The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Today we want to recall some things we have long been familiar with, in order to draw important conclusions from them that, in a certain sense, can build on what was discussed here a few days ago.

[ 2 ] We know that the human being is a fourfold being, and we characterize him by speaking of his physical body, his life body, his astral body or feeling body, and his “I.” But we also know that we can only fully understand the human being if, in addition to these members—which essentially constitute what is currently developed in the human being—we add others, which you know as the spiritual self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human being. We also know, however, that these latter three aspects of human nature are not such that we can speak of them as fully complete in the present time. We can speak of them only as something that human beings, so to speak, carry within themselves as a potential for development and that they will unfold in the future.

[ 3 ] One could say that just as we have a physical body and so on, all the way up to the “I,” so too will we one day have a spiritual self, a life spirit, a spiritual human being. We know from the descriptions—which have long been available in our literature—how what we regard as the structure of the human being is connected to the entire cosmos and its evolution. In a certain sense, we relate what is our physical body to the most ancient incarnation of our Earth, which we call the ancient Saturn. We relate the life body to the ancient Sun, the astral body to the ancient Moon, and what we call our “I” essentially to our present Earth.

[ 4 ] What does this actually mean: We relate the “I” that we carry within us to our present Earth? It means: In what we recognize—or fail to recognize—as the elements of the Earth, as the forces of the Earth, and so on—in that lies what stimulates the “I” within us. Our “I” is intimately connected with the forces of the Earth.

[ 5 ] If you consider the entire evolution, this entire development of the human being, you will find that our present-day human being points, for the most part, into the past: our physical body points to a long-gone prehistory, to the ancient Saturn era; our life body points to the ancient Sun era, and so on. Although our “I” is not yet fully developed, but that in its very essence it points toward the present-day earthly realm. This, however, already indicates that what we call the spiritual self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human being is not actually rooted in the earthly realm itself; that, insofar as we as human beings carry within us the potential for development into the spiritual human being, the life spirit, and the spiritual self, we thereby carry within us something that we must develop beyond the earthly realm—something we must develop in such a way that the earthly realm provides us with no guidance for it. We stand, so to speak, as human beings on Earth, and we are to first fully develop our “I” here on Earth; we have already developed it to a certain degree. By having developed it to a certain degree, the forces—the essential nature of the Earth—have provided us with the guidance for this. What we will still unfold here through the remainder of Earth’s evolution—a certain deepening, a certain strengthening of the “I”—we will owe to the Earth and its forces. But we must also tell ourselves: If we were to attribute our human nature solely to the Earth and its forces, then we could never develop a spiritual human being, a life spirit, or a spiritual self. For the Earth cannot provide that. It can only inspire us toward the development of the “I.” We must therefore regard the Earth, in relation to the human being, as something that, in and of itself, cannot make us fully human. We stand on the Earth and must go beyond it. This is also hinted at in our literature, which points out how the Earth must be superseded for our development through a subsequent Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan era. During these periods, we will also have to fully develop, outwardly as well, the spiritual self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human being.

[ 6 ] But we are here on Earth in our present existence. We must develop ourselves on Earth. We cannot draw from the Earth everything we need to develop within ourselves in order to cross over into the future—to the spiritual self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human being. If we had to draw everything we can unfold within ourselves solely from the Earth, then we would have to forgo the unfolding of the spiritual self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human being.

[ 7 ] This, again, is easy to say in theory, but such thoughts are not enough in their purely theoretical form. They truly move us as human beings only when we allow them to encompass our whole being, when we feel, as it were, the full weight of the enigma resting upon us—the enigma that lies in the fact that we must say to ourselves: We humans stand on Earth; we look around us. From what the Earth can give us—with its beauties, but also with its ugliness, with its pains and sufferings, with everything it can fashion for us as fate—from all of this, we cannot derive that which makes us fully human. We must carry within us a longing that extends beyond what the Earth can give us. This must be felt; it must, so to speak, illuminate and warm everything we can possibly carry within us in the form of ideals. We must be able to ask ourselves in all seriousness and depth: What are we, as human beings, to do, since we have only the earth around us and must develop into something for which the earth itself can offer no inspiration? We must be able to feel the full weight of this question, to experience it. We must, in a sense, already be able to tell ourselves how the earth is insufficient for us, how we are compelled, as human beings, to rise above the earthly.

