The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] From yesterday evening’s reflections, it should be clear to you how necessary it is for people today to turn the eye of their soul toward spiritual scientific insights—toward those spheres of existence and reality in which the workings of the spirit within human evolution are clearly perceptible to those who are able to look into these regions of reality.

[ 2 ] Since the middle of the 15th century—as I had to tell you—civilized humanity has been living in a period in which the old relationship between the human soul and the higher beings of the three immediately higher hierarchies—the Angeloi, the Archangeloi, and the Archai—has become completely different from what it was before. Previously, this relationship was such that the beings of these three hierarchies worked on human development out of their own interest—that is, driven by their own impulses. Now we are living in an epoch in which this work by the beings of the higher hierarchies has been completed. For the time being, these beings have no interest in continuing the work on human development that they have carried out until now. They will enter into a new relationship with humanity only if human beings, of their own accord, of their own free will, and out of their own initiative, begin to engage with the spiritual worlds. If, in the near future, we as human beings were not to turn toward the spiritual world of our own free will, we would lose our connection with the spiritual worlds, because the beings of the spiritual worlds who belong to us have no interest of their own in engaging with us. We will only rekindle their interest when we once again engage with the spiritual world from within our souls—that is, when we nurture thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will into which spiritual forces can flow.

[ 3 ] Now, however, you may raise the question—and it must be raised in light of our discussion yesterday: How does a human being first come to engage with the spiritual worlds in such a way that he or she can maintain a relationship with the higher hierarchies even in the future of Earth’s evolution? I will have things to say to you that, at first glance, may not seem to have much to do with this question. But we will see that it is precisely these things that lay the foundation for us to reestablish our relationship with the spiritual world, from the present into the future. The first thing we must turn our attention to is the influence of the various denominations—the various religious confessions—that exist within civilized humanity. Until now, there has been a certain necessity for these denominations to direct the heart and mind of the human soul toward the spiritual world in the way they have done. In the future, the denominations will either contribute to cutting people off from the spiritual world, or they will have to introduce something entirely new into their endeavors. The denominations of the present are, in essence, built upon human selfishness, and we need only set before our souls one of the most important questions, which forms—and must form—the guiding principle for our reflections on denominations: the question of the immortality of the human soul—and we can see from the way this question is usually treated by the religious denominations that their approach relies heavily on people’s egoistic impulses. For the most part—albeit for deeper underlying reasons that we do not wish to discuss today—when the denominations speak of immortality, they speak of the soul’s survival after death; that is, they speak of the continuation of human soul life after death. It is relatively easy to speak to people when discussing immortality from this perspective, for human egoism asserts itself in this matter in the most eminent sense. People simply cannot bear—leaving aside for the moment all truths in this realm—the thought of not living on after death, so that we always find a certain degree of receptiveness in the human soul when we speak of life after death. And you can be quite certain: those people who take an interest in the question of immortality, as it is mostly treated today, approach it from this perspective with a selfish interest. They do not want their souls to die as well. Of course, any future perspective that addresses the immortality of the soul will also have to speak of the soul’s continued existence after death, for—as you all know from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—we are dealing here with a fact of reality. But the way in which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks of the soul’s continued existence after a person’s physical death is still far from being accepted by the religious denominations.

[ 4 ] But there is another important point: that people today must hear a completely different discourse on immortality than they have been accustomed to hearing thus far. Whoever discusses the question of immortality must not only address life after death, but also the life lived here in the physical world from birth to death. For, as you know, this life is also a continuation. It is the continuation of the life we spent between our last death and the birth through which we entered this physical existence. And humanity will have to learn to view this physical life between birth and death as the continuation of the spiritual life before birth—or rather, before conception. For in every growing child, we will have to observe, day by day, week by week, year by year, what rises from within—the forces emerging from the spiritual worlds, which enter through birth and work toward the gradual shaping of the human being from birth into later years. In a sense, we will have to unravel the God within the human being by intervening in the child’s life in a way that fosters its development. Social relationships between people will, in a certain way, have to take on something of a religious impulse that permeates our entire social life, including our interactions from person to person. But the most important thing, the essential point, will be that we come to view this physical life as a continuation of a spiritual, pre-birth life—that we never forget, at any moment, how the human being’s physical life is a continuation of their pre-birth spiritual and soul life.

