The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] My dear friends! At the end of this lecture I would like to explore the arrangement of the material which we want to consider in the time remaining available to us. Today I want to start by continuing what I had begun yesterday. This will make it easier to reach clarity quite quickly regarding the effects of the teaching when the necessary basics are there in the sense I have imagined them and added them to this. For these basics to be more solid, we need a little additional time.

[ 2 ] If we consider how to enter into the Gospels in the sense of working with the Gospel processes, then we first of all discover before our souls how in a most particular way the Gospels can be related to, and it is of course necessary, regarding this point, that everyone approaches them from a personal perspective. You then generally understand the content when such a perspective is asserted. For this reason, you may allow me to say something personal in today's lecture. I'm urged to do this because it is the best way for you to receive the following. [ 3 ] When I approach the Gospels, it often happens that I have quite a distinctive feeling that within the Gospels, as far as they can be understood, what has been thought and said about them—and you could even, I say this explicitly, however often you approach them—always encounter something new. You can never know enough about the Gospels. Learning about the Gospels is linked to something else; it is linked to the fact that the further you occupy yourself with them, the more your admiration grows for the depth of the content, for just that, I could call it the immeasurable, into which you can become immersed, which calls for the actual experience, that there is no end to this immersion into the depths, that this admiration increases greatly with every deepening of the Gospel involvement.

There are however difficulties along this path which come to the fore when some strides are made into the Gospel—I stress the words "into"—that make you stumble over the inherited content. For actual spiritual researchers this creates less of a disturbance, because such a person would place the primordial Gospel into, what one could nearly call, a wordless text, and that makes it easier not to stumble over the inherited content. Admiration as a basis for reading the Gospels, seems to me an indispensable element for individuals, as a foundation for their religious learning processes. I once more need to stress that it is not important to characterise religious life in general, but to supply a foundation for the teaching process, in any case for religious processes as such.

[ 4 ] This admiration you develop for the Gospels actually connects to everything, including details in the Gospels, and follows something else which will probably surprise you, but as I said, I'm speaking from a personal perspective; as a result of this admiration there is the feeling that you are never completely satisfied with just one of the Gospels, but you would only be satisfied with a combined harmony sounding through all the Gospels in a lively way. For instance a great deal of meaning can be found if you let the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel work on you and strive to enter into it as I've tried to indicate yesterday and want to continue with today; then again taking the parallel position, but now with Luke's Gospel, into your soul, where approximately the same situation is described, then you will have quite a changed impression of the experience. The impression becomes quite different; one arrives at quite another synopsis to one which one usually experiences, compared with an inner, lively synopsis.

[ 5 ] You see, when you have occupied yourself with such things for a long time, you have had all kinds of experiences in life, and these experiences could seem quite important in as far as having started as a youngster and entering into these teaching processes which you wanted, in the majority.

[ 6 ] I once encountered a man with a New Testament. For this New Testament he had acquired four differently coloured pencils and then he had with one pencil, I think it was the red one, underlined everything carefully which appeared as common content in all four Gospels. That meant, as he showed me, very little. He had taken St John's Gospel. There were four pencils; the other three he had applied to delete what only is contained in the Matthew Gospel, and then, what only was in Mark's Gospel and finally that which only appeared in the Gospel of Luke. In this way he had in his way created a strange analytical synopsis about which he was extraordinarily proud. I objected, saying such attempts were often made; we also know about it within German literature—it was an Englishman who held this achievement in front of me—where these attempts are made with corresponding places indicated next to one another in columns and blank intermediate spaces left where it can only be found in one of the Gospels. He was a priori convinced that his synopsis was the best.

[ 7 ] It is exactly the opposite way to what can be found with the choice of the spiritual route. Here the different Gospels' content doesn't fall apart in contradictions, but they are enclosed into the totality of the deed, together; the coming-into-admiration is an experience which has to be had, an experience which is resisted in the most imminent sense by our present spirit of the time. For the spiritual scientist, however, it turns out that what I cannot even ask you to accept is still there, it turns out that there is no other way, than that the content of truth must appear other than just by the harmony between the four Gospels. It would, even if one would create an external synopsis as in Tatian's sense, which are not contradictory within certain limits, it would not result in what is found in the four Gospels as a concrete harmony.

You need to allow all four to work on you and then wait to see what comes out of this, not by first prescribing what the unopposed abstract truth should be and then only look for all which you can eliminate which contradicts the abstract truth. The truth needs to be experienced, and the Gospels themselves are such written works in which truth can be experienced; however, you need to have patience in order to experience this truth in the Gospels. You can of course object and say, you will never actually be able to experience the truth within the Gospels. I have to agree with your point of view because I still never presume to believe that I have found the truth of the Gospels completely; by continuously making further progress I have the decisive feeling that remaining patient in waiting is the basis, because the certainty of truth does not diminish, but becomes increasingly bigger. You can calmly feel the truth as an ideal placed before you at an immeasurable distance yet with the awareness that you are on your way towards it. These are the things you need to place in the soul with Gospel reading, and shape in your heart, otherwise you would actually never be able to cope with the Gospels in a real way. Of course, you could ask: Should I do this?—It will be shown in the next few days, that yes, one should do this after all.

[ 8 ] Now I must say, it was quite an inner rejoicing for me when I came across something in the Gospels which someone else probably have found as well, but I came across it through spiritual research into the Gospels. I came across an image which really should be grasped with the eyes of the soul; an image of the three Wise Men or the Three Kings—kings were in those days initiates, inspired by wisdom—how the three Wise Men according to their knowledge discovered in the stars, clearly saw the starry script in the heaven leading them to the Star of Christ, and they came to worship Christ. They actually saw that Christ had to come, according to the prophecy in the stars. For those who know out of scientific foundations what is called star wisdom, can actually only honour this image in the right sense, because they would know that star wisdom is in the most imminent sense different from what we call astronomy today.

What we call astronomy today is mathematical and, at most, of a physical nature. If we talk about astronomy today, which is a science of calculations, and we talk of astrophysics, which is a mechanical science, also when we as religious individuals come from a different basis to our feeling towards the cosmos, we speak out of our time spirit and feel and think within it. However, prophetically predictive star wisdom of the Tree Wise Men is something quite different.

Star wisdom was at that time not taken like earth wisdom. Star wisdom was called something which could not be calculated purely by mathematics or physics, it was regarded as something that must be read like a scripture which had to be learned. The starting point was the twelve fixed signs of the zodiac, and then to look what changes the planets experienced in their positions—seven were accepted, as you know—in relation to the fixed signs of the zodiac. These curved movements were taken up by man; just as we read letters, so man saw signs in the curves, signs giving through the planetary positions in the zodiac, and with their own observations of the stars, to each was added a plane. These planes were differentiated according to how man experienced the world-all from the physical point of view: (draws on blackboard) north, south, east, west, with which you could intensively think about the depth of the dimensions, with nothing added, but everything that was found in the dimensional depth, projected on this plane. By looking at these fourfold differentiated planes as the table on which you read what is shown in the starry worlds as revealed, resulted in a feeling as if you read in the cosmos, and there were specific tasks, which one attains through this reading of the cosmos.

One such task was that you said: Shift yourself particularly into seeing, into your inner seeing and understand how you feel yourself within it, and by understanding yourself in this inner positioning, you now follow the moon's course, follow therefore what can be placed here (demonstrates on blackboard), and you will understand as earthy man, the secrets of Saturn.

I initially just want to indicate how such things came about. These were once lively human occupations and through this reading in the heavens a certain amount of knowledge was gathered. Today's astronomy and astrophysics by comparison appear as someone describing the letters, but in the astronomy under consideration here, I'm not even talking about the letters but about reading the text. That's the difference. With this I wanted to characterise how wisdom was created for humanity from which the wise men rose up out of the Orient in search of Christ: this wisdom directed them to the Christ.

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[ 9 ] My dear friends, what has actually arisen in our souls with this? What is placed before our souls is that the highest wisdom which could, at that time, be reached in the world, was leading towards the Mystery of Golgotha, the highest wisdom. To a certain extent in this lies the thought of the proclamation: May you obtain the highest wisdom; the highest wisdom which can be gained from reading the stars, proclaiming the Mystery of Golgotha to you. [ 10 ] This image appears in the Matthew Gospel when you are in the position to fully engage in the Matthew Gospel, in its own time epoch. This experience forms itself in such a way that it really turns into admiration for the depictions of the Matthew Gospel.

[ 11 ] Now you leave this image for a moment. Going on to Luke's Gospel you find the verse of the shepherds in the fields. In contrast to the Three Wise Men from the Orient, who have the highest knowledge, you are taken to the simple-minded shepherds in the fields, who know nothing about knowledge, who can't for a moment sense the knowledge possessed by the three Wise Men from the Orient. The shepherds, through the natural relationship they have with their consciousness, only have an inner experience in which the announcement is given: The Divine is revealed in the Heights, so that peace may come to all mankind—only out of their uncomplicated, simple-minded experience this manifests as an image, not a mere dream image, but a picture of an imagination of a higher reality, a higher actuality. We are led to the hearts of these shepherds, who out of this human simplicity, in the absence of all knowledge, come to the decision to go and worship the Child.

Let's now place these two side by side. We don't look at them as something about who said this or who said that, but we place them side by side as the complimentary experience towards the complete truth. What do we get then? We have the direct, enlivened conviction: The Mystery of Golgotha has appeared in such a way that it is revealed to the highest of knowledge of that time and the most simple-minded hearts, if they are open to it in a selfless way. On the one hand, hardly anything can be seen with greater illumination and on the other hand experienced with greater depth in the soul, than the feelings in the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 12 ] You have to have the boldest of modern intellectualist minds towards experiences, well founded in present knowledge and not only in an outer content of old wisdom, but in the soul constitution of the old wise ones, if you want to behave like modern science behaves towards these things. Just as deeply as the cosmic reading resides within the starry worlds, so deeply are the simple-minded shepherds in the fields certain of the strong validity of the announcement. Today, mankind no longer knows how the soul constitution has changed in the course of time, humanity doesn't know how, what can be read in the outer knowledge of the stars, can be experienced inwardly in the human soul as it was experienced in olden times, how astral truths were heart-felt experiences, and how we as human beings, in order to gain our freedom, were led out of these stages of consciousness, and after gaining our conscious freedom, we can again return to this earlier stage. My dear friends, we must be able to acquire this selfish feeling. To achieve our freedom, we must go back so far, let's say from 20 December to 6th or 7th January just as abstractly as people with our souls, as we do, for example, when we (abstractly) experience Easter time. Let me express this particularly clearly—as I've said, these things even take root in life's experiences—I once attended a small gathering where the discussion was about a reformed calendar, a reformed calendar to be developed from modern needs. A modern astronomer who was highly regarded in the astronomic scholarly community, was also present. He obviously was an expert witness and pleaded for the uniformity in the Easter festival being determined as always being on the first Sunday of April, that it would be at least purely outwardly, abstractly, fixed. He had no understanding at all that mankind had to look at the alternating relationship between the sun and moon in order to determine the Easter festival. To speak like this in such a gathering would of course have been complete foolishness. We are so far away from our inner religious experience of what current humanity can understand of the cosmos, which, just when it's at the highest point of its particular chapter of scholarship, they see it only as normal for mankind.

Among the reasons given at the time to determine the Easter festival, there was also introduced the disorder which had to be put into the annual accounting records, when the variable time of Easter had to be placed into these books, they no longer preserve anything other from the old religion than inserting the words "With God" on the first page. This was recorded in the accounting records. I ask you to please go and look for yourselves, how much of this expression is observed in the pages that follow.

[ 13 ] You need to understand such things thoroughly, as expressions of the spirit of the time. If you don't grasp the spirit of the time even into the details, how will you then sense the actual impulse for religious renewal? You have to be able to say to yourself with certain seriousness that this "with God" should prove true on the pages of the General Ledger and Cash Book or Journal. Just imagine what power is needed to encounter the forces active in today's social life, to really bring religion into life. This has to be sensed constantly in the background, or otherwise the drive to religious renewal is not serious enough, as it should be today. So, a feeling must develop for change in the soul constitution. You must understand that in olden times the soul constitution was such that when the earth was frozen and the stars appeared in its extraordinary aura in the second half of December, inner mankind was so contracted that they came to visions which allowed them to inwardly experience what in reality was outwardly read in the stars by the exploring astrologers.

From the same source did the poor shepherds on the fields and the astrologers (for that was they were, the Wise Men) come to worship the Christ infant. They came from different sides to the same place. The ones from the periphery of the world-all, the others from the centre of the heart of mankind, and they discovered the same. We must learn while doing one thing or another, to also really find the same, we must, particularly as religious teachers do this, so that our words gather content, content of such a kind as the content in the words the Tree Wise Men brought from the Orient.

In the same way as the shepherds went forth in the fields, we must go, because only then will words become as powerful as they need to be. We need content for our words, and we need power in words. We attain such content for our words when we deepen ourselves in something like the Matthew Gospel; and we attain the power when we deepen ourselves in something like the Luke Gospel. These two Gospels—we will still come back to the others—stand to a great extent as complimentary opposite each other. It is what anyone can give and taken into their being, just as if we break through what is given as religious teaching content coming from of the depth of the human soul.

[ 14 ] So you see, we can only really speak in this way through Anthroposophy. Just try for once if you can find the possibility somewhere, to speak in this way. Where you will find it, Anthroposophy is actually subliminally present; it doesn't always have to be called dogmatic, it is not meant that way.

[ 15 ] Now, as soon as we approach such feeling and experiences as we find in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel, my dear friends, then first of all we will find—by just taking the words, as they are expressed—that their experienced content is not the same as what we so easily have in the awareness of our time—we discover first of all an elevated admiration for the entire composition of the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel. The entire composition can only leave one filled with admiration.

First of all, we have the parable of the sower. After this parable we have three parables, from the sowing of the herbs and the weeds which should grow until the harvest, we have the mustard seed parable and the parable of the sourdough. Between these parables we have certain instruction of the disciples who should listen differently compared to how other people listen. Then come the dismissal of the people and more parables which are addressed to the disciples only. During the course of the chapters we are led through parables spoken to the people, and to instructions given to the disciples regarding the parables which had been given to the people. Then follows the disciples being taken into, I'd like to call it, the secrecy of the parables which only the disciples share, followed by the question: Have you understood the parables?—and the answer: Yes, Lord.—

This is a wonderful composition and it becomes even more admirable when we go into details. First of all, we simply have the parable of the sower. After introductory words having been said, we are told what the sower sows; that birds also eat the sown seeds, some seeds fall on stony ground where they can only have weak roots and get too little inner strength, others fall on good earth. This is clearly put to us; and after this has been given, the next parable already starts with the words: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like ..." The parables that follow and that are also spoken to the people, begins with "The Kingdom of Heaven is like ..." The people are therefore thoroughly prepared, by first having the facts established and then they are softly led to what is said as facts, facts aimed at the nature of the kingdoms of heaven. That's all the people will be told, then they will be released.

The following parables are taught to the disciples: the parable of the treasure in the field, the parable of the precious pearl, the parable of the fish caught in the net from which many are thrown out, and the good ones gathered for nourishment. These parables are only spoken about to the disciples, and they are asked whether they have understood. They answer with the word "Yes," which in the context of the Gospel would mean the same if today we could acquire the right feeling for it, and say: Yes, Amen.—In this the wonderful composition lies, which does not have to be looked for because it comes across in a natural way.

[ 16 ] Sceptics may well say: this layout means nothing, as it is put down.—However, my dear friends, if you let yourself live into the Gospels, you will not be able to do anything other than experience these things; and it will have its reasons why we must experience them so, as to live into the wonderful composition, in order to really notice all the details, the Gospels have to reveal. Here you have a wonderful composition.

[ 17 ] Let's try and enter into this wonderful composition. Let's go to the three parables only told to the disciples about heaven. According to the total sense in which the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel is expressed, out of the spirit of Matthew's Gospel of Christ Jesus, this is not said to the people. Listen carefully what I emphasize: in the spirit of the Matthew Gospel this would not be told to the people. Try to remember exactly what is said in these parables which are only told to the disciples. Firstly, there's the parable about the treasure in the field, discovered by a man who then sells all he has in order to buy the field with the treasure in it, so he may own it. Actually, it comes down to this, that he sells everything in order to acquire this treasure; that he gives up everything so that he may have the treasure. This relationship of Jesus to his disciples may not be expressed to the people. Why? Because it contains a certain danger; that of becoming egotistic, the danger of reward-ethics. One could not, without damaging the people, without further ado speak about egoism. Egoism is addressed when one urges good deeds with reference to the reward of the Eternal. Reward ethic, which fundamentally is still present to a marked degree in the Old Testament, this reward ethic is rejected by Christ Jesus. That is why he speaks about this parable—for which the unprepared would look for as reward—only to those who had already progressed far enough that there would no longer be a danger for this parable to indicate its egotistic meaning. The disciples who through their communal life with Christ Jesus had gone beyond egoism, to them this could be said as it is in this parable, to them the heavenly realms could be compared with a treasure. In the disciples the urge for selfishness was not agitated. To the people in this sense of the Matthew Gospel it could not be said, just as little as what follows, which is structured accordingly with the parable of the merchant who sells everything in order to acquire the Heavenly realm. Because Christ Jesus knows he may speak to his disciples in this way, he can speak to them about the last, the most dangerous parable. It is the parable which must have a terrible effect on unprepared people, the parable of everything which is in offensive, evil or sinful, will finally be burnt in the furnace of fire, and only the good be gathered for Heaven. This can only be tolerated by minds which have learnt to be un-egoistic; otherwise it would anger their minds regarding such a parable.

What is it actually, that should be avoided with such an instruction, which Christ Jesus gives his disciples? Becoming angry should be avoided, that people should become angry with the way of the world and about being human. The entire 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel is an instruction to make people patient regarding their destiny; for this reason, it can only be revealed at the very end, as to what will happen at the end of the world. So these final parables are the ones which could only be spoken to the disciples in secrecy because in they were—whatever the Christ Jesus may also say, as the most terrible thing, at this moment, in this immediate present—to be found in unselfishness. For this reason, they could say: Yes, Amen.

[ 18 ] After we have tried to have an experience of these particular parables addressed only to the disciples, we can go back to the others. A person can only be prepared for a selfish notion of something if he approaches something which exists outside of him in nature, without agitation of his judgement. If a person dwells on the contemplation of the four processes of the seeds—if a person doesn't think of anything other than: the seeds which fall on to the ground are eaten by the birds, the seeds that fall on stony ground, fall under the thorns, and some on good ground—by simply spending time with these observations, one can actually not be engaged with oneself: one is drawn into selfless observation. After one has, in this way, presented the outside world to the usually selfishly dominated mind, then only can something happen. What is it that can happen?

[ 19 ] Now you see, here we again come to an important detail of the 13th Matthew Gospel chapter. I can do nothing towards someone finding this examination of details as perhaps pedantic; for me it is not pedantic, it is certainly a reality. From out of the time consciousness of the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha important differences are made between ears, errors in hearing, and eyes which are slumbering, sleeping and not awake. The explanation is given that the evolution of mankind should be discovered through the inaccurate hearing and that the eyes should be awakened.

[ 20 ] You see, this leads us to, as at that time—which we know about from other anthroposophic foundations—a clear differentiation made between the organisation of hearing and the organisation of seeing. People in the present day clearly know nothing about this. They don't know for example, that the total organisation which stream out from the rhythmic, goes up into the head organisation, and encircles an inner organisational harmony between hearing and speech. Hearing and speech belong together. Hearing and speech is to a certain extent combined in a single organ complex, which today's physiology doesn't list. When I show you my wooden sculpture group you will be able to use this practically demonstrated physiology—but which it doesn't want to be—to see how it appears these days, out of anthroposophic foundations, that they are a unit: breathing, speaking and hearing. These three are also present in seeing. Take this for example (writes on blackboard):

• Breathing
• Speaking
• Hearing

[ 21 ] I could also have written: speaking, breathing hearing—the sequence is unimportant. Take these three as the members of a single deed. The three members are also present in seeing. Also in seeing it is there on the one hand, something driven through breathing into the brain, the breathing process participates in seeing. All this is so quietly indicated in the human organization that we are able to say: This here (note on blackboard: breathing) is completely atrophied in human consciousness; what we are still able to observe, when we speak, and thus look at our breathing, we don't notice in the visual act; it is completely atrophied. (Beside the word Breathing he writes on the blackboard):

—completely atrophied

[ 22 ] With the act of seeing there is also something half atrophied that links to hearing. (Beside the word Hearing he writes on the blackboard):

—half atrophied

[ 23 ] That is partially atrophied, it remains quite in the shadows of the subconscious. The only thing which is expressed in seeing, corresponds to speaking. (Beside the word Speaking he writes on the blackboard):

—developed

[ 24 ] In conjuring up the images around us through our eyes, we speak etherically. However, the other two members which otherwise clearly diverge, which diverge while listening and speaking, are hardly present with seeing, but atrophied; here mere formation of the image overwhelms us. [ 25 ] Because this connection is not perceived, today's tricky physiological foundation lies in epistemology. All epistemological theories, or at least many of them, start from the physiological foundation of observation, which are equally described for all the senses; they actually have no meaning other than an act of seeing. What you can find in the physiological foundation only really fits the act of seeing and is therefore unclear, because people can't see that some things are atrophied. One could say that these physiological views, which dominate there in relation the sensory physiology, are the most dreadful, able to depress the human mind: one is forever being bothered with things said about the senses in general while each sense must be treated concretely, individually. In many cases it is so that a sensory unit theory is taken as a basis.

[ 26 ] Such a science as we have developed in Anthroposophy was of course not available at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. How we can discover the truths about things today essentially depends on our admiration for the Gospel content. Today there's been talk that one must apply great efforts to reach into spiritual research, and that we must regard seeing differently to listening. With listening one must say: People can actually only hear in error because listening is fully developed as a single act. We also have ears that are open during sleep; we have no wilful influence on our auditory images. Our 'I' doesn't quite flow into them and form what is heard, but only in such a way that it can penetrate them with erroneous judgements. Hearing can become incorrect. Seeing has caused hearing to become half atrophied. Seeing has only developed what corresponds to it in speech. Added to this one must be awake, the eyes must be awakened just as people need to learn to speak.

[ 27 ] Without it being explicit knowledge in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, it would have been simply correctly spoken and understood out of the inner soul constitution of the people. I'm not saying something like the Christ having learnt Anthroposophy—that sounds very amusing—or to those he had spoken, had learnt about Anthroposophy. He spoke in such a way because he was aware how the other, by listening, would have understood. Yet also there he had to speak in such a way, as one spoke at that time, regarding seeing, and regarding hearing, from out of the most inner soul constitution. Because of me you use the expression "out of the subconscious" which is a term often misused today in an inconvenient way for these things. In order to have this understood in the right way, you can also understand the third which is also contained in the Matthew Gospel: to understand it with a person's whole being; his concentration, understanding through the heart. Understanding with your whole being is quite a different kind of understanding; one must speak to the heart of the person if you want to explain the parables. You can't speak in a different way to the heart if it is not functioning in such a way that the eyes are made to see in the right way, the ears to hear in a right way. This is how you have to distinguish: you must awaken the ability to see and make the ears hear in the right way. The ears don't need to be awakened, they only need to hear correctly.

[ 28 ] In the total style of the 13th Matthew Gospel one's first attention is directed to the full human being; to the focus of the whole human being in his heart, perceiving through his senses, if he is to approach the interpretation of the parables. In the following way Christ Jesus makes it understandable to his disciples: after he has gone through from quite an objective observation given in the parable of the sower, he can no present further active parables and allow these to lead towards the functions of the heavenly realms. First, we have the parable of the plants and the weeds which point out that the good seeds could not flourish, without evil next to it. Then again one could say this is being expressed in a wonderful, quite scientific knowledge, because we know in a certain sense that plants can be damaged if the weeds are taken out in the wrong way. Likewise, we would harm mankind if we were to eradicate sin, for example, by not leading sinful men spiritually to the righteous, but by eradicating them before "the harvest," that is, before the end of the earth. This is approachable to people; what works in plants or in weeds, can be placed before their souls. It can be taken further, placed there objectively, how the world is spread out in the wide-open spaces, and how to carry what comes from the world, to the heavenly kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is the mustard seed, which is small compared with other seeds, then again it becomes a bigger tree compared with other plants.

This too, has to be pointed out to people, how it needs to be seen that the sprout is less visible to the eye than the grown-up plant, the heavenly less obvious than the worldly. Then awareness is drawn to how the kingdom of heaven works like sourdough, but all permeating, also working—at that time this imagination was far more obvious—as something spiritual. At that time this imagination could be uttered without introduction: Look at the sourdough as it is taken by the woman who leavens the bread with it; look at the bread which it spiritualises, behold the kingdom of heaven as it spiritualizes the world. You could not say to the people: Sell everything! The people had to behold what is indicated here, otherwise if you said: Sell everything!—in their selfishness they would really sell the whole world in order to buys something which is in the heavenly realm.

[ 29 ] So we see in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel the construction and composition of the truth because the truth is not simply stated as an abstraction, but the activity of truth consciously works from one person to another, that one needs to feel all the time, how one should speak. This is not the teaching of a hierarchy, this is simply the result of what becomes necessary through reality. It is in fact necessary, my dear friends, to speak to you in a different way because you want to become pastoral workers, than I would have spoken to non-pastoral workers, who are only believers. This content of the truth we find in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel comes to us as a direct life experience which we can have in our time, which calls such a strong feeling within us, that it actually has something of a religious character.

[ 30 ] You see, for those who have the sense that a way must be found to the truth, the truth must turn into such an inner component that it exists among people and that people can experience the truth—they would feel that university education, as it lives in writing books, is actually something hostile. Today something exists in our writing of books; when we write a book, we don't really feel like a human being among other human beings, for it is conceived as an abstraction; while writing the book it is without regarding who would be acquiring the book. This even produces the desire particularly when spiritual supersensible things are spoken about, for things that can stand alone in a book, and that, because it is ignorant, can only give something very deficient to unknown crowds of people, also again jointly experience the truth with the people in the manner and way these people are prepared for truth, while much is given in the preparation of the truth and less to the ignorant formulation of the truth content. This gives one a clear and strong experience of what I yesterday called the vital content of the Gospels. The vital content of the Gospels must also not be understood abstractly, as many do today. People do not believe, when they as religious teachers allow their words to a certain extent to flow together, that words are permeated with feelings; they firmly insist that in what one calls sacramental, they believe they should find something flowing forth out of the abstraction.

[ 31 ] This is not the essential thing; the essential is the sense of feeling oneself a person among people, by experiencing truth with other people. This is after all Christian. For this reason, it is necessary to believe in Christian community building, not only Christian proclamation. It is very necessary to believe that everything must necessarily flow towards real community building: this means not merely thinking about what others are saying, but to communally feel and act together. In community building the foundation must be for the community feeling communally, and act communally. It must be a real soul-spiritual organism built by the community. We will talk about this further.

The following list was given for the material to be discussed:

1. Preliminary conditions
2. Foundation of teaching activity
3. The way to experiencing the truth
4. The essence of the breviary, the sermon
5. Building the ritual
6. The treatment of the Community.

Prayers were said from various sides before the start of the lecture, and a particular wish was expressed to hear more closely about the battle of Luther's soul.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: Yes, my dear friends, if I want to continue exploring which what we started, in various directions, it is important that I firstly touch on what existed in ancient Christianity, and then what unfolded out of the various forces working from ancient Christianity leading to the rise of the Evangelical-Protestant experience. We must be quite clear that during the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, those people who would at least have a tendency to accept Christianity, were still of a totally different soul constitution, than what was later the case. The Mystery of Golgotha took place in the human evolution during a time in which it had basically nothing at all to do with, I could call it, pursuing the objective course of the world in a spiritual-scientific way. This is quite extraordinary. When you try to deepen yourself particularly into the objective course of the world, as it is presented in its totality, incorporating the physical, soul and spiritual, you have a strong impression regarding the development in the 8th century before Christ. Once again, you will get this strong impact—this can already be noticed in outer knowledge—regarding the time which I've often spoken about, in the 15th century.

[ 2 ] The time epoch stretching from the 8th century BC to 15th AD creates roundabout an epoch in which humanity's development, if you follow this development spiritual-scientifically, was unfolding and can be called the Mind- or Intellectual Soul; in other words, it was the epoch of the Mind- or Intellectual Soul development. In its purest form it comes out of the Greek people's evolution. I call it Mind Soul but ask you, please, not to connect an intellectual concept to this term. Should you want to study the Mind Soul today, as it had developed out of Greekdom, then you need to study such individuals who had in a certain sense some kind of clairvoyance, not schooled clairvoyance but an atavistic one; inherited clairvoyance which can still pop up in some people at present. You can see that the content of the world appears to such people as imaginative, made up of images. If you should ask them to describe their pictorial impressions—of course only if no physical deformation disorder is involved, but when the whole thing is pure—you discover an extraordinary amount of understanding in the images thus depicted. They describe some processes in the spiritual world in pictures. They receive the images, but they get the sense of them as well. They can't help it if they include understanding in the images they receive because they take place together. Up to the 15th Century the soul constitution of many people were still not as developed as the mind is today, but they were inspired by their minds, they could have revelations in the mind. Only after the 15th Century did intellectualism develop which means that the mind had to be actively laboured with inwardly in the soul. Logic had to be developed, it was something to be worked at; it was not, so to speak, just given to the soul. That is the essential difference in the soul constitution of more modern people in comparison with those in this earlier epoch.

When you go still further back, to the evolutionary period of mankind, before the 8th century BC, then you arrive at an epoch where such pictorially filled imaginations initially developed as involuntary imaginations. You get to an epoch which reached back to the 3rd century and find that just this reading in the cosmos which I've described for you this morning, unfolded and appeared in the human soul as pictorial imaginations, still existed in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, in naive and simple mind natured people. By contrast we have an epoch since the 15th century in which human consciousness must veer to freedom, and this can only happen when people create their own thought forms, out of themselves.

[ 3 ] If we simply study world processes objectively, we initially have no reason to believe in the Mystery of Golgotha. We need to attain intuitive knowledge in the sense in which I've depicted in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its attainment," and then you get the idea that the Mystery of Golgotha can be seen as falling out of the entire remaining course of the world view. (Writes on the blackboard.) If I namely have 8 centuries BC before here, the 15th century, then we have a particular process which must be considered as flowing together, and now gives a particular impact in our years of one or zero.

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[ 4 ] To a certain extent we can research from the oldest times the evolution of the earth and man, and we will reach a certain stage in the development, but we do not arrive at seeing the Mystery of Golgotha within this research. We definitely come through research of this evolution, if we do not look at the Mystery of Golgotha, to the feeling: we are moving to the end of the earth, as human beings we must find our grave in the earth.—This way we arrive at quite a decisive conclusion of the earth dying away. Then we can turn our gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha and so we will find that the earth was renewed, fructified by the Mystery of Golgotha, that a new seed from the expanse contained up to that moment evolutionary streams, and that this new seed, having arrived through the Mystery of Golgotha, forms the foundation for the renewal of the earth. This is primarily the meaning of the Gospel's words which I mentioned yesterday when I said: The spiritual beings who remained on the earth would have perished with the earth (if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place): The demons screamed when they saw the Christ, because he stripped them of their rulership. This is certainly a real process. You can be quite certain it isn't merely about accepting some or other event given in the Bible, but it is about a clear observation of the processes.

[ 5 ] The Mystery of Golgotha does not even fall in the middle of these time slots (between 8 BC and 15 AD), because the middle of this time is in about the middle of the 4th century. Therefore, this event doesn't even fall into the middle, so one could say: The event of Golgotha is something which took place in contrast to the world of necessity, taking place through divine freedom entering into the earth. It is a deed of freedom coming out of the divine worlds, it certainly was given to humanity from outside, as a gift from the divine world order. As a result, it can't be understood by those who want to observe the continuous historic processes, they may not be able to discover something within it like the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 6 ] To suggest that, I often express it this way: If, let's say, a Mars inhabitant came down to earth, he would find much he can't understand, but he would be able to start understanding something when he looks at something like the painting of the last supper of Leonardo da Vinci. To this extraordinary image and what is intended with the Christ, he would be able to see something which would indicate the central point of earthly events to him. That is obvious only through comparison, but it is a comparison which I've often had to make to indicate what is important here.

Particularly for those who had a strong feeling for the sense of the Mystery of Golgotha as fallen out of the ordinary earthly course, like all that the Roman Catholic Church has gradually become, still a kind of departure came about from the original meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. It has crystallized into an historic anecdote. When Leonardo da Vinci was appointed to paint the Last Supper, he worked slowly, for a long time. Actually, he needed more than ten years. Then a new Prior arrived and wanted this painting chap to finish off the thing at last. The painting had been completed up to the figure of Judas when the new Prior asked when it would at least be complete. Leonardo said that up to that point he had not been able to complete the painting because he had no model for Judas. Now however, he had in the Prior a model for Judas, and he could complete the painting.

With this anecdote there is definitely a crystallization of the feeling which in the Roman Catholic Church had as a departure from the original sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, how one would far rather take a Prior and make a Judas out of him than anyone else.

[ 7 ] This attitude of mind can be studied up to the middle of the 4th century, and then again, how it prepares itself for intellectualism from the middle of the 4th century onwards. For example, you can already see, when you study the writing of Scotus Eriugena, how in the 10th century on the one hand, the tendency plays in towards intellectualism that would later fully emerge, and on the other hand in what one could call the gifts of understanding out of higher worlds. This appeared strongly in that time in which it prepared itself from the middle of the previous epoch up to the 15th century of our present epoch. It is conclusively quite different before the middle of 4 AD; it continues into the 5th century, the times are not so strictly separate. You always find strong experiences towards the Mystery of Golgotha present in the first centuries after the event, as the supersensible spiritual plays into the earthly. This permeation of outer spiritual into the earthly became ever more difficult for the ordinary state of mind. We are just seeing in the centre of this previously mentioned period, a personality wrestling with every possible thing, just to get along. It is with such a turn that the one side of the human state of mind really changed, and on the other side a new kind of understanding necessary for the Mystery of Golgotha. This personality, as you know, was Augustine.

