The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] In order to foster an understanding of certain points that must be addressed in connection with what has been discussed recently, it will be necessary to recall facts that have already been mentioned. We have seen, after all, how human beings are connected to their surroundings and to the other kingdoms of existence. We have seen how the human etheric body points to the animal kingdom, how the human astral body points to the plant kingdom, and how the human “I” points to the mineral kingdom, and we have then seen how, through the work that the “I” performs upon itself in communion with other human beings—that is, within the social order—that which we actually know first and foremost as the cultural development of humanity in art, religion, and science comes into being. Essentially, as I said yesterday, the contents of art, religion, and science are nothing other than what arises through this work of the human “I” upon itself. Thus we have here one example of how the human being is also connected to social life. Art, religion, and science are, to the greatest extent, the contents of the actual spiritual realm of the social organism.

[ 2 ] We then have what arises from the transformation of the astral body. At the present stage of human development, this transformation must, of course, be far more subconscious than what takes place in the spiritual realms of art, religion, and science. And what arises through the transformation of the astral body is, in essence, what we must designate as the legal sphere within the social organism. Then, on an even more unconscious level, we have what arises through the transformation of the human etheric body in community—through the fact that people are together. And everything that arises from what people do because they transform their etheric body belongs, within the social organism, to the economic sphere. Here, then, we have the relationship, the connection of the human being to the outside world. And we already saw yesterday what significance it has that human beings have such relationships with social life outside; for through this, as we have seen, human beings essentially prepare the natural foundation for their next earthly life. In a sense, they are thereby working on the very creation of earthly existence itself. And it would be desirable for as many people as possible to grasp the extraordinary importance and significance of the moment in which we now stand in the development of humanity.

[ 3 ] It can be said that, up to this moment in world history, the development of humanity has essentially been guided by those beings in the higher hierarchies who stood above human beings. As we know, humanity has evolved—already in the ancient Indian cultural epoch—to a certain stage of development of the etheric body; in the ancient Persian epoch, to a certain stage of development of the astral body; in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, to a certain stage of development of the feeling soul; and in the Greek-Latin epoch, to a stage of development of the intellectual soul. And now humanity is in the process of raising the conscious soul up from the depths of soul life. But because the seed of what is to come must always be present in the preceding stages of development, there are already signs of what must be the content of the next cultural epoch: the development of the spiritual self. This development of the spiritual self, however, must be one that originates from within the human being himself.

[ 4 ] We have passed through various earthly lives. When we speak of the people of prehistoric India, of ancient Persia, of the Egyptian-Chaldean era, and of the Greek-Latin era, we are actually speaking of ourselves, for it was we who lived back then under entirely different conditions, and it was we who lived in an animal, plant, and mineral environment that, in a sense, had still been prepared for us from the legacy of our divine ancestors—the beings on the Moon, the Sun, and Saturn—who, in their time, went through on Earth what we are now going through. What was the substance of an earlier planetary form always remains for the next planetary form. We lived off what the gods—the beings of the higher hierarchies—had left behind for us. And now we stand at the point where the Earth would wither and dry up if humankind did not, as it were, spin a new thread of life from within itself.

[ 5 ] Consider how this was actually brought about. Of course, our social life encompasses a spiritual life, and the people of the West take pride in that spiritual life; they take pride in their art, religion, and science. But one must distinguish between what the Mystery of Golgotha was—a fact—and the way it has been understood up to now through the ideas and concepts that could be derived from religion, art, and science. People have understood Christ in accordance with the spiritual content they possessed. And in the West, we have established something that is like a continuation of the ancient spirituality. But fundamentally, if one is able to approach impartially what has been established as the actual spiritual life in Europe and its American offshoot, it is all, in the final analysis, an Eastern heritage. It is nothing else. Certainly, we have transformed many things. I have already pointed out in these lectures how what was quite different in the East—what in the East was once able to grasp in a magnificent way the lawful connections between the successive earthly lives of the human being—was then, in the Greek worldview, shaded into the concept of “fate,” and how this, through the Latin-Roman element, developed into something legalistic. I have indicated how one feels when looking at Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel, where Christ stands as a judge of the world, as the universal jurist, and judges between the good and the evil according to legal principles! The worldview has become thoroughly legalistic. It was not like that as an Eastern worldview.

