The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] The public lectures given over the past few days have dealt with social problems and the social demands of the present—not merely as they arise, I would say, from intellectual observation, but as they manifest themselves in reality, in the events of contemporary world life.

[ 2 ] All these matters, which pertain to human life and whose consideration is today an absolute necessity in the broadest sense and for the widest circles, can be explored in even greater depth precisely by those with an anthroposophical orientation. For we must never, as members of the anthroposophical movement, forget that it must be part of our deepest feeling to view all things in the world in such a way that we penetrate the outer appearances and outer facts with the insights we gain from the spiritual world. It is only through this—by being able to conceive of all things as permeated by the spiritual, by that essence which is initially hidden in the outer earthly world but which nevertheless truly lives within this earthly world—that all things take on the true face of reality for us.

[ 3 ] The last time I was here with you, I already gave you some insights—from the perspective of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—into the social impulses of human life. At that time, we had already attempted to view the human being as a social being, as a being with both social and antisocial instincts. However, we must never lose sight of the fact that, as human beings on this Earth, we bring into our earthly existence the effects and results of what we experience during the time that elapses between death and a new birth. We bring into our earthly life the results of our last spiritual life, of our last sojourn in the purely supersensible world. And we do not view our earthly life fully unless we take into account how what we do—what happens to us in the world as we live together with others—simultaneously bears within it something of the effects of our life in the spiritual world from which we have emerged through birth, traces and forces of which we, however, bring with us into this world.

[ 4 ] On the one hand, this is what reaches into the physical world from the spiritual world for us humans. On the other hand, however, we must not overlook the fact that in the life we lead here on Earth, things take place that at first do not fully enter our consciousness; they occur within us and around us without us taking the initiative to perceive them clearly in our consciousness, and that it is precisely these experiences—which, in a sense, remain in the subconscious during our earthly life between birth and death—that we carry as the most important things back through the gate of death into the supersensible world, which we in turn experience again when we step out of the earthly world through death. Many things happen to us in our earthly life that do not have significance for this earthly life itself, but rather serve as preparation for the life after death—if I may use the term “life after death” in contrast to “pre-birth life.”

[ 5 ] Well, such a perspective in particular—the one I spoke about yesterday in my public lecture—only becomes fully and concretely clear when one also knows how to illuminate it from the direction from which the light from the supersensible world comes. And from this perspective, I would like to explore this topic—which is so relevant today—in greater depth from an anthroposophical standpoint. I would like to consider today’s social problem as a problem of humanity as a whole. For us, however, all of humanity is not merely the sum of the souls who happen to be living together socially on Earth at a particular moment; it also includes those who are in the supersensible world at this particular time—they are connected to human beings through spiritual bonds and belong to what we might call the totality of humanity. Let us first consider what is called, in the earthly sense, the human spiritual life.

[ 6 ] In the earthly sense, human spiritual life is not the life of spiritual beings, but rather what people experience as spiritual life in their social interactions. This spiritual life encompasses, above all, everything related to science, art, and religion. But this spiritual life also includes everything pertaining to schooling and education. Let us first consider what people experience as spiritual cultural life in their social interactions. You know, of course, from a talk such as the one I gave yesterday, that this spiritual life—the entire school system, the entire system of education, all scientific, artistic, and literary life, and so on—must form a distinct social structure of its own. To the outer world, this can only be made clear on the grounds that the outer world itself acknowledges today. It can become completely clear: Common sense must be entirely sufficient to fully understand these things. But to view them concretely becomes particularly possible for those who engage with an anthroposophically oriented view of the world. To such a person, what is called earthly spiritual life appears in a very special light.

