The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] From the observations we have made here, you know that humanity has entered the Age of Consciousness since the 15th century. And indeed, in today’s age, it is necessary for anyone who truly wishes to witness the development of humanity to gain insight into certain matters. Otherwise, they will no longer be able to navigate their place within the broader social context of life today. In their interactions with other people, in the various relationships that arise in life—but especially in their interactions with those of different ages, as an older person with young people, or as a younger person with the elderly—they experience things that remain incomprehensible unless they can engage with what spiritual scientific knowledge can contribute to an understanding of all that is human on this earth.

[ 2 ] Today, let us take a closer look at a fact in human life that has long been known to us: the fact that it is only in the waking state that a human being has a direct connection to his four members—the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego—in direct connection; whereas, as a sleeping human being, on the one hand, the physical body is more closely connected to the etheric body, and on the other hand, the ego and the astral body are separated from both.

[ 3 ] When we look at a person from the outside, we do indeed encounter them in their physical body, in which the etheric body manifests itself. One can indeed say “manifests,” for everything through which a human being reveals themselves to another does not occur merely through the physical body, but through the activity of the etheric body—or body of formative forces—within the physical body. It is therefore actually what lives in the physical and etheric bodies that seeks to reveal itself directly to another human being on Earth. But what is contained in the depths of the “I” and what lives in the astral body eludes external observation; for the human being themselves, it enters an indeterminate darkness between falling asleep and waking up. To the external observer, this is veiled by what is manifested through the physical and etheric bodies.

[ 4 ] This separation of his being—which a person experiences at least once a day in ordinary life—is of profound significance for his entire life. That which manifests as the physical body and the etheric body—as we see it, when viewed through the external senses and the external intellect—undergoes a process of development from birth to death.

[ 5 ] From what first manifests itself in the child through instinctive life and childlike imitation, and later through the life that develops under the authority of adults—from this, the human being then evolves toward a more independent life. We thus see the most diverse stages with regard to growth, with regard to the external form of the physical body, and with regard to what comes to life in language and thought—that is, in what is indeed expressed through the physical body but nevertheless belongs more to the manifestations of the soul; we see there a development from birth to death.

[ 6 ] That other development—which also exists—manifests itself in a different way: the development of the “I” and the astral body between birth and death. With regard to the “I” and the astral body, the situation is this: when a human being first enters earthly life from the spiritual world, many of the forces that were active within them in the spiritual world are still at work within them. During the stage of childhood growth—in the formation of what develops so clearly in the child’s physical form—those forces continue to exert their influence everywhere; forces that, in their full significance and true form, act upon the soul, through the soul, and in the spirit of the human being during pre-earthly life. They are present in a weakened form during childhood, but they are at work in the process of growth and are present in everything that gradually develops in the human being as the physical expression of the soul. And the physical expression of the soul is, after all, that which is deeply hidden within the physical body: for example, the development of the brain into a fully formed organ of thought, the development of the circulatory system, which underlies the development of feeling, and so on.

[ 7 ] But what acts within a person as echoes of the forces of pre-earthly life grows weaker and weaker, and reaches a certain low point at which the person then remains stagnant for the rest of their life with regard to their pre-earthly forces. This low point, however, does not occur until a person’s twenties, but once it is reached, it is a fact. At that point, the human soul begins to draw more upon the forces that arise from the developed physical body; the human being is then no longer so devoted to what acts as an echo of pre-earthly life, but is instead more devoted to everything that the physical body has acquired and that, in turn, radiates back from this physical body into the soul.

[ 8 ] Now, however, if one were to observe this development of the “I” and the astral body just as clearly, one would arrive at insights into this development that are just as concrete as the insights one gains into the development of the physical and etheric bodies from birth to death. One would say: In childhood, a human being has an astral body that looks a certain way, an “I” that looks a certain way, and then changes these over the course of their earthly life. — One must then, however, consider how that which the human being draws out of their physical and etheric bodies as their actual spiritual-soul aspect during the sleeping state undergoes transformation. If, alongside the observation directed at the human being during the period from waking to falling asleep, one were to add the observation directed at the “I” and the astral body—always from falling asleep to waking—one would, so to speak, obtain two life histories of the human being. Both life histories are equally important for the whole of life; indeed, for certain total forces of the human being, the development of life during sleep is even more important than that during wakefulness; but for the ordinary observer, the observation of the “I” and the astral body simply cannot be carried out.