[ 5 ] Many other things will be connected to this. It will involve our recognizing once again how our true humanity lies deep within our being and is gradually emerging. I once drew your attention to the early stages of human evolution—those periods that, from an anthroposophical perspective, we recognize as the first and second post-Atlantean epochs of human development, and so on. I have pointed out to you how, in those days, people were capable of development well into old age—a capacity that today is found only in very young people. Very young people undergo a physical development around the age of seven, during the change of teeth. They undergo another metamorphosis expressed in physical life with the onset of sexual maturity. Then the processes taking place in their development become less noticeable in their outer lives. It was not like that in ancient times. Back then, what a person experienced spiritually and emotionally was expressed well into much later stages of life. Now this goes unnoticed. Now we simply become “old people” as early as seventeen or eighteen, and today we are horrified to see very young people behaving like old people. An example: Some time ago, we had a meeting of the Cultural Council in Stuttgart where the topic of discussion was the current state of education. The subject was addressed from a wide variety of perspectives. Then a young man took the floor—let’s say a young man, though I could also call him an older boy. He said he had to instruct society about the true ideals of education. At first, he spoke a few very clichéd words; then he read aloud the program of a contemporary educational association—though he was constantly interrupted in the process. He was unable to continue speaking, so he concluded his remarks with the following words: “I must therefore conclude that the older generation no longer understands its own youth.”—Then he stepped down. — I had replied that I certainly understood that he had not been understood, but for the simple reason that he spoke in a far too senile manner, that he came across as far too old-fashioned. For he presented principles that were truly the height of abstraction—old-fashioned! For what is the essence of today’s old-fashioned mindset? It is this: that a person is usually capable of development only up to a certain age; then they take in all sorts of things, and they are not yet ashamed to continue developing. Then come the years around the age of twenty, when they become ashamed to continue developing. We very rarely see today that people who already have gray hair and wrinkles on their faces look forward to each coming year, for the reason that each coming year offers the organism new possibilities for development, so that in each new year one could learn something new that one simply could not learn before because one’s organism was not yet capable of it. But people today do not allow their organism to develop. They are ashamed to learn anything new or to make themselves capable of further development once they have reached the “youthful” age of thirty. What matters is that human beings truly retain the ability to look forward to each new year throughout their entire lives, because every year conjures up the divine-spiritual contents of their inner being in new forms. This is something I would like to emphasize: that we must learn, in truth and in reality, to experience not merely our youth as capable of development, but our entire existence between birth and death. Of course, this will require a new kind of education. When our older people look back on their school years, they usually do not recall anything pleasant. We must be able to shape the school years in such a way that, when we look back on them, they are always a new source of renewal for us. You can see from this that, in this regard as well, human beings can open up the possibility for themselves to truly perceive the divine-spiritual within their inner being—to experience something within themselves that goes beyond a life stimulated and stirred from the outside.

[ 6 ] There are still other things that will need to be recognized as necessary in the present. People today are still unaware of a mystery of life that is intimately connected with the current stage of human development. In earlier times, before the middle of the 15th century, there was no need to pay much attention to this mystery. Today, it is necessary to pay attention to it. This mystery of life consists in the fact that human beings, as they are now constituted—physically, psychically, and spiritually—look in a certain way each night toward the events of the coming day, but in such a way that they do not always need to have these events of the coming day fully present in their daytime consciousness. For those who do, that is their Angelos. So, what is experienced during the night in communion with the being we call an angel is a preview of the coming day. Now, you must not view this from the standpoint of human curiosity—that would be an entirely wrong perspective—but rather from the standpoint of practical life. Only when a person is completely imbued with this attitude will they make decisions in the right way and incorporate these thoughts into their daily routine. Let’s take a concrete example: suppose a person is supposed to do something at a certain time of day, for example at noon. What they are to do has already been discussed between them and their Angelos the previous night. This has been the case with human beings since the mid-15th century. They do not need to be conscious of it; it is not intended to arouse their curiosity. But human beings should be imbued with this attitude, so that they may bring to fruition during the course of the day what they negotiated with their angelic being the previous night.

