The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If you combine the observations I made here yesterday with the other lectures I gave here a week ago, you will, in a sense, obtain an important key to much of spiritual science. I would just like to outline the main ideas we will need for our further considerations, so that we can orient ourselves. About eight days ago, I pointed out the significance of processes which, from the point of view of the physical world, are called processes of destruction. I pointed out that, from the point of view of the physical world, reality can only be seen in what arises, what emerges, as it were, out of nothing and comes into noticeable existence. So we speak of reality when a plant breaks free from its roots, develops leaf by leaf until it blossoms, and so on. But we do not speak of reality in the same way when we look at the processes of destruction, at the gradual withering, at the gradual fading away, at the final flowing away, one might say, into nothingness. For those who want to understand the world, however, it is absolutely necessary to also look at what is called destruction, at the processes of dissolution, at what ultimately results for the physical world as flowing into nothingness. For consciousness in the physical world can never develop where only sprouting, budding processes take place; consciousness begins only where what has sprouted in the physical world is in turn carried away, destroyed.

I have pointed out how the processes that life brings about in us must be destroyed by the soul-spiritual if consciousness is to arise in the physical world. It is indeed the case that when we perceive anything external, our soul-spiritual nature must cause destructive processes in our nervous system, and these destructive processes then convey consciousness. Whenever we become conscious of anything, the processes of consciousness must arise from processes of destruction. And I have pointed out how the most significant process of destruction, the process of death, which is so important for human life, is precisely the creator of consciousness for the time we spend after death. Through this, our soul and spirit experience the complete dissolution and detachment from the physical and etheric bodies, the merging of the physical and etheric bodies into the general physical and etheric world, our spiritual soul draws the power from the process of death to be able to have processes of perception between death and a new birth. The words of Jakob Böhme: “And so death is the root of all life” thus gain their higher meaning for the entire context of world phenomena.

Now the question will often have come to your mind: What actually happens during the time that the human soul passes through between death and a new birth? It has often been pointed out that for normal human life this period is long in relation to the time we spend here in the physical body between birth and death. It is short only for those people who live their lives in a worldly manner, who, I would say, come to do only what can truly and genuinely be called criminal. In such cases, there is a short period of time between death and a new birth. But for people who are not solely devoted to selfishness, but spend their lives in a normal way between birth and death, there is usually a relatively long period of time between death and a new birth.

But the question must burn in our souls, I would say: What determines the return of a human soul to a new physical embodiment? The answer to this question is intimately connected with everything we can know about the significance of the processes of destruction I have mentioned. Just think that when we enter physical existence with our souls, we are born into very specific circumstances. We are born into a specific age, drawn to specific people. So we are born into very specific circumstances. You must realize quite clearly that our life between birth and death is actually filled with everything into which we are born. What we think, what we feel, what we experience—in short, the entire content of our life depends on the time into which we are born.

But now you will also easily understand that what surrounds us when we are born into physical existence depends on previous causes, on what has happened before. Suppose, if I were to draw this schematically, that we are born at a certain point in time and go through life between birth and death. (It was drawn.) If you add what surrounds you, it does not stand there in isolation, but is the effect of what came before. I mean to say: you are brought together with what came before, with people. These people are children of other people, who in turn are children of other people, and so on. If we consider only these physical generational relationships, you will say: When I enter physical existence, I take something from people; during my upbringing, I take a lot from the people around me. But they, in turn, have taken a great deal from their ancestors, from the acquaintances and relatives of their ancestors, and so on. One could say that, going further and further back, people must seek the causes of what they themselves are.

If we then allow our thoughts to continue, we can say that we can trace a certain current beyond our birth. This current has, as it were, brought everything that surrounds us in life between birth and death. And if we continue to trace this current upward, we would eventually arrive at a point in time where our previous incarnation took place. So, by tracing time back before our birth, we would have a long period of time in which we lingered in the spiritual world. During this time, many things happened on earth. But what happened brought about the conditions in which we live, into which we are born. And then, finally, we arrive in the spiritual world at the time when we were on earth in a previous incarnation. When we speak of these conditions, we are speaking of average conditions. There are, of course, numerous exceptions, but they all lie, I would say, within the line I indicated earlier for natures that come to earthly incarnation more quickly.

What determines that, after a period of time has elapsed, we are born again here? Well, if we look back at our previous incarnations, we see that during our time on earth we were also surrounded by certain conditions, and these conditions had their effects. We were surrounded by people, these people had children, they passed on to their children what their feelings and ideas were, the children in turn passed them on to the next generation, and so on. But if you follow historical life, you will say to yourself: there comes a time in the course of development when you can no longer recognize anything really the same or even similar in the descendants as in their ancestors. Everything is passed on, but the basic character that is present at a certain time appears weakened in the children, even more weakened in the grandchildren, and so on, until a time comes when nothing remains of the basic character of the environment in which one was in the previous incarnation. Thus, the stream of time works to destroy what was once the basic character of the environment. We observe this destruction in the time between death and a new birth. And when the character of the previous age has been wiped out, when nothing of it remains, when that which came to us, as it were, in previous incarnations has been destroyed, then the moment arrives when we enter earthly existence once again. Just as in the second half of our life our life is actually a kind of dismantling of our physical existence, so between death and a new birth there must be a kind of dismantling of earthly conditions, a destruction, a annihilation. And new conditions, a new environment into which we are born, must be there. So we are reborn when everything for which we were previously born has been destroyed and annihilated. Thus, this idea of being destroyed is connected with the successive return of our incarnation on earth. And what our consciousness creates at the moment of death, when we see the body fall away from our spiritual soul, is strengthened at this moment of death, at this viewing of destruction, for viewing the process of annihilation that must take place in earthly conditions between our death and a new birth.

Now you will also understand that those who have no interest in what surrounds them on earth, who are basically not interested in any human being or any creature, but are only interested in what is good for themselves and simply steal from one day to the next, are not very strongly connected to the conditions and things on earth. They have no interest in following their slow deterioration, but they return very soon to repair what they have done, in order to truly live with the conditions they must live with, so that they may learn to understand their gradual destruction. Those who have never lived with earthly conditions do not understand their destruction, their dissolution. Therefore, those who have lived very intensively in the basic character of any age, who have immersed themselves completely in the basic character of any age, have above all the tendency, unless something else intervenes, to bring about the destruction of that into which they were born and to reappear when something completely new has emerged. Of course, I would say that there are exceptions at the top. And these exceptions are particularly important for us to consider.

Let us assume that one lives in a movement such as the spiritual scientific movement today, at a time when it is not in tune with everything around it, when it is something completely foreign to its surroundings. This spiritual scientific movement is not what we were born into, but rather what we have to work on, what we want to see enter into the spiritual cultural development of the earth. It is then a matter above all of living with the conditions that are opposed to spiritual science, and of reappearing on Earth when the Earth has changed to such an extent that spiritual scientific conditions can truly take hold of cultural life. So here we have the exception upwards. There are exceptions downwards and upwards. Certainly, the most serious co-workers of spiritual science today are preparing to reappear in an earthly existence as soon as possible, while at the same time working during the course of this earthly existence to bring about the disappearance of the conditions into which they were born. So you see, if you take up the last thought, that you are in a sense helping the spiritual beings to guide the world by devoting yourselves to what lies in the intentions of the spiritual beings.

When we consider the circumstances of our time today, we must say that, on the one hand, we have something that is eminently heading toward decadence and decline. Those who have a heart and soul for spiritual science have been placed in this age, as it were, to see how ripe it is for decline. Here on earth, they are introduced to that which can only be known on earth, but they carry this knowledge up into the spiritual worlds, where they now see the decline of the age and will return when a new age is to be brought about, which lies precisely in the innermost impulses of spiritual scientific striving. In this way, the plans of the spiritual leaders, the spiritual guides of Earth's evolution, are promoted by what such people, who are concerned with something that is not, so to speak, part of the culture of the times, take into themselves.

You may be familiar with the accusations frequently made by people today against those who profess spiritual science, that they are concerned with something that often appears outwardly fruitless, that does not outwardly intervene in the circumstances of the time. Yes, there is indeed a need for people in their earthly existence to concern themselves with things that are important for further development, but not immediately for the present time. If one objects to this, one should only consider the following. Imagine that these were successive years: 1915, 1914, 1913, 1912.

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We could then continue. Suppose these were consecutive years and these were the grain crops (center) of the consecutive years. And what I am drawing here would always be the mouths (right) that consume these grains. Now someone might come along and say: Only the arrow pointing from the grains of corn into the mouths (→) has any meaning, because that is what sustains the people of the successive years. And he might say: Anyone who thinks realistically looks only at these arrows pointing from the grains of corn to the mouths. But the grains of corn care little about this arrow. They do not care about it at all, but only have the tendency to develop into the next year's grain. Only the grain kernels care about this arrow (→); they don't care at all that they will be eaten, they don't care about that at all. That is a side effect, something that happens incidentally. Every grain kernel has, if I may say so, the will, the impulse, to pass into the next year in order to become a grain kernel again. And it is good for the mouths that the grains of corn follow this arrow direction (→), because if all the grains of corn followed this arrow direction (→), then the mouth here would have nothing to eat next year! If all the grains of corn from 1913 had followed this arrow (→), then the mouths of 1914 would have nothing to eat. If someone wanted to apply materialistic thinking consistently, they would examine the grains of corn to determine their chemical composition so that they would produce the best possible food products. But that would not be a good observation, because this tendency does not lie in the grains of corn at all, but rather in the grains of corn lies the tendency to ensure further development and to evolve into next year's grain of corn.

So it is with the world process. Those who truly follow the world process are those who ensure that evolution continues, and those who become materialists follow the mouths that only see this arrow here (→). But those who ensure that the world continues need not be deterred in their efforts to prepare for the times to come, any more than the grains of corn are deterred from preparing for the next year, even if the mouths here demand arrows pointing in a completely different direction.