[ 6 ] And then came what stems from economic thinking. Bacon was the one who actually based his thinking entirely on economic principles, and all of Europe followed in Bacon’s school of thought. And what we have in our sciences—what today pervades all European circles as a popular worldview—is the result of Western economic thinking, which, as I have indicated, did not remain confined to the economic sphere, but has extended into higher realms, into the legal sphere and also into the spiritual sphere. If minds such as Huxley’s and Spencer’s were to apply their thinking to organizing economic relationships, they would be in the right place. But by applying their distinctive mode of thinking to establish the foundations of science, they are out of place. Yet the whole world has followed their example.

[ 7 ] And so we can say: What we possess in terms of true spirituality is, in essence, merely the outdated legacy of the ancient Orient. Then, in Greece and Rome, legal thinking and political thinking began to emerge. It would simply be nonsense to think that this existed in the ancient Oriental state structures. These dignified, patriarchal structures—of which the early Chinese constitution provided the last example—were not, in the sense that a European might understand it, state structures. What we have as legal structures did not yet exist at all in Oriental society. This actually entered Western culture only weakly through Greek thought and then very strongly through Latin thought. So we must say: Fundamentally, the entire spiritual life still has a character that was imparted to it by what the Orientals possessed. But consider how I had to describe the emergence of this Eastern spiritual life. It arose from human metabolism, from the inner impulses of metabolism, in the Vedas and in the magnificent poetry of the East. One must seek it as it springs anew from metabolism, just as the blossoms and fruits of trees grow. And the one who can see the connections as they truly are in reality knows how to look at the blossoms and fruits of the trees and says to himself: There is the sap that springs forth from the earth, that flows into the trunk, that shoots out into the branches, that turns green in the leaves, changes color in the blossoms, and ripens in the fruits; that is what then presents itself to the eyes. — If we look at what is there as the result of metabolism from what has just been drawn out of the earth along with the substance and taken in by the human being, if we observe how it is digested, cooked down, how it passes into the blood, how it is refined and etherized within the body, within the earthly body, it sprouts and grows and matures just as that which becomes blossoms, fruits, and trees. It merely becomes something else when it sprouts, grows, and matures through human organs; it becomes the poetic fruit of the Vedas, it becomes the philosophical fruit of Vedanta philosophy. What was regarded in the East as spiritual life was viewed just as much as a fruit of the earth—of the metabolism that passes through the human being—as what is regarded as the green growth and fruit-bearing that takes place within a tree. What appears in the Vedas and in Eastern poetry is closely connected to the essence of the earth. It is the blossom of the earth. And it is nonsense when people today turn our earth into that lifeless product as geology, for example, regards it; for the earth comprises not only what sprouts from it in the form of blossoms and fruits, but also that which arose in humanity in ancient times in the Vedas and in the philosophy of Vedanta. And whoever wishes to see only the stones forming in or on the earth, whoever sees only the farmland—in other words, whoever regards the earth solely as a mineral entity—does not know the earth, for the earth also includes what it bore as blossoms and fruit through the human body in ancient times.

[ 8 ] Then came the other era, when humankind had already emancipated itself from the earth, when humankind was no longer connected to the earth, when it was connected only to the climate and the atmosphere, when it expressed its rhythmic system more than its metabolic system. This is the era in which the great spiritual intuitions of antiquity no longer arise, but rather the concepts of law develop.

[ 9 ] And now, in more recent times—notably with Bacon—humanity has begun to withdraw completely into itself, to separate itself from the earth, and to shape what lives only within it as mere reason in the economic thinking of the Western world. Thus, I would say, what develops through human beings is differentiated across the earth.

[ 10 ] These are all things that people today should pay attention to. However, if people want to pay attention to these things, they must awaken their souls from within. They must seek to understand what spiritual science can offer them. They must tell themselves: The time is past when one could simply sit down—after, so to speak, having worked intensively throughout the week—and then allow oneself to be taught an abstract concept about the connection between the human being and a divine world order. Those times are past. That is antiquated. It is up to humanity today to grasp, in concrete terms, how the human being itself is connected to the cosmos, how it is situated within the cosmos. And one consequence of this understanding will be that people will grasp the necessity of structuring social life into the spiritual life—which, after all, is essentially just a kind of legacy from the Orient that has become increasingly lifeless, for our spiritual life today is dead—and the other two aspects. The ancient Oriental, the Oriental of primeval times, would not even have understood what it means to say that one does not understand life. Today we say: we do not understand life, for we merely live—albeit with the “I,” which the Easterners had not yet done—but only within the mineral, dead realm. Yet life must enter there. And what is it, fundamentally speaking, when we as human beings strive to give the spiritual realm a special place within the social organism? What is it, actually, that we are seeking there?

