The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Over the next few days—today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow—I will be speaking about what was already pointed out some time ago: the special way in which, in the first half of the 20th century, a kind of re-revelation of the Christ event is to take place, so to speak. To this end, some groundwork will need to be laid—beginning today, as I will attempt to characterize the spiritual state of the civilized world once more from a certain perspective, and from this perspective draw attention to the demands that the very fact of humanity’s development itself will place on human development and education on a grand scale in the near future.

[ 2 ] As we know, a new era in the development of civilized humanity began around the middle of the 15th century. Since that time, we have been dealing with a unique development of the human intellect. Today, people no longer have a clear picture of the state of mind that existed among those who lived before this great turning point in modern history. They do not consider what a different state of mind it must have been, and yet it would be easy to imagine just how different the state of mind must have been in Europe—a state of mind that, across vast territories, inclined people to undertake the Crusades toward Asia, toward the Orient—if one considers how impossible such an event, rooted in ideal-spiritual motives, has become since the mid-15th century. People do not consider what entirely different interests humanity had before this historical turning point, and what interests have become particularly significant since that time. But if, among the various characteristics one can attribute to this more recent period, one wishes to highlight one as the most significant, it is precisely the predominance and ever-increasing intensity of human intellectual power.

[ 3 ] Now, there is always another force within human beings—whether as a longing or as a more or less clear fact of consciousness—lurking in the depths of the soul. It is the longing for knowledge. If we look back to earlier times—even to the 11th, 12th, and 13th 14th centuries of European development, one can speak of a distinct longing for knowledge, insofar as people at that time possessed capacities within their souls that led them to establish a relationship with nature, with what nature revealed of the spirit, and thereby a relationship with the spiritual world itself. Certainly, there has been much talk of such longings for knowledge ever since. But if one observes human development with complete objectivity, the thirst for knowledge that prevails today cannot be compared in intensity to the thirst for knowledge that prevailed before the middle of the 15th century. It was an intense matter of the human soul to strive for knowledge—for a kind of knowledge that also meant something in terms of fervor and inner warmth for the individual, and that also meant something to that individual in terms of the impulses that led him to carry out his work in the world, and so on. What has emerged since the mid-15th century can be compared less and less with the thirst for knowledge that existed back then. And even if we consider the great philosophers of the first half of the 19th century, they offer brilliant elaborations of the human system of ideas, but in reality, I would say, only artistic elaborations of this system of ideas; there is no true concept—not in Fichte, not in Schelling, not in Hegel—and certainly not in Hegel—of what the thirst for knowledge had previously entailed. And then, in the second half of the 19th century, knowledge—even if it is still cultivated in isolation according to old habits—more or less enters the service of external life. It enters the service of technology and also takes on the form of that technology. Where does all this come from? Yes, it stems precisely from the fact that in this most recent era we have witnessed the particular development of the intellect. Certainly, this did not happen all at once. This intellect has been slowly developing. The echoes of the old clairvoyant state had, after all, long since become only highly indistinct. But one can still say: To a certain extent, even if not the old clairvoyant state itself, its echoes were still present well into the 15th century. All people—at least those who strove for knowledge—had a conception of the higher abilities that emerge from the human soul, abilities that transcend those of everyday life. Even if these abilities emerged from the soul only in a dreamlike manner in ancient times, they were nonetheless abilities distinct from those of ordinary life; and through such abilities, people sought to penetrate the depths of the world’s essence and reached the spiritual nature of that world’s essence. And that is what led to insight. It was experienced as insight when, through natural phenomena and natural beings, one sensed and perceived how spiritual-elemental beings worked through the individual phenomena of nature, and how the divine-spiritual being worked, on the whole, through the totality of nature. This was perceived as insight when gods spoke through natural phenomena, when gods spoke through the movements of the celestial bodies and in their appearance. This is what was understood by the term “insight.”

[ 4 ] The moment humanity ceased to perceive the spiritual in the phenomena of the world, the concept of knowledge also began, to a greater or lesser extent, to decline. And we must note this decline in the actual intensity of knowledge as a characteristic of the most recent period of human development.

