The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Although my stay in Stuttgart is intended to be devoted to other matters, I felt compelled to speak to you this evening on an anthroposophical topic, and today I would like to share some thoughts on the relationship between the human being and the world around them, insofar as this world influences the human being’s very nature. I would like to approach this topic in such a way that its content can be particularly relevant to various considerations that are necessary in light of the decline of civilization in our time.

[ 2 ] If we bring together some of what we have come to know about the human being over the years through anthroposophical spiritual science, then much of it can be summarized in that threefold division of the human being—which has, after all, often been presented to our souls—namely, the threefold division of spirit, soul, and body. When we look at our contemporary education from the standpoint of spiritual science—at that which is increasingly permeating our contemporary education—we must say that the development of humanity has gradually come to the point where, in fact, only the physical aspect of the human being is subject to consideration. With regard to this study of the physical, we certainly possess comprehensive knowledge today—and even more so, a desire to understand the physical in its relationship to the rest of the world’s phenomena. Yet we are living at a time when, more and more, our gaze must once again turn toward the soul and the spirit. Precisely when one observes the physical aspect as carefully as is the case with today’s prevailing understanding, one must actually be led by this observation of the physical to also consider the soul and the spirit.

[ 3 ] I would like to begin with phenomena that cannot really be understood today, because people focus only on the physical, and yet—I would say—these phenomena stand before humanity as great questions. When we consider the human physical realm, it fits into the entire natural order, and scientific inquiry has gradually sought to reconstruct this natural order entirely from necessarily interconnected causes and effects. The human physical realm is also conceived as integrated into this chain of causes and effects and is explained in terms of it. This, in the broader and proper sense, is the materialistic character of our present-day understanding: that we direct our gaze solely toward natural causes and effects and the way in which the human physical realm emerges from these causes and effects with a kind of mechanical necessity.

[ 4 ] But certain phenomena immediately present themselves to people—phenomena that are, admittedly, abnormal in a certain sense, yet stand before us like great mysteries, like question marks, if one limits oneself to a purely natural explanation based on cause and effect. We see how the human physical body unfolds. The natural scientist comes and seeks in the human body the same laws that he seeks out there in the rest of nature. He may say that they are merely more complex in the human body, but that they are the same laws that exist out there in nature. And lo and behold, we see individual laws from which—albeit in an abnormal way—certain phenomena arise that cannot, at first glance, be integrated into this course of natural events. The materialist thinker strives—though he has not yet gotten around to it today, he regards it as an ideal—to explain ordinary volition in humans, ordinary feeling in humans, and thinking or imagination in humans as effects of physical processes, just as we explain, for example, a flame through the combustion of fuel. And one can certainly say that, even though such explanations have not yet been achieved today, the natural scientist may, in a certain sense, say that a time will come when thinking, feeling, and volition will also be explained on the basis of human physicality, just as the flame is explained by the combustion of fuel. But how, for example, should we regard human imagination if this view were entirely correct? In life, we distinguish between ideas that we accept because we can call them true, and ideas that we reject because we call them false—because we say they are errors. But in the order of nature, everything must follow from causes and be a regular effect of those causes. We can therefore say, in accordance with the natural order: error and delusion arise from necessary causes just as much as correct, justified ideas do. — And so we are already faced with a puzzle: Why do the phenomena of nature—which are supposed to be entirely necessary—sometimes produce the true in humans and at other times the false?

[ 5 ] But we are faced with an even greater mystery when we observe in individual human beings what we call deceptive visions or false hallucinations—phenomena that we know lead us to believe something is real, even vividly so, without having any basis in reality. How can we then say that we may dismiss something as an unjustified hallucination, when everything that takes place within a human being necessarily arises from the natural order that is also present within them? We would have to attribute just as much validity to hallucinations as to what we call true impressions and true perceptions. And yet, we are—and we may feel and sense this—rightly convinced that hallucinations as such must be rejected. Why must they be rejected? Why can they not be recognized as a legitimate part of human consciousness? And how can we even recognize them as hallucinations?

