The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. Cultivation of Insight and Will

[ 1 ] The exercises for finding inspiration that I have described are, in fact, merely preliminary exercises for a deeper supersensory insight. Through these exercises, however, one comes to be able to view one’s own human life course in the way I have described—to perceive what unfolds as the ethereal realm of reality behind human thinking, feeling, and willing within the vastness of earthly existence. By cultivating those visual perceptions gained in consciousness—either during meditation or as a result of it—and by creating this state of empty consciousness, one also comes to know the etheric essence of the cosmos and the spiritual beings that reign within it through their manifestations. However, if one comes to know only the human soul life in this way—that is, the astral organization of the human being—it first becomes clear what is present in the development of heredity for the human physical organization; in other words, what the human being inherits for the physical body from their ancestors through the ongoing processes of heredity. One also gains an insight into what is brought in from the cosmos into the etheric organism—that which is not subject to heredity but rather eludes it and is significant for human individuality; that which, therefore, frees the human being—already in his etheric body and astral organization—from what he inherits from his ancestors, from whom he receives his physical body.

[ 2 ] It is of the utmost importance to arrive, in this way, at a precise distinction between what is transmitted from ancestors to descendants in the continuous stream of physical heredity, and what, on the other hand, is given to the human individual from the etheric-cosmic world—through which this human individual actually becomes personal and individual in the first place and breaks free from inherited characteristics. Gaining a clear understanding of this is particularly important for the science of education, for pedagogy; and it is precisely through such insights, to which I am referring here, that significant foundations can be gained for the educator. In this connection, I might refer to the little booklet available in Albert Steffen’s edition of the Pedagogical Course that I held here in Dornach at Christmas last year, as well as to the article in the latest July/August issue of the English journal Anthroposophy, which is also of interest with regard to education.

[ 3 ] The inspired insight developed through the exercises described here merely familiarizes a person with the astral organization of earthly life. One learns to recognize what one is, as a spiritual-soul being, in one’s development from birth to the present moment; but based on what one recognizes in this way, one is not yet able to say that it begins with the course of earthly existence and also ends with the course of earthly life. One arrives, so to speak, at the spiritual-soul aspect of one’s earthly life, but one does not yet come to perceive this spiritual-soul aspect as something eternal, as the eternal core of the human being. For this, it is necessary that the exercises in bringing forth the images evoked through meditation be continued and expanded in such a way that the soul becomes ever stronger and more energetic in this process of bringing them forth. This continuation can initially consist of nothing other than persistent, energetic practice. One must strive again and again to dispel from consciousness—with great effort—such images that are either evoked or created by the imaginative consciousness, so that consciousness becomes empty. Gradually, the soul’s power in this act of dispelling grows to such an extent that it eventually becomes so great that one can now also dispel that single, vast image of one’s life course itself—from birth onward—which is presented to the soul through imagination.

[ 4 ] So, mind you: It is possible to continue the exercises for clearing away the contents of the soul and for creating an empty consciousness to such an extent that the soul becomes strong enough to abstract even from one’s own life course. And at that moment, when one is strong enough to do so, one lives in a state of consciousness that no longer has before it the physical organism, no longer has before it the etheric organism, and thus no longer has before it anything from the world that is perceived through the physical and etheric organisms. For this consciousness, the sensory world with all its sensory impressions does not exist; nor, however, does the sum total of all etheric events in the cosmos exist for this consciousness—to which one has, after all, only just ascended through imaginative cognition. One has thus set all of that aside. This brings about a higher degree of inspiration within the human soul. What then arises through this higher degree of inspiration is the state of the soul as it existed in a spiritual-soul world before it descended, through conception, embryonic life, and birth, into a human physical organism. In this way, one arrives at a vision of the human soul’s pre-earthly existence. One looks into those worlds in which the soul existed before it received, here on Earth—I might say—the first atom of the physical body at conception. One looks back at the development of this human soul in the spiritual-soul world; one comes to know the pre-existent life of this human soul. Only then has one grasped one aspect of the eternity of the human soul-core. And once one has grasped this, one has, in essence, only then recognized the true nature of the human “I”-being, the spiritual human being. Only then is one open to that inspiration which can abstract not only from one’s own physical body and its impressions, but also from one’s own etheric body as a life course and its impressions.