[ 5 ] What has become necessary here? That which currently exists only within the small circle of people striving toward anthroposophy, but which must become more and more widespread. Yes, natural phenomena spoke to the people of old in such a way that they revealed the spiritual to them. The spiritual spoke from every spring, every cloud, every plant. By coming to know natural phenomena and natural beings in their own way, people came to know the spiritual. That is no longer the case. Intellectualism is merely an intermediate state. For what is the deepest characteristic of this intellectualism? That with it—with pure intellectuality—one cannot recognize anything at all. For the intellect is not at all meant for recognition. This is the great error to which human beings can succumb: the belief that the intellect is meant for recognition. People will only come to know again when they engage with that which underlies spiritual scientific research—that which is conveyed, at the very least, through imagination. People will only come to know again when they say to themselves: In ancient times, spiritual-divine beings spoke through natural phenomena. They do not speak to the intellect. For higher, supersensible knowledge, natural phenomena will not speak directly—for nature, as such, is silent—but beings will speak to human beings; these beings will appear to them in imaginations, will inspire them, will unite with them intuitively, and they will in turn be able to relate these beings to natural phenomena. — Thus one can say: In ancient times, the spiritual appeared to human beings through nature. In our intermediate state, human beings possess the intellect. Nature remains spiritless. Human beings will rise to a state where they can once again recognize—where, although nature will no longer speak to them of the divine-spiritual, they will nevertheless grasp the divine-spiritual through supersensible knowledge, and through this will once again be able to relate this spiritual aspect to nature.

[ 6 ] This is the distinctive feature of ancient Eastern spiritual life, of ancient Eastern knowledge, which we know lived on as a legacy in Western civilization: that during the heyday of their spiritual insight, the Easterners perceived a spiritual dimension in all natural phenomena at the same time—that the divine-spiritual spoke through nature, whether through the lower elemental beings in individual things and phenomena, or through the all-encompassing divine-spiritual speaking through nature as a whole. Later, within the center of the Earth, that which was governed by the juridical-dialectical spirit took shape. It was from this that intellectuality was born. Humanity retained spiritual culture as a legacy from the ancient East. And when people still harbored a final longing to learn something from the East—they did indeed learn something through the Crusades and brought it to Europe— and after this final longing had been satisfied through the Crusades, on one side of the Orient emerged what Peter the Great established, who eradicated the remnants of the Oriental spiritual disposition in favor of the European side; on the other side stood the Turks, who, precisely at the beginning of the period we call the fifth post-Atlantic era, established their rule in Europe. In a sense, European culture was closed off from the East. It had to develop further. It could only develop under the influence of legal-dialectical life, under the influence of economic life emerging from the West, and amid the decadent decline of what had been received from the East in terms of spiritual life—yet the gates to the East had been closed off in the manner I have described. This, in fact, also paved the way for the situation in which we now live, where we are dependent on opening the gates to the spiritual world anew from within ourselves, and on attaining a vision of the spiritual world through imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

[ 7 ] The whole matter is connected with the fact that in those ancient times, when the people of the East were ascending to their insights, what was particularly important were the abilities and powers that a person brought with them into physical existence at birth. Essentially, in those times of Eastern wisdom—despite what was unfolding there as “civilization,” which was imbued with wisdom—everything lay in the blood; yet what lay in the blood was at the same time spiritually acknowledged. It was determined through the Mysteries who, by virtue of their bloodline, was called to lead humanity. There was no contradiction. The one who was called to leadership through the Mysteries was, so to speak, placed in his position by the fact that his bloodline served as the outward sign. There was no legal proof of any kind as to whether anyone had been correctly placed in his position, for there was no objection to the divine decree by which people were placed in their positions. Jurisprudence was unknown in the Orient. Theocracy, certainly; divine rule of the world was known. From the spiritual world, a person’s mission here in the sensory world was assigned to them. In place of what one felt when saying to oneself: A person who has been placed in his rightful position, whose bloodline the gods have directed in such a way that he could be placed in his rightful position—in place of this feeling came another, one clothed in a legal-dialectical guise, from which one could argue on legal grounds whether anyone was entitled to stand in his place, to do this or that, and so on.

