The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Since we are able to be together again today, it seems right to me to revisit—perhaps in a slightly different form—some points that were raised precisely during this period and that are of particular significance for the overall mindset of people in our time.

[ 2 ] The fact that there is such a thing as the need for a new outlook on humanity in our time should be evident precisely from the reflections that have been presented here and elsewhere during this period. It is essential to recognize today that the kind of judgment that was customary in the previous epoch can no longer carry humanity into the future. This must be emphasized again and again, because it is precisely against this that the feelings and sensibilities of contemporary people still resist the most. Modern people would like to be part of the dawn of a new era, so to speak—it is dimly clear to them that a new era must be approaching—but they do not want to become different themselves. They want to continue judging things just as they have been accustomed to judging them up to now. And even when they do muster the courage to admit that a new way of judging must take hold, they still fall back, time and again, into their old way of thinking. They do this especially because the new attitude actually demands a radical turning inward on the part of human beings. And this radical turning inward is, in fact, very, very unpleasant for modern people.

[ 3 ] Now, if one wishes to grasp the full depth of what underlies what has just been said, one must, so to speak, look with an open mind at the entire way in which we have become accustomed to organizing our lives in the broadest sense in modern times, especially since that point in time which I have often characterized to you as a major turning point in human development, since the middle of the fifteenth century. One could say: What today emerges in a radical way from human hearts as demands has, in fact, always been smoldering to a greater or lesser extent beneath the surface of human consciousness since that time; but all things that develop do so unnoticed for a while and only then become fully ripe to burst forth and enter existence in a completely radical way.

[ 4 ] In our recent efforts, we have had to point out a certain threefold division from a wide variety of perspectives. As you know, the impulse of this threefold division permeates our entire external public work. But here I have also had to point out that human knowledge, if it is not to lead people astray, must also be based on the threefold nature of human beings themselves. Science, which human beings have developed out of a certain necessary obscurity—this science, which, as it now stands, also had its beginnings in the middle of the fifteenth century—regards the human being more or less as a unity. It is not clear to science that the human being is in fact that triad which must be described as the head-human or nervous-sensory human, the rhythm-human or respiratory-circulatory human, and the metabolic human. These three aspects of human nature are, in their essence, entirely distinct from one another. The reason people are reluctant to admit that human beings actually live within this threefold structure is that, when they do wish to categorize things, they want to arrange them neatly side by side. One sees this time and again: when people do deign to classify something, they want this classification to be arranged side by side; they want to arrange the parts of this classification so that they can neatly survey them with their external powers of cognition. This, after all, underlies that peculiar essay the Tübingen professor wrote before Fleck against the threefold division. I have already mentioned that the good Professor von Heck, completely disregarding what is actually said in the threefold social order, has concocted his own threefold division. He cannot understand the kind of thinking at all that is involved here; he cannot even grasp the sense that we are living in an age in which a new way of thinking, a new sensibility, is necessary. And so he hears of a spiritual element, a legal or political element, and an economic element of the social organism. Three elements, he says. In the one element we have known so far, we have gradually become accustomed to a parliamentary system. It has, after all, become difficult enough for gentlemen of this sort to get used to it; they would prefer to be governed centrally, from above, but they have grown accustomed to a parliamentary system. But if one is willing to engage with it, then Paragraph A, Paragraph B, and Paragraph C must stand side by side. The spiritual, the legal, and the economic—these must be outwardly and tangibly comprehensible if one is to engage with them at all. Yes, approaching the new with the mindset of the old is certainly no way to move forward. And one can certainly criticize the threefold social order, as Professor von Heck does, but it is, after all, his own absurd threefold social order that he is criticizing, and not the one that the Association for the Threefold Social Order is currently seeking to introduce to the world.

[ 5 ] Well, all of this stems from the fact that people instinctively resist what is most essential in our time: a reorientation of their entire way of thinking and feeling. And this reorientation of thought and feeling will not come about until people are willing to establish at least a subjective, initial connection to spiritual science—to a genuine understanding of spiritual life. And on the one hand, people will have to be willing to recognize the threefold social order as a necessity, but also to acknowledge the threefold nature of the human being itself as a fact of nature. But the fact that the human being has not neatly arranged these three parts side by side—rather, that one part always flows into the other—is precisely what confuses the new human being, who is bound to his old ideas. For of course, when I speak of the head organization and the nervous-sensory organization, this head organization, viewed from the outside, is initially centered in the head. It has its center in the head. But it sends out into the rest of the human being the extensions that are necessary; for the sensory faculties are, after all, present throughout the entire human being. This means: as a “head-human,” the human being is a “nerve-sense human” only in the primary sense; the whole human being is a “nerve-sense human.” And as a “rhythm-human,” the human being is a “chest-human.” The rhythmic system—the respiratory and circulatory systems—has its center in the chest. So the point is that the human being, as a “rhythm-human,” is a “chest-human.” The respiratory-circulatory system is localized in the chest system, but of course the rhythm—the rhythmic activity—is in turn transmitted both to the head system and to the metabolic system. So the chest-being is a rhythmic being only in the primary sense. And the same is true of metabolism. Of course, metabolism is also present in the head and in the chest, but it is regulated by the limb system, just as I have always described it. So what must be referred to as the limbs flows into the other system. This naturally confuses people who always want to draw clear lines and who want to see whatever comes to mind as standing side by side.

