The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. Signs of the Times: East, West, Central Europe

[ 1 ] The friends of our spiritual movement who are here in Ulm came together some time ago to cultivate the ideas, aspirations, and impulses of our spiritual movement here as well. We—friends from out of town—are united here today with our friends from Ulm to commemorate this event together, which consists precisely in the fact that friends of our movement have also come together in this city of Ulm. They have come together in a solemn time, in a difficult time, in a time that speaks to the hearts of humanity through significant signs. And so, on this occasion today, it is fitting that we reflect on broader contexts—spiritual contexts of human development—into which our spiritual movement will place itself for our time and for the near future. I would like to say: Let us turn our gaze, for a moment, away from what is most immediately connected to humanity’s interests—including in the spiritual realm—and toward the all-encompassing, that all-encompassing reality with which our movement is connected.

[ 2 ] We know, after all, that those contemporary figures who are uniting under the influence of our spiritual impulses must feel deep in their souls and hearts that they are seeking something that no other spiritual movement or spiritual endeavor of the present can give them—something connected precisely to what human beings must seek in the realm of the soul in our time and in the near future if they are to become conscious of their humanity in the fullest sense of the word. In this search, precisely as it is expressed in our movement, we encounter many opponents. And our opponents are precisely those who believe they must, from one perspective or another, protect the true goods of human development—protect them, as they see it, from what they regard as a deviation of the human spirit, such as is present in our movement. Thus, many religious-minded or seemingly religious-minded people of the present day believe that our movement is likely to lead them away from what they need for true religious deepening.

[ 3 ] Now, however, one could counter some who speak this way with a judgment that is perhaps somewhat superficial, yet no less apt: Has the advocacy of Christian ideals, for example, over the course of the last few centuries, managed to elevate humanity to a level that could have—I won’t even say “eliminated” the current terrible catastrophe, but merely “mitigated” it? — It has not been able to do so! But those people who never want to learn from events also learn nothing from the fact that religious life has unfolded in accordance with their views for centuries, indeed millennia, and yet this catastrophe has nevertheless been able to break out across the entire earth, despite this religious life. But even if it seems obvious to ask such a question, let us not direct our thoughts precisely in this direction. Let us begin today by raising another question—one that is perhaps given very little consideration, but which is nonetheless connected to some very, very profound aspects of the present.

[ 4 ] Do you know which word, according to contemporary scholars—especially philologists—is the most mysterious in terms of its origin and etymology? Do you know which word, even in the most scholarly works, when you seek guidance, you will find that no one can say where it comes from, what it actually means, or what its significance is? — The word whose linguistic and spiritual origin you will search for in vain in scholarly references is the word “God.” No science today can provide you with information about the linguistic and spiritual origin of the word “God.” That is indeed a peculiar fact. For this fact points not merely to externalities, not to something that falls within this or that series of facts, but rather to something that is deeply, deeply connected to the human soul. People all believe they are saying something when they speak of the divine, when they speak of their turning toward God. And yet, even with all the means of contemporary scholarship, they cannot even begin to indicate the origin of the word “God.” This indicates that by far the majority of people today who speak on religious or other spiritual matters do not, in truth, know what they are talking about. If only one would delve deeply enough into what is actually meant by the fact that people do not know what they are talking about when they believe they are speaking of what is most intimately connected with the human soul’s striving! Those who feel compelled to emerge from the various spiritual confusions of the present day and turn to our spiritual impulses sense this—if not clearly and consciously, then at least instinctively. That these spiritual impulses, which come precisely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, are connected to the most urgent needs of our time—this is something I have emphasized time and again during the period in which the current severe storm has, in fact, been gathering for a long time.

[ 5 ] I would like to recall a statement I have made on several occasions, as those friends who have been following our movement for years now are aware. I have often said that over the course of the last three to four centuries, the Earth, with its various peoples, has become a single entity in terms of commerce, industry, banking, and so on. I have pointed out how modern means of transportation—and what, until recently, has been carried across the entire globe by these means—have spread a unity of economic life, of external economic activity, across the entire globe—a unity, if we may say so, of physical life on Earth. We had a unity of physical life on Earth. A check issued in New York could be cashed in Tokyo or Berlin or anywhere else. In the years leading up to this war, I always added this demand to that fact: Not only does the human body need a soul, but every body needs a soul; it cannot live without a soul. What has spread across the earth as a physical body—in commercial, industrial, and other respects—requires a soul, a soul that makes it possible for people across the earth to understand one another spiritually, just as they understand one another commercially and financially. To give the earthly body an earthly soul—this is something I have often spoken of as a worthy goal.