[ 9 ] Today we would like to highlight a particularly important moment in this development of the ego and the astral body. This moment is marked by the special role that speech—language, not this or that specific language, but language in general—plays in human life.

[ 10 ] Certainly, the whole human being—the entire waking human being—is involved when we speak. The physical body is involved in the vibration of our vocal cords and in the activity of the entire speech apparatus; the etheric body is involved, as are the astral body and the “I.” But relatively speaking, the physical body and the “I” are actually the least involved in the entire process of speech. The etheric body and the astral body are most deeply involved in speech.

[ 11 ] It may come as a surprise that the etheric body is more involved in speech than the physical body; but it must be said that human beings cannot observe what takes place in the etheric body with their ordinary senses, that conventional science tells them nothing about it, and that, therefore, people usually focus only on what the physical body does during speech, while the much more varied and formative activity of the etheric body during speech—which then continues into the astral body—is not taken into account in ordinary sensory perception. Above all, however, if one wishes to understand the role of speech in life, it is essential to recognize what takes place in the etheric body and the astral body during speech.

[ 12 ] But consider this: Since speech primarily involves the etheric body and the astral body, it has two aspects. First, there is the aspect through which the etheric body, in conjunction with the physical body, produces the outwardly perceptible, audible speech. But as we speak, something always flows back into our soul as well. We feel what has been spoken within ourselves; we experience it along with what is spoken. While others, in order to perceive our inner life, must rely on the physical sound to gain access to it, we ourselves, as the speaker, experience in an inner way within our astral body what we put into our speech. But because we withdraw the astral body from our physical and etheric bodies during sleep, we also carry something from speech with us—something important—into the sleeping state.

[ 13 ] Yes, it is indeed true: What we pour into our words from morning until evening—drawn from our innermost being—continues to vibrate and resonate from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. This remains unconscious to us, but I would like to say: Everything spoken during the day continues to vibrate—albeit in reverse order—while we are asleep. It is not that the words actually resound backward exactly as they sound through our mouths during the day, but rather it is the rising and falling emotions inherent in the words, the impulses of will that have flowed into them, and the expressions of cheerfulness, sadness, joy, and pain that are revealed in the tonal quality of speech.

[ 14 ] But all of this does not merely linger in sleep as some vague state; rather, it lingers in such a way that what the soul experiences actually resounds, right down to the sequence of sounds, in that unconscious state which a person undergoes—from falling asleep to waking up—with ordinary consciousness.

[ 15 ] Now, up until the age of seven, what lingers in the sleeping child’s soul from the moment of falling asleep until waking up depends to an extraordinary degree on the child’s human environment. What the father and mother—and the rest of the human environment—express as emotional, volitional, and intellectual life through the words the child hears resonates within the child’s soul from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, and this child’s soul is entirely devoted to what is poured into those words from the heart and soul of the human environment. Feelings that the child experiences through the language of adults become much more deeply connected; feelings, impulses of will, and thoughts become much more deeply connected with the sounds. The child is, in fact, completely devoted to everything it experiences in its environment.

[ 16 ] This is less true in the second stage of human life, from the age of seven to fourteen; yet it is still very much the case. But with sexual maturity, at the age of fourteen, something quite special begins: what lives on from language in the sleeping soul is transformed by its own essence in such a way that it seeks to enter into a relationship with the spiritual world.

[ 17 ] So this is something highly peculiar. One might say: Up to the age of seven, the child still seeks to communicate—even in sleep—with what it hears from the people around it; in a certain sense, this continues from the age of seven to fourteen as well, except that from seven to fourteen it focuses more on the actual inner life of those around it, whereas up to the age of seven it focuses more on the outward aspects of life. But after the age of fourteen, following the onset of sexual life, the need arises for the sleeping soul to communicate with beings of the spiritual world through what lives on in sleep as an echo of speech. As I said, it is very remarkable. People are not aware of this in their ordinary lives, but during sleep the necessity arises for the soul life to allow the linguistic aspects of earthly life to resonate in such a way that the world of the archangels, the world of the Archangeloi, can take pleasure in this resonating linguistic life.

[ 18 ] One might well say: The need arises for human beings to communicate with the world of the archangels through that linguistic element which remains with them in the sleeping state as an echo of the outer earthly language. There, the words of the day resonate in a remarkable way: internally, the vowel sounds deepen, while the consonant sounds take on the concreteness of moving forms—this is what is experienced. And the sleeping souls would feel unhappy if what resonates there were not a language that now sounds similar to what resounds from the language of the archangels from the other side. There can be a harmony between what resonates into sleep as the echo of language and what, from all sides of the universe, causes the world of the archangels to resound in their language from the astral realm.