Within his soul, Augustine just couldn't come to terms completely with how the spiritual worked into matter. Augustine for instance sought amongst the Manichaeans for a possibility of how to recognise the spiritual in the material. He didn't manage; he actually only managed by withdrawing completely into himself, in order to depend on the self-assurance of his human I, which made him one of the precursors of the famous Descartes declaration: "Cogito, ergo sum." (I think, therefore I am.) This principle is found with Augustine already. However, on the other hand he was confronted with a certain doubt about the teaching, and this doubt was eating him up. One can certainly understand out of the configuration of the time, why Augustine felt this way. How the old heathen point of view of the church fathers, namely Clemens von Alexandria, was still completely accepted, so that in the oldest Christian times they were totally overtaken by the pagan in Christian teaching, and this Augustine could no longer accept, because in his human soul constitution it was no longer appropriate. The teaching content was also shaped in such a way that, essentially in the time of the Council of Nicaea, it had been brought as abstract dogmas which could then be absorbed by intellectualism. So the human soul in Augustine's time, I can mention, was already driven towards intellectualism. From then on Augustine could do nothing other than accept the dogmatic Catholic Church content, in order to find a teaching content.

[ 8 ] Through this, a great crack came about in the Catholic Church. What appeared from the ceremonial of course could not correspond to a soul content. Humanity didn't come in the same way to the undermining of the ceremonial content, as it came to the drying up of the soul content. So it happened in the Catholic Church that the soul content dried out dogmatically, while the ceremonial content actually sustained itself. This ceremonial content of the Catholic Church didn't come out of Christianity, but it came out of far older ceremonial processes. Out of such times it stirred, from a time in which people still had a living reading of the cosmos in which, as a sacrificial offering, it could be accomplished from the reading in the cosmos. What was drawn from the ancient ceremonies of the mysteries, was then Christianized. The Mass offering is also certainly taken from the ancient mystery ceremonies and Christianized. However, what remained as symbolic in the act of sacrifice, is what actually continued within the Catholic Church.

[ 9 ] The Catholic Church was actually on this point always consequential, also when it became a worldly establishment under Constantine, as it went over into the political field. It was, one could say, really ironclad in its consequentiality. It has maintained its ceremonies in the most conservative way and in order not to go under, suffocated its soul content with dogmatism. No wonder that the ceremonial content became more and more strange as an experience, because people had no lively relationship to it anymore, and the dogmatic content was experienced as something obsolete—while it had been lively knowledge in olden times, knowledge experienced by a different soul constitution. The dogmatic content could not hold true compared with what came out of purely worldly knowledge. However, the Catholic Church had to remain absolutely consequential, and it has remained in its conserved state right up to the present. It has remained conservative by not participating in the state of mind/soul constitution residing in the present day. It has remained so, that it demands faith in preserved dogmas, which corresponds to a knowledge of an earlier soul constitution so that what is learnt about the Catholic Christ in the Church today is completely bound up with a dogmatic content which believes it presents a level of knowledge which mankind had actually reached at the end of the 14th century AD.

[ 10 ] What Anthroposophy wants to developed is regaining the supersensible substance of knowledge; the kind of supersensible knowledge which has died in dogma; Anthroposophy wants to enable the achievement of a new understanding for the Mystery of Golgotha, because the dogmas of the Catholic Church can no longer penetrate into an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is extraordinarily important, that the dogmas of the Catholic Church no longer can allow the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha to come through. The ritual of mass lets the souls penetrate to something different, to taking an interest in the symbols of the ritual. It is already so, that the Roman Catholic Church has remained in line with its ironclad consistency even into the 19th Century. Some things appear as quite strange if you examine the dogmas instituted by the Catholic Church before the 19th Century. I would like to give you an example so you can see what a kind of abyss exists, in order for you to reach an insight as to how such an abyss can once again be bridged over.

[ 11 ] Once I had a conversation with a very learned theologian regarding the Conceptio immaculate, the immaculate conception, which was only instituted in the 19th Century. You perhaps know that this doesn't deal with the immaculate reception of Jesus himself, but of the immaculate conception of Mary; that means St Anna conceived Mary in an immaculate conception. This is actually the dogma laid down in the 19th century. The other dogma—that of the immaculate conception of Jesus—had existed already for a long time. As a "singular grace" it can be seen by those who can even see the emergence of dogmas from the imaginative content, even if they can't approve of it at all because its content is deadened by it—but one can see it.

So, in my conversation with this theologian, I said to him that it was impossible to reconcile the idea of the immaculate conception with modern conscious. I said to him, one isn't compelled to lead the modern consciousness over into dogma in relation to the individual case; one is not compelled to apply logic in an individual case because the singular also, according to scholastic opinion, evades follow-up. The moment you assume a series of facts, in other words a backward looking of a series of facts, where you rise up from the immaculate conception of Mary to the immaculate conception of St Anna, it is necessary to continue and then you, out of necessity, must accept an entire generation line of immaculate conceptions.—Now the theologian turned to me and said that is not correct, because then we come back to David—this is how he expressed it—and then the story would be quite disastrous, and that could not be allowed.

You see, with today's consciousness this has a certain stroke of frivolity, but it certainly is something which can be made known, how within the Roman Catholic Church the entire relationship to the truth is something quite different.

[ 12 ] In this depiction of our conversation I wanted to firstly stress the kind of perception of truth we lived in during the middle of the 15th Century. The Catholic clergy was not experiencing the perception of truth like modern consciousness does, but a truth-conception corresponding to an earlier time epoch. They were not aware of the view of truth that reckons with the consequences of truth for the inner life of a human being. Quite a different attitude to the truth existed, and as it had changed from olden times, was not clearly understood. We need to look back at the evolution of humanity which means that the soul constitution essentially has changed. Basically, there is no incorrect expression other than that nature had made no leaps. Nature in fact makes continuous jumps. Take for example a green foliage leaf to the coloured flower petal—that is a jump. In the same way we have leaps in the course of time, apparently quite a sharp advancement from one soul state into another. However, people don't always grow in the same degree but allow old points of view to continue and as a result their souls atrophy, as we are able to notice if we look at the enormous leap which has come about in modern human soul constitutions and which has not been participated in by a large number of people.

[ 13 ] Now we must clearly see that such an inner kind of experience, as can be describe as an historical consciousness, which can be acquired, stands out particularly strongly in a person who, through a certain education in the Church, it can especially be applied, when we think of a case like Luther's. If you want to understand Luther's soul then you must be clear that be comes out of the after effects of Augustinism, and that it is precisely in his time, just a bit after the beginning of the intellectualist age, that he is confronted with one of the most serious soul conflicts imaginable. Why was this so? You must just imagine: Augustine had come to an agreement on the recognition of the Christian-Catholic dogma, but for him this was connected with his living within something which was still alive, and even more alive among the Manicheans with whom he had met. What was still full of life in his time was the observation of original sin, in general the consideration of higher processes taking place in relation to lower earthly processes. People still have trouble today to make such things comprehensible.

[ 14 ] If we position ourselves at the beginning of earth evolution, we can gradually enter into an imagination of the origins of what we today call a human being. There were higher beings who were in a certain way connected with earthly evolution. The Old Testament indicates one such higher being having become the snake, a being who we call Lucifer today. This higher being, so it is described in the Bible, actually initiated the original sin. In the beginning of earthly existence, this being was there and the original sin was actually due to the calculation of man's precursors of his ancestors, who then appeared as the serpent of paradise. What this pre-human being had begun by the seduction in paradise was transferred on to the human beings. During that time, what played into human thoughts, existed there as primal guilt, within which man got trapped and later dragged it along, because he originally had become entangled and then in fact he now transferred it from one generation to the next through the blood.

As a result of this primal sin the Christ appeared on the earth—I am speaking in the consciousness of this time period—in order to gradually heal people from their dying through what Lucifer had done to them. That we outwardly know so little about the constitution of consciousness, is a result of the really innumerable things proclaimed by the Roman Catholic Church, which is based on this ancient tradition. Above all, everything Gnostic was eradicated and also later the reproduction of anything that still had an older soul constitution was made exceedingly difficult. You know the writing of Scotus Eriugena had been lost and only later rediscovered, and for centuries people knew nothing about Scotus Eriugena because all copies of his writing which one could get hold of, had been burned. It is certainly so that it deals with looking again at an event which took place in the supersensible world and into what human beings had become entangled.

[ 15 ] Among the impulses of such observations, I could say something worked behind human events, active through superhuman events of other beings who actually were also involved with human evolution, in order for Augustine's teaching regarding predestination, to develop. Augustine saw the incarnation of people on earth as something much rather, if it could be expressed it would be by saying: The human being is actually the result of the battle of superhuman beings.—This meant individuals had no intrinsic worth; that only happened in the middle of the 15th century. Augustine believed it quite possible to think of human development as beyond their will, accomplished by the destinies of superhuman beings. His teaching could only be alive in him if a part of the human being, not the sinful part, but a part, be destined for demise and another part of the human being destined for bliss, the teaching which is not usually presented in all its meaning, when it is to be experienced. Today this can't be experienced in devotion, which was possible for Augustine. Into this soul constitution something also played that one can call original sin, which is balanced out by the Mystery of Golgotha. People in Luther's time still expressed it in this way, but they lived in another time of a soul constitution as in the time of Augustine. It was quite impossible to find one's way into these ideas with all of one's soul. In this way Luther experienced the illumination through his soul, as an Augustine monk.

[ 16 ] Now I must speak to you about my conviction which is based—even though it is called a conviction—on knowledge. For me it certainly is knowledge. I am not in the position to speak in the same way about chance or coincidences like other people because coincidences also belong to an order of things which is usually ignored. I can't attach it to an actual incident in Luther's life, I can't be indifferent to a lightning strike in a tree beside him, but I can see it, according to my knowledge, only as the effect of a truly supersensible intrusion. You can think about it in any way you like, but if I speak sincerely and honestly, I certainly regard part of Luther's soul constitution as this pointing in, if I may call it so, of God's finger, not out of belief but out of recognition. Luther's state of mind or soul constitution became something quite different under the influence of such a deed; it happened so that certain inner sources were opened. These sources, or better said, the effectiveness of these sources, had already been prepared through the wrestling with misunderstood lore. It could not rise up, it was like a turning point in the soul itself, but it could not consciously show itself. Then it rose up into consciousness and became a turning point for only that which was happening. If I want to express myself roughly, the body has been softened, so to speak, and what had been prepared in Luther for a long time, permeated through a soft body.

Now Luther gradually became aware of all the dangers in which modern man lives. It isn't easy to say in how far this went into Luther's clear consciousness, and it's also not that important. In any case this position of modern man played into Luther's soul on the one hand as a streaming from earlier times, and on the other hand, what man should be since the middle of the 15th century. The entire dangers of modern man flooded Luther's soul. What did this consist of? It consisted of—I'm speaking in a Christian way—man being afflicted with the deeds or the sequences of deeds of superhuman beings in which he had become entangled. Through what had been an entanglement of original sin in the lower human being as inherited traits, man entered into the next epoch in a different manner than he would have if there had been no original sin through the Fall. As a result, that which should appear in humanity as intellect came through in a far more abstract measure than how life used to be in former times, when it was afflicted with something subhuman through original sin. To a certain extent, what man was to experience intellectually became diluted, more abstract, which in earlier life had been more dense, more natural, than it should be for mankind. It was only now that man was basically condemned to fall away from God through his intellectualism. The whole danger of intellectualism which pushes too far to greater abstraction, lived itself out in Luther's soul, and Luther really experienced it with such vehemence as described in his vicious battle at Wartburg Castle.

[ 17 ] We have two opposite poles which can clearly be determined in the newer evolution of mankind. On the one hand is Luther, positioned in the great spiritual battle after the middle of the 15th century—of course a little later—and now as a result, while he wanted to loosen himself from intellectual dangers, first renounces the intellect and seeks justification outside the intellect which can lead him to the divine, as it were, beneath the intellect.

The other pole is Faust. He took on the intellect with all his senses, resulting in his deteriorating into the dangers of the intellect, as he entered into all the individual dangers of the intellect. It is not for nothing that these personalities are a kind of landmark for modern mankind: on the one side Luther and what he connected to, and on the other side Faust, and what he associates with. It was truly no small deed of Goethe when he wanted to reshape Faust in such a way that he would not perish. Lessing already thought about it. If freedom is to be achieved for humanity, the intellect needs to be engaged with, but humanity should not be pushed away from the divine. The Faust fragment of Lessing ends with the words (of the angels to the devil): "You shall not prevail!" which Goethe remodelled. He said to himself there should be a possibility not to be separated from the divine when mankind engages with the intellect—but he needs it for the development of freedom. In this terrible battle Luther stood. He saw how the intellect contained within itself the danger that man also strangulates his soul from the divine, how man succumbs to the death of the soul. That which is devoured by the intellect—in anthroposophy we call it "becoming Ahrimanic"—which totally enters into the intellect, becomes devoured, it is cut off from the divine. This is what Luther felt for modern man.

Historically it was so that on the one hand there was the Catholic Church where people were absolutely not within the intellect, it even wants to save people by preventing them from entering into the intellect, it wanted to preserve them from progress made in the 15th century onwards by conserving such dogmas like the one which claims infallibility, such as the dogma regarding the immaculate conception, as I've mentioned earlier. They couldn't manage consequently in the Roman Catholic sense without the infallibility dogma because they even deny its intellectual meaning, declaring it unfit for development and incapable of understanding the spiritual world. A reinforcement was needed for what people had to believe, indicating the sovereignty of the Papal Command for the Truth. There is nothing more untimely, but basically nothing greater than this determination of the dogma of infallibility, to completely contradict all consciousness of the time and all human desires for freedom. It is the last consequence of the secularization of Catholicism in an iron clad consequence of tremendous genius. One must say if you take, on the one hand, the ironclad consequence of the Roman clerics in their determination of the infallibility dogma, and on the other hand the kind of polemics of a Dollinger, the latter is of course philistine in the face of tremendous ingenuity—you could even call it devilish—something is carried out, because it was once the consequence to that which Rome has come to since the secularization of Christianity by Constantine.

[ 18 ] So it happened that in the bosom of the Roman Catholics, two souls could live next to one another. On the one hand was the submission to the rigid dogma, which no human being could touch save the infallible Pope—because the Council had lost its power since the determination of the infallibility dogma—and on the other hand the unhindered care of outer science as an external manipulation to which one is devoted and partake off, but don't attribute any meaning to the actual content of religious doctrine. Just consider from a modern consciousness, what the justification of the Roman Catholic doctrine looks like. I suggest you read for instance such writing as "The Principle of Catholicism and Science" by Hertling, the previous German Imperial Chancellor.

Firstly, you'll discover that it was a world historic mistake for this man to have become the Imperial Chancellor but on the other hand you will learn something about the unusual thoughts modern people had and how these two souls could justifiably live in the same bosom. It is also remarkable that this writing on the principle of Catholicism appears in French. It is therefore extraordinarily interesting that the writer of this work, whose name doesn't come to my mind at the moment, has a perpetually logical conscience and therefore he has to make a differentiation between the Roman Catholic teaching material and what constitutes the content of outer science. That is why he proposes two concepts next to each other, the idea of truth and the idea of science, which he always sees as two disparate ideas. He says something can very well be scientific, but truth is something else; what is true does not need to be scientific. In some or other way he comes to the conclusion that science doesn't have anything to do with what one acknowledges directly as containing truth. So on the one hand things worthy of contemplation are mentioned, but are already beaten, on the other hand the most grotesque somersaults are being beaten in order for these two souls to become reconciled with one another.

[ 19 ] So, on the one hand we have the continuation of symbolism, the symbolism that led to the enormous upswing of art in the Renaissance period in central Europe. Art Historians need only dig deep enough to discover that without the Catholic symbolism the entire artistic development of Giotto, Cimabue, from Leonardo to Rafael and Michelangelo would have been impossible, because the artistic development is certainly a propagation of Christian artistic subjects and belongs so strongly in Christianity that people can't, for example, understand why the Sistine Madonna looks like she does.

Look at the Sistine Madonna, she is magnificent. As far as one can see there are images of clouds which transform purely into angelic heads, and how the Madonna herself, with the Child, condenses out of the angles who reside in the clouds. It is as if the angelic forms have condensed out of the cloud images and have descended down to the earth, yet everything is wonderfully lifted into the spirit. Then the two curtains (he sketches on the blackboard) and below that a coquettish female figure and a terrible priestly figure, all things which absolutely do not belong to it. Why is this so? It is simply from the basis of Raphael having initially intended with this image, to give a soul experience with the picture of Mary on a certain feast day of Mary—now this is on the Feast of Corpus Christi—where people walk around in a procession with a picture of the virgin Mary that is carried under a canopy and comes to the altars where people kneel down. This is why there are these curtains (points to sketch on blackboard) with the kneeling female and male forms in a chapel, in front of the picture of Mary. Well, that is the kind of elementary school way of looking at what Raphael painted. What is actually meant here stands right in the Roman Catholic cult—absolutely right inside it.

[ 20 ] Basically, everything contained in this Roman Catholic ritual is what Luther saw in Rome. Isn't it tremendously symbolic, historically symbolic, historically symptomatic, that Luther saw only corruption in Rome, not being actually touched deeper by what flowed out into depictions in art, how he was not deepened inwardly by art, but that he only saw moral corruption? Here we see how the soul in fact was positioned through his particular development in the historical becoming of mankind, he was like a soul at war, thrown this way and that, searching for a way out. Despite all this, like the doom of Lutherism in particular, comes the big problem: How do we as human beings absorb intellectualism, so that we are not doomed but that we overcome the fear of becoming doomed, because it is necessary for human freedom to integrate us?

Modern intellectualism presses strongly into our human consciousness. The evangelical church reckoned with it for centuries, the Catholic Church kept itself completely distanced from it. The evangelical church gradually withdrew back on to faith because with intellectualism, as it developed in the world, it didn't agree, so it increasingly withdrew from knowledge by depending on belief; it now rests within a faith in which the doctrine content is to be sought. The Catholic Church had doctrine content, but it was allowed to dry up. From the intellectual point of view the way to individuals can't be found, who see themselves isolated from those superhuman forces which could still be felt as being connected to Augustinism.

Basically we in humanity stand right in this battle today, only, if I could put it that way, we have come to the cutting edge, so that we simply stand there and say: We need a pure concept of faith so that we have a religion opposite intellectualism, because we can't take up the old Catholic doctrine, for it has dried out.—With this dried out dogmatic content the evangelical church rejected the ritual in the most varied forms. This is what started with Luther, putting us today on the knife edge; we must become aware of the seriousness of this position. It is a struggle for the power of faith in the soul, who wants to save the faith at the cost of not having the existing doctrine content at all. However, without content we can't learn, and it appears impossible to simply rediscover a bridge to what Catholicism has secularised.

[ 21 ] Now my dear friends, I come to the question of how we should proceed. It is like this: you see, with all this there was also an evangelical consciousness introduced in the evolution of humanity, in the individual human development, because the earlier evangelical consciousness to a certain degree entangled man in the supernatural, superhuman processes and acts of superhuman beings. With Augustus it was expressed somewhat differently, that the progress of humanity was permeated with the superhuman element ... (gap in notes). People saw the superhuman battle raging as something like Christ fighting against the enemy who wants to lead him into the temptation of appearing super human; that the one who drew near to the Christ was one to whom original guilt was traced back to, and it is shown how Christ turns against the original sin. This understanding has now come to an end. Earlier, this understanding had been adhered to, for what was supersensible-divine permeated earthly matter, and there already has been an intention present for specialization to make a dividing border between the supernatural, and that part of man entangled in sensuality.

This dividing border is done through consecration. Consecration is actually the separation of the human being, or that part of the human being, from being entangled in the earthly. The ordination of the priesthood is only one part because there are also implements and so on; everything possible is consecrated. Once during a war, the Pope consecrated the bullets but that is only due to the secularization of Catholicism.

[ 22 ] Do you see that consecration is really the dividing boundary between two worlds, and there is certainly the awareness in Catholicism—even if it is not present in individual priests—that a consecrated priest is active in another world when he does something, that he is also speaking from another world when he speaks of the Gospels, even though all his ordinary actions are in the earthly world. This differentiation could not be understood since the 15th century. In historic Catholicism, throughout, was this strong differentiation where, in circles of ordained priests, it was consciously stressed. Only now and then some bishop, by mistake, will bring something non-Catholic into Catholicism, namely modern consciousness, and that leads to absurdities. There was for example a pastoral letter written which claimed that the priest in the fulfilment of the sacrament at the altar would be more powerful than Christ Jesus, because he forces Christ Jesus to be present in the sacrament; Christ Jesus has to be present when the priests demands it; the result is that the priest is now more powerful than Christ.—This is the content of a pastoral letter of not long ago. You can come across such things when out of modern consciousness something is understood which should be understood in quite a different mood, namely that which lies beyond the earthly sphere and separated from it by the consecration.

[ 23 ] The principle of consecration comes from far, far back. It already existed in the oldest oriental religions and it was particularly developed on (the Greek island of) Samothrace. Catholicism took it over from ancient times but for the newer consciousness it was totally lost.

Tomorrow I will try to add further elements to it, so that you can come to a full understanding of the principle of consecration, and also priest ordination, without which the apostolic succession won't be comprehensible

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Today we need to pursue what we had started yesterday, by adding details to some of the requests. Above all questions, as difficult as they may be—be it in the religious sense, or anthroposophic sense—will be those related to knowledge which reaches into the future. Such knowledge into the future can only be understood if one is able to discuss all prerequisites for such knowledge, so to speak. You know, of course, that outer materialistic science also has certain knowledge of the future which is quite possible.

[ 2 ] Solar and lunar eclipses can be predicted to the second, and these predictive calculations depend upon having a definite insight into the details of the phenomena. In outer materialistic science it relates to this insight of the context of the phenomena being hidden, because it is presented in formulae; the formulae are learnt and one no longer really knows where they came from; they actually originate from observations made in the very same area to which they are applied. Nobody would be able to calculate the solar and lunar eclipse predictions if solar and lunar eclipses were not originally observed, forming a basis for observation and formulas obtained from these, which now continue as based on the belief of a regularity applied to these phenomena. The psychological process which takes place here is far more complicated than one is often aware of today. Things start becoming particularly complicated if they are not applicable only to outer, spatial mechanical or mathematical kinds of laws, but if they deal with what happens inwardly, in the intrinsic sense, in the course of the world. Because these questions are based on the prerequisites of modern consciousness they can barely be studied, that's why we find modern Bible explanations—and the priest must also be a Bible explainer—so difficult, like chapter 13 of the Mark Gospel and everything relating to this chapter. Besides that, in later translations this particular chapter has become extraordinarily difficult to understand because it relates to circumstances which have become the most corrupt.

[ 3 ] Now I would like, before I proceed into the situation of this chapter, to say something about the predictions in the Christian sense. You have the feeling that within the development of Christendom there had already been, especially in olden times, references to future events, and future events of the most important kind had already played a major role. You also get the feeling that present day people hardly believe such indications, and that they actually can hardly reckon with such indications being anything but illusion. One always gets the feeling, when such things do happen—in modern language use it would be called prophesy—that something else must play along, other than real knowledge of what will happen in the future. You must however make yourself familiar with it, it is after all also present in our time, in the time of intellectualism—and rightly so in this time—it has eradicated certain traditional, inherited, atavistic clairvoyance. There are clairvoyant people of the older kind who are still serving certain theorists, also of the 19th century, as examples from which they wanted to prove the existence of a supernatural world they could not experience for themselves. We only need to consider such a type of prediction, then we will see—quite equitably, whether we believe it or not—what is actually meant. Such cases could happen, and it has, if I take it as typical, and still occurred numerous times in the course of the last century, whereas in the present time it shows a certain decline. Such abilities are still common in country people. It could happen that someone sees in an advantageous moment in a dream, how he, riding a horse, falls and hurts himself. Such seeing is certainly a sight into the future and one can, even by being careful, find out everything with all the scientific chicaneries that exclude an influence on following events, one cannot speak otherwise but admit a true looking into the future exists. This is something which had been recorded by the most earnest theorists everywhere, up to the middle of the 19th century. You can find this writing originating from otherwise quite serious natural scientists from the first half of the 19th century, discussed in numerous journals. As I've said, whoever observes people today must see that such atavistic abilities have gone backwards and become drowned out by intellectual life; a condition which completely excludes looking into the future.

[ 4 ] Now, as we've said, we must at least familiarise ourselves with such abilities which can be called looking into the future, abilities present in ancient times and certainly understood in the surroundings of Christ Jesus, when he spoke in a certain way about the future. In order not to be misunderstood, I want to call your attention straight away to something else. When you take literature which appears as Christian literature according to the actual Gospels, according to the letters of Paul and others, of direct disputes attributed to the disciples, and you take the later literature of the so-called church fathers—under 'church father' it is meant those who were still students of disciples or at least scholars or the apostles not too long ago—when you take the literature of the church fathers, then you will often discover three characteristics.

The first characteristic is that these writings have become dried up of an actual living understanding for the Old Testament. You will clearly notice how everywhere in these writings, up to the "Shepherd of Hermas," the craving comes to the fore to depict the Old Testament intellectually, in this case interpreting it allegorically, therefore it is pulled out of a real encounter to a mere concept, into what is, so to say, intellectual. The restyling of concepts into allegory puts up with the tradition of the Old Testament as a tradition of facts, told as facts—in reality these are to be understood through the intellect. That is the first essential characteristic. [ 5 ] The second essential characteristic is that the Second Coming of the Christ is clearly mentioned everywhere in the writings, that is to say, exactly what is referred to in the 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel in the most delicate sense of the word. It was certainly, one must admit, the belief in the entire spirit of the church fathers' writings from the 4th century that the Second Coming of Christ can be predicted in the near future. They called people's attention to how the old world would fall apart and how the Christ would reappear, and added to this, the imagination was created that Christ would appear in a similar way, in the most wonderful way, strolling over the earth, as it had been the case before.

[ 6 ] The third element in the writings of the church fathers is what actually contributed a great deal to the church doctrine. Everywhere a kind of legal element developed, a warning to obey the bishops, the dogmas, to submit to the constitution in the developing church. So everywhere something was taking place which one could be referred to as this: To the believers it was said that they will fall into bad luck if they develop anything which comes from within themselves, while they are searching for a religious path.—The religious path given by the church's constitution and the legal constitution, which ordered obedience to the church, was something that has continued particularly in Catholicism to the widest extent, which even as an experience today can still oppose one very forcefully.

[ 7 ] I once, for example, had a conversation in Rome with a priest brought up in quite the Jesuit manner—it was very hard, to get this conversation going—indicating all the sources which gave him the basis of his teaching and also showing the way in which he was to arrive at the teaching content. He pointed out that one then had the written words containing the dogmatic church content, and those were all things which needed no proof, they simply had to be believed, in as far as dogma was concerned. He pointed out that only interpretation was allowed, one was not to criticise or prove anything in the Gospels, while reading them again and again; one had the church tradition which flowed into the breviary, and then one had a living example of the life of the saints.

[ 8 ] The former could not very well form the subject of a discussion involving this cleric because one had to admit that what the Catholic Church wanted to protect was presented in such an ingrained sense, that there was no way around it. But the latter, the relationship of the Catholic clerics to the saints, that of course is something which creates certain difficulties even with the Catholic clergy when they think about it, and here an objection could be used. Saints are fixed personalities valued by the church for their faultless manner in their direct, vital relationship to the supersensible worlds, either through the understanding of how they had found the revelation out of the supersensible world through their inner experience, or that they performed deeds which can only be understood through accepting these deeds as having been performed with divine assistance.

You may know that such a canonization in the Catholic Church requires a very detailed ceremony, preceded by the exact determination of how the relevant person lived and what he thought, a process which should not last years, but centuries. Further, this examination must end with a ceremony which exist of all those who come forward, who have something well founded to present regarding the living exchange the personality has in relation to the divine, and to some extent always enter into what is said in such a way, that the so-called Advocatus diaboli, the representative of the demonic world, who has to refute everything that the other side has to say for the relevant canonisation, is brought to attention. So there will be an extensive trial, at which the being who should be regarded as the Diabolus, the devil, will have on the other side, the Christ representative, for the Christ-like will always be drawn into the discussion with the devilish representative, when a saint is to be recognised.

[ 9 ] Now of course I could have interrupted this conversation with him, regarding the church always admitting to the possibility of lively exchanges with the divine, so that supersensible experiences were possible. It is however the dogma of the Catholic Church that such supersensible experiences which could take place, are devilish and that they must be avoided, one must be forced to flee from them. Of course, it is certainly the Catholic Church's dogmatism which says that all of Anthroposophy is objectionable from the basis that it claims to touch on insights in the supersensible worlds. For this reason, Anthroposophy is rejected because such an insight can only be arrived at with the help of the Devil; it is therefore evil. That is something which is judged by the Catholic Church as quite necessary, quite consistent. Things are already such that they must not be blurred. Whoever thinks reconciliation between Anthroposophy and the Catholic Church can without further ado be brought about, is mistaken. The Initiate knows, for the Catholic Church to be consequent from their side, it will regard Anthroposophy as devilish, and more than ever, the Catholic church today has allowed such consequences to become its custom.

[ 10 ] As an answer from the priest I received his claim that any exchange with the supersensible worlds may in no way be wished for; if it happens in this world it must be made clear that the divine principle has been besieged by the devil.—So, I said to him: If you now have such an exchange with the supersensible worlds, would you consider that as devilish?—He answered: Yes, he has on his side the talent to merely work with literature of the saints in order to know that something like that exists; but he doesn't desire to become a saint himself.—This is now the last sentence which would be expressed by these people, this person also did not express it because if he did, then the last sentence would be that he says: To regard me as a saint, the church has the right to wait for two to three centuries.

[ 11 ] We can draw all kinds of conclusions from this. You could for example connect all kinds of evil thinking habits to it which is relevant particularly at present, when someone says that everything which can be said about the causes of the war, one would only really know about after decades when all the archives have been combed through. If you have any sense for reality you would know that in a couple of decades everything would be so blurred that no truth would be discovered in the archives in order to determine something as some tradition, and you would know that one, I could call it, very insidious step could renounce what has been said out of the consciousness of the present. This is also something which must be considered more deeply, but it only belongs in parenthesis here: I only want to draw your attention to it, that with the proclamation of a saint, waiting for such a long time, things in question could have become thoroughly blurred, and you can have insight into the Catholic Church's extraordinarily difficult burden towards its real progress.

[ 12 ] These three characteristics you will find in post apostolic literature during the first four centuries: the allegoric explanation of the Old Testament, the reference to the Second Coming of Christ and the destruction of the old world, and the admonition of obedience to the superiors. We need to focus our present interest primarily on the middle one, the reference to the Second Coming of Christ, because to this reference we need to link line 6 of the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Mark: Many will come as though they came in my name and say: I am he, and will lead many astray.—In this chapter you find a remarkable reference; many will come and appear in the name of Christ, and they will forthwith be referred to one or another person who also designate themselves as Christ. Here you see something extraordinary. On this basis it is extraordinary to see—I will speak more closely about these things but I'm leading up to it—that already at this point in the Mark Gospel the reference is linked to the view of the church fathers of the post apostolic time. By presenting it thus, that the Christ will reappear in this way, it is at the same time the fulfilment of the prophecy that tempters will come who all want to be designated as Christs; and this is what also happened in the first centuries, in this sense many came to the fore, who actually referred to themselves as Christ. An astonishing amount of literature has been lost in the first centuries—these things can actually only be found through spiritual science.

[ 13 ] So we must say - and I have expressly spoken about it—if we look at the totality of facts, the Christian church fathers lived in a misunderstanding of the Gospels, perhaps even a really bad misunderstanding of the Gospels. When we actually bring our feelings into the Gospels, as I have shown you yesterday, when we really with our whole heart and entire soul find ourselves with ever more wonder towards the Gospels, then we would find it inordinately difficult to find our way with our intellect to the first church fathers. We discover with the first church fathers that we relatively early come to the end of understanding because the Gospel itself leads us into immeasurable depths, and we very clearly experience that in a certain way we actually feel uncomfortably touched when after our wonder at the Gospels we now turn to something which appeared in the church fathers.

[ 14 ] Now, this leads us on to something else. Later we will talk about the justification of prophecy but now we want to find our way into the situation in terms of contemporary history and so it appears to me, that if we want to understand the 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel, before anything else, we need to pose this important question: Can the fulfilment of the prophecy be asserted from a correct pursuit of the facts? Surely you first need to be able to understand in what way the prophecy should be fulfilled, and then you could ask, what are the facts? Then, isn't it true, that with something like the destruction of Jerusalem it is easy to raise a question, but when it comes to the destruction of the world which we are still expecting, and regarding the coming of the kingdom of God, modern thought only has information that it still has not happened, that under all circumstances it must have been an illusion, that you had in all cases to do with false prophesies; and then you only have the choice to either interpret these things out of the Gospels, or to follow what the first church fathers did with the Old Testament through allegorizing, or even to do anything as long as it is abstract. All of this is being done against the total feeling which is necessary in relating to the Gospels, which does not arise here. The most important question seems to me to be the impact of the prophecy, because that helps towards understanding the process of prophecy.

[ 15 ] I tell you, my dear friends, for me, the destruction of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God have simply already been fulfilled. We must swing around to look at the world in such a way that we learn to represent this statement as having been fulfilled. Towards this we certainly must penetrate more deeply with spirit into the words of Christ Jesus, as opposed to what usually happens.

[ 16 ] Those who were around Jesus knew exactly, just as the poor shepherds in the fields knew in their inner sight: Christ had arrived. They still knew precisely that the entire life of human beings on earth would have been different in ancient times and it would become something different at this historical moment, even if little by little. Gentle feelings are still around at present, but only gentle feelings. I have such a quiet feeling about it but that must be trained in an intensive manner, for example, as found in the art historian Herman Grimm, and perhaps it will interest you to look into something like this as well because psychologically it leads to what we need to attain, little by little.