[ 7 ] There are many things in the present that can poignantly remind people of what I have just told you. It is precisely these years of suffering—the last four to five years—that can instill in humanity this great lesson: that, unfortunately, this awareness of our connection to the higher beings was not present each day through the experiences of the previous night. How different everything would have been in the last four to five years if this attitude had permeated people’s minds: What you do, you do in harmony with the consultations with your angelic being that took place during the course of the previous night. — These are things that must be spoken of today. It must be spoken of that human beings will have to learn to regard this life between birth and death as a continuation of the spiritual-soul life they lived before birth. We must speak of the fact that human beings should be able to experience the revelations of God within their being throughout their entire lives. And we must speak of the fact that human beings should carry a strong awareness through their entire daily life: What you do from morning until evening, you have previously negotiated with your angelic being during the time between falling asleep and waking up.

[ 8 ] People must turn to such feelings—feelings that are far more concrete in relation to the spiritual world than the more abstract ones found in today’s religious denominations, and which at the same time require that we appeal not to the selfish but to the unselfish impulses of the human being. And from such feelings will arise what will constitute the necessary relationship to those beings who belong to the hierarchy of the Angeloi. Then these beings will once again be able to take an interest in humankind. People’s attitude toward the spiritual world must move in the direction indicated here.

[ 9 ] There is something else that must be understood. As you know, today’s denominations speak a great deal about God and the divine. What are they actually talking about? Of course, they speak only of that of which there is at least a vague awareness in the human soul. After all, it does not matter what one calls a thing, but rather what is present in the human soul. People speak of God; they speak of Christ—but they always mean only the angel. For that is still the entity to which people can turn, because it still strikes a familiar chord in their souls. No matter what the denominations speak of today—whether of God, Christ, or anything else—the mental material from which they speak encompasses only the angelic beings associated with humanity, the Angeloi. Today, people do not rise higher than this hierarchy, because they are averse to seeking their relationship to the spiritual world in a way that is more comprehensive than one rooted in selfishness. The relationship to the Archangeloi, to the hierarchy of the archangels, must simply be sought in a different way. The interests that people have today must be significantly expanded. I want to give you an example of how people’s interests must be expanded so that their feelings can rise from an inclination toward the Angeloi all the way up to the Archangeloi.

[ 10 ] People must go through something like this in their souls and say to themselves: Over the past four to five years, we have witnessed terrible events across the entire civilized world. Many people have asked about the reasons for these events; many have accused one another. There has been much talk of guilt and innocence. And yet, one need only set aside the most superficial of perspectives, and one will not be able to take much interest in such talk of causes, of guilt and innocence, for the simple reason that one can see that what has been brought to the surface over the past four to five years resembles the waves of the sea, which are carried up from the depths to the surface by the forces of the sea. It was indeed the case that, year after year, the forces of humanity were becoming more and more agitated. One nation after another took part in the great human folly of recent years, and one could only say: Something is stirring up elemental forces, which are being thrown to the surface. The sea of human life has become turbulent. What is this?

[ 11 ] One cannot gain clarity on this matter unless one extends the fact that humanity has fallen into such turmoil to encompass the entire period we call history. One will have to admit: What has taken place over the last four to five years in the form of armed conflict is only the beginning of events that will unfold in an entirely different realm—events that, in their nature, have never before been seen in human history. We are not at the end—that is merely the conclusion of a superficial view of human development—we are at the starting point of the greatest struggles, the spiritual struggles of the civilized world. And we must devote all our attention to ensuring that we are up to the task of these struggles. The East and the West threaten more and more to stand opposed to one another in a spiritual sense in the times to come. For the East and the West have developed in two entirely different directions. If one wishes to gain insight into these matters, one must regard certain phenomena of the present as profound mysteries.

[ 12 ] For decades now, one has heard in socialist circles—based on the Marxist worldview—that everything people experience as art, religion, customs, law, and science is ideology. I have discussed this in greater detail in the first chapter of *The Key Points of the Social Question*. In other words, what has developed over the past three to four centuries as a worldview among the leading bourgeois circles—but which, out of a certain cowardice, the bourgeois circles have not dared to acknowledge—has been acknowledged by socialist circles over the past half-century as a matter of truth. They have said: The true reality of social life consists solely in what is actually taking place; the economic forces of the economy alone constitute the real. What has developed in humanity as art, religion, custom, science, law, and morality is merely something like smoke rising from the true reality. That is merely ideology; it has no reality—it has only an illusory reality.” —This is precisely why the social aspirations of socialist parties in recent times are based on the belief that these parties say: “We need only transform economic life, and then everything else will change along with it.” For the rest—morality, customs, law, religion, and so on—is, after all, merely something that rises like smoke, as something unreal, as ideology, from the only reality: economic activity.