[ 8 ] Anthroposophy can only truly be for a person what it is meant to be if they are able to ask themselves such questions intuitively—as questions of inner destiny—and if they can sense the gravity of such questions. And if one senses this gravity, then one can be rightly directed back to what has permeated our last two reflections. One can be directed back to the Mystery of Golgotha, and one can be directed back to that which, as it were, is to be repeated in our century—in the first half of the 20th century—as a spiritualization of the Mystery of Golgotha. For we have always had to emphasize, whenever we delved into the Mystery of Golgotha, that the Christ Being is not something earthly, that it was, so to speak, drawn from the extra-earthly into an earthly body at the right moment, and that something extra-earthly, super-earthly, has become connected to the earth through the Christ Being. And with this extraterrestrial, super-earthly element—with which we can connect our own being—we have, when we truly experience Christ, a source of strength, an element of inner fortification, inner warmth, and inner illumination that leads us beyond the earthly, because it itself is not derived from the earthly, because Christ entered the Earth from the extraterrestrial.

[ 9 ] When we gaze longingly toward something otherworldly because we must tell ourselves: In order to become fully human, to unfold within ourselves all that we must develop in the future as the spiritual self, as the spirit of life, as the spiritual human being—when, in other words, we gaze longingly beyond the Earth and tell ourselves, ‘There is nothing in the earthly realm itself that could inspire us toward this super-earthly aspect within our own being,’ then we must look beyond the earthly realm to that which has entered the earthly realm from the non-earthly. There we must look to Christ and say to ourselves: Christ has brought those non-earthly forces into the earth that can inspire us to develop what the earth itself can never inspire us to develop. And we must grasp with our whole being that which initially presents itself to us more in concepts, in ideas. Through this, we must learn to recognize Christ as the Savior of our humanity. We must learn to recognize him as the being who makes it possible for us—so to speak—not to remain bound to the earthly, so that we are not, as it were, buried on Earth for all eternity, and so that what within us could develop beyond the Earth need not remain undeveloped. If we can thus regard Christ as the Savior of our humanity, if we can sense from the nature of the earth that we must have something within this earthly realm that leads us out of it, if we feel Him as the guide to our full humanity, then we feel the Christ-force within us. And we should actually realize that we can never speak seriously of our development toward the spiritual self, toward the spirit of life, toward the spiritual human being, without becoming aware that speaking of these things makes sense only if we appeal to Christ, because Christ is that which can develop more within us than the Earth can give us.

[ 10 ] This is, in essence, the great question of our time. A large portion of today’s civilized humanity, in particular, would like to shape earthly life in a certain way; it would like everything that can make a person fully human to be achievable through some form of social organization of earthly life itself. But that will never be possible. We will never be able to develop on Earth a form of political, economic, or even spiritual life that is purely earthly and that could make us fully human. We are still living in a time when people can believe such things, when they attempt to do so, and when they fail to realize that there is something within us that can only be developed through a supernatural force.

[ 11 ] First of all, during the period—the inner nature of which I have already described to you from a wide variety of perspectives—Christ Jesus appeared in a physical body. We are now in the age when he is to appear to humanity once more, so to speak, in a supersensible form—the form I spoke of again last time. Of course, even today we cannot exhaustively cover the entire renewed Mystery of Golgotha, but let us once again point to this Mystery of Golgotha from a certain perspective.

[ 12 ] Over the past few centuries, since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the scientific element—and everything connected with it, which I recently referred to in a public lecture as the “scientific spirit of the West”—has become particularly strong among the people of the modern civilized world. This scientific spirit of the West initially arose entirely without any connection to the Christ Being. Anyone who examines this modern science impartially and honestly will not be able to find any actual connection to the Christ Being within it. The best proof of this is the following: Christianity, as I have explained to you, first entered the course of Earth’s evolution at a time when remnants of ancient clairvoyance still existed, and it was understood by people through these remnants of ancient clairvoyance. It was then preserved as a tradition. It has been increasingly diluted into abstract concepts, but it has been preserved as a tradition. In the end, it has even become nothing more than a proverbial saying, but still, it has been preserved as a tradition. But then, in the last three to four centuries, the spirit of science has entered the picture. This spirit of science has now also turned its attention, for example, to the Gospels. The Gospels were revered by countless people—and are still revered today by countless people—as the very source that conveys to them the mysteries of Golgotha. But the spirit of modern science, particularly in the 19th century, approached these Gospels and discovered contradiction upon contradiction within them; it could not understand them and interpreted them in its own way. And now, essentially, through this scientific scrutiny of the Gospels, the Christ-like nature of these Gospels has been dissolved, particularly for the most modern theology. It is no longer there. Within this modern theology, one can only speak of the Gospels containing something about the Christ if one is not entirely honest, if one is not entirely truthful, or if one constructs all sorts of mutually contradictory concepts. One might well say: The modern scientific spirit has destroyed what was the spirit of Christianity—a spirit that still consisted of the remnants of ancient clairvoyance and that was also perpetuated in tradition through those remnants of ancient clairvoyance. For this modern scientific spirit was not, at first, imbued with the Spirit of Christ. Science can only be imbued with the spirit of Christ again if it is enlivened by insight—by that very thing toward which modern spiritual science strives.