At the end of “The Riddles of Philosophy,” I pointed to this way of thinking, pointing out that what is called materialistic knowledge can be compared to eating a grain of corn, that what really happens in the world can be compared to what what happens to a grain of corn through reproduction until the following year. Therefore, what is called scientific knowledge is just as insignificant for the inner nature of things as eating is for the growth of grain, which has no inner significance. And today's science, which is concerned only with the way in which what can be known from things can be brought into the human mind, does exactly the same as the man who uses the grain for food, for what the grains of corn are when eaten has nothing to do with the inner nature of the grain. into the human mind, does exactly the same as the man who uses the grain for food, because what the grains of corn are when eaten has nothing to do with the inner nature of the grains of corn, just as external knowledge has nothing to do with what develops inside things.

In this way, I tried to throw a thought into the philosophical hustle and bustle, and it will be interesting to see whether it will be understood, or whether even such a very plausible thought will again and again be met with the foolish reply: Yes, Kant has already proven that knowledge cannot approach things. He only proved it with regard to knowledge that can be compared to the consumption of grains of corn, and not with regard to knowledge that arises with the progressive development that is in things. But we must already familiarize ourselves with the fact that we must repeat again and again, in all possible forms—but not in hasty forms, not in agitational forms, not in fanatical forms—what is the principle and essence of spiritual science to our age and to the age that is coming, until it is drummed into people's heads. For it is precisely characteristic of our age that Ahriman has made people's skulls very hard and dense, and that they can only be softened again very slowly. So no one, I would say, needs to shrink back from the necessity of emphasizing again and again, in all possible forms, what is the essence and impulse of spiritual science.

But now let us look at another demand that was made here yesterday in connection with various prerequisites, namely the demand that in our time there must be a growing reverence for truth, a reverence for knowledge, not for authoritative knowledge, but for knowledge that is acquired. The attitude must grow that one should not judge out of nothing, but out of the knowledge one has acquired about the processes of the world.

Now, when we are born into a particular age, we are dependent on our environment, completely dependent on what is in our environment. But this is connected, as we have seen, with the whole stream of development, with the whole upward striving, so that we are born into circumstances that are dependent on previous circumstances. Just consider how we are placed there. Certainly, we are placed there through our karma, but we are nevertheless placed in what surrounds us as something very specific, as something that has a certain character. And now consider how this makes us dependent in our judgment. We do not always see this clearly, but it is really so. So that we must say to ourselves, even if it is connected with our karma: What would it be like if we had not been born at a certain time in a certain place, but fifty years earlier in another place? Then we would have acquired the form and inner direction of our judgments from the different circumstances of our environment, just as we have acquired them from the place where we were born, wouldn't we?

So that, on closer self-observation, we really come to the conclusion that we are born into a certain milieu, into a certain environment, that we are dependent on this milieu in our judgments and in our feelings, that this milieu reappears, as it were, when we judge. Now think how different it would be, I mean, if Luther had been born in the 10th century and in a completely different place! So even with a personality who has an enormously strong influence on their environment, we can see how they incorporate into their own judgments what is characteristic of the age, whereby the personality actually reflects the impulses of the age. And this is true of every human being, except that those in whom it is most evident are the least aware of it. Those who are most likely to reflect only the impulses of the environment into which they were born are usually the ones who talk most about their freedom, their independent judgment, their lack of prejudice, and so on. When, on the other hand, we see people who are not as thoroughly dependent on their environment as most people are, we see that it is precisely such people who are most aware of what makes them dependent on their environment.

And one of those who never got rid of the idea of dependence on their environment is the one we have just seen pass before our eyes, Goethe. He knew in the most eminent sense that he would not be who he was if he had not been born in Frankfurt am Main in 1749, and so on. He knew that, in a sense, his age spoke through him. This enlivened and moved his behavior in an extraordinary way. He knew that his judgment had been shaped by certain inclinations and circumstances he had observed in his father's house. His judgment had been shaped by his student days in Leipzig. His judgment had been shaped by his move to Strasbourg. This made him want to escape from his circumstances and enter into completely different ones, so that in the 1880s, one might say, he suddenly disappeared into the night and only told his friends about his disappearance when he was already far away, after it was impossible to bring him back under the circumstances at that time. He wanted to get out so that something else could speak through him. And if you take many of Goethe's statements from his formative years, you will notice this feeling, this sense of dependence on his environment everywhere.

Yes, but what should Goethe have strived for then, when he became fully aware that one is actually completely dependent on one's environment, when he connected his feelings and perceptions of this dependence with the thoughts we have expressed today? He would have had to say: Yes, what my environment is, is dependent on the whole current of history, right back to my ancestors. I will always remain dependent. I would have to transport myself back in my thoughts, in my soul experience, to a time when today's conditions did not yet exist, when conditions were completely different. Then, if I could put myself in those conditions, I would come to an independent judgment, not only judging how my time judges my time, but how I judge when I lift myself completely out of my time.

Of course, it cannot be a matter of such a person, who feels this to be necessary, transporting himself into his own former incarnation. But essentially he must transport himself to a time connected with a former incarnation, when he lived in completely different circumstances. And when he now transports himself back to this incarnation, he will not be dependent as he was before, because the circumstances have become completely different; the former circumstances have been destroyed, have come to an end. It is, of course, something else when I now transport myself back to a time whose entire environment, whose entire milieu has disappeared. What do you actually have then? Well, you have to say: before, you live your life there, you enjoy life; you are interwoven with life. You can no longer be interwoven with the life that has been destroyed, with the life of an earlier time; you can only live through this life spiritually and soulfully.

Then one could say: “We have life in its colorful reflection.” Yes, what would have to happen if such a person, who felt this, wanted to portray this emergence from the circumstances of the present and the arrival at an objective judgment from a standpoint that is no longer possible today? He would have to portray this in such a way that he is transported back to completely different circumstances. Whether this is exactly the previous incarnation or not is irrelevant; what matters are circumstances that were completely different on earth. And he would have to strive to fill his soul with the impulses that existed at that time. He would have to put himself into a kind of phantasmagoria, identify with this phantasmagoria, and live in it, live in a kind of phantasmagoria that represents an earlier time.

But this is what Goethe strives for when he continues his “Faust” in the second part. Think about it: he first places Faust in the circumstances of the present, where he lets him experience everything that can be experienced in the present. But deep down he feels that this cannot lead to any true judgment, because I am always influenced by what is around me; I have to get out, I have to go back to a time whose circumstances have been completely changed in our time and therefore cannot influence my judgment. That is why Goethe lets Faust travel all the way back to classical Greek times and lets him enter and experience the classical Walpurgis Night.

What he can experience in the present in the deepest sense, he has depicted in the Nordic Walpurgis Night. Now he must go back to the classical Walpurgis Night, because from the classical Walpurgis Night to the Nordic Walpurgis Night, all conditions have changed. What was essential to the classical Walpurgis Night has disappeared, and new conditions have arisen, symbolized by the Nordic Walpurgis Night. There you have the justification for Faust's return to the Greek era. The entire second part of Faust is the realization of what can be called: “In the colorful reflection we have life.”

First, there is still a passage through the conditions of the present, but these are conditions that are already preparing for destruction. We see what is developing at the imperial court, where the devil takes the place of the fool, and so on.

We see the creation of the homunculus, how the escape from the present is sought, and how, in the third act, Faust now enters the classical era. Goethe had already written the beginning at the turn of the 18th century; the other scenes were added in 1825, but the Helena scene had already been written in 1800, and Goethe calls it a “classical phantasmagoria” to indicate through the words that he means a return to conditions that are not the physical, real conditions of the present.

That is what is significant about Goethe's Faust poem: that it is, I would say, a work of striving, a work of struggle. I have emphasized clearly enough in recent times that it would be nonsense to regard Goethe's Faust poem as a finished work of art. I have done enough to show that there can be no question of a finished work of art. But as a work of striving, as a work of struggle, this Faust poem is so significant. Only then can one understand what Goethe achieved intuitively, when one allows oneself to be illuminated by what our spiritual science can shed on such a composition, and sees how Faust looks into the classical era, into the milieu of Greek culture, where conditions were completely different in the fourth post-Atlantean era than in our fifth post-Atlantean era. One really gains the highest respect for this struggle when one sees how Goethe began working on Faust in his early youth, how he gave himself over to everything that was accessible to him at the time, without really understanding it very well. Really, when approaching Faust, one must apply this point of view of spiritual science, because the judgments that the outer world sometimes makes are too foolish in relation to Faust.

How could the spiritual scientist fail to notice that time and again people who consider themselves particularly clever come up and point out how magnificently Faust expresses his creed, and say: Yes, in contrast to everything that so many people say about some kind of confession of faith, one should remember more and more the conversation between Faust and Gretchen:

... Feeling is everything;
Name is sound and smoke,
Enshrouding the glow of heaven.

Well, you know what Faust is discussing with Gretchen, and what is always cited when someone thinks they need to emphasize what should not be seen as religious profundity and what should be seen as religious sentiment. But they fail to consider that in this case Faust was forming his religious confession for the sixteen-year-old Gretchen, and that all the clever professors are actually demanding that people never go beyond Gretchen's point of view in their religious beliefs. The moment one presents Faust's confession to Gretchen as something particularly sublime, one demands that humanity never rise above Gretchen's point of view. This is actually convenient and easy to achieve. One can also very easily boast that it is all feeling and so on, but one fails to notice that it is Gretchen's point of view.

Goethe, for his part, strove quite differently to make his Faust the bearer of a continuous struggle, as I have now indicated again with reference to this placing oneself in a completely earlier age in order to obtain the truth. Perhaps at the same time or slightly earlier, when Goethe wrote this “classical-romantic phantasmagoria,” this transposition of Faust into Greek antiquity, he wanted to clarify once again how his Faust should actually unfold, what he wanted to portray in Faust. And so Goethe wrote down a plan. It was based on his Faust at that time: a foundation, a number of scenes from the first part, and probably also the Helena scene. Goethe wrote down: “Ideal striving for influence and empathy with the whole of nature.”

So, as the century drew to a close, Goethe took up “the old Tragelaphen, the barbaric composition” again, as he said, at Schiller's suggestion. This is how he rightly described his Faust at the end of the century, for it had been written scene after scene. Now he said to himself: What have I actually done here? And he placed before his mind's eye this striving Faust, emerging from scholarship and drawing closer to nature.

Then he wrote down: I wanted to present:

1. “Ideal striving to influence and empathize with the whole of nature.
2. The manifestation of the spirit as world and genius of action."

This is how he sketched the manifestation of the earth spirit.

