The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] If an understanding of what might be called the reappearance of the Christ is to take root in the soul in the proper way, it is necessary to acquire a preliminary understanding of the path that the idea of the Christ, the concept of the Christ, has taken in the course of human history. We recall that human development began with a state of mind that we have often called a kind of instinctive perception, a clairvoyance that was dull and dreamlike. Now, we have repeatedly characterized the various epochs of human development by placing the corresponding forms of these states of mind within those periods.

[ 2 ] Today we want to remember that strong remnants of humanity’s ancient clairvoyant state still existed at the time the Mystery of Golgotha took place. The Mystery of Golgotha must first be understood as a fact—but as a fact that, by its very nature, can never be fully grasped by the intellect that has characterized the spiritual constitution of modern civilization since the mid-15th century, though it had already been developing since Greek and Roman times. So one can say: While Greek history unfolds, Roman history unfolds, and the Mystery of Golgotha takes place on Earth, strong remnants of the ancient clairvoyance still exist among many people. Other people had already lost this clairvoyance and were already well into the early stages of intellectual development. This was particularly the case with the Romans. And one can therefore say that, in terms of its reality and its essence, the Mystery of Golgotha could initially be grasped only by those who still possessed remnants of the ancient clairvoyance. It could be described, and its symbolism could also be hinted at to those who did not possess such remnants of the ancient clairvoyance. This instinctive clairvoyance was a characteristic particularly found among the ancient Eastern peoples, and essentially, its remnants have also been preserved primarily among Eastern peoples. After all, Christ Jesus also walked the earth among the Eastern peoples. Thus, the Mystery of Golgotha was initially understood through the remnants of ancient Eastern wisdom. When this Mystery of Golgotha then spread westward to the Greeks and the Romans, it became possible to accept what those people said—those who, drawing on the remnants of the ancient clairvoyance, had still understood what had actually taken place on Earth. And so that a vision based on spiritual eyewitness testimony might also be available, Paul, through a special enlightenment that came to him only in later life, attained a state of such clairvoyance in which he, Paul, could convince himself of the truth and authenticity of the Mystery of Golgotha. What Paul could say out of his own conviction, and what those who had preserved remnants of the ancient clairvoyance could articulate—drawing on the ancient Eastern wisdom—regarding the Mystery of Golgotha, could then be accepted as knowledge and clothed in the form of the nascent intellect; but at first, this intellect could not truly penetrate the Mystery of Golgotha. The way in which those who still possessed remnants of ancient clairvoyance spoke of the Mystery of Golgotha was described as Gnostic. And I would like to say that the way of speaking about the Mystery of Golgotha—as was possible with these remnants of ancient clairvoyance—is Christian Gnosis. The description of the Mystery of Golgotha has been passed down to posterity in the manner I have described in my book *Christianity as a Mystical Fact*. Thus, the first understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha was attained through these remnants of ancient clairvoyance, through ancient Eastern instinctive perception. One might say that this ancient Eastern, instinctive perception persisted to a sufficient degree right up to the Mystery of Golgotha, so that a genuine human understanding of this Mystery could still take root before the intellect took over and an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer exist. Had the Mystery of Golgotha come at the height of the intellect’s power, it would naturally have made no impression whatsoever on humanity.