[ 8 ] The nature of the soul—which had already been developing out of Greek culture, but especially out of Roman culture—through which people in Central Europe began to derive what is right from concepts and dialectics; this nature of the soul—as I have already explained from a wide variety of perspectives—was, however, unknown to the East; it was entirely foreign to it. For the Orient, the concern was to fathom the will of the gods. And there was no dialectic involved in determining what the gods wanted.

[ 9 ] But now we find ourselves at another turning point. Now humanity is faced with the necessity of taking a closer look at this dialectical-legal aspect as well. For the economic sphere—the economic element that has conquered the world from the West with the aid of technology—is already deeply entangled with this state of affairs that has emerged through the dialectical-legal. The economic sphere constituted a subordinate element in the ancient cultures, which were entirely theocratic, entirely imbued with the divine spirit. In economic life, people simply did what naturally followed from the position and dignity into which the gods had placed them through the pronouncements of the mystery sages. Economic life—which, in a sense, was woven into the fabric of dialectical-juridical life—was now beginning anew in a primitive form; for when the Middle Ages, the so-called Middle Ages, began, the Romans, above all, no longer had any money. The monetary economy gradually faded away, and in Europe, dialectical-legal culture essentially spread under a kind of subsistence economy. The early Middle Ages were, in essence, cash-strapped; hence all those forms of military organization emerged that were necessary because the troops could not be paid in money. The Romans had paid their troops with money. In the Middle Ages, the feudal system developed, and a distinct class of soldiers emerged. All of this occurred because people, bound to the land, could not undertake long military campaigns under the influence of a subsistence economy. Thus, this dialectical-legal system developed within a kind of natural economy, and it was only when technology from the West permeated this economic life that the modern era dawned. This modern civilization, which is now becoming so fragile, essentially arose entirely during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch through technology. I have already elaborated on this in various ways. I have explained how, according to external estimates, there were 1,400 million people living on our Earth at the end of the 19th century, but that in reality as much work was being done as if there were 2,000 million people living there. This is because such an immense amount of work is performed by machines. Mechanization, with its colossal transformation of economic life—and also its colossal transformation of social life—has emerged.

[ 10 ] What mechanical economic technology must now bring into modern civilization has not yet arrived—precisely because intellectual life still overwhelms everything. With regard to what lies ahead for humanity, one can have the most remarkable experiences today. There are already many people today—especially among those who call themselves “practitioners,” who, for example, bring their practical expertise into government offices, where it usually vanishes; that little bit of practical expertise that still remains usually vanishes when people bring it into government offices. Such “governing practitioners” or “practical rulers”—one has to put that in quotation marks today—are coming up with strange ideas these days. Someone recently said to me: “Yes, the modern age has brought us machines and, with them, urban life; we must bring life back out to the countryside.”—As if one could simply do away with the machine age! “The machines will simply go out to the countryside with us,” I told the man. I said to him: “Everything can be forgotten—even spiritual culture can be forgotten—but the machines will remain; we’ll simply take the machines out to the countryside with us. What has blossomed in the cities will take root in the countryside.”

[ 11 ] People simply become reactionaries on a massive scale when they no longer have any inclination—and that is, in fact, the defining characteristic of people today, that they lack the will—to form ideas about true progress. So they would most like to restore the old ways out in the countryside. They imagine that this can be done. They believe that they can do away with what the centuries have brought about. That’s nonsense! But people today love this nonsense immensely, because they are too complacent to grasp the new, and know better how to cope with the old. The age of machinery has dawned. The machines themselves demonstrate this, showing that they have saved human labor. Today, it would simply take five hundred million people to accomplish what the machines accomplish, if it were to be done by human hands on Earth.

