The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Today, in our present time, to speak of Pentecost in the way that has become customary seems to me, given the gravity of the times, to be an unchristian act—even though such unchristian acts are, in fact, the order of the day today. After all, everything that is being put forward here by those who are committed to the renewal of our educational and school systems—and who earnestly profess their allegiance to our movement for the threefold social order—is, in fact, spoken in the spirit of Pentecost. For in the separation of spiritual life, in the establishment of an independent school system, lies the most important Pentecostal spirit of our present time—the very spirit that has long since vanished from the other so-called religious and denominational movements of our age. Let us hope, indeed, that it is precisely from the emancipation of spiritual life—as we strive for it—that the renewal of this spiritual life, which humanity so desperately needs, will emerge. What must happen today in our educational system to bring about a renewal of the spirit—to bring forth the true Pentecostal spirit of our time—can only be understood by those who form their own judgment about how the anti-Pentecostal spirit has seeped into everything we encounter today in public life and in the so-called intellectual interactions among people.

[ 2 ] When we speak in the way that we must at this time, based on anthroposophical principles, we may even hear the accusation today—and I say “even,” and I emphasize this three times—that the words “German” and “Christian” or “Christ” hardly appear at all in these speeches.

[ 3 ] If we cannot find within ourselves the spirit to reject such nonsense, we have not yet recognized the essence of the anthroposophical worldview. Such idle chatter is the fruit of our misguided approach to the education of the people and of humanity; in this chatter, the misconceptions that have been instilled in our souls during our upbringing find their full expression. Therefore, it is essential, above all else, to gain insight into the connection between the misguided chatter of our age and our misguided system of education and instruction. Gaining this insight is what should today split apart and descend in individual fiery tongues upon the heads of our contemporaries.

[ 4 ] There is much talk in our time about not respecting the word, for: “In the beginning was the deed.” But an age like ours will also misapply this principle, for in this age the word has become a vacuous phrase and the deed has become thoughtless brutality. Such an age is justified in turning away from the word, because in the word it knows, it can perceive only empty phrases, and in the deed it knows, only thoughtless brutality.

[ 5 ] There is a deep connection between our upbringing, our education, and the fact just described. We carry within us two sources of a distorted humanity: we carry within us a distorted Greek spirit and a distorted Roman spirit. We do not understand how to accept the Greek spirit in its own time and place, just as it is. We do not understand how the noble figures of Socrates and Plato struggled so hard to rid the Greeks of their irresistible tendency toward illusion. The Greek was so disposed that he constantly felt the urge to rise above the seriousness of life to an insubstantial illusion and to seek his satisfaction in it. The Greek lawmakers, Socrates and Plato, had to point out the reality of the spirit with the utmost clarity so that the Greeks would not sink ever deeper into their national flaw, their racial flaw: comfortably deluding themselves with illusion to escape the seriousness of life. And the Greeks forgave Socrates for speaking of the seriousness of life only as long as the “loafer” Socrates seemed harmless to them. But when they realized what seriousness of life was actually contained in the words of the loitering Socrates, they poisoned him.

[ 6 ] As people of our age, we do not possess within us the spirit of Socratic seriousness. We prefer to embrace that spirit of Hellenism that poisoned Socrates, and we remain silent in this spirit of Hellenism. We allow ourselves to accept that the pearl of world literature, the Gospel of John, is poisoned at its very beginning by the fact that, in place of what the Old Testament spoke of—that if man lets it slip into his illusions, heaven and earth will collapse—we take the harmless word at face value. “In the beginning was the Word”—thus begins the Gospel of John. People today are glad to find the word “Word” at this point, a word they are inclined to take as mere rhetoric. But in truth, what stands here is something capable of dispelling all the illusions that people project into the phrase. The heaven and earth of our illusions collapse when one truly and earnestly seeks to perceive the truth of the Logos that stands here and should be felt.

[ 7 ] So our contemporary culture has sought to soften the harshness of life—either through mystical comfort or brutal violence. This is what we must recognize today, and above all, what we must recommit ourselves to. Today, we must expel from our souls—through the earliest education, beginning as early as school—and all the way up to the highest levels, we must learn to expel from human beings what Socrates and Plato sought to expel from Greek civilization by telling that civilization: “Beware of illusions!” The spirit has reality. Reality lies in the idea, not in what you wish to see in this idea with your illusory phrases.