[ 19 ] Human beings develop in their ego and astral body in such a way that, from about the age of fourteen onward, between falling asleep and waking up—if I may put it that way—they must interact with angels and archangels, and during this interaction they are dependent on communicating with angels and archangels. This is a profound mystery of human life.

[ 20 ] Now, it is a peculiarity of our age that there are more and more people who, while asleep, do not attain such understanding; who, so to speak, carry something of language with them into sleep, which shapes these human souls in such a way that they do not understand the language of the archangels, and that the archangels take no pleasure in what echoes from that language into their sleeping lives.

[ 21 ] We have now entered an age—one must express these things in earthly terms, though they are naturally difficult to convey in earthly language—in which the beings of the spiritual world can no longer truly communicate with sleeping human souls, where misunderstandings constantly arise between what the beings of the spiritual hierarchies say, and what human souls say when they are asleep. Discrepancies and disharmonies have arisen.

[ 22 ] This is the aspect that presents itself from the other side of life in our age. A tormenting state of misunderstanding—of not understanding one another at all—has set in during our time, creating a state of slumber between human souls and spiritual beings. And for anyone who is aware of this “reality of spiritual life” today, the question must be a pressing one: Where does this state come from?

[ 23 ] Now, the words we draw from the realm of language—into which we immerse ourselves—can, as we learn them in childhood, develop in such a way that these words are directed solely toward the physical world. This has indeed become more and more the case in this materialistic age. People have words, but these words express only something physical. Consider how it was in earlier ages: People immersed themselves so deeply in language that they had many words whose content carried them up into spiritual, ideal worlds. It must be said that true idealism has grown weak in our age. Precisely among those who absorb our present-day intellectualistic education, this idealism has become extraordinarily weak.

[ 24 ] There is, after all, a big difference between whether or not a person has embodied ideals in the language they grow up with. Today we see that people who are supposed to be studying still have a feel for those words that refer to—if I may put it this way—outwardly crude, material, concrete things, but that they immediately stop thinking, that the threads of their thoughts snap, when they are supposed to rise to a level of thinking in which they must have pure thoughts that reflect something spiritual. It is precisely those educated in accordance with the spirit of our age who are most prone to having their train of thought break when they are asked to take in, let us say, idealistic, significant ideas of pure thought. There, words become mere appearances to them. Indeed, it is true that in our age, children grow accustomed to a language whose words lack the wings to carry them beyond earthly life.

[ 25 ] In early childhood, up to the age of seven, a person is still able—even in a sleeping state—to experience something spiritual through the echoes of language, provided they are immersed in a human environment. If this environment, out of materialism, denies the spiritual, then it denies itself, for it is soul and spirit. Thus, even in sleep, a person still possesses something spiritual.

[ 26 ] He also experiences it during his second stage of life, from the age of seven to fourteen. But if the words a person takes in no longer contain any idealistic-spiritual meaning—as is the case in this materialistic age, in which even religious concepts have essentially lost their powerful spiritual influence on human souls—then, after the age of fourteen, with the onset of puberty, the person grows into a soul life that binds them to the physical realm while they are asleep. The soul cannot detach itself from the physical realm between falling asleep and waking up. It is the words—the resonance of the words—that compel and bind it to the physical. And vibrating into what a person experiences between falling asleep and waking up is the clamor of the mineral world from all sides; the clamor of the plant world in its physical sense also vibrates into it. This penetrates the resonance of speech between falling asleep and waking up with a discordant tone, and thus the soul cannot develop what the genius of language otherwise infuses into speech—and what can bring about understanding between the human soul and the beings of the higher hierarchies.

[ 27 ] And then that peculiar state sets in, in which the soul experiences something—it cannot put it into words because it does not experience it in a conscious state, but it is there—in which the soul experiences something that can be characterized, for example, in the following way: After reaching sexual maturity, a person enters the spiritual world while asleep. The world of the archangels opens up before them. They sense this world of the archangels. However, no threads of thought extend from the world of the archangels into their soul, nor from their soul to the world of the archangels. And it is with this terrible deficiency that they return to their physical body upon waking.