[ 6 ] Thus, a different kind of perspective—a completely different way of relating to reality—is necessary for people who wish to engage in thinking, as well as in willing and acting, with a view to the near future. But one must by no means believe that these things have significance only for cognition or for one’s worldview. These things have their very special significance for the life of humanity, for one’s entire attitude toward life. And this must be taken into account very carefully. From this perspective, one must first assess our entire life and then ask oneself: How must it be reshaped? In a certain sense, our lives are indeed threefold, but this threefold structure requires, first, precise insight, and second, further development. Precise insight must arise from examining what is actually present in our lives, with our understanding enriched by the perspective of spiritual science. What, then, is present in our lives? That which we, through the threefold social order, call for as a distinct element is, of course, already there; it is simply chaotically intermingled with the other two—the legal element and the economic element. The spiritual is embedded within our real life, simply because human beings need a certain spiritual guidance for external culture and for external life. Without spiritual guidance, there is no external cultural life. In our present-day life, this spiritual guidance is not based on an original, elemental expression of human nature, but rather on something inherited. It is based on something that has been historically passed down to humanity. You surely recall that when speaking of the newer spiritual life that emerged with the great transformation of the fifteenth century, one does not speak of a new creation, but rather of a Renaissance or Reformation. One speaks—and rightly so—not of a new creation, but of a rebirth, of a restoration of something ancient. And in a certain sense, we live spiritually only within this restored ancient tradition. For spiritually, we draw our sustenance from the legacy of that which, in a certain sense, coalesced in Greek civilization from much older spiritual cultures—namely, those of the East and Egypt. The fact that we have our old-style Greek-style high school today is, I would say, merely a clear indication that our spiritual life is, on the whole, actually a Greek Renaissance.

[ 7 ] But what, then, is the foundation of Greek spiritual life? It is difficult to grasp this because Greek spiritual life has, in a certain sense, developed quite strongly the very foundation upon which it rests: Oriental spiritual life. But it has profoundly transformed this Eastern spiritual life. As a result, no matter how deeply one delves into Greek spiritual life using mere intellectual understanding—if one refuses to take spiritual-scientific premises into account—one fails to recognize what Greek spiritual life is actually founded upon. For it depends entirely on the fact that members of the conquering class were instinctively granted the right to reveal the spiritual, and that this revelation of the spiritual was not granted to members of the conquered class. Greek culture actually encompasses two distinct populations: the ancient population that inhabited the Greek peninsula in prehistoric European times, and which had a social structure entirely different from that of later Greek civilization. Later Greek civilization—which we can actually trace back to the emergence of that spiritual power expressed in the royal lineages of the Agamemnons and so on—this Greek way of life spread over an indigenous population. And these conquerors were of a different bloodline than the indigenous population. You can see this difference in blood precisely in what I have already mentioned here: Greek sculpture. Greek sculpture, after all, features clearly distinct types: the Zeus type, which has different ears, a different nose shape, and a different eye placement than the Hermes-Mercury type, which in turn has a different nose shape than the satyr type. These last two types point to the indigenous population of Greece, who were of a different bloodline than those we know as the bearers of Greek culture. This means that the entire configuration of Greek spiritual life—which we, after all, adopted during the Renaissance—is of an aristocratic nature; it is a transformed theocracy of the Orient and Egypt. It is based on the view that the things of the world do not reveal themselves—as was later believed—through proof, but that they seek to reveal themselves precisely through revelation: on the one hand, through revelation from the oracles or the like, that is, through that which breaks into the human world as spiritual revelation; but what is to govern the world also reveals itself as T’aten—not in such a way that human beings seek to judge these deeds with their reason or intellect, but rather by allowing powers outside themselves to decide. Regarding the latter, Greek civilization adopted the warlike principle of the Orient. It merely transformed it; hence we do not notice that two things have merged in Greek culture: theocracy and militarism. Theocracy and militarism, however, are the elements of aristocracy. Thus, precisely through our high school education—through the adoption of Greek culture—we incorporate into our spiritual life an aristocratic element that encompasses theology on the one hand and military decision-making on the other. Theology, which does not arrive at its truths through proof; military decisions, which do not arise from human reason but, according to human perceptions, result from an external judgment of God or nature. In a sense, we have this embedded in our social organism through Greek culture, which achieved such greatness in its state and in its era. Through Greek culture, we have within us the aristocratic sensibility of human beings. And these things must simply be understood psychologically. Of course, no one today, upon internalizing this high-school-style aristocracy, will in turn become a Greek in their outlook, but they will become something that no longer fits into our time: they will become a bearer of an aristocratic principle that must be overcome. No matter how much one may rave about this aristocratic element in our time, one can certainly accept this aristocratic element insofar as it expresses itself precisely in spiritual life and in the forms of spiritual life, for it is rooted in something very appealing, in Greek culture—which we naturally do not wish to do without—but in the way it is rooted in Greek culture today, it simply cannot become the foundation of general human education. Therefore, it must take root in our culture in an entirely different way. This is something we carry within us, so to speak, as a primary element: a spiritual life that is still shaped by Greek culture.