[ 13 ] But anyone who views the world not on a small scale but on a large one takes a stand on this word “ideology,” which bourgeois circles could have been using for three or four centuries. They were simply too cowardly to do so; they sensed that economic life is the only real one, and that what is set apart as science, art, religion, and so on is merely like smoke. Life as a whole was like that, and only the final conclusion has been drawn by the disciples of this bourgeois world. For the socialists are merely the disciples of this bourgeois world; they have merely taken it to the extreme. But what I have just said is the worldview that took shape in the West and reached its peak there precisely in the second half of the 19th and in the 20th century.

[ 14 ] Driven by other impulses, a certain perspective has emerged in the Orient that has developed a worldview which says: I look at what is happening externally in the world. I look at what my senses convey to me as impressions; I look at what I use as a tool to transform the world; I look at what shines down to me from the stars; I look at what I myself am physically. What is all this? — It is Maya. What, then, is true reality; what is not illusion? What is experienced within the human soul—that is reality. — Whoever translates not in a lexicographical sense—which yields nothing—but inwardly, knows that the same word that is called Maya in the East is called ideology in the West. For millennia, the Easterners have regarded the external world—which acts upon our senses, including the economy—as Maya. The Westerners, on the other hand, see in what is external—what is Maya for the Easterners—reality, and what arises within the soul is, for them, ideology. Both worldviews have reached a certain level. Ask the leading figures of the socialist parties today—especially in those regions where the first revolution has not yet taken place—which here must be understood as the November Revolution. This revolution, however, has also somewhat altered the concepts held by socialist leaders. Not the feelings, but the concepts—; even today you still hear from them what was heard up until the catastrophe of the war: the view that one need not contribute anything out of one’s own will to the transformation, to the revolutionizing of the world, but that this will happen of its own accord. A certain fatalism had taken hold in the West. People said: We need only wait until the means of production have developed to such an extent that what has become concentrated in private capital will of its own accord take on other forms. The mindset was such that people would say, for example: The air in this room is bad; I can no longer breathe. I could open the window, but I won’t. I’ll wait until the air improves on its own.

[ 15 ] Fatalism in the West, fatalism in the East—we know it well. In the East—though not right from the start—as the Maya worldview took shape, people fell into complete fatalism. Every worldview, by virtue of its inner laws, has the tendency to eventually become fatalistic. But today we have reached the point where we must tell ourselves: We must break free from fatalism. We must find the transition from mere observation, from contemplation, to the will, to the act of willing. We must stimulate our will by developing the kinds of impulses I have just described: regarding birth as a continuation of prenatal life, regarding remaining young until one gets white hair and wrinkles, and regarding the way the Angelos’s nocturnal work plays into daily life. This is necessary. It is necessary for a person to absorb impulses for their life of will in this way, by expanding their sphere of interest so that they see not only what plays into their own personal, individual life, but also what is taking place in a differentiated manner in the civilized world. Let us look to the West, to which we ourselves belong: we see ideology—the inner world. Reality—the outer world. Let us look to the East: ideology, Maya—the outer world. Reality—the inner world. And in the clash of people today, we have the task of consciously finding a way out of what has already become fatalism in this worldview. We must seek this path; we will find it only if we can take seriously something that still terribly annoys people today.