[ 11 ] As long as the spiritual realm is connected to the entirely different realm of law or the state, or even to economic life, the individual human personality cannot bring into this spiritual life what must be present within it. Let us be clear on this very point! Given the habits of thought prevalent today, it is not easy to grasp precisely what is at stake here. I will attempt to explain what should actually be understood on this point in the following manner.

[ 12 ] Just imagine: the state enacts its school regulations. These school regulations are enacted—whether out of a despotic or tyrannical impulse, or out of a democratic one—but they are enacted nonetheless. How are they enacted? Well, let’s keep it simple. Just imagine three people sitting down together. When three people sit down together, they are incredibly wise in the abstract. The fact is, three people who sit down together basically always know everything about everything, and that doesn’t change even if three hundred and sixty people gather in some political party; they always know everything about everything. They know exactly how to draft Paragraph 1 on how religion should be taught, Paragraph 2 on how German or another language should be taught, Paragraph 3 on how arithmetic should be taught, and Paragraph 4 on how geography should be taught. One can draft wonderful paragraphs that would then represent an ideal state of the educational system, and one can then turn that into law; the law can be implemented. It makes no difference whether three people or three hundred people draft it—it will always be very sensible, because people are, after all, very clever when they piece things together in the realm of abstractions. Then it becomes law. But it’s different, for example, when you stand in front of a school class with fifty very specific children—they have very specific personalities; they aren’t the malleable material you might think they are when you’ve drafted Paragraph 1, Section 2 out of pure cleverness. They are individuals whom you can only guide as far as is possible given their particular characteristics and abilities.

[ 13 ] But there is something else to consider. You are now standing in front of the class yourself and have special abilities. These, too, are limited. And anyone with experience knows that, in the abstract, you can formulate rules that are excellent (see illustration, left), but a wise teacher can only implement them to a limited extent (see illustration, right). For in abstract terms, one can bring everything together. In reality, however, the point is that one must reckon with reality itself. The state, as such, can achieve nothing more than such abstractions through the educational system, which is part of the realm of the spirit. These can be absolutely wonderful, outstandingly good; but set the state aside—keep it out of the school system, out of the educational system, which is part of spiritual life—and make the educational system dependent on the teachers who happen to be present in any given age: then it becomes reality, then it becomes actual, then it does not become a lie, but rather what it can be according to the era in question. That is what it means to work toward realities. But something else takes its place: Paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 10, 50—they are all dead, and the way they are observed is, in essence, something absolutely irrational. That which lives through the real teaching community, that which comes into being in the living interaction of the real teaching community—that is what lives. There you have the point where life, originating from the mineral realm, enters in. It moves up a sphere. We bring life—illuminated life—into the spiritual realm by directing this spiritual realm toward human individualities, not toward paragraphs 1, 2, and so on. We bring life into it; we permeate the spiritual realm around us with an etheric body, drawing from what emerges from the living human being. When you have your own spiritual disposition, that which is otherwise dead—that which is otherwise mechanical thought or mechanical activity—becomes a living being. The spiritual realm spreads around the entire Earth as something that is inwardly alive. This is what one must understand inwardly. One must feel how life flows in from an unsuspected depth of the soul into the independent spiritual life, how we actually enliven this independent spiritual life by grounding it in human individuality.

[ 14 ] You see, what is drawn from spiritual science for immediate life has a very deep connection to reality. One might well despair, I would say, when one sees how little energy, how little enthusiasm humanity can actually muster for this revitalization of the spiritual realm. It then feels as if people were animated by the same mindset as, say, someone who would prefer that only stillborn children be born—someone who does not want the spark of life to enter what would otherwise be born dead. That is how it is with humanity today. It sits upon a dead culture, as if glued to its comfortable chairs with pitch, and refuses to rise to enthusiasm for the revitalization of spiritual life. Above all, we need enthusiasm, for this spiritual life cannot be revived from the dead routines of daily life.