[ 8 ] But we also carry within us a second element: Roman life. We do not merely carry Greek life—chaotically intermingled—in our social culture and intellectual life, in terms of its form, structure, and organization; we also carry Roman legal life within us. Essentially, we carry within us the urge to shape that form of government which was, after all, only good and right for human development during the time when Roman civilization flourished, and in the place where it flourished. Greek spiritual life and Roman legal life are rooted within us. It is, after all, extraordinarily interesting to see how, in the middle of the fifteenth century and later, European legal life actually sought to establish itself on its own foundations, how it sought to develop something entirely different from what ultimately emerged. That is when the concepts of Roman law made their entrance and permeated the structure of states, just as Greek intellectual life had permeated the structure of states. And so our legal life, in turn, did not become something arising from an original, elemental impulse of human nature, but rather something like a kind of Renaissance, a revival of the past.

[ 9 ] But where it was not possible to carry over anything from the past was in the realm of economic life. One can cling to an old spirit; one can cling to old legal forms; but one cannot eat what the Greeks ate, nor what the Romans ate. Economic life does not tolerate this adoption of the old. Economic life developed out of Central European, Germanic, Frankish, and other conditions—with a certain elemental force, to be sure—but it was permeated by the Renaissance of intellectual life and the Renaissance of legal life. And it is interesting how people perceive this: Yes, within our social organism, only economic life is viable—viable in the modern sense. Marx and Engels, in particular, hold this view. I have outlined this somewhat in the fourth issue of our Threefold Order journal under the title “Marxism and the Threefold Order.” Marx and Engels feel: Yes, with regard to economic life, it is moving according to newer impulses, and these newer impulses merely need to be properly developed; they do not yet exist in the external world of facts, but they do exist in human longing. — And so Marx and Engels want an economic life that no longer influences people—as Greek life did—by governing them in terms of their spiritual faculties. Marx and Engels no longer want a social structure that influences social life in the sense of Roman law. They regard this as a foreign element in modern economic life. They perceive it as alien and therefore wish to cast it out. They want to establish, within economic life, something that no longer governs people at all, and a legal system that merely administers production processes, the circulation of economic goods, and so on. But this is not the sole task of the modern era. The task of the modern era is to recognize: Certainly, economic life must be restructured; economic life must take on the form demanded by human longings; but we can no longer make do with a legal system that no longer fits into our economic life, nor can we make do with a spiritual life based solely on the Renaissance. In our time, we need not only a sensible restructuring of economic life; we need a reorganization of the legal system to replace Roman law, and we need a complete renewal of spiritual life. That is to say, we need not only a spiritual Renaissance, but a spiritual re-creation. And Christianity, too—which became entangled in the Greek and Roman eras—cannot be understood by us in the same way it was understood through the medium of Greek and Roman culture; rather, it must be understood anew by us through a newly created spiritual life. That is the mystery of our time.

[ 10 ] Take a look at the ancient world in Eastern Europe. There you will find that, in this part of Eastern Europe, Christianity—in the form of Russian Orthodoxy—has been permeated by the Greek worldview. We have adopted Christianity within the Roman worldview, not the Greek one. As a result, we no longer have within it what stems from the Greek worldview, but we do have within Christianity that which stems from the Roman conception of law. Let us try to understand this Roman conception of law in its basic structure. The Roman conception of law is based on not viewing a person according to their bloodline. In Greece, one was considered worthy if one belonged to the “right” bloodline—the aristocratic bloodline. What the gods revealed through members of the aristocratic bloodline was also considered the right and wise course. In Roman culture, things were different. There, it gradually became clear that one’s identity was defined by one’s integration into the abstract state, into the constitutional state. One did not, as with the Greeks, become a member by blood, but rather a member by the state—a citizen. One was nothing special other than what one was as a citizen. It did not matter that a person existed with body, soul, and spirit; what mattered was that they were registered within the state system, that the state system imprinted upon them the mark of citizenship. And when citizenship spread from the Italian Peninsula, starting from Rome, throughout the entire Roman Empire, it was a momentous event. For people at that time perceived it as something intrinsically linked to life itself. But hasn’t that remained with us in a certain sense? In a certain sense, it has remained with us that we organize our entire public life according to our state system, which is derived from Roman thought and sensibility.