[ 12 ] And, essentially, all this mechanized work originated in Western civilization. It emerged in Western civilization, spread to the East only very late, and has by no means become as deeply ingrained there as it is in Western civilization. But this is a transitional period. And now consider this idea—however strange it may seem to you—and take it seriously: Let’s assume that ancient man saw a cloud, perhaps a river, all kinds of plants, and so on. In them, he saw not merely what modern man sees—dead nature—but spiritual elemental beings, all the way up to the divine-spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies. He saw these, so to speak, through nature. Nature simply no longer speaks of these divine-spiritual beings. We must grasp them as spiritual, beyond nature; then we can relate them back to nature. The transitional period arrived. Humanity added machines to nature. At first, people view these machines in complete abstraction. They work with them in complete abstraction. They have their mathematics, their geometry, their mechanics. With these, he constructs his machines and thus views them in a state of complete abstraction. But he will very soon make a certain discovery. As strange as it may still seem to people today that this discovery will be made, humanity will discover that, in all the machinery it incorporates into economic life, the spirits it once perceived in nature will begin to act once more. In his technical economic mechanisms, he will perceive: he has fabricated them, he has made them, but they gradually take on a life of their own—at first, however, only a life that he can still deny, because it manifests itself in the economic sphere. But through what they themselves create, they will notice more and more how it takes on a life of its own, how—even though they have brought it into being through their intellect—they can no longer grasp it with their intellect. Perhaps we cannot even form a clear picture of this today, yet it will be so. For people will discover how their economic objects become, in every sense, the bearers of demons.

[ 13 ] Let’s look at the same issue from a different angle. The Lenin-Trotsky system, which aims to build an economic life in Russia, arose from pure intellect, from the driest of minds. Intellectual life, despite Lunacharsky, does not interest people. It is supposed to be nothing more than ideology derived from economic life. One certainly cannot claim that the dialectical-legal aspect is particularly strong in the Lenin-Trotsky system. But everything is supposed to be oriented toward the economic. They want, so to speak, to embody the intellect in economic life. If one could do this for a while—this first experiment won’t work at all—but let’s assume one could, then economic life would get out of hand; it would give rise to destructive, demonic forces everywhere. It wouldn’t work because the intellect cannot handle the economic demands that would emerge everywhere! Just as the ancient human being looked upon nature and natural phenomena and saw the demonic in them, so must the modern human being learn to recognize the demonic in what he himself brings forth in economic life. For the time being, these demons—which people have not channeled into machines—have still taken hold of human beings and are asserting themselves as destructive forces in social revolutions. These destructive social revolutions are nothing other than the result of the failure to recognize the demonic in our economic life. Elemental spirituality must be sought in economic life, just as elemental spirituality was sought in nature in ancient times. And mere intellectual life is only an intermediate state that has no significance whatsoever for nature or for what human beings produce, but only for human beings themselves. Human beings have developed the intellect so that they may become free. Human beings must develop precisely a capacity that has nothing to do with either nature or the machine, but only with human beings themselves. When human beings develop capacities that relate to nature, they are not free. If they seek refuge in economic life, they are not free either, for the machines merely overwhelm them. But if they cultivate abilities that have nothing to do with either knowledge or practical life—such as pure intelligence—they can acquire freedom in the course of cultural development. It is precisely through a faculty that stands in no relation to the world—such as the intellect—that freedom could emerge. But to this intellect—so that the human being does not become detached from nature, so that he can once again exert an influence upon nature—imagination must be added, along with everything that spiritual scientific research seeks to discover.

[ 14 ] There is another point to consider. As I have already said, bloodlines were of particular importance to the ancient Orientals; for the initiates of the mysteries relied on them as divine signs when assigning people their places. All these things then lingered on like stragglers, like ghosts, into later times. Then came the dialectical-legal element. State certification became the essential factor. The diploma, the exam result—or rather, what was written on the paper regarding the exam result—became the essential factor; whereas blood had been the decisive factor in the ancient times of theocracy, paper now became the decisive factor. Those times were drawing near, times characterized by all sorts of things; a lawyer once said to me during a discussion I had with him: “Yes, it doesn’t matter that you were born, that you’re here!”—That didn’t interest him; rather, the baptismal certificate or birth certificate had to be there; it had to be written on it. In other words, the substitute piece of paper! The dialectical-juridical aspect—isn’t that right?—came to the fore then. This is also, at the same time, an expression of the illusory nature of the world, of the illusory nature of the intellect. But it was precisely within human beings themselves that the antithesis of this illusory nature of the world could develop—that which gave human beings freedom.