[ 15 ] And the field of law itself as the second (see diagram on page 233): It is born, I said, out of instincts, out of half-instincts. It was still something half-unconscious, so that it shimmered into consciousness as the field of law had hitherto been born out of Greek, but especially out of Latin and Roman life, and was then further developed. Now it is to be placed independently on its own democratic foundation. What has emerged from what the impulse of the field of law has been up to now? It is precisely the legal provisions that have emerged—those legal provisions in which human beings have so little a say that I must say, there has hardly been anything in my life that has left such a bitter taste in my mouth as when I had to deal with any lawyer. It has happened to me quite often in life. There you go to the one who is the representative of the law, the scholar of the law. There is a specific case at hand. You watch this lawyer walk over to some cabinet, to some compartment in that cabinet. He takes out a bundle of files. With great effort, he pieces together what he is reading at that moment; he stands completely outside the matter itself. You want to know how this fits into the legal framework. He goes to his library, pulls out some law book, and leafs through it over and over, but nothing comes of it because, fundamentally, he is completely unfamiliar with the subject. Nothing of what is humanly connected to these matters is present in such a case. It once happened to me that a certain lawsuit I had to conduct led to all sorts of correspondence back and forth over the course of years; I won’t go into the whole story. Then it finally turned out that it was necessary to have an international law book on the matter as well. Now the whole thing had perhaps taken two and a half years, when the good man said to me: “Well, I don’t have an international law book; you’ll have to get one for me. You’ll have to provide me with the documents in the first place if I’m to give you any further advice!” — Well, anyone who knows me knows that I certainly don’t boast about such things. Nor do I have any illusions about myself. I then procured that international code of law, and within two hours it was clear to me how the whole case stood. For one need only look at things with common sense to know that what would otherwise drag on for two years can be settled in two hours. That which has become intertwined within the social organism from its three members—that which is the human element—is so far removed from what actually constitutes the legal order. We must return to a way of life in which we perceive what lives in the law just as we perceive external sensory objects. We must be vitally connected to what exists as the legal organism.

[ 16 ] That is the true meaning of democracy: that humanity be infused into the lifeless legal provisions, that there be a shared sense of what otherwise lives within those lifeless provisions. And just as life enters the realm of the spirit through what can be born of spiritual science, so too will feeling enter the realm of law through what is willed by spiritual science. What lives from person to person will be felt.

[ 17 ] And we move on to the third area, the economic sphere. We know that this takes place largely in the subconscious, that the individual today is not at all capable of fully comprehending, in a fully conscious way, what is happening in the economic sphere based on the information at hand. Associations must form in which one person’s experience is complemented by another’s. Judgment must then emerge from these associations and from the formation of groups. Whereas in the spiritual realm, each individual must bring forth what is in accordance with their own aptitudes, what is active in the economic sphere must arise from the group’s judgment. Then, from this group judgment, what is “reigning reason” will emerge. In economic life, there will be reigning reason.

1. Spiritual Realm: Life—Etheric Body
2. Legal Realm: Feeling—Astral Body
3. Economic Realm: Reason—Ego

[ 18 ] Reason will prevail in economic life. This means that we carry outward what we have developed within ourselves through the legacy of the gods—what we have developed as ethericity, what we have developed as the astral body for sensation, and what we have developed as reason for the “I.” In the economic sphere, we do not yet need to carry this out as individuals; therefore, we carry it out through associations, through groups. But what we have developed individually within our “I”—reason—will become something that permeates the entire economic sphere if we work toward associations in the appropriate way. Thus we carry out into the social order that which is the impulse in our etheric body, into spiritual life, by enlivening spiritual life. What pulsates in our astral body as feeling, we carry it out into the legal sphere, and what pulsates in our “I” as reason, we carry it out into the economic sphere. As human beings, we have attained a threefold nature within the cosmic order: etheric body, astral body, and ego; we depart from the world once more with etheric body, astral body, and ego. We give it back to the world. We shape the world order from within ourselves. Why should it be any different? In the lower animal kingdoms, we see certain things prefigured: for example, the spider spins from within itself that which is to come to pass. Human beings must indeed become creators of the world; they must shape from within themselves that which will be their future environment. We carry the future within us. I have discussed this from a wide variety of perspectives.

[ 19 ] What good is all this philosophical talk about the reality of the world! We can convince ourselves of this reality by looking at the realities of the future. What will be real in the future, we carry within us today as an ideal. If we shape the world, then it will become real. This must not merely live within us as a theory; it must be within us as a feeling, as our innermost impulse of life. Then we will have a cognitive relationship to our worldly surroundings and, at the same time, a religious relationship to our surroundings. Out of this impulse, art, too, will become something entirely different in the future. Art will become something that connects with immediate life. Our life itself will have to take on an artistic form. Without this, we will be forced to drift into the philistinism of a Lenin, a Trotsky, or a Lunacharsky. For the only thing that can rescue us from this quagmire is the spirit that human beings create from within themselves. And if legal life is not to become completely barren, we will have to imbue it with feeling, and economic life with reason.