The art historian Herman Grimm had roughly the following view: when we go back with our examination of history, from our time to the Middle Ages and further back to the migration of peoples, back to the Roman empire, we still may have the possibility to understand the history. We have such feelings today, we could say, through which we can understand the roman imperial age and roughly the roman republic. We are still capable today, to understand this. When we go back into Greek history with the same kind of soul understanding then we enter into the highest form of illusion if we believe we can understand an Alkibiades, Sophocles, Homer or someone similar. Between grasping the Roman world and the Greek world there is an abyss, and what has been inherited from the Greek world, so Herman Grimm says, is basically a fairy tale; here starts the world of fairy tales, a world into which we no longer can enter with our present day understanding. We must be satisfied with the inherited images presented to us, but we must take these in a general sense as a world of fairy tales, without intellectual understanding.—It still has a soft echo of something which human beings need to create; an inner feeling towards the historical development of mankind.

[ 17 ] This sensitivity of feeling will of course become completely distorted by those whose opinions are according to modern evolutionary theories, which simply go back from the present and consider modern human beings as the most perfect now than what was initially achieved. Here one arrives at a perspective from which one no longer can understand those who were around Christ. One also understands why, out of what soul foundations, such experiences and imaginations of today have become clothed in the scientific view when for instance you look at the answers the imminent thinker, Huxley, gave an archbishop; his words are quite understandable according to the modern perspective. The archbishop said the human being descended from this divine being; the godhead placed him without sin in the world, and that's who has descended into the present human condition.—This archbishop's opinion couldn't but let Huxley reply to this sentence with: I would surely be ashamed as a human being if I have descended so far from my divine origin, but I can be very proud from my animal standpoint of how far I have worked towards who I now am.—

Here you can precisely see the moral impulses entering into what we call objective science. The need to revert to moral impulses is everywhere for those who tinker with science, if this tinkering it is to be believed.

[ 18 ] You must be very clear about the ancient human being before the time of Christ, the heathen person, who without sin, was aware that everywhere, when he observed nature or when he looked into human life, he encountered the divine and nature simultaneously. In the rock spring he didn't just hear the rushing sound we hear today, but he heard what he perceived and interpreted as the voice of the divine. In every animal he saw something that had, so to speak, been brought about from a supersensible world, but despite its deep fall from the supersensible world, if one really understands it, still totally leads back to the contemplation of this supersensible world. In this way the ancient people could not imagine the supersensible world without the divine, being part of it.

[ 19 ] In Judaism, quite an intense feeling came to the fore. It was this: In whatever form or way the divine appears, man may not claim himself to also have the divine appearing in himself in a perfect form, but only at most as an inspiration, but not in its complete form. This was something the orthodox Jew didn't even want to touch in his thoughts; that which he still permitted for the rest of nature, that everywhere the divine may be revealed, and what he considered facts in his Old Testament, this he didn't allow to happen in people. For the surrounding heathen world, for the old way of observation, it was self-explanatory that the mineral kingdom, the plant and animal kingdoms were consequentially built on one another, and so, just like the rest of nature was divine, so also the human being is an incarnation of the divine. At the same time thousands had a firm belief that the human being was ever more losing the possibility through his outer life, to realize God within.

So, it had been an original human ability to create the divine within, but people gradually lost this ability. Those who surrounded Christ experienced that the divine, which had been in humanity earlier and which also appeared in the outer world, this divine element no longer could appear in humanity; it was given to the earth, it appeared everywhere through the Son of God but stopped appearing in mankind and can no longer appear in human children. It must come once again from elements outside the earth so that the last incarnation of the divine, which actually becomes a new time, can catch up, but it must come from outside—if I might express myself roughly—from the stock out of that which the earth had originally loaned.

[ 20 ] From this point of view—knowledge, at that time, my dear friends, was filled with feeling, which as such took place in immediate experience—from this point of view those around Christ looked on with feeling at that which had invaded the Roman Empire and was now being fulfilled in Asia. What was this, which was accomplished through the invasion of the Roman Empire into Asia? You need to look at what actually penetrated the consciousness of that time. The ongoing war was at that time outer events which in their final dependency were also derived from divine will. However, this was not the most important aspect; the most important thing was that those who sat on the thrones were Roman Caesars who through religion presented themselves as incarnations of gods, and that, as lawful. Caesar Augustus was according to law a recognised incarnation of the godhead. Some Caesars tried, through ceremonies which had been fulfilled in ancient times, to bring about a ritual action which was so close to human truths, to inner human truths, that the Caesars could allow these ceremonies to be fulfilled but transformed into earthly existence, in order for the divine to actually act, for the divine to be made real.

Penetration of these secret divine mysteries into the world can perhaps not be more strongly symbolized than through relating the story of (the Roman Emperor) Commodus, (son of Marcus Aurelius) when he searched for initiation and allowed the ceremony to be fulfilled, because the ceremony also included the symbolic slaughter of an uninitiated person; at his mystery initiation a man was really killed, murdered. In brief, one felt that by this penetration of the Roman Empire, the divine disappeared, and the divine is presumed to be that, thus in the presumption of the divine there is an incarnation of the ungodly, for man must incarnate into something. The divine was not incarnating, it had stopped, so if the divine was not incarnating then in meant the ungodly was incarnating, the enemy of the divine. You could interpret it as you wish, but you will only be right if you understand that those who surrounded Christ Jesus, had said: In the Roman Empire, which is spreading in the world, is the incarnation of the enemy of the divine.

[ 21 ] This is elementary, this is truly a discerning feeling and discernment in Christianity for those who were around Christ Jesus. Never again, from the Christian point of view, would that which had developed further as a dependence on the Roman Empire, be seen as anything other than an earthy bound realm, an empire of the world in opposition to the realm of Heaven. This means in other words: this world which existed then, the divine world, perished, it went under due to the Roman Empire. The downfall was accomplished in the first three centuries up to the middle of the 15th century, as I've mentioned to you. The downfall was accomplished. It is a perished world that now exists, a world that is no longer divine, a world that only gives news of the divine. One must turn to the last, who had become the first, to the divine incarnation of Christ in Jesus, who through his own power gave the possibility, through the handling—if I could use such an expression—through the handling of that which is associated with the fulfilment of the Holy Spirit in one, not by nature, but in a direct way to reach the divine-spirit world, which one can also find in nature when one has found the following of Christ Jesus through the spirit.

The world is coming to an end. The Christ is no longer coming as an earth dweller, but out of the clouds, out of the cosmos he will come again. In this way he comes to everyone who has the awareness of what was meant by the world before, which perished with the Roman Empire.

[ 22 ] My dear friends! It is an unpleasant truth for those who want to be within today's consciousness; they don't know what to do about it; it is an unpleasant truth certainly for those who from an erroneous view want to apologize for Christianity before the present time. It is an extraordinary chapter in the involvement of today's world when people come and say Christianity is impractical, Christianity is something which allows escape from the world, Christianity has a mystical atavistic element which makes it unworldly. Then others come along who want to excuse Christianity by discussing away what some are saying who considered the world in a strong spiritual light and who still have a relationship to the world. The excuse is given that things don't need to be understood, they are really not meant so badly regarding fleeing from the world and with it coming to an end, it has continued its progress from the first centuries up to now; the world is just and anything some fanatical priest or fanatical pastor claims about the downfall of the world from God, is really not so seriously meant, it has only come about through the Catholic influence; one must wipe it out.

In brief, my dear friends, the largest part of pastoral and theological work exists in this. Place your hand on your heart and learn through it, feel out of your heart what I have said regarding the necessity for the renewal of Christianity, for the Christian impulse, because the biggest part of what is being preached and discussed exists in the continuous retreat from the recognition of gross intellectualism and the piecemeal eradication of everything out of Christianity, which actually should be understood in a profound way through strong thinking, through such a powerful thinking that the world finds God through Christ, and when God has been discovered through Christ, which can also become practical because in the discovery of the divine, the divine grasped in thought, the godless world can be included to bring about the re-introduction of the divine.

[ 23 ] These powers must be carried in those of you who today want to speak about the renewal of Christianity, you must be able to say: Yes, today we have to look at the divinized world which started with the Roman Empire and goes back to the Roman Empire; but in this world we must not look for the divine. The world, however, can't remain without the divine. We must grasp that which does not come from the earth, something—speaking symbolically—which comes from the clouds, in a spiritual manner. We must find the Kingdom of Heaven in the place of the divinized earth kingdom. The Kingdom of Heaven has opened up and is to be found; and for this reason, we must be there to bring the divine into our earthly world. The downfall of the earth has taken place and continues to happen more and more. When we look at this earthly realm, we are then looking at the heavenly realm which Jesus Christ has brought. You must see, my dear friends, the realm of Heaven spiritually. We must see its arrival; we must be able to feel the fulfilling of what Christ meant when he spoke about the coming of his kingdom, the kingdom which he had to bring into the world and which does not speak out of nature; when it can however work into nature, then one can speak about this kingdom. This is primarily the feeling he stimulated in those who directly surrounded him. This is also what we must strive for in our words, when we really want to speak about these things.

[ 24 ] We see how it is stated in about the first 3 sentences of the Mark Gospel: After Christ left the temple—the temple in which one also heard something within the outer world of the divine—one of his disciples says to him: 'Look, what magnificent stones, and wonderful buildings.' Jesus however said to him: 'You see only the large buildings. There will not be one stone left on top of another, without man taking part in the process of destruction because from now on, all of the outer, ungodly world begins to become a world of destruction.' And he went away and spoke intimately. On the Mount of Olives, he spoke either intimately by himself through teaching people how to pray, or he spoke only to his most intimate disciples, to Peter, James, John and Andrew. To Peter, James, John and Andrew he only spoke about spiritual events as observed from the perspective of divine realms in contrast to destructive events in the world facing destruction.

[ 25 ] You see, I'm neither speaking allegorically, nor symbolically. If you felt that way, you would be putting it in my words. I'm speaking directly out of the situation experienced as it occurred, by me trying, certainly in the words of current speech, to indicate these things. I ask you to now take note of the situation. In order to experience the content of the 13th chapter of St Mark we are taken up the Mount of Olives. It ends with the word: "Awake!"—immediately followed by us being taken to the Last Supper—we are led to the first impetus for the coming of the divine kingdom through Christ placing it in front of us.

[ 26 ] Tomorrow we will continue speaking about it. What I'm saying to you is quite new, by addressing our current consciousness. I certainly want to speak honestly, as these things present themselves to me, because I believe that by only pointing to the very first elements can one come to a true and honest conviction of what is necessary today.

Emil Bock: There are a couple of questions, about meanings in the seven sacraments for example, then also about the difference between Luther's idea of salvation and the idea of salvation in Anthroposophy, as seen in Paul's experience of Christ.

Constantin Neubaus asked Dr. Steiner to say something further about meaning in the sacraments and the consecration; he would be grateful to hear more about consecrated water, the Eucharist, the importance of the mass and prayers for the dead, and about celibacy and marriage.

A participant asked, with reference to what Dr. Steiner had related, having seen how the Host acquired an aura during the celebration: how would this be if the priest did not have complete dignity?

Another participant asked for some insight into the communications of the priest with those who have died.

Rudolf Steiner:These questions will all be addressed. In what sense are you referring to this communication with those who have died?

A participant: Like you also have in the Catholic Church, in relation to the priest's help with the dead, with the sacraments of the dying.

Another participant mentioned that the question has been raised several times regarding the cosmic significance of the sun and moon standing still in Joshua.

Another participant declared he had not understood something in the morning's lecture, regarding the statement: "The human beings ever more lost the capability to manifest the divine in themselves" and he wanted to know, what this meant: the divine manifesting itself within.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: This is only the explanation of a statement which should be taken this way: in olden times the earthly evolution of humanity experienced right into their very own form, that actually, if I could express it this way, their skin enveloped divine wisdom. This became particularly strongly expressed in the terminology being used, which is really a mystery-terminology: Man is a temple of God.—So, this immediate living-within something which originated out of the divine predecessor of human beings, was experienced in human beings. Then came the time when only a few chosen ones were ascribed with the possibility of experiencing such divinity. Actually, those who belonged to the mysteries during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were completely convinced that people in their earthly form could no longer harbour a divine wisdom within, because of the decline gradually taking place up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Because of this, the time epoch can be characterised by saying: the earthly human being would have lost what had been its divine being in olden times, had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place—in contrast to those with knowledge who said: the last one who comes from outside of this, to fill a human body, would become the first.—Then the earth would have been in a declining evolution, which means plunged into its downfall. This is what can be added as a clarification to the words.

[ 2 ] However, all these things which have been brought forward now—and I ask that you make notes in advance of such questions and remarks—are actually in need of real and factual answers before we can continue to enter into the essence of the sacraments. Allow me, as if by insertion, to enter a little into the essence of the sacraments today. In this way we will possibly find it easier to discover answers regarding the consecrated water, sign of the cross, the Eucharist, mass offering and so on.

[ 3 ] You do know of course that the Catholic Church acknowledges seven sacraments. This adaptation of seven sacraments—and we can only understand the sacramental when we approach them with such preparations as I would like to do now—these adaptations of the seven sacraments is based on the observation that we look at human life in seven stages. It is however impossible to enter into the essence of the sacraments, if you don't adapt a certain process in yourself, which has today more or less disappeared from current consciousness, a process which, I believe, also connects to that which is otherwise extraordinarily significant regarding our discussion content yesterday, because it relates to what I've only up to now fleetingly characterised as the actual foundation of Luther's soul battle.

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[ 4 ] Speaking about evolution today, you actually have a one-sided imagination of it, to a certain extent. People believe, when they talk about evolution, they must have some starting point; and this starting point, like a seed, provides the second step, and from the second comes a third and so on. In this way evolution is considered to be a process of actually always going from one previous step resulting in the next one. This evolution concept is quite one-sided in contrast to reality because evolution does not happen this way. When you look at a plant and the condition of having fully developed its leaves, flowers, right up to organs of fruit, you could kind of think how this relates to the characteristics of the evolution concept. (He draws on the blackboard, on the left.) But you can't imagine it in the same way if you start from the root, actually from the seed, and then look for the seed in the flower once again. You have to admit: there is a condition in the unfolding growth process where it involves a greater unfolding outward, and there is another condition where it involves the slightest outwards unfolding. Then a rhythm of unfolding alternates with the reverse, where, in a way, the essence of the thing pulls back so that the outer sense perceptible element becomes the most inconspicuous imaginable, but the full power, so to speak, is concentrated to a point.

If you want to speak in the Goethean sense, you would say: At one stage in the unfolding, the spiritual is withdrawn and the sensory aspect developed in the farthest periphery (he draws on the blackboard) and here where growth has been drawn inward, is where the spiritual develops and the sensory is squeezed into the most inconspicuous germ imaginable. So, we certainly have to take into account that when we speak about a concept of development, we have to speak about rhythms, but we don't come right with the development concept if we actually look at what nature is. In that moment we come up with history, things get a bit more complicated. Take for instance the course of historic development in that time span which I've characterised yesterday, from Augustus to Luther. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Augustus ------------------------------------------ Luther

[ 5 ] It is extraordinarily important to visualise everything that was contributed in this period of time, outwardly and inwardly, in the outer cultural life and the inner spiritual and soul life, towards humanity. Just imagine, that in this time epoch there was also the infinitely significant mystic ... (stenographer record unclear, other than the name containing a B ) ... who lived at this time when the booklet was drafted which played a big role in Luther's point of view, called Theologia deutch, and then we can think about what directly resulted after this time as extraordinary, rising from the foundation of historical development in minds like Paracelsus, and Jakob Böhme, just afterwards. When we look at these things, then we have primarily the impression—we must have an impression—that there was during this period of western development a strong tendency towards turning inwardness. Souls turned inward. If you enter completely into such arguments as sermonized by for instance Johannes Tauler, you will discover an inward striving, a withdrawal from the outer things, a waiting until, one could call it, a sparkle arose which could then renew the human mind. I have also characterised this in my booklet about the Middle Age mystics. When you look at such inner striving as with Tauler, when you notice how he, after years during the course of his life, he had become ever more mature in his internalization, how he in quite a mysterious way met a person and how this person simply through an impression from something out of that already deepened interior was transformed, so that this created the occasion for a sermon which was described in such a way that all who listened in the church were as struck as if by a blow and some fell down as if dead. People were so struck within their souls that they fell into quite a faint.

If you envisage all of this you will find that during this time, an unbelievable internalization was happening in the lives of many people in the west. If I could tell you, my dear friends, in detail, what a roll this played in the entire development, in the reading, in interpretation, yes, even the dramatic performance of the gospel action of the Gospel of Luke, this inner most gospel, and when we look at the pastoral care of this time, then we certainly find the extraordinary characteristic of internalization being poured out over this entire time period. We then discover, as this period came to a close—it had prepared itself already from the 15th century onwards and came out in Luther's time—general culture took on a certain externalisation. In everything there developed the opposite of the internalisation of the Middle Ages. The people's gaze developed towards the outside; methods of observation were directed outward, less and less care and attention was applied to the inner life. So we have—and we are still within this process of externalisation in relation to cultural development—we clearly have historically two successive conditions which differ as much as the unfolded plant does from the plant contracted into the centre. So we have the same thing, in plants as in history, that during such a period of internalisation, like from Augustus to Luther—and this period of internalisation was particularly present despite everything I mentioned this morning—all the power which was inwardly concentrated, later comes out, later unfolds.

[ 6 ] My dear friends! Today we all work in what is outer culture, with forces which had been inwardly developed during the time from Augustinus to Calvin or up to Luther. When we look at developments in this way, then it disintegrates into an evolutionary state—that is the unfolding, it goes outwards—and a state of involution, so that the evolution is followed by involution. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Evolution
Involution

[ 7 ] Only when we do an overall study of the alternate rhythms from evolution to involution, we are able to fully understand development.

[ 8 ] The human being is a complicated being because he is actually a microcosm. What is regarded here as a concept of evolution and involution, takes on the most complicated form in the human being. This most complicated form we must first bring before our souls in a single imagination. Think for instance about birth. (He writes on the blackboard.)

1. Birth

[ 9 ] If we look at the meaning of the event of a birth, regarding the relationship formed out of embryonic life, to what is brought about between conception and actual birth, we have previous steps which were initially soul-spiritual in the human being, moving into the material aspect. There is an integration of the spiritual-soul orientation into the material orientation. This is certainly a complicated process which psychology hasn't yet studied properly, regarding its deeper meaning. I can admit that the development of the germ has not been studied completely. It is usually only studied by starting with the germ cell, briefly, the evolution is followed from the first germinal cell which has been fertilized through its formative elements up to the embryo's maturity when it is then pushed out. What is not fully studied is what actually happens in the mother's body in the Chorion and the amniotic glands as organs which are around the embryo and in their way are most perfect in the beginning of embryonic development but then become more complicated and are pushed out at the birth of the embryo.

What we have here in the germinal cell is certainly the rising evolution, while the involution is through the soul-spiritual of the organs by which they are first established in the mother's body, from the Chorion, from the Amnion, and then gradually moving to the actual egg nucleus, to the actual embryo, so that we have here an involution of the soul-spiritual into matter. This matter becomes pushed out and then we have the continuation of embryonic evolution. The embryo is born and now puts forward its forces, as I've already explained to you, which it had been developing during the embryonic phase. This continues into the development of speech and still remains available in our bodies until later. We carry within our entire earthly lifetime the forces that remain inside us as remnants of embryonic development: the forces of birth. These birth forces develop within us, evolve in us like a gift of nature. This happens, if I may use this expression which sounds somewhat trivial, out of itself. However, immediately, from taking our first breath, from being in contact with the outer world, other processes come into play, processes related to those of dying. From the beginning we also have forces of dying in us. In these forces of dying our soul-spiritual becomes involved in our exchanges with the outer world.

Through observation, through thinking, we allow dying processes to be integrated into us. This is the opposite process of the developmental process at birth. Like humanity developed since the time epoch a bit before and after the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity experienced those changes of which I have spoken, and people had to a certain extent turn the involution processes into something holy, in contrast to the contrasting evolutionary processes. Evolution is natural, it is a gift of nature; that which is given to us at birth and continues to work, is a gift of nature. If we begin to feel the involution process starting to take hold of us as a dying process is, then it must be sanctified since that divination of the world which I spoke to you about this morning, which means, it must be included into what comes out of the Christ impulse. So we see since the development of Christianity something which should be added into the sacraments due to this dying process, and that is the sacrament of baptism. We will still speak about the ritual involved. In order for us to say: what is an evolutionary process at birth, the baptism should take place as a process of involution. We should add to this rhythm in which we are placed in at birth, the repulsion through the pendulum of baptism. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Baptism

[ 10 ] The second evolutionary process which appears in our lives, which shows itself to great effect is when a person reaches puberty, when the physical body and astral body reach a certain development and the astral body starts in its development to introduce something quite particular, when also that which separates in the sleeping state, comes into a new relationship. During the state of sleep the physical body and ether bodies remain in bed while the astral body and ego leave. Human life consists of the intimate relationship between the physical and the ether bodies, but in a more loose connection to both the astral body and ego. While in a state of growing these four members are united, in the state of sleep the astral body and ego goes out so that their relationship is looser. However, this relationship comes into a modification, it only really matures in the 14, 15 or sixteenth year, then it comes in a real alternating process with what happens in sleep with the physical body lying asleep in bed.

The right harmony only appears around the age of 14, 15 or 16. The young person is taken hold of, by an inner strength, through which the physical body is permeated with the soul-spiritual, which means the astral with the ego-being. This is outwardly expressed in adolescence, and it is only an outer revelation while a complete transformation takes place in the whole person. This event which appears as an evolutionary process can be called maturity. (He writes on the blackboard.)

2. Maturity (adolescence)

[ 11 ] This is the evolutionary process. The corresponding process of involution as related to maturity, just as baptism relates to birth, is confirmation. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Confirmation

[ 12 ] Confirmation also has the task—and we will see with this in mind what a fitting ritual it can be—the task in the Christian sense to what can be given to the ego and astral body through which everything has evolved in a modified way between the ego and astral body, between the soul-spiritual and the physical bodily nature, having developed with the coming of maturity.

[ 13 ] We enter with this into an age in life where we have something else in relation to development. Our soul-spiritual becomes immersed in the physical bodily nature. The physical body captures our soul-spiritual; the soul spiritual is as a result connected in a certain way with the physical body. This is the condition of our development, because we, when we want to examine it as an evolutionary process, describe it as the soul-spiritual incorporation into the human being. We could say: the third evolutionary process is the incorporation. (He writes on the blackboard.)

3. Incorporation

[ 14 ] Added to this, if we now look for the corresponding process of involution, then we must above all see, my dear friends, that the human being, through the immersion of his soul-spiritual into the physical body, has evolved an admirable power in his being, continually being in the state of oscillation in which there is a return to the soul-spiritual, in the repetition of the re-immersion into the physical bodily nature so that it contains a rhythm, which threatens him to be either lost in the ecstatic soul-spiritual aspect or to fall back into the animalistic, in complete incorporation. Human beings need something which stand opposite this evolutionary process as a process of involution, and this process is reception to Holly Communion. The process of involution for the incorporation is Holy Communion. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Holy Communion

[ 15 ] In our discussion about evolution and what the case has been up to now, we could say the following. It is so, that the human being in his soul-spiritual nature, confronts the physical bodily nature at every moment; at every moment the human being must take care to move in the correct rhythm so that his or her soul-spiritual nature is not allowed to sink into animalism, or that the physical is left alone and to a certain extent the unworldly rises into the soul-spiritual which would weaken the soul-spiritual. Bringing the altar sacraments into the right rhythm is what the human being must look for in the reception of sacraments.

[ 16 ] With this, not the entire human evolution is given, because the complete human evolution includes that we not only in a single moment stand in this swing between the soul-spiritual and the physical bodily nature, but the complete development includes that we also, in time, could swing back again. We need reminders of previous earthly incarnations and earthly experiences. You only need to look at psychopathology and you will see what it means for people when their normal true recollection is ruined, undermined, somehow erased. These recollections certainly develop early and only those things connected to these recollections, intimately felt completely within, getting to complete grasps with it, only really happens after puberty. This is the difference, which today's modern psychology doesn't consider, between for instance what is present in a child's life of recollections up to 15 and 16 years of age, that it is different to what comes later when memories are again gathered so that through the recollections gathered, the I is actually firmly consolidated. In brief, we see that this becomes more and more consolidated, this which we call life's recollections. It's one of our necessities; it evolves out of our being—as humans. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Life's recollections

[ 17 ] The corresponding process of involution is experienced in Christianity as the sacrament of repentance. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Repentance

[ 18 ] Here the recollections of life are permeated with Christ; the process of recollection being permeated with Christ, lifts it into the moral realm. Not only is the person's I consolidated, but he is—through his complete lifting of his recollections towards bringing them into account in moral terms, through the process of the sacrament and developed through ritual, by developing the process towards the sacrament and asserting it through ritual worship—he is lead to the involution process of repentance. This process in the Catholic Church comprises various stages which all clearly start with a recollection. Repentance in Catholicism exists in the examination of conscience, in repentance, in the serious intention to discard the mistakes of which one has become aware in oneself, in what confession is—we still have to discuss this—and the retribution one imposes on oneself or is imposed by on one of the pastors. Through these steps, complete repentance comes about, and it is the expression for what the process of involution is supposed to be with regard to the process of the totality of memory's evolution, this means, what makes up the power of recollection in the human being.

[ 19 ] Here we have created, my dear friends, processes involved in the evolution of the human being since birth, and then we have that which he now returns to in a natural way as an act of involution. We have a succession of evolutions. Through memory the sequence of evolution enters deeply into inner man. Memory therefore represents an internalisation of what has unfolded outwardly through birth. Here we come to the fifth of a naturally unfolding process of involution; we come to death, which concludes the life of the individual. (He writes on the blackboard.)

5. Death

[ 20 ] Earlier evolutionary processes we've always contrasted with sacramental action and processes of involution; however, the evolutionary processes have gradually become similar to processes of involution. The process of involution during repentance is in a certain way the outer unfolding of quite an inner decisive recollection process; it is the process of involution which is slowly approached by the process of evolution. We need, when we now want the sacramental action for this natural involutionary process of death, to introduce it in a somewhat cultic, ritualistic form, in which something of a spiritual side of nature's knowledge can be perceived, which serve to confront the dying person and manage to do something to the dying person which is simultaneously stimulated in his soul-spiritual life, stirred by the natural processes of his physical bodily being. It shall, expressed in a rhythm, let the physical-bodily aspect disappear upon death, and the soul-spiritual in turn take shape. For certain reasons, which we will still discuss, one can always see in oils, in everything oil-like, that something leads back to the soul-spiritual. In nature as well, oiling processes are regarded as processes of salvation. Therefore, the holy last anointment is performed here. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Last anointment

[ 21 ] We can add, so to speak, the process of evolution to that of involution. [ 22 ] Thus, we have exhausted the individual life of a human being, and there are still two human relationships left that are no longer of an individual nature. The one relationship is where the human being, standing here on earth in his physical bodily being, actually treasures a soul-spiritual relationship in heaven, so that the umbilical cord to his soul spiritual, which had been severed, so to speak, now again is reconnected to the soul-spiritual. This doesn't involve individual people; it involves the relationship of exchange with the heavenly-spiritual. This is something which is present in all people, albeit unconsciously. If we were to be completely severed from the soul-spiritual, we would never find our way back, it is a deep process of involution which is eternally present in us, quite a hidden process, even more hidden than what happens in the inner soul life when the organism passes through death; for this reason it is a process which in the course of individual lives of people do not become conscious at all. For this, an outer evolutionary process must be looked for and this evolutionary process is given in the ritual of priest ordination. As the sixth one, we have a process which is given out of itself, as I said - you could call it a connection—and corresponding as its counter impulse or the outer evolutionary process, in the priest ordination. (He writes on the blackboard.)

6. Reconnection: Priest ordination

[ 23 ] Now as the seventh one we have an image of the earthly relationship given as a relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily: this relationship is in nature's way given as the relationship between a man and a woman. For each true observation of the relationship between a man and a woman it is so, that the balance in the feminine swings more to the soul-spiritual side, and in the male, more to the physical-bodily nature. Yes, it is so. On earth, to a certain extent, the relationship is expressed between the human being and the spiritual world, and it is, I could say, that the woman has made one less step down into the physical life, than the man. One must say it actually differently, one must say: The descent into earthly life can be depicted by a definite boundary; the woman doesn't quite arrive at the boundary while the man crosses over it. This is actually the contrasting difference between a man and woman, expressed in a physical way. There is a certain boundary to reach, the woman doesn't quite manage it and the man crosses over it. Both bear a kind of imperfection within, between them a state of tension exists as a result. When this state of tension which exists naturally in a relationship between a man and woman, searches for a sacramental evolutionary value—this is a deeply hidden process of involution which we are pointing out here, when we indicate the manly and womanly—then we are given the sacrament of marriage. (He writes on the blackboard.)

7. Man and woman: marriage

[ 24 ] This is what has always been in Christian esotericism in relation to sacramentalism, in so far as it is to be applied to man, that man enters this world endowed with values partly through evolution, partly through values of involution, and to this must always be added, through the sacraments, the values of evolution to involution, and values of involution to evolution. Man equally speaks out of the foundation of his experience: the human being steps with his incomplete being fully into earthly existence; he or she must first be made into a complete being. He or she expresses their incompleteness at birth, in puberty, in incarnation, in memory and in death. To these things the human being, in order to live as complete physical-bodily-soul-spiritual beings, has to add, through sacramental ways, the baptism, confirmation, sacrament at the altar, repentance and last anointment.

With regard to the social sphere, man stands in an exceptional state of priesthood, where through outer signs done in a sacramental way, also in the priest ordination, the deeply hidden value of involution is present. In the healing of marriage, the sacrament should express how that which is only given in an incomplete value as involution in a man and a woman, is to be complemented by an external sacramental action.

[ 25 ] I ask you to take what I have initially presented to you not in a one-sided naturalistic way, otherwise you could of course say, it was all presented in a one-sided naturalistic way. If you grasp the outer natural world and the inner moral-religious world as one unit, then we always have a sacramental evolution value for an inner moral-religious value. By contrast, what we have as an expression of an outer form of evolution, is what we need to search for as a value of involution, that means, an internalisation in human beings of the outer evolution. For us it is really necessary to again accomplish the values of involution, through the sacraments.

My dear friends, why do moral and religious truths have so little power for modern man? They have little power because it is necessary that what come to man is not merely admonishment and a commandment, but that he becomes aware in this approach of an actual penetration with the Godhead taking place. This can take place in human consciousness only in sacramental actions.

[ 26 ] So, you have asked me to speak about these sacraments. The questions asked for, today, have largely not been answered, but they were spoken about as thoughts and experiences forming the foundations of what is sacramental. These fundamental experiences and fundamental thoughts as sacramental are alive no longer, basically no longer since the time—obviously, of course, with good reason—since the sacramental has become a subject of discussions. If today it can't be somehow intentional to take up all the sacraments outside the Catholic Church, then it must be considered how to again accomplish a real cult, a real ritual, because only these, as we will still see, actually can have a community building effect.

This is what I wanted to speak about as a foundation. We will go further into the questions which had been asked.

(Blackboard notes:)

1. Birth—Baptism
2. Adolescence—Confirmation
3. Incorporation—holy Communion
4. Life's recollections—Repentance
5. Death—Last anointment
6. Reconnection—Priest ordination
7. Man and Woman—marriage

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Yesterday we started by addressing a wish which licentiate Bock had expressed at the beginning of our course and we find that what we need to build on to what I said yesterday afternoon about sacramentalism relevant to today, can be discovered if we link the possible reflections, which are necessary, to the 13th chapter of the Gospel of St Mark. It is important for us to certainly try again, in all seriousness, to derive specific meaning from what is expressed in living words. To me it is impossible that pastoral care can be developed in the future, without yourself developing the application of living words and even experiencing living words. However, it is impossible for current mankind which is so strongly gripped by materialism, to be able to handle the living Word in itself, without a historical deepening. It is simply so, that in dealing with intellectualistic concepts and ideas we are only dealing with dead words, with the corpse of the Logos. We will only deal with the living Word when we penetrate through the layer in which man lives today, only, and alone, by penetrating through the layer of the dead, the corpse-like words.

[ 2 ] My dear friends, the Catholic Church has to a certain degree understood very well how to misplace and obstruct access to these living words for those who, in their opinion, should be the true believers. In pastoral care the Catholic Church in a certain sense considers these enlivening words already, but in an outward sense. All these things will only become understood when we take what I presented yesterday and think them through deeply, and, if we can still penetrate them further, to yield clarity. I'm saying that the Catholic Church understood very clearly in this regard, to exterminate the life of the Word, because it belonged to one of the most significant epochs of all human development, and which had contributed briefly before and some three centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, just to the civilized part of humanity.

[ 3 ] When we ask our contemporaries about the essence of the Gnosis, for example the essence of the Montanistic heresy, then with the current soul constitution you basically can't understand anything correctly relating to it. That which would outwardly be informative in the becoming church has been carefully eradicated and the things that archaeologists, philosophers, researchers of antiquity discover from this characterised epoch, will indeed be deciphered word for word, but the decipherment does not mean reaching an understanding. All of this must actually be read differently, in order to enter the real soul content of olden times. It is for instance possible for modern humanity, to take the Deussen translation, which has exterminated all real meaning of the Orient, and, while thinking these translations are great, while mankind can't eradicate all understanding for what Deussen translated, devote yourself to such a Deussen translation. In order to understand, you need to penetrate the meaning of the first Christian centuries, more specifically the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha happened.

[ 4 ] I would like to give you access, somewhat in the way I have out of Anthroposophy, by means of a presentation, which you can visualise as symptomatic of what history brings. One of the most extinct things belonging in the first Christian centuries was referred to as the Pistis, placed in contrast to the Gnosis. The Gnosis can't be understood if one doesn't know that in that time epoch, in which, let's say, you appeared in the form of a Basilides or Valentinus, people who lived in the spirituality of that time, were fighting a very terrible battle, which can be characterised by them asking a question: What do we poor people have to do on the one hand with the spirit that juts in our souls, and on the other hand our physical body into which our soul likewise juts into? In a terrifying manner this question played out in the soul battle among religious people. The two opposite poles, to a certain extent, of this battle was the Gnosis and Montanism sect.