[ 6 ] We will only be able to shed light on these mysteries if we turn our attention to something else—something that may at first remind us of hallucinations, but which, based on our intuition, we cannot regard as unfounded in the same sense as hallucinations—namely, the products of the human imagination. These products of the human imagination first rise from the unfathomable depths of the human soul; they manifest themselves in images that appear magically before the human soul, and they are the source of much that beautifies and uplifts life. Nothing artistic would be conceivable without these products of the imagination. Nevertheless, even with regard to the products of the imagination, we are aware that they are not rooted in a solid reality, that we must regard them as something that deceives us if we attribute reality to them in the ordinary sense of the word. But then we come to something else.

[ 7 ] From our spiritual science, we are familiar with the first stage of supersensible knowledge. Here we speak of imagination; here we speak of imaginative knowledge; here we describe how, through certain exercises, the soul comes to have a pictorial content in its perception—a content which, however, is not regarded by the researcher of the spirit as a dream, even though it appears as a pictorial content, but is regarded as something that relates to a reality, something that depicts a reality.

[ 8 ] We have, so to speak, three stages of soul life before us: the hallucination, which we recognize as a complete delusion; the figment of the imagination, which we know we have somehow drawn from reality, but which, as it appears within us as a figment of the imagination, has no direct connection to reality; and thirdly, we have imagination, which also appears as an image or as a sum of images in our inner life and which we relate to reality. The researcher of the spiritual world knows how to relate this imagination to reality through life, just as he relates the certain perception of color or tone to reality. And to those who say that imagination—true imagination—cannot be proven in its reality, that it might also be an illusion, one must reply: Anyone who has become attuned to these aspects of inner life will say, “You cannot know for certain that a hot piece of steel is a real hot piece of steel and not merely a thought, a mere figment of the imagination.” — This cannot be proven through thought, but it can be proven through life. Everyone knows, through the way they interact with external physical reality in life, how to distinguish the merely imagined hot iron—which does not burn one—from the real hot iron. And so, in life, the spiritual researcher knows how to distinguish—precisely through the contact he establishes with the spiritual world through imagination—between what is merely imagined in this spiritual world and what, through imagination, points to a reality within this spiritual world.

[ 9 ] Well, one cannot understand the relationship within this threefold system—hallucination, fantasy, and imagination—unless one is able to penetrate the nature of the human being in relation to his entire worldly environment through the spiritual sciences. Human beings are, after all, beings composed of spirit, soul, and body. If we first consider human beings as they present themselves to us between birth—or, let’s say, conception—and death, then, in terms of our immediate experiences, we have them before us in their physicality. Even with today’s science, we understand only a very small part of this physicality of human beings. This physicality is a very, very complex phenomenon. The more one is able to trace it down to its finest details, the more it reveals itself to be a wondrous structure. But the answer to the question: How do we understand this physicality? — must come from another direction, and it comes to us only from the perspective that spiritual science offers when it directs our attention to the spirit.

[ 10 ] But if you take into account, once again, much of what has been said in the various lectures over the past years, you will actually be able to say to yourself: Just as we have before us the physical nature of the human being between birth and death, so too do we have before us—in the life the human being lives between death and a new birth—his spiritual nature, his spirit. And if we consider—as I did in the lecture series I gave in Vienna in the spring of 1914—the life of the human being between death and a new birth, then we are observing the growth and development of the human spirit during that same period, just as we observe the growth and development of the human body when we follow a person from birth to death. It is truly the case that when we turn our gaze to the newborn child and then follow the development of the human being—how he develops out of childhood, how he becomes ever more mature, how decline then sets in, and how death then occurs— We observe this with our external senses and combine our external sensory impressions with our intellect; we observe the human body in its becoming. In the same way, we observe the human spirit in its development when we consider the growth and maturation of the spirit, when we arrive at what I have called in my Outline of Esoteric Science the midnight hour of existence between death and new birth, and when we then see its return to physical life; we are then observing the spirit, and we must then look at the relationship of this spirit—which actually appears to us in its primordial form between death and a new birth—to what appears to us here in the physical world as its body in the process of becoming.

[ 11 ] Now, spiritual research reveals to us the significant, the important fact that what we experience here as the body—what reveals itself to us as the body—is, in a certain sense, an image, an external image, a faithful representation of what we observe as spirit between death and a new birth, and what we perceive as spirit in the manner just described is the model for what we perceive here in physical life as the body. This is precisely how we must concretely conceive of the relationship between the spiritual and the physical. Anyone who knows nothing of the life between death and a new birth knows, in essence, nothing of the human spirit either.