[ 5 ] Once one has progressed to this understanding of the pre-existing human soul in its purely spiritual-soul existence, one can also gain an insight into what thinking and imagining actually are—those processes we, as human beings, experience in the soul as part of our ordinary consciousness during our earthly existence. Even through the most careful self-observation of the soul, the faculties and powers of ordinary consciousness are insufficient to penetrate the essence of thinking or imagination.

[ 6 ] If I am to explain how the essence of human earthly imagination presents itself in relation to this inspiration, I must use an image—but this image expresses the full reality. Imagine a human corpse. This corpse still retains the forms that the person had in life. The organs are still arranged as the person had arranged them in life. Nevertheless, when we look at the corpse, we must say: It is only the remnant of what the living person once was. — But if we now study this corpse in terms of its essence, we must say to ourselves: As it lies before us as a corpse, it cannot possess any original reality. It is inconceivable as something that comes into being in the form it takes as a corpse; it can only exist as the remnant of a living organism. The living organism must have existed first. — The forms of the corpse—the limbs, everything—point not only to the corpse itself, but to that from which the corpse came into being. And whoever views the corpse correctly in the context of life is led by the corpse to that from which it came into being: the living human being. Nature, to which we entrust the corpse, can only destroy it. It cannot build it up as such. If we wish to look at the constructive forces within the corpse, we must look to the living human being.

[ 7 ] On another level, and in a similar way, the essence of the thinking or imagining that we experience in ordinary consciousness is revealed to inspired insight. For this is, in fact, a corpse—or at least something that, throughout earthly life, continually transforms into the corpse-like nature of the soul. Living thought existed when human beings did not yet have their earthly existence, but were spiritual-soul beings in the spiritual-soul world. There, this thinking and imagining was something entirely different; there, it was a living force within the spiritual process. And what we have as our power of thought in ordinary consciousness is a remnant of that spiritual-living being that we were before we descended to Earth. It has remained, just as the corpse remains of the living physical human being. Just as the observation of a corpse reveals that the corpse points back to the living human being, so too, for the one who, through inspired insight, now looks upon the dying or already dead thinking or imagining of the soul, it becomes clear how he must treat this thinking as the corpse of the actual “thinking being,” and how he must trace this earthly thinking back to a supersensible, life-filled thinking.

[ 8 ] This is what also reveals to us, in a qualitative sense, the relationship between a part of our soul life and our prenatal, purely spiritual-soul existence. In this way, we simply learn to truly recognize what ordinary imagination and thinking mean when we trace them back to their living essence, which cannot be found within earthly existence but is merely reflected in it. And this reflection is ordinary thinking or imagination. Therefore, this ordinary thinking or imagination, with its abstract nature, is fundamentally far removed from true reality, just as the human corpse is far removed from true human reality. When we speak of the abstract nature, of the mere intellectuality of thought, we sense vaguely that, as this thinking presents itself to us in ordinary consciousness, it is not what it ought to be; it has become something other than what its true nature actually is. — This is what is extraordinarily important: that true knowledge understands how to relate what a human being experiences here in the physical body—not merely in general terms but through concrete images—to his eternal core of being, just as has now happened with thinking and the imagination of ordinary consciousness. Only then does the insight into the significance of imagination and inspiration truly come into its proper light, for then one knows that dead or dying thinking is, in essence, revived through those exercises one performs to bring about inspiration—revived within physical earthly existence. Acquiring inspired insight is thus, in essence, the revitalization of dying thinking. This does not mean that one is completely transported back to pre-birth existence, but through spiritual insight one gains a true picture of this pre-birth existence, which one knows did not originate here on Earth, but rather shines into this human existence from a pre-earthly human existence. One recognizes this in the image as the testimony of knowledge regarding the state of the human soul in pre-earthly existence.

[ 9 ] The significance of this for philosophical understanding will be discussed in the next part of this lecture.