[ 8 ] We won’t get anywhere if we keep rambling on about ethics and religion. For the Gospel itself is action in the unfolding of the world. Today, the Gospel has become mere chatter. That is why thoughtless, brutal action exists alongside it. But we must be able to take into our souls what can truly inspire us when we speak. We must find a way to let the heart participate when the lips move. We must find a way to put the whole person into our words; otherwise, the word becomes an educator of illusion, a guide away—a comfortable guide away from the seriousness of reality. We must bid farewell to that spirit that allows us to enter the church so that, within it, we may be lifted away from the gravity of life and comfortably lulled by the phrase: “The Lord will take care of it; He will deliver you from your troubles.” — We must seek out the powers within us, which are the divine powers in our very souls, for they have been placed within us since the creation of the world so that we may use them and so that we may receive God into our own souls. We must not allow ourselves to be lulled by talk of an external God, so that our souls can recline in comfortable tranquility on the philistine sofas we so love when it comes to spiritual life. And our education and our educational system must seek the path to move beyond—as one may already call it today—the Greek phrase; our education and our educational system must find the path to move beyond the Roman phrase.

[ 9 ] For the Romans, what our age still worships as the spirit of the law was right. For what was the purpose of this spirit of the Roman law? Oh, the legend of the founding of Rome has a profound meaning. Bands of robbers were rounded up so that the worst animalistic-human instincts could be fought against in them. Roman law existed for this very purpose: to tame wild beasts. But we should reflect on the fact that we have become human beings, and that we should not worship that spirit of the law, which arose from the legitimate impulses of Roman civilization to subdue wild, animal-like human passions. What we have retained from the Roman spirit—namely, the spirit of law, as it still reigns within us today—is characterized everywhere by the need to tame those wild human passions that cannot reign freely on their own.

[ 10 ] People say that this word—“Christian”—is absent from the sermons being preached today. Yet time and again, people forget a truly Christian teaching, a teaching from Paul: Sin came through the law, not the law through sin. If the Law were not there, sin would be dead. That may not mean much for our time, because people have become unchristian. But this is a saying whose deep meaning one must learn. This is what it means to be Christian: that from what people today see as the all-sustaining, all-encompassing entity—the state, which is our legacy from Roman times—the free spiritual life and economic life, which must stand on their own, be separated from it. People do not want the Christian spirit. That is why they seek comfort in having the words “Christian” and “Christianity” used as often as possible merely as empty phrases. Likewise, people today want to hear the word “German” used as often as possible as an empty phrase. The German spirit truly reigns in Goethe. A newer Central European spirit, which is un-German, has, through its enlightened representative at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, coined the phrase I have already cited here: the honor of these gentlemen, today’s intellectual leaders, lies in the fact that they see themselves as the “scientific protective force of the Hohenzollerns.” The same man who coined this phrase also delivered, in the spirit of contemporary scientific rhetoric, the lecture “Goethe and No End,” and with this lecture he sought to trample all of Goethe’s scientific spirit into the ground. He had the audacity to say: Goethe’s Faust would do better to invent the air pump and make Gretchen virtuous than to carry out the things that Goethe’s Faust does. — That was the modern spirit that trampled underfoot the true German spirit—which does not always vainly utter the word “German”—just as it has been the spirit of modern Christianity—that is, an unchristian spirit—to always demand the words “Christian” and “Christianity,” and to pay no heed to the other commandment: “You shall not take the name of God in vain.” — One should feel what is Christian, and not be dependent on the constant chatter about Christianity reaching our ears.

[ 11 ] That is the spirit of Pentecost today. One cannot say that this spirit of Pentecost, if it is not nurtured and cultivated, would easily find fertile ground today. We have the opportunity to observe how this Pentecost spirit is misunderstood by both the left and the right. Is it not a remarkable illustration—if I step down from the heights of contemplation for a moment to the everyday—a remarkable illustration of the spirit of our time, what has actually taken place: Our Association for Social Threefolding sets out to put a seed idea into action, and—so that it may be understood—it draws upon the words of a man who now, for his part, also wishes to speak of socialization; whose words are very useful when speaking of socialization; whose words can be quoted effectively because, as words, they would in fact—if these seed ideas were put into action—mean precisely what we want. — And what happens? From the very side from which these words originated, what should be drawn from them as deeds is immediately crushed to the ground. What does that actually mean deep within a person? It means: Woe to you if you take our words as anything other than idle chatter and empty phrases! The moment you take them seriously—these words of ours—we become your adversaries. — This is the effect of the education that has been raised under the state’s wing in modern times. That is from one side.

