensory reality of the stars only from the surrounding world. I have described to you how this was in Greek culture. There, people knew that the soul lives in every single physical manifestation; but they no longer sensed the soul’s home in the cosmos in that way. That is why you see in the great sage—whom I have often cited to you as characteristic in other respects—Aristotle, precisely because he was not an initiate, that he no longer holds intuitive perceptions of the stars, but instead establishes a philosophy of the stellar world. He interprets; he interprets what the eye sees, and he does so because he still knows: in the life between birth and death, the soul is in the body. Philosophically, Aristotle also knows: the soul has its home where the supreme God—for Aristotle—governs the outermost sphere, and the lesser gods then govern the other spheres. Aristotle also had a philosophy concerning the elements of earth, water, air, fire, or heat, but he had only a philosophy, not an experience. In earlier times, experience—direct perception—was present. This was not the case in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. Humanity had been driven out—truly driven out—of the spiritual world. That is why that decisive intervention had to come, which came precisely through the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 8 ] I pointed out to you the full, profound significance of this mystery of Golgotha at that point in these reflections where I showed you: humanity had remained capable of development up to the age of 33, and the Christ within Jesus was experiencing precisely his 33rd year. What a marvelous coincidence! So immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe, human beings remained capable of development up to the ages of 56, 55, 54th year and so on; at the beginning of the second period, up to the 48th, 47th year and so on; at the end, up to the 42nd year; at the beginning of the third period, up to the 42nd year, then declining until the end of the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, down to the 36th year. Then the Greek-Latin era began, in 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha. At that time, humanity remained capable of development only up to the age of 35, then up to the age of 34. And when humanity was capable of development only up to the 33rd year—because the 33rd year of life lies below the 35th year; development rises up to the 35th year, then descends—people no longer experienced the descent of the soul at all; hence the Spirit came from outside: the Christ Spirit. Consider how this sheds light on the necessity of the Christ Spirit’s entry into human development!

[ 9 ] Let us now take a look back at the ancient patriarchs, who were supremely gifted. They were consulted when it came to making decisions regarding the organization of the Earth, because through their own spiritual development they were able to embody the divine-spiritual. It became less and less possible to turn to human beings for guidance. And when humanity had reached the 33rd year, Christ had to come from entirely different worlds in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The impulse that humanity had lost through the natural course of its own development had to come to them from a completely different source. Here we see deeply into the necessary connection between human development and the Mystery of Golgotha. Time and again, one can only say: If spiritual science can work in this way, it will show how the Christ entered into human development out of an inner necessity. And that humanity today needs such a perspective, such a renewal of understanding of the Christ impulse—you see it everywhere, at every turn.

[ 10 ] In the latest issue of *Die Tat*—which contains many interesting articles, and which I therefore recommend you read—you will find an interesting essay by our esteemed friend Dr. Rittelmeyer and one of the last works by our dear departed friend Deinhard. But this issue also contains an essay by Arthur Drews that is very significant because Arthur Drews once again examines the role that Jesus Christ can play in the modern development of humanity. As you know, we have spoken of Drews on several occasions. He is the one who spoke out in Berlin at the time when so-called monists were attempting to prove that Jesus of Nazareth could not have been a historical figure, and so on. The two books on the “Christ Myth” were, after all, written to demonstrate that it cannot be historically proven that a Jesus of Nazareth ever lived.

[ 11 ] This time, Drews approaches the problem of Jesus Christ from a peculiar perspective. It appears in the third issue of 1917/18—the June issue of *Die Tat*, published by Diederich’s Publishing House—in the article “The Position of Jesus Christ in German Piety.” Now he constructs a peculiar concept of “German piety.” It is just as absurd as if one were to construct a concept of the “German sun” or the “German moon.” For the reality is that, when speaking of these things in terms of national distinctions, one can already compare the phrase “German piety” to the nonsensical phrases “German sun” or “German moon.” Yet these ideas find a large audience today. And it is interesting how Drews—who otherwise would not rely so heavily on Eckhart, Tauler, or Jakob Böhme—now draws on Fichte here, whom he would not normally cite even in philosophical matters; how he builds on this and goes off on a tangent with the concept of “German piety,” attempting to show that, in fact, today one can only— especially if one is German, can arrive at a true concept of Jesus Christ not through historical reflection or historical theology, but through what he calls “German metaphysics”—metaphysics! According to Drews, one cannot even count on a historical Jesus Christ at all, for he cannot be discovered by any metaphysics.