[ 12 ] But when we now stand before the human being as he appears to us in the physical form revealed to us between birth and death, and we then arm ourselves with the awareness that this is an image of the pre-birth spiritual realm, we ask ourselves: What mediates between the original and the image? What is it that causes the original—which, after all, precedes the image in time—to take shape within the image? — We might perhaps dispense with such mediation if the human being were to appear fully perfect from the start, if, so to speak, he were born in such a way that his spiritual archetype would immediately transform into the perfect human being, and he would no longer have to grow and develop, but would stand before us in perfection. Then we could say: In a spiritual world beyond, there is the human spirit; here in the physical world, there is the physical image. We relate the physical image to the spiritual archetype. — But as we know, this is not the case; rather, through birth, the human being first enters sensory existence as an imperfect being and only gradually, slowly, becomes like his archetype. Since the spirit acts only up to conception or, to a certain extent, into embryonic life—that is, up to birth— since the spirit then, so to speak, “releases” the human being, there must be a mediating factor—something that, for example, by the age of twenty, shapes that which previously did not yet fully correspond to its spiritual archetype in such a way that it increasingly corresponds to it. And that which in the physical realm replicates the spiritual archetype—that is the soul.

[ 13 ] And so we find the human being situated within his entire worldly environment. We then trace his spiritual existence between death and a new birth, his physical existence between birth and death, and we regard his soul life as that which the archetype gradually shapes within the physical body, within the physical image. Then, for the human being, the midpoint of his earthly development comes, so to speak, around the age of thirty-five. Then decay sets in. Then, so to speak, the human being becomes increasingly hardened in his physical nature. But what is taking shape within them is already preparing to merge once again, at death, into their spiritual, purely spiritual being, so that the human being can then live out their existence once more in spiritual form between death and the next birth. What, then, is it that increasingly prepares the physical body so that it can become spiritual again at death? It is, once again, the soul. This soul thus prepares us to be an image of our spirit in the first half of our life. It prepares us to become spirit once more in the second half of our life. And so we arrive at the human trinity of spirit, soul, and body. Thus we gain a concrete conception of this relationship between spirit, soul, and body. But we also gain a conception of the physical that is clear in itself, that is internally consistent in the sense that it must be so. For if the physical is a faithful image of the spiritual, then all spiritual activities must also be reflected in the physical; then what is spiritual must be traceable in the body in material form. And we need not be surprised, then, that materialism has emerged in modern scholarship and claimed that the physical is the origin of the spiritual. If one considers only what develops in the human being between birth and death—namely, what develops as imagination—one finds everything that lives in the life of the imagination reflected in the features of the human body. One can trace the human being back to his or her imagination within the body, and one can fall into the delusion of the materialistic view, because one must indeed find those fine ramifications of the physical organization that come to light in thinking and imagination.

[ 14 ] So one can become a materialist in this way. One can become a materialist because the physical is a faithful reflection of the spiritual. And if one knows nothing of the spiritual, then one can be content with the physical, limit oneself to the physical, and believe that the whole human being is contained within the physical. But this physical body arises with embryonic life and dissolves after death. This physical body is transitory, and everything we develop as a life of imagination—bound to this physical body—is also transitory. And yet, it is a true reflection of the spiritual. This physical body is, in particular, a true reflection of the spiritual when we look at the activity of this physical body. We carry out an activity within the fine structures of our nervous-sensory system, and this subtle activity is indeed a reflection of a spiritual activity that took place between death and a new birth.

[ 15 ] And when we now look at this physical activity, when we consider how it is—as I have indicated—spiritually mediated, we must say: This physicality is an image, a reflection, and we find the spiritual only in the corresponding spiritual world. — Here in this physical world, the human being, insofar as he is in this physical world, is thoroughly a material being, and the organization of his materiality simultaneously expresses the true image of the spiritual. Admittedly, the soul lives within him, mediating the spiritual; but the whole human being includes that which lives within him right down to embryonic life, which then transforms into that into which the human being is transformed back after death: the spiritual. The spiritual, the soul, and the physical are thus interconnected.

