The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today I would like to draw attention once again to the ideal that was associated with the building that misfortune has taken from us. I would like to do so so that, here as well, the right way of thinking may prevail regarding what is to be undertaken in the coming days as—I would say—a first step toward a new life in the Anthroposophical Society in Stuttgart. For whatever is to emerge from anthroposophy must, after all, rest on the secure foundation of human enthusiasm. And this human enthusiasm can only come to us by turning our gaze toward that ideal which should dwell in the heart of every anthroposophist and which is grand enough to hold the members of the Anthroposophical Society together in love. It cannot be denied that, while not the ideal of anthroposophical work itself, the enthusiasm for this ideal has waned somewhat during the three successive epochs of our anthroposophical development. And now, as we stand in mourning before the ruins of that building through which we were able to express this ideal in a language perceptible to the outside world, now it is all the more necessary that we come together in a shared sense of the anthroposophical ideal, so that from this shared feeling and the shared thinking that arises from it, a strong force may emerge—one that we very much need today, especially in the face of opposition that grows with each passing week. Therefore, allow me in this very lecture today not to speak about the continuation — at least not directly about the continuation — of what I have presented here in recent lectures and for weeks now, but rather to describe a little of what might serve as one of the important memories associated with our building and what might be suitable for reestablishing those relationships that are necessary among the individual members of the Anthroposophical Society. For it is in coming together around a shared ideal that the love must also be kindled which every individual anthroposophist should show toward one another, and which should preclude the possibility that anyone within the Anthroposophical Society might harbor even the slightest resentment toward another, even in thought.

[ 2 ] You may recall that when we were able to open the first university course at the Goetheanum, I emphasized in a brief introductory speech at the time how, in a new way, through what is realized by the people at the Goetheanum, a truly world-appropriate interplay of science, art, and religion is to be sought.

[ 3 ] What, then, should have grown forth at the Goetheanum—what should have grown forth through the language of its forms and colors—was a scientific, an artistic, and a religious ideal. Today we must engrave all the more deeply in our hearts that which can no longer speak to us through external forms and colors. And perhaps we can do so if, in the same way we have done for other considerations in recent weeks, we ask how the scientific, artistic, and religious ideals have been pursued in the successive epochs of human development.

[ 4 ] When we look back at the magnificent, sublime spiritual life of the East, we come upon a specific point in time within that ancient Eastern spiritual life when, in a sense, the spiritual content of values presented itself to the Eastern peoples as a direct revelation. We come upon a time when people did not doubt at all that what they could see with their senses was merely the faint outer imprint of that which revealed itself to their earlier, albeit dreamlike, yet for them entirely real vision as the divine-spiritual.

[ 5 ] Perception, though instinctive and impulsive, was once such among humankind that, in certain special states of consciousness, people perceived the spiritual beings of the world in immediate reality, just as they perceived their fellow human beings through the physical body and the beings of the three physical kingdoms through physical corporeality. Just as certain as the existence of a fellow human being, so too was the existence of the divine-spiritual beings connected with humankind, based on direct perception, for the ancient Oriental.

[ 6 ] This gave him his inner religious certainty. And this inner religious certainty was none other than the certainty he possessed regarding the external phenomena of nature. With the same certainty with which he could believe in the existence of a stone, a plant, the clouds, and rivers, with that same certainty he could believe in the existence of his God, for he beheld this God. And what modern science calls animism—which presents the matter as if, in earlier times, people had projected things onto nature, imbuing them with living, spiritual qualities through their imagination—is simply childish; it is simply the dilettantish science of today. In truth, people saw the divine and spiritual just as they saw the sensory and natural.

[ 7 ] From this, as I have already said, sprang the certainty of their religious life; but from this also sprang what they needed for their art, for their artistic creation. The divine-spiritual had a concrete, immediate form for them. They knew what forms this divine-spiritual took; they knew in what colors the spiritual appears. They were able to express what appeared to them in the spiritual realm through the means of the sensory world, through the means of the physical world. They could take the building materials available to them—the tools of sculpture or other arts—and apply them with the techniques they were capable of, thereby expressing what was revealed to them in the spirit.