[ 13 ] This modern spiritual science does indeed strive to possess just as much scientific spirit as any other science. But it strives not to treat this science as something lifeless, but to experience it inwardly, just as one experiences the life force of human beings themselves. And this enlivened science will, in turn, succeed in penetrating to the very essence of Christ.

[ 14 ] What form will this revitalized science take? The groundwork for this has already been laid, but unfortunately, very little attention is being paid to it today. I would like to point out that as early as the beginning of the 1890s—actually, already at the end of the 1880s—I drew attention to a certain connection between Schiller’s development and Goethe’s. I pointed out how Schiller, in his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” attempted in his own way to solve the riddle of human development. Schiller started from entirely abstract concepts. First, he began with the concept of rational necessity, of logical necessity. He told himself: This logical necessity is something that compels us humans. We must think logically. There is no freedom when we are to analyze anything logically, for there we are subject to the law of logic. There is no freedom. — And on the other hand, standing before Schiller’s soul was the concept of human natural instinct, the concept of everything that is instinctive in human beings, everything that springs from the sensual capacity for desire. Here, too, human beings are not free, for necessity imposes itself upon them. In a certain sense, then, the highest spiritual realm to which abstract reason initially ascends—logical necessity—is something that enslaves human beings. On the other hand, natural instinct, the state of being governed by instincts, is also something that enslaves human beings. But human beings can find a middle ground between logical thinking and instinctive feeling. Schiller sees this middle state realized particularly in artistic creation and aesthetic enjoyment. When we contemplate beauty or create beauty, we do not think logically, yet we do think in the spiritual realm. We connect ideas, not by submitting to a logical connection, but by surrendering to aesthetic appearance. And on the other hand, art strives to make everything it reveals sensually vivid, just as the things of necessity and instinct are sensually vivid. And so, Schiller argues, we come to find in art and aesthetic enjoyment, on the one hand, that which somewhat tempers the logical, so that it no longer enslaves us, so that it, as it were, becomes absorbed into that which we personally subdue and master, and, on the other hand, to bring the instinctive up into the spiritual sphere—in other words, to perceive the instinctive as something spiritual at the same time, and to experience the logical as something personal. Schiller wishes to generalize this state for all humanity, for he says: “Only in this state is a human being enslaved neither from above nor from below, but free”—Schiller also wishes to shape this state into the force that permeates society and social life when people face one another: that they find pleasure in what is good and can at the same time surrender to their instincts, because they have purified and spiritualized these instincts to such an extent that they no longer drag them down. Then they will also relate to one another in social life in such a way that a free social society emerges. Schiller thus considered the three human states, but in an abstract form: the state of basic necessity, the state of rational necessity, and the free state of aesthetic experience.