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[ 10 ] Just as one is able, in this way, to explore the true nature of thinking and imagination in ordinary consciousness, so too can one, through the supersensible knowledge referred to here, bring to light the nature that lies behind volition. However, this requires not merely the higher knowledge of inspiration, but the higher knowledge of intuition, which I characterized yesterday and about which I said that certain exercises of the will are necessary to develop it. When one performs these exercises of the will, one comes to carry one’s own soul-spiritual essence out of both the physical and the etheric organism. One carries it out into the spiritual world itself. One carries one’s own being—as an “I”-human and as an astral organism—out into the spiritual world. In this way, one learns to recognize what it means to live outside one’s physical and etheric organisms. One learns to recognize the state into which the human soul enters once it has shed the physical and etheric organisms. But this means nothing less than that one thereby gains a foreshadowing of what happens to a human being when he or she passes through the event of death.

[ 11 ] Through the event of death, the physical and etheric organisms are shed. They are shed in such a way that they can no longer serve as the human being’s outer garment in the form they took during earthly life. But what then happens to the actual core of the human being is something one comes to know through intuitive insight even in the foreview, when, with one’s spiritual self—rather than being in one’s physical body—one is out in the world of spiritual beings. For that is what one is. Through intuitive knowledge, one is enabled to be present within other spiritual beings—outside one’s physical and etheric organization—just as one is otherwise present within one’s physical and etheric bodies here in earthly life. What one thus gains through intuition is a vivid experience of what one must go through when passing through the event of death. Only in this way can one gain a true insight into what underlies the idea of the immortal human soul. This human soul is—as inspired knowledge already teaches—on the one hand, unborn; on the other hand, it is immortal.

[ 12 ] This is what intuition teaches. But in this way—since through it one comes to know the true nature of the human eternal core, insofar as it is to lead a life after our physical death—one also learns to recognize what lies behind human volition. What lies behind human thinking has just been described; this can be recognized through inspiration. What lies behind human volition becomes recognizable when one brings about intuition through exercises of the will. Then volition reveals itself in such a way that behind it lies something entirely different, of which the volition of ordinary consciousness is merely a reflection. For it then becomes evident that volition has something behind it that is, in a certain sense, a younger element of human soul life. If we speak of thinking and imagination as something that is dying out, indeed as something already dead, and regard them as the older part of the human soul, then we must, by contrast, refer to volition as the younger part of the human soul. We can say that volition—or rather, what lies behind volition as the actual soul element—relates to thinking in the same way that a young child relates to an old man. However, when we look at the child and the old man, in the human organism the “old man’s” organization actually comes after the “child’s” organization in terms of time. In the soul, on the other hand, the childlike and the old-man-like exist side by side. The soul continually carries within itself its old age and its youth, indeed even its death and its birth.

[ 13 ] Compared to such an understanding of the soul—one that is grounded in inspiration and intuition and is entirely concrete—what is called philosophy today is something extraordinarily abstract, for it merely describes thinking and willing. True knowledge of the soul, on the other hand, can point out that when volition grows old, it becomes thought, and that thought which has grown old—indeed, has died—has developed out of volition. In this way, one truly comes to know the life of the soul and learns to observe the fact that what reveals itself to us in this earthly life as thinking was a will in a previous earthly life, and what is a will in this earthly life—that is, something still young in the life of the soul—will become thinking in a later earthly life.

[ 14 ] In this way, one learns to look into the soul and, in fact, only then truly comes to know it. Then the volitional part of the human soul reveals itself as something that leads an embryonic life. When we step out into the spiritual world with what we have within us as volition, we have a youthful soul that, through its very nature, teaches us that it is, in fact, a child. And just as we cannot assume that a child will not continue to grow into old age—unless it is ill—so too, as intuition reveals to us, we cannot assume that what we recognize as a youthful soul will dissolve at death, for it has only just reached its embryonic stage of life. Through intuition, we come to know how it passes into the spiritual world at the moment of death. This means truly recognizing the eternal core of the human being in terms of its pre-birth existence and its immortality. In contrast, modern philosophy works only with ideas drawn from ordinary consciousness. But what does that mean: ideas drawn from ordinary consciousness? Well, we can see from what has been said: these are dead soul entities.