[ 12 ] On the other hand, the charming denunciation: We are, after all, in complete agreement with everything Steiner says; we agree with the views he puts forward for combating capitalism as it has existed so far; we agree with his threefold social order—but we oppose him, because we will not allow a spirit-seer to tell us such things!

[ 13 ] Well, that would be reason enough—but the reason must not be a poisonous plant—to say to oneself: What is to be done with an age that, in this way, wants nothing but either mere rhetoric or mere thoughtless, brutal action, and that rejects everything that is not rhetoric or thoughtless brutality—and that which carries within itself the very seeds of humanity’s true reality? So that one need not think, one wants thoughtless class struggle. So as not to let their thoughts become deeds, they utter the most beautiful phrases. And when others take them seriously, they fight them tooth and nail.

[ 14 ] This question must take root in our hearts: Do people born of such a spirit still have the right to gush about the miracle of Pentecost in well-crafted phrases? The flattery that is unceremoniously heaped upon the miracle of Pentecost today comes from the same glands that produce the poison with which people today seek to spray everything that comes from the Spirit—and with which they claim to rely, on the one hand, on empty phrases and, on the other, on thoughtless, brutal acts. On the one hand, empty phrases have become the religious babble of the world; on the other, brutal, spiritless acts have become militarism, the root evil of our time. Until one recognizes how these two things are rooted in flawed education and flawed schooling, one cannot think fruitfully about what should happen. Everything else is quackery.

[ 15 ] The things that must be done must be done based on reality. For reality embodies the spirit, and any denial of the spirit ultimately becomes, in truth, real nonsense and absurdity. But if someone tries to point to spiritual reality, then he is labeled an illusionist or a seer of spirits. That is how he is branded in our time, because a sense of true reality is completely lacking in the broadest circles.

[ 16 ] Comparing the social organism to the human organism or any other organism has become a cliché even in our time, and it is a rather trite one. If one wishes to avoid clichés in this area, one must provide the foundational principles that have been set forth in my work *On the Mysteries of the Soul*. What would be the point today of speaking of the threefold structure of the social organism if this spiritual foundation—the threefold structure of the human organism into nervous and sensory faculties, rhythmic faculties, and metabolic faculties—had not first been presented to people as a genuine scientific insight? But people are too complacent to allow the contemporary ideas—which have grown out of a flawed educational system—to be corrected by what stems from true reality.

[ 17 ] Another horrifying notion persists in our official science—that is, the science universally regarded as authoritative. This science participates in the idolatrous worship of everything that has emerged as “high culture” in modern times. How could this modern science, when it wishes to express something particularly mysterious, fail to take refuge in whatever it most reveres at any given time? And so, the nervous system has become for it a collection of telegraph lines; the entire nervous activity of the human being has become for it a remarkably complicated telegraphic function. The eye perceives; the skin perceives as well. What is perceived from the outside is transmitted via sensory nerves to the “telegraph station” that is the brain. Then there sits in the brain—I do not know what kind of being—a spiritual being, which modern science, of course, denies—so through a being that has become a mere cliché, because nothing real is perceived in it, what is perceived by the “sensory” nerves is transformed by the “motor” nerves into volitional movements. And the distinction between sensory nerves and motor nerves is drummed into young people, and the entire conception of the human being is built upon this distinction.

[ 18 ] For years I have been fighting against this absurdity of the distinction between sensory and motor nerves, first of all because this distinction is an absurdity—since the so-called motor nerves serve no other purpose than that for which the sensory nerves also serve. A sensory nerve serves as a tool for us to perceive what is happening within our sensory system. And a so-called motor nerve is not a motor nerve at all, but rather a sensory nerve as well; its sole purpose is to allow me to perceive my own hand movements—my own movements—which arise from causes other than the motor nerves. Motor nerves are internal sensory nerves for perceiving my own volitional decisions. The sensory nerves exist so that I can perceive what is happening externally within my sensory apparatus, and the so-called motor nerves exist so that I do not remain an unknown entity to myself—walking, striking, or grasping without being aware of it—that is, not to exert the will, but to perceive what the will is doing within us. The entire body of thought that has been shaped by modern science—arising from the convoluted intellectual knowledge of our time—is a truly scientific absurdity. That is one reason why I have been fighting this absurdity for years.