[ 6 ] Well, something like this certainly does not come about in a single day; it takes time, and what I am expressing here is not meant to be a critique of the times, but merely a characterization; it is intended to kindle within people’s souls what should serve as impulses for action, thought, feeling, and will. It is not meant to accuse, but to articulate what ought to happen. Therefore, it is not meant as a reproach [when it was said] that human beings have failed, in the past decades—during which the common earthly body has developed with particular intensity—to form a common earthly soul for this earthly body. This Earth soul can, after all, only be found if we help people understand what, in a spiritual sense, is as common to all humanity as the sun is in a physical sense—and what is to be disseminated among humanity through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

[ 7 ] But this has been neglected until now. And in these current catastrophic times, we are experiencing in the most terrible way—as has never before occurred in the documented history of human development—that humanity finds itself in a dead end, a true dead end. And, in all seriousness, it will only find a way out of this dead end if it resolves to truly add to physical culture—of which humanity is so proud—the spiritual culture of the Earth soul for our time and for the near future, which is an integral part of that physical culture.

[ 8 ] One may resist these efforts to imbue the Earth with a new spirituality as much as one likes, but the truth will inevitably assert itself under any circumstances. Humanity is now in the midst of a terrible catastrophe. If humanity does not resolve to truly embrace the new spirituality referred to here, then these catastrophes will recur again and again in ever-new periods—perhaps in quite short intervals. With the means that humanity already knew before this catastrophe broke out, this catastrophe and all its consequences will never be remedied. Anyone who still believes this is not thinking in terms of humanity’s earthly evolution. And this catastrophic era will last—even if it can seemingly be bridged for a few years in between—until humanity interprets and understands it in the only correct way, namely, as a sign that people are turning toward the Spirit that must permeate purely physical life. This may still be a bitter—because uncomfortable—truth for many today, but it is a truth.

[ 9 ] Let us ask ourselves: What, in fact, has managed to maintain some connection with the spiritual world to this day, despite the increasingly intense prevalence of a purely materialistic earthly culture over the past three to four centuries? Anyone with experience in this field knows that, in reality, only a single fact—one of grave significance for humanity—has sustained this connection with the spiritual world. A man who was one of the most prominent leaders of the unproductive “Society for Ethical Culture” in recent years once told me one day that he had thought long and hard about how it could be that in our enlightened age—in which humanity surely knows that salvation can lie only in an understanding of the material world—how it is possible that in this enlightened age there are still churches, churches alongside the various states. And he said he had figured out why churches still exist. He expressed this solution—with which he intended to convey a profound mystery—in roughly the following words: States administer life; churches administer death; and since people have not yet outgrown the notion that death is something terrible, the power of the church lies in the fact that it administers death. — It is a genuinely materialistic way of thinking, for the man wanted to express that if people had finally broken the habit of viewing death as something significant that intervenes in human life—if they had grown accustomed to letting death come upon them just as it does to animals—then the churches would have lost their power.

[ 10 ] Well, of course this statement is utter nonsense, downright brilliant nonsense; but when one looks at the intellectual life of the present, it is not entirely without foundation. Sometimes, in order to understand itself—to express what it is in intellectual terms—the present must utter nonsense. In the future, this will be cited as a distinctive characteristic of our time: that the most spirited people of the present were compelled, when they sought to express so aptly the character of the present—that is, the period around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century—to utter nonsense. Yet there is something true in this very nonsense—namely, the truth that for many people today, almost the only bridge connecting them to the spiritual world is that, in a certain sense, they either fear death or cannot bear the thought that, once their loved ones have passed away, they might somehow be reduced to nothingness. Certainly, it should not be overlooked that these thoughts are still significant enough, that they are still connected to the deepest interests of the human soul. However, neither fear nor any other feeling toward death can lead to a genuine connection with the spiritual world. For this, there must be a genuine, true knowledge of the spiritual world; there must be an understanding of the reality of the spiritual world. And this understanding of the reality of the spiritual world is possible today only by supplementing a scientific mindset with a spiritual-scientific mindset.

[ 11 ] If people do not know where the word “God” actually comes from, or what the divine actually is, what are people actually doing today when they speak of the need for this or that form of religious worship, or of the divine? People who often believe themselves to be deeply religious by pretending to worship the supreme divine—what are they actually doing? It is by no means unimportant to bring this question before one’s soul in a moment of serious reflection. What does this question entail? This question entails: What is actually the God of whom most people today speak, those who pretend to be religious?

