The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I shall Speak to-day of certain matters in a way that could not be used in public lectures but is possible when I am speaking to those who have been studying spiritual science for some considerable time.

The importance of the subject of which we shall speak first, will be evident to all serious students of spiritual science. Reference has frequently been made to this subject but one cannot speak too often of spiritual-scientific concepts, for they must become actual forces, actual impulses in men of the present and immediate future. I shall lay emphasis to-day upon one aspect of what spiritual science must signify in the world, namely, the need to impart soul to our “world-body,” as we may call it.

A comparatively short time ago in the evolution of humanity it would not have been possible to speak, as we can speak to-day, of a “world-body.” Looking back only a little into the historical development of mankind, we shall find that in the comparatively recent past, the idea of a world-body peopled by a humanity forming one whole had not yet come into the consciousness of men. We find self-contained civilisations, enclosed within strict boundaries. Guided by the several Folk-Spirits, the Old Indian civilisation, the Old Persian civilisation, and so on, embraced peoples living a self-contained existence, separated from one another by mountains, seas or rivers.

Needless to say, such civilisations still exist. We speak, and rightly so, of Italian, Russian, French, Spanish, German culture, but as well as this, when we look over the earth to-day we perceive a certain unity extending over the globe—something by which peoples separated by vast distances are formed as it were into a single whole. We need think only of industry, of railways, of telegraphs, of recent inventions.¹ Railways are built, telegraph systems installed, cheques made out and cashed, all over the globe, and the same will hold good for discoveries and inventions yet to be made.

Now let us ask: What is the peculiarity of this element that extends over the globe and is the same in Tokyo, Rome, Berlin, London, and everywhere else? It is all a means of providing humanity with food and clothing, as well as with ever-increasing luxury goods. During the last few centuries a material civilisation has spread over the earth, without distinction between nation and nation, race and race. Greek culture flourished in a tiny region of the earth and little was known of it outside that region. But nowadays, news flashes around the whole globe in a few hours—and nobody would doubt the justification of calling this material culture an earthly culture! Moreover it will become increasingly material and our earth-body more and more deeply entangled in it.

But those who realise the need for spiritual science will understand with greater clarity that no body can subsist without a soul. Just as material culture encompasses the whole body of the earth, so must knowledge of the spirit be the soul that extends over the whole earth, without distinction of nation, colour, race or people. And just as identical methods are employed wherever railways and telegraph systems are constructed, so will mutual understanding over the whole earth be necessary in regard to questions concerning the human soul. The longings and questionings that will arise increasingly in the souls of men, demand answers. Hence the need for a movement dedicated to the cultivation of spiritual knowledge. Something comparable with cultural relations between individual peoples will then take effect on a wide scale, weaving threads between soul and soul over the whole earth. And what will weave from soul to soul may be called a deep and intimate understanding in regard to something that is sacred to individual souls everywhere, namely, how they are related to the spiritual world.

In a future not far distant, intimate understanding will take the place of what led in past times to bitterest conflict and disharmony as long as humanity was divided into regional civilisations which knew nothing of each other. But what will operate on a universal scale over the globe as a spiritual movement embracing all earthly humanity, must operate also between soul and soul. What a distance still separates the Buddhists and the Christians, how little do they understand and how insistently do they turn away from each other on the circumscribed ground of their particular creeds! But the time will come when their own religion will lead more and more Buddhists to Anthroposophy, and Christianity itself will lead more and more Christians to Anthroposophy. And then complete understanding will reign between them.

That humanity is coming a little nearer to this intimate understanding can be discerned to-day in the fact that the science of comparative religion is also finding its place in the domain of scholarship. The value of this science of comparative religion should not be underrated, for it has splendid achievements to its credit. But what is really brought to light when the different teachings of the religions are set forth? Although it is not acknowledged, the basis of this science of comparative religion amounts to no more than the most elementary beliefs, long since outgrown by those who have grasped the essence of the religions. The science of comparative religion confines itself to these elementary beliefs.

But what is the aim of spiritual science in regard to the various religions? It seeks for something that lies beyond the reach of the scientific investigators, namely for the essential truths contained in the religions.

From what does spiritual science take its start? From the fact that mankind has originated from a common Godhead and that a primeval wisdom belonging to mankind as one whole and springing from one Divine source has only for a time been partitioned, as it were, in a number of rays among the different peoples and groups of human beings on the earth. The aim and ideal of spiritual science is to rediscover this primeval truth, this primeval wisdom, uncoloured by this or that particular creed, and to give it again to humanity. Spiritual science is able to penetrate to the essence of the various religions because its attention is focussed, not upon external rites and ceremonies, but upon the kernel of primeval wisdom contained in each one of them. Spiritual science regards the religions as so many channels for the rays of what once streamed without differentiation over the whole of mankind.

When a professed Christian, knowing nothing beyond the external tenets of belief that have been instilled into the hearts of men through the centuries, says to a Buddhist: ‘If you would reach the truth you must believe what I believe’ ... and the Buddhist rejoins by declaring what he holds sacred, then no understanding is possible between them. But spiritual science approaches these questions in an entirely different way.

Those who can penetrate to the essence of Buddhism as well as to that of Christianity through the methods leading to the development of the new clairvoyance, come to know of sublime Beings who have risen from the realm of man and are called Bodhisattvas. Herein lies the central nerve of Buddhism. And the Christian, too, hears of a Bodhisattva who arises from mankind and works within humanity. He hears that one of these Bodhisattvas—born 600 years before our era as Siddartha, the son of King Suddhodana—attained the rank of Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life. A Christian who is an anthroposophist also knows that a Being who has risen from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha need not appear again on earth in a body of flesh.

True, such teachings are also communicated to us by the scientific investigators of religions, but they can make nothing of a Being such as a Bodhisattva or a Buddha; the nature of such a Being is beyond their comprehension; neither can they realise how such a Being continues to guide humanity from the spiritual worlds without living in a body of flesh.

But as anthroposophical Christians, our attitude to the Bodhisattva can be as full of reverence as that of a Buddhist, In spiritual science we say exactly the same about Buddha as a Buddhist says. The Christian who is an anthroposophist says to the Buddhist: I understand and believe what you understand and believe. No one who has come to spiritual science from the ground of Christianity would ever dream, as a Christian, of saying that the Buddha returns in the flesh. He knows that this would wound the deepest, most intimate feelings of the Buddhist and that such a statement would be utterly at variance with the true character of those Beings who have risen from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha. Christianity itself has brought him knowledge and understanding of these Beings.

And what will be the attitude of the Buddhist who has become an anthroposophist? He will understand the particular basis of Christianity. He will realise that as in the case of the other religions, Christianity has a Founder—Jesus of Nazareth—but that another Being united with him. A great deal could be said about all that has been associated with the personality of Jesus of Nazareth through the centuries. But the Christian's view of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth differs from the Buddhist's view of the Founder of his religion. In the East it would be said: “One who is a great Founder of religion has achieved the complete harmonisation of all passions and desires, of all human, personal attributes. Is such complete harmonisation manifest in Jesus of Nazareth? We read that he was seized with anger, that he overthrew the tables of the money-changers, drove them out of the temple, that he uttered words of impassioned wrath. This is evidence to us that he does not possess the qualities to be expected of a Founder of religion.” Such is the attitude of the East.

We ourselves, of course, could point to many other aspects of this question, but that is not what concerns us at the moment. The really significant fact is that Christianity differs from all other religions inasmuch as they all point to a Founder who was a great Teacher. But to believe that the same is true of Christianity would denote a fundamental misunderstanding. The essence of Christianity is not that it looks back to Jesus of Nazareth as a great Teacher. Christianity originates in a Deed, takes its start from a super-personal Deed—from the Mystery of Golgotha.

How could this be? It was because for three years there dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth a Being, Whom—if we are to give Him a name—we call Christ. But a name cannot encompass the Divine Spirit we recognise in Christ. No human name, no human word, can define a Divinity. In Christ we have to do with a Divine Impulse spreading through the world: the Christ Impulse which at the Baptism in the Jordan entered in Him, into Jesus of Nazareth. The very essence of Christianity lies in the Christ Impulse which came to the earth through a physical personality, the physical personality of Jesus of Nazareth into whose sheaths it entered. The Christ took these sheaths upon Himself because the course of world-evolution is, first, a descent, and then again an ascent. At the deepest point of descent the Mystery of Golgotha takes place, because from it alone could spring the power to lead humanity upwards.

After the Atlantean catastrophe came the ancient Indian epoch of civilisation. The spirituality of that epoch will not again be reached until the end of the seventh epoch. The ancient Indian epoch was followed by that of ancient Persia, that again by the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. When we survey evolution, even in its external aspect, the decline of spirituality is evident. Then we come to Greco-Latin civilisation with its firm footing in the earthly realm. The works of art created by the Greeks are the most wonderful expression of the marriage of spirit with form. And in Roman culture, in Roman civic life, man becomes master on the physical plane. But the spirituality in Greek culture is characterised by the saying: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.’ Dread of the world lying behind the physical plane, dread of the world into which man will pass after death is expressed in this saying. Spirituality has here descended to the deepest point.

From then onwards, mankind needed an impulse for the return to the spiritual worlds, and this impulse was given in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch through an Event at a level far transcending the physical plane.

The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted in a remote corner of the earth, for the sake of no particular race or denomination. It took place in seclusion, in concealment. Neither outer civilisation nor the Romans who governed the little territory of Palestine, knew anything of the Event. The Romans were no followers of Christ—the Jews still less!

Who were present when the Mystery of Golgotha took place? Whom had he gathered around him who in his thirtieth year had received the Christ into himself? Had pupils gathered around this Being as they had gathered around Confucius, Laotse or Buddha? If we look closely we see that this is not so. For were those who until the Event of Golgotha had been His disciples, already His apostles? No! They had scattered, they had gone away when the One Whom they had followed hitherto entered upon the path of His Passion. Only when having passed through death, He gave them the certain knowledge of the power that had conquered death—only then did they become true Apostles and carried His impulse to the peoples of the earth. Before then they had not even understood Him. Even Paul, the one who after the Mystery of Golgotha achieved most of all for the spread of Christianity, understood Him only when He had appeared to him in the spirit!

So we see that, unlike the other religions, Christianity was not, in essence, founded by a great Teacher whose pupils then promulgate his teachings. The essential, basic truth of Christianity is that a Divine Impulse came down to the earth, passed through death and became the source of the impulse which leads humanity upwards. When the individual personal element had passed through death, had departed from the earth—then and only then did the power which came upon the earth through Christ, begin to work. It is not a merely personal teaching that works on, but the actual Event that Christ was within Jesus and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and that from the Mystery of Golgotha a power streamed forth over the whole subsequent evolution of mankind.

That is the difference between what Christianity sees as the starting-point of its development and what the other religions see as theirs. When, therefore, we turn our attention to the beginning of Christianity, it is a matter of realising what actually came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha. Paul says, in effect: The descending line of evolution was caused through Adam, even before the Fall, before he was man, before he was a personality in the real sense. The impulse for the ascent was given by Christ.

To feel this as a reality, we must go deeply into the occult truths available to mankind. To grasp this stupendous fact, man's understanding must be quickened by the deepest, most intimate occult truths. It will then be comprehensible to him that, to begin with, even in Christendom itself, the loftiest thoughts and deepest truths could not immediately be understood. To grasp the full meaning of this Divine Death and the Impulse proceeding from it, to realise that such an Event cannot be repeated, that it occurred at the deepest point of the evolutionary process and radiates the power which enables mankind henceforward to tread the path of ascent—to conceive this was possible only to a few. And so in the centuries that followed, men clung to Jesus of Nazareth—for understanding of the Christ was as yet beyond their reach. Moreover it was through Jesus that the Christ Impulse also made its way into works of art. Men yearned for Jesus, not for Christ.

We ourselves are still living at the dawn of true Christianity; Christianity is only beginning to come into its own. And when men plead to-day: ‘Do not take from us the individual, personal Jesus who comforts and uplifts our hearts, on whom we lean; do not give us, instead of him, a super-personal event’ ... they must realise that this is nothing but an expression of egoism. Not until they transcend this personal egoism and realise that they have no right to call themselves Christians until they recognise as the source of their Christianity the Event that was fulfilled in majestic isolation on Golgotha, will they be able to draw near to Christ. But this realisation belongs to future time.

There may be some who say: Surely the Crucifixion should have been avoided! But this is simply a human opinion—no more than that. These people do not know the difference between an utter impossibility and what is merely a mistaken idea. For what came into the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha could proceed only from the impulse of a god Who had endured all the sufferings and agonies of mankind, all the sorrows, the mockery and scorn, the contempt and the shame that were the lot of Christ. And these sufferings were infinitely harder for a god than for an ordinary human being.

That the Mystery of Golgotha actually took place cannot be authenticated in the same way as other historical events. There is no authentic, documentary evidence even of the Crucifixion. But there is good reason why no proof exists, for this is an Event which lies outside the sphere of the general evolution of mankind. The Mystery of Golgotha—and this is its very essence—is an Event transcending that which has merely to do with the evolution of humanity.

The Mystery of Golgotha was concerned with the descending path which men have taken and with what must lead them upwards again—with the Luciferic influence upon mankind! Lucifer, together with everything belonging to him, is verily not a human being. Lucifer and his hosts are superhuman beings. Nor did Lucifer desire that through his deeds men should be set upon a downward path; his purpose was to rebel against the upper gods. He wanted to vanquish his opponents, not to set men upon a downward path. The progressive gods, the upper gods, and Lucifer with his hosts of the lower gods of hindrance, waged war against each other, and from the very beginning of earthly evolution, man was dragged into this warfare among gods. It was an issue that the gods in the higher worlds had to settle among themselves, but as a result of the conflict, men were drawn more deeply into the material world than was originally intended. And now the gods had to create the balance; humanity had to be lifted upwards again, the deed of Lucifer made of no avail. And this could not be achieved through a man but only through a Divine Deed, the deed of a god. This deed of a god must be understood in all its truth and reality.

If we ponder deeply about earthly existence, we find as its greatest riddle: birth and death.The fact that beings can die is the fundamental problem confronting humanity. Death is something that occurs only on the earth. In the higher worlds there is transformation, metamorphosis—no death. Death is the consequence of what came into human beings through Lucifer, and if something had not taken place from the side of the gods, the whole of mankind would have been more and more entangled in the forces which lead to death. And so a sacrifice had to be made from the side of the gods: it was necessary that One from among them should descend and suffer the death that can be undergone only by the children of earth. This was a deed which created the balance for the deed of Lucifer. And from this death of a god streams the power which also radiates into the souls of men and can raise them again out of the darkness in which Lucifer's deed has ensnared them. A god had to die on the physical plane.

This is not a direct concern of men ... they were here spectators of an affair of the gods. No wonder that physical means are incapable of portraying an Event which is an affair of the higher worlds, for it falls outside the sphere of the physical world.

But the fruits of this deed of a god which had perforce to be wrought on the earth, became the heritage of humanity, and the Christian Initiation gives men the power to understand it. And just as mankind could come forth only once from the bosom of the Godhead, so could the overcoming of what was then instilled into the human soul be achieved only once.

If the Christian who has become an anthroposophist were to speak of the nature of Christ to a Buddhist who has become an anthroposophist, the Buddhist would say: ‘I should therefore misunderstand you were I to believe that the Being Whom you call Christ is subject to reincarnation. He is not subject to reincarnation—any more than you would say that the Buddha can return to earthly existence!’

Yet there is one fundamental difference. The Buddhist points to the great Teacher who was the originator of his religion; but the true Christian points to a deed of the spiritual worlds, enacted in seclusion on the earth, he points to something entirely non-personal, having nothing to do with any specific creed or denomination. No single human being, to begin with, recognised this deed; it had nothing to do with any particular locality on the earth. In majestic seclusion the Divine Power poured from this deed into the whole subsequent evolution of mankind.

The task of the spiritual-scientific conception of the world is to seek for the truths contained in the different religions, and to seek for the kernel of truth in them all is the augury of peace. When an adherent of some creed truly understands his religion in the light of spiritual science, he will never force its particular ray of truth upon adherents of another religion. As little as the anthroposophical Christian will speak of the return of the Buddha—for then he would not have understood him—as little will the anthroposophical Buddhist speak of the return of Christ—for that too would be a misunderstanding. Provided personal bias is laid aside, the truth concerning Buddha and the truth concerning Christ never makes for discord and sectarianism, but for harmony and peace. This is a natural consequence of truth, for truth is the augury of peace in the world. At the highest level of truth, all nations and all religions on the earth can belong to Buddha the great Teacher; and at the same highest level of truth, all nations and all religions can belong to Christ, the Divine Power. Mutual understanding augurs peace in the world. This peace is the soul of the new world. And to this soul, which must reign all over the globe as the science of the Spirit belonging to all men in all earthly civilisations, Anthroposophy should lead the way.

From the 13th and 14th centuries onwards, such knowledge was cultivated in the Rosicrucian Schools. It was known there that together with such knowledge, peace draws into the souls of men. And in these Rosicrucian Schools it was known, too, that many a one who on earth cannot experience this peace, will experience it after death as the fulfilment of his most treasured ideals—when he looks down to the earth and beholds peace reigning among the peoples and nations to the extent to which men open their hearts to receive such knowledge.

As I have spoken here to-day, so did the Rosicrucians speak in their small, enclosed circles. To-day these things can be communicated to larger gatherings of men. Those to whom it has been entrusted to carry into effect through spiritual science what streams into humanity from the Mystery of Golgotha, know that every year at Eastertide, Jesus, who bore the Christ within him, seeks out the places where the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled. Whether actually in incarnation or not, every year he visits these places, and there his pupils who have made themselves ready, can be united with him.

A poet—Anastasius Grün—felt the reality of this. He describes five such meetings of the Master with his pupils. The first, after the destruction of Jerusalem; the second, after the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders; the third—Ahasver, the Wandering Jew, lingering on Golgotha; the fourth—a praying monk, yearning and pleading for deliverance from his conqueror. For while sects of different kinds scattered over the earth are at strife among themselves, he through whom the greatest of all tidings of peace was brought to the earth, looks again at the places that were the scene of his earthly deeds.

These four pictures are given of past visits of Jesus to the scene of his work on Golgotha. Then, in the poem printed under the title of “Five Easters,” Anastasius Grün pictures another return to Golgotha, in the far future. In this far future of which he gives us a glimpse, the power of peace will then have prevailed on the earth, a peace based, not on denominational Christianity, but on Christianity as it is understood in Rosicrucianism. He sees children who, while they are at play, dig up an object of iron and do not know what it is. They alone who still possess some remote information of the strife waged among men in what is for them the distant past—they alone know that this object is a sword. In that age of peace the purpose of a sword is no longer known—it has been replaced by the ploughshare. Then a farmer digging in the earth finds an object made of stone ... Again it is not recognised. “For a time this was banished from the earth,” say those who still have some knowledge, “for men no longer understood it! Once upon a time they used it as a symbol of strife.” It is a cross of stone,—but now, when the impulse given by Christ Jesus for all future time gathers men together, now it has become something different!

How does this poet, writing in the year 1835, describe this symbol of the mission of the Christ Impulse, when rightly understood? He describes it as follows:

Though known to none, yet with its ancient blessing,
Eternal in their breast it stands upright;
There blooms its seed abroad on every pathway,
A Cross it was—this stranger to their sight.

The Cross of Stone now stands within a garden,
A strange and sacred relic from of old;
Flowers of all patterns lift their growth above it,
While roses, climbing high, the Cross enfold.

So stood the Cross, weighty with solemn meaning,
On Golgotha, amidst resplendent sheen
Long since 'tis hidden by its sheath of roses;
No more, for roses, can the Cross be seen.²

• 1. Since this lecture was given wireless broadcasting has been perfected.
• 2. The whole poem consists of 108 verses, in five parts.

Dear attendees! In the past, almost every year I have been able to give a lecture in this city in the field that I have recently taken to calling spiritual science. Since our friends have also requested such a reflection in these fateful times, it shall be given this evening. But you will understand that in our present time, when all our feelings, our emotions and our thoughts are focused on the great events, on those events that claim so many hopes, so much confidence, on the events that undoubtedly most significant events are now unfolding, events that are also causing so much pain and suffering. You will understand that at this time, such a reflection, especially if it is to be based on the spiritual scientific worldview, must also be made in view of the fateful events of our time. But it cannot be my task to add yet another of the numerous reflections that are being set forth today in lectures on the things that are so powerfully moving our time. Rather, it must be my task to say, from the point of view of spiritual science, from which I have always spoken here, what can be said in brief about our time from precisely this point of view.

It has been emphasized many times that the present struggle, the present mighty struggle, in which, in fact, apart from smaller tribal and linguistic differences, 35 different peoples of the earth are at war with each other; it has been said often that this mighty struggle is caused above all by the present-day commercial, economic, social and political antagonisms, and that it is of primary importance to look clearly and energetically at reality and the values in question and not to obscure these considerations with metaphysical speculations. From the standpoint of spiritual science, one can only agree with such a view and never oppose it.

But spiritual science also wants to stand on the standpoint of reality. This is one way in which this evening's meditation will differ from those that are so often practiced, in that it takes into account the realistic admonition of our contemporaries, while also considering that this mighty struggle is, after all, part of the whole course of human development, in which, above all, great impulses are at work that can only be achieved through spiritual contemplation. One could also say: At that time, when the Germanic tribes of Central Europe threatened the southern empires, the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Middle Ages, only the Roman spheres of interest with their social and political intentions were confronted with what was to come from Central Europe. Of course, at the time, one could justifiably speak in this way. But if we look at things today, and judge from a higher point of view, as we must today, because the world has advanced, we would see that if these struggles had not taken place back then, the reorganization of Europe through these struggles, which were initially caused by the Roman spheres of interest, of course, took place in a certain way —, then the whole Western development up to our time would have taken on a different face. That is one thing.

The other thing, however, is that anyone who follows the intellectual development of nations, the intellectual development in history, must really come to the conclusion, without indulging in any fantasies, without speculating, that what is now being fought out between thirty-five nations of the earth is, in fact, certainly the most significant thing imaginable for the present. It is not words that will fight it out, nor thoughts and human philosophies, but the bravery of the armies. But behind all this, one can see another struggle, a struggle of spiritual forces, a struggle of world views. And without going into what has often been said, I should perhaps emphasize that history will one day regard it as the most absurd of claims that Central Europe somehow provided the immediate cause of this world war. It will be seen more and more clearly, especially when viewed from a higher perspective, that Central Europe and particularly the German people are involved in a purely defensive struggle. But if we look at this defensive struggle, then from a certain point of view we can see how this struggle is one part of a great, mighty defensive struggle that German intellectual life, intellectual impulses, have already had to fight out in part, and in part have to fight out with ever-increasing strength, against that which is also a kind of intellectual encirclement of Central European intellectual life. What I mean by this, I would like to characterize it with a symptom that may not seem very meaningful to you. But one could cite many things and one would always find the same thing.

What we in many respects count among the greatest and most significant things that the spiritual life of modern times has taken up, is called the “idea of development,” the “worldview of development.” And no one tires of emphasizing how significant it was for the whole development of the spiritual life of humanity that people learned to see how not the individual entities of the world around us stand side by side, but that they have developed apart; how one can trace a developmental series from the lowest creatures up to humans.

The one who, out of the deepest impulses of the supporting forces of the German spirit, spoke of such a development in a deeply inward sense is none other than Goethe. And it may be said that, since Goethe, German culture has had a wonderful, to use a Goethean expression: a spiritual doctrine of development. This spiritual doctrine of development has not been taken up into the general world view, nor into the European world view. In contrast, it takes five to six decades for the general consciousness of modern cultural humanity to accept the doctrine of development - but in what form - in the form of Darwinism.

When something like this is said, it still seems to have a chauvinistic coloring for many today. But future times will see it in all the power that is inherent in it. Darwinism has given the idea of development a materialistic [utilitarian] slant; and in this slant, which has been forced upon it, the idea of development has been incorporated into modern cultural ideas by an entirely English thinker. And the deeper German developmental idea is definitely faced with the necessity of defending itself. In the future, the world will realize that it is not necessary to say that Darwinism is something wrong, something incorrect, but that it will be necessary to take the deeper foundations, the more vigorous knowledge from the sources of German intellectual life for the developmental idea as well. In other words, it will be necessary to forge weapons that can defend the spiritual goods of Central Europe against the attacks that are being waged in countless fields, as in the field just mentioned, against this Central European intellectual life. And just as it is not important, when one is in the midst of a struggle between nations such as that which exists today, to wage war with these or those words, so to speak, between individual nations, whether words of hatred or sympathy, but rather, as is much more natural, to take the position that one has to defend what one recognizes as one's fatherland, as one defend one's family without disparaging anything else, so in the field of spiritual struggles, which, as everything shows, we will face in the near future in a tremendous way, it is important to be fully imbued with what the forces of this Central European, especially German, intellectual life are. In these forces there will be weapons that will be needed in the future. I cannot go into more detail, but I would like to suggest that the current struggle of external weapons will only be the beginning of what is to come in terms of spiritual struggles, and that the ill-intentioned, malicious, defamatory views that are hurled at German culture from all sides already show us the beginning.

If we now want to talk about these things from the point of view of spiritual science, it is of course incumbent upon us to at least characterize this point of view of spiritual science with a few words. Even though today, as in other lectures that I have also given in this city, I cannot go into the details of this spiritual science, which is to enter the development of time and the world as something new, and even though I will not be able to say anything conclusive in favor of spiritual science, I would still like to indicate with a few words, with a few points of view, what spiritual science wants.

Spiritual science wants to be a real science of the spirit. Above all, it wants to show how the human soul life, that which we call our innermost human nature, is connected with the real and true spirit that flows and weaves through nature and humanity. And just as natural science renewed the world view of humanity a few centuries ago, so spiritual science today wants to enter into the spiritual development of humanity in a very similar way, albeit from a different point of view.

I would like to draw attention to the following: if you were to say to someone who knows nothing about chemistry, who has never heard of chemistry and only knows water – of course, we can only imagine such a person hypothetically – that in this water, which is liquid and extinguishes fire, extinguishes fire, there is a gas in it that can be separated out, that is hydrogen; this hydrogen burns, it is not liquid but gaseous, so the person who has never heard of chemistry may consider this to be a highly fantastic idea. Natural science has made this into a very ordinary, even trivial, idea today. There was certainly a time when those who claimed such things were thought of as fantasists.

Today, on the other hand, anyone who knows nothing of spiritual science is considered a fantasist who says: When we have the human body with its soul before us, it presents itself in such a way that we cannot recognize the essence of what is directly connected to it while this essence is inside the body itself. One must separate it by the spiritual-scientific method, the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, as one separates hydrogen from water by chemical methods, if one wants to recognize it. This spiritual-scientific method does not take place in an external laboratory, but in the intimate processes of the human soul itself.

But there are spiritual scientific methods by which man can truly become a spiritual scientist, by which he can come to separate his spiritual soul from the physical body so that it is outside, as hydrogen is outside of water. But then the spiritual researcher lives in this spiritual-soul realm. He learns to recognize the characteristics and nature of this spiritual-soul realm, that which goes through birth and death in man, that which passes through the gate of death into a spiritual world and then, after death, world with a higher consciousness, with a consciousness that the spiritual researcher learns to recognize when he applies the spiritual scientific method to his soul, just as the chemist learns the properties of water when he applies the chemical methods. A time will come when people will speak of these things as they speak today of the Copernican world view, which was also once regarded as fantasy, or of similar things.

Just as today the spiritual researcher has to present to humanity the truth that there is a spiritual core in us that passes through the gate of death to return to repeated lives on earth, to repeated and repeated lives on earth, so one day this will be a truth, as the idea of development in external natural science is considered true today. If today what the spiritual researcher has to say is quite naturally regarded as a dream, as a fantasy, from many sides, then those who have immersed themselves in these things may point out how, at a certain time, Copernicanism, which is generally recognized today, was regarded as contradicting the five senses. And so it is today. What spiritual science has to say about repeated lives on earth, about the independence of the soul, and so on, is said to contradict the five senses. And if you take a materialistic point of view, you say: the life of the soul is enclosed between birth and death.

One must compare such a view with another view that still existed in the Middle Ages: that the blue firmament arches over us, which is a conclusion, a boundary, a spatial boundary. Modern science shows us that this boundary is only formed by our ability to see, that space extends into an infinite world, that we are embedded in infinite space on the earth. When modern science dawned, the blue firmament was broken through and recognized as something that is evoked by human vision. Through spiritual science it will be recognized that the boundaries that seek to enclose life between birth and death are like the blue firmament in relation to space. Through spiritual science, people will learn to look beyond this temporal firmament, which is set by birth and death, and they will find human life embedded in a line of development from which it emerges again and again.

Between earthly lives lie realms of development of a purely spiritual nature. And so, by learning to experience himself in this way, the spiritual researcher has something to proclaim in spiritual science: in the spiritual and soul realm, the human being feels, not through philosophical speculation but through experience, a connection with the real spiritual world, which surrounds the physical, from which the spiritual-soul is released - spiritual science speaks of an experience of the spiritual world, a spiritual world in which spiritual beings are, as physical beings are around us here.

It is perhaps still somewhat unpopular today if one is obliged to present these basic concepts of spiritual science in this way. But we live in a time in which humanity is living in a time of transformation of all thinking. Just as a Copernicus or a Galilei had to be anticipated in the dawn of modern natural science, so one can see something in spiritual science that lies, as it were, in the bosom of our time.

If we now follow German spiritual life and really immerse ourselves in it, then from the point of view of spiritual science we will have to gain a very definite view of German spiritual life, of that which has constantly revealed itself in it. I cannot go into details now, only with regard to the last times of German spiritual life. Thus, I said, the peculiarity of spiritual science is that the spiritual researcher, through his special spiritual-scientific method, learns to experience himself in the spiritual-soul that has been freed from the physical body and now knows itself, not in time but in eternity.

Let us see, by visualizing this spiritual view, how the most German of philosophers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, I would say, lived out his belief in immortality and his belief in the soul. Fichte, like his contemporaries, was not yet able to have a real spiritual science. But how he drew from the spiritual life and knew this life in connection with the life of his national spirit is shown in the speeches he addressed to his people in one of Germany's most difficult times. But I don't want to talk about that today, but rather about how Fichte expressed himself, for example, where he wanted to give a “directions for a blessed life” philosophically, about his doctrine of immortality and soul. There he says:

I cannot admit that one seeks the main thing in the immortal human life only after death. That which is most important to me is that we become aware in this life of the body within us of that which passes through the gate of death and then goes into a spiritual world and lives on in it. For this invisible element living in us, I want to live through this earthly life.

This is not yet spiritual science, but it is the germ of spiritual science. And this germ of spiritual science can be found wherever we look at the fruits of German intellectual life. Everywhere we find the urge, the longing, not to satisfy ourselves with the abstractions of thought, with the external spirit of science, from which the science of the senses or the combination of the sensual is born. The German does not seek only for concepts and ideas, but also for their connection with the living spirit. The German feels moved when he can realize that science is not an external absorption of knowledge, but that it is the true life of knowledge, which he strives for so that the soul communes with the spirit that pervades and permeates the world. In the real connection with what spiritually permeates and permeates the world, the German wants to see the ideal of his knowledge, that he does not just want to absorb ideas, not just concepts, a science that is like an image of something external. He wants to have something in his soul that flows like a spiritual lifeblood in him, like the God himself who lives in him. And this is expressed more intensely and powerfully in a creation that no nation in the world has; which may not stand at the pinnacle of world creation in an artistic sense, but in the way it expresses itself, in that the German does not strive for a merely external visual connection with the spirit, but for a confrontation, spiritual eye in spiritual eye, with the spirit. You know that by this creation I mean the Goethean “Faust” poetry.

Do we not see in Faust how his consciousness turns away from all that is mere external knowledge, what is mere derivation from something external? Do we not see how he strives for the source of life, the manifestation of the spirit; how he strives to confront this spirit eye to eye? How he turns away from the external and strives to experience supersensible worlds? The German can never be satisfied with something he has achieved as knowledge. This is best seen by looking at the following: the beginning of Goethe's “Faust” has become almost trivial. It reflects the mood of Goethe in the 1770s. We see how Faust wants to get out of a knowledge that is not connected to the living spiritual world. When we grasp its full depth, we are shaken when Faust speaks the words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
thoroughly, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool,
and am as wise as before!

Now let us see how this German intellectual life unfolds. Let us see how Goethe, in the 1770s, longs for the appearance of the earth spirit, for the sources of intellectual life, for higher self-knowledge, which is achieved by the soul immersing itself in the living spiritual of the transcendental world.

Then we see how greatly the German philosophers strove in this respect after Goethe's time. We see that, after Goethe wrote his “Faust”, German thought, German poetry and German music all seek to look at things from the deepest sources. We see the emergence of thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; we see them connecting with Goethe; we see how they create something from a knowledge that is supposed to be more original than all that has gone before, that is also supposed to come from the very depths of the human soul; we see that they are creating a philosophy; and when we consider that Hegel created a “natural right” and that Schelling published a medical journal, that all these minds were searching for a renewal of science, despairing at Faust! They also sought to renew theology, for they all wanted to be theologians. We see how all this greatness, which has not yet been properly appreciated, springs from the fundamental forces of the German spirit, and we can perhaps say: Goethe could have stood there, after he had seen all this pass him by, and could have said: What I felt in despair back then in the 1770s has been brilliantly brought forth by the German spirit from the sources of life! And let us assume that Goethe had grown even older than he did; let us assume – and I believe that no one would dispute this hypothesis – that Goethe had begun in 1840 [or let us assume that he had been even younger ], to write “Faust” again after all that had happened in the meantime in German intellectual life, can we believe that the beginning of “Faust” around 1840 would have sounded like this:

Now, thank God, I have studied philosophy,
law and medicine, with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel
and, thank God, theology as well
with great zeal and assiduity,
and here I am, a wise man,
as wise as one can be.

Do you think the beginning of “Faust” would have sounded like that? Certainly not. It would have sounded exactly the same as in 1772. Exactly the same!

But what does that tell us? It testifies that it is in the essence of this quintessentially German, Goethean idea of Faust to regard everything that has already been achieved not as something that can satisfy the individual, but that a striving is rooted in this German spiritual life, where it is manifested precisely in its representatives, that every individual, in turn, has to go through, in every age, an eternal becoming, never being complete. This is the case because German intellectual life can only describe the grasping of the spiritual as a true one if the spirit is experienced. But it can never be experienced if one wants to grasp it in an established way. To experience the spirit, one must always approach the spirit in a renewed way. But this is a typically German trait, and at the same time it is what can be called the “supporting force of the German spirit”.

Not concepts, not ideas, not something acquired in reason is what the German strives for, but what is to be striven for is that which can be grasped again at any time in original power. Not the spirit in a coffin, but the ever-living spirit is striven for. So that we may say: Admittedly, we do not see an archetypally German striving in the older times in the same way that we see spiritual science today. But we see the seeds; in what lives in the best, we see the same striving for direct experience of the connection with the spirit. This is always being witnessed anew. That means: a real life of the spirit is presupposed, in which the individual stands. That means: the supporting power of the spirit lives in him in such a way that they hold secret dialogue, that he is touched by what the German spirit wants from him. And this we see continuing to have an effect even where German intellectual life has been pushed back on itself by attacks from left and right, from above and below; we see the original German being carried by the real spirit continuing to have an effect. I would like to mention just one of the many phenomena that could be cited from the second half of the nineteenth century.

One of the most important representatives of the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century, who has not yet been fully recognized today, is Herman Grimm, the son of one, the nephew of the other of the Brothers Grimm, the great researchers of myths and legends, the researcher of the German language. Herman Grimm is first known as a German cultural historian, as an art historian. If you now delve into Herman Grimm's art history, you come across something peculiar. There is nothing in Herman Grimm's writings of what could be called pedantic erudition, of external systematics, but there is something that originally springs from the spiritual. The most important thing that one can gain from the works of Herman Grimm must be read between the lines, it must be sensed from what is said. Why? Because in Herman Grimm lives the sustaining power of the German spirit, which is brought to life by him, and through which he lets himself be whispered in each individual case through an inspiration as to what he has to say about an artistic phenomenon. So that one cannot but feel the affinity between the one who writes and the one who inspires him, one feels like a living conversation of the German national spirit with the one who speaks to us through his books in terms of art history. This Herman Grimm, he prepared himself in a peculiar way for his art historical profession. In his youth, he wrote novellas and also a significant novel. The recognition of these things also belongs to the living German intellectual heritage. For it is not because of their German nature that they have been forgotten, but because attacks have been made on German intellectual property from outside.

I will briefly outline one of Herman Grimm's novellas. We will see shortly what the purpose of this is. The novella is called “The Songstress”. We are presented with a very beautiful characterization of a woman. We see a man in the woman's surroundings. The man is deeply in love with the woman; the woman cloaks herself more in a nobly flirtatious being. He suffers terribly. Herman Grimm wrote a so-called first-person novella with this novella. What he writes is as if the story were being told by a person who lives next door to the couple and experiences everything that happens. And so, in the novella, the author – but in reality, of course, his friend – describes the events that transpire. The singer's coquettish behavior finally drives the lover completely mad. He distances himself from her. He cannot bear the situation. Later, his friend meets him again and sees that he has completely fallen apart. He takes him into his house and sees that this person has come to the edge of the grave because of his love. He sees that he is on the verge of suicide at any moment. So he takes him into his house. But he sees that it is necessary to get the singer over there. He fetches her. And lo and behold, as he approaches the house with the singer, who is to come as the unfortunate man's last hope, so to speak, they hear a shot. The unhappy lover has shot himself, he is dead. The content of the novella is wonderfully beautiful in its characteristics; but that is not what matters to me now. What matters to me is what happens to the singer now that she has found only the dead, suicidal lover. The singer stays in the friend's house for some time. She explains to her friend that she cannot remain in this house, that she is experiencing terrible things in this house. The friend to whom she relates her experiences does not believe this, of course; he is a rationalist. He thinks as rationalists of the present day think. So she asks him to watch with her for one night. And there he is convinced of what is happening to this woman as a result of the death of her lover. He sees for himself how the woman straightens up. He sees a figure enter through the door; that is, he only recognizes it from the words, he does not see the figure, but through what the woman sees, he is convinced that this is indeed a subjective but true experience, that the woman is really in contact with the dead, that this is a matter of the working out of destiny, which throws its rays over death.

Not because I want to use a work of fiction to prove spiritual science, but because the spiritual scientist has to say: Herman Grimm describes like a spiritual science expert, Herman Grimm wants to describe that a person's destiny is not only understood between birth and death. This novella is wonderfully moving, deeply moving, because it describes a person's life beyond death.

Now this is not a temporary phenomenon in writing. In his great cultural-historical novel, Herman Grimm again describes a female character who also has to experience the death of her lover. He describes how real the death is, how the death of the hero occurs, how the spiritual figure rises out of the physical figure. Now Herman Grimm describes how - appropriately - this figure enters into the spiritual world and how a connection remains between the dead and what rises out of the physical body of the heroine. I describe these things because they show how, in German literature, where one is confronted with representatives of the Germanic spirit, the supporting power of the German spirit works in such a way that the novellist, the novelist, too, can do so if he wants to rise into the world of real, supersensible reality. We are shown how the best minds do not stop at outward, visible reality, but how they follow the human soul into the spiritual world. These representatives of the German character did not yet have spiritual science, but their souls were so directed that they sensed the supporting power of the German spirit, which wants to lead the German character to the experience of the spiritual. Therefore, one can have the strongest confidence in the development of spiritual science when one looks at what is there as a germ for this spiritual science in German idealism, in the German longing, not for the abstract but to the living spirit that lives in the supersensible world, just as the mineral world, the plant world, and the animal world live in the sensory world around us. This testifies to the fact that to be German means to be connected in a very specific way as an individual human being with a totality of spiritual life. And in this respect, German experience is not only easily misunderstood, but is attacked and will be attacked again and again. It is not easy for German experience, which is more profound than anything that has developed around it, to take up the weapons with which German intellectual life, which has been pushed into a corner, will have to defend itself over the course of millennia against the hostile forces that come from all sides through the conditions of life.

What then springs from these original German spiritual impulses? They can perhaps be best characterized by pointing to an older time. This German spiritual life did not first appear with this character in modern times, but already in the Middle Ages. If we go back to the mystic Angelus Silesius, he has left many sayings. One particularly meaningful saying is where he says: “Not I as a human soul experience death, in the depths of my human soul dwells God, and God experiences death in me.” The depth of such a saying is not immediately apparent. It proves the primal German thinking and feeling and sensing, which experiences in itself a being with the world spirit that permeates and interweaves everything. Let us only think of the words of Faust:

[Ehrlicher Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet.
Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich,
Kraft, sie zu fühlen, zu genießen. Nicht
You only allow cold, astonished visitors,
Allow me to look into their deep chests,
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks, The giant spruce topples, crushing neighboring branches, And neighboring trunks, sweeping down, And the hill thunders hollowly with its fall;Then you lead me to the safe cave, show Then myself, and my own chest secret, deep wonders open up.)

That is what the German has always sought in his best representatives. That is what he has sought: to truly find in his soul, to find in his deepest inner being the living spirit, to live together with this living spirit. So that Angelus Silesius, in all his peculiarity, already expounds great ideas of immortality when he speaks of the experience of death. For God can only be felt as alive. But he who experiences God in this way within himself knows that he is immortal. For God must be immortal, therefore death can only be an appearance. From this feeling of the German soul, even the grasp of the immortal life for this German soul emerges. But that is what has given this German soul this certainty, this firm footing in its development. That is what has always brought this German soul, of all national souls, closest to what we today call spiritual science. I would like to bring this home to your souls from a certain point of view.

Let us compare this German spiritual life with Eastern spiritual life, not in its lower regions, but let us go up to the highest regions of Russian spiritual life. Let us try to visualize one of Russia's most outstanding minds, Soloviev. Soloviev, who really took everything that was in Russian intellectual life into his soul and gave it back as a world view – not just as what is called a “philosophical world view”, but in such a way that one feels the Russian life vibrating – gave something that lived in this deep soul. I can only refer here to his works, only a small part of which have been translated, I cannot go into all of them. But I would like to point out that this philosopher, who retained his faith throughout his life – the faith that lives in many Russians, that Western European life, and Central European life as well, is a dying life, the renewal of which can only come from Russia. He lives according to this error. But this error gives his philosophy its special character. And again and again, in rousing speeches, Solowjow assures his people of the creative and sustaining forces within them. Then came the end of his life. Solowjow ended his life by increasingly arriving at a meager worldview, which I will characterize by comparing it to what lives in a similar field in the German worldview.

Let us see what lives in the German world view: it is the certainty that the human soul can live together with the spirit of the world, that it can hold its dialogue with the spirit of the world. We have seen this in the representative figure of Faust. Solowjow does not speak of the certainty of spiritual experience in the way that a human soul speaks out of the Germanic nature. Rather, he speaks thus: Yes, the Russian people have a great mission, but it is fulfilled by a divine being from the other world, who, through grace, takes hold of the Russian people and gives them their mission. God must work in the Russian people. And the Russians are waiting for the miracle, for a god, a kind of manifestation of the light of Christ, to appear and call the Russian people to their task.

In Central European spiritual culture, people know that they can experience their soul, they can experience God in their soul. Soloviev is waiting for that which pushes and drives and urges him from outside; he is waiting for the miracle. But now, in the year of Solowjow's death, the remarkable thing is that Solowjow appeared before the Petersburg public with a speech that must have been wonderfully moving, because something deeply emotional spoke from his words, which so convinced the audience that this power of persuasion passed over to people like a magic breath. He said: “Everything that has ever been believed about humanity being able to find something within itself that would redeem it, that would lead it to a divine state, is a vain deception and illusion. All that is deception, what believes that humanity will ever find the strength within itself to experience the divine through what it is now. No, Solowjow emphasizes, everything that humanity has of strength now, everything that it has of seemingly highest culture, that must perish. “The whole world lies in ruins” - such are his words - for there is nothing in present-day humanity that could lead this humanity to a spiritual goal. Only when everything has perished will the God who redeems souls step in from outside the dissolved earth, the perished earth. We cannot find anything in our souls that points us to something we could seek ourselves.

And he also describes in detail what he expects. As in a powerful vision, he sees the Asian peoples approaching, he sees them waging war on Europe, he sees how, in the twentieth, twenty-first century, Christianity will have declined to such an extent that only one-tenth of those who are on earth will still be Christians, while the whole world will be flooded with a harsh, materialistic worldview, which is pouring over the world, because “the whole world is in a state of decay.” He who listened to what the greatest philosophical mind of the Russian people spoke out of a deep faith shortly before his death, just weeks before his death, might ask: What could have inspired the one who has passed away to say: My soul, through its own power, has lost all eternity.

Let us instead consider the will and testament of a German. There are still people today who scoff at Lessing's momentous will and testament, 'The Education of the Human Race', in which he describes how development continues through all times, how souls keep coming back. For Lessing was the first to incorporate the doctrine of repeated earthly lives into German spiritual life. People often say: Well, yes, Lessing was a great man, but when he wrote this 'Education of the Human Race', he was already an old man. Well, people always arrange what they want to acknowledge as they want. But Lessing did not weaken, rather he had ascended to a deep sense of this direct communion, this speaking of the human soul with the living spirit, which pours out its sustaining strength over the soul of the individual, so that the individual soul can live with it in the sustaining strength of the German spirit. Lessing said something like the following as the closing words of his will: Is it not clear to my soul, from what it experiences within itself, that it must keep coming back to a new life on earth in order to keep learning new things and developing ever higher? That would take a lot of time, well, isn't eternity mine? - That is what Lessing extracts from the depths of the human soul itself, that is what he lays down in his testament. This is a spiritual culture that comes to different words than the one that says: We will never find the strength from the human soul itself.

From such a juxtaposition of different moods, one will understand that in the East, the Russian spiritual mood is asserting itself, which stands without understanding in relation to what is taking place in Central Europe, and which does not overlook everything that is emerging here as a living spiritual life, but always speaks of the decaying culture of the West. Thus, the so-called intellectuals justify, from a spiritual point of view, what they had always intended to do against the West, including politically. The terrible war in which we are engaged was caused as much by the moods of the East as by external interests. But these moods will not disappear with this war. In order to bring German intellectual life to bear, it will be necessary to forge weapons from the spirit, from which the greatest minds of Central Europe have taken their weapons, for this confrontation with the spirit must always be renewed.

And how, by a completely natural process, the enemies of this German intellectual life must be encircled – we can see this if we take a look at how German intellectual life is understood, the German intellectual life that I was able to sketch out in a charcoal drawing, the subject of much discussion. In defense of and in an effort to understand this German intellectual life, I would like to call to mind a Western spirit that truly belongs to the best [Western spirits] of the nineteenth century, an American who wrote in English, Emerson. He is truly not someone to invoke when one wants to describe the contrast between the West and German intellectual life based on prejudice. Emerson portrays the English people as the first world people; but strangely, he places the Germans higher. Despite Emerson's description of the English as the first world people, he says:

The English do not appreciate the depth of German intellectual life.
The German thinks for Europe.

But now I would like to mention something else that is very characteristic from the point of view on which I have based this reflection today. Emerson wrote two wonderful essays, one about Shakespeare and one about Goethe. Unfortunately, people today only read with half a mind, but it could be interesting if a number of people really did what I am about to suggest. It would be interesting to get involved in the essays that Emerson wrote and that bear the title “Representatives of the Human Race,” reading the two essays, one about “Shakespeare, or the Poet,” the other about “Goethe, or the Writer.” You will not believe that I am so brutal, or, one could also say, so “barbaric”, that I want to denigrate Shakespeare in any way, or that I do not revere him to the highest degree as one of the greatest poets of humanity. That is what he is, for Emerson too. And Emerson states that if you want to characterize the poet, you have to name Shakespeare as the representative poet. By comparison, you have to call Goethe the representative writer. Now, one should not just read what is there, but one should feel from the words what passed through the whole soul of the presenter when he gave the characteristics. Emerson tries to present Shakespeare as the representative of the poet in general, based on the characteristics of the English national soul, and then Goethe as the representative of the writer in general. And Emerson seeks to draw out the traits that one must consider if one wants to truly characterize Shakespeare inwardly. And with Emerson it is the case that when he is confronted with an appearance, he characterizes the one appearance with all the power of the word, as if there were nothing else, he immerses himself in the individual appearance. In Shakespeare, when he discusses Shakespeare, in Goethe, when he discusses Goethe. [It is a special gift.] And what is it that he seeks to express when he contemplates Shakespeare, Shakespeare the poet, [whom he regards as the most exquisite poet and this as the most exquisite of the English, and this as the most exquisite of the peoples]? He feels compelled to say, while characterizing Shakespeare: An original mind is not, as is usually thought, one that creates everything out of itself, but one that works as Shakespeare did, who goes everywhere and takes the intellectual property he can find. And now he shows how the whole of England thought like Shakespeare, how he was only the echo of his people. On the other hand, he tries to show how Shakespeare used French and Italian sources, how he gathered everything together to become Shakespeare, how he became the great man by organizing the great intellectual goods from other worlds and other peoples. That is what Emerson comes to through Shakespeare. And I would like to read you a few characteristic words:

Great men are distinguished more by their comprehensive minds [and] by the height of the vantage point from which they look down than by their originality. If we demand that originality which, like a spider, draws its own web from its own entrails, which itself finds the clay, forms stones from it and erects the house, then great men are by no means original. The essence of truly valuable originality does not lie in dissimilarity to others.

Thus Emerson characterizes Shakespeare in such a way as to show: I must show why Shakespeare is so unoriginal. “The essence of truly valuable originality does not lie in dissimilarity to others.”

And one saying, to which particularly much value must be attached in Emerson's characteristics of Shakespeare, is the following, which is not said by me, but Emerson speaks thus about Shakespeare:

It has become a kind of practical rule among writers that once someone has shown themselves capable of creating something original, they may then also discreetly steal the works of others.

So Emerson, when characterizing one of the greatest minds of the world order, needs nothing less than to excuse Shakespeare for being original, even by stealing from others and combining what has been stolen. You have to look a little deeper into what the impulses of human development are when you are standing in such a momentous world period as today.

And then we turn the page, especially in the beautiful translation by Herman Grimm, which he made of Emerson's essays on Shakespeare and Goethe. Let us now turn to Goethe. Again, Emerson delves into Goethe, absorbed in the essence of Goethe, as if nothing else existed. And what comes to Emerson's mind now to characterize Goethe as the representative of writing? He comes up with the following words: All of nature, every stone, everything that is and will be strives to be expressed. The whole world strives for expression. And favored human souls, whom other souls cannot emulate, who therefore stand alone, they find the words to express, in wrestling with the world spirit, what is wrestling with the world spirit.

With Shakespeare, Emerson describes how he [makes references everywhere].

With Goethe, he describes how Goethe himself is connected to the world spirit, which works in the individual realms of nature. Compare the one with the other. About Goethe, Emerson says:

In my eyes, the writer stands as a man whose position was foreseen in the construction of the world.

In direct contrast to the beginning of the world, he brings Goethe. Shakespeare he believes he has to excuse. And further he says of Goethe:

The position he took, he owes nothing, but he entered the world from his birth as a free, [supervising] genius.

About Shakespeare, he says:

It is easy to see that all the best that has ever been written and done in the world was not the work of one man, but the product of a vast, collaborative effort in which a thousand like one, all driven by a single impulse, lent a hand.

Shakespeare is explained entirely out of the environment, out of the world that surrounds him. Regarding Goethe, Emerson says:

He is all eye and instinctively turns to where the truth lies. Say something, and he will immediately know whether it is true or false. It is hateful to him to repeat the old wives' tales, even if they have had the good faith of humanity for a thousand years, and to be made a fool of by them. No one else needs to strain their eyes for him to show them whether something is true or a lie.

I believe, my dear audience, that one can feel something deep and meaningful by comparing Emerson's essay on Shakespeare with his essay on Goethe; one will feel everywhere that this American had a certain right to say: “The English [do not appreciate the depth of German intellectual life. The German thinks for Europe.] He tried to fathom it, but in fathoming it, he sensed something of what I wanted to characterize today as the living forces of the German spirit, which penetrate into every single soul; not that power that flows from the commonality of human beings, but from the direct intercourse of the individual soul with the spirit. And one can feel how Emerson is imbued with this sustaining power of the German spirit when, at the end of his meditation on Goethe, he speaks words that must be taken with feeling, not just with the mind. At the end of his meditation on Shakespeare, Emerson says:

It must be admitted that these were only imperfect histories of imperfect men. The world is still waiting for the poet-priest, the reconciler, who, unlike Shakespeare, does not play, who, unlike the body-burial Swedenborg, does not search in graves, but who will see and speak and act with equal enthusiasm. For knowledge will give splendor to sunshine; justice is more beautiful than secret preference, and love is compatible with all-embracing wisdom.

What feelings does Shakespeare inspire in Emerson? The feeling that we must wait for the coming of the one who will bring reconciliation.

What does the contemplation of Goethe inspire in him? He says at the end of the contemplation:

The secret of genius is not to tolerate a lie, to make everything we are aware of a truth; in the sophistication of modern life, in art and science, in [the] books and in people, to awaken faith , certainty and trust, and to honor each truth, as we begin and as we end, as we go along and as we go forward, by not only knowing it but by making it a rule of action.

Thus, it was not only Goethe but also Shakespeare who inspired Emerson not to wait for anyone. And the words I have just read are preceded by the following:

We too must write sacred writings to reunite heaven and earth.

We would say today: We have to immerse ourselves in spiritual science, in what human science can be. But Emerson does not grasp the depth of German intellectual life, and is fundamentally hostile to it.

This, however, is precisely why German intellectual life will be in a kind of defensive position for a long time to come. For it experiences strange things even with those of whom it is said that they are trying to penetrate into this German intellectual life. I would also like to give you a sample of this.

Those who are reasonably familiar with the intellectual life of the recent past may have been surprised that such high hopes were placed in some German minds before this war taught people, let's say, about someone like Romain Rolland, a different lesson. The people who admired him represent, to a certain extent, a break in the intellectual life of the present. Those who admired him could not really understand how he could speak so contemptuously of the Germans after the outbreak of the war. One has indeed been able to read strange articles in Germany about Romain Rolland. I will only refer to one work by Romain Rolland, “Jean-Christophe”. In this novel, Romain Rolland portrays a German, but you will see in a moment how. Even this description of Jean-Christophe is to be said: it is given by a person who has never been touched by the real inner strength of the spiritual life. What is Jean-Christophe in the two-volume novel? It is a German musician and how he develops in his Germanness. Romain Rolland wants to describe that. And he really does describe something, yes, you can't say otherwise, than a chaotic mixture of the destinies of various Germans such as Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Gustav Mahler and so on. All of this is mixed up in the most impossible way, and that gives the completely impossible character of Jean-Christophe, who has been so much admired, but who shows himself to be nothing more than the result of an artist's inability to face reality, which not only records external nature but also penetrates into the depths of existence, and can see the impossibility of mixing up such chaos.

I am well aware that there may be many people who will interpret what I am about to say about Romain Rolland as “barbaric”. But I believe that I can take on what these people defend from their apparent aesthetic high ground when it comes to judging the particular aesthetic and artistic nature of people like Romain Rolland. [It has nothing to do with what Schiller said to Goethe. “People say that there is something immoral in Wilhelm Meister. No, the characters are as they have to be.”] For with Romain Rolland, you never know what the author says and what his characters say. Therefore, what his characters say can be seen as the attitude of Romain Rolland himself. This attitude comes across to us wherever he talks about Germanness. For example, he describes the father of Jean-Christoph.

I will now only quote a few significant things that we can say are a Frenchman's recent judgment of the German character. And I will cite evidence because there were people who said: This novel is the first great act since 1870 that will bring about the reconciliation of Germans and French. No political act is as important for this reconciliation as Romain Rolland's novel, so people said. Well, anyone who reads the novel will agree with me if I disagree. You can't say that Romain Rolland didn't want to say what his characters say, you just have to look at it from an artistic point of view. Because what we are hearing from this Romain Rolland, this “reconciler between Germanness and Frenchness”, has recently been presented to us in the most defamatory way as German “barbarism” from the West. So it is said of the father:

He was a fine speaker, well built, if a little heavy, and the type of what is considered classical beauty in Germany: a broad, expressionless forehead, strong regular features and a curly beard: a Jupiter from the banks of the Rhine.

Then he characterizes a number of chamber musicians, whom he considers typical of German chamber music, in the following way:

They played neither very accurately nor very in time; but they never went off the rails and faithfully followed the indicated expressive markings. They possessed that musical ease that requires little, and that perfection in mediocrity that is abundant in the race that is called the most musical in the world.

Romain Rolland characterizes Uncle Theodor, the stepson of Jean-Christophe's grandfather, as follows:

He was a partner in a large trading house that had business connections with Africa and the Far East. He was a typical example of the new type of German, who mockingly spurn the old idealism of the race and, drunk with victory, practice a cult that proves that they are not accustomed to living under that sign. But since it is impossible to suddenly change the centuries-old nature of a people, the suppressed idealism kept resurfacing in language, behavior, moral views, and Goethe quotes on the occasion of the slightest domestic events; and so, through the bizarre effort to reconcile the honorable principles of the old German bourgeoisie with the cynicism of these new shop-keepers, a strange mixture of conscientiousness and self-interest, a mixture that has a rather nauseating smell of hypocrisy, which amounts to making a symbol of all that is right, of all justice and truth, out of German strength, greed and the pursuit of personal interest.

That is Romain Rolland's description of certain Germans. We have heard it again through Romain Rolland. But then we are told about Jean-Christophe himself:

He lacked that compliant Germanic idealism that refuses to see and does not see what it would find embarrassing to discover, for fear of destroying the comfortable serenity of its judgment and the comfort of its life.

Of course, Romain Rolland sees German idealism, but he wants to show it in the light that, in his opinion, is the true light. He wants to characterize this German idealism somewhat, and there he says about this German idealism – since Romain Rolland is a good musician, his friends claim that he understands German music particularly well, he may refer to it –; Romain Rolland seeks to characterize German idealism as what the Germans delude themselves about as a blue haze that the Germans fear to see and therefore idealize. He sees in it something with which the Germans mask all kinds of things so as not to see reality. Then he says:

The Germans are not idealists for the reason that they falsify feelings.

– he speaks, I beg to be heard, he speaks as if it were a characteristic of Schumann and Wagner – that is not the problematic thing in music, that idealism fakes feelings, but that feelings are fake, that is shown in Schumann. The German feels fake. These are Romain Rolland's own words:

But it was precisely his example that led Christof to the realization that the worst falsity of German art did not lie where artists wanted to express feelings that they did not feel, but rather where they expressed feelings that they felt but that were false in themselves. Music is a relentless mirror of the soul. The more naive and trusting a German musician is, the more he reveals the weaknesses of the German soul, its insecure foundation, its [soft] sensitivity, its lack of candor, its somewhat devious idealism, its inability to see itself, to dare to look itself in the face.

He wants to get to the very heart of this German idealism. That is why he refers to Mrs. von Stael, who once characterized the Germans, as Romain Rolland reports. She said:

They are well-behaved. They use philosophical reason to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear that transforms respect into admiration.

Romain Rolland refers to these words of Mrs. von Stael.

Christof found this feeling in the greatest and the smallest [in Germany]

— he says. And then, to say something quite characteristic of the Germans, he adds:

from Wilhelm Tell, the deliberate, small-minded bourgeois with the muscles of a porter, who, as the free Jew Börne says, “to reconcile honor and fear, walks with downcast eyes before the post of ‘dear Lord’ Gessler, so that he can invoke the fact that he who disobeyed who did not see the hat,” up to the portly, seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed him, hastily gave way to him on the footpath and went down to the road.

[He hated the brutal militarism that he felt weighing on him, all those sabers clanking on the pavement, those pyramids of rifles and cannons set up in front of the barracks, ready to fire with their muzzles pointed towards the city.

We are hearing all of this again now. The novel already contains the same words that we are hearing again now, with the only difference being that later on, the French no longer thought that the muzzles were only pointed at their own German cities, but sensed that they could be pointed elsewhere.

But it cannot be said that Romain Rolland is entirely unjust towards the Germans, whom he characterizes in this way. He does find that these Germans have nothing of the true esthete. In music, he grants them some talent. He calls thinking “clear but cloudy,” and so on. But in the opinion of this Frenchman, who is considered one of the best minds in France today, the Germans do not have much of a sense of beauty. He describes a German girl: “The nose [gap in the text] up one side, down the other.” That, according to him, is the typical German girl. I also ask you to consider the following words:

The Germans are fortunate in their tolerance when it comes to physical imperfections: they manage not to see them; they can even come to embellish them with benevolent imagination, finding unexpected relationships between the [face] they want to see and the most magnificent examples of human beauty.

This refers to the face with the nose that I just described. It would not have taken too much persuasion to get old Euler to declare that [his] granddaughter had the nose of Juno Ludovisi.

But it cannot be said that Romain Rolland is or wants to be completely unjust. He also praises where he wants to praise and recognizes in the German character what he believes he can acknowledge. For example, after he has shown how this Jean-Christophe, who is such a talented fellow that he cannot stand it in the German world, that he strives outwards, because such a genius cannot flourish in the German world. After showing this, he finally invites him to be a guest of a professor, whom he wants to depict as a typical German. And what unfolds in the presence of this German professor is where Romain Rolland does praise the Germans, finding something praiseworthy in them. You see, the professor takes great pains to have his housekeeper prepare the best meal possible. And she, so convinced that she has achieved great art, leaves the door ajar to see how the gentlemen are enjoying their meal.

It was an exhibition of unforgettable, honest, unadulterated German cuisine, with the aromas of all the herbs, the thick sauces, the nourishing soups, the exemplary meat dishes, the monumental carp, the sauerkraut, the geese, the homemade cakes, the aniseed and caraway breads.

You can see that he also has something good to say about the Germans! And he particularly benefits from the meal that has now been taken and a real German, a singing German, is to be described. He describes him in such a way that you can see; he is actually wondering why this particular specimen can sing, and even sing well. He says that the German actually has no idea how to sing:

They are seized by the power of the song, and the song works through them as through an instrument. The spirit of the songs takes hold of them, and they obey it. For the soul of the German must do so. This soul obeys the song as the soldier obeys the general.

The so-called German militarism has grown deep into the soul of those who speak of it today with voluptuous expressions. He now describes a real singer by saying: He was a fat man who always sweated when walking, but especially when he made sounds. - He describes his nature, his figure. Then he says: He looked like a Bavarian, a particular variety of German. He says that there are many of these Bavarians, because they have “the secret of this human race, which came about through a system of pasta-eating similar to how poultry is fattened.”

He wants to find out what the people who are actually able to practice this German art of singing, which he also admires, look like.

Now, it is no wonder that this mixture of Beethoven, Strauss, Wagner and Mahler, who has the peculiarity of not having a spark of any of the four in his soul, cannot endure this artificial construct in Germany. He must get out of Germanness! It is said that although he did not know it, he is driven by German confusion to “Golden Paris”.

But instinctively his eyes looked towards the Latin South. And first of all to France. To France, the eternal [refuge] from German confusion.

Now it is described how the one who has to leave Germanness has to find his way in Latin culture. There he becomes a great mystic. I hope you will excuse me from pursuing the further paths. But we would find many a characteristic there of what must be called the misunderstanding of that which sustains and carries the individual German from the supporting power of the living spirit, with which the German essence feels connected.

Therefore, it may be said that it must be clear to all those who believe that humanity's future lies in the strong and vigorous representation of intellectual life through a world culture how the German spirit has not yet completed its mission in the world, but how this German spirit has laid the seeds from which it can be seen that they must continue to flourish ever more abundantly.

And that appears to us as the fundamental strength of the German spirit, that we know: we can only hope for the blossoms and fruits of the future. We stand confidently in the midst of it, in the living experience of the German spirit. This must also give us the strength for the necessary defense, for the defense of German intellectual life as well, which, as perhaps few today already suspect, is in a fundamental struggle, just as much as the external life of the immediate present.

It would be out of place to present a reflection that was only meant as a consolation. Who needed weak consolation or who needed words of strength or the like, when a nation that knows how to defend its goods with such strength has shown and has already held out for almost a year with strength and courage and a willingness to make sacrifices?

But we must be aware that the German spirit must be on guard just as much as external German life had to be on guard. And when we look more deeply into this spiritual life of the German, we find something of which we can say: This is the core and the root of Germanness: its yearning for the living spirit, its living together with the living spirit.

Those who revile the Germans today and say: We do not mean this German spirit when we revile them, must be told: You seem to us like someone who says: I know there is a person with strong hands, but when he uses these hands, we do not like it!

The French philosopher Bergson said in a Christmas speech that the German mind today shows that it can no longer grasp the living, it can only grasp the mechanistic. Today, only cannons stand against the French; only mechanisms are seen coming from Germany, and armies.

There is not much logic in what he says, as logic is generally missing today when the world situation is discussed so beautifully. You would have to ask this philosopher Bergson whether he expected the French soldiers to be confronted with recitations of Schiller's poems or with Novalis' works.

But a glance, which I could only hint at with weak words – a glance into the essence and life, into the roots of the German spirit, shows us that, looking at this spirit, we can say:

It has not only not completed; it shows that it is taking its ascending path to a fully blossoming and fruitful spiritual life. And anyone who can trust in inner strength can have the utmost confidence in what the German spirit is willing to accomplish. And anyone who has such an insight into the inner effectiveness of the German spirit also knows what great and powerful things must be defended with external weapons today; he knows that the soul of the German nation still has much, much more to bear.

Therefore, let me express what I wanted to express to you today in a few words, and what I ask you to take more from what underlies my words as feelings and emotions. Finally, let me summarize it in a few words that are based on my feelings, which should be words of confidence for the soul, from what can be known about the sustaining power of the German spirit, in the past and into the future. I would like to say: If you follow through in your thoughts what I have only been able to sketch with a few lines of charcoal, you will increasingly come to the feeling that I would like to express at the end with the words:

The German spirit has not fulfilled
What it should bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in worries about the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerfully
Hidden things that must still mature. —
How can a wish for his end arise in the power of the enemy without understanding, so long as life reveals itself to him, which holds him in the roots of his being?

Handwritten summary of contents for the censors.

During the war, public events were subject to the supervision of the censorship authorities. For this purpose, Rudoif Steiner wrote the following table of contents for his lecture scheduled for June 16, 1915 in Düsseldorf (NZ 1564-1566).

Contents of the lecture to be given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in Düsseldorf. The lecture has already been given in Berlin, Leipzig and in a similar form in Munich.

The lecture begins with the introduction of personalities who, in fateful times within the development of German culture, placed the security, the confidence, the true invincibility of the German being before the soul of the people by evoking the soul's deep permeation with the effective power of the ruling spirit. For them, this “spirit” was not a “concept” or an “idea,” as it is for the naturalistically thinking consciousness; for them, the spirit was a real being with which the soul maintains contact in its deepest interior, from which it draws spiritual life-force, just as the body draws physical life-force from the air through the lungs.

Thus Fichte stood in the midst of his people when they had to work their way up to freedom, supported only by their own strength, by showing how the German people, in contrast to the Romance peoples, already prove through their language that they are connected in their very essence to the innermost roots of the vital impulse of spiritual existence. The German does not feel spiritual life as something that is only recognized in the individual human soul, but as something that reigns over this individual soul as an independent being and that carries the individual soul.

From this consciousness, a creation within German culture has emerged that is only possible within the German people: Goethe's “Faust”. Faust strives out of dead knowledge towards an inner living contact with the essence of the spirit. In Faust, the most ancient German consciousness of nature and the world comes to life again in a newer way. One does not need to deny the great significance of Shakespeare; but one must still say that in Faust, everything human rises to a nobler height than in Hamlet. Consider how, when confronted with the truly spiritual, the latter can only fall back on doubt and uncertainty, on the hopeless question, “To be or not to be?” By contrast, when confronted with the power of evil, of material things, Faust asserts the inner certainty of victory of his connection with the spirit: “In thy nothing I hope to find the All.”

Those who belong to the nations that today do not want to revile German deeds enough, must have come to the same conclusion that Ernest Renan expressed in 1870, when they sensed the nature of this in the development of German culture. 70, that Germany has added something to the development of humanity in terms of “depth and extent” that “for those who have experienced it, it is as if they only know elementary mathematics compared to those who are proficient in differential calculus”.

This connection of the German soul with the sustaining power of the world-ruling spirit has, in minds like Herder's, evoked the consciousness of the world-significant task of German culture, of the fact that this culture has a contribution to make to the overall education of the human race, insofar as this illuminates the lofty goal of working “until everything has happened, until the genius of enlightenment has traversed the earth.”

This consciousness warmed Lessing's soul as he wrote his incomparable testament to the “education of the human race,” which elevated all contemplation of history to an experience of the eternal spiritual activity of the world through the human soul.

And this consciousness lives on to the present day in the most exquisite minds of the German people. It will now be shown how this fundamental strength of the German spirit has led to a deep world view and outlook on life in individual personalities of the nineteenth century. Herman Grimm's genuine German character is characterized; lesser-known personalities are also mentioned to show what particular German character is in thinking, feeling and experiencing.

Finally, it is suggested how, in the present day, the consciousness that comes from the sources, in which the German essence is intimately connected with the power of the spirit, may live in the German mind, and how this consciousness may trust in its power within the world of enemies, in the face of which it has to assert itself in our fateful days.

My dear attendees, as soon as a person looks at the world around them, they will find the greatest secrets and mysteries everywhere. Wherever they look, they see phenomena that they cannot understand the cause of, and the greatest mystery for humans is arguably humans themselves. And this can be very well understood in our very materialistically colored time, when we consider that today's science attempts to explain man on the basis of a hypothesis, which says that man developed from the animal kingdom, that the animals developed from the plant kingdom, and that the plants developed from the mineral kingdom. Spiritual science admits that, as long as one takes this point of view, it is completely impossible to explain the human being. Everything would be easier to explain as the human being, as long as one starts from this materialistic view that man has developed from the lower natural kingdoms, and it is precisely spiritual science that will be able to show, clearly show, that man is not a being as science imagines him to be.

Let us look at the world and try to be clear about what we see around us when we want to look at the human being. The first thing we see about such a person is his physical body. This physical body is composed of all the elements that we see in the nature around us. We can examine the human physical body chemically and then we will see that all the forces and laws that we also find in the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms prevail in it. We can therefore say: the human being has the physical body in common with the three lower kingdoms of nature.

But if we were to consider only the part of the human being that we call the physical body, no one would claim that this body could be a human being. We see that the human being has different characteristics from those of the minerals. We see that the human being has the power within him by which he grows, by which he reproduces, by which he can feed himself. We cannot go into this in too much detail today and just want to say that the power that manifests itself in the functions is the result of the etheric or life body. By ether, we do not mean the ether that science has assumed as a hypothesis. This etheric body or ether has very specific tasks to fulfill, such as nutrition, reproduction and so on. But this life body has yet another completely different task, which remains together with the physical body from birth to death. And the ether body ensures that the physical body does not follow the physical laws. If the physical body were to follow the physical laws, the physical body would immediately fall apart. Only because a physical body is enclosed and permeated by the etheric body, the physical body retains its shape and does not disintegrate. We can say that during life, from physical birth to death, the etheric body is a fighter against the decay of the physical body, and this etheric or life body is shared by humans with all plants and animals. Minerals do not have an etheric body as I have described it.

If man had only a physical body and an etheric body, he would have the ability to grow and nourish himself and so on, namely, all the things we see in plants. But man has something else that is much closer to him than all these qualities, namely his joy and pain, pleasure and suffering, his urges, desires and passions, and man would not have all this if he were composed only of an etheric body and a physical body. We cannot go into this in any more detail here, but for now we can merely state that the astral body is the body that makes it possible for a being to feel joy and pain, pleasure and suffering, instinct, desire and passion. The astral body also has many other characteristics, which can be precisely described by spiritual science, but for our consideration today we need only state what has just been said.

We see that where the astral body is the carrier of the above-mentioned qualities, a being that has such an astral body leads an inner life. And if we now look at nature, we see that only the human kingdom and the animal kingdom have such an inner life. Just as man has the physical body in common with the minerals, plants and animals, and the etheric or life body in common with the plants and animals, so he has the astral body in common with the animals. But if man had only a physical body, etheric body and astral body, he would not differ from animals. However, if we take a closer look at man and see how he differs from animals, we will find that man has an ability that no other being in the aforementioned realms has. Man has self-awareness. He can say “I” to himself. Take any other thing: at table it can say “table”, at the clock “clock”, at roses “roses”, at cloth “cloth”; but no human being can say the word “I” if it does not mean only itself. Every human being is a “you” to me, and I am a “you” to every other human being. The “I” or self-awareness is what distinguishes humans from all other beings in the natural kingdoms mentioned.

Thus we see that man is composed of four parts, namely, the physical body, which is composed of physical and chemical substances and laws; an etheric or life body, which protects the physical body from decay; an astral body, which enables man to lead an inner life; and finally, the ego, through which man attains self-awareness. All this was known to people in earlier times, and only when humanity has allowed itself to be fertilized again by spiritual science will people recognize again what great truths can be found in the sacred books of all nations. In these books we find messages about this compilation, only our present-day science cannot understand this because it is not willing to be taught, but because it thinks it can find out everything itself, which has been secretly written in the old books.

We have already had the opportunity to speak here in this city about other issues that touch on spiritual science, or as it is called in our time, theosophy, namely reincarnation and karma. We have spoken here before about the fact that the spiritual part, the I of the human being, goes from embodiment to embodiment in order to gain new experiences in each new incarnation, and that through the great law of karma, the human being has to bring balance into all his actions and all his experiences. When a person dies, what happens then? First, he lays down his physical body, which is returned to the physical earth. The physical body decays and the elements dissolve. The etheric body, the astral body and the self move out. After a short time, the etheric body separates. An extract of the etheric body is preserved and absorbed by the self. After the time on the astral plane, or as it is called in theosophical literature: Kamaloka, the astral body also disintegrates. An extract of this astral body is also taken by the ego, and now the ego goes through other states, which we do not need to describe here. After a certain time, the ego comes back, takes an astral body, an etheric body and reincarnates itself again on our earth.

If we take a closer look at this process, we will find that the ego takes a new physical body each time through the various reincarnations, which is given to it by its parents. This physical body therefore has the characteristics of the parents, and the physical body inherits the physical traits from its parents, grandparents and so on. But the ego is not inherited; that is something completely different, which was there long before the physical body was there. Only the physical body a person gets from his parents. Tonight we do not want to go into or at least not go too far into the etheric and astral body in relation to inheritance.

Material science claims that man is the product of heredity and imagines, for example, that genius is the result of heredity. As an example, it cites the fact that in the Bach family, about twenty more or less important musicians lived within two hundred years and now says that this gift is the result of heredity, or it proves that in the Bernoulli family there were six or eight important mathematicians within a short period of time and attributes this to heredity. But if science wanted to prove something, then it would have to start at the top with a genius and then prove that the genius was inherited in further generations. But this is not possible because, as is well known, it would be difficult to prove such cases. But how is it that there were so many great musicians and mathematicians in the Bach or Bernoulli families?

The first requirement for being a musician like Bach is a good ear, a good physical ear. Without such an ear, a person cannot be a musician. Now, a very good ear was formed in the Bach family through inheritance, and therefore people were born into this family who had to undergo a certain development in the field of music. This is not a matter of mere chance, but very definite laws are the basis of these incarnations. If the same people had lived in other families, had been born of other parents, who did not possess such an excellent ear, these people would simply not have been musicians, and exactly the same applies to the Bernoulli family. Certain physical predispositions are also necessary for a mathematician, and these physical necessities were present in this family.

We have now seen that the physical body is recreated each time, while the I remains. If nothing stood between the body and the I, then all people would be more or less the same. But something stands between the physical being of the human being and the I, and that is temperament. Every person has their own unique temperament. As you know, there are four temperaments: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic.

As we said before, man consists of four parts, which together form his being: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego. These four parts have not been created at the same time, but there has been a very long development before man reached the stage he is at today. You can find more detailed information about this in my article 'Akasha Chronicle' in 'Lucifer – Gnosis' (numbers 13 to 35).

Humanity has so far gone through four stages of development, and at each stage a part of its being has been developed. First, its physical body was developed, then its etheric body, then its astral body and finally the I. Now each of these four parts expresses itself in a physical part of the human being, and in such a way that the physical body expresses itself in the senses, the etheric body in the glands, the astral body in the nerves and the ego in the blood. The blood, as we can see it in humans today, is the expression of the ego, and there was no blood before the ego came into being.

Now every person has the four bodies, as stated above, and thus every person also has sense organs, glands, nerves and blood, but these four bodies are not equally developed in all people. There are all kinds of mixtures, and it is through this mixture that the difference in temperaments arises, as we shall see.

As I said, blood is the expression of the ego. We recognize a person as a choleric person if they have a strongly developed ego; we recognize someone as a sanguine person if they have a strongly developed astral body. We recognize a person as a phlegmatic person if they have a developed ether body, and we recognize a person as a melancholic person if they have a developed physical body. Spiritual science is able to explain this precisely because it knows how things relate to each other.

Take the choleric type, for example. As I said, the person has developed his ego strongly. The person in question has an excellent blood principle. When we look at such a type, we see something compressed in his build. A very good example is found in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the German philosopher. This is because the blood constricts the nerves, and thus the growth is, so to speak, restrained. We also see this in Napoleon. These are people with a strongly developed ego, which manifests itself in the choleric temperament. When we see such people walking, it is as if they want to stomp through the ground, not just put their feet on the ground, no, it is - / gap. The coal-black eyes look sharply into the world. The whole body gives the impression of willpower and energy, to which the bridled nature contributes. This is not to say, of course, that the choleric person must be small, only that if the same person were not a choleric person, he would be somewhat taller.

Now let us take the sanguine type. As we have seen, the sanguine type has a strongly developed astral body, and consequently a strongly developed nervous system. What is the result of this? Such a person walks very hoppily, everything springs out, because his astral body has the power and is not held back by the blood. Such a person always walks hopping, looks lively through his light blue eyes, has blond hair. But the sanguine person has very little lasting interest. As soon as he sees something, it gives him interest, but the same is not permanent. Tomorrow he sees something else, and that arouses his interest more, and so it goes on and on. But because he is interested in everything, he faces the world with a certain joy in life.

But let us now look at the phlegmatic person. As I said, this person has the most developed glandular system, which gives such a person an inner comfort. Such a person has no interest in the outside world, and we can see that from his dull eye and his calm gait. He is not interested in anything around him, and as I said, the reason for this is that the etheric body or the glandular system is in control.

Now let us take the melancholic. He has developed his physical body strongly, not the musculature, but the principle of the physical body. Such a person is weighed down, we would say, by the weight of his body. He cannot lift himself up, he cannot get ahead, and so everything is too much for him.

We have now seen how these four temperaments relate to the bodies, but it would not really have much practical value if we did not look at the matter further.

Not only can we apply what we are about to discuss to ourselves, but it is also of great importance in education. Take, for example, a choleric child. His disposition compels him to achieve the best in everything, it is not difficult for him to achieve the best because his temperament and disposition give him the ability to do so. How should we educate such a child? Many parents today are willing to say: The child does everything so easily, we don't need to worry about that – and yet that is not right. If we let such a child go, the time will come when the child will not go through all difficulties so easily. The child must be guided in a very specific way. If we want to give such a child a proper teacher, we must look for someone who is able to answer every question the child asks, so that the child gains respect for that person's knowledge. The child must realize that there is someone who is far more knowledgeable than he is, and precisely because of this the child acquires the ability to respect that which is above him. In general, we will see that such children do not have many opportunities to show their full strength, and although it may be unpleasant for [parents], it would be good if such a child were to have the opportunity to test his strength to the utmost. We can go even further ourselves, we have to let such a child do something that we know in advance he cannot do. In this way the child develops what we might call respect for the force of facts, and in this way we can keep such children on the right track. A choleric person – and a child like that too – will carry out everything he does to the letter; in other words, he will maintain an interest in his cause.

But now let us take a sanguine child. As I said, such a child has no lasting interest. Many parents now think they have found the right way to force the child to develop lasting interest by means of punishment and beating, but that does not work. We have to take into account what the child has, not what is not there, and what is not there is the disposition for lasting interest. We have to take that into account. All external things pass quickly. But there is one thing that all sanguine people recognize as lasting interest, and that is love for a particular personality. Where the choleric person must have someone beside them who forces respect through their knowledge, there is nothing to be done with such a personality with the sanguine person. The sanguine child needs to have someone by their side whom they can love, and if you have such a person, they will be able to guide the sanguine child in the right direction. As I said, the sanguine child jumps from one interest to the other, so to speak. To change this, there is no point in punishing the child. But you can try the following: You give the child something that he is a little more interested in and take it away before his interest has waned. You can also give the child something that is good for temporary interest. If you take these two tests in a tactful way, you will see that lasting interest will arise very soon. As I said, it is useful for such a child to have someone they can love, because a lot depends on that. Not through knowledge will anything be achieved with such a child, but only through love.

Now we come to the phlegmatic temperament. As we have seen, a phlegmatic person, and also a phlegmatic child, has a strongly developed etheric body and thus leads a comfortable inner life, as a result of which no interest arises for external things. A phlegmatic child has no interest in the outside world as far as it is concerned in relation to the outside world. But there is something else. Where the phlegmatic has no interest in what concerns himself, he does have interest in the things and affairs of others. If we bring a phlegmatic child into the environment of other children, we will see that such a child becomes interested in the affairs of others. Being with other children also has a strong suggestive effect, and a lot can be achieved in this way. If we try to force the child to take an interest, we will see that this is quite futile, but interest can still be taught in the way described above.

The melancholic child has developed the principle of the physical body excellently, and as a result, everything feels heavy to him. Even when there are no external causes, the child is in a bad mood. If you now think that this can be changed by getting the child a pleasure – which as a rule is not much pleasure – you will soon find out that this is not possible and that such contrived distractions are futile. This is also because the child does not have what is needed to respond to such joyful things. We have to work with what is available, not what is not. We do well to show such a child the suffering of other people, because this will help the child to see that its complaints are unjustified. However harsh it may sound, it is absolutely right for us to give such a child the opportunity to complain where there really is reason to complain. If the reason has disappeared, the child will feel relieved, and in this way we bring a certain change, whereby the child learns to appreciate the pleasant, and in this way we can contribute a great deal to distracting the melancholic temperament. Of course, a great deal of tact is required, and this is precisely what is important in education.

What we have said here for children applies equally well to adults. If, for example, a person is strongly melancholic, then he should deliberately seek out opportunities to feel uncomfortable. In this way he learns to appreciate the better. The same applies to sanguine people. If, for example, we see that we are too flighty, that we cannot keep our interest in one thing, then we can either be torn away from things that interest us very much – which can also happen – before the interest has expired. We can also force ourselves to do something for a week, for example read a book that does not interest us at all. We force ourselves to do it, and by doing so we learn to distinguish between what is worth our interest and what does not deserve our interest as much. If people would really take the trouble to hear what spiritual science has to say about such things, they would not take the position that today's materialistic science takes and claim that it is all fantasy or worse. Spiritual science is really able to provide answers to important questions about life and solve the riddle of man. One should not think that spiritual science will provide a recipe for every person, telling them what to do and what to avoid, but it does indicate the paths that a person who is really serious about life should follow. A person who just wants to get involved in everything that materialistic science has to say will certainly be able to learn a great deal about the laws of physics and the chemical composition of physical matter, but it is not possible for a person to find what is most relevant to him on the basis of this materialistic science. Spiritual science or theosophy fully recognizes the great achievements that materialistic science has given to the world, but it also knows that on the basis of this science, man can only recognize a part of his being. If man really wants to strive to know his inner being, then he has to listen to what spiritual science has to say, because this science is able to give people what today's humanity needs.

Dear attendees! When a person, after a day's work and toils, takes a little time to reflect and tries to find his way in the life of the soul, the question arises as to how the individual facts of life, how the individual experiences are connected with the whole human destiny, with the great goal of human life in general. One of the questions that then arises for the soul is undoubtedly that of the meaning of human knowledge.

When we talk about knowledge, we can initially mean that knowledge which relates to the direct services of practical life, to everything that enables us to get to know the outside world in such a way that we can put it at the service of our practical interests. The question becomes somewhat different when we consider knowledge that attempts to penetrate the deeper foundations of life, the riddles of existence – knowledge that does not lead us to an immediately practical work and activity. It is said that man has an immediate urge to know and that knowledge is valuable in itself. Those who look deeper will hardly be satisfied with such an answer. What value would knowledge have if it were only an inner image, only a repetition of what is outside in the world? Why should that which is weaving in the world be effective in the outer world and be repeated in one's own soul only as in a mirror? Is it really only the satisfaction of a soul urge that pushes for knowledge that reaches beyond the everyday? This question will occupy us today: the goal and destiny, essence and significance of human knowledge.

If we mean the concept of knowledge that many people have today, which consists in saying that knowledge should provide us with a true reflection of what the world is experiencing, then it will not be easy to relate knowledge to the great goals and tasks of human existence. We will have to ask ourselves: Is knowledge really only the repetition of something external? Or is it one of the forces that must work in our soul in order to advance it on the paths it must traverse in its existence in the world?

This question cannot be answered by external science; it can only be answered if we consider the whole human being. External science only provides us with information about what our senses perceive and our minds grasp. But beyond this ordinary science, there is something that is trying to become part of our entire spiritual life today, which can be called spiritual science or anthroposophy.

What does theosophical spiritual science seek to comprehend? It seeks to comprehend the whole human being. Let us first agree on what that means, the whole human being. When we look at a person, we see two strictly separate states within the normal human existence of today. These two states, which life presents to us, are so familiar to the human being that he does not even notice that the greatest riddles of existence are hidden in them. We express these states in the words “waking and sleeping”. We recall that from time immemorial many philosophies have called sleep the little brother of death. We can combine these words with two others, namely with the words “life and death”. In these words we have a large part of what we can count among the riddles of existence.

Let us try, starting from what presents itself to us in the most ordinary way, to understand the changing states of waking and sleeping. In the waking state, we try to comprehend all the impressions that constantly flow into our soul - impressions that our senses transmit to us, everything that fills us with joy, desire and pain, in short, what constitutes what we call our mental life. We see this ebb and flow of drives, desires, passions, and so on, plunging into an indeterminate darkness in the evening. During sleep, it transitions into another state, that of unconsciousness. It would be absurd to say that the human being as a being of soul disappears in the evening and is reborn anew in the morning. We must ask ourselves: where is that which works in us throughout the day, where is it when we let our soul life sink into an indeterminate darkness in the evening? We are immediately pointed to answers that cannot be given from an ordinary, sensory perspective, because that perspective escapes precisely that which hides behind the nocturnal state in the evening. The question of where the soul is at night can only be answered by theosophical spiritual science, because it rises from the knowledge of the sensual to the knowledge of the supersensible, from the visible to the invisible.

We need to come to an understanding about how theosophical spiritual science can arrive at such supersensible insights by once again taking a brief look at what really fulfills our entire life during the day. We can say that we live with our soul during the day through external stimulation, through external impressions. In the evening, the external stimuli fade away, creating the emptiness of the sleeping state. But because a person in the normal life of today's existence can lead a soul life only when external perceptions evoke from his soul that which we are currently experiencing, we can imagine that the inner work of the soul dies, withers away when the external stimuli are not there. Must it be so?

That it need not be so can be seen if one accepts the experiences of clairvoyant consciousness. What knowledge of the sensory world is comes about through the stimulus of the sensory world. Supersensible knowledge can only come about through the soul's willingness to unfold work within itself, in order to develop powers and abilities even when there are no stimuli from the external sensory world. The possibility of developing such inner powers is given to us by the method of spiritual schooling. This method is there for those who want to penetrate into the knowledge of the supersensible world. This method can only be briefly hinted at here. Those who want to get to know it thoroughly can find it in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. We shall only briefly indicate here how man can find within himself the abilities to ascend to knowledge of the higher worlds.

The first thing is that man learns to artificially evoke, through a strong willpower, what otherwise only comes in the state of unconsciousness, namely, what man experiences when the sensory impressions cease. He must be able to command all outer impressions to stop; all outer impressions around him must fall silent, just as they do in the evening when we fall asleep. But this moment must take place through his will, in full consciousness. He would be like a sleeper if he could awaken nothing in his own soul. But although all outer impressions fall silent, he learns to unfold strong powers; he draws out of the deep recesses of his soul what slumbers there. No outer efforts are needed; they are intimate soul processes. There is a sinking into strong, vigorous thoughts, which are not given from without, but which the soul forms for itself.

This is meditation or concentration, as it is called – a drawing together of thoughts. Without external impressions we must feel joy and sorrow. The spiritual researcher lets powerful, strong thoughts arise in his own soul, thoughts that have nothing to do with the external world, and these are ideals as well as impulses of the will. These must have a stronger effect than external impressions; the soul must be seized by them intensely and powerfully. If a third element were not added, these perceptions would have the effect of volcanoes. This is that through a strong effort of will an inner calm and quiet can be brought about despite these impulses. Then the spiritual researcher experiences - even if only after a long time - the great moment that can be compared to the moment when a blind person suddenly regains his sight after an operation. Just as the impressions of the external world flood into the soul of the blind man after an operation, so too does everything that was previously unavailable to him.

This fact makes it clear to us that there can only be a supersensible world for us if the organ of perception for it is present. When this organ is awakened, a new world opens up. We must not decide about what we do not know, but only about what we know. These organs, which are necessary for recognizing the supersensible world, are developed through meditation or concentration in the calm of our soul. Then “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” arise - to use an expression of Goethe. It could now be objected: Yes, it may be that the spiritual researcher experiences a higher world, but what do the spiritual worlds have to do with the others who cannot ascend to them? — That is not correct. The spiritual eye is necessary for recognition [of the supersensible worlds], but to understand what the spiritual researcher has to say, unbiased reason is sufficient, and therefore it concerns all people.

Someone in whom the higher organs are awakened can observe such a phenomenon as sleep. It is a very different state from that of waking. Only part of the human being remains in the physical world during sleep, the other part, the soul-spiritual, withdraws from the physical body when falling asleep and returns to its home, the spiritual world. The spiritual world need not be imagined as a different place; it is all around us. We have human nature, divided into two parts; during waking these are together, but during sleeping they are separated. But human nature is not yet fully explained. We can get a rough idea of the two parts that go out at night by comparing man with the animals that are closest to him of all visible creatures. We also find instincts, desires, and feelings in animals. Even if they are not present in the same perfection, they are still more or less present in animals, and only those who cannot rise to a higher [contemplation] will consider them to be the same as in humans. We need only think of something that is usually not emphasized in external science; we need only remember that, for example, in the German language there is a word that cannot be called to anyone from the outside, [the word “I”]. This name cannot sound [from the outside] to our ear when it means our own self; it must arise from one's own soul life. All true religions have recognized this. This is an announcement of what is essentially the same in man as in the divine. Correctly understood, “I” means the ineffable name of God, because Yahweh, correctly translated, means “I am,” no matter what philology may otherwise interpret. This does not mean that man is to be made a god. Just as a drop of water is not the sea, so man is not God.

That which withdraws itself in the evening divides again into two parts: that which is the carrier of desires, passions, etc., and that which lets all these perceptions flow together in us and works through them - the I. Through the I, man becomes the crown of all creatures on this earth. But that which goes out at night is composed of the I and the astral body. What does a human being leave behind? The physical body, and we have that in common with every mineral. It consists of the same forces. The inanimate mineral, the crystal, takes its form from the forces within it; this is not the case with a living being. In the case of humans, we see that their physical body is subject to chemical laws only in one instance, and only at death. In death, we see what the forces imprinted on the mineral do to the body. In life, it never follows these forces. What remains in bed at night is imbued and permeated by another body, and we call this the etheric or life body. This prevents the body from following the chemical and physical laws; it is a faithful fighter against them.

Now we can ask ourselves: Why does this happen every evening, that a person must return to their spiritual home, so to speak? Why must they withdraw into a spiritual world every evening? In the evening, external impressions fade; we are overcome by fatigue. When the astral body and the ego withdraw into the spiritual world, the person falls into unconsciousness. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and pain, urges, passions and so on. Why does all this disappear from our soul life? How can it be that all this dies away at night? We shall soon understand why this is so. The astral body and the I are the bearers of pleasure and pain, of perceptions and concepts. But in order for this to become conscious to the human being, it is necessary that they are mirrored by the physical body and the etheric body. We perceive nothing but what lives in ourselves. It is like a kind of echo that is produced in us by the physical and etheric bodies. Man does not perceive directly what he feels, but what he experiences is mirrored to him through the astral body and the I, through the etheric and physical bodies. But the work of the astral body involves conjuring up what we call the soul life. The real work is done by the astral body and not by the mirror – just as it is necessary for a person to be active at a mirror in order to create this or that image. The astral body has to work from morning till evening to extract from the physical what we can call the content of our soul. The forces that the astral body needs to work during the day, it must draw from the spiritual world. When these forces are exhausted, fatigue sets in, and it must draw new forces again.

Sleep has a profound significance. In the spiritual world is the source of everything we conjure up during our daily lives. If we look at our daily life in this way, we ask: What is the significance of our daily life if the soul has to draw its strength from the spiritual world? The soul and the ego do not enter the astral world empty, but take something with them from our outer world every evening. Life during the day is not without fruit for the soul's life. We need only look at what is characteristic of our soul in its deepest meaning and what is taken from our daytime life into our nighttime life. This can be seen indirectly when we look at our soul during our youth and in old age. This gives us an idea of development. In youth, we see germinal tendencies, but undeveloped, and later we see our soul transformed, with richer content. How can we transform ourselves? By the soul forming a kind of essence every evening from the external impressions we have received. We carry our daytime experiences into the night, and in the morning that which was the soul's spiritual experience has entered the soul; it joins what is already there, and in this way the soul develops.

You only have to look at people who cannot sleep, and if you are an attentive observer, you will notice how the soul's progress suffers when it cannot get the right amount of sleep. We can only imprint something on our memory if we have had a proper amount of sleep. Only in this way can we develop the forces that lead us ever higher. We imprint in our soul what the world reveals to us during our waking life, and in this way our soul becomes wiser. Knowledge is an important means of developing our soul between birth and death. But let us now ask ourselves how much transformation we can actually achieve. How narrow are the limits within which we find ourselves? We can increase our soul development. We can see this in individual abilities, for example in learning to write. Writing encompasses a whole group of abilities. When we look back, we see what a wide range of abilities were involved, how much work and effort and so on went into learning the art of writing. Or think of the first attempt we made to draw the first letter, of everything that then flowed together into the one skill of writing. From what we experienced then, we extracted an essence, and through such weaving together a soul skill arises.

Whatever has a deeper impact on our lives can only develop within very narrow limits in the time between birth and death. If someone pursues the riddles of the world or has gone through this or that life experience in deep pain, you can even see that reflected in their physiognomy and in their movements. From decade to decade, this is expressed more and more, even in the body. But we can develop in this direction only to a limited extent. Why? Because we have our souls before us like a malleable material, but we cannot work with what our inclinations have created between birth and death into the body, no matter how many experiences we have gathered. Let us take the example of music. If we do not have a finer ear, if we are not musical, we are unable to develop the ability during our lifetime that could change our physicality in this respect between birth and death. We are powerful in the face of the soul, but powerless in the face of the facts of our physicality. But we know that when we face the external world and conjure up all these images, they are born out of our soul - not only, but through its activity, because it could never conjure up such reflections if something were not given from outside. And this outside includes the same forces that make up our physical body. It seems so mysterious to us because we cannot penetrate there. We would have to conjure up a fine musical ear and so on from the same world. It is something like a veil, like a shell. But behind it is something that, if we could master it, would give us the ability to transform our physical body just as much as the astral.

We can gain knowledge, but we cannot utilize it; we cannot transform our body with the knowledge. But there is a possibility to transform our physical body in the same way as the astral one. Even if we recognize the forces, we could not apply them directly, because our physical and etheric bodies are given to us as dense material. Here we want to refer to a law that will be incorporated into modern spiritual life through Theosophy.

In the 17th century, not only laymen but also naturalists believed that worms and fish could arise from mud. If we go back to the 17th century, we find scholarly works that describe how wild animals grew out of other animals – for example, hornets out of a dead ox that had been beaten until it was brittle, bees out of a horse carcass, and wasps out of a donkey carcass. It was [the naturalist] Francesco Redi who first uttered the sentence: Living things can only arise from living things. There must be a germ of something living in order for something living to arise. Redi was almost burned [as a heretic] for saying this. Today, anyone who claims otherwise would be considered backward. Spiritual science says: Spiritual-soul things can only arise from spiritual-soul things. Just as an earthworm does not come from mud, so the spiritual does not come from the inheritance of the father and mother.

We have to distinguish between the environment of the spiritual and the spiritual itself. In spiritual science, this leads us to the law of reincarnation [of what lives spiritually in man]. Today those who have recognized this law are perhaps not exactly called heretics – fashions change. Today the [true] enlightened are declared to be fantasists, dreamers. But in the not too distant future, people will no longer be able to understand how anyone could have believed otherwise. Thus, we see in what comes into existence through birth the repetition of an earlier earthly existence. And what lies between death and birth is a purely spiritual existence. When we look at a child with undeveloped features, we see what it has brought with it from previous lives on earth, and we can understand something that is very important.

Why can we only develop mental abilities during our lifetime? When we wake up, we find the same body with the same organs. But when a person passes through the gate of death, the great moment arrives when he discards his physical body and only what is spiritual and mental remains. Now he is no longer bound to the body. The conditions are quite different than during sleep. In the morning, when we wake up, we find the same physical body; we cannot destroy it and rebuild it. But when the physical falls away at death, what we have taken in knowledge during our life is united with our soul. In accordance with the knowledge and experiences we have had, we can now reshape them and incorporate them into a new body.

Thus, in each life, we build our body according to what we have gained in the last life; we make it the product of our experiences in the last life. Life experience in the present life is our existence in a next life. This is how knowledge works in us; it is one of the most important forces of existence, shaping itself. We are grateful for the knowledge of the last life; it has produced a body in the present life and preserves that with which we have enriched ourselves in the present life, and that will bring us higher in the next life. Now we also understand why there can be a huge difference between different people when we consider the strength and weakness of their cognitive abilities.

Now you will ask: why does man not remember his previous lives? That is also a matter of development. A four-year-old child cannot count. But it would be a false conclusion to say that this is not a human being, because humans can count. Wait until he is ten years old. There comes a time for every person when he begins to remember. One can only remember that which is present. Fichte was right to say that most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than a self. The realization of what the self is is still missing. Just as the flowers can only be recognized through sensory impressions, so can the spiritual only be recognized through spiritual research. From the intimate study of the self, it follows that the self must be there as a conscious idea before one can remember. Only when we have generated the idea of self can we reflect back on ourselves. Thus, knowledge as self-knowledge leads us to build up our memory in such a way that we consciously expand life beyond the life that is enclosed between birth and death. If we can continue to work from life to life, if through knowledge we succeed in shaping ourselves and thus awaken the eternal in us, then the knowledge of development helps us in the shaping of all that is eternal in us. Now we give the work of knowledge and its meaning for our whole life. It brings us immortality and gives us knowledge of our immortality.

Immortality and knowledge belong together. In a particular life, our body appears to be something that has been worked into it from the previous life. We often cannot use the knowledge in this life, but we need it to build a new body. This certainty gives spiritual science a practical meaning in life. It must not remain mere theory, but we must permeate ourselves with it completely. We then see death in a new light. Knowledge has built up our present body. Through the disintegration of our body, we become free from it and gain the opportunity to build a new one. Thus, even if we look at death in pain when it touches others, or with fear when it approaches us, it appears to us in a completely different form. If we can rise to a higher point of view, we can say that we are grateful for death, because it gives us the opportunity to build a new body for ourselves - for a higher life. The old spiritual researchers have always recognized this and also said so. Goethe puts it so beautifully in front of our soul, how we bring in from fresh life what we have worked for in the previous life:

As on the day when you were given to the world
The sun stood in greeting of the planets,
You immediately thrived and thrived
According to the law by which you entered.
So you must be, you cannot escape yourself,
So the Sibyls said, so the prophets said;
And no time and no power can dismember the form that has been stamped, which develops itself alive.

Dear attendees! Spiritual science or theosophy is, through what it gives us as human beings for knowledge, at the same time a basis for life practice. The fact that we are able to see through the sensible, through what is merely comprehensible to the external mind, into the supersensible, makes this spiritual science a tool for us to feel that we are part of the supersensible world. In this way, Theosophy gives us the nourishment of knowledge that flows like spiritual blood into our entire spiritual organization, and we gain security and strength of life by absorbing knowledge of the supersensible world. But we are only in such a case when we seek to bring that which is supersensible into our knowledge. It is a different matter when we are confronted with the developing human being, as he enters into existence through birth, as he is compelled, through the normal course of life, to assert, step by step, through the material of the body, that which is rooted as a human spirit in indeterminate depths and comes more and more to the fore in the course of development. Here we are in a different situation from when we acquire knowledge, for we seek to bring the spirit out of its hiddenness into real existence, not only through our knowledge but also through our help and deeds. This prospect of passing from the external physical to the spiritual will have to arise in our soul when we consider the question that is the subject of our meditation today.

It must be emphasized at the outset that a prerequisite in the sense of spiritual science must be made for this question. Spiritual science goes beyond what presents itself to us in human life between birth or from the development before birth until death as an individual life. It penetrates to the essence of the human being, to the spiritual soul that exists before birth and that remains after death - to the core that can be traced from life to life through spiritual research, because we are indeed talking about repeated lives on earth. We make a strict distinction between these lives, which a person repeatedly spends on earth between birth and death, and the lives that lie in between in a purely spiritual world. When a human soul-spiritual comes into existence through birth, it is the case that it brings with it into this life all the effects of those causes that are to be found in previous lives. When we look at the developing human being, we see emerging like a sacred riddle what he has acquired in previous lives and brings into this life. The human being enters into the present life and lives spiritually, but he envelops himself with the qualities, characteristics and abilities that lie in the line of inheritance. Thus, the human being brings with him into his life the spiritual and soul essence, and he experiences in a certain way the strengths and abilities that the talents, characters and other qualities of his ancestors can give him. What a person brings with them from the spiritual world and what they inherit from their ancestors comes together in their development. To truly answer the question of education in a more intimate sense, we must be able to gain insight into the relationship between inherited traits and the spiritual-soul core of the person.

If we treat these repeated earthly lives and the effects of earlier lives on later ones as a spiritual scientific fact, this will provoke the opposition of many people who do not want to be informed in detail about the evidence that can be provided by spiritual science. It is not possible to convince oneself that this truth really exists in any other way than through practice. One can discuss at length whether a piece of iron, which is claimed to be a magnet, really is one. One can put forward many reasons against it; one could say that the person making the claim seems credible and so on, and so it can be argued about for an infinitely long time. But proof is there if one takes a small piece of iron and sees whether it is attracted. Through practice, evidence is provided. In a similar sense, one can be convinced of the truths of spiritual science.

The educator can now say: What I encounter in the child puzzles me; I must try to see whether what spiritual science claims is true, whether something really comes into the world as a spiritual-soul core of being. It will be shown that such a principle bears fruit for education by enabling us to enrich the child's life and to divine and coax out his or her gifts. We must focus on the way in which the gifts are formed if we want to distinguish the spiritual-soul core of the being from what the child has inherited. To do this, we must allow the human being's predisposition – everything that gradually comes to us in the way of qualities, abilities, talents and so on – to come to the fore, and we then find that it is characteristic of the human soul to allow the individual forces to interact so that they support and sustain each other in an overall organism. But still we see that the soul-forces of man, for example, thinking, feeling and willing, or other forces, appear independently of each other in their strength, yes, so independently that we find, for example, people in whom the power of thought is so highly developed that they can be good thinkers, while the power of will, on the other hand, recedes. Others are men of will and are equally ready to tackle an action, but are not always able to keep their thoughts together and follow them logically in a comprehensive way. They act, but do not think much. There are still other people who are pushed by their feelings to do this or that without thinking too long. So we see: the individual abilities can be developed to different degrees. For example, a person is very musical, and the other abilities recede. Some people, on the other hand, do not have the ability to do extensive calculations and so on.

The abilities are therefore independent of each other, but come together to form a complete organism. When we visualize the soul forces of a person, it becomes clear that he or she enters into existence with a very specific tendency and nature that brings soul forces into relationship and connection. If we turn our attention to what is inherited, that is, to the line of inheritance, and then to what enters into existence from a previous life, we can see what connects the forces and abilities. It is in fact the case that what the person brings with them as a result of previous lives has the ability to organize the abilities and shape them into a whole organism. The emotional tendencies, qualities, talents and so on point us in the direction of the line of inheritance. There is no more interesting observation to be made than to see how, on the one hand, the spiritual core of the being works to connect the soul forces and form an overall organism, and how, on the other hand, the individual forces are inherited from the ancestors.

Spiritual science is able to indicate very definite laws as to the relationship between these two elements. These can be understood in the same way as natural laws, but on a higher plane. When such laws are stated, one must not come and try to refute them with casual observation. That is child's play, even in the field of chemical physics. Let us suppose that a physicist establishes that the line traced by a stone thrown through the air is a parabola. If someone now follows the line externally, he will see that it is not exact. The line varies due to the resistance of the air and other external circumstances, but one can only arrive at the truth by going back to the law. One can only arrive at what underlies the spiritual life as a law by penetrating behind the scenes of existence.

Now, two types of forces present themselves in the soul life of man; we can describe one type more as the intellectual principle, and also as that of the imagination: everything that man has as a life of ideas, the way he conceives something, whether he goes slowly from one idea to another or can grasp rapid associations of thoughts, whether he can follow thoughts sharply and over a long distance, and the like. We have to take people who easily develop pictorial representations, who are able to clothe facts in images of the imagination, in short, who have the element of the intellectual and imaginative particularly active, who have inventiveness and the ability to think of many things, we have to take them as representatives of one side of the soul life. The other side, on the other hand, is the side of affects, passions and drives, the way someone is quickly captivated by this or that, whether they have many interests or are dull and so on. The latter is more connected with what we call the element of character, the former more with the reflective, the internalization. We must strictly distinguish these two sides, because if we are observers of life, the laws of development only reveal themselves to us when we can follow how the spiritual-soul essence of the human being, going from life to life, acquires one or the other element.

In general, we find that the child inherits the side that has to do with interest, passions, and attention more from the father; the spiritual-soul core of the human being borrows these elements from the father where it finds what passions are, what confronts events in life, what intervenes in the outer life. When a person wants to embody themselves, they are drawn to the father as if by magnet, who can transfer the qualities of interest, strength of character and so on, which are suitable for their individuality. They seek out the father who can give them this. The intellectual and imaginative qualities are more likely to come from the mother. Generally speaking, if we disregard more specific causes, we can say that the child's mental character comes about because the spiritual core of the being brings about something like a mixture of the intellectual and imaginative qualities of the mother with the temperament and drives of the father. How these qualities are mixed depends on the overall disposition of the spiritual core of the being. We can see what the elements are that belong to the nature of will and passion by looking at the father. We must look to the mother for what the core of the being has in the way of imagination and intellectuality. The children of the same parents are so different because the spiritual-soul core of their being mixes the paternal and maternal elements in different ways.

But we must go into this in more detail and distinguish between male and female offspring. Real observation of life will also confirm this law – that is, if the reservation is made in the same way as with physical laws and the secondary circumstances are not made the main thing. That which is in the soul character of the mother is more easily inherited by the sons, and in such a way that it is transformed in the son to a certain extent. If the mother is imaginative but only works in the narrowest circle, the soul of the mother works in such a way that it descends a step in the son, as it were, and gives him the outer organ predisposition so that he expresses this predisposition to a greater extent. The mother remains in the soul element in the narrow circle; the son shows what she has in her soul but imprinted in the brain as his tool. He has as a world ability what she experienced in the innermost circle. A talent for which the mother shows the disposition can come about in this way. And what descends more into the physical disposition through the mother is mixed and imbued with what is inherited from the father. This is how it is with sons.

It is different with daughters. Here it can be seen how what the father lives in his profession and so on is more expressed in the overall personality. What is the predisposition of the father's physical body is reflected in the soul of the daughter. What the father had as external qualities is realized in the soul. In the daughter, we encounter in spiritualized form what was more in the physical man in the father. It is particularly interesting, and one can almost express it as a law of nature, that the mother in the son descends in relation to her soul and appears in the physical, while the father ascends in the soul of the daughter with what he is in the physical man.

This can be demonstrated in hundreds and thousands of cases, and life will prove it right across the board. Here it will be explained only by means of one particularly characteristic example – in Goethe, in whom this general law shows itself especially clearly: What was admired in the mother's innermost circle as a spiritual quality was manifested in a “lowered” form in the son and was admired by the world. Frau Goethe had a desire to tell stories, which could have a stimulating effect in the innermost circle. In Goethe's case, it became a mental disposition, so that he became a world-affecting personality.

We also see the opposite in a wonderful way in his sister Cornelia. Councillor Goethe was extremely likeable due to his strong character and the serious way he led his life. He stood firm in the outer life as a thorough and earnest man. Let us take a look at how Goethe relates to his father. It is peculiar that the outer character traits, temperament, thoroughness and so on are inherited by the son. When people with the same disposition live next to each other, they sometimes repel each other. There was never any intimate relationship between father and son Goethe. But the sister had absorbed her father's thoroughness into her soul as depth of soul and seriousness, mixed with intimacy, as is often the case when external qualities are transformed into soul qualities and come to us. That is why the siblings were such loyal companions, because the qualities that Goethe did not like in his father had penetrated into the soul of his sister.

Can we not see this peculiar survival of maternal soul qualities in the external organ systems of the son everywhere? Throughout world history, we see the relationships of sons to mothers, for example in the poet Hebbel. He was the son of a bricklayer. If you knew him and were with him, you would know that the gnarled, pedantic character he had within was already apparent on the outside. His hands were much too long, his legs even longer, and his movements were angular. He got all that from his father, but he and his father did not get along. On the other hand, he got his mother's simple nature, which he relates so beautifully. We see how her soul, descended by one level, reappears in his poetic personality. This is how the two came to understand each other, and it was only through his mother that he escaped the fate of becoming a mason. Wherever we look, in everyday life and in history, we can see that this law applies universally.

But how should we proceed as educators when we see this complex interaction between inherited traits and the spiritual and psychological core? We must direct our attention as much as we can to the way in which certain traits that we see in children can be found in their parents at a different level. But we must not regard the child as a copy of [the parents], for then we would not consider the transformation, how the soul qualities of the mother descend into the body of the son, and how, conversely, the physical nature of the father is transformed in the soul of the daughter. Today, people are inclined to admit transformations of natural forces; natural science, for example, shows how natural substances transform into heat. But it is not admitted that these laws also apply to the spiritual. A real art of education can only come about when people become aware that spiritual science can flow into such areas of life as education.

We are always talking about individuality. But what is individuality? Today, we only refer to the word in a very abstract way. However, if we know how individuality arises, in that the spiritual-soul core of the child not only absorbs the qualities of the father and mother, but transforms them, we can grasp it in a concrete way. Then education comes from the abstract to the concrete, from materialistic abstraction to true reality. Now someone might object: You tell us that the soul-spiritual core of the being envelops itself in what is given to it in inherited powers. But we see the human being as a unified being, and how can we distinguish between what is inherited and the spiritual core of the being?

If we consider development only superficially and see only the individual, we will not make any progress. But life offers us proof, sufficient proof, to show how the spiritual-soul core of our being is enveloped and permeated by what comes from our parents and ancestors. Great minds such as Newton or Humboldt, who achieved great things, did not do particularly well at school and were considered to be poorly endowed. Many other people with great names could be named who also developed slowly, while child prodigies progressed rapidly. In the case of Newton or Humboldt or others, they brought a rich core of being into this life, with much sprouting and budding in the soul, and this working into what had been inherited from the parents had to happen slowly. The rich inner core needs more time, because it must first chisel out, transform, precisely gradate and so on, what it has inherited in powers. So rich natures, which are called to give much, must work longer on adapting the inherited material.

This will become increasingly clear, because today a person who brings strong soul forces with them has to fight against all the tough obstacles, because very rigid, sober, fixed hereditary traits are inherited that are not very flexible, so it takes a long time to adapt them precisely to the individual core of the being. Child prodigies are quickly finished, because they quickly process the abilities that lie in the line of inheritance and absorb them in a one-sided way. But it soon becomes apparent that their talents dry up and wither away. When we look at these most extreme cases, we see the slowly developing genius or the quickly developing prodigy and all the stages in between, as the spiritual and psychological core of the being works its way through the obstacles.

This slow process of working one's way through can also be found in Goethe. If, like me, you have spent three decades studying Goethe in detail and with humility, you can safely say, without running the risk of being misunderstood: If one surveys Goethe's life, one notices a slow progression in the development of his abilities and talents. We find the tendency towards what he became in him even as a child sacrificing to the great God, but what effort he had throughout his life to bring what was in him through the many obstacles of his physicality. We recognize him when he expresses his great thoughts, for example in the second part of Faust, as a mature human being, in contrast to young Goethe, who, compared to old Goethe, wrote many immature things. How does what is said here go against the judgment of our time, where the editions of the youthful works are particularly praised – there, it is thought, he achieved the greatest things. The young Goethe, it is said, brought forth great and powerful things. He is praised to the skies. And of the old Goethe, some say that he produced the second part of Faust in his old age. Few people understand that he developed and deepened slowly and gradually, that the Italian world fostered him inwardly, and that his essential core increasingly removed external obstacles. In short, they do not understand the old Goethe because he is too lofty for them. Even during his lifetime, he had to suffer from the fact that his later works were decried as products of old age. He expresses this in the following verse:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The pack of rags and tags thinks,
It would no longer be!

In Goethe's case, it is particularly evident how the spiritual and mental core of his being rose to its height in the second half of his life, and no one who believes that the whole of Goethe was already present in his youthful writings understands him. People understand the young Goethe better, but they attribute this not to the fact that they do not understand the old Goethe, but to the fact that he has declined. Thus, we can also find it true in this great spirit how the spiritual-soul core of being works its way into the outer shells.

Someone might object that we are talking here about an essential core that must be there to group and organize abilities. But we need only point out that the most important qualities nevertheless lie in the line of inheritance and can be explained from it. For example, in the last few centuries there were 25 to 28 musicians in the Bach family. So how can you say that the essential core is the main thing? Similarly, there were a whole series of important mathematicians in the Bernoulli family in Basel. In their case, it is particularly clear how seemingly mere inheritance works, because some of them were destined for something completely different, but nevertheless, in later life, it drove them to mathematics.

To understand this correctly, one must consider the relationship between the spiritual-soul core of one's being and one's inherited disposition and talents. To be a musician, one needs a musical ear; but this belongs to the physical organization, that is, to the shell. Just as one inherits the shape of one's nose, hands and so on, one also inherits the finer inner organs that lie hidden beneath the surface of the physical body. A soul-spiritual core that strives to receive physical tools for musicality will be drawn to families that can pass on musical organs. What is musical talent based on? Not on the brain, which is the organ of logic, but on the shape of the ear canals. One must look at the individual relationships very carefully. Such auditory ossicles of a certain shape are inherited from generation to generation. It is similar with the Bernoullis. Those who need a predisposition for geometry can seek out such a family. Thus, what life shows us here again coincides with what spiritual science asserts. We can understand and illuminate life better if we bring before our soul the connection between heredity and predisposition and the harmony or disharmony that arises from it.

If we distinguish between the spiritual-soul core of our being and the environment in which it is embedded, then life means an interaction between these two elements. Let us look at a child in the very first weeks of its life. His features are still undefined, his organs not yet fully functional; he cannot yet walk and so on. But if we think properly, we know that where features and abilities are still undefined, the core of the being is still dormant and is only gradually working its way to the surface to become defined. What the person will become later works its way out of the vagueness of movements, gestures and so on. It works its way up from indeterminate depths to the surface, and more and more the outer shell becomes an expression of what lives inside the person. In later life, much more is expressed on the outside, as the person really is. In the youthful child, the forces that will one day express themselves in his features, in his gestures, in his hand movements, and so on, are still dormant. In later life, the human being shows the imprint of the soul's inner character in the physical. The outer, the envelope-like, becomes more and more [a mirror] of itself; in the physical, what he is as a spiritual human being shows.

During the first period of life, the human being works more into his physical being. There is something very interesting connected with this fact, and it is connected with the same lawfulness as a physical law. With regard to inheritance, a distinction must be made between what children inherit who are born in the first years of marriage and what those who are born in later years of marriage inherit. The first children show in a remarkable way the ability to shape the inherited traits in the freest way; they can do this more with an individual style independent of their parents. The later children are more constrained to yield to the strong element of heredity; they become more of an imprint of their parents. Children born in the early years of a marriage find it easier to mix the inherited traits with each other; inheritance is less tyrannical towards them. Those born in the later years of the marriage have to apply stronger forces, because the power of inheritance is stronger in their case. Thus we see how these children become more and more like their parents. Of course, this can be broken by the most diverse circumstances, but in the sense of today's scientific research, this is a law.

When we consider these laws of inheritance, the right relationship between a person's disposition, talents and upbringing becomes apparent. Such laws can only be made useful for the soul's life if they do not remain mere theories and insights, but if they are transformed into feelings and intuitions. It is a remarkable thing how feelings kindled by knowledge give us the gift of tactfully divining what qualities are striving for expression in a human being. If we have goodwill and a sense for it, we stand face to face with the developing human being as with a sacred riddle. The secret of education lies in our approaching the child with such a feeling, for then he will solve the riddle for us. He shows us what abilities can be drawn out of him. Then there is no need for much speculation; tact will guide us so that we do not burden the child with something that cannot be developed in him. This brings the educator into the right relationship with the child. Then we stand before the human being we have to educate as before a sacred riddle and not – as many an educator often does – as before a vessel, where one can discuss what is best to be poured into it. That is a very external point of view! We must not forget that life often forces us to bring the child to something that, in our opinion, is not within his or her individuality, so that he or she can get ahead in life. But generally speaking, all the talk about education is usually less about what the child is more or less suited for and more about family relationships and education befitting one's station in life. But we must grasp the demands of life and individuality in a concrete sense, harmonize the blending of the soul-spiritual essence and the inherited predispositions, and endeavor to solve the riddle according to the circumstances of life. A riddle can be solved in different ways, but one must recognize it, then one can let the child become different, otherwise one will often not hit the right thing despite all speculation.

It is precisely in such areas [as education] that the fruitfulness of spiritual science for life becomes apparent. Spiritual science is not just theory, but something that can and will prove itself in life every day and every hour - for the progress of all humanity and of each individual. It places us in life in such a way that we acquire the security, strength and confidence we need for life. This chapter on disposition, talent and education thus proves to us that, indeed, through having gone through many lives, the human being carries an enigma at the core of his being and that life, in the broadest sense, must be a solution to this enigma.

The better we can answer the riddle within us, the happier, more secure and more fruitful a person's life will be – we must take this as our motto.

The spiritual and soul essence that goes through many births and deaths is a riddle, and life is the solution.

Goethe, who had such a penetrating insight into so many things, once said the following remarkable words about the fate of the Bible in more recent times: For many centuries, people did not actually get their hands on the Bible, but only got to know it indirectly. When wider circles began to take an interest in the Bible, people were more inclined to think critically about the Bible and its origin and much less to delve directly into its content and its effect, so that actually, as Goethe says, since the acquaintance with the Bible in wider circles, much less has been spoken out of the spirit of this document than has been spoken about it.

What Goethe felt a hundred years ago has intensified significantly over the course of this century. In research, it has become increasingly rare to immerse oneself in the spirit of this religious scripture without prejudice; instead, critical research is increasingly conducted to determine how the individual parts correspond, when and how each part originated, and what the external history of this work is. People are paying less and less attention to the spiritual content.

At the same time, Goethe remarks that basically the Bible is the book of books; so says Goethe, this so-called pagan. Yes, he says that it is not going too far to say that everything that lives in our attitudes and feelings, in our perceptions and ideas, in our way of thinking today, is based on the Bible. It is particularly noteworthy that even that in our civilization which has seemingly made us independent of the Bible is nevertheless, if you follow things closely, a result of the Bible. It is so easy to believe that modern science since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is merely an opponent of the Bible. But the power of thought, the direction of imagination, even if seemingly contrary to the Bible, are taken from the depths of the Bible.

Copernicus may have explored the heavens in a way that seemingly contradicted the Bible, but he drew the power of thought from the Bible. Yes, the thought forms of modern monism, of materialism, have gained their strength from the Bible. Those social parties that radically oppose biblical faith have also — this is recognized by anyone who understands the psychology of the soul — drawn the strength of thought and feeling from the Bible. This is most the case with so-called biblical criticism, which, after all, most strongly opposes the Bible. They have gone through this in the culture of the Bible. If one follows this intimate historical course of the new time, one could say in view of this:

Your good nature, in foreign veins,
will soon quarrel with you.

Goethe said this with reference to one of his students who, in certain views, opposed Goethe and became his critic. Thus, it is the thoughts that have taken root in people over the centuries in our Western culture that have made our thinking, feeling and willing strong, the thoughts of our ancestors that struggle with the ancestors in the veins of their descendants.

Among the parts of the Bible that have suffered the most from modern thinking is the Gospel of John, which for centuries was considered the most vivid source of Christianity. This is far less appreciated by modern Bible criticism than the first three, so-called synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Bible critics try, to the best of their ability, to test the books of Scripture for their historical value. They say that if you examine the first three Gospels, which, if you ignore the details, agree, you will find a picture of Christ Jesus that turns out to be credible. If you add the Gospel of John, there are so many contradictions to the first three Gospels that it is impossible to reconcile it with the first three Gospels. The first three Gospels report historical facts that give a vivid picture of the one who walked around in Palestine. The fourth evangelist, they say, cannot be regarded as a presenter of historical truths. He is rather an enthusiast for the personality of Christ Jesus. His aim was to compose a significant hymn to Christ Jesus, to express in lyrical form what he felt to be the truth about this revered personality, and to merely wrap this in historical facts.

Thus, to many, the fourth gospel does not appear as a historical document, but as a teaching in which one can be edified, like a poem, but which is not suitable to say something about the one who was the founder of the Christian religion on earth. As this view became more and more widespread in the course of the nineteenth century, the scholar Bunsen said in the 1850s: If it were really the case that the Gospel of John could not be taken as a historical document, then it would be bad for historical Christianity.

It cannot be denied that in the first three gospels, Jesus is presented even more humanly than the personality that gradually unfolds in its greatness, but that in the fourth gospel, an accomplished being , who has descended from invisible heights, who has nothing more to learn from his surroundings, who is endowed with grace and truth from the very beginning, who himself carries the fullness of the Godhead within himself.

The first three gospels contain beliefs and doctrines. In the fourth gospel, the essence of Christ Jesus apparently speaks mostly of itself, of what he is supposed to be to humanity and his disciples. These are differences that everyone notices. Those who notice them are pushed to the question: How does this fourth gospel relate to the other three gospels? We must realize that these contradictions have actually always been present, but that through the centuries the wisest people have not taken offense at them. Anyone who does not subscribe to the view that only in the nineteenth century did people become wise knows that in the most ancient times the wisest people endeavored to establish a harmony between the Gospels and also thought that they had succeeded.

Every age understands every thing in the way that the age itself is characterized. In other ages, there was not this exclusively materialistic way of thinking, which has even crept into the criticism of religious writings. Another age did not have that preference for the “simple man from Nazareth”. The urge has arisen more and more to push Christ Jesus down to the level of humanity, to say more and more, “In Him there is indeed an ideal figure, but He is still human.” To measure Him against other people has increasingly become the thinking habit of our time. Other ages have not had this urge; throughout centuries of Christian development there was a different ideal, a different aspiration. In an inaccessible distance stood the Christ Being. All human learning, all depth of wisdom, all depth of feeling and sensing sought to lift themselves up to those heights where one could sense something of that Being. It was believed that only the purest, most refined knowledge could approach this Being. The urge of the older times was to lift oneself up in knowledge and feeling in order to sense the height of that being. Thus nothing other than the spirit of the age in which one thinks, feels and searches is reflected in the conception of the Gospels.

We are now once again in an epoch that wants to elevate people to a higher world. But even though it is only at the beginning, this epoch knows its goal precisely and also knows how to pursue it in detail. The aim of Theosophy is to grasp and understand the Gospel of John. It could well be that the Gospel of John will celebrate a kind of resurrection through the means of this research. Through spiritual research, we will come to understand the evangelist again, who so sublimely presents the essence of Christ Jesus. If we first immerse ourselves in the content using the means of spiritual research, this gospel indeed presents itself as the deepest book of humanity. This gospel has been taken as a book of life throughout many centuries. Perhaps it can become a book of life again.

Let us try to consider some of the things that arise for those who seek to understand in this area. It turns out that the Gospel of John is a writing that is in wonderful congruity with the Old Testament. The Gospel of John begins with the beginning of things, as does the Old Testament. There, the gods create heaven and earth from what was chaos at the beginning. The Gospel of John also begins with the words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Thus both documents refer us to the beginning. In both cases, humanity's gaze is directed towards the same thing. There is a congruence here, but one that nevertheless reveals a remarkable difference. In the Gospel of John, there is something actually new. In the Old Testament, we are transported to the starting point of humanity. In grand and powerful images, the genesis of the world is shown, up to the human being, who appears to us as the companion of other beings in the world of minerals, plants and animals, presented as an external, visible being. His development is traced back to the development of a people, the Jewish people. It is not a particular human becoming that is described, but rather humanity as it arises in the world, and then ascends to a people. A people is described as a whole. Only those who appreciate the guiding thread in the right way understand the Old Testament correctly. The meaning of the Old Testament lived in the soul of every single Jew. The individual human being feels himself as a member of the whole people. When the Jew wanted to express his innermost feelings, he spoke of his common bond with Abraham. When he wanted to speak of his transcendental nature, which extends beyond death, he spoke of his transcendental self going to Abraham's bosom. He did not feel the separate self, but rather the great national self, and that the common blood connected him with the nation, which leads up to the father Abraham. When he looked up to the Highest, he looked up to a Being Who revealed Himself through the blood of the whole people. Not only was the memory of the patriarch Abraham sacred to him, but also the feeling of unity with him. Further up, the beginning of the world was taken up, how one blood flowed in a coherent human whole and how the cosmic order, God Himself, permeates and spiritualizes such a group of people.

Let us contrast this with the Gospel of John. This also takes as its starting point the beginning of our entire development. However, it does not begin where the Old Testament begins, but rather, in a certain way, before that. The Old Testament places the emergence of the material world, of what can be seen, of what is there for the outer senses, at the very beginning. “And God said, ‘Let there be light!’” (Genesis 1:3) The author of the Gospel of John takes us further back, to an even earlier time, to a point when nothing material yet existed, when only the spiritual was there: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” (John 1:1), which is nothing other than the spiritual, of which all material things are the manifestation. He says: It is true that the visible world began as it is described in the Old Testament. But it was preceded by a spiritual world. All the laws that were lived out in that primeval beginning are expressed not in any individual, but in the common blood that connects him to the whole people. If we go back to the spirit that precedes this sensual beginning of the world, we also come to that in man which is exalted above all sensuality, above all national context and to that which is found in every human being, in every human individuality. If we put ourselves in the place of the Jew for the God principle, we find: He felt united with the father Abraham when he traced back the whole line of blood.

In John, we find a tremendous advance in relation to this view. What does the Christ of John's Gospel say? In what he says, there is tremendous progress compared to the spirit of the Old Testament. If you examine what appears to us as the deepest human essence, then you need not go beyond the individual human being. The individual human being can stand alone, by himself; he finds the Father within himself, that from which he emerged.

I, my innermost being, I and the Father are one. (John 10:30)

This is the meaning of the herald's call, the revelation of the individual human being. How did Christ Jesus relate to the Jews who went up to the Father Abraham? He said exactly: This human ego lives in you; when you find the human “I” or “I am” in yourselves, the power of individuality, then everyone may say: There is something living in me that is out of time.

Before Abraham was, the I AM was.

What can be experienced in the innermost core of a person's being is more eternal than anything that can be experienced in the external world. We no longer go up to Abraham; we go up to that which will be eternal in us.

I and the Father are one.

Every single person finds access to the eternal through themselves. Thus we ascend to the very beginning of that which lives eternally in each individual.

Thus, the Gospel of John is the significant continuation of what is written in the Old Testament. It presents itself as a revelation of what was before the very beginning of what is presented in the Old Testament. To understand what is meant in the Gospel of John, we have to engage with the use of words. What is meant by the Logos, the Word? One scholar says of the beginning of the Gospel of John that it is not found in the other gospels. They simply tell, albeit steeped in miracle stories, what happened externally. It is said that the writer of the fourth gospel, on the other hand, was a philosopher. John must have known Philo. It can be said of him that he expresses similar speculations to those in the Gospel of John. He also says that the Word stands between the Creator of the world and man. From Alexandrian and Greek education, John drew the elements of his writing. From this, John had conceived that he would tell the story in the Gospel in such a way that the Christ is the Word made flesh. This had not occurred to any other evangelist.

Let us read the beginning of the Gospel of Luke with this in mind:

Since many have undertaken to set in order an account of the same words that have been handed down to us, as they were delivered to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,

Here stands the exact same word or logos. It is said that one wants to retell it to those who have been “servants of the word”. In truth, something else is also there: “as those who have been eyewitnesses and servants of the word know”. — In Luke, there is also a way of speaking that John speaks of the word. He also says that those who know something from the beginning have been eyewitnesses of the word. Among the initiates, it was common at the time to speak of the being that lived in Christ as the Word and to call themselves servants of the Word. The author of the Gospel of John adopted the term “the Word” from the language of the initiates. Only spiritual science can explain what is actually meant by the “Word”. To understand this, we must consider the nature of man in terms of theosophy.

What is known from the external senses is only a part of the human being. Wherever spiritual science or theosophy has been present, there has been exactly the same division of the human being as is taught now. Spiritual science speaks of a second part of the human being, the etheric or life body. It says that the human physical body consists of the same substances as all of nature. But in the human body, these substances are combined in such a way that, if they followed their own laws, the physical body would disintegrate. However, the etheric body prevents this decay. The moment the ether body leaves the physical body, the physical body follows its own laws and decays. The fact that this does not happen during a person's lifetime is due to the fact that the physical body is imbued with the ether or life body.

If we consider that when we look at a person, we are not just looking at their physical and etheric bodies, but also at something that is much closer to them than their physical and etheric bodies, that they are permeated by a sum of pleasure and pain , joy and pain, drives and passions, wishes and desires, we have in it what spiritual science calls the astral body, the third part of the human being, which is much more original than the ether body and the physical body. Just as ice forms out of water, water in a different form, so the ether body and the physical body are a condensed astral body. Spiritual science shows that the etheric and physical bodies are denser astral bodies. The astral body is the cause of the etheric body and the physical body. The human being shares the physical body with all visible beings of nature, with minerals, plants and animals. The etheric body is shared with plants and animals, and the astral body with animals. But there is one thing that human beings have alone that makes them the crown of all beings. Everyone can only say a name to themselves, and that is the name 'I'. No one can pronounce the name 'I' if it is meant to refer to someone else. Everyone can only say this name to themselves. This is where the actual center of a person's nature is revealed; so that spiritual science imagines the human being as having four parts, with the 'I am' as the fourth. This is a power and entity of its own. Jean Paul describes in his biography how the thought first occurred to him: You are an I. He said: “There I looked into the most hidden sanctuary of my soul.” All religions based on spiritual wisdom have sensed this fact. The Hebrew people have also sensed it. Yahweh or Jehovah is nothing other than the “I am”. (Ex 3:14) He is the “I am” and points to the innermost core of human nature. In this ancient Hebrew people, the “I am” or Jehovah was felt to be something that expressed itself in the whole group. They applied this name to that which flowed down through the whole stream of Abraham's blood.

This “I am” – how was it seen? In those places of ancient times, which were called mystery schools, one can say that they were both church and school at the same time. In the mysteries, the mystery students sought to rise to the nature of the “I am”. There they were led from the sensual into the spiritual. A complete renewal of this fourth link of the human being occurred through the appearance of Christ Jesus. The term for this “I am” is the Logos or the Word. From the invisible worlds, the spiritual in the I announced itself, revealed itself in the I, permeated the I.

In terms of their physical body, human beings are an extract of the entire mineral world. This is why we call human beings a microcosm. Their etheric body is an extract of the life forces that live outside in the plant and animal kingdoms. Their astral body is an extract of all the astral forces that live in animals. The I is not related to the surrounding mineral, plant and animal world, but only to the invisible, divine spiritual world. It is an extract of the spiritual, a drop of the substance of the divine. A drop from the ocean of the divine is the I. Thus the Divine penetrates into man and sends its drop into the innermost part of man, and the expression of this Divine is the “I am”. This drop of the divine nature is even older than the astral body. It was in the bosom of the Divine before our astral body came into being.

“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), or the “I am”, that innermost power of the human being that represents the eternal. People should become educated so that everyone can find the drop of divinity within themselves if they seek this community within. Man should become educated so that he can find communion with God as an individual individuality within himself.

The knowledge of the Word penetrated into the world, it shone into the darkness of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Only a few who were not born of the flesh understood it. They could reveal themselves as children of God. But now the eternal, all-embracing aspect of human nature, which was before Abraham, entered in, which every human individuality has. This supersensible power has become flesh in Christ Jesus. Thus, Christ Jesus is the power in the evolution of humanity that wants to lead humanity to the realization of its innermost being, of its “I am”. From this point of view, the Gospel of John and especially that most profound chapter in which so much is said about the “I am” becomes understandable. He says explicitly: “All I say of the ‘I am,’ I do not say of myself” (John 14:10), but He says that when people recognize the power of the “I am,” then they have something higher than all other powers. When you express the “I am,” you speak of the power that also lives in the Light of the world. “I am” lives in everything; it is what permeates the entire being of the earth in all realms. You can only properly explore what the earth gives you as food if you understand the ‘I am.’

I am the bread of life (John 6:48),
I am the vine (John 15:5),
I myself am planted by the Father, and the Father is the vinedresser (John 15:1).

Thus this chapter of John's Gospel presents itself as something that must give people strength and life. These powers are rooted in the Father, the spirit of the world: “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30)

If we go far back in time, we come to times when blood ties played an increasingly important role. They were the basis of what we call love. Love existed only between those in whose veins related blood flowed. In those days, close marriage prevailed. Later, distant marriage replaced close marriage. At that time, only shared blood brought about love. As humanity developed through later eras, the peoples became more and more mixed. The Jewish people felt even more the togetherness of the common blood. But in those days, when Christianity arose, the time began when the peoples were mixed up. That was also the beginning of the time of a new love that is not based on blood. Christ Jesus said: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37). “If anyone comes to me and does not hate (leave) his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, he cannot be my disciple.” This saying must be interpreted in such a way that at the beginning of the development of the earth, those who were related loved each other; but at the end of the development of the earth, people will love and recognize each other in soul love. That brotherly love that goes from soul to soul, that comes from the spirit, that is the love that takes its starting point from the power of Christ Jesus, which will gain more and more ground in humanity. Where the same blood flowed, there one felt as a member of a group ego. At the end of human development, one will feel as a member of the whole of humanity. One will then seek the “I am” not in the blood of the tribe or people, but in the spirit and in the truth. The Old Testament worships the God in the foundations of nature; in the New Covenant, God will be worshipped in that which is prior to nature, in the spirit and in truth. Even for those who were intimately connected with the Lord, it was not readily understandable how that other love should take the place of the love of blood. Only the Lord's favorite disciple understood this. The other evangelists still tell the whole line of descent to the father Abraham. But the one who came into the world as the being that was embodied in Christ Jesus, he could say: “Before Abraham was, the I AM was.” (John 8:58) That the favorite disciple had understood. He goes up to the extra-temporal in his presentation. There is no external contradiction between the Gospel of John and the other Gospels. It is only the difference between a subordinate and a higher point of view. We are dealing here with different perspectives. If we know this, then we also understand the old Bible interpreters. They knew that one can describe the truth from different points of view.

We so often find the expression “one” and “we” in today's scientific writings: “one cannot see this,” “we cannot see this,” and so on. These “one”s and “we”s take the standpoint of the blind man who wants to judge what can be seen or not seen. Man can judge only what he knows, but not what he does not know. The higher man rises in the spiritual world, the deeper he also looks into the spiritual world. John's perspective may differ from that of the other evangelists, but not the content.

The task of Theosophy is to reawaken understanding of this neglected gospel and to show people its power. Because this gospel has the greatest power, it will also play the greatest role in the future of humanity. Those who delve into the gospel of John will find something that lifts them above all the doubts of science.

In modern times, the world has divided into two halves: the world of nature and the world of moral life. The law of nature is seen as something special, and the moral law as something special. This dichotomy in particular will not be able to exist in the long term. Man had to seek something deeper, something that encompasses both. He must not feel a dichotomy between inside and outside. He no longer feels this dichotomy if he understands the innermost core of the Gospel of John. We find the origin of the world within ourselves through the development of our innermost self. We come to something that encompasses the laws of nature and our innermost being. What the “I am” reveals to us was there as the original spiritual before the external world. The Logos, the Word was there before the outer world. — Thus there is a reconciliation between the external and the innermost nature of man. Especially the chapter of John's Gospel, where the “I am” is spoken of, will be an invincible conqueror of human nature. Only man has lost the thread of recognizing the purely spiritual in it.

Theosophy will again attempt to understand what was said by the one who gave the Gospel of John to mankind. When the revealed word is understood, all natural laws will be recognized as the revealed word, but the inner moral law will also appear as the revealed word. Whether one calls himself an idealist or not, if one judges the document of the spirit only according to what the senses see, then a materialistic attitude lives in us. This has been felt by deeper minds, and they sensed and longed for a time when humanity would learn to understand such things again, for example, Goethe and also Carlyle, who said: “We see in this day and age how external institutions have turned away from the spirit that originally emerged from the grasp of the spirit (religion), and how the spiritual seeks a refuge in the individual soul, or, where it does not find it, how it seeks it in external organizations and founds sect after sect and so on, in order to seek again ways to the original spirit.

But the future of humanity and of Christianity lies in learning to understand again a document such as the Gospel of John. We can follow different points of view in their relationship to the teachings about the world in the religious scriptures as humanity develops.

The first point of view is that of naive belief. The second is the point of view of clever people. When we arrive at the third point of view, people interpret the document of humanity in a mystical sense; they understand it as allegories, as symbols.

The fourth point of view is where we learn to recognize spiritual facts in their unambiguous nature through theosophy. Then one encounters such a document with the deep reverence that its inner greatness demands. This is how one will understand the Gospel of John in the future. In the future, spiritual science will again point the way to the true understanding of the Gospel of John and to the true form of Christianity.

The time has now come to make known in wider circles that which has been spoken of throughout the history of the evolution of mankind under the name of the Mysteries or Mysticism, the so-called Esoteric Wisdom.

For in the soul of man, behind what comes to the light of day lies a deeper wisdom which has hitherto remained unknown to mankind in general.

Let us be quite clear what it is men have always understood by the term “Mysteries” or the “esoteric.” All that has been brought about in the world through civilisation goes back ultimately to a few great personalities, a few leading individuals. For example, a construction like the Simplon tunnel can be traced back to the mental work of great individuals, who were not themselves directly concerned with the building of the tunnel but who made it possible, by their Intellectual discoveries, for others to build it.

The “practical” man would perhaps be of the opinion that such things are accomplished by an activity that is purely external. It would be the very greatest mistake to accede to such an opinion. Neither the engineers who conceived the plan, nor the workmen who carried it out, are the spiritual originators. If it were not for what is called Higher Mathematics as elaborated by Leibnitz, Newton and others, such works could never be there at all. These thinkers were necessary in order to bring into being what is called “technics.” If we go to the root of the matter, we shall find that such works could never have been achieved, nor any goods have been manufactured, without the soul of the Thinker.

If this is so with regard to the outer materialistic culture, it is true in still greater measure of the spiritual currents that flow through human history.

All the Religion and all the Art that has ever been brought to mankind, all the Justice that has ever borne rule in states, all the order and Morality that has lived among men leads back to great Initiates, leads back to hidden sources of Wisdom. This is what we find when we set out to look for the deeper origin of things.

Consider the works of Art which have succeeded each other through the centuries, and you will find that they can all be traced back to deeper sources. Whether we take a poet like Dante, or a mind and spirit like Goethe's, or a painter such as Raphael, or again some great religious event in history—all moral and religious streams, all art and all science, lead back into the hidden places, where was cultivated in secret that which is known as Mysticism or Esotericism.

And as with all other religions so with Christianity too we find its foundations in the esoteric. It is only an evidence of shortsightedness when the objection is raised, that Christianity is for simple hearts and should speak to the feelings and be comprehensible for all. That is a very shortsighted view. All religions, it is true, ultimately clothe their truths in sentences so full of power and impulse that no soul is too simple to receive them. What emerges finally, however, in this simple form, has its origin in the heights, with the so-called Initiates.

Throughout history there have always been Initiates. In ancient India it was the Rishis who taught a primeval Wisdom. In Persia Zarathustra was the teacher of Wisdom. We look to Greece, to Egypt, to Rome, everywhere we find to begin with, a religion of the people, but standing in the midst of the people are always those who may be called spiritual “Giants,” unknown to mankind by name. These are they who formed themselves into occult brotherhoods. Whosoever wished to be accepted into such a brotherhood had to undergo a strict and severe probation. The probation had no immediate relation to the intellectual life. It was far more a question of a man's wrestling his way through to an inner freedom of character, where feelings and passions had no power with him. Then he had to learn not to misuse his knowledge. Men who had passed through severe trials and tests of this nature became missionaries to the rest of mankind. They were not allowed to have any other feeling or purpose in their heart, save only this—to serve and help mankind. They had to be men who would make real the words—“He who would be first among you, let him be the servant of all”—And in intellectual striving also they must never lag behind but always press on to find the Higher Truths.

Today it is frequently said to one who believes in the possibility of knowing the Spiritual Worlds: But we human beings have boundaries to our knowledge. But inside the Mystery circles it was said: Thou has capabilities which slumber in thee; if thou develop them, then canst thou strive through to a Higher Knowledge.

The development a man was enabled to undergo by the training of his inner talents and capacities was called in the Mystery Centres a Second Birth. It was said that such a one experienced on a higher plane what a man born blind experiences here in the world of the senses when he has undergone an operation and can see. This “operation” on the soul, the re-birth in the Spirit, was performed for the Mystics in the Mysteries.

That which was called in the Mysteries the Kingdom of Heaven, into which the Mystic was led, was not in some other place. The Kingdom of the Spiritual World is here where man is. As many worlds are around us as we have ability to realize and grasp. It was no dry and abstract Wisdom that was received in the Mysteries, but a Wisdom which was at the same time Religion and Art.

In the Mysteries of Greece the spiritual eye of the Mystic was opened. It was shown to him how once in primeval times man had been half animal and how the soul had striven upwards to that stage of humanity upon which he now beheld himself. Three stages were shown to him. He saw first forms as they lived in a very distant evolution of mankind, then forms half animal and half man, and finally perfect human forms. These three types of the evolution of mankind stood before him in the Greek Mysteries and they found their expression in Greek sculpture. There was (1) the Zeus type, with the straight nose and with the eyes rounded out upwards; (2) the type of the God Mercury with woolly hair and snub nose; and (3) the type of the Satyr, with quite different eyes, different nose and different corners to the mouth. These three types stand before us in Greek art as an image of the stages of the evolution of mankind. At another time it was shown to the Mystic how the God himself descended into nature, how he evolved upwards through the mineral kingdom, plant kingdom and animal kingdom to the human kingdom and was then born anew out of the human heart. That was called the descent of the God, his Resurrection and his Ascension. The whole process was represented in the Greek drama. All that was represented in the drama came originally from the Mysteries.

Just as the trunk of the tree divides itself into different branches, so did religion, science and art become divided in the Mysteries. The ancient Mysteries which were celebrated in Greece—the Eleusinian—and the Mysteries of the Egyptian Priest-wisdom were called Mysteries of the Spirit. Those who stood high in these Mysteries as teachers and leaders had attained to the spiritual worlds; they associated with Spirits, they had intercourse with Spiritual Beings. Iamblichus shows us how the Gods descended in the Mysteries. Only after moral purification, and only when the intellect had been made clear and lucid, could one obtain admission into these places of wisdom.

This is how it was in the ancient heathen times, in the times of the Mysteries of the Spirit. Never without the most wonderful enthusiasm and the most inward devotion did the Mystics speak of that which could be experienced in the Mystery-schools. Aristides speaks thus: “I thought I touched the God and felt him near, I myself being at the time in a condition between waking and sleeping. My spirit was light, so as none can describe or realise who has not himself been initiated.” And in another passage he says: “It was as if the Spiritual World flowed and poured around me.” Plutarch says, “He who had received initiation in these Mysteries greeted the Godhead with the greeting of eternity.” Whoever had had this experience was called “re-born.”

We must now say a little about what formed the last act in every such Initiation into the Mysteries of the Spirit.

There had first to be the moral purification and the clarifying of the intellect. Then the pupil must learn to see with the eyes of the Spirit. Behind the consciousness which accompanies us through the waking condition, there is another consciousness. This consciousness does not sink into complete darkness when man falls asleep. Man remains conscious at night, he is there present. But the consciousness which accompanies him from morning until evening, that does not remain. There is however a way of overcoming the unconsciousness man has in sleep; there are methods whereby this end can be attained. By a culture of the soul which brings about certain intimate processes in the innermost being of the soul, man can win through to the possibility of finding new revelations in his dream life; he can experience things which he recognises in another way than with the eyes and ears of the senses. It is immaterial whether a man recognizes the truth in sleep or by day when awake; in either case he must learn to carry over into reality the world which he there experiences. When in this way he has come into the position of being able to see the Spiritual in the whole world, then he has attained the first stage of initiation.

At the second stage he has an experience which is like living in a flowing ocean of colour. At this stage there is a higher initiation; a consciousness is developed wherein is revealed to him a still higher Spiritual world. Today in ordinary life man is not capable of awakening the consciousness which lies behind the physical world.

In the last act of the Mysteries of the Spirit the pupil was put into a kind of sleep. Care had been taken in the preparation that when the day consciousness sank down, consciousness did not cease. For three days and three nights the man lay in another state of consciousness in the Mystery temple, citizen and participator in another world. Then he was awakened by the Priest. He received a new name. He was an Initiate, he had been “born again.” One could say of the Mysteries of the Spirit: “Blessed are they who have experienced them, blessed are they who now behold in the Mysteries of the Spirit.”

At the time of Christ Jesus, to the Mysteries of the Spirit were added the Mysteries of the Son, and these have been ever since the time of Christ. The Mysteries of the Father—the Mysteries of the Future—are only cultivated in a very small circle. The Mysteries of the Son are cultivated in the Rosicrucian Mystery which is also Christian, for those who require a Christianity that is armed to meet all Wisdom.

Today we will concern ourselves with the Mysteries of the Son, and see how they differ from the ancient heathen Mysteries. If we would grasp what a mighty step forward has been taken by the coming of Christianity, we must learn to understand two important utterances. The one is: “Blessed are they who believe, even when they do not see,” and the other: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” If we comprehend these utterances in all their depth, then we understand the very foundation of Christianity.

Whilst to the world at large Paul spoke in powerful kindling words, he also gave teachings to his intimate pupils which were transmitted first by word of mouth and then in writing, teachings that are connected with the name of Dionysius, who was known as Dionysius “The Areopagite.” We have here to do with something founded by Saint Paul himself, wherein was proclaimed the deepest wisdom. These teachings of Saint Paul were written down for the first time in the sixth century, in the writings of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius. It is not so much the historical fact, but the content of these documents which is of interest for us.

An esoteric Christianity does exist. This is not admitted in certain circles, with the result that a peculiar place has been assigned to the Saint John Gospel. The Saint John Gospel is looked upon by theologians as a book which emanated out of poetic genius. They have however no understanding for what the Saint John Gospel means.

Whereas the three other evangelists relate the exoteric. Saint John relates what he experiences as an initiated seer, who could look into the Spiritual worlds. The writer of the Saint John Gospel wrote from the point of view of an initiate. Whoever looks upon it as a book that one should read and understand in the same way as one reads and understands any other book knows nothing of the Saint John Gospel. He alone has knowledge of it who can experience it. Most translators do not render the Spirit of it at all.

The first words of this Gospel, rightly translated, sound as follows:

1. In the primeval beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and with God was the Word.

2. The same was in the primeval beginning with God.

3. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

4. In Him was the Life and the Life was the Light of men.

5. And the Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

6. There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

7. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the Light, that all might believe on it.

8. He was not the Light, but a witness of the Light.

9. For the true Light which lighteth every man, was to come into the world.

10. It was in the world, and the world was made by It, but the world knew It not.

11. It came into each individual man (even into the ‘I’ man It came) but the individual man (the ‘I’ man) did not receive It.

12. Those who did receive It, through It they could reveal themselves as Children of God.

13. They who trusted in His Name were not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of human will, but of God.

14. And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us and we have heard His Teaching, the Teaching of the only Son of the Father, filled with Grace and Truth.

These words with their mighty content—one should not take them and speculate over them, but rather allow them to work upon one in the same manner as countless human beings have done through the centuries. Early in the morning when the soul was still virginal, they have let these words resound in their soul, up to the passage: “And the Word become Flesh and lived among us ...” as above.

When a man does this day by day, then something shows itself in the soul which gives him new life, he is reborn, he is spiritually transformed. He sees around him a spiritual world of which he had previously no idea.

Everyone who takes the first verses of the Saint John Gospel and lets them work upon him for the education and training of his soul, experiences the Saint John Gospel itself in mighty pictures.

There before his spiritual sight stands John the Baptist, as he baptises the Christ; there he sees the picture of Nicodemus, as he has his conversation with the Christ. He sees how Christ cleanses the Temple, he has before him all the following scenes of the Saint John Gospel, he experiences the “stations” from the thirteenth chapter onwards.

In order for the pupil to receive aright the influence of these words and find the ‘word’ which is proclaimed by the Saint John Gospel, the teacher spoke as follows: “Thou must fill thy soul for weeks at a time with this one feeling. Think of the plant. It is rooted in the dead stone. If it had consciousness, it would have to bow down to the dead stone and say to it: ‘Without thee I could not live; out of thee I drew nourishment and strength: I owe to thee my being, I thank thee.’ The animal would have to speak in similar words to the plant: ‘Without thee I could not live, I incline myself towards thee in thankfulness, because out of thee I draw that which I require for my existence.’ And it is the same with all the kingdom. Man, who has attained to a higher stage of evolution, must also bow down, as the plant to the stone, to those who work for him, and thank them.” He who would become a Christian Initiate must develop this feeling during a period of many weeks—the feeling that he owes gratitude to him who stands beneath him. Then he experiences in the spirit the thirteenth chapter of the Saint John Gospel where this feeling is given sublime and eternal expression by Christ in the Washing of the Feet. Christ means to say: “Without you I could not be, I incline myself to you as the plant to the stone.” As an outer symbol the Initiate experienced at this stage a feeling as if water were flowing around his feet. It continued for a long time.

When he had gone through this, the Christian Mystic could experience the next stage of initiation. For this he must cultivate the power to endure all the storms and stresses of life. Then he experienced a second picture. He saw himself scourged, and could feel in his own body something like pain at certain points. This went on for many weeks. He experienced the scourging.

Now he could rise to the third stage. The teacher said to him: “Thou must cultivate a feeling which can endure that all thou holdest highest should be treated with scorn and derision.” The scorn and derision must be for him nothing, in comparison with his own inner strength and certainty. Then the pupil experienced two symptoms of Christian initiation. He experienced the crowning with thorns; spiritually he saw himself with the crown of thorns and experienced a kind of pain in the head which is the sign of this stage of initiation. Afterwards, as a fourth experience he had to develop the feeling that his body was no more for him than any other object in the world. He carried the body with him only as an instrument. In many Mystery-schools one learned to accustom oneself to speak in the following way: “My body goes through the door,” and so on. In this way the mystic experienced in himself the Crucifixion. He saw himself crucified. The outer symbol was that during the meditation stigmata appeared at the places of the wounds of Christ—in the hands, in the feet and in the right side. This is the blood-trial of the Mystic, the fourth stage of initiation.

After this the pupil rose to the fifth station which is called the mystic death, a sublime experience of a spiritual nature, of which no more than an indication can be given. There are moments for a pupil when the whole of the physical world surrounds him as with a black veil. In these moments he learns to know the origins of evil. This was called the descent into hell. Then came a strange and wonderful feeling as if the whole curtain were torn asunder. The mystic death—followed by the mystic awakening!

The sixth stage is the so-called Laying in the Grave. All that the earth bears must become as precious to man as his own body. The physical body of man could not exist separated from the earth. If it were removed even a few miles from the earth it would wither, as the hand would wither when separated from the body. What my body is for my finger, that the earth is for men. The independence man attributes to himself is an illusion. And just as man is dependent physically on the earth, so is he dependent spiritually on the Spiritual World. When man comes to feel his unity with the whole planet—then is he “laid in the earth,” then does he undergo the “burial.”

Hereon follows the seventh stage, the “Resurrection” and the “Ascension.” Man experiences here the Eternal. This stage does not admit of description. The Egyptian Priests (who were also their Wise Men) did not make use of the symbols of writing to describe such things. The Mysteries must find a way to tell what cannot be expressed in words. Through the power and might, through the magical power of the Saint John Gospel itself, these things can be experienced.

Such an initiation is the initiation of the Son. It has only been possible since Christ came to earth. The outward Christ who walked in Palestine is related to the inward Christ whom the mystic experiences, as the sun is related to the eye. If there were no eye, then could the sun not be perceived. But the sun produced the eye. Where there is no light, the organ for the light is also lost. The eye was gradually created by the Sun. The eye was created for the light by the light, says Goethe. Whosoever allows the Saint John Gospel to work upon him, develops the inner eye. But, as without the sun the eye would never have come into being, so would spiritual seership never have been there if Christ, the Spiritual Sun, had not walked the earth in person. No Christianity without the personal Christ Jesus: that is the essential and all-important fact.

All other founders of religion could say of themselves: “I am the way and the truth.” All were teachers. Christianity has brought no new teaching. But that is not important. The important thing is that Christians feel themselves bound together with the personal Christ Jesus, as in a family. That is what matters—that He was there, and has lived and has said: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

Oriental teachers of religion have exoteric teaching and esoteric, in the same way as Christianity has. Christianity differs from them in that exoteric Christianity is more simple and popular, it speaks to the heart, to the feelings; while esoteric Christianity is essentially deeper than all oriental esoteric. The truth is, the Christian esotericism is the most profound which has ever been brought to mankind.

Christian esotericism was brought to the earth by that very Being Himself with whom one must be united. It is a question of belief in the divinity of Christ. In the ancient Mysteries one had to behold personally during the three days of initiation. What formerly was only present in the Mysteries—that is, in the Mysteries of the Spirit—has in Christianity become an historical fact. The events in Palestine are historical fact and at the same time symbol. Christianity is of such a nature that the simplest heart can grasp it; and yet the wisest man will never outgrow it. For the deepest teachings of Wisdom lie therein.

If we understand the Saint John Gospel as a Book of Life, so that we wish to live with it, and let it come to life within us, then we shall come to know esoteric Christianity. Such esoteric Christianity has always existed, it has always been active wherever Christianity has been able to manifest in a worthy and noble way, wherever Christianity has brought the blessings of culture and civilisation to mankind.

Into all those who had experienced union and fellowship with Christ Jesus there streamed such strength as enabled them to know that life will always gain the victory over death, and that death is never a reality.

Goethe said that the great World Powers invented death in order to have “much life” in the world. Christianity is a proof that there can arise in the soul a consciousness of the fact that Life is continually and always the Victor in the world.

My dear friends!

On January 29, 1827, Goethe said to his friend Eckermann about the then already advanced second part of “Faust”:

But everything is sensual and, when presented on the stage, will catch everyone's eye. And that is all I wanted. If only the crowd of spectators take pleasure in the appearance; at the same time, the initiated will not miss the higher meaning, as is the case with The Magic Flute and other things.

In this way, Goethe expressed that he himself allows a deeper meaning to be recognized in his works. It is well known that explanations of Goethe's deeper worldview are met with the objection: You yourselves put all sorts of things into the works that Goethe did not mean at all. This objection could easily be refuted. Only someone who does not want to apply all the powers of their soul to get behind the meaning of the poem can say this. We will counter all these objections with what Goethe said in his conversation with Eckermann. Goethe appears to us as one of those artistic figures who did not allow themselves to be inspired by the arbitrariness of fantasy or the randomness of external experience, but rather strove to recognize and explore the great riddles of existence. Goethe was a serious and profound seeker. The direction of his quest can be seen in his very earliest childhood disposition. Nowhere can such a direction confront us as powerfully as in what Goethe told us about the time when he was seven years old. He takes the best minerals and rocks from his father's collection of natural objects and arranges them in a regular form on a music stand. This is the altar on which he wants to offer sacrifices to the god of nature. At the top he places incense cones, which he ignites with the help of a burning glass through the collected rays of the rising morning sun. For him, natural products are the expression of the primal divine forces of nature. Through the rays of the morning sun that he had captured, he had kindled a natural fire, a sacred fire through the essence of the divine forces of nature itself. With this, he wanted to make an offering to the god of nature; in this way, he wanted to come closer to the great god of nature. In this childlike way, Goethe's entire spiritual relationship to the cosmos is expressed. On higher levels, we see young Goethe's confession again in his prose hymn “Nature”, when he was already working in Weimar:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – unable to step out of her, and unable to get deeper into her. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms.

Then he addresses all the beings of nature, how they are revelations of the spirit that is present in nature. Finally, he says:

She has brought me in, she will also lead me out. I trust her. She may do with me as she pleases. She will not hate her work. I did not speak of her. No, what is true and what is false, she has spoken everything. All is her fault and all is her merit.

And before that it says:

With a few draughts from the cup of love, she indemnifies for a life full of toil.

After his student days in Leipzig, Goethe had an important inner experience: on his sickbed, he learned to feel the seriousness of life. In Frankfurt, he then undertook all kinds of strange studies with friends and delved into many mystical and alchemical works. He met people who were involved in mysticism and who sought the God, the Christ, within themselves. Then in Strasbourg he met the other great mind, Herder, by whose side he gained a keen eye for nature, which was then expressed in his scientific studies and writings. When Goethe had moved to Weimar, we often find him in Jena, like a student, listening to the lectures of Loder and other scholars in order to get closer to the divine power in nature. He always sees a manifestation of the spirit in everything that presents itself materially. While he was still in Strasbourg, he came across a book by a materialistic French encyclopedist. It made a great impression on him. He says about it in “Poetry and Truth”:

But how hollow and empty we felt in this dreary atheistic half-night [...] Matter was supposed to have existed from eternity, and moved from eternity, and now, with this movement, right and left and in all directions, it was supposed to produce the infinite phenomena of existence without further ado.

Then he continues:

But he knew as little about nature as we do: for having nailed up a few general concepts, he immediately leaves them behind in order to transform that which appears in nature as higher than nature, or as higher nature, into material, heavy, and indeed moving, but directionless and formless nature, and thereby believes he has gained a great deal.

This is a critique that Goethe could also make of today's materialistic science. Those who immerse themselves in Goethe will soon notice that when he talks about nature, he speaks from great depths, from the spirit that we call the theosophical worldview. It was in the fourteenth century when this was already being cultivated in the Rosicrucian current. Nothing reliable about it has been reported by outsiders. Only the initiates knew what really mattered.

There is a poem by Goethe, “The Mysteries”, where a personality comes to a kind of monastery and meets a gathering of enlightened personalities, twelve in number. A thirteenth is with them, who is about to die. His twelve brothers speak of him in the most beautiful, appreciative terms. Some traits of this great man, who stands as the knower of the world, are then told. It is said that as a boy he had already killed the adder, which signifies the overcoming of the lower nature. Then, after many meaningful words, the lines follow:

From the power that binds all beings,
The man who overcomes himself is freed.

One who has overcome himself is presented in this poem “The Secrets” by Goethe. The whole situation in which the brother, to whom this greatness is being told, is led into, appears to the knowledgeable as the Grail or Parzifal situation. Goethe could not complete the poem, the material was too great. He once gave a student an explanation of it. He hinted at a league of enlightened people who had joined together in a brotherhood. Each of them represents one of the great religious systems of the world. The great emissaries of these are united in a brotherhood, where there must be one of the leaders who sees the unity, the core of wisdom, in the religions. What Goethe says here could be made the principle of the theosophical movement. Goethe points here to what every initiate knows, that there is a secret union. Goethe lets the newcomer see the mysterious symbol at the gate: the cross with the roses entwined. Goethe wanted to point out that there is such a mystery within the modern world, as there have been such initiates in all times.

Goethe then sought God further as an artist during his Italian journey. He sought God in the universe, in all his creations that breathe the divine greatness; he also sought him in the creations of men, in art, which was a continuation of nature for him. He wrote on September 6, 1787 in the diary of his Italian journey:

These great works of art, which are also the greatest works of nature, have been created by man according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imagined collapses; there is necessity, there is God.

Of Greek art, Goethe says:

I have a suspicion that they proceeded according to the very laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.

He expresses the connection between man and nature beautifully in his book about Winckelmann:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort gives him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being. For what is the purpose of all the effort of suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of worlds that have come into being and are still in the process of becoming, if not ultimately for a happy human being to unconsciously enjoy his existence?

That which lives in man, in the depths of man, as a spiritual-mental entity, that is Nature herself, and for man she becomes conscious in the soul of man. It was this intuitive perception that guided Goethe when he attempted to shape the legend of Faust in a new form. This legend expressed what a number of people felt at that time. In the medieval Faust, we see a man who wants to recognize the divine in nature itself. In the Middle Ages, the search for the divine in nature was seen as apostasy. The divine was only to be found in the religious record of the Bible. On the other side was the legend of Faust, who seeks the divine in nature and makes a pact with the devil. On the other side was Luther, who, as the legend goes, threw the devil's inkwell at his head. Faust falls prey to the devil; he became a worldly man and a physician who wants to recognize the great God in nature. In the Middle Ages, such people were called “sons of the devil”. Goethe brings something new to the Faust idea; his guiding principle is:

Whoever strives, we can redeem.

A striving person who seeks the sources of nature, who seeks the spirit of nature, must reach the goal. Goethe is serious about the interpretation. Where man not only seeks something soulful and spiritual in himself, but where he rises to the realization that everything around us is ensouled, there he is on the right path. When we look at the human being, we have to say that our finger, for example, is only conceivable as a limb of our entire organism. Man lives under the illusion of personal self because man devotes himself to the idea that he is independent and self-sufficient, and not a member of the whole earth organism. But if man were to be lifted several miles above the earth, he would no longer be able to live; he would have to [suffer a miserable death by] suffocation and wither away like the finger of my hand if it were to be cut off. Goethe recognizes the earth organism. There is a deep recognition in his desire to let Faust penetrate to the sources of life and to characterize the spirit of the earth with the words:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
an eternal sea,
a changing weaving,
a glowing life,
so I create at the whirring loom of time
and weave the living garment of the Godhead.

How Goethe has placed himself in the spirit of the cosmos, how he feels and senses the spirit in the cosmos, and how he also lives in the human heart, is shown when he has Faust speak with the same Earth Spirit elsewhere. There we recognize that Goethe sees the same work in every tree, every plant, as in man:

Exalted Spirit, thou hast given me, given me everything
I asked for. Thou didst not turn thy face to me in fire in vain.
Thou gavest me the glorious kingdom of nature
and the power to feel and enjoy it. Thou dost not
allow only cold, astonished visitors,
granting me to look into her deep chest,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
the giant spruce toppling, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks squashing down,
And her fall dull hollow the hill thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself, and my own chest
Secret deep wonders open up.

We will find the theosophical ideas in Goethe again, without compulsion.

There is talk of Pythagorean music of the spheres. At higher levels of human development, there are experiences that are similar to those of a person born blind who undergoes a successful operation and suddenly gains sight – only much more magnificent and powerful. Such a spiritual operation does exist. In it, we learn about things and beings that are all around us in the world. The world of the spirit, of which Fichte spoke to his audience in 1813, then opens up for us. He says: “A new sense is needed for this.” When one speaks of these worlds to people, it often happens to those who speak as it happens to a seeing person among a group of blind people, to whom he speaks of color, shine and light. Everything that is said theosophically about this spiritual world is spoken entirely in the spirit of Fichte. The theosophist does not speak of a beyond. How many worlds we perceive around us depends on how many organs we have for perceiving these worlds. As many dormant abilities as are awakened in us open up as many new worlds for us. For the human being of today, there is initially a level of consciousness through which he perceives sensual and externally perceptible things. Then there is another level of consciousness for those who have attained the ability of higher vision. A new world of color, splendor and light opens up before their mind's eye. This world is called the astral world. An even higher world can be perceived when one attains continuity of consciousness, where the manifestations of a higher world manifest themselves in a way called sounds. The devachanic world is a sounding world. This world is then taken over into everyday consciousness so that one can also perceive it when walking among everyday things, among tables and chairs. The theosophical worldview speaks of a world of the soul, the astral world, and of a devachanic world, the world of the spirit, which can be perceived by those whose spiritual eyes and ears are open. Where Goethe has Faust placed between the forces of good and evil, he lets the words resound:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In the spheres of the brothers' song,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

When most people say that this is a poetic image, they misunderstand the poet if they think he is making up a phrase. A true poet does not do that. The physical sun does not resound. But if we look at the sun as the expression of a spiritual organism, then we can speak of the sun resounding. In the second part of Faust, Goethe lets him encounter a similar situation. It says:

Hark! Listen to the storm of the hours!
For spiritual ears,
The new day is already being born.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter,
What a roar is brought by the light!
It drums and trumpets, eye blinks and ear is amazed,
unheard-of things are not heard.

These are the depths of wisdom from which Goethe draws. Those who do not know that Goethe sought to draw from the sources of esoteric wisdom do not understand Goethe well. He himself said that the deep meaning of his poetry would not remain hidden.

The second part of “Faust” has always been a big problem for people, also the fact that Mephistopheles, the representative of evil forces, is associated with Faust. Goethe researchers have also written an infinite amount about Mephistopheles. The word is composed of “Mephis” – is equal to Verderber – and “Tophel” – is equal to liar. At the same time, this leads us to the fact that Goethe was able to draw from sources where exactly this meaning of Mephistopheles could be found. We get to know the esoteric Goethe from the second part of “Faust”. People have thought a great deal about the homunculus. Some interpreters of Faust suggest that the homunculus represents humanistic research. Faust scholars can also be seen grappling with the question of what the “mothers” represent.

Occult teachings have always distinguished between the physical, mental and spiritual nature of the human being. Even today's materialistic science regards the physical nature. The soul world belongs to what we have characterized as the astral. The spirit belongs to the devachanic world. As in all mysticism, for Goethe the physical body is the transient one. The soul is that which forms the connection between what is transient in time and the spiritual eternal. For Goethe, the human being is also composed of three parts: body, soul and spirit. For the one who thus considers the structure of human nature, what happens to him when a person enters this world? He comes from the eternal sphere of Devachan. The source of spiritual existence is spoken of as the “Mothers”. The threefold source of the human being is with the Mothers. The eternal corresponds to the spirit. The soul also has an eternal archetype. In Theosophy, this is referred to by the Sanskrit words: Atma, Budhi, Manas. This is referred to as the divine trinity, which is with the mothers, of which man is a threefold image. Goethe wants to depict this, the way in which the threefold nature of man is composed of spirit, soul and body. A long-dead person is to stand before Faust: Helen. The example of Helen is to be used to illustrate the development of humanity. The re-emergence of the spirit in a new form is to be shown there. The three parts of the human being are to come together again.

Goethe depicts the soul itself through the homunculus, which is the astral body of the human being; it longs to be embodied. The spirit must join it; it is with the mothers. Now Goethe actually describes the journey to the mothers in a very appropriate way. Mephisto says to him as Faust enters the realm of the mothers:

Sink away! I could also say: rise!

There is no difference between up and down in Devachan. Then he shows him the tripod, which shows him the way to the mothers, the threefold nature of man. Faust succeeds in bringing up the ghost of the deceased Helena. Faust is not yet ready to fully understand this. When he wants to embrace Helena passionately, an explosion follows.

Homunculus is created; this is precisely the human astral body. This astral body is to receive a physical body. Goethe has him guided down to the ancient Greek philosophers. He wants to have the “thoroughly practical” for the astral soul. Now he is to learn from the Greek philosophers how to come into being and develop. The entire development through stones, plants and up to the human being is then described. The process of passing through the plant kingdom is aptly described as “it grunts so”. Finally, we see the possibility arise that the body connects with the soul when Eros comes. Homunculus is dashed to pieces against the shell carriage of Galathea; as a spirit he no longer exists, he has connected with the elements.

In the great world poem, we see how Goethe embodied his view in it. Goethe describes his view differently in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. The way the “fairy tale” was created should make it clear that what is expressed here is possible. During the time of their friendship, Goethe and Schiller published the Letters on Aesthetic Education as a kind of dowry. Schiller asked Goethe to make a contribution. Goethe wrote to him that he could not express what he had to say in a philosophical way, but that he would present it in a pictorial form. So he wrote the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. If we want to understand what Goethe meant by the “fairytale”, we only need to read what Schiller wrote to Goethe at the time. Schiller sees in the realm of beautiful appearance, in the realm of artistic appearance, an intermediate realm that elevates people from the realm of necessity, of sensual nature, to inner freedom. He sees in the artist the person who finds the spiritual in the physical, so that the sensual is spiritualized. In this way, art can help people to rise above the sensual world. It is a means for them to purify and spiritualize their instincts. People may then follow their instincts when they have been so purified that they no longer go against the spirit, so that people cannot help but want the ideal. Goethe presents this in a great image, but one that is drawn from infinite depths. In the will-o'-the-wisp in the fairy tale, who cross a river and have to promise the ferryman to pay for their journey with three onions, three artichokes and three cabbages, we recognize the lower self of man , the ego nature, which has the potential to develop the three-part, higher, future nature, namely the wisdom nature or manas, the kind nature or budhi, piety and the strength nature or atma, strength. The development of man to this higher trinity is called initiation, which is carried out in the mysteries. Gradually, in the great process of evolution of humanity, all people will become initiates.

In all esotericism, water is used to describe the astral world.

Human soul, how like thou art to water!

says Goethe. There are two types of human nature: one that acquires wisdom in selfishness, the other that acquires wisdom by working from experience to experience. If the astral — the river — is to accept the gold, the wisdom acquired in vanity, then it will flare up. In esotericism, the original is represented by the lotus flowers, by something that can be peeled off so that a germ remains. The will-o'-the-wisps represent the human ego that only wants to shine; the snake represents the human ego that identifies itself with wisdom. Goethe once said:

If the eye were not solar
How could we see the light?

When the snake glows from within, it can enter the temple, where humanity acquires the three highest goods, which are represented by three kings: wisdom, piety or beauty and strength. The old man with the lamp represents the way in which most people are now enlightened. Religion is symbolized by the old man's wife. The beautiful lily represents the eternal, which man can only attain when he has been purified. The highest kills all that is living and immature. But through mystical death, man attains the highest spiritual gifts. In this fairy tale, Goethe has embedded the deepest truths of esotericism. In it, he shows how man attains the highest goods of humanity through the sacrifice of his lower nature. The same idea is expressed in the saying that appears in the West-Eastern Divan, in the poem that begins:

Tell no one, only the wise,
Because the crowd would scoff.

In the end, he speaks of the sacrifice of the lower nature and the spiritual rebirth of man:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
If you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

In our time, the result of the struggle is often seen as something that brings about progress. One often hears it said that forces must be steeled by meeting resistance. It is thought that only through struggle can one move forward. This is also believed to be the case in the spiritual life. It is believed that the best way to help young people to progress is to present life to them as a kind of battlefield. This view is far removed from another one, which has at least as many adherents as the other. This view is related to the world view that Buddha characterized with the words: hatred is not overcome by hatred, but by love. This contains the exact opposite of a fighting spirit. Genuine Christianity, too, is built on a different attitude than one that makes struggle the lever of progress. But in our time, precisely the deepest minds, in order to bring about what many long for, have believed that they are delivering the best for the progress of humanity in development in the fighting spirit.

The most radical expression of a militant attitude is found in Nietzsche. He says: “I love only the great war.” This view is that man develops through struggle towards greatness. In science, this view believes it finds its support. If that is so, we cannot easily dare to try to object to such an attitude. But we must try to see whether this science itself is based on solid ground. This is opposed to what the theosophical world view is supposed to solve.

Among the many questions that the theosophical world view addresses are those of brotherhood and the struggle for existence. The Theosophical Society and the theosophical current are there to bring about a new era in this area as well, to support in a different way many things that have so far been based on struggle, and to place them on solid ground.

The three principles of the Theosophical Society only appear to be unrelated. They are all connected. But especially the second and third are connected with the first, with the principle of bringing about a foundation for a general brotherhood of man. The theosophist, by thinking seemingly impractically, idealistically, has precisely the most practical thing in mind. We want to put ourselves in the shoes of our fellow human beings so that we can understand where the combative attitude can come from. We hear about the class struggle, the struggle for the liberation of women, for the liberation of the worker. Wherever we see the big issues of the day raised, we see them literally shrouded in the question of struggle. Because this is rooted in the soul of the times, it has led to the struggle being presented as the principle of progress, and especially since Darwin. How do Darwinian materialists think of progress? They think: perhaps there was once something imperfect and inappropriate in nature, alongside something perfect and more appropriate. The appropriate has overcome the inappropriate. Those who embrace this view believe that in the struggle for existence, the better will continually gain supremacy. The idea of the struggle for existence is linked to the idea of progress. This also continues in human life. The world of beings around us is like a gladiatorial fight, in which the strongest remains victorious and the weaker is overcome. Some Darwinians have justified the view that something similar is necessary in human life as well. In Haeckel's work, you can read that the strong triumph and that the weak must perish. Alexander Tille says that from our view that we must help our depressed brothers and sisters, draw them to us, warm them with our love, embrace them with our feelings, another view must emerge that replaces compassion with struggle; that the weak should not be protected precisely for the sake of general human progress. What Nietzsche said about the great struggle, about the great war, also stems from this opinion. It is significant that this struggle for existence has even been laid into nature.

We must assume something in the nature of time, the soul of time. If it is the case that those animals have the best chance of developing that oppress their weaker brothers, then we would have to draw a peculiar conclusion about the soul of time. If this is not the case, then man has been mistaken, then he has seen the struggle in nature, and he himself is now particularly predisposed for this struggle. Our public life is hardly based on anything other than the struggle for existence. Even people who are close to each other are in such a struggle for existence. Our minds often face each other quite differently than we face each other as persons in reality. Our lives have become alien to the way our institutions are. Suppose two people were involved in different business relationships. The two businesses are in fierce competition. But the minds of the two people love each other. In truth, however, they fight each other behind the scenes of personal life.

Our public life is in fact based on the war of individuals against others. We must realize that today our circumstances are so complicated that it takes a great deal of insight for people to face each other consciously in such a way that our whole life is built on brotherhood. For this we need a world view that permeates all areas of life, that can reach into everything, that is based on this brotherhood. One should get to know Theosophy by approaching it through individual practical questions in life and showing how the theosophical view can be applied to the individual questions. Here in Western Europe, we can learn a lot about the struggle for existence, and we do not know that for 25 years there has also been a trend in natural science that has almost proved to an obvious extent that the view of the struggle for existence in nature is wrong. In 1880, the Russian naturalist Kessler gave a lecture in which a highly plausible scientific view was clearly explained, namely that it is not the animals whose individuals fight with each other that progress best, but those that provide the most mutual help.

Of course, there is struggle in nature. But it is not what war causes that is progressive, but rather that which works against war and in favor of mutual assistance. Since that time, much work has been done in the field of natural science. If we familiarize ourselves with this, we become more and more convinced that it was in the soul of those who established the struggle for existence as a principle to see this struggle for existence as the principle of progress. — On the other hand, souls that have the spirit of brotherhood within them will also find brotherhood outside in nature. If we consider this, we will no longer be able to hold on to the idea that the human race is progressing through mutual conflict. The human race is a species. It will only progress as a species if its entire life is built on mutual assistance. This is where the theosophical worldview comes in, in that it regards mutual help not as based on an indefinite feeling, but on the deepest knowledge of the nature of man. The two great teachings that the theosophical worldview shows us appear absurd to those who approach them with prejudice. When a meteorite was once exhibited, a certain academy of sciences declared that it was impossible for this stone to have fallen from the sky. The teachings of reincarnation and karma, of human destiny and universal justice, are also still regarded by many as absurd.

Our life between birth and death is not the only one; we have an immortal core of existence within us. This was there before the physical body was there, and it will still be there when the physical body has disintegrated. We have often lived before, and we often return. Life becomes infinitely more understandable through these teachings. I see a person born into deepest misery, with little ability, condemned to live his whole life in poverty and misery; I see another endowed with great abilities, so that the whole of life is an easy matter for him. The theosophical world view tells us: That which we see here carries within itself an essential core, an imperishable soul that has prepared its destiny in previous lives. Everything we experience in this one lifetime is the consequence of our previous incarnations. When I do something that I consider justifiable now, I am building my future life. Through my work in previous times, I have built my present life.

Let us look back to a time when this world view was a general sentiment. The Egyptian slave could perform the hardest labor in building the pyramids without grumbling, because he knew that this incarnation was one among many, that he would one day stand where his master stood, that his fate was his karma, the consequence of previous embodiments, and that he himself would one day prepare his next embodiments. When this becomes the deepest consciousness, then a calm spreads in the soul, the peaceful resting in existence; and in the spiritual relationship, a life in bliss spreads in man. Then it is deeply written in the soul: My brother stands beside me. I see him. He is perhaps what is called a bad person. And I judge him, even though Christianity prescribes: Do not judge! As long as I only know the sensual existence, I may judge rightly. But if I know that this person may not be facing me for the first time in the world, then I may well think that I was with him in a past life – I myself may be to blame for the fact that he is not different. Perhaps as a father or as an educator, I neglected my duty towards him. If I have an inkling of a past life, the principle of brotherhood becomes even more profound. Even if someone does me wrong, I must realize that what he does to me I may have brought about myself in a previous life. If we think of life spiritually as permeated and entwined by a network, then the feeling of brotherhood arises from this.

Those who understand theosophical life will learn of other reasons why spiritual threads intertwine from person to person. We recognize how the deeper spiritual essence in all of us is one. You have to gradually feel the unity with all the powers of the soul. If I separate the hand from the body, it withers. It is only valuable on the communal organism. A few miles above the earth would be enough to kill us instantly. Only at this height above the earth can we live. Just as the hand is attached to the body, so man is attached to the earth. Our whole being continues outside as well, it is not only there within our skin. Anyone who recognizes this says to his entire physical environment: That's you. As human souls, we are all connected to each other by even stronger bonds. If we look at the spiritual, we will feel that no one could be there without their fellow human beings. If we wanted to peel the soul out of the rest of humanity, then our soul would wither. The task of the theosophical movement is to empathize with all of humanity and to recognize ourselves as a part of it; to know that if we take out one part, we will cause that part to wither. The individual human soul, taken out of the whole human community, no longer remains the soul, the living soul; it withers. It becomes more and more understandable to those who immerse themselves in the spiritual world view that just as the individual cells subordinate themselves to the body and fit into the whole, so must the individual souls fit into the whole. If the individual cells were to go their own way, we could not live. The soul lives on a higher level than the individual cells. The cells work together in a community. They create a new center. The soul works in it; so the souls also work together. The law of cooperation also applies in every other area of existence.

Imagine a community of people whose souls give up their own existence, think together with their thoughts, feel together with their feelings, want together with their will impulses, as cells join together. When we join together in this way, we create a new center for a higher being; we give an invisible being the opportunity to express itself here as often as people join together like cells. A true being of a higher kind can then work through the powers of human beings, as a soul works through the cells. For this, something more is needed than what is called the brotherly disposition, something that reaches deep into the soul of man. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the principle of liberty, equality and fraternity was established. We have indeed managed to respect personal liberty. At least in principle this is recognized, in theory. But there is a much deeper principle of fraternity, equality and freedom. Here something comes into consideration that is capable of conquering a world. It is not so easy for me to recognize that I am interfering with the freedom of the other person through my words, thoughts and feelings. When two people talk to each other, you often hear that one does not wait to hear what the other is saying. He contradicts outwardly or, if that is not possible, inwardly. There is an art of listening. There is an enormous amount of self-discipline involved in learning the art of listening, in fully tolerating even the opposite opinion, appreciating it in all its dignity. Our lives would take on a completely different shape if we learned to hold back with our words and thoughts. This is the second principle: we want to recognize the kernel of truth in all religions. If we make an effort to understand others, to embrace their opinions with love, even in religious matters, then we find that all opinions contain a kernel of truth. In all world views and religions, different religions, we seek the kernel of truth so that we can live together fraternally. If souls tolerate each other inwardly, then they will also outwardly create such conditions that serve the principle of brotherhood. This is where the full practice of life truly begins. The present way of life is fundamentally different from what has been characterized. All our institutions have arisen from what is not tolerance. The public institutions are images of what lived in the souls of our ancestors. If we start from the deep principle of brotherly love, then we also pour brotherly love into the institutions of social life. This clear brotherly love must be built on a clear view of the human soul.

Here followed the example of the government councilor Kolb, who went to America to work among the workers and gain experience – who came to the realization there of how little the gentlemen at the study table know of what matters.

We must test our present world view against the theosophical world view. The theosophical world view does not stop at the mask of life, but leads into the spirit. In every single personality lives the reflection of the one spirit. In earlier times, the idea of brotherhood was more present than one might think. In the time when the myriad small towns emerged into what we today call the bourgeoisie, we find everywhere that life, where it is formed in a new way, is based on the principle of brotherhood. Today, the bond between the lawyer and the one he has to judge is abstract and intellectual. In the Middle Ages, the judge knew the one he had to judge. Brotherhoods were founded at that time among those who were united by common interests. These old forms no longer fit our times. But Theosophy is to create new forms for the new conditions.

It is the same with religions. The founders established the individual religions for the abilities of the different peoples. Now the whole globe is connected by common thinking. Man must also understand man inwardly. The advent of the theosophical world view is linked to the cultural progress in the material realm through inner bonds. It is intended to achieve the same in the spiritual realm as culture has done in the material realm. The theosophical world view is suitable for deepening all areas of life again: medicine, education, law, and so on. The fact that there is little understanding of the spiritual means that all these areas of life suffer.

If we imbue each of these areas of life with theosophically trained thinking, then everything will be completely transformed. Anyone who has once passed through the thoughts that the theosophical worldview has provided will see into the innermost essence of things. He learns to train his thinking in a completely different way. All this shows how the theosophical world view understands the principle of brotherhood, which is based on a true knowledge of the world and life. Looking into the soul of the other and seeing oneself in the mirror image is the highest fruit of theosophy. The old teaching “know thyself” is given new validity here. A new life built on brotherly love, because this brotherly love is built on knowledge. Opening one's spiritual eyes and looking into the soul of another person, becoming tolerant of what lives in the soul of the other person, leads to truly loving them. Know thyself in the other, embrace with the feeling of community the common essence that is in all. Learn to say of the other as of yourself: That is you.

Throughout the millennia, different peoples have sought to satisfy their deepest needs in life through religion. In our time, it is easy to misjudge the significance of the religious aspirations of nations. It is easy for a modern person to harbor illusions about the nature of religion. Since one of the principles of Theosophy is to fathom the wisdom of religions, some light will also be shed today on the aims and tasks of the Theosophical movement in general.

At first, our topic was discussed by learned religious scholars from a cultural-historical point of view. In the past, such things were not considered at all. In the past, individuals were aware that they could find the truth in their religion. It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that people decided to compare different religions. This has revealed a remarkable fact: a consensus in the various religious beliefs of different human races. But they did not get much further than the assumption that the childlike imagination of the nations forms ideas about God and man in the same way. It has become common practice to see in the different religions of different peoples childlike stages of human spiritual development, and no more. If one delves deeper into the question hinted at here, one comes to the conclusion that one underestimates even the simplest religious ideas if one does not take them deeply and thoroughly. If you go deeper, you acquire the right kind of humility, the humility that says: You understand something of the great, powerful images, but there is still much you cannot fathom. You learn to recognize more and more by climbing the ladder of human development yourself.

Go down to ancient Egyptian culture. There you find the male deity Osiris and the female deity Isis. If you learn to understand the deity Osiris from the perspective of the Egyptian people, it reveals itself as a meaningful religious concept. It is said that Osiris was dismembered by his brother Typhon, and the individual pieces were buried in different places. The idea is associated with this that everything that lives on earth emerged from Osiris. Everything that happens on earth is seen as a resurrection of Osiris. When a person experiences their spiritual core, they say to themselves: Osiris rises within me. The earth is the dismemberment of Osiris. The human being is the resurrection of Osiris.

Now let us go up to the legends and myths of the Nordic world. There we meet the giant Ymir, who was overcome by Wotan, will and woe. We learn that he was dismembered, that the rocks were made from his bones, the streams and seas from his blood, the vault of heaven from his brain, and so on. This Earth is an enlarged, idealized human being. She is a sleeping giant.

We find similar ideas in the religions of different peoples everywhere. We should not believe that the religions of “lesser” peoples are childlike compared to our own. Let us take an example of how a sublime religion can be found in another nation. When the ancient Indians of North America were increasingly pushed back by the peoples of Europe, the latter believed that they were far superior to the North American Indians. At a meeting with the Europeans, a Native American chief gave a speech that beautifully reflects the religious beliefs of the Native American tribes. The way the chief spoke is how many representatives of these peoples spoke about God.

They had been promised land, but this had not been done. The chief now said the following to the representatives of Europe: You learn about God and what He says from books, in which small black characters appear. The white man only knows about his God from the black signs in the books, but the brown man recognizes the great spirit as it speaks to him from the whispering of the wind, from the lapping of the waves, [from lightning and thunder]. You promised us to give us land, but did not do it. Your God has not taught you to speak the truth, etc.

This is how many peoples thought about the great spirit before there was what we call religion. Religion comes from “religere”, to reconnect. We want to understand why religion is important for reconnecting.

Before our present human race populated Europe, Asia and Africa, it was preceded by the Atlantean population on the Atlantic continent, between America and Europe. This continent was inhabited by the Atlantean race. There they lived, the Atlanteans, with a peculiar spiritual life. What remains of Atlantean culture can be found in the seemingly wild, but in fact only backward culture on the periphery of the former Atlantis.

There they felt in a primitive and elementary way what one might call the equivalent of religion. What was the religion of the most ancient ancestors of early man is preserved in the form that we can find in the religion of China, in the so-called Tao religion.

When the Chinese pronounce the Tao, they feel something similar to how that Indian spoke of the great spirit. It was a completely different way of feeling and thinking; it was a sense of belonging to the whole world. Man did not feel like a special being, as we do today. Today's man does not think much of breathing in and out. The breathing process is carried out as a purely mechanical process. In the ancestors of yore, a feeling was awakened in response to breathing. They felt gratitude to the great spirit. They felt that he united with them with every inhalation. They united with him with every exhalation. When they felt their pulse, they attributed this power to the great spirit. They felt at one with the universal spirit. The breath was spirit to them, the blood that pulsed in their veins was spirit to them. They felt part of the great world spirit. One must try to feel what is going on in a human soul that feels itself as one piece with the great world spirit flowing through it, the divinity within itself, and within the divinity, how our ancestors were completely blissful in this sensation, one must learn to empathize.

There is only one feeling that comes close to this - when the Vedantist feels the “Tat twam asi”: “That art thou,” he says to the world around him. But in the main, our nature has lost the feeling of our ancestors. Sympathy for the whole world was called Tao. Tao is what lives in the wind, what lives in lightning and thunder, what lives in animals and plants, what is in man, what pulses through him as his life. It was a unified feeling. Our thinking is itself a product of development. Those who felt the Tao did not yet have this intellect. It is precisely a characteristic of our present race. When our race developed from the Atlantean race, intellectual thinking developed from the clairvoyant gift of the Atlanteans. Now people learned to think in terms. The consequence of conceptualization was that man strictly separated himself from his environment. This had a significance when man conquered intellect. The Atlanteans did not feel that they were separate from others. Tao was the blood, the air, Tao was the other human being. The feeling of separation arose in them through the intellect working within. Everything they felt in the world, they had to experience within.

The God who pulsed through man was a unity that flowed outside and flowed inside. Now the separation had taken place. Now the “religere” - “reconnect” had to occur, the religion that connected the outside with the inside. The entire fifth root race strives in religion to reconnect with the divine All-Spirit.

On the basis of what has just been said, one must ask oneself: How can man of our present cycle imagine his God? He must first seek him within himself. But when he realizes that this is the same God as out there, then he has achieved something in his own way, as the ancient Atlantean felt in Tao. This is expressed in the ancient, sacred religion that the Rishis taught their disciples, the religion that preceded the Vedas. The Vedas are only an echo of that ancient, sacred religion of ancient India. This religion of ancient India can be brought to life within oneself even without esoteric knowledge. For it lives everywhere between the lines and words. It is a religion of life, which assumes that the divine is found within the human being. Whereas in the past people felt the connection with the God in their environment, in ancient India people sought the God in the separate individual soul. They sought to develop themselves to the point of direct realization that what lives in the individual soul lives in all souls. If one could experience one's own divinity in this way, if one had found what led beyond all separateness; beyond the deception of separateness, then one called it the divine Brahman. One could not theorize about that. One had to experience it within oneself. Then one gradually came to recognize this unified divinity from three points of view. This is found in all religions, these threefold aspects, under which the Brahman is sought.

The three aspects of the divine are understood roughly as follows in the intimate life of the different religions: The divine spirit lives in you. But the divine spirit also lives outside in the universe. And a spark of this divine spirit lives in you. The spirit that lives in you when you have an urge, a passion, an ideal, also lived when it built the house in which you now feel and sense everything. The deeper you penetrate into the structure of human wisdom, the clearer it becomes how this divine spirit has worked in you. Your passions, your sense of truth, are still subject to error. But the human body is not subject to error. Only the soul makes mistakes. It continually attacks the wonderful organism that the Deity has built as a housing for man. The structure of the human body is perfect. Every bone, for example, is wonderfully designed. It is composed of fine beams in such a skillful way that no engineer today could imitate it. The thigh bone has a reciprocating structure that allows it to support the body with the least amount of force.

The higher bodies of man are much more imperfect than the physical. This perfect physical casing was built by the great spirit; then he was drawn into this shell like a spark. Now take this whole world of this structure that lives around you, apart from what lives in you as a soul, and you have the third aspect of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. Then take your own soul and the souls of your fellow brothers and fellow creatures. That is the Son, the second aspect of the Godhead, the second form in which the Godhead appears. At the beginning of the world process, we have everything that surrounds us as the perfect world. That is the Holy Spirit. What now lives in it as soul, that is the Son. That which the Son will become and that to which we will come through the Son, what we will be at the end of the days, that is the first aspect, the Father. Religions look at the primal essence from these three aspects, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

You can go through all religions and you will always find this Trinity as the basic concept of all religions. The disciples were spoken to in this way countless times. When I speak, my words break free from my soul. They vibrate in the air. Then the vibrations go out to the other souls. Imagine that the organ of hearing is switched off – I speak – the words could be made visible – then you could see what I am saying. Imagine that you could turn the vibrating air into water and then into something solid. Imagine that you could very quickly condense the [vibrating] waves. Then the words would fall down as pieces of solid matter. They would lie at the bottom of the ground. This is how religion imagines everything around us, only by thinking the macrocosm formed similarly to how the words do here.

The macrocosm was once a very fine substance. Now the deity spoke a word, a primal name. The substance condensed, and so everything came into being. This is how rock crystal was formed too. The words of God were spoken into this substance, and it condensed. Everything was the thought of God, everything was spirit. That from which the spirit emerges is the original word. The Word of God that resounded into space was called the “Word”, the second aspect of the Deity. The thought of God that had condensed was the third aspect of the divine essence. The Word that resounded was the second aspect of the divine essence. God was in the Word and in the Word was God. (John 1:1) But before the Word can be spoken, something must precede it. That was the Father-God, the beginning. A deep connection has been recognized in all religions between what was in the beginning, the Father-God, and the life of the present. The Son is the life of the present. In the soul lives the Son as the Word. Veda - Edda means: the word. That which is called the actual revelation in the different religions always goes back to the word. The divine documents express this word. That is why they are also called the Word. In the religious records is that which the Spirit of God has spoken into the world. An echo of this lives in the human soul.

Another part of the core wisdom of all religions is the awareness that man is in a process of development, that he can reach ever higher and higher levels of development. The soul can increasingly resemble God. In my body, I see that the forces and materials of nature have worked together to create the perfect physical body for me. Plants and animals are experiments. A development has taken place. In the human being, the keystone of this development is opposed to us. In us, we carry the spirit germ like a bud. This is how we participate in the spiritual world. Thus, the human being lives in a physical environment and, on the other hand, grows into a spiritual world. Within himself, he has powers and abilities through which he is connected to the spiritual world. Stones, plants, animals are beings in different degrees of perfection. The soul also exists in various degrees of perfection, existing in a sequence. This begins with us. We are the most imperfect in the spiritual world. We have to live ourselves into a community with supersensible beings, with spiritual beings that form the connection between man and the Supreme Divinity, Devas, Dhyan Chohans, Angels, Archangels, etcetera. Everywhere, in all religions, there is the core of wisdom of a spiritual world, of a sum of entities of a supersensible nature. Just as man belongs to the rest of the [physical] world through his physical body, so he belongs to the spiritual world through his core of being.

Another core wisdom of all religions is that all development occurs in cycles, which can be compared to breathing in and out, day and night. The life of a human being, the life of the soul, also runs in such cycles. Man alternates between this side of existence, where he gathers experiences, and another where he lives in community with spiritual beings, in Devachan. In rhythmic succession, physical life on earth appears again and again, and again the life of the spirit. The idea that one earthly life is one among many is a common basic law of all developed religions.

It is a mistake to say that Christianity does not teach reincarnation. In its esoteric form, it teaches reincarnation. It just doesn't teach it on the outside. Christ spoke to his intimate disciples about reincarnation. When he was alone with his disciples, he explained many things to them on the mountain. He only spoke most intimately to his most intimate disciples, James, John, Peter, at the Transfiguration. The expression “building huts” is there. (Mk 9,5) These are the most intimate disciples who have risen to the level where huts are built. You experience what you experience when you can build huts. Space and time are overcome. Moses and Elijah appear. The deepest secret is shown to the disciples. Elijah is the Way. “El” means Way. Moses is the Truth, and Christ is the Life. He stands in the middle. The Way, the Life, the Truth. This ancient wisdom of the Christian religion stands here in bodily form; it appears to the disciples in the devachanic, raptured state. Christ said to them: Elijah has returned. They just did not recognize him (Mk 9:19). He spoke to them of reincarnation, but continued: “But do not tell anyone until I return” (Mk 9:9). The Second Coming refers to the point in human development when they will be ready to find the inner Christ.

Angelus Silesius points to the essence of this inner Christ and its significance:

A thousand times if Christ were born in Bethlehem and not in you, you would be a thousand times lost.

The inner experience of Christ enables us to grasp the Christ in the world. When people have come so far, then one can speak again of reincarnation. Until then, it should be kept secret. Among the Egyptian slaves, there was a living awareness: This is one life among many. In the other life, I will be like the one who now commands me. Thus he recognized the law of reincarnation and karma, the connection between cause and effect in the moral world. He felt this to be the law of his life. Then we understand the deep significance that the law of karma and reincarnation had in the souls.

But this humanity would have only looked up and lost the appreciation of the one life between birth and death. Once the soul had to go through a life where it knew nothing of reincarnation. About 1500 [or 2600] years is the period that elapses between two embodiments. In the 2000 years after Christ, the soul has gone through one such embodiment. Therefore, the disciples should not teach reincarnation until people could grasp the Christ within themselves.

The doctrine of reincarnation is contained in Christianity, not as a mere teaching, but as a legacy for the future. The teaching was not lost in Christianity by accident or disgrace, but was deliberately not taught for 2000 years. Man has grown out of the whole of nature. Goethe felt the Taoist feeling in the words he addressed to nature in the Hymn to Nature. This contains an examination of how he empathized with nature.

Man had to become a special being, but then he had to be reconnected to the divine. The search for the way back to the divine is what the old mystics of the Middle Ages called deification. This is how man expresses that he is eminently created for a development. In order for him to grow towards deification, the divine must be present in him in a seed-like way.

To make this one's content is to be a religious person. And to know what then lives in the soul and flows through it is theosophy. This is, in another form, what religions give to man. It makes religions understandable to him. Divine wisdom is the antitype of the soul's content, which itself is permeated and pulsated by the truth. The earlier religious conceptions were more or less the content of faith. This content of feeling must be raised into full, bright day-consciousness. The deepening of all religions into wisdom, so that it permeates us completely with its living content, so that the soul thereby reaches the goal of deification; that is what Theosophy will lead us to.