[ 11 ] I once had an old acquaintance who had a childhood sweetheart he’d met when he was eighteen, but he couldn’t marry her that same year. He had to wait; he had to earn some money first. And so the man had reached the age of sixty-four. To be able to marry, he returned to his hometown, for his childhood sweetheart had remained faithful to him and he wanted to marry her. But what had happened? The church and the parsonage, where the baptismal records were kept, had burned down, and the baptismal records had been destroyed in the fire. The man had no baptismal certificate. He wrote to me from his hometown and said: “Yes, to my common sense, the fact that I was born seems to me to be proof that I exist, but people don’t believe me because I don’t have a baptismal certificate that attests in writing that I exist.” — So, it must first be on record that one exists, that one is officially registered. Of course, when you tell a story like that, people say it’s an exaggeration. But it’s not an exaggeration. For this plays a major role in our public affairs. This is the way of thinking that has replaced the theocratic way of thinking of the East, and which has been somewhat transformed by Hellenism. The Roman way of thinking is an abstract one. The East believed in divine powers that entered human beings through the blood. In the East, the person through whom the gods revealed themselves was one of divine descent. In Roman culture, people were imbued with a belief in concepts, ideas, and abstractions. This belief—which was metaphysical, in contrast to the theological belief of the East—was accompanied by jurisprudence. Just as militarism is the sister phenomenon of theocratic aristocracy, so is jurisprudence the sister phenomenon of the abstract bourgeois principle of ideas that already emerged in Roman culture. Metaphysics and jurisprudence are siblings. The time is dawning when things are no longer accepted as revelations, but when everything must be proven. Just as one proves in jurisprudence that someone has stolen, so too must it be proven not only that 2 times 2 equals four, but also that God exists. This led to the ever-recurring proof of God’s existence. All the “proving” of our scientific logic is nothing other than a metamorphosed form of legal logic. That this legalistic mindset has entered our public life is something you can, if you pay attention, truly still recognize everywhere even today. Just think of how people complain that in the most diverse administrative offices within the bureaucratic apparatus—which is entirely modeled on the Roman Empire—lawyers, not technicians, occupy positions that should be held by people who understand the technical aspects. That is truly the case. Lawyers occupy these positions everywhere. This is the second element that has entered our lives, just as theocracy and militarism were the first pair of siblings. Theocracy and militarism—that is, Hellenism—are truly rooted, strange as it may sound, in the spiritual constitution of the human being; Romanism, on the other hand, is rooted in the human conception of law. And based on these documents I have cited for you, the Western Roman Catholic Church also differs from the Eastern Greek Catholic Church. Eastern Greek Catholicism has remained more of a spiritual matter. The Roman Church is, at its core, entirely a civil and legal institution. It has always asserted itself as such. It has transformed what was meant to be purely spiritual into legal institutions. But it has even introduced legal concepts into the Catholic worldview. The justification of human beings before God through confession and such things—which spring entirely from legal thought—can be found at every turn in later Catholic dogmatics, which is not originally Christian but rather Roman-dogmatic, permeated by Roman thinking. And what has permeated Catholic thought through Roman thinking actually finds its strongest, most abstract expression in Protestantism, which is based entirely on a legal concept: the justification of man through faith.

[ 12 ] These are the old elements that are embedded in our cultural life. We must look at these old elements with an open mind, for in our time they are ripe for extinction. Marx and Engels recognized this. But Marx and Engels did not realize that we now need something new to take their place. They believed that economic life should continue through the mere administration of the branches of production, goods, and material objects; the rest, they thought, would follow of its own accord. It does not follow of its own accord. Alongside the practical administration of the branches of production and goods, we need a democratic legal structure and a renewal of spiritual life. Nothing new of a spiritual nature will ever emerge from that which is not spirit. Therefore, the threefold social order is intimately connected with the entire demand of our time. It emphasizes that, since the old spirit has been squeezed out of our culture, it is necessary for it to be replaced by a new spirit—by a new creation of the spirit. As cultured people today, we cannot be content with a new Renaissance. We cannot simply rehash the old; rather, we need a new creation of the spirit. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to be. It will therefore face the greatest opposition because people cling to the old. And secondly, we need a new creation of legal life, which must be brought fully into the democratic mainstream; it must be created in a way that cannot be achieved under the old conditions, because under the old conditions, human beings never face one another as human beings, but rather class or privilege-based divisions always play a decisive role. This is what falls to the people of the present: to truly immerse themselves in these new creations. In many cases, they lack the courage to do so. But this courage will simply have to be mustered. And it will be mustered when the most complacent segment of our population—namely, those who have completed academic studies—on the whole and generally speaking, though there are, of course, exceptions—when this very most complacent segment deigns to break with tradition, whether it be revelations derived from Hellenism or abstract ideas derived from Roman culture. One must come to terms with the possibility of shaping a legal system through a democratic form of government, and shaping intellectual life through a new creation that stands on completely free ground and must therefore break with all the absurdities that are based solely on the preservation of the old or on something nebulous and unclear. Please consider, from this perspective, what is unfolding right now.