[ 12 ] This is deeply connected to something I told you in these reflections; I pointed out to you that, in a certain sense, one can find only one idea of God—the Father God—that, in fact, Christ is not present at all in Harnack’s work but has merely been dragged into it, and that, in reality, only the Father God is present. For one cannot, through mere so-called inner mysticism, find anything other than the unified God. One cannot find Christ in what Tauler and Eckhart have to offer; it is different with Jakob Böhme, but Drews does not understand the difference—there, because the concept of Christ is present, one can incorporate him. Nor can one find Christ through the theology of Adolf Harnack. Arthur Drews is, from the present standpoint, a bit more honest. He seeks Christ and does not find him, because one cannot find him from the standpoint of his metaphysics, which does not relate to historical facts—which, do you think, lead us so far that we even comprehend the age of Christ Jesus in the Mystery of Golgotha—because Drews wants to remain stuck in an abstract metaphysics that is, at best, still accepted today and in which one cannot find Christ. One cannot find him there either, but can only invoke him within an abstract metaphysics. A metaphysics will find a God, will be theistic, if it is not diseased, but it cannot find Christ. This is connected to what I told you: to be an atheist, to not find God, is actually a disease; to not find Christ is a misfortune; to not find the Spirit is blindness. This is all connected. This is how Drews comes to say to himself: Yes, we have no right to call what we find there ‘Christ’; therefore, Christ must disappear. Now Drews constructs—and he believes he is standing firmly on the ground of the present, and does stand on it, insofar as this present rejects spiritual science—and believes he can say: Precisely the kind of religion we must strive for—one founded on metaphysics—cannot, if it is honest, include the concept of Christ at all. — Now let us listen to the words with which Drews concludes this remarkable essay:

[ 13 ] “Any such historical tradition” — by which he means a historical tradition that treats Christ as a figure of history — “is, however, an obstacle to religion, and the great work of the Reformation, which Luther has only just begun, will not be completed until religious consciousness has done away with even the last remnants of any kind of belief in history.”

[ 14 ] As I have often said, spiritual science will establish this historical faith because it truly leads, in a concrete way, to the spiritual impulses of development that—just as abstract metaphysics finds God—find the concrete Christ. But metaphysics, which loves the present—if it still wants metaphysics at all—can only arrive at a unified God. There, one has no right to distinguish between God the Father and Christ.

[ 15 ] “The ‘German religion’ will either be a religion without Christ or it will not exist at all.”

[ 16 ] That is, in fact, what I have often hinted at to you. It is already being said that the consciousness of the present will have to do away with the Christ unless it is willing to revive this Christ by engaging with the spiritual world in a concrete way, as spiritual science does. He goes on to say:

[ 17 ] “Where God and man are essentially one”—just think: we are accused of making God and man one, but they are doing exactly that!—“where every human being, by nature, is a ‘Christ,’ that is, a God-man, there is no place for a Jesus Christ. One may draw upon the facts he reported to clarify and illustrate certain religious processes, just as the mystics have done; one may also make use of the words attributed to him to illuminate and enliven one’s own opinion, but not in any other sense than one makes use of the words and deeds of any other outstanding individual.”

[ 18 ] It is strange, however, that one finds the lie being promoted here as well; on the one hand, it is proven that “Christ did not live,” and on the other hand, that “one can use him for illustrative purposes.” He then goes on to say:

[ 19 ] “For a historical mediator of salvation, on the other hand—let alone for a ‘unique’ human being named Jesus, as he haunts the minds of our liberal theologians—the ‘German religion of the God-man’ has absolutely no use. It must reject him because its fundamental concept of the God-man requires no symbolic representative; indeed, such a figure could only confuse its views. Above all—but also for this reason—it must declare him superfluous, indeed harmful, because he introduces into the German religious worldview a foreign element—the Protestant ethic, which, for all its sublimity, is nevertheless one-sided and, in its main points, unacceptable to us—an element that is partly to blame for today’s turning away from Christianity, and whose contradiction to the duties imposed on us by our own nature we are once again feeling so deeply at this very moment.”