[ 7 ] As a result of modern developments, this intellectual life—which, under the influence of the bourgeoisie and its intellectuals, has degenerated into a mere ideology, and which the proletariat has therefore adopted as a mere ideology in its worldview— and which encompasses the branches I have discussed—is one that arises for us solely from economic life. This is roughly how the proletarian worldview conceives of things today: Everything that constitutes religious conviction and religious thought, everything that constitutes artistic achievement, everything that constitutes legal and moral views—all of this, as the proletarian worldview holds, is a superstructure, in a sense something that rises like clouds of spiritual smoke from the only true reality, economic reality. This earthly spiritual life is reduced to ideology, to something that is merely conceived. For those who know the foundations from which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arises, however, what encompasses human beings as spiritual cultural life is a gift from the spiritual beings themselves. For them, it does not rise up from below out of the economic underworld; rather, it flows down to them from the life of the spiritual hierarchies. This is the radical difference between what is expressed in the bourgeois worldview and its legacy in the proletarian worldview—namely, that, fundamentally speaking, for what has developed in humanity since the 15th and 16th centuries, the spiritual world is ideological, a mere haze rising from economic harmonies and disharmonies — and the worldview that must emerge, the one that alone can bring salvation leading out of the present chaos, for which what flows down is a stream from the true spiritual life of the world, to which we belong just as much as we belong to the physical-earthly world through our senses and our intellect. But now that we have reached the fifth post-Atlantean period, we find our way as social beings into the social human organism with this spiritual life only by being prepared for this earthly spiritual life through those relationships we enter into before birth—when we have not yet descended into earthly existence—with other spiritual beings of the hierarchies, as we have often mentioned. This is what emerges from spiritual research as an important fact of life.

[ 8 ] When we come into existence through birth, we enter into a relationship with other people in two distinct ways. Distinguish carefully between these two types of relationships we form with others. The first relationship we enter into—and must enter into—with others is one of destiny. We enter into a fateful connection with one person or another, with a greater or lesser number of people. When we are born into earthly existence, we enter a specific family. We enter into a fateful connection with our father and mother, our siblings, and the extended family.

[ 9 ] As individuals, we enter into fateful relationships with other people, one person facing another. As individual human beings facing one another, we live out our karma. How does this karma come about? How do these fateful connections come about? They come about because they have been prepared through this or that life event in previous earthly lives. So take this to heart: When you enter into existence through birth, you enter into fateful relationships with other people—as one individual facing another—in accordance with what you have experienced with that person in past earthly lives. This is one way in which you form relationships with other people: through fate.

[ 10 ] But you also enter into other relationships with people. As a member of a nation, you belong to a group of people with whom you are not fatefully connected in the way just described. You are born into a nation, just as you are born into a specific territory. On the one hand, this is certainly related to your karma, but as a result, you are, so to speak, forged together within the social organism with many people with whom you are not bound by destiny. In a religious community, you may share the same religious feelings with a number of other people with whom you are by no means bound by destiny. Spiritual life—that is, earthly-spiritual life—brings about the most diverse social connections among people, not all of which are based on destiny. These connections are not all prepared in previous earthly lives, but rather during the time you experience between death and a new birth. Especially as you approach the second half of this period between death and a new birth, you enter into a relationship with spiritual beings—above all those of the higher hierarchies—through which you are influenced by the forces of these hierarchies in such a way that you become spiritually bonded with various groups of people. What you experience there as spiritual life—in religion, in art, in the context of a people, in a mere linguistic community, for example—what you experience through a very specifically directed upbringing and so on—all of this is already being prepared outside the purely karmic currents in prenatal life. You bring into your physical, earthly existence what you have already experienced in prenatal life. And what you experience in prenatal life—albeit in a completely different way—is reflected in what constitutes spiritual life and spiritual cultural life on Earth.

[ 11 ] Now, for those who are able to take such a fact of the spiritual world seriously in the fullest sense, a very specific question arises: How does one actually do justice—in the higher sense—to this earthly spiritual life, knowing that this earthly spiritual life is a reflection of what one has already experienced in the true, concrete spiritual life before birth? One does justice to this earthly spiritual life only when one does not view it as an ideology, but rather when one knows that the spiritual world lives within it. And we relate to this earthly spiritual life in the right way only when we become aware that the active forces of the spiritual world itself are to be found everywhere within it. Imagine, hypothetically: what the beings—whether they be beings of the higher hierarchies who never take on an earthly body, or even human beings not yet born, human beings who have not yet entered earthly life through the gateway of birth—what these beings belonging to the supersensible world think, what they experience as their soul life, that lives; that lives on in a kind of dreamlike reflection within the earthly-spiritual cultural world. So that we can always justifiably ask, whenever any artistic, religious, or educational reality presents itself to us: What lives within it? — Not merely what human beings here on Earth have created, but what flows in from the forces, the thoughts, the impulses, and the entire soul life of the higher hierarchies—that is what lives within it. We never see the world in its entirety if we deny these thoughts of spiritual beings—which are, in a sense, reflected through our spiritual-earthly culture—beings who are not incarnated on this earth, who are not incarnated at all, or who are not incarnated at this very moment. If we can intuitively take to heart—I would say—this sacred contemplation of the spiritual world around us, so that we can regard this spiritual world as that which the spiritual beings themselves bestow upon us, with which the spiritual beings surround us, then we will be able to be truly grateful for this gift of the supersensible world, which we experience as our earthly-spiritual cultural world. As a result, this spiritual cultural world necessarily presents itself as something independent within the entire social structure of humanity, in that it is the continuing effect of what we experience in the spiritual world before birth. If we illuminate social life with the light of spiritual insight, it becomes self-evident to recognize a distinct, independent reality in this spiritual life.

