The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In September and October of this year, we held courses at the Goetheanum in Dornach that attempted to apply the anthroposophical perspective to a wide range of academic subjects and to various areas of practical life. The aim of these college courses was not merely to discuss anthroposophy as such, but rather to bring together experts from a wide range of scientific fields, artists and also practitioners of commercial, industrial and other practical life. was precisely that they should show how the anthroposophical point of view, the anthroposophical way of examining life and the world, can be used to fertilize the most diverse scientific and practical areas of life.

You are aware that today, despite the great triumphs fully recognized by spiritual science, in particular in the field of natural science, the scientist everywhere comes up against certain limits wherever questions arise that cannot be answered at all with the methods and means of observation recognized by official science today. Then one is inclined to say: Well, there we have insurmountable limits to human knowledge, to human cognitive power, and man simply cannot transcend these limits. Anthroposophical spiritual science is intended to show precisely how the research methods, the way of thinking and looking at things, which the more materialistically oriented scientific and life attitude of modern times has brought about, can be fertilized when one moves on to a completely different way of knowing, to a completely different way of looking at things.

And here I touch upon the point that still earns anthroposophy the most opponents and even enemies in the present day. Opposition to anthroposophy does not arise so much from certain logical foundations or from scientifically well-tested objections, but this opposition comes from a quarter that recently - whole books are now appearing, almost every week one, to refute anthroposophy - a licentiate in theology described it in the following way: He said that anthroposophy makes one angry, that it is unpleasant and unsettling. So it is not from logical grounds that a certain antagonism arises, but, one might say, from feeling. And this stems from the fact that anthroposophy does not simply accept the knowledge that has been developed by mankind to date, which is simply structured in such a way that one says: Man has inherited certain abilities for his cognition; he gradually brings these to light through his natural development; through ordinary education he is then further trained to become a useful member of human society - and so on, and so on. With what one acquires on one side, one now also approaches knowledge itself, scientific life. One then tries to develop different methods: methods of observation, methods of experimentation, logical methods, and so on. But if one looks at the whole methodology of today's science, it is based on the assumption that one has once achieved something in the normal in terms of cognitive power, and that is not exceeded. No matter how much one is armed with the microscope, the telescope, the X-ray apparatus and so on, one does not go beyond a certain level of cognitive ability, which is regarded today as the average human being. Scientific progress is made by developing this ordinary method of knowledge in a complicated way or in exact detail, but above all, it is not thought of in the way that anthroposophy does. It starts from what I would call 'intellectual modesty'. And that is precisely where it becomes provocative for people of the present day, who, to a certain extent, do not want to hear anything like that from the outset. But one cannot help but present the facts in an unembellished way.

You see, if a five-year-old child is given a volume of Goethe's poetry, all they might know how to do with it is tear it up. When the child is ten years older, they will do something completely different with the volume of Goethe's poetry. They will delve into what is written on the individual pages. Something has grown with the child. The child has matured. The child has brought forth from its depths something that was not there ten years ago. A real, not merely a logical process has taken place. The child has, as it were, become a different being.

Intellectual modesty, I said, must be shown by anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense. At a certain moment in their lives, they must be able to say to themselves: just as a real process takes place with the child between the ages of five and fifteen, and just as soul forces that have not revealed themselves before actually do so after ten years, so can one further develop what the cognitive faculty and the soul forces are in ordinary life. One can move away from the scientific point of view that one once accepts as the normal one; one can undergo a real process in one's knowledge. One can also develop further that which most people today already regard as the end of the cognitive faculty and at most further develop in science logically or through experimental arrangements - one can develop this further by bringing forth further powers from within the soul. And the anthroposophical method is based on this bringing forth of the forces slumbering in the soul. It is based on the fact - I will characterize it quite concretely right away - that one completely subordinates to the will that which otherwise exists as thinking merely in reference to the external world.

So how do we actually think in everyday life? How do we think in science? We think in science in such a way that we abandon ourselves to the external world or to our experiences. We think, so to speak, along the thread of our experiences or of appearances. To a certain extent we apply our will to our thinking, in judgment and in drawing conclusions; but something entirely different arises when that which otherwise lives only instinctively as a thought in man, when that, if I may use the comparison, is taken up by man inwardly in self-education into his hand.

When a person has practised for years the art of placing easily comprehended ideas in his consciousness, when he has brought certain ideas (and I emphasize the term “easily comprehended”) into the centre of his consciousness entirely through his own will and not through stimuli from the outside world, and when he has then, again with the application of his full will, on such inner visualization, inwardly resting, diverting attention from everything else and inwardly resting on a complex of ideas that he himself has placed at the center of his consciousness, he can exercise the powers of the soul in a different way than one does in ordinary life and also in science. And just as a muscle acquires a certain strength when it is exercised, so the soul powers acquire a definite power through exercise. They are trained in a very definite direction when one applies these inner methods, these intimate soul methods that I have described, to oneself as a spiritual researcher. I have described these methods in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', in my 'Occult Science' and in other books; there one can read in full detail what I now only want to characterize in principle. I have called meditation and concentration that which the soul undertakes with itself, which is an inward, intimate spiritual-scientific method. But I would like to make it very clear that these things cannot be mastered in a short time. It is rather the case that spiritual scientific research takes no less time than research in clinics, in chemical laboratories or at the observatory. Just as in these fields one must acquire methods through years of practice, so too must one, and with a strong inner power of concentration, greater conscientiousness, still bring the soul faculties out of the soul itself.

And then, when such methods are applied to the soul, the capacity for knowledge expands. Then one certainly comes to see how man can recognize quite different things than he can perceive through his sensory eyes and through the combination of appearances presented by the sensory eyes or the senses in general.

That is one way. It goes through concentration, through the power of imagination, and through this one arrives at inner beholding, at what I have called in my book 'Mysteries of the Soul', the human being's power of beholding, of beholding cognition.

One can also develop the soul powers in another way, indeed one must do so if one really wants to achieve something. We must also train that faculty, which you all know well in its simplest manifestation: attention. We do not relate to external life and internal phenomena merely by surrendering to them passively, but we direct our power of observation, our attention, to something in particular, which I might call, we carve out of our surroundings. Even when we are doing scientific research, we have to focus on something in particular and link the other things to it. Then, when you train this attentiveness through inner will, through the application of the most active soul powers, when you do exercises that make you aware of the power you use when you pay attention to something, when one practices this power of focusing, this ability to concentrate one's soul life on something isolated from life, over and over again, then one makes a remarkable discovery. Then one makes the discovery that one gradually develops more and more the soul power that otherwise only comes to us in what we call interest in the world around us. We pay more or less interest to the one object and less to the other. This reveals a gradation in our soul's behavior towards the inner world. This interest is accompanied by an enormous liveliness; it becomes such a liveliness that one can truly say: it becomes something quite different from what it is in ordinary life and in science. It becomes what one can call: one feels at one with things. The soul's powers gradually permeate the essence of things. And this experience of an increased power of interest goes even further. It now goes so far as to develop a special power that is otherwise only brought to bear in another area of life, but which, through anthroposophical spiritual science, becomes a power of knowledge.

We have arrived at a point where, if we express the realities that are within Anthroposophy and reveal themselves as such, we are quite understandably considered to be amateurs or fantasists when compared to the views of today. What at first is attention in itself is transformed into the power of interest with which one experiences so clearly how the whole human being can be drawn out of the world; how one does not first have to prove and hypothesize whether this or that wave vibration underlies red or blue, but rather one grows with red and blue; where that is further developed, which Goethe so ingeniously developed in the chapter “Sensual-moral effect of color” in his theory of colors, where man really feels his soul life flowing out into the world, so that his cognitive faculty becomes like a flowing out of his soul life into the world phenomena. And his power of knowledge is transformed into that which we otherwise call love in life. Love, through which we become one with another being, is present in ordinary life, I would say only in its beginning; through the soul exercises I have indicated, it becomes such a soul power that recognizes itself in the whole environment.

And so one can say – I can only hint at all this, in my books it is presented in more detail – by developing the imagination on the one hand, and on the other hand the power of attention, the power of interest, the power of love, which underlie the life of the will, new powers of knowledge develop, and the human being experiences an expansion of his knowledge. What is otherwise called the limit of knowledge and what is often described as insurmountable, especially by contemporary researchers, can only be transcended through the development of the soul's inner powers - not by arming the eye with the microscope and telescope or with the X-ray apparatus, but only by training the human soul itself, by developing that power of knowledge that takes us beyond the sensual and the combination of the sensual through the mind. What now reveals itself to the human being is not a second edition of the sensory world, but the real spiritual world. And by awakening in this way what works in him supernaturally as spiritual life – for that is awakened by these two powers that I have mentioned – by awakening this in himself and bringing it to real exactness, in a way that otherwise only mathematics can achieve, he is led beyond the world of the senses, not through speculation about atoms and molecules, but through direct experience and observation of what the senses present. And man comes to recognize that which underlies him as a supersensible world just as his physical body underlies him as a physical thing. Man comes to know the spiritual world.

The anthroposophical spiritual science that emanates from the Goetheanum in Dornach is not to be confused with the many attempts today to study the mind by imitating the methods that are otherwise used in laboratories. There are certain people — just think of spiritualism — who believe that today, through external actions, through external experiments, they can penetrate deeper into the essence of things; they would like to recognize the supersensible through sensory research. That is precisely the essential point: that the supersensible can only be recognized with supersensible powers. And since these supersensible powers are slumbering in man at first - because, as he is once constituted between birth and death, he must first become proficient in the sensory world - he must get to know through the development of supersensible powers that which goes beyond death and birth, that which belonged to him even before he entered into this existence through birth, that which he retains when he passes through the gate of death.

I will just briefly mention how, in fact, when man penetrates to this supersensible faculty of knowledge, regions are opened up that cannot be opened up in any other way, namely, precisely that which is beyond birth and beyond death. Today it is almost entirely left to the faith of the creeds to teach people anything about what is beyond death. But even our language testifies to the fact that we are actually proceeding in a fundamentally one-sided way in this respect. We have the word 'immortality'. Admittedly, it does not come from knowledge, but from faith. But this immortality only wants to speak of the life that is beyond death. Spiritual science shows, by opening up the supersensible worlds, that man was also present in the spiritual world before birth, or let us say before conception. And the fact that we do not have the word “unborn” testifies that we have not recognized a real spiritual science in the present. As soon as man penetrates into the supersensible world through knowledge, not merely through faith, not only the prospect of the immortality of his being opens up to him, but also of the unborn of his being.

I can only briefly touch on all this, because my task today is to show how this anthroposophical spiritual science – which is intended to be modelled on a very exact science, but which is also taken entirely from the human soul: mathematics – can actually lead to cognitive insights into spiritual and supersensible life. We draw mathematics from the inner being, and if one person is familiar with the Pythagorean theorem, thousands or millions of people could come and deny it, he would know the truth of the mathematical field simply by having this content in his consciousness. It is the same with the inner experiences of the supersensible, as they come to light through spiritual science. This spiritual science is already developed in many details today, and, as I indicated in my introduction, it can have a fruitful effect on individual sciences as well as on practical life. Although this spiritual science is already being actively researched in the field of medical therapy, for example, I myself held a course for doctors and medical students in Dornach this spring, in which I tried to show how spiritual scientific observations can lead to a much more rational therapy than the one we have today.

We have also founded institutions for practical life, such as the Futurum in Dornach, which is intended to be a purely practical undertaking and to found an association in which various branches of industry are united in order to make further progress in rational administration than time has brought us, which has led us so much into an economic catastrophe. Everything in practical life today testifies that humanity is at a boundary that must be crossed.

Now, I do not have to spread out today over the other areas in which spiritual science is already proving its fertility through the practice of life itself; I have to speak primarily about the fertilization that education, the pedagogical art, can experience through this spiritual science.

First of all, it should be noted that the knowledge and understanding that is gained in the way I have just described is not the kind that has been brought to humanity in particular in the last three to four centuries. This knowledge of the last three to four centuries, although based on experiment and observation, is essentially knowledge that is developed by the intellect and speaks only to the intellect. It is essentially head knowledge. The knowledge and insight that is gained through anthroposophical spiritual science speaks to the whole person. It not only engages the intellect, but it spreads out in such a way that what can be recognized there also permeates our emotional life. We do not draw a conclusion from our feelings — that would be an ambiguity, a nebulous mysticism. Knowledge is attained through vision. But what is attained in this way then has an effect on the human emotional life, it stimulates the human will, it leads the human being to develop this knowledge, this insight, into their daily life, so that it permeates them like a soul blood, which in turn communicates itself to the physical body's functions, impulses and practical life. And so we can say that the whole human being is affected.

And it is precisely for this reason that this anthroposophical spiritual science, when it permeates the individual, is a foundation for what the educator, the teacher, has as a task in relation to the developing human being. As you know, it is always emphasized today that the art of education must be based on psychology, on the study of the soul. But if we look around at what is considered psychology by our contemporaries, we have to say that the many judgments and discussions that take place show how much it is all just empty words, how little this contemporary science, which has achieved such great triumphs in its research into the external world, can penetrate into the actual knowledge of the human being. This is the peculiarity of anthroposophical spiritual science: it does not acquire this knowledge through external experimental psychology – although nothing should be said against this, because its results only become truly fruitful when they are also fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. What one must penetrate in the science of the soul, if one wants to become an educator, a teacher, one acquires by allowing oneself to be seized by anthroposophical spiritual science. One learns to recognize what actually lives in the human being as body, soul and spirit when one approaches the anthroposophical methods and through them inwardly grasps the human being.

I have already described how anthroposophical spiritual science strives to inwardly grasp what lives in our environment by means of its special methods of knowledge. But we must penetrate to the core of the human being, especially if we want to treat him pedagogically. And here it is a matter of the fact that our time cannot at all build a bridge between the soul-spiritual on the one hand and the physical-bodily on the other. All manner of psychological hypotheses have been put forward, ranging from the interaction of body and soul to 'psychophysical parallelism', in order to explain the mystery that lies before us in the relationship between body and soul or the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. But our psychology, because it does not use spiritual scientific methods for research, is not at all so far advanced that it could provide any basis for real pedagogy, for the real art of teaching. And I must point out something here that I only hinted at in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' ('On Soul Mysteries'), but which is the result of thirty years of research by me. I would not have allowed myself to express it earlier, what I now have to say and what I hinted at in that book after thirty years of research. It is that today it is commonly believed that mental life is mediated only by the nervous system. The nervous system is regarded as the sole physical basis of human mental life. It is not! It can be shown in detail – and I have also hinted at such details in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' – that only what we call the life of thinking has the nerve sense system as its physical basis and that the actual organ of the life of feeling in man is not the nerve sense system, but directly the rhythmic system, the respiratory system, the blood circulation system. Just as the nervous system underlies the life of thinking, so the rhythmic system underlies the life of feeling in the human being, and the life of will is based on the metabolic system.

These three systems, however, comprise all the inner processes that a person undergoes. The human being is a threefold creature. But we must not imagine that these three parts of the human being - the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic system - are juxtaposed. No, they are interwoven, and we have to separate them from each other in a spiritual-soul-like way if we want to see through the essence of the human being at all; because, of course, the nerves also need to be nourished. The metabolic system also plays a role in the nervous system, and also in the organs of the rhythmic system; but the organs of the rhythmic system serve only the will insofar as the metabolism plays a role in them; whereas insofar as they represent actual rhythmic movements, they serve the emotional life. And again, when our rhythmic being encounters something, when our breathing rhythm, for example, encounters our nervous system indirectly through the cerebral fluid, the interaction between the life of feeling and of imagination arises. In short, the human being is a more complex creature than is usually believed. Even that which one can ultimately have as the correct physical view of a person cannot be achieved with today's scientific methods, but only through inner vision, through growing together with the person himself in such an insight as I have described.

When one grows together with the being of a person in this way, when one sees the soul's activity in the physical body, then the growing person also presents himself in a new light. For someone who does not grasp things with a sober, dry intellect, but who can recognize the world through feeling, the growing child is a wonderful mystery as it reveals more and more of its inner life from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year. That which we cannot observe merely with the abstract faculty of knowledge, that which we can only observe if we ourselves can inwardly immerse ourselves in what is revealed on the face, what is revealed in the movements, what is revealed in the development of speech and so on, that can only be truly grasped with a knowledge that inwardly penetrates the outer world.

And such knowledge reaches us not only by grasping our intellect – with this intellect we then want to recognize externally the tasks that we should apply to educate and teach the child – no, anthroposophical spiritual science encompasses the whole human being. And in that it reveals the developing child to the whole human being in the interaction of body, soul and spirit, anthroposophical knowledge permeates our minds and our will — I would say in a way that is as natural as the blood, enlivened by the breath, permeates the human body. We are not only inwardly connected with the child through our intellect, we are also connected through our soul. We are connected through our will, in that we know directly: when we recognize how the child develops, we know what we have to do in this or that year of the child's development. Just as the air sets our blood in motion, just as the organism comes into its functions through what the outside world invigorates in it, just as it is seized by what the outside world accomplishes in it, so our soul and spirit are seized by such a living knowledge as we receive through anthroposophical spiritual science. And then, that which is developing within the human being as his individuality reveals itself to us, and we learn in an inward way to treat this individuality in an educational and teaching way.

Do not expect anthroposophical spiritual science to establish new educational principles. Educational principles, beautiful ones – I am completely serious when I say this – deeply penetrating pedagogical rules: the great educators have found them, and no spiritual science would dare to object to the genius of the great educators of the 18th and 19th centuries. But there is something here that needs to be pointed out very clearly.

You see, people say today, and have been saying for decades, that education should not be about just introducing something to the child; rather, one should develop what is in the child, his or her inner individuality. One should draw everything out of the child. In an abstract form, spiritual science must also say this. But precisely for this reason, spiritual science is misunderstood. If I want to make myself understood, I would like to recall something that I am using for comparison. It was in 1858 when the socialist Proudhon was accused of disrupting society. After the judges had reproached him with various things, he said that it was not at all his aim to disrupt human society, but rather to lead human society towards better conditions. The judges then said: Yes, that is what we all want, we want exactly the same as you. So spiritual science says: We want to develop human individuality. It has also been said in a certain abstract form for a long time that human individuality should be developed. But the point at issue is not to express such a principle in abstract forms; the point at issue is to really see this human individuality developing in a living contemplation, to really grasp the human being inwardly.

And now I would like to illustrate how the developing human being presents himself to spiritual science. First of all, we have clearly definable stages of life in a human being. We have a stage of life that begins at birth and lasts until about the age of seven, when the teeth change. Then, if one is able to observe correctly, a very intense change takes place in the human being – physically, mentally and spiritually. Then the development continues again until about sexual maturity, when a new change takes place. Within these individual stages of life, there are smaller stages. I would like to say that in each of these stages, we can distinguish three smaller stages that can only be properly obtained through observation that penetrates into the inner being of the human being. That is what it is about. Because what we want to know about the human being is at the same time the driving force for pedagogy, in that pedagogy should become art.

First of all, the first phase of life up to the age of seven shows us, above all, how the human being, as a spiritual, soulful and bodily creature, is entirely inclined to be an imitative being. If you study the human being in this phase of life and see how strongly he is predisposed to devote himself entirely to his surroundings, to carry out within himself what is presented to him in his surroundings, then you understand the human being. But one must be able to observe this concretely. One must then see how, for example, in the first two and a quarter years of life - these are, of course, all approximate figures - what occurs in the human being does not yet show itself as a real imitation, how organizing forces prevail inwardly, but But then, as the human being progresses in the third year of life, they show themselves in such a way that the human being becomes more attentive to his fellow human beings with these forces, so to speak directing these forces to what emanates from his fellow human beings. And then, around the fifth year, the time begins when the human being actually becomes an imitative being. And now one must be able to observe in the right intimate way what the relationship is like from person to person, and thus also between educator and child. One must know that this is profound for the whole human development, that this phase of life tends towards imitation.

For those who work with such things, I would say professionally, some of the complaints of a mother or father, for example, are on a par with that. They come and say: my child has stolen! - Well, one asks: Yes, what has the child actually done? He opened the drawer in the cupboard, took out some money, and - I am telling you a specific case - didn't even use this money to buy something for himself, but even distributed what he had bought among his fellow pupils! You have to say: Yes, my dear woman, at this age it cannot be called theft at all, because the child has clearly seen how you go to the cupboard every day and open the drawer; the child has done nothing other than try to do the same. It imitates that. In the first seven years, there is no other way to approach the child than to set an example for the child and let it imitate intimately what is to be brought to the child through education. Therefore, it is of such great importance for the first seven years of life that the educator, the parents, not only act as role models for the child in their outer actions, so that everything can be imitated, but that they also think and feel only what the child can think and feel. There is no boundary between the person with the child in his or her environment and the child itself. Through mysterious powers, our innermost thoughts are also transferred to the child. A person who is moral, who is truthful, makes different movements, has a different expression, walks differently than a person who is untruthful. This is something in the outer appearance, which is completely blurred in later life – but it is there for the child. The child does not merely see the morality of those around it through its ideas, but the child sees, through its movements, not with intellectual knowledge but through a subconscious knowledge that rests deep within, if I may use the paradoxical word, from mysterious hints in the way the person expresses themselves, what it should imitate. There are imponderables not only in nature, but also in human life.

Then, when the child has passed the age of imitation, what the child brings to school comes into play, and here it is particularly important to ensure that teaching and education really do help the developing human being to grow in terms of his or her individuality, humanity and human dignity. We have already made a practical attempt in this direction. The Waldorf School has existed for more than a year in Stuttgart, and there the lessons are taught entirely according to the principles that arise from this anthroposophical worldview and scientific method.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart is not a school of any particular worldview. We are not interested in introducing anthroposophy to children in the same way that we would a religion. Oh no, that is not what we consider to be the main focus. We leave the parents and the children themselves entirely free, because it could not be otherwise in the present situation. Those who wish to be taught in the Protestant faith are taught by the Protestant pastor, those who wish to be taught in the Catholic faith are taught by the Catholic pastor; those who wish to have free religious education in line with their parents' beliefs or their own will receive such education from us. We cannot help the fact that the number of the latter - but not by our will, but in accordance with the current circumstances - is overwhelmingly large, especially in the Waldorf School. We have no interest in making the Waldorf school a school of direct world view, but we want to let what the anthroposophical knowledge gives flow into the art of education, into the practice of this educational art. How we do it with the child, not what we bring to the child, that is what matters to us.

And so we see that, as the child passes the change of teeth and crosses a significant point in life, the power of imitation continues to have an effect into the seventh or eighth year. The power of imitation continues to have an effect until about the age of eight. It is particularly strong in the child during this time, which is an element of will in the human being.

When a child starts school, we should not focus on the intellectual side of things, but rather take the whole person into account. I would like to explain this in relation to something specific. We take this into account in Waldorf schools. We don't start by teaching children to write by teaching them the letters of the alphabet. These letters, as they are written today, actually only speak to the intellect. They have become conventional signs. The head has to be strained on one side. We therefore teach writing by starting from drawing or even from painting visible forms. We first introduce the child to something that is artistic and then develop the forms of the letters from the artistic, from drawing, from painting. It is not so important to go back to the study of primitive peoples and their writing, which has developed in a similar way. Rather, one can trace the individual letters back to what one can make of them in terms of painting and drawing. But the essential thing is that one methodically starts from that which takes hold of the whole person, which is not just to be thought about, but where the will comes to expression. In what the child accomplishes through painting, the whole human being lives, so to speak, the whole human being becomes one with what the child can create. Then, on the one hand, what should interest the head can also be developed from what engages the whole person.

So we start from that which initially affects the child's will. And even what is expressed in an intellectualistic way in writing lessons, we first develop out of the will. Then the soul is particularly involved. The child feels something by first developing the form, and then letting the forms merge into the existing signs. Only then do we develop reading more out of what writing has become. So that, as I said, we appeal to the whole person, not just to the head. And it becomes clear when we carry out something like this, what a difference it makes whether you simply teach people from the point of view of the current external social life in that to which they have no reference, or bring them to that which you extract from their inner whole person, which is inherent in them.

During this time from the age of seven to sexual maturity, we see how the child's inner development is not focused on imitation – which continues to play a role until after the age of eight with the particular application of the will – but we now gradually see a completely different force entering the child's life. This is what I would call the natural sense of authority. This is something that is perhaps more or less mentioned today, but it is not properly considered. Just as a plant must have its growth forces if it is to develop flowers at a certain time and in a certain way, so the child must develop an elementary sense of authority within itself from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, because this belongs to its physical, mental and spiritual growth forces. It must rely on the teacher and educator, and it must accept the things that it then believes, that then approach it, that become the content of its feeling, its will, it must accept them, just as it in imitation, now it must accept them on the basis that it sees them in the behavior of the teacher, that it hears them expressed by the educator, and that the child looks up to its educator in such a way that what lives in the educator is a guiding force for it. This is not something that one can hope for through anything else, let us say in a more free-spirited time than today, which one is supposed to long for. No, one cannot replace what simply grows up with us through this elementary sense of authority, through devotion to the educator or instructor, with anything else. And throughout one's entire life, it has an enormous significance whether, between the ages of seven and fourteen, one has been at the side of teachers or educators in relation to whom one has developed a natural sense of authority.

This touches on a point where the materialistic view goes too far astray, for example when it says: after all, what does the individuality of the teacher do in its effect on the child! We should teach the child primarily through observation; we should lead it to think and feel for itself. I need hardly say that in some methods this has been reduced to the absurdity that we should only bring to the child what it already understands, so that it can analyze it in its own observations. I would like to draw attention to the following: In this phase of life, which I am now talking about, it is of particular importance what we accept on authority, what we take in out of a sense of authority, even if we do not immediately understand it, and that we do not just acquire what is tangible. For just as willpower underlies the imitation instinct in the first seven years of life, so between the seventh year and the year of sexual maturity everything that is memorized underlies the child's expressions. The child wants to memorize things under the influence of the sense of authority. And precisely what is said against the memory-based appropriation shows that, basically, all possible life practices are built on theories today, without taking the whole of human life into account.

Those who want to trace everything back to intuition fail to take two things into account: firstly, there are very broad areas of the world that cannot be made vivid. These are the realms of the beautiful; but above all, they are the moral and religious realms. Those who want to base everything on intuition do not take into account the fact that the most valuable thing, without which man cannot be, the moral and religious and its impulses, cannot be brought to man intuitively - especially not in these years of life - but that it must take hold of man supersensibly. In these years of life, when it is time, it can only do so through a sense of authority. That is one thing.

The other thing, however, is this. If you look at the whole of human life, not just a period of life in theory, then you know what it means when you are thirty-five or forty years old and look back on something you experienced in childhood, assuming it without understanding it at the time, because you said to yourself: the person who lives next to you as a teacher knows, it must be so. You accept it. You are in much older decades – it comes up again. Now you are mature enough to understand it. It has become a force of life. It is a wonderful thing in human life when you see something emerging from the depths of the human soul, for which you are ripe in later human life, but which has already been implanted in youth. It is a remedy against growing old; it is a life force. One has an enormous amount of what one has absorbed in childhood.