[ 20 ] However, this is a sentence I can’t quite make sense of. How can one come to terms with this contemporary way of thinking? For those who adhere to realistic thinking, this is an unfathomable matter. Now, let’s continue:

[ 21 ] “What is great and significant about the Gospels will not be lost to humanity, even if there never was a Jesus and his words should have a completely different origin than has been assumed thus far: in any case, we cannot make our salvation dependent on them. The recognition of Jesus as a principle of salvation not only entails the entire dualistic metaphysics of Palestinian Judaism—which is, after all, incompatible with the modern spirit—but it also binds religion to historical scholarship, exposes it to the shifting opinions of the day, and turns historically dubious events into evidence for eternal religious truths! “The ‘German religion of the divine humanity’ is, as such, a religion of the deepest innermost spirituality, a religion of freedom. But it will not come to life until we have freed ourselves not only from every external form of church life to date and its claim to mediation, but also from Jesus Christ. For, as Fichte says, ‘Only the metaphysical, by no means the historical, brings salvation.’ But metaphysics knows nothing of a Jesus Christ.”

[ 22 ] It would be good if people realized that modern education without spiritual science inevitably leads to this conclusion, for the alternative is incomplete and therefore insincere; one would then come to realize that the science of the spirit is truly not something that is arbitrarily thrust into the present, but rather something that is in fact connected to the deepest demands—the true demands of the present—as they relate to the human soul.

[ 23 ] Ever since 1413, following the Mystery of Golgotha, we have been in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which has become even more alien to us due to humanity’s own development of the spiritual world. We have no choice but to find our connection to the spiritual realm from within the soul itself, through our own inner soul impulses that no longer arise from the physical body. And because people today are not yet so deeply imbued with Christianity that they would feel the necessity of a spiritual connection to the world of the spirit, they therefore fall into abstraction in the way I have described to you. That is why all concepts have become abstract today. There is truly a connection between the unchristian nature of the present and the abstractness of concepts—the unreality of concepts. Our concepts will remain unreal unless we learn to reconnect them with the Christ who lives in the Spirit, who can make them just as alive for us as the ancient Indian patriarchs, through their very personalities, brought to life what was right and just. Our rights and laws themselves are abstract today. If a bridge is built incorrectly, one soon sees—when it collapses—that it was constructed according to false concepts. In social life, one can engage in quackery; there, the quackery is revealed only through the misfortunes that people must endure in times such as ours, and the connection is not immediately apparent. When a bridge collapses, the engineer who built it is blamed; but when misfortune befalls humanity due to concepts that do not engage with reality, people blame all sorts of things—except the fact that we are currently going through a crisis in which people no longer have a true sense of a concept that is related to reality, but rather of a concept that is alien to reality.

[ 24 ] I would like to use that example from the external physical world once more, so that you may once again bring this distinction between concepts related to reality and those alien to reality to the forefront of your mind. Take a crystal: if you think of it as a crystal, it can also exist as a crystal; for that is how it comes into being, that is how it truly is. So if you construct the concept of a six-sided prism, closed at the top and bottom by six-sided pyramids, you have a concept of quartz that corresponds to reality. If you construct the concept of a flower without roots, you have an unreal concept; for a flower without roots cannot live in reality. For those who do not strive for reality, a flower torn from its stem is just as real as a quartz crystal. But that is not true. Those who think realistically cannot even conceive of a flower without roots in their minds. People must first learn again to form concepts that correspond to reality. A tree that has been uprooted is no longer a reality when we conceive of it as a concept. And if we have the impression that it is a reality, that is incorrect, for it cannot live without its roots in the earth; it withers away; it can no longer be alive. Therein lies the difference!

[ 25 ] But such thinking cannot form concepts that correspond to reality; otherwise, someone like Professor Dewar would not say that one could imagine a real final state of the Earth in which the walls are coated with protein that glows in a bluish light, and so on; none of this can be real. This must become a habit of thought; otherwise, one can only fantasize one’s way into the spiritual world. Only those who can form a concept of what is alive and what is dead can have a concept of the spiritual world. But anyone who regards a tree without roots or a geological layer as real—which, after all, cannot exist without another layer beneath it and another above it—anyone who thinks as geologists, physicists, and especially biologists do; anyone who conceives of a tooth as existing on its own, even though a tooth cannot exist on its own—such a person does not think realistically. That is why it is the case today that, among those not devoted to spiritual science, only artists—with the exception of pure naturalists—still possess an understanding of real concepts: that something is real or unreal from certain points of view when nothing else is present, and so on.