[ 12 ] The second sphere of social structure is what one might call the external rule of law—political life in the narrower sense—that which pertains to the order of legal relations between people, that in which all people are to be equal before the law. This is the true life of the state. And the true life of the state should, in essence, be nothing other than this. Certainly, one can again recognize, on the basis of pure, sound common sense, the necessity that this life of the state—this life of public law, this life that relates to the equality of all people before the law, indeed to equality from person to person—that this part of the social organism must stand on its own. But if one examines the matter again through the lens sharpened by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, something quite different becomes apparent.

[ 13 ] This life—true state life—is, within the social organs, that which has nothing to do with the pre-birth realm and nothing to do with the post-death realm. It is that which finds its order and orientation purely within the world that human beings experience between birth and death. The state is a self-contained whole with its own essential being only when it extends to nothing that reaches into the supersensible world, whether on the side of birth or on the side of death. “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” — But do not—one must add—give to Caesar what belongs to God, and to God what belongs to Caesar. — He will reject it!

[ 14 ] Things must be clearly separated, just like the individual systems within the human natural organism. Everything that public life can encompass—everything that can be discussed or agreed upon at the state level—relates solely to human coexistence. That is the essence of it. Deeper religious souls have sensed this throughout the ages. — Other people, who were not deeply religious, did not even allow these matters to be discussed freely, honestly, and sincerely. — For a particular conception of these matters has taken root precisely among those of a deeply religious nature. These deeply religious individuals told themselves: The state encompasses life—which, insofar as humanity is concerned, has to do only with everything that lies between birth and death, everything that pertains to the purely earthly. — It is a grave matter when that which relates merely to the earthly seeks to extend its dominion over the supernatural, the supersensible, and that which lies beyond birth and death. But beyond birth and death lies earthly spiritual life, for it contains the shadows of the soul experiences of the supersensible beings. If that which pulsates in mere state life seizes control of the life of earthly spirituality, deeper religious natures have called this: the power exercised by the unlawful prince of this world. — Behind the expression “the unlawful prince of this world” lies what I have just alluded to. This is also the reason why, in those circles that have an interest in confusing the three members of the social organism, people do not like to speak of this unlawful prince of this world—indeed, it is even frowned upon to speak of him.

[ 15 ] The situation is somewhat different, however, when it comes to the thoughts, feelings, and soul impulses that develop within a person as a result of belonging to the economic member of the social organism. This is something highly peculiar. However, you will already have become accustomed to the fact that, in your views shaped by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, you must engage with many things that at first appear paradoxical. When we speak today of the economic member of the social organism, we must, of course, be clear that, as we speak of it now, this is precisely a peculiarity of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In earlier epochs of human development, these things were different. Therefore, what I have to say in this regard applies particularly to our present and to the future. But with regard to our present and future, it must be said: In earlier times, people instinctively immersed themselves in economic life. Now, this immersion in the economy must become more and more conscious. Just as people—as I have already said—learn the multiplication tables in school, just as they learn other things in school, so too must they learn in school in the future the things that pertain to life within the social organism, to economic life. People must be able to feel themselves as a part of the economic organism. Of course, this will be an inconvenience for some people, because other habits of thought and feeling have already taken root, and these will have to undergo radical changes. Isn’t it true that if someone today did not know how much three times nine is, they would be considered uneducated? In some circles, a person is already considered uneducated if they do not know who Raphael or Leonardo was. But in general, in certain circles today, one is not considered uneducated if one is unable to provide a proper explanation of what capital is, what production and consumption are in relation to one another, what the credit system is, and so on—not to mention that very few people have a clear idea of what a Lombard transaction is and the like.