[ 12 ] Well, people reject the idea—when we speak from the standpoint of spiritual science—that there are other beings above us: the angels, archangels, archai, and so on, so that we perceive a hierarchy of spiritual beings, and that the path leads far upward to what is the highest Divine. People today do not want this kind of intellectual humility. They often express it by saying that they do not want any mediation between themselves and God; they always want to turn directly and immediately to the Most High God. But the point is not what one believes about such a turning, but rather what one actually does in one’s soul, what one actually experiences in one’s soul.

[ 13 ] Take everything that a preacher from any recognized religious community tells you today about the divine—what he says about the divine. What does this refer to if one does not go by his words but by reality? It refers to two things. Either what he speaks of refers to no higher being than his angel, who stands as a guiding entity over each and every one of us. He worships this angel; he calls him the highest God. Anyone who knows what words can truly signify knows that everything said about God in modern sermons never refers to any higher God than an angel—or, if not to an angel, then to something else entirely. For if one investigates the question of where, in fact, the feelings of such people originate—those who speak of their God, who preach about their God in their churches, who often even claim to have an experience of God in their souls, as some people of the present day do—they then call themselves, with a certain arrogance, “evangelized people” and the like—and if one investigates the impulses emanating from the souls of such people, one arrives at the following conclusion: Such people feel within their souls the impulse of their own being, as this being developed in a purely spiritual environment between their last death and their birth. This spiritual being, which developed within us between our last death and our birth, is now in our body; it has taken up residence in our body. Much of what we now experience comes solely from this being, from this pre-birth being. Human beings perceive this pre-birth being as something spiritual; it is with this pre-birth being that they feel united. Indeed, even so-called theosophists of the most diverse schools of thought have repeatedly told people—in order to offer them something spiritually sweet as honey—that what matters is for a person to unite with the God within themselves. But what a person feels when he supposedly unites with his God is himself; it is merely his spiritual-soul being in the period between his last death and his last birth. And what numerous pastors and priests speak of when they speak of the God they feel in their souls is nothing other than a sense of their own “I”—not as it develops here in the physical body and physical surroundings, but as it has developed in the spiritual world between death and birth. That is what they sense, and then they begin to pray. And what are they worshiping? Themselves.

[ 14 ] This is what strikes one so heart-wrenchingly in many of today’s intellectual currents. If one looks at these things as they really are, one must admit that people have gradually come to worship themselves—subconsciously, without even realizing it. And once someone realizes this, they express it in strange ways, as Friedrich Nietzsche did. One must make this absolutely clear to oneself: Either the person who refuses to acknowledge the hierarchies—the wondrous breadth and grandeur of the spiritual world—simply worships their own “angel”—which is, after all, a form of selfish worship—or they worship themselves. This is the spiritual form of egoism to which humanity has gradually come under the influence of modern materialistic development.

[ 15 ] Now you’ll say: What on earth is he telling us? That can’t be true! People don’t actually say that they worship themselves, that they only worship their angel! — Certainly, they don’t say it, but they do it; and what they say is merely a means of numbing themselves to the fact, which is no less real for that. What is said today is often a narcotic for humanity, because, of course, people do not want to admit to themselves what is actually at stake. Today, people often find it too inconvenient to elevate themselves to the spiritual worlds through inner work. They do not want that. They want to penetrate the spiritual worlds in a much simpler way—as simple as possible. That is why they deceive themselves; that is why they numb themselves. But one cannot numb oneself with impunity. The world goes on as it must. The divine-spiritual is at work in the world, even if people refuse to acknowledge it. It is at work and weaving within it. And this is the deepest task of our time: to rediscover our connection with the true spiritual, to rid ourselves of the spiritualized egoism we have just described, and to overcome it. This is what speaks so deeply to one’s heart once one has grasped the true, deeper impulse of spiritual science for the present. The world—as I pointed out earlier—will, through its powerful signs, compel people to seek the spirit once more. But there must be a certain core of striving humanity that finds its way into this spiritual striving, which alone can be the right, true, and real path for the present.

[ 16 ] You see, the Earth has undergone various missions. It is not just the individual human being who has a mission; the entire Earth continually has its various missions. The people of Indian civilization had a different mission in the period immediately following the great Atlantean catastrophe, and the people of Persian civilization had yet another mission somewhat later; people had a different task when the Egyptians and Chaldeans set the tone, and yet another when the Greco-Roman peoples set the tone. This continued well into the 15th century. Another task has been assigned to us from the 15th century to the present day. And this task, which has now been assigned to us, is quite different from any that has ever existed on Earth. One can characterize this task, which is currently assigned to humanity—one that began in the 15th century and will continue well into the 4th millennium—by pointing to the most essential aspect of what is happening on Earth during this very period.