It is not a matter of demanding something out of some prejudice, of taking something on the authority of someone else, or of accepting something literally on mere authority, but it is a matter of demanding this for the sake of human salvation. Why do people today grow old so quickly? Because they have no life forces within them. We must know in detail what forces we must implant in the child if we want to see these forces emerge in a rejuvenating way in the later decades of life.

I will now give another example. Anyone who has a good understanding of how children play in the first years of life, up to around the age of five, and who pleasantly arranges their play according to the child's individuality, prepares something in the child that will in turn be expressed in much later life. To do this, one must understand human life in its totality. The botanist looks at the plant in its totality. What today wants to be “psychology” only ever looks at the moment. Anyone who observes a person at around the ages of twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight – or a little earlier – when they are supposed to find their way into life experience, find a relationship with life practice, become a skillful person, a purposeful person, anyone who can be properly and accurately observed, it can be seen how, in childhood play — between birth and about five years of age — the nature of the playing has announced the way in which, in one's twenties, the person finds their way into life as a practical person, as a skillful, purposeful person. In earliest childhood we bring forth what later comes as a flower, I might say at the root of development. But this must be understood from such an inner knowledge as anthroposophy offers, which delves into human nature. This must be recognized by observing the whole human being. We must, so to speak, if we want to be teachers and educators, feel the whole burden of the human being on us. We must feel what we can learn from each individual, what we can find in the child.

And so we know that up to the age of nine, a child cannot yet distinguish between subject and object in the right way. The outer world merges with the inner. Therefore, in these years, only that which lives, I would say, more in the form of fantasy, in images, should be brought to the child – so [should] everything [be designed] that one wants to bring as teaching in these years. Observation of plants, simple natural science, history can only be taught to the child from the ninth year onwards. Physical or historical facts that are not biographical but concern the context of historical epochs can only be taught to children after the age of twelve because only then can they be built upon something related in the child's nature. And again, one should not stick to the abstract principle of developing individuality, but one must really be able to observe this individuality from week to week.

This has proved to be a fruitful method in Waldorf schools and must be so by its very nature. When the teacher is imbued and enkindled by all that can be awakened in his soul and will, he enters into a quite different relationship with his pupils. I will again make this clear by means of an example. It is not only the rough line that extends from the educator to the child or from the teacher to the child, which is the result of the external materialistic way of observing, but there are always imponderables at play. Let us assume that the child is to be taught the idea of immortality at a suitable age. Now this idea of immortality can be very easily conveyed in pictures, and up to the age of nine one should actually teach quite pictorially. Everything should be transformed into pictures. But if you first develop the picture with your mind, if you proceed abstractly in developing the picture, then you do not stand in the picture. For example, you can say to a child: Look at a butterfly chrysalis; the butterfly crawls out of the chrysalis. Just as the butterfly visibly crawls out of the butterfly chrysalis here, so the human being's immortal soul escapes from the body. But if I have first created this image from my inner abstraction, if I am not present myself, if I am only adjusting everything for the child, I am not teaching the child anything. It is a peculiar secret that when one regards the whole of nature as spiritualized, as is natural in spiritual science, one does not merely adjust the image, but knows: What higher level than immortality is not conceived by my intellect but is modeled on things themselves; for example, the butterfly struggling out of its chrysalis is an image presented by nature itself. I believe in what I tell the child. I am of the same faith and conviction that I wish to instill in the child. Anyone who is observant can see that it makes a completely different impression on the child if I teach it a belief that I can believe in myself, that I do not merely present to the child intellectually and have stated because I am so clever and the child is still so stupid.

This shows what imponderables are at play. And I would like to mention one more thing. During the time at primary school, the situation is such that, initially, up to about the age of nine, what remains is the tendency to imitate what the predominant will is. But then something occurs for the child that teaches it to distinguish itself from its environment. Anyone who is really able to observe children knows that it is only between the ages of nine and ten that the child really begins to distinguish between subject and object, between itself and its environment. Everything must be organized with this in mind. But one would look at many things in life differently than one does, and in particular shape them differently than one does, if one were to see that in the same phase of life in which the child between the ages of nine and ten really learns to distinguish between its surroundings, in this phase of life it is indispensable for the whole moral life of the human being in the future that he can attach himself with the highest respect and with the highest sense of authority to someone who is his teacher or educator.

If a child crosses this Rubicon between the ages of nine and ten without this feeling, it will have a deficiency in its whole life and can later, at best with great effort, conquer from life itself what should be transmitted to the child in a natural way at this point in life. Therefore, we should organize our education and teaching in such a way that, especially in the class where the child crosses the Rubicon between the ninth and tenth year, we stand before the child in such a way that we really have something to offer the child through our own inner morality, through what we have in the way of inner truthfulness, of inner soul content, we can really be something for the child, that we do not just act as a model for it, that everything we say to it is felt by it as the truth. And one must establish in it the feeling that must exist in social life between the maturing child and the adult and the old person. The fact that this child goes through its reverence at this point in life between the ages of nine and ten is also the basis of what moral religious education is. Developing intellectuality too early, not taking into account the fact that the will must be influenced by images – especially from primary school onwards – and that one must not immediately penetrate into the abstract of writing and reading , nor does such an understanding of the human being provide those feelings and sensations that become useful when we want to teach the child moral maxims, ethical principles, when we want to instill religious feelings in it. They do not take effect later, nor do they work through a sense of authority, if we are not able to use the individual predisposition of the whole human being from the age of seven, for example, from the age of seven.

And so we can follow the development of the child in a very real way. Teachers and educators become pedagogical artists when they allow the knowledge they can gain about the human being through anthroposophical spiritual science to take effect in them. We do not want to create new, abstract educational principles, but we do believe that the human being's entire personality is stimulated by what anthroposophy can give as a spiritual-soul breath of life. Just as blood invigorates the organism as a matter of course, so spiritual science should invigorate those whose profession it is to educate and teach in such a way that they truly become one with the child and education and teaching become a matter of course. We would like those who enter the gates of their class to do so with such an attitude before the children in the Waldorf school.

Not because we want to add our two cents in every possible field, we also talk about pedagogical art, we also cultivate pedagogical art, but because we have to believe from our insights that a new fertilization is actually also necessary there. The phenomena of life have led to such terrible times that they demand a new fertilization. Not out of some foolish attitude or ideology, or because it wants to agitate for something, but out of the realization of the true needs of our time, anthroposophy also wants to have a fertilizing effect on the art of education. It wants to understand and feel correctly that which must underlie all real education and all real teaching. A true sense of this can be summarized in the words with which I want to conclude today, because I believe that if anthroposophy shows that it has an understanding for these words, the most inner, truest understanding, one will also not deny it its calling to speak into the pedagogical art, into the science of education. She does not want this out of some revolutionary sentiment, she wants this out of the needs of the time, and she wants this out of the great truths of humanity, which lie in the fact that one says: Oh, in the hand of the educator, in the hand of the teacher, the future of humanity, the near future, the future of the next generation, is given. The way in which education is provided, the way in which the human being is introduced to life as a becoming, depends, firstly, on the inner harmonious strength with which he can lead his life to his inner satisfaction as an individual. And this determines how he will become a useful and beneficial member of human society. A human being can only fulfill his destiny if, first, he has inner harmony and strength, so that he cannot be complacent about himself, but can always draw from this harmony the strength to work, the strength to be active and to feelings for his surroundings, and if, on the other hand, through his diligence, through his growing together with the needs of the time and the humanity surrounding him, he is a useful, a salutarily effective member of the whole of society. Anthroposophical spiritual science would like to contribute to making him such, for the reason that it believes that one can find a very special understanding of the human being in its way and thereby also a very special art of treating people.

Answering Questions

Rudolf Steiner: First of all, a written question has been received:

In what way should the individuality of the child be influenced by play?

The spiritual science referred to here should be completely realistic and never work as an abstraction and from theories; therefore, those questions that one is otherwise accustomed to answering, I might say, briefly, in a nutshell, cannot be answered briefly for spiritual science. But one can always point to the direction in which spiritual science sees. One will indeed come across it in the play of the youngest children. Play is most characteristic up to about the age of five. Of course children play afterwards too, but then all kinds of other things get mixed into the game, and the game loses the character, completely, I would like to say, of flowing out of the arbitrariness of the inner being. Now, if you want to guide the game appropriately, you will, above all, have to keep an eye out for what is called the child's temperament and other things that are related to temperament. The usual approach is to think that a child who, for example, shows a phlegmatic character should be guided towards the right path by something particularly lively that will excite them; or a child who shows a tendency towards a more introverted nature, such as a melancholic temperament – even if this does not yet appear in the child as such, but it may be there in the disposition – one would like to bring it, in turn, onto the right path by means of something uplifting. This is basically, especially as far as play is concerned, not very well thought out, but on the contrary, it is a matter of trying to study the child's basic character – let us say whether he is a slow or a quick child – and then one should also try to adapt the game to this. So, for a child who is slow, one should try to maintain a slow pace in the game, too, and for a child who is quick, maintain a quick pace in the game and only seek a gradual transition. One should give the child just what flows from his inner being. The worst educational mistakes are made precisely because one thinks that the same should not be treated the same, but the opposite should be treated by the opposite. There is one thing that is always particularly missed.

There are excited children. Of course, you want to calm these excited children down, and you think that if you buy them toys in darker colors, i.e., the less exciting colors, blue and the like, or if you buy them clothes in blue, it would be good for the child. In my little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science', I pointed out that this is not the case, that one should make the toys reddish for the excited child, and blue and violet for the careless child, the child who is not lively. Through all these things one will find out what is suitable for the child according to his or her particular individual disposition. There is an extraordinary amount to be considered. You see, it is commonly believed – as I said – that if you have a lively child, too lively a child, you should approach him with dark colors, with blue or violet; but you can see for yourself that if you look at red, at a red surface, and then look away at a white one, you have the tendency to see the so-called complementary color as a subjective form. So it is the complementary color that is inwardly stimulated. The dark colors are inwardly experienced by the light ones. Therefore, when a child is excited, it is good to keep its toys and clothes in light colors so that it is inwardly stimulated. So these things, too, may only be considered in such a way that one penetrates, as it were, into the inner nature of human nature and being.

Then I would like to point out that, as a rule, one does not meet the individuality of a child, or any individuality at all, if one listens too intently to the combinative aspects of the games. Therefore, from his point of view, the humanities scholar must actually consider everything that is a game of combinations, building blocks and the like, to be of lesser value because it is too much like an intellectual exercise for children; on the other hand, anything that brings more life to the child – appropriately varied according to their individuality – will make a particularly good toy. I have long endeavored to somehow bring about a movement for this - but it is so difficult in the present day to inspire people for such little things, seemingly little things - that more would be reintroduced the movable picture books for children. There used to be such picture books, which had pictures and you could pull on strings at the bottom; the pictures moved, whole stories were told by the pictures. This is something that can have a particularly favorable effect on children when it is varied in different ways. On the other hand, anything that remains static and requires a particular combination, such as a building-block story, is not really suitable for children's play, and building blocks are just one manifestation of our materialistic age.

Then I would also like to point out that when it comes to games, it is important to consider how much the child's imagination is involved. You can kill the most beautiful powers in a person by giving them, the developing human, a “beautiful” clown as a boy or a very “beautiful” doll as a girl - after all, they are always hideous from an artistic point of view, but people strive for “beautiful dolls”. The child is best served when the imagination itself is given the greatest possible leeway when it comes to such toys. The child is happiest when it can make a doll or a clown out of a handkerchief that is tied at the top to form a little head. This is something that should be encouraged. The activity of the soul should be able to be set in motion. If we have an eye for temperament, we will get it right, for example, by giving a particularly excited child the most complicated toys possible and a slow child the simplest toys possible, and then, when it comes to handling, proceeding in the same way. What the child does with himself is also of particular importance in later years. You can also tell by letting a child run fast or slow: you let an excited child run fast, and you force a casual child, a child who is lazy in thinking, to run slowly in games and the like. So it is a matter of treating like with like when adapting the game to the individuality, and not with the opposite. This will go a long way for those who really strive in this direction to treat children accordingly.

Question: What about introducing fairy tales to children? If we bring, for example, the image of the butterfly pupa and the butterfly, then we ourselves can believe in it; but if we tell stories such as about the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, stories that we ourselves do not believe in but that make children so happy, does that have a damaging effect on the child, or is it harmless simply as an image?

Rudolf Steiner: It is only a matter of approaching these things in the right way. Of course, there are some things that you have to tell the child in his childlike way, and that will be the case with such things because the image is somewhat far removed from what it is about. But I certainly can't say, for example, that I don't believe in the Easter Bunny! So it's just a matter of finding the way to this belief. You'll forgive me for making such a frank confession. But I don't know of anything, especially in this area, that I couldn't believe if only I could find the way to it. The point is that where things are not as simple as with the butterfly, but more complicated, one must then also undergo a certain more complicated mental process in order to have within oneself the frame of mind that brings this to the child in the right, credible way. There is a meaning to the legend that lives on in certain parts of the Orient that when the Buddha died he was transported to the moon and there he looks down on us in the form of a hare. These things, which are originally contained in the deeper legends, point to the fact that deep natural secrets underlie things.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that today such things are extremely difficult to judge. There is a very famous philosopher of nature, Ernst Mach. Most of you will know the name. Mach claims that it is no longer appropriate to teach children fairy tales or the like; this is not appropriate for such an enlightened time as ours. He assures us that he raised his children without fairy tales and the like. Now Mach has also given us a remarkable example of his inability to get to the human ego at all. Mach once said – I don't want to say anything against his importance in a limited area, where he has it; but we live in a time in which even a person like that can say something like this – he said: self-knowledge is actually something that is very far from a person, because he was once he was quite tired – he was a university professor – walking along, a bus had just come along, so he jumped in and saw a strange man getting in on the other side – as if the bus could have been boarded from the other side as well. He was amazed at that, but he just saw a man approaching, and he thought to himself: What kind of a neglected schoolmaster gets on there! Only then did he realize that there was a mirror on the other side and that he knew so little about his own outward appearance that he had not recognized his reflection. Another time, the same thing happened to him: he was walking along the sidewalk on the street and there was a mirror that was slightly askew, so that he also saw himself there, without immediately recognizing himself.

In this instance, he offers this as a kind of explanation of how little a person actually penetrates to his or her true self. He also regards this self-knowledge only from an entirely external point of view. He rejects fairy tales out of the same impulse. Now, of course, the fact is that, as the fairy tales are widely available today, it seems that one cannot cling to the fairy tales as an adult with inner involvement and a certain inner conviction; but that is something deceptive. If you go back to what is actually experienced, then you come to something completely different.

In this respect, it is truly regrettable that certain beginnings, which, according to spiritual science, have been pending for a long time, have not been developed at all. My old friend Ludwig Laistner had written his two-volume work “The Riddle of the Sphinx” in the 1880s. x», in which he proves what a foolish idea it is to believe that myths, sagas and legends came about because people made up something about clouds, something about the sun, earth and the like; that spring myths came about because the popular imagination invented them. Ludwig Laistner – in this respect his book is, of course, imperfect because he knows nothing of the actual state of mind of earlier people, which was more directed towards the real observation of reality – attributes everything to dreams, but at least he goes so far as to ascribe an experience, even if a dream experience, to every mythical construct.

Now, let us look at the dream. It certainly does not correspond to the kind of knowledge we have during the day, when we approach things through our senses; but anyone who studies the dream life intimately – of course, there is no need to stray to the side of the dream books – will see that the dream life is also an expression of a reality. You dream of a tiled stove, feel the heat radiating on you – and wake up with a pounding heart. The dream has symbolized an inner process for you. You dream – I am telling you real things – of snakes that represent all kinds of things to you; you wake up and have some kind of pain in your intestines; the pain in the intestines is symbolized by the snakes. Every dream is basically indicative of a person's inner processes, and a person's inner processes are in turn an expression of the great soul processes. Truly, the world is much deeper than we think in our so-called enlightened times. And anyone who actually studies fairy tales will find such significant psychology in them, for example, that there is already a way to believe in fairy tales, so that the degree of inner soul mood that I use to teach the child something from “Snow White” or “The Easter Bunny” or “St. Nicholas” is such that it can give rise to the very feeling that has a belief in me. I just have to be inwardly imbued with a relationship to the thing. Take 'St. Nicholas': St. Nicholas is definitely what leads back to the old Germanic Wotan, is actually the same as the old Germanic Wotan, and then we come to the World Tree, and we have a clue in the branch that St. Nicholas carries. It is this branch – the Christmas tree is hardly a hundred and fifty years old, it is still quite young – that gradually grows into the Christmas tree. You can see that there are inner connections everywhere. It is only necessary to find one's way into these inner connections, but it is already possible. And then there are quite different imponderables that extend from the mind of the teacher and educator to that of the child. I am not sure whether my answer quite meets the point of your question; it is something like this.

Question (not recorded verbatim): What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and spiritual science?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in relation to many things, anthroposophical spiritual science is in a position where it has to speak. There are small circles and it forms a large circle; the small circle lies within the large one, but the large one does not lie within the small one, and mostly those people who have the small circles are the most fanatical. Anthroposophy is absolutely the opposite of any fanaticism. Isn't it true that there is a quarter or half truth in psychoanalysis? They try to extract the soul provinces and so on from within, the isolated soul provinces and so on. There is a truth in this, but you have to dig deeper if you want to find the actual basis. So that one can say, as we find with very many views, “Yes, but the other person does not return the same love for us, he finds that because one has to present it more comprehensively, one contradicts him.

I will remind you only of the shining example that is almost always given in most books of psychoanalysis. You will remember it if you have studied the material: a lady is invited to an evening party. The lady of the house – not the invited guest – is supposed to leave for a spa that very evening, leaving the master of the house at home alone. Now the evening party is taking place; the lady of the house is sent off to the spa, the master is back again, the evening party breaks up. The people are walking on the street. Around the corner rushes a droshky – not a car, a droshky. The evening party moves aside to the left and right, but one lady runs in front of the horses, always away, running, running, running, as the others also try and the coachman curses and swears, but she runs until she comes to a stream. She knows very well that you can't drown in the stream – she throws herself into it and is of course now saved. The people don't know what else to do: she is taken back to the house where she just came from, where the master of the house is, in which the lady of the house has just been sent to the bathroom.

Now, a real Freudian – I followed this from the beginning, was very well acquainted with Dr. Breuer, who together with Freud founded psychoanalysis – yes, a real Freudian looks for some hidden complex of the soul: In her seventh or eighth year, when the lady was still a child, she was followed by a horse; this is now a suppressed complex of the soul, and it is coming out. But things are not that simple. I must now apologize, but things are such that the subconscious can sometimes be quite sophisticated. This subconscious has been working in the lady the whole time: if only she could be with the man after the other one has been sent to the bathroom! And now she is getting everything ready – in her conscious mind, of course, the lady would be terribly ashamed to do this, she would not be trusted to do this in her conscious mind, but the deeper, the subconscious mind is much more sophisticated, much worse – she knows how to arrange everything, knows very well in advance: If she runs ahead of the horse and throws herself into the water, she will be carried back into the house because the others know nothing of her real intention.

Sometimes you have to look at completely different things. There is far too much artifice in the method of psychoanalysis today, although it basically points to part of the truth. It is simply an experiment with inadequate means, which is understandable from the materialistic spirit of the age, where one also seeks the spiritual first with materialistic methods.

Yesterday we indicated that it was now necessary to answer the question: What really happened to that Being whom we designate as Christ Jesus from the Baptism by John in Jordan to the Mystery of Golgotha? To answer this question as far as possible, we must recall briefly what we know from former lectures concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who in his thirtieth year became the bearer of the Christ. The essential points are given in my recently published book, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind.

We know that in Palestine, at the time which concerns us, not one but two Jesus-children were born, one of them from the Solomon line of the House of David. This is the Jesus child of whom the Matthew Gospel speaks. The peculiar contradiction between the beginnings of the Matthew and the Luke Gospels derives from the fact that the writer of the Matthew Gospel was concerned with one of the Jesus-children, the one born from the Solomon line. Then, at almost but not quite the same time, another Jesus-child was born, from the Nathan line of the House of David.

The important thing is to understand clearly what kind of beings these two children were. Occult investigation shows that the individuality who was in the Solomon Jesus-child was none other than Zarathustra. After Zarathustra's most important mission, of which we have spoken in connection with the ancient Persian civilisation, he had been incarnated again and again; lastly during the Babylonian-Chaldaic civilisation, and now as the Solomon Jesus-child. This Zarathustra individuality, with all the great and powerful inner forces which in the nature of things he had brought over from earlier incarnations, had to incarnate in a body descended from the Solomon side of the House of David; a body adapted for working up and further developing the great faculties of Zarathustra, in the way that human faculties, when they are already at a very high level, can be brought further on, in so far as they belong to the being who is going from incarnation to incarnation. We are concerned therefore with a human body which did not wait until later years to work on these faculties, but could do so in a youthful, child-like and yet powerful organism. Hence we see the Zarathustra-individuality growing up in such a way that the faculties of the child developed comparatively early. The child soon showed an extent of knowledge which would normally have been impossible at his age.

One fact, however, we must keep firmly in mind: the Solomon Jesus-child, although the incarnation of so lofty an individuality, was only a highly developed man. Hence he was encumbered—as even the most highly developed man must be—with certain liabilities to error and moral difficulties, though not exactly vices or sins. Then we know that in his twelfth year the individuality of Zarathustra, by an occult process known to everyone who has made himself conversant with such facts, forsook the body of the Solomon Jesus-child and went over into the body of the Nathan Jesus-child. Now the body of this Nathan Jesus-child—or, better, his three-fold bodily organisation physical body, etheric body, astral body—was formed in a quite special manner. In fact, this body was such that the child showed capacities exactly contrary to those of the Solomon Jesus-child. Whereas the latter was remarkable because of his great gifts in relation to things one can learn externally, it might almost be said that in this respect the Nathan Jesus-child was untalented. You will understand that saying this implies not the slightest deprecation. The Nathan Jesus-child was not in a position to familiarise himself with the products of human culture on earth. By contrast, the remarkable fact is that he could speak as soon as he was born. A faculty which belongs more to the physical body was thus present in him from his birth. But—according to a good tradition which can be occultly confirmed—the language he spoke could be understood by his Mother only. The child's most strongly marked characteristics were qualities of the heart. He had an immense capacity for love and a disposition capable of immense self-sacrifice. And the remarkable thing is that from the first days of his life his mere presence, or his touch, had beneficent effects—magnetic effects, one might perhaps call them nowadays. Thus all the qualities of heart were manifest in this child, enhanced to such a degree that they could have a beneficent magnetic influence on his environment.

We know also that active in the astral body of this child were the forces which had once been acquired by that Bodhisattva who became Gautama Buddha. We know indeed—and in this respect the oriental tradition is absolutely correct, for it can be confirmed by occult science—that the Bodhisattva, who on becoming Buddha five centuries before our era no longer needed to incarnate further on earth, worked from the spiritual world upon all those who devoted themselves to his teachings. It is characteristic of such an individuality, who rises to heights from which he need no longer incarnate in a body of flesh, that he can then take part in the affairs and destiny of our earth existence from out of the spiritual worlds. This can happen in the most manifold ways. In fact, the Bodhisattva who went through his last incarnation on the earth as Gautama Buddha has taken an essential part in the further evolution of humanity. Our human spiritual world stands continually in connection with all the rest of the spiritual world. The human being not only eats and drinks and so takes into himself the substance of the physical earth; he continually receives soul-spiritual nourishment from the spiritual world. In the most varied ways forces continually flow into physical earthly-existence from out of the spiritual world. Such an in-flow of the forces which Buddha had gained for himself came into the wider stream of humanity through the fact that the Buddha forces permeated the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child. We know, too, from earlier lectures that the words we still have today as a Christmas message—‘The Divine reveals itself from the heights, and on earth peace will spread in the hearts of men of good will!’—originate in essence from the influence which flowed down into human evolution through the immersion of the Buddha powers in the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child.

Thus we see the Buddha forces working further in the stream of earth-existence which took its start from the Events of Palestine. And it is interesting that precisely the researches made by western occultism in quite recent years have led to the recognition of a very important connection between European civilisation and the Buddha forces. For a long time these Buddha forces have been working from the spiritual worlds, particularly upon everything in Western civilisation which is unthinkable without the specific influence of Christianity. All those philosophical streams which have developed during recent centuries up to the nineteenth century, in so far as they are Western spiritual currents, are permeated by the Christ-Impulse, but the Buddha has always been working into them from out of the spiritual worlds. Hence the most important thing that European humanity can receive from Buddha today does not depend on the handing down of the teaching that Buddha gave to men about 500 years before the Christian era, but on what he has become since that time. For he has not remained at a standstill; he has progressed; and it is through this progress, as a spiritual being in the spiritual worlds, that he has in the highest sense been able to take part in the further evolution of Western civilisation. The outcome of our own occult investigation harmonises in a wonderful way with much that had been known previously, before this important influence could be investigated again. For we know that the same individuality who appeared as Gautama Buddha in the East had previously worked in the West, and that certain legends and traditions connected with the name of Buddha or Wotan have to do with this same individuality, just as Buddhism has with Gautama Buddha in the East; hence the same field of action in human evolution which had been prepared earlier by the same individuality has again been occupied in a certain sense. Thus are interlaced the ways taken by the spiritual currents within the evolution of humanity.

Today the most important thing for us is to establish that in the astral body of the Jesus-child described by Luke we have the Buddha forces at work. And when this Nathan Jesus-child was twelve years old, the Zarathustra individuality passed over into his three-fold being.

Why is it, then, that this Jesus-child had the remarkable qualities we have just characterised? It was because he was not a human individuality like every other, but in a certain respect quite different, and in order to understand him we must go back to the ancient Lemurian time in which, strictly speaking, the Earth-evolution of man took its start. We must clearly understand that everything before the Lemurian time was really only a repetition of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods. Only in the Lemurian time was the first germ-condition laid down in man as a potentiality, so that during the Earth-evolution he could receive the fourth member of his being, the Ego. We can say the extension of mankind over the Earth—a subject dealt with more precisely in the Outline of Occult Science—is to be traced to certain human ancestors in the Lemurian period, the period with which our present Earth took its start.

It is only after a certain point of time in this Lemurian period that we can speak correctly, in a modern sense, of the human race. Before this, those Egos who have since continued to incarnate were not present in men on Earth. They were not yet separate from the substance of that Hierarchy which had first brought the human Ego into being: the Hierarchy of the Spirits of Form. We can now picture to ourselves—occult research shows this—that part of the substance of the Spirits of Form entered into the incarnations of men for the building up of the human Ego. But when in due time man was given over to his physical incarnations on the Earth, something was held back. A certain Ego substance was not brought into the stream of physical incarnations. If we were to represent the stream of physical human incarnations, beginning with him whom the Bible calls ‘Adam’, the progenitor of the human race, we should have to draw a genealogical tree with wide-spreading branches. Instead, let us simply imagine that the substance poured down from the Spirits of Form now flows onward, but that something was held back: an Ego that was now protected from entering into physical incarnations. Instead, this Ego preserved the form, the substantiality, which man had had before proceeding to his first earthly incarnation. This Ego lived on collaterally with the rest of humanity, and at the time of which we are now speaking, when the Event of Palestine was to take place, it was still in the same condition, if we wish to speak according to the Bible, as was the Ego of Adam before his first embodiment in flesh.

