The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] In the various reflections we have shared here recently, we have spoken of the necessities of the times. Today, human beings must prepare themselves to receive the influence that seeks to enter the physical world. We have seen how, in the most intense way in European life for about sixty years, a struggle has been raging—one that began in the last third of the 19th century and which contains the causes of all the turmoil of recent times. I have pointed out to you the fact that what is happening is still taken too lightly, insofar as people are unwilling to accept that old Europe led only a sham existence in the 20th century, has fallen apart, and cannot be patched back together. This crisis can be compared to a crisis such as that which occurred in the ancient Roman Empire when Christianity gradually swept into it and swept away everything that existed. Something entirely new has developed. Anyone with insight into life will see, across the entire spectrum, that everything that had been built up since the first Christian centuries has been shattered.

[ 2 ] Let us now take a look at what has developed. The Mystery of Golgotha was there. But the Mystery of Golgotha and our understanding of it are two different things. Let us clarify this with a comparison. Suppose you are looking at a person whose inner life or whose impulse to act is shaped by this or that. When a child observes such a person, the child forms a judgment; but this is a child’s perspective. An educated adult will then also be able to form an opinion about this person; this will be a more mature perspective. But not everyone who holds a mature view will necessarily have sufficient knowledge or insight into the person in question, especially if that person is a genius. For that to be the case, it would be necessary for another genius to have formed their own view of this person.

[ 3 ] So we have a set of facts in this case: A person can exist, and there can be different understandings of these facts. — This is how it has been throughout history with the event that brought Christianity into the world. This event, as such, once took place; it stands at the starting point of our modern civilization. The understanding that has been applied to Christianity up to now is rooted essentially in the views, ideas, and concepts that people were able to derive from those spiritual foundations that had replaced the spiritual foundations of the ancient Roman Empire. To confirm this, one need only look, for example, at the now-defunct Austria, which—with the exception of a few outstanding individuals—essentially possessed a culture—not merely an intellectual one, but a culture encompassing the full breadth of life—that, in essence, traced its origins back to the early Christian centuries.

[ 4 ] That is where the seeds of decay begin. People did not want to believe it; but anyone familiar with the circumstances could see it. And so it was in the rest of Europe as well. Europe was built upon very ancient ideas—that is, within an ancient spiritual framework. And it was through these ideas that the Mystery of Golgotha was understood. But these ideas have now been exhausted. They are no longer sufficient to convey an understanding of the events at Golgotha to people today. Out of a conservative inclination, people would like to cling to the old ideas. Yet deep within the soul, however, the demands for a reshaping of Europe and the entire civilized world are firmly rooted. This is the great struggle that has been discernible at the very foundation of European culture for about sixty years. Something is striving to take shape, but people’s entrenched ideas are holding it back. When a river’s current becomes blocked somewhere, rapids eventually form. These rapids have now emerged in European culture. These are the years of terror that have broken upon us—years that are by no means over, but which, in fact, are only just beginning. What is necessary today is to establish a new outlook on life based on spiritual foundations. Those who oppose such a view of life today are like those who opposed Christianity when it spread from the south to the north. The wave of development sweeps over such people.

[ 5 ] But such people can cause a great deal of harm, and there will still be plenty of harm caused by such people. Let us consider the specific circumstances. Anyone who considers how the situation that existed before 1914—and, in a certain sense, even during the final years as the catastrophe began—came about will see that there were indeed certain so-called national borders on the map of Europe. You can trace through history why these national borders took shape as they did over the course of the centuries. But it is precisely through a genuine, unbiased examination of history that you will gain the insight that these states—from the great Russia down to the smallest entities—came into being under the influence of the understanding of Christ, that is, the understanding of Christ as it took hold in Europe during the so-called Migration Period, at the time of the Roman Empire’s decline. In 1914—to give a specific year—these conditions, expressed in the “lines” that demarcated the states on the map of Europe, were all already unnatural. There was nothing true left in these borders. There was nothing there that had any inner stability. And anyone who believes today that anything can be held together out of what was no longer true in 1914 has simply gone down the wrong path. Furthermore, anything that has been formed or seeks to be formed on the basis of these conditions is also untenable.