[ 19 ] But there is another reason why this absurdity must be eradicated—this superstition about sensory and motor nerves, between which there is no difference other than that the former are sensitive to what is outside, and the latter to what is within one’s own body. This other reason is as follows.

[ 20 ] No one can gain a true understanding of humanity’s relationship to work in any social science if they base their concepts and ideas on the convoluted distinction between sensory and motor nerves. For one will always arrive at peculiar notions of what human labor actually is if, on the one hand, one asks: What is actually going on inside a person when they work, when they set their muscles in motion? — and, on the other hand, has no idea that this setting of the muscles in motion does not depend on the so-called motor nerves, but on the soul’s direct interaction with the external world. Of course, I can only hint at these questions, for the reason that not even the most basic concepts for understanding them exist today. People still understand nothing at all about these things, because the school system has not yet introduced even the most basic concepts necessary for understanding such matters, because it still operates on the delusion of distinguishing between sensory and motor nerves.

[ 21 ] When I come into contact with a machine, I must come into contact with it as a whole person; above all, I must establish a relationship between my muscles and this machine. This relationship is what human labor truly rests upon. This relationship is what matters when one seeks to evaluate work from a social perspective—the very special relationship between a person and the basis of their work.

[ 22 ] What concept of work are we actually using today? What goes on inside a person when he is, as they say, working—whether he is toiling at a machine, chopping wood, or playing sports for pleasure—is essentially the same. They can wear themselves out just as much through the enjoyment of sports; they can expend just as much energy in socially superfluous sports as in the socially useful task of chopping wood. And it is the illusion regarding the difference between motor and sensory nerves that psychologically distracts people from grasping a true concept of labor—one that can only be grasped if we view people not in terms of how they wear themselves out, but in terms of how they relate to their social environment. I believe you have not yet formed a clear concept of this, because the concepts one can acquire about these matters today are so distorted by our educational system that it will take some time before we can make the transition away from the socially nonsensical concept of work and from the insane scientific notion of distinguishing between sensory and motor nerves. But these very issues also explain why we think in such an impractical way. For how can humanity think practically about practical matters when it succumbs to the insane notion that a telegraph apparatus reigns within us, and that the wires lead to something in the brain where they are switched to other wires—sensory and motor nerves? Our unscientific mindset—which stems from a flawed educational system and is believed by the general public, seduced by the plague of newspapers—is the source of our inability to think in a truly social way.

[ 23 ] This is what we should recognize today as the Spirit of Pentecost, and it would be wiser for it to be poured out in individual tongues upon the people of the present than to be regarded today as some form of quackery intended to improve this or that. When people say today that humanity must relearn and rethink, they usually believe that these terms refer to the same cliché they themselves have in mind—naturally, because people immediately reduce what is said to a cliché or utopia. But isn’t there a difference between, for example, an arbitrary editor saying: “Humanity must relearn”—or if one says it because one knows: Humanity has formed false ideas down to such depths through false habits of thought, habits that extend to the sensory and motor nerves, that penetrate the very structure of what humanity today believes in with unshakable faith simply because its authorities command it? It is the task of the Anthroposophical Society to make it clear to the world that, while speaking from a reality, the language of “rethinking” and “relearning” used within the Anthroposophical Movement refers to that reality in a different way. For the cliché has gained such power today that, with regard to outward words, anyone who lacks the ability to distinguish between reality and cliché can say: “Well, just read today’s editorial in the *Stuttgarter Tagblatt*; there you will also find the doctrine of relearning.” But today it is not a matter of comparing words, for in doing so we fall right into the trap of empty rhetoric; today it is a matter of grasping reality and guarding against falling into empty rhetoric. How often have I had to be reluctantly dismissive when, time and again, phrases like these came up: “Well, there’s another one who spoke ‘in a thoroughly theosophical way’ from the pulpit,” as people say. These things were the worst, for they testified to how little discernment there is between the knowledge of reality and the comfortable life of empty phrases. May the Feast of Pentecost also instill this admonition into human souls: Away from your empty phrases, toward reality! Today, in the realms of science, art, and religion, we speak everywhere in empty phrases—phrases that get stuck in the throat and therefore fail to move the whole person; just as people today believe that the sensations of their senses get stuck somewhere in the brain and do not affect their motor functions. There are the most precise connections between all these things, and until the transformation of our time takes hold precisely in those habits of thought that authoritarian science has cultivated today—that which the scientific papacy has cultivated—there will be no real renewal, for all other renewal flows only from the surface, and not from where it must flow: from the true inner self. If our school and educational systems are truly to undergo renewal, we must be mindful, through such matters as have been discussed here, of protecting people from what can so easily arise in humanity today, because it carries within itself the legacy of Roman culture.