[ 3 ] Thus, the accounts of the Mystery of Golgotha lived on in the reports of the ancient clairvoyants, and essentially—as you know from my exposition in *Christianity as a Mystical Fact*—the Gospels are nothing more than such clairvoyantly obtained information about the Mystery of Golgotha. But now that wave spread across human development—a wave that had already taken root in Greek culture, as I have described to you, that has its source primarily in Roman culture, and that can be described as the wave that prepared the way for later intellectualism, yet in which that intellectualism was already alive. Legal-dialectical thinking spread—the very thinking that subsequently led to state-political thinking. This spread from the south, penetrating those regions where, as I told you yesterday, a subsistence economy still prevailed, and making its way into the northern territories. Central European civilization took shape; initially nourished by Rome, it was characterized primarily by the intellectual—that is, essentially the legal-dialectical—unfolding of the human soul. Amid all that was unfolding, it was no longer possible to contemplate the Mystery itself in the spirit of the ancient spiritual tradition; instead, people received the accounts, they received the tradition, and clothed it in the form of the state of mind they possessed. They clothed it more and more in dialectics. Through Roman culture, the Mystery of Golgotha was clothed in this dialectic. Out of what was Christian gnosis—which was still based on vision—pure dialectical theology emerged, going hand in hand with the establishment of the European imperial structures that later became states. But the first great empire was actually the secularized church empire—the church empire permeated by Roman legal forms. Externally, many events took place that show how this legal-dialectical, political thinking, into which the ancient Eastern vision was clothed, spread across Europe.

[ 4 ] Charlemagne, for example, became a vassal of the Pope. His imperial title was conferred upon him by the Pope. And when one studies the expansion of Charlemagne’s entire realm, one finds, on the one hand, among the forces through which this realm expanded, the ecclesiastical-theological influence. A kind of theocratic empire spread; but this is permeated everywhere by legal-dialectical forms. The clergy are the officials; they hold government offices, and in their persons they unite the political element with the ecclesiastical element. The old spiritual life, based on visions—which, as we have often discussed, had already abolished the spirit altogether by the year 869—is completely transformed into a political ecclesiastical empire that spread across most of the European territories.

[ 5 ] You know from history and from what I have already presented here from a humanities perspective how this constant intermingling of the Roman Catholic Church and those forces that, to a greater or lesser extent, sought to break away from it, clashed with one another, and how these struggles essentially constitute a large part of medieval history. But one must consider the enormous difference that exists between the entire social structure of this medieval entity—which was later absorbed into the modern states—and the social structure of the ancient Orient, which was thoroughly imbued with the ancient instinctive vision and with everything that this vision entailed.

[ 6 ] Where, then, did the content of ancient Eastern vision actually come from? It came—one cannot put it any other way—from innate disposition; for those who were masters of the mysteries sought out as their students people who possessed such innate abilities that they could attain this instinctive vision. From the vast mass of humanity, they selected those for whom such perception was in their very blood. It was thus clearly understood that people sent into this physical world as children from the spiritual realms bring with them remnants of their experiences in those spiritual realms. I am always speaking of the times when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching or had already arrived. With some, less came in; with others, more came in. I would say that, along with the blood, echoes of the experiences in the spiritual worlds also came in. Those who had the most instinctive memories of their experiences before birth or before conception were the most suitable students of the mysteries. They were able to comprehend and perceive—or rather, through comprehending perception—what the gods intended for humanity, for they had experienced this before birth and retained an instinctive memory of it in this earthly life. And they were chosen by the Mystery sages, by the priests, to be set before humanity once more as those who were now witnesses to what the spiritual world intends for the physical world. It was such people who were the first to speak of the Mystery of Golgotha. One could say that this was a completely different way of placing the human being within the social order. He was placed within this social order in such a way that, as the initiates of the Mysteries recognized, he was placed there by the gods themselves.

[ 7 ] The world of innate abilities derived from the influence of blood was now replaced by that medieval world in which there was nothing—or ever less—within human beings; in which, at any rate among the influential figures, there was nothing left of what is brought into the physical world from the spiritual worlds at birth; in which nothing remained but instinctive memory. On what, then, could one base what constituted the social structure among human beings? On what could one base it in the dialectical-juridical age? One could base it only on authority. The authority that the Roman popes, above all, claimed for themselves—it was this authority that took the place of what the ancient mystery priests, through their insight, recognized as having been brought over from the spiritual worlds. In ancient times, decisions regarding what should take place in social life were also based on what had been brought over from the spiritual worlds. Now, such decisions could be made only by conferring a certain authority on earth upon specific individuals—namely, the Roman popes, and by extension, the individual feudal lords of the Roman popes, the kings, and other princes—by granting them such authority, as it were, through legal justification and formal law. People now had to command, since the gods no longer commanded. And this—who was to command—had to be determined solely by external law.