Now I have shown you how, after the manifestation of the earth spirit, Wagner, who appears, should actually be only a means for Faust's self-knowledge, should be only what is in Faust himself, a part of Faust. What is struggling within Faust? What is Faust doing now, with something struggling within him? He realizes: Until now, you have only lived in your surroundings, in what the outer world has offered you. He can see this best in the part of himself that is Wagner, who is completely content. Faust is in the process of achieving something in order to free himself from what he was born into, but Wagner wants to remain entirely what he is, wants to remain in what he is outwardly. What is it that lives out outwardly in the world from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch? It is the form into which human striving is imprinted. The spirits of form work outside on that into which we are to enter. But if man does not want to die in form, if he really wants to progress, he must always strive beyond this form. “Struggle between form and formlessness,” Goethe also writes.

But now Faust looks at the form: the Faust in Wagner there inside. He wants to be free of this form. This is a striving for the content of this form, a new content that can spring from within.

When we decided to erect a building here for the spiritual sciences, we could have looked at all possible forms, studied all possible styles, and then built a new building from them, as many architects of the 19th century did, and as we find everywhere outside. In that case, we would have created nothing new from the form that has come about in the development of the world: Wagnerian nature. But we preferred to take the “formless content,” we sought from what is initially formless, what is only content, to take the living experience of spiritual science and pour it into new forms.

Faust does this by rejecting Wagner:

Let him not be a loud fool!
It is reason and right sense
With little art that carry themselves forward.

“Preference for formless content,” Goethe also writes. And this is the scene he wrote when Faust rejects Wagner:

4. “Preference for formless content over empty form.”

But form becomes empty over time. If, after a hundred years, someone were to build exactly the same building as we have built today, it would again be an empty form. That is what we must take into account. That is why Goethe writes:

5. “Content brings form with it.”

That is what I want us to experience, and that is what we want with our building: content brings form with it. And: “Form,” writes Goethe, “is never without content.” Certainly it is never without content, but the Wagnerians do not see the content in it, so they accept only the empty form. The form is as justified as it can possibly be. But it is precisely in this that progress consists, that the old form is overcome by the new content.

1. Ideal striving for influence and empathy with the whole of nature.
2. Manifestation of the spirit as genius of the world and of action.
3. Conflict between form and formlessness.
4. Preference for formless content over empty form.
5. Content brings form with it.
6. Form is never without content.

And now a sentence that Goethe wrote down to give his “Faust” the impetus, so to speak, a highly characteristic sentence. For the “Wagners” who think about it: Yes, form, content, how can I concoct that, how can I bring that together? - You can easily imagine a person in the present day who wants to be an artist and says to himself: Well, yes, the humanities, that's all very well. But it's none of my business what these muddle-headed people come up with as the humanities. But they want to build a house that, I believe, incorporates Greek, Renaissance, and Gothic styles; and there I see what they are thinking in the house they are building, how the content corresponds to the form. One could imagine that this would happen. It has to come if people think about eliminating contradictions, when the world is made up of contradictions and it is important to be able to place contradictions side by side. Goethe writes:

7. “These contradictions, instead of being united, must be made more disparate.”

That is, he wants to portray them in his “Faust” in such a way that they stand out as strongly as possible: “These contradictions, instead of being united, must be made more disparate.” And to do this, he once again juxtaposes two characters, one who lives entirely in form and is content when he clings to form, greedily digging for treasures of knowledge and happy when he finds earthworms. In our time, we could say: greedy for the secret of becoming human, and happy when he discovers, for example, that human beings originated from an animal species similar to our hedgehogs and rabbits. Edinger, one of the most important physiologists of our time, recently gave a lecture on the origin of human beings from a primitive form similar to our hedgehogs and rabbits. It is not true that the human world descended from apes, semi-apes, and so on; science has already moved beyond that. We must go further back, to where the animal species first branched off. There were once ancestors that resembled hedgehogs and rabbits, and on the other side we have humans as their descendants. Isn't it true that because humans are most similar to rabbits and hedgehogs in certain aspects of their brain structure, they must have descended from something similar? These animal species have survived, while the others have naturally all died out. So, dig greedily for treasures and be happy when you find rabbits and hedgehogs. That is one kind of striving, striving merely in form. Goethe wanted to portray this in Wagner, and he knows well that it is an intelligent striving; people are not stupid, they are intelligent. Goethe calls it “bright, cold, scientific striving.” “Wagner,” he adds.

8. “Bright, cold, scientific striving: Wagner.”

The other, the disparate, is what one wants to work out from within with every fiber of one's soul, after not finding it in form. Goethe calls it “dull, warm, scientific striving”; he contrasts it with the other and adds: “student.” Now that Wagner has confronted Faust, the student also confronts him. Faust remembers how he used to be a student, what he absorbed, such as philosophy, law, medicine, and unfortunately also theology, how he said when he was still a student: “All this makes me feel so stupid, as if a mill wheel were turning in my head.” But that is all in the past. He can no longer put himself back in that position. But it all had an effect on him. So:

9. “Dull, warm, scientific striving: student.”

And so it goes on. From then on, we actually see Faust becoming a student and then once again immersing himself in everything that enables one to take in the present.

Goethe now calls the rest of the first part, insofar as it was already finished and still needed to be completed, the following:

10. “The enjoyment of life as seen from outside; in dullness and passion, first part.”

This is how precisely Goethe understands what he has created. Now he wants to say: How should it continue? How should Faust really emerge from this enjoyment of life by the person into an objective worldview? He must come to the form, but he must now grasp the form with his whole being. And we have seen how far he must go back, to a place where conditions are completely different. There the form then confronts him as a reflection of life. The form confronts him in such a way that he now takes it up by becoming one with the truth that was valid at that time, and casts off everything that had to happen at that time. In other words, he tries to put himself into the time insofar as it was not permeated by Lucifer. He tries to go back to the divine standpoint of ancient Greece.

And when one lives into the external world in such a way that one enters into it with one's whole being, but takes nothing from the circumstances into which one has grown, then one arrives at what Goethe calls beauty in the highest sense. That is why he says: “enjoyment of deeds.” No longer enjoyment of the person, enjoyment of life. Enjoyment of action, going out, gradually removing oneself from oneself. Settling into the world is enjoyment of action outwardly and enjoyment with consciousness.

11. “Enjoyment of action outwardly and enjoyment with consciousness; second part. Beauty.”

What Goethe was unable to achieve in his struggle because his time was not yet the time of spiritual science, he nevertheless sketched out at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. For Goethe wrote some very significant words at the end of this sketch, which was a recapitulation of what he had done in the first part. He had already planned to write a kind of third part to his “Faust”; but only the two parts were completed, and they do not express everything Goethe wanted to say. For that he would have needed spiritual science.

What Goethe wanted to portray there is the experience of the whole of creation outside, when one has emerged from one's personal life. This entire experience of creation outside, in objectivity in the world outside, so that creation is experienced from within by carrying the truly inner outwards, is sketched out by Goethe, I would say, stammeringly with the words: “Enjoyment of creation from within” – that is, not from his point of view, in that he has stepped out of himself.

12. “Enjoyment of creation from within.”

With this “enjoyment of creation from within,” Faust would now have entered not only the classical world, but also the world of the spiritual.

Then there is something else at the end, a very strange sentence that refers to the scene Goethe wanted to create, did not create, but wanted to create, which he would have created if he had already lived in our time, but which was foreshadowed to him. He wrote: |

13. “Epilogue in chaos on the way to hell.”

I have heard very intelligent people discuss the meaning of this last sentence: “Epilogue in chaos on the way to hell.” People have said: So Goethe really had the idea in 1800 that Faust would go to hell and deliver an epilogue in chaos before entering hell? So it was only much, much later that he decided not to let Faust go to hell! I have heard many, many very learned discussions about this, many, many discussions! It means that in 1800 Goethe was not yet free from the idea of letting Faust go to hell after all. But they did not think that it was not Faust who delivered the epilogue, but of course Mephistopheles, after Faust had escaped to heaven!

Delivering the epilogue — we would say today — Lucifer and Ahriman on their way to hell; on their way to hell, they would discuss what they had experienced with the striving Faust.

I wanted to draw your attention once again to this recapitulation and to Goethe's exposition because it shows us in the most eminent sense how Goethe, with all that he was able to gain in his time, strove toward the path that leads straight upward into the realm of spiritual science.

One can only view “Faust” in its true sense if one asks oneself: Why has “Faust” remained, at its core, an imperfect work of literature, even though it is the greatest work of literature in the world and Faust is the representative of humanity in that he strives to break out of his milieu and is even carried back to an earlier age? Why, then, has this Faust remained an unsatisfactory work of literature? Because it merely represents the striving for what spiritual science is to incorporate into the development of human culture.

It is good to focus on this fact and to consider that at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, a work of literature emerged in which the figure at the center of this work, Faust, was to be lifted out of all the restrictive barriers that must surround human beings as they go through repeated earthly lives. The significance of Faust is that, however intensely he was born out of his folk culture, he nevertheless grew beyond it and into the universal human condition. Faust has none of the narrow barriers of folklore, but strives upward toward the universal human nature, so that we find him not only as the Faust of modern times, but also, in the second part, as a Faust who stands as a Greek among Greeks. It is an enormous setback in our time that, in the course of the 19th century, people began once again to place the greatest emphasis on the barriers to human development and even to see in the “national idea” something that could somehow still be a bearer of culture for our era. Humanity could wonderfully climb up to an understanding of what spiritual science should be, if one wanted to understand something like what is hidden in Faust.

It was not for nothing that Goethe wrote to Zelter, when he was writing the second part of Faust, that he had hidden much in Faust that would only gradually come to light.

Herman Grimm, of whom I have often spoken to you, pointed out that Goethe will only be fully understood in a thousand years. I must say that I believe this too. When people have delved even deeper than they have in our time, they will understand more and more of what lies in Goethe. Above all, however, they will understand what he strove for, what he struggled for, what he was unable to express. For if you were to ask Goethe whether what he put into the second part of Faust was also expressed in his Faust, he would say: No! But we can be convinced that if we were to ask him today: Are we, with spiritual science, on the path that you once strove for, as it was possible at that time? he would say: What spiritual science is, is moving along my paths.