[ 16 ] These concepts will certainly change under the influence of social transformation, and in the future it will be easier for people to seek and obtain appropriate information about these matters. Today, after all, people are left quite at a loss when they try to obtain rational information about these things. For what could be more natural than for someone, in order to understand what capital actually is, to pick up a textbook on economics written by a renowned economist? If you were to pick up three different economics textbooks today, you would find three different definitions of what capital actually is in those three different textbooks. Just imagine what a peculiar view you would have of geometry if you were to pick up three geometry textbooks by three different authors and find the Pythagorean theorem presented differently in each one—if its meaning were different to you in each case. The reality is that even today, authorities in the field of economics can offer very little real clarification on these matters. One cannot, therefore, blame the general public too harshly for not seeking such clarification. But it will have to be sought; it will have to come about. Human beings will have to build a bridge from themselves to the—specifically economic—structure of the social organism. They will have to consciously integrate themselves as subjects into the economy, into the social organism. There they will learn to think about how they relate to other people, simply by conducting economic activities together with them within a specific territory regarding a wide variety of goods. This way of thinking, which is developed there—and into which the entire relationship between the natural order and the human being flows—is a completely different way of thinking from that which develops, for example, in the world of spiritual culture. In the world of spiritual culture, you experience, among other things, what beings of the higher hierarchies think—what you yourselves experienced in your pre-birth life. In the thinking you develop as a participant in the social economic struggle, another person—as paradoxical as this may seem to you—always thinks along with you: a deeper person within you. Precisely when you feel yourself to be a member of an economic body, a deeper person within you thinks along with you. You are called upon to bring together external factors of life through your thinking. You must think: What will the price of this or that be? How do I acquire one commodity, then another, and so on? In doing so, your thoughts, as it were, flit over the external facts; it is not the spiritual that lives there, but the external, the material, that lives in your thinking. Precisely because the external and material dwell in your thinking—because you must experience what is happening in economic life through thought, not merely instinctively like an animal—therefore another, deeper aspect of your being is constantly reflecting on these matters within you; it is this aspect that carries the thoughts forward and gives them a purpose and coherence. And it is precisely this human being who plays an essential role in everything you carry into the supersensible world through death. As paradoxical as it may seem to some, it is precisely the reflection on material things here in the world—to which human beings are compelled—that stirs within them, because it is never finished, because it is never something complete, another inner spiritual life that they carry through death into the supersensible world. Thus, the feelings and impulses we develop especially in economic life are more closely connected to our life after death than people believe. This may seem strange and paradoxical to some today; yet, once brought into consciousness, it is precisely what developed in human beings during atavistic periods of human evolution—when the spiritual world was incorporated into human instincts. I would like to draw your attention to the following:

[ 17 ] Striking social structures can be found among certain so-called “primitive peoples.” Now, we certainly need not adopt the nonsensical and foolish view of these “primitive peoples” that contemporary ethnology—contemporary anthropology—holds. Contemporary anthropology believes: There are certain “primitive peoples,” such as the indigenous Australians, who stand at the most primitive stage of humanity, and today’s “civilized” peoples were once just like these “primitive peoples” are today. — That is nonsense! The truth is rather that what are today called “primitive peoples” have fallen into decadence; they are the remnants of a different stage that have sunk to a lower level. It is simply that today’s so-called primitive peoples have preserved within themselves the characteristics of earlier times, which have been masked in the so-called civilized peoples. That is why one can still study many things among these so-called primitive peoples that existed in a different form during the times of ancient atavistic clairvoyance. And there were, for example, the following institutions: There was the institution whereby, within a tribe, the members of that tribe were divided into smaller groups; each of these smaller groups had a specific name derived from a plant or an animal found within the territory where that group lived. The naming of these smaller groups within larger contexts was connected to the following: for example, a group—let’s use modern names just to make ourselves understood—a group bearing the name “Rye” was responsible for ensuring that rye cultivation on that land was properly managed, so that the other people, who did not bear the name “Rye,” could be supplied with rye. It was the task of these people, who bore the name “Rye,” to oversee rye cultivation and the distribution of rye. And the others, who had different names, relied on being supplied with rye by this one group. Another group, for example, bore the name “Cattle”: its task was to engage in cattle husbandry and to supply the others with cattle and everything associated with them. These groups were not only responsible for supplying the others, but at the same time, the others were forbidden from cultivating the plant or raising the animal in question—which, as it was said, was the exclusive right of that particular totem. This is the economic significance of the totem, which, in the area where this totem reigned, was at the same time a mystery cult. A mystery cult that is not, as modern people imagine, confined to higher realms, but which—based precisely on the decrees of the gods, which were accessible to the initiates of the mysteries—ordered human life down to its very finest details. They organized the tribe according to totemic forms and totemic groups, thereby bringing about a corresponding economic organization, in addition to revealing to people in a specific way the nature of the spiritual world and how the spiritual world interpenetrates earthly spiritual life—just as was appropriate for the times in question. Just as they provided for legal life—which is of a purely earthly nature—in their own way, so too did they prepare people here on Earth through the organization of economic life in such a way that, upon death, they could then enter another world where they would have to develop relationships that they could prepare for here on Earth only through their interaction with the non-human beings of the other natural kingdoms. Thus, these people of ancient times, under the guidance of their initiates, learned to incorporate a proper economic element into their worldly life.