In examining what occult science knows about this Ego—which naturally for modern man is something extremely foolish—we see that this Ego, which was, as it were, held back ‘in reserve’, was given into the care of the Holy Mysteries through Atlantean and post-Atlantean times. It was preserved in an important Mystery centre, as in a tabernacle, and because of this it had quite special characteristics; it was untouched by everything that a human Ego could have learnt on Earth. It was therefore untouched by any Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it was indeed something we can think of, in contrast to other human Egos, as an empty sphere, still completely virginal with regard to all earth experiences—a nothing, a negative, in this respect. Hence it seemed as though the Nathan-child, described in the Luke Gospel, really had no Ego; as though he consisted only of physical, etheric and astral body. And it is quite adequate if at first we say that an Ego, developed as Egos had developed in Atlantean and post-Atlantean times, was not there at all in the Luke Jesus-child.

We speak in the true sense of the words when we say that in the Matthew Jesus-child we have to do with a completely human being; whereas in the Nathan Jesus-child of the Luke Gospel we have to do with a physical, an etheric and an astral body which are interrelated in the harmonious unity that belonged to man when he emerged from the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Hence this Jesus-child, as the Akashic Record tells us, was untalented for all that human culture had developed. He could not receive it because he had never been among it. External abilities and adaptations to existence are the outcome of certain experiences in earlier incarnations. Anyone who had never shared in such experiences would show himself without talent for all that men have accomplished during the earth-evolution. If the Nathan Jesus-child had been born in our time, he would have been totally ungifted for learning to write, since in Adamic times writing was unknown. By contrast, the Luke Jesus-child revealed in a high degree the qualities he had brought with him—qualities that had not fallen into decadence through the Luciferic influence. Even more interesting is the remarkable language he spoke.

Here we must bring to mind something I mentioned in The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind: that the languages which are now spread over the earth took their rise comparatively late in evolution: they were preceded by what can truly be called a primal human language. It is the disuniting spirits of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic world who have made many languages out of the primal language. The primal language is lost, and can be spoken today by nobody with an Ego which in the course of earth-evolution has passed from incarnation to incarnation. This Jesus-child, who had not gone through human incarnations, acquired from the starting-point of human evolution the faculty of speaking, not this or that language, but a language of which we can rightly say that it was not comprehensible to those around him. But, because of the inner qualities of heart that lived in it, it was understood by his Mother's heart. This points to a phenomenon of immense significance in the case of the Luke Jesus-child.

We have seen that when this Luke Jesus-child was born, he was provided with everything that had not been influenced by the Lucifer-Ahrimanic forces. He did not possess an Ego that had been through a series of incarnations; therefore nothing had to be discarded when, in his twelfth year, the individuality of Zarathustra passed over from the Solomon Jesus-child into the Nathan Jesus-child. I have already said that the human element which had remained behind, and up to this time had developed in the Mysteries by the side of the rest of humanity, was born for the first time in the Palestine period as the Nathan Jesus-child. There was a transference from a Mystery centre in Western Asia, where this human kernel had been preserved, into the body of the Nathan Jesus-child. This child grew on, and in his twelfth year the individuality of Zarathustra passed into him. We know also that this passing over is intimated in the scene of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple. It was quite natural that the parents of the Nathan Jesus-child, who were accustomed to regard him in the light we have described, should find a remarkable change when they discovered him in the Temple after he had been lost. For that was the moment when Zarathustra passed over into this twelve-year-old child. From the twelfth to the thirtieth year, therefore, we have to do with the individuality of Zarathustra in the Luke Jesus-child.

Now in the Luke Gospel we have a remarkable expression which indicates something that can be made clear only by occult investigation. You know that in the Luke Gospel, after the description of the scene with the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, there is a passage: ‘And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man’. (Luke II:52). In truth this passage stands as follows when we restore the text of the Gospels from the Akashic record: The twelve-year-old child increased in everything wherein an astral body can increase, i.e., in wisdom; in everything wherein an etheric body can increase, i.e. in all the qualities of kindliness, goodness, etc; and in everything wherein a physical body can increase, i.e., in all that pours itself into external beauty of form. In this passage, therefore, a special indication is given that the Jesus-child, not having gone from incarnation to incarnation, had up to his twelfth year remained untouched, and could not be touched in his individuality, by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. The Luke Gospel intimates this again by tracing the sequence of generations back through Adam to God, thus indicating that the substance in question was uninfluenced by all that had taken place in human evolution.

So this Jesus-child lived on, increasing in all that was possible for a three-fold organism not touched by the contamination which has affected the three-fold bodies of other men. And this enabled the individuality of Zarathustra, from the twelfth to the thirtieth year of life, to pour into this three-fold human being all that could come from the heights to which he himself had previously attained. Hence we form a correct idea of Jesus of Nazareth, up to the thirtieth year of his life, when we think of him as a lofty human individuality, for whose coming into existence the greatest possible preparations had been made.

But we must now be clear about one thing if we want to understand how the fruits of a development we go through in our bodies are of benefit to the individuality. Our bodies enable our individuality to absorb the fruits of our life for its future evolution. When in death we forsake our bodies, we do not usually leave in them what we have achieved and gained for ourselves as individuals. Later on we shall see under what special conditions something may remain in the bodies; but it is not the rule that the individuality should leave behind in his bodies whatever he has won for himself. When Zarathustra forsook the threefold bodily being of Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year, he left behind the three bodies, physical, etheric, and astral. But all that he had been able to gain through these instruments went into the individuality of Zarathustra and lived on further with him, to his benefit. Something however, was gained by the three-fold bodily organism of Jesus of Nazareth. His human nature, still free, as it always had been, from Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, was conjoined for a period with the individuality who had unequalled insight into the spirituality of the cosmos.

Think what this Zarathustra had experienced! While he was founding the ancient Persian civilisation and looking up to the great Sun Spirit, he was even then gazing out into the cosmic realms of the spiritual. Through successive incarnations his development went on. When the innermost part of human nature, together with the most intensive powers of sympathy and love, had become manifest through the unsullied human substance which had been preserved until the birth of the Nathan Jesus, and when the astral body had permeated itself with the forces of Gautama Buddha, there was present in this child what we may call the most intimate inwardness of man. And then into this bodily nature there entered the individuality who above all others had seen most clearly and deeply into the spirituality of the Macrocosm. By this means the bodily instrument, the entire organism, of the Nathan Jesus was so transformed that it could be the vehicle capable of receiving into itself the Christ-extract of the Macrocosm. If this bodily nature had not been permeated by the Zarathustra-individuality up to the thirtieth year, the eyes would not have been able to endure the substance of the Christ from the thirtieth year up to the Mystery of Golgotha; the hands would not have been capable of being permeated with the substance of the Christ in the thirtieth year. To be able to receive the Christ, this bodily nature had to be prepared, expanded, through the individuality of Zarathustra. Thus in Jesus of Nazareth, as he was at the moment when Zarathustra took leave of him and the Christ-Individuality entered into him, we have to do neither with an adept, nor with anything like a higher human being. For an adept is an adept because he has a highly developed individuality, and it was just this that had passed out of the threefold bodily nature of Jesus of Nazareth. We have simply the bodily nature so prepared through the indwelling of Zarathustra that it could take into itself the Christ-Individuality. But now, through the union of the Christ-Individuality with this bodily nature, by necessity the following consequence came about.

During these three years, from the Baptism by John in Jordan onwards to the Mystery of Golgotha, the development of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body was quite different from the bodily development of other human beings. Since the Nathan Jesus had received no influence from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, the possibility was given that, from the Baptism in Jordan onwards—now that there was in Jesus of Nazareth no human Ego, but solely the Christ Individuality—everything which is normally at work in a human organism was not developed.

We said yesterday that the human Phantom, the primal form which draws into itself the material elements that fill out the physical body and are laid aside at death, had degenerated in the course of time up to the Mystery of Golgotha. At the beginning of human evolution it was intended that the Phantom should remain untouched by the material elements that man takes for his nutrition from the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. But it did not remain untouched. For the Luciferic influence brought about a close connection between the Phantom and the forces which man absorbs through his earthly evolution; a connection particularly with the ashy constituents. The result was that the Phantom, while continuing to accompany man during his further evolution, was strongly drawn to these ashy constituents, and instead of adhering to the etheric body, it attached itself to these products of disintegration. But where the Luciferic influences had been kept away, as they were from the Nathan Jesus, no force of attraction arose between the Phantom and the material elements that had been taken into the bodily organism. Throughout the three years from the Baptism up to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Phantom remained untouched by these elements.

In occult terms we can say: The human Phantom, according to its intended development through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, should not have been attracted to the ashy constituents but only to the dissolving salt constituents, so that it would have taken the path of volatilisation in so far as the salt constituents dissolved. In an occult sense one can say that it would have dissolved and passed over, not into the earth but into the volatile constituents. The remarkable fact is that with the Baptism in Jordan and the entry of the Christ Individuality into the body of the Nathan Jesus, all connection of the Phantom with the ashy constituents was wiped out; only the connection with the salt constituents remained.

This is alluded to in the passage where Christ Jesus wishes to explain to his first-chosen disciples: ‘Through the way in which you feel yourselves united with the Christ Being, a certain possibility for the future evolution of humanity will come about. It will be possible for the one body risen from the grave—the spiritual body—to pass over into men’. That is what Christ wished to say when he used the phrase, ‘You are the salt of the earth’. All these words we find in the Gospels, reminding us of the terminology and craft language of the later alchemists, the later occultism, have the deepest imaginable significance. And in fact this significance was well known to the mediaeval and later alchemists—not to the charlatans mentioned in the history books—and not one of them spoke of these connections without feeling in his heart a connection with Christ.

Thus it followed that when Christ Jesus was crucified, when his body was nailed to the Cross—you will notice that here I use the exact words of the Gospel, for they are con-firmed by true occult research—when this body of Jesus of Nazareth was fastened to the Cross, the Phantom was perfectly intact; it existed in a spiritual bodily form, visible only to super-sensible sight, and was much more loosely connected with the body's material content of earth-elements than has ever happened with any other human being. In every other human being a connection of the Phantom with these elements has occurred, and it is this that holds them together. In the case of Christ Jesus it was quite different. The ordinary law of inertia sees to it that certain material portions of a human body hold together after death in the form man has given them, until after some time they crumble away, so that hardly anything of them is visible. So it was with the material portions of the body of Christ Jesus. When the body was taken down from the Cross, the parts were still coherent, but they had no connection with the Phantom; the Phantom was completely free of them. When the body became permeated with certain substances, which in this case worked quite differently from the way in which they affect any other body that is embalmed, it came to pass that after the burial the material parts quickly volatilised and passed over into the elements. Hence the disciples who looked into the grave found the linen cloths in which the body had been wrapped, but the Phantom, on which the evolution of the Ego depends, had risen from the grave. It is not surprising that Mary of Magdala, who had known only the earlier Phantom when it was permeated by earthly elements, did not recognise the same form in the Phantom, now freed from terrestrial gravity, when she saw it clairvoyantly. It seemed to her different.

Moreover we must clearly understand that it was only through the power of the companionship of the disciples with the Christ that all the disciples, and all those persons of whom the same is told, could see the Risen One, for He appeared to them in the spiritual body, the body of which Paul says that it increases as a grain of seed and passes over into all people. Paul himself is convinced that it was not a body permeated by the earthly elements which had appeared to the other apostles, but that the same which had appeared to him had also appeared to them, as he says in the following passage:

For I have delivered unto you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that He was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (I Corinthians XV:3–8.)

But what was it that convinced Paul? In a certain sense Paul was an Initiate before the Event of Damascus. His Initiation had combined the ancient Hebrew principle and the Greek principle. He knew that an Initiate became, in his etheric body, independent of the physical body, and could appear in the purest form of his etheric body to those who were capable of seeing it. If Paul had had the vision of a pure etheric body, independent of a physical body, he would have spoken differently. He would have said that he had seen someone who had been initiated and would be living on further in the course of earth-evolution, independently of the physical body. He would not have found this particularly surprising. What Paul experienced on the road to Damascus could not have been that. He had experienced something which he knew could be experienced only when the Scriptures were fulfilled; when a perfect human Phantom, a human body risen from the grave in a super-sensible form, would appear in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. And that is what he saw! That is what appeared to him on the road to Damascus and left him with the conviction: ‘He was there—He is risen! For what is there could come only from Him: it is the Phantom which can be seen by all human individualities who seek to relate themselves to the Christ.’ This is what convinced him that Christ was already there; that he would not come first in the future, but was actually present there in a physical body, and that this physical body had rescued the primal form of the human physical body for the salvation of all men.

That this deed could be accomplished only through the greatest unfolding of divine love, and in what sense it was an act of love, and then in what sense the word ‘salvation’ is to be understood in the further evolution of humanity—this will be our subject tomorrow.

Many people who are naturally fitted to receive Anthroposophy in our present age will find it necessary to clear away various contradictions that may arise in their minds. In particular, the soul can be brought up against a certain contradiction when it wants to take seriously the memories of such a season of festival as that which includes Christmas and the New Year. When we take these memories seriously, then it becomes clear to us that at the same time as we try to gain knowledge, we must penetrate into the spiritual history of mankind if we are to understand rightly our own spiritual evolution. We need only take a certain thought, and we shall find it on the one hand full of light, while on the other it makes us disturbingly aware of how contradictions, difficulties, must pile up before the soul of anyone who wants to accept in the right sense our anthroposophical knowledge concerning man and the evolution of the world.

Among the varied forms of knowledge that we try to reach through our anthroposophical studies we must of course include knowledge of the Christ; knowledge of the fundamentally important impulse—we have called it the Christ Impulse—which came in at the beginning of our era. And we are bound often to ask ourselves how we can hope to penetrate more effectively, with deepened anthroposophical knowledge, into the course of human evolution, in order to understand the Christ Impulse, than those who lived at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were able to do. Was it not much easier for them to penetrate into this Mystery, whose secret is specially bound up with the evolution of humanity, than it is for us, at this great distance in time? That might be a troublesome question for persons who want to seek an understanding of Christ in the light of Anthroposophy. It might become one of those contradictions which have a depressing effect just when we want to take most earnestly the deeper principles of our anthroposophical knowledge. This contradiction can be cleared away only when we call up before our souls the whole spiritual situation of humanity at the beginning of our era.

If we try—at first without any kind of religious or similar feeling—to enter into the psychic disposition of man at that time, we can make a most peculiar discovery. We can say to ourselves that we will rely on what cannot be denied even by minds most given over to externals; we will draw on the old tradition as found in history, but we will try to penetrate into that part of it which embraces the purest spiritual life. In this way we may hope to lay hold of essential elements in the evolution of humanity. Let us therefore try to enter quite historically into the endeavours that were made by men, say two hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha and a hundred and fifty years after it, to deepen their thinking in order to understand the secrets, the riddles, of the world. Then we realise that during the centuries before and after the Mystery of Golgotha a change of far-reaching significance occurred in the souls of men with regard to the life of thought. We find that a large part of the civilised world received the influence of that which Greek culture and other deepened forms of thinking had achieved some centuries previously.

When we consider what mankind had accomplished in this way by its own efforts, not in response to any impulse from without, and how much had been attained by men called “sages” in the Stoic sense (and a good many personalities in Roman history were so ranked), then we are bound to say: These conquests in the realm of thought and ideas were made at the beginning of our era, and Western life has not added very much to them. We have gained an endless amount of knowledge concerning the facts of Nature and have been through revolutions in our ways of thinking about the external world. But the thoughts, the ideas themselves, through which these advances have been made, and with which men have tried to discern the secrets of existence in external, spatial terms, have really developed very little since the beginning of our era. They were all present—even those of which the modern world is so proud, including the idea of evolution—in the souls of that period. What might be called an intellectual laying hold of the world, a life of ideas, had reached a certain summit, and not only among particular individuals, such as the pupils of Socrates a little earlier; it had become popular in a limited sense and had spread widely over Southern Europe and other regions. This deepening of thought is truly astonishing.

An impartial history of philosophy would have to pay special attention to this triumph of human thinking at that time.

But if we now take these highly significant advances in the realm of ideas, and on the other hand the secrets bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha, we become aware of something different. We realise that as the story of the event on Golgotha became known in that age, an immense wrestling of thought with that Mystery occurred. We see how the philosophies of the period, especially the Gnostic philosophy in its much profounder form, struggled to bring all the ideas it had gained to bear on this one purpose. And it is most important to let this struggle work upon us. For we then come to recognise that the struggle was in vain; that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared to human understanding as though it were dispersed through far-distant spiritual worlds and would not unveil itself.

Now from the outset I would like to say that when in these lectures I speak of the Mystery of Golgotha, I do not wish to invest this term with any colouring drawn from religious traditions or convictions. We shall be concerned purely with objective facts that are fundamental to human evolution, and with what physical and spiritual observation can bring to light. I shall leave aside everything that individual religious creeds have to say about the Mystery of Golgotha and shall look only at what has happened in the course of human evolution. I shall have to say many things which will be made clear and substantiated later on.

In setting the Mystery of Golgotha by the side of the deepest thought of that time, the first thing that strikes one is what I expressed by saying: The nature of this Mystery lies far, far beyond what can be reached by the development of thinking. And the more exactly one studies this contrast, the more is one brought to the following recognition. One can enter deeply into the thought-world that belongs to the beginning of our era; one can try to bring livingly before one's soul what thinking meant for those men of Greece and Rome; one can call up before one's soul the ideas that sprang from their thinking, and then one comes to the feeling: Yes, that was the time when thought underwent an unprecedented deepening. Something happened with thought; it approached the human soul in a quite new way. But if then, after living back into the thought-world of that time and recreating it in one's soul, one brings clairvoyant perception to bear on this experience, then suddenly something surprising emerges. One feels that something is happening far, far away in the spiritual worlds and that the deepening of thought is a consequence of it.

We have already called attention to the fact that behind our world lie other worlds—the Astral, the Devachanic, and the Higher Devachanic. Let us first remind ourselves that these three worlds lie behind our own! Then, if the clairvoyant state of soul is raised to full activity within oneself, the impression is received that neither in the Astral world nor in the lower Devachanic world can a complete explanation of the deepening of thought at that time be found. Only if one could place one's soul in the higher Devachanic world—so says clairvoyant insight—would one experience what it is that streams through the other two worlds and penetrates right down into our physical world.

On this physical plane there is no need to be aware, while steeping oneself in that past world of ideas, of anything told concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. One can leave that quite out of account and ask simply: No matter what happened over there in Palestine, what does external history indicate? It shows that in Greece and Rome an infinite deepening of thought took place. Let us put a circle round this Greek and Roman thought-world and make it an enclosed island, as it were, in our soul-life—an island shut off from everything outside; let us imagine that no report of the Mystery of Golgotha has reached it. Then, when we inwardly contemplate this world, we certainly find there nothing that is known to-day about the Mystery of Golgotha, but we find an infinite deepening of thought which indicates that here in the evolution of humanity something happened which took hold of the innermost being of the soul on the physical plane. We are persuaded that in no previous age and among no other people had thinking ever been like that! However sceptical anyone may be, however little he may care to know about the Mystery of Golgotha, he must admit one thing—that in this island world that we have enclosed there was a deepening of thought never previously known.

But if one places oneself in this thought-world, and has a clairvoyant faculty in the background, then one feels truly immersed in the individual character of this thought. And then one says to oneself: Yes, as this thinking flowers into idea, with Plato and others, as it passes over into the world we tried to enclose, it has a quality which sets the soul free, which lays hold of the soul and brings it to a loftier view of itself. Whatever else you may apprehend in the external world or in the spiritual world makes you dependent on those worlds; in thinking you take hold of something which lives in you and which you can experience completely. You may draw back from the physical world, you may disbelieve in a spiritual world, you may refuse to know anything about clairvoyant impressions, you may shut out all physical impressions—with thoughts you can live in yourself; in your thinking you lay hold, as it were, of your own being!

But then—and it cannot be otherwise if one enters with clairvoyant perception into this sea of thought, as I might call it—a feeling of the isolation of thought comes over one; a feeling that thought is still only thought; that it lives first of all only in the soul, and that one cannot draw from it the power to go out into a world where the ground of the rest of our being—the ground of what else we are—is to be found. In the very moment when one discerns the grandeur of thought, one discerns also its unreality. Then one can see also how in the surrounding world that one has come to know through clairvoyance, there is fundamentally nothing to sustain thought.

Then why should thought be there at all? The physical world can do nothing but falsify it. Those who wish to be pure materialists, who refuse to ascribe to thought any primal reality of its own, should really prefer to prohibit it. For if the natural world is the only real world, thought can only falsify it. It is only because materialists are illogical that they do not embrace the only theory of cognition that goes with monistic Materialism—the refrain-from-thinking, think-no-more theory. But to anyone who immerses himself with clairvoyant perception in the world of thought there comes this disquieting awareness of the isolation of thought, as though he were standing quite alone with it. And then only one thing remains for him; but it does remain. Something comes towards him, even though it be from a far spiritual distance, separated from him by two worlds; and it becomes apparent—so the clairvoyant soul says to itself—that in this third world lies the true origin, the fountain-head, of that which is in the life of thought. For clairvoyant souls in our time it could be a powerful experience to immerse themselves, alone with their thinking, in the time when thought underwent its deepening; to shut out everything else, including knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, and to reflect how the thought-content on which we still nourish ourselves came forth in the Graeco-Roman world.

Then one should turn one's gaze to other worlds and feel rising over the Devachanic world a star that belongs to a higher spiritual world; the star from which rays out the power that makes itself felt in the thought world of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Then one feels oneself here on Earth, but carried away from the world of today and plunged into the Graeco-Roman world, with its influence spreading out over other regions at that time, before the Mystery of Golgotha. But as soon as one lets the spiritual world make its impression on one, there appears again, shining over Devachan, the star (I speak symbolically), or the spiritual Being of whom one says to oneself: Yes, the experience of the isolation of thought, and of the possibility of thought having undergone such a deepening at the beginning of our era—this is a consequence of the rays that shine out from this star in the higher spiritual world. And then comes a feeling which at first knows nothing of the historical tradition of the Mystery of Golgotha but can be expressed thus: Yes, you are there in the Graeco-Roman world of ideas, with all that Plato and others were able to give to the general education of mankind, with what they have imparted to the souls of men—you feel yourself living in the midst of that. And then you wait ... and truly not in vain, for as though deep in the background of spiritual life appears the star which sends forth its rays of power; and you can say that what you have experienced is a result of that power.

This experience can be gone through. And in going through it one has not relied on any kind of tradition, but has quite impartially sought the origin of what took place in the Graeco-Roman world. But one has also had the experience of being separated by three worlds from understanding the root-causes of that Graeco-Roman world.

And then, perhaps, one turns to the men of that time who tried in their own way to understand the change. Even the external scholarship of today has come to recognise that in this period of transition at the beginning of our era some religious-philosophic geniuses lived. And they can best be encountered by looking at Gnosticism. The Gnosis is known in the most varied ways. Externally, remarkably little is really known about it, but from the available documents one can still get an impression of its endless depth. We will speak of it only in so far as it bears on our present considerations.

Above all we can say that the Gnostics had a feeling for what I have just described; that for the causes of what happened in that past epoch one must look to worlds lying infinitely far away in the background. This awareness was passed on to others, and if we are not superficial we can, if we will, see it glimmering through what we may call the theology of Paul, and in many other manifestations also.

Now, anyone who steeps himself in the Gnosis of that period will have great difficulty in understanding it. Our souls are too much affected and infected by the fruits of the materialistic developments of the last few centuries. In tracing back the evolution of the world they are too readily inclined to think in terms of the Kant-Laplace theory of a cosmic nebula, of something quite material. And even those who seek for a more spiritual conception of the world—even they, when they look back to the beginning of time, think of this cosmic nebula or something similar. These modern people, even the most spiritual, feel very happy when they are spared the trouble of discerning the spiritual in the primal beginnings of cosmic evolution. They find it a great relief, these souls of today, when they can say to themselves: “This or that rarefied form of material substance was there to start with, and out of it everything spiritual developed side by side with everything physical.” And so we often find souls who are greatly comforted when they can apply the most materialistic methods of inquiry to the beginning of the cosmos and arrive at the most abstract conception of some kind of gaseous body.

That is why it is so difficult to enter into the thoughts of the Gnosis. For what the Gnosis places at the beginning of the world carries no suggestion of anything at all material. Anyone thoroughly attuned to modern education will perhaps be unable to restrain a slight smile if he is invited to think in the sense of the Gnosis that the world in which he finds himself, the world he explains so beautifully with his Darwinism, bears no relation to a true picture of how the world began! Indeed, he will hardly be able to help smiling when he is asked to think that the origin of the world resides in that cosmic Being who is beyond all concepts, not to be reached by any of the means that are applied nowadays to explaining the world. In the primal Divine Father—says the Gnosis—lies the ground of the world, and only in what proceeds from Him do we find something to which the soul can struggle through if it turns away from all material conceptions and searches a little for its own innermost depth. And this is Silence: the eternal Silence in which there is neither space nor time, but silence only.

It was to this duality of the primal Father and the Silence preceding time and space that the Gnostic looked up; and then, from the union of the primal Father with the Silence, as it were, he conceived other existences proceeding: one can equally well call them Worlds or Beings. And from them others, and again others, and again others—and so on through thirty stages. And only at the thirtieth stage did the Gnostic posit a condition prior to our present mentality—a condition so delightfully explained by Darwinism in terms of that mentality. Or, strictly speaking, at the thirty-first stage, for thirty of these existences, which can be called Worlds or Beings, precede our world. “Aeon” is the name generally given to these thirty Beings or Worlds that precede our own.

One can get a clear idea of what is meant by this Aeon-world only by saying to oneself: To the thirty-first stage there belongs not only what your senses perceive as the external world, but also the way in which your thinking as physical man tries to explain the sense world. It is easy enough to come to terms with a spiritual conception of the world if one says: Yes, the external world is certainly Maya, but with thinking we penetrate into a spiritual world—and if one hopes that this thinking really can reach the spiritual world. But according to the Gnostic this is not so; for him, this thinking belongs to the thirty-first Aeon, to the physical world. So not only sense perception, but human thinking, lies outside the thirty Aeons, who can be looked up to through the stages of spiritual evolution, and who reveal themselves in ever-mounting perfection.

One can easily imagine the smile that comes to a Monist, standing at the summit of his time, if he is asked to believe in thirty preceding worlds—thirty worlds with a content entirely different from anything his thinking can conceive. But that was the view of the Gnostics. And then they asked themselves: How is it with this world?