[ 17 ] If we look back to the period up to the 15th century and examine it from a humanities perspective, we see that, up until the 15th century, everything people did was imbued with a certain spiritual quality. External history tells us nothing of this, for it is a conventional fable that we learn in schools and universities. Just take a close look at what people created in their everyday lives—it was imbued with a certain spirituality. This is the defining characteristic of our era: that this spirituality has declined, and that it will gradually be lost entirely unless humanity adds a new spirituality to its purely external, material culture. Due to purely external circumstances, the Earth’s evolution is doomed to become purely materialistic. Humanity must, through a free inner act, add the spirit—which, in a sense, arose of its own accord in earlier epochs of Earth’s development—to what is presented to us.

[ 18 ] If one disregards what human beings can contribute to earthly culture through their inner freedom and their consciousness, and focuses solely on what has arisen spontaneously during our fifth epoch—which has lasted since the middle of the 15th century—it becomes clear that this is the epoch in which the Earth gradually begins to die for the entire cosmos, for the entire universe. The fifth epoch marks the beginning of the Earth’s death. While all earlier epochs were able to contribute to the aforementioned spirit of the universe through what arose from the Earth itself, all the brilliant culture that developed during this fifth epoch—the telegraph, the telephone, the railroad—has great significance for the Earth, but no significance beyond it. Nothing that arose in Egyptian or Greek civilization will perish with the Earth; but what arises in our time on the foundation of a purely materialistic culture will perish with the Earth when the Earth itself becomes a world corpse. What the present material culture creates will perish with the Earth. This time had to come. For human beings must become free. They were not to be compelled to find the spirit; they were to find the spiritual through a free act of inner consciousness. Hence this present era has come, in which everything we can find externally—of which we can be so proud—exists externally only for the Earth, yet does not exist for the spiritual world. Therefore, it is also the time that leaves it up to human beings to rise to the spirit—a time that directs people to their inner selves, to their souls, to their hearts, to their minds, if they wish to become more spiritual; a time that does not force people to be more spiritual, but leaves it up to them whether they wish to decline along with the outwardly decaying culture, or whether they do not wish to decline with this culture.

[ 19 ] One can grasp a truth such as the one just expressed—that is, what is absolutely necessary for humanity—either through spiritual science—and everything you find in spiritual science literature provides you with the building blocks for understanding what I have just summarized— or, if one is somewhat prepared by spiritual science, one can also read these things from the powerful signs that are unfolding in our time. But people are still not very inclined to read the signs of the times.

[ 20 ] Consider the following. Anyone who has looked around a little in recent decades in the fields of human development has been able to make some very remarkable observations. If they have asked themselves: “How do people strive toward ideals for the future, toward spiritual renewal?”—and if they then set out to truly understand these matters, they would have found a lively striving, a spiritual striving, spiritual activity, and a sense that things on Earth must change in the realm that has come to be called “socialism” in the world of labor, in the labor movement. Purely material, yet genuine ideals for the future—ideals that constantly ask how the world must be transformed, how something new must come about—that was one aspect.

[ 21 ] If one looks beyond the realm of socialism—where our intellectual movement is still just a tiny handful of, as people say, eccentric, half-crazy individuals—and asks the intelligent people, those who have truly understood the ideas of our time, one finds, everywhere in recent decades, the most appalling intellectual wasteland. Within church theology, the strangest discussions arose: whether Jesus Christ ever lived at all, or at least that he could not have been some kind of extraterrestrial being; the “simple man from Nazareth”—that, after all, was still the only thing people cared about. And what else? Well, what did people find? In this era, when people had “become free from all belief in authority”—an era in which people guided themselves solely by the principle: “Test everything, and keep what is best”—they found the blindest belief in authority in what, as they say, science demands. Blind belief in authority in all fields! Blind belief in authority, from the field of history right on through to medicine. After all, no one found it particularly convenient to know much about what health depends on; that is left to be taken care of by those who are authorities in that field. Simply the most appalling blind faith in authority! Clinging to the remnants and scraps of what one has salvaged from the past, what one has held onto out of convenience. No striving that would have sprung from the awareness that a spiritual renewal of humanity is necessary!