[ 26 ] This is borrowed from the external, physical world. But today, everything that constitutes political economy—and political science in particular—suffers from such unrealistic concepts. Hence the impossibility of political science, which I have demonstrated to you using Kjellén’s book, *The State as a Form of Life*. If someone were to write such a book in the field of the natural sciences—you know I have great respect for Kjellén—a book like *The State as a Form of Life*, which is so widely read today and held in such high esteem, that person would simply be laughed at. One cannot write about a crocodile the way one writes about the state, because not a single concept with which he fills his book is conceived in a realistic way.

[ 27 ] But this is precisely what humanity must learn to do; then it will learn to distinguish, in particular, between that which is capable of becoming part of the social order and that which is incapable of doing so. Think how necessary it is for us today to gain a realistic understanding of the people living on Russian soil. It is remarkable how little effort people make to gain a realistic understanding of such matters. What people here—or elsewhere in Western or Central Europe—think today about the nature of the Russian population is completely divorced from reality. I read an essay a few days ago that argues: Russians are, to some extent, still steeped in medieval mysticism; they have not undergone the intellectual development that has been commonplace in the West and in Central Europe since the Middle Ages. And it is pointed out that the Russians will now have to begin to attain this same intellectualism that the rest of the European population has happily attained—because the author has no idea that the entire Russian character is entirely different.

[ 28 ] It doesn’t even occur to people today to study real things. Where real things appear, people today no longer feel anything right. One of our friends tried to tie together what I have written in my books about Goethe with what I once lectured on here about human and cosmic thought. He turned it into a Russian book—a strange Russian book. The book has already been published. I am convinced that it will be read extensively in Russia by a certain segment of the population. If it were translated into German or other European languages, people would find it deadly boring, because they have no sense for the finely chiseled concepts—for the wonderful filigree work of concepts, I might say—that is particularly striking in this book. It is quite remarkable that in the Russian character, as it develops, something entirely different will emerge than in the rest of Europe; that there, unlike in the rest of Europe, mysticism and intellectuality will not exist separately, but rather a mystical nature will express itself—one that itself has an intellectual effect—and an intellectuality that is not without a mystical foundation; that something entirely new is emerging there: an intellectualism that is at the same time mysticism, a mysticism that is at the same time intellectualism, but one that has already developed to this point, if I may put it that way. There is not the slightest understanding of this, and yet this is precisely what currently lies entirely hidden within this Eastern chaos, for it will only come to full expression in this unique character, which I have only hinted at in a few strokes. But to understand these things, one must have a sense of the reality of concepts; of the reality of ideas. Yet today, it is as necessary as anything else that one acquire this sense, this feeling for the reality of ideas; otherwise, one will time and again mistake abstract political platforms and fine political speeches for something that could truly be creative, when in fact it cannot be truly creative. One will not be able to gain a sense of those points in history that could be very instructive—those in which, if one truly follows them, something emerges that could also be extraordinarily instructive for the present.

[ 29 ] I would like to give you an example of this that is very characteristic. For anyone who, I might say, is grappling with the enigmas of the present, the mid-eighteenth century—specifically the 1760s—keeps cropping up time and again; for there were also remarkable impulses of European development during that period which, when one attempts to understand them, are very instructive for the present. As you know, the European political landscape at that time—it was, after all, the period of the Seven Years’ War—was such that England and France were deeply divided, particularly due to the situation in North America; England was allied with Prussia, France, on the other hand, was allied with Austria, and that, as long as the Russian Empress Elizabeth reigned, there was an absolutely hostile sentiment toward Prussia in Russia, so that one can already speak of an alliance between Russia, France, and Austria against Prussia and England. This had led to circumstances that, one might say, are certainly something of a “miniature version” compared to today’s, but which, for that time, presented a very similar picture of European chaos. And in particular, the early 1860s—if you examine the circumstances—are not at all dissimilar to our year 1917. Now, the curious thing is that I would like to mention the following: It was, I believe, on January 5 that Tsarina Elizabeth had died; as historians say, she had ended her life—one that was rarely sober, for she had spent most of her life drunk, so the story goes. Tsarina Elizabeth had died. And her nephew stood before the authorities at that time to have the tsar’s crown placed upon his head. A remarkable figure stood there on January 5, 1762, for the solemn assumption of the tsar’s dignity in the high honors of the Preobrazhensky Regiment—wearing the green jacket, the red collar and red lapels, the straw-yellow vest, straw-yellow trousers, and gaiters that reached above his knees—for even as Grand Duke he had grown accustomed to never bending his knees when he walked; instead, walking with stiff knees seemed more dignified to him—with a long braid, two powdered curls, a hat with a turned-up brim, and a proper walking stick, which he carried as his symbol. You know that Catherine was his wife. He assumed the tsar’s crown. And history portrays him as little more than a young man who never matured. It is extremely difficult to determine what kind of person he actually was. It is highly probable that he was indeed a very immature, almost feeble-minded individual. He thus assumed the tsar’s throne at one of the most significant moments in European history. At his side lived that woman who, as a seven-year-old girl, had already written in her diary that she wished for nothing more than to become the independent ruler of the Russians—a woman whose dream was to be an autocrat, and whose pride, it seems, lay in the fact that she never needed to have a legitimate child by her tsar-husband among her direct descendants. Now, the situation at that time was such that there had been a long war, and all the peoples longed for peace—or at least felt as though peace would be a blessing—but could not have it.