We will disregard for a while what we have ourselves said about the world in the sense of the early twentieth century. What I am now telling you must not be taken as offering a convincing world-picture. In the Anthroposophy of the twentieth century we have naturally to get beyond the Gnosis, but just now we want to sink ourselves in it.

Why is this surrounding world, including the human faculty of thinking about it, shut off from the thirty Aeons? We must look, said the Gnostic, to the lowest but still purely spiritual Aeon. And there we find the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. She had evolved in a spiritual way through the twenty-nine stages, and in the spiritual world she looked up to the highest Aeon through the ranks of spiritual Beings or Worlds. But one day, one cosmic day, it became evident, to her that if she was to maintain a free vision into the spiritual world of the Aeons, she had to separate something from herself. And she separated from herself that which existed in her as desire. And this desire, being no longer present in the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, now wanders through the realms of space and permeates everything that comes into being in the realms of space. Desire does not live only in sense perception, but also in human thinking, and in the longing that looks back to the spiritual world; but always as something cast out into the souls of men. As an image, but as an image of the Divine Sophia cast out from her, lives this desire, Achamod, thrown out into the world and permeating it.

If you look into yourself, without raising yourself into spiritual worlds, you look into the desire-filled world of Achamod. Because this world is filled with desire, it cannot disclose within itself that which is revealed by looking out into the world of the Aeons. Far, far away in the world of the Aeons—so thought the Gnosis—the pure spirituality of the Aeons engenders what the Gnostics called the Son of the Father-God, and also what they called the pure Holy Spirit. So we have here another generation, as it were, another evolutionary line, different from that which led to the Divine Sophia. As in the propagation of physical life the sexes are separate, so in the progression of the Aeons another stream took its origin from a very high level in the spiritual world: the stream of the Son and the Holy Spirit stemming from the Father. So in the world of Aeons there was one stream leading to the Divine Sophia and another to the Son and the Holy Spirit. If one rises through the Aeons, one comes eventually to an Aeon from whom there arose on the one hand the succession leading to the Divine Sophia, and on the other the succession leading to the Son and the Holy Spirit. And then we ascend to the Father-God and the Divine Silence.

Because the human soul is shut off with Achamod in the material world, it has in the sense of the Gnosis a longing for the spiritual world, and above all for the Divine Sophia, from whom it is separated through being filled with Achamod. This feeling of being separated from the Divine, of not being within the Divine—this feeling is actually experienced, according to the Gnostic, as the material world. And the Gnostic sees originating from the divine-spiritual world, but bound up with Achamod, what one might call (to borrow a Greek word) the Demiurgos, the cosmic Architect.

This Demiurgos is the real arch-creator and sustainer of that which is permeated with Achamod and the material. The souls of men are woven into his world. But they are imbued also with longing for the Divine Sophia. As though in the far distance of the Aeon-world appear the Son and the Holy Spirit in their pure divine spirituality, but they appear only to someone who has—in the sense of the Gnosis—raised himself above everything in which is embodied Achamod, the desire that pervades space.

Why is there this longing in the souls that have been drawn into the world of Achamod? Why, after their separation from the divine-spiritual world, do they feel a longing for it? The Gnostics also asked themselves these questions, and they said: Achamod was cast out from the Divine Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, but before Achamod had completely become this material world, where men now live, there came to her something like a brief raying-out of light from the Son of God; and then immediately the light vanished again. For the Gnostic this was an important concept: that Achamod—the same Achamod that lives in the souls of men—had been granted in the primal remote past a glimpse of Divine light, which had then immediately disappeared. But the memory of it lives on today in human souls, however deeply enmeshed in the material world the soul may be. “I live in the world of Achamod, the material world”, such a soul might have said. “I am surrounded with a sheath drawn from the material world, but when I sink into my inner being, a memory comes to life within me. The element that holds me bound to the material world longs after the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom; for the being of Achamod, which lives in me, was once illuminated by a. ray from the Son of God, who dwells in the world of the Aeons.”

We should try to picture clearly to ourselves such a soul as this, a disciple of the Gnosis. There were such souls: they are not a hypothetical invention. Anyone who studies history with understanding will come to realise through the external documents that many souls of this kind lived in that period.

. We need to see clearly why there are such strong objections nowadays to what I have been saying. What will a thoroughly level-headed man of today have to say about the Gnosis? We have already had to listen to the view that the theology of Paul gives an impression of rabbinical subtleties, far too intricate for a sensible Monist to concern himself with—a Monist who looks out proudly over the world and draws it all together with the simple concept of evolution or with the still simpler concept of energy, and says: “Now at last we have grown up; we have acquired the ideas which give us a picture of the world based on energy, and we look back at these children, these poor dear children, who centuries ago built up the Gnosis out of childishness—they imagined all sorts of spirits, thirty Aeons! That is what the human soul does in its time of nursery play. The grown-up soul of today, with its far-reaching Monism, has left such fancies far behind. We must look back indulgently at these Gnostic infantilisms—they are really charming!”

Such is the prevailing mood today, and it is not easily teachable. One might say to it: Yes, if a Gnostic, with his soul born out of the Gnosis, were to stand before you, he might also take the liberty of expressing his outlook, somewhat like this: “I understand very well how you have become so proud and arrogant, with your ideas of evolution and energy, but this is because your thinking has become so crude and simple and primitive that you are satisfied with your nebulae and your entirely abstract concepts. You say the words ‘evolution’ and ‘energy’ and think you have got something, but you are blind to the finer spiritual life that seeks its way up into that which rises through thirty stages above anything you have.”

But for us the antithesis mentioned at the beginning of this lecture becomes all the sharper. We see on the one hand our own time, with its quite crude and primitive concepts, and on the other the Gnosis. And we have seen how the Gnosis employs endlessly complicated concepts—thirty Aeons—in order to find in the course of evolution the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and to find in the soul the longing for the Divine Sophia and the Holy Spirit.

Then we ask ourselves: Is it not from the deepening of thought in the Graeco-Roman world that we have gained what we have carried so splendidly far in our thoughts about energy and evolution? And in this Gnosis, with its complicated ideas, so unsympathetic to the present day, are we not looking at something quite strange? Are not these colossal contrasts? Indeed they are. And the contradiction, lying like a weight on the soul, becomes even greater if we reflect on what was said about clairvoyant souls: that they can transpose themselves into the thought-world of the Greeks and Romans, and then see the world with the star, of which we have spoken. And mingled everywhere with this deepening of Greek thought we find that other deepening which the Gnosis exemplifies. Yet when we look at this with the aid of what Anthroposophy should give us today, and are yet powerless to understand what the star should signify, separated as we are from it by three worlds—and if we ask the Gnostics: Have you understood what happened at that time in the historical evolution of humanity? ... then, standing on the ground of Anthroposophy, we cannot take the answer from the Gnostics, for it could never satisfy us; it would throw no light on what is shown to the clairvoyant soul.

It is not my wish that you should treat our considerations today as offering an explanation of anything. The more you feel that what I have told you is not an explanation; the more you feel that I have put before you contradiction after contradiction and have shown you only one occult experience, the perception of the star, the better will you have understood me for today. I would wish you to see clearly that at the beginning of our era there appeared in the world something which influenced human understanding and was yet far, far from being understood; I would like you to feel that the period at the beginning of our era was a great riddle. I want you to feel that in human evolution there happened something which seemed at first like a deepening of thought, or a discovery of thought; and that the root causes of this are a profound enigma. You must seek in hidden worlds for that which appeared in the Maya of the physical sense-world as a deepening of Graeco-Roman thought. And it is not an explanation of what we have heard, but the setting out of a riddle, that I wished to give you today. We will continue tomorrow.

On the history of the division of the Esoteric School of the Theosophy into an Eastern and a Western School in 1907.

with introductory words commemorating the laying of the foundation stone of the Goetheanum on September 20, 1913

My dear friends! If the destructive flames of the New Year had not affected our Goetheanum in such a terrible way, we would have been able to look back on the laying of the foundation stone for this Goetheanum on the hill of Dornach ten years ago with deep satisfaction. We can only look at the fact that, apart from the foundation stone, very little of this Goetheanum has actually remained for us. And indeed — the foundation stone was meant not only to be what it immediately presented itself as, and the celebration at that time was also not meant to be only what immediately came to external expression. The destiny associated with the anthroposophical movement has, as it were, given birth to this Goetheanum out of its bosom, and the foundation stone was laid for the Goetheanum in the first place. But the way in which the celebration was conducted at that time, the way which was then, as you know, presented in such a terribly ugly way by the outside world, which was so reviled – this celebration was actually intended to consolidate the anthroposophical essence in the first place. It was intended to speak deeply to the spiritual part of the hearts of those who participated in this cornerstone ceremony not only physically, as only a few could, but also spiritually. And in this way it was indeed held at the time.

We may perhaps express the wish today that, although the building that has arisen from this laying of the foundation stone has gone well for the time being, the spiritual part may nevertheless retain its firmness; that firmness that the world already needs in this difficult time, which has become difficult and will become even more difficult. For gradually the conviction is gaining ground in some minds today that a breakthrough of the spiritual could be the only remedy for this epoch.

But this conviction is only gaining ground with great difficulty, because there are so many obstacles for people that if this conviction only shines as an extraordinarily small, weak flame, it cannot develop. There are obstacles that are again due to the circumstances of the time. For it is indeed the case that a large part of the reasons why humanity has run into its present difficulties lies in the fact that the conditions of the external world have become so extraordinarily complicated. And today man stands in the most diverse relationships into which he is born, into which he is educated, into which he is drawn by the social conditions. And what is actually missing in most cases is the courage – I do not even want to say to get out of these relationships, that does not even have to be the case – but there is not the courage that is really necessary to get clarity about these relationships that the individual has to the world, to his fellow human beings and so on from the extraordinarily complicated development of the last decades.

Man often seeks to dampen the insights that would bring him clarity about these circumstances. And that which acts as a dampening, paralyzing force for this conviction also extinguishes the small flame that is already saying in the depths of many hearts today: Yes, the salvation of humanity is only possible through the path of a spiritual world current. And so it is extraordinarily difficult for these flames, which are in the souls of those whom I called homeless souls here some time ago, to really lead to what they must lead to. And it was precisely to consolidate such convictions that the foundation stone ceremony for the Goetheanum was held here ten years ago. The laying of the foundation stone has always been a point of reference for everything that has since been done for the Goetheanum. It is hardly surprising that the excessive outbursts of the opponents have been joined by those who refer to the laying of the foundation stone.

It is now the case that on the one hand today - I have often said this - there is an eminent need, more than at any other time in the development of humanity, to work with all the fibers of the human mind towards a spiritual goal. But on the other hand, there is a terrible hatred - “hatred” must be said – a terrible hatred of everything that bears the mark of spirituality in the true sense of the word. Today, the symptoms of such hatred sometimes appear in a paradoxical way.

We have just had the Stuttgart conference, which on the whole was much more peaceful than the February conference; I would also say that more joyful hopes for the future were revealed, and that the will was expressed to place the Anthroposophical Society on a new foundation in an energetic way. That is what everything has been leading up to, and in this sentence everything can actually be summarized, so that, as far as the German Society is concerned, proper preparation can be made for the international conference of delegates that is to take place here at Christmas. But there were also some individual episodes, and one of these episodes belongs to those that I would like to tell here, because it might not be unnecessary for you, my dear friends, to hear about this matter.

Then a younger man came forward, one of those who try to keep watch over the situation at Landhausstrasse 70 in Stuttgart, and he spoke in a very urgent and serious manner about the urgent need for a strong consciousness within the Anthroposophical Society. And then he also said that what one could observe in this way already demands a great deal, and that it challenges one to always admonish this urgency in a more serious way. For example, he had seen, while he was watching over Landhausstrasse 70, that is, the branch office in Stuttgart, how a greengrocer had driven by who said to someone else: “Yes, that's the house; Dornach has burned, but the firebrand should also be thrown into this house, and up there under the roof, that's where the people live who actually make it necessary to shoot up there.

Well, you see, it's not exactly credible that this “vegetable” grew on the greengrocer's own heart, his own soul, but one must assume that the greengrocer's voice is the often-occurring echo of slogans coming from quite elsewhere. But it is not unnecessary to mention here the matter that was brought before the large assembly in Stuttgart. Perhaps from observing these or those episodes, as they were presented at the Stuttgart conference before the large assembly, and which are symptomatic of something, it may be possible to piece together what will justify what I have been repeating for many years: What we need is vigilance in all directions, and the last thing we need, especially within the Anthroposophical Society, is complacency.

All this comes to mind when one sees how much has been destroyed of what arose from that laying of the foundation stone ten years ago. It comes to mind because today one must really have the most enthusiastic longing in the truest sense of the word that what was spiritually connected with that laying of the foundation stone, what spiritually permeated that laying of the foundation stone, that this may signify a laying of the foundation stone for a building that can perhaps only be built with tremendous difficulties and efforts, of which perhaps very little still stands today: I mean the spiritual part! One would have to say the same thing even if a new Goetheanum were to be built again on the outside as a house! But that this spiritual building, of which perhaps little still stands today, may become ever stronger and more impressive for the world through the intense enthusiasm of those who have recognized how necessary anthroposophy is for our time, that is what I wanted to express before you today.

We may indeed say, especially in remembering that laying of the foundation stone: Despite the serious misfortune that has befallen us, this laying of the foundation stone should remind us even less of this misfortune than of what our task is in building. We should not dwell on what has been destroyed and what is only part of a work of destruction that is far from complete.

Now, my dear friends, I would like to add something else that is somewhat related to this. It is not intended to be presented in a sentimental way. I did present it in Stuttgart at the delegates' meeting, but even there it was not presented in a sentimental way. And since it is truly meant very seriously – despite not being presented in a sentimental way – from a certain point of view, allow me to present it here as well – although, of course, here too, as I did in Stuttgart, I must in a sense apologize for presenting things in this way. But since I really am presenting so many things here that I would like to say, which have been achieved with all my heart and soul – in the spiritual sense, of course, this is absolutely meant – which thus testifies that I am truly not concerned about the soul, from this place to become ironic, but it is always meant seriously, so I may well speak about it in this circle as well. There was an episode at the Stuttgart conference; people insisted on reporting this little episode, especially before the very last meeting at 8 o'clock on Monday morning. So perhaps I may also bring this event up here.

At the Stuttgart assembly of delegates, there was much talk about the fact that a certain, I would say, laxity has gradually crept in with regard to the administration of the Anthroposophical Society as such; perhaps it would be better to say of the individual anthroposophists' conception of what they should actually do in the interest of the stability and inner security of the Anthroposophical Society. It was pointed out many times how people without membership cards are admitted to the meetings, and how opponents can repeatedly sneak into these meetings. For example, it was pointed out that during the delegates' meeting itself, someone appeared with a membership card that had been borrowed from someone else – I believe from the sister. It was then debated that the circumstances made it necessary to affix photographs to the membership cards of anthroposophists. I took the liberty of remarking that these would only help if they were stamped at the same time, because otherwise one could simply peel them off and stick them over the photograph. It was then also immediately reported that the person who had this membership card is said to have said: A photograph won't help, because I look exactly like my sister. - Well, these are very strange views that lead to all sorts of things.

You see, such an opinion has also been formed with regard to the cycles, of which it can be said today that perhaps not so many people have read them in detail within the opposition as in the ranks of the supporters, but that they are fruitfully read by the opponents – I would like to say in the sense of the opponents: They are actually implemented, they are utilized by the opponents. They are read very carefully there, and everything possible is done by the opponents with regard to the cycles. Today, it is already the case that one can say what is being done with the cycles by the opponents. We have recently learned how the latest cycle was immediately exploited in an opponent's publication. So there is a great zeal that one would sometimes like to see within our walls. Various suggestions were also made in Stuttgart, without of course considering that none of these suggestions can be of any use. For one cannot take action against something that has become necessary, once the Society has reached a certain size, in this way, especially with the way in which the membership is otherwise handled. One can only say one thing – with full knowledge that today everything, not only what is printed but also what is spoken, comes into the hands and ears of the opponents; with full knowledge and not wasting time with all kinds of measures to prevent this, because that means wasting time – one can only say one thing: If the content of the cycles, the spiritual current flowing through them, is championed in the same way that its opponents champion anthroposophy, then that is the best protection for the cycles in their current form, the form in which they are disseminated by the Anthroposophical Society. Negative protection is of no use here, only the positive, the active, can be of use: that one can also take the initiative for the cause.

And so many things were discussed. Much was also discussed in such a way that one always had the feeling that what was being said no longer applies to the current situation. For example, in all that was being said about protecting society from opponents, there was a grotesque contrast to what Dr. Husemann said when he discussed the opponent Dr. Goesch. Dr. Goesch made a very grandiose impression – I just want to say that in parentheses, of course it was largely a feigned impression – but he made a grandiose impression on those people who gathered in Berlin some time ago under the slogan: The Non-Anthroposophical Experts on Anthroposophy. This assembly consisted of enlightened pastors, licentiates, professors and so on. And a certain Dr. Goesch made a particular impression there, as did a certain Dora Hasselblatt. Now I do not want to reopen the whole issue. Much of how Dr. Goesch in particular conducts his opposition has been reopened at the Stuttgart assembly of delegates. But what is of symptomatic significance is this: he still pursues this antagonism today in such a way that he says: 90 percent of all that exists in anthroposophy is something to which he adheres with complete conviction. He is not fighting anthroposophy at all, but only me and the anthroposophists.

Now, that is a distinction, isn't it, which is based on a strange disposition of the soul. But I don't even want to mention that today; instead, I would like to mention something else. I would like to mention that there were people gathered together – as I said, enlightened pastors, licentiates, professors – who then agreed to send speakers around for whom what had been discussed in this assembly was to form part of the material for opposing speeches. These opposing speeches have already begun, and it was emphasized at the Stuttgart assembly of delegates that there are good reasons to expect that they will continue, especially from October onwards. Since recently, especially in Central Europe, the number of opposing speeches far exceeds the number of speeches given by supporters, there is a good chance that this will continue to increase.

But that is not even what I am concerned with at this moment, but rather what I would like to point out and what Dr. Husemann presented, that is, how these personalities, who were gathered there and who were to be given the impulse from the assembly to appear as fierce opponents of anthroposophy, how they were convinced by Dr. Goesch and what positive arguments he presented to make them opponents of anthroposophy. People are now saying and emphasizing – as can be seen from the speeches made at this congress of non-anthroposophical experts on anthroposophy – that anthroposophy poses a great danger to the physical and mental health of humanity.

In contrast to this, it seems very strange to hear Dr. Goesch's positive statements. For example, he said that he knew exactly what the intentions at the center of anthroposophy are. The intention was that Dr. Steiner and I would form a planet of our own, which would be separated from the earth and on which the members of the Anthroposophical Society would initially settle, so that in this way there would be a separation of our planet from the Anthroposophical Society on its own planet. And for this purpose, despite the fact that 90 percent of anthroposophy is the pure truth, the Anthroposophical Society was founded, and the poor members of the Anthroposophical Society are in this danger.

Now, my dear friends, I ask you to imagine the situation: enlightened pastors, licentiates, and professors are being told about their studies in terms of anthroposophy, that a piece of the Earth's planet should be split off to found a cosmic colony. This is the legitimization with which Dr. Goesch presents himself to this enlightened assembly in our enlightened cultural age.

Now I ask you: How many of these enlightened pastors, licentiates, professors and so on will have listened to such a thing and thought it foolish? For I do not really know what should be going on in the minds of the enlightened pastors, licentiates and professors – they are not anthroposophists, they want to fight them – so what should actually be going on in their minds if they do not consider it foolishness! But despite all this, the impulse to fight anthroposophy arises from this “positive”.

Now, please, just imagine the state of mind of this assembly. Such an assembly is possible today! Such an assembly grows out of the spiritual life of our present time! But that is not yet all, my dear friends, why I am mentioning this matter, but I am mentioning this matter for a completely different reason, and I will now characterize it for you.

You see, if you think a little further than those who just take crazy facts to look at them as they are and don't think any further – if you just think a little further, you have to say to yourself: On the third or fourth day, during the conference of the enlightened licentiates, pastors and professors, a number of these gentlemen, along with others like them, were sitting in other meetings where important things were discussed that affect the order of contemporary social life. On the tenth day, let us say, another group of these people sits together with their peers. You, my dear friends, must think beyond this assembly and consider that these are the people who otherwise sit together in assemblies when the great human affairs of the present are being arranged. And that is the important thing when one wants to judge our culture, that is what comes into consideration! Above all, one can be so objective, especially on the basis of anthroposophy, that one naturally regrets what follows from such a meeting for the physical world; but one must still be aware that such a meeting, even of the most inferior spirits in the spiritual world, can only be received with the most thorough laughter. That is an inner truth. But the fact remains that in a terrible way it points to the whole soul constitution of the present time, that such a gathering is an enormously telling symptom of what is happening in the wide world of so-called spirituality today! And that is the important thing.

I wanted to show by these concrete examples how different things come into consideration today. There are opponents. There will be people who think that the impulses of these opponents should be combated with this or that. Yes, my dear friends, with the vast majority of opponents it is not even possible to take the impulses that arise there seriously! Because these people, who now send their speakers out as opponents, who have written their articles, these people of the caliber of Mr. Lempp, who was mentioned here a few weeks ago in an admittedly unfortunate way in connection with the fact that our “Anthroposophy” published an article by him: these people could be persuaded on the basis of the information that we want to split off a piece of the planet and settle on it!

Yes, now you have to say to yourself: So not only did people not believe a word of it, they didn't believe a single atom of it! There is no thread of truth connecting what they are now developing as their opposition with what has been put forward to them as reasons for this opposition. There is no thread of truth, no matter how thin, connecting the two! That is how strongly the sense of truth of the opposing side has been eliminated today. This must really be taken into account today.

On the other hand, we must realize what the rest of our culture has come to be, when such things are possible. For the people who have so little to do with the truth in what they do, with the starting-point of their work, are in many cases the same people who, so to speak, lead our culture in an official capacity. We need not be guilty of anthroposophical social egotism when we consider these things. On the contrary, if we are not egotistical and take such things as our starting-point in order to gain a symptomatic grasp of the spiritual life of the present day, then this is something that should really go to our hearts.

And so, in connection with the fact that, in view of these really decisive facts, much of what is said in our meetings today seems, I might say, rather unwise, with little penetration of the consciousness of what is actually at stake, I said just last Monday evening in Stuttgart: I do not want to speak about the named and unnamed opponents, who are dealt with in a very concise manner in the book by Mr. Werbeck, who is really working on the composition of this book in an ingenious way. But, I said, I don't want to go into the question of opponents in any great detail, because I really don't have the time and I would miss out on many other infinitely more important things if I were to go into this question of opponents myself.

But I will discuss three enemies, I said, who – and now I also apologize to you for speaking of these three enemies – who are actually almost in all such assemblies, as the Stuttgart assemblies were again! There, too, were three enemies – not exactly opponents, but enemies – who are now always admitted, not with false membership cards, but without any membership cards at all, and are actually always there, and who are really causing a great deal of damage with their enmity. There are two female opponents and one male opponent.

The first female opponent is actually still terribly young, chubby-cheeked, with a youthful face, almost childlike, and somewhat flirtatious in the way she presents herself – not always, but especially when she asserts her impulses in anthroposophical gatherings. This is precisely the kind of opponent who has crept so terribly into even the more intimate Stuttgart gatherings! The three of them were always there. They were even there among the trusted people.¹They would meet in a smaller group – the three were always there! So this innocent creature, naivety with a name – and a very strong enemy in our meetings – comes without a membership card.

The second enemy is also female, is considerably older, with horn-rimmed glasses, I said, on her nose, a pointed nose. You could call her Aunt, but just as well “Fag”. That is namely the Lady Illusion. But she is extraordinarily loved, despite the fact that she causes extraordinary harm.

These two personalities in particular succeed in instigating those thoughts that then become suggestions of membership cards, of protective measures for the dissemination of cycles; and especially of what can often be heard and has done so much harm: that so-and-so has spoken “quite anthroposophically” again. Of course he was not speaking anthroposophically at all, but – well, I won't say how. But in any case, this longing in those who speak in such a way to find something 'completely anthroposophical', so that one can comfortably reassure oneself, is also fuelled by the two female personalities of naivety and illusion.

The third is a man, a man who bears the name: Leberecht Frei-Herr vom Unterscheidungsvermögen (free lord with no right to distinguish). This man is also always present at our meetings. And he prevents what has an inner value in the anthroposophical sense from being distinguished from the anthroposophical nonsense. But these are only the most extreme poles: anthroposophical solidity and anthroposophical nonsense – in between there are many gradations. And if we do not have, so to speak, a core within our society that consists of personalities who always appear without a membership card and who are free from all discernment and who transfer their capacity as Baron Leberecht Freiherr from discernment to so many - if there are not also those who turn their nose up at this Baron Leberecht, then we will most certainly, with all that we will only accumulate obstacles upon obstacles, weakness upon weakness, and so on.

These are three powerful enemies, who sometimes creep in through the keyhole: the ladies Naivety, Illusion, and the Baron Lack of Discernment. We must now be very careful to pay attention to these personalities.

You see, it is a difficult matter, and I apologized for bringing it up; but I usually, when I bring up something like this, always say: Those present are exempt. Yes, I usually say that. Now, my dear friends, it is not meant to be so badly, but it is meant as a way of drawing attention to these enemies who are always there. |

And indeed, what you can find as a kind of characteristic in the last scene of the last mystery drama also applies to these enemies, where it is said of certain spiritual entities – because you have already seen that spiritual beings are meant, spiritual enemies — it is said that they have their power as long as one is not aware of them, but that their power immediately ceases when one develops an awareness of them.

This is the secret of very many things in the spiritual world: evil powers can only maintain their power as long as there is no awareness of them, as long as no awareness of them is developed. On the other hand, the development of consciousness for certain spiritually hostile or evil spiritual powers works the same way as day does for the unkind ghosts: they run away when consciousness is developed.

I have often emphasized that it is harmful to say: This or that is a harmful entity; so one should beware of having anything to do with it, and flee from it oneself. — No, one should confront this hostile power with all one's inner strength, learn to recognize it! For when a reflection of it arises in one's own consciousness, it acts as the light from which it flees.

I have often characterized this by saying: Many a person, when they hear about Lucifer and Ahriman, says: Oh, we must beware! Away, away, away from it! — But that is not the task; rather, the task is precisely to grasp these two powers so precisely in our consciousness that they run away from us. This is something that really helps us to make progress. For in the spiritual world, different laws apply from those we have in the physical world.