[ 8 ] When they arrived at inner worship—at an inner, human emotional relationship with their divine-spiritual beings—they experienced this as religion. When they expressed through external means, through physical means, what they beheld in the spirit, they experienced this as their art. But the thing about their art was that everything they could create with their artistic tools—their technical skills and the physical materials they had at their disposal to express what they envisioned in their minds—was insignificant compared to what they actually envisioned in their minds.

[ 9 ] We come to a point in ancient Eastern development where that which appeared to human beings as the divine-spiritual—that which, to use Goethe’s expression, appeared in a sensory-supersensory form—was of sublime, resplendent beauty and had a powerful effect on the mind, and had a powerful effect on the imagination; and because the techniques of external artistic expression had not yet been mastered, what appeared far more beautiful in the spirit was expressed, at best, in a clumsy symbolic or allegorical form. An artist of that ancient time might have said, had he wished to express his own artistic creation in terms of our sensibilities: “Beautiful is that which appears in the spirit, and only a faint reflection of it can be conveyed in what I can shape from clay, from wood, or from other artistic materials to express what appears in the spirit.”

[ 10 ] And an artist was, then, a person who perceived the spiritual in a beautiful way and revealed it through sensory representations to other people who could not perceive it directly, but who were convinced of it: When the artist presented to them, in his allegorical and symbolic form, what he had beheld in the spirit, they, too, were able—through the medium of this sensory expression—to find their way into a world that lies above the earthly one, into a world into which a person must transport themselves if they wish to feel their full human dignity. - And this connection, this relationship to the divine-spiritual, was so immediate—it was, if I may put it that way, so real and concrete—that people felt that when they thought, when they formed thoughts, these thoughts came from the gods, whom they could indeed see, who were present just like other human beings. And the people of ancient times said: When one speaks to human beings, they speak to you in words that resound in the air; when one speaks to the gods, they convey thoughts that are audible only within the human soul. Words that can be expressed through sounds are human words; words that can be expressed through thoughts are messages from the gods.

[ 11 ] And as human beings formed their thoughts, they did not believe that they were creating these thoughts inwardly with their souls; rather, they believed they were hearing what the divine-spiritual beings whispered to them as thoughts. When they heard with their ears, they said to themselves: “I hear people.” - When he listened with his soul, where what he heard existed only as thoughts, he said: “I hear divine-spiritual beings.” - And so, for these people of an ancient age, the knowledge that lived in ideas was a divine revelation. The language of the gods was the Logos spoken directly from the gods to humankind.

[ 12 ] So one can say: In the religious ideal, the vision of the gods found its full expression. In the artistic ideal, the re-creation of the divine through human means found its expression in a symbolic and allegorical manner. In the scientific ideal, human beings reproduced the language in which the gods spoke to them. These were the three ideals that converged into one in ancient Oriental times, for, in essence, these three ideals were one ideal.

[ 13 ] In this one ideal, humankind gazed upon divine revelation. Religion spread throughout the entire life of the human soul. Science and art were the two means through which the divine coexisted with humankind on earth. And the artist felt, as he created his work of art, that God guided his hand, or the poet felt that God shaped and molded his words. “Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus!” It is not the poet who speaks; the Muse speaks through the poet. And that was a truth. The abstract conception to which such things are attributed today—and which claims, for example, that it is merely a poetic disguise—belongs precisely to the grotesque childishness of contemporary views on such matters, which have no idea how true Goethe’s statement is: “What you call the spirit of the times is, in essence, the spirit of the masters themselves, in which the times are reflected.”

