The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Those of you who have heard the most recent lectures given here will have gathered from the observations made therein to what extent it is indeed a pressing need of our time to allow the so-called science of initiation—the true science of spiritual life—to flow into our entire cultural development. And I have already spoken at some length about the obstacles that stand in the way of this integration of the science of the spiritual world into our present cultural life—and indeed into the cultural life of the future as well. First and foremost, there is what I have often characterized as the fear of spiritual knowledge. One need only voice this, and in the present day it will, as it were, be met with “offense” from all sides. For how could it possibly be true, in the view of many people, that in this age—in which we have made such magnificent progress—people should have any fear of knowledge at all? People today believe they are capable, as it were, of comprehending everything—absolutely everything—with their powers of cognition. But the fear I am speaking of—and of which I have spoken often—does not, at first, reside in people’s consciousness. In their consciousness, people delude themselves into believing they are courageous enough to embrace any kind of insight. But deep within that part of the soul of which people know nothing—and, fundamentally, still do not wish to know anything even today—there lies this unconscious fear; and because these people harbor this unconscious fear, all sorts of so-called “reasons”—which they claim are logical objections to spiritual science—surface within them. These are not logical objections; they are merely outpourings of the fear of spiritual science that reigns unconsciously in human souls. For in the depths of the soul, every human being actually knows much more than they realize. They simply do not want to allow this knowledge—which is rooted in the depths of the soul—to rise to the surface, precisely because they fear it. Above all, human beings sense something of the supersensible worlds: they sense that in everything they call “thinking,” in everything they describe as their “world of thought,” there is indeed something contained that belongs to the supersensible world. Even materialistically minded people today cannot always shake off the sense that there is indeed something in their life of thought that somehow points to a supersensible world. But at the same time, human beings sense something else about this world of thought: they sense that this world of thought relates to a certain reality much as the image one sees in a mirror relates to the reality that is reflected. And just as the image in the mirror is not actually reality, so too must human beings admit to themselves that their world of thought is not reality. The moment a person had the courage, the fearlessness, to admit to themselves that the world of thought is indeed not reality, at that very moment they would also have to grasp the longing for knowledge of the spiritual world. For one would surely want to know what it points to—that which one sees only as a mirror image.

[ 2 ] But what I have just said has, I would say, an important polar opposite. When one ascends through the science of initiations across the threshold into the spiritual world, everything that is experienced here as sensory reality becomes, conversely, a mere image, an illusion. One ascends into the supersensible world, and just as here—let us say, on Earth—the supersensible world is a mirror image, existing as a reflection, so too does the earthly world exist in the supersensible world only as a mirror image. And anyone speaking from the science of initiation must therefore, of course, speak of sensory reality as if it were merely images. People then sense that what they can so comfortably stand upon, what they can so comfortably breathe in, what they can so comfortably see—without having to do anything more than, at most, open their eyes in the morning and rub them—becomes a mere image. People then feel this, and they begin to feel uncertain; they begin to feel about as uncertain as a person who has been led on a walk to the edge of an abyss and is then seized by the dizziness of fear. On the one hand, then, a person should feel how their thinking here in the sensory world is merely a sum of images; on the other hand, they should feel—and they do feel it, but they deceive themselves about it through an unconscious fear—that what is told of the supersensory world turns this world here into an image. As I said, people sense this. That is why they resist what comes from the science of initiation. They resist because they believe that the secure foundation of their existence would be lost if the sensory world were, so to speak, reduced to a mere image.

[ 3 ] Certainly, not everyone can readily undergo in the present what one who is practically entering the world of initiation must undergo. For one who enters the world of initiation must not only recognize within it what all people today should strive to recognize, but must also live within it; they must live within it just as one lives with one’s body in the physical-sensory world. That is to say, they must, in a sense, truly experience on behalf of others what in the physical-sensory world can only be experienced at the moment of death. They must gain the ability to live in a world for which the physical-sensory human being is not at all prepared. Even when we merely cut our finger, we feel a certain pain; we feel something unpleasant. Why do we feel something unpleasant when we cut our finger? Well, for the simple reason that the knife cuts through the skin, muscle, and nerve, but not the supersensible etheric body. When our finger is uncut, our supersensible etheric body fits this uncut finger; when we have cut our finger—yet cannot cut through the etheric body—the uncut etheric body no longer fits the cut finger, and that is why the astral body then feels the pain. This stems from the lack of adaptation to the physical body. When a person crosses the threshold into the supersensible world, all of their bodies are no longer attuned to the physical body; then, little by little, they feel something similar to what they feel locally when they have cut their finger. And this, my dear friends, is to be conceived of in an infinite progression.