[ 15 ] If, then, this philosophy—which works with the ideas of ordinary consciousness—wishes to correctly examine the thinking part of the soul in order to arrive at conclusions, it will, if it is open-minded enough, say to itself—simply by examining what is present in the thinking and imagining of ordinary consciousness—: This does not explain its existence from within itself—just as one must say of a corpse: It cannot have arisen from a corpse; it must have arisen from something else. —Physiology points this out through observation. Philosophy should draw the following conclusion from what is present here through intuition: Precisely because ordinary thinking and imagination have a moribund character, I may infer from them the existence of something preceding them. — What inspiration through intuition fathoms, philosophy can discover through logical inferences, through dialectic—that is, in an indirect, demonstrative manner.

[ 16 ] What, then, must a philosophy do that wishes to remain within ordinary consciousness? It must say: If I do not wish to rise to some form of supersensory knowledge, I must at least analyze what is present in ordinary consciousness. — And if it does so impartially, it will find that the thinking and imagining of ordinary consciousness have something cadaverous about them. It would therefore have to say: Because this is something that does not explain its essence from within itself, I may conclude that the true essence of the matter precedes it. — This, however, requires a certain impartiality in the analysis of the soul—an impartiality that recognizes that thinking and imagination have something cadaverous about them. But this impartiality is possible. For only a biased mind perceives something living in thinking as it is given to ordinary consciousness. Impartiality reveals this thinking as something that has died within itself. That is why I also said in the previous lecture: It is quite possible to incorporate the content of natural science into this dead thinking. — That is on the one hand.

[ 17 ] Intellectualist philosophy can therefore only arrive at an understanding of the eternal essence of the human being indirectly, and indeed only through an understanding of that which must be regarded as preceding earthly life. If such a philosophy then does not focus solely on thinking—if it does not seek to be merely intellectualistic, but also addresses an inner experience of willing, and indeed of the other soul forces that, within the context of the world, are younger than thinking—then such a philosophy can form a conception of the interplay between thinking and willing. It then arrives, on the one hand, at the logical conclusion regarding the connection between fading thought and the pre-earthly existence of the soul—which it cannot perceive, whose essence it cannot recognize, but which it can infer as something that exists in the unknown. And when it turns its attention to volition or to the emotional faculties and experiences the interplay between thinking and the emotional faculties, it will come to recognize not only a fading element but also an embryonic one within volition. You can even find this in Bergson, if you only express it impartially in the appropriate words. In the way he speaks, in the way he philosophizes, one can sense in him the impulse that he himself feels, and through this feeling he immerses himself in the realization of an eternal core of the human soul. But since Bergson refuses to arrive at a supersensible realization, he reaches only a realization of the core of human being insofar as it reveals itself in earthly life; and he cannot actually derive conclusive proofs of pre-existence and immortality from his philosophy. Yet on the one hand, he characterizes what has become old as thought—even if he calls it by another name—and as something corpse-like lying over sensory perceptions. On the other hand, through the vivid way in which he characterizes it—the embryonic aspect of the will, into which he can vividly immerse himself and in which one senses that there is something eternal within—he does, however, arrive only at a characterization of the spiritual-soul core of the human being in earthly life, and no further.

[ 18 ] Thus, one can say: Any philosophy of ideas based solely on ordinary consciousness, if it is unbiased, can—through an analysis of thought and will—reach only an indirect conclusion that the soul is an unborn and immortal being, but not a direct intuition of this fact. This direct insight—that is, the fulfillment of the philosophy of ideas, the insight into the true, eternal essence of the soul—can only be attained through imagination, inspiration, and intuition, as described here. Therefore, any genuine insight into the eternal nature of the human soul—even if it appears in philosophy today—will still be drawn traditionally from older, dreamlike insights, even though philosophers are often unaware of this and believe they are deriving it from within themselves. This insight may be permeated by dialectic and logic. But a true renewal of philosophical life depends on the spiritual life of the present recognizing fully conscious imagination, fully conscious inspiration, and fully conscious intuition—and not only recognizing these methods of knowledge but also genuinely applying their results to philosophical life. I will attempt to explain what this means for cosmology and religion in the next two parts of this discussion.