[ 24 ] We must combat the tendency toward illusion, the love of illusion, which is so widespread among humanity today. People today feel comfortable when they are allowed to delude themselves about the value of reality, when they are allowed to say to themselves: It is not the Christ within me—who stirs the forces within me and strengthens them—to whom I profess my faith, but rather the Christ who is independent of me and who, through grace, frees me from my sins without my making any serious effort of my own.

[ 25 ] Time and time again, in numerous letters, this confession of faith in Christ Jesus has been held up to me in contrast to what anthroposophy must and wants to do. And time and again I have been confronted with the desire to adapt what must be sharply defined today out of the reality of the spirit—because the times demand it—into a trivial, popular phrase, so that people might at least understand it. But the moment one were to tailor anthroposophical truths into trivial phrases, they would become what is so cheap in our time: they would become mere phrases, reduced to the triviality of the street or the philistinism of modern science. Time and again I have been urged to do both. Time and again, I have struggled not to do either—neither to reduce anthroposophy to the trivial clichés of the street—what is called “popularization” in today’s sense—nor could I follow the other exhortations to speak to scientists in a way they would understand. These exhortations came to me many times. Well, then I would have had to speak in a way that would have resonated with the scientific nonsense of the present day. I much prefer it when people behave as a professor in Tübingen did recently, acting in accordance with the prevailing scientific mindset of the time. It seems to me quite clearly that truth reigns in the facts, because this behavior is the best proof of just how much spiritual life needs to be transformed. In particular, if one wishes to find this transition to the true Spirit of Pentecost—from idle chatter to words that bear the seed of truth—then one must be careful not to keep leading souls back, time and again, to their old, familiar concepts in order to grasp what they refuse to grasp with new concepts—what can indeed be chattered about using old concepts, but cannot truly be understood.

[ 26 ] It makes little sense for a member of the bourgeoisie to point out today—using the “values” that these words often carry—that in certain circles the proletariat has the goodwill to understand matters pertaining to the threefold social organism better than the bourgeoisie does. “Just have that good will yourselves, you bourgeois!”—that is what one might often say today. The proletarian, of course, laughs at this appeal to the bourgeoisie’s good will; for it is true that he is better prepared than the bourgeois to understand many things. But he is equipped to understand these things from a different perspective as well, and he laughs when people say one should appeal to the bourgeoisie’s goodwill for understanding; and he laughs especially when people say that one could expect success from such an appeal. For he knows full well that his greater understanding stems from something entirely different: that if he doesn’t work tomorrow, he’ll end up on the street. He is connected to the social order—I would say—in specific, isolated ways, not through a straight line, as is the case with today’s bureaucratic citizen. He speaks from his humanity because today’s social order has led him to have no interests other than human ones; for he remains nothing other than a human being if he is thrown out onto the street tomorrow. This is the source of his greater understanding.

[ 27 ] The citizen—especially the civil servant—is taken under the state’s wing as soon as possible, though not too early, because at that stage the process of taking him under the wing is still somewhat unrefined; at that stage, it is left to mothers and wet nurses. But once he has outgrown that initial state of impurity, the state immediately takes him into its care, trains him, and molds him—not into a human being, but into a civil servant. That is when the threads are woven so that he is not connected to the social order in isolated instances, like the proletarian, but is bound to the existing social order—which is maintained by the state—through a long chain, through ropes, with all his interests. He is conditioned to become, in his entire demeanor, the proper expression of this social order. Then he is given food, and then he is content. And one does not merely feed him; one provides for him so that he need not provide for himself. And then, when he can no longer work, the state ensures that he receives his pension, that he is properly sustained—without any effort on his part—by the powers that prepared him to be their faithful expression. This continues until death. Then, through religion—which does not draw its remedies from the soul’s inner powers but receives them from outside through grace—they ensure that the soul remains “retired” even after death. This is precisely the essence of state wisdom and religious wisdom. No wonder that the citizen of both state and heaven, so bound to the interests of the state, clings to that to which he is bound.