[ 15 ] But now, out of what the paper signifies—what blood used to signify—out of what a letter of nobility or other such documents signify, there is emerging what is already evident today, but which will remain as things continue to unfold—and they will continue to unfold. Bloodline will no longer have any significance; a letter of nobility or something similar will no longer have any significance; at most, only what people have managed to preserve from the old times will remain. Asking “why” was not possible when the gods still determined man’s place in the world. One could discuss the “why” during the legal-dialectical age. Now all discussion ceases, for only the purely factual remains—the actual reality, that which people have managed to preserve. At the very moment when people no longer believe in the paper at all, they will no longer discuss it either, but will simply take away the things that people have managed to preserve. There is no other option—since nature no longer reveals the spiritual to advance humanity at all—than to turn back toward the spiritual itself. And, on the other hand, to find within the economic sphere itself what was once found in nature.

[ 16 ] But this can only be found through association. What the individual can no longer find, association can find; and association, in turn, will develop a kind of group soul that will focus on what the individual no longer decides. In the Middle Ages, the Age of the Intellect, the individual was the manager; in the future, it will be the association. And within the association, people must stand together. Then, if one recognizes that a spiritual element must be harnessed in economic life, something can emerge that can replace bloodline and patent. For economic life would become too much for a person to handle if they were not up to the task, if they did not bring a spiritual element to guide this economic life. No one will associate with another if that other person brings nothing to the table that makes him capable in economic life, nothing that entitles him to truly harness the forces at work in economic life. A completely new spirit will emerge. And why will that be?

[ 17 ] Yes, in those ancient times when people were judged by their blood, what had taken place before birth—or rather, before conception—was important to them, for they brought that into the physical world through their blood; even if prenatal life had been forgotten, this recognition of prenatal life still lived on in the acknowledgment of bloodline. Then came the dialectical-legal approach. Human beings were recognized only in terms of what they lived out as physical human beings. Now the other aspect—economic life, which is becoming demonic—is intruding. Now, once again, the human being must be recognized according to his spiritual-soul core; and just as one will look at the demonic aspect of economic life, one will have to begin to look at what the human being carries through his repeated earthly lives. One will have to look at what he brings with him into this life. This will have to be resolved in the spiritual part of the social organism. If one judges by bloodline, one essentially needs no pedagogy at all, but only an understanding of the symbolic through which the gods express where they have placed a human being. As long as one judges merely in legal-dialectical terms, one needs an abstract pedagogy—a pedagogy that speaks generally of the human child. But if one is to place a person within associative life so that they can function effectively there, then one must take the following into account; one must first be clear about this: The first seven years, during which a person develops their physical body, are not significant for what they will later be able to accomplish in social life; they must simply be made capable in a generally human sense. During the period from the seventh to the fourteenth year, when the etheric body actually undergoes its development, the human being must first be understood; one must recognize what then emerges around the fourteenth or fifteenth year as the astral body, and what comes into play when the human being’s actual spiritual-soul core is to place him in the position where he is meant to stand. This is where the educational factor becomes a special social factor. The point is that an understanding of the child being raised can truly lead to the conclusion: “This child is suited for that, and that child is suited for this”—and this becomes clear no earlier than the very moment the child leaves elementary school. And it will be part of artistic pedagogy and didactics to be able to make the decision: “This one is suited for this, that one is suited for that.” Based on this, the decisions will be made that are called for in the “Key Points of the Social Question” regarding the circulation of capital—that is, the means of production. A completely new spiritual perspective must emerge—one that, on the one hand, penetrates economic life in its inner spiritual vitality and, on the other hand, understands the role that spiritual life must play and how spiritual life must shape economic life. This can only happen if spiritual life is independent, if economic life does not impose anything upon it. It is precisely when one grasps inwardly the entire course of human development that one recognizes how this development calls for the threefold structure of the social organism.