[ 13 ] Isn’t it true that the Social Democratic Party—and I don’t want to get into nuances here—claims to be the party that will bring about a transformation of modern economic life? Leninism within this Social Democracy is, after all, the most consistent expression of this social democratic worldview, for Lenin is truly a worthy successor to Marx. This Leninism seeks to create a spiritual life out of mere economic life on the ground—where this is least feasible, because all popular instinct contradicts it—through Lunacharsky’s alchemy. When I speak of these things, I am not relying on any news reports, so that one might say, “Fairy tales are being told about Russia,” and the like. There is no need to pay attention to the descriptions at all, for they are naturally colored by subjective views. A bourgeois will describe things differently than a Social Democrat. No, I base my argument on what Lenin himself stated in his work. I know that what underlies his view is not the rebirth of culture, but the murder of a culture. I do not wish to speak about the school system as it is described, but rather about the laws being imposed on the Russian school system, and no intellectual life can emerge from that. What matters to me is not what is described, but what those very people are doing who, driven by their illusions, want to create something new. We in Central Europe are not yet at that point; therefore, we cannot yet make these grave mistakes, but we are well on our way to ruining everything that might come to pass in the future.

[ 14 ] Isn’t it true that Marx and Engels took the position that economic life is everything, and that intellectual life must develop from it? — That is theory; that is utopia. What happens in reality? One senses: Yes, if we merely establish economic institutions in opposition to the current culture, it does not seem that a genuine intellectual life will emerge from them—so one makes compromises with the old intellectual life: social democracy with the Center Party. Actually, according to Marx and Engels, the smoke that would invigorate our minds and those of future generations should not rise from the Center, but rather from the autonomy of economic life as the superstructure. It is very strange in Marx’s and Engels’ theory: economic base; intellectual, ideological superstructure—law, customs, intellectual life in general—but an illusionist theory. In reality: the economic base is social democracy; the superstructure is provided by the Center Party and Roman clericalism. The base: the Marxist-conceived economic state or the Marxist-conceived economic cooperative; the illusory superstructure: the ideal human being springing from illusion, who is supposed to submit; reality: the portly Erzberger. — You see, these things seem grotesque when you say them out loud, but they do express reality, and if they are taken seriously, they show where we actually stand and what errors we are heading toward. But they also show that we will not escape these errors unless we resolve to embark on the re-creation of an intellectual life and to treat this re-creation with sympathy. We must treat it with sympathy because the time has already come when spiritual life cannot merely become a worldview or remain mere theory, but must find its way into the practical conduct of life.

[ 15 ] Because modern medicine could rely only on one branch of the natural sciences and could be based only on a branch of the natural sciences that does not take into account the threefold human being—the nervous-sensory human being, the rhythmic human being, and the metabolic human being— this modern medicine—which is now a practical discipline, serving both as hygiene and as a method of healing—has become one-sided, a fact that, thankfully, is already recognized today not only by a great many people but also by a great many doctors. However, our medicine will never be placed on a sound foundation unless it can be grounded in the threefold nature of the human being. Oh, the “head-oriented person,” who is modeled after the cosmos, is something entirely different; therefore, those irregularities in human nature—the pathological irregularities—that are of cosmic origin are something entirely different. Something else entirely are those impairments of human nature that are of telluric origin and that essentially arise indirectly through metabolism—they are of earthly origin, not cosmic. Something else entirely is everything connected with what lies between the cosmos and the Earth, with what lives in the air and, to some extent, in the water. This must become the starting point in the future for a truly freely pursued medical education. For it is, after all, peculiar that of these three things I have just mentioned—which must form the foundation of truly practical medicine based on the threefold constitution of the human being—only one, I would say, can actually be learned in the official, school-based system. Through the methods that exist today solely within our university system—which is modeled after Greek and Roman life—one can study only that which in the human being is based on the metabolic system. And in fact, our entire medical-scientific way of thinking is a way of thinking based on the metabolic system. For as science stands today, there is really only the science of metabolism. But if you wish to add the other aspects—namely, what can occur in human nature as harm caused by air and water—then you are actually dealing with purely individual factors. The harm that arises in a person from air and water is entirely individual; it can only be learned through dedicated collaboration with older physicians who already have experience in this field. This can only be acquired by a young person attaching themselves to an older, experienced physician—not in an academic setting, but as an assistant, which is indeed what happens in today’s clinical residency programs, though as a caricature, reduced to the realm of metabolism. It must happen in such a way that a certain medical instinct, a certain medical intuition—which, to a greater or lesser extent in different individuals, will border on clairvoyance—arises in the person who is the assistant to an older physician, and in such a way that it does not even occur to him to treat things merely in a typical, schematic way, but rather that, out of instinct, he combines new individual elements with older individual elements—those he has absorbed through training—which he does not merely imitate. And whatever damage enters the human organism from the head side—which, as I said earlier, although it permeates the whole person, is centered only in the head—cannot be taught to anyone at all. There is no method for learning from the outside how to recognize those illnesses that arise in the human organism from the head. These can only be recognized through innate talent, and this talent must be awakened. Therefore, it is necessary to consider from the very beginning whether such aptitudes can be awakened in a particular person.