[ 16 ] There was a strange reaction once when, during a lecture in a city in southern Germany, I said something that really annoyed people, but it was one of the truths that are necessary at the present time. You cannot say the things you say in a way that pleases people; rather, you must say them in a way that is true. In that context, I had to say: It is precisely today’s ruling class that has a decadent physical brain. It is unpleasant to have to say this; it is not merely unpleasant to hear it. But it is necessary for people to learn this. It is precisely those people who have brought about the current state of affairs who have come to possess a decadent physical brain. That is the reality! And in a certain sense, we find ourselves today in a situation similar to that of the people of Europe during the Migration Period and the spread of Christianity. The Christian impulse came from the East; it first passed through Greece and Rome. The Greek and Roman worlds were, of course, far more highly developed than the Germanic world. The Germanic peoples were barbarians. But the minds of the Greeks and Romans were decadent. Therefore, the Christian wave was not received in the Greek and Roman worlds in the same way it was when it reached the Germanic peoples. That is the Migration Period, which proceeded horizontally. Today it is vertical. Today a wave of spiritual life is coming from the spiritual world. Just as Christianity first collided with the Greeks and Romans, so the spiritual world is colliding with the present-day, bourgeois world—and that world is decadent. The proletariat is not yet decadent; they will yet come to understand what is meant by the spiritual world. But the others will need the preparation offered by anthroposophy—that is, they will have to develop that part of the brain that is not yet physical: the etheric brain. Today we are faced with the necessity that the ruling classes will not only have a decadent brain, but will fall entirely into decadence if they do not realize that they must grasp the spiritual worldview through supersensible means.

[ 17 ] This is the tragedy of the bourgeois world order: it seeks to understand everything physically, whereas today we are dependent on the etheric brain to grasp things—that is, to take spiritual truths into ourselves. That is the direction in which contemporary humanity must steer, and that is where the West must take the lead. And here we must familiarize ourselves with something very important.

[ 18 ] Take a look at the development of language, moving from east to west. Let’s take our German language as an example. It is, of course, terribly misused today, but we know that it has this distinctive feature—if we look back to the language of Goethe and Lessing—that not so long ago, the words of the German language could express the very essence of what spiritual life is. Today we have terribly neglected the language, reducing it to mere clichés. But the fact that it cannot be spiritual does not lie in the language alone. The further we move toward the Western languages, however, the more we find that these languages have expelled the very essence of the spiritual from the language itself—from its sounds, its tone, and even its grammar. And from this expulsion of the spiritual-soul aspect from the Anglo-American idiom follows the world mission of the Anglo-American peoples. This world mission of the Anglo-American peoples consists in their learning—they learn it quite instinctively, but they will learn it, and in seizing world domination they will learn it—by listening to other people, not merely to hear the sound, but to interpret the gesture of language, to perceive more than the mere physical sound, to perceive, when speech occurs, something that passes from person to person, yet transcends what is spoken. This works from etheric body to etheric body. This is the secret of Western languages: that the physical sound loses its meaning. And the spiritual gains in significance. It is therefore the task of the people to allow the spirit to permeate the language—not merely to hear physically, but to intuit, to perceive more than what is contained in the sound itself. In the West, the spiritual must be sought through language itself.

[ 19 ] Let us now turn our gaze to the East, we will sense an ever-increasing urge among the peoples of the East, as they delve deeper inward, not to stop at what has previously been elaborated upon regarding karma, reincarnation, and so on, but to look out into the world and perceive the spiritual in the world outside, and also to establish a kind of view of nature.

[ 20 ] These are just small examples of how one can broaden one’s interests—starting from one’s own personality and cultural heritage—to encompass all of humanity, how one can say to oneself: We look to the West and see ideology there, but an ideology different from that of the East. But we see how, out of these opposites, the elemental forces are stirred up within humanity on Earth. We learn to recognize that we are at the very heart of the entire civilized world. And when we develop within ourselves this awareness of being at the very heart of the entire civilized world, then we also develop within ourselves the capacity to arrive at feelings through which we rise above the sphere of the Angeloi. Our sphere of interest is simply expanded in such a way that we are drawn toward concepts that ascend into the sphere of the Archangeloi. For everything I have just described regarding the contrast between ideology and Maya and so on—this is something that, in terms of its primal forces, takes place in the sphere of the Archangeloi, the Archangels. There we go beyond the sphere of the angels. From this you can see what is truly necessary for people today. If someone today speaks of Maya, of ideology, and so on, as I have explained, and if they even say that the primal forces behind these lie in the sphere of the archangels, what are they then in the eyes of intelligent people? A fool, of course, because people are so constrained by the spirituality they have acquired that they have no interest in the great concerns of humanity. This can only be understood from a spiritual perspective, only by delving into what is at work in the great concerns of humanity.