[ 22 ] At the same time, it became apparent to those who were once again able to observe from a spiritual-scientific perspective that in Eastern Europe—I would say, under the sign of fire—something of a new spirit was heralded through purely natural processes, for even under the most humiliating external yoke in Eastern Europe, a future era was developing in the minds of even the most apathetic inhabitants of this part of Europe. It is remarkable how, since the 9th century, the rest of Europe has, as it were, pushed toward the East that which was meant to remain—that which was not to be eroded by the West—as it then appeared in the outward form of the so-called Russian Empire over the various centuries, inwardly preserving the old in a remarkable way and, within the shell of the old—as if within a cocoon—preparing something new for a later culture! One might say that mystery cults have been preserved within this Russian people; this Russian people lives by mystery concepts, having understood little of the West’s abstract religious concepts, yet feeling deeply—in the deepest, deepest recesses of their being—the forms of worship, that which carries the human spirit toward the divine in pictorial form. In the East, people feel within their own souls that which the Western religious leader is named after: “Pontifex,” meaning bridge-builder—a bridge-builder leading toward the spiritual. But in the East, they preserved enough of the old to remain untouched by the new—the new materialism—and thus at least keep the bridge to the spiritual open.

[ 23 ] And now, take this along with today’s signs of the times! One is tempted to say: The very, very bitterest irony of human development has been poured out precisely upon Eastern Europe—the bitterest irony! The caricature of every higher human aspiration, which has asserted itself in Leninism and Trotskyism as the ultimate caricatured consequence of purely materialistic socialist ideas, has been thrust upon the people of the East like a garment that does not fit. Never before have greater opposites clashed than the soul of Eastern Europe and the inhuman Trotskyism or Leninism. This is not spoken out of any sympathy or antipathy; it is spoken out of insight—an insight that is meant to show us what terrible things are brewing in Eastern Europe through the convergence of the greatest opposites that have ever come together. This should also point out to us that the signs of the times speak volumes. It should show us, above all, that we must once again begin to take spiritual science seriously enough that we may, through it, enter into reality; for through it, one can penetrate the reality of the present.

[ 24 ] Tagore—Rabindranath Tagore—gave a remarkable speech to the Japanese about the spirit of Japan. Tagore speaks as an Oriental; but today, Orientals speak in such a way that Europeans, if they so choose, can understand them to some extent. But precisely when one delves into what Tagore said about the spirit of Japan—what he, in a sense, wanted to say to the whole world—one finds that Tagore, along with all discerning people of the East, knows this: The East preserves an ancient spiritual culture, a spiritual culture that the sages of the East have carefully kept secret, which they have not allowed to reach the common people. But it is a spiritual culture that they have incorporated into their social institutions right up to the present day. A culture that is spiritual through and through, but whose time has passed. Hence the peculiar unnaturalness that confronts us—I would say—throughout the entire Asian East. People are adapting Western forms of thought and Western cultural forms to their old spiritual sensibility. This essentially results in something terrible, because spiritual thinking—particularly as the Japanese have developed it—is flexible and penetrates reality. If it joins forces with European-American materialism, then—unless European materialism is willing to become spiritual—it will most certainly outstrip it. For Europeans lack the mental agility that the Japanese possess. The Japanese have inherited this as part of their ancient spirituality.

[ 25 ] Well, as if by some wondrous wisdom, I would say, the Russian national soul had been preserved from everything that leads to a downward spiral into decadence. But now it is to be poisoned by Leninism and Trotskyism. It is to be infected by that which would utterly extinguish the spirit from the entire culture of the Earth if it were to come to power. That, of course, must not be allowed to happen. But if it is to be prevented—if spiritual success is to be achieved—it depends on resolving to regard spiritual science not merely as an abstract theory, not merely as a convenient means of developing a certain inner indulgence, or to cultivate a certain mystical reverie in the soul—one in which one feels at ease, through which one deludes oneself into believing that one has nothing to do with the world—one despises this vile world and feels transported into a spiritual hereafter. But that is nothing but egoism—a higher form of egoism, yet still merely egoism. One should have nothing to do with such mysticism, such theosophy, but rather with that spiritual grasp of existence which truly comprehends the spirit, experiences the spirit, yet seeks to grasp reality through the spirit.