[ 6 ] What exactly do the people of Europe, along with their American allies, intend to do with the civilized world now? Let’s take an unbiased look at what the people of Europe, along with their American allies, currently intend to do with the civilized world. They want to do what might have emerged in the first centuries after Christ, during the Migration Period, from the ideas held by the Goths, the Vandals, the Lombards, the Heruli, the Cherusci, and so on—ideas that the Romans themselves held before they were swept up by Christianity. That did not come to pass, even though people back then did not resist the course of events with their consciousness nearly as strongly as they do today. But let us hypothetically assume that, back then, people had not wanted to allow Christianity to spread, but had instead wanted a Europe cobbled together from the ideas of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Vandals, the Lombards, and so on, combined with the remnants of the old Roman way of life—simply impossible! A viable Europe emerged only because a spiritual influence took hold in that Europe. And that spiritual influence came through Christianity. Without that spiritual influence—which, after all, changed everything—Europe would have come to nothing during the centuries from the 4th and 5th through the 20th. Just imagine Europe without the influence of Christianity over the past centuries: you couldn’t even conceive of it. Just think for a moment about what remains of what the Goths, the Heruls, the Lombards, and so on represented in Europe. You have to admit: Christianity arrived—and everything changed.

[ 7 ] If, back then, the Lombards had rejected every new impulse just as strongly as, say, the Czechoslovaks, the Poles, or the French reject them today, then what I have hypothetically posited—the impossible—would indeed have happened. And just as the Lombards would have behaved if they had said, “We don’t want Christianity; we want to remain Lombard,” so do the Czechoslovaks, the Magyars, the French, the English, and so on behave today. They do not want to embrace a new spiritual direction.

[ 8 ] But Europe is at a standstill without a new impetus. Nothing is emerging. Just as little is emerging from Europe now as would have emerged from a Europe of the Goths, Lombards, and Vandals at the time when Christianity was ready to make its impact on European civilization. This is a thought that the vast majority of people today fear. It may surprise you when I say they are afraid, because you believe they resist this idea for this or that practical reason, or for logical or other reasons. That is not the case. The reason they resist it is subconscious fear. When one has subconscious fear, one does not understand things. One invents logical reasons; one invents all sorts of observations that one believes one has made in order to refute this idea, while in reality one is afraid of it. But people do not admit to this fear! Yet the issue is so significant that it is absolutely necessary to examine these circumstances closely. And it is necessary today to speak words that certainly still sound paradoxical to a large portion of humanity. When Christianity first spread, it also sounded paradoxical to people. Just imagine how it must have sounded when the propagators of Christianity—let’s say, for example, in Alsace or Switzerland—arrived in places where people still worshipped the images of Wodan, the god Saxnot, and so on; it was something of a paradox. Today it seems paradoxical to people when one speaks to them of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must describe as both a new direction and, at the same time, a new understanding of Christianity. But today everything must become a matter of conscious awareness; today everything must be more willed than people were capable of willing back then. Above all, there is one thing that must be understood with the utmost clarity by humanity today. We have what is called a scientific, an intellectual life. I characterized one aspect of this intellectual life for you in last Sunday’s lecture; I described the character that this intellectual life has acquired through the English-speaking population. Do not believe that this intellectual life leaves everyday life unaffected in any way. What our children learn in school, starting as early as age six, shapes their souls; it shapes the whole person, and people today go about as they are shaped by our school system, which in its lower grades is in turn strongly influenced—especially today, in the age of widespread journalism—much more than one might think, indeed tremendously influenced by what, in the upper echelons of intellectual life, is called “science.” Science has had its great external successes. It has brought us the telephone and air travel; it has brought us wireless telegraphy. In all these fields, it has made great achievements. But I have now repeatedly drawn your attention to a peculiarity of this science, a peculiarity of our entire body of knowledge. This peculiarity consists in the fact that one can understand everything. One can understand machines, one can understand minerals, one can understand plants, one can understand animals—but one can least of all understand human beings through what our science offers. The fact that one derives human beings directly from the animal kingdom—that one says they are merely a higher stage of development within the animal kingdom—stems solely from the fact that… one simply knows nothing about human beings. Not because human beings actually descend from animals, but because one knows nothing about the true nature of human beings—and can only reveal the conception one holds—one allows human beings to be derived from the animal kingdom. It is, after all, merely a prejudice of an age that lacks the scientific knowledge to judge human beings. That is why, even in the present, we are unable to acquire a true understanding of human nature based on our contemporary worldview. By “understanding of human nature,” one cannot mean that hodgepodge of all sorts of ideas that people today form about themselves. A true understanding of human nature could only arise from the knowledge of that from which the true human being, the genuine human being, is composed.