[ 30 ] As early as February, after Peter III—who was said to be mentally deficient—had ascended the tsar’s throne, a Russian manifesto was issued to the other powers of Europe. That is strange. That is why I would like to read it to you verbatim in translation. This manifesto was addressed to the envoys of Austria, France, Sweden, and Saxony; Electoral Saxony was united with Poland at that time:

[ 31 ] “His Imperial Majesty, who, upon his fortunate accession to the throne of his ancestors, considers it his first duty to promote and enhance the welfare of his subjects, observes with the deepest regret that the current, war, which has raged for six years and has long been a burden to all the powers involved, instead of drawing to a close, is spreading ever further to the great misfortune of all nations, and that the human race must suffer all the more from this scourge, since the fate of the war, which has been subject to so much uncertainty up to this hour, remains no less uncertain for the future. Since His Imperial Majesty, in such circumstances and out of a sense of humanity, feels compassion for the needless shedding of innocent blood and wishes to put a stop to such an evil on his part, he deems it necessary to declare to the Allies of Russia that, by giving priority to the first law that God prescribes to sovereigns—namely, the preservation of the peoples entrusted to them— above all other considerations, He wishes to secure for His realms the peace that is so necessary and so precious to them, and at the same time to contribute as much as possible to its establishment throughout all of Europe. To this end, His Majesty is prepared to sacrifice the conquests made in this war by Russian arms, in the hope that all the allied courts, for their part, will prefer the return of tranquility and peace to the advantages they might expect from the war—advantages that can be obtained only through the further shedding of human blood. For this reason, His Imperial Majesty advises you, in the best of spirits, to devote all your energies to the completion of such a great and beneficial undertaking. St. Petersburg, February 23, 1762.”

[ 32 ] I would like to ask: Will people today truly sense that this manifesto is as concrete as possible, that it is directly rooted in reality? One must feel this! A manifesto felt directly from reality. When one reads the notes issued in response to this manifesto, one reads declarations that are roughly in the same style as the latest Entente notes—especially the note from Woodrow Wilson—and also the most recent note from Woodrow Wilson, which I have already characterized for you in its own way. All abstract, abstract, abstract! Nothing at all to do with reality! Yet when, on February 23, 1762 (New Style), the text I just read aloud was written, something quite remarkable was at work—even though the Tsar stood as I have just described—something quite remarkable; there must have been some power behind it that could bring about such a thing, a power that had a sense of reality. For after the other abstract declarations had been issued—all of which contained such things—what are called today “peace without annexation,” “freedom of nations,” and whatever else these abstractions are called—after all these declarations had in turn reached Russia, another response was issued by Peter, the feeble-minded one, which the Russian envoy, Prince Gallitzin, presented at the Viennese court on April 9. Listen to this declaration! It states:

[ 33 ] “The friendship that has existed between the Imperial Russian and Royal Prussian courts since the time of Emperor Peter I has been shaken in recent years by mere chance events and changes in the European order. However, since the war that has broken out as a result cannot last forever, nor can the advantages gained from it outweigh the friendship of a power that has been a useful ally for so many years and may continue to be so in the future, His Imperial Russian Majesty has resolved not only to conclude a lasting peace with the King of Prussia, but also, as required by his interests, to conclude a further treaty of alliance.”