[ 26 ] Now, we must recognize what is at stake here as a task—a serious task for the present. But such matters are sometimes inconvenient. And precisely because they are inconvenient, certain brotherhoods that have preserved them until now have kept them secret from the general public, guarding them closely. That time has passed. The time has come for people to strive from within their conscious inner selves in free spirituality. The things that have been kept secret for millennia must now be revealed to humanity. One must realize that in the East, in ancient, bygone eras, a spiritual wisdom already existed, but the time for that spiritual wisdom has passed. A different kind of spiritual wisdom must come. People often delude themselves about this. How many people have emerged in our present age of seeking and have sought to make things easy for Europeans, because something like our spiritual science is far too difficult for them—for it requires thinking; and thinking is such an inconvenience! It requires spiritual alertness; and being spiritually alert is such an inconvenience! So many people have come forward who wanted to spare Europeans the effort of seeking their own path to the spirit, and have taught them all manner of Eastern wisdom—Zoroastrian wisdom and all sorts of other things. Europeans felt so comfortable not having to seek the spirit themselves, but instead having the spirit brought to them ready-made from ancient India. It was a narcotic, for they did not want to explore the universe through the spirit. They wanted to numb themselves by grasping an ancient means of knowledge. That was the mistake made in many areas when turning toward the East.

[ 27 ] And another mistake has been made. This other mistake is connected to the fact that this modern era—which, in a sense, is leading the world toward the decline of its culture—brings about in people an unconscious need to seek their own inner selves. The urge to seek and find this inner self—this urge is already there. Oh, the number of people setting out to seek their own inner self is growing ever larger! The search for one’s own inner self is disguised, even masked, in the worship of a god—which is either the worship of an angel or of one’s own self. The search for the inner self will become ever more vivid and alive in modern humanity. The more science and technology people embrace in modern times, the more vividly the counter-impulse of the search for the inner self will emerge. Today, people often search along the wrong paths, but they are searching nonetheless. Those who search the least are the very ones who are employed as official bodies to search for the spirit; they seek the “limits of knowledge.” They seek to determine what human beings cannot know about the spiritual world. And so today we have spiritual leaders who are primarily concerned with telling people how not to penetrate the spiritual world, and a humanity that, while searching, has no real awareness of its own search.

[ 28 ] This is the most striking phenomenon. If you truly seek to unravel the mystery of the soul across the earth, you will find that people—the laypersons who are in the thick of life’s hardships and struggles—are everywhere searching for the soul. Ask the leaders who, from their pulpits and lecterns, ought to speak to people in such a way as to satisfy this search, and they will tell you that science does not permit one to cross the boundaries of knowledge, that human beings cannot penetrate the spiritual world. Kant, they say, has established the limits of human knowledge once and for all, and anyone who does not accept this is a fool. — This is the most striking phenomenon of the present day. Yet the urge to seek the inner world exists in the widest circles, even if people are not consciously aware of this urge. Where such an urge exists, people will not, in the long run, be satisfied with mere limits, but will continue to seek something else.

[ 29 ] Just as the East has sent us the narcotic of an ancient culture, a culture that has outlived its time, so the distant West sends humanity another narcotic. This is what people will gradually come to realize: Anglo-Americanism is, culturally speaking, the narcotic of the modern age that numbs the search for the spirit within the human soul. On the one hand, Anglo-American culture has the task of organizing and disseminating the material world across the globe, but—by virtue of an inherent characteristic of the Anglo-American nature—it combines this task with the aim of using “Americanisms” to numb people in their search for the spiritual within the soul. The more one were to become “Oriental” in Europe, the more one would numb oneself with regard to spiritual knowledge of the world; the more one were to become “Anglo-American” in Europe, the more one would numb oneself in the search for the true spirit, the true self within the human soul.

[ 30 ] These things are said here not to foster chauvinism, nor to launch into all sorts of tirades about this or that world mission, but because—in the most humble way—this must be understood in order to grasp the responsible position of the Central European. For ever since the era of intellectual deepening brought about by Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller—through everything I have attempted to describe in the book *The Riddle of Man* as the forgotten resonance of German intellectual life—the Central European spirit has been called upon to lead humanity beyond these two intoxicants: the intoxicant of Orientalism and the intoxicant of Americanism.

[ 31 ] To understand how the spiritual tableau unfolds across the Earth, to understand what is laid upon our souls—this is what spiritual science is meant to guide us toward. Can people out in the world today know what spiritual impulses might flow from Central Europe into the world? Can they know that? Let us put the question another way: Have we proven ourselves worthy of such a spiritual quest as that inspired by Herder and Goethe? — My dear friends, meditation is rightly recommended to us in spiritual science. Do you know what a wonderful meditation it would be, one that could even be started with the youngest children? Read Herder’s descriptions of how he portrays every sunrise as a new creation within a magnificent cosmic picture. And read the countless images found in Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Forgotten, faded away! Just the other day, a gentleman who is serious about Central European intellectual life told me: “I’ve never heard a thing about any of that in Herder’s work!”