[ 18 ] Later on, this became more or less confused, although it is not all that difficult to trace the instinctive threefold structure of the social organism all the way back to Greek culture, and indeed even to medieval culture—to trace it precisely from the perspective I have just outlined, showing how its rudiments can still be found at least up into the 18th century. Oh, modern people are so lazy in their thinking—they want everything, absolutely everything, presented to their minds as superficially as possible! If one were to truly study the life of bygone eras—not according to what is called “history” today, which is often nothing more than a fable convenue, but according to how it really was—then one would see: There was an instinctive threefold division; only in one of its parts—the spiritual life—did everything proceed from the spiritual center and thereby distinguish itself from mere political life.

[ 19 ] When the Catholic Church was at its height, it already constituted an independent entity, and in turn organized the other aspects of earthly spiritual life as an independent entity; it founded schools, structured the educational system, established the first universities, made earthly spiritual life independent, and ensured that public life would not be permeated by the unlawful prince of this world. And in economic life, even in later times, there was at least a sense that when brotherhood among people was cultivated in economic life, something was being prepared within it that would find its continuation in the life after death. That brotherhood among people is rewarded after death is, admittedly, a self-serving reinterpretation of the higher concepts that were lived out in totemism, but at least there remains an awareness that a life of brotherhood in human economic activity finds a continuation in the spiritual realm of the afterlife. Even the excesses in this area must be judged from this perspective. That excesses occur is part of human nature. The sale of indulgences is certainly one of the most depraved excesses in this area. Yet it arose—even if only as an excess—from the awareness that the economic sacrifices a person makes here in physical life have significance for their life after death. Even if it is a caricature of what is truly the case, it arose—as a caricature—from the correct view of the significance of what we experience here by entering into relationship with the beings of the other kingdoms of the Earth: the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. Through our relationship with these other beings, we acquire something that only reaches its full development in the life after death. Isn’t it true that, in relation to what we are after death, we here as human beings are still related to the lower realms—to animals, plants, and minerals? Yet it is precisely through this experience of the non-human that we prepare something which is only to grow into the human realm after death. If you turn the thought around in this way, you will understand it more easily, and you will more readily realize how entirely natural it is that what we experience with animals, plants, and minerals finds its expression on Earth in something that unites human beings, something that surrounds them like a spiritual air, a spiritual atmosphere within the earthly realm. What human beings experience among themselves gives rise only to a purely ethereal realm between birth and death.

[ 20 ] What people experience in the subhuman realm—in economic life—only becomes truly human, only is elevated to the human realm of the earth, once we have passed through death.