And so, since Goethe allowed his Faust to go back to Greek times in order to show him as someone who understood the present, it is permissible to say: Reverence for truth, reverence for knowledge that is wrested from the knowledge of the milieu, from the limitations of the environment, that is what we must acquire. And it is truly like a warning from current events, which are showing us how humanity is heading toward the opposite extreme, toward judging things as superficially as possible, and would prefer to go back only as far as the events of 1914 in order to explain all the terrible things we are experiencing today.

But those who want to understand the present must judge it from a higher vantage point than the present itself.

This is what I have wanted to place in your souls as a feeling during these days, a feeling that I have wanted to show you how it follows from a truly inner, living understanding of spiritual science, and how it has been sought by the greatest minds of the past, such as Goethe.

By not merely accepting what comes before our souls in these reflections as something theoretical, but by processing it in our souls, by letting it live in the meditations of our souls, it only then becomes living spiritual science. May we hold fast to this, to much, indeed to everything that passes through our souls as spiritual science!

In the lectures given during this week there lies much which can lead us to understand the nature of man in its connection with the historical evolution of humanity in such a way as to enable us to gradually form a conception of necessity and free will. Such questions can be less easily decided by means of definitions and combinations of words than by bringing together the relevant truths from the spiritual world. In our age humanity must accustom itself more and more to acquire a different form of understanding for reality from the one so prevalent today, which, after all, holds to very secondary and nebulous concepts bound up with the definitions of words. If we consider what certain persons who think themselves especially clever write and say, we have the feeling that they speak in concepts and ideas which are only apparently clear; in reality however, they are as lacking in clarity as if someone were to speak of a certain object which is made, for example, out of a gourd, so that the gourd is transformed into a flask and used as such. We can then speak about this object as if we were speaking of a gourd, for it is a gourd in reality; but we can also speak of it as if it were a flask, for it is used as a flask. Indeed, the things of which we speak are first determined by the connections we are dealing with; as soon as we no longer rely upon words when we are speaking, but upon a certain perception, then everyone will know whether we mean a flask or a gourd. But then we may not confine ourselves to a description or a definition of the object. For as long as we confine ourselves to a description or definition of this object it can just as well be a gourd as a flask. In a similar way, that which is spoken of today by many philologists—persons who consider themselves very clever—may be the human soul, but it may also be the human body—it may be gourd or it may be flask. I include in this remark a great deal of what is taken seriously at the present time (partly to the detriment of humanity). For this reason it is necessary that a striving should proceed from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for which clear, precise thinking is above all a necessity, a striving to perceive the world not in the way in which it is customary today (not by confusing the gourd and the flask) but to see everywhere what is real, be it outer physical reality, or spiritual reality.

We cannot in any case arrive at a real concept of what comes into consideration for the human being when we hold only to definitions and the like; we can do so only when we bear in mind the relationships of life in their reality. And just where such important concepts as freedom (free will) and necessity in social and moral life are concerned, we attain clarity only when we place side by side such spiritual facts as those brought out in these lectures, and always strive to balance one against the other in order to reach a judgment as to reality.

Bear in mind that over and over again—even in public lectures and also here—I have brought out with a certain intensity, from the most varied points of view, the fact that we can only rightly grasp what we call concepts when we bring them into relation with our bodily organism, in such a way that the basis of concepts in the body is not seen in something growing and flourishing, but just the opposite—something dying, something in partial decay in the body. I have expressed this in public lectures by saying that the human being really dies continually in his nervous system. The nerve-process is such that it must limit itself to the nervous system. For if it were to spread itself over the rest of the organism, if in the rest of the organism the same thing were to go on that goes on in the nerves, this would signify the death of man at every moment. We may say that concepts arise where the organism destroys itself. We die continuously in our nervous system. For this reason spiritual science is placed under the necessity of pursuing other processes besides the ascending processes which natural science of today considers authentic. These ascending processes are the processes of growth; they reach their summit within the unconscious. Only when the organism begins to develop the processes of decline does the activity of the soul appear which we designate as conceptual or indeed as perceptive activity of the senses. This process of destruction, this slow process of death, must exist if anything at all is to be conceived. I have shown that the free actions of human beings rest upon just this fact, that the human being is in a position to seek the impulses for his actions out of pure thoughts. These pure thoughts have [the] most influence upon the processes of disintegration in the human organism. What happens in reality when man enacts a free deed? Let us realize what happens in the case of an ordinary person when he performs an act out of moral fantasy—you know now what I mean by this—out of moral fantasy, this means out of a thinking which is not ruled by sense-impulses, sense-desires and passions—what really takes place here in man? The following takes place: He gives himself up to pure thoughts; these form his impulses. They cannot impel him through what they are; the impulses must come from man himself. Thoughts are mere mirror-pictures, they belong to Maya. Mirror-pictures cannot compel. Man must compel himself under the influence of clear concepts.

Upon what do clear concepts work? They work most strongly upon the process of disintegration in the human organism; they bring this about. So we may say that on the one side the process of disintegration arises out of the organism, and on the other, the pure deed-thought (Tat-Gedanke) comes to meet this disintegrating process out of the spiritual world. I mean by this the thought that lies at the basis of deed. Free actions arise by uniting these two through the interaction of the process of disintegration and willed thinking.

I have said that the process of disintegration is not caused by pure thinking; it is there in any case, in fact it is always there. If man does not oppose these processes of disintegration with something coming out of pure thinking, then the disintegrating process is not transformed into an up-building process, then a part that is slowly dying remains within the human being. If you think this through, you will see that the possibility exists that just through the failure to perform free actions man fails to arrest a death process within him. Herein lies one of the subtlest thoughts which man must accept. He who understands this thought can no longer have any doubt in life about the existence of human freedom. An action that is performed in freedom does not occur through something that is caused within the organism but occurs where the cause ceases, in other words, out of a process of disintegration. There must be something in the organism where the causes cease; only then can the pure thought, as motive of the action, set in. But such disintegrating processes are always there, they only remain unused to a certain extent when man does not perform free deeds.

But this also shows the characteristics of an age that will have nothing to do with an understanding of the idea of freedom in its widest extent. The age running from the second half of the 19th century to the present has set itself the particular task of dimming down more and more the idea of freedom in all spheres of life, as far as knowledge is concerned, and of excluding it entirely from practical life. People did not wish to understand freedom, they would not have freedom. Philosophers have made every effort to prove that everything arises out of human nature through a certain necessity. Certainly, a necessity underlies man's nature; but this necessity ceases as disintegrating processes begin, as the sequence of causes comes to an end. When freedom has set in at the point where the necessity in the organism ceases, one cannot say that man's actions arise out of an inner necessity, for they arise only when this necessity ceases. The whole mistake consists in the fact that people have been unwilling to understand not only the up-building forces in the organism, but also the disintegrating processes. However, in order to understand what really underlies man's nature it will be necessary to develop a greater capacity to do this than in our age. Yesterday we saw how necessary it is to be able to look with the eye of the soul upon what we call the human Ego. But just in our times human beings are not very gifted in comprehending this reality of the Ego. I will give an illustration.

I have often referred to the remarkable scientific achievement of Theodor Ziehen “Die physiologische Psychologie”—“Physiological Psychology.” On page 205 the Ego is also spoken of; but Ziehen is never in a position even to indicate the real Ego, he merely speaks of the Ego-concept. We know that this is only a mirror-picture of the real Ego. But it is particularly interesting to hear how a distinguished thinker of today—but one who believes that he can exhaust everything with natural scientific ideas—speaks about the Ego. Ziehen says:

It will perhaps occur to you that the Ego-concept which is expressed in the small word “I,” is a very complex threefold entity containing thousands and thousands of partial concepts. But I beg you to ponder this, the word is indeed short, but its conceptual content must be complex, as shown by the fact that each one of you would be at a loss if he were asked to render in thoughts the content of his so-called Ego-concept.

And now Ziehen attempts to say something about the thought-content of the Ego-concept. Let us now see what the distinguished scholar has to say concerning what we must really think when we think about our Ego.

You will immediately think of your body, [you notice that he says—you will think of your body] of your relationships to the outer world, [connection with the outer world] your family and personal relationships, [in other words you will soon begin to think of your bank account and to count your money!] of your name and title.

Now the distinguished scholar emphatically points out that we must also think of our name and of our title if we are to grasp or to encompass our Ego in the form of concept.

..... Your principal inclinations, predominating ideas and finally your past, and thus prove to yourself how extremely complex this Ego-concept is. Indeed, the reflective human being reduces this complexity of the Ego-concept to a relative simplicity by placing his own Ego as the subject of his feelings, thoughts and movements, against the outer objects and other Egos. Of course, this contrast and this sharpening of the Ego-concept has also its deeper scientific and philosophical basis, but considered purely psychologically this simple Ego is only a theoretical fiction.

Thus “this simple Ego” is only a “theoretical fiction” that means a mere fantasy-concept, which constructs itself when we put together our name, title, or let us assume our rank and other such things also, which make us important! By means of such points we can see the whole weakness of the present way of thinking. And this weakness must be held in mind the more firmly because of the fact that what proves itself to be a decided weakness for the knowledge of the life of the soul is a strength for the knowledge of outer natural scientific facts. What is inadequate for a knowledge of the life of the soul, just this is adequate for penetrating the obvious facts in their immediate outer necessity.

We must not deceive ourselves in regard to the fact that it is one of the characteristics of our times, that people who may be great in one field are exponents of the greatest nonsense in another. Only when we hold this fact clearly in mind—which is so well adapted to throw sand in the eyes of humanity—can we in any way follow with active thought what is required in order to raise again that power which man needs in order to acquire concepts that can penetrate fruitfully and healingly into life. For only those concepts can take firm hold of life as it is today, which are drawn out of the depths of true reality—where we are not afraid to enter deeply into true reality. But it is just this that many people shun today.

At present people are very often inclined to reform the spiritual reality, without first having perceived the true reality out of which they should draw their impulses.

Who today does not go about reforming everything in the world—or at least, believing he can reform it? What do people not draw up from the soul out of sheer nothingness! But at a time such as this only those things can be fruitful which are drawn up from the depths of spiritual reality itself. For this the Will must be active.