[ 8 ] This is how the principle of authority in the Middle Ages came about, and one could say that the entire conception of the Mystery of Golgotha—which was, after all, received only as a message—was also incorporated into this principle of authority. At most, it could be clothed in symbols, but these were merely images. One such symbol is the Mass with Holy Communion; it is everything that a Christian could experience in the church. In the Holy Communion, according to their understanding, they had the immediate presence of what was the influx of the Christ-force into the physical world. The fact that this Christ-force could flow into the physical world for the believers was placed under authority; this, in turn, stemmed from the consecrations of the Roman Church.

[ 9 ] But what emerged there as a legal-dialectical-Roman element also carried, in a sense, its opposite within itself. It, in turn, carried within it a constant protest against authority. For when everything is based on authority, as was the case in the Middle Ages, then what is to come in the future already manifests itself in human beings: the inner protest against authority. This inner protest against authority came to light through a wide variety of historical phenomena, through people such as Wyclif, Hus, and so on, who rebelled against the mere principle of authority and sought to comprehend Christ from within themselves—though the time for that had not yet come. So, in essence, one could only succumb to the delusion of believing that one understood Christ from within.

[ 10 ] Those who appeared as mystics even in medieval times also spoke of the Christ, but they had not yet had the Christ experience. After all, they essentially had only the ancient accounts of the Christ. And this rebellion against authority grew stronger and stronger. Consequently, the urge to consolidate this authority naturally grew ever stronger. And the greatest expenditure of energy to consolidate this authority—to, so to speak, base what emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha solely on authority, to base it on authority in such a way that it could forever rest solely on authority—that is Jesuitism. Jesuitism has nothing left of Christ. Jesuitism already contains within itself the complete and total rebellion against the original understanding of Christ. That original understanding had arisen precisely from the remnants of Eastern clairvoyance within Gnosticism. Jesuitism absorbed only the intellectual-dialectical aspect; it rejected the Christ principle. It did not develop a Christology; rather, it developed a doctrine of struggle for Jesus—a “Jesulogy.” Even though Jesus was regarded as someone who transcended all human beings, what Jesuitism presented as leading to the Mystery of Golgotha was to be nothing more than something based purely on authority.

[ 11 ] This laid the groundwork for what was to come, the culmination of which we see people experiencing in the 19th century, when the Christ impulse—as something spiritual, as something of the spirit—had been completely lost, and when theology, insofar as it sought to be modern theology, wanted to speak only of the man Jesus. As this entire development unfolded, however, certain—I would say—abuses had arisen. Take, for example, the fact that what was available in terms of information about the Mystery of Golgotha was adopted from the Roman principle through purely legal dialectics—that is, it was adopted through external symbolism that could be interpreted—and thus there was no way to make this information, as it existed, accessible to the faithful. Hence the strict prohibition against the faithful of Rome reading the Bible. This, in fact, is the most important ecclesiastical reality right up into the late Middle Ages: that the ban on believers reading the Bible remained in place. Within the priesthood and among the leading Catholic circles, the most dreadful prospect was that the Gospel might become known to the broad masses of believers. For the Gospel stems from an entirely different state of mind. The Gospel can only be understood from a spiritual state of mind. A dialectical state of mind cannot make sense of the Gospel at all. It was therefore impossible, in those times when the intellect—when dialectics was taking shape—to allow the Gospel to reach the masses. The Church fights furiously against the spread of the Gospel, and regards as the most savage heretics those who rebel against the ban on reading the Gospel—such as the Waldensians or the Albigensians; they claimed the right to be instructed by the Gospel itself regarding the Mystery of Golgotha. The Church rebelled against this, for it knew full well that the way it treated the Mystery of Golgotha was incompatible with the spread of the Gospel, since this Gospel, in its true form, consists of four Gospels that contradict one another. It was understood that if the Gospels were given to the vast majority of believers, they would initially receive nothing but contradictory accounts, which—given their burgeoning intellectuality—they could only perceive as something to be understood in the same way one understands things on the physical plane. Indeed, when it comes to an event on the physical plane, one cannot comprehend that it should be described in four different ways. For an event that must be understood through higher powers, what matters is how it appears from one perspective or another, since it must always be viewed from various angles. I have often said that this applies even to dreams; people can dream the same thing—that is, the same process can be taking place within them—but what takes shape for them in images can differ in the most varied ways. Thus, for one who approaches the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual way, the contradictions in the Gospels mean nothing. But the people of the emerging Middle Ages did not stand in a spiritual relationship; they were under the sign of dialectics, right down to the lowest strata of the people. For this dialectic, one could not present a fourfold contradictory account of the Mystery of Golgotha. And when the Church could no longer uphold the ban on the Bible, when Protestantism arose, that very discrepancy emerged in European life which then led to the modern theology of the 19th century, in which everything in the Gospels that contradicted itself was ultimately erased. And in the end, the Gospels have truly become a very plucked chicken. The leanest, most stripped-down elements that emerged are the ones uncovered by Schmiedel—a figure well-known in these circles—who regarded as the only authentic passages those in the Gospels where someone is not praised or where something derogatory is said, while dismissing everything else. And this is how the descriptions of Jesus by the theologians of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century came about—theologians who wanted only to describe Jesus as a human being and believed they could still remain within Christianity by doing so. Within Christianity, an intellectual-dialectical era could only stand by banning the Gospels. With the Gospels, a dialectical-juridical era could only bring about the gradual and complete elimination of Christ as such.