[ 4 ] Now, of course, it is impossible to imagine what would become of the people of the present day—who are often so courageous in their consciousness yet so whiny in their souls—if they were to be given the immediate opportunity to live in the supersensible world, if they were to go through everything that comes from being ill-adapted to this supersensible world. But not only is humanity today at a stage where it can understand, through common sense, everything that those who know life in the supersensible world describe; rather, this knowledge of the supersensible—this reception of the science of the supersensible—is in fact an absolute necessity for the common sense of our time. For only this knowledge of the supersensible can shed light today on all that surrounds us so chaotically, so devastatingly in the present. We live, it must be said, in a world in which things come to light, things play out, about which we must say that they cannot remain as they are; they must undergo a transformation. But humanity today does not at all perceive what is actually at work around it. To understand what is actually at work around humanity today—this is possible only through the science of initiation; it is possible only by comparing, above all, the life of the present with all the manifestations of life that have intervened in the course of human development over the centuries and millennia.

[ 5 ] At a certain point, it had to be said to the public of today: If one wishes to introduce any fruitful impulse into the life that is marked by today’s destructive phenomena, this impulse is none other than that of the threefold social order. This was necessary to direct people’s spiritual gaze toward the three fundamental currents of our present cultural life. These fundamental currents—as you are no doubt already well aware—are those of spiritual life proper, those of legal and political life, and those of external economic life.

[ 6 ] When we present these three fundamental currents of life to the human soul, we actually encompass—by uttering the words that describe these fundamental currents—a vast array of life’s manifestations within each of these fundamental currents. Let us, so to speak, allow these three fundamental currents to pass before our inner eye one by one.

[ 7 ] We have a spiritual life today. In one way or another, human beings are placed within this spiritual life. Some, depending on the economic or legal foundations upon which their existence is built, may attend only elementary school, while others may be guided further in our educational institutions. What people take in there lives on among us in our social life. It shapes how we relate to our fellow human beings. Today is the time to thoroughly raise the question: Where does this entire spiritual life come from, and how has it, in the course of its origins and development, come to assume precisely the character it has today? If one traces this spiritual life back to its true origin, one must, so to speak, first pass through certain stages. What permeates our elementary school life and our secondary school life today can be traced—albeit through intermediate stages that I will omit—all the way back to the distant past. People simply do not usually recognize how far back it goes; in the elementary school system, for example, they do not recognize how it traces back to what emerged in ancient Greece. Essentially, our spiritual life is nourished by the impulses that existed in ancient Greece—albeit in a somewhat different form—and that have merely been transformed since then. But they did not originate in ancient Greece either. They originated over in the Orient and, though millennia ago, took a different form at their source in the Orient than they did in ancient Greece. Back then, in the Orient, they were mystery wisdom. If we set aside our legal and political life—which is, after all, chaotically entangled with our spiritual life, like a tangled ball of yarn—and set aside economic life, and if we isolate our spiritual life in abstraction, then we can trace its path backward, ascending to certain mysteries of the Orient, whose origins, admittedly, lie millennia ago—but in which what is today, for us in our educational institutions, a dry, sober abstraction—something alien to life—was, in fact, something thoroughly alive. If we transport ourselves in spirit back to those mysteries of the East—which is what I actually mean—we encounter, as the leaders of these mysteries, people whom we can describe as a kind of fusion of priest, king, and at the same time—as strange as it may sound to people today—economist or steward. For in these mysteries—I would like to call them the mysteries of light or of the spirit—a comprehensive understanding of life was cultivated, an understanding that initially sought to explore the nature of the human being through the facts of the celestial and stellar world; but it was also a wisdom that sought to regulate the lawful coexistence of human beings in accordance with these insights. And from these mystery sites came instructions on how to tend livestock, how to cultivate the fields, how to build canals, and so on. This science of initiation from a distant antiquity had a social impact; it was something that filled the whole person, something that was capable not merely of speaking beautifully about the good and the true, but of mastering, organizing, and shaping practical life from within the spirit. The path that these leaders of the mysteries followed—and which they showed, as far as they were able, to the peoples who belonged to such a mystery—was a path from above to below. First, these leaders of the mysteries sought the revelation of the spiritual worlds; then they worked their way down, grasping the spirit in concrete terms according to the principles of the atavistic art of clairvoyance; then they worked their way down to political life, to the political structuring of social organisms; and finally to the economy, to economic life. That was wisdom with the power to inspire life. How, exactly, had this wisdom with the power to inspire life actually come among humanity?