[ 14 ] And if we move from this Eastern triad of human ideals in religion, art, and science over to the Greeks—who then found a prosaic and meager echo in the Romans—we find these three ideals further developed. What had previously, I might say, revealed itself to humanity from the heights of radiant light as the divine-spiritual, the Greeks perceived as speaking through humanity itself. Religious life in Greek existence was closely bound to humanity. The person in Greece felt that which he himself was in form and inner life—pervaded and imbued with the divine. He no longer looked into the heights of radiant light, but into the wondrous structure of the human being himself. He thus no longer possessed that intense vision of the divine-spiritual that the Oriental had, but, I might say, a fainter shadow-image of the heavenly-spiritual. But anyone who can truly immerse themselves in Greek poetry, in Greek art, in Greek philosophy, can understand that for the Greeks this was, after all, a fundamental feeling through which they said to themselves: The human being who walks here on earth—who is not merely a convergence of what the eyes perceive in the external sensory world—is a witness to the existence of the divine-spiritual. And the human being who walks here on earth—who, for the Greeks, could not have been of earthly origin—is a direct testimony to the reign of Zeus, to the reign of Athena in spiritual worlds.

[ 15 ] The Greeks saw in the human form and in the inner development of human life the most sublime testimony to the divine-spiritual forces at work in the world. And so the Greeks humanized their gods, because they still perceived human beings themselves as divine.

[ 16 ] It is quite different when the Greek anthropomorphizes his gods than when, for example, modern man creates a mental image of his God-man in terms of a subordinate anthropomorphism. For the Greek, a testimony to the divine still lived within man. The Greeks could still say to themselves: If there were not something divine interweaving and surging through the world, human beings could not stand before me as they do. — Religion was integrated into the understanding of the human being. Human beings were revered in a manner appropriate to what they could not give themselves, yet as what they were in the world. Not everyday human activity, not vain human striving on earth, but that which was brought into earthly life through the human being—that was revered in a fitting manner. And this reverence for the human being extended to reverence for the divine-spiritual world. And the artistic ideal among the Greeks was such that, on the one hand, the Greek sensed his divine-spiritual nature, attested to by the existence of the human being on earth; on the other hand, he strongly sensed—unlike the Oriental—the laws of sensory-physical nature, the laws of harmony and disharmony, the laws of proportion, the laws of loading and bearing materials. And while the Oriental, I might say, was still unskilled in mastering the material—while he could express the spiritual forces overwhelming and overgrowing him only through allegory and symbolism—so that the spiritual, when expressed through some sensory form in a work of art in the ancient Oriental world, was always far more more powerful, and more majestic than what could be clumsily expressed in the sensory form, the Greeks strove to pour everything they could grasp in the spirit into that which they had already come to recognize in the sensory-physical world.

[ 17 ] For him, a column was not allowed to be any thicker than was necessary to provide the load-bearing capacity required for what rested upon it. Unlike in Oriental art, where the sensual expression of the spiritual was allowed to represent the physical-sensual laws in a clumsy manner, the physical-sensual laws had to be grasped in their perfection. The spirit had to, so to speak, enter into a marriage of equals with physical sensuality. There is as much spirit and as much physical-sensual regularity in a Greek temple as there is expressive power in the material—and as much spirituality revealed through that material—in a Greek statue. And so the verses of Homer flow in such a way that the flow of the language of the gods is immediately revealed in the flow of human language. As the poet shaped his words, he felt that everything must be mastered from what flows from the laws of language themselves; that nothing may remain clumsy, nothing may be stammering, as is still the case in Oriental hymn poetry, but that everything must find an expression adequate to the spirit: Complete mastery by man of the physical and sensory laws governing artistic materials, so that nothing of the spirit is revealed that does not appear in the sensory forms themselves.

[ 18 ] Just as the Greeks viewed human beings as a testament to the divine, so too must the artwork of the temple—the artwork of the statue—be a direct testament to the workings of the divine, albeit now arising from the human imagination. One could see from the temple that the one who built it had mastered all the laws of sensory-physical material, so that in every expression of this physical-sensory material he could reproduce what he had allowed to flow into himself—into his human being—through his communion with the gods.

[ 19 ] And the earliest Greek tragedies were such that the beings portrayed were in fact representations of the divine, of the Apollonian, of the Dionysian, and that the chorus surrounding them was a kind of resonance of nature, a kind of echo of divine-spiritual power. Using human beings as the appropriate material, tragedy sought to express what takes place in the worlds of the gods, but in such a way that—unlike in Eastern traditions—one does not always have to, I might say, have to look up with the spiritual eye into a higher region than that in which the sensory image is located, but rather that one could remain on the same level where the actors perform the tragedy, in order to perceive in every gesture, every word, and every recitative of the chorus something in which the divine continued to flow in a sensory manner appropriate to it. That was the artistic ideal of the Greeks.

[ 20 ] And what of the scientific ideal? No one felt as vividly as the Orientals that the gods spoke to them through ideas and thoughts. He had already sensed something of the fact that human beings must make an effort to form thoughts. But just as he perceived human beings themselves—who walked the earth—in their form and inner life as an immediate, living testimony to the divine, so he perceived thought as real as a sensory perception. Just as he directly perceived red or blue or the note C-sharp or the letter G, so he perceived his thoughts; he perceived them in the external world, just as the eyes and ears receive sensory perceptions. Consequently, he no longer knew the Logos with that same concreteness, in such concrete language, as the Easterners did; the Greeks no longer wrote the Vedas, which the Easterners felt the gods had implanted in their minds. The Greek knew that he had to work out his thoughts, just as one knows that one must look around with one’s eyes in order to perceive one’s surroundings through the senses. But the Greek still knew that these thoughts he worked out were the divine thoughts embedded in nature. And so, for him, thought was the earthly testimony to the divine language. While the Oriental still heard the divine language himself, the Greek already perceived the language as a human language, but he perceived it as the immediate testimony to the language of the gods, as it is attested to him here on earth.

[ 21 ] For the Greeks, science was thus something divinely and spiritually inspired, something in which one could still see that it had been sent to Earth from the divine and spiritual realm, just as human beings themselves, in their physical form and inner experience, are placed on Earth by the divine forces. We see how the religious, artistic, and scientific ideals have changed in the course of human development, from the ancient Oriental world to the Greek world.

[ 22 ] We have now once again reached a point—and the development of humanity in the civilized West, as I have often explained to you, has been approaching this point since the first third of the 15th century—where humanity is faced with the necessity of giving new form to the ancient, sacred ideals: the religious, the artistic, and the ideal of knowledge. That was what I wanted to express when we opened the first university course at our Goetheanum. I wanted to express that this Goetheanum stands here because it follows from the inner laws of human development itself that the religious, artistic, and cognitive ideals must take on new forms—even in contrast to the magnificent forms of ancient Greece.

[ 23 ] This is what fills one with such terrible melancholy when, today, one sees the ruins in place of that which, in form and color, in every line, in every wooden shape, sought to express how the three great ideals were to take new form from the very depths of humanity’s spiritual evolution. It is with nothing but melancholy, with the deepest sorrow, that one can look upon this site, which should have spoken so eloquently of the renewal of humanity’s three great ideals, and which now stands in ruins—stands in such a way that we can only carry within our hearts what was once embodied in this building. For even if it were to become possible for a building to be erected here once more, it would certainly not be the old one! And in the way that the old building spoke, no other building will ever be able to speak again.

[ 24 ] That is why we should engrave even more deeply in our minds what this structure was actually intended to represent for the three great ideals of humanity. We cannot say today that, just as in the instinctive clairvoyance of the Easterners, the divine-spiritual shines vividly before us like an external, sensory being, or that the deeds of the gods appear before the soul’s eye of human beings just as sensory deeds unfold before us in the sensory world or in everyday life. But when we bring to life within ourselves that deep immersion in natural and human existence—which we can bring to life through anthroposophical thinking and feeling—then the world, the cosmos, and the universe appear to us in a form different from the one in which they appeared to the Greeks.

[ 25 ] When the Greek turned his gaze out toward nature, when he directed his gaze toward human beings undergoing outward, physical change, he had, in a sense, the feeling: When the spring flows here, when the mountain rises, crowned by the cloud, when the sun rises there in the glow of dawn, when the rainbow arches—through all of this, the divine-spiritual speaks. The Greeks had seen so much of nature that they were able to experience the divine-spiritual in everything. But their view of nature was such that they found satisfaction in it; they felt, as it were, their full human fulfillment in what they saw in nature.

[ 26 ] I have often emphasized that it is right to speak of progress in our understanding of nature, and anthroposophy is particularly well-suited to grasping the true significance of scientific progress over the past few centuries. I have indeed often emphasized this. It is not some amateurish criticism of the natural sciences, of the view of nature, or of delving deeply into nature that is close to the heart of anthroposophy, but rather a genuine, loving immersion. Yes, my dear friends, when it comes to nature, people have learned a great deal over the past few centuries. And when one delves deeper into what has been learned, one gains—from a view of nature, as I have often explained to you right here from this very spot—an insight into humanity’s repeated earthly lives and an insight into the transformation of nature. One gains a perspective on future times, when human beings will once again bring to life what they experience in the present through their senses, their soul, and their spirit.

[ 27 ] And by truly immersing oneself in nature, one gains a different perspective, a different holistic view of nature than the Greeks had. One might say that the Greeks viewed nature as a fully developed being that revealed to them the glory of the divine-spiritual world. Modern people can no longer view nature in this way. When we look at everything we can perceive today in the natural world—with all our exquisite instruments and all our exquisite tools—nature, together with human beings as natural beings, appears to us as something embryonic, something that carries within its bosom something that can only unfold in the future.

[ 28 ] The Greeks regarded every plant as something that, just as it is, possessed a perfect existence, because the god of the plant lives within each individual plant. We regard the plant as something from which something higher must emerge in nature; today, wherever we look, we see something in its embryonic stage. And in what we see today—not in nature as it is fully formed, but, I would say, in nature that is pregnant with the future and full of promise—in all of this we see something that leads us to say to ourselves: A divine power reigns in nature and must reign, because it will bring this embryonic nature to a form that was once perfect.

[ 29 ] We have learned to look more closely at nature. Whereas the Greeks saw the bird, we see the egg in nature. While the Greeks saw the finished being, we see the potential everywhere. And today, a true view of nature is held by those who can be captivated with their whole soul, with their whole heart, with their whole mind by the germinative nature, by the potential inherent in nature.

[ 30 ] This is the other side of our current understanding of nature. When one begins to look through the microscope with a religious eye, when one begins to look through the telescope with a religious eye, one perceives embryonic states everywhere. The precision of our observation of nature allows us to see nature in its embryonic state, to see nature as creative everywhere, and to see nature as rushing toward the future everywhere. This gives rise to a new religious ideal.

[ 31 ] However, this religious ideal can only be attained by those who—as we have often explained here—recognize in each individual human life what appears to them as the seed for future, different kinds of human lives on Earth and in other worlds.

[ 32 ] In a sense, the Greeks saw in human beings the convergence of the entire cosmos—but of the present cosmos. The ancient Orientals saw in human beings the convergence of the entire cosmic past. We sense in human beings the seed of the future. This gives the new religious ideal its character.

[ 33 ] And if we turn to the artistic realm, then when we immerse ourselves in nature today—not stopping at lifeless contours, not stopping at abstract ideas, but delving into the forms of nature with a living soul—yes, what do we find? My dear friends, you have seen it in the capitals I was able to give to our columns; you have seen it in the architrave motifs that crowned the columns over there: this did not arise from observing nature; it arose from experiencing nature firsthand. Nature produces forms that could, however, be different; nature challenges us everywhere to transform its forms into others, to metamorphose them. Those who merely observe nature copy it and fall into naturalism. Those who experience nature—who do not merely look at the lines and colors of plants but experience them inwardly—will find that from every plant, every rock formation, and every animal form, another emerges, which they can imprint upon the material. One does not do as the Greeks did, who, in a sense, sought to fully express the spirit through the technique of the material; one wrestles with the forms of nature and creates independent forms out of the forms of nature themselves—not in a symbolic-allegorical way as with the Orientals, nor in such an adequate way as with the Greeks, but in such a way that something is immediately expressed in the sensory revelation, something that in every line, in every color, strives toward the divine. Among the Orientals, the divine expressed itself, so to speak, through the symbolic and the allegorical; it radiated forth like an aura, like a cloud, so that the divine-spiritual overflowed the forms, overgrew the forms, and said more than the forms themselves. We modern people must create works of art in which form says more than nature does, yet speaks quite naturally, so that every single line, every single color becomes a prayer of nature to the divine. We wrest from nature, as it were, those forms through which nature itself can worship the divine; we speak to nature, as it were, artistically.

[ 34 ] In truth, every plant and every tree longs to look up in prayer toward the Divine. We can see this in the physiognomy of the tree, in the physiognomy of the plant. But the means of expression available to the plant and the tree are not sufficient. They are inherent in the tree and the plant. If we draw out what lives in trees and plants, in clouds and stones—in their lines, their colors, their inner vitality—and imprint it upon the building material or the sculptor’s material, then nature speaks to the gods through our work of art. We discover the Logos in nature. And in our art, a higher nature than the nature outside appears to us—a nature that, in turn, allows the Logos to flow upward in a completely natural way toward the divine-spiritual world.

[ 35 ] In Oriental works of art, the Logos flowed down, and found only a stammering expression in the human material of art. Our art forms must be true forms of language, speaking the very language that nature would speak if it could reach its goal. This is the artistic ideal—that artistic ideal which stands alongside the religious ideal, which sees nature in its predispositions, in its budding potential.

[ 36 ] And the third is our scientific ideal—that ideal which no longer, as with the Oriental, perceives thought as something that God whispers directly into the soul. Nor can our modern ideal of thought or ideas, like that of the Greeks, perceive thoughts as a testimony to the divine arising within the human being; we discover thought in a purely human way, through human labor—through the inner work of the human soul. But once we have elevated ourselves to thought in such a way that we allow nothing of egoism, nothing of self-interest, nothing of inner passion—which is partial to this or that— —that is, nothing of human partiality toward one judgment or another—then, as human beings, we have risen to the point of experiencing the thought within us in the form it itself wishes to assume; then we do not feel like the shaper or the creator of the thought, but rather like the inner spiritual stage through which the thought plays itself out within us. And then we perceive the greatness of the thoughts we ourselves have formed, of the ideas we seem to have created within ourselves—without selfishness, without taking sides in favor of one judgment or another. Then we are surprised: the ideas we have formed in this way are worthy of reflecting the Divine. We discover afterward how the thought formed within our own breast is worthy of reflecting the Divine. We discover the thought first and realize afterward: The thought is, in fact, the Logos! While you selflessly allow your thought to take shape within you, you have, through that selflessness, created the possibility that God was the Creator of your thought. - What the Easterners perceived as a revelation of thought, what the Greeks perceived as a testimony through thought, we perceive as a living discovery: we have the thought, and it reveals itself to us afterward as that which is permitted to express God. That is our scientific ideal.

[ 37 ] And so, in the course of human evolution, we stand here, grasping the moment in which we live within that evolution, and we know: We must succeed not merely in observing the human head with the ears on the sides, with the larynx, with the stunted shoulder blades, but we must succeed—by transforming the form of nature—in bringing about, out of the growth of the shoulder blades and the interweaving of the larynx with the ears, a single entity comprising chest, head, wings, larynx, and ear—a being that appears to us as a Luciferic figure.

[ 38 ] We come to see the artistic aspect of nature—that which brings form to life in nature—so that a higher life of form emerges than exists in nature itself.

[ 39 ] But this also enables us to trace nature even to those places where it itself, through metamorphosis, transforms human beings. We are able to bring this art into the field of education and teaching. Where the child becomes a different person every day, there we bring artistic creativity into our educational work, because we have first grasped it in art itself in such a way that we see in this art a nature that acts beyond itself and produces the Logos. We learn from the spring that becomes more than a spring, that speaks to the gods; we learn from the tree that is more than a tree, because through its branches it stammers only in gestures, while in those forms that unfold before the modern artistic imagination, with its branch gestures and its crown gestures, it points upward toward the gods; we learn from the cosmos by metamorphosing its forms in the way they have been attempted to be reshaped in our Goetheanum; we learn from this how we must cooperate with the child day by day to reshape that which is itself being reshaped in the child from day to day. Through this, we are able to bring art into the treatment of humanity, into pedagogy. And so it is in other fields.

[ 40 ] Viewed in this way, the three great, revitalized ideals of humanity arise before the soul of the anthroposophist: the religious ideal, the artistic ideal, and the ideal of knowledge. Through the forms of the Goetheanum, the anthroposophist should feel inspired to experience this reformation of the noble, great human ideals. We must now quietly inscribe this in our souls. But we must draw enthusiasm from it. And when we draw enthusiasm for what, in this way, elevates us to the divine-spiritual through the three ideals, then this becomes our highest earthly ideal. When the Gospel says, “Love your neighbor as yourself and God above all else,” then it must also be said on the other hand: Whoever views the divine-spiritual as it must be viewed by modern humanity in the light of the three ideals brought into the present, learns to love the divine-spiritual, for he feels that he cannot be human unless he devotes himself to these three ideals with all the love he is capable of. But then he feels united in the same way with those who can send this love upward in the same manner. He learns to love the divine-spiritual above all else and then his neighbor as himself, out of love for the divine. And resentment does not arise.

[ 41 ] But this is precisely what can hold the individual members of the Anthroposophical Society together as a whole. That is what we need today. We have just experienced a phase within the Anthroposophical Society in which anthroposophy has flowed into individual branches of life: into education and teaching, into other practical areas of life, into the arts, and so on. Today we need unity. We have excellent Waldorf teachers and outstanding practitioners in other fields. Today, we also need all those who are doing their best in their individual roles to find a way to allow the sources of anthroposophical life to flow anew. That is what we need today.

[ 42 ] And because we need it—because we need the leading figures in anthroposophy to bear witness to the realization that a revitalization of the Anthroposophical Society is currently necessary—this gathering in Stuttgart will convene in the coming days, and if one is sincere about the Anthroposophical Society, one must have the greatest possible hopes for what will take place in Stuttgart over the next few days. For only if the individuals who will speak there find the right words for this or that—words that resonate with a genuine, active enthusiasm for the three great ideals, which are at the same time ideals that flow from love—only if this is guaranteed by the power and substance of the words spoken there, can we hope that the Anthroposophical Society will achieve its goal. For what comes to light there will then inevitably come to light in wider circles as well.

[ 43 ] As for me, it will become clear what I need to do depending on how this conference in Stuttgart turns out. We look forward to it with great anticipation. I ask you—in case you are unable to attend—to be there in spirit with your powerful thoughts. For this is about being present at a crucial moment, about actively committing ourselves, on a sound foundation, to the great ideals necessary for humanity today, those great ideals of which we are told not by some arbitrary human text, but by the very text that speaks to us so clearly from the entire course of development—from the very meaning of the entire development of humanity on Earth—just as the midday sun speaks to the awake human being. If we kindle enthusiasm in our souls in this way, then enthusiasm will turn into action. And action is what we need.