[ 34 ] And now, please, listen to the incredibly brilliant idea that’s coming up:

[ 35 ] “The reasons His Imperial Russian Majesty has for hastening this matter require no lengthy explanation, since it is easy to demonstrate that a peace as universal as the Peace of Westphalia cannot be expected given the endless changes in the course of war and the widely divergent intentions of the parties, and that such a peace cannot be lasting. In the Peace of Westphalia, each party had to be assured of the possessions it had already acquired; but now the issue hinges on claims that arose only as a result of the war and cannot be easily reconciled, since—especially at the beginning of the war—the focus was on drawing more powers into it rather than considering where the many treaties and alliances, so hastily established, would ultimately lead.”

[ 36 ] One cannot imagine a more ingenious government document. Just think—if someone were able to read it now, they would realize that it concerns pretensions that only arose during this war!

[ 37 ] “The Russian Imperial Court has consistently insisted on the necessity of first reconciling these vastly differing interests and demands before a general congress could be convened. The Viennese court seemed to understand this, which is why—without ever responding directly to the Imperial Russian position—it merely referred briefly to the agreement it had secured to its advantage and, by remaining silent on the other demands, pinned all its hopes on the possible success of arms...

[ 38 ] The war that has since broken out between England and Spain is exacerbating the general misery and offers no means of halting the war in Germany, even though England is doing everything in its power at sea. Sweden, exhausted and having fought to no avail and with no hope—indeed, at the cost of its own glory—seems unable to either continue the war or bring it to an end. Since all the courts involved in the present war seemed content to wait and see who would take the first and most decisive step toward establishing peace, and His Imperial Russian Majesty is now the only one capable of doing so out of deep compassion and in consideration of the favors shown to you by His Majesty the King of Prussia, you are also in a position to take the aforementioned step all the more readily, since you made such intentions known to all the courts immediately upon assuming your reign on February 23.”

[ 39 ] Peace was achieved as a result of what was set in motion by this concrete, real document. But one must develop a sensitivity to what history has handed down to us—a sensitivity to ideas and concepts that cannot possibly intervene in reality, and to those ideas and concepts that are deeply rooted in reality and can therefore also sustain reality. One should therefore not believe that words are always just words; words can also be deeds, but they must be grounded in reality. One must simply convince oneself that we are currently going through a crisis, that we must reconnect with reality in a new way. That is why people seem so out of touch with reality today. We see it at every turn. Let me give a small example: Today, so much that is untruthful is heard and put into practice because people have become detached from reality and therefore lack the sense for the correct presentation and understanding of the facts. It is very important to also relate today’s untruthfulness to the crisis we are going through. Take a small, obvious example. A little magazine has appeared called *The Invisible Temple*—obviously a magazine in which abstract mystics—I mean mystics—hope to find something profound. *The Invisible Temple*—profound, profound! “A monthly journal for the gathering of spirits.” Well, I don’t want to go into the matter any further; but in one issue, monists and theosophists are also discussed. Various rather foolish things are said. But then comes a curious sentence that I would like to read to you, for this magazine is, after all, the official publication of a society that, under Horneffer’s leadership, claims today to be renewing the world:

[ 40 ] “As different as the monists’ approach is from that of the Theosophists, and as fervently as they fight and despise one another, they are nevertheless remarkably similar in one respect: they both lay claim, as it were, to the word ‘science’ for themselves. What they themselves do is true, pure science; what other people do is pseudo-science and imitation science. This can be read in the works of Haeckel and Rudolf Steiner.”

[ 41 ] Now I ask you to take everything I have ever written and said, and try to find what is claimed here to be in my writings. But how many people today are willing to call a spade a spade in such cases: it is deceitful, a plain and simple lie! But one must also recognize this. One must call a spade a spade. Isn’t it true that Horneffer—whom I once had to prove, when he was Nietzsche’s editor, that he didn’t have the slightest understanding of Nietzsche, and who wrote and published the most foolish nonsense as Nietzsche’s editor—that he ultimately writes such things is understandable, but such things are taken seriously. That is why it is possible today that the worst, most foolish charlatanism is confused with and lumped together with the serious pursuit of the humanities, and that, above all, lies are not called lies, which would be the right thing to do.

[ 42 ] Well, this is something that simply has to be learned: that a new connection to reality must be found. For what is the last thing that remains from that ancient time of the first post-Atlantean cultural period, when the patriarchs in the 1950s assimilated the spiritual through a natural process of development? What has remained through the Greek era and into our own time? What has remained of all this is what we call geniuses. There is still, in a sense, a dependence on nature when genius manifests itself. The geniuses of the fifth cultural period will be the last geniuses of our Earth’s evolution. There will be no more geniuses in the future. It is important to know this. That genius which is a natural gift will come to an end—one must face reality without embellishment—and in its place, acquired genius must take its place, that genius which must be connected to a living relationship between the human being and the spirituality revealing itself from without. It is immensely interesting to contemplate the facts in this context.