[ 16 ] But if we truly grasp this—just try to truly grasp what I have set before your soul—then you will say to yourself: What a human being unfolds as the power of thought must be influenced—even if only as an echo, mediated through the soul—by what preceded his embryonic life. — In other words: When I now form ideas, a certain power lives in my life of imagination, but this power is not merely developed from the body; the body contains only its afterimage. This power resonates, so to speak; it is an after-resonance of the life I spent before my embryonic life, between death and a new birth. This life must play a part in my present life. When the ordinary person of today imagines something, it is indeed the case that the echo, the after-resonance of their prenatal life, lives on in their imagination.

[ 17 ] And how does a person come to attribute a form of being to himself? He comes to attribute a form of being to himself through an unconscious awareness of it: by imagining that my pre-birth existence lives on within me, resonates within me, and that my body is a reflection of this pre-birth existence. — Now, if a person begins to develop such an activity—one that is actually meant to arise only through the reverberation of prenatal existence—what then? Then, because the body is a reflection of that prenatal existence, it unjustifiably develops, of its own accord, something within this physical existence that resembles the activity of imagination. And this can indeed occur. When we stand in normal life and think and imagine, our prenatal life resonates within us; and since the human being is threefold, the nervous-sensory life can be shut out, and every other part can begin to mimic—from a purely physical perspective—the very activity that should actually be resonating from prenatal existence. When the rhythmic human being—or the metabolic-limb human being—unjustifiably develops from within such an activity that resembles the legitimate imagination resonating from prenatal life, then hallucination arises. And if you view the matter from a spiritual-scientific perspective, you can distinguish with hair’s-breadth precision between the legitimate imagination—which, at the very moment it is recognized as such, serves as living proof of pre-existing life— from a hallucination, which—by virtue of its very existence as an imitation from within the body of the imaginative power emerging from the Eternal—is living proof, precisely because it is an imitation, that the original it imitates also exists; yet this hallucination is entirely concocted from within the body and therefore stands as something unjustified. For in physical life, the body has no right to imitate from within itself that mode of imagination which is to be born out of the spiritual life of the pre-born human being.

[ 18 ] One must indeed make such considerations if one wishes to move beyond those foolish notions that are accepted today as definitions of hallucinations and the like. One must look into the structure of the whole human being if one wishes to distinguish the hallucinatory life from the real life of the imagination. And when the real life of imagination is further developed—when it is consciously embraced and when this awareness is added to it: that one does not merely experience the echo of prenatal life in one’s imagination, but rather consciously transforms this echo into an image and thereby looks back from the echo to reality—then one arrives at imagination. Thus, the true scholar of spiritual science distinguishes hallucination—which is something distilled from the physical body—from imagination, which points toward the spiritual, which transports oneself back into the spiritual, so that one can say: In the case of the hallucinator, the body combines; in the case of the imaginer, who transports himself back from the echo into the prenatal world, the spirit combines; he extends his life beyond physical existence and allows the spirit to combine. Within him, the spirit combines. Those people who, out of prejudice or—as is already happening today—out of malice, repeatedly claim that imagination in spiritual science could also be hallucination, deliberately overlook the fact that the spiritual scientist knows how to make a strict distinction precisely between hallucination and imagination, that it is he who, in the strictest sense of the word, can clearly distinguish one from the other, whereas what is said today in mainstream science about hallucinations stands everywhere without any foundation; everywhere there are arbitrary definitions. And this is really only proof that modern science does not know what hallucinations are, that it cannot distinguish what it encounters as imagination from hallucinatory experience.

[ 19 ] Given the nature of the insinuations being made in this field, one must already speak of deliberate slander being perpetrated here. It is merely laziness on the part of our scientists toward what spiritual science research is that they put such things out into the world at all. If they were not too lazy to engage with spiritual science, they would see just how strict the distinctions between hallucinatory and imaginative life are established in spiritual science.

[ 20 ] But one must take this to heart if one wishes to honestly commit to our movement: that in our contemporary society there is malice stemming from laziness, and one must track down this laziness—which then leads to deceitfulness—in our present-day culture, right down to its hiding places; spiritual science has no other path today. So that we can say: In the hallucinatory life, the body combines; in the imaginative life, the spirit combines; and the human being also feels completely removed from the world between birth and death when he feels fully immersed in the imaginative life.