[ 12 ] Modern humanity has, in fact, developed under this falsehood. This modern humanity has no inkling that it essentially lives entirely under the principle of authority, yet it constantly denies to itself that it lives under this principle of authority. There is hardly a stronger manifestation of belief in authority than is found among all those who accept today’s official science as the ultimate authority on the world. Just look at how satisfied people are when they are told somewhere that something has been “scientifically established.” They know nothing else about this scientific finding other than that it was stated by a person who completed high school and university studies, who became a private lecturer and then a university professor—that is, someone who was in turn appointed by authorities; and so it is disseminated. Then what reaches people in this way is considered certain science. Try to take stock of what people today assume to be established, certain science. Ultimately, it is based—and people are merely deceiving themselves and indulging in illusions about it—on nothing other than a purely authoritarian principle, on the purest belief in authority. This is the belief in authority that has just emerged, having replaced the other way of influencing the social structure, which still originated in the East.

[ 13 ] And one must understand the hatred that developed within those circles that no longer had any understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, that possessed only what had been passed down traditionally through authority, and that were fearful and anxious about the Gospel becoming known among the masses; one must understand the hatred that actually grew stronger and stronger and was then developed into a fully formed system, especially within Jesuitism: the hatred of what Gnosticism was. And even today, we still see theologians turning red in the face whenever Gnosticism is mentioned! We must understand this in the context of the historical development of European civilization. One must, for example, understand the development of the universities. How did the universities develop? Look at history from the 11th through the 13th and 14th centuries: they developed out of the Church. The monastic schools became universities. Everything that was taught was supposed to be approved by Rome; only what was approved by Rome was to be truly believed. The idea that it had to be approved by Rome gradually faded away. But the idea that it had to be approved in some way remained. And so the principle of authority persisted even among those who no longer believed in Roman authority. And even without believing in Rome or in Roman authority itself, this persistence of the Roman principle of authority is the spiritual mindset of university life today. It is the spiritual mindset even in Protestant countries. The Catholic Church simply continues to fight for its authority to the exclusion of all that is spiritual, slandering everything that transcends its dialectical-legal way of thinking, slandering everything that refuses to conform to the social principle of authority. One need only understand how deeply this has taken root in the mindset of those people who lived during the rise of modern civilization. For most of them, it was precisely this that led to a loss of engagement with the substance of truth, and that ultimately resulted in the great confusion, the terrible chaos, within which we now live.