[ 9 ] Even if we study everything we have on Earth—using the methods of modern science—we can build machines and design mechanisms with it, but we can never understand human beings through it. That is precisely why anthroposophical spiritual science exists: to help us understand human beings from an extraterrestrial perspective. People sense this, but in their current thinking they do not admit that human beings today must be understood from an extraterrestrial, supersensible perspective. And so, for such people, there is no science. For centuries now, the world has been deluding itself about this fact in a strange way.

[ 10 ] I would like to use one example—though many could be cited—to show you how people have been deceiving themselves about this fact over the centuries. When we began what has now been developed here over the years and lies before you as an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, some people who had come to appreciate what I, for example, had presented on the basis of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science said: We would rather immerse ourselves in the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, in the mysticism of Johannes Tauler. Everything is much simpler there; there one can say so nicely and comfortably: ‘I immerse myself in my inner being; I grasp the higher human being within me; my higher self has grasped the divine human being within me.’—But that is, after all, nothing other than a refined form of egoism, nothing other than a withdrawal into the egoistic personality, a running away from all of humanity, an inner self-deception. When, in the 14th and 15th centuries, people began to lose the ability to understand humanity, it was clear that figures such as Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart would have to emerge—figures who pointed to the inner self in order to seek out humanity. But today that time has passed. Today, this deepening and immersion into the inner self is no longer sufficient. Today, the task is to truly understand a word of Christ—that is the example I mean—this one word of Christ, which is one of the most important and significant: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among you.” This means that when one is alone, Christ is not there. One cannot find Christ without feeling connected to all of humanity. Today, one must seek Christ through the path that all of humanity is walking. In other words, inner self-satisfaction leads one away from the Christ impulse.

[ 11 ] This is the misfortune, particularly of 19th-century Protestant theology: the emergence of a tendency toward a purely individualistic and egoistic inner experience of Christ. There is a European crowned head—one of those who are still crowned—who always replied, whenever the topic of contemporary spiritual understanding came up: “I have my personal experience of Christ!” — This crowned head was satisfied with that. But many say similar things. Yet that is precisely the misfortune of the present day: that people do not want to have a general interest in the impersonal human condition. For one only comes to know oneself when one knows humanity as such. But one cannot come to know humanity as such without seeking its origin in conditions beyond the earthly realm.

[ 12 ] Consider how, in extraterrestrial terms, the origin of what we today call “humanity” is sought, in the sense of my *Outline of Secret Science*. This “Secret Science” is so unappealing to people for no other reason than that it rejects all confused human knowledge and derives the human being as such from the entire universe, specifically from the extraterrestrial universe. But this is precisely what is necessary in the present age. The present age must resolve to add the other, spiritual sources of knowledge to all that is currently cherished as sources of knowledge.