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[ 19 ] If you consider that it is only through higher inspiration that one can gain insight into the eternal essence of the human being—as this essence exists in extraterrestrial existence—then you will say to yourself: It is only through this higher inspiration—and, bearing in mind what I have said about intuition—only through intuition that human beings can truly come to know themselves. — Thus, they can recognize what flows from the cosmos into their own being only through higher inspiration and through intuition. If a person truly comes to know that into which the cosmos flows—namely, themselves—only through inspiration and intuition, then a true cosmology—that is, a picture of the cosmos that encompasses the human being in their total essence—can arise only within inspired and intuitive knowledge. Only in this way does the human being gain an insight into what is at work within his physical and etheric organisms even during his earthly existence.

[ 20 ] In this physical and etheric organism, the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being is not only hidden, but is actually transformed—metamorphosed—during earthly existence for the purposes of waking daily life. Just as the root cannot reflect a plant in its true form, so too can an examination of the physical and etheric organisms not provide an insight into the eternal essence of the human being. This can only be gained by looking into what lies beyond the human being before birth and after death. Only then, however, can one relate the true essence of the human being—which must be observed outside of earthly existence—to a cosmos. For this reason, modern spiritual life—during the period in which it rejected any form of clairvoyance—had no possibility whatsoever of arriving at a cosmology that encompasses the human being, as I have already indicated, but as must be particularly evident from what I have described today. Nevertheless, in earlier times—even at the beginning of the last century, but especially at the end of the 18th century—philosophers developed what was called a “rational cosmology” as a branch of philosophy.

[ 21 ] This rational cosmology, which was intended to be a part of philosophy, was developed by philosophers solely with the aid of ordinary consciousness. But if even ordinary philosophy encountered the difficulties just described in penetrating to the true essence of the soul, then one will understand that it is entirely impossible to arrive at a genuine content for a cosmology that includes human beings if one wishes to remain confined to the ideas of ordinary consciousness. Rational cosmology, as developed by philosophers until quite recently, therefore drew its substance, in truth, from the cosmological ideas received through tradition—ideas that had been gained by humanity when a dreamlike form of clairvoyance still existed—and which can only be renewed through what is described here as exact clairvoyance. In this field, too, the philosophers were unaware that they were in fact borrowing from ancient cosmology. They arrived at certain ideas; they drew these from the history of cosmology and believed they had produced these ideas on their own. But what they produced were merely logical connections through which they pieced together the old ideas and, for example, devised a new system. Thus, such cosmologies arose in earlier times as part of philosophy; but since people no longer had a living relationship to what they absorbed as ideas—what they had taken over from ancient clairvoyance—the ideas of cosmology became increasingly abstract.

[ 22 ] One need only look at the philosophical books of earlier times, in the chapters that discuss cosmology, to see how abstract and, in essence, empty these ideas are—the ones developed there about the origin of the world, the end of the world, and so on. One might say that these ideas have been borrowed. In ancient times, these ideas were alive because human beings had a living relationship with what these ideas expressed. Gradually, these ideas became thin and abstract, and people came to characterize only in a superficial way what a cosmology should contain—one that does not merely address the external order of nature, but one that can encompass the human being in his or her entirety and addresses the spiritual and soul aspects of the cosmos. In this regard, the extraordinarily insightful Emile Boutroux has provided significant descriptions of how to arrive at a cosmology. However, since he, too, wishes to build only upon what ordinary consciousness can grasp, he, too, arrived only at an abstract cosmology.