[ 15 ] Schiller developed this philosophy of life in the early 1790s, wrote it down in his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” and presented it to Goethe. Goethe, whose human nature was quite different from Schiller’s, sensed: Yes, Schiller is striving here to unravel a certain mystery—the mystery of human nature, human development, and human freedom. — But for Goethe, the matter was not so simple that one could piece together the entire essence of human development from three abstractions. And then, in Goethe’s complex and therefore deeper nature, the “fairy tale” of the green snake and the beautiful lily came to light, in which Goethe depicted everything that lies within the human soul through some twenty figures and illustrated human development through the relationships between these figures. What Schiller sought to compose from three abstractions, Goethe sought to illustrate through twenty imaginative figures. In a certain sense, the two were in agreement on this point. For what had they actually done? Schiller proceeded scientifically by writing the letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man.” In fact, he proceeded entirely in the spirit of that scientific approach that later became the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century. But he did not go as far as this scientific spirit of the nineteenth century. He remained, so to speak, within the personal realm. Nineteenth-century science is, after all, completely detached from the personal, and it takes pride in being detached from the personal. The more impersonally one can shape knowledge, the more one believes the ideal of that knowledge has been fulfilled. In the nineteenth century, people simply said—and still say to this day—that one knows this or that about this or that. One knows it in such a way that it can apply equally to every human being, that it is completely detached from the personal. It is, in fact, so detached from the personal that modern man is actually not satisfied with science until it is laid to rest in those tombs that we must recognize as the giant tombs of modern intellectual life, namely the libraries, those tombs of the modern spirit, where dead knowledge is stored, where one goes when one needs some bone to incorporate into a dissertation or a book. These tombs are, after all, the very ideal of the modern scientific spirit. There, a person wanders through this stored, entirely objective knowledge, and their personal self is not present at all—truly not present at all.

[ 16 ] Schiller did not go that far in his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”; rather, he remained within the realm of the personal. For every concept he developed, he sought personal enthusiasm and personal involvement. That is important. And while the letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” are certainly abstract, the abstract still breathes the spirit of personality. One still feels that what one knows is linked to one’s own personality. Thus, the abstraction—the concept—still has something personal about it. Schiller does not yet release the concept into the objective and impersonal, into the inhuman. But at any rate, he does venture as far as abstraction. For Goethe, this abstraction is impossible. He sticks to the image, but he is very cautious. For he does not yet live in an age where one can establish a science of the spirit; he has a certain reluctance to tackle these images—which he presents in the “Fairy Tale” of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily—with any real vigor. He hinted that he actually meant something like a future state of social life. You’ll find this well expressed in the conclusion of the “fairy tale” of the green snake and the beautiful lily, but he does not wish to go so far as to provide a sharp characterization. He did not say that social life must be threefold, just as that which he depicts through the golden king—the king of wisdom—the silver king—the king of outward appearance, of illusory life, of political life—and the bronze king—of life in the material and economic spheres—must be threefold. He does, after all, depict the unified state in the composite king, who collapses within himself; but he does not push this characterization to its logical conclusion. It was not yet the time when such delicate fairy-tale figures could be translated into rough characterizations of social life. Isn’t that right? With Goethe, we are dealing with delicate fairy-tale figures, but the time had not yet come to carry out into life what existed there—half in fantasy, half already alive in the imagination.

[ 17 ] When the idea of staging a play in Munich first arose years ago, the intention was to bring to the stage the world-shaping forces contained in Goethe’s “Fairy Tale” of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It didn’t work. It had to be approached in a much more concrete way. And from this arose the Mystery Play “The Gate of Initiation.” It is, after all, quite obvious: in Goethe’s time, the era had not yet arrived in which one could transform what was still contained in delicate fairy-tale images into the real figures found in “The Gate of Initiation.” But by the time “The Portal of Initiation” was written, the time had already come when one could soon bring these things out into life. And so one had to do more than merely interpret the Golden King, the Silver King, the Bronze King, and the Mixed King; one had to show how modern social life—which, under the unitary state, seeks to encompass everything—must shatter, how it must be structured into a distinct branch of spiritual life—the Golden King— into a distinct component of the state—the silver king—and into a distinct component of the economy—the bronze king. The “Key Points of the Social Question” are already Goetheanism, properly understood, but precisely Goetheanism in the 20th century.

[ 18 ] So this is what it comes down to: that Goethe and Schiller were able to reach a certain point in their time—Schiller in the realm of conceptual abstractions with his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” and Goethe in the realm of imagery, where he sometimes became quite repulsive toward those around him because they wanted to interpret these images and because he felt: The time has not yet come to translate this crudely into life. — But this shows us, after all, that the time of Schiller and Goethe was precisely the moment when one did not yet have to release the modern scientific spirit into the inhuman and objective, but when one still wanted to keep it within the personal. To do this, however, one must go back, and one can do so only through the science of the spirit, by grasping through the science of the spirit as reality that which Schiller, with his personal-abstract concepts in the letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” and to which Goethe, striving to solve the same riddle, alluded in his “fairy tale” of the green serpent and the beautiful lily.