[ 5 ] The Gnosis was, for people who wanted to become Gnostics, being aware that within a person, where the soul resides, the spirit can only be reached through knowledge, through clear, lucid, light-filled knowledge. However, it was already during a time in which intellectualism was being prepared in the dark, in a time when intellectualism was regarded as the enemy of the human soul's relation to the spirit. To a certain extent people prophetically saw how intellectualism would push in, in the future; this arrival of intellectualism was seen as stripping the world of spirituality, wanting to completely make the world void of the Divine, like I have characterised for you yesterday. People saw this and people experienced intellectualism as a danger. People wanted to hold on to something spiritual which didn't come from intellectualism. That's roughly the soul battle Basilides fought, the Gnostic who wanted to stick to what was revealed in the course of the year. He said to himself: When a person submits himself to his forthcoming intellect, then he separates himself from the Divine spirituality of the cosmos; he must connect to what lies in his environment, which has come into being through the Divine spiritual cosmos; he must adhere to that which has the venerable image of cosmic creation in the circling of the world and thus the Divine process in matter; he must adhere to the course of the year.—Basilides did the following: He looked up - but with him it was actually still only tradition, so no longer an inner imaginative perception as in older times, which I characterised as the reading of the movement of the stars—he looked up and said: Last but not least, the spiritual gaze is lost; when we feel, that when we become aware the spiritual gaze is lost, then we talk about the unknown God, the God who can't be grasped in words and concepts, from whom the fist aeon this unknown God manifests himself, revealing himself—this concept of manifestation which later unified things as with Basilides, will be totally misunderstood if compared with what we understand today under "manifestation"; one should not say "it manifests itself" but "it is formed out of," it is individually shaped—out of the unknown God is formed the Nous, which also appeared with Anaxagoras as the first creation of the unknown God.

That is the first principle, which exists in people as a copy, when the human mind, not the intellectual mind but the lively mind I've characterised for you during these days, still existed within Greek philosophy (up to Plato), and which then appeared in a weaker form still in Aristotle.

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[ 6 ] What comes next is the Logos, in which from the Nous we descend further down. In human beings it is expressed by perceiving sound and tone. In the neck area we find five other principles which we need not characterise in detail now. With this we have what was first called the holy days of the year, which gives people, when they read the cosmos, an understanding of the human body, leading to the human head organisation.

[ 7 ] Besides these principles we find others in the human organization, 364 in total, which gives 364 + 1=365, the outer symbol which is expressed as the 365 days of the year. The word Day (Tag) originally was inwardly connected to God, so what Basilides, by speaking about 365 days, spoke about 365 gods which all partake in the creation of the human organism. As the last one of the gods—i.e. if you take one plus 364, and then take the last day of the year as a symbol for one God—Basilides saw the God who was worshipped by the Jews in the Old Testament. You see, this is what is extraordinary in the Gnosis, that it is in such a relationship to Jahve, the Jewish God, that he is not the unknown God connected to the Nous and Logos but with the Jewish God as the 365, as the last day of the year.

[ 8 ] By understanding the Gnosis in this way, the experience of the soul was to be permeated spiritually. If I were to give you a characteristic aspect of the Gnosis, in relation to inner human experience it is this: that the Gnostic aspired in everything to penetrate the Highest with knowledge, so that his gaze rose above the Logos up to the Nous. The Gnostic says: In Christ and in the Mystery of Golgotha the Nous is embodied in the human being; not the Logos, the Nous is embodied. This, my dear friends, if it is grasped in a lively way, has a distinct result for our inner soul life. If you consider these things abstractly, as is in our intellectual time presented to many people, well, then it is heard that people in olden times didn't speak about the Logos in which Jesus became flesh, but of the Nous, which became the flesh of Jesus. That's the thing then, if you have pegged such a term. For a person who spiritually lives within a lively experience of concepts, he would not be able to do otherwise, than to grasp such a soul's content, as to imagine sculpturally what the Nous becoming flesh is. The Nous having become flesh however, can't speak; this can't be the Christ, can't go through death and resurrection. The Christ of the Gnostic, which is actually the Nous, could only come as far as being embodied in people; it could not die or accomplish resurrection.

For Basilides, this darkened his observation. His gaze becomes clouded the moment he approaches the last acts of the Mystery of Golgotha with his inner gaze; it clouds his gaze when it comes to dying and resurrection. His gaze is drawn to the route towards Crucifixion, the route to Golgotha of Jesus Christ, but he couldn't accomplish, out of a lively imagination, that the Christ carried the cross to Golgotha, was killed on the cross and resurrected. He regards it in such a way that Simon of Cyrene took the cross from the Christ, that he carried it up to Golgotha, and instead of Christ, that Simon of Cyrene is crucified. This is the Christ imagination of the Gnostic in as far as the image of Basilides appears and is basically the historical expression of the Gnosis.

[ 9 ] So we see how the Christ in his final deed, is omitted by the Gnostic, how the Gnostic can't grasp the final result of Golgotha, how in their imagination the Christ is merely accomplished through the Nous, how it ends at the moment the Christ gives the cross away to Simon of Cyrene. On the one hand we have Gnosis, which is so strongly afraid of intellectualism that it did not let the legitimate power of intellectualism into human vision and as a result could not enter into the last act of the Mystery of Golgotha.

What did the Gnosis do? It stood in quite a lively way, I could say, in relation to the most extraordinary and powerful question of that current age: How does one penetrate the supersensible spirit from which the soul originated?—The Gnostic pointed away from that which somehow wanted to flow in from intellectualism and result in the image of Christ up to the point when he hands the cross to Simon of Cyrene. This is the one side of the human battle which at the time had the result of creating the influence of the great question, which I have set before you. What comes forth from this wrestling?

From all this wrestling another great question arises which became the crux for the Christian Gnostics. My dear friends, because the Gnostics regarded 365 as the Divine god of the Jews, they experienced the Fatherly and the Divine at the end of this row. When the Jews worshiped their god, they experienced it as Fatherly, while what later appeared as the Holy Ghost, they experienced the opposite pole, in the Nous. As a result, the Gnostics gave an answer to the primordial question in the first Christian centuries, an answer which is no longer valid today. Their answer was: The Christ is a far higher creation than the Father; the Christ is essentially equal to the Father. The Father, who finds his most outward, extreme expression in the Jewish god, is the creator of the world, but as the world creator he has, out of its foundations allowed things to be created simultaneously, the good and evil, the good and bad, simultaneously health and illness, the divine and the devilish. This world, which was not made out of love, because it contains evil, the Gnostics contrasted with the more elevated divine nature of the Christ who came from above, downward, carrying the Nous within, who can redeem this world that the creator had to leave un-liberated.

Christ is not essentially the Father, said the Gnostics, the Father essentially stood lower than the Son; the Son as Christ stood higher. This is the fundamental feeling permeating the Gnosis: however, it has been completely obstructed by what later occurred in the Roman Catholic continuation. Basically, we can't look back at what the big question was: How does one relate to the greater Christ in contrast to the less perfect Father? The Gnostic actually saw things in such a way that the Father of the worlds was still imperfect, and only by bringing forth his Son, he created perfection; that through the propagation of his Son, the act of procreation of his Son, He would complete the development of the world.

[ 10 ] In all these things you see exactly what lived in the Gnosis. If we now look at the opposite side, which comes into the strongest expression with Monatunus, already weaker but still clearly with Tertullian, then we look over to those who said to themselves: If we want to reach into the Gnosis, everything disappears; we can't through the outer world, not through the contemplation of the seasons, not through reading the stars, reach the divine, we must enter into man, we must immerse ourselves in man.—

While the Gnosis directed its gaze to the macrocosm, so Mantanismus dived into the microcosm, in the human being himself. Intellectualistic concepts were at that time only in its infancy and could not yet be fully expressed; theology in today's sense did not arise in this way. What existed in all the exercises, in particular those prescribed by Mantanus for his students, were inner stories, something which was enlivened within the students as visions. These atavistic visions for the Montanists were particularly indigenous. All those who were to separate themselves from belonging to the mere pastoral care of the Montanists were allowed to practice, and all of them were allowed to practice to the extent that they could answer the question: how does the soul-spiritual in man, in the microcosm, relate to the physical-bodily aspect?

[ 11 ] During ancient times, long before the Mystery of Golgotha, what I've just said was something obvious; had a self-evident answer. For those who lived in the time epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha, such an obvious answer didn't exist. People first had to dive into physicality. Because a fear existed of bringing intellectualism into this physicality, one entered the corporality with the power of the imagination and we get to know the descriptions of the forming of Montanist visions, which have also disappeared. In descriptions of Montanist visions—and this is characteristic—we always find the repetitive idea of the Christ soon returning in a physical body to the earth. One can't think of Montanism without thinking of the imminent return of the Christ to earthly corporeality. While the Montanist was familiar with the idea of finding the returning Christ, he strongly set before his soul what happened at the cross, what was accomplished through the death on the cross, what is involved in dying, what is involved in resurrection. The re-descent of the Christ, the physical-bodily immersion that takes place, was tinged by materialistic feelings in this view of the Montanists; they lived in the idea that Christ would come again and live in time and space. This was pronounced and those who believed this in the schools were only those who responded to the belief of the imminent coming of Christ Jesus to the earth, where he would stride along as if he is in a physical body.

[ 12 ] This is in contrast to the Gnosis, this is the other pole: it had a different danger, the danger that all historic development of humanity is to be imagined in space and time. The urge to imagine such an idea of the world is what Augustinus for instance experienced in his exchange with the Bishop Faustus. Through Faustus a method of imagination is introduced which is completely tinged with the senses as images presented to Augustinus, and this became a materialistic experience of the world for Augustinus, from where he approached the world. Augustinus' words are gripping: I search for God in the stars, and do not find Him. I search for God in the sun, in the moon, and don't find Him. I search for God in all the plants, in all the animals, and don't find Him. I search for God on the mountains, in the rivers; I don't find Him.—

He means that in all the images there is no inner experience of the Divine, as it is with the Montanists. Through this Augustinus learnt, as it happened in his exchange with Faustus, to recognise materialism. This created his soul battle, which he overcomes by turning to himself, to faith, towards believing what he doesn't know.

[ 13 ] We must let this rise out of history because the important things do not happen in a way, we can control it, by taking a document in hand which has lain in the archives, or by looking at the entire history of these fore-mentioned men from outside—that is an outer assessment of history. The most important part of history takes place in the human soul, in human hearts. We need to look into the soul of Basilides, into the soul of Montanus, into the soul of Faustus, into the soul of Augustinus, if we want to look into what really happened in the historic fields which one then can develop into what actually became a covering of Christianity in the Church of Constantine. The Constantine Church took on the outer life of worldly realms in which the spiritual no longer lived—in the sense of the 13th Chapter of the Mark Gospel—depicted as an already un-deified earth, a perished earth, into which the divine kingdom must again live as brought by him in its real spiritual soul form.

[ 14 ] You see, in the course of both these viewpoints, one on the side the Gnosis which only came up to the Nous, and on the other side Montanism, which remained stuck in a materialistic conception, you see, how in these contrasts present during the first Christian century, the writer of the St John Gospel was situated. He looked on one side to the Gnosis, which he recognised from his view as an error, because it said: In the primordial beginnings was the Nous and the Nous was with God, and God was the Nous, and the Nous became flesh and lived among us; and Simon of Cyrene took the cross from Christ and thus accomplished a human image of what happened on Golgotha, after Christ only went up to carrying the cross and then disappeared from the earthly plane.—For the gaze of the Gnostic Christ disappeared the moment Simon of Cyrene took over the cross. That was a mistake.

Where do you arrive if you succumb to all thought being human and having nothing to do with the spirit? No, this is not the way the writer of John's Gospel experienced it. It was not the Nous which was at the primordial beginnings, not the Nous with God and a veil covering everything which is related to the Christian Mystery, but: In the primordial beginnings was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and a God was the Logos and the Logos became flesh and lived among us.—So the first actions are connected to the final actions: a unity comes about when we understand it with the spirit. We wish for something which doesn't lift us above human heights, to where we must find the Nous, because that is only one perspective of the spiritual.

Just as much spirit is needed for the spiritual orientation to let people form the idea that Jesus and the Christ God is one, so much spirituality exists in the Logos. When we hold on to the Nous, we only reach Christ; when we hold on to a Montanistic vision we only reach Jesus who in an unbelievable way returns as Christ, but then again only as a physical Jesus. No, we should not turn ourselves to the Nous coming from humanity, we must turn to the Logos, in which the Christ became man and walked among us.

[ 15 ] The origin of the St John Gospel has really come about through an immense spiritual time context. I can't do otherwise, my dear friends, than to make a personal remark here, that I need to experience it as the greatest tragedy of our time, that theologians do not experience the majesty of the John Gospel at all, that out of a deep struggle preceding it, out of a struggle, the big question arose: How can mankind manage to, on the one hand, find a way to his soul-spiritual in the spiritual-supersensible where his own soul-spiritual nature originated from? On the other hand, how can mankind reach an understanding for how his soul is within the physical-bodily nature?

On the one hand the question could be answered by the Gnosis, and on the other hand it could be answered by an imagination towards the Pistis, which then came to Montanism in a visionary manner. The writer of the St John's Gospel was continuously placed in the middle, between these two, and we feel every word, every sentence only intimately if we do it in such a way as it flowed out of the course of the times, and in such a way that you feel the course of time during the Mystery of Golgotha as if it can be experienced forever in the human soul. With an anthroposophic gaze we can look back at the turning point in time, to the most important turning point in the earth, when one wanted to have this experience of adoration of the St John's Gospel. The day before yesterday I said to you, one has, and must, have an experience when one reads the Gospels with an anthroposophical approach, by reading them time and time again. This admiration of the reader is always renewed with each reading by the conviction that one can never learn everything from the Gospels because they go into immeasurable depths. In Gnosis, my dear friends, you can learn everything because it adheres to outer nature and cosmic symbols. In Montanism one can learn all about it because everyone who is familiar with such things knows what a tremendous suggestive persuasiveness all this has, that can be experienced through microcosmic visions, stronger than any outer impression. You must first learn, my dear friends, in order to be able to talk someone out of a vision, you first need to learn how to do it. You could, if you want to convince a person religiously, rather talk him out of what he has experienced with his outer senses, than anything he has experienced as visions, as atavistic clairvoyance, because atavistic visions are far deeper in a person. By allowing atavistic visions into a person, he is far more connected to them than to his sense impressions. It is far easier to determine an error in sense impressions than an error related to visions. Visions are deeply imbedded in the microcosm. Out of such depths everything originated which the writer of John's Gospel saw from the other side, the side of the Montanists.

Montanism was the side of the Charybdis while the Gnosis was the side of the Scylla. He had to get past them both. I feel it at once, as our current tragedy, that our time has been forced—really out of the very superficial honesty, which prevail in such areas—that the Gospel of St John has been completely eliminated and only the Synoptics accepted. If you experience the Gospels through ever greater wonderment at each renewed reading, and when you manage to delve ever deeper and deeper into the Gospels, then it gives you a harmony of the Gospels. You only reach the harmony of the Gospels when you have penetrated St John's Gospel because all together, they don't form a threefold but a fourfold harmony. You won't accomplish, my dear friends, what you have chosen to do in these meetings for the renewal of religion in present time, if you haven't managed to experience the entire depths, the immeasurable depths of the St John's Gospel. Out of the harmony of John's Gospel with the so-called synoptic Gospels something else must come about as had been established by theology. What can really be experienced inwardly as a harmony in the four Gospels must come about in a living way, as the living truth and therefore just life itself. Out of the experience, out of every experience which is deepened and warmed by the history of the origin of Christianity, out of this experience must flow the religious renewal. It can't be a result out of the intellect, nor theoretical exchanges about belief and knowledge, but only from the deepening of the felt, sensed, content which is able to be deepened in such a way as it was able to truly live in the souls of the first Christians.

[ 16 ] Then, my dear friends, we see how Christianity was submerged by all that Christ experienced in Romanism—as I've presented to you—in the downfall of the world. Those who still understand Christ today will have to feel that the downfall is contained in all that is held by the powers of Romanism. By allowing the powers of Romanism to be preserved by the peoples who lived in this Romanism—the Roman written language, the Latin language had long been active—by our preservation of Roman Law, in our conservation of the outer forms of the Roman State, by our even uprooting the northern regions which contained the most elementary Germanic feelings experienced out of quite a different social community, in the Roman State outstripping all that is from the north, we live right up to our present days in a Roman world of decay because in Christendom, as it was considered in the vicinity of Christ Jesus himself, no other site could be found. This is because the Christianity of Constantine, which found such a meaningful symbol in the crowning of Constantine the Great in Rome, was a Christianity which expressed itself in outer worldliness, in Roman legalities. Augustinus already experienced, as I characterised yesterday and today, the feeling in his soul: Oh, what will it be then, if that gets a grip on the world, that which streams out of godless intellectualism, out of godless Romanism into the world? The principle of civil government will become something terrible; the Civitas of people will be opposed by the Civitas Dei, the God State.—So we notice the rise—earlier the indications had already been there, my dear friends—we see an interest emerging that was just seized in the following times in its fullest power in religious fields, that a light is cast on all later religious battles in the soul, which has just felt these religious battles most deeply.

Already with Augustinus this question emerged: How do we save the morality in the face of outward forces of law? How can we save morality, the divinely permeated morality? Into Romanism it can't spread.—This is the striving for internalization we find in the commitments and confessions of Augustinus, if we penetrate them correctly.

[ 17 ] This occurs in the later striving in the most diverse forms. It appears in the tendency towards outer moral stateliness, which had to be developed according to Roman forms of the Roman Papal church, develop through the coronation of the kings becoming Roman emperors, in which the kings were accepted as instruments of the Roman Papal church, which itself was only fashioned out of ungodly Romanism. I speak in the Christian sense, in the sense of the first Christianity, which experienced Romanism as an enemy. How could one escape this which was being prepared? The first way one could get out was to not allow the internalised Christ to submit to the nationalization of morality, as it had evolved in the Roman Papal church. The nationalization, the outer national administration of morality was what Augustinus still accepted on the one hand, while, however, in the depths of his soul there were forces which he rebelled against.

[ 18 ] We see in this rebellion, one could call it, the tendency of morality to withdraw within, at least to save the divinity within morality, according to what one had lost in outer worldliness. We see this morality being turned inward, being searched for as the "little spark" mentioned by Meister Eckhard, by Tauler, by Suso and so on, and how in particular it profoundly, intimately appears in the booklet Theologia Deutch. This, my dear friends is the battle for the moral, which now came to the fore, not to be lost within the divine spirituality, when it has already been lost in outer world knowledge and administration of the world. However, for a long time one was not ready to use such force like Suso regarding morality and seize the divine to penetrate the moral.

[ 19 ] At first it was a question of arranging the whole in a kind of vague form, always envisioning the side of the outside world, for there had to be someone like a Carolus Magnus, who on the one hand was a worldly administrator, and who could transfer the state administration of morality to the crown of the emperor as an outward gesture, while the church worked in the background. It was imagined in such a way, I could say, that it became a kind of moral dilemma, a conscience that has become historical. This started in the 9th, 10th centuries and this inner conscience steered towards people looking at the world, and that man, because he stood in the middle of the search for the divine in the moral, didn't manage it in the world and searched for the enemies in the world which he felt within. Man looked in the world to find enemies. This resulted in the danger of Christians looking for enemies in the outer world, this led, my dear friends, to the mood of the crusades.

[ 20 ] The crusade mood stands in the middle of the quests for internalization, yet people still didn't reach that place within themselves where the divine was grasped through the moral. The crusade mood lived in two forms; it lived above all in the moral impact of Godfrey of Bouillon and his comrades. From them the call went out against Rome: Jerusalem against Rome! To Jerusalem! We want to replace Rome with Jerusalem because in Rome we have become acquainted with outwardness, and in Jerusalem we will perhaps find inwardness, when we relive the Mystery of Golgotha in its holy places.—This is how the imagination came to Godfrey of Bouillon who we may think of as finding the enemy inwardly, even though he still looked for it outwardly, looking for it in the Turks. The striving to turn more inward and there find the ruler of the world, but at the same time to crown a king of Jerusalem, all this expressed itself in the historic mood of the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. All this lived in the people. For once try to place yourself, in both the worldly and the spiritual reasons of the crusades and you will discover this historical mood everywhere.

[ 21 ] Rome saw this. Rome felt it indeed, something was happening in the north: Jerusalem against Rome. In Rome one felt the externalization, but Rome was careful. Rome already had its prophets; it was careful and looked into the future, seeing what people wanted: Jerusalem against Rome. So it did something which often happens in such cases, it introduced in its own way what the others first wanted, and the Pope allowed his creatures, Peter of Amiens and his supporters, to preach about the crusade in order to carry out from Rome what actually went against it. Study the history with understanding; take it as an impulse and you will see that already the first steps of the crusades took place in what Rome had anticipated and that which Godfrey of Bouillon and his supporters strived for.

[ 22 ] So we see in the historic mood how outer actions were searching for what lay within. I could say we can understand this historic mood in a spiritual way when we see how the Order of the Temple has grown out of the crusades, orders which are already further in their turning within. As a result of the crusades it brought an inwardness with it. It only takes things in such a way that it knows that one does not actually internalize them if one does not penetrate the exterior at the same time, when one doesn't, in order to save the moral, see it as an enemy in an exterior way. As paradoxical as this might appear, my dear friends, what Godfrey of Bouillon saw outwardly in the realm of the Turks, this is like Luther's battle at Wartburg Castle with its devils as an inner power. The struggle is directed inward.

[ 23 ] If you now look at all of this, what appears in programs about such people as Johannes Valentin Andrea, Comenius, what lives in the Bohemian brothers, then you will understand how in the later centuries of the crusades the pursuit of internalization has gone. I must at least mention the most symptomatic picture seemed to me always to be in a single place when I looked at this lonely thinker who lived in Bohemia, the contemporary of Leibniz, Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz. For the first time, in all clarity—we don't only know this today—he stripped morality of legality. Everywhere in the early days of writing in the Roman spirit, the legal was bound to the moral. What lived in a religious way in most people, lived in a philosophic way in the contemporaries of Leibniz. He wanted the moral element to be purely philosophic. Just like Luther wanted to get the inner justification, because in his time it was no longer possible to get justification in the outer world, so Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz as a lonely thinker, saw the task: How do I save, purely conceptually, morality from the encirclement and transformation of legality, with those poor philosophic concepts? How do I save the purely human-moral?—He didn't deepen the question religiously. The question was not one-sidedly, intellectually posed by Hoditz—Wolframitz. However, just because it is put philosophically, one notices how he struggles philosophically in the pure shaping of the substantial moral content living in the consciousness.

[ 24 ] In order to understand these times which after all form the foundation of ours, in which the feelings of our contemporaries live—without knowing it—you should, my dear friends, always look back at the deep soul battles experienced in the past, also when a modern person feels that he has "brought it so delightfully far"; by looking back at this time of the most terrible human soul battles, only one period of superstition is seen.

[ 25 ] So, I could say, the historic development of the struggle for morality came about. What was being experienced in this struggle shows up right into our present day, and it can be imposed on the spiritual search into religion, for religious behaviour, even into aberrations. Still, no balance has been found between Pistis and Sophia, between Pistis and Gnosis. This abyss is still gaping in contrast to the writer of the Gospel of St John who had infinite courage to stand above it and find the truth in between it all.

This summoning of strength in the search for the moral, in the will to save the divine, by applying it only to the moral, was felt in their simple, deep but imperfect way by those southern German religious people who are regarded as sectarians today, the Theosophists, who we find on the one hand in Bengel, and on the other, in Oetinger, but who are far more numerous than only in these two. They use all their might to strive, in complete earnestness, for attaining the divine in the moral, yet by trying to attain the divine in morality they realise: We need an eschatology, we need a prophecy, we need foresight into the course of the world's unfolding. This is still the unfulfilled striving of the Theosophists in the first half of the 19th century, started at the end of the 18th century when we must see the dawn of that which was completely buried at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and which must, from all those who experience the necessity for religious renewal, be seen.

[ 26 ] For this reason, my answers to your wishes which are in pursuit of such religious renewal, can't turn out in any other way than they do. I would quite like to give you what I must believe you are actually looking for.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! I agree with Licentiate Bock who suggested it would be best to take up yesterday's reflections plus those of the afternoon and orientate ourselves toward questions that had arisen.

[ 2 ] Yesterday I tried to present a kind of overview of the seven sacraments. I tried to show how the sacraments either determine a kind of value of involution to an evolution value, or the reverse. In the questions which have been asked, there is a wish for something to be said about the sacrament of priest ordination. We have looked at how five sacraments essentially are arranged along the developmental line of each individual human being, how this line connects from birth up to death. We have seen how both the sacraments of priest ordination and marriage in the Christian sense fall away from the other (five) sacraments, and how the priest ordination ceremony points out the evolutionary element which is present in each human being as an involutionary process, namely the mysterious connection each individual human being has with the Divine.

[ 3 ] Now let us first of all try to place the concept of this sacrament of ordination in front of us according to its development, how its Christian content has gone over into Christian ceremonies and gradually crystallized life in Catholicism as the culmination of all ceremonies.

[ 4 ] We must very clearly understand that the connection of human beings with the Divine in the sense of the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, was such that it certainly existed way back, behind the consciousness of modern man today. If we go back far into the cultural development of humanity, we discover another kind of selection for the priesthood than what was later the case, and of the kind we actually want to talk about here. You must clearly understand that ceremonies, rituals and sacraments only become comprehensible within the entire relationship of human evolution, because the Christian sacraments are a kind of transformation of older sacraments. So, regarding priesthood, the relationship is different compared to olden times. In earlier times the one who was taken up into the mysteries by leaders of the mysteries was elected according to his soul characteristics; his entire human development was regarded as being worthy—if today we could select an apt term we would say: 'to be chosen'. This is a concept which has so much more meaning, the further we look back in human evolution. The point of view that people are equal is a modern-day opinion; it is actually essentially something that only emerged from the consciousness of the epoch around the Mystery of Golgotha. By contrast they believed that in fact, in olden times, one person was more worthy of being chosen than another, so that those who were worthy to be inducted into the Mysteries—or to be initiated, as one can clearly impress the imagination with other expressions—was to be discovered within the masses of people. When these individuals were in this or that way discovered, which was believed as predestination for a priestly calling, he had to go through with the initiation. This process of initiation meant that the person was brought into a situation where he had to manage another state of consciousness other than merely the one he experienced in the outer world. In olden times another state of consciousness prevailed, quite different from what it is today. Today quite a different state of consciousness is needed to be able to manage Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. So when I take today's second kind of consciousness as a start, perhaps it can lead to greater understanding, in such a way that the usual daily consciousness still remains complete. A person should not for a moment—without falling sick—be somehow impaired by exercises or the like, as I have described in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds"; a person should not be impaired in the management of his daily consciousness, it must be present. The other consciousness which lacks real freedom which consist in managing Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition must be there as something which can always change quickly, in an instant change to ordinary daily consciousness, like sleep can be changed into the waking state, only that this changing between seeing consciousness and ordinary day consciousness would be completely situated within human capriciousness. This is certainly something which can only be attained after practice and needs to be examined in all its being, in order to talk about this at all.

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[ 5 ] It is precisely this other consciousness which presents a completely different world compared with the world developed out of the senses and understood with the mind, aspects which feed back into the being of the human I, to stick to the human ego. The human I is present in the other consciousness with great power, one doesn't have something which is merely permeated with a single imagination or feeling, but one has an image. One has the possibility of looking at it and knows, this I is something in which one not merely lives, but it is present as an objectivity. The other thing about this higher consciousness is that one doesn't gain any insight into the mineral kingdom—the mineral kingdom belongs only to ordinary human daily consciousness—by contrast it is fully aware towards anything plant-like, animal-like and the human self. One really lives in another world. What is between these two worlds is called the threshold; it must be crossed over but can only be crossed over after preparations have been achieved, after one has really faithfully practiced the exercises which I have presented in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment." If one has not really prepared for this crossing, one could, through the acquisition of this new consciousness, slip down into physicality. (During the following presentation a central drawing is made on the blackboard.)

I would like to sketch it in the following way. Let's accept that this daily consciousness is connected to human physicality. This higher consciousness is now lifted from it and one sees a completely new world. However, now one has to retain this higher consciousness; it must be purely soul-spiritual. It can't happen however, if one has not previously developed the strength through exercises—it can't happen if not accomplished in a lively way; what I'm implying is more of a hypothesis—so, when one has not acquired the strength through exercises, it can all collapse into physicality. This means one is not living in a free soul-spiritual consciousness but the processes in human organs will reveal what this consciousness observes; then one has to do with dreams, one does not really have actual objective imaginations full of content. The objective, content-filled imagination exists as a result of, what one experiences, not being impregnated with bodily processes, but processes of the supersensible world. This must be achieved through exercises and by having achieved this, being able to step over the boundary between the sensual and supersensible which is designated as the threshold. This is the case today. Today our ordinary consciousness contains content known to everyone, but we have another content—which of course can be described as I have done now again from a certain point of view - which is certainly described as the content of a higher world as opposed to that of the ordinary world.

If we now go back to the times of human earthly development which I want to speak to you about here, in which the chosen ones were inaugurated, then we find they also sought another condition of consciousness but it was different to that of today in as far as the condition of consciousness which we regard as the normal human consciousness, was most extraordinary in each mystery pupil, and a certain image-rich imagination, observing the Divine in all the individual things, was the norm. So, what at that time in the old Mysteries was indicated as the threshold lay in quite a different place to where the threshold is situated for us today. We can even see this in outer things. [ 6 ] You see, today there is something which a child already learns at school, and that is the heliocentric world system. The heliocentric world system—you can find this actually historically handed down—has passed into literature through a kind of betrayal. The heliocentric world system already existed in Greek times, it was already clearly present earlier; it was taught in the Mysteries. What an ordinary child learns today at school, which forms their attitude towards the view of the world, this was taught in olden times only in the Mysteries. In outer normal consciousness people of that time had an image-rich consciousness. We can really say: in comparison to olden times, today every human being who has gone through school, has gone beyond the threshold. Those in the old Mysteries would regard it quite dangerous for people who have not gone through a regular initiation but through some or other elementary experience, to have gone over the threshold, for example by not adhering to the geocentric system—that the earth remains stationary and the sun and stars move—but believe in the immobility of the sun as the initiated students believed in olden times. People said you had to be prepared to tolerate what lies, for example, in the heliocentric world system or what lies, for example, in our current biology or psychology, and so on. This seems like a paradox to people today, yet it was so. One can say that historically human kind as such in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha crossed over the threshold which in earlier epochs in the Mysteries had to be artificially crossed in order to reach initiation. At that time those to be initiated learnt what every child learns today. Today we again learn to gain insight into Higher Worlds which later would be the norm. So it is with the evolution of humanity. It is not recognised through examples from olden writings that it was a given—for human consciousness was image-rich—in such a way that things were not seen outwardly but that all things were perceived for their inner spirituality. One must be aware that the words of these ancient writers are to be read in a different way to the way today's ancient language researchers or cultural historians or anthropologists and their equivalents read, because the consciousness at that time was image-rich. We could therefore say, in olden times the initiate was led towards the world we know today.

[ 7 ] I would like to still add one more detail. When we go back to olden Greek times, we find people couldn't clearly perceive the colour blue as we can today. They had no sensual experience of the colour blue, they had much more of a sense developed towards the other side, towards vital colours, red and so on, so that for the Greeks blue appeared more green than it is for us today. From this point of view, one must understand everything as the ancients did. We must clearly understand that active thinking is connected to humankind's development towards an experience of blue. If blue is mentioned in ancient scriptures it is always in error, because those people didn't have the experience of blue as we have in today's active experience of understanding. Those people, upon looking at blue, didn't have the ability to be objective, for the out-flowing of the I as an objective, they had far more the experience of what stirred in red, which goes from the objective towards the subjective, which is outwardly active and touches and is sensed, where the awareness of the Divine lay in the objects.

[ 8 ] So this initiation was already something quite definite, it involved the initiation being carried out in these olden times by the fact that man himself had to do things which he had to endure physically which to a certain extent formed a kind of inner sacrament. The sacraments in olden times were more inward. Take for instance some outer events which throw a person into a state of fear, caused by these external actions. For example, in Greece there existed Mysteries in which one of the most important processes consisted in a person being placed in total darkness, where he has to live into this darkness, and then suddenly the room was lit up completely—this is the perception he would have been given. What it meant at that time was the transformation of the state of consciousness from being in the darkness, in the blackness, to going into the light. Something happened in a person, fine processes took place inside. These fine processes which were happening in people, I can describe in the following manner.

When a human being, after he has for some time experienced this transformation out of the darkness into the light, salt is separated in him—depending on his individual nature - which is deposited. Salt deposits actually took place as a result of the transfer of going from a dark state to a light state, taking place during the change. These processes became something of which a person became completely aware as being accompanied by the feeling very similar to fear. These salt deposits were observed by a person; he was inwardly observing an interrelation taking place inside himself. At that moment when it happened in him through an external action, man had gone through an initiation process because in olden times initiation consisted in a person experiencing such processes out of himself. What is important now however, was what accompanied such a process of salt deposits within him. Such a salt depositing process within was accompanied by the person's consciousness being impregnated by the process of light perception, not merely of the light perception but from the inner light containing spirituality; he was thus taking in the light which contained spirituality. By the salt coagulating in his inner being, a person felt this coagulation of salts as a penetration of the Divine. To make these conditions conscious was the art of initiation in ancient times. A person could speak quite differently, in them the life of light was not a mere observation by the senses but it was a penetration of light, so that he could say: 'By me living in the light, matter coagulates in me'. With that which is contained in ordinary matter, in a certain sense he directly perceived the effect of that which lies above the substance of ordinary matter.

[ 9 ] Now we will not understand these things, my dear friends, if we don't know that the entire constitution of people in older times was different to what it became later. Such a process, which I have sketched for you, you can observe today when waking up or going to sleep. When physical development reaches puberty, the conditions are such that you won't be able to do these things any longer. The influence on the human being is no longer possible in this intense way; people have hardened more in themselves. Today it doesn't happen for these fine spiritual processes which are taking place there, to be observed just like that. In this respect it will even change the human race. As a result, it has happened that what had taken place within, during earlier times, now is to be looked for outwardly. To a certain extent the opposite of the inner process is performed as a ceremony.