[ 18 ] So, once again, because on the one hand Turkey and on the other hand Peter the Great’s Petrinism have, in recent times, cut us off from the Orient, we need an independent spiritual life—a spiritual life that truly perceives the spiritual world in a new form, not as was the case in ancient times, when one allowed nature to speak to oneself. One will then be able to relate this spiritual life to nature. But once this spiritual life has been found, one will also be able to cultivate it within the human being in such a way that it becomes the substance of his skills, so that through this spiritual life, in associative interaction, he satisfies the economic life that is becoming ever more and more vibrant. These ideas must actually be present in an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Therefore, such a spiritual science can only arise from an understanding of the course of human evolution.

[ 19 ] The first is that we must strive toward a genuine understanding of the spirit. That general talk about the spirit in empty, abstract terms—as is prevalent today among official philosophers and other circles, and as has also become popular—will be of no use in the future. The spiritual world is different from the physical world. Therefore, one cannot gain any insight into the spiritual world through abstraction from physical perception; rather, one must gain insights into the spiritual world through direct spiritual research. These insights naturally appear to be something entirely different from what a person can know if they are familiar only with the physical world. People who, out of convenience, want to know only about the physical world may today call it fanciful when one speaks of the Lunar Age, the Solar Age, or the Saturnian Age. They think one is merely expressing ideas when speaking of these previous incarnations of the Earth, which mean nothing to them. One is describing things of which they have not the faintest idea. It is only natural that they have no clue, for they want to know nothing of the spiritual world. Now they are told about the spiritual world, and they find: “Yes, it doesn’t correspond to anything we already know!” — But that is precisely the point: that worlds are discovered which do not correspond to anything one already knows. Isn’t that roughly how a philosophy professor like Arthur Drews, for example, judges spiritual science? It doesn’t align with anything he’s already imagined. Yes, even the postmaster of Berlin said, when the railroad from Berlin to Potsdam was to be built: “Now I’m supposed to run trains all the way out to Potsdam!” I send out four stagecoaches a week, and there’s no one sitting in them. If people want to throw their money out the window, they might as well do it directly! — Of course, the railroads looked different back then than the stagecoaches of the staid postmaster from Berlin in the 1830s. But of course, the description of the spiritual world also looks different from what lurks inside minds like that of Arthur Drews. Yet he is merely representative of all the others; he is even still one of the better ones—curiously enough, one must say that—not because he is good, but because the others are even worse.

[ 20 ] It was first and foremost necessary to show how one can truly penetrate the spiritual world while remaining firmly grounded in the strict realm of science. That, after all, was the primary aim of our university course this fall. And although all of this is still in its infancy, it has at least been shown how, in certain fields, knowledge can be elevated from the sciences themselves to the recognition of the spiritual as such, and how, in turn, the spiritual can then permeate what sensory perception gains.

[ 21 ] But what can be gained in terms of knowledge, and what will ultimately be achieved in spite of the prevailing tendencies of academic scholarship, would remain incomplete—for it is there that the most beautiful beginnings are revealed; it has already been shown, after all, how psychology, and indeed even mathematics, point upward toward spiritual realms—but the effort would remain incomplete, and thus would be unable to aid our crumbling civilization, unless a truly fundamental, truly intense will were to arise from the realm known as practical economic life. It is necessary that the old customs and habits truly be abandoned, and that spiritual awareness also permeate everyday life. This is something that must come about as a flowering of the anthroposophical movement: that, with the help of that spiritual attitude which can arise from spiritual science, an insight into practical life—namely, practical economic life—be brought forth, and that it be shown how decline can be averted by bringing into this economic life the awareness that one is actually creating something living.