[ 13 ] Here lies—call it guilt, call it ignorance—it may be one word or the other, but words are not what matter—what must be characterized as originating from our universities, from those people who set the tone when it comes to what human beings can and cannot know. The world views what emanates from our European and American universities—so-called human wisdom, but also social wisdom, technical wisdom, and so on—while excluding all those factors that are, after all, quite naturally inherent in human beings. Anyone today who seeks access to any leading position—even a lowly one—in human society has no opportunity whatsoever to learn anything that would enable them to gain knowledge of human nature. And without knowledge of human nature, there is no social life; without knowledge of human nature, there is also no renewal of Christianity. One can become a theologian today without having the slightest idea what the Mystery of Golgotha means, for most theologians today have no idea who Christ is. Today, one can become a lawyer without having the slightest idea of what the human being actually is. Today, one can become a physician without having the slightest idea of how this human being is structured within the cosmos, without having the slightest idea of how the healthy and the sick body relate to one another. Today, one can become a technician without having the slightest idea of the influence the design of any machine has on the entire course of Earth’s development, and one can be a brilliant inventor of the telephone without having the slightest idea of what the telephone means for the entire course of Earth’s development. People lack a perspective on the course of human development. And every person feels the need to form a small circle for themselves and to establish a routine within that small circle, applying this routine in the interest of their own self-interest so that they may distinguish themselves, without considering how what they are contributing as a part of the whole of the world fits into that whole. If one were to build houses in the world using the same method by which one establishes livelihoods today, they would collapse immediately. If one were to shape bricks and build houses with them using the same method by which we train our theologians, lawyers, doctors, philologists, and so on—and especially our philosophers—today, these houses would not last a week within the whole of the world. On a grand scale, people do not notice the collapse. After all, it has been collapsing continuously since the last third of the 19th century. People know nothing of this; on the contrary, they speak of a great upswing, and some even say that we should use the very same bricks—which have long since become unusable—to build a new world. One cannot build a new world unless… a fundamentally new spiritual impulse takes hold throughout the entire civilized world. One can patch things up, but one cannot build without this spiritual impulse.

[ 14 ] There are people—well-meaning people—who are overcome by a hopeless fear of such intensity of knowledge, of such intensity of insight as is sought by spiritual science. They are afraid for a certain reason—I am not telling you something I have made up, but only things that correspond to the facts—and they say to themselves: How boring it will be when we know everything about human beings that spiritual science claims to know; then we can no longer hope that the future will bring new knowledge, and then we cannot even know whether that knowledge will be of any help. What a dreadful prospect for the future, they think, if everything is already known!