[ 21 ] Now I have given you an idea of how one can work one’s way up into the sphere of the Archangels. One can work one’s way up even higher. Humanity today must learn this as well. Our educated classes had to look back to the Greek era. They had to—especially insofar as they were men (and in more recent times this practice has also been applied to young women)—attend the gymnasium, absorb a Greek education, and through this they received sufficient impetus to feel themselves drawn more and more back into the Greek world. This is of great significance for our civilization, for we structure our education so that, precisely during our most crucial years of development, we learn what the Greeks contributed to the world. The Greeks did things differently. It naturally never occurred to them to teach their boys the Egyptian language, for example. They devoted themselves to what was their immediate reality. They possessed a direct sense of reality. We occupy our youth in a way that prevents them from getting to know their surroundings and absorbing the impulses of reality. We transport them to an ancient time. We have no idea what we are actually doing. For we are not merely teaching the children—young gentlemen and young ladies, one might say—the Greek language. Rather, the entire character of an entire people lies in the language, in its sound structure, and in its grammar. As people absorb the Greek language, as happens today, the innermost position of their soul in the world also takes on a similar structure to that which existed in Greece. There, all cultural life was arranged in such a way that only a small upper class actually participated in culture; the others were slaves. After all, in Greece it was only befitting of a free man to engage in science, politics, and at most—but only in a supervisory capacity—in agriculture. Everything else was the work of slaves. This is reflected in the language. And as we unite Greek culture with the language within ourselves, we unite aristocracy with our intellectual development. For the Greeks, it was natural to structure the entire social organism according to their spiritual orientation, for to them this was inextricably linked to blood. There were the people who constituted the broad masses. Then there were those who belonged to the higher type, and they already possessed the higher spiritual life within them by virtue of their blood. This is even expressed in Greek sculpture. Compare the Mercury type—the way the nose and ears are positioned—with the Zeus or Athena type: different nose positions, different ear positions. The Greeks knew exactly what they wanted to express by creating the Mercury type on the one hand and the Aryan Zeus type on the other.

[ 22 ] We are permeated by all of this more than we realize. As we develop worldview ideas today, we are essentially developing ideas that are still adapted to what sprang from the very blood of the Greeks. Our spiritual and cultural life is permeated by what we absorb from Greek culture. Greek culture looms over our time in a Luciferic way. Greek culture underwent a metamorphosis into Roman culture. We have a subsequent era in Roman culture. Compared to the Greeks, the Romans were a sober, prosaic people, and they developed other aspects of life. What sprang from the blood of the Greeks, they lived out in an abstract way. In contrast to the Greeks, they turned the human being itself into an abstraction—the citizen. The human being is not really a human being in the Roman sense; he is a citizen. This is something incomprehensible to the Greeks. One is not what one is as a human being by entering into humanity, but one is what one is by being registered in some state document. This sometimes comes to light in a grotesque way. I had an old friend who was sixty-four years old. One day he said: “I’ve saved up so much now—he’d always been a poor fellow—that I want to marry the love of my youth.”—He had, in fact, become engaged at eighteen, but at the time he had no money to marry his fiancée. And the two of them promised each other to wait until they could marry. That had now become possible. By then, he was sixty-four and she was sixty-two. So he moved back to his hometown and wrote that everything was now in order—he had the money. But they couldn’t get married after all, because his parish doubted his identity. Years earlier, the parsonage had burned down, along with all the baptismal records and so on, and there was no one left who could verify his identity. He thought that his very presence was proof enough, but he had no legal proof! Although the marriage eventually took place, these difficulties made it clear to him that a baptismal certificate is far more important than one’s own identity. So one is a citizen.