[ 19 ] The spirit of science must become personal once again. The Earth no longer provides the inspiration for this. For this, we need the Christianization of science itself. And when we Christianize science, we plant the first seeds for the development of the spiritual self.

[ 20 ] Let us be clear: This Earth, which has inspired us to develop the “I,” and which, even in its demise, will inspire us to further strengthen the “I”—this Earth is something we must leave behind for later forms of development on Jupiter and so on. This Earth, then, is something with which we cannot connect our full humanity. We must, so to speak, withdraw our humanity from the Earth. If we were to develop only the Earth science that Goethe and Schiller did not want to pursue—Schiller not, because he treated abstract concepts as personal, and Goethe not, because he stopped at half-formed imaginings—if we were to allow ourselves to be inspired only by the elements of the Earth, then we would never be able to develop the spiritual self. We would only be able to develop a dead science. We would ever more expand that field of corpses that exists in the libraries, that exists in our books, that is separated from the human being. And we would wander among these intellectual corpses, ourselves, as it were, enchanted by them, and thus fulfill Ahriman’s ideal. For among the things Ahriman wishes to bestow upon us is this: to create quite a few libraries, to accumulate quite a lot of dead knowledge around us. Ahriman would like us—just as the ancient Egyptians wandered among their tombs, just as the early Christians once wandered about surrounded by corpses—to sink more and more with our human nature back into mere instinctual beings, into selfish instinctual beings, and for whatever thoughts we can muster to be stored away in our libraries. One could imagine a time approaching when some young man or even a young woman, aged about twenty to twenty-three, would at first not know how to make their way in the world of the Silver King—what is outwardly called “earning a doctorate.” Very little, after all, rises up from within a person; for if one were to write down what rises up from within a person in, say, a doctoral dissertation—I am speaking, then, of the possibility that such a time might come if Ahriman were to triumph!—this doctoral dissertation would be rejected, for it would be something personal, something subjective. So one sits in libraries, picks up one book after another, as far as possible guided only by the catalogs, which list everything that can be linked to this or that keyword—when a new keyword comes up, one takes out a new book—and cobbles together a treatise that then makes one a doctor. You’re really only present with your external, physical self. You have a desk in front of you, with many books lying on it. You’re present with your personality insofar as, when you sit there for a few hours, you get hungry and then feel that hunger as a personal fate. Perhaps one is also present with one’s personality through the human relationships one remembers, which one must then fulfill again after those few hours. But then one closes the books and is no longer personally connected to them. What one has now cobbled together from the various books becomes, in turn, a small book or a thick book and takes its place among the books, waiting until someone else uses it again. I do not know whether such a state already exists anywhere today, but if Ahriman were to achieve his ideal, it could very well come to pass, and those would be dreadful conditions. The human personality would wither away under these dreadful objective, extra-human, impersonal conditions.

[ 21 ] In contrast, knowledge itself must become a personal matter. Libraries may well shrink, and people must carry what is contained in the libraries more within their own souls. The spiritual self can emerge only from this personalization of knowledge. This will not come about unless people familiarize themselves with that which is no longer earthly. For the Earth has passed beyond the midpoint of its development. This is precisely what it means to die. Knowledge is dying in our libraries. It is also dying in our books, these coffins of our knowledge. We must once again take back into our own personalities that which is knowledge. We must carry it within us. Above all, the renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha will help us in this. Thus it will help those who know, and thus it will help those who are the disciples of the Golden King.

[ 22 ] Such a revitalization must take place in another sphere: the legal system. After all, people today have just as little personal connection to their legal system as they do to their system of knowledge. I recently presented a small, clear example of this in a public lecture. I said: For decades, the German Empire had universal, secret, and equal suffrage—the best electoral system one could possibly wish for. But was real life connected to this electoral system? Did people actually vote in accordance with the spirit of this electoral system? Was what was truly alive within the structure of the German Empire a result of what was provided by this electoral system? That was by no means the case. This right to vote existed only on paper in the constitution. It did not live in the souls of the people. A state of affairs must come about in which people will no longer need to enshrine in objective constitutions what takes place between human beings, but rather in which, in the living interaction among equal human beings, the law itself proves to be a living reality. What need is there for written constitutions if people feel their relationships with one another in the right way, if the relationship between people becomes a personal matter—just as it had become an impersonal one in the last three decades of the 19th century and remained so amid the intense materialism of the 20th century? The law can become something living only when the Spirit of Christ permeates human beings.