[ 28 ] This state has, in fact, prevailed for a large part of humanity since the last third of the 19th century. And in the unconscious—beyond what is conscious to human beings—there lies within many souls today something that awakens them to the point where they unconsciously say to themselves: We were born into a world that does not allow us to enter spiritual existence in the proper way while asleep. — And such souls who experience this state would then like to say: We were taken in as children by a human world that, in its words, denied us the spiritual. — But all of this lives on in the feelings that young people today often direct toward their elders. This is the spiritual aspect of the feelings that arise through the youth movement.

[ 29 ] What does the young person today want in relation to the older generation? He cannot put it into words, because his consciousness is held back rather than opened up by what he receives as a legacy during his education—by the older generation. They cannot put it into words, but they sense it; they feel it in the most indefinable darkness of their inner spiritual life: As a child, I must find my way into what is handed down to me by the older generations. These older generations must also educate me, but they deny me the opportunity to communicate with the spiritual world where it is necessary. — To the same extent that materialism continues to develop in all areas of life—in the realm of knowledge, in the artistic realm, in the religious realm—to that same extent, at the same time, youth and old age will be unable to understand one another, because youth feels they must feel toward the older generation that it has denied them the idealism of language—the meaning in words that points toward a spiritual life. The materialism of civilization divides youth and the older generation. And the true source of the lack of understanding between youth and old age lies in what, through language’s corruption by materialism, brings about an unhealthy state of the young person’s dormant spiritual life.

[ 30 ] Certain aspects of civilization today simply cannot be understood unless one is able to address the spiritual side of life; for we live in the Age of Consciousness, and in this age one must become aware of what shapes human beings and enables them to develop in the spiritual realm. And understanding between the young and the old will only be possible again when our human languages once more become such that words are given wings—those wings they have lost—through which the word rises from the realm of the crudely material and concrete into the experience of ideals.

[ 31 ] In 1859, the people of Central Europe celebrated Schiller’s memory. But at the same time, in a certain sense, it was precisely the year of the death of true idealism. And furthermore, what young people experience in Schiller today—and what they often despise precisely because they do not experience the true Schiller—is merely an outward torrent and frenzy of words; it is not what truly lived within Schiller, because the words no longer possess those wings they had in Schiller’s time, wings that carried them out into the realm of ideals. And if we present Schiller to young people using today’s philistine, prosaic interpretations of his words, this becomes more of a burden on the soul than a liberation of the spiritual life.

[ 32 ] Nor can one restore to the soul, in any external way, what it is meant to have—not even through the nebulous so-called idealisms, which are merely illusory idealisms and which arise here and there out of the materialism of our time, albeit with good intentions but, at their core, based on false thinking. One can give the soul what it is meant to have only by restoring its dynamic power through a genuine spiritual understanding of language, so that it can once again lead to the genius of language.

[ 33 ] As language stands today, it is actually regarded more or less solely as a means of communication on the physical plane; with regard to declamation and recitation, we have even seen a trend toward emphasizing the prose content. That which leads language toward imagery, rhythm, meter, and melodious drama—that which thus leads back into the soul, and from the soul, through the musical and imaginative, ascends into the spiritual world—we have witnessed how this has been cast aside, thereby, I might say, making yet another concession to the materialism of language.

[ 34 ] Language, as it exists today among all civilized peoples, binds the soul—from the moment it falls asleep until it awakens—to the purely physical murmurs of the mineral world, to the hissing and whispering of the purely physical content of the plant world, and does not open up to the soul, as it prepares for sleep, the luminous language of the angels, nor the loud, trumpet-like language of the world of the Archangels with its cosmic, profound meaning.

[ 35 ] Actually, today, from the age of sexual maturity onward, a person should naturally acquire something from language that prepares his brain during waking life in such a way that, in ordinary physical life, he can use words to understand the conceptual content of things. Because the language of the archangels can speak to their soul from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up, they should bring with them that which enables their blood circulation to at least sense the spiritual depths of world events. And if they are unable to absorb spiritual insight today—if our school education lacks spiritual depth—they bring into their blood instead the scraping and grinding sounds, the rolling and sweeping sounds of the physical mineral world; they bring in the hissing, murmuring, striking, and dripping-tapping sounds of the physical part of the plant world.

[ 36 ] As a result, he is compelled to contrast this brain—which has been whipped into a state of mere mineral-like disharmony by sleep— and the circulatory process, permeated by the characteristic hissing and murmuring, to the conventional linguistic realm—and, in fact, to live solely within the earthly sphere through language, whereas otherwise language could carry him beyond mere earthly experience into a higher experience.