[ 23 ] One is what one is in an abstract context. This view is essentially Roman, and everything of this nature that exists in everyday life is essentially Roman. Our education is, after all, essentially taken over by the state, which has become so abstract and which, under socialist influence, will become even more abstract. People today are not educated to be placed in the world as human beings, but to have a state-sanctioned profession and to be placed into it. The state takes young people under its wing—not right away, for at that stage they are still too unrefined for it, so it leaves them to their parents for the time being. But then it spreads its tentacles toward the individual and trains them so that they are suitable for it. And it knows very well that people are then suited to it. For what does it give them? It gives them an economic life, provides them with everything that is prescribed for them, and then it grants them a pension. And just consider what it means to a person when they can say to themselves: in addition to their job—for which they are not only paid—they will also receive a pension later on! That is something truly great, and it chains people to the abstract state; and this then permeates their entire mindset as well. Here, too, the Romanic mindset has taken hold in the rest of humanity. If you were to say to a person today: “In order to share in your immortality, you must activate what is at work in your soul, so that you yourself may carry your soul actively through the gate of death”—he would not understand it. He has been thoroughly weaned from directing his understanding toward such things. Instead, they tell him, “You need only believe in Christ and in what the state does.” And he then knows: first, the state will provide for him, and when he has worked enough, the state will grant him a pension. And the Church does something else as well. It “retires” a person’s soul after death, so that in life he does not have to work on his soul or do anything himself when he carries his soul through the gate of death. People today are registered, and the politics of the Roman essence—we have incorporated this as a second aspect into our very being and are absorbing it more and more.

[ 24 ] One can have terrible experiences in this area. I have recently been involved in establishing the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, and in the process I had to review the various curricula. When I think back to the 1870s and 1880s, I have to say that back then the curricula were still somewhat limited; they contained what was to be covered in each grade. The learning objectives and the subject matter were specified; as for everything else, the teacher still had freedom. Now we are presented with curricula of great scope, and on the first page it says: Official Gazette, Regulation, and then it specifies exactly how one is to proceed in teaching. So, what was once meant to flow from one living personality to another is now enshrined in laws and regulations; it has become official; it is decreed. That is the death of spiritual life. This death of spiritual life leads directly from Central Europe to Rome! That is the second thing we have internalized: the political-legal system along with Romanism.

[ 25 ] Added to this was something that cannot be transplanted from ancient times into the modern era: economic life. That had to be modern. For one can reflect on what the Greeks recognized; one can let the Roman legal system influence oneself; but one cannot eat what the Greeks and Romans ate. Economic life must be modern. Thus, we have gradually brought our economic life to the point where it has become intertwined with Greek spiritual life and Roman legal life, and we now face the task of separating these elements again, of gaining an understanding that these three layers—which have coalesced as if from different eras—must be disentangled. This means expanding one’s interest—as in the past across the Orient and the Occident in space—to the present; that is, to rise above, to make oneself capable of feelings that can elevate us to the Archai. But how many people today want to develop an interest in these things—an unbiased interest—given how the spirit of the times blurs the boundaries between eras, as I have described? I spoke in Stuttgart about the unnatural nature of our high school education. I do not know if it was merely a coincidence in timing, but the coincidence was there. A few days after I had spoken on this subject, large advertisements appeared in Stuttgart newspapers, signed by all sorts of old-fashioned figures—pardon me—professors and the like; stating that high school education must not be underestimated, for it had, after all, contributed its share to the greatness of the German people, which had so magnificently come to the fore in recent times. Literally, this was presented as the supposed opinion of the educators of the youth in April 1919—after October 1918! Such things are possible in our time. And there are, of course, other things that are possible as well.

[ 26 ] Until we come to view these things in such a way that we perceive the impulses flowing from the spiritual world into our physical world, until we realize that just as human beings are connected through their physical constitution to the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms, so too are they connected through their spiritual constitution to the hierarchies of the Angeloi, archangels, and archai—personalities as guardians of personal development, national spirits as guardians of national development in space, and spirits of the age as guardians of development across the ages—before we have the ability to understand these things from their spiritual foundations, we cannot make any progress. Everything must ultimately lead to humanity today finding the courage and strength to look into the spiritual world. We stand at the beginning of a fierce wave of struggle in which all instincts will be stirred up—instincts arising from one half-truth: that economic reality is the only reality, and everything spiritual and psychological is ideology—and from the other: that the only reality is the spiritual and psychological, and everything external is ideology, is Maya. — These opposites will unleash such instincts in human nature that the spiritual struggle will rage for a long, long time in forms of which humanity today has no inkling. We will have to know this, and we will also have to know how, in the spirit of the age, we must rise to the perception of the spiritual world, just as we understand it.

[ 27 ] This is what time itself commands of us, what is demanded of it. We must turn our attention to it. More on this tomorrow.