[ 23 ] And just as in the realm of law people must become disciples of the Silver King, so too in the realm of economics they must become disciples of the Bronze King. But this means nothing other than that what is presented as the abstract ideal of brotherhood must become a reality. How does brotherhood become a reality? By forming associations, by truly uniting with one another, by not fighting one another over conflicting interests, but by reconciling those conflicting interests. Associations are the living embodiment of brotherhood. Just as the spirit of life is to dwell in the law, so too does the spiritual human being, in its earliest form, live within associations through the permeation of economic life with the Christ. But the earth does not provide all this. All this can become a reality for human beings only when they are permeated by the approaching Christ, who appears to them as an ethereal being.

[ 24 ] You see, what might be called the spiritual renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha is already connected to what we also recognize from anthroposophical cosmology—what we recognize by telling ourselves that we carry within us the potential for the development of the Spiritual Self, the Life Spirit, and the Spiritual Human. But we have become so abstract that today it actually seems to people like something terribly sober and prosaic when they are told that something highly spiritual like the Spiritual Man must first make itself known in the context of economic life—the “lower” economic life, the material economic life. Economic life is, after all, not something a spiritual researcher may point to without “dishonoring” himself. For a spiritual researcher must bring people together in small gatherings where nothing is spoken of that has to do with anything edible or drinkable, where one lives only in the “spirit”—but in reality, in abstractions.

[ 25 ] However, what turns out to be the case is that once people have spent long enough in conventicles—which are essentially sects—feeling comfortable within themselves, they eventually go out into the world again and, well, end up needing bread and—I’ll say “water” so as not to cause too much offense—water. But then, as a rule, they take very little of the principles they developed for their spiritual indulgences in the conventicles with them into the outside world.

[ 26 ] True spiritual life exists only where it is strong enough to overcome material life, not to let it lie alongside it as something that enslaves and subjugates one. That is what must eventually be understood.

[ 27 ] I believe that when one engages in a line of thought such as the one we have just followed, one sees that life in the present requires seriousness, but that this seriousness can actually only arise when one immerses oneself in the way that spiritual science makes possible. For you see, bringing the spiritual into contact with the human personality is possible only through spiritual science. Schiller and Goethe were, in a sense, the last to remain rooted in the personal—drawing on something ancient, a legacy from bygone eras: Schiller, by not allowing abstractions to become as cold as ice, as they do in modern times; and Goethe, by keeping his imaginings within the personal realm and not allowing them to break through entirely into external life.

[ 28 ] Today, we cannot stop there. Faced with our harsh reality today, one cannot directly engage with “Aesthetic Letters”—at most over a cup of tea—nor with “fairy tales,” except perhaps to engage in very pleasant conversation about them in a salon, even in those caricatures of salons that have joined the old lecterns as lecture halls for modern literary history. But what we need today is to break through into life with what Goethe and Schiller held to be personal. For this, we need strong concepts and, on the other hand, powerful imaginations; for this, we need the dawn of a genuine spiritual understanding of the external world. But for this, we need to be permeated by the Christ Spirit. For this, we need all the faith in the Christ Spirit in its true sense—the faith that the Christ Being is something we must connect with that which, within us as human beings, leads us beyond the earth, that which makes us fully human by helping us to develop our spiritual self, our life spirit, and our spiritual nature.

[ 29 ] All things that we encounter in the realm of spiritual science are intrinsically connected. And if one understands these inner connections, one will also be able to see in the proper light how spiritual science belongs in the present and how spiritual science is called upon in the present to truly influence all individual areas of life, including practical life.

[ 30 ] Spiritual science is therefore compelled to approach life with the utmost seriousness. For it would strike the true spiritual scientist as an inner frivolity if he did not approach life with the utmost seriousness, if he were to limit himself to crafting beautiful abstract concepts that are soothing to the soul but are not suited to breaking through into life.