[ 20 ] There was one who looked back on the way the world had developed. He looked at it and said: Everything that is real is rational, and everything that is rational is real. — He was looking precisely at what the world had become through the ancient gods; he was not looking into the future. It was Hegel, about whom I spoke here on August 27, on the 150th anniversary of his birth. But today we stand at the point where the world is becoming irrational, where humanity must make it rational again. And this must be known; it must be incorporated into our thinking, feeling, and willing. And there is only this one social reform: to know what part humanity will have to play in shaping the world order.

[ 21] This is what we should, I would say, repeat to ourselves in our minds every morning and every evening, so that we may come to understand anew what nonsense it is to speak of the eternity of matter or the preservation of matter. Everything around us that is matter will pass away. What lives within us as ideals will take the place of what, through the destruction of matter, leaves empty spaces—spaces into which that which currently lives within us only as the ideal will step as a future reality.

[ 22 ] Thus, human beings must feel bound to the order of the universe. Thus, human beings must once again take to heart the words of Christ: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” Whoever understands this saying knows that it is a genuine and original Christian one, for Christianity is based on the transience of the material and of external force, and the modern scientific worldview mocks Christianity by teaching the permanence of matter and force, For heaven and earth—that is, all matter—will pass away, and all force will pass away, but that which takes shape in the human soul and lives in the Word—that will be the world of the future. That is Christianity. This Christianity, understood anew, must eradicate the counter-Christianity—the anti-Christianity—of the modern materialistic worldview, which fantasizes about the permanence of the transitory, of matter and energy. And it has come to this: what Christianity is—the eternity of the spirit and the transience of matter—is today regarded as madness in the face of the firmly established delusion of the permanence of matter and energy. And it has come to this: we are lying by pretending to still be Christians, while we lend a hand to the spread of a worldview that is anti-Christian. Anyone who clings to the material foundations of modern natural science would only be true and honest if they renounced Christianity. And certainly representatives of the Christian denominations—priests, pastors—who make compromises with modern natural science are, in reality, undoubtedly the most bitter enemies of Christianity at heart. There is no other way but to begin to see these matters clearly and honestly. We must speak about these things with ever-increasing seriousness. Without this, we cannot move forward. All the empty talk about reform ideas—which all manner of associations and reform movements are chattering about today—is fantasy; it merely adds fuel to the fire of those who are bringing about the decline. Renewal can only be hoped for through an understanding of the living spirit—that living spirit which must find its source in what it means to be a creative human being, and which is the foundation for the reality of the future—not just some ideal future, but the cosmic future.

[ 23 ] Truly, unless modern humanity embraces this metamorphosis of modern thought with the same fervor with which worldviews were once embraced in earlier times, the decline will not turn into a rise. What is meant by this is that one does not want it to be merely grasped comfortably through ideas; one wants it to be sensed, to be felt, to pulse through the will. For until it is sensed, until it is felt, until it pulses through the will, all talk of emerging from this catastrophic era is nonsense. Most people do not realize the terrible way in which we are sailing toward ruin, which is already taking hold of the physical realm. But the physical is always the consequence of the spiritual. The physical reality of the future will be the consequence of the spiritual reality we carry in our souls today; the physical events occurring now stem from past spiritual realities, and recent physical events stem from humanity’s long-past spiritual realities. When we are told today that, for example, of some six hundred schoolchildren in Berlin, on average far more than a hundred currently have no shoes or socks and no prospect of obtaining them; when we are told that far more than one hundred and fifty of these six hundred children have parents who can no longer even afford to buy them their rations, and that so many do not even receive a warm breakfast before going to school, and that over the course of the last school year more than a hundred have died of tuberculosis—do the math—then, my dear friends, you are dealing with material phenomena. These material phenomena are the outward manifestation of what humanity has cultivated spiritually over the past centuries. One might ask today: Do we want to continue fostering social movements, women’s movements, and all manner of reform movements as a continuation of the ideas that have borne such fruit, or do we want to create and draw inspiration from a new source? This question should stand before our souls in shining letters as we reflect on and feel the point at which we now stand.