[ 15 ] I do not mean to say that this is a convenient answer for those who are too lazy to engage with this understanding, but I would like to point out that it is only when human beings are understood as fully as they can be through spiritual science that the possibility of thinking about social structure truly begins. One cannot lay the foundation for social reconstruction without first, so to speak, having clarified our understanding of human nature. To make this clear to oneself, one need only consider the following. Take everything that has led to our communities up to now—people do not owe this in any way to their Enlightenment; they do not owe it to the ideas they have fully assimilated into their consciousness; they owe it to those spiritual forces that shine through the blood, which have sprung from the old blood ties and kinships. Even today, we still have something that manifests itself in our world as a remnant of those ancient blood kinships—the national principle that gives us our identity and reveals itself through it. The reason why one person calls himself an Englishman, another a Frenchman, and yet another a Pole stems from all that has, from time immemorial, given rise to those bonds among human beings that are based on kinship. This kinship had its justifiable place throughout the millennia of human development, for through this kinship arose within humanity that which brought people together and founded human communities. And as you can see from my *The Secret Science*, people were by no means so unified at the end of Earth’s development. Human souls had come to Earth from the most diverse places, as you know; they truly did not love one another and learned to love only by being born as souls into bodies related by blood. In earlier lectures, I have repeatedly shown how the beneficial nature of this kinship, this blood community, was opposed by the forces hostile to humanity—the Luciferic-Ahrimanic forces. That was in ancient times. Back then, human beings were precisely dependent on establishing human communities based on blood kinship. To believe today that one need only translate the old principle of blood kinship into abstract language—and that one can say, by cloaking this abstraction in “Fourteen Points”: “To every single people, even the smallest, the right to self-determination!”—one must be as out of touch with reality and as abstract as Woodrow Wilson to be able to do such a thing. Today we must realize: That was once the case. Blood kinship once formed the basis of human communities. Today, however, other forces—the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers opposed to humanity—are at work; today, people are to be led astray through blood kinship. Just as Christ did not come into the world to abolish the law but to take it into himself, so too should blood kinship not be eliminated from the world; on the contrary, blood kinship must first be guided along the right paths. But whereas in ancient times the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings opposed kinship in people’s hearts and sought to divide people into selfish individuals by opposing kinship, today the issue is that people are to be led astray by Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces into relying solely on blood kinship, whereas the time is now ripe to recognize that every human being who truly possesses body, soul, and spirit and stands before us has come down from the spiritual world—has come down from the spiritual world in such a way that they have lived a pre-earthly life. They themselves seek out the blood through which they wish to incarnate on Earth. And a feeling for this spiritual community must gradually arise. In pre-Christian times, reincarnation existed as a feeling, for it was only a conscious understanding before the year 1860, prior to Christianity; after the year 1860, throughout Egypt and in the times of the Near East and Rome, it was merely an instinctive feeling. But now the time is coming when the view of the human being as a spiritual being undergoing a process of development between death and a new birth will become a living feeling, a living sensation—a time when we must live with the idea of the transcendent significance of human souls. For without this idea, the culture of the Earth will be destroyed. It will not be possible to engage in practical activity in the future without being able to look up to the spiritual significance of the fact that every human being is a spiritual being. And one will have to add—as paradoxical as this still seems to people today—paradoxical not so much in theory, for I do not wish to theorize but rather to draw parallels; rather, it is a matter of feeling, yet it is indeed so—that one will have to learn not only to say to oneself: “As parents, we rejoice that a child is being born to us; we rejoice at this addition to our family because this child is being born to us”—but one will have to say: No, we are merely the instrument through which a spiritual individuality—one that is waiting to continue its existence on Earth—finds the opportunity to do so through us! — Among the things that will have to be considered antiquated will be, for example, the aristocratic notion of the heir to the family line, the aristocratic notion of the mere continuation of the family’s bloodline, and the sentiment, the feeling, will have to extend to all of humanity. Even today, aristocrats still hold the belief that their primary task is to perpetuate their lineage, so that the physical human being has descendants bearing the same name. This sentiment will have to be reversed so that these successors are placed in the service of all humanity, enabling certain individualities who wish to descend into the world to continue their existence here on Earth. The old attitudes persist in aristocracy—in family-based aristocracy—even into our present time. This must be countered by the attitude of that universal understanding of human nature; then we will also be able to understand Christ anew. For he did not appear on Earth for the sake of family egoism, but for the sake of all humanity. Nor did he appear on Earth for the sake of any particular nationality, but for the sake of all humanity. He did not appear so that those who call themselves victors might establish nation-states, but so that what is universally human might be nurtured on earth within the framework of the national.

[ 16 ] These things lie at the root of what is happening now. And they lie in such a way that, fundamentally speaking, what is intended for life on Earth today is being opposed by what the majority of people still say today, by what the majority of people still want today. But if people continue to pursue this course, they will only create situations that lead to their own absurdity, that lead to their own impossibility. Either people will come to realize this, or they will have to wade through European chaos for a long time to come. Establishing nation-states is the best way to continue wading through this European chaos.