The vanity that wishes to take up every possible idea of reform on the basis of emptiness of soul is just as harmful for the development of our present time as materialism itself. At the conclusion of a previous lecture I called your attention to how the true Ego of man, the Ego which indeed belongs to the will-nature and which for this reason is immersed in sleep for the ordinary consciousness, must be fructified through the fact that already through public instruction man is led to a concrete grasp of the great interests of the times, by realizing what

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struction man is led to a concrete grasp of the great interests of the times, by realizing what spiritual forces and activities enter into our events and have an influence upon them. This cannot be accomplished with generalized, nebulous speeches about the spirit, but with knowledge of the concrete spiritual events, as we have described them in these lectures, where we have indicated, according to dates, how here and there certain of these powers and forces from the spiritual world have intervened here in the physical.

This brought about what I was able to describe to you as the joint work of the so-called dead and of the so-called living in the whole development of humanity. For the reality of our life of feeling and of will is in the realm where the dead also are. We can say that the reality of our Ego and of our astral body is in the same realm where the dead can also be found. The same thing is meant in both cases. This, however, indicates a common realm in which we are embedded, in which the dead and the living work together upon the tapestry which we may call the social, moral, and historical life of man in its totality; the periods of existence which are lived through between death and a new birth also belong to this realm. We have indicated in these lectures how between death and a new birth the so-called departed one has the animal kingdom as his lowest kingdom, just as the mineral kingdom is our lowest kingdom. We have also pointed out in a certain way, how the departed one has to work within the being of the animal kingdom, and has to build up out of the laws of the animalic the organization that again forms the basis for his next incarnation. We have shown how as second kingdom the departed one experiences all those connections which have their karmic foundation here in the physical world and which, correspondingly transformed, continue within the spiritual world. A second kingdom thus arises for the departed one, which is woven together of all the karmic connections that he has established at any time in an earthly incarnation. Through this, however, everything that the human being has developed between death and a new birth gradually spreads itself out, one might say, quite concretely over the whole of humanity.

The third kingdom through which the human being then passes can be conceived as the kingdom of the Angels. In a certain sense we have already pointed out the role of the Angels during the life between death and a new birth. They carry as it were the thoughts from one human soul to another and back again; they are the messengers of the common life of thought. Fundamentally speaking, the Angels are those Beings among the higher Hierarchies of whom the departed one has the clearest living experience—he has a clear living experience of the relationships with animals and human beings, established through his karma; but among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies he has the clearest conception of those belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels, who are really the bearers of thoughts, indeed of the soul-content from one being to another, and who also help the dead to transform the animal world. When we speak of the concerns of the dead as personal concerns, we might say that the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels must strive above all to look after the personal concerns of the dead. The more universal affairs of the dead that are not personal are looked after more by the Beings of the Kingdom of the Archangeloi and Archai.

If you recall the lectures in which I have spoken about the life between death and a new birth, you will remember that part of the life of the so-called dead consists in spreading out his being over the world and in drawing it together again within himself I have already described and substantiated this more deeply. The life of the dead takes its course in such a way that a kind of alternation takes place between day and night, but so that active life arises from within the departed. He knows that this active life which thus arises is only the reappearance of what he has experienced in that other state which alternates with this one, when his being is spread out over the world and is united with the outer world. Thus when we come into contact with one who is dead we meet alternating conditions, a condition, for instance, where his being is spread out over the world, where he grows, as it were, with his own being into the real existence of his surroundings, into the events of his surroundings. The time when he knows least of all is when his own being that is in a kind of sleeping state grows into the spiritual world around him. When this again rises up within him it constitutes a kind of waking state and he is aware of everything, for his life takes its course within Time and not in space. Just as with our waking day-consciousness we have outside in space that which we take up in our consciousness, and then again withdraw from it in sleep—so from a certain moment onward the departed one takes over into the next period of time the experiences which he has passed through in a former one; these then fill his consciousness. It is a life entirely within Time. And we must become familiar with this.

Through this rhythmic life within Time, the departed enters into a very definite relationship with the Beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi and of the Archai. He has not as clear a conception of these Archangeloi and Archai Beings as of the Angels, of man, and of the animal; above all he always has this conception that these Beings, the Archai and Archangeloi, work together with him in this awaking and falling asleep, awaking and falling asleep, in this rhythm which takes place within the course of time. The departed one, when he is able to do so, must always bring to consciousness what he experienced unknowingly in the preceding period of time; then he always has the consciousness that a Being of the Hierarchy of the Archai has awakened him; he is always conscious that he works together with the Archai and Archangeloi in all that concerns this rhythmic life.

Let us firmly grasp the fact that just as in a waking state we realize that we perceive the outer world of which we know nothing during sleep, just as we realize that this outer world sinks into darkness when we fall asleep, so in the soul of the so-called dead lives this consciousness—Archai, Archangeloi, these are the Beings with whom I am united in a common work in order that I may pass through this life of falling asleep and awaking, falling asleep and awaking, and so forth. We might say that the departed one associates with the Archangeloi and Archai just as in waking consciousness we associate with the plant and mineral world of our physical surroundings. Man cannot however look back upon this interplay of forces in which he is interwoven between death and a new birth. Why not? We may indeed say, why not, but just this looking back is something which man must learn; yet it is difficult for him to learn this owing to the materialistic mentality of today. I would like to show you in a diagram why man does not look back upon this.

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Let us suppose that you are facing the world with all your organs of perception and understanding. This will give you a conceptual and perceptive content of a varied kind. I will designate the consciousness of a single moment by drawing different rings or small circles. These indicate what exists in the consciousness during the space of a moment. You know that a memory-process takes place when you look back over events—but in a different manner than modern psychologists imagine this. The time into which you can look back, to which your memory extends, is indicated by this line; it really indicates the space which here reaches a blind alley. This would be the point in your third, fourth or fifth year that is as far back as you can remember in life. Thus all the thoughts which arise when you look back upon your past experiences lie within this space of time. Let us suppose that you think of something in your thirtieth year for instance, and while you are thinking of this you remember something that you experienced ten years ago. If you picture very vividly what is actually taking place in the soul you will be able to form the following thought. You will say, if I look back to the point of time in my childhood which is as far back as I can remember, this constitutes a “sack” in the soul, which has its limits; its blunt end is the point which lies as far back in my childhood as I am able to remember. This is a sort of “sack” in the soul; it is the space of time which we can grasp in memory. Imagine such a “soul-sack” into which you can look while you are looking back in memory; these are the extreme limits of the sack which correspond in reality to the limit between the etheric body and the physical. This boundary must exist, otherwise ... well, to picture it roughly, the events that call forth memory would then always fall through at this point. You would be able to remember nothing, the soul would be a sack without a bottom, everything would fall through it. Thus, a boundary must be there. An actual “soul-sack” must be there. But at the same time this “soul-sack” prevents you from perceiving what you have lived through outside it. You yourself are non-transparent in the life of your soul because you have memories; you are non-transparent because you have the faculty of memory.

You see therefore—that which causes us to have a proper consciousness for the physical plane is at the same time the cause of our being unable to look with our ordinary consciousness into the region that lies behind memory. For it does really lie behind memory. But we can make the effort to gradually transform our memories to some extent. However we must do this carefully. We can begin by trying to keep before us in meditation with more and more accuracy something which we can remember, until we feel that it is not merely something which we take hold of in memory, but something which really remains there. One who develops an intensive, active life of the spirit will gradually have the feeling that memory is not something that comes and goes, comes and goes—but that memory contains something permanent. Indeed, work in this direction can only lead to the conviction that what rises within memory is of a lasting nature and really remains present as Akashic Record, for it does not disappear. What we remember remains in the world, it is there in reality. But we do not progress any further with this method; for merely to remember accurately our personal experiences, and the knowledge that memory remains—this method is in a higher sense too egotistical to lead farther than just to this conviction. On the contrary, if you were to develop beyond a certain point just this capacity of looking upon the permanency of your own experiences, you would obstruct all the more your outlook into the free world of spirit. Instead of the sack of memories, your own life stands there all the more compactly and prevents you from looking through.

Another method may be used in contrast to this; through it, the impressions in the Akashic Record become remarkably transparent, if I may use this expression. When we are once able to look through the stationary memories, we look with a sure eye into the spiritual world with which we are connected between death and a new birth. But to attain this we must not use merely the stationary memories of our own life; these become more and more compact, and we can see through them less and less. They must become transparent. And they become transparent if we make an ever stronger attempt to remember not so much what we have experienced from our own point of view, but more what has come to us from outside. Instead of remembering for instance what we have learned, we should remember the teacher, his manner of speech, what effect he had upon us and what he did with us. We should try to remember how the book arose out of which we learned this or that. We should remember above all what has worked upon us from the outer world. A beautiful and really wonderful beginning, indeed an introduction to such a memory, is Goethe's Wahrheit and Dichtung (his autobiography) where he shows how Time has formed him, how various forces have worked upon him. Because Goethe was able to achieve this in his life, and looked back on his life not from the standpoint of his own experiences, but from the standpoint of others and of the events of the times that worked upon him, he was able to have such deep insight into the spiritual world.

But this is at the same time the way that enables us to come into deeper touch with the time which has taken its course between our last death and our present birth.

Thus you see that today I am referring you, from another point of view, to the same thing to which I have already referred—to extend our interests beyond the personal, to turn our interests and attention not upon ourselves, but upon that that has formed us, that out of which we have arisen. It is an ideal to be able to look back upon time, upon a remote antiquity, and to investigate all the forces that have formed these “fine fellows”—the human beings.

Indeed, when we describe it thus, this offers few difficulties; it is no simple task, but it bears rich fruit because it requires great selflessness. It is just this method that awakens the forces which enable us to enter with our Ego the sphere which the dead have in common with the living. To know ourselves, is less important than to know our time; the task of public instruction in a not too distant future will be to know our time in its concrete reality, not as it now stands in history books ... but time such as it has evolved out of spiritual impulses.

Thus we are also led to extend out interest to a characteristic of our age and its rise from the universal world process. Why did Goethe strive so intense to know Greek art, to understand his age, through and through, to weigh it against earlier ages? Why did he make his Faust go back as far as the Greek age, as far as the age of Helen of Troy, and seek Chiron and the Sphinxes? Because he wished to know his own age and how it had worked upon him, as he could know it only by measuring it against an earlier age. But Goethe does not let his Faust sit still and decipher old state-records, but he leads him back along paths of the soul to the impulses by which he himself has been formed. Within him lies much of that which leads the human being on the one hand to a meeting with the dead, and on the other hand with the Spirits of Time, with the Archangels (this is now evident through the connection of the dead with the Archangels). Through the fact that man comes together with the dead, he also comes in touch with the Archangels and with the Spirits of Time.