[ 14 ] But we are now living in a time when a new kind of vision is once again taking shape. Spiritual science aims to prepare us for this vision, which humanity must once again embrace. Not the old, instinctive vision, but a vision based on full consciousness. Professors of theology and others are fighting against this vision. They confuse it with the old Gnostic vision; they say all sorts of things—things they themselves do not understand—against this modern vision. But this modern vision is emerging as a necessity that must take hold of humanity. And into this vision, a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha can now shine.

[ 15 ] So the development of the concept of Christ is actually as follows: The Mystery of Golgotha takes place at a time when remnants of ancient clairvoyance still existed. People are just barely able to understand it. They incorporate this understanding into the Gospels. Christianity spreads westward and is embraced by the Roman world with a dialectical spirit. It is understood less and less. People speak of the Mystery of Golgotha in words—words that remain mere words—so that believers are content simply to be in church while the priest recites the words in a language they do not understand. For what matters to them is not understanding the matter itself; at most, what matters is living within the general atmosphere that points to the Mystery of Golgotha. And the true connection between human beings and the Mystery of Golgotha is lost. It is lost more and more. At a certain point in the Middle Ages, people began to discuss the meaning of a symbol in which the ongoing message of the Mystery of Golgotha had taken form. They began to discuss, for example, the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. But the moment one begins to discuss something, one no longer truly understands it. That which lives within the development of humanity lives as an experience. As long as one has it as an experience, one does not argue about it. When the controversy over the Lord’s Supper arose in the Middle Ages, the very last, the very last remnant of understanding of the Lord’s Supper had already been lost; the dialectical game surrounding the Lord’s Supper had already taken hold. And so modern human life developed until the ban on the Bible could no longer hold. In theory, all Catholics are still forbidden today to read the Bible. They are theoretically permitted to read only that excerpt from the Bible that is presented as if the Gospels were a single entity. Catholics are still strictly forbidden today to engage with the four Gospels, for, of course, the moment one brings the four Gospels into the modern spirit—the moment one reads them as one would read a description of the outer physical plane—at that very moment the Gospels fall apart. It is irresponsible when people who know this very well—who have also witnessed how, in the course of the 19th century, the Gospels fell apart precisely under the philological approach of theology—dare — there is no other way to put it — to say of Anthroposophy that it interprets the Gospels in an arbitrary manner, that it reads all sorts of things into them. These people know that the connection to the Mystery of Golgotha is lost if the Gospels are not understood in a spiritual sense. One sees how all these people take the podium from the standpoint of Catholic or Protestant theology and go on and on, time and again, babbling that anthroposophy reads things into the Gospels, while they know full well: If nothing of a spiritual nature is read into the Gospels, then the Gospels must fundamentally destroy the Christian state of mind. If people would only look a little more closely at how, for most of those who spout such nonsense about anthroposophy, what really matters is simply continuing to administer their office in the most comfortable way possible—just as they learned to do in their youth—then people would realize that these theologians do not possess a genuine sense of truth, but only the fear that they might lose their comfortable way of understanding things—then we would already be much further along in rejecting such people as Frohnmeyer and others like him, who are simply no longer imbued with even the slightest spark of any sense of truth.

[ 16 ] What must be saved today is the Mystery of Golgotha itself. And we must prepare for this Mystery of Golgotha to appear once more to the human imagination. For it cannot appear to the intellect. The intellect can only dissolve it. The intellect can only eliminate it through its philological arts, or it can preserve it through a tyrannical authority in the Jesuit sense for those who strive not for truth but only for a comfortable life. For those, however, who strive for truth, the path today leads toward the imagination—that is, toward the conscious beholding of the spiritual worlds. The point here is that, from the perspective of this conscious beholding of the spiritual worlds, one is also able to grasp the entire nature of humanity anew. Above all, the point is that the entire process of educating and instructing people takes place from this perspective.