[ 23 ] Thus, cosmologies became increasingly devoid of real substance, turning into a collection of abstract ideas and characteristics. It is therefore no wonder that this rational cosmology has gradually fallen into disrepute. Then came the natural scientists, who were able to explore nature in such a way that it marked a triumph of the natural sciences, as has happened in more recent times. They can formulate laws of nature, establish an inner regularity of nature through observation and experiment, and construct a naturalistic cosmology from this. What was thus compiled from ideas about external nature as a naturalistic cosmology did indeed have content—external, sensory content. The content-less rational cosmology constructed by philosophers could not compete with this. It therefore fell into disrepute; it was gradually abandoned, and consequently one no longer speaks of a rational—that is, purely logically deduced—cosmology, but is now content with a naturalistic cosmology, which, however, does not encompass human beings.

[ 24 ] Thus, one might say: Cosmology, even more so than ordinary philosophy, teaches us how we must once again take refuge in imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Philosophy can at least observe the human soul, and through an unbiased observation of thought—which, as it fades away, points to something else—it finds that there is something beyond the entirety of human existence that encompasses human beings from within; and in the same way, it can point beyond death. Thus, philosophy can at least enrich and diversify its abstractions through conclusions drawn from the rich inner life of thought, feeling, and will. That is still possible. Cosmology, as a spiritual science, can only be founded if it is given content derived from spiritual intuition. One can no longer even infer such content. If one wishes to have content, one must borrow it from the old clairvoyant insights, as it was found in the traditionally inherited ideas, or one must arrive at it anew in the manner described.

[ 25 ] While philosophy is still capable of following the logical path, cosmology is no longer able to do so. Consequently, as a rational cosmology that could rely only on ordinary consciousness, it has gradually lost its substance and, with it, its credibility. And if we wish to move beyond naturalistic cosmology to a new cosmology that encompasses the human being in his or her totality, we must be willing to look, through inspiration and intuition, at that aspect of the human being in which the spiritual cosmos is reflected. In other words: Even more than philosophy, cosmology depends on the new spiritual life recognizing the methods of fully conscious imagination, inspiration, and intuition—and not only recognizing these methods, but also applying the results of these methods to a genuine cosmology.

[ 26 ] What can be said about religion from this perspective will be discussed in the final section.

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[ 27 ] For religious life to have a foundation in knowledge, it is necessary that the experiences the spiritual human being can have with spiritual beings be brought into earthly life and described within it. In these experiences, one is dealing with something that is completely unlike earthly life, entirely different from it. One is dealing with something in which the human being actually stands only outside of earthly life, something that can therefore be grasped only with those human faculties that are entirely independent of the physical and etheric human organism—faculties that certainly cannot lie within ordinary consciousness. Only when this ordinary consciousness rises to clairvoyant abilities can it formulate descriptions of the experiences that a person has in the purely spiritual world. Therefore, “rational theology”—a theology that seeks to rely solely on ordinary consciousness—is in an even worse position than “rational cosmology.”

[ 28 ] Rational cosmology does, after all, still have something that at least sheds some light on human existence on Earth, since—albeit indirectly, through a roundabout way—even the physical and etheric human beings are influenced in their form and in their lives by spiritual beings. However, the experiences that human beings have in purely spiritual worlds—and which can be perceived through precise intuition—cannot be deduced in any way from ordinary consciousness, as is the case in philosophy. Nor can they even be surmised; rather, today—when there is a tendency to derive all human knowledge from ordinary consciousness—they can be understood in an even clearer way than is the case with cosmological ideas, only be inherited traditionally from those times when people, through dreamlike clairvoyance, immersed themselves in the spiritual worlds and brought back into this earthly world what they had experienced there.

[ 29 ] If anyone imagines that he can somehow, based solely on ideas constructed from ordinary consciousness, say anything about the essence of what a human being experiences in the world of God, he is greatly mistaken. Consequently, theology has increasingly come to take the form of a kind of historical theology, and in doing so has, even more so than cosmology, merely incorporated the old ideas about the Kingdom of God that were acquired through clairvoyance in earlier times. These ideas are then organized into a system through logic and dialectics. People then believe they have something fundamentally original in it, but it is, after all, merely a systematic framework belonging to those who have developed this theology. It is a historical product, sometimes cast into new forms. But all that exists in terms of real content—for those who wish to draw solely from ordinary consciousness—is precisely that which is borrowed from tradition and history. Consequently, however, what individual philosophers in earlier times developed as a rational cosmology—and also sought to develop as rational theology—has fallen even further into disrepute. There, rational cosmology has fallen into disrepute in comparison with naturalistic cosmology; here, in the religious sphere, rational theology has fallen into disrepute in comparison with what has emerged as purely historical theology, which has renounced pure reality—that is, the direct generation of ideas about the spiritual world arising from an experience of the spiritual world.