I have already mentioned some of this. In the physical world, for example, the law applies that the whole is always greater than one of its parts. The four triangles are the parts of the large triangle; the large triangle is greater than one of its parts. Now one thinks that this is absolutely correct. For the spiritual world it is not correct at all, but there the part is always greater than the whole. You will say that cannot be. But that is just something we cannot imagine in the physical world! Yet it is a fact: in the spiritual world, your liver is infinitely larger than you are as a whole. And so it must be said that the same applies in the spiritual world: if I run away from Lucifer, he comes closer and closer to me. Only when I stop and he runs away, then he does so in the sense of running away in the spiritual world - and then he really gets far away, not close. On the other hand, if I run away from him – well, from a spiritual point of view I would not do it, because then I would know this secret that I have just explained – but if I run away from Lucifer, I do it the way you run away in the physical world: if you have longer legs, you escape him by running in the physical world. But in the spiritual world you get closer and closer to him, the opposite applies. On the other hand, if you make him run away, he observes the laws of the spiritual world, and he does it like the unholy ghosts before dawn: that he really moves away from his reflection in the human soul.

These things must be taken very seriously! If we take them seriously, we will also know that we can only fight these invisible opponents, naivety, illusion, lack of discernment, by not having any illusions about them, by chasing them away – yes, how should I put it, at the moment when you talk about them, that is when they always want to exist again. I myself must say: one must come to have no illusions about naivety, illusion and lack of discernment. So here again one must stand on the right ground in the face of the illusion.

But you see, this is my observation, which has become more and more firmly established over the last ten years: that we learn from what was meant at the foundation stone ceremony to expel these invisible, but no less powerful and significant enemies from our anthroposophical circles. And if we stand firmly on what was meant ten years ago when the foundation stone was laid, then we will drive these enemies out within our own assemblies. Otherwise, these enemies – I could name a few more, but that is enough for today – will be able to contribute unspeakably to the power of our opponents growing from day to day outside our ranks. I wanted to mention this today, firstly as a reminder of the laying of the foundation stone, and secondly as a brief report on the Stuttgart conference.

• 1. The Dreißigerkreis is meant.

For those of you who are able to be here today I wish to give a kind of interlude in the studies we have been pursuing for some time. What I shall say today will serve to illustrate and explain many a question that may emerge out of the subjects we have treated hitherto. At the same time it will help to throw light on the mood-of-soul of the civilisation of the present time.

For years past, we have had to draw attention to a certain point of time in that evolution of civilisation which is concentrated mainly in Europe. The time I mean lies in the 14th or 15th century or about the middle of the Middle Ages. It is the moment in the evolution of mankind when intellectualism begins—when men begin mainly to pay attention to the intellect, the life of thought, making the intellect the judge of what shall be thought and done among them.

Since the age of the intellect is with us today, we can certainly gain a good idea of what intellectualism is. We need but experience the present time, to gain a notion of what came to the surface of civilisation in the 14th and 15th century. But as to the mood of soul which preceded this, we are no longer able to feel it in a living way. People who study history nowadays generally project what they are accustomed to see in the-present time, back into the historic past, and they have little idea how altogether different men were in mind and spirit before the present epoch. Even when they let the old documents speak for themselves, they largely read into them the way of thought and outlook of the present.

To spiritual-scientific study many a thing will appear altogether differently. Let us turn our gaze for example to those historic personalities who were influenced on the one hand from the side of Arabism, from the civilisation of Asia—influenced by what lived and found expression in the Mahommedan religion, while on the other hand they were influenced by Aristotelianism. Let us consider these personalities, who found their way in course of time through Africa to Spain, and deeply influenced the thinkers of Europe down to Spinoza and even beyond him. We gain no real conception of them if we imagine their mood of soul as though they had been like men of the present time with the only difference that they were ignorant of so and so many things subsequently discovered. (For roughly speaking, this is how they are generally thought of today). The whole way of thought and outlook, even of the men who lived in the above described stream of civilisation as late as the 12th century A.D., was altogether different from that of today.

Today, when man reflects upon himself, he feels himself as the possessor of Thoughts, Feelings, and impulses of Will which lead to action. Above all, man ascribes to himself the ‘I think,’ the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’

But in the personalities of whom I am now speaking, the ‘I think’ was by no means yet accompanied by the same feeling with which we today would say ‘I think.’ This could only be said of the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’ In effect, these human beings ascribed to their own person only their Feeling and their Willing. Out of an ancient background of culture, they rather lived in the sensation ‘It thinks in me’ than that they thought ‘I think.’ Doubtless they thought ‘I feel,’ ‘I will,’ but they did not think ‘I think’ in the same measure. On the other hand they said to themselves—and what I shall now describe was an absolutely real conception to them:—In the Sublunary Sphere, there live the thoughts. The thoughts are everywhere within this sphere, which is determined when we imagine the Earth at a certain point, and the Moon at another, followed by Mercury, Venus, etc. They not only conceived the Earth as a dense and rigid cosmic mass, but as a second thing belonging to it they conceived the Lunar Sphere, reaching up to the Moon. And as we say, ‘In the air in which we breathe is oxygen,’ so did these people say (it is only forgotten now that it ever was so):—‘In the Ether which reaches up to the Moon, there are the thoughts.’ And as we say ‘We breathe-in the oxygen of the air,’ so did these people say—not ‘We breathe-in the thoughts’—but ‘We perceive the thoughts, receive them into ourselves.’ They were conscious of the fact that they received the thoughts.

Today, no doubt, a man can also familiarise himself with such an idea as a theoretic concept. He may even understand it with the help of Anthroposophy, but as soon as it becomes a question of practical life he forgets it. For then at once he has this rather strange idea, that the thoughts spring forth within himself—which is just as though he were to think that the oxygen he receives in breathing were not received by him but sprang forth from within him.

For the personalities of whom I am now speaking, it was a profound feeling and an immediate experience: ‘I have not my own thoughts as my own possession. I can not really say, I think. Thoughts exist, and I receive them unto myself.’

Now we know that the oxygen of the air circulates through our organism in a comparatively short time. We count these cycles by the pulse-beat. This happens quickly. The men of whom I am now speaking did indeed imagine the receiving of thoughts as a kind of breathing, but it was a very slow breathing. It consisted in this: At the beginning of his earthly life, man becomes capable of receiving the thoughts. As we hold the breath within us for a certain time—between our in-breathing and out-breathing—so did these men conceive a certain fact, as follows: They imagined that they held the thoughts within them, yet only in the sense in which we hold the oxygen which belongs to the outer air. They imagined that they held the thoughts during the time of their earthly life, and breathed them out again—out into the cosmic spaces—when they passed through the gate of death.

Thus it was a question of in-breathing—the beginning of life; holding the breath—the duration of earthly life; outbreathing—the sending-forth of the thoughts into the universe.

Men who had this kind of inner experience felt themselves in a common atmosphere of thought with all others who had the same experience. It was a common atmosphere of thought reaching beyond the earth, not only a few miles, but as I said, up to the orbit of the moon.

This idea was wrestling for the civilisation of Europe at that time. It was trying to spread itself ever more and more, impelled especially by those Aristotelians who came from Asia into Europe along the path I have just indicated. Let us suppose for a moment that it had really succeeded. What would then have come about?

In that case, my dear friends, that which was destined after all to find expression in the course of earthly evolution, could never have come to expression in the fullest sense: I mean, the Spiritual Soul. The human beings of whom I am now speaking, stood in the last stage of evolution of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. In the 14th and 15th century, the Spiritual Soul was to arise—the Spiritual Soul, which, if it found extreme expression, would lead all civilisation into intellectualism.

The population of Europe in its totality, in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, was by no means in a position merely to submit to the outpouring of a conception such as was held by the men whom I have now described. For if they had done so, the evolution of the Spiritual Soul would not have come about. Though it was determined in the councils of the Gods that the Spiritual Soul should evolve, nevertheless it could not evolve out of the mere independent activity of European humanity even in its totality. A special impulse had to be given towards the development of the Spiritual Soul itself.

And so, beginning in the time which I have now described, we witness the rise of two spiritual streams. The one was represented by the quasi-Arabian philosophers who, working from the West of Europe, influenced European civilisation very strongly—far more so than is commonly supposed. The other was the stream which fought against the former one with the utmost intensity and severity, representing it to Europe as the most heretical of all.

For a long time after, this conflict was felt with great intensity. You may still feel this if you consider the pictures in which Dominican Monks, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, are represented in triumph—that is to say, in the triumph of an altogether different conception which emphasised above all things the individual and personal being of man, and worked to the end that man might acquire his thoughts as his own property. In these pictures we see the Dominicans portrayed, treading the representatives of Arabism under foot. The Arabians are there under their feet—they are being trodden underfoot.

The two streams were felt in this keen contrast for a long time after. An energy of feeling such as is contained in these pictures no longer exists in the humanity of today, which is rather apathetic. We need such energy of feeling very badly, not indeed for the things for which they battled, but for other things we need it.

Let us consider for a moment what they imagined. The in-breathing of thoughts as the cosmic ether from the Sublunary Sphere—that is the beginning of life. The holding of the breath—that is the earthly life itself. The out-breathing—that is the going-forth of the thoughts once more, but with an individually human colouring, into the cosmic ether, into the impulses of the sphere beneath the Moon, of the Sublunary Sphere.

What then is this out-breathing? It is the very same, my dear friends, of which we speak when we say: In the three days after death the etheric body of man expands. Man looks back upon his etheric body, slowly increasing in magnitude. He sees how his thoughts spread out into the cosmos. It is the very same, only it was then conceived—if I may say so—from a more subjective standpoint. It was indeed quite true, how these people felt and experienced it. They felt the cycle of life more deeply than it is felt today.

Nevertheless, if their idea had become dominant in Europe, only a feeble feeling of the Ego would have evolved in the men of European civilisation. The Spiritual Soul would not have been able to emerge; the Ego would not have grasped itself in the ‘I think.’ The idea of immortality would have become vaguer and vaguer. Men would increasingly have fixed their attention on that which lives and weaves in the far reaches of the Sublunary Sphere as a remnant of the human being who has lived here on this earth.

They would have felt the spirituality of the earth as its extended atmosphere. They would have felt themselves belonging to the earth, but not as individual men distinct from the earth. Through their feeling of “It thinks in me,” the men whom I described above felt themselves intimately connected with the earth. They did not feel themselves as individualities in the same degree as the men of the rest of Europe were beginning to feel themselves, however indistinctly.

We must, however, also bear in mind the following. Only the spiritual stream of which I have just spoken, was aware of the fact that when man dies the thoughts he received during his earthly life are living and weaving in the cosmic ether that surrounds the earth. This idea was violently attacked by those other personalities who arose chiefly within the Dominican Order. They on their side declared that man is an individuality, and that we must concentrate above all on his individuality which passes through the gate of death, not on what is dissolved in the universal cosmic ether. This was emphasised paramountly, albeit not exclusively,—emphasised representatively, I would say,—by the Dominicans. They stood up sharply and vigorously for the idea of the individuality of man, as against the other stream which I characterised before. But precisely as a result of this a certain condition came about. For let us now consider these representatives—shall we say—of individualism.

After all, it was the individually coloured thoughts which passed into the universal ether. And those who fought against the former stream—just because they were still vividly aware that this was being said, that this idea existed,—were troubled and disquieted by what was really there.

This anxiety, notably among the greatest thinkers,—this anxiety as a result of the forces expanding and dissolving and passing on the human thoughts to the cosmic ether,—did not really come to an end until the 16th or 17th century.

We must somehow be able to transplant ourselves into the inner life of soul of these people,—those especially who belonged to the Dominican Order. Only then do we gain an idea, how much they were disquieted by what was really left as an heritage from the dead,—which they, with their conception, no longer could nor dared believe in.

We must transplant ourselves into the hearts and minds of these people. No great man of the 13th or 14th century could have thought so dryly, so abstractly or in such cold and icy concepts as the men of today. When the men of today are standing up for any ideas or theories, it seems as though it were a recognised condition for so doing that one's heart should first be torn out of one's body. At that time it was not so. At that time there was deep feeling, there was heartiness in all that men upheld as their ideas. But in a case such as I am now citing, this heartiness also involved the presence of an intense inner conflict.

That philosophy, for instance, which proceeded from the Dominican Order was evolved under the most appalling inner conflicts. I mean that philosophy which afterwards had such a strong influence on life—for life at that time was still far more dependent on the authority of individual men. There was no such popular education at that time. All culture and education—all that the people knew—eventually merged into the possession of a few. And as a consequence, these few reached up far more to a real philosophic life and striving. And in all that then flowed out into civilisation, these inner conflicts which they lived through, were contained.

Today one reads the works of the Schoolmen and is conscious only of the driest thoughts. But it is the readers of today who are dry. Those who wrote these works were by no means dry in heart or mind. They were filled with inner fire in relation to their thoughts. Moreover, this inner fire was due to the striving to hold at bay the objective influence of thoughts.

When a man of today thinks on philosophic questions or questions of world-outlook, nothing is there, so to speak, to worry him. A man of today can think the greatest nonsense—he thinks it in perfect calm and peace of mind. Humanity has already evolved for so long within the Spiritual Soul, that no such disquieting occurs, as would occur, for instance, if individuals among us felt how the thoughts of men appear when they flow out after death into the ethereal environment of the earth. Today, such things as could still be experienced in the 13th or 14th century, are quite unknown. Then it would happen that a younger priest would come to an older priest, telling of the inner tortures which he was undergoing in remaining true to his religious faith, and expressing it in this wise: ‘I am pursued by the spectres of the dead.’

Speaking of the spectres of the dead, they meant precisely what I have just described. That was a time when men could still grow deeply into what they learned. In such a community—a Dominican community for instance,—they learned that man is individual and has his own individual immortality. They learned that it is a false and heretical idea to conceive, with respect to Thought, a kind of universal soul comprising all the earth. They learned to attack this heresy with all their might. And yet, in certain moments when they took deep counsel with themselves, they would feel the objective and influential presence of the thoughts which were left behind as relics by the dead. Then they would say to themselves, ‘Is it quite right for me to be doing what I am doing? Here is something intangible, working into my soul. I cannot rise against it—I am held fast by it.’

The intellects of the men of that time,—of many of them at any rate,—were still so constituted that they were quite generally aware of the speaking of the dead, at least for some days after death. And when the one had ceased to speak, another would begin. With respect to such things too, they felt themselves immersed in the all-pervading spiritual—or at the very least, ethereal—essence of the universe.

Coming down into our own time, this living feeling with the Universal All has ceased. In return for it we have achieved the conscious life in the Spiritual Soul, while all the spiritual reality that surrounds us (surrounds us as a reality, no less so than tables or chairs, trees or rivers) works only upon the depths of our subconsciousness. The inwardness of life, the spiritual inwardness, has passed away. It must first be acquired again by spiritual-scientific knowledge livingly received.

We must think livingly upon the knowledge of spiritual science, and we shall do so if we dwell upon such facts of life as lie by no means very far behind us. Imagine a Scholastic thinker or writer of the 13th century. He writes down his thoughts. Nowadays it is easy work to think, for men have grown accustomed to think intellectualistically. At that time it was only at the beginning, and was still difficult. Man was still conscious of a tremendous inner effort. He was conscious of fatigue in thinking even as in hewing wood, if I may use the trivial comparison. Today the thinking of many men has become quite automatic. We of today are scarcely overcome by the longing to follow up every one of our thoughts with our own human personality! We hear a man of today letting one thought arise out of another like an automaton. We cannot follow, we do not know why, for there is no inner necessity in it. And yet so long as a man is living in the body he should follow up his thoughts with his own personality. Afterwards they will soon take a different course; they will spread out and expand, when he is dead.

So could a man be sitting there at that time, defending with every weapon of sharp incisive thought the doctrine of individual man, so as to save the doctrine of individual immortality. So could he be rising in polemics against Averroes, or others of that stream of thought which I described at the beginning of this lecture. But there was another possibility. For especially in the case of an outstanding man like Averroes, that which proceeded from him, dissolving after his death like a kind of spectre in the Sublunary Sphere, might well be gathered up again by the Moon itself at the end of that Sphere, and remain behind. Having enlarged and expanded, it might even be reduced again, and shape and form be given to it, till it was consolidated once again into a being built, if I may say so, in the ether. That could well happen. Then would a man be sitting there, trying to lay the foundations of individualism, carrying on his polemic against Averroes; and Averroes would appear before him as a threatening figure, disturbing, putting off his mind.

The most important of the Scholastic writings which arose in the 13th century were directed against Averroes who was long dead. They made polemics against the man long dead, against the doctrine which he had left behind. Then he arose to prove to them that his thoughts had become condensed, consolidated once again and thus were living on.

There were indeed these inner conflicts, before the beginning of the new age of consciousness. And they were such that we today should see once more their full intensity and depth and inwardness. Words after all are words. The men of later times can but receive what lies behind the words, with such ideas as they possess. But within the words there were often rich contents of inner life. They pointed to a life of soul such as I have now described.

These, then, are the two streams, and they have remained active, fundamentally speaking, to this day. The one—albeit now only working from the spiritual world, yet all the stronger there,—-would fain impress it upon man that a universal life of thoughts surrounds the earth, and that in thoughts man breathes-in soul and spirit. The other stream desires above all to point out that man should make himself independent of such universality. The former stream is more like a vague intangible presence in the spiritual environment of the earth, perceptible today to many men (for there are still such men) when in peculiar nights they lie there on their beds and listen to the void, and out of the void all manner of doubts are born in them as to what they are asserting today so definitely and so surely in their own individuality.

Meanwhile in other folk, who always sleep soundly because they are so well satisfied with themselves, we have the unswerving emphasis on the individual principle.

This battle, after all, is smouldering still at the very foundations of European culture. It is there to this day; and in the things that are taking place outwardly at the surface of our life, we have after all scarcely anything else than the beating of the surface-waves from that which is still present in the depths of souls,—a relic of the deeper and intenser inner life of yonder time.

Many souls of that time are here again in present earthly life. In a certain way they have conquered what then disquieted them so much in their surface consciousness—disquieted them at least in certain moments of their surface consciousness.

But in the depths it smoulders all the more, in many minds and hearts today. Spiritual science, once again, is here to draw attention also to such historic facts as these.

But we must not forget the following. In the same measure in which men become unconscious, during earthly life, of what is there none the less, namely the thoughts in the ether in the immediate environment of the earth—in the same measure, therefore, in which they acquire the ‘I think’ as their own possession—their human soul is narrowed down. Man passes through the gate of death with a contracted soul.

The narrowed soul has carried untrue, imperfect, inconsistent earthly thoughts into the cosmic ether, and these work back again upon the minds of men. Thence there arise such social movements as we see arise today. We must understand these too as to their inner origin. Then we shall recognise that there is no other cure, no other healing for these social ideas, destructive as they often are, than the spreading of the truth about the spiritual life and being.

Call to mind the lectures we have given here, especially the historic ones taking into account the idea of reincarnation and leading to so many definite examples. These lectures will have shown you how things work beneath the surface of external history. You will have seen how that which lives in one historic age is carried over into a later one by men returning into earthly life. But everything spiritual plays its part, between death and a new birth, in moulding what is carried by man from one earth-life into another.

Today it would be good if many souls would attain for themselves that objectivity to which we can address ourselves, awakening an inner understanding, when we describe the men who lived in the twilight of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul age.

Some of the men who lived at that time are here again today. Deep in their souls they underwent the evening twilight of an age, and through the constant attacks they suffered from the spectres of which I have now spoken, they have, after all, absorbed deep doubts as to the unique validity of what is intellectualistic.

This doubt can well be understood. For about the 13th century there were many men—men of knowledge, who stood in the midst of the life of learning, almost entirely theological as it then was—men for whom it was a deep conscience question: What will now become?

Such souls had often carried with them into that time mighty contents from their former incarnations. They gave it an intellectualistic colouring; but they felt this all as a declining stream. While at the rising stream—pressing forward as it was to individuality—they felt the pangs of conscience. Until at length those philosophers arose who stood under an influence which has really killed all meaning. To speak radically, we will say: those who stood under the influence of Descartes! For many, even among those who had their place in the Scholasticism of an earlier time, had already fallen into the Cartesian way of thought. I do not say that they became philosophers. These things underwent many a change. When men begin to think along these lines the strangest nonsense becomes self-understood. To Descartes, as you know, is due the saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Countless clever thinkers have accepted this as true: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Yet the result is this: From morning until evening I think, therefore I am. Then I fall asleep. I do not think, therefore I am not. I wake up again, I think, therefore I am. I fall asleep, and as I now do not think, I am not. This then is the consequence: A man not only falls asleep, but ceases to be when he falls asleep. There is no less fitting proof of the existence of the spirit of man than the theorem: ‘I think.’ Yet this began to be the most widely accepted statement in the age of evolution of Consciousness (the age of the Spiritual Soul). When we point to such things today, it is like a sacrilege—we cannot help ourselves!

But over against all this, I would now tell you of a kind of conversation. Though it is not historically recorded, by spiritual research it can be discovered among the real facts that happened. It was a conversation that took place between an older and a younger Dominican, somewhat as follows:—

The younger man said, ‘Thinking takes hold of men. Thought, the shadow of reality, takes hold of them. In ancient times, thought was always the last revelation of the living Spirit from above. But now, thought is the very thing that has forgotten that living Spirit. Now it is experienced as a mere shadow. Verily, when a man sees a shadow, he knows the shadow points to some reality. The realities are there indeed. Thinking itself is not to be attacked, but only the fact that we have lost the living Spirit from our thinking.’

The older man replied, ‘In Thinking, through the very fact that man is turning his attention with loving interest to outer Nature, (while he accepts Revelation as Revelation and does not seek to approach it with his thinking),—in Thinking, to compensate for the former heavenly reality, an earthly reality must be found once more.’

‘What will happen?’ said the younger man. ‘Will European humanity be strong enough to find this earthly reality of thought, or will it only be weak enough to lose the heavenly reality?’

This dialogue truly contains all that can still hold good with regard to European civilisation. For after the intermediate time, with the darkening of the living quality of thought, mankind must now attain the living thought once more. Otherwise humanity will remain weak, and with the reality of thought will lose its own reality. Therefore it is most necessary, since the entry of our Christmas impulse, that we in the Anthroposophical Movement speak without reserve in forms of living thought. For otherwise it will come about, more and more, that even the things we know from this source or from that—as for instance, that man has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body,—will only be taken hold of with the forms of dead thinking.

These things must not be taken hold of with the forms of dead thinking. For then they become distorted, misrepresented truth, and not the truth itself.

So much I wanted to describe today. We must attain a living, sympathetic interest, a longing to go beyond the ordinary history and to attain that history which must and can be read in the living Spirit, which history shall more and more be cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement. Today, my dear friends, I wished to place before your souls, as it were, the concrete outline of our programme in this direction.

Much has been said today in aphorism. The inner connection will dawn upon you if you attempt, not so much to follow up with intellect, but to feel with your whole being, what was desired to be said today. You must attempt to feel it knowingly, to know it feelingly, in order that not only what is said but what is heard within our circles may be sustained more and more by real spirituality.

We need education to spiritual hearing, spiritual listening. Only then shall we develop the true spirituality among us. I wanted to awaken this feeling in you today; not so much to hold a systematic lecture, but to speak to your hearts, albeit calling to witness, as I did so, many a concrete spiritual fact.

Today I would like to insert certain things which will afterwards make it possible for us to understand more closely the karmic connections of the Anthroposophical Movement itself. What I wish to say today will take its start from the fact that there are two groups of human beings in the Anthroposophical Movement. In general terms I have already described how the Anthroposophical Movement is composed of the individuals within it. What I shall say today must of course be taken in broad outline and as a whole; but there are the two groups of human beings in the Anthroposophical Movement. The things which I shall characterise do not lie so obviously spread out ‘on the palm of the hand,’ as we say. They are by no means such that crude and simple observation would enable us to say: in the case of this or that member, it is so or so. Much of what I shall characterise today lies not in the full everyday consciousness of the personality, but, like most karmic things, in the instincts—in the sub-consciousness. Nevertheless, it does thoroughly impress itself on the character and temperament, the mode of action and indeed the real action of the human being.

We have to distinguish the one group, who are related to Christianity in such a way that those who belong to it feel their attachment to Christianity nearest and dearest to their hearts. There lives in these souls the longing, as anthroposophists, to be able to call themselves Christians in the true sense of the word, as they conceive it.

This group derives great comfort from the fact that it can be said in the widest and fullest sense: The Anthroposophical Movement is one that recognises and bears the Christ Impulse within it. Indeed, for this group, pangs of conscience would arise if it were not so.

Now as to the other group:—In the manifestations of their life, those who belong to it are indeed no less sincerely Christian. And yet, they come to Christianity from rather a different angle. To begin with they find great satisfaction in the anthroposophical cosmology—the evolution of the earth from the other planetary forms, and so forth. They find satisfaction in all that Anthroposophy has to say about Man in general. From this point they are then led naturally to Christianity. But they do not feel in the same measure an inward need of the heart, to place Christ in the central point at all costs.

As I said, these things work themselves out to a large extent in the subconsciousness. But whoever is able to practice true observation of souls will be able to judge the different individuals in the right way in every single case.

Now the origins of this grouping go back into very ancient times. You know, my dear friends, from my Occult Science that at a certain period of earthly evolution the souls took their departure as it were from the continued evolution of the Earth and came to dwell on other planets of our system. Then, during a certain time—during the Lemurian and Atlantean times—they came down again to Earth. Thus the souls came down again from the various planets—not only from Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, etc., but also from the Sun—to take on an earthly form. And we know how there arose, under the influence of these facts, what I described in Occult Science as the Oracles.

Now there were many among these souls who tended through a very ancient karma to come into that stream which afterwards became the Christian stream. We must remember, after all, that less than a third of the population of the earth are professing Christians to this day. Thus only a certain number of the individual souls who came down to earth unfolded the tendency, the impulse, to evolve towards the Christian stream.

The human souls came down at different times. There were those who came down comparatively soon, in the first periods of Atlantean civilisation. But there were also those who came down relatively late—whose sojourn, so to speak, in the pre-earthly, planetary life was long. When we look back into the life of such a soul—beginning with the present incarnation—we come perhaps to a former Christian incarnation and maybe to yet another Christian incarnation. Then we come to the pre-Christian incarnations. But we reach comparatively soon the earliest incarnation of such a soul, whereat we must say: Tracing the life still farther back from this point, it goes up into the planetary realms. Before this point, these souls were not yet present in earthly incarnations.

In the case of other souls, who have also found their way into Christianity, it is different. We can go very far back; we find many incarnations. It was after many incarnations, pre-Christian and Atlantean too, that these other souls dived down at length into the Christian stream.

For intellectualistic thought, such a thing as I have just mentioned is exceedingly misleading. For one might easily be led to suppose that those who by the judgment of present-day civilisation would be considered as particularly able minds, are the very ones who have had many incarnations. But this need not by any means be the case. On the contrary, people who have excellent faculties in the present-day sense of the word—people who are well able to enter into modern life may often be the very ones for whom we find comparatively few past incarnations on the earth.