[ 21 ] Between the two stands the soul. The soul is the mediator—in a sense, the spiritual-fluid substance that mediates between the spirit, the archetype, and the body, the image. It must not be sharply defined on either side; it must have fluid contours, blurring contours; conversely, one cannot say with certainty that it is rooted in reality or that it is not rooted in reality. In the case of hallucinations—because they are merely concocted by the body, which, however, cannot produce anything real unless it lives in the afterglow of prenatal life—one can say of the body and its hallucinations that they are not rooted in reality. As for imaginations and their abstract representations—thoughts—one can say that they are rooted in reality.

[ 22 ] In the images that arise from the interplay of the soul—in the products of the imagination—we now encounter something blurred; they are both real and unreal. They are drawn from reality, but the sharp contours of reality are softened, faded, and blurred. We feel lifted out of reality, but at the same time we sense that this is something that holds significance for our inner life, for our entire experience of the world. We sense the intermediate state between hallucination—between deceptive hallucination and true imagination—in the mediating figment of the imagination, and we may say: In hallucination, the body combines; in figments of the imagination, the soul combines; and in imagination—of which abstract thoughts are the reflection in ordinary life—the spirit combines. — Here you have the threefold nature of the human being in his activity and in his relationship to his surroundings. We may say: When we stand in the spirit—whether in the shadowy image of thoughts or in imagination, through which we then rise to the higher levels of knowledge—we synthesize reality;

[ 23 ] When we are within the soul and its figments of the imagination, we combine something that floats back and forth between reality and unreality; when the body combines them, the hallucinations deceive us into believing something that may in fact correspond to unreality.

[ 24 ] If you take what I have just outlined, you will say to yourself: Yes, an unbiased view of the human being reveals to us this trinity of spirit, soul, and body. And even with regard to what is active through the human being’s essence, we can distinguish three types—hallucination, fantasy, and imagination—and are thereby pointed toward body, soul, and spirit. — You see, this is how it is with anthroposophy: one must penetrate deeper and deeper into its essence to see how it substantiates the details from its wholeness.

[ 25 ] We see how one must first present, in a more abstract way, the division of the human being into body, soul, and spirit, and how this then becomes filled more and more with concrete content. When one seeks the relationships between what one has presented in this way and other aspects, one finds more and more evidence. But it is essential in the anthroposophical life to keep delving deeper and deeper. Yet this is precisely what modern people—who feel so terribly clever—do not like. Modern people do not like to say to themselves, for example: “I’ve just read an anthroposophical essay; I’ve heard an anthroposophical lecture; yes, the matter isn’t clear to me yet, but I’ll wait; I’ll see what else comes.” — If they were to wait, they would see that progress is constantly being made toward other things, and that in the end everything will certainly prove true, that one thing becomes the proof of the other. And to the person who says: “If one thing is proof of another, then the whole universe is without foundation, with one thing always holding up the other”—to the person who raises this objection, simply tell them that they cannot accept the description of the Earth provided by astronomy. There, too, he is told that one part of the Earth supports the whole and that the whole stands without any foundation. Anyone who wants evidence other than this support of one thing by another fails to consider that, in cases where one arrives at totalities, this is precisely the defining characteristic: that one thing supports the other.

[ 26 ] What is necessary in order to even bring before our souls something like what we have developed today is not merely that we always speak of the spirit — of course, one can easily speak of the spirit and actually mean nothing at all — but that one speaks of the spirit in a spiritual sense, that one is truly gripped by the spirit and structures one thing in relation to another in the world in such a way that the creative work of the spirit comes to light. Those who think only in material terms simply cannot distinguish between hallucination, imagination, and figments of the imagination when they set them side by side. But those who see the living spirit in the interplay of these three, who draw the threads from one to the other, are filled with living spiritual content in their way of looking at things; they speak with the spirit living in their words. One should not merely speak of the spirit in science; one should let the spirit speak in spiritual science. Please reflect on this sentence, which is indeed very important if the essence of spiritual science is to be understood: One should not merely speak about the spirit or of the spirit; one should, in a spiritual way, let the spirit speak. — It is precisely in this that one becomes free, for the Spirit receives one freely, and one expresses the essence of the Spirit through one’s own spirit. One must speak of the Spirit in a spiritual manner—that is, with fluid thinking, not with the rigid thoughts characteristic of materialistically oriented science.