Just the impulses that Goethe indicated in his Faust contain that through which the human being extends his interest to the Time Spirit, and that which is preeminently necessary for our times. It is indeed necessary for our times to look in a different way for instance upon Faust. Most of those who study Faust hardly find the real problems contained in it. A few are able to formulate these problems, but the answers are most curious.

Take for example the passage where Goethe really indicates to us that we should reflect. Do people always reflect at this point? Yet Goethe spares no effort to make it clearly understood that people should reflect upon certain things. For instance you know that Erichtho speaks about the site of the Classical Walpurgis-night; she withdraws and the air-traveler Homunculus appears with Faust and Mephistopheles. You will recall the first speeches of Homunculus, Mephistopheles and Faust. After Faust has touched the ground and called out. “Where is she?”—Homunculus says:—

It's more than we can tell
But to enquire would here be well.
Thou 'rt free to hasten, ere the day,
From flame to flame, and seek her so:
Who to the Mothers found his way,
Has nothing more to undergo.

Homunculus says:—

Who to the Mothers found his way,
Has nothing more to undergo.

How does he know that Faust has been with the Mothers? This is a question which necessarily arises; for if you will look back through the book you will find that there is nowhere any indication that Homunculus, a distinct and separate being from Faust, could have known that Faust had been with the Mothers. Now suddenly Homunculus pipes out that, “Who to the Mothers found his way, has nothing more to undergo.” You see, Goethe propounds riddles. With clear-cut necessity it ensues that Homunculus, if he is anything at all, is something within the sphere of consciousness of Faust himself, for he can know what is contained in the sphere of Faust's consciousness only if he himself belongs to this same sphere of consciousness.

Call to mind the various expositions we have given of Faust:—how Homunculus is really nothing else than what must be prepared as astral body, in order that Helen may appear. But for this reason he is in another state of consciousness; his consciousness is spread out over the astral body. When we know that Homunculus comes within the sphere of Faust's consciousness we can understand his knowledge. Goethe makes Homunculus come into existence because, through the creation of Homunculus, Faust's consciousness finds the possibility of transcending itself as it were, not merely of remaining within itself, but of being outside. He, too, is where Homunculus is to be found; Homunculus is a part of Faust's consciousness. Goethe as you see takes alchemy very seriously. There are many such riddles in Faust which are directly connected with the secrets of the spiritual world. We must allow Faust to work upon us so that we become aware of the depths of spiritual reality which are really contained in it. We can only understand a man like Goethe when we realize on the one hand, that he had studied what had formed him really as if he had viewed it from outside, as can be seen in his autobiography (Wahrheit and Dichtung)—and that on the other hand, he knew that this must lead back to distant perspectives, to distant connections with the dead. Faust enters the life of very ancient civilizations of humanity, the life of spiritual Beings lying far back in the past.

[But if one wants to see clearly what is necessary in a positive sense for the present, then one must also have an eye and a feeling for the negative in many respects, one must develop the right feeling for the negative. One must have an eye for everything that prevents the necessary coming together of living people in a common plan with the work of the dead. You can discover these obstacles everywhere today. You find them at every turn. You find them precisely where education — forgive me for using this ugly word — is spread today.¹

How can a person today feel truly intelligent, deeply intelligent, enlightened, when he can write something like this: “Swedenborg, whose dark and enigmatic personality even Goethe explored with reverent hesitation, communicated with angels beyond the earth. He said that these supernatural beings, armed with thoughts, even walk around dressed in robes. The struggle for knowledge and enlightenment is not foreign to them, for they have set up a printing press from which they sometimes send a few sheets to particularly fortunate people. The newspapers of the hereafter are then covered with Hebrew letters. A peculiar feature of the venerable biblical symbols is that every line, every edge, every curve conceals a mysterious spiritual value. Man only has to learn to read the angelic squiggles correctly in order to be initiated into the truth of the hereafter, into the reversed, eternally sunlit life, into the blissful festivity and exhilarating paradise of the hereafter. Swedenborg, who sometimes managed to die to earthly life while still alive and to make the transition to the afterlife before physical death, asked the angels many questions and reported on them. Centuries before him, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Jews practiced the same craft of exploration. Generations after him, even to this day, it is done by those beings on earth who are dissatisfied, who want to seek counsel from God about their future, who do not want to renounce the company of their dead, and who finally believe that the bridge built from their dream-filled beds to the realms of the incomprehensible is a solid, seraphic path, cemented and supported by spirits.

And so the person in question, who considers himself very clever, continues his reflections, indulging in cheap mockery of those who try to build a bridge to the hereafter; for this very clever man has read the book of another person who considers himself very clever and writes about it: “This beyond of the senses, inhabited by the soul, is what the weighty book by Max Dessoir wants to describe anew, after thousands of thinkers have already entered this path to the afterlife. This time, therefore, it is a philosopher who speaks, who has strived more for knowledge of human nature than for the separation of orphaned schools of thought, an art lover who has not shied away from interpreting the enigmatic moment of an artist's birth, a man who has occasionally searched the bones and nerves of human beings with a knife in his hand in order to find his way through the numerous earthly hiding places of the soul.”

Because Dessoir is so multifaceted in his protection against the rashness of fanatics and the coldness of arrogant rationalists, his judgment on matters of the hereafter, which he has been preparing for more than thirty years, deserves respect and attention even from those who cannot follow him on his path,” and so on.

I had to discuss this individual, Max Dessoir, in the second chapter of my book, “Von Seelenrätseln” (On the Riddles of the Soul), because this university professor had the audacity to discuss anthroposophy as such. I had to undertake the task of proving that the whole way Max Dessoir works is the most unscrupulous, superficial way imaginable. This man has the audacity to pass a disparaging judgment based almost exclusively on nonsensical quotations that he extracts from a few of my books and always quotes in such a way that they are distorted in the most absurd manner. One must state the facts in this way if one wants to see the scandal that is possible within what is today often called science. I have only seen Dessoir once in my life; it was in the early 1990s. At that time, he made a very clever remark to me. My “Philosophy of Freedom” had not yet been written. Max Dessoir said at the time—it was at a Goethe dinner in Weimar: “Yes, you do have one fault, you concern yourself with too many sciences.” That was the great mistake, trying not to be one-sided!

Among the other absurdities that Max Dessoir commits in his book is, for example, that he now refers to my Philosophy of Freedom as my “first work.” It was written about ten years after my actual first work; I had been a writer for ten years before Philosophy of Freedom. All this and much more is equally false in Dessoir's book. How many people will read the necessary, factual refutations in my book Von Seelenrätseln (On the Riddles of the Soul), which show what hot air Dessoir's scholarship is! But how much journalistic rabble of the sort found in Max Hochdorf in Zurich is gathering to trumpet Max Dessoir's nonsensical book Vom Jenseits der Seele (Beyond the Soul) in such a way that one says, “This beyond the senses, which is inhabited by the soul, is what Max Dessoir's weighty book wants to 'Vom Jenseits der Seele' (Beyond the Soul), after thousands of thinkers have already entered this path into the hereafter,” and so on.

It is necessary to focus on such things. It is well known that what is attempted on the basis of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is distorted in the most unprecedented ways here and there, sometimes by people who know very well that the opposite of what they say is true. But these are mostly poor wretches who have been unable to satisfy their personal interests within society, who believed they could satisfy them, and whom one can pity, but about whom there is no need to talk further. And they themselves know best how it stands with the objective truth of what they say. But poison such as that spread by Max Dessoir must be taken more seriously, and I had to do my part to clarify, sentence by sentence, so to speak, the entire philosophical worthlessness of Dessoir's arguments. Until a healthy judgment prevails in the widest circles about such alleged science as that of Max Dessoir—and there are many such Max Dessoirs—and until a healthy judgment prevails about such followers of Max Dessoir, such as the author of this article, who of course cannot resist concluding his article with the words: “Because the path to the afterlife is so completely blocked” — of course, for the blocked mind of this Mr. Max Dessoir, the path to the afterlife is blocked! — ‘people have tried again and again over the millennia to break down the barriers.’ Dessoir calls these fighters for the desperately fixed yet intangible spirit realm ”magical idealists.” He lists them all, these faith healers, apostles of numbers, Egyptian magicians, Negro saints, anthroposophists, neo-Buddhists, Kabbalists, and Hasidim. He is a highly captivating chronicler of all those generations who have submitted to miracles and yet rebelled against them. A peculiar society forms when one lists all the men, wise and foolish, who wanted to gather around the pure spirit. Cagliostro and Kant, Hegel and even the modern sorcerer Svengali meet there as they wander aimlessly on their way to the afterlife.

It is, of course, impossible to prevent people from writing in this way, but in the widest circles a healthy judgment must prevail which prevents what comes into the public domain in this way from being accepted as authoritative. For it goes without saying that thought forms of this kind, spraying around in our social organism, prevent any possibility of beneficial progress for humanity. For oneself, when one has had to attack scientific rubbish such as that of Max Dessoir, one can wash one's hands and declare oneself satisfied. But this scientific rubbish flows and flows, and today there are far too many channels through which this rubbish can flow. Sometimes one has to nail down an example. In this case, it had to be done again, because you can imagine how many people's minds will once again be filled with a judgment about anthroposophy when a feature article such as the one that appeared on December 14, 1917, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung is written by someone who is considered quite clever and who bases his views on someone else who is considered just as clever, namely Max Dessoir!