Perhaps I may here remind you of what I said at the time when the anthroposophical stream which we now have in the Anthroposophical Movement was inaugurated. I may remind you of what I said at the Christmas Foundation Meeting, when I spoke of those individualities with whom the Epic of Gilgamesh is connected.¹ I explained certain things about such individualities. We find, as we look backward, that they had had comparatively few incarnations. But there were other individualities again who had many incarnations

Now, my dear friends, for those human souls who come to Anthroposophy today—no matter whether there are still other, intermediate incarnations or not—that incarnation is important, which falls roughly into the 3rd or 4th or 5th century after Christ. (We find it nearly always, spread out over a fairly long period,—two to three centuries. Sometimes it is later—even as late as the 7th or 8th century). Above all things, we must look into the experiences of these souls in that early Christian time. We then find a subsequent incarnation when all these experiences were fastened or confirmed. But I will connect what now I have to say today most definitely with what we may describe as the first Christian incarnation.

Now in the case of all these souls, the important thing is: According to all their past conditions, their former lives on earth, how were they to relate themselves to Christianity? You see, my dear friends, this is a very important karmic question. Later on we shall have to consider other, more subsidiary karmic questions; but this question is so to speak a cardinal question of karma, because, passing over many other subsidiary things, it is through their deepest, innermost experiences in former incarnations—through what they underwent with respect to world-conceptions, religious beliefs and the like—that human beings come into the Anthroposophical Society. With respect to the karma of the Anthroposophical Society, this must therefore be placed into the foreground. What have the souls in this Society experienced, in matters of Knowledge, World-conception and Religion?

Now in those early centuries of Christian evolution, one could still take one's start from traditions of knowledge—which had existed ever since the founding of Christianity—about the Being of Christ Himself. In these traditions, He who lived as Christ in the personality of Jesus was regarded as a Dweller on the Sun, a Being of the Sun, before He entered into this earthly life. We must not imagine that the attitude of the Christian world to these truths was always as negative as it is today. In the first centuries of Christianity they still understood the Gospels, certain passages of which speak so distinctly of this Mystery. They understood that the Being who is called Christ had come down into a human body from the Sun. How they conceived it in detail is less important for the moment; the point is that this conception was still theirs. It certainly went as far as I have just described.

At the same time, in the epoch of which I am now speaking, the possibility of really understanding such a conception had dwindled very much. It was hard to understand that a Being coming from the Sun descends on to the Earth. Above all, many of the souls who had come into Christianity having a large number of earthly incarnations behind them—far back into Atlantean times—could no longer fully understand how Christ can be called a Being of the Sun. The very souls who in their old beliefs had felt themselves attached to the Sun-Oracles, and who thus revered the Christ even in Atlantean times inasmuch as they looked upward to the Sun—the souls therefore who according to the saying of St. Augustine were ‘Christians before Christianity was founded upon Earth,’² Christians as it were of the Sun—these very souls, by the whole character of their spiritual life, could find no real understanding of the saying that Christ was a Sun-Hero. Therefore they preferred to hold fast to that belief which—without such interpretation, without this cosmic Christology—simply regarded Christ as a God, a God from unknown realms, who had united Himself with the body of Jesus. Under these conditions, they accepted what is related in the Gospels. They could no longer turn their gaze upward to the cosmic worlds in order to understand the Being of the Christ. They had learned to know Him only in the worlds beyond the Earth. For even the Mysteries on Earth—the Sun-Oracles—had always spoken to them of Christ as a Sun-Being. Thus they could not find their way into the idea that Christ—this Christ beyond the Earth—had really become an earthly Being.

These Christian souls, when they afterwards passed through the gate of death, came into a strange position, which I may describe—somewhat tritely perhaps—as follows. These Christians, in their life after death, came into the position of a man who knows the name of another man and has heard many things about him; but he has never made his acquaintance in person. To such a man it may happen, at a moment when all the support which served him as long as he merely knew of the name are taken away, that he is suddenly expected to know the real person, and his inner life completely fails him in face of this new situation. So it was with the souls of whom I have now spoken: those who in ancient times had felt themselves belonging especially to the Sun-Oracles. In their life after death, they came into a situation in which they had to say, ‘Where, then, is the Christ? We are now among the Beings of the Sun, where we had always found Him, but now we find Him not.’ That He was on Earth, this they had not really received into the thoughts and feelings which remained to them when they passed through the gate of death. So after death they found themselves in a state of great uncertainty about the Christ and they lived on in this uncertainty about Him. They remained in many respects in this uncertainty. Thus, if in the intervening time another incarnation followed, they tended easily to join those groups of men who are described to us in the religious history of Europe as the various heretical societies.

Then, no matter whether they had passed through such another incarnation or not, they found themselves together again in that great gathering above the earth, which I described here the other morning, placing it at the time of the first half of the 19th century. Then it was that these souls among others found themselves face to face with a great super-sensible cult or ritual, consisting in mighty Imaginations. And in the sublime Imaginations of that super-sensible ritual there was enacted before their spiritual vision, above all other things, the great Sun-Mystery of Christ. These souls, as I explained, had as it were come to a blind alley with their Christianity. And the object was, before they should descend to earthly life again, to bring them, in picture-form, at least, face to face with Christ, whom they had lost—though not entirely—yet to such extent that in their souls He had become involved in currents of uncertainty and doubt.

Now these souls responded in a peculiar way. Not that they found themselves in a still greater uncertainty through the fact that all this was enacted before them. On the contrary it gave them a certain satisfaction in their life between death and a new birth—a feeling of salvation from many doubts. But it also gave them a kind of memory of what they had received about the Christ—albeit in a form that had not yet been permeated in the true cosmic sense by the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus there remained in their inmost being an immense warmth and devotion of feeling towards Christianity, and at the same time a subconscious dawning of those sublime Imaginations.

All this was concentrated into a great longing, that they might now at last be able to be Christians in the true way. Then when they descended—when they became young again, returning to the earth at the end of the 19th or at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries—having received the Christ by way of inner feeling though without cosmic understanding in their early Christian incarnation, they could do no other than feel themselves impelled towards Him. But the impressions they had received in the Imaginations to which they had been drawn in their pre-earthly life, remained in them only as an undefined longing. Thus it was difficult for them to find their way into the anthroposophical world-conception, inasmuch as the latter studies the cosmos to begin with and leaves the consideration of Christ until a later point.

Why did they have such difficulty? For the simple reason, my dear friends, that they had their own peculiar relationship to the question ‘What is Anthroposophy?’ Let us ask: What is Anthroposophy in its reality? My dear friends, if you gaze into all those wonderful, majestic Imaginations that stood there as a super-sensible spiritual action in the first half of the 19th century, and if you translate all these into human concepts, then you have Anthroposophy. For the next higher level of experience—for the adjoining spiritual world whence man descends into this earthly life—Anthroposophy was already there in the first half of the 19th century. It was not on the earth, but it was there. And if Anthroposophy is seen today it is seen indeed in that direction: towards the first half of the 19th century. Quite as a matter of course one sees it there. Nay, even at the end of the 18th century one sees it.

For example, one may have the following experience. There was a certain man who was once in a peculiar position. Through a friend, the great riddle of human earthly life was raised before him. But this his friend was not altogether free of the angular thinking of Kant (“das kantige Kant'sche Denken”), and thus it came to expression in a rather abstract philosophic way. He himself—the one of whom I am now speaking—could not find his way into the ‘angular thinking of Kant.’ Yet everything in his soul stirred up the same great riddle, the great question of life. How are the reason and the sensuous nature of man connected with one another? And lo, there were opened to him—not merely the doors but the very flood-gates, which for a moment let radiate into his soul those regions of the World in which the mighty Imaginations were being enacted. And all this—entering not through windows or doors but through wide-open flood-gates into his soul—translated as it were into little miniatures, came forth as the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. For the man of whom I speak was Goethe.

Miniatures—tiny reflected images, translated even into a fairy-like prettiness—descended thus in Goethe's Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. We need not therefore wonder that when it became necessary to give Anthroposophy in artistic scenes or pictures, (where we too must naturally have recourse to the great Imaginations), my first Mystery Play, ‘The Portal of Initiation’ became alike in structure—albeit different in content—alike in structure to the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

You see it is possible to look into the deeper connection even through the actual things that have taken place among us. Everyone who has had anything to do with occult matters, knows that that which happens on earth is the downward reflection of something that has taken place long, long before in the spiritual world, though in a somewhat different way, inasmuch as certain spirits of hindrance are not mingled in it there.

These souls now, who were preparing to descend into earthly existence at the end of the 19th or at the beginning of the 20th century, brought with them—albeit in their subconsciousness—a longing also to know something of cosmology, etc., i.e. to look out upon the world in the anthroposophical way. But above all things, their heart and mind were strongly inflamed for Christ. They would have felt pangs of conscience if this whole conception of Anthroposophy—to which they found themselves attracted as an outcome of their pre-earthly life—had not been permeated by the Christ Impulse. Such was the one group, taken of course ‘as a whole.’

The other group lived differently. If I may put it so, the other group, when they emerged in their present incarnation, had not yet reached that weariness in Paganism which the souls whom I described just now had reached. Compared to those others, they had indeed spent a relatively short time on earth—they had had fewer incarnations; and in these incarnations they had filled themselves with the mighty impulses which a man may have, if through his lives on earth he has stood in a living connection with the many Pagan Gods, and if this connection echoes strongly in his later incarnations. Thus they were not yet weary of the old Paganism. Even in the first centuries of Christianity the old Pagan impulses had still been working in them strongly, although they did incline more or less to Christianity, which, as we know, only gradually worked its way forth from Paganism.

At that time they received Christianity chiefly through their intellect. Though indeed it was intellect permeated with inner feeling, still they received it with their intellect. They thought a great deal about Christianity. Nor must you imagine this a very learned kind of thinking. They may indeed have been relatively simple men and women, in simple circumstances; but they thought much.

Once again it matters not whether there was a subsequent incarnation in the meantime. Such an incarnation will of course have wrought some changes; but the essential thing is this: When they had passed through the gate of death, these souls looked back upon the earth in such a way that Christianity appeared to them as something into which they had not yet really grown. They were less weary of the old Paganism; they still bore within their souls strong impulses from the old Pagan life. Thus they were still waiting, as it were, for the time when they should become true Christians.

The very people of whom I spoke to you a week ago, describing how they battled against Paganism on the side of Christianity—they themselves were among the souls who in reality still bore much Paganism, many Pagan impulses within them. They were still waiting to become real Christians. These souls, then, passed through the gate of death. They arrived in the spiritual world. They passed through the life between death and a new birth, and in the time which I have indicated—in the first half of the 19th century or a little earlier—they came before that sublime and glorious Imagination; and in these Imaginations they beheld so many impulses to fire their work and their activity. They received these impulses paramountly into their will.

And, if I may say so, when we now look with occult vision at all that these souls are carrying today, especially within their will, we find—above all in their life of will—the frequent impress of those mighty spiritual Imaginations.

Now the souls who enter their earthly life in such condition feel the need, to begin with, to experience again here upon earth—in the way that is possible on earth—what they experienced in their pre-earthly life as a determining factor for their karmic work. For the former kind, for the former group of souls, the life in the first half of the 19^th century took its course in such a way that they felt themselves impelled by a deep longing to partake in that super-sensible cult or ritual. Yet they came to it—if I may so describe it—in a vague and mystic mood, so that when they afterwards descended to the earth, only dim recollections remained to them; albeit Anthroposophy, transformed into its earthly shape, could make itself intelligible to them through these recollections. But with the second group it was different. It was as though they found themselves together again in the living after-effect of the resolve that they had made. For they, even then, had not been quite weary of Paganism. They still stood in expectation of being able to become Christians in a true way of evolution. And now it was as though they remembered a resolve that they had made during that first half of the 19^th century: a resolve to carry down on to the earth all that had stood before them in such mighty pictures, and to translate it into an earthly form.

When we look at many an anthroposophist who bears within him the impulse above all to work and co-operate with Anthroposophy most actively, we find among such anthroposophists souls of the kind that I have now described. The two types can be distinguished very clearly.

Now, my dear friends, perhaps you will say: All that you have here told us may explain many things in the karma of the Anthroposophical Society; but one may well grow anxious: ‘What is coming next?’—seeing that so many things are being explained about which one might well prefer not to be torn away from blissful ignorance. Are we now to set to work and think, whether we belong to the one type or the other? My dear friends, to this I must give a very definite answer. If the Anthroposophical Society were merely to contain a theoretic teaching or a confession of belief in such and such ideas of cosmology, Christology, etc.—if such were the character of this Society—it would certainly not be what it is intended to be by those who stand at its fountain-head. Anthroposophy shall be something which for a true anthroposophist has power to change and transform his life, to carry into the Spiritual what is experienced nowadays only in unspiritual forms of expression.

I will ask you this: Has it a very bad effect upon a child when at a certain age certain things are explained to him or her? Until a certain age is reached, the children do not know whether they are French or Germans, Norwegians,—Belgians or Italians. At any rate this whole way of thinking has little meaning for them until a certain age. One may say, they know nothing of it in reality. We need only put it radically:—You will surely not have met many Chauvinist babies, or even three-year old Chauvinists! ... It is only at a certain age that we become aware: I am German, I am a Frenchman, I am an Englishman, I am a Dutchman and so on. Yet in accepting these things, do we not grow into them quite naturally? Do we say it is a thing unbearable, to discover at a certain age of childhood that we are a Pole or a Frenchman, or a German or a Russian or a Dutchman? We are used to these things, we take them as a matter of course. But this, my dear friends, is in the external realm of the senses. Anthroposophy is to raise the whole life of man to a higher level. We must learn to bear different things, things which will only shock us in the life of the senses if we misunderstand them. And among the things we are to learn to recognise there is this too:—We must grow just as naturally and simply into the self-knowledge which is to realise that we belong to the one type or the other.

By this means too, the foundation will be created for a right estimation of the other karmic impulses in our lives. Hence it was necessary, as a kind of first direction, to show how the individual—according to the special manner of his pre-destination—stands in relation to this Anthroposophy, to this Christology, and in relation to the greater degree of activity or passivity within the Anthroposophical Movement.

Of course there are transitions too, between the one type and the other. These however are due to the fact that that which comes over from the previous incarnation into the present is still irradiated by a yet earlier incarnation. Especially with the souls of the second group, this is often the case. Many things still shine over from their genuinely heathen incarnations. For this reason they have a very definite pre-disposition to take the Christ in the sense in which He must truly be taken, namely as a Cosmic Being. But what I am now saying shows itself not so very much in the ideal considerations; it shows itself far more in the practical things of life. The two types can be recognised far better by the way in which they tackle the detailed situations of life than by their thoughts. Thoughts indeed have no great significance—I mean, the abstract thoughts have no such great significance for man. So, for instance (needless to say, the personal element is always to be excluded here) we shall frequently find the transition types from the one to the other among those who somehow cannot help carrying over the habits of non-anthroposophical life into the Anthroposophical Movement. I mean, those who are not even inclined to take the Anthroposophical Movement so very seriously, and those above all who are always grumbling in the Anthroposophical Movement, finding fault with the anthroposophists. Precisely among those who are always finding fault with the conditions in the Anthroposophical Movement, especially with the personalities and all the little petty things, we find the transition types, flickering from the one into the other. For in such cases the intensity of neither of the two impulses is very strong.

Therefore, my dear friends, at all costs—even though it may sometimes mean a searching of conscience and character—we must somehow find it possible, each one of us, to deepen the Anthroposophical Movement in this direction, approaching such realities as these and thinking a little earnestly on this: How do we, according to our own super-sensible nature, belong to the Anthroposophical Movement? If we do this, there will arise a purer conception of the Anthroposophical Movement; it will become in course of time an ever more spiritual conception. What we have hitherto maintained in theory—and it need not go so very deep, when we merely stand for it as a theory—this we shall now apply to real life. It is indeed an intense application to life, when we learn to place ourselves, our own life, into connection with these things. To talk a lot of karma, saying that such and such things are punished or rewarded thus and thus from one life to the next, need not strike so very deep; it need not hurt us. But when it reaches so to speak into our own flesh and blood—when it is a question of placing our own present incarnation, with the perfectly definite super-sensible quality that underlies it—then indeed it goes far nearer to our being. And it is this deepening of the human being which we must bring into all earthly life, into all earthly civilisation through Anthroposophy.

This, my dear friends, was a kind of Intermezzo in our studies, and we will continue from this point next Friday.

• 1. See World History in the Light of Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977.
• 2. St. Augustine: Retractationes. I.xiii.3. “When I said (in his book De Vera Religione) ‘That is in our times the Christian religion, to know which, is the most secure and certain salvation,’ it was said in relation to the name, not in relation to the thing itself, of which it is the name. For the thing itself, which is now called the Christian religion, was there among the people of antiquity, and was not wanting from the beginning of the human race, down to the time when Christ came in the flesh; whereafter the true religion, which was always there, began to be called Christian. For when the Apostles began to preach Him after the resurrection and ascension into heaven, and very many believed, first of all at Antioch, as it is written, they were called Christian disciples (Acts X1, 26). Therefore I said: ‘This is in our times the Christian religion,’ not because it was not there in earlier times, but because in later times it received this name.” (Tr. from the Latin text).

For those of you who are able to be here today I wish to give a kind of interlude in the studies we have been pursuing for some time. What I shall say today will serve to illustrate and explain many questions that may emerge out of the subjects we have treated until now. At the same time it will help to throw light on the mood of soul of the civilisation of the present time.

For years past, we have had to draw attention to a certain point of time in that evolution of civilisation which is concentrated mainly in Europe. The time I mean lies in the 14th or 15th century or around the middle of the Middle Ages. It is the moment in the evolution of humanity when intellectualism began—when people began mainly to pay attention to the intellect, the life of thought, making the intellect the judge of what shall be thought and done among them.

Since the age of the intellect is with us today, we can certainly gain a good idea of what intellectualism is. We need but experience the present time to gain a notion of what came to the surface of civilisation in the 14th and 15th centuries. But as to the mood of soul which preceded this, we are no longer able to feel it in a living way. People who study history nowadays generally project what they are accustomed to see in the present time back into the historic past, and they have little idea how altogether different people were in mind and spirit before the present epoch. Even when they let the old documents speak for themselves, they largely read into them the way of thought and outlook of the present.

To spiritual-scientific study many things will appear differently. Let us turn our gaze for example to those historic personalities who were influenced on the one hand by Arabism, the civilisation of Asia—influenced by what lived and found expression in the Mohammedan religion, while on the other hand they were influenced by Aristotelianism. Let us consider these personalities, who found their way in the course of time through Africa to Spain, and deeply influenced the thinkers of Europe down to Spinoza and even beyond him. We gain no real conception of them if we imagine their mood of soul as though they had been like people of the present time with the only difference that they were ignorant of so and so many things subsequently discovered. (Roughly speaking, this is how they are generally thought of today). The whole way of thought and outlook, even of the people who lived in the above described stream of civilisation as late as the 12th century A.D., was altogether different from that of today.

Today, when man reflects upon himself, he feels himself as the possessor of thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will which lead to action. Above all, man ascribes to himself the ‘I think,’ the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’

But in the personalities of whom I am now speaking, the ‘I think’ was by no means yet accompanied by the same feeling with which we today would say ‘I think.’ This could only be said of the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’ In effect, those human beings ascribed to their own person only their feeling and their willing. Out of an ancient background of culture they rather lived in the sensation ‘It thinks in me’ than that they thought ‘I think.’ Doubtless they thought ‘I feel,’ ‘I will,’ but they did not think ‘I think’ in the same measure. On the other hand they said to themselves—and what I shall now describe was an absolutely real conception to them: The thoughts live in the Sublunary Sphere. The thoughts are everywhere within this sphere, which is determined when we imagine the earth at a certain point, and the moon at another, followed by Mercury, Venus, etc. They not only conceived the Earth as a dense and rigid cosmic mass, but as a second thing belonging to it they conceived the Lunar Sphere, reaching up to the moon. And as we say, ‘In the air in which we breathe is oxygen,’ so did these people say (it is only forgotten now that it ever was so):—‘In the ether which reaches up to the Moon, there are the thoughts.’ And as we say ‘We breathe in the oxygen of the air,’ so did these people say—not ‘We breathe in the thoughts’—but ‘We perceive the thoughts, receive them into ourselves.’ They were conscious of the fact that they received the thoughts.

Today, no doubt, a person can also familiarise himself with such an idea as a theoretical concept. He may even understand it with the help of Anthroposophy, but as soon as it becomes a question of practical life he forgets it. For then at once he has the rather strange idea that the thoughts spring forth within himself—which is just as though he were to think that the oxygen he receives in breathing were not received by him but sprang forth from within him.

For the personalities of whom I am now speaking, it was a profound feeling and an immediate experience: ‘I have not my own thoughts as my own possession. I cannot really say, I think. Thoughts exist, and I receive them unto myself.’

We know that the oxygen of the air circulates through our organism in a comparatively short time. We count these cycles by the pulse-beat. This happens quickly. The people of whom I am now speaking did indeed imagine the receiving of thoughts as a kind of breathing, but it was a very slow breathing. It consisted in this: At the beginning of his earthly life, man becomes capable of receiving the thoughts. As we hold the breath within us for a certain time—between our in-breathing and out-breathing—so did those people conceive a certain fact, as follows: They imagined that they held the thoughts within them, yet only in the sense in which we hold the oxygen which belongs to the outer air. They imagined that they held the thoughts during the time of their earthly life, and breathed them out again—out into the cosmic spaces—when they passed through the gate of death.

Thus it was a question of in-breathing—the beginning of life; holding the breath—the duration of earthly life; out-breathing—the sending forth of the thoughts into the universe.

People who had this kind of inner experience felt themselves in a common atmosphere of thought with all others who had the same experience. It was a common atmosphere of thought reaching beyond the earth, not only a few miles, but as I said, up to the orbit of the moon.

This idea was wrestling for the civilisation of Europe at that time. It was trying to spread itself ever more and more, impelled especially by those Aristotelians who came from Asia into Europe along the path I have just indicated. Let us suppose for a moment that it had really succeeded. What would then have come about?

In that case, my dear friends, that which was destined after all to find expression in the course of earthly evolution could never have come to expression in the fullest sense: I mean the Consciousness Soul. The human beings of whom I am now speaking stood in the last stage of evolution of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. In the 14th and 15th century, the Consciousness Soul was to arise, which, if it found extreme expression, would lead all civilisation into intellectualism.

The population of Europe in its totality, in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, was by no means in a position merely to submit to the outpouring of a conception such as was held by the people whom I have now described. For if they had done so, the evolution of the Consciousness Soul would not have come about. Though it was determined in the councils of the Gods that the Consciousness Soul should evolve, nevertheless it could not evolve out of the mere independent activity of all European humanity. A special impulse had to be given towards the development of the Consciousness Soul itself.

And so, beginning in the time which I have now described, we witness the rise of two spiritual streams. One was represented by the quasi-Arabian philosophers who, working from Western Europe, influenced European civilisation very strongly—far more so than is commonly supposed. The other was the stream which fought against the former one with the utmost intensity and severity, representing it to Europe as the most heretical of all.

For a long time after, this conflict was felt with great intensity. You may still feel this if you consider the pictures in which Dominican Monks, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, are represented in triumph—that is to say, in the triumph of an altogether different conception which emphasised above all things the individual and personal being of man, and worked to the end that man might acquire his thoughts as his own property. In these pictures we see the Dominicans portrayed, treading the representatives of Arabism under foot. The Arabians are there under their feet—they are being trodden underfoot.

The two streams were felt in this keen contrast for a long time after. An energy of feeling such as is contained in these pictures no longer exists in the humanity of today, which is rather apathetic. We need such energy of feeling very badly, not only for the things for which they battled, but for other things as well.

Let us consider for a moment what they imagined. The in-breathing of thoughts as the cosmic ether from the Sublunary Sphere—that is the beginning of life. The holding of the breath—that is the earthly life itself. The out-breathing—that is the going forth of the thoughts once more, but with an individually human colouring, into the cosmic ether, into the impulses of the sphere beneath the Moon, of the Sublunary Sphere.

What then is this out-breathing? It is the very same, my dear friends, of which we speak when we say: In the three days after death the etheric body of man expands. Man looks back upon his etheric body slowly increasing in magnitude. He sees how his thoughts spread out into the cosmos. It is the very same, only it was then conceived, if I may say so, from a more subjective standpoint. It was indeed quite true, how these people felt and experienced it. They felt the cycle of life more deeply than it is felt today.

Nevertheless, if their idea had become dominant in Europe, only a feeble feeling of the I would have evolved in the people of European civilisation. The Consciousness Soul would not have been able to emerge; the I would not have grasped itself in the ‘I think.’ The idea of immortality would have become vaguer and vaguer. People would increasingly have fixed their attention on that which lives and weaves in the far reaches of the Sublunary Sphere as a remnant of the human being who has lived here on this earth.

They would have felt the spirituality of the earth as its extended atmosphere. They would have felt themselves belonging to the earth, but not as individuals distinct from the earth. Through their feeling of “It thinks in me,” the people whom I described above felt themselves intimately connected with the earth. They did not feel themselves as individualities in the same degree as the people of the rest of Europe were beginning to feel themselves, however indistinctly.

We must, however, also bear in mind the following. Only the spiritual stream of which I have just spoken was aware of the fact that when a person dies the thoughts he received during his earthly life are living and weaving in the cosmic ether that surrounds the earth. This idea was violently attacked by those other personalities who arose chiefly within the Dominican Order. They declared that man is an individuality, and that we must concentrate above all on his individuality which passes through the gate of death, not on what is dissolved in the universal cosmic ether. This was emphasised, albeit not exclusively,—emphasised representatively, I would say,—by the Dominicans. They stood up vigorously for the idea of the individuality of man, as against the other stream which I characterised before. But precisely as a result of this a certain condition came about. For let us now consider these representatives of individualism.

After all, it was the individually coloured thoughts which passed into the universal ether. And those who fought against the former stream—just because they were still vividly aware that this was being said, that this idea existed,—were troubled and disquieted by what was really there.

This anxiety, notably among the greatest thinkers,—this anxiety as a result of the forces expanding and dissolving and passing on the human thoughts to the cosmic ether,—did not really come to an end until the 16th or 17th century.

We must somehow be able to transplant ourselves into the inner life of soul of these people, especially those who belonged to the Dominican Order. Only then do we gain an idea of how much they were disquieted by what was really left as an heritage from the dead,—which they, with their conception, no longer could nor dared believe in.

We must transplant ourselves into the hearts and minds of these people. No great man of the 13th or 14th century could have thought so dryly, so abstractly or in such cold and icy concepts as the people of today. When the people of today are defending ideas or theories, it seems as though it were a recognised condition for so doing that one's heart should first be torn out of one's body. At that time it was not so. At that time there was deep feeling, there was heart in all that men upheld as their ideas. But in a case such as I am now citing, this heart also involved an intense inner conflict.

That philosophy, which proceeded from the Dominican Order, evolved under the most appalling inner conflicts. I mean that philosophy which afterwards had such a strong influence on life—for life at that time was still far more dependent on the authority of individual men. There was no such popular education at that time. All culture and education—all that the people knew—eventually merged into the possession of a few. And as a consequence, these few reached up far more to a real philosophic life and striving. And in all that then flowed out into civilisation, these inner conflicts which they lived through were contained.

Today one reads the works of the Scholastics and is conscious only of the driest thoughts. But it is the readers of today who are dry. Those who wrote these works were by no means dry in heart or mind. They were filled with inner fire in relation to their thoughts. Moreover, this inner fire was due to the striving to hold at bay the objective influence of thoughts.

When a person of today thinks on philosophic questions or questions of worldview, nothing is there, so to speak, to worry him. A man of today can think the greatest nonsense—he thinks it in perfect calm and peace of mind. Humanity has already evolved for so long within the Consciousness Soul that no such disquieting occurs, as would occur, for instance, if individuals among us felt how the thoughts of men appear when they flow out after death into the ethereal environment of the earth. Today such things as could still be experienced in the 13th or 14th century are quite unknown. Then it would happen that a younger priest would come to an older priest, telling of the inner tortures which he was undergoing in remaining true to his religious faith, and expressing it in this wise: ‘I am pursued by the ghosts of the dead.’

Speaking of the ghosts of the dead, they meant precisely what I have just described. That was a time when people could still grow deeply into what they learned. In such a community—a Dominican community for instance,—they learned that man is individual and has his own individual immortality. They learned that it is a false and heretical idea to conceive, with respect to thought, a kind of universal soul comprising all the earth. They learned to attack this heresy with all their might. And yet, in certain moments when they took deep counsel with themselves, they would feel the objective and influential presence of the thoughts which were left behind as relics by the dead. Then they would say to themselves, ‘Is it quite right for me to be doing what I am doing? Here is something intangible working into my soul. I cannot rise against it—I am held fast by it.’

The intellects of that time, many of them at any rate, were still so constituted that they were generally aware of the speaking of the dead, at least for some days after death. And when one had ceased to speak another would begin. With respect to such things too, they felt themselves immersed in the all-pervading spiritual—or at the very least, ethereal—essence of the universe.

Coming into our own time, this living feeling with the Universal All has ceased. In return for it we have achieved conscious life in the Consciousness Soul, while all the spiritual reality that surrounds us (surrounds us as a reality, no less so than tables or chairs, trees or rivers) works only upon the depths of our subconscious. The inwardness of life, the spiritual inwardness, has passed away. It must first be acquired again by spiritual-scientific knowledge livingly received.

We must think livingly upon the knowledge of spiritual science, and we shall do so if we dwell upon such facts of life as lie by no means very far behind us. Imagine a Scholastic thinker or writer of the 13th century. He writes down his thoughts. Nowadays it is easy work to think, for people have grown accustomed to think intellectually. At that time it was only at the beginning, and was still difficult. Man was still conscious of a tremendous inner effort. He was conscious of fatigue in thinking even as in hewing wood, if I may use the trivial comparison. Today the thinking of many people has become quite automatic. Today we are scarcely overcome by the longing to follow up every one of our thoughts with our own human personality! We hear a person of today letting one thought arise out of another like an automaton. We cannot follow, we do not know why, for there is no inner necessity in it. And yet so long as a man is living in the body he should follow up his thoughts with his own personality. Afterwards they will soon take a different course; they will spread out and expand when he is dead.

So a person could be sitting there at that time, defending with every weapon of sharp incisive thought the doctrine of individual man in order to save the doctrine of individual immortality. He could be arguing with polemics against Averroes, or others of that stream of thought which I described at the beginning of this lecture. But there was another possibility. For especially in the case of an outstanding person like Averroes, that which proceeded from him, dissolving after his death like a kind of ghost in the Sublunary Sphere, might well be gathered up again by the Moon itself at the end of that Sphere, and remain behind. Having enlarged and expanded, it might even be reduced again, shape and form be given to it, till it was consolidated once again into an essence built, if I may say so, in the ether. That could well happen. Then the man would be sitting there, trying to lay the foundations of individualism, carrying on his polemic against Averroes; and Averroes would appear before him as a threatening figure, disturbing his mind.

The most important of the Scholastic writings which arose in the 13th century were directed against Averroes, who was long dead. They made polemics against the man long dead, against the doctrine which he had left behind. Then he arose to prove to them that his thoughts had become condensed, consolidated once again and thus were living on.

There were indeed these inner conflicts before the beginning of the new age of consciousness. And they were such that we today should see once more their full intensity and depth and inwardness. Words after all are words. The people of later times can but receive what lies behind the words with such ideas as they possess. But within the words there were often rich contents of inner life. They pointed to a life of soul such as I have now described.

These, then, are the two streams, and they have remained active, basically speaking, to this day. The one—albeit now only working from the spiritual world, yet all the stronger there,—would like to convince man that a universal life of thoughts surrounds the earth, and that in thoughts man breathes in soul and spirit. The other stream desires above all to point out that man should make himself independent of such universality. The former stream is more like a vague intangible presence in the spiritual environment of the earth, perceptible today to many people (for there are still such people) when in certain nights they lie on their beds and listen to the void, and out of the void all manner of doubts are born in them as to what they are asserting today so definitely and so surely in their own individuality.

Meanwhile in others, who always sleep soundly because they are so well satisfied with themselves, we have the unswerving emphasis on the individual principle.

This battle is smouldering still at the very foundations of European culture. It is here to this day; and in the things that are taking place outwardly on the surface of our life, we have scarcely anything other than the beating of the surface-waves from what is still present in the depths of souls—a relic of the deeper and intenser inner life of earlier times.

Many souls of that time are here again in present earthly life. In a certain way they have conquered what then disquieted them so much in their surface consciousness—disquieted them at least in certain moments of their surface consciousness.

But in the depths it smoulders all the more in many minds and hearts today. Spiritual science, once again, is here to draw attention also to such historic facts as these.

But we must not forget the following. In the same measure in which people become unconscious during earthly life of what is there none the less, namely the thoughts in the ether in the immediate environment of the earth—in the same measure, therefore, in which they acquire the ‘I think’ as their own possession—their human soul is narrowed down. Man passes through the gate of death with a contracted soul.

The narrowed soul has carried untrue, imperfect, inconsistent earthly thoughts into the cosmic ether, and these work back again upon the minds of men. Thence there arise such social movements as we see today. We must understand these too as to their inner origin. Then we shall recognise that there is no other cure, no other healing for these social ideas, destructive as they often are, than the spreading of the truth about the spiritual life and being.

Call to mind the lectures we have given here, especially the historic ones taking into account the concept of reincarnation and leading to so many definite examples. These lectures will have shown you how things work beneath the surface of external history. You will have seen how what lived in one historic age is carried over into a later one by people returning into earthly life. But everything spiritual plays its part between death and a new birth in moulding what is carried by man from one earth-life into another.

Today it would be good if many souls would attain for themselves that objectivity to which we can address ourselves, awakening an inner understanding, when we describe the people who lived in the twilight of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul age.

Some of the people who lived at that time are here again today. Deep in their souls they underwent the evening twilight of an age, and through the constant attacks they suffered from the ghosts of which I have now spoken, they have absorbed deep doubts about the validity of intellectualism.

This doubt can well be understood. For around the 13th century there were many people—men of knowledge who stood in the midst of learning, almost entirely theological as it then was—people for whom it was a deep question of conscience: What will happen now ?

Such souls had often carried with them into that time mighty contents from their former incarnations. They gave it an intellectual colouring; but they felt this all as a declining stream. While at the rising stream—pressing forward as it was to individuality—they felt the pangs of conscience. Until at length those philosophers arose who stood under an influence which has really killed all meaning. To speak radically: those who stood under the influence of Descartes! For many, even among those who had their place in the Scholasticism of an earlier time, had already fallen into the Cartesian way of thought. I do not say that they became philosophers. These things underwent many changes. When people begin to think along these lines the strangest nonsense becomes self-evident. To Descartes, as you know, is due the saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Countless clever thinkers have accepted this as true: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Yet the result is this: From morning until evening I think, therefore I am. Then I fall asleep. I do not think, therefore I am not. I wake up again, I think, therefore I am. I fall asleep, and as I now do not think, I am not. This then is the consequence: A person not only falls asleep, but ceases to be when he falls asleep. There is no less fitting proof of the existence of the spirit of man than the theorem: ‘I think.’ Yet this began to be the most widely accepted statement in the age of evolution of consciousness (the age of the Consciousness Soul). When we point to such things today it is like a sacrilege, but we cannot help ourselves!

But over against all this I will now tell you of a kind of conversation. Though it is not historically recorded, by spiritual research it can be discovered among the real things that happened. It was a conversation that took place between an older and a younger Dominican, somewhat as follows:

The younger man said, ‘Thinking takes hold of men. Thought, the shadow of reality, takes hold of them. In ancient times thought was always the last revelation of the living Spirit from above. But now thought is the very thing that has forgotten that living Spirit. Now it is experienced as a mere shadow. Verily, when a man sees a shadow, he knows the shadow points to some reality. The realities are there indeed. Thinking itself is not to be attacked, but only the fact that we have lost the living Spirit from our thinking.’

The older man replied, ‘In thinking, through the very fact that man is turning his attention with loving interest to outer Nature, (while he accepts Revelation as Revelation and does not seek to approach it with his thinking),—in thinking, to compensate for the former heavenly reality, an earthly reality must be found once more.’

‘What will happen?’ said the younger man. ‘Will European humanity be strong enough to find this earthly reality of thought, or will it only be weak enough to lose the heavenly reality?’

This dialogue truly contains all that still holds good with regard to European civilisation. For after the intermediate time, with the darkening of the living quality of thought, humanity must now attain to living thinking once more. Otherwise humanity will remain weak and the reality of thought will lose its own reality. Therefore it is most necessary, since the our Christmas Conference impulse, that we in the Anthroposophical Movement speak without reserve in forms of living thought. For otherwise it will come about more and more that even the things we know from this source or from that—for instance that man has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body—will only be grasped with the forms of dead thinking.

These things must not be grasped with the forms of dead thinking. For then they become distorted, misrepresented truth, and not the truth itself.

That is what I wanted to say today. We must attain a living, sympathetic interest, a longing to go beyond ordinary history and to attain that history which must and can be read in the living Spirit, the history which shall more and more be cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement. Today, my dear friends, I wished to place before your souls the concrete outline of our programme in this direction.

Much has been said today in aphorism. The inner connection will dawn upon you if you attempt not so much to follow up with the intellect, but to feel with your whole being what has been said today. You must attempt to feel it knowingly, to know it feelingly, in order that not only what is said but what is heard within our circles may be sustained more and more by real spirituality.

We need education to spiritual hearing, spiritual listening. Only then shall we develop true spirituality among us. I wanted to awaken this feeling in you today; not so much to give a systematic lecture, but to speak to your hearts, albeit calling to witness, as I did, many a concrete spiritual fact.

The rulership of Michael in its cosmic, spiritual aspect shows us, as you will have gathered from what I have already told you, that he occupies a special position among those spiritual Beings whom we call the Archangeloi. And precisely because of its bearing upon the central theme of these lectures, we shall appreciate the significance of the fact that in the centuries preceding the founding of Christianity, Michael sent his impulses—his ‘cosmopolitan’ impulses—from the Sun to the Earth. As time went on, these cosmopolitan impulses disappeared: the Cosmic Intelligence fell away from Michael and by the eighth century A.D. had arrived on Earth. In earthly evolution we then find men whose thoughts were produced out of themselves, who are, as it were, ‘self-made’ thinkers. This personal, self-engendered thinking was then cultivated in preparation for the next reign of Michael. As we have seen, the wise Masters of the School of Chartres worked in unison towards this end with those souls who had been connected with the previous reign of Michael and who were predestined to develop the once cosmic but now earthly Intelligence. They were predestined to carry their work on into the nineteenth century when—at first in the spiritual world—it became possible, through the Imaginative Cult I have described to you, to prepare for what the Anthroposophical Movement was intended to achieve.

Since the last third of the nineteenth century we have been living in the initial stage of the new reign of Michael; throughout this time, and above all in our own day, preparation has to be made for what must come to pass in the twentieth century. For before the end of this present century a considerable number of human beings who have unfolded real understanding of Anthroposophy will have passed through a briefer period between death and rebirth than is usual and will again be united on the Earth under the leadership of those who were the Masters of Chartres and with those who have remained in direct connection with the sovereignty of Michael. This will take place in order that under the spiritual guidance of these two groups of beings the final, hallowed impulse may be given for the development of the spiritual life on Earth.

Anthroposophy can only be of real significance for those who want to ally themselves with it, when with a certain inner, reverent fervour they become conscious that they may indeed have their place within a sphere of happenings like those described yesterday. This realisation will not only kindle inner enthusiasm but also be a source of strength, giving us the knowledge that it is our task to be the continuers of what was once alive in the ancient Mysteries.

But this consciousness must be, and indeed can be, deepened in every direction. For in the light of what was said yesterday, we look back to the time when, united with a host of super-earthly Beings in the spiritual realm of the Sun, Michael sent down upon Earth those impulses and signs which inspired the deeds of Alexander on the one side and the Aristotelian philosophy on the other. Out of these impulses arose the last phase of the inspired Intelligence on Earth. Then, together with human souls who on his behalf carried out this work on Earth, together with his spiritual hosts and the hosts of human souls around these leading spirits, Michael witnessed the Mystery of Golgotha from his abode on the Sun. Truly our souls may be stirred by picturing that moment when Michael, together with a host of Angeloi, Archangeloi and human souls, witnessed the Christ departing from the Sun in order to enter the bodily sheaths of a man and, through what He could experience in a human body on Earth, to unite Himself with the further evolution of humanity. But for Michael himself this was at the same time the sign that henceforward he must allow the heavenly Intelligence, hitherto in his keeping, to stream down like holy rain upon the Earth, to fall away gradually from the Sun. And when the ninth century of the Christian era had come, those around Michael perceived: The content of what had been guarded hitherto under Michael, is now down below, upon the Earth.

What mattered now was that in complete harmony with the sovereignty of Michael there should arise all that came into the world through the Masters of Chartres and also through certain chosen souls in the Order of the Dominicans. In short, there came about the phase of evolution which from the beginning of the fifteenth century inaugurated the epoch of the Consciousness Soul—it is the phase of evolution in which we ourselves are living. Approximately in the first third of the preceding epoch, that is to say during the first third of the epoch of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, as an outcome of Alexandrianism, the super-earthly Intelligence had spread in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe. Following upon this, came the time when Michael, the foremost Archangel-Spirit of the Sun, knew that the Cosmic Intelligence was passing away from this realm, away from his administration: the conditions were now established for the development of the Intelligence on the Earth. A further phase of development on Earth began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian era, when Gabriel became the administrator—as I explained in my previous lecture—while Michael was free from his earlier obligations in the Cosmos.

Michael was now in an unusual position. In other circumstances, when an Archangelos is not himself the ruling Spirit in the affairs of Earth, he lets his impulses pour, nevertheless, into what the other Archangeloi are bringing to pass. The impulses from all the seven consecutive Archangelic rulerships flow in continually—it is simply that one rulership predominates in a particular age. When, for example, in earlier epochs of evolution, Gabriel was the leading Spirit, it was paramountly those impulses of which he was the actual ruler that flowed into earthly evolution; but the other Archangeloi were also at work. Now, however, when Gabriel was exercising his dominion, Michael was in the unusual position of being unable to participate from the Sun in the affairs of the Earth. Truly it is a strange position for a ruling Archangelos to perceive that the activity he has been wielding through long ages has, for the time being, come to an end. And so it was that Michael said to those who belonged to him: For the time during which we cannot send impulses to the Earth (it is the period which ended about the year 1879) we must set about a special task, a task within the realm of the Sun. It was to be possible for those souls who have been led by their karma into the Anthroposophical Movement, to behold in the realm of the Sun the deeds performed by Michael and his hosts while Gabriel was holding sway upon the Earth.

This was detached from the otherwise regular sequence of deeds taking place between gods and men. The souls connected with Michael—the leading souls of Alexander's time, the leading Dominicans with those of less eminence who had gathered around them, and a large number of aspiring human souls in association with the leading spirits—these souls felt torn away from the age-long connection with the spiritual world. There, in super-sensible worlds, those human souls predestined to become Anthroposophists experienced something never previously experienced by human souls between death and rebirth in the super-earthly realm. In earlier times during the period between death and a new birth, the karma for the future earthly existence had been elaborated by human souls in connection with leading spiritual Beings. But no karma had ever previously been elaborated in the same way as was the karma of those predestined to become Anthroposophists. Never before in the realm of the Sun between death and rebirth had there been accomplished such work as was possible under the leadership of Michael when, as was now the case, he was free of the concerns of the Earth.

Something came to pass in the super-sensible worlds. It was something that lies implanted deep down in the hearts of the majority of Anthroposophists to-day, although in the unconscious, wrapt in sleep or dream. And the Anthroposophist speaks truly when he says to himself: Within my heart there lies a secret although I am yet unconscious of it. It is a secret mystery wherein are reflected the deeds of Michael in realms beyond the Earth when, before my present incarnation, I was serving him. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Michael, being free of his wonted tasks, was enabled to work in a special way, and I was working under him.

Michael gathered his hosts, he gathered from the realms of the Angeloi and the Archangeloi the super-sensible Beings who belonged to him, but he gathered, too, human souls who in one way or another had been connected with him. And thus there arose a kind of School—a great and ever-widening super-sensible School. In the same way that a kind of heavenly Conference had taken place at the beginning of the thirteenth century between those who worked together as Platonists and Aristotelians, a super-sensible tuition now took place, from the fifteenth into the eighteenth centuries, under the direct leadership of Michael—a super-sensible schooling in which the great Teacher, ordained by cosmic decree, was Michael himself. Thus, before the super-sensible cult that took its course during the first half of the nineteenth century in mighty Imaginations, as I have told you, numbers of human souls had already received a super-sensible schooling whose results they now carry subconsciously within them. These results come to expression in the urge felt by such people to come to Anthroposophy. The urge that brings them to Anthroposophy is indeed the outcome of this schooling. And it can truly be said: At the end of the fifteenth century, Michael gathered his hosts of gods and of human souls in the realm of the Sun and gave them teaching which extended over long periods of time. This teaching was to somewhat the following effect.—

Since the human race has peopled the Earth in human form, Mysteries have existed upon the Earth: Sun Mysteries, Mercury Mysteries, Venus Mysteries, Mars Mysteries, Jupiter Mysteries, Saturn Mysteries. Into these Mysteries the gods poured their secrets; in these Mysteries men were initiated when they were fit for Initiation. Thus it has been possible for the human being on the Earth to know what proceeds on Saturn, on Jupiter, on Mars and so forth, to know, too, how happenings in these spheres work into the evolution of mankind on Earth. Always there have been Initiates who, in the Mysteries, communed with the Gods. With an old, instinctive clairvoyance, these Initiates received the impulses coming to them in the Mysteries. But even meagre traditions (thus spoke Michael to those who belonged to him) even meagre traditions of this have almost vanished from the Earth. The impulses can no longer stream into the Earth. It is only in the lowest-lying region—that of physical procreation—it is there and there alone that Gabriel still has the power to let the Moon-influences flow into the evolution of humanity. The ancient traditions have almost disappeared from the Earth and therewith the possibility to nurture and cultivate the impulses streaming into the subconscious life and into the differently constituted bodily natures of men. We, however, turn our gaze back to all that once was brought in the Mysteries as a gift of the Heavens to men; we survey this wonderful tableau. And also we look downwards across the flow of the ages. And there we find the places of the Mysteries, we see how the heavenly wisdom streamed into these Mysteries, how men were initiated, how from our hallowed realm in the Sun the Cosmic Intelligence poured down to men in such a way that the great Teachers of humanity received truly spiritual ideas, thoughts, concepts. These ideas and thoughts were inspired into them from our hallowed realm in the Sun. These inspirations have vanished from the Earth. We see them only when we look back into epochs of antiquity ... stage by stage we see them disappearing from earthly evolution during the time of Alexander and its aftermath—and down there below we see the Intelligence that has now become earthly, spreading gradually among men. But the vista has remained with us. We yet behold the secrets that were once divulged to the Initiates of the Mysteries. Let us bring this fully into our consciousness! Let us bring it to the consciousness of those spiritual Beings who are around me, those Beings who never appear in earthly bodies but have their existence only in an etheric form. But let us bring it, too, to those souls who have often lived on Earth in physical bodies, those who are actually there now, and who belong to the Michael community—let us bring it to the consciousness of these human souls. We will image forth the great Initiation-teaching which once streamed down in the ancient fashion, through the Mysteries, to the Earth. We will present this to the souls of those who in their life of Intelligence were linked with Michael.—

And then—if I may use an earthly, and in such a context an almost trivial expression—then the ancient Initiation-Wisdom was “worked through.” In a great and comprehensive heavenly School, Michael taught the contents of what he was now no longer able to administer himself. It was an overwhelming deed—something that in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries and on into the eighteenth, caused such profound disquiet and alarm to the Ahrimanic demons on Earth that a remarkable thing happened. Between heavenly deeds and earthly deeds at this time polaric contrast was established. In the heights, in the spiritual world, there was this sublime School, gathering together the old Initiate-Wisdom in a new form, calling up into the Intelligence-filled consciousness, into the Consciousness Soul of predestined human beings between death and rebirth, what in earlier times had been man's treasury of wisdom in the Intellectual Soul, the Sentient Soul, and so forth. In inner words, seeming stern in many respects when they were uttered, Michael placed before those who belonged to him the picture of cosmic relationships, the anthroposophical relationships. These souls received teaching which unveiled the secrets of worlds. Below, on the Earth, the Ahrimanic spirits were at work.—And here it is necessary to point without reserve to a secret. Outwardly regarded it will seem unacceptable in face of modern culture, but it is nevertheless a divine secret and one of which Anthroposophists must be cognisant in order to be able to lead civilisation in the right way to the end of the twentieth century.

While Michael above was teaching his hosts, there was founded in the realm lying immediately below the surface of the Earth, a kind of sub-earthly, Ahrimanic school. The Michael School was in the super-earthly world; in the region beneath our feet—for the spiritual is actively at work in the sub-earthly region also—the opposing Ahrimanic school was founded. And in that particular period, when no impulses were streaming down from Michael bringing heavenly inspiration to the Intelligence, when the Intelligence on the Earth was, for the time being, left to itself, the Ahrimanic hosts strove all the harder to send their impulses up from below into the development of the Intelligence in mankind. It is a truly overwhelming picture. The Earth's surface—Michael above, teaching his hosts, revealing to them in mighty, cosmic language the ancient Initiate-Wisdom, and below, the Ahrimanic school in the sub-strata of the Earth. Upon the Earth, the Intelligence that has fallen from the Heavens is unfolding. For the time being, Michael holds his School in heavenly isolation from the earthly world—no impulses stream down from above—and there below are the Ahrimanic powers, sending up their impulses with all the greater strength.

There have always been souls incarnated on the Earth who were aware of this sinister situation. Anyone conversant with the spiritual history of this epoch, especially the spiritual history of Europe, will everywhere find evidence of the fact that there were individuals here and there—often quite simple men—who had an inkling of this sinister situation: abandonment of humanity by the Michael rulership, and impulses rising from below like demonic vapours, striving to conquer the Intelligence.

It is remarkable how closely the revelations of wisdom are bound up with the human being, if all that springs from such revelations is to be beneficial. This is the secret which must here be touched upon.—A human being whose task it is to proclaim the Michael wisdom feels that in a certain respect he is following the right course when he tries to put into words, when he wrestles to find the terminology to express, what is, in very truth, the wisdom of Michael. Such a one feels, too, that he is further justified when with his own hand he writes down this wisdom; for then the flow of the spiritual is directly connected with him and streams, as it were, into the forms of what he is writing, into what he is doing. Thus he willingly communicates this wisdom to others in the form of reading material when it is written down by him in his own hand. But when through mechanical means, through the medium of the printed book, he sees his work duplicated, he has a feeling of uneasiness. This has to be endured, for the method is in keeping with our age. Nevertheless, the feeling of uneasiness is never absent from one who stands within the life of the Spirit together with what he has to proclaim.

In connection with the lecture yesterday, somebody has asked me whether, as Swedenborg has hinted, the letter (Buchstabe) is not, after all, the ‘last outflow’ of the spiritual life. That indeed is so! It is the last outflow of the spiritual life so long as it flows through a man in a continuous stream from the Spirit. But when it is fixed by mechanical means as it were from the other pole, when it comes before the eyes of men as printed letters, it becomes an Ahrimanic spiritual power. For, strange to say, it is that Ahrimanic school which worked in opposition to the School of Michael in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—it is that Ahrimanic school which brought the art of printing, with all its consequences, to Europe. Printing can be the soil from which demonic powers, well adapted to combat the rulership of Michael, may spring.

An Anthroposophist must be able to perceive the significance and meaning of realities in life; he must recognise that printing is a spiritual power but precisely that spiritual power which Ahriman has placed in opposition to Michael. Therefore to those who in his School at that time were being taught by him, Michael constantly gave this warning: When you descend again to the Earth in order to give effect to what has here been prepared, gather men around you, make known the essentials by word of mouth, and do not regard the ‘literary’ effects produced in the world through the printed book as of foremost importance.—Hence the more intimate method of working from man to man is more truly in accord with Michael's way. If, instead of working merely through books, we meet together with one another, letting the impulses flow into us in the sphere of the human and the personal, and only then using the books as aids to memory, shall we be able to inaugurate the stream that—imponderably at first—is destined to flow through the Anthroposophical Society. It is inevitable that we should make use of books for we must also become masters of this art of Ahriman's—otherwise we should be delivered into his hands. We must be able to reckon truly with the Ahrimanic spirit of the times, otherwise tremendous power would be given to him. Thus it is not a matter of merely ousting the printed book but of bringing it into relationship with what works in a directly human way. So it would not be right, as a result of what I have just put before you, to say: ‘Away with all the anthroposophical books!’ Thereby we should be delivering up the art of printing to the most powerful enemies of the Michael wisdom; we should be making it impossible for our anthroposophical work to thrive, as thrive it must, until the end of the century is reached. What we must do is to ennoble the art of printing through our reverence for the Michael wisdom. For what is it that by way of the art of printing Ahriman is intent upon achieving in opposition to Michael? Ahriman is intent upon conquest of the Intelligence. There is evidence of it everywhere to-day. Conquest of the Intelligence, which asserts itself wherever conditions are favourable. And when do we find the Ahrimanic spirits most potent in their attacks against the coming age of Michael? We find them at those times when a diminution or lowering of the consciousness takes place in human beings. These Ahrimanic spirits then take possession of human consciousness, they entrench themselves within it. For instance, in the year 1914, many individuals in a lowered state of consciousness became entangled in events which led to the outbreak of the terrible World War. And within the lowered consciousness of such men the hosts of Ahriman promoted the World War—promoted it by way of human beings. The real causes of that War will never be brought to light by documents contained in archives. No, one must rather look deeply into history and perceive that there, at some particular point, stood an influential personality, at this point another, and there again another—and these men were in a lowered state of consciousness. That was the opportunity for Ahriman to take possession of them. And if you want to realise how easy it is in our age for men to be possessed by Ahriman, you need think only of this example.

What happened, when, with the printed volumes they had brought with them, the Europeans arrived in North America in times when Indians were still to be found in the eastern part of the land? When the Indians saw these volumes with their strange characters of script they took the letters to be little demons. They had the right perception for these things. They were terribly frightened when they looked at all these little demonic entities—a, b, and the rest, as they appear in print. For these letters, reproduced in such a different way, do contain something that fascinates, something that casts a spell over the modern mind; and only the good outlook of Michael, with eyes open to the human element in the proclamation of wisdom, can lead men beyond the danger of this lure. But evil things may happen in this domain.

At this point let me say the following.—There are certain secrets connected with the vision of world-existence which cannot be penetrated before a somewhat advanced age in life. Each particular period of life enables one who possesses Initiation-science to behold the individual secrets of existence. Thus between the twenty-first and forty-second years of life—not before—such a man is able to gaze into the Sun-existence; between the forty-second and forty-ninth years into the Mars secrets; between the forty-ninth and fifty-sixth years into the Jupiter secrets. But to behold the secrets of worlds in their interconnections, one must have passed the age of sixty-three.¹ Therefore before I myself was in this position, I should not have been able to speak of certain things of which I now speak without any reserve. Before the vision can penetrate into anything related to the Michael Mysteries, to the influences working from the spiritual realm of the Sun, one must look upwards from the Earth through the Saturn existence into the secrets of worlds. One must be able to experience, to live within that twilight of the spiritual world which proceeds from the ruler of Saturn, from Oriphiel, who was the leading Archangelos at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and who will again assume the leadership when the Michael Age has run its course.

To such vision, however, shattering, overwhelming truths connected with the present age are revealed. As we have seen, the art of printing spread over the Earth through the Ahrimanic school working in opposition to the School of Michael, and because of this, ‘authorship’ on a wide scale has arisen on the Earth. Who, then, were ‘authors’ in earlier times, before printing was in existence? They were men whose writings could be known only in the narrowest circles, in circles, moreover, that were properly prepared. Into how many hands did a book find its way before printing was in use? Think of the following, and you will be able to judge how things were. A kind of substitute for the later art of printing was already in existence in ancient Chinese civilisation and had reached a high level of perfection. A kind of printing art had been established there—also in an Age when Michael was ruling above; and when below there was an Ahrimanic anti-rulership. But nothing very much came of it. In those times the power of Ahriman was not yet so powerful and he was still unable to make really effective attempts to wrest from Michael the rulership of the Intelligence. The attempt was renewed in the time of Alexander but then again was unsuccessful.

Ahriman's influence in the printing art of the modern age, however, has assumed deep significance. Authorship has, so to speak, been popularised. And something has become possible, something that is as great in a wonderful, brilliant, dazzling way as, on the other hand, the necessity is great to receive it in absolute equableness of soul and to estimate it according to its true significance. First attempts have been made, attempts which from Michael's realm may be characterised by saying: Ahriman has appeared as an author. For Michael and his circle, this is a deeply significant happening to-day. Ahriman as an author! Not only have men been possessed by him as I indicated in the case of the outbreak of the War, but in that he manifested on Earth through human souls, he himself appeared as an author. That he is a most brilliant author need be no cause for astonishment; for Ahriman is a mighty, all-embracing spirit. True, he is not by nature fitted to promote the evolution of mankind on the Earth according to the intentions of the good gods; he opposes it. Nevertheless in his own sphere he is not only a thoroughly useful but a beneficent power—for beings who on one level of world-happenings are benefactors are exceedingly harmful on another. It need not be assumed, therefore, that in characterising the works of Ahriman they must come in for unqualified rebuke. Provided one is conscious of what they are, one can even admire them. But the Ahrimanic character must be recognised!

Michael teaches how recognition can be made to-day if men are willing to listen to him. For the Michael schooling has worked on and still to-day it is possible for men to draw near it. Then it teaches how Ahriman himself as an author has made attempts—first attempts of a deeply shattering, deeply tragic character—working, of course, through a human being. Nietzsche's Anti-Christ, his Ecce Homo, his autobiography, and the annotations in The Will to Power—those most brilliant chapters of modern authorship with their often devilish content—Ahriman was their writer, exercising his sovereignty over that which in letters on the Earth can be made subject to his dominion through the art of printing! Ahriman has already begun to appear as an author and his work will continue. On Earth in the future alertness will be necessary in order that not all the productions of authorship shall be deemed of the same calibre. Works written by men will appear, but some individuals at least must be aware that a Being is training himself to become one of the most brilliant authors in the immediate future: that Being is Ahriman! Human hands will write the works, but Ahriman will be the author. As once the Evangelists of old were inspired by super-sensible Beings and wrote down their works through this inspiration, so will the works of Ahriman be penned by men.

The further history of the evolution of humanity will present itself in two aspects. Endeavours must be made to propagate in the earthly realm—to the greatest extent possible—what was once taught by Michael in super-sensible Schools to souls predestined to receive it; endeavours must be made in the Anthroposophical Society to be reverently mindful of this knowledge and to impart it to those who will be incarnated in the coming times, until the end of the century has arrived. And then, many of those who for the first time are learning of these things to-day will come down to the Earth again. The time will be short. But meanwhile on Earth much that has been written by Ahriman will appear.

One task of Anthroposophists is this: steadfastly to cultivate the Michael Wisdom, to bring courageous hearts to this Michael Wisdom, and to realise that the first penetration of the earthly Intelligence by the spiritual sword of Michael consists in this sword being wielded by those into whose hearts the Michael wisdom has found its way. And so the picture of Michael in a new form may inspire each single Anthroposophist—Michael standing there within the hearts of men, beneath his feet the production of Ahrimanic authorship. Such a picture need not be painted in that external form in which during the time of the Dominicans the image was often fixed—above, the Dominican Schoolmen with their books, below, crushed under their feet, the heathen wisdom as represented by Averröes, Avicenna and the rest. Wherever it was a matter of portraying the battle waged by Christian Scholasticism against heathendom, these pictures are to be found. But in the spirit there must be this other picture: Devotion to Michael as he enters into the world, laying hold of the Intelligence upon Earth; and—in order that one may not be bedazzled—alertness with regard to the brilliant work of Ahriman as an author through the whole of the twentieth century. Ahriman will write his works in the strangest places—but they will be there indeed—and he is preparing pupils for his purposes. Even in our day, much in the subconscious is being schooled in such a way that souls will be able to incarnate again quickly and become instruments for Ahriman as an author. He will write in all domains: in philosophy, in poetry, in the sphere of the drama and the epic; in medicine, law, sociology. Ahriman will write in all these domains!

This will be the situation into which mankind will be led when the end of the century is reached. And those who are still young to-day will witness many samples of how Ahriman appears as an author. In every sphere watchfulness will be needed—and reverent enthusiasm for the Michael Wisdom.

If we can permeate ourselves with these things, if we can feel ourselves standing within the spiritual life in the sense of the indications here given, then, my dear friends, we shall place ourselves as true Anthroposophists into the civilisation of the present time. Then, maybe, we shall realise more and more deeply that a new Impulse is going out from the Christmas Foundation at the Goetheanum, that in truth only now are there being presented to the Anthroposophical Society things whereby this Society can see itself as it were in a great cosmic mirror—in which the individual, too, together with the karma which leads him into the Anthroposophical Society, can see himself reflected.

That is what I wanted to lay on your hearts in these lectures. For it is to hearts that the words are chiefly spoken. The hearts of men must become the helpers of Michael in the conquering of the Intelligence that has fallen to the Earth. Just as once the old Serpent was destined to be crushed by Michael, so must the Intelligence that has now become the Serpent be conquered by Michael, be spiritualised by Michael. And whenever the Serpent appears in its unspiritualised state, made Ahrimanic, it must be recognised through the vigilance, the alertness which belongs to the anthroposophical spirit and is developed through the Michael-like tenor of soul.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. Lecture 6. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

Also known as: Archangels and the Living Source of Speech Lecture 2 of 13 from the lecture series: The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

If you will remind yourselves of some of the things I have said in recent lectures, you will, I think, be able to call up a picture of the relationship of man's faculty of speech to those Beings in the spiritual world whom we are accustomed to assign to the Hierarchy of the Archangels. You will remember I explained to you the difference it makes to man whether the words he speaks are formed in such a way as to refer only to material things, in which case speech assumes a materialistic character, or whether in his speaking he unfolds a certain idealism, so that every time he utters a word, the feeling is present in him that he belongs to a spiritual world and that the words that ring in his speaking, coming as they do from the soul, must have some relation to Spirits. According as the one or the other is true, so does man come, between falling asleep and awakening, into a wrong or right relation with the Archangels. If he allows idealism to disappear altogether from his speaking, then he gradually loses the connection, which is so essential to him, with the Archangels. I am reminding you of this, because I want to speak to-day more particularly of one aspect of this relationship of human speech with the hierarchy of the Archangels. Speech, like everything else in evolution that has to do with man, as we have had full opportunity of realising in our study of his being, has had its history. What I want to bring forward does not refer to any one language in particular. The periods of time we have to take into view when we are studying some deep-seated change in speech are so long that even primitive languages show the same character as civilised ones in respect of such matters as we shall be considering. To-day therefore we shall not concern ourselves with the differences that exist between the several languages, but rather with those metamorphoses which human language in general has undergone in the course of the evolution of mankind on Earth.

If we consider the relationship man has to-day to language, we find that the words he speaks are nearly all of them signs for things that are round about him. As you will know, we have in the course of our studies alluded to a more intimate relationship between word and object. In our day however there is hardly any feeling left for this; words are very little more than mere outward signs for the objects indicated. Who is there who still feels, when the word Blitz (lightning) is uttered, something of the same experience he has when lightning actually flashes through space? To-day we are inclined to look on the word merely as a combination of sounds that is a sign for the phenomenon of the flash of lightning. It was not always so. If we go no farther back than to the earlier part of the Greek civilisation, we find that man's relation to language was not then one of thought, where the word is for him a sign and a symbol. The man of olden time entered with heart and soul into the sounds of his words and into the whole way the sounds were formed and arranged. And in the case of the languages of Northern Europe we do not even need to go back so far before we come to a time when the word Pflug (plough) gave man the same inner experience as did the activity of ploughing. This has been lost, and the word has become no more than a sign. But it is scarcely more than 1500 years or so since words were still felt in this way in the Northern parts of Europe. The feeling a man had when he was ploughing was similar to the feeling he had when he heard the word which in those days designated the plough. When anyone was listening to or speaking a word, it was not so much his thinking that partook in the experience as his feeling.

If now we go back into more remote ages, we find something different again; the will takes an intense and active part in the forming of words. But in order to study the times when man's relationship to external Nature was pre-eminently one of will, we must take our thoughts right back to Atlantis. For we have to reckon with long epochs of time when we are considering the evolution of language.

Within language lives the Genius of language. Language is not dependent for its evolution on the decision of man. In language lives the Genius of language. And the Genius of Language belongs to the hierarchy of the Archangels. When man speaks—when, that is, an atmosphere is prepared around the Earth within which can live man's utterances articulated into speech, then that atmosphere of speech and language is the element of the Archangels. Hence are the Archangels the Spirits of the different peoples—the Folk Spirits as we call them. You will know of this from the lectures I gave on the Mission of the Folk-Souls.

The evolution of language on Earth has thus a deep and intimate connection with the evolution of the Archangels. We can go so far as to say that in the evolution of speech and language we are beholding the evolution of the Archangels themselves. For even when we are studying something that has to do with the Earth, it is by no means impossible in the course of that very study to come to a knowledge of the evolution of higher spiritual Beings. We need only learn how to relate particular facts and phenomena to particular higher spiritual Beings, and we can arrive at a clear perception of how the continuous evolution of the Archangels is expressed and revealed in the changes that are to be observed in man's faculty of speech.

Now in those far-off times when an element of will came to expression in man's speech—that is, in the later part of the Atlantean evolution—it was not the same Beings of the Hierarchy who lived in his language as in more recent times. The whole relationship moreover was different. In those remote times man was not yet so interested in the feelings aroused in him at the sight, for example, of the blossoming of flowers or by changes in weather. These feelings interested him, it is true, in another connection, but not in respect of the faculty whereby the word welled up from the depths of his soul. Whether danger threatened him from this or that fact in Nature, summoning him to defend himself, or whether something else had a kindly and favourable influence and he would fain bring it into the orbit of his life, or again whether another object of perception were good or bad for his health,—in effect, how his will was aroused to activity, what he was induced to do under the influence of some fact or other,—this was the aspect of experience that interested him, and he formed his words accordingly. So that in those older times we find words that express how man reacts, what he finds himself impelled to do under the influence of the world around him. The most ancient language of all consisted almost entirely of expressions of will. How do we account for this? It was due to the fact that the Archangels came to language by way of Intuition. Read the descriptions I have given in my books of the nature of Intuition, and you will have a picture of the activity exercised by the Archangels in the later part of the Atlantean evolution, when they bestowed upon man the language of will.

Later, these Archangels moved forward in their own evolution. In my little book, “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,” I spoke about the evolution of the Leaders and Guides of humanity who live in the spiritual world. To-day we will extend this into a realm to which on that occasion we gave little attention,—the realm of speech and language. The advance made by the Archangels in their relation to language may be described in the following way. In the older faculty of Intuition they were standing within the world of still higher Hierarchies, giving themselves up in devotion to these worlds, so that together with speech they received something of the very being of higher Hierarchies than themselves. So long as it all depended upon Intuition, the Archangels surrendered themselves to the next higher Hierarchy,—Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. They were within the worlds of this higher Hierarchy, and it was the experience of standing intuitively within this higher Hierarchy that enabled them to put the speech-forming power into human life on Earth.

In the next epoch the Archangels make, as it were, a step forward and then their speech-forming power flows no longer out of Intuition but out of Inspiration. They are not now completely surrendered to the next higher Hierarchy. (What they did still receive through their devotion to this Hierarchy underwent a change; it ceased to be something they could then communicate to man as speech or language). Now they hearken to the Inspirations of the First Hierarchy,—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim,—and from out of this Inspiration they pour down to Earth the speech-forming power.

If we go back to the earliest times of Post-Atlantean evolution, or even only as far as ancient Egypt and Chaldea, we find in every land that the source from which the Archangels drew, in order to communicate speech to man, is Inspiration. Language itself is metamorphosed. Words become an expression before all else of sympathy and antipathy, of every shade of human feeling. Instead of a language of will, as in former times, we have now a language of feeling. We have come to a stage where this feeling, which is called forth in man by an external process or being is the very same as is experienced when the sounds issuing forth from the depths of his being are uttered by the speech organs and articulated into the word.

We have reached a significant phase in the evolution of mankind. The Hierarchy of the Archangels is at first the receiver of Intuitions; and the language of will, brought down as it were out of these Intuitions, is created by these Beings. The Archangels move on further and become the receivers of Inspiration. And what they receive through the inspiration of Beings of the First Hierarchy, gives rise to the language of feeling.

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It was out of an extraordinarily deep perception that the well-known scholar and writer on the history of Art, Hermann Grimm, drew a clear line of division between the Greeks and the Romans. When we learn history at school or at the university, we are, he said, exhorted to take pains to understand what we learn; but as we go back over the evolution of mankind, we can only understand history as far back as Roman times. Cicero and Caesar we can still understand, for up to a point they are similar to the man of the present day,—although it must be said that the understanding generally brought to a study of Caesar is far from being free and natural. If we were not so thoroughly drilled and trained to it, we would never take much interest in Caesar! We would leave it to the pupils in military schools. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to trace a continuous stream back from our own day to Rome. A certain element of pedantry, which has gradually been creeping into man's life and has to-day reached a kind of culmination, first began to show itself in Rome. But, thinks Hermann Grimm, if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot claim to understand Pericles or Alcibiades. We understand them in the same way as we understand characters in fairy tales. As a matter of fact, it is only through a deeper study of Anthroposophy that one can come again to an understanding of the soul life of such figures; as you know, we have sought here again and again to enter into the whole way in which a Greek thinks and forms his ideas. Hermann Grimm is aware of the distance that lies between the inner life of a Greek and the inner life of a man of the present day. To the Roman we can still feel ourselves near; then comes a great gulf. The way the Greeks are described in the schools to-day is really deplorable! They are made out to be just like ourselves. They were not so at all, their whole life of soul was of a different character altogether. We need to look round for quite other methods to describe the Greeks. You could not have more striking evidence of this than when the learned Wilamowitz undertakes to translate the Greek tragedians. The whole affair is simply a disgrace. I need hardly say, there is nothing of the Greek tragedies left in his translations, not a trace! And yet people are immensely pleased, quite enchanted with them. Their dramatis personae simply do not exist in the tragedies themselves.

Hermann Grimm showed a true and sure instinct, when he said that we come into an entirely different world when we come to Greece—to say nothing of the Orient. It is really no more than a ridiculous mockery for modern man to imagine he can understand anything of the true Orient out of Deussen's translations. The first thing necessary is to be able to comprehend the change that has come about since then in the very being of man's soul.

And now when we come to consider our particular sphere, the sphere of speech or language, then we find that the language of feeling still prevailed in Greece among the philosophers up to the time of Plato. The first philosophical pedant is Aristotle, the great and universal spirit.¹ It will surprise you that I give him these two appellations, one after the other, but we do not understand Aristotle unless we see in him the first philosophical pedant and at the same time the universal spirit. He is great in a certain aspect but he is in another aspect the first pedant philosopher, for he made out of words categories of thought. It would never have occurred to the Greek of an older time to take words and force them, as it were, to yield categories of thought; he still felt the words as something that is inspired into man, still felt the presence of higher Spirits in speech and language.

Well on into the Greek epoch and—for the man in the street, as we say—as late as the Mystery of Golgotha, we can still detect in the speech-forming power of man the element of Inspiration, as it lives in the soul of the Archangel. True, the ordinary person lags behind the philosopher in certain respects; but in spiritual matters he is often less behind, and in the matter of the speech-forming faculty, he retains the Inspirations longer. Dates can of course be no more than approximate. In one region of the earth Inspiration lasts a longer, in another a shorter, time. In one region, men still feel how the word pulsates in them as the blood pulsates in the body; they feel it in the power of the breath. In the power of the breath as it enfills and surges through the body, they feel the presence of the Archangel, who is himself subject to Inspiration.

Then we come into a time when it is no longer so that the Archangel is yielding to Inspiration when he communicates to man the power of speech, but to Imagination. And language becomes the language of thought. Man begins to speak more out of thoughts; language approaches the abstract. And behind this lies a fact of great significance.

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The Archangels, who belong to the Third Hierarchy, received Intuitions from the Second Hierarchy, and Inspirations from Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—the First Hierarchy. Whence do they receive Imagination? There is no Hierarchy beyond the First! The Imaginations cannot at any rate come to them from any one of the Hierarchies named in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. For he tells of no Hierarchy beyond the first. Certain Archangel Beings were therefore obliged to turn to the past for Imaginations, to find in the past the pictures of the speech-forming power,—for that is what the Imaginations are. What came from an earlier time had to be carried on into the future. There was no longer any immediate and present flow of the speech-forming power. And inasmuch as speech now took its source from an earlier stage, into it crept an Ahrimanic element. This is a fact of incalculable significance. And what the Archangels felt above them came to expression in the world of man in a deadening of speech and language. Language became polished and at the same time paralysed, it no longer retained the livingness it had in earlier days.

Try to understand the significance of this change. Something enters into the life of man that in reality requires a higher hierarchy than the First. If we have a right understanding for this event in human development in all its tremendous significance, we shall come to see that a time had arrived when the Gods had to grow out beyond what is contained in the First Hierarchy. There is one thing that up to that time had not yet been achieved by the Gods, and was already present here on Earth in picture. What the Gods had not yet achieved is the passage through Death. You have often heard me speak of this. The Gods who stand above man in the various Hierarchies knew only of changes from one form of life into another. The actual event of death in life had not, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, been an experience of the Gods. Death came as a result of Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it came, that is, through the agency of Divine Beings who had either remained behind in evolution or pressed forward too quickly. Death had no place in the life-experience of the higher Hierarchies. It enters into their experience in the moment when the Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha—passes, that is, through Death, uniting Himself so deeply with the destiny of Earth Man as to have this also in common with him,—that He passes through Death. The event of Golgotha is accordingly more than an event of the life of Earth, it is an event of the life of the Gods. The actual event that took place in that moment on Earth, and the knowledge of the Event that finds its way into the hearts and minds of men—all this is an image of the infinitely more lofty and sublime and far-reaching Event that took place in the worlds of the Gods themselves. Christ's passing through death on Golgotha is an event whereby the First Hierarchy reached up into a still higher realm. Therefore have I always had to speak to you of the Trinity as standing above the First Hierarchy. In reality It only came there in the course of evolution. Everywhere there is evolution.

And so, if we are speaking of the Hierarchies as described in Dionysius the Areopagite, we have to say that the Archangels lose the possibility of forming Imaginations from above. Consequently Man loses the possibility of continuing to build and fashion his language in a living manner. In the world of the Gods an event takes place of which the Mystery of Golgotha is an earthly reflection. Therefore the Event of Golgotha contains among its many implications also this,—that as men gradually receive into themselves more and more of the Christ Impulse, they receive again through the Christ Impulse the living spring and fountain of language.

We have to-day the various languages that run their course like diverging streams. And if we look at these various languages in a free and unbiassed way, we cannot fail to observe how they carry in them—and more especially, the farther we go Westward—an element of death, how they tend to become mere empty husks. In Asia things have not yet gone so far, but as we go West we find increasingly how the languages show signs of dying.

There is only one way whereby the speech-creating power can be quickened into life,—and that is through men coming to realise the Christ Impulse as a living Impulse. Then the Christ Impulse can become a power in man that can create speech. And among all the facts to be noted if we want to form a true picture of the significance of the Christ Impulse in the whole evolution of mankind, this must also have place, that at the time when man went forward into freedom, he came right out of the Divine and spiritual stream in which he had been steeped hitherto. Had speech remained as it was in the time of ancient Greece, man would not have been able to evolve to freedom. That speech serves the purpose merely of a sign,—this absurdity (for so I must call it) had to come about when the Archangels lost the possibility of forming Imaginations from the present and had to resort to the past. During the time since the Christ first made Himself known to men, during all this time while He has let the Mystery of His Being and His activity be there on record in the Gospels, the knowledge of Christ has not come in its fullness, the knowledge men have had of Him has not been sufficiently spiritual, it has often been merely traditional. But when the word of the Gospel is quickened to life by an understanding of the Christ, an understanding that derives from the Christ Himself as He still works on in the world, continuing to have influence always upon man, then—and only then—will proceed from the Christ Impulse, from the living Christ Impulse, the speech-forming power.

Let us now set down on the blackboard what I have been indicating. Here up above, the Gods grow more and more exalted. Down below an evolution goes on among men. On the one hand they receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom.

And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom. And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ, Who has found His home in the hearts of men on Earth; He enters with His Impulse right into the Imaginations of the Archangels, and these become alive, become quick with immediate present life.

We shall in the future have an altogether different kind of language-forming power. A quite new kind will begin to work. I have spoken of this from other points of view in earlier lectures.

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We can describe the evolution that goes on above in the Heavens at the same time as mankind evolves on the Earth below. And we can also describe its copy or reflection on Earth,—the progress from the language of will to the language of feeling and thence to the language of thought or symbol. And we can know that amidst it all Archangels are ascending—or shall we rather say descending—from Intuition to Inspiration and to Imagination. We behold first the evolution of the Archangels and all that takes place in connection therewith among the higher Hierarchies, and when we turn from that to man in his evolution, it is on the evolution of language and of the word that we have to fix our attention. We will consider one particular stream in the whole history of mankind, into which a divine stream was interwoven. It goes back to the origin of all things, the far beginning of all things. “In the Beginning was the Word” where was the word in those distant ages, when mankind had a language of the will? The Word was with God, it had to be sought there by means of Intuition. “The Word was with God ”.

The Archangels had to transpose themselves by means of Intuition into the Being of the Second Hierarchy. The Being that flowed over into Them was the Word. “And a God was the Word”.

In the Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.

We see how intimate is the connection of that stream in evolution which finds its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha with the Logos, the Word. And it is all bound up with the great cosmic event of man's “becoming” and the passage of Christ through death. When those great sentences were uttered: “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word ”—in those days the Word was felt as moving and weaving in the soul of man. With the Advent of the Mystery of Golgotha came a time when Christ was present in a human body—men beheld Him through the Word. The Word had entered into physical man. “ And the Word became flesh ”.

Deep truths, deep facts of evolution, lie hidden in the ancient writings, but earnest and persistent work is needed to find them again. We must first be able to observe in the spiritual world. Above all, we must approach these ancient writings with reverence, knowing that we shall only be able to deepen our understanding of their content by learning to investigate these sublime matters for ourselves. And as we are able to enter into their deeper meaning we enter also into spiritual life itself.

Well indeed would it be for us in this age, had we a Michael civilisation, a culture and a civilisation fired by what I recently called the Michael thought! This Michael thought should be alive, above all, in the autumn time. The festival of autumn should be filled with it. The leaves have withered and are falling from the branches of the trees, the plants are fading away, life is being mineralised. All the fresh young sprouting life that we saw in the earlier part of the year is receiving death into itself, death and decay, and is fast undergoing mineralisation. Now must the Michael power well up from man's inner being; now must man recognise how, just where the physical and material grows weak and faint and tends to die away,—just there the spiritual enters in! The Autumn Festival of Michaelmas at the end of September should become a festival filled with life and impulse. It has to express how man, while he stands right within the decaying processes of Nature, grows correspondingly active in his soul. When the Michael Festival shall have this character, then all human activity will be fructified from it. And how sore is the need to-day for such fructification! Let me give you an instance.

A short while ago, we heard a great deal about a resolve some people had made to study language. Nothing came of it, nothing at all. All manner of facts about language were collected, but the whole effort was completely lacking in spirituality. It was really so. There you had a group of young people, straight from school. At school of course, they had not yet woken up, but now—they are going to “study language”! They begin to plan it all and think how it will be when they have gone on studying for some time; a dazzling picture floats before their eyes of the fruit of all their labours. Actually all the preliminary steps are there; they could quite well have gone on to a recognition of the great miracle that unfolds before us when we look away from the present-day language of thought, through the language of feeling, to the language of will, and behold there the wonderful working and weaving of the Divine Archangels, behold too how their working and weaving stirs even yet in the language corpses of to-day. Were the life of the First Beginnings to flow again in language, what a sublime greatness were there revealed!

You must understand that the Michael thought is not a thing to be taken easily. You cannot simply say: Let us inaugurate a Michael Festival; it will be wonderful, and we shall then be in the very forefront of progress. The Michael thought has relation to the strongest and deepest impulses of the human will. It must reckon with these innermost impulses, and a Michael Festival cannot be other than a festival which gives a tremendous urge to human life, much as in those olden times, when man had the power to create festivals, the institution of the Christmas Festival or of the Easter Festival gave a new urge and impetus to the whole life of man on Earth.

• 1. Pedant’ seems to be, in this connection, the nearest rendering for ‘Philinter.’ (Note by Translator).