[ 8 ] If we go back to the times when the mysteries I am referring to were not yet dominant, we find that throughout the regions of what was then civilized humanity there were people endowed with a certain primal, atavistic clairvoyant power—people who, when speaking of what they needed for life, could draw upon the impressions of their hearts, their souls, and their vision. These people were spread across the regions of present-day India, Persia, Armenia, North Africa, Southern Europe, and so on. But one thing was absent from the souls of these people: that which we today regard as our proudest spiritual asset—intelligence, the intellect. In a sense, the population of the then-civilized world did not yet need the intellect. For what the intellect does today was done by people based on the soul’s inspirations, and this was guided and directed by the leaders these people had. But then, something began to spread into precisely those regions—something we might call a different human race, or a completely different kind of human being than the population I have been speaking of. In legends and myths—and likely in history as well—it is told that certain people descended from the highlands of Asia and, in very ancient times, brought a certain culture to the south and southwest. Spiritual science must investigate what kind of people these were who descended among those who received the guiding force for life solely from within themselves, from their intuitions. When examined through the lens of spiritual science, we find that these people, who entered the civilization of that time as a new element of the population, combined two qualities that the others lacked. The other people possessed atavistic clairvoyant powers without reason or intelligence; those who descended still retained some of these clairvoyant powers, but at the same time they had received within their souls the first seeds of intelligence and reason. And so they brought to the civilization of that time a form of clairvoyance imbued with reason. These were the first Aryans of whom history tells us. And out of the contrast between the ancient people, who lived in an atavistic, soul-centered way, and these people who infused the ancient soul power with reason, the first caste distinction arose—externally, physically, and empirically—which still has an effect in Asia today, as Tagore, for example, speaks of. The most outstanding of these people—who possessed both the ancient insight into the soul and the intellect and intelligence that were just beginning to dawn in humanity—became the leaders of those mysteries I have just spoken of, the mysteries of the Oriental Light, and from them sprang what later made its way to Greece. So, if I were to sketch it schematically, I can tell you: From the mysteries of the Orient emanated the current of the Spirit (see diagram on page 23). It was that living wisdom with practical, life-affirming momentum of which I have just spoken to you. Over time, it made its way to Greece. We can still sense its aftereffects in the oldest Greek culture. But as Greek culture developed, it was, so to speak, filtered and diluted, as its bearers lost the ancient spiritual vision and the intellect increasingly took precedence over this spiritual vision. As a result, however, the bearers of this culture lost their purpose, so to speak. For their purpose lies solely in the fact that they are endowed with both spiritual vision and intelligence. But in history, what had meaning in ancient times is preserved even in later periods, and so, in Greek cultural life, people continue to live, in a sense, in the same structured way that made sense for that ancient time, when the leaders of the mysteries were, in a sense, emissaries of the gods. And what was wisdom imbued with driving force was transformed into Greek logic and dialectic—into Greek wisdom, which had already been filtered in relation to its Eastern origins.