[ 27 ] But if we take this, then it is precisely what leads, I would say, to the very heart of what is actually the innermost task of our time, and what alone can save us from the decline that is such a powerful force within our entire civilization today. We can say: If we feel today, completely uninhibited and with genuine, true devotion to knowledge, at home within the world, then we will be led—as if by a grace of the worlds pouring down upon us—to think in such a way that we think spiritually about the world. This is what, fundamentally speaking, first emerged as a characteristic of world development at the end of the 19th century. Anyone who follows the development of humanity with an open mind will see that the development of the world was such that, before the last third of the 19th century, it had a different task; but one might say that the gates of the spiritual have opened, and that today, after the materialistic view of nature has celebrated its great triumphs, we are faced with the task of once again viewing the world from a spiritual perspective. For human development, too, is a rhythmic process through which the individual passes in the rhythm of repeated earthly lives. This life is rhythmic. In rhythmic recurrence, the human being passes through that which once found its full expression in such spiritual human striving as, for example, reached its peak in the mid-19th century, when people directed their attention solely toward the material and sought to explain everything in material terms, and our present time, when we must once again return to a spiritual perspective, because when we allow our soul to be filled without prejudice by what comes from the world, that soul is precisely filled with the urge toward a spiritual contemplation of the world.

[ 28 ] That, I would say, is essentially the secret of this day. Anyone who lives in the spirit today must tell themselves: The gates from the supersensible world to the sensory world are open to earthly existence. Just as the things of the sensory outer world speak to us through colors and sounds, so too does a spiritual world speak clearly to people today. But people are still accustomed to letting the old, merely representational material world speak to them, and they have therefore waged a struggle in every form against the influx of the spiritual mode of perception. This struggle manifests itself in the materialistic-scientific worldview; this struggle manifests itself in the terrible materialistic conflicts that shook the beginning of the 20th century. But just as in an earlier period of human development people once aspired too strongly toward the spiritual and thus fell into illusions and fanaticism—seeking to express the spiritual through their physical bodies—so too does anyone who fights against the spirit today—as, in essence, the majority of civilized people still do— into the clutches of the power that today resists the descent of the spiritual into the physical world. And we have therefore seen the emergence of what inevitably arises in those souls who resist the influx of the spiritual: we arrive at what constitutes the emergence of falsehood, which we have seen pouring in so terribly during the time of the World War. It had, however, already been prepared beforehand, and we are living today in a time when not only does the world resist knowledge, but when the world is developing, in a truly terrible way, a tendency to speak untruths. And falsehood is, in essence, the bulk of what is being put forward today by opponents against anthroposophy and against everything connected with anthroposophy. What profound insincerity is evident in those who today actually present themselves as the bearers of truth, who call themselves the heralds of truth!

[ 29 ] Here is an example—I must always cite obvious examples, much as I regret it—: A newspaper is published in Stuttgart called the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt. In issue No. 19, on page 149, this Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt published a few sentences that included, among other things, the following. Someone—a retired city pastor named Jehle—had given a talk on the current anti-church movements. Much of value was said there regarding the understanding of monism and freethinking, and the retired city pastor Jehle clearly explained the deeper reasons behind A. Drews’s bitter struggle against the historicity of Jesus; he then shed light on Christian Science, which—in the sharpest contrast to the materialistic worldview—declares all material things to be unreal, and further: “Steiner’s theosophy, which Pastor Rittelmeyer, in gratitude for his allegiance, declares to be the reincarnation of Bernard of Clairvaux.”

[ 30 ] Well, my dear friends, a friend of ours has tried to set the record straight on this matter. The matter also came to the attention of Pastor Rittelmeyer, and Pastor Rittelmeyer then wrote the following letter to those who are spreading such rumors:

[ 31 ] “In issue No. 19 of the Stuttgart Evangelical Sunday Journal dated May 8, I have just read a report on the annual meeting of the Evangelical Church Association, at which Pastor Jehle, in a lecture on contemporary anti-church trends, claimed that Dr. Steiner had ‘declared Pastor Rittelmeyer to be the reincarnation of Bernard of Clairvaux in gratitude for his loyalty.’ This statement is completely contrary to the truth in every respect. Not only has Dr. Steiner never—either directly or by implication—declared me to be the reincarnated Bernard of Clairvaux or anything of the sort—neither to me personally nor, as I can say with certainty, to anyone else—but I myself have never said or thought anything of the kind. I ask you, in accordance with press conventions, to give this correction the space it deserves in its entirety. Allow me also to express my deep sorrow at the low level of ecclesiastical polemics, which is once again evident here. Any foolish drivel is welcome, so long as it disparages the supposed opponent, and not even the customary practice of prior verification—which is otherwise generally observed among decent people—is observed. I very much hope that you will appreciate the low character attributed here to both Dr. Steiner and myself, and the base instincts to which such a statement—based solely on gossip that can easily be proven false—appeals in the listener and the reader.”