The old process of initiation, the process through which a person allows the spirit to reign, this process is now performed outwardly. The priest ordination was in olden times not at all the weakened process of today, but a process, despite it being performed outwardly, still making a deep impression on people. In later times, still in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and afterwards, the act of baptism, for example, was at least performed as a deed which still accomplished something in people themselves. Those being baptised were immersed in water and thus brought in the same situation as someone being drowned, who sees the retrograde perspective of their life processes flash through them in a spiritual vision. This was part of baptism in earlier times; a person's past life was brought before his soul, so that he learned to see spiritually in a certain way. Later on the sacrament of baptism was temporarily postponed and so it could not be performed in this way, but only symbolically. It is the same with the priest ordination.

The priest ordination in itself is to a certain extent an outer process for that which earlier was evoked inwardly in those going through initiation, through the inversion of outer processes; it is what in fact places the human being in another world. A person is then made aware—I can depict this even more precisely—of certain interrelationships in the cosmos, which can't be studied in the outer world. A person is made aware that physical processes are taking place which do not coincide with the usual outer sensually perceptible processes and he becomes attentive to what is actually sacramental. He learns to see for instance, in dissolving salt in water, that something is happening which isn't created in a physical-chemical process of dissolution, but what happens in salt dissolving in water is actually something inward, I could call it, something radiant. He learns to recognise how processes happen which are only conceivable through the spirit in man. This becoming transported into the world of such revelations which can't be seen with the outer senses or understood with ordinary minds, essentially belongs to the priest consecration. Therefore, through the priest ordination the person will as much be penetrated by this world of the Divine, as the person in olden times was initiated through not merely sensing the penetration of his physicality with light, but that he feels permeated also with the soul-spiritual of the light.

[ 10 ] So, I can put it like this: through priest ordination human consciousness is brought into such a condition that a person can with total inner conviction say: the world around us is actually only a fragment of the world; it is there to hide many things from us, namely hiding spiritual processes, from us. We see spiritually in the processes when we are prepared in the appropriate way to do so. Priest ordination involves such preparation which would allow for spiritual perception, to see, everywhere, the sense perceptible as well as the spiritual processes. Let's take a concrete example.

We can look at the development of leaves on a plant, the development of the flowers, the ovary, the stamens and see the ovary mature. (He draws on the blackboard, left.) We then observe how the pollen flies around, how it fertilises the flowers. If you only observe outwardly then you will evaluate according to the sense perceptible outer processes which you then combine in your mind. Someone who has become mature in spiritual seeing, must see a supersensible weaving which expands as a kind of wavering transmission over plant growth and all that is involved in plant fertilization. Through this however, the earth in which the plants have their roots, is brought into a reciprocal relationship with the spiritual environment of the earth.

[ 11 ] A renewed way of looking must be introduced through priest ordination. Only then, when you have been introduced to this spiritual observing through the priest ordination, will you learn to recognise how the human word evolves in the world, how the human word is not a mere material movement of air but that the word carries spirit on physical air movement, how this spirit permeates certain substances which are fleeting, like for instance the smoke. So being a priest means: seeing how the expressed word grip the smoke, how the smoke weaves the matter, the words, and how through this, that it penetrates the words, how the words tinged with smoke envelops the matter in the words, changing the words themselves, just like in fact evolution continues, how a real, a spiritual reality is there in what happens in the outer world, in phenomena of the world. So being consecrated also means: to be able to perform actions which, besides their physical meaning, also have a spiritual meaning.

[ 12 ] This is of course something—I always must stress this—which lies extraordinarily far from modern consciousness, but unbelievably close to that consciousness which was available at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. During that time people stood in the middle, between the old and the new, they still knew about seeing the Divine-spiritual in everything natural, either through tradition or through atavistic vision, and they lived in fear of the conditions which would arrive when what is natural would no longer be regarded as natural and as a result the Divine-spiritual would be only be understood as a derived abstraction. At that time people still understood the weaving of the spiritual with the sense perceptible. The disciples of Christ Jesus simply knew that this being-in-his-presence meant something different than being in the presence of one another. They knew that he was the carrier of a supersensible being, they felt moved by this supersensible being, and this togetherness with him was for them without doubt the glow of supersensible consciousness.

[ 13 ] Let's think about this. We see a number of people around Christ Jesus in a world, who say: When one is in his presence, one is brought into a world where one can see the Divine-spiritual.—Now, in connection with this, I want to call your attention to important concepts necessary for the understanding of the earliest Christian times. Those individuals who could still call themselves the apostles of the Lord, who, for the affirmation of their mission, did not only refer to the fact that they had heard his words. Having heard his words didn't really carry as much weight as we would experience today when we listen to some or other speech, or a teaching. The teaching of Christ Jesus was something that was felt to be completely charitable in his environment, but it wasn't the first thing you would consider as the most important. It was far more important for them to stress the results: we have lain our hands in his wounds, we have participated in looking at his Being.—The direct togetherness with Christ Jesus is something in particular which I ask you to please consider seriously.

[ 14 ] You see, you will reach a conclusion of what actually is at a soul foundation when I say to you: you need to first sense the difference between what you experience when you place your one hand on an outer object, or on your own hand, or when you place it on some part of your body. You must come to the conclusion that you sense a difference, that there is a difference. You must also be able to feel something else; you must be able to feel you possess two eyes with two lines of vision which meet and cross. (He draws on the blackboard, right.) These two lines of sight which cross at what we are looking at—it is quite like when I hug myself with my two arms encircling myself. Just think about the difference between man and animal. An animal has, to a much reduced degree, the possibility to experience what we for instance experience when our one hand touches the other. Just look at the position of particular animal eyes; you can clearly distinguish how strong the egoism of an animal is, according to its eye positions. Animals which have eye positions with eye axes which can't cross are unable to develop egoism, because the experience, the sense of having an I, depends on a person being able to "grasp" his I, and that the right gaze of the eye can meet the left gaze by crossing. On this the sense of the I is dependant.

[ 15 ] The disciples knew themselves to be so connected to the Christ that in a certain sense it was as similar as feeling their own hands, when they touched his wounds. So this direct connection with the Christ was something which gave them the awareness that they lived with him in a higher world. This was actually what the disciples felt, it was as if a spiritual island surrounded them and their Lord, and when they felt that their Lord had gone away and they had now become the teachers, they called themselves teachers, training for this how-to-be-together-with-him.

Then again, the disciples of the Apostles in turn depended on the imagery which they had experienced; you can even read this in individual letters. When some or other apostolic disciple, Polycarp of Smyrna for instance, could describe what some or other person who had taught him, looked like, the description was unbelievably more important than the communication of mere words. What is most essential here, was recalling the feeling of being-together-with everything in connection with the Christ, so that one can say the Apostles sensed the succession, but they could no longer inwardly experience every transformation which had been experienced in the old initiation mysteries. Don't misunderstand me, I don't suggest that the apostles or apostle disciples have made such deliberations, but their soul constitution was so that they could make such deliberations and it was characteristic of their soul constitution to formulate such deliberations. When they were asked to formulate their soul constitution, they would have said: Yes, we couldn't go through with it in the same way as was still possible in the earlier Mysteries, for instance experiencing the transformation of light to darkness; we can no longer experience how one is anointed with oil and so on, and we can no longer experience the inner pain through recalling; but here a God has incarnated in the form of Jesus who was here, and with whom we have relations and when we really in our consciousness take it up, not merely with intellectual grasping but when in all concreteness we live in it, then something lifts us up into the supersensible world.

[ 16 ] With the apostles it was the direct living-in-community with the Christ, with the apostle disciples it was the community living-with-him, being carried over to them, who had laid their hands on those who had still been touched by the Lord, and transmitted to those in the third generation who had again laid their hands on someone who had had the Lord touch them. They would get a sense of apostolic succession when they would recall what I've just said, and they would also get a feeling for what it meant to stand inside a world which is spiritually, as it were, like standing in a physical line of ancestors. The physical line of ancestors flows through from birth. The spiritual ancestral line however, must go up to the spiritual father ancestor, the Christ Jesus, it flows through the ongoing, continuous fulfilment of consecrated ceremonies, which lead to the Christ, which certainly must always become more and more outward, because it must ever more make an intensive impression on people. As a result, besides the laying on of hands, other ceremonies were recorded in the next centuries, to make the outer impressions even stronger. A process of internalisation existed with those surrounding Christ Jesus: here Christ Jesus was performing a ritual himself. My dear friends, why was this necessary?

The life of Christ Jesus was the ritual for that which was around him, that which was accomplished in reality, that was the ritual/cult: the great offering of mass was fulfilled on Golgotha. Here we are led back to the first fulfilment of the ritual: at least this is what lives in Christian consciousness. This was followed by outward signs: it required the necessity for an outward imprint of activity, like remembrance, to show the eyes and to impress it on the soul in prayer, which could not be as alive as it had been with the apostles and the apostle disciples.

[ 17 ] I know that many people who hear such things with today's consciousness say: Why don't you simply express it in a short and sweet answer, shaped in sharply outlined terms, this or that is apostolic succession?—If someone wants such sharply outlined concepts, his argument is inwardly untruthful. One only speaks truth when it introduces the view of something that has been experienced. Such a thing can't be understood in sharply outlined concepts.

[ 18 ] Apostolic succession is something experienced first and then one knows that actually something is being experienced in a spiritual line of ancestors leading back to Christ, just like the ancestral line flowing through the blood links to the natural ancestral line, to any of the ancestors. This spiritual blood lies in the continuous fulfilment of the priestly ordination ceremony. It forms therefore the direct connection, for those who become priests, to the spiritual world. It is consecrated by someone who have themselves received such a consecration, and these, to those, and so on, up to the point where the supersensible descended into a human body and in this way for the first time brought a new, substantial fructification in the earth, which had become old.

[ 19 ] We will want to develop the particular format of the priest ordination, into a ritual form. I would like, still today, to point out that you could eventually find something which remains incomprehensible in the priest ordination. Now, by me saying something like this you will understand, also in connection with the regular previous lectures up to this morning, that in fact a complete break had to take place regarding the understanding of such things, when the changed consciousness appeared from the middle of the 15th century. In me expressing these things, I'm using words, which actually for the general consciousness could only have been fully understood before the middle of the 15th century. Then people actually stopped having a real sense for the meaning of these words. It is basically only through the trust you have been able to put in me, that you can hear something here in the manner and way it happened in former times when the soul constitution experienced things in quite a different way. Then came the time when less importance was attached to a concrete connection, when people who still knew how to attach importance to this concrete connection, became rare. Now, the most importance was attributed to the comprehensible content of the Gospels, to the comprehensible content of religion as such. Thus, gradually it took on particular importance to discuss the content of the Gospels, to discuss the content of the sacraments and to a certain extent particularly look into the teaching material, at the teaching content. The teaching content gradually became the most important. Not actually the concrete, but the abstract, became the most important, that is the essential thing. While for the catholic consciousness—I don't mean merely the roman catholic, but the catholic Christian consciousness—the priest ordination placed the chosen one in a spiritual ancestry up to Christ, which actually for the modern person made everything quite comprehensible, from definitions to declarations which places nothing into a reality. However, we must be very clear about it, that we live again in a time where we need deepening again in that direction.

[ 20 ] Well, the catholic consciousness has basically always acted quite consistently according to these prerequisites; quite consistently. In order not to be misunderstood regarding what follows, I would like to introduce it like this. When today we want to prepare someone—in fact, I mean for something which we see as a new ritual—when we, today, want to prepare someone to perform ceremonial actions, then we would for those who stand outside Catholicism in the world, no longer with full inner devotion be able to integrate a person into the apostolic succession. As I've mentioned to you, there have been remarkable Theosophists like Leadbeater and similar ones, who have likewise tried to place themselves in the apostolic succession, but that's going to resist any man who's honest with the world, if he is not imbued with Catholic consciousness.

[ 21 ] We need to look for something else. We need to fully understand that a reality is not something which is spoken about, something abstract. We must also learn to understand the sacramental. We must learn to understand, throughout, that the content of the teaching does not contain the essential but that something must be added from real processes and in such a way that these actual processes are carried on the waves of reality as the weaving of the Divine. There have only been single individuals, like Novalis, who understood this—do read his Aphorisms, then you'll see. He spoke about magical idealism; he knew this wasn't alive in outer sensory worlds, but within people, there lived the soul—spiritual. Then there was Schelling—in his old age, that's why he was hardly understood—for whom it was quite absurd to believe that the essence of Christianity consisted in the acceptance of what Christ taught; rather, Schelling recognised the essential much more according to the account of Jesus going through the process of the entire Golgotha drama, in the description of actions which took place around Golgotha. However, there are individuals who tend towards the reality, who in turn want to enter into actual experiences connected to the spiritual. In totality one could say that the way Catholicism experiences it, is something quite antiquated which can't be introduced into modern consciousness any longer. For this reason we mustn't only search for a renewal of old rituals but we must search for a ritual which we can create out of ourselves, but created in such a way that it creates the Divine in us in the sense we have spoken about, so that the words of Paul become the truth—in Gospel interpretation, and in all religious activities: Not I, but Christ in me.

[ 22 ] Catholicism, as Roman Catholicism, has actually always known how to act consistently. To a certain extent it has turned out, lifted out, from general humanity, all those who were descendants of Christ Jesus himself and so a sharp awareness has come about, separating the priestly spiritual generation, meaning those people connected to consecration, from all other people who had not attended consecration. Like a member of the nobility who for instance connects his bloodline back to the 18th ancestor and knows who carry this blood in their veins, their ancestral connection differs from that of the rest of humanity, in the same way there's a difference from those consecrated into the apostolic succession up to Christ himself, who have continuously and consistently received consecration, right down to those who had not received it. They felt themselves placed in this connection and felt others were different; that's why it was quite necessary during a certain time period that certain things were presented to people. A person gradually absorbed what had more or less consciously existed in his awareness and allowed this to be expressed in his actions. After this, because of the ever-increasing sharper awareness related to the Christ developed, came the necessity for greater withdrawal for the uninitiated: celibacy. The celibate already had his inner foundation and there where the celibate was dogmatised it was found throughout that the priest had to withdraw from connecting to all others, was a human personality who found it far more important to practice the priest consecration as a conscious inheritance of the father of his ancestors and because he was placed in this ancestral blood of a spiritual ancestry, he could not be in contact with that world from which he was taken out by the consecration ceremony. The moment a person strongly experienced this particular situation of priesthood in relation to the world, the necessity for celibacy was added, and of course there's no denying that one could also feel the political usefulness for Rome, and so on. However, you can be quite certain that during the time when celibacy was introduced—it was a time when the celibate person came from the monk priesthood—in the unconscious impulses was the urge for a certain honesty and truthfulness. It was certainly the case that the creation of celibacy was understood in the way I have presented it now. Just as in the 19th century, in a kind of natural way—as I said—the consequential process living in the Catholic consciousness resulted in the dogma of immaculate conception and how this resulted in the infallibility dogma, so at a certain time causes led to the consequences of celibacy.

[ 23 ] Well, if you take all of this in then we already come to what is of particular importance today. Of particular importance today for us is to again return to the ritual, to ceremonies. You are experiencing, at least many of you have said you experience it like this: you are actually experiencing necessities based on what has come out of, and is given by, this time. Of course we can't undo events, we can't go back to untruths for instance, we can't reverse an untruth, such as taking something which no longer feels alive were to be changed externally, like being ordained by an olden-time Catholic priest. That would be contradictory to those who have already ignited the Protestant consciousness too strongly in themselves because for the Protestant consciousness this possibility doesn't exist; in their experience one can't oppose something which has been created out of quite other circumstances.

[ 24 ] What you need to arrive at, if reality is at all part of your striving, is what can flow out of the spiritual world itself, which can be seen as flowing directly from Christ Jesus. We must strengthen ourselves in the words of Jesus: I am with you until the end of earthly days.—

These words out of the Gospels also announce such a process of the Christ impulse will be found on the earth for so long, that it will last until the end of the earth comes about. For this reason, one must firstly announce this as a postulate to a certain extent, that it must be possible—as a reality—to come to Christ, like with the Catholic consciousness, through the apostolic succession historically the spiritual family tree is searched for, reaching right to Christ. It must be able to find Him again, in a moment in the present; a connection to the Divine, a connection to the Christianized Divine as it was historically found by the Catholics in the apostolic succession right up to the Christian ancestors of this apostolic succession. That is why it must take place this way, that we find the spiritual again, not only in words about the Christian aspect, but so that we actually connect with what is real in the Christian aspect. Then we can create the ritual out of this, like the ritual was created within the apostolic succession. However, we need to penetrate it with an understanding which goes far beyond the understanding of the time.

[ 25 ] We must indeed move towards an understanding that can be expressed—I want to first formulate it as follows: In the world and in ordinary human thinking we experience the phenomenal: we however want to experience the nominal, we want to try and enter into the essential and out of this essence find the ritual. If you really want to find the ritual, then it must finally be so that this ritual is discovered as it had been during the second century, where gradually, what used to exist in simpler forms—only a few of which have been recorded—has now been transferred to the forms of later rituals. [ 26 ] How was the ritual experienced? A person was caught up in it, just like a person who smokes knows what he is doing by smoking; he knows he can express what he wants to, only by smoking. So you must again learn to feel that you, when you perform some or other ceremony, know for yourself: the ceremony must be performed in this way. A person knows what he has to say today when he turns to other people, he knows how to clothe his inner life with words. My dear friends, there is a moment in life, where one inwardly experiences that it is impossible to continue using words, where what you want to say no longer translates into words, where you have to stop with words or at most continue with words by carrying out the sacred act by starting to not merely letting the word sound out but where, for instance, the development of smoke must take place, where in particular one of the other actions must be carried out imaginatively. Where the words connect with a particular action, by coming into the original consciousness, where also, like your soul content, being enlivened by the Divine, pours into the words, now your soul content will no longer be merely a phenomenal one but a nominal one, then you will be lifted out of what the outer world comprises, there you will gradually enter into the sacramental.

[ 27 ] Somewhat in this way, I've tried to clarify how one must enter into the sacramental. It actually makes no sense, let's say, in simply transforming holy water as is often done today by subordinate clerics. There is simply no point in performing the transubstantiation in this way, as is done by many subordinate clerics today, who are left in the dark in relation to the esoteric consecration of the Catholic Church. Regarding the old soul constitutions, it had made sense to be fully aware of one's actions when a certain word was spoken over the salt substance, and that they knew the salt substance had changed as a result.

Today experiments have already been done to make the gentle sensitivity of a flame visible, by placing a flame somewhere and a person speaking rhythmically at a distance from it, to see the flame copy the rhythm. Here a rhythm is being copied by something inorganic. If I know the right words in the right word correlation over the salt substance, then the salt substance will change. If I now allow this salt substance which has been permeated, to enter into water, then I have kindled a process, which, if I understand it, when I have performed it in spirit, is a sacramental act. We must be able, once again, to look at the nominal as such. This we will address tomorrow. [ 28 ] I think, in any case, my dear friends, that many questions could be conjured out of the soul by me speaking about these things, and I would love it if the questions, while you are all here, not in general, could also be formulated concretely so that no doubt remains. I completely understand that with earnestness your small circle has turned to me with the clear intention to really work toward a renewal of the religious life. It is not possible to do so by merely changing the teaching content; it is only possible when you enter with a changed soul constitution. We are now entering more deeply into things and, triggered through your questions we will become ever more acquainted with these things so that you're actually going to understand what I mean to convey.

My dear friends! Yesterday I tried to lead up to the consciousness of the present time by means of a kind of historical consideration, which, however, was intended to have a spiritual-Christian content. The reflections that will now follow in this direction can be inserted into what we still have to discuss. I wanted to get that far yesterday so that today I could speak of something very specific that relates to contemporary consciousness. But I must first make a necessary preliminary remark.

You see, what the anthroposophical movement, as far as I consider it my duty to represent it, can do is never anything other than to bring into the world what is already clearly recognizable as a demand of the world, that is, what is in some sense demanded from some quarter or other; after all, the demand does not always have to consist of clearly articulated words. But it must be regarded as something that I consider necessary for the anthroposophical movement, that it does not in any way appear in the sense that one calls agitatorisch. Today, of course, all words are misunderstood, and so, if one wants to misunderstand – if one wants to cast an evil eye in the sense of yesterday's very grateful lecture [by Pastor Geyer] – one can define what is happening from the anthroposophical side as agitational. On the other hand, it can be said quite honestly and truthfully that I myself do not engage in any agitation. Giving public lectures cannot be agitation, because it is a matter of the sense in which one gives them and to what extent one can take them from the whole configuration of contemporary spiritual life to the best of one's knowledge; it is a matter of them being demanded by the times themselves. Anyone can go away after a public lecture and say, “I want nothing to do with that.” Well, in this sense, everything is held. Therefore, when I speak of the things I will speak of today, I ask you to bear in mind that these things are held in such a way that they have been directly demanded by the circumstances.

I had to say this in advance because I now want to discuss the following. When we founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, the intention was that the Waldorf School should absolutely not be a school of world view, but rather that it should be a school in which the teaching of what could come from anthroposophy, the institution was made so that the actual religious, in this sense the world view, was transferred to the pastors of the respective denominations. So the religious instruction of the Roman Catholic children was entrusted to the Roman Catholic chaplain, and the religious instruction of the Protestant children to the Protestant chaplains, who were mainly concerned that as many as possible should attend, so that the individual had to do as little as possible. Incidentally, we also had this experience with Catholic pastors; it took us a long time to find someone who had the courage to enter this “den of iniquity.” So this is the principle of assigning the pastoral care to the pastoral workers concerned. Of course, the children of dissidents and their parents should also be allowed to receive religious instruction in their own way; and it soon became apparent that a not inconsiderable number of them wanted religious instruction, which now flows entirely from the anthroposophical movement, to be given specifically to the children of dissidents. You have to bear in mind that this is in fact already a considerable step forward in terms of religious sentiment, because the Waldorf School was initially founded for the children of the workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, so in the vast majority of cases for children of proletarian-Social Democratic parents, and it was the dissident sentiment that was actually predominantly represented. If these children had been sent to a regular school, they would not have taken part in any religious instruction at all; they would not have been forced to do so – after all, coercion would actually have contradicted the religious belief. In our case, religious instruction was specifically requested for these children, so the religious need arose out of complete freedom. In my opinion, this represents progress in religious belief. We were forced, as it were, to set up religious instruction in the sense of the anthroposophical worldview, and I sought to do so in such a way that it was actually separated in principle from the management of the school, which was to remain absolutely neutral on these matters and consider it only its task to work in an educational and didactic way. I consider it an important matter of principle that the school management and everything that flows into the school management has nothing to do with this religious education, so that the representatives of this religious education are placed in the school in the same way as the Roman Catholic and the various Protestant religion teachers. There were no Old Catholics, otherwise they would have been taken care of.

Thus Anthroposophical religious education, as it was often called – I myself don't think much of names – was inaugurated and began in the way that Anthroposophy believes it should be taught, namely by placing it as much as possible in life, and so that, in a sense, knowledge of the Bible and especially knowledge of the Gospels emerges as the crowning glory of all religious education. Now, I say that the Gospel is considered the crowning glory, so that this religious education, in which all kinds of children are mixed together, that is, children who have grown out of Catholic, Protestant or Jewish backgrounds, is definitely given in a Christian sense, and this is of course connected with the fact that the whole of the Waldorf School has an absolutely Christian character in terms of its imponderables. Those who have a feeling for such things would notice this very quickly if they were to enter a Waldorf school.

What then became necessary – not on our part, because we want to accommodate, not agitate – was seen very quickly: the children who receive our anthroposophical religious education need what has become a Sunday act. At first there was a very lively desire to have such a Sunday event, that is, to gather the children who receive anthroposophical religious education for a kind of ceremony on Sunday. And for reasons connected with the whole basic attitude of the Waldorf School towards the public, which is not very favorable to us, we have to carry out this Sunday ceremony in front of the children in the presence of the parents, or, if they are foster parents, we say, in the case of children who are educated in Stuttgart but whose parents are far away from Stuttgart, in the presence of the foster parents who are present in Stuttgart. Those who have no business being there, who want to go to this Sunday event for the sake of mere sensation, will not be admitted, but those who are responsible for the children will be allowed to attend the Sunday event with the children.

Now it was a matter of finding a ritual for this Sunday activity. I will discuss this ritual with you a little now and would like to make the following comment: In the next few days, I will have a lot to say about the ritual itself, about devices and the like, but we are definitely in the process of becoming, so that these things, which will also come into consideration for us, are even less likely to be considered in the Waldorf school. So it is important that you see the matter as an evolving one, that you see it in such a way that only that which can be imbued with full life can be done at first. But I believe that we will be able to communicate well precisely because you will receive a report not about something lifeless, but about something alive, and we will then be able to move up all the more easily to what – if I may use a prosaic expression – has to be planned in terms of ritual, ceremony, sacrament, worship and so on. In the whole cult, for example, the garment of the celebrant is not a trivial matter, but something important; but I will speak about that later.

Please do not misunderstand the expression. When a ritual is conceived, it is really not a matter of intellectually constructing something in the ritual, but rather that this ritual is conceived from the spiritual world. The problem with the ritual is that there is still an extraordinary difficulty at present; if you look at it realistically, the difficulty is that if you were to go about it radically, communion would be necessary for such a Sunday action. Now, given the circumstances, it is not possible to go to communion for the children of the Waldorf School in such a ritual today; it cannot be done. Therefore, it was necessary to emphasize that which is to be carried out in the communion later, and to handle it more spiritually. You will see that with the gradual introduction of rituals, you will have to go from the word, I would say, from the word that potentially contains the action, to the actual execution of the action. This will be a path that you will simply have to go through. You will not be able to come straight out with it, but you will have to go through the path from the action suggested by the word, whereby you must be aware that this is a beginning to the fully completed action.

But a ritual must never be composed merely intellectually; it must live in the living world process. For this, my dear friends, one thing is necessary: It is absolutely necessary to pay strict attention to the requirements of a ritual. My dear friends, when we speak from person to person, we must be clear about the fact that our speech must always be based on the only thing that lies solely in the convincing power of the content of our speech. If we understand the present time correctly in a religious sense, we must realize that we have no other work to do through the speech we address to people or to a gathering of people than that which can flow from the speaker out of his own conviction and the power of his own personality. Speeches that contain a moment of suggestion – as we use the word in Central Europe, not as it is used in Western Europe – would be absolutely reprehensible in the context of today's world, because we have come to the point in the development of humanity that, when we can use the word in a free way, we must put into the word that which is our own personal free conviction. If spiritual life is to be taken in full reality, nothing that is suggestive may be imposed on this personal free conviction, but one must behave in such a way that the consent of the other person comes out of complete freedom. This is the prerequisite for every future religious or spiritual-scientific or other work. If anyone were to misuse speech for magic, then this would be in the most extreme sense irreligious, even ungodly, in the strict sense that Anthroposophy must understand it, it would be a sin against the Holy Spirit, and this is what Anthroposophy must represent. For the speech may only be imbued with that sanctification which may be called sanctification through the Holy Spirit, and must observe in man absolutely the principle of directly and completely free conviction, which could not have existed in the evolution of mankind before the Mystery of Golgotha, because the word would have been repulsed by the human being altogether if the word had only had the power that it alone may have had today. At that time it had to work suggestively because the human organization was designed for it. That is why there also had to be chosen leaders, as I said yesterday, and it was also allowed at that time to work through the word in a sense that only happens in the spirit, by becoming aware, one spoke in the spirit, not out of one's own power, but out of the power of the God living in one, the Nous or the Logos. One must realize that this is impossible today, and that today one may only speak out of the Holy Spirit; but that is the word to which alone the free conviction of the one who hears the word answers. Therefore, all instruction today must be given under the sign of the Holy Spirit. We must be very clear about the fact that everything that flows from words into action can only be carried out in the Christian sense if the person carrying it out has the Paul consciousness: Not I, but the Christ in me! — Nothing in an act that is carried out in this way may be done without the consciousness that the act is performed as an inward divine commandment, as that which is performed in the spirit of the Christ-commandment itself.

We must realize that we are only the instrument through which the Christ can speak to people. This is especially difficult with children, because what I have explained applies to a limited extent to children only, and not to fully developed, mature people. Therefore, we must also make a distinction in what we do towards the person who is already considered worthy of the sacrament of the altar and towards the one we consider still too childlike to receive the sacrament of the altar. What I have now discussed must be evident in every action. Without this underlying principle, the action would be absolutely impossible.

The task is to find the Sunday activity from this point of view, and I ask that, as I describe it to you, you consider it only from this point of view. In doing so, we must today still leave out some things in the discussion that have a future value, but which we do not yet need to get into today. Of course, in the future we would actually need not only the spoken word, but also what in the older sense was also part of the cult: the recitative. But this is something that cannot be done today either, because recitative would still have too suggestive an effect on people today; we would make them unfree. Therefore, the ceremonies must not be performed in any other way than as initial ceremonies, initial cults, which I will now talk to you about.

The Sunday ritual is performed in such a way that the children are to gather in front of the entrance door to the room where the Sunday ritual is performed. There is someone standing at the door who first has to make the child aware that he or she must enter this room in a very special mood. Therefore, as the child enters the room, he or she is taken by the hand and told:

You know you are going to the act that
is to uplift your soul to the spirit of the world.

I will begin by telling you. I will speak later about how the matter can be carried out in a completely Christian sense, not in an anthroposophical sense, which must shape the matter differently, but which shapes it in such a way that it is led to the Christian. I would like to point out that what is being explained here is being done precisely because an anthroposophical religious education has been requested, which can only emerge from what anthroposophy already is and is allowed to be.

So the child is received with the words, by being greeted with the touch of the hand:

You know you are going to the act that
is to uplift your soul to the spirit of the world.

Then the child enters the room, which is relatively extraordinarily simple at first. It has a kind of altar at one wall, with seven candles on it. We shall have more to say about these seven candles in this context. Above the altar there must be a picture of Christ. Since I have not yet been able to get hold of a better one, the Stuttgart Waldorf School uses the one painted by Leonardo da Vinci as the image of the youthful Christ. But that is still an imperfection, but one can only do what is possible under the real circumstances.

Now the person who is facing the altar, with his back to the children as they enter, turns around and faces the children. He now speaks words to the children that are thoroughly ritualistic, in which the formulation of the sentences is such that the sequence of words moves in an element where the person cannot say that he speaks, but rather that he expresses what the Christ has to say within him. So the person says:

We now raise our thoughts and feelings to the spirit,
To the spirit that lives and works
In stone, plants and animals;
That lives and works in human thoughts and deeds, That works in everything that works,
That lives in everything that lives,
He who leads the living into death, so that it may live anew,
He who leads the dead into the living, so that it may behold the spirit.

Every word has been weighed, not only so that it stands as a word, but also so that each word stands in its right place and in the right relationship to the other words. After the one who is speaking has spoken this, he turns to the Christ-Image and speaks with arms raised to the Christ-Image the following words:

He who works as a spirit in the universe took on body in him.
Christ died.
He came to life in the being of human beings
Who gave him a home in their hearts.
Let our heart turn to him too.
Let it be imbued with his power
So that he may work in it
So that he may permeate
our thinking, feeling and willing.

So this is the direction towards the Christ-spirit of the world. Now the person who is doing the work speaks, turning to the children and with hands that bless. The gesture for blessing consists of taking two fingers together and spreading the hands out in this way. [The gesture is demonstrated.] Now the point is that the moment has come when Communion should be administered or something similar. So it is the case that the officiant turns to the children. After saying the words that I have expressed, the person turns to the children and speaks, preparing them, as it were, for what is to be said as a substitute for receiving Communion:

My dear ones! We learn to understand the world.
We learn to work in the world.
Love among people revives all human endeavor
Without love, being human becomes bleak and empty.
Christ is the teacher of human love.

The person who is acting speaks to the children about the relationship between Christ and them. This is followed by the common prayer, which is spoken in unison:

We lift up all our feeling and thinking to the Spirit of God.
We honor the Spirit of God. We love the Spirit of God.
We will remember the Spirit of God
When we are alone,
And also when we are with people.
Then He will be with us.

You must pay attention to all the details. In particular, you must pay attention to the fact that this turning to the Spirit of God is required “when we are alone and also when we are with people”.

Now follows what must first be introduced as a kind of surrogate for Communion, which can take on different forms, insofar as it can be given to children or an indicative substitute for it can be given to them. We cannot do more than the officiant approaches each individual child and speaks, laying his hand on the child's head or extending his hand – so it is spoken to each individual child, going through the whole row [of children]; before, it was only spoken to them as a group:

The spirit of God will be with you if you seek it.

The child answers:

I will seek it.

So you don't have to take this as a lecture, but as a ceremony.

Now the officiant returns to the altar and, with hands blessing, says:

I call upon the spirit of God
to be with you when you seek it.

After this, the Gospel chapter is read, which must be read in the correct manner at the appropriate time. We will have more to say about the distribution of the Gospel chapters throughout the year. Then the children sing a hymn that is relevant to the whole service, and finally the officiant says:

Dear children! I now dismiss you,

But keep in good thoughts

What you have heard, felt and thought here.

Then appropriate music follows. The children then leave the hall after the officiant has stepped back from the image of Christ.

The person performing the act can prepare himself by saying to himself before the act:

Through Your power, O Spirit of God,
I shall direct to You
the souls entrusted to me.
Let Your light illuminate the sphere of my thinking,
Your warmth of life permeates the center of my feeling, Your soul power permeates the radiant body of my will, Be in the service I want to do for you.

With these words, which he speaks to himself in thought, the doer prepares himself before the children are admitted.

I would like to make it clear that you should understand this as a ritual; you should not interpret it as a teaching instruction. This is counteracted by the fact that religious instruction is given in the corresponding religious education lessons. There is teaching, there is no cult.

The ritual that is performed, my dear friends, works, if it is performed in the right way and with the right attitude, precisely not as teaching for humanity. This must be borne in mind. And only in this way will you be able to understand how carefully the whole matter at hand is being handled. It can only be handled in such a way that the whole spirit of the matter is only gradually advanced, and we are actually coming to the development of the matter very slowly, because we can only respond, so to speak, to the signs of the times that we seek to understand.