[ 28 ] That is the contrast: interest on the one hand, but also interest on the other. It is the interest on the other side that today calls upon a number of people to do what humanity must achieve in the age of the conscious being—something I have often spoken of: standing on the ground of the individual human being. The proletarian is the first to have the opportunity to stand on this individual ground, precisely because he has not been absorbed into the others. The more he is absorbed, the worse off he is. For on the one hand, we have those people who have been placed in their positions in a similar way by the proletariat: the union officials. Even if their positions have different names, they comfortably settle into the airs and graces of the others and then fight against anything that seems as though it might run counter to those airs and graces. In this way, they gradually slip into the habits of the bourgeoisie.

[ 29 ] Today, in the proletarian world, people speak of trade unionism. In England, about one-fifth of the entire working class is economically organized. That is a relatively large proportion. Consequently, given the current spirit of organization, today’s English working class has quite naturally grown into the bourgeois way of thinking. In Germany, only one-eighth is organized; the rest are unorganized workers. And it is the unorganized workers today who are placed at the pinnacle of the individual; they are the true driving forces, or those who have preserved within their organization the awareness of what it means to remain human—when one is not employed for one’s physical life, then retired, and finally, as I have indicated, also “retired” from one’s spiritual and soul life after death. These people, who outwardly feel that they have been placed at the pinnacle of their own individuality in economic terms, possess, I would say, the spiritual disposition for what must emerge today in the course of world history—and this is what makes today’s proletarian demand at the same time a demand of world-historical significance.

[ 30 ] The modern economic order has drawn the proletariat into capitalism through factory work, where it is easier for them to understand the demands of the times than it is for the middle-class citizen, who is utterly dependent on his livelihood and pension and who refuses to think. For if he were to think—if he were to grasp the times correctly today—it could not happen that a professor from Tübingen would speak as the gentleman did the other day, who replied to me in the discussion: “People talk about how a ‘dignified existence’ for the proletarian is undermined when this proletarian is ‘rewarded’ for his work.” But isn’t Caruso also “rewarded” when he sings one evening and receives thirty to forty thousand marks for his work? Or, as the selfless gentleman put it, am I not also rewarded? And I don’t feel there’s anything undignified about collecting my salary for my work. And Caruso doesn’t feel that way either when he collects his thirty to forty thousand marks. — That was the gist of the matter. And it was added: The only slight difference is that one amount is more and the other less, but that doesn’t matter, because in essence it’s the same thing.

[ 31 ] This is the spirit that is blossoming from today’s school and education system. This is also the spirit that says: We will become a poor people; we will not be able to pay for schools and education, so the state will have to step in and will have to pay for them. — Well, anyone who thinks for themselves will surely object: Yes, but how is the state supposed to manage if everyone is poor, and now it’s suddenly expected to be Croesus, paying off the debts that none of us can pay? After all, the state first takes from others—in the form of taxes—what they have; it therefore seems to me that it cannot, like Croesus, produce what people do not have. — But this class of people must first learn to see this. This is what even those who receive their livelihood from the state—out of the pockets of those who stand at the pinnacle of their human individuality, including economically—should ultimately come to understand. But as long as people have not learned this—have not learned it through the hardships of life—it cannot be instilled in their thinking. And so it seems to me that a large number of people today simply want to conjure up an age in which one will be able to learn that one can also be thrown out onto the street if one does not truly wish to bring about a different social order through an impulse of thought. For it could very easily be the case that those pensions I have spoken of can no longer be paid. And then, I believe, if those very material pensions can no longer be paid, people would also no longer place as much value on those other pensions—the spiritual ones for the souls after death—that are currently provided by religious communities, which have themselves become very dependent on physical powers.