These things must be regarded as cultural-historical facts, and their cultural-historical significance must be taken into account. Certainly, there is unfortunately only a slight possibility today of bringing something like this chapter I have written, “Max Dessoir on Anthroposophy,” to the attention of the general public. For even in the Anthroposophical Society there is only a small circle that truly understands its task: the task of enlightening humanity about the way science is often practiced today, of enlightening it in the right and proper way. And what is practiced today as science is only a symptom of general thinking. For just as things are in science — of which Max Dessoir, with all his followers, is a glaring example — so they are in other fields. And if you ask the question: What deeper forces have led to today's catastrophe? — you will always remain on the surface if you do not go into these deeper reasons, into what lies in the contortion, in the deliberate contortion and in the deliberate superficiality, charlatanism, a charlatanism that seeks to maintain itself by attributing serious intellectuality precisely to charlatanism. This must be seen in its true form in a healthy sense. I cite the example of Max Dessoir only because it is so obvious. But it is an example of much that exists as negative in our time. If anyone in humanity wants to have a heart for the positive aspects of growing together with the spiritual world, then they must also have a heart for rejection, for strong, heartfelt rejection wherever possible, of the inauthentic, the superficial, the useless.

We are experiencing this very much in our own day, that often those who are portrayed in the worst light in public life are precisely the most decent people. There is no need to view these things with pessimism, but there is a need to seek forces within one's own soul that will produce and nurture a healthy judgment about these things in that soul.]

• 1. The section in brackets was not available in the original translation.

We have often looked back to the views of earlier times, and we want to do so again today, in a certain sense, with the aim of gaining some insights into the history of humanity and human development. When we go back thousands of years in human development, for example to the times we refer to in our terminology as the ancient Indian cultural period, we find that people's way of looking at things was completely different from the way we look at things today, even if we take a period of time that is very far removed from our own. When we go back to those older times, we know that people simply did not see nature as we see it today. People saw nature in such a way that they still perceived spiritual beings directly in everything, in the individual parts of the earth's surface, in mountains and rivers, but also in everything that initially surrounds the earth, in clouds, in light, and so on. It would have been unthinkable for a person of those older times to speak of nature as we do. For they would have felt as we would feel if we were sitting in front of a collection of corpses — the image is somewhat grotesque, but it corresponds quite well to the facts — and then said that we were among human beings. What presents itself to human beings today as nature would have been perceived by people thousands of years before our era as nothing more than the corpse of nature. For they perceived spiritual and soul elements in everything that surrounded them.

We know that when today's humanity hears from poetry or from the messages of myths and legends how it was once believed that spiritual-soul qualities can be found in the source, in the flowing river, in the interior of the mountains, and so on, it believes that the ancients let their imagination run wild and that they were inventing. Well, that is a naive point of view. The ancients did not make things up at all, but they perceived the spiritual and soul just as one perceives colors, as one perceives the movements of tree leaves, and so on. They perceived the spiritual and soul directly, and they would have thought of what we call nature today as merely the corpse of nature. But in a certain sense, some individuals among these ancients strove to gain a different way of looking at things than that which was the general one.

You know, today, when people strive to gain a different view from the usual one, and when they are at all capable of doing so, they become 'studied people', they receive concepts that go beyond what they otherwise see only externally. Then they absorb science, as it is called, into themselves. This science did not exist in the times of which we are now speaking. But there were individuals who aspired to go beyond the general observation, beyond what one knew in everyday life. They just did not study as it is done today. They did certain exercises. These exercises were not like those we speak of today in anthroposophy, but they were exercises that were more closely tied to the human organism in those older times. For example, there were exercises through which the breathing process was trained to do something other than what it is by nature. So they did not sit in laboratories and do experiments, but they did, so to speak, experiments on themselves. They regulated their breathing. For example, they inhaled, held back their breath and tried to experience what happened inside the organism when the breath was altered in this way. These breathing exercises should not be copied today. But they were once a means by which people believed they could come to higher knowledge than they could come to if they simply observed nature with their ordinary perceptions, if they saw external natural things as we see them, but also saw the spiritual and soul-like in all natural things.

When people devoted themselves to such exercises, the nature of which, although in a weakened form, has been preserved in what is described today as yoga exercises from the Orient, when they thus changed their breathing in relation to ordinary breathing, then the spiritual-soul aspect disappeared from the view of the surroundings, and it was precisely through such breathing that nature became for these people as we ourselves see it today. So, in order to see nature as we see it today, such people first had to do exercises in those ancient times. Otherwise, spiritual-soul entities would have leapt out of all the beings around them for them to see. They drove away these spiritual-soul entities by changing their breathing process.

Thus they — if I use the term that is current today for those who aspire so high above the general contemplation — as “learned men” no longer aspired to have nature around them as ensouled and spiritualized, but to have it around them in such a way that they perceived it as a kind of corpse. One could also say that these people felt, as they looked out into nature, as if they were in a surging, billowing, soul-spiritual universe, but they felt within it as a person of the present day would feel when dreaming in vivid images and could hardly wake up from these dreams. That is how they felt. But what did these individuals — let us call them the scholars of that ancient time — achieve when, through such special exercises, they distinguished themselves from this living surging and killed it in contemplation, so that they really felt that they now had a dead, corpse-like thing around them? What did they strive for as a result?

They strove for a stronger sense of self. They strove for something through which they experienced themselves, through which they felt themselves. Today's man says every moment: “I am”. “I” is a word that he uses very frequently from morning till night, because it is natural to him, it is self-evident to him. For these ancient people, it was not a matter of course in their ordinary daily experience to pronounce the “I” or even the “I am”. They had to acquire this. To do so, they first had to do such exercises. And by doing these exercises, they came to such an inner experience that they could say with a certain truth: “I am”. Only by doing this did they come to the awareness of their own being.

So what we take for granted only became an experience for these people when they made an effort in an inner breathing process. They first had to, so to speak, kill the environment for contemplation, to awaken themselves. This is how they came to the conviction that they themselves are, that they could say “I am” to themselves. But with this “I am” they were given something that we take for granted again today. They were given the inner development of the intellectual. Through this they developed the possibility of having an inner, secluded thinking.

If we go back to times when the old oriental views set the tone for civilization, it was the case that people felt a soul nature in their everyday lives, but had a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, did not at all summarize this sense of self in the conviction “I am,” but that individual people who were trained by the mystery schools were led to experience this “I am.” But then they did not experience this “I am” in the way we take it for granted today, but in the moment when they were brought to it through their breathing process, to be able to say “I am” at all out of inner conviction, out of inner experience, they experienced something that even today's man does not really experience at first.

Think back to your childhood: you can only think back to a certain point, then it stops. You were once a baby, but you have no memory of what you experienced as a baby. Your ability to remember ends at some point. You were certainly already there, crawling around on the ground, being caressed by your mother or father. You may have wriggled and moved your hands, but you do not know in your ordinary consciousness what you experienced inwardly at that time. Nevertheless, it was a more active, more intense soul life than later on. For this more intense soul life, for example, has shaped your brain plastically, has permeated your rest of the body and shaped it plastically. There was an intense soul life present, and the old Indian felt transported into this soul life at the same moment that he said to himself, “I am”.

Imagine very vividly what that was like. He did not feel in the present moment when he said to himself “I am”; he felt transported back to his babyhood, he felt the way he felt in his babyhood, and from there he spoke to his whole later life. He did not have the feeling that he now But this was only drawn into this inner being after it had previously lived in the spiritual-soul world. That is, by first transporting himself back to his babyhood through his breathing process, this old Indian yogi became aware of the time before his existence on earth. It seemed to him like a memory. Just as if a person today remembers something that he experienced ten years ago, it was like the occurrence of a memory in the moment when the “I am” shot through the soul, when in this ancient Indian time a person strengthened himself inwardly by breathing exercises and killed the outside world around him, but made it alive, which was not his outside world now, but what the outside world was before man descended into the physical world.

In those days, if I may use a modern expression, which of course sounds infinitely philistine when I use it for those ancient times, one was really lifted out of one's present earthly existence and into the spiritual-soul existence through the study of yoga. One owed one's elevation into the spiritual-soul worlds to one's studies at that time. One had a somewhat different consciousness than we have today. But precisely when one was a yogi in the former sense, one could think – the other people could not think, the other people could only dream – but one thought into the supersensible world, from which one had descended into earthly existence.

This is also a characteristic of the time of the earth's development, which, if we characterize it somewhat roughly, preceded, for example, the Greco-Roman conceptions in the fourth post-Atlantean period. There, the “I am” had already penetrated more into people in their ordinary everyday consciousness. Admittedly, the verb in language at that time still contained the I; it was not yet as separate as it is in our language, but nevertheless there was already a distinct I-experience. This distinct I-experience was now a natural, self-evident fact of the inner life. But in contrast to this, outer nature was already more or less dead. The Greeks, after all, still had the ability to experience the two aspects side by side, and without any special training. They still clearly experienced the spiritual and soul-like in the source, in the river, in the mountain, in the tree, albeit weaker than people of older times. But at the same time, they could also perceive the dead in nature and have a sense of self. This gives the Greeks their special character. The Greek did not yet have the same view of the world as we do. He could develop concepts and ideas about the world like ours, but at the same time he could take those views seriously that were still given in images. He lived differently than we do today. For example, we go to the theater to be entertained. In ancient Greece, people only went to the theater for entertainment in the time of Euripides, if I may put it this way – hardly in the time of Sophocles, and certainly not in the time of Aeschylus or in even older times. In those times, people went to dramatic performances for different reasons. They had a clear sense that spiritual and soulful beings live in everything, in trees and bushes, in springs and rivers. When you experience these spiritual and soulful beings, you have moments in life when you have no strong sense of self. But if you develop this strong sense of self, which the ancients still had to seek through yoga training, and which the Greeks no longer needed to seek through yoga training, then everything around you becomes dead, then you only see, so to speak, the corpse of nature. But in doing so, you consume yourself. They said to themselves: Life consumes the human being. The Greeks felt that merely looking at dead nature was a kind of mental and physical illness. In ancient Greek times, people felt very strongly that the life of the day made them ill, that they needed something to restore their health: and that was tragedy. In order to become healthy, because one felt that one was consuming oneself, that one was making oneself ill in a certain sense, one needed, if one wanted to remain fully human at all, a healing, therefore one went to tragedy. And tragedy was still performed in Askhylos' time in such a way that one perceived the person who created the tragedy, who shaped it, as the physician who, in a certain sense, made the consumed person healthy again. The feelings that were aroused – fear and compassion for the heroes who appeared on stage – had the effect of a medicine. They penetrated the human being, and by overcoming these feelings of fear and compassion, they created a crisis in him, just as a crisis is created in a pneunomia, for example. And by overcoming the crisis, one becomes healthy. So the plays were performed to make people who felt used up as people well again. That was the feeling that was attached to tragedy, to the play, in the older Greek era. And this was because people said to themselves: When you feel your ego, the world is divested of its gods. The play presents the god again, because it was essentially a presentation of the divine world and of fate, which even the gods must endure, thus a presentation of what asserts itself behind the world as spiritual. That was what was presented in the tragedy.