[ 32 ] Yes, we have a responsibility; we must recognize this responsibility. Listen today to a Chinese man like Ku Hung-Ming. Listen to an Indian like Tagore. Do you really believe these people have the ability to truly understand, given what is happening, what spiritual impulses are at work in Central European intellectual life? They look at it and say to themselves: Well, Goethe lived; a Goethe Society has even been founded to promote Goetheanism. But what has happened? In recent years, people have been searching for someone to lead this Goethe Society, someone to stand at its head; yet they have not even raised the question: Should it be a man who works in the spirit of Goetheanism, who could contribute to spirituality in the sense in which it is now to be conceived, a hundred years after Goethe? No, a man who was formerly a finance minister has been placed at the head of the Goethe Society. The outside world sees him as the steward of Goethean spirituality. No one other than a former finance minister is seen as the steward of Goethean spirituality!

[ 33 ] It is not enough simply to cry out: “Spirit, Spirit, Spirit”—but rather to permeate reality with what one has gained from spiritual insight, and to bring this spiritual insight into reality as well. A task has been assigned specifically to Central Europeans, and this task has begun. For spiritual science, as conceived here, is nothing other than the continuation of what emerged around the great turning point in modern spiritual life to which I have just alluded. The purely materialistic socialist striving—which for decades was the sole driving force—should have found a counterbalance in a spiritual movement! It is true that it is never too late, but what is our specific task must finally be understood so that it does not fall by the wayside. It must finally be understood that one cannot make progress with all these slogans alone, that a new spirit must take hold of humanity. But people today are passing the spirit by. Life provides us with countless examples of this.

[ 34 ] Just one example among thousands and thousands that could be cited. Recently, a strange essay by a very intelligent man appeared in a widely read German newspaper. This witty man “tore apart” a book that had unfortunately been published in the series “Aus Natur und Geisteswelt” (From the Natural and Spiritual World); he railed horribly against this little book. And when one read this essay, one couldn’t figure it out: Why, exactly, is this man ranting? For this book discusses the development of astrology and the horoscope in exactly the way a typical modern university professor—who is quite respectable and, of course, does not subscribe to the “superstition” of astrology—would speak. And at the end, he further elaborates on his view by describing Goethe’s horoscope, and he actually pokes fun at the fact that one can find all sorts of things in that horoscope. So a perfectly respectable university professor has written from today’s perspective. One couldn’t be a more respectable university professor than the one who wrote that little book. But Fritz Mauthner rants and raves about this book, claiming that someone is spreading superstition. He rants and raves and doesn’t even know why! A few days later, the author published a clarification in which he points out: I am in complete agreement with Fritz Mauthner—he makes fun of astrology and horoscopes, and so do I! I only cited the horoscope to show that you can read whatever you want into it. So we are in complete agreement.” — The Berliner Tageblatt, whose former theater critic was Fritz Mauthner, had nothing to say in response, because it did not think that Mauthner had misunderstood the point. Mauthner, too, offers no word of clarification. In short, two people who were in complete agreement clashed in the most furious manner, and no one knew why. There wasn’t the slightest reason for it.

[ 35 ] That’s just how things are these days—that’s what characterizes the present! People no longer even listen to what they have to say to one another; for the most part, they have very little to say to one another anyway. But what they develop, what they have against one another, stems from something entirely different from what they admit to themselves. We live within something completely inexplicable, within something entirely irrational, because we have become estranged from reality and can no longer access it.

[ 36 ] If you think through and truly feel such things, you will already sense in your souls the importance and significance of what spiritual science is. Anyone who believes today that spiritual science is something impractical is on a very, very wrong track. In fifty years, it will no longer be possible to establish factories or any kind of working communities without permeating these endeavors with spiritual science, for it alone will find the path to reality. When people come to understand—truly understand—that all the old catchphrases lead to dead ends, that even in the most extreme material life we need insight into the spirit that governs the world, then they will understand spiritual science; then they will not seek to cross over into the spiritual world in a selfish manner via the “only bridge of death,” but rather they will draw life even from death.