[ 37 ] How could people who have gone through today’s materialistic education still utter from the depths of their souls the words: “My immeasurable realm is thought, and my winged instrument is the word”? — For people of today’s educational system, thought is not an immeasurable realm, but rather the most immediate realm, which essentially encompasses only the physical, sensory things one has directly observed in one’s sensory environment. And the word is not a winged instrument, but a tool through which we stammer an indefinite inner life from mouth to ear—yet in such a way that there is little spiritual or supersensory meaning in this stammering. And while language, through a spiritual worldview, could be a sea of the soul into which a person’s inner being is immersed and which would carry the human soul higher and higher, it becomes precisely that which binds a person to the earth, that which binds him to the most earthly and limited circumstances.

[ 38 ] But this is also playing out today in the fate of the entire human race. We see how modern civilization is based on the distinctions between people that are reflected in the languages spoken across the earth. People want to create new cultural divisions based on language. But from what language has become, it is readily apparent that these cultural divisions, these cultural ideas, exist only in the purely material realm; that they form, as it were, a blanket to be spread over the peoples of the earth as the substance of civilization, in order to seal off these peoples from the spiritual world. And we see this most material walling off of human soul life, directed upward, at work everywhere today. This is what carries the materialism of attitude, the materialism of thought and feeling, into outer human life as well. This is what gradually causes people to forget that, within the human race, they live within something that is ordained from the spheres; yet when people are divided into nations, peoples, and so on, this increasingly instills in them the belief—a blind belief—that they must remain within something purely materialistic.

[ 39 ] And so we see that into earthly life as a whole—as the life of civilization and culture—there is entering that element which, as inner materialism, has taken hold of intellectual life, artistic life, and religious life. Today we can see quite clearly in the national entities emerging on Earth how it is no longer—as it once was—that which intervenes in earthly life from the vastness of the universe, shaping it creatively, but rather that which grows out of the depths of the Earth itself. We are literally seeing more and more how human beings, even within the whole of a nation, are becoming fused with the purely material aspects of earthly existence.

[ 40 ] If one were to decide to focus one’s attention on what, in many ways, sounds quite paradoxical in today’s age: that human beings also have a life history for their “I” and for their astral body, which in its individual phases always unfolds from falling asleep to waking up, just as outer physical life in its development from birth to death unfolds from waking up to falling asleep—then one would see where much of what exists in our present-day civilization comes from, and about which one must say: Things cannot go on like this! — But if one stops at the mere outward aspects of sensory observation, one will fail to see precisely the most important, indeed the very most important, of what must be done to transform today’s decline into an ascent toward the future.

[ 41 ] If one truly wishes to view life today in such a way that human beings can make use of this perspective—that this perspective can also become practical for everyday life—then one must enter into a spiritual understanding of human life, and for that one needs the spiritual-scientific perspective.

[ 42 ] And this spiritual-scientific perspective must therefore permeate the entire educational process in such a way that the child, just as it today absorbs a vocabulary whose individual words have all been stripped of their wings, now, by taking in the spirit and being guided by it, takes in along with that vocabulary that which carries it up into the spiritual worlds, where human beings, after all, originate in their true essence. With our physical life, we can deny the spirit. With our spiritual part, which must shed the physical and etheric bodies between falling asleep and waking up, we cannot deny the Spirit. And if we deny this spirit from the physical side, then we wake up every day in such a way that, as adults, we no longer understand life, and this misunderstanding—this failure to understand life—infiltrates all our thinking, feeling, and willing. And the coming generation grows up in such a way that it must view the legacy handed down to it by its elders with resentment, because this legacy gives it something that plunges it into an abyss—where it cannot be materialistic, where it must become spiritual—when it is in its mere “I” and in its astral body.

[ 43 ] The ancient languages of humanity were languages whose other aspect could be brought into the spiritual world and could lead to communication with the spiritual beings with whom human beings must interact when they are free from the physical body. The further development of language to its present state has resulted in a situation where, when a person is to interact with spiritual beings, they are placed in a condition in which they must remain spiritually mute and deaf to the spiritual world, and can only take in that which pulls them down—that which lives in the physical realm of the mineral and plant kingdoms.

[ 44 ] Thus, in order to understand life today—if I may use this somewhat trite expression—one must look behind the scenes of that life. But this is possible only through true and genuine spiritual science.