[ 17 ] We know that until the age of seven, until the change of teeth, the child lives through imitation. Imitation is, in essence, nothing other than a continuation of what existed in a completely different form in the spiritual world before birth or conception, where one being merges into another; this then expresses itself in the child’s imitation of its human environment as an echo of spiritual experience. Then, from the age of seven—from the time of the change of teeth until sexual maturity—the child’s need for authority arises. Precisely that which today lives on only in the child’s imitation once lived, in a certain sense, through the whole human being within the ancient Eastern structure. Those who worked from the mysteries did so with such powerful force that other people followed them, just as a child follows the adults in its environment. Then came the principle of authority. And now the human being is growing out of the principle of authority. He is growing into the principle that begins to emerge in him after sexual maturity—though in a personal, individual way, as distinct from the course of humanity’s overall development. Today, humanity is moving toward a time when it will become necessary to cultivate within itself that which cannot develop on its own. The child is born as an imitator. In ancient Eastern social life, too, the child was born as an imitator. But what lived within the child as the principle of imitation remained effective even into the age of authority and the age of judgment with regard to social affairs, as well as with regard to everything that constituted religious life. In the ancient Orient, the principle of authority asserted itself only in relation to one’s immediate surroundings. The great matters of life remained in the form of childhood experience.

[ 18 ] Then these great matters of life emerged during the Middle Ages. The principle of authority prevailed. Now, first and foremost, a departure from the principle of authority is asserting itself; the principle of one’s own judgment is asserting itself. What had unfolded in the ancient Orient regarding the affairs of religious and artistic life—and indeed, of human life in general that transcends the immediate, elemental, natural realm—could be found in the child, who carried it through the blood from the spiritual worlds into this physical world. When the principle of authority prevailed, one need only rely on what developed with a certain inevitability from the still entirely unconscious etheric body. Now that the principle of free judgment is emerging, a new and great responsibility arises for pedagogy and didactics. This means that one must look within the developing child to see what will emerge. When the child reaches the age of fifteen, the astral body is born within him or her. That which is born within the child is what brings into the world—now not unconsciously, but in an increasingly conscious manner—the experiences of the spiritual world.

[ 19 ] The time is approaching when, despite all our education and instruction, we must observe what emerges from the child when he or she reaches the age of fourteen or fifteen. This was of no great importance in times past, for it is connected to what lives freely within the human being—that which a person does not bring with them at birth, nor can they receive through authority, but must truly draw out of themselves. And to ensure that the child draws this out of themselves in the right way, we must take care to raise and educate the child properly up to the age of fourteen or fifteen, so that they can then develop their astral body in the right way during those years. Education and instruction are taking on a whole new meaning in these modern times, and teaching should no longer take place without an understanding of the human being’s connection to the spiritual world. This is the struggle that lies ahead.