[ 16 ] You see, what comes into play here is the attitude that must develop within the independent spiritual organism—an attitude that will lead us to be attentive to human gifts, that is, to place each person in the position to which they are guided by their particular gift. It is therefore essential that this particular spiritual life truly stand on its own two feet, for only in a free spiritual life, where talents are allowed to flourish freely, are those talents truly recognized. Through this, as the human being enters into the spiritual realm, he or she returns, in a certain sense, to the natural and the organic, and this, in turn, will give rise to new possibilities. As you all know, we suffer today from the fact that virtually all circumstances can no longer be properly managed because we do not administer the affairs of the world based on natural thinking—that is, on spiritual thinking. We have certain positions in the government or elsewhere; yet there are always far too many people vying for these positions. There are always far more applicants than are needed. Conversely, other positions remain unfilled because people lack the necessary training. Certain professions cannot exist because people are not being trained for them. In the vision of the threefold social organism as a free spiritual life, none of this can be the case, because there the human being does not act out of arbitrariness, but rather acts in harmony with the great laws of the universe. And where this happens, things generally go well. Where, on the other hand, things are shaped out of human arbitrariness in defiance of these great laws of the universe, things generally do not go well. And the Roman system is most prone to arbitrariness. The purely metaphysical-juridical system is most prone to sheer arbitrariness. The Greek system had a certain instinct rooted in bloodline, even if this instinct only serves the interests of the minority. The economic sphere has its own natural necessity. The metaphysical-legal system is what most distances human beings from the foundations of nature in terms of their feelings and sensibilities. The Roman-legal system is the one we must, above all else, examine impartially. For until we overcome it in all areas, we will not make any progress. If someone were to ask today, “Will there really be enough—or not too many—people in the future, emerging from an independent spiritual life, to fill leadership positions in a particular profession?” one can only answer: These questions must not be answered according to the logic structured on the model of Roman jurisprudence, but according to the logic of facts. — It has now been several decades since the news spread from Vienna throughout humanity—the educated world, as they say—that people had been found who would be able to regulate the nature of births in the future. That is to say, in the future one would be able to determine whether what is to be born will be a boy or a girl. As you know, this Schenksche theory caused quite a stir, and people had very high hopes for it. Do you know what the real effect would be? The effect would be that in this approximate—and it is good that it is approximate—order, in which roughly equal numbers of men and women are born, the greatest disorder would ensue if gender were left to human whim. The greatest disorder would ensue. And so it will be when, with regard to other, less natural matters, people once again exercise their arbitrariness. The fact that we have too many people for one profession and too few for another stems from the unnatural nature of human thinking and human institutions. The moment this arbitrary, metaphysical-juridical Roman essence merges with what is inspired by spiritual science and intuition—which in turn converges with what was also an older instinct—we return to a way of life that regulates social order in such a way that it can endure.

[ 17 ] You see, the new social way of thinking cannot be properly understood through purely abstract thought alone. In a certain sense, one must already have entered into a kind of marriage with nature itself. And those people who today believe most strongly that they are thinking naturally are, in fact, thinking in the most unnatural way, for they think in a distorted Roman-legal manner, which has permeated all aspects of our lives. One cannot even imagine how, for example, even in something as far removed from Roman law as medicine and medical thinking, this abstract nature has crept in.

[ 18 ] And now we must not forget that this whole abstract concept has become so unnatural since the 1870s. One need only distinguish between what came before and what came after. Right up into the 1870s, old traditions were still present in everything. The positive elements of the various Renaissance movements were still at work then. For in the 1870s and 1880s, it was clearly evident that the old was losing its validity for the progress of humanity, and that humanity must strive for new creations, both in legal life and in the entire spiritual life. For only in this way will economic life—which is quite clearly calling for a reorganization—be permeated by the human ideas that are necessary.

