The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] The lectures given here have, up to now, been primarily intended to bridge the gap between insights from Spiritual Science and a view of life demanded by our present age, and I intend to offer a few thoughts on this very topic over the next few days as well.

[ 2 ] What we call modern life is, after all, a vivid reality for those people who—as we might say—have been cut off from their direct connection with nature by urban or related ways of life. And we know that ever since the advent of this modern life, people have constantly reflected on the significance of modern life for the entire cultural progress of humanity—both material and spiritual. Now, what we perceive as the impulses coming to us from Spiritual Science must be integrated into this modern life. We will gradually have come to realize that, in the face of much of what we encounter in this life, Spiritual Science is necessary as a kind of counterbalance to much of what modern life contains that has a dampening—one might even say destructive—effect on the general spiritual-divine life forces of human beings.

[ 3 ] If the person who is capable of allowing modern culture to influence him—in the context of life—through the initial stages, so to speak, of the initiated life, truly allows it to influence him, then he has experiences that can teach him more deeply about the significance of modern life for the totality of human life than the external observation of this life—unsupported by spirituality—is capable of doing. The person who, so to speak, has taken the first steps on the path of the initiated life experiences in a different way what one might experience when spending a night on a train or a steamship—especially when sleeping on the train or steamship. The difference here between someone in the early stages of the initiated life and someone who has not yet come into contact with this initiated life in any way lies in the fact that, for the former, these experiences become conscious; he learns to recognize what is actually happening to him when he spends a night, especially while sleeping, on a steamship or in a train. The influences that such an experience exerts on the entire human organism are, of course, experienced just as fully by those who do not come to know these things through initiation as by those who learn of these influences through initiation. With regard to the overall effect on human nature, there is naturally no difference.

[ 4 ] If we want to understand what these hints actually mean, we must recall a truth from Spiritual Science that is, however, well known to us, namely, that while we sleep, we exist with our “I” and our astral body outside of our physical and etheric bodies. In fact, due to certain limitations naturally imposed on us by cosmic laws, we are in such cases—with our “I” and our astral body—preferably in the immediate vicinity of our physical and etheric bodies, so that when we sleep while traveling in a railroad car, we are, in essence, right in the midst of all the braking, the rumbling and the clatter associated with the train’s wheels and machinery, and so on. It is the same on a modern steamship. We are right in the midst of everything that is happening around us. We are right in the midst of these truly not-exactly-musical experiences of our surroundings, and one need only have gone through the very first steps of initiation to notice upon waking how the “I,” returning to the physical and etheric bodies, still brings back with the astral body what it experienced while being pressed by the machinery—in which it was truly immersed and through which it passed in the moment just before waking.

[ 5 ] All that disharmonious pressure and tugging is carried over into the physical and etheric bodies, and anyone who has ever awakened with the lingering effects of what a steamship or a train, with their machinery, has wrought within their self, within their astral body, who has brought this into their waking consciousness—such a person realizes how little what is brought in there harmonizes with what takes place within the human being as a kind of experience of the “I” and the astral body arising from the inner laws of the physical and etheric bodies. One actually brings in the harshest disorder, the most ghastly din—a tugging, squeaking, and creaking—and if one has a finer sensitivity to the matter, this actually affects the etheric body as if—this is, of course, a crude comparison, but you will not misunderstand it—one’s physical body were being crushed and torn apart in a machine. This is an absolutely necessary side effect of modern life, and I would like to make a—I would say—cautionary remark right from the start, because discussions such as those I intend to have today very easily evoke what I would like to call the hidden arrogance of theosophists, a certain hidden arrogance that indeed flourishes abundantly here and there.

[ 6 ] I say this, of course, without the slightest allusion—not even a general one, let alone a more specific one—because when one discusses something like what has been discussed today, it immediately provokes judgments. I mean, given the theosophists’ implied arrogance, it can easily happen that one says to oneself: I must be very careful not to expose my own physical self to these destructive forces; I must be very careful in the face of all the influences of modern life; I must shut myself away nicely in a little room with the right surroundings—with the colored walls recommended by theosophy—so that nothing affecting my physical constitution touches me, from all that modern life brings.

[ 7 ] I truly do not wish to bring about this effect through my discussions. All this withdrawal—this desire, in a sense, to protect oneself from the influences of what world karma must necessarily bring upon us—stems from weakness. Anthroposophy, however, can only strengthen the human spirit; it is meant to develop the very force that arms and strengthens us inwardly against these influences. Therefore, no recommendation to withdraw from modern life—to create a sort of “greenhouse culture” of spiritual life—could ever flourish within our spiritual movement. That is why this can never be the aim of true spiritual culture. Although it is understandable that weaker natures may wish to withdraw from modern life into this or that colony where they are not touched by modern life, it must nevertheless be said that this does not stem from a strength, but from a weakness of the soul. Our task, however, is to strengthen the soul by imbuing it with the impulses that come from Spiritual Science and spiritual research, so that it is armed against the influences of modern life—so that the soul can endure, no matter how much it is pounded and battered, and is nevertheless able to find its way into the spiritual -divine realms through the hammering and pounding of the Ahrimanic spirits.

[ 8 ] There is one thing we must keep in mind, which I have already alluded to many times. As human beings, we do not sleep only at night. We actually sleep during the day as well; it’s just that we are less aware of daytime sleep than of nighttime sleep. At night, a person’s mental life subsides, and because human beings primarily live in their thoughts—especially on a spiritual level—they naturally notice this subsiding of mental activity more during nighttime sleep. During the day, it is the life of the will that rests; this is less noticeable because we live less in the will. One consequence of this is all the philosophers’ arguments about the freedom and lack of freedom of the will, because they fail to realize that, as “day sleepers,” they are examining the will and therefore cannot grasp its true nature, so that they spout a lot of nonsense about free and unfree will, about indeterminism and determinism. In fact, as we go about our broad, everyday lives, we are only minimally aware of our volitional life; it sinks down into the subconscious, into the region that belongs purely to the astral body.

[ 9 ] Thus, even during our waking hours, we participate in all that modern life has produced around us—the clatter and clanging of modern technology. At night, we immerse ourselves more deeply in this clatter and clanging with our emotional and mental lives; during the day, more so with our volitional and emotional lives.

[ 10 ] The fact is that what we call “modern life” has not always existed in the course of human development. It has only emerged—and, in essence, has emerged since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. The beginning of this modern way of life coincides with the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. How does external spiritual culture speak of the emergence of this modern way of life? Modern spiritual culture, as we know, takes pride in what it has achieved through this modern way of life. It says something like this: Throughout all of antiquity and the entire Middle Ages, people were not capable of developing a genuine observation of nature that could have led to the natural sciences. This has only come about in more recent times. — And when one speaks of “more recent times” in this way, it coincides precisely with the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. People have freed themselves from the old way of observing nature and now view nature impartially, purely in terms of its abstract laws. As a result, the natural sciences have also been able—through the experience of natural laws in an unprecedented way (a phrase one hears quite often)—to make the mastery of natural forces possible for themselves. But that is modern technology, and what modern technology consists of is precisely what arose from humanity’s discovery of the laws of nature and, in turn, its shaping of matter according to these laws into machines, with which it then acts upon nature and life by permeating modern life with machinery and creating its technical environment—that is, everything that constitutes modern life around us and what it brings into being. Thus we see: It is only in recent times that true natural science has been established, and with it the proper mastery of nature and its forces.

[ 11 ] One very often hears people speak in this way. But when one speaks like this, one is speaking the language of Ahriman, for this is expressed in the language of Ahriman. Let us try to translate this language of Ahriman into that real, true language which we are striving to reclaim through Spiritual Science, and through which words are given not only the meaning that can be derived from the observation of external nature, but also the meaning that belongs to them when we contemplate the cosmos in its entirety—that is, simultaneously in its nature and in its spiritual life.

[ 12 ] Let us first consider, from a purely external perspective, what happens when we develop modern technology. What happens there is, at first glance, nothing other than—I would say—a process in two stages. The first stage consists of our destroying the interconnectedness of nature. We tear down the quarries, extract the stones from them; we ravage the forests, extract the wood from them—one could go on and on—in short, we first create raw materials by tearing down and wearing away the natural order. And the second stage consists of reassembling what has been extracted from nature into a machine according to the laws that have been recognized as the laws of nature. These are the two stages, when viewed from the outside.

[ 13 ] But how does the matter appear when viewed from within? Viewed from within, the matter is as follows: When we wear down nature—beginning with the mineral realm—this is—as we know from earlier considerations—linked to a certain sense of well-being that the spiritual elemental forces within it experience. But that should concern us less here. What is important in what is happening here, however, is that we are driving out of nature the elemental spirits that hold nature together—spirits that belong to the realm, the sphere, of the hierarchies that progress in an orderly manner. Elemental spiritual beings are present in all of nature’s existence. By wearing down nature, we drive the nature spirits out into the realm of the spiritual. This is, in fact, what is constantly linked to the first stage. We shatter and wear down material nature and thereby release from it the spirits of nature, whom we, so to speak, drive out of their sphere—assigned to them, I might say, by the Yahweh gods—into the realm where they can flutter freely and are no longer bound to their assigned dwelling place. Thus, we can also call the first stage the expulsion of the spirits of nature. The second stage is this: we assemble—in accordance with the laws of nature we have recognized—what we have worn down and extracted from nature. Indeed, when we construct a machine or a system of machines from raw materials according to a law of nature we have recognized, we in turn introduce certain spiritual entities into the structure we are thus forming.

[ 14 ] The structure we are thus shaping is by no means devoid of spirit. As we shape it, we create a home for other spiritual beings, and these spiritual beings—whom we are now conjuring into our mechanical structures—are the entities that belong to the Ahrimanic hierarchy. So, in the first stage, we encounter the nature spirits who are in a state of ongoing development, drive them out, and in the second stage, we unite these Ahrimanic spirits with what we construct as mechanisms or other works of technology. But the fact that we live in this technical environment in modern times has the effect of creating a thoroughly Ahrimanic setting for that which lies dormant within us, whether by day or by night. It is therefore no wonder that the person who stands at the first stage of initiation, when upon waking he brings in what he has experienced out there in the clamor, strife, and din, perceives it as destructive when he brings it into his physical and etheric bodies through his ego and astral body. For he is, so to speak, bringing into his own organism the consequence of living alongside the Ahrimanic elemental spirits. We can say: As a third stage now, as a cultural stage, we have this aspect of the technology surrounding us—that we are stuffing ourselves with Ahrimanic spirits, truly filling ourselves to the brim with them. — This is how the matter appears from within.

[ 15 ] If we now look back from what we have come to know, as it were, as the occult side of modern life, to those times when human beings lived in such a way that they slept separated from nature only by walls that were spiritually permeable, or worked during the day within nature, where the true spirits of the Yahweh hierarchy were still present, then we must say: Back then, the nature spirits—which had a stimulating effect on the inner life of the soul—were brought into the physical and etheric bodies by the human soul, the “I,” and the astral body. And the further back we go in the history of human evolution, the more we find what is becoming ever rarer today: that people do not fill themselves with the Ahrimanic spirits of technology, but rather with the nature spirits that have developed in a straight line, which—if we may use the expression—have united the good spirits of the hierarchies with what takes place or occurs in nature as facts or beings.

[ 16 ] Now, a person attains the connection that is necessary if they are to be human in the true sense of the word only by seeking this connection within their inner life, by descending so deeply into the depths of their soul through their inner experience that they find within these depths the forces that unite them with the spiritual essence of the cosmos, from which they originate and in which they are embedded, and from which they can be separated—separated already through sensory perception and intellectual thought, but now also, as we have seen, by the way modern life fills them with Ahrimanic spirits. Only by descending into the depths of his own being can a human being come into connection with the divine-spiritual beings that are good and healing for him, with the spiritual hierarchies that are developing in a straight line. This coming together with the spiritual hierarchies—for which we were, in fact, spiritually born—and this living in communion with them is made exceedingly difficult for human beings by the world’s increasing permeation with the milieu of modern technology. Human beings are, so to speak, torn away from their spiritual-cosmic context, and within them, that which is meant to develop the forces necessary to remain connected to the spiritual-soul aspect of the cosmos is dampened and dimmed.

[ 17 ] Those who have already gone through the first stages of initiation therefore realize that everything mechanical that permeates modern life penetrates the spiritual and soul aspects of humanity in such a way that it kills and destroys much within them. And such a person realizes that this destruction makes it particularly difficult for him to truly develop the inner forces that connect human beings with the rightful—do not misunderstand this word—spiritual beings of the hierarchies. When someone who has taken the first steps toward initiation seeks, while meditating in a modern railroad car or on a modern steamship, to attune themselves to the spiritual world, they naturally strive to develop within themselves the power of vision and perception that will carry them up into the spiritual world, but he notices how the Ahrimanic world fills him with everything that resists this devotion to the spiritual world, and the struggle is then a tremendous one. One might say it is an inner struggle, to be experienced in the etheric body, a struggle that is grueling and crushing. Of course, others who have not undergone the first steps of initiation also face this struggle, and the only difference is that those who have undergone the first steps of initiation consciously recognize it. Everyone must go through it, and everyone experiences its effects.

[ 18 ] It would be utterly wrong to say, for example, that we must resist what technology has brought us in modern life, that we must guard against Ahriman, or that we must simply withdraw from this modern life. In a certain sense, that would amount to spiritual cowardice. The true remedy lies not in allowing the powers of the modern soul to weaken and withdrawing from modern life, but in strengthening the powers of the soul so that modern life can be endured. A courageous stance toward modern life is what is required by world karma, and that is why true Spiritual Science has this distinctive character: it demands from the very beginning that the human soul make efforts—efforts that are, to a greater or lesser extent, even quite intense.

[ 19 ] One hears so often: Yes, the books on modern Spiritual Science that are available to us are written in a difficult style; they require such a great effort that one must actively develop one’s soul powers in order to fully immerse oneself in this Spiritual Science. - “Well-meaning” people—I put that in quotation marks—therefore keep coming forward with the idea that they want to make things a little easier for their fellow human beings in difficult passages and, as far as possible—and I’m not putting this in quotation marks—trivialize what is written in a somewhat difficult style. But it is part of the very nature of Spiritual Science that it places demands on the activity of the soul life; that, so to speak, one does not easily come to an appreciation of Spiritual Science, for within this Spiritual Science it is not merely a matter of taking in this or that which Spiritual Science has to say about this or that, but rather it is a matter of “whether one is able to take it in—that is, to take it in through effort, through the activity of the soul—that one must, so to speak—forgive me the less polite expression—work out the treasure of Spiritual Science in the sweat of one’s soul. This is part—forgive me the mechanical expression—of the endeavor in Spiritual Science.”

[ 20 ] It reveals yet another misunderstanding of the very essence of Spiritual Science when people, so to speak, shy away from the difficult ideas and conceptual frameworks that Spiritual Science offers. And we know just how many people shy away from this—how many would much rather dream—the Lord grants it to His own in their sleep!—and would much rather have things conjured up for them from the very beginning in all manner of dream images of the spiritual world than to gain insights through active engagement and the exertion of their inner, spiritual life. We know how many people would rather experience this or that vision than sit down and study a book dealing with difficult material from Spiritual Science—a book that is, however, capable of speaking to those powers of the human soul that lie dormant in ordinary daily life, which thus stimulates what is otherwise unconscious in the human being and thereby transports the person vividly into the spiritual world. The right path is not to passively accept conscious daily life and drift in a haze, but to make an effort to break through in the activity of one’s soul through the development of thoughts and ideas. For when one immerses oneself in these developments of thought and ideas, when one makes an effort to courageously immerse oneself, then through this courageous, active immersion one reaches the stage where mere theorizing, mere thinking, and merely accepting as true what is presented transforms into a seeing, into a genuine standing within the spiritual world. But what emerges for us from these reflections as a modern view of life is that, through the technical environment, we descend into a kind of Ahrimanic sphere and allow ourselves to be permeated by Ahrimanic spirituality.

[ 21 ] The most terrible calamity would have befallen the evolution of the Earth if precautions had not been taken in earlier times for what, according to world karma, modern humanity must experience under this Ahrimanic spirituality. Life unfolds—and cannot unfold otherwise—in what I would call a pendulum swing. Life is experienced as swinging back and forth, as if by the strokes of a pendulum, in one direction or the other. One cannot simply say, “Beware of Ahriman!”—for there is no means by which one could guard against Ahriman. And if someone longs, for example, to retreat permanently into a little room with colors as soothing to him as possible, where there are as few factories as possible and no railroad passes by, in order to withdraw completely from modern life, there are still many, many other ways to bring the Ahrimanic spirituality into his soul. He may withdraw from modern life, but modern spirituality will still find a way to reach him.

[ 22 ] What has, in a sense, kept misfortune at bay from human development is the fact that something has come to pass that I alluded to some time ago in a series of lectures in Munich. One must take all these things into account; this, too, is part of the active experience of modern Spiritual Science. Humanity has, so to speak, been given art—the art that also draws its raw material from nature by breaking it down and fragmenting it, and then, in a second stage, reassembling this raw material into something new and breathing a certain, if only pictorial, life into it. This life, which was bestowed through the artistic impulses of the past, is—as I indicated back then in Munich—capable of permeating the material world with a greater measure of Luciferic spirituality. Luciferic spirituality—the beautiful appearance, everything in art that affects human beings—is a leading of the human being away from the material into the spiritual, but through material life. Lucifer is the spirit who always seeks to escape the material and carry human beings into spiritual life in an unwarranted way. That is the other swing of the pendulum. It is only because we must pass through the technical environment in our present incarnation that it becomes possible to come into contact with the Ahrimanic—to come into contact with something that, in earlier incarnations, was able to submerge itself into a more artistic realm. In this way, we counter certain Luciferic forces with today’s Ahrimanic forces, which create a balance, whereas previously the pendulum of life swung first in one direction and now in the other.

[ 23 ] What Spiritual Science aims to achieve, in particular, is that human beings should not pass through what world karma imposes upon them in a state of sleep and dreaming. But people who want nothing to do with Spiritual Science go through all the influences of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces while asleep and dreaming. They are exposed to these influences and effects, even if they themselves know nothing about them. But one cannot go on living this way, for one can only go on living consciously, and Spiritual Science exists precisely so that people do not go through the world asleep and dreaming, but rather recognize the environment in which they live. This, however, requires that we truly engage with the intimacies—if I may say so—of the practice of Spiritual Science—forgive me for using that term. Such “intimacies” are often overlooked, and I can see this when I read transcripts of lectures I have given. I find that what is often important to me does not appear in the transcripts. Take just two things from what I have just said. Earlier I used a phrase and said that Spiritual Science does not want something, but rather ought to want or must want it. This is a certain turn of phrase that arises quite naturally and naively for anyone speaking from the spirit of Spiritual Science, for Spiritual Science quite naturally leads to a more impersonal grasp of the truths of spiritual life than the other sciences do. Speaking in the style of the other sciences, one would say: Spiritual Science wants something. — But it says: How it ought to want or must want. — And I say: How I must express myself, and not: How I express myself.

[ 24 ] It is precisely such intimate details that matter most; we must not overlook them. Rather, we must begin to believe that what matters is that Spiritual Science penetrates to the very core of the human soul’s powers and is also capable of transforming them; and therefore, it is not acceptable to approach Spiritual Science with the same way of thinking that one is accustomed to applying to external life. People really still have little awareness of the things I mean by this. One can observe this—or, I would say, sense it—in certain, I might say, crude symptoms of external scientific development.

[ 25 ] Let us single out one example among many. Modern religious studies—irreligious religious studies, to be precise—has taken particular pride in having uncovered certain insights into the connection, let us say, between New Testament sayings and commandments and those of the Old Testament and pagan sayings and commandments. For example, scholars have traced the origins of each individual phrase in the Lord’s Prayer and said: This particular phrase is already found here, that one there. When one hears this, it might seem reasonable. But the moment one approaches the Mystery of Golgotha from the perspective of world history—specifically, from a spiritual perspective on world history—one realizes that all these things appear in a new context, and that what matters is not discovering that all these phrases already existed in earlier times, but rather always considering the context surrounding these phrases, through which they take on a new nuance. And this nuance is always different in the Old and New Testaments. Through this, what has come through the Mystery of Golgotha is introduced into very intimate matters. The words often remain the same, as do the contexts, but the way in which these contexts are shaded and nuanced is different, and that is precisely what matters.

[ 26 ] One extraordinary aspect, for example, is that the concept, the mental image of the “I” within the entire system of language development, is organized quite differently the further back one goes into pre-Christian times than it is later on, as one moves forward from the Mystery of Golgotha into the future. The way one speaks of the “I” changes, and this can already be seen in the structure of language. For example, when the “I” is incorporated into the verb in many languages, this means something entirely different than when it is set apart from the verb and pronounced separately, and so on.

[ 27 ] What matters, then, is that through Spiritual Science we work our way toward a view of life that enables us to consciously observe the influences exerted on our spiritual, soul, and physical human organism. The way I have described the relationship between human beings and their technological environment is, of course, still in its infancy. It has been about four centuries since this phenomenon began on the scale we see today. And the 19th century, so proud of itself, took a mighty step forward in this “Verahrimanization” of human life. But important steps will be taken toward this “Verahrimanization” in the future of human development. We have been in this process for about four centuries. It is emerging slowly and gradually. Today it has already reached a certain peak for all those—and there are indeed many among our fellow human beings—who, due to their isolation in city life, have scarcely any connection left with the true spirits of nature. I once said—I would call it a symbolic statement—that it is essential for human beings, essential for their development, that they be able to distinguish oats from barley. But really, how many people do we find in urban environments who can no longer tell oats from barley! They may still be able to distinguish the plants themselves, since that is relatively easy with oats and barley, but they can no longer distinguish the grains—one grain from another. If they have lived in the city, or were even born there, they usually cannot tell them apart.

[ 28 ] However, the development of humanity is such that whenever a new stage is reached, this advancement to the next stage is linked to another experience, as it were, at a different stage, which lies within a parallel current. And this is indeed what has happened. As modern humanity has moved toward Ahriman through technological life in the way I have described, it has also moved toward Ahriman in yet another way. When a spiritual view of history replaces the crude historical perspective that materialism has produced today, people will already begin to understand what Spiritual Science must now point toward.

[ 29 ] If one looks back to the times that preceded the last four centuries, one sees that, above all, human beings not only had a different relationship to their milieu and their environment than they do today, but they also had a different relationship—a completely different relationship—to something that manifests itself within them, truly manifests itself within them: he had a different relationship to his language, to his speech. In language, we truly have not merely what modern materialistic science believes, but we have in language something that is in many ways connected to non-fully-conscious human experience, something that often takes place in the subconscious regions of the human being, and which is therefore also permeated by spiritual beings. Spiritual beings live within human language, work within it, and as human beings form and shape words, elemental spiritual beings press their way into those words. On the wings of words, spiritual beings fly through the spaces where people converse with one another. That is why it is so important to pay attention to certain subtleties of language and not simply to surrender to the whims of one’s emotional life when speaking.

[ 30 ] Up until the 15th and 16th centuries, one might say, human beings related to their language in such a way that they still retained something of the living experience of the elemental spirituality present in language. They still retained something of this experience of the elemental spirituality of language. The spiritual element inherent in language still worked within them, for language is, in a sense, more ingenious and spiritual in many respects than the individual human being. Today one notices only occasionally how people, so to speak, fall back from a materialistic mindset into a sense of the ingenious spirituality of language.

[ 31 ] I once pointed out here, using a very clear—albeit trivial—example, how one can, so to speak, break away from the materialistic mindset of the present through one’s attitude. Basically, many people still do this, but they are not immediately aware of it. For example, when someone, while traveling along the Rhine, speaks of the “old Rhine,” what does he mean by that? Undoubtedly, he feels something at that moment. But what is it that he means? I do not believe that when people speak of the “old Rhine,” they mean the riverbed, the hollow in the earth. That would, after all, be the only thing that remains. But what else the “Old Rhine” is supposed to be, one cannot discover at all, for the water is certainly entirely new; it flows on and on, and if you try to find anything old besides the hollowed-out riverbed, you will not be able to discover it. The Old Rhine! Language is more ingenious than man, for it is, of course, the language’s intention—even if it does not occur to man—to refer to the river god of the Rhine. The elemental entity that belongs to him is quite aptly designated when one says: The Old Rhine.

[ 32 ] This is a rough example. The language is permeated throughout with such spirituality, with such a belief in the spiritual. And a sense, at least, of this connection to the spiritual realm through language was truly still present in the nature of the human soul throughout the course of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, right up into more recent times—into the 15th and 16th centuries—among all the peoples of Europe. For if one fails to recognize this, then one also lacks the proper sense of the beginning of the Gospel of John. For the fact that the Gospel of John begins with the sentence, “In the beginning was the Word,” was truly still rooted in the awareness that in what the Word is within the entire human organism and in human life, there exists a connection between the human being—initially through elemental spirituality—and the entire world that lies beyond the sensory world.

[ 33 ] When we examine human life through the lens of Spiritual Science—as it unfolded from the Middle Ages into more recent times—and if we are able to look into people’s souls, we find that the relationship between human beings and their language was indeed different during the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, and even in its final phase extending into the 14th, 15th centuries. People still heard, as it were, undertones—true undertones—in everything they spoke. People no longer believe this because today human beings truly live only in the material aspect of speech sounds. Something spiritual resonated along with it, as if the same things were sounding in a lower octave. Thus, when one spoke or heard someone speak, something resonated that was no longer differentiated into this or that language, but was rather something universally human. One can truly say: When human experience unfolds, as it were, in the flowering of individual languages, humanity today experiences this flowering as a kind of trembling of sounds in the ear, and it experiences these sounds as something that carries meaning. In contrast, in earlier times one experienced an immersion of the entire linguistic element into something that resonated and was not differentiated into various languages. The boundary between these two experiences is marked by the 15th and 16th centuries. Humanity has been torn away from the genies of language.

[ 34 ] No one can understand the true impetus that was given to humanity during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries without considering this peculiar dampening of the undertones of linguistic experience. Something has been lost to humanity; this becomes evident within the course of historical events, whether in battles or in works of peace. The human soul experienced it before the aforementioned period. In all of this, the resonance of such undertones of linguistic experience still lived on in the human soul. Therefore, the entire history prior to this period has a completely different character than that which followed it. When engaging with Spiritual Science, one must, I would say, train one’s spiritual ear to perceive this entirely different resonance of events in the Middle Ages compared to today, because human souls experienced what could be experienced at that time in a completely different way.

[ 35 ] I would like to single out, for example, the Crusades as a human experience, as a spiritual experience. They are conceivable—as they unfolded in the Middle Ages—only if one recognizes that this shared experience of such undertones—intellectual and spiritual undertones of linguistic experience—was present. People in Central and Western Europe today would truly not be as moved by the words of the Council of Clermont—“God wills it; Dieu le veut”—as people in the Middle Ages were. But the reasons for this can only be understood if one considers what has just been said.

[ 36 ] All of this, however, is also connected to an important phenomenon in modern intellectual life as a whole. The entire structure of recent historical life is linked to it. Try to let this intimacy of linguistic undertones flow into your understanding of history, and you will understand why, at the point in time that has been indicated, the European nationalities—which previously stood in entirely different relationships to one another and were governed by entirely different impulses in their relations to one another—began to group themselves together. The way in which nationalities in the individual territories of Europe have united and taken shape up to the present day is connected to impulses that are completely misinterpreted when, looking back from the present, one seeks the origins of nations in the Middle Ages or in antiquity without taking into account how such an important stage had to be traversed in the life of the soul.

[ 37 ] When topics are raised that actually require a great deal of reflection, I can only offer you hints. The most important aspects of these matters must be left to your own meditation, which will uncover what may emerge in response to such suggestions. What I would like to achieve through this suggestion is simply to give a mental image of how a bridge can be built from Spiritual Science to a worldview and outlook on life, and how Spiritual Science can lead to a conscious engagement with that in which we actually live.

[ 38 ] Naturally, when one considers the true underlying reasons for such suggestions, it must seem that our modern age necessitates many things that, in contrast to the past, must in turn constitute a renewal. If, through world karma, we are placed today in an environment characterized by particularly Ahrimanic influences and must strengthen our soul power in order to find our way into the spiritual spheres despite all the obstacles that come to us from the Ahrimanic spirit, then the human soul today needs different means of support than it did in the past. And this is connected to the fact that art, too, must take different paths in all fields.

[ 39 ] Art, of course, had to speak differently to a soul that was less exposed to Ahrimanic influences than it must speak to the souls of today, who are far more exposed to these influences. The very first steps toward such an art—truly the very first steps, nothing perfect—were to be taken with our building. How an attempt was made to truly create, in this building, an art that appeals to the soul’s activity: in connection with the whole conception of modern life, but with the spiritual conception of modern life. Recall once more the utterly shameful and trivial comparison I made a few weeks ago regarding the building. I said: How does what our building is meant to be relate to the way an older building—indeed, any old work of art—used to appear?

[ 40 ] An ancient work of art made an impression through its forms and colors. The forms and colors made an impression. To put it schematically: if this was the form, then this form made an impression on the eye (as it was drawn). What was present in the space within the form—the space that the form filled—that is what made an impression. And the same is true of colors. The color on the wall—that is what made an impression.

[ 41 ] I said that’s not what we mean by our building; rather, our building is meant—and this is precisely the shamefully trivial comparison—to be like a bundt pan, like a cake pan, which isn’t there for its own sake, but for the cake. What matters is that what is inside takes on the form, and when it is empty, the ring cake pan actually shows that it is there for a purpose. What it does with the ring cake—that is what matters. And in our architecture, what matters is what the soul experiences in its deepest depths—as it dwells within this structure—when it reaches the limits of the forms of this structure. Thus, the work of art is actually inspired only by the forms that are present. The work of art is that which the soul experiences as it moves along the forms. The work of art is the cupcake. What has been built is the cupcake pan, and that is why we had to try to proceed here according to an entirely new principle.

[ 42 ] Even the painterly elements that will be found in our building are not there to exert an effect in and of themselves, as was the case with ancient art, but rather to allow the soul—by coming into contact with what is there—to experience that which transforms its experience into a work of art. Through this, however—and I can only hint at it all—an old artistic principle is transformed into a new one, which can be described as follows: the sculptural, pictorial element, by being taken a step further, is led into a certain musical experience. There is also the reverse path, from the musical back to the sculptural-pictorial.

[ 43 ] These are things that are not arbitrarily created by the human soul, but are connected to the innermost impulses we must experience as we stand in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. This is, as it were, prescribed to us by the spiritual beings who guide this development.

[ 44 ] Everywhere, a start must be made. If people find that some aspects of our construction are imperfect, they can rest assured that those involved in this construction will find many, many more imperfections than those who criticize—truly many more. There are flaws in it that those who merely look at it would never even notice. But that is not what matters; what matters is that a start is made on all the things that must be done. What matters is not the perfection with which we can carry out what must be done, but rather that what must come into being here—even if it must do so in an imperfect way—is eventually done, that a start is made. For everything that enters the world as something new is imperfect compared to what continues to exist as the old. The old exists as the highest stage, and the new is still in its infancy. That goes without saying.

[ 45 ] I will then take these most recent remarks on a renewal of the artistic worldview and the connection between the artistic worldview and contemporary cultural life as my starting point in tomorrow’s reflections.