[ 32 ] Well, you see, the Stuttgarter Evangelische Sonntagsblatt did not print the last words at all—the part about the lowly mindset and so on—but only the first words, and added the following:

[ 33 ] “Regarding this statement”—which is, in other words, printed incompletely! — “we can only note here: Personal communications from the speaker (which were also sent to the person concerned), as well as his character—well-known and proven to so many of our readers—rule out even the slightest doubt for anyone who knows him that he reproduced the statement to the best of his knowledge and belief.” So one must hear that the person who is initially addressed first says that the whole thing is a lie, and second, that the matter reflects a base mindset. Then one extricates oneself from the situation in this manner and adds: “Regarding its wording and reproduction in our newspaper’s report, which took place without the speaker’s knowledge or consent and without a final review by the editor-in-chief, who had since gone on vacation”— — so while the speaker did say that, one excuses the reporting by claiming that he was not informed of the version, and one excuses the person who maliciously served the one who then criticized the reporting, excusing him in turn by saying that he is at the spa — “the reporter, along with the speaker and the editor, regrets that, contrary to our intention, various readers” — so they do not regret that they spread a lie, but rather the following: they regret — “that, contrary to our intention, it could have been misunderstood by various readers, as Pastor Dr. Rittelmeyer informs us, as though we attributed to him the vanity of taking pleasure in such an appointment, and as though Dr. Steiner had counted on this vanity.”

[ 34 ] So, while it is not admitted that a lie was spread, regret is expressed that readers interpreted it as if one had been counting on their vanity. And now it continues: “As much as we regret, for objective reasons, the promotion of Rudolf Steiner’s cause by a representative of the church, the idea of personally disparaging him was far from our minds. We also have no doubt that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised by the thought of such an appointment by Rudolf Steiner.”

[ 35 ] This creates the impression that Pastor Rittelmeyer was taken aback when he heard that I had appointed him, whereas he explicitly states that he was taken aback that such a lie was being spread by the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt.

[ 36 ] “Incidentally, I believe our regular readers know us too well to suspect us of any intention to personally disparage or even slander anyone; they also know that we are fully occupied with better and more beautiful work.” — I leave it to the readers of the Evangelisches Stuttgarter Sonntagsblatt to judge this.

[ 37 ] You see, this is how those who call themselves the representatives—the official representatives—of the truth operate today, and whom many people consider obligated to uphold this truth. One need only point this out to draw attention to where the tendency toward untruth lies today. But there is still not enough widespread revulsion—sufficiently deep revulsion—against such immorality, against such anti-religion, which calls itself the Christian Sunday service.

[ 38 ] One need only point to a single such symptom—of which hundreds could be cited today— to show where, everywhere today—and this will get much worse, because we are living in these times—where the starting points are today that then coalesce into those rowdy outbursts, such as those that took place at our most recent eurythmy performances in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden. The very same eurythmy performance that was viewed here with such deep appreciation last Sunday—that very same performance—was jeered at and booed in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden with all sorts of keys and similar instruments, not, of course, out of objective judgment, but due to the convergence of two factors. First, the struggle—which is being waged for reasons you have no doubt heard from me again today and on many previous occasions—is being waged on a broad scale against the assertion of the inflow of spiritual life into our physical world, and is being driven by a tendency toward untruthfulness. People no longer have much regard for it, but it must be pursued right into its most remote hiding places. And the other factor is the inability that goes hand in hand with laziness and a reluctance to make an effort. When a respected newspaper from here—I have already mentioned this—deigns to offer an authoritative judgment for its readers, it turns to one of the current authorities, for example, Professor Traub in Tübingen; and in one of these articles—I have already mentioned this—one found quite peculiar words. This university professor—who still has the right today to prepare, as they say, so many young souls for their professions—simply writes: “In Rudolf Steiner’s worldview, spiritual things and spiritual beings move in the spiritual world just as tables and chairs move in the physical world!” — Well, has anyone ever, with a clear head, seen tables and chairs move in the physical world? Professor Traub in Tübingen has taken to writing that in my writings I speak of spiritual beings moving in the spiritual world just as tables and chairs move in the physical world. Since Professor Traub probably does not admit to being a spiritualist, I will at least not be so rude as to assume he was in that other state of mind while writing this article, in which one usually sees tables and chairs being moved.