[ 9 ] In the East, people knew exactly why there were those who listened when their leaders gave them economic guidance; in Greece, there was the division between masters and slaves. This division among people still existed, but its meaning was gradually lost. And what the Greeks still possessed with far greater meaning—something they at least knew stemmed from the ancient mysteries—was filtered even further along the path it then took into our modern educational life. For there, in our modern educational life, it has become entirely abstract. Today we pursue abstract science and can no longer find any connection between this abstract science and external life. For this current has flowed on through Greece into our universities, high schools, elementary schools, and into the entire popular intellectual life of modern humanity, and today we can observe a peculiar phenomenon. Among the people walking among us today, we encounter those whom we call nobles, whom we call aristocrats. We strive in vain to find a reason why one is an aristocrat and another is not; for what distinguishes the aristocrat from the non-aristocrat, humanity has long since worn away, long since lost. The aristocrat was the leader of the Eastern mysteries of light, and he could be so because everything that possessed real vital force in the political and economic spheres emanated from him. Wisdom has been filtered away. The social structure it once brought about among people has become an external abstraction, devoid of meaning for those living within it, and from this current emerged what we call our feudalism. In outward social life, this feudalism persists—tolerated, perhaps even to the annoyance of others—yet without meaning. People no longer reflect on its meaning, because even today it can no longer be found in life; yet in our present age of chaos, the feudal origin of our abstract knowledge and understanding is still quite clearly evident. When our present spiritual life became entirely the spiritual life of journalism, then, my dear friends, a word was invented—a word that is actually a monstrosity—through which one seeks to bring about a transformation of our lives, but which has become merely the expression of a thoroughly stunted spiritual life; then the word “spiritual aristocracy” was invented. Spiritual aristocracy! If someone were to explain what is actually meant by this, they could only say: It is that which, squeezed to the extreme, once had the power—in the mysteries of the Orient—to penetrate even the outermost tendrils of practical life; that which had meaning there and which today has lost all meaning. If one were to sketch our spiritual life, one would have to draw a rather tangled ball of yarn down there, in which everything is all tangled up. There are mainly three threads tangled together. I have just shown you one of these threads (see drawing on page 23).

[ 10 ] This is our essential task: to untangle this knot, and to this end we turn the gaze of our souls toward the second current. This second current has a different origin, one that also lies far back in the development of humanity, but which also lies within the very essence of the mysteries—namely, in the mysteries of Egypt. I would like to call these mysteries—just as I have called those of the Orient the “mysteries of light”—the “mysteries of the human being.” Above all, these mysteries sought to gain, from their Egyptian origins, that wisdom which gives the power to shape human coexistence and to establish a relationship between one person and another. But this stream of mystery then spread northward through Southern Europe and made its way—just as the other stream passed through Greek civilization—through the unimaginative Roman people. I would like to call it the “current of law.” It passed through Rome. Everything that has gradually been instilled in the course of human development—in jurisprudence, in legal provisions—is the filtered knowledge, the filtered insight of these mysteries of humanity. The second thread in our cultural tapestry has reached us through this process, but it has been greatly, greatly altered, deeply transformed—having passed through the lack of imagination of Roman civilization. One cannot understand contemporary life unless one knows that people today have, for the time being, remained barren of spiritual life and legal life; unless one knows that they have received one aspect, after it had traveled the long path from the mysteries of the East through Greece to us, and the other after it had traveled the long path from the mysteries of Egypt through Roman civilization to us. Our present humanity is barren with regard to both of these currents. One could cite many examples that would prove this; but one need only point to the paths of Christianity.

[ 11 ] When Christianity sought to enter the world, where did Christ Jesus have to appear so that what he had to give the world could find a way? He had to appear in the East; he had to imbue the very fabric of life in the East with what he had to give to humanity. The Mystery of Golgotha is a fact; what people know about it is still evolving. What is said about the Mystery of Golgotha was initially clothed in all that remained of the mysteries of the East. The Mystery of Golgotha was enveloped in the science and wisdom of the mysteries of the East, and people sought to understand it through this wisdom. Thus we still find Christianity reflected, for example, in the writings of the Greek Church Fathers.

[ 12 ] One can also point to another phenomenon. When Western culture—intellectually utterly barren—sought intellectual renewal through one of its human representatives, what did it do? Some people in England and America joined forces and drew wisdom from the defeated and enslaved Indian people. That is to say, they recently traveled to the East to seek the spiritual current there, to seek what remained as the last remnant of that spiritual current over there in the East. Hence the Anglo-American-influenced Theosophy, which sought to draw from this source—but in its present form. It is the barrenness of contemporary spiritual life that stands out most strongly, particularly in Western countries. |