Now, of course, it is important that the special times of the year also be made known to the child in the way he or she must be Christian, likewise through ritual. And so I would like to give you as an example the Christmas ritual first – we will talk about others later – which is added as a special one to the Sunday rituals, or would be performed on a Sunday if the birthday of Christ Jesus fell on a Sunday. So it is for the time being. I cannot say how things will turn out in the further development. So it is for the time being, according to our ability.

This Christmas action occurs in the same way as the Sunday actions. When the children have gathered, the person performing the action turns to them and says:

Dear children,

We live in the beginning of winter.
Our eyes see little of the outer sun.
It appears late and disappears early.
But within, our soul's eye beholds
In winter's cold and winter's darkness:
The bright shining spiritual sun of Christ,
Which has appeared through Jesus to humanity
From divine realms.

In the humble soul of the shepherd
Was heard the word of heaven:
God's spirit reveals itself in heights,
And he brings peace to the people of the earth,
In whose hearts dwells good will.
And the shepherds were led
By the lofty word of heaven,
And they sought the Spirit of God
After the proclamation on earth.
At the place of poverty they found
The child Jesus, who then became
The Christ.

It was the first Christmas in the world
When the humble shepherds
With a praying heart kneeled
At the poverty site before Jesus, the infant,
Through the light of the spirit
He appeared to the people of the earth.

Through the Christ
Who is the spirit sun, we will find
The way to spiritual heights,
And so become
First true people.
So the humble shepherds thought
In their intuitive souls,
When they saw the light,
That shone from the child's eyes
In the first Christmas of the world.

And as if they saw the light
The humble shepherds
There was a new beginning of the world:
The Christmas of mankind began.
And it can be light ever since
In the hearts of men,
Who learn to love
To say: behold, it is the Christ
Through whom the soul finds
The way into the spirit's
Sunshine-bright kingdom.

And it will remain bright
In the hearts of men,
Who lovingly feel
In their deepest innermost being
The light that shines there
On the way to the Christ
Sunshine-bright kingdom.

In the hearts of men
The dark night of winter
Becomes a bright spiritual day
When the soul consecrates itself
To the light that shines through Jesus
In earthly life.

The person carrying out the action goes to each child as usual and speaks to them:

Raise your thoughts and feelings
to the Christ-Spirit.

Then, after going back to the front of the line, he speaks to the children:

You shall raise your thoughts and feelings
to the Christ-Spirit,
He is the light
That shines in the hearts of men
So that they may find
The way to the Kingdom of God.

Now a piece of music suitable for Christmas should be played, and then the person carrying out the action continues:

Through the power of the Spirit's salvation,
In the consecration of the world,
Soul light awakens,
Human strength awakens,
Courage of the heart awakens,
After it once awakened
From times of Christmas
To eternal healing power.

Man fulfills himself
With true soul meaning,
When at Christmas time
He turns within
In strong thinking
In heartfelt feeling
To the power of Christ
Man strengthens himself
Through true spiritual power
When at Christmas time
He turns within
In bright thinking
In warm feeling
To the light of Christ.

Dear children:
Hold all this in your hearts,
and bring it from the holy Christmas season
into the life of the whole year.

This can, of course, be followed, in the sense that we will have to discuss it later, by a reading from the corresponding gospel.

Since we have accepted children of all age groups into the Waldorf School, we were soon obliged to also celebrate a youth festival with the children who had completed elementary school and were about to go out into life. This youth festival will be the basis for a confirmation or confirmation ritual. The text for this youth festival is the following: Upon entering, which is done in the same way as usual, the child is said, each one individually, for each one is admitted separately:

Consider the importance of this moment in your life.

Now the children are admitted, the person performing the act turns to the children and says:

Dear children, remember the importance of this moment in your life. You are entering a new age. You are rising from childhood to youth. Your teachers have guided you. Their concern was that the Spirit of God

shine in your thinking
be powerful in your feeling
be effective in your will.

Your teachers wanted to show you the Christ who died so that human souls could live, so that He might be:

the light in your soul
the guide on your path through life
the giver of the joys of existence
the comforter in the suffering of existence.

The man turns around and raises his arms, as I showed earlier, to the image of Christ, and says:

You light of souls
You guide on our paths of life
You giver of the joys of existence
You comforter in the suffering of existence
I spoke to you with beseeching words, imploring light for these children's thoughts, longing for strength for these children's feelings, seeking the blessing of action for these children's will. So send your light, bestow your strength, let your blessings flow in this hour
upon those who were entrusted to us
and whom we now hand over to life
so that they may
think through your light
feel through your strength
work through your blessing
in all their earthly lives
until in the moment of death
you lead them into the existence of the soul.
For you have spoken:

Now follows the reading of the high-priestly prayer from the Gospel of John. The person conducting the service then goes to each individual child, takes them by the hand and speaks to them:

Through the spirit of Christ
Who conquered death
So that the soul of man
Was saved in life
You were led
Here in this school for children:
So may the spirit of Christ guide
Your life forces
Your soul powers
Your spiritual goals
Through the great school of life.

The person who is doing this returns to his or her place and speaks about Easter in a speech that has something like the following content – here he is given complete freedom, and what I will now read as a speech to the children is to be understood only as an appeal:

Dear Children,

It was in spring, when the earth finds new life in its plants, that Christ went through death on Golgotha. He died. But he overcame death. As victor over death, he lives with people: he lives in people who seek him, seek him with all their thinking, feeling and willing. And every time spring brings the high Easter festival, then man, when he sees the new life of the earth, should remember death and the resurrection of Christ.

— The youth celebration is intended for Easter. —

Dear Children, each year at this Easter time, remember the feast we celebrate with you today and celebrate it anew each year, so that the thought of the death, resurrection and indwelling of Christ in the souls of those who seek him may be revived in you.

Then a hymn follows, as in the Sunday celebrations, prepared in the appropriate way for this festival. Finally, the following is spoken again:

Dear children, every Sunday I have
released you, asking you to remember
what you have experienced here;
now I dismiss you
with a sorrowful soul
into life.
The Spirit of Christ be with you
Seek Him
and you shall find Him:
As your light
As your strength
As your guide
As your comforter.

Each child is dismissed individually, taken by the hand and spoken to:

Remember the importance of this moment in your life. Never forget it, not in joy, not in sorrow.

Then the child is dismissed, at first from the action. The rest would be instruction, would no longer belong to the actual ritual.

I have given you here some examples of how this must be grasped in a living way in religious life, how it can flow into a cult that is now also sought in a completely living way out of that which can be a renewed religious life. Everything, my dear friends, is imperfect in the beginning, and of course many, many objections can be raised against any beginning. Accept this as a beginning, and know that where there is a sincere desire for such a beginning, the strength to improve what can be given in such a beginning will also be found. I believe, my dear friends, that it is not a matter of stifling such a child in its beginning, but rather of working on what is wanted. Of course, where the living and not the dogmatic is desired, every objection can only be welcome. But it should be clear to you from this example that, wherever the living is sought, the cultic must be sought. I have already been able to draw your attention to the prayerful character of what the person performing the action can have as a preparatory prayer. In a similar way, we begin each teaching morning, of course in a correspondingly simple way. This, of course, goes beyond the principle if the principle is only grasped in a completely abstract way. If the principle were grasped in a completely abstract way, we would not be allowed to place anything at the beginning of the teaching morning at all, but would have to start [with the teaching] straight away. But that would be quite impossible, because after all, all teaching must have a mood to it, and ultimately the Christian mood cannot be something that hovers above everything as an abstraction, but must be incorporated into every detail. There can be no principle in the life of the world, only that which changes in life. This should not be seen as an inconsistency, but as a requirement of life itself.

But you also see that, in accordance with what can only be use today, we must remain with the word as much as possible, and only the word itself can be transformed into action, because action is already inherent in the word, especially when the word occurs in the context of life itself. It is absolutely the case that in such a youth celebration, not only is something discussed, but something happens, something happens to the souls, not with, but to the souls of the children.

Just compare this, my dear friends, with how strong the belief was that the main thing had to be put into the teaching material that was being taught. Basically, this is still the case today in all religious denominations and in all forms of religion; too much emphasis is placed on the teaching material as such, on its dogmatic or other content. One must gradually come out of the merely human word and, by detour, by being aware that one draws the word from the spiritual worlds for the ceremony, penetrate to the immersion of the whole ceremonial in an atmosphere where acts of worship can take place without sacrificial acts.

But in the course of time, another problem arose: the children of the dissidents also wanted to be baptized. Until now, of course, I could only help myself, at least in the main, by teaching our friends who are priests and who were also imbued with the idea of breathing new life into their profession a baptismal ritual that could only be in keeping with the spirit of the times. But, my dear friends, before I proceed to this baptismal ritual tomorrow, I must make a few remarks, without which this baptismal ritual could not be understood. You see, a baptismal ritual would be impossible to create if one did not inspire one's understanding of the world and of God through that which in earlier times, when such things still lived atavistically, flowed into a ritual at all. I have pointed out to you times when no alchemical operation (that is, in those days, chemical operation) was carried out without the alchemist (that is, in our language, the chemist) having the Book of the Gospels in front of him in his alchemical laboratory. People at that time said that one would not have considered oneself authorized to carry out an alchemical process in the true sense of the word with the right attitude without the Gospel. You must always bear in mind how far a modern chemist is from such a thing, and how a modern chemist would fare if he were expected not to act with his retorts and his heating apparatus and with all that he does if he did not have the gospel book at his laboratory table. One must penetrate something like this if one seriously wants to see through what it is all about. One must also understand the concern that was present precisely in those who had the good eye in the times when modern science was emerging and one could see that, abandoned by the Spirit of God, actions were being carried out in accordance with the external laws of nature and external natural forces. One must put oneself in the shoes of such people, who were seized by a terrible fear when they heard that Agrippa von Nettesheim or his teacher, the Sponheimer, were performing something that had to do with new powers. They were extremely concerned that this should not have anything to do with divine powers. And so one must put oneself in the frame of mind that consecrating religious services, performing ceremonies, celebrating was nothing other than the highest stage of that which one also performed in alchemy. Therefore, one must really be imbued with the realization that not only external signs were present in those things that were used in a cultic act, but that the view that was held at that time of the substantial that served one in a cultic act was present. It was not, as would be the case today, decided to devise this or that symbol for this or that, whereby human arbitrariness plays an enormous role and with which one actually has to struggle continuously today. Isn't it true that in all these things it really depends on the how. And so it is just as necessary that in order to understand rituals it is also recognized that there is nothing arbitrary in the ritual, but a deeper knowledge of the substantiality of the world than can be admitted at present in science at all.

You see, a few years ago, for example, I read in a book written with good intentions that dealt with the history of alchemy how an alchemist's recipe from around the time of Basilius Valentinus's work was cited. The recipe was presented as it could be described from the works of Basilius Valentinus, which are largely forgeries. Then the excellent chemist who had to judge it wrote his verdict and said: This is complete nonsense, it is all nonsense; today's chemist cannot imagine what it means, it is complete nonsense. — Not a single word that the historian wrote down is wrong. The man could only not imagine anything because the recipe combined words that had to be learned in their terminological meaning, of which one would first have to know how they were used. There was talk of processes that are again expressed according to the words today, of dissolution, of heating and so on. Yes, if one reads the word “loosening” as today's chemists do, it is nonsense. If you read the word 'gold' as today's chemist does, it is nonsense, and if you read the word 'mercury', today's chemist cannot imagine what it is at all; because he understands mercury to mean the mercury that we also have in thermometer tubes, for example. If we approach the formulas of the 13th and 12th centuries with this terminology, they are complete nonsense today, and it would be much better if people admitted to themselves that they appear to be nonsense than if people today , which is what is really happening, they run to the antiquarian bookshops and buy works by Basilius Valentinus, which are forgeries – but which sometimes contain correct things that are just not understood today – or they buy all kinds of works by Paracelsus. They read it and think they understand it, while it would be more honest to just say to themselves: That is the height of madness from the point of view of today. That is just what must be taken into account; in this respect people today have, I might say, basically strayed from the honest sense of truth; they write and prattle on in words and are satisfied if the words are only moved into a slightly different atmosphere from the one they are accustomed to hearing today, even if they do not understand the words. Today, because all these things are taught in school, there is definitely an atmosphere in which people say to themselves: Yes, one hears about water, salt, phosphorus, mercury; one can understand all that, one understands it if one picks up the very first chemistry textbook today. But [they think], that which one understands cannot be of any value, that is knowledge that is of no value from the outset. Now they take a work by Paracelsus or a work by Basilius Valentinus. There they find the same words, but because they cannot understand it in the context, they believe that they are now in mystical depths because they do not understand anything, but they want to believe that they are experiencing something. That is where we have to be honest. Even if we only go back that far, we still have to search a little for the key. We have to learn to read these things, because today it is extremely difficult to even get a correct idea of what the spirit, what the supernatural actually is. It helps a great deal if one prepares oneself by delving into times when the spirit was still alive in the material world, by going back to such times and asking oneself: What did people in the 12th or 13th century understand when they talked about salt, water, ash? Not at all what people understand today. What did they understand when they spoke of salt, water, ash?

This is what I wanted to point out to you first, and I will start on it tomorrow when I have more to say about ritualism.

My dear friends! It is quite natural that where personalities with very different starting points are together, difficulties of understanding arise, and such difficulties must arise, especially on the most important points. I can only try to overcome these difficulties little by little by guiding you slowly towards the things. In the long run, nothing can be achieved in these matters with ordinary questions and answers, and so it seems necessary to me, also with regard to the questions that have been raised, that I continue a little longer in the way of looking at things that I presented to you here yesterday afternoon, and which, at the point where we are now, makes it necessary for us to engage somewhat with the work of redemption as such. This was also one of the questions that was asked in the form of: What is the difference between the Lutheran idea of redemption and that which arises, for example, from anthroposophical contemplation?

This question cannot actually be asked so simply, and in particular it cannot be answered so simply. Rather, it must be characterized on the basis of its foundations. It is particularly necessary to be clear about the fact that there is a fundamental difference between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church precisely in the understanding of the work of redemption, but that there are also many other nuances to be considered in the understanding of this matter outside of these two broad categories. I must therefore discuss the act of Salvation as such, and then we will see how the concept is initially nuanced in Catholicism and in the Protestant Evangelical Church.

Now, we have the work of redemption in the first place in such a way that it confronts us in the deed of the Mystery of Golgotha. This deed of the Mystery of Golgotha, understood and presented as an objective historical fact, is what must first be brought together in the form of the question with what this work of redemption is in relation to man; let us say: In what way is the deed of Golgotha a work of redemption for man, from what does it redeem him, and so on? — But this question cannot really be answered any differently for today's consciousness of time than by also taking into account the subjective factor of how the work of redemption is experienced in the individual Christian personality. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of anthroposophical life, and who confuse much of the content of anthroposophy with what they encounter in the various theosophical views of the present day, very easily, I might even say very carelessly, characterize the opposition as follows: The Christian doctrine of redemption is the redemption through Christ Jesus and can therefore only be sought in the relationship of man to Christ Jesus, while the [theosophical] doctrine of redemption actually presupposes self-redemption, because in the successive in successive earthly lives, he would perform all deeds connected with his karma in such a way that he would lead [himself] out of a sinful existence into a sinless one; so there is self-redemption.

Take the numerous, and indeed intelligent, personalities – and in the present day their number is increasing day by day – [who convert from the Evangelical Protestant Church to the Catholic Church.] You can be sure that if something real does not happen in time, there will be a great influx from Evangelical Protestant areas to the Catholic Church in the future. It is becoming more and more apparent that what, in certain respects, leads to a kind of nullity in the Protestant Church that still exists today, as was so aptly characterized yesterday evening, is felt by many somewhat deeper people today, and this leads them back into the fold of the Catholic Church. It is absolutely the case that if we pay attention, we can experience this today in large numbers, and if something right does not happen, we will experience it, as I said, very, very strongly. My dear friends, discussing these things is something that could cost people very dearly in the near future. Always wanting to discuss and not considering that under this discussion the majority, precisely in the form of the most intelligent personalities, disappears. To single out one example, we need only look at a personality such as Friedrich Schlegel, the German romantic who returned to the Catholic Church. If we want to understand what actually led a personality like Friedrich Schlegel back into the fold of the Catholic Church, we have to look at the person as a whole. What led such a personality back into the bosom of the Catholic Church was basically the mystery of the sacrifice of the Mass; at least, from what I know of Friedrich Schlegel, I have never been able to form any other view than that it was the mystery of the sacrifice of the Mass. He came to this realization at a certain point in his life: everything that was given to me in a theoretical way while I belonged to the Protestant community is actually an outer work, something that does not place me in any reality; the moment I understood - so he said to himself — how a mystery is actually accomplished in the sacrifice of the Mass, whereby the mystery of Golgotha can be present in its reality at every moment, I knew how I could be religiously placed in a reality. — That is roughly the feeling that we can imagine of Friedrich Schlegel's conversion, if you will, to Catholicism.

Now, we are dealing with the fact that the path from the mystery of Golgotha to the individual believers is mediated by the priest in such a way that what happened at Golgotha is transferred from the ordained priest to the individual believer through the sacrament. The process itself is one that takes place entirely outside of subjectivity. And then, within Catholicism, we have to move on to a completely new area, I would say, if we now want to find the subjective correlate to that which takes place as something completely objective, as something that takes place in the external world. The only thing that matters in the Catholic Church is that simply by the existence of this church, a process has been created that unfolds in time and connects the individual Catholic, no matter what age he lives in, with the Mystery of Golgotha through the continuity of the church. We have, then, first of all, to look at the actual process itself, and see what has been accomplished in the course of time, from the Mystery of Golgotha to the moment when anyone receives the sacrament. We must therefore see in this process an essential element, something that is needed by the divine government of the world in order to guide earthly evolution to its goal. This must then be strictly separated from what happens within the Catholic Church. The further is to educate the individual through instruction and other means that are permitted within the Catholic Church, to bring him to an inner, and indeed to a full inner understanding of what is actually happening to him as a Catholic. He must therefore be taught to be seized by that which, however, happens to him in full objectivity. I know very well that this seems a bit radically expressed, but it is absolutely necessary to express it not as some would like to express it, who believe they have to excuse Catholicism before the world, but as it is expressed by those who are actually the ecclesiastical authorities. It is also about the individual being brought to an understanding, to an active understanding of the context of what is emanating from the Mystery of Golgotha through the means of grace of the sacrament in the individual, in his time and in his place, in the sanctification of each work, in the understanding of activity. At the most, it can be understood by the individual as a sin if he receives the sacrament unworthily; he can thereby commit a sin, but he cannot prevent the objective content of the event, the objective process of the event. Thus, for example, according to the Catholic view, I can receive a sacrament unworthily and thereby incur a grave sin, but I cannot prevent the process that takes place in all objectivity. I can also incur a grave sin as a Catholic priest if I administer the sacrament as an unworthy priest, but I cannot possibly prevent the effect of the sacrament. If I had to say at first that only in isolated cases can what I believe to be an indication of an objective event, namely that the aura around the transubstantiated host after transubstantiation , can at most be understood to mean that someone who today informs themselves about these things through supersensible vision can gain insight from such appearances, from such observations, that it is not as the Catholic Church presents it. But let us first get an exact idea of how the Catholic Church presents it.

Now, what I said in this sense, that one goes to see, so to speak, whether what the Catholic Church thinks is true, the Catholic Church would consider that a terrible sin, it would see it as the work of the devil. The Catholic interpretation would be to say: If someone goes around checking whether the host has an aura around one priest and not around another, then he is possessed by the devil, who wants to whisper an erroneous idea into his ear about what actually exists in Catholicism. So what I have just said is, in the sense of the Catholic Church, nothing more than a deception that comes from the enemy of Christ Jesus. That is how the Church must see it, and it cannot see it any differently if it remains within the bounds of its own understanding and if it does not want to apologize to the world. The views that one must have are quite strict. The Catholic Church makes this possible by including Romanism in its conceptual world, which can do such a thing; it makes it possible to find very sharp conceptual contours for these things. In fact, these things appear much sharper when they are presented in a Romance language. If you express them in a Romance language, for example in Latin, then it is the case that these conceptual contours can be produced with extraordinary clarity, even in modern Romance languages. However, as in modern French, the concept can evaporate and it flows out into a mere empty shell of a word. But even a mere empty phrase can represent something quite sharply defined, so that one must say: In those areas where priests are trained in the correct concepts, they are trained to a very, very sharp definition, and in such a way that this desire to grasp concepts firmly actually dries up all of life. I myself have seen the difficulties that some Catholic priests go to in order to understand it, priests who celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass daily. They usually start from a careful Aristotelian definition in order to understand how the material substance of the bread and wine can actually be transformed into the real body and blood of Christ Jesus, but of course a truly educated Catholic priest cannot have the slightest doubt that this is the case. He can only strive to get ideas that can explain it to him in some way; of course he is allowed to research this, but he must not doubt the content of the dogma. The goal of science is something quite definite for the Catholic, but within the limits of what lies between human abilities and the goal, the Catholic is absolutely free. Therefore, Catholic science also always relies on its freedom and then recognizes from certain points of view that the goal is not actually a contradiction in terms of the freedom of science, because this goal is of course also present elsewhere. This is something that is always coming back to. It is absolutely clear, for example, that if we have hydrogen in one test tube and oxygen in the other, that through a certain process the two combine to form water, and it is only our task to penetrate this inevitably established fact with our concepts. It is the same with the truths of revelation; they are also there, and they must likewise simply be permeated with the concepts. Science, according to Catholic scholars, is no freer in the field of natural science than in the field of revelation. In the one case, nature provides the objective, in the other case, the content of revelation. And if we add to this that the believing Catholic has no different relationship to revelation than to nature, that it is basically the same to him whether something is revealed to him through what appears as revelation, let us say, the Golgotha mystery and so on, or whether, on the other hand, things are revealed to him through his intellect, these two revelations are simply the same for him, and science is completely free for both. If you call it free in one case, you must also call it free in the other.

It must be clearly understood that the difference lies much deeper than in the field that is the subject of much discussion today, because the discussion is rather easy. As foolish as it was often believed among materialists, for example, that these things could be dismissed by discussing them with great arrogance, things are not so foolish; this must be noted again and again. If one approaches, for example, the arguments of David Friedrich Strauß with an open mind, which Nietzsche also characterized very well in his booklet 'David Friedrich Strauß, the Philistine and the Writer', and if, on the other hand, one also what appears with all possible old good traditions within the Catholic Church, then one must find, with an unbiased judgment, that what appears in David Friedrich Strauß is quite clearly below the level at which the Catholic discussion as such moves.

These things only make sense when they are said in a certain context. What I had to characterize as the actual Catholic is, of course, juxtaposed on the other side with what is meant by “mysticism” in the usual sense of the word, that mysticism which actually clearly leads back to inner experience, which also understands communion with Christ as an inner experience. Here we are actually dealing with the individual human being, who, simply by virtue of his particular nature and character, can have this 'unio mystica', behind which what takes place in the sacrament – which is the main thing in the Catholic sense – basically sinks to the level of an outer work, indeed for many mystics it disappears altogether. In fact, the connection with the objective fact of Calvary is completely lost, and all that is actually worth striving for is reduced to some subjective process. So, if you make the necessary efforts to do so, or if you are blessed or have some other kind of predisposition, you can experience the Christ within yourself through subjective experience, and often do not even realize that in this way you are intellectually and emotionally withdrawing from the world to the subject, and that you are actually completely losing the objective Christ with this subjective mysticism.

But it was precisely during the time when Luther was active that there was a strong urge for this mysticism, especially in the decisive area of religious development. And it may be said that a large part of the struggle through which Luther passed consisted in his having on the one hand to look to what was given him simply by his starting point from the Catholic priesthood, and on the other hand to what he particularly observed in something like his study of the “Theologia deutsch” or other mystical endeavors - after all, it was everywhere present in the early days of the Lutheran era - so it was according to the purely subjective experience that for him contained the danger of now completely losing Christ and falling prey to the mere devilish work, his subjective experience. For Luther could not regard the subjective experience, which completely loses the Christ, as anything other than the work of the devil, and in it he saw directly the danger of an arousal on the part of the devil, who aims to present the image of Christ inwardly to man, but to take away the Christ. Indeed, Luther must have felt, the adversary could find no better way to take Christ from humanity than to educate all people to the purely subjective experience of Christ. Of course it is quite possible to eliminate the objective Christ from the world by making it clear to people, in the most absolute pure experience, that if they inwardly experience Christ, that is enough. For Luther this experience of Christ would have taken away from him all objectivity, the whole of the objective process; for him it would have meant a taking away of Christ from mankind by the adversary of Christ.

This, my dear friends, is, if I may express myself in religious terms, a means of the evil spirits to dissuade us from the supersensible world, to instill images of the supersensible world into us and let us be satisfied with the images of the supersensible world. Anyone who is grounded in genuine spiritual science knows that materialistically tinged visions do not represent a connection with the spiritual world, but a turning away from the spiritual world, a casting out of the spiritual world. So when, for example, let us say, the anthroposophist, who sees things impartially, comes to atavistic or to morbid, pathological visions, it is his task not to remain in this visionary state, but to fight this visionary state with all his might, because the visions do not lead not lead to the supersensible, they lead away from the supersensible; and it is, I might say, only a distillate of that visionary experience which emerges in the false mysticism that wants to come to Christ through inner experience; it is only a distillate. Because people are basically incapable of having real visions, they make up fantasy content, which then actually throws people back on themselves.

In contrast to this, there is what can be felt as the relationship of man to Christ in the Lutheran sense, and this is that, first of all, the sense of the reality of the external work is lost, that is, the focus is on the historical-temporal, in the physical sense temporal church, and that in place of this church, not a non-church, but the invisible church is placed. In Catholicism, then, we have in the first place the visible church, which is nothing other than the work of Christ, and which sees in the outward world of temporal facts a definite and continuous trend extending from the event of Golgotha to the individual believer. On the other hand, we have the turning away from this closed current, so to speak, the reduction of what is a merely temporal process to a supra-temporal process. Thus, in the individual Catholic believer, let us say, for example, when he receives Holy Communion from the priest, a connection is made directly with the Mystery of Golgotha throughout the entire development of time. If he takes the matter strictly, the one who communicates according to the Roman Catholic ritual – in fact, according to any Catholic ritual – can imagine that this communion is carried out directly by Christ through the priest. He must be directly aware of the immediate presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper through the temporal mediation of the church, which has never given up this continuity. On the other hand, in the Lutheran ritual, communion can only be seen as a connection between the human being and the supernatural, and also with the supernatural, which is given by Christ himself, so that this connection is not a temporal but a trans-temporal act, through which the individual is brought into a direct relationship with Christ, not through the mediation of time, but directly, and that this relationship is mediated through faith. It is the case that the person with whom the communicant is connected through a timeless act proves, in subjective consciousness, to be identical with the one who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. There is actually no other consistent interpretation of the matter. It is about this: someone communicates at the altar, and through this they are brought into direct contact with the supersensible. Grace is at work at that moment; through grace, through the working of grace, faith is now aroused in that moment. But faith is not just an abstract, subjective belief; rather, faith is something that contains reality within itself. And through this faith, the communicator encounters the Christ, who has gone through the mystery of Golgotha, in that, through a special effect of grace, his faith is given to him in the immediate presence of the Christ and through this faith he is brought into the right kind of connection with the supersensible world in communion.

Of course, these things are also interpreted in the most diverse ways, and you can indeed read the most diverse interpretations about these things today. I must confess to you that I have read many such interpretations, the majority of those that appear today, and that are precisely from people who live in the consciousness of the present day. Most of these interpretations actually seem to me to avoid arriving at a very clear, coherent idea, so that one can do extremely little with them if one is accustomed to arriving at coherent ideas in these matters. It is not possible to accept what appears as faith in Luther's work as a mere subjective belief, as we are accustomed to in today's science, but it is necessary to see that in the act of faith through a gift of grace, the power of Christ is present in Luther's work. In a kind of trans-temporal act, one encounters on earth the same one who went through the Mystery of Golgotha.

But with that, my dear friends, we have given the great difference that exists between mysticism, as I characterized it to you earlier, and what the presence of the act of faith is in the consciousness, in the soul of the human being within the Lutheran confession. The mystic must incline more and more to regard the whole matter as a completely subjective one, as a completely personal relationship with Christ, whose objectivity actually eludes him. The Lutheran believer must say to himself: If I can have the right faith, then I must at the same time be a chosen one, I must be predestined to have in my faith not only the powers that can spring from my personality, but in this act of faith the power of Christ Himself, which is not given to me by something inward, but which comes to me entirely from without, but never through some kind of process that takes place in such a way that I could also see it externally, that I could visualize it through some temporal context, but which is actually a trans-temporal process that must be presented as something that could never enter into the process of historical becoming, of historical development. Thus, in the course of temporal-historical becoming, what appears as a supra-temporal act in the act of faith simply cannot be contained in it. So in this sense, no visible church could actually form a real ascent to what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha, because the only truly Protestant way of saying it is: In the act of faith, a supra-temporal act takes place; if now, in addition, the church is there to lead up to the Mystery of Golgotha in a temporal way, this purely temporal act, this continuity within the church actually means only one direction, which has nothing to do with the supra-temporal as such, other than that it is somehow the bearer of this supra-temporal.

Consider the consequence of this. If, in the sense of Catholicism, the essence of the temporal mediation by the church is seen to be that it must happen, then the continuity must not be allowed to break anywhere, then the apostolic succession must not be allowed to end anywhere, then only the ordained priest can ordain the other priest, and then only the one ordained by an ordained priest can be a priest, then we are led to the necessity of maintaining the continuity of the Church, because the temporal act is at the same time the supersensible act, which cannot be broken anywhere. That is the Catholic view.

If we turn to the Protestant view, the essential thing is a supra-temporal act, because that which is temporal in the church is only the 'vehicle of this supra-temporal act. So the succession can break somewhere. When the supra-temporal takes place in the individual personality through the supra-temporal act of grace, then this leads through the act of grace each time up to the Mystery of Golgotha. One encounters the Christ, and it does not matter what temporal mediation is present. For example, if the act beyond time takes place in the right way, historical continuity can be broken. It is not at all necessary for the act beyond time to be supported by any kind of temporal succession. That is how sharply things are opposed to one another. You must not fail to recognize this. And even if one or the other does not feel that way, it is simply the case that one really does shrink from ultimate consequences; and certain solutions will only come about if one decides not to confuse these things, not to blur the difference, but to present it to the soul in all clarity.

If we now continue in the anthroposophical sense, we see on the one hand the Catholic Church as it is today. I am speaking for the present time; what I say would not apply to the Catholic Church, say, in the 12th century. I speak for the present time, because we are dealing with resolutions that you are also making in the present time, and the development in the anthroposophical sense could not be something that would make it possible for us to say what we are saying today at a different time, but we have to speak directly from what is necessary for the present time. On the one hand, Catholicism, in which anthroposophy can see nothing other than what brings the supersensible world down into the sensory realm, an earthly manifestation of that which can never be completely absorbed into the earthly, which, through its earthly manifestation, can only be so that it is falsified in its actual meaning. Thus, in Catholicism, we see, on the one hand, something emerging that draws the [supratemporal] into the temporal element, and we cannot help but say: today's consciousness has not yet reached the point that it has created complete clarity about these matters in a sufficiently large number of people. It is simply the case that because in Catholicism there is no stronger contrast between the trans-temporal and the temporal, because the trans-temporal can appear in the temporal, can be within it, because a temporal appear and at the same time represent in its reality something beyond time, then it may well be the case within Catholicism that the real event emerges for that which the true [supersensible] event is.

Only out of such an awareness could I, for example, speak of many things in my theory of knowledge that could not have been expressed out of any other awareness. Thus we see how deeply justified the claim is for the act of faith to be a timeless act. And if we now consider the relationship to Christ Jesus in the Mystery of Golgotha, anthroposophy, through its cosmology, recognizes the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha, it recognizes the real passage of the extraterrestrial Christ-being through the deeds and experiences of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, from the side of knowledge, what comes from cosmology flows into that which the human being experiences in himself through the timeless act. What comes from cosmology is then a full confirmation that we are not dealing with something subjective, but that we are dealing with a process that is taking place in the development of the earth. And now we come to the point where we have to say, from the anthroposophical point of view, that if, for example, [the connection] with the supratemporal takes place in the right way in communion, then through this act communion is also established with the historical deed on Golgotha, established in a supratemporal way, and the appeal to the temporal mediation is not necessary as such, because something objective has happened for the evolution of the earth through what has happened for the earth and for humanity through the mystery of Golgotha. Anthroposophy simply leads us to say: With the Mystery of Golgotha, an integrating process for the whole of earthly evolution has taken place; after the Mystery of Golgotha, the whole of earthly evolution is something different than it used to be. The Christ Himself descended from supermundane spheres to the earthly realm and has been partaking in the process of earthly evolution since the Mystery of Golgotha. In the evolution of the earth itself, He has thereby initiated a supra-temporal process that has been present ever since and that does not depend on the temporal establishment of the Church. Thus, what can be encountered as a mere article of faith from the invisible church, acquires a content through anthroposophical knowledge, which must simply present the activity of Christ in the evolution of the earth as a reality.

My dear friends, when the activity of Christ is present in earthly reality, then it is present; the only question is whether one can find the Christ objectively working in the earthly process. One need not find him through some institution, which can only be a mediator. One must find him through what happens to oneself as a result of the institution. One can find him at any time, in any place, since the Mystery of Golgotha, and a church can be the mediator alone. When it appears as a church, it will sanctify itself as a church precisely by sanctifying its faithful. So one can say: the anthroposophical view is simply that, in religious terms, [finding Christ] depends on what happens on the path one takes to Christ, but that an unconditional reliance on succession succession within the church current would be a falling down into that which was entirely justified within the pre-Christian development of humanity, which only radiates through Catholicism into the development of humanity since the Christ event.

My dear friends, for those people to whom, in some local context, say, in the ancient Orient, a god approached — I say a “god” because the gods in the ancient Orient were, after all, in relation to Christ, we would today say, “sub-gods” — this very different god who approached must have appeared to them as the real source for everything divine in this tribe. One had to maintain continuity with him within the earth; once this god had appeared, one had to somehow find a ceremonial disguise that would never break away. Let us say that it was possible to offer this god the sacrifice of fire on the altar. If this meant that one had approached this god, if this meant that contact with this god had been established within the sensual entities, then this fire, once kindled on the altar of sacrifice, could never be allowed to go out, for with the physical flame the god would also have vanished. This fire had to be continuously maintained, the one fire had to be lit at the other; its flame had to endure in time, because in this way the god was preserved, who was “fired” into this material.