[ 19 ] But even the necessary practical activities, such as medicine, can only be enriched if the spiritual life does not merely give rise to revivals, but rather creates something entirely new. A new creation of spiritual life—that is what we need.

[ 20 ] It was truly born out of the necessity of our time that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science was combined with social action in the League for the Threefold Social Order. And indeed, in recent months the need has arisen to seek a closer connection between the social and the truly spiritual. Certainly, the traditionalists will have all sorts of objections to this as well. The traditionalists have always had something against the League for the Threefold Social Order; they will also have something against this working hand in hand. People have absolutely no sense of just how strong these “braids” are. Nor do they have any sense of how necessary it is in our time to cut off these “braids” and thereby overcome “European Chineseness”; otherwise, “Asian Chineseness” could become far too dangerous for us if we were to continue wearing the “braid” of “European Chineseness” any longer.

[ 21 ] Now, a certain understanding of this growing necessity has begun to emerge from the foundations of spiritual science, particularly within our circle, and we have seen that the elements are at least in place to prepare humanity for a certain receptivity to this new spiritual striving. Indeed, we have found friends who have worked to spread the anthroposophical worldview here in Stuttgart and in the surrounding area, and this has proved quite satisfactory. It is now to be hoped that understanding will be found precisely for these matters, which are also socially necessary today in the most eminent sense. It is incorrect to believe that humanity, in its broadest circles, is not receptive to these matters. If we are to understand what is socially necessary today, we need a way of thinking that has been trained by the concepts and ideas derived from spiritual science. For you see, alongside all other contrasts of the present, there will also be this contrast: Roman-legal, purely logical thinking, and spiritual-scientific thinking. Spiritual scientific thinking, which is based everywhere on the logic of facts—and Roman, Catholic, legalistic thinking, which is based solely on the logic of concepts, solely on egoistic human logic. This kind of thinking will never be strong enough to penetrate reality. I have, after all, cited a clear, concrete example of this for you.

[ 22 ] Isn’t that right? Avenarius taught in Zurich, Mach in Prague and Vienna, and Fritz Adler—a student of Mach’s and the son of the elder Adler—taught as well. Mach and Avenarius, with their purely positivist epistemology, were good, average people; they were respectable people of the present—or, if you will, of the past—since there is supposed to be something new in the present—and all those who espoused the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach naturally believed themselves to be perfectly respectable people of the present. As a rule, this held true for the first generation of students when purely positivist theories of the senses were formulated, but not for the next generation. That is when the logic of the facts came to the fore, and it became evident that Avenarius and Mach are the political philosophers of Bolshevism. Just imagine these respectable Central European citizens, who certainly never went overboard in this direction—they are the idols, the philosophical idols of the Bolsheviks. This is the logic of facts; it is a logic that is seen through by anyone who engages in spiritual-scientific understanding that proceeds in accordance with the facts. Anyone who thinks solely in terms of Roman-legal logic analyzes the philosophy of Mach, the philosophy of Avenarius. Yes, there he finds nothing within it that could be logically extracted and that would then constitute a practical system of Bolshevism. Oh no! Even what people might do according to the views of such a purely conceptual logic, such a purely metaphysical logic, is also conventional. That is to say: what the Roman-style logician must conceive as a consequence of Avenarius’s worldview is conventional bourgeois thought. But what the logic of reality works out from this is Bolshevism. Today we need concepts that master reality, that enter into reality. We have strayed very far from reality due to the Roman-legal nature that has crept into everything, absolutely everything. People today believe they are expressing their own free human nature. In truth, they are expressing only what has been instilled in them by the Roman or Catholic—which is also Roman—legal mindset. That is why it is difficult today to bring to people that which does not spring from human arbitrariness, but rather emerges from the facts themselves. Of course, spiritual science itself must strike a different note in its mode of presentation than what has been produced thus far. But in the depths of human nature there is already a longing that resonates with the spirit of spiritual science. And if only there is enough perseverance and courage, it is precisely from these currents—which can be found today among some of our friends—that spiritual science will be carried out into the world; from these currents will emerge what the present needs. One should not allow oneself to be misled today by opinions that, in their way of thinking, stem solely from the Romanic bourgeoisie, which say: “Oh, if humanity were to progress through what you have in mind, it would take decades!” — That, too, is nonsense in the face of reality. It is, once again, nothing other than Roman-legal logic. The truth must think differently. When you watch a plant growing, it develops slowly at first, leaf by leaf. And anyone who believes that this would continue indefinitely at that pace is quite mistaken. Then there is a sudden surge, and the calyx and petals develop rapidly from the leaf. And so it will be, provided we ourselves have the endurance to carry on with what we can achieve through spiritual science and social work. It all comes down to will. It may seem for a long time as if things are moving very slowly. But then, once everything that can grow has come together, the turning point comes all at once. Yet it will have a positive effect only if as many people as possible are prepared for it. That is what I wanted to tell you right now, as a kind of summary of our work during these weeks, which I would like to call our “Stuttgart Weeks.” For the point is that we must not slacken in our efforts to focus on what flows from our cause itself. Not to look to the left, not to look to the right, but to look at what flows from our cause itself—that is what matters. And to avoid, even if only in our thoughts and feelings, harboring any mistrust toward what flows from this cause itself. No matter how fiercely the things that flow from our cause may be attacked, we must not allow ourselves to be led astray by such attacks. For if we take a closer look at these attacks, we will soon find that they echo and resonate from the old ways, even if they claim to be “declarations of renewal.” For today, all renewal can come about only when economic thinking is complemented by a new legal mindset and a new spiritual life. This is what we must regard as a necessity, what we wish to infuse into everything, everything at all, and what we must allow to permeate us in order to participate in the social reformation of humanity.