[ 37 ] Anyone who has seriously engaged with spiritual research may perhaps speak of such things in such an intimate circle. I, who have now been writing about Goethe for more than thirty years, have not sought to write about him in a purely philological, philosophical, or otherwise scholarly manner; rather, my aim has always been to use my relationship with Goethe to offer a path—and to express this in my books—to what Goethe now wishes to say to humanity in a specific field that is close to my heart. I did not turn to the dead Goethe in order to study him, but rather I wanted to find, through what Goethe left behind, the path to the living Goethe. To the Goethe who speaks into our souls when we realize that the dead are living beings just like us, that they live within the world in which we ourselves live—only that we walk about in the flesh, while the dead are among us in spirit.

[ 38 ] Is there truly a communion with the dead in religious communities? A self-centered belief in immortality does exist, and it should not be condemned; but it is spiritual science that makes the lives of the dead fruitful. For through spiritual science, people will find the way to those with whom they were karmically connected—those who have passed into the other world and are still linked to this world by thousands upon thousands of threads. For what happens here on Earth is not shaped solely by the impulses of the living. A person does not cease to influence the world once they have passed through the gate of death.

[ 39 ] We are only partially awake. When we perceive and form mental images, we are awake. When we feel, we are dreaming. Our feelings are no more vivid in our consciousness than our dreams. And as for our impulses of will—we are oblivious to them. We know through mental images how we recall dreams, yet in ordinary consciousness we do not even know how the will operates when we move our arm. In feeling, we dream; in willing, we sleep. Because we are beings who feel and will, there is a world of the spirit all around us that we do not perceive in ordinary consciousness. We are torn away from this world through perception and thought. Because we are perceivers, thinkers, and enjoyers of the physical world, we do not realize that the dead walk among us. The dead walk among us. When a human being has developed throughout their life, they pass through the gate of death. They remain connected to earthly existence; threads extend from them down into earthly existence. We cannot feel or will without the dead who were karmically connected to us influencing our feelings and will. Spiritual science provides the recognition of that which looks in from a life not lost to the earth—a life that is otherwise believed to be in nothingness—in a living way. The spiritual dispositions of the people of the East are also based on this. The peoples of Central Europe have the task, out of the freedom of the soul, of drawing forth into the fourth millennium everything that human beings can consciously create out of the freedom of their souls. To this end, however, external material reality must be permeated by the spiritual. But it must not plunge into Wilsonism, which is the opposite of all spirituality. In the East, from those terrible opposites—from that incongruity that has arisen from the grafting of Trotskyism and Leninism onto burgeoning spirituality—what is preparing to become the next culture must once again be redeemed; a culture that will be called upon to ask, whenever something happens on Earth: “What do the dead say about this?”

[ 40 ] Yes, today it is much more important to know that this is something we are approaching in the evolution of the Earth. People today are smart—they’re already so smart by the age of twenty! They get elected to parliament at twenty because today everyone already has their own point of view by the age of twenty; they’re fully formed individuals. That life, from the age of twenty until death, is not given to us in vain, but that we are constantly growing, that new things are revealed to us, that once we have passed through the gate of death, wisdom continues, life continues, and we become wiser—this is something people must truly take to heart. And in the future, people will come to realize that the wisest people to ask about what is to happen on earth are the dead.

[ 41 ] The soul of consciousness—if you look up what that is in my book Theosophy—shapes the present, while the spiritual self shapes the next civilization. The spiritual self will come into being through the dead serving as advisors to the living on Earth. Today this is still regarded as fanciful daydreaming, as half-madness. It will become a reality. There will come a time when people who are united on Earth to accomplish something meaningful for the development of the Earth will consult not only the living but also the dead. We cannot yet go into detail today about the specific form this will take in the future—including its political structure and how it must be prepared; that can only remain a mystery for now. But we can already take to heart the fact that this living awareness must arise within humanity—that we are together with the dead; that human beings should not merely develop a selfish striving for immortality, but rather that living striving which finds its fulfillment in action, in deed.

[ 42 ] I considered it particularly fitting to reflect on this occasion—where our friends have gathered here to find spiritual-scientific answers to certain questions of life—on the realization that spiritual knowledge seeks to integrate the individual human striving into the universal striving of the Earth. To realize that this is not merely a matter of narrow-minded human spiritual needs, but that today—if we are seriously committed to spiritual science—it concerns the fate of Earth’s culture; to bring this to consciousness is not arrogance, not megalomania, this can be done in all humility, but it must be done, because there must be people today who truly grasp the gravity of human striving on Earth. If you immerse yourself in spiritual science in this way, you will find that, however small such a branch may still be, it can contribute its share to what is to come in human evolution—what must come to pass if the Earth is to move toward its goal!