In a more spiritualized form, this then comes to us within the Catholic Church, which has preserved old customs, in the continuity of priestly ordination, and it comes to us within the individual church that contains the eternal flame. In every Catholic church there is a flame that must never be extinguished, a small candle that must always be lit from one that is still burning. And if today we see the small candle in the eternal lamp by which Galileo Galilei observed the laws of the pendulum in the church of Pisa, , then this flame, burning today, was kindled from that which burned earlier, and this goes all the way up to the first flame, so that in every single flame of a single church one should see that which was first kindled by the apostles themselves. There also had to be a material community for each individual flame, ascending to the one that was first kindled in the bosom of the apostles.

We see, on the one hand, Catholicism with its great danger of materializing everything, of bringing everything down into the temporal-material, and, on the other hand, Protestantism with the danger of atomization, which must be avoided. And that must be the big question in your endeavors: How can we avoid atomization, that each individual has his or her own confession, which leads to the impossibility of building a community? Because everything that must be understood as a timeless act that can be achieved by each individual tends towards that, and as a result, the Protestant Church carries the danger of atomization within itself. The Catholic Church runs the risk of completely destroying the existence of the individual, of only recognizing him as a link in the materialized Christ process. The Protestant Evangelical Church is in danger – in what it has now become, which it was not at the time of Luther – of pushing the individual so far that any community building becomes impossible, so that the church disintegrates into its atoms and that there will no longer be any possibility of pastoral care, that the Church would have to face its dissolution, its nullity, and in view of the present situation this would have to happen very soon if nothing is done to counteract this trend.

Thus, on the one hand, we have materialization, and on the other, spiritualization. Both are great dangers for the development of religious life in the civilized world. And so today we are faced with the possibility that on the one hand someone may arise and say as a Catholic: The Church is everything and she must not be shaken! — and on the other hand someone may say: The Church is nothing!

All this is expressed in the most diverse nuances, and it is expressed in the most diverse nuances. For example, among certain Protestants there is a constant tendency to become Catholic; on the other hand, among Catholics there is always a tendency to become Protestant. I do not say to “protest”, but to “protestantize”. We are indeed living in a chaos inside. It is extremely difficult, for example, for someone who is looking for clear concepts to understand how it really is in the mind of a personality like the one who opposed Dr. Geyer yesterday and simply asserted the resurrection as an historical fact based on the testimony of eyewitnesses. That is precisely the question: are the eyewitnesses credible? How do we come to understand the fact as an historical fact? The whole question of the [possibility of a] falsification of historical facts is dismissed because it is convenient to do so, and we have certainly contained a Catholicizing tendency within Protestantism, just as, on the other hand, Protestantizing tendencies are contained in Catholicism, especially when they express themselves subjectively, but without the pastors actually coming to a real departure from the church.

The following draft of a declaration of collaboration in a religious renewal was presented to Rudolf Steiner on October 4, 1921.

First version of a declaration of cooperation in a religious renewal:

I declare my determination to cooperate in the efforts for a comprehensive and effective religious renewal, as initiated by the organizers of the religious teaching course led by Dr. Rudolf Steiner from June 12 to 16, 1921 in Stuttgart, in accordance with the following guiding principles.

1. I recognize that anthroposophy is, in decisive respects, the new worldview that must be presupposed for a religious renewal today and that it has the necessary sources of knowledge for the new cults to be developed.

2. I declare my willingness to prepare and found independent congregations by implementing the cultic forms and suggestions for sermons and teaching gained from anthroposophical sources of knowledge. I will only seek to establish ties within the church where the purity of the impulse is not endangered.

3. To become qualified for the responsible priestly profession, I am willing to familiarize myself with the spirit of sacramental priestly work through intensive training.

4. For the present time, I recognize the following conditions for the pastoral work in question, based on scientific training: thorough theological training, an academic final examination; for non-theologians who, by way of exception, can be admitted on the basis of personal aptitude, participation in a four-month theological course organized by the leadership is required.

5. I undertake to use my best endeavors to recruit serious and suitable co-workers. After obtaining the consent of the Central Office, the person to be recruited may be approached and the material made accessible to him, under the condition of confidentiality. After completing the Dornach Course in September-October 1921, the commitment to the present declaration and the guarantee of a committed co-worker is required to join the co-workers. Every new co-worker should, as far as possible, be enabled to participate in a conference to be held at a location to be announced at the beginning of January 1922.

6. Only committed employees are entitled to purchase the course transcripts, and then only on condition that they treat them in strict confidence and return them to the management immediately upon request. Special copies of the course transcripts are available for advertising purposes (see point 5 for instructions).

7. I agree, for the sake of unity of action, not to use any cultic forms before the jointly determined date. In the event that I revoke my commitment, I forfeit all rights to use anthroposophically based rituals.

I will treat as confidential all material communicated to me orally, in writing or in print, as well as the names of all personalities involved in the movement.

Discussion after the Seventeenth Lecture

I will then ask you to ask further questions. And now, perhaps, I may conclude with a few words about the document with the seven points that was handed to me and that, of course, actually concerns not so much me as those who would come to sign this document. I also have no influence over anything that is to be decided on the basis of this document. I would just like to note that certain difficulties have arisen for me in three points, I believe in the 4th, 5th and 7th points. I didn't have to read it very quickly, but certain difficulties arose for me in points 4, 5 and 7, which I believe are only one difficulty. Of course, I don't need to read the points to you, I just want to read the fourth one, because this difficulty should be overcome.

“For the present time, I recognize the following conditions for the pastoral work in question, with regard to scientific training: thorough theological training, a final academic examination; for non-theologians who, by way of exception, can be admitted on the basis of personal aptitude, participation in a four-month theological course organized by the management is required.”

This point cannot be implemented without at the same time finding a way of appointing the organizers to decide on it. This point cannot be followed without having impeccable authorities who can bring about a decision in these matters. So that seems to me to be actually missing here, who has to decide on this. It is not the case that this can simply be decided after the expression: “Thorough theological training, an academic final examination”, but who allows it? And “for non-theologians... participation in a theological course organized by the management is required”. Who is the management? At least I couldn't find any clear indication of this. The fifth point reads: “I undertake to recruit serious, suitable collaborators to the best of my ability. After obtaining the consent of the central office, the person to be recruited can be approached and the material made accessible to him, provided this is done in confidence.” So at the very least, a central office would have to be set up properly, also in line with point 7: ‘[...] for the sake of unity of purpose’ and so on. Of course, it is also necessary that at least from the beginning a flawless central office must be created, and that you must create it in such a way that it takes care of those points that concern the law - because we immediately fall into the law when we stipulate in this way, and with that comes apostasy from God. We also come into the necessity of succession, so the mode between you would also have to be discussed in detail, in which way you create a flawless succession to that which you again establish in a flawless way as a central office in Berlin. In such a matter it is not possible to proceed in a purely associative manner, but in the creation of such a matter I consider it necessary to bring the whole seriousness of the matter before the soul. You can hardly do that without realizing that if you take on such strict conditions as those formulated in points 1, 2 and 3, you must actually create a very serious institution for the outside world, which must be more than what is achieved through the current association-based approach. For as a rule, firstly, the individual does not take care of it, and secondly, it is constantly being changed, so that what is there from the spirit of those first chosen is turned upside down by the next people. You have to ensure that what you set down here cannot be turned upside down by your successors. This is something that, in addition to this, should be discussed in a very serious way.

Emil Bock: We actually meant that these sentences should only have provisional validity, and we also meant to create a central office...

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, but I think that it is part of the creation of an institution of any kind to be absolutely clear about this central office. I think you should not part here without...

Emil Bock: That should happen when the signatures are available.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, can that be done? I don't want to say anything other than advice; consider what I am saying as nothing more than advice. It would have to be discussed among you whether the individuals who sign this do so before the central office is created or whether they sign it after the central office is created. In the first case, you are committing yourself to a number of sentences whose execution you do not know; in the second case, you are committing yourself to belonging to a certain reality. I do not want to exert any influence, but you must consider whether you want to sign statutes that you write and profess, or whether you are performing a real action. You will only carry out the real action when you have set up the central office, because that is where everything starts for the whole movement. Of course, either of the two possibilities can arise, but there is an enormous difference.

Emil Bock: It was actually only intended as a suggestion.

Rudolf Steiner: This has far too much weight. I must say that if someone is to put their name to points 1, 2 and 3 - (the text is read out again) - if you sign such important points, you must be aware that it is, so to speak, a decision for life. It means a decision for life.

One participant believes that the question of how the central office should be created can actually only be dealt with by a group of people who want to work on it; it would not be acceptable for people to join the discussion who had no intention of participating in the work.

Rudolf Steiner: So you think it is a matter of first signing this thing in order to then create the central office from the circle of those who have signed it? Of course, that can be the case too. But it would still have to be a cohesive undertaking, otherwise you create an intermediate period between what one is committed to for life and, isn't it, the actual real work. Of course, those who really work in this way can subscribe to that. But in my opinion, if it is really subscribed to, if it is subscribed to very seriously, it is such a decisive step for life that one cannot help but create this central office from the center.

Emil Bock: We thought that it would not be possible for a central office to present itself. We do not think we have the right to do so.

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps it will not be so difficult, given the way you have come together. You must first recognize each other. My opinion is that you are founding the central office at the same time as you sign. I even see it as a unified act. I think it cannot be that one first gives a formal signature. Only by giving one's signature does one become a co-worker in a very real Zeitströmung, otherwise this signature has no meaning, so that the signing would be identical with the creation of a central office.

Emil Bock: There is the question of how this central office should be created.

Christian Geyer: I don't think it's possible for us to discuss such important matters without these things being prepared in a small group. (Pastor Geyer follows up with the question of whether the work to renew religious life is not possible within the church organization, along the lines of Rittelmeyer's work in Berlin, or whether this ceases to be the case the moment this central office is brought into being.) I believe that this question must be thoroughly discussed in another circle by a small group and only then can it be put forward for general discussion.

Rudolf Steiner: I assumed that something like this had happened because I find in point 2 what concerns the position on church communities. It is stated in point 2 in such a way that I cannot imagine a greater precision: “I declare my willingness to prepare and found free communities by realizing the cult forms and suggestions for preaching and teaching gained from anthroposophical sources of knowledge. I will seek to establish ties within the church only where the purity of the impulse is not endangered by doing so.” — I cannot imagine it more precisely, everything is given in reality; therefore I have assumed that the wording has essentially been discussed in a small circle.

Christian Geyer points out that he has already experienced significant religious movements that have become so strong that the church was faced with the question of either letting them go or absorbing them into its organization. He finds that nothing has yet been said about the relationship between free communities and the church community.

Rudolf Steiner: But actually it has. I think it is clear, because [it says], “I will only seek to establish ties within the church where this does not endanger the purity of the impulse.” So that would be self-contained: if someone in such a free community says that it does not endanger the purity of the impulse, it is possible that he will work in such a community within the church. That is actually contained in the sentence.

A participant: It would therefore be a matter of including in this document a passage that would describe the central leadership in detail.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, you must take it that I do not want to have the slightest influence on what is to be done in the spirit of such a document. But I have read it, and I consider its contents so serious for the one who signs it that nothing but something tremendously serious can follow from it, that an act can follow. I must place that on one side, and in this direction I can only give advice. On the other side I must place something else. If I had time, I would give you a collection of all the things that have come to my attention in the course of the existence of the anthroposophical movement in the form of such documents within this society, where people have set out to do this or that. There is nothing else but such documents lying in my paper collection, and most of them have been forgotten by those who signed them at the time. Of course, these are the most extreme cases, but they represent the other side of the coin. I think that we are now at such a serious point in time that if we even think of going as far as signing such a document, we must also immediately move on to real action. I don't mean that you will form so many churches the day after tomorrow. That is not what I mean, but the actual working towards it, even if it is only possible in a small circle, the actual working towards a specific, very concrete goal. The concrete goal is there, but at the same time the possibility of very serious work must be created, which is not mere association or other work, but which is aware of accomplishing a world-historical deed. That is what I mean.

Emil Bock: That has actually been our intention, and it is actually quite clear that we do want to create the central office we have been talking about. We also discussed it this morning.

Rudolf Steiner: Is the earlier also meant in this sense? I just mean that if you sign such points, then at the same time you create the necessity to have the central office, otherwise you cannot read the individual points. The text refers to the central office; this wording already presupposes the central office.

A participant: May I perhaps draw a parallel? I would like to recall the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. I believe that something similar must happen here. At that time, three personalities took responsibility for bringing such a society into being, and I think that the process here should also be that a number of personalities find the courage to make a start and then say: We want this and that. Who will join us? I believe that a number of people who might naturally emerge from the Stuttgart Circle will find the courage to simply constitute themselves as the Central Council.

Rudolf Steiner: There is, of course, a difference between the Anthroposophical Society and what would have to arise here; it is a significant difference. You see, what is today the Anthroposophical Society used to be within the framework of the Theosophical Society, the great Theosophical Society, and I never treated it any differently than I did later on with the Anthroposophical Society. In such a society complete freedom must prevail; above all, when one is dealing with such a spiritual movement as the Anthroposophical Society, freedom must prevail in such a way that the leaders, above all, can never be enslaved. As soon as a society comes into being, the leaders actually lose their freedom; that is the danger. Therefore, societies like the Anthroposophical Society must actually do everything to ensure that the leaders do not lose their freedom. Of course, for many years I could only achieve this by simply doing as I pleased, which was probably what was intended by the spiritual world. I always took the principle of 'those who go along, go along; those who do not want to go along, do not go along and do not stay'. Everyone joins of their own free will; but those who have something to lead also have their free will. There can be no democracy or anything like that. When the Anthroposophical Society was founded, it was founded only in a somewhat more detailed way on the same basis as within the Theosophical Society, with the three of them in Munich saying: “We three are are here now – Dr. Unger, Dr. Steiner, Mr. Bauer – those who want to go with us to lead an Anthroposophical Society go with us; those who are right with us go with us, those who are not right with us do something else.

If you think about things thoroughly, you will find that there is no other way than this one, everything else leads to the enslavement of the free spiritual life. The moment any kind of agreement becomes necessary, the spiritual life is immediately enslaved. I really recommend that you think about this in this area; you will see that there is no other way than this one. You must not forget that the conditions of a society such as the Anthroposophical Society, which is completely involved in the field of comprehensive spiritual life, are somewhat different from what you want to establish. Therefore, you must consider the matter very carefully. The Anthroposophical Society, insofar as it adheres to me – I myself have preserved my freedom to such an extent that I am not a member of the Anthroposophical Society; there is a very profound reason why I am not a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and I occasionally emphasize this very sharply – that I am not a member of the Anthroposophical Society. So, the Anthroposophical Society, I have always understood it, comes into the world as a new creation, a completely new creation in every respect, as a new creation of the anthroposophical, for example. So within any statutes of the Anthroposophical Society, there could be no question of anything similar to your fourth sentence: “For the present time I recognize the following conditions with regard to scientific training...” So that makes it quite clear that there really are absolute differences. A distinction must be made, and we must first become clear about it. And that in the first point [required]: “I recognize that anthroposophy is the basis for a new worldview in crucial points,” one would not even be allowed to say that if, so to speak, one demanded it from the members of an Anthroposophical Society; it would not even occur to one to demand the anthroposophical worldview from the members. If someone is an atheist out of their own free will and joins the Anthroposophical Society in order to freely engage with what is being done there, then they can certainly do so. In reality, it is perhaps the only way to realize what Anzengruber says: As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist! — That is a famous atheistic oath.

But you have to be clear about the fact that what is [right] in the Anthroposophical Society is not actually possible for you, because you create out of a certain continuity, you recognize certain prerequisites. But I, for example, would not believe that the first point must be adhered to in such a strict way. I would not, for example, agree with the statement: “I recognize that in decisive points, anthroposophy is the new worldview that must be presupposed for a religious renewal today.” From my point of view — but I am only saying what I mean — I would prefer to say, for example: I recognize that for a religious renewal today it is necessary to turn one's attention to those phenomena that claim today, from original sources, to come from the supersensible world, such as Anthroposophy. I would think that the matter would be better that way. But, as I said, I do not want to influence anyone. And I certainly don't want anthroposophy to be represented in the world today by saying that it should be taken up, although I also believe that what I have said is more in the spirit of anthroposophy than if it were made into a kind of dogmatics, even if in a very free sense, which it is not in reality.

These are the things I wanted to say.

Corrected version of the Statement

I declare my determination to work in accordance with the following guiding principles in the efforts towards a comprehensive and far-reaching religious renewal, as initiated by the organizers of the religious teaching course led by Dr. Rudolf Steiner from June 12 to 16, 1921 in Stuttgart.

1. I recognize that today every effort towards religious renewal must go hand in hand with the effort towards a new world view that can claim to come from original sources in the supersensible world, such as anthroposophy.

2. I declare my willingness to prepare and found free communities by realizing the cult forms and suggestions for sermon and teaching that I have gained from anthroposophical sources of knowledge. I will only seek to establish ties within the churches where I am certain that the purity of the impulse will not be endangered.

3. For the sake of unity of action, I undertake not to use any of the cultic forms in any other way or at an earlier time than will be determined by common agreement.

4. In order to become qualified for the responsible priesthood, I am willing to familiarize myself with the spirit of sacramental priestly work through intensive training.

5. I am prepared to do my best to recruit serious, suitable co-workers.

6. I will treat as confidential all material communicated to me orally, in writing or in print, as well as the names of all individuals involved in the movement.

7. Should I fail to fulfill the above obligations, I will renounce the use of any anthroposophically based rituals.

8. I join those personalities who, during the Dornach Course in October 1921, entrusted Lic. Emil Bock with the leadership of of the work, with the proviso that he ensures that the necessary work is carried out in conjunction with Lic. Dr. Rittelmeyer (if the latter agrees) and the personalities who will continue to be co-opted.

The leadership initially has the following tasks:

a. Facilitating the exchange of ideas among all co-workers.

b. The direction of the promotional activity, which for the sake of order will be handled as follows:

The participants of the Dornach Course who could not sign the present declaration in Dornach will be kept in contact through a circular letter organization. Their signatures can be accepted at any time without further ado.

New co-workers must commit to this declaration and be sponsored by a co-worker who has signed up to the Dornach Course.

Every new co-worker should endeavour to attend a three- to four-day conference that will take place at the beginning of January 1922 at a location yet to be determined.

c. The administration of all course transcripts, which are the intellectual property of Dr. Steiner and can only be accessed with his consent, and of other material. Only signatories of this declaration are entitled to purchase the transcripts. Disclosure to those to be recruited is only possible after consultation with the management. In special cases, the management can make the transcripts available to course participants who have not yet signed.

d. The scientific prerequisites will be determined on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, in order to realize the common goal in public, a thorough theological education and an academic final examination are currently required. Non-theologians are encouraged to participate in introductory courses organized by the leadership.

Dear Friends,Yesterday I began to speak about the path that has been sought to arrive at a baptismal ritual, and I introduced it by pointing out that in these rituals there must be a real connection between an insight into the supersensible worlds and what takes place here in the ceremony. We have perhaps seen from this that if we are to speak of a real ceremony, we have to relate to the world somewhat differently than we do today. You will perhaps understand me even better if I say the following.

Today, people strive in the outer world for knowledge of natural laws. They consider this knowledge to be something that they set as a goal and believe that it must be achieved unconditionally as a kind of last resort. Now, when anthroposophical spiritual science is more widely recognized, it will be something very surprising when people find that the natural laws they talk about today only apply — (it is drawn on the board) if this is the earth — a certain distance beyond the earth, but not beyond that. For example, at a certain height, the chemist would try in vain to carry out his laboratory experiments in the usual way, not only because what he imagines analogous to the laws of the earth does not prevail there, but because completely different laws prevail there. While, for example, a theory such as Einstein's theory of relativity, which he invented and which impresses the world, can be called an ingenious theory within the context of earthly existence, beyond earthly existence it is – forgive the trivial expression – simply nonsense, real rolled-out nonsense. And one can certainly not expect someone who has insight into the supersensible world to accept the visualizations that Einstein undertakes, not even if he only executes them as thoughts. I am merely drawing your attention to Einstein's comparison of the clocks, where he says that if a clock were to fly away at the speed of light and then return, it would — as he imagines — be on the same hand position as before. That is complete nonsense. Anyone who thinks realistically knows that such an image cannot be realized. He should just imagine, in line with the higher world, how this clock returns, which he lets walk out at the speed of light. Einstein also imagines that if a person were to move at the speed of light, he would gradually become as thin as a sheet of paper because the movement would also cause deformation. Ingenious thought up, but it is absolute nonsense, because the human organization is not something with which one can mathematize, but something with which one must reckon as a being, and which, by its own nature, precludes one from simply letting it become as thin as a sheet of paper. These are all very unrealistic ideas, and so are the rest; but, as I admit, for the earthly being they are extraordinarily ingenious ideas.

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Now, the one who acts sacramentally must come to ideas that are quite different from those that one can have merely within earthly existence. On the one hand, St. Paul's saying must be taken quite seriously: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” It must be taken so seriously that it is connected with the other saying: “All power is given unto me, not only in the kingdoms of the earth, but also in the kingdoms of heaven.” That is, the actions that are carried out must be able to be imagined in the sense of eternal becoming, not just of earthly becoming. Now, for example, all the manipulations we carry out today with our several seventy elements of chemistry have no significance at all; other ideas that we have to form are of great importance. Without these ideas, one cannot achieve real imaginative knowledge at all, and it can be said that when imaginative knowledge becomes real, one gets such ideas as are needed for sacramentalism.

Now I will describe to you – as I said, all these things are of course in the process of becoming – how the baptismal act can be performed after I have tried to draw your attention to the fact that one must have a different relationship to the substances of the world than the current zeitgeist.

Now, for the baptismal act, one has to prepare three small vessels, which should actually have the following shape when seen from the side (it is drawn on the blackboard), so that they can be arranged on a small table. In these three vessels one has some water, salt and ash. Imagination suggests that one should actually use pure wood ash. The little table on which these vessels stand — I will have to talk about these things later — is best covered with a blue carpet or something similar. The three vessels then stand on a red doily and are arranged as I have drawn here. And now one prepares the thing so that one has water in this vessel here (see plate), salt in this vessel here, ash in this vessel here. I have been able to bring it out so far.

Now, in order to understand this, we must be clear about what real ideas must be associated with salt, water and ash if we are to relate to them through imagination. In the imagination, the idea of restoration connects with the water, the restoration of something or other that has lost its essential being in some ongoing process, whereby the water can thus reveal its mediating presence in the world process. This water is to be taken pure; distilled water is best used. The water dissolves the salt. In every salt process, that is, whenever salt settles somewhere – and we can certainly use the general term salt here for everything that settles in this way – so whenever salt settles, it means that the salt also releases a spiritual-ethereal content into the environment. So the salt that is dissolved in the liquid, in the water, that is, as one knows through the imagination, holds wisdom. The dissolved salt holds wisdom. As the salt coagulates, as the salt settles, the real wisdom evaporates into the environment and the salt becomes empty of wisdom. You have to think of all this as being more connected with the process than with the substance, because it is a process that takes place in the most eminent sense in one's own human organism; and when you think, when you develop thoughts, you are only filled with thoughts by the fact that salt is deposited in you. The denser the development of thoughts, the more salt is deposited.

A tremendous light falls from this truth on the whole physiology of the human body. It may well be that you do not subjectively participate with consciousness in this development of wisdom that is taking place. If, for example, you develop salt in a dream, even in a dull dream that is already perceived by the human consciousness as sleep, then this salt deposit definitely means fulfillment with wisdom, and at this level of knowledge, wisdom can be said to be everything that is the spiritual correlate of the growth phenomena. So when you look at the plant cover of the earth and let the growth of the plants take effect on you, from the point of view of the being of the earth it means a continuous salting or salinization process in the plant and an outpouring of wisdom. While the physical eye perceives the process of growth, the spiritual eye should see in this growth a process whereby the spiritual, as it were, is released, whereas it was formerly bound in the salt.

“You are the salt of the earth.” Such things are already to be found in religious documents, and I would ask you to pay close attention to the fact that any merely abstract explanation of “You are the salt of the earth” does not capture the meaning; originally, it was meant to be quite specific.

So it is a matter of understanding this salting process and now knowing that in the moment when one has salt and dissolves it again, the water substance is permeated by regenerative forces.

On the other hand, consider that which has now become pure ash; it has not emerged from a coagulation process, not from a deposition process, but it has emerged from the fire process; it is the opposite process. What comes from the material side as the material field of activity for the spiritual is also the result of the fire process.

You will understand this best if you imagine that you have some water, add salt on one side and ash on the other. What happens is a process from the extraterrestrial world, whereas our chemical processes only relate to the earthly world. If I add some salt on one side and some ash on the other, I create growth force, that is, active spirit. Through the ash that I let flow in, I add that which must always combine with the dissolution of the salt; this must always combine to give the spirit the possibility of being material.

Now, of course, the whole thing must not be carried out without the human being really making the whole cosmos consciously present within himself. Therefore, the baptismal act begins with a kind of monologue, after the child has first been brought in with the godparents.

Now one must be clear about what takes place in baptism. I have already said that anthroposophical activity can only be one that works and shapes out of the reality of the present. Therefore, when it comes to the act of baptism, we cannot today enter into a dialectical discussion about whether the act of baptism should be performed at the beginning of earthly life or whether it should perhaps only be performed in the course of life when one is conscious. Today we are dealing with the fact that we simply have to place ourselves in what is, and that is that the act of baptism is performed at the beginning of earthly life. Now it is important to always know that when one places oneself in the cosmic process in this way, one is actually not that chaotic whole that one is usually aware of, but rather one stands as the threefold being. This threefold nature is such that the actual thinking tends towards an understanding of what the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is, that the feeling tends towards an understanding of what the Son, the Christ, is, and that the all-willing tends towards an understanding of the Father. One must always feel connected, knowing oneself as a thinking, feeling and willing being through the triad of the soul with the Spirit, with the Son, with the Father. If one pronounces this in the sequence as I have now pronounced it, one is aware that one is pursuing one of the world currents, the current that goes from heaven to earth. If one pronounces it as it was originally pronounced: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, then one places oneself in the world current that goes from the earth upwards.

So first a monologue is spoken:

To you world spirits
My will
My feeling and my thinking,
Through the power of the
All-pervading Water
Through the might of the
All-sustaining Salt
Through the weight of the
All-renewing Ashes
That I may lead
This soul into the community of Christ Jesus.

From this monologue, you can see the meaning that the act of baptism must have when it is performed at the beginning of life on earth, when it is thus aligned with present-day consciousness. The act of baptism must then signify that the person being baptized is accepted into the Christian community and considered a member of the Christian community. It is, so to speak, the vow that the Christian community, which baptizes the child, accepts him and, insofar as this can happen in the sense of Christian development, watches over his Christian development. So that, my dear friends, is what we have to bear in mind when we perform a baptism today. This is its meaning.

After this monologue has been spoken, the officiant of the baptismal ceremony turns to those present who have the child that was brought in before the aforementioned prayer. The officiant now speaks to those present:

Dear baptismal community:

This soul, which has been sent down
from the spiritual community into the earthly community
We are to receive it
and carry it into the
community of Christ Jesus.
It originates in the body
from divine cosmic power
It originates in the soul
from divine words of activity
It shall live in the spiritual sphere
From divine spiritual goal.

Now you also have all this in the baptismal act, in that one first points out what this soul is to the body, to the soul, and how life on earth is to take on a meaning that is given by the last lines:

It shall live the spiritual sphere
From divine spiritual goal.

To this one has just to contribute, about that one has, that one vows to watch.

Now the one who performs the baptismal act will extend his hand to the two godparents standing on his left and right and then speak:

As the guardians

— that is, the godparents —

order from the heart's sacrificial strength

— now the names of the godparents are mentioned. And then one speaks to the godparents:

That you lead this soul into the
community of Christ Jesus
This should tell you in this moment of celebration:
The power of sacrifice of your heart.

You see, the ceremony must be guided entirely by personal considerations. Now the leader of the baptismal ceremony steps in front of the child. He speaks:

Looking up to the spiritual world's powers of light
Feeling myself with the power of the Christian community I call you

— now the name of the person being baptized is pronounced first. Then the index and middle fingers are moistened with the water and spoken:

This is not common water
It is the Spirit's all-pervasive power
I baptize you (say the name of the person being baptized)
with the water of all-pervasive world-birthing

Now the A sign is made on the forehead of the person being baptized with the water. Now dip both fingers into the water again, then into the salt and say:

Let this not be common salt
Let it be the soul's all-preserving power
I baptize you (say the name of the person being baptized)
with the salt of all-preserving world powers.

This sign is made

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Let this not be common ashes
Let it be the goal that renews man
I baptize you (name of the child)
with the ashes of the goals of the world that renew.

And now the sign of the cross is made on the chest of the person being baptized. We will have more to say about these signs. Then one speaks to the child:

So live in the community of Christ Jesus (name of the person being baptized)
Through the power of water
Through the power of salt
Through the ash, power of renewal
In the Father's cosmic substance (the sign of the cross is made over the child).
In the stream of the Christ's word (the sign of the cross is made again).
In the splendor of the Spirit's light (the sign of the cross is made again).

The officiant of the baptismal ceremony now speaks to the community:

I have before and with
your thinking spirits
before and with
your feeling souls
before and with
your human will
this (or these) (name(s) of the person to be baptized)
guided from
spirit-light-worlds
into the community of Christ Jesus
. Guide this soul so that it
may grow in the community of Christ.
Amen.

The baptismal act is at an end. Now the Lord's Prayer can be prayed at the conclusion with the understanding of which we spoke. Then the baptismal act as such, as I can perform it in the present, would be at an end.

You see, when one seriously considers reintroducing ritual and symbolism, what is really at issue is, if I may say so, a fully human – is a word — a whole-human understanding of the world (the word “whole-human” is written on the board), an understanding that lives not only in thinking but also in feeling and willing. Otherwise, what we do in this way remains either a mere sign, which is also abstract, or it is performed as a mere magical act, which also does not really reach the human being. Something must live in the ceremonial act, where man grows together with the originality in the spirit. We must, so to speak, in the moments when we perform ceremonial acts, try to really experience the spirit within the material work in its immediate presence. It is, of course, always there, but it is not experienced when it is merely looked at with the eyes and done with the ordinary human will. But such ceremonial acts are those where it is done out of the spirit, and where the volition itself is sustained in the spirit, where therefore something actually happens that goes beyond earthly activity, and which basically, when it happens, gives meaning to our entire earthly existence, that we may divide our time into ordinary weekday moments and into holiday moments.

In such moments, when we perform things that are a living testimony to the fact that in an earth where man is supposed to be present, through man the divine is also truly present, there is something that must first be felt in the modern consciousness of time. For modern time consciousness tends towards two aberrations: First, the error that I have already characterized from a certain point of view, which we have in today's knowledge, that only recognizes that knowledge that wants to penetrate external nature in an external abstract way. That is the one error. The other error is when we mystically immerse ourselves only in our inner being and only deal with ourselves.

This is at the same time the spiritual battle that Luther fought, on the one hand sensing the devil in that natural scientific aberration, which he felt was approaching, and on the other hand sensing the great, the immense danger that arises when man merely loses himself in his inner being and egoistically cuts himself off from the world. This egotistical shutting out of the world is to be avoided, on the one hand, by not carrying out spiritual acts within oneself alone, but in such a way that one has contact with the outer world; and, on the other hand, overcome what is merely abstract and unmanageable, by not merely doing things that have such an abstract and unmanageable character, but doing things that are done out of the spirit itself.

Only when we again come to a proper concept of sacramentalism will we have overcome, on the one hand, the dangers of science and, on the other, the dangers of mysticism. Luther fought against the enemies of man, of whom he had an inward fear and who could approach him, on the one hand, as the emerging natural science and, on the other, as its necessary correlate, abstract mysticism within man, which is at the same time an egoistic mysticism. Anthroposophy must overcome both obstacles. It does this by not shying away from completely immersing itself in science, that is, by going through what is experienced in natural research and knowledge, so that the human being, so to speak, plunges into this abyss, in which, if he remains in it, he would absolutely lose himself. And on the other hand, anthroposophy does not shy away from the mystical abyss, which one must also get to know; one must really be able to experience mysticism, but one must also be able to overcome it. One will not have to fall into this abyss, into the abyss of egoism. Man can lose himself in egoism just as he can lose himself in nullity on the other side.

To stop at natural science means to be tempted by all the luciferic powers as a human being, even if one also wants to come to a spiritual one. To stop at mysticism means to be tempted by all the ahrimanic powers as a human being. One simply has to know this. It must be clearly understood that it is through the power of Christ that we can overcome natural science and mysticism. We must not be afraid to experience these two things, for these enemies of humanity are only dangerous when they rule in us unconsciously. They lose their power over man only when he consciously elevates them to full consciousness. I would particularly like to place this sentence in your hearts, my dear friends: that for our time consciousness, the only thing that can apply is what I tried to present scenically at the end of the final scene of my first mystery drama, “The Portal of Initiation”, that only by emerging into consciousness can the real enemies of humanity be overcome. So, in answer to Luther's soul-struggle, Anthroposophy simply says that one has to oppose the Luciferic power, one has to oppose the Ahrimanic power, and one has to overcome them both through the power of Christ; one has not to retreat from them, but one has to overcome them. One simply has to learn what it means when, on the one hand, the luciferic power says: you, follow me out into the vastness, where you, with your abstract knowledge, measure nature in all its vastness — then one has to have the answer: “I can do that, I can measure the vastness of nature in all its infinities with my intellect, but when I measure these infinities with my intellect, I have to leave love at the threshold. Love must then be left behind at the threshold. But if I leave love behind at the threshold, then the power of Christ does not remain with me in the expanses, but the luciferic forces of the world draw near to me in the expanses. And on the other hand, when I descend into my own inner being, I must know that the Ahrimanic power lurks at the threshold. I must know that when I descend into this interior, at the threshold the Ahrimanic forces present me with the illusion that everything I can strive for spiritually lies in my ego. And I must know how to say: If, in descending into this inner being, I do not have the strength to overcome egoism, if I develop an egoistic mysticism, then I can never find in its true form, in the form of Christ, that which prevails in myself.