[ 23 ] That, my dear friends, is what I wanted to tell you today, because I truly believe that this iron we have been forging up to now must not be allowed to cool; it must remain hot. Then it will bring about everything that can lead humanity along the path it is meant to follow. That is why I would like to summarize this very reflection—which sought to encapsulate some of what we have been doing here over the past few weeks—in just two words. In two words that are very old, but which people today will have to understand in a new way—understand them in such a way that they approach them with the sentiments and feelings that will arise from spiritual science. And these words are: Learn and work!

[ 24 ] Today, we cannot succumb to the naive belief that we already know everything and that we can draw up plans based on what we know. We must once again find ideas from life itself, but life renews itself every day, and we must have faith in what we can learn anew from life each day. And we must not be cowards who believe they can work only when they can rely on so-called “safe” ideas—by which they always mean those ideas handed down from time immemorial, those that have always been there. We must have the courage to work while learning and to learn while working. Otherwise, human beings cannot engage with the future and its demands. This, too, will be their new Christianity. Many people today are experiencing a certain inner conflict. When one speaks, in the anthroposophical sense, of the Mystery of Golgotha, they remind one that, in their opinion—according to the Gospel—Christ died on the cross to redeem souls through his deed; that is, the souls who merely believe in Christ are redeemed without any effort on their part. It is certainly true—you can read about it in my *Christianity as a Mystical Fact*—that through the Mystery of Golgotha something happened in which human beings, with their present-day consciousness, have no immediate part, for present-day consciousness did not begin until the middle of the fifteenth century. But what matters today is not that we lazily surrender to what is provided for us from outside ourselves. We must not speak today as, for example, some Catholic church leaders—whether lower- or higher-ranking—do when they say: “Socially, we cannot make progress unless Christ stands at the center, at the very heart, of social action.”—I have recently observed in many gatherings that Christ has been thrown into the discussion in this very way. Yes, my dear friends, as I listened, I made use of my spiritual ear to some extent, so that I heard that outwardly the words resounded through the hall: “We cannot make social progress without Christ,” but inwardly it was only Benedictus who resounded, not Christ. Inwardly, it was not about Christ, but about Benedictus. I am referring to the one who now sits on the Chair of Rome. And this is precisely why humanity today cannot move forward—because it relies on something other than what connects with its own soul. Christ must also be understood anew. The external Church cannot take the place of Christ. Only what a person experiences within themselves can move them forward. Therefore, no one understands Christ unless they understand that he must be reborn in the soul of every single human being. But human beings must co-create their own spiritual development. Only when we believe that our truly human powers are not born with us, but that the truly active human powers of the future will be those we ourselves develop within us—only then do we stand on truly Christian ground. Not the Christ who is born with us—that is merely God the Father—but the Christ whom we ourselves experience within us as we develop toward him; that is the Christ who must be understood.

[ 25 ] There are books today written by Protestant Christians, such as Harnack’s book *The Essence of Christianity*. If you were to strike out the word “Christ” wherever it appears in this book, then this book would go from being a lie to being the truth. As it stands, it is a lie, because wherever “Christ” appears, it should read: God the Father. What Harnack writes refers only to the general, paternal God of nature. There is nothing in the book about Christ. He has been falsely inserted into it. Christ can only be found in human nature that has been transformed and renewed—in human nature understood as acting of its own accord.

[ 26 ] This is what must be overcome today; yet, unfortunately, unfortunately, instead of thinking about overcoming it, the world is making compromises. The compromises being made out there today are also being made in great measure within the soul, and if our souls were not such dreadful compromisers, then such dreadful compromises—like the one now emanating from Weimar, the school compromise—would not exist in external life either. Those with a compromising nature creep through existence today, and they are the ones who experience everything with a backward-looking gaze, who do not move forward. We move forward only when we have the will to learn, when we have the courage to incorporate what we have learned into our lives. Only from this will and this courage can the new motto spring forth:

I want to learn, I want to work!
I want to work while learning!
I want to learn while working!