[ 43 ] In our time, there are people who very often recognize what is essential in one field or another, as is the case with Robert Scheu, whom I drew attention to here fourteen days ago. But they lack the ability to see this within a broader context, to truly place it in relation to the development of the world as a whole.

[ 44 ] That psychologist who died in March 1917 was truly a very interesting person; I have already mentioned his name, Franz Brentano. Not only was he the most eminent expert on Aristotle of his time, but he was also entirely characteristic of the contemporary way of thinking. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that he had begun writing a work on the psychology of the soul. The first volume was published in 1874; the second was scheduled to appear in the fall, and several more volumes were to follow. Nothing else was ever published—neither the second volume in the fall nor the subsequent volumes. I am convinced—and this conviction stems from nothing other than a thorough knowledge of Franz Brentano, for I am familiar with both his personal style of presentation, having known him from Vienna; I can hardly refrain from saying that there is scarcely a single printed line by Brentano that I have not read; I am familiar with his entire intellectual development, and I can therefore form a conviction; —that as an honest man, Brentano simply could not have allowed the subsequent volumes to be published. For he already makes it clear in the first volume that he is working toward a conception of the immortality of the soul. He expresses this clearly. But he could not proceed beyond the first volume—much less reach the fifth volume, where he intended to prove the immortality of the soul—without the science of the spirit, which he did not want; he ruled out the science of the spirit; he did not want it. He ruled out the science of the spirit. He is, after all, the very inventor of what occupied so many nineteenth-century philosophers: “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est.” “True spiritual science has no other method of inquiry than that of the natural sciences.” He put forward this statement as a lecture thesis upon taking up his post in 1866, when he left the Dominican Order and became a professor in Würzburg. Philosophy was already completely despised at that time. When he entered the lecture hall for the first time—where a follower of Baader had taught until then—the words “Sulfur Factory” were written on the wall.

[ 45 ] Now, he was a man of great intellect; he took the thesis I just mentioned as far as it could go, but he was unable to enter into spiritual science. That is why it remained at the first volume. What he wrote later consists of individual fragments. But one of his treatises is exceptionally interesting. This treatise is a transcript of a lecture he gave. And Franz Brentano was a keen observer; he was not someone who could rise from the observation of the external world to the spiritual realm, but he was a keen observer. And this treatise I am referring to is actually a refutation of the idea of genius. It is titled “Genius.” But what it actually challenges is the possibility that genius arises from some kind of subconscious foundation. It argues that what manifests as genius is essentially based on a faster, more comprehensive grasp of the world than that which is sought and achieved by the ordinary person. This treatise is very interesting; for although Brentano was unable to achieve a science of the mind, he was a keen observer and, in observing the reality of contemporary life, could no longer find the concept of genius. He was honest enough to challenge the idea of genius.

[ 46 ] Such things seem downright mysterious to one if one does not delve into the deeper foundations of human development, if one does not know that what will replace genius in the future will consist in certain people finding their way to interact with the spiritual world in a different way than was the case in ancient times. And because they will do so, they will receive impulses from the spiritual world that will then manifest in what, in the future, will be equivalent to what geniuses created in the past. This is the extent of the idea of evolution: Everything, absolutely everything, was different in ancient times; everything will be different in the future. — I know full well how people still laugh at you today when you say such things, but these observations are drawn from a concrete examination of reality, whereas today people fall in love with abstract concepts. For example, someone has formed the concept that exercise is good for certain illnesses. There’s nothing wrong with that. But then someone comes to him complaining of an illness, and he decides that these are the conditions for which exercise is good. He advises the sick person to get plenty of exercise, but the person replies: “Excuse me, but you seem to have forgotten that I’m a mail carrier!” — Concepts are simply not real if one does not realize that they are merely instruments for reality, if one does not realize that one must never be dogmatic. — As I said, the same applies to the concept: “The most capable person in the right position”—if one later becomes convinced that the nephew or the son-in-law is the most capable man. What matters is reality, not concepts one falls in love with. One must preserve this sense; otherwise, one will learn nothing from history, nor anything from the reality of the present, and one will not find a way to rediscover Jesus Christ.

[ 47 ] We will continue this discussion in eight days.