[ 21 ] This should be of the utmost interest and the greatest significance, especially for the anthroposophically oriented mind—for those who seek a deepening of life through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—to recognize that this threefold structure of the social organism is concretely grounded simply in the fact that the human being is also a threefold being in this respect, in that, when he grows into the physical world as a child, he still carries within himself something of what he experienced before birth; in that he carries within himself something that has meaning only between birth and death; and in that, so to speak, beneath the veil of ordinary physical life, he is already preparing here that which, in turn, has a supersensible, post-mortem significance. What appears here as the lowest form of life—life within the physical realm—seems, here on Earth, to be lower than the spiritual life; yet this experience of the lower realm simultaneously compensates us by allowing us, while we are immersed in the lower realm, to gain the time needed to prepare our deeper human nature for life after death. By belonging with our soul to the life of art, the religious life, the life of education, and other spiritual life, we draw upon the inheritance we bring with us through birth into physical-earthly existence. But by lowering ourselves, as it were, through economic life into the subhuman realm—into that mode of thinking that does not reach so high—we are compensated by preparing, in our innermost being, that which will then, after death, rise up into the human realm. This may still sound paradoxical to people today, because they tend to view things one-sidedly and actually do not want to acknowledge that every single thing unfolds its nature in life from two sides. What is high on one side is low on the other; what is low on one side is high on the other. In real life—I might also say in the reality of life—every single thing always has its other side. People would gain a much better understanding of themselves and the world if they were aware that every single thing always has its other side. Sometimes it is unpleasant to bring this fully to mind, for it imposes various duties of life upon us. For example: With regard to certain things, we must become wise, but we cannot develop the degree of this wisdom in relation to certain things without developing an equal degree of foolishness on the other side. One thing always determines the other. And we should never actually consider a person completely foolish, even if they appear foolish to us in their outward life, without realizing it: in their subconscious there may lie a profound wisdom that is simply hidden from us. Reality reveals itself only when we do justice to this duality of all that is real. And so it is: on the one hand, the life of spiritual culture appears to us as the highest; at the same time, it is the very realm where we are actually always overexploiting, where we are always drawing upon what we bring with us through our birth into physical existence. Economic life appears to us as the lowest link: this is only because it shows us the lowest aspect between birth and death. It gives us time to unconsciously develop what constitutes the spiritual aspect of economic life—that which we carry into the supersensible world through death. This sense of belonging in brotherhood with other human beings—that is what I primarily mean by the spiritual aspect of economic life.

[ 22 ] Well, humanity urgently needs to understand these things if it is to emerge from certain calamities that have arisen precisely because these things have not been taken into account. Among the leading intellectuals of the ruling classes, something has emerged—I spoke of this the day before yesterday—that lacks the momentum to permeate everyday life. Acquiring the right understanding in this regard is particularly important for people today. You see, the leading intellectual circles of the ruling classes have developed a certain moral worldview, a certain religious outlook. But they prefer to keep this moral and religious worldview one-sidedly and entirely idealistic. It is not meant to have the momentum to penetrate everyday life at the same time. In practical terms, this becomes evident to you when you visit the familiar churches Sunday after Sunday—and even more often: sermons will be preached to you, but these sermons consistently fail to address the most pressing duties of the times. You will be told all sorts of things about what you should do based on a religious worldview, but these teachings lack any driving force. For when you leave the church and step back into everyday life, you cannot apply everything that is preached there about love between people—what one should do, what one person is just experiencing, and what another has just preached. Where is the connection, the link, between what the preacher or moral teacher says to his students and what actually prevails in everyday life?

[ 23 ] This was different, for example, in the times to which the totem cult refers: back then, the initiates organized daily life according to the will of the gods. It is an unhealthy state of affairs that today nothing is heard from the pulpits about the necessary organization of economic life. What is preached there really resembles—I have often used this comparison—standing in front of a stove and saying: “O stove, you stand here in the room. Just as you are positioned in relation to the other objects in the room, it is your sacred duty to warm the room. So fulfill your sacred duty and warm the room.” — You can preach to the stove like that for a long time, but it won’t warm the room! But you don’t need to preach at all; instead, put wood or coal in it and light it, and that’s how you’ll warm the room. In the same way, you can dispense with all moral teachings that merely speak of what a person should do for the sake of eternal bliss, or for the sake of other things that pertain solely to faith. So you can dispense with the sermons that today mostly make up the content of pulpit speeches, but you cannot dispense with what today constitutes real knowledge of the social organism. It would be the duty of those who wish to be educators of the people to build, in practical terms as well, a bridge from what, as the spiritual, permeates and weaves through the world, to what happens in the most everyday life. For God, the Divine, lives not only in what human beings dream of in the heights of the clouds, but in the smallest, most ordinary things. When you pick up the salt shaker on the table, when you bring a spoonful of soup to your mouth, when you buy something from your fellow human being for five pfennigs—the Divine lives in all these things. And when one surrenders to faith: on the one hand, there is the coarse material, the concrete—that which is of a lower nature—and on the other hand, the divine-spiritual, which one is supposed to keep quite separate from this coarse, material, concrete realm, because one is sacred and the other profane, because one is exalted and the other lowly—then one is directly contradicting the innermost meaning of a worldview grounded in reality: the impetus from the Highest, the Holy, down into the most everyday experiences of human beings.