[ 20 ] In a sense, still from instinctive depths, what later came to the surface of human consciousness in the idealist philosophy of Central Europe asserted itself: the sense of the “I,” which, after all, in the works of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had to do only with what a human being experiences between birth and death, and had nothing to do with what is supra-physical and human. I said yesterday that the Central European was cut off from all that was Oriental by the Turks and by the influence of Peter the Great, but what lived on as a legacy was that which still loomed before them as a revelation—one that was actually understood only in the ancient Orient through ancient clairvoyance—and which still has its echoes in the Asian-sensing Russian soul, in the Russian soul that had not yet been Europeanized. Revelation, in essence, though quite decadent, still lives on today over in Asia. There is still a sense of revelation there. The intellectualistic element, the purely dialectical element, is the Western element, which today is developed only for economic life. Caught between these two elements—Western intellectualism, still entirely confined to the earthly and economic, and human rationality, which seeks to deal only with external experience—and Eastern revelation, the Central European element has always been caught in the middle. And the clouds gathered ever more menacingly, since, in essence, there was only a kind of rhythmic balance between revelation and rationality. What the great Scholastics of the Middle Ages attempted to keep separate—rational understanding of the external sensory world and supersensory revelation—became increasingly intertwined as the modern era dawned. And we see this merging particularly in the first half of the 19th century, when Central European idealist philosophy was born; we then see how Westernization spread in the second half of the 19th century, how, in a sense, all of Europe—even as far as Russia—became anglicized, and how the outward sign of a profound inner process—one that humanity is currently simply unwilling to comprehend—is the utter crushing of Central European culture, which now lies prostrate on the ground. Everything caught between the West and the East lies prostrate, is crushed, has absolutely no idea what to do with itself, lives in convulsions, talks about all sorts of things in the hope of somehow moving forward, but ultimately speaks only of utter trivialities. This is evident even in the smallest details. A tremendous inability to manage the old conditions is evident. What is being done? Either they squeeze out of the old system whatever is still left in it through a terrible tax squeeze, or they make up for what is missing by printing worthless banknotes, churning out billions of them in a single week. And even if it is perhaps only a symbol, it stands before the souls of certain people: this decadent clinging to the revelation in the East, the insignificance of the Middle, and the rationality of the West, which now resides solely in the economic sphere. And they speak as if of a future prospect—as if the Middle did not exist at all—of the great struggle that lies ahead between Japan and America. Of course, people imagine this merely in physical terms. Yet it also signifies something immensely profound. And when that which is real—the decadent in the East, the as-yet-unborn in the West—clashes with the disregard for the Middle, then, so to speak, the sense of self, which has found its expression particularly in the Middle, sinks into the chaos created by the crushing forces of the East and the West. Reflection on the “I” has, after all, disappeared along with Central European idealist philosophy. It has not existed since the mid-19th century. Even what people sought to create out of the upheavals—as a political entity—lies in ruins today. Impossible political entities arise, such as Czechoslovakia, which certainly cannot survive or perish in the long run. These impossible constructs can arise only because peace is being concluded by people in the West who have no idea what living conditions are like in Central Europe. In Zurich, one hears someone from Paris who, in a witty manner—as they say—preaches to the people about the unity of the Slovak and Czech elements. People are astonished by what such a professor proclaims about the predestination of Czechoslovakia, because they have no idea what the living conditions in the East are like, and because they simply do not know that what is emerging there is nothing but a crushing force—the clash between East and West. People are still covering their eyes so as not to see the outward signs of what is coming. They refuse to believe that even in this Central Europe such scenes are unfolding—albeit currently still largely confined to the East—where the remnants of those who waged the war, now appear here and there as officers who no longer have any justification under the current circumstances, forcing innocent women to dance naked before them and then thrusting a bayonet into their bellies and twisting it around inside them—scenes that are undoubtedly ordered by people who bravely fought alongside them in the war.

[ 21 ] Above all these things, the deluded people of the West—who make peace over matters they do not understand—turn a blind eye. They do not see how something significant is unfolding in what is actually taking place. And for the most part, people go on living as if nothing at all were happening in the world. Thus, one might say, something is driven into the most complete narrowness of consciousness. That which once produced such idealistic heights, such ideas as are found in Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—that is, in reality, no longer present in public life. And when it seeks to assert itself, as here at the Goetheanum, it is slandered; then slanderous scoundrelism rears its head everywhere, seeking to portray it as something of which it pretends to understand and which it must condemn. Into this void, something is developing that was still a radiant spiritual life a century ago. And above it, clouds are gathering from the east and from the west.

[ 22 ] And what does this mean—what is bound to manifest itself in the most terrible way in the coming decades—what does it mean? On the one hand, it is a call to stand firm on the ground that is about to give birth to the new spiritual life; and on the other hand, it is the flash of lightning heralding what has long been discussed among us—the approach of the Christ in the form in which he will have to be seen from the 20th century onward. For before the middle of this century has passed, Christ will have to be seen. But first, everything that remains of the old must be driven into nothingness; the clouds must gather. Human beings must find their full freedom out of this nothingness. And the new way of seeing must be born out of this nothingness. Humanity must find its entire strength out of nothingness. Spiritual science seeks only to prepare humanity for this. This is something of which one cannot say that it wants it, but rather that it must want it.