[ 31 ] This is precisely what has been weighing heavily on spiritual science for more than a year—weighing on us here, who are active in Stuttgart— for this work in Stuttgart has imposed upon us the responsibility of bringing spiritual science into immediate practical life in all areas—to bring into life, as a threefold social order, what still appears in Goethe’s fairy-tale images of the golden, silver, bronze, and composite kings who collapse within themselves. Do you remember the fairy tale about how the mixed king collapses within himself and how the people then come and lick out the gold? — Anyone who looks closely at the world around them today can see this phenomenon. Since November 1918, this mixed king has collapsed in Central Europe, and aren’t the various ministers who have appeared since that time, the various leaders of the people, all licking out the gold until they have licked it all out? Then the entire structure of the mixed king will collapse, to the horror of the people. But then it will be time to get serious—not with fairy-tale images of a golden, silver, and bronze king, but with a firm understanding of the three members of the social organism: the spiritual member, the state-political member, and the economic member.

[ 32 ] However, when one speaks of these things, two thoughts immediately come to mind. I would like to mention one of these thoughts today, because the longer we have to work this way in Stuttgart, the more evident it becomes that, for the friends who are accustomed from earlier years to approaching me for one reason or another to seek advice, there is simply no time available for that at the moment. For everything that could have been discussed in person in the past has, for quite some time now, had to be repeatedly postponed to a later date, and everything that can be done here—despite my increasingly extended stays—must be devoted to the great task at hand. And I must also say that, especially this time, it was quite impossible to take personal requests into account in any way. This cannot be more painful to anyone than to myself, because I know that it cannot remain this way in the long run; otherwise, the anthroposophical movement would be deprived of its foundation. We would then, in fact, be building on shifting ground.

[ 33 ] But on the other hand, we must also recognize that people have always clung to the old ways. But this is something very new, which I would like to call taking the golden, the silver, and the bronze kings seriously. This is something very, very serious. And spiritual science cannot bring itself to extract the gold from the composite king as he settles and sinks. This is then taken amiss by certain quarters. I know I’m stirring up a hornet’s nest, but in some respects I will now have to stir up a hornet’s nest if I am to characterize, for example, a person like Hermann Keyserling—who simply speaks untruths, who lies—in a completely objective manner.

[ 34 ] There are people who say that there is so much criticism within the anthroposophical movement today. I must repeat again and again what I have said many times before: In such instances, one sees what we must do when we have to defend ourselves—and yet people criticize it. It is often criticized even by those sitting here who are listening to what is being said. And not a word of rebuttal is uttered—otherwise one would be engaging in polemics oneself—against those who hurl slander at us from the outside. It is considered unkind to call someone a liar when this truth comes from the anthroposophical side. But people allow anyone who wants to lie about the anthroposophical movement to hurl any lie they like at us. Our Threefold Order newspaper is often considered too polemical: people say we should direct our words at those against whom this polemic must necessarily be directed; we should have the courage to direct our words there, not at us, who are driven by self-defense. But this is an old bad habit, and it shows how much people want a complacent anthroposophy rather than a serious one that grapples with the great problems of our time.

[ 35 ] It is indeed necessary to speak quite seriously about such matters from time to time. For such things—as I said, for example, in my public lecture regarding Count Hermann Keyserling—do not merely refer to what is said about anthroposophy from that side; they refer to the entire inner insincerity of this spiritual life. Read works such as What We Need. What I Want; read this chapter of the latest “Unbuch,” Philosophy as Art. There is nothing in it about anthroposophy, but all that insubstantial conceptual schematism is there—empty concepts that the empty-headed traditionalists claim give them an extraordinary deal. But that is the evil of our time: that people want to reject what has substance—what draws from the spirit, the living spirit—and instead want empty words, mere empty phrases.

[ 36 ] If one continues down this path, one will bring about the ruin of humanity. For with these empty platitudes, which come from that side—even if they call themselves “Diary of a Philosopher”—one undermines the entire culture of humanity. What are they, these empty platitudes? They are the words one coins when one fawns on the mixed-race king. Whether one fawns a little more brutally, like some of today’s socialist leaders, or more elegantly, in patent leather boots, like Count Hermann Keyserling, makes no real difference anymore.

[ 37 ] These things need not be taken as if they were spoken with any kind of emotion, even when they are spoken sharply. They are spoken sharply because, unfortunately, it is indeed the case that some people would like to count themselves among the followers of anthroposophy, even though they are not truly part of it inwardly—because they cannot muster the necessary seriousness, because they do not want to muster the necessary seriousness, because they do not want to be fully committed. One is not unloving when one truly speaks the truth where it is necessary. But I would still like to ask: if one counts oneself among us, is it very loving to allow others to hurl filth at us and then call it a lack of love when we have to defend ourselves out of self-defense? One may find it regrettable that we must defend ourselves with harsh words, but one should, precisely for that reason, stand up for those harsh words and should not, out of sentimentality or the like, somehow bring up the literary drivel about the “lack of love” in unjustified polemics.