[ 17 ] For this very reason, we had to speak of this great responsibility precisely to those who, in the near future, will outwardly come to hold world dominion. This responsibility exists. The English-speaking population bears this tremendous responsibility before the world: not to continue rejecting the spiritual, not to continue being Baconian or Newtonian, but to embrace the spirit in its new form. Picture this scene in your mind today: Newton, formulating that astronomical worldview of which Herman Grimm rightly says: Just as one imagines it in the sense of this astronomical worldview—that the Earth and the planetary system emerged from the Sun out of a mist, a thin nebula, which transformed and transformed again, that from this vortex animals, humans, plants arose, and that one day the whole will fall back into the Sun—is a scrap of carrion around which a hungry dog circles, a more appetizing morsel than this worldview; and future generations will one day have great difficulty comprehending the cultural-historical madness of the Newtonian, the Kant-Laplacean system, which is taught in schools today. That is to say, people will ask themselves: How could an entire age once have been so mad as to extol this view? — Today it is still considered madness to side with Goethe against Newton, to engage with Goethe’s ideas about physical phenomena. But everything that lies within the tasks of our time is truly connected to these matters. A few people are beginning to grasp these connections today, and I was, in a certain sense, pleasantly surprised when the latest issue of our journal *Die Dreigliederung* explained how what is written in my book *The Key Points of the Social Question* regarding the social understanding of the world means the same thing that Goetheanism once meant for the natural sciences. But just as people turned away from Goethe because he had to contradict the natural science of his time, so too are people today turning away from the threefold social order. Why? It contradicts what they are accustomed to, just as Goetheanism once did, so that they also contradict this threefold social order.

[ 18 ] These things might lead you to ask: But what, then, should the individual do? — First and foremost, it all comes down to one’s attitude toward the matter—to a clear, objective examination of it. What matters is that one truly begins to develop a deep interest in the affairs of all humanity. One can look back on what one has experienced over the past four to five years, and never before has there been such ample opportunity to encounter, time and time again, a certain breed of know-it-alls in the world—for, in fact, every single person was, at heart, a know-it-all. Then came the Germans, who knew exactly who was to blame for the war and that they themselves were, in fact, completely innocent; then came the French, who knew exactly how everything stood; and then there were the Italians, who at least still professed their “sacro egoismo.” — People have always known exactly what was at stake. They’ve all had their own views; they’ve had their thoughts, their ideas. It’s certainly convenient to form these ideas without any supporting evidence. One is French by blood, one is Polish by blood, one is Czechoslovak by blood, and through that one has a certain view of how life in Europe ought to be shaped. One needs do nothing more than this or that, feel it within oneself, and one judges—judges just as those judgments come to mind. That is precisely the great misfortune of our time: that people, without really making an effort, without taking an interest in the affairs of humanity, judge today from their subconscious, considering this or that to be right, considering this or that to be indispensable. But the time is past when one can consider this or that to be indispensable based solely on the unconscious. The time has come when judgments may be made only on the basis of objective facts, when one must make an effort to truly gain an overview of the necessities of the times and of what the times demand of us. It breaks one’s heart today to encounter people who are interested only in themselves. For that is the great misfortune of our time, whereas the only salvation for our time might lie in the fact that now, after the terrible events of recent years, people would say to themselves: We must take an interest in the affairs of all humanity; we must not limit ourselves to what is happening immediately around us, within the confines of our own people.

[ 19 ] These thoughts arise directly from spiritual science as a feeling, and I am sharing them today to lay the groundwork for some concluding remarks. You see this building here, which is, after all, the embodiment of our anthroposophical spiritual science. One may have different feelings about various aspects of this building, and each person will be right in their own way. But the only person who has the right feeling toward this building is the one who sees in every single line something that is demanded by the most urgent necessities of our time—who sees that the building must stand because our time demands this or that, because this or that must be felt in these or those columns, in these or those rows of windows; because it is necessary for humanity today to take this building—what it intends to be—out of the entire configuration of the times. And whoever at the same time feels, truly internalizes this entire new style, will recognize that this style has absolutely nothing to do with anything specialized for this or that, but that it has to do only with what is most universally human. There is nothing in this entire structure to which an American, an Englishman, a German, a Russian, a Japanese, or a Chinese person could not say “yes,” for it is not shaped by the sensibility of any single individual. I cannot be portrayed—at least not by those who know me—as an immodest person when I say: I myself know of nothing currently being created of this kind that is as independent of differentiated human will and that is as fully rooted in the most general knowledge and understanding of humanity as this building.

[ 20 ] But this must be taken into account if the things that seek to emerge from our motives—with regard to the future of humanity—are to serve that future for the good and not for the harm.