[ 22 ] I would say that every day we should take a fresh look at the strikingly obvious signs of our declining economic life. This old economic life cannot be revitalized. Humanity can only be advanced by creating new economic centers. For just as no one today should take pride in what they gain from conventional science—since that would certainly lead humanity into the future prophesied by Oswald Spengler—so, too, no one should take pride in what they can gain from the old economic life through competence suited to that economic life. No one today can be proud of being a physicist, a mathematician, or a biologist in the conventional sense. But neither can anyone be proud of being a merchant or an industrialist in the old sense. And yet this old sense is the only one that still exists today. We still see nothing emerging anywhere today that would already represent true associations. It would be necessary that, if we were to have here—as it were, as a second event of this Goetheanum—something like this course has now been, then we might see something that can be concretely grasped from practical life itself, standing alongside the sciences. We do not make progress through what one current merely contains; rather, we make progress solely through the fact that this other side of our striving is now truly revealed as well.

[ 23 ] This remains the most distinctive feature of humanity’s current development: On the one hand, there are the traditional guardians of the old spiritual life, who condemn and slander anyone who seeks to infuse modern science with spirituality. They do this quite deliberately today because they have no interest in the progress of human development, and because their primary concern is simply to hold back this development. They sometimes do so in such a grotesque manner as that peculiar scholar who recently spoke about anthroposophy in Zurich and who spoke so outrageously that even his colleagues found it too much, so that, it seems, this very attack on anthroposophy has turned into a kind of small-scale publicity. But they do it; they will do it even more, for they will come forward with very serious slanders. There one sees precisely what is at stake, manifesting itself in the form of slanders and so on, in the form of falsehoods.

[ 24 ] On the other hand, there is still strong resistance today, though it essentially plays out in the unconscious. And this is a painful experience; for in this area, there is certainly an inner opposition—which is sometimes not even intentional—against what must actually be in line with the aspirations of spiritual science. The task will be to learn, precisely in this area, to fully go along with what spiritual science seeks to achieve there. For judging what must be intended from the perspective of spiritual science according to the subjective standards that have been customary up to now would, in this field, amount to exactly the same thing that pastors and others do in other fields when they denounce spiritual science. This is what makes our anthroposophical movement difficult: that, fundamentally speaking, a kind of inner opposition is clearly discernible precisely in this field. One could even say that it is precisely in this field that what sheds light in such a curious way on certain accusations coming from various quarters becomes most clearly evident. People say: “In this Anthroposophical Society, everyone is just parroting one person’s views”—and in reality, they aren’t parroting at all, but rather, whatever each person thinks for themselves, they say it as if that is what the other person wants. We’ve experienced this so many times, haven’t we? Very often, when someone wants something, they claim I told them to do it—even if they’ve heard the exact opposite from me. That is the belief in authority that truly prevails. A most peculiar belief in authority! This has been evident in many cases. But it would be particularly harmful if this—which is, after all, a strange kind of opposition —and in reality, there has actually always been more opposition than belief in authority, which is why the accusation of belief in authority is truly quite unfair—, it would be even more disastrous if what I am referring to here as inner opposition were to take on further dimensions precisely in the realm of practical life. For then, as long as it is still possible, the opponents of the anthroposophical endeavor would naturally say: Well, it’s a sectarian, fanciful movement that can’t possibly be practical. — Of course it cannot be practical if practitioners do not engage with it, just as one cannot sew without a needle, no matter how well one understands the art of sewing.

[ 25 ] I simply want to point out something that must be taken into account. I am not expressing criticism here, nor am I alluding to anything in the past; rather, I am pointing to something that is necessary for the future. Of course, I would not be making this point if I did not see all sorts of plumes of smoke rising. But I am really only pointing to something that must be regarded, so to speak, as a call to truly work together from all sides—and certainly not to entrench oneself behind reactionary practices, thereby—despite perhaps wanting to help it—essentially destroying anthroposophy behind the ramparts of those reactionary practices. So I am not pointing to anything that has already happened, but rather to what is necessary for the future. It is indeed necessary to reflect on these things.

[ 26 ] I will have to leave it at these remarks for today. We will then have to follow up on this preface—which, as you will see, is in fact an introduction to the contemplation of Christ for the 20th century—tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.