[ 30 ] This direct connection, these living relationships with the experiences in the spiritual world, had in fact already faded away for modern humanity by the time the proofs of God emerged in the Middle Ages. As long as a direct connection to what was experienced in the Kingdom of God existed, there was no talk of dialectical or logical proofs of God. The proofs of God themselves are evidence that, by the time they emerged, the living connection to the Kingdom of God had died out. Essentially, scholastic theology was correct in stating: Ordinary reason is incapable of saying anything about the Kingdom of God; it can only clarify the ideas that already exist and organize them into a system. It can only contribute to shaping the doctrine into a form acceptable to human beings.

[ 31 ] In more recent times, we can observe how this inability of ordinary consciousness to grasp the Kingdom of God has given rise to two forms of error. On the one hand, there are the scholars who wish to speak about religion and about God, but who, sensing the inability of ordinary consciousness to grasp the Kingdom of God, end up merely establishing a history of religion. Religious content cannot be brought forth in the immediate present in this way. Therefore, one views existing religions or past religions from a historical perspective. What, exactly, is one observing there? One observes what once existed as religious content through the old, dreamlike, intuitive clairvoyance. Or one observes what remains of religious life in the present that has been preserved as a remnant of the old, dreamlike, clairvoyant state. This is referred to as the history of religion, and one completely refrains from bringing forth a religious life of one’s own.

[ 32 ] Others, however, realize that this ordinary consciousness—this clear, everyday consciousness in human beings—is ultimately powerless to say anything about the experiences in the purely spiritual Kingdom of God. Therefore, people turn to the more subconscious regions of the human soul—to the world of feelings, to certain mystical abilities—and speak of a direct, elemental experience of God. It is, after all, very common today to speak of a direct, elemental experience of God. Indeed, it is precisely the proponents of this elemental experience of God who are particularly characteristic of the current state of the human spirit. They avoid at all costs the possibility of translating their consciousness of God into clear, logically structured ideas. They go to great lengths to explain that this very elementary experience of God—which, in their opinion, constitutes true religion—cannot be expressed through logical proofs, and that one must refrain from expressing religious content in intellectual forms. Yet such advocates of an elementary awareness of God are merely indulging in illusions, for what is experienced somewhere in a region of the soul can indeed be expressed in clear ideas. And if, following the example of these people, one posits the theory that religious content is lost when it is translated into clear ideas, one thereby demonstrates that one has devoted oneself not to a real, but only to an imagined set of ideas. It is particularly characteristic of the present day, with regard to religious life, that people appeal to something which, if it is to be brought to clarity, actually falls into error.

[ 33 ] This makes it particularly clear that we can only renew the epistemological foundation of religious life if we do not reject a method of knowledge that can lead us into a living perception of the experiences of the spiritual human being and of spiritual beings. It is precisely for the epistemological foundation of religion that we need this method of knowledge most of all. For in the case of religion, ordinary consciousness can at most systematize or clarify insights, or give them doctrinal form; it cannot discover them. Otherwise, religion must limit itself to the mere traditional acceptance of what emerged from entirely different states of the human soul in earlier times. It would thus have to confine itself to what would never satisfy a consciousness trained in modern science.

[ 34 ] Therefore, in order to establish the epistemological foundation of religion, a proposition must be stated—one that I have already stated today in other contexts, but which must be stated quite specifically for each individual branch. I must now state it for the third time in order to establish the epistemological foundation of religion:

[ 35 ] If religious life is to be renewed and experience a vibrant revival based on the spiritual needs of the present, then contemporary spiritual life must fully acknowledge imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge—and, particularly in the religious sphere, it must not only acknowledge these findings of spiritual science but also apply them appropriately to the living substance of religion.