[ 13 ] And the second current is the one of a political-legal nature that ran through Roman civilization. Therein lies the origin of our legal and political life, and it is only through a side branch that this current has flowed into our legal life and continues to exert its influence there, so that in many ways we have received the spiritual life that has flowed into us and into our culture via the detour through the Roman political-legal system. That is why so much of it is found there. Even Christianity, which spread throughout the West via the Roman path, has taken on the form determined by this phenomenon. What has become of the religious element through this passage through Roman civilization? It has become that great body of jurisprudence known as the Roman Catholic religion. There, God, along with his lesser gods, is entirely a being who, according to Roman legal concepts, judges only in the supernatural world; there lie the concepts of sin and guilt, which are actually legal concepts that were not present in the mysteries of the East or in the Greek worldview; there lie the legal concepts of Roman civilization within it. This is a thoroughly legalistic religious movement. Everything that manifests itself in life can also take on forms of beauty. And when we see that legal-political scene—in which the God of the world becomes the Judge of the world, and the entire development of the earth is brought to a close by a legal act—when we see it beautifully transfigured in Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, this is the glorious expression of legalistic Christianity; but precisely of “juridified” Christianity, which finds its culmination in the Last Judgment.

[ 14 ] We must untangle the knot of our spiritual life and our legal and economic life in order to see what lies within; for we live in the cultural chaos that lies there. These currents are influencing us. We must disentangle them. But a third current has also flowed into this cultural tangle of ours, one that originated more in the North and has, for the most part, persisted to this day—albeit filtered, but filtered in a different direction—in Anglo-American social organization. I would like to call this the Mysteries of the North or the Mysteries of the Earth. What initially developed there as primitive spirituality from the Mysteries of the Earth is a different path than the one taken by the spiritual being in the East. I said: There, it took the path from above to below, first revealing itself as the Mysteries of the Heavens and of Light, and then carried down into politics and the economy. Here in the North, things originated in the economy. This origin, however, has already disappeared from outward life; one can still discern it, at most, in old remnants that have been preserved. Take, for example, the customs that are still described when speaking of ancient Nordic culture, of which English culture is a branch. There, at a certain time of year, you’ll find processions through the villages featuring the crowned bull, which had just fertilized the herd of cows. In other words, a longing for spiritual life was drawn up from the bottom to the top; the path taken is from the bottom to the top. There, everything—even what remains of primitive spirituality—is drawn from economic life, and all festivals were originally festivals related to economic life, expressing something of the meaning of economic life. Just as the path was taken from the top down in Eastern culture, so must the path be taken here in the North from the bottom up. Humanity must be raised from below, from the economic sphere upward through legal life into the mysteries of the spirit. But you see, this path from below to above has not yet progressed very far. When we examine legal life as it has developed in the West, we find it thoroughly oriented toward Rome; if we examine spiritual life, we find that, while it is often not as tangibly oriented toward the East as that Indian theosophy I spoke of earlier, we nevertheless find that which is contained there as original spiritual life—that which is not borrowed from the East or derived from Rome in a legalistic form—struggling to detach itself from economic life. Let us take a characteristic example.

[ 15 ] Philosophers and natural scientists such as Newton, Darwin, Mill, Spencer, and Hume can only be understood if one sees how they developed out of economic life, how they tried to make their way to the top. For example, one can only understand Mill from an economic perspective by explaining him in terms of the economic foundations that surrounded him; likewise, one can only understand the English philosophers by explaining them in terms of the economic foundations of their environment. This is something inherent in this third current—the current of the mysteries of the Earth, which flows from the bottom up and which, though still largely unexplained, has become woven into our modern civilized life as the third thread in the skein.

[ 16 ] There you have the three threads that live, chaotically woven together in a tangle, within our so-called civilization. In a certain sense, people have always rebelled against this. Least of all in the West; there, on the one hand—including in America—people adopted the economic life derived from the mysteries of the North, upon which they built theories that were alien to the spirit and devoid of spirit, constructing them scientifically; they adopted legal, political, and judicial life via the detour through Rome, and took the spiritual essence from the East. In Central Europe, many things rebelled against this. There arose, in many cases, the striving to grasp these things in their purity; in spiritual life, most forcefully in what I would like to call Goetheanism. Goethe, who wanted jurisprudence to be derived from the natural sciences, is characteristic of this rebellion against a purely Oriental spiritual life. For we, too, have jurisprudence embedded within the natural sciences: we speak of natural laws. The Orientals did not speak of natural laws, but rather of the workings of the world will. Natural law only came into being when that side current was incorporated. There, legal law crept in through a window into the understanding of nature and became natural law. Goethe wanted to grasp the pure appearance, the pure fact, “the pure phenomenon, the primordial phenomenon.” Unless we purify our natural science of the accretions of jurisprudence, we cannot attain a purified spiritual life. Spiritual science therefore grasps facts everywhere and refers to laws only as a secondary phenomenon.