[ 32 ] But if something now emerges that is not meant to be mere rhetoric, but rather a seed of thought for action, then people today are unable to perceive it as anything other than rhetoric. Then one does not sense that it is based on a genuine understanding of life, down to the finest details—an understanding that reveals the scientific madness of the distinction between sensory and motor nerves, which prevents social science from arriving at a genuine working concept. Today it is already necessary for at least some people to see into these depths. Today it is urgently necessary for individuals not to be deluded into saying: “We are socializing external economic life, but we will not touch the school system—especially secondary and higher education—it must remain as it is.” — That is the very worst outcome, if that is precisely what remains. For not only will the damage it has caused so far continue to be inflicted in the future, but it will inflict it in an even worse way. Socialize the economy, and leave this spiritual life alone; then, in a short time, your current pseudo-socialization will turn into a much worse tyranny and much worse living conditions than anything that has developed in the present. Of course, there is an economic pressure today that triggers something terrible in the social organism. Is this now to be replaced by social climbing, by the most savage bureaucracy? Does humanity—which has now finally, albeit rather late, learned that it must not appeal to “throne and altar”—believe that it would be better, out of the same mindset, to appeal to the state’s ledger and the state’s counter? Capitalism has understood how to gradually transfer the altar—in terms of veneration—into the fireproof safe. A pseudo-socialism will understand how to transform the current pseudo-veneration for powers that no longer exist, that live on only in rhetoric, into the idolatry of cooperatives and the careerism of cooperatives.

[ 33 ] What humanity needs for the renewal of the spirit is the courage to recognize that the experience of the spirit within the true human inner being, as it has become today, has led, on the one hand, to religious babble and, on the other, to thoughtless, brutal acts—to militaristic acts. The person who feels like a true modern human being, a product of the capitalist age, feels at ease when cutting off his coupons, but in the midst of it all turns a blind eye to what is actually happening—when, on the one hand, the Gospel is reduced to idle chatter and he is told about love of neighbor and brotherhood, while he conveniently cuts charity and brotherhood in two with his scissors and need not see how things actually unfold in reality—because, on the other hand, he is certain that he himself need not protect his business through such actions, but that the state does so by sharpening the swords. We have, after all, just experienced in modern times that very alliance between business and the state that led us into the global catastrophe. What, then, has the state—of which people have been so proud—been other than the great protector of economic life as it has been conducted under capitalism? One might hope that the patriots of the past, whose convictions were not to be questioned—for they were “good” patriots, they had coined the phrase with that patriotic word, and in the bygone era it was a rather serious matter if one were to point out, for example: this patriotic phrase has a very real basis, for the state, revered as patriotic, is, after all, the protector of banknotes— one would hope that time will not provide particularly compelling evidence that these people, who were so patriotic, will not turn their patriotism on their own country and now, since they perhaps know their money is better protected by the Entente powers, will hastily rebrand their patriotism! I do not wish to say anything specific about the possibility in this area, but I would like to point out the ease with which patriotic rhetoric can turn into its opposite. There are plenty of signs of this.

[ 34 ] These are the things that must be said today as a Pentecost reflection, particularly with regard to the need for a renewal of the education and teaching system. For the unctuous speeches with which humanity has been served should no longer be used to serve it. People should get used to listening to words that point to the realities of the present. Then it would be possible for the Spirit of Pentecost to truly be distributed, so that in the future small tongues may enter into all that is to arise on the basis of a liberated spiritual life—as the smallest school, as the highest school— so that the liberated spirit—which is the true Holy Spirit—may be active for the true spiritual development of humanity, emerging from the emancipated spiritual life of the future.

[ 35 ] This may be something that today’s religious prattlers would not exactly consider Christian. But the people of today will one day have to consider whether the Christian rhetoric of our time does not still stem from the same spirit that led Peter to deny the Lord three times, or whether it already stems from the spirit that said: “What I have revealed to you is not limited to a single age, but will endure throughout all ages.” And I will not cease to tell you the truth, and I will be with you until the end of the age. — Those who today can hear only the spirit of the past, even within Christianity, will be the windbags, the chatterers. Those who even today perceive the living Spirit working to transform and rebuild the human order—they may well be the ones in whom one will be able to recognize the true Christians.

[ 36 ] May this age arise from a truly grasped Spirit of Pentecost.