[ 24 ] This also characterizes what religious development has failed to do right up to our own time—a development that merely preaches to the stove that it should be warm, and that frowns upon engaging with genuine, concrete spiritual knowledge. If only people everywhere would speak freely about what has been neglected—neglected by those who feel called to lead the spiritual life—that alone would be a significant step toward what must happen.

[ 25 ] How often do people today speak of salvation, of grace, of the objects of faith? They speak in a way that makes it extremely convenient for people: there are people with their human minds. Christ Jesus once died on Golgotha and—though advanced theologians no longer believe this today—rose again. But he does all of this for himself; people need do nothing more than believe in it. That is what many believe today, and they regard it as a disruption to their circles when people think differently. But we must learn to think differently! It is precisely in this area that a radical change must take place.

[ 26 ] One might say: Today, once again, we hear the warning of Christ—or even that of John the Baptist: Repent, for the time of crisis is drawing near. — People have grown accustomed to assuming the spiritual exists somewhere—somewhere where it takes care of them—and to having religious preachers tell them that such a spiritual world exists, one that is described as little as possible. People do not want to make an effort in their thinking to actually know anything about the spiritual world; they simply want to believe in it. The time when this was permissible is over! The time must begin when people must realize: Not merely, “I think—perhaps I also think about the supersensible”—but rather, “I must grant access to the divine-spiritual powers in my thinking, in my feeling. The spiritual world must live within me; my thoughts themselves must be of a divine nature. I must give God the opportunity to express Himself through me.” — Then spiritual life will no longer be merely ideology. That is the great sin of modern times: that spiritual life has been reduced to ideology. And theology is already ideological today; ideology is not merely the proletarian, socialist worldview. But people must recover from this ideology. The spiritual world must become a reality for them. And they must know that the spiritual world lives as a reality within each member of the social organism, just as the legacy of prenatal life—of the so-called spirit world—does; and that something spiritual is being prepared even as we seemingly immerse ourselves among people in economic life. It is precisely there, as a counterbalance to this immersion, that what is taking shape—which, if we live it through correctly, is to lead us back, through the life we enter upon when we re-enter the spiritual world through death, into a more human, brotherly science here on Earth.—

[ 27 ] To view life realistically—that is what must come again. And the one who, as a follower of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, takes his rightful place in the world is the one who becomes aware that: The things that must one day enter into humanity can be deepened for him by the fact that anthroposophy is not merely developed as something that is simply science, but that he possesses it as something that penetrates all his feelings, that permeates his entire sense of life, and even transforms it, shaping it in such a way that he can enter as a worthy member into that which must begin in the present and which alone can become the salvation for humanity’s future.

[ 28 ] These things indicate what is necessary for humanity, but also what humanity has failed to do. Only by fearlessly and courageously engaging with what has been neglected and with what is necessary can anything beneficial be brought about for the present and the near future. That is why I sought once again here, where we are among ourselves, to add to what can be said publicly today about the social problem that which can be said specifically from the perspective of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—where one can incorporate that which extends into this earthly life from the immortal, supersensible life of the disembodied human being.