Thus, for the Greeks, art was still a kind of healing process. And in that the first Christians lived according to what was given in the embodiment of Christ in Jesus and what can be contemplated and felt in the Gospels – the death of Christ Jesus, to suffering and crucifixion, to resurrection, to ascension – they felt, to a certain extent, an inner tragedy. That is why they also called Christ, and he was increasingly called the physician, the savior, the great physician of the world. In ancient times, the Greeks sensed this healing quality in his tragedy. Humanity should gradually come to experience and feel the historical, the historically healing in the sight, in the emotional experience of the mystery of Golgotha, the great tragedy of Golgotha.

In ancient Greece, especially in the time before Aeschylus, when what had previously been celebrated only in the darkness of the mysteries had already become more public, people turned to tragedy. What did people see in this older tragedy? The god Dionysus appeared, it was the god Dionysus who worked his way out of the forces of the earth, out of the spiritual earth. The god Dionysus, because he worked his way out of the spiritual forces and up to the surface of the earth, shared in the suffering of the earth. He felt, as a god, in his soul, not in the way it was in the Mystery of Golgotha, also in his body, what it meant to live among beings that go through death. He did not experience death in himself, but he learned to look at it. One sensed that there is the god Dionysus, suffering deeply among human beings because he had to witness all that human beings suffer. There was only one being on the stage, the god Dionysus, the suffering Dionysus, and around him a chorus that spoke and recited so that people could hear what was going on in the mind of the god Dionysus. For that was the very first form of the drama, of the tragedy, that the only really acting person who appeared was the god Dionysus, and around him the choir, which recited what was going on in Dionysus' soul. Only gradually did several persons develop out of the one person who represented the god Dionysus in the older times, and then the later drama out of the one play. Thus the god Dionysus was experienced in the image. And later, as an historical fact in the evolution of humanity, the suffering and dying God, the Christ, was experienced in reality. Once as an historical fact, this was to take place before humanity so that all people could feel what had otherwise been experienced in Greece in the drama. But as humanity lived towards this great historical drama, the drama, which was so sacred in the old grienzeit that one felt in it the saviour, the miracle-working human medicine, was, more and more, I would say, thrown down from its pedestal and became entertainment, as it is already the case with Euripides.

Humanity lived contrary to the times, when it needed something other than having the spiritual world presented to it in images, after nature had been deprived of its soul for viewing. Humanity needed the historical mystery of Golgotha. The ancient yoga student of the Indian period had taken in the breath, held it back in his own body, so to speak, in order to feel in this breathing: The divine impulse of the I lives within you. As yoga students, people experienced God within themselves through the breathing process. Later times came. People no longer experienced the divine impulse within themselves in the breathing process. But they had learned to think, and they said: Through the breath, the soul entered into human beings. The ancient yoga students experienced this. Later humans said: And God breathed the living breath into humans, and they became souls. — The older yoga students experienced this, later humans said it. And by saying this in ancient Hebrew times, people already experienced in a certain abstract sense what they had previously experienced concretely. But people did not look at it in ancient Hebrew times, they looked at it in ancient Greek times. One thing always takes place in one part of the world, another in another part. People no longer experienced God within themselves as the old yoga student did, but instead they experienced the existence of God in human beings in images. And this experience of the existence of God in human beings was very much present in the older Greek drama. But this drama now became a world-historical event. This drama became the mystery of Golgotha. But in return, the image was now discarded. The image became a mere image, just as the process of breathing was now only described in thought. The entire human soul state became different.

Man saw the outer world as dead, and for him it was elementary, natural, that he saw the outer world as dead. He saw it de-deified. He saw himself as the outer world, as the physical outer world, de-deified. But he had the consolation that once, in this de-deified world, the real God had come down, Christ, and had lived in a human being, and through the resurrection had passed into the whole of earthly evolution as the Christ impulse. And so human beings were now able to develop a certain view in the following way. They could say to themselves: I see the world, but it is a corpse. Of course, they did not say this to themselves, for it remained in the unconscious; human beings do not know that they see the world as a corpse. But gradually the image of the corpse on the cross, the dead Christ Jesus, formed in their view. And when one looks at the crucifix, at the dead Christ Jesus, then one has nature. One has the image of nature, that nature in which man is crucified. And if one looks at the one who rose from the grave, who was then experienced by the disciples and by Paul as the Christ living in the world, then one has what was seen in ancient times in the whole of nature. Certainly, in a multiplicity, in many spiritual beings, in gnomes and nymphs, in sylphs and salamanders, in all kinds of other beings of the earthly hierarchies, one saw the divine-spiritual; one saw nature spiritualized and animated. Now, however, people felt the urge, through the intellectualism that was already sprouting, to summarize what was scattered in nature. They summarized it in the dead Christ Jesus on the cross. But in Christ Jesus they see everything that they have lost in outer nature. One sees all spirituality by looking at the fact that Christ, the Spirit of God, rose from this body, conquered death, and now every human soul can participate in His essence. One has lost the ability to see the divine-spiritual in the surroundings of nature. One has gained the ability to find this divine-spiritual in Christ again in view of the mystery of Golgotha.

Such is evolution. What mankind has lost, it has been given back to it in Christ. In what it has lost, it has gained selfishness, the possibility of feeling itself. If nature had not become dead to human contemplation, man would never have come to the experience of “I am”. He has come to the experience “I am”; he could feel himself, inwardly experience himself, but he needed a spiritual outer world. That became the Christ. But the “I am”, the egoity, is built on the corpse of nature.

Paul sensed this. Let us imagine Paul's perception for a moment. All around, the corpse of what people had once seen in ancient times. They saw nature as the body of the divine, the soul-spiritual. Just as we see our fingers, so did these people see mountains. It did not occur to them to think of the mountains as inanimate nature, any more than it occurs to us to think of the finger as an inanimate limb; rather, they said: There is a spiritual-soul element that is the earth; it has limbs, and the mountain is such a limb. — But nature became dead. Man experienced the “I am” within. But he would only stand there as a hermit on the de-spiritualized, de-souled earth if he could not look to the Christ. But this Christ, he must not look at him merely from the outside, so that he remains external; he must now take him up into the I. He must be able to say, by rising above the everyday “I am”: Not I, but the Christ in me. If we were to schematically depict what was there, we could say: Man once sensed nature (green) around him, but this nature everywhere ensouled and spiritualized (red). This was in an older period of human history.

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In later times, man also felt nature, but he felt the possibility of perceiving his own “I am” (yellow) in the face of nature, which had now become soulless. But for this he needed the image of the God present in man, and he felt this in the God Dionysus, who was presented to him in Greek drama.

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In even later times, human beings again felt the soulless nature (green) within themselves, the “I am” (yellow). But the drama becomes fact. On Golgotha, the cross rises. But at the same time, what man had originally lost arises within him and radiates (red) from his own inner being: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

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What did the man of ancient times say? He could not say it, but he experienced it: Not I, but the Divine-Spiritual around me, in me, everywhere. Man has lost this “Divine-Spiritual everywhere, around me, in me”; he has found it again in himself and in a conscious sense he now says the same thing that he originally experienced unconsciously: Not I, but the Christ in me.

The primal fact, unconsciously experienced in the time before man experienced his ego, becomes a conscious fact, an experience of Christ in the human heart, in the human soul.

Do you not see, when you draw such a trivial diagram, the form that the reality must take in ideas? Do you not see the whole world filled with the spirit of Christ, which arises from within the human being, and draws from the cosmos into the human being? And when you realize what significance sunlight has for human beings, how human beings cannot live physically without sunlight, how light surrounds us everywhere, then you will also be able to understand when I tell you that in those older times of which I have spoken today, human beings certainly felt themselves to be light in the light. They felt they belonged to the light. He did not say 'I am', he perceived the sunbeams that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the sunbeams. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because that is where he felt himself. When the light arrived, he felt himself on the waves of light, on the waves of the sun, the sun.

With Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that enters one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. Of course, this comparison of Christ with light is mentioned many times in the Bible, but when anthroposophy wants to draw attention to the fact that one is dealing with a reality, today most people rebel who have “divinity” listed as their faculty in the university directories. They actually reject knowledge of these things. And it is a deeply significant fact that there was once such a theologian in Basel who was also a friend of Nietzsche: Overbeck, who wrote the book on the Christianity of today's theology. With this book, he actually wanted to state as a theologian that one still has Christianity, that at that time, in the 1870s, there was still this Christianity, but that much had already become unchristian, and that in any case, theology was no longer Christian. This is what Professor Overbeck, of the Faculty of Theology at Basel, wanted to prove with his book on the Christianity of today's theology. He was highly successful. And anyone who takes the book seriously will come to the conclusion that there may still be some Christianity today, but modern theology has certainly become unchristian. And there may still be some Christianity today, but when theologians begin to talk about Christ, their words are no longer Christian. These things are just not usually taken seriously enough. But they should be taken seriously, because if they were taken seriously, then one would not only see the necessity of today's anthroposophical work, but one would also see the full significance of anthroposophy. And above all, people would be aware of their responsibility towards contemporary humanity with regard to something like anthroposophical knowledge. For this anthroposophical knowledge should actually underlie all knowledge today. All knowledge, especially social knowledge, should be derived from this anthroposophical knowledge. For by learning that the light of Christ lives in them - Christ in me - by fully experiencing this, they learn to see themselves as something other than what one gets when one sees man only as a corpse of nature. But it is from this view that man belongs to nature that has become a corpse that our antisocial, unsocial present has emerged. And a real view, which in turn can make people brothers and sisters and bring real moral impulses into humanity, can only come about if man penetrates to an understanding of the word: Not I, but the Christ in me — when the Christ is found as an effective force precisely in the dealings from person to person. Without this realization we make no progress. We need this realization, and this realization must be found. If we advance as far as it, then we will also advance beyond it, and our social life will be thoroughly imbued with the Christ.