[ 39 ] But these are the authorities one turns to when seeking a judgment on what is presented today as spiritual science. These matters are simply not always presented with sufficient clarity, and above all, they are not thought through or felt with sufficient clarity by many of our friends. And time and again we experience that when someone says something against us and we describe him in terms of his entire character, people do not hold it against him that he is a liar, but rather they hold it against us that we say he is a liar. We have experienced this particularly in recent weeks—one might say, day by day, right here and elsewhere.

[ 40 ] One can certainly speak of incompetence when such nonsense is written, as Professor Traub of Tübingen did; he also wrote in the same essay: “Secret science cannot be science, simply because the terms ‘secret’ and ‘science’ are mutually exclusive; what is secret is not science.” — Now I ask you: if one person wrote a scientific book and another had the whim to keep it secret for a hundred years, would it be any less scientific simply because it was kept secret? Surely it is not scientific because it is kept secret or made public, but because of its scientific character! One must truly be devoid of all sound reasoning to even write such a sentence.

[ 41 ] And another thing—it’s okay to say this here, since we’re among ourselves—I simply have to say a few things myself, because, unfortunately, too little is being said from other quarters. For many years now, in our work accompanying eurythmy, we have been striving for an art of recitation and declamation that returns to the good old principles of art, that once again recalls what is truly art in poetry—rhythm, meter, the musical quality, the imagery—whereas in our unartistic age, poetry is actually recited only in a prosaic manner. People recite the prosaic, the literal; they do not go back to the underlying foundation of rhythm and meter; and because, in conjunction with our eurythmy, we are once again seeking what Goethe, for example, meant when he himself rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors, conducting them with a baton like a music director, thereby pointing to what is truly artistic in poetry—because we are moving back from the inartistic to the artistic, that is why the patrons—or the people themselves—who today, while pretending to recite poetry, croak and bleat all manner of prosaic nonsense, rise up, croaking and bleating, out of their own incompetence and hurl abuse at those who devote themselves to recitation that, in turn, seeks to bring the true art of recitation to the fore.

[ 42 ] I regret having to say this myself, but what good does it do? If others do not articulate these things, then I must simply articulate them myself. And I cannot help but see in this very struggle another form of the struggle of incompetence—as can be demonstrated, for example, in Traub’s work, which descends into thoughtlessness—a struggle of the incompetence of the bleaters against what attempts to be a genuine recitation. One can understand that what arises from incompetence itself bleats—or causes its protectors to bleat—but we have an obligation to protect intellectual heritage, and we must, even if it is taken amiss, point out in strong terms what constitutes the fundamental damage of our time. I have spoken to you today about a topic relevant to the humanities, and I had to—well, it was already after our session had ended—so it was an encore—once again let my reflections drift into something that, in terms of contemporary history, is very much connected to the main topic of pure spiritual science. I regret that I must let my reflections drift into such controversies, but we do not live in a cloud cuckoo land; we live right here in the world, and if we have the necessary enthusiasm, if we feel the sacred obligation to stand up today for the cause of anthroposophical knowledge and its effects, then we must see with clear eyes where the opposition lies, and then we must develop within ourselves—by coming to an understanding about these things—the strong will to shed light on this opposition. For only in this way will we connect with that which, in the face of decline, leads once again to a rise—the impulses that, in opposition to the struggle against spirit and soul, seek to bring about the assertion of spirit and soul in earthly life. So that we may truly feel in unison with one another in the powerful assertion of the force that seeks to—and can—bring spirit and soul to the fore, we must come to an understanding about everything that is opposed to spirit and soul.

[ 43 ] I did not wish to complain about or rail against our opponents, but I wanted to speak to you to hint at what is necessary so that our souls may resonate together in our work for the spirit and the soul. More on that when we meet again.