[ 29 ] Only one part of the social organism—namely, the part that relates to the external state organization—is purely earthly. The other two members are intertwined with the supersensible in two different ways. On the one hand, we are granted a spiritual life as an earthly spiritual life, which—because it is, so to speak, squeezed out of the prenatal, supersensible spiritual life—can be lived through by us, I would say, as an abundance. And on the other hand, as physical human beings—through which we are connected to the animality of the earth—we must immerse ourselves in mere economic life. But precisely because we are not merely physical human beings, but because within this body the soul is preparing itself for subsequent earthly lives and for subsequent supersensible lives, economic life also serves to prepare that which lifts up into humanity the part of us that is not yet fully human here: the human being who must be fully engaged in economic life. We have, as it were, something of a superhuman within us, insofar as we can enter into a social context that interweaves the earthly spiritual life. We possess something of the mere human being in ourselves when we become citizens. We have something within us that compels us to descend into both, but at the same time we are compensated by the supersensible world in that, within what appears to be the lowest link in social experience, there is already being prepared that which in turn leads us upward, reintegrating us into the supersensible.

[ 30 ] Reality, however, is not as superficial, nor as easy to grasp, as one might sometimes wish. Yet, on the other hand, it shows how human life goes through the most diverse phases, with each phase bringing new moments, new elements, and new impulses—which can only be found in these specific realms—into human life. Thus we see how the threads of the life we live here between birth and death intertwine with those threads we weave as we live through the life between death and a new birth. And everything fits together in the most meaningful way throughout this entire human life. That which, in turn, unfolds here in earthly life from one human individual to another—what we do to a person here by bringing them joy, by causing them suffering, by enriching or impoverishing their thoughts, by teaching them this or that— — all of this prepares our karmic, fateful life for our next earthly existence.

[ 31 ] But we must distinguish this from what we need to prepare ourselves for the life we will unfold immediately after death as a supersensible existence. Here we are brought together into certain social communities. We must be led out of them again. This happens when something emerges from our mere economic life—from mere economics—that guides us through the gate of death into the spiritual world, so that we do not remain in the social community in which we have settled here, but can be received into another one in a future life. In this way, the karmic threads are meaningfully interwoven with those threads that place us within the general life of the world.

[ 32 ] What can still be gained from spiritual science—through the connection of the supersensible with physical-earthly life—regarding this threefold structure of the social organism seems to already significantly deepen what must become the exoteric content concerning the threefold structure of the social organism. It seems to already significantly deepen it. Certainly, this is difficult for the outsider to understand; there is no help available for that today. But those who are part of the anthroposophical movement should always take in, alongside everything that can be grounded here on Earth, everything that connects us to the sphere into which we enter after our death—the sphere from which we came through our birth—and in which we must seek out those who have gone before us from this world and with whom we have certain relationships. For this will be the most beautiful human achievement of anthroposophical deepening: that it teaches us to penetrate the two great mysteries of earthly life—birth and death—and builds a bridge between the sensible and the supersensible, between the so-called living and the so-called dead, so that the dead become like the living among us, and we can say of the living: That life—which was ours in the supersensible realm before birth and will be ours after death—is nothing other than another form of being. It is dead here in the sensible realm, just as the sensible realm is dead when we live through the supersensible. Things in the world are relative to one another. And only when we see through these two sides of every reality do we penetrate reality itself.

[ 33 ] This is what I wanted to offer you today as a supplement—a more esoteric supplement—to those questions that are now so urgently in need of public discussion, and in which discussion those who are close to the anthroposophical movement should participate in a very special way.

[ 34 ] In response to a question that has not been preserved, Rudolf Steiner further remarked:

[ 35 ] These things are such that one can truly say: This view of the social organism is a solid foundation. And one need only examine how it takes root in life in each individual case.

[ 36 ] If you know the Pythagorean theorem, you will not ask: How is it justified in every detail? — If you know it, you know this: It will be true wherever it is applicable, just as three times ten is thirty, wherever you apply it: You won’t have to ask whether it’s correct or prove it. You must see these things for yourself. In the same way, you will also find that this view of social life starts from a certain foundation that simply proves to be correct; the other elements that follow then fit together correctly. The tax system, the system of property ownership—everything follows as a consequence. All of this will become clear when one grasps the living social organism. And so it follows that people, for example, will by no means hesitate to send their children to the Free School as well. On the contrary: they will want to send them there because they will have an interest in it.

[ 37 ] And again, in the realm where the relationship between each person and every other person develops: It is necessary to be capable of sound judgment in the realm of legal life, and no one who lacks this capacity could be elected to the representative body of the second member of the social organism. Of course, such matters must then be examined: what relates from person to person—this concern for others, this conscious engagement with life—is preserved quite naturally in the free organism, which will already be on the path to health.