[ 38 ] That is precisely the difficulty within the movement—which is to be developed here as the anthroposophical movement—that there are so few individuals today who commit themselves to the cause with their whole being. If one is to bring about what the anthroposophical movement is meant to achieve, one needs many such individuals today. Well, we have found dedicated individuals in a wide variety of fields, above all in the field of education among our Waldorf school teachers. We have also found dedicated individuals in many other fields—but far too few. And the number of those who have no intention of taking things seriously, who have no intention of committing themselves with their whole being—as would be necessary for our cause—is extraordinarily large, even within our own ranks. And that is why we are making such slow progress. Over time, we have had to experience time and again how, fundamentally, a large number of those who enroll—so that they can hear the things we proclaim—are, outwardly, still to some degree ashamed to openly profess their affiliation with us. We have heard time and again that it is better not to appear in public under the name “Anthroposophy,” but rather to omit the name and “let something seep in,” as the pleasant saying goes among those who do not wish to take the field of anthroposophy seriously. So here is yet another person—and especially a woman here and there—who wants to “let something” from anthroposophy “flow in” because she is ashamed—or he is ashamed—to speak openly about anthroposophy. So one lets “something flow in”! This requires less courage, and one is less likely to cause offense—one simply lets “it flow in.”

[ 39 ] But today is not the time to let things seep in, but rather to make an honest confession and to speak the words that describe things as they truly are. For those who are against us do not let anything seep into us; they speak in crude terms. And it should actually be felt throughout our ranks as something outrageous when a Hermann Keyserling presumes to speak of this spiritual science as a materialization of spiritual life, a natural science of the spirit. One cannot help but say that the man who, as we know, has gone to great lengths to sneak his way into the cycles of a number of people in order to learn their content—when he writes this today—is quite deliberately writing falsehoods—and this is what is called lying. And anyone who objects to this statement loves the lie. And anyone who says we are being too polemical when we correctly describe the truth has no sense of truth and loves the lie. And loving the lie should not be our business within the anthroposophical movement; rather, we must love the truth. The full weight of these words must be felt: to love the truth and not to love the lie for the sake of convention, for the sake of a pleasant social life. For to be lenient toward lies is already tantamount to loving lies. But in the time to come, the world will not advance through frivolous indifference toward untruth, but solely through a free and fresh commitment to the truth. Anthroposophy must concern itself with serious and highest spiritual matters, and in this we have never fallen short. And anyone who says that speaking of Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon constitutes a “materialism of the spirit”—when they have the opportunity every day to look up what is written in my Outline of Esoteric Science about Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon—is lying. For there is nothing there about the materialization of the spirit. One does not grasp the full gravity of the situation if one now wants us to turn against our opponents—who are throwing mud at us—using insincere, salon-style rhetoric. These things are precisely what true love entails. For true love, after all, includes enthusiasm for the truth. And the world will only move forward through this enthusiasm for the truth.

[ 40 ] It was truly my duty, for spiritual reasons, to speak these words today before I must take my leave of you once again for a while. And as much as it pains me that I cannot speak with some of you at all right now—simply because there isn’t enough time—yesterday the friends of our Threefold Social Order movement and of The Coming Day were gathered here again for a meeting that lasted until three in the morning, and this is how it goes now, almost day after day— as much as I regret that many things now have to be left undone—things that are cherished by some—it must be said on the other hand: Perhaps we can still hope that, through the efforts being made on a large scale, the anthroposophical movement will yet earn for itself that right in the world which it must earn, because it contains the strength and the will to move forward through the truth. If we are to work in the truth, then even today we have no choice but to expose falsehood—when it asserts itself in such a terribly intrusive manner—for what it really is.

[ 41 ] This time, it was necessary to emphasize our commitment to the truth, for it is absolutely essential, my dear friends, that we all—every single one of us—be imbued with this spirit of longing for truthfulness. For if it is at all still humanly possible: only through this spirit of longing for truth can the barbarism that would otherwise descend upon humanity be averted, and can we move forward toward a new, spiritualized civilization.