[ 17 ] Then there is also a certain resistance to the Roman legal system, which is present even in the minds of those with socialist leanings—for example, in the case of—yes, he was even a Prussian Minister of Education—Wilhelm von Humboldt. When he wrote his beautiful treatise on the limits of the state’s effectiveness, he was driven by a desire to separate cultural and economic life from mere state life. Read that lovely little Reclam booklet—I don’t know what it costs today, but it used to be available for a few pfennigs—“Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the State’s Sphere of Influence.” Therein lies the urge to separate the legal-political from the other two guiding forces. This rebellion against the old is also alive in German philosophy. But only when a healthy perspective on what the science of initiation can offer regarding the origin of our cultural life takes hold can healing and health enter into this cultural development of humanity.

[ 18 ] Emotionally speaking, one feels—especially in Eastern Europe, and has always felt there—the necessity for the coexistence of these three elements in our present-day cultural life. For of these three currents, the one that has found its most characteristic expression in the West is the one that comes from the North. There, everything is overshadowed by economic life. As for the legal aspect, there is a great deal of it in Central Europe; and of what constitutes the mysteries of the Orient—the mysteries of light—we find much in Eastern Europe and Asia. Where we still encounter caste systems, we still find something of the spirit of the old feudalism that arose from the spirit. Life permeated by the legal system has bred the modern bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie stems from the legal current. These things must be clearly understood today. I would like to say: In people’s unconscious there is already an urge to see through such things clearly; but only spiritual science can bring this longing, this urge, to true clarity. It was also evident throughout the 19th century how people strove to arrive at ideals for the future through the interplay of often unclear currents. The aim was to achieve this by ensuring that people do not face one another as abstractly as they do today—because spiritual life has been filtered and lives within us in its abstract form, because legal life has been filtered and also lives within us in its abstract form, and because economic life is struggling to find its way from the bottom up.

[ 19 ] In that part of Eastern Europe where so many significant events are now unfolding—events that are so unsettling and devastating—it was there that it first became apparent, even in the often-confusing 19th century, how people attempted to cope with this entanglement of culture precisely by rebelling against it. The Russian revolutionaries of the second and final third of the 19th century, in fact, sought to enrich what in the East was still a certain preliminary stage of spiritual life with what had already emerged in Central Europe as a rebellion against traditional customs. And so, when these Russian revolutionaries of the second and final third of the 19th century exchanged letters, we find them pointing out, as it were, that in Central Europe the intellect—the pure, purely abstract life of reason—had already been attempting to permeate itself with a certain spirituality. And time and again, a sentiment emerges among these Russian revolutionaries that is roughly similar to the following statement: In German philosophy, an attempt had been made to raise the intellect—which had lost its former insight into the soul—back up to a certain spirituality. In the East, they sought to become intimately acquainted with what had emerged in Central Europe, and this intimacy was reflected in the way these revolutionaries wrote to one another. They greatly revered the philosopher “Ivan Petrovich” and spoke of how he had risen to pure thought, how he had attempted to reintroduce spirit into the dialectical interplay of ideas in Western culture; and they sought to draw logical conclusions from his philosophy. To better express their emotional connection to him, they do not call him Hegel, but rather “Ivan Petrovich.” It is precisely in these aspirations that we see what was later bound to become devastating—I would say, a specter haunting us. In our time, clarity must prevail across the entire earth. Therefore, everything must be done to help this clarity triumph. But to achieve this, one must become aware of all that stands against us today when we attempt to attain this clarity—including, among many other things, people’s desire for comfort. We must also break the habit of indulging people’s complacency, for humanity needs the Spirit, and the Spirit cannot be led to victory along the comfortable paths that are so often taken today. For today, the invasion of the science of initiation is being fought with strange weapons.

[ 20 ] I felt a deep sense of satisfaction the other day when our dear friend Dr. Stein wrote from Dornach to describe how, without showing any leniency, he had unreservedly put an enemy of human spiritual life here in the neighborhood in his place—albeit on an occasion that is quite significant in terms of cultural history. For it did indeed come to pass—you will correct me if I am mistaken, since I was not there myself—that the pastor in question, who was presiding over a meeting, when Bible verses were quoted by one of our friends and the pastor no longer found the truth of those verses to his liking, used the words that Christ was mistaken here. Was that said? [Agreement.] If, today, one no longer knows how to help oneself on that side, then one is infallible oneself, but Christ is mistaken. We’ve come a long way!

[ 21 ] You see, all these things bear witness to the truthfulness of what pulsates through humanity today as spiritual life. Where spiritual life has become the utmost abstraction, it can no longer maintain itself within the sphere of truth. But one must sense what is actually present there. The journal *The Threefold Social Order* recently published a brief report on a meeting that is said to have taken place here in Stuttgart, where representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, in agreement with those of the Protestant side, spoke out against what is being taught here as spiritual science. The cathedral canon in question is said to have remarked that a discussion was unnecessary, since people could learn what Dr. Steiner’s teachings were from the opposing writings. However, Dr. Steiner’s writings are not to be read, for the Pope has banned them. In fact, this is the latest Jesuit doctrine from the Congregation of the Holy Office, which is to be applied above all to Catholics: the doctrine that Catholics are forbidden to read the writings on anthroposophy. Consequently, Roman Catholics today are officially urged to learn about what I teach from the writings of my opponents—from the writings of Seiling and certain others—since these are permitted and have not been banned by the Holy Congregation. But they are not allowed to read what I myself write. On the other hand, if one is familiar with the entire structure of the Roman Catholic Church and understands how the individual, as he is integrated into it, is merely a representative of the entire organization, one must in all seriousness raise the question in the depths of one’s soul regarding the moral qualities of such a course of action and ask: Is such a course of action still in any way compatible with human morality? Is it not profoundly immoral? Such questions must be asked today without leniency. We are living in serious times and must not continue to sleep through them in a light, complacent, and casual manner. We must unreservedly give voice to those things that are capable of bringing about salvation, while at the same time exposing the immorality of today’s falsehoods for what they are. And, when all is said and done, this falsehood is by no means uncommon.

[ 22 ] The other day, Dr. Boos brought me an essay by a Docteur en sociologie. It began with something like the following words: What a long way it is from the clear thoughts of Waxweiler to the obscure thoughts of Rudolf Steiner! But this gentleman was, after all, a close confidant of Wilhelm II, and it is said that he supported Wilhelm II with important advice, especially in his final years, so that one might even call this man the “Rasputin of Wilhelm II.” “We do not wish to act as the source of this rumor,” the next sentence states.

[ 23 ] Here you can see two things: First, the moral depravity of such a person who makes himself the bearer of this rumor, and his “beautiful” logic, in that he says: By spreading this rumor here before my readers, I am not making myself the spreader of this rumor. — This is how many people think today, cut off from all sense of reality, since what they say is already outside of any reality. For I cannot say: “I am saying something by not saying it.” For that is the kind of person Monsieur Ferriere is, the one who wrote this. One cannot get involved with such morally depraved individuals. I could only state—and I hope this will be thrown back in his face—that I had the following connections to that Wilhelm II. First: I was once sitting in a Berlin theater, perhaps in 1897, in the first tier up above, and in the center of the theater sat Wilhelm II in the royal box, and I saw him at a distance roughly equivalent to that from here to the end of this hall. The second time I saw him was when he was walking behind the coffin of the Grand Duchess of Weimar, from a great distance. The third time was on Friedrichstraße in Berlin, where he rode through the streets with his entourage, the marshal’s baton in hand, and the people were shouting “Hurrah!” Those are my only connections to Wilhelm II; I have never had any others and never sought them. This is how allegations arise today, and much of what you read—set in type on paper—is worth no more than this slanderous rumor, which is being used today to denounce anthroposophy in Romance-speaking countries. Today, we must trace things back to their source; today, it is not enough merely to accept what is said, but it is necessary for people to get into the habit of going to the source of what is said and claimed. But the sense for the true origin of the external world of facts will blossom within humanity only through a deepening into genuine spiritual science.