The human being must find these two strengths, otherwise he is either tempted, through what has been brought forth by modern civilization, to dissolve as a soul in an infinite cosmic unconsciousness in space, or to contract into himself in an intense egoism and lose the I in his inner being. [Man must find both these strengths so that] his ego does not float through the cosmos like a hermit, but is connected with the power of Christ.

All these, my dear friends, are sentiments that must permeate us if the ceremony is to have meaning, and we will be able to find this meaning for the ceremony more and more truly ourselves if we know how to enter into what surrounds us in a deeper way. We must learn to combine the gospel, the teaching, the message with the ceremony. But to do that, we must first come to an understanding of the gospels; we must first learn to read them.

You see, it is not so easy to read the Testament at all. The strangest conflicts arise when something like this is not understood in the right light. Because it touches on a question that was asked during our meeting here, I would like to point to a certain experience that I once had with regard to the content of this question.

Someone had heard — someone who actually had the good will, the good eye to understand what comes from anthroposophical spiritual science —, he had heard or even read in a cycle that I said that both the Old and the New Testament should actually be taken quite literally. So basically, literal readings are not really wrong. He paid little attention to the fact that preparation is needed to understand the words [of the Old and New Testaments] in order to be able to read them, and so he simply said from his abstraction: “But man will go astray if you simply tell today's man that the Gospels are to be understood literally, and then modern man – and he identified himself with a modern man – reads in the Bible: ”And it And it came to pass, that they fled from before the people of Israel, and were at the descent of Beth-horon, and the Lord rained upon them great stones from heaven, even unto Azekah, and they died; and there were those that died by the hailstones, and they were more in number than those that fell by the sword of the children of Israel, the people of Joshua. And Joshua spoke to the Lord of Hosts at the time when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the eyes of the children of Israel, and he spoke as he did so that Israel's eyes might see: Sun at Gibeon, stand still, and Moon in the valley of Ajalon! And the sun stood still at Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, until the people had avenged themselves of their enemies.” — And now comes the most important sentence -: ”Is this not written in the book of those who see God? And the sun stood still in the midst of heaven at Gibeon, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. Never before has there been such a day for the people of the earth, when the Lord of Hosts allowed such a thing to happen at the voice of a single man; but that became the sign that the Lord was there with the people of Israel."

This passage must be read first. You will see how a true reading of the passage actually opens up the possibility of understanding the matter. Now this person said to me: If I read that, then of course it can only be meant symbolically; and I am disappointed in you, because it seems to me that you make judgments that are impossible to record in detail, as if you wanted to save the Bible by saying something like: the Bible must be taken literally. —

In this context, I have to say that it is of course not possible for me to give you a full explanation of this passage now. It requires a little more, a lot more preparation. But, as I said, we want to come back to this passage in the next few days because a question along these lines has been raised. But what I want to say now is that it is necessary to be able to read the Gospels. Now it is not possible to read the Gospels correctly without placing them in the context in which they were spoken. Today, my dear friends, much of what is written in the Gospels is simply taken in such a way that sentences are omitted that are important in the very least sense for understanding. For example, if something like this is written somewhere in the Gospels: And when the sun had set, Christ Jesus healed the sick here and there - today this is naturally understood as if a modern person were to say: When the sun had set, he said this or that. But nothing is unnecessary in the Gospels. If it were unnecessary, “when the sun had set,” then it would not be there. And it means that everything that is now being told is being accomplished by Christ Jesus after the sun has set; that means that if the sun were still there, it would be an obstacle to what is to be accomplished. — So the understanding of the Gospels must be drawn from what went into the writing of the Gospels. But first of all it is necessary to be clear about one thing, which I now want to discuss from a certain point of view.

We have received three religious festivals for the year from the most diverse Christian confessions; and before I want to continue saying anything else about rituals and ceremonies, I would like to talk about the festivals, because otherwise we will not be able to understand each other.

First of all, we have Christmas, we have Easter, and we have Pentecost. Christmas has been transferred from an old consciousness to the time when the sun draws its strength most powerfully from the earth, when the earth, with all its activity, and thus also with what it can be for man, is most dependent on itself. At Christmas time, we are dealing with the earth that is abandoned to itself, and in the face of this, human beings must remember to awaken in their souls that which can come to them from the earth that is abandoned to itself. Thus we have fixed the Christmas festival quite according to earthly conditions. Even in its fixing lies the fact that the human being who experiences the Christmas season in the right way, I would like to say, feels connected in warm fervor with that which the earth can give out of its own strength.

My dear friends, if you have lived in the countryside, you will have experienced how, in the fall, farmers dig large pits to a certain depth in the ground; they put their potatoes in them, and then they cover them up. These potatoes are kept in the right way by the warmth stored in the depths of the earth, so that they do not freeze. Why don't they freeze? Because the earth physically stores the warmth of the summer sun in its womb during the winter season. And if we were to observe everything that the earth stores from the summer season, not only in terms of warmth, but also in terms of light, mineral chemistry and life, then, my dear friends, we would be connected to the earth differently in our consciousness. Then, especially in the depths of winter, at the winter solstice, one would have to say to the earth: In you, everything that draws towards the earth in summer is revealed to me, in the warmth of the worlds, in the light of the worlds, in all that lives in the vastness of the world in terms of measure, number and weight, in all that lives in the vastness of the world in terms of life force. All of this is present in earthly existence during the winter season, and most strongly during the winter solstice. It is the inner substantiality of the earth to which we appeal when we set the Christmas festival in the season in which the sun most strongly withdraws its power from the earth. In a sense, we turn completely to the center of the earth by setting the Christmas season; in a sense, we are alone with the earth and its substantial existence; we are expelled from our heavenly context, but we see that we have given from this loneliness of the earth into the earth itself when we set the Christmas season on the calendar.

We then live our way out of this Christmas season, approaching Easter through various intermediate stages, which we will also discuss. And so, out of an ancient awareness that Easter was not determined according to earthly conditions, man is meant to turn outwards into the cosmos at Easter time. Man does not set the Easter season according to the substantial transformations of the earth; man sets it according to heavenly relationships, according to the relationships that exist between solar and lunar processes. Easter is on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. Why is Easter on the first Sunday after the spring full moon? For the reason that on Sunday we delve into that which is eternal, but because we want to celebrate this eternal in the sense of connecting our consciousness with the realm of the heavens, which is accessible from the outside. When the full moon appears, it radiates the light of the sun back to us with its full power. We thereby attune ourselves, not only to the mechanical movements of the outer universe, but we attune ourselves to the intensity of the universe. We attune ourselves to the light, but it is not the usual moonlight that reflects back to us, it is the moonlight that appears to us when the sun begins to send its power down to the earth ever stronger and stronger. There we are on earth, there we are not abandoned to the heavens and have to turn to earth, there we are as men so arranged in the cosmos that the light of the world stops in us, which does not go to the interior of the earth, which now stops in us men, and we turn to that what stops there, what is reflected back into us men. What is reflected back at the first full moon of spring is exactly the same power that is reflected back from the full moon itself at this time; it is the power of the sun that is held back. We set the date of Easter according to our connection with heaven. In a certain sense, we relate to earth and heaven in a different way at Easter than at Christmas, and it is a significant, profound immersion in the course of time when one becomes aware of what it means to set Christmas as an earthly festival and to set Easter as a heavenly festival.

Now, my dear friends, we do not yet penetrate this with spiritual consciousness, but we move within what lies within the Christmas and Easter seasons, basically at first in the sensual manifestation of the eternal world activity. For us human beings, we participate in this sensual world activity through warmth on the one hand and through light on the other; we do not go further. We come, by remaining in the sensual, to the point that is announced [in the Bible] with the words: You, the Lord of Hosts, Lord of the hosts localized in the stars, Lord of the stars, You have ordered everything according to measure, number and weight. - We can inwardly experience warmth, we can outwardly experience warmth, that is, warmth can be given to us in sensual observation. We can inwardly experience light, we can outwardly experience light, that is to say, light can be given to us in sensory perception. But that which we experience as measure, number and weight, that is missing, so that we are not aware that we know absolutely nothing about our own center of gravity, although we use it when walking and standing, that we know nothing about our equilibrium, although we live through it constantly, that we know nothing about our weight. We are so physically arranged that we know nothing of our weight, and we could not live on earth if we knew our weight, because we could only know of our weight through our brain making this weight conscious in us. If the brain, with its entire weight – that is about 1300 grams – were to rest on the blood vessels that are located under the brain in our head, my dear friends, these blood vessels would be crushed every moment. We do not live with the absolute weight of the brain, we live within this weight in such a way that the brain fluid constantly penetrates up and down through the arachnoid space and the spinal canal, and the brain floats in the brain fluid. You know that according to Archimedes' law, every floating body loses as much of its weight as the weight of the displaced water. Our brain displaces so much water that it weighs about 1200 to 1300 grams; but that is almost as much as the brain weight less 20 grams, so that the brain presses only with 20 grams instead of with 1300 grams on its base. But that is what we experience. In this upward striving, we experience ourselves.

This is something that can initially only be observed from the outside, something that is not fully appreciated by human beings in its inner significance. We do not experience what the ordering of the world is in terms of the divine principle, the order of measure, number and weight; but we have to change our inner being by experiencing the time [from Christmas to Easter] and to live spiritually into what changes outwardly in a sensory way. We must add to this an understanding of that which can only be experienced inwardly, an understanding of that which can only be present in our consciousness if we experience it inwardly. We must proceed to make arrangements that are now based neither on earthly observations nor on heavenly observations; we must proceed in such a way that we then only say: Whitsun falls so many days after Easter. So many days, that is, we no longer rely on anything that can be observed externally; we only set [the Pentecost] according to an internal process and thus step out of the sensual by developing from Easter to Pentecost.

Take what I have suggested in the abstract, my dear friends, as a fully human understanding – as I said, “fully human” written as one word: ganzmenschlich —, take this as a fully human understanding, for then it does not just take hold of thinking, but also of feeling and willing, and the powers of understanding are absorbed in feeling and willing. If you imbibe what I have said inwardly in relation to thinking alone, you will indeed have something, but it will be something through which the fruit of Christ will only sprout thirtyfold in the soul. If it penetrates to your feeling, you will have something through which the fruit of Christ will bear fruit sixtyfold in you. But if you permeate thinking, feeling and willing, then the Christ-fruit will bear a hundredfold fruit in you. Take this in with the whole human understanding, not with two-thirds thinking and feeling, not with one-third mere thinking, but take it in with the whole human understanding, then you will find the mood that must live in the Christian by living from Christmas to Pentecost. He then lives the year with, he lives it in a concrete way, and he is ready to live into the Johanni mood, which he can only experience if he does not become intoxicated by the ever stronger and stronger growing sun. If he becomes intoxicated, that is, if he does not live towards the summer solstice in such a way that he lives through it with all his powers, then he undergoes a certain world fainting; he fades, so to speak, powerlessly in the summer warmth and sunlight. But if he holds together through what he has developed from Easter to Pentecost, he remains aware of what has been placed in his soul by divine world powers, and he experiences what is there at the summer solstice, at the time of St. John, with the full power of his inner being, insofar as this full power of his inner being is meant to be there.

And then he can go on living, in that what he has, as it were, transplanted into himself as a human being, can mature more and more within him, so that his inner being ripens towards the Christmas season to such an extent that he is strong enough to draw from the earth what the earth itself can give him.

In this way, an understanding of the year is awakened in our soul. And it is out of such an understanding that the Gospels are written, and it is out of such an understanding that we must know how to distribute their content throughout the year. If we thus include the Gospels as messages in our religious services, they must be included in such a way that they are included out of our inner understanding. And if we want to advance to that which enables us to really place ourselves in all acts of consecration, then we must find the breviary. But we can never find this breviary if we do not know how to attach ourselves to that which can be achieved in such an understanding of the year, in a cosmic, whole-human understanding. Therefore, I will have to give you the principle of the secret of building up a breviary. This consists in the fact that we first have a prayer for each day, a prayer that is inwardly meditative in character, but which has something cognitive for each day of the week, that we are able to direct this prayer in four parts through the month to the east, west, south and north, and that we are able to carry it through the twelve months of the year, so that a real annual cycle emerges from it. A breviary must therefore be constructed in such a way that inner experiences are rhythmically repeated through the breviary, which will be structured like the seven days of the week, the four weeks of the month and the twelve months of the year. We will see how a breviary should be structured, beginning with that which is connected to the course of the year through the twelve, that which relates to space through the four, and that which relates to the day through its essential content. The content of the day will be the content, the guiding force will be that which relates to the weeks, and the mood will be that which relates to the twelve months of the year. No breviary has ever been different, and if you, my dear friends, have the will to move on to such things, then you must also be prepared to acquire an understanding of these things.

I had to assume that this would follow from the baptismal ritual before we move on to further discussions of rituals.

My dear friends! Today I would like to say a few more words in continuation of what was said yesterday and the days before, and then I would ask you to use the next discussion hour in such a way that all the individual questions that are on your minds are actually put forward, so that we can then turn the hour into a real discussion. Today I would like to do it differently for the reason that what I said yesterday makes it absolutely necessary to look at the whole thing from the other side as well, namely to also consider the subjective process of redemption. We have, so to speak, set out what belongs to the act of redemption outside of man and must now say something about the other part of the question, about how redemption looks in the Lutheran sense, in the anthroposophical sense and so on, and that in relation to redemption, insofar as it is something subjective.

The first question that arises, my dear friends, is what are we to be redeemed from, what do we need to be redeemed from, what is it about human beings that is in need of redemption? I must confess that I have actually found the most inaccurate ideas about this question in the sphere of Christianity, and this is because people today do not like to go into things in detail and ask questions quite seriously. You know, of course, that the act of redemption is actually something outside the course of the ordinary external development of the world. This can already be seen from all that I said yesterday. Therefore, the relationship between the act of redemption and the human being must also be something that leads the human being out of his subjectivity. Now, the concept of original sin already suggests something that leads out of the human being's subjectivity, because essentially it is about redemption from original sin. Of course, this raises the big question: what is original sin? Now, however, one finds that in many conceptions of original sin there is actually, one can say, in the truest sense of the word, blasphemy. For if one is convinced that everything that works and lives within creation owes its origin to the divine Creator, then one must ascribe to God the presence of a sin that is, as it were, injected into the course of the world. Such such ascribing of sin to God is in fact nothing less than blasphemy, and there is no way to maintain original sin on the one hand and on the other hand to speak of a God who, as the unified Creator, underlies everything. If you want to have any chance of arriving at a concept in this area that does not involve blasphemy, then you have to be able to hold on to the tri-personality of God.

The tri-personality of God does not at all imply a transition from monotheism to a polytheism, to a tri-theism, but it is absolutely, if it is understood, properly compatible with a thoroughly monotheistic world view. But the question arises: by what subjective power do we humans come to a sense of the deity? It may be said that within the mystery, the Christian mystery and the mystery outside of Christianity, no other view of how to reach God has ever been accepted than that God lives in love. And it is actually a matter of clear insight, in the sense in which I expressed it this morning, of complete human insight into the sentence that God lives in love. This sentence can only be understood if we ask ourselves: what other paths could there be to God than the one that, if I may put it this way, is paved with love? What other paths to God could there be, or rather, in what imaginations could we see God except in the imagination of love?

There are two other ways to approach God through inner experience, besides love. There are two other possibilities, namely the way of wisdom and the way of power. And from there one could have the three judgments: God lives in wisdom, God lives in love, God lives in power. After all, something like this has emerged from certain confessional backgrounds, which already lack the full human clarity in this area: all differentiations have been swept aside, so to speak, and God is worshipped or prayed to as the Almighty, the All-loving, the All-knowing. It is impossible to arrive at a pure and correct relationship between human beings and humanity and God for our time after the Mystery of Golgotha if one starts from the sentence: God is attainable through wisdom. It was one of the most profound sentences that has been spoken through the Gospel: God is not attained through wisdom. Of course, God lives in wisdom, but this must not be revealed to humanity in such a way that humanity in this day and age simply wants to find God through wisdom. For if we imagine the wise God, then, if we attach any real, concrete value to the idea, we must imagine this wisdom of God, which then works in the world, as surpassing all human wisdom; and then we immediately come to find no bridge to God by the way of wisdom. We lack the bridge if we want to seek God on the path of wisdom, because God's wisdom must infinitely outshine all human wisdom and we could never enter into the weaving and essence of God if we wanted to build the bridge with human wisdom.

We will always find an abyss, my dear friends, if we want to seek God on the path of wisdom, the abyss at which we must absolutely stop. It is not the case that we cannot regard our human wisdom as a gift from God, it is. But we must not seek God on the path of wisdom, nor must we seek God on the path of power. For if we were to seek God by the way of might, the might of God would tower so high above all in the one seeking Him that all individual freedom would be excluded. And so it would be impossible for any freedom of the human being to develop on this earth if we were to seek God only by the way of that which is truly involved in Him as Almighty.

The only way that truly leads to God, that connects the creature with the Creator, is the way of love, the love that man freely gives to God, which is nothing other than the universal human understanding of the love that God gives to man. This is the one thing that really does not lead us to an abyss, but rather leads us to finding a way to God, so that we do not have to look for some image when it is said that God lives in love, but that we have to imagine this as a reality before our soul. I am not speaking of something individual, my dear friends, but of something that, as I said, is the mystery wisdom of all times, whether it is brought out from the beginning of all knowledge or not, that is not important at this moment. What is important is that this knowledge: God is love – or: God lives in love – is the common mystery wisdom of all times.

Now, when we understand this in a living way, it has a certain consequence that we can visualize when we look at the overall development of man on earth. We live in a certain state of consciousness in our time. You already know from the lectures of the past few days that this state of consciousness has not always been there in the development of mankind, but that the present state was preceded by a much duller, dream-like state, which was, however, brightened up so that at that time man could perceive the divine in images which were like images in a dream, and that the actual dream-like awareness of God in all of nature has ceased around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so that a new approach, a new way of finding the path to the divine has become necessary. We must therefore clearly distinguish the path that the human race has taken up to the proximity of the Mystery of Golgotha, from generation to generation, where consciousness was by no means awakened in the same way as it is today. Of course, for external activities it was similar to our present state of consciousness, but [people were] always able to put themselves, as it were, into states that lie between waking and sleeping and that led them to the divine through direct atavistic, imaginative contemplation, through contemplation of the divine in images. The oldest documents speak a great deal about this way of approaching the divine; that was the way, my dear friends, to approach the divine through wisdom, through human wisdom.

Why was it possible in those days to approach the divine through human wisdom? Yes, you see, the state of consciousness was subdued; as a result, man was protected from experiencing in the fullest sense, with the intensity that exists today, those qualities in his organization that are inherited qualities, that is, from experiencing everything that comes into the individual human being through inheritance. Of course, even in ancient times people attached importance to their inherited characteristics, to racial characteristics, to consanguinity and similar things, but this was always counterbalanced by the assumption of a spiritual element in these inherited characteristics. One has to imagine that, by entering the earth, man has come into such a community with the physical process of development that he had to absorb inheritance into himself, so that something is actually inherited through the blood. But man had not yet reached the stage of consciousness where he could fully live by these inherited qualities. In fact, man experienced the inherited qualities of original sin within himself when he was dreaming. These were the impulses that constantly pushed him away from the divine, constantly urging him to sink below the level of his humanity. But he had, as it were, the counterweight in the atavistic clairvoyance, so that he did not completely merge within this hereditary current. That he entered into this hereditary current with full consciousness only became clearly established around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; there man enters into this hereditary current more deeply and more intensely. Thus one can say: In the course of his evolution, man was led down to the experience of original sin, and he became in need of redemption from this inherited evil; but he only needed this redemption from the moment when the Mystery of Golgotha approached in the evolution of mankind. When man — if I may use the biblical image — entered the earthly element on earth through Adam's [fall into sin], he was lowered into the region of inherited qualities, but his consciousness was not yet so far advanced that he could be carried away by all that comes from inherited qualities. Original sin also developed, and so did being pushed into the inherited qualities. This is something that is given to the whole human race. It is something that lives in evolution as an impulse for the whole human race. This had to be counteracted by another impulse, which can now lift human consciousness up again, out of the sphere of inherited traits. This impulse was to be given by the Christ impulse. In a spiritual-soul way, man was to become acquainted with everything that he had previously experienced only in the blood, in the succession of generations, but which had become so that he was no longer allowed to experience it only in the blood.

Thus, in ancient times, mankind was allowed to seek the way to God through wisdom, and that is through human wisdom, which had not yet been fully entangled in original sin. This was corrupted in the last phases of paganism, and it was also corrupted in the last phases of Judaism; it is just that actually the historical records report only on these last phases and not on what preceded them.

What is it, then, that actually carries a person down into the region of inherited qualities within the earthly world? Let us ask what it is. We come across concepts that, I would say, are quite embarrassing for today's earthman, because one comes to speak about an area that today's man either very easily helps himself with all sorts of tirades, or or that he understands it in the sense in which it has become customary in recent times — as it can only be understood by anthroposophy as the culmination of the recognition of sin — in the psychoanalytical sense. We come to an area where the lowest phase of love life must be touched upon — only with regard to world orientation the lowest — that is, sexual love life. From the same source that a person is born human, from the same source arose what a person experienced in ancient wisdom. Only in this ancient wisdom, I would say, was the human being not fully awakened to life in the impulses of inheritance. Man is fully awakened here on earth through love, first of all as sexual love, and as a continuation of sexual love through child love and parental love, which, as long as they are bound by blood, always have something that pushes man deeper down than he should actually be in the world according to the original divine intention.

And so it becomes necessary, starting from love itself, to sanctify this love by replacing the blood ancestor, the blood-ancestral rule, with the ancestor to whom one professes allegiance, not because of inherited qualities but because of one's own qualities, which one can develop as a human being beyond inherited qualities, or which can be developed in a person beyond inherited qualities. To profess such an ancestor means to include in one's consciousness, in addition to blood relationship, the relationship that arises from free choice, from free decision, that is, to add to blood relationship the elective affinity with Christ, with the ancestor who appears as the ancestor of love, spiritualized love, which now has nothing to do with blood, and which can therefore take hold of the whole human race because it arises from free choice, because it is a choice affinity. Now arose the idea of seeking the inner impulses for freely choosing a being, that is, of being educated in the course of one's individual life in such a way that this choice is a free one, but that one then professes this ancestor, chosen in free election, just as one used to profess the God of Abraham through blood relationship. After all, all ancient religions are based on direct blood relationships. That which was lived in the polytheism of later times was nothing more than a transformation of the service to the ancestors, that is, the kinship felt with the ancestral god as the blood relative.

Now came the great realization that what had previously lived on earth only in the blood, what was somehow connected with the blood, had been handed over to the earthly life of the spirit and soul. Who handed it over? He who lives in the blood relationship and who sent the old wisdom out of the blood relationship into human consciousness. Who was it? It was the Father-God. It had to be recognized that the Father-God lives in such a way that human beings could remain human in a certain sense, right up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then he had to make a decision – and human consciousness is only possible because it understands something like this, because it moves beyond everything earthly not only to a supermundane experience, but to an [understanding of the] supermundane decision – to give up the one who was always connected with him, to give the son to the earth, to let him go through an event, as a result of which the son was no longer united with the father as he had been before, but where a different relationship between the son and the father had come about through the relationship of the son to humanity.

It is extremely difficult to put these things into words, but I will try to put it into words as clearly as possible, as clearly as I can.

We are referred back to the ancient recognition of the Father-God, who, subconsciously, passed through the generations with the blood, who enclosed the Son within himself, who, with wisdom, gave people the experience of love, and we are also referred to the ancient sacrificial service.

You see, my dear friends, in the later corrupted times of the Gentiles and also in the later corrupted times of the Jews, people did not seek the essence of the sacrifice in what the sacrifice actually is. Let us take the characteristic sacrifice, the animal blood sacrifice. What is its essential nature? That the animal sacrifice was performed did not alone constitute the essence of the sacrifice, but rather that something that belonged to someone or to a community was given up, and in such a way that this individual or this community no longer had the possession. That is an essential part of the sacrifice. The further back we go in the evolution of time, the more we find that this concept is inseparable from the concept of sacrifice: the giving up of something one possesses. Animal sacrifice only became such because the animal was given to the fire; in older times, all animal sacrifices were carried out on living animals. When the sacrifice was made on the living animal, the life also perishes; something living is sacrificed. It was therefore definitely intended that through the sacrifice one should redeem and free oneself from a possession that one had, a possession which, if understood in the usual egoistic sense, consisted in something that benefited one, in something that one had inherited. If you understand it in a spiritual sense, then the possession was something that brought you down below humanity, something that you only had through blood. This was also to be given up again in the blood sacrifice, insofar as it was to be taken away from people.

But one could only think in this way as long as one was allowed to believe that the innocent degree of consciousness, which does not reach down into original sin, is maintained, even when going through the moment when the blood fire, because the merging of the blood in the fire is, after all, the opposite act of what happens to the blood when it enters and pulses in the human organism, and what is precisely the carrier of original sin. But in order that what lies in the blood in the activity of the Father-God might be taken away for the whole human race in a uniform manner, the event of Golgotha had to be given to mankind through the sacrifice of the Son, so that henceforth the Son does not live in the succession of births as he formerly lived with the Father, but that he lives in that in which human consciousness immerses itself without falling into the powers that go through the succession of births, and that looks to him who has gone through death on Calvary. This victory over death and the feeling of what can be felt in this context, pulls one out of the context of being placed into original sin, as people said in ancient Christianity, in mystery Christianity. The elective affinity with Christ pulls one out of the original sin of blood relationship. You may sense your relationship to the event of Golgotha in a shadowy way, then this sense of yours brings about nothing but at most again wisdom, which was also there before the event of Golgotha, but you can also sense your connection with the Christ so strongly, you can strengthen your relationship to the Christ so much that you love him as you loved out of the blood. If you can do that, then your feeling of love for Christ works in you in the opposite way to how original sin worked in you. Then you heal the original sin in you. And then the Father God, the underlying of the world as the one aspect, the one person of the Godhead, the one mask or form of the Godhead, but which is connected to the other mask, the other form, the other person of the Godhead, to the person of the Son of God.

But in the succession of time, especially when we think of the time that lies behind the mystery of Calvary in the gray time of the origin of mankind, we think of the God who works through the blood and through the succession of generations. And we think of God the Father, who sacrificed his Son, to whom love – which, as we have said, is the only real way to God for man – to whom love in the spiritual and soul life in man can be kindled so much can be so strengthened when he contemplates the full tragedy, the full horror of the Mystery of Golgotha; and when this love becomes so strong, then there is indeed in man a power that counteracts original sin. This then asserts itself from the body, in the effect of the blood in the original sin, in the inherited qualities, but we do not then merge into these inherited qualities; we rise with the feeling and willing gaze that we direct to Golgotha, above life in the original sin in consciousness itself and thereby bring about such a strong power in consciousness that it counteracts original sin. There is no other way to counteract original sin than to look at the Mystery of Golgotha. My dear friends, there is no self-redemption to counteract this original sin, there is only the redemption through Christ, the redemption through the vision of Christ passing through the Mystery of Golgotha. And by developing this feeling towards Christ, which consists of nothing but love, we may now look up to the God of might, to the Father-God, who underlies the creative activity in the blood and who allowed this might of his to pass over into the working of the Son. So that we can say: We do not need to look to the omnipotence of God, as we stand today in the development of the times; we leave that beyond love; it is in God, but we do not find the way to God if we go this way of power.

The last emanation of the principle of original sin, my dear friends, is human knowledge that relies entirely on inherited characteristics. In the moment when – as a final phase – that which emerges from the impulses that lie in the blood flowing through the generations merges into knowledge, it becomes intellectualistic knowledge, it becomes the knowledge of modern natural science. It is the last phase of the original human sin; it is the spirit of antiquity transferred into the abstract; it is that which requires healing; it is that which makes it necessary for man now no longer to believe that he comes to God through the spirit alone, as it was possible in ancient times, when the divine was attained through wisdom. What is needed is the realization that man cannot attain the divine through wisdom alone, but that this path of wisdom must be sanctified. This is what has now come through the consequence of the event of Golgotha through the experience of knowledge in the power of the Holy Spirit. We have the third form of the Godhead. We have to look at the unified God in three forms. We now know that we may not behold the God of might without the mediation of the Christ in love, by reflecting back to the God of might what is given to us in the Christ, to whom we cleave through true love, and we also know that we may not receive any wisdom without sanctifying it, healing it through the Spirit sent to humanity through Christ. We must lift up human wisdom by the power of Christ, by the power that we have within us when we contemplate the event of Golgotha; we must regard it as sick and heal it by letting that supersensible permeate it, which can come to us and which is meant by permeation, by sanctification through Christ.

So, my dear friends, there can be no other redemption from original sin than that through Christ Jesus; the other sins are consequential sins. Individual sins are committed by man because he can be weak through original sin, can be inclined to sin. These individual sins find their atonement in what must be achieved through self-redemption; they must be atoned for through self-redemption in the course of earthly or supermundane life. But that which is the original sin, the mother of all other sins, that could only be taken out of the human race through the act of redemption by Christ. And the moment someone, through something like – call it anthroposophy, call it Christianity, call it religion, it does not matter – the moment someone comes to a true realization of these things, there can be no doubt about it. And if there is still doubt, it stems from the inability to put it into words. For in itself there must be something directly convincing, something freely convincing in what leads to the historical Christ in love and to His deed, to the event of Golgotha.

Not that which lives in Harnack's 'Essence of Christianity' (to give a specific example), can be a path that leads to Christ; the path can actually only lead away from Christ if one has the Christ merely as [the proclaimer] of the doctrine of the Father-God, where the main thing lies in the teaching. No, the path to the Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha, does not lie in a teaching, it lies in freely developing, freely flowing love. Only through this is the path to the Christ attainable. And when this freely flowing love is present, our wisdom will also take up within itself the Spirit, which is the healing, the Holy Spirit. This is the same Word, but it means at the same time that no other human relationship can redeem man than the relationship to the historical Christ, to the one who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. There is no other human relationship that can take away original sin from a person than the relationship to the historical Christ, who went through the mystery of Golgotha. The wisdom that only reveals itself as the last descendant of original sin says, with Harnack: “We don't want to talk about what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, after all, no eye has seen it; in any case, however it may have happened with the resurrection, the belief in resurrection, that is, the Easter belief, emerged from it. It is not Christian to speak in this way. And once, in an association called the Giordano Bruno Association (it was not the Giordano Bruno League), I explained how someone who speaks in the spirit of Harnack has no right to call himself a Christian, especially not in the sense of the newest spiritual consciousness, I pointed out the passage where Harnack says in his “Essence of Christianity” that what matters is not the factuality of the resurrection but the belief in the resurrection. Then the chairman, who was a well-informed man and who felt he was a well-informed Christian, told me that it was nowhere in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity,” that he had not read it in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity”; and if it were in there, it would not be Protestant, it would be pagan-Catholic, because it simply resembled the statement – not me saying this, but him saying this – that was made by the Catholic side about the origin of the Holy Robe of Trier; there it also did not depend on where it actually came from, it depended on the faith that one associates with the Holy Robe of Trier; but that is not Protestant, that is pagan-Catholic. He had not found this in Harnack's Essence of Christianity, he said.

I told him that I did not have the book with me and that I would send him the page number tomorrow. But at the same time I saw from this how such ideas are received today and in what a trivial sense one takes such things seriously and lives into them. One does not feel at all that the literary products that appear in the theological field are no longer Christian at all, and that the Overbeck, who made a great impression on Nietzsche in Basel, was quite right in all that he wrote about modern theology [in his book] “On the Christianity of Our Present-Day Theology”, in which he had actually already provided proof in the 1870s that modern theology, whatever it may be, is no longer a product of Christianity. And Harnack's 'Essence of Christianity' is the least of all that has something to do with Christianity. If you replace the name Christ with the name Yahweh, the Father-God, wherever Harnack uses the name Christ, you are justified in saying that the person who wrote this book no longer knows the real relationship that the Christian must have with his Christ.

I do not believe, my dear friends, that we can feel the full seriousness of what needs to be done to renew Christian religious life if we do not feel how far removed from Christianity those are who often think they can uphold Christianity before the world today by sacrificing everything in this great apologetic process that theology undertakes before the world, ultimately even their relationship to Christ himself. One cannot imagine anything more un-Christian than Harnack's principle that the gospel does not belong to the Son, but only to the Father, and that the gospel is not a message from the Son, but only the message of the Son from the Father. Someone might confess something like this today under the pressure of modern materialism, but they would have to have the honesty to then stop calling themselves Christian.

There is no other way than to present these things in all their complexity and thereby rise to the realization: redemption from original sin means having such a relationship with the historical Christ, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, that this relationship pulses through our veins in a spiritual-soul way just as truly as blood pulses through our veins in a physical way. That is the power, that is the strength that can be called the power and the strength of faith. One should not seek an abstract concept for faith, but this strength, this power for faith. To believe means to find in one's soul such strength and such power for the Christ that this soul power, this soul strength is as great as that which the blood ties can achieve in us. Then we will find the way to the unified Christ of all humanity, to that unified Christ who, through the event of Golgotha, is also the real objective cause for every subjective act of redemption. But then we will no longer seek the act of redemption in external signs; on the contrary, we will seek through the sacraments that which is the real relationship of the human soul to the Christ. We will have to talk about this in the other part. Then we also do not seek in an abstract or mystical way a relationship to a Christ who eludes us, but we establish in the human spirit and in the human heart and in the whole human being an elective affinity to the Christ, just as we have a consanguineous relationship to the life of the Father-God, in so far as this life expresses itself in the blood of mankind, that is to say, in the life-creative power of mankind in the physical realm.

I have tried to present to you the subjective side of the idea of redemption. I do not believe that in this day and age one can arrive at an objective understanding of the subjective idea of redemption from other premises, from other antecedents.

I would now like to ask you, my dear friends, to prepare your questions well so that we can really get into a discussion, a back